R.I.P. Saul Bellow [Archive] - Literature Network Forums

Ron Price

09-04-2012, 06:40 PM

The following will serve, at least for me, as I look back at both Bellow's life and mine, as a quasi-eulogy. I thank the writers of this thread some 7 years ago, for their opening notes, indeed for this logical opening for my writing below here in cyberpsace on this master novelist of the 20th century.

Finally, some apologies to those who prefer short posts here at this Literature Network Forum or, indeed, elsewhere on the world-wide-web. May I suggest that people with such preferences skim or scan the following----if your interest in Saul Bellow is not a strong one or, if long posts on the internet give you intellectual indigestion, or simple visual discomfort.-Ron Price, Tasmania, Australia:nopity:
--------------------------------------------
When I retired from a 50 year student-and-working life, 1949-1999, I slowly went about reinventing myself, as they say these days. It was a somewhat unconscious process, but gradually several roles emerged to pleasantly occupy myself in the evening of my life. Only time would tell how many years remained before I shuffled off this mortal coil and suffered or enjoyed the sleep of death, as Shakespeare puts it in Hamlet. Whether these years, thusfar, were early evening or late, I did not, although I might in time, know.

In the first dozen years of my retirement from FT, PT, most volunteer work and any formal educational study, I became, by sensible and insensible degrees: a writer and author, an editor and researcher, a poet and publisher, a scholar and student, an online journalist and blogger. In the years from 1999 to 2012 I organized, as systematically as I was able, a reading and writing program around my many interests. One of the categories of my interests was the literary world of: writers and poets, novelists and essayists, playwrights and letter-writers, biographers and autobiographers, diarists and journalists. Some call this field, which includes all literary works, and especially: fiction, poetry, drama, or essays, belles-lettres. It is a vast field of general literature and it is valued for its aesthetic qualities, its originality of style and tone, and often for the lighter branches of literature.

This afternoon, on the 4th day of spring in Australia, in the 2nd month of my 69th year, I had a review, another look, at Saul Bellow. I had written about him several times since discovering him during these retirement years, having taken a sea-change at the age of 55, and living in Australia’s oldest town about 5 kms from the sea, an extension of the Great Southern Ocean. After a light lunch, I read over the list of fiction writers that I had put together in the more than 20 years since last teaching English literature in the early 1990s. I decided somewhat casually, indeed I like to think, serendipitously, to do some reviewing and research on Saul Bellow in Volume 1.1 of my eight arch-lever and 2-ring binder files on my fiction writers list.

The following 3 pieces are the result. They are edited prose-poems written since I left the world of full-time paid employment in July 1999, and PT employment in 2003. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 4 September 2012.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CAN’T GO ANY HIGHER

I’ve often thought that the Baha’i writings and teachings provide what the famous American novelist Saul Bellow said human beings need. Bellow once said that he thought there existed in society “an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings were, who we were and what this life was for." This famous novelist completed his first novel, Dangling Man, in 1944. It was about a young man from Chicago waiting to be drafted for the war. I was born in 1944 and, of course, knew nothing of Bellow. I only began to read about him when I retired from the job world. Bellow was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976, the year I began teaching students in an old gold-mining town in Australia, students working on their B.A., B.Ed., and B.Sc. among other degrees and diplomas.–Ron Price with thanks to Saul Bellow in “Saul Bellow: Celebrating His Life and Literary Legacy,” A Discussion With Gregory Bellow, Ann Birstein, Herbert Gold, & Steven J. Zipperstein. Moderator: Michael Krasny, November 2, 2005, Stanford Education, Department of Jewish Studies, Internet Site.

You said fiction was a
higher autobiography,
a tool for studying society,
to find a way to see reality.
Autobiography will partly
do it for me in these years
of the evening of my life.

You saw yourself, when a
youth in Chicago, as quite
unsophisticated….Me too,
Saul, me too: the son of a
Welshman and an English
woman, good people, true,
tried hard, and solid stock.

You said a writer was on track
when the door of his native,
deeper, intuitions was open.
His sentences had to come
from that source and then
he could build around them.1
I have to settle for autobiography,
poetic and prose forms, Saul.
I don’t seem to be able to write
fiction, Saul. To each their own,
Saul……to each their own, eh?

1 Michiko Kakutani, “A Talk With Saul Bellow: On His Work and Himself,” The New York Times on the Web, December 13th 1981.

Ron Price
February 10th 2006
Updated on: 4 September 2012.
--------------------------------------------
WITHOUT GENITALIA

In 1959, the year I joined the Bahá'í Faith and completed grade 9, American novelist Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson The Rain King was published. Like most novels there are many lines of interpretation to describe the meaning of this work. One explanatory line is that the novel seeks to explain the fate of the self in modern life, to describe the individual’s journey to find the self. Bellow’s hero in this book is one, Eugene Henderson, who lives actively but mostly inside his own mind. His inner voice is ceaselessly crying: “I want; I want.” He has lots of money, but he seeks wisdom; he seeks the answer to who he is; he seeks psychological and spiritual health and freedom from life’s endless distractions, from his temper and from his wants.

