The Dean's December

...But Bellow has not imagined the subject fully...

...Watkin's Morality and Architecture became a cult book for a time--because it was about theories --and was carried around by students (who probably never opened it...

...The world of Chicago, of course, is very d i f f e r e n t from the world of Bucharest, but Corde is disturbed by both...

...I could begin scouting around for grammar schools furnished with extra-large desks (and basketball teams...

...And in this novel he has grimly observed that if in the East the danger comes from above--from the 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1982 Stalinist bureaucracy with its secret police and informers--in the West the danger comes from below, from an underclass out of control...

...Americans, I am sorry to say, have fallen for the "High Tech" gimmickry of British architects like Stirling, Foster, and Rogers, s o that when I say that the glazing of English buildings by Foster is less sophisticated and interesting than that of a Hyatt Regency Hotel, American architects think I am either joking, which I am not, or that I am trying to damn Foster by comparison with something palpably awful, which I do not think those wonderfully extravagant hotels are...

...In the long run, as adequate substitutes are developed, consumers will have the option of choosing among competing alternatives...

...When the novel opens, Corde is in trouble with the powers-that-be at the university: He has written a bruising article for Harper's on the "whirling souls" of the black underclass in Chicago and has involved h i m s e l f in the prosecution of two who runs a drug abuse program...

...Traditional styles can never today be used straightforwardly...

...Thus, he demonstrates that food should become more plentiful and less costly, pollution less severe, minerals more accessible...

...British architecture also completely changed direction in the 1930s and 40s following an influx of Continental refugees, and they soon acquired native acolytes who did their best to wipe out the old guard and suppress the traditions of building in which we once excelled...

...As Wolfe observes in a crucial passage, "For any architect to have explored an avenue such as a new, straightforward (non-ironic), exuberant (noncamp) system of decoration for American architecture in the late twentieth century would have been a revolutionary development...

...Following the train of Corde's thoughts, we sense that Bellow has thought deeply about a subject that is on the minds of most Americans--not bureaucracy, alienation, or the other fashionable subjects most American n o v e l i s t s wine and dine on, but crime...

...rather, a detail must be made nonsense of to show that it is "an ironic historical reference...

...The facts were covered from our perception...

...In Chicago, however, Corde feels that he can do something...

...Four issues $12.50...

...THE ULTIMATE RESOURCE Julian L. Simon / Princeton University Press / $14.50 Philip F. Lawler During the past month, my baby son grew two inches...

...his main characters are always struggling with ideas--getting angry at them or, more often than not, being confused by them, befuddled by the profusion of ideas on the loose in the modern world...

...He is our most essayistic novelist...

...But the problem with The Dean's December is not simply that Bellow is, so to speak, too close to Corde...

...The Ultimate Resource is written as an antidote to these follies, and so Simon has aimed for a popular audience...

...The result, paradoxically perhaps, is that postwar British commercial architecture has been little else but a cheap, inefficient copy of New York and Chicago...

...He is a l s o - - s t r a n g e l y enough--a dean of students...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1982 35...

...Corde spends most of the novel in Bucharest, having flown there with his wife to pay his respects to a dying mother-in-law...

...The result is a novel brimming with important ideas yet inert as a work of fiction...

...Page after page, Simon punctures myths of scarcity and offers instead the counsels of optimism...

...If my son grew two inches last month, he would sprout two more this month...

...now available from Penguin, $10.00...

...Or I could do some historical research into typical patterns of childhood growth...

...Yet few great novelists have been invisible in their novels...

...Even Flaubert did not always follow his artistic creed...

...His basic point is that, despite all the new "isms" and the apparent rejection of Modernism by many architects, the compound walls are as high and as impenetrable as ever...

...But even novels such as Herzog and Humboldt's Gift, which have intellectuals as central characters, are generally successful despite their garrulity and gimcrack plots because Bellow makes them farcical as well as serious...

...Indeed, he befriends two black men who themselves are trying to do something about the sordid realities of life in the underclass-a prison reformer and an ex-addict and the slow death of an underclass bent on destroying itself as well as other people--it is also about death in Romania...

...The entire structure of the compounds and the clerisy, with all their rewards, psychic and mundane, Would have to be dismantled first...

...the problem is that Bellow takes Corde all too seriously...

...To provide an architecture which is truly popular and decorative has yet to be attempted, despite all the verbiage in Skyline or Oppositions or any of the other journals over which architectural students in the compounds pore...

...Since I am not a social scientist, I chose the latter option...

