Mississippi Before Dinner And Konstantinov And Bellow example essay topic

Dr. David Jenkins Plovdiv University and the American University in Bulgaria Perspective by Incongruity: On the Road with Henry James, Aleko Konstantinov, and Saul Bellow " 'What's your road, man? -- holy boy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow... I'm cutting along in my life as it leads me. ' " (Dean Moriarty, in Jack Kerouac's On the Road 206). Scene One: Waiting for a Train Three men were standing together on Platform Five at the Baton Rouge Train Station. One was slightly built, the other two were burly, broad-shouldered and imposing.

All were well dressed in the fashion of the time. Other than their improbable names, there was little to distinguish them from the other passengers waiting on the platform. Those names bore an uncanny resemblance to men who are very well known. The three men were Henry James, Aleko Konstantinov, and Saul Bellow. They were on their way to Chicago to visit the World's Fair. James nervously looked at his watch, then turned to Konstantinov, picking up the thread of their conversation.

"It's not too late for you... you don't strike me as in danger of missing the train; besides which people can be in general pretty well trusted, of course -- with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here -- to keep an eye on the fleeting hour. All the same don't forget that you " re young-blessedly young... Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life".

Unlike James, who was visiting from London, his adopted home (another uncanny resemblance), Konstantinov was completely at ease in the American South, and for that matter at ease all the way from New Orleans to Minneapolis. Though he had once had hopes of becoming a writer, he was now a travelling salesman for a Texaco subsidiary, selling crude oil and other petroleum products. It was his idea to meet his friends in New Orleans, then ride the train with them to Chicago via San Antonio, since he had arranged a dinner with Geraldo Gonzales, the Mexican consul. Konstantinov had often met with the consul on business, and they were on a first-name basis. The consul had even given Konstantinov a signed portrait one evening on the River Walk: "To Aleko with respect and friendship from Geraldo, and to many more mutually profitable joint ventures". He had shown the portrait to James and Bellow more than once.

Konstantinov had already been to the fair, since his company has set up a pavilion there. He enthusiastically described the transportation exhibit for his friends. .".. You can see every conveyance known to man, from the most primitive carts to the most up-to-date locomotives, palatial dining cars, and Pullman sleepers. Their comfort and elegance will simply bowl you over, knock you out. And the same goes for the boats -- from the oldest triremes to the most modern liners and battleships.

Horse-drawn and electric trams, omnibuses, diligence's, fi acres, coupes, landaus, cabriolets -- you name it. The very latest in human ingenuity, in every shape and form, whether for freight or passengers, all in one huge hall. The upper galleries are filled with bicycles and model ships, and there are model trains too. They constantly circle the rooms on miniature rails, pulling true-to-life cars. I saw monorail trains that seem to float somewhere between heaven and earth.

Full-sized trains scattered around the hall like toys. Giant locomotives with cars done up in walnut and mahogany, silk and velvet, crystal chandeliers and electric candles. Something for even your discriminating taste."Ah, yes", James replied. "The art of transportation, like all art, lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints". James was something of an aesthete. He was independently wealthy, a confirmed gourmet, and an amateur psychologist.

He and Bellow had met at a graduate seminar in Chicago before Bellow moved to Montreal to take a teaching position, and James and Konstantinov had met in Paris, where James was on vacation and Konstantinov on a business trip. Bellow agreed that to live fully it was certainly necessary to be observant, to notice the little things, to "try to be one of those persons on whom nothing is lost". With a little practice, he had found that a certain quality of attention "becomes second nature". So now he tried to live every day as if it were his first, or his last. He had recently been reminded of how fragile life could be, since he had barely survived a serious nervous disorder brought on by food poisoning, when he ate some tainted fish. For months he could barely lift his arm, and couldn't even write his own name.

All he could do was draw cramped little circles, and even those cost him great effort. As the train to San Antonio pulled into the station, he recalled his brush with death to his two friends. "I've never seen the world before. Now I was seeing it, and it's a beautiful, marvelous gift. Enchanting reality! And when the end came, I was told by the cleverest people I knew that it would all vanish.

I'm not absolutely convinced of that". As they hoisted their bags into their compartment -- which was Spartan, worlds away from the rolling pleasure palaces that Konstantinov had described -- they saw a young man rush up to the train and hop on just as the train pulled out. A few minutes later he joined them. "Hello", he said, tipping his hat to them, almost saluting. He brushed the dust off his overcoat.

Mind if I join you? I'm on my way to St. Louis. I go to the university there. I have to take a final exam, then I plan to go on to Chicago, to the fair.

