More than half-way through Ruth Miller's flawed though fascinating "intellectual" biography of Saul Bellow we come across the following observation. "Had it been left to the New York literary establishment, Humbolt's Gift would never have found its way into the display case of Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf." For those who have read the first half of Miller's biography, this statement comes as no surprise. But for those who have only a vague familiarity with Bellow's reputation, it may come as something of a shock. Bellow is generally regarded as the most important novelist in America this side of Faulkner and Hemingway, and, in any case, he is certainly the most celebrated, with three national book awards, a Pulitzer, a Guggenheim fellowship, and, of course, a Nobel prize. How is it that the cultural establishment has taken such a disliking to him?
We find an implication of an answer in Joyce Carol Oates review of Miller's biography in the Los Angeles Times Book Review where she writes that Miller's book "certainly helps to explain the extreme conservatism and air of angry reproach in Bellow's public utterances since approximately 1970. Unlike the young, vigorous, tolerant Augie March, Bellow has grown increasingly reactionary," continues Ms. Oates; "his diatribes against the current state of literature, indeed of humanity in general, are well known. Women's studies, African-American studies, gay and lesbian writing, experimental art, Third World literature, above all the 'academy' and 'intellectuals' - all have drawn Bellow's scorn in recent years, as if, garlanded with awards as he is, he fears the emergence of voices and vision distinct from his own." In other words, what Oates appears to be saying here, is that Bellow started out his career as "young, vigorous, tolerant" author, producing novels such The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, and Herzog, but then, having established his reputation and stuffed his closets with awards and prizes, he used his position as America's leading novelist to undermine any attempt by younger writers to reach his status. But such an interpretation of Bellow's motives is not at all borne out by Miller's biography. On the contrary, Miller's Bellow comes out as a man of intransigent decency, more sinned against than sinning. Whatever quarrels he has had with the current state of literature have been imposed upon him by his own moral sense and his quixotic determination to speak his mind, regardless of whose feelings might get hurt as a result. The fact is, whatever might be said for such literary phenomenon as gay and lesbian fiction, experimental art, women's studies, African-American studies and so on pales in comparison with what can be said against them. Those of us who believe that there is more to culture then just the mere sentimental bawling over historically oppressed minority groups which seems to increasingly characterize so much of the current pronouncements of the current literary establishment, ought to be thankful that a man of Bellow's eminence has had the courage to take on the establishment and question its pretensions. For it is not in the power of most of us to be heard over the roar of cacophony which passes for contemporary opinion. If Bellow hadn't spoken out against the present darkness, who else could have? Miller tells the story of an incident which occurred during one of Bellow's speeches, one which he gave in 1980 in the auditorium of the library of Congress to a gathering of leading establishment intellectuals. What was the speech about? Basically, Bellow was saying that all the intellectuals of the era were sycophants to those who ruled society. But, as Miller reminds us, "it was nothing new. Over the years in his essays and speeches, in his interviews, Bellow had called intellectuals literary mandarins, culture-bureaucrats, Philistines, pampered children, small Daedaluses, custodians of culture, ideological package-makers, truffle makers, French-chocolate makers, epigones, pseudo-learned swamp makers, crisis chatters, mind defectives, high-culture surgeons who perform lobotomies, technological achievers, the enemies of the past, oblivion makers, pedants digging in the stacks of libraries, mole-wise, pythons, ivy league sodomites, and figurines of hand carved suet." At one point in this particular speech at the library of Congress, Bellow called intellectuals ruling reptiles, and when a gentleman in the front row heard these words, he bit the stem clear off his pipe. But at least the man-however chagrined he may have felt-was listening, which is the whole point: for who else but Bellow would be tolerated by establishment audiences, who are drawn to his lectures solely due to his status as America's leading novelist? Even though it is not very likely that Bellow is going to change anybody's mind, there is something to be said for the discomfort which his establishment audiences have to quietly endure through the course of his scathing speeches. Their sufferings represent a sort of poetic justice.
