It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future
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Saul Bellow
IT ALL ADDS UP
Contents
Preface
Mozart: An Overture
PART ONE: Riding Off in All Directions
In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt
Literary Notes on Khrushchev
The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them
A Talk with the Yellow Kid
PART TWO: Writers, Intellectuals, Politics
The Sealed Treasure
Facts That Put Fancy to Flight
White House and Artists
A Matter of the Soul
An Interview with Myself
Nobel Lecture
Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence
PART THREE: The Distracted Public
The Jefferson Lectures
The Distracted Public
There Is Simply Too Much to Think About
PART FOUR: Thoughts in Transition
Spanish Letter
Illinois Journey
Israel: The Six-Day War
New York: World-Famous Impossibility
The Day They Signed the Treaty
My Paris
Chicago: The City That Was, the City That Is
Vermont: The Good Place
Winter in Tuscany
PART FIVE: A Few Farewells
Isaac Rosenfeld
John Berryman
John Cheever
Allan Bloom
William Arrowsmith
PART SIX: Impressions and Notions
A Half Life
A Second Half Life
Follow Penguin
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
It All Adds Up
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) is the only novelist to receive three National book awards, for The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr Sammler’s Planet. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Humboldt’s Gift. The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to him in 1976 ‘for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.’ In 1990, Mr Bellow was presented with the National Book Award Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. He has also received the National Medal of Arts. His books include Dangling Man (1944), The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mosby’s Memoirs (1969), Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970), Humboldt’s Gift (1975), To Jerusalem and Back (1976), The Dean’s December (1982), Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984), More Die of Heartbreak (1987), A Theft (1989), The Bellarosa Connection (1989), Something to Remember Me By (1991), It All Adds Up (1994), The Actual (1997), Ravelstein (2000) and Collected Stories (2001).
Preface
It is never altogether pleasant to read what you wrote decades ago. Here and there I found pieces that pleased me, and for a moment I could say, like little Jack Horner, “Oh, what a good boy was I!” The least gratifying of my discoveries was that I, too, had a King Charles head and that I had been doodling away like Mr. Dick in David Copperfield. I was obsessed or distracted by the subject of distraction. A second King Charles head, smaller but nearly as persistent, presently materialized: I kept mentioning Wyndham Lewis. Why was it that I invoked few other names?
I have been reading Lewis for half a century or longer. His political ideas repelled me (I still dislike them), but he had thought more deeply and written more intelligently about the lot of the artist in the twentieth century than any of his contemporaries. I cared little for The Art of Being Ruled, but I have gone back repeatedly to books like Men Without Art, America and the Cosmic Man, The Writer and the Absolute, and his literary autobiography, Rude Assignment. I have studied him closely, and I referred to him oftener than I had realized. He has been described and dismissed as a Nietzschean, and I was occasionally advised to go to the source. But a writer of genius like Lewis is more than the sum of his influences. William Blake is sometimes described as a Rousseauan, but it was not Rousseau who wrote the Songs of Experience. A writer often casts about for the support of a precedent, and when I needed one I found myself frequently recalling what Lewis had to say on matters of importance.
In reading these pieces again, I kept thinking about Robert Frost’s poem to the effect that there had been promises to keep and miles to go before I could sleep. Not so. I had already been fast asleep and had to trust the little horse to bring me home. He knew the way (more or less).
I have been invited to print all the trifles I wrote to support myself, but I have decided to acknowledge no “historical responsibilities.” This therefore is not a reliquary but a gathering of some of the more readable essays. If I were to write these pieces today, I think that I should say less about distraction and emphasize instead the importance of attention. Many years ago, reading Tolstoy’s essay on Maupassant, I was struck by his short list of indispensable qualifications for good writing. These were: a perspicuous style (I have to accept the translator’s adjective), a moral foundation—that is, a strong stand taken on the problem of good and evil—and lastly the faculty of attention. By attending closely, the writer was to breed attentiveness in his readers, replacing the world with his world. Single-mindedness and passion are interchangeable here. All that remains to be said on the subject is that a writer is educated mainly by his mistakes. And as Henry James grimly suggests in his story “The Middle Years,” when you have completed your self-education and mastered your trade, you are likely to find that your time has run out.
When a writer says “My time is up,” it’s highly probable that he doesn’t really mean it. What most saddens him is that his mistakes are indelibly recorded in what he once wrote. If I had it to do again I could do it so much better, he says, and he longs to correct himself publicly and to revise and retract. Some of my friends have been deeply skeptical about adult education. Prevailing opinion has been that it is no use to attempt in middle age what should have been done in the years of maximum receptivity. But some of us are stubborn learners, and my sixties and my seventies proved to be enlightening decades. I learned many things that I should have known earlier.
