what it was about him that stirred me was the instant impression he gave — no matter about the old heap he rode in or the peculiarity of his retinue – of navigation by the great stars, of the highest considerations, of being fit to speak the most important human words and universal terms. When you are as reduced to a different kind of navigation from this high starry kind as I was and are only sculling on the shallow bay, crawling from one clam-rake to the next, it’s stirring to have a glimpse of deep-water greatness. And, even more than an established, an exiled greatness, because the exile was a sign to me of persistence at the highest things. ‘
* * *
The Dean’s December promised the arrival of a fresh inspiration in Bellow’s work, and this stirring collection, Him With His Foot In His Mouth, confirms that it is here to stay. Without tempting providence too much, I think we can agree to call the new phase Late Bellow. It has to do with last things, leave-taking, and final lucidities.
Late Bellow expresses itself through the familiar opposition: a rich, generously comic and fanatically detailed record of the human experience and habitat, set against a wayward dreaminess or mooniness, an intoxicated receptivity to ideas — Bellow’s own poetry of meditation. None of these delights is withheld, but there are now two changes of emphasis. First, a more formal artistry, with sharper focus, a keener sense of pattern and balance. And secondly a countervailing ferocity in his apprehension of the peculiar disorders and distortions of the modern era. ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to’ may not sound like much of a topic-sentence when you hear it at the bus-stop — yet this is Bellow’s subject. Actually it is the central subject, and always has been.
While he concedes that America is now ruled by drunkards, liars and venal illiterates, Bellow decides that the most vivid symptoms of distemper can be found a little closer to home. On the lake-front, shrubs are razed and sentry-box toilets are installed, to thwart rapists. In a snow-bound airport a woman asks an official for directions, and, instead of being merely rude or unhelpful, he stamps her instep with his heel. City cops moonlight for the Mob as hired executioners. Meanwhile, ‘We Care’ stickers are gummed to the walls of supermarkets and loan corporations. Meanwhile, a woman consults a lawyer to ask whether she should describe herself as a person of ‘high integrity’ or ‘known integrity’ as she prepares to swindle a medical school. Meanwhile, ‘a good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become’.
These are stories about Chicago (new and old Chicago) and about families. They shore up one’s impression that Bellow’s greatness has always been endorsed by two lucky accidents — and this is to belittle neither the strenuousness of his discipline nor the luck of literary talent itself. First, Chicago. When Chicagoans call their home town ‘the city that works’ they have more in mind than efficiency and high employment, bustle and brawn. They mean that they have accepted money as the only ‘vital substance’; and they regard the ubiquitous corruption that results from this as a sincere definition of maturity: ‘If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich?’ Such distortions, which include an aggressive, even a disgusted philistinism, provide the writer with a wonderfully graphic reversal of human values. Arriving in Chicago in 1914 (from St Petersburg via Montreal), Bellow was uniquely well placed to witness the formation and summation of the American idea — and to stay outside it, in his writer’s capsule.
Bellow’s second slice of congenital good fortune lies in his Jewishness, which, along with much else, provides him with an unusual tenderness for the human ties of race and blood: ‘Jewish consanguinity — a special phenomenon, an archaism of which the Jews, until the present century stopped them, were in the course of divesting themselves.’ In the same story Bellow’s narrator asks why the Jews have always been such energetic anthropologists, virtually the founders of the science (Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl, Mauss, Boas, et al.). Was it that they were ‘demystifiers’, their ultimate aim to ‘increase universalism’? The narrator demurs. ‘A truer explanation is the nearness of the ghettos to the sphere of Revelation, an easy move for the mind from rotting streets and rancid dishes, a direct ascent into transcendence.’