The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (3 page)

But of course, Bellow does also make us see the human form, does open our senses and discipline our sensibilities, as Flaubert told Maupassant the writer should: “There is a part of everything which is unexplored,” said Flaubert, “because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.” Bellow exposes this unknown quality, either by force of metaphorical wit (hips like a car jack) or by noticing, with unexpected tenderness of vision, what we have grown accustomed to overlooking: the “white shine” of poor McKern’s shins as he lies on the bed, or Pop’s bald head, as remembered by his son in “A Silver Dish”: “the sweat was sprinkled over his scalp—more drops than hairs.”

And seeing is important, lays an injunction on us, in these stories. Many of them are narrated by men who are remembering childhood experiences, or at least younger days, and are using powers of visual recall to conjure forth vivid characters and heroes. Physical detail, exactly rendered, is memory’s quarry and makes its own moral case: it is how we bring the dead back to life, give them a second life in our minds. In fact, these memories become, through force of evocation, a first life again and begin to jostle us as the actually living do. In “Cousins,” the narrator agrees to intervene in a relative’s court case because his family memories exert a pressure over him: “I did it for Cousin Metzger’s tic. For the three bands of Neapolitan ice cream. For the furious upright growth of Cousin Shana’s ruddy hair, and the avid veins of her temples and in the middle of her forehead. For the strength with which her bare feet advanced as she mopped the floor and spread the pages of the
Tribune
_ over it.”

Bellow’s way of seeing his characters also tells us something about his metaphysics. In his fictional world, people do not stream with motives; as novelists go, he is no depth psychologist. Instead, his characters are embodied souls, stretched essences. Their bodies are their confessions, their moral camouflage faulty and peeling: they have the bodies they deserve. Victor Wulpy, a tyrant in thought, has a large, tyrannical head; Max Zetland, a reproving, witholding father, has an unshavable cleft or pucker in his chin, and when he smokes, “he held in the smoke of his cigarettes.” It is perhaps for this reason that Bellow is rarely found describing young people; even his middle-aged characters seem old. For in a sense he turns all his characters into old people, since the old helplessly wear their essences on their bodies, they are seniors in moral struggle. Aunt Rose, in “The Old System,” has a body almost literally eaten into by history: She had a large bust, wide hips, and old-fashioned thighs of those corrupted shapes that belong to history.”

Like Dickens, and to some extent like Tolstoy and Proust, Bellow sees humans as the embodiments of a single dominating essence or law of being, and makes repeated reference to his characters’ essences, in a method of leitmotif. As, in
Anna Karenina,
_ Stiva Oblonsky always has a smile, and Anna a light step, and Levin a heavy tread, each attribute the accompaniment of a particular temperament, so Max Zetland has his reproving pucker, and Sorella, in “The Bellarosa Connection,” her forceful obesity, and so on. In
Seize the Day,
_ probably the finest of Bellow’s shorter works, Tommy Wilhelm sees the great crowds walking in New York and seems to see “in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence—/
labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want.”
_

Bellow has written that when we read “the best nineteenth and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature,” and his own work, his own way of seeing essential human types, may be added to that grand project.

Bellow’s stories seem to divide into two kinds: long, looseedged stories, which read as if they began life as novels (such as “Cousins”), and short, almost classical tales, which often recount the events of a single day (“Something to Remember Me By,”

“A Silver Dish,”

“Looking for Mr. Green”). Yet in both types of story the same kind of narrative prose is at work, one that tends toward the recollection of distant events and tends also toward a version of stream of consciousness. Here, the unnamed narrator of “Zetland” recalls Max Zetland, his friend’s father: Max Zetland was a muscular man who weighed two hundred pounds, but these were only scenes—not dangerous. As usual, the morning after, he stood at the bathroom mirror and shaved with his painstaking brass Gillette, made neat his reprehending face, flattened his hair like an American executive, with military brushes. Then, Russian style, he drank his tea through a sugar cube, glancing at the
Tribune,
_ and went off to his position in the Loop, more of less
in Ordnung.
_ A normal day. Descending the back stairs, a short cut to the El, he looked through the window of the first floor at his Orthodox parents in the kitchen. Grandfather sprayed his bearded mouth with an atomizer—he had asthma. Grandmother made orange-peel candy. Peels dried all winter on the steam radiators. The candy was kept in shoeboxes and served with tea.

Sitting in the El, Max Zetland wet his finger on his tongue to turn the pages of the thick newspaper… Tin pagoda roofs covered the El platforms. Each riser of the long staircase advertised Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. Iron loss made young girls pale. Max Zetland himself had a white face, white-jowled, a sarcastic bear, but acceptably pleasant, entering the merchandising palace on Wabash Avenue…

The narrator, who is not related to Max Zetland, is writing about Max Zetland as if he himself had been there, as if he were recalling the daily scene, and he is using a style of writing that Joyce perfected in
Ulysses
_—a jumble of different recollected details, a life-sown prose logging impressions with broken speed, in which the perspective keeps on expanding and contracting, as memory does: at one moment, we see Grandfather caught in a moment of dynamism, spraying his bearded mouth with an atomizer, and then in the next we hear that Grandmother made candy from orange peel and that this peel spent all winter drying on the radiators. At one moment we see the advertisements for Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, the next we see Max entering his workplace. The prose moves between different temporalities, between the immediate and the traditional, the shortlived and the longlived. The narrator of “Something to Remember Me By” writes that at home, inside the house, they lived by “an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life.” Bellow’s prose moves in similar ways, between the “archaic” or traditional, and the immediate, dynamic “facts of life.”

Detail feels modern in Bellow because it is so often the remembered
impression
_ of a detail, filtered through a consciousness; and yet his details still have an unmodern solidity. At the risk of sounding apocalyptic, one might say that Bellow reprieved realism for a generation, the generation that came after the Second World War, that he held its neck back from the blade of the postmodern; and he did this by revivifying traditional realism with modernist techniques. His prose is densely “realistic,” yet it is hard to find in it any of the usual conventions of realism or even of storytelling. His people do not walk out of the house and into other houses—they are, as it were, tipped from one recalled scene to another—and his characters do not have obviously “dramatic” conversations. It is almost impossible to find in these stories sentences along the lines of “He put down his drink and left the room.” These are at once traditional and very untraditional stories, both “archaic” and radical.

Curiously enough, the stream of consciousness, for all its reputation as the great accelerator of description, actually slows down realism, asks it to dawdle over tiny remembrances, tiny details and lusters, to circle and return. The stream of consciousness is properly the ally of the short story, of the anecdote, the fragment—and it is no surprise that the short story and the stream of consciousness appear in strength in literature at about the same time, toward the end of the nineteenth century: in Hamsun and in Chekhov, and a little later in Bely and Babel.

At home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life.” This is the axis on which many of these stories run, both at the level of the shifting prose and at the larger level of meaning. For most of the heroes and narrators of these stories, Chicago, where “the facts of life” reign, exists as both torment and spur. Chicago is American, modern; but life at home, as for Max Zetland, is traditional, “archaic,” respectably Jewish, with memories and habits of Russian life. (Bellow was nearly born in Russia, of course; his father came from there to Lachine, Quebec, in 1913, and Bellow was born in June 1915.) In these tales, Bellow returns again and again to the city of his childhood, massive, industrial, peopled, where the El “ran like the bridge of the elect over the damnation of the slums,” a city both brutal and poetic, “blue with winter, brown with evening, crystal with frost.” Chicago, this agglomeration of human fantasies—the protagonist of “Looking for Mr. Green” realizes that the city represents a collective agreement of will—must be reckoned with and recorded as exactly and lyrically as the humans who throng these characters’ memories. But Chicago is also a realm of confusion and vulgarity, a place inimical to the life of the mind and the proper expansion of the imagination. The narrator of “Zetland” remembers that he and young Zetland (Max’s son) would read Keats to each other while rowing on the city lagoon: “Books in Chicago were obtainable. The public library in the twenties had many storefront branches along the car lines. Summers, under flipping gutta-percha fan blades, boys and girls read in the hard chairs. Crimson trolley cars swayed, cowbellied, on the rails. The country went broke in 1929. On the public lagoon, rowing, we read Keats to each other while the weeds bound the oars.”

