`Novelties Consonant With Recorded Reality'

In his review of the latest books by some of our least gifted and most popular poets, William Logan, always lethal with a parenthetical shiv, lets this pass between brackets: “(all description is an act of imagination only partly tethered to the world, if tethered at all).” In context, Logan is eviscerating the already eviscerated poems of Mary Oliver, but his offhand aside doesn’t feel offhand. Rather, he’s making a useful distinction between inspiration and dull literalism. Consider this sentence from a novella:

“On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores.”

“Gassy” is a novel modifier of “air.” A lesser writer might have settled for smoky, smoggy, stinking, fume-filled or polluted. None works. “Gassy” carries a suggestion of the human body – its smells and discomforts. “Leaden spokes of sunlight”: We’ve often seen sunlight shining in spokes, when refraction breaks the uniform spill into luminous shafts. But “leaden?” It can’t refer to color, a dull or shining gray. It must imply oppressive weight – another suggestion of discomfort. And why not simply “sawdust?” Footprints hint at absence, a deserted space like a de Chirico palazzo. In one sentence, uptown Broadway, always dense with humanity, is rendered inhospitable, alien and utterly true to the scene. In his next sentence the writer gives us this:

“And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence – I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want.”

We go from emptiness to a Whitman-like throng. Three pages from the conclusion of Seize the Day, Saul Bellow’s effect is jarring but right. The first sentence is shadowed by Joyce, from whom he learned to use unexpected but suggestively “realistic” adjectives. From Dickens he took the trick of physiognomy-as-character. As in an antiquated theory of criminal identification, his people often look like what they are: “in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence.” In a documentary sense, none of this is photographically faithful.

Bellow’s description is “only partly tethered to the world, if tethered at all,” and is more vivid and poetic than Mary Oliver’s desiccated lines. Bellow, like any great writer, gives readers a new set of lenses, a way to look at the world with heightened acuity. Broadway will never look the same, nor city air, sunlight and sawdust on a sidewalk. He fulfills what Jacques Barzun observes in his review of Donald M. Frame’s translation of The Complete Works of Montaigne:

“The more independent and imaginative a writer is, the more in retrospect he is likely to find his novelties consonant with recorded reality.”