Wise Guy
Kevin Stevens
Saul Bellow: Letters, by Benjamin Taylor (ed), Penguin, 624 pp, $20, ISBN 978-0143120469
"The heroes of these books are anguished men who nurse large grievances, battle grasping wives and dominating fathers, and are out of sync with the rah-rah optimism of the times. They make their way through an America at the zenith of its postwar prestige, pre-Vietnam, with the dollar supreme, gas at thirty cents a gallon, and a military-industrial complex so powerful it frightened even the old warhorse Dwight Eisenhower. Within this purring beast of a nation, so at ease with itself on the surface, Bellow found disquiet. Consumerism, the language of advertising, mass entertainment, bland politics, and a new twist on classic American pragmatism had, in Bellow’s view, crowded out the deeper needs of the self and made it harder for the individual (and the novelist) to satisfy the “immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for” (to quote from his Nobel address). His characters are “feeling individuals”, sensitive types who know they are weak but in accepting weakness and separateness “discover solidarity with other isolated creatures”. And their stories are told in language that is broad, muscular, rich, and assured.
Bellow was not afraid to tackle these lofty themes. His novels supported what he argued in his letters: that in spite of the ennui of the age and the low esteem America had for serious fiction, the frequent assertion that the novel was dead or dying was critical escapism."
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