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Saul Bellow (1915-2005) |
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American author, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, one of the major representatives of Jewish-American writers. Saul Bellow's works influenced widely American literature after World War II. Among his most famous characters are Augie March, Moses E. Herzog, Arthur Sammler, and Charlie Citrine – a superb gallery of self-doubting, funny, charming, disillusioned, neurotic, and intelligent observers of the modern American way of life. "Hidden in the country, he wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead." (from Herzog: A Novel by Saul Bellow, New York: The Viking Press, 1964, p. 9) Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal. His original birth certificate was lost when Lachine's city hall burned down in the 1920s, but Bellow customarily celebrated his birthdate on June 10. Bellow's parents had emigrated in 1913 from Russia to Canada. In St. Petersburg Bellow's father, Abraham (Abram), had imported Turkish figs and Egyptian onions. Bellow was raised in an impoverished, polyglot section of
Montreal,
full of Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Greeks, and Italians. A precocious
child, he was fluent at an early age in English, French, Hebrew, and
Yiddish. When Bellöow was eight, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
Bellow spent at a hospital ward several months in isolation. After his
father was beaten – he was also a
bootlegger – the family moved to Chicago, Humboldt Park, in 1924. "I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or glowing the knuckles." (from The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow, with an introduction by Martin Amis, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015, p. 5; first published in 1953) Although Bellow
is not considered an autobiographical writer, his Canadian birth is
dealt with in his first novel, Dangling Man (1944), and his
Jewish heritage and his several divorces are shared by many of his
characters. This novel, which drew from his experience as a Merchant
Marine during WW II, was a philosophical journal of a young man waiting
to be drafted. Bellow's mother, Lescha (Liza), was very religious. Her death
when
Bellow was 17, was a deep emotional shock for him. "My life was never
the
same after my mother died," Bellow said. His childhood bout of
tuberculosis and loss of his mother left Bellow permanently with a fear
of death. In 1933 Bellow entered the
University of Chicago, but transferred to Northwestern University,
where he studied anthropology and sociology and graduated in 1937. With
the help of Melville J. Herskovits, he was given a fellowship in
anthropoly at the University of Wisconsin. Bellow's first published short story, 'The Hell It Can't' (1936), which appeared in the student newspaper The Daily Northwestern, was about a young man seized and whipped. The story was a reply to Sinclair Lewis's novel It Can't Happen Here (1935). As friendly advice, the English-department chairman told Bellow to forget his plans to study the language: "No Jew could really grasp the tradition of English literature." Bellow himself tought he could be a movie star, well aware that he was not handsome enough to be the male lead. In later interviews Bellow said that his Jewish heritage was "a gift, a piece of good fortune with which one does not quarrel." (Bellow's People: How Saul Bellow Made Life Into Art by David Mikics, 2016, p. 28) However, he also insisted that is not a "Jewish" writer writer but an American writer who happens to be a Jew. At Wisconsin Dr. Goldenweiser assured Bellow that his writing
had
too much style for standard scientific papers. During the Christmas
vacation Bellow fell in love, married first wife, Anita Goshkin, and
abandoned his postgraduate studies to become a
writer. It took
years before Bellow published his first book. He taught at
Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers' College, Chicago, from 1938 to 1942, and
worked then for the editorial department of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica from 1943 to 1944. After the outbreak of WWII, Bellow was first rejected by the Army because of a hernia, but in 1944-45 he served in the US Merchant Marine. He then returned to teaching, holding various posts at the Universities of Minnesota, New York, Princeton and Puerto Rico. While serving with the Merchant Marine, Bellow wrote Dangling Man, loosely based on Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground (1864). It was followed by The Victim (1947), a paranoid story of a doppelganger, set against the realistic background of New York City. However, Chicago became the town that is usually connected to Bellow's books. "The people of Chicago are very proud of their wickedness. This is good old vulgar politics, despite the pretensions." (Bellow in The New York Times, July 6, 1980) In The Adventures of Augie March (1953) Bellow let himself loose and abandoned some of the formal restrictions he had followed in his earlier books. He started to work on the novel in Paris, and continued it in other places, but "not a single word of the book was composed in Chicago," he later said. The rich picaresque novel recounts the seemingly unconnected
experiences of its hero in his quest for self-understanding. Augie
March, the protagonist, is born into an immigrant Jewish family in
Chicago before the Depression. His mother is poor and nearly blind.
