by Saul Bellow
Our ablest political commentators have used theatrical metaphors to describe Khrushchev’s behavior. Mr. Sulzberger in the New York Times speaks of the “fierce illogic of a Brendan Behan play.” Others have been reminded of the Leningrad circus, and a British psychologist has suggested that Khrushchev may have made a study of Pavlov’s conditioned reflex. After Pavlov had rewarded his dogs for responding to given signals, he scrambled the pattern, and the animals suffered a hysterical breakdown. Our leaders, amid flowers and smiles and exchanges of charm, made appointments to meet Khrushchev at the summit, only to find that he had turned into Ibsen’s Great Boyg of the northern snows, who deafened them with snarls and stunned them with ice. If Khrushchev had needed instruction in the technique of blowing hot and cold, he could have gotten it from Hitler, who made a great deal of noise in the world, rather than from Pavlov, who made very little. From Hitler he might have learned that angry demonstrations unnerve well-conducted people and that in statesmanship the advantage always lies with the unprincipled, the brutal, and the insane. Hitler could at will convulse himself with rage and, when he had gained his ends, be coolly correct to his staff, all in a matter of moments. Khrushchev does not seem to have this combination of derangement and cold political technique that threatens the end of the world in fire and ice. But does he need lessons from Professor Pavlov in psychological techniques? Teach your granny to suck an egg.
No, the dramatic metaphor is the best one, and in trying to place his style, even before I had seen Khrushchev in action during his recent American visit—a short, buoyant, ruddy, compact, gesturing, tough man—it struck me that Marcel Marceau, another mime, appearing in The Overcoat at a New York theater, and Khrushchev, at the other side of town, had both been inspired by the Russian comic tradition. The masterpiece of that tradition is Gogol’s Dead Souls. From Gogol’s landlords and peasants, grotesquely thickheaded or just as grotesquely shrewd, provincial autocrats, creeps, misers, officials, gluttons, gamblers, and drunkards, Khrushchev seems to have taken many of the elements of his comic style. He is one of Gogol’s stout men who “know better than thin men how to manage their affairs. The thin ones are more often employed on special missions, or are merely ‘on the staff,’ scurrying hither and thither; their existence is somehow too slight, airy and altogether insubstantial. The stout ones are never to be found filling ambiguous posts, but only straightforward ones; if they sit down anywhere, they do so solidly and firmly, so that, though their position may creak and bend beneath them, they never fall off.”
When the occasion demands more earnestness, he plays the Marxist. Speaking at the UN, he made me think, when he called for colonial liberation, of Trotsky in the first years of the Russian Revolution and in particular of Trotsky’s conduct during the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. There, to the amazement of the German generals, he delayed the negotiations in order to make speeches calling on the world proletariat to support and extend the revolution. Those days are gone forever, of course. They were gone even before Lenin died. And there is a great difference between the fresh revolutionary ardor of Trotsky and the stale agitational technique of an old party hack. Still, when it suits him, Khrushchev is a Marxist. Defending the poor working girls of Hollywood, he delivered the judgment of Marxian orthodoxy on their wriggling and kicking (more of the alienating labor imposed by capitalism on humanity).
There are certain similarities between Khrushchev’s Marxism and the liberal ideology of Western businessmen. They make use of it at their convenience. Khrushchev, however, enjoys a considerable advantage in that the needs of Russian history and those of his own personality have coincided so that he is able at times to follow his instincts without restraint. He has besides a great contempt for the representatives of the West, who are unable to do without the brittle, soiled, and compromised conventions of civilized diplomacy. Those conventions figure as the great coma, the deep sleep, and Khrushchev despises the sleepers and takes advantage of them. The pictures taken at the summit reveal the extent of his success. General de Gaulle’s mouth is drawn very small in a pucker of foreboding and distaste. Mr. Macmillan seems deeply hurt. Former President Eisenhower looks sad but also opinionated. Things have gone wrong again, but it is certainly no fault of his. Together, all three must have seemed to Khrushchev like Keats’s “still unravished bride of quietness.” And it is not hard to guess what he, the descendant of serfs, risen to a position of such might, must have experienced. Confronting the leaders of the bourgeois West, so long feared and hated, he saw himself to be tougher, deeper, and more intelligent than any of them. And, in expressing his feelings, more free.
It’s hard to know whether the Khrushchev we saw banging with his shoe at the UN Assembly is the “real” Khrushchev. But one of the privileges of power seems to be the privilege of direct emotional self-expression. It is not a privilege exercised by many people in the West, so far as I can see.
“Men who have arrived can do what they like,” declared our own Daily News recently in one of its snappy ads. “There was a guy who liked spaghetti and beer, but when he became a junior executive, he thought it more fitting to order steak and asparagus. It was only when he became president of his company that he felt assured enough to go back to spaghetti and beer.”
Such are the privileges of power, but bafflingly enough, apart from artists and tyrants, few people, even among company presidents, feel strong enough to tell the world how they feel. New York’s Police Commissioner Kennedy, a man who has apparently arrived, could not, some time ago, express his honest views as to the religious convictions of the Jewish members of the force. Everyone knows that the commissioner is not anti-Semitic. Yet the New York Rabbinate felt compelled, as did Mayor Wagner, for formal reasons, to ask for a retraction. So it’s not easy to speak one’s mind. Even the artists have taken cover, disguising themselves as bank clerks and veiling their sayings. That leaves us with the tyrants. (Is it only a coincidence that Emily Post died during Khrushchev’s visit?)
Masked in smiles and peasant charm, or in anger, the Russian Premier releases his deepest feelings, and if we are not shaken by them, it is because we are not in close touch with reality. In the West, the connections between opinion, feeling, and bodily motion have been broken. We have lost the expressive power. It is in the use of such power, falsely exploiting his Russian and peasant background, that Khrushchev has shown himself to be an adept. He has a passion always ready to exploit, and though he lies, he has the advantage. The principles of Western liberalism seem no longer to lend themselves to effective action. Deprived of the expressive power, we are awed by it, have a hunger for it, and are afraid of it. Thus we praise the gray dignity of our soft-spoken leaders, but in our hearts we are suckers for passionate outbursts, even when those passionate outbursts are hypocritical and falsely motivated. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”
At times Khrushchev goes beyond Gogolian comedy; this is no longer the amiable chiseler who stuffs himself with fish or pancakes dipped in butter. Gogol’s Chichikov, to congratulate himself when he has pulled a fast one, dances in the privacy of his room. But Khrushchev goes into his cancan before the world public with a deep and gnomish joy. Here is a man whom all the twisted currents of human purpose have brought within reach of world power. At a time when public figures show only secondary or tertiary personal characteristics, he appears to show only primary ones. He wears his instincts on his sleeve, or like Dostoyevsky’s Father Karamazov, that corrupt and deep old man, he feigns simplicity.
When the charm and irony wear thin, he shows himself to be a harsh, arbitrary, and complicated man. It was a simple enough matter for him to have joked contemptuously with Spyros Skouras; in debate with well-informed men who press him closely, he becomes abusive, showing that the habit of authority has made him inflexible. He seems unable to discuss any matter except on his own terms. Nature, history, Russian Marxism, and, perhaps most of all, the fact that he has survived under Stalin make
it impossible for him to entertain other views. What amounted in Paris to ex-President Eisenhower’s admission of a blunder must have seemed to him incredible. He lives under an iron necessity to be right. What he perhaps remembers best about men who were not right is their funerals. For him the line between the impossible and the possible is drawn with blood, and foreigners who do not see the blood must appear preposterous to him.
The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them
(1955)
Foreword to Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (New York: Criterion, 1955). First published in New Republic, 23 May 1955.
Renting an apartment in Paris was not a simple matter in 1948, but Nicolaus, a good friend of mine, had found one for my family on the Right Bank in a fussy building. From the U.S. I had brought a new Remington portable typewriter, which the landlady absolutely demanded as a gift. She had to have the rent in dollars, too. Francs would not do. The rental was steep. Nicolaus, however, said the apartment was worth the money. He knew Paris, and I took his word for it. Nicolaus spoke French perfectly. People from Indianapolis take to French quite naturally; I met several of them in Paris, and they were all fluent. My old pal was a consummate Frenchman, carried a pair of gloves and drove a French car. He was annoyed with me when I asked my landlady what one did about the garbage here. “In France,” he said to me severely, detaining me in his chilly dining room, “no man would ask such a question. Garbage is not your concern. You are not supposed to know that garbage exists. Besides, ordures is not a nice word.”
I said that I was sorry and that I shouldn’t have asked.
The landlady now brought forth her inventaire. An amazing document! A catalogue of every object in the house, from the Chippendale chair to the meanest cup, fully and marvelously described in stiff, upright, copious characters. We started to go through the list, and moved from Madame’s room, a flapper’s boudoir of the twenties, backward to the kitchen. Madame read the description and displayed each article. “Dining room table, Style Empire. Condition excellent. Triangular scratch on left side. No other defect” We finished in the kitchen with three lousy tin spoons.
“Ah,” said Nicolaus. “What a sense of detail the French have!”
I was less impressed, but one must respect respect itself, and I did not openly disagree.
As soon as Madame left, I turned a somersault over the Chippendale chair and landed thunderously on the floor. This lightened my heart for a time, but in subsequent dealings with Madame and others in France, I could not always recover my lightness of heart by such means.
Depressed and sunk in spirit, I dwelt among Madame’s works of art that cold winter. The city lay under perpetual fog, and the smoke could not rise and flowed in the streets in brown and gray currents. An unnatural smell emanated from the Seine. Many people suffered from the grippe Espagnole (all diseases are apt to be of foreign origin) and many more from melancholy and bad temper. Paris is the seat of a highly developed humanity, and one thus witnesses highly developed forms of suffering there. Witnesses and, sometimes, experiences. Sadness is a daily levy that civilization imposes in Paris. Gay Paris? Gay, my foot! Mere advertising. Paris is one of the grimmest cities in the world. I do not ask you to take my word for it. Go to Balzac and Stendhal, to Zola, to Strindberg—to Paris itself. Nicolaus said the Parisians were celebrated for their tartness of character. He declared that it would be better for me to feel my way into it than to criticize it. Himself, he was a connoisseur of the Parisian temperament. I was lacking in detachment, he said. To this accusation I pleaded guilty. I was a poor visitor and, by any standard, an inferior tourist.
Once, I tried to show a lady from Chicago the view of the Forum from the Tarpeian Rock, but she had just arrived from Florence and would not stop talking of its wonders, even when we were standing before so famous a sight. She annoyed me greatly, and I said to myself, “Damn her! I know she’s been in Florence. But now she’s on the Tarpeian Rock.” And I said to her, “Do you know what used to happen here?” She seemed not to hear but answered with a remark about the Signoria, which, for a split second, made me want to throw her down like one of the ancient criminals. But I wronged her. How could she react to the Tarpeian Rock when she had not yet absorbed the Signoria?
But I was going to tell the story of my first reading of Winter Notes on Summer Impressions.
My young son came down with the measles. Our lanky doctor observed that the apartment was not nearly warm enough. “You must heat the boy’s room,” he said, and filled out a requisition for an emergency coal ration. I put on my coat and took the paper to the Mairie of our arrondissement, as instructed. There I sat and waited, as one waits in government offices the world over.
A large stained room. Shadows of chicken wire. Blinding lights. Several ladies at an official table, each of them the spit and image of Colette, their cheeks autumnally red, their heads bushy, small brown cigarette butts between their lips—no French civil servant who lacks a mégot can be an authentic officer of the state.
For an hour or two I waited my turn, and when it came I stated my case simply and presented the doctor’s note; I confidently expected to receive a coal order.
“Ah, non!” Colette number one told me. The doctor’s order was written upon one of his regular prescription blanks, whereas a special blank was provided for coal orders, very similar to but not identical with the prescription sort of blank. The real thing had perforations on the left side.
Didn’t the Mesdames believe that my order bore the doctor’s signature? Did they think that I had forged it? Not necessarily, said Colette number two. Nevertheless they could do nothing that was not in proper form. They could issue emergency coal rations solely upon presentation of the perforated fiche. The rougeole did not impress them, though I prided myself on having pronounced the word creditably. From the look on the face of Colette number three I knew that the coal ration was a dead issue. I made my way back to the dripping street, telling myself in French that I was going to get my coal on the black market. Je vais acheter, etc. I was determined not to allow the natives to talk me down.
It was on the same day that I found on the stand of a bouquiniste near the Châtelet a book by Dostoyevsky called Le Bourgeois de Paris—the French title of Winter Notes—and I sat in the illegally heated room, in the odor of the paste my son was using on his paper dolls, and eagerly and sometimes wildly read it. Its prejudices ought to have offended me; instead I was unable to suppress certain utterances of satisfaction and agreement. I, too, was a foreigner and a barbarian from a vast and backward land. And one is more foreign in France than in other countries. Americans find it hard to believe that foreigners are unalterably foreign, for they have seen generations of immigrants who became Americans. But old cultures are impermeable and exclusive—none more so than the French. I should like to make it clear that I had not heaped blame irrationally upon France. I said to myself often, “Because you have paid the price of admission and have come with your awkward affections in your breast and dollars in your pocket, do you expect these people to take you to their hearts and into their homes? You must try to appreciate the fact that they have other and more important things to think about. Food, for one. Only three years ago, Hitler was deporting thousands, shooting hostages. A war has been fought here, probably the most atrocious in history. And now the communists are trying to drag France into Russia. America presses from the other side. Armies of tourists are beginning to pour in. And do you have to interject your irrelevant self?”
Yet as I read Winter Notes, I realized that to foreign eyes the French in 1862 were not substantially different from those of 1948. The great wars had not made too many changes here. If the lessons of war could be learned, wouldn’t we all be very different? If death and suffering had the power to teach us … Et cetera. Hard, stubborn man, alas, does not easily correct himself, forgets what he has felt and seen … (being very sententious with myself).
Some of Dostoyevsky’s strictures repelled me by t
heir harshness. He is disagreeable as only a great radical can be. Recalling how evasive he had been when the czar’s soldiers killed Polish patriots, I disliked his Slavophile notions. And then, too, a Jewish reader can seldom forget Dostoyevsky’s anti-Semitism.
It is, however, essential to remember that it was for his participation in the Petrashevsky “conspiracy” that Dostoyevsky had been sent into exile. The idols of this immature and probably harmless group of young men were the French radicals—Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Sebastian Cabet among others. The Petrashevsky group had given a banquet honoring Fourier’s birthday. Dostoyevsky was therefore no ordinary Russian tourist in Paris. He had been condemned to death for his adherence to French and Western ideas. Reprieved, he had been severely punished. He had only just returned from Siberia, and he now proceeded, understandably enough, to examine the European right to teach and lead young Russians.