Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Every writer is eventually called a “beautiful writer,” just as all flowers are eventually called pretty. Any prose above the most ordinary is applauded; and “stylists” are crowned every day, of steadily littler kingdoms. Amidst this busy relativity, it is easy to take for granted the immense stylistic powers of Saul Bellow, who, with Faulkner, is the greatest modern American writer of prose.

But again, many writers are called “great”; the word is everywhere, industrially farmed. In Bellow’s case it means greatly abundant, greatly precise, greatly various, rich, and strenuous. It means prose as a registration of the joy of life: the happy rolling freedom of his daring, uninsured sentences. These qualities are present in Bellow’s stories as fully as in his novels. Any page from this selection yields a prose of august raciness, ripe with inheritance (the rhythms of Melville and Whitman, Lawrence and Joyce, and behind them, Shakespeare). This prose sometimes cascades in poured adjectives (a river, in “The Old System,” seen as “crimped, green, blackish, glassy”) and at other times darts with lancing metaphorical wit (“his baldness was total, like a purge”). Controlling these different modes of expression is a firm intelligence, always tending to peal into comic, metaphysical wryness—as in the description of Behrens, the florist, in Something to Remember Me By”: “Amid the flowers, he alone had no color—something like the price he paid for being human.”

Bellow is a great portraitist of the human form, Dickens’s equal at the swift creation of instant gargoyles; everyone remembers Valentine Gersbach in Herzog, with his wooden leg, “bending and straightening gracefully like a gondolier.” In these stories, more eagerly chased by form than the novels, Bellow is even more swift and compactly appraising. In “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” we encounter Victor Wulpy, the great art critic and theorist, who is disheveled and “wore his pants negligently”: “By the way his entire face expanded when he spoke emphatically you recognized that he was a kind of tyrant in thought”; in “Cousins,” Cousin Riva: “I remembered Riva as a full-figured, dark-haired, plump, straight-legged woman. Now all the geometry of her figure had changed. She had come down in the knees like the jack of a car, to a diamond posture”; in “A Silver Dish,” Pop, who fights with his son on the ground and then suddenly becomes still: “His eyes stuck out and his mouth was open, sullen. Like a stout fish”; in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” Professor Kippenberg, a great scholar with bushy eyebrows “like caterpillars from the Tree of Knowledge”; in “Zetland,” Max Zetland, with a “black cleft” in his chin, an “unshavable pucker”; and McKern, the drunk brought home by the young narrator of “Something to Remember Me By,” and laid out naked on a sofa: “I looked in at McKern, who had thrown down the coat and taken off his drawers. The parboiled face, the short nose pointed sharply, the life signs in the throat, the broken look of his neck, the black hair of his belly, the short cylinder between his legs ending in a spiral of loose skin, the white shine of the shins, the tragic expression of his feet.”

What function do these exuberant physical sketches have? First, there is joy, simple joy, to be had from reading the sentences. The description of Professor Kippenberg’s bushy eyebrows as resembling caterpillars from the Tree of Knowledge is not just a fine joke; when we laugh, it is with appreciation for a species of wit that is properly called metaphysical. We delight in the curling process of invention whereby seemingly incompatible elements—eyebrows and caterpillars and Eden; or women’s hips and car jacks—are combined. Thus, although we feel after reading Bellow that most novelists do not really bother to attend closely enough to people’s shapes and dents, his portraiture does not exist merely as realism. We are encouraged not just to see the lifelikeness of Bellow’s characters, but to partake in a creative joy, the creator’s joy in making them look like this. This is not just how people look; they are also sculptures, pressed into by the artist’s quizzical and ludic force. In “Mosby’s Memoirs,” for instance, a few lines describe a Czech pianist performing SchЎnberg. “This man, with muscular baldness, worked very hard upon the keys.” Certainly, we quickly have a vision of this “muscular baldness”; we know what this looks like. But then Bellow adds: “the muscles of his forehead rising in protest against tabula rasa —the bare skull,” and suddenly we have entered the surreal, the realm of play: how strange and comic, the idea that the muscles of the man’s head are somehow rebelling against the bareness, the blankness, the tabula rasa, of his bald head!

But of course, Bellow does also make us see the human form, does open our senses and discipline our sensibilities, as Flaubert told Maupassant the writer should: “There is a part of everything which is unexplored,” said Flaubert, “because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.” Bellow exposes this unknown quality, either by force of metaphorical wit (hips like a car jack) or by noticing, with unexpected tenderness of vision, what we have grown accustomed to overlooking: the “white shine” of poor McKern’s shins as he lies on the bed, or Pop’s bald head, as remembered by his son in “A Silver Dish”: “the sweat was sprinkled over his scalp—more drops than hairs.”

And seeing is important, lays an injunction on us, in these stories. Many of them are narrated by men who are remembering childhood experiences, or at least younger days, and are using powers of visual recall to conjure forth vivid characters and heroes. Physical detail, exactly rendered, is memory’s quarry and makes its own moral case: it is how we bring the dead back to life, give them a second life in our minds. In fact, these memories become, through force of evocation, a first life again and begin to jostle us as the actually living do. In “Cousins,” the narrator agrees to intervene in a relative’s court case because his family memories exert a pressure over him: “I did it for Cousin Metzger’s tic. For the three bands of Neapolitan ice cream. For the furious upright growth of Cousin Shana’s ruddy hair, and the avid veins of her temples and in the middle of her forehead. For the strength with which her bare feet advanced as she mopped the floor and spread the pages of the Tribune over it.”

Bellow’s way of seeing his characters also tells us something about his metaphysics. In his fictional world, people do not stream with motives; as novelists go, he is no depth psychologist. Instead, his characters are embodied souls, stretched essences. Their bodies are their confessions, their moral camouflage faulty and peeling: they have the bodies they deserve. Victor Wulpy, a tyrant in thought, has a large, tyrannical head; Max Zetland, a reproving, witholding father, has an unshavable cleft or pucker in his chin, and when he smokes, “he held in the smoke of his cigarettes.” It is perhaps for this reason that Bellow is rarely found describing young people; even his middle-aged characters seem old. For in a sense he turns all his characters into old people, since the old helplessly wear their essences on their bodies, they are seniors in moral struggle. Aunt Rose, in “The Old System,” has a body almost literally eaten into by history: She had a large bust, wide hips, and old-fashioned thighs of those corrupted shapes that belong to history.”