‘Often a lesser novel can provide more incisive biographical insights than a great one,’ says Karl. (p. 75) If this is so – and not many contemporary biographers would disagree – then we confront a general problem about literary biography and the status of so-called biographical insights. May it not be that if the minor work seems to reveal more than the major work, what it reveals is worth knowing only in a minor way? Perhaps Faulkner – to whom the odes of John Keats were a poetic touchstone – was indeed what he felt himself to be: a being of negative capability, one who disappeared into, lost himself in, his profoundest creations. ‘It is my ambition to be a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless,’ he wrote to Cowley: ‘It is my aim . . . that the sum and history of my life . . . shall be . . . : He made the books and he died.’10
Jay Parini is the author of biographies of John Steinbeck (1994) and Robert Frost (1999), and of two novels with a strong biographical content: The Last Station (1990), about the last days of Leo Tolstoy, and Benjamin’s Crossing (1997), about the last days of Walter Benjamin.11
Parini’s life of Steinbeck is solid but unremarkable. The Frost book is more self-reflective: biography, Parini muses, may be less like historiography than we like to think and more like novel-writing. Of his own biographical novels, the one on Tolstoy is the more successful, perhaps because there is such a multiplicity of accounts of life on Yasnaya Polyana to draw on. In the Benjamin book Parini has to spend too much time explaining who his self-absorbed hero is and why we should be interested in him.
In the case of Faulkner, Parini attempts what neither Blotner nor Karl offers: a critical biography, that is to say, a reasonably full account of Faulkner’s life together with an assessment of his writings. There is a great deal to be said for what he has produced. Though he relies heavily on Blotner for the facts, he has gone further than Blotner by conducting interviews with the last generation of people to have known Faulkner personally, some of whom have interesting things to say. He has a fellow writer’s appreciation for Faulkner’s language, and expresses that appreciation vividly. Thus the prose of ‘The Bear’ proceeds ‘with a kind of inexorable ferocity, as though Faulkner composed in excited reverie’. Though by no means hagiography, his book pays eloquent tribute to its subject:‘What most impresses about Faulkner as writer is the sheer persistence, the will-to-power that brought him back to the desk each day, year after year . . . [His] grit was . . . as much physical as mental; [he] pushed ahead like an ox through mud, dragging a whole world behind him.’ (pp. 261, 429)
In a non-specialist book like this, one of the first decisions the writer has to make is whether it should reflect the critical consensus or take a strong individual line. By and large, Parini goes for a version of the consensus option. His scheme is to follow Faulkner’s life chronologically, interrupting the narrative with short critical essays of an introductory nature on individual works. In the right hands such a scheme could result in exemplary specimens of the critic’s art. But Parini’s essays are not up to exemplary standard. Those on Faulkner’s best-known books tend to be his best; of the rest, too many consist of not particularly deft synopsis plus summary of the critical debate, where what counts as debate tends to be rather humdrum academic inquiry.
As in Karl’s book, there is also a degree of questionable psychologism. Thus Parini offers a rather wild reading of As I Lay Dying – a short novel built around the grotesque trip on which the Bundren children take their mother’s corpse on the way to the grave – as a symbolic act of aggression by Faulkner against his own mother as well as a ‘perverse’ wedding present to his wife. ‘Does Estelle supplant Miss Maud [his mother] in Faulkner’s mind?’ asks Parini.‘Such questions are beyond answers, but it’s the province of biography to ask them, to allow them to play over the text and trouble it.’ (p. 151) Perhaps it is indeed the province of the biographer to trouble the text with fancies plucked from the air; perhaps not. More to the point is whether either Faulkner’s mother or his wife understood the novel as a personal attack on them. There is no record that either did.
Parini’s explorations of Faulkner’s mind entail much talk of parts of the self, or selves within the self. Does Faulkner disapprove of the adulterous lovers in The Wild Palms? Answer: while ‘a part of his novelistic mind’ condemns them, another part does not. Why does Faulkner in the late 1930s choose to focus on Flem Snopes, the beady-eyed, cold-hearted social climber of the trilogy? ‘I suspect it has something to do with exploring his own aggressive self,’ Parini writes. Having ‘succeeded beyond his own dreams . . . [Faulkner] wanted to think on that success and to understand the impulses that might have led him to it.’ (pp. 238, 232–3)
Was it really Faulkner’s ‘aggressive self’ that produced the great novels of the 1930s, achievements at which Flem would have sneered, so little money did they make for their author? Does Flem’s crooked genius really resemble Faulkner’s baffled relationship with money, including his naiveté in signing a contract with Warner Brothers, the most stolidly unadventurous of the studios, that made him their slave for seven years?
All in all, Parini’s book is a puzzling mixture: on the one hand it shows a real feel for Faulkner as a writer, on the other, a readiness to vulgarise him. The worst instance comes in his remarks on Rowan Oak, the four-acre property that Faulkner bought in run-down state in 1929 and lived on until his death. Faulkner was prepared to spend money he did not have on renovating Rowan Oak, Parini writes, because ‘he had a vision of antebellum luxury and superiority that he wanted, above all else, to re-create in his daily life . . . The film Gone with the Wind . . . appeared [in 1939], taking the nation by storm. Faulkner didn’t need to see it. It was his life’s story.’ (p. 250) Anyone who has read Blotner on daily life at Rowan Oak will know how far it was from the fantasy of Tara.
‘A book is the writer’s secret life, the dark twin of a man: you can’t reconcile them,’ says one of the characters in Mosquitoes (1927).12
Reconciling the writer with his books is a challenge that Blotner sensibly does not take on. Whether either Karl or Parini, in their different ways, brings together the man who signed his name ‘William Faulkner’ with his dark twin is an open question.
The acid test is what Faulkner’s biographers have to say about his alcoholism. This is not a subject around which one should pussyfoot. The notation on the file at the psychiatric hospital in Memphis to which Faulkner was regularly taken in a stupor was, Blotner reports, ‘An acute and chronic alcoholic.’ (p. 574) Though Faulkner in his fifties looked handsome and spry, that was only a shell. A lifetime’s drinking had begun to impair his mental functioning. ‘This is more than a case of acute alcoholism,’ wrote his editor Saxe Commins in 1952. ‘The disintegration of the man is tragic to witness.’ Parini adds the chilling testimony of Faulkner’s daughter: when drunk, her father could be so violent that ‘a couple of men’ had to stand by to protect her and her mother.13
Blotner does not try to understand Faulkner’s addiction, merely chronicles its ravages, describes its patterns, and quotes the hospital records. In Karl’s reading, drinking was the form that rebellion took in Faulkner, the way in which he defended his art against the pressures of family and tradition. ‘Take away the alcohol and, very probably, there would be no writer; and perhaps no defined person.’ (pp. 130-2) Parini does not demur, but sees a therapeutic purpose to Faulkner’s drinking as well. His binges were ‘downtime for the creative mind,’ he says. They were ‘useful in some peculiar way. They cleared away cobwebs, reset the inner clock, allowed the unconscious, like a well, to slow fill [sic].’ Emerging from a binge was ‘as if he’d had a long and pleasant sleep’. (p. 281) It is in the nature of addictions to be incomprehensible to those who stand outside them. Faulkner himself is of no help here: he does not write about his addiction, does not, as far as we know, write from inside it (he was mostly sober when he sat down at his desk). No biographer has yet succeeded in making sense of it; but perhaps making sense o
f an addiction, finding the words to account for it, giving it a place in the economy of the self, will always be a misconceived enterprise.
(2005)
16 Saul Bellow, the early novels
AMONG AMERICAN NOVELISTS of the latter half of the twentieth century, Saul Bellow stands out as one of the giants, perhaps the giant. His noontime stretches from the early 1950s (The Adventures of Augie March) to the late 1970s (Humboldt’s Gift), though as late as 2000 he was still bringing out notable fiction (Ravelstein). In 2003, while he was still alive, the Library of America admitted him to its version of the classic canon by republishing his first three novels – Dangling Man (1944), The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953) – and promising the rest of the oeuvre.1
Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) brought Bellow favourable critical attention, but they were both rather literary efforts, European in their inspiration. It was the loud, sprawling Augie March that won Bellow a public.
