Volume 36, Number 15 · October 12, 1989
Mr. Memory
By Garry Wills
The Bellarosa Connection
by Saul Bellow
Penguin, 102 pp., $6.95 (paper)
One of the many ways Alfred Hitchcock improved John Buchan's novel for his movie The Thirty-Nine Steps was the introduction of 'Mr. Memory.' Hitchcock had recalled such a virtuoso of memorization from a vaudeville act, and he turned that performer's odd skill into a means by which complex defense formulae could be transmitted to England's enemies. But Mr. Memory's gift becomes a tragic blessing, like Cassandra's compulsion to prophesy. Asked to recite the 'classified' formulae, even on a vaudeville stage, he must prove his retentiveness. Only a bullet fired by his foreign employer stops him at the movie's climax. Mr. Memory's achievement was his undoing because his flow of information was automatic, recallable on cue; rendered up, as it had been committed to his memory, without regard to content. He was as replayable as a machine, and he died by the hypertrophy of one function.
Review, 1568 words
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