What this profane and holy comedy of dazzling, beating, multiform profusion hints at, paradoxically, is that Bellow is as notable for what isn’t in his pages as for what is. No preciousness, of the ventriloquist kind or any other; no carelessness either (formidably the opposite); no romantic aping of archaisms or nostalgias; no restraints born out of theories of form, or faddish tenets of experimentalism or ideological crypticness; no neanderthal flatness in the name of cleanliness of prose; no gods of nihilism; no gods of subjectivity; no philosophy of parody. As a consequence of these and other salubrious omissions and insouciant dismissals, Bellow’s detractors have accused him of being “old-fashioned,” “conventional,” of continuing to write a last-gasp American version of the nineteenth-century European novel; his omnivorous “Russianness” is held against him, and at the same time he is suspected of expressing the deadly middle class.
The grain of truth in these disparagements takes note, I think, not of regression or lagging behind, but of the condition of local fiction, which has more and more closeted itself monkishly away in worship of its own liturgies—i.e., of its own literariness. Whereas Bellow, seeing American writing in isolation from America itself, remembered Whitman and Whitman’s cornucopia: in homage to which he fabricated a new American sentence. All this, of course, has been copiously remarked of Bellow ever since Augie March; but these five stories say something else. What Bellow is up to here is nothing short of a reprise of Western intellectual civilization. His immigrants and children of immigrants, blinking their fetal eyes in the New World, seem to be cracking open the head of Athena to get themselves born, in eager thirst for the milk of Enlightenment. To put it fortissimo: Bellow has brain on the brain, which may cast him as the dissident among American writers.
But even this is not the decoding or revelation I spoke of earlier. It has not been enough for Bellow simply to have restored attention to society—the density and entanglements of its urban textures, viz.: “He [Woody Selbst in “A Silver Dish”] maintained the bungalow—this took in roofing, pointing, wiring, insulation, air-conditioning—and he paid for heat and light and food, and dressed them all out of Sears, Roebuck and Wieboldt’s, and bought them a TV, which they watched as devoutly as they prayed.” Nor has it been enough for Bellow to have restored attention to the overriding bliss of learning: “Scholem and I [of “Cousins”], growing up on neighboring streets, attending the same schools, had traded books, and since Scholem had no trivial interests, it was Kant and Schelling all the way, it was Darwin and Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and in our senior year it was Oswald Spengler. A whole year was invested in The Decline of the West.”
To this thickness of community and these passions of mind Bellow has added a distinctive ingredient, not new on any landscape, but shamelessly daring just now in American imaginative prose. Let the narrator of “Cousins” reveal it: “We enter the world without prior notice, we are manifested before we can be aware of manifestation. An original self exists, or, if you prefer, an original soul. . . . I was invoking my own fundamental perspective, that of a person who takes for granted distortion in the ordinary way of seeing but has never given up the habit of referring all truly important observations to that original self or soul.” Bellow, it seems, has risked mentioning—who can admit to this without literary embarrassment?—the Eye of God.
