by Saul Bellow
It would be naive not to assume that he had already judged Europe. It’s not for his fairness that he is famous. Besides, it is not easy to blame him. But he had certainly formed his views of Europe beforehand; he was already under Slavophile influence, and in London he went to visit Herzen, the greatest of the Russian exiles in Europe. Some of Herzen’s views are reflected in these articles. Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind, it’s not always the fair-minded who are clearly in possession of the truth. In France, England, and Germany, Dostoyevsky found what he needed to support his biases. Bourgeois France aroused his profoundest hatred. There is not a nation anywhere that does not contradict its highest principles in daily practice, but the French contradiction was in his eyes the very worst because France presumed to offer the world political and intellectual instruction and leadership.
Examining the great slogans of the French Revolution, Dostoyevsky declared that liberty in France was the possession of those who had a million francs:
Equality before the law as it is now put into practice, each Frenchman can and ought to consider a personal insult. What is left of the formula? Fraternity. Now, this is a very curious item and, it must be admitted, still forms the chief stumbling block for the West.
The Westerner speaks of fraternity as of a great motivating force of humankind and does not understand that it is impossible to obtain fraternity if it does not exist in reality. … But in French nature, and in Occidental nature in general, it is not present; you find there instead a principle of individualism, a principle of isolation, of intense self-preservation; of personal gain, of self-determination of I, of opposing this I to all nature and the rest of mankind as an independent, autonomous principle entirely equal and equivalent to all that exists outside itself.
It is the Western form of individualism that offends Dostoyevsky. He invokes a higher individualism, to which the desire for fraternal love is natural, an individualism that is self-effacing and sacrificial:
Understand me: voluntary, fully conscious self-sacrifice utterly free of outside constraint, sacrifice of one’s entire self for the benefit of all, is in my opinion a sign of the supreme development of individuality, of its supreme power, absolute self-mastery and freedom of will.
Elsewhere, and especially in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky asks the question that inevitably arises from this attitude: How Christian can a civilization—any civilization—be? And as an artist must, he answers with ever more profound questions. But his severity toward the French never relaxes. In the French bourgeois character he sees a betrayal of the greatest hopes of the modern age.
It is in Winter Notes that his antagonism toward France first appears. It culminates in his wild satire of Bribri and Mabiche, a funny and also rather ugly affair. Poets (and novelists) wish to see a poetic principle in human action, but they are not always gratified at the effects of literature on social behavior. Dostoyevsky abhors “literary” bourgeois motives and the idolatry of culture.
What happens when literature becomes part of the life of a nation?
I myself did not know whether to cheer or weep when I saw posted in a station in Paris the announcement of a discussion of Racine by the police of the district. Flics! Cops! you see. And Racine! I must admit that I derived a curious ironic satisfaction from this. Wonderful France, where even the bulls are educated for sensibility. The pervasiveness of literary culture in Paris was not always pleasant. I had to submit when my dentist carried on about a dull play of Camus called Les Justes, and Sartre’s latest novel. On the boulevard Saint-Germain, a fashionable shop displayed silk scarves inscribed romantically with the names of Jean-Paul and Simone. Often Parisians struck me as behaving exactly like a huge cast of characters. Baudelaire complained in Mon Coeur Mis à Nu that everyone in France looked like Voltaire.
A great civilization always distinguishes, frames, sets apart, places an imprint of value, upon its members. The Parisian face is thus framed, individually distinguished. The historic task of a civilization is to remake the world in its own image. To a Frenchman, the French world is the world. In no other form is it conceivable. Do you want to see an Eskimo? Turn to the Encyclopédie Larousse. There you may see him as he is. He cannot be otherwise. On a fiercely hot day in Paris, a storekeeper told me, “La chaleur est plus brutale chez vous.” He had never been chez moi, but he had no need to leave Paris in order to know this.
But now the stable heavens have been torn asunder. Above is a chaos that French order cannot bear to see. The world has been expanded, horribly. Walls have fallen. The old stability has turned to bitter dust, and the Parisian countenance is filled with irony and with anger.
