Refiner’s Fire: The Human Understanding of Saul Bellow

When the American novelist Saul Bellow (b. 1915) was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, it was only the latest in a series of awards he has received over the past two decades. The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964), and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) each garnered the National Book Award, and Humboldt’s Gift (1975) won Bellow the Pulitzer Prize. He has received the commendation of governments, and various universities have awarded him honorary degrees. The Nobel Prize, however, is special. It means that Bellow is recognized to be a writer whose significance is truly international.

In awarding the prize the Swedish Academy cited Bellow “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.” Certainly these two qualities have marked Bellow’s writing from the beginning. But it is the former that interests me most—the “human understanding” that pervades his work from his first novel, Dangling Man (1944), to his most recent work, To Jerusalem and Back (1976), his only book-length piece of nonfiction.

“What is the true stature of a human being?” asks Mr. Sammler, the seventy-year-old hero of my favorite Bellow novel. Indeed, what is it? Bellow asked the same question in Dangling Man. There Joseph, the hero (or anti-hero, really), fears the answer might lie with Hobbes: “The world was crude and it was dangerous and, if no measures were taken, existence could indeed become—in Thomas Hobbes’ phrase, which had long lodged in Joseph’s mind—’nasty, brutish, short.’ ” Skip thirty-two years to 1976 and we find Bellow in To Jerusalem and Back still contemplating Hobbes: “We forget … that as a species we are generally close to ‘the state of nature,’ as Thomas Hobbes described it—a nasty, brutish, pitiless condition in which men are too fearful of death to give much thought to freedom.”

These brief passages only hint at the multitude of themes woven into Bellow’s work. He deals with the nature of man—his dignity and freedom; his alienation from God, from others, and from himself; his desire for a view from the top, for a way out of finitude, for a way to live meaningfully this side of death and then move through and beyond it.

Does Bellow understand the plight of people caught in finitude—a brief episode of consciousness between two oblivions? Consider Joseph, the draft-age man who in the middle of World War II dangles for months between a civilian job and the military. No one identifies with him, society has cut him off, he can’t even cash a check. And so, “alone ten hours a day in a single room,” he has time to think. And think he does. As Alfred Kazin says, “Bellow’s protagonists are intellectuals and have to think, think, think all the time.” Think and dream—dream of death, of facing his murderer, the one who comes in any and every guise to make the nasty and brutish also short.

Joseph writes in his diary, “I can safely think of such things [his recurring visions of death] on a bright afternoon.… When they come at night, the heart, like a toad, exudes its fear with a repulsive puff. But toward morning I have away also of holding court on myself, and that is even more intolerable. Half-conscious, I call in a variety of testimony on my case and am confronted by the wrongs, errors, lies, disgraces, and fears of a lifetime. I am forced to pass judgment on myself and to ask questions I would rather not ask: ‘What is this for?’ and ‘What am I for?’ and ‘Am I made for this?’ ”

But Joseph is a humanist. He cannot believe in a God who could provide what Joseph cannot provide for himself—“grace without meanness.” “There are no values outside life. There is nothing outside life,” Joseph says. “No, not God, not any divinity.” To attain an answer that would satisfy him Joseph realizes that he would have “to sacrifice the mind that sought to be satisfied.” So, he concludes, “My beliefs are inadequate, they do not guard me. I think invariably of the awning of the store on the corner. It gives us much protection against rain and wind as my beliefs give against the chaos I am forced to face.” His philosophy of life cannot stand when its implicit philosophy of death is laid bare.

Many—I think most—of Bellow’s major characters are humanists. And all of them who think (which is all of them) face Joseph’s dilemma: to satisfy the mind one must sacrifice the mind. Joseph refuses to do this. Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift, toying with such theosophical trivializers as Rudolph Steiner, sacrifices both his mind and his common sense.

But Mr. Sammler is different—unique among heroes of modern novels, really. Sammler intuits a reality beyond his present threescore and ten: “[A man] has something in him which he feels it important to continue. Something that deserves to go on.… The spirit feels cheated, outraged, defiled, corrupted, fragmented, injured. Still it knows what it knows, and the knowledge cannot be gotten rid of.” Sammler, alone among Bellow’s characters, sees through the chaos of contemporary existence and has at least a vision of what it would be like to see things sub specie aeternitatis, from a place beyond time which would provide a norm for existence in time.

This, of course, is what Christians have claimed the Bible and God’s acts in history have given—a place to stand, a plumbline to measure moral rectitude. Bellow never seriously considers a fully orthodox Christian viewpoint. But Mr. Sammler shows that the ideas have not been far from his purview.

This is why, after Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift is so disappointing. In the 1970s Charlie Citrine, who calls “the death question” the “question of questions,” is attracted by the occult with its offer of psychic salvation. In the 1940s Joseph knew better than to hasten after false prophets, as his put-down of Christian Science shows. Joseph’s brother, for example, says, “Some fine afternoon I’ll stick a knife into him [a Christian Scientist] and say, ‘Pray yourself out of that, you bastard.’ That’s a vulgar refutation, like Johnson’s kicking the stone to triumph over Berkeley. But I can’t think of any other way to deal with him.” One could wish for more of this kind of realism in Humboldt’s Gift. But such is the logic of the human search for meaning: if the truth is missed, any error is as likely as another—naturalistic humanism, gnostic mysticism, you name it.

