Minding the world
Maloff, Saul
'OUR PRINICPAL NOVELIST OF NUTTY IDEAS' Minding the world SAUL MALOFF IN BELLOW'S Bucharest, as in Ceausescu's, life is harsh, gray, damp, chilly, frozen. Terror is always possible, lurking yet...
...The governing ideas in The Dean's December (Harper & Row...
...Phones are tapped, but clumsily, obviously, and to no purpose...
...A colleague of hers takes the Dean along for the ride and a fast look around astral space...
...No contest, a mismatch: in Bellow's world-view, the End of Days is no mere way of speaking...
...Thomas Hardy said he wanted to be remembered - he wanted it inscribed on his gravestone - as a "man who noticed such things...
...and he is at his best always a novelist first - ideas, that is, are embodied, enfleshed in person and event, gesture and word, act and scene...
...The scene between Corde and his nephew, the self-styled revolutionary, fantasist, and "white Negro" who fancies himself blacker than thou and more incendiary than any firebrand that ever brought down a corrupt social system - this scene is perfectly fashioned by the hand of the master...
...never has that been more so than here...
...In creating Chicago he passes it "through his own soul" but only as a "mass of data, terrible, murderous," lacking the "force of coherence," and awaiting the reality it would attain "only when the soul found its underlying truth...
...It is damn cold," he tells the young astronomer as they descend to where we all live, some distance below the invisible kingdom...
...If the presiding deity isn't Rudolph Steiner, it's Plato...
...But these are brilliant set-pieces, virtuoso performances of undiminished power and authority intermittently disturbing the flow and cascades of Corde's reflections and observations...
...the imagery, as much political and moral as physical, is grim, cold, dark, iron - an imagery of failed revolutions, high intentions debased, regressed into spite, malice, petty persecution when it is not murderous...
...312 pp...
...Bellow is our chronicler, our principal novelist of nutty ideas: he is fatally attracted to them, and they are, at divers times, essential to his genius as they can also be his undoing...
...The achievement of the novel is thus exactly assessed and wonderfully put: Corde-Bellow as a world-minder, in both senses - as guardian against the barbarian at the door, and as observing, notating, connecting, classifying mind retrieving the world from its obscurers and distorters and purveyors of false consciousness - the work of salvation that is the proper work of art...
...but no matter, he is unmistakably Bellow...
...At the end Corde accompanies his wife to Mount Palomar, where as a distinguished astronomer she peers into spacious mysteries at the eye of the great telescope...
...and as if Corde weren't already a source of enough embarrassment to his university, he has written some articles for Harper's describing jailhouse conditions in particular and how life in general goes in the ghetto that bring great unhappiness to City Hall...
...In Bucharest, the old lady lies dying, dies never having emerged from her coma, and is cremated and interred...
...A carton of American cigarettes bends iron rules, opens most doors...
...Nothing could be more congenial to Corde's taste for infinity and the "cold out there, its power to cancel everything merely human," a cold "not to be compared to the cold of the death house" in which Valeria was cremated, in fact the precise opposite of it, here where "the living heavens looked as if they would take you in...
...The metaphysical predicate is made explicit: without mind and art the "literal world" is devoid of substance, of reality - "what you didn't pass through your soul," Corde feverishly proclaims, "didn't even exist, that was what made the literal literal...
...But while Corde is worried about real towers collapsing into fecal seas, less visible varieties of doom torment him even more...
...The world is in a very bad way, a gasp away from extinction...
...his nephew, afire with revolutionary passions or oedipal rages, denounces him most roundly, in the cadence and language of the late sixties...
...THE NOVEL'S other great achievement lies in its attempts to dramatize its mass of terrible, murderous data and disclose its underlying truth...
...queues form for scarce goods - the permanent image in the unpainted murals of failed revolutions...
...Back home in Chicago, the Antichrist has already descended, and - as anyone not utterly blinded by ideology or well-meant but deceiving received ideas can clearly perceive - the Antichrist prevails...
...And he attempts to do just that by recreating the world, fresh and new, cleansed of the sludge of cliche, received ideas, tarnished imagery...
...and Bellow attempts this by means of what he does superbly well - argument outright, face-to-face adversary argument, the direct antagonism of opposed perspectives, the elucidation of conflicting ideas and viewpoints through dialectic, though with the difference that he's interested more in thesis and antithesis than in synthesis in the form - least of all in easy resolution...
...A mammoth sewer runs beneath that great city of architectural marvels, with a capacity of forty billion gallons, as wide as three locomotives side by side, running a hundred miles deep - tons of excrement will topple the topless towers of that Ilium at the End of Days...
...13.95...
