CORRESPONDENCE
ignore evidence, remarking wistfully
that
"If
we knew nothing of Bellow,
it might be possible to believe that
Herzog
had been written not by a
Jew," implying that it might have
been written by Mr. McCormick's
"talented Zen Buddhist." And when
he says that
to
bring up the con–
cept of the Waste Land with respect
to
Herzog
"is to inflate the novel
intolerably," I can only agree, since
that's just what I said, but I'd point
out that the inflation occurs not
in my review but throughout the
book and specifically on p. 75. Still,
how could the relevance of the
Waste Land outlook to
Herzog
be
understood by anyone who thinks
that the literary context in which
Bellow located himself when he
began to write included "Thomas
and Virginia Wolfe-Woolf"! Mr.
McCormick's critical theorizing is
no less out of touch with the issues
than are his citations. Yes, the form
of a novel
is
"protective," but what
I criticized was Bellow's relation–
ship to Herzog and the degree to
which it prevents him from making
more than a superficial penetration
of that character or of the way he
sounds and thinks. That the pro–
tectiveness is ultimately self-defeat–
ing, I demonstrate at some length
and without using that platitudi–
nous pairing of Mr. McCormick's
"form and content," the flotsam
and jetsam of literary criticism.
Any effort to reach the sources
of life in a work by a major writer
means, if one is at all successful,
discovering where he is alive in a
book and where he is only decep–
tively so. Serious criticism is neces–
sarily headed in the direction of the
author's personality not as it exists
in
rumor or gossip or details of his
private life but as it exists in the
way he writes. This is true of
Her~og-it
is also true of
An Amer-
483
ican Dream,
to cite an example,
since Mr. McCormick needs one,
of a book that really has been treat–
ed wretchedly by reviewers who
failed to grasp the distinction, made
by the book itself, between the
conduct of the writer in its pages
and his conduct outside of them.
Of course the comfortable way out
is to write the kind of review pro–
posed by Mr. McCormick when he
offers a possible line of attack on
H crzog
"for occasional failures of
taste and language." But that isn't
criticism at all. It's rather a kind
of hedge-clipping that doesn't begin
to do credit to Bellow, to any writer
worth the attention of criticism, or
to Mr. McCormick.
