The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America Read Free Page B

topic-sentence when you hear it at the bus-stop — yet this is Bellow's subject. Actually it is the central subject, and always has been.
    While he concedes that America is now ruled by drunkards, liars and venal illiterates, Bellow decides that the most vivid symptoms of distemper can be found a little closer to home. On the lake-front, shrubs are razed and sentry-box toilets are installed, to thwart rapists. In a snow-bound airport a woman asks an official for directions, and, instead of being merely rude or unhelpful, he stamps her instep with his heel. City cops moonlight for the Mob as hired executioners. Meanwhile, 'We Care' stickers are gummed to the walls of supermarkets and loan corporations. Meanwhile, a woman consults a lawyer to ask whether she should describe herself as a person of 'high integrity' or 'known integrity' as she prepares to swindle a medical school. Meanwhile, 'a good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become'.
    These are stories about Chicago (new and old Chicago) and about families. They shore up one's impression that Bellow's greatness has always been endorsed by two lucky accidents — and this is to belittle neither the strenuousness of his discipline nor the luck of literary talent itself. First, Chicago. When Chicagoans call their home town 'the city that works' they have more in mind than efficiency and high employment, bustle and brawn. They mean that they have accepted money as the only 'vital substance'; and they regard the ubiquitous corruption that results from this as a sincere definition of maturity: 'If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?' Such distortions, which include an aggressive, even a disgusted philistinism, provide the writer with a wonderfully graphic reversal of human values. Arriving in Chicago in 1914 (from St Petersburg via Montreal), Bellow was uniquely well placed to witness the formation and summation of the American idea — and to stay outside it, in his writer's capsule.
    Bellow's second slice of congenital good fortune lies in his Jewishness, which, along with much else, provides him with an unusual tenderness for the human ties of race and blood: 'Jewish consanguinity — a special phenomenon, an archaism of which the Jews, until the present century stopped them, were in the course of divesting themselves.' In the same story Bellow's narrator asks why the Jews have always been such energetic anthropologists, virtually the founders of the science (Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl, Mauss, Boas, et al.). Was it that they were 'demystifiers', their ultimate aim to 'increase universalism'? The narrator demurs. 'A truer explanation is the nearness of the ghettos to the sphere of Revelation, an easy move for the mind from rotting streets and rancid dishes, a direct ascent into transcendence.’
    This describes Bellow's origins as a writer, and perhaps accounts also for the strong vein of (heterodox) transcendentalism in his work. In the middle-period novels the transcendental 'alternative' takes on structural status, affording a radiant backdrop against which the protagonists shuffle and blunder. The primitive prince-liness of Africa in Henderson the Rain King, the Wellsian dreams of lunar escape in Mr Sammler's Planet, the 'invisible sciences' of Humboldt's Gift: these are respectively ranged against the nullity of New England, the hysteria of New York, and the gangsterism — both emotional and actual - of Chicago.
    The emphasis on these illusory otherworlds was probably too heavy, laying Bellow open to charges of crankery and self-indulgence. In Late Bellow, however, the transcendentalism has found its true function, which is Yeatsian — a source of metaphor, a system of imagery that gives the reader an enduring mortal pang, a sense of his situation in larger orders of time and space. 'What were we here for, of all strange beings and creatures the strangest?' Bellow has made the real world realer (sharper, harsher), and has confronted its