George, his younger brother, is retarded, and his elder brother, Simon,
wants to become rich as soon as possible. Each of them is "drafted
untimely into hardships." Augie proceeds through a variety of dubious jobs and adventures, losing his girlfriend along the way. His employers include the real estate dealer named Einhorn and Mrs. Renling, owner of a smart men's store, and other colorful, energetic characters, obsessed with sex, making money or both. Augie loves women and observes each portion of the female anatomy closely. On his mystical quest to discover 'the lesson and theory of power,' Augie finds everywhere lies, and asks why he always have to fall among theoreticians. The novel is a hymn to city life, it avoids sentimentality, and ends in Augie's healthy laugh. At the beginning of his career, Bellow was influenced by
Trotskyism
and the Partisan Review group of intellectuals. Bellow never met Trotsky.
On the morning they were meant to meet, the Russian revolutonary leader
was murdered at his home in Mexico City. Bellow's belief in world
revolution died out when the Soviet Union
attacked Finland in 1939. By 1951, he had turned into a follower of
Wilhelm Reich. In his apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, Bellow had an
orgone energy accumulator, invented by Reich to help harness orgasmic
energy. Bellow rejected Ernest Hemingway's "tough guy" model of American fiction, and became engaged with a wide range of cultural fields and tradition – Nietzsche, Oedipal conflicts, popular culture, Russian-Jewish heritage. Already from the first published stories Bellow examined the relation of author-character-narrator. Books narrated in the first person often have been mistaken for representing Bellow's own thoughts. "No writer can take it for granted that the views of his characters will not be attributed to him personally," he once said. "It is generally assumed, moreover, that all the events and ideas of a novel are based on the life experiences and the opinions of the novelist himself." (Bellow in The New York Times, March 10, 1994) In the play The Last Analysis (1965) Bellow
attacked naive Freudianism, The Dean's December, More Die of
Heartbreak, and A Theft deepened his engagement with the
writings of Jung, Seize the Day used motifs from social
anthropology. In the 1960's, as John Updike said, Bellow's literary
world remained "essentieally a Thirties world of scramble and
survival." (Higher
Gossip: Essays and Criticism by John Updike, edited by
Christopher Carduff, 2012, p. 101) With The Adventures of
Augie March
Bellow changed his style, and made his homage to Mark Twain. It was the
first novel, Bellow later said, that he had written with an "authentic
voice" rather than the voice of "an Englishman or contributor to The
New Yorker." Herzog (1964), Bellow's major novel from
the 1960s, centers on a middle-aged Jewish intellectual, Moses E.
Herzog, whose life had come to a standstill. Herzog is a twice-failed
husband. Trying to sort his life out, on the brink of suicide, he
writes long letters to Nietzsche, Heidegger, ex-wife Madeleine, Adlai
Stevenson, and God. As Augie March, Moses Herzog is introspective and
troubled, but he finally realized the futility of hatred and finds that
he has much reason to be content with his life. After pouring all Herzog's thoughts into letters Bellow notes
in the last words of the book: "At this time he had no messages for
anyone. Nothing. Not a single word." The British writer Ian McEwan
considers Herzog
the most important post-war American novel. He once argued that Bellow,
alone among American writers of his generation, had seemed to
assimilate the whole European classical inheritance." (Arguably by Christopher Hitchens,
2011, p. 63) "Bellow, too, is convinced that to have a conscience is, after a certain age, to live permanently in an epistemological hell. The reason his and Dostoevsky's heroes are incapable of ever arriving at any closure is that they love their own suffering above everything else. They refuse to exchange their inner torment for the peace of mind that comes with bourgeois propriety or some kind of religious belief. In fact, they see their suffering as perhaps the last outpost of the heroic in our day and age." (Charles Simic in New York Review of Books, May 31, 2001) From 1960 to 1962 Bellow co-edited he literary magazine The
Noble Savage,
and in 1962 he was appointed professor on the Committee of Social
Thought at University of Chicago. Following a visit to Israel, Bellow
recorded his impressions in his first substantial non-fiction book, To
Jerusalem and Back (1975).
