The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow Part 1

The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow.

Saul Bellow.

To Beena Kamlani, whose kindly function is to face me in the right direction. Her respectful and grateful author. -S. B.

Preface.

Yesterday my husband and I took our year-old daughter, Naomi Rose, for a stroll in the neighborhood. The weather was ferociously cold-what the forecasters in these parts unaccountably describe as "bl.u.s.tery." To escape the icy wind we headed for the Brookline Booksmith. Now when Saul ducks into a bookstore, chances are he's going to be there for some time. I pulled Rosie out of her snowsuit and attempted to distract her with the dust jacket of Ravelstein. "Who's this, Naomi Rose? Who's the man in the picture?" And turning to point at Saul, she answered in that bell-like infant voice of hers that could be heard all through the store, "Dad, dad, dad." Now Dad was m.u.f.fled in turtle fleece to the eyebrows, but his face emerged to give her a most delicious smile.

This morning, as I begin to write, I imagine Rosie the reader, a couple of decades deeper into the century. When Rosie is ready for Saul's books, what memories will there be of Dad at his desk? And does memory need an a.s.sist? Will someone produce an accurate portrait of her father at work? Why not begin, I ask myself, with this little preface? To say for Rosie's sake, and for scores of others who will never see the man sitting down to write-this is how it was done.

Proximity has been my privilege. I was there, for instance, when "The Bellarosa Connection" was born.

It began innocently enough. In the first week of May 1988 en route from Chicago to Vermont we stopped in Philadelphia, where Saul gave a lecture, "A Jewish Writer in America," for the Jewish Publication Society. In the weeks before he delivered this talk, and for the remainder of that month-during the drive from Philadelphia to Vermont; while exploring Dartmouth, where he was a visiting lecturer; and later in Vermont; where we were doing battle with the blackflies to lay in a garden-our conversation was about nothing but the fate of the Jews in the twentieth century. Just then Saul was facing the final revisions on "A Theft," and he was wrestling with A Case of Love_-a novel he would never finish. Meanwhile, he was waiting to hear whether "A Theft" had been accepted by The New Yorker._ Both Esquire_ and the Atlantic Monthly_ had already decided the story was too long. It wasn't in Saul to mope alone by the telephone. Every morning over breakfast he diverted me with puns or entertained me with possible subjects for stories, and often he came downstairs to say that he had dreamed up a new way to jump-start A Case of Love._ Why not introduce an eccentric Parisian pianist of the old school who would teach his heroine about love? We were reading and rereading the proofs of "A Theft." Saul habitually revises well beyond the last moment. The ending wasn't right-too many ideas, not enough movement. He would rework it by day and each night I would type and retype the latest pages. In the middle of May we got word that The New Yorker_ had also turned down his story, but Saul was too busy to be checked by bad news. He was reflecting deeply on what should come next, and the weather wasn't being cooperative. Now I ought to explain that Saul is extremely weather-sensitive. High-pressure azure skies-those of late May and early June-have always turned him on. But in that spring of'88 the gloomy rain fell day after day. Saul would light a fire in the kitchen, drink his coffee, and then slosh out to the studio through the blackfly-infested soppy gra.s.s. He wasn't writing, he told me; he was going there "to brood." And he added, "That's how I've always done things-you separate yourself from editors, lawyers, publishers. You set down your burdens and you brood."

Our Vermont friends and neighbors Herb and Libby Hillman, looking to lift our sagging spirits, invited us to dinner. Over Libby's homemade bread and roast chicken, the conversation turned once again to the Jewish question, and Saul introduced an idea we had been debating since his Philadelphia lecture. Should the Jews feel shame over the Holocaust? Is there a particular disgrace in being victimized? I was ferociously opposed to this suggestion. As we awaited dessert we let go of the argument. The smell of chocolate announced that the drowsy end of the evening was upon us. Serious subjects gave way to gags, jokes, old chestnuts. But as we were getting ready to leave, our host, a retired chemist specializing in house paints, began to tell the story of one of his colleagues. This man, now dying of lung cancer after a lifetime of exposure to toxins, had been a European refugee in the early forties. I have to admit: while I was sc.r.a.ping the last of the chocolate from my plate, my mind was already on the rain and the slippery ride home. I was not attending as closely as I might have been.

May 24: The first fine day of the season. When Saul came back from the studio for lunch he had that s.h.i.+ning-eyed look that made me antic.i.p.ate his announcement: "I'm on to something new. I don't want to talk about it just yet." Next day as we were driving into Brattleboro for our weekly supplies, he elaborated: "I haven't found a shape for the new story yet, but it's based on what Herb told us over dinner." Did I remember the details? No. But fortunately, Saul did: A refugee is imprisoned by the Italian Fascists, but prior to his imprisonment, having become aware that his arrest is imminent, he has written overseas to the Broadway impresario Billy Rose on the advice of a friend. (In the story as Saul eventually wrote it, the hero makes no such appeal to Billy Rose and in fact has never even heard of him.) A mysterious plan is concocted while he waits in his prison cell. He learns that his door will be left open at a certain hour on a certain night. Someone will meet him in the street behind the prison and indicate that he has been sent by Billy Rose. There will be money and instructions about which city to go to until the next contact appears. All happens as planned, and with the aid of these emissaries he escapes to the States. There, he is denied entry because of the quotas, but makes it to Cuba. Years later when he is back in the United States he tries to contact Billy Rose and to thank him in person. But it seems Rose, who has helped a lot of people, will have nothing to do with the refugees he has saved, perhaps fearing that they will lean on him or mooch from him indefinitely. The rescued man is quite shaken by the cold shoulder he gets from Broadway Billy.