The establishment would like to think that Bellow's "uncomfortably conservative, distastefully anti-American" pronouncements are motivated by purely personal considerations, and it must be regretted that, to a certain extent, Ruth Miller in her biography of Bellow not infrequently plays into the hands of such ad hominem establishment sycophants. Miller argues throughout her book that Bellow's attitudes towards American culture are shaped by such personal experiences as his feeling of estrangement from his family (who never entirely approved of his career as a writer), by the many betrayals he suffered at the hands of his friends, and by the faithless and rapacious behavior of several of his wives. Now of course a man's views are shaped by his experiences. But this does not mean that all of his views are for that reason false or distorted. Moreover, Bellow's personal disappointments are not sui generis: they are not isolated phenomena with no meaning beyond Bellow's own life. On the contrary, they are symptomatic of our entire society and its utterly diseased condition. Critics have complained of Bellow's so-called misogyny, yet all that he is really guilty of is describing the women that have taken part in his life as faithfully as possible. Bellow has been married four times. At least two of his wives have been guilty of behavior which it is impossible to justify: his second wife had an affair with one of his closest friends, and his third wife, five years after their divorce, reopened the case in order to get her hands on Bellow's Nobel Prize money, on the grounds that Bellow had not made a full disclosure of his income and assets. Bellow cannot be blamed for using these personal experiences in his novels. But many establishment intellectuals, pusillanimous before anything which even so much as implies criticism of feminism and "the status of women," do not want anyone, let alone the greatest living American novelist, to suggest that there are women out there who are not victims of male domination, but rather victimizers of males.
The role of the artist in society is not merely to create beauty-although this is of course very important-but also to serve as a critic of life. Now this formulation of the artist's role in society-a formulation which we owe originally to Matthew Arnold-must not be considered as a blank check to allow the artist to do whatever he or she desires. Just as there is good and bad criticism of literature, so is there good and bad criticism of life. With the fiascos which, in recent years, have caused so many people to question the bona fides of the NEA, we find many examples of bad criticisms of life. The notorious Mathlethorpe photos in particular serve quite dramatically as an expression of poor criticism of life. Even if the critic dismisses entirely from evaluation considerations of beauty, on grounds of criticism alone the controversial Mathlethorpe photos deserve to be condemned as atrocious art. Criticism is primarily an intellectual activity, not a sensuous or visual one, and therefore a certain distinctness in its formulation is required. Indistinct criticism is practically a contradicto en adjecto. It is mere noise-or, in Mathlethorpe's case, mere black and white.
Actually, it must be noted here that visual arts-like sculpture, painting, dance, and photography-can never be critical in the sense that literary arts-such as prose fiction, poetry, and drama-can be. It is in the novel, in fact, in which art's criticism of life reaches its highest expression. And it is Saul Bellow, America's premier novelist over the past thirty years, who has emerged as our leading critic of American life.
To be a critic sometimes implies a rancorous disposition. Bellow, despite some slanders to the contrary, is entirely free of such a fault. In his portrayal of women, for example, which I mentioned before, he never stoops to mean-spirited caricature or malicious satire. Though he is certainly not afraid to show women in a bad light, he does not revel in the follies of the contemporary female. There is actually a great deal of of sympathy and anguish in his portrayal of, as Ambrose Bierce dubbed them, the "unfair sex." They are as much victims of the contemporary madness as are any of Bellow's other characters. Bellow, like any decent critic, never separates understanding from judgment, nor compassion from moral feeling.
Of course it has been fashionable in modern literature to make a cult of compassion and understanding. Even cold blooded murderers have received sympathetic treatment in the hands of modern novelists-witness In Cold Blood and The Executioners Song. Compassion can, one could argue, be taken too far, and in any case, compassion alone doesn't make the artist a critic of life. And it is true that criticism does require a certain amount of judgment, but that judgment in turn must have a broad foundation. The artist must have the ability to see things from a broad-one might almost want to say universal-point of view, because it is only from such a perspective that the seemingly fortuitous occurrences of life take on a rich and allusive significance.
