The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (2 page)

Most mornings we linger. Work will wait. We tour the “giardino” and see which flowers have appeared. This June there is a white anemone of which Saul is enormously proud (there’s never been another before or since—the moles seem to get at the bulbs). The giant red-orange poppies are budding, the peonies will flower this year in time for Saul’s birthday, and there’s one early bright purple cosmos blossom. We admire a fat sassy snake curling among the wild columbines. “The whole world is an ice cream cone to him,” Saul laughs as he disappears into his studio.

Everything must be taken up nimbly, easily, or not at all. You can’t read Saul without being aware of the laughter running beneath every word. He has always been playful. Now he is also firm and spare. There is also the matter of taste. Sometimes a detail is borrowed because the flavor is right (like Charlus and the telephone in the narrator’s mansion—never mind the anachronism). Saul generally steers clear of puzzles and riddles. Lovers of word games must look to Joyce or Nabokov for the serious pleasures of the anagrammist. What we find instead is Stendhalian brio—laughter, whimsy, lightness of touch. Odd, perhaps, that I should speak of laughter in considering what is essentially Saul’s darkest look at one of the century’s most serious subjects. But “Bellarosa” wasn’t born in anger. Everything that moved Saul deeply at that time found its way into the novella, and what moved him deeply, no matter how serious, was a source of energy and ultimately of pleasure. This was a time when we were often up toward dawn—discussing the story, his memories of New Jersey or of Greenwich Village, and most often the history of the Jews. But perhaps because we were young lovers then my memories ofthat spring are anything but dark. Saul was writing this powerful, even horrible book with intense heat and joy, dipping into his brightest colors.

That’s not to say the writing always came easily or that the work went on uninterrupted. By early June Saul had begun turning the yellow pages into manuscript. I remember hearing the sound of the typewriter one morning, and feeling a thrill that his breakfast forecast—“I think I’ve got something here”—was being realized. He was working in the house, and when I took him his tea, I stood by and listened for another volley of staccato fire. Saul hunts down his words with the keys of his Remington. He revises as he types, and spots of silence are followed by these racy rattling rhythmical bursts. He looks forward to this cup of hot tea with one round slice of lemon floating on top. The proper drink for a European Jew on an overcast day, Saul first observed when he visited the empty Jewish quarters of Polish cities. The lemon stands for the sun; the sugar and caffeine give the jolt you need when the surge from your morning coffee subsides. How he was managing to write at all was fairly mysterious, since he would accept no protection from distractions. And there had been many: a visit from a neighbor; phone calls from an agent, a lawyer, a friend (I could always tell from the roars of laughter when it was Allan Bloom on the line). After each interruption the study door would close and the wonderful
ack-ack-ack
_ of the typewriter would begin again.

A week before his birthday on June 10, Saul read me the first dozen typed pages of the story. The account of Fonstein’s escape from the Italian prison made me hold my breath then, and every time I’ve heard it since. The narrator would be an older man, recounting a story that had been told to him by Fonstein years earlier.

Though Saul was bushed, he was putting on speed so as to have as much done as possible before we took off for Paris and Rome in the middle of the month. What? Europe, now? Well, we would see Bloom in Paris, and in Italy the Scanno Prize was being offered to Saul. The details of the award—a bag of gold coins, a stay in a hunting lodge in the remote Abruzzi region—had too much of the flavor of adventure to resist. Saul never takes it easy when he is overworked and beginning to feel run down. He continued to ride his mountain bike, to chop up the fallen limbs of an apple tree, to remove boulder-sized rocks from the garden, to carry in logs for the morning fire. I was convinced he had a horseshoe over his head that spring. He tripped while cutting brush and scraped his face; he had a gashed shin to show for a tumble from his mountain bike; his eye was bloodshot; there was a bleeding nose. Of course he worked the morning of the nosebleed, lying down on the futon in the studio whenever the bleeding started, and then getting up to scrawl out a new paragraph. When he hadn’t returned for lunch I carried a bite out to him and found him typing vigorously, his face and his T-shirt covered with blood. Composing for Saul is an aerobic activity. He sweats when he writes, and peels off layers of clothing. When he is concentrating particularly hard, he screws up his left eye and emits a sound that’s a cross between the panting of a long-distance runner and a breathy whistle: “Windy suspirations of forced breath.”

