It All Adds Up:
From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future
By Saul Bellow
Viking, 327 pages, $23.95
My dearest friend in this life said to me, “Don’t tell me about his book; I want to read it myself.” I said, “Don’t worry, I can’t tell you one ten-thousandth of all that’s in it.”
Here, in these nonfiction writings, Saul Bellow draws upon those powers of observation basic to his fiction: his minutely detailed descriptions of people and places and striking conclusions about wonders of the world he has seen in many places. Someone asks him how he trained his eye to see so much. Bellow replies:
“I don’t know whether it was training at all. I think it was just spontaneous. I think that when I was a very small child it wasn’t what people said, the contents of what they said, so much as the look of them and their gestures that spoke to me. That is, a nose was also a speaking member, and so were a pair of eyes. And so was the way your hair grew and the set of your ears, the condition of your teeth, the emanations of the body. All of that.”
One day in 1956 his eye was upon Yellow Kid Weil, famous Chicago confidence man, whom Bellow encountered in the lobby of the Sun-Times building. Weil was 80.
“He must once have been very imposing. Now there is a sort of fallen nattiness about him. His shoes are beautifully shined, though not in top condition. His suit is made of a bold material; it has gone too often to the cleaner, but it is in excellent press. His shirt must belong to the days of his prosperity, for his neck has shrunk and the collar fits loosely. The cloth has a green pattern of squares within squares. Tie and pocket handkerchief are of a matching green. His little face is clear and animated. Long practice in insincerity gives him an advantage; it is not always easy to know where he is coming from.”
Bellow sees the Loop, circa 1977: “You see costumes of powerful originality in the Loop, where many of the shoppers are junior civil servants who work in the skyscrapers built by the federal government. The Loop streets at noon are a fashion show. And in courtrooms and detention cells, men charged with mugging are also dressed in high style, soiled but elegant, in suede and velveteens, hair teased out in saffron or henna puffballs. Dudes in torn shirts but with coat sleeves that pucker ingeniously at the shoulders wear blunt boots in four colors with red or yellow laces that crisscross up the leg.”
In 1961, reporting Khrushchev’s visit to the U.S., Bellow observed that “one of the privileges of power seems to be the privilege of direct emotional self-expression. . . . Such are the privileges of power, but bafflingly enough, apart from artists and tyrants, few people . . . feel strong enough to tell the world how they feel.” Bellow the artist, so different from the tyrant observed, eventually seized for himself the power and privilege of direct emotional self-expression.
This book of selected essays, articles, travel accounts, lectures, historical recollections, character analysis, literary appreciations and cheerful obituaries (Bellow never stoops to the obligatory eulogy-truth at all times, even at a funeral) is no mere dutiful repository of tame pieces or curiosities. These are vivid, vibrant documents telling us how we have lived during the life of Bellow’s memory (he was born in 1914) and how we might yet perfect ourselves, how the world might become that place in which art reigns and thought becomes aesthetic pleasure. “But what America lacked, for all its political stability,” he once wrote, “was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures.”
This gathering of Bellow reveals, by the re-emphasis natural to a collection, certain fundamental ideas to which he has held steadfast. Stubbornly inextricable from his being, his ideas are reiterated here in separate essays written over 50 years.
Bellow is no short-term pragmatist but an idealist, a visionary. He thinks beyond self-interest. He does not defend the world as a kind place simply because it has been so kind to Saul Bellow. He is a utopian. He knows the world to be brutal, savage, bleak, miserable. It is wrong that the world should be as it is. With the end of the Cold War it was Bellow’s hope that mankind might at last employ its imagination to transform the world. Humankind must approach its potentiality for civilization.
“My case against the intellectuals,” he writes, “can be easily summarized: Science has postulated a nature with no soul in it; commerce does not deal in souls and higher aspirations-matters like love and beauty are none of its business. . . . Intellectuals seem to me to have turned away from those elements in life unaccounted for in modern science and that in modern experience have come to seem devoid of substance. The powers of soul, which were Shakespeare’s subject (to be simple about it) and are heard incessantly in Handel or Mozart, have no footing at present in modern life and are held to be subjective. Writers here and there still stake their lives on the existence of these forces. About this, intellectuals have little or nothing to say.”
