Milosz's ABCs

...Bellow has had his own kind of greatness, but it has not been like that of William Blake or D. H. Lawrence...

...Though born a Lithuanian, maybe even a Russian, Milosz has always considered himself Polish...

...One wonders in what spatial reality their authors live...

...The entire issue of human sexuality and the gospel tradition is, it seems to me, not so much a matter of church versus individual conscience...

...For Milosz, the world is inhabited by all these people who suffered and struggled to survive in times that were deeply and profoundly troubled...

...24...

...Like the literary and heroic characters of Orpheus, Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante before him, Milosz has realized that there is no understanding the present until one makes a perilous descent into an underworld of memory, first to placate and then to query those gone before...

...The answers are multiple...

...Later they became close friends, corresponding extensively by letter and telephone, as well as the occasional visit, until her death...

...Certainly Bellow has looked to ideas to orient his life and structure his fiction...

...One incident adduced by Atlas is revelatory in this regard...

...That's understandable...

...How can a reader possibly be engaged by such seemingly parochial considerations...

...Atlas's entertaining, well-paced, original account of the fate of the serious artist amid the welter of mid-twentieth-century history shows precisely the way to render Saul Bellow's American life...

...Herzog reveals in what limited sense Bellow has been a novelist of 18 ideas...

...It is about the cuckolding and subsequent psychological breakdown of a historian of ideas—it was the first novel of Bellow's in which the hero was by profession a thinker...

...Atlas also helps us see how much Bellow has always been dependent for the ideas in his fiction on a succession of mentors—usually big-brother types...

...Bellow seemed to speak for them as children of immigrants, victims of the Depression, and perhaps above all as onceradical intellectuals who had been deprived during the cold-war years of a public existence...

...and Allen Bloom, with whom Bellow co-taught in the Committee on Social Thought up to the time of Bloom's death...

...In my congregation there is a man who left his position as an active priest in the wake of Paul VI's Humanae vitae...

...One thinks of the gurus in Bellow's life, among them the University of Chicago sociologist Edward Shils...

...The writer is Metropolitan Archbishop of the Orthodox Catholic Church of America...

...That was a wrong call...

...It is to show the way things have been, to show what Bellow's creative imagination has had to wrestle with...

...Maybe that's why there is such massive apostacy among young people of marrying age, as well as so many who are married...

...But a book about the development of Bellow's worldview and spiritual strivings would most like- Not quite a metaphysician ly have been a muddle because Bellow has been neither a clear thinker nor a prophetic visionary...

...They can fulfill their duties only by trying to reconstruct precisely things as they were and by wrestling the past from fictions and legends...

...Augie March insists he is not "a candidate for adoption" in the 1953 novel named after him, but he would not be insisting so much on his freedom if he did not always feel tempted to surrender it...

...The only right kind of biography for so great a novelist must be a biography of his imagination...

...MOST REV...

...His special vocation as a novelist could not have been more unlike that of Tolstoy, who could "write philosophy," as another philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, showed in his great essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox...

...Why has Atlas not illuminated the development of the "firm metaphysical intelligence" that these reviewers claim to be Bellow's defining literary talent...

...On the other hand, he devotes a large entry to Denise Levertov whom he met at a very delightful dinner in Greenwich Village...

...As Saul had been the youngest and dreamiest of the men in his immediate family, so has he all through his life been the naive, often the faux naive, outsider/beginner...

...In this book, the events of history become experience and, finally, art as Milosz turns the memory of experience back to elucidate the event...

...Herzog removes himself from society in order to recover, and he writes letter after letter to contemporary political leaders and thinkers and others who inspire his skeptical comments and questions...

...E. BRIAN CARSTEN Angola, Ind...

...It is much the best work of fiction he had written in a long time, but it is a brilliant study in character, not a philosophical novel or a visionary work...

...Czelsaw Milosz was born in 1911 in Polish Lithuania, then subject to Russia...

...First, while some people chronicled here do not loom large on the contemporary horizon, they are representative of the human spirit in the context of its mingled aspirations, frustrations, and grubby reality...

...Later, notably in Humboldt's Gift, Bellow offered himself as a spokesman for anthroposophy, Rudolph Steiner's early, Central-European forerunner of Scientology...