...Centre for Conftlcf Stud|es, University of New Brunswick Fredericton, N.B., E3B 5A3 Canada Telephone: (506) 453-4978 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1982 33 to come up with a c h a r a c t e r who might be a suitable mouthpiece for his own ideas...

...We feel that we are reading a lecture, not a novel...

...A pity, for though young architects will find it disconcerting, the book has much to teach them...

...He refuses, for example, to c o l l a b o r a t e with an eminent scientist who explains the conduct of the underclass by the pervasiveness of lead poisoning in the slums...

...Or perhaps, as the wittiest and cleverest pseudoapostate of them all, Philip Johnson, observes, perhaps the scholasticism of the East Coast is becoming irrelevant and a vigorous American architecture is going up in places like Houston or Los Angeles...

...They often insist upon their presence--commenting on a character's actions, offering a reflection about human nature...

...the characters, especially the character of Corde, were an afterthought...

...But some novelists, of course, are more visible than others...

...Contrary to the popular myth, we will never exhaust our supply of vital materials...

...Corde comes though the novel with flying colors--getting high marks for insight, decency, moral seriousness...

...Only one other character--an old school pal who is now a famous columnist--acts as a foil to Corde, but Bellow never gives the columnist a chance to challenge Corde's views...

...Corde's own situation seems farfetched, as if Bellow were desperate He or She Who reads The American Spectator Ought also to read a new international journal dealing with low-intensity conflict--the wars that are occurring everywhere--and ways in which governments, the media, and the public respond...

...Reading his novels--or, to be precise, reading all but his first two novels, which are Flaubertian-we hear a vigorous, sardonic, brash voice, the voice of a writer refusing to be confined to the demands of plot and character creation...

...Far from it, he is a hero of sorts, but his heroism is not sufficiently tested in the novel...

...The increase of theories and discourse, itself a cause of new strange forms of blindness, the false representations of "communication," led to horrible distortions of public consciousness...

...Even though some of his novels are in the third person and others are in the first, it does not seem to make much of a difference...

...More than they had been in the past...

...By the time the latest ideas reach Chicago, they're worn thin and easy to see through~ You don't have to bother With them and it saves lots of trouble...

...He doesn't endorse his central characters' opinions...

...But the United States is not alone in this craven subservience to foreign fashions...

...blacks accused of killing a white s t u d e n t of his...

...the tyranny of Modern dogma is worldwide...

...But the truly delightful aspect of the book is its persistent iconoclasm...

...One hopes he will return to the question again, for he--more than any other American novelist save, perhaps, Ralph Ellison--has the imagination, intelligence, and knowledge to write a novel that will make us see the question...

...he merely offers them for inspection...

...Ironically, such predictions have ignored two of the social scientist's most valuable analytical tools: the historical record and the laws of supply and demand...

...The public was treated to a bewildering succession of scenarios for disaster--overpopulation, famine, depletion of the ozone layer, shortages of key raw materials --all based on the assumption that the future would be exactly like the present, only more so...

...It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that Corde here is simply a spokesman for Bellow, because Bellow has always made much of his Chicago connection...

...During the 1970s, however, social scientists preferred the first alternative, and thus created an unprecedented bull market in the doom-andgloom industry...

...Like Nabokov and Updike, Saul Bellow is often very visible in his novels...

...asperated, and angered by the way we live now...

...He is not a farcical figure...

...And because Bellow often has trouble distancing himself from his main character, it is hard to know what to make of Corde's opinions...

...The main force of Simon's argument, however, is directed at the Philip F. Lawler is managing editor o f _9 The Global 2000 Report to the d~resident, Policy Review...

...Corde is an ex-journalist who has become a professor of journalism at a local u n i v e r s i t y in Chicago to have more time for r e a d i n g and thinking...

...The dangers of Bellow's essayistic approach to fiction are obvious...

...Similarly, I can confirm the accuracy of Wolfe's remarks about the "apostates"--those modern architects who dared to step out of line to try to design something rich, decorative, and enjoyable--who found themselves virtually excommunicated in polite architectural society: Edward Durrell Stone, Eero Saarinen, John Portman...

...Consequently, when the Global 2000 rep-ort'Teiterated the discredited Limits to Growth analysis, few critics noticed the irony...

...If Updike is the narrator-as-preacher, nudging his readers to speculate about what it all means, and Nabokov is the narrator-as-aesthete, insisting that his readers pay close attention to his exquisitely detailed observations, Bellow is the narrator-as-taxi driver, telling his readers to cut the nonsense and stop taking this or that fashionable idea seriously...

...If supplies run short, prices will rise, impelling users to find substitutes or to do without...

