It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future

Leí “Todo cuenta” y me impresionó la cercanía que el autor establece con los lectores, algo que es bastante raro. Esta colección de ensayos, crónicas y artículos parece girar en torno a la inquietud por ser norteamericano. Bellow se plantea la pregunta de qué significa ser norteamericano, hijo de inmigrantes judíos de la Rusia zarista. Pero también es una reflexión sobre la distracción, el entretenimiento y el juego del mercado por captar la atención de los sujetos. No es casual que el primer texto sea un perfil biográfico de Mozart, destacando su carácter individual y separándolo del majestuoso genio elevado a hito histórico por la academia. Tampoco es casual que termine con dos entrevistas que muestran un sentido particular de autocrítica sobre el propio quehacer de Bellow.

En las seis partes en que se divide el libro, aparecen diferentes dobleces de esa inquietud por el sentido de la vida humana amenazada durante el siglo XX por la sinrazón desquiciada de las ideologías. Bellow arma una silueta de esos años a través de personajes como Roosevelt o Nikita Jruschov, describe el ambiente cultural y literario de mediados de siglo y realiza un recorrido por las ciudades que habitó. Además, sus crónicas y análisis del conflicto palestino-israelí llaman especialmente la atención, enunciando personajes y decisiones que se pierden en la ilusión de lo obvio.

Saul Bellow hace de “Todo cuenta” una experiencia de lectura personal muy semejante a escuchar a un abuelo lúcido que nos hereda su testimonio con una mirada aguda. Sin embargo, sentí cierta distancia ante ciertos segmentos localistas norteamericanos, pero eso se compensa con la habilidad de Bellow por trascender sus inquietudes al plano humano de la experiencia compartida.

Outwardly, Saul Bellow had little cause for bitterness. He had won every literary award imaginable, including the Nobel Prize. However, it seems that in the last decades of his life, he felt under siege. The literary tradition that he saw himself as both beneficiary and steward of was under threat.

In 1991, Bellow told an interviewer, “It isn’t contemporary literature alone that is threatened. The classics themselves are shooting, not drifting, Letheward. We may lose everything at this rate…[I feel] anger, contempt, and rage, by this latest betrayal by putty-headed academics and intellectuals.”

Bellow spent much of his life among these so-called putty-headed academics and intellectuals. Like many writers of the first half of the last century, he started off as a Marxist. His parents immigrated from Russia to Montreal in the early 1910s, and Lenin and Trotsky were topics of nightly discussion at the Bellow dinner table. We learn from the essay "Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence" that Bellow was scheduled to meet Trotsky in Mexico in August 1940, on the very day that Trotsky was assassinated. The Russian Revolution casts a long shadow over these pages.

Bellow writes, “There was the revolutionary myth that the masses had taken things into their own hands in 1917, and destroyed the power of capitalist imperialism. It took me a long time to get over that.”

The Soviet Union's failure to live up to its promises seems to have permanently disillusioned Bellow with any movement that aimed to create a better world. He famously drifted rightward in later years and took offense at those who, unlike him, were unable to shed their leftist political orthodoxies.

Not surprisingly, Bellow often sounded like a reactionary (a charge he vehemently rejected). He dismissed those caught up in the daily political squabbles (politicians, the media, polemicists, activists, and, again, intellectuals and academics) as contributing to the “crisis chatter” and the “moronic inferno” (a term borrowed from his acolyte Martin Amis) of the age.

“Atomic energy, environmentalism, women’s rights, capital punishment...such are the daily grist of newspapers and networks,” he writes. “And this, let’s face it, is the action; this is where masses of Americans find substance, importance, find definition, through a combination of passion and ineffectuality.”

He can be tone-deaf, out-of-step, a defender of the status quo, and a person whose views, in my opinion, often run in the wrong direction. But his larger and more important point is that the ideas of the day, the prevailing ideologies and dominant systems of thought, distract and disorient us, distort our “first soul” (as Bellow called it), and obscure what Tolstoy and Proust referred to as our “true impressions.” Coupled with the “crisis chatter” we are daily confronted with, the modern individual is under tremendous pressure. Academics, polemicists, intellectuals, and bien pensant liberals all contribute to these conditions.

“This society...but cannot absolutely denature us,” Bellow writes. “It forces certain elements of the genius of our species to go into hiding.”

He elaborates elsewhere: “My case against the intellectuals can be easily summarized: Science has postulated a nature with no soul in it; commerce does not deal in souls and higher aspirations—matters like love and beauty are none of its business...Intellectuals seem to me to have turned away from those elements in life unaccounted for in modern science and that in modern experience have come to seem devoid of substance.”