Such were the bare bones of the story, as sketched by Saul that day on the way to town, a story no longer about Herb's friend, but already about a character-Harry Fonstein-"Surviving Harry," as Saul would later call him, borrowing from John Berryman's "Dreamsong" (dedicated to Saul) about "Surviving Henry." Saul, it turned out, knew quite a lot about Billy Rose. For in his Greenwich Village days he had known Bernie Wolfe, who was Rose's ghostwriter. A Wolfe-like character might become the intermediary between Rose and the protagonist. Wolfe had been a very bright, very savvy and strange man who took an unusual interest in New York people and their obscure motivations. Such a man would be sympathetic to the Fonstein character. Saul then told me a story about going to Wolfe's place in the Village and noticing an old, worn woman dusting and scrubbing the apartment. On Saul's way out Wolfe turned to him and said, That lady is my mother." He hadn't introduced her or paid her any heed. Why make the confession then? Oh, people had ideas about being open in those Village days, Saul added. They prized their singularity. At that time they worried a great deal about their mental health. What a contrast such low-level American antics would provide to the somber seriousness of the European story.

Saul had also seen Billy Rose in Jerusalem. What did he look like? I asked. Well, he was small, Jewish; he might have been handsome but for the tense lines in his face. He looked strained, greedy, dissatisfied with himself."

When we got to town Saul borrowed a book on Billy Rose from the library. We couldn't turn up any information about Wolfe.

The next day the sun shone again, and when Saul returned from work he said only, "I've figured out a way to write this story."

On May 29 we dawdled to the studio together, and Saul read me the first few pages-handwritten on lined yellow legal-size paper. What struck me at first was how intently he had listened to Herb's tale. Saul had remembered that the protagonist was in Italy when he had been imprisoned. In Rome the man had managed to become a clerk at a hotel. Thanks to his gift for languages and his false papers, he had such freedom of movement that he'd even found himself at a gathering where Hitler had made an appearance. And so on. Now I've always prided myself on my attentiveness-to Saul I am a "genius noticer." This time it didn't matter that I'd been less than alert: Saul had been fully present. When he is on to a story, his capacity for hearing and absorbing details expands exponentially. I realized then that a writer does not need to be tuned in all the time. In fact-forgive me, Henry James-being "someone upon whom nothing is lost" is too distracting. A writer keeps to himself, broods, sits quietly. But from the moment when he attaches himself to a story, everything is rearranged. Suddenly, as Saul puts it, the wakeful writer has "feelers all over the place."

From an after-dinner story came one luminous strand of silk, and over the next few days and then weeks I watched as Saul wove event, accident, memory, and thought-what he had read, what we had discussed, and the contents of his dreams-into that oriental carpet of a novella "The Bellarosa Connection." This mingling of elements, however, has very little to do with facts, with autobiography. It is so rare and complex and strange a use of human material that even if I were to unravel every thread that found its way into the work, and to describe the process by which each was carded and dyed and woven and tied, I would still come no closer to the secret of its composition.

Saul had already decided that the story would have two central characters: not only this European Jew, Fonstein, who made his escape, but an American Jew as well. He wanted his reader to be able to feel the difference in tone between the two men's lives. He could mine his own experience and call upon his memories of Wolfe for the American, but who would be the model for his European character? On June 2, Saul told me a long story about his stepmother's nephew. Over the winter he had learned that this nephew was dead, and he had been oppressed by the fact that the death had occurred some time ago, and that he hadn't known that the man was gone. At one time he had been very fond of this chess-playing sober young refugee. They had sought each other out at his stepmother's boring Sunday gatherings. What does it mean to say that you are close to someone, Saul wondered, when you discover that you are relying only on sc.r.a.ps of memory about that person? From these musings came Saul's notion of the "warehouse of good intentions." Someone occupies a place in your life, takes on some special significance-what it is, you can't really say. But you have made a real connection-this person has come to stand for something in your life. Time goes by, you haven't seen the party, you don't know what has happened to him, he may even be dead for all you know, and yet you hang on to the idea of the unique importance of that individual. What a shock to discover that memories have become a standin for that warehoused person.

So much of our conversation about the Jewish question revolved around memory. Now it would be Saul's memories of this late immigrant arrival with his singsong Polish accent, his gift for languages, and his business smarts that would give flavor to his European character, Harry Fonstein. The American narrator in "The Bellarosa Connection" would find out about the death of Fonstein in much the same way that Saul learned of the death of his stepmother's nephew.

When pieces of life begin to find their way into the work, there is always something magical about the manner in which they are lifted from the recent-or distant-past or the here and now, and then kneaded and shaped and subtly transformed into narrative. Saul did have_ a nightmare like the one that wakes his narrator. He described what it felt like to be overcome by midnight dread, to be in that pit without the strength to climb out. And he did_ have a stepmother who parted her hair in the middle and baked delicious Strudel. And while lecturing in Philadelphia we had_ visited a grand old mansion much like the home Saul's narrator would find himself uncomfortably, awkwardly inhabiting. And there are so many bits that never find their way into the narrative. Here's one I loved: The European, Harry Fonstein, tells the American about the way he grieved for his mother, whom he had buried in Ravenna, by speaking of his aversion to a particular shade of blue-gray. This was the color of the shroud in which he had buried his mother. In our hotel room in Philadelphia, Saul and I had been talking about the way certain colors impress you. He had told me then that his own mother had been buried in a blue-gray shroud.

