Mosby's Memoirs by Saul Bellow

First published: 1968

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: About 1962

Locale: South-central Mexico

Principal Characters:

• Willis Mosby, a former Princeton professor
• Hyman Lustgarten, a Marxist turned capitalist
• Trudy Lustgarten, Hyman's wife
• Alfred Ruskin, an American poet
• Klonsky, a Polish Belgian, Lustgarten's associate

The Story

Dr. Willis Mosby is in Oaxaca, Mexico, on a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, writing his memoirs. Mosby's memoirs depict him as one of the brightest, most observant people in the twentieth century. He is "erudite, maybe even profound; [had] thought much, accomplished much—had made some of the most interesting mistakes a man could make in the twentieth century."

Mosby thinks that he must now put some humor into his memoirs. He has told about his early life: shaking hands with Generalissimo Francisco Franco during the Spanish Revolution; having experiences in the Office of Strategic Services, the U.S. organization for intelligence gathering and secret operations created during World War II; and describing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as having limited vision during the war. During the war, Mosby argues, "the Nazis were winning because they had made their managerial revolution first. No Allied combination could conquer, with its obsolete industrialism, a nation that had reached a new state of history and tapped the power of the inevitable, etc." Although Mosby admits that the concentration camps had been deplorable, he thinks they show that Germany had rational political ideas. After the war, he expected a high government appointment but was disappointed. Princeton University also fired him because, he thinks, his mode of discourse upset the academic community.

Now Mosby begins to write about 1947 in Paris and Hyman Lustgarten, whom he considers to be a funny man. An American from New Jersey, Lustgarten was a follower of the communistic philosophy of Karl Marx. In 1947, Lustgarten was in Europe trying to make a fortune as a capitalist. When Mosby met him, Lustgarten was working for the U.S. Army, doing something involving cemeteries, although Mosby is not sure what. On the side, Lustgarten invested all of his and his mother's money in an illegal dental-supply business with a German dentist in Munich who cheated him. Lustgarten next borrowed money from his brother to import a Cadillac into France because Cadillacs could then be sold without taxation at enormous profit. The day his Cadillac arrived, new regulations went into effect, making it impossible for him to sell the car. Lustgarten and his wife, Trudy, moved out of the hotel at which they were staying. Trudy stayed with friends; Lustgarten lived in the Cadillac and used Mosby's place for washing and shaving. Lustgarten next decided to sell the Cadillac in Barcelona. As Klonsky, his associate, was driving the car south, Lustgarten received a marvelous offer for the car from a capitalist in Utrecht in The Netherlands. He took the train south, caught up with Klonsky, and started to drive the car himself to Utrecht. He fell asleep at the wheel, wrecked the uninsured car on the side of a mountain, and landed in the hospital.

While Lustgarten was in the hospital, he heard a rumor that his wife was going out with Alfred Ruskin, an American poet. Mosby, in fact, had arranged for Trudy and Ruskin to be seen in public to mask his own affair with Trudy, of whom Mosby also made fun.

Lustgarten then went to Yugoslavia, thinking he was to be a guest of the communist government of Marshal Tito, the prime minister. Lustgarten was, Mosby wrote, a candidate for resurrection. Instead of being resurrected, however, Lustgarten found himself trapped in the mountains in a labor brigade that he described as being just like a chain gang. Lustgarten returned to Paris sick, disillusioned, and penniless. In the meantime, Trudy had divorced him. Nevertheless, as Lustgarten walked away from Mosby, Mosby noticed that Lustgarten had a certain dignity.

Mosby next saw Lustgarten five years later. Lustgarten had gotten on the wrong elevator trying to find the offices of Fortune magazine to sell them the story of how he had made a fortune running a coin-operated laundry with Klonsky in Algiers. He also had married Klonsky's sister and had children. Later the Algerians expelled the French and the Jews, so the one Mosby called "a sweet old Jewish Daddy" and "Jewish-Daddy-Lustgarten" had to move on.

While Mosby is writing about Lustgarten, a car arrives to take him to the ruins at Mitla. Along with two elderly Welsh women, he travels to Tula and then to Mitla. They look at the temples where the Zapotecs—members of a large tribe of Indians who now live in the Mexican state of Oaxaca—once practiced human sacrifice, under Aztec influence. Mosby and the women enter a tomb, where Mosby finds himself oppressed and afraid. The story ends with Mosby telling the guide he has to get out, and admitting to the women that he finds it very hard to breathe.

Bibliography

Bradbury, Malcolm. Saul Bellow. New York: Methuen, 1982.

Braham, Jeanne. A Sort of Columbus: The American Voyages of Saul Bellow's Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.

Cronin, Gloria L., and Leila H. Goldman, eds. Saul Bellow in the 1980's: A Collection of Critical Essays. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1989.

Cronin, Gloria L., and Ben Siegel, eds. Conversations with Saul Bellow. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.

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Newman, Judie. Saul Bellow and History. London: Macmillan, 1984.

Siegel, Ben. "Simply Not a Mandarin: Saul Bellow as Jew and Jewish Writer." In Traditions, Voices, and Dreams: The American Novel Since the 1960's. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995.

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