Albert Corde is ‘an image man’, ‘a hungry observer’. He has a ‘radar-dish face’, for ever picking up signals ‘from all over the universe’.
He looked out, noticing. What a man he was for noticing! Continually attentive to his surroundings. As if he had been sent down to mind the outer world, on a mission of observation and notation. The object of which was? To link up? To classify? To penetrate?
Corde has ‘the restless ecstasy’ common to Bellow’s heroes — a global version of Henderson’s 7 want, I want, I want. He suffers from ‘vividness fits’, ‘storms of convulsive clear consciousness’, ‘objectivity intoxicated’. And it wasn’t just two, three, five chosen deaths being painted thickly, terribly, convulsively inside him, all over his guts, liver, heart… but a large picture of cities, crowds, peoples, an apocalypse…
Up to now the Bellow hero has always kept these convulsions to himself. They provide the substance of his meditations and, at most, they give the spur to some climactic effort of passionate utterance — to a friend, a girl, anyone who will listen. But Corde, like the book built round him, has gone public. The key to his self-exposure, and self-injury, is his journalistic outpouring on Chicago, which might almost be seen as a pre-emptive strike for the novel itself. Corde’s articles are reckless, irresponsible: but their main presumption, as Dewey Spangler gloatingly points out, is that they are full of ‘poetry’. They constitute an act of romantic regression and are an embarrassment to everyone, Corde included.
An old childhood pal, Spangler is ‘just another VIP’ (in his own words) passing through Bucharest in a ‘sweep’ across Eastern Europe. Like Dr Temkin in Seize the Day, or Allbee in The Victim, Spangler is a malevolent alter ego, a traveller on a parallel path, the wrong path. He lives in ‘a kind of event-glamour’, unaware that the increase of theories and discourse, itself a cause of new strange forms of blindness, the false representations of ‘communication’, led to horrible distortions of public consciousness. Therefore the first act of morality was to disinter the reality, retrieve reality, die it out from the trash, represent it anew as art would represent it.
The alternative to the East is not the West; the alternative to the West is not the East. The alternative to both is the unobtainable world glimpsed through art, the ‘pangs of higher intuition’ which balance ‘the muddy suck of the grave underfoot’.
So matters have long stood in Bellow’s topology. According, however, to The Dean’s December (and the title is not autumnal so much as candidly wintry), a great and uncovenanted unification is at hand. Seeing the first marks of old age on an ex-lover’s face, Herzog identified ‘death, the artist, very slow’. But if death has always been an artist, he is now an ideas-man too, a formidable illuminator. Mr Sammler, in his lucid ripeness, felt the ‘luxury of non-intimidation by doom’ and was free to make ‘sober, decent terms with death’. With the Dean it is more a case of creative collaboration, of ecstatic symbiosis. In an extraordinary paragraph Corde looks down at the Chicago lakescape through die guardrails of his sixteenth-storey balcony:
It was like being poured out to the horizon, like a great expansion. What if death should be like this, the soul finding an exit. The porch rail was his figure for the hither side. The rest, beyond it, drew you constantly as the completion of your reality.
La Rochefoucauld said that neither ‘the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye’. Maybe this is Bellow’s last assignment – the eye narrowed, as it must be, by the strictest, the most precise artistry. Saul Bellow has always been an energetic recycler of his own experience, and The Dean’s December shows signs of the flattened, chastened, almost puritanical mood which waylays the traveller to a stricken country. ‘They set the pain level for you over here,’ as Corde remarks. Some readers may regard the result as a top-heavy novel, with too much instruction, and not enough delight. But there are many, many thrilling pages here. Reading Bellow at his most inspired, you are reminded of a scene in Augie March, when Augie, down on his luck in a small Mexican town, sees Trotsky alight from his car in the cathedral square: