(Source: ic photo)
The cloud also regresses/text
"Yeta, I want to tell you about the words that I have been thinking about in my heart for weeks, and these words are rolling around in my mind, and I just don't know how to say them. In the face of you, I can't open my mouth, Yeta, all because I am not sure, timid. Really, I admit I'm a coward. We are all cowards in our hearts, but admitting it, timidity is not a big deal. ”
The beginning and the end are always the most important, the most attractive, and everything in the middle is second, no matter how perfect. A few years after the death of the great writer Saul Bellow, a thick collection of Letters of Sol Bellow was compiled and published, and the first letter contained in it was a letter written by the 17-year-old Bellow to his first love, Yeta, on May 28, 1932. He was going to break up with Yeta. These above sentences give rise to the first verse of self-confidence, a strong literary atmosphere, mixed with a strong tendency to speculate and deliberate, and then a perfect description of the scene, writing about "the lonely wind rustling the leaves", writing about "out of nowhere in the night, a bird cries against the wind", and writes that "the waves in Lake Michigan are angrily rushing toward the house, but they cannot get close to the corner, they can only roar and retreat." Reading this, I can't help but wonder whether either this was an intentional arrangement of the editors, and there may actually be a letter earlier than this, but the text is not so beautiful, or that the 17-year-old Bellow was ready to publish it in the future when he wrote the letter.
In either case, it can be asserted that Bellow was ready to become a great writer at that time. When he writes about the waves of Lake Michigan "roaring and receding," the writer's self-consciousness is revealed: he is always letting his inner feelings seduce the wind and grass of the outside world, making them echo or oppose, cross or parallel, like his infamous means of seducing women. In this letter, his use of language has revealed a desire to conquer, which is omnipresent, even if he is acknowledging his own shortcomings, bellow must grasp the absolute initiative of discourse.
Who is Yeta? She was a classmate of Bellow's high school classmates in Chicago, a few months older than Bellow, and was also born in 1915. In the United States, yeta joined the Youth Communist League, and by June 1932, when she graduated from high school, Yeta, who was good at speaking, delivered a speech on behalf of the class, entitled "The Future Belongs to Youth."
To the ambitious Bellow's first love, Yeta is also very courageous. Her home was close to Bellow's. The two families visited each other, and Bellow remembered too many details, such as that Yeta's family had a car (fewer Americans could afford to buy a car at that time), and he found that the back seat of the car was piled with wood chips and shavings, so he speculated that Yeta's father was a carpenter. Yeta's grandfather was a Jew, a bearded man, and when he met him in the church, Bellow couldn't see his face at all; and what a handsome black-haired woman Yeta's mother was, and she was happy that Yeta had joined the Youth Communist League.
Both of them were also Jewish. The Yetas immigrated to North America from Russia, so it was natural that the Yeta were sympathetic to communism, because the Communists and anarchists were actively trying to trouble the Tsar while the old tsarist regime was oppressing the people. However, by the time Yeta took the podium to speak, the Soviet regime established by the Communists had already experienced a power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, who had seized power and Trotsky was forced into exile in Europe, becoming a mobile revolutionary flame. When Yeta and Bellow were together, politics was a major theme of the two men, and Yerta brought Bellow some pamphlets on Trotsky on the German question, and she supported Trotsky, believing that the right path of revolution was no longer in the Soviet Union.
Bellow later said that he was sitting on the dock steps of Humboldt Park, where two bronze bulls stood, or on the dock steps of Humboldt Park, listening to Yeta talk about Leninism, collectivization, democratic centralism, Stalin's evils, and why Stalin was one notch lower than Trotsky. When she stood on the podium of the graduation ceremony with high emotions, her sincere and enthusiastic expression made the parents in the audience bright and excited. Bellow remembers that Yetta used several strange words in his speech, such as "extreme poverty" and "comfort": "All of you here, we will bring you comfort." She said.
Although Bellow sympathized with Trotsky, he was disgusted by the Youth League that Yeta had joined, and dismissed the theme of Yeta's speech, "The Future Belongs to Youth.". This, like his writing and level of speech, has become a portrayal of his maturity beyond his age. He later had a friend, Albert Grotzer, who had worked as a guard and secretary for Trotsky in exile, and what he learned from Grotzer confirmed Bellow's long-standing suspicions: groups under the banner of "youth" were used by powerful people to win over young people and use themselves as a tool for guns, and he regarded the Youth League as a character of the black shirts with the Hitler Youth and Mussolini; the Boy Scout movement founded by Baron Baden Powell in England in 1907 and later active in British and American society The impact is far-reaching, but it is ruthlessly ridiculed by Bellow, who says that Boy Scouts are the worst things, and its only benefit is that it does not harm the future.
