HANGING BETWEEN CIVILIAN LIFE AND WAR
Mayer, Milton
Hanging Between Civilian Life And War DANGLING MAN, by Saul Bellow. Vanguard Press. $2.50. Reviewed by Milton Mayer ONE of the blessings of war—and all of them added up may not outweigh its...
...His alien status kept him waiting, waiting, waiting...
...The waiting between two worlds drove him half, perhaps all the way, crazy...
...It has to be read because it is a story of war that no one else has tried to write...
...But he doesn't make it...
...Long live regimentation...
...Fortunately for his time and (I think) posterity, he has a lot of time to go it in...
...Saul Bellow is 28...
...Saul Bellow's heroic battlefield—Dangling Man is a carelessly disguised autobiography—was a rooming house, where for two years he hung between the rich life of a free, feeling man and the living burial of soldiery...
...Bellow, a Canadian-born Chicagoan and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, is compared, by his publisher, with Dostoevsky...
...Dangling Man is a diary of those heroic months...
...Dostoevsky he is not...
...And for the supervision of the spirit...
...Reviewed by Milton Mayer ONE of the blessings of war—and all of them added up may not outweigh its costs—is the heroism it produces...
...he's a writing fool, but he hasn't either the mastery of the medium or the maturity of universal-personal agony that give the Russians their monopoly in the genre of wretchedness...
...At the end, his character, his habits, his reflections are all reduced to misanthropic (and theref&re suicidal) irascibility...
...He was finally rejected for military service, in real life, because of that pleasant psychosis known as hernia...
...His dialogue is more like a bad translation of Dostoevsky than it is like Dostoevsky...
...He suddenly sees he can't go it any longer and volunteers for induction with a bitter cry of, "Hurray for regular hours...
...Joseph, the diarist, quit his job in anticipation of immediate induction...
...It has to be owned because people will some day want to own (still again, / think) the first novel of as true a revolutionary (if not as consummate an artist) as the Dostoevsky who wrote Notes from the Underground...
...His effort to catch human torment behind the measured simplicity of simple words is Dostoevskian...
...His delineation of the spasms that are the secret heart of all men fall either short or too long...
...I am thinking not so much of the heroics of the battlefield as I am of the heroics of the human spirit...
...Dangling Man is the beginning (again, I think) of a life of great writing...
...His wife supported him...
...He has a long way to go...
Vol. 8 • April 1944 • No. 15
