by Saul Bellow
“I was of a very fragile constitution, unfit for the heavier sort of manual labor. I knew I could not toil like other men. How was I to live? My power lay in words. In words I became a commander. Moreover, I could not lead a tame life of monotony. I needed excitement, variety, danger, intellectual stimulus.
“I was a psychologist,” he went on. “My domain was the human mind. A Chinese scholar with whom I once studied told me, ‘People always see themselves in you.’ With this understanding I entered the lives of my dupes. The man who lives by an idea enjoys great superiority over those who live by none. To make money is not an idea; that doesn’t count. I mean a real idea. It was very simple. My purpose was invisible. When they looked at me they saw themselves. I only showed them their own purpose.”
There are no longer such operators, says the great confidence man, perhaps jealous of his eminence. Where are they to come from? The great mass of mankind breeds obedient types. They express their protests in acts of violence, not ingeniously. Moreover, your natural or talented confidence man is attracted to politics. Why be a robber, a fugitive, when you can get society to give you the key to the vaults where the greatest boodle lies? The United States government, according to the Kid, runs the greatest giveaway program in history.
The Kid at one time tried to found an independent little republic upon a small island made of fill, somewhere in Lake Michigan. His object was to make himself eligible for foreign-aid grants.
A prominent figure, something of a public man, a dandy and a philosopher, the Kid says that he now frequently does good works. But the confidence squad still keeps an eye on him. Not so long ago he was walking down the street with a certain monsignor, he tells me. They were discussing a fund drive in the parish. Presently the con squad drew alongside, and one of the detectives said, “What you up to, Kid?”
“I’m just helping out the monsignor here. It’s on the level.”
The monsignor assured him that this was true.
The detective turned on him. “Why, you so-and-so,” he said. “Aren’t you ashamed to be wearin’ the cloth for a swindle?”
The thought so enraged him that he took them both to headquarters.
The Kid laughed quietly and long over the copper’s error; wrinkled, bearded, wry, and delighted, he looked at this moment like one of the devil’s party.
“They refuse to believe I have reformed,” he said. The psychology of a policeman, according to the Kid, is strict, narrow, and primitive. It denies that character is capable of change.
So much for the police, incurably, hopelessly dumb. But what about the criminals? The Kid did not think much of criminal intelligence either. And how does the underworld see the confidence men? I asked. Gangsters and thieves greatly dislike them, he said. They never trust them, and in some cases they take a peculiar and moral view of the confidence swindler. He is too mental a type for them.
“The attitude of the baser sort of criminal toward me is very interesting,” he said. “They have always either shunned or behaved with extreme coldness to me. I never will forget a discussion I once had with a second-story man about our respective relations to our victims. He thought me guilty of the highest immorality. Worst of all, in his eyes, was the fact that I openly showed myself to dupes in the light of day. ‘Why,’ he said to me with an indescribable demeanor, ‘you go right up to them. They see your face!’ This seemed to him the worst of all deceits. Such is their scheme of ethics,” said the Kid. “In their view, you should sneak up on people to pick their pockets, or break and enter to burglarize their houses, but to look them in the eyes, gain their confidence, that is impure.”
We parted on noisy Wacker Drive, near the Clark Street Bridge. No longer listening to the Kid, I heard the voice of the city. Chicago keeps changing, amazing its old-timers. The streetcars, for instance, are different. You no longer see the hard, wicked-looking, red, cumbrous, cowlike, trampling giant streetcars. The new ones are green and whir by like dragonflies. Glittering and making soft electrical sounds, one passed the Kid as he walked toward the Loop. Spruce and firm-footed, with his beard and wind-curled hat, he looked, beside the car, like the living figure of tradition in the city.
Part Two
WRITERS, INTELLECTUALS, POLITICS
The Sealed Treasure
(1960)
The Times Literary Supplement, 1 July 1960.
A few years ago, I traveled through the state of Illinois to gather material for an article. It was brilliant fall weather; the corn was high, and it was intersected by straight, flat roads over which it was impossible not to drive at top speed. I went from Chicago to Galena and then south through the center of the state to Cairo and Shawneetown. Here and there, in some of the mining counties and in the depopulated towns along the Mississippi, there were signs of depression and poverty, but these had the flavor of the far away and long ago, for the rest of the state was dizzily affluent. “Pig Heaven,” some people said to me. “Never nothing like it.” The shops were filled with goods and buyers. In the fields were the newest harvesting machines; in the houses washers, dryers, freezers and refrigerators, air conditioners, vacuum cleaners, Mixmasters, Waring blenders, television and stereophonic hi-fi sets, electrical can openers, novels condensed by the Readers’ Digest, and slick magazines. In the yards, glossy cars in giddy colors, like ships from outer space.
Down in Egypt, as the narrow southern end of the state is called, a Negro woman, her head wrapped in an old-fashioned bandanna, flashed by in her maroon Packard with a Boston bull terrier affectionately seated on her shoulder. Here at least was some instinct for the blending of old and new. For the most part, everything was as new as possible. Churches and supermarkets had the same modern design. In the skies, the rich farmers piloted their own planes. The workers bowled in alleys of choice hardwood, where fouls were scored and pins reset by electrical devices. Fifty years ago, the Illinois poet Vachel Lindsay had visited these towns preaching the Gospel of Beauty and calling on the people to build the New Jerusalem.
