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Fw: Fw: Fw: Fw: Martin Amis on Bellow , VN, et al
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Date
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Stringer-Hye, Suellen" <suellen.stringer-hye@vanderbilt.edu>
To: "Vladimir Nabokov Forum" <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2004 7:44 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: Fw: Fw: Martin Amis on Bellow , VN, et al
> Yes but he forgot Marvelous Melville!
>
------------------------------------------------------>
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Rodney Welch
> > To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
> > Sent: Saturday, March 13, 2004 6:20 PM
> > Subject: Re: Fw: Fw: Martin Amis on Bellow , VN, et al
> >
> > I swear to God, Andrew -- when you're on fire, you're peerless.
> >
> > Rodney Welch
> > Columbia. SC
> >
> > On Saturday, March 13, 2004, at 08:58 PM, D. Barton Johnson wrote:
> >
> >
> > EDNOTE. First-rate vituperation.
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Andrew Brown
> > To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
> > Sent: Saturday, March 13, 2004 3:27 PM
> > Subject: Re: Fw: Martin Amis on Bellow , VN, et al
> >
> > I apologize for being late in jumping in on this, but I was in
> > the toils of the remarkably annoying business of working, a fact
> > of life I still find onerous even at this advanced stage.
> > The idea of a Greatest American novelist, Bellow or no Bellow is,
> > to my mind, peculiarly British and linked in some way to their
> > xenophenomenon of class consciousness. They just cannot absorb
> > the multiplicity of American cultures, and so it's tough for even
> > the brightest of them, among which I would include Amis (even
> > though his essays sometimes suggest that an attractive style
> > isn't necessarily a concommitant of ideation), to "get" the fact
> > that the pin's head on which America's "greatest" novelist(s)
> > disport themselves offers room for a barn dance of Dawn Powell,
> > Hemingway, Welty, Lightweight-but-Lovely Scott Fitzgerald, James
> > T-is-for-Tedious Farrell, Hank James, Nat Hawthorne, Sam Clemens,
> > N. Leadfoot Mailer, Keyboard Kerouac ... and, sure, Bellow,
> > capering the theosophist two step. There is no one Great American
> > Novelist and there never will be as long as we are -- thank God,
> > Yahweh, Ja, Higher Power, Whatever -- a grab bag nation from
> > Erewon and Everywhere.
> > Is it guilt over their own (Europe and England's, not Amis's)
> > anti semitism that makes them throw out these crazy claims for
> > Bellow? A self-castigation for choking off their own emigres and
> > immigrants for so long? By the way, I refuse to allow Nabokov to
> > be considered anything other than an American novelist. He chose
> > us. He's ours. And he's a genius who is, in relation to Bellow,
> > what Shakespeare is to, say, Kit Smart. Adopted children agree,
> > the one who broke their back to raise you is the true parent, not
> > the one who merely begat you.
> > I give Amis due credit for loyalty in friendship. Kingsley begat
> > Martin, but Bellow provided the example of Literary Stamina.
> > Where Martin's biological father squandered his substance in
> > carping letters to the editor, skirt chasing and well-aged
> > MacCallan, Bellow puts the ink on the page like a sharecropper
> > with one mule, a dozen mouths to feed, and the fear of God.
> > Martin has nothing to gain by boosting his elderly friend at this
> > point, so it's honest and honorable, even if it is entirely
> > mistaken. MA's Information, a novel I seem almost alone in
> > considering possibly his best, offers some interesting and maybe
> > unintentional insights into MA's notions about American cultural
> > diversity. He kind of despises it. The writers of the Bold Agenda
> > imprint are all talentless freaks who have achieved publication
> > only because of their diversity. It's a ballsy anti-fashionable
> > fictional stance. But, just as many a truth is said in jest, many
> > a privately held opinion is articulated in the prism of fiction.
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: D. Barton Johnson
> > To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
> > Sent: Monday, March 08, 2004 9:24 PM
> > Subject: Fw: Martin Amis on Bellow , VN, et al
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Mark Bennett
> > To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
> > Sent: Monday, March 08, 2004 1:34 PM
> > Subject: RE: Martin Amis on Bellow , VN, et al
> >
> > Amis doesn't pass up an opportunity to take the Bellow Bandwagon
> > out of the garage, does he? "Bellow's place as the greatest
> > American Novelist is unchallenged"? Perhaps not in the
> > reactionary British literary circles where Amis, Hitchens,
> > Barnes, et al revolve around one another, but over here in
> > Freedom's Land, Bellow's "place," wherever it may be, is easily
> > challenged. Bellow doesn't even reign supreme among the "Jewish
> > Giants," such as they are: to my mind Philip Roth beats
> > "America's Tolstoy" hollow. This constant promotion of Bellow,
> > with the inevitable and pointless reference to VN, is becoming a
> > bore. Martin was much more interesting when he was toothless and
> > drunk.
