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

by Saul Bellow

  But the rejection of thinking in favor of wishful egalitarian dreaming takes many other forms. There is simply too much to think about. It is hopeless—too many kinds of special preparation are required. In electronics, in economics, in social analysis, in history, in psychology, in international politics, most of us are, given the oceanic proliferating complexity of things, paralyzed by the very suggestion that we assume responsibility for so much. This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive.

  It is here that the representatives of knowledge come in—the pundits, the anchormen, the specialist guests of talk shows. What used to be called an exchange of views has become “dialogue,” and “dialogue” has been invested with a certain sanctity. Actually, it bears no resemblance to any form of real communication. It is a hard thing to describe. Two or more chests covered with merit badges are competitively exposed to public view. We sit, we look, we listen, we are attracted by the perceptions of hosts and guests.

  When I was young, the great pundits were personalities like H. G. Wells or George Bernard Shaw or Havelock Ellis or Romain Rolland. We respectfully read what they had to say about communism, fascism, peace, eugenics, sex. I recall these celebrities unsentimentally. Wells, Shaw, and Romain Rolland brought punditry into disrepute. The last of the world-class mental giants was Jean-Paul Sartre, one of whose contributions to world peace was to exhort the oppressed of the third world to slaughter whites indiscriminately. It is hard to regret the passing of this occasionally vivid spirit.

  On this side of the Atlantic, our present anchormen are the successors of the Arthur Brisbanes, Heywood Brouns, and Walter Lippmanns of the twenties, thirties, and forties. Clearly, figures like Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Dan Rather, and Sam Donaldson, with their easy and immediate access to the leaders of the nation, have infinitely more power than those old wordmen their predecessors. Rather oddlooking, today’s tribunes (not magistrates chosen by the people), with their massive hairdos, are the nearest thing observable to the wigs of Versailles or the Court of St. James’s. These crowns of hair contribute charm and dignity but perhaps also oppress the brain with their weight. They make us aware, furthermore, of the study and calculation behind the naturalness of these artists of information. They speak so confidently and so much on such a variety of topics—do they really know enough to be so fluent? On a talk show not long ago, a prominent African-American declared that the Roosevelt administration had closely supported Hitler until the Pearl Harbor attack. The journalists on his panel made no objection to this. Had none of them heard of Lend-Lease, hadn’t they read about FDR, were they unaware of Nazi hostility toward the United States? Can these high-finish, well tailored and hairstyled interviewers know so little about history?

  America is, of course, the land of the present, its orientation is toward the future. That Americans should care so little about the past is fetching, even endearing, but why should we take the judgments of these splendid-looking men and women on public matters seriously? That they have had “backgrounders” or briefings we may take for granted. One is reluctant to conclude that their omniscience is a total put-on. But this, too, may be beside the point. The principal aim of these opinionmakers is to immerse us again and again in a marinade of “correctness” or respectability.

  What is it necessary that we Americans should know? When is ignorance irrelevant? Perhaps Americans grasp intuitively that what really matters to humankind is here—all around us in the capitalist U.S.A. Lincoln Steffens, playing the pundit in Russia after the Revolution, said: “I have been over into the future, and it works.” Some secret wisdom! As a horseplayer he would have lost his shirt. Sigmund Freud, visiting the U.S. before World War I, said America was a great experiment that wasn’t going to work. Later, he called it a misgeburt—a miscarriage. This was the judgment of German high culture on us. Perhaps the death camps of World War II would have changed Freud’s mind.

