by Saul Bellow
One final outcome of this White House dinner should be noted. One of the guests was Mr. David Rockefeller of the Chase Manhattan Bank. With him President Kennedy had a long conversation about the economy, which resulted in an exchange of letters between the two. These letters were published by Life. So far as I know, there have been no letters about the state of American culture. We can wait until the other crises are over.
A Matter of the Soul
(1975)
Opera News, 11 January 1975.
To accept the honor of opening these learned proceedings, I have come downtown at nine in the morning. I would not otherwise do this unless I were summoned by the police. It’s not really my part of Chicago. This is the district dominated by banking, insurance, commodities speculation, and department stores, by the practice of law and the operations of politics, by steel, oil, chemicals, airlines, computers, and utilities. Culture is represented in these parts by the Public Library and the Art Institute.
Millions of people come to view the treasures of the Institute. Schoolchildren arriving in buses from the vast middle-class reaches of the city and from the slums are marched through the galleries. One of the curators has told me that sometimes the spittle of resentful kids has to be wiped from the glass. Compulsory veneration is bound to come out as rebellion, hatred, and blasphemy.
I remember these emotions from my own school days in Chicago, circa 1925, during the art-appreciation or the music period, when teachers showed us colored slides of The Angelus or Turner’s Téméraire towed into the Thames sunset or, winding up the gramophone, played for us Chaliapin singing the “Song of the Flea” or Galli-Curci the “Bell Song” from Lakmé or Caruso or Tito Schipa or Madame Schumann-Heink. What did it signify to us? If we were sensitive, we responded to the piety of the teachers. If we were tough, we jeered, we razzed or cursed them in our hearts. But tough or sensitive, we somehow grasped the tacit Chicago assumption that this was a rough place, a city of labor and business, gangs and corrupt politics, ball games and prizefights. We were the children of groping, baffled immigrants who were trying to figure out what had become of them in America.
Crudity, disappointment, sickness, heartbreak, money, power, happiness, and love in rudimentary forms—this was what we were aware of. This was a place where matter ruled, a place where stone was value and value stone. If you were drawn toward a higher life—and you might well be, even in the city of stockyards, steel, and gangsters—you had to make your own way toward it. Conditions were vastly different in a city like Milan a century and a half ago, when Verdi arrived from his native village to study music and found there, and later in other cities, theaters, producers, musicians, and a public of exacting and responsive amateurs.
Not that one never heard of such things here. There was music in primordial Chicago. At the age of twelve, I myself performed Böhm’s “Moto Perpetuo” on the violin in a student recital at Kimball Hall. And I had learned quite a lot about grand opera from Jeremiah, our roomer.
Jeremiah, whose hair was kinky and red, longed heart and soul to become a singer. A workingman, he operated a punch press in a factory. He sang for us in the kitchen. He rose on his toes, his octagonal glasses sweated, and when he brought his hands together I wondered whether his calluses might not be causing pain. Talentless and fervent, he made his friends smile. He had been an amateur boxer, and, at the YMCA, his nose was flattened. My private theory was that a punch in the nose had ruined his chances as a dramatic tenor. This gentle, hopeless man, my particular friend, studied singing with Alexander Nakutin in the Fine Arts Building. Chicago has a building of that name, and in those days it was filled with foreign professors of music. They had marvelous names like Borushek, Schneiderman, Treshansky, and their pupils were for the most part the sons and daughters of immigrants.
Chicago was a very different city in the days of open immigration. The quota laws of 1924 changed the character of urban America decisively. It stopped the flow of artisans, of cabinetmakers, skilled ironworkers, confectioners, bakers, cooks, instrument makers, and other craftsmen from Central Europe, Italy, and the Balkans. Internal population movements brought up unskilled workers from the South. Life took a different turn. The descendants of European artisans dropped their trades, many of which in any case would have become obsolete.
Chicago was merely an anticipation of what was to happen everywhere. A new world was quickly replacing the old one. Chicago and high culture—I say this with a certain surprise, as a Chicagoan—have drawn closer. Chicago now hears sophisticated concerts, while Milan has explosions in its banks. Italy’s bourgeoisie closely resembles ours; in both cities, the young are increasingly similar. And intellectuals everywhere, alas, are more and more alike. The intellectuals, refined specialists in a hundred fields, are often as philistine as the masses from which they emerged. I hear a mathematician of high rank boast that he has yet to enter the “new” University of Chicago library, which opened five years ago. He needs nothing but papers in his own special field.
Intellectuals have not become a new class of art patrons. This means that the universities have failed painfully. They have not educated viewers, readers, and audiences as they should have done, and educated philistinism emerges as a new negative force here as in all countries. The learned are farther from art and taste than they were even a generation ago. If you believe in the truth of Stendhal’s rule “Le mauvais goût mène aux crimes”—“Bad taste leads to crime”—you can foresee no end to crime waves to come. I am speaking of crimes against art. There is no sign that they are subsiding; they are multiplying madly.
