SOURCE: Charyn, Jerome. “Inside the Hornet's Head.” Midstream 49, no. 6 (September-October 2003): 17-22.

[In the following essay, Charyn states that the lasting legacy of The Adventures of Augie March is the novel's profound influence on generations of Jewish American writers and readers.]

1.

I did not stumble upon [The Adventures of Augie March] lightly. I gave it as a gift to the most beautiful girl in my high school class, Valerie K. Hadn't it won awards? And wasn't it about a Jewish bumpkin like myself? (So I'd heard secondhand). I meant the book to bring me closer to Valerie, but it never did. And then, a year or two later, I actually read it and was overwhelmed by its bounty. It was a book that never stopped to breathe, and I was breathless in its wake. Leslie Fiedler calls it “unlike anything else in English except Moby Dick.” It had the same largeness of imagination … and a wondrous eagle called Caligula instead of a white whale.

But it was much more than that. It was a model and a manifest for a boy from the Bronx, a kind of open-sesame into the art of writing. I'd been nowhere, had seen nothing outside my own little ghetto: all I had was a crazy babble of tongues, an exalted gangster talk, a mingling of Yiddish, Russian, and all the books I'd ever read—whole scenes ripped from Anna Karenina, whose heroine would have been much better served in the Bronx, where we loved tall, aristocratic women with husbands that were beneath their dignity—all the dialogue from every film I'd ever seen, which included the entire repertoire of MGM and the other majors, and the rough but chivalrous language of the street, where we were all knights in pegged pants. And when Augie says that “we are meant to be carried away by the complex and hear the simple like the far horn of Roland when he and Oliver are being wiped out by the Saracens,” I knew what the hell he was talking about.

Augie's adventures have little to do with the magical places he visits—the mountains of Mexico or the plains of Paris. They are only desiderata, icons, throwaways, bits and pieces of décor in a landscape that shifts right under our feet and sends us scrambling onto the next page and the next. Augie, says Leslie Fiedler, is “a footloose Jewish boy [who] becomes Huck Finn,” with his own Mississippi—a river of words. If the Mississippi gives Huck a godlike strength, nurtures him, soothes him, allows him to shove beyond the perimeter of his own lies, then it is language that soothes Saul Bellow and carries Augie March from adventure to adventure, so that he is never used up, no matter how much narrative is crammed into a single sentence. The book is a constant rush of dialogue and detail, of shenanigans and magic tricks, or as Bellow himself writes in “Where Do We Go from Here: The Future of Fiction,” the modern hero is “an oddly dispersed, ragged, mingled, broken, amorphous creature whose outlines are everywhere, whose being is bathed in mind as the tissues are bathed in blood, and who is impossible to circumscribe in any scheme of time.” He's a “cubistic” character, an “uncertain, eternal, mortal, someone who shuts and opens like a concertina and makes a strange music.”

To read The Adventures of Augie March is to live inside a hornet's head—to hear and feel an endless clatter … whose sting is a source of terror and delight. We cannot recover from Augie March. Its sting remains with us for life. And we have to ask why. Part of the answer is in Bellow's bona fides. Born in Quebec in 1915, he grew up in Chicago's South Side ghetto during the reign of America's most notorious beer baron, Al Capone—and almost all of Bellow's male characters in Augie March have some kind of gangster mentality. They strut, they wear swell clothes, and they bully us with their words, which Fiedler reminds us, land “like kisses or blows.” And they capture the tumult of the city. Like George Gershwin, who had his share of little wars on Manhattan's Lower East Side, another cradle of gangsters [and Capone's original turf], he was raised “in the heart of noise.” As one of Gershwin's own colleagues said: “He hears the noise and finds music in it.” And Augie March might be considered Bellow's own “Rhapsody in Blue,” but with a much more hysterical and alarming beat.

