wants sympathy; he demands it as a human being. Yet his expectations lie fallow in the stony ground of his father’s heart and in the heartlessness of Tamkin and the commodities exchange.

Another intellectual schlemiel, Moses Herzog, whose name in German suggests the word “heart,” is a scholar of Romanticism who writes letters to the world to keep from going mad. His alienation from the world can only partly be explained as neurosis. Much of it stems, as does Tommy Wilhelm’s, from his own moral insight, which places him above the world while keeping him enthralled by the demands of the world.

Ultimately, what places Bellow in the mainstream of classic novelists—if one can label a contemporary as “classic”—is his concern with a theme common in the work of the great novelists: the inherent contradiction between the hero’s potential as a human being and the moral value of his actual experience. Such a theme, sometimes expressed as the conflict between illusion and reality, has been characteristic of great literary works from Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605; Don Quixote of the Mancha, 1612), whose hero jousts with windmills in the belief that they are giants, to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857; English translation, 1886), whose heroine finds the illusion of romance stronger than the reality of daily life.

All of Bellow’s protagonists joust, metaphorically, with windmills. A seeker such as Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift has a romantic, imaginative point of view which is counterpoised by the hardened realism of his mistress and of his mentor, Humboldt. The huge, corporeal reality of Sorella Fonstein in The Bellarosa Connection contrasts ironically with her own spiritual delicacy; even the freneticism of Augie March betrays at ground level Augie’s sense of human decency.

Finally, Bellow is one of the great wordsmiths of the American novel. His prose style varies with the nature of the protagonist and the dilemma. The euphoric, Whitmanesque breathlessness of The Adventures of Augie March simmers into the quiet restraint of Seize the Day, expands into Moses Herzog’s tempered frustrations, and dilates into the metaphorical considerations of Mr. Sammler’s Planet. In each work the prose is often a startling mix of erudition and slang, of the analytically precise and the casually colloquial; yet it is also effective and always right. His work is irresistibly entertaining, containing accurate portrayals of contemporary life dramatized by dialogue of unerring naturalness.

The Adventures of Augie March

First published: 1953

Type of work: Novel

Through a skein of events from Chicago of the Depression to postwar Paris, Augie March experiences life as an affirmation of the human spirit.

Bellow’s third work is not only a picturesque novel of great zest but also a kind of Bildungsroman, an autobiographical record of physical experience as it relates to intellectual and emotional growth. Augie’s own exuberant narration of his life, beginning in Chicago during the Great Depression, reveals a personality who is in some ways a reckless and amoral character reminiscent of the rogue-heroes of the Spanish picaresque novel of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet he is also a man who must define himself by his relationship to others and who views the world at large as basically sound. Many critics have likened the book, and Augie in particular, to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and certainly Augie’s status as folk hero, his take-the-world-as-it-is attitude, and his earthy narrative “talk” are very much influenced by Mark Twain’s classic American novel.

Yet Augie is deeper than Huck because he is less naïve and, because of his origins, more cynical. He is not easily drawn into others’ sphere of influence, as, by contrast, Huck was credulously drawn to the Duke and the King. Augie’s adventures—his various jobs as stock boy, coal salesman, petty thief, prize-fight manager, union organizer, and even eagle trainer—are attempts to taste all of life. Augie is the embodiment of nineteenth century American poet Walt Whitman’s belief in the value of all people and professions. All labor is valuable in a democracy; all occupations play a part in the positive force that is life itself. The various jobs are also, for Augie, a means to an end, the end being, as he says, “a better fate.”

A better fate was also what the heroes of a previous literary generation sought for themselves. Clyde, in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), however, climbed the social ladder only to end a literal prisoner to his own ambition: That there was no way out but death was the naturalistically logical conclusion to Clyde’s ambition. Unlike Clyde, Augie is not merely a product of his environment, not only the sum total of his experiences (equaling zero). The “better fate,” as Augie implies, is, indeed, worldly success but success tempered by insight. Though he ends his story in Paris, involved in some international business ventures of questionable legitimacy, Augie comes to understand the value of commitment to humanity, the need for involvement with life.

This sense of commitment is ultimately missing in Augie’s life. He is a hero the reader can admire for his individuality and sense of independence, but he does not learn by the novel’s end to cease his wandering ways—emotional, intellectual, or physical. His major love affairs, first with Thea, then with Stella, whom he marries, are largely failures. Even his ability to accept people as they are—Einhorn, for example, whose crippled body Augie carries about—does not encourage him to commit himself to a creed or code.

Augie can see people objectively; he is capable of giving them the benefit of the doubt. The world is thus not a valley of despair. Beyond this passive acceptance of people for what they are in a world clearly teeming with life, however, Augie has no goal, no plan. Lacking commitment, he drifts from one adventure to another, hoping for the right “feel.” He is akin to a latter-day knight-errant, seeking adventures in the vague hope of discovering the Holy Grail.

Seize the Day

First published: 1956

Type of work: Novella

Like a Greek tragedy, this novella is an intensely compact work examining one day in the agonized life of loser Tommy Wilhelm.

Set in the Gloriana Hotel on Broadway during one morning and in the commodities exchange on Wall Street later in the day, Seize the Day begins with its suffering hero, Tommy Wilhelm, seeking the company of his father, Dr. Adler. Dr. Adler does not love his son and views him as a failure and a dreamer. Adler disdains his son’s misery: Tommy’s marriage has failed, and his career at Rojax Corporation has floundered. In seeking out his father, Tommy does not so much want financial help, though he needs it and even expects it. What he really seeks is his father’s approval and love. At the very least, he seeks understanding from the old man, a compassion that Tommy has not found from anyone—especially his wife, who is stonily demanding further alimony. Adler is pitiless, disdainful, and sententious, One of Bellow’s most consummately realized villains, he is a soulless creature who is himself ironically effete, living in tight-fisted retirement in a second-rate hotel.

Broke and desperate, Tommy turns to another father figure, a wily, fast-talking con man, Dr. Tamkin. Tamkin wearies Tommy with his incessant talk, an overwhelming mixture of Emersonian bromides on self-reliance and psychoanalytic jargon about money as a type of aggression. He convinces Tommy to invest the last of his money on the commodities market—ironically, in futures.

Tommy’s inevitable failure is depicted in a brilliant scene in which he anxiously watches the exchange board for signs of profit, while Tamkin, ever talking, preaches on the evils of greed. When Tommy is wiped out, Tamkin disappears and Tommy is left a pathetic victim. He is, in his father’s words, a slob. In the final scene, the broken Tommy wanders into a funeral chapel. There, unknown to the mourners, he weeps aloud for the dead, a gesture symbolizing his own dead end and suggesting his deeper, personal loss of love, compassion, and human sympathy.

Seize the Day is rich in character portrayal. Reminiscent of Einhorn in The Adventures of Augie March, Tamkin is a characteristic mix of the comic and the villainous. Fast-talking, full of trite sayings, and even shrewdly understanding of his victims’ needs, Tamkin is the con man par excellence because he has almost convinced himself of his own sincerity in preaching against the evils of materialism. He cheats Tommy not only out of his money but also out of his beliefs, his ideals. Dr. Adler, whose name means “eagle” in German, is indeed a predator of sorts. Like Tamkin, he preys on his son’s weakness as a way of preening himself. Lofty, aristocratic, and fiercely aloof, Adler has become ignoble by divorcing himself from human feelings.

The novella’s title provides a final ironic commentary on the story’s central idea. The carpe diem theme—literally, “seize the day”—was a classical pronouncement that urged humans to make the most of their time, to extract from each moment the joy of life that time was ever stealing away. Tommy’s dilemma is that he cannot subscribe to that pronouncement. His failed investment in futures is an ironic assertion of Tommy’s need to live beyond the day, beyond the commercial grind—to seek for a deeper meaning of life and its sufferings.

Henderson the Rain King

First published: 1959

Type of work: Novel

A millionaire goes to Africa in search of meaning, eventually finding it in sympathy for humankind.