He held out his hand. "My name's Conrad. Joseph Conrad."What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?" Scene Two: Dinner with a Diplomat Though James relished fine food, he was still too much of an American at heart to stick to cr^eyes, truffles and souffl " es. .".. Lay in tomatoes, ice-cream, corn, melons, cranberries and other indigenous victuals", he crowed to his friends as they rang the doorbell at the Mexican Consulate.

One reason James had agreed to join them on this adventure was his periodical insatiable hunger for the American scene. "I wish I could tell you how characteristic everything strikes me as being... everything from the vast white sky-to the stiff sparse individual blades of grass". Conrad was now part of the group -- the original threesome had become a foursome. He had offered to show them around Saint Louis on their way to Chicago, and so they had invited him to spend a day or two with them in San Antonio.

All four of them were obviously out of their element in the resplendent hacienda of their host Gonzales, and their attempts to make themselves comfortable. For instance, Bellow offered the consul flowers to give to his wife, a perfectly courteous gesture, except that the consul wasn't married. On the way upstairs Bellow had caught a glimpse of the consul's mother, and had made the wrong assumption. When the consul offered to show them the family album, James pointed to one of the pictures and said, "So you were in the army?" It was a photo of the consul and his sister.

When the consul served tea, Conrad emptied the entire sugar bowl into his cup, then drank all the cream straight from the silver salver. Grimacing diplomatically, the consul rang for his servant and asked that dinner be served. At least the meal passed without incident. As the last course arrived -- a caramel mousse sculpted in the shapes of leopards and swans -- James turned from his swan to Konstantinov and waxed philosophical.

"The affair-I mean the affair of life-couldn't, no doubt, have been different for me; for it's at the best a tin mould, either fluted and embossed, with ornamental excrescences, or else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one's consciousness is poured-so that one 'takes' the form as the great cook says, and is more or less compactly held by it: one lives in fine as one can". Conrad, raising his fork from the leopard quivering beneath him, objected to this psychological rendering of dessert. "With all due respect, Mr. James, you take a most essentialist and evanescent view of things. Even the most far-fetched fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting-on second-hand impression.

Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience". Turning to Konstantinov, Conrad added, "Don't you agree with me, sir? Didn't you once aspire to a literary career?" Scene Three: A Woman with Her Hand on the Table, a Man with His Hand on a Fish The four travelers were once again settled at a dinner table, this time in St. Louis. It turned out young Conrad lived in a boarding house with a Czech woman and her voluptuous daughter.

Neither mother nor daughter spoke English, since they had only been in the country for a few months. It was blatantly obvious that Conrad and the daughter were more than casual acquaintances. James noticed the two mooning at each other over an hors d'oeuvre and aperitif, and couldn't resist an observation in passing. "It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident, I think it will be hard to say what it is. At the same time it is an expression of character". Conrad turned to the woman in question and said to her in perfect Czech, "He neither toils nor spins, trades nor makes war, bears children in pain nor brings them up with sacrifices...

James is the laureate of leisure". Though no one but the mother understood a word he said, the vehemence with which he delivered this opprobrium, the sudden anger in his voice, was enough to make them uneasy. Who was this young man of such adamant convictions and ardent passions? The evening devolved into further misunderstanding and innuendo. As the vegetables simmered, the conversation again turned to writing, since it seemed that Conrad, who had recently been in the Merchant Marine, was no more than a nominal student. His passion, he confessed to Konstantinov, was to become a man of letters: to bear witness, keep a record of human dealings, keep score.

Bellow couldn't contain himself when Conrad insisted that the only reason to write was to communicate with a few close friends. "Je sens mon coeur et je connais les hommes", he asserted in his adopted Quebequoise, though he was the only one at the table who spoke passable French. "If you write for people you know, you find yourself limited. God knows, we " re limited enough without new limitations on ourselves". Conrad and his nubile companion decided to walk down to the Mississippi before dinner, and Konstantinov and Bellow went up to their rooms to rest. Konstantinov said he had some work to do, though for some reason he said it in German, perhaps to get into the multilingual spirit of the evening.

"Ich hab' ein gross arbeit", he said as he closed the door behind him. So the only ones left in the kitchen were James, the well-heeled transatlantic gourmet, and his bustling Czech hostess. "Seeing her put a fresh fish in a pot of water, he jumped up and grabbed the good woman's hand. With the other hand he managed to extract the fish from the pot, all the while gesturing with both his head and hand as if to say, 'Now wait a minute, don't move a muscle, let me show you the right way to prepare a fish. ' He called for salt, and when she gave it to him he took the lid off the shaker, grabbed a huge handful, and massaged big lumps of it into the fish with his pudgy fingers. 'Red pepper!' But it seemed there was no red pepper in the good woman's pantry.

"Then black pepper!' He poured the pepper prodigally over the fish. 'Now an open flame!' But how could she understand his wild gesticulations? How could he communicate 'an open flame' to her without words? But wasn't he a man of the world?

