My friend cloudminder tells me that Christopher Hitchens has died (here’s one of hundreds of appreciations that have already appeared).

I suppose, in line with the post just below this one, one could call Christopher Hitchens the anti-Gingrich. His was perhaps the most human soul of our time. His humanity was so soulful that – like Blake, and Lawrence, and Hitchens’ hero Orwell – he became positively prophetic about it, about rooting into your flesh and mind and heart and being a human being and no other thing.

He liked human beings. He even liked disliking them. He was intensely social.

His spiritual practice was the reading of Auden and Larkin; he sought in them the intensest praise of our beauty and the beauty of the world. He never said, like the woman in Stevens’ Sunday Morning, But in contentment I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss. He sought bliss, and imperishability be damned.

His bliss, above all, was writing. Writing, as Seamus Heaney says in his most famous poem, creates beauty by digging deeply into the meaning of human life: Through living roots awaken in my head. The writer lives intensely, kicks up the deep-lying truths of who we are, and then reaches down and hauls the truths up into prose.

And all of this is blissful: life, mental fight, writing.

Blissful even when your boot suddenly turns over the dirt of the grave.

… a past winner, 1987’s Joseph Brodsky.

A Russian poet tossed out of Russia for being a poet as well as a Jew, he lived in the States for many years until his early death (heart attack; he was a prodigious chain smoker) at 55. He loved the English language, and used it beautifully, but wrote most of his poems in Russian — and then turned around and translated many of them into English. He’s famous not just for his great poems and essays, but for the sass he gave a Soviet judge (“Who decided you’re a poet?” “Nobody. Who put me in the ranks of mankind?”).

In a review of a memoir about Susan Sontag, the reviewer cites a Brodsky anecdote:

[Joseph] Brodsky could outdo [Susan] Sontag both in heedless self-absorption and European-style imperturbability – though of course Brodsky, a Russian, was hardly more European than his paramour [Sontag]. Late in the book, [its author] reflects on something he had said over dinner: “You know in the end, none of it matters, what happens to you in your life. Not suffering. Not happiness or unhappiness. Not illness. Not prison. Nothing.”

So we can start here, with Brodsky’s nihilism (“I was a normal Soviet boy,” [Brodsky once] said. “I could have become a man of the system. But something turned me upside down: [Fyodor Dostoevsky’s] Notes from the Underground. I realized what I am. That I am bad.”), which of course wasn’t nihilism, or wasn’t thoroughgoing every blessed day nihilism… He’d been through enough horror and absurdity in his life to feel the pointless degradation of being human — at least in the corporate sense (“I think the world is capable of only one thing basically — proliferating its evils.”). Yet he insisted in his Nobel address that

Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one’s task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one’s own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends. It would be regrettable to squander this one chance on someone else’s appearance, someone else’s experience…

Personal salvation, if you will, was indeed possible, through the mutual misanthropy, the consciousness-equality, of aesthetic experience:

A novel or a poem is not a monologue, but the conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation, I repeat, that is very private, excluding all others – if you will, mutually misanthropic. And in the moment of this conversation a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around, regardless of whether the writer is a great one or not. This equality is the equality of consciousness. It remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of memory, foggy or distinct; and, sooner or later, appropriately or not, it conditions a person’s conduct. [A] novel or a poem is the product of mutual loneliness – of a writer or a reader.

Take his poem, Seaward:

*******************************

Seaward

Darling, you think it’s love, it’s just a midnight journey.
Best are the dales and rivers removed by force,
as from the next compartment throttles “Oh, stop it, Bernie,”
yet the rhythm of those paroxysms is exactly yours.
Hook to the meat! Brush to the red-brick dentures,
alias cigars, smokeless like a driven nail!
Here the works are fewer than monkey wrenches,
and the phones are whining, dwarfed by to-no-avail.
Bark, then, with joy at Clancy, Fitzgibbon, Miller.
Dogs and block letters care how misfortune spells.
Still, you can tell yourself in the john by the spat-at mirror,
slamming the flush and emerging with clean lapels.
Only the liquid furniture cradles the dwindling figure.
Man shouldn’t grow in size once he’s been portrayed.
Look: what’s been left behind is about as meager
as what remains ahead. Hence the horizon’s blade.

