George Grebe is a white, classically educated college graduate of small physical stature and long sideburns. It’s Depression Chicago. He takes a job distributing relief checks in a “blight-bitten” Black neighborhood. The job is not ideal to Grebe, but it’s a job. He aims to do it well. We learn of Grebe’s tenacity from the Ecclesiastical epigraph at the top of “Looking for Mr. Green,” a story Saul Bellow published in Commentary magazine in 1951, when he was thick in the creation of the wondrous and nearly epic Adventures of Augie March: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might…”
Bellow excludes the second clause of the verse–“for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest”–maybe because this is not a story about Grebe seizing the day (though there’s some of that) but about a hunt for Tulliver Green, a man difficult to find in this Black jungle. Are you uncomfortable yet? Bellow gets me there within eight lines of the first paragraph when he describes Grebe as “like a hunter inexperienced in the camouflage of his game.” A white hunter? In camouflage? In a minority neighborhood? For a moment I thought I was reading the latest account of a Midwestern ICE raid. Anachronisms aside, “Looking for Mr. Green” is not far off. Heart of darkness, here comes Mr. Grebe hunting for Mr. Black, albeit for a good, patronizing purpose.
Grebe will soon “prowl around” the neighborhood of this “Negro load,” as his white boss describes it, knock on random doors (“a young Negress answered,” a line barely more excusable in Édouard Manet’s time a century before), describe one Black man’s lips as “grimy,” a Black man’s head as shaped like a shako, a Black apartment as filled with “earthen, musky human gloom,” the street beneath the L as “the straight alley of flamey gloom.”
The sublime prose in service of a debased perspective culminates with a white shopkeeper’s paraphrased screed about “these people”: “They stabbed and stole, they did every corrupt thing you ever heard of, men and men, women and women, parents and children, worse than the animals. They carried on their own way, and the crimes passed off like a smoke. There was never anything like it in the history of the world.” I happened to read the story within days of Donald Trump’s Führious rant about “garbage” Somalis. Plus ça change.
The story can and has been read as one of Bellow’s elegies to “the fallen world of appearances” as a young man perseveres through obstacles and discoveries, many of them dispiriting, some of them shimmered by the Bellow magic of association, as when Grebe looking at tenement graffiti “saw WHOODY-DOODY GO TO JESUS, and zigzags, caricatures, sexual scrawls, and curses. So the sealed rooms of pyramids were also decorated, and the caves of human dawn.” The image reminded me of how Picasso transformed an upturned bicycle handlebar and bike seat into the head of a bull. Beauty like this, beauty from supposed blight especially, makes you feel born anew for a moment.
“Supposed” is my qualifier, not Bellow’s. He only qualifies, nuances, nurtures and entices us when it’s Grebe. Everyone else is one-dimensional. The blight in “Looking for Mr. Green” is not supposed. It is the necessary canvas to Grebe’s hunt–for Mr. Green and for Grebe to prove to himself that he can “do well, simply for doing-well’s sake.” It is all transactional. The blighted neighborhood and “these people” are props to Grebe’s enlightenment. The more he shines, the more they grime.
That supremacy pollutes “Looking for Mr. Green” down to, on reflection, that initially striking image of graffiti. It is literary flair in the service of Grebe’s educated allusions. Surely Bellow isn’t suggesting that the scrawls are as beautiful as the bison and horses of Lascaux? Surely he isn’t saying that the bison and horses are as primitive as the scrawls? Isn’t the comparison of hallway graffiti to the unsurpassed art of Neolithic caves another way of diminishing both before the eye of the contemporary supremacist? The image has no parallel in any other beauty Bellow conjures from the human beings around Grebe. All he conjures is blight and weirdness, except in Grebe, the outsider who remains very much the outsider, and thank God for that, you can almost hear him say with the detached imperiousness of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad.
Bellow sets up Grebe’s and his boss’ superiority when they briefly exchange Latin quotations to prove their educated bona fides to each other. If there is a counterpoint to the graffiti in the hallway, that is it. It’s like the end of the scene in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow’s more outwardly racist novel and social critique of 1960s New York, after Sammler is confronted by a Black pickpocket’s slightly violent exhibitionism of his “great oval testicles, a large tan-and-purple uncircumcised thing—a tube, a snake… suggesting the fleshly mobility of an elephant’s trunk.” Note the unsubtle Serengeti allusion.
