Now, in retrospect, that Yes! can be seen to have come at a price: the price of critical consciousness. Augie March presents itself as, in some sense, the story of the coming to maturity of Bellow’s generation. But how good a representative of that generation is Augie? He hangs around with left-wing students, he reads Nietzsche and Marx, he works as a union organiser, he even contemplates a job as bodyguard to Leon Trotsky in Mexico, yet the broader world picture barely registers on him. When war arrives, he is stunned. ‘Wham! The war broke out . . . I went off my rocker, I hated the enemy, I couldn’t wait to go and fight.’ (p. 905) At what point does his absorption in the here and now turn into idiocy?
The Library of America compendium edition comes with fifteen pages of notes by James Wood. These notes are particularly useful in the case of Augie March, where names and allusions are strewn like confetti. Wood nails down many of Augie’s glancing references, but there are plenty left over. Who was it, for example, who was set on a horse by his weeping sisters to go and study Greek in Bogotá? (p. 477) What ambassador from what country blew shellac through the water pipes of Lima to stop the rust? (p. 658)
Dangling Man, which Bellow wrote almost a decade earlier during the war years, is a short novel in the form of a journal. The journal-keeper is a young Chicagoan named Joseph, an unemployed history graduate supported by his working wife. Joseph uses his journal to explore how he has become what he is, and in particular to understand why, about a year ago, he abandoned the philosophical essays he was writing and began to ‘dangle’, a word which in the slang of the times meant waiting in limbo for word from one’s draft board but to which Bellow gives a more existential sense.
So wide does the gap seem between himself as he is now and his earnest, innocent past self that at moments Joseph the journal-keeper thinks of himself as the double of the earlier Joseph, wearing his cast-off clothes. The earlier self had still been able to function in society, to strike a balance between his job in a travel agency and his scholarly pursuits. Yet even then there had been troubling premonitions, feelings of alienation from the world. From his window he would survey the urban prospect – chimneys, warehouses, billboards, parked cars. Does such an environment not deform the soul, he would ask himself ? ‘Where was there a particle of what, elsewhere, or in the past, had spoken in man’s favour? . . . What would Goethe say to the view from this window?’ (p. 55)
It may seem comical that in the Chicago of 1941 someone should have been occupied in such grandiose musings, says Joseph the journal-keeper, yet in each of us there is an element of the fantastical. By mocking such philosophising as comical he is in effect denying his better self.
Though in the abstract the early Joseph is prepared to accept that man is aggressive by nature, when he looks into his own heart he can detect there nothing but gentleness. One of his idler ambitions is to found a utopian colony where spite and cruelty will be forbidden. Therefore one of the developments that most dismays the later Joseph is to find himself being overtaken by unpredictable fits of uncharacteristic violence. He loses his temper with his adolescent niece and spanks her, shocking her parents. He manhandles his landlord. He shouts at a bank employee. He feels that he is ‘a sort of human grenade whose pin has been withdrawn’. (p. 107) What is happening to him?
An artist friend tries to persuade him that the monstrous city around them is not the real world: the real world is the world of art and thought. In the abstract Joseph is prepared to respect this position and see its beneficial effects: through sharing with others the products of his imagination, the artist allows an aggregate of lonely individuals to become a community of sorts. But he, Joseph, is not an artist. His potentiality is to be a good man. Yet living as he does ‘separate, alienated, distrustful’, he might as well be in jail. (p. 65) What is the point of being good in a jail cell? Goodness has to be practised in company; it has to be attended by love.
