by Saul Bellow
A brief break from words is never a sign that the mental wheels aren’t racing round and round. Two days later Saul returned from his morning’s work and announced: “I started my story again from scratch. There are times when it takes over, you know.” At dinner I pressed him about the new beginning and he became very expansive: there were too many ideas piled on at the start—too much to expect the reader to digest all at once. All this stuff about the American versus the European Jew. This must unfold gradually. What the story is really about is memory and faith. There is no religion without remembering. As Jews we remember what was told to us at Sinai; at the Seder we remember the Exodus; Yiskor is about remembering a father, a mother. We are told not to forget the Patriarchs; we admonish ourselves, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…” And we are constantly reminding God not to forget his Covenant with us. This is what the “chosenness” of the Chosen People is all about. We are chosen to be God’s privileged mind readers. All of it, what binds us together, is our history, and we are a people because we remember.
Saul then told me that his narrator was beginning to come to life. He had decided not to give him a name. This elderly man, narrator X, is starting to lose his memory. He is walking down the street one day, humming “Way down upon the…” and he can’t remember the name of the river—it torments him, he’s in agony over this loss of a word, he feels ready to stop a passerby, to do anything to recover the word (this actually did happen to Saul during the winter in Chicago, while strolling around downtown on his way back from the dentist, and until Suwannee came to him he was beside himself). The narrator can’t afford such a lapse because, as Saul explained, his whole life has been built around memory. He will be the founder of this institute—the Mnemosyne Institute—that helps business people sharpen their memories. In order to put it all together and make a coherent picture, he is going to take it upon himself to remember what Fonstein’s life had been, to write a memoir about this European refugee.
Over the next couple of days we pored over an essay about Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power that Saul felt was central to his thoughts about the American half of the story. The “nihilism of stone” that Nietzsche talks about has degenerated, in Saul’s formulation, into a “nihilism of sleaze.” Now the will to power supposedly releases creative energy. Is the Hollywood of Billy Rose, the Las Vegas of Fonstein’s cardplaying son, the chaos of American life the best we are able to come up with by way of new creation? Perhaps the narrator of “The Bellarosa Connection” means to oppose the idea that human life has become an utterly meaningless chaos with memory—which is another way of saying faith.
The spring that had begun with cold and rain was ending in a heat wave. It was pushing 90 degrees on June 13, and as I made for the pond at high noon I found Saul heading the same way, bending the long grasses and parting the wildflowers. When we met before the green water we had the following exchange: “Was it a good morning?” I asked.
“Yes. I started something new.”
“What?!”
“I’m loosened up now, I’m just writing something I had it in mind to write.”
Stripped of our clothes (yes, Rosie, your parents were young and wild once upon a time), we went for the first swim of the season, Saul leading the way into the deliciously cold water. Then, as we were drying ourselves on the rocks in the blazing sun, Saul asked: “You want to hear some of it?” I don’t know what I was expecting. Probably a new beginning for “Bellarosa.” But when he opened the composition book he had brought down to the pond, he began to read the first several thousand words of something completely_ new—what would eventually become Marbles,_ a novel he has written and rewritten for close to a decade now, and has never, to this day, completed.
When thinking of Saul at work, I have before my eyes the image of a juggler—luminous airborne balls, each one a different color, turning against an azure sky, kept aloft by the infinite skill of a magician, who is at once relaxed, wry, and concentrating intensely. Hand him a telephone, ask him a practical question about dinner, or invite him on a walk and he’s still working those airborne balls. If you were aware of them, and walking behind him on that road, you would see them circling overhead.
—Janis Bellow
INTRODUCTION
Every writer is eventually called a “beautiful writer,” just as all flowers are eventually called pretty. Any prose above the most ordinary is applauded; and “stylists” are crowned every day, of steadily littler kingdoms. Amidst this busy relativity, it is easy to take for granted the immense stylistic powers of Saul Bellow, who, with Faulkner, is the greatest modern American writer of prose.