...and so are the obligatory scenes between Corde and his boyhood friend and implacable rival Dewey Spangler, now a famous journalist passing through Bucharest, scenes intended to test and, if he can, undermine Corde's essential modes of world-minding: art and metaphysics confronted by worldly savvy, hardheaded, skeptical and outright brusquely dismissive realism impatient with any form of damn nonsense, especially that of the loftier variety, all that fancy rot about art and philosophy, the mind and the soul...
...A white student has been killed by a black and Corde will not rest until justice is done, though the circumstances are ambiguous and he might have let it lie...
...And so Bellow talks, wonderfully generally, crankily at times, tendentiously, polemically, settling old scores, setting the record straight...
...What a man he was for noticing...
...The Revolution has long since drowned in its own excrescence...
...To link up...
...Bellow talking is always worth listening to, even when the spin is slightly or even wildly awry...
...And in argurflfentjftp one is fairer than Bellow - the devil is given the stronger, more eloquent, seemingly persuasive arguments...
...Continually attentive to his surroundings...
...Not for the first time in his work is the talker recognizably Bellow himself...
...But Bellow is possessed of a powerful sense of his art and its truth as standing alone against the rising floods, seeking the precisely right spin of language for pacifying those raging waters...
...For a long time we had been moving inexorably in that direction and though the truth has not yet been universally recognized, it is nonetheless so that the "inner city," a condition of the soul as much as of urban blight and moral plague, has spread outward to encompass the whole visible world...
...which is all very well for astronomers, astral space and the cold which cancels everything merely human - but who's going to mind the world down here and attend to the merely human that is the base stuff of novels...
...surveillance, like the cold, is a permanent fact of life, omnipresent, brutal, pointless...
...but if he is given to confusing art and life, Bellow's Chicago, by all odds the best-realized city in American literature, beats all contenders hands down...
...Who but Bellow...
...Bellow not Corde read Rilke's letters, Aristotle and Plato, Hegel and Marx, Swedenborg, Balzac and the Victorian poets - and everything else: read far, far too much, as Corde keeps saying...
...In a world of "superfluous populations," of "doomed people," in an age marked by "wounds, lesions, cancers, destructive fury, death," where every man carried within him his own inner inner city - cesspool and sewer, slum and jailhouse - of what possible use is the "well-disposed liberal democratic temperament" that cannot say outright "an evil has been done" because it is "rooted in a deformed conception of human nature" - in such a world as this, what can we mean when we say the' 'forms that made true experience were corrupted" by vulgar, shallow journalism, tawdry "event glamour" and that "reality," having been lost by such "false consciousness," can only be retrieved!restored to us, by and through the interventions of art...
...So it is written...
...The forms of despotism, as it is experienced by Albert Corde, the American university Dean come to that unlikely capital in the company of his Rumanian wife to pay last respects to his dying mother-in-law, are grotesque rather than terrifying, a tyrannous, meanspirited, byzantine bureaucracy staffed by unchanging types recognizable from the nineteenth as from the ninth century...
...Terror is always possible, lurking yet remote, elsewhere: the atmosphere is post-Stalinist, steely, lightless...
...If the mysterium tremendum is the astronomer-mathematician Minna's playground, the phenomenal world of flux is Corde's, his own bailiwick...
...Against the triumphant Antichrist, in a manner of speaking, what can prevail...
...But cold is cold and he has had enough of it in the Bucharest death house...
...What forces can be aligned against the overwhelming force of history in its final phase...
...Having come from Chicago for this final visit and having committed the unforgivable sin of making an unauthorized visit to the hospital bed of the comatose woman, the Cordes will not be permitted to see her again - so rules the commissar in charge of these matters...
...The mission to record and chronicle is seen as sacred...
...To penetrate?'' But these meditations appear in a novel, not in a philosophical treatise...
...In the Stalinist East, gloom, death, hopelessness...
...Albert Corde can be tricked out with all manner of physical disguise to distinguish him from Bellow, and provided with bizarre particulars (among other things he's given a French Huguenot-Irish lineage, of which nothing at all is made) and uncongenial background (he was formerly a Paris-based correspondent for the International Herald Tribune who returned to an unnamed university in his native Chicago first as professor and now as Dean of Students...
...Valeria was thereupon cast into outer darkness by the Party...
...Yet ordinary consciousness raised to the magnitude of force and subtlety of Bellow's ordinary consciousness certainly begins the process of knowing what's happening and takes us a considerable distance into it...
...All history is sacred history, including the history of sewers...
...And here and there, both there and here, fragile vestiges of civilization, the memory of what life could be, once was, and of those remembered gestures enacted in impossible circumstances, infinitely touching though on the brink of extinction, as in the old courtesies and loving kindnesses of Minna Corde's Bucharest family, survivors of some ancient regime beyond history and politics...
...That is the novel's triumph - the lovingly detailed descriptive passages ranging from ordinary objects perceived in the ordinary course of daily life to the marvelous pages devoted to Valeria's death, cremation, interment, so that this death, the death of this person and no other, will be memorialized forever...
