The Gap Between Literature and Life

There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction
by Saul Bellow
Viking, 2015, 532 pages, $43.50

Authors like Les Murray and David Malouf read a lot, and as a result produce stimulating essays. Saul Bellow, the best American novelist of the past half-century, confesses, “I am of course an auto­didact, as modern writers always are,” and this posthumous selection of essays puts him among the best commentators too.

As the book’s title explains, we are today so bombarded by foreground chatter, crises, information overload and media blitzes that we’re constantly distracted: “Each of us stands in the middle of things, exposed to the great public noise.” So taken up are we by public events that our very personalities have been, as Bellow shows, appropriated by our own history: “waves of disintegrative details wash over us and threaten to wear away all sense of order and proportion”. Wordsworth believed the world is “too much with us”; T.S. Eliot said he didn’t read the newspapers because they were too exciting.

Nineteenth-century Romantic writers allied themselves with nature against society. But, as Bellow says:

Romantic enthusiasm (resistance to bourgeois existence) was largely discredited by the end of the nineteenth century. The twentieth inverted romanticism by substituting hate for love and nihilism for self-realization.

Many writers in our time still stand apart, adopting a superior, adversary attitude to society, the writer as scourge of society. Sometimes they even ditch literature, and go for power and celebrity status. The public roles of authors like Norman Mailer, Jean-Paul Sartre and Gunter Grass overtook their writing.

The presence of authors in universities and at literary festivals adds to this temptation. Bellow comments:

Hostile to institutions, anti-authority by tradition, [writers] are not likely to be tranquil in their university sanctuary. Bad conscience leads them to take exaggeratedly radical attitudes. But this radicalism of gesture turns out to be immensely popular. A large and growing public shares the uneasiness of writers and welcomes this show of radicalism … But it is only the manner that is radical. Few things can be safer, more success-assuring, than this non-threatening radicalism, dangerous to no one and relying, at bottom, on the stability of institutions.

Ideology under the guise of “deep reading” dominates literary criticism. This Bellow satirises by imagining a professor asking why Achilles drags the body of Hector around the walls of Troy. A modern student, wised up on postmodernism, might reply: “Well you see, The Iliad is full of circles—shields, chariot wheels and other round figures. And you know what Plato said about circles. The Greeks were all made for geometry.” The professor thanks the student for this “beautiful thought” but adds: “Still, I always believed that Achilles did it because he was angry.” When classic literature was derided in universities and replaced by courses on post-colonial writing, Bellow famously asked: “Where is the Papuan Tolstoy?”

In this disturbed, ideology-driven world the writer, Bellow believes, must discard preconceived superstructures, immerse himself in mainstream life, absorb a lot and draw his own conclusions. He has to create his world from the ground up, putting it together as a coherent whole by an act of imagination, not cognition. In this way distraction is overcome and “It All Adds Up”—the title of Bellow’s previous collection of essays.

Under the pressure of modern life our personalities can become flaky—we no longer have the comfort of a stable, pre-determined personality. Bellow was himself a bohemian liberal and a non-observant Jew. But, destabilised by a world crumbling around him, and liable to crumble himself, he would, he tells us rather unexpectedly:

fall back instinctively on my first consciousness [Jewishness], which has always seemed to me to be the most real and most easily accessible. But our meddling mental world puts all such realities in doubt. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.

In his essay on Philip Roth’s novella Goodbye, Columbus, Bellow shows how the book’s satire is deficient—Roth stands apart and looks down on bourgeois life as philistine and materialistic. This in Bellow’s view constitutes a facile opposition between spirit and worldly goods. By contrast, in the great novels of Bellow’s middle period (Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift, Mr Sammler’s Planet and The Dean’s December), the satire works because it is internalised and self-deprecating, not egotistical like Roth’s.

In Herzog, Bellow exploits to great comic effect the gap between literature and life. When a moment of truth comes, all your reading and learning are of no use to you:

What is he [Herzog] to do in this moment of crisis, pull Aristotle or Spinoza from the shelf and storm through the pages looking for consolation and advice? I meant to show how little “higher education” had to offer a stricken man.

Herzog tries, however ludicrously, to make sense of his shattering experience, to put the pieces together, and to painfully build up again a serviceable personality. We now know from the biography of Bellow that the novel’s genesis was his wife leaving him and his own difficulty in coping with this. So writing the novel was probably therapeutic for him as well as Herzog, getting it off his chest.

Bellow was a liberal mugged by reality. He came to agree with the Congress for Cultural Freedom view of the Cold War, even though he had some differences with leading Congress figures like Sidney Hook:

Activists like Hook made a difference. Their contribution to victory in the Cold War can’t be measured but must be acknowledged. It was Hook, not Sartre, whose views prevailed and should have prevailed.

Bellow has a lovely easy fluid style in these essays, relaxed, unpanicky, musing and meandering among his thoughts, expanding on key passages from literature that have meant much to him, and conveying all this to his audience in an unhurried, conversational tone, which is by turns witty, sly and ironical. It’s a joy to meet a mind which gives you such a lift and a reassurance that sanity may prevail.