But again, many writers are called “great”; the word is everywhere, industrially farmed. In Bellow’s case it means greatly abundant, greatly precise, greatly various, rich, and strenuous. It means prose as a registration of the joy of life: the happy rolling freedom of his daring, uninsured sentences. These qualities are present in Bellow’s stories as fully as in his novels. Any page from this selection yields a prose of august raciness, ripe with inheritance (the rhythms of Melville and Whitman, Lawrence and Joyce, and behind them, Shakespeare). This prose sometimes cascades in poured adjectives (a river, in “The Old System,” seen as “crimped, green, blackish, glassy”) and at other times darts with lancing metaphorical wit (“his baldness was total, like a purge”). Controlling these different modes of expression is a firm intelligence, always tending to peal into comic, metaphysical wryness—as in the description of Behrens, the florist, in Something to Remember Me By”: “Amid the flowers, he alone had no color—something like the price he paid for being human.”
Bellow is a great portraitist of the human form, Dickens’s equal at the swift creation of instant gargoyles; everyone remembers Valentine Gersbach in Herzog,_ with his wooden leg, “bending and straightening gracefully like a gondolier.” In these stories, more eagerly chased by form than the novels, Bellow is even more swift and compactly appraising. In “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” we encounter Victor Wulpy, the great art critic and theorist, who is disheveled and “wore his pants negligently”: “By the way his entire face expanded when he spoke emphatically you recognized that he was a kind of tyrant in thought”; in “Cousins,” Cousin Riva: “I remembered Riva as a full-figured, dark-haired, plump, straight-legged woman. Now all the geometry of her figure had changed. She had come down in the knees like the jack of a car, to a diamond posture”; in “A Silver Dish,” Pop, who fights with his son on the ground and then suddenly becomes still: “His eyes stuck out and his mouth was open, sullen. Like a stout fish”; in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” Professor Kippenberg, a great scholar with bushy eyebrows “like caterpillars from the Tree of Knowledge”; in “Zetland,” Max Zetland, with a “black cleft” in his chin, an “unshavable pucker”; and McKern, the drunk brought home by the young narrator of “Something to Remember Me By,” and laid out naked on a sofa: “I looked in at McKern, who had thrown down the coat and taken off his drawers. The parboiled face, the short nose pointed sharply, the life signs in the throat, the broken look of his neck, the black hair of his belly, the short cylinder between his legs ending in a spiral of loose skin, the white shine of the shins, the tragic expression of his feet.”
What function do these exuberant physical sketches have? First, there is joy, simple joy, to be had from reading the sentences. The description of Professor Kippenberg’s bushy eyebrows as resembling caterpillars from the Tree of Knowledge is not just a fine joke; when we laugh, it is with appreciation for a species of wit that is properly called metaphysical. We delight in the curling process of invention whereby seemingly incompatible elements—eyebrows and caterpillars and Eden; or women’s hips and car jacks—are combined. Thus, although we feel after reading Bellow that most novelists do not really bother to attend closely enough to people’s shapes and dents, his portraiture does not exist merely as realism. We are encouraged not just to see the lifelikeness of Bellow’s characters, but to partake in a cr
eative joy, the creator’s joy in making_ them look like this. This is not just how people look; they are also sculptures, pressed into by the artist’s quizzical and ludic force. In “Mosby’s Memoirs,” for instance, a few lines describe a Czech pianist performing SchЎnberg. “This man, with muscular baldness, worked very hard upon the keys.” Certainly, we quickly have a vision of this “muscular baldness”; we know what this looks like. But then Bellow adds: “the muscles of his forehead rising in protest against tabula rasa_—the bare skull,” and suddenly we have entered the surreal, the realm of play: how strange and comic, the idea that the muscles of the man’s head are somehow rebelling against the bareness, the blankness, the tabula rasa,_ of his bald head!
