by Saul Bellow
You don’t see avarice as the problem, do you?
No. “A people with its mind in this state” is where I lay the stress. We are in a peculiarly revolutionary state, a condition of crisis, a nervousness that never ends. Yesterday I came upon a description of a medical technique for bringing patients to themselves. They are exposed for some minutes to high-frequency sounds, until they become calm enough to think and to feel out their symptoms. To possess your soul in peace for a few minutes, you need the help of medical technology. It is easy to observe in bars, at dinner tables, everywhere, that from the flophouse to the White House, Americans are preoccupied by the same questions. Our own American life is our passion, the problems of our social and national life with the whole world as background, an immense spectacle presented daily by the papers and the television networks—our cities, our crime, our housing, our automobiles, our sports, our weather, our technology, our politics, our problems of sex and race and of international relations. These realities are real enough. But what of the formulae, the jargon, adopted by the mass media—the exciting fictions, the heightened and dramatized shadow events presented to the great public and believed by almost everyone to be real. Is reading possible for a people with its mind in this state?
Still, a book of good quality can find a hundred thousand readers. But you say that there is no literary public.
An influential book appears to create its own public. When Herzog was published, I became aware that there were some fifty thousand people in the United States who had evidently been waiting for something like it. Other writers have certainly had similar experiences. But such a public is a temporary one. There is no stable culture that permanently contains all these readers. Remarkably steady and intelligent people emerge somehow, like confident swimmers from the heaving waters, the wastes of the American educational system. They survive by strength, luck, and cunning.
What do they do while waiting for the next important event?
Yes. What can they read month in, month out? In what journals do they keep up with what matters in contemporary literature?
What about the universities? Haven’t they done anything to train judgment and develop taste?
To most professors of English, a novel may be an object of the highest cultural importance. Its ideas, its symbolic structure, its position in the history of romanticism or realism or modernism, its higher relevance, require devout study. But what has this sort of cultural study to do with novelists and readers? What they want is the living moment; they want men and women alive in a circumambient world. The teaching of literature has been a disaster. Between the student and the book he reads lies a gloomy preparatory region, a perfect swamp. He must cross this cultural swamp before he is allowed to open his Moby Dick and read “Call me Ishmael.” He is made to feel ignorant before masterpieces, unworthy; he is frightened and already repelled by the book he is meagerly qualified to begin. And if the method succeeds, it produces B.A.’s who can tell you why the Pequod leaves port on Christmas morning. What has been substituted for the novel itself is what can be said about the novel by the “educated.” Some professors find educated discourse of this kind more interesting by far than novels. They take the attitude toward fiction that one of the church fathers took toward the Bible. Origen of Alexandria asked whether we were really to imagine that God walked in a garden while Adam and Eve hid under a bush. Scripture could not be taken literally. It must yield higher meanings.
Are you equating church fathers with professors of literature?
Not exactly. The fathers had sublime conceptions of God and man. If professors of humanities were moved by the sublimity of the poets and philosophers they teach, they would be the most powerful men in the university and the most fervent. But they are at the lower end of the hierarchy, at the bottom of the pile.
Then why are there so many writers at the universities?
A good question. Writers have no independent ground to stand on. They now belong to institutions. They can work for news-magazines and publishing houses, for cultural foundations, advertising agencies, television networks. Or they can teach. There are only a few literary journals left, and those are academic quarterlies. The big national magazines don’t want to publish fiction. Their editors want to discuss only the most significant national and international questions and concentrate on “relevant” cultural matters. By “relevant” they mean political. (And I mean grossly political.) The “real” questions facing us are questions of business and politics. There are questions of life and death at the heart of such important public matters. But these life-and-death questions are not what we discuss. What we hear and read is crisis chatter. The members of our intelligentsia had literature in their student days—they did it and are now well beyond it. At Harvard or Columbia, they read, studied, absorbed the classics, especially the modernist ones. These prepared them for the important, the essential, the incomparable tasks they were to perform as functionaries in business, in government, in the professions—above all, in the media. Sometimes I sense that they feel they have replaced writers. The “cultural” business they do is tinged by literature, or rather the memory of literature. I said before that our common life had become our most passionate concern. Can an individual, the subject of a novel, compete in interest with corporate destinies, with the rise of a new class, a cultural intelligentsia? The rise of a class is truly important.
Do you suggest that when we become so extremely politicized we lose interest in the individual?
Yes, if you confuse what is public, or before the attention of the public, with real politics. A liberal society so intensely political—as I have qualified the term—can’t remain liberal for very long. I take it for granted that an attack on the novel is also an attack on liberal principles. I view “activist” art theories in the same way. The power of a work of art is such that it induces a temporary suspension of activities. It leads to contemplative states, to wonderful and, to my mind, sacred states of the soul. These are not, however, passive.
And what you call crisis chatter creates a contrary condition?
I should like to add that the truth is not loved because it is improving or progressive. We hunger and thirst for it—for its own sake.
To return for a moment to the subject of a literary world …
No tea at Gertrude Stein’s, no Closerie de Lilas, no Bloomsbury evenings, no charming and wicked encounters between George Moore and W. B. Yeats. Reading of such things is very pleasant indeed. I can’t say that I miss them, because I never knew anything like them. My knowledge of them is entirely bookish. That Molière put on the plays of Corneille, that Louis XIV himself may have appeared, disguised, in one of Molière’s farces—such facts are lovely to read in a history of literature. I’d hardly expect Mayor Daley to take part in any farce of mine. I have, however, visited writers’ clubs in communist countries and can’t say that I’m sorry we have no such institutions here. When I was in Addis Ababa, I went to the emperor’s zoo. As Selassie was the Lion of Judah, he was bound to keep a collection of lions. These poor animals lay in the filth of dim green cages too small for pacing, mere coops. Their marvelous eyes had turned dull yellow and blank, their heads were on their paws, and they were sighing. Bad as things are with us, they are not so bad as in the emperor’s zoo or in writers’ clubs behind the iron curtain.
Not so bad is not the same as good. What of the disadvantages of your condition?
There are moments of sorrow, I admit. George Sand wrote to Flaubert, in a collection of letters I looked into the other day, that she hoped he would bring his copy of her latest book on his next visit. “Put in it all the criticisms which occur to you,” she said. “That will be very good for me. People ought to do that for each other, as Balzac and I used to do. That doesn’t make one person alter the other; quite the contrary, for in general one gets more determined in one’s moi, one completes it, explains it better, entirely develops it, and that is why friendship is good, even in literature, where the
first condition of any worth is to be one’s self.” How nice it would be to hear this from a writer. But no such letters arrive. Friendships and a common purpose belong to a nineteenth-century French dream world. The physicist Heisenberg in a recent article in Encounter speaks of the kindly and even brotherly collaboration among scientists of the generation of Einstein and Bohr. Their personal letters were quoted in seminars and discussed by the entire scientific community. Heisenberg believes that in the musical world something of the same spirit appeared in the eighteenth century. Haydn’s relations with Mozart were of this generous, affectionate kind. But when large creative opportunities are lacking, there is no generosity visible. Heisenberg says nothing about the malice and hostility of less lucky times. Writers today seldom wish other writers well.
What about the critics?
Edmund Wilson wouldn’t read his contemporaries at all. He stopped with Eliot and Hemingway. The rest he dismissed. This lack of goodwill, to put it at its mildest, was much admired by his fans. That fact speaks for itself. Curious about Canadians, Indians, Haitians, Russians, studying Marxism and the Dead Sea scrolls, he was the Protestant majority’s big literary figure. I have sometimes thought that he was challenged by Marxism or modernism in the same way that I have seen the descendants of Orthodox Jews challenged by oysters. A man like Wilson might have done much to strengthen literary culture, but he dismissed all that, he would have nothing to do with it. For temperamental reasons. Or Protestant majority reasons. Or perhaps the Heisenberg principle applies—men are generous when there are creative opportunities, and when such opportunities dwindle they are … something else. But it would have made little difference. At this moment in human evolution, so miraculous, atrocious, glorious, and hellish, the firmly established literary cultures of France and England, Italy and Germany, are not thriving. They look to us, to the “disadvantaged” Americans, and to the Russians. From America have come a number of great irrepressible solitaries, like Poe or Melville or Whitman, alcoholics, obscure government employees. In busy America there was no Weimar, there were no cultivated princes. There were only obstinate geniuses such as these writing. Why? For whom? There is a real acte gratuit for you. Very different from Gide’s gratuitous murder of an utter stranger. Unthanked, these writers augmented life marvelously. They did not emerge from a literary culture, nor did they create any such thing. Irrepressible individuals or a similar type have lately begun to show themselves in Russia. There Stalinism destroyed a thriving literary culture and replaced it with a horrible bureaucracy. But in spite of this and in spite of forced labor and murder, the feeling for what is true and just has not died out. I don’t see, in short, why we, here, should continue to dream of what we have never had. To have had it would not help us. Perhaps if we were to purge ourselves of nostalgia and stop longing for a literary world, we would see a fresh opportunity to extend the imagination and resume imaginative contact with nature and society.
Other people, scholars and scientists, know a great deal about nature and society. More than you know.
True. And I suppose I sound like a fool, but I nevertheless object that their knowledge is defective—something, is lacking. That something is poetry. Huizinga, the Dutch historian, in his recently published book on America, says that the scholarly Americans he met in the twenties could speak fluently and stimulatingly, but he adds: “More than once I could not recognize in what he wrote the living man who had held my interest. Frequently repeated experience makes me hold the view that my personal reaction to American scholarly prose must not rest upon the qualities of the prose itself. I read it with the greatest difficulty; I have no sense of contact with it and cannot keep my attention fixed on it. It is for me as if I had to do with a deviant system of expression in which the concepts are not equivalent to mine or are arranged differently.” That system has become even more deviant during the last fifty years. I want information and ideas, and I know that certain highly trained and intelligent people have it—economists, sociologists, lawyers, historians, natural scientists. But I read them with growing difficulty and exasperation. And I say to myself, “These writers are part of the educated public, your readers.”