************************************

A man takes a train journey, with his lover, to the coast. He reprimands her for her romanticism. Nothing like traveling on a swaying train late at night, the windows dark, muffled voices from other compartments, the natural world blurred by the force of the train’s onward rush… Or so you think, love. Really, we’re just traveling from Point A to Point B. The lovers in the next compartment? They’re as ridiculous as we are when we go at it.

The world of the train is in fact cramped and pitifully reduced to basic human needs, a place of hooks for the bags of food we’re carrying, and little toothbrushes for our smoke-stained teeth. Hook to this, and brush to that — the setting is ridiculously like a military camp, full of machines that want to be of service but are “dwarfed” by a sense of futility.

Be happy, then, for the busy, legible, utilitarian world that will reveal itself outside all this, when the sun comes up. We prefer that richly elaborated world, because losing ourselves in it means losing our sense of pointlessness.

Only trapped inside of places like trains, where our essential reduction reveals itself, do we recognize the truth. Only negotiating the narrow bathroom recalls us to our degraded condition.

In other words: Want to see yourself? Look at your piss dwindling in the flushed toilet bowl.

Man shouldn’t grow in size once he’s been portrayed.
Look: what’s been left behind is about as meager
as what remains ahead. Hence the horizon’s blade.

Not really in a holiday mood, is he? She thought they’d steal away for a romantic weekend at the shore; he’s brooding over the stinky, sicko, Toy World we all agree to live in… Only thing to do is be honest about it. Let’s not give ourselves airs. We’re just as stupid and embarrassing in our pretensions to a higher passion as the people in the next compartment. The cramped toy world of wrenches and nails hasn’t been left behind when we go to the majestic shore. On the contrary, the horizon over the ocean is just another machine — a blade — which makes clear, with infinite precision, the chopped up, meager nature of the earth.

The technique here is the same as Auden’s (a major influence on Brodsky) and the same as Elizabeth Bishop’s:

What interests me is [Auden’s] symptomatic technique of description. He never gives you the real . . . ulcer . . . he talks about its symptoms, ya? He keeps his eye all the time on civilization, on the human condition. But he doesn’t give you the direct description of it, he gives you the oblique way. …[I]f you really want your poem to work, the usage of adjectives should be minimal; but you should stuff it as much as you can with nouns — even the verbs should suffer. If you cast over a poem a certain magic veil that removes adjectives and verbs, when you remove the veil the paper still should be dark with nouns.

Language, using language in a certain way, turns out to be, for Brodsky, the one reliable non-nihilism:

A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave – as he thinks at that moment – a trace on the earth. He resorts to this form – the poem – most likely for unconsciously mimetic reasons: the black vertical clot of words on the white sheet of paper presumably reminds him of his own situation in the world, of the balance between space and his body. … The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience…

The train is a pathetic, jerry-built interior accelerating extraordinarily through an immense outer darkness. To this train the poet brings his train of thought, his wordkit. However dark the manifest content he derives from the meeting of mind and machine, consciousness and world, the poet will in fact be celebrating, scrunched up in his little compartment, his writing pad on his knees. For he has felt the ecstasy of comprehension. And that’s the ticket.

Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass — the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper …

He anticipated even the names of our cars.

From Dry September.

… as I read Christopher Hitchens on having lost his voice.

… I have never been able to sing, but I could once recite poetry and quote prose and was sometimes even asked to do so. And timing is everything: the exquisite moment when one can break in and cap a story, or turn a line for a laugh, or ridicule an opponent. I lived for moments like that. Now, if I want to enter a conversation, I have to attract attention in some other way, and live with the awful fact that people are then listening “sympathetically.” At least they don’t have to pay attention for long: I can’t keep it up and anyway can’t stand to.

[I have always been able to sing. ‘Twas in the genes. My father was in the Johns Hopkins Glee Club, and had a marvelous voice. My mother sang light opera and spirituals very prettily. They were always singing. We were all – my parents, their four children – musical, the house vibrating with guitars and pianos and recorders. I’d take my nylon string guitar into the bathroom and sit on the hamper and sing Joan Baez-style English ballads.

