The Fallen World of Appearances

With two novels behind him, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) Saul Bellow applied for a Guggenheim grant three times before it was accepted in 1948. The Victim, published by Vanguard Press, sold just 2,257 copies. He spent the next five years moving between Europe and America writing The Adventures of Augie March. His story, "Looking for Mr. Green" was published in the magazine Commentary in March 1951. Commentary had been founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee as a successor to the Contemporary Jewish Record, whose editor had died in 1944. Norman Podhoretz characterized the periodical as one that would usher the American Jewish intelligentsia "out of the desert of alienation ... and into the promised land of democratic, pluralistic, and prosperous America."

The year before "Looking for Mr. Green" was published Bellow wrote an unpublished essay, "The Sharp Edge of Life," that presented what was, for him, the central problem for the novelist:

The great issue in fiction is the stature of characters. It starts with something like the psalmist’s question, “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” Responses range from “a little lower than the angels” to “a poor, bare, forked animal.” The struggle of the novelist has been to establish a measure, a view of human nature, and usually, though not always, as large a view as belief and imagination can wring from observable facts.(1)

Bellow's short stories come at the reader the same way his novels do - there is no apparent effort to be concise or control the exuberance of his language. At 8,500 words, "Looking for Mr. Green" concerns George Grebe, St. Olaf’s College, instructor in classical languages, Fellow, University of Chicago, now employed, thanks to the Great Depression that reached all the way to academia and back, in delivering public relief checks in Chicago's West Side. In his mid-thirties, Grebe isn't bitter at all about his new line of work. Like everyone else who has a job, he knows its essential value when so many have no work at all. His boss, who passed the bar exam and makes twelve dollars more a week than Grebe calls it "the fallen world of appearances":

I’ll tell you, as a man of culture, that even though nothing looks to be real, and everything stands for something else, and that thing for another thing, and that thing for a still further one—there ain’t any comparison between twenty-five and thirty-seven dollars a week, regardless of the last reality.

Grebe's boss asks him what his education could possibly have prepared him for, and sends him to "the Negro district" with a pocketful of relief checks. It's a part of Chicago he doesn't know, between Cottage Grove and Ashland, and he's told to expect no one to trust him or help him to find any of the people he's carrying checks to, because he's white. He sets off, at first responding well to the leg work. But "it was dark, ground-freezing, pre-Thanksgiving weather ... He could find the streets and numbers, but the clients were not where they were supposed to be, and he felt like a hunter inexperienced in the camouflage of his game." One name in particular stubbornly refuses to yield up the man who owned it - Tulliver Green.

After searching all day and past 6 o'clock when he should've quit and gone home, he doesn't give up searching for Mr. Green. Looking at the ruins of the city around him, Grebe is driven to wonder what all of it means:

Okay, then, Grebe thought further, these things exist because people consent to exist with them—we have got so far—and also there is a reality which doesn’t depend on consent but within which consent is a game. But what about need, the need that keeps so many vast thousands in position? You tell me that, you private little gentleman and decent soul—he used these words against himself scornfully. Why is the consent given to misery? And why so painfully ugly? Because there is something that is dismal and permanently ugly? Here he sighed and gave it up, and thought it was enough for the present moment that he had a real check in his pocket for a Mr. Green who could be real beyond question. If only his neighbors didn’t think they had to conceal him.

In Bellow's 1950 essay, "The Sharp Edge of Life," he wrote:

I believe simply in feeling. In vividness ... Only feeling brings us to conceptions of superior reality ... A point of view like mine is not conducive to popular success. I believe with Coleridge that some writers must gradually create their own audience. This is, in the short run, an unrewarding process. The commercial organization of society resists it, and let us face it, there is widespread disgust, weariness, staleness, resistance, and unwillingness to feel the sharp edge of life.

We have for hundreds of years had an idolatry of the human image, in the lesser form of the self and in the greater form of the state. So when we think we are tired of Man, it is that image we are tired of. Man is forced to lead a secret life, and it is into that life that the writer must go to find him. He must bring value, restore proportion; he must also give pleasure. If he does not do these things, he remains sterile himself.

Philip Roth wrote: "The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists: William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century. Bellow's special appeal is that in his characteristically American way he has managed brilliantly to close the gap between Thomas Mann and Damon Runyon." Not Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Faulkner and Bellow.

Last week, I stumbled on an essay by novelist Michael Chabon in The Paris Review called "What's the Use?". Chabon wondered if art was of any use whatever in a world as terrible as ours has become (notice Chabon's use of the word "blade."):

Maybe the world in its violent turning is too strong for art. Maybe art is a kind of winning streak, a hot hand at the table, articulating a vision of truth and possibility that, while real, simply cannot endure. Over time, the odds grind you down, and in the end the house always wins... Or maybe the purpose of art, the blessing of art, has nothing to do with improvement, with amelioration, with making this heartbreaking world, this savage and dopey nation, a better place.

Maybe art just makes the whole depressing thing more bearable. I don’t mean that we should think of art solely as offering a kind of escape from the grim reality of reality, though personally I can’t think of higher praise. To experience the truth in art reminds us that there is such a thing as truth. Truth lives. It can be found. And there is no encounter more powerful than the encounter between the slashing, momentary blade of truth and a lie-entangled mind.

And what is that truth, the truth of art, that freeing blade, that slaking drink in the desert of the world? It’s this: You are not alone. I am not I; you are not you. We are we. Art bridges the lonely islands. It’s the string that hums from my tin can, over here looking out of my little window, to you over there, looking out of yours. All the world’s power over us lies in its ability to persuade us that we are powerless to understand each other, to feel and see and love each other, and that therefore it is pointless for us to try. Art knows better, which is why the world tries so hard to make art impossible, to immiserate artists, to ban their work, silence their voices, and why it’s so important for all of us to, quite simply, make art possible... We are each only one poem, one painting, one song away from another mind, another heart. It’s tragic that we need so much reminding. And yet we have, in art, the power to keep reminding each other.

I don't think Bellow wondered so much about being reminded. To him, art was there to reconcile us with life. Reading his glorious fictions reminds us what a glorious thing it is to be alive.


(1) In 2012 "The Sharp Edge of Life" was included in There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, edited by Benjamin Taylor.