Saul Bellow: "Zetland: By a Character Witness," "Leaving the Yellow House" and "What Kind of Day Did You Have?"

It is time to read some serious mainstream literature!  Let's attack three stories from the middle of the 2001 hardcover edition of Collected Stories by Saul Bellow that I bought at the book sale at the Central Branch of the Public Library of Des Moines many years ago.

"Zetland: By a Character Witness" (1974)

This is a 14-page biography of a sickly Jewish genius, born in the Chicago of the early Twenties, the son of a poor man who moved his way up to become a buyer at a department store.  Zet the genius reads all the hard books and has opinions about all the avant garde artists and is intimately familiar with all the major composers, even as a little kid.  He studies philosophy in college and marries a sexy Macedonian girl whom his father detests and he gets a fellowship at Columbia and they move to New York but there he suffers a recurrence of his childhood illness and loses interest in philosophy, drops out of Columbia and starts hanging out in Greenwich Village.  The story ends without telling us what happens to this guy other than that he wants to join up during World War II and has a son born during the war; it is not even clear if he ever joins the military (seems unlikely--he is quite unhealthy) or ever gets a real job or just lives off his wife's earnings as an office worker--it is made clear that Zet himself is unsuited to office work.  It seems possible he becomes a novelist, as during his illness he becomes smitten by Moby Dick.    

At times the story, which I guess is primarily meant to be a vivid reconstruction of American Jewish life before 1945, seems like a celebration of Jewish intelligence and affinity for the life of the mind, what with how we are told again and again how Zet and his father know all about art, literature and music, and how Zet is fun and kind and generous to everybody, but at the end you have to suspect it is a tragedy--Dad doesn't like the girl his son is so crazy about and Zet is apparently too sick (or maybe too scatterbrained and unfocused?) to really do anything much productive with his superbrain.  There is also the issue of Zet's politics--as a young man he is a commie, but the behavior of the Soviet Union in 1939 seems to disillusion him.  And then there is the title, with its reference to the unobtrusive narrator, who knew Zet when they were teens--is he a "character witness" because during or after the war Zet got in trouble with the law?

The story sort of lacks a climax and resolution, but it is dense with detail.  Some of these details seem to suggest Zet is a romantic poseur, almost a goofball (he relishes living in crappy apartments, for example), and others are surprising, perhaps meant to shock.  Zet's household growing up included two maiden aunts, and we are told they notice a smell like herring coming from Zet's wife--they have never had sex themselves, and assume this smell is a sign of disease, when in fact Bellow tells us it is just the normal smell of a woman who has had sex.

After first appearing in 1974 in the scholarly journal Modern Occasions, "Zetland: By a Character Witness" would be reprinted in the 1984 collection Him With His Foot In His Mouth and Other Stories.

"Leaving the Yellow House" (1958)

I'm not Jewish and I'm not very smart, but I can identify with a guy who likes books and moves to New York City to attend grad school and then disappoints his parent by dropping out and marrying a woman parent does not approve of.  "Leaving the Yellow House" is more challenging for me to inhabit, as it is about an old woman who likes to drink and lives in the desert in the South West.  

Hattie is something of a loser, a septuagenarian divorcee who likes nothing more than to drink booze and smoke cigarettes.  From a middle-class East Coast family, she suffered a severe decline in her fortunes and has had jobs and relationships she found demeaning, and has done things for which she is ashamed, like publicly accusing a neighbor of killing her dog when it was she herself who had to kill the aggressive beast when it attacked her.  Her last job was to be the live-in companion of a more sophisticated woman whom she was supposed to discourage from drinking--Hattie instead became her eager drinking companion.  When this woman died she left Hattie her yellow house with the beautiful view of the lake and mountains.  This story is largely about Hattie's determination to keep this yellow house even as she declines and people keep telling her she should sell it or rent it out and move because she can no longer look after it or herself--this house to her represents her greatest triumph, it being the only thing she has ever really owned, and she does not want to give it up.  Bellow creates tension in the story as he gives us so many reasons to see Hattie as irresponsible, selfish, and a troublemaker, but also a figure of pity who has suffered--can we excuse her foolishness and her disregard for the safety of others because she herself has had a tough time of it?  

"Leaving the Yellow House" was included in Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories after its initial appearance in an issue of Esquire the cover of which is reminding me of the work of Yayoi Kusama, whose current exhibition at the Hirshhorn my sister dragged me* to a few days ago--that woman loves dots!  (I'm going to level with my fellow philistines and tell you that I thought Kusama's work banal gimmickry and her poem about coronavirus highlighted at the Hirshhorn exhibition like something a child would write; I like this Esquire cover much better--maybe it belongs in the government museum!)

