Saul Bellow’s Quest for
the Vernacular Sublime
By LEON WIESELTIER
SAUL BELLOW
Letters
By
Edited by Benjamin Taylor
571
pp. Viking. $35
“We often stopped before a display of children’s
shoes. My mother coveted for me a pair of patent-leather sandals with an
elegantissimo strap. I finally got them — I rubbed them with butter to preserve
the leather. This is when I was 6 or 7 years old, a little older than Rosie is
now. Amazing how it all boils down to a pair of patent-leather sandals.” Saul Bellow recorded that ancient
memory, stirred to it by play with his little daughter, in a letter on Feb. 19,
2004, when he was 88 years old. It is the last letter in this magnificent book.
The old master died a year later.
The “it” to which those talismanic shoes refer is what
might be called the vernacular sublime, which was the object of Bellow’s inner
exertions all his life. The story of his avenues and approaches and attacks in
his campaign for it composes the plot of this collection. Everything leads to
the epiphany of the sandals, and its triumphant creatureliness. The man is all
here in this book, in his stunning, almost baffling plenitude. Bellow’s letters
are — as anybody who corresponded with him must have expected them to be, and
here I must disclose, or confess, or boast, that the volume includes also some
gorgeous letters to me, written in the fullness of our friendship decades ago,
when we used to worry over metaphysics and the novel as we chopped wood — one
of Bellow’s greatest books. Benjamin Taylor records that it contains only
two-fifths of what Bellow called his “epistling,” but its riches are
nonetheless immense. Taylor has selected and edited and annotated these letters
with exquisite judgment and care. This is an elegantissimo book. Our literature’s debt to Taylor,
if our culture still cares, is considerable.
“I have a certain feeling for reality,” Bellow wrote
in 1961; and in 1974, “I know how to transform common matter.” As with those
sandals, the poetry of his prose, its force of consciousness, lay always in its
fidelity to the concrete. In the appearances of things and circumstances and
psyches, he discerned the revelatory details. Bellow was a giant of description,
and he knew it. About the editors of a certain magazine he wickedly remarked,
in 1991, that “I could make those people very unhappy by describing them.”
Perhaps it was the same scruple that made him confine so much of his
shatteringly accurate portraiture to the dead.
As with his novels, the reading of his letters leaves
one amazed by how much Bellow saw. He was always glancing and glimpsing. In a
letter to a former student, in 1955, he cautioned her about “American books,
including my own” that “pant so after meaning. They are earnestly moral,
didactic; they build them ever more stately mansions, and they exhort and plead
and refine.” He instructed her, instead, that “a work of art should rest on
perception.” In 1957, criticizing a story that Philip Roth had sent him, he
scolded the young writer that “I have a thing about Ideas in stories.” And Bellow was just
as vigilant about the arrogance of form. To Alfred Kazin, in 1950, he
complained about the prevalence of the notion that “to write a story is to
manipulate symbols,” and warned against “what happens when literature itself
becomes the basis for literature and classics become crushers.” About “The
Adventures of Augie March,” he wrote to Bernard
Malamudthat “a novel, like a letter, should be loose, cover
much ground, run swiftly, take risk of mortality and decay. I backed away from
Flaubert, in the direction of Walter Scott, Balzac and Dickens.”
Bellow’s cause was actuality, the whole mess of it.
His ideal was wakefulness. Writing to an old schoolmate in 1948 — his lifelong
devotion to the people of his youth is one of the most moving features of this
book — he declares, almost creedally, that “the man we bring forth has no
richness compared with the man who really exists, thickened, fed and fattened
by all the facts about him, all of his
history.” In 1956, in the aftermath of the early death of his cherished friend
Isaac Rosenfeld, he professes in a melancholy letter to Delmore Schwartz’s
ex-wife that in his writing he has “tried to make a little more reality, or
tried to reclaim a little of infinite unreality.”
The justly celebrated vastness of Bellow’s
metaphorical field was owed to this fight for veridical observation, this
longing for true knowledge. Metaphor is the juxtaposition of disparate elements
of the world in which an unsuspected commonality, an illuminating partial
likeness, has been discovered, and the more unlikely the juxtaposition, the
greater the consequent sensation of the unifying of the world; and so the range
of a writer’s metaphor is a measure of the range of his cognition. The
novelist, Bellow proclaims, must make himself aware of nothing less than “the
total human situation.” Sometimes this magisterial sensitivity brings amusement.
