Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays

by Cynthia Ozick

  Bellow’s capacity for what might (in quick march) be called Jewish intelligence summoned deeps far beyond where the journalists could follow: the literary talent that rose up, in puzzling if impressive flocks, out of what appeared to be a low immigrant culture. Bellow was distinctive in transcending—transgressing against—the archetype of the coarse and unlettered ghetto greenhorn. The greenhorns in their humble trades were aware that they were carriers of a moral civilization. (“You are too intelligent for this,” Herzog protests to his vaporously overtheorizing friend Shapiro. “Your father had rich blood. He peddled apples.”) Though he had repeatedly declared himself, as an American, free to choose according to will or desire, Bellow also chose not to be disaffected. He was in possession of an inherited literacy that few novelists of Jewish background, writers of or close to his generation, could match, however sophisticated otherwise they might be. His range spanned an inclusive continuum; as his eulogy for Malamud insisted, Western learning and literature had also to mean Jewish learning and literature. He was at home in biblical Hebrew, was initiated into the liturgy from early childhood, and read and spoke (always with relish) a supple Yiddish. In the letters he will now and again slide into a Yiddish word or phrase for its pungent or familial aptness where English might pale. It was Bellow who, with Irving Howe and the Yiddish poet Eliezer Greenberg standing by, translated I. B. Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” in effect creating, in a matter of hours, a modernist American writer out of what had passed, mistakenly, for an old-fashioned Yiddish storyteller. What other “American Jewish writer” could have pulled off this feat? Or would have been willing to set aside the mask of fiction to pursue—his personal viewpoint plain to see—the political culture of Israel, as Bellow did in To Jerusalem and Back, a book-length essay composed at the crux of churning contention? (Decades old and read today, it remains, in its candor and credibility, shatteringly up-to-date.) And finally—we are compelled to come to this—there is the strangely misunderstood question of Bellow and the Holocaust.

  In a letter dated July 19, 1987, he wrote:

  It’s perfectly true that “Jewish writers in America” (a repulsive category!) missed what should have been for them the central event of their time, the destruction of European Jewry. We (I speak of Jews now and not merely writers) should have reckoned more fully, more deeply with it. . . . I was too busy becoming a novelist to take note of what was happening in the Forties. I was involved with “literature” and given over to preoccupations with art, with language, with my struggle on the American scene, with the claims for recognition of my talent or, like my pals at the Partisan Review, with modernism, Marxism, New Criticism, with Eliot, Yeats, Proust, etc.—with anything except the terrible events in Poland. Growing slowly aware of this unspeakable evasion I didn’t even know how to begin to admit it into my inner life. Not a particle of this can be denied. And can I really say—can anyone say—what was to be done, how this “thing” ought to have been met? Since the late Forties I have been brooding about it and sometimes I imagine I can see something. But what brooding may amount to is probably insignificant. I can’t even begin to say what responsibility any of us may bear in such a matter, a crime so vast that it brings all Being into Judgment.

  If there appears to be a contradiction in this arresting statement, it is hardly to the point. “I was too busy becoming a novelist to take note of what was happening in the Forties” may in fact clash with “Since the late Forties I have been brooding about it,” but it is the closing phrase that calls reality into question—the known reality of “the terrible events in Poland.” Bellow was made fully aware of these events earlier than most, and with a close-up precision unbefogged by such grand metaphorical abstractions as “a crime so vast that it brings all Being into Judgment.” The writer who could explicitly describe the particular texture of an old man’s boots glimpsed seventy years before here fades into the elusiveness of high declamation. Yet a single much-overlooked biographical datum may dispute these assertions of overriding literary distraction. In 1948, three years after the defeat of Germany and the appalling revelations of the death camps, Bellow and Anita Goshkin, the social worker who became his first wife, went with their small son Gregory to live in Paris; a Guggenheim grant made the move possible. Bellow settled in to work on a new novel, caught up in the convivial cadres of literary Americans drawn to postwar Paris, while Anita found a job with the Joint Distribution Committee. Here we must pause to take this in. The Joint, as it was called, was a privately funded American effort to salvage the broken lives of the remnant of Holocaust survivors; Anita was perforce immersed daily in freshly accumulating news of “the terrible events in Poland.” Are we to believe that the wife never imparted to the husband what she learned and witnessed and felt every day, or that, detached, he took no notice of it?

