Saul Bellow’s essay on this subject was written in 1963. When Bellow refers to the cultural trends of his time, his comments have dated. When he leaves off observations of the current scene he attains a perennial relevance.
Bellow notes that novels with messages are popular, a sly condemnation. He cites the quote attributed to Hemingway that if you want messages try Western Union. But then Bellow broadens his discussion to cover the American literary mind in historical context and here he excels.
We have the most popular, message saturated Horatio Alger colliding with the brutal realities of Al Capone and other hometown Chicago gangsters. But it’s the 19th century context that’s telling…romantic, idealistic and saturated with “messages”. Bellow perhaps can be said to bash Emerson and Thoreau. Bellow says that the commercial and industrial expansion that scandalized them is simply how we live now. But it’s interesting in suggesting, apparently, the moral irrelevance of these writers that he doesn’t bring up the great 19th novelists, Hawthorne, Melville and Twain.
When Bellow was growing up Alger was more popular than Walt Whitman, not a surprise. We laugh at Alger today if we read him at all. Bellow cites the great realist writers of his early years, Norris, Dreiser, James T. Farrell and also Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West as responsible for nailing Alger into his coffin.
The “battle of the dualities” in American literature is the central architecture of “The Writer as Moralist” I suppose we must have dualities if we are to talk about morals, or in this case, the light and dark angels of American lit.
Bellow cites Philip Rahv that American writers are either Palefaces or Redskins, with apologies to the politically correct…who are correct. That means, I would suppose, that they’re either white glove guys in academies (they would be mostly guys) or getting their hands dirty outside the establishment.
Bellow breaks this down to the struggle “between the squares and some other shape considered better”, which is funny. He calls them the Cleans and the Dirties. “Certain upper class idiocies are answered by growling from the swamps.” Also funny. Okay Mr. Bellow, you like neither group, so what are you after?
Bellow seems to get nostalgic for the time when literature consisted of telling us stuff, being a chronicle of experience was more than enough. But early 20th innovators like Valery, D.H. Lawrence and Joyce made the stability of the experiencing self problematic, and that gave the game away.
The last two or three pages of Bellow’s essay are the best, but the preparation has been necessary. Tolstoy’s view that a novelist should have a passionate moral relation to his subject matter is set aside. Bellow also sets aside an art for art’s sake attitude that would be more akin to Flaubert.
We are left with productive ambiguities. The writer’s commitment lies in “his power to absorb us, by the energy it contains. And I loved this: “Dullness is worse than obscenity. A dull book is wicked.” But I liked the latter sentence better. I don’t think in our time we believe that obscenity exists. So the comparison in the first sentence is perhaps meaningless? And you can be dull and obscene.
The essay concludes…you can be pro-life or anti. And this doesn’t relate to the terms of our local politics. It means: if you’re really such a nihilist then why write a book…or read one? Novels in this sense are always affirmations.
If there’s any meaningful duality in our literary scene today that corresponds to Bellow’s Cleans versus Dirties, I don’t know what it is. The weight attached to sex and drugs, that so put off Bellow in the work of Henry Miller and William Burroughs, is no big deal in our culture.
Every new writer seems to have little choice but to climb up the greasy pole of literary marketing. Either that or be an outsider, off the grid, like photographer Vivian Maier, knowing no one, not caring, being great and on her own. Perhaps that’s not a choice that any but a handful of eccentrics can undertake…outsider art being so very outside these days. Is there anything that’s outside? Tell me. I think I’d like to go there.
If any cultural achievement of our time is going to be acclaimed by future generations, it will be our new golden age of television. That’s a conclusion I would have found unbelieveable twenty years ago. But in our society, the unbelieveable is merely what we are doing now.
I haven’t unpacked Saul Bellow’s essay.That’s called “reading”. But I have tried to take the top off it so you can peek inside. From my purchased, outstandingly fine, recent publication: There’s Simply Too Much to Think About, from Viking, edited by Benjamin Taylor.