If we take an introductory glance through the dramatis personae of the new book, we see the usual rhythmical clinches but also sense that Bellow is playing in a minor key, and using the mute. There are various judges, shysters and ambulance-chasers with names like Ellis Sorokin, Wolf Quitman and Maxie Detillion (these hardly rival the three divorce lawyers in Humboldt’s Gift, who are called Tomchek, Pinsker and Srole); there is a rock-hard black whore called Riggie Hines, and a suave black rapist called Spofford Mitchell; there is an ageing athlete called Silky Limpopo, a prison-reformer called Rufus Ridpath, a world-famous journalist called Dewey Spangler… That last name looks a bit artful and specific for a Bellow character, and perhaps this provides a more general clue to the novel’s intentions. A pivotal figure in the book, Dewey Spangler is somewhere between Walter Lippmann and Andre Malraux, a flashy trader in geopolitical generalities and global diagnoses. ‘Dewey’, of course, is America’s great philosopher, its star-spangled thinker; and ‘Spangler’, I suspect, has something to do with the decline of the West.
The Dean’s December is spent in Bucharest, 6,ooo miles from home. The Dean is Albert Corde, ex-journalist, ex-womaniser, ex-trivialiser (he is also a Gentile — surprising for such an obvious and detailed Bellow surrogate). Home is Chicago. The year is uncertain: there are mentions of Carter, Margaret Thatcher, but also of Entebbe, Cambodia. The Dean has come to Bucharest with his Rumanian wife Minna, a distinguished astronomer. Minna’s mother Valeria is dying. ‘Corde had come to give support.’ He is consciously testing his reserves as a good husband, exhaustively considerate and correct. He is a reformed character, proving his seriousness. In a way, this is what the novel is doing too. It is a necessary connection. ‘I was then becoming careless about time,’ says Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift, ‘a symptom of my increasing absorption in larger issues.’ Such a crack would be unthinkable in The Dean’s December. There has been a moral tightening. No more gadabouts like the unpunctual Citrine. You have to get life right before you start going on about its meaning.
Old Valeria, one-time Minister of Health, is in an ambiguous position vis-à-vis the Party, and Minna herself is a defector. The powers that be being what they are, Mr and Mrs Corde are given a hard time as they brace themselves for their bereavement. And ‘the city was terrible!’ says Corde, helplessly, in a bracketed aside. ‘Aged women rose at four to stand in line for a few eggs’; the queues have ‘an atmosphere of compulsory exercise in the prison yard’. But this is not crudely emphasised. Bucharest is summoned in terms of peeling stucco, bad food and bad light. ‘Air-sadness, Corde called this. In the final stages of dusk, a brown sediment seemed to encircle the lamps. Then there was a livid death moment. Night began. Night was very difficult here, thought Albert Corde.’
There is not much Corde can do in Bucharest. He attends to his wife’s grief, and to the stiff cousins who glide in their bad clothes through the antique apartment. He sits in his wife’s childhood room. He goes to bed after breakfast. ‘As he did this, he sometimes felt how long he had lived and how many, many times the naked creature had crept into its bedding.’ For the Bellow hero, however, solitude always opens the way to the gregariousness of memory — to the inner riot of the past. In Herzog, Herzog relives a marriage while putting on his tie. In Humboldt, Citrine reviews a literary career while meditating on his sofa. Albert Corde has his own ‘restless ecstasy’ to contend with: but the Dean’s December, like The Dean’s December, is caught up in more public matters.
Corde’s troubles emerge slowly, piecemeal. Humboldt’s Citrine came out of his Chicago apartment block one morning to find that his Mercedes had been beaten up with baseball bats: ‘Now the moronic inferno had caught up with me.’ The phrase recurs here:
but this time we are closer in, much nearer the first circle. As college dean, Corde is involved in an investigation into the murder of one of his students. It happened during a torrid Chicago night: ‘one of those choking, peak-of-summer, urban-nightmare, sexual and obscene, running-bare times, and death panting behind the young man, closing in’. On the night of his murder, the student ‘had been out for dirty sex, and it was this dirty sex momentum that had carried him through the window’.