  But if we may not conjecture what a wife privately recounts to a husband—even one so alert to the historically momentous—the letters themselves, with their multiple sharp retrospections, are testimony enough. In 1978, writing to the twenty-something Leon Wieseltier (“I found I could tell you things”), Bellow responded to a pair of articles Wieseltier had sent him on the philosophic origins of Hannah Arendt’s post-Holocaust thinking. “That superior Krautess,” as Bellow dubbed her, had notoriously charged the European Jewish leadership with collaboration in the administration of the Nazi ghettos and deportations. “She could often think clearly,” Bellow tells Wieseltier, “but to think simply was altogether beyond her, and her imaginative faculty was stunted.” He goes on to cite the “simple facts”:

  I once asked Alexander Donat, author of The Holocaust Kingdom, how it was that the Jews went down so quickly in Poland. He said something like this: “After three days in the ghetto, unable to wash and shave, without clean clothing, deprived of food, all utilities and municipal services cut off, your toilet habits humiliatingly disrupted, you are demoralized, confused, subject to panic. A life of austere discipline would have made it possible to keep my head, but how many civilized people had such a life?” Such simple facts—had Hannah had the imagination to see them—would have vitiated her theories.

  Arendt may have been a respectable if not wholly respected adversary, but the treasonous Ezra Pound was likely the most poisonous figure by whom Bellow judged both “the terrible events in Poland” and the writers who declined to face them. In 1982, addressing Robert Boyers’s commiseration with what Boyers termed an “uncharitable” review of The Dean’s December by the critic Hugh Kenner, Bellow fulminated against Kenner’s “having come out openly in his Eliot-Pound anti-Semitic regalia” in defense of Pound. Infamous for his wartime broadcasts from Mussolini’s Italy—tirade after tirade on Jews and “usury”—Pound had nevertheless attracted faithful literary champions. “It was that the poet’s convictions could be separated from his poetry,” Bellow argued. “It was thus possible to segregate the glory from the shame. Then you took possession of the glory in the name of ‘culture’ and kept the malignancies as a pet.” A quarter of a century before, in 1956, in the most coldly furious confrontation to be found here, Bellow had already accused William Faulkner of heartlessly overlooking Pound’s malevolence. As head of a presidentially appointed committee of writers “to promote pro-American values abroad,” Faulkner had asked Bellow to sign on to a recommendation for Pound’s release from his confinement in a hospital for the insane; though deemed a traitor, he had been spared prison. With uncommon bitterness, Bellow retorted:

  Pound advocated in his poems and in his broadcasts enmity to the Jews and preached hatred and murder. Do you mean to ask me to join you in honoring a man who called for the destruction of my kinsmen? I can take no part in such a thing even if it makes effective propaganda abroad, which I doubt. Europeans will take it instead as a symptom of reaction. In France, Pound would have been shot. Free him because he is a poet? Why, better poets than he were exterminated perhaps.

  Shall we say nothing in their behalf? America has dealt mercifully with Pound in
sparing his life. To release him is a feeble and foolish idea. It would identify this program in the eyes of the world with Hitler and Himmler and Mussolini and genocide. . . . What staggers me is that you and Mr. [John] Steinbeck who have dealt for so many years in words should fail to understand the import of Ezra Pound’s plain and brutal statements about the “kikes” leading the “goy” to slaughter. Is this—from The Pisan Cantos—the stuff of poetry? It is a call to murder. . . . The whole world conspires to ignore what has happened, the giant wars, the colossal hatreds, the unimaginable murders, the destruction of the very image of man. And we—“a representative group of American writers”—is this what we come out for, too?

  In light of this uncompromising cri de coeur, and of similar mordant reflections in the novels and stories (covertly in The Victim and boldly elsewhere), how are we to regard Bellow’s “I was too busy becoming a novelist” apologia? A false note: there was, in fact, no “unspeakable evasion”; rather, an enduring recognition of acid shame and remorse. And can I really say—can anyone say—what was to be done? Clearly, and from the first, he saw and he knew.