He continues: “Our American world is a prodigy. Here, on the material level, the perennial dreams of mankind have been realized. We have shown that the final conquest of scarcity may be at hand. Provision is made for human needs of every sort. In the United States-in the West-we live in a society that produces a fairy-tale superabundance of material things. Ancient fantasies have been made real. We can instantaneously see and hear what is far away. Our rockets are able to leave the earth. The flights we make are thoughts as well as real journeys. . . . I myself believe that everything that can be imagined is bound to be realized at least once-everything that mankind is capable of conceiving it seems compelled to do. These, for better or for worse, are the thoughts the end of the cold war suggest to me.”
Bellow has always declined to play the celebrity. In spite of his prizes he deplores the competitive system. People coming to see a celebrity but finding his remarks inaccessible to them, often end by calling Bellow boring. They dismiss him by belittling his influence.
In 1977, when a remark in a newspaper troubled him, he wrote, “The columnist Mike Royko, in his obituary on Mayor Daley, said that it was the powerful, semiliterate Daleys who spoke for Chicago, not the S. Bellows. Up to a point, he was right. No novelist can be Chicago’s representative man. But the novelist can see, perhaps, what is coming. What (the novelist) did he did not do for the sake of being different or out of arbitrariness. He did it because of his intuition that something humanity was up to in its American setting was not yet visible and clear and that he must not take what was manifest as final.”
Bellow the explorer repeatedly discovers Chicago. “A fiction writer by trade, I see myself also as something of a historian.” In an article published in 1983 he took a rambling look around:
“City politics are comic opera. Circuit judges are convicted of racketeering. One can only guess how many grand juries are hearing testimony and preparing indictments. On my rounds, feeling like an unofficial, unsalaried inspector, I check out the new apartment houses on the banks of the Chicago River, in my time an industrial wasteland. To call these expeditions sad wouldn’t be accurate. I am not heavyhearted. I am uneasy but also terribly curious, deeply intrigued. After all, I am no mere spectator, for I have invested vital substance in these surroundings, we have exchanged influences-in what proportions I can’t say.”
Bellow inherited from his family both socialism and Judaism, not as havens but as foundations of his moral life. “I didn’t go to a parochial school, but the religious vein was very strong and lasted until I was old enough to make a choice between Jewish life and street life. The power of street life made itself felt.”
No writer was ever more earnest about his work and craft, ever more devoted, committed or filled with urgency to speak to his fellows. We see how serious-minded he was as a young man in Paris:
“I was not going to sit at the feet of Gertrude Stein,” he writes. “I had no notions about the Ritz Bar. I would not be boxing with Ezra Pound, as Hemingway had done, or writing in bistros while waiters brought oysters and wine. Hemingway the writer I admired without limits; Hemingway the figure was to my mind the quintessential tourist, the one who believed that he alone was the American whom Europeans took to their hearts as one of their own. In simple truth, the Jazz Age Paris of American legend had no charms for me. . . .”
Americans, so well trained in all the fields of knowledege and machinery, lead only a mental life-“a mental life, I say, and not a moral life.” Bellow yearns for our living at “the moral top of the universe.” If we will not live there with him he will live there nearly alone in the company of compatible figures of literature and history, and with a few friends from Chicago and elsewhere. His admiration for the late John Cheever is based in part on Cheever’s intention “not only to find evidence of a moral life in a disorderly society but also to give us the poetry of the bewildering and stupendous dreamlike world in which we find ourselves.”
In his eulogy to Cheever in 1982 Bellow said, “For me no one makes more sense, no one is so interesting, as a man who engaged his soul in an enterprise of this kind. I find myself, as I grow older, increasingly drawn to those who live as John did. Those who choose such an enterprise, who engaged in such a struggle, make all the interest of life for us.”
