Bellow's New Reading

...Age is a part of experience that this novelist forces us to face without any of the protections of orthodoxy He is as formidable in his acceptance of death as he has always been in his acceptance of life Back home finally, Corde is looking over the bars of his sixteenth story porch "Here in the Midwest there sometimes occurred the blues of Italian landscapes and he passed through them, very close to the borders of sense This was different It was like being poured out to the horizon, like a great expansion What if death should be like this, the soul finding an exit The porch rail was his figure for the hither side The rest, beyond it, drew you constantly as the completion of your reality " Since this is clearly moving and not at all intellectual, it raises the question whether a novelist ought not to purge his understanding before the plot begins, as Hawthorne did when he planted his fine distinctions between wholesome and unwholesome, good and evil, deep into his mesmerizing stories But that would deprive us of one of America's most optimistic literary achievements the Bellow drama of self-correction...

...Our giant skyscrapers and high technology intimidate and befuddle our thought'-journalism, even as it claims an authentic connection with real events, preabsorbs disasicrs lor us, rounds off the sharp edges of reality "Here is what things are like today in a city like Chicago Have a look...

...And on occasion there has been a jibe or two at his oceanic generalizations and undulating phrases—in other words, his Bellowquence, still with us in the present volume "It was not so much the inner city slum that threatened us as the slum of innermost being ' But in fiction Bellow enjoys inventing adversaries who have the hero's number, and who incidentally jazz up the rather stern preoccupations of the novel The most cutting of them here is Corde's old high-school crony, Dewey Spangler, once a lover of Oscar Wilde and Rilke, now a big-time newspaper pundit (we have to imagine an implausible amalgam of C L Sulzberger, Joseph Kraft and Walter Cronkite) with a venge-ful streak Spangler accuses him—with some justice, Corde admits—of "abyssifying and catastrophizing," of pushing poetry too far, of turmng a routine magazine assignment into a visionary project While Corde is furious with Spangler for a column quoting out of context a quip about academics, which causes Corde to lose his job at the university, he is half impressed by Spangler's criticism of his character and his ideas Corde acquires another antagonist in his radical nephew, Mason, a college dropout with a "bullying, lusterless, put-down stare," who thinks of himself as a representative of" the street people " The dean has had a role in bringing to trial a black dishwasher who murdered one of his white students His nephew turns out to be a friend of the murderer and has organized a defense campaign for him, based on the easy assumption that the guilty party is society Mason jeers at his uncle for acting "appalled, all shook-up," and for voicing mechanical pieties without knowing what really happened Not only is Corde intrigued by such rebukes (this one provides a good opening for him to consider the complex elements that go into justice), but he relishes taking a few swipes at himself that are undeniably on the mark " Look at him—an earnest, brooding, heartstruck, time-ravaged person (or boob) with his moral desires and taking up the burdens of mankind " All the same, Corde and Bellow stick to their guns When the novelist received the Nobel prize in 1976, he said in an interview that while his writing up to then had tried to work out his obsessions with people he loved, it was time for him to move on and "write about people who make a more spirited resistance to the forces of our time " In Rumania, where Corde and Minna try desperately to get permission from an obdurate secret police colonel to visit the dying Valeria—once a Minister of Health, then purged in a political shake-up, yet still widely respected—there is no confusion about what forces we would wish to resist But in America, the cultural forces that undermine us take on more innocent guises?fashionable ideas, liberal orthodoxies, media jargon—and are usually promulgated by pleasant and prepossessing spokesmen The Chicago articles (the author may have had in mind something as precise and poetic as James Agee's description of sharecropper families in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) and The Dean's December deliver an eloquent warning against all those influences that seal us off from experience...

