Books
A resonant Bellow
Anthony Burgess
To Jerusalem and Back Saul Bellow (Secker and Warburg £3.90) It was proper, if not necessarily just, to give all the Nobel prizes to Americans in this their bicentennial year (what, anyway, has justice to do with prizegiving?). Bicentennial junketings or not, I had expected Vladimir Nabokov to be the strongest candidate for the literary award, but he is a Cambridgeeducated Russian expatriate enjoying a second expatriation in Montreux, and he wrote a somewhat scandalous novel. Saul Bellow, though born in Montreal, at least lives in Chicago, and his work is undisfigured either by scandal or experiment. Moreover, he is a Jew, and the American novel—since Ralph Ellison is sadly still a henna unius libri—may be regarded as more or less a Jewish moncpoly. American Jews have all the qualifications for writing important fiction. The stuff of the modern novel is urban experience, and the Jews are the great urban experts. They are complex, anxious, inhibited and given to speculation and dialectic.
Ten years ago, in these columns, I praised Saul Bellow as the novelist who had turned the Jew into the representative American, or it may have been the other way about. The propriety of awarding him the Nobel prize is, to me, proved by the fact that he has evinced no new line of development since the ten-year-old Herzog. He wrote a novella in his twenties, Dangling Man, which promised, in its French terseness, a restlessly progressive oeuvre, but it is seen now as the mere fruit of his having lived for a time in France. He is a long-settled, totally achieved artist, and to such men the Nobel prize must go. He joins Rolland, Galsworthy and Matilde Serao as a prizewinner from whom it would be indecent to expect literary surprises. The only exception to the rule of the prize's being an old-age honour even when its recipient is young must be, I think, Yeats, whose old age was a disconcerting adolescence.
To Jerusalem and Back is not a novel, though it could be. Bellow calls it 'a personal account,' which is what I take each of his novels to be, especially his masterpiece Herzog. It is about a three-month stay in everybody's holy city, and the sharpness of the recorded response to Jerusalem— urgent, fragmented—is appropriate to a temporal limitation whose analogue is a brief novel. It is not the novelist's task to deliver intellectual judgments or even to think coherently. When we say that Bellow is an intellectual novelist, we mean that his characters are intellectuals, and that ideas and book-titles jostle freely with impressions of the table and the bedchamber. The problems of Israel are compelling and compel the anxieties of all of us (they may even be more distressing to a Mediterranean Christian than to a Chicago Jew), but we must not go to the 'personal account' of a novelist for diagnosis and prognosis—unless, as here and as always in Bellow, we may expect to get these from personages real or invented.
Real or invented—where's the difference? The great mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, scrupulous, ubiquitous, incredibly energetic, is a novelist's gift. The masseur who recommends loosening the neck by making the head dance the numbers from I to 9 joins the Puerto Rican taxi-driver in Herzog in a touching Bellow gallery of minor vivid portraits. And, in the presentation of his personages, Bellow ,consults the claims of narrative climax even in a book which is so often (but delightfully, delightfully) a ragbag of impressions. Bellow, back from Jerusalem, has lunch with Henry Kissinger ('bowls of soup, a veal dish, and desserts too rich to be eaten'). Here, after so much wise talk from the powerless, is the horse's mouth in 'a full face' with 'a remarkable head of hair, the tight curls mounting in dense waves.' A wretched Jewish heart beats inside that frame fed on the world's official banquets. Kissinger deals out warmth to his fellow-Jew but ice as well. The Jewish lobbyists in Washington had better mind their step: 'in the disastrous event of Israel's defeat they too will get it in the neck. So they had better stop making so much noise in Washington and undermining their chief protector, Henry Kissinger.' And at the end of the meeting Mr Kissinger has a remarkable thing to say. It deserves a paragraph to itself.
'Ah, if only the Bible had been written in Uganda. Everyone would have been so much better off.'
It is all too easy for a reviewer of a book on the problem of Israel to ignore the book and epigrammatise in the Kissingerian manner on the problem. It is enough for me to say here that Bellow permits a great number of mouths, equine and other, to sound nti and that a common cadence, unorchest rated by the author, warns of impending disaster: the Arabs, to whom Allah has granted the most spiritual fatness of oil, will not in their power and insolence allow Israel to survive if they can help it, and poor Isreal may ritn rely too much on her friends. Bellow finds enemies not only among the oil-thirslY and their cynical feeders (who, as you maY learn in the tea-lounge of Al-Dorchester. don't give a hoot in naraka for the Palestinian Arabs) but also among the progressive intellectuals, especially in France. Bellow lived in Paris, apparently, only to learn to mistrust the French, with their closed minds. reliance for facts on out-of-date Larousse. penchant for scraps of Muslim culture (like, perhaps, calling the doctor the toubib). theoretical devotion to third-world revolution and the spilling of blood. Sartre, whom Bellow used to go to Left Bank cafes to look at, though the Master never deigned to look back, comes in for an especial drubbing-rightly so. Sartre wants the Arabs to cut throats and break the chains of povertY; Israel posits too much bending of straight" line programmatic generalities to merit his compassion or even attention. Certain writers tend to centrifugality, and Bellow is one of them—to, I think, his credit or (now he is a Nobel prizeman) glorY. I mean that he observes and enjoys the minutiae of daily existence too much. t° allow the prospect of Israel's annihilation to shut out the light. And, after all, he is a child of the Diaspora, prepared to eat strange meat and relish Samuel Butler; he inherits a bigger world than Israel. The memorabilia of his book are the trivialities that lend reality to works of fiction-disgust at the reek of boiled chicken, a nostalgia for a vegetable diet, a delight in the special 'poetic dirt' of a poet's lodgings, the eighteenth-century lady who never washed her hair and had a nest of mice in it, oddities from Ruskin and Mark Twain. And he has the true novelist's 'lateral' approach. Back in Chicago he reads the Odyssey in Greek: remembers the 'beautiful T. E. Lawrence translation, thinks of the false history of Seven Pillars, ends by saying that the 'taking' of Damascus by Lawrence and Feisal is an invention—'a piece of HollY' wood history for which Lawrence wrote the scenario. He is one of those highly gifted romantic legend-makers who created "the Arab" for us; he is an early style-designer of Arab nationalism.' And so back from the Odyssey to the omnipresent agony. Not onlY Israel's and the Jews' ; the general Gadarene swinishness (via Eliot)of statesmanship and power politics. And so back to the OdysseY again, if we wish, via another Nobel prize' man: 'What theme had Homer but original sin?'
Previous page