...Bellow is most successful when he creates characters who are not intellectuals, such as Tommy Wilhelm of Seize the Day, Hattie of "Leaving the Yellow House" (a short story), and Woodrow Selbst of "The Silver Dish," a recent short story that is one of Bellow's most powerful works of fiction...

...In Bucharest, Corde knows that there is nothing he can do about the gray death-in-life that is Statinist- Romania, and he lets others do the wheeling and dealing necessary to ensure that his mother-in-law dies in a relatively humane way and gets a decent funeral...

...He challenges the reader continuously, in one case volunteering to bet a substantial sum of money against anyone who disagrees with his proposition that the price of mineral resources will decline over time...

...If he continued to grow at the same rate, I suddenly realized, he would be ten feet tall when he entered the first grade...

...When the bubble is burst and sanity restored, the story is relegated to the bowels of the newspaper...

...Despite its limp central character, The Dean's December is in the b e s t s e n s e a d i s t u r b i n g novel, disturbing because Bellow confronts the problem of the black underclass - - r e f u s i n g to blink at it, to make easy s e n s e of it by invoking the "deep" explanations of psychology and sociology...

...The passage is central to an understanding of what The Dean "S December is about, but it somehow doesn't work--in that the ideas advanced are not sufficiently assimilated into the novel...

...Confronted with this frightening prospect, I saw only two possible alternatives...

...When the Club of Rome issued its pessimistic Limits to Growth in 1972, popular coverage was intensive...

...If oil prices rose last year, they would rise again next year...

...Even so, as extraordinarily badly taught as the British architectural schools are, they are not yet as pretentious and as ethereally theoretical as those in the United States...

...Unfortunately, crises make better news than solutions...

...Therefore the first act of morality was to disinter the reality, retrieve reality, dig it out from the trash, represent it anew as art would represent it...

...In short, he is an T activist professor, but one who goes I f the novel is about death in against the liberal grain, asking ob- Chicago--the death of his s t u d e n t vious questions about the realities of the underclass, not afraid to appear to be on the wrong side of many i s s u e s , though clearly he is not a racist...

...THE DEAN'S DECEMBER Saul Bellow/Harper& Row/$13.95 Stephen Miller CJkhe~r~ a r t i s t , " Flaubert said, "must be in his work as a god in his creation, invisible yet all-powerful...

...Each prediction was based on a simple, naive extrapolation of an existing trend...

...Take, for instance, the case of "vanishing" raw materials...

...All through my career as a writer," Turgenev once said, " I have never taken ideas but always c h a r a c t e r s for my s t a r t i n g point...

...Corde realizes that in o r d e r to see what life in the u n d e r c l a s s is like you have to " r e c o v e r the world t h a t is buried under the debris of false description or nonexperience...

...we do not know who is doing the struggling with ideas--the main character or the novelist...

...It would also have been heretical . . . . no architect who tried it was likely to have any significant effect on the course of American architecture...

...B e l l o w ' s sardonic voice can be heard in his latest novel, The Dean's December...

...Since competition will eventually bring down prices, the net result will be an increase in the abundance of raw materials, with a concomitant decrease in their cost to the consumer...

...And as Julian Simon argues, anyone using these two tools would have realized that the doomsayers were talking nonsense...

...Explaining why he returned to live in Chicago after spending years in Paris, Albert Corde (the central character) says: "There's the big advantage of backwardness...

...Yes, because the changes, especially the increase in consciousness-and also in false consciousness--was accompanied by a peculiar kind of confusion...

...I cannot see the same happening with From Bauhaus to Our House: it is too irreverent, too funny, too accessible...

...But when the same group reversed its findings in 1976, virtually no one noticed...

...His style is conversational, even combative...

...Yet the ideas themselves are compelling...

...In the American moral crisis," he thinks, the first requirement was to experience what was happening and to see what must be seen...

...The Dean's December reads as if it began with an idea...

...As a worldly-wise taxi driver--one, moreover, who has read all the Great Books--Bellow is not afraid to pursue his own reflections while the plot languishes...

...I begin to think that a cultural inferiority complex is a condition peculiar to the Anglo-American liberal intelligentsia...

...At times his novels veer too close to monologue...

...we hear Bellow talking in all of them, hear the voice of a writer who is in turn amused, exStephen Miller is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...

...On the current state of affairs in the architectural compounds Wolfe is superb, and by quoting the words of the Whites and the Greys, the PostModernists, the Rationalists, and the rest, he successfully makes them seem ridiculous, and strangely irrelevant...

...So when a new disaster is predicted, the popular media rush to publicize it, never wondering how soon it will be proved spurious...