BELLOW, Saul

Nationality: American. Born: Lachine, Quebec, Canada, 10 June 1915; grew up in Montreal; moved with his family to Chicago, 1924. Education: Tuley High School, Chicago, graduated 1933; University of Chicago, 1933-35; Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 1935-37, B.S. (honors) in sociology and anthropology 1937; did graduate work in anthropology at University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1937. Military Service: Served in the United States Merchant Marine, 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 Ionescu Tulcea in 1975 (divorced 1986); 5) Janis Freedman in 1989. Career: Teacher, Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College, Chicago, 1938-42; member of the editorial department, "Great Books" Project, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago, 1943-44; freelance editor and reviewer, New York, 1945-46; instructor, 1946, and assistant professor of English, 1948-49, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; visiting lecturer, New York University, 1950-52; creative writing fellow, Princeton University, New Jersey, 1952-53; member of the English faculty, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 1953-54; associate professor of English, University of Minnesota, 1954-59; visiting professor of English, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, 1961; Romanes Lecturer, 1990; professor, from 1962, and chairman, 1970-76, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago; Gruiner Distinguished Services Professor. Co-editor, The Noble Savage, New York, then Cleveland, 1960-62. Fellow, Academy for Policy Study, 1966; fellow, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Lives in Chicago. Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1948, 1955; American Academy grant, 1952, and gold medal, 1977; National Book award, 1954, 1965, 1971; Ford grant, 1959, 1960; Friends of Literature award, 1960; James L. Dow award, 1964; International Literary prize, 1965; Jewish Heritage award, 1968; Formentor prize, 1970; Nobel prize for literature, 1976; Pulitzer prize, 1976; Neil Gunn International fellowship, 1977; Brandeis University Creative Arts award, 1978; Malaparte award (Italy), 1984; Scanno award (Italy), 1988; National Medal of Arts, 1988. D.Litt.: Northwestern University, 1962; Bard College, 1963. Litt.D.: New York University, 1970; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972; Yale University, 1972; McGill University, Montreal, 1973; Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, 1973; Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, 1976; Trinity College, Dublin, 1976. Chevalier, 1968, and Commander, 1985, Order of Arts and Letters (France). Member: American Academy, 1970; Commander, Legion of Honor (France), 1983.

Publications

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.

A Theft (novella). 1989.

The Bellarosa Connection. 1989.

Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales. 1992.

Novels

Dangling Man. 1944.

The Victim. 1947.

The Adventures of Augie March. 1953.

Henderson the Rain King. 1959.

Herzog. 1964.

Mr. Sammler's Planet. 1970.

Humboldt's Gift. 1975.

The Dean's December. 1982.

More Die of Heartbreak. 1987.

The Actual. 1997.

Plays

The Wrecker (televised 1964). Included in Seize the Day, 1956.

Scenes from Humanitas: A Farce, in Partisan Review. 1962.

The Last Analysis (produced 1964). 1965.

Under the Weather (includes "Out from Under," "A Wen," and"Orange Souffle") (produced 1966; as The Bellow Plays, produced 1966). "A Wen" published in Esquire, January 1965; in Traverse Plays, edited by Jim Haynes, 1966; "Orange Souffle" published in Traverse Plays, 1966; in Best Short Plays of the World Theatre 1968-1973, edited by Stanley Richards. 1973.

Television Play:

The Wrecker, 1964.

Other

Dessins, by Jesse Reichek; text by Bellow and Christian Zervos. 1960.

Recent American Fiction: A Lecture. 1963.

Like You're Nