The Dean’s involvement with the moronic inferno has another dimension. Recently Corde published two long articles in Harper’s — articles about Chicago, ‘the contempt centre of the USA’. (One reflects that Bellow has been very lucky with his home town: a great city, vast, bloody, hugely mercantile, and not trodden flat by writers.) In these pieces Corde submitted to an atrocious anger: ‘he gave up his cover, ran out, swung wild at everyone’. The articles examine Chicago’s ‘underclass’, the disposable populations of the criminal poor. Born into slums, jails and hospitals, the Morlock sub-race is permitted — even expected — to destroy itself with violence, lead-poisoning and junk. In Bucharest, with its ‘strict zero-blue and simple ice’, ‘the trees made their tree gestures, but human beings were faced by the organised prevention of everything that came natural’. Chicago is repeatedly described as a jungle populated exclusively by rats. In Bucharest, the city rodents have been ‘rolled flat by trucks and cars’; they are ‘as two-dimensional as weather vanes’, just like everything else. In Bucharest, a communist dog barks in the street, ‘a protest against the limits of dog experience (for God’s sake, open the universe a little more!)’. In Chicago, a capitalist Great Danç wallows at his own birthday party, showered with ‘ribboned presents’ and ‘congratulatory telegrams’: ‘the animal came nudging and sighing. What to do with all this animal nature, seemed to be the burden of the dog’s groans.’
The Rumanian ordeal continues. During the frigid Christmas, Corde and Minna preside over Valeria’s obsequies. Tottering relatives in fake fur coats join the Cordes at the suburban crematorium. Feeling himself ‘crawling between heaven and earth’, Corde descends from the fiery crematorium into the deep-frozen crypt, ‘the extremes of heat and cold splitting him like an ax’. It is a memorable scene, conspicuously intense, the emotional crisis of the book. And here, the slowly solidifying ‘thesis novel’ – so carefully and subtly arrived at – is abandoned, rejected, put aside. The Dean’s December ceases its inspection of East and West, the vying perversions of humanity, and goes on to bigger things.
The heroes of Saul Bellow’s major novels are intellectuals; they are also (if you follow me) heroes, which makes Bellow doubly remarkable. In thumbnail terms, the original protagonists of literature were gods; later, they were demigods; later still, they were kings, generals, fabulous lovers, at once superhuman, human and all too human; eventually they turned into ordinary people. The twentieth century has been called an ironic age, as opposed to a heroic, tragic or romantic one; even realism, rock-bottom realism, is felt to be a bit grand for the twentieth century. Nowadays, our protagonists are a good deal lower down the human scale than their creators: they are anti-heroes, non-heroes, sub-heroes.
Not so with Bellow. His heroes are well tricked out with faults, neuroses, spots of commonness: but not a jot of Bellow’s intellectuality is withheld from their meditations. They represent the author at the full pitch of cerebral endeavour, with the simple proviso that they are themselves non-creative — they are thinkers, teachers, readers. This careful positioning allows Bellow to write in a style fit for heroes: the High Style. To evolve an exalted voice appropriate to the twentieth century has been the self-imposed challenge of his work. It began with The Adventures of Augie March (1953), at times very shakily: for all its marvels, Augie March, like Henderson the Rain King, often resembles a lecture on destiny fed through a thesaurus of low-life patois. Herzog erred on the side of private gloom, Humboldt on the side of sunny ebullience (with stupendous but lopsided gains for the reader). Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970) came nearest to finding the perfect pitch, and it is the Bellow novel which The Dean’s December most clearly echoes.
The High Style is not a high style just for the hell of it: there are responsibilities involved. The High Style attempts to speak for the whole of mankind, with suasion, to remind us of what we once knew and have since forgotten or stopped trying to regrasp. ‘It was especially important’, Corde reflects, ‘to think what a human being really was. What wise contemporaries had to say about this amounted to very little.’ The Bellow hero lays himself open to the world, at considerable psychological cost. Mr Sammler is ‘a delicate recording instrument’; Herzog is ‘a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness’. All that can be done with these perceptions, these data, is to transform them into — into what? Humboldt suffered from ‘the longing for passionate speech’. Corde, like Sammler, aches to deliver his ‘inspired recitation’. It is the desire to speak, to warn — to move, above all.