`Uninsured Sentences'

In the summer of 1968, I was 15 going on 16 and already a regular reader of The New Yorker, long before it had a table of contents, when you had to riffle to the end of a story to find out who had written it. Two or three Golden Eras in the magazine’s history had passed. Thurber and Liebling were dead, and we had already seen Joseph Mitchell’s final byline, though we didn’t know it then. In the July 20 issue appeared a story that started like this:

“The birds chirped away. Fweet. Fweet, Bootchee-Fweet. Doing all the things naturalists say they do. Expressing abysmal depths of aggression, which only Man – Stupid Man – heard as innocence. We feel everything is so innocent – because our wickedness is so fearful. Oh, very fearful!”

I inhaled the rest of the story, “Mosby’s Memoirs,” by Saul Bellow, and from that moment I can date my resolve to become a writer. I’m forced to reconstruct my teenage reaction because only a residue of impressions remains, but I’m certain I remember how thrilled I was to read narrative with intellectual content, my first comprehension of the essayistic streak in Bellow’s fiction (and later in Philip Roth’s). The mingling of high and low, philosophical and demotic, Bellow’s raffish way with words and ideas, all appealed to me. I also realized for the first time that a writer alive in my lifetime could honorably take his place alongside Melville, Tolstoy, Conrad and Kafka. I was star-struck, and I still am. I read Bellow to be thrilled by his human comedy and the fizz of his language. James Wood described Bellow’s style as “greatly abundant, greatly precise, greatly various, rich, and strenuous,” and continued, “It means prose as a registration of the joy of life: the happy rolling freedom of daring, uninsured sentences.”

For a marvelously uninsured sentence, try this from the fourth paragraph of “Mosby’s Memoirs,” a quick sketch from Bellow the portraitist:

“He had fine blue eyes, light-pained, direct, intelligent, disbelieving; hair still thick, parted in the middle; and strong vertical grooves between the brows, beneath the nostrils, and at the back of the neck.”

Has any fiction writer ever observed so intently and rendered so vividly? Joyce, perhaps. Bellow had a gift for the unexpected adjective that illuminates its subject without calling gratuitous attention to itself. “Light-pained?” A lesser writer might have left it at “squinting.” And “disbelieving” is a minor miracle.

Bellow’s legacy as a writer is to forever challenge my words and assumptions. It’s useful in an era of literary partisanship to remember that Bellow and the other SB (and the other great fiction writer of the second half of the last century), Samuel Beckett, were mutual admirers.