These are circumstances that bring out the deepest characteristics of a culture. Although we give exclusiveness as one of the criteria of culture, not all cultures are equally exclusive. Everywhere there are natural and human recognitions that supersede the cultural. It is the greater culture that allows the greatest latitude to certain natural human needs and simplicities.
Let it be remembered that it was as a journalist that Dostoyevsky wrote these Winter Notes. The articles were published in a review called Vremya and were read by most educated Russians. Our American journalism today is quite different. Vast organizations prepare for us their version of things as they are abroad. For this purpose they employ numbers of quite ordinary reporters. And when the stuff gathered by these reporters comes in, it is processed editorially. And then we are fed a homogeneous substance called information, created by experts (or ideologists) well and thoroughly indoctrinated in the views of the management. Rarely are talented and educated writers permitted to convey in their own words their own sense of reality. No. If an activity is not, in our bureaucratic times, corporate, vetted by “responsible” people, it is suspect. What we read in our national papers and magazines is an artificial mixture concocted to appease our desire to be informed.
Winter Notes is often intemperate, worse than unfair, and even frivolous. With his usual comic and cruel candor, Dostoyevsky concedes that his observations are sometimes sour and jaundiced, and it is characteristic of him that he does not conceal his prejudices. For him the revelation of bias is a step toward the truth. “Good” principles tempt us to conceal ill feeling and to lie. Liberalism, whether it is Eastern or Western, is habitually deceitful. “Let us come forward as we are,” Dostoyevsky is forever saying, “in our native crudity. No disguises.”
This is one of his important principles, and he holds to it with fanatical consistency. You may study his views on many topics in the huge, crazy, foaming, vengeful, fulminating book called A Writer’s Diary. In this collection of his journalistic writings, he records repeatedly his ever mounting bitterness toward Europe. Europeans cannot understand Russia, he says. Even those who attempt “to grasp our Russian essence” do so in vain; they “will long fail to comprehend …”
Yet Dostoyevsky considered himself a most practical Christian. The literary historian D. S. Mirsky speaks of “the rational and pragmatic nature of his Christianity.” A statement of this sort about a man who freely confessed his hatred of Frenchmen, Germans, and Poles gives one pause. We are explicitly commanded by Christianity not to do this. Non-Christians have long understood the difficulty—no, the impossibility—of following this injunction. It is almost unnecessary to add that Christians have too. If I employ the word “almost,” it is because the mixture of nationalism and Christianity is not easy to comprehend. Was Dostoyevsky able to love Russians more because he detested Germans? Is it perhaps necessary to fix a limit to the number of people one can try to love? It does not surprise modern readers, acquainted with twentieth-century psychology, that the power to hate increases the power to love also. The Duc de Saint-Simon said long ago that love and hate were fed by a single nerve. The same thought is expressed clearly enough by William Blake, and Dostoyevsky was not ignorant of it. But his personal opinions were not rational. As an artist, he was both rational and wise.
An odd thing: When Dostoyev
sky was toward the end of his career, corresponding with his friend the infamous reactionary Pobedonostyev, he referred once to a problem he was facing in the composition of The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevsky had just concluded the section of The Brothers in which Ivan had declared that he doubted the existence of God—had offered to return his “ticket” to the Creator. Having made a powerful case for atheism, Dostoyevsky now prepared the answer of faith. For this he turned to Father Zosima. He hoped, he told Pobedonostyev, to avoid polemics. These he considered “inartistic.” To answer artistically is to do full justice, to respect propositions and harmonies with which journalists and polemicists do not have to bother their heads. In the novel, Dostoyevsky cannot permit himself to yield to cruel, intemperate, and arbitrary personal judgments. The writer’s convictions, perhaps fanatically held, must be tamed by truth.
The degree to which you challenge your own beliefs and expose them to destruction is a test of your worth as a novelist.
A Talk with the Yellow Kid
(1956)
The Reporter, 6 September 1956.
