The Actual

Essences Rising

This novella is a ricochet from a talent that has already hit many targets: it has an interrupted energy. The Actual is slight, without the obvious weight of Bellow's major work. Yet it has its own nervous perfection. Like all his work, it is about our wrestle for the essential amid the piles of our emotional slack. Like several of his stories, it has at its buried center a portrait of a sharp, canny, limited old man, accustomed to power — the type of old commander whose abrasions and self-satisfactions enrage and delight Bellow. The Actual tells us that love is what matters; in this, too, the novella hangs from the branches of Bellow's more complicated work, offering in miniature the fruit of his deepest concerns.

The old man is Sigmund Adletsky, a very rich Chicago businessman, now in his 90s. He has dinner one evening with Harry Trellman, the narrator of the story, and summons him to his corporate palace. Harry is as vigilant as any of Bellow's narrators — a cognitive scout, riddled with sense-impressions. He cannot help noticing everything, and prides himself on this. At Adletsky's office, for instance, he reports on changed business fashions: "You no longer face an executive across his desk. You sit with him on a divan. Beside you is a coffee table with a demitasse, a dish of sugar cubes." He sees that Adletsky is like Napoleon on St. Helena, exiled and bored. "Now old age was Adletsky's exile." Harry is worldly, careful and clever. Adletsky, in his boredom, asks Harry to act as a kind of intellectual informer for him — to provide the old man with advice, entertainment, cultural scraps. Harry will be a kind of brain trust for Adletsky. Harry agrees.

Harry Trellman is middle-aged. He has been abroad for a while, in the Far East, and has now returned to Chicago. His sadness is his lifelong unrequited love for Amy Wustrin. She is "the actual" of the book's title — Harry's actual. He has loved her since high school, has watched her marry his old school friend Jay Wustrin — a large, confident, sexually accomplished, elephant- skinned lawyer — and watched her get divorced from him. When the book opens, Wustrin has recently died, and Harry, after decades of passionate expiration, sees his chance. "Half a century of feeling is invested in her, of fantasy, speculation, and absorption, of imaginary conversation," he admits to us. Unexpectedly it is Adletsky, whom Harry assumed to be uninterested in such things, who brings them together.

Though The Actual has a rationed power, it has plenty of sentences on which Bellow has breathed. True, Chicago is taken for granted here, as it is not in the big novels. Lake Michigan, the streets, the scathing weather — all are quieted in this book. We are not in the Melvillean world of Humboldt's Gift, which nudged Lake Michigan into queued adjectives: "the limp silk fresh lilac drowning water." Still, Chicago may be quiet, but Bellow's people are not. Even in a mere 100 pages, his observations of physical detail have all the familiar comedy and the emphatic oddity. Amy Wustrin, in particular, sheds enticements. Bellow has often described women superbly. Renata, for instance, in Humboldt's Gift: "Her throat was ever so slightly ringed or rippled by some enriching feminine deposit" — a description that alters one's vision of a woman's neck, and which wittily rewards the body with its own mysterious metaphysical agency ("feminine deposit"). Bellow, via Harry, dotes on Amy. Harry can tell us "how she raises her profile to the spray" when she is in the shower, how, "when she shrugged, the soft breasts in her sweater added weight to her shrug," and how her imperfections arouse:

The imperfect application of her lipstick was another point of identity. That was the whole power of it — the beauty of this flesh-and-blood mortality. Just as mortal was the shape of her bottom when she walked, a mature woman swinging a schoolbag. She didn't walk like a student. There was also the faulty management of her pumps. They dropped on the minor beat. This syncopation was the most telling of all. It bound the other traits together. What you were aware of was the ungainly sexiness of her movements and her posture. The years between, with their crises and wars and presidential campaigns, all the transformations of the present age, have had no power to change her looks, the size of her eyes, or the brevity of her teeth. There's the power of Eros for you.

And once again Bellow sees old age. There is Adletsky, tiny but firm; and his wife, "small and light — something like a satin-wrapped pupa." Bellow sees the way in which very old and elegant ladies, when sitting, seem to become detached from their legs, which suddenly appear to be too stilt-like to support a body. All this, in one flicked aside about Mrs. Adletsky: "Her bird legs, aslant, were laid together or set aside until they should be called upon to move." "Set aside" — the beauty of the observation lies in those two words. Mrs. Adletsky recalls Rappaport in Seize The Day, the ancient investor whom Tommy Wilhelm helps across the road, holding his "big but light elbow...the large hollow elbow."

There is a way in which Bellow's interest in physical markings turns all of his characters, of whatever age, into old people. His love of the Dickensian grotesque ages everyone. For the old wear their stretched essences on their bodies: their moral camouflage is faulty, their deformities fixed. Their bodies speak to us, as in Herzog: "the strong marks of decay: the big legs of women and blotted eyes of men, sunken mouths and inky nostrils." Likewise the rest of Bellow's people. Humboldt is not old, but he seems so: "he was gray stout sick dusty." Victor Wulpy, in "What Kind of Day Did You Have?" is aging but not old; yet his body is physically disheveled, "he wore his pants negligently."

Bellow reads bodies with Victorian judgment, as phrenologists would read skulls, dividing them into zones of power and motive. His characters are seniors in moral struggle, and their bodies are enormous, helpless gestures toward this. In The Actual, Harry tells us that, although he is Jewish, he has a vaguely Asiatic face, sometimes Chinese-looking, sometimes Japanese-looking. He has the finalized features of an old man — "a pair of fat black eyes, a wide mouth with sizable lip." His Asiatic face is part of his equipment as a careful noticer, the inscrutable Oriental vigilance that gives nothing back: "I seemed to...drown my emotions in my face, Chinese-style." Yet Harry's face expresses its function, for its Asiatic appearance marks it precisely as — in the Western myth — the face of one who sees carefully, through narrowed eyes. (Victor Wulpy, an art critic who misses nothing, has "narrow visual canals.") Harry's face is his destiny.

The comedy of Bellow's physical descriptions is that, although he insists on our free agency as intelligences and souls, he insists also on the imprisonment of our bodies. Physically, we are all victims, helpless account-keepers. This is why his comic protagonists are so often large, bearish, panting, fat-chested, clumsy men with delicate sensitivities — such as Tommy Wilhelm, Humboldt, Wulpy, Benn Crader in More Die of Heartbreak (who is "built like a Russian church — bulb-domed") and Harry Trellman in The Actual, who tells us that "I myself was both larger and heavier than my parents, though internally more fragile, perhaps."

That Bellow's characters wear their moral age so visibly, as a tree stump is ringed in years, tells us something about his metaphysics. In his fictional world — and The Actual offers a fine example — people do not stream with motives. They are embodied souls. There is very little activity in Bellow's world, even ordinary activity; indeed, a sign of his lovely strangeness is that it is almost impossible to find in his writing a sentence such as "He put down his drink and left the room." This is because Bellow's people do not have personalities but souls — souls that vibrate dynamically inside the body, throwing out signals and markers on the skin.

Though they want to live in the present, the world of ordinary activity, Bellow's people generally live in memory or in anticipation. Everything important has already happened to them, and they must lug around the sunken Atlantis of their pasts. Or they are in cognitive hiding, waiting for the completion of the here-and-now. Tommy Wilhelm's tragedy is precisely that he cannot "seize the day," cannot grasp the present. He is caught in a crevice of becoming. Suspended between his memory of past slights and the fear of future failures, he is trapped between his destiny and his will. In a smaller way, Harry Trellman is similarly arrested. He cannot join ordinary life because he is in waiting. He has spent his life waiting for Amy: "It was a lengthy intelligence job for me, cracking one cipher after another. Held up here for a week, there for a decade, I always knew where she was located and what she was up to, more or less." His uncanny powers of vigilance, honed on Amy, are a kind of evasion of life as much as an involvement.

These expressive humans act like Bellow's prose, logging impressions with broken speed. If their bodies can be read by us, their minds are in turn constantly reading the world, even if the messages received are aborted or confused: "Pausing on the metal doors of the sidewalk elevator, Moses Herzog received the raised pattern of the steel door through his thin shoes; like Braille. But he did not interpret a message." The world presses on Bellow's characters like Braille for those who do not need it. Reality is both a code and a distraction, and the task is to sort out the necessary from the superfluous. Old Adletsky would seem to have sorted things out; but, of course, he has really been engaged in superfluities, in money-making rather than soul-making. "He is very old now and small — light enough to fly away into the everlasting. His sons and grandsons, however, still report to him. His judgment in business matters, old style, is as sound as ever."

"Old style": Bellow's fiction is full of stern fathers and father figures. The relationship between father and son is one of the analogues, for Bellow, of intellectual inheritance. Here The Actual suggests a mellowing. Herzog remembers his father like this: "At three in the afternoon, half dressed, he came out for his tea, silent, his face filled with stern anger." In Seize The Day, Tommy Wilhelm suffers the burden of his cruel, withholding father, Dr. Adler, who refuses to help his son financially, despite his riches. Tommy feels that "the fathers were no fathers and the sons no sons." Bellow suggests that contemporary intellectual confusions are partly a matter of perverted inheritance.

