More Die of Heartbreak, Saul Bellow’s tenth novel, was published in 1987. The narrator, Kenneth Trachtenberg, is a transplant from Paris to an unnamed Midwestern city and college where he teaches Russian Literature. He has also gone West to be closer to his uncle Benn Crader, a highly distinguished botanist, and their dialogue comprises much of the work. The dialogue and the narrative voice alike are characterized by Benn’s “associational anarchy”, which seems to have influenced his nephew, getting them at some speed from God and Adam, through Chekhov, to Akim Tamiroff in The Great McGinty (?), or from Hitchcock, through Whistler’s Mother, to John Donne’s “Die not, poor Death”. Bellow had written of his earlier novel Herzog (1964) that its dense referentiality had been misunderstood, that he had “meant the novel to show how little strength 'higher education' had to offer a troubled man.” In More Die of Heartbreak, there is certainly copious education, much of it self-directed, attached to the author and to his main men, Kenneth and Benn. Its inadequacy is more obvious here, particularly when it is to be put in service of marriage, a “universal human aim which shouldn’t be so hard to accomplish.” Modern degeneracies have changed things, Bellow says, and the mind necessarily lags behind those developments. But putting aside the love theme, it’s the old problem of the individual versus the mass, an inherited preoccupation of Tolstoy’s that Bellow had acknowledged in Herzog (“The higher one stands in the scale of power, the more his actions are determined.”)
Whether the individual even really exists, a question to be handled before the individual-mass question can even be addressed. Bellow dismisses it by page 14, and attributes doubt on Benn’s part to that eccentric’s anxiety: “So that when Benn sounded off about the complexities of existence and talked about “social determinants” you didn’t take him seriously, since what you saw when he was bearing down on you was not the gaze of a man formed by “social determinants””. And that gaze is not only inviolably individual, but transformative of what it fixes itself upon: “The eye sockets resembled a figure eight lying on its side and this occasionally had the effect of turning you topsy-turvy and put strange thoughts into your head—like: This is the faculty of seeing; of seeing itself, what eyes are actually for.” Kenneth later rejects Feuerbach’s deterministic “You are what you eat” in favor of William Blake’s “As a man sees, so he is.” Benn’s hungry eyes are synecdoche enough for him, at least until Kenneth gets some hearsay about his home life. All this to say that Bellow and Kenneth believe man “is”, in some irreducible way. But if disconnection from others is a horror, (More Die of Heartbreak), being is clearly not enough. And if man is in isolation both incoherent and predictable, there may be little comfort even in communion; Kenneth and Benn have both been reading Admiral Byrd’s memoirs, Alone, which tell them that “The time comes when one has nothing to reveal to the other, when even his unformed thoughts can be anticipated, his pet ideas become a meaningless drool.”
Bellow and Kenneth certainly have a lot of pet ideas. Benn, unlike either, has his botany, and plants are more compliant than pets. Kenneth calls him “a Jew who moves into the vegetable kingdom,” the figure of the Jew being understood as a combination of the archaic and the modern. “If I were a painter,” he writes (adapting a primitivist work), “I should picture Uncle together, with a tree, as a pair, as associates or buddies.” Kenneth is at times admiring of the free society that allowed Benn this movement, but there is a preemptive mockery of Benn, the manifestation of the “venturesome child”, as any sort of American ideal: “There are crackpot ideologists who will argue that this was an achievement of capitalism. But that’s like saying that Athens made Alcibiades.” He’s bringing us back to world history, away from the intellectual stakes of the Cold War, and to the celebrated singular vision (Benn’s eyes), which are in some way detached from circumstance.
Even in marriage to the very eligible Matilda Layamon, daughter of a wealthy midwestern doctor, Uncle Benn remains detached, though Kenneth had feared he’d be utterly domesticated. Benn’s and Matilda’s mutual unknowability, which Kenneth calls “One of those mercies which permit the flow of life to continue,” allows Benn the time and intellectual energy to stay in communion with his plants, which by contrast to the inscrutable Matilda are mindless, and essentially extroverted: “Highly structured, they gave no signs of consciousness as we understood it. Atop a world of rock, they were succulent, they breathed, they reached outwards.” Bellow’s people, as against Benn’s plants, are never so highly structured and open to inquiry.
Benn’s botany, much as Kenneth would wish to understand it as a primal man-nature relation, is really all about the specifics. “Upon request, by shutting his eyes, he could name you all the parts of the storage organ of a given plant down to the hairlets.” His minute knowledge, “more complete than the text”, should be contrasted with Kenneth’s grand theories, which “were nothing but trouble if you entertained them indiscriminately.” The Hedgehog-Fox scheme that separates uncle and nephew is drawn more clearly when the younger man is frustrated by their conversation: “The part of me that was philosophic didn’t have much use for Uncle’s details. I was occasionally impatient with his emphasis on his particulars. Yet even then I often suspected that my abstracts were more treacherous than his specifics.” This treachery has alienated Kenneth from the mother of his child, Treckie. At dinner with a friend, the engaging and far more loyal Dita, the problem appears attributable to others. “Understanding has amounts to nothing if you have nobody to communicate it to,” as Kenneth writes, and Treckie, who has fled to Seattle with the daughter and taken up with a bruiser of a man, Ronald the ski instructor, has little interest in his theories.
Whether because his field involves grand distant ideas, rather than calyxes, sepals, and papillae, or because he can’t project himself into an Edenic tableau as he can his Uncle, Kenneth is much more the modern monad than even he may realize. Venturing out of that field to describe his wish for union with Treckie, he writes, “I have sometimes stated the case of Treckie in subatomic terms: Particle A carries the charge specifically needed by Particle B, True affinity.” Added to his anxiety about his Uncle’s self-annihilation through marriage, and about his distance from Treckie, there is an individual rather than personal worry. Kenneth may be gesturing with a grand narrative aside toward a far worse fate, lamenting “how far we’ve fallen below the classical Greek standard,” having “split things in two, dividing the physique from the mind.” If some time after the apparently sustainable resolution of the narrative (Benn leaves his wife and Kenneth gains custody of his daughter), there’s further trouble and division at Kenneth’s atomic level, then the outcome will be far more destructive than anything he has consciously imagined, Bellow’s novel will look a lot more like a Cold War novel in the paranoid sense, and the claim of its title (Benn’s), that there are more deaths from heartbreak than from atomic radiation, will be proven naive. Or if “heartbreak” is to be understood differently, true in a non-aphoristic way. Bellow, in an apparent denigration of the British novel, has already told us to move past aphorism, and shown us how he’s trying to do better:
As E.M. Forster once said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” This is true, as far as it goes. Englishmen, however, are so often pleased with a striking beginning that they stop right there. The next requirement is to carry your thought forward, to take it out of the category of bright sayings.