Bellow, Saul 1915-

BELLOW, SAUL 1915-

Writer

Themes

During his years at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University in the 1930s, young Saul Bellow knew instinctively the academic life was not for him. He felt it was too narrow, too dictatorial; only as a writer could he find the freedom and independence he craved to explore his imagination and interpret the world. Bellow was well-read, and his attachment to books led to employment writing book notices in New York. He soon turned to fiction writing and achieved some attention with his first novel, Dangling Man (1943). The book established what was to become typical in Bellow's work over the years: a sensitive protagonist who feels he does not belong or is out of step with the world, searching for some sense of personal destiny or self-realization. This theme paralleled the author's own struggle during his long career for such understanding. The Victim (1947) established Bellow as a Jewish writer, a label he often resented as limiting and insulting. Bellow maintained that his characters and their quest for transcendence were more universal than specifically ethnic.

Attention

Bellow's 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March received the National Book Award and brought him serious attention as an important postwar novelist. Drawing from his Chicago upbringing, Bellow explored the choices facing a young man who seeks a fate worthy of his own sense of "special destiny." His painful self-exploration leads him to a common Bellow conclusion: Augie finally must reject the search altogether, turn his back on intellect and reason, in favor of the simple joys of life, of love, and of commonplace experience. Bellow's style—long, dense sentences, deluges of detail and allusions, jumps in time, and multiplicity of memory—allowed the author to explore his characters' (and his own) complex thoughts and emphasized their subjective take on reality. Seize the Day (1956) continues the theme with a loser hero who realizes that only his reconnection to others in the world around him can resurrect his deadened spirit. Bellow had come to feel that writers and critics, like his fictional heroes, also must become attuned to human frailty and nuance. The mixed reviews of Augie March and Seize the Day led to his stinging attacks on critics, who he now saw as rigid and unimaginative in their insistence on literary tradition.

Defiance

With his next novel, Henderson the Rain King (1959), Bellow sought to defy every traditional tenet of writing. Its protagonist deserts his dull married life to pursue the desires of his heart and learns, after a series of African adventures, that his simple existence back home was more important than his insistence on a planned destiny. Bellow had less luck with his own life; The Noble Savage, a literary journal he cofounded with his friend Jack Ludwig, fizzled after five issues when Ludwig had an affair with Bellow's wife. The pain of this betrayal was the source and inspiration for Bellow's next—and, many feel, best—novel, Herzog (1964). The narrator, Moses Herzog, pours out simultaneously his personal anguish and his frustration with the deplorable state of civilization in the form of letters addressed to everyone he can think of, from his mother to the president to God. Again, the character seeks freedom in truth and learns that, ultimately, one can only be healed and find meaning through the acceptance of self and others as they are, and in sharing one's fate and suffering with the rest of humanity. This time the critics raved. Herzog was on The New York Times best-seller list for a year and received the National Book Award. Bellow had found acceptance.

Maturity

Or had he? When Bellow's 1968 short-story collection was greeted less than favorably, he again railed at the narrow hypocrisy of critics, this time in lecture appearances. Some of his anger and frustration emerged in his next novel, Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970). Imagining himself as an elderly curmudgeon, alienated and embittered by the modern world, Bellow for the first time seemed to reject the possibility of transcendence or even hope. Sammler's one remaining purpose before his death is simply to reexamine his life so as to square himself with God and accept the truth of his own failure. Over the course of two days he does so and is left only with the small dignity of his attempt, finally, to measure up. Despite the book's mature content it received mixed reviews, but Bellow again won the National Book Award in 1971. His next work found a slightly more appreciative audience. In Humboldt's Gift (1976) Bellow again intermingled past and present events as the narrator, Charlie Citrine, reviews his life. This time his character admits that he was more betrayed by himself than by others and condemns himself for his losses. Citrine confronts the memory of his mentor and friend Von Humboldt Fleischer, whose ultimate gift is the opportunity for the narrator to make peace with himself in the face of death—to transcend his past and his failings by simply being. Humboldt's Gift was, of all Bellow's novels, the truest examination of the author's life, imagination, and frustration. Despite its typically mixed critical response, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer. He subsequently won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Seeker

Despite a generally favorable reception for To Jerusalem and Back (1976), his observation of modern Israel and the history of Islam, Bellow again used lectures to air his diatribes against the dehumanization of the United States and critics as intellectual tyrants. This was ironic given the shift of late-1970s critics, especially younger reviewers, toward a new appreciation of Bellow as a serious artist. Bellow struggled on in his search for spiritual truth with The Dean's December (1982), a fictionalized meditation on the author's life and career and an indictment of presentday Chicago. For the first time in his fiction, Bellow tempered criticism of the world with solutions and action for its problems. If reviewers were displeased with the book's sterility and pessimism, the bitterness of More Die of Heartbreak (1987) was more alarming. By now Bellow's protagonist had become trapped by his own memory and recognized that he had failed himself utterly. The Bellarosa Connection (1989) marked a return to Bellow's best form, revealing a spirit still very much alive, still searching for truth and transcendence.

Source:

Ruth Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991).