“I am American, Chicago born,” Bellow insists at the very beginning of the novel, “and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style and will make the record in my own way.” We're not caught within some ghetto tale, a lightning rise from rags to riches, a celebration of America's ability to spit out righteous little citizens—noble, healthy, and clean. Augie is a monster of the New World, more American than America itself. And we have to examine this within the context of the Jewish-American writer. It's not the success of Augie March that's startling—a Book of the Month selection and winner of the National Book Award for fiction [it was published in 1953]. But suddenly, with one blow, like a fist coming out of nowhere, Saul Bellow made “[h]is appearance as the first Jewish-American novelist to stand at the center of American literature,” as Fiedler says. It's hard to grasp this fifty years after the fact. But Jewish-American writers had always lived in a terrible kind of ghetto, as if they were quaint little children, talented ventriloquists who were miming the American idiom for their Yankee readers, and if they were good, they might be rewarded with a few leftovers and shown off as the most current Jewish clown … until another clown was discovered and took this clown's place. They were entertainers, dimwits, who couldn't really enter the canon of American literature, like Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, or Edith Wharton and Eudora Welty, when women began to be noticed as writers, rather than quaint knitters of patchquilt prose. Henry James, America's first “experimental” writer, who understood the music and the hieroglyphics of modern fiction, couldn't even fathom the idea of a Jewish-American writer. When he visited the Lower East Side in 1907, he was repelled by what he saw and heard in “the flaring streets. … There is no swarming like that of Israel when once Israel has got its start,” he writes in The American Scene. He discovered “a Jewry that had burst all bounds.” He worried over “the Hebrew conquest of New York.” And East Side cafés were nothing but “torture-rooms of the living idiom.”

James's words were echoed in every English Department of every prominent university in the United States, where Jews couldn't possibly teach English literature, because they couldn't enter into the spirit of Milton, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, no matter how hard they mimed. Lionel Trilling, the son of a Bronx tailor, and America's most eloquent literary critic, was the first American Jew to receive tenure in the English Department of an Ivy League school [Columbia], and it didn't happen until 1945! The tailor's boy had already published books on Matthew Arnold and E. M. Forster, essays on Sherwood Anderson, Kipling, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and would soon publish essays on Henry James and Huckleberry Finn. And he might never have taught at Columbia if he hadn't had such a melodious name—Lionel Trilling. Also, by 1945, America—and much of the world—had begun to change. The first images of GIs liberating the ghostly remains of Hitler's concentration camps had brought attention to the Jews, and a kind of niggling sympathy that almost humanized them. It was the Jewish freedom fighters and terrorists of the Haganah and the Irgun that finally altered the psychological and symbolic landscape, as Jews were seen as warriors rather than victims, and as “winners” once the State of Israel was voted into existence in 1948. America was now ready for Bellow's “atomic bomb.” The country seemed to need an urban myth, as “relentless urbanization [had made] rural myths and images no longer central to our experience,” according to Fiedler.

Bellow had literally concocted a new America in Augie March, with language as American as the Mississippi, and with rhythms that seemed to incorporate Faulkner, Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson, as if Bellow were a country boy and a city boy at the same time, rural and urban, and as if his concertina could include every strand of music out of America's past … except for one, that of Ernest Hemingway. In his best stories, Hemingway was a minimalist who believed, with Flaubert, that each particular sentence was an island unto itself, that the white space between sentences could contain an entire planet, and that the real thunder of a text derived from the reader's own imagination. The reader connected these islands inside his head. He (or she) was as much the creator as “Hem.” But Bellow's own daring was to narrow that space between sentences, almost eliminate it, as if he returned to the picaresque of Fielding and Cervantes, but with a modern twist—the hero is as schizoid and haunted as the 20th century. And Augie is always around, exhausting the reader with his parodies and puns, his constant riffs, thrusting the reader right inside the hornet's head, where he experienced Augie March like an abundance of battlefields …

2.