Henderson the Rain King is a mad, antic fantasy, perhaps the most comic of Bellow’s novels. Rich, world-weary Eugene Henderson, like the heroes of myth, seeks escape from the burden of the world and embarks on a journey to unknown lands in search of meaning and peace. The unknown land is Africa, and Henderson arrives there in poverty of spirit, having, like lshmael in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), the need to find purpose in his life. Henderson is a kind of Tommy Wilhelm in reverse, except that Henderson, a graduate of an Ivy League university, has a broader perspective, a core of reference that is beyond Tommy’s imagining. Whereas Tommy seeks meaning in the financial markets and then in the urbanized coldness of his father’s disapproval, Henderson, already financially secure, seeks meaning in the pastoral and the primitive. Where Tommy seeks relief in futures, Henderson seeks salvation in a kind of past, a land primeval and innocent.

His first adventure is in the land of the Arnewi, in a village in the midst of mountains and clean air. The landscape suggests a primordial world of Edenic innocence, and Henderson at first is a kind of Adam, ready to start fresh. The novel, in fact, is rich in suggestive allusions to biblical and secular literary characters. As a new Adam, however, Henderson is a failure. As Moses, armed with his faith, had parted the waters of the Red Sea to save his people, so Henderson, armed with the weapons of technology, attempts to rid the life-giving well of an infestation of frogs. His role as savior backfires: He blows up the well, bringing destruction rather than life. Like Mark Twain’s “Sir Boss” in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), Henderson has tried to improve humankind by the beneficence of civilization; he has tried to impose a modern system of values on a primitive but honest culture.

In this first adventure, however, the destruction that Henderson wreaks teaches him little about his own place in the world. Continuing his quest for meaning, he comes next to the Wariri, among whom his most telling lessons in self-wisdom occur. Though he has become a “rain king” by the notable feat of moving a stone rain goddess, his exalted position comes only at the price of his physical humiliation—he is flayed and thrown into the mud of a cattle pond.

Additionally, Henderson comes under the influence of the tribe’s philosopher-king, Dahfu, who ponders metaphysics and is convinced that his destiny is to return in the afterlife as a lion. King Dahfu is a puzzling character. He seems genuinely humble in the face of universal mysteries revealed to him in his philosophy, yet his incessant talking reminds the reader of the stream of con men who appear in Bellow’s novels, from Einhorn and Tamkin to the gangster, Rinaldo Cantabile, of Humboldt’s Gift. Dahfu’s effect on Henderson is both serious and wildly comic. Convinced that Henderson must free himself from his fears of inadequacy, Dahfu prescribes a therapy entailing Henderson’s confrontation with a lioness. The scene in which the rain king finally learns to imitate the courage of the lioness, even to the point of getting down on all fours and roaring, is both comic and pathetic. Again, Henderson is humiliated, this time spiritually, but he has learned the meaning of humanity’s noble fragility in a crazy world.

The novel ends with one of those physical epiphanies typical of Bellow’s work. Henderson is at an airport in Newfoundland—the place name reflects Henderson’s newfound self. He has escaped from the Wariri and from the “past” of Africa, and he has taken under his wing an American child who is flying back to the United States, alone and frightened. He cares for the child, gives it comfort, and embraces it. He has found his meaning: sympathy for the family of humankind.

Herzog

First published: 1964

Type of work: Novel

A student of Romanticism, Moses Herzog, tries to come to term with the material, unromantic world.

Considered by many to be Bellow’s masterwork, Herzog may well be his prototypical novel, and Herzog the prototypical Bellovian hero. Like Emily Dickinson, who wrote poems as a means of opening a communion with the world, Moses Herzog, sensitive student of Romanticism, writes letters to the world-at-large in an attempt to keep his sanity and to measure his need for compassion and empathy in a world devoid of both. Like Gimpel the Fool, Herzog is a true schlemiel, a loser by the standards of the world but a noble spirit.

Though capable of anger and self-pity at the breakup of his marriage, and of lust in his relationship with his mistress, Ramona, Herzog can still yearn for a deeper, richer life. Like the great thinkers to whom he writes his imaginary letters, he seeks meaning and peace. Even amid the bustle of the urban life of New York and Chicago, Herzog is withdrawn into the private bustle of his mind, remembering events from his broken marriage and formulating rebuttals to the negative, spirit-killing philosophies of men such as Sandor Himmelstein, whose surname means “stoney heaven,” and even seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. His letters come to him like bursts of inspiration and serve as antidotes to his own fears that he is out of his mind.