But of course, Bellow does also make us see the human form, does open our senses and discipline our sensibilities, as Flaubert told Maupassant the writer should: “There is a part of everything which is unexplored,” said Flaubert, “because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.” Bellow exposes this unknown quality, either by force of metaphorical wit (hips like a car jack) or by noticing, with unexpected tenderness of vision, what we have grown accustomed to overlooking: the “white shine” of poor McKern’s shins as he lies on the bed, or Pop’s bald head, as remembered by his son in “A Silver Dish”: “the sweat was sprinkled over his scalp—more drops than hairs.”
And seeing is important, lays an injunction on us, in these stories. Many of them are narrated by men who are remembering childhood experiences, or at least younger days, and are using powers of visual recall to conjure forth vivid characters and heroes. Physical detail, exactly rendered, is memory’s quarry and makes its own moral case: it is how we bring the dead back to life, give them a second life in our minds. In fact, these memories become, through force of evocation, a first life again and begin to jostle us as the actually living do. In “Cousins,” the narrator agrees to intervene in a relative’s court case because his family memories exert a pressure over him: “I did it for Cousin Metzger’s tic. For the three bands of Neapolitan ice cream. For the furious upright growth of Cousin Shana’s ruddy hair, and the avid veins of her temples and in the middle of her forehead. For the strength with which her bare feet advanced as she mopped the floor and spread the pages of the Tribune_ over it.”
Bellow’s way of seeing his characters also tells us something about his metaphysics. In his fictional world, people do not stream with motives; as novelists go, he is no depth psychologist. Instead, his characters are embodied souls, stretched essences. Their bodies are their confessions, their moral camouflage faulty and peeling: they have the bodies they deserve. Victor Wulpy, a tyrant in thought, has a large, tyrannical head; Max Zetland, a reproving, witholding father, has an unshavable cleft or pucker in his chin, and when he smokes, “he held in the smoke of his cigarettes.” It is perhaps for this reason that Bellow is rarely found describing young people; even his middle-aged characters seem old. For in a sense he turns all his characters into old people, since the old helplessly wear their essences on their bodies, they are seniors in moral struggle. Aunt Rose, in “The Old System,” has a body almost literally eaten into by history: She had a large bust, wide hips, and old-fashioned thighs of those corrupted shapes that belong to history.”
Like Dickens, and to some extent like Tolstoy and Proust, Bellow sees humans as the embodiments of a single dominating essence or law of being, and makes repeated reference to his characters’ essences, in a method of leitmotif. As, in Anna Karenina,_ Stiva Oblonsky always has a smile, and Anna a light step, and Levin a heavy tread, each attribute the accompaniment of a particular temperament, so Max Zetland has his reproving pucker, and Sorella, in “The Bellarosa Connection,” her forceful obesity, and so on. In Seize the Day,_ probably the finest of Bellow’s shorter works, Tommy Wilhelm sees the great crowds walking in New York and seems to see “in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence—/ labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want.”_
Bellow has written that when we read “the best nineteenth and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature,” and his own work, his own way of seeing essential human types, may be added to that grand project.
Bellow’s stories seem to divide into two kinds: long, looseedged stories, which read as if they began life as novels (such as “Cousins”), and short, almost classical tales, which often recount the events of a single day (“Something to Remember Me By,”
“A Silver Dish,”
“Looking for Mr. Green”). Yet in both types of story the same kind of narrative prose is at work, one that tends toward the recollection of distant events and tends also toward a version of stream of consciousness. Here, the unnamed narrator of “Zetland” recalls Max Zetland, his friend’s father: Max Zetland was a muscular man who weighed two hundred pounds, but these were only scenes—not dangerous. As usual, the morning after, he stood at the bathroom mirror and shaved with his painstaking brass Gillette, made neat his reprehending face, flattened his hair like an American executive, with military brushes. Then, Russian style, he drank his tea through a sugar cube, glancing at the Tribune,_ and went off to his position in the Loop, more of less in Ordnung._ A normal day. Descending the back stairs, a short cut to the El, he looked through the window of the first floor at his Orthodox parents in the kitchen. Grandfather sprayed his bearded mouth with an atomizer—he had asthma. Grandmother made orange-peel candy. Peels dried all winter on the steam radiators. The candy was kept in shoeboxes and served with tea.