The eponymous hero of Augie March is born into the world around 1915 – the year of Bellow’s own birth – into a Jewish family in a Polish neighbourhood of Chicago. Augie’s father makes no appearance, and his absence is barely commented on. His mother, a sad and shadowy figure, is nearly blind. He has two brothers, one of them mentally handicapped. The family subsists, somewhat fraudulently, on welfare and on the contributions of a Russian-born boarder, Grandma Lausch (no relation of theirs), for whom young Augie fetches books from the library (‘How many times do I have to tell you if it doesn’t say roman I don’t want it? . . . Bozhe moy!’) and from whom he picks up a smattering of culture. (p. 392)
It is Grandma Lausch who in effect brings up the March boys. When her fondest hope is disappointed – that one of them will turn out to be a genius whose career she can manage – she sets her sights on turning them into good clerks. She is dismayed when they grow up rough and unmannerly. Worse, in fact: like other boys in the neighbourhood, Augie goes in for petty lawbreaking. But he has too much conscience for a life of crime. His first organised heist leaves him so miserable that he drops out of the gang.
Looking back on this childhood from the perspective of his mid-thirties, when he commits to paper the story we are reading, Augie wonders what effect it had on him to grow up not in the ‘shepherd-Sicily’ of the poets but in the midst of ‘deep city vexation.’ (p. 477) He need not trouble himself. The strongest parts of the book of his life come out of an intense reliving of an urban childhood rich in spectacle and social experience, of a kind that few American children today enjoy.
As a young man in the Depression years, Augie continues to hover on the fringes of criminality. From an expert he learns the art of stealing books, which he then sells to students at the University of Chicago. But he keeps his heart pure, more or less, rationalising the theft of books as a special case, a benign form of larceny.
There are also countervailing influences, among them a fatherly employer who presents Augie with a set, slightly spoiled, of the Harvard Classics. These Augie keeps in a crate under his bed, dipping into them when the mood takes him. Later he will act as a research assistant to a wealthy amateur scholar. Thus, though he never goes to college, by one means or another his adventures in reading continue. And the reading he does is serious, even by University of Chicago standards: Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, de Tocqueville, Ranke, Burckhardt, to say nothing of the Greeks and Romans and the Church Fathers. No romanciers.
Augie’s elder brother Simon is a man of appetite, larger than life. Though no philistine, Simon pinpoints Augie’s reading as the chief obstacle to his plan that Augie should find himself a wealthy girl to marry, study law at night school, and become his partner in the coal business. In obedience to Simon, Augie for a while lives a double life, working in the coalyard all day, then dressing up to frequent the salons of the nouveaux riches.
Under Simon’s tutelage Augie has his first chance to taste the good life, and in particular the silky warmth of expensive hotels. ‘I didn’t want to be just borne down by the grandeur of it,’ he writes.
But . . . finally they [the appurtenances of the hotel] are what becomes great – the multitude of baths with never-failing hot water, the enormous air-conditioning units and the elaborate machinery. No opposing greatness is allowed, and the disturbing person is the one who won’t serve by using or denies by not wishing to enjoy. (p. 656)
No opposing greatness is allowed. Augie is clearsighted enough and pragmatic enough to recognise that whoever denies the power manifested in the great American hotel runs the risk of marginalising himself, no matter what authority he may call on to back him from the Harvard Classics. On the grounds that what he is writing is not the summing-up of a life but a mid-term report, Augie declines to take a position for or against the hotels of Chicago, for or against the kind of future they represent. He also pleads what amounts to juridical incompetence. ‘But then how does anybody form a decision to be against and persist against? When does he choose and when is he chosen instead?’ (p. 656)
Augie’s cautious stance is not dissimilar to the stance of Henry Adams before the 1893 Chicago Exposition; and Adams himself ironically evokes the ghost of Edward Gibbon confronting the ruins of Rome. ‘Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time,’ Adams writes, ‘the question whether the American people knew where they were driving.’ The answer, it seems to him, is that they do not. Nevertheless, they might still be ‘driving or drifting unconsciously’ toward a point when they can then articulate the goal of it all. The wisest position for an observer to take – particularly an observer who is himself an American – would be no position at all, simply watching and waiting.2
Another presence at Augie’s elbow, signalled by rises in the quotient of portentous rumination and gaseous language, is Theodore Dreiser, Bellow’s great predecessor as recorder of Chicago life. In such characters as Carrie Meeber (Sister Carrie) and Clyde Griffiths (An American Tragedy) Dreiser gave us uncomplicated, yearning Midwestern souls, neither good nor bad by nature, sucked like Augie into the orbit of big-city luxury, access to which, they quickly discover, requires no credentials, no ancient blood, no education, no password, nothing except money.
