by Saul Bellow
It looked, then, as if my wide-awake and energetic peers were going to take all the active roles in “serious” life—in the professions, in business or research. They were qualified by health, strength, race, social class, birth. I didn’t belong to a class that could bring me into a significant life. Therefore I had to seek a significant life in my own way. My way was to write. Nothing seemed more wonderful, but I wasn’t absolutely sure of my qualifications. What was there for me to write? Did I know English well enough to write it? I had thoughts. I had a heart full of something. I studied my favorite authors. I rode the bobbling el cars reading Shakespeare or the Russians or Conrad or Freud or Marx or Nietzsche, unsystematic, longing to be passionately stirred. I thought I might confirm my own truths from hints provided by my chosen thinkers. So I moved completely equipped, like a Roman legion, as ready for Parthia as for wild Britain, setting up camp with my books, hanging up my Velázquez and my Daumier prints, spreading a hand towel over the grease stains of the armchairs. Fastidiousness was a handicap here, and it could not last long. You had to forget those who had smoked, slept, eaten, lolled, dreamed, sickened, and grieved before you. I disapproved strongly of my orphan’s emotions, my castaway’s sinking heart, and did my best to develop bohemian attitudes toward cockroaches and mice. As a bohemian, driving your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead, living cheerfully, you stood for something, you fought for your freedom, you were cured of bourgeois squeamishness about dirt, debt, property, or sex, and you were not afraid of idleness. But you couldn’t fully train yourself into bohemianism, and as you faced the horror of the room you had just rented, your bohemian attitudes sometimes crumbled away. You inspected the mattress, smelled the decay, turned over the desk blotter to see if it had a clean side, and you longed boundlessly, frantically, for contact, interest, warmth, order, continuity, meaning, real reality. Community, kinship, roots? It was the essence of your situation that you had no such connections. You were, if you could bear it, ideally free.
That, certainly, was how Walt Whitman saw the American condition. What an opportunity! he exclaims in “Song of the Open Road.” The earth, that is sufficient. The new man needs no good fortune; he himself is good fortune. Henceforth he whimpers no more, postpones no more. “Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, / Strong and content I travel the open road.” The universe itself, conceived as such a road, draws you into happiness; happiness, an efflux of the soul, pervades the open air. Nor is this a solitary, self-absorbed freedom and happiness; it is the happiness of friends, lovers, and camerados. The poet does not reject the “old delicious burdens” but carries them, together with the men and women whom they afflict, wherever he goes. Receptive to all, he neither prefers nor denies, welcomes the black, the felon, the sick, the beggar, the drunkard, the mechanic, the rich person, the sleeping couple, the market man, the furniture mover, the hearse.
I would have been glad to embrace this blissful freedom (something like Rousseau’s “sentiment de l’existence”), but it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. It required thought and discipline. Impulse wasn’t enough. Besides, I couldn’t find Whitman’s America in Depression Chicago. There were many thousands of sleepers near me nightly in apartment buildings and rented rooms, but in the morning those who were fortunate enough to be employed went to their factories, offices, warehouses. By the time I got to my window, the streets were already vacant, the children at school, the housewives washing up. Dogs and cats were irresponsibly free. The unemployed (in those days) were most responsibly sad. There were no carefree mechanics having a lark on the street corner. If I wanted to mingle with friends, lovers, and camerados, I had to take the train downtown.
I had no intention of succumbing to complaints and to libraries. I agreed in principle with Whitman about the evils of solitary self-absorption. Nevertheless I am bound to point out that the market man, the furniture mover, the steamfitter, the tool-and-diemaker, had easier lives. They were spared the labor of explaining themselves. What was the meaning of my unpractical life? Ordinary gainful employment was better, wasn’t it? The tool-and-diemaker understood penniless idleness, but what was he to make of toilsome pennilessness? What was the sense of this self-imposed discipline? It was worthwhile in principle, no doubt, it was courageous to assert that a world without art was unacceptable. But it was no more than the simple truth that the hero of art was himself unstable, stubborn, nervous, ignorant, that he could not bear routine or accept an existence he had not made for himself. This militant life, in which the purpose of militancy was not perfectly clear, developed strength of will certainly, and the answer to Professor L.’s question might have been: ‘The romancier certainly is making something of himself. Something perhaps free, perhaps generous, firm of purpose, whatever else. But what is the purpose? The romancier has an idea, but he doesn’t yet know quite what it is.
I think I can see now what I was getting at. Pioneering America, immigrant America, political America, the industrial America of the Carnegies, Du Ponts, and Henry Fords, did not entirely engross the human spirit in the New World. Something that humankind was doing in this American setting was beyond all these activities and innovations, which so impressed or frightened or antagonized the whole world. That something had not found full expression, and this was the intuition that made solitary young men and women so obstinate in their pursuit of art.
