It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future

by Saul Bellow

  The bitterness of defeat, occupation, and liberation pervaded postwar Paris. An atmosphere of disgrace and resentment darkened the famous facades and made the Seine (at least to me) look and smell medicinal. This oppressiveness, I was later persuaded, was an early symptom of the cold war. For the time being, the French lay helpless between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. The communist alternative, so far as I could judge, held an edge in public opinion, so that you couldn’t have your hair cut without enduring torrents of Marxism from the barber. I had come to Paris as Americans generally did, to be educated, and the general ignorance of the history of the Soviet Union in all quarters came as a great surprise. Reading Sartre, I said to myself, Chicago style, “This has got to be a con.” A con on my turf was a shade more venial than a lie. I preferred to believe that Sartre’s curious behavior was deliberate, Machiavellian. His hatred of the bourgeoisie was so excessive that he was inclined to go easy on the crimes of Stalin. On the intellectual Dow-Jones—if there had been such a thing—his credentials, before I began to read him, would have been comparable to preferred stock. But the facts were readily available, and that he should know so little about them was a great disappointment. He spoke in Marxist style of an oppressive bourgeois ideology, and while he admitted his bourgeois origins, his aim was to create a revolutionary public. Himself an heir of the eighteenth-century philosophes, he would speak to the proletariat as his literary ancestors had spoken to the bourgeoisie, bringing political self-awareness to those who were to be the revolutionaries of today. He asserted that the workingman seeking liberation would liberate all of us as well, and for all time. The French CP was an obstacle standing between Sartre and the working class. As for existentialism, he readily conceded that it was a phenomenon produced by the decomposition of the bourgeois carcass. The only public at present available to him came, disgustingly, from the intelligent sector of the rotting bourgeoisie (victims, no doubt, but tyrants also).

  “Were the author an Englishman we should here know that our leg was being pulled,” wrote Wyndham Lewis in The Writer and the Absolute. “But Sartre does not smile … he is at his wits’ end what to do.” Lewis seems wryly sympathetic. And he does here and there agree with Sartre and quotes him approvingly when he declares that we are living in the age of the hoax. “National Socialism, Gaullism, Catholicism, French communism are hoaxes—consciousness is deluded and we can only safeguard literature by disillusioning or enlightening our public. … Sartre believes all that the communists believe,” Lewis concludes. “But he did not wish to convert this collage into a marriage.” He says that Sartre was a fellow traveler in the front populaire. “He engaged in a path in those days which leads either to communism or to nothing. It was the néant that he chose.”

  My own guess in 1949—when I was immature: not young, only, as I now see, underdeveloped—was that French intellectuals were preparing themselves, perhaps positioning themselves for a Russian victory. Their Marxism also reflected the repugnance they felt for the other superpower. There were comparable anti-American sentiments in England. Graham Greene, like many writers (and civil servants) of his generation, abominated the U.S.A. and its politics. Successive English governments agreed on the whole with the American line, but Greene found ways to transfer at least part of the odium from London to Washington. On our side of the Atlantic he had a big following. Educated Americans, establishment haters, dearly love to see our society and its official policies loused up. “The main enemy is at home” was Lenin’s wartime slogan. Of all his ideas, it may well be the most durable.

  When I revert to those times, I can take no pleasure in having spotted the errors of Sartre et al. I am disheartened rather by the failure of all these aspirations for justice and progress. I can understand that as crisis succeeded crisis, no one wanted to surrender to passivity. It is sad to watch so much ingenuity invested in leaky theories. Behind the iron curtain, experiencing totalitarianism directly, people had a clearer orientation.

  In the West, there was a certain opinion consumerism. One asked oneself, What shall I think, this or that? Sidney Hook in his autobiography scorns the Partisan Review intellectuals, the respectable left. His description of them makes them look like small-business types, importers of foreign specialties in a highbrow artistic mall. Mere talkers, Hook thought, some of them had no taste for real politics. Moreover, they believed that World War II was an imperialist war, exactly like the first. Since they were not the kind of Leninists who aimed to lead a putsch in Washington, their analyses of England and Germany did bring to mind the theologians of Lilliput. The account given by Hook, the stalwart cold warrior, of their confused Marxism was, four decades later, still edged with bitterness. But the fact that we can do nothing does not preclude wanting to be right, and everyone was then intent on the one true position. “I had to turn my heavy guns on Dwight Macdonald and the others,” Hook would tell me in his last years. But no one has ever examined the connection between helplessness and holding the right views. Following contemporary events is in a way like reading history. To read history is essential, but what in actuality can we do about it? The novelist Stanley Elian, in an essay called “The First Amendment as an Art Form,” asks: “Who in old times ever held anything so uncalled for as an opinion? … History, history really was, still is, the agenda of activists. The rest of us, you, me, the rest of us are mere fens of a world view and use the news like theater—episodes, chapters in some Sabbath soul serial.” He goes on to say that if we don’t have the gift for effecting change, we have “the solace of criticism.”