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU]
> > On Behalf Of D. Barton Johnson Sent: Sunday, March 07, 2004 10:24
> > AM
> > To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
> > Subject: Martin Amis on Bellow , VN, et al
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Sandy P. Klein
> >
> > <image.tiff>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > <image.tiff><image.tiff>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > <image.tiff>
> >
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> > <image.tiff>
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> >
> >
> >
> > <image.tiff>
> >
> >
> > http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1162181,00.html
> >
> > Capo di capi
> >
> > Egomania is a burdensome ingredient of literary talent, Martin
> > Amis argues, yet writers are surprisingly realistic about
> > hierarchy. And Saul Bellow's place as the greatest American
> > novelist is unchallenged
> >
> > Saturday March 6, 2004
> > The Guardian
> >
> > Whereas English poetry "fears no one", EM Forster wrote in 1927,
> > English fiction "is less trium-phant": there remained the little
> > matter of the Russians and the French. Forster published his last
> > novel, A Passage to India, in 1924, but he lived on until 1970 -
> > long enough to witness a profound rearrangement in the balance of
> > power. Russian fiction, as dementedly robust as ever in the early
> > years of the century (Bulgakov, Zamyatin, Bely, Bunin), had! been
> > wiped off the face of the earth; French fiction seemed to have
> > strayed into philosophical and essayistic peripheries; and
> > English fiction (which still awaited the crucial infusion from
> > the "colonials") felt, well, hopelessly English - hopelessly
> > inert and inbred. Meanwhile, and as if in obedience to the
> > political reality, American fiction was assuming its manifest
> > destiny.
> >
> > The American novel, having become dominant, was in turn dominated
> > by the Jewish-American novel, and everybody knows who dominated
> > that: Saul Bellow. His was and is a pre-eminence that rests not
> > on sales figures and honorary degrees, not on rosettes and
> > sashes, but on incontestable legitimacy. To hold otherwise is to
> > waste your breath. Bellow sees more than we see - sees, hears,
> > smells, tastes, touches. Compared to him, the rest of us are only
> > fitfully sentient; and intellectually, too, his sentences simply
> > weigh more than anybody else's. John Updike and Philip Roth, the
> > two writers in perhaps the strongest position to rival Bellow, or
> > to succeed him, have both acknowledged that his seniority is not
> > merely a question of Anno Domini. Egomania is an ingredient of
> > literary talent, and a burdensome one: the egomaniacal reverie is
> > not, as many suppose, a stupor of self-satisfaction; it is more
> > like a state of red alert. Yet writers are surprisingly realistic
> > about hierarchy. Jo! hn Berryman claimed he was "comfortable"
> > playing second fiddle to Robert Lowell; and when that old flag
> > ship Robert Frost sank to the bottom, in 1963, he said
> > impulsively (and unsentimentally), "It's scary. Who's number
> > one?" But that was just a rush of blood. Berryman knew his proper
> > place.
> >
> > Rather impertinently, perhaps, you could summarise the
> > preoccupations of the Jewish-American novel in one word:
> > "shiksas" (literally, "detested things"). It transpired that
> > there was something uniquely riveting about the conflict between
> > the Jewish sensibility and the temptations - the inevitabilities
> > - of materialist America. As one Bellow narrator puts it, "At
> > home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of
> > life." The archaic rule is sombre, blood-bound, guilt-torn,
> > renunciatory, and transcendental; the facts of life are atomised,
> > unreflecting, and unclean. Of course, the Jewish-American novel
> > subsumes the experience of the immigrant, with an "old country"
> > at one remove; and the emphasis is on the anxiety of entitlement
> > (marked in Roth, too, and in Malamud). It is not an anxiety about
> > succeeding, about making good; it is an anxiety about the right
> > to pronounce, the right to judge - about the right to write. And
> > the consequence would seem to be that these ! novelists brought a
> > new intensity to the act of authorial commitment, offering up the
> > self entire, holding nothing back. Although Jewish-American
> > fiction is often comic and deflationary, concerning itself with
> > what Herzog called "high-minded mistakes", something
> > world-historically dismal lies behind it - a terminal standard of
> > human brutality. The dimensions of this brutality were barely
> > grasp-able in 1944, the year that saw the beginning of Bellow's
> > serial epic. And America would subsequently be seen as "the land
> > of historical redress", a place where (as Bellow wrote with cold
> > simplicity) "the Jews could not be put to death".