And so America had a king, at least that part of America that could read a book. Just as Dostoevsky had said that all Russian writers of fiction had come out from under Gogol's overcoat (Gogol had written a bizarre, surreal story about a stolen overcoat that assumes a life of its own), so American writers at mid-century, Jews and gentiles, had come out from under the wings of Caligula, Bellow's eagle who “crackled his feathers or hissed as if snow was sliding.” Suddenly the novel had burst out of its narrative skin and had become an assault on language itself, a great whooping war cry. And other warriors and adventurers, demonic jokesters, including Nabokov, Pynchon, John Hawkes, and John Barth, would soon gain acceptance and recognition in good part because of Bellow. I doubt that Gunther Grass's The Tin Drum and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude would have found many followers in the U.S. if there had been no Augie March to initiate readers into the notion that a novel could be a jungle of words … or a much wilder thing. Even Faulkner, the wildest of American novelists after Melville, was grounded in his imagined South, his “postage stamp” of Yoknapatawpha County, and Bellow was grounded in nothing at all. Like Caligula, his language could soar and then rocker down into some abyss. No one was safe, neither Augie March nor the reader.

But Bellow's book would give a particular nudge to Jewish-American writers, make them visible for the first time, not as ventriloquists, but as human beings with a singular vision and voice that could reach across America. Bellow himself would help Isaac Bashevis Singer (an immigrant who'd arrived in America as an adult and wrote exclusively in Yiddish) with a superb and stunning translation of “Gimpel the Fool.” And the fire that Bellow breathed into the story, his own magical rhythm, came from Bellow's largeness of spirit, the almost Talmudic need of one master to recognize another. Singer's concerns are less elliptical than Bellow's, but in “Gimpel,” at least, we can find a prototype of Augie March—the dreamer who weaves stories out of the air—yet Augie's world is comic, and Singer's comedy spills into nightmare.

Bellow would also solidify the reputation of a younger writer, Philip Roth, in Commentary, a magazine that was one of the first to value this new, farcical American voice that could often be so mocking of Jews themselves. In the late forties (Commentary was founded in 1945), the fifties and early sixties, the magazine didn't follow any pattern of “political correctness.” Under Elliot Cohen, Theodore Solotaroff, and Norman Podhoretz (at first), the magazine seemed eager to experiment and to discover and sustain new writers. Singer, Roth, and Bernard Malamud were all published with a certain regularity and rhythm within its pages.

Malamud and Roth would both win the National Book Award in the 1950s, after Augie March, and with books of stories rather than novels, a difficult feat, since publishers hated books of stories—stories weren't supposed to sell. The three of them—Bellow, Malamud, and Roth—were soon called the Hart Schaffner & Marx of American fiction (Hart Schaffner & Marx being an upscale Jewish clothier that dressed successful Jewish gangsters, singers, actors—the whole hoi polloi). Bellow would remain the spiritual father of this little club, with Singer as a kind of kissing cousin from an older world.

But there were more immediate cousins, like Stanley Elkin, Herbert Gold, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Tillie Olsen, Leonard Michaels, and Leonard Cohen, who had the same sense of danger in their prose, a crazy concertina with its own variety of registers that could play on and on without the need to end. Elkin seems the closest to Bellow in his insistence upon the mingling of high and low styles, rhetoric and tough-guy talk, and his first novel, Boswell (1964), is like a mirror world of Augie March, homage in the form of parody. Elkin, Paley, Ozick, and Roth all have a particular thing in common with Bellow—the invention of an idiolect that has exploded traditional English, flooded it with rhythms that had never been there before, given it an elasticity and an electrical pull. It's hardly an accident. Elkin's language, like Bellow's, is a lethal weapon, a dive bomber readying to attack the American heartland, to take revenge on a white Protestant culture that had excluded all minorities for so long (not just Afro-Americans and Jews), but the attack is always masked; it comes with a kiss, with a jibe and a bit of buffoonery. One can find the same sabotage in the films of Woody Allen, like Annie Hall (1977), where Allen's alter ego, Albie Singer, attacks all of America outside of New York City, and still managed to win an Academy Award as best picture of the year …

But Bellow's attack is buried in the nucleus of his book; Augie's an orphan of sorts who never knew his dad. It's as if that monster, Augie March, gave birth to himself. “Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand. … I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America.”