Sitting in the El, Max Zetland wet his finger on his tongue to turn the pages of the thick newspaper… Tin pagoda roofs covered the El platforms. Each riser of the long staircase advertised Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. Iron loss made young girls pale. Max Zetland himself had a white face, white-jowled, a sarcastic bear, but acceptably pleasant, entering the merchandising palace on Wabash Avenue…
The narrator, who is not related to Max Zetland, is writing about Max Zetland as if he himself had been there, as if he were recalling the daily scene, and he is using a style of writing that Joyce perfected in Ulysses_—a jumble of different recollected details, a life-sown prose logging impressions with broken speed, in which the perspective keeps on expanding and contracting, as memory does: at one moment, we see Grandfather caught in a moment of dynamism, spraying his bearded mouth with an atomizer, and then in the next we hear that Grandmother made candy from orange peel and that this peel spent all winter drying on the radiators. At one moment we see the advertisements for Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, the next we see Max entering his workplace. The prose moves between different temporalities, between the immediate and the traditional, the shortlived and the longlived. The narrator of “Something to Remember Me By” writes that at home, inside the house, they lived by “an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life.” Bellow’s prose moves in similar ways, between the “archaic” or traditional, and the immediate, dynamic “facts of life.”
Detail feels modern in Bellow because it is so often the remembered impression_ of a detail, filtered through a consciousness; and yet his details still have an unmodern solidity. At the risk of sounding apocalyptic, one might say that Bellow reprieved realism for a generation, the generation that came after the Second World War, that he held its neck back from the blade of the postmodern; and he did this by revivifying traditional realism with modernist techniques. His prose is densely “realistic,” yet it is hard to find in it any of the usual conventions of realism or even of storytelling. His people do not walk out of the house and into other houses—they are, as it were, tipped from one recalled scene to another—and his characters do not have obviously “dramatic” conversations. It is almost impossible to find in these stories sentences alon
g the lines of “He put down his drink and left the room.” These are at once traditional and very untraditional stories, both “archaic” and radical.
Curiously enough, the stream of consciousness, for all its reputation as the great accelerator of description, actually slows down realism, asks it to dawdle over tiny remembrances, tiny details and lusters, to circle and return. The stream of consciousness is properly the ally of the short story, of the anecdote, the fragment—and it is no surprise that the short story and the stream of consciousness appear in strength in literature at about the same time, toward the end of the nineteenth century: in Hamsun and in Chekhov, and a little later in Bely and Babel.
At home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life.” This is the axis on which many of these stories run, both at the level of the shifting prose and at the larger level of meaning. For most of the heroes and narrators of these stories, Chicago, where “the facts of life” reign, exists as both torment and spur. Chicago is American, modern; but life at home, as for Max Zetland, is traditional, “archaic,” respectably Jewish, with memories and habits of Russian life. (Bellow was nearly born in Russia, of course; his father came from there to Lachine, Quebec, in 1913, and Bellow was born in June 1915.) In these tales, Bellow returns again and again to the city of his childhood, massive, industrial, peopled, where the El “ran like the bridge of the elect over the damnation of the slums,” a city both brutal and poetic, “blue with winter, brown with evening, crystal with frost.” Chicago, this agglomeration of human fantasies—the protagonist of “Looking for Mr. Green” realizes that the city represents a collective agreement of will—must be reckoned with and recorded as exactly and lyrically as the humans who throng these characters’ memories. But Chicago is also a realm of confusion and vulgarity, a place inimical to the life of the mind and the proper expansion of the imagination. The narrator of “Zetland” remembers that he and young Zetland (Max’s son) would read Keats to each other while rowing on the city lagoon: “Books in Chicago were obtainable. The public library in the twenties had many storefront branches along the car lines. Summers, under flipping gutta-percha fan blades, boys and girls read in the hard chairs. Crimson trolley cars swayed, cowbellied, on the rails. The country went broke in 1929. On the public lagoon, rowing, we read Keats to each other while the weeds bound the oars.”
