Bellow and the Burden of His Past

ONE MIGHT HAVE expected it of Saul Bellow Perhaps it was the Nobel Prize. Or maybe it was the Pulitzer, which the cunning novelist deserved and derided for so long that they finally gave it to him for his last novel. Humboldt's Gift in 1976 More likely, it was simply has own realization that he, certainly as much as any other American now writing had the talent and breadth of vision to take stock, as he might say, in a big way. The creeps and crazies, the depressingly sane, the visionaries--Bellow has claimed them all as his province. So it should be no surprise that his latest novel. The Dean's December pushes back the borders a bit further, to include the hitherto unincluded. His new annexation is the "jungle"--America's urban centers and their massive waste.

Bellow's ambition is admirable. Many writers have carved wombish little niches for themselves as "chroniclers"--so the "blurbistes" and reviewers call them--of some class or set. Even such a fine writer as John Updike does not care too much about people who happen not to live in an Eastern seaboard suburb or a small part of Pennsylvania and who do not now make more than $40,000. Sure action is supposed to take a long look in all the corners. But someone also has to take all the snapshots and try to piece them together into the moral. Below has consistently taken his picture with a wide angle lens. And even if the scene is always filtered through that unique character, the Bellow hero, much of Bellow's reputation owes to his ability to bind up magically a very incoherent world. In taking on the problems of the rotten heart of the city. Bellow performs an act of considerable artistic bravery as well as one of hubris.

Explonation, though, is usually a young man's profession. For Bellow at 67 the proposition of extended travel in unknown realms is a questionable one. Indeed, judging by The Dean's December, one wonders just how for from part the good ship Bellow gets, or whether it ever leaves the harbor at all.

EVERY BELLOW NOVEL has at its center some slightly modified version of the Bellow hero. A dreamy type, someone off in his own world--irretrievable so to the "commonsensical" folk surrounding him. The Bellow protagonist is a seer, a dealer in the currency of big ideas and grand historical visions. And yet, he has street smarts--savvy gleaned from a long well-spent education. But whether a garden-variety schlemiel like Tommy Wilhelm of Seize the Day, a disheveled and dislocated intellectual like Mosses Herzog of Herzog, or a questionably successful writer like Charlie Citrine of Humboldt's Gift. Homo Bellow has the task of getting himself horsewhipped by a comically brutal world. Then, of course, the Bellow protagonist will accept the world as his own awful mother. No fan-fare, no fireworks, just a tidy little epiphany.

The incarnation of The Dean's December is Albert Corde. A journalist by profession, he is an insider of the outside world--and for the last ten years a professor of journalism and dean of students at a Chicago college. The novel finds Corde far from home, stuck in a small apartment in Bucharest, waiting for his mother-in-law to die. Meditatively, he licks the wounds of recent Chicago battles--battles which rage unabated, awaiting his return. While ineptly ministering to the miseries of his emigre/astronomer ("Palomar calibre") wife. Minna (perhaps Bellow is losing his old feisttness: this protagonist is happily married, with no Renatas or Ramonas to scheme over him, no vicious wives trying to castrate him), and sucking down plum brandy. Corde explores the smoldering wreckage of life in Chicago, his and the city's.

The two are closely tied Corde had made it as a journalist while still very young, heading back to academe in mid-life to finish his "reading." Now he is recalled to the real world by a bad, even lethal state of affairs. A graduate student is murdered on a hot summer night in sordid circumstances and Corde has to identify the body. Shaken in a way he had not expected--"his feelings took him by surprise"--the Dean is moved to action.

Pressing the case with unusual vigor, he puts out a reward and eventually gets some arrests. The two suspects are inner-city Blacks, one a tough hoooker, the other Lucas Ebry, her part time procurer, a piece of human flotsam Corde's zeal for prosecution draws fire from many quarters. The liberals in the suburbs think he may be a racist, the college administration thinks he may be a bit unbalanced. The college radicals, led by Corde's nephew. Mason are sure he is both.

Mason, moreover, bears a grudge against his abstracted uncle, and has problems of his own.

His nephew as Corde saw him was in an uncomfortable stage of development Uncomfortable 'Bright light he was also bristling, writing The young racket wasn't doing him a but of good Well, the field was very crowded he was one of global millions How to rise above the rest, grab the lead--that was the challenge, and he hadn't yet figured out how this was to be done Hence the equivocal menace, a sort of announcement "Watch this space"

And when Mason retains Corde's cousin. Maxie ("I leshie Maxie") Detillion as Ebry's lawyer--Maxie, who swindled Corde and then played the hurt one ("Yes, thought Corde, and because he conned me down in Joliet and screwed me up in Chicago, he is, by his logic, the injured party. That's how it works. You swindle a man and then grab even the sense of injury for yourself. A devouring man devours all there is."), porcine Maxie of the sexual deviations ("if he should every be elected to office, he wouldn't put his hand on a Bible to take the oath, he'd put it on his cock")--we can see the classic Bellovian scenario shaping up: The world conspiring against the thinker with the twist this time of family acting the parts of conspirators.

