by Martin Amis
He once told a prospective biographer (who wrote a whole book on his failure to write a book on Bellow): 'What can you reveal about me that I haven't already revealed about myself?' In the novels Bellow's surrogates have their vanities and blind spots (Herzog is 'not kind', Sammler was 'never especially kind'), their brainstorms and dizzy spells. Sanity, like freedom, like American democracy — he suggests — is a fragile and perhaps temporary condition. It is clear from his books, his history, his face, that Bellow has weathered considerable turbulence. As soon as you start scrutinising a writer's life (however monumental or exemplary its achievements may be), that life quickly takes on a human shape — only human, all too human.
Apart from the ingratiation, the danger of becoming a cultural functionary, the extra mail ('suddenly even more people think that what I want to do is read their manuscripts'), Bellow is appalled by the 'micro-inspection' to which Nobel Prizewinners are subject. 'One is asked to bare one's scars to the crowd, like Coriolanus.' Well, it is all in the novels, at one remove or another, for the not-so-idly curious. There you will find a moral autodidact, slowly crystallised and moving steadily now to 'the completion of his reality".
Which is? 'Ignorance of death is destroying us,' Bellow has said. 'Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.' A well-lived life leaves you on 'sober decent terms with death'; if you are a writer, though, it leaves you more than that. The Dean's December inaugurates Bellow's 'late' period but Mr Sammler's Planet prefigured it — old Sammler, with his 'farewell detachment', his 'earth-departure-objectivity': 'the luxury of non-intimidation by doom'. Bellow looks set to enjoy a Yeatsian old age. Just let him finish.
Chicago — 'huge, filthy, brilliant and mean' — is hardly a hermit's cot, yet in a sense Bellow belongs to the reclusive or spectral tradition of Frost, Salinger and Pynchon. The philistinism, the 'hardboiled-dom' of the place provides the sort of insulation which an American writer sheds at his peril. 'The main thing about Chicago is that it's not New York. There are no writers to talk to in New York, only celebrities on exhibit.' His determination to stand aloof (especially from the youth-worshipping campus-fever of the Sixties) has moved certain pundits to label him as a reactionary. Was it fastidiousness or vocational sense that had kept him out of public debate?
'I now think I was probably wrong,' he said. 'Things are going down so fast, I think maybe I should have been involved all along. As for Vietnam, I went on record. But the war could be identified as an evil by Americans because it was packaged by television and was therefore comprehensible to an entertainment society. Other evils, money-mania, corruption, urban vileness — these are not package-able.' Out there in Chicago, as Bellow has written, lie 'many, many square miles of civil Passchendaele or Somme'.
What is the content of these data?
1. In Cabrini Green, the black housing project, a man butchers a hog in his apartment, and then throws the guts on the stairs. A woman slips and breaks her arm. In the ambulance 'she was smeared with pig's blood and shriller than the siren', 2. In 'ratshit Woodlawn' old people scavenge for food behind the supermarkets. The store guards try to keep them off lest they poison themselves with spoiled fish, and then sue. 3. A black youth leaves his car in the parking lot of the courthouse, where he attends a hearing on a rape charge. In the boot of his Pontiac lies a young housewife, kidnapped at gunpoint. Every few hours he takes her out and rapes her. Two days later he shoots her in a vacant lot and covers her body with trash. These horror stories, and many more, appear in The Dean's December, in which Bellow contrasts the super-licensed rat-jungle of Chicago with the 'penitentiary society' of Bucharest. Citing Rilke's wartime letters, the Dean observes that there is no effective language for the large-scale terrors; during such times 'the heart must hang in the dark', and wait. But there is a countervailing urge 'to send the soul out into society', 'to see at first hand the big manifestations of disorder and take a fresh reading from them'. The result is head-spin, heart-fever. And the conclusion he reaches is that America now has an 'underclass', lost populations expected, even encouraged, to dispose of themselves with junk, poison and Saturday-night specials.
I asked Bellow how he had assembled his litany of depradation. Did he trudge round the jails, the hospitals, the projects? The process is largely an imaginative one, but it is a process much simplified in classless, dollar-driven, magimixed Chicago. 'The corruption is everywhere. You can say this for Chicago — there's no hypocrisy problem here. There's no need for hypocrisy. Everyone's proud of being a bastard ... You just meet all these guys. You went to school with them. I used to play basketball with a Machine executioner. He lives out in Miami now. Quietly.’