In a rueful letter about aging, he cites his “blue-cheese ankles.” Reporting
merrily, in 1997, on a dinner for Vaclav Havel that turned into an
admiring mob, he writes that “Havel and I chatted for about three minutes and
were separated as if we were tomato seeds in the digestive tract.” This is the
sort of drollery that gives evidence of an uncommonly large internal space.
“The 19th century drove writers into attics,” he tells Alice Adams. “The 20th
shuts them in nutshells. The only remedy is to declare yourself king, or queen,
of infinite space.”
In the mid-1970s, there came a crisis. The dazzling
representation of the appearances no longer satisfied Bellow. “For some time
now,” he writes to Owen Barfield in 1975, “I have been asking what kind of
knowledge a writer has.” The “interest of much of life as represented in the
books I read (and perhaps some that I wrote) had been exhausted. But how could
existence itself become uninteresting.” He concludes that “images or
representations this side of the mirror have indeed tired
us out.” Even more startlingly, he informs Barfield that “lately I have become
aware, not of illumination itself, but of a kind of illuminated fringe — a
peripheral glimpse of a different state of things.” Barfield was an
extraordinary figure, a disciple of Rudolf Steiner’s eccentric “anthroposophy”
and its belief in a spiritual world with which we may have direct acquaintance,
but also a profound thinker in his own right about language and imagination and
the spoliation of human inwardness by a scientific and technological
civilization. Bellow’s letters to Barfield are perhaps the most fascinating in
the book, not least because they are the only ones in which Bellow is humble.
At Barfield’s suggestion, he undertook a study of
Steiner — in defiance, to put it mildly, of his own skeptical and secular
temperament. Perhaps his old schooling in the Russian writers — “We were so Russian,
as adolescents,” he recalls toStanley Elkin in 1992 — inclined him
to such explorations. His impish delight in outraging the advanced cultural
consensus of his time might also have encouraged him in this flamboyantly
anti-materialist heterodoxy. But not surprisingly, the doctrine did not win
him. No doctrine ever did. In 1977 he confides to a friend that “I can’t manage
this new kind of consciousness. I don’t know what to do about it.” And in 1979,
in a dramatic letter to Barfield, he revolts. “I am troubled by your judgment
of the books I’ve written. I don’t ask you to like what you obviously can’t
help disliking, but I can’t easily accept your dismissal of so much investment
of soul.”
It is a stirring moment, and more than an outburst of
pride. It is a vindication of the old calling on the new ground: he has found
spirituality in the enterprise of fiction. The rumor of dessication is
dispelled. He will have no more of the other side’s condescension to this side.
Never mind that the form of the novel was built on the ruins of metaphysical
certainty: novels, too, may be soulful. Three years later Bellow castigates his
erstwhile teacher for an uncomprehending review of “The Dean’s December,” and
in a parting shot he taunts the mystagogue that “ ‘the leap beyond’ . . . would
have to be a leap into a world of which one has had some experience.” Without
such a continuity, the consummation would be meaningless. The transfiguration
of the sandals must be preceded by the recognition of the sandals.
In recent years, Bellow has been venerated primarily
for his laughter and his language. His British admirers in particular, orphaned
by the dreariness of their own postwar fiction and in abject (and rather
boring) envy of American energy, have remade Bellow according to their need: a
comic writer, a high mocker and essentially a stylist. There is some truth,
obviously, to this worship of his ebullience, of the libertine vigor of his
voice. Of all modern writers, Bellow somehow managed to combine intellectuality
and vitality without compromising either of the indispensable terms. The
life-force never deserted him, even as it was always attended by
interpretation. The unruliness of existence was Bellow’s lasting theme; but
while he studied it, he never quite ordered it. In his fiction and in his life,
he seemed to believe in the fecundity of disorder.
Yet something is missing from the chortling
celebration of Bellovian jollity, and that is its foundation in gloom. “Bitter
melancholy” is “one of my specialties,” he tells Edward Shils in 1962. About
“the power to despair,” he writes to a friend in 1961 that “having myself felt
it, known it, bathed in it, my native and temperamental impulse is to return to
sanity in the form of laughter.” The letters show a man constantly wresting
high spirits from low, and forbidding himself “the newest wrinkle in anguish.”
The charming and gregarious writer feels “almost astrally alone, but still “I’m
out for sursum corda.
