Washington Post Book Reviews
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Monday November 15, 2010
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SAUL BELLOW: Letters Benjamin Taylor
Viking
ISBN 978-0670022212
571 pages
$35
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
In the march of what we like to believe is progress, we win some and we lose some. We now enjoy the convenience and ease of instantaneous professional and personal electronic communication, which on the whole is good, but we no longer write letters, which is not. This by now is a commonplace, so there is no point in laboring it, but "Saul Bellow: Letters" is close to, if not exactly, the last of its kind. The long history of published collections of correspondence, from Lord Chesterfield to Abraham Lincoln to Virginia Woolf to Flannery O'Connor, is coming to an end. The loss, as Bellow's letters remind us, is very much our own.
Bellow, who died in 2005 just two months shy of his 90th birthday, was a prolific correspondent but not an unduly brilliant one. "I'd be a better correspondent if I weren't writing all the time," he told an old friend in 1980. "You have to be a graphomaniac to spend hours on a manuscript and then turn, for relaxation, to letters. A critic, years ago in Paris, said I had bureaucratic tendencies. He offended me then. Now I'm inclined to see it his way. I learned to organize my daily life for a single purpose."
This was the writing of the novels, novellas and short stories that made him one of the most important writers of the 20th century. His letters are well-written and interesting (of course!), but mostly they do not have the depth or passion of those written by his contemporary O'Connor, collected so brilliantly by Sally Fitzgerald three decades ago in "The Habit of Being."
The several hundred letters published here have been edited rather lightly by Benjamin Taylor, a novelist and essayist. Though excesses of annotation usually are more annoying than helpful in letters collections, Taylor tends to err on the side of minimalism, not always providing as much information (if any) about people, events and issues under discussion. He also puts such information as he does provide at the end of a letter rather than at the beginning, a minor annoyance but an annoyance all the same. Finally, the selection of letters is a bit odd. There are a great many very brief notes of little or no import, yet I sense that some letters of real value have either been missed or rejected. Some years ago a mutual friend sent me a photocopy of a superb letter he'd received from Bellow about popular democracy and the mass audience; I was surprised, and disappointed, not to find it here.
Still, there is far more to celebrate than to lament in "Saul Bellow: Letters." He was by all accounts, including his own, a difficult man, possessed of what he called an "austere-critical mind," but he was also keenly observant, generous in his fashion, unfailingly forthright and often very funny. The letters trace the arc of his long career, from the predictable struggles and frustrations of a young writer trying to find readers and, literally, to put food on the table, to the entirely different yet no less vexing problems attendant to the great fame that descended on him in 1976 with the receipt of a Nobel Prize in Literature. As he wrote in 1982 to a boyhood friend:
"I have become a sort of public man, which was not at all my intent. I thought, in my adolescent way, that I would write good books (as writing and books were understood in the Thirties) and would have been happy in the middle ranks of my trade. It would have made me wretched to be overlooked, but I wasn't at all prepared for so much notice, and I haven't been good at managing 'celebrity.' That's a long story and I shan't go into details. I can't do the many things I'm asked to do, answer the huge volume of mail, keep up with books and manuscripts and at the same time write such things as I want and need to write."
Or, as he put it many years before, "I really don't care for the sort of life that has formed about me in the last few years -- accountants, tax-experts, investment counselors, organizations and fronts, fundraising, autobiographing, speechifying, mail-answering, lawsuits, interior decorations, spleen and other antipoetic phenomena." As the letters make plain, a lot went on in his life apart from writing -- five marriages and a number of affairs, four children, numerous travels sometimes to distant places, award ceremonies and other distractions -- but his life centered on his writing, and he never allowed himself to drift far from it.
He had many literary friendships (and a few rivalries), and a certain amount of literary talk goes on in these letters, but there's less of it than one might expect. His letters to the poet John Berryman are full of joshing and affectionate encouragement, and he was saddened but not surprised by Berryman's suicide. He was fond of that other tormented poet, Delmore Schwartz, but vexed by his decline; Schwartz was the inspiration for Von Humboldt Fleischer, the protagonist of Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift" (1975), for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He and Ralph Ellison were close and corresponded regularly; he and Alfred Kazin were friends for many years, a friendship interrupted by a long falling out. There is a rather remarkable letter to William Faulkner in which, after dealing briefly with the business of a writers' committee on which both of them served, he raises the matter of Faulkner's support for the release from St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington of Ezra Pound, who "advocated in his poems and in his broadcasts enmity to the Jews and preached hatred and murder." Bellow goes on:
"What staggers me is that you and Mr. Steinbeck who have dealt for so many years in words should fail to understand the import of Ezra Pound's plain and brutal statements about the 'kikes' leading the 'goy' to slaughter. Is this -- from 'The Pisan Cantos' -- the stuff of poetry? It is a call to murder. If it were spoken by a farmer or a shoemaker we would call him mad. The whole world conspires to ignore what has happened, the giant wars, the colossal hatreds, the unimaginable murders, the destruction of the very image of man. And we -- 'a representative group of American writers' -- is this what we come out for, too? A fine mess!"
That letter was written in 1956, when Bellow was 40 years old. "The Adventures of Augie March" had established him three years earlier, but Faulkner was more than a decade and a half older than he and one of the most famous writers in the world. It took real courage to write that letter, and real conviction as well. For once we see Bellow in a moment of passion, and it is most impressive.