On the open road, separateness was ideal because it ended in joining, but no such choice was ever offered in our century. At least we believed that 1914 and 1917 and, later, Hitler, Holocaust, and Hiroshima had made a special case of us and that the camerado to whom Whitman held out his loving hand had become far too kinky a bird for the wholehearted simplicity of such a gesture. Take, for contrast, Hemingway’s view of the separate self. With him isolation is a permanent kind of despair. “Moral vacancy” is what John Berryman called it in a short essay on Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” This modern condition of emptiness suited me no more than the open road. I recognized the truth of it for Hemingway—as his truth, it was impressive. Borrowed, the same truth was shabby. The mind in its incessant activity makes all possible suggestions, conceives everything. Hemingway’s dignity in the face of nothingness is not a negligible conception; its attraction is understandable. But one need not go down with the decay of religious beliefs that have lost their power to bind us to life. “Moral vacancy” is nihilism, and nihilism acknowledges the victory of the bourgeois outlook. The bourgeois outlook is that if you can’t beat ’em you had better join ’em. But other responses may be possible.
Rootlessness, so frightening to some, exhilarates others. Wyndham Lewis, who has given this question more thought than anyone else in our time, wrote that no American worth his salt should long for Gemeinschaft or go about looking for roots. The American’s most conspicuous advantage is that he is pleasantly detached or disembodied; the sensation he has is that of being in the world, not necessarily in a nation. He is liberated from castes, czars, masters, corvées, and he is attached to the absence of burdens and limitations and has learned to be at home in a “slightly happy-go-lucky vacuum in which the ego feels itself free. It is, it seems to me, something like the refreshing anonymity of a great city, compared with the oppressive opposite of that, invariably to be found in the village,” said Lewis in America and Cosmic Man. “Everything that is obnoxious in the Family is encountered in the latter; all that man gains by escape from the Family is offered by the former.” A “rootless Elysium,” as he calls it, is enjoyed “by the great polyglot herds in American cities.” In old Europe, this Elysium was enjoyed by kings, who had connections in all countries. In modern Europe, it is behind the iron curtain that people stay put and that the “rootless cosmopolitanism” of the West is denounced. If you reply that the cruel dullness of police states does not justify the whirling of random human particles in the West, I will agree. Wyndham Lewis saw the promise of Elysium in this happy-go-lucky vacuum. He had a strong head and was ready for a un
iversal future in which writers, painters, and thinkers would become strong enough to lead a free life. But most of us are aware that many of the human attachments cut in the process of liberation will have to be restored and renewed. Such renewal can occur only because we will it and think it. We will it and think it not because we are nostalgic but because there is no human life without the attachments that we express in words like “good,” “moral,” “just,” “beautiful.” The restoration of these connections is to be undertaken only out of the soul’s recognition of their necessity. It will not happen because we join political parties or take up causes. It will begin when the intellect confirms what the soul desires.
It will be objected that if thinking be the first step in our recovery, we are done for. In saying this, I am not being dreamy or hypothetical. Rather, I am taking into account what is visible to everyone: namely, the increase of concepts and abstractions in ordinary life and the grip that “science” has on it. The weakening of traditional culture, the thinness of aesthetic and religious influences, drive Americans, as they do modern men everywhere, to look for guiding ideas. Their thinking is invariably poor, their ideas are unfortunately wretched, but since we are deprived of the old ways of life, of dependable customs and of saving inertias, we have no alternative but to think. Our way of going about thinking is not something on which we can congratulate ourselves. The ideas around us are apt to produce more confusion than order. One sits down, for instance, to watch a private-eye movie set in southern California and then finds oneself called up to review a variety of literary, psychological, and philosophical notions from André Gide and his more important predecessors—views of family life that date from the days of Ibsen and Strindberg, plainly adapted from Sorel and ultimately from Nietzsche. In every scene of the picture you can see a sort of dandruff of existentialism on the shoulders of the actors.
So it comes down to this: the living man is preoccupied with such questions as who he is, what he lives for, what he is so keenly and interminably yearning for, what his human essence is, and instead of the bread of thought he is offered conceptual stones and fashionable non-ideas. And so, immensely needy, people are engaged in thought or with the products of thought, taking attitudes that presuppose thought—attitudes toward public responsibility, or personal adjustment, or crime, morality, punishment, abortion, child care, education, love, race relations. This is what people, aided or misled by advisers, teachers, experts, therapists, social scientists, newspaper columnists, television writers, actors, and political leaders, are attempting to work out.
