A sparse sampling from Levi’s meditation on the German abominations, some familiar, some not. Cardinal John O’Connor’s theologizing not long ago—which led him to identify the torments of Auschwitz as a Jewish gift to the world—is no doubt indisputably valid Roman Catholic doctrine concerning the redemptive nature of suffering; but, much as the observation was intended to confer grace on the victims, it strikes me as impossible, even for a committed Christian, even for an angel of God, to speak of redemption and Auschwitz in the same breath. What we learn overwhelmingly from Levi is this: if there is redemption in it, it cannot be Auschwitz; and if it is Auschwitz, it is nothing if not unholy. Let no one mistake Primo Levi. If an upright forehead and a spirit pure mean forgoing outrage for the sake of one lofty idea or another—-including the renunciation of hatred for the designers of the crematoria—then Primo Levi is as sullied as anybody else who declines to be morally neutered in the name of superior views.
He is in fact not morally neutered, and never was. He is not a “forgiver” (only someone with a clouded conscience would presume to claim that right on behalf of the murdered), and he is not dedicated, as so many believe, to an absence of rancor toward the strategists of atrocity and their followers. He is, as he asserts, a scientist and a logician: nowhere in Levi’s pages will you find anything even remotely akin to the notion of “hate the sin, not the sinner.” He is not an absurdist or a surrealist; nowhere does he engage in such a severance. On the contrary, his preeminent theme is responsibility: “The true crime, the collective, general crime of almost all Germans of that time, was that of lacking the courage to speak.” One thinks, accordingly, of those unmoved German citizens waiting for a train on a station platform, compelled to hold their noses in revulsion as the freight cars, after passing through miles of unpeopled countryside, disgorge their dehumanized prey—a “relief stop” conceived in malice and derision. In his final chapter, “Letters from Germans,” Levi quotes a correspondent who pleads with him “to remember the innumerable Germans who suffered and died in their struggle against iniquity.” This letter and others like it bring Levi to the boiling point. He scorns the apologists, the liars, the “falsely penitent.” He recalls his feelings when he learned that Survival in Auschwitz would be published in Germany:
yes, I had written the book in Italian for Italians, for my children, for those who did not know, those who did not want to know, those who were not yet born, those who, willing or not, had assented to the offense; but its true recipients, those against whom the book was aimed like a gun, were they, the Germans. Now the gun was loaded. . . . I would corner them, tie them before a mirror. . . . Not that handful of high-ranking culprits, but them, the people, those I had seen from close up, those from among whom the SS militia were recruited, and also those others, those who had believed, who not believing had kept silent, who did not have the frail courage to look into our eyes, throw us a piece of bread, whisper a human word.
He quotes from Mein Kampf; he reminds his “polite and civil interlocutors, members of a people who exterminated mine,” of the free elections that put Hitler into office, and of Kristallnacht; he points out that “enrollment in the SS was voluntary,” and that heads of German families were entitled, upon application, to receive clothing and shoes for both children and adults from the warehouses at Auschwitz. “Did no one ask himself where so many children’s shoes were coming from?” And he concludes with an accuse directed toward “that great majority of Germans who accepted in the beginning, out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride, the ‘beautiful words’ of Corporal Hitler.”
The Drowned and the Saved is a book of catching-up after decades of abstaining. It is a book of blows returned by a pen on fire. The surrender to fury in these burning chapters does not swallow up their exactness—the scientist’s truthful lens is not dissolved—but Levi in the violated voice of this last completed work lets fly a biblical ululation that its predecessors withheld: thy brother’s blood cries up from the ground. I do not mean that Levi has literally set down those words; but he has, at long last, unleashed their clamor.
And what of the predecessor-volumes? What of their lucid calm, absence of hatred, magisterial equanimity, unaroused detachment? Readers have not misconstrued Levi’s tone, at least not until now. The Drowned and the Saved makes it seem likely that the restraint of forty years was undertaken out of a consistent adherence to an elevated idée fixe, possibly to a self-deception: a picture of how a civilized man ought to conduct himself when he is documenting savagery. The result was the world’s consensus: a man somehow set apart from retaliatory passion. A man who would not trade punches. A transparency; a pure spirit. A vessel of clear water.
I spoke earlier of creeping fuses, mutedness, the slow accretion of an insurmountable pressure. “The Furies. . . . perpetuate the tormentor’s work by denying peace to the tormented.” But all that was subterranean. Then came the suicide. Consider now an image drawn from Primo Levi’s calling. Into a vessel of clear water—tranquil, innocuous—drop an unaccustomed ingredient: a lump of potassium, say, an alkali metal that reacts with water so violently that the hydrogen gas given off by the process will erupt into instant combustion. One moment, a beaker of unperturbed transparency. The next moment, a convulsion: self-destruction.
The unaccustomed ingredient, for Levi, was rage. “Suicide,” he reflects in The Drowned and the Saved—which may be seen, perhaps and after all, as the bitterest of suicide notes—“is an act of man and not of the animal. It is a meditated act, a noninstinctive, unnatural choice.” In the Lager, where human beings were driven to become animals, there were almost no suicides at all. Amery, Borowski, Celan, and ultimately Levi did not destroy themselves until some time after they were released. Levi waited more than forty years; and he did not become a suicide until he let passion in, and returned the blows. If he is right about Amery—that Amery’s willingness to trade punches is the key to his suicide—then he has deciphered for us his own suicide as well.
What we know now—we did not know it before The Drowned and the Saved—is that at bottom Levi could not believe in himself as a vessel of clear water standing serenely apart. It was not detachment. It was dormancy, it was latency, it was potentiality; it was inoperativeness. He was always conscious of how near to hand the potassium was. I grieve that he equated rage—the rage that speaks for mercifulness—with self-destruction. A flawed formula. It seems to me it would not have been a mistake—and could not have been misinterpreted—if all of Primo Levi’s books touching on the German hell had been as vehement, and as pointed, as the last, the most remarkable.
Published as “The Suicide Note,” The New Republic, March 21, 1988
*Let no one misconstrue this remark. The point is not that Jews suffered more than anyone else in the camps, or even that they suffered in greater numbers; concerning suffering there can be no competition or hierarchy. To suggest otherwise would be monstrous. Those who suffered at Auschwitz suffered with an absolute equality, and the suffering of no one victimized group or individual weighs more in human anguish than that of any other victimized group or individual. But note: Catholic Poland, for instance (language, culture, land), continues, while European Jewish civilization (language, culture, institutions) was wiped out utterly—and that, for Jewish history, is the different and still more terrible central meaning of Auschwitz. It is, in fact, what defines the Holocaust, and distinguishes it from the multiple other large-scale victimizations of the Nazi period.
What Drives Saul Bellow
A concordance, a reprise, a summary, all the old themes and obsessions hauled up by a single tough rope—does there come a time when, out of the blue, a writer offers to decode himself? Not simply to divert, or paraphrase, or lead around a corner, or leave clues, or set out decoys (familiar apparatus, art-as-usual), but to kick aside the maze, spill wine all over the figure in the carpet, bury the grand metaphor, and disclose the thing itself? To let loose, in fact, the secret? And at an h
our no one could have predicted? And in a modestly unlikely form? The cumulative art concentrated, so to speak, in a vial?
For Saul Bellow, at age sixty-eight, and with his Nobel speech some years behind him, the moment for decoding is now, and the decoding itself turns up unexpectedly in the shape of Him with His Foot in His Mouth, a volume of five stories, awesome yet imperfect, at least one of them overtly a fragment, and none malleable enough to achieve a real “ending.” Not that these high-pressure stories are inconclusive. With all their brilliant wiliness of predicament and brainy language shocked into originality, they are magisterially the opposite. They tell us, in the clarified tight compass he has not been so at home in since Seize the Day, what drives Bellow.
What drives Bellow. The inquiry is seductive, because Bellow is Bellow, one of three living American Nobel laureates (the only one, curiously, whose natural language is English), a writer for whom great fame has become a sort of obscuring nimbus, intruding on the cleanly literary. When The Dean’s December was published in 1982, it was not so much reviewed as scrutinized like sacred entrails: had this idiosyncratically independent writer turned “conservative”? Had he soured on Augiesque America? Was his hero, Albert Corde, a lightly masked Saul Bellow? Can a writer born into the Jewish condition successfully imagine and inhabit a WASP protagonist? In short, it seemed impossible to rid Bellow’s novel of Bellow’s presence, to free it as fiction.
