Saul
Bellow: Leaving Behind In a letter, dated April 5, 1930, from Cesare Pavese—One of Italy’s major writers and Americanists (He was then learning English and living marginally in Turin)—to the musician Antonio Chiuminatto, Pavese says of America and its writers:
In another letter, this one to Paolo Milano some twenty years later, Pavese wrote that he hadn’t liked Saul’s The Dangling Man. He said it made him think of "man who’s enlisted and is waiting to be called to arms. All he can do while he’s waiting is hang around and think. Some of the thoughts and his irritations with the world about him are good, but on the whole the protagonist doesn’t add up, he symbolizes nothing universal (the alienated contemporary man, the imminence of death): only his irritated self." ‘Hang around and think’. The ‘irritated self’. Both phrases are apt. Particularly apt to a child of the Russian Jewish diaspora. You could say that’s what Jewish intellectuals brought with them to America. Habits of mind, remnants of a socialist culture, an apartness, and highly irritated selves. The two major American Jewish writers who saved themselves from these intellectual tics—which killed many lesser Jewish writers, from one Roth to another—were Nathanael West and Saul, and they both did it the same way, via language that was as new as it was excessive. Of course Pavese was right to have been disappointed—as he was right about American culture, seeing it in America’s energy and inventiveness. And the Saul of Dangling Man had yet to find the language-energy in which to express America, and that he triumphantly did in Augie. Saul himself was fully aware of the change in himself.
‘A fusion of colloquialism and elegance.’ Yes. That’s there all right, and it gets more refined book by book. It’s a language that’s entirely Saul’s own, and which often seems diminished — if not downright smart-alecky — when it is borrowed, adopted, used by lesser writers. Because on the surface — without its scaffolding of meaning and intent, its foundation cemented in metaphor — this new language is all fizzle and razzle-dazzle; it cracks you up; you’re meant to crack up — at its jokes, at its self-irony, at its panoply of high-and-low. But to copy just the surface of the is to do no more then nudge open the gate to the great Garden where that apple tree grows and Eve and the Serpent await. For inside Saul’s way of writing lurks, forever questioning the Tree of Knowledge, a finely-tuned intelligence. He has, as he recently said of John Auerbach (in what may be the last text he wrote), ‘that gift of being able to transmit instantly to those whose antennae are prepared to receive rare frequencies.’ Winging it up in those rare frequencies is a high-risk strategy. There’s static in the world’s radio. Pitch is a variable. yle, racking up, page after page, what James Wood — by far the most discerning critic writing in English — calls ‘the happy rolling freedom of those daring uninsured sentences.’ There is a distinct step beyond language. It is what Saul has always called ‘voice’. How often have I seen draft after draft of a novel (from Herzog onwards) tossed aside with near-despair that the ‘voice’ just wasn’t quite right. The ‘voice’ is the elusive thing. It is the anima, the soul. Not just any soul, however, but the character’s own soul: what identifies him, his language, his aspirations, his despair, his muddle. That individual voice is close to what Saul has called the ‘first soul’ — the original self which has become irritated because it can’t come out, the original self, mental or sexual, which you might have to bring to the surface, as Saul tried, by dwelling in a Reichian orgone box, releasing the muscular rigidities (wives do the same) which inhibit the expression of your true self. Get rid of those rigidities — as you got rid of mandarin language — and all these people, the Valentine Gersbachs and the Herzogs and Ravelsteins, will speak to you. You become their medium. Oh yes, this is a very ‘romantic’ notion! In the nineteenth-century sense of the word. Me, me, me, you hear Beethoven scream! The Noble Savage is a prominent figure. But he has a very dark side, this savage, and he’s not as noble as he looks. He retreats into Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which is one of Saul’s key books — being all about that first soul, which is unknowable and horrifying. One’s education, one’s learning, is what keeps one from the primal scream. We have an overload of civilized ‘explanations’. "When Herzog says, ‘What are you proposing to do when your wife takes a lover? Pull Spinoza down from the shelf and look into what he says about adultery? About human bondage?’" The higher learning apparently is no more capable of dealing with betrayal and pain than mandarin language is. The very first drafts of Herzog had worked this violence done to his (Herzog’s) fabric out exclusively in the form of letters. It was once, in fact, all letters. Because letters test the voice. Not for nothing did our three magazines have a section called ‘Arias’. Arias were where you sang for your supper. They were the embodiment of something absolutely personal and, preferably, unique to the writer. (I used to wonder at his admiration for Samuel Butler and his Ramblings on Cheapside until I understood that Butler had been writing Arias without knowing it!) Thus each of the (usually eponymous — Herzog, Henderdon, Augie, Ravelstein — heroes of his novels has a unique voice: that in which what he says is mysteriously blended with what he says. Or what he says could not be said without the way in which he says it. And oddly enough, the weakest of his books are those that are not marked by that forthright