“The book considers what value a single life has in one of these countries of Eastern Europe,” he said. But he thinks its Chicago segments will raise the controversy: “It’s a protest about the dehumanization of the blacks in big cities. I’m speaking up for the black underclass and telling the whites they’re not approaching the problem correctly. The people [in the book] who stand out in moral stature, who each in his own way tries to do something, are blacks. But it’s one of these touchy subjects you know will draw flack. Either the white liberals will be up in arms or the black leadership will disapprove. When I began this book, any discussion of this subject, unless it was framed in the conventional pieties, would have been taboo.”
The black condition, he believes, “represents a complete failure of the imagination in the country. We are now in the fourth or fifth welfare generation, people who’ve never worked, people sealed out, set aside, and they look to me like a doomed population. And from the social organizations, educators, psychologists, bureaucrats—nothing, just zilch. Who’s got some imagination about this? Is the city going to turn into a septic tank with people moving out and doing their work by computer and nothing in the city center but the big corporations and the blasted remains? The population is economically redundant.…”
He stopped speaking.
“I’m using journalistic terminology. I could kick myself. You can’t talk about people being economically redundant.” He said that in the novel he quotes the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who wouldn’t discuss the Great War with anybody. “He shunned all sorts of discussion,” said Bellow, “because they could only be held in newspaper language, and he felt this gave him a foulness in the mouth, and you could only betray experience this way.”
Bellow has worked journalistically (his own style) in the past, covering Khrushchev’s visit to the United Nations for Esquire; writing a book on contemporary Israel, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account; and a few years ago, he began to face down Chicago for a nonfiction work on his hometown. But that book is dead: “I’ll never have any more to do with it. That’s a subject for some kind of poetry, not a factual account. The very language you have to use as a journalist works against the true material. To do a piece about, say, the way the criminal courts operate in Chicago, you’d have to write about people on the bench, criminal detention, the conditions that breed crime, and you’d have to do it with a show of objectivity, and in the end it would all be dead.”
Bellow turned his energy toward the novel instead and made the protagonist of The Dean’s December (he’s dean at an unnamed Chicago college) a former journalist on the Paris Herald who has returned to Chicago to teach. After some years, he writes two magazine articles comparing the Chicago of yore with Chicago today and the articles create a storm, which continues while he is in Bucharest visiting his wife’s dying mother. The writing of the novel illustrates Bellow’s profound differentiation between journalism and literature: “Although you are reading about it all the time, you can’t find out what’s happening in this world. You read Encounter, Commentary, Foreign Affairs, books by psychologists, sociologists—and you can’t find out what’s happening humanly. Unless you pass it through your own soul, you can’t understand it. We live in this alleged age of communication, which comes in the form of distracting substitutes for reality. But the reality in our day comes from art. And we live in a country that has ruled this off limits.
“It’s hard to interest readers, isn’t it? They’re not used to following the human motion of character. The motion of the soul is not what they consider to be exciting. The excitement demand has gone sky-high. One week the President is shot, another week the pope. This would have caused a holy war two centuries ago, but now it’s only something to titillate the public’s appetite for sensation. This causes people to forget human knowledge—knowledge of their own souls. Somewhere they’re paying humanly for the lack of reality all this represents. They can always find something to dwarf something else with—Chicago is dwarfed by the Gulag peninsula, which is dwarfed by the Holocaust. There’s a totalitarianism in all this, in that it’s reductive of human experience.”
This loss of the power to experience is a theme Bellow threads through The Dean’s December. “I felt moved on behalf of the human stuff itself,” he said, “and the need to recover the power to experience.” As we talked, this feeling translated into an attitude toward the abundance of modern writers who have succumbed to the pop reality and gone to the movies or to thrillers or to nonfiction or to fiction that merely fulfills popular expectations. Bellow feels writers are making themselves superfluous. “They think the game is over, they think we’re in a situation where all we can do is prepare for the next epoch by doing more of the same, by repeating the redundancy. That’s what heats me up about it. A question that bugs me all the time is, what really is interesting? What is it human beings long to think about, read about, see, or feel? There’s some sort of capitalist competition going on about what is interesting. Power is interesting now. Weakness is much less interesting. Sexuality is interesting, or at least people say it is, though they generally mean lust. All this sexual stuff has become practically obligatory, because it’s certainly a big deal commercially. And there’s a demonism in this sexuality because of the big money that certifies the importance, the social success of this trend. It makes me think of Marie Antoinette: ‘Let ’em eat cake.’ Now the masses are gorged on all this sexual cake, and everybody’s got sexual pimples.
“I have a very simple feeling about this when I’m writing. I don’t want to waste people’s time. They’re gasping for a breath of life and they’re being robbed by every con artist who comes along. If I didn’t think I was speaking to people’s souls, I would not write anything. If I didn’t have a true word to speak to them, I’d keep my fucking mouth shut.”
Of course, there were American writers who had not succumbed to “pop reality.” Which of these writers did Bellow value?