But whether or not a literary culture exists …
Excuse me for interrupting, but it occurs to me that Tolstoy would probably have approved of this and seen new opportunities in it. He had no use for literary culture and detested professionalism in the arts.
But should writers make their peace with the academic ivory tower?
In his essay “Bethink Yourselves,” Tolstoy advises each man to begin at the point at which he finds himself. Better such towers than the cellar alternatives some writers choose. Besides, the university is no more an ivory tower than Time magazine, with its strangely artificial approach to the world, its remote-making managerial arrangements. There, too, you see an ivory tower, of a sort. Even more remote than Flaubert’s tour d’ivoire. A writer is offered more money, bigger pensions, richer security plans by Luce enterprises than by any university. The ivory tower is one of those platitudes that haunt the uneasy minds of writers. Since we have none of the advantages of a literary world, we may as well free ourselves from its banalities. We need to think, and the university can be as good a place for thinking as any other. And you don’t have to become an academic simply because you teach in a university.
Can you conveniently give a brief definition of academic?
I limit myself arbitrarily to a professorial type to be found in the humanities. The British pundit Owen Barfield refers in one of his books to “the everlasting professional device for substituting a plethora of talk” about what matters for what actually matters. He is sick of it, he says. Many of us are sick of it.
Nobel Lecture
(1976)
Delivered in Stockholm on 12 December 1976. Published in The Nobel Lecture (New York: Targ Editions, 1979).
I was a very contrary undergraduate more than forty years ago. One semester I registered for a course in Money and Banking and then concentrated my reading in the novels of Joseph Conrad. I have never had reason to regret this. Perhaps Conrad appealed to me because he was like an American, speaking French and writing English with extraordinary power and beauty—he was an uprooted Pole sailing exotic seas. Nothing could seem more natural to me, the child of immigrants who grew up in one of Chicago’s immigrant neighborhoods, than a Slav who was a British sea captain and knew his way around Marseilles. In England, he was wonderfully exotic. H. G. Wells warned Ford Madox Ford, with whom Conrad collaborated in the writing of several novels, not to spoil Conrad’s “Oriental style.” He was valued for his oddity. But Conrad’s real life had little oddity in it. His themes were straightforward—fidelity, the traditions of the sea, hierarchy, command, the fragile rules sailors follow when they are struck by a typhoon. He believed in the strength of these fragile-seeming rules. He also believed in his art. He stated in the preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” that art was an attempt to render the highest justice to the visible universe: it tried to find in that universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what was fundamental, enduring, essential. The writer’s method of attaining the essential was different from that of the thinker or the scientist, who knew the world by systematic examination. To begin with, the artist had only himself; he descended within himself, and in the lonely regions to which he descended he found “the terms of his appeal.” He appealed, said Conrad, “to that part of our being which is a gift, not an acquisition, to the capacity for delight and wonder … our sense of pity and pain, to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts … which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”
This fervent statement was written some eighty years ago, and we may want to take it with a few grains of contemporary salt. I belong to a generation of readers who knew the long list of noble or noble-sounding w
ords, words such as “invincible conviction” or “humanity,” rejected by writers like Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway spoke for the soldiers who fought in the First World War under the inspiration of Woodrow Wilson and other orotund statesmen whose big words had to be measured against the frozen corpses of young men paving the trenches. Hemingway’s youthful readers were convinced that the horrors of the twentieth century with their deadly radiations had sickened and killed humanistic beliefs. I told myself therefore that Conrad’s rhetoric must be resisted: resisted, not rejected, for I never thought him mistaken. He spoke directly to me. The feeling individual appeared weak—he felt only his own weakness. But if he accepted his weakness and his separateness and descended into himself, intensifying his loneliness, he discovered his solidarity with other isolated creatures.
I feel no need now to sprinkle Conrad’s sentences with skeptical salt. But there are writers for whom the Conradian novel—all novels of that sort—has become invalid. Finished. There is, for instance, M. Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the leaders of French literature, a spokesman for “thingism”—choseisme. In an essay called “On Several Obsolete Notions,” he writes that in great contemporary works—Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’s The Stranger, Kafka’s The Castle—there are no characters; you find in such books not individuals, merely entities. “The novel of characters,” he says, “belongs entirely in the past. It describes a period: that which marked the apogee of the individual.” This is not necessarily an improvement; that Robbe-Grillet admits. But it is the truth. Individuals have been wiped out. “The present period is rather one of administrative numbers. The world’s destiny has ceased, for us, to be identified with the rise and fall of certain men of certain families.” He goes on to say that in the days of Balzac’s bourgeoisie it was important to have a name and a character; character was a weapon in the struggle for survival and success. In that time, “It was something to have a face in a universe where personality represented both the means and the end of all exploration.” Our world, he concludes, is more modest. It has renounced the omnipotence of the person. But it is more ambitious as well, “since it looks beyond. The exclusive cult of the ‘human’ has given way to a larger consciousness, one that is less anthropocentric.” However, he offers in comfort a new course and the promise of new discoveries before us.