Authors: Cynthia Ozick
One could take issue with the designated decade; probably every fevered reader will choose the hour of her own youth as that Golden Age when literature was woven into the sinews of the
world. What we can be certain of is that the old system (and “The Old System” is the title of one of Bellow’s crankiest short stories) is gone—gone
as
a system, meaning as a collective perception, or as the lining, as it were, of a corpus of time. Individuals, of course, go on being born into the life-shock of print, into the recognition (as Bellow set it out in his introduction to Allan Bloom’s
The Closing of the American Mind
) that poets and novelists “give new eyes to human beings, inducing them to view the world differently, converting them from fixed modes of experience.”
But in the absence of the old system this wizardlike conversion no longer tosses rapturous signals from reader to reader—so that hearing the phrase “the haying scene,” said just like that, will instantly sweep one into the fields with Levin, joyful among the reapers. For that to happen,
Anna Karenina
must be common property. There is plenty of common property nowadays—so many globally-fixed modes of experience, pictures clicked into place by that household appliance all families, the richest and the poorest, live with and through. But the images of television, and of film, are immutable and uniform; everything arrives ready-made, already “processed,” already envisioned, and, in effect, already
seen
. If literature can give new eyes to human beings, it is because the thing held in common is separately imagined. Utter “I would prefer not,” and out of these few words Bartleby materializes, your Bartleby and my Bartleby, a mutual Bartleby: yet the seeing differs from mind to mind. And at the same time a tunnel has been dug from mind to mind, and an unsuspected new current runs between them.
“In the greatest confusion,” Bellow comments, “there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves—to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make final judgments and put everything together.” (Be assured that the channel Bellow speaks of is not NBC’s Channel
Four.) And it is literature that assists in driving a chink into that higher consciousness.
Inklings of the deepest part of ourselves; flashes of the indelible, or call it lightnings from an inner storm—Levin mowing with the peasants, Bartleby’s
“I would prefer not” in Melville’s industrious Wall Street.
And truly Levin had never drunk any liquor so good as this warm water with green bits floating in it, and a taste of rust from the tin dipper. And immediately after this came the delicious slow saunter, with his hand on the scythe, during which he could wipe away the streaming sweat, take deep breaths of air, and look about at the long string of mowers …
The longer Levin mowed, the oftener he felt the moments of unconsciousness in which it seemed not his hands that swung the scythe, but the scythe moving of itself, a body full of life and consciousness of its own, and as though by magic, without thinking of it, the work turned out regular and well-finished of itself. These were the most blissful moments.
“I would prefer not to,” said he.
I looked at him steadfastly. His face was leanly composed; his grey eye dimly calm. Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him. Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been anything ordinarily human about him; doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises. But as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors …
“I would prefer not to,” he replied in a flute-like tone. It seemed to me that while I had been addressing him, he carefully revolved every statement that I made; fully comprehended the meaning; could not gainsay the irresistible conclusion; but, at the same time, some paramount consideration prevailed with him to reply as he did.
To these some will want to add certain culminating lines from
The Death of Ivan Ilyich:
It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible to him before, namely that he had not spent his life as he
should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend.
Tommy Wilhelm of
Seize the Day
is present in this company of the higher consciousness, and his convulsion of grief at a stranger’s funeral—a great and turbulent wave of introspective terror—belongs with literature’s most masterly scenes of transfiguring self-disclosure:
Standing a little apart, Wilhelm began to cry. He cried at first softly and from sentiment, but soon from deeper feeling. He sobbed loudly and his face grew distorted and hot, and the tears stung his skin …
Soon he was past words, past reason, coherence. He could not stop. The source of all tears had suddenly sprung open within him, black, deep, and hot, and they were pouring out and convulsed his body, crippling the very hands with which he held the handkerchief. His efforts to collect himself were useless. The great knot of ill and grief in his throat swelled upward and he gave in utterly and held his face and wept. He cried with all his heart …
“The man’s brother, maybe?”
“Oh, I doubt that very much,” said another bystander. “They’re not alike at all. Night and day.”
W
HEN
Seize the Day
first appeared, the old system was fully at work. Ah! How to describe it? Hunger, public hunger; and then excitement, argument, and, among writers, the wildly admiring disturbances of envy. A new book by Bellow! You lived by it, you absorbed it, you took it into your system.
Augie March
had been published three years earlier, in 1953; Bellow was thirty-eight. It was his third novel, following
Dangling Man
(1944) and
The Victim
(1947). These were received, as Diana Trilling put it in the
Nation
in 1948, as “solidly built of fine, important ideas”; Bellow was recognized as a philosophical novelist. But
Augie March
was an eruption, a tumult, a marvel; a critical deluge pursued it. Original even in the scope of its ambition in a mostly narrow decade, it was a work that turned over American fiction, breaking through all restraints of language (mixing the lavish with the raffish) and of range: the barriers of inhibition kicked down, the freed writer claiming authority over human and planetary organisms.
There was, besides, another element in Bellow’s prose—in the coloration of his mind—that could not be immediately detected, because it contradicted a taken-for-granted sentiment about human character: that the physical body is simply a shell for the nature hidden within, that what I look like is not what I truly am, that my disposition is masked by the configuration of my features. The American infatuation with youth tends to support this supposition: a very young face
is
a sort of mask, and will generally tell you nothing much, and may, in fact, mislead you. Bellow in a way has invented a refreshed phrenology, or theory of the humors; in any case, by the time
Seize the Day
arrived, it was clear he was on to something few moderns would wish to believe in: the human head as characterological map. But such a premise is not a retreat or a regression to an archaic psychology. It is an insight that asks us to trust the condition of art, wherein the higher consciousness can infiltrate portraiture. Disclosure is all. Human flesh has no secrets: Levin’s hand on the scythe is the teacher of Levin’s soul, Ivan Ilyich in his body’s decay reads the decay of his soul, Bartleby’s frozen serenity incarnates a consummate innerness. Bellow, like every artist, is no dualist—his bodies are not bodies, they are souls. And the soul, too, is disparaged by moderns as an obscurantist archaism.