> >
> > Universalisingly, the Jewish-American novel poses a mind-body
> > problem - and then goes ahead and solves it on the page. "When
> > some new thought gripped his heart he went to the kitchen, his
> > headquarters, to write it down," Bellow writes on page one of
> > Herzog (1964) - "When some new thought gripped his heart": the
> > voice is undisassociated; it responds to the world with
> > passionate sensuality, and at a pitch of cerebration no less
> > prodigious and unflagging. Bellow has presided over an
> > efflorescence that clearly owes much to historical circumstances,
> > and we must now elegiacally conclude that the phase is coming to
> > an end. No replacements stand in line. Did "assimilation" do it,
> > or was the process something flabbier and more diffuse? "Your
> > history, too, became one of your options," the narrator of The
> > Bellarosa Connection (1989) notes dryly. "Whether or not having a
> > history was a 'consideration' was entirely up to you." Recalling
> > Philip Rahv's famous essay of 1939, we may say th! at the
> > Palefaces have prevailed over the Redskins. Roth will maintain
> > the tradition, for a while. Yet he is Chingachgook - last of the
> > Mohicans.
> >
> > Praise and dispraise play their part in the quality control of
> > literary journalism, but when the value judgment is applied to
> > the past its essential irrationality is sharply exposed. The
> > practice of rearranging the canon on aesthetic or moralistic
> > grounds (today such grounds would be political - that is,
> > egalitarian) was unanswerably ridiculed by Northrop Frye in his
> > Anatomy of Criticism (1957). To imagine a literary "stock
> > exchange" in which reputations "boom and crash", he argued, is to
> > reduce literary criticism to the sphere of "leisure-class
> > gossip". You can go on about it, you can labour the point, but
> > you cannot demonstrate that Milton is a better poet than Macaulay
> > -or, indeed, that Milton is a better poet than McGonagall. It is
> > evident, it is obvious, but it cannot be proved. Still, I propose
> > to make an educated guess about literary futures, and I hereby
> > trumpet the prediction that Bellow will emerge as the supreme
> > American novelist. There is, hereabouts, no short! age of
> > narrative genius, and it tends, as Bellow tends, toward the
> > visionary - a quality needed for the interpretation of a New
> > World. But when we look to the verbal surface, to the instrument,
> > to the prose, Bellow is sui generis. What should he fear? The
> > melodramatic formularies of Hawthorne? The multitudinous
> > facetiousness of Melville? The murkily iterative menace of
> > Faulkner? No. The only American who gives Bellow any serious
> > trouble is Henry James.
> >
> > All writers enter into an unconscious marriage with their
> > readers, and in this respect James's fiction follows a peculiar
> > arc: courtship, honeymoon, vigorous cohabitation, and then
> > growing disaffection and estrangement; separate beds, and then
> > separate rooms. As with any marriage, the relationship is
> > measured by the quality of its daily intercourse - by the quality
> > of its language. And even at its most equable and beguiling (the
> > androgy-nous delicacy, the wonderfully alien eye), James's prose
> > suffers from an acute behavioural flaw. Students of usage have
> > identified the habit as "elegant variation". The phrase is
> > intended ironically, because the elegance aspired to is really
> > pseudo-elegance, anti-elegance. For example: "She proceeded to
> > the left, towards the Ponte Vecchio, and stopped in front of one
> > of the hotels which overlook that delightful structure." I can
> > think of another variation on the Ponte Vecchio: how about that
> > vulgar little pronoun "it"? Similarly, "breakfas! t", later in
> > its appointed sentence, becomes "this repast", and "tea-pot"
> > becomes "this receptacle"; "Lord Warburton" becomes "that
> > nobleman" (or "the master of Lockleigh"); "letters" become
> > "epistles"; "his arms" become "these members"; and so on. Apart
> > from causing the reader to groan out loud as often as three times
> > in a single sentence, James's variations suggest broader
> > deficiencies: gentility, fastidiousness, and a lack of warmth, a
> > lack of candour and engagement. All the instances quoted above
> > come from The Portrait of a Lady (1881), from the generous and
> > hospitable early-middle period. When we enter the arctic
> > labyrinth known as Late James, the retreat from the reader, the
> > embrace of introversion, is as emphatic as that of Joyce, and far
> > more fiendishly prolonged.
> >
> > The phantom marriage with the reader is the basis of the
> > novelist's creative equilibrium. Such a relationship needs to be
> > unconscious, silent, tacit; and, naturally, it needs to be
> > informed by love. Bellow's love for the reader has always been at
> > once safely subliminal and thrillingly ardent. And it combines
> > with another kind of love, to produce what may be the Bellovian
> > quiddity. Looking again at the late short story "By the St
> > Lawrence", I found I had marked a passage and written in the
> > margin, "So is this it?" The passage runs:
> >
> > "She was not a lovable woman, but the boy loved her and she was
> > aware of it. He loved them all. He even loved Albert. When he
> > visited Lachine he shared Albert's bed, and in the morning he
> > would sometimes stroke Albert's head, and not even when Albert
> > fiercely threw off his hand did he stop loving him. The hair grew
> > in close rows, row after row.
> >
> > These observations, Rexler was to learn, were his whole life -
> > his being - and love was what produced them. For each physical
> > trait there was a corresponding feeling. Paired, pair by pair,
> > they walked back and forth, in and out of his soul."
> >
> > And this is it, I think. Love is celebrated for, among other
> > things, its transformative powers; and it is with love, in
> > concert with his overpowering need to commemorate and preserve
> > ("I am the nemesis of the would-be forgotten"), that Bellow
> > transforms the world:
> >
> > "Napoleon Street, rotten, toylike, crazy and filthy, riddled,
> > flogged with harsh weather - the bootlegger's boys reciting
> > ancient prayers. To this Moses' heart was attached with great
> > power. Here was a wider range of human feelings than he had ever
> > again been able to find. The children of the race, by a
> > never-failing miracle, opened their eyes on one strange world
> > after another, age after age, and uttered the same prayer in
> > each, eagerly loving what they found. What was wrong with
> > Napoleon Street? thought Herzog. All he ever wanted was there."
> >
> > "I am an American, Chicago born," Augie March says, at the
> > outset. It could have gone, "I am a Russian, Quebec born - and
> > moved to Chicago at the age of nine." And Bellow is a Russian, a
> > Tolstoy, in his purity and amplitude. Which brings us to another
> > ghost from Saint Petersburg: Vladimir Nabokov. An earnest admirer
> > of Pnin (1957) and Lolita (1955), Bellow has nonetheless always
> > felt that Nabokov was artistically weakened by patricianism (the
> > Jamesian flaw); and it is patricianism, certainly, that distances
> > us from the magnum opus, Ada (1969), in which the bond with the
> > reader simply disappears. Nabokov was not an immigrant ("Don't
> > carry on like a goddamn immigrant," Herzog's older brother says
> > as they bury their father): Nabokov remained an ÈmigrÈ. He
> > couldn't become an American; he was - however delightfully -
> > slumming it over there. Bellow as a child, to his immense
> > advantage, knew what slums really were: they presented the widest
> > range of human feelings, but also dire! cted the gaze upward, to
> > the transcendent.
> >
> > Some years ago I had a curious conversation with a notably
> > prolific novelist who had just finished re-reading The Adventures
> > of Augie March (1953). We talked about the book; then he thought
> > he was changing the subject when he said, "I went into my study
> > today - and there was nothing. Not a phrase, not a word. I
> > thought, 'It's all gone.'" I said, "Don't worry, it's not you.
> > It's Augie March." Because the same thing had happened to me.
> > That's what Bellow can do to you, with his burning, streaming
> > prose: he can make you feel that all the phrases, all the words,
> > are exclusively his. At the same time, we share Augie's utopian
> > elation when, reduced almost to non-entity in Mexico (c. 1940),
> > he glimpses none other than Leon Trotsky.
> >
> > "I believe what it was about him that stirred me up was the
> > instant impression he gave - no matter about the old heap he rode
> > in or the peculiarity of his retinue - of navigation by the great
> > stars, of the highest considerations, of being fit to speak the
> > most important human words and universal terms. When you are as
> > reduced to a different kind of navigation from this high starry
> > kind as I was and are only sculling on the shallow bay, crawling
> > from one clam-rake to the next, it's stirring to have a glimpse
> > of deep-water greatness. And, even more than an established, an
> > exiled greatness, because the exile was a sign to me of
> > persistence at the highest things."
> >
> > Martin Amis
> >
> >
> >
> > Read Saul Bellow's Nobel lecture
> > Read Saul Bellow's Nobel banquet speech
> >
> >
> > <image.tiff>
> >
> >
> > http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1162181,00.html
> >
> >
> > <image.tiff>
> >
> >
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> >
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> >
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> >
> >
> > <image.tiff>
> >
> >
> > Fast. Reliable. Get MSN 9 Dial-up - 3 months for the price of 1!
