Continuing with the Mark Harris theme (begun the other day, here), novelist Saul Bellow was another of Professor Harris's scholarly interests. Indeed he was so interested in becoming Bellow's official biographer that he pursued, or perhaps the apt verb is stalked, his quarry, occasionally securing interviews, like in the writer's Chicago office or at Manhattan restaurants--Bellow was a city slicker--during which the Nobel laureate would check his watch while Harris made his pitch. We know this is true because ultimately Harris, despairing of success, wrote a book anyway, a kind of memoir of the hunt called Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck. It's an unusual and funny book, the humor often of the self-deprecating type: a contemporaneous review by James Wolcott is available here (though the meaty middle is behind a subscriber wall, you can at least get a taste from the free part).
The subtitle about the drumlin woodchuck is the first way in which the book about Bellow displays Harris's evident interests and preoccupations. Remember how the epigraph to It Looked Like Forever was the Frost poem "Provide, Provide"? Another of Frost's poems is "A Drumlin Woodchuck," which celebrates the alert self-interest of the title animal, especially the double exits of his underground home. The identification of his "quarry" with the sly woodchuck is part of Harris's joke on himself, and also part of his view of Bellow's character.
But for Bellow readers there is another connection to what we know about Harris, the Johnson-Boswell scholar. For the words of Bellow's novels, like the words in the Life of Johnson, are preeminently, and most memorably, the record of smart people talking things over. When I say "smart," I mean in every sense of the word, including book-smart and streetwise, as suggested by Samuel Monk's description of the Life:
The chief glory of the Life is the conversation, always dominated by Johnson but not at all a monologue. It is the talk of a man, or rather of men, who have experienced broadly, read widely, observed and reflected on their observations, whose ideas are constantly brought to the test of experience, and whose experience is habitually transmuted into ideas. The book is as large as life and as human as its central character.
If you like Bellow's novels, you might similarly commend them. If you dislike them, you might complain of their "talkiness." Though the books are crowded with incidents, there is not so much a conventional plot as there is people talking and reflecting on things that have happened. You can see how this could be a problem. I've just finished reading Herzog, and the little trick of that book--the method for letting Moses Herzog carry on like the mature Johnson and his friends at their club--is that he has just been divorced and, out of perturbation of spirit, has begun compulsively composing letters. They are addressed to his shrink, his professor friends, his children, his former spouses, historical figures, many of them dead, others. Plainly the letters aren't all meant to be mailed, but Herzog pours forth his thoughts in them. The drama in the book is that of a strong mind working. One's appreciation is assisted by a liberal arts education, and I find that in a couple memorable passages some sacred figures from religion class at St Olaf College, circa 1977, receive pretty rough treatment. For example:
I'm sure you know the views of Buber. It is wrong to turn a man (a subject) into a thing (an object). By means of spiritual dialogue, the I-It relationship becomes an I-Thou relationship. God comes and goes in man's soul. And men come and go in each other's souls. Sometimes they come and go in each other's beds, too. You have dialogue with a man. You have intercourse with his wife.
That letter, to his psychiatrist, is from relatively early in the novel, and the bitterness is informed by personal experience. Much later, he writes to an academic colleague and rival, giving the man's new book a generally good review but with a large, heady, plainspoken caveat:
My dear Professor Mermelstein [there is in Bellow a Dickensian relish for names]. I want to congratulate you on a splendid book. In some matters you scooped me, you know . . . . But then I thought the treatment you gave Kierkegaard was fairly frivolous. I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of Hell will have to regain their reality before mankind turns serious once more. I do not see this. Let us set aside the fact that such convictions in the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, make me sick. We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games. People frightening one another--a poor sort of moral exercise. But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it. You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time. With the religious, the love of suffering is a form of gratitude to experience or an opportunity to experience evil and change it into good. They believe the spiritual cycle can and will be completed in a man's existence and he will somehow make use of his suffering, if only in the last moments of his life, when the mercy of God will reward him with a vision of the truth, and he will die transfigured. But this is a special exercise. More commonly suffering breaks people, crushes them, and is simply unilluminating.
Not the kind of thing one is accustomed to reading in a novel, this also has the flavor, in its conclusion, of a Johnsonian retort, terse, indignant, memorable. Depend upon it, Sir. Suffering is most frequently crushing and unilluminating. Your comfortable theologizing cannot redeem it. There's a lot of talk but Harris is one who enjoys listening. In the last sentence of his funny book, he says that Bellow's writings enriched him, amused him, informed him, raised him up.