BELLOW, Saul

Nationality: American. Born: Solomon Bellows, Lachine, Quebec, Canada, 10 June 1915. Education: University of Chicago, 1933-35; Northwestern University, B.S. (honors) in sociology and anthropology 1937; graduate studies in anthropology, University of Wisconsin, 1937. Military Service: Merchant Marines, 1944-45. Family: Married 1) Anita Goshkin in 1937 (divorced), one son; 2) Alexandra Tschacbasov in 1956 (divorced), one son; 3) Susan Glassman in 1961 (divorced), one son; 4) Alexandra Ionesco Tuleca in 1974 (divorced); 5) Janis Freedman in 1989, one daughter. Career: Biography writer, WPA Writers' Project; instructor, Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College, Chicago, 1938-42; member of editorial department of "Great Books" project, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, 1943-46; member of English department, 1946, assistant professor of English, 1948-49, and associate professor, 1954-59, University of Minnesota at Minneapolis; Grunier Distinguished Services Professor and member of Committee on Social Thought, 1962-93, and committee chair, 1970-76, University of Chicago. Since 1993 professor of English, Boston University. Visiting lecturer, New York University, 1950-52; creative writing fellow, Princeton University, 1952-53; faculty member, Bard College, 1953-54; visiting professor of English, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, 1961; celebrity-in-residence, University of Chicago, 1962; lecturer and fellow, Oxford University, Academy for Policy Study, 1966; fellow, Brandford College, Yale University; war correspondent, Newsday, 1967. Founder and coeditor, The Noble Savage, 1960-62. Awards: Guggenheim fellowship in Paris and Rome, 1948; National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, 1952; National Book award, 1954, for The Adventures of Augie March, 1965, for Herzog, and 1971, for Mr. Sammler's Planet; O. Henry Award, 1956, for "The Gonzaga Manuscripts," and 1980, for "A Silver Dish"; Ford grants, 1959 and 1960; Friends of Literature fiction award, 1960; James L. Dow award, 1964; Prix International de Litterature (France), 1965, for Herzog; Jewish Heritage award, B'nai B'rith, and Croix de Chevalier (France), both in 1968; Formentor prize, 1970; Pulitzer prize, 1976, for Humboldt's Gift; Nobel prize, 1976, for literature; Gold medal, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Emerson-Thoreau medal, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Neil Gunn International fellowship, all in 1977; Brandeis University creative arts award, 1978; Malaparte prize for literature (Italy), 1984; National Medal of Arts, 1988; Lifetime Achievement award, National Book Awards, 1990. D.Litt: Northwestern University, 1962, Bard College, 1963, New York University, 1970, Harvard University, 1972, Yale University, 1972, McGill University, 1973, Brandeis University, 1974, Hebrew Union College, 1976, and Trinity College (Dublin), 1976. Commander, Legion of Honour (France), 1983; Commander, Order of Arts and Letters (France), 1985. Member: American Academy of Arts and Letters. Addresses: Office: 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637, U.S.A.; or c/o Boston University, 754 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, U.S.A.

Publications

Collections

The Portable Saul Bellow. 1974.

Collected Fiction, edited by Janice Bellow. 2001.

Novels

Dangling Man. 1944.

The Victim. 1947.

The Adventures of Augie March. 1953.

Henderson the Rain King. 1959.

Herzog. 1964; critical edition, 1976.

Mr. Sammler's Planet. 1970.

Humboldt's Gift. 1975.

The Dean's December. 1982.

More Die of Heartbreak. 1987.

A Theft (novella). 1989.

The Bellarosa Connection (novella). 1989.

The Actual (novella). 1997.

Ravelstein. 2000.

Short Stories

Seize the Day, with Three Short Stories and a One-Act Play. 1956.

Mosby's Memoirs, and Other Stories. 1968.

Him with His Foot in His Mouth, and Other Stories. 1984.

Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales (includes Something to Remember Me By; A Theft; The Bellarosa Connection ). 1991.

Plays

The Wrecker. In New World Writing 6, 1954.

The Last Analysis, a Play (produced New York, 1964). 1965.

Under the Weather (three one-act comedies: Orange Souffle; A Wren; Out from Under; produced London and New York, 1966).

Orange Souffle. In Esquire, January 1965.

A Wren. In Esquire, October 1965.

Other

Like You're Nobody: The Letters of Louis Gallo to Bellow, 1961-1962, plus "Oedipus-Schmoedipus, the Story That Started It All" (letters and short story). 1966.

To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (memoir). 1976.

Nobel Lecture (Stockholm, December 12, 1976). 1977.

It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. 1994.

Editor, Great Jewish Short Stories. 1963.

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Bibliography:

Saul Bellow: A Comprehensive Bibliography by B. A. Sokoloff and Mark E. Posner, 1971; Saul Bellow: His Works and His Critics: An Annotated International Bibliography by Marianne Nault, 1977; Saul Bellow: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources by Francine Lercangée, 1977; Basic Bibliography in English and Chinese for the Study of Saul Bellow by William Yeh, 1977; Saul Bellow: An Annotated Bibliography by Gloria L. Cronin and Blaine H. Hall, 1987.

Manuscript Collection:

Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

Critical Studies:

Saul Bellow by Earl Rovit, 1967; The Novels of Saul Bellow; An Introduction by Keith Michael Opdahl, 1967; Saul Bellow: A Critical Essay by Robert Detweiler, 1967; Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man by John Jacob Clayton, 1968; Saul Bellow's Fiction by Irving Malin, 1969; Saul Bellow by Robert R. Dutton, 1971, revised, 1982; Saul Bellow by Brigitte Scheer, 1972; "Imagining the Holocaust: Mr. Sammler's Planet and Others" by Edward Alexander, in Judaism, 22, 1973, pp. 288-300; Saul Bellow's Enigmatic Laughter by Sarah Blacher Cohen, 1974; Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Earl H. Rovit, 1975; Critical Essays on Saul Bellow, edited by Stanley Trachtenberg, 1979; 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 Revision by Daniel Fuchs, 1984; "The Holocaust in Mr. Sammler's Planet " by Lillian S. Kremer, in Saul Bellow Journal, 4(1), Fall/Winter 1985, pp. 19-32; Saul Bellow, edited by Harold Bloom, 1986; "The Holocaust in the Novels of Saul Bellow" by L. M. Goldman, in Modern Language Studies, 16(1), Winter 1986, pp. 71-80; Saul Bellow in the 1980s: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Gloria L. Cronin and L. H. Goldman, 1989; Saul Bellow by Robert F. Kiernan, 1989; Saul Bellow: Against the Grain by Ellen Pifer, 1990; Saul Bellow at Seventy-Five: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Gerhard Bach and Jakob J. Kollhofer, 1991; Saul Bellow by Peter Hyland, 1992; Saul Bellow, A Mosaic, edited by L. H. Goldman, Gloria L. Cronin, and Ada Aharoni, 1992; New Essays on Seize the Day, edited by Michael P. Kramer, 1998; Bellow: A Biography by James Atlas, 2000; Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction, edited by Gerhard Bach and Gloria L. Cronin, 2000; A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in the Novels of Saul Bellow by Gloria L. Cronin, 2001.

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It is difficult to generalize about Saul Bellow's ideas about the Holocaust except to say that he has found it extremely confusing and complicated. As readers would expect from this most cerebral of writers, he tries to examine many points of view about the Holocaust, its survivors, and its aftermath. For example, in his short story "Mosby's Memoirs" (1968) his unlikable protagonist, Willis Mosby, showed during the war great admiration for the Nazis, whom, because of their "managerial revolution," he considered unbeatable, and after the war he argued that "however deplorable the concentration camps had been, they showed at least the rationality of German political ideas." In the work To Jerusalem and Back (1976), although the Holocaust is not nearly as central as one might expect, Bellow repeatedly finds himself examining different, even extreme ideas about it, such as that of Prof. Jacob Leib Talmon, who asks Bellow, "Didn't Hitler after all win? As far as the Jews are concerned?" In the same book he seems to conclude that "it is difficult to apply reasonable propositions to the survivors of the Holocaust," and he seems to feel that the same could be said about the Holocaust itself and its aftermath.

Bellow's second novel, The Victim (1947), treats Kirby Allbee's persecution of Asa Leventhal in post-World War II New York City. Behind it lie the horrors of the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the death camps. This background makes horrifying a series of incidents that may to an outsider and sometimes even to Leventhal appear trivial. In fact, several critics argue that Bellow agrees with the protagonist of the novel Herzog (1964) that all Jews in the post-Holocaust world are "survivors" and that "to realize that you are a survivor is a shock." Still, he ultimately seems puzzled about just where this realization leads.

Artur Sammler, of Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), is a literal survivor of the Holocaust, as is Harry Fonstein of the short novel The Bellarosa Connection (1989). Sorella Fonstein is determined that her husband, Harry, have a chance to thank in person Billy Rose, the Broadway impresario, for rescuing him from the Nazis. After the Nazis had confiscated the investments of Harry's father, he died. Harry's sister and her husband hid in the woods but ended up in the death camps. In spite of a poorly constructed orthopedic boot, Harry escaped from Lemberg (Lvov), in the Ukraine, managing to walk with his mother to Italy, where she died. He eventually reached Rome, where he worked as a waiter at a reception for Hitler. Imprisoned in Rome, he risked being deported by the SS. He escaped from the Italian jail, went to Ellis Island, and then was sent to Cuba, thanks to an underground organization Rose had set up. Thus, when Fonstein, who at the time knew no English, heard the name Billy Rose, what he thought was the Bellarosa Connection came into existence. Thanks largely to Rose, "Fonstein had survived the greatest ordeal of Jewish history." After he had married Sorella, he went to the United States, where in time he made a small fortune.

When Harry approaches Rose at Sardi's in New York City, the impresario turns his back on him, and a bouncer leads Harry from the restaurant. Sorella eventually acquires a manuscript by one of Rose's associates, the same person who had met Harry at Ellis Island and had told him that he had to go to Cuba. The manuscript implicates Rose in shady dealings. Sorella meets with Rose, hoping to use the manuscript to get him to receive her husband's thanks. But Rose claims that he does not remember Harry Fonstein and refuses to meet with him. His forgetfulness contrasts with the nameless narrator's memory. The narrator is a relative of Sorella by marriage and the founder of the Mnemosyne Institute, an organization, as the name implies, dedicated to memory. He is in Jerusalem to explore the idea of setting up an Israeli branch when Rose goes there to donate a sculpture garden. It is there Sorella confronts him, but Rose, with justice, tells Sorella, "I did all I could," and he adds, "And for that point of time, that's more than most can say."

Both Sorella and the story's narrator are American Jews, and for this reason the narrator feels that, unlike Harry Fonstein, he can never "grasp the real facts" of the case. For the narrator ultimately, and perhaps for Bellow too, even though they may be "survivors," they are non-European Jews and thus did not directly experience the Holocaust and have trouble remembering, much less understanding, it. Like the nameless narrator of The Bellarosa Connection, the best such people can do is to try to remember what they learn from others about the horrible things that happened and then to pass the memories on to others.

—Richard Tuerk

See the essay on Mr. Sammler's Planet.