It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future

by Saul Bellow

  I myself believe that everything that can be imagined is bound to be realized at least once—everything that mankind is capable of conceiving it seems compelled to do. These, for better or for worse, are the thoughts the end of the cold war suggests to me.

  Part Three

  THE DISTRACTED PUBLIC

  The Jefferson Lectures

  (1977)

  I. Washington, D.C., 30 March 1977.

  II. Chicago, 1 April 1977.

  (National Endowment for the Humanities.)

  I

  Chicago is a prairie city with a waterfront. In the twenties, it was a mark of privilege to live within sight of the lake. The ultrarich had built their fine houses near it. Landlocked slum dwellers coming eastward on streetcars in the heat of July with their picnic beach blankets and baskets headed for the shore. They straggled through the streets of the Gold Coast, for the car lines ended several blocks to the west of its mansions, hotels, and apartment buildings. This was how the children of immigrant laborers first came to know the smell of money and the look of luxury. And although the Potter Palmers had gone off years earlier, as the buffalo had gone before them, you still made progress in Chicago by moving toward the water.

  Since those times, middle-class residential buildings have risen along the shore on the north side of the city. If you live in one of these and your windows face eastward, Chicago is at your back; its brick six-flats, its schools, hospitals, factories, cemeteries, and used-car lots can still be seen if you look westward from the balcony. But you can’t stand on the balcony now. On this January day, the thermometer is well below zero, and Lake Michigan resembles Hudson Bay, scaly white and gray, with slabs of ice piled offshore by high winds. Oceangoing ships, late in leaving Calumet Harbor, seem to be stuck on the horizon, and their coast guard rescuers also appear to be immobilized. In this weather, Chicago, which has changed so much in the last forty years, looks its old self again in its ice armor of frozen grime, fenders and car doors whitened with salt, smoke moving slowly from the stacks, the fury of the cold shrinking the face and the heart as it did in the good old days. Then other resemblances come back: pyramids of oranges behind frost-engraved plate glass, the smell of blood at the butcher’s, the black and white of newsprint matching the black and white of the streets. I try to remember who it was that said opening the newspaper was like tearing the bandage from a wound. This winter makes me feel that time, when I was starting out, when there was a Great Depression, when gangs of unemployed men in public works projects reported at daybreak and stood in the dim frost that drifted like a powder toward the dim sun. At their make-work jobs, the unemployed picked up the paving blocks, chipped them clean, and laid them down again.

  Lately, I have been rereading some of the books I was reading in the thirties, the novels of John Dos Passos and Scott Fitzgerald, Lewis’s Babbitt, Dreiser’s The Titan, Sherwood Anderson’s Mid-American Chants. What a good idea it seemed during the Depression to write about American life, and to do with Chicago (or Manhattan or Minneapolis) what Arnold Bennett had done with the Five Towns or H. G. Wells with London. By writing novels and stories, Dreiser and Anderson had added our American life, massive and hardly conscious of itself, to the world and its history. People who in the past would have remained inert and silent, sons and daughters of farmers, laborers, servants, and small tradesmen, had become capable of observation and comment. European literature had taught the children of workers and farmers that novels might be made about American small towns and back streets, about actresses from Wisconsin and speculators from Philadelphia. Highly finished works of art were not produced by American and British writers like Dreiser in the Midwest, or Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells in provincial England, but it was wonderful what they could do, how intensely interesting they could be, how much they extracted from the experiences of obscure young women like Jennie Gerhardt or Sophia Baines. Such books didn’t satisfy every taste, of course. Ezra Pound complained, “The post-Zolas or post-realists deal with subject matter, human types, etc., so simple that one is more entertained by Fabre’s insects or Hudson’s birds and wild animals.” But in the same essay he made the following handsome concession: he said, “Art very possibly ought to be the supreme achievement, the ‘accomplished,’ but there is the other satisfactory effect, that of a man hurling himself at an indomitable chaos and yanking and hauling as much of it as possible into some sort of order (or beauty), aware of it both as chaos and as potential.” There are books, Pound added, “which despite their ineptitudes and lack of ‘accomplishment’ or ‘form’ and finish contain something for the best minds of the time, a time, any time.” I see this as a fair statement of the case. As an adolescent in Chicago I already felt the truth of it. I could not be expected to grasp it fully, but stimulated by the Russian, French, English, and German books I read, I felt it strongly. On winter afternoons when the soil was frozen to a depth of five feet and the Chicago cold seemed to have the headhunter’s power of shrinking your face, you felt in the salt-whitened streets and amid the spattered car bodies the characteristic mixture of tedium and excitement, of narrowness of life together with a strong intimation of scope, a simultaneous expansion and constriction in the soul, a clumsy sense of inadequacy, poverty of means, desperate limitation, and, at the same time, a craving for more, which demanded that “impractical” measures be taken. There was literally nothing to be done about this. Expansion toward what? What form would a higher development take? All you could say was that you accepted this condition as a gambler would accept absurd odds, as a patient accepted his rare disease. In a city of four million people, no more than a dozen had caught it. The only remedy for it was to read and write stories and novels.