Noteworthy, the Arab inhabitants of the city are almost invisible in
the book. Edward Said and Bellow, who were friend for a long time,
ended up having a strong disagreement about the Palestinians. "Why do
Barbara Tuchman and Saul Bellow, for example," Said wrote in Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship
and the Palestine Question
(1988), "except that 4 million of us, scattered everywhere, can be made
to repeat the lie of our existence for 35 years? Do they imagine that
all of us get instructions from a central propaganda office?" (ibid,. pp. 30-31) After having been booed, Bellow walked out of lecture at San Franciso State College in 1970. His disenchantment with the liberal establishment reflected in his novel Mr Sammler's Planet (1970), where Arthur Samler, an elderly Polish Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, views with his only intact eye the world of black pickpockets, student revolutionaries, and the ill-mannered younger generation. An acute observer of the signs of the times, Bellow said in Ravelstein (2000): "Odd that mankind's benefactors should be amusing people. In America least this is often the case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain it." Humboldt's Gift (1975), which won the Pulitzer Prize, was narrated in the first person. The protagonist, Charlie Citrine, is a writer, rich and successful. But in his heart he knows that he is a failure – he is under the thumb of a small-time Chicago gangster, ruined by a divorce and finally abandoned by his mistress. He admires his dead friend, Von Humboldt Fleischer, modelled on the poet Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966). Humboldt, a talent wasted, represents for him all that is important in culture. Citrine continues the series of Bellow's losers, from Herzog to Sammler, but like his other novels, it is not gloomy, and finds a comic side even in its protagonist's tragedy. Bellow published also short stories and plays and translated from Yiddish into English works of his fellow-Nobel laureate I.B. Singer. His conservative tone of the 1970s and early 1980s changed with the short story collection Him with His Foot in His Mouth (1984) into a more relaxed mode of his earlier works. The Bellarosa Connection (1989) was based on an anecdote Bellow overheard at a dinner party. Bellow proved again his ability to arouse controversy in his
13th novel, Ravelstein.
It drew a portrait of Abe Ravelstein, a university professor and a
closet homosexual who ultimately dies of AIDS-related illness.
Ravelstein's character was based on Allan Bloom, Bellow's colleague at
the University of Chicago and the author of The Closing of the
American Mind
(1987), who died in 1992. The cause was officially announced as liver
failure. Ravelstein's sexual inclinations were only a small detail but
critics found it most interesting. "This is a problem that writers of
fiction always have to face in this country. People are literal minded,
and they say, 'Is it true? If it is true, is it factually accurate? If
it isn't factually accurate, why isn't it factually accurate?' Then you
tie yourself into knots, because writing a novel in some ways resembles
writing a biography, but it really isn't. It is full of invention." (Bellow in Time, May 8, 2000) Bellow's attitude to blacks stirred much criticism. In an interview (The New Yorker, March 7, 1988) he asked, "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" – this time behind the comment was not a fictional character but the writer himself, who wanted to point out that "Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo." Tired of passing the houses of his dead friends, as he said,
Bellow left Chicago in 1993, and settled in Boston, where he began
teaching at Boston University. In 1994 he became seriously sick after
eating a toxic fish on a Caribbean vacation. Bellow had three sons from his first four marriages. In 1989 he married Janis Freedman, his assistant. A PhD student at Chicago University, Bellow had been one of her professors. At his class, she first noticed his hands, "Judging by his hands, he was an extraordinary human being," she later said in an interview. ('Saul Bellow's widow on his life and letters: 'His gift was to love and be loved' by Rachel Cooke, The Guardian, 10 Oct 2010) They had one daughter, Naomi, born in 1999. Bellow died on April 5, 2005, at his home in Brookline, Mass. For further reading: Saul Bellow: A Critical Essay by Robert Deitweiler, edited by Roderick Jellema (1967); Saul Bellow's Enigmatic Laughter by Sarah Blacher Cohen (1974); Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Earl H. Rovit (1975); Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck by Mark Harris (1980); Quest for the Human: An Exploration of Saul Bellow's Fiction by Eusebio L. Rodrigues (1981); Saul Bellow by Malcolm Bradbury (1982); Saul Bellow's Moral Vision: A Critical Study of the Jewish Experience by L.H. Goldman (1983); Saul Bellow: Vision and TRevision by Daniel Fuchs (1984); Saul Bellow, edited by H. Bloom (1986); On Bellow's Planet: Readings from the Dark Side by Jonathan Wilson (1986); Sort of Columbus: The American Voyages of Saul Bellow's Fiction by Jeanne Braham (1984); Saul Bellow Against the Grain by Ellen Pifer (1990); Saul Bellow and the Decline of Humanism by Michael K. Glenday (1990); Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination by Ruth Miller (1991); Saul Bellow by Peter Hyland (1992); The Critical Response to Saul Bellow, edited by Gerhard Bach (1995); Handsome Is: Adventures With Saul Bellow by Harriet Wasserman (1997); New Essays on Seize the Day, edited by Michael P.Kramer (1998); Saul Bellow: A Biography by James Atlas (2000); A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, edited by Gloria L. Cronin and Lee Trepanier (2013); The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 by Zachary Leader (2015); Bellow's People: How Saul Bellow Made Life Into Art by David Mikics (2016); The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife 1965-2005 by Zachary Leader (2018); Madness and Subversion in Saul Bellow's Later Novels: A Deconstructive Perspective by Ramzi Marrouchi (2023); Saul Bellow: "I Was a Jew and an American and a Writer" by Gerald Sorin (2024) Selected works:
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