In consequence of which, one is obliged to put a riddle: if you found this book of stories at the foot of your bed one morning, with the title page torn away and the author’s name concealed, would you know it, after all, to be Bellow? Set aside, for the interim, the ruckus of advertised “models”: that Victor Wulpy of “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” has already been identified as the art critic Harold Rosenberg, Bellow’s late colleague at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought; that the prodigy-hero of “Zetland: By a Character Witness” is fingered as the double of Isaac Rosenfeld, Bellow’s boyhood friend, a writer and Reichian who died at thirty-eight. There are always anti-readers, resenters or recanters of the poetry side of life, mean distrusters of the force and turbulence of the free imagination, who are ready to demote fiction to the one-on-one flatness of photojournalism. Omitting, then, extraterritorial interests not subject to the tractable laws of fiction—omitting gossip—would you recognize Bellow’s muscle, his swift and glorious eye?
Yes, absolutely; a thousand times yes. It is Bellow’s Chicago, Bellow’s portraiture—these faces, these heads!—above all, Bellow’s motor. That Bellow himself may acknowledge a handful of biographical sources— “germs,” textured shells—does not excite. The life on the page resists the dust of flesh, and is indifferent to external origins. Victor Wulpy is who he is as Bellow’s invention; and certainly Zetland. These inventions take us not to Bellow as man, eminence, and friend of eminences (why should I care whom Bellow knows?), but to the private clamor in the writing. And it is this clamor, this sound of a thrashing soul—comic because metaphysical, metaphysical because aware of itself as a farcical combatant on a busy planet—that is unequivocally distinguishable as the pure Bellovian note. “The clever, lucky old Berlin Jew, whose head was like a round sourdough loaf, all uneven and dusted with flour, had asked the right questions”—if this canny sentence came floating to us over the waves, all alone on a dry scrap inside a bottle, who would not instantly identify it as Bellow’s voice?
It is a voice demonized by the right (or possibly the right) questions. The characters it engenders are dazed by what may be called the principle of plenitude. Often they appear to take startled credit for the wild ingenuity of the world’s abundance, as if they had themselves brought it into being. It isn’t that they fiddle with the old freshman philosophy-course conundrum, Why is there everything instead of nothing? They ask rather: What is this everything composed of? What is it preoccupied with? They are knocked out by the volcanic multiplicity of human thought, they want to count up all the ideas that have ever accumulated in at least our part of the universe, they roil, burn, quake with cosmic hunger. This makes them, sometimes, jesters, and sometimes only sublime fools.
“What Kind of Day Did You Have?,” the novella that is the centerpiece of this volume, also its masterpiece, gives us a day in the life of “one of the intellectual captains of the modern world”—Victor Wulpy, who, if love is sublime and lovers foolish, qualifies as a reacher both high and absurd. Reaching for the telephone in a Buffalo hotel, Victor calls his lover, Katrina Goliger, in suburban Chicago, and invites—commands—her to fly in zero weather from Chicago to Buffalo solely in order to keep him company on his flight from Buffalo to Chicago. “With Victor refusal was not one of her options,” so Trina, sourly divorced, the mother of two unresponsive young daughters, acquiesces. Victor’s egotism and self-indulgence, the by-blows of a nearly fatal recent illness and of a powerfully centered arrogance, are as alluring as his fame, his dependency, his brilliance, his stiff game leg “extended like one of Admiral Nelson’s cannon under wraps,” his size-sixteen shoes that waft out “a human warmth” when Trina tenderly pulls them off. Victor is a cultural lion who exacts, Trina surmises, ten thousand dollars per lecture. In Buffalo his exasperating daughter, a rabbinical school dropout who once advised her decorous mother to read a manual on homosexual foreplay as a means of recapturing Victor’s sexual interest, hands him her violin to lug to Chicago for repairs; it is Trina who does the lugging. Victor is headed for Chicago to address the Executives Association, “National Security Council types,” but really to be with Trina. Trina suffers from a carping angry sister, a doting hanger-on named Krieggstein, who carries guns and may or may not be a real cop, and the aftermath of a divorce complicated by psychiatric appointments, custody wrangling, greed. She is also wrestling with the perplexities of a children’s story she hopes to write, if only she can figure out how to extricate her elephant from his crisis on the top floor of a department store, with no way down or out. At the same time Victor is being pursued, in two cities, by Wrangel, a white-furred Hollywood plot-concocter, celebrated maker of Star Wars-style films, a man hot with ideas who is impelled to tell Victor that “ideas are trivial” and Trina that Victor is a “promoter.”