And that is perhaps what his intellectual fevers have always pointed to. “Cousins” speaks of it explicitly: “As a man is, so he sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its powers.” Yet “Cousins” is overtly about “the observation of cousins,” and moves from cousin Tanky of the rackets to cousin Seckel whose “talent was for picking up strange languages” to cousin Motty, who, “approaching ninety, still latched on to people to tell them funny things.” All this reflects a powerfully recognizable Jewish family feeling—call it, in fact, family love, though it is love typically mixed with amazement and disorder. The professor-narrator of “Him with His Foot in His Mouth”—the title story—like cousin Motty is also a funny fellow, the author of a long letter conscientiously recording his compulsion to make jokes that humiliate and destroy: putdowns recollected in tranquillity. But the inescapable drive to insult through wit is equated with “seizure, rapture, demonic possession, frenzy, Fatum, divine madness, or even solar storm,” so this lambent set of comic needlings is somehow more than a joke, and may touch on the Eye of Dionysus. “A Silver Dish,” with its upside-down echo of the biblical tale of Joseph’s silver cup, concerns the companionable trials of Woody Selbst and his rogue father, the two of them inextricably entwined, though the father has abandoned his family; all the rest, mother, sisters, aunt, and ludicrous immigrant reverend uncle, are Jewish converts to evangelicalism. Woody, like Joseph in Egypt, supports them all. The Eye of God gazes through this story too, not in the bathetic converts but in the scampish father, “always, always something up his sleeve.” “Pop had made Woody promise to bury him among Jews”—neglected old connections being what’s up that raffish sleeve. It is Woody’s “clumsy intuition” that “the goal set for this earth was that it should be filled with good, saturated with it.” All the same, the commanding image in this narrative is that of a buffalo calf snatched and devoured by a crocodile in the waters of the Nile, in that alien country where Joseph footed the family bills and his father Jacob kept his wish to be buried among Jews up his sleeve almost to the end.
The commanding image of this volume—the concordance, so to speak, to all of Bellow’s work—turns up in the reflections of one of the cousins, Ijah Brodsky: “‘To long for the best that ever was’: this was not an abstract project. I did not learn it over a seminar table. It was a constitutional necessity, physiological, temperamental, based on sympathies which could not be acquired. Human absorption in faces, deeds, bodies, drew me toward metaphysical grounds. I had these peculiar metaphysics as flying creatures have their radar.”
This metaphysical radar (suspiciously akin to the Eye of God) “decodes” Saul Bellow; and these five ravishing stories honor and augment his genius.
Published as “Farcical Combat in a Busy World,” The New York Times Book Review, May 20, 1984
Henry James’s Unborn Child
Henry James is the only American writer whom our well-ingrained democratic literary conventions have been willing to call Master. Not even Emerson, who as philosopher of individualism stands as a kind of Muse to all subsequent American culture and society, has been granted that title. It fell to James—this acknowledgment of magisterial illuminations—not simply because of his Balzacian amplitude, although that would have been reason enough. From the oceanic plenitude of James’s imagination and genius there rode out, with the aristocratic majesty of great seagoing ships, a succession of novels (20 of these), short stories (112; some, by contemporary standards, the size of novels), biographies and autobiographies, critical and social essays (ranging from a book-length vision of Hawthorne to the 1905 Bryn Mawr College commencement speech), travel and museum impressions, a dozen plays, innumerable literary notebooks, dazzling letters bearing both difficult truths and what James himself termed “the mere twaddle of graciousness.”
Like the Cunarders of his day, James’s ambition was intercontinental. An expatriate who came of age in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the Civil War, he lived and wrote in hotels and lodgings in Rome, Venice, Florence, Paris. Eventually he took up residence in London, and finally he bought a house in the little English sea town of Rye. His themes too were international—Americans in Europe, Europeans in America. “Very special and very interesting,” he once noted, “the state of being of the American who has bitten deep into the apple of ‘Europe’ and then been obliged to take his lips from the fruit.” As it turned out, James never did take his lips from the fruit; he died an American bachelor who was also a patriotic British subject. Numbers of his short stories—like “Hugh Merrow”—are about English people in England.
Yet what marks James as Master is not his Europeanized cosmopolitan eye, o
r even the cornucopia of his cascading novels and tales—masterpiece after masterpiece. Well before the advent of what we now call Modernism, James’s prose began to exhale the most refined and secret psychological processes and nuances; and it is these exquisite techniques of insight that distinguish him from other late-nineteenth-century writers. Mysteriously, with the passing of each new decade, James becomes more and more our contemporary—it is as if our own sensibilities are only just catching up with his. We can recognize him now as a powerful symbolist, one of the supreme literary innovators of consciousness.
