268
RICHARD POIRIEI
believe, do we find what the literary ragpickers call key passages.
Where such passages obtrude in writing that asks us to
be
discriminating
about style, as they do in Fitzgerald and Hemingway as well
as
ill
Bellow, there is always a lack of assurance in what Bellow
has
himself
called "the sole source of order in
art":
the "power of imagination.·
And he distinguished this from "the order that ideas have." "eritia
need to
be
reminded of this," he remarks in "Distractions of a Fictioo
Writer." His alertness in the matter is understandable. Between
hi
evident intellectual ambitions and the fictional materials he
thinb
congenial to them there is in
Herzog,
as in
Henderson the Rain Ki",
and in
The Adventures of Augie March,
a gap across which these novels
never successfully move. Sections of the present book read like a lese
Middlemarch,
the longest of the "ridiculous" letters offering pretty
much what Bellow-Henog want to say about "modem" life. Herzog'l
interest in romanticism is itself :an expression of a familiar concern
ci
Bellow: the effort to preserve individuality during a period of economic
and scientific acceleration with which it is supposedly impossible fer
the human consciousness to keep pace. Henry Adams, among othen,
gave us the vocabulary; George Eliot predicted the condition;
Bellow
the novelist is victimized by it. What I call the gap in his novels between
their intellectual and historical pretensions, on one side, and the stuff
of life as he so brilliantly renders it, on the other, prevents me from
believing that he is himself convinced by his snappy contempt for
"the
commonplaces of the Waste Land outlook, the cheap mental stimulants
of Alienation." Quoted from a letter of Henog's these are obviously
indistinguishable from Bellow's own attitudes. My objection isn't
merely
that Bellow would replace the "commonplaces" of alienation
with
eYeD
more obvious commonplaces about "the longing
to
be human." I
mean
that his works, the truest and surest direction of their energy, suggest
to
me that imaginatively Bellow does not himself find a source of order
in
these commonplaces.
Lawrence, who would have found Bellow interesting, was right:
"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the
critic
is to save the tale from the artist who created it." Imagine such
a
critic's response
to
Bellow's connivance at his hero's self-promotion
&I
Your Ordinary Striver:
Just then his state of being was so curious that he was com–
pelled, himself, to see it-eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous,
crazed and, to the point of death, "comical." It was enough to
make a man pray
to
God to remove this great, bone-breaking
burden of selfhood and self-development, give himself, a failure,
