More Die of Heartbreak
Saul Bellow
MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK
Introduction by MARTIN AMIS
Contents
Introduction
More Die of Heartbreak
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
More Die of Heartbreak
SAUL BELLOW (1915–2005) is the only novelist to receive three National book awards, for The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr Sammler’s Planet. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Humboldt’s Gift. The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to him in 1976 ‘for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.’ In 1990, Mr Bellow was presented the National Book Award Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. He has also received the National Medal of Arts. His books include Dangling Man (1944), The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mosby’s Memoirs (1969), Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970), Humboldt’s Gift (1975), To Jerusalem and Back (1976), The Dean’s December (1982), Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984), More Die of Heartbreak (1987), A Theft (1989), The Bellarosa Connection (1989), Something to Remember Me By (1991), It All Adds Up (1994), The Actual (1997), Ravelstein (2000) and Collected Stories (2001).
MARTIN AMIS’S novels include The Rachel Papers (1973), Dead Babies (1975), Success (1978), Other People (1981), Money (1984), London Fields (1989), Time’s Arrow (1991), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Information (1995), Night Train (1997) and Yellow Dog (2003). He has also published two collections of stories: Einstein’s Monsters (1987) and Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998). His nonfiction appears in three collections of essays: The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986), Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993) and The War Against Cliché (2001), which includes book reviews as well as essays and won the National Book Circle Critics Award for Criticism, and Koba the Dread (2002). His autobiography, Experience (2000), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Martin Amis lives in London.
Introduction
by Martin Amis
This piece is a book review—with a couple of differences. It was read out loud by me in Haifa, Israel, and in the presence of the book’s author. The occasion was a Saul Bellow Conference organised, or spearheaded, by the distinguished Israeli novelist A.B. (‘Bully’) Yehoshua. At this convocation of Bellovians most of the papers were delivered by American academics. Jolted awake on my first morning by a call from the foyer telling me that “the Conference miniboose” was revving in the forecourt, about to begin its journey to the Conference Centre, I then sat breakfast-less through two or three lectures called things like “The Caged Cash-Register: Tensions between Existentialism and Materialism in Dangling Man.” During the first session Bellow was overheard to say: “If I have to listen to another word of this I think I’m going to die.” Thereafter he was not often to be found at the Conference Centre. He was in stalwart attendance, however, on the day I gave my paper alongside Amos Oz and Alan Lelchuk.
The “wallet” referred to in the first sentence was a leatherette lecture-pouch presented to each delegate on arrival with the compliments of Bank Hapoalim. My assignment was the novel More Die of Heartbreak, published later the same year (1987).
I am delighted to be here, for all sorts of reasons: the sun, the sea breezes, this new wallet, the convulsive coughing fits that will punctuate my discourse. And I have further grounds for self-satisfaction. We are all familiar with our Herzogs and Humboldts and Hendersons, we all know our Augies and our Arturs; but nobody here has read the new one. Perhaps you have heard tell of it, you are acquainted with its lovely title: More Die of Heartbreak. But only I have read it. That is to say I have reread it; and I become more and more convinced that you cannot read writers like Saul Bellow; you can only reread them. I have read the new one—and you haven’t. Not even Saul Bellow has read it. Oh, he has peered at the typescript, he has agonised over the proofs. He has written it. But he has not read it, as I have.
Once the first days of creation are over (once life has been assigned to various hunches and inklings), writing is decision-making. After the big decisions, the medium-sized decisions; then the little decisions, lots of little decisions, two or three hundred a page. When Bellow reads More Die of Heartbreak he isn’t reading; he is squirming and smarting, feeling the pulls and shoves and after-shocks of a million decisions. For him the book is a million clues to a million skirmishes—scars, craters, bullet-holes. For me, it is a seamless fait accompli. And I am here to tell you—I am literally here to tell you—that it is as dense, as funny, as thought-crammed, as richly associational and as cruelly contemporary as anything he has written. He’s over seventy. What’s the matter with him?