Lift up the heart.” In 1968, in a letter to Meyer Schapiro about Delmore
Schwartz (who had died two years earlier) andJohn Berryman (who would kill himself
four years later), he remarks that “I see why these self-destructive lives are
led. But I can’t convince myself that it is a good tradition.” There is an
almost erotic charge to Bellow’s endless affirmations; they are so affecting
because they are so willed. Since they are deeply reflective, they do not seem
merely manic. “Really,” he writes to Lionel Trilling in 1952, “things are now
what they always were, and to be disappointed in them is extremely shallow. We
may not be strong enough to live in the present. But to be disappointed in it!”
Bellow was clear about the role of comedy in his work.
“The real thing is unfathomable,” he declares in 1974. “You can’t get it down
to distinct or clear opinion. Sensing this, I have always had intelligence
enough (or the intuition) to put humor between myself and final claims.” To
Richard Chase, in 1959, he remarks on his lack of “the will or the capacity to
continue to a definite conclusion” — this was a charge frequently brought
against his teeming novels — and explains that “I sometimes think the comedy in
my books is a satire on this inconclusiveness.” The satire could sometimes be
savage, of course; and he was usually not the object of his own cruelty. But
the laughter in Bellow is mainly philosophical laughter. He had Camus’s
lucidity, but not his solemnity. (“ ‘The Plague’ was an IDEA.
Good or bad? Not so hot, in my opinion.”) His only equal in this attainment was
Beckett, except for the abstraction and the allegory, which Bellow could do
without. (In an archive Taylor found Beckett’s calling card, arranging for a
meeting with Bellow in Paris — as Taylor nicely puts it, “the living embodiment
of modernism was eager to meet the great quarreler with modernism.” The
encounter was brief and uneventful.) There was nothing hip or cynical or
self-satisfied about Bellow’s hilarity. It was a boisterous stoicism, a
technique of perseverance.
Bellow liked to scoff at serious people, but he never
left their company. He, too, always had something urgent to say. The Yiddish
writer I. L. Peretz once castigated a critic (a Bellovian activity!) that it is
not enough to speak Yiddish, you have to have something to say. The view of
Bellow as primarily a stylist, the pleasure-seeking reading of Bellow, the cult
of his sentences, is inadequate. His manner was rougher and more controversial,
stubbornly animated by ultimate questions, motivated by mind, an intervention
in society as well as in literature. Even greater than how he said what he said
was what he had to say. His writings, these letters included, are efforts in
explanation, or in the hunger for explanation. He did not compose manifestoes
or programs, and he despised ideologies — Norman Mailer is “such an ideologist,”
whereas “I do everything the hard way”; but his ridicule of intellectuals never
led Bellow, as it did some of his contemporaries, to the barbarities of
anti-intellectualism.
Denouncing “culture-gravity,” he jokes to Bernard
Malamud that “they say ‘picaresque’ and don’t laugh,” but Bellow laughed and
said “picaresque.” The author of these letters was, from beginning to end, a
genius reader, always returning to the old thinkers and writers, always
tussling with them. He was, in his nature, one of their number. “Ideology is of
no use to us in refurnishing the empty house,” he observes to Leslie Fiedler.
What is of use, by contrast, is humanism. Humanism is “the most subversive of
all — and I am a humanist.” The absence of irony from that avowal is like a
cool breeze. Trotsky, Reich, Steiner: Bellow was forever chasing the answer,
but his disappointments in belief never dissuaded him from the chase. “The best
of me has formed in the jumps.” Finally he was — may this, too, be said without
irony? — a seeker after truth.
One marvels for many reasons at the man who wrote
these letters, but for no reason more than that he was a free man. I do not
refer merely to his rebelliousness and his restlessness, to his “jail-breaking
spirit.” He is beset by cares and obligations; his friends die and die and die;
he makes a slop (until, in 1989, he marries Janis Freedman) of his private
life; but nothing ever robs him of the free and unfettered use of his powers.
“A language is a spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us,” and in that
palace Bellow was sovereign. “The only sure cure is to write a book,” he
advises Alice Adams. Only time, and the accidental ingestion of a poison fish
in the tropics in 1994, dims him. Otherwise, for the duration of the long and unsinkable
life chronicled in these pages, he is a large man growing larger, a spirit
expanding, an unabating lightstorm, and “the name of the game is Give All.” He
never loses his constancy of purpose. In the penultimate letter in this volume,
in the winter of 2002, he sums himself up for a distant relative in a casual Abschied:
“Actually, I’ve never stopped looking for the real thing; and often I find the
real thing. To fall into despair is just a high-class way of turning into a
dope. I choose to laugh, and laugh at myself no less than at others.” And then,
on the next page, the final page, as if to verify his visionary relation to the
real, the sandals.
Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of
The New Republic.
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