Rather than dig up some of Bellow's more reliable academic pals, I went to see an old schoolfriend of his, a criminal lawyer whom I had better call Iggy. He was friendly. We were soon on first-name terms. 'You come all the way from London to talk with Saul?' he asked. Yes, it takes all sorts. Pushing seventy, pouchy, paunchy, yet still ignited with the American vigour, Iggy elegantly explained that there might be the odd 'telephonic interruption' from his clients — the fuddled rapists, bail-jumpers and drug-dealers he represented. At once there was a telephonic interruption. I looked round the file-heaped office. Lawyers Make It Stand Up In Court, said a sign. 'Will you shut up and listen?' said Iggy to his client.
Iggy and Saul studied at Tuley High. 'Ninety per cent of us came from illiterate immigrant families. They had a wonderful faculty corps there. At the last reunion dinner we had Saul come along. And you know? Of that 90 per cent, 90 per cent of them — no, 98 per cent — had made it. We'd all made it.’
Bellow had also told me about Tuley High. Fleeing the pogroms, his parents had left St Petersburg (he calls it 'Pettersburg') for Montreal in 1913. Bellow himself arrived two years later, the only child of four to be born on the far side of the Atlantic. (His writing, one reflects, has much of the candour, the adultness of the Russian voice.) In 1924 they moved to Chicago, to the slums of the Northwest Side. Bellow's father was an onion-dealer and part-time bootlegger.
'There was something oppressive', said Bellow, 'about being an alien, a hybrid — but then everyone was. You knew you were always going to have dirt under your fingernails, but this is a natural twentieth-century feeling. There was no bar to learning. And I wondered — by what right or title was I reading great books, while also discovering America: pool halls, ball parks. It was one of the worst slums in Chicago. By the time I was twelve, I had seen everything.' During the Depression the likes of Saul and Iggy lived off welfare hand-outs and municipal !OUs. 'But we came through,' Iggy affirmed. 'Even during that bad time we were full of energy and hope. We made it.’
I asked Iggy what he thought of Bellow's portrayal of Chicago chicanery. 'When it comes to corruption in Chicago', he said with deep satisfaction, 'Saul is a child. It's much much worse than he says.' Iggy ought to know. He was disbarred and jailed, after a lucrative misunderstanding, many years ago. 'In my opinion', he said, 'the best of Saul's titles is The Dangling Man [sic]. I have the first edition. Someone told me it's worth $400! When he dies it'll be worth even more. So I say to Saul, I say, "When you gonna die!"‘
Has Iggy made it? His generation was among the most amibitious and resilient that America has ever produced. The slums of the Northwest Side still exist, but there aren't many bookish Russians and Czechs and Poles queueing on the library steps. They watch TV these days. And they're all just Americans now.
The next evening I met up with Bellow at the Cultural Center in the Old Library Building. Today's Activities', said the billboard wistfully: 'Chicago as a Literary City'. I had spent the day strolling round Chicago and wondering what literature or art or culture could seriously be expected to do about the place.
'The Dorm That Dripped Blood' announced the cinema sign. 'The Hounds of Hell dogs leaping up at you in 3d'. In the beanery thin old ladies in tracksuits serve enormous meals to the working people of Chicago, tribally gruff, hoarse, one-lining. 'I
switched from Ultrason to Coherent,' booms a diner. Does he mean corporations or cigarette brands? At the next table a young couple discuss a portly paperback. 'I'm getting into Kate now,' says the girl. 'Kate's gonna marry Greg. That's what I think. Or David. She's pregnint but she won't make a commitmint.’
I went to see the Impressionist collection at the Institute of Art. It rivals that of the Jeu de Paume — but there is a tangible air of donation, patronage, social power, all the tax-exempt American money that goes into religion, opera, academic quangos, writing fellowships. A highschool teacher was telling her class about seurats La Grande Jatte. 'It's set on a hot afternoon in Paris a century ago, long before air-conditioning. So what people used to do was, they...' A businessman stared at a Monet. 'First class,' he decided, before moving on.
