by Bellow, Saul
The modern reader (or viewer, or listener: let’s include everybody) is perilously overloaded. His attention is, to use the latest lingo, “targeted” by powerful forces. I hate to make lists of these forces, but I suppose that some of them had better be mentioned. Okay, then: automobile and pharmaceutical giants, cable TV, politicians, entertainers, academics, opinion makers, porn videos, Ninja Turtles, et cetera. The list is tedious because it is an inventory of what is put into our heads day in, day out. Our consciousness is a staging area, a field of operations for all kinds of enterprises, which make free use of it. True, we are at liberty to think our own thoughts, but our independent ideas, such as they may be, must live with thousands of ideas and notions inculcated by influential teachers or floated by “idea men,” advertisers, communications people, columnists, anchormen, et cetera. Better-regulated (educated) minds are less easily overcome by these gas clouds of opinion. But no one can have an easy time of it. In all fields we are forced to seek special instruction, expert guidance to the interpretation of the seeming facts we are stuffed with. This is in itself a full-time occupation. A part of every mind, perhaps the major portion, is open to public matters. Without being actively conscious of it we somehow keep track of the Middle East, Japan, South Africa, reunified Germany, oil, munitions, the New York subways, the homeless, the markets, the banks, the major leagues, news from Washington; and also, pell-mell, films, trials, medical discoveries, rap groups, racial clashes, congressional scandals, the spread of AIDS, child murders—a crowd of horrors. Public life in the United States is a mass of distractions.
By some this is seen as a challenge to their ability to maintain internal order. Others have acquired a taste for distraction, and they freely consent to be addled. It may even seem to many that by being agitated they are satisfying the claims of society. The scope of the disorder can even be oddly flattering: “Just look—this tremendous noisy frantic monstrous agglomeration. There’s never been anything like it. And we are it!_ This is us!”_
Vast organizations exist to get our attention. They make cunning plans. They bite us with their ten-second bites. Our consciousness is their staple; they live on it. Think of consciousness as a territory just opening to settlement and exploitation, something like an Oklahoma land rush. Put it in color, set it to music, frame it in images—but even this fails to do justice to the vision. Obviously consciousness is infinitely bigger than Oklahoma.
Now what of writers? They materialize, somehow, and they ask the public (more accurately, a_ publc) for its attention. Perhaps the writer has no actual public in mind. Often his only assumption is that he participates in a state of psychic unity with others not distinctly known to him. The mental condition of these others is understood by him, for it is his condition also. One way or another he understands, or intuits, what the effort, often a secret and hidden effort to put the distracted consciousness in order, is costing. These unidentified or partially identified others are his readers. They have been waiting for him. He must assure them immediately that reading him will be worth their while. They have many times been cheated by writers who promised good value but delivered nothing. Their attention has been abused. Nevertheless they long to give it. In his diaries Kafka says of a certain woman, “She holds herself by force below the level of her true human destiny and requires only… a tearing open of the door….”
The reader will open his heart and mind to a writer who has understood this—has understood because in his person he has gone through it all, has experienced the same privations; who knows where the sore spots are; who has discerned the power of the need to come back to the level of one’s true human destiny. Such a writer will trouble no one with his own vanities, will make no unnecessary gestures, indulge himself in no mannerisms, waste no reader’s time. He will write as short as he can.
I offer this as a brief appendix to the stories in this volume.
The End
“By the St. Lawrence” first appeared in Esquire.
“A Silver Dish” originally appeared in The New Yorker; “Zetland: By a Character Witness” in Modern Occasions; “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” in Vanity Fair; and “Him with His Foot in His Mouth” in The Atlantic Monthly. These stories, with “Cousins,” formed the collection Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. Copyright й Saul Bellow Limited, 1974, 1978, 1982, 1984. Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
“The Bellarosa Connection” and “A Theft” were each published in book form by Penguin Books. “Something to Remember Me By” first appeared in Esquire. The three stories comprised the volume, Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales, Penguin Books. Copyright й Saul Bellow, 1989, 1990. “The Old System” originally appeared in Playboy; “Looking for Mr. Green” in Commentary; “Leaving the Yellow House” in Esquire; and “Mosby’s Memoirs” in The New Yorker. These works were published in Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories, Viking Press. Copyright й Saul Bellow, 1951, 1957, 1967, 1968.