Bellow obviously believed that with such a talent as his, it was natural to maintain the independence of the mind, and the mind was also the most important thing in jewish culture, because the ability to know, think, feel, judge, and imagine could not be deprived of by outsiders under any circumstances. In his letters, he showed off his thinking and sensibility, his ability to make figurative metaphors, one moment to exalt first, the next to suppress: "All my thoughts are around you," he said, but these thoughts are not all warmth, "here are needles, there are whips." But these few sentences were not enough, and Bellow had to dispel Yeta's resistance:
"You might say in your heart, 'You're really playing with words.'" Because you have a mind of the Youth League. Or: 'What did bellows hear again?' ’”
The original text of the phrase "playing with rhetoric" is literally translated as "phrase seller". This hand is too powerful, he designed lines for the other party to rebuke himself, designed accurately and vividly. In this way, I really don't know if Yeta, who received the letter, had the courage to read the whole letter, and if she did, she could laugh it off. Bellow not only taunted her across the board, but also gave her weakness to the other side after the incident—"You call me a phrase-talker!" I deserve it! Later, Bellow's novel "Hersog" has such a plot, as if it is a "diagram" of this: Hersog was forced into a corner by a black man on the street, and he was surprised to see the black man pull open his pants chain and show his penis. He suddenly felt greatly humiliated, even more than the humiliation of the other party using knives and guns to coerce him into handing over the money.
Bellow's sarcasm seems to be only due to Yeta's empathy, she fell in love with Nathan Goldstein, and will marry him later. Apparently, Bellow was reluctant to accept the fact that he had been dumped, which is why he wrote so high-profile, pretending that he was going to end the relationship himself. But he was too heavy-handed, almost in front of a group of his future, imaginary readers. The power of this knife of words may not be under Bellow's own control:
"You might think I'm crazy?" I'm just crazy. But I have a pen in my hand; I am like a fish, and I despise you. (There was a long silence here, and then a sigh erupted like a fierce wind; the indomitable Bellow was full of pride and went all out.) ）”
Thanks to Yeta, he stimulated Bellow to release his energy. This No.1 epistle raises the entire collection of letters to the same level as Bellow's brilliant novel. Although the two earliest novels of Bellow, "The Man Who Dangled" and "The Victim", are a little rougher than later works, just by looking at this letter to his girlfriend, it is no exaggeration to assert that Saul Bellow is "the peak of his debut", and he has accumulated his own ferocious bookish atmosphere when young boys and girls of his age throw themselves into passionate utopian ideas. He was arrogant, he teased, he showed off, and his arrogance at that time broke through the weak fortifications set by ready-made comments such as "young and crazy", and even enough to intimidate him to look back at himself at every stage of the future.
Every young man has to grow up in dialogue with his predecessors, but the young Bellow, reading his letters, is a man who, no matter what kind of person he speaks to, can freely express his views on the current situation and current events, he can sharply point out the mistakes of the other party, say what he knows and thinks in a polemical tone, even if he obviously wants others, he unremittingly reveals his insight with the blade. After 1944, Bellow had to deal with literary figures like James T. Farrell and Edmund Wilson in order to apply for a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, and he wrote to Farrell, first saying "I am grateful for my support" and then saying that "Chicago is becoming more and more like Siberia," and that he was sentenced to exile and the Tsar refused to pardon him. Writing to Wilson, he was also grateful for the first, and then began to "show off":
"Can only be sought and suffered as Ixion (the god punished by Zeus in Greek mythology, tied to a steam wheel and unable to move), even if it is a drifting cloud."
He told Farrell that he didn't expect "The Man Who Dangled" to please him, but that I would be very upset if he "thought I was too low-level and should have painted with my fingers instead of writing." There was a coercive tone here, and it seemed that he had begun his words regardless of who the recipient was. In the conventional situation, people are confident with the expansion of their reputation, but Bellow believes in his fame when he has not yet fully owned the fame, it is difficult to say that there are some points here that are strategic, some points are due to disposition, and it can only be said that this extraordinary self-confidence has produced an effect that benefits him.
