My Friend Saul Bellow

ALFRED KAZIN

ONE day in 1942 I was walking near the Brooklyn Borough Hall with a young writer just in from Chicago who was looking New York over with great detachment. In the course of some startlingly apt observations on the life in the local streets, the course of the war, the pain of Nazism, and the neurotic effects of apartment-house living on his friends in New York, observations punctuated by some very funny jokes and double entendres at which he was the first to laugh with hearty pleasure for things so well said, he talked about D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, not as great names but as fellow artists. He said, as casually as if he were in a ball park faulting a pitcher, that Fitzgerald was “weak,” but Dreiser strong in the right places. He examined Hemingway’s style like a surgeon pondering another surgeon’s stitches. And citing D. H, Lawrence with the intimacy of a brother-in-arms, he pointed to the bilious and smoke-dirty sky and said that like Lawrence he wanted no “umbrella” between him and the essential mystery.

The impression this conversation made on me was very curious. Bellow had not yet published a novel, and he was known for his stories and evident brilliance only to a small intellectual group drawn from the Partisan Review and the University of Chicago. Yet walking the unfamiliar Brooklyn streets, he seemed to be measuring the hidden strength of all things in the universe, from the grime of Brooklyn to the leading stars of the American novel, from the horror of Hitler to the mass tensions of New York. He was measuring the world’s power of resistance, measuring himself as a contender. Although he was friendly, unpretentious, and funny, he was serious in a style that 1 had never before seen in an urban Jewish intellectual: he was going to succeed as an imaginative writer; he was pledged to grapple with unseen powers. He was going to take on more than the rest of us were.

As Bellow talked, I had an image of him as a wrestler in the old Greek style, an agonist contending in the games for the prize. Life was dramatically as well as emotionally a contest to him, and nothing of the agony or contest would be spared him. God would try him in his pride and trip him up, and he knew it; no one was spared; he had been brought up an orthodox Jew, and he had a proper respect for God as the ultimate power assumed by the creation. A poor immigrant’s gifted son, he had an instinct that an overwhelming number of chances would come his way, that the old poverty and cultural bareness would soon be exchanged for a multitude of temptations. So he was wary — eager, sardonic, and wary; and unlike everybody else I knew, remarkably patient in expressing himself.

For a man with such a range of interests, capacities, and appetites, Bellow talked with great austerity. He addressed himself to the strength of life hidden in people, in political issues, in other writers, in mass behavior; an anthropologist by training, he liked to estimate other people’s physical capacity, the thickness of their skins, the strength in their hands, the force in their chests. Describing people, he talked like a Darwinian, calculating the power of survival hidden in the species. But there was nothing idle or showy about his observations, and he did not talk for effect. His conceptions, definitions, epigrams, aperçus were of a formal plainness that went right to the point and stopped. That was the victory he wanted. There was not the slightest verbal inflation in anything he said. Yet his observations were so direct and penetrating that they took on the elegance of achieved thought. When he considered something, his eyes slightly set as if studying its power to deceive him, one realized how formidable he was on topics generally exhausted by ideology or neglected by intellectuals too fine to consider them. Suddenly everything tiresomely grievous came alive in the focus of this man’s unfamiliar imagination.

Listening to Bellow, I became intellectually happy — an effect he was soon to have on a great many other writers of our generation. We were coming through. He was holding out for the highest place as a writer, and he would reach it. Even in 1942, two years before he published his first novel, Dangling Man, his sense of his destiny was dramatic because he was thinking in form, in the orbit of the natural storyteller, in the dimensions of natural existence. The exhilarating thing about him was that a man so penetrating and informed should be so sure of his talent for imaginative literature, for the novel, for the great modern form. We all knew brilliant intellectuals, academic conquistadores, geniuses at ideology, who demanded one’s intellectual surrender. Every day I saw intellectuals clever enough to make the world over, who indeed had made the world over many times. Yet Bellow, who had been brought up in the same utopianism and was himself a scholar in the formidable University of Chicago style, full of the Great Books and jokes from the Greek plays, would obviously be first and last a novelist, a storyteller, creating new myths out of himself and everyone he had ever known, fought, loved, and hated. This loosened the bonds of ideology for the rest of us. It was refreshing to be with a man who so clearly believed himself headed for power in the novel: it disposed of many pedantic distinctions.

Saul Bellow was born in Montreal in 1915, but grew up in Chicago. Chicago from the 1890s until well past the First World War was a good town for novelists to grow up in, for it was a powerhouse of American life, it could give a writer the whole surrounding Midwest, and it promoted a fierce sense of rivalry with the East that made writers ambitious and cocky. Chicago, said Henry Blake Fuller in the nineties, was a great city built for the express purpose of making money; it was hard but bracing, brutal yet assimilable. A writer could understand it and feel equal to it. In no other great Northern city, up to our day, have Negroes and whites been so conscious of each other; no other great American city has been given so much of its character by the immigrant groups. New York, by contrast, has for a century been so big, complicated, and important that no novelist can be equal to all of it, as Dreiser and Anderson, Herrick and Fuller, Farrell and Algren have been representative of Chicago. New York has for so long been a center of culture and the literary business that what makes it a perpetual feast for the dilettantes makes it unreal even to writers who live in it. Chicago, for as much as half a century after the World’s Fair of 1893, was a focus for all the rawness and power of American capitalism. Yet it was a human scene still open to a single novelist.

