Nor did Bellow and Beckett. Had he read
Dangling Man
, Bellow’s first published novel, Beckett would have come upon this quick bit of dialogue—
“If you could see, what do you think you would see?”
“I’m not sure. Perhaps that we were the feeble-minded children of angels.”
—and might have wondered if he, Beckett, had written the lines, for they could as well have been spoken by Vladimir to Estragon in
Waiting for Godot
or by Nag to Nell in
Endgame.
But Beckett, that good and generous man, was likely responding to everything in Bellow antithetical to himself: an unfazed humanistic faith and, beyond that, a faith in things beyond the grave. The last ditch, the final straw, the end of the line, the
fin de partie
—all these ways of thinking, all these metaphors for nullity, were anathema to Bellow’s fundamentally buoyant, bright-hearted imagination.
A photo from his bar-mitzvah year shows a handsome, compact boy in knickerbockers, kneesocks and spectators, smiling mildly into the camera. The day is sunny, the season leafy. In one hand he holds an open book. Harder to see, tucked under an arm, is a second book. No time to waste, what with all there was to read: Tocqueville, Stendhal, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Marx, Flaubert, Durkheim, Tolstoy, Weber, Conrad, Frazer, Dreiser, Malinowski, Boas, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence. This “superior life,” as he calls it in
Humboldt’s Gift
, this insatiable book-hunger, was from childhood the necessary complement to “bread-and-butter, meat-and-potatoes, dollars-and-cents, cash-and-carry Chicago.” Alongside the Division Street world of peddlers, tailors, greengrocers, fishmongers, butchers,
ganzer machers,
touts and
shnorrers
was this lavish invitation to otherness, this superabundant hospitality of books. “I had a heart full of something. I studied my favorite authors. I rode the bobbling el cars reading Shakespeare or the Russians or Conrad or Freud or Marx or Nietzsche, unsystematic, longing to be passionately stirred.”
Bellow’s bookishness has inclined critics to sum him up as a novelist of ideas. True, his protagonists are intellectuals—but intellectuals who discover how feeble their learning is once real life has barged in. He shows the comic inefficacy of ideas when brought to the test of experience. Scratch these intellectuals and you find flesh-and-blood, struggling, bewildered human beings. In
Herzog
, for example, Bellow dramatizes the sad hilarity of a scholar no more able to finish his magnum opus,
The Roots of Romanticism,
than Mr. Casaubon in George Eliot’s
Middlemarch
could finish his
Key to All Mythologies
. But when Moses Herzog undergoes the additional humiliation of being cuckolded by his best friend, the block lifts. He finds he can write—not, however, about Romanticism. What he manically scribbles is letters. Not the stamped-and-mailed kind collected here. No, it’s unsent letters that save Herzog, epistolary furor transmuting the failed Romantic scholar—by one of Bellow’s beautiful reversals—into the article itself, a genuine Romantic. Let others dabble in nihilism as they please; for Herzog life remains what it had been for Keats—the vale of soul-making. The thing he’d attempted to tackle at second hand Herzog now knows
originally
, without mediation, as a birthright. His humiliation becomes the groundwork for revelations of the Sublime. Letters are dispatched to an ever more sacred company. Here, for example, is Herzog writing to his childhood friend Shapiro: “But we mustn’t forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals. The canned sauerkraut of Spengler’s ‘Prussian Socialism,’ the commonplaces of the Wasteland outlook, the cheap mental stimulants of alienation, the cant and rant of pipsqueaks about Inauthenticity and Forlorn-ness. I can’t accept this foolish dreariness. We are talking about the whole life of mankind. The subject is too great, too deep for such weakness, cowardice—too deep, too great, Shapiro.” And to Morgenfruh, a social scientist fondly remembered from graduate-school days: “Dear Dr. Morgenfruh, Latest evidence from the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa gives grounds to suppose that man did not descend from a peaceful arboreal ape, but from a carnivorous, terrestrial type, a beast that hunted in packs and crushed the skulls of prey with a club or femoral bone. It sounds bad, Morgenfruh, for the optimists, for the lenient hopeful view of human nature.” And here to God, in whom Herzog (like his maker) involuntarily believes when he feels life beating against its boundaries: “How my mind has struggled to make coherent sense. I have not been too good at it. But I have desired to do your unknowable will, taking it, and you, without symbols. Everything of intensest significance, especially if divested of me.” Finally, and most movingly, to his long-dead mother: “The life you gave me has been curious, and perhaps the death I must inherit will turn out to be even more profoundly curious. I have sometimes wished it would hurry up, longed for it to come soon. But I am still on the same side of eternity as ever. It’s just as well, for I still have certain things to do. And without noise, I hope. Some of my oldest aims seem to have slid away.”
