Apart from the ingratiation, the danger of becoming a cultural functionary, the extra mail (‘suddenly even more people think that what I want to do is read their manuscripts’), Bellow is appalled by the ‘micro-inspection’ to which Nobel Prizewinners are subject. ‘One is asked to bare one’s scars to the crowd, like Coriolanus.’ Well, it is all in the novels, at one remove or another, for the not-so-idly curious. There you will find a moral autodidact, slowly crystallised and moving steadily now to ‘the completion of his reality”.
Which is? ‘Ignorance of death is destroying us,’ Bellow has said. ‘Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.’ A well-lived life leaves you on ‘sober decent terms with death’; if you are a writer, though, it leaves you more than that. The Dean’s December inaugurates Bellow’s ‘late’ period but Mr Sammler’s Planet prefigured it — old Sammler, with his ‘farewell detachment’, his ‘earth-departure-objectivity’: ‘the luxury of non-intimidation by doom’. Bellow looks set to enjoy a Yeatsian old age. Just let him finish.
Chicago — ‘huge, filthy, brilliant and mean’ — is hardly a hermit’s cot, yet in a sense Bellow belongs to the reclusive or spectral tradition of Frost, Salinger and Pynchon. The philistinism, the ‘hardboiled-dom’ of the place provides the sort of insulation which an American writer sheds at his peril. ‘The main thing about Chicago is that it’s not New York. There are no writers to talk to in New York, only celebrities on exhibit.’ His determination to stand aloof (especially from the youth-worshipping campus-fever of the Sixties) has moved certain pundits to label him as a reactionary. Was it fastidiousness or vocational sense that had kept him out of public debate?
‘I now think I was probably wrong,’ he said. ‘Things are going down so fast, I think maybe I should have been involved all along. As for Vietnam, I went on record. But the war could be identified as an evil by Americans because it was packaged by television and was therefore comprehensible to an entertainment society. Other evils, money-mania, corruption, urban vileness — these are not package-able.’ Out there in Chicago, as Bellow has written, lie ‘many, many square miles of civil Passchendaele or Somme’.
What is the content of these data?
1. In Cabrini Green, the black housing project, a man butchers a hog in his apartment, and then throws the guts on the stairs. A woman slips and breaks her arm. In the ambulance ‘she was smeared with pig’s blood and shriller than the siren’, 2. In ‘ratshit Woodlawn’ old people scavenge for food behind the supermarkets. The store guards try to keep them off lest they poison themselves with spoiled fish, and then sue. 3. A black youth leaves his car in the parking lot of the courthouse, where he attends a hearing on a rape charge. In the boot of his Pontiac lies a young housewife, kidnapped at gunpoint. Every few hours he takes her out and rapes her. Two days later he shoots her in a vacant lot and covers her body with trash. These horror stories, and many more, appear in The Dean’s December, in which Bellow contrasts the super-licensed rat-jungle of Chicago with the ‘penitentiary society’ of Bucharest. Citing Rilke’s wartime letters, the Dean observes that there is no effective language for the large-scale terrors; during such times ‘the heart must hang in the dark’, and wait. But there is a countervailing urge ‘to send the soul out into society’, ‘to see at first hand the big manifestations of disorder and take a fresh reading from them’. The result is head-spin, heart-fever. And the conclusion he reaches is that America now has an ‘underclass’, lost populations expected, even encouraged, to dispose of themselves with junk, poison and Saturday-night specials.
I asked Bellow how he had assembled his litany of depradation. Did he trudge round the jails, the hospitals, the projects? The process is largely an imaginative one, but it is a process much simplified in classless, dollar-driven, magimixed Chicago. ‘The corruption is everywhere. You can say this for Chicago — there’s no hypocrisy problem here. There’s no need for hypocrisy. Everyone’s proud of being a bastard … You just meet all these guys. You went to school with them. I used to play basketball with a Machine executioner. He lives out in Miami now. Quietly.’