“I like [John] Cheever very much.… I have a weakness for writers of my own generation—Wright Morris, J. F. Powers, Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor among the novelists. Bernard Malamud is extraordinarily good. I liked The Assistant very much, and I like the stories immensely.
“I admire Norman Mailer quite a lot. I think he’s a writer of immense talent, but he’s lacking in originality. I know his originality takes American readers by storm, but I find him crowded with clichés. I like the improvisational ones—writing about prizefights. He’s a man of remarkable talents, but his seriousness is impossible to take seriously.”
What did he mean about Mailer’s clichés?
“Take the recent one about the knifer [In the Belly of the Beast, in which Mailer introduces the letters of the convict Jack Henry Abbott]. Malraux was giving the world shudders with this kind of stuff fifty years ago, and even then it was old hat. It came from an earlier French generation of syndicalist wild men—Sorel’s Reflections on Violence—and tons of supporting hooey way back into the nineteenth century. Wyndham Lewis is awfully good on this when he looks into Sartre and Malraux and points out how all these admirers of criminal violence came from the middle class and had the best education France could give them.
“It’s literature in the worst sense of the word because it’s only writing about the knife. But then comes the knife, and a life is taken [Abbott was convicted of a fatal stabbing while free on parole and was returned to jail.] The good old New York Times writes an editorial that blames the prison system. Rebecca West says that men see things in outline, silhouettes and nothing else. Women see the human details. So when there is a threat to the community or to the state, the men go for armaments and the women say these terrible things wouldn’t happen if there were decent bathrooms for everybody. So The New York Times in this case takes the feminine attitude that this wouldn’t happen if our prisons weren’t so bad.
“And there’s another point to be made about writers enveloped in sexual charisma—that they are drawn to
violent criminals who are also sexually charismatic. Now, the criminals, I suppose, are knifing in real earnest. But the writers are in the sexual game with their violence. There is a kind of flattery of women in it.”
He’d praised Cheever, now and also publicly. What was it in Cheever’s work that moved him?
“He’s one of the few American writers who have undergone a visible development. Take a writer like [James T.] Farrell. He wrote Studs Lonigan first and he wrote Studs Lonigan last. Most of them are that way. But here’s Cheever—you read those stories and you see his power of transformation, his power to take the elements given and work them into something new and far deeper than they were at the outset. I think you can truly judge the importance of a writer by his power to transform the original given.”
He’d translated Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Gimpel the Fool” from the Yiddish. What did he think of Singer?
“I think he’s written a couple of first-rate books and some marvelous stories. He’s very prolific, and sometimes he hits the target and sometimes he hits a spectator or two.”
Which books of Singer’s did he think were really first-rate?
“The Magician of Lublin, The Spinoza of Market Street, and Gimpel the Fool, the book of stories with that title. I don’t think my praise will cut much ice with him. His opinion of himself is so high he doesn’t need anyone else’s certification.”
He noted an egregious fact of American literary life: that good readers are hung up on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. “It’s very strange that serious readers think this country has made so very little progress since then. That they formed a standard around themselves is something to wonder at. It’s as if people were saying, that’s when we were still okay—before the fall. Funny they should all be considered so American when they were so nihilistic. But they gave Americans an image they wanted to be known by. The Fitzgerald stereotype alternated with the Hemingway one—in ball parks, in newspapers, and among the younger people in universities, though not so much there anymore.”
Bellow considered all that he had said to me and explained that he didn’t usually make these sorts of statements. “I’ve never been so outspoken before about people like Mailer. It’s an exhibitionistic thing to do, which amuses the public, but I’m getting old enough now not to care. I could have named lots of people. They’ll never know how much they’ve been spared.”
This talk of American writers led naturally into talk of writers of world stature. Whom did he judge to be of the first rank?
“One reads less as one grows older,” he said. “You realize your time is limited and that you have to ration yourself. I may mention some strange birds to you. The late Nadezhda Mandelstam, for one [she was the wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam]. Her two volumes, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, are very important modern books. They have a kind of personal, human, intuitive, intelligent, and cultivated response to what has happened in Russia since 1917, through life and death, through war and peace. A fragile little old woman in her sixties and seventies wrote these books, which seem to me to contain the complete answer to Communist totalitarianism.
“Solzhenitsyn is a wonderful writer but a kinky one. He’s chock-full of old Slavophile ideology, religiosity, to which I have no objection. Among the Russian dissenters, he belongs to the right wing, which I find fascinating but not especially sympathetic. Anyone who could stand up to the regime as he did needs heroic virtues and all kinds of special powers, and he clearly has them. But I’m not deeply moved by his novels, except the first one, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
“There’s a Russian writer, Varlam Shalamov—his collection of short stories about the concentration camps, Kolyma Tales, is worth reading—and Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz is his pseudonym) is also an admirable writer; I think that he’s a writer of genius.
