The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow Read Free Page A

to expect the reader to digest all at once. All this stuff about the American versus the European Jew. This must unfold gradually. What the story is really about is memory and faith. There is no religion without remembering. As Jews we remember what was told to us at Sinai; at the Seder we remember the Exodus; Yiskor is about remembering a father, a mother. We are told not to forget the Patriarchs; we admonish ourselves, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…” And we are constantly reminding God not to forget his Covenant with us. This is what the “chosenness” of the Chosen People is all about. We are chosen to be God’s privileged mind readers. All of it, what binds us together, is our history, and we are a people because we remember.
    Saul then told me that his narrator was beginning to come to life. He had decided not to give him a name. This elderly man, narrator X, is starting to lose his memory. He is walking down the street one day, humming “Way down upon the…” and he can’t remember the name of the river—it torments him, he’s in agony over this loss of a word, he feels ready to stop a passerby, to do anything to recover the word (this actually did happen to Saul during the winter in Chicago, while strolling around downtown on his way back from the dentist, and until Suwannee came to him he was beside himself). The narrator can’t afford such a lapse because, as Saul explained, his whole life has been built around memory. He will be the founder of this institute—the Mnemosyne Institute—that helps business people sharpen their memories. In order to put it all together and make a coherent picture, he is going to take it upon himself to remember what Fonstein’s life had been, to write a memoir about this European refugee.
    Over the next couple of days we pored over an essay about Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power that Saul felt was central to his thoughts about the American half of the story. The “nihilism of stone” that Nietzsche talks about has degenerated, in Saul’s formulation, into a “nihilism of sleaze.” Now the will to power supposedly releases creative energy. Is the Hollywood of Billy Rose, the Las Vegas of Fonstein’s cardplaying son, the chaos of American life the best we are able to come up with by way of new creation? Perhaps the narrator of “The Bellarosa Connection” means to oppose the idea that human life has become an utterly meaningless chaos with memory—which is another way of saying faith.
    The spring that had begun with cold and rain was ending in a heat wave. It was pushing 90 degrees on June 13, and as I made for the pond at high noon I found Saul heading the same way, bending the long grasses and parting the wildflowers. When we met before the green water we had the following exchange: “Was it a good morning?” I asked.
    “Yes. I started something new.”
    “What?!”
    “I’m loosened up now, I’m just writing something I had it in mind to write.”
    Stripped of our clothes (yes, Rosie, your parents were young and wild once upon a time), we went for the first swim of the season, Saul leading the way into the deliciously cold water. Then, as we were drying ourselves on the rocks in the blazing sun, Saul asked: “You want to hear some of it?” I don’t know what I was expecting. Probably a new beginning for “Bellarosa.” But when he opened the composition book he had brought down to the pond, he began to read the first several thousand words of something completely _ new—what would eventually become Marbles, _ a novel he has written and rewritten for close to a decade now, and has never, to this day, completed.
    When thinking of Saul at work, I have before my eyes the image of a juggler—luminous airborne balls, each one a different color, turning against an azure sky, kept aloft by the infinite skill of a magician, who is at once relaxed, wry, and concentrating intensely. Hand him a telephone, ask him a practical question about dinner, or