If I am out of mind, it's all right with me, thought Lee Siegel.
Well, maybe not. But I'm quite sure I don't agree with Matthew Price in his review of Siegel's collection of critical essays, Falling Upwards, the gist of which book amounts to: "The best, like yours truly, are full of conviction and passionate intensity while the worst are everywhere." You don't have to have read every volanic disquisition on art, literature and television that has dripped from the pen of Sprezzatura to hip to the fact that anyone who is praised for this —
Feeling pretty gloomy about the cultural scene, he mounts a sweeping indictment of his contemporaries, dismissing along the way a generation or two of artists, writers and critics. Though he doesn’t name names—which weakens his case—the charges are as follows: an art world obsessed with money; business-savvy cultural producers out for a buck and little else; and a complacent review corps backing the whole thing up by issuing bland, rubber-stamped judgments. Bohemia is just another subsidiary of the Very Big Corporation, Inc.; its motto: “Get your own, and get it fast, and do it behind a virtuous appearance and with an optimistic air.”The obstacles to unfettered imagination are everywhere: reality TV, memoirs galore, novels propped up by historical “research” (The Da Vinci Code)—all examples of a culture afflicted by a pernicious “art-suspicion.” Fewer and fewer people are willing to submit to the genuinely made-up, to put themselves “in the power of another world—the work of art—and in the power of another person—the artist.”
Yet Bellow could indeed put you off with his sometimes ludicrous visitor-from-another-planet generalizations about contemporary life–people don't even wipe themselves anymore, ruminates Ithiel Regler, Clara Velde's boyfriend, as he sits sniffing in the back of a New York taxi. (This astounding social observation was deleted in a later edition.)
They teach you in elementary school that the worst thing a reader can do is confuse the opinions of a fictional character with those held by its author. Bellow was rebellious by instinct, then curmudgeonly by design, but does anyone really think he believed voidance was any less hygenic an act in the 1980's than it was in the 1930's? I mean, come on.
And how delicious is the sequel to all this? Compare Ithiel's wrinkled nostril to one of Siegel's own pseudonymous posts on The New Republic blog:
You have quite an obsession with Siegel! Sounds to me like you’re an envious young writer. I mean, first you have a wife and two kids, and now you’re a poor young lawyer with time to write extended tirades against Siegel. Every young writer in NYC has it in for poor Siegel it seems. They all write like middle-aged hacks. He has the fire and guts of a young man (I assume he’s middle-aged himself, or somewhere near there.) Who am I? Someone who knows who you are.