Love and Death in Chicago
CHRISTOPHERSEN, BILL
Love and Death in Chicago The Actual By Saul Bellow Viking. 112 pp. $17.95. Reviewed by Bill Christophersen Author. "The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown s American...
...What keeps him here...
...Uninclined to "disclose anything to those 'close'" to him, he may remind longtime Bellow fans of Joseph, the protagonist of The Dangling Man (1944), before his reticence was shattered by the prospect of induction into World War II...
...The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown s American Gothic" Reviewing his literary career in a 1990 interview, Saul Bellow remarked, "I see with satisfaction the escape from certain tyrants, Marx, Lenin, Freud...
...Adletsky places a call, and soon Harry is gliding to the cemetery in the stretch limo that has been put at his disposal...
...The Actual works because, not in spite of, its crazy-quilt backdrop of bed-hopping, divorce, criminal obsession, and coffins...
...Someone like Harry Trellman...
...Like Joseph, who dangled for months awaiting call-up, "unfinished emotional business' dating back to Harry's youth has left him in a kind of suspended animation...
...The hit man —whom Madge, by the by, is stuck on— botched the job, and Madge has spent the past three years in jail...
...But Adletsky finds Harry hard to fathom...
...Speaking of Harry's impervious preColumbian look, how many times do we need to be told how reserved he is...
...are up to...
...Their highschool romance lapsed when his best friend, Jay Wustrin, cut him out...
...Harry, an astute observer, notices it, and Adletsky notices Harry noticing it...
...The burlesque shenanigans of Jay Wustrin, Madge Heisinger and Fritz Rourke (Frances Jellicoe's incontinent ex-husband) keep it from becoming too trite or sentimental...
...By now Bellow's antic muse is onstage cutting monkey shines behind the scrim...
...The sellers are a rich old couple with an even more grotesque history than the Wustrins...
...Look for the way the narrator's declamation that Freud is passé plays against Jay Wustrin's oedipal obsession for cutting out male rivals and bedding their women— an obsession he carries to the grave when he becomes an intruder in the family plot...
...What purer (and, in Harry's case, more ironic) homage can one pay to The Psychopathology of Eveiyday Life...
...His latest novella, The Actual, seems at first to say so...
...While Jay's casket is being exhumed, Harry and Amy exhume their buried feelings...
...Then again, he is a cross between Sigmund Freud and the stereotypical Jewish mother, figuring Harry out and fixing him up...
...Cut to the present...
...Yet he is, as Harry remarks, "no abstraction": Plainspoken, wry and hard-nosed (as the Heisingers find out when they try to snow him on the apartment furnishings), he's the tale's crispest character...
...Not everything in The Actual is as fine as Adletsky...
...Such a job for a widow, muses Adletsky...
...we are supposed to empathize...
...Adletsky and Harry meet after attending a party whose hostess, Frances Jellicoe, has an inconspicuous falling out with a guest...
...We respect his emotional loyalty, his eye for quality, his stiff upper lip...
...If the relationship between Harry and Amy occupies the foreground of The Actual, the one between Harry and Adletsky is the story-behind-the-story...
...Such unsubtle ploys stand out in this otherwise subtle work...
...Now Amy, having spoken with Jay's family, is getting the casket exhumed and buried elsewhere...
...He cultivates Harry's acquaintance and makes him part of his brain trust...
...That a slip of the tongue will lead you back to the mischievous id needs no more proving...
...The other principals, for instance, are mealy by comparison...
...The story makes plain that the psychopathology—and, for that matter, the mystery—of everyday life can't be overestimated, even in an age that seems to know what makes everything tick...
...But if The Actual does not exhibit the perfect pitch of Seize the Day (1956), it is rich in much that counts—orchestration of mood and theme, an off-beat humor and, as always with Bellow, an appreciation for the psychological strings by which we dangle...
...Jay, whose most humane feature was a sick sense of humor, bought it...
...The dangling man is reanimated by the stringpuller nonpareil, a trillionaire Prospero with a brain trust instead of books and a cell phone for a wand...
...Don't look for the lanced angst of Herzog or the manic momentum of Henderson the Rain King (1959...
...A man about town, he can ease Adletsky's isolation and put him in closer touch with the world...
...Don't be fooled though, by the setup...
...She's got an errand to perform at the cemetery, where her recently deceased ex-husband Jay is buried—in the plot next to her mother's...
...Over the years the two become friends...
...That, after all, is Bellow's theme—and one reason for the mix of moods...
...An impervious pre-Columbian look...
...But Amy can't stick around while the old folks dicker over the price of Persian carpets...
...He philandered for years, then, having goaded Amy into responding in kind, bugged the bedroom, sued for divorce and left her scandalized...
...Nor is Harry easy to warm to...