"What Kind of Day Did You Have?" (1984)

Clocking in at some 70 pages, "What Kind of Day Did You Have" is almost three times as long as "Leaving the Yellow House," which I have to admit felt sort of lengthy. This one has a big cast of characters.  The central figure is Katrina Goliger, mother of two little kids.  Her husband Alfred was a jewelry and antiques dealer who travelled around the world all the time and cheated on Katrina, she in turn cheated on him, so now they are divorced and in a custody fight over the kids.  Katrina for over a year has been in an affair with a famous 70-something intellectual, Victor Wulpy, a guy who gives lectures all over the place on modern poetry and painting and philosophy and has written articles about E. E. Cummings (Wulpy capitalizes it), Karl Marx and Paul Valery.  Wulpy has a wife and is a serial adulterer, and Katrina is his favorite mistress, the one who can really get him going, really get his septuagenarian penis erect.  A somewhat mysterious police officer, a Lieutenant Krieggstein, is also courting Katrina.  Krieggstein, as his name perhaps reflects, carries with him at all time three pistols, so is always ready to fight, but he is losing the competition for Katrina, stuck in what the kids call "the friend zone":  Krieggstein is always doing favors for Katrina, like walking her dog and looking after the kids and helping her with the custody fight, but he never makes any progress with Katrina--it is the famous Wulpy who treats her like a sexual plaything whom Katrina desires; nice guy Krieggstein finishes last.  Katrina has a sister, Dorothea, whose husband, head of a plastics company, died, so that now Dorothea is trying to run the business herself; Dorothea is envious of her sister, now that she is having sex with a world class intellectual and meeting famous brainiacs and celebs like Buckminster Fuller, Willem de Kooning and Jackie O.  There's also the black woman who was nanny to Katrina and Dorothea and is now nanny to Katrina's own kids, Ysole, who may or may not be on the side of Katrina's husband in the custody fight.

"What Kind of Day Did You Have?" is about how life, especially the effort to build human relationships, is essentially futile.  It is impossible to make connections with other people; love is always a one-way street, a yearning that will not be requited.  The people who theoretically should love you--your parents, your children, the nanny who actually raised you, the people you have sex with--are opponents you combat or exploiters to whom you submit.  Across the lines of sex and race and age, connections are impossible--Bellow describes many marital relationships, parental relationships, and business relationships in the story, and presents all of them as humiliating and painful. 

The plot.  Wulpy is in Buffalo on his way to Chicago and wants company so he calls up Katrina, who lives in Evanston, Ill., and gets her to meet him at the airport in Buffalo so she can fly with him back to Chi-town.  Katrina loves being with Wulpy so accedes to his request, even though she will miss a court hearing and may be putting her right to custody of her kids (whom she doesn't seem to get along too well with anyway) in jeopardy.  At the airport in the Empire State, Wulpy tells Katrina all about the talk he just gave in Buffalo--set up by his daughter, a student at the college where he spoke, it was on how the insights of Marx's famous The Eighteenth Brumaire can be applied to 1970s America--and a talk he must give tomorrow to some business executives in Chicago.  Then appears an old acquaintance of Wulpy's, Larry Wrangel, an attendee of this Buffalo lecture.  Wrangel was a philosophy student at NYU and a writer for Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers comic books when Wulpy first knew him, now he is a Hollywood director who has made a blockbuster science fiction movie that the characters keep comparing to Star Wars.  (I recall there being SF references in Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet and Herzog, which I read years ago.)  These two rich creatives discuss whether an analysis of America that relies on European class categories is of any actual value, and the related idea that Americans create themselves, are deracinated self-made men left adrift, unmoored.  Well, at least I think that is what these guys are talking about:

"Well," said Wrangel, "I have a friend who says that the created souls of people, of the Americans, have been removed.  The created soul has been replaced by an artificial one, so there's nothing real that human beings can refer to when they try to judge any matter for themselves.  They live mainly by rationales.  They have made-up guidance systems." 

Wrangel admires Wulpy, sees him as a great man, even compares him to FDR (whose vast temple I  traversed on Sunday while attending with my sister the cherry blossom festival in the capitol of our empire of artificial-souled rationale followers) but Wulpy treats him shabbily, in part because Wrangel doesn't slavishly follow Wulpy's thinking, but challenges it--he seems to suggest that ideas--to which Wulpy has devoted his life--do not really drive life and history.  Wulpy has gotten rich and famous and has been able to have sex with lots of women because of his facility with ideas, but his work doesn't really matter in the long run.

Wulpy and Katrina catch their flight to Chicago, but snow over the Windy City diverts it to Detroit, where they meet Wrangel again for more wrangling over ideas.  There is a dearth of flights to Chicago.  Will Wulpy miss his speech to the executives?  Will Katrina's lie to her kids and her black nanny about what she is really up to be exposed?  Wulpy contacts the executives, and they send a private jet to pick him and Katrina up and bring them to Chicago.  As they wait in a Detroit hotel room, Katrina calls the nanny, who accuses her of lying about where she is, and humiliates her by saying she always lied as a child, leading Katrina to reflect that black people hate white people:

They hate us, said Trina to herself, after Ysole had hung up.  They hate us terribly.

and on what it is she admires about Wulpy:

Katrina again felt: Everybody has power over me.  Alfred, punishing me, the judge, the lawyers, the psychiatrist, Dotey--even the kids.  They all apply standards nobody has any use for, except to stick you with.  That's what drew me to Victor, that he wouldn't let anybody set conditions for him. Let others make the concessions.  That's how I'd like to be.  Except that I haven't got his kind of ego, which is a whole mountain of ego.  Now it's Ysole's turn.     

