Dispatches and Details From a
Life in Literature
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
LETTERS
By Saul Bellow
Edited by Benjamin Taylor. Illustrated. 571 pages. Viking. $35.
Herzog, the title character of Saul Bellow’s 1964 novel, is famously
a writer of letters he never sends, letters to friends, rivals, relatives and
strangers; letters that satisfy his craving “to explain, to have it out, to
justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends.” The letters are,
by turns, cranky, coruscating, clever and cerebral: the outpourings of a man
overflowing with ideas and grievances, and reeling from the complications of
his life and the stubborn mystifications of the world around him.
The real-life letters of Herzog’s creator turn out to
be just as arresting, seizing the reader by the lapels and refusing to let go.
Although Bellow (1915-2005) repeatedly apologizes in this collection for being
a lousy correspondent — suffering from some sort of “disagreeable reticence” —
he is a gifted and emotionally voluble letter writer, convinced that sharing
his experiences and thoughts with friends provides an escape hatch from the
“miserliness” of “private consciousness.”
Some of his letters are yesterday’s equivalents of
e-mail, catching his recipients up on the daily stuff of life, annoyances large
and small, “toil, tears, sweat and business-wriggling.” Others are
philosophical meditations on literature, politics, literary politics and the
state of the modern world, musings that remind us of Bellow’s love of the Old
Testament, Shakespeare and the great 19th-century Russian novels, and his
belief that fiction ought to address the great moral questions of human
existence and “account for the mysterious circumstance of being,” as he once
observed in The New York Times. Taken together, the letters form a sort of
discursive autobiography and intellectual cri de coeur.
They amplify Bellow’s argument that all American
books, including his own, “pant” after meaning. They underscore his
simultaneous craving for intellectual conversation and his impatience with the
literary establishment and what he called “fashionable extremism” — “the
hysterical, shallow and ignorant academic ‘counterculture.’ ” And they
point up the highly personal sources of much of his fiction: “You damn near
killed me,” he writes his ex-wife Sondra in one especially vituperative letter.
“I’ve put that behind me, but I haven’t forgotten the smallest detail. Nothing,
I assure you. I made something [in ‘Herzog’] of the abuses I suffered at your
hands.”
As in his novels, Bellow is as comfortable here
discussing the “daily monkeyshines” of people he knows in the cacophonous city
of Chicago as he is at academic debate, and his inimitable voice —
accommodating the slangy and the high-brow, the vernacular and the oracular —
burbles through these pages. He describes his father (who was skeptical of his
choice of a literary vocation) “giving me a Polonius, berating all my friends,
warning me, adjuring me, doing everything short of damning me.” And he writes Leon
Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, that Jewish
history “is denser than the Amazon jungle, and even if I were the Paul Bunyan
of the machete I could never hack my way through.”
The Bellow that floats to the surface in this volume
is a close spiritual relative of the heroes who populate his fiction: a seeker
and searcher who also happens to be a first-class noticer; an intellectual,
deep in what he once called “the profundity game,” who is constantly trying to
balance the equation between rumination and action, solipsism and distraction,
the temptations of selfhood and the noise of the real world.
Like his heroes, he frequently commutes between the
magnetic poles of depression and exuberance. He is both “a glacier and a
volcano.” He sometimes regards himself as a bear who bites “people’s heads off
when they cross” him, but also feels himself to be a creature who flies, though
“too heavy to be a bird, too sinful to be any sort of angel.”
Throughout this volume, animal metaphors proliferate.
Bellow jokingly describes himself as an “experimental rabbit” and “a poor lost
woof from the kennel of Fate looking for a dog to belong to.” He discusses his
slow, digestive approach to certain ideas as his “anaconda method,” and tells
his son Adam that the long, cold winter in Chicago has made him aware of his
“lizard ancestors,” connected to “the Mesozoic” and in need of a drink to
“rejoin the mammalian order.”
But when it comes to depicting a run of productive
writing, Bellow turns to a mechanical analogy. “I live on broiled meat and salt
pills and my brains and insides go around at high speed,” he writes. “Have you
ever visited a clothing factory, heard the sewing machines rrrrhhhahhhrrr with
the loudness in the middle of the phrase? I feel like that myself, like the
operator sliding in the cloth. Only the machinery is internal and the seams
never end.”
He “learned to organize” his daily life for the
“single purpose” of writing, Bellow tells one friend; his other drive, “the
sexual one,” would result, like that of many of his heroes, in a woman-filled
life, including, in his case, five marriages and many affairs.
The “files of Eros” found in this volume range from
rhapsodic avowals of love (“Susie and I could be happy on an ice floe,” he says
of his third wife) to bitter denunciations. Of his first wife, he rants: “Anita
still wields her wicked power. She wants money, money, money, money, or failing
money, blood.” An equally broad gamut of emotions animate his more literary
letters. Few punches pulled, generosity rarely withheld. He tells Martin Amis that he will be “a sort
of adoptive father,” and tells Philip Roth that he knew his stories
were “the real thing”: “When I was a little kid, there were still blacksmiths
around, and I’ve never forgotten the ring of a real hammer on a real anvil.” He
is even more rhapsodic to his friend John Cheever: “Will I read your book? Would I accept a free trip to Xanadu with
Helen of Troy as my valet?”
Of William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch,” Bellow, in a
letter to a girlfriend, is archly patronizing. “It doesn’t have much human
content, and I think it’s just the other side of all the ‘niceness’ and
‘cleanliness’ and ‘goodness’ in the country.”
When it comes to responding to William Faulkner’s
request of support for Ezra Pound (who had been committed
to a hospital for the insane after making anti-American and anti-Semitic
broadcasts during World War II), Bellow is succinct in his moral outrage: “If
sane he should be tried again as a traitor; if insane he ought not to be
released merely because he is a poet. Pound advocated in his poems and in his
broadcasts enmity to the Jews and preached hatred and murder. Do you mean to
ask me to join you in honoring a man who called for the destruction of my
kinsmen?”
As the calendar pages whip by with the years, Bellow,
the struggling apprentice, who has “not clicked with editors” and has “known
169 brands of humiliation,” gives way to the confident journeyman who, with “The Adventures
of Augie March,” has found his voice. “The writing of it gave me
considerable pleasure,” he says of “Augie.” “It was wonderful to feel I had the
gift of amusement.”
In time we also see the mature craftsman — “Every once
in a while I put ‘Henderson’ on me like a plumber’s level. The bubble is
usually in the wrong place, so I sigh and knock off for the day” — slowly morph
into the Nobel Prize-winning public figure, who worries he’s “headed for the waxworks.”
“There comes a moment, with increasing frequency,” he
writes in 2002, “when artists feel that they are hopelessly surrounded by goats
and monkeys. I am against falling into despair because of superficial
observations such as the foregoing. Actually, I’ve never stopped looking for
the real thing; and often I find the real thing. To fall into despair is just a
high-class way of turning into a dope. I choose to laugh, and laugh at myself
no less than at others.”
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