  I used to do my writing forty years ago on yellow second sheets from the five-and-dime, and I became attached to this coarse yellow paper, which caught the tip of the pen and absorbed too much ink. It was used by those young men and women in Chicago who carried rolls of manuscript in their pockets and read aloud to one another in hall bedrooms or at Thompson’s or Pixley’s—cafeterias known as “one-arm joints.” No one had money, but you needed very little to be independent. You could rent a small bedroom for three dollars. A fifteen-cent breakfast was served at all soda fountains. The blue-plate dinner at thirty-five cents was perfectly satisfactory. We smoked, but we hadn’t yet learned to drink. And my late friend Isaac Rosenfeld said that it cost less than a thousand dollars a year to be poor—you could make it on seven or eight hundred. But to be poor in this way meant also to be free. We were in our early twenties. Some of us were released from our families by the death of parents; some of us were supposed to be university students. Stenographer sisters who should have been laying up a trousseau were sacrificing their savings for student brothers, but no one was studying much. To feel these sisterly sacrifices too keenly was to lose some of your delicious freedom. Instead you could have wonderful discussions about remorse, drawing on Freud or on the class morality denounced by Marx and Engels. You could talk of Balzac’s ungrateful children on the make in Paris, of Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, the student with the ax, or of the queer bad boys of André Gide. The children of Chicago bakers, tailors, peddlers, insurance agents, pressers, cutters, grocers, the sons of families on relief, were reading buckram-bound books from the public library and were in a state of enthusiasm, having found themselves on the shore of a novelistic land to which they really belonged, discovering their birthright, hearing incredible news from the great world of culture, talking to one another about the mind, society, art, religion, epistemology, and doing all this in Chicago, of all places. What did—what could—Chicago have to do with the mind and with art? Chicago was a complex of industrial neighborhoods, a string of immigrant communities, Germans, Irish, Italians, Lithuanians, Swedes, German Jews on the South Side, Russian Jews on the West, blacks from Mississippi and Alabama in gloomy vast slums; even more vast were the respectable endless bungalow-filled middle-class neighborhoods. What else was there? There was the centr
al business district where adventurous architects had pioneered the skyscraper. And we were known to the world for our towers, stockyards, railroads, steel mills, our gangsters and boosters. Oscar Wilde had come here and tried to be nice, Rudyard Kipling had looked us over and written a nasty report. Mr. Yerkes had made millions out of car lines and el trains and Mr. Insull out of the utilities. Jane Addams had worked in the slums, and Harriet Monroe had worked in poetry. But the slums got bigger, while the poets left for New York, London, and Rapallo. If you looked here for the sort of natural beauty described by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Yeats, you would never find it. Nature on the prairies was different, coarser. The soil, the air, the plants, the blasting heat, the blasting cold, the winds, the storms, the horizons—all different. Modern Europeans might complain of their excessively humanized environment—too much history and tradition, too many ghosts, the soil sifted by the hands of too many generations, the landscapes too smooth and the flowers too tame—but they didn’t know what it was like here, you thought. Were the spirits of this place going to be friendly to art and culture? Most of the time you felt that those spirits would have no truck with your effeminate European cultural frills.

  So you sat in your three-dollar room, which you had anxiously civilized with books (your principal support in life) and with a few prints from the Art Institute: a Velázquez Job who said Noli Me Condemnare, a Daumier Don Quixote riding featureless over the Castilian wasteland; and in this dusty cubicle you recognized that you were out of line, you were a strange deviant. With the steelmaking dinosaurs just to the south, and the stockyards, the slaughter rooms blazing with aereated blood where Croat or Negro workers sloshed in rubber boots, right at your back, and the great farm-machinery works and the automobile assembly lines and mail order houses, and the endless railyards and the gloomy Roman pillars of the downtown banks, this was a powerful place, but the power was something felt, not shared. And what had these labors or these transactions to do with you and your books? The meaning of this prodigious power lay in things and the methods by which things were produced. What Chicago gave to the world was goods—a standard of living sufficient for millions. Bread, bacon, overalls, gas ranges, radio sets, telephone directories, false teeth, light bulbs, tractors, steel rails, gasoline. I asked a German-Jewish refugee, just arrived, to tell me quickly, without thinking, his opinion of the city. What had impressed him most in Chicago? He said at once, “Stop and Shop”—the great food store on Washington Street, with its mountains of cheese, its vats of coffee, its ramparts of canned goods, curtains of sausage, stacks of steaks. Goods unlimited and cheap, the highest standard of living in the world, “and for the broad masses, not for an elite.” The “struggle for existence” went on under your eyes, but the very fact that we could even think about such a struggle meant that millions of well-fed people could afford to sit theorizing about the human condition. What we were thinking as adolescents is succinctly summarized in a recent book by Norman Macrae of the Economist—The Neurotic Trillionaire: A Survey of Mr. Nixon’s America. He says of the United States: “For this, after all, is the society in which the last important stage of man’s long economic revolution is succeeding.”

  What is the place of poets and novelists in such a revolution? Can a nation preoccupied with such objectives be asked not only to complete mankind’s economic and political destiny but also to pursue the pure sciences, philosophy, and art?

  But I am going too fast. Let me turn back four decades to my three-dollar room in the middle of an America where people saw themselves in a collective image as inhabiting down-to-earth, bread-and-butter, meat-and-potatoes, dollar-and-cents, cash-and-carry Chicago. Wealth and ostentation, upper-class society with its Oriental and European connections, its picture galleries and opera houses, might pretend that there was another Chicago. But that was phony, for the money came from lard, steel, coke, and petroleum, and the material standard was the only genuine one. Even a gifted writer like Ring Lardner saw it that way. Here are a few sentences from the account of a performance of Carmen, given by one of his lowbrow narrators, dragged unwillingly, Maggie-and-Jiggs style, to Chicago’s Auditorium Theater. “Carmen,” he says, “ain’t no regular musical show where a couple o’ Yids comes out and pulls a few lines o’ dialogue and then a girl and a he-flirt sings a song that ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. Carmen’s a regular play, only instęad o’ them sayin’ the lines, they sing them, and in a for’n language so’s the actors can pick up some loose change offen the sale of the librettos.” Lardner’s American animal is snarling here against the show-off women in formal dress who drag their husbands in soup-and-fish to an evening of fancy foreign culture. It was possible for H. L. Mencken of Baltimore, a he-man himself, to declare openly his admiration for Wagner, but in Chicago the normal male despised this female sickliness, the phony singing dagos wearing rompers and carrying knives. Lardner on the whole sided with Boobus Americanus, the Chicago wise guy who drank whiskey, played rummy for small stakes, slept in a Kelly bed—a shrewd, proud lout. I know those attitudes well. As a student usher at the same Auditorium Theater during the annual visits of the San Carlo Opera Company, I struggled with my own vulgarity, and when I read the Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, I marked the passages where Steffens confesses that as an undergraduate in Germany he had had to turn his back to the stage, eliminating the obese costumed singers, who interfered ridiculously with the music. When Leonid Massine’s Ballet Russe came to town, I offered to get one of my pals an usher’s job, but he said he preferred jazz joints and prizefights. This was an American statement, and in my heart I sympathized with it. In adopting such a Know-Nothing attitude, strictly American, no one was more self-congratulatory than the sons of Russian-Jewish immigrants. By God! We belonged to the heart of the country. We were at home in the streets, in the bleachers. I remember portly, sonorous Mr. Sugarman, the schochet on Division Street, singing out the names of the states during the Democratic roll call, broadcast on the radio, that nominated FDR. He did this in cantorial Jewish style, as though he were standing at the prayer desk, proud of knowing the correct order from A to W, an American patriot who wore a black rabbinical beard.