Much of the vividness of Bellow’s novels, his powerful sense of place, comes out of Chicago. Two of his best books— The Victim (1947) and Seize the Day (1956)—are set in New York, and he manages to put into the city some quintessential urban quality which New York novelists themselves, usually absorbed in unrepresentative worlds like Madison Avenue and the Bronx, do not often see. “On some nights,” The Victim opens, “New York is as hot at Bangkok. The whole continent seems to have moved from its place and slid nearer the equator, the bitter gray Atlantic to have become green and tropical, and the people, thronging the streets, barbaric fellahin among the stupendous monuments of their mystery. . . .” Bellow’s senses have been tuned by the big city and the new situations always confronted by its immigrant masses. As Angie March says in the opening sentence of the book that established Bellow’s reputation, “I am an American, Chicago-born — Chicago, that somber city - and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way. . . .”

And without the intellectual pugnacity that some Chicago novelists pick up because of their contempt for the old genteel culture, Bellow has the quicknesses that come from living on the firing line. He was brought up in a deeply Jewish spirit and with the Yiddish language, the life-thread of a cultural and religious tradition in Eastern Europe which the Nazis and Communists have destroyed along with three quarters of its speakers. To those who still possess this language, it is an incomparable assurance of identity. It is said of a new arrival in Israel who was berated for teaching her son Yiddish rather than Hebrew that she answered, “I want my son to be a Jew.” This is Bellow’s tradition, and of the many talented and interesting novelists of Jewish background in this country, there is probably no other who feels so lovingly connected with the religious and cultural tradition of his Eastern European grandfathers. And since he is at the same time the least ghettoized and least sentimental of “Jewish" novelists, one who makes the Jew a central figure because Bellow naturally thinks of the Jew as man at the end of his tether, which is where all dramas begin, his combination of many conflicting traditions and inclinations makes for remarkably vivid powers of mind, an unusual feeling for all the pressures and explosions inside the human community.

Bellow’s most striking quality as a novelist is his ability to make the reader see dramatic new issues in situations that a great many people live with. The interest he arouses is very natural; he starts from the world we all know and share; many people recognize the stresses he writes about. Only one of his novels, Henderson the Rain King (1959), takes place in a wholly “arranged" setting, Africa, and is naturally preferred to his other books by those who like fiction allegorical and provoking to their subtlety. Yet even Henderson finds his marriages more real to him than he does Africa. Although Bellow’s six novels, from Dangling Man (1944) to Herzog (1964), are frankly novels of development, Bildungsromaner without the cultural piety that the Germans attach to this form, they appeal to a very wide audience because, even more, they are novels of personal struggle, of life diiliculties, domestic difficulties, common penalties and pains. Everyone can recognize the battle that Bellow puts his heroes through: it is made up of love and sex and marriage, of common apprehensions and natural catastrophes, of the struggles between parents and children, between victims and persecutors, between love and hatred, between life and death.

MORE than twenty years have passed since my first meeting with Bellow, twenty years in which he has become one of the most celebrated and influential of living novelists. Yet never in his life or work has he lost his prime sense of existence as one man’s contest with terrible powers. As he nears fifty he looks considerably more benign than he used to. Yet the elegant aptness of his most informal observations, though more brilliant than ever, still yields easily to that tragicomic sense of buffoonery that urged some Yiddish genius to write: “If God lived on earth. His windows would always be broken.” That wit is Bellow’s habitat, and the terms of the joke are natural to him. The proud, moody, and handsome young writer who. like Joseph in the Bible, airily confided his dreams of greatness to his brothers has always been a man who suffers, as he would say, “in style” — with an air. In Bellow, anguish and wit have always been natural companions.

Characteristically, the hero of his new novel. Herzog, is a tortured scholar in his mid-forties, a specialist in intellectual history, author of Romanticism and Christianity, who has been abruptly turned out of his house and divorced by his formidable second wife, then discovers to his horror that he has been cuckolded all along by his best friend and former proteégé. The nervous crisis into which this plunges him, one frantic midsummer in New York, compels a total exposure of his life and thinking to himself.

Herzog’s fantastic mind is always the center of the book, so this is an operation on conscious flesh. Yet his thinking is wildly comic. At the mercy of the most primitive feelings, he writes letters that he will never mail, letters that he usually does not finish, burning scraps of thought addressed to Eisenhower, to Hegel, to Nietzsche, to his dead mother, to old girl friends. Herzog’s suffering has become a lion in his path challenging him to overcome it. It is a sign from the unknown powers that surround us. Living entirely in his mind and on it, Herzog sends out his messages to the powerful and unseen, to the famous dead and to his own dead, in order to establish his suffering as a significant fact; he wants its seriousness to be acknowledged, its dignity to be respected. Herzog’s pain is not something that other people have a right to pass over, to turn into another abstraction. Herzog is already suffering from too many abstractions. He is exasperated by “how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of the intellectuals. The canned sauerkraut of Spengler’s ‘Prussian Socialism,’ the commonplaces of the Wasteland outlook, the cheap mental stimulants of Alienation, the cant and rant of pipsqueaks about Inauthenticity and Forlornness. I can’t accept this foolish dreariness. We are talking about the whole life of mankind. The subject is too great, too deep for such weakness, cowardice — too deep, too great, Shapiro. It torments me to insanity that you should be so misled. A merely aesthetic critique of modern history! After the wars and mass killings! You are too intelligent for this. You inherited rich blood. Your father peddled apples.”

