68:Was I a Man or a Jerk?

68

Was I a Man or a Jerk?

A Dying Writer’s Last Question

I was online researching the Canadian-born American writer Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976, and I came upon his son Greg Bellow talking about his memoir Saul Bellow’s Heart that he wrote to show his father as he knew him growing up as opposed to the impression of the lionized writer that the public had of his famous father, and Greg related a fascinating anecdote about his father’s dying question that peaked my interest enough to explore the moral implications of that question in today’s spiritual musing.

Even to the very end, Saul Bellow was in moral conflict with himself; why else would he ask his friend for an honest answer to the question “was I a man or a jerk? Although I have only read two of Saul Bellow’s books, his novella The Actual and It All Adds Up, a nonfiction collection of some of his work which includes his Nobel Lecture, and one short story called “The Silver Plate,” I never read any of his major novels like Humbold’s Gift, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (the one I want to read is Ravelstein, which was based on his friend and author of The Closing of the American Mind, Professor Alan Bloom), but after all of my research on Bellow and his novels and listening to Zachary Leader talk about his biography The Life of Saul Bellow I elicited a strong impression of the writer that gave me a context to the final question of his long-lived life: “was I a man or a jerk?”

Why would a man who spent his whole life exploring the human condition in his novels ask such a question if he did not have moral reservations about his life? But let me relate the anecdote first as his son Greg told it in the You Tube video JST Presents: “Saul Bellow’s Spiritual Quest,” and then I can explore his father’s disturbing death-bed question. A man in the audience asked Saul’s son Greg Bellow the question, “I wonder if you know the manner of his dying? Were you with him when he died?”

“I was not,” Greg replied; and then the man asked, “Did you hear about how he handled the occasion?” That’s when Greg related the anecdote of his father’s final question.

Saul Bellow was in his bed at home dying and tended to by his fifth wife Janice, who was forty years his junior, and he was in and out of consciousness and had not awakened in a couple of days when his friend Gene Goodheart came to visit him.

 “Saul, Saul,” said his friend, trying to wake him up, and Saul opened his eyes and saw his friend and said, “Gene, I want to ask you a question if you give me an honest answer.”

“You know I’ll give you an honest answer,” said Gene Goodheart.

 And Saul said, “Gene, was I a man or a jerk?”

We don’t know what Gene Goodheart answered, but Saul’s son Greg interpreted his father’s question to mean that he was still wrestling with his conscience. “In other words, he had moral courage to the end, to be able to assess himself, to be able to criticize himself. That’s what I know, and I don’t think he lasted anther few days,” he replied to the man who asked Greg about his father’s death; but if I were asked to give an answer to Saul Bellow’s dying question, I would have to say: “He was both.”

Saul Bellow was the same as any other person in the world, only more exaggerated because he was a very gifted writer who explored his own conflicted nature through his novels; that’s why he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.”

Like every writer who taps into the consciousness of their times and becomes a witness to their generation, Saul Bellow reflected the human condition in his fiction as he experienced it in the inescapable dynamic of his Jewish heritage, mostly focused on Chicago where he lived, just as every other writer explores the same human condition in the dynamic of their own heritage, like mine for example which is Italian Canadian; but why would I say that this Quebec-born American Jewish writer who sacrificed everyone for his art was both a man and a jerk? That’s what I hope to explore in today’s spiritual musing…

“One cannot tell writers what to do. The imagination must find its own path,” wrote Saul Bellow in his Nobel Lecture; but the path that the writer takes may take him closer to the truth of the human condition than most people can bear. That’s why Bellow added, “Perhaps humankind cannot bear too much reality, but neither can it bear too much unreality, too much abuse of the truth” (It All Adds Up, “The Nobel Lecture,” p. 95); and that’s the dilemma that every writer must suffer, because the closer they get to the truth of the human condition the harder it is to bear it, which was why Saul Bellow’s conscience forced him on his deathbed to ask his friend Gene Goodheart “was I a man or a jerk?”

Just as an aside, if I may be allowed a moment of personal humor, I find the fact that Saul Bellow should ask a friend named Gene Goodheart for an honest answer to his deathbed question “was I a man or a jerk? to be so laden with irony that it would take a whole book to explain it; but it’s enough to know that the spirit of synchronicity has a playful sense of humor, and why this unpredictable spirit has often been called the Trickster.

Being a writer, I am acutely conscious of the fact that we cannot escape what we are, which has been the inspiration for such great works of literature as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevens, and The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde; and Saul Bellow could not escape the fact that he was as much of a jerk (perhaps more so, depending upon one’s relationship with him) as he was the man he tried to be.

But that’s the dilemma that art cannot resolve, which was why the gifted young writer Katherine Mansfield told her redoubtable editor A. R. Orage that “art is not enough” and why I wrote in my own memoir The Pearl of Great Price, “Stories bear the truth of the human condition, and the human condition is the story of our becoming; but not until we solve the riddle of our becoming will literature resolve the issue of the human condition.”

Saul Bellow could not resolve the issue of his personal condition with the creative genius of his fiction, which is why he spent years studying the esoteric spiritual teachings of Rudolph Steiner, the founding father of Anthroposophy, and why Katherine Mansfield sought out the enigmatic teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France to study his radical teaching of self-transformation just before she died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four.

But what is the central issue of the human condition that art cannot resolve? That’s the question that writers feel with every fiber of their being but cannot resolve with their art but which they have to explore to give expression to that lump of painful truth pushing at their heart, as another Nobel laureate Alice Munro expressed the writer’s compulsion to write; what is this lump of painful truth that has to find expression in a writer’s work?

The prescient literary critic Professor Harold Bloom, author of Novelists and Novels, among many other brilliant books of literary criticism, caught a glimpse of this lump of painful truth pushing at Saul Bellow’s heart and had this to say about the aesthetic mystery of Bellow’s literary achievement: “His heroes are superb observers, worthy of their Whitmanian heritage. What they lack is Whitman’s Real Me or Me Myself, or else they are blocked from expressing it” (Novelists and Novels, p. 419).

This “Real Me or Me Myself” is that lump of painful truth forever pushing at the writer’s heart and what they seek with their fiction, which became the theme of my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway because like Saul Bellow my literary mentor and high school hero Ernest Hemingway also died unresolved, which he confessed to in his memoir A Moveable Feast, the book that he was working on just before taking his own life.

“When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her,” wrote Hemingway at the end of A Moveable Feast, speaking of his first wife Hadley Richardson whom he betrayed with his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, the woman who seduced and stole him away from Hadley but who was to be replaced by the journalist Martha Gellhorn, and she by his fourth wife Mary Welsh; and Saul Bellow’s son Greg tells us in his memoir Saul Bellow’s Heart that his father confessed to him that he wished he had never divorced Greg’s mother, his first wife; but he did divorce her, and four more wives later he’s in bed dying full of regrets.

And if I may, risking the esoteric flavor of my humor, I honestly feel that Saul Bellow’s friend Gene Goodheart was providentially sent to visit Saul on his deathbed to let him know, in that playfully synchronistic way, that lacking in the virtues of a good heart one will always risk being a jerk in life. It was like the medieval morality play The Summoning Everyman and Mr. Good Heart went to Saul, who was also summoned by God for a reckoning, and found him lacking in the virtues of a good heart, and the delicious irony of Saul Bellow’s life was that he failed to see his answer to his dying question in his good friend Gene Goodheart’s name.

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