The New Criterion

Saul Bellow’s most recent publication, The Actual, brings his literary production—in a publishing career now spanning more than half a century—to some eighteen volumes of prose fiction, criticism, travel writing, and reminiscence. In his longevity, at least, he has rivaled William Dean Howells, and it may turn out that Bellow will have done best, for our time, what Howells did well for nineteenth-century America—that is, to have provided a reasonably realistic and representative portrait of the moral and social tendencies of his time. Hippolyte Taine called Howells “a precious painter and a sovereign witness,” and a like tribute may be voiced in respect to Bellow. In any case, both men in old age earned the “distinction” of being called “the Dean of American Letters.” In Bellow’s case, its literal relevance may lie in his having poured himself, so fully, into The Dean’s December (1982).

Bellow most likely will be remembered for his comic, freewheeling novels: Adventures of Augie March (1953)—which won the National Book Award; Henderson the Rain King (1959); Herzog (1964)—another NBA winner; Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970)—ditto; and Humboldt’s Gift, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Still, in certain moods, I confess to a partiality for Bellow in a minor key. He launched his literary career, more than fifty years ago, with that genre sanctified by Henry James as the “blest nouvelle.” Dangling Man (1944) dealt with the Kafkaesque situation of a young man awaiting induction into the army in World War II. It established Bellow, in the generation of the Forties, as a master of the foreshortened glimpse and so prepared the way for the splendid brevities of Seize the Day (1956), A Theft (1989), The Bellarosa Connection (1989), and now The Actual.

Thanks to the big books of the Fifties, Bellow’s readership vastly expanded. His reputation, like that of Bernard Malamud, peaked in the late 1960s, with the huge postwar American hunger to understand contemporary Jewish life and experience. Although his characters almost always moved in and out of a Chicago underworld culture of petty thievery, small-time graft, and civic corruption, they were usually winsome seekers for the good life, street-smart, wisecracking comedians spouting, in mixed-up and mangled fashion, Plato, Virgil, Dostoyevsky, or Sholem Aleichem. Out of an odd mix of great philosophers, historians, and artists, Bellow created an appealing affirmation of modern life. His was a secular humanism based on the accumulated wisdom of Jewish experience, providing an alternative to the commonly felt postwar pessimism and despair.

In due course, Bellow fell out of favor with certain New York critics, who resented his failure throughout the Sixties to parrot the familiar leftist pieties still de rigueur in those years if one wanted to be taken as a serious novelist. Mr. Sammler’s Planet and The Dean’s December were especially grating to the Left because they showed the collapse of the “Great Society”—the Liberal Dream of presidents Kennedy and Johnson—into a crime-ridden, drug-infested, race-torn society run by venal manipulators and the charlatans of identity politics. The Dean’s December was doubly vexing in that it showed Eastern Europe, the workers’ paradise, to be the rotten shell of a once-vibrant culture. Bellow’s clarifying vision of Sixties America expressed in fictional form something like the Neoconservative critique of bankrupt liberalism then arising in the West. The gathering power of those fictional achievements, together with the depth of his social observation, won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.

During the 1980s, Bellow seemed largely to bask in the glow of his laureate status. Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984), like his earlier Mosby’s Memoirs (1968), was a provocative short miscellany, but it was mostly notable for an emergent elegiac tone that suggested an older writer beginning to throw his backward glance o’er travel’d roads. Elegiac memory deepened into the theme itself in The Bellarosa Connection, where the narrator—the founder of the Mnemosyne Institute of Philadelphia—undertakes to memorialize the rescue of some Italian Jews from the Nazis, thanks to the intervention and misunderstood “connections” of Billy Rose, the show-biz impresario.

By the 1990s, as Bellow approached and then passed the octogenarian landmark, this tone of elegiac retrospection became even more acute. It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to an Uncertain Future (1994), a nonfiction collection, returned Bellow to the Montreal of his birth and to the Chicago of his youth. Reminiscing about his search for aesthetic bliss, Bellow rose to a spirited defense of art, contesting, among other things, the viewpoint of those Marxist intellectuals and left-wing reviewers who, years before, had faulted him for not being radical and who hung on to Stalinism, indeed even after the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact had shown the moral bankruptcy of the Communist Left.

