by Saul Bellow
In literature it had this grand effect, didn’t it, that it allowed the writer’s imagination to create characters who were larger than life. Their characteristics were so accentuated and out in the open that to be called a Jew or a Catholic or whatever just exaggerated that aspect of your life. You could write a whole book about being that. By now it’s reduced to our being all absolutely identical gray specks.
Except just over the border, in the first band of the unconscious, where you know perfectly well that this isn’t so. But that particular band of the unconscious somewhere in the primitive part of the brain has taken a lot of punishment.
So at thirteen or fourteen you were already aware of being in possession of unconscious feelings?
We were passing Freud from hand to hand at school. And Marx and Lenin. By the time I was fifteen, the Depression was already upon us and everybody was suffering from it. On the other hand, there was what I now recognize as an unconquerable and spontaneous adolescent spirit, which didn’t recognize such things as depressions. Depression was a social fact, but it was certainly not much of a personal fact.
How does the Depression make its appearance as an idea?
It was the first time capitalism was under direct attack for its failures.
Was that the way you put it as an adolescent?
By the time I was fifteen, certainly. That was 1930. It was impossible to avoid this, you see, because the reactionary press itself introduced these terms. “We don’t want any Russian revolutions here” and all the rest of it. So when they fell on their faces, they had already themselves prepared the vocabulary of accusation. And of course, immigrants were filled with revolutionary hopes, because 1917 was … well, so glorious.
Was there any notion in your adolescence, again as an idea, of a difference between the intelligentsia and the rest of the world?
Yes, there was that definitely. You could see it. You could go into the main Jewish streets and see people who described themselves as the intelligentsia. They dressed differently. They wore pince-nez. They smoked with curious gestures; they had a different vocabulary. They spoke of capitalism and socialism. They talked about evolution; they talked about Tolstoy. All these things were very important in my adolescence. I met a new sort of people on the main streets of the community. In making the distinction between the back streets on which you lived as a boy and the main streets on which you lived as an intellectual semi-adult, you became a grownup. In my Chicago case, it was Division Street, with its mixture of Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, Scandinavian elements.…
Did you class yourself at that time as an intellectual?
It never occurred to me that I was any such thing. I was just a pair of eyes, a set of ears.
But it must have been somewhere back then that you began to see yourself as a writer, an observer. Can you remember any one moment, or was writing just part of the training of the eye? The point is, you’re such a physical writer, the emanations of people, their effluvia, mean so much to you.
I don’t know whether it was training at all. I think it was just spontaneous. I think that when I was a very small child it wasn’t what people said, the content of what they said, so much as the look of them and their gestures, that spoke to me. That is, a nose was also a speaking member, and so were a pair of eyes. And so was the way your hair grew and the set of your ears, the condition of your teeth, the emanations of the body. All of that. Of which I seemed to have a natural grasp. That is to say, this is the way things are seen by me when they are most visible. I couldn’t help but do the kind of observation that I’ve always done. It wasn’t entirely voluntary. It wasn’t based on ideas. It was the given.
But the physicality of someone or something is surely an idea….
Right. It’s the abstraction of a speculative principle. The abstraction came later. Actual life was always first.
What better foundation for ideas?
If you go back to the Greeks, or the Greeks and the Elizabethans, you may come to feel that conceptualization is a weak substitute for this sort of feeling for things and beings as they are immediately perceived.
Things are visceral. Things are real. One lives in a real world in which one sees phenomena. You have a powerful affinity to such elements. As in Michelet. That comes across in his History of the French Revolution with such power. He understood that there are emanations from the body. And when one talks of the body politic, it really is a body; in Michelet, it isn’t some metaphor of what a state should be.
I grew up to appreciate abstraction in some forms. I was thinking about this lately because I came across a passage from a book on Kafka in which Kafka says (I’m sure I’m right in this paraphrase) that he couldn’t bear to read Balzac because Balzac’s novels contained too many characters. He’s asked, Aren’t you interested in characters? And he says, No, I’m only interested in symbols. And I could see that as a source of dramatic power. Especially when I was growing up, I found that a “personality” could also be constructed of something artificial. Something of conceptual origin. On the other hand, the number of types and roles were really limited; they soon became tiresome because they were derivative. This was confirmed when I began to go to Europe. I was already quite grown up. I soon began to understand that national character had been shaped by the classic writers. In Paris, you could identify your Balzacian or Molieresque characters in clerks and shopkeepers, in your concierge, and all the way up the scale to the intellectual and revolutionary elites. Similarly in London, with people being Dickensian or Trollopian, or Oxonian. I began to see that modern man’s character is also derivative from literature or history. Or the movies, which are our equivalent of those old fictions. I won’t mention television, because the psychology of that medium is in this connection of no interest whatever.
And what conclusion did you draw from Kafka’s remark?
I understood it in myself. I understood that I had both tendencies in me. On the one hand, I could always count on my innate reactions to people. Baudelaire’s advice: In any literary difficulty, recall what you were at the age of ten. On the other hand, those innate or early reactions weren’t going to get me very far if I wasn’t also prepared to think about what I was seeing.
