It All Adds Up

338 Pages·2013·1.14 MB·English

by  Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow

IT ALL ADDS UP
Contents
Preface
Mozart: An Overture
PART ONE: Riding Off in All Directions
In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt
Literary Notes on Khrushchev
The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them
A Talk with the Yellow Kid
PART TWO: Writers, Intellectuals, Politics
The Sealed Treasure
Facts That Put Fancy to Flight
White House and Artists
A Matter of the Soul
An Interview with Myself
Nobel Lecture
Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence
PART THREE: The Distracted Public
The Jefferson Lectures
The Distracted Public
There Is Simply Too Much to Think About
PART FOUR: Thoughts in Transition
Spanish Letter
Illinois Journey
Israel: The Six-Day War
New York: World-Famous Impossibility
The Day They Signed the Treaty
My Paris
Chicago: The City That Was, the City That Is
Vermont: The Good Place
Winter in Tuscany
PART FIVE: A Few Farewells
Isaac Rosenfeld
John Berryman
John Cheever
Allan Bloom
William Arrowsmith
PART SIX: Impressions and Notions
A Half Life
A Second Half Life
Follow Penguin
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
IT ALL ADDS UP
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 in 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 with 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).
Preface
It is never altogether pleasant to read what you wrote decades ago. Here and
there I found pieces that pleased me, and for a moment I could say, like little
Jack Horner, “Oh, what a good boy was I!” The least gratifying of my
discoveries was that I, too, had a King Charles head and that I had been doodling
away like Mr. Dick in David Copperfield. I was obsessed or distracted by the
subject of distraction. A second King Charles head, smaller but nearly as
persistent, presently materialized: I kept mentioning Wyndham Lewis. Why was
it that I invoked few other names?
I have been reading Lewis for half a century or longer. His political ideas
repelled me (I still dislike them), but he had thought more deeply and written
more intelligently about the lot of the artist in the twentieth century than any of
his contemporaries. I cared little for The Art of Being Ruled, but I have gone
back repeatedly to books like Men Without Art, America and the Cosmic Man,
The Writer and the Absolute, and his literary autobiography, Rude Assignment. I
have studied him closely, and I referred to him oftener than I had realized. He
has been described and dismissed as a Nietzschean, and I was occasionally
advised to go to the source. But a writer of genius like Lewis is more than the
sum of his influences. William Blake is sometimes described as a Rousseauan,
but it was not Rousseau who wrote the Songs of Experience. A writer often casts
about for the support of a precedent, and when I needed one I found myself
frequently recalling what Lewis had to say on matters of importance.
In reading these pieces again, I kept thinking about Robert Frost’s poem to the
effect that there had been promises to keep and miles to go before I could sleep.
Not so. I had already been fast asleep and had to trust the little horse to bring me
home. He knew the way (more or less).
I have been invited to print all the trifles I wrote to support myself, but I have
decided to acknowledge no “historical responsibilities.” This therefore is not a
reliquary but a gathering of some of the more readable essays. If I were to write
these pieces today, I think that I should say less about distraction and emphasize
instead the importance of attention. Many years ago, reading Tolstoy’s essay on
Maupassant, I was struck by his short list of indispensable qualifications for
good writing. These were: a perspicuous style (I have to accept the translator’s
adjective), a moral foundation—that is, a strong stand taken on the problem of
good and evil—and lastly the faculty of attention. By attending closely, the
writer was to breed attentiveness in his readers, replacing the world with his
world. Single-mindedness and passion are interchangeable here. All that remains
to be said on the subject is that a writer is educated mainly by his mistakes. And
as Henry James grimly suggests in his story “The Middle Years,” when you have
completed your self-education and mastered your trade, you are likely to find
that your time has run out.
When a writer says “My time is up,” it’s highly probable that he doesn’t really
mean it. What most saddens him is that his mistakes are indelibly recorded in
what he once wrote. If I had it to do again I could do it so much better, he says,
and he longs to correct himself publicly and to revise and retract. Some of my
friends have been deeply skeptical about adult education. Prevailing opinion has
been that it is no use to attempt in middle age what should have been done in the
years of maximum receptivity. But some of us are stubborn learners, and my
sixties and my seventies proved to be enlightening decades. I learned many
things that I should have known earlier.
The bitterness of my dissatisfaction in rereading some of these pieces is due to
basic revisions, radical changes in my point of view. I can see now where I went
wrong. The “road not taken” was taken, taken a hundred times. By now I have
gone many miles toward the promise of sleep, but I reach my destination
blindingly wide awake. My state therefore is something like a state of insomniac
illumination. I failed to understand the things I wrote, the books I read, the
lessons I was taught, but I find that I am a most persistent self-educator, that I
long for correction. Very possibly I have not achieved my goals, but it gives
great satisfaction nonetheless to have rid oneself of tenacious old errors. To enter
an era of improved errors.
Mozart: An Overture
(1992)
BOSTONIA MAGAZINE, SPRING 1992. DELIVERED AT THE MOZART BICENTENNIAL, 5
DECEMBER 1991, IN FLORENCE, ITALY.
In preparing this essay, I have found myself sizing up Mozart as if I were
thinking of writing a novel in which he might appear as a character. I was not
aware at the outset that this was what I was doing. It was only after I had written
half of it that I recognized what I had done.