But The Actual is even mellower in its tender retrospections than its recent predecessors. Despite its brevity, it is about a great many things that are not as simple as they at first seem. One of these is the narrator, Harry Trellman, a retired Jewish-American businessman who has lived a life of emotional self-concealment. A man who never wished to be known, Harry has lived in exile from others, in fact even from himself. The fact of his spiritual camouflage Bellow symbolizes in Trellman’s impassive, even Oriental-looking face and his pronounced “Chinese lip.” Trellman, in any case, is drawn into the orbit of a retired billionaire businessman, Sigmund Adletsky, who has spotted Harry’s most impressive personal gift—the capacity for identifying the hidden motive beneath people’s idiosyncratic social behavior. Adletsky recruits Harry for a kind of informal “brain trust.” He wants, as occasional advisers, men such as Harry who are first-class “noticers.”

Not much happens in the course of The Actual. Trellman ruminates at length on the people who move in his social circle. He spends a lot of time thinking of his first love, Amy Wustrin. She is a decorator whose philandering husband, Jay, after years of neglect, bugged her bed, caught her in flagrante delicto with some lover, and then sued her for adultery. After his death, Jay was wrongly buried in her father’s cemetery plot and must now be exhumed and reburied elsewhere. Trellman has known both Jay and Amy since childhood and envied Jay his marriage to Amy, although he never told her of his love. Even so, Harry has been having imaginary conversations with Amy since they were fifteen. She is the central fact of his emotional life, although she evidently does not know it.

The rich Adletsky and his wife, “Dame Siggy,” decide to purchase a lakefront apartment, and are obliged to dicker with the Bodo Heisingers, who want to sell the fake antique furniture with it. Adletsky hires Amy to advise them. He also picks Harry’s brain about the Heisingers. This couple is mainly notable because Madge Heisinger had tried to ice her husband. The plot failed when her hit man, Tommy Bales, dropped the gun. She and the hit man went to jail for four years, but Bodo, after divorcing her, forgave her and remarried her when she got out of the slammer. Heisinger is a recurrent Bellovian type: “one of those men who dote on impossible women.” Even so, Harry ruminates:

These were all commonplace persons. I would never have let them think so, but it’s time to admit that I looked down on them. They were lacking in higher motives. They were run-of-the-mill products of our mass democracy with no distinctive contribution to make to the history of the species, satisfied to pile up money or seduce women, to copulate, thrive in the sack as the degenerate children of Eros, male but not manly, and living, the men and women alike, on threadbare ideas, without beauty, without virtue, without the slightest independence of spirit—privileged in the way of money and goods, the beneficiaries of man’s conquest of nature as the Enlightenment foresaw it and of the high-tech achievements that have transformed the material world.

Commonplace they are, but Harry notices, them, watches them, studies them. He is looking for “signs of a higher capacity.” Although he finds precious little to encourage him, he expresses the burden of Bellow’s advancing age as he prepares himself “to make my peace with my species.” Perhaps he is more like Bodo than he realizes--“thinking of the time remaining, a decade or so: ‘the final years,’ as biographers refer to them—a period of ‘mature’ acceptance, reconciliation, openhandedness, general amnesty.” But Harry’s fear of death is also displaced onto troubling images of his friend Jay Wustrin being exhumed: the decomposing body laid out in a suit, the tie, the knotted shoelaces.

There is, of course, one person that Trellman cares for—Jay’s ex-wife Amy. The billionaire Adletsky, a good noticer himself, intuits this and sends Harry off to attend her during the exhumation process. In the end, Harry’s evasiveness dissolves. In fact, sitting in the limousine, he makes a better-late-than-never marriage proposal—even as the noisy backhoe is digging the new grave for Jay. What makes Amy so important is that she is “actual.” She is “the actual.” Other women exist—but only to remind Harry of her. There is only one Amy.

This view of Amy produces some rather interesting philosophical seeds that Bellow is content to drop without cultivating. Evidently he intends to suggest that whatever may be the appeal of the merely subjective Amy (with whom Harry has talked things over for forty years); whatever may be the attraction of the imaginative Amy (with whom he continually conversed during their long respective marriages); or whatever may be the appeal of the platonic idea of Amy, Bellow’s protagonist finally embraces the actual woman.

Is there a connection here with his art? In my reading, Bellow himself has always embraced the actual, always married his art to the actualities of the here and now. For this expert noticer of the hidden motive, the actual has always yielded just enough evidence of a higher capacity in people, just enough evidence of even a spiritual grandeur in humanity, to accommodate a “mature acceptance” of the species. The result is a fictional celebration of the world as created, despite its human imperfections, an act of life even at the edge of the grave.