What distinguishes Saul Bellow from many of his fellow critics of American life is that Bellow is able penetrate through the veneer of meaninglessness which covers the minute, trivial incidents of life and reveal the hidden significance lying underneath. This strength of vision which characterizes Bellow's art is due in large part to his astonishing command of humanistic knowledge. He may be the best-read novelist in our entire literary history, and has been criticized by his critics and readers for mentioning "Old World writers" and having "highbrow airs." But such criticisms are the result of the prevailing ignorance of even educated people in this country. "I readily concede," admitted Bellow in his foreword to Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, "that here and there I am probably hard to read, and I am likely to become harder as the illiteracy of the public increases. It is never an easy task to take the mental measure of your readers." Bellow's erudition allows him to take a much wider perspective than his less well-read rivals are able to. Whereas most contemporary writers, bounded within the narrow perspective of the present scene and unable to imagine any higher aspirations than the trivial ones of our time, are unable to rise above the age in which they are born, Bellow, who admits that, in his youth, he had decided he wasn't about to become a product of his environment, transcends the narrow prejudices of his age and sees things under the form of eternity-that is, he sees things as they really are, not as they appear for the moment to be. The time-bound modern, strapped by his lack of historical sense to the present like a horse is strapped to his blinders, falls victim to all sorts of pathetic errors which his ignorance and his inveterate lack of maturity leads him. I mentioned earlier that, far from allowing his personal disappointments to distort his view of American society, Bellow uses them to acquire greater insight into those causes which are responsible for our decadence. But this ability is predicated upon a rich grasp of the wisdom of the greatest geniuses of Western Civilization. A man like Oliver Stone, for example, whose superficial grasp of history and human nature is almost as pathetic as his intransigent immaturity, cannot help but blame the divorce of his parents and his father's financial let-down on President Kennedy's assassination and the Vietnam War because he is not wise nor cultured enough to understand what is really, truly wrong with our society.
Bellow's merits as an artist and as a critic of life can be seen with greater force and clarity by an examination of his actual work. His career as a writer began in the forties. As a young man, Bellow was characterized by the same inextinguishable determination to master his art that both Henry James and Ernest Hemingway shared, and consequently Bellow impressed his less focused contemporaries (and here I quote from Miller's biography) with "his single-minded dedication to his muse." In 1944, at the age of 29, Bellow published his first novel, The Dangling Man, which received generally good reviews. Written in diary form, it is not a terribly important work and need not be discussed here. Four years later Bellow's second novel, The Victim, came out. This work, an insightful exploration of anti-Semitism, also received good reviews. On the strength of these two novels, Bellow was soon considered in many quarters as one of the most promising of the younger novelists. Yet, looking over these two early novels and comparing them to Bellow's later ouvre, one cannot help but regard them as being a little stale and confined. The technique manifesting in both of them is solid but lacking in the free-wheeling virtuosity of Bellow's later work. This is not to say that these works don't have qualities to commend them. The Victim is something of a minor masterpiece, despite the conventionality of what Bellow described as its "Flaubertian" prose and construction.
However, it is not until The Adventures of Augie March that Bellow really found himself. Its publication in 1953 heralded the most important emergence of a new talent in American fiction since Faulkner. The style of the novel, which Miller describes, with some exaggeration, as "convoluted miracles of syntax with catalogues of details that are explosions," found few admirers among early critics of the work. In the forties and fifties, the style of Hemingway, simple, bland, and hard-boiled, became the way to write. A more luxurious style, a supple style which wrapped its subject in a mantle of poetry, was considered a crime against the principles of good writing. It is true that a writer like Faulkner was able to get away with a highly rhetorical and baroquely poetic style, but after all, almost every critic who has written anything about Faulkner has expressed some sort of reservations about his prose. In Bellow's case the animadversions of the critics only proved how short-sighted and superficial are the judgments of most practicing literary critics. In the nearly forty years since the publication of Augie, Bellow's style has been entirely vindicated. In fact, going over the many fictions that have been published since then, one cannot help but notice how flat and mundane is the prose of all those authors who followed in the footsteps of Hemingway. Their unadorned styles, affected in their simplicity and tedious in their directness, seem today as tiresome as a well worn joke. It is unfortunate that this style of writing should have become so prevalent in the schools. I myself remember being told repeatedly in English classes to avoid adjectives and passive verbs. The consequence of such teachings are prose styles that are simple without being charming, and energetic without having any life.
Merely skimming through a few pages of Bellow's Augie is enough to convince the reader of how superior his style is to that of his contemporaries. Bellow's style is at once supple, rich, colorful, poetic, intellectually piquant, and never dull. There is a complex and varying rhythm to his sentences. And more than that, his prose is far more alive and full of vitality than the sort of writing which, in order to give a semblance of movement and energy, tries to cram active verbs into every sentence. But instead of any real vitality, one finds in such active verb inflated writing mere wheel-spinning, like a furious squirrel in his cage. The vitality of a prose style is not a consequence of the sort of verbs a writer uses, but results from the vitality of the writer's thoughts and perceptions. The basic premise behind the pedagogics of writing over the last fifty years is that writing is all technique, and is therefore as every bit as teachable as basket weaving or book binding. This is absolutely not the case. All that the teaching of writing can accomplish is to make mediocre writers pretentious and talented writers pedantic. Before the collapse of the classical system of education there was hardly anyone who could write brilliantly in Latin or Greek, though most educated persons studied those languages far more exhaustively than they did their native tongues. Those who write well do so because they have special innate abilities. To believe that equality can be reached through education is one of the most puerile of delusions.
