Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 1915 – 2005)
Canadian-American writer, best known for his novels The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet, (each winning the National Book Award for Fiction), Henderson the Rain King, Seize the Day, Humboldt’s Gift, (which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1976) and Ravelstein. A Father-to-Be was first published in The New Yorker on January 29th 1955 and in Seize the Day on November 15th 1956.
Available to read online here.
This is the last of eight stories in the volume Points of View to be given the style classification by Moffett and McElheny of Biography, or Anonymous Narration – Single Character Point of View. Their introduction concludes: “We have included a large number of selections in this group because this technique is the most widely used for telling a short story and very often used for telling a novel, especially in this century. Examples are Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Marquand’s Point of No Return.”
Spoiler alert – if you haven’t read the story yet and want to before you read the summary of it below, stop now!
A Father-To-Be
On a snowy Sunday evening, 31-years-old research chemist Rogin is on his way to his fiancée Joan’s for supper. She had asked him to buy some items on the way, so he stops at a delicatessen to buy roast beef, shampoo and some other treats he thinks she might enjoy. He allows his mind to wander; thinking about how he has to give money both to Joan and to his brother to get him through college, then he observes the behaviour of the people in the delicatessen, and people on the subway as he starts his journey to Joan’s. There’s a man who thinks no one knows he drinks, two children from different families with the same toy, a dwarf whose sex he cannot determine, and a middle-aged man whose facial features reminded him of Joan. He takes an instant disliking to the man – and becomes upset as he realises he is how any son that Joan gives birth to will look like him. His anxieties escalate when he thinks of how the future could turn out, so much so that he considers ending his relationship with Joan. When he arrives at her home, he is initially frosty and grumpy, but Joan insists on washing his hair with the new shampoo, and this gentle, loving action calms him down so that his mind is once again at rest.
This is a very curious short story for two main reasons. First, very little happens. A man goes to his fiancée’s home via a delicatessen and the subway. Almost all the events of the journey happen in his mind. Second, our hero Rogin does not come across as a particularly pleasant person. True, he is generous, not worrying about the thirty dollars he gave Joan a few days ago, buying extras at the shop so that their supper will be more enjoyable, and we note that he pays for his brother’s college fees. But he is very judgmental; he mentally appraises and criticises all the people he meets and observes on his journey. Sometimes he compares them to himself, and always unfavourably.
Bellow’s concise writing is always effective and tells us more than we need to know. He encapsulates everything about Rogin in his first paragraph; not only his age and profession, but the eccentricities of his appearance (for example, his “preposterous gait”) and the fact that he wears a Burberry coat suggests his wealth. He also tells us exactly what the rest of the story will be about: “the strangest notions had a way of forcing themselves into Rogin’s mind”, and “he fell into a peculiar state”.
“Who is free […] who has no burdens?” Rogin asks himself, as he reflects on both the people around him and his own life. He likes to fantasise about inventions he could make – but doesn’t – and frets about his mother’s changing behaviour and condemns the secret drinker for believing he could fool anyone. He rehearses how he is going to compliment Joan when he meets her, as if he has to plan his spontaneity. He condemns the unthinking crowd because of “how they slept through life” and spends more time than he should trying to decide whether the subway passenger is male or female – something that should be of absolutely no concern to him at all.
But it’s when he allows his fanciful brain to expand on the character of the silent man to whom he takes an instant dislike that it actively does damage to the balance of his character. The title of story is A Father-to-be, but it’s not as though Rogin is shortly to become a father; there’s no evidence that Joan is pregnant, and indeed, it wouldn’t be something that would be acceptable in that time and in that social stratum. It’s just his imagination that, if he and Joan were to have children together, and did have a son, he fears he would grow up to resemble this man, about whom he makes the wildest judgments without knowing the first thing about him. To Rogin he is simply “flat-looking, with his ordinary, clean, rosy, uninteresting, self-satisfied, fundamentally bourgeois face.” “What a curse to have a dull son!” he concludes.
As a result, his demeanour has quite changed by the time he gets to Joan’s, but her loving touch and the possible religious symbolism of a hair-washing ritual – using the shampoo that is a “sweet, cool, fragrant juice” – puts all those damaging thoughts out of his mind. However, one does wonder whether those damaging thoughts are gone forever; and it’s curious to reflect on what kind of relationship he and Joan might have long-term. Will his fears of dull suburban existence come true, or will he just enjoy life for what it is?
Finely and precisely written, it’s a fascinating insight into the way one’s thoughts can wander and drift, and how easily it is to catastrophise. It definitely captures a recognisable moment and tells us more about the central character than he would ever want us to know.
The next story in the anthology is the first of three to be classified by Moffett and McElheny as Anonymous Narration – Dual Character Point of View, Maria Concepción by Katherine Anne Porter.