Books: Truth and Consequences

THE DEAN'S DECEMBER; By Saul Bellow; Harper & Row; 312 pages; $13.95

At its richest, Saul Bellow's freestyle prose reads as if a Division Street Dostoyevsky were writing a book called Thus Spake the Nobel Savage. In Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), the author's tone took a Spenglerian edge as the novel's elderly New Yorker ruminated on the decline of the West Side and, inferentially, civilization as the author knows and reveres it. Sammler had political repercussions. Bellow was accused of being aloof, insensitive and a neoconservative. He has calmly and disdainfully rejected these labels as simplistic.

Any suggestion that the 1976 Nobel prizewinner was intimidated by his critics is dispelled in The Dean's December, a work that opens a second front in Bellow's war on cultural and intellectual nihilism. The scenes are set almost exclusively in Chicago and Bucharest, a disparity underscored by the line, "There was nothing too rum to be true." In fact, the book is largely based on a trip that the novelist and his wife made to Rumania a few years ago to visit her dying mother.

The literary result is Albert Corde, the latest and best of Bellow's old cogitators. Corde, a Chicago college dean, spends a great deal of time in an underheated Bucharest apartment waiting for his mother-in-law to die in a state hospital and mulling over the retreat of "personal humanity" before "the worldwide process of consolidation." The woman was an eminent psychiatrist and former Minister of Health whose humanism was incompatible with the Communist regime. Corde's wife Minna is an astrophysicist who defected to the U.S. and must now beg a vindictive bureaucracy for permission to see her failing mother.

The dean, a "hungry observer," describes the bleak utilitarianism and pinched daily life in the old Eastern European capital. Earthquake damage is crudely patched if repaired at all; the public crematorium is a factory where the dead are reduced unceremoniously to convenient size; his wife's childhood home, once a center of culture and comfort, is only a notch above a slum tenement: "Radiators turned cold after breakfast. The faucets went dry at 8 a.m. and did not run again until evening. The bathtub had no stopper. You flushed the toilet with buckets of water."

These are not cheap shots aimed to cripple Rumania's tourist industry or elicit smug agreement about Communist inefficiency. Corde has seen worse in Chicago. He has, in fact, written about it with appalling accuracy for Harper's magazine and caused a flap. The dean has also been criticized for his role in the arrest of two blacks accused of murder. Corde has been called a racist, a traitor to his home town and a fool. His boss is miffed at the publicity caused by his magazine piece, and his boyhood friend Dewey Spangler, now a famous columnist and "princely communicator," complains that Corde put too much poetry into Chicago.