And that's how the novel ends, with Augie the self-creator bumping along on his little lifeboat of words.

3.

Perhaps the most lasting and powerful legacy of Augie March is that it inspired an archeological dig—it helped bring back forgotten masterpieces such as Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. First published in 1934, the novel slept in its own sarcophagus until all the brouhaha began to broil around the Jewish musketeers of Hart Schaffner & Marx. The book was republished in 1962 by a small press; I happened to grab hold of a copy and instantly fell into the dream of its “Mississippi,” a marriage of James Joyce and ghetto English and Yiddish of the Lower East Side. I was a little priest of literature at the time and brought Call It Sleep to my editor, Robert G., who was about to publish my own first novel.

“Bob,” I said, “it's a … masterpiece. Read it. You gotta publish it in a bigger edition. I'll be the editor. We'll make a million.”

I was a wild child, his wild child, and we would have lunch twice a week at Barbetta's, a north Italian restaurant on West 46th Street favored by Mafia chieftains and rich, melancholy men with melancholy mistresses and wives. I'm not quite sure what else Bob did other than take me to lunch. He'd come out of Cornell, had scribbled a novel of his own, and was a senior editor at a publishing house whose prodigy I'd become. They were banking on me as the next Saul Bellow, which just proves how much magic Bellow had in 1964 and how “innocent” Bob was, since every major publishing house was banking on another Bellow or two. The king had just come out with Herzog, which was a much bigger bombshell than Augie March, Moses Herzog was like a relative of Joyce's Leopold Bloom, but I didn't have the same affection for him as I'd had for Augie March. Herzog, we're told, likes to make love in the missionary position, and I couldn't imagine Augie, with all his slurpings, ever saying that. No matter. Herzog was number one on the bestseller list.

I was drinking white wine with Bob. I knew nothing about white wine. The novel I'd written was about an aging Yiddish actor on Second Avenue. I hadn't seen too many Yiddish actors, but I'd tramped the Lower East Side as a kid and had discovered pictures of the great stars, like Maurice Schwartz and Molly Picon, in the lobby of a decrepit theatre next to the Williamsburg Bridge. Still, the book seemed authentic enough to Bob. Bashevis Singer had sent him a letter declaring that his protégé and wild child had a mysterious understanding of cafeteria culture. Bob liked to keep the letter in his wallet and wave it to me during lunch.

“That's our meal ticket,” he'd say, showing off in front of the waiters, who adored him, because Bob was as loyal to Barbetta's as the Mafia chiefs. There weren't many other editors around, since most publishers, like Viking and Holt, were on the East Side, but a couple of young editors happened to be in the restaurant. And Bob would gloat with that letter in his hand.

“Fellas, meet Jerome. He doesn't write. He paints—like Chagall, swear to God.”

The first chapter of my novel had just been published in Commentary, and these young editors pretended to have seen it. “Your kid's a comer,” they said. “Roth and Malamud had better make a little room … Book of the Month Club, Bob. Or at least a Pulitzer.”

They were con artists and flatterers, and when they returned to their table, I brought up Call It Sleep. But Bob wouldn't bite at whatever little bait I had.

“It's old-fashioned,” he said. “I couldn't even finish the book.”

