580 The American Century: Literature since 1945the most revelatory explorations into a problem that has haunted America, and
so many American writers. And taken us, then, into the prospect of a solution,
a resolution that lies beyond words.
No subsequent novel of Bellow’s matched the achievement of Herzog or Augie
March. In their own fiercely ruminative manner, however, they considered the same
overwhelming question. His 1969 novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, acquires additional
urgency, as it considers the possibility of “the collapse of civilization” and the
barbarous destruction of consciousness, from the fact that its protagonist, in his
seventies, is a survivor of the Holocaust. Humboldt’s Gift (1975), his next novel,
presents a story of personal and social crisis through the account of the relationship
of an ambitious young writer and a visionary poet, Von Humboldt Fleisher, modeled
on Delmore Schwartz. The Dean’s December (1982) places its clearly autobiographical
central character between two social orders, the decaying communism of Eastern
Europe and the anarchic capitalism of the United States, that seem equally repellent.
Collectivism and individualism both lead here to violation of the spirit. And there is,
it appears, no alternative, no third way. What is notable about these later books is
their darkening of tenor and tone, their reluctance to admit much hope, much sense
that “the dream of man’s life” may somehow be accomplished. So, More Die of
Heartbreak (1987) presents us with a typical Bellow protagonist, gifted but tortured,
struggling gamely with the several, impossible tasks of reconciling the ideal with the
actual and coming to terms with family and mortality. The Bellarosa Connection
(1989) is an ongoing dialogue between the members of a family about the Holocaust,
disclosing the differing positions of American and European Jewish people regarding
that traumatic event. And the semi-autobiographical Ravelstein (2000) tells of a
friendship between two university professors, fondly recalled under the shadow of
inevitable and imminent death. What the historian of civilization tended to see in
these later works was its failure, the decline of Western society into barbarism.
What the historian of consciousness recorded was its impotence, the inability of the
individual to do much more than gaze, in anger or despair, at the spectacle of the
streets. What remained for Bellow, however, as he pursued both these histories, was
a ferocious belief in the integrity of knowledge, the imperative of looking without
flinching into the heart of things – and the ineluctable nature of the truth we can
find there. As Mr. Sammler in his 1969 novel puts it, despite all the vagaries of
consciousness and violence of civilization, “we know what is what.” There is a
primitive, creaturely understanding of what is right, what is humanly necessary that
anyone, in the presence of death, “summoned to the biggest of the black,” will surely
feel. “In his inmost heart, each man knows,” Mr. Sammler insists; “we all know, God,
that we know, that we know, we know, we know.” That knowledge is something all
Bellow’s protagonists possess, at some juncture. It is also what his fiction, even at its
darkest, manages to teach.
By the end of Herzog the narrator has reached a point where, he tells us, he felt
“a deep, dizzy eagerness to begin.” At the end of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) by Philip
Roth (1933–), to conclude the manic monologue that constitutes the book, his
psychiatrist is permitted the final word: “Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”GGray_c05.indd 580ray_c 05 .indd 580 8 8/1/2011 7:31:32 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 32 PM