Truth and Consequences

THE DEAN'S DECEMBER; By Saul Bellow; Harper & Row; 312 pages; $13.95

At its richest, Saul Bellow's freestyle prose reads as if a Division Street Dostoyevsky were writing a book called Thus Spake the Nobel Savage. In Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), the author's tone took a Spenglerian edge as the novel's elderly New Yorker ruminated on the decline of the West Side and, inferentially, civilization as the author knows and reveres it. Sammler had political repercussions. Bellow was accused of being aloof, insensitive and a neoconservative. He has calmly and disdainfully rejected these labels as simplistic.

Any suggestion that the 1976 Nobel prizewinner was intimidated by his critics is dispelled in The Dean's December, a work that opens a second front in Bellow's war on cultural and intellectual nihilism. The scenes are set almost exclusively in Chicago and Bucharest, a disparity underscored by the line, "There was nothing too rum to be true." In fact, the book is largely based on a trip that the novelist and his wife made to Rumania a few years ago to visit her dying mother.

The literary result is Albert Corde, the latest and best of Bellow's old cogitators. Corde, a Chicago college dean, spends a great deal of time in an underheated Bucharest apartment waiting for his mother-in-law to die in a state hospital and mulling over the retreat of "personal humanity" before "the worldwide process of consolidation." The woman was an eminent psychiatrist and former Minister of Health whose humanism was incompatible with the Communist regime. Corde's wife Minna is an astrophysicist who defected to the U.S. and must now beg a vindictive bureaucracy for permission to see her failing mother.

The dean, a "hungry observer," describes the bleak utilitarianism and pinched daily life in the old Eastern European capital. Earthquake damage is crudely patched if repaired at all; the public crematorium is a factory where the dead are reduced unceremoniously to convenient size; his wife's childhood home, once a center of culture and comfort, is only a notch above a slum tenement: "Radiators turned cold after breakfast. The faucets went dry at 8 a.m. and did not run again until evening. The bathtub had no stopper. You flushed the toilet with buckets of water."

These are not cheap shots aimed to cripple Rumania's tourist industry or elicit smug agreement about Communist inefficiency. Corde has seen worse in Chicago. He has, in fact, written about it with appalling accuracy for Harper's magazine and caused a flap. The dean has also been criticized for his role in the arrest of two blacks accused of murder. Corde has been called a racist, a traitor to his home town and a fool. His boss is miffed at the publicity caused by his magazine piece, and his boyhood friend Dewey Spangler, now a famous columnist and "princely communicator," complains that Corde put too much poetry into Chicago.

Corde responds that Chicago put the poetry into him. He had to write the truth as he saw it on the streets. Pulling Corde's strings, Bellow leaves little doubt of his position: "What was the real explanation? Again, the high intention--to prevent the American idea from being pounded into dust altogether. And here is our American idea: liberty, equality, justice, democracy, abundance. And here is what things are like today in a city like Chicago. Have a look! How does the public apprehend events? It doesn't apprehend them. It has been deprived of the capacity to experience them."

Corde points to a prevailing materialism that deadens the senses with adgab, propaganda and information bits. He fingers professional explainers like his pal Spangler, whose theories and discourses usually distort rather than describe. "The first act of morality," Corde concludes, "was to disinter the reality. . . represent it anew as art would represent it."

The caul that separates mankind from nature and the power of art to restore perception and feeling are not new themes for Bellow. But never has he stated them with more force or political intent. This is not to say that the author has a future in politics. He lacks the facile answers that pull votes; he has only difficult questions, and he insists on talking up to his audience.

Where, then, does this leave The Dean's December as a novel to be read and enjoyed? Two generations of Bellow fans should not be disappointed. Although Corde is usually found shivering in one room in Rumania, he has total recall. There are flashbacks of Chicago as only Bellow can re-create it, boisterous hard-nosed and advantageously backward: "By the time the latest ideas reach Chicago, they're worn thin and easy to see through."

There is no conventional plot other than the Cordes' efforts to see Valeria. But no writer turns an idea into a physical sensation as well as Bellow does. He has no contemporary equal in revealing the "mad clarity" of family relationships or in planting the seeds of metaphor in fertile situations. Corde's considerations of lead poisoning in the environment suggest an age of reverse alchemy in which the gold of Western civilization is turned into a crushing, toxic weight. The difference between an open society where the speculations grow spontaneously and a closed system with its sterile dogma is dramatized in a stunning juxtaposition. Corde and his wife ascend the telescope cage under the opening dome of the Mount Palomar observatory. He feels that he could go on forever. But he is also reminded of the rounded roof of the Bucharest crematorium, the dome "that never opened. You could pass through only as smoke."

