Seize the day. Has Saul Bellow written his last book? Stephen Amidon on the work of a modern master and the search for a place in the American century
Published 10 December 2001
Collected Stories
Saul Bellow Viking, 442pp, £20
ISBN 067089172X
There seems to be a bit of mischief going on in the title of Saul Bellow's new book. It is not, you will notice, The Collected Stories - there are a number of novellas and short stories missing from this otherwise generous book, ranging from such classics as Seize the Day to the less well-known "A Father-to-Be" and "The Gonzaga Manuscripts". Why, then, "collected"? Why not "selected"? Could it be that the author is giving us a sly thematic nudge here, using a literary commonplace to indicate a unifying concern?
My guess is yes. Collection here means recollection. For Bellow's vibrant and unforgettable characters are in fact collectors of stories, just as others might hoard butterflies, Picassos or grievances. They are on the lookout for memories, gathering them in, jealously bringing them out for a guest to examine, occasionally bestowing them as gifts on those they love. In the aptly titled "Something to Remember Me By", for instance, an elderly man recounts a sad and funny Depression-era story of lost innocence as a form of inheritance for his only daughter. "I haven't left a large estate, and this is why I have written this memoir, a sort of addition to your legacy." That his story turns out to be self-deprecating, with the teller wandering the bitterly cold streets of Chicago in a dress after a run-in with a crooked whore, makes it all the more generous. In "A Silver Dish", a 60-year-old man memorialises his recently dead father by telling another shaggy-dog story of the Depression, this one involving a father-son wrestling match on a rich woman's dining-room floor, which finds its harrowing echo 40 years later when the son climbs into his father's death bed to calm his agonised thrashes. The story recollected in "Him with His Foot in His Mouth" is offered as a form of penance, with a failed musicologist sending a cockeyed letter of apology to the librarian he brutally insulted four decades earlier.
If the acquisition of memory is the object of these stories, then their subject is more often than not the process of Jewish Americanisation. In "The Bellarosa Connection", a professional memory specialist, the "founder of the Mnemosyne Institute in Philadelphia", searches out the story of Harry Fonstein, a European Jew who was saved from Hitler's death camps by the unlikely figure of Billy Rose, a Broadway entrepreneur and Americanised Jew, who spurned all attempts Fonstein made to thank him once he arrived in the United States. The unnamed narrator, also thoroughly American, succinctly describes the seemingly irreconcilable differences between the two sorts of Jewry in those postwar years. "We were bigger in my generation because we had better nutrition. We were, moreover, less restricted, we had wider liberties. We grew up under a larger range of influences and thoughts - we were the children of a great democracy, living it up with no pales to confine us . . . Were we giddy here? No doubt about it. But there were no cattle cars waiting to take us to camps and gas chambers."
This rupture in American Jewishness is vividly animated throughout the book, whether it be the traditionalist brother feuding with his thoroughly integrated sister in "The Old System", or the figure of Lustgarten in "Mosby's Memoirs", who arrives in war-ravaged Europe with a sense of entrepreneurial entitlement (those old-world Gentiles owe him for what they did to the Jews), only to wind up sleeping in the imported Cadillac he cannot sell.
Reading these stories, you are struck not only by the comic profundity of Bellow's 20th-century take, but also by the wonderful economy with which he draws memorable characters as they, too, find their place in the American century. There are dozens of examples, but let us be content with Mendy Eckstein, who "had a peculiar relish for being an American of his time. Born in Muskingum, Ohio, where his father ran a gents' furnishings shop, he attended a Chicago high school and grew up a lively, slangy man who specialised in baseball players, vaudeville performers, trumpeters and boogie-woogie musicians, gamblers, con artists, city hall small-rackets types . . . Mendy's densely curled hair was combed straight up, his cheeks were high, damaged by acne, healed to a patchy whiteness. He had a wonderful start of the head, to declare that he was about to set the record straight. He used to make this movement when he laid down his cigarette on the edge of the pool table of the University of Wisconsin Rathskeller and picked up his cue to study his next shot."
Perhaps the most memorable character here is the city of Chicago, which is to Bellow as Dublin was to Joyce, a municipality of sensuality and daily human drama that is perfectly willing to stand in for the rest of the universe. Corrupt, crowded, unmanageably busy, unnavigably vast and gripped by lousy weather, Bellow's Chicago possesses its own unique ways, "which came so natural that nobody thought to question them". It becomes clear in reading these stories that "the moral law [is] never thicker, in Chicago, than onionskin or tissue paper".
In "Cousins", Ijah, a lawyer and media personality who made a name for himself with a seedy television show called Court of Law, meets his cousin Tanky Metzger, a hoodlum who wants Ijah to write a letter of reference to the judge who is about to sentence Metzger to prison. They meet in the Italian Village restaurant in the city's famous Loop, a place that "retained its Al Capone atmosphere - sauce as red as blood, the foot smell of cheeses, the dishes of invertebrates raked up from sea mud". Here is Bellow's Chicago in a nutshell, a place where past crime and present corruption commingle seamlessly, where vivid memory mixes with the crush of current events - a place where stories are waiting to be collected with the same avidity as a loan shark's bad debts.
Stephen Amidon's latest novel is The New City (Black Swan, £6.99)
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