A Political Companion to Saul Bellow

6. "Washed Up on the Shores of Truth": Saul Bellow’s Post-Holocaust America

129 6 “Washed Up on the Shores of Truth”: Saul Bellow’s Post-Holocaust America Victoria Aarons In a 1987 letter to the American Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow , Nobel laureate and novelist of vast intellectual depth and complexity, acknowledged what for him was a failure of reckoning. The overwhelming event of the Holocaust, in Bellow’s words, “a crime so vast that it brings all Being into Judgment,” was met by American intellectuals in the years following the war with an unconscionable silence, a reprehensible disregard for that which defined the failure of the civilized world.1 For Bellow, the silence imposed upon the known events of the Holocaust, “the destruction of European Jewry,” amounted to an unforgivable restraint among those who should have assumed the censuring voice of America’s conscience. In the immediate aftermath of the war, writers, intellectuals, and artists might have brought to the forefront of modern sensibilities what was surely an irrevocably defining moment of the twentieth century.2 In exposing the appalling brutality and pathology of German anti-Semitism and Nazi legislation —in Bellow’s words, the “forces of deformity that produced the Final Solution”—as well as criticizing the belatedness of America’s intervention in a war that might have been averted or at the very least abbreviated, the voices of American writers, and, as Bellow cautions, in particular, “Jewish Writers in America,” heedlessly missed the opportunity to shape public response to the incalculable loss of human lives and to the atrocities instituted by the Nazi regime.3 Inexplicably, those whose influence helped shape modern thought and whose censure might have created a public moral reckoning remained silent. And this turning away from what, in Bellow’s words, was 130 Victoria Aarons “the central event of their time,” constituted a personal as well as a shared failure for Bellow and his generation of writers.4 In writing to Cynthia Ozick, whose own literature challenges the limitations of expression in Holocaust narratives, Bellow admits to a failure of moral and literary courage: “I can’t say how our responsibility can be assessed. We . . . should have reckoned more fully, more deeply with [the Holocaust]. Nobody in America seriously took this on and only a few Jews elsewhere (like Primo Levi) were able to comprehend it all . . . but in the matter of higher comprehension . . . there were no minds fit to comprehend. . . . All parties . . . are passing the buck and every honest conscience feels the disgrace of it.”5 For Bellow, the omission of the Holocaust in literary discourse in the direct aftermath of the war remained disquieting. His lingering sense of ambivalence, not about the nature of the events of the Holocaust—for him “the most atrocious [war] in history”—but about the value of literature in performing any useful function in explaining those events seems something of an uncharacteristic hesitancy from a writer such as Bellow, an intellectual whose critical commentary on the transgressions and pathologies of twentieth-century life and thought have defined him throughout his career.6 But this nagging ambivalence seems to have shadowed Bellow throughout a half century of prolific literary accomplishment and enormous influence on twentieth-century American letters. As late as 1990, Bellow persisted in asking, “What would writing about [the Holocaust] have altered?”7 In so doing, Bellow raises the persistent question of the representation of the Holocaust in literature and, more generally, of the role of the artist in the expression of atrocity. As Bellow candidly confesses, his priorities, not unlike America’s collective opportunism in the increasing plenty of the years following World War II, might be characterized as self-interest at the expense of conscious awareness, not only of the political events of his time, but of the human condition forever altered by, as Bellow put it, “a singular kind of madness.”8 Of course, for the intellectual, self-deception, a willful and willed obliviousness to a higher consciousness, is the most unforgiveable deceit as well as the one most difficult to maintain. And Bellow was, after all, in his own characterization, a writer of utmost honesty, critical probing, and ironic, self-critical reflection. As Bellow readily acknowledges, I was too busy becoming a novelist to take note of what was happening in the Forties. I was involved with “literature” and given over to preoccupations “Washed Up on the Shores of Truth” 131 with art, with language, with my struggle on the...