A Theft
Bellow, Saul
A THEFT Saul Bellow/Penguin/109 pp. $6.95 paper Rick Marin nveiling his fourteenth book only in paperback edition seems a move either of sublime crankiness or craftiness on Saul Bellow's part....
...she begs...
...An inspired, global brain who Clara boasts "thinks no more of going to Iran than I do about Coney Island," THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 47 Regler is a major macher, a backstage adviser to international potentates ("The Shah likes to talk to him") and a constantly talking head, on and off MacNeil/Lehrer...
...Among contemporary American novelists this one still reigns king of what D. H. Lawrence called "head culture...
...Such was Saul Bellow's promise...
...her shoulders were not broad but high...
...Bellow spends a great deal of time inventing Clara, preparing her and us for The Theft—her four husbands, digressions up the family tree, the days when she used to cook dinner naked but for a pair of clogs, and so on—to the point where you wish he had gone at it again with the blue pencil...
...A mind like hers demanded space...
...In 109 pages of his elegant, supremely confident prose, Bellow packs a wallop of possibility...
...The thievery in question doesn't occur until near the halfway mark, a playful dalliance...
...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989...
...Though it's been received with polite enthusiasm, all the blurbable ink on A Theft still reads like a tribute to what might have been...
...As the story goes, Bellow's agent shopped the Nobel Laureates 25,000-plus words around to a select few of the better magazines and was told, No thank you, too long...
...Gog and Magog—last of the giants...
...And behold: the book becomes not just a publishing event, which any new work by Saul Bellow already is, but a Media Event, essential "Life" news for USA Today...
...Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift: all reasons to seek out the author's latest fictional pronunciamento, whatever its form, and read on...
...Like Jay McInerney...
...Her blue eyes, exceptionally large, grew prominent when she brooded...
...in Clara, because she had so much personal force, it came across as ruggedly handsome...
...a writer of big books, not little ones...
...a mind like hers demanded space...
...Sidney Poitier...
...She needed that head...
...But Clara is a woman after his own heart, more substantial than the erotic playthings he's plunked in the beds and bathtubs of dozens of male alter egos over the years...
...In a person of an inert character a head of such a size might have seemed a deformity...
...The mouth was very good, but stretched extremely wide when she grinned, when she wept...
...And he does, inveighing against psychiatry ("keeps you infantile"), child abuse ("normal punishment in my time"), and even—Bellow taking a slightly anachronistic shot here—glasnost...
...She needed that head...
...Would the NL care to have another go with the blue pencil...
...The long answer: it's worth the trip anyway...
...The short answer is never...
...Readers disconcerted to find a woman the center of Bellow's fictional attention can take ample solace in Ithiel's robust, manly company...
...It's the skeleton for a novel...
...Clara insists he's the man to write the "wrap-up of wrap-ups" for the twentieth century, a "Gibbon or Tacitus of the American Empire...
...Her forehead was powerful...
...All this from the former Reichian turned shrink-basher...
...She is woman, trumpets A Theft...
...The nose isn't North Sea (maybe North Side) but the mouth is very good, stretching, as it does, extremely wide when "grinned...
...Nuts to the New Yorker—surely one of the unnamed magsand its ilk...
...The cocky boy with his combat boots up on Clara's silk pillows is a direct descendant of the giant Negro pickpocket who exposed himself to old man Sammler back in 1969...
...A Theft isn't a triumph of nuance or portraiture, like some of the stories in Him With His Foot in His Mouth...
...When this vicariously gossipy tone isn't just right —Bellow enjoying a colloquial stroll up Fifth Avenue—it becomes society-column, banal "bad news...
...On hearing that her new au pair is from Vienna, she tries to subdue thoughts about that "hatchery of psychopaths and Hitlerites...
...The characters never seem equal to their eloquence, even by Bellovian standards...
...But Bellow's most daring rhetorical parry is his casting of the au pair's Haitian boyfriend as the ring thief...
...Herzog, Mr...
...She doesn't purr, she roars...
...She was big-boned...
...Not exactly...
...He too rails, with Clara and Ithiel, against indiscriminate sex, the criminal breed, Communism...
...Meet her on page one, beginning, as Bellow suggests, with "what was conspicuous about her": . . . short, blond hair, fashionably cut, growing upon a head unusually big...
...Her concluding sentiments are typically high-ceilinged Bellow, but the architecture is too puny to hold them...
...The NL would not...
...Ithiel—a name plucked from Old Testament obscurity (meaning "God with me") and a resonant echo of Milton's warrior-angel Ithuriel—is a seer, one who takes in "the big, big picture...
...He rails, Clara swoons...
...It's Bellow the polemical reactionary, the stubborn counterrevolutionary, who's most alive in A Theft...
...Much of Clara's story is told in the presence of her confessor, an inscrutable Oriental named Laura Wong...
...Sound familiar...
...But breezing through A Theft is so fast and fluid a business that it leaves the Rick Marin is television critic for the Washington Times...
...When does the great writer's long story, his short novel, start to get great...
...Anybody who had it in mind to get around her was in for lots of bad news...
...And that's the problem...
...His too, his too...
...devoted reader in a state of constant, breathless expectation...
...If this weren't the pre-Ayatollah 1970s he'd be opining on "Nightline...
...The nose was small—ancestrally a North Sea nose...
...Not that Clara doesn't have her splenetic moments too: "By now nobody can tell the difference between natural and unnatural sex," she grouses...
...Glance at the authorial mugshot on the back cover...
...As a fictional device their one-sided "conversations" are functional, but never quite credible...
...The heroine is Clara Velde...
...Clara is less a character than Bellow's idea for one: "his failed concept," to borrow a phrase from the book...
...Self-knowledge and a clearer grasp of what she calls "the Human Pair" come to Clara when she finally dismounts the proverbial couch...
...Big head, big-boned, shoulders not broad but high, eyes exceptionally large...
...Bellow the humanist, the intimate sage of heart and mind, doesn't keep up...
...Regler is a regular font for Bellow's bile...
...A quarter century after Herzog's feverish memos to posterity, Bellow still sees the walls tumbling down around Civilization, with the jungle (and its lawless barbarians) creeping inexorably in...
...Has Bellow conjured a female after his own image, from a prime cut of his own rib...
...He's "French-speaking, dark-skinned, very good looking, arrogant like," according to Clara's Hispanic cleaning lady...
...Not if Bellow can help it: "These people came up from the tropical slums to outsmart New York, and with all the rules crumbling here as elsewhere, so that nobody could any longer be clear in his mind about anything, they could do it...
...Bellow would publish A Theft without them and uncut, as "A Novella By...
...New York City she dubs "Gogmagogsville...
...And such a head...
...Yet for all that, she never seems quite real...
...Cranky and crafty, it's the old master's way of telling the world he still has a few tricks up his sleeve...
...Tell...
...They strangled the opposition, and now they're pretending to be it...
...The pilfered objet is an emerald ring, a sentimental memento cum "fairy-tale object" symbolic of Clara's first and last true love, Ithiel "Teddy" Regler...
...When on stage, Ithiel takes over, like a strong character actor supporting weak leads...
...Powerful and rich in her middle age, the "czarina of fashion writing" is formidably outsize...
Vol. 22 • July 1989 • No. 7