“While the reeds bound the oars”—Chicago always threatens to entangle the Bellovian character, as also does his family, to stifle him. In these stories, Bellow’s characters are repeatedly tempted by visions of escape—sometimes mystical, sometimes religious, and often Platonic (Platonic in the sense that the real world, the Chicago world, is felt to be not the real world but only a place where the soul is in exile, a place of mere appearances). Woody, in “A Silver Dish” is suffused with the “secret certainty that the goal set for this earth was that it should be filled with good, saturated with it,” and sits and listens religiously to all the Chicago bells ringing on Sunday. Yet the story he recalls is a tale of shameful theft and trickery, an utterly secular story. The narrator of “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” is attracted by the visions of Swedenborg, and to the idea that “the Divine Spirit” has “withdrawn in our time from the outer, visible world.” Yet his tale is couched as a letter of apology and confession to a peaceful woman he once cruelly insulted. The narrator of “Cousins” admits that he has “never given up the habit of referring all truly important observations to that original self or soul” (referring here to the Platonic idea that man has an original soul from which he has been exiled, and back to which he must again find a path). But again, the spur of his revelations is completely secular—a shameful court case involving a crooked cousin.

Bellow’s argument, if that word is not too bullying, would seem to be that a purely religious or intellectual vision—a theoretical intelligence—is weightless, even dangerous, without the human data provided both by a city like Chicago and by the ordinary strategies and culpabilities of families and friends. Zetland, who, we are told, has “no interest in surface phenomena,” abandons the pure thought of analytic logic after moving to New York and reading Melville. Victor Wulpy may be a great art critic, but he cannot tell Katrina, his lover, that he loves her, even though it is what she most earnestly longs to hear. It falls to a charlatan and producer of science fiction films, Larry Wrangel, correctly to remark on the painful limits of Victor’s all-knowing mind.

Bellow’s characters all yearn to make something of their lives in the religious sense, and yet this yearning is not written up religiously or solemnly. It is written up comically: our metaphysical cloudiness, and our fierce, clumsy attempts to make these clouds yield rain, are full of hilarious pathos in his work. In this regard, Bellow is perhaps most tenderly suggestive in his lovely late story “Something to Remember Me By.” The narrator, now old, recalls a single day from his adolescence, in Depression-dug Chicago. He was, he recalls, a kid dreamy with religious and mystical ideas of a distinctly Platonic nature: “Where, then, is the world from which the human form comes?” he asks rhetorically. On his job delivering flowers in the city, he always used to take one of his philosophical or mystical texts with him. On the day under remembrance, he becomes the victim of a cruel prank. A woman lures him into her bedroom, encourages him to remove his clothes, throws them out of the window, and then flees. The clothes disappear, and it is his task then to get home, an hour away across freezing Chicago, to the house where his mother is dying and his stern father waits for him, with “blind Old Testament rage”—“at home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life.”

The boy is clothed by the local barman and earns his fare home by agreeing to take one of the bar’s regulars, a drunk called McKern, to McKern’s apartment. Once there, the boy lays out the drunk and then cooks supper for McKern’s two motherless young daughters—he cooks pork cutlets, the fat splattering his hands and filling the little apartment with pork smoke. “All that my upbringing held in horror geysered up, my throat filling with it, my guts griping,” he tells us. But he does it. Eventually, the boy finds his own way home, where his father, as expected, beats him. Along with his clothes, he has lost his treasured book, which was also thrown out of the window. But, he reflects, he will buy the book again, with money stolen from his mother. “I knew where my mother secretly hid her savings. Because I looked into all books, I had found the money in her
mahzor,
_ the prayer book for the High Holidays, the days of awe.”