RUDIMENTS, pt. 130
Making Cars
One of my favorite and fairly
simple writers has always been
Saul Bellow; to whom I always
referred as 'Sail Below.' I can't
say specifically why. I can't, by
the same token, say why him and
not Philip Roth. It's just something.
Writers and artists always have slabs
of meatloaf, as it were, which are
their writings. You are allowed to
slash and cut away that which you
don't like or do not want. So it goes.
Roth and Newark have always
subsisted together in my mind. I
can't cut out one from the other,
which is perhaps why I value him.
For years I wanted to just cut away
that whole Portnoy thing, and take
him without that - but now I've
changed that idea too. He's all
mixed up with Portnoy, and it
all has to be taken. Thy day I saw
another weasel-boy rock-couplet
writer get the Nobel Prize for
Literature (Literature, mind
you!) and not Philip Roth, I
about pissed my pants in anger
and apoplexy. At least Saul Bellow
gained that rightful accreditation -
when it still meant something and
had some relativistic value. Now it's
just all been devalued to followers
of Onan. Bellow, I guess, was Chicago,
through and through. And Delmore
Schwartz - they had a special
relationship, and Princeton. I dug
all that stuff, and when Bellow, in the
mid-fifties, whenever, at Princeton,
found a way to get a position for
Schwartz as well, anything that came
out of that, 20 years later, I sought
out and devoured. In fact, I spent
many hours over the years investigating
where in the heck Schwartz's rented
farmhouse out by Baptistown could
have been. I've tried tracking down
each road and lane I could find, by
description and location, but no one
ever knows anything about it, or him.
The only thing I've not done is ask any
elderly postman; of course, they're all
dead now. The world is funny like that;
people are mostly dense and stupid
and know nothing about what's
right around them. Bellow, and
Schwartz, often held court at Lahiere's,
in Princeton, right on Witherspoon,
just at Nassau. It was a great place;
gone now, it's been replaced by
some food-whore's version of a
jackal-cuisine a la today. Too bad.
The world needs more of the old -
it needs the dark and the dirty,
filthy black coffee, tar and cigarettes,
spit and vomit. Alcohol too, I
suppose. It all runs together with
ink and paint. Just as it does with
writing - time takes its toll. It's
fairly difficult to read Schwartz
today; most people have neither
the time nor the inclination to
get caught up in all that stuff.
Same, pretty much, with Bellow.
And almost with Roth, although
he's always retained more of an
'everyman's' accessibility. It's the
same way with roads and terrain -
RD2, Baptistown, NJ is pretty
meaningless now, compared to 1955.
Farms and lanes are long gone, things
are paved over, re-used, re-built, taken
down. An entire other array of things,
the present day's overlay of meager
wants and purposes, has superseded
all that.
-
In about 1969, whenever it was, I read
Mr. Sammler's Planet, and it was a big
surprise to me. I had really liked Herzog,
(this is by Bellow, these), and yet the
oddball ferocity of Mr. Sammler's Planet
took me by surprise : it managed to bring
in all the turmoil of those days, the black
and the white, the race and the anxiety,
the force-field variants and the violence
on the edge as well. I'd not really thought
about race before that, as a concept. I just
knew there were black people, and there
were white people. Sometimes they
crossed OK, sometimes they were cross.
The way Bellow wrote about it all was
captivating. How does one write about
all that? I found it hard to consider; it
was too, excuse the pun, black and white
for my tastes. That was one of things I
needed to get steady about - most things
in my orbit were almost ephemeral, by
contrast to the way Bellow considered
and wrote of things. It was almost tedious
sometimes, all that scouring and scratching
to make concepts fit the real world, the
world we're told about. I realized 'mine'
was somewhere else. By 1976, thank
goodness, he had his Nobel Prize, for the
body of life's work, as I'd put it. The
trilogy of Philip Roth's Newark books,
beginning with American Pastoral, damn
well deserve the same thing. 'You got a
lotta' nerve.'
-
I never knew what kind of life it was
that would keep other people FROM
life - squeamish, shy about stuff, not
wanting to see. It always seemed the
opposite of life to me, and mostly it
was religious urgings that were behind
it. Pretty odd. At least these guys wrote
about it; urges, ribaldry, rawness, the
reality of life as it is. I don't know how
one is instructed to accept reality, take
in all that salvation stuff, and then
not accept it, what's right around
you. The scene by Roth that which
closes that daughter-reconciliation
episode at the old railroad wall; it's
pretty real and right to me.
-
As I grew up I also grew 'into' things:
right thinking, as I saw it, and I guess
that's the same thing everyone else does,
in their own views of it. Most of the
problem comes from who or what
you allow in to intercede for you. I
never bought that idea. No one intercedes
for me. I'll do it myself. The idea of
wasting away, falling apart, as happened
with, say, Delmore Schwartz - long
after he and Bellow had mostly parted
ways, that never suited me at all.
Back in the Princeton days, Schwartz
had a gigantic old bomb of a car, an old
late 1940's Buick. He'd vamp around in
that thing, bet stopped for no muffler,
hanging fenders, etc., and yet he went
back and forth, from Princeton to
RD2 Baptistown, wherever that really
was, both directions, at high rates of crazy,
drunk speeds, known as a driving madman,
likely to die at the wheel - off roads, into
ditches, drunkenly hitting trees. Just
wasting away. He claimed to be writing
but was doing nothing really. Drink was
his ink. It all went downhill from there.
He died, neglected and forgotten, unclaimed,
and dead a few days when found, years
later, in some New York Hotel room or
elevator or something. Total travesty. Lost.
I had to swear that would never be me.
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