Saul’s birthday—at least for the fourteen years I have celebrated it with him—is always a his-kind-of-working-weather day—blue skies, copper sun, the atmospheric high of high pressure. But there would be no writing today. I should add that time off is something unheard of for Saul. No holidays, no Sabbaths. A birthday is like any other day—a chance to type another couple of pages. He was, however, high as a kite. Family was on the way, and at his request I was baking a devil’s food chocolate cake with chocolate icing and toasted coconut.

A brief break from words is never a sign that the mental wheels aren’t racing round and round. Two days later Saul returned from his morning’s work and announced: “I started my story again from scratch. There are times when it takes over, you know.” At dinner I pressed him about the new beginning and he became very expansive: there were too many ideas piled on at the start—too much to expect the reader to digest all at once. All this stuff about the American versus the European Jew. This must unfold gradually. What the story is really about is memory and faith. There is no religion without remembering. As Jews we remember what was told to us at Sinai; at the Seder we remember the Exodus; Yiskor is about remembering a father, a mother. We are told not to forget the Patriarchs; we admonish ourselves, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…” And we are constantly reminding God not to forget his Covenant with us. This is what the “chosenness” of the Chosen People is all about. We are chosen to be God’s privileged mind readers. All of it, what binds us together, is our history, and we are a people because we remember.

Saul then told me that his narrator was beginning to come to life. He had decided not to give him a name. This elderly man, narrator X, is starting to lose his memory. He is walking down the street one day, humming “Way down upon the…” and he can’t remember the name of the river—it torments him, he’s in agony over this loss of a word, he feels ready to stop a passerby, to do anything to recover the word (this actually did happen to Saul during the winter in Chicago, while strolling around downtown on his way back from the dentist, and until Suwannee came to him he was beside himself). The narrator can’t afford such a lapse because, as Saul explained, his whole life has been built around memory. He will be the founder of this institute—the Mnemosyne Institute—that helps business people sharpen their memories. In order to put it all together and make a coherent picture, he is going to take it upon himself to remember what Fonstein’s life had been, to write a memoir about this European refugee.

Over the next couple of days we pored over an essay about Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power that Saul felt was central to his thoughts about the American half of the story. The “nihilism of stone” that Nietzsche talks about has degenerated, in Saul’s formulation, into a “nihilism of sleaze.” Now the will to power supposedly releases creative energy. Is the Hollywood of Billy Rose, the Las Vegas of Fonstein’s cardplaying son, the chaos of American life the best we are able to come up with by way of new creation? Perhaps the narrator of “The Bellarosa Connection” means to oppose the idea that human life has become an utterly meaningless chaos with memory—which is another way of saying faith.

The spring that had begun with cold and rain was ending in a heat wave. It was pushing 90 degrees on June 13, and as I made for the pond at high noon I found Saul heading the same way, bending the long grasses and parting the wildflowers. When we met before the green water we had the following exchange: “Was it a good morning?” I asked.

“Yes. I started something new.”

“What?!”

“I’m loosened up now, I’m just writing something I had it in mind to write.”

Stripped of our clothes (yes, Rosie, your parents were young and wild once upon a time), we went for the first swim of the season, Saul leading the way into the deliciously cold water. Then, as we were drying ourselves on the rocks in the blazing sun, Saul asked: “You want to hear some of it?” I don’t know what I was expecting. Probably a new beginning for “Bellarosa.” But when he opened the composition book he had brought down to the pond, he began to read the first several thousand words of something
completely
_ new—what would eventually become
Marbles,
_ a novel he has written and rewritten for close to a decade now, and has never, to this day, completed.

When thinking of Saul at work, I have before my eyes the image of a juggler—luminous airborne balls, each one a different color, turning against an azure sky, kept aloft by the infinite skill of a magician, who is at once relaxed, wry, and concentrating intensely. Hand him a telephone, ask him a practical question about dinner, or invite him on a walk and he’s still working those airborne balls. If you were aware of them, and walking behind him on that road, you would see them circling overhead.

