May 30, 2015 05:40 PM
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blogs/...-mendelson
=EXCERPT=
Jonathan Derbyshire: [...] In his new book “Moral Agents“, the critic Edward Mendelson argues that the Olympian confidence of these pronouncements on the “crises of modern life” is entirely characteristic of the public utterances of a group of eight writers, [Saul] Bellow included, active in the United States in the middle of the last century. Mendelson examines the careers of “novelists, poets, and critics, who, in addition to practising their craft, seized for themselves the power and authority to shape literary culture.” According to Mendelson, Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, William Maxwell, Norman Mailer, WH Auden and Frank O’Hara all felt that they were in possession of gifts that made them “morally superior,” qualified, indeed “obliged,” to “lead others.” Last week, I spoke to Mendelson on the phone from New York, where he occupies a chair in the Humanities at Columbia University named after one of his subjects, Lionel Trilling....
JD: [...] One of the things that distinguishes [Saul] Bellow from the other writers you discuss in the book is his tolerance for metaphysical or “spiritual” ideas that others might dismiss as crankish—his enthusiasm for Rudolf Steiner, for example. That’s always struck me as a lapse on Bellow’s part—of taste, if not of intellectual rigour. What do you put it down to? You make the point that he was quite insistent that those metaphysical were central to his intellectual self-image.
EM: The surprise in writing about many of these writers is that they wanted to be religious thinkers and that they were embarrassed, to a great extent, by their wish to think in religious terms. I was struck by something Frank Kermode once said, which was that as they get older, critics tend to write about the bible. He was an example of that himself—he was not religious and had no religious feelings himself. But all he wanted to write about at the end of his life was religion and religious issues.
Bellow, it seems to me, had the admirable ambition to want to understand the great subjects, the largest issues and to connect his own personal experience to something that applied to the whole universe. And Steiner provided a method that was neither Jewish nor Christian. Many things that look crackpot are slightly distorted forms of things that would be admirable if anybody could figure out how to do them. But nobody has figured out how to do them, so they emerge only in these eccentric forms.
JD: This leads me to a question about [WH] Auden, who’s unusual in this company in using frankly and more traditionally religious categories.
EM: That’s right, but he’s constantly making clear that he uses them as metaphors. It’s interesting that he has no supernatural beliefs, that he can’t make himself believe in the Resurrection, that [he believes] that the idea of heaven is a Platonic idea not a Christian one. It seems to me that he and Macdonald are seeing the same things, only Auden is calling them Christian and [Dwight] Macdonald is not.
Auden has a late review of Orwell in which he says that Orwell hated Christianity probably because of his experiences at school, but that when he thinks who in the 20th century was the greatest Christian, he thinks of Orwell.
JD: And then in [Norman] Mailer, in his fiction at least, you get this Manichean obsession with evil and other vast cosmic forces at work.
EM: He’s finding something that is not part of the Judaism he grew up with, which he thought was repellent. He told his mother how disgusted he was by having a Jewish marriage for her sake. Any variety of mysticism seemed [to him] like a way of getting in touch with the divine.
It’s hard to be a genius without some sense of a universe of meaning, however that’s expressed. It’s all over Virginia Woolf, for example. And it seems to me that the only way to understand Beckett sensibly is to think of him as spectacularly moral-minded. In other words, the man who went to work for the French Resistance even though he could have lived through the war as a neutral, the man who gave away most of his Nobel Prize, is not someone who thinks the world is meaningless....
JD: Your most important insight into the shape of Mailer’s career, it seems to me, is the following: “The same habits of mind that kept Mailer from writing a great novel made him a great journalist.” Could you unpack that a little? How did his novels go wrong and, conversely, where does the journalism and reporting go right?
EM: I’m grateful to you for noticing that sentence. Mailer seemed to me to be the only political writer who recognised the deep mythical currents in contemporary politics. When Jung was writing in the late Thirties there are some lectures in which he talks about—it’s a line which Auden quotes in “September 1, 1939”—waves of anger and fear circulating over the earth. He was thinking in archetypal ways about 1930s fascist politics. But then that style of thinking disappeared because it got associated with fascism.
Mailer’s genius, it seems to me, was in part to bring these ideas back without all the bad associations they’d developed. Mailer found a way of talking about politics in a mythical way that represented a lot of the reality of the politics of utopian fantasy. This full-throated sense of politics driven by mythical laws was something Mailer picked up on, and was already in his thinking as early as The Naked and the Dead, in those passages about deep, hidden, unknowable forces.
The trouble was that when he tried to write a novel about them, everybody became symbolic. You can’t represent a human being as representing something, because then you’re not representing the human being at all. You’re pushing aside everything in that human being that doesn’t fit the model you’ve created. Fairy stories can work with mythical figures, but the medium that Mailer was trying to write in was one that required recognising the particularity of human beings. And he was always being distracted into their mythical significance.....