A month or two later a pocket edition of Call It Sleep appeared, and was reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, which rarely ever happened to a reprinted book. The reviewer was Irving Howe, another member of the Jewish “gangster” critics, with Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler, who'd risen out of the ghetto to reinterpret all of American literature. Howe celebrated Call It Sleep, and it would go on to sell more than a million copies and bring Henry Roth, who'd become a chicken farmer and slaughterer in Maine, back from the dead. Roth might have remained a chicken slaughterer if Augie March hadn't exploded upon the landscape and redefined the parameters of American literature; but one writer Augie wasn't able to rescue was Anzia Yezierska, who flourished in the 1920s as a kind of ghetto princess, received much more acclaim than Henry Roth … and a Hollywood contract, and then fell into complete silence until 1950 when she published a novel-cum-memoir, Red Ribbon on a White Horse, about her own unraveling as a writer. Like Saul Bellow, she'd worked in the WPA Writers Project during the Depression (a kafkaesque federal relief agency that paid writers to produce by the “pound”). But Bellow went from writers' relief to the Merchant Marines in the middle of World War II (like Augie March), to a teaching job at Bard College, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948, and to a stint in Europe, where he wrote much of Augie March, just as Augie claims to be writing his own memoirs while he sits in Paris.

The fact is that Yezierska fell into fashion … and fell out. And she never belonged to that same wild school as Bellow and Paley and Elkin and Gold and Philip Roth. How could she? She wasn't born into English, hadn't learnt it as some brat in the streets of Chicago or the Bronx. It would never have the elasticity of Augie March; there was a much different kind of hornet inside her head, the music of lament …

No one really knows when she was born. It was around 1880. There were no birth certificates in her Polish shtetl. She arrived in America in 1901, according to Irving Howe, who documents her story with a great deal of tenderness in The World of Our Fathers (a monumental study of the migration to America of East European Jews). I would never have tumbled onto her without Irving Howe. The name stuck in my head, Anzia Yezierska, like a tiny, poetic lexicon that was as strange and oddly familiar as the Old World itself. I couldn't call her Yezierska. She was Anzia from the start, like a lost child. Howe made her five years younger (born in 1885), but that was the mask Anzia wished to wear—the “maiden” who'd gone out to Hollywood rather than the forty-year-old. She'd been a servant girl, a charwoman, a sewing machine operator in a sweatshop … and a frustrated professor of cooking She'd studied English at night school like so many greenhorns. But Anzia was different. She started to sew with words. She wanted to become a writer in this borrowed, twisted Yankee tongue. And like Virginia Woolf, she desperately desired a room of her own. “My earliest dream of becoming a writer flashed before me,” she declares in one of the last stories she ever published. “My obsession [was] that I must have a room with a door I could shut. To achieve this I left home. And so I cut myself off not only from my family, but from friends, from people. The door that I felt I must shut to become a writer had shut out compassion, feeling for pain and sorrow, love and joy of friends and neighbors. Father, Mother, sisters, brothers became alien to me, and I became alien to myself.”

Her story, in Howe's hands, has more than a hint of Jewish pathos and melodrama—a miraculous rise out of the ghetto, a journey to Hollywood, “Yiddish accent and all,” a drying up of her talent, a descent into “loneliness and poverty,” with a few books published “but little noticed: all in her fervent signature, pitiful in their transparency.” Then her autobiographical novel at sixty-five (she was closer to seventy), with a title chosen from an old Jewish proverb, says Irving Howe: “Poverty becomes a wise man like a red ribbon on a white horse.” And Howe insists that “[i]n some groping, half-acknowledged way she had returned to the world of her fathers—a final reconciliation, of sorts.”

Her own father was a Talmudic scholar who totally rejected her career as a writer. “A woman alone, not a wife and not a mother, has no existence.”

And Howe wouldn't permit Anzia one little ironic touch. She did indeed wear her poverty “like a red ribbon on a white horse.” But the “old Jewish proverb” was her own, invented by Anzia as a bit of deviltry. What Howe couldn't quite comprehend was that Anzia was a “hunger artist,” like Kafka. “She is destined to eat herself alive forever,” according to Vivian Gornick, who wrote the introduction to Anzia's collected stories in 1991, when a new generation of writers and readers began to resurrect her.

