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

by Saul Bellow

  In all his acts contemporary man seems narrow and poor, yet there are moments when he seems to leap towards the marvelous in ways more varied and whole-hearted than any of the generations of the past. … Released in this aged and bottomless metropolis [Paris] from national folklore, national politics, national careers; detached from the family and the corporate taste, the lone individual, stripped, yet supported on every side by the vitality of other outcasts, with whom it was necessary to form no permanent ties, could experiment with everything that man today has within him of health or monstrousness. … Because the Modern was often inhuman, modern humanity could interpret itself in its terms.

  Elsewhere he speaks of “a dream living-in-the-present and a dream world citizenship—resting not upon real triumphs but upon a willingness to go as far as was necessary into nothingness in order to shake off what was dead in the real.” Germany was ready by the end of the thirties to transfer these modern formulas from art to politics. “In that country,” he writes, “politics became a ‘pure’ (i.e. inhuman) art, independent of everything but the laws of its medium. The subject matter of this avant-garde politics was, like that of the earlier art movements of Paris, the weakness, meanness, incoherence and intoxication of modern man.”

  Rosenberg’s propositions are highly suggestive; I don’t know how many of them I would call true. Can we all agree upon what it was in the “real” that was dead? We can only agree that many people were profoundly convinced that they were being asked to submit to enslavement, to surrender their lives to the service of dead realities. Another question: Was it necessary to plunge into nihilism in order to be purified, to shake off what was dead? Or was this revolutionary attitude not, in many cases, a screen for perversity, an excuse for the craving to make war, to destroy men, women, children, cities, peoples? Was Hitler the “pure” inhuman artist whose medium was politics? But it is not necessary to agree in detail with Rosenberg. He has located a phenomenon and brings us in a few sentences before one of these giant manifestations that, prompted by a desire for “normalcy” or “sanity,” we would rather not see. It is useless to talk about literature if we are not prepared to think about the facts of life in this present staggering century.

  Observe that Rosenberg speaks of the lone modernist sustained “by the vitality of other outcasts,” with whom he did not need to form ties. But the Picassos, Apollinaires, Diaghilevs, Joyces, Kandinskys, and Wyndham Lewises were a relatively sociable and jolly crew. I am reminded, as I read these words about the mutual aid of these modernist outcasts, of the far more drastic isolation of artists in modern Russia, of poets who had only their own resources to sustain them and were not at all inclined to experiment with “everything that man today has within him of health or monstrousness.” People utterly cut off from all institutions, all social support, poets like Osip Mandelstam or Akhmatova, formed attachments to Pushkin or Dante. Dante was Mandelstam’s inseparable companion. He carried a pocket edition of The Divine Comedy, says his widow, “just in case he was arrested not at home but in the street” The volume he took to Siberia with him was a bulky one. Nadezhda doubts that it was still in his possession when he died, for “in the camps under Yezhov and Stalin nobody could give any thought to books.”

  The subject matter of poets who continued in Soviet Russia to be poets was not “the weakness, meanness, incoherence and intoxication of modern man.” Writers were more apt to concern themselves with the life they were denied, with the deeper meaning of the art they were forbidden to practice, with the rights and powers of the individual apparently so defenseless, with the artist as artist, who was, in the gangster state, so insignificant.

  This is not to deny that “the weakness, meanness, incoherence and intoxication of modern man” are real themes. But they are not the only genuinely modern themes. And it was not because the Russian poets I have mentioned were eager to go the way of their modernist colleagues in the West that they resisted Stalin. You do not defy terror or risk exile because you have accepted as an artist the task of chronicling weakness. Terror has won you the right to wider scope.