=EXCERPT=
Jonathan Derbyshire: [...] In his new book “Moral Agents“, the critic Edward Mendelson argues that the Olympian confidence of these pronouncements on the “crises of modern life” is entirely characteristic of the public utterances of a group of eight writers, [Saul] Bellow included, active in the United States in the middle of the last century. Mendelson examines the careers of “novelists, poets, and critics, who, in addition to practising their craft, seized for themselves the power and authority to shape literary culture.” According to Mendelson, Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, William Maxwell, Norman Mailer, WH Auden and Frank O’Hara all felt that they were in possession of gifts that made them “morally superior,” qualified, indeed “obliged,” to “lead others.” Last week, I spoke to Mendelson on the phone from New York, where he occupies a chair in the Humanities at Columbia University named after one of his subjects, Lionel Trilling....
JD: [...] One of the things that distinguishes [Saul] Bellow from the other writers you discuss in the book is his tolerance for metaphysical or “spiritual” ideas that others might dismiss as crankish—his enthusiasm for Rudolf Steiner, for example. That’s always struck me as a lapse on Bellow’s part—of taste, if not of intellectual rigour. What do you put it down to? You make the point that he was quite insistent that those metaphysical were central to his intellectual self-image.
EM: The surprise in writing about many of these writers is that they wanted to be religious thinkers and that they were embarrassed, to a great extent, by their wish to think in religious terms. I was struck by something Frank Kermode once said, which was that as they get older, critics tend to write about the bible. He was an example of that himself—he was not religious and had no religious feelings himself. But all he wanted to write about at the end of his life was religion and religious issues.
Bellow, it seems to me, had the admirable ambition to want to understand the great subjects, the largest issues and to connect his own personal experience to something that applied to the whole universe. And Steiner provided a method that was neither Jewish nor Christian. Many things that look crackpot are slightly distorted forms of things that would be admirable if anybody could figure out how to do them. But nobody has figured out how to do them, so they emerge only in these eccentric forms.
JD: This leads me to a question about [WH] Auden, who’s unusual in this company in using frankly and more traditionally religious categories.
EM: That’s right, but he’s constantly making clear that he uses them as metaphors. It’s interesting that he has no supernatural beliefs, that he can’t make himself believe in the Resurrection, that [he believes] that the idea of heaven is a Platonic idea not a Christian one. It seems to me that he and Macdonald are seeing the same things, only Auden is calling them Christian and [Dwight] Macdonald is not.
Auden has a late review of Orwell in which he says that Orwell hated Christianity probably because of his experiences at school, but that when he thinks who in the 20th century was the greatest Christian, he thinks of Orwell.
JD: And then in [Norman] Mailer, in his fiction at least, you get this Manichean obsession with evil and other vast cosmic forces at work.
EM: He’s finding something that is not part of the Judaism he grew up with, which he thought was repellent. He told his mother how disgusted he was by having a Jewish marriage for her sake. Any variety of mysticism seemed [to him] like a way of getting in touch with the divine.
It’s hard to be a genius without some sense of a universe of meaning, however that’s expressed. It’s all over Virginia Woolf, for example. And it seems to me that the only way to understand Beckett sensibly is to think of him as spectacularly moral-minded. In other words, the man who went to work for the French Resistance even though he could have lived through the war as a neutral, the man who gave away most of his Nobel Prize, is not someone who thinks the world is meaningless....
JD: Your most important insight into the shape of Mailer’s career, it seems to me, is the following: “The same habits of mind that kept Mailer from writing a great novel made him a great journalist.” Could you unpack that a little? How did his novels go wrong and, conversely, where does the journalism and reporting go right?
EM: I’m grateful to you for noticing that sentence. Mailer seemed to me to be the only political writer who recognised the deep mythical currents in contemporary politics. When Jung was writing in the late Thirties there are some lectures in which he talks about—it’s a line which Auden quotes in “September 1, 1939”—waves of anger and fear circulating over the earth. He was thinking in archetypal ways about 1930s fascist politics. But then that style of thinking disappeared because it got associated with fascism.
Mailer’s genius, it seems to me, was in part to bring these ideas back without all the bad associations they’d developed. Mailer found a way of talking about politics in a mythical way that represented a lot of the reality of the politics of utopian fantasy. This full-throated sense of politics driven by mythical laws was something Mailer picked up on, and was already in his thinking as early as The Naked and the Dead, in those passages about deep, hidden, unknowable forces.
The trouble was that when he tried to write a novel about them, everybody became symbolic. You can’t represent a human being as representing something, because then you’re not representing the human being at all. You’re pushing aside everything in that human being that doesn’t fit the model you’ve created. Fairy stories can work with mythical figures, but the medium that Mailer was trying to write in was one that required recognising the particularity of human beings. And he was always being distracted into their mythical significance.....