In a powerful passage, he blames his violent outbursts on the unbearable contradictions of modern life. Brainwashed into believing that each of us is an individual of inestimable value with an individual destiny, that there is no limit to what we can attain, we set off, each of us, in quest of individual greatness. Inevitably we fail to find it. Then we begin to ‘hate immoderately and punish ourselves and one another immoderately. The fear of lagging [behind] pursues and maddens us . . . It makes an inner climate of darkness. And occasionally there is a storm of hate and wounding rain out of us.’ (p. 63)
In other words, by enthroning Man at the centre of the universe, the Enlightenment, particularly in its Romantic phase, imposed impossible psychic demands on us, demands that work themselves out not just in petty fits of violence such as his own, or in such moral aberrations as the pursuit of greatness through crime (vide Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov), but also perhaps in the war that is consuming the world. This is why, in a paradoxical move, Joseph the journal writer terminates his reflections, lays down his pen, and enlists. Isolation redoubled – the isolation imposed by the ideology of individualism, and then the isolation of self-scrutiny – has brought him, he believes, to the brink of insanity. Perhaps war will teach him what he has been unable to learn from philosophy. He ends his journal with the cry:
Hurray for regular hours!
And for the supervision of the spirit!
Long live regimentation! (p. 140)
Joseph draws a distinction between a mere self-obsessed individual like himself wrestling with his thoughts and the artist, who through the demiurgic faculty of the imagination turns his petty personal troubles into universal concerns. But the pretence that Joseph’s private wrestlings are mere journal entries meant for his eyes alone is barely maintained. For among the entries are pages – renderings of city scenes for the most part, or sketches of people Joseph meets – whose heightened diction and metaphoric inventiveness betray them as productions of the poetic imagination that not only cry out for a reader but reach out to and create a reader. Joseph may pretend he wishes us to think of him as a failed scholar, but we know, as he must suspect, that he is a born writer.
Dangling Man is long on reflection, short on action. It occupies uneasy ground between the novella proper and the personal essay or confession. Various personages come onstage and exchange words with the protagonist, but beyond Joseph in his two sketchy manifestations there are no characters, properly speaking. Behind the figure of Joseph can be discerned the lonely, humiliated clerks of Gogol and Dostoevsky, brooding their revenge; the Roquentin of Sartre’s Nausea, the scholar who undergoes a strange metaphysical crisis that estranges him from the world; and the lonely young poet of Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. In this slim first book Bellow has not yet developed a vehicle adequate to the kind of novel he is feeling his way towards, one that will offer the customary novelistic satisfactions, including involvement in what feels like real-life conflict in a real-life world, yet leave its author free to deploy his reading in European literature and thought in order to explore contemporary life and its discontents. For that step in Bellow’s evolution we will have to wait for Herzog (1964).
Asa Leventhal, who may or may not be the victim in the short novel The Victim, is an editor on a small trade magazine in Manhattan. At work he has to endure the pricks of casual anti-Semitism. His wife, whom he loves dearly, is out of town.
One day, on the street, Leventhal gets the feeling he is being watched. A man approaches him, greets him. Dimly he recalls the man’s name: Allbee. Why is he late, asks Allbee – does he not remember that they had a rendezvous? Leventhal can remember no such thing. Then why he is here, asks Allbee? (Time and again Allbee will throw Leventhal with such logical ju-jitsu.)
Having trapped Leventhal, Allbee embarks on a tedious story from the past in which Allbee had fixed Leventhal up with an interview with his (Allbee’s) boss, during which Leventhal had (on purpose, Allbee says) behaved insultingly, as a result of which Allbee lost his job.
Leventhal dimly recalls the events but rejects the implication
that the interview was part of a plot against Allbee. If he stormed out of the interview, he says, it was because Allbee’s boss showed no interest in hiring him.
Nevertheless, says Allbee, he is now jobless and homeless and has to sleep in flophouses. So what is Leventhal going to do about it?
Thus commences Allbee’s persecution of Leventhal – or so it feels to Leventhal. Doggedly Leventhal resists Allbee’s claim that he has been wronged and is therefore owed. All of this resistance is presented from the inside: there is no helping hint from the author to tell us whose side to take, which of the two is the victim and which the persecutor. Nor are we issued with any authorial guidance in the moral area. Is Leventhal prudently resisting being taken for a ride, or is he refusing to accept that we are each our brother’s keeper? Why me? – that is Leventhal’s sole cry. Why does this stranger blame me, hate me, seek redress from me?
