Saul Bellow, responding to a critic who said that modern literature is lousy because the modern world is "mutilated and broken":
Are most novels poor today? Undoubtedly. But that is like saying mutilation exists, a broken world exists. More mutilated and broken than before? That's perhaps the world's own secret. Really, things are now what they always were, and to be disappointed in them is extremely shallow. We may not be strong enough to live in the present. But to be disappointed in it! To identify oneself with a better past! No, no!
--Letter to Lionel Trilling, 1952
To be fair to that critic, the world in 1952--that is, within a decade or so of 1945--had a better claim to be mutilated and broken than many other periods. Certainly than our own.
ReplyDeleteSure. I have only read two of Bellow's novels, but I have the impression that the ruin of the world was the essential background to his brand of cautious optimism. His characters spend a lot of time railing about how bad things are. But to Bellow the right response is to roll up your sleeves and get to work. The horrors of his time were, to him, no excuse for artists to avoid the hard work of making serious art.
ReplyDeleteThinking this over, I wonder if in a century or two the 1950s will be regarded as a great decade for American art. I am not a huge fan of the period, but to modernists Abstract Expressionism, bebop jazz, Beat poetry, John Cheever's stories, and Bellow's novels are among America's greatest artistic productions. So a critic who, in 1952, saw only a mutilated artistic landscape could be accused of being out of touch with what was going on in the art world.