  Granted, activists like Hook made a difference. Their contribution to victory in the cold war can’t be measured but must be acknowledged. It was Hook—taking Hook as representative of any number of thinkers and activists—Hook, not Sartre, whose views prevailed, and should have prevailed. And what Mr. Elkin does is to report accurately on the state of opinion in a democracy like ours. What we need to consider is the combining of theorizing with effectiveness. I give Hook full marks for the wars he fought and admire him despite his evident lack of sympathy with my way of looking at things. He was the active, not the contemplative, sort, not so much a philosopher as an ex-philosopher. On one of the last evenings I spent with him, he told me that philosophy was no more. I asked what the Ph.D.’s he had educated were doing with themselves. They were working in hospitals as ethicists, he said. That didn’t make him unhappy either. I don’t think that the end of the cold war signifies that theorizing is bankrupt. To obtain a clear picture of the modern project, to give the best possible account of the crisis of the West is still a necessity.

  Politics as a vocation I take seriously. But it’s not my vocation. And on the whole, writers are not much good at it. The positions they take are generally set for them by intellectuals. Or by themselves, insofar as they are intellectuals (e.g., the case of Sartre). Those anticommunist intellectuals and publicists with whom I have agreed on issues of the cold war, though they tend to be high-toned and swollen with cultural pride and suffisance, are often philistine in their tastes. Their opposite numbers on the left are, in this respect, a mess entirely.

  My policy has therefore been to avoid occasions that bring writers together. When President Johnson invited some twenty or thirty “leaders of the arts” to the White House, I foolishly accepted. I thought I would announce my opposition to Vietnam in a letter to the Times, and I could then attend the jamboree—in order to show my respect for the presidency. These principles! I have a weakness for stupid loftiness. Robert Lowell, who boycotted the event, had telephoned me more than once to concert a strategy for the afternoon. I gathered that he and his group were giving me a clearance to participate—somebody like me should be inside. The White House that day was filled with the cries of Lowell supporters, whom I will call the pros; the cons were in the minority. The journalists covering the event were as noisy and furious as the writers. The climax for me was the appearance of the uninvited Dwight Macdonald, tall, satyr-bearded, walking into the Rose Garde
n in sneakers, the great bohemian himself going around with a resolution endorsing Lowell’s boycott. Many signed. LBJ afterward said the whole thing was nothing but an insult. “They insult me by comin’, they insult me by stayin’ away.”

  Philip Rahv set me straight about this. “You got put on the spot by Cal Lowell. He’s a crafty schemer. When he gets into maneuvering that way, nobody has a chance with that dreamy poet.”

  The last literary meeting I can remember to have attended was the International PEN Congress in New York. There I was assigned to a panel on “The State and the Alienation of the Writer”—a superfluous and foolish topic. In a short talk (the shorter the better on this occasion), I said that our government hardly bothered with writers at all. The Founders had put together an enlightened plan for equality, stability, justice, relief from poverty, and so forth. Art, philosophy, and the higher concerns of mankind are not the business of the state. The emphasis here is on well-being and on a practical sort of humanitarianism. With the help of science, we would conquer nature and force her to provide for us. Scarcity was to be abolished. On the whole, I believed this program had met with success. In a commercial society, nothing prevents one from writing novels or painting watercolors, but culture does not get the same attention as crops or manufacture or banking. I concluded by saying that many of the material objectives of the Founders had been successfully realized.

  Before I could step down, Günter Grass had risen to attack me from the floor. He said that he had just visited the South Bronx and that the poor blacks who lived in those monstrous streets could not agree that they were free and equal. The horrors they endured were not at all like the picture of American success that I had described. The hall was crowded with writers and intellectuals. Grass had just lighted the ideological fuse and out came a tremendous boom, a blast of anger from delegates and visitors. Replying as well as I could in the uproar, I said that of course American cities were going to hell in a hurry; they had become monstrous. I tried also to indicate that corrective actions, if there were any, could be taken only by a rich society, and this seemed to prove that the material objectives of the Founders had indeed been met. I added, since this was a PEN conference, that writers in politics hadn’t done at all well. In this connection I mentioned Brecht and Feuchtwanger in Germany. Grass protested that he was always being put down in America as a communist.

  You have to hand it to the social visionaries and liberators: they know how to get the high ground and keep it. They are masters also of the equivalence game: you have spoken well of the American system because you are an apologist for it and a stooge; you are not concerned about the poor, and you are a racist to boot.

  He had pressed the agitprop button; up went a familiar semaphore. To this semaphore the agitated crowd responded with a conditioned reflex.

  “I am afraid that great German writers do not have to know in order to pronounce,” Melvin Lasky has written apropos of Grass.

  Grass seems to have believed I was justifying the establishment—that moth-eaten shroud. No, I was simply describing what there is to see.

