This describes Bellow’s origins as a writer, and perhaps accounts also for the strong vein of (heterodox) transcendentalism in his work. In the middle-period novels the transcendental ‘alternative’ takes on structural status, affording a radiant backdrop against which the protagonists shuffle and blunder. The primitive prince-liness of Africa in Henderson the Rain King, the Wellsian dreams of lunar escape in Mr Sammler’s Planet, the ‘invisible sciences’ of Humboldt’s Gift: these are respectively ranged against the nullity of New England, the hysteria of New York, and the gangsterism — both emotional and actual – of Chicago.
The emphasis on these illusory otherworlds was probably too heavy, laying Bellow open to charges of crankery and self-indulgence. In Late Bellow, however, the transcendentalism has found its true function, which is Yeatsian — a source of metaphor, a system of imagery that gives the reader an enduring mortal pang, a sense of his situation in larger orders of time and space. ‘What were we here for, of all strange beings and creatures the strangest?’ Bellow has made the real world realer (sharper, harsher), and has confronted its perversities; but human destiny still ‘depends on what you think, feel and will about such manifestations or apparitions, on the kabbalistic skill you develop in the interpretation of these contemporary formations’. He keeps a soul’s watch upon the world, as passionate as ever and yet disinterested now, with no stake in the outcome.
There aren’t any weaklings in the new book: each story has the same consistency of brilliance and vigour. (One of them, ‘What Kind of Day Did You Have?’, is longer, and better, than Seize the Day.) In the title story an old man languishes in British Columbia, facing extradition to Chicago, a fall-guy for various financial crimes committed by his family. hí’s only sin has been his spontaneity, whereas the sins of his adversaries were always shrewdly premeditated. The narrator is one of Bellow’s lighter, more playful presences, like Charlie Citrine, who suffered from the same difficulty: ‘I mean, if I were a true hypocrite I wouldn’t forever be putting my foot in my mouth.’ Up in Canada, the only company is the landlady, a mad widow who babbles of the Divine Spirit. No one wants to hear all this, but the old boy finds that he is more than ready to listen:
The Divine Spirit, she tells me, has withdrawn in our time from the outer, visible world. You can see what it once wrought, you are surrounded by its created forms. But although natural processes continue, Divinity has absented itself. The wrought work is brightly divine but Divinity is not now active within it. The world’s grandeur is fading. And this is our human setting …
Of course, the myth of decline — the elegiac vision, which insists that all the good has gone and only the worst remains — has never looked less like a myth and more like a reality. But perhaps the world always looks that way, especially when you start your preparations for leaving it. At the height of his earthly powers, Bellow makes generous reparations to the credit side of the ledger, helping ‘to bring back the light that has gone from these molded likenesses’.
London Review of Books 1982. and Observer 1984
The Killings in Atlanta
1. Murder in America
‘It looked like a straight verbal mugging. The kid points the gun and says: “Gimme all your money.” The guy hands over $90, credit cards, watch, links, everything. Then as the kid walks off he turns around, real casual, and shoots him anyway. These days, man, it’s your money and your life.’
‘Then the handyman flipped and laid into the old lady with an ax … Then this transvestite took a monkey-wrench out of his handbag … Buried her body under the … Sawed his head off with a … Watch out for the Downtown Slasher … the Uptown Strangler … the Midtown Mangier…’
Conversation about murder in America is as stoical and routine as talk about the weather. A New Yorker will tell you about some lurid atrocity in his own flatblock with no more animation than if he were complaining about the rent. Terrible things happen all the time. This is the terrible thing.