Bellow inhabits and observes the world as a writer, not just primarily but solely. And though he addresses a general reader, his admonitions are mainly intended for fellow writers and artists, whose job, according to Bellow, is to stand against the chaos.

Even if, in Bellow's view, engaging with politics is mostly a dead-end proposition for an artist, that doesn't mean he believes writers shouldn't be passionately moral. (He references Tolstoy, who said a writer must take a moral view—meaning, above all, giving intense attention to one’s subject and characters; or, as Henry James put it, being “one of those people on whom nothing is lost.”)

"If the remission of pain is happiness, then the emergence from distraction is aesthetic bliss,” Bellow writes. “I use these terms loosely for I am not making an argument but rather attempting to describe the pleasure that comes from recognition or rediscovery of certain essences permanently associated with human life. These essences are restored to our consciousness by persons who are described as 'artists.’"

For Bellow, literature is not an agent of change (as W.H. Auden famously said, “Poetry makes nothing happen”); nor is it meant to explain “the roots of this, the causes of the other, the history, the structure, the reasons why.” Rather, it is autotelic; it represents the living moment and, in doing so, temporarily releases us from the object world of ideas in which we are caught; it restores our natural knowledge; it “raises the soul through the serenity of form above any painful involvement in the limitations of reality.”

The New Yorker's Richard Brody wrote of Bellow in 2015 (upon the publication of another collection of essays, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, which has significant overlap with this collection): “[His] most enduring conflict is the one at the very heart of modernity—between the visionary vortex of the inner voice and the turbulent volume of worldly experience, between the freely unhinged life of the mind and the irrefutable life of the times.”

“Can so much excitement, so much disorder, be brought under control?” Bellow asks in his 1990 essay ‘The Distracted Public.’ “Such questions must be addressed to analysts and experts in a variety of fields—prediction is their business. The concern of tale-tellers and novelists is with the human essences neglected and forgotten by a distracted world.”

Love the cover image - what a natty dude!

Bellow's non-fictional ruminations are truly as rich as his novels and stories. He is, without a doubt, a novelist through and through. He has an uncanny ability to blend warmly specific personal recollection with abstract speculation in a way that no one else can. And that Bellow tone - it is a thing of beauty and wisdom that flows free and easy, a jaunty, slangy, conversational high style that is both engaging and captivating. This bundle of lectures and magazine pieces reads like a testament to his genius. He is truly a giant in the world of literature, and his work will continue to be studied and admired for generations to come.

Though his fiction is his calling card, Bellow's essays are equally crafted with language, insight and erudition that is masterful. Saul Bellow was a renowned American writer, celebrated for his profound and thought-provoking works. His novels, such as "The Adventures of Augie March" and "Herzog," have left an indelible mark on the literary world. However, his essays are often overlooked, despite their remarkable quality. In his essays, Bellow demonstrates his command of language, using it to explore a wide range of topics with great depth and clarity. His insights are incisive, cutting through the surface of things to reveal the underlying truth. Moreover, his erudition is on full display, as he draws on his vast knowledge of literature, history, philosophy and other fields to support his arguments. Bellow's essays are a testament to his literary genius and should be given the same level of attention and appreciation as his fiction.

I had read this book quite a while ago and found myself eager to request it again from my local library branch. Saul Bellow, a Russian Jew, grew up in the outskirts of Chicago. Here, he ponders over a wide range of things, mostly in what seems to me to be a "stream-of-consciousness" writing style.

The prose is rather challenging to piece together for most of the collection of essays. Only a few stand out. For instance, his essay about his time at a Tuscan winery in the dead of winter, when sniffing dogs are in search of precious truffles, or his story on "The Yellow Kid," which was perhaps my favorite among them.

There is a strong emphasis on the concepts of nihilism and philistinism as they relate to Marxist, Fascist, and Communist ideologies, which mostly eluded me. Nevertheless, I do believe this work is worthy of being read, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to do so. It offers unique perspectives and insights that can expand one's intellectual horizons.

Although some parts may be difficult to understand, the overall experience of reading this book is enriching. It makes one think about various aspects of life, society, and ideology. Saul Bellow's writing style, though unconventional, adds to the charm and depth of the work.

In conclusion, despite its challenges, this book is a valuable addition to any reader's collection. It encourages critical thinking and offers a glimpse into the mind of a brilliant writer. I would highly recommend it to those who are interested in exploring different literary styles and ideas.

