Goodbye
Saul Bellow
April 2005
by Michael Bryson
"How does it feel/ to be on
your own/ like a complete unknown?"
- Bob Dylan, "Like A
Rolling Stone"
I've just returned from the used book
store around the corner from my house. I went there to look for novels
by Saul Bellow, who died earlier this week at the age of 89. I bought Mr.
Sammler's Planet and Humbolt's Gift. About a decade ago, I
saw Bellow speak at the University of Toronto. At the time, I asked a
couple of different friends if they were interested in going; they
weren't. "How often do you get to see a Nobel Prize winner?" I
asked. Still, no takers. I went alone.
This week seems to be the week of old
men dying. The one getting all of the attention is Pope John Paul II.
Others I've seen on CNN in the past couple of days: Johnnie Cochrane
(best known as O.J. Simpson's lawyer: "if the glove don't fit, you
must acquit") and Prince Rainier of Monaco (best known for marrying
movie star Grace Kelly).
The Toronto Sun had a short
article on Bellow's death, right below a larger article with a
photograph and a headline: BRITNEY SPEARS GETS 'REAL' (the pop star and
her new husband are going to be the feature of a new reality show on TV
... or is that "reality" show?).
At the University of Toronto a decade
ago, Bellow read his short story "By the St. Lawrence" and
answered questions. The short story had been published in Esquire.
It was a reflective piece about a narrator born in Montreal early in the
20th-century who moved as a young child to the USA, as the author did.
Someone asked Bellow if he revised his work much, or did the writing
come out nearly fully formed. Bellow said it depended on what he was
working on. He said the story he'd just read hadn't been revised very
much, though as he was reading it he could see some places where he'd
like to make revisions. Someone else asked about the decline of
literature. Did it bother him that his audience was small, especially as
compared to the audiences of popular TV shows? Bellow said it didn't
bother him. His novels, he said, sold in the range of 200,000 copies,
which was an audience comparable to that of Charles Dickens in the 19th
century. Of course, as a percentage of the population, that audience was
significantly smaller. But it was still substantial -- and dedicated.
As the obituaries this week have noted,
Bellow is perhaps best known for the optimism that bouys all of his
work. The New York Times ended its obituary noting that the
author's "approach to his art was that of an alien newly arrived on
the earth." The obituary quoted Bellow:
I've never seen the world before. Now
I was seeing it, and it's a beautiful, marvelous gift. Enchanting
reality! And when the end came, I was told by the cleverest people I
knew that it would all vanish. I'm not absolutely convinced of that.
If you asked me if I believed in life after death, I would say that I
was agnostic. There are more things between heaven and earth, Horatio,
etc.
Another quotation, this one the opening
sentences of Bellow's novel Herzog. In my opinion, one of the
great openings in literature:
If I am out of my mind, it's all
right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
Some people thought he was cracked
and for a time he himself had doubted that he was all there. But now,
though he still behaved oddly, he felt confident, cheerful,
clairvoyant, and strong.
Henry Miller is blurbed on the cover of
my copy of Bellow's Henderson The Rain King, surely one of
the strangest, most wonderful, most ecstatic novels ever written. Miller
says: "What a writer! I've made a great discovery. It's how I'd
like to write myself." That Miller did, in a way, write in a manner
similar to Bellow should be lost on no one. The famous beginning to
Miller's Tropic of Cancer reads:
I am living at the Villa Borghese.
There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are
all alone here and we are dead.
Last night Boris discovered that he
was lousy. I had to shave his armpits and even then the itching did
not stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful place like this? But no
matter. We might never have known each other so intimately, Boris and
I, had it not been for the lice.
At its heart, Bellow's work, like
Miller's, broadcast a powerful belief in the transcendent power of the
human spirit. He was not afraid of words like "beauty" and his
work resonates with the belief that however dark the day, however long
the drought, light will shine, rain will come. The human spirit will
prevail. (This is a sentiment, on the other hand, that one struggles to
locate -- and wonders why it's so hard to find -- in the novels of this
country's preeminent Nobel hopeful; yes, I mean Margaret Atwood.)
