REVIEW / BOOK
VITALITY, HUMANITY, ANGER AND WIT OF BELLOW ARE BACK
THE DEAN S DECEMBER, BY SAUL BELLOW. HARPER & ROW. 312 PP. $13.95.

Author: By Margaret Manning

Date: Sunday, January 17, 1982
Page: ?????
Section: BOOKS

The verdict: The book fits the head, which has not swelled.

The same qualities - vitality, anger, wit, luminous intelligence - are as always in abundance. Bellow has talked in other contexts about the value of suffering, about primary feeling as the bedrock of humanity, of mercy, of humaneness. His novels, while not usually merciful, have never deviated from this philosophical ground, even when they have been boisterous about pain.

"The Dean's December" is about pain, loss, treachery, death - the trials that men and women are obliged to endure if they can, and it isn't in any way boisterous, which is not to say that it doesn't have its moments of blood- curdling irony. It does. Bellow is angrier now than he was 10 years ago. He is more outraged than simply annoyed by hypocrisy, crime, plain cruelty.

The Dean is Albert Corde, dean of students at a Chicago university. He seems to be about 60. For years he had been a journalist, an observer, an outsider. He had watched the world carefully (he still does), not often having been a passionate participant in it. When he does take up arms he loses his serenity. But without the loss of serenity there would be no novel.

Corde is another in the Bellow pantheon of heroes manque. Though he is reticent and scornful, still he tends to admit to mistakes he hasn't even made. He is overly rational. His wife Minna is another kind of observer: She is an astronomer distinguished enough to rate a week's residence at the Mt. Palomar Observatory. He thinks of her that "in science she was scientific; in other matters her methods were more magical."

As the novel begins they have come to Bucharest because Minna's mother is dying. But the communist apparat there is not happy about them and makes troubles. Minna is regarded as a defector. Her mother, a doctor, was in Ana Pauker's government, which to me is rather like saying that she was a guard at Auschwitz, but both Bellow and Corde are more tolerant than I. At the end of World War II Valeria and her husband (a now dead brain surgeon) had tossed flowers to the Russian troops. They were well meaning intellectual socialists who soon experienced what turned out to be the agonies they had unwittingly sought. Valeria sent her to be educated in the West, and Minna stayed.

Valeria herself was banished from the Party, her flat is bugged, the usual drill. But she has been rehabilitated to the point that she is allowed VIP treatment on her deathbed.

Corde in Bucharest has little to do and spends hours sitting in Minna's girlhood room thinking about the problems he has left behind in Chicago: a student's murder by two street blacks, his revolting nephew's championing of these killers, two articles he has written for Harpers Magazine on Chicago police and penitentiary problems that have disturbed university authorities. In fact Corde should probably have been happy to get away from all that and come to Bucharest.

But in Bucharest there is the hostile bureaucracy, a dark, cold apartment, a Gothic toilet (no running water except morning and evening), old women who rise before dawn to stand in food queues. "If emigration were permitted the country would be empty in less than a month," Corde thinks.

Not so in America, though naturally all is far from perfect here. Corde muses that in the West people are cut off from each other by too much communication. Some people are "outsides without insides." He thinks of them as "whirling souls." At least his wife's family have roots in the past if not in the present.

And he reminds himself that in one of Chicago's housing projects a man had butchered a hog in his apartment, threw the guts on the stairs where a woman slipped on them and broke her arm. Not to forget murder and rape and Lake Forest. He uses the words whirling souls in the same sense that Yeats wrote "the center cannot hold." Corde-Bellow is revolted by American vulgarity, and cruelty and -

The correct Eastern dissidents call America degenerate, lacking in seriousness and morality. As Bellow describes Chicago in what I take to be the end of the Daley era, they are right. No decent person could involve himself in what goes on municipally. Except that they must, and Corde does.

So, besides the story of the death of an old woman in Bucharest, Bellow is writing about the corruption of the earth and the evil man does to his fellows. As the book goes on Corde continues to rewrite his Harpers articles inside his own head. And at the same time he is asking himself whether he ought to accept an invitation to engage in another public involvement: An American geophysicist wants him to write more articles on the generalized environment and particularlyhow lead poisoning is blighting urban life. More sociology, of course, but he is tempted.

Bellow recasts these familiar positions in more or less novelistic terms. Corde's thoughts and conversations are not only interesting and penetrating but poignant.

The man of academia becoming an activist is yet another familiar theme, but no other writer does it with more grace than Bellow.

There are thousands of other (other than sociological) themes in the book, ranging from broken friendships trying to repair themselves, to jealousy, meanness and love. Psychiatry (a pox on it). And why people live - and live as they do.

Bellow believes deeply in what he calls "the spirit of the time, in us by nature, working on every soul." I think there are many different spirits though. Can there really be only one ruling ambiance? If there is, it is cruelty and stupidity. Worldwide. It is people like Corde and Bellow who try to ameliorate it.

Incredibly Bellow has been called crude, obtuse, trivial, a "would-be thinker," timid, vindictive, claustrophobic, tiresome, etc., etc. I am interpreting, no I am reporting on an article from The Partisan Review by a well-known critic who must himself be most of the above.

Bellow is not.

Others have blasted him in the name of serious criticism. Thank God hardly anyone pays attention to these persons because Bellow, along with Updike, Malamud, Cheever and maybe John Gardner, is what we have most to cherish in contemporary American literature.

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