“I have always affected a pearl stickpin upon my neckwear,” says Yellow Kid Weil. The Kid, who is now in his eighties, is an elegant and old-fashioned gentleman; he likes round phrases and leisurely speech. One of the greatest confidence men of his day, he has publicly forsworn crime and announced his retirement. A daughter of his in Florida urges him to pass his remaining years with her, but he prefers Chicago. He will tell you that he knows of no better place, and he has lived in many places. Chicago is his city.
As we stood talking in the lobby of the Sun-Times Building not long ago, a young photographer came running up to the famous criminal, threw an arm about his narrow old shoulders, and said affectionately, “Hi ya, Kid. Kid, how’s it goin’?” At such moments his bearded old face is lit with a smile of deepest pleasure, and looks of modesty and of slyness also steal over it. Bartenders, waitresses, reporters, know him. The vanishing race of old intellectuals in the neighborhood of Bughouse Square respects him. Real estate men, lawyers, even judges and bankers, will sometimes greet him. Why should he live elsewhere? He was born in Chicago, his career began there.
It was Bathhouse John Coughlin, Chicago’s primitive alderman and illustrious boss, who named him the Yellow Kid. Bathhouse had started out in life as a masseur in the old Brevoort Hotel. When he attained great power he was not too proud to talk to a young fellow like Joe Weil, as the Kid was then known. Weil came often to Coughlin’s saloon. An early comic strip called “Hogan’s Alley and the Yellow Kid” was then appearing in the New York Journal, to which Coughlin subscribed. Weil followed it passionately, and Bathhouse John saved the papers for him. “Why, you’re the Kid himself,” Coughlin said one day, and so Weil acquired the name.
The Kid is now very frail, and it becomes him. His beard very much resembles the one that the late Senator James Hamilton Lewis, a great dandy, used to wear. It is short, parted in the middle, and combed into two rounded portions, white and stiff. Beneath the whiskers, the Kid’s chin is visible, an old man’s chin. You think you have met with a happy old quack, a small-time charlatan who likes to reminisce about the wickedness of his past, until you become aware of the thin, forceful, sharp mouth under the trembling hairs of old age. It is the mouth of a masterful man.
He must once have been very imposing. Now there is a sort of fallen nattiness about him. His shoes are beautifully shined, though not in top condition. His suit is made of a bold material; it has gone too often to the cleaner, but it is in excellent press. His shirt must belong to the days of his prosperity, for his neck has shrunk and the collar fits loosely. The cloth has a green pattern of squares within squares. Tie and pocket handkerchief are of a matching green. His little face is clear and animated. Long practice in insincerity gives him an advantage; it is not always easy to know where he is coming from.
By his swindles he made millions of dollars, but he lost as many fortunes as he made, and he lost them always in legitimate enterprises. This is one of his favorite ironies, and he often returns to it. His wife was forever urging him to go straight. He loved her—he still speaks touchingly of her—and for her sake he wanted to reform. It never worked. There was a curse on any honest business that he tried, whether it was giving pianos away as a coffee premium or leasing the Hagenbeck-Wallace circus. An inner voice seemed to warn him to stay crooked, and he did not ignore it.
The years have not softened his heart toward the victims of his confidence schemes. Of course he was a crook, but the “marks” whom he and his associates trimmed were not honest men. “I have never cheated any honest men,” he says, “only rascals. They may have been respectable, but they were never any good.” And this is how he sums the matter up: “They wanted something for nothing. I gave them nothing for something.” He says it clearly and sternly; he is not a pitying man. To be sure, he wants to justify his crimes, but quite apart from this he believes that honest men do not exist. He presents himself as a Diogenes whose lifelong daylight quest for absolute honesty has ended in disappointment. Actually, he never expected to find it.
He is a thinker, the Kid is, and a reader. His favorite authors seem to be Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer. Spencer has always been the favorite of autodidactic Midwestern philosophers, that vanishing species. During the 1920s, the Kid belonged to a bohemian discussion group on the Near North Side called the Dill Pickle Club. Its brainy and colorful fleet of eccentrics—poets, painters, and cranks—have long been dispersed by vulgar winds. Once, Chicago promised to become a second London, but it was not to be; bowling alleys and bars increased, bookshops did not. New York and Hollywood took away the artists. Death did the rest. Herbert Spencer also was destined for the dustbin.
