GUEST SHOT

Two Reviews
by Jack B. Moore

Of Love & Marketing Strategies

The Actual: A Novel by Saul Bellow
New York: Viking, 1997; 112 pages.

I'M GOING TO BEGIN THIS REVIEW the way so many reviews of Saul Bellow begin, by lamenting the general lack of interest in Bellow among the new ruling classes in American literary criticism. It seems that this distinguished writer -- who considers art's special domain as "that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make final judgments, and put everything together" -- is not a great object of interest among the forces responsible for conducting our time's mainstream academic discourse (that last word being an inescapable, favorite, culturally resonant, portentously nebulous term, a sort of pumped-up synonym for "discussion").

Essentially I'm saying a great many people who teach and write articles and books about American culture aren't particularly interested in him, and so their students don't often hear about him. He never attained the kind of popular success some good American writers like Hemingway and Steinbeck and Mailer achieved, nor the notoriety of fellow skilled writers in the Jewish American tradition like Philip Roth. Yet he's a genuinely deserving Nobel Prize recipient -- no Pearl Buck -- and a rarity among American writers: a deeply (and intensely crafty) novelist of ideas who refuses to see human existence as absurd.

Sukhbir Singh, an Indian critic writing recently in American Studies International, has said what fascinated him most about Bellow was "his treatment of modern man as a 'survivor' who has passed through catastrophic conditions and ultimately learned how to prevail without losing his morality, identity, and sanity."

Bellow doesn't preach his ideas but thinks them through in novelistic dramatizations that are fairly old fashioned technically, as are some of his ideas philosophically. He goes against today's grain in being leery about emancipation as an invariably glittering goal and has said young people seeking education today should acquire "inner order" to replace their "inner disorientation."

He's a maverick but, unfortunately for his popular status, not an attractive outlaw. He subverts the subverters.

"I have nothing to do," he has claimed, "with Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, Multi-culturists, Postmodernists, and Politically Correctionists. I feel that these people are really trying to destroy literature.... That's as if the priests of a church get together to plan the destruction of the church to which they belong. The professors of literature in the university are supposed to be preservers, the teachers of the tradition, and represent its spirit. Instead, we are now shown how narrative whether in poetry or in prose has fallen under the influence of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, bourgeois civilization, anti-feminism, and racism., etc. To my mind that's a worthless enterprise" expressing nothing but the "animosity of the people who are trained in these subjects."

Like the Old Testament Jeremiah, he's a crotchety geezer with an admirable command of the rhetoric of imprecation.

The Actual is no Jeremiad, however. In some ways it's a love story for the middle-aged and older, both tender and substantial in its telling, passionate but not sentimental. One of its many couples is in its nineties and quite sharp-eyed, even ruthless: hardly standard Cupids yet half-knowingly they play that role here.

The novel's central pair, Harry Trellman and Amy Wustrin, have maintained one of the longest interludes of coitus interruptus in modern literature -- four decades, since their petting days in high school, an interruption itself almost interrupted once mid-term in later years when now married Amy's boyfriend (not husband) invites his former chum, now married Harry, to a shower a trois in a Chicago hotel, and then after some sudsing around leaves the former sweethearts together alone.

Hardly anyone in this adult screwball dark comedy is unadulterous, but Harry and Amy do not couple in the spray -- though at book's end it is clear that for both the other is their one true love.

Certainly Amy is Harry's "actual," he tells her, because though "other women might remind me of you ... there was only one actual Amy." He says he loves her so much that if there had been a bare room in her house without even a carpet "it would do me good to go in and lie face down on the wooden floor." It is doubtful that even Dostoevski's gorgeous Grushenka had it much better in the self-abasing adulation department.

Harry confesses his fixation to Amy during an enchanting talk the two have while extracting the coffin holding Amy's exuberantly unfaithful ex-husband from his grave next to her mother who hated him, so that she can soon place her senile, dying father next to the wife who Amy says "after fifty years of the marriage bed ... wish[ed] that it should be eternal." Amy's philandering mate gains too: he escapes the grave, like his role model Boris Karloff, if only for a couple of hours until he's plopped beside his own admired father.

"Something like musical chairs," according to Amy.

Bellow turns gritty, wintry Chicago into as love (or at least lust) filled a place as any wondrous midsummer's wood near Athens. His created city possesses an opportunistic toy manufacturer so enamored of his wife that he seeks her release from the jail she's been sentenced to for conspiring to have him murdered, and will apparently soon boast of a most modern enterprise, a divorce registry facilitating gift-giving to newly-splits. Jeremiah had a good sense of the doom awaiting us miscreants, but the old curmudgeon was never this humanly humorous.

  Jack Moore's Review of
    The Killing of History,
    Nonfiction by Keith Windschuttle

Jack Moore teaches at The University of South Florida, where he is affiliated with the departments of English and of American Studies and with The Institute on Black Life. He is a frequent contributor to print magazines, newspapers and journals, and is the author of books on, among others, W.E.B. Du Bois and Joe Di Maggio. This is his first appearance here, but not his last.

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