> > (Limited-time Offer)
> >
> >
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------
> Stringer-Hye, Suellen
> Vanderbilt University
> Email: suellen.stringer-hye@Vanderbilt.Edu
From: "Stringer-Hye, Suellen" <suellen.stringer-hye@vanderbilt.edu>
To: "Vladimir Nabokov Forum" <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2004 7:44 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: Fw: Fw: Martin Amis on Bellow , VN, et al
> Yes but he forgot Marvelous Melville!
>
------------------------------------------------------>
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Rodney Welch
> > To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
> > Sent: Saturday, March 13, 2004 6:20 PM
> > Subject: Re: Fw: Fw: Martin Amis on Bellow , VN, et al
> >
> > I swear to God, Andrew -- when you're on fire, you're peerless.
> >
> > Rodney Welch
> > Columbia. SC
> >
> > On Saturday, March 13, 2004, at 08:58 PM, D. Barton Johnson wrote:
> >
> >
> > EDNOTE. First-rate vituperation.
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Andrew Brown
> > To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
> > Sent: Saturday, March 13, 2004 3:27 PM
> > Subject: Re: Fw: Martin Amis on Bellow , VN, et al
> >
> > I apologize for being late in jumping in on this, but I was in
> > the toils of the remarkably annoying business of working, a fact
> > of life I still find onerous even at this advanced stage.
> > The idea of a Greatest American novelist, Bellow or no Bellow is,
> > to my mind, peculiarly British and linked in some way to their
> > xenophenomenon of class consciousness. They just cannot absorb
> > the multiplicity of American cultures, and so it's tough for even
> > the brightest of them, among which I would include Amis (even
> > though his essays sometimes suggest that an attractive style
> > isn't necessarily a concommitant of ideation), to "get" the fact
> > that the pin's head on which America's "greatest" novelist(s)
> > disport themselves offers room for a barn dance of Dawn Powell,
> > Hemingway, Welty, Lightweight-but-Lovely Scott Fitzgerald, James
> > T-is-for-Tedious Farrell, Hank James, Nat Hawthorne, Sam Clemens,
> > N. Leadfoot Mailer, Keyboard Kerouac ... and, sure, Bellow,
> > capering the theosophist two step. There is no one Great American
> > Novelist and there never will be as long as we are -- thank God,
> > Yahweh, Ja, Higher Power, Whatever -- a grab bag nation from
> > Erewon and Everywhere.
> > Is it guilt over their own (Europe and England's, not Amis's)
> > anti semitism that makes them throw out these crazy claims for
> > Bellow? A self-castigation for choking off their own emigres and
> > immigrants for so long? By the way, I refuse to allow Nabokov to
> > be considered anything other than an American novelist. He chose
> > us. He's ours. And he's a genius who is, in relation to Bellow,
> > what Shakespeare is to, say, Kit Smart. Adopted children agree,
> > the one who broke their back to raise you is the true parent, not
> > the one who merely begat you.
> > I give Amis due credit for loyalty in friendship. Kingsley begat
> > Martin, but Bellow provided the example of Literary Stamina.
> > Where Martin's biological father squandered his substance in
> > carping letters to the editor, skirt chasing and well-aged
> > MacCallan, Bellow puts the ink on the page like a sharecropper
> > with one mule, a dozen mouths to feed, and the fear of God.
> > Martin has nothing to gain by boosting his elderly friend at this
> > point, so it's honest and honorable, even if it is entirely
> > mistaken. MA's Information, a novel I seem almost alone in
> > considering possibly his best, offers some interesting and maybe
> > unintentional insights into MA's notions about American cultural
> > diversity. He kind of despises it. The writers of the Bold Agenda
> > imprint are all talentless freaks who have achieved publication
> > only because of their diversity. It's a ballsy anti-fashionable
> > fictional stance. But, just as many a truth is said in jest, many
> > a privately held opinion is articulated in the prism of fiction.
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: D. Barton Johnson
> > To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
> > Sent: Monday, March 08, 2004 9:24 PM
> > Subject: Fw: Martin Amis on Bellow , VN, et al
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Mark Bennett
> > To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
> > Sent: Monday, March 08, 2004 1:34 PM
> > Subject: RE: Martin Amis on Bellow , VN, et al
> >
> > Amis doesn't pass up an opportunity to take the Bellow Bandwagon
> > out of the garage, does he? "Bellow's place as the greatest
> > American Novelist is unchallenged"? Perhaps not in the
> > reactionary British literary circles where Amis, Hitchens,
> > Barnes, et al revolve around one another, but over here in
> > Freedom's Land, Bellow's "place," wherever it may be, is easily
> > challenged. Bellow doesn't even reign supreme among the "Jewish
> > Giants," such as they are: to my mind Philip Roth beats
> > "America's Tolstoy" hollow. This constant promotion of Bellow,
> > with the inevitable and pointless reference to VN, is becoming a
> > bore. Martin was much more interesting when he was toothless and
> > drunk.
