by Saul Bellow
If you want to know what happens in devastated Chicago, you must look into the welfare system, inquire in the grammar schools and high schools, read the sociologists, talk to the police and the firemen, visit the eviction court, the youth court, the violence court, the hospitals, clinics, the Audy “Home” for juvenile offenders, the county jail. The first fact that strikes you in courtrooms is that so large a part of Chicago’s black population is armed—men, women, children, even, go into the streets with handguns. When the police make an arrest for illegal possession of guns, they have to justify themselves under questioning by defense lawyers who throw the Fourth Amendment at them. Stop and frisk. “How did you know the defendant was carrying a weapon?” “His jacket was open, and I saw it stuck in his belt.” Or the prosecution says, observing the clumsy formalities of the courtroom, “Directing your attention, Officer, to the night of January 4, when you entered those premises on South Lawndale—tell the court why you did it.” “Because we received a radio call at 1:15 A.M., instructing us to investigate a report that unlicensed liquor was being sold at this address. This was a burned-out condemned building, where we found sixteen men consuming unlicensed liquor and a pair of guns lying on the plank with the bottles. The defendant said they were his guns. He had no permit for them. I arrested him.” A small-businessman, Puerto Rican, driving a van, was stopped by the police because he was weaving in traffic. He was carrying a gun. “I was taking my money to the bank, Your Honor—twelve hundred bucks. If they rob me, I close my business. I got to protect myself.” His honor understands this, and a great deal more. His honor, a man in his late forties, is himself a product of these streets, so altered in the last decades. He served in Korea with the Marine Corps. Badly wounded but not crippled by an exploding land mine, he still plays handball and spends his virile holidays out West, breaking horses. After Korea he became a cop, he went to law school at night and, with a little political help, became a magistrate. The political connection is indispensable. And, in Chicago, entirely normal. Chicagoans used to prefer machine appointments to civil service procedures. They preferred the pols to the bureaucrats. The politicians know their constituents, and they are right to put a man like R. on the bench rather than a technician or a trained administrator. We know by now what these highly trained specialists are like. The need is for common sense, street experience, and sympathy, and Judge R. has all of these. He has had to defend himself now and then from attackers in the courtroom. A few months ago, a defendant who went at him with a knife was dragged away to a cell and chained to a bench. “So freaked out,” said the judge, “that he tore the bolted bench out of the floor.” I know that the judge himself, when he was in night court at Eleventh and State, carried his service revolver in his belt because it wasn’t safe, at four in the morning, to walk to a parked car within a block of Chicago’s police headquarters.
The hookers who hold up their tricks, the pushers who post bond from huge rolls of fresh bills, the rapists, the security guard at the shopping center who cracks a man’s head for stealing a package of Certs, the schoolgirls who are caught lifting blue jeans, the senseless shootings and stabbings and ridiculous thefts, endlessly appear before the bench. We take away their guns, says the judge, and they buy more—send them to the house of correction, they come back.
Among schoolchildren, you look in vain for resemblances to the past. The schools are now almost entirely black and Puerto Rican. Chicago’s teachers have the highest salary scale in the country, but they are not paid to keep order. That, in theory, at least, is the business of the security system. There is no security. What teachers teach is hard to determine, and whom they teach is even more mysterious. I have entered classrooms in which the pupils wandered about knocking out rhythms on the walls, absorbed in their transistors. No one seemed to grasp that the room had a center. No one heeded the teacher when she spoke. In this disorder you felt the ungrasped despair of the children. It pressed on your heart and viscera.
Some of the kids are like little Kaspar Hausers—blank, unformed; they live convulsively, in turbulence and darkness of mind. They do not know the meaning of words like “above,” “below,” “beyond.” But they are un like poor innocent Kaspar in that they have a demonic knowledge of sexual acts, guns, drugs, and of vices, which are not vices here.
The young men and women as they stand before Judge R.’s bench are unreachable, incomprehensible. You will never know what they are thinking and feeling. I am speaking, please notice, of what sociologists call the underclass, not of black Chicago as a whole, the orderly, churchgoing black working people or members of the growing middle class. These struggle to maintain themselves in a seemingly disintegrating city and to protect their children from beatings in school corridors and assaults in hallways and toilets, from shootings in the playgrounds. No one goes out carefree for a breath of air at night.
It takes a gun in the waistband to give you freedom of the streets. If you are one of those dudes for whom it is a necessity to button up into a long coat of patchwork leather, to put on a fancifully swelling peaked cap, to wear clacking platform shoes and Berber, Polynesian, American Indian ornaments, to be bearded like the pard, you are ready for display. So you go out carrying a gun, a knife.