  Nearly forty years ago, in the year 1940, I sat on a park bench in Chicago and read Rosenberg’s essay. “In all his acts,” he said, “contemporary man seems narrow and poor. Yet there are moments when he seems to leap towards the marvelous in ways more varied and whole-hearted than any of the generations of the past.” What I felt, in isolation, was my privilege, my painful freedom, to think and feel. Workers in factories, doctors in hospitals, clerks in the shops, even criminals in prison, belonged to a community of some sort, but a young man who had left his rooming house with a copy of Partisan Review in his pocket to sit in Jackson Park, detached indeed from family and corporate taste, considered the oddity of his calling, so remote from workers, clerks, doctors, even criminals, and yet so intimately connected with the vital needs of them all. The consciousness of this intimacy was mine only. For how were others to guess what I had privately determined to attempt. If they knew, they would think it very curious indeed. And to tell the truth, they were curious to me too, living without the higher motives of which I was so wildly, perhaps ridiculously, proud. But I would, for the sake of us all (I was very young then), narrow and poor as I was, try myself to leap towards the marvelous. Here we were only beginning to understand what a decade of horrors we had entered. The Depression was ending, and the factories were stoking up again, people were returning to work. But Warsaw had been destroyed, and Rotterdam, and hundreds of thousands of people, just massacred, were still in the first stages of decay, under the rubble or in mass graves. And Paris, which for a few years had been the seat of an international modern culture, was now a conquered city.

  I shall not go on talking about the disasters of the century. We don’t need any more of that. But it is, I think, necessary to consider what sort of person these experiences, these strange turns, have produced. This person is our brother, our semblable, our very self. He is certainly in many respects narrow and poor, blind in heart, weak, mean, intoxicated, confused in spirit—stupid. We see how damaged he is, how badly mutilated. But the leap towards the marvelous is a possibility he still considers nevertheless. In fact, he is well qualified by his peculiar experiences to try jumping. He dreams of beating the rap, outwitting the doom prepared for him by history. Often he seems prepared to assert that he is a new kind of human being, whose condition calls for original expression, and he is ready to take a flier, go for the higher truth. He has been put down, has put himself down too, but he has also dreamed of strategies that will bring him past all this detraction, his own included. For he knows something. Anyone who has lived attentively through five decades of this epoch has had centuries of history thrust upon him, ages of mental experience. He is (or can be) skeptical, cant-free, heedful of his own intuitions. He has seen orthodoxies come and go, and he has learned that he must trust the communications coming from his own soul—stipulating that his soul should know the dry taste of objectivity. The principal characteristic of this survivor is that he has made himself lighter by putting off, by setting aside, the ideas and doctrines that have dominated this century, its leading psychologies and philosophies, its wilder political beliefs, the endless horrible comedy of public lying. What is observable in our best contemporaries is a lightening, a divestiture. They lighten themselves not because they care less but because they care more, not because they are attracted by the silliness of a cynical style but because they are repelled by that form of theatrical vanity precisely and have come to detest the worldly-wise man. Perhaps they have come to see that the theories they accepted for decades had nothing to do with their most significant intentions and actions. We “square” ourselves with our ideas, but in time we recognize that the unacknowledged soul has somehow saved us from the worst effects of those ideas.

  I occasionally encounter persons who have been “lightened.” They are by no means fault-free, redeemed from error, heroes and heroines of love, or saintly characters. They have moved away f
rom the prevailing prejudices of the century. There are more of these “lightened” persons in real life than in books, but now and then a poem or a story may emit the welcome signal. I saw it recently in a short book by Christina Stead, The Little Hotel. There are signs of it also in one of her earlier novels, Places of the Heart. One of her characters says, “I often wonder at my strange fate to be born into the first generation that understands humanity’s birthright, the perfect consummation.” The lady who is speaking is an oddball, somewhat crazy in her generosity, a deserted woman who can know very little about the “birthright” of erotic consummation. That sort of bliss is not for her. And perhaps there is no such bliss as the deprived imagine. I put the emphasis in another place. She is one of those who feel that they can understand the “birthright” of humanity. It may be an illusion merely, but it can be strongly argued that it is based on a genuine intuition.

