Books: What Makes Augie Run?

(2 of 2)

Back in Chicago, brother Simon has married for money and made more, but Augie still doesn't know what he wants. An intellectual friend tries to guess: "O King David! O Plutarch and Seneca! O chivalry! . . . O Strozzi Palace. O Weimar! O Don Giovanni, O lineaments of gratified desire! O godlike man! Tell me, pal, am I getting warm?" He is. But by this time, war has come, and Augie, joining the merchant marine, goes to New York. He sees Stella there, marries her and reflects that he doesn't envy his brother, "seeing I was married to a woman I loved and therefore I was advancing on the only true course of life."

Everybody Is Inside. At war's end, Augie is living in Paris with Stella and, as usual, is deep in illicit business. But he feels he has arrived at wisdom. A man's character is his fate, Augie believes, and "this fate, or what he settles for, is also his character." The real battle, unseen from the outside, is internal, where "you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin."

Augie knows that what he has been running after is to stop running. ("When striving stops, the truth comes as a gift—bounty, harmony, love . . .") He asks: "Is the laugh at nature—including eternity—that it thinks it can win over us and the power of hope?" And answers, Chicago-style: "Nah, nah! ... It never will."