...Writers & Writing BELLOW'S NEW READING BY ISA KAPP ONLY A WRITER who has held readers in the palm of his hand, and has been on as unceremonious and confessional terms with them as Saul Bellow, could venture a novel so tantalizingly intellectual, wryly self-critical and austerely demanding as The Dean's December (Harper & Row, 312 pp , $13 95) The story (at least the part of it that is accessible to our sentiments rather than our minds) begins in the "air sadness" of Bucharest, with its faded electric lights, faucets that go dry after 8am, familial concierges who double as police informers, and aged women who rise at four in the morning to wait on queues all day for a few eggs, a small ration of sausages and three or four spotted pears It is astonishing to realize that until now, apart from an occasional short story and Bernard Malamud's compelling recreation of pre-Revolutionary Russia in The Fixer, none of our prominent novelists has written about East Europe But it is more astonishing to see how resolutely Bellow has divested himself of that old romantic throb of extravagant complaint and urgent expectation that still reverberates for readers of Her-zog and Henderson the Rain King In the Bucharest episodes, the plain, short, serviceable sentences and wintry tone are perfectly attuned to the subject, the hard worn-down face of Rumanian reality "The smell was cold, dank and bad Coupled rusty-orange trams ran with a slither of cables Pale proletarian passengers looked out They wore caps, the women kerchiefs Together with cast-iron sinks and pull-chain toilets, these tramcars belonged to the old days It was all like looking backwards You saw the decades in reverse " The hero, Albert Corde, dean of students in a Chicago university (and earlier a well-known journalist for the Pans Herald), has come to Bucharest with his wife, Minna, because her mother is dying of a stroke Warned to keep of f the streets while Minna tries to arrange for them to visit the hospital, he spends most of his time in her old room, drinking plum brandy and ruminating about unfinished business and unsettled scores back home in Chicago Elderly ladies come and go, running errands for bedridden Tanti Gigi, with whom his mother-in-law, Valeria, has been sharing her flat Sheltered in this solicitous household, Corde divines the compensatory boon of the dismal police state Suspicious, willing to accept bribes from their best friends, the Rumanians he encounters are nonetheless warm, intense and loyal, they take risks and go out of their way to do favors for one another Ioanna, the concierge, is on watch behind her window ("Her cheeks were like cold storage apples, a bandanna was knotted under her chin, she had the shape of a bale ") so she can report to secuntate Yet it is her nephew who, for small recompense, bypasses regulations, relieves the visitors of all the bureaucratic paraphernalia and saves them many dreary hours of waiting When Valeria dies, Gigi goes for solace to the concierge and the two women sink down on her small bed, embracing and weeping Ioanna "was a blackmailer, but she gave her heart For there was a love community of women here " It may be the excited clarity experienced by responsive travelers in a foreign country that makes the Rumanian section of The Dean's December seem so empathetic and close to actuality, and so unequivocal Even in his Bucharest sanctuary, however, with death hovering in the wings, the hero mainly has Chicago on his mind That vulgar and vital city preempts the weightier and certainly the wordier part of the book Here Bellow approaches his old self, succumbing to rambunctious brilliance, crowds of images, clashing thoughts—and understandable ambivalence toward his native grounds Exposed to life in Rumania, he is all the more starkly conscious of the corruption of feeling back in Chicago Merely contemplating for a moment the uniquely American drama of Patty Hearst, and her staggenng ability to make a transition from the garish to the normal, gives us some idea of the immeasurable human territory American writers have to tackle, why they are forced to go out looking for their own emotions How else are they to put into coherent form and mood the multitudes, the contradictions, even the sheer prosaic durability of their country'' With the exception of a few fine novels like Robert Penn Warren's Night Rider, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Malamud's The Tenants, most contemporary American fiction has busied itself with particles of daily existence (private grievances, aberrant outbursts, amorphous clues) at a great remove from the center of our culture More than other novelists, Bellow has insisted on some wide-ranging social content for his novels Ever since Dangling Man he has made a grand try at telling us what it feels like to wake up in the America of our decades, what angers, interests or depresses us, and what we aspire to In the Chicago sections of The Dean's December he takes a long, quizzical and not entirely dissatisfied look at his own performance The dean has written two articles for Harper's about Chicago, full of "images and details supplied by his own disposition, observation, by ideas, dreams, fantasies, his own experience of life" (a fair thumbnail sketch of Bellow's fiction) He has managed to rile the college, the press and the politicians At a window facing the gray Communist residential blocks, Corde reads his mother-in-law's copies of the articles, wondering why she underlined certain passages, trying to explain to himself the motives for his overemotional language and his compulsion to pile up endless disagreeable facts about sewer projects, drug addicts, criminals, public urinators the Chicago blight "You begin to lose contact with human beings and with the world,'' Corde muses " You experience spiritual loneliness it seems better to go out and see at first hand the big manifestations of disorder and take a fresh reading from them " THE BULK OF THE BOOK is given over to the uproar caused by this fresh reading In real life, Bellow has been the object of more adulation than reproach from critics and readers, the sole noteworthy disaffection having been provoked by his portrait of a black pickpocket on a New York bus in Mr Sammler's Plane...

