Saul Bellow's essay was published in the TLS for July 1, 1960.
A few years ago I travelled through the state of Illinois to gather material
for an article. It was brilliant fall weather, the corn was high and it was
intersected by straight, flat roads over which it was impossible not to
drive at top speed. I went from Chicago to Galena and then south through the
centre of the state to Cairo and Shawneetown. Here and there, in some of the
mining counties and in the depopulated towns along the Mississippi there
were signs of depression and poverty, but these had the flavour of the far
away and long ago, for the rest of the state was dizzily affluent. "Pig
Heaven", some people said to me. "Never nothing like it." The
shops were filled with goods and buyers. In the fields were the newest
harvesting machines; in the houses washers, dryers, freezers and
refrigerators, air conditioners, vacuum canons, Mixmasters, Waring-blenders,
television and stereophonic hi-fi sets, electrical can openers, novels
condensed by the Readers' Digest and slick magazines. In the yards, glossy
cars in giddy colours, like ships from outer space.
Down in Egypt, as the narrow southern end of the state is called, a Negro
woman, her head wrapped in an old-fashioned bandanna, flashed by in her blue
Packard with a Boston bull terrier affectionately seated on her shoulder.
Here at least was some instinct for the blending of old and new. For the
most part, everything was as new as possible. Churches and super-markets had
the same modern design. In the skies the rich farmers piloted their own
planes. The workers bowled in alleys of choice hardwood where fouls were
scored and pins reset by electronic devices. Fifty years ago the Illinois
poet Vachel Lindsay had visited these towns preaching the Gospel of Beauty
and calling on the people to build the New Jerusalem.
Except for the main stem, the streets were boringly empty, and at night even
the main stem was almost deserted. Restless adolescents gathered in the
ice-cream parlours or loitered before the chain saws, vibrators, outboard
motors and garbage disposal units displayed in shop windows. These, like
master spirits, ruled the night in silence.
Some important ingredients of life were conspicuously absent.
* * *
I had been asked to write about Illinois, but how was I to distinguish it from
Indiana, Michigan, Iowa or Missouri? The houses were built and furnished in
the same style, the cows were milked by the same machines, the programmes
broadcast by C.B.S and N.B.C. were alike in Rockford, Illinois, and Danbury,
Connecticut, and Salt Lake City, Utah. The magazines, the hair styles, the
salad dressings, the film stars were not merely American but international.
What but slight differences in the menu and the cut of the clothes
distinguished the comfortable life of middle-class Illinois from that of
Cologne or Frankfurt ?
I asked, "What do people do, hereabouts ?" "They work." "And
when they don't work?" "They watch TV. They play a little poker or
canasta or gin." "What else ?" "They go to club
meetings. Or to the drive-in movie. They pitch a little. They raise a little
hell. They bowl. They drink some. They tinker around the place, fool with
power-tools. They teach the kids baseball in the Little League. They're Den
Mothers over at the Cub Scouts." "Yes, but what do they do?" "Well,
mister, I'm telling you what they do. What are you getting at ?" "You
see, I'm writing an article on life here." "Is that so! Gosh,
you're barking up the wrong tree. There ain't nothing here to write about.
There's nothing doing here, or anywhere in Ellenois. It's boring." "You
can't have millions of people and nothing doing." "I tell you, you
want to write about Hollywood or Las Vegas or New York or Paris. That's
where they've got excitement."
I had a score of conversations like this one.
Was the vitality of these people entirely absorbed by the new things ? Had a
superior inventive and productive power taken them over, paralysing all the
faculties it did not need? Or had the old understanding of reality been
based on the threat of hunger and on the continual necessity for hard
labour? Was it possible that what people complained of as boredom might in
fact be an unbearable excitement caused by the greatness of the change?
I went to the libraries and was not surprised to learn that good books were
very much in demand, and that there were people in central Illinois who read
Plato, Tocqueville, Proust and Robert Frost. I had expected this. But what I
did not understand was what use these isolated readers were making of the
books they borrowed. With whom did they discuss them? At the country club,
the bowling league, sorting mail at the post office or in the factory, over
the back fence, how did they bring up Plato's Justice or Proust's Memory?