Except for the main stem, the streets were boringly empty, and at night even the main stem was almost deserted. Restless adolescents gathered in the ice cream parlors or loitered before the chain saws, vibrating recliners, outboard motors, and garbage disposal units displayed in shop windows. These, like master spirits, ruled the night in silence.
Some important ingredients of life were conspicuously absent.
I had been asked to write about Illinois, but how was I to distinguish it from Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, or Missouri? The houses were built and furnished in the same style, the cows were milked by the same machines, the programs broadcast by CBS and NBC were alike in Rockford, Illinois, and Danbury, Connecticut, and Salt Lake City, Utah. The magazines, the hairstyles, the salad dressings, the film stars, were not merely American but international. What but slight differences in the menu and the cut of the clothes distinguished the comfortable life of middle-class Illinois from that of Cologne or Frankfurt?
I asked, “What do people do hereabouts?” “They work.” “And when they don’t work?” “They watch TV. They play a little poker or canasta or gin.” “What else?” “They go to club meetings. Or to the drive-in movie. They pitch a little. They raise a little hell. They bowl. They drink some. They tinker around the place, fool with power tools. They teach the kids baseball in the Little League. They’re den mothers over at the Cub Scouts.” “Yes, but what do they do?” “Well, mister, I’m telling you what they do. What are you getting at?” “You see, I’m writing an article on life here.” “Is that so! Gosh, you’re barking up the wrong tree. There ain’t nothing here to write about. There’s nothing doing here, or anywhere in Ellenois. It’s boring.” “You can’t have millions of people and nothing doing.” “I tell you, you want to write about Hollywood or Las Vegas or New York or Paris. That’s where they’ve got excitement.”
I had a score of conversations like this one.
Was the vitality of these people entirely absorbed by the new thin
gs? Had a superior inventive and productive power taken them over, paralyzing all the faculties it did not need? Or had the old understanding of reality been based on the threat of hunger and on the continual necessity for hard labor? Was it possible that what people complained of as boredom might in fact be an unbearable excitement caused by the greatness of the change?
I went to the public libraries and was not surprised to learn that good books were very much in demand and that there were people in central Illinois who read Plato, Tocqueville, Proust, and Robert Frost. I had expected this. But what I did not understand was what use these isolated readers were making of the books they borrowed. With whom did they discuss them? At the country club, the bowling league, sorting mail at the post office, or in the factory, over the back fence, how did they bring up Plato’s Justice or Proust’s Memory? Ordinary life gave them little opportunity for such conversation. “You can’t have millions of people and nothing doing.” I was dead sure of that. But the intelligence or cultivation of a woman in Moline, Illinois, would necessarily be her secret, almost her private vice. Her friends at the bridge club would think it very odd of her to think such things. She might not reveal them to her sister, nor perhaps even to her husband. They would be her discovery, her treasure ten times sealed, her private source of power.
“The language, the dress, and the daily actions of men in democracies are repugnant to ideal conceptions,” said Tocqueville. He said more, but this is text enough for the moment. Let us set beside it the fact that these men, or some of them, will read The Divine Comedy, The Tempest, and Don Quixote. What will they make of these works? They will, some of them, mix them up with television productions. Others will scale them down. Our understanding of them (it is time to drop the third person) will certainly be faulty. Nevertheless they move us. That is to say, human greatness can still be seen by us. And it is not a question of the gnat who sees the elephant. We are not members of a different species. Without a certain innate sympathy, we could not read Shakespeare and Cervantes. In our own contemporary novels, this power to understand the greatest human qualities appears to be dispersed, transformed, or altogether buried. A modern mass society has no open place for such qualities, no vocabulary for them, and no ceremony (except in the churches) that makes them public. So they remain private and are mingled with other private things that vex us or of which we feel ashamed. But they are not lost. The saleswoman in Moline, Illinois, will go to the library and borrow Anna Karenina. This society, with its titanic products, conditions but cannot absolutely denature us. It forces certain elements of the genius of our species to go into hiding. In America, these hidden elements take curiously personal, secret forms. Sometimes they corrupt people; sometimes they cause them to act with startling generosity. On the whole, they are not to be found in what we call our Culture.
They are not in the streets, in the stores, at the movies. They are the missing ingredients.
The greatest danger, Dostoyevsky warned in The Brothers Karamazov, was the universal anthill. D. H. Lawrence believed the common people of our industrial cities were like the great slave populations of the ancient empires. Joyce was apparently convinced that what happened to the ordinary modern man, his external life, was not interesting enough to chronicle. James Stephens in his preface to Solitaria by the Russian philosopher Rozanov said that novelists were trying to keep alive by artificial means feelings and states of being which had died out of the modern world, implying that we were only flattering the dwarfs by investing them with the passions of dead giants.