“Hugh Merrow,” an unfinished short story written in the densely reverberating style of James’s “late manner,” was discovered in 1937 by Leon Edel, James’s unsurpassed interpreter and biographer, in an old sea chest at the bottom of Harvard’s Widener Library. It lay there “neatly tied with red and blue cotton strips” among the last of the Notebooks and in the company of several commercial pocket diaries (in one of which James could view the Jewish liturgical calendar for the year 5671 amid the eclipses and tides of 1911). A fragment had, of course, no place in Edel’s twelve-volume definitive edition of James’s Tales. For fifty years—though “Hugh Merrow” was there for the asking, catalogued, readily accessible—no one came forward to publish it, comment on it, or even marvel at its uniquely truncated condition. An unaccountable absence of scholarly curiosity, given the always bustling university industry represented by Jamesian studies. (A Jamesian wonderment: is it only artists who are lured by the inchoate, and never scholars?) In bringing out The Complete Notebooks of Henry James— the sea-chest residue of James’s pen—Leon Edel and his collaborator, Lyall H. Powers, have put into our hands the text of an acute psychological riddle: why did James, whose brilliant consummations did not fail him in 112 completed stories, break off in the middle of this one?
That he could have been discouraged by any falling off in tone or brio is unlikely. The style of “Hugh Merrow” is James at his steadiest and most assured. The comedy is burnished and fully self-aware. The progression of the plot is as finely calculated as anything James ever wrote. And it was not his habit, as the output of half a century testifies, to leave work unfinished. Nor was there anything casual about the design of “Hugh Merrow”—the Notebooks reveal at least six separate foreshadowings of this eccentric tale.
The first appears in the fall of 1895, in the form of a subject James calls “The Child,” a story about a painter told to him thirdhand by friends of the Italian novelist Luigi Gualdo. In May of 1898, James begins to imagine a “woman who wants to have been married—to have become a widow,” who approaches a painter for a portrait of the husband she has never had. A tendril of this motif turned into “The Tone of Time,” chiefly about rival lovers—but what seems to have been brewing here, and to have kept on brewing, is the idea of the life never lived, the missed experience. (This was to become the reigning theme of The Ambassadors, a novel at the summit of James’s art, also written during this period.) Two years later, in 1900, “the little ‘Gualdo’ notion” is still haunting James, and now he jots down the version he will finally pursue: “a young childless couple comes to a painter and asks him to paint them a little girl (or a child quelconque) whom they can have as their own—since they so want one and can’t come by it otherwise. My subject is what I get out of that.”
That same day, setting down a long row of names (over a hundred of them) for possible future use in stories, James lists “Archdean,” which will emerge as Captain Archdean, the young would-be father in “Hugh Merrow.” Two other names on that list—“Marcher” and “Bartram”—will empower one of James’s most shocking psychological horror tales, “The Beast in the Jungle,” published the following year: about a man whose life, tragically hollow, passes him by solely because he has wilfully missed the chance to live it. John Marcher does not marry May Bartram, and ends in devastating loneliness.
James was at this time preoccupied with his own loneliness. Not long after the names Archdean, Marcher, and Bartram were entered into his Notebook, he confessed, in a letter, to “the essential loneliness of my life”— the emphasis is his. “This loneliness,” he inquired, “what is it still but the deepest thing about one? Deeper about me, at any rate, than anything else; deeper than my ‘genius,’ deeper than my ‘discipline,’ deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep counterminings of art.” Loneliness, he said, was to be his final port. He was fifty-seven.
The bachelor painter Hugh Merrow is presented cheerfully as “our young man,” and yet he too is described as ultimately solitary. “He was single, he was, behind everything, lonely, and it had been given him so little to taste of any joy of perfect union, that he was, as to many matters, not even at one with himself. The joy of perfect union, nevertheless, had hovered before him like a dream. . . .” Again the theme of the missed experience. In the story’s original scheme it was not to have been in the artist, this sense of the lost life, but rather in the childless couple. It is as if James had inadvertently sketched himself in: a fleeting self-portrait in a corner of the canvas.
