Stepping through Sludge

Issue 149

Paris 2018

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Life, at times, comes with a bit of sludge. When you try to walk, your steps feel labored, heavy, a bit unsteady. There’s little that you can do, it seems, but descend into days that are nothing but gray and dreary and long. Despite your best efforts at a jump-start, the normal tricks don’t seem to work, as the sludge that surrounds your body is too omnipresent, too imposing, too exhausting, it runs through your fingers and clouds your vision and weights upon your legs—even though you know with absolute certainty that, in your life, you need a change.

In Paris, in 1948, in the aftershocks of war, the days are, in fact, gloomy and gray and miserable, especially if you’re the target of suspicious looks. Lacking friends doesn’t help, nor does the frustration, the sense of dread, that comes from wasting so many months with bad writing—of fighting with a tedious manuscript, with its hundreds of pages surely just a record of defeat.

The gloom everywhere was heavy and vile. The Seine looked and smelled like some medical mixture. Bread and coal were still being rationed. The French hated us…I was terribly downcast and writing about a hospital room, and coaxing a dying man to assert himself and claim his share of life, and thinking my gloomy thoughts beside the medicinal Seine and getting no relief from the great monuments of Paris.

Here is the recollection of Saul Bellow, nearly fifty years after his “depression thicker than the palpable soddenness of Paris.” He had already written two novels, but those pages, in his mind, hadn’t been worth remembering. Those stories were uninspired, flat, the work of a writer following conventions. Years later he was still unsure how to escape the trap of an artist caught by the traditions of his time.

…I recognized that this was not what being a novelist was supposed to have meant. The bitterness of mine was intolerable, it was disgraceful, a symptom of slavery. I think I’ve always been inclined to accept the depressions that overtook me and I felt just now that I had allowed myself to be dominated by the atmosphere of misery or surliness…

When you’ve fought a long campaign, when you’ve been moping and moaning, when you’re obviously losing the war, there can still be a moment—long before any victory—when you decide to exhale. Because eventually there’s nowhere else to go, and there’s at least something refreshing about knowing that the hole can’t possibly get any deeper. Once you reach bedrock, what’s the difference? In the worst times, this sensation is disturbingly close to resignation, or capitulation, yet it is also liberating. Thus, on a darkened day, in a moment of surrender, Bellow tosses aside hundreds of pages, his eye caught by the reflection of water on a Paris street, and he begins to write with an exhale.

To my cold octogenarian eye, it seems overblown now, but I recognize nevertheless that I was out to satisfy an irrepressible hunger for detail. The restraint of the first two books had driven me mad—I hadn’t become a writer to tread the straight and narrow. I had been storing up stuff for years and this was my dream opportunity for getting it all out.

In Paris, Bellow wrote about Chicago; in English, Bellow wrote with the “half a dozen tongues” of his immigrant childhood; in a novel, Bellow put a lifelike, impassioned sensibility of the street; in his sentences, Bellow stopped following the prescriptions of grammar and the expectations of literary tradition and simply let the words flow—which is unmistakable in the opening of his novel:

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

For an immigrant, for someone who couldn’t find his face or family or language anywhere in the history American literature, notice the certitude of those first words—these opening lines don’t request, nor do they argue, they merely state, they’re declarative, and I can’t help but read them as capitalized, emphatic, fearless, unapologetic.

It was enormously exhilarating to take liberties with the language. I said what I pleased and I didn’t hesitate to generalize wildly and to invoke and dismiss epochs and worlds. For the first time I felt that the language was mine to do with as I wished.

The resulting novel, The Adventures of Augie March, deserves its exalted status among 20th Century novels, for countless reasons that are notable and worth studying—although, when you’re amid the sludge, when you’re struggling to find your voice, when the days feel gray and dreary and long, perhaps its vibrancy of language is the most telling. There’s a thrust to the sentences, one that’s quintessentially Bellow.

I was also up to my eyes in mental debt. By this I mean that in becoming a writer I hoped to bring out somehow my singular reactions to existence. Why else write? I had prepared and over prepared myself by reading, study, and fact-storage or idea-storage and I was now trying to discharge all this freight.

The question is forever present: Why else write? It is posed here by Bellow in a letter to Philip Roth about the Parisian origin to his novel, but there’s never a bad time to ask yourself the question, especially if you happen to be stepping through sludge, stuck in one place, seemingly unable to move forward. What is the point? Why should I write this? What’s my voice?

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If you’re an artist with work that lands just outside the culture—misunderstood, overlooked, and, worst of all, ignored—it is a bit like walking around a city where you can’t speak the language. And that’s only magnified when you sense that you’re creating work that isn’t intrinsically yours. It is a dreadful combination: creating work that lacks passion, having that work ignored. There aren’t enough islands on this planet for all the lonely artists who feel unable to say what they want to say.

There was something deeply unsatisfactory about the language used by contemporary writers—it was stingy and arid, it was not connected with anything characteristic, permanent, durable, habitual in the writer’s outlook.

But nobody has taught you to write with the intention of creating an innovative voice on the page, just as you’ve never been taught any skill, or shown any procedure, with the expectation that you, the student, will soon toss away the rules. Although I suspect that, unfortunately, you probably won’t look past the expectations of your time if you need to ask permission. Nobody comes and knocks on your door to request a unique voice. Finding that voice isn’t exactly easy, but what point is there in writing—why else write?—without even trying?

The blank page will always mock you. The conventions of culture and expectations of literature will always restrain you. So you’ll feel doubtful and uncertain and be sure to hesitate if you try to skip past the constraints, but you’ll also feel miserable if you don’t. Those are your choices, and there’s certainly no guarantee: your words might refuse to cooperate, your ideas might falter, your readers might not care. But your own voice, if you write, is the only way that you’ll feel free—which isn’t really, in the end, a statement about writing.