  In the journal of the poet George Seferis, I meet other “lightened” people, himself the most distinctly “lightened” of them. The signs are all there: a mind of great clarity and evident power, experienced in despair, a witness to murder, war, ruin. He is by the sea, the Aegean, and he writes: “It was impossible to separate the light from the silence, the silence and light from the calm. … There was a sense that another side of life exists.” Again, he writes, after rowing, walking, and swimming: “Myself has come out.” And he continues: “The day holds its breath. Such calmness that every motion—a leaf, a sound, a boat in the canal—stays for a long time suspended in the light as if there were no end.…” Then he speaks of desires and plans, and he says: “It’s strange (for me) to have any feeling for this sack full of ‘personal sentiments’ that is now loosened and drives me mad (literally) with these unsettled winds. I had kept them all tightly shut up during the war years, for six years at least.” He mentions dreams and says: “It’s natural that the language of dreams pertains even to trifles; messengers condescending even to humble errands. The intellectuals have made them speak only with the trumpet of Jericho or with bagpipes.” The man who has been lightened reserves for himself the right to consider what a dream is, not to submit it to intellectual professionals who will tell him what to make of these most intimate mysteries. And here are sentences from a letter Seferis received from his friend Angelos, who went to America and died there. “The feeling of New York. ‘This country is starving spiritually amid her gold, like Midas. All this is relative of course …,’” writes Angelos. “‘There is no place where you see man’s naked soul more than over here; blacks with bloody faces, women crying in the subway.’” By the light of one’s own judgment, and in one’s own style, and with one’s own powers, one sees the naked soul. When oneself has come out, many things become visible.

  We have long been locked in by respectable opinion, by the prestigious sciences, by ideologies, locked in even by those modern masterpieces that have for a few decades now become a part of us. And I am speaking of that freedom to approach the marvelous which cannot be taken from us, the right, with grace, to make the most of what we have, to make as much as human beings ever have made of their condition. To do this by means of an art that, admitting defects and impurities and making the most realistic concessions, fully aware also of the sackful of “personal sentiments” that have the power to drive us mad, taking into account, finally, the cruelty, abasement, monstrosity, and evil that we know, is nevertheless true and powerful. Perhaps even, in spectacular defiance of this chaos that surrounds us, a divinely beautiful art.

  II

  A kind friend, worried about my soul, has sent me a handsomely printed little book called The Bitch Goddess Success. It was William James who first called success a bitch and identified her as the source of our most serious disease—the squalid cash interpretation of realized ambition. She was to blame, he thought, for the moral fiabbiness of so many Americans.

  I was glad to receive this anthology, for like a great many of us, I am aware of shameful shortcomings and I am eager for accurate diagnosis and grateful for correction and cure. The easiest way to get my attention is to approach me from the side of reform. So I sometimes sit down with this handy book and read a few frightening but improving sentences from Thoreau or Walt Whitman. But it occurred to me the other day that these great and lucky men were having it both ways: they were doubly successful. Whitman not only succeeded in writing poems of great beauty but saw through success as well and transcended it. He stands in the American heavens as a twin star—poetic and monitory.

  We have always been as fascinated by admonition as by success. America, please remember, is (or used to be) the land of the sampler and of Poor Richard. Grandmothers no longer embroider bracing sayings about sleeping sluggards, but the critical spirit, although changed, is very strong and omnipresent in its new forms. There was a Goddess of Rebukes, who worked in the shadows behind the Goddess of Success. Less prominent, she was perhaps more powerful and enduring. She makes herself felt today in the pervasive uneasiness experienced by all Americans. When the first Rockefeller declared that he was the trustee of common property, committed to his care by God’s providence, he was defending himself sturdily against the second goddess. Is there a banker on Wall Street who would say any such thing today? God is no longer invoked by capitalists. When a member of President Eisenhower’s cabinet said a few years ago that what was good for General Motors was good for the country, he caused a scandal. The wisdom of tycoons is no longer respected. Skepticism of success has increased. Make no mistake about it, the Rebuke Goddess is stronger than the Bitch Goddess. Tame executives who have learned of Max Weber at seminars in Aspen mention the Protestant Ethic but only as a phantom, one of the vanished forces of religion. What has carried over from the days of sin and preaching is a diffuse awareness of moral defectiveness, a sense of undeserved advantages, of ingratitude for good fortune; a feeling that this miraculously successful country has done evil, spoiled and contaminated nature, waged cruel wars, failed in its obligations to its weaker citizens, the blacks, the children, the women, the aged, the poor of the entire world.