Henderson is seeking, in what may well be Bellow’s most loved book, something I had begun to find in the 1950s, a Movement I joined in that same year 1959, and a religion that helped me acquire psychological and spiritual health inspite of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that beset me over several tempestuous decades.

As I look back over those same decades, I could say that without any effort I had attained the goal Henderson sought; I had attained the object of my quest, although the full meaning and beauty, the value and utility of this object, I had only begun to appreciate. I was rapt, at the age of fifteen in 1959, in the veil of self,(1) viewing life, as most children and adolescents do in the west where I had lived and had my being, as one long indulgence.-Ron Price with appreciation to (1)Bahá'u'lláh, Hidden Words, #22 Arabic.

It was a bi-polar culture back then,(1)
back in the fifties, back when my
bi-polarism first emerged with a
chemical efficiency far beyond
any social determinism. Culture
has always been bi-polar for me
and every atom in existence was
quintessentially a mystery…..far
beyond any empirical analysis &
prediction………Although, I…......

must say that the mask of the fifties
was drawn aside about 1959/60, &
a changing face, regretful, doubting,
and looking for a type of rebirth in
rock-‘n’-roll was waking us up from
Doris Day, Mr. Clean, General Ike
Eisenhower, luxury without stress,
life without negroes and certainly
without the unspoken genitalia.(2)

1 M.A. Quayam, “Bellows: Henderson and The Rain King as An Allegory for The Fifties,” American Studies International, Vol.33, No.1, 1995, pp.65-74.
2 D.T. Miller and M. Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were, Doubleday and Co. Inc., N.Y., 1977, p.18.

Ron Price
May 25th 2006
Updated on: 4 September 2012
----------------------------------------------------------
THE DEAD THE LIVING AND THE YET UNBORN

“I was a very contrary undergraduate more than 40 years ago. It was my habit to register for a course and then to do most of my reading in another field of study.” Such was the opening sentence of American writer Saul Bellow’s Nobel Lecture in December 1976. At the time of Saul Bellows receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, I had been living in the old gold-mining town of Ballarat Australia for nine months and lecturing in the social sciences at the Ballarat College of Advanced Education, now the University of Ballarat. I knew very little, if anything, about Saul Bellow. But I could write that opening sentence of Bellow’s now; these words of Bellow’s could very well apply to me during my four years of post-secondary school education from 1963 to 1967.

In those 4 undergraduate years at university I often found myself reading in other fields of study than in those I was enrolled. Indeed, I often think it was a miracle that I ever passed into post-graduate work and the field of employment. My contrary reading habits, my bipolar illness, my sexual frustrations, the death of my father, the sadness of my mother, the distractions from my studies due to my enthusiasms for and activities in the Baha’i community, as well as the eccentricities associated with my laziness and lack of fitness, my mood swings and general immaturity---like driving a car without brakes, eating chili-con-carne four times a week and smoking two packs of cigarettes a day for at least two of those four years--all militated against my academic success.

In the end, though, I got two ‘B’s(67-76%)) and two ‘C’s(50-59%) in my 4 undergraduate years. In September 1967 I proceeded to try and teach 8 and 9 year old Inuit children, Eskimos, on Baffin Island---an unusual, some might say, eccentric activity at the time, if there ever was one.--Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, February 8th 2006.

I appeal, like Conrad, to that part of us
which is partly gift, partly acquisition,
to our capacity for delight and wonder,
to our sense of pity and pain, a latent
feeling of fellowship with all of creation,
to the subtle, but invincible conviction
of solidarity that knits all together the
loneliness of innumerable hearts and
binds together all humanity---the dead,
the living & the, mostly, yet to be born.(1)

(1) Part 1:

These ideas come from the Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad(1857-1924). They were quoted by Bellow in his Nobel Prize speech. They were written in the 1890s just after many inventions in the world of science and technology, and after the passing of Bahá'u'lláh, the Founder of the Baha’i Faith, the religion I have been associated with now for nearly 60 years.

I, like Bellow, offer these words with a few grains of additional comment. Bellow said he felt no need in his Nobel Prize speech of 1976 to sprinkle Conrad's words with any skeptical salt. Nor do I.

Part 2:

Individuals have been wiped-out by the 100s of millions in the 20th century. One recent figure is: 1000 million!! Hundreds of millions have died in that century from a variety of traumas: war, violence, murder, disasters, and on and on goes the litany of history's factors. The early 21st century, which we the living have inherited, is one of staggering complexity, psychological tempests and trials, and global tensions of an unprecedented quantity. The world's destiny has ceased, for us, to be identified with the rise and fall of certain men, of certain families and, for the most part, of history's heroic individuals. Something called humanity is struggling to be born, to find peace and security.

