In September of 1953, Lionel Trilling published his essay “A Triumph of the Comic View,” a very favorable assessment of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. Below, Bellow writes Trilling with his appreciation.
October 11, 1953 Barrytown, N.Y.
Dear Lionel,
I’ve more than once wanted to write you a letter of thanks. I know that you have contributed more than a little to the success of my book. I’m in your debt also for mental support—for the intelligence of your reading. Though I’m not, perhaps, the most objective judge to be found, I thought your essay brilliant. The many criticisms of Augie I’ve seen since have made me appreciate yours all the more; I appreciate above all your sense of justice, for I know the book must have offended you in some ways.
Reading Emerson’s “Transcendentalist” the other day while getting ready for class, I ran across a passage on the remoteness of the high-minded transcendentalist from wordly activities which made me think of one of our differences. It goes like this:
“We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust: but we do not like your work.”
“Then,” says the world, “show me your own.”
“We have none.”
“What will you do, then?” cries the world.
“We will wait.”
“How long?”
“Until the universe beckons and calls us to work.”
“But whilst you wait, you grow old and useless.”
“Be it so; I can sit in a corner and perish (as you call it) but I will not move until I have the highest command…your virtuous projects, so called, do not cheer me. If I cannot work at least I need not lie…”
So it runs. And this attitude (would you call it “inner-directedness”?) is what seeped into my comedy. It isn’t that Augie resists every function—that would make him a tramp; and while I would not hesitate to write about tramps if I were called to it, Augie is something different. I was constantly thinking of some of the best young men I have known. Some of the very finest and best intentioned, best endowed, found nothing better to do with themselves than Augie. The majority, whether as chasers, parasites, bigamists, forgers and worse lacked his fairly innocent singleness of purpose. They had reached the place where they fixedly doubted that Society had any use for the abilities. I think if you had been aware of their great negativism you might have taken another view of my “propaganda.” To love another, genuinely to love, is the inception of a function, I wished to say. I suppose I didn’t quite make [my point] convincingly. It may be that for this a kind of intelligence is required that I’m not able to exercise. I’m satisfied with the other kind—the intelligence of imagining. I would be satisfied, that is, but for the fact that you sometimes can’t imagine very far without crossing the border into the other kinds of intelligence.
Not the least of my surprises, as reviews come in, is my surprise at the chaotic disagreement as to what constitutes normalcy. This is picturesque! Writers on the fiftieth floor of the Time building speak confidently with the vox populi, telling us what is normative in American life. The scene couldn’t be more bizarre. An anarchy of views upon normalcy. We might get some sociological principle out of this: When the daily life of a people is full of astonishments, miracles and wonders, the lives of individuals are duller (a natural reaction to the disorganizing hyperaesthesia resulting from over-stimulation) and the greater the disorder and lack of agreement the larger the number of spokesmen for “normalcy.” […]
Your discussion of my treatment of the hero was full of brilliant perceptions (the eagle as anti-hero I had not thought of) but I was myself more conscious of satirizing this disagreement over the normative.
On the whole, however, I was fairly free of deliberate intentions. I could scarcely follow Mr. West’s review with its system of symbols. I had forgotten, since leaving Great Books Inc., what “simony” meant.
Well, it’s all very interesting and what fascinates me most is the book’s sale. That I had never anticipated. The world’s a mysterious place.
Yours faithfully—
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FURTHER READING
For Trilling’s “A Triumph of the Comic View,” click here.
For more on “inner-directedness” in Saul Bellow’s novels, click here, here, here and here.