  A brief quotation from an exceptionally clear-minded political theorist, Allan Bloom, will show better than I can the direction I meant to take in my speech before the PEN vipers: “Civil societies dedicated to the end of self-preservation cannot be expected to provide fertile soil for the heroic or the inspired. They do not require or encourage the noble. … One who holds the ‘economic’ view of man cannot consistently believe in the dignity of man or in the special status of art and science.”

  These are the basics, the first principles of modernity, of the Enlightenment conviction that this is what would be best for most of us. The objectives of Lenin’s revolution never materialized in Russia, but they are all about us here in bourgeois America, says the philosopher Kojève. But in the process, everything worth living for has melted away.

  Eastern Europe was “spared” our revolution. Instead Russia had seven decades and more of Stalin, an Oriental despot; and Poland, Hungary, and the rest came in for nearly half a century of Soviet rule. The writers who stood their ground against totalitarianism and went to the Lubyanka and the gulag move us deeply as moralists and artists. I particularly admire Shalamov, the author of Kolyma Tales, and Aleksander Wat, who wrote My Century, together with many others, Russians, Poles, and Jews, who endured Stalin’s prisons and Hitler’s death camps.

  In the West, people excused from such torments are, I think it fair to say, inclined to mix self-reproach with their admiration. They wonder how they would have fared under pressure. Terror is the test of tests, and I suspect that the Hobbesian or the Darwinian states of nature challenge many of us imaginatively. Intellectuals are particularly susceptible to such challenges and possibly speculate whether living through such ordeals might not have healed their divided souls.

  It comes back to me now that Lenin loved Jack London’s stories of the Yukon. His favorite, “To Build a Fire,” is about a man stopping for the night in vast snowfields and finding that he has only a single match left. He will freeze to death if it fails to light. I can remember when I was a boy holding my breath as I read the story. Jack London, I later discovered, had a great following in Eastern Europe. This turning back to what precedes civilization is common also among refined people, as is an admiration for elemental men, men capable of exceptional violence. Dostoyevsky, for instance, was greatly impressed by the criminals he came to know in Siberia. One murderer said to him, “ ‘You are very innocent, so innocent that it’s pitiful.’ … Whether it was that he looked on me as somebody immature, not fully grown up, or whether he felt for me that sympathy which every strong creature feels for a weaker, I do not know … even in the act of stealing from me he was sorry for me.”

  Do I seem here to be making a case against the intellectuals, criticizing even the way they read Solzhenitsyn or Shalamov? Well, yes—insofar as they allow tyranny to define the ground rules of existence. The tyrant tells us what true being is and how it should be judged. A scale of suffering is set up for us, with the camps at the top and Western societies at the bottom. Those who undergo the most dreadful torments are “serious,” the rest of us are not worth bothering about.

  My case against the intellectuals can be easily summarized: Science has postulated a nature with no soul in it, commerce does not deal in souls and higher aspirations—matters like love and beauty are none of its business; for his part, Marx, too, assigned art, etc., to the “superstructure.” So artists are “stuck” with what is left of the soul and its mysteries. Romantic enthusiasm (resistance to bourgeois existence) was largely discredited by the end of the nineteenth century. The twentieth inverted Romanticism by substituting hate for love and nihilism for self-realization. Intellectuals seem to me to have turned away from those elements in life unaccounted for in modern science and that in modern experience have come to seem devoid of substance. The powers of soul, which were Shakespeare’s subject (to be simple about it) and are heard incessantly in Handel or Mozart, have no footing at present in modern life and are held to be subjective. Writers here and there still stake their lives on the existence of these forces. About this, intellectuals have little or nothing to say.

  We yield to these forces when we read a Shalamov or an Aleksander Wat. We recognize them as coming directly from human nature when that nature rejects the imposition of slavery and totalitarian injustice. But among ourselves, in the West, the forces are not acknowledged, they cannot even be recognized.

  Here I have no choice but to go overboard. Russia’s Oriental despotism comes from the past, and the sympathies generated by those who fought for their lives against it have little to do, I suspect, with this present world of ours. Our American world is a prodigy. Here, on the material level, the perennial dreams of mankind have been realized. We have shown that the final conquest of scarcity may be at hand. Provision is made for human needs of every sort. In the United States—in the West—we live in a society that produces a fairytale super
abundance of material things. Ancient fantasies have been made real. We can instantaneously see and hear what is far away. Our rockets are able to leave the earth. The flights we make are thoughts as well as real journeys. This is something new, and it is of a magnitude too vast to be grasped. To contemplate this can make us tremble for the humanity we miss in everything we see in the incredible upwelling of inventions and commodities that carries us with it. We can’t say whether this humanity has been temporarily diminished or has gone for good. Nor can we tell whether we are pioneers or experimental subjects. Russia is perhaps done with tyranny and privation. If it develops a free market and becomes a union of commercial republics, it will have to do as we have been doing all along. Kojève hints that we are irreversibly trivialized by our unexampled and bizarre achievements, so that neither life nor death can now be grasped. He seems to accept Nietzsche’s appalling vision of the degenerate “Last Man.”