Perhaps this goes back to the days you spent at university and afterward and to your choice of anthropology. That was a somewhat peculiar one for you, really.
The idea of anthropology is at heart a very democratic idea. Everybody is entitled to equal time. They have their culture and we have ours, and we should not get carried away by our ethnocentrism. The latter is a purely Western idea. It wouldn’t occur to an Iranian to think his perspective distorted by ethnocentrism. Well, hardly ever.
On the contrary, he’d find it nefarious, as an American Indian would. It’s funny that these very ancient civilizations really didn’t feel their ethnocentrism as in any way slanting their vision of the world. New ones might.
I think the idea is that real culture is blinding. Because you’re completely possessed by it. You don’t have to think, with great difficulty and some unnatural adjustments, that the stranger coming toward you is black or white, male, female, safe, dangerous, etc. It isn’t you the liberal democrat or bien pensant making these judgments. It’s that real, sometimes embarrassingly ugly entity, your own self. Culture is prejudice in its basic (or, if you prefer, lower) forms.
The catalogue of ideas one looks back on in the years between puberty and serious study, which is universitarian, would consist of what? It’s as though you drew up a mental list of what sorts of things you thought Raskolnikov had in his brain when be decided to become a murderer. What was in yours? What strange mélange?
Of course it was a mélange. It’s as if the head of a modern person were sawed open and things were tumbling in from every direction. So you had the Bible and the Patriarchs cheek by jowl with Russian novelists and German philosophers and revolutionary activists and all the rest. Your mind was very much like the barrel of books at Walgreens,
where you could pick up a classic for nineteen cents. I still have a copy here of the The World as Will and Idea by Schopenhauer, which I bought for two dimes and read when I was a high school junior—or tried to read. I think I grasped it fairly well. Those books would pass from hand to hand, and the notes in that Schopenhauer were made by my late friend Sydney Harris, a high school chum of mine. All kinds of mad scribbles in the margin. But we did read those things. On the one hand, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and on the other, Marx and Lenin. And then again John B. Watson, and also Theodore Dreiser and Dostoyevsky and Balzac and all the rest. You were really pitched headlong into a kind of mental chaos, and you had to make your way.
What the hell has happened to our adolescents today that this is a rare occurrence?
Well, they have their music and sex and drugs instead. And their privilege … compared to what we had.
It’s not underprivileged to have a mind filled with books.
No, but it does create a terrible disorder, and you’d better make sense of it because the premise of the whole thing is your autonomy. You are going to govern yourself. And you don’t realize what the cost of it will be. At first it fills you with pride and a sense of purpose and power, and then you begin to see that you are incapable of making the finer adjustments by yourself and life is going to be a mass of errors, that clarity is to be found only in spotting the mistakes. You are being educated by your mistakes.
Whereas today?
I suppose the objectives are simpler today. You want pleasure, you want money, you want to get ahead in the world. You want to lead a full American life.
But you don’t really want anything. Everything is available, which cuts down on desire.
That’s true. There’s been a decline of desire. Besides, you can no longer read a contemporary book about chaste girls and wonder about the outcome, as you did then. You used to feel how impossible it was for her to choose between rival attractions. Meanwhile the girl was thinking: Which suitor shall I marry? That doesn’t happen anymore.
Hence the utter impossibility of a celibate clergy, for instance, just to mention one side effect. When bishops sit around discussing whether homosexuality is acceptable sacramentally, you know there’s something screwy going on.
Oh, yes, all these things have run out. When I say I had to decide between Schopenhauer and the rest, that was a sign of those times. Some or many of these burning questions have run their brief course and are no more. It’s all gone. The last to be generally discredited, except in the third world and the American universities, is Marxism. I was filled with it. You couldn’t read the Communist Manifesto when you were young without being swept away by the power of the analysis.
The studies are there, the mind is slowly filled, and there enters a strange concept in the world of ideas, which is one’s own originality, one’s own sense of one’s difference from the stock. How does that occur to you? How does the personage Bellow emerge from this maelstrom?
He begins to see his life as a process of revision, of the correction of errors. At last you have the satisfaction of having escaped from certain tyrants. Let me make clear what I mean. I mentioned Marx—Marx and Lenin. I might have mentioned Freud. These philosophers and writers were the source of powerful metaphors, which had such a grip on you that you couldn’t escape them for decades. It’s not easy to get rid of the idea of history as an expression of class struggle. Nor is it easy to cast off the idea of the Oedipus complex. Those are metaphors that will have their way with you for a long time.
Yet at the same time you’re working in a perfectly real world. These ideas dominate a part of your mind, but the operative part is full of its own pizzazz and ultimately goes its own way. It takes these ideas, but it moves somewhere centrally. Didn’t you feel that in your pre-university late adolescence?
