There wasn’t much humility in the Bellow of that period. It was understandable. You had made it. Most of them hadn’t.
I made a point of speaking down to people (the nobs) who believed that I should look up to them. My lack of humility was aggravated by the rejections I met or expected to meet. Those confrontations were a part of my education. Five minutes of friendly clarity would have spared me this, but there was no one to assist my poor, slow mind. At that time, I was under tremendous emotional pressure. I had married into a New York bohemian family, and before long my wife began to say that my mind had been formed in the Middle Ages. She might have gone back even further—to antiquity, to the Patriarchs. My childhood lay under the radiance (or gloom) of the archaic family, the family of which God is the ultimate father and your own father is the representative of divinity. An American (immigrant plus WASP) version of the most ancient of myths: the creation, the garden, the fall, Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges. The Old Testament became part of your life, if you had had that kind of upbringing. Imagine how well this fundamentalism would equip you to face the world I was entering—bohemianism, avant-garde art, the sexual revolution. I took to saying that in the sexual revolution there was no 1789. It was all 1793—all Terror.
My wife’s father was a painter, a Marxian-Freudian-Jungian theorist, and the genius of a group of disciples for whom he was the artist. My wife had had it with artists. … This flamboyant Svengali circle was fun—in a hateful way. But my young wife and I should have agreed to jettison all “formative experiences” and, to the extent possible, make a new start, shelve our respective fathers.…
I had an additional burden—my “higher education.” That counts for a great deal. When that higher education was put to the test, it didn’t work. I began to understand the irrelevancy of it, to recoil in disappointment from it. Then one day I saw the comedy of it. Herzog says, “What do you propose to do now that your wife has taken a lover? Pull Spinoza from the shelf and look into what he says about adultery? About human bondage?” You discover, in other words, the inapplicability of your higher learning, the absurdity of the culture it cost you so much to acquire. True devotion to Spinoza et al. would have left you no time for neurotic attachments and bad marriages. That would have been a way out for you.
What the above argues is not that higher education is a bad thing but that our conception of it is ridiculous.
One of the things you have to learn, which is never clear to you until an advanced age, is how many of the people you have to deal with are cut off from their first soul. This is in itself a revelation. And it never ceases to be a surprise to you that other people have a personal history so very different from your own. And have completely lost sight of that first soul, if indeed it ever existed for them. They may have turned away from it at a young age. In the earlier Greenwich Village generation, there was still some memory of it, even among the most anarchic and revolutionary. A person like Paul Goodman had a grip on it—on that first soul of his, as curious as it was, and as disfigured by psychoanalytic examination and the eccentric ideas he elaborated or fabricated. Still, it was there somewhere, a core of the self from first to last. It need not be—often it is not—a good or desirable core.
To many, the notion of an original center is alien and preposterous. Experience shows us more reproductions than originals. Zarathustra on the Last Man is hard for us to take. But Nietzsche didn’t describe the Last Man for Last Men, any more than Marx described the alienated proletarian for proletarians. Marx was certainly addressing a new historical protagonist who was expected to survive the grinding forces of depersonalization. But who can deny that we are confronted daily with a mass of artificially constructed egos? And even relatively enlightened people prefer a Fabergé to a real egg.
Why would one marry a Fabergé?
Because of the attraction of art. And because you may feel (or wish to feel) that somewhere within the Fabergé you see before you there is a real egg with a rich yolk, a hidden residual first soul. Remember the E.T.A. Hoffmann story of the woman of springs, cushions, and wires invented by a mad Italian, and of the inflammable student who falls in love with her. She comes apart in his arms. In short, your own passion in some cases makes you think the power to reciprocate is there. And then we are not dealing with out-and-out automata—the object of your affections may know what it is that you want and have the talent to simulate it. A marvelous skill in deception often lies within “constructed” personalities.
To learn all this requires time, and you must wait long before you are ready to deal with human nature telle qu’elle est. Finally, we are unwilling for ideological reasons to think such things. They do not suit the liberal vision of human nature instilled by our bien pensant education. We shrink from cruelty and sadism. We hate to discover scheming, cunning, sharp practice. The ideology referred to is our middle-class legacy.
The high comedy of the intellectual in the never-never land of the “heart.” I refer to men and women who love painting or poetry or philosophy and who are surrounded and nurtured by fictions. Perhaps they rely on crisis, war, revolution, to bring them to “reality” again. Hitler, Stalin, death camps, terrorist operations—these were the “real life” antidote to the “fiction” opiates.
We apparently have concentration camps of our own: in neighborhoods that are a vision of some future hell.