Bellow's Augie has more to it, of course, than just the style. In it, Bellow introduces his favorite theme, man's search for his higher self. According to Bellow's vision of things, modern man, like Dante, has awaken to find himself in a dark wood "where the straight way is lost." The only way to find our way out of the thickets of modernity, with all its attendant confusions-its billiard balls and dice materialism, its degrading psycho-analysis and its "untreated sewage odors of a century of revolutionary rhetoric," etc.-the only way to escape all this is to find "an open channel to the soul.The channel is always there," insists Bellow, "and it is our business to keep it open, to have a access to the deepest part of ourselves-to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make final judgments and put everything together. The independence of this consciousness, which has the strength to be immune to the noise of history and the distractions of our immediate surroundings, is what the life struggle is all about."
In any case, this "life struggle" is in large part what his novels are all about. Curious to note, his characters are never entirely successful in their various struggles. In fact, they usually fail, but their failure is so enriched by Bellow's comic pathos that his novels are not in the least gloomy.
Bellow's comic talent is as great as any American novelist's this side of Mark Twain; but his novels, so exuberantly alive to the muse of comedy, are utterly lacking in those immensely powerful scenes which characterize the work of the very greatest novelists of World literature. The difficulties which the Bellow character gets himself into are pathetic, not tragic. His novels, for all their merits, are rarely deeply powerful.
Perhaps this quality in Bellow's work explains a curious defect which so many of his novels share. I have in mind here the fact that the first part of a Bellow novel tends to be stronger than the second half, and that his endings are oftentimes anti-climatic. This is especially the case with Augie, Henderson the Rain King, and Humbolt's Gift, and of which start out brilliantly but then seem to loose much their earlier richness of comic incident and intellectual and stylistic focus in the second half. Bellow's novels, free from the discipline of plot which the tragic mode forces upon a work of fiction, tend to be entirely episodic and therefore lack the dramatic build-up that one finds in, say, a Dostoevsky or a Hardy novel. But it is easy to go too far in such criticism of Bellow's novels, for the defects of his novels are amply balanced by the depth and subtlety of his mind and his brilliantly comic intelligence.
The first fifteen years after Augie saw the publication of three widely diverse Bellow novels. Seize the Day, a novella, was brought out in '56; three years later Bellow published his strangest but most imaginative work of fiction, Henderson the Rain King; and then, in 1965, he came out with a novel regarded by many as his masterpiece, which details the anguish and turmoil of a professor faced with a collapsing marriage and whose higher education proves useless in his attempt to come to grips with his troubles. Herzog was Bellow's first major novel to be greeted with near unanimous praise. Despite the erudition displayed in its pages, it was a major bestseller and made Bellow, at least for the nonce (that is, until his third divorce), a wealthy man.
The difference between a major writer and a merely minor one is tellingly indicated by how they respond to critical and financial success. Herzog made Bellow the indubitably best writer of his generation. Having achieved this preeminent position in American letters, it would have been very easy for him to rest on his laurels and bask in the saccharine warmth of critical approbation. Such cases of basking can be seen in writers like Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, and Bernard Malamud; writers who, after initially producing some promising work, took their elevated position in the realm of contemporary literature for granted and began coming out with inferior productions which merely echoed points of view that the literary establishment either sympathizes with or at the very least tolerates. Not so, however, Mr. Bellow. It is following Herzog that Bellow's criticism of American life-and in particular, his criticism of the American establishment-emerges from the background of his earlier work to become a conspicuous aspect of nearly all his later fictions and speeches. His first major exercise in criticism came in the form of the novel Mr. Sammler's Planet, which constitutes the essence of Bellow's reaction to the sixties. In it Bellow places the septuagenarian Artur Sammler, a holocaust survivor and former Bloomsburyite, into the New York of the sixties. Sammler has reached the point where he can no longer care much about curing human perversity; he can only watch from the sidelines, a helpless spectator. Bellow follows his goings to and fro and records his reactions to the outrageous events which pass across the screen of the old man's consciousness over a two day period. On the morning of the first day, Sammler shuffles off to Columbia University to give a lecture about British life in the thirties, but the students in the audience will have none of it. "What you are saying is shit", "His balls are dry," they jeer. For such a scene as this Bellow has been accused of being unfair to young people, despite the fact that he was merely describing an event from his own experience. And for what happens next to Sammler Bellow has been accused of racism. Sammler, after slipping out of the auditorium at Columbia and taking the bus back to his apartment, finds himself cornered by a black pickpocket he had seen working the Broadway bus. The pickpocket, as a sort of warning to the old man, unzips his pants and wags his penis in Sammler's face.