Last night, in my quiet house – my husband in Saudi Arabia, my daughter in Ireland – I took out my ratty, forty-year-old copy of the Joan Baez Songbook and sang, with the book’s simple piano accompaniments, all of the Lyrics and Laments, the Child and the Broadside Ballads, until my voice ran out of steam.  All of the songs I sang with the nylon string guitar when I was fifteen.

That was a pleasant losing of the voice, a losing that happened after it had been used to generate deep and happy memories.   After it confirmed that my fifteen-year-old voice and its ballads were still in there.]

… I owe a vast debt to Simon Hoggart of The Guardian (son of the author of The Uses of Literacy), who about 35 years ago informed me that an article of mine was well argued but dull, and advised me briskly to write “more like the way that you talk.” At the time, I was near speechless at the charge of being boring and never thanked him properly, but in time I appreciated that my fear of self-indulgence and the personal pronoun was its own form of indulgence… If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.

[My fear of self-indulgence and the personal pronoun.  Yes.  When you teach writing to smart and sensitive undergraduates, you’re torn between championing to them the personal pronoun and worrying about their being self-indulgent with it.  And yet over the years I’ve seen that self-indulgence rarely.  One of the best papers I received, just now, in my Novels of Don DeLillo course, took issue with DeLillo’s characterization of Phoenix and the American desert in Underworld.  Its main character was displaced to Arizona from Brooklyn, and in the novel Brooklyn was all about authenticity and roots and identity, Phoenix about white noisy drift and vacancy.  But my depth, wrote my student, resides in the desert; and this is why…]

The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favorite authors and see if that isn’t precisely one of the things that engage you, often at first without your noticing it. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull or obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful. This is how philosophy evolved in the symposium, before philosophy was written down. And poetry began with the voice as its only player and the ear as its only recorder. Indeed, I don’t know of any really good writer who was deaf, either. How could one ever come, even with the clever signage of the good Abbé de l’Épée, to appreciate the miniscule twinges and ecstasies of nuance that the well-tuned voice imparts? Henry James and Joseph Conrad actually dictated their later novels—which must count as one of the greatest vocal achievements of all time, even though they might have benefited from hearing some passages read back to them—and Saul Bellow dictated much of Humboldt’s Gift. Without our corresponding feeling for the idiolect, the stamp on the way an individual actually talks, and therefore writes, we would be deprived of a whole continent of human sympathy, and of its minor-key pleasures such as mimicry and parody.

… It’s in engagements like this, in competition and comparison with others, that one can hope to hit upon the elusive, magical mot juste. For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.

[And of course Humboldt’s gift was precisely – like Ravelstein’s gift – his self, his nuance, his idiolect, his stamp.

And if, in finally allowing yourself to hear the actual human voice, what you hear is what DeLillo’s character, James Axton, at the Parthenon, hears –

I hadn’t expected a human feeling to emerge from the stones but this is what I found, deeper than the art and mathematics embedded in the structure, the optical exactitudes. I found a cry for pity. This is what remains to the mauled stones in their blue surround, this open cry, this voice which is our own.

– then, well, what did you expect? What do our most well-tuned voices tell us? Why does Wayne Koestenbaum love the voice of Maria Callas? “The steel and the wobble announced a predicament; [I] loved the mistakes, because they seemed autobiographical, because without mediation or guile they wrote a naked heart’s wound.” The gift Humboldt and Ravelstein carry is the high-level articulation of their woundedness.  Precisely Christopher Hitchens’ current gift.]

… has made for great UD viewing. It’s as if the people running the most corrupt of the spectacularly corrupt Bowl Championship Series games said to themselves What sort of writing can we produce to make UD optimally happy?

Put aside the alliteration-extension clever writers chronicling fiestal filth have already put into play. That’s a fun, but rather thin, amusement.

Look instead at the sudden renaming of the “Fiesta Frolic,” a golf junket for the NCAA (you wouldn’t want these guys actually overseeing what you do), to “Valley of the Sun Experience & Fiesta Bowl Seminars.”

MAKE MY DAY.

I mean here you get not only the gravitas of ancient history and myth (Valley of the Sun), but intellectual seriousness (seminar)… Frolic? Who said frolic? Did you say frolic? We speet on your frolic!

