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Book Reviews Contrasts: Hecht, Bellow and their critics By GEORGE HENDRICK William MacAdams. Ben Hecht: The Man Behind the Legend. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990. Pp. 366 with notes, filmography and index. $24.95 (cloth). Ruth Miller. Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. Pp. 385 with appendices, notes and index. $27.95 (cloth). Ellen Pifer. Saul Bellow Against the Grain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1990. Pp. 208 with notes and index. $27.95 (cloth). Three books on two remarkably different Illinois writers provide pleasure, puzzlement and information. For pleasure I can recommend William MacAdams' paean to Ben Hecht, a writer who consciously sought success in both the literary and the film worlds. Hecht the legend is actually more interesting than Hecht the man, and MacAdams' account is filled with anecdotes about the Chicago newspaperman turned Hollywood screenwriter. Most of these seem partly true, and they are always entertaining. MacAdams did not have access to Hecht's papers, nor did Rose Hecht, the author's widow, give MacAdams appreciable help. MacAdams read Hecht's stories and novels (now dated) and saw the films Hecht wrote, or helped write, or doctored, such as Scarface, The Front Page, Stagecoach, Wuthering Heights, Gone with the Wind, Spellbound and The Man with the Golden Arm. He taped a huge number of interviews with those who knew and worked with Hecht, and from these materials he fashioned a book aimed, it seems, at a popular audience. Hecht was never at a loss for words, was never unable to spin out a plausible outline for a play or film and was never involved for more than a short time on any one project before hurrying on to some other profitable writing assignment. His life and loves were played out at a furious pace. His own autobiographic accounts reveal an unreflective person who exaggerated and shaped his materials to suit his own purposes.
MacAdams' filmography is valuable, but mostly he relates neatly encapsulated stories, dropping Broadway and Hollywood names by the hundreds. The reader does not learn much about the workings of the Chicago newspaper world or the Hollywood dream factories or Hecht's inner life, but MacAdams' fast-paced biography is consistently entertaining. For puzzlement I turn to Ruth Miller's peculiar book on the life and works of Saul Bellow. In 1938 Miller was a first-year student at Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College in Chicago, and the young Bellow was her English instructor. They became acquaintances or friends (it is not certain from the text which word is more appropriate), and after their meetings she made journal entries about their conversations. In the introduction Miller exposes the heart of the problem with her book: "To thank Saul Bellow for the many hours of conversations we have shared over a long span of years may suggest he is in part responsible for what I have written. He is not. Indeed, I understand that Bellow disagrees with much of what I say in this book and, I am told, now denies having said many of the things I quite clearly recall him saying, things I often recorded in my journal at the time. Of course, I must stand by my memory and my notes. I express my gratitude to him for allowing me to read his letters and papers deposited in the archives of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, although he ultimately decided not to let me quote from them." Bellow is notoriously secretive about his private life. Does he disagree with much of what Miller writes because she is inaccurate or because she is accurate? Why did he refuse her permission to quote from his letters? Are the two no longer on speaking terms? The mysteries are many fathoms deep. Miller's method is often reductive. In a typical example she puts down something Bellow said to her (or something she says Bellow said to her, if his disavowal is correct) such as, "When I asked Bellow to explain to me what he wished to do as an artist, he answered with an anecdote about his childhood." She then gives the anecdote and finds that Bellow reworks this very story in More Die of Heartbreak. In her discussion of Bellow's Seize the Day she offers a sophomoric plot summary and ends with a story about her family which she believes was translated into the novel. When her father-in-law died in 1952, her father arrived late at Weinstein's Funeral Home: "There were several 'parlors' in the funeral home and he went quickly into the first one, got in line, and walked to the bier to pay his respects. Standing before the coffin, he looked down and saw a total stranger. As he told us later, 'I knew it wasn't Kriesberg because this guy wore glasses and Kriesberg always had good eyesight.' Many times I told my father that his mistake became one of the most famous scenes in contemporary American fiction. All he said was, 'It's true. I didn't recognize anyone from his side. I couldn't find the old lady.' And he struck a match to light his cigar and waited for me to pour him a cup of coffee." When did Miller tell Bellow this story? The reader is not told. Miller does not seem to be aware that in her version of the story her father is callous and comic, certainly not the way his "counterpart" is depicted in the mortuary episode in Seize the Day. She does not show how Bellow changes the scene (if indeed he knew her story) for his own artistic purposes. Miller's "biography of the imagination" (as she styles it) covers Bellow's life and writings for 50 years or so beginning in 1938. Her book should be used with caution, and readers should be prepared to be puzzled. Ellen Pifer's book is consistently informative, though the writing is densely academic. She has read Bellow and his June 1992/Illinois Issues/27 Book Reviews scholarly critics carefully; she has definite ideas of her own, which she reaches after examining the evidence. She discusses all of Bellow's novels and some of his short fiction, and she knows how to present the evidence to support her thesis: "Each of Bellow's protagonists is divided against himself .... The conflict that arises in Bellow's characters stems... from the tendency ... to confuse reasoned analysis with metaphysical truth — and to uphold analytic methods as proof against the exigencies of spirit."
That thesis works well. In her discussion of the mortuary scene in Seize the Day, for instance, Pifer sees that when Wilhelm weeps for the dead stranger he experiences "deep feeling" and that he weeps for every "human creature." She concludes: "More significant than the 'reckoning' of Wilhelm's worldly losses and failures is the value Bellow accords his protagonist's capacity to feel and suffer ...." Pifer understands Wilhelm's emotional release, as Miller does not. Pifer is a sophisticated reader of Bellow's fiction. She convincingly demonstrates that Bellow goes against the secular grain of contemporary culture by asserting spiritual values. Hers is not an easy book to read, but of the three books under review here it is the most authoritative. I do recommend that the reader discard the dust jacket, for the illustration on the cover — a drawing of Bellow's head, split down the middle — is both offensive and without artistic merit. Don't let the inferior art work influence your reading of Pifer's intelligent study. George Hendrick is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has recently published books on such Illinois writers as Mark Van Doren, Carl Sandburg and James Jones. 28/June 1992/Illinois Issues |
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