The novel thus represents a form of psychoanalysis: Herzog’s remembrances are transferred into the actual world of his letters. The direction of the plot is thus not chronological but psychological: Events have meaning not in relation to time but in their associations with other events or ideas. The main action of Herzog is not physical but mental, and despite brilliant evocations of city life, the real power of the book is the revelation of Moses Herzog’s mind.

The incisive treatment of the effects of the urban experience on a sensitive, troubled spirit, however, is finely contrasted in Herzog with scenes of almost idyllic calm. Scenes of Herzog enjoying the pleasures of his country retreat in the Berkshires serve both to reinforce the traditional aspects of Bellow as a novelist—his use of nature as a corrective to Herzog’s troubled mind, for example—and to strengthen the psychological truthfulness of his hero. Herzog is, after all, a student of Romanticism, and nature for the Romantic was curative, an agency or force by which people, by attuning themselves to its power, could find inspiration, illumination, and genuine spiritual sustenance.

Nowhere is the redeeming force of nature more explicit than in the scene in which Herzog, from his country retreat, recalls the time Valentine Gershbach (his former wife’s lover) was bathing Herzog’s child. The scene is presented with the feeling of a pastoral. The purity, the gentleness implicit in Gershbach’s action, gives pause to Herzog’s anger. Herzog sees his rival as a human being, a fellow creature, as much to be pitied as condemned. He releases his anger and comes to terms with Gershbach; Herzog thus survives not by hating but by forgiving.

Mr. Sammler’s Planet

First published: 1970

Type of work: Novel

Old, one-eyed Mr. Sammler, survivor of the Holocaust, is both horrified and philosophically resigned to the cultural nightmare of 1960’s America.

Mr. Sammler’s Planet explores the typical Bellovian conflict of accepting the world on its own terms while recognizing and adhering to higher spiritual values. The “planet” of Mr. Sammler is not the moon—a plan for the colonization of which has been proposed by his scientist friend—but the very earth itself. Moreover, Mr. Sammler, an aged, one-eyed Polish Jew now living in New York with his daughter, is not an astronomer by profession but by a philosophical state of mind. With his one good eye he peers through the telescope of history, exploring the cultural landscape of a planet which has just sent a man to the moon yet which is rife with social and political cant and a spiritual emptiness. Having escaped death in a concentration camp during World War II, Sammler is disillusioned, even horrified by the violence around him. The novel presents a dreary, hellish picture of New York of the late 1960’s. Surrounded by muggers, pickpockets, and an assortment of hollow intellectuals, Sammler is convinced that the world has gone mad, that the human race has deteriorated into barbarism.

An indictment of the radicalism of the era, the novel is Bellow’s bleakest, and Mr. Sammler his most despairing hero, a survivor of the Nazis who finds an almost cosmic indifference in the prevailing violence and decay. For Mr. Sammler, New York City is representative of the demise of culture, of humanism.

In the course of his three-day adventure that constitutes the heart of the plot, Sammler experiences fear of death at the hands of a “Negro” deviant, engages in a philosophical conversation about biology and human will with his scientist friend, and makes an abortive attempt to visit his dying nephew. Each day presents one aspect of the endemic cultural decline.

The last scene of the novel is crucial in understanding Mr. Sammler’s ultimate resignation. Too late to say good-bye to his dying nephew, Sammler stands at the bedside of the corpse and mutters a kind of prayer for the dead. The scene is reminiscent of the final act of an earlier Bellovian hero: Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day, broke and desperate, visits a funeral chapel and weeps for the unknown dead. Sammler’s prayer is a similar act, a personal mourning for dead humanity.

Humboldt’s Gift

First published: 1975

Type of work: Novel

Two writers try to reconcile their poetic ideals with the demands of the world of popular taste and the lure of success.

Humboldt’s Gift is a kind of gothic novel in the sense that its protagonist is haunted by a ghost. The ghost is both a living man and the spirit or ideals that the man, an older writer named Von Humboldt Fleisher, represents.

Humboldt is a writer whose talent—or genius—has been corrupted by the American vision of success. The protagonist is modeled closely on Bellow’s recollections of a friend, poet Delmore Schwartz, who in the late 1930’s produced a first book of poetry that was hailed as a work of promising genius but who died with the promise unfulfilled. Humboldt has also produced a first volume of poems, Harlequin Ballads, but has since lived off his early reputation. Humboldt had “made it big,” as the narrator remarks, but had produced nothing since. Instead, he had lived the good life, which included fast cars, women, and other trappings of materialistic success.