But Bellow’s art escapes the judgment of the merely enlightened. The nursery-rhyme proverb may be more to his liking: my face is my fortune. If manners are small morals, as Hobbes said, then bodies and faces may be morals writ large; or what is meant by soul. Here is Dr. Tamkin, a central character of
Seize the Day
—who may not be a doctor at all:
What a creature Tamkin was when he took off his hat! The indirect light showed the many complexities of his bald skull, his gull’s nose, his rather handsome eyebrows, his vain mustache, his deceiver’s brown eyes. His figure was stocky, rigid, short in the neck, so that the large ball of the occiput touched his collar. His bones were peculiarly formed, as though twisted twice where the ordinary human bone was turned only once, and his shoulders rose in two pagodalike points. At mid-body he was thick. He stood pigeon-toed, a sign perhaps that he was devious or had much to hide. The skin of his hands was aging, and his nails were moonless, concave, clawlike, and they appeared loose. His eyes were as brown as beaver fur and full of strange lines. The two large brown naked balls looked thoughtful—but were they? And honest—but was Dr. Tamkin honest?
And here is a minor character, the manager of a brokerage office, no more than a walk-on:
Silvery, cool, level, long-profiled, experienced, indifferent, observant, with unshaven refinement, he scarcely looked at Wilhelm.… The manager’s face, low-colored, long-nostriled, acted as a unit of perception; his eyes merely did their reduced share. Here was a man … who knew and knew and knew.
And about whom there is nothing further to know. What more would the man’s biography provide, how would it illuminate? Bellow’s attraction to the idea of soul may or may not be derived from an old interest in Rudolf Steiner; but no one will doubt that these surpassingly shrewd, arrestingly juxtaposed particulars of physiognomy are inspired grains of what can only be called human essence.
Dr. Tamkin, curiously, is both essence and absence: which is to say he is a con man, crucially available to begin with, and then painfully evaporated. Wilhelm, strangled by his estranged wife’s inflated expenses, father of two boys, runaway husband who has lost his job—salesman for a corporation that promised him advancement and then fired him in an act of nepotism—is drawn to Tamkin as to a savior. Tamkin takes Wilhelm’s last seven hundred dollars, introduces him (bewilderingly) to the commodities market,
pledges a killing in lard, and meanwhile spills out advice on how to live: Tamkin is a philosopher and amateur poet. Wilhelm’s vain and indifferent father, Dr. Adler, an elderly widower, also supplies advice, but brutally, coldly.
Much of this futile counsel takes place in the Gloriana, a residence hotel within view of the Ansonia, an ornate Stanford White-era edifice which “looks like a baroque palace from Prague or Munich enlarged a hundred times, with towers, domes,” a leftover from the socially ambitious Broadway of a former age. Despite its name, the Gloriana’s glory days are well behind it; its denizens are chiefly retired old Jews like Wilhelm’s fastidious father and the ailing Mr. Perls, who drags “a large built-up shoe.” Wilhelm at forty-four may be the youngest tenant, and surely the healthiest—“big and fair-haired,” “mountainous,” with “a big round face, a wide, flourishing red mouth, stump teeth.” But he is also the humblest: failed husband, failed actor still carrying a phony Hollywood name, broke, appealing to his father for the rent money, pleading with his wife not to squeeze him so hard.
Though maimed and humiliated, Wilhelm is no cynic; he is a not-so-naive believer in search of a rescuer. And because he is hopeful and almost gullible, and definitely reckless, a burnt-out sad sack, he is aware of himself as a hapless comic figure. “Fair-haired hippopotamus!” he addresses his lumbering reflection in the lobby glass. And later, heartlessly: “Ass! Idiot! Wild boar! Dumb mule! Slave!”
Wilhelm may seem even to himself to be a fool, but there are no outright fools in Bellow’s varied worlds: all his clowns are idiosyncratic seers. Wilhelm sees that his father is mesmerized by old age as death’s vestibule, incapable of compassion beyond these margins: a confined soul, disappointed in his son, Dr. Adler, though affluent enough, refuses him help. “He doesn’t forget death for one single second, and that’s what makes him like this,” Wilhelm thinks. “And not only is death on his mind but through money he forces me to think about it, too. It gives him power over me.” Wilhelm may be a hollow flounderer in all other respects—work, wife, sons, father, lover, past, future, all lost—but he can
see
. And he sees a glimmering in Tamkin, a market gambler with
Wilhelm’s money, a fly-by-night speculator, a trickster, a kind of phantom appearing and disappearing at will, an opportunist and exploiter, plainly shady if not an out-and-out crook—he sees that Tamkin is somehow and despite everything a man in whom to put his trust. Pragmatically, this will turn out to be a whopper of a mistake; yet Wilhelm, in a passion of nihilist self-seeing, embracing his blunders, defines himself through misjudgment and miscalculation:
… since there were depths in Wilhelm not unsuspected by himself, he received a suggestion from some remote element in his thoughts that the business of life, the real business—to carry his peculiar burden, to feel shame and impotence, to taste these quelled tears—the only important business, the highest business was being done. Maybe the making of mistakes expressed the very purpose of his life and the essence of his being here. Maybe he was supposed to make them and suffer from them here on this earth. And though he had raised himself above Mr. Perls and his father because they adored money, still they were called to act energetically and this was better than to yell and cry, pray and beg, poke and blunder and go by fits and starts and fall upon the thorns of life. And finally sink beneath that watery floor—would that be tough luck, or would it be good riddance?