You love Moses Herzog for blindness, for haplessness, for thrashing around. At length, you love the feeble-minded child of angels for having come into his own. All that letter writing has delivered him to silence. At the book’s climax, while a hermit thrush sings his evening song, Herzog’s self and soul chat amiably, inwardly: “But what do you want, Herzog?” “But that’s just it—not a solitary thing. I am pretty well satisfied to be, to be just as it is willed, and for as long as I may remain in occupancy.” He fills his hat with flowers: rambler roses, day lilies, peonies. “At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.” Resentment, rage, hatred, jealousy, self-pity—all are transfigured into natural piety. And such piety, in Bellow’s mimetic art, has the last word, however bad the news from Olduvai Gorge.
Novels and stories draw their strength from the humility of the emotions, not from the grandeur of big ideas. Their abiding power is a belief—always difficult to sustain—in the existence of others. “This caring,” says Bellow, “or believing or love alone matters.” Let one instance, taken from
Humboldt
, stand here for hundreds. The scene is the old Russian Bath on Division Street: “Mickey who keeps the food concession fries slabs of meat and potato pancakes, and, with enormous knives, he hacks up cabbages for coleslaw and he quarters grapefruits (to be eaten by hand). The stout old men mounting in their bed sheets from the blasting heat have a strong appetite. Below, Franush the attendant makes steam by sloshing water on the white-hot boulders. These lie in a pile like Roman ballistic ammunition. To keep his brains from baking Franush wears a wet felt hat with the brim torn off. Otherwise he is naked. He crawls up like a red salamander with a stick to tip the latch of the furnace, which is too hot to touch, and then on all fours, with testicles swinging on a long sinew and the clean anus staring out, he backs away groping for the bucket. He pitches in the water and the boulders flash and sizzle. There may be no village in the Carpathians where such practices still prevail.”
Franush appears and vanishes, yet he is immortal, a datum nothing can unmake.
From the Fifties, the population of what Bellow called “my Dead” steadily grows, of course. Inevitable in the collected letters of a long life: more and more loved ones nowhere certainly but in the safekeeping of memory. After seventy-five, you look in vain for survivors from the older generation; after eighty-five, only remnants of your own remain. Like Rob Rexler in “By the Saint Lawrence,” his last story, written at the age of eighty, Bellow no longer sees death as the ugly intruder. The metaphor has changed. Now death is the universal magnetic field, irresistible, gathering us in. Yet now, as never before, the ecstatic sense of being alive—and the hallucinatory vividness of those who are gone—bear down on Rexler with blessings. He recalls his earliest encounter with death: In Lachine, at the level crossing of the Grand Trunk, a man has been killed by an oncoming train. Standing up on the running board of Cousin Albert’s Model T for a better look, Robby sees organs in the roadbed. Aunt Rozzy, when Albert and Robby come home to tell her, lowers her voice and mutters something devout. Remembered in old age, the long-ago day is suddenly possessed as much more than a memory. Everything that happened then seems also to be happening now. Elderly Rob Rexler
becomes
young Robby stroking Cousin Albert’s close rows of wavy hair, as Albert fiercely pushes the hand away. “These observations, Rexler was to learn, were his whole life—his being—and love was what produced them.”
A sentence of fiction like that is art of the highest order. Bellow’s letters are the other side of the tapestry, hitherto unseen: tangled, knotty, loose threads hanging, reverse of the radiant design. He called his novels and stories “letters-in-general of an occult personality.” The letters-in-particular here collected reveal the combats, the delights, the longings—the will, the heroic self-tasking—that gave birth to such lasting things.
