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answer of these stories is the integrity of language: the truth, wit and
eloquence with which it represents the world. The wisecrack and the
cliche are degraded versions of the aphorism, the aspiration to ex–
press reality with "ultimate seriousness." We need only consider the
trivializing power of the media through which we acquire so much of
our political and moral "knowledge" of the world to appreciate the
significance of Bellow's imaginative enterprise.
Bellow's work recalls Flaubert in his moral sensitivity to cliche.
But unlike Flaubert, he does not confuse cliche with reality. (Writers
like Donald Barthelme, who have the Flaubertian gift, have become
complicit parodists of the cliche. Art is a matter of reduction: there is
no higher and lower, no inner and outer. The pre-Columbian truth
of the world is that it is flat.) For Bellow, art is not a bastion of purity
to be preserved from the contaminations of the world. He has a
healthy American or Chicagoan respect for the crude, even criminal
vitalities in the world. Resistance comes, however, not only from
criminal vitality, but from a higher self, which, as Shawmut re–
marks, "few people are equipped to observe." Bellow's quest for a
higher spirituality, an ultimate seriousness, need not disquiet pro–
fane readers, for it has not extinguished his profane delight in the
world. In these stories, spirituality is an element in a vision of com–
plexity and balance that resists the reductions of experience to absur–
dity and despair.
EUGENE GOODHEART
THE FINE ART OF REMEMBRANCE
THE COLLECTED PROSE. By Elizabeth Bishop.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $17.50.
Since
The Collected Prose
has been widely reviewed, its
relation to Bishop's poetry evaluated, it seems most useful to examine
the salient themes and dominant traditions of these appealing, if
flawed, stories and memoirs.
Memory is so much the matter of Elizabeth Bishop's art that
she almost takes her place as the Proust of the Americas (North and
South), reincarnate in a familiar, clipped, modest idiom. The magic
