Eggheads in Love
Book reviewed: More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow
One of Saul Bellow’s less well-known works, More Die of Heartbreak is the story of a bromance between Kenneth Trachtenberg, a Russian studies scholar and narrator of the novel, and his uncle Benn Crader, a renowned botanist. Kenneth, who grew up in the sophisticated Parisian home of his American but staunchly Francophile parents, has swapped the pleasures of the City of Light for an unglamorous teaching job in the US Midwest, where he can be close to his uncle. Being close to his uncle is something of a full-time job. Crader is a Luftmensch, “one of those special types who are all right until they get into the common life. Once in the mainstream, however, they can’t make it without protection.” When Crader ties the knot with Matilda Layamon, he finds himself in need of all the protection he can get. There is a price for marrying a wealthy beauty half one’s age, and Crader’s new in-laws quickly sock him with the bill. His family was once involved in litigation with an unscrupulous wheeling-dealing relative who had stiffed them, a certain Vilitzer. Now that the elderly Vilitzer is facing health problems and a government probe into his operations, the venal Layamons pressure Crader into blowing the dust off the hoary legal case to shake Vilitzer down. Before long, Crader is knee-deep in the “common life” and needs to wade through it to keep his wife. His nephew Kenneth tries to help, but in matters of the heart one has to fly solo, and besides, Kenneth has women problems of his own. He is suffering from an intense amatory hangover after a relationship with a woman named Treckie Sterling, who bore him a daughter but soon decamped to Seattle to start a new life, leaving Kenneth to ruminate on his inadequacies.
More Die of Heartbreak is vintage Bellow — heavyweight intellectuals whose Old World souls struggle to adjust to the dog-eat-dog reality of the New World. They don’t know what to make of their destiny, what it should be, and even what they want it to be. Kenneth, whose childhood dinners featured Kojève and other luminaries entertained by his parents at their Paris home, has ambivalent feelings about America. On the one hand, it is “where the action is now”; its contrasts, extremes, and absurdities make the US the perfect stage for a modern human comedy of a Balzacian sweep. Kenneth thinks there is “no reason to exist unless you believe you can make your life a turning point,” and what better place to give it a shot than America. On the other hand, as a Florida woman told me recently in an Italian espresso bar, the US is a great country if you are rich and don’t give a shit about anyone else. This is one of the facts of life, or at least it sounds like one, and there is no use bellyaching about those. But it’s hard to be a “Citizen of Eternity” — a figure whom, Kenneth says, we think about and by whom we make our souls — in a land of unbridled consumerism. America does not need Citizens of Eternity; it needs the Vilitzers and Layamons of the world. Not that they get away unscathed. For all their success, the toll that self-enrichment takes can be significant: Vilitzer is about to be indicted by the authorities, and Crader’s father-in-law, Dr. Layamon, is “mentally on skid row.” But then such people are at low risk of dying from heartbreak. Vilitzer succumbs to (mild spoiler here) an aorta rupture, his own heart having been disturbed by normal wear and tear and a pacemaker, never heartbreak.
The title of the novel struck me as schmaltzy at first, but it is actually very apt. Interviewed by a newspaperman about the danger of rising radiation levels, Crader says that more people die of heartbreak than radiation. The remark is inspired by a tragicomic entanglement with a lonely neighbor who showed up on his doorstep one night. Unable to resist her advances, Crader spent the night with the woman; when he balked at any further developments, she besieged the front door of his apartment, demanding to know what she was to do with her sexuality. Following his protocol for dealing with relationships that have reached their expiry date, Crader fled the country; by the time he returned, the woman had died. The official cause was cardiac arrest, but Crader and Kenneth are convinced it was the lack of love that had killed her. Heartbreak is sweeping across the US, killing untold numbers. It seems Bellow believed it himself; he certainly suggested as much in a 1996 conversation with Lawrence Grobel. Acknowledging that things had been going downhill for a while (since the times of Rousseau, to be exact), he said the sexual revolution had been the death knell for love. By making people interchangeable, it had turned them into commodities. Capitalism had taken over — but the ethos of the market economy is inimical to love. There is no finality to any relationship when you can always get a refund.