—Benjamin Taylor
CHRONOLOGY
1912-13
Abram Belo forced to flee Russia following trial in which he is convicted of conducting business on false papers. (“In Petersburg Pa had made a handsome living. He dealt in produce and traveled widely. He was the largest importer of Egyptian onions and Spanish fruit.”) Immigrates to Lachine, Quebec, a village on the Saint Lawrence River. Wife Lescha (Liza) Gordin Belo and their three children—Zelda (Jane), born 1906; Movscha (Moishe, Maurice), born 1908; and Schmule (Samuel), born 1911—follow once he is settled. Abram variously works as a baker, junk dealer and small-scale importer of dry goods. Family name is changed to Bellows.
1915
A fourth child, Solomon (later Saul), born on June 10 at 130 Eighth Avenue, Lachine.
1918-19
Family moves from Lachine to Montreal. (“We lived on Saint Dominique’s Street, which is a good clerical name, but in addition you had old Reuben, who could barely walk, going to shul or coming from shul—and you had all kinds of people. Very strange people, most of them Yiddish speaking, in this neighborhood.”) Abram fails repeatedly at various enterprises. Solomon begins religious training. (“We were near the waterfront, on a long hill, and I used to go across the street to my rabbi. His name was Shikka Stein and he had a very Chinese look. [ . . . ] He taught me my
Aleph Beis
and then we began to read
Breishis
and it was wonderful. For one thing, these were all my relatives. Abrahams and Isaacs and Chavas and so forth. So yes, it was like a homecoming for me. I was four years old and my head was in a spin. I would come out of Shikka Stein’s apartment and sit on the curb and think it all over in front of my house.”) Speaks French in the street, Yiddish at home.
1923
Following U.S. enactment of the Volstead Act banning sale of alcoholic beverages, Abram supports family by bootlegging liquor across the Canadian-American border. Aged eight, Solomon falls ill with peritonitis and pneumonia; six months of convalescence at Royal Victoria Hospital. (“I started to read in the hospital, where I spent a lot of time. They would come around with a cart [ . . . ] and you would pick some books; mostly they were foolish fairy tales, but sometimes there was a real book.”)
1924
Abram goes to Chicago to work in bakery of cousin Louis Dworkin. Rest of family illegally enter U.S. to join him, arriving at Chicago on July 4. Residence in Humboldt Park. Family name now Bellow. (In subsequent years, brothers Maurice and Sam will again add the final s
.
) Sol is enrolled in Lafayette School and Columbus Elementary. Abram widely entrepreneurial. (“My father owned various businesses, always very strange businesses. For instance, he sold wood to the Jewish bakeries of Chicago, as fuel. He had this bakery experience so he knew all the Jewish bakers in Chicago. Of course they wanted to buy from him. But for my father this involved going to the lumber mills in Michigan and Wisconsin and buying up the scrap wood, the reject wood, and bringing it to Chicago in freight cars and then selling it to his bakeries.”)
1928
With Isaac Rosenfeld, Sol composes Yiddish send-up of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” (“I had a very close friend in Chicago when I was about thirteen. He and I were very mischievous and we used to translate—or parody—famous poems into Yiddish, just for fun. That’s why we did T. S. Eliot. So:
In dem zimmer / vu die waibers zinnen / redt men fun Karl Marx und Lenin .
. .”) Both parents inculcate early love of nineteenth-century Russian literature.
1930
Following graduation from Sabin Junior High, enters Tuley High School, where, in addition to Rosenfeld, friends include Oscar Tarcov, Louis Sidran, Abe Kaufman, Sam Freifeld, David Peltz, Hymen Slate, Louis Lasco, Stuart Brent, Rosalyn Tureck, George Reedy, Nathan Gould, Herbert Passin, Yetta Barshevsky and Zita Cogan. (“The children of Chicago bakers, tailors, peddlers, insurance agents, pressers, cutters, grocers, the sons of families on relief, were reading buckram-bound books from the public library and were in a state of enthusiasm, having found themselves on the shore of a novelistic land to which they really belonged, discovering their birthright, hearing incredible news from the great world of culture, talking to one another about the mind, society, art, religion, epistemology, and doing all this in Chicago.”) Collaborates with childhood friend Sydney J. Harris—later well-known columnist at
Chicago Daily News
—on novel. Sydney brings book to New York; is taken up by John Dos Passos and Pascal Covici among others. (“In the opinion of the New York experts who had read our manuscript, Sydney was an obvious winner. Covici the publisher had commissioned a book on Chicago’s revolutionary youth and paid Sydney an advance of two hundred dollars. In the judgment of the publishing illuminati, I would do well to enter my father’s business.”)