  That America is an experiment has been said often enough (probably more often said than understood). Consistent with this—in a small way—Charles Burress on Michael Jackson is advocating experimentation. “Suppose Jackson were seen,” he writes, “not as a freak, but as a brave pioneer devoting his own body to exploring new frontiers of human identity.” The underlying hypothesis seems to be that we human beings, considered as material, are totally plastic and that the material of which we are made will take any (improving) shape we choose to give it. A less kindly word for it is “programming.” The postulate is that it is necessary to reject what we are by nature, that the given, the original, the creature of flesh and blood, is defective, shameful, in need of alteration, correction, conversion, that this entity, as is, can contribute nothing, and that it would be better to remake us totally. In my youth, the civilized world was taken aback by the Stalin model of Soviet Man as pictured in newspapers and textbooks, in art and literature. Stalinist falsification, we called this. Now we, too, seem to have come up with a synthetic man, a revised, improved American. What this implies is that the human being has no core—more accurately, that his personal core, if there should be one, would be undesirable, wicked, perverse, a lump of prejudices: no damn good at all.

  We are beginning to feel the effects of this project. Perhaps the personal core, or what we are by nature, is becoming aware that what lies behind this drive to revise us is tyranny, that consciousness raising and sensitivity training are meant to force us to be born again without color, without race, sexually neutered, politically purified, and with minds shaped and programmed to reject “the bad” and affirm “the good.” Will the real human being become persona non grata? No wonder so many of us are in a blue funk.

  A self-improving lot, Americans have a weakness for this kind of thing: the idealist holding aloft a banner with a strange device. Huck Finn had no use for the nice bright clean New England boy advancing under the motto Excelsior. When Aunt Sally threatened to “sivilize” him, he decided to “light out for the territory ahead.” There was a time when it was normal for American children to feel that “self-improvement” propaganda would lead us not up the mountain but into the sloughs.

  In the matter of opinion, Americans are vulnerable to ideologues, “originators,” trendsetters, heralds of better values. Lacking the sustaining traditions of older cultures, we cast about for prescriptions, we seek—in our uncertainty—the next necessary and “correct” step. I can’t at the moment remember who it was who said (it sounds like Elbert Hubbard, or perhaps R. W. Emerson), “Invent a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” Revised and updated, this would go: “Invent a new cliché and you will make it big.”

  Perhaps the worst thing of all is the language used by these “originators,” these heralds of the new. Can anything palpably, substantially, recognizably human be described in words like theirs? It was perhaps in reaction to the degradation of this newspeak—the very latest—that I instinctively turned to William Blake:

  The Good are attracted by Men’s perceptions,

  And think not for themselves;

  Till Experience teaches them to catch

  And to cage the Fairies & Elves.

  And then the Knave begins to snarl

  And the Hypocrite to howl;

  And all his good Friends shew their private ends,

  And the Eagle is known from the Owl.

  Part Four

  THOUGHTS IN TRANSITION

  Spanish Letter

  (1948)

  Partisan Review, 15 February 1948.