I have not come here to lay a burden of discouragement on scholars devoted to the study of Verdi. I myself am not overcome by sadness when I speak of art in the modern world. I’m only trying to be clear-headed about what is happening. Millions, no, billions of human souls are riding into consciousness on a revolutionary storm. Over large parts of the earth, revolutions have produced police states and slave societies, where ideology replaces reality.
Max Weber had already told us early in the century that modernity is “disenchanted.” Apparently the rise of consciousness is linked with certain kinds of privation. It is the bitterness of self-consciousness that we knowers know best. Critical of the illusions that sustained mankind in earlier times, this self-consciousness of ours does little to sustain us now. The question is: which is disenchanted, the world itself or the consciousness we have of it? The usual explanation is that the cause of our disenchantment lies in the rationality of the new social, economic, and technological order. No artist worth his salt will wish to concede this. He would rather argue that it is a false rationality that is to blame. But he hasn’t an easy case to make.
Perhaps it is a mistake, though, to think always of the overall condition of art, or of an entire civilization, not portions of that civilization. Good performances still find discriminating audiences, and there still are readers waiting for books. They belong to a minority, but a fraction of a modern population can be numerically significant. A public numbering two or three hundred thousand would certainly satisfy the needs of most artists. There were of course in the nineteenth century national artists, like Dickens or Dostoyevsky or Verdi, who were strengthened and inspired by the interest and admiration and the vital support of an entire people. A Dickens who spoke to all of England, and in a measure for it, enjoyed an incomparable advantage, but with the possible exception of Russia—I am thinking here of Solzhenitsyn—this sort of position is not available to the artist of today. To have 250,000 readers is, however, nothing to complain of.
The number would be even larger if American education were not disabling, confusing, and alienating students. There must be 25,000,000 college graduates in the U.S., but one of the problems of the country is the silliness, instability, and philistinism of its educated people. I often think there is more hope for the young worker who picks up a paperback copy of Faulkner or Melville or Tolstoy from the rack in the drugstore than there is for the B.
A. who has had the same writers “interpreted” for him by his teachers and can tell you, or thinks he can, what Ahab’s harpoon symbolizes or what Christian symbols there are in Light in August. In colleges and universities, no passion for novels and poems is instilled. What people learn is how to conduct a cultured conversation for a few minutes without betraying ignorance or stupidity.
Still, the university is in some sense my patron—or was, when I still needed patronage. In the decades of prosperity after World War II, American universities gathered in poets, novelists, painters, and musicians and gave them sanctuary. Since private universities are supported by philanthropists, by the generosity of the rich, the rich were, indirectly, the patrons of these same poets, painters, and musicians. The very rich, however, seldom deal personally with artists. They let institutions—foundations, universities, museums, and prize committees—set their standards for them in consultation with their tax lawyers or the trust departments of the big banks.
For patronage, as we all know well, is dominated by the tax policies of the federal government as interpreted by the Internal Revenue Service. It is fair to say that many of the deepest human needs, those we refer to when we use words like “art,” are regulated by bodies and individuals who have the least feeling for it.
I have in my time had the usual pipe dreams of ideal patronage—sad daydreams about how nice it would have been to commune, as writers did in the eighteenth century, with an aristocratic patron, himself a man of sensibility. How pleasant it was for Jonathan Swift to be secretary to Sir William Temple. How useful Prince Esterházy was to Haydn. And however cruel and capricious patrons might be—I think of Mozart and his archbishop—one can’t get over wishing that those who dominated society with their money and their power had some feeling for art, or at least some understanding of what a world without art would be. For, quite simply, such a world would be a world corrupted—a condition far more desperate than any envisioned by the most pessimistic ecologists.
My own situation is relatively simple. A novelist needs no instrumentalists, singers, choruses, theaters. I don’t have to cope with patrons or trade unions, every year more painfully aware that opera is being priced out of existence. I have paper and a typewriter and readers. My needs are easy to meet.
What novelists, composers, singers, have in common is the soul to which their appeal is made, whether it is barren or fertile, empty or full, whether the soul knows something, feels something, loves something.
In our world it seems that as soon as a clear need appears, it is met falsely. It becomes a new occasion for exploitation. We know this to be true at all levels. To begin with trivial instances, we are not sold real apples or real ice cream, we are sold the idea of an apple, the memory of ice cream. Most people, for their fifteen cents, buy the idea of a newspaper. On other levels still, they hear the idea of music in elevators. In politics they are presented with ideas of honor, patriotism; in law, the shadows of justice. The media offer flimsy ideas of human attachment, the films produce the spooks of passion and of love. Then there are impresarios, performers, painters, and writers who offer in various packages the thinnest recollection, the phantom of art. Many contemporary artists appear to feel that it is sufficient to cast artificial pearls before real swine. This is how the modern world meets the deepest of human needs—by fraud, demagogy, opportunism, and profiteering.
The real thing will have to be preserved by tiny minorities until such abuses, probably inevitable in the present condition of our civilization, are driven out by an increase of stability and by the growth of taste and discrimination. I say “driven out,” but I know that this wonderful improvement may never take place.
