It is notable that Saul Bellow’s characters have little interest in literary theorizing, because typically they swim, indeed drown, in fervent theoretical reflection, even if they happen to be housewives or movie stars. Writers and philosophers are ceaselessly invoked in his fiction—the merest flip through Humboldt’s Gift, for example, yields references to Goethe, Wharton, Baudelaire, Kierkegaard, and, inevitably, Marx—but there’s next to nothing on the question of how a novel might be written in order to lay claim to formal newness or validity. Bellow’s heroes—and, we may gingerly and vicariously conclude, their creator—apparently have other things on their minds. There is the famous opening of his first novel, Dangling Man, in which the narrator, Joseph, curses the “era of hardboiled-dom,” otherwise known as Hemingway’s era; but Bellow’s subsequent work barely bothers with the whithers and wherefores of fictional forms. Unsurprising, then, that Bellow is most commonly described, not always in friendly terms, as a realist. Unsurprising that he has asserted (one learns from John Barth, a distinguished prose experimenter) that to be technically up-to-date is the least important attribute of the novelist.
One suspects that part of this disdain for theoretical currency has to do with Bellow’s idiosyncratic predilection for ranking human types, so that Benn Crader, the hero of More Die of Heartbreak, is not merely a world-class botanist but one of the Citizens of Eternity (who are themselves “lower in the hierarchy than the Greats”). You get the feeling that Bellow considers the technicians and taxonomists and temperature-takers of fiction to be persons lacking full stature, persons in the same bracket as the schoolgirls and schoolboys who scamper and stoop and toss the tennis balls to the tennis star, persons made fit by their littleness for a convenient but peripheral task. Bellow is not little. Nor will he stoop for another. He is a player. That’s not to say that his novels do not embody ideas about the novel. They must. But (and here one humbly scurries after a yellow Bellow ball) what could those ideas be? What kind of game is he playing? The Actual, Saul Bellow’s small, penultimate book, suggests a large answer.
One might as well state right away that The Actual, though undoubtedly Bellovian, is a Bellovian oddity. By its author’s lush standards of novella-writing, it is a bare, almost grassless text. To revert to our metaphor, it’s as if he had decided to play a different game, as if a champion of real tennis, with its crazy, poetic bounces and unique multidimensionality, its strange rallies and strange hybridity, its drooping net and asymmetrical walls—it’s as if this almost premodern maestro had suddenly switched to the two-dimensional modern format with its unforgiving tramlines and baselines, and, once there, decided to deploy a serve-and-volley game: aces, winners, no frills. The Actual limits itself (like Benn Crader’s final note to his nephew) to just “the fundamental, minimum information.”
It is tempting to equate this kind of brevity with the loss of energy one might expect in an octogenarian writer: The Actual was published in 1997, when Bellow was eighty-two. However, an alternative equation is possible. Consider, first, Ravelstein, the fully vigorous novel that appeared when Bellow was eighty-five. Then consider the brief essay Bellow appended to his volume of long stories Something to Remember Me By (1989). It contains an unusual confession:
It’s difficult for me now to read [my] early novels, not because they lack interest but because I find myself editing them, slimming down my sentences and cutting out whole paragraphs.
He then argues as follows: that the contemporary reader, her consciousness stormed by powerful cultural forces—“Think of the consciousness as a territory just open to settlement and exploitation, something like the Oklahoma land rush”—is entitled to expect that “a writer will trouble no one with his own vanities, will make no unnecessary gestures, indulge himself in no mannerisms, waste no reader’s time. He will write as short as he can.” This is pure pragmatism, of course—the suggestion being, in effect, that a writer of fiction should accommodate a reader of diminished powers of attention—and, indeed, a less idealistic prescription for serious literary enterprise is hard to imagine. But even if Bellow is being a little provocative, his late affection for shortness may help explain how Harry Trellman, the to-the-point narrator of The Actual, came into being. Pithiness of expression must on some level relate to pithiness of perception—to the ability to locate, in excessively bundled experience, what is innermost and most important.
Harry is a businessman who, after years of working abroad in a “sufficiently legal” venture involving furniture restoration, has resettled in his hometown, Chicago, for a distinctly uncommercial reason: Chicago is where he has “unfinished emotional business.” For a man guided by emotion, and for a Bellow protagonist to boot, Harry is unforthcoming—hard-boiled, you might even say. The aforementioned Joseph declared (and here he might be speaking for Augie, Moses Herzog, Charlie Citrine, et al.), “I intend to talk about [my difficulties], and if I had as many mouths as Siva has arms and kept them going all the time, I still could not do myself justice.” Not so Harry, for whom a single mouth seems more than enough. He is a man who from his youth has hidden behind his inscrutable “Chinese look,” who never offers us more than the sketchiest map of his personal hinterland (a divorce, an unpublished book on the political thinker Walter Lippmann, a spell in Burma), who keeps “thousands and thousands of things” to himself. And also from himself: only late in life does it becomes clear to Harry that his life has been spent “in continual mental touch” with Amy Wustrin, who at the age of fifteen was his high-school beloved, and that “all my efforts to detach myself from her had failed completely”:
After forty years of concentrated imagining, I feel able to picture her at any moment of any given day. When she opens her purse to find her house keys, I am aware of the Doublemint chewing gum fragrance that comes out.
