Read The Pritchett Century Online
Authors: V.S. Pritchett
The Pritchett Century (98 page)
What has happened to Moses Herzog, this restless dabbler in the ideas of four centuries? He is having a breakdown because his second wife has destroyed his sexual confidence. He sees himself—and Mr Bellow sees him—prancing through one marriage and several liaisons with success and then marrying the all-time bitch; exhibitionist, hysteric, looter of his brain, spender of his money, far-seeing in matters of law and property, adulterous, glamorously second-rate but adroit with the castrating scissors. To add insult, not to mention symbolism, to injury, the man she goes off with is a one-legged radio phoney. The ruthless and learned Moses, a walking university, begins to look like a Jumboburger who has been told he has lost his mustard. His earlier women may say “Serve him right,” but neither they nor the reader are likely to think his sufferings of much importance when, in a ham ending, he solemnly shacks up with a tremendously international woman called Ramona—of all names—who is apt to come swaggering out of the bathroom with her hand on her hip like a dagger-carrying flameneo
dancer, and wearing black frilly panties with saucy ribbons. Twice during the novel she clinches the entire deal by serving the gourmet the only dish, apparently, she knows how to cook: Shrimp Arnaud, washed down with a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé. His earlier ladies must have thought they had paid a high price. Why didn’t they think of applying this particular nostrum to the exposed soul of modern man? One knows that the fantasy life of university professors is often surprisingly gaudy, that the minds of experts on seventeenth-century thought or the
condition humaine
often drift off to Hollywood in the evenings. If this is Mr Bellow’s ironical realism it certainly describes the feeble state of contemporary erotic fancy: but I detect no irony. Yet irony and self-irony are usually Mr Bellow’s strength. What is more, the one or two love affairs in the book suggest that Moses is looking for easily punishable women without his or Mr Bellow’s knowing it. In a moment of insight Moses wonders if his obsession with sex and love isn’t really feminine. The reader is likely to go further and ask whether Moses is not hermaphrodite.
Structurally and in content, the story of
Herzog
is unsustaining. But what Herzog sees, the accidental detail of his experience, is very impressive. Here he grows. He really has got a mind and it is hurt. It is a tribute to Mr Bellow’s reserves of talent that the novel survives and over-grows its own weaknesses. The muddle Moses is in, his sense of victimisation, are valuable. His paranoia is put, by Mr Bellow, to excellent use. If the theme is lost, we have the American scene. Moses is not really exposed, but his New York and Chicago are. Mr Bellow has something like a genius for place. There is not a descriptive insinuator of what, say, a city like New York is like from minute to minute who comes anywhere near him. Some novelists stage it, others document it; he is breathing in it. He knows how to show us not only Moses but other people, moving from street to street, from room to room in their own circle of uncomprehending solitude. Grasping this essential of life in a big city he sees the place not as a confronted whole, but continually askance. His senses are especially alive to
things
and he catches the sensation that the
things
have created the people or permeated them. This was the achievement of
The Victim
, and it is repeated in
Herzog
. A wanderer, he succeeds with minor characters, the many
small figures in the crowd who suggest millions more. The dialogue of a Puerto Rican taxi driver, a Chicago cop, a low lawyer, a Jewish family, people brash, shady or saddened by the need of survival and whose ripeness comes out of the dirty brick that has trapped them, is really wonderful. It is far superior to Hemingway’s stylised naturalism: Bellow’s talk carries the speakers’ life along with it. Their talk makes them move. They involve Moses with themselves and show him living, as all human beings do, in a web spun by others as well as by himself.
The habit of seeing things askance or out of the corner of his eye has given Mr Bellow an even more important quality: it keeps alive a perpetual sense of comedy and feeds his originality. There is sometimes talk of a taste for elegance in his book; spoken of like that, as a sort of craving or innate possession, it sounds very nearly vulgar. But there is an implicit elegance of mind in his writing: it sharpens the comic edge and dares him to spirited invention. As far as the comedy is concerned it has all the fatality of Jewish comedy, that special comedy of human undress and nakedness of which the Jewish writers are the world’s masters. The other gift of Mr Bellow is his power of fantastic invention. He has hit upon a wonderful device for conveying Herzog’s nervous breakdown. How to deal with his paranoia—if that is what it is—how to make it contribute not only to the character of Herzog but also to the purpose of the book? Mr Bellow decides that Herzog’s dottiness shall consist in writing unfinished letters to all kinds of people living and dead, known and unknown—to his women friends, to editors, tutors, professors, philosophers, to his dead mother, to the President. It is the habit of the mad and Moses is not mad; but he at once is comically and seriously disturbed by every kind of question. Is romanticism “split religion”? “Do the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals?” He writes to Eisenhower asking him “to make it all clear in a few words.” He begins addressing M. de Jouvenal about the aims of political philosophy. The letters are really the scribbles of an exhausted mind. Travelling in the subway Moses evokes the dream figure of a Dr Shrödinger at Times Square:
It has been suggested (and why not) that reluctance to cause pain is actually an extreme form, a delicious form of sensuality, and that we increase the luxuries of pain by the injection of a moral pathos. Thus working both
sides of the street. Nevertheless, there are moral realities, Herzog assured the entire world as he held his strap in the speeding car.