“I like Rebecca West, a marvelous old broad. She’s wrong about a lot of things but incomparably right when she’s right.” He picked up the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of The Paris Review, which he’d been reading, and quoted a passage from an interview with West. She was talking about writing multiple drafts of a book and said to the interviewer: “I’ve never been able to do just one draft. That seems a wonderful thing. Do you know anyone who can?” And the interviewer responded: “I think D. H. Lawrence did.” To which West answered: “You could often tell.”
Bellow roared and took off his glasses. “A marvelous one-liner,” he said. “I can tell with Lawrence where he didn’t revise. There’s a certain repetitiousness and silliness, even in his very best things.”
We talked about other writers.
“There’s another old girl,” he said. “Christina Stead. Her novel The Little Hotel I recommend strongly. I think you’ll love it.”
And what of Samuel Beckett, who certainly belongs in the first rank?
“I just met Beckett in Paris,” Bellow said. “He’s very gentle. Indrawn rather than withdrawn.”
What did “indrawn” mean to him?
“He shows the physical tension of having removed himself inwardly to some deeper location inside. He’s physically an old man, worth looking at, worth studying. There’s an odd twist to him. The color of the eyes is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Even the growth of the hair expresses some kind of torsion—there’s a twist of sorts to his constitution. It’s very appealing, most attractive. His constitution has its own sort of grain.”
What did Bellow and Beckett talk about?
“Literature, his life, and Joyce and Pound and Hemingway and Wyndham Lewis. He was willing to talk about them, but not enthusiastic about those conversations. He spoke with reverence of Joyce but not of many others. We met in the lobby of the Pont Royal Hotel. The bar downstairs was the headquarters of Sartre and Company all through the highest moments of existentialism, and I said: ‘Do you want to go downstairs to the bar?’ And he said no. He wouldn’t have anything to do with that stuff. In fact, he wouldn’t have anything to do with anybody’s stuff, and I rather like that about him because there’s something in me that’s similar—the dislike of being one of the pack, any pack.”
What did Bellow think of Samuel Beckett as a writer?
“He’s an extraordinary writer. Not my sort. I’m not his sort either. He interests me. He doesn’t stir my soul deeply. But it was a friendly meeting in which the tones counted more than what was said. The vibes, as the children would say. I was satisfied with the vibes. I can’t speak for him. He’s too mysterious to be spoken for.”
Last spring, on the wall of an English department in an upstate New York university, and presumably on college walls everywhere, a document appeared announcing the creation of the Saul Bellow Newsletter, a publication that will pursue “Bellow materials”—bibliographies, reviews, interviews, conferences, probably gossip on the private life as well. This thrusts Bellow into the company of Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and other writers judged by academe to be newsletter-worthy icons. How did the new icon feel about this newsletter?
“I don’t get it,” he said. “And if I got it I wouldn’t read it. Somebody told me about it, but I just stay in my foxhole.”
How did he feel about books by academics analyzing his work?
“I’ve read few of the critical works,” he said. “I don’t pay too much attention to them. I always think, the end is not yet, and when I see these things I think: ‘Don’t announce the results of the election or the people on the Coast will walk away from the polls.’ Also, it is sometimes depressing to read what educated people think I’m doing, and I feel downcast for days. It can be very distressing to see how wrong people are. And then they invariably translate what you do into the modern intellectual vocabulary, which itself is depressing.”
He teaches and lectures at universities but sees himself apart from academic life.
“I went back to Chicago in the sixties because I didn’t want to get caught in the literary life and its rackets. There were gangs organized in those day
s—the New York poets, the Commentary group, The New York Review of Books group, the people around Stanley Kunitz and Cal [Robert] Lowell—and I thought I might just as well go back to Chicago, where a spade is a spade and a philistine is a philistine. I really do prefer the untroubled vulgarity of Chicago, where, when my wife gives her name to a department-store clerk, the clerk asks, ‘Bellow? Doesn’t your husband swim in the Olympics?’
“As you grow older as a writer,” he said, “you become more and more accustomed to talking to yourself. In what the punks like to call the literary milieu you’d think you’d find some milieuvniks to talk to. You’d think there were heaps of people to attach yourself to. But you have to pick yourself through heaps of no-goodniks, casts of thousands in the literary world who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.”
We arrived, finally, at the subject of the Nobel Prize. It came to him in 1976, and the Swedish Academy praised his work for these reasons: first, because it represented an emancipation of American writing from the “hard-boiled” style that had become “routine” in thirties literature; and second, for its mix of “exuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy, and burning compassion.”
Bellow’s initial response to the prize was viewed by the press as casual, and I asked him about this.
“How should I behave?” he inquired.
I had no suggestions but noted that Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, had rejected the prize in 1964, partly on political grounds.
“I don’t feel it incumbent on me politically to do one thing or another,” Bellow said. “I don’t think the world is waiting to see how I line up. Part of me thinks back to the streets of Chicago and says, ‘Who, me? Don’t be silly.’