Saul Bellow, an outstanding writer and Nobel Prize winner, has a body of work that I find to be somewhat uneven. While I am captivated by many of his novels such as Dangling Man, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift, The Dean's December, More Died of Heartbreak, The Actual, there are others like The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King that I cannot abide. Perhaps my preference lies with the novels whose protagonists are introverted and reserved, grappling with an external reality that is alien to them, forcing them to explore and understand their inner selves. In contrast, I cannot stand the novels with larger-than-life extroverted protagonists who have manic tendencies.

I had mistakenly expected the essays in this book to reflect the writer in his more introverted vein. However, I found the collection to be generally disappointing, with many of the essays, especially the earlier ones, frustratingly banal, shallow, or dated.

I am willing to admit that the essays focusing on Chicago may be fascinating to readers familiar with the city. For me, though, the Chicago of his novels is far more vivid and captivating.

This collection of essays is divided into six parts.

The first part, Riding off in all directions, is a hodgepodge of essays. Literary notes on Khrushsev is a fascinating and still relevant analysis of Khrushev and his cynical manipulation of the US media, which presciently anticipates other flamboyant despots like Saddam Hussein or Hugo Chávez. The French as Dostoyevsky saw them is another effective and surprising essay. However, In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt is a long-winded piece that seems to refer to a very distant and naïve USA, with little appeal to non-US readers. A Talk with the Yellow Kid is also unsatisfying, more of a journalistic period piece on a retired Chicago con-man, though it might be more successful as a sketch for a possible Bellow character.

In the second part, Writers, Intellectuals, Politics, Bellow tiresomely lambasts the US cultural milieu for its philistinism. Many of the essays read like uninspired newspaper articles with little depth. However, Saul Bellow's Nobel Lecture stands out like a shining beacon among the rest of the essays in this section and is definitely worth a close read.

The Distracted Public, the third part of the book, is really a continuation of the second part, criticizing what Bellow sees as the US public's inability to focus on issues rather than aimlessly zapping through them.

The fourth part, Thoughts in Transition, contains a mix of travel essays. Spanish Letter makes for fascinating reading if you are aware of the contrast between twenty-first century Spain and the 1948 Spain visited by Bellow. The author describes his impressions of traveling through a dusty, poverty-stricken, and backward 1948 Spain under Franco's dictatorial police state. In Israel: The Six-Day War, Bellow attempts to write as a self-conscious eyewitness war correspondent, but the war was already over when he arrived. It is an uncomfortable read in many ways, as Bellow struggles to come to grips with the subject matter and slips into the role of a reporter striving for objectivity but splintered with rather rote shards of human interest. There are also other unsuccessful essays on various locations.

The fifth part, A Few Farewells, contains short eulogies on several notable figures. I particularly liked the excellent and personal eulogies on John Berryman and Allan Bloom.

The sixth and final part, Impressions and Notions, contains the two parts of an outstanding interview of Saul Bellow. I was especially struck by his less than flattering opinion of the Great Books program at the University of Chicago. It is important to note that Bellow studied under this program until he abandoned it and transferred to anthropology and sociology at Northwestern University.

This book will undoubtedly receive very different appraisals from its readers, depending on their backgrounds and interests, such as whether they or their families lived in Chicago between 1930 and 1980, what they have read by Bellow, their politics, their stance on the quality of American undergraduate education, and the role of intellectuals in society.

Not exactly a book: a materialized soul.

You read it, and it is as if Saul Bellow was there, right beside you. He guides you through Mozart's geniality, taking you on a journey to Spain, Tuscany, and of course, Chicago. He introduces you to his friends and finally opens up his heart.

While reading this one and for a while after you're done, you will not only be hearing Bellow's voice when thinking about certain matters, but also seeing things in this world through his large, oblong, ancient eyes. It's like having a personal connection with the great author, experiencing his thoughts and perspectives as if they were your own.

This isn't just a book; it's a living, breathing entity that brings Bellow's world to life and allows you to become a part of it. It's a remarkable experience that leaves a lasting impression and enriches your understanding of literature and life.

I've never delved into the works of Saul Bellow before, but now I have a strong sense that I really should.

I had the intention of reading this particular book with the hope of enhancing my essay writing skills.

Throughout my college and graduate school years, I've always been engaged in writing papers. However, I've long desired to create essays that are not only accessible to a wide audience but also avoid being boring.

I believe that by exploring Bellow's writing, I might gain valuable insights and techniques that could help me achieve this goal.

His works are renowned for their depth, complexity, and unique perspectives, which I think could inspire me to approach essay writing in a more creative and engaging way.

I'm excited to embark on this literary journey and see how it will impact my own writing.

Perhaps I'll discover new ways to present my ideas, use language more effectively, and capture the attention of my readers.

Only time will tell, but I'm looking forward to the experience with great anticipation.