Wasn't he resourceful enough to cook this fish over an open flame if he chose? He removed the other pots and pans from the gas oven and turned all the flames up as high as they could go, then places the fish on the pyre. It smoked and sizzled, covered by now with ash from head to tail. He snatched it from the flame with his bare hands and flung it onto a platter. 'Quick! While it's still hot we must saut'e it with wine and lemon juice!

Unless it's swimming in wine this fish won't be worth two cents". Scene Four: Chicago Politics The four men were again sharing a train compartment. The Chicago skyline loomed in the distance. Toying with the watch chain tucked into the vest that spread across his ample belly, James recalled something he had once read about America, something he agreed with, a vision of an America that no longer had wide-open spaces to offer the traveler, no longer proffered her green breast to explorers come to marvel at a brave new world.

"If we are walking over that lawn it is nonetheless in city clothes, high heels piercing the thin membrane of webbed roots. The light is soft, that slowly graying dusk that takes an hour or more. We may be watching the sky from the back of a cab. But it is never a brazen season. We are never in the tropics, it is never noon. We are always among the thousand grays of home".

But Chicago had never been the home to James that it had been to Bellow. As the train rumbled through gray Gary, Bellow looked out the window and talked politics. "We don't have plastic politics here. The people of Chicago are very proud of their wickedness... The line between virtue and vice meanders with madly effective government on one side, connections on the other. Odd things happen."Not long ago, Allen Dorfman of the teamsters' pension fund was gunned down in a parking lot.

Now plea-bargaining witnesses are talking freely about Joey (The Clown) Lombardo, convicted with Dorfman and Roy Williams, the teamsters' union president, of conspiring to bribe Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada. Politics are politics, crime is crime, but in Chicago they occasionally overlap. One of these alleged assailants... turned out to be a Cook County deputy sheriff employed as a process server... A hit man on the county payroll? Would there be others? Well, that's how it is.

People shrug". Scene Five: To Chicago and None of the Way Back They got off the train and checked into a downtown hotel. After a good night's sleep they were ready to visit the fair. For some reason, Bellow seemed to be in a jocular mood. In the lobby he told them a joke. "Socrates said, 'The unexamined life is not worth living.

' My revision is, 'but the examined life makes you wish you were dead. ' " His companions didn't find anything particularly funny in the remark, especially since they hadn't even had their morning cup of coffee yet. He tried again as they were getting into the cab. "An American singer... makes his debut at La Scala.

He sings his first aria to great applause. And the crowd calls 'Ancora, vita, vita. ' He sings it a second time, and again they call for an encore. Then a third time and a fourth... Finally, panting and exhausted, he asks, 'How many times must I sing this aria?' Then someone tells him, 'Until you get it right.

' " The others still saw little reason to laugh, so he took pains to excuse himself, turning to face the three of them crammed into the back seat of the cab". 'I don't think I was a very sophisticated person,' he said, recalling his youth in Chicago as the son of an onion importer who had immigrated from Russia. 'Chicago is not a city that produces sophisticated people. ' " James tried to rescue the situation in his usual lugubrious way. And though he was obviously trying to help, he ended up sounding overblown, falsely cosmopolitan, Olympian. Worse, he ended up sounding like he was feeling sorry for himself.

.".. One has the illusion of freedom; therefore don't be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it; I don't quite know which. The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have...

Do what you like so long as you don't make MY mistake. For it was a mistake. Live". Bellow could only shrug, while Konstantinov nodded thoughtfully, his hat crumpled in his hands. Young Conrad hadn't said a word all morning. He just stared out the window of the cab, perhaps thinking about his girlfriend in St. Louis.

After they went through the fair, awestruck at all the latest technology and luxury that had been amassed in one place, they stopped for lunch at a caf'e that offered an unobstructed view of the Columbus fountain. Konstantinov read to them from the guidebook. "An impressive group of marble figures perched on Columbus's hip, with the captain seated amidst adoring nymphs. One crowns him with a laurel wreath while others are arranged in various attitudes of praise.

A nymph also pilots the ship. Cascading streams of water bathe the entire ensemble. At night, the pool that surrounds them shimmers in the glow of resplendent electric lights. Opposite the fountain stands a massive golden statue representing the Republic, and on the southeastern side of the monument, at the edge of Lake Michigan, you may observe the caravelle Santa Maria, the very ship that Columbus sailed when he discovered America". Is this the same Christopher Columbus that Bellow remembered? No, as he looked up at the monument he sees something else, something entirely different: a miniscule soldier of fortune on the beach of a Caribbean island, brazenly claiming the New World for Spain.