You see costumes of powerful originality in the Loop, where many of the shoppers are junior civil servants who work in the skyscrapers built by the federal government. The Loop streets at noon are a fashion show. And in courtrooms and detention cells, men charged with mugging are also dressed in high style, soiled but elegant, in suede and velveteens, hair teased out in saffron or henna puffballs. Dudes in torn shirts but with coat sleeves that pucker ingeniously at the shoulders wear blunt boots in four colors with red or yellow laces that crisscross up the leg.
Norman Macrae in The Neurotic Trillionaire lists our main institutions, in reverse order of importance, as the business corporations, the government, and the mechanisms for living together. What are these mechanisms? “A sense of community”; “values held in common.” The U.S.A., the most productive country in the industrial world, has apparently begun to put to itself curious questions, such as: “After production—what?” Or: “Why not begin to make use of commodities with gypsy vigor and, right now, in a setting of squalid glamour, use the miracle of productivity for ‘camp’ purposes and, day in, day out, turn street life into theater?”
The not-so-well-meaning friend who needled me about Success had not kept up with the times. Success today is in junk bonds, in hype, in capturing the presidency itself with the aid of spin doctors. When William James denounced the Bitch Goddess, he had in mind the bad strong men who had wounded and recklessly wasted the country, justifying themselves by the fortunes they had earned and their contribution to the growth of the nation. Simple old-fashioned stuff.
Perhaps the economic historian Schumpeter was not mistaken in suggesting that the bourgeois order no longer makes sense to the bourgeoisie and that the bourgeoisie can no longer really care.
From this one can only conclude that the cost of all the great successes—economic, technical, organizational—may be the abasement of man, the degradation one finds in Chicago (or New York, or Rome, or Kiev). We have to go back to the Bible, to Plato, to Shakespeare, to see what man once was.
What remains to be considered is the story of how this came to pass. And there is no reason why “the end of history” and the humiliation of man’s pride should impose silence on the artist. Humankind goes on thinking or fantasizing about itself, and while it prefers grandeur, it can be fascinated by misery as well. Nietzsche warned us that modernity, the time of the Last Man, was upon us. But the mind to which this warning was addressed was inevitably assumed to be capable of grasping his meaning, his historical message—his tale.
Now, Nietzsche died in 1900.
Toward the end of The American Scene, written in the early years of our century, shortly after Nietzsche’s death, Henry James devoted some pages to the future of Beauty in the United States. For he did n
ot see why Beauty should not have a future here. He speaks of the “ground so clear of preoccupation, the air so clear of prejudgment … you wonder why some great undaunted adventure of the arts, meeting in its path none of the aged lions of prescription, of proscription, of merely jealous tradition, should not take place in conditions unexampled.”
Are we here to illustrate those unexampled conditions? Is it possible that James gives a new twist to Hegel’s “end of history,” interpreting it as a fresh opportunity, a new clearing of the ground?
He seems to have been aware that the world had used America as its dump. Like Henry Adams et al., he thought that Europe had disposed of its human refuse here. And we must suppose that it would astonish him to learn that Europe in its deadly crises was saved in this century by American intervention, by the descendants of its “rejects.”
When he visited the Lower East Side, James was alarmed by the Jewish immigrants he saw, appalled by their alien, ill-omened presence, their antics and their gabble.
There is no end to the curious ironies all this offers to an active imagination—and, in particular, to a descendant of East European Jews like myself.
The Distracted Public
(1990)
Romans Lecture, Oxford University, 10 May 1990.
Our schoolteachers, when I was a boy in Chicago, were something like missionaries. They earnestly tried to convert or to civilize their pupils, the children of immigrants from every European country. To civilize was to Americanize us all, and to Americanize was in no small part to Anglicize. We were to learn what America owed to English history, English law, and English literature. We were required to commit to memory speeches from Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley also were in the curriculum, and I memorized many of Wordsworth’s poems. “The World Is Too Much with Us” may, for all I know, have been my introduction to the subject of distraction, for Wordsworth’s warning not to lay waste our powers by getting and spending was not lost on me (although I had so little to spend). Nor did I miss his point about emotion recollected in tranquillity—or his emphasis on the supreme importance of a state of attention or aesthetic concentration that would put the world of profit and loss in its place.
Adolescents in the streets of industrial-commercial, getting-and-spending Chicago after the Great War had their heads filled with English Romantic poetry. More intoxicating than Shelley and in my case more influential than Wordsworth was the Coleridge of “The Ancient Mariner.” The Mariner, you will remember, stops a guest on his way to a wedding and compels him to listen to his story. “Hold off, unhand me, greybeard loon!” cries the guest Physical restraint is unnecessary. The Mariner’s power is hypnotic: “He holds him with his glittering eye.” The wedding guest beats his breast. He cannot choose but hear. When I think of the power of a tale-teller to obtain attention, I remember that glittering eye.
