Darkness In Literature: Saul Bellow`s Something To Remember Me By

"Death," wrote Saul Bellow in his 1975 novel Humboldt`s Gift, "is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything." And though there is a literal darkness to his 1990 short story Something to Remember Me By, it is the figurative darkness of the earlier aphorism the Bellow seems to be exploring over the dozen or so pages that make up this later work.

Set over the course of a single February day in 1933 ("Chicago in winter, armored in gray ice, the sky low, the going heavy"), Something to Remember Me By takes the form of a childhood memory as narrated by an elderly father to his adult son. There is a pervasive melancholy throughout, a sense of encroaching gloom that settles upon the narrative like the coal soot upon the snow piling up in the streets. In 1933 the narrator, Louis, is 17 years old ("an indifferent student, generally unpopular, a background figure"); his mother lies at home dying of cancer ("her eyelids were brown; the color of her face was much lighter"); meanwhile, the growing darkness of the wider world is briefly alluded to in the planned topic for Louis` discussion club that afternoon ("Von Hindenburg`s choice of Hitler to form a new government"). On this particular day, however, Louis is unable to attend his club. Instead, he has to deliver lilies for a florist to an address across town. What follows is a kind of Short Day`s Journey into Night, during which the tragic and the comic work upon Louis in equal measure and "the facts of life [have] their turn".

Upon arriving at his destination, Louis discovers that the lilies are for a young girl`s wake. In the dining room he observes the body of the girl laid out in her coffin, before being summoned into the kitchen by the girl`s mother:

"On the drainboard of the sink was a baked ham with sliced bread around the platter, a jar of French mustard and wooden tongue depressors to spread it. I saw and I saw and I saw." By the time Louis leaves the apartment it is early evening. "There wasn`t much daylight left. At noon it was poured out; by four it had drained away." Reluctant to return home, Louis pays a visit to his brother-in-law, a dentist. His brother-in-law is out, but in the office of the gynaecologist next door, Louis encounters a beautiful naked woman. At the sight of the woman`s breasts, Louis is unable to stop himself picturing "his mother`s chest mutilated by cancer surgery". Here, then, is an early glimpse of the mirror`s dark backing. Or, as Louis puts it himself a short while later as he excitedly escorts the woman back to her hotel: "I refused absolutely to believe for a moment that people here were doing what they thought they were doing. Beneath the apparent life of these streets was their real life, beneath each face the real face, beneath each voice and its words the true tone and the real message." Ironically, Louis` theory is proved to be true when the woman turns out to be a con-artist who throws his clothes out of the hotel window and leaves him naked and penniless, miles from home.

When Louis finally manages to make it back to his family - hours later, in borrowed, ill-fitting clothes - he finds his father waiting up for him and is struck about the head. However, this blow comes as a relief: had his mother already died, Louis realises, his father would have embraced him instead. And in this moment Louis is made aware of "the hidden work of uneventful days"; that "the measured, reassuring, sleep-inducing turntable of days [had become] a whirlpool, a vortex, darkening toward the bottom".

Bellow is not quite finished, though. Now that Louis has been reminded of his mother`s imminent death, the reader is reminded that the narrator`s death is imminent also. Of course, the death of the narrator has been present from the very start: the title itself, Something to Remember Me By, providing the dark backing for this particular mirror. But it is easy to forget the present when one is lost in the past. And so the story comes to an abrupt end with a couple of wry, throwaway lines:

"Well, they`re all gone now, and I have made my preparations. I haven`t left a large estate, and this is why I have written this memoir, a sort of addition to your legacy." It is almost as if, having made the darkness visible, he quite simply has nothing more left to say.