Leventhal claims his hands are clean, but the friends he consults are not so sure. Why did he become mixed up in the first place, they ask, with an unsavoury character like Allbee? Is he being entirely honest with himself about his motives?
Leventhal recalls his first meeting with Allbee, at a party. A Jewish girl had sung a ballad, and Allbee had told her she should try a psalm instead.‘If you’re not born to them [American ballads], it’s no use trying to sing them.’ (p. 174) Did he, Leventhal, at that moment unconsciously mark down Allbee as an anti-Semite, and decide to pay him back?
With a heavy heart, Leventhal offers Allbee refuge in his apartment. Their cohabitation is a miserable failure. Allbee’s personal habits are squalid. He pries into Leventhal’s private papers. (Allbee: If you don’t trust me, why leave your desk unlocked?) Leventhal loses his temper and strikes Allbee, but Allbee keeps bouncing back.
Allbee preaches a lesson that (he says) Leventhal ought to be able to understand despite being a Jew, namely that we have all to repent and become new men. Leventhal doubts Allbee’s sincerity and says so. You doubt me because you are a Jew and I am not, replies Allbee. But why me? demands Leventhal again.‘Why?’ replies Allbee.‘For good reasons; the best in the world . . . I’m giving you a chance to be fair, Leventhal, and to do what’s right.’ (p. 328)
Arriving home one evening, Leventhal finds the door locked against him and Allbee in bed with a prostitute – not just in bed, in Leventhal’s bed. Leventhal’s outrage amuses Allbee. ‘Where else, if not in bed? . . . Maybe you have some other way, more refined, different. Don’t you people claim that you are the same as everybody else?’ (p. 362)
Who is Allbee? A madman? A prophet in deep disguise? A sadist who selects his victims at random?
Allbee has his own story. He is like the plains Indian, he says, who in the coming of the railroad foresees the end of his old way of life. He has decided to join the new dispensation. Leventhal the Jew, member of the new master race, must find him a job on the railroad of the future. ‘I want to get off [my] pony and be a conductor on that train.’ (p. 329)
With his wife about to return, Leventhal orders Allbee to find other accommodation. In the middle of the night he wakes up to find the apartment full of gas. Allbee has been trying unsuccessfully to gas himself in the kitchen.
Allbee disappears from Leventhal’s life. Years pass. By degrees Leventhal sheds the feeling that he has ‘got away with it’. (p. 372) There was never any need to feel guilty, he reflects. Allbee had no right to envy him his good job, his happy marriage. Envy like that rests on a false premise: that to each of us a promise has been made. No such promise has ever been made to any of us, neither by God nor by the state.
Then one evening he runs into Allbee in the theatre. Allbee is squiring a faded actress; he smells of drink. I have found my place on the train, Allbee informs him, but not as conductor, merely as a passenger. I have come to terms with ‘whoever runs things’. ‘What’s your idea of who runs things?’ asks Leventhal. (p. 379) But Allbee has disappeared into the crowd.
Bellow’s Kirby Allbee is an inspired creation, comic, pathetic, repulsive, and menacing. Sometimes his anti-Semitism seems amiable in a bluff kind of way; sometimes he seems to have been taken over by his own caricature of the Jew, who now lives inside him, an anti-Jew speaking through his lips. You Jews are taking over the world, he whines. There is nothing for us poor Americans to do but seek out a humble corner for ourselves. Why do you victimise us so? What harm have we ever done you?
There is also a patrician-American twist to Allbee’s anti-Semitism. ‘Do you know, one of my ancestors was Governor Winthrop,’ he says. ‘Isn’t it [i.e., isn’t the present state of affairs] preposterous? It’s really as if the children of Caliban were running everything.’ (p. 259)
Above all Allbee is shameless, id-like, unclean. Even his moments of ingratiation are offensive. Let me touch your hair, he pleads with Leventhal – ‘It’s like an animal’s hair.’ (p. 323)
Leventhal is a good husband, a good uncle, a good brother, a good worker in trying circumstances. He is enlightened, he is not a troublemaker. He wants to be part of mainstream American society. His father did not care what gentiles thought of him as long as they paid what they owed. ‘That was his father’s view. But not his. He rejected and recoiled from it.’ (p. 232) He has a social conscience. He is aware of how easily, in America in particular, one can fall among ‘the lost, the outcast, the overcome, the effaced, the ruined.’ (p. 158) He is even a good neighbour – after all, none of Allbee’s gentile friends had been prepared to take him in. What more can be demanded of him?