Mind manipulation, brainwashing, and social engineering are only the newest developments in an evolution long understood by writers of the civilized world. When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature, to justify the continuation of life as well as the writing of novels. Like it or not, says Dostoyevsky, it is our nature to be free and, under the sting of suffering, to choose between good and evil. And Tolstoy says of human nature that it contains a need for truth, which will never allow it to rest permanently in falsehood or unreality.
I think the novelists who take the bitterest view of our modern condition make the most of the art of the novel. “Do you think,” Flaubert replies to a correspondent who has complained of Madame Bovary, “that this ignoble reality, so disgusting to you in reproduction, does not oppress my heart as it does yours? If you knew me better you would know that I abhor ordinary existence. Personally, I have always held myself as aloof from it as I could. But aesthetically I desired this once—and only once—to plumb its very depths.”
The writer’s art appears to seek a compensation for the hopelessness or meanness of existence. By some occult method, the writer has connected himself with the feelings and ideal conceptions of which few signs remain in ordinary existence. Some novelists, the naturalists, have staked everything on ordinary existence in their desire to keep their connection with the surrounding world. Many of these have turned themselves into recording instruments at best, and at worst they have sucked up to the crowd, disgustingly. But the majority of modern novelists have followed the standard of Flaubert, the aesthetic standard. The shock caused by the loss of faith, says Professor Heller in The Disinherited Mind, made Burckhardt adopt an aesthetic view of history. If he is right, a sharp sense of disappointment and aestheticism go together. Flaubert complained that the exterior world was “disgusting, enervating, corruptive, and brutalizing. … I am turning towards a kind of aesthetic mysticism,” he wrote.
I am sticking to Flaubert because the connection between Yonville in Normandy and Galesburg in Illinois is constantly growing closer; because Flaubert believed that the writer by means of imagery and style must supply the human qualities that the exterior world lacked. And because we have all been schooled in his method, we are like the isolated lady in Moline whose sensitivity is her ten-times-sealed treasure.
Disappointment with its human material is built into the contemporary novel. It is assumed that society cannot give the novelist “suitable” themes and characters. Therefore the important humanity of the novel must be the writer’s own. His force, his virtuosity, his powers of poetry, his reading of fate, are at the center of his book. The reader is invited to bring his sympathies to the writer rather than to the characters, and this makes him something of a novelist too.
The insistent aesthetic purpose in novelists like Flaubert and Henry James and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce is tyrannical at times. It overconditions the situation of the characters. We are greately compensated with poetry and insight, but it often seems as though the writer were deprived of all power except the power to see and to despair. In reality, however, he has a very great power. Is it likely that Westerns, thrillers, movies, soap operas, and true confessions can usurp that power and permanently replace it? Not unless human nature is malleable without limits and can be conditioned to do without its ancient bread and meat.
A work of fiction consists of a series of moments during which we are willingly engrossed in the experiences of others. Or, as a recent article in the Hudson Review puts it, “the exuberant conviction that the individual life of somebody else holds all human truth and human potentiality” must be shared by the novelist and his reader. Let us say, putting it as mildly as possible, that modern society does not often inspire this exuberant conviction. We have learned to lie to ourselves about this. Americans, softly optimistic, do lie about the love they bear one another. My informant in Illinois was telling the truth when he said his life was boring, but he would have turned awfully pious if I had asked him whether he loved his neighbor. Then he would have stood on the creed and answered that he felt a boundless love for him.
The matter was put as strongly as possible by D. H. Lawrence. “The sympathetic heart is broken,” he said. “We stink in each other’s nostrils.” That is, we cannot easily accept our own creaturely existence or that of others. And that is the fault of modern civilizat
ion, he tells us. We must in part agree, but the matter is so serious that we should be careful not to exaggerate. Our lives depend on it. Yes, there are good reasons for revulsion and fear. But revulsion and fear impair judgment. Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.
One would have to be optimistic to the point of imbecility to raise the standard of pure Affirmation and cry, “Yea, Yea,” shrilly against the deep background of “Nay”s. But the sympathetic heart is sometimes broken, sometimes not. It is reckless to say “broken”; it is nonsense to say “whole and unimpaired.” On either side we have the black and white of paranoia.
As for the novelist, he must proceed with care and modesty. He should deplore no general evil on purely literary grounds. The world owes him nothing, and he has no business to be indignant with it on behalf of the novel. He must not expect life to bind itself to be stable for his sake or to accommodate his ambitions. If he must, let him, like Flaubert, “abhor ordinary existence.” But he should not fall into despair over trifles. One of his legacies from Romanticism is a sensitivity to banality and ugliness, in which originates much of the small change of modern fiction—the teeth that are crooked, the soiled underclothes, the clerk with carbuncles. From this comes a conventional unearned wretchedness, a bitterness about existence, which is mere fashion.
The enormous increases in population seem to have dwarfed the individual. So have modern physics and astronomy. But we may be somewhere between a false greatness and a false insignificance. At least we can stop misrepresenting ourselves to ourselves and realize that the only thing we can be in this world is human. We are temporarily miracle-sodden and feeling faint.