I suppose that more powerful than any of the books I read was my inner conviction that we were all here on a very strange contingency plan, that we didn’t know how we had gotten here or what meaning our being here really had. I read many books in the hope of making some discovery of truth about these persistent intimations. At bottom the feeling was always very strange and would never be anything but strange. All of the explanations you got failed to account for the strangeness. The systems fall away one by one, and you tick them off as you pass them. Au revoir, Existentialism. But you never actually finish with this demand that you account for your being here.
One book after another of yours expresses the same question in different terms.
I suppose this is the highest point a modern man can hope to achieve. What do you see when you start reading Shakespeare? You begin with the early plays and you end with The Tempest and find just that. In Lear you are told “ripeness is all.” We must abide our going hence even as our coming hither and all the rest of it. … You know, this sense of the mystery, the radical mystery of your being, everybody’s being. The nature of the phenomena has changed somewhat. You’re not just surrounded by nature’s world, you’re surrounded even more by technology’s world. You don’t understand it any better for having been educated. Because no matter how extensive your education, you still can’t explain what happens when you enter a jet plane. You sit there, open your book, and all these strange mechanisms of which you haven’t the remotest conception, really, carry you in a matter of hours to New York and you know how long it used to take on a Greyhound bus. And even the bus was a technological advance. There’s something that remains barbarous in educated people, and lately I’ve more and more had the feeling that we are nonwondering primitives. And why is it that we no longer marvel at these technological miracles? They’ve become the external facts of every life. We’ve all been to the university, we’ve had introductory courses in everything, and therefore we have persuaded ourselves that if we had the time to apply ourselves to these scientific marvels, we would understand them. But of course that’s an illusion. It couldn’t happen. Even among people who have had careers in science. They know no more about how it all works than we do. So we are in the position of savage men who, however, have been educated into believing that they are capable of understanding everything. Not that we actually do understand, but that we have the capacity. Since all of these objects are man-made and we are men, we should be able to comprehend the ultimate or even the proximate mysteries.
You’re saying the sweet mystery of life is gone. And yet that particular sort of speculative Jewish upbringing must have been one of the greatest of all gifts. It taught you that there were miracles, that the mysterious existed—for a Catholic, the central act of worship was something you could not understand even if you tried, because your capacity was not equal to God’s.
Now the mysterium has passed to high tech. However, we have all been brought up to believe that we can understand these things, because we are “enlightened.” But in fact, we haven’t a clue. We have to be satisfied with a vocabulary, with terms like “metabolism” or “space-time.” It’s a funny conjunction….
Yet we remain dismissive of mystery. We think mystery is an archaism. Only in the Dark Ages did people wonder. There are no modern mystics except those who are spaced out—and they don’t know it.
What I am really trying to say is that we’ve been misled by our education into believing there are no mysteries, and yet …
But, forgive me, you weren’t misled by your education. Why not?
I suppose I had a radical Jewish skepticism about all the claims that were made.
Did anthropology assume that sense of mystery in any way?
Yes, it did. But I soon realized that I was really getting a version of primitive life produced by other people educated as I had been, giving me nothing any newer about the Trobriand Islanders than would have been the case if I had never heard of them. Simply because you read Malinowski and Company didn’t mean that you now knew the Trobriand Islanders. What you knew was the version of an educated civilized European. And I guess there was a kind of buried arrogance in the whole idea
of the anthropologist: in the idea that because the Trobrianders are simpler, their depths can be sounded. Thoroughly. With simple peoples we can nail down the meaning of life.
Surely Malinowski understood that. That’s what’s good about him.
I chose one of the very best to criticize. You might entertain doubts in the case of a Malinowski or a Radcliffe-Brown, but you would have no confidence at all in the majority of cases. You knew when you met these scholars that they would never understand what they had been seeing in the field. To me they were suspect in part because they had no literary abilities. They wrote books, but they were not real writers. They were deficient in trained sensibilities. They brought what they called “science” to human matters, matters of human judgment, but their “science” could never replace a trained sensibility.
Which brings us back to you.
Which was what I acquired without even knowing it.
But there is no way to acquire a trained sensibility.
Not unless you take certain masterpieces into yourself as if they were communion wafers.
The Eucharist of world literature.
In a way, it is that. If you don’t give literature a decisive part to play in your existence, then you haven’t got anything but a show of culture. It has no reality whatever. It’s an acceptable challenge to internalize all of these great things, all of this marvelous poetry. When you’ve done that, you’ve been shaped from within by these books and these writers.
While you’re absorbing all this, there’s one part you extract from the people you read. You extract Tolstoy’s ideas, or Shakespeare’s ideas. Then there’s another part, which is inextricable from the way they express those ideas, which is incarnate in their style, their narrative, the characters they create. Was that distinction clear to you at university level?
It began to be clear, yes. For instance, I read all of Tolstoy when I was in college. I can agree with Natasha or with Ivan Nikolayevich even when I can’t agree with Tolstoy’s views on Christianity, man, and nature. So I know the difference, and so did he, evidently.