To watch these details working their way into or out of the novella is nothing like the cutting and pasting of actual events. Biographers, beware: Saul wields a wand, not scissors. He is no fact-collector. Better to imagine Prospero at play. Or to picture Saul as he lights out for the studio: a small boy with his satchel and his piece of fruit.

Most mornings we linger. Work will wait. We tour the "giardino" and see which flowers have appeared. This June there is a white anemone of which Saul is enormously proud (there's never been another before or since-the moles seem to get at the bulbs). The giant red-orange poppies are budding, the peonies will flower this year in time for Saul's birthday, and there's one early bright purple cosmos blossom. We admire a fat sa.s.sy snake curling among the wild columbines. "The whole world is an ice cream cone to him," Saul laughs as he disappears into his studio.

Everything must be taken up nimbly, easily, or not at all. You can't read Saul without being aware of the laughter running beneath every word. He has always been playful. Now he is also firm and spare. There is also the matter of taste. Sometimes a detail is borrowed because the flavor is right (like Charlus and the telephone in the narrator's mansion-never mind the anachronism). Saul generally steers clear of puzzles and riddles. Lovers of word games must look to Joyce or Nabokov for the serious pleasures of the anagrammist. What we find instead is Stendhalian brio-laughter, whimsy, lightness of touch. Odd, perhaps, that I should speak of laughter in considering what is essentially Saul's darkest look at one of the century's most serious subjects. But "Bellarosa" wasn't born in anger. Everything that moved Saul deeply at that time found its way into the novella, and what moved him deeply, no matter how serious, was a source of energy and ultimately of pleasure. This was a time when we were often up toward dawn-discussing the story, his memories of New Jersey or of Greenwich Village, and most often the history of the Jews. But perhaps because we were young lovers then my memories ofthat spring are anything but dark. Saul was writing this powerful, even horrible book with intense heat and joy, dipping into his brightest colors.

That's not to say the writing always came easily or that the work went on uninterrupted. By early June Saul had begun turning the yellow pages into ma.n.u.script. I remember hearing the sound of the typewriter one morning, and feeling a thrill that his breakfast forecast-"I think I've got something here"-was being realized. He was working in the house, and when I took him his tea, I stood by and listened for another volley of staccato fire. Saul hunts down his words with the keys of his Remington. He revises as he types, and spots of silence are followed by these racy rattling rhythmical bursts. He looks forward to this cup of hot tea with one round slice of lemon floating on top. The proper drink for a European Jew on an overcast day, Saul first observed when he visited the empty Jewish quarters of Polish cities. The lemon stands for the sun; the sugar and caffeine give the jolt you need when the surge from your morning coffee subsides. How he was managing to write at all was fairly mysterious, since he would accept no protection from distractions. And there had been many: a visit from a neighbor; phone calls from an agent, a lawyer, a friend (I could always tell from the roars of laughter when it was Allan Bloom on the line). After each interruption the study door would close and the wonderful ack-ack-ack_ of the typewriter would begin again.

A week before his birthday on June 10, Saul read me the first dozen typed pages of the story. The account of Fonstein's escape from the Italian prison made me hold my breath then, and every time I've heard it since. The narrator would be an older man, recounting a story that had been told to him by Fonstein years earlier.

Though Saul was bushed, he was putting on speed so as to have as much done as possible before we took off for Paris and Rome in the middle of the month. What? Europe, now? Well, we would see Bloom in Paris, and in Italy the Scanno Prize was being offered to Saul. The details of the award-a bag of gold coins, a stay in a hunting lodge in the remote Abruzzi region-had too much of the flavor of adventure to resist. Saul never takes it easy when he is overworked and beginning to feel run down. He continued to ride his mountain bike, to chop up the fallen limbs of an apple tree, to remove boulder-sized rocks from the garden, to carry in logs for the morning fire. I was convinced he had a horseshoe over his head that spring. He tripped while cutting brush and sc.r.a.ped his face; he had a gashed s.h.i.+n to show for a tumble from his mountain bike; his eye was bloodshot; there was a bleeding nose. Of course he worked the morning of the nosebleed, lying down on the futon in the studio whenever the bleeding started, and then getting up to scrawl out a new paragraph. When he hadn't returned for lunch I carried a bite out to him and found him typing vigorously, his face and his T-s.h.i.+rt covered with blood. Composing for Saul is an aerobic activity. He sweats when he writes, and peels off layers of clothing. When he is concentrating particularly hard, he screws up his left eye and emits a sound that's a cross between the panting of a long-distance runner and a breathy whistle: "Windy suspirations of forced breath."

Saul's birthday-at least for the fourteen years I have celebrated it with him-is always a his-kind-of-working-weather day-blue skies, copper sun, the atmospheric high of high pressure. But there would be no writing today. I should add that time off is something unheard of for Saul. No holidays, no Sabbaths. A birthday is like any other day-a chance to type another couple of pages. He was, however, high as a kite. Family was on the way, and at his request I was baking a devil's food chocolate cake with chocolate icing and toasted coconut.

A brief break from words is never a sign that the mental wheels aren't racing round and round. Two days later Saul returned from his morning's work and announced: "I started my story again from scratch. There are times when it takes over, you know." At dinner I pressed him about the new beginning and he became very expansive: there were too many ideas piled on at the start-too much to expect the reader to digest all at once. All this stuff about the American versus the European Jew. This must unfold gradually. What the story is really about is memory and faith. There is no religion without remembering. As Jews we remember what was told to us at Sinai; at the Seder we remember the Exodus; Yiskor is about remembering a father, a mother. We are told not to forget the Patriarchs; we admonish ourselves, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem..." And we are constantly reminding G.o.d not to forget his Covenant with us. This is what the "chosenness" of the Chosen People is all about. We are chosen to be G.o.d's privileged mind readers. All of it, what binds us together, is our history, and we are a people because we remember.