Ordinary life gave them little opportunity for such conversation. "You
can't have millions of people and nothing doing." I was dead sure of
that. But the intelligence or cultivation of a woman in Moline, Illinois,
would necessarily be her secret, almost her private vice. Her friends at the
bridge club would think it very odd of her to think such things. She might
not reveal them to her sister, nor perhaps even to her husband. They would
be her discovery, her treasure ten times sealed, her private source of
power.
* * *
"The language, the dress, and the daily actions of men in democracies are
repugnant to ideal conceptions", said Tocqueville. He said more, but
this is text enough for the moment. Let us set beside it the fact that these
men, or some of them, will read The Divine Comedy, The Tempest and Don
Quixote. What will they make of these works? They will, some of them, mix
them up with television productions. Others will scale them down. Our
understanding of them (it is time to drop the third person) will certainly
be faulty. Nevertheless, they move us. That is to say, human greatness can
still be seen by us. And it is not a question of the gnat who sees the
elephant. We are not members of a different species. Without a certain
innate sympathy we could not read Shakespeare and Cervantes. In our own
contemporary novels this power to understand the greatest human qualities
appears to be dispersed, transformed or altogether buried. A modern mass
society has no open place for such qualities, no vocabulary for them and no
ceremony (except in the churches) which makes them public. So they remain
private and are mingled with other private things which vex us or of which
we feel ashamed. But they are not lost. The saleswoman in Moline, Ill., will
go to the library and borrow Anna Karenina. This society with its titanic
products conditions but cannot absolutely denature us. It forces certain
elements of the genius of our species to go into hiding. In America they
take curiously personal, secret forms. Sometimes they corrupt people;
sometimes they cause them to act with startling generosity. On the whole
they are not to be found in what we call our Culture.
They are not in the streets, in the stores, at the movies. They are the
missing ingredients.
The greatest danger, Dostoevsky warned in The Brothers Karamazov, was the
universal ant-hill. D. H. Lawrence believed the common people of our
industrial cities were like the great slave populations of the ancient
empires. Joyce was apparently convinced that what happened to the ordinary
modern man, his external life, was not interesting enough to chronicle.
James Stephens in his preface to Solitaria by the Russian philosopher
Rozanov said that novelists were trying to keep alive by artificial means
feelings and states of being which had died out of the modern world,
implying that we were only flattering the dwarfs by investing them with the
passions of dead giants.
Mind manipulation, brainwashing and social engineering are only the newest
developments in an evolution long understood by writers of the civilized
world. When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists we
soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a
definition of human nature, to justify the continuation of life as well as
the writing of novels. Like it or not, says Dostoevsky, it is our nature to
be free, and under the sting of suffering to choose between good and evil.
And Tolstoy says of human nature that it contains a need for truth which
will never allow it to rest permanently in falsehood or unreality.
I think the novelists who take the bitterest view of our modern condition make
the most of the art of the novel. "Do you think", Flaubert replies
to a correspondent who has complained of Madame Bovary,
that this ignoble reality, so disgusting to you in reproduction, does not
oppress my heart as it does yours ? If you knew me better you would know
that I abhor ordinary existence. Personally, I have always held myself as
aloof from it as I could. But aesthetically I desired this once—and only
once—to plumb its very depths.
The writer's art appears to be a compensation for the hopelessness or meanness
of existence. He by some method has retained the feelings and the ideal
conceptions of which no sign remains in ordinary existence. Some novelists,
the naturalists, have staked everything on ordinary existence in their
desire to keep their connexion with the surrounding world. Many of these
have turned themselves into recording instruments at best, and at worst they
have sucked up to the crowd, disgustingly. But the majority of modern
novelists have followed the standard of Flaubert, the aesthetic standard.
The shock caused by the loss of faith, says Professor Heller in The
Disinherited Mind, made Burckhardt adopt an aesthetic view of history. If he
is right, a sharp sense of disappointment and aestheticism go together.
Flaubert complained that the exterior world was "disgusting,
enervating, corruptive and brutalizing. . . . I am turning towards a kind of
aesthetic mysticism", he wrote.
I am sticking to Flaubert because the connexion between Yonville in Normandy
and Galesburg, Illinois, (and London and Chicago) is constantly growing
closer; because Flaubert believed that the writer by means of imagery and
style must supply the human qualities that the exterior world lacks; and
because we have all been schooled in his method—we are like the isolated
lady in Moline whose sensitivity is her ten times sealed treasure.
Disappointment with its human material is built into the contemporary novel.
It is assumed that society cannot give the novelist suitable themes and
characters. Therefore the important humanity of the novel must be the
writer's own. His force, his virtuosity, his powers of poetry, his reading
of fate are at the centre of his book. The reader is invited to bring his
sympathies to the writer rather than the characters, and this makes him
something of a novelist, too.
* * *
The insistent aesthetic purpose in novelists like Flaubert and Henry James and
Virginia Woolf and James Joyce is tyrannical at times. It over-conditions
the situation of the characters. We are greatly compensated with poetry and
insight, but it often seems as though the writer were deprived of all power
except the power to see and to despair. In reality, however, he has a very
great power. Is it likely that Westerns, thrillers, movies, soap-operas and
True Confessions can usurp that power and permanently replace it? Not unless
human nature is malleable without limits and can be conditioned to do
without its ancient bread and meat.
A. work of fiction consists of a series of moments during which we are
willingly engrossed in the experiences of others. Or, as a recent article in
the Hudson Review puts it, "the exuberant conviction that the
individual life of somebody else holds all human truth and human
potentiality" must be shared by the novelist and his reader. Let us
say, putting it as mildly as possible, that modern society does not often
inspire this exuberant conviction. We must not lie to ourselves about this.
We must not lie. The Americans are softly optimistic and do lie about the
love they bear one another. My informant in Illinois was telling the truth
when he said his life was boring, but he would have turned awfully pious if
I had asked him whether he loved his neighbour. Then he would have stood on
the creed and answered that he felt a boundless love for him. The matter was
put as strongly as possible by D. H. Lawrence. "The sympathetic heart
is broken", he said. "We stink in each other's nostrils."
That is, we cannot easily accept our own creaturely existence or that of
others. And that is the fault of modern civilization, he tells us. We must
in part agree, but the matter is so serious that we should be careful not to
exaggerate. Our lives depend on it. Yes, there are good reasons for
revulsion and fear. But revulsion and fear impair judgment. Anxiety destroys
scale and suffering makes us lose perspective.
One would have to be optimistic to the point of imbecility to raise the
standard of pure Affirmation and cry, "Yea, Yea", shrilly against
the deep background of "Nays". But the sympathetic heart is
sometimes broken, sometimes not. It is reckless to say "broken";
it is nonsense to say "whole and unimpaired". On either side we
have the black and white of paranoia.
As for the novelist, it would become him to proceed with care and modesty. He
should deplore no general evil on purely literary grounds. The world owes
him nothing, and he has no business to be indignant with it on behalf of the
novel. He must not expect life to bind itself to be stable for his sake or
to accommodate his ambitions. If he must, let him, like Flaubert, "abhor
ordinary existence". But he should not fall into despair over trifles.
One of his legacies from Romanticism is a sensitivity to banality and
ugliness in which originates much of the small change of modern fiction—the
teeth that are crooked, the soiled underclothes, the clerk with carbuncles.
From this comes a conventional unearned wretchedness, a bitterness about
existence which is mere fashion. One of his legacies from Humanism is an
idea of dignity which makes him think a great deal of what he sees about him
absurd.
The enormous increases in population seem to have dwarfed the individual. So
have modern physics and astronomy. But we may be somewhere between a false
greatness and a false insignificance. At least we can stop misrepresenting
ourselves to ourselves and realise that the only thing we can be in this
world is human. We are temporarily miracle-sodden and feeling faint.
