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.He dismisses “prayer shawls and phylacteries and Sabbath sentiment, the Seder, the matchmaking, the marriage canopy; for sadness the Kaddish, for amusement the schnorrer, for admiration the bearded scholar.” Bellow goes at Jewishness free-style, his own way; the myths that comfort others have no appeal for him.But he doesn’t want a bold new image either, unless it’s the reality he knows best, the ravenous Jewish intellectuals he lives among.BELLOW IS a natural comedian, and so his piece on Jewish short story writers becomes an argument for the depth of their comedy.Clearly, he is thinking of his own work too when he writes, “The real secret, the ultimate mystery, may never reveal itself to the earnest thought of a Spinoza, but when we laugh (the idea is remotely Hasidic) our minds refer us to God’s existence.Chaos is exposed.” With his practice of serious comedy in his books, Bellow makes us think not just of Jewish authors like Sholem Aleichem or Isaac Babel, but of Dostoevsky, with his frantic, hugely entertaining sufferers.Bellow is one of the most personal and intimate of fiction writers.What he values most of all is the battered heart, and its dealings with the world.Yet his work is not at all grim: he might be the funniest of our major writers.“ ‘I have suffered,’ he said, and then he laughed as if nothing could be funnier”: so Susan Cheever in one of her memoirs remembers Bellow at a party.He tells us something that cannot be told by the intellectual, the editorialist, the historian, or the political commentator—something that sparks the soul, and wants to wake it up.“Things around Saul were magical,” Leon Wieseltier told me.“He noticed more so I noticed more.The vitality was off the charts; it was physical, it was intellectual.The thing that offended Saul more than anything was drowsiness.” Wakefulness was Bellow’s constant goal, Wieseltier said.“He lived in the present in a ferocious way.The New York intellectuals were always looking for masters who weren’t themselves.Saul didn’t do that.There was something so deeply unsubservient about Saul.His mind was as good as anybody’s mind, he thought.He didn’t have reverence.He blew the whole thing up, even though he was one of them.He gave you this feeling of being primary, which is a very rare feeling.”Bellow is sometimes called a novelist of ideas, but he sensed that ideas can block life.His particular target was the New York intellectuals, the gang he ran with but also the frequent object of his attacks.In a letter to Fiedler in June 1955, he wrote, “I don’t consider myself part of the Partisan group.Not those dying beasts.” He delighted in introducing the eminences of Partisan Review to Dave Peltz, a colorful and louche pal whom he’d known since he was a teenager.He assigned Peltz to show Hannah Arendt around Chicago when she was considering a job at the university (in the end, the meeting between Peltz and Arendt never took place).Once Bellow and Peltz took Lionel Trilling slumming after a lecture, standing him drinks in a dive bar.“A cold coming we had of it,” Bellow joked in a letter, likening these three diverse Jews to T.S.Eliot’s Magi.The intellectual’s doom occurs when he chooses ideas over the lively world.In Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow reluctantly judges that the madcap and mad Von Humboldt Fleisher, based on his friend Delmore Schwartz, has succumbed to ideas.He has made himself boring, and so turned his back on life.“Humboldt had become boring in the vesture of a superior person, in the style of high culture, with all of his conforming abstractions.Many hundreds of thousands of people were now wearing this costume of the higher misery.” Bellow’s task is to shake us out of this straitjacket, the higher misery of ideas.Yet he loved ideas, too: you had to go through them to get out of them.His son Adam recalled that Bellow “once told me that he’d worked through all the ideologies of the twentieth century so that I wouldn’t have to.I still did, though.”A little-noticed article that Bellow wrote for Encounter in 1963, “Some Notes on Recent American Fiction,” is his declaration of independence as a writer, or at least the place where he declared what he wasn’t.He wrote the essay as he was finishing Herzog, and it shows: his tacit job is to figure out how this book, in which Bellow truly comes into his own, outdoes its rivals.American fiction seems narrow to Bellow, which makes him ask some old-new questions: What can a novel tell us about ourselves? And what has the self become anyway in the twentieth century?In his Encounter essay Bellow rejects what he calls the writers of “sensibility,” the craftsmen (and women) of inwardness.He remarks, “The individual in American fiction often comes through to us, especially among writers of ‘sensibility,’ as a colonist who has been sent to a remote place, some Alaska of the soul.What he has to bring under cultivation, however, is a barren emptiness within himself.”Bellow’s chief example of sensibility is John Updike, who would become a long-running critical foe, a habitual negative reviewer of Bellow’s books in The New Yorker.What Updike’s self-cultivation really amounts to, Bellow says, is “the rearrangement of things in new and hostile solitude.” About Updike’s story “Pigeon Feathers” Bellow remarks cuttingly, “We suspect [sensibility] of a stony heart because it functions so smoothly in its isolation.” And the “stoicism of separateness” in Hemingway or John O’Hara also seems arid to Bellow, much like Updike’s method.Like the writer of sensibility, the stoic is an obsessive craftsman.Bellow wants something wider and freer.Bellow showed an intense concern with Lolita in his 1963 Encounter essay.Nabokov’s scandalous tour de force had taken the literary world by storm with its American publication five years earlier; Herzog would achieve a similar victory.But Bellow was determined to make Herzog a far different book from Lolita.Bellow compares Lolita to Death in Venice and is troubled by the decline of desire from Mann to Nabokov.Mann’s “sad occurrence involves Apollo and Dionysus,” he writes, whereas “the internal life of Humbert Humbert has become a joke.” Humbert “is a fourth- or fifth-rate man of the world and is unable to be entirely serious about his passion.” Bellow adds, “The earnestness of Mann about love and death might be centuries old.The same subject is sadly and maliciously comical in Lolita.” Nabokov’s Quilty doesn’t take his own death seriously, and so loses “a life that was not worth having anyway.”Nabokov, of course, poked fun at what he considered Mann’s plaster-of-paris pretense to great themes and ideas; his ironies were more corrosive, and also easier, than Mann’s [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]