  Are we wrong thus to reproach ourselves? I haven’t said that.

  At the moment I am considering only our extraordinary sensitivity and our appetite for rebuke. Many of our intellectuals serve as priests of the Goddess of Rebuke, nagging, scolding, and infecting a vulnerable people with gnawing anxiety and remorse. In so doing they have become successful. They can claim that they do not serve the Bitch Goddess. Personally immune to her, they merely refer to her for purposes of rebuke. This was why my considerate friend sent me the handsomely printed little anthology.

  Really, the Bitch Goddess is as dated as Thomas Edison’s gramophone.

  Anthologists have made Walt Whitman sound like a scold. Whitman is too grand for that. His denunciations of America’s literary and moral failures—corruption, hollowness of heart, depravity, the hell under the breastbones—are as fresh and true as when I first read them in his Democratic Vistas half a century ago. Some of the other contributors to the Bitch Goddess volume are less impressive moralists, but I welcome their attacks too, because I believe with H. L. Mencken that being attacked does more good than harm. In a letter written to Theodore Dreiser in 1920, he said: “There is always a certain amount of truth in every attack, however dishonest. … I have learned more from attacks than from praise. In even the most vicious of them there is a touch of plausibility. There is always something embarrassing about unqualified praise. A man knows, down in his own heart, that he doesn’t deserve it.” Thus even the iconoclastic Mr. Mencken proves to be a genuine American who feels that we sinners need all the help we can get, that it is more useful and bracing to be damned than blessed, that if the soul is to build more stately mansions, it cannot do without the shaping suggestions only your enemies can make. Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance. I have a friend who tells me he thinks that the most powerful moral docume
nt in America was, for a time at any rate, the Boy Scout’s Handbook. He believes the moral sentiments of this book caused untold harm to several generations of young men pure in heart by preparing them for high-principled victimization. Girls, he argues, were not hampered by such teachings. Their mothers brought them up in the real world. They saw their advantages clearly and took them up nimbly. Out of this comes what he calls the “Big Galahad Disaster.” He goes on to draw a picture of sexual misery, mother hatred, alcoholism, and blasted illusions such as … well, such as you may find in five hundred American novels written since The Great Gatsby.

  But I must hold to my subject. I was saying that I had taken to reading daily in The Bitch Goddess Success because I found it full of helpful suggestions, mantras for meditation. Mr. Charles Ives, for instance, in criticizing prize competitions in the arts, says that “a close union between spiritual life and the ordinary business of life is necessary” and that we must keep the balance between ordinary life and spiritual life. Well, this is of course the name of the game. But the maddening fact is that after you have said these obviously true things, you are up against it still. For when Mr. Ives, casting about for an example of the ordinary, says that “a month in the Kansas wheatfields may do more for a young composer than three years in Rome,” you ask yourself when he himself last looked at ordinary life in Kansas. Again, he says: “If, for every thousand dollar prize, a potato field be substituted, so that these candidates of Clio can dig a little in real life … art’s air might be a little clearer.” Then he checks himself slightly by quoting a French moralist: “On ne donne rien si liberalement que ses conseils.” But he has not checked himself in time. Digging potatoes? Kansas wheat-fields? The last American artist to try those wheatfields was Vachel Lindsay when he went forth to preach his Gospel of Beauty in the days before the First World War. The ordinary business of life in the United States and its great cities is what it is because out in Kansas they aren’t bringing in the sheaves as they did in 1910.