Saul then told me that his narrator was beginning to come to life. He had decided not to give him a name. This elderly man, narrator X, is starting to lose his memory. He is walking down the street one day, humming "Way down upon the..." and he can't remember the name of the river-it torments him, he's in agony over this loss of a word, he feels ready to stop a pa.s.serby, to do anything to recover the word (this actually did happen to Saul during the winter in Chicago, while strolling around downtown on his way back from the dentist, and until Suwannee came to him he was beside himself). The narrator can't afford such a lapse because, as Saul explained, his whole life has been built around memory. He will be the founder of this inst.i.tute-the Mnemosyne Inst.i.tute-that helps business people sharpen their memories. In order to put it all together and make a coherent picture, he is going to take it upon himself to remember what Fonstein's life had been, to write a memoir about this European refugee.

Over the next couple of days we pored over an essay about Nietzsche's idea of the will to power that Saul felt was central to his thoughts about the American half of the story. The "nihilism of stone" that Nietzsche talks about has degenerated, in Saul's formulation, into a "nihilism of sleaze." Now the will to power supposedly releases creative energy. Is the Hollywood of Billy Rose, the Las Vegas of Fonstein's cardplaying son, the chaos of American life the best we are able to come up with by way of new creation? Perhaps the narrator of "The Bellarosa Connection" means to oppose the idea that human life has become an utterly meaningless chaos with memory-which is another way of saying faith.

The spring that had begun with cold and rain was ending in a heat wave. It was pus.h.i.+ng 90 degrees on June 13, and as I made for the pond at high noon I found Saul heading the same way, bending the long gra.s.ses and parting the wildflowers. When we met before the green water we had the following exchange: "Was it a good morning?" I asked.

"Yes. I started something new."

"What?!"

"I'm loosened up now, I'm just writing something I had it in mind to write."

Stripped of our clothes (yes, Rosie, your parents were young and wild once upon a time), we went for the first swim of the season, Saul leading the way into the deliciously cold water. Then, as we were drying ourselves on the rocks in the blazing sun, Saul asked: "You want to hear some of it?" I don't know what I was expecting. Probably a new beginning for "Bellarosa." But when he opened the composition book he had brought down to the pond, he began to read the first several thousand words of something completely_ new-what would eventually become Marbles,_ a novel he has written and rewritten for close to a decade now, and has never, to this day, completed.

When thinking of Saul at work, I have before my eyes the image of a juggler-luminous airborne b.a.l.l.s, each one a different color, turning against an azure sky, kept aloft by the infinite skill of a magician, who is at once relaxed, wry, and concentrating intensely. Hand him a telephone, ask him a practical question about dinner, or invite him on a walk and he's still working those airborne b.a.l.l.s. If you were aware of them, and walking behind him on that road, you would see them circling overhead.

-Janis Bellow.

INTRODUCTION.

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, gla.s.sy") 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, d.i.c.kens'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 s.h.i.+ne of the s.h.i.+ns, 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 Schnberg. "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 Maupa.s.sant the writer should: "There is a part of everything which is unexplored," said Flaubert, "because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in a.s.sociation 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 s.h.i.+ne" of poor McKern's s.h.i.+ns 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-fas.h.i.+oned thighs of those corrupted shapes that belong to history."

Like d.i.c.kens, and to some extent like Tolstoy and Proust, Bellow sees humans as the embodiments of a single dominating essence or law of being, and makes repeated reference to his characters' essences, in a method of leitmotif. As, in Anna Karenina,_ Stiva Oblonsky always has a smile, and Anna a light step, and Levin a heavy tread, each attribute the accompaniment of a particular temperament, so Max Zetland has his reproving pucker, and Sorella, in "The Bellarosa Connection," her forceful obesity, and so on. In Seize the Day,_ probably the finest of Bellow's shorter works, Tommy Wilhelm sees the great crowds walking in New York and seems to see "in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence-/ labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want."_ Bellow has written that when we read "the best nineteenth and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature," and his own work, his own way of seeing essential human types, may be added to that grand project.

Bellow's stories seem to divide into two kinds: long, looseedged stories, which read as if they began life as novels (such as "Cousins"), and short, almost cla.s.sical tales, which often recount the events of a single day ("Something to Remember Me By,"

"A Silver Dish,"

"Looking for Mr. Green"). Yet in both types of story the same kind of narrative prose is at work, one that tends toward the recollection of distant events and tends also toward a version of stream of consciousness. Here, the unnamed narrator of "Zetland" recalls Max Zetland, his friend's father: Max Zetland was a muscular man who weighed two hundred pounds, but these were only scenes-not dangerous. As usual, the morning after, he stood at the bathroom mirror and shaved with his painstaking bra.s.s Gillette, made neat his reprehending face, flattened his hair like an American executive, with military brushes. Then, Russian style, he drank his tea through a sugar cube, glancing at the Tribune,_ and went off to his position in the Loop, more of less in Ordnung._ A normal day. Descending the back stairs, a short cut to the El, he looked through the window of the first floor at his Orthodox parents in the kitchen. Grandfather sprayed his bearded mouth with an atomizer-he had asthma. Grandmother made orange-peel candy. Peels dried all winter on the steam radiators. The candy was kept in s...o...b..xes and served with tea.

