Hero-Bashing: Thoughts on Bellow's Prose

    In an interview on a Spanish arts-and-culture show in the late 1980s (available now on YouTube), Saul Bellow admits (or is it boasts?) that no less an eminence than W.H. Auden once challenged his approach to long-form prose. Auden contended, said Bellow, that the fineness of Bellow’s writing – its euphony and romping rhythms, its elevation of the sentence to a new poetic form – was doomed, was unsustainable. Bellow was making a huge mistake; he was bound to drive himself mad with his efforts, to wreck the keel of his prosody on the rocks of so demanding a form. These demands being, of course, the arranging of plot, the drawing and development of character, the mixing of voices and teasing of themes – demands the poet must certainly answer, but in smaller, more manageable ways. In Auden’s view, language, for the novelist, was primarily a medium; for the poet, however, it was the the entirety: medium, action, and artwork all at once. By presuming to foreground his language, a prose that verged on verse, Bellow (in Auden’s view) was confusing the tools for the work itself, like a man too busy admiring his brush to paint on the actual canvas.
    Somehow I doubt this anecdote, with its bragging tone disguised as self-reproach. For one thing, few readers, whether they’re casual fans or laurel-decked poets like Auden, could accuse Saul Bellow of short-changing the novel – and certainly not by mid-century, in the wake of Ulysses (to say nothing of Finnegans Wake). Bellow, in other words, was not alone in his elevation of prose over mere reportage. After all, he was an artist in the Age of Style, an era which, though subject to tremors in taste, has shown no signs of collapse. (There are few “literary” writers today who don’t shape their prose with great care. Even a “plainspoken” style bows to Style.) In this sense, Bellow’s prose is both typical and extraordinary: one more flame in the undying bonfire of modernism.
    Another reason I doubt this anecdote: The prose isn’t poetry. It is too laden with description, too flabby with adjectives, too bogged down and boggy with its own exhaustive catalogs. Anti-poetic, too, is Bellow’s taste for caricature, for delineating the grotesque and the beautiful with the strokes of a cartoonist – strokes that, for all their color and abundance, tend to obscure grotesquery and beauty alike. In Herzog, Bellow’s early-60s blockbuster, the eponymous hero describes his ex-wives and -girlfriends in the hard-breathing manner of an undersexed Hooter’s patron. Here is Herzog reflecting on the comelier features of his Argentine mistress: “Ramona with her intoxicating eyes and robust breasts, her short but gentle legs, her Carmen airs, thievishly seductive, her skill in the sack (defeating invisible rivals)….” A few lines later, as if to complete her portrait as a sex robot, Ramona concedes to the needy Herzog, “But I know better than to be proud and demanding. Life has taught me to be humble.” And yet Bellow intends us to take this woman seriously; caricature, in such moments, becomes much more than a flaw in the prose.

Probably thinking of adjectives

    Bellow uses similar stampedes of detail to describe his less fortunate characters. In Herzog, the hero’s lawyer, Sandor Himmelstein, is presented as something of a monster: “He was a short man, misshapen from the loss of part of his chest. In Normandy, he always said…. [T]his dwarf and hunchback was disabled by a mine near the beachhead…. [T]hat was Sandor, with a proud, sharp, handsome face, pale mouth and sallow skin, grand nose, thin gray hair.” The use of adjectives here, particularly in the description of Himmelstein's face, is typical of Bellow. What may seem vivid in theory becomes, in the act of reading, a traffic jam of detail, with each descriptor laying on the horn, desperate to exert its own meaning. The resulting clamor is both sloppy and easy to imitate. In fact, Bellow sometimes seems to imitate himself, as in his description of Polina, Herzog’s ex-mother-in-law: “She was frugal, arid, clean, respectable and domineering. But there was nothing so tart, sweet, soft, and fragrant as her strudel made with brown sugar and green apples.” These short, packed, muddled yet sonorous sentences cry out for a thorough re-reading.
    Bellow remains, however, one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century, and Auden’s protests – whether fictional or not – are obviously misplaced. Bellow may have flirted with verse, but his genius lies in the rhythms of prose: in the cascading of his clauses, the momentum of his paragraphs, his simultaneous fluency in the slang of Chicago and the cant of Academe. But the ultimate sign of his greatness, for me, is that I cannot read him without yearning, myself, to write like him. I’ll leave the last word to another of my heroes, John Cheever, who once described Bellow as a “brother” and a “real explorer.” Writing in his journal of a 1961 meeting of the Yaddo board of directors, Cheever admits that he’s intimidated by his friend’s vast talents: “During the meeting my own personality seems dispersed. I seem further demolished by the white of Saul’s eye. I wonder foolishly at the supremacy of his creative energies.” Whether those energies were indeed supreme is a discussion for another post, but the fact still stands: Bellow was a genius, and his genius emerged not in poetry, but in sentences – in the iconic bounce of his majestic, musical, adjective-rattling prose.


Two of my heroes (and a painting by my brother)

The Tender Specificity of Roland Barthes

        My attraction to Roland Barthes – which was immediate and intense – began as a kind of recognition. In the charming imperiousness of Mythologies (an authority that seduced me, that brushed past my defenses with disarming erudition and humor), I recognized my ticket to a pure superiority – intellectual political, moral. At the age of twenty-one, I was starving for this power (though I’m not sure I knew this myself). If Barthes, dismantling the structures that give us detergent ads and Lego sets, could rupture the very fabric of middle-class life – a life I was coming increasingly to disdain (a form of self-disdain, no doubt) – couldn’t I, simply by reading him, step outside and above these same ugly structures? I mistook his sensitivity for smugness, and I adopted this smugness as my own. I shrank just as much as I grew.

But now, six years later, as I read Camera Lucida, I see the limits of my previous reading – the limits of pure criticism. Through love, the inconsolable love of mourning, Barthes steps beyond the structures that, in Mythologies, confine him to a critical parlor trick. Camera Lucida is not an act of reduction, dissection, and dismissal; it is an exercise in tenderness, in transcendence through the particular.

Delineating the tension between the Mother as Figure and the exquisite specificity of his mother (who had died two years before), Barthes writes:

I could understand my generality; but having understood it, invincibly I escaped it. In the Mother, there was a radiant, irreducible core: my mother…. For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable. (Camera Lucida 75)

For my own part, I am learning – much too slowly, perhaps – not to read or write as a means of fostering distance. It is true that the clichés of ideology are dangerous, and we must always seek to dismantle them. But just as important (if we can remain ever wary of pre-structured falsehood) is the recognition of another’s humanity, of its “radiant, irreducible core.”