Saul Bellows

[katana]

"Vividness is what novelists must desire most and so they must value human existence or be unfaithful to their calling."


"Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm."


Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal, in 1915, and was raised in Chicago. He attended the University of Chicago, received his Bachelor's degree from Northwestern University in 1937, with honors in sociology and anthropology, did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, and served in the Merchant Marine during World War II.

Mr. Bellow's first novel, Dangling Man, was published in 1944, and his second, The Victim, in 1947. In 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent two years in Paris and traveling in Europe, where he began The Adventures of Augie March, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1954. Later books include Seize The Day (1956), Henderson The Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories (1968), and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970). His most recent work of fiction, Humboldt's Gift (1975), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Both Herzog and Mr. Sammler's Planet were awarded the National Book Award for fiction. Mr. Bellow's first non-fiction work, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account, published on October 25,1976, is his personal and literary record of his sojourn in Israel during several months in 1975.

In 1965 Mr. Bellow was awarded the International Literary Prize for Herzog, becoming the first American to receive the prize. In January 1968 the Republic of France awarded him the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, the highest literary distinction awarded by that nation to non-citizens, and in March 1968 he received the B'nai B'rith Jewish Heritage Award for "excellence in Jewish literature", and in November 1976 he was awarded the America's Democratic Legacy Award of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the first time this award has been made to a literary personage.

A playwright as well as a novelist, Saul Bellow is the author of The Last Analysis and of three short plays, collectively entitled Under the Weather, which were produced on Broadway in 1966. He has contributed fiction to Partisan Review, Playboy, Harper's Bazaar, The New Yorker, Esquire, and to literary quarterlies. His criticism has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Horizon, Encounter, The New Republic, The New Leader, and elsewhere. During the 1967 Arab-lsraeli conflict, he served as a war correspondent for Newsday. He has taught at Bard College, Princeton University, and the University of Minnesota, and is a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Further works
To Jerusalem and Back. A Personal Account, 1976
Him with His Foot in his Mouth and Other Stories, 1984
More Die of Heartbreak. A Novel, 1987
The Bellarosa Connection. A Novella, 1989
A Theft (novella), 1989
Something to Remember Me By. Three Tales, 1992

The Nobel Speech
There are not many things on which the world agrees but everyone I think acknowledges the importance of a Nobel Prize. I myself take most seriously the Nobel Committee's recognition of the highest excellence in several fields and I accept the honor of this award with profound gratitude.

I have no very distinct sense of personal achievement. I loved books and I wrote some. For some reason they were taken seriously. I am glad of that, of course. No one can bear to be ignored. I would, however, have been satisfied with a smaller measure of attention and praise. For when I am praised on all sides I worry a bit. I remember the scriptural warning, "Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you." Universal agreement seems to open the door to dismissal. We know how often our contemporaries are mistaken. They are not invariably wrong, but it is not at all a bad idea to remember that they can't confer immortality on you. Immortality - a chilling thought. I feel that I have scarcely begun to master my trade.

But I need not worry too much that all men will speak well of me. The civilized community agrees that there is no higher distinction than the Nobel Prize but it agrees on little else, so I need not fear that the doom of universal approval is hanging over me. When I publish a book I am often soundly walloped by reviewers - a disagreeable but necessary corrective to selfinflation.

When the Committee's choice was announced and the press rushed at me (a terrifying phenomenon!) and asked how I felt about winning the Nobel Prize in literature, I said that the child in me (for despite appearances there is a child within) was delighted, the adult skeptical. Tonight is the child's night entirely. On Sunday I will have some earnest things to say from the pulpit. Sunday is the best day for dark reflections but the child's claim to this Friday night will not be disputed.