(No doubt feminists, Marxists, BLM activists and every other species of liberal or leftist could write reams about this scene in which a duplicitous white middle-class woman who hobnobs with celebrities whines that her "Negro" servant has power over her!)   

In the hotel room Katrina and Wulpy have sex, and Katrina indulges in memories of earlier pivotal moments in the history of their relationship, providing insight into how Wulpy manipulates her as well as his wife, and suggesting that he doesn't really love either of them, though Katrina speculates that perhaps he manipulates her for (his conception of) her own good.  For example, Wulpy insisted Katrina read Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, a book that she interprets as debunking the very idea of love--is this just callousness, or some kind of test, or an effort by Wulpy, who is much older than Katrina and nearly died a year ago, to prepare Katrina to accept Wulpy's death?--the solipsistic Wulpy may not love Katrina, but he can easily believe that his own death will break her heart.  

The private plane picks Katrina and Wulpy up, and, caught in severe turbulence, they fear they will crash and die.  Katrina tries to get Wulpy to tell her he loves her, and he dismissively refuses.  Back in Chicago, Katrina is reunited with her kids and with Krieggstein, who has been using his resources to help her in her custody fight.  Her overtures to the kids are rebuffed--her own children ignore her--and it looks like despite his efforts on her behalf Krieggstein's love for Katrina is going to remain unrequited for the foreseeable future.       

"What Kind of Day Did You Have" is a dense story, with lots of stuff going on, but there are so many striking little details and so little fat and no tedious repetition that it doesn't feel slow or long; Bellow also doesn't actually tell you what you are expected to think about the characters or their actions, he just throws a bunch of evidence at you and lets you make up your own mind, which keeps you engaged.

Among the odd details, we have, as in "Zetland," a surprising reference to female sexual smells ("the woman-slime odor--that swamp-smell") and in response I came up with a theory that Bellows says this sort of stuff because he is trying to be the kind of audacious mountain of ego who ignores social conventions and refuses to make concessions that he portrays Victor Wulpy as.  

An interesting piece of symbolism comes in the form of a violin.  Wulpy's daughter in Buffalo hands her expensive violin (which Wulpy bought her and the resale value of which he monitors as if he really thinks of it as an investment) to him to take to Chicago to have worked upon by experts.  Wulpy, as a rhetorician, promotes art, argues that one of America's problems is we don't take art seriously, that asserts that art should be treated as something as vital as oxygen and food, and by carrying around this valuable violin he is physically embodying the role of protector of fine art.  All of Bellow's mentions of how Wulpy (and then Katrina) are carrying it and where they are putting it add suspense to the story, as the reader expects it to get crushed or lost at any moment.

The references to popular culture in the story are amusing, in particular how Katrina caused a crisis in her relationship with Victor by dragging him to see the film M*A*S*H*, which she had already seen and felt deserved a strong recommendation; he detested the movie and lost respect for her taste.  Katrina, after reflecting that her own children are alien to her, suggests that Victor told her that "Star Wars flicks corrupted everybody, implanted mistrust of your own flesh and blood."  I thought this was wild, in part because early in the week my sister dragged me* to a loud, garish and horrendous Smithsonian exhibit celebrating how TV, cinema and sports advanced diversity and other au currant values and the opinion the government museum espoused about Star Wars was that it renewed America's spirit after the USA had made the humiliating blunder of opposing communism in South East Asia.    

It seems a version of "What Kind of Day Did You Have?" appeared in Vanity Fair on the cover of which Bellow's tale was promoted as "an extraordinary love story" inside a heart scrawled by Keith Haring (having slagged the work of Yayoi Kusama as childish and gimmicky, you can perhaps guess how I feel about Haring's work.)

*So you don't think this was a totally one-sided phenomenon, I'll own that I dragged my sister to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art to see sculptures by Paul Manship and Augustus Saint-Gaudens and paintings by Abbot Handerson Thayer.  

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These are good stories, "What Kind of Day Did You Have?" probably the best, as it has so many economically interwoven characters and themes, though "Zetland: By a Character Witness" is probably my fave because it builds a vivid portrait of a past world in which I am interested and offers plenty of sharp images.  

It is undeniably worthwhile to spend a week reading "real" 20th-century American literature and marching hither and thither through Washington, D.C. attending festivals and visiting monuments and bookstores and museums and eating for lunch braised lamb at Cava three out of four days, but I am looking forward to hunkering down in MPorcius Fiction Log's rural HQ next week and getting back to my usual diet of SF stories and inexpensive groceries.  See you soon!