Kenneth and Crader, along with the other lovelorn characters, are therefore looking for something that no longer exists, with predictable results. The women who come their way treat them not as soulmates but resources. Matilda wants Crader to go after his uncle Vilitzer so that they can move into a luxury apartment Crader doesn’t need and entertain people Crader doesn’t want to see. Kenneth’s Treckie is less materialistic, but her businesslike manner is equally off-putting. When Kenneth flies to Seattle to confront Treckie about her decision to marry another man, Treckie informs him that, as far as the custody of their daughter goes, he “should have some input. I agree to that.” These are the kinds of women who present their men with long laundry lists and force them to see relationship therapists if their orgasms aren’t synchronized. While Bellow’s storied personal life might have informed his jaundiced view of love and relationships in post-1960s America, looking at the dysfunctional social landscape of the Anglo sphere in 2023, I’d say Bellow has a point or two.
The bumbling intellectual making a mess of his love life is one of Bellow’s recurring characters. More Die of Heartbreak has not one but two such “heroes.” Kenneth and Crader are of a piece; both suffer from what can be described, to use the title of a literary work the Russian scholar Kenneth would have appreciated, the Woe From Wit Syndrome. They are well-read intellectuals with first-rate minds, but their enormous noetic prowess fails them when it comes to their personal lives. All that cerebral power is a hindrance to happiness. Kenneth, as someone says of him, is the type of person who thinks over things until they disappear entirely, and the same is true of Crader. Kenneth tosses names like Berdyaev and Solovyov as if they were a Frisbee, and Crader might be the world’s top authority on the morphology of North Pole lichens, but when it comes to swimming in the “mainstream,” they struggle to stay afloat.
A search for clues about this phenomenon will take us much further than Griboedov’s classic play Woe from Wit, all the way to the Book of Genesis. Contrary to the standard interpretations of the forbidden fruit story, the fall of man is not about a (sexual) loss of innocence, disobedience, or temptation, at least not primarily. It is more about the perils of knowledge — not just knowing the difference between good and evil, but knowing as such. Ignorance is literally bliss, knowledge a curse. The forbidden fruit is akin to the fire that Prometheus gave man. In both cases, the illicit acquisition was knowledge. Knowledge empowers man to talk back, something he is not supposed to do — “O man, who art thou that repliest against God,” asks Paul (Romans 9:20). Elsewhere in the New Testament, Jesus says the kingdom of heaven belongs to children. This cannot be because children are untainted by sin — according to Christian doctrine, everyone is born in sin, and children are not exempt from confession. A more convincing explanation is that children’s minds are undeveloped and unencumbered by knowledge. Knowledge, then, appears to stand between man and the kingdom of God. This does not at all mean that Christianity is anti-noetic, quite the opposite. Since its early years, the Christian faith has produced a galaxy of highly learned minds, and St. Augustine wrote that philosophy was one of man’s consolations. But he was referring to “true philosophy,” by which he meant the philosophy granted by divine grace and one that was in the service of God. This is certainly not the philosophy of Kenneth and his uncle, who, outside the eyries of their minds, seem to sleepwalk and blunder their way through life. They are certainly unable to derive much pleasure from the “mainstream.” This conforms to real-life experience: people with higher levels of intelligence are more prone to depression, and even faith offers only limited protection in such cases. Rousseauesque bards of primitivism, with their criticism of civilization, sensed this. Simple minds are rarely visited by melancholy. This for me is the main, if unintentional, message of the novel.
More Die of Heartbreak is an uneven book. The narrator tends to return to his favorite topics, and the central themes repeat like Ravel’s Boléro. At one point, Crader explains that his interest in botany was originally spurred by a second person inside him. This reader wondered if Kenneth was that second person, or perhaps if Crader was the second person inside Kenneth — the two are virtually indistinguishable. The other characters are also weakly developed, though Dr. Layamon is rendered vividly — Bellow’s money-grubbing philistines are always memorable. The plot is overwrought, some of the dialogues overcooked, and even the names seem contrived (Kevin Trachtenberg? Matilda Layamon? Treckie Sterling?). A good deal of the novel consists of intellectual onanism; its preoccupations are trivial and petty in the big scheme of things. But then just about everything is, in the big scheme of things. Bellow is Bellow even when he is not pulling out all the stops, and a reader willing to plough through some of Kenneth’s more arid disquisitions will be rewarded. While not one of Bellow’s best novels, More Die of Heartbreak has its delights all the same.