But not absolutely. Just by looking at his above performance, you may think that his family is in a good situation, so there are also capital arrogance. Not really. Throughout Bellow's life, he did not really become rich until he published Hersog in 1964, when he was over fifty years old, and even though he had several successful novels before, the royalties he bought and the salary he taught at the university were not enough for him to repeatedly marry and divorce, let alone raise children, or because of the death of his father, leaving him with an inheritance, he only carried through the most difficult period. In some of the letters, he spoke of his embarrassment, and although he still maintained his usual strong style, he did show a worried look. He didn't write books very quickly, and it took him four or five years to complete a work—it was all a big truth, but his novel talent was so dazzling that he ignored the fact that he tried his best to write between the tedious details of life.
Talking to his agent, Bellow still has to be cautious, his road to fame and family, after all, depends heavily on the contribution of others. In 1947, his second novel, The Victim, sold poorly, and some bookstores didn't even have any stores, much to Bellow's chagrin. He wrote to his agent at the time, Henler, complaining about it, though he was as sharp as ever, preemptively defending himself: "I know you will accuse me again of taking off the cloak of a sage, saying that I am too impatient, and you will say that I will have to write five or six books before I can count on writing to make a living." But I'm writing very slowly, and I'm going to be forty before I'm done with my fifth book, and I think there's nothing unreasonable about hoping that what I've already done will work the most. Seeing that it was already impossible for me to concentrate on a year or two of continuous work without interference, I couldn't help but face injustice. I was sick this year, and teaching has left me with no energy to write. I had hoped to take a year off, but then I would lose my source of livelihood..."
Bellow was an assistant professor of English at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis at the time. The work cut the time he spent writing, the anxiety he had been trying to hide, and this time it exploded because of "The Victim". "I see that next year, the year after tomorrow, the year after college, will all be spent in college..." He added that he had never discussed money with Wolfening for the previous four years, "not even when he signed the contract." ”
The letter was not sent, but, just as he had broken off relations with Yeta in the first place, he still wanted to take the initiative to break off relations with his agent. Volkenin clearly wanted him to be more market-oriented and not to be so willful as to write only about the style and subject matter he wanted to write, but Bellow refused to do so, even if he lost a lot of potential gains. Henler warned Bellow that he had to write five or six books before he could make a living by writing; Bellow said, "I don't want to be a business writer, nor do I want to be tied down by money," which was a contradiction in the eyes of the agent, "and the horse to run, and the horse not to eat grass." But Bellow didn't think so, and his economic embarrassment was provoked not so much frustration and humiliation as anger.
He angrily defended his freedom of inspiration, his freedom to create without being dictated, and, importantly, the freedom not to be poor. He broke his contract with Henler; but on the other hand, he was not arrogant enough to think that he had no talent and no eyes in the world. Regarding The Victim, he wrote to David Bazren in early 1948 that it was indeed an immature work and that he was going through a difficult and painful "apprenticeship period". However, when others criticize the work, Bellow will defend, and his defense always seems reasonable, well-thought-out, not just "vibrant".
He wrote new works, each one improving, and when he didn't seem to have any more obvious progress, the next one seemed to be completing a whole piece of his puzzle. Reading his letters, one can see where this man's strong confidence in himself comes from—from his seriousness about words (of course, this may be the credit of the editor), he has always pursued heights, even if there are only two or three lines in a letter, he must practice his writing and give a beautiful and accurate expression; even when he writes words such as "thank you very much" and "I like it", he seems to be preparing for the necessary cutscenes to complete a stunning action next.
It is also fine to regard this collection of letters as a work of literature, for when I read it later, I cannot help but recall the letter to Rita, as if I were actively arguing that the book had the author's overall consideration. When I saw Bellow enter the late stages, and the people he liked died one by one, bringing him unavoidable sadness, looking back at his "parting words" to Rita, I couldn't help but admire his watertight pride again, and the maturity that made people fall to the ground, or "precocious":
"We can still be friends in general. But by the time I'm old and bloated, maybe we can reconcile. In the middle of this time, let's live happily. ”
When Rita died in 1996, Bellow wrote her a parody in which he spoke of Rita's graduation speech entitled "The Future Belongs to Youth" and satirized the subject without hesitation but with reason. He also talks about how he excitedly read Romain Rowland's John Christopher at The Recommendation of Rita and reread it decades later, "I found it to be nothing more than a bunch of crap." Bellow in his writing, always—at least since the age of 17—has not changed his appearance, his sharpness, his strength, his frightening wit, he only mentions at the end "an important Jewish beauty" in Rita, and of course, this is the secret power that only he, Saul Bellow, can discover.