CLASSICS REVISITED
Guy next door
By Ravi Vyas
Dangling Man, Saul Bellow, first published 1944, Penguin paperback, £4.99.
It is with private disorder and public bewilderment that we try to live. We stand open to all anxieties. The decline and fall of everything is our daily dread; we are agitated in private life and tormented by public questions.
Saul Bellow, Nobel Lecture, 1976
Yet, "in the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by mid-life it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves."
From the Foreword to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (1987)
WAY back in 1963, Saul Bellow (1915-2005) wrote a seminal essay, "Some Notes on Recent American Fiction" that was to become the basis of his 17 novels, short story collections and literary and political essays on the contemporary American scene. In the essay, Bellow says that the individual in America was always under "great strain. Labouring to maintain himself, or perhaps an idea of himself (not always a clear idea), he felt the pressure of a vast public life, which may dwarf him as an individual, while permitting him to be a giant in hatred or fantasy... The individual in American fiction often comes through... as a colonist who has been sent to a remote place, some Alaska of the soul. What he has to bring under cultivation, however, is a barren emptiness within himself. The American novelist has to assume that only private exploration and inner development are possible, and accepts the opposition of public and private as fixed and indissoluble."
The inner life
The American hero clings to the hope of self-knowledge and personal improvement and concludes that with all his faults he loves himself still. "His inner life, if it can be called that, is a rather feeble thing of a few watts." The private and inner life has been the subject of Saul Bellow's writings: My welfare, my development, my advancement, my earnestness, my marriage, my family... the persistent "I" is the characteristic of all Bellow's writings which started off with his debut novel, Dangling Man (1944). If this is a longish introduction it is simply because Bellow's writings are a clutch of ideas and metaphors that have to be read between the lines to get a hang of what he thinks of the Great American Dream.
Bellow liked to quote Alberto Moravia's axiom that fiction was a higher form of autobiography. What could you reveal about me, he once challenged a prospective biographer, that I haven't already revealed about myself? Each book not only contains the essence of the man but captures, however obliquely, the spirit of the age. Dangling Man, about a Hyde Park intellectual awaiting draft induction, brilliantly reflected the climate of moral despair that presided over wartime America; Edmund Wilson described it as "one of the most honest pieces of testimony on the psychology of a whole generation to have grown up during the depression and the war."
Dangling Man is autobiographical or rather "experience totally transformed". Joseph is an intellectual and a writer-in-the-making who is caught waiting for the Draft and who romantically believes that intellectual and spiritual enlightenment can be attained by isolating himself within the confines of a room in a cheap New York boarding house while he studies the great writers of the European Enlightenment.
Writing and social contract
A great novel, it is said, is also social history (the operative word is also) and so it is here as it reflects the 1940s preoccupation of American intellectuals with French existentialism and the themes of individual freedom, the meaning of moral responsibility, death and social contract. Modern writers like Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Lawrence and Eliot, who influenced the style and content of many 20th Century novels come and go but Bellow adds another dimension: the fallout from the Holocaust on American Jews. As with other Bellow novels, it is a mix of high intellectual energy with superb social observation of life in modern Chicago and New York that makes Dangling Man a work of formidable wit and power. Looking back on American intellectuals and how hopelessly wrong they were proved later, he was to say that "a great deal of intelligence could be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep".
As months go by, Joseph quarrels with all his friends and relatives. He lives off the earnings of his wife, Eva, succumbs to fits of paranoia and anger, engages in a desultory affair, hates the physical decay around him and is haunted by the prospect of death. Finally, he admits that his intellectual experiment "to govern, not by succession or chance, but by the power of the mind" has ended up in smoke within the four walls of the room. Studies of the great European thinkers have not resulted in any metaphysical enlightenment or any kind of transcendental breakthrough. He is just like the guy next door with the same physical, social and historical features. Joseph is at last seen standing in a line of naked military recruits, being prodded by an elderly physician before being recruited into the Navy. Significantly, Joseph expresses a sense of spiritual ennui that is empty and meaningless at the end of it all.
Either way, it's funny
In Dangling Man it seems as if Bellow was testing the saying of Socrates that the unexamined life was not worth living. Apparently, he finds the examined life funny too. Some like Joseph cannot find the life they are going to examine. The power of public life had become so vast and threatening that private life cannot have a space or identity of its own. There was no way Joseph could join mainstream American life except by falling in line with the rest of the boys.
A question nevertheless remains. Joseph is something. What is he? And this question, Bellow implies, modern writers have answered poorly. They assume that they know, as they conceive that physics knows or that history knows. The soul is not knowable; it is a mystery that increases, not grows less, as you read more and more to know less and less.
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