Since Moses is a man of intellect these addresses are often interesting in themselves; but chiefly they convey the dejected larking of a mind that has been tried by two contradictory forces: the breakdown of the public world we live in and the mess of private life. In which world does he live? He is absurd yet he is fine; he is conceited yet he is raw. He is a great man yet he is torpedoed by a woman who “wants to live in the delirious professions”—trades in which the main instrument is your opinion of yourself and the raw material is your reputation or standing. At times he lives like a sort of high-class Leopold Bloom, the eternal Jewish clown; at others he is a Teufelsdröckh; again he is the pushing son of the bewildered Polish-Jewish immigrant and failed boot-legger, guilty about his break with the past, nagged by his relations, his ambitions punctured.
As a character Moses is physically exact—we know his domestic habits—but mentally and emotionally amorphous. Any objection to this is cancelled by his range as an observer-victim. It is a triumph that he is not a bore and does not ask our sympathy.
The outsize heroes of Bellow’s long novels are essentially moral types who have been forced by the American scene to behave like clowns. They are the classic American monologue in person, elephantine chunks of ego. In
Humboldt’s Gift
we meet the clown as performing poet:
A wonderful talker, a hectic non-stop monologist and improvisator, a champion detractor: to be loused up by Humboldt was really a kind of privilege. It was like being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso or an eviscerated chicken by Soutine …
One recognises the voice at once: it has the dash, the dandyism, the easy control of side-slipping metaphor and culture-freaking which gives pace to Saul Bellow’s comedies. He is above all a performer, and in
Humboldt’s Gift
he tells the story of performance in the person of Citrine, Humboldt’s worshipper, disciple and betrayer.
As a youth Citrine had kneeled before the great manic depressive
who had passed the peak of his reputation and was left, gin bottle in hand, cursing American materialism for what it does to genius and the life of the imagination. Humboldt was shrewd enough to see that the young Citrine was on the make, but was glad to have an ally among the young: everything went well, in a general alcoholic way, until Citrine did a frightful thing: he wrote a Broadway success which made him a sudden fortune. He had gone straight to the top of the tree. This was more than the crumbling, middle-aged poet could bear: he did not mind that Citrine had portrayed him as a knockabout Bohemian character; what he resented was the money going into Citrine’s pocket. By this time Humboldt has become the classic American drunken genius and hospital case who shows up American philistinism. Getting out of Bellevue, Humboldt has a delightful time with the psychiatrists:
Even the shrewd Humboldt knew what he was worth in professional New York. Endless conveyor belts of sickness or litigation poured clients and patients into these midtown offices like dreary Long Island potatoes. These dull spuds crushed psychoanalysts’ hearts with boring character problems. Then suddenly Humboldt arrived. Oh Humboldt! He was no potato! He was papaya, a citron, a passion fruit … And what a repertory he had, what changes of style and tempo. He was meek at first—shy. Then he became child-like, trusting, then he confided … He said he knew what husbands and wives said when they quarrelled … People said ho-hum and looked at the ceiling when you started this. Americans! With their stupid ideas about love and their domestic tragedies. How could you bear to listen to them after the worst of wars and the most sweeping of revolutions, the destruction, the death camps, the earth soaked in blood … The world looked into American faces and said: “Don’t tell me these cheerful, well-to-do people are suffering … Anyway I’m not here to discuss adolescent American love-myths”—this was how Humboldt talked. Still, I’d like you to listen to this.
And, suddenly blazing up, he howled out all the melodramas of American scandal and lust. The lawyers had heard it a thousand times—but they wanted to hear it again from a man of genius. He had
become what the respectable professionals long for—their pornographer.