Then there’s this amazing bit of prose from the head of the Fiesta Bowl’s board of directors – a man who, fittingly, also runs an outfit called Waste Management. It’s one thing to underground diapers; it’s another thing to shovel this much shit.

Duane plucks real hard on our heartstrings throughout his defense of the sublimity of the Fiesta Bowl. I’ll let you read for yourself his sobbing insistence that they’ll come out of this better men. But I do want to reproduce Duane’s final lines.

… I received [an email] last week from Air Force Lt. Col. and Fiesta Bowl Committee member Bob Whitehouse, stationed at Balad Air Base in Iraq.

Half a world away, in the midst of an armed conflict, Lt. Col. Whitehouse sounded a rallying cry for his beloved Fiesta Bowl.

“In the face of adversity,” Whitehouse wrote, “We can either crumble and fail, or we can rise above it and reach even greater success.”

Our choice is clear.

Dr Johnson! Thou should’st be living at this hour.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Update: They’re canceling this year’s event.

Requiem for a Frolic.

Absolutely fantastic pun.

I’m not sure the writer intended it.

UD takes sections of Judith Thurman’s marvelous 2008 New Yorker essay about paleolithic art caves, changes a word here and there, and makes a poem.

(There’s a new 3D Werner Herzog film about one of the caves.)

***************************************

LETTER FROM SOUTHERN FRANCE

As the painters were learning
to crush hematite, and to sharpen
embers of Scotch pine for their charcoal
(red and black the primary colors),
the last Neanderthals were still living
on the vast steppe that was Europe.

The scratches made by a standing bear
have been overlaid with a palimpsest
of signs or drawings, and one has to wonder
if cave art didn’t begin with a recognition
that bear claws were an expressive tool
for engraving a record — poignant and indelible —
of a stressed creature’s passage through the dark.

“As we trailed the artists deeper and deeper,
noting where they’d broken off stalagmites
to mark their path, we found signs that seemed to say,
‘We’re sanctifying a finite space in an infinite universe.’ ”

Halfway home to the mortal world,
we paused and turned off our torches.
It takes the brain a few minutes to accept
the totality of the darkness — your sight
keeps grasping for a hold.
Whatever the art means, you understand,
at that moment, that its vessel is both a womb and a sepulchre.

… The Great Gatsby seems inescapable lately, which is a good thing, because it’s hard to think of a more beautifully written novel.

With a new film adaptation in the works, people are already blogging skeptically about the capacity of any director to translate the depth of that novel to the flatness of the screen.  Look here, and here, and elsewhere.

In his remarks about the novel and upcoming film, New York Times blogger Ross Douthat cites the Gatsby paragraphs below as the sort of excitingly visual material a smart filmmaker should focus on in any adaption of the work.   Let’s look at the paragraphs, though, in terms of their prose style.  (My comments about what Fitzgerald’s doing with his prose appear in blue, in brackets.)

***********************************************

By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived, [The present tense gives the passage a sense of immediacy, gives us the drama of the party as it unfolds. The speaker here, Nick Carraway, is, as his name hints, carried away, excited, anticipating, taking each sound, object, and person in with superficial excitement, and then moving on to the next sound, object, person.  All of the party guests, we assume, are doing this — all are caught up in the madly shifting celebratory moments.] no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. [Note the poetic repetition of O sounds throughout this sentence: o’clock, orchestra, no, whole, oboes, trombones, saxophones, viols, cornets, piccolos, low… It creates a kind of bass tone, making us feel as though the ‘ensemble’ of this passage is tuning up in preparation for high points; or, if you like, that the ‘engine’ of the passage is revving.] The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. [Notice how the writer gives equal status to human beings and objects in this sentence. Swimmers, cars, halls, salons, verandas, hair, shawls — tossing animate and non-animate things together in this way does more than deepen the already-established sense of frenetic, one-thing-after-another, excitement; it implicitly suggests the superficiality of the party-goers, reducing them to objects. Pay attention as well to the insistent use of the word “and.” It’s everywhere in these paragraphs – the simple monosyllabic conjunction allows the writer to fling phrases into a crazy salad, to convey the mad chaotic feel of the scene.  Yet there’s also an undeniably biblical cadence to the repeated invocation of and.] The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names. [There’s another subtle thing going on in this paragraph: The last swimmers, dreams of Castile, and now permeate and floating… In subtle opposition to the hyper-modern, radically present accounting of the event, there’s a strange, elegiac, dreamy, retro something pressing itself on the reader. This language is odd.  It’s off somehow, coming from another, deeper world.  Think of phases like the nymphs are departed from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; they have the same odd mix of modernity and antiquity, routine and mythic.  Fitzgerald’s giving his story a universal, timeless feel, rather in the way Joyce’s Ulysses gets that feel from his direct use of myth. Although in the Gatsby passage the mythic aspect is oblique, the reader, I think, gradually registers this heightening corona around the earthbound narrative facts, so that when she arrives at the novel’s famous last paragraphs, with their romantic, elevated language, she’s prepared for them.]