Sitting in the El, Max Zetland wet his finger on his tongue to turn the pages of the thick newspaper... Tin paG.o.da roofs covered the El platforms. Each riser of the long staircase advertised Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. Iron loss made young girls pale. Max Zetland himself had a white face, white-jowled, a sarcastic bear, but acceptably pleasant, entering the merchandising palace on Wabash Avenue...

The narrator, who is not related to Max Zetland, is writing about Max Zetland as if he himself had been there, as if he were recalling the daily scene, and he is using a style of writing that Joyce perfected in Ulysses_-a jumble of different recollected details, a life-sown prose logging impressions with broken speed, in which the perspective keeps on expanding and contracting, as memory does: at one moment, we see Grandfather caught in a moment of dynamism, spraying his bearded mouth with an atomizer, and then in the next we hear that Grandmother made candy from orange peel and that this peel spent all winter drying on the radiators. At one moment we see the advertis.e.m.e.nts for Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, the next we see Max entering his workplace. The prose moves between different temporalities, between the immediate and the traditional, the shortlived and the longlived. The narrator of "Something to Remember Me By" writes that at home, inside the house, they lived by "an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life." Bellow's prose moves in similar ways, between the "archaic" or traditional, and the immediate, dynamic "facts of life."

Detail feels modern in Bellow because it is so often the remembered impression_ of a detail, filtered through a consciousness; and yet his details still have an unmodern solidity. At the risk of sounding apocalyptic, one might say that Bellow reprieved realism for a generation, the generation that came after the Second World War, that he held its neck back from the blade of the postmodern; and he did this by revivifying traditional realism with modernist techniques. His prose is densely "realistic," yet it is hard to find in it any of the usual conventions of realism or even of storytelling. His people do not walk out of the house and into other houses-they are, as it were, tipped from one recalled scene to another-and his characters do not have obviously "dramatic" conversations. It is almost impossible to find in these stories sentences along the lines of "He put down his drink and left the room." These are at once traditional and very untraditional stories, both "archaic" and radical.

Curiously enough, the stream of consciousness, for all its reputation as the great accelerator of description, actually slows down realism, asks it to dawdle over tiny remembrances, tiny details and l.u.s.ters, to circle and return. The stream of consciousness is properly the ally of the short story, of the anecdote, the fragment-and it is no surprise that the short story and the stream of consciousness appear in strength in literature at about the same time, toward the end of the nineteenth century: in Hamsun and in Chekhov, and a little later in Bely and Babel.

At home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life." This is the axis on which many of these stories run, both at the level of the s.h.i.+fting prose and at the larger level of meaning. For most of the heroes and narrators of these stories, Chicago, where "the facts of life" reign, exists as both torment and spur. Chicago is American, modern; but life at home, as for Max Zetland, is traditional, "archaic," respectably Jewish, with memories and habits of Russian life. (Bellow was nearly born in Russia, of course; his father came from there to Lachine, Quebec, in 1913, and Bellow was born in June 1915.) In these tales, Bellow returns again and again to the city of his childhood, ma.s.sive, industrial, peopled, where the El "ran like the bridge of the elect over the d.a.m.nation of the slums," a city both brutal and poetic, "blue with winter, brown with evening, crystal with frost." Chicago, this agglomeration of human fantasies-the protagonist of "Looking for Mr. Green" realizes that the city represents a collective agreement of will-must be reckoned with and recorded as exactly and lyrically as the humans who throng these characters' memories. But Chicago is also a realm of confusion and vulgarity, a place inimical to the life of the mind and the proper expansion of the imagination. The narrator of "Zetland" remembers that he and young Zetland (Max's son) would read Keats to each other while rowing on the city lagoon: "Books in Chicago were obtainable. The public library in the twenties had many storefront branches along the car lines. Summers, under flipping gutta-percha fan blades, boys and girls read in the hard chairs. Crimson trolley cars swayed, cowbellied, on the rails. The country went broke in 1929. On the public lagoon, rowing, we read Keats to each other while the weeds bound the oars."

"While the reeds bound the oars"-Chicago always threatens to entangle the Bellovian character, as also does his family, to stifle him. In these stories, Bellow's characters are repeatedly tempted by visions of escape-sometimes mystical, sometimes religious, and often Platonic (Platonic in the sense that the real world, the Chicago world, is felt to be not the real world but only a place where the soul is in exile, a place of mere appearances). Woody, in "A Silver Dish" is suffused with the "secret certainty that the goal set for this earth was that it should be filled with good, saturated with it," and sits and listens religiously to all the Chicago bells ringing on Sunday. Yet the story he recalls is a tale of shameful theft and trickery, an utterly secular story. The narrator of "Him with His Foot in His Mouth," is attracted by the visions of Swedenborg, and to the idea that "the Divine Spirit" has "withdrawn in our time from the outer, visible world." Yet his tale is couched as a letter of apology and confession to a peaceful woman he once cruelly insulted. The narrator of "Cousins" admits that he has "never given up the habit of referring all truly important observations to that original self or soul" (referring here to the Platonic idea that man has an original soul from which he has been exiled, and back to which he must again find a path). But again, the spur of his revelations is completely secular-a shameful court case involving a crooked cousin.

