[Marxism] Saul Bellow

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Saul Bellow died yesterday at the age of 89. He was one of the few
remaining literary modernists. His last published novel was the 2000
Ravelstein, a thinly disguised portrait of his life-long friend, U. of
Chicago colleague and fellow neoconservative Alan Bloom. Both Bellow and
Bloom hated the 1960s in general and Black militancy in particular. Bloom
wrote "Closing of the American Mind" which likened 60s radicals to Nazi
brownshirts. In this assault on social movements, Bloom remained curiously
silent on gay liberation. That was likely because Bloom was gay himself. He
died of AIDS in 1992.

Bellow shared Bloom's contempt for cultural diversity. They were defiantly
opposed to "watering down" the curriculum with works foreign to the Great
Books/Western Civilization chapel. Bellow once wrote, "Who is the Tolstoy
of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?"

Ironically, Christopher Hitchens, who is now running tours of Merrie Olde
England in the spirit of Bloom/Bellow with David Horowitz and Paul Johnson,
had these people nailed once upon a time. In an April 27, 2000 LRB review
of Ravelstein, Christopher Hitchens wrote:

"Chaos, most especially the chaos identified with pissed-off African
Americans, was the whole motif of The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom
had taught at Cornell during the campus upheaval of 1968, and never
recovered from the moment when black students produced guns to amplify
their demands. (He also never reconciled himself to the ghastly fondness of
the young for rock music. 'Whether it be Nuremberg or Woodstock,' he wrote
in a passage of extreme dyspepsia comparing everybody to the Brownshirts,
'the principle is the same.') However, there was hope. A small group of
classics students copied out and xeroxed a passage against ochlocracy from
Plato's Republic and passed it out as a leaflet. Bloom sounds just like
Bellow when he recalls this moment: 'They had learned from this old book
what was going on and had gained real distance on it.'"

Full:
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n09/print/hitc01_.html>http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n09/print/hitc01_.html

Despite his resentment at being viewed in this fashion, Saul Bellow was
habitually grouped with fellow Jewish-American novelists Philip Roth and
Bernard Malamud. All three had a talent for picaresque tale-telling and
vivid characters, often gripped by one neurosis or another. Bellow
subjected himself to psychoanalysis on three different occasions and even
sat in an orgone box for a time.

I regard "Herzog" as his crowning achievement. This is a novel about a
character like Bellow. After being cuckolded, Moses Herzog goes to live in
a cabin in the woods where he writes long, philosophical letters to God and
famous personages living and dead but that are never sent. As a long-time
writer of such letters on the Internet, I feel a certain kinship with
Herzog, although my efforts probably have more to do with Lazlo Toth.

Like any other reactionary author, Bellow's work has to be judged solely on
literary merit. As such, "Herzog" would be sufficient grounds for awarding
Bellow the Nobel Prize. In 1980, a year after I dropped out of the
Trotskyist movement, I read this novel and a number of other classics in
order to familiarize myself with novel-writing techniques. I had plans--you
see--of writing the Great American Novel. After reading "Herzog," I decided
to get back into politics because there just didn't seem to be any point in
trying to accomplish something in a field that was so totally dominated by
superior talents. There is one scene in particular in "Herzog" that made me
feel like I was woefully inadequate. In a visit to one of his new
girl-friends, Herzog spends a moment or two in her bathroom performing his
ablutions. Bellow takes this opportunity to describe the woman's character
through the objects in the bathroom and how they are organized. It is a
bravura performance. After reading this passage, I confessed to myself that
I could never write like this in a million years.

After reading "Herzog," I became a fan of Bellow despite his politics. My
loyalty was put to the test when I read "Mr. Sammler's Planet," a work
about a holocaust survivor on Manhattan's Upper West Side that exhibits in
full bloom (pun intended) his growing animosity toward Blacks and
resentment toward young radicals. Although Sammler is treated with a
certain amount of disdain by Bellow, he becomes a vehicle for a lot of the
racism and reactionary politics brewing inside the author. This is a
favored device of novelists shifting to the right: using fictional
characters as a sounding board for their new ideas. By introducing an
openly reactionary character, the novelist is free to state that this is
"not really me, just a character". This is a ploy used by Ian McEwan, whose
latest novel "Saturday" features the stream of consciousness of a
neurosurgeon alienated by protestors against the war in Iraq.

One of the most repellent (and unbelievable) scenes in "Mr. Sammler's
Planet" involves Sammler and an immaculately dressed African-American
pickpocket who exposes himself while robbing the old man. It not only
stretches credulity. It breaks it into a thousand pieces.

In a fascinating April 10, 1993 Guardian article titled "Marx At My Table,"
Saul Bellow describes his political evolution. After arriving in Chicago
from Canada, Bellow describes his rapid politicization in the 1930s:

>>The country took us over. We felt that to be here was a great piece of
luck. The children of immigrants in my Chicago high school, however,
believed that they were also somehow Russian, and while they studied their
Macbeth and Milton's L'Allegro, they read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as well
and went on inevitably to Lenin's State And Revolution, and the pamphlets
of Trotsky. The Tuley high school debating club discussed the Communist
Manifesto and on the main stem of the neighbourhood, Division Street, the
immigrant intelligensia lectured from soapboxes, while at "the forum", a
church hall on California Avenue, debates between socialists, communists
and anarchists attracted a fair number of people.