At the Cultural Center we sat and listened to Karl Schapiro as he read from his uncompleted autobiography. It was the same story: the young poet, working in a department store all day, reading and dreaming all night. When he grew up, he edited Poetry Chicago. Later there was a reception, with wine ('compliments of Nit & Wit magazine') and snacks ('supplied by Orange Products'). In his rusty checked suit Bellow resembled an appropriate cross between a distinguished man of letters and a retired gangster. I hung back as he greeted Schapiro, an old friend.
'Saul Bellow's here,' said a lady behind me. 'Where?' asked her companion. 'You're looking right at him ... Mm, give me a Sidney Sheldon or a Harold Robbins. I don't want to be taxed too much.' 'Me neither. Give me a Ken Follett.' 'Give me a Herman Wouk.’
Bellow came over. He talked about the library, how its stack had been relocated, how the Byzantine splendours of its staircase and dome were now no more than a sentimental husk. He used to come here daily as a boy, for his Aristotle, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Tolstoy. Then I said, 'I think I know how I want to end my piece — with the question, "What then must you do?" But there's no real answer, is there?’
The previous day Bellow had filled me in on what he called 'the American search for personal form'. Whitman said that poets would one day tell Americans how to be adults. 'But this is not an art society. It is a money society, a pleasure society.' Most Americans — 'in an amorphous state, demanding forms for themselves' — now regard novels as how-to books about life, or about life-style. The writer is no curer of souls; he is on the level of the etiquette page and advice to the lovelorn. The busiest sections of the Chicago bookstores, I noticed, were those marked 'Personal Growth'.
'One must go on. No. One must go further.' Aware of all the prescriptive dangers, Bellow'nonetheless believes that the time has come for serious (i.e. talented) writers to be serious, without losing lyricism or laughter. 'No more novels about adolescence, career problems, sexual adventure, wounded ethnicity.' Why not address 'the mysterious circumstance of being', and say what it's like to be alive at this time, on this planet? Then you depend on a process of seepage. That is all you can really hope for.
'We are usually waiting', writes Bellow, 'for somebody to clear out and let us go on with the business of life (to cultivate the little obsessional garden).’
And I was relieved, in a way, to be off his case. I survived a vast and inedible fish platter and a near-mugging under the El as I walked back to the Quality Inn. Actually it was more like an aggressive demand for charity, only slightly sharper than its London equivalent. The black youth waved a train timetable in front of me and did a spiel about missing his stop. 'So are you gonna help me out? Have you got a dollar?' 'That depends,' I wanted to say. 'Have you got a gun?' But I walked past his tough stare, without paying my dues.
In the hotel lobby a small black boy sat waiting for his mother to come off shift. He read out loud from his book: 'Help. Help. I axed — I axed the man to help me out. I'm stuck in the mud. Help me out. I'd help you.'' Some days your life feels like a short story — or is it just the travel, and the preoccupation? This morning, even the black, bent, bald shoeshiner who slicked my boots with his fingers (he had his name on his breast, in capitals) was called art.
In my room I looked out The Dean's December and re-read the passage about Toby Winthrop. Based on a real Chicagoan, Win-throp is a black ex-junkie and reformed Mob murderer who now runs a detoxification centre on the South Side. The Dean goes to see him:
A dirty snow brocade over the empty lots, and black men keeping warm at oil-drum bonfires. He parked and got out of the car feeling the lack of almost everything you needed, humanly. Christ, the human curve had sunk down to base level, had gone beneath it ...Winthrop's office window was heavily covered in flowered drapes of pink and green. The body of this powerful man was significantly composed in the executive leather chair. If you had met him in the days when he was a paid executioner, if he had been waiting for you on a staircase, in an alley, you would never have escaped him. He would have killed you, easy ... Until now Winthrop had sat immobile, but now he turned and began to lower himself towards the floor. What was he doing? He was on his knees, his big arm stretched toward the floor, his fingers hooked upwards. You see what we have to do? Those people are down in the cesspool. We reach for them and try to get a hold. Hang on — hang on! They'll drown in the shit if we can't pull 'em out ... they're marked out to be destroyed. Those are people meant to die, sir. That's what we are looking at.’
Many times in Bellow's novels we are reminded that 'being human' isn't the automatic condition of every human being. Like freedom or sanity, it is not a given but a gift, a talent, an accomplishment, an objective. In achieving it, some will need more time or thought or help. And, put that way, it doesn't sound too hard a lesson to learn.
Observer 1983