Here are further grounds for extreme complacence on my part: Bellow has been reading Philip Larkin. Now the narrator of More Die of Heartbreak grew up in Paris at the feet of heavy thinkers like Boris Souvarine and Alexandre Kojève who talked about geopolitics and Hegel and Man at the End of History and wrote books called things like Existenz (note the powerful z on the end, rather than the more modest ce). I grew up in Swansea, Wales, and Philip Larkin was a good deal around. He didn’t talk about posthistorical man. He talked about the psychodrama of early baldness. Bellow quotes Larkin as follows: “‘In everyone there sleeps a sense of life according to love.’” “He also says that people dream ‘of all they might have done had they been loved. Nothing cures that.’” And nothing—i.e., death—did cure that. Love was not a possibility for Larkin. Because to him death overarched love and rendered it derisory. He died in 1985; by Bellow’s age, incidentally, he had been dead for years. For him, death crowded love out. With Bellow, it seems to be the other way around. More die of heartbreak, says the title. Well, Larkin never had any heartbreak, not in that sense.* Perhaps one of the many, many things the new novel has to say is that you need heartbreak, to keep you human. You need it to keep America off your back. (The book is sometimes like a rumour of war against America.) The right kind of heartbreak, mind you. Anyway, whether you need it or not, you are certainly going to get it.
I have a third and, I think, final reason for impregnable self-satisfaction—though more may yet occur to me. Whereas other speakers at this conference are addressing themselves to themes and structures, to literary correspondences and genealogies, existentialism, authenticity, percussive nouns and whatnot, all I’ve got to do is tell a story.
It is a love story, but a modern one. “Modern”: what has Bellow done to that word? In Bellow, modern now comes with its own special static, its own humiliating helplessness, its own unbearable agitation … We begin with a conversation between the book’s two main actors, Kenneth Trachtenberg, the narrator, an Assistant Professor of Russian Literature, and his colleague and uncle, Benno, Benn Crader, the distinguished botanist, who specialises in the anatomy and morphology of plants (a plant “clairvoyant” “mystic”, and “telepathic” as he is variously styled). The two men love two women but they also love each other: it is a ‘devouring’ friendship; they are central to each other’s lives. As the novel opens Benn is in crisis. We see how things are going to be on the first page, when Benn draws Kenneth’s attention to a Charles Addams cartoon which has come to obsess him:
A pair of lovers was its subject—the usual depraved-desolate couple in a typical setting of tombstones and yews. The man was brutal-looking and the long-haired woman (I think the fans call her Morticia) wore a witch’s gown. The two sat on a cemetery bench holding hands. The caption was simple:
“Are you unhappy, darling?”
“Oh yes, yes! Completely.”
Kenneth is the younger by a couple of decades but he is
by far the more worldly, with his Parisian, UNESCO, Euroculture background. On the other hand, everyone is more worldly than Benn. Kenneth has long hair, a “Jesusy” look, like “a figure in a sketch, somewhere between Cruikshank and Rembrandt—skinny, long-faced, sallow and greenish (reflections from a Dutch canal). Modern life, if you take it to heart, wears you out …” Benn, for his part, has “cobalt-blue” eyes and “a face like the moon before we landed on it.” For Kenneth, Benn has “the magics” a charismatic soul, purity, innocence; and it is these qualities that Kenneth has come to America to protect, “to preserve Benn in his invaluable oddity.” He has also come to America because America is “where the action is” the real modern action; it is where modernity is.
This is Benn’s trouble. After fifteen years as a widower-bachelor he has remarried. The second wife is “more beautiful, more difficult, more of a torment.” What was he after? “Two human beings bound together in love and kindness”—a universal human aim, as Kenneth concedes: “In the West, anyway, people are still trying to do it, rounding off the multitude of benefits they enjoy.” Benn’s attitude is of course not so brisk. He is, or was, infatuated, “carried away by unreasoning passion” (that is the second dictionary definition of infatuation, the first being ‘made foolish’). Kenneth is doubly sceptical. Benn got married on the sly, while Kenneth was away; he hadn’t cleared it with Kenneth, and he damn well should have done. Benn “had the magics, but as a mainstream manager he was nowhere.” Kenneth has always aspired to be Benn’s mainstream manager, his modernity intermediary. And he has always felt that Benn had the love potential, “he actually could fall in love,” he was a strong candidate for love in “a classic form.” To put it at its lowest (which is still pretty high these days), “he was a man who really did have something to do—other than trouble others, which seems to be what so many of us are here for, exclusively.”
