Shop Talk (19 page)

"How sad," says Citrine, "about all this human nonsense which keeps us from the large truth." But the human nonsense is what he loves and loves to recount and what delights him most about being alive. Again: "When ... would I rise ... above all ... the wastefully and randomly human ... to enter higher worlds?" Higher worlds? Where would Citrine be—where would
Bellow
be—without the randomly human driving the superdrama of the
lower
world, the elemental superdrama that is the worldly desire for fame (as exhibited by Von Humboldt Fleisher, the luckless, mentally unsound counterpart of fortunate, sane Citrine—Humboldt, who wishes both to be spiritual and to make it big, and whose nightmare failure is the flip-side travesty of Citrine's success), for money (Humboldt, Thaxter, Denise,
plus Renata's mother the Señora, plus Citrine's brother Julius, plus more or less everyone else), for revenge (Denise, Cantabile), for esteem (Humboldt, Cantabile, Thaxter, Citrine), for the hottest of hot sex (Citrine, Renata, et al.), not to mention that worldliest of worldly desires, Citrine's own, the hellbent lusting after life eternal?

Why does Citrine wish so feverishly never to leave here if not for this laugh-a-minute immersion in the violence and the turbulence of the clownish greediness that he disparagingly calls "the moronic inferno"? "Some people," he says, "are so actual that they beat down my critical powers." And beat down any desire to exchange even the connection to their viciousness for the serenity of the everlasting. Where but the moronic inferno could his "complicated subjectivity" have so much to take in? Out in some vaporous Zip Codeless noplace, nostalgically swapping moronic-inferno stories with the shade of Rudolf Steiner?

And isn't it something like the same moronic inferno that Charlie Citrine excitedly memorializes as it rages in the streets, courtrooms, bedrooms, restaurants, sweat baths, and office buildings of Chicago that so sickens Artur Sammler in its diabolic 1960s-Manhattan incarnation?
Humboldt's Gift
seems like the enlivening tonic Bellow brewed to recover from the sorrowful grieving and moral suffering of
Mr. Sammler's Planet.
It's Bellow's cheerful version of Ecclesiastes: all is vanity and isn't it something!

What's He in Chicago For?

Humboldt on Citrine (my edition page 2): "After making this dough why does he bury himself in the sticks? What's he in Chicago for?"

Citrine on himself (page 63): "My mind was in one of its Chicago states. How should I describe this phenomenon?"

Citrine on being a Chicagoan (page 95): "I could feel the need to laugh rising, mounting, always a sign that my weakness for the sensational, my American, Chicagoan (as well as personal) craving for high stimuli, for incongruities and extremes, was aroused."

And (further along on page 95): "Such information about corruption, if you had grown up in Chicago, was easy to accept. It even satisfied a certain need. It harmonized with one's Chicago view of society."

On the other hand, there's Citrine's being out of place in Chicago (page 225): "In Chicago my personal aims were bunk, my outlook a foreign ideology." And (page 251): "It was now apparent to me that I was neither of Chicago nor sufficiently beyond it, and that Chicago's material and daily interests and phenomena were neither actual and vivid enough nor symbolically clear enough to me."

Keeping in mind these remarks—and there are many more like them throughout
Humboldt's Gift
—look back to the 1940s and observe that Bellow started off as a writer
without
Chicago's organizing his idea of himself the way it does Charlie Citrine's. Yes, a few Chicago streets are occasionally sketched in as the backdrop to
Dangling Man,
but, aside from darkening the pervasive atmosphere of gloom, Chicago seems a place that is almost foreign to the hero; certainly it is alien to him.
Dangling Man
is not a book about a man in a city; it's about a mind in a room. Not until the third book,
Augie March,
did Bellow fully apprehend Chicago as that valuable hunk of literary property, that tangible, engrossing American place that was his to claim as commandingly as Sicily was monopolized by Verga, London by Dickens, and the Mississippi River by Mark Twain. It's with a comparable tentativeness or wariness that Faulkner (the other of America's two greatest twentieth-century novelist-regionalists) came to imaginative ownership of Lafayette County, Mississippi. Faulkner situated his first book,
Soldier's Pay
(1926), in Georgia, his second,
Mosquitoes
(1927), in New Orleans, and it was only with the masterly burst of
Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury,
and
As I Lay Dying,
in 1929-30, that he found—as did Bellow after taking
his
first, impromptu geographical steps—the location to engender those human struggles which, in turn, would fire up his intensity and provoke that impassioned response to a place and its history which at times propels Faulkner's sentences to the brink of unintelligibility and even beyond.

I wonder if at the outset Bellow shied away from seizing Chicago as his because he didn't want to be known as a Chicago writer, any more, perhaps, than he wanted to be known as a Jewish writer. Yes, you're from Chicago, and of course you're a Jew—but how these things are going to figure in your work, or if they should figure at all, isn't easy to puzzle out right off. Besides, you have other ambitions, inspired by your European masters, by Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Proust, Kafka, and such ambitions don't include writing about the neighbors gabbing on the back porch ... Does this line of thought in any way resemble Bellow's before he finally laid claim to the immediate locale?

Of course, after
Augie
it was some ten years before, in
Herzog,
Bellow took on Chicago in a big way again. Ever since then, the distinctly "Chicago view" has been of recurring interest to him, especially when the city provides, as in
Humboldt,
a contrast of comically illuminating proportions between "the open life which is elementary, easy for everyone to read, and characteristic of this place, Chicago, Illinois" and the reflective bent of the preoccupied hero. This combat, vigorously explored, is at the heart of
Humboldt,
as it is of Bellow's next novel,
The Dean's December
(1982). Here, however, the exploration is not comic but rancorous. The mood darkens, the depravity deepens, and under the pressure of violent racial antagonisms, Chicago, Illinois, becomes demoniacal: "On his own turf ... he found a wilderness wilder than the Guiana bush ... desolation ... endless square miles of ruin ... wounds, lesions, cancers, destructive fury, death ... the terrible wildness and dread in this huge place."

The book's very point is that this huge place is Bellow's no longer. Nor is it Augie's, Herzog's, or Citrine's. By the time he comes to write
The Dean's December,
some thirty years after
Augie March,
his hero, Dean Corde, has become the city's Sammler.

What is he in Chicago for? This Chicagoan in pain no longer knows. Bellow is banished.

In the 1990s
Philip Roth
won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for
Patrimony
(1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for
Operation Shylock
(1993), the National Book Award for
Sabbath's Theater
(1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for
American Pastoral
(1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for
I Married a Communist
(1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for
The Counterlife
(1986) and the National Book Award for his first book,
Goodbye, Columbus
(1959). In 2000 he published
The Human Stain,
concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For
The Human Stain
Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient."