Hitchens on Bellow

Christopher Hitchens's review in the November issue of The Atlantic is not online, but it's worth paying the $6.99 cover price to read. The first two volumes of the Library of America's Saul Bellow edition give him a chance to deliver one of his typically personal, erudite and insightful readings of a great writer's work.

At the start of the review, Hitchens asks an interesting question, one I've been turning over for some time, too:

"At Bellow’s memorial meeting, held in the Young Men’s Hebrew Association at Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street two years ago, the main speakers were Ian McEwan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Martin Amis, William Kennedy, and James Wood (now the editor of this finely produced collection). Had it not been for an especially vapid speech by some forgettable rabbi, the platform would have been exclusively composed of non-Jews, many of them non-American. How had Bellow managed to exert such an effect on writers almost half his age, from another tradition and another continent?"

I, too, have been puzzled and concerned by the way in which Amis and McEwan have shown their enthusiasm for Bellow. It seems to me that they've somehow deracinated him.

When I was young, Bellow was thought of not just as a Jewish writer, but as the prototypical Jewish writer, moreso even than Philip Roth, who was perhaps too controversial to hold that title. The worldview of Bellow's novels seemed predicated on his Jewishness, a Jewishness that speaks to the anxieties and paradoxes of assimilation, the pride in and defensiveness of a towering intellect, the ironies that undercut anything that sounds like a grand pronouncement. Not to mention that prose, which never seems far from the cadence of Yiddish-inflected English.

For instance, Martin Amis's famous appreciation of The Adventures of Augie March ("A Chicago of a Novel," The Atlantic Monthly, October, 1995), in which he crowns that book as "the Great American Novel," manages to avoid ever using the words "Jew" or "Jewish" in its thirteen laudatory pages.

How can that be? After all, Jewishness suffuses that book, and all of Bellow's oeuvre. Augie's voice, according to Irving Howe, is "a mingling of high-flown intellectual bravado with racy-tough street Jewishness." (Howe's comment is quoted in James Atlas's Bellow, p. 191.) And as James Atlas puts it so well: "Like Bellow, Augie played down his ethnic status, but it permeated everything he did." (p. 192) For Atlas, Augie March is a synthesis of "two vital cultural strains."

"As a Canadian and as a Jew," Atlas writes, "[Bellow] would always be an outsider, but that same ancestry enabled him to renovate the language, bringing to American literature the legacy of Babel and Chekhov, whose stories he remembered his father reading aloud--in Yiddish--at the dinner table. 'It is the poetry of the Jew that makes his hero what he is,' wrote Karl Shapiro, 'in Chicago, in Mexico, wherever Augie happens to be.'" (p. 193)

Similarly, Ian McEwan's heartfelt memorial, which ran as an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times in 2005, also avoids the words "Jew" and "Jewish."

I have to admit, I find this all very strange. Hitchens's explanation, and he could be right, is that Bellow's work is universal, transcending its ethnicity. And indeed, Atlas says much the same, but note that he does so in a way that does not seem to hide or ignore Bellow's roots: "Yet The Adventures of Augie March wasn't a 'Jewish' novel, Bellow insisted strenuously. It was a novel by an American writer who happened to be a Jew. To claim otherwise would have diminished its universality." (p. 193) I think those scare quotes around "Jewish" are telling. Just because Bellow didn't write a "Jewish" novel, doesn't mean his work wasn't the product of what Atlas calls a "Jewish voice."

It is simply misleading at best--and perverse at worst--not to refer to the identity that informs all of Bellow's work. It would be like talking about James Joyce without mentioning he was Irish.

I would love to see the brilliant minds of Mssrs. Amis, Atlas, Hitchens, and McEwan hash this all out. Maybe in a public forum, such as a New Yorker panel. That would be a literary event worth paying cash money to see.

From the Archives ...

I wish our libraries did this: the web site of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France has digitized collections of major newspapers, which can be read in PDF. It's a great resource and worth checking out. I was just reading the lead story in the Figaro of February 12, 1885, in which a parliamentary debate was raging between those who wanted to tax wheat imports from the United States (in order to protect French farmers), and those (the "economists," as the story called them) who wanted free trade in order to keep prices down. Hard to believe that the same debate goes on today.