A recent television program introduces to the public a psychiatric social worker who deals at a “halfway house” with juvenile delinquents. In his conversation with a young parolee, the social worker elevates the dialogue to the conceptual plane. “Suppose you were to kill one of your holdup victims, what would you feel? Have you killed anyone?” The boy smiles, neither affirming nor denying, but leaving the impression that he has committed a murder (it would be strange, with such a record, if he hasn’t). He answers, “I wouldn’t feel much of anything. I keep on going the only way I know how to go along.” The social worker speaks of asocial behavior. The term is familiar to the young criminal. The social worker is able to explain the causes of this asocial behavior. But the delinquent could do it too, and in the very same terms. So they bandy abstractions with equal ease and familiarity. “I don’t owe anybody no different, because of the way I grew up and what they done to me.” The social worker indicates that he understands this. The delinquent accepts his understanding, shares it, but does not appear to be touched in any deeper place by it. Indeed, no deep place is mentioned. It is absent from the “concepts” used by both parties. The young criminal evidently sees himself as the significant person who is the object of the concepts. He is formulated by them, he formulates in his turn, and these formulations constitute his mental life, which is perhaps not less exiguous than that of the intellectuals who study criminology, teach courses, and give degrees. A mental life, I say, and not a moral life.
It is not too much to say that the young writer in his Chicago rooming house had already begun to understand this condition when he read Dostoyevsky, for Dostoyevsky’s subject was, after all, the condition of mankind at the beginning of this new age of consciousness. Dostoyevsky would have felt about the post-realists very much as Pound was to feel: namely, that they dealt with subject matter, with human types, so simple that one was more entertained by the insects of Fabre or the birds of W. H. Hudson. But then Pound added, as we have just seen, that while art ought to be the supreme achievement, the artist looks like a man hurling himself at a chaos and hauling as much of it as possible into some kind of order. There are modern books, he insisted, that, despite their lack of accomplishment, “contain something for the best minds of the time, … any time.” With this I agreed and still agree. But how useful are even the best instruments developed by modern literature for this purpose? What good is what we have come to know best, we writers—the lessons of Symbolism with its Romantic legacy, of modernism and the various kinds of vanguardism? In asking what good Proust, Joyce, Mann, Lawrence, Kafka, Hemingway, can do us, I intend no disrespect. These writers have formed my mind. But it is for that very reason that I can see why they should perhaps be put aside by the contemporary American novelist. Educated America would be pleased to see its writers continue to Joyce-ify or Lawrenceize. People have become accustomed to take their cultural pleasures in these familiar ways, writers have learned to gratify these tastes, but the game can’t interest writers whose art binds them to the modern reality of disorder, to American society as it is now and the mixture of mind and crudity it offers.
A recent correspondent writes to me about the culture of Chicago and speaks of it as a “white-knuckle” city. A native Chicagoan, he writes: “I clearly remember long afternoons in the alley digging up rusty nails and bottle caps from the blacktop. That stuff is really Chicago’s culture—an oily, foul-smelling matrix that binds together people and their jobs, brick and building.” I cite this not as a judgment that I share but as a common attitude for which there is something to be said. This Chicago does not inevitably possess us, but it most palpably surrounds us. The columnist Mike Royko, in his obituary on Mayor Daley, said that it was the powerful, semiliterate Daleys who spoke for Chicago, not the S. Bellows. Up to a point, he was right. No novelist can be Chicago’s representative man. But the novelist can see, perhaps, what is coming. What he did he did not do for the sake of being different or out of arbitrariness. He did it because of his intuition that something humanity was up to in its American setting was not yet visible and clear and that he must not take what was manifest as final. The manifest Mayor Daley was incoherent and sometimes vulgar. There was another Mayor Daley, who was infinitely knowledgeable and subtle. Both of these Daleys were real. The relations between the two of them must have been fascinating. For things are not what they seem. Even Longfellow knew that. Chicago’s crudities do not lack a certain theoretical background, an idea not too far below the threshold of consciousness. I was aware, in a word, that if the post-realists of my youth, in describing white-knuckle Chicago, thought they were representing human types as simple as Fabre’s insects or Hudson’s birds, they were badly mistaken.
It was, then, in blacktop Chicago, among the white knuckles, that an apprentice novelist was reading refined and exquisite poets and grave philosophers, while he sat on park benches or in the public libraries. He read not only his American contemporaries but journals like transition, The Dial, and The Little Review, which published the French, German, and Irish geniuses of the early twenties. In Chicago, we were well aware that Paris was the center of an international culture. To this center belonged decadents, nihilists, surrealist cubists. Mondrian, Picasso, Diaghilev, were there. A cultural Klondike, Harold Rosenberg has accurately called it (in “The Fall of Paris”), in which the century found its fullest expression. This international culture was peculiarly appreciated in Chicago, a c
ity of Italians, Hungarians, Poles, blacks just up from the South, Irish stockyard workers and politicians, German mechanics, Swedish cabinetmakers, Jewish garment workers, Greek cooks, Iowa dirt farmers, and Hoosier smalltown storekeepers, a city of foreigners, roughnecks, and working stiffs. Anyone might become a prospector and strike it rich, find the gold of art under the el tracks. Such was the hope emanating from Paris in those great years.
This is what Rosenberg has to say in his memorable essay: