Our meeting took place in the fourth week of October 1983. The previous Sunday 230 US marines had died in the Beirut suicide bombing. The Grenadan intervention was in its second day. It was crisis week — but every week is crisis week. Arguing in wide concentric loops, Bellow needed no prompting.
The adventure in Grenada, he said, was an opportunist PR exercise, designed to atone for, or divert attention from, the disaster in Lebanon. Reagan was helplessly wedged between specialist advice and public opinion. ‘Experts’ simply act in accordance with the prevailing standards of their profession. You get no morality from them: ‘all you get is – “But everyone else does it.'” After settling – post-war Europe, America was pleased with her new responsibilities and felt she had marvellously matured. ‘Not global policeman so much as Little Mary Fixit.’ The US shows a persistent determination to ‘angelise’ herself. No moral ideas; instead, a conviction of her own purity. Pro-good, anti-bad, and right by definition.
Public opinion is in the hands of the media-managers: in other words, it is in the hands of TV, which is ‘ugly, ignorant, self-righteous and terrifyingly influential’. This week the television screen throngs with bereaved families, each granted (and fully embracing) its sixty seconds of prime-time crack-up. A mother weeps over a framed photograph: ‘My baby. Where is my baby?’ A father wrings his hands: ‘I say to him, Louie – don’t go! Don’t go!’ By the end of the week the news shows will feature the obliging hysterics of the ‘rescued’ medical students from Grenada. Meanwhile, the American CO explains: ‘We were not micro-managing Grenada intelligencewise until about that time-frame.’
‘Oh bad!’ as one Bellow hero puts it – ‘Very bad!’ President Reagan, TV-tested, is the latest face in ‘a long gallery of dumb-bells’. As another Bellow hero remarks: ‘Today’s psychiatrists would not be shocked. Asked whom they love best, their patients reply in increasing numbers, “My dog.” At this rate, a dog in the White House becomes a real possibility.’
So far as Bellow is concerned, however, the ‘crisis’ is general and omnipresent. ‘For the first time in history’, he wrote in his analytical memoir To Jerusalem and Back, ‘the human species as a whole has gone into politics — What is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations.” The result is interminable ‘event-glamour’, ‘crisis-chatter’. That word crisis is part of the crisis. The crises are part of the crisis. And you can’t see the crisis for the crises.
Mr Bellow was identifiable, in the anteroom of the Arts Club, not by certain signs of decay but by his dapper, compact figure and by his expression — one of courteous vigilance. I clutched a copy of The Dean’s December, Bellow’s latest novel, which I was re-rereading. ‘As you see,’ he said, when we filed into the dining-room, ‘it’s not an arts club at all.’ Indeed, this snazzy private restaurant was one of the many examples 1 encountered of Chicago’s flirtatious or parodic attitude to high culture. ‘There’s a Braque, a de Kooning, a Matisse drawing. But it’s just a lunch club for elegant housewives.’
Bellow is sixty-eight. His hair is white and peripheral but the eyes are still the colour of expensive snuff. Generous yet combative, the mouth is low-slung, combining with the arched brows to give his face an animated roundness. In repose the face is squarer, harder. He looks like an omniscient tortoise. According to Humboldt’s Gift, America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short. Over here, writers aren’t meant to be as sane as Bellow persists in being, or as determined to have his say, in full.
He once told a prospective biographer (who wrote a whole book on his failure to write a book on Bellow): ‘What can you reveal about me that I haven’t already revealed about myself?’ In the novels Bellow’s surrogates have their vanities and blind spots (Herzog is ‘not kind’, Sammler was ‘never especially kind’), their brainstorms and dizzy spells. Sanity, like freedom, like American democracy — he suggests — is a fragile and perhaps temporary condition. It is clear from his books, his history, his face, that Bellow has weathered considerable turbulence. As soon as you start scrutinising a writer’s life (however monumental or exemplary its achievements may be), that life quickly takes on a human shape — only human, all too human.