Mozart is immediately accessible to the naive. Others obviously require
preparation. It is no criticism of twelve-tone composers, to choose an obvious
example, to note that they oblige us to give some thought to the formal
assumptions they expect us to share. Mozart, however, can be loved freely and
naturally by amateurs. It is because I am an amateur that I have been invited to
discuss Mozart, and I intend to make the most of my amateur standing,
bypassing the problems that intrigue and vex the learned specialists I have read
in my efforts to get a handle of my own on this subject.
My best course is to convert ignorance to an advantage. What follows is a
confession, supplemented by such tentative ideas as are bound to flutter out
when any of us makes an open declaration of this sort. I shall begin by saying
that there are corners of my existence which from the first were furnished by
Mozart. It does not seem to me that any other musical tenant ever had to be
moved out to make room for him. I had an older sister—much my senior—who
played the piano. She did not play particularly well. She was a perfect
metronome (metrognome) of a pianist, but she did familiarize me with Mozart.
There was a manufacturer in Chicago by the name of Gulbrantsen, and in his
advertisements, painted on brick walls, an infant was shown pressing the pedals
of a piano. The legend was: “The richest child is poor without a musical
education.” This was a warning taken seriously by parents in the Midwest. I was
given violin lessons at an early age. Many of the music teachers were refugees
from revolutionary Russia. Mine was a stout gloomy man from Odessa seeking a
prodigy, a second Heifetz or Menuhin or Elman, to make his reputation.
Obviously I lacked the gifts he was looking for, and he would snatch the bow
and whip my bottom with it. He was so peevish and futile that I was more
amused than hurt. I did, somehow, learn to fiddle adequately, and until middle
age I was on the lookout for amateur musicians like myself and had the pleasure
occasionally of playing Mozart sonatas arranged for duets and trios. In my
student years I was an unpaid usher at the Auditorium Theater; the Ballet Russe
de Monte Carlo and the San Carlo Opera came regularly to Chicago. Samuel
Insull, the utilities tycoon, gave the city an opera house (before he fled to Greece
and had to be extradited). International celebrities were brought to Orchestra
Hall by Hurok the impresario. There were excellent teachers of theory and music
history and first-rate performers at the south end of the Loop. Although I was not
trained in a conservatory, I absorbed a considerable amount of music, and while
I preferred books to instruments, there were odd corners of my existence
reserved for Handel, Mozart, Pergolesi, etc.
I have now explained my amateur standing and will go on to the confessions I
promised. But what does one confess today, when the worst of the sins have
become venial? It is the violation of orderly processes of thought as prescribed
by the higher rationality that throws you into sin. To be unscientific is in our
time a grave mental offense.
Some of my speculations on Mozart are notably unscientific. I often puzzle
over the nature of his genius. How was it that it should appear so early and
develop so swiftly and be so complete? Was it because his father was an
educator of corresponding genius? Nobody ever suspected genius of any sort in
Leopold. Neither do the educational or genetic contributions of his mother strike
his biographers as exceptional. Mozart, to borrow a figure from William Blake,
was a piece of ground already spaded and seeded. It looks, in other words, as if
he had brought it all with him. And then I think of other prodigies born into
mathematical or musical families. The mature forms assumed by these
exceptional creatures are not to be accounted for by environmental or historical
theories. They resemble the flowers or the insects, they have powers that
astonish and physiological refinements or resources of intelligence too curious to
be explained by probability theory or the ponderous slowness of time, or by trial
and error. What they suggest is the intervention of invisible purposes. “To a
certain extent,” writes Alfred Einstein, “it is true that Mozart was only a visitor
upon this earth. Mozart as a man was nowhere truly at home: neither in
Salzburg, where he was born, nor in Vienna, where he died.”
At the heart of my confession, therefore, is the hunch that with beings such as
Mozart we are forced to speculate about transcendence, and this makes us very
uncomfortable, since ideas of transcendence are associated with crankiness or
faddism—even downright instability and mental feebleness. These are the
charges and the guilts you open yourself to when you confess that you find it
impossible to dismiss such speculations. To some reasonable minds this might
lead to the limiting of art—art in which religious or other “undesirable”
tendencies survive—to ceremonial or traditional observances. On occasions like
the present one: occasions of cultural piety.
Music, I assume (amateurishly), is based on a tonal code containing,
inevitably, expressions of the whole history of feeling, emotion, belief—of
essences inseparable from what we call our “higher life.” I suggest also that this
is where we tend to go when we have gone as far as we can in the new positive
orthodoxies that keep us within bounds—the assumptions which our education
and the business of the world have trained us to accept as normal, practical, and
indispensable: the founding postulates of our scientific and technological
achievements.
From all this a Mozart gives us an orderly and also an emotional exit—an
endlessly rich and exalted release.
I don’t want to make too much of this notion of a profound originality coming
from God knows what source. I invoke it as a corrective to the earthbound
psychology that rules our minds in this century. It does no harm to be reminded
that this psychology is painfully limiting to the intelligence and is often little
more than a convenient way to dispose of troublesome intimations of a forbidden
nature. The miracles that fascinate us are the scientific and technological ones.