The Gonzaga Manuscripts by Saul Bellow

First published: 1954

Type of plot: Realism

Time of work: About 1950

Locale: Madrid

Principal Characters:

• Clarence Feiler, a young scholar, unemployed but with a small income, who comes to Madrid looking for the Gonzaga manuscripts
• Faith Ungar, an art student in Madrid who befriends Feiler
• Guzman del Nido, Gonzaga's friend and literary executor, who Feiler thinks has the manuscripts

The Story

For the purposes of this story, Saul Bellow invents a famous modern Spanish poet, Manuel Gonzaga, whose elusive manuscripts set the plot in motion. Clarence Feiler is a naïve young man from California who hears from a Spanish Republican refugee that there are more than one hundred poems by Gonzaga somewhere in Madrid. Feiler wrote his graduate thesis on Gonzaga's Los Huesos Secos, an experience that, he felt, put him "in touch with a poet who could show me how to go on, and what attitude to take toward life." Feiler has been leading an aimless fife; he realizes that he is "becoming an eccentric" and is "too timid to say he believed in God," and so his quest for the Gonzaga manuscripts evolves into a quest for his own identity. Finding the manuscripts and presenting them to the world matters to him, and "what mattered might save him."

Feiler's first act on arriving in Madrid is to find Miss Faith Ungar, an art student whose fiancé is an airline pilot regularly engaged in bringing in blackmarket pesetas from Tangiers. Miss Ungar is sympathetic to his ambitions, but he frets that "the kind of woman who became engaged to an airline pilot might look down on him." Her friendship with Feiler does seem sincere, though, and perhaps would have developed into something deeper had he had the courage to pursue it. At one time he even reflects, "He should have a woman like that. It passed dimly over his mind that a live woman would make a better quest than a dead poet." The moment passes, however, leaving a faint after-sense of an opportunity wasted.

Feiler takes a room at a pension and immediately involves himself in a verbal exchange with a Miss Walsh, a querulous Englishwoman who baits him about his country's testing of atomic bombs. When she calls him "some sort of fanatic," Feiler responds by identifying her as "a nasty old bag." His discomfiture as an American in Europe thus begins soon and unexpectedly.

The baiting of Feiler the American naif continues when he visits Guzman del Nido, the friend and literary executor of Manuel Gonzaga. Caught in a terrible rainstorm on his way to Guizman's home, Feiler arrives sodden and at a considerable disadvantage among the other guests—an Italian monsignor, an Egyptian woman from New York, and a German insurance executive. When Feiler tells a humorous story, he is mortified by the blank response, and he soon realizes that he is being patronized by Guzman. Feiler discusses Gonzaga's poetry with Guzman, who seems to think that he cannot appreciate the Spaniard's sensibility, and his frustration is complete when Guzman tells him that he gave the poems to a Countess del Camino, now dead. Guzman thinks the poems may have passed on to the countess's secretary, also dead, but whose nephews may know something of the whereabouts of the poems. To conclude his exasperating day, when Feiler returns to his pension he is sure—for no apparent reason—that the police have searched his room.

He resolves to track down the nephews in Alcala de Henares, but when he finds them they can only taunt him with silly anti-American jokes about "la bomba atomica" and send him on another quest to Segovia to see Pedro Alvarez-Polvo, who had been a great friend of the countess. Alvarez-Polvo gives Feiler a pompous lecture on Segovian architecture, and in a comedy of misunderstandings reveals that he thinks Feiler is interested in the rights to a pitchblende mine formerly owned by the countess's secretary. The uranium content of pitchblende brings Feiler face-to-face once more with the motif of "la bomba atomica," and he finally cries out in fury, "What do I care about atom bombs! To hell with atom bombs!"

So much for the quest for the poems and for Feiler's sense of his mission in life. On his return to his hotel room in Segovia, he is convinced that his valise has been searched. When he berates the manager in a great rage, a man in the lobby mistakes Feiler for an Englishman and harangues him for criticizing Spain: "The whole world knows you have a huge jail in Liverpool, filled with Masons. Five thousands Masons are encarcelados in Liverpool alone." Feiler packs up and heads back to Madrid, defeated in spirit and dreading the next meal with Miss Walsh.

Bibliography

Bradbury, Malcolm. Saul Bellow. New York: Methuen, 1982.

Braham, Jeanne. A Sort of Columbus: The American Voyages of Saul Bellow's Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.

Cronin, Gloria L., and Leila H. Goldman, eds. Saul Bellow in the 1980's: A Collection of Critical Essays. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1989.

Cronin, Gloria L., and Ben Siegel, eds. Conversations with Saul Bellow. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.

Goldman, L. H. Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. New York: Peter Lang, 1992.

Hyland, Peter. Saul Bellow. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Newman, Judie. Saul Bellow and History. London: Macmillan, 1984.

Siegel, Ben. "Simply Not a Mandarin: Saul Bellow as Jew and Jewish Writer." In Traditions, Voices, and Dreams: The American Novel Since the 1960's. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995.

Trachtenberg, Stanley, comp. Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.