As the veteran Bellow-reader would by now expect, the full picture takes some time to emerge; it is a case of one step forward two steps back, with each sortie into the present demanding elaborate legitimisation from the past. While omens gather, we first review Benn’s erotic career, and the usual modern spectacle: “the best people are always knee-deep in the garbage of “personal life” to the gratification of the vulgar.” Or again: “the private life is almost always a bouquet of sores with a garnish of trivialities or downright trash.” And here is Ben, “dredged in floury relationships by ladies who could fry him like a fish if they had a mind to.” There was Caroline Bunge, the department-store heiress, the Valium queen, who, when Benn rushes to meet her at the airport, walks straight past him without blinking: “Being on mood pills was 100 per cent contemporary. If you aren’t up-to-the-moment you aren’t altogether real. But crazies are always contemporary, as sandpipers always run ahead of the foam line on the beaches.” There was Della Bedell, another contemporary personage. Having learnt from TV and the magazines that it’s okay for the lady to take the initiative, she comes down from the apartment above and submits Benn to a matter-of-fact seduction. She practically debags him. Thereafter she haunts his front door crying, “What am I supposed to do with my sexuality?” Benn slides into these things out of politeness (and “politeness gets funnier the more the rules of order disintegrate”). He gets out of them less decorously: he does a runner, or a flyer, jetting off to Brazil, Japan, Antarctica, anywhere. “He flies around, but his thought lag is such—I refer to the gap between his personal interests and the passions of contemporary life—that he might as well be circling the Dead Sea on a donkey.” Benn is not an old-fashioned figure, he is an eternal figure; he has innocence, and we all know what modernity will do with that. Innocence is a claim to immunity, and there is no immunity any more; modernity makes no exceptions. “Towards the end of your life,” says Benn (and this is a very Bellovian strophe),
you have something like a pain schedule to fill out—a long schedule like a federal document, only it’s your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes—like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. Next category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much, and you see the ravages everywhere, why not be sensible and sign off early?
“Because of immortal longings,” says Kenneth. “Or just hoping for a lucky break.” Meanwhile, a Miss Matilda Layamon, modernity’s erotic nemesis, patiently looms.
Kenneth is immersed, or rather stalled, in his own parallel difficulties: unrequited love for a girl called Treckie, the mother of his infant daughter. Early on Kenneth remarks that the nature of his own preoccupations marks him out as “a genuinely modern individual. (Can you say worse of anybody?)” Compared to Treckie, Kenneth is positively Hanoverian, or Pushkinian. There is a lovely phrase later on in the book, when Benn is being extravagantly lunched by his appalling, his unforgivable, his inadmissible father-in-law; Benn is trying to be cheerful, but he can’t “get the note of TV brightness into his responses” TV brightness: Treckie has plenty of that. I have a name for girls like Treckie; I call them Jackanory-artists, Blue Peter-merchants. Radiant with non-specific vivacity, they come on like kiddie-show hostesses (“And right after the break we’ll be doing it again with me on top”). “What kind of a name is Treckie?” asks Dita Schwartz, the other contestant for Kenneth’s affections. A good question: what kind of a name is Treckie? Here, I think, we have a bit of subliminal inspiration on Bellow’s part. In TV parlance a “Trekkie” is a devotee of the space-opera TV series Star Trek. Trekkies model themselves on the cast of the show, would-be Captain Kirks and Lieutenant Uhuras who boldly go out into the universe, to pester alien life forms with the American Constitution …
Treckie is a person with goals, a “life-plan.” She is “either very clever or playing by clever rules”: the latter, definitely the latter. Treckie believes in growth, in change, in full self-realisation. “The way to change for the better,” summarises Kenneth,
is to begin by telling everybody about it. You make an announcement. You repeat your intentions until others begin to repeat them to you. When you hear them from others you can say, ‘Yes, that’s what I think too.’ The more often your intention is repeated, the truer it becomes. The key is fluency. It’s fluency of formulation that matters most.