  The police come first to your notice in Spain, taking precedence over the people, the streets, and the landscape: The Guardia Civil in their wooden-looking, shiny, circular hats, brims flattened at the back, hats that are real enough, since they are worn and seen, but, unlike the tommy gun that each guardia has in the crook of his arm, lacking in real reality. Next, gray-uniformed police with the red eagle on their sleeves and rifles hanging on their backs. Even the guard in the park, an old man in the costume of a Swiss chasseur, with a draggled f
eather, leather jerkin, and shabby leggings, holds a rifle by the strap. Then there are the secret police; no one knows how many kinds there are, but you see a great deal of them. On the Irún-Madrid express, our passports were examined by one who swung into the compartment and reversed his lapel, showing us the badge of blue, gold, and red enamel. He was quiet, equable, and unsystematic, sighing while he wrote some of the passport numbers into his notebook and ruffling the pages as if wondering what to do next with his authority. He murmured Adios and withdrew. The train labored on toward the flower-blazing villas of Santander, the wooden walls of the car quivering. The seats were long and seignorial, each headrest covered with lace, and in one of them sat a Spaniard who, as we were passing the harbor, engaged us in conversation, not casually, by design, preventing me from looking at the ships in the silver, coal-streaked evening water. He gave us a lecture on the modernity of Santander and invited us to ask questions on Spanish life, Spanish history, geography, industry, or character, and without being asked, wrinkling his narrow forehead and shooting forward his palms like a photographer ordering you to hold still, he began to speak of hydroelectric power, very minute in his details about turbines, wiring, transmitters, and whatnot. We were American and therefore interested in mechanical subjects. I was not an engineer, I told him. Nevertheless he finished his speech and sat as if waiting for me to propose a subject closer to my interests. He was a small, nervously mobile, brown man with measuring, aggressive, melancholy eyes. He wore a gloomy brown gabardine suit, shiny with dirt, and shoes that were laced through only half the eyelets. Already we were climbing into the thickening darkness; farms appeared below, remote in the steep green valleys. “You are on a holiday?” he said. “You will see many beautiful things.” He enumerated them: the Escorial, the Prado, the Alhambra, Seville, Cádiz, la taza de plata. He had seen them all; he had been everywhere; he had fought everywhere. “In Spain?” I asked. In Spain, of course, and in Russia and Poland as a member of the Blue Division against the Reds. Essentially he was a soldier; he came of a military family; his father was a high-ranking officer, a colonel in the air force. He threw his hand open to me, displaying a white scar in the palm—his souvenir of Albacete. Just then a young guardia, lanky and sunburned, began to roll back the refractory door, and he sprang from his place, seized the handle, and held it. He spoke a few rapid words in an undertone to the guardia and rattled the door shut. Someone, certainly not one of the Spaniards in the compartment, said, ”Hay sitio.” There was room enough for two more passengers. But the colonel’s son kept his counsel, and stepping over legs to his own seat, he resumed his conversation—with me alone this time, confidentially; and for a while something of the expression with which he had dismissed the guardia lingered on his face, the roused power of his office. Yes, he belonged to the police and made three trips a week between Irún and Madrid. He liked the job. Being an old campaigner, he did not mind the jolting or the noise—there was singing accompanied by rhythmical clapping and stamping in the next compartment; in his own good time, he put a stop to that. The pay was not enough for his style of life, but he was expecting a good enchufe, or sinecure, to which he felt himself entitled. Fortunately, he could add to his income by writing. He wrote fiction, and at present he was busy with a long historical novel in verse. His eyes grew hot and visionary as he began to talk of the poets he admired and to quote, somber and reverent. I reflected that it was probably appropriate, since so many European writers were ambitious to become policemen, that the police should aspire to become writers.

  Meanwhile the sky had grown dark, and the train threaded its weak light among the trees and rocks or stopped briefly at stations as weakly lighted as itself. Crowds waited in the mist, and the passage was filling. No one made a persistent effort to get into the compartment; everyone was turned away by the colonel’s son. We, the Americans, were in his charge, and he was determined that we should have a comfortable night, with space enough to stretch out and sleep. But somehow, by pressure of numbers, the vacant places were filled, and sensing our disapproval of such a thing, he did not try to evict the new occupants. He continued to be as solicitous as before. When I broke off a piece of the loaf I had bought in Hendaye, he was horrified to see me eat such inferior bread. I must have a slice of his tortilla. He dragged down his valise, touched the lock, and it sprang open. The tortilla was in a round tin box. Under it lay copies of Green Hornet, Coyote, and other pulp magazines. He cut a thick gray slice of the cake. I ate what I could of it, excused myself from finishing, and went into the corridor. Most of the people there were traveling between local stations, a crowd of gente humilde, sad, shabby, and world-worn, resting between the walls, leaning on the brass rods along the windows, with gloom-deepened eyes and black nostrils; in muffling shawls or berets that flattened their heads and made a disproportion in their long, brown faces; melancholy, but with a kind of resistance to dreariness, as if ready to succumb so far but no farther to it—the Spanish dignidad.

  The passengers in the neighboring compartment had become very boisterous, and now the colonel’s son came out and subdued them. I returned to my seat and he to his. Immediately he opened a new topic. Tired of his conversation and of humoring him, I refused to respond, and at last he was silent. Then the shades were drawn, someone turned off the light, and we tried to sleep.