On the other hand, James’s self-scrutiny is everywhere on the canvas. Captain and Mrs. Archdean are hoping to commission a portrait of a child that doesn’t exist, the child they cannot have. Adoption won’t do; a real son or daughter will fall short of the ideal. “Hugh Merrow,” from its confident start to its abrupt stop, is a meditation on the nature of imagination. How close to reality is the artist’s invention? Can there be invention without at least partial grounding in actuality—some hint or model? Is there an ideal beauty that solid flesh can never duplicate? Can one live on fantasy just as well as on reality? Is there “such a drawback as [the artist’s] having too free a hand?” Is imagination only a tricky disguise for the actual and the known? Is art the same as forgery?
But these questions point to only half the riddle of “Hugh Merrow.” The other half may come nearer to the marrow of the self. (Is it unimportant, by the way, that “Hugh” can be heard as “you,” and “Merrow” as “marrow”?) The other half is psycho-sexual. It is Mrs. Archdean’s intelligence that Hugh Merrow draws close to; she asks him to combine with her in the making of her child. Looking around his studio at “things on easels, started, unfinished, but taking more or less the form of life,” she vividly implores him to give birth to an imagined child on her account, in her place. And what is the sex of the child to be? Captain Archdean wants a boy who will look like his wife; Mrs. Archdean wants a girl in the image of her husband. Since they can’t agree on which it is to be—they aren’t a perfect union—they leave it up to Hugh Merrow: the sexual choice is his. Girl or boy? The painter must decide.
Here the fragment ends. There is no climax. “It was wonderful how he pleased them. . . . If only he could keep it up!”
Yet James had often before made such choices. His novels and stories are full of little girls understood—and inhabited—from within. Sensitive little boys are somewhat fewer, but they are dramatically there. He continually chose one or the other—in effect he chose both. But in “Hugh Merrow” he was pressing the artist—himself—to give birth to pure imagining, roused from the artist’s inmost being and equivalent to it. If the painting is the painter, then James was pressing the artist—he was pressing himself— to decide his own sex, a charge impossible to satisfy. James had never married; he had never achieved perfect union with anyone. He counted his solitude the deepest thing about him. As for sexual union, he was apparently wholly inexperienced, a true celibate. He was at various times attracted to artistic young men, and there has always been speculation about suppressed homoerotic inclinations. Some have even gone so far as to hint at a castrating accident, the notorious “obscure hurt” of James’s youth.
James, for his part, burned all the papers and letters he wished to keep from us. He intended to close the door on his privacy. It is a door that we, out of respect for the Master, ought not to force. But “Hugh Merrow” may, after all, be a crack of light from under the door
. If James did not go on with “Hugh Merrow,” it may be that it required him to resolve, once and for all, the unspoken enigma of his sexual identity. And this, as protean artist, as imaginative tenant of the souls of both women and men, he could not do.
There is more. In the figurations of “Hugh Merrow,” James put to himself in its most radical form the question of his own missed experience. In life he had chosen not to be husband or father. But “Hugh Merrow” demanded more than symbolic fatherhood. It demanded that the artist become, through the visionary organization of his art, a mother. It equated the artist with the embryo-bearing woman—while at the same time urging the substitution of art for life. The aesthetic birth was to be an explicit stand-in for an impossible biological fruition. And here the intrinsic contradictions may have grown too stressful for James; the metaphor burst and could not be sustained. He could not keep it up, he could not deliver. In “Hugh Merrow”—a tale seemingly easy and comic, and surely rich with the recognitions of its own bizarreness—James was flinging himself past the threshold of the erotic into the very birth canal itself. In the face of psychological pressure so plainly insupportable, he withdrew.
The question for us is whether we will withdraw. Given the enchantment of an unfinished story by Henry James brought to light almost a century after the Master first conceived “the little ‘Gualdo’ notion,” how many writers and readers will be tempted to complete the artist’s birth rites? Who now will dare to paint the unimaginable unborn Child?
Metaphor and Memory Page 7