  Now it may be imagined—or even insisted—that too much is being made of all this, that the emphasis here is disproportionate, and that there are other dimensions, more conspicuous and profuse, which can more readily define Bellow as writer. Or it can be said, justifiably, that he openly denigrated anything resembling special pleading—after all, hadn’t he brushed off as “a repulsive category” the phrase “Jewish writers in America”? And what was this dismissal if not a repudiation of a vulgarizing tendency to bypass the art in order to laud the artist as a kind of ethnic cheerleader—much as young Jewish baseball fans are encouraged to look to Hank Greenberg for prideful self-validation. Besides, he had long ago put himself on record as freewheeling, unfettered, unprescribed, liberated from direction or coercion. In words that will not be found in the correspondence (they derive from the essays, those publicly personal letters to readers), Bellow wrote, “I would not allow myself to become the product of an environment”—flaunting willful italics. And though he never failed to refresh his law of the unleashed life, it rang now with a decisive coda: “In my generation, the children of immigrants became American. An effort was required. One made oneself, freestyle. . . . I was already an American, and I was also a Jew. I had an American outlook, superadded to a Jewish consciousness.” To Faulkner’s indifference he could speak—powerfully, inexorably—of “my kinsmen.” And to history the same.

  Say, then, that he was, as he intended to be, free, unstinting in what he chose to love or mourn or recoil from. The letters tell us whom and how he loved. He loved his sons. He loved John Berryman, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Martin Amis. He loved Alfred Kazin (whom he mostly disliked). He loved, to the end, Janis Bellow and their little daughter, Naomi Rose. He loved, even in death, Isaac Rosenfeld, the tumultuously inspired intimate of his youth (who nastily destroyed a hoard of his old friend’s letters). He revered—but not always—thought, civilization, and what he named “the very image of man,” all of which could be undone. He believed in outcry, and trusted the truth of his own. He was adept at witticism and outright laughter. He was serious in invoking whatever particle of eternity he meant by soul, that old, old inkling he was fearless in calling up from contemporary disgrace.

  Like the novels and stories, the letters in their proliferation and spontaneity unveil the life—those sinews of it amenable to utterance—almost to its final breath. What happened soon afterward came to something less. On September 21, 2005, five months after Bellow’s death, a celebratory symposium was convened at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The participants included British writers Ian McEwen, Martin Amis, and the critic James Wood, the first two having flown from London for the occasion; William Kennedy and Jeffrey Eugenides completed the panel. Each spoke movingly in turn: joyfully reverential, heartfelt, intermittently (and charmingly) anecdotal, adoring—a density of love. There was mention of modernism, fictional digression, character, childhood, Chicago, crowded tenements, the immigrant poor. Riffing in homage, Amis delivered an imitation of Bellow’s laugh, the delight and self-delight of it, the lifted chin, the head thrown back. But all this was a departure from the culminating sentiment—it was a sentiment, a susceptibility, a rapturous indulgence—that captivated and dominated these writerly temperaments. Wood: “I judge all modern prose by his. . . . The prose comes before and it comes afterward.” Amis: “His sentences and his prose were a force of nature.” McEwen: “The phrase or sentence has become part of our mental furniture. . . . Sentences like these are all you need to know about Saul Bellow.” And so on. Understandable, plainly: superb novelists, stellar craftsmen, each one mesmerized by Bellow’s unparalleled combinations.

  Yet, despite these plenitudes, Saul Bellow was missing on that platform and in that auditorium teeming with admirers—as much missing there as, clothed in living flesh, he is an insistent presence in the letters. It was as if a committee of professional jewelers, loupes in place, had met to sift through heaps of gems strewn scattershot on a velvet scarf—the splendor and flash and glitter of opal and ruby and emerald, the word, the phrase, the sentence, the marvelous juxtapositions, the sublime clashes of style, the precious trove of verbal touchstones!