...The Actual is a comedy—a love story suspended, as Bellow's tales often are, between pathos and farce...
...Look for the way Rourke's drunken demolition of wine glasses at Frances' party plays against the story's glass-enclosed settings (limo, lakeview apartment, Adletsky's "glassy lair")—or how those hermetic settings echo Harry's personality...
...Bland and cultured, Harry is a fixture on the social circuit, yet his defining trait is his reserve...
...Even as his heart thaws in Amy's microwaving presence, there are moments when his interior nattering ("Composure is one of my special gifts...
...Not to look impressed...
...Amy is a credible middle-aged businesswoman, but only Harry, who knew her when, could wax passionate about her...
...Some of Harry's reflections amount to stage whispers on Bellow's part, telling us how to read the tale: "Again I saw parallels between Bodo and Jay Wustrin," Harry remarks at one point...
...Madge Heisinger tried to have her husband, Bodo, killed...
...Jay married Amy, but made her life hell...
...Besides, when marriages are exploding so sensationally all over town, we become more curious about a high-school crush whose fuse burns for decades...
...She should have someone along for moral support...
...The tale is narrated by Harry Trellman, an art importer in his 50s...
...The art is in the counterpoint...
...It is developed less by dramatic means than through contrasting motifs, ironic echoes...
...I grant that Freud was one of tire most ingenious men who ever lived, but I have no more use for his system than I have for Paley's watch—a metaphor for the universe, wound up in the beginning, then ticking away for billions of years...
...Adletsky and his wife are buying a furnished apartment, and Amy, now an interior decorator whom they have hired, is appraising the furnishings...
...First love," says Harry, "strikes you at 17 and, like infantile paralysis...
...But Freud...
...Bellow is wise not to romanticize his characters or their transformation...
...Look for the way the service Harry renders Adletsky in easing his isolation is returned in kind...
...That is true of the novella in general...
...Maybe it's in the air of this continent...
...But he can be snooty and tiresome, now deploring his friends as "runof-the-mill products of our mass democracy, with no distinctive contribution to make to the history of the species," now floating academic tropes ("When I met her, she made me think of a course in field theory...
...The Red Indians were famous for it...
...After Amy's mother died, her senile father took a notion to sell his plot to his son-in-law...
...Set in a contemporary Chicago where marriages crash and libidos zigzag like bumper cars...
...Still less endearing, in some respects, is the Harry who finally emerges from cold storage...
...Harry won't say, but Adletsky gathers that he is orbiting around an old flame named Amy Wustrin...
...Nor is that the only instance of authorial mistrust adding unnecessary grams of fat to the narrative...
...Half a century of feeling is invested in her," Harry admits early on...
...it, too, can be crippling...
...He realizes, however, that Harry really leads a bleak life in Chicago...
...Far from leaving Freud behind, this story of modern urbanités fending off or mudwrestling with Eros suggests, at its best, a comic-opera treatment of Civilization and Its Discontents...
...It may also be—given Bellow's lifelong admiration for Russian writers—an homage to Turgenev, whose novellas First Love and Torrents of Spring show the transmogrifying as well as the transfiguring side of passion...
...Yet this is a romance...
...Enter Sigmund Adletsky, a retired businessman and self-made trillionaire in his 90s who has turned his attention to human affairs...
...The narrator dismisses Freud out of hand: "It's easy enough to see what people...
...To be a trillionaire," Harry surmises, "is like living in a controlled environment...
...He knows Harry imports broken artifacts from China, repairs them in Guatemala and sells them in America...
...She has just been paroled at Bodo's request: He missed her...
...Seeming unable to trust us to get the picture that Harry's character hinges on his reserve—or the posture of reserve—Bellow spells this out repeatedly...
...makes us yearn for the fellow who kept his thoughts to himself...
...it features an "actual affinity" that is nothing if not time-tested...
...Years have gone by since I last found interest in The Psychopathology of Eveiyday Life and its once fresh story-behind-the-story...
...Adletsky is God As Retired Tycoon, trying to keep up with the human drama (at one point he sits in his limo monitoring the news and weather on three TV screens...
...By the time Jay is being reburied, Harry and Amy have stepped out of the limousine into the open air together...
...Has the author of The Victim (1947), Herzog (1964) and A Theft (1989) finally moved beyond psychological preoccupations...
...at another, "If there were parallels between Bodo Heisinger and Jay Wustrin, would there be resemblances also between their wives...
...What's in it for Adletsky...
...Harry knows all about it: Jay has played him the tape...
...Marx, Lenin—granted: It has been a long time since we sensed the class struggle simmering beneath Bellow's fiction...
...The Heisingers are selling the apartment to start over...
Vol. 80 • July 1997 • No. 12