...How does the public apprehend events9 It doesn't apprehend them It has been deprived of the capacity to experience them " As for Corde, he has taken it upon himself "to pass Chicago through his own soul " Though the sermon engulfs the story, the novel does have some engaging episodes and considerable charm Bellow has never been better disposed toward women, and he gives us several affectionate portraits—including an especially enjoyable one of Minna's mother, an 80-year-old lady of sturdy disposition During a family reunion in London, she corrects Corde's French, agrees to buy gifts in Harrod's for friends and relatives but not for herself, and keeps Corde under constant scrutiny to determine whether he will make a trustworthy husband for her daughter There is an amusing treatment, too, of the relationship between Corde and Minna, who is a distinguished professor of astronomy (Bellow's Rumanian-born wife is a professor of mathematics) The man of letters is evidently in awe of his lady of science, while she respects and appreciates him, she is not greatly impressed by his calling He usually comes upon her when she is thinking about something important, literally out in space The men in the book are less engaging, albeit often more pungent-ly and colorfully described Corde's obstreperous, dishonest lawyer-cousin, MaxieDetilhon, sweeps the courtroom "with bold Rooseveltian looks" or swings "his wide buttocks with crazy grace, mincing out Caribbean rhythms on a dance floor " Bellow's work has frequently dealt with men in crises that connect them with society—failure, fraud, exile—but he has never before involved his plots with social problems as such—slums, drugs, jails, politics, intrigues, disorders At this stage he wants these to be confronted in specific terms In The Dean's December Corde pays three visits that are described at length one to the lawyer for Rufus Ridpath, the hard-working black director of the dangerous county jail, disliked by radicals because he disciplined violent prisoners and by city officials and contractors because he refused to take graft, another to a tough ex-hit-man dressed in a caramel-colored jacket and chocolate pants, who runs a successful drug rehabilitation center, and the third to a kidney dialysis ward where Corde observes in cinematic detail the patients' conditions and the attendants' skills The moral in each of these episodes is central to Bellow's present thinking and to the novel We are to set great store by instinct, and proceed with undiminished ardor in the face of infinitesimal results Dead serious as he clearly is, Bellow seeks to avoid the appearance of wanting to be taken too seriously Rereading in Bucharest the grim passage about the hospital ward, he comments mockingly "No wonder Harper's lost millions of dollars, printing this sort of stuff " Despite Bellow's pique with journalism, the greatest virtues of The Dean's December are, ultimately, reportonal speed, color, immediacy, unflagging observation Compared to the media professionals, Bellow's writing is of course purer, more artful, his senses and nerves more daz-zlingly awake Yet what the book most resembles is the literary diary in which the writer takes the privilege of confessing and refining his thoughts—that is to say, his feelings about his thoughts The Dean 'sDecemberhas no luxuries of fun or frustration like those of Henderson or Herzog, no indestructible urban images like those in Seize the Day or Mr Sammler's Planet, no patience with embellishments of character like Humboldt's Gift, and no adventures except adventures of the mind But it is fascinating (and upsetting) to witness this hero in his late 50s examining and re-examining his situation as if he were still the "dangling man" of27, waiting for the good word He wonders how to act, how to write, what to believe, and most of all, how he appears to others "His nonchalant way of looking at you, the extruded brown eyes, that drowned-in-dreams look, was probably the source of his reputation as a swinger, a chaser," Corde tells us in the first of many camera shots of himself Flashes of cockiness and self-confidence notwithstanding, he is a glutton for criticism, never on solid ground, when he touches earth, he bounds up, as if it were too hot Throughout the book, he is in the throes of an intellectual passion—faint, pale, sweating, feverish, he goes through all the physical responses usually reserved for passions of the heart BELOW IS ONE OF the few American writers who could safely undertake such a novel of ideas, yet I suspect that what really captures us is its confrontation with the simple fact of age " In these last days, we have a right and even a duty to purge our understanding," Corde tells Spangler And in the frightening but magnificent scene at the Bucharest crematorium, trapped between the icy cold above and the hot blasts below, he thinks, "Your last options How to choose between them...