Bellow's prose is unadorned, hard and penetrating. Yet even in such a serious work he cannot suppress his poetic impulses. Ignorant of astrophysics, Corde explains his wife's occupation as "bringing together a needle from one end of the universe with a thread from the opposite end." Elsewhere, he muses that if a film were made of one's life, every other frame would be death: "Destruction and resurrection in alternate beats of being, but speed makes it seem continuous." And there is Corde himself, whose name is French for string. A little obvious, but Bellow has never had much patience for furtive symbolism. Stretched tightly between Chicago and Bucharest, his fine fictional instrument is tuned perfectly to the dissonances of the times and the unheard but strangely felt music of a seductive eternity. --By R.Z. Sheppard

At 165 Ibs., he is ten pounds heavier than when he regularly played paddle ball. Saul Bellow, 66, also says that he used to be 5 ft. 9 in. tall but seems to have shrunk. The burdens of the Nobel Prize?

"The award was a pain in the neck in lots of ways," he says. "It made a celebrity out of me and gave me a lot of empty responsibility, like signing letters . . . But I could say what I liked on any subject and, for a kid from the Chicago streets, that's some change."

What the novelist has been saying lately is that writers in the 20th century have to make up their minds about the view that existence is meaningless. Bellow has made up his mind: "Nihilism is an act of pride. You are so secure in rational or intellectual analysis, beginning with the death of God and descending to the last detail of one's wretched biology--that you arrogate to yourself powers of judgment that you don't really have." Who is to judge? Like Albert Corde, Bellow does not leap into religious faith: "I never take it upon myself to make statements over which I have no mental or emotional control. I go with my deepest inclinations and what they say, they say. But I don't have any title for them."

Literature, then, is about experience not labels. Henderson the Rain King, Herzog and Humboldt's Gift, for example, are filled with woman troubles. Three of Bellow's marriages ended in divorce. Since 1974 he has been married to Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea, 47, a Rumanian-born mathematician who teaches at Northwestern University. But many characters were drawn from people Bellow knew and heard about in Chicago. There are the loners, losers, roughneck lawyers and sharpies. Bellow himself can give a raffish appearance. His wardrobe includes snappy suits, colorful ties and dark hats.

Those who knew the author during the '40s and '50s in New York City recall an assured, witty man whose almond-shaped eyes, strong, straight nose and wide, sensuous mouth attracted many female admirers. Bellow too remembers the "glorious girls" but also the rich cultural life before the universities lured away many of his writer friends, and the painters moved to the beaches of Long Island. "New York was the city of my dreams," he says, before tartly adding, "Of course, it's no longer the city of anybody's dreams unless you specialize in nightmares."

Chicago, too, is a place where one can wake up screaming. Before moving to a high-rise apartment overlooking Lake Michigan, the novelist used to play classical music to drown out street noises. Says Bellow: "The nights are long; the streets are dangerous; people don't go out and I'm not a great television watcher. So I read a lot."

Bellow continues to lecture at the University of Chicago, where since 1962 he has been a member of the Committee of Social Thought. He still sees many of his high school friends: "People in Chicago are fairly innocent about fame and so on, and after a few minutes we are on old footings. They speak freely to me. I speak freely to them." A few years ago, one friend taught Bellow to stand on his head, an exercise he practices daily. Says the author, who has never been satisfied with the conventional view: "It does wonders for me to put myself in reverse. It has become an indispensable change of perspective."

Excerpt

" 'This is a terribly bad time for my wife.'

Spangler said sympathetically but knowingly (superknowingly--that had always been a specialty with him): 'I can just imagine. For you, too. All kinds of hell in Chicago. I'm damned if I can explain why you wrote those pieces . . . Then there's the trial you're mixed up in.'

'You've been following that?'

'I always take the Chicago papers. My assistant forwards the clippings. Your fat-ass cousin is going to town on you . . . He's a bad actor.'

'I thought you had changed your mind, and he was now okay by you.'

'What are you talking about?. . . I didn't want him around. It was you who listened to his bogus poetry.'

'Well, we needn't make a contest of it. I did say once that with a slot in his head Max would make a terrific piggy bank.' "

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