It takes a few days for the New Yorker to get to California, so it was only yesterday that I read Adam Gopnik’s Feb. 8 article on J.D. Salinger, which reveals there was no Saul Bellow.
A deluded "reader" of the non-existent Saul Bellow
Gopnik was modest about his discovery. He implied it instead of making a big deal about it. But for those like myself who spent decades thinking we were reading Saul Bellow novels and talking about his significance to postwar American literature the news was harsh, as Cher Horowitz would say.
The blow, as I said, was delivered with subtlety, but not so obliquely that I didn’t feel as if I’d walked into an open cupboard. Gopnik knew what he was doing. He even used the key word from the first page of Bellow’s first not-a-novel — knowing that Bellow-believers share a mass psychosis that feeds off a standard edition of the mythical works.
Hardboiled. That’s what Gopnik took from the never written Dangling Man and applied instead to Salinger to claim for J.D. the shtarke braininess that brought down Hemingway culture in American writing. “But if it had been Hemingway’s role to make American writing hardboiled” — stick the knife in a little to the left, Adam, so I’ll be sure to bleed to death slowly — “it was Salinger’s to let it be soft, even runny, again.”
And then for proof Gopnik trotted out Salinger’s 1950 “For Esme–with Love and Squalor,” which first appeared in the New Yorker. It was that story in that year that provided the “antidote,” Gopnik writes, to the story’s depiction of the recent war’s battles and by extension to the Hemingway school, which recoiled in the face of Salinger’s soulfulness, openness, and a “tone alive with an appetite for experience as it is.”
Oh, if only Bellow had published Dangling Man in 1944 and objected there on the first page — as he did in my dreams — to the culture of “hardboiled-dom.” It was so lovely, those days when I imagined reading, “Most serious matters are closed to the hard-boiled. They are unpracticed in introspection, and therefore badly equipped to deal with opponents whom they cannot shoot like big game or outdo in daring.”
Do you see, Adam, you see? The Hemingway allusion there? Yes, I know you saw it. You knew this would happen. You knew that tossing out hardboiled and Hemingway in your Salinger story would trigger convulsions in Bellovians like dogs Pavlovian. And because those words appeared on the illusory first page of never-born Bellow’s first unpublished novel, you knew the whole imaginary Bellow superstructure would collapse like children’s blocks. And children’s dreams. Their dreams, Adam.
Only how did you know about those triggers, those terms as ingrained among Bellow-believers as a McDonald’s jingle? Were you one of us? Did you have the password to that collective unconscious where Bellow works float? Come back, Adam. Join us. You can find that “appetite for experience as it is” in The Adventures of Augie March. It may not exist, but it’s good.
Comments
It may be easier to conflate Bellow and Salinger than you think. Buddy has a brilliant, worldwise older brother named Seymour and Augie has a brilliant worldwise older brother named Simon, and these fraternal dyads are perhaps the core fundament primeval creations of both. And find me where this has been noted? You, my brother, have google priority on this save for a jstor or two.
I have no problem with the conflation, just the oversight dealt Bellow on a theme central to Bellow. And let me surrender right here and admit that I am no Salinger scholar, But I know Simon from Augie, and near the end of that novel Simon is hectored by his wife and Augie feels sorry for his big brother. Not sure if your point has been noted. You can check the bibliography at Saul Bellow Journal. Always glad to find a Bellow brother.