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. [See how Fitzgerald – what to call it? – cosmologizes his scene? How he always frames it in terms vastly greater than the scene itself? The earth and the sun with their dance; and then the partygoers also heavenly bodies, moving, dissolving, undergoing sea-changes… Add the Biblical echoes in words like prodigality and wanderers, and all of it lends that coronal atmosphere of vastly greater implication to the proceedings.  See how the paragraph begins and ends with light?   As the natural light of the world wanes, the unnatural – and ominously unstable – light of human activity intensifies.]

Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun.  [varies his rhythm obligingly for her — the implicit sexuality of the scene, that low bass of excitement at the beginning of these paragraphs, is now made explicit.]

If you’ve hung around University Diaries for a long time, you know that UD hugely admires the writing of Anthony Tommasini, the New York Times music writer. The man’s got style.

Yet UD freely admits a struggle, all these years, with Tommasini’s adjectives. They are many and pretty and … baffling, especially when they are characterizing a person’s singing voice. Here he describes the great Polish contralto, Ewa Podles:

It’s the dark coloring, earthy character and plummy richness of her sound that define her powerful contralto voice. Even in its upper register, it has dusky tone and throbbing intensity.

Dark, earthy, plummy, dusky, throbbing… I sort of get it, but I have to say that I’ve been pondering plummy ever since this review appeared in 2006. Plummy.

****************************

This morning was another challenge.

The tenor Marcello Giordani brings his beefy, ardent Italianate voice to the role of Ramerrez…

I read it aloud to Mr UD, who sat across from me drinking Starbucks Italian Roast Sweet Slightly Smoky X-Bold Whole Bean Coffee and eating one of his horrid Atkins bars.

“Listen to this. It’s describing a tenor’s voice. Beefy. Ardent. Italianate.”

Mr UD looked confused. “Beefy? How does a beefy voice differ from, say, a porky voice?”

“I think it means to convey masculinity. A beefy voice is a macho voice. Muscular.”

“Italianate? Aren’t buildings Italianate? What if he’d written Italian? How does an Italian voice differ from an Italianate?”

“I do not know. But here’s one of those damned if you do damned if you don’t things in the same review:

As always, Ms. Voigt’s singing will stir debate within the opera world. Given the competition around right now, I cannot think of a soprano who could sing any better this demanding role, which requires luscious legato phrasing, a powerful top range and stamina. But the Deborah Voigt of more than a decade ago, before her surgery to help shed excess weight, had a richer, warmer, more gleaming sound. For Minnie, she has found a way to soften the sometimes harder edges of her voice and sing with lyrical pliancy while still cutting through the orchestra for big climaxes, including a fearless high C in Act I.

Voigt was teased and tormented and denied roles because she was so fat. So she did the bariatric thing and now she looks good. But they surgically removed her voice! The surgeons are going to have to reinstall her stomach!”

“What is a gleaming sound?”

… became a hit, has died.

[T]he work…achieve[d] …explosive success — a surprise, given its unceasingly mournful character — [when] a recording by the soprano Dawn Upshaw, with David Zinman conducting the London Sinfonietta, was released on the Nonesuch label in 1992. The recording became a radio hit in Britain, where it broke into the Top 10 on the Music Week pop chart, and sold more than a million copies worldwide. For a while, Nonesuch said, it was selling 10,000 copies a day in the United States.

Here’s the first part of the symphony.

Saul Bellow gave it all away in his books.

