Saul Bellow Creates Usual Protagonist In ‘Actual’

“The Actual” A Novella by Saul Bellow (Viking, 104 pp., $17.95)

Beautiful Bellow! No American writer is capable of waxing quite so cantankerous, and yet his voice has the meticulous range and certainty of a cathedral choir.

The wit is exquisitely mannered; the intelligence both fearless and elegant.

After more than half a century of defining our literature, the great Bellovian powers are imbued as well with the serene diplomacy of having endured a life.

That’s the message of “The Actual,” at any rate, which is the thoughtfully realized story of a man who has lived at the margins of passion. Harry Trellman is “a first-class noticer,” an aging entrepreneur who has a singular talent for understanding the psychological architecture of a situation.

What this really means is that Harry is like a lot of Bellow men: cheerfully melancholy and introspective, caught in the steel trap of his intellect and always a couple of feet this side of taking the leap - into love, or helplessness, or the sometimes-precious oblivion of not knowing which end is up.

In spite or because of this general reticence, he has managed to acquire a comfortable fortune by moving goods around between the Far East and Guatemala before importing them to the United States. The business allowed Harry a certain freedom, one that brought him home to Chicago - where he could reside in silent emotional splendor near Amy Wustrin, the object of his affections for most of his adult life.

“The Actual” is enchantingly deep and simple, and the pulse slows a little while reading it - it is Bellow with tender restraint, comprehending the past and acknowledging the ironies of time. Enlightenment thought (or posturing) doesn’t help Harry much anymore, he tells us at the beginning of his story, and so we know we are again in the company of a narrator wise to the modern world: a place that has ravaged the likes of Herzog and Tommy Wilhelm and the rest of Bellow’s dangling men over the past five decades.

In his measured way, Harry has probably risked less and lost more. He loved Amy when they were teenagers, groped her in the dark of adolescent parties, and flirted with her through each of their marriages to others, but his relationship with her - the central attachment of his life - has mostly been lived in the careful privacy of his imagination.

This thin but reliable gruel suffices until Harry has the occasion to meet up with Amy again, through the social webbing of an aged multibillionaire who has gathered Harry into his “brain trust.” Sigmund Adletsky is fond of Harry from the outset - “We are both oddball Jews,” he tells Harry warmly - and expects his new adviser to keep him updated on the emotional complexities of the people they know in common.

Dinner party analysis, in other words, which covers a multitude of sins and neuroses, and allows Harry the literary opportunity to play a kind of Fool in Adletsky’s court. Finished with the challenge of great wealth, Adletsky seeks the subtleties of life he bypassed on his charge up the mountain; Harry, from his end, has an eager audience now for the endless theorizing he has enjoyed over the years.

The ensuing dialogue also paves the way for the hilarity of man’s many absurdities - most notably, the story of a wealthy toy manufacturer, Bodo Heisinger, whose younger wife tried to take out a contract on him. When she emerged from a three-year prison term for her murderous disloyalty, old Heisinger remarried her, proving once again that virility can easily eclipse intelligence.

Marriage has always been more of a death-wish wrestling match than a sacred institution in Bellow’s fiction, and it fares no better here. Amy herself was fleeced by an adulterous husband who tape-recorded her in bed with another man. A prankster lawyer, Wustrin made a good joke from the grave by buying his father-in-law’s burial plot on a dare, then dying prematurely and winding up resting next to the mother-in-law who loathed him.

This is the kind of sex-and-death humor Bellow relishes, and Harry relays it with a wryness so dry it crackles. Now Amy is evicting her late husband from her father’s plot, which presents the stalwart Harry, in his role as family friend, with a last-gasp chance to make himself known.

“To become known was never a special desire with me,” he has told us on the opening page of “The Actual;” this reserve was both his talent and his failing - the schism between alienation and self-reliance, between safety and love.

And yet he has been faithful to Amy Wustrin through his secret devotion: She is the “actual” of his inner life, the only pure feeling. “I was prepared by now to make my peace with my species,” Harry tells us. “For most of them, I am aware in hindsight, I generally had a knife within reach.”

“The Actual” is considered and elegiac, the cruelties of its universe tempered by morality and desire. Pointing out the off-key squawk in the cathedral choir, I wish Bellow weren’t so insistently shortsighted about the women he portrays - he tends to draw boorish connections between sexuality and intelligence (usually the preponderance of the first ensures the lack of the second), and the literary result is beneath him.

But Harry Trellman is one of his sweet unknowables, roaming between hope and realism. The paradoxical gift here is that he is a mystery only to himself; we recognize him immediately, for he could only belong to Bellow.