As admirers of Saul Bellow’s work know, he is a master of elaborately patterned narrative that slips back or forward in time, circulating like Sterne, like Proust even. Sterne did this because he loved human inertia: Bellow is out for every tremor of the over-electrified American ego: he is expert in making characters disappear and then reappear swollen and with palms itching for more and more instant life. Humboldt will die in an elevator, but he will haunt the novel to the end like Moby Dick: even contemporary ghosts are jumbo size. The story moves to Chicago and there, on native ground, Citrine fills out. He is Cleverness and Success in person:
It was my turn to be famous and to make money, to get heavy mail, to be recognised by influential people, to be dined at Sardi’s and propositioned in padded booths by women who sprayed themselves with musk, to buy Sea Island cotton underpants and leather luggage.
His troubles with the tax man, with his ex-wife’s lawyers who are stripping him of everything they can get hold of, seem to excite rather than depress him. His sexual life is avid and panicky: he hopes to outsmart middle age. He has bouts of hypochondria. These are enjoyable because he is very frank about his vanity: his touchiness, as middle age comes on, is the making of him as a comic figure. Gleam as he may with success, he cherishes what his wife calls his “cemetery bit”; he has a bent for being a victim: ironical and sentimental, he also knows he is as hardheaded as that other famous twelve-year-old charmer, David Copperfield.
Once Humboldt is dead, Citrine is without a necessary enemy, and here Mr Bellow makes a very interesting find: Rinaldo Cantabile, a small crook with the naïve notion that he can “make” the top Mafia. Unlike Humboldt, there is nothing myth-attracting in Cantabile. He is a loud, smart, nasty smell; he understands the first lesson of gangsterdom: to humiliate your victim; but he is an ass. We remember that Citrine is out to explore the American love-hate of Culture and Genius and indeed takes us round colleges and foundations: Cantabile is
introduced to suggest that the Mafia might get a foot in here. Cantabile even thinks he can terrorise Citrine into seeing that Cantabile’s wife gets a Ph.D. by fraud. My own view is that he does not make the grade as a compelling menace: he is without the extra dimension given to Bellow’s strongly felt characters.
However, good comes of Cantabile, for he gets Mr Bellow back to Chicago. That city is the hero of
Humboldt’s Gift
. No American novelist surpasses Bellow in the urban scene. He knows Chicago intimately from the smell of old blood in the hot nights to the rust on its fire escapes and the aluminium glint of the Lake. He knows the saunas:
the wooden posts were slowly consumed by a wonderful decay that made them soft brown. They looked like beavers’ fur in the golden vapour … The Division Street steam-bathers don’t look like the trim proud people downtown … They are vast in antique form. They stand on thick pillow legs affected with a sort of creeping verdigris or blue-cheese mottling of the ankles … you feel these people are almost conscious of obsolescence, of a time of civilisation abandoned by nature and culture. So down in the super-heated sub cellars all these Slavonic cavemen and wood demons with hanging laps of fat and legs of stone and lichen boil themselves and splash ice-water on their heads by the bucket. Upstairs, on the television screen in the locker room, dudes and grinning broads make smart talk or leap up and down … Below, Franush, the attendant, makes steam by sloshing water on the white-hot boulders.
The secret of Mr Bellow’s success is that he talks people into life and never stops pouring them in and out of his scenes. In this book the women are particularly well-drawn. Citrine’s sexual vanity is a help here: once satisfied, he is taken aback by the discovery that women have other interests—the delightful delinquent Demmie is reformed, but in sleep at night her buried life comes out in groans and howls as she wrestles with the devil, and she wakes up next day fresh as a daisy to get down on her knees for redemption by scrubbing floors. Denise is the climbing wife of the climbing man. Vassar girl, seductive and respectable—what more does she want? The ear of top people at the White House; she wants to tell them what she has just read in
Newsweek
!
And then Renata-a fate for more than one Bellow hero-Spanishy, flamenco-ish; vulgar, genial, sexually voracious, knows her Ritzes, and while willing to listen to high-class intellectual talk for a while, makes it clear that her price is very high and her fidelity at perpetual risk. These women are real, even likeable. Why? I think because in some clever way Mr Bellow shows them moving through their own peculiar American day, which is unlike the day of Citrine. One might press the point further and say that Bellow’s characters are real to us because they are physical objects-Things. What other tenderness can a materialist society contain?