(And while I'm out on a tangent here,
I'll take a moment to write against myself. Bellow's
Henderson The Rain King [1958] has some stirring,
inspiring moments, but it's also highly unselfconscious of the race
issues embedded in its narrative -- a rich, urban, and urbane, white
American becomes the "Rain King" of a tribe of rural black
Africans ... It was written before the race riots of the 1960s -- and at
a time when there was an even more stirring transcendent voice rising
from black America: that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Bellow has written eloquently about the
effects of the anxieties of modern life of the eternal characteristics
of the human soul. At the same time, his championing of
"universalism," as The New York Times obituary pointed
out, put him "in fierce debates with feminists, black writers,
postmodernists." As the Times noted, Bellow once asked:
"Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?"
Bellow later called the ensuing controversy "the result of a
misunderstanding."
What couldn't be misunderstood, was
that Bellow stood on the conservative side of the aesthetic ledger. In
his memoir Experience, Martin Amis tells of a visit to Bellow
with friend Christopher Hitchens.
Their talk came around to the author of Orientalism, Edward Said,
a friend of Hitchens and someone Bellow vehemently disagreed with.
Hitchens dug in his heels, while Amis kicked him under the table and
tried to get him to cool his jets; never-the-less, a verbal slugfest
ensued. Later, when everyone was well battered, Hitchens apologized,
saying he would have felt bad if he hadn't stood up for his friend.
Bellow asked: "How do you feel now?")
Besides an obituary, The New York
Times also published two commentaries on Bellow's fiction. Joseph
Berger wrote about how Bellow was "captivated by the chaos of New
York." Berger noted Bellow's novels evoked New York's "emigre
intellectuals and eccentrics, its connivers and kooks, its complicated
women and vacillating men," a theme picked up by Michiko Kakutani
in an article headlined: "Saul Bellow, Poet of Urban America's
Dangling Men."
Kakutani called Bellow's novels
"less plot-driven works than portraits of men trying to figure out
their place in the world." Kakutani quoted Herzog's narrator
asking what does it mean "to be a man. In a city. In a century. In
transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power.
Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization.
After the late failure of radical hopes."
(Of course, whether those "radical
hopes" have failed is very much open to question -- a point that
relates to my tangential moment above. Herzog was written in the
1960s, when certain radical hopes were very much alive -- and one only need search "Naomi Klein" on Google to see that
the hearts of radicals continue to beat strong -- and always will.)
What I most appreciated about Bellow,
was his ability to place his narrators in context of grand themes. In a
review of More
Die of Heartbreak (1987) on this website, I quoted Bellow from that
novel:
There aren't any words for what
happens to the soul in the free world. Never mind "rising
entitlements", never mind the luxury "life-style." ...
Full wakefulness would make us face up to the new death, the
peculiar ordeal on our side of the world. The opening of a true
consciousness to what is actually occurring would be a
purgatory.
This quotation shows, I believe, that
Bellow was a critic -- like Pope John Paul II, incidentally -- of the
unalloyed consumerism that was rampant in the 1980s, and is even more
rampant now. He just approached his criticism in a way we're not used to
seeing, in a way different from Naomi Klein -- or any other Toronto
Star columnist or social
activist. Bellow's narrators turn to ancient philosophy, high-brow
literature, and transcendent emotions to assert meaning in the face of
our contemporary insanity.
What insanity? Remember BRITNEY SPEARS GETS 'REAL'?
What do those quotation marks mean? Reality is a product to be packaged
and sold. Bellow's novels remind us that a world fed only on pop culture
is a world that cannot sustain the individual soul. They also tell us
that individuals will fight against the current. The human spirit cannot
be defeated.
I heard one commentator on TV this week
refer to the remarks Pope John Paul II gave when he was made Pope 26
years ago. "Be not afraid," the Pope said, quoting the angels
who visit the shepherds on the night of the Christ child's birth.
"Keep hope alive," is the catch-phrase of one-time US
presidential contender Jesse Jackson. "If I am out of my mind, it's all
right with me," thought Moses Herzog.
Philip Roth has said that Bellow, along
with William Faulkner, was "the backbone of 20th-century American
literature." When Faulkner won the Nobel Prize, he noted that, in
an era dominated by fears about the atomic bomb, in an era dominated by
fears about the death of the human race, what writers couldn't forget
was that literature was about "the human heart in conflict with
itself." Bellow never forgot that. His narrators dreamed big dreams
and eschewed easy, "radical" solutions. His narrators also
delighted in the human spirit -- and believed that the possibilities of
the human spirit never diminished, no matter what the obstacle, as long
as the individual refused surrender.
RIP Saul Bellow. May your soul find
other worlds to delight it.
Michael Bryson is the
editor of The Danforth Review.
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