The Getaway Artist

If society knew what was good for it, Saul Bellow would be in jail. For behind the great fortune of Bellow’s imagination lies the idea of crime. Along with writers from Andre Gide to Isaac Babel to Norman Mailer, Bellow likes to toy with an analogy between lawbreakers and art makers; he sees both the criminal and the artist as original, elemental personalities. Crime as a motif runs through “Collected Stories” like a bright green thread, most strikingly in “A Silver Dish,” one of several masterpieces included here.

After his father’s death, Woody Selbst reexamines his own divided life. The product of a British-Jewish mother who became a fanatical Christian convert and a Polish-Jewish father who left Woody’s mother for a married Catholic named Halina, Woody occupies two worlds.

Woody recalls a day in his adolescence when Morris, his father, reappeared and told him a tale about how he desperately needed money to pay back Halina, who had stolen $50 to help Morris out. Bring me to Mrs. Skoglund, Morris says--a rich, suppressive fundamentalist Christian who is Woody’s patron--and together we’ll ask her to lend us the money. Woody knows that there’s something rotten about the story, but he and his father travel through a Chicago snowstorm to old Mrs. Skoglund’s palatial home. After hearing their story, Mrs. Skoglund decides she needs to be alone for a few moments to ask God for guidance. As soon as she’s gone, Morris declares (wrongly) to Woody that she’ll never give up the money, and he grabs an expensive-looking silver dish from a cabinet and stuffs it down his pants.

The image serves a remarkable purpose. Throughout the story, Bellow vividly describes church bells ringing: “The last of the bells still had the bright air streaming with vibrations.” Silver is the stuff of spiritual bells and, by having Morris shove Mrs. Skoglund’s dish next to his groin, Bellow fancifully weds spirituality to libido. After all, Bellow describes Morris, a con man and thief, as a man who is “vital and picturesque,” an advocate of “real life and free instincts, against religion and hypocrisy.”

Morris maddens and exasperates Woody, but Woody loves him above anyone else; he crawls into his father’s hospital bed and holds the old man as he dies. “Pop divided himself. And when he was separated from his warmth, he slipped into death.” Perhaps we are all dead when we separate ourselves from our warmth, from the part of us that steps, for the sake of life, beyond law and convention.

Crime in literature has something to do with the desire of sensitive bookish male authors, their ambition sheltered and fueled by tender, maternal affection, to triumph over an untender and unmaternal world. In Bellow’s art, however, the bookish son’s alter ego is also the quiet outsider, expelled to society’s margins by exotic aspirations that flow from peculiar gifts. Such a figure’s toughness expresses itself through guile more than through physical force. The type of criminal that inhabits the core of Bellow’s imagination is not the man who has the capacity to injure or kill but the man who takes chances that defy social habits and routines; not the murderer or violent burglar but the gambler and the con man.

In his passionately intelligent introduction to this volume, James Wood writes that “Bellow’s characters all yearn to make something of their lives in the religious sense.” Yet Wood is also keenly aware of Bellow’s joy in sensuous worldly intensity. Bellow’s characters, in fact, yearn to make something of their lives in a world where religion is insufficient for living a modern life. They wish to make sense of their own selves, while religion leads one away from the self. The gambler recasts his identity every time he does or doesn’t beat the odds.

It’s too bad that this wonderful, indispensable book does not quite live up to its claim of being the “collected” stories. Several tales have been left out that would have sharply illuminated Bellow’s development as a writer, and one of them, “Two Morning Monologues,” captures Bellow’s obsessive identification of crime with imaginative freedom.

Appearing in Partisan Review when Bellow was in his late 20s, the story concerns a young man who finds himself at loose ends, lacking a job and a conventional purpose in life. In his first monologue, he labors under doubt and hesitation, waiting for his inertia to blossom into an exceptional destiny. His second monologue carries a much different tone. Unfolding crisply in the idiom of the gambler or the con man, it is a crackling rumination that celebrates risk and danger and flies in the face of convention.