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU]
> > On Behalf Of D. Barton Johnson Sent: Sunday, March 07, 2004 10:24
> > AM
> > To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
> > Subject: Martin Amis on Bellow , VN, et al
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Sandy P. Klein
> >
> > <image.tiff>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > <image.tiff><image.tiff>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > <image.tiff>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > <image.tiff>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > <image.tiff>
> >
> >
> > http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1162181,00.html
> >
> > Capo di capi
> >
> > Egomania is a burdensome ingredient of literary talent, Martin
> > Amis argues, yet writers are surprisingly realistic about
> > hierarchy. And Saul Bellow's place as the greatest American
> > novelist is unchallenged
> >
> > Saturday March 6, 2004
> > The Guardian
> >
> > Whereas English poetry "fears no one", EM Forster wrote in 1927,
> > English fiction "is less trium-phant": there remained the little
> > matter of the Russians and the French. Forster published his last
> > novel, A Passage to India, in 1924, but he lived on until 1970 -
> > long enough to witness a profound rearrangement in the balance of
> > power. Russian fiction, as dementedly robust as ever in the early
> > years of the century (Bulgakov, Zamyatin, Bely, Bunin), had! been
> > wiped off the face of the earth; French fiction seemed to have
> > strayed into philosophical and essayistic peripheries; and
> > English fiction (which still awaited the crucial infusion from
> > the "colonials") felt, well, hopelessly English - hopelessly
> > inert and inbred. Meanwhile, and as if in obedience to the
> > political reality, American fiction was assuming its manifest
> > destiny.
> >
> > The American novel, having become dominant, was in turn dominated
> > by the Jewish-American novel, and everybody knows who dominated
> > that: Saul Bellow. His was and is a pre-eminence that rests not
> > on sales figures and honorary degrees, not on rosettes and
> > sashes, but on incontestable legitimacy. To hold otherwise is to
> > waste your breath. Bellow sees more than we see - sees, hears,
> > smells, tastes, touches. Compared to him, the rest of us are only
> > fitfully sentient; and intellectually, too, his sentences simply
> > weigh more than anybody else's. John Updike and Philip Roth, the
> > two writers in perhaps the strongest position to rival Bellow, or
> > to succeed him, have both acknowledged that his seniority is not
> > merely a question of Anno Domini. Egomania is an ingredient of
> > literary talent, and a burdensome one: the egomaniacal reverie is
> > not, as many suppose, a stupor of self-satisfaction; it is more
> > like a state of red alert. Yet writers are surprisingly realistic
> > about hierarchy. Jo! hn Berryman claimed he was "comfortable"
> > playing second fiddle to Robert Lowell; and when that old flag
> > ship Robert Frost sank to the bottom, in 1963, he said
> > impulsively (and unsentimentally), "It's scary. Who's number
> > one?" But that was just a rush of blood. Berryman knew his proper
> > place.
> >
> > Rather impertinently, perhaps, you could summarise the
> > preoccupations of the Jewish-American novel in one word:
> > "shiksas" (literally, "detested things"). It transpired that
> > there was something uniquely riveting about the conflict between
> > the Jewish sensibility and the temptations - the inevitabilities
> > - of materialist America. As one Bellow narrator puts it, "At
> > home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of
> > life." The archaic rule is sombre, blood-bound, guilt-torn,
> > renunciatory, and transcendental; the facts of life are atomised,
> > unreflecting, and unclean. Of course, the Jewish-American novel
> > subsumes the experience of the immigrant, with an "old country"
> > at one remove; and the emphasis is on the anxiety of entitlement
> > (marked in Roth, too, and in Malamud). It is not an anxiety about
> > succeeding, about making good; it is an anxiety about the right
> > to pronounce, the right to judge - about the right to write. And
> > the consequence would seem to be that these ! novelists brought a
> > new intensity to the act of authorial commitment, offering up the
> > self entire, holding nothing back. Although Jewish-American
> > fiction is often comic and deflationary, concerning itself with
> > what Herzog called "high-minded mistakes", something
> > world-historically dismal lies behind it - a terminal standard of
> > human brutality. The dimensions of this brutality were barely
> > grasp-able in 1944, the year that saw the beginning of Bellow's
> > serial epic. And America would subsequently be seen as "the land
> > of historical redress", a place where (as Bellow wrote with cold
> > simplicity) "the Jews could not be put to death".
