Him with his foot in his mouth and other stories. - book reviews

National Review, August 10, 1984 by D. Keith Mano

THIS COLLECTION is a spirit-wrestler: it fills the pericardial sac. Such chord-changing, such a rich stocked lake, such transfiguration: I should leap up and dance my praise. In five stories Bellow, our best manuscripts illuminator, has thrown off more stylistic improvisation and bright elegance, more body English, than ten normal-good penmen could. He is star drift and Solomon's Song. Once again his redemption of detail from civic or personal history creates Chicago, place and emblem-place, as if it were the primal wellhead. Remembering, for Bellow, is a profound custodial event--not cheap nostalgia, no, the single human certainly instead. All else tends to Americanization: future-looking, groundless, half-afraid. "The principal characteristics of our existence is suspense," muses one Bellow person, Ijah. "Nobody--nobody at all--can say how it'going to turn out." Recollection, a careful anthropology of self, of ancestor, will bless and anneal.

I wonder now if the fine Jewish aptitude for fiction is, at base, religious--a Kaddish-saying, so to speak. In this collection relatives, dead and moribund, are venerated through some imaginative chronicle. Ijah, for instance, has become a cousin-preserver. (Until, with horror, he must realize the he, also, is just another old cousin. And that there may be no next-generation heir who will act as curator for his memory.) Relatives, father-relatives in particular, are like a troupe of kvetching incubi: kin can trammel and grave-blanket you. For Bellow, indeed, remembering seems closer to propitiatory prayer than to mere narration.

And part of the immediate kin group, an uncle at least, is that distinguished, old, humanistic, philosophical, art- and logic-chopping Jewish tradition. These relatives were people who, as children, read Plato and Spengler and Kant and Mark and four hundred other important men I've never even heard of (Tzara, Carnap, Morris cohen). Him with His Foot in His Mouth can be an intelectual midrash--on occasion heavier than drilling mud for that. Sometimes, I suspect that Bellow, so revered, still is afraid he isn't taken seriously enough. Fiction doesn't rank up there with thought, you know. Really he wanted to be Lionel Trilling (and Trilling wanted to be Bellow). With trolley tracks and Lydia Pinkham went a generation--European at heart, not yet American--that searched, if not for cohesive theory, then for some cohesive way of theorizing: from trilobite right through to Einstein. Without ever troubling a busy God overmuch.

But, in fact, the relationship between art and intellect is circular. Draw it clockwise so. Intellect [right arrow] despair and frustration [right arrow] sickness and/or death [right arrow] crisis [right arrow] art [right arrow] intellect as interpreter of art [right arrow] and back around again. A Bellow artist is usually someone who has experienced (or can strongly imagine experiencing) physical collapse. Major writers maintain brinkmanship of the spirit. Zetland, a precocious college assistant in symbolic logic, has, when sick, come across Moby Dick. Pure reason will be snow broth for him after that. "What really frees you from these insulating fictions is the other fiction, of art. There really is no human life without this poetry ... I've been starving on symbolic logic."

In Humboldt's Gift (1975) Charles citrine (a social critic and Bellow protagonist) made the point explicit. He said: "Artists must interest intellectuals ... that's why the state of culture and the history of culture become the subject matter of art." Become: well, became. This artist-critic symbiosis is probably an obsolete formulation in 1984. Bellow came just after the Joyce-Eliot epoch: men who wrote for intellectual because, in good part, there were enough of them to furnish and influence a decent, if modest, paying readership. But that circle has been broken by now. The brilliance of Ezra Pound et al. is proved in the brilliance of Hugh Kenner's Pound Era. Who would bother to write an Updike Era or a Pynchon Era? We have had some potent and labyrinthine academic thinkers in fiction--John Gardner, maybe--but their effort was without genuine reference, except ironic, to wider philosophical and social and religious tradition. If learned, it is all quirky, fantastic, subjective stuff. It won't preserve or extend a culture. It lives, as the daily human animal must, in suspense, that "principal characteristic of our existence."

So Bellow, I sense, is challenging, auditioning his deal critic now: a Kenner, Wilson, Eliot. Perhaps there will be no taker of worth. Bellow has, I quote Ijah on a talented cousin, "too much Chinese in his cantos." Moreover, those who might produce The Bellow Era (and you can conceive of such a book) are contemporary, getting on. Critical kin have dispersed. Who will preserve Grandpa Bellow, in his humanistic and social and Chicago context, as Woodrow remembers a father, Ijah each cousin? Saul Bellow, it is commonplace to say, is our greatest living novelist. But, dead, he won't be a plate of kasha either.