SSSHHH ... DON'T TELL THE LAWYERS

We'd posted earlier about the kindness of TEV readers monitoring our obsessions.  Today's inbox finds another gift - the full text of James Wood's appreciation of Saul Bellow from The New Republic.  It's a lovely, personal piece, deeply heartfelt and moving in a way that the Guardian piece wasn't.  We reproduce it in its entirety here, after the jump, and will leave it up until TNR lawyers threaten us.

SAYING GOODBYE TO BELLOW.
Gratitude
by James Wood

I judged all modern prose by his. Unfair, certainly, because he made
even the fleet-footed--the Updikes, the DeLillos, the Roths--seem like
monopodes. Yet what else could I do? I discovered Saul Bellow's prose
in my late teens, and henceforth, the relationship had the quality of a
love affair about which one could not keep silent. Over the last week,
much has been said about Bellow's prose, and most of the
praise--perhaps because it has been overwhelmingly by men--has tended
toward the robust: We hear about Bellow's mixing of high and low
registers, his Melvillean cadences jostling the jivey Yiddish rhythms,
the great teeming democracy of the big novels, the crooks and frauds
and intellectuals who loudly people the brilliant sensorium of the
fiction. All of this is true enough; John Cheever, in his journals,
lamented that, alongside Bellow's fiction, his stories seemed like mere
suburban splinters. Ian McEwan wisely suggested last week that British
writers and critics may have been attracted to Bellow precisely because
he kept alive a Dickensian amplitude now lacking in the English novel.

But nobody mentioned the beauty of this writing, its music, its high
lyricism, its firm but luxurious pleasure in language itself. Like all
serious novelists, Bellow read poetry: Shakespeare first (he could
recite lines and lines from the plays, remembered from his school days
in Chicago), then Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, Hardy, Larkin, and his old
friend John Berryman. And, behind all this, with its English stretching
all the way back into deeper antiquity, the King James Bible. Nobody
mentioned the way Bellow could describe a river as "crimped, green,
blackish, glassy," or Chicago as "blue with winter, brown with evening,
crystal with frost," or New York as "sheer walls, gray spaces, dry
lagoons of tar and pebbles." Here is a paragraph, one of my favorite in
all Bellow, from the story "The Old System":

On the airport bus, he opened his father's copy of the Psalms. The
black Hebrew letters only gaped at him like open mouths with tongues
hanging down, pointing upward, flaming but dumb. He tried--forcing. It
did no good. The tunnel, the swamps, the auto skeletons, machine
entrails, dumps, gulls, sketchy Newark trembling in fiery summer, held
his attention minutely.... Then in the plane running with concentrated
fury to take off--the power to pull away from the magnetic earth, and
more: When he saw the ground tilt backward, the machine rising from the
runway, he said to himself in clear internal words, "Shema Yisroel,"
Hear, O Israel, God alone is God! On the right, New York leaned
gigantically seaward, and the plane with a jolt of retracted wheels
turned toward the river. The Hudson green within green, and rough with
tide and wind. Isaac released the breath he had been holding, but sat
belted tight. Above the marvelous bridges, over clouds, sailing in
atmosphere, you know better than ever that you are no angel.

I suppose there must be people--as there are people left cold by Mozart
or Brahms--who are untouched by such a passage, though I pity them.
Bellow had a habit of writing repeatedly about flying, partly, I used
to think, because it was the great obvious advantage he had over his
dead competitors, those writers who had never seen the world from above
the clouds: Melville, Tolstoy, Proust. And how well he does it! In
sentence after sentence the world is captured with brimming novelty:
Newark seen as "sketchy" and "trembling in fiery summer"; the jet
"running with concentrated fury to take off" (a phrase that, with its
unpunctuated onrush, itself enacts such a concentrated fury); New York,
which, as the plane tilts, "leaned gigantically seaward" (say the
phrase to yourself, and see how the words themselves--"leaned
gi-gan-tic-ally sea-ward"--elongate the experience so that the very
language embodies the queasiness it describes); the dainty, unexpected
rhythm of "The Hudson green within green, and rough with tide and wind"
("green within green" captures very precisely the different shades of
green that we see in water when several thousand feet above it); and
finally, "sailing in atmosphere"--isn't that exactly what the freedom
of flight feels like? And yet, until this moment, one did not have
these words--the best words, the right words in the right order--to fit
this feeling. Until this moment, one was comparatively inarticulate;
until this moment, one had been blandly inhabiting a deprived
eloquence.

 

 

How, exactly, does one thank a writer for this? Fifteen years ago, at
the age of 24, when I was working for The Guardian in London, I did so
the only way I knew how: I arranged to meet Bellow and interviewed him
for that newspaper. Over the years, I wrote about him again and again
and visited him whenever I could. By happy accident, I co-taught a
class with him at Boston University. My daughter played with his; our
family became close to Bellow and his wife Janis, and to his devoted
assistant, Will. I accompanied him on the piano when he played the
recorder. It was a delight to talk to him about literature, to make him
laugh--he would throw his head back and give out a distinctive chortle,
"ha, ha, ha, ha," each laugh separately articulated--and to laugh with
him when he was making a joke.

But I cannot say that I truly knew him (partly because I knew him only
in his old age); and, in some ways, the human distance was of my
making, not his, for my literary gratitude was literally unspeakable,
and floated massively above us. The prose was what I truly knew before
I knew the man, and always I felt magically indebted in his presence.
Like anyone, writers, of course, are embarrassed by excessive praise,
just as readers are burdened by their excessive gratitude--one cannot
keep going on about it. And, eventually, it is easier to turn the
beloved literary work into a kind of disembodied third party: to admit
that the work itself exceeds the writer, that it sails--sails in
atmosphere, indeed!--away from the writer and toward the delighted
reader. In the final year of Saul's life, as he became very frail, I
would read some of his own prose to him; something he would doubtless
have found, as a younger man, mawkish or cloying or tiresome. It did
not feel any of those things, as Bellow sat there in forgetful frailty;
rather it felt as if I were gently reminding him of his own talent and
that he was grateful for this, and perhaps grateful for my gratitude.
But, in truth, I could not thank him enough when he was alive, and I
cannot now.

Comments

[Michael Pokocky]

A Poem to compliment James
Wood's Gratitude story

SIMPLE BUT DISCREET IS HIS KISS
NEVER EXPECTING
NEVER DEMANDING
SOLITUDE'S HIS VICE
LOVE COMPLETES HIM

Thanks for having the courage to post James Wood's Gratitude