...To present Bellow's life in its gritty detail is not to be reductive...

...In his Nobel lecture, seventy years after his birth, Milosz said: "Those who are alive receive a mandate 20 from those who are silent forever...

...GEORGE R. FITZGERALD, C.S.P...

...The critics have had one common theme: What they see as Atlas's materialism and reductionism is the wrong way to go at Bellow...

...Rather, it is about the church learning from the lived wisdom of her members and having the courage to (here is that word...

...It is interesting to notice that of the people he knew as friends, and those he knew only by reading their work, the amount of space given to each can be disproportionate to the roles they played in his life...

...Both of these Commonweal articles are priceless and full of wisdom from men who have actually "been there and done that...

...Beyond the use of these two figures as a kind of envelope, there is little or no structural arrangement to the entries apart from the simple fact that they are an assortment of recollections of one life...

...There have been so few American novelists with anything like European writers' interest in general ideas that the New York intellectuals were gratified by what they greeted as the creative fulfillment of their own and their generation's experience...

...Most of them have long ago put aside church teaching on birth control...

...Like Odysseus gone down to Hades seeking news of home, Milosz has put himself at risk of considerable pain in remembering and recounting his own experience and the experience of those gone before him...

...I must admit, sadly, that in my thirty-six years as a priest, most married persons—and those to be married—with whom I have spoken feel that the church doesn't really address the complex problems couples face today...

...But, alas, people like him who try to introduce fresh ways of looking at such questions, while preserving the deep values of our faith, often find the welcome mat snatched out from under 23 them...

...Bellow's New York contemporaries, like the literary critics Philip Rahv and Irving Howe, tended to exaggerate his intellectual power...

...This is where we can see the aptness of Atlas's concern with the material conditions of Bellow's life...

...Of course, both will be decried by those who believe Catholics should all walk in lock step with any current papal teaching, especially in matters of sexual ethics...

...At the same time, Milosz is careful to note the treachery of memory and he hesitates to regard his own memory as definitive...

...The concluding entry is for Tomasz Zan, a prominent figure in the city where Milosz spent his childhood and youth...

...Although ambitiously conceived, Bellow deals more satisfactorily with the author's life than with his art...

...Have they ever had any firsthand, practical experience with marriage...

...Few great cities can have been as indifferent to the effort of mind and imagination as Chicago...

...Second, there is the writer's view of the dead and of memory...

...The letters are brilliant, and the novel is wonderfully funny in dramatizing the comedy of the emotionally distraught, unmoored intellectual drowning in a sea of ideas...

...In Herzog the anguish of the eponymous hero was the anguish of a whole intellectual generation for whom the discrediting of left-wing politics had meant having to find their fulfillment in domestic life...

...Atlas's emphasis on the material and matrimonial side of Bellow's life has disposed some reviewers to protest: What about the striving of Bellow's characters, and of their creator, toward a higher spiritual condition...

...Several years later, at the outbreak of World War I, his family moved to Wilno, where Milosz lived until 1936, when he moved to Warsaw...

...That is not to say that he did not ascribe to himself a profound philosophic-religious consciousness...

...What had ensued for many of them was a riot of sexual affairs and messy divorces that had nothing like the dignity of 1930s debates in the agora (namely, Broadway cafeterias) about the fate of capitalism...

...ANDREW GALLIGAN Tracy, Calif...

...Milosz's recollection of selected details of the last bloody century is anything but the charming reminiscence of an old man or the indulgence of a regressive nostalgia...

...incorporate it...

...Ravelstein, Bellow's memorial to Bloom, appeared in 2000, in the novelist's eighty-fifth year...

...Vail, Colo...

...21 (Continued from page 4) Lived wisdom Luke Timothy Johnson's persuasive article on John Paul II's theology of the body is perhaps the finest article of its kind I have read in forty years...

...the art critic Harold Rosenberg, whom Bellow memorializes in his novella "What Kind of Day Did You Have...

...In the years when Bellow was writing Henderson the Rain King (1959), he experienced a new creative power that inspired moments of ecstatic confidence...

...To be sure, Bellow's antiheroes live in a world of ideas, but compared, say, to Thomas Mann or James Joyce, Bellow himself seems a kibitzer...

