The Whole Human Mess: On Saul Bellow
What happens in the plot happens in the sentences; the place where the Bellovian poles of high thought and venal circumstance most directly touch and spark is in his prose. Bellow’s way with portraiture is often to open up with a barrage of jostling adjectives: “We met Sewell for lunch—a muttering subtle drunken backward-leaning hollow-faced man.” He throws them out, the epithets, a boxer dealing rights and lefts. And when he’s really roused, the jumble’s wilder still: “He wore a black carabiniere cloak, his feet were bare, he drank Pepsi-Cola, he had eight or ten children, he owed money to everyone, and he was a cultural statesman.” A vivid miscellany, Bellow’s style, like the American city itself. There is a sublime ungainliness about the phrases, a restless discontent, the philosophical-abstruse yoking itself, with loosely fitted joints, to the concrete-vernacular. The syntax comes in a tumble, submitting itself to the urban experience: “A mysterious tremor, dust, vapor, emanation of stupendous effort traveled with the air, over me on top of the great establishment, so full as it was, and over the clinics, clinks, factories, flophouses, morgue, skid row.”
It’s like drinking from a fire hose. This is your brain on Bellow. There’s as much perception in his prose per square inch as there is thought in Henry James. He looks the facts in the face. Under such attention, everything is lovely: “the patrons of the Russian Bath are cast in an antique form. They have swelling buttocks and fatty breasts as yellow as buttermilk. They stand on thick pillar legs affected with a sort of creeping verdigris or blue-cheese mottling of the ankles.” But also, often, there’s a kind of coarse approximateness, a roughness like a rough guess, life handled largely, with stiff workman’s gloves: “Upstairs, on the television screen in the locker room, little dudes and grinning broads make smart talk or leap up and down.” And finally, behind it all, there is the tension of an enormous highbrow intelligence being held in check, diverted. Registered, finally, in an exquisite dryness of manner, like Scotch evaporating on the tongue.
Herzog, Sammler, Citrine: they think, but they are not thinkers in the usual sense, professional intellectuals, and neither, quite deliberately, was Bellow. Having come of age in young Marxist Depression-era Chicago, having gone east to seek his literary fortune amid an even more hypertrophically intellectualized and politicized milieu, the Partisan Review crowd in its heyday, living in a century of omnivorous ideas and cannibalistic ideologies, he distrusted the big theory, the blanket explanation. The postwar scene was only worse. Already by 1948 he is bemoaning “our failing connection to reality.” Journalism, sociology, political talk, “the canned goods of the intellectuals”—all of these he saw as mass delusions, groupthink on a global scale. All the official sources of cultural authority were suspect to him, all the “centers”: Partisan (they were the “dying beasts”), New York, the Ivy League, Europe.
“I must say, here”—he is referring to the University of Minnesota, where he taught as a young man—”that sociologists are the greater offenders. I listen to them…with every effort to be fair and understanding but I can’t make out their Man…. The creature the theologians write about is far closer to me.” Bellow insisted on the reality of the soul, of its powers and greatness and supreme importance, a conviction he derived not from orthodox belief or any other kind but from his own intuitions and intimations, his encounter with himself and others. The soul: individual, unique, immediate, irreducible—not an average, not a notion. “The novelist labors in character,” he writes here, eschewing the Village’s fashionable Freudianism, “not in psychology, which is easier and swifter; the psychology of a man comes from many different sources, a theory that is shared; the vision of him as a character comes from the imagination of one man.” Vision, imagination, art: this is the way to get at the truth, to get at the soul. Instead of talking about what matters, he says here, we should talk about “what really matters”—not received concepts or causes but feeling, perception, experience, the world as it arrives to us direct. “What I felt all through,” he says of Cheever’s novel Falconer, “was an enraged determination to state the basic facts.”
His own tendency to think the general thought he recognized and sought to guard against. “Hattie in ‘The Yellow House’ and Henderson and ‘The Old System’ seem to me my most interesting things,” he writes, “because they are not argued.” His notion-spinning heroes were a way of keeping his own intellect at arm’s length, ironizing the will to master mentally chaotic circumstances. His novels aren’t essays, and they don’t contain essays, either. Herzog’s cogitation and the others’—it is mobile, improvisational, circumstantial, speculative, the mind wrestling with reality, not shutting it in the cellar. When Bellow started a literary magazine, the Noble Savage, in 1959, his goal, he said, was to get writers out of the “nutshells” into which the twentieth century had shut them and “into the world again.” “It’s a lucky man who has a generous style,” he writes, “and can accept the wider range of other people’s facts.” Other people’s facts: reality as it exists apart from us. His friend Allan Bloom said it brilliantly and best: “He has always understood that even if you are on your way from Becoming to Being, you still have to catch the train at Randolph Street.”
Understanding, for Bellow, begins in feeling—hardly an intellectual’s position or, these days, even a comprehensible one. Citrine, we read, is a man who has decided “to follow the threads of spirit he had found within himself to see where they might lead.” That is why Bellow’s memories of childhood were always his essential touchstone. “Love reclaims one for reality,” he writes here—that same love that he felt for his readers. And that is why he insisted, to Alfred Kazin, that when it comes to judging a work of literature, “The first criterion is enjoyment, and so are the second and third criteria.” Bellow was against interpretation long before another writer got there. “While our need for meanings is certainly great,” he wrote in a 1959 essay, “our need for concreteness, for particulars, is even greater.” And that is why he thought by telling stories.