Part 3:

Humanity’s struggle, though, is not in the context of a search for unity, but rather it is one of attachment to the sectarian, political, nationalistic and racial loyalties of the past. New global institutions are crucial to our survival, but the individual must not be lost in the woodpile.Characters, Bellow emphasized, are not created by writers. They pre-exist and they have to be found. If we do not find them, if we fail to represent them, the fault is ours, the novelists. I am not a novelist and I can only create characters in my poetry and essays, my letters and autobiography. But what I create in my writing are not fictional characters. I write about real people.

Part 4:

I have found many people, many characters, in my classrooms as a teacher and in the many Baha’i communities I have been a part of since the 1950s. I have got to know many people in their lounge rooms, over cups of tea, coffee and, in recent years, glasses of water for my kidneys. I have found them and known them in endless discussions with individuals and in groups across two continents over at least five decades. Bellow said that finding such individuals such characters was not easy. I did not find this to be so, that is, I did not find it difficult.

By the time I had pulled-the-plug from FT, PT and all volunteer-teaching and most community and group activity by 2005, I had come to know 100s, if not 1000s, of people. I had had an uncountable number of deep and meaningful relationships. By 2005 at the age of 60, I felt I was suffering from an excess of speech; I had had a life full of characters, and I yearned for solitude. I was no longer hungry for the deep and the meaningful, for a high social context for my life.

Part 5:

Indeed, talking and listening to my fellow Baha’is, my students as well as my fellow students and colleagues over 50 years, 1955 to 2005, wore me out by the time I was in the last years of middle age. I was burnt-out. This burn-out was partly, perhaps mainly, due to the rigors of having to deal with bipolar disorder. Bellow wrote that he found the condition of human beings increasingly difficult to define as a novelist and as the 20th century advanced. I agree with him in the sense that we are in an early stage of universal history with its overwhelming, its staggering, complexity. We are being lavishly poured together like a great-big dog’s breakfast, it sometimes seems.

We seem to be experiencing the anguish and the liberation of a new state of consciousness. This new state is partly defined by the Baha’i teachings as: the oneness of humankind. The ex-Jesuit Malachi Martin in his book on the Christian church compares the modern American to Michelangelo's sculpture, The Captive. He sees "an unfinished struggle to emerge whole" from a block of matter. The American "captive" is beset in his struggle by "interpretations and admonitions, forewarnings and descriptions of himself by the self-appointed prophets and priests, judges and prefabricators of his travail," says Martin. For to emerge whole is to experience that oneness and, of course, only by degrees and with subtle and not-so-subtle tests and personal tensions.

Part 6:

What is at the center now? At the moment, neither art nor science but humankind determining, in confusion and obscurity, whether it will endure or go under. The whole species, everybody, has gotten into the act. Many are the loud voices; many are the silent. But we are all in it and one of the major contexts is a thralldom to our natural instincts and physical tendencies. At such a time it is essential to lighten ourselves, to dump encumbrances, including the encumbrances of education and all organized platitudes, to make judgments of our own, to perform acts of our own. The novelist Joseph Conrad was right to appeal to that part of our being which is a gift.

We must hunt for that gift under the wreckage of many systems of socialization and education, of information overload and media image and print-glut. The failure of those systems and their outworn shibboleths, may bring a blessed and necessary release from archaic formulations, from old, over-defined and misleading senses of what it means to be conscious and human. If there is no concerned action towards a single goal, some map of the journey, vague sentiments of good will, however genuine, are far, far from satisfactory. Some map must be in our hands and followed. Some explicit agreement in principles is required for any co-ordinated progress.

Part 7:

No one who has spent years in the writing of novels like Bellow has done can be unaware of that great, staggering, complexity confronting humanity. The novel can't be compared to the epic, or to the monuments of poetic drama. But it is the best we can do just now, says Bellow, even though he thinks the novel is up-against it as a force of influence. It is a sort of latter-day lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes shelter. A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

The novel tells us, at least as Bellow sees it, that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony and even justice. What Conrad said was true: art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential. This is equally true of my poetry, my autobiography, my letters, and my essays.-Ron Price with thanks to Saul Bellow, Nobel Prize Lecture, 1976.

Criticism is necessary….a
corrective to self-inflation;
not to be ignored, however
undesirable, helps to keep
the ego in bounds. I write
out of a sense of obligation
which compels me to pen
words as the lightning flashes
& I laugh at my coursings over
two continents, & aware of my
fancies & illusions, my endless
analyzing of complex dubieties.

Ron Price
8 February 2006
Updated on: 4 September 2012
-------------------------------------------
End of document