“For his part, Max Horkheimer was careful to avoid any overt
expressions of his political convictions, which might have jeopardized the
support of his father or the trust of his professors. Horkheimer had learned
long before to cultivate a rich interiority in which he could safely pursue his
genuine concerns.”
How I wish that I had learned to cultivate a rich
interiority! Instead, I’m a blabbermouth – my interiority is always dribbling
out of me, which is a nasty and embarrassing habit. I was not destined to be
one of the sleek ones in this world, an escaper of nets, an elegant coder of
elegies, rubbing the right elbows.
Novelists are generally of the blabbermouth kind. Their rich
interiority is for show. But what a triumph if they can convey the Horkheimer
type – a man whose actions are carefully calculated not to land him in the hot
water that his opinions would surely make for him. The faucet, to continue with
that hot water commonplace, is not turned to on, save on rare occassions.
Silence, cunning exile – such were Stephen Daedalus’s vows, although he was too
much the student, too much the Hamlet manque, not to indulge himself in the
right company.
I’ve been reading Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, lately, and
thinking about the paradox that this is at once a book loaded with sexism and
racism, full of neo-con turns (when they were still young), and yet quite an
amazing novel – even for a person like me whose entire belief system falls
under what Stanley Crouch, Bellow’s friend, called the “degeneracy” of American
life. Crouch is writing about the sixties, and there’s a pretty heavy paradox
riding on his phrase, since of course if America was degenerating in the
sixties, then it must have been hale and healthy before the sixties, in the era
of Jim Crow apartheid. Crouch was selected to write the intro to a recent
edition of Mr. Sammler’s Planet under some obvious publisher’s equation – a black
writer introducing the novel could ameliorate phrases like:
“Millions of civilized people wanted oceanic,
boundless, primitive, neckfree nobility, experienced a strange release of
galloping impulses, and acquired the peculiar aim of sexual niggerhood for
everyone.”
Bellow had become a George
Wallace Democrat in the late sixties; “sexual niggerhood” is not some poetic
phrase that only a literalist or leftist would interpret as bigoted in the
slightest. Causuistry of that kind diminishes Bellow rather than defends him.
But the thing that Crouch’s
introduction gets wrong (as does so many other reviews and essays about this
novel) is the casual exchange of Bellow for his character, Mr. Sammler. Whether
Sammler is endowed with Bellow’s opinions or not, as a successfully realized
fiction, those opinions undergo an essential change when put in Sammler’s mind.
For it is not the case that a rich interiority can resist or remain
uninfluenced by the material circumstances of the experience that circumscribes
it. If the book were merely the opinions of a rich celebrity on the sexual
depravity of women and African Americans, the book would be forgotten – it would
be like one of the numerous conservative screeds so regularly published by Saul
Bellow’s son, Adam, for the Free Press. Who can tell one Glenn Beck book from
another?
There’s a moment in Mr.
Sammler’s Planet where Sammler says about Ulysses
that it is entirely in medias res – and this is what I think Bellow was up to
here. Instead of a scion of Central Europe in Dublin – Bloom – we have a scion
of Central Europe, a survivor of the Nazi death squads, in New York in the
sixties. Sammler, with his nobility and his bigotries, his rich interiority and
his doubts of its worth in the face of what he knows from his horrendous
exterior experience, transcends Bellow’s opinions and lives through Bellow’s
real talent.
It is difficult to describe
how a novel that is so opinionated is, at the same time, so free of its
opinions. I am tempted to seize on Bakhtin’s idea of dialoguism as a sort of
spar to save me from a sea of contradictions. It is, on the other hand, rather
odd that the book can be described as dialogic when the text is so monologic –
so centered on Sammler’s meditiations and description of the world of
Manhattan. What dialogic means is that there is an interplay of points of view,
and that this interplay is essential to these points of view – it is not
accidental to them, they are not pre-formed before the interplay. This is
harder to grasp in that my language seems to undercut me, insisting on making the phrase “point of view” into something
hard and isolate, a substance – rather than an aspect, an unfinished moment.
But this is what makes a novel, or at least a novel that is still visibly
connected to high modernism, work. And it is why Crouch, or Irving Howe (in his
review of the book) or James Atlas (in his smarmy biography of Bellow) or maybe
even, at times, Bellow himself are so mistaken to transpose Bellow and Sammler.
This isn’t to say that Bellow doesn’t breath down his elderly deathsquad
survivor’s neck – for instance, there is clearly a contradiction between Mr.
Sammler’s often acute visual description of things and the fact that one of his
eyes has been knocked out by a blow from a riflebutt in Poland in 1940. I can’t
believe that Bellow didn’t experiment (as anybody would) by closing one eye and
walking down the sidewalk, which would have at least given him a glimmer of the
way in which a one-eyed man would see the world. Sometimes Sammler truly is one
eyed, sometimes the fiction breaks down. And this is similarly true with the
thoughts that are mulled in his rich interiority. One feels the engineering
hand at certain points.
No comments:
Post a Comment