Only the best artists know that life matters more than art. Saul Bellow was certainly one of those.
“Perhaps writing something matters. Perhaps it does,” he says on the death of a friend. Bellow explored this idea, as well as certain life events’ capacity to render learning and thinking futile, in Herzog, his masterpiece about a man who composes unsent letters while coming to terms with a divorce. A friend of mine says there’s two bad lines in The Great Gatsby but I submit that there are none in Herzog. Bellow would have balked at talk of perfection but his best novels get it right the way Scott Fitzgerald and Gustave Flaubert do.
“A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously, in a form which frees his mind, his energies. Why should he hobble himself with formalities?” This is a more complicated statement than it looks because, although The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog have unorthodox structures, their energy never spills into incoherence or even the order through chaos Bellow admired. Cathedrals of words they may be; loose, baggy monsters they are not.
Bellow, the child of Russian Jews, might have had an ambivalent attitude to Dostoyevsky’s concept of true brotherhood. He was a loyal and stimulating friend but he was strict about not making demands on others and he expected reciprocal integrity. “When shall I see you?” he consistently asks of the likes of John Berryman and John Cheever but as well as great enthusiasm for people he possessed a weakness for dramatic severances. The latter may be an unfortunate byproduct of the former but often, reading of his disappointment in a former intimate, one senses that the addressee might wonder when it’s their turn to feel his wrath. Sometimes the reader is glad to have not known him.
The women of the Letters are as compelling as those of the fiction. They have none of the haunting imperfections of, say, Philip Roth’s buck-toothed bisexuals and gammy-legged head-cases, they are more like the women of Herzog: Ramona, the Fifth Avenue florist with a taste for frilly underwear and ageing intellectuals; Madeleine who puts on black stockings and high heels to leave her husband. Bellow is, of course, alive to the ironies of these “Big bosomed, assertive,” fantasies.
He was married five times and the divorces make for painful reading. It was ridiculous of his second wife to demand a share of the proceeds from a novel which drew on her decision to leave Bellow for his friend, but she is right to expect increased contributions for their son when Herzog becomes a bestseller. Collecting honorary degrees from Ivy League colleges, retreating to Italian villas, playing tennis with Cambridge philosophers, Bellow frequently grumbles about the cost of his sons back in the Midwest. In a particularly unedifying account of an alimony case, he writes, “It’s true that I took an advance of fifty thousand, but suppose I’d been unable to complete the book?”
Over all, this book is full of joy. “They have none of that ingenuous, possibly childish love of literature you and I have,” Bellow says, swiping at critics in an immortal missive to Roth. “We owe something to life,” he tells a woman who may be contemplating suicide. “It must come easily or not at all,” he says, debunking the myth that writing fiction cannot be enjoyed. Bellow was affirming in life as in art.
Any Cop?: Martin Amis, who appears here, believes that novelists enter a period of purgatory before their legacy is properly cemented. If Bellow’s popularity has dwindled since his death in 2005, it might be because his work is so full of unfashionable joy. Let’s change that.
Max Liu
Bookmunch 