> >
> > Universalisingly, the Jewish-American novel poses a mind-body
> > problem - and then goes ahead and solves it on the page. "When
> > some new thought gripped his heart he went to the kitchen, his
> > headquarters, to write it down," Bellow writes on page one of
> > Herzog (1964) - "When some new thought gripped his heart": the
> > voice is undisassociated; it responds to the world with
> > passionate sensuality, and at a pitch of cerebration no less
> > prodigious and unflagging. Bellow has presided over an
> > efflorescence that clearly owes much to historical circumstances,
> > and we must now elegiacally conclude that the phase is coming to
> > an end. No replacements stand in line. Did "assimilation" do it,
> > or was the process something flabbier and more diffuse? "Your
> > history, too, became one of your options," the narrator of The
> > Bellarosa Connection (1989) notes dryly. "Whether or not having a
> > history was a 'consideration' was entirely up to you." Recalling
> > Philip Rahv's famous essay of 1939, we may say th! at the
> > Palefaces have prevailed over the Redskins. Roth will maintain
> > the tradition, for a while. Yet he is Chingachgook - last of the
> > Mohicans.
> >
> > Praise and dispraise play their part in the quality control of
> > literary journalism, but when the value judgment is applied to
> > the past its essential irrationality is sharply exposed. The
> > practice of rearranging the canon on aesthetic or moralistic
> > grounds (today such grounds would be political - that is,
> > egalitarian) was unanswerably ridiculed by Northrop Frye in his
> > Anatomy of Criticism (1957). To imagine a literary "stock
> > exchange" in which reputations "boom and crash", he argued, is to
> > reduce literary criticism to the sphere of "leisure-class
> > gossip". You can go on about it, you can labour the point, but
> > you cannot demonstrate that Milton is a better poet than Macaulay
> > -or, indeed, that Milton is a better poet than McGonagall. It is
> > evident, it is obvious, but it cannot be proved. Still, I propose
> > to make an educated guess about literary futures, and I hereby
> > trumpet the prediction that Bellow will emerge as the supreme
> > American novelist. There is, hereabouts, no short! age of
> > narrative genius, and it tends, as Bellow tends, toward the
> > visionary - a quality needed for the interpretation of a New
> > World. But when we look to the verbal surface, to the instrument,
> > to the prose, Bellow is sui generis. What should he fear? The
> > melodramatic formularies of Hawthorne? The multitudinous
> > facetiousness of Melville? The murkily iterative menace of
> > Faulkner? No. The only American who gives Bellow any serious
> > trouble is Henry James.
> >
> > All writers enter into an unconscious marriage with their
> > readers, and in this respect James's fiction follows a peculiar
> > arc: courtship, honeymoon, vigorous cohabitation, and then
> > growing disaffection and estrangement; separate beds, and then
> > separate rooms. As with any marriage, the relationship is
> > measured by the quality of its daily intercourse - by the quality
> > of its language. And even at its most equable and beguiling (the
> > androgy-nous delicacy, the wonderfully alien eye), James's prose
> > suffers from an acute behavioural flaw. Students of usage have
> > identified the habit as "elegant variation". The phrase is
> > intended ironically, because the elegance aspired to is really
> > pseudo-elegance, anti-elegance. For example: "She proceeded to
> > the left, towards the Ponte Vecchio, and stopped in front of one
> > of the hotels which overlook that delightful structure." I can
> > think of another variation on the Ponte Vecchio: how about that
> > vulgar little pronoun "it"? Similarly, "breakfas! t", later in
> > its appointed sentence, becomes "this repast", and "tea-pot"
> > becomes "this receptacle"; "Lord Warburton" becomes "that
> > nobleman" (or "the master of Lockleigh"); "letters" become
> > "epistles"; "his arms" become "these members"; and so on. Apart
> > from causing the reader to groan out loud as often as three times
> > in a single sentence, James's variations suggest broader
> > deficiencies: gentility, fastidiousness, and a lack of warmth, a
> > lack of candour and engagement. All the instances quoted above
> > come from The Portrait of a Lady (1881), from the generous and
> > hospitable early-middle period. When we enter the arctic
> > labyrinth known as Late James, the retreat from the reader, the
> > embrace of introversion, is as emphatic as that of Joyce, and far
> > more fiendishly prolonged.