  I summon up the furnished rooms in which I lived in the late thirties. At Sixty-first and Ellis there is now a gas station; on the site of the Beatrice, where you had to pull a primitive hawser to get the elevator started, there is now a community vegetable garden; the building on Ingleside where I awoke covered with bedbugs has been torn down; the small brick house at Fifty-seventh and Kenwood where Mr. Hrapek burned rags and garbage in the hot-air furnace, poisoning the air, has made way for a playground. The best-known student rooming houses—Kootich Castle, Petofsky’s on Woodlawn Avenue, Kenwood Gardens, with the skylighted court and wandering corridors and galleries—have vanished. I was dealing with the void before the existentialists put a name to it. Life in these houses was entertaining, but when you had your degree and your friends had gone to take up their professions in New York, in California, or in North Africa, it became hard to explain why you were still here. In 1939, when I was writing a book, I met on the street a professor who put a difficult question to me. He, Dr. L., was a European scholar, immensely learned. Growing bald, he had shaved his head; he knew the great world; he was severe, smiling primarily because he had occasion to smile, not because anything amused him. He read books while walking rapidly through traffic, taking notes in Latin shorthand, using a system of his own devising. In his round, gold-rimmed specs, with rising wrinkles of polite inquiry, he asked, “Ah? And how is the romancier?” The romancier was not so hot. The romancier’s ill-educated senses made love to the world, but he was as powerfully attached to silliness and squalor as to grandeur. His unwelcome singularity made his heart ache. He was, so far as he knew, the only full-time romancier in Chicago (apart from Nelson Algren), and he felt the queerness (sometimes he thought it the amputation) of his condition. He was angry, obstinate. With his ideas of beauty, harmony, love, goodness, friendship, fr
eedom, etc., he was altogether out of it. He hated Professor L. for his sarcasm and for being right. The romancier was dans la lune. And Professor L.? The professor held an excellent degree from a European university. He had a position, an office, students; he had an apartment—he had status. In his office was a folding cot, on which he lay annotating his many volumes of Toynbee and Freud, and cutting articles from the world press. In five or six languages, he studied history, psychology, and politics. What was even more enviable was his grasp of the real world, his total comprehension of Hegel, Marx, Lenin, his detailed knowledge of society and of the history of civilization. My own relation to society was misty, dubious. I, too, was supposed to understand, but on my own peculiar conditions. Solitary, I was mystically connected to all this on unilateral terms. Through it all I appeared to be walking the streets minding my own business. I was on a mission of an esoteric sort. On detached service, as they used to say in the military, but drawn by powerful and vivid longings and sympathies, hungry for union and for largeness, convinced by the bowels, the heart, the sexual organs, and, on certain occasions, by clear thought that I had something of importance to declare, express, transmit.

  I had one of my three-dollar rooms that seemed, to a young man of depressive tendencies, abandoned by life and purpose—musty, sour. I slept in see-through sheets, the wallpaper was buckling, the dry paste sifted down behind it. Shades of the city dump and the auras of bonfires hung over the table and the dresser; you knew how the varnish would smell when it burned; the carpet was trodden down to the fiber. Wood-boring insects had for decades been eating their way through chair legs. Their wood chewing and my yellow second-sheet manuscripts—there were days when such comparisons forced their way forward. Your acquaintances had real tasks and belonged to teams, institutions—even the termites were bound by instinct to an organized will and collective purpose and had their reasons for gnawing. Happy were those, said Baudelaire (I always had all the texts I needed), who could say at nightfall, “Aujourd’hui nous avons travaillé.” Often I couldn’t say that to save my soul. I looked into the letters of D. H. Lawrence and found his bitter protest against that “savage pilgrimage” his wandering life, and “the privation of the social instinct” from which he had suffered. But of course the prevailing assumption—and the Romantic assumption still prevailed—was that man could find the true meaning of life and of his own unique being by separating himself from society and its activities and collective illusions. If walking in the mountains as a solitary Rousseau didn’t turn the trick, you could go and derange your senses artificially, as Rimbaud recommended.