INTERVIEWER
Your context is essentially that of the modern city, isn't it? Is
there a reason for this beyond the fact that you come out of an urban
experience?
BELLOW
Well, I don't know how I could possibly separate my knowledge of
life, such as it is, from the city. I could no more tell you how deeply
it's gotten into my bones than the lady who paints radium dials in the
clock factory can tell you.
INTERVIEWER
You've mentioned the distractive character of modern life. Would this be most intense in the city?
BELLOW
The volume of judgments one is called upon to make depends upon the
receptivity of the observer, and if one is very receptive, one has a
terrifying number of opinions to render—“What do you think about this,
about that, about Vietnam, about city planning, about expressways, or
garbage disposal, or democracy, or Plato, or pop art, or welfare states,
or literacy in a 'mass society'?” I wonder whether there will ever be
enough tranquillity under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary
Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do
with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness
that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that
art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of
distraction. The modern masterpiece of confusion is Joyce's Ulysses. There the mind is unable to resist experience. Experience in all its diversity, its pleasure and horror, passes through Bloom's head like an ocean through a sponge. The sponge can't resist; it has to accept whatever the waters bring. It also notes every microorganism that passes through it. This is what I mean. How much of this must the spirit suffer, in what detail is it obliged to receive this ocean with its human plankton? Sometimes it looks as if the power of the mind has been nullified by the volume of experiences. But of course this is assuming the degree of passivity that Joyce assumes in Ulysses. Stronger, more purposeful minds can demand order, impose order, select, disregard, but there is still the threat of disintegration under the particulars. A Faustian artist is unwilling to surrender to the mass of particulars.
INTERVIEWER
You have on occasion divided recent American fiction into what you
call the “cleans” and the “dirties.” The former, I gather, tend to be
conservative and easily optimistic, the latter the eternal naysayers,
rebels, iconoclasts. Do you feel this is still pretty much the picture
of American fiction today?
BELLOW
I feel that both choices are rudimentary and pitiful, and though I
know the uselessness of advocating any given path to other novelists, I
am still inclined to say, Leave both these extremes. They are useless,
childish. No wonder the really powerful men in our society, whether
politicians or scientists, hold writers and poets in contempt. They do
it because they get no evidence from modern literature that anybody is
thinking about any significant question. What does the radicalism of
radical writers nowadays amount to? Most of it is hand-me-down
bohemianism, sentimental populism, D. H. Lawrence-and-water, or
imitation Sartre. For American writers radicalism is a question of
honor. They must be radicals for the sake of their dignity. They see it
as their function, and a noble function, to say Nay, and to bite not
only the hand that feeds them (and feeds them with comic abundance, I
might add) but almost any other hand held out to them. Their radicalism,
however, is contentless. A genuine radicalism, which truly challenges
authority, we need desperately. But a radicalism of posture is easy and
banal. Radical criticism requires knowledge, not posture, not slogans,
not rant. People who maintain their dignity as artists, in a small way,
by being mischievous on television, simply delight the networks and the
public. True radicalism requires homework—thought. Of the cleans, on the
other hand, there isn't much to say. They seem faded. the rest, in the Paris Review, hither...
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