Feeling Bad for Bellow

As an antidote to the laborious academic work of my thesis on Saul Bellow, I wrote this critique of the response to his Letters for my creative writing class with Stephen Metcalf last fall.??
Saul Bellow died in 2005, but when his letters were published last year, many critics treated them as something of an incarnation. The letters, wrote William Deresiewicz in The Nation, were "A gift from the grave." Philip Roth, in his dust jacket comments, said reading the letters was "as though I'd stumbled upon a lost Bellow masterpiece only recently unearthed." For Cynthia Ozick, writing in The New Republic, it were as if Bellow had never left. After a merciless catalog of the once-prominent writers mentioned in Bellow's correspondence whom death has silenced?she includes Edmund Wilson, Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Ginsberg among the "mute"?Ozick asserts that among this company of great twentieth century writers, Bellow "alone courts lastingness, he alone escapes eclipse."

Ozick's blithe certainty about the security of Bellow's reputation is difficult to account for. The appearance of his letters gave his name a currency it hadn't enjoyed since his dying day half a decade earlier; the intervening five years were ones in which among Ozick's rank of grave-muffled writers, Bellow may have made more noise than, say, Robert Lowell, but not by much. What Ozick does not discuss is to whom, exactly, Bellow matters. Even at the height of his public career, in the early 1970s, many young cultural turks scorned Bellow as obsolete, the last scion of an archaic literary tradition. He drew on his own 1968 experience at San Francisco State when writing the memorable episode of Mr. Sammler's Planet, in which an angry student shouts down the title character ("Why do you listen to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you?") at a Columbia lecture. The counterculture rejected him violently; with the silence of cool superiority, the culture warriors of the 1980s did the same, lumping him?despite real differences in outlook and style?onto a scrap heap with other representatives of the midcentury male literary establishment: Updike, Cheever, Roth, and Mailer. Bellow has been absent from syllabi ever since; courses in postwar American fiction are likely to include On the Road and The Crying of Lot 49 but not The Adventures of Augie March. Outside the academy, Bellow doesn't seem to fare much better. Who, Ozick asks, is reading Lionel Trilling at this hour? As if every backpack on the New York subway toted a worn copy of Herzog.

What Ozick omits is that Bellow matters chiefly to a dying breed, the cultural praetorians who can recall a day when a writer like Bellow seemed to speak to a unified, capital-C Culture, with critics like Ozick acting as the high priests, interpreting the signs and symbols that rained from on high. It's a vision of culture that is somehow at once more idealistic, more egalitarian, and more elitist than our contemporary literary scene. But whatever its merits, that era is gone, leaving Bellow's memory to endure among a small segment of an already-diminished reading public. Ozick's response is to assume no erosion whatsoever and to say that Bellow matters, period. Leon Wieseltier struck closer to the truth in the Times: "Our literature's debt to Taylor [Benjamin Taylor, who edited the Letters], if our culture still cares, is considerable."

Wieseltier is more clear-eyed than Ozick, but he is also more curmudgeonly. Ultimately, the extent to which the culture cares about Bellow is moot. Bellow's literature is indeed uniquely valuable among postwar American letters, but neither oblivious hagiography nor tiresome laments for the demise of reading will preserve Bellow's gifts in his absence. These are expressions of worried critics' hopes and fears, not testaments to Bellow's importance. Put simply, Bellow needs better friends.

Speaking for the dead is a dubious business, but one suspects that Bellow, for all his vainglory, would not have wanted his letters to be treated as a major literary event. The airing of his personal life would have struck him as one of fame's tiresome accoutrements. Nor would he be flattered to serve as the occasion for more moaning over the sorry state of literature (which, indeed, may not be as sorry as it seems). The publication of Bellow's letters became a second funeral, an occasion for both excessive lionization?while revealing, the letters hardly constitute a new masterpiece?and wistful reminiscing over past Elysiums, neither of which would have much pleased the Master. If Bellow's admiring critics really had his work's best interest at heart, they would have let him do the talking, perhaps by quoting his 1971 letter to John and Kate Berryman on the occasion of their daughter's birth:

"This is to greet and bless Sarah Berryman on her arrival in this gorgeous wicked world which has puzzled and delighted my poor soul for fifty-six years. I expect the planet will go on a few billion years yet and she will thrive on it."

If words such as these can no longer inspire piety in our hearts?if they can no longer stir a need, however faintly felt, to receive a blessing?then surely the situation lies beyond the power of any critic.

Source: http://jsantel.blogspot.com/2012/02/feeling-bad-for-bellow.html

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