The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America Read Free

scale than their creators: they are anti-heroes, non-heroes, sub-heroes.
    Not so with Bellow. His heroes are well tricked out with faults, neuroses, spots of commonness: but not a jot of Bellow's intellectuality is withheld from their meditations. They represent the author at the full pitch of cerebral endeavour, with the simple proviso that they are themselves non-creative — they are thinkers, teachers, readers. This careful positioning allows Bellow to write in a style fit for heroes: the High Style. To evolve an exalted voice appropriate to the twentieth century has been the self-imposed challenge of his work. It began with The Adventures of Augie March (1953), at times very shakily: for all its marvels, Augie March, like Henderson the Rain King, often resembles a lecture on destiny fed through a thesaurus of low-life patois. Herzog erred on the side of private gloom, Humboldt on the side of sunny ebullience (with stupendous but lopsided gains for the reader). Mr Sammler's Planet (1970) came nearest to finding the perfect pitch, and it is the Bellow novel which The Dean's December most clearly echoes.
    The High Style is not a high style just for the hell of it: there are responsibilities involved. The High Style attempts to speak for the whole of mankind, with suasion, to remind us of what we once knew and have since forgotten or stopped trying to regrasp. 'It was especially important', Corde reflects, 'to think what a human being really was. What wise contemporaries had to say about this amounted to very little.' The Bellow hero lays himself open to the world, at considerable psychological cost. Mr Sammler is 'a delicate recording instrument'; Herzog is 'a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness'. All that can be done with these perceptions, these data, is to transform them into — into what? Humboldt suffered from 'the longing for passionate speech'. Corde, like Sammler, aches to deliver his 'inspired recitation'. It is the desire to speak, to warn — to move, above all.
    Albert Corde is 'an image man', 'a hungry observer'. He has a 'radar-dish face', for ever picking up signals 'from all over the universe'.
    He looked out, noticing. What a man he was for noticing! Continually attentive to his surroundings. As if he had been sent down to mind the outer world, on a mission of observation and notation. The object of which was? To link up? To classify? To penetrate?
    Corde has 'the restless ecstasy' common to Bellow's heroes — a global version of Henderson's 7 want, I want, I want. He suffers from 'vividness fits', 'storms of convulsive clear consciousness', 'objectivity intoxicated'. And it wasn't just two, three, five chosen deaths being painted thickly, terribly, convulsively inside him, all over his guts, liver, heart... but a large picture of cities, crowds, peoples, an apocalypse...
    Up to now the Bellow hero has always kept these convulsions to himself. They provide the substance of his meditations and, at most, they give the spur to some climactic effort of passionate utterance — to a friend, a girl, anyone who will listen. But Corde, like the book built round him, has gone public. The key to his self-exposure, and self-injury, is his journalistic outpouring on Chicago, which might almost be seen as a pre-emptive strike for the novel itself. Corde's articles are reckless, irresponsible: but their main presumption, as Dewey Spangler gloatingly points out, is that they are full of 'poetry'. They constitute an act of romantic regression and are an embarrassment to everyone, Corde included.
    An old childhood pal, Spangler is 'just another VIP' (in his own words) passing through Bucharest in a 'sweep' across Eastern Europe. Like Dr Temkin in Seize the Day, or Allbee in The Victim, Spangler is a malevolent alter ego, a traveller on a parallel path, the wrong path. He lives in 'a kind of event-glamour', unaware that the increase of theories and discourse, itself a cause of new strange forms of blindness, the