There was so much confusion around such simple facts. Suddenly this isolated priestess of art had a daughter, two husbands, a college degree, a short but not quite love affair and fling with America's foremost “Puritan,” philosopher John Dewey, a different name—Hattie Mayer—and twenty lost years between Hester Street and Hollywood. Red Ribbon on a White Horse is dedicated to her daughter, Louise Levitas, who is never once mentioned in the book. In fact, Anzia tells us in the final chapter: “I too had children. My children were the people I wrote about. I gave my children, born of loneliness, as much of my life as my married sisters did in bringing their children into the world.”

Anzia was hiding, like any hunger artist, but it's thanks to this invisible daughter—abandoned by her mother at four—that we have some image of what Anzia might have been about. Her birth is still unclear. She was the youngest of seven children, born in the Polish-Russian village of Plotsk (often called Plinsk in her own writing). Her family arrived at Castle Garden, an artificial stone island off the Battery, used as a processing station for immigrants before Ellis Island. Levitas believes the Yezierskas arrived around 1890 and were immediately Americanized into the “Mayers.” And Anzia, who was ten at the time, became “Hattie Mayer.” Ten isn't fifteen or twenty, and she might have seized English if she'd labored in the classroom like a little bandit, but her father, a total tyrant in his religious zeal, didn't allow her much schooling, and she had to help support him and the rest of the family. Thus began the saga of Hattie Mayer as a servant girl and seamstress. But in 1899 she would opt for that room of her own, while still supporting her family, and moved into a monklike cell at the Clara de Hirsch Home for working girls. She conned the wealthy patrons at the home into giving her a scholarship to study “domestic science” at Columbia University Teachers College, so that she could return to the ghetto as a cooking teacher with a college degree. But she had to invent a high school diploma for herself, since she'd never been near any high school.

“Domestic science” didn't do her much good. The Board of Education considered her sloppy and unkempt and wouldn't give her a permanent teacher's license. She had to drift from school to school as a substitute teacher. Somewhere in her twenties she decided to write, and the nom de plume she settled on was Anzia Yezierska—her very own name. The truth is that Anzia had no name; she was an invented creature, a forlorn child of the New World, without a language of her own.

In December 1917, after she'd abandoned her child and her second husband and was living like a monk, utterly devoted to the craft of writing in this invented English of hers, she ran to John Dewey, the doyen of education at Columbia. “[B]urning-eyed and red-haired,” she cornered him in his office, hoping he would intervene in her fight with the Board of Ed, and poor John “never knew what hit him,” Vivian Gornick reminds us. A New England “pragmatist,” he was susceptible to gypsies like her. Married, with children of his own, he took Anzia under his wing, permitted her to audit his seminar in philosophy, found her work as a translator on one of his projects, and gave the little gypsy her first typewriter. He would also take walks with her through the Lower East Side. Dewey was reticent. But Anzia clutched at him with her eyes, wouldn't let him retreat. They began to exchange letters on the sly. Anzia lived within the dream of John Dewey as some godlike creature. He worried about his “evasion of life. … I must begin humbly like a child to learn the meaning of life from you.” She remained the hunger artist in spite of loving him and criticized his stilted, academic prose, his “clear head and cold heart.” But his letters were warm and passionate. “In your letters … you are St. Francis, loving the poor.”

The Puritan was obsessed with her, as much as his own nature would allow. “You are translucent,” he wrote while he was on a lecture tour. He began writing poems to Anzia that he hid inside his desk. He talked about his “unillumined duties” and “thoughts which travel th' untracked wild / Of untamed desire.”

Finally, he acted on his desire. He arrived at Anzia's tenement, took her to dinner, and then strolled with her in a neighborhood park. He kissed her, fumbled with her breast, and Anzia's body stiffened against his touch. “His overwhelming nearness, the tense body closing in on me was pushing us apart instead of fusing us,” she would write in Red Ribbon, trying to recapture the moment. “A dark river of distrust rose between us. I had not dreamed that God could become flesh.”