naming (The Dean’s December, The Bellarosa Connection and, of course, his first two short novels): it seems as though he had to discover that unique name/voice connection before he was freed to write exactly as the persona might, with all that persona’s eccentricities and tics lovingly, even relishingly, described.) This ‘voice’ has not much to do with style; it has everything to do with a world-view, a separate universe, the world that belongs exclusively to that character and which is not perceived by others — especially by the women, who are forever excluded from that private domain even as the hero clasps them to his bosom. Or essence. The imaginative fierceness which this involves, which is a matter of a long ‘living with’ his characters, explains why he is unable to create women of the same dimension as his male personae. Women inhabit a world of body and copious goods. They are like a gigantic emporium in which men shop: ‘I’ll have a little of this, a little of that’, thereby earning the male’s gratitude. But not his loyalty. For the hero empties the shop out until there’s nothing left on the shelves. Then she accuses him of having stolen her worth and moves on. This, of course, is the mark of the great sensualist, who loves only himself and extracts from each flower its own specific honey — only to flit on. Women, for Casanova, for da Ponte (and Mozart), for Benvenuto Cellini, are the treasure-chests of the world. They display all the tea in China. They are copious, they are generous. But they have a world of their own and that world is clearly demarcated. On this, the writer’s side, the life of the mind, the luminous imaginings of centuries, the whole of the language of the world, of all the languages — music, painting, audacious projects, conquests, but also the details of those worlds, barbers shaving stubbled cheeks, haulers with sacks of coal athwart their shoulders, accountants totting up figures and, above all, dreamers with vast projects of the Self, the Alan Blooms, the Delmore Schwartz’s, the Chapmans. It does not matter if these mens’ voices describe their inner fraudulence. So much the better! The real world is always there to trip them up, to hobble them, to domesticate them, to turn them into husbands, fathers, bread-winners. Such people are literally enormous in their self-presentations, in the elaborate ways they have mounted their lies. Because characters must exists as they see themselves, as they are embodied in their own obstinate illusions, in the ways they speak. The marvel here, and one of the reasons for Saul’s greatness, is that each is allowed his own total freedom. Having set them up, imagined them, described them, surrounded them with place and circumstance, Saul lets them rip: to glory or disaster. That freedom is something that happens only in the greatest writers, those with no heed at all for what people will think of them. Lear was unimaginable until Shakespeare freed him. Think of the ways in which Dante allows men and women, good and evil, to be. Lesser writers finick and adjust and circumscribe, as though the faults in the characters they have created — Philip Roth is a perfect example — have to be explained. By circumstance, mischance, background, the malevolence of their surroundings, the climate of the times, etc. etc. Saul’s personages actually don’t deign to live in any specific time or place. Of course Chicago, the Hudson River Valley and other places matter. Because reality matters. But they don’t discourse as though the Depression, the Atom Bomb, or anything else really stood in their way. They are trascendent. Intro
He is a very secular and somewhat skeptical Jew; I perhaps take God more seriously. But we both grew up in a Catholic environment: he with the New Testament as his first reading (in a hospital in Lachine run by nuns), I at my mother’s knee. In my house it was my father who was skeptical: to the point of agnosticism. Then in that other religion, money, our fathers (his Russian, mine old American) concorded: that was what life was about. You will have observed that all of Saul’s prodigious old men are rich: in money, in wives and in appetites. His father wasn’t particularly (sometimes the coal business was good, sometimes it wasn’t), but his brothers prospered, and so has he. There again we meet up. He may have had less plenty when young than I, but he has the better grasp of how deeply money is what makes America tick. As to the difference in age, those of you who are past Conrad’s ‘Shadow Line’ will know that gaps diminish, and then vanish altogether. It is childhoods that matters. Whether our first childhood or our second — into which my very dear friend is slipping and where I shall no doubt follow him. There we might have been identical twins, for it was early illness — his a pneumonia at seven, mine severe burns at nearly three — that made writers of us. It is in bed, having slipped past death’s door, that we both learned to read and to value books and the imaginary life as far superior to anything the real world could offer. If my childhood was European and his American, his America was heavily tinged with Russia (the family samovar stands nobly by his dining room table) and my father, though living in Europe, was in essence as in body, American. Finally, celebrity is of no interest to either of us. The Nobel that Saul has was something he always deeply rued, and indeed, to many writers it has been a curse. In Saul’s case, the money went in large part to his recent ex-wife and the remainder to his business-man Chicago brother for investment. And, of course, got lost. But the money wasn’t the worst of it. Money is, after all, but a commodity. You expect to