  It was not enough. It was an abundant truth that diminished even as it aggrandized. A mammoth absence opened its jaws—where was the century, the century that Bellow’s reality-stung inquisitiveness traversed almost in its entirety, from Trotsky to Wilhelm Reich to Rudolf Steiner; where was the raw and raucously shifting society he knocked about in, undermined, reveled in, and sometimes reviled? Where was his imagined Africa, where were the philosophies he devoured, where were the evanescent infatuations he pursued, where was the clamor of history, and the defiant angers, and the burning lamentations for the beloved dead, the broken heart for Isaac Rosenfeld, whose writer’s envy blazed, and for the father and brothers whose belittlements never left off hurting? And where, during that long tribute-laden afternoon in New York, was America itself?

  Among the soon-to-be-forgotten novelists of our time, Saul Bellow stays on. Surely it is for the kaleidoscopic astonishments of his sentences that he lasts. But not only.

  “Please, Stories Are Stories”: Bernard Malamud

  Hart and Schaffner are dead; Marx, ringed round with laurels, has notoriously retired. But the firm itself was dissolved long ago, and it was Saul Bellow who, with a sartorial quip, snipped the stitches that had sewn three acclaimed and determinedly distinct American writers into the same suit of clothes, with its single label: “Jewish writer.” In Bellow’s parody, Bellow, Malamud, and Roth were the literary equivalent of the much-advertised men’s wear company—but lighthearted as it was, the joke cut two ways: it was a declaration of imagination’s independence of collective tailoring, and it laughingly struck out at the disgruntlement of those who, having themselves applied the label in pique, felt displaced by it.

  Who were these upstarts, these “pushy intruders” (as Gore Vidal had it), who were ravishing readers and seizing public space? Surveying American publishing, Truman Capote railed that “the Jewish mafia has systematically frozen [Gentiles] out of the literary scene.” In a 1968 essay, “On Not Being a Jew,” Edward Hoagland complained that he was “being told in print and sometimes in person that I and my heritage lacked vitality . . . because I could find no ancestor who had hawked copper pots in a Polish shtetl.” Katherine Anne Porter, describing herself as “in the direct, legitimate line” of the English language, accused Jewish writers of “trying to destroy it and all other living things they touch.” More benignly, John Updike invented Bech, his own Jewish novelist, and joined what he appeared to regard as the dominant competition.

  Yet it was not so much in response to these dubious preconceptions as it was to a rooted sense of their capacious American literary inheritance that all three unwillingly linked novelists were reluctant to be defined by the term “Jewish writer.” “I am not a Jewish write
r, I am a writer who is a Jew,” Philip Roth announced in Jerusalem in 1963. And Bellow, pugnaciously in a 1988 lecture: “If the WASP aristocrats wanted to think of me as a Jewish poacher on their precious cultural estates then let them.”

  Bernard Malamud sorted out these contentious impulses far more circumspectly. “I am a writer,” he said in an interview on his sixtieth birthday, “and a Jew, and I write for all men. A novelist has to, or he’s built himself a cage. I write about Jews, when I write about Jews, because they set my imagination going. I know something about their history, the quality of their experience and belief. . . . The point I am making is that I was born in America and respond, in American life, to more than Jewish experience.”

  Though unexpressed, there lurks in all these concurring animadversions a fear of the stigma of the “parochial”—a charge never directed (and why not?) against Cather’s prairie Bohemians, or the denizens of Updike’s Brewer or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. Still, it is not through sober public rhetoric but in the wilder precincts of fiction that Malamud discloses his animating credo. It emerges in the clear voice of Levitansky, the antihero of “Man in the Drawer,” a harried Soviet-Jewish writer whose work is barred from publication because it speaks human truths inimical to Stalinist policy. The American journalist who has worriedly befriended Levitansky asks whether he has submitted any Jewish stories, to which the writer retorts: “Please, stories are stories, they have not nationality. . . . When I write about Jews comes out stories, so I write about Jews.” It is this unanchored drive to create tales, Malamud implies, that generates subject matter—the very opposite of Henry James’s reliance on the story’s “germ,” the purloinings and devisings of the observed world. “Stories are stories” is Malamud’s ticket to untrammeled writerly freedom. Except to Scheherazade, he owes no social debts.