Saul Bellow and the Human Look

IN 1963, just ahead of the release of his career-making novel Herzog, Saul Bellow wrote an essay for The Atlantic, “The Writer as Moralist.” Here, Bellow weighs in on a number of the disputes we’d expect from the essay’s title and date of publication: bourgeois optimism vs. romantic pessimism; Tolstoy’s moral commitment vs. Flaubert’s aesthetic objectivity; American “cleans” (i.e., squares) vs. American “dirties” (i.e., not squares); capitalism vs. whatever else. I don’t want to dwell too much on Bellow’s argument here, and I don’t want to use it as a lens through which to view his novels, since the novels are good enough without any lens at all. That said, Bellow closes “The Writer as Moralist” with a stirring and desperate thought, a thought that transfigures his critical nitpicking into a shimmering concern for the existential. “One last thing,” he begins, casually, as if this were in fact only a postscript tacked on to a more substantial idea. “Not too many people will disagree if the proposition is put as follows—either we want life to continue or we do not. If we don’t want to continue, why write books? The wish for death is powerful and silent. It respects actions; it has no need of words.”

Throughout his fifty-plus years as a novelist, over and over again, Bellow decides he’d rather have life than death. I don’t mean this to sound trite; Bellow’s fiction isn’t “life-affirming” in the cliché mode of Hollywood movies and Hallmark greeting cards. His current reputation may proceed mostly from his ramshackle, ebullient third novel, (1953), but he was a writer who knew well that the world is often a terrible, violent place (1959), with the title character holding an orphan, ecstatically running laps around a plane in the snow and ice—we have an expression of despair, like Tommy Wilhelm’s at the end of , where he weeps over the casket of a stranger. Later in his career, Bellow casts his own inimitable light into the darkest corners of the twentieth century (the totalitarian Eastern Bloc regimes and violent Chicago streets of , the Nazi death camps of ). He’d rather have life continue than not, but he knows that not just any kind of life will do.