The bitterness of my dissatisfaction in rereading some of these pieces is due to basic revisions, radical changes in my point of view. I can see now where I went wrong. The “road not taken” was taken, taken a hundred times. By now I have gone many miles toward the promise of sleep, but I reach my destination blindingly wide awake. My state therefore is something like a state of insomniac illumination. I failed to understand the things I wrote, the books I read, the lessons I was taught, but I find that I am a most persistent self-educator, that I long for correction. Very possibly I have not achieved my goals, but it gives great satisfaction nonetheless to have rid oneself of tenacious old errors. To enter an era of improved errors.
Mozart: An Overture
(1992)
Bostonia magazine, Spring 1992. Delivered at the Mozart Bicentennial, 5 December 1991, in Florence, Italy.
In preparing this essay, I have found myself sizing up Mozart as if I were thinking of writing a novel in which he might appear as a character. I was not aware at the outset that this was what I was doing. It was only after I had written half of it that I recognized what I had done.
Mozart is immediately accessible to the naive. Others obviously require preparation. It is no criticism of twelve-tone composers, to choose an obvious example, to note that they oblige us to give some thought to the formal assumptions they expect us to share. Mozart, however, can be loved freely and naturally by amateurs. It is because I am an amateur that I have been invited to discuss Mozart, and I intend to ma
ke the most of my amateur standing, bypassing the problems that intrigue and vex the learned specialists I have read in my efforts to get a handle of my own on this subject.
My best course is to convert ignorance to an advantage. What follows is a confession, supplemented by such tentative ideas as are bound to flutter out when any of us makes an open declaration of this sort. I shall begin by saying that there are corners of my existence which from the first were furnished by Mozart. It does not seem to me that any other musical tenant ever had to be moved out to make room for him. I had an older sister—much my senior—who played the piano. She did not play particularly well. She was a perfect metronome (metrognome) of a pianist, but she did familiarize me with Mozart.
There was a manufacturer in Chicago by the name of Gulbrantsen, and in his advertisements, painted on brick walls, an infant was shown pressing the pedals of a piano. The legend was: “The richest child is poor without a musical education.” This was a warning taken seriously by parents in the Midwest. I was given violin lessons at an early age. Many of the music teachers were refugees from revolutionary Russia. Mine was a stout gloomy man from Odessa seeking a prodigy, a second Heifetz or Menuhin or Elman, to make his reputation. Obviously I lacked the gifts he was looking for, and he would snatch the bow and whip my bottom with it. He was so peevish and futile that I was more amused than hurt. I did, somehow, learn to fiddle adequately, and until middle age I was on the lookout for amateur musicians like myself and had the pleasure occasionally of playing Mozart sonatas arranged for duets and trios. In my student years I was an unpaid usher at the Auditorium Theater; the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and the San Carlo Opera came regularly to Chicago. Samuel Insull, the utilities tycoon, gave the city an opera house (before he fled to Greece and had to be extradited). International celebrities were brought to Orchestra Hall by Hurok the impresario. There were excellent teachers of theory and music history and first-rate performers at the south end of the Loop. Although I was not trained in a conservatory, I absorbed a considerable amount of music, and while I preferred books to instruments, there were odd corners of my existence reserved for Handel, Mozart, Pergolesi, etc.
I have now explained my amateur standing and will go on to the confessions I promised. But what does one confess today, when the worst of the sins have become venial? It is the violation of orderly processes of thought as prescribed by the higher rationality that throws you into sin. To be unscientific is in our time a grave mental offense.
Some of my speculations on Mozart are notably unscientific. I often puzzle over the nature of his genius. How was it that it should appear so early and develop so swiftly and be so complete? Was it because his father was an educator of corresponding genius? Nobody ever suspected genius of any sort in Leopold. Neither do the educational or genetic contributions of his mother strike his biographers as exceptional. Mozart, to borrow a figure from William Blake, was a piece of ground already spaded and seeded. It looks, in other words, as if he had brought it all with him. And then I think of other prodigies born into mathematical or musical families. The mature forms assumed by these exceptional creatures are not to be accounted for by environmental or historical theories. They resemble the flowers or the insects, they have powers that astonish and physiological refinements or resources of intelligence too curious to be explained by probability theory or the ponderous slowness of time, or by trial and error. What they suggest is the intervention of invisible purposes. “To a certain extent,” writes Alfred Einstein, “it is true that Mozart was only a visitor upon this earth. Mozart as a man was nowhere truly at home: neither in Salzburg, where he was born, nor in Vienna, where he died.”
At the heart of my confession, therefore, is the hunch that with beings such as Mozart we are forced to speculate about transcendence, and this makes us very uncomfortable, since ideas of transcendence are associated with crankiness or faddism—even downright instability and mental feebleness. These are the charges and the guilts you open yourself to when you confess that you find it impossible to dismiss such speculations. To some reasonable minds this might lead to the limiting of art—art in which religious or other “undesirable” tendencies survive—to ceremonial or traditional observances. On occasions like the present one: occasions of cultural piety.