Indeed, as if lining up most of the people at all concerned with the trial against himself were not enough. Corde invites aggravated assault when his fury at the city overflows into two articles in Harpers. He blends a bit of impressionistic journalism and intellectual freewheeling to blast Chicago on nearly every count--the courts, the jails, the neighborhoods--everything. Piling on top of it all Hegel. Vico and Rilke don't make it any more palatable. If the trial did not convince them, the articles did: Albert Corde is a poetic jackass.

Unfortunately, Bellow has a problem connecting. Corde recalls from the Bucharest flat in endless flashbacks and conversations the list of horrors, but we can't manage to see them quite so vividly as Corde does. Only once does Bellow, who seems to stand fairly close behind Corde, trying to speak over his protagonist's shoulder, break through. Describing a case in which a man kidnaps a woman, rapes her repeatedly and locks her in the trunk of his car, finally shooting her and dumping the body in a trash heap. Bellow drives home the point of a world out of control. But he undercuts the effect when Corde gives his own impressions of the event to the defending lawyer in a language that sounds a cross from Annie Hall doublespeak and pop psychologese:

"I see more than a white mask facing a black one. I see two pictures of the soul and spirit--if you will have it straight. In our flesh-and-blood existence I think we are pictures of something. So I see a picture, and a picture. Race has no bearing on it. I see Spofford Mitchell and Sally Sathers, two separatenesses, two separate and ignorant intelligences. One is staring at the other with terror, and the man is filled with a staggering passion to break through, in the only way he can conceive of breaking through--a sexual crash into release."

"Release! I see. From fever and delirium."

"From all the whirling. The horrors is in the literalness--the genital literalness of the delusion. That's what gives the curse its finality. The literalness of bodies and their members--outsides without insides."

That doesn't sound so much like horror or anarchy or even the insides of the horror, the causes of it. It sounds more like studied expression, a bit of stylized rhetoric and not a real indication of where the problem lies. Possibly Bellow intends to convey the impotence of to speech about the subject. But that seems unlikely. Though Corde is not Bellow, there is an unmistakably close relationship between the intellect of creator and character.

Yet another, more important, reason why the reader can never feel so urgent a threat from the debris of the city as Corde lies in the logorrhea of the work, idea-rrhea, maybe, would be a better word. Bellow has long made the wild stringing of ideas a calling card of his, utilizing it next in Herzog. The average Bellow chapter contains mention of more great thinkers than there are on the Modern Library publication list, and usually he pulls it off. But in The Dean's December one senses the so-called "novel of ideas" working back-on itself, turning horror into an abstraction rather than applying the ideas to make some out of the horror. Bellow writes about the process of thinking about the manifold breakdown Corde is observing.

You see(Corde say), you being to lose contact with human beings and with the world. You experience spiritual loneliness. And of course there are the classics to mull over. Dostoyevsky's apathy-with-intensity, and the rage for goodness so near to vileness and murderousness, and Nietzsche and the Existentialists, and all the rest of that. Then you tire of this preoccupation with the condition of being cut off, and it seems better to go out and see at first hand the big manifestations of disorder and take a fresh reading from them.

But somehow large quantities of "Baudelaire and Rilke, even Montesquieu and Vico; also Machiavelli; also Plato" still get slathered over everything. The novel does not asphyxiate beneath this icing. But it is certainly not Bellow's best staff.

Luckily, crime and the underclass are not the only element in The Dean's December. Bellow may not have achieved the great foray into the alien waters he had hoped for, but he remains brilliantly entertaining on his home turf. In particular, his characters are dazzling. Valeria Raresh, Corde's mother-in-law, for whom the Corders have traveled to Rumania (Bellow, incidentally, also went to Bucharest several years ago with his mathematician wife on a similar journey) lies in a state hospital, her face criss-crossed with tapes and tubes. After a coronary and a stroke, it is only a matter of time for Valeria. But in Corde's reminiscences of her. She is a strikingly vital character. "Great Valeria," the psychiatrist, the epitome of Old World class in a country of New Age brutality and philistinism, the matriarch who called the shots for a circle of loyal women spread out over thousands of miles, from Chicago to Bucharest. Corde comes to understand her more, to love her.

Or Dewey Spangler, a top-flight newspaper columnist a la Alsop who wields more power than any single senator, a boyhood chum of Corde's who turns up on swing through Eastern Europe. As a kid, Spangler was inebriated with Swinburne, Wilde, Nietzsche. Now he is slick, in analysis, still a bit cowed by Corde, and at the same time vindictive.

There are plenty more, and Bellow again demonstrates his keen sense of how all these disparate people are thrown, indeed, bonded together over huge distances and years. Even in this his "dark" book. Bellow shows a strong instinct for seeking out and lauding the crumbs of humanity he finds in the interstices of an inhuman world. The appearance of crowds of Valeria's friends at her funeral dressed in the threadbare finery they saved from the pre-way years is an occasion for quiet joy. And in the give-and-take between Corde and his wife. Bellow demonstrates his acute sense of the way emotional exchanges are made in the world.

Saul Bellow falters somewhat in The Dean's December. It will not stand as his best book, probably not even one of his best three of four. It is, nonetheless, reassuring in a strange way that the shortcomings of the work are due to experimentation and imperfect exploration and not to any diminution of the genius which made him one of the country's finest writers.