Bellow's argument, if that word is not too bullying, would seem to be that a purely religious or intellectual vision-a theoretical intelligence-is weightless, even dangerous, without the human data provided both by a city like Chicago and by the ordinary strategies and culpabilities of families and friends. Zetland, who, we are told, has "no interest in surface phenomena," abandons the pure thought of a.n.a.lytic logic after moving to New York and reading Melville. Victor Wulpy may be a great art critic, but he cannot tell Katrina, his lover, that he loves her, even though it is what she most earnestly longs to hear. It falls to a charlatan and producer of science fiction films, Larry Wrangel, correctly to remark on the painful limits of Victor's all-knowing mind.

Bellow's characters all yearn to make something of their lives in the religious sense, and yet this yearning is not written up religiously or solemnly. It is written up comically: our metaphysical cloudiness, and our fierce, clumsy attempts to make these clouds yield rain, are full of hilarious pathos in his work. In this regard, Bellow is perhaps most tenderly suggestive in his lovely late story "Something to Remember Me By." The narrator, now old, recalls a single day from his adolescence, in Depression-dug Chicago. He was, he recalls, a kid dreamy with religious and mystical ideas of a distinctly Platonic nature: "Where, then, is the world from which the human form comes?" he asks rhetorically. On his job delivering flowers in the city, he always used to take one of his philosophical or mystical texts with him. On the day under remembrance, he becomes the victim of a cruel prank. A woman lures him into her bedroom, encourages him to remove his clothes, throws them out of the window, and then flees. The clothes disappear, and it is his task then to get home, an hour away across freezing Chicago, to the house where his mother is dying and his stern father waits for him, with "blind Old Testament rage"-"at home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life."

The boy is clothed by the local barman and earns his fare home by agreeing to take one of the bar's regulars, a drunk called McKern, to McKern's apartment. Once there, the boy lays out the drunk and then cooks supper for McKern's two motherless young daughters-he cooks pork cutlets, the fat splattering his hands and filling the little apartment with pork smoke. "All that my upbringing held in horror geysered up, my throat filling with it, my guts griping," he tells us. But he does it. Eventually, the boy finds his own way home, where his father, as expected, beats him. Along with his clothes, he has lost his treasured book, which was also thrown out of the window. But, he reflects, he will buy the book again, with money stolen from his mother. "I knew where my mother secretly hid her savings. Because I looked into all books, I had found the money in her mahzor,_ the prayer book for the High Holidays, the days of awe."

There are coiled ironies here. Forced by the horridly secular confusions of his day ("the facts of life," indeed) to steal, the boy will take this money to buy more mystical and unsecular books, books that will no doubt religiously or philosophically instruct him that this life, the life he is leading, is not the real life! And why does the boy even know about his mother's hiding place? Because he looks "into all books." His bookishness, his unworldliness, are the reasons that he knows how to perform the worldly business of stealing! And where does he steal this money from? From a sacred text ("the archaic rule," indeed). So then, the reader thinks, who is to say that this_ life, the life our narrator has been so vividly telling us about, with all its embarra.s.sments and Chicago vulgarities, is not real? Not only real, but also religious in its way-for the day he has just painfully lived has also been a kind of day of awe, in which he has learned much-a secular High Holiday, complete with the sacrificial burning of goyish pork.

It might be said that all of these beautiful stories throw out at us, in burning centrifuge, the secular-religious questions: What are our days of awe? And how shall we know them?

BY THE ST. LAWRENCE.

NOT THE_ ROB REXLER?.

Yes, Rexler, the man who wrote all those books on theater and cinema in Weimar Germany, the author of Postwar Berlin_ and of the controversial study of Bertolt Brecht. Quite an old man now and, it turns out, though you wouldn't have guessed it from his work, physically handicapped-not disabled, only slightly crippled in adolescence by infantile paralysis. You picture a tall man when you read him, and his actual short, stooped figure is something of a surprise. You don't expect the author of those swift sentences to have an abrupt neck, a long jaw, and a knot-back. But these are minor items, and in conversation with him you quickly forget his disabilities.

Because New York has been his base for half a century, it is a.s.sumed that he comes from the East Side or Brooklyn. In fact he is a Canadian, born in Lachine, Quebec, an unlikely birthplace for a historian who has written so much about cosmopolitan Berlin, about nihilism, decadence, Marxism, national socialism, and who described the trenches of World War I as "man sandwiches" served up by the leaders of the great powers.

Yes, he was born in Lachine to parents from Kiev. His childhood was divided between Lachine and Montreal. And just now, after a near-fatal illness, he had had a curious desire or need to see Lachine again. For this reason he accepted a lecture invitation from McGill University despite his waning interest in (and a growing dislike for) Bertolt Brecht. Tired of Brecht and his Marxism-his Stalinism-he stuck with him somehow. He might have canceled the trip. He was still convalescent and weak. He had written to his McGill contact, "I've been playing hopscotch at death's door, and since I travel alone I have to arrange for wheelchairs between the ticket counter and the gate. Can I count on being met at Dorval?"

He counted also on a driver to take him to Lachine. He asked him to park the Mercedes limo in front of his birthplace. The street was empty. The low brick house was the only one left standing. All the buildings for blocks around had been torn down. He told the driver, "I'm going to walk down to the river. Can you wait for about an hour?" He antic.i.p.ated correctly that his legs would soon tire and that the empty streets would be cold, too. Late October was almost wintry in these parts. Rexler was wearing his dark-green cloaklike Salzburg loden coat.