Such is Mr. Sammler's morning! The afternoon and the day following are much in the same order. Throughout the novel Sammler reflects on the shattered ideals of love and brotherhood, made such a mockery of by the glandular enthusiasms of the sixties. How could love have any meaning in a world where women are all into prestige, manipulation, power-lust, sex-lust, sex-dominance, neurosis? or where women like Sammler's niece Angela, with her "[sexed]-out" eyes and "white vital heat in the flesh of her throat," talk their lover into playing switch with another couple? It is not love, Sammler ruminates, it is is not brotherhood, but power and perversity which hold sway in modern American society.
Such is the gist of Mr. Sammler's Planet. The arresting gloominess of the work is only partially relieved by the farcical character of many of the scenes. Six years later Humbolt's Gift appeared, and though it bagged a Pulitzer for Bellow, it is probably his most uneven novel. The first two-hundred pages of the work represent Bellow's highest achievement in the novelistic art; but the last two-hundred pages are only middling Bellow in comparison, and consequently one finishes the novel not entirely satisfied. Bellow himself, however, thought very highly of the work.
Six years after Humbolt's Gift Bellow would publish his darkest novel, The Dean's December-darkest because, unlike Mr. Sammler's Planet, there is nothing of a farcical nature to relieve the brooding seriousness of the novel. What is most remarkable about this work is the large amount of pure fact it contains. Bellow, before beginning thus novel, had engaged in extensive research for a planned book on Chicago. In the meantime, he had had to accompany his wife to Bucharest to observe the sickness unto death of his mother-in-law. From these two sources he spun the web that would become The Deans December.
In Bellow's previous novels, the main character had almost always been something of a self-parody or caricature of Bellow himself. Albert Corde, the protagonist of The Deans December, is the closest we have to a serious Bellow self-portrait. Corde, like Bellow, is intent upon telling the truth. "If I didn't have a true word to speak [to people]," Bellow told William Kennedy during an interview, "I'd keep my f--g mouth shut." The problem is, people in this country, especially the intellectual establishment, are not interested in the truth. Corde has created a national furor over two articles he wrote attacking corruption in Chicago. Reflecting over the response to these articles, Corde asks himself, Why did I write them?
To prevent the American idea from being pounded into dust altogether[is his answer. He explains:] Here is our American idea: liberty, equality, justice, abundance. And here is what things are like in a City like Chicago. Have a look! How does the public apprehend events? It doesn't apprehend them. It has been deprived of the capacity to experience them.
This capacity to experience the truth is central to Corde. "In the American moral crisis, the first requirement was to experience what was happening and to see what must be seen." But to see this moral crisis it was absolutely requisite to understand that it was in fact a moral crisis, not merely physical one. "It was not so much the inner slum that threatened us, as the slum of innermost being, of which the inner city was perhaps a material representation," reflects Corde. Corde, like Bellow, adamatinely rejects all those who would save society through some physical gimmick. Responding to an emissary of the scientist Beech, an environmentalist who believes that lead pollution was destroying the nerve cells of Homo sapiens, Corde, speaking for Bellow, says,
Where Beech sees poison lead I see poison thought or poison theory. The view we hold of the material world may put us into a case as heavy as lead, a sarcophagus which nobody will even have the art to paint becomingly. The end of philosophy and of art, will be to 'advanced' thought what flakes of lead paint or leaded exhaust fumes do to infants. Which of these do you think will bring us to the end of everything?
The Deans December frequently broods in such an apocalyptic manner as the above. For, according to Bellow's vision, it is not merely the West, as represented by America, that's in bad shape, but the East, as represent by Rumania, as well. Bellow's impressionistic portrait of Bucharest under communist rule is exceedingly gloomy in its atmospheric projection of bureaucratic ruthlessness and sadism. But it is not merely the bureaucrats which draw Bellow's eye; he is in fact far more interested in the victims of the ruling regime. He finds something heroic in such victims' struggles to live in the face of a brutal, power-lusting despotism.