...The first entry is for a fellow Lithuanian Pole, Ludwik Abramowicz, who from the early years of the twentieth century published, as a labor of love for Polish-speaking Lithuanians, a small journal, the Wilno Review...

...Thus these shadowy figures are given a share of his life and they come, now, bearing a saving history that becomes the lifeblood of a man approaching the end of his own life...

...To the novelist Herb Gold, he burst out on one occasion: "Pretty soon I'll be unassailable, and I can write philosophy like Tolstoy...

...Yet, in reading through the book, it becomes obvious that the Wilno Review of Ludwik Abramowicz and the library named to commemorate the generosity of Tomasz Zan were both major formative influences in Milosz's early years, providing him with a community of intellectual comfort in truly desperate times...

...He will never be free of the past just as the past now will never be free of him...

...Each time we gather at the Lord's table, I see in his eyes, lo these many years later, the struggling wisdom that is so evident in Johnson's words...

...Ambivalence seems a constant in his character...

...More frequently his readers were grateful to Bellow because the confusion of his characters legitimated their own...

...Indeed, it contains more than most readers will want to know about Bellow's many wives and girlfriends...

...Though he may have met Maritain while still in Poland, it was with Merton that he corresponded regularly and at some length through the last decade of Merton's life...

...Is anybody listening to them...

...Between these two entries is a cornucopia of persons and places, some trivial, some well-known, some so tangential as to be mystifying except for their importance to the author's life...

...For example, he mentions Thomas Merton but only in passing while discussing the achievement of Jacques Maritain...

...Following the last alphabetical entry is an envoi reflecting on the place of memory and its persistence as it relates to Milosz's conviction about how life continues after death, and that the spirits of the dead retain an interest in the affairs of those still alive...

...Set in abecedarian form, this collection of precis, short essays, observations, and close descriptions of the minutiae of cataclysmic change is arranged by the totally arbitrary place that a keyword gives each entry on an alphabetical string...

...Atlas observes that, for all Bellow's gifts as an artist, he has not been notable for his self-knowledge...

...On different planets Luke Timothy Johnson's critique of Pope John Paul II's reflections on sexuality was the most theologically cogent and pastorally persuasive commentary I've read in years about Catholic sexual teaching...

...To be sure, Luke Timothy Johnson will not be joining Avery Dulles at the next consistory...

...How long can we afford to lose this critically important segment of the Catholic church in favor of a moral theology of sexuality that appears so rigid and static...

...Herzog's is the comic pathos of the intellectual rendered ineffectual: he has no audience, and his letters go unsent...

...The documents issuing from Rome and diocesan offices come across as totally abstract and divorced from real life...

...Oh well...

...19 A POET REMEMBERS, FRUITFULLY Harold Isbell This little book, by the Nobel Prize-winning poet, is a remarkable testament to the place of memory in the definition of a conscious self...

...REV...

...In Chicago, which is Atlas's hometown as well as Bellow's, spirit has always had to struggle against the grit, even the sewage, of materiality...

...At times he has appeared very dependent on others, and at other times fiercely protective of his independence...

...That Bellow believed people might be acquiring a similar kind of wisdom from his novels suggests a misguided self-conception...

...For instance, in the novelist's early phase there was Wilhelm Reich with his theories about the armored body and the need to liberate "orgastic" energy...

...But what he remembers is, now, all that he has...

...In crafting this work, as the two brief entries "truth" and "time" eloquently suggest, a life shaped by the terror of political instability and institutionalized brutality relentlessly goes on seeking that order which is the natural desire of every human mind...

...No red hat Luke Timothy Johnson's incisive critique of John Paul II's pronouncements on love, sex, and pleasure should be studied and openly discussed in every Catholi college and Newman Club in the nation—together with Paul Baumann's humorous reflections on George Weigel's biography of our pope ("Crossing the Threshold," December 3, 1999...

...There is also much new information about Bellow's close male friendships, which have been just as fraught as his relations with women, and about the nuts and bolts of his literary career...

...It's exciting to read something like Johnson's refreshing insights...

...The problem is that most of the ideas he has promoted have not been very good ones...

...On the contrary, the appearance of big ideas or intimations of visionary experience in a Bellow novel is often the sign of a lapse of literary imagination and its displacement by the pedagogic will...