This is no kind of fluency, no kind of conversation, no kind of girl-friend for a Bellow hero. How can you discuss life with somebody who lives a “life-style” according to a “life-plan”? When Kenneth talks to Benn about Treckie he uses “skinny Gallic gestures to enlarge the horizon.” The horizon needs all the enlarging it can get.
I have no clue to what Treckie is waiting for. We don’t talk about me. These last few days we talked mostly about her. She wanted to tell me about her progress in self-realization, the mistakes she’s correcting, her new insights into her former insights and the decisions she’s taken as a result.
And yet Kenneth is crazy for Treckie, crazy about Treckie: she has the franchise on his libido, whereas he can’t begin to get a line on hers. Diminutive Treckie’s sexual life-choice is masochism. She’s a masochist and a pushy one, too: “… her legs were disfigured by bruises. Her shins were all black and blue. No, blue and green circles like the markings of peacock feathers … When she saw me staring at her she shrugged her bare shoulders, she laid her head to one side, and her underlip swelled softly towards me. There being a challenge in this, a ‘What are you going to do about it?’ She seemed to take pride in these injuries.” Treckie likes rough men; Kenneth is a kind man, a delicate man. And that would appear to be that. There is nothing much that Kenneth, or indeed the novel, can do about Treckie. She must, she says, have her “multiple acculturation,” her “multiple choices”: i.e., she must have her multiple boyfriends. With Treckie, says Kenneth, “it was just me versus contemporary circumstances, and against those I never had a chance.”
Kenneth’s “private life” is a mess but a static one. Wit
h Benn, contemporary circumstances assume more dynamic form. Matilda Layamon has been ominously hovering over the first third of the book (bad news, but what kind of bad news?); now she descends. She is rich, clever, beautiful, high-gloss, “glittering, nervous”: what does she see in Benn (and seeing is a good deal of what this novel is about: you are what you see, not what you eat, “as that literalist German maniac Feuerbach insisted”)? Look at the men Matilda might have had in Benn’s stead! “A national network anchorman, then a fellow who was now on the federal appeals bench, plus a tax genius consulted by Richard Nixon.” Why, her father plays golf with the likes of Bob Hope and President Ford. Yet she alights on Benn, with his awkward figure, the Russian “bulge of his back like a wing-case,” the infinity-symbol figure-eight spectacles, and his paltry sixty grand a year. This isn’t going to be good. And why can’t Benn see it? What, in fact, does Benn see in her?
When we read, we read with pencils in our hands. When we read something particularly significant or apposite, we draw a vertical line in the margin. The fit reader of the perfect book could thus run his pencil down the length of every last page. And in a way he is still none the wiser—it gets him no further forward. More Die of Heartbreak is a bit like that: read it twice, and all you’ve got is parallel tracks, right the way through. In its allusiveness, its density, its vigour, the novel comes at you like the snowstorm that Kenneth sees: a storm, but with each snowflake doing everything that is acrobatically possible. Yet these allusions, while sending their specific messages, also acquire an emotional aspect. Plants, Eden, a Tree of Life with which botanist Benn cannot commune, a reclining nude, tigers of desire, “impulses from the fallen world surrounding this green seclusion”—“twentieth-century instability.” And against this a different setting, the Antarctic, the setting of Benn’s rambles and of Admiral Byrd’s memoirs entitled Alone: out there, on the border of borders, the time quickly comes “when one has nothing to reveal to the other, when even his unformed thoughts can be anticipated, his pet ideas become a meaningless drool,” when “people find each other out.” Hand in hand, modernity and Matilda have something in mind for Uncle Benn. It won’t be anything obvious. It won’t be secret drinking, infidelity, slobby habits—none of that old stuff. The takeover will have a contemporary subtlety. And it will require Benn’s collusion.