From Les Prix Nobel, 1976

[katana]

February 11, 1962
A Novelist-Critic Discusses the Role of Reality in the Creation of Fiction
By SAUL BELLOW
have read somewhere that in the early days of the movies a miner in Alaska rushed at the screen to batter down the villain with his shovel. Probably he was drunk, but his action was significant nevertheless. This man had considered it a practical thing to travel thousands of miles into a frozen wilderness to dig for buried treasure. Money, land, furs, jewels, champagne, cigars, silk hats he must have accepted as legitimate objects of the imagination. Yet there was no place in his mind for this new sort of transaction. It must have seemed to him that if the fellow had taken the trouble to tie the kicking heroine to the tracks, he must mean business. His imagination could only conceive of real objects. Thus, with the self-same shovel he dug for gold and swung at shadows.
Few people make this error in so primitive a form, but almost no one is altogether free from it. We understand, of course, that art does not copy experience but merely borrows it for its own peculiar purposes. Americans however do not find it always simple to maintain the distinction. For us the wonder of life is bound up with the literal fact, and our greatest ingenuity is devoted to the real; and this gives reality itself magical and even sacred properties and makes American realism very different from the European sort. With us the interest of the reader and often of the writer, too, is always escaping toward the fact.

The non-factual imagination also returns to the fact. Ask a woman to describe her son, and she is likely to tell you with pride that he is 6 feet 2 or 3 inches and weighs 220 pounds, that his shoes are size 14 and that he eats four eggs at breakfast and two pounds of steak at a sitting. Her love in short, frequently takes a statistical form. Years ago, in Chicago, I used to listen to a Negro virtuoso, Facts-and-Figures Taylor, who entertained shouting crowds in Washington Park by reciting the statistics he had memorized in the Public Library. “You want to know what the steel industry exported in nineteen and twenty-one? You listen to this now.”

“You tell ‘em, Facts-and-Figures. Give ‘em hell!”

People who are not particularly friendly to art may be reconciled to it by factual interests, by descriptions of the stretching or priming of the canvas, the method of applying the paints or the dollar value of the picture. One thinks more kindly of a painting valued at $10,000, the original factory colors dripped from a six-inch brush, than of one which has not applied to the prevailing form of the imagination for consideration. The theatregoer may be pleased to learn that behind the living room represented on the stage are fully furnished bathrooms or kitchens that will never be seen but are there to give a reassuring sense of completeness of closure. The imitation will be absolutely genuine. Because we have a strong taste for the solid background, for documentation, for accuracy, for likeness, we are often confused about the borders between art and life, between social history and fiction, between gossip and satire, between the journalist’s news and the artist’s discovery.

The demands, editorial and public, for certified realities in fiction sometimes appear barbarous to the writer. Why this terrible insistence on factual accuracy? “Our readers will want to know,” an editor will sometimes say, “whether your information is correct.” The research department will then make inquiries. How many stories does the Ansonia Hotel really have; and can one see its television antennae from the corner of West End Avenue and Seventy-second Street? What do drugstores charge for Librium? What sort of mustard is used at Nedick’s? Is it squeezed from a plastic bottle or applied with a wooden spoon?

These cranky questions will be asked by readers, compulsively. Publishers know they must expect their errors to be detected. They will hear not only from the lunatic fringe and from pedants but from specialists, from scholars, from people with experience “in the field,” from protective organizations and public relations agencies, from people who have taken upon themselves the protection of the purity of facts.

Archaeologists and historians are consulted by movie producers in the making of Roman spectaculars. As long as the chariots are faithful copies, the fire real Greek fire, it seems to make little difference that the dialogue makes you clutch your head, that the religious theme is trumped up with holy music and cunning lights. It presently becomes clear that the protagonist is not Ben-Hur, not Spartacus, but Knowhow Art based on simple illusion is art in one of its cruder forms, and it is this that Hollywood with its technical skills has brought to perfection.

The realistic method made it possible to write with seriousness and dignity about the ordinary, common situations of life. In Balzac and Flaubert and the great Russian masters the realistic externals were intended to lead inward. I suppose one might say that now the two elements, the inward and the external, have come apart.

In what we call the novel of sensibility the intent of the writer is to pull us into an all- sufficient consciousness which he, the writer, governs absolutely. In the realistic novel today the writer is satisfied with an art of externals. Either he assumes that by describing a man’s shoes he has told us all that we need to know about his soul, or he is more interested in the shoes than in the soul. Literalists who write to the editor are rather odd and amusing people who do not need to be taken too seriously, but the attitude of the writer himself toward externals is a serious matter.