The answer is: everything. The Victim is Bellow’s most Dostoevskian book. The plot is adapted from Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband, the story of a man accosted out of the blue by the husband of a woman he had an affair with years ago, someone whose insinuations and demands become more and more insufferably intimate. But it is not just the plot for which Bellow is indebted to Dostoevsky, and the motif of the detested double. The very spirit of The Victim is Dostoevskian. The supports for our neat, well-ordered lives can crumble at any minute; inhuman demands can without warning be made of us, and from the strangest quarters; it will be only natural to resist (Why me?); but if we want to be saved we have no choice, we must drop everything and follow. Yet this essentially religious message is put in the mouth of a repulsive anti-Semite. Is it any wonder that Leventhal baulks?
Leventhal’s heart is not closed; his resistance is not complete. There is something in all of us, he recognises, that fights against the slumber of the quotidian. In Allbee’s company, at stray moments, he feels on the point of escaping the confines of his old identity and seeing the world through fresh eyes. Something seems to be occurring in the area of his heart, some kind of premonition, whether of a heart attack or something more exalted he cannot say. At one moment he looks at Allbee and Allbee looks back and they might as well be the same person. At another – rendered in Bellow’s most masterly understated prose – we are somehow convinced that Leventhal is teetering on the point of revelation. But then a great fatigue overtakes him. It is all too much.
Looking back over his career, Bellow has tended to disparage The Victim. If Dangling Man was his BA as a writer, he has said, The Victim was his PhD. ‘I was still learning, establishing my credentials, proving that a young man from Chicago had a right to claim the world’s attention.’3 He is too modest. The Victim is within inches of joining Billy Budd in the first rank of American novellas. If it has a weakness, it is a weakness not of execution but of ambition. It was within Bellow’s powers to make Leventhal enough of an intellectual heavyweight to dispute with Allbee (and with Dostoevsky behind him) the universality of the Christian model of the call to repentance. But he did not do so.
(2004)
17 Arthur Miller, The Misfits
THE MISFITS (1961) was put together by a notable set of creative people. The film is based on an original screenplay by Arthur Miller. It was directed by John Huston; and it starred Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in what turned out to be their last big roles. Though it w
as not a great box-office success, it continues to hang around on the fringes of critical attention, and deservedly so.
The plot is simple. A woman, Roslyn, visiting Reno, Nevada, for a quick divorce, gets friendly with a group of part-time cowboys and goes off with them into the desert on a jaunt to trap wild horses. There she discovers that the horses will end up not as riding mounts but as pet food. The discovery precipitates a breakdown of trust between her and the men, a breakdown that the film patches over only in the most uneasy and unconvincing of ways.
Aside from the ending, the script is a strong one. Miller is operating at the tail end of a long literary tradition of reflecting on the closing of America’s western frontier, and the effects of that closing on the American psyche. Huckleberry Finn, at the end of the book about him by Mark Twain, still had the recourse of lighting out for the territories so as to escape civilisation (and Nevada, in the 1840s of Huck’s childhood, was one of the territories in question). Miller’s cowboys, a century or so later, are trapped in the States with nowhere to go. One of them, Gaye (Clark Gable), has become a gigolo preying on divorcees. Another, Perce (Montgomery Clift) scrapes together a living as a rodeo performer. The third, Guido (Eli Wallach), exhibits the dark side of the male homosociality of the frontier, namely a vicious misogyny.
These are Miller’s misfits, men who have either failed to make the transition to the modern world or are making that transition in an ignominious way. The three are presented with a roundedness that is rare in cinema, the result of Miller’s deft professional stagecraft.
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