Action and Idea in Saul Bellow

Among his contemporaries, Saul Bellow is distinguished because he joins intellectual interest to imagination. Unfortunately, the two don’t perfectly mesh, so that although Bellow is beyond question one of our best novelists, he has never written a wholly successful novel. Bellow’s deficiency is not excessive contrivance, the too-naked transfiguration of action into idea; rather, it is the separation between them.

That became apparent in his second book, The Victim, in whose powerfully evoked urban environment anti-Semitism constitutes a rage of the disappointed. But Bellow is not satisfied merely with dramatizing a fact of life. He wants to moralize it; if possible, to point a way out. So he asserts that society’s victim is not only the persecuted Jew but the anti-Semitic gentile who is ironically victimized by the Jew’s instinctual self-protectiveness. Though Bellow’s insights are brilliant, they are often rendered in authorial asides, and the debates of his two central characters lead an existence progressively divorced from the facts of their experience. Moreover, in seeking to prepare for the book’s upbeat finale (in which the hero, Leventhal, acknowledges kinship with the anti-Semite), Bellow creates a raisonneur, a Mr. Schlossberg, whose obtrusive positivism succeeds only partly in being dramatic by virtue of his richly idiomatic slang.

The division in Bellow’s fiction between mimetic vividness and extraneous discourse is even more gaping in The Adventures of Augie March because this book’s marvelous collection of grotesques, babbling in polyglot plenitude, would overwhelm even a professional sage. In the novel’s first half, Augie’s refusal to be appropriated is only an amiable pretext that allows him to meet, seriatim, the urban Machiavellians. At midpoint, however, Bellow decides to make Augie not a reflector but an interesting character; and now things begin to collapse. Though Augie has been a lover only in the vaguest sense, we are asked to regard his disaffiliation as a sin against Eros. The plot, heretofore so richly realistic, suddenly turns symbolic, while characters (like the mad scientist, Bateshaw) become exemplary, and the tangy blend of idiom and erudition loses its savor through adulteration by rhetoric. Moreover, Augie starts playing Schlossberg on himself, giving us that passage, so dear to academic celebrants of Bellow’s “accommodation” but so embarrassing to the reader, on the saving power of “axial lines.” Then, perhaps exhausted by having breathed life into so ample a human parade, Bellow can only exhale, in conclusion, that existence is a bitter-sweet riddle.

Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories by Saul Bellow (Viking, $5.00)

In addition, an odd note of self-congratulation is first heard in Augie, subsequently rising to deafening volume in Herzog. Somewhat less brassily, it resounds through Henderson the Rain King, where, as in Augie’s case, the hero is constantly being criticized for that least reprehensible of human vices: expecting too much. What precisely Henderson expects we are never told, just as we are never told why he should be so encouraged by the solution of King Dahfu (Schlossberg in blackface). Achievements marginally related to Bellow’s theme quicken his book: the parodistic but nonetheless compelling African scenes.

In Herzog, Bellow offers his best characterization, his supplest language, but also his most insistent and least assimilated philosophizing. Moreover, by now, the hero’s aggrandizement, however speciously qualified by satire, seriously disrupts the plot.

For all his self-flagellation, Herzog is unambiguously the victim of a pack of Machiavellians that makes Augie’s look benign. Madeleine, Herzog’s wife, is indeed so awful that we can understand neither why he married her nor why he carries on after her loss. As a result, the wonderful letters which give the book flesh seem not so much to extend as to inflate its action.

Only in “Seize the Day,” a masterpiece that belongs with the best novellas in English, does Bellow embed his ideas in the action, because only in this work does he keep faith with his essential vision of man plowed down by the egotism of his fellows. This story succeeds because it treats what is demonstrably Bellow’s favorite human relationships: fathers and sons or sons and brothers (all that is most deeply felt in Bellow falls into these categories: Leventhal and Albee, broth ers despite race; fatherless Augie and his love-hate for Simon; Henderson making brother-father-mentor out of Dahfu; Herzog seeking father figures throughout time and space) and what is demonstrably his primal misfortune: the rupturing of such relationships. Third, by compressing himself within a narrow scope, Bellow controls his tendency toward extraneous discourse. Finally, he chooses for his spokesman figure a sage as ambiguous and complex as the data he would interpret (Dr. Tamkin). Literally on a tide of images (mainly of water), Bellow brings both reader and hero to the “consummation of [the] heart’s ultimate need,” the truest affirmation of brotherhood, the brotherhood of pain.

Yet in praising “Seize the Day,” I do not mean to imply that Bellow is fine only in short works with dour implications. In his whole career, he has written some dozen short tales, the best of which is more affirmative than the novels. But on the whole, the short form simply does not provide him with room sufficient for the flexing of mental muscles, and the most recent stories in this new collection seem undernourished versions of his longer works. “Mosby’s Memoirs,” the title story, about a diplomat trying not to draw misanthropic conclusions from a recollected life, is a smallscale Herzog, so sketchy as to seem the rehearsal of some future book. “The Old System,” in which a Jewish scientist reviewing the history of his venal-vital family concludes that untidy life may be the best available, seems the pale ghost of Augie March. “Leaving the Yellow House,” in which an impoverished alcoholic affirms existence at its lowest ebb, is a more sentimental, less truly observed “Seize the Day.”

Since the book’s three other stories were all originally printed in the volume containing “Seize the Day” (1956), Mosby’s Memoirs would inspire us to retrospection even if the newer tales were less imitative. But it does contain one item that can never lose its freshness: “Looking for Mr. Green.” About an educated man forced during the Depression to work for the Welfare Department, this story traces his attempt to deliver a relief check to the elusive title character. In the course of his adventures, which Bellow fills with more wonderful characters than there are in all but his best novels, the hero begins really to feel for his clients, so that he is no longer a worker for personal survival but a seeker for human betterment. He may not have found the Mr. Green, but he finds the

determination to alleviate such suffering. This story is to Bellow’s positive vision what “Seize the Day” is to his knowledge of pain. Moreover, it reminds us that Bellow is also on a quest — to find a raison d’être in life’s senseless variety, not above it.