The facts may excite a writer deeply, and in America we have a poetry of fact--the details of labor in Walt Whitman, the knowledge of navigation in Mark Twain, the descriptions of process in Hemingway’s fishing stories. But in every case it is the writer’s excitement that counts. Without this excitement the facts are no more interesting than they would be in a manual of river navigation or a Sears, Roebuck catalogue. What is happening now is that the intrinsic excitement of the facts themselves has become intense, and the literary imagination must rival the power of the real. With us this rarely happens.

The American desire for the real has created a journalistic sort of novel which has a thing excitement, a glamour of process; it specializes in information. It resembles the naturalistic novel of Zola and the social novel of Dreiser, but is without the theoretical interests of the first and is unlike the second in that it has no concern with justice and no view of fate. It merely satisfies the readers’ demand for knowledge. From this standpoint it may sometimes be called an improving or moral sort of book. However, it seldom has much independent human content, and it is more akin to popularized science or history than to the fiction of Balzac or Chekhov. It is not actively challenged by the “novel of sensibility.”

The living heirs of Henry James and Virginia Woolf do not do very well, and I’m afraid that they largely deserve their neglect. They have receded altogether too far from externals, from observation, in their desire for mental independence and free sensibility. They give us very little information; and after we have visited them in their tree houses once or twice they lose their charm.

The novel in America has taken two forms, neither satisfactory. Those writers who wish to meet the demand for information have perhaps been successful as social historians, but they have neglected the higher forms of the imagination. The novel of sensibility has failed to represent society and has become totally uninteresting.

It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything can be more exciting than the times themselves and our common life. These modern facts perhaps have thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps like the nouveau riche of other ages we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.

By now it is misleading to speak of the facts as if they were soluble, washable, disposable, knowable. The facts themselves are not what they once were and perhaps present themselves to the imagination of the artist in some new way. A. J. Liebling, in an uncommonly good article on Stephen Crane (The New Yorker, Aug. 5, 1961), writes, “We have seen in our time that the best writers as they mature become journalists--Sartre, Camus, Mauriac, Hemingway.” Are we to suppose therefore that the artistic imagination at its highest development must be drawn back into the world and its realities? Is the challenge of journalism higher than that of art itself in our time?

Some of our novelists can scarcely help being better fact-bringers than artists. They are turning ground that has never been turned before--the Army, the laboratory, the modern corporation, the anarchic sexual life of “free spirits”: such phenomena in the raw state are not quickly assimilated into art. Moreover, it’s hard for writers to get on with their work if they are convinced that they owe a concrete debt to experience and cannot allow themselves the privilege of ranging freely through social classes and professional specialties. A certain pride in their own experience, perhaps a sense of the property rights of others in their experience, holds them back.

The novelist, convinced that the novel is the result of his passionate will to suppose that he can know everything about the life of another human being, finds that he must get through the obstacles of the literal to come at his subject. Thus, he is prevented from doing the essential thing. Hard knowledge is demanded of him; to acquire this hard knowledge, he must at least temporarily transform himself into some sort of specialist.

How then is the novelist to write about such questions as power--power which he has never experienced? Evidently he is asked to be reliable about the lower ranges of fact and is not expected to concern himself with the upper. He may be realistic but not about the things that matter, the arrangements that shape our destiny. In this smaller way to stick to the facts limits him to minor schemes of social history, to satire, to muckraking and leveling, or to the penny psychology of private worlds. To this sort of “objectivity” writers give all they’ve got. Strong on experience, they are much, much less strong on the truth.

The greatest of the realists always believed that they owed a very special debt to truth. “The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the strength of my soul, whom I have tried to set forth in all his beauty, and who has always been, is, and always will be the most beautiful, is--the truth.” So wrote Tolstoy at the conclusion of “Sevastopol in May.” And Dostoevsky commenting on “Anna Karenina” tells us that he found the book at times very monotonous and “confined to a certain caste only” and that as long as it was merely a description of life in society it made no great claim to any deeper interest.

Later, he says, “in the very center of that insolent and petty life there appeared a great and eternal living truth, at once illuminating everything. These petty, insignificant and deceitful beings suddenly became genuine and truthful people worthy of being called men.”

That is, after all, what the novelist wants, isn’t it?