  By morning the passage was bare, swept clean. The colonel’s son said, “We will pass the Escoriai soon, where the tombs of the kings are.” I was stony to him. We were running downslope in a rush of smoke. The shallow fields, extending on either side to the mountains, looked drought-stricken, burnt, desert, mere stubble and dust. We burst into the suburbs of Madrid and into the yards. On the platform the colonel’s son was at my back, and in the sooty arcades and the hell’s-antechamber turmoil of the station he hung on, rueful and anxious at my speed. Presumably he had to know where I was staying in Madrid to complete his report. From the hotel bus I saw his brown face in the spectator throng of porters, cabbies, and touts for hotels and pensiones, watching the baggage being lifted to the roof, hot-eyed, avoiding my glance, and looking on at the work. Successful!

  First and last, the police. In every hotel there are police forms to fill, and passports have to be registered at the station. To obtain a railroad ticket you must make out a declaration stating the object of the journey, and you cannot travel without a triptico, a safe-conduct. No consulate or embassy is permitted to grant a visa without the police salida. The broad face of Seguridad, near the place where the first shots were fired on Napoleon’s troops, dominates the Puerta del Sol with barred and darkened windows. The police license radios. The police go through your suitcase in a provincial rooming house. The woman living in the cave dug in the bluff near the Manzanares is quick to tell you, “We are here with the permission of the policía.” Everywhere you hear that the jails are full. There is regular bus service for visitors from Cibeles, at the center of town, to the Carabanchel prison. On a trolley car near the Toledo Gate, I saw two arrestees, an old man and a boy of about eighteen, being taken there. They were handcuffed and in the custody of a pair of guardias with the inevitable machine guns. The boy, with thick hair that grew sturdily down his neck and with prematurely deep creases beneath his eyes, had the precarious nonchalance of deep misery and deep hatred. There was a loaf of bread sticking out of his pocket. The old man was one-armed, filthy, and scarred. His feet were coming through the rope-soled alpargatas. He was nearly bald, and the lines of a healed wound spread under his thin gray hair. I looked at him, and he gave me a gentle shrug of surrender, not daring to speak, but when I got down in Mataderos, among buildings demolished during the civil war, he ventured to lift his hand and wave it as far as the steel cuff permitted.

  These were probably common criminals, not Rojos. Hundreds of the latter are arrested every month, and the trials at Alcalá de Henares continue endlessly. Political prisoners released from the overflowing jails are on conditional liberty and show you the cards on which they must have
a current official stamp. Most of them are not granted work permits and live as they can in the streets, shining shoes, opening taxi doors, peddling lottery tickets, and begging.

  At the center of Madrid you occasionally notice shot-scarred buildings, but on the whole there are few reminders of the civil war in the better barrios. On Gran Via the shops are almost American in their luxury, and the early-evening café crowds that sit looking down the broad curve of the street at the mass of banks, churches, and government buildings resemble those in New York and Washington bars. Hollywood pictures run in all the better theaters, and the craving for American good things—Buicks, nylons, Parker 51 pens, and cigarettes—is as powerful here as in the other capitals of the world, and as in most of the capitals, there are no dollars and the black market thrives. The police do not interfere with it. Peddlers go among the tables offering pens and cigarettes. Some of these, especially the pens, are obvious counterfeits; the Lucky Strike packages are beautifully done; the blue tax stamps are perfect; the cigarettes are filled with dung and crumbled straw. A boy comes with a huge gold ring to sell. He gives you glimpses of it in his cupped hands with exaggerated furtiveness, his face frantically thievish. It is a heavy, ugly, squarish ring, and you wonder who would ever buy it. He whispers, “It’s stolen,” and offers it for two hundred pesetas, one hundred, fifty, and then he gives you up with a sad, bored look and tries another table. Women flap their lottery tickets and beg tenaciously. Some of them carry blind or crippled infants and exhibit their maimed or withered legs. One, with a practiced movement, turns the child and shows me a face covered with sores and a pair of purulent eyes. Juanita, my Basque landlady at the pension, tells me that most of these children are hired out by the day to the professional beggars. It’s all business, she contemptuously says.