Saul Bellow reveres Mozart. But when it comes to understanding the roots of the composer`s genius, even the great novelist not lacking in insight in human affairs concedes to being a bit baffled.
Spring Bostonia, a quarterly from Boston University, includes ”Bellow on Mozart,” a bewitching essay that`s an adaptation of a speech Bellow gave last year in Italy at a celebration of Mozart`s bicentenary.
Bellow learned to play the violin as a kid in Chicago and often heard Mozart creations as an usher at the Auditorium Theatre. He remains enthralled with Mozart, especially when he wonders how someone could be so brilliant so young.
”Mozart, to borrow a figure from William Blake, was a piece of ground already spaded and seeded. It looks, in other words, as if he had brought it all with him,” Bellow writes.
What`s most alluring about Bellow`s musing is his assertion that rationality and orderly processes of thought only get one so far into dissecting Mozart. One can`t be totally scientific in analyzing Mozart, which amounts to a sin of sorts since, ”To be unscientific is in our time a grave mental offense.”
Bellow`s big personal concession is one that violates our craving for orderly processes. It`s his hunch that ”with beings such as Mozart we are forced to speculate about transcendence and this makes us very uncomfortable, since ideas of transcendence are associated with crankiness or faddism-even downright instability and mental feebleness.”
Bellow is too much a Rational Man to get starry-eyed about all this. He doesn`t want to go overboard in pressing a thesis of ”profound originality coming from God-knows-what source.” He invokes it largely ”as a corrective to the earthbound psychology that rules our minds in this century,” a mind-set ”painfully limiting to the intelligence and often little more than a convenient way to dispose of troublesome intimations of a forbidden nature.” (The issue can be had for $4.50 via 10 Lenox St., Brookline, Mass. 02146).
Quickly: April Milwaukee greets a new baseball season with a charming look back at the Milwaukee Brewers when they were a minor league team (from 1902 to 1952), and includes a picture found in archives of an unidentified pitcher ”supposedly traded for a dog that was later named Sue.” . . . April Outlines, a gay-lesbian monthly, has a somewhat inelegant caption, linked to a story inside and underneath a cover photo of a smiling Gloria Steinem alongside Illinois` upset Democratic U.S. Senate primary victor Carol Moseley Braun: ”Lesbians and gays `ecstatic` about Carol Moseley Braun primary victory.” Steinem is believed to be happily heterosexual, and there`s no hint otherwise inside. . . . April D, Dallas` city monthly, includes a kindly profile of George W. Bush, 45, the president`s eldest son and an owner in the Texas Rangers. The son`s role in the sacking of White House Chief of Staff John Sununu is laid out, including his soliciting opinions and then reporting back to his dad. He calls that role a highlight of his life: ”It`s just not that often that you can do something really meaningful to help the president of the United States.” . . . April 13 New Yorker begins what looks to be an engrossing two-parter on what linguists are learning about the relationship of speech to mental and emotional development from the case of a deeply abused California woman. She was discovered in 1970 at age 13 after having been essentially a prisoner in her home and unable to understand and speak more than a handful of words. . . . Most curious headline of the week is from April Longevity: ”Leaky Bladders: It`s not age, it`s aerobics.” It cites findings of a University of Michigan researcher that indicate that Baby Boom women who exercise ”are experiencing a problem that`s usually associated with later life: urinary incontinence.” All that bouncing is affecting their bladders, news that will surely be of help to those incontinent 90-year-olds using Jane Fonda workout videos. . . . Historian Lawrence Bloom of San Diego State University treads on potentially treacherous turf in April New Woman but pulls off a warm, funny and somewhat risque first-person account of how he and his wife, both now 43, tried exhaustingly to start a family four years ago by placing their trust in science, including such methods as intrauterine inseminations. ”My penis had been replaced by a needle. After all we had been through, I wasn`t sure my wife would notice the difference.”