If you’ve read Herzog and Ravelstein, you don’t really need his just-released letters. I mean, enjoy them by all means, as UD just did; but you don’t need them.

Most reviewers of them admit as much. While respectful and appreciative, they clearly find the Letters rather disappointing.

****************************************

Bellow himself, in a 1987 note to Cynthia Ozick, helps explain their anemia. Ozick is one of many correspondents who complain that he doesn’t answer when they write to him.

I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? Because I have become such a solitary… [I’m] a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key… By now I have only the cranky idiom of my books – the letters-in-general of an occult personality, a desperately odd somebody who has, as a last resort, invented a technique of self-representation.

Yet the business of withdrawing into yourself as you get older started young for Bellow. In an earlier letter, he writes:

[O]ne of my friends tells me, truly, that I am the solitary of solitaries, a combination of a glacier and a volcano, that I have perfected the power to be alone.

That solitude was partly a revulsion against modernity, post-modernity:

I make no claim to be special. I haven’t been at all special. I made all the plainest, most obvious mistakes. But all the large “cultural” trends… are so obviously wrong that I don’t have to act to isolate myself. I am passive, registering what’s wrong in what this civilization of ours thinks when it speaks of Nature, God, the soul, and it cuts me off from all organized views. It doesn’t cut me off at all from the deeper being of people – in fact that’s where my reaction against these organized views begins.

Cut off from all organized views, Bellow fashions what he calls his cranky idiom, his odd, occult technique of self-representation. But he neglects to add that this seemingly eccentric writing in fact speaks to millions of readers and is therefore not occult at all. It is original; it is true; it gets at the occult depths of human experience. For most of his life, Bellow, an intensely committed fiction writer, was engrossed in transforming his life into art, in giving beautiful clarity to what would otherwise be a blizzard of events. And letters. Blizzard life, life untransformed, had rather weak claims on him.

In a letter to John Cheever, Bellow captures the motive and force of great fiction writers:

You were engaged, as a writer should be, in transforming yourself. When I read your collected stories I was moved to see the transformation taking place on the printed page. There’s nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul.

Transformed, the soul of a great writer becomes an incredibly sensitive receptor/transmitter of things human.

**********************************************

Bellow seems to have rolled through life restlessly generating personal turmoil in order to write about it. His best novels happened in the aftermaths of atrocious divorces.

I don’t mean that he consciously spun himself around in the direction of calamity; I mean that his combination of experience-hunger and innocence, visceral passion and aesthetic curiosity, made him as much of a chump as Ted Hughes. Or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Like them, he hurled himself forward, insistent on passion and insistent on the truth; like them, he took a lot of falls.

Janis Bellow says, in an interview in Tablet:

He was direct. There was nothing he wouldn’t say and not just in a letter to another writer but in company or among colleagues, or to students. He had a clean, pure, open way of being in the world. And maybe some of that will emerge for people reading this book — his fearlessness may impress young people who are longing to be that way themselves.

As he says in a 1981 letter to Philip Roth, “I discovered some time ago that there was nothing to stop me from saying exactly what I thought.”

The fearless instinct for saying exactly what you think; the courageous insistence on following your heart; yes. But frequently what he thinks turns out to be wrong; what he feels is mistaken. The most compelling series of letters in the collection records, for instance, Bellow’s outrageous adoration of one of his lovers, Maggie Staats. You can read these letters and feel entirely convinced that she was the one. Yet Bellow’s fanatic passion alters… Maybe she’s a little unstable? Demanding? There are hints in his glaciating (though Bellow was, as his friend up there observed, as much a volcano as a glacier; he ran hot and cold) letters to her; but what matters is that Bellow was a headstrong, heartstrong man who threw himself into things and then, with rather a lot of damage, fashioned an exit strategy.

*****************************************

In the perfection of the life or the work sweepstakes, in other words, Bellow was always way ahead of the field on the work. The Letters record what was left over for life.

The work, the literary work, flashes out in these letters; and that’s what makes them worth reading. There’s his inimitable mordancy:

Well, [Bernard Malamud] did make something of the crumbs and gritty bits of impoverished Jewish lives. Then he suffered from not being able to do more. Maybe he couldn’t have, but he looked forward to a fine old age in which the impossible became possible. Death took care of that wonderful aspiration. We can all count on it for that.