Bellow, however, finds hardly anything heroic in those associates of Corde's who struggle for their place in the lucrative corruption and soul benumbing materialism of American society. Vain, manipulative, weak, lacking in any genuine noble impulses, there is something extremely small and trivial about the American characters in The Dean's December book. They are victims of the "soft nihilism" which rages in the U.S., as opposed to the "hard nihilism," the nihilism of torture and cruelty and tyranny, which holds sway in the dismal, poverty-eaten streets of Bucharest.
This penchant on Bellow's part for comparing East and West again comes to the fore in More Die of Heartbreak, the only major novel he has completed since The Dean's December. This is one of the most readable and accessible of his later novels, and contains what is perhaps his most satisfying story. After making such encomiums, it is only fair to add, however, that More Die of Heartbreak does not provide the reader with as vivid an illustration of Bellow's genius as does Augie, Herzog, or the first two-hundred pages of Humbolt's Gift. In More Die of Heartbreak-to return to my previous train of thought concerning the difference between East and West-posits two differing ordeals: the ordeal of privation (Russia), and the ordeal of desire (America). More Die of Heartbreak is an examination of the latter ordeal, the ordeal of desire, with an emphasis on its sexual component.
Bellow's general attitude about current sexual mores in America is well summarized in the following excerpt:
All those mad men and mad women sharing beds. Two psychopaths under one quilt. Do you never know who is lying beside you, the thoughts behind the screen of "consideration"? A flick of the thermostat and the warmth of love explodes, a bomb of flame that cremates you. As you float away from your ashes into the etheric world, don't be surprised to hear sobs of grief from your destroyer.
Bellow's feelings on the direction of our society is even more emphatic:
Mankind was long supported by an unheard music which buoyed it, gave it flow, continuity, coherence. But this humanistic music has ceased, and now there is a different barbarous music welling up, and a different elemental force has begun to manifest itself, without form as yet. Do we consent to go under or do we take advantage of our freedom to search for the original self?
One gathers from reading the entire novel that Bellow believes we have consented to go under. "Our souls,"-or so Miller, summarizing Bellow, tells us-"have been contaminated by their link to the body rather than strengthened by their bond to the cosmos, to God." The narrator of More Die of Heartbreak, Kenneth Tractenberg, sums all this up in an (unintentionally) humorous little myth expounded by another character in the novel, the Russian mystic Yermelov:
This Yermelov [says Tractenberg] was the first of my Russian teachers.He told me that each of us had his angel, a being charged with preparing us for a higher evolution of the spirit.In the solitude enforced upon us, we were aware, each of us, of a small glacier in the breast.This glacier must be thawed, and the necessary warmth for that must to begin with be willed. Thinking begins with willing, and thinking must be warmed and colored with feeling. The task of angels is to instill warmth into our souls.We must assist the angels by making the necessary preparations. Here the difficulty is that waking consciousness is nowadays very meager. The noise of the world is so terrible that we can endure it only by being coated by sleep. We can give the angels little help from within when they try to instill warmth into us-the warmth of love. And the angels also are fallible. They were human once; that's why they are subject to confusion. And, said Yermelov, they goof. Our waking consciousness louses up their efforts, and since they have orders to transmit their impulse at all costs, they send it when we're sleeping. What happens then is terrible.Denied access to the soul, the angels work directly on the sleeping body. In the physical body this angelic love is corrupted into human carnality. Such is the source of all the disturbed sexuality of the present age. "Animalized!" Yermelov said. The prise de courant led directly into the flesh and the instincts, whereas the current should have gone into the sentient soul. Instead, planetary demons of electricity were entering us from beneath.They filled the spinal fluid with their currents of lust. As the millennium approached its end, this was the true picture of human sexuality. Pure love is overcome by perversity. We become fixated on the sexual members. The angels failing, the physicians take over. Love is replaced by Health, and Health is obtained by anatomical means. Freud himself writes the prescription, penis normalis, dosim. Then drugs, hormones, narcotics, our souls are brutalized, human beings become impervious to all higher impulses.You have to pity the angels too. By their failure to penetrate our sodden sleep they also degenerate. M. Yermelov would insist on this.
The practical result of all this is the sexual madhouse which the United States has become. Bellow scrupulously catalogues the grimaces, the rages, the sexual poses and copulatory manipulations which the inmates, in their manic blindness, descend to. It is all there-all the contemporary confusion and silliness and cruelty.
