Looking for Mr. Green by Saul Bellow

First published: 1951

Type of plot: Realism

Time of work: The Depression

Locale: Chicago

Principal Characters:

• George Grebe, a relief worker
• Mr. Raynor, his supervisor
• Mrs. Staika, a welfare recipient
• Winston Field, another welfare recipient and one of George Grebe's cases

The Story

"Looking for Mr. Green" recounts the efforts of George Grebe to deliver relief checks to handicapped residents of the South Side of Chicago. Grebe, thirty-five and an instructor of classical languages, has been reduced by the hard times of the Depression to taking a series of trivial, part-time jobs until an old schoolmate secures for him a position at the relief office. Grebe's desire to do well at his new job is hampered by its peculiar difficulty: "He could find the streets and numbers, but the clients were not where they were supposed to be." Grebe is particularly frustrated by his inability to find Mr. Tulliver Green but persists in his search long after quitting time. As the story develops, Grebe's quest to find Mr. Green becomes a symbolic quest to find his own identity.

Grebe systematically questions a local grocer, the janitor, and several tenants of Mr. Green's building. Their responses are hostile and evasive. Grebe is viewed "as an emissary from hostile appearances" because he is not yet a familiar face in the territory and because he is white. Although Grebe himself has known hardship, he is out of place in this rundown district of the city, where he is shocked by the distrust of the people and the blighted physical setting.

Before Grebe continues his hunt, he recalls his first meeting with his supervisor, Mr. Raynor. Their conversation establishes somewhat of a kinship between them. Both are well educated and speak foreign languages, and they exchange a few Latin phrases. Their views on the nature of reality, however, establish that they are indeed from different worlds. Although Grebe treats the problem of appearance and reality philosophically, Raynor's reality comes down to money, "even though nothing looks to be real, and everything stands for something else, and that thing for another thing, and that thing for still a further one—there ain't any comparison between twenty-five and thirty-seven dollars a week, regardless of the last reality." Grebe's and Raynor's perceptions of Mrs. Staika further illustrate their differences.

Staika is called the "Blood Mother of Federal Street" because she is a professional donor of blood, dragging her children around with her as she defies the world. After notifying the press, Staika sets up her ironing board at the agency office to protest their failure to pay her electric bill. Raynor believes that Staika will "get what she wants. . . . She's got [the commissioner] submerged; she'll submerge everybody in time, and that includes nations and governments." Grebe, however, disagrees completely; he does not believe that Staika's yelling will bring about change, because her protests are so outrageous. Staika reminds Grebe of "the war of flesh and blood, perhaps turned a little crazy and certainly ugly." Grebe temporarily gives up his search for Mr. Green and looks for Winston Field.

Field's insistence on identifying himself with a Social Security card, his relief certification, and other credentials suggests the problem of the identity of the individual in modern society. For Field, like Raynor, identity is related to money, and he tells Grebe his scheme for making black millionaires who would employ black workers in their businesses. Field's idealism rekindles Grebe's, and after a long review of the philosophical problem that he has been facing, Grebe continues his search for Mr. Green.

In the end, Grebe finds Mr. Green's bungalow, inhabited by a heavy woman, naked and drunk, who screams furiously at him and knocks into him with her huge breasts. Grebe is shocked and embarrassed at "what he had tracked down, in his hunting game." Although he believes Mr. Green to be upstairs, Grebe does not go up, afraid that Mr. Green will be similarly naked and drunk. Recalling Field's insistence that Grebe obtain proper identification before handing over relief checks, Grebe nevertheless gives the check to the woman, who might or might not be Mrs. Green, for "whoever she was, the woman stood for Green, whom he was not to see this time." The story ends with Grebe elated that Mr. Green has been found. By handing over the check, Grebe does what the epigraph of the story suggests he do: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might."

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.

Goldman, L. H. Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. New York: Peter Lang, 1992.

Hyland, Peter. Saul Bellow. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

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.

Trachtenberg, Stanley, comp. Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.