The difficulties we have had, in the modern age, are difficulties of intellectual patrimony. We are like spoiled children, saturated in wealth we do not know how to spend wisely. Herzog, writing his letters to the dead philosophers, stands before old ideas like a son before his father, hoping for a sign. He is childlike: "Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression the fall into the quotidian.' When did it happen?" "Dear Herr Nietzsche"; "Dear Mr. Kierkegaard" — these are silent parents. The connections have broken. Tamkin, the psychologist, tells Tommy: "From Euclid to Newton there was straight lines. The modern age analyses the wavers." The satisfactions that these parents offer do not quench the soul: "When a dog is drowning, you offer him a cup of water,' Papa used to say, bitterly," recalls Herzog. Nine years earlier, in Seize The Day, Bellow used a cup of water to signal a breakdown in communication and inheritance:

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. "I'm fainting, please get me a little water." You were lucky even then to make yourself understood.... You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or to be understood, not to know the crazy from the sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the old or the sick from the well. The fathers were no fathers and the sons no sons.

This is a great swipe at the maddening Bourse of modern life, everyone speaking an inessential language, or different data, to everyone else. Perhaps Bellow had in mind Emerson's passage in "Self-Reliance," in which he uses the image of a cup of water to complain that our individuality has been surrendered to collectivity, that "now we are a mob." Emerson laments that "man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone." Emerson and Bellow seem to say opposites: Emerson, that we have not enough privacy and cannot breathe; Bellow, that we have too much privacy and cannot breathe. Yet they are saying the same, which is that we do not have the right soul-privacy, the essential grounding that would enable us to communicate with ourselves and with each other. Remember, warns Emerson in the same essay, that "the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles." We must separate what is necessary from what is trivial. This is one of the great themes of Bellow's writing; in this regard, he is our Emerson.

The Actual sets up a father-son relationship between Adletsky and Harry. But for once, communication is not arrested. At first Adletsky seems to resemble old Dr. Adler in Seize The Day. He is tough, shrewd, unimaginative. He describes an acquaintance like this: "He's got a condom over his heart. There's nothing human about bank officers." And Adletsky seems to have a condom over his own heart, blind to Harry's sadness. Harry decides that Adletsky and his kind (including Amy's late husband) were "commonplace people.... They were lacking in higher motives." And there follows a marvelous Bellovian tumble of accusations, the prose collapsing the ceiling and the basement, to manage an august raciness: "They were run-of-the-mill products of our mass democracy, with no distinctive contribution to make to the history of the species, satisfied to pile up money or seduce women, to copulate, thrive in the sack as the degenerate children of Eros, male but not manly, and living, the men and women alike, on threadbare ideas, without beauty, without virtue, without the slightest independence of spirit...."

But Harry is wrong in one respect. Adletsky has employed Amy as his interior design consultant. Somehow, without exactly asking either Amy or Harry, he has divined that Harry's reason for remaining in Chicago is his obsession with Amy. His heart may be sheathed, but he sees that Harry's is not. Harry jokes that "at ninety-two, Adletsky was pioneering in compassion, a new field for him." But this crabby pioneer arranges for Harry and Amy to share one of his limousines, alone. It is here that Harry unburdens himself to Amy, confesses that there is nothing stronger than first love. Bellow finds a new sweetness and simplicity, as he has Harry describe this love:

I had fallen in love with her when I was an adolescent schoolboy. This tremendous feeling came, as they say, "we know not whence." Everything — but everything! — was as before...this love, straight and simple, an involuntary music, was an embarrassment to a little crook like me...this love, direct, from nature, came over me.

Harry, who was put in an orphanage when he was a little boy, and who mentions his father only once in the book, has discovered that Adletsky has acted like a father should, that the old patriarch has not been entirely without "higher motives." And Bellow tells us something that his work has never been too complicated to disdain, that (as Woody puts it in the story "A Silver Dish") "the goal, the project, the purpose was...that this world should eventually be a love world, that it should eventually recover and be entirely a world of love."

This calm nudity of statement — "love, direct, from nature" — might put us in mind of the unwounded nineteenth century. This is Bellow's patrimony, of course. He has written that when we read "the best nineteenth and twentieth century novelists, we soon realise that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature." In most contemporary literature, however, "this power to understand the greatest human qualities appears to be dispersed, transformed, or altogether buried." He is like the great Russians in his determination to deliver his characters from the inessential.

And Bellow's characters speak nakedly; he is unafraid to allow them the flourish of the explicit. For it is precisely because we cannot say exactly what is essential, or exactly what God is like, or exactly what the actual is, that we can be explicit about our daring vagueness. It is at this moment that the best Bellovian comedy begins. We are delivered from the comedy of the inessential to the comedy of the essential; our metaphysical cloudiness, and in particular our fierce, clumsy attempts to make these clouds yield rain, is full of hilarious pathos. Fifty years ago, Bellow had the hero of his first novel, Dangling Man, wonder aloud: "But I must know what I myself am." Almost half a century later, Zetland, in "Zetland: By A Character Witness," asks himself: "What were we here for, of all strange beings and creatures the strangest?" Well, Bellow's work tells us, we are here to seek what we are here for. That is our actual.

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