And of course there’s the way he found words, combinations of words, no one else could find:

[The] young dons [at Oxford] practiced their snob-judo on me at High Table…

*****************************************************

I … go out of doors [in the Vermont winter] and rinse my brains in God’s icy air…

… the Goncourt.

Fine. Here it is in English.

[UD has bolded some words.]

It is time again for all NIU employees to complete ethics training.

Under the terms of the State Officials and Employees Ethics Act, all full-time and part-time, regular and temporary faculty, staff, graduate assistants, extra help and student employees must complete online ethics training. Everyone who receives a paycheck from the university must complete this training.

On Wednesday, Oct. 20, all employees will receive an e-mail notification with specific directions on how to access the online training.

… Ethics training begins at 8 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 20, and concludes at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 18. There are no extensions.

The state’s Office of the Executive Inspector General notes that employees who do not comply with the annual training mandate can be subject to fines and disciplinary action.

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NIU didn’t have to use threats. It could instead have told the campus community to complete its ethics training in honor of Rod Blagojevich, who instituted the policy.

… there’s this amazing bit of writing at the end of D.H. Lawrence’s story, Odour of Chrysanthemums, in which a miner’s wife gazes at his dead body laid out in her parlor. Her husband has just suffocated in a sudden mine collapse (his body is still warm). As she prepares his body for burial, she thinks about their lives, and about his death….

Before I quote those lines: Lawrence’s theme is the polar opposite of the theme we’ve all been rather emotional about as we watch long-buried husbands triumph over isolation and darkness. We watch them return to union with life and with their beloved, and our sense of love as the central reality of human existence is deepened.

It’s positively mythic! The return from the underworld… Their eyes, too weak for the radiance of above-ground life, had sunglasses on them… Now gradually they regain that radiance: The love of life, and the love of the beloved.

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In Lawrence, the darkness of the mine has fetched up as the deeper truth of the woman’s life.

… She saw him, how utterly inviolable he lay in himself. She had nothing to do with him. She could not accept it. Stooping, she laid her hand on him, in claim. He was still warm, for the mine was hot where he had died. His mother had his face between her hands, and was murmuring incoherently. The old tears fell in succession as drops from wet leaves; the mother was not weeping, merely her tears flowed. Elizabeth embraced the body of her husband, with cheek and lips. She seemed to be listening, inquiring, trying to get some connection. But she could not. She was driven away. He was impregnable.

… They never forgot it was death, and the touch of the man’s dead body gave them strange emotions, different in each of the women; a great dread possessed them both, the mother felt the lie was given to her womb, she was denied; the wife felt the utter isolation of the human soul, the child within her was a weight apart from her.

… The man’s mouth was fallen back, slightly open under the cover of the moustache. The eyes, half shut, did not show glazed in the obscurity. Life with its smoky burning gone from him, had left him apart and utterly alien to her. And she knew what a stranger he was to her. In her womb was ice of fear, because of this separate stranger with whom she had been living as one flesh. Was this what it all meant—utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living? In dread she turned her face away. The fact was too deadly. There had been nothing between them, and yet they had come together, exchanging their nakedness repeatedly. Each time he had taken her, they had been two isolated beings, far apart as now. He was no more responsible than she. The child was like ice in her womb. For as she looked at the dead man, her mind, cold and detached, said clearly: “Who am I? What have I been doing? I have been fighting a husband who did not exist. He existed all the time. What wrong have I done? What was that I have been living with? There lies the reality, this man.”—And her soul died in her for fear: she knew she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met nor whom they fought. And now she saw, and turned silent in seeing. For she had been wrong. She had said he was something he was not; she had felt familiar with him. Whereas he was apart all the while, living as she never lived, feeling as she never felt…

Life with its smoky burning gone from him… Great writing.

An example of very good writing from one of the miners.

Dubbed “el enfermero” — the nurse — [Johnny Barrios Rojas] served as the miners’ medic during the ordeal, dispensing medication sent in by health officials, passing out nicotine patches and photographing wounds.

He reportedly ended all his letters this way: “Get me out of this hole, dead or alive.”

‘Tis wonderful. UD‘s thinking of making it her automatic signature on her emails.

(Barrios is also the Francois Mitterand of the group.)