> >
> > The phantom marriage with the reader is the basis of the
> > novelist's creative equilibrium. Such a relationship needs to be
> > unconscious, silent, tacit; and, naturally, it needs to be
> > informed by love. Bellow's love for the reader has always been at
> > once safely subliminal and thrillingly ardent. And it combines
> > with another kind of love, to produce what may be the Bellovian
> > quiddity. Looking again at the late short story "By the St
> > Lawrence", I found I had marked a passage and written in the
> > margin, "So is this it?" The passage runs:
> >
> > "She was not a lovable woman, but the boy loved her and she was
> > aware of it. He loved them all. He even loved Albert. When he
> > visited Lachine he shared Albert's bed, and in the morning he
> > would sometimes stroke Albert's head, and not even when Albert
> > fiercely threw off his hand did he stop loving him. The hair grew
> > in close rows, row after row.
> >
> > These observations, Rexler was to learn, were his whole life -
> > his being - and love was what produced them. For each physical
> > trait there was a corresponding feeling. Paired, pair by pair,
> > they walked back and forth, in and out of his soul."
> >
> > And this is it, I think. Love is celebrated for, among other
> > things, its transformative powers; and it is with love, in
> > concert with his overpowering need to commemorate and preserve
> > ("I am the nemesis of the would-be forgotten"), that Bellow
> > transforms the world:
> >
> > "Napoleon Street, rotten, toylike, crazy and filthy, riddled,
> > flogged with harsh weather - the bootlegger's boys reciting
> > ancient prayers. To this Moses' heart was attached with great
> > power. Here was a wider range of human feelings than he had ever
> > again been able to find. The children of the race, by a
> > never-failing miracle, opened their eyes on one strange world
> > after another, age after age, and uttered the same prayer in
> > each, eagerly loving what they found. What was wrong with
> > Napoleon Street? thought Herzog. All he ever wanted was there."
> >
> > "I am an American, Chicago born," Augie March says, at the
> > outset. It could have gone, "I am a Russian, Quebec born - and
> > moved to Chicago at the age of nine." And Bellow is a Russian, a
> > Tolstoy, in his purity and amplitude. Which brings us to another
> > ghost from Saint Petersburg: Vladimir Nabokov. An earnest admirer
> > of Pnin (1957) and Lolita (1955), Bellow has nonetheless always
> > felt that Nabokov was artistically weakened by patricianism (the
> > Jamesian flaw); and it is patricianism, certainly, that distances
> > us from the magnum opus, Ada (1969), in which the bond with the
> > reader simply disappears. Nabokov was not an immigrant ("Don't
> > carry on like a goddamn immigrant," Herzog's older brother says
> > as they bury their father): Nabokov remained an ÈmigrÈ. He
> > couldn't become an American; he was - however delightfully -
> > slumming it over there. Bellow as a child, to his immense
> > advantage, knew what slums really were: they presented the widest
> > range of human feelings, but also dire! cted the gaze upward, to
> > the transcendent.
> >
> > Some years ago I had a curious conversation with a notably
> > prolific novelist who had just finished re-reading The Adventures
> > of Augie March (1953). We talked about the book; then he thought
> > he was changing the subject when he said, "I went into my study
> > today - and there was nothing. Not a phrase, not a word. I
> > thought, 'It's all gone.'" I said, "Don't worry, it's not you.
> > It's Augie March." Because the same thing had happened to me.
> > That's what Bellow can do to you, with his burning, streaming
> > prose: he can make you feel that all the phrases, all the words,
> > are exclusively his. At the same time, we share Augie's utopian
> > elation when, reduced almost to non-entity in Mexico (c. 1940),
> > he glimpses none other than Leon Trotsky.
> >
> > "I believe what it was about him that stirred me up was the
> > instant impression he gave - no matter about the old heap he rode
> > in or the peculiarity of his retinue - of navigation by the great
> > stars, of the highest considerations, of being fit to speak the
> > most important human words and universal terms. When you are as
> > reduced to a different kind of navigation from this high starry
> > kind as I was and are only sculling on the shallow bay, crawling
> > from one clam-rake to the next, it's stirring to have a glimpse
> > of deep-water greatness. And, even more than an established, an
> > exiled greatness, because the exile was a sign to me of
> > persistence at the highest things."
> >
> > Martin Amis
> >
> >
> >
> > Read Saul Bellow's Nobel lecture
> > Read Saul Bellow's Nobel banquet speech
> >
> >
> > <image.tiff>
> >
> >
> > http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1162181,00.html
> >
> >
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> >
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> > <image.tiff>
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> >
> > Fast. Reliable. Get MSN 9 Dial-up - 3 months for the price of 1!
> > (Limited-time Offer)
> >
> >
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------
> Stringer-Hye, Suellen
> Vanderbilt University
> Email: suellen.stringer-hye@Vanderbilt.Edu