This was the beginning of my radical education. For on the recommendation
of friends I took up Marx and Engels, and remember, in my father's bleak
office near the freight yards, blasting away at Value Price and Profit
while the police raided a brothel across the street - for non-payment of
protection, probably - throwing beds, bedding and chairs through the
shattered windows. The Young Communist League tried to recruit me in the
late 1930s. Too late - I had already read Trotsky's pamphlet on the German
question and was convinced that Stalin's errors had brought Hitler to power.

IN COLLEGE in 1933 I was a Trotskyist. Trotsky instilled into his young
followers the orthodoxy peculiar to the defeated and ousted. We belonged to
the Movement, we were faithful to Leninism, and could expound the
historical lessons and describe Stalin's crimes. My closest friends and I
were not, however, activists; we were writers. Owing to the Depression we
had no career expectations. We got through the week on five or six bucks
and if our rented rooms were small, the libraries were lofty, were
beautiful. Through "revolutionary politics" we met the demand of the times
for action. But what really mattered was the vital personal nourishment we
took from Dostoevsky or Herman Melville, from Dreiser and John Dos Passos
and Faulkner. By filling out a slip of paper at the Crerar on Randolph
Street you could get all the bound volumes of The Dial and fill long
afternoons with T. S. Eliot, Rilke and e. e. cummings.

Toward the end of the 1930s the Partisan Review was our own Dial, with
politics besides. There we had access to our significant European
contemporaries - Silone, Orwell, Koestler, Malraux, Andre Gide and Auden.
Partisan's leading American contributors were Marxists - critics and
philosophers like Dwight Macdonald, James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Clement
Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro and Harold Rosenberg. The Partisan Review
intellectuals had sided with Trotsky quite naturally, during the Moscow
trials. Hook had persuaded his teacher John Dewey to head a commission of
inquiry in Mexico. We followed the proceedings bitterly, passionately, for
we were, of course, the Outs; the Stalinists were the Ins. We alone in the
US knew what a bad lot they were. FDR and his New Dealers didn't have a
clue, they understood neither Russia nor communism.

Although I now drifted away from Marxist politics, I still admired Lenin
and Trotsky. After all, I had first heard of them in the high-chair while
eating my mashed potatoes. How could I forget that Trotsky had created the
Red Army, that he had read French novels at the Front while defeating
Denikin? That great crowds had been swayed by his coruscating speeches? The
glamour of the Revolution still cast its spell. Besides, the most respected
literary and intellectual figures had themselves yielded. Returning from a
visit to Russia, Edmund Wilson had spoken about "the moral light at the top
of the world," and it was Wilson who had introduced us to Joyce and Proust.
His history of revolutionary thought, To The Finland Station, was published
in 1940. By that time Poland had been invaded and France had fallen.

Nineteen-forty was also the year of Trotsky's assassination.

I was in Mexico at the time, and an acquaintance of the Old Man, a European
lady whom I had met in Taxco, arranged a meeting. Trotsky agreed to receive
my friend Herbert Passin and me in Coyoacan. It was on the morning of our
appointment that he was struck down, and when we reached Mexico City we
were met by the headlines. When we went to his villa we must have been
taken for foreign journalists, and we were directed to the hospital. The
emergency room was in disorder. We had only to ask for Trotsky. A door into
a small room was opened for us and there we saw him. He had just died. A
cone of bloody bandages was on his head. His cheeks, his nose, his beard,
his throat were streaked with blood and with dried trickles of iodine.

He is reported to have said once that Stalin could kill him whenever he
liked, and now we understood what a far-reaching power could do with us;
how little it took to kill us, how slight a hold we, with our historical
philosophies, our ideas, programmes, purposes, wills, had on the matter we
were made of.

It is perfectly true, as Charles Fairbanks has suggested, that
totalitarianism in our century has shaped the very definition of what an
intellectual is. The "vanguard fighters" who acted under Lenin's direction
in October were intellectuals, and perhaps the glamour of this event had
its greatest affect on intellectuals in the west. Among political activists
this was sufficiently evident, but the Bolshevik model was immensely
influential everywhere.

Trotsky and T. E. Lawrence were perhaps the most outstanding of the
intellectual activists to emerge from the first world war - the former as
Lenin's principal executive, Lawrence as the delicate scholar and recluse,
a Shakespearian Fortinbras materialising in the Arabian desert. Malraux was
inspired by both men, obviously, an aesthete and theorist eager in his
first phase for revolutionary action, and manifesting a curious relish for
violence in a great cause. It was he who set an example for French writers
of the 1940s. Sartre was certainly one of his descendants and many in
France and elsewhere modelled themselves upon him, up to the time when he
abjured revolution. There was a trace of this also in Arthur Koestler, who
so often exposed himself to personal danger, but it was in France between
the 1930s until the time of Regis Debray that leftist intellectuals
presented themselves in the west as soldiers of the revolution.<<

The article concludes with Bellow's confession that "politics as a vocation
I take seriously. But it's not my vocation. And on the whole writers are
not much good at it." I think that we call all agree on this.


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