Bellow, I suspect, is continuing his literary quest for the human understanding the Swedish Academy so aptly cited. But I also suspect that his contribution to that understanding will come mainly through his novels. To Jerusalem and Back is a record, a “personal Israel syllabus,” he calls it, of several months’ stay in the country of his ethnic origin. But though its themes are universal, its details are transient, too tied to one time, one place, too free from imagination and mythic power. Non-fiction is not Bellow’s strongest medium.

But give him the artist’s prerogative of speaking sub specie aeternitatis as far as the worlds of his own novels are concerned, and Bellow becomes a creator of literary universes (Tolkien calls them Secondary Worlds) where chaos is brought under control.

“I am not a journalist. I am a dreamier sort of creature,” he says in To Jerusalem. “Being a writer is a rather dreamy thing,” he remarked in an interview after the Nobel Prize was announced. “One has to protect one’s dream space.”

If Bellow succeeds in keeping celebrity status from spoiling him, and I think he will, we will see from him more wondrous works of the imagination but perhaps be left with no more wondrous prizes to award.

James W. Sire is the editor of Inter-Varsity Press and the author of “The Universe Next Door.”

What Tall Tales Teach

When I was in the fourth grade my class delighted in hearing American folk tales—Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Pecos Bill, or Johnny Appleseed, for example. Those tall tales taught us something about our country and about the American imagination.

When we studied other lands we learned history and geography. They’re important, and we had to learn straight facts about our nation, too. But the flavor of a people comes through in its folk tales.

Ethnic anecdotes are gaining in popularity, and last fall several such books were published. The people represented include Bantu and Hottentot, gypsy, Mexican, Arab, and Tadzhikistan. The wit, customs, myths, religion, and culture of each are well conveyed through words and illustrations. The publishers are to be commended.

Ranking these books is not simple; each has its appealing characteristics. I think my favorite is Forbes Stuart’s third collection of African folktales, The Magic Horns (Addison-Wesley). Two of the eight stories are familiar, though the versions might be strange to some children: “How the Leopard Got Its Spots” and “The Hare and the Tortoise.” Aesop added a moral that the Hottentot storyteller left out. Appreciation for the shrewd tortoise remains. In these tales the animals talk, as in the introduction to the well-known story:

“Four hundred and sixty years went by before the hares solved the mystery of how their speedy ancestor had been defeated in a race against the cumbersome tortoise. One hundred and twenty-five years after the event itself, an aging tortoise told the story—in confidence of course—to an elephant who kept it to himself for two hundred and seven years. Then he told a jackal who passed it on to a baboon who informed a parrot. Growing increasingly garrulous with age, the parrot—in his sixty-seventh year—told his tale to a Hottentot storyteller.…” The numbers and adjectives add believability to this tall tale. Charles Keeping’s fine illustrations convey an African atmosphere, and the animals seem about to reveal more long-held secrets.

One of the best writers for younger children, Dorothy O. Van Woerkom, has retold three Middle Eastern tales. The vocabulary in Abu Ali (Macmillan) is simple and the stories clever and amusing; the book is a good one to give young readers.

Mexican Folk Tales (distributed by Scribner’s) is the most religious of these new books. Juliet Piggott’s retelling shows both Catholic and Aztec influences on the religious thought of this people. John Spencer’s illustrations reflect the Aztec half. Mexico is not just a Spanish nation. Many Indian tribes still speak their own languages (the first major missionary effort of Wycliffe Bible Translators began there), and these tales show some of the myths still held by many of Mexico’s people. Quetzalcoatl, the god who first discovered corn, and Tlaloc, the rain god to whom the corn really belonged, are deities that reflect the major agricultural interest of the people. Piggott’s book would make a good resource for Sunday-school mission programs.

Abingdon’s little book entitled Sister of the Birds and Other Gypsy Tales should delight anyone interested in gypsies (and who isn’t fascinated by these peculiar people?). Polish author Jerzy Ficowski has traveled with the gypsy camps in Poland; translator Lucia Borski, who was born in Warsaw and lived there until she was sixteen, puts these stories in interesting English.

The Sandalwood Box (Scribner’s) is the longest and most unusual of the folktale books. Tadzhikistan is a Muslim country northwest of the Pamir highlands, bordering Afghanistan on the south and China on the east. The language is similar to Persian, though these tales are translated from German, but the people use the Cyrillic (Russian) alphabet. The glossary at the front of the book is essential to understanding the stories. Many of these clever tales turn on the relationship between ruler and the ruled, husband and wife, God or the spirits and human beings—in short, between the strong and the weak. Long-time missionaries to that part of the world have said that Westerners have a difficult time understanding the Eastern mentality. Here’s a book to help.

CHERYL FORBES

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