Meanwhile, planes rise and land, or don’t take off at all; there is a bad-weather detour to Detroit and a chance for serendipitous sex in an airport hotel, and finally a perilous flight in a Cessna, where, seemingly facing death in a storm, Trina asks Victor to say he loves her. He refuses, they touch down safely at O’Hare, the story stops but doesn’t exactly end. Wrangel has helped Trina dope out what to do about the trapped elephant, but Trina herself is left tangled in her troubles, submissively energetic and calculating, and with no way up or out.
What emerges from these fluid events, with all their cacophonous espousal of passion, is a mind at the pitch of majesty. The agitated, untamable, yet flagging figure of the dying Victor Wulpy, a giant in the last days of his greatness, seizes us not so much for the skein of shrewd sympathy and small pathos in which he is bound and exposed, as for the claims of these furious moments of insatiable connection: “Katrina had tried to keep track of the subjects covered between Seventy-sixth Street and Washington Square: the politics of modern Germany from the Holy Roman Empire through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; what surrealist communism had really been about; Kiesler’s architecture; Hans Hofmann’s influence; what limits were set by liberal democracy for the development of the arts. . . . Various views on the crises in economics, cold war, metaphysics, sexaphysics.”
Not that particular “subjects” appear fundamentally to matter to Bellow, though they thrillingly engage him. The young Zetland, discovering Moby-Dick, cries out to his wife: “There really is no human life without this poetry. Ah, Lottie, I’ve been starving on symbolic logic.” In fact he has been thriving on it, and on every other kind of knowledge. “What were we here for, of all strange beings and creatures the strangest? Clear colloid eyes to see with, for a while, and see so f
inely, and a palpitating universe to see, and so many human messages to give and receive. And the bony box for thinking and for the storage of thought, and a cloudy heart for feelings.”
It is the hound of heaven living in the bony box of intelligence that dogs Bellow, and has always dogged him. If the soul is the mind at its purest, best, clearest, busiest, profoundest, then Bellow’s charge has been to restore the soul to American literature. The five stories in Him with His Foot in His Mouth are the distillation of that charge. Bellow’s method is to leave nothing unobserved and unremarked, to give way to the unprogrammed pressure of language and intellect, never to retreat while imagination goes off like kites. These innovative sentences, famous for pumping street-smarts into literary blood vessels, are alive and snaky, though hot. And Bellow’s quick-witted lives of near-poets, as recklessly confident in the play and intricacy of ideas as those of the grand Russians, are Russian also in the gusts of natural force that sweep through them: unpredictable cadences, instances where the senses fuse (“A hoarse sun rolled up”), single adjectives that stamp whole portraits, portraits that stamp whole lives (hair from which “the kink of high vigor had gone out”), the knowing hand on the ropes of how-things-work, the stunning catalogues of worldliness (“commodity brokers, politicians, personal-injury lawyers, bagmen and fixers, salesmen and promoters”), the boiling presence of Chicago, with its “private recesses for seduction and skulduggery.” A light flavoring of Jewish social history dusts through it all: e.g., Victor Wulpy reading the Pentateuch in Hebrew in a cheder on the Lower East Side in 1912; or Zetland’s immigrant father, who, in a Chicago neighborhood “largely Polish and Ukrainian, Swedish, Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical Lutheran. . . . preferred the company of musical people and artists, bohemian garment workers, Tolstoyans, followers of Emma Goldman and of Isadora Duncan, revolutionaries who wore pince-nez, Russian blouses, Lenin or Trotsky beards.”
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