Something To Remember Him By

The Oriental Theater on Randolph St.

And when I wouldn't take her downtown to the Oriental Theatre she didn't deny herself the company of other boys.


It was last Saturday. I was sitting in the sala (living room) of my small, dark apartment late that morning on my Philippine island. But it wasn't 85 degrees, with my front door open so I had enough light to read by. I had been transported to Chicago in February by Louie, the narrator of Saul Bellow's story, "Something to Remember Me By."

One day in early February, 1933, Louie, 17 and in high school, lives through a day so exceptional, so incredible that it reveals to him the workings of a hidden force in his life, the very principles of existence. This unforgettable day, which Louie relates in old age to his grandchild, "began like any other winter school day in Chicago - grimly ordinary." Just how ordinarily grim, Bellow makes extraordinarily clear:

Chicago in winter, armored in gray ice, the sky low, the going heavy ... The temperatures a few degrees above zero, botanical frost shapes on the windowpane, the snow swept up in heaps, the ice gritty and the streets, block after block, bound together by the iron of the sky ... The street ice was dark gray. Snow was piled against the trees. Their trunks had a mineral black look. Waiting out the winter in their alligator armor they gathered coal soot ... The days short, the streetlights weak, the soiled snowbanks toward evening became a source of light. 

But, like a threnody, there is Louie's dying mother, so near to death that each day holds the threat of him returning home in the evening to a father who will embrace him or strike him with his fists in his "Biblical rage." Louie has an after-school job delivering flowers. On this particular day his delivery takes him to the city's North Side, an hour's ride by streetcar. He's delivering lilies to a family in mourning. He is shown through to the kitchen, past a room empty but for the coffin. He looks at the corpse, a girl older than his girlfriend, now "all buoyancy gone, a weight that counted totally on support, not so much lying as sunk in this gray rectangle."

His delivery done, by now almost dark, Louie visits the office of Philip, his dentist brother-in-law, with whom he can travel home. Philip isn't there. So Louie looks for him next door in a doctor's office. On entering an examining room, he encounters a young woman, lying naked on the table, copper wires attached to her wrists. Without showing the slightest embarrassment, letting him see everything, the woman dresses slowly. In his reminiscence written a lifetime later, Louie writes: 

As the woman raised both her arms so that I could undo the buckles, her breasts swayed, and when I bent over her the odor of her upper body made me think of the frilled brown papers in a box after the chocolates had been eaten--a sweet aftersmell and acrid cardboard mixed. . . The cells of my body were like bees, drunker and drunker on sexual honey (I expect that this will change the figure of Grandfather Louie, the old man remembered as this or that but never as a hive of erotic bees).

Complaining of muscle spasms in her back, the woman asks Louie if he can help her down the stairs to the street. Forgetting Philip, the hour, and his distance from home, Louie proceeds with her to the street, where she then asks him to take her home. "At the moment, a glamorous, sexual girl had me in tow. I couldn't guess where I was being led, nor how far, nor what she would surprise me with, nor the consequences."

But it's a setup, a prank that leaves Louie with no clothes and not even the seven cents for the streetcar fare. He finds clothes, but they're nothing but a woman's dress, a quilted bed jacket and a knitted tam. He puts them on and goes back to the street. Still looking for Philip, Louie locates a druggist who might know where he is. Mistaking Louie for a girl, the druggist suggests a neighborhood speakeasy where Philip sometimes went. 

Finding the place is easy enough. Inside, "A sort of bar was set up, a few hanging fixtures, some tables from an ice cream parlor, wire-backed chairs." The barman, a Greek, listens to Louie's misadventure. He sympathizes and offers to give him fifty cents if he will carry a drunk customer home. Louie gets him there and even cooks his two little girls a supper of fried pork chops. He feels his defilement is complete as the pork fat spatters onto his arms. "All that my upbringing held in horror geysered up, my throat filling with it, my guts griping." He looks in on the drunk, finds some pants and, putting them on, simply tucks the dress down them. He grabs a handful of pennies off the drunk's nightstand and leaves. 

Louie makes it home and is relieved when his father hits him on the head, instead of embracing him, a sure sign that his mother hasn't died. On the streetcar home he had thought of all the things his people did when someone died. "After a death, mirrors were immediately covered. I can't say what this pious superstition means. Will the soul of your dead be reflected in a looking glass, or is this custom a check to the vanity of the living?"

The meaning of Louie's long day in February is something he seeks in his books, something metaphysical. Yet he doesn't notice the signs he encounters along the way: the lilies, the dead girl in her coffin, the naked woman and her frustrated promise of gratified desire, only to be stripped naked himself and forced to scramble across the city wearing a dress.

When Louie escorts the woman to her "home," she asks him "What are you going to be, have you picked your profession?" But Louie is thinking

I had no use for professions. Utterly none. There were accountants and engineers in the soup lines. In the world slump, professions were useless. You were free, therefore, to make something extraordinary of yourself. I might have said, if I hadn't been excited to the point of sickness, that I didn't ride around the city on the cars to make a buck or to be useful to the family, but to take a reading of this boring, depressed, ugly, endless, rotting city. I couldn't have thought it then, but I now understand that my purpose was to interpret this place. Its power was tremendous. But so was mine, potentially. I refused absolutely to believe for a moment that people here were doing what they thought they were doing. Beneath the apparent life of these streets was their real life, beneath each face the real face, beneath each voice and its words the true tone and the real message. 

The woman notices the loose pages of a book in Louie's pocket. "You would have thought that the book or book-fragment in my pocket was a talisman from a fairy tale to open castle gates or carry me to mountaintops." He spends all his money on books. When his clothes are stolen, it's the book-fragment that he regrets losing the most.

Bellow's stories are almost all about loss, and about the salvages his protagonists achieve at the end - sometimes at the cost - of their lives. And they are always reaching for some design, a reason for, some solution to, the astonishing adventures that Bellow relates. Refusing to believe that the calamities that afflict them can have no ultimate point, they sometimes apply the most far-fetched reasoning, from a deservedly obscure book they once read, to make sense of it all. 

Giving proportion to what is out of all proportion. Like Chicago itself: "The city was laid out on a colossal grid, eight blocks to the mile, every fourth street a car line." The cars are streetcars. An hour's ride from home to the North Side. Louie would read on the long passage because, he claims, "Reading shut out the sights. In fact there were no sights - more of the same and then more of the same. Shop fronts, garages, warehouses, narrow brick bungalows." Louie trying to interpose the knowledge he finds in books on the immovable spectacle, the undeniable spectacle of city streets in all their ugliness and multitudinous meaning is the story's final irony. Bellow uses metaphors that add to the solidity of the world, making the world more substantial than it already is. Devoting the power of language to conveying the richness of sensual experience is Bellow's ultimate truth.