The Unknown Wagner

While the Royal Opera at Covent Garden is doing their Ring cycle (sans Bryn Terfel), they've also spiced up the usual attendant lectures and exhibits with a concert of Wagner Rarities. The program includes excerpts from his first operatic effort, Die Hochzeit, the 1850 attempts at Siegfrieds Tod, Henze's orchestration of the Wesendonck songs, and the opening of something called Männerlist größer als Frauenlist, or Die glückliche Bärenfamilie--no doubt the difficulty involved in pronouncing the title doomed the effort.

Southbank Sinfonia/Barlow: Wagner Rarities - MusicalCriticism.com (concert review)

Chasms of Poe's Brain

Whose head is swinging from the swollen strap?
Whose body smokes along the bitten rails,
Bursts from a smoldering bundle far behind
In back forks of the chasms of the brain,--
Puffs from a riven stump far out behind
In interborough fissures of the mind . . . ?
***
That last night on the ballot rounds, did you,
Shaking, did you deny the ticket, Poe?
--Hart Crane, The Bridge

A new theory of what killed Edgar Allan Poe: brain tumor.


Poe’s Mysterious Death: The Plot Thickens! The New York Observer

Young Conductor Watch

Asher Fisch (StageDoor) is just named principal guest conductor of the Seattle Opera (via Arts Journal). I haven't heard him conduct aside from some YouTube clips, but he has already built a reputation as a Wagner conductor.

A New Approach to Thematic Programming

I've been enjoying a biography of the French composer Alberic Magnard, who flourished at a time when enmity between France and Germany was high, and felt not only by the people but by artists as well. Romain Rolland, the writer, music lover, pacifist, popularizer of Indian mysticism, and Stalin-boosting communist--and also acquaintance of Magnard--had a brilliant suggestion for dealing with nationalism on concert programs. In speaking out against a decision at the 1905 Strasbourg festival to schedule a small piece of Charpentier before a concert performance of the last scene of Meistersinger--in effect marginalizing the French composition--he wrote: "If one wants to have a joust between German and French music, let it be on equal terms: oppose Berlioz to Wagner, Debussy to Strauss, and Dukas or Magnard to Mahler." (quoted in: Perret, Simon-Pierre and Harry Halbreich: Alberic Magnard. Paris: Fayard, 2001, p. 259)

I like the idea of dueling pieces on concert programs. It might be more instructive than some of the anemic thematic programming that is so fashionable these days.

Webcast Alert

Those who are fond of William Christie and Les Arts Florissants--and who isn't?--can catch a webcast of their upcoming production of Landi's Il Sant' Alessio this Thursday, October 18, according to Playbill Arts. And here's the best part: The video will be offered in streaming format for 24 hours after the live webcast. Check the link for complete information.

Review of the Month

Joshua Kosmon of the San Francisco Chronicle attended a concert of songs by Philip Glass to texts by Leonard Cohen. L'essential:

"'Book of Longing,' which opened the new season at Stanford Lively Arts, is an evening-long song cycle that weds Glass' music with the words of songwriter Leonard Cohen. It comprises nearly two dozen numbers, performed without intermission by a quartet of singers and an eight-member instrumental ensemble, and there is scarcely a moment in the piece that doesn't inspire shame.

"Long, tedious, witless and numbingly repetitive, 'Book of Longing' is a sort of perversely virtuosic display of awfulness. The only thing keeping it from being utterly negligible is its unshakable air of grandiose self-importance."

Snap! Worth reading the whole thing.

Review: Philip Glass takes on Leonard Cohen. Big mistake.

Florez, Recitalist

Florez's Paris recital disappoints Le Monde's critic. His singing is faultless; but his program includes pieces--songs by Tosti, the Duke from Rigoletto--best suited to other tenors.

Le Monde.fr : Un ténor un peu trop tiré à quatre épingles

Young Conductor Watch

Philippe Jordan (IMG Artists), whom I have heard at the Met twice, most recently conducting Le Nozze di Figaro, and whose conducting I disliked quite vehemently, is the latest young conductor (and IMG artist) to get a big post, as music director of the Paris Opera. Please tell me this means he won't appear as much at the Met.

PlaybillArts: News: Philippe Jordan Named Next Music Director of Paris Opera