councilor.org
| Source | Louis Proyect |
| Date | 05/06/08/03:27 |
| (Swans - June 6, 2005) When Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1976, he joined other American prize winners who expressed their time. 1962 Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck captured the spirit of the turbulent 1930s just as African-American Toni Morrison, who received the award in 1993, gave expression to another period of strife and struggle. Contrary to these voices of rebellion, Bellow epitomized the postwar America retreat into psychoanalysis, material success, and establishment politics. As somebody who had experienced poverty in the 1930s and who had made a brief commitment to radical politics, Bellow was the artistic counterpart to an entire generation of intellectuals who had made room for themselves at the American dinner table. As so many of the others in this movement, Bellow's Jewish identity gave added weight to his right turn. The ascendancy of the Jewish intellectual in terms of social acceptance and material gain in the USA corresponded to the rise of the state of Israel. Not only had they made it; they resented others who had not picked themselves up by the bootstrap. Despite his conservative bent, Saul Bellow was a great writer capable of deep humanitarian insights. This article will consider his life and career and focus on one of his most highly regarded works, Seize the Day. This 1956 novella captures the anxieties of people on the precipice of fame and wealth but still capable of falling backwards into poverty and obscurity. Bellow was the bard of an America that still remembered the Great Depression but that was anxious to move forward to power and prosperity. This tension gives it literary value. It also drives home what a loss it was when people such as Saul Bellow finally achieved insider status and lost touch with their humble roots. Born on June 10, 1915 to immigrant parents in Lachine, a working-class suburb of Montreal, Saul Bellow and his family soon moved to Chicago, Illinois, where his father struggled to make ends meet, eventually turning to bootlegging. Ironically, things improved after the 1929 crash, when his father began selling wood chips for bakers' ovens. (This biographical detail and subsequent ones come from James Atlas's Bellow, a definitive 685-page work that took a decade to research and write. Atlas is obviously alienated from Bellow's political views and shortcomings as a human being, but was scrupulous in his treatment of the great writer.) Bellow discovered an early love of literature. By the time he was nine years old, he had read all the children's books in the local library and was moving on to the adult section, starting with Gogol's Dead Souls. When Saul Bellow arrived at Tuley High School in 1931, he discovered a thriving radical movement. He soon struck up a friendship with Albert Glotzer, a Trotskyist who later became one of the exiled Russian's bodyguards. Although Bellow was never ideological, his sympathies were with the left. As Glotzer put it, "It was inevitable, given our experience of life under Tsarism, that our family and close friends would be politically radical, if not always socialist." Bellow was a fellow traveler of the Young People's Socialist League, which was moving leftwards in the 1930s and offered an alternative to the Communist Party. In addition to Glotzer, Bellow had struck up a friendship with Isaac Rosenfeld, another leftist and son of immigrant Jewish parents, who would eventually become a respected contributor to the Partisan Review, a journal that reflected Trotsky's influence. Bellow remained friends with Glotzer and Rosenfeld long after his shift to the right. After Bellow and Rosenfeld became freshmen at the University of Chicago, they became known as Zinoviev and Kamenev on campus. They belonged to the Socialist Club on campus and edited Soapbox, its journal. On the masthead there was a quotation from William Randolph Hearst: "Red radicalism has planted a soapbox in every educational institution in America." In 1938, the Depression was still in full-swing and Saul Bellow had to scramble around for employment like other young men and women. That year he landed a job with the Federal Writers' Project, which was a hotbed for aspiring young authors, especially those with a social conscience. It provided employment for other Chicago radicals like Nelson Algren, who had already published a novel, Somebody in Boots, about vagrant life, and Richard Wright, who spent most of his time at the project working on Native Son. Algren was a supporter of the Communist Party (CP) and Wright a member. Looking back at this period in a Guardian article dated April 10, 1993 -- long after he had embraced conservative ideology -- Bellow still demonstrated an obvious affection for his youthful radicalism: 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 intelligentsia 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. By the end of WWII, the United States had already begun to move past the revolutionary fervor of the 1930s. To an extent, a new-found willingness to accept liberal capitalism on its own terms was accentuated by the Communist Party's submersion into the New Deal, symbolized by party chairman Earl Browder's announcement that the CP was ready to dissolve itself into a kind of discussion club called the Communist Political Association that disavowed revolutionary goals. For writers and intellectuals around the Trotskyist movement, a willingness to accommodate had more to do with personal ambition rather than ideology. Since Saul Bellow was always consumed early on by a desire to write great literature rather than make a revolution, the goal of "tending one's garden" made perfect sense. From the publication of Dangling Man in 1944 (a semi-autobiographical tale of a young writer awaiting a military call-up at the end of WWII) to the 1953 Adventures of Augie March, Bellow would earn the reputation of a gifted and serious writer who never enjoyed commercial success. His struggle to make it had Oedipal overtones since his father (and brothers) had all become wealthy businessmen by the late 1930s. Saul was always seen as the dreamer whose modest achievements were downplayed as long as he remained economically insecure. He would often have to borrow money from his father or brothers just to make ends meet. Handouts were inevitably accompanied by a lecture. If Bellow remained unfulfilled in a material sense, by the arrival of the 1950s there was a spiritual void that gnawed at him as well. Despite his strong identification with the Yiddish language and culture, he was basically a secular Jew. Like many people in the 1950s, Bellow gravitated toward psychoanalysis, which had become a secular religion with the analyst filling in for the priest. For Bellow, deliverance assumed the form of Reichian therapy delivered at the hands of Dr. Chester Raphael. Wilhelm Reich had earned a reputation as a Marxist opponent of Nazism, especially in terms of its sexual repression, but had become something of a crank during his exile in the United States. Reich had developed a bizarre theory of orgone energy, which posited the existence of an invisible substance that was critical to mental health. To overcome neurosis, he recommended sitting in specially licensed orgone boxes. Eventually the FDA cracked down on Reich's quackery and he died in prison. For a time Bellow followed a strict Reichian regimen. He sat in an orgone box in his modest Queens apartment gathering up orgone energy while reading books beneath a single light bulb strung from the ceiling. Occasionally he stuffed a handkerchief into his mouth and screamed, another method recommended by Reich to achieve emotional release. There is no indication that this therapy did much for Bellow, who remained profoundly unhappy throughout his life, just as Woody Allen remains neurotic despite decades of psychoanalysis. (In many ways, Woody Allen is the popular culture analogue to Saul Bellow. Perhaps in recognition of these connections, Bellow appears as one of the talking head experts in Zelig, a modestly amusing meditation on a mediocre character played by Allen who adapts chameleon-like to changing circumstances. Bellow's take on Zelig: "His sickness was also at the root of his salvation; it was his very disorder that made a hero of him.") full: http://www.swans.com/library/art11/lproy25.html |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho