Master of the Universe
By Ian
McEwan
Saul Bellow, circa of 1989
WHEN a
great writer dies an unusual event, for this is a rare breed -- we pay our
respects by a visit to our bookshelves, library or bookshop; mourning and
celebration merge honorably. It will be some time before we have the full
measure of Saul Bellow's achievement, and there is no reason we should not
start with a small thing, a phrase or sentence that has become part of our
mental furniture, and a part of life's pleasures. After all, good readers,
Nabokov advised his students, ''should notice and fondle details.''
Bellow
lovers often evoke a certain dog, barking forlornly in Bucharest during the
long night of the Soviet domination of Romania. It is overheard by an American
visitor, Dean Corde, the typically dreamy Bellovian hero of ''The Dean's
December,'' who imagines these sounds as a protest against the narrowness of
canine understanding, and a plea: ''For God's sake, open the universe a little
more!'' We approve of that observation because we are, in a sense, that dog,
and Saul Bellow, our master, heard us and obliged.
In fact, the very freedom that Henry James claimed
for the novelist in his essay ''The Art of Fiction'' (''All life belongs to
you'') was generously embraced by Mr. Bellow; he set himself, and succeeding
generations, free of the formal trappings of modernism, which by the mid-20th
century had begun to seem a heavy constraint.
He had
no time for Virginia Woolf's assertion that in the modern novel character is
dead. Mr. Bellow's world is as densely populated as Dickens's, but its citizens
are neither caricatures nor grotesques. They sit in memory like people you
could convince yourself you have met: the hopeless racketeer Lustgarten
(''partly subtle, partly ill'') in ''Mosby's Memoirs,'' who brings financial
ruin to his family by importing a Cadillac into postwar France; the excitable
low-lifer, Cantabile, waving a gun in ''Humboldt's Gift'' -- in his agitation
he suddenly needs to defecate, and forces his victim, Charlie Citrine (''a man
of culture or intellectual attainments'') into the stall with him. Citrine distracts himself with reflections
on ape behavior while Cantabile ''crouched there with his hardened dagger
brows.''
And most
vivid of all, for me at least, Moses Herzog, Mr. Bellow's most achieved
dreamer, the least practical of men in an America of vigorous, material
pursuits. In ''Herzog,'' Mr. Bellow brought to perfection the art of fictional
digression. When the hero goes to visit his lover, the lovely Ramona, he waits
on the bed while she goes off to change into what Martin Amis would call her
''brothel wear.''
In those moments Herzog reflects on the way the
entire world presses in on him, and Mr. Bellow seems to set out a kind of
manifesto, a ringing checklist of the challenges the novelist must confront, or
the reality he must contain or describe. It also serves as a reader's guide to
the raw material of Mr. Bellow's work. I came to know this passage by heart
through re-reading, and borrowed it for the epigraph of a novel. It was a risk,
because the pulse of this prose was likely to make my own sound puny.
''Well,
for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In
transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject
to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late
failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the
person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self
negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not
pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great
cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered
what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape
organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs''
Mr.
Bellow's city, of course, was Chicago, as vital to him, and as beautifully,
teemingly evoked, as Joyce's Dublin; the novels are not simply set in the 20th
century, they are about that century -- its awesome transformations, its
savagery, its new machines, the great battles of its thought systems, the
resounding failure of totalitarian systems, the mixed blessings of the American
way. These elements are not dealt with in abstract, but sifted through the
vagaries of character, of an individual trying to figure where he stands in
relation to the mass of which he is a part. And always, the past is pressing
in, memories of childhood, the crowded streets and tenements, shared rooms,
overbearing and eccentric relatives and neighbors -- the immigrant poor,
attending to the call to American identity.
The
American critic Lee Siegel wrote recently that every British writer with an
intellectual or emotional connection to America wants to lay claim to Mr.
Bellow, saying, ''He is their Plymouth Rock, or maybe their Rhodesia.'' There
is some truth to this.
What is
it we find in him that we cannot find here, amongst our own? I think what we
admire is the generous inclusiveness of the work -- not since the 19th century
has a writer been able to render a whole society, without condescension, or
self-conscious social anthropology. Seamlessly, Mr. Bellow can move between the
poor and their mean streets, and the power elites of university and government,
the privileged dreamer with the ''deep-sea thought.'' His work is the
embodiment of an American vision of plurality. In Britain we no longer seem
able to write across the crass and subtle distortions of class -- or rather, we
can't do it gracefully, without seeming to strain or without caricature. Mr.
Bellow appears larger, therefore, than any British writer can hope to be.
Another
reason: in a literary culture that has generally favored the whole scheme of a
novel against the finely crafted sentence, we honor the musicality, the wit,
the lovely beat of a good Bellovian line. An example, rightly favored by the
critic James Wood, is the description of Behrens, the florist in the story
''Something to Remember Me By'': ''Amid the flowers, he alone had no color --
something like the price he paid for being human.'' Another example, of special
significance to me because I paid tribute to Bellow by making a variation on
it: in ''Herzog,'' we read of Gersbach with his wooden leg, ''bending and
straightening gracefully like a gondolier.''
It is
not surprising then that some of the best celebrations of Mr. Bellow's writing
have originated in Britain. Certain essays may already be on your shelves, and
in this time of taking stock, it might be enlivening to reach for them. One of
them is Martin Amis's magnificent advocacy of ''The Adventures of Augie March''
as the definitive Great American Novel in the introduction to the Everyman
edition; another is James Wood's introduction to Penguin's ''Collected
Stories,'' in which joy is a central element in his response to the work.
Writers
we admire and re-read are absorbed into the fine print of our consciousness,
into the white noise of our thoughts, and in this sense, they can never die.
Saul Bellow started publishing in the 1940's, and his work spreads across the
century he helped to define. He also redefined the novel, broadened it,
liberated it, made it warm with human sense and wit and grand purpose. Henry
James once proposed an obvious but helpful truth: ''the deepest quality of a
work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer.'' We are
saying farewell to a mind of unrivalled quality. He opened our universe a
little more. We owe him everything.
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