Music, I assume (amateurishly), is based on a tonal code containing, inevitably, expressions of the whole history of feeling, emotion, belief—of essences inseparable from what we call our “higher life.” I suggest also that this is where we tend to go when we have gone as far as we can in the new positive orthodoxies that keep us within bounds—the assumptions which our education and the business of the world have trained us to accept as normal, practical, and indispensable: the founding postulates of our scientific and technological achievements.
From all this a Mozart gives us an orderly and also an emotional exit—an endlessly rich and exalted release.
I don’t want to make too much of this notion of a profound originality coming from God knows what source. I invoke it as a corrective to the earthbound psychology that rules our minds in this century. It does no harm to be reminded that this psychology is painfully limiting to the intelligence and is often little more than a convenient way to dispose of troublesome intimations of a forbidden nature. The miracles that fascinate us are the scientific and technological ones. These have changed space, time, and nature. To positivists ours is an object world ruled by ideas. A contemporary environment is made up of such embodied ideas—ideas of residence, transportation, seeing and hearing at a distance, etc. By means of such ideas (and they are highly sophisticated) the earth itself has been humanized. This is simple enough to see, and externally self-explanatory. Press a switch and you will see people, you will hear them speak. Few of us, however, can explain the techniques by which this is accomplished.
Years ago I read a curious book by Ortega y Gasset called The Revolt of the Masses. In it Ortega explains what a Mass Man is: he is not invariably a proletarian—educated professionals may also be mass men. This is not the place to explain what Ortega was talking about. Only one of his arguments concerns me here: he says that the Mass Man is unable to distinguish between a natural object or process and an artifact, a second-nature object. He takes it for granted, as part of the order of things, that when he enters an elevator and presses the button he will go up. When mechanisms fail, when, for instance, elevators do not rise or buses do not arrive, the spirit in which he protests reveals that he understands elevators or buses to be free commodities like daylight or the universal availability of breathable air.
To congratulate ourselves, however, on our educated enlightenment is simply an evasion of the real truth. We the “educated” cannot even begin to explain the technologies of which we make daily use. We speak of electronics or cybernetics—but it is all in vain. Natural processes are beyond us too, and despite our talk of lipids or carbohydrate metabolism, we understand virtually nothing about the physiology of digesting or the transmission of nerve impulses. Face-to-face with the technological miracles without which we could not live our lives, we are as backward as any savage, though education helps us to conceal this from ourselves and others. Indeed, it would utterly paralyze us to ponder intricate circuits or minicomputers, or attempt to gain a clear understanding of the translation of the discoveries of particle physics into modern arms.
These, however, are the miracles for which we have a very deep respect and which, perhaps, dominate our understanding of what a miracle is. A miracle is what brings people to Australia in ten hours. And we owe this to the scientific revolution.
What I am calling to your attention is entirely transparent. No other generation in history has lived in a world miraculously transformed by readily available artifacts. Ortega y Gasset notwithstanding, we are by and large no better at distinguishing nature from artifice than his Mass Man. Worse, we have lost Ortega’s old-fashioned confidence in our power to explain what nature is. Can we say that we comprehend the metabolic internal bli
zzard that converts matter into energy?
Our assignment, in one sense, is simply to man the artifacts that technology provides in ever more esoteric and miraculous variations. But what of the music of Don Giovanni or Così Fan Tutte considered as a miracle—as a comprehensive revelation of what Eros can be in two such different outpourings of sound?
I suppose almost everyone would feel that just as the principles behind a product of technology can be fully grasped if we determine to study the method laid down for us by intelligent beings whom basically we resemble, we will be able also to give a full account of these operas. But when we try to do that, the music brings us to a standstill. There is a dimension of music that prohibits final comprehension and parries or fends off the cognitive habits we respect and revere. We appear to feel that we are riding the crest of a wave of comprehension that has already overcome nature, and we are committed to the belief that there are no mysteries—there is only the not-yet-known. But I think I have made myself clear. We are as ignorant of fundamentals as human beings ever were. Self-respect demands that we appear to be “with it.”
And perhaps what I have been saying is related to the growing importance of Mozart, for as the twentieth century concludes, his Romantic rivals seem less great than they did fifty or sixty years ago. The most accomplished of contemporary music historians, writers like the brilliant Wolfgang Hildesheimer, feel that he is the sort of man we find singularly familiar, and Peter Porter some time ago in an Encounter essay (June 1983) wrote that Mozart “seems a modern man,” closer to ourselves than Bach, “a personality in sight and comprehensible to our temperament.” He goes on to say that there is enough evidence (by which he means documentary evidence—correspondence, personal reminiscences, data brought to light by researchers) “to induce a great sadness when we consider Mozart’s life. It will not look like a triumph, it refuses to allow us to escape an uncomfortable if anachronistic sense of guilt; no arrangement of facts or twisting of fiction, from the sugary distortions of Sacha Guitry to the demeaning simplifications of Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus, will fit Mozart out in the garments of vindication or apotheosis. He is so very unlike Beethoven, a titan of a very different sort.”