The spell was broken for John. He withdrew from Anzia, asked her for his letters back. She insisted on keeping them. Dewey disappeared on a lecture tour that lasted three years. Her own sentimental education was already over. The hunger artist in Anzia now consumed her. She wrote stories that were rejected everywhere. “The stories had become her whole existence,” writes Louise Levitas. Then magazines began to buy them and soon swallowed her up as the “Sweatshop Cinderella,” even though she hadn't worked in a sweatshop for years. It was the start of the Jazz Age, and readers loved the notion of an immigrant working girl who could deliver the ghetto to them in good English. Samuel Goldwyn bought the film rights to Anzia's first collection of stories, Hungry Hearts, for ten thousand dollars [a fortune in 1920], and beckoned her to Hollywood to work on the script. And Anzia had her revenge. The Board of Education that had shunned her as slovenly invited Anzia to lecture on her book …

Red Ribbon starts with Anzia as a starving writer on Hester Street who receives a telegram that invites her to pack her bags … and she's on her way to Hollywood. “I felt like a beggar who drowned in a barrel of cream.” But Hollywood couldn't satisfy her own hungry heart. It was nothing but a “fish market in evening clothes.” And Anzia left without having written one line. But she'd been picked up by influential journalists, and her portrait appeared in all the Sunday supplements. She went to Europe, met with Joseph Conrad and Gertrude Stein, and on the trip back, she decided to travel steerage like the ordinary immigrant that she had once been. But Anzia couldn't revisit her own past. She was horrified by the stench and the filth, and after one night, she was transferred to second class …

Still, the Jewish Cinderella couldn't last. She kept repeating her own immigrant tales. “I can never learn to plot and plan. It's always a mystery to me how I ever work out a beginning or an end of a story.”

By the end of the decade she'd stopped being a mystery to her readers. Anzia was no longer read. The Depression didn't have much use for ghetto princesses. And she would never regain those lost readers during her lifetime. But she labored continually, often spending two or three years on a single story. “I went on writing and rewriting, possessed by the need to get at something unutterable, that could only be said in the white spaces between the words.” [“The Fat of the Land”]

These white spaces were her own lost language—the Yiddish, Russian, and Polish of her childhood, before America. This is why she was so brutally shut out. Anzia wrote like an amnesiac, with missing musical chords. And the white spaces in her stories unsettle us, because they have all the sadness of the unsaid. One of her most discerning critics. William Lyon Phelps, claimed that Anzia “has, in one sense of the word, no literary style. … In the works of Tolstoy, the style is like plate glass, so perfectly does the plain, simple word fit the thought, but in Anzia Yezierska's tales there is nothing. One does not seem to read, one is too completely inside.”

And Anzia is like the dybbuk of Saul Bellow and all the stylish writers that clustered around him in the sixties; she's that troubled “ancestor” who didn't dare mix the high and the low, who was like some eternal veteran of a night-school war in which she had to spend herself to embrace the Yankees and offer them a glimpse into her private and public ghetto. She was too brittle to “evolve,” to wear the mask of style after style. Anzia loved to wear masks, to fabulate and confound her own history, but as a writer, she had no mask—she was pure emotion in a language that didn't really fit. It leaves us with the guileless charm of unadornment … and permanent grief. She didn't go back into any orthodoxy, as Irving Howe suggests. She persisted as a hunger artist to the very end, and her style of no style moves us more than most other writers.

Before there could be a king like Bellow, there had to be a ghetto princess like Anzia, the golem that gave birth to Saul Bellow and his flowering in the fifties. He would seize Yiddish and Henry James and everything else around him. He had no desire to explain himself to Americans, as Anzia did. He was America the way Anzia could never be, certain of himself, ready to fight any establishment catch-as-catch-can. And Jewish-American literature exists in the shifting tonalities, the shrinking white spaces, that finally wed Anzia to Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Woody Allen …

Note: One can only lament that Leonard Cohen has stopped writing novels and that Woody Allen is much more obsessed with film than with narrative fiction: both were once genuine hunger artists.

I would include Allen Ginsberg, because at least in Kaddish he too had lived inside the hornet's head.