Saul Bellow
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Saul Bellow died yesterday at the age of 89. He was one of
the few remaining literary modernists. His last published novel was the 2000 Ravelstein, a thinly disguised portrait of his life-long
friend,
Bellow shared Bloom's contempt for cultural diversity. They were defiantly opposed to "watering down" the curriculum with works foreign to the Great Books/Western Civilization chapel. Bellow once wrote, "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?"
Ironically, Christopher Hitchens,
who is now running tours of Merrie Olde
"Chaos, most especially the chaos identified with
pissed-off African Americans, was the whole motif of The Closing of the
American Mind. Bloom had taught at Cornell during the campus upheaval of 1968,
and never recovered from the moment when black students produced guns to
amplify their demands. (He also never reconciled himself to the ghastly
fondness of the young for rock music. 'Whether it be
Full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n09/print/hitc01_.html
Despite his resentment at being viewed in this fashion, Saul Bellow was habitually grouped with fellow Jewish-American novelists Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. All three had a talent for picaresque tale-telling and vivid characters, often gripped by one neurosis or another. Bellow subjected himself to psychoanalysis on three different occasions and even sat in an orgone box for a time.
I regard "Herzog" as his crowning achievement. This is a novel about a character like Bellow. After being cuckolded, Moses Herzog goes to live in a cabin in the woods where he writes long, philosophical letters to God and famous personages living and dead but that are never sent. As a long-time writer of such letters on the Internet, I feel a certain kinship with Herzog, although my efforts probably have more to do with Lazlo Toth.
Like any other reactionary author, Bellow's work has to be judged solely on literary merit. As such, "Herzog" would be sufficient grounds for awarding Bellow the Nobel Prize. In 1980, a year after I dropped out of the Trotskyist movement, I read this novel and a number of other classics in order to familiarize myself with novel-writing techniques. I had plans--you see--of writing the Great American Novel. After reading "Herzog," I decided to get back into politics because there just didn't seem to be any point in trying to accomplish something in a field that was so totally dominated by superior talents. There is one scene in particular in "Herzog" that made me feel like I was woefully inadequate. In a visit to one of his new girl-friends, Herzog spends a moment or two in her bathroom performing his ablutions. Bellow takes this opportunity to describe the woman's character through the objects in the bathroom and how they are organized. It is a bravura performance. After reading this passage, I confessed to myself that I could never write like this in a million years.
After reading "Herzog," I became a fan of Bellow
despite his politics. My loyalty was put to the test when I read "Mr. Sammler's Planet," a work about a holocaust survivor
on Manhattan's Upper West Side that exhibits in full bloom (pun intended) his
growing animosity toward Blacks and resentment toward young radicals. Although Sammler is treated with a certain amount of disdain by Bellow,
he becomes a vehicle for a lot of the racism and reactionary politics brewing
inside the author. This is a favored device of novelists shifting to the right:
using fictional characters as a sounding board for their new ideas. By
introducing an openly reactionary character, the novelist is free to state that
this is "not really me, just a character". This is a ploy used by Ian
McEwan, whose latest novel "Saturday"
features the stream of consciousness of a neurosurgeon alienated by protestors
against the war in
One of the most repellent (and unbelievable) scenes in "Mr. Sammler's Planet" involves Sammler and an immaculately dressed African-American pickpocket who exposes himself while robbing the old man. It not only stretches credulity. It breaks it into a thousand pieces.
In a fascinating
The country took us
over. We felt that to be here was a great piece of luck. The children of
immigrants in my Chicago high school, however, believed that they were also
somehow Russian, and while they studied their Macbeth and Milton's
L'Allegro, they read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as well
and went on inevitably to Lenin's State And Revolution, and the pamphlets of
Trotsky. The Tuley high school debating club
discussed the Communist Manifesto and on the main stem of the neighbourhood, Division Street, the immigrant intelligensia lectured from soapboxes, while at "the
forum", a church hall on California Avenue, debates between socialists,
communists and anarchists attracted a fair number of people.
This was the beginning
of my radical education. For on the recommendation of friends I took up Marx
and Engels, and remember, in my father's bleak office near the freight yards,
blasting away at Value Price and Profit while the police raided a brothel
across the street - for non-payment of protection, probably - throwing beds,
bedding and chairs through the shattered windows. The Young Communist League
tried to recruit me in the late 1930s. Too late - I had already read Trotsky's
pamphlet on the German question and was convinced that Stalin's errors had
brought Hitler to power.
IN COLLEGE in 1933 I
was a Trotskyist. Trotsky instilled into his young followers the orthodoxy
peculiar to the defeated and ousted. We belonged to the Movement, we were
faithful to Leninism, and could expound the historical lessons and describe Stalin's
crimes. My closest friends and I were not, however, activists; we were writers.
Owing to the Depression we had no career expectations. We got through the week
on five or six bucks and if our rented rooms were small, the libraries were
lofty, were beautiful. Through "revolutionary politics" we met the
demand of the times for action. But what really mattered was the vital personal
nourishment we took from Dostoevsky or Herman Melville, from Dreiser and John
Dos Passos and Faulkner. By filling out a slip of
paper at the Crerar on Randolph Street you could get
all the bound volumes of The Dial and fill long afternoons with T. S. Eliot, Rilke and e. e. cummings.
Toward the end of the
1930s the Partisan Review was our own Dial, with politics besides. There we had
access to our significant European contemporaries - Silone,
Orwell, Koestler, Malraux,
Andre Gide and Auden.
Partisan's leading American contributors were Marxists - critics and
philosophers like Dwight Macdonald, James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Clement
Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro and Harold Rosenberg. The
Partisan Review intellectuals had sided with Trotsky quite naturally, during
the
Although I now drifted
away from Marxist politics, I still admired Lenin and Trotsky. After all, I had
first heard of them in the high-chair while eating my mashed potatoes. How
could I forget that Trotsky had created the Red Army, that he had read French
novels at the Front while defeating Denikin? That great crowds had been swayed by his coruscating
speeches? The glamour of the Revolution still cast its spell. Besides, the most
respected literary and intellectual figures had themselves yielded. Returning
from a visit to
Nineteen-forty was
also the year of Trotsky's assassination.
I was in
He is reported to have
said once that Stalin could kill him whenever he liked, and now we understood
what a far-reaching power could do with us; how little it took to kill us, how
slight a hold we, with our historical philosophies, our ideas, programmes, purposes, wills, had on the matter we were made
of.
It is perfectly true,
as Charles Fairbanks has suggested, that
totalitarianism in our century has shaped the very definition of what an intellectual
is. The "vanguard fighters" who acted under Lenin's direction in
October were intellectuals, and perhaps the glamour of this event had its
greatest affect on intellectuals in the west. Among political activists this
was sufficiently evident, but the Bolshevik model was immensely influential
everywhere.
Trotsky and T. E.
Lawrence were perhaps the most outstanding of the intellectual activists to
emerge from the first world war - the former as Lenin's principal executive,
Lawrence as the delicate scholar and recluse, a Shakespearian Fortinbras materialising in the
Arabian desert. Malraux was inspired by both men, obviously, an aesthete and theorist
eager in his first phase for revolutionary action, and manifesting a curious
relish for violence in a great cause. It was he who set an example for
French writers of the 1940s. Sartre was certainly one of his descendants and
many in France and elsewhere modelled themselves upon
him, up to the time when he abjured revolution. There was a trace of this also
in Arthur Koestler, who so often exposed himself to
personal danger, but it was in
The article concludes with Bellow's confession that
"politics as a vocation I take seriously. But it's not my vocation. And on
the whole writers are not much good at it." I think that we can all agree
on this.