—Janis Bellow

Every writer is eventually called a “beautiful writer,” just as all flowers are eventually called pretty. Any prose above the most ordinary is applauded; and “stylists” are crowned every day, of steadily littler kingdoms. Amidst this busy relativity, it is easy to take for granted the immense stylistic powers of Saul Bellow, who, with Faulkner, is the greatest modern American writer of prose.

But again, many writers are called “great”; the word is everywhere, industrially farmed. In Bellow’s case it means greatly abundant, greatly precise, greatly various, rich, and strenuous. It means prose as a registration of the joy of life: the happy rolling freedom of his daring, uninsured sentences. These qualities are present in Bellow’s stories as fully as in his novels. Any page from this selection yields a prose of august raciness, ripe with inheritance (the rhythms of Melville and Whitman, Lawrence and Joyce, and behind them, Shakespeare). This prose sometimes cascades in poured adjectives (a river, in “The Old System,” seen as “crimped, green, blackish, glassy”) and at other times darts with lancing metaphorical wit (“his baldness was total, like a purge”). Controlling these different modes of expression is a firm intelligence, always tending to peal into comic, metaphysical wryness—as in the description of Behrens, the florist, in Something to Remember Me By”: “Amid the flowers, he alone had no color—something like the price he paid for being human.”

Bellow is a great portraitist of the human form, Dickens’s equal at the swift creation of instant gargoyles; everyone remembers Valentine Gersbach in
Herzog,
_ with his wooden leg, “bending and straightening gracefully like a gondolier.” In these stories, more eagerly chased by form than the novels, Bellow is even more swift and compactly appraising. In “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” we encounter Victor Wulpy, the great art critic and theorist, who is disheveled and “wore his pants negligently”: “By the way his entire face expanded when he spoke emphatically you recognized that he was a kind of tyrant in thought”; in “Cousins,” Cousin Riva: “I remembered Riva as a full-figured, dark-haired, plump, straight-legged woman. Now all the geometry of her figure had changed. She had come down in the knees like the jack of a car, to a diamond posture”; in “A Silver Dish,” Pop, who fights with his son on the ground and then suddenly becomes still: “His eyes stuck out and his mouth was open, sullen. Like a stout fish”; in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” Professor Kippenberg, a great scholar with bushy eyebrows “like caterpillars from the Tree of Knowledge”; in “Zetland,” Max Zetland, with a “black cleft” in his chin, an “unshavable pucker”; and McKern, the drunk brought home by the young narrator of “Something to Remember Me By,” and laid out naked on a sofa: “I looked in at McKern, who had thrown down the coat and taken off his drawers. The parboiled face, the short nose pointed sharply, the life signs in the throat, the broken look of his neck, the black hair of his belly, the short cylinder between his legs ending in a spiral of loose skin, the white shine of the shins, the tragic expression of his feet.”

What function do these exuberant physical sketches have? First, there is joy, simple joy, to be had from reading the sentences. The description of Professor Kippenberg’s bushy eyebrows as resembling caterpillars from the Tree of Knowledge is not just a fine joke; when we laugh, it is with appreciation for a species of wit that is properly called metaphysical. We delight in the curling process of invention whereby seemingly incompatible elements—eyebrows and caterpillars and Eden; or women’s hips and car jacks—are combined. Thus, although we feel after reading Bellow that most novelists do not really bother to attend closely enough to people’s shapes and dents, his portraiture does not exist merely as realism. We are encouraged not just to see the lifelikeness of Bellow’s characters, but to partake in a creative joy, the creator’s joy in
making
_ them look like this. This is not just how people look; they are also sculptures, pressed into by the artist’s quizzical and ludic force. In “Mosby’s Memoirs,” for instance, a few lines describe a Czech pianist performing SchЎnberg. “This man, with muscular baldness, worked very hard upon the keys.” Certainly, we quickly have a vision of this “muscular baldness”; we know what this looks like. But then Bellow adds: “the muscles of his forehead rising in protest against
tabula rasa
_—the bare skull,” and suddenly we have entered the surreal, the realm of play: how strange and comic, the idea that the muscles of the man’s head are somehow rebelling against the bareness, the blankness, the
tabula rasa,
_ of his bald head!