by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

When Writing About Bellow, Always Overstate the Case

      “To accuse novelists of egotism is like deploring the tendency of champion boxers to turn violent.”

That’s Martin Amis, in a piece about Saul Bellow in (last week’s, yes) Times Book Review.  It’s clever, but is it true?  I don’t think so – not for Bellow, and not for Amis, whether he recognizes it or not.

The piece itself disproves the point as concerns both writers.  Having quipped thus about novelists and egotism, Amis immediately cites some of Bellow’s “core principles,” and they’re clearly restraints on the novelist’s egotism rather than expressions of it:

“Everything is to be viewed as though for the first time.” Assume “a certain psychic unity” with your readers (“Others are in essence like me and I am basically like them”). Accept George Santayana’s definition of that discredited word “piety”: “reverence for the sources of one’s being.” Cherish your personal history, therefore, but never seek out experience, or “Experience,” as grist: Some writers are proud of their “special efforts in the fields of sex, drunkenness” and poverty (“I have even been envied my good luck in having grown up during the Depression”); but “willed” worldliness is a false lead. Resist “the heavy influences” — Flaubert, Marx, etc., or what Bellow, citing Thoreau, calls “the savage strength of the many.” The imagination has its “eternal naïveté” — and that is something the writer cannot afford to lose.

Meanwhile, the piece makes plain that for Amis the example of Bellow serves precisely as a restraint on his own egotism.   Amis’s ego is plenty strong, but when writing about Bellow, as he does often – there’s a different piece of his about Bellow in the current Vanity Fair – he frankly recognizes a talent greater than his own and writes with appealing humility and tenderness, stepping aside to quote the master-novelist amply and at length.

In this piece, Amis’s egotism is so well restrained that – for the first time in all his writing about Bellow, as far as I recall – he lets another living writer have the last word, concluding with a quotation from “the artist-critic Clive James”:

“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humor are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.”

As long as I am on the topic, Louis Menand’s conclusion to his Bellow piece – “Saul Bellow, whose greatest subject was himself” – also fits into the it-sounds-good-but-is-it-true category.