This theme of lawbreaking grows throughout Bellow’s work into a mighty world view. Augie March supports himself by stealing books; the down-at-his-heels hero of “Seize the Day” humorously wishes that he could expropriate the money of old people. The intellectual historian Herzog, in the novel of that name, relishes the fact that Willie Sutton, the legendary bank robber, read the entire set of Encyclopaedia Britannica while serving a life sentence; “Humboldt’s Gift’s” Charlie Citrine is fascinated and repelled by a gangster who smashes Citrine’s Mercedes with a baseball bat and invites him to have a menage a trois with him and his girlfriend.

Though Bellow portrays no gamblers or con men in the short stories gathered here, he gives us plenty of risk-taking and crime. “A Theft”--originally published as a novella--turns on the suspected pilfering of an emerald ring and the series of risks that the story’s female protagonist takes in trying to retrieve it. In “Looking for Mr. Green,” George Grebe is, like the hero of “Two Morning Monologues,” jobless and at loose ends. He is thus yet another version of the authentic outsider, of the artist free to gamble with his destiny. “He felt that his luck was better than usual today,” Bellow tells us. Finally finding employment at a public assistance agency, Grebe is assigned the job of giving a black man named Tulliver Green his welfare check, but Green proves to be as elusive as reality itself. Indeed, by the end of the story, Grebe’s search for Green becomes an odyssey of chance-taking and self-invention.

Bellow often associates a larcenous mentality with an appetite for living, and he identifies an appetite for living with the artist’s gift. In “Mosby’s Memoirs,” Hymen Lustgarten is a simple man from Newark who goes to Europe to make money on the black market. Lustgarten is a ludicrous figure, not at all equipped for the schemes he has hatched in his oversized imagination. His plan to take his American Cadillac to Europe and sell it for a fortune ends in brilliant comic disaster. Yet Mosby, the cold-blooded memoirist and consummate respectable insider who derisively recalls Lustgarten’s escapade, experiences something like a minor breakdown when he realizes how empty his life is alongside Lustgarten’s vital imagination and will.

In the extraordinary “Something to Remember Me By,” an adolescent boy has his money and his clothes stolen by a prostitute. He in turn steals clothes from three different strangers to keep himself warm as he makes his way home through a blizzard to his parents’ house, where his mother lies dying. Once there, he resolves to repay a debt that he incurred on his journey by stealing the money from his mother, who has hidden the bills “in her mahzor, the prayer book for the High Holidays, the days of awe.” But since it is a sin to to keep money in the prayer book, let alone to handle money on the days of awe, the boy’s mother is as much a lawbreaker as her son. In this way, the boy will crown his three thievish transformations of identity with a sensational minor crime. But it is not really a crime. About to pass to the other side, the mother has bequeathed the boy something sacred in the form of something profane. She has taught him that the way to pass from death to life--from being naked in a blizzard to being wrapped in warmth at home--is to take a transforming leap of faith over hindering rules. Like all the gamblers and mild lawbreakers in Bellow’s fiction, the boy suddenly gains a second life in the daring of his imagination.

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From ‘A Silver Dish’

After a time, Pop’s resistance ended. He subsided and subsided. He rested against his son, his small body curled there. Nurses came and looked. They disapproved, but Woody, who couldn’t spare a hand to wave them out, motioned with his head toward the door. Pop, whom Woody thought he had stilled, had only found a better way to get around him. Loss of heat was the way he did it. His heat was leaving him. As can happen with small animals while you hold them in your hand, Woody presently felt him cooling. Then, as Woody did his best to restrain him, and thought he was succeeding, Pop divided himself. And when he was separated from his warmth, he slipped into death. And there was his elderly, large, muscular son, still holding and pressing him when there was nothing anymore to press. You could never pin down that self-willed man. When he was ready to make his move, he made it--always on his own terms. And always, always, something up his sleeve. That was how he was.

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Lee Siegel is a contributing writer to Book Review and a contributing editor to Harper’s and the New Republic.