There was nothing familiar to see at first, you met no people here. You were surprised by the bigness and speed of the St. Lawrence. As a kid you were hemmed in by the d.i.n.ky streets. The river now had opened up, and the sky also, with long static autumn clouds. The rapids were white, the water reeling over the rocks. The old Hudson's Bay Trading Post was now a community center. Opposite, in gloomy frames of moss and grime, there stood a narrow provincial stone church. And hadn't there been a convent nearby? He did not look for it. Downriver he made out Caughnawaga, the Indian reservation, on the far sh.o.r.e. According to Parkman, a large party of Caughnawaga Mohawks, crossing hundreds of miles on snowshoes, had surprised and ma.s.sacred the settlers of Deer-field, Ma.s.sachusetts, during the French-Indian wars. Weren't those Indians Mohawks? He couldn't remember. He believed that they were one of the Iro-quois nations. For that matter he couldn't say whether his birthplace was on Seventh Avenue or on Eighth. So many landmarks were gone. The tiny synagogue had become a furniture warehouse. There were neither women nor children in the streets. Immigrant laborers from the Dominion Bridge Company once had lived in the cramped houses. From the narrow front yard (land must have been dear), where Rexler's mother more than seventy years ago had set him cross-strapped in his shawl to dig snow with the black stove shovel, you could see the wide river surface-it had been there all the while, beyond the bakeries and sausage shops, kitchens and bedrooms.

Beside the Lachine Ca.n.a.l, where the "kept" water of the locks was still and green, various reasons for Rexler's return began to take shape. When asked how he was doing-and it was only two months ago that the doctors had written him off; the specialist had told him, "Your lungs were whited out. I wouldn't have given two cents for your life"-Rexler answered, "I have no stamina. I put out some energy and then I can't bend down to tie my shoelaces."

Why then did he take this trying trip? Was it sentimentality, was it nostalgia? Did he want to recall how his mother, mute with love, had bundled him in woolens and set him down in the snow with a small shovel? No, Rexler wasn't at all like that. He was a tough-minded man. It was toughness that had drawn him decades ago to Bert Brecht. Nostalgia, subjectivism, inwardness-all that was in the self-indulgence doghouse now. But he was making no progress toward an answer. At his age the reprieve from death could be nothing but short. It was noteworthy that the brick and stucco that had walled in the Ukrainian-, Sicilian-, and French-Canadian Dominion Bridge Company laborers also cut them off from the St. Lawrence in its platinum rush toward the North Atlantic. To have looked at their bungalows again wouldn't have been worth the fatiguing trip, the wear and tear of airports, the minor calvary of visiting-lecturer chitchat. Anyway, he saw death as a magnetic field that every living thing must enter. He was ready for it. He had even thought that since he had been unconscious under the respirator for an entire month, he might just as well have died in the hospital and avoided further trouble. Yet here he was in his birthplace._ Intensive-care nurses had told him that the electronic screens monitoring his heart had run out of graphs, squiggles, and symbols at last and, foundering, flashed out nothing but question marks. That would have been the way to go, with all the machines confounded, from unconsciousness to nonconsciousness. But it wasn't over yet, and now this valetudinarian native son stood in Monkey Park beside the locks shadowed with the autumn green of the banked earth and asked himself whether all this was a justified expense of his limited energy.

The cook, she's narri was Roste_ She cam from Mo'real_ And was chambermaid on a lumber barge_ In the Grand Lachine Ca.n.a.l._ Rexler had more than once thought of opening an office to help baffled people who could remember only one stanza of a ballad or song. For a twenty-five-dollar fee you would provide the full text.

He remembered that when a barge was in the locks, the Lachinois, loafing unemployed or killing time, would chat or joke with the crew. He had been there himself, waving and grinning at the wisecracks. His boy's body was clean then. As such things are reckoned he had still been normal during his final childhood holiday in Lachine. Toward the end of that summer he came down with polio and his frame was contorted into a monkey puzzle. Next, adolescence turned him into a cripple gymnast whose skeleton was the apparatus he worked out on like an acrobat in training. This was how reality punished you for your innocence. It turned you into a crustacean. But in his early years, until the end of the twenties, his body was still well formed and smooth. Then his head grew heavy, his jawline lengthened, his sideburns were thick pillars. But he had taken pains to train himself away from abnormality, from the outlook and the habits of a cripple. His long eyes were mild. He walked with a virile descending limp, his weight coming down on the advancing left foot. "Not personally responsible for the way life operates" was what he tacitly declared.

This, more or less, was Rexler, the last of the tribe that had buzzed across the Atlantic early in the century and found limited s.p.a.ce in streets that shut out the river. They lived among the French, the Indians, the Sicilians, and the Ukrainians.

His aunt Rozzy, who was fond of him, often rescued him in July from the St. Dominick Street slum in Montreal. His older cousins in Lachine, already adults, all with witty strong faces, seemed to like his company. "Take the boy with you," Aunt Rozzy would say when she dispatched them on errands.

He tooted all over Lachine with them in their cars and trucks.