The actual urban environment of fear and caution. What I like to call the Fort Dearborn complex.
Except the cavalry is not riding up….
The cavalry is not riding up, and your comrades inside the fort have no intention of fighting the Indians.
The Nobel Prize seemed as much a burden as a pleasure.
Yes, I didn’t really like the volume of attention it brought. I wanted some recognition, of course, but I didn’t need, or expect, supercertification.
The tone of your acceptance speech seemed to indicate that the times were slipping into a posture antagonistic to serious thought, anti-intellectual; literature was taking a beating; it was no longer taken seriously.
Literature in my early days was still something you lived by; you absorbed it, you took it into your system. Not as a connoisseur, aesthete, lover of literature. No, it was something on which you formed your life, which you ingested, so that it became part of your substance, your path to liberation and full freedom. All that began to disappear, was already disappearing, when I was young.
Under the influence of politics?
Partly under the influence of the world crisis, yes. I often try to fathom the feelings, attitudes, and strategies of a Joyce during the Great War when he concentrated on the writing of Ulysses. Could the fury of such a war be ignored? There’s hardly a trace of it in Ulysses. But the war claimed the attention of most of mankind. Like the army mule struck between the eyes: an infallible way to get the critter’s attention. I understand that Rilke, sick at heart, wrote almost nothing between 1914 and 1918.
In the first session, you acknowledged that you consistently ignored certain major events.
I was late in catching up. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested. I was deafened by imperious noises close by.
American culture can isolate, it can muffle….
The immediate American surroundings are so absorbing, so overwhelming. Because our minds are all over the place, we tend to forget that America, like Russia, is not a country, merely, but a world unto itself.
It has always been difficult for us to imagine life on premises different from our own. We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans—convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.
But if literature is something to be lived and absorbed, Americans generally represented that as “ego.”
Important American writing after the Great War was avant-garde writing. Young Americans took as their models the great figures of Symbolist and postwar European literature. That was, after all, small-public literature. It was not meant to be offered broadly to a democratic public.
/> It was something of a paradox for writers whose background, whose vital substance, was American to adopt these imported attitudes. The truth is that they weren’t entirely imported. You had here a great public utterly devoid of interest in your literary plans. And in fact, you didn’t wish to approach this public on its terms.
Wyndham Lewis, in a book called Rude Assignment, his intellectual biography, examines this question with exemplary clarity. He makes a distinction between small-public art and great-public art. The great-public writers of the nineteenth century were the Victor Hugos, the Dickenses, the Tolstoys, the Balzacs. They wrote for a national public. With the appearance of a Baudelaire, a Flaubert, you had an art that was intended for a limited public of connoisseurs. As the indifference of the great public to this dusk art increased, it became, perhaps from defiance, less and less accessible to the generality of readers.
I think this happened on both sides of the Atlantic. The Americans, of course, closely following the best European models, produced their own kind of small-public art. It was one of the achievements of Hemingway to reach a vast public with small-public stories and novels. What you had in America subsequently was a generation of writers who, with an esoteric outlook, presented themselves to a large public.
A doomed enterprise.
An odd one at best. Also increasingly associated with the universities, which gave shelter to small-public artists.
Did you feel it yourself?
Of course I felt it myself. I was schooled, as others were, in this art of choice means. Or refined instruments. I think The Adventures of Augie March represented a rebellion against small-public art and the inhibitions it imposed. My real desire was to reach “everybody.” I had found—or believed I had found—a new way to flow. For better or for worse, this set me apart. Or so I wished to think. It may not have been a good thing to stand apart, but my character demanded it. It was inevitable—and the best way to treat the inevitable is to regard it as a good thing.
That might account for some of the petty rancor the American literary establishment does feel toward you at times: that you’ve tried to occupy a stage, take literature seriously, and deal with public issues. They really don’t like that, do they?
They don’t take it kindly. But let’s remove me from this for the moment. The question has a wider interest, which ought to be addressed.
I think the mood of enthusiasm and love for literature, widespread in the twenties, began to evaporate in the thirties. Not only in America but in England, France, and Italy. Not in the Soviet Union. There the Stalin dictatorship generated a spiritual need for it. In the United States, and even in France, it became nugatory. In the United States you had a brand of intellectuals who presented themselves at the beginning of their careers as literary people. But they quickly abandoned literature. Didn’t really much care for it. They made their reputations on the ground between literature and politics, with diminishing attention to literature. Not large-scale politics, because they were ineffectual there. They were literary highbrows who continued the work of Orwell and Koestler. They moved from literature to political journalism. The “literary” screen, a stage property, was hoisted away into the flies.