Yet Humboldt was aware of his entrapment by the overpowering world of things. Sensing his own surrender to materialism, he had taken to playing the role of the great Romantic nonconformist. The paradox of Humboldt’s condition was that, as a poet, he was an example of unfulfillment and failure, but as a man and public figure he represented the idea of poetry as a spiritual, revivifying force capable of saving a sick society.

It is this paradox that haunts the narrator, Charlie Citrine. He too is a writer, but unlike Humboldt, his idol, he has not produced any significant work—he has written histories, biographies, and political essays, the residue of others’ ideas. Citrine dreams of producing his own great work, a philosophical treatise on the human mind; like Humboldt, however, he gives in to the demands of public taste. He writes a Broadway play which becomes a smash hit and secures a lucrative motion-picture contract. Now wealthy, Citrine has become another Humboldt of sorts. When Humboldt dies and becomes, in Citrine’s words, one of his “significant dead,” Citrine renews his aspiration, believing that he has been singled out to produce a great work.

Ironically, Citrine’s aspiration remains largely unfulfilled. He falls to the lure of the flesh. His mistress, Renata, is flesh personified, and his passionate enjoyment of her is his only genuinely poetic experience. In fact, the poetry of Charlie Citrine is in his natural zest for the physical quality of living, a total, rhapsodic immersion in things.

This expression of the intensity of life is one of the hallmarks of the novel. The villains, for example, are depicted with a Dickensian verve and sprightliness. Rinaldo Cantabile, the gangster who ensnares Citrine into subjection by a gambling debt, is portrayed with such fearsome energy that he is wonderfully comic in his wickedness. Charlie Citrine’s “adventures” amid the likes of Cantabile and Renata and her gorgonic mother can be viewed as latter-day depictions of the hero in the underworld, a hell of soulless materialism.

Humboldt’s Gift is thus the most gothic of Bellow’s novels. Just when Charlie has met defeat—broke, dejected, and deprived even of the luscious Renata, who has married an undertaker (perhaps from the underworld)—he is visited by a final ghost: Humboldt’s gift, a legacy of a film script from the dead poet. Citrine submits the script to a producer, makes a fortune from the sale of the rights, and once again is on his feet, independent, ready to continue the pursuit of the good life. The old Romantic dream, however, is gone. Citrine realizes that he will never produce art, that he is too addicted to the popular taste and the world of the flesh. In the final scene, Citrine is at Humboldt’s gravesite. He has buried his idol and, with him, the dream of producing poetry in the materialistic land of America.

The Bellarosa Connection

First published: 1989

Type of work: Novella

Sorella Fonstein hounds showman Billy Rose into an interview during which she hopes Billy will admit his responsibility—and thus admit his humanity—in saving Sorella’s husband from the Nazis.

As Bellow had used the traditional, even old-fashioned narrative structure of the picaresque for his first major work, The Adventures of Augie March, so thirty years later the author shows his interest in more modern narrative forms. The Bellarosa Connection is an example of the so-called new journalism, in which real events and people are treated in broadly fictional ways. E. L. Doctorow, for example, had used such historical personalities as Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, and J. P. Morgan in the fictional tapestry of his Ragtime (1975).

In The Bellarosa Connection, Bellow creates a series of events based on the historic atrocity of the Holocaust during World War II. The action centers on Sorella Fonstein’s persistence in gaining an interview with impresario Billy Rose, who was responsible—through his anonymous underground railroad—for bringing a number of Jews to America as they escaped from the Nazis. Among those who were saved was Sorella’s husband, Harry. Fonstein is snubbed by Billy Rose (the European Jews had called their savior “Bellarosa”), but Sorella herself, with tigerlike tenacity, ultimately succeeds in confronting Billy and blackmailing him, through her knowledge of a scandal, into meeting with Harry.