These were solid detailed recollections, nothing dreamlike about them. Rexler knew therefore that he must have come back to them repeatedly over many years. Again and again the cousins, fully mature at twenty, or even at sixteen. The eldest, Cousin Ezra, was an insurance adjuster. Next in age was Albert, a McGill law student. And then Matty, less tough than his big brothers. The youngest was Reba. She had the odor stout girls often have, Rexler used to think-a distinctive s.e.xy scent. They were all, for that matter, s.e.xy people. Except, of course, the parents. But Ezra and Albert, even Matty, varied their business calls with visits to girls. They joked with them in doorways. Sometimes with a Vadja, sometimes a Nadine. Ezra, who was so stern about business, buying and trading building lots-the insurance was a sideline-would laugh after he had cranked his Ford and say as he jumped into the seat, "How did you like that one, Robbie?" And, playful, he surprised Rexler by gripping his thigh. Ezra had a leathery pleasant face. His complexion, like his father's, was dark and he had vertical furrows under each ear; an old country doctor had cured him surgically of swellings caused by milk from a tubercular cow. But even the scars were pleasant to see. Ezra had an abrupt way of clearing his nose by snorting. He trod the pedals of the Ford. His breath was virile-a little salty or perhaps sour. Over Rexler he had great seniority-more an uncle than a cousin. And when Ezra was silent, having business thoughts, all laughing was shut down. He brought his white teeth together and a sort of gravity came over him. No Yiddish jokes then, or Hebrew with double meanings. He was a determined man out to make good. At his death he left an estate in the millions.

Rexler had never visited his grave or the graves of the others. They all lay together somewhere on a mountainside-Westmount, would that be, or Outremont? Ezra and Albert quarreled when Reba died. Ezra had been away and Albert buried her in a remote cemetery. "I want my dead together." Ezra was angry at what he saw as disrespect to the parents. Rexler, recalling this, made a movement of his crippled back, shrugging off the piety. It was not his cup of tea. But then why did he recall it so particularly?

On a June day he had gone in the car with Albert across the Grand Trunk tracks where the parents owned rental property. They had been here no more than fifteen years and they didn't know twenty words of the language, yet they were buying property. Only the immediate family were in on this. They were secretive. At Rexler's age-seven or eight years old-he wouldn't have understood. But when he was present they were guarded nevertheless. As a result, he did come to understand. Such a challenge was sure to provoke him.

Cousin Albert put you off with his shrewd look of amus.e.m.e.nt. For women he had a lewd eye. And at McGill he had picked up a British manner. He said "By Jove." He also said "Topping." Joe Cohen, an MP in Ottawa, had chosen Albert to be a student clerk. Clerking for Joe Cohen, he was made. In time he would become a partner in Cohen's firm. He'll stop saying "By Jove," and say instead "What's the deal?" was Cousin Ezra's true prophecy. But Ezra had airs of his own. The look of the firstborn, for example. A few thousand years of archaic gravity would settle on him. The advantage of being in remote Lachine was that he could freely improvise from the Old Testament.

Anyway, Rexler was in the family's second Ford with Albert on the far side of the tracks, over toward Dorval, and Albert parked in front of a large bungalow. It had a s.p.a.cious white porch, round pillars, and a swing hanging on chains.

"I have to go in," said Albert. "I'll be a while."

"Long?"

"As long as it takes."

"Can I go out and walk back and forth?"

"I'd like you to stay in the auto."

He went in, Rexler remembered, and the wait was interminable. The sun came through the June leaves. Dark periwinkle grew in all the shady places and young women came and went on the broad porch. They walked arm in arm or sat together on the swing or in white wooden Adirondack chairs. Rexler moved into the driver's seat and played with the wheel and the choke-or was it the spark lever? Crouching, he worked the pedals with his hands. A cloven hoof would be a good fit on the ovals of the clutch and brake.

Then it became tiresome to wait.

Then Rexler was fretful.

He might have been alone for as long as an hour.

Did he, Rexler now wondered, have any idea as to what was keeping Albert? He may have had. All those young women pa.s.sing through the screen door, promenading, swinging between the creaking chains.

Without haste Albert stepped between the green plots to the Ford. Smiling, a pretense of regret in his look, he said, "There was more business to do than usual." He mentioned a lease. Baloney, of course. It wasn't what he said but how he spoke that mattered. He had a lippy sort of look and somehow, to Rexler, his mouth had become an index: lippy, but the eyes were at variance with the lower face. Those eyes reflected the will of an upper power center. This was Rexler's early manner of observation. His eagerness, his keenness for this had weakened with time and, in his seventies, he did not care about Albert's cunning, his brothels, his secret war against his brother Ezra.

At the first candy store Albert parked the Ford and gave Rexler a copper two-cent piece-a helmeted woman with a trident and s.h.i.+eld. With this coin Rexler bought two porous squares of blond mola.s.ses candy. He understood that he was being bribed, though he couldn't have explained exactly why. He would not in any case have said a word to Aunt Rozzy about the house with all the girls. Such outside street things never were reported at home. He chewed the candy to a fine dust while Albert entered a cottage to make the rent collection for his mother. Not a thing a university man liked doing. Although where money came from didn't much matter.

Albert was in a better humor when he came out and gave little Rexler a joyride through the pastures and truck gardens, turning back just short of Dor-val. Returning, they saw a small crowd at the level crossing of the Grand Trunk. There had been an accident. A man had been killed by a fast train. The tracks had not yet been cleared and for the moment a line of cars was held up and Rexler, standing on the running board of the Model T, was able to see-not the corpse, but his organs on the roadbed-first the man's liver, s.h.i.+ning on the white, egg-shaped stones, and a little beyond it his lungs. More than anything, it was the lungs-Rexler couldn't get over the twin lungs crushed out of the man by the train when it tore his body open. Their color was pink and they looked inflated still. Strange that there should be no blood, as if the speed of the train had scattered it.

Albert didn't have the curiosity to find out who the dead man was. He must not have wanted to ask. The Ford had stopped running and he set the spark and jumped down to crank it again. When the engine caught, the fender shuddered and then the file of cars crept over the planks. The train was gone-nothing but an empty track to the west.

"So, where did you get lost such a long time?" said Aunt Rozzy.