...Now, unless this is to be a mere pretty piece of aestheticism or grandiloquent classroom bombast, Bellow must make good on the implied pledge to redeem reality by his art...
...The Antichrist, casting about for likely places to descend upon in the actual world, will, I daresay, have an embarrassment of riches to choose among...
...but Chicago, from which the Cordes departed and to which they'll return, is clamorously present in Corde's reflections...
...As reproduced in long excerpts, there is no reason why they mightn't have appeared in Harper's as they stand - classy magazine articles but magazine articles all the same...
...With ordinary consciousness," Corde thinks at one point, "you can't even begin to know what's happening...
...IN THIS wintry novel the sense of urgency is so compelling Bellow wants above all to talk, and never mind the niceties of narrative and drama - never mind fiction in any of the more conventional senses...
...and it is Bellow, not Corde, who is dreamily adrift in the book's ideas and assessments, language and idiosyncracies - his own sovereignty, his "special sense of life," as Corde-Bellow remarks at one point...
...a novelist and critic, is a regular contributor to Commonweal...
...How shall we live in the world as given...
...As if he had been sent down to mind the outer world, on a mission of observation and notation...
...as if reminded of this interesting fact Corde brings himself up sharply and adds:"To follow a sprinting little van-hearse over gloomy boulevards was the immediate assignment," thereby getting on with the work of fiction in an afterthought...
...Bellow is our only serious novelist of general ideas...
...the horror...
...Chicago is roiling, filled not only with Bellow's cast of characters, that "special kind of highly intelligent top-grade barbarian" who fill his pages with their violent energies and nuttiness...
...To classify...
...No pestilential sewers up there, rampaging rivers of excrement reeking of the human condition...
...And it isn't the Grand Inquisitor's universal anthill that we have to worry about after all, but something worse, more titanic - universal stupefaction, a Saturnian, wild, gloomy murderousness, the raging of irritated nerves, and intelligence reduced by metal poison, so that the main ideas of mankind die out, including of course the idea of freedom," already direly stricken and quite, quite dead over much of the inhabited globe...
...are fairly familiar by now, to put it generously, however fresh in detail, however spinning and bucking, however vivid and strong in expression...
...Corde, en route to the cemetery, sits steeped in reverie, the appointed guardian of the things of the world, making minute observations as if they were truths of ultimate importance, and thinks that this after all is what he is on earth to do: "He looked out, noticing...
...The object of which was...
...AGAINST ALL THIS, how can civility and poetry avail...
...No novelist is more worldly than Bellow, and none more otherworldly...
...while hardly startling, are peculiarly Bellow's and have come to bear his distinctive tone, manner, signature, quirks and habits of mind and imagination - his "spin," as he says...
...At his best Bellow has always seemed happiest, wildly happy, when this fusion of idea and its dramatic actualization is most completely realized and the ideas, penetrated and impaled by imagination, crackle and pop, leap and lurch, the flakier the better...
...Such questions as these are deeply embedded in Bellow's novel (and in his work in general) and the small answers to large questions - civility, poetry, the redemptive powers of art, the truthtelling of art - are easy enough to speak but less accommodating to dramatic representation...
...in the played-out West, chaos, disorder, violence, bloody mayhem in the streets, corruption, vice, some unnamable disease of the spirit...
...The metaphor is not accidental...
...When ideas catch fire and seem imagined into life as if new and previously undreamt-of under the sun, Bellow is incomparable, a joy to the world, one of the few novelists worth our most serious attention...
...environmental poisons, dripping moral and chemical venom, menace not only Chicago, Corde says, in one of many moments of high feeling, but the "whole world...
...Or, this being Bellow after all, they may thrash about, straggling violently for a life of their own, and may attain a Hand of goofy vitality-wild improvisations in the hands of a brilliant talker answerable to nobody...
...Boredom - spiritlessness, inanimation - is more deadly than the secret police...
...and this can be said with confidence of no other American novelist...
...Beyond that we are adrift in ozone, Bellow's preferred rarified atmosphere where breathing is not always easy...
...And the ideas, the criticism of life embedded in the scandalous articles (the horror...
...The daughter, Minna, a distinguished astrophysicist, defected with the blessings and active collusion of her mother, Valeria, herself a distinguished scientist...
...when they fail to ignite they turn pale and die - nothing is quite so dead as a disembodied idea...
...and when he is asked whether he really minds all that much, he replies in what is the final line of the novel: "The cold...
...the brief bedside visit has not gone through the correct procedures - and that's that: no visiting...
...and Bellow, being strange on this subject, means just that...
...But I almost think I mind coming down more...
...Bucharest is the scene of the current action, such as it is...
Vol. 109 • May 1982 • No. 10