A man absolutely ignorant of the people whose lives he changes forever, unable to speak a single word of their language, completely ignorant of their ways. A travel-weary profiteer regally declaiming to three or four of his men and a few bewildered Arawaks, pompously enacting his ritual of possession and sovereignty, fashioning a shabby myth of order in the face of chaos, proclaiming ownership in perpetuity because of a chance landfall. Bellow could almost hear the captain's words echo hollowly at the edge of the jungle, like quotations out of context or a pre-recorded message. The monument that loomed above the four men as they buttered their toast was both a testimony to history's bewilderment and a reminder that the New World Columbus had claimed maintains to this day a sturdy belief in progress, progress that can be measured by dynamos, skyscrapers, an enormous gross national product, ever broadening horizons. And not only America measures progress in such terms. As Jos'e Ortega y Gas set has said, "World history compels us to recognize Man's continuous, inexhaustible capacity to invent unrealizable projects.

In the effort to realize them, he achieves many things, he creates innumerable realities that so-called Nature is incapable of producing for itself. The only thing that Man does not achieve is, precisely, what he proposes to -- let it be said to his credit. This wedding of reality with the demon of what is impossible supplies the universe with the only growth it is capable of". And what could better symbolize a vision of progress than the World Fair? Perhaps a slaughterhouse, Konstantinov suggests to his companions, again consulting his guidebook.

"Of course it would be a big mistake to visit Chicago without seeing its famous slaughterhouses. In one of these, the biggest, Armour's Packing House, they slaughtered 1,750,000 pigs, 800,000 steers, and 600,000 sheep. The total net worth of meat products processed in Chicago is more than 140 million dollars a year". So they decided to ride over to the slaughterhouse together. This time Konstantinov sat in the front seat, while Conrad sat directly behind him.

Bellow told them about something he had read in the paper that morning. "Just the other day, a middle-level mob personality, Tokyo Joe Eto, having reason to feel that his time had come, instructed his wife to put his insurance policies in order. Sure enough, he was soon afterwards shot in the head by two associates who had gotten into his car. Three shots were fired from the back seat, none of which pierced his skull.

With extraordinary presence of mind, he fell over the steering wheel, shuddered convulsively and played dead". As James clucked disapprovingly at the violence of the criminal class, Konstantinov suddenly stiffened in the front seat, as if he knew what was coming. Their young friend Conrad reached calmly into his pocket, the pocket next to the window, and produced a small pistol. Without hesitating, he pressed it against the back of Konstantinov's head and pulled the trigger. The coroner's report said that the bullet entered the brain some two inches above the base of the skull, killing the crude oil salesman instantly.

During the trial it came out that Conrad had long been involved with a group of Polish anarchists who fanatically opposed what they called American imperialism, and who were determined to combat it at any cost. His seemingly chance appearance at the Baton Rouge train station had been no accident. In fact, Conrad had planned to kill both Konstantinov and the Mexican consul in San Antonio, since he knew that they had often done business together on behalf of the oil cartels. No wonder Conrad had taken such an interest in Konstantinov's signed photograph: "To Aleko with respect and friendship from Geraldo, and to many more mutually profitable joint ventures". But Conrad had never gotten his chance in San Antonio, so he simply bide d his time. His Czech girlfriend was also an anarchist, as she readily confessed (in perfect English) when questioned by the FBI.

The mother knew nothing about any of it. All she recalled of that evening in St. Louis was how James had filled her kitchen with the smell of burnt fish. When he was sentenced to be executed, Conrad offered a final cryptic remark, perhaps filled with menace, clearly without a shred of remorse. "You remain with the sense of the life still going on; and even the subtle presence of the dead is felt in that silence that comes upon the artist-creation when the last word has been read.

It is eminently satisfying, but it is not final". James and Bellow attended Konstantinov's funeral, then James boarded a train for Boston. He had booked a first-class cabin to London, on the Queen Elizabeth. As the two men stood together on the platform (as they had stood with the unfortunate Konstantinov in Baton Rouge just a few days before), James bemoaned life's brevity and fragility. "It's too late. And it's as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to know it was there.

Now I hear its faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that". The two friends shook hands one last time and then the train was gone. Bellow returned to his parents' apartment in downtown Chicago, wanting only to put the whole monstrous scene behind him, wanting only to get back to Montreal as quickly as possible.

Late that afternoon a thunderstorm swept in over Lake Michigan. As he watched the dark clouds thicken, he murmured to himself, "Even Bellow the Rain King couldn't part these waters". Then came the deluge. He struggled to reassure himself that this too would pass, and he was thinking of far more than a sudden autumn shower. "It's like the storm in Beethoven's Sixth Symphony", he said to himself, pressing his forehead against the glass.

"It only lasts twenty minutes.".