Clyde Griffiths is a drifter in the Dreiserian sense: he does not choose his fate, his American version of tragedy, but drifts into it. Augie is in danger of being a drifter too: a personable young man whose adventures in consumption wealthy women are all too eager to subsidise. If what little distinguishes an Augie from a Clyde – brushes with the Russian novel and the Harvard Classics – is no proof against the power of the great hotel, what makes Augie’s story different from the story of any other child of his times?
To this question Bellow offers only a Proustian response: the young man who begins his story with the words ‘I am an American, Chicago born . . . and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way,’ (p. 383) and ends it by recalling how he wrote those words and then comparing himself to Columbus – ‘Columbus too thought he was a flop . . . Which don’t prove there was no America’ (p. 995) – is not a flop, even if he can excogitate no opposing power to the blind gigantism of America, for the achieved memoir itself constitutes such a power. Literature, Bellow asserts, interprets the chaos of life, gives it meaning. In his readiness first to be swept along by the forces of modern life and then to re-engage with them through the medium of his ‘free-style’ art, Augie, we are given to understand, is better equipped than he knows to oppose the seductions of the drifting lifestyle.
One element of Dreiser that Bellow does not take over is the deterministic machinery of fate. Clyde’s fate is sombre, Augie’s is not. One or two careless slips and Clyde ends up in the electric chair; whereas from all the perils that surround him Augie emerges safe and sound.
Once it becomes clear that its hero is to lead a charmed life, Augie March begins to pay for its lack of dramatic structure and indeed of intellectual organisation. The book becomes steadily less engaging as it proceeds. The sc
ene-by-scene method of composition, each scene commencing with a tour de force of vivid scene-setting, begins to seem mechanical. The many pages devoted to Augie’s spell in Mexico engaged in a harebrained scheme to train an eagle to catch iguanas add up to precious little, despite the compositional resources lavished on them. Augie’s principal wartime escapade, torpedoed, trapped with a mad scientist in a lifeboat off the African coast, is simply comic-book stuff.
This is not to say that Augie himself is an intellectual cipher. By conviction he is a philosophical idealist, even a radical idealist, to whom the world is a complex of interlocking ideas-of-the-world, millions of them, as many as there are human minds. Each of us, he believes, tries to advance his or her unique idea by recruiting fellow human beings to play a role in it. Augie’s rule, developed over the course of half a lifetime, is to refuse recruitment into other people’s ideas.
His own world model grows out of the imperative to simplify. The modern world, in his view, overburdens us with its bad infinity. ‘Too much of everything . . . too much history and culture . . . , too many details, too much news, too much example, too much influence . . . Which who is supposed to interpret? Me?’ (p. 902) His response to too much of everything is, first, to ‘become what I am’; (p. 937) second, to buy land, get married, settle down, teach school, do home carpentry, and learn to fix the car. As a friend comments, ‘I wish you luck.’ (p. 905)
By his own account, Bellow had a great time writing Augie March, and for the first few hundred pages his creative excitement is palpable and infectious. The reader is exhilarated by the daring, high-speed, racy prose, by the casual ease with which one mot juste (‘Karas, in a sharkskin, double-breasted suit and presenting a look of difficulties in shaving and combing terrifically outwitted’) after another is tossed off. (p. 498) Not since Mark Twain had an American writer handled the demotic with such verve. The book won its readers over with its variety, its restless energy, its impatience with the proprieties. Above all, it seemed to say a great Yes! to America.
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