Letters Read Free Page B

if divested of me.” Finally, and most movingly, to his long-dead mother: “The life you gave me has been curious, and perhaps the death I must inherit will turn out to be even more profoundly curious. I have sometimes wished it would hurry up, longed for it to come soon. But I am still on the same side of eternity as ever. It’s just as well, for I still have certain things to do. And without noise, I hope. Some of my oldest aims seem to have slid away.”
    You love Moses Herzog for blindness, for haplessness, for thrashing around. At length, you love the feeble-minded child of angels for having come into his own. All that letter writing has delivered him to silence. At the book’s climax, while a hermit thrush sings his evening song, Herzog’s self and soul chat amiably, inwardly: “But what do you want, Herzog?” “But that’s just it—not a solitary thing. I am pretty well satisfied to be, to be just as it is willed, and for as long as I may remain in occupancy.” He fills his hat with flowers: rambler roses, day lilies, peonies. “At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.” Resentment, rage, hatred, jealousy, self-pity—all are transfigured into natural piety. And such piety, in Bellow’s mimetic art, has the last word, however bad the news from Olduvai Gorge.
    Novels and stories draw their strength from the humility of the emotions, not from the grandeur of big ideas. Their abiding power is a belief—always difficult to sustain—in the existence of others. “This caring,” says Bellow, “or believing or love alone matters.” Let one instance, taken from Humboldt , stand here for hundreds. The scene is the old Russian Bath on Division Street: “Mickey who keeps the food concession fries slabs of meat and potato pancakes, and, with enormous knives, he hacks up cabbages for coleslaw and he quarters grapefruits (to be eaten by hand). The stout old men mounting in their bed sheets from the blasting heat have a strong appetite. Below, Franush the attendant makes steam by sloshing water on the white-hot boulders. These lie in a pile like Roman ballistic ammunition. To keep his brains from baking Franush wears a wet felt hat with the brim torn off. Otherwise he is naked. He crawls up like a red salamander with a stick to tip the latch of the furnace, which is too hot to touch, and then on all fours, with testicles swinging on a long sinew and the clean anus staring out, he backs away groping for the bucket. He pitches in the water and the boulders flash and sizzle. There may be no village in the Carpathians where such practices still prevail.”
    Franush appears and vanishes, yet he is immortal, a datum nothing can unmake.
     
    From the Fifties, the population of what Bellow called “my Dead” steadily grows, of course. Inevitable in the collected letters of a long life: more and more loved ones nowhere certainly but in the safekeeping of memory. After seventy-five, you look in vain for survivors from the older generation; after eighty-five, only remnants of your own remain. Like Rob Rexler in “By the Saint Lawrence,” his last story, written at the age of eighty, Bellow no longer sees death as the ugly intruder. The metaphor has changed. Now death is the universal magnetic field, irresistible, gathering us in. Yet now, as never before, the ecstatic sense of being alive—and the hallucinatory vividness of those who are gone—bear down on Rexler with blessings. He recalls his earliest encounter with death: In Lachine, at the level crossing of the Grand Trunk, a man has been killed by an oncoming train. Standing up on the running board of Cousin Albert’s Model T for a better look, Robby sees organs in the roadbed. Aunt Rozzy, when Albert and Robby come home to tell her, lowers her voice and mutters something devout. Remembered in old age, the long-ago day is suddenly possessed as much more than a memory. Everything that happened then seems also to be happening now.