This is the last essay from the 60’s, sort of Bellow’s swan song to the era, in the recently released collection of his nonfiction. The thrust of its meandering thought is that our innovations in literary practice, combined with the soul killing of our commercial culture has created a kind of anti-matter of literacy.
Early in the twentieth, the writer in America was an alien weed. Bellow says that some writers, upon discovering their vocation, went abroad. Writers were itinerant. They migrated to cities where they could learn their craft at the local newspaper. Media in those days was not mass. There was scope to be literate in the press. But the press became a business and when it commodified, stopped being a school for writers.
We are a business and mass media civilization. Bellow’s temper was cast, it seems, fundamentally in the 20’s. He cites Coolidge that the business of America is business, a statement that deeply offends him. Writers cannot be expected to get into the minds of a nation of Babbits. The regional havens of literacy became innervated as writers gravitated towards the book Babylon of New York.
I’ve realized that I’m not interested in publishing but in books; there’s a difference. So when Bellow denied that New York was the literary capital of the country but rather the administrator of the business of publishing, I was willing to listen to him. But I also thought: Here’s a regional voice complaining about the center and…let’s bring this news to Brooklyn.
Bellow locates centers of literacy in universities rather than cities. He says that even Paris isn’t Paris anymore. And he sees academics as reshaping society in many fields in the 60’s. But the writer doesn’t really fit into the modern university system, which is a collection of disconnected specialities, except as a teacher of writing skills.
Bellow asks: What do the writers of fiction know? What can they claim to be experts in? Have generations of scientific progress ruptured the writer’s lock on realism? In the nineteenth century an outsider might gain mastery of a science. But in the twentieth, that’s impossible. Perhaps the writer’s ability to fashion facts into coherent literary form is no longer convincing.
Bellow considers if information should now be the writer’s muse. But using the massive Sunday Times (in print form only) as an example, he says that being fully informed is an illusion. Bellow was complaining about information overload, pre-internet.
The writer examines classic twentieth century literary influences, Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway etc and implies that they’re exhausted, that there hasn’t been significant innovation in literature in (his) past half century.
If there can’t be a science of fiction and traditional literary pathways of inspiration are exhausted perhaps the alternative is the writer as shaman, as the witch doctor of the tribe. Bellow introduces the concept of the “art life”. Practicing the art life, the writer life, is to master the surfaces of the profession rather than the craft. This may involve wearing the right clothes, going to the right bars, adapting to the literary speak of the day and attending conferences.
Robert Musil, in The Man Without Qualities, talks about Vienna on the eve of World War I. Appearance is prime: looking like an Olympic athlete without actually being athletic is the height of fashion. It’s the glow that counts, not the fitness. Musil has a character that is decorating his apartment and can’t decide on a style. He has access to every historical design that has ever been and as a result they all seem arbitrary.
Bellow is implying something similar about literacy. He has a story where a writer meets his biggest fan. He inspects his fan’s library and there are all the author’s works in splendid array. Only his fan has never read them. He only collects the books.
Bellow says, in this context, that’s it’s easier than ever to become a writer rather than to be one. It’s as gauche as wearing a prestigious school tie without having attended the school.
I would add that it’s easier to pretend you’re a reader than to be one. Viewed from the perspective of our century, with the rise of the indie writer and the corresponding indie reader, Bellow seems prescient. It seems that nearly everybody in the world of books is rushing to strike a pose in social media.
The essay spikes all over the place like a vine that needs pruning. Society appreciates writers and poets because we know that a complex, sophisticated civilization such as ours is supposed to have such things. So we must place some people in those positions. And besides, it’s profitable.
Saul Bellow is flailing against the atmosphere of the twentieth, seeking substance when all the era wants to know is functions and relations of power, commercial and administrative. He seems to be quixotically investigating the theology of literature, attempting to find the really real substance of it and how that bears on our authentic lives, all the while fighting off the misdirection of the society he lives in.
In some ways the essay dates. Bellow writes as if all writers will be male. And he assumes that male writers and artists risk appearing queer…that’s his word…because they are involved in the arts. These were mainstream attitudes in the sixties that were only beginning to be undermined.
There are more opportunities for innovation in literature than Bellow seems to accept, as judged from the perspective of his essay. If you attempt to nullify sexism, homophobia and racism, if your view of the landscape is both local and international, if you don’t confine creative writing to a narrow elite of same school novelists, then doesn’t the field of literature break open?
This essay appears in my purchased copy of There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, Collected Nonfiction by Saul Bellow, edited by Benjamin Taylor and recently released from Viking.