The most interesting thing about Amy is that she is not, on the face of it, all that interesting. Unintellectual, unambitious, professionally unaccomplished—it is only after the death of her husband, Harry’s philandering old school friend Jay Wustrin, that she makes a name for herself as an interior decorator—Amy has little of the evident enchantingness and complexity one might expect in a lifelong object of passionate obsession. She is not a siren. (She is not a Matilda Crader or Madeleine Herzog or Denise Citrine, hazards to passing mariners of the spirit.) Her very straightforwardness made the young Harry “ashamed of the ordinary middle-class character of my connection to Amy” and drove him to other, seemingly grander and more subversive romantic directions. But as the decades pass, Amy remains fascinating, even after Harry has run into her on a Chicago street and does not at first recognize her, this middle-aged woman, “gray-faced as a maid-of-all-work—an overworked mother.” Nothing else has changed. In spite of the years and everything they contain, the connection between them continues to exert mystery and influence.
There is a precedent in Bellow for the kind of enduring, tantalizing early love that runs concurrently with subsequent, less lasting adventures of the heart, runs like a never-ending, never-stopping freight train into which, from opposite sides of the track, the lovers persistently but vainly try to jump: in A Theft, a relationship of true love slips along in parallel to the seven marriages the true lovers between them have undertaken with others. More pointedly, there is a precedent for Amy Wustrin, the childhood sweetheart who never loses her allure and who in her apparent uncomplicatedness promises to redeem the adult male from amorous perplexity, intellectual over-elaboration, and, as Bellow writes somewhere, “perturbation-pleasure.” Step forward, Naomi Lutz, whom Charlie Citrine, of Humboldt’s Gift, has never gotten over:
When I loved Naomi Lutz I was safely within life. Its phenomena added up, they made sense. Death was an after all acceptable proposition . . . I couldn’t help thinking what a blessed life I might have led with Naomi Lutz. Fifteen thousand nights embracing Naomi and I would have smiled at the solitude and boredom of the grave.
Naomi is memorable for her warm raccoon coat of yesteryear, beneath which “was a delicious mixture of coon skin and maiden fragrance.” When Charlie pays her a sentimental visit, he finds a fifty-three-year-old policewoman in the rain, stopping traffic for the benefit of schoolchildren. On closer examination, he concludes that even though “she really didn’t look good . . . it would have worked. Molecule for molecule she was still Naomi. Each cell of those stout arms was still a Naomi cell.” Naomi disagrees: “We would have had nothing but maladjustment and conflict. You would have to speak all this high-flown stuff to yourself, and everyday gobbledygook to me.”
Amy Wustrin in her youth also wore a raccoon coat (in high school, Harry “valued highly the smell of animal musk released from the fur by the warmth of Amy’s body”); Amy, too, was a “petty-bourgeois broad,” and Amy, like Naomi, was intimidated and alienated by her young paramour’s “high-level mental life.” But Amy is unlike Naomi in a crucial respect: she does not regard her romantic revenant as a practical impossibility. Amy is a believer.
As if to rescue the reunion of Harry and Amy from implausibility, The Actual is dotted with examples of the unlikely persistence of human pairs. There’s Frances Jellicoe, a stout society hostess who remains in love with an ex-husband who is a drunk and a boor. There’s the toy manufacturer Bodo Heisinger, loyal to his wife, Madge, even after she has been imprisoned for plotting to murder him. And there are the nonagenarian trillionaires Mr. and Mrs. Sigmund Adletsky, who shop for a new apartment like young homemakers even as their bodies become ever tinier and more lightweight—“like a satin-wrapped pupa,” in Mrs. Adletsky’s case. (Bellow is a wonderful describer of human ancientness—who can forget Harold Vilitzer, in More Die of Heartbreak, “as light as an empty plastic egg carton. Not an egg left in him”?) Coupling, on this evidence, is a baroque, unfathomable enterprise and an inextinguishable source of salvation, even when it might seem too late. Not for nothing does Harry’s renewed courtship of Amy sharpen as she, in deep winter, undertakes the sad chore of disinterring her late husband and (for a peculiar, almost comic reason) removing his remains to another grave. Harry reckons:
We had, let’s say, a score of years remaining. One should probably write off the final five—make a reasonable allowance for ailments. That left fifteen fully worth having.
The affirmation is not only hopeful but in its practicality and optimism uncharacteristic of Bellow, who devoted vast, despairing novels to love’s incorrigible troublesomeness. Usually his males end up fleeing the scene—Herzog to the sticks, Citrine to Europe, Crader to “an incomprehensible location in reindeer country, far out in the tundra. Probably near Novaya Zemlya. Even that was not remote enough.” But Harry Trellman is not a bolter. On the contrary, he is a returner and he is a stayer.
Why, though? What does Harry know that his brethren in fiction don’t? The answer has to do with Amy’s unique realness—“Other women were apparitions. She, and only she, was no apparition”—and the “actual affinity” she inspires in Harry. As he explains to her, “Other women might remind me of you, but there was only one actual Amy.”
It seems wrongheaded to unpack this simple, beautiful statement. But it has an important mystical dimension. “My misery comes, maybe, from ignoring my metaphysical hunches,” Charlie Citrine speculates. Harry, one might suggest, finds happiness by heeding such a hunch. What is the hunch? That the nature of love is something like the divine simplicity proposed by theologians: God is without parts. For Harry, Amy is without parts. She is without a like. Since there is only one Amy, there can be only one love. She is love.
And it’s here that one circles back to the original point of inquiry and to the matter of Saul Bellow’s fundamental artistic affiliation. His fiction is splendidly earthen, but, at the same time, it reaches for a transcendent yet actual reality. Rather than call him a realist, might one not call Saul Bellow an actualist?
JOSEPH O’NEILL