But the Kid is still faithful to him; he spends his evenings at his books—so at least he says—meditating upon the laws of society, the sanctioned and the unsanctioned, power and weakness, justice and history. I do not think the Kid loves the weak, and he dislikes many of the strong, especially politicians and bankers. Against bankers he has a strong prejudice. “They are almost always shady,” he says. “Their activities are usually only just within the law.”
The twilight borderlands of legality attract the Kid’s subtle mind. Not long ago he was picked up in the lobby of the Bismarck Hotel on suspicion. He had merely been chatting with one of the guests, he told me, but the manager was worried and phoned the confidence squad. The Kid is used to these small injustices, and they do not offend him or disturb his tranquillity. In court he listened attentively to the case preceding his own, that of a bookie.
“Why should this man be fined and punished?” said the Kid when his turn came at the bar. “Why should he be punished for betting when betting is permitted within the confines of the track itself?” The judge, to hear the Kid tell it, was very uneasy. He answered that the state derived revenues from the track. “I would gladly pay revenues to the state,” the Kid said, “if I could rent a building within which confidence games would be legal. Suppose the state were to license me. Then confidence men operating outside my building could be arrested and imprisoned. Inside the door, licensed operatives would be safe. It makes the same kind of sense, Your Honor.” According to the Kid, the judge offered “no cogent reply.”
Perhaps the Kid’s antagonism toward bankers rests on an undivulged belief that he would have made a more impressive banker than any of them. In his swindles, he often enough pretended to be one. With phony Wall Street credentials, he would take in the president of some country bank who would be only too eager to give him permission to make use of his premises. Often the Kid would find a pretext to sit in the president’s own office. Entering, his victims would see him seated behind the great mahogany desk and take him for the president.
At one time the Kid was actually the legitimate officer of a bank, the American State Bank on South La Salle Street in Chicago. He and Big John Worthington, a confidence man who closely resembled J. Pierpont Morgan, together paid some seventy thousan
d dollars and obtained a controlling interest. The Kid became a vice president. He started a racket in phony letters of credit by which he made about three hundred thousand dollars. He was not caught. On another occasion the Kid rented an empty bank building and filled it with his stooges. The stooges made it look busy; they arrived with bogus currency for deposit, and bags full of lead slugs. Taken in by this activity, the mark was swindled easily by the Kid. Once, he took a suite of offices in the heart of Chicago’s financial district. Girls from secretarial schools were hired to look busy. They typed names from the telephone directory.
Sometimes the Kid posed as a doctor, sometimes as a mining engineer or as a professor or a geologist. Or, during World War I, as a financial representative of the Central Powers. He put magazines and books into circulation from which original photographs were removed and pictures of himself inserted. All his life long he sold non-existent property, concessions he did not own, and air-spun schemes to greedy men.
The Kid’s activities landed him in jail now and then—he has served time in Atlanta and Leavenworth—but he says, and not unbelievably, that there were not many dull days in his life. His total gains are estimated by the “police and the daily press” at about eight millions. Most of this money he lost in bad investments or squandered in high living. He loved wild parties, showgirls, champagne suppers, European trips. He had his clothes made in Bond Street or Jermyn Street. This English wardrobe is still good; real quality doesn’t go out of fashion. But almost everything else is gone.
“Before I reached the years of maturity,” the Kid said, “I fell in love with a young woman of the most extraordinary pulchritude. I brought her home one night to dinner. My mother,” he said with a bluster of his whiskers and looking gravely at me with the thin diffused blue of his eyes, “was renowned for her perfection in the culinary art. We had a splendid meal, and later my mother said to me, ‘Joseph, that is a most beautiful young woman. She is so lovely that she cannot be meant for you. She must have been meant for some millionaire.’ From that moment I determined that I, too, would be a millionaire. And I was.” The sexual incentive to be rich, the Kid told me, was always very powerful with him.