When the pickpocket returns schlong to trousers, Sammler has this reflection: Quod erat demonstrandum, of course untranslated by Bellow, restoring white superiority with–and this is Bellow’s supreme wit and cynicism–the very meaning of the phrase: “that which was to be demonstrated.” It isn’t the Black man who demonstrated penis. It’s Sammler-Bellow who demonstrated supremacy.
Mr. Green is not easy to find, and Grebe may not have ever found him. Absent the resolution that refuses to humanize Mr. Green, Bellow resorts to slapstick with the scene of a naked woman in a stairwell “climbing down while she talked to herself, a heavy woman, naked and drunk. She blundered into” Grebe, who thinks Mr. Green is in the apartment at the top of the stairs, and that the woman may be Mrs. Green. She has come out of the apartment cussing out someone inside who has apparently told her that she “cain’t fuck.” (Never pass up a chance at slingshotting slang.) He lets her sign for the check, breaking a rule, and leaves, convincing himself through the stairwell fright that (like the drifting, aimless Augie March comparing himself to Columbus) he’d been successful.
If Steinbeck chose Okies and James Agee and Walker Evans chose poor Southerners to tell the stories of Depression desperation, why should Bellow not use Chicago Blacks to the same end? Because you never feel in Steinbeck, in Agee’s prose or in Evans’s photographs, that the human beings in the lens are means to an end. They are their own ends. The wrath of Grapes is Tom Joad’s own. Steinbeck is not a disinterested outsider. He disappears, letting his characters be as they are. There is more distance between authors and subjects in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but the implied judgments are of the sort of society that prizes material comforts over dignity. (Fortune magazine, which assigned the original story, rejected it when Evans and Agee turned in their work.)
Postscript: In 1963, three years after he took over Commentary magazine–an organ of lapsed liberals that would become a coaling pit for neocons–Norman Podhoretz wrote a piece called “My Negro Problem–And Ours.” The bigoted pomposity of the title hasn’t aged. Its judgments are enjoying a revival in the shadows of Charlie Kirk’s halo and maga’s prisonhouse. Podhoretz, who died a maga fan on Dec. 17–the same day the more evidence-loving Peter Arnett died— recalled his white Depression youth in “an integrated” Brooklyn neighborhood full of what he saw as predatory Blacks. He was afraid of them and “hated them with all my heart.” The experience convinced him of the failure of integration and liberalism, whose reverse racism he called “crow-jimism” (a term he borrowed from Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth). It convinced him of a white superiority he still felt as the 33-year-old who wrote Mein Negerproblem.
“How, then, do I know that this hatred has never entirely disappeared?” he writes. “I know it from the insane rage that can stir in me at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism.” Did he reserve equal rage for Charles Lindbergh or a millennium of Catholicism then? Might maga’s flowering into tiki-torched great replacement theories have convinced him since that he was wrong to call Trump’s election a “miracle”? His hatred gets worse: “I know it from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a mixed couple” (Loving v. Virginia was four years away); “and I know it from the violence that can stir in me whenever I encounter that special brand of paranoid touchiness to which many Negroes are prone.”
That special brand of paranoid touchiness to which many Negroes are prone. Would he have ever allowed such a bigoted generality about any other racial or ethnic group to appear in the pages of Commentary? Did he not spend his life fighting rancid generalities about Jews? If he could appreciate Bellow’s ironies, which redeem so much of Bellow, why not his own? His magazine, now edited by his son, still boasts of the piece as “One of the Most Controversial and Powerful Essays Published in COMMENTARY.” Bellow’s story doesn’t carry a similar avowal on Commentary’s site, though when it was one of the 13 stories republished in Bellow’s Collected Stories in 2001 (he died in 2005), Publishers Weekly called “many of them classics.” Consensus literary critics include “Looking for Mr. Green” among them.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive.
Leave a Reply