To Jerusalem and Back is a chatty, rambling,
digressive book by Saul Bellow, based on a visit he made to Israel late in 1975
and published in 1976, the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
It’s early late Bellow, with the celebrated author upstaging Abba Eban, Teddy
Kollek, Henry Kissinger and Hubert Humphrey. Much of it amounts to sometimes
amusing, other times dull and irritating, gossip. I remember reading the book
shortly after it was first published and finding it thin, unlike the best of
Bellow’s fiction. It’s a long way from Augie
March. Reading it again with hindsight can be awkward. Bellow is
accompanied to Israel by the fourth of his five wives, the Romanian mathematician
Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea. She comes off as an aging writer’s “trophy wife.”
They would divorce a decade later.
Bellow
can be petty and vain but seldom stupid. He seems to have read and remembered everything,
and his literary judgments are pungent. This passage early in the book redeemed
much of the subsequent triviality:
“The
bravest of modern writers are the Mandelstams and the Sinyavskys. Before he
died of cold, hunger, and exhaustion in Siberia, Osip Mandelstam recited his
poems to other convicts, at their request. Andrei Sinyavsky, in his prison
journal, concentrates on art. Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances is
also to reach the heart of politics. Then human feelings, human experience, the
human form and face, recover their proper place—the foreground.”
Politics
tends to kill writers – if not literally, then figuratively by snuffing out whatever
gift they possess. Politics is a corrosive. In the 1921 essay “The Word and Culture”
(trans. Sidney Monas, Selected Essays,
1977), Mandelstam writes:
“Social
distinctions and class antagonisms pale before the division of people into
friends and enemies of the word. Authentically, sheep and goats. I sense, almost
physically, the unclean goat smell issuing from the enemies of the word. Here,
the argument that arrives last in the course of any serious disagreement is
fully appropriate: my opponent smells bad.”
And
this from “Fourth Prose,” written in 1929-30 (trans. Clarence Brown, The Noise of Time: The Prose of Osip
Mandelstam, 1986):
“I
divide all of world literature into authorized and unauthorized works. The
former is all trash; the latter – stolen air. I want to spit in the face of
every writer who first obtains permission and then writes.”
The
“prison journal” Bellow refers to would be published in English later in 1976
as A Voice from the Chorus (trans. Kyril
Fitzlyon and Max Hayward). At the
time he was writing To Jerusalem and Back,
Bellow had read only the French edition of Sinyavsky’s book. He translates
several passages:
“`.
. . no longer men but great sweeps. Space, fields, not characters,’ he says,
speaking of his fellow prisoners. `Human frontiers blur where they touch the
infinite. Beyond biography. When you try to support your weight on “personal
characteristics” you sink up to the waist. Personality is a ditch covered
lightly by a growth of psychological traits, temperaments, habits, ways of
doing things. I have no sooner taken a step toward an approaching stranger than
I find that I have fallen into a hole.”
In
a passage from 1966, in the Fitzlyon/Hayward version of A Voice from the Chorus, Sinyavsky writes:
“I
have no time to read books, but think of them constantly, with wonder and
gratitude. And never cease marveling at a book’s capacity to absorb and then
conjure up on demand a whole world for you to see.
“In
childhood a book resembled a folding screen. A heap of animals and plants would
suddenly pop out at you from behind dreary grey covers and when you shut it,
everything vanished again. A book has something of the `magic cap,’ or the
`magic table-cloth.’”
The
translators add a footnote to the phrases in quotes: “The reference is to
Russian fairy-tales in which he who dons a magic cap becomes invisible and
where a magic table-cloth becomes instantly laid with plates, cutlery and
food.”
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