Bellow: The Gonzaga Manuscripts

Saul Bellow's story The Gonzaga Manuscript (1953, reprinted in Mosby's Memoirs) owes an obvious debt to James's The Aspen Papers: an amateur literary scholar in pursuit of unpublished works by a favorite famous poet travels from the US to Europe where he tries rob track down various literary executors to get to the source. In the Bellow story the poet supposedly left poems to a beloved woman long since gone. In both stories the protagonist comes up against structures and modes of the old world and esp in the Bellow story faces prejudice and even contempt toward the new world. In the Bellow story a wealthy young man, Clarence, seeks the love poems left by his favorite writer, the eponymous Gonzaga - modeled in some ways on Garcia Lorca. In fact a highlight of the story is Bellow's attempt to provide snatches of G's verse - a hilarious re-creation of some of the tone and tropes of GL as well as some of the great Latin American poets, Vallejo and Neruda in particular. His quest leads him on many stages of what is in a sense a self-discovery and in particular a discovery of what the post-war world thinks of the US: forward, brash, impetuous, dangerous, and unappreciative of the niceties of Continental life. Spoiler alert: in the end Clarence's quest leads him to a man holding stock certificates for a uranium mine, which of course he thinks the American will want above all else: both because of the obsession w money and the dawn of the atomic age. This conclusion somehow echoes the pursuit of uranium in the movie Beat the Devil - though the two works appear at exactly the same time and don't appear to have influenced each other - but they both show the fear and loathing the US provoked at that time when the world seemed on the brink of annihilation.

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