Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Miss Ferguson would not put up with redundancy, prolixity, periphrasis, or bombast. She taught us to stick to the necessary and avoid the superfluous. Did I heed her warnings, follow her teaching? Not absolutely, I’m afraid, for in my early years I wrote more than one fat book. It’s difficult for me now to read those early novels, not because they lack interest but because I find myself editing them, slimming down my sentences and cutting whole paragraphs.

Men who loved stout women used to say (how long ago that was!), “You can’t have too much of a good thing.” Everyone does understand, however, that a good thing can be overdone. Those devoted men, it should be added, didn’t invent the obese ladies whom they loved; they discovered them.

Some of our greatest novels are very thick. Fiction is a loose popular art, and many of the classic novelists get their effects by heaping up masses of words. Decades ago, Somerset Maugham was inspired to publish pared-down versions of some of the very best. His experiment didn’t succeed. Something went out of the books when their bulk was reduced. It would be mad to edit a novel like Little Dorrit. That sea of words is a sea, a force of nature. We want it that way, ample, capable of breeding life. When its amplitude tires us we readily forgive it. We wouldn’t want it any other way.

Yet we respond with approval when Chekhov tells us, “Odd, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read—my own or other people’s works—it all seems to me not short enough.” I find myself emphatically agreeing with this. There is a modern taste for brevity and condensation. Kafka, Beckett, and Borges wrote short. People of course do write long, and write successfully, but to write short is felt by a growing public to be a very good thing—perhaps the best. At once a multitude of possible reasons for this feeling comes to mind: This is the end of the millennium. We have heard it all. We have no time. We have more significant fish to fry. We require a wider understanding, new terms, a deeper penetration.

Of course, to obtain attention is harder than it used to be. The more leisure we have, the stiffer the competition for eyes and ears and mental space. On the front page of this morning’s national edition of the New York Times, Michael Jackson, with hundreds of millions of fans worldwide, has signed a new contract worth a billion with Sony Software “to create feature films, theatrical shorts, television programming and a new record label for the Japanese conglomerate’s American entertainment subsidiaries.” Writers do not have such expectations and are not directly affected by the entertainment world. What is of interest to us here is that these are facts involving multitudes, that the news is commented upon by a leading “communications analyst,” and that the article is continued in the Living Arts section of the paper, where the Trump divorce is also prominently featured, together with the usual television stuff, bridge, gardening, and Paris fashions. A new novel is reviewed on page B2.

I don’t want to be understood as saying that writers should be concerned about the existence of these other publics.

There is a wonderful Daumier caricature of a bluestocking, a severe lady stormily looking through the newspaper at a café table. “Nothing but sports, snipe-hunting. And not a single word about my novel!” she complains.

What I do say is that we (we writers, I mean) must cope with a plethora of attractions and excitements—world crises, hot and cold wars, threats to survival, famines, unspeakable crimes. To conceive of these as “rivals” would be absurd even monstrous. I say no more than that these crises produce states of mind and attitudes toward existence that artists must take into account.

The subject is not an easy one. I shall try to make a new beginning: Years ago Robert Frost and I exchanged signed copies. I gave him a novel respectfully dedicated. He signed a copy of his collected poems for me, adding, “To read 11 I will read him.” A great tease, Frost. He couldn’t promise to read my novel. I already knew his poems. You couldn’t get a high school certificate in Chicago without memorizing “Mending Wall.” What Frost hinted, perhaps, was that my novel might not stand high on his list of priorities. Why should he read mine, why not another? And why should I read his poems? I had my choice of dozens of other poets.

It’s perfectly plain that we are astray in forests of printed matter. The daily papers are thick. Giant newsstands are virtually thatched with magazines. As for books—well, the English scholar F. L. Lucas wrote in the fifties: “With nearly twenty thousand volumes published yearly in Britain alone, there is a danger of good books, both new and old, being buried under the bad. If the process went on indefinitely we should finally be pushed into the sea by our libraries. Yet there are few of these books that might not at least be shorter, and all the better for being shorter; and most of them could, I believe, be most effectively shortened, not by cutting out whole chapters but by purging their sentences of useless words and paragraphs of their useless sentences.” Answer the problem of quantity with improved quality—a touching idea, but Utopian. Too late, thirty years ago we had already been pushed into the sea.

The modern reader (or viewer, or listener: let’s include everybody) is perilously overloaded. His attention is, to use the latest lingo, “targeted” by powerful forces. I hate to make lists of these forces, but I suppose that some of them had better be mentioned. Okay, then: automobile and pharmaceutical giants, cable TV, politicians, entertainers, academics, opinion makers, porn videos, Ninja Turtles, et cetera. The list is tedious because it is an inventory of what is put into our heads day in, day out. Our consciousness is a staging area, a field of operations for all kinds of enterprises, which make free use of it. True, we are at liberty to think our own thoughts, but our independent ideas, such as they may be, must live with thousands of ideas and notions inculcated by influential teachers or floated by “idea men,” advertisers, communications people, columnists, anchormen, et cetera. Better-regulated (educated) minds are less easily overcome by these gas clouds of opinion. But no one can have an easy time of it. In all fields we are forced to seek special instruction, expert guidance to the interpretation of the seeming facts we are stuffed with. This is in itself a full-time occupation. A part of every mind, perhaps the major portion, is open to public matters. Without being actively conscious of it we somehow keep track of the Middle East, Japan, South Africa, reunified Germany, oil, munitions, the New York subways, the homeless, the markets, the banks, the major leagues, news from Washington; and also, pell-mell, films, trials, medical discoveries, rap groups, racial clashes, congressional scandals, the spread of AIDS, child murders—a crowd of horrors. Public life in the United States is a mass of distractions.

By some this is seen as a challenge to their ability to maintain internal order. Others have acquired a taste for distraction, and they freely consent to be addled. It may even seem to many that by being agitated they are satisfying the claims of society. The scope of the disorder can even be oddly flattering: “Just look—this tremendous noisy frantic monstrous agglomeration. There’s never been anything like it. And we are it! This is us!”

Vast organizations exist to get our attention. They make cunning plans. They bite us with their ten-second bites. Our consciousness is their staple; they live on it. Think of consciousness as a territory just opening to settlement and exploitation, something like an Oklahoma land rush. Put it in color, set it to music, frame it in images—but even this fails to do justice to the vision. Obviously consciousness is infinitely bigger than Oklahoma.