Kenneth Tractenberg, a professor and Russian literature nut, wants to marry Treckie, who has had a kid by him, but she refuses his honorable intentions to move to Seattle so she can increase her self-awareness and discover who she is. Later, she takes up with a sadistic snow mobile driver who bruises her shins during love making. In the meantime, Tractenberg finds solace from Dita Schwartz, who loves him so much that she submits to a face peeling, hoping that Tractenberg "will fall in love with the angelic face of the real Dita." Taking her home from the doctor, Tractenberg removes the blood soaked bandages from Dita's face. "She looked," he notes, "as if she had been dragged over the highway on her face.These torments and martyrdoms to which women submit their bodies, the violent attacks they make on their own long-hated faults or imagined deformities! Gladly assaulting themselves. The desperate remedy. The poor grinding their own faces."
Underneath the sheen of comic wit which pervades More Die of Heartbreak, there lurks a despairing sadness. Ken Tractenberg's uncle, Benn Crader, is a world famous botanist. A journalist inquires of Crader about the hazards of increasing radiation due to Chernobyl. "It's terribly serious of course," Crader replies, "but I think more people die of heartbreak than of radiation." Again we find Bellow insisting on the primacy of the moral or spiritual aspect of human life over the physical or material.
It seems as if his shallow contemporaries are unable to understand this. As Bellow points out in the novel, thousands upon thousands of people will march on Washington to protest nuclear power or nuclear waste, but no one will ever whip up a protest against the dehumanization of sexuality in America. The most tragic victims of this dehumanization are, as is typically the case in this sort of thing, those men (and women) of generally excellent moral character. Benn Crader is portrayed as a truly wonderful man-wise, empathetic, humorous, insightful, lovable. His nephew tries to describe Crader's special qualities by declaring that his uncle has "the magics." Crader, however, has a fatal flaw: he is unable to deal with his erotic needs. Our culture, hints Bellow, simply won't let him. Wherever he turns, he is reminded of it. In order to find some relief from his sexual torments, he agrees to marry Matilda Layamon, a young, beautiful but ruthless social climber. As it turns out, her purpose in marrying Crader has nothing to do with love. On the contrary, she is after prestige and money. When Crader is ultimately forced to accept this depressing fact, he signs up with a special team of research scientists to go study a rare form of plant life in the arctic circle. Only in the polar wilderness can a man escape the insanity of contemporary civilization.
Such is the gist of Bellow's criticism of American life, especially as it is lived by the rich and powerful. That it is for the most part true I do not think can be denied. Therefore, all the talk about Bellow merely enacting out personal disappointments and betrayals is, as I have state before, merely that-just talk. Bellow is not only our premier novelist, he is one of our premier critics; and being this, he is also one of our are most important and endurable links to the great writers of the Nineteenth Century. If any portion of that tradition of great novel writing is to be passed down to future writers, the conduit of that passing will have to be in large part, if I am not mistaken, Bellow and his work. Bellow himself seems to be aware of this, for he takes his status as our nation's greatest novelist as a great obligation requiring him at all times to speak the truth, even in the face of organized hostility. And speak the truth he certainly has. In a speech at the Annual Literary Awards Banquet, Bellow, commenting on the current literary situation, said,
I'm not sure that what we have is a literary situation; it seems rather to be a sociological, a political, a psychological situation in which there are literary elements. Literature itself has been swallowed up. In East Africa last year I heard an account (probably sheer fantasy) of a disaster that had over taken one of three young Americans.A python had silently crushed and swallowed [one of ] the young [men]. In the morning, his friends saw the shape of his body within the snake and his tennis shoes sticking out of the creature's mouth. What we see of literature now is the sneakers.
Later in this speech Bellow compared the publishing industry, academia, and literary critics with the python, and contemporary writers are, of course, the sneakers-a very apt comparison. But if this be true, as I believe it is, what are young writers suppose to do about it? In a lecture entitle "Why art?" Bellow has given us as good an answer as anyone could possibly give. And what is this answer? Quite simply, it is this: to stay outside the establishment and refuse to surrender one's intellect to the intelligentsia, those "high-culture surgeons" of lobotomies who have created what is, in effect, an "adversary culture." In other words, beware, young writers, of academia; beware of intellectuals; beware of literary pundits: they are all, in effect, the children of darkness. An aspiring artist cannot wish for any better advice than this.