Here’s my recollection of an exchange between William Phillips and Philip Rahv. I heard it in the Astor Place office of Partisan Review nearly fifty years ago.
I have come to deliver the manuscript of a story. Rahv enters and asks Phillips, “Has anything for the next number come in?” Phillips says, “None of the important stuff [i.e., political, critical, academic] is here yet.”
Though half of his preoccupations were political, Rahv was genuinely a literary man. But the repositories of vast power in my day never were art lovers. Stalin telephoned Pasternak to get a reference for Mandelstam: not because he was thinking of reading his poems but because he had Mandelstam on his hit list. Party leaders, heads of state, generalissimos, board chairmen, etc.—down to junk-bond scammers—have no time for belles lettres. Nor do the once literary intellectuals who buzz about them as (largely unheeded) advisers, rooters, and besserwisser—know-betters.
These intellectuals, now totally political, have gone over to junk culture. High-level junk culture, to be sure, but junk is what they genuinely prefer. After a day of unremitting crisis, they want pleasant entertainment. They’re not rushing home to read Act Three of The Tempest or to get in a few pages of Proust before bedtime, are they? And much of junk culture has a core of crisis—shoot-outs, conflagrations, bodies weltering in blood, naked embracers or rapist-stranglers. The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.
The prospect of his soon being hung will concentrate a man’s thoughts wonderfully, Dr. Johnson has told us. For us, perhaps, thrillers are aids to such concentration and help us to stay braced through our dark night. Nothing “normal” holds the slightest interest. Spare us the maiden joys of Tolstoy’s Natasha. Give us only his spinning minié balls, about to explode. We use the greater suffering to expel the lesser. The top ratings are permanently assigned to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the gulag. The Vélo d’Hiver is somewhat lower. Famine makes Ethiopia eligible. And North America, if you except Mexico, isn’t even in it.
This continent is the Kingdom of Frivolity, while all the “towering figures” are in Eastern Europe. This is how literary-political intellectuals view the present world. It isn’t contemporary literature alone that is threatened by this. The classics themselves are shooting, not drifting, Letheward. We may lose everything at this rate.
Is this a note of despair I bear?
Do I look or sound despairing? My spirits are as high as ever. Not despair—anger. Contempt and rage. For this latest and longest betrayal by putty-headed academics and intellectuals.
Copyright Acknowledgments
Some of the essays in this collection first appeared in other publications, as follows:
“Mozart: An Overture,” “A Half Life” (as “An Autobiography of Ideas: A Half Life”), and “A Second Half Life” (as “An Autobiography of Ideas, Part Two: A Second Half Life”) in Bostonia; “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt” and “Literary Notes on Khrushchev” in Esquire; “The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them” in The New Republic, “A Talk with the Yellow Kid” in The Reporter; “The Sealed Treasure” in The Times Literary Supplement; “Facts That Put Fancy to Flight” and “New York: World-Famous Impossibility” (as “World-Famous Impossibility”) in The New York Times Book Review; “White House and Artists” in The Noble Savage; “A Matter of the Soul” in Opera News; “An Interview with Myself” in The Ontario Review; “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence” in The National Interest; “There is Simply Too Much to Think About” in Forbes; “Spanish Letter” and “Isaac Rosenfeld” in Partisan Review; “Illinois Journey” in Holiday, “The Day They Signed the Treaty” in Newsday; “My Paris” in The New York Times Magazine; “Chicago: The City That Was, the City That Is” in life; “Vermont: The Good Place” (as “The Good Place”) and “Winter in Tuscany” in Travel Holiday; “John Cheever” in The New York Review of Books and “William Arrowsmith” in Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics.
“John Berryman” first appeared as the foreword to Recovery by John Berryman, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1973.
“The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them” was later published as the foreword to Winter Notes on Summer Impressions by Feodor M. Dostoyevsky, Criterion Books, Inc., 1955.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following selections:
“Nobel Lecture” by permission of The Nobel Foundation. © The Nobel Foundation 1976.
“Report on Israel” (retitled: “Israel: The Six-Day War”), Newsday, issues of June 12, 1967, June 13, 1967, and June 16, 1967. © Newsday Inc., 1967. Reprinted with permission.
Excerpts from The Dream Songs by John Berryman. Copyright © 1969 by John Berryman. Repr
inted by permission of Farrar Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank my agent, Harriet Wasserman, for urging me to take the time to put together this collection.
To Marjorie Shain Horvitz, my copy editor, who attended so diligently to the minute particulars and who devoted so much time to the correction of these pieces, special thanks are due.
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