Billy’s ignorance and crudity as a human being are portrayed with insight, for if human character is fraught with contradiction, then Billy’s character is contradiction personified. His motive for underwriting his sole example of generosity and unselfishness in a life of hustling selfishness is never fully explained; Billy himself is not really sure of his motive. As a Jew, Billy may have truly acted in sympathy with his fellow Jews, as if (as the narrator points out) “the God of his fathers still mattered.” For one time in his life, this obsessively vulgar person begrudgingly freed the font of human goodness within him.

In spite of his complexity, however, Billy Rose is not the main character. He is seen by the reader only in the climactic interview with Sorella. It is, in fact, Sorella who commands the reader’s—and the narrator’s—attention. Like many of Bellow’s women, she is fierce, tenacious, and in absolute command over her husband. With an animal obesity to match, she is bright and yet oddly gentle, even humble. What Sorella achieves by the interview is not only Billy’s consent to meet with her husband so that Harry can thank him. At bottom lies Sorella’s extorting from Billy a sense of responsibility for the life he had saved, a responsibility that extends to all humanity. Billy thus shares kinship with Harry, with Jews, and with all humankind. Sorella seems to have understood this connection—the real Bellarosa connection—the chain of mutual responsibility, of recognition of human suffering, of compassion for the human condition.

This connection is ultimately clarified by the novella’s point of view. The narrator is a distant relation of Sorella, who tells the story in an effort to purge his memory. He is the founder of Mnemosyne Institute, a company engaged in training businessmen and government leaders in memory techniques. Like Billy Rose, the narrator is a self-made millionaire. His working motto being “memory is life,” he is now on the eve of retirement, about to pass on the business to his son. His recollections of the Fonstein and Billy Rose story thus close the circle of relationship. The narrator’s memory forms the link connecting the participants of the drama with the rest of humankind. Like the narrator, the reader is vicariously involved. Humanity, through memory, is being tested and vindicated.

Ravelstein

First published: 2000

Type of work: Novel

The narrator recalls the larger-than-life acts and opinions of Abe Ravelstein, professor, best-selling author, and political philosopher.

Ravelstein, like its title character, is a puzzling work. At once a mass of fact and observations on history, philosophy, and the world-at-large, the book appears to be composed of a series of discontinuous scenes and repetitious pronouncements affirming the genius of Abe Ravelstein, professor, best-selling author, and would-be celebrity. Yet when the narrator, Chick, reveals that as Ravelstein’s friend and admirer he has been selected by the professor to write his memoirs, the scheme of the novel’s structure becomes clear, the apparent disjointedness a mark of the narrator’s admiration and puzzlement. Ravelstein is thus a tribute to a great man and a cautionary tale illustrating his weaknesses.

Though Ravelstein is a worldly success, a big man with big appetites, almost a kind of cult leader among young intellectuals, he is, as his name implies, a “complicated” fellow whose real sympathies lie “knotted” and “tangled” amid the blandishments of the physical world. Seduced by success and fame into pursuing an extravagant lifestyle, Ravelstein enjoys all the pleasures of the modern world while pontificating to Chick in a tone of hardened cynicism.

Chick is amused, even impressed by the breadth and seeming wisdom of Ravelstein’s knowledge, from the political origins of twentieth century Germany to the courtship rituals of native South American headhunters. Ravelstein’s opinions permeate Chick’s life, and Abe Ravelstein himself is the last of a long line of fast-talking hustlers and con men who fill Bellow’s books, characters such as Einhorn in The Adventures of Augie March and Tamkin in Seize the Day.

Though there is a bit of the charlatan in Abe Ravelstein, he is not spiritually bankrupt. While he gently mocks what he considers Chick’s conventional idealism and his capacity for hope, he insists that Chick write his biography, thus revealing his own yearning for immortality, for the human need to be remembered. Throughout this final novel, Abe Ravelstein, this “raveled” human being who is both “complicated” and at “loose ends,” admits to Chick that he is a confirmed nihilist. Ravelstein dies of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), and Chick himself survives a near-fatal illness near the end of the book. Chick realizes that his friend’s hard-core reliance on pleasure and materialism actually disguised his basic human empathy. When he tells Chick, for instance, that the Jewish people are living witnesses to the absence of redemption, Ravelstein is confronting the great question that all of Bellow’s heroes face: How does a human being come to terms with the allurements of the physical world and still preserve a spiritual integrity?