Saul Bellow's short stories · 8:28pm May 8th, 2014
Two weeks ago, I reviewed Saul Bellow's Seize the Day. I've been reading his Collected Stories (1951-1990). The introduction says this of Bellow, and I think it's true:
One might say that Bellow reprieved realism for a generation, the generation that came after the second world war, that he held its neck back from the blade of the postmodern; and he did this by revivifying traditional realism with modernist techniques. His prose is densely realistic, yet it is hard to find in any of the usual conventions of realism or even of storytelling. His people do not walk out of the house and into other houses — they are, as it were, tipped from one recalled scene to another — and his characters do not Obviously dramatic conversations. It is almost impossible to find in the stories sentences along the lines of "he put down his drink and left the room." These are at once traditional and very untraditional stories, both archaic and radical.
(My speech recognition software heard a "scene" as a "seeing", which I think is an improvement.)
I'm ashamed that I didn't notice this while reading the stories. He writes careful descriptions of the people, their thoughts, any unusual or significant things they see, and their reactions, but almost nothing about the rooms or the cars they are in.
What is obvious is the similarities between the stories. I only read four of them, but they all went something like this: The narrator is a Jew, from Brooklyn or Chicago. He is old, probably his family's last survivor of his generation, probably dying. (There is always a death, usually two.) He is probably an intellectual, a writer or a professor. He thinks back and recalls the events of one day in his youth. He lists all the members of his family, how they make their money, and how much money they make. There is a female relative, somewhat older than him, who is short and fat and mean, but nice to him. There is an older male relative who became a success in some kind of business and is now the family patriarch, respected but also resented. There is an older male relative with energy and vitality who has plenty of sex with good-looking women. These last two may be the same person. The narrator thinks about sex but never gets any. At some point the relative with vitality takes the narrator somewhere in a car (there is always a car, or at least a streetcar) and leaves him there while he goes into a building, where he stays for a long time. Later the narrator realizes it was a brothel. There is an incident or conflict in the second half of the story, and this is the part that makes the stories different. The story connects the incident with his family and with a death. Nobody is American; they are Jewish, Italian, Greek, Swedish, Ukranian, something. The boy reflects on the story, then the old man telling the story reflects on being that boy. He is unhappy with his life, he has earned the respect of his family with his intellectual work, but he wishes he had been the businessman who made a lot of money, or the vital man who screwed a lot of women, though he doesn't say any of this. Then the story ends.
So every Saul Bellow short story is, probably, Saul Bellow's autobiography, expressing his regret at becoming a writer (to make his family happy?) instead of making a lot of money and screwing a lot of women, wrapped around a story about family and death. The funny thing is that he spend 40 years writing these stories about regretting wasting his life writing stories.
The preface, by his wife, describes the gradual development of one of the stories, "The Bellarosa Connection". It's only about 25,000 words, but he worked on it full-time every day for about a month, just to write one first draft, then start over and write a second first draft of it.
I wish I could read the stories and figure out the author's style. Some people can just look at things and see the style. Those are people who have style. I tried reading style magazines for one year. The had page after page of photographs of things that were stylish that year, without a word of explanation or even a counter-example; the reader was supposed to intuit the rules of style from those pictures. I never could learn one damned thing about style from them. I don't seem to be able to do any better at picking up style from writers.
Since I'm left with nothing but the story, I don't think I'm going to finish this book. I already know that Saul Bellow wished he had had more sex instead of becoming a world-famous writer, and this is not encouraging for a man wanting to become a writer.
I'm reading another famous literary yet non-modernist writer, Philip Roth, and it might not be coincidence that he's also Jewish. A storytelling culture may provide the strength to resist literary trends.
c.f. Waters, Roger (of Floyd, Pink)
I wrote a bit of a story (which you've read), in which I introduce two OCs. And nowhere in it will you learn what their cutie marks look like or the colors of their coats, manes or tails. Because I don't know myself. Because I never thought of these things while I was making these characters up.
I don't think I have a very good conception of style, but I can pick up on superficial details easily enough. You tend toward a very transparent prose style—simple words used simply, but to great effect, but the emotional tenor of your stories is a dead giveaway. There's a particular type of 'sad' I ascribe to you, and a particular type of tragedy. A tragedy of people constrained by what they are, what society expects of them—a tragedy of people trapped in little boxes that they half had a hand in making, and doomed to be cruel and victims of cruelty by the mechanics of the movement of those boxes that they understand only dimly. Bleak is the word I use.
Is that a style? Is it a style that I write in an ornate self-aware mode with, of course, lots of digressions and footnotes?
Is it possible you expect too much from a style? Some deep insight?
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Economy of detail, I guess. It is important. That said, when I think of a character I often have a lot more in my head than I put on the page, including quite a lot about appearance.
It's different with ponies than with humans, I find, because ponies are more... schematized in their appearance and it is very difficult to describe them in a non-cliche manner. And you can't rely on the reader's long exposure to ponies and a brain evolved to recognize ponies and use elliptical descriptions as you might with humans.
I admit, I have difficulty describing surroundings as well. I have to work to get a picture of a room or environment in my head, let alone describe it in text.