His other passions revolved around the women in his life. They ranged from great ardor -- see, for example, two letters to his lover Margaret Staats written in April 1966 -- to fury, especially as aroused by his second wife, Susan Glassman, with whom he waged wars over money, property and just about everything else. Mostly, though, what is on display is his "austere critical mind," as in this comment to a protege searching for "meaning" in fiction: "I think this is a fault of all American books, including my own. They pant so after meaning. They are earnestly moral, didactic; they build them ever more stately mansions, and they exhort and plead and refine, and they are, insofar, books of error. A work of art should rest on perception.
'Here' in other words, 'is my vision, be meaning what it may.'" That is an exceptionally astute observation, but then Bellow was an exceptionally astute man. He was also formidably well-read, an intellectual in the deepest sense of the word but also a lover of pleasure in many forms. His collected letters are probably the last book we shall have from him, and despite some editorial lapses a very good one.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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ATLANTIC: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories
Simon Winchester
Harper
ISBN 978-0061702587
495 pages
$27.99
Reviewed by Ken Ringle
Simon Winchester is one of those maddeningly gifted British writers who could probably write the history of mud and make it fascinating. In fact, he sort of did. His 2003 best-seller, "Krakatoa," started with the Big Bang theory of the universe, embraced tectonic plates and volcanology and somehow made the history of the physical Earth as compelling as a detective story. "The Professor and the Madman" (1998) did the same with the Oxford English Dictionary. Now comes "Atlantic" which he describes as a "biography" of the ocean. Has he finally overreached himself? In places, perhaps. But what a rollicking ride he gives us anyway.
On one hand this is a grab bag of sea yarns, as the subtitle suggests, and no one tells a better yarn than Winchester. But the author has a larger scheme in mind. "One might say that if the Mediterranean had long been the inland sea of the classical civilization, then the Atlantic Ocean had in time replaced it by becoming the inland sea of Western Civilization" -- the wellspring of the "Atlantic Community" that has dominated most of the past 400 years. Though the most mobile members of that community may cross the Atlantic by jet these days with hardly a thought for the ocean below them, hasn't the ocean itself, he asks - with its seismic geology, dynamic meteorology and myriad forces, resources and distances -- shaped our past and future in ways more powerful and diverse than we recognize?
It's a teasing thought -- and all that Winchester needs to usher us aboard a page-turning 495-page voyage of discovery ranging almost from the primeval ooze of millennia long past to the environmental concerns of the early 21st century. But the winds propelling us on that voyage are often Winchester's own breezy adventures. Whether he's sailing to the storm-whipped Faroe Islands, where nervous sheep live their entire lives on the slender grassy ledges of near-vertical rock faces, a mere hoof-step from oblivion, or he's being tossed into a Patagonian prison while attempting to cover the Falklands War as a journalist, the author is often his own best evidence for what's compelling about what we might call Atlanticality. Steam ship travel?
Winchester made one of the last regularly scheduled trips on a trans-Atlantic liner. Offshore oil? He worked for a term on a wave-pounded rig in the North Sea. Continental drift? This geologist-turned-journalist continues to have rocks in his head, but communicates their fascination to him almost casually with asides that John McPhee might find instructive.
What's best about Winchester's writing is his omnivorous curiosity and mischievous eye for the irresistible detail. Nobody thought of the Atlantic as a separate ocean, he tells us, until the writings of Amerigo Vespucci, "the colorful Italian explorer and sorcerer (and in later life ... pimp)" whose book was "wildly popular -- helped no doubt by Vespucci's loving discussions of the cosmetic self-mutilation, anal cleanliness and sexual practices of the people he met along the way."
Prince Albert I of Monaco was so taken with oceanography that he endowed the International Hydrographic Organization, in the shadow of Monte Carlo's casinos, which fixes the boundaries of the Atlantic, one of which is Anticosti Island in the St. Lawrence estuary. Which, Winchester informs us in another unforgettable footnote "was once owned by a French chocolatier, was nearly bought by Hitler, and now is home to a tiny community of lighthouse keepers."
This sort of thing is so addictive that one soldiers on through tales a good bit taller. He suggests, for example, that the world owes parliamentary government to Iceland and massive intercontinental trade to the Hanseatic League and massive long-distance fishing to the Atlantic cod banks and Atlantic whaling, and so on. Many of his arguments tying the Atlantic to our very being are unarguable, like the rise of global communication following the advent of Atlantic telegraph cable and Marconi's ship-to-ship wireless traffic. But at times watching him synthesizing all this is a bit like watching a tightrope walker at work: One is enthralled more by the daring than convinced by the argument.
Still, it's all great fun. One wishes, however, that Winchester had given at least a nod to a previous "Atlantic," a splendidly written, too-little-noticed 2002 book by Scott Cookman which covers a surprising amount of the same territory while describing the last great transoceanic yacht race -- the way-over-the-top 1905 Kaiser's Cup -- as a kind of maritime precursor to World War I.
But this "Atlantic" is enough. How could it not be with a writer who describes his subject as "a sinuous snakelike river of an ocean, stretching ... from the Stygian fogs of the north to the Roaring Forties in the south, riven with deeps in its western chasms, dangerous with shallows in eastern plains, a place of cod and flying fish ... of gyres of Sargasso weed and ... unborn hurricanes, a place of icebergs and ... currents hot, cold, torrential, and languorous ... of underwater volcanoes and earthquakes, of stromatolites and cyanobacteria and ... giant squid and jellyfish and their slow-and-steady southern majesties, the great and glorious wandering albatrosses"?
Ken Ringle is a former Washington Post reporter and a sailer.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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