When a brutal crippled lawyer tries to shout Herzog into submitting to his wife, the exhausted and much-tried scholar nevertheless resists him as one of those “reality instructors” who are always able to impose their coarse cynicism on sensitive minds. And when a delectable lady florist who has been consoling Herzog in his misery tries to persuade him that life can be perfect when sealed by her accomplished charms, Herzog remains obstinately convinced that his crisis is deeper, that it is attached to the age and that by confronting it with all his intellectual and moral strength, he will attain some satisfying hold on the truth. Yet in the course of this struggle, Herzog naturally falls victim to people less perturbed than himself. Seeking some legal information, he spends a day in court, and there is so sickened by testimony on the murder of a child by its crippled mother and her lover that he runs off to Chicago, where his ex-wife and former friend are living. He digs up his father’s old pistol and stalks his wife’s house, but watching the lover bathe Herzog’s child, he decides not to kill anyone. A day later, while driving with his daughter, his car is hit by a truck and he passes out; the police discover the loaded gun on him, and he lands briefly in jail. Yet in jail and out of it, he looks for a truth equal to the absoluteness of his suffering.

This search will never end; he is Herzog, a creature given to thought as a confrontation of the total human condition. Though he suffers to the root of his being every crisis in his affections, his intelligence is so powerful and obstinately independent that because of his intellectual adventure, Herzog becomes a vivifying experience. The reader finds himself drawn by Herzog’s pace, thinking with Herzog’s freedom, sending out manifestos of his own to the powers of this world. The bracing quality of the book stems from Herzog’s mobility of spirit and the extremism of his emotions. As Blake said in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.” Although Moses Elkanah Herzog is only a sometime professor having a nervous breakdown, his mind gives form to the novel and pace to its rhythms. Flashbacks, immediate experiences, and reflections move in and out of each other with ease; when Herzog is thinking, he can say “I” as easily as Bellow can say “Herzog,” and the intricate sequences work because Bellow assumes they can.

Philosophers are authentic when they think as though their lives depended on it. This is already a dramatic subject, as Nietzsche knew about himself. But philosophers are hard to realize in fiction; thought is secret. How do you show thought in the contemporary novel, the unbreaking soliloquy of an obsessed and powerful mind, without giving up the common world that has come back for novelists despite the genius of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf? The interior world has grown stale, and the outer one is now actually more experimental. Herzog conveying the essence of Tolstoy and Hegel to Eisenhower in letters that the General will never see, mentally addressing a question to “Professor Nietzsche from the floor,” or insisting on “moral realities” to another philosopher as he stands thinking in the subway expresses one way of moving between the private and public worlds.

It works in Herzog because of its inherent absurdity. Bellow’s image of life is always a confrontation of opposites, a marriage of unlikely possibilities. A scholar betrayed and humiliated, so self-centered as to be unbearable to himself, finds life-enhancing powers of thought. Yet in the “post-quixotic, postCopernican U.S.A., where a mind freely poised in space might discover relationships utterly unsuspected by a seventeenth-century man sealed in his smaller universe . . . in nine-tenths of his existence he was exactly what others were before him.” Philosophers, even Nietzsche, once thought themselves the voice of reason, but reason now has to prove that it will not kill. In the glut of sex and culture, food and limitless self-expression, all things assume each other’s identities. A couple lie naked in bed with heavy tomes of Russian spirituality all around them. Herzog’s beautiful young mistress, a convert to Roman Catholicism, makes herself up to look older and more proper than she is, puts on a long old-fashioned skirt, and then catches her heel in it and falls down the subway steps. Herzog listening to testimony on the murder of a child by her mother and the mother’s lover reflects that people get up to murder but down to make love. Herzog is cuckolded during the hours he is away getting psychoanalyzed. These harsh turns of thought, these absurd and brutal contingencies of existence, are capped by the most unlikely hope for the world as a whole. In the midst of death we are in life. “To realize that you are a survivor is a shock. At the realization ol’ such election, you feel like bursting into tears. As the dead go their way, you want to call to them, but they depart in a black cloud of faces, souls. They flow out in smoke from the extermination chimneys, and leave you in the clear light of historical success the technical success of the West. Then you know with a crash of the blood that mankind is making it — making it in glory though deafened by the explosions of blood. Unified by the horrible wars, instructed in our brutal stupidity by revolutions, by engineered famines directed by ‘ideologists’ (heirs of Marx and Hegel and trained in the cunning of reason), perhaps we, modern humankind (can it be!), have done the nearly impossible, namely, learned something.”