I am no prophet, only an observer. I observe, for instance, the hunger of huge audiences, which expresses itself in storms of applause the instant the last note of a concert has been played. On the radio one hears this. The crowd at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, or in London or New York, can hardly wait to burst into applause, shouting with primitive enthusiasm, following the harmony of the orchestra with a chaotic demonstration. This explosion, a great human release of everything at once, the performance of the crowd following the performance of the players, is a typhoon of collective release. They are yelling hoarsely, “Yes, this is the fine thing we all want!”
This howling and roaring is our gratitude for Aïda, a girl who never set foot on Michigan Boulevard. For Otello, a suffering black man dressed in brocaded robes and singing in Italian, utterly foreign to us except in music and humanity. The desire is there, and awe is moved in many thousands of people. The noise expresses a will to have such strange things, and to honor them. An Ethiopian maiden, a jealous Venetian general, interpreted by a nineteenth-century composer and presented by Italian singers, can have greater reality to people from Chicago’s Ravenswood district than their own Chicago streets. And it is imperative that they should have a reality finer than those streets—something impractical, something gratuitous, something that does not defraud, exploit, or add more phantoms to a life already filled with phantoms, seductions, and cheats.
Perhaps the desire for such things will develop also into a responsibility toward them. Perhaps a society in which adolescents spend more than a billion dollars on Christmas gifts alone will come to understand that it is necessary for the public itself to ensure that its important needs will be met. Perhaps the public’s role in patronage will increase. Perhaps even trade unions will wish to do something to sustain the arts and spend on music at least one percent of what they spend to put a president into the White House.
Utterly impossible ideas like this show me to be a genuine Chicagoan. Chicago’s motto is “I will.” I will what? Something different, I hope, from what it has willed in the past. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Chicago.
An Interview with Myself
(1975)
Ontario Review 4, 1975 (titled “Some Questions and Answers”).
How do you, a novelist from Chicago, fit yourself into American life? Is there a literary world to which you belong?
When I entered the Restaurant Voltaire in Paris with the novelist Louis Guilloux some years ago, the waiter addressed him as “Maître.” I didn’t know whether to envy him or to laugh up my sleeve. No one had ever treated me so reverentially. I knew how important literature was to the French. As a student I had sat (in Chicago) reading of salons and cénacles, of evenings at Magny’s with Flaubert and Turgenev and Sainte-Beuve—reading and sighing: What glorious times! But Guilloux himself, a Breton and a former left-winger, seemed to flinch when he was called “Maître.” It may be that even in Paris, literary culture is now publicly respected only by smarmy headwaiters. Here I am not altogether on firm ground. What is certain is that here nothing like this happens. In America we have no Maîtres, no literary world, no literary public. Many of us read, many love literature, but the traditions and institutions of literary culture are lacking. I do not say that this is bad. I only state it as a fact that ours is not a society that interests itself in such things. Any modern country that has not inherited these habits of deference simply does not have them.
American writers are not entirely neglected; they mingle occasionally with the great; they may even be asked to the White House, but no one there will talk literature to them. Mr. Nixon disliked writers and refused flatly to have them in, but Mr. Ford is as polite to them as he is to actors, musicians, television newscasters, and politicians. At large receptions the East Room fills with celebrities who become ecstatic at the sight of other celebrities. Secretary Kissinger and Danny Kaye fall into each other’s arms. Cary Grant is surrounded by senators’ wives, who find him wonderfully preserved, as handsome in the flesh as on film. They can hardly bear the excitement of personal contact with greatness. As for culture, there are “few high topics” in normal conversations. People speak of their diets, of their travels, of the vitamins they take and the problems of aging. Questions of language or style, the structure of novels, trends in painting, are not discussed.
The writer finds Mr. Ford’s party a wonderful pop occasion. Senator Fulbright seems almost to recognize his name and says, “You write essays, don’t you? I think I can remember one of them.” But the senator, as everyone knows, was once a Rhodes scholar. He would remember an essay.
It is actually pleasant on such an evening for a writer to pass half disembodied and unmolested by small talk from room to room, looking and listening. He knows that active public men can’t combine the duties of government with literature, art, and philosophy. Theirs is a world of high-tension wires, not of primroses on the river’s brim. Ten years ago, Mayor Daley in a little City Hall ceremony gave me a five-hundred-dollar check, awarded by the Midland Authors’ Society for my novel Herzog. “Mr. Mayor, have you read Herzog?” asked one of the reporters, needling him. “I’ve looked into it,” said Daley, thick-skinned and staunch. Art is not the mayor’s dish. Indeed, why should it be? I much prefer his neglect to the sort of interest Stalin took in poetry.
Are you saying that a modern industrial society dismisses art?
Not at all. Art is one of those good things which society encourages. It is quite receptive. But what Ruskin said about the English public in 1871 applies perfectly to us. “No reading is possible for a people with its mind in this state. No sentence of any great writer is intelligible to them.” For this Ruskin blamed avarice: “ … so incapable of thought has it [the public] become in its insanity of avarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, little worse the this incapacity of thought; it is not corruption of the inner nature; we ring true still, when anything strikes home to us … though the idea that everything should ‘pay’ has infected our every purpose so deeply.”