The event, the festival to which the guest has been invited, the wedding, is now an affair on a world scale, and the Mariner would need an eye with the force of the sun to keep us from the feasting, the drinking, from the music of the bassoon and the beauty of the rosy bride. But then, few distractions today are as innocent and charming as a country wedding two centuries ago. Wedding invitations now are apt to bring to mind divorce statistics, thoughts of sexual instability, reflections on the sexual revolution and on venereal disease, on the effects of herpes and AIDS on marital fidelity. Children would also figure in our thoughts, concerns about their care and nurture, anxieties about their molestation by adults, the problems of subsidy for day-care centers where kids are dumped so that parents may be free to pursue their careers or celebrate the full equality of the sexes. It is no longer shades of the prison house that surround the growing child, but the terrors of a drug-addicted and criminal future. Your contemporary wedding guest has been transported by modern forces of malign magic into a sphere of distraction where instead of hearing village musicians he is blasted by a great noise—the modern noise.
Shakespeare’s view of marriage is closer to the modern one than it is to Coleridge’s idyll. Hamlet tells Horatio that the baked meats served at his father’s funeral reappeared at his mother’s wedding feast, and he asks Ophelia: “Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” Dying, he tells Horatio: “Absent thee from felicity awhile, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story.” Today Horatio would have to wait for an opportunity to get a word in edgewise. He wouldn’t have an easy time of it. It’s no simple matter to get people to listen, for it is increasingly difficult to make them heed or get them to agree. There are many Horatios with stories to tell, and rival Horatios and false Horatios bidding for your time and promising to be more innovative, more exciting, more startling, and more bloody than the other guys. And by now we, the listeners, have learned to hear and not to hear, to be both present and absent. We know a trick or two ourselves.
In the tone and in the slant of these words of mine you will quickly identify the modern theme, also known as the contemporary crisis or the apocalypse of our times, and you will have begun to brace or to deaden yourselves, as I myself am apt to do when lecturers wheel their big guns into position and prepare to lay down a barrage. I shall do my best here to avoid words like “the transformation of human consciousness” or “the new urban universe” or “the last man” or “mass societies.” These are not necessarily meaningless, but they do, eventually, paralyze thought, and writers instinctively avoid them. They are distracting, and distraction is the word by which I designate the main difficulty. If you are in a trade that depends on your ability to obtain and hold attention, distraction is the hostile condition (massive and worldwide) that you are called upon to overcome.
I thought it only fair to trace the history of my preoccupation with this subject back to my adolescent Romanticism, to Wordsworth’s contrast between factories, desk jobs, commerce, the wealth of nations, and the poet’s “sea that bares her bosom to the moon.” By Wordsworth and others I was made aware in adolescence that there were higher things and that these high things were under siege, were in trouble—their ground was diminishing. It was decades later that I began to realize how quixotic and comical it was in an age of technology, in the broad noon of industrial capitalism, with steel mills on one side and stockyards on the other, to be mooning over Lucy, “a violet by a mossy stone, / Half hidden from the eye.”
But my own mental history is not my topic. I propose to examine a certain common phenomenon, an affliction from which no one can be immune and which obviously originates in the endless crises of this century. Distraction is the barrier through which a writer must force his way. Distraction is a term for the ordeal of getting people to attend to what is essential—to what writers, speakers, teachers, journalists, or advertisers believe to be essential.
The attention of the public (and there are thousands of publics in every large nation, but we must begin somewhere) is something like a continent penetrated, invaded, overrun by a variety of forces—political, commercial, technological, journalistic, agitational. Vast enterprises described as the communications industry inform, misinform, or disinform the public about politics, wars, and revolutions, about religious or racial conflicts, and also about education, law, medicine, books, theater, music, cookery. To make such lists gives a misleading impression of order. The truth is that we are in an unbearable state of confusion, of distraction.
We are now face-to-face with the Information Revolution, a subject that has come to horrify us all and that we would willingly avoid, if it were possible. But George Orwell warned us some time ago: “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of civilized men.” The obvious is that all minds are drawn toward a common field. To enumerate the forces that draw them would land us at once in this vast field or swamp of obviousness. For my purpose it is enough to point out that the common field is a scene of extraordinary excitement and agitation. Wordsworth, when he tells us that poetry comes from emo
tion recollected in tranquillity, is speaking from a world that has gone forever. I suspect that if you went to the Lake Country now to find tranquillity, you might have to dig for it like an archaeologist. In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings—about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes—and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight. This is not to say that fundamental feelings, the moral sentiments so long bred into civilized peoples, have been wiped out altogether, but the sentiments have obviously been unable to keep up with the abominations that have been visited upon us, with the cruelties and crimes of this century. That the old feelings would survive the First World War was probably too much to expect. Their decline had already been observed and described long before 1914. The Second World War did the rest. One of the most powerful of modern philosophers has called what overtook us in this century “the night of the world.” He saw Washington and Moscow as twin evils, in all significant respects identical. Urbanization and technology indisputably dominate the planet. A world society quite different from the one anticipated by Marxists has materialized, and we are looking for ways to come to terms with it.