A Pilgrim's Digression

Since last winter, I’ve read four books by Saul Bellow:

1. The Adventures of Augie March
2. Seize the Day
3. The Victim
4. Herzog

And I am in the process of reading two more, his first published novel, Dangling Man, and one of his later book of short stories, Something to Remember Me By (1991).

The latter is called a book of short stories, but it actually contains only three novellas. I would define a novella as anything over 50 pages, which fits the first two stories but not the eponymous final story, which comes in at (only) 35 pages.

Even 35 pages seems too long for a short story, but admittedly when I think of short stories, I think of Hemingway. Now that man wrote short stories.  In fact one, titled “A Very Short Story” is barely a page long but Hemingway manages to pack in a love story between an Italian woman and an American soldier in WWI. The very short story ends with the soldier returning to Chicago, ignoring his lover’s letters, and contracting gonorrhea from having sex in a taxi cab with a salesgirl in a Loop department store.

Now that is a short story and any writer who can pack that much detail into a one page story has my utmost admiration. Not that I am holding Bellow to that standard. However, in the preface to the book, he does hold himself to that standard, many times extolling the virtue of brevity–a virtue he admits he himself has not practiced.

Still, I am reading his stories anyway. The first two are done, the third awaiting my attention tonight. Something to Remember Me By, published in 1991, presents an interesting contrast to the 1944 novel Dangling Man I am also reading.

Read more…

After finishing up with Augie March last week, I began reading another Bellow book, The Victim. Though Bellow wrote it before his purported masterpiece, I actually consider The Victim to be the better book. It has a lot of the qualities I’ve come to value in a novel: conciseness, a realistic portrayal of characters–their language, interactions, psychology–and some philosophical depth, but not an over-powering avant garde flavor.

What it reminds me most of are the short novels of Kafka and Camus, two of my favorite writers. The plot is simple: Leventhal, a copy editor at a small trade magazine in New York, is stalked by a man he barely remembers, but who claims that Leventhal did him some great harm long ago. As the story unfolds, it becomes difficult to say whether the stalker is right or wrong.

Leventhal has his own grievances, not just about the man harassing him, but about the anti-semitism he seems to detect in the people with whom he works and associates himself. Again, it’s difficult to tell to what degree his suspicions are justified. Leventhal himself, whose mother supposedly died in an insane asylum, sometimes wonders if he is not suffering from paranoia.

The novel is wonderfully ambiguous on just about every point. Who is the victim? Is Leventhal going insane? Maybe the “victim,” Allbee, has a point and Leventhal did ruin his life. There is even a certain ambiguity in Leventhal’s personal story. He has always accepted his father’s account of what happened to his mother–that she went insane and had to be committed, and later she died in the hospital. Leventhal’s wife, Mary (who is away visiting family for the entire novel), has suggested to Leventhal that maybe he shouldn’t accept his father’s account of the event at face value.

I think it’s a bit simplistic to take the novel at face value, as well. It isn’t just the story of a man compelled to self-examination by the sudden appearance of someone he wronged long ago. My impression, especially with the anti-semitism angle so prominent, is that Bellow is examining the ways in which every one of us hurt each other, sometimes unconsciously, and the way that hurt gets spread around through our often careless interactions. Not to go all bleeding heart, but in some ways we are all the victim.