spend it. The worst is the celebrity. It’s being, when you are a private person, made public. Being expected to pronounce on every issue known to man. Having your biography written by people not worthy to be your blotting-paper. Being misread, misquoted and misunderstood. Having your mind — in Saul’s case, a very considerable mind, a subtle, inquisitive, nuanced mind — grossly simplified for public consumption. Of course I regret bringing myself into this, but I am here to speak as his friend. The things I can tell you about, those that you may want to hear, are personal things. This is highly unfashionable in current intellectual/academic life, where supposedly disembodied texts float about, like the ghosts in Noh plays, and authors are those unhappy people on whom the ghosts play tricks. Saul is a nineteen-century novelist whose invention of a new language for the novel is the source of his greatness. As the great Russian writers said of Gogol, that they all came from under his coat, so it is with the second half of the twentieth century in American writing. Before him, American literature was one thing; and after him, it was another. This is no accident. Jews
Bellow’s world must be particularly difficult to a Japanese audience in that the experience of Bellow’s characters — wholly concentrated (despite their many voyages, viz Henderson and Augie and D.D.) on the urban Jewish intelligentsia not just of the United States but of Chicago — must often seem as alien as, say, Kawabata’s Snow Country or The Master of Go appear to us. I take it that there are few urban Jewish intellectuals in Japan, as there are few muscle building, extreme nationalist, seppuku-committing Japanese in Chicago, or America. This requires consistency. And it is the stuff of the XIXth century novel. (In that sense, as Sibelius and Shostakovich are the last great nineteenth-century symphonists, Bellow’s fiction is the culmination of observations on society made by Balzac and Dickens. [That it is self-consistent. ] It is, for instance, quite inconceivable that Bellow should alter the basic traditional form of the novel — a narration which engages the Reader in an imaginative world. He rather liked Calvino as a man, but not for him the fabulous, the breaches of realism by the so-called ‘magic realists’, the disruption of syntax and language of Joyce. [Though he greatly admires some Joyce stories, I’ve never heard him refer to Ulysses or finnegans wake.] Predilects Weaknesses
Weaknesses of Omission: the events of his time (Stendhal, you will recall, had Napoleon) do not weigh much. There is hugely intelligent commentary on the human condition, which is very amply explored in essays (and finds its way into the mouths of his characters) but of war, genocide, crime (in the big sense) there is very little in his novels. Neither of these are really faults: the Bellovian drama is internal, and the women are the other halves of the Bellovian heroes; conflict, as with Pope, is reduced to exact observation of those same forces (the urge to kill, destroy) etc. unleashed in the domestic sphere, He is more Dunciad than Paradise Lost. Some of this, I feel, is due to the absence of God. Secular Jews do not have the same ultimates as religious, practising Jews. [Philosophically, a skeptical hedonist with interests in mysticism as a form of human eccentricity: Swedenborg, Reikh, etc.] The Lexicon
of the Imperium [Very few can work across languages when English, German or Russian come into play, because these are lexically gigantic. A good number of writers have converted to writing in French (Kundera, Julien Green) but that’s an easy transition. The case of foreigners writing in English is radically different. Sometimes it works (seemingly especially among Poles — Conrad and his successor, the Polish-Israeli writer John Auerbach), sometimes it half works (Arthur Koestler wrote assembly-line English) and sometimes it hardly works at all, as in Joseph Brodsky.] The truth is that our language, my language, is simply too immense. No one, English or American (even professional lexicographers) can ‘know’ it. The most erudite might recognize, though not necessarily use, about one-twelfth of the language — where if you used one-twelfth of Japanese you might quickly get stuck expressing yourself. As to so-called ‘minor’ languages, Hungarian, Dutch, the question always revolves around ‘why should I?’ The Question
of Voice
I doubt there is a more ‘erudite’ or better-read writer than Saul, but what fascinates him are the arcanae, the mysteries: whether these be Swedenborgian, Reikhian, or more simply, how men get rich and why women are unfaithful. He has an awe for Mystery in general that is ill-adapted to the XXth century, in which everything can be ‘explained’. His old men know that their worlds, their travels, their sustenance, their sexual and family relationships, move in mysterious and unpredictable ways. This they have long absorbed into their characters, into the ways they act in imaginative dramas. I think this has much to do with the obliqueness of Saul’s observation, which detaches what he sees from the real person on which the character is based. Hence Gersbach’s walk (like a gondolier), Pierre Thaxter’s teeth (like Stonehenge), Ravelstein’s oriental dressing gown. The powerfully physical. The Carnal. Their specificity is manifested in language; the language is inseparable from the persona; hence the immense power of the voice.
EXCELLENCES
That’s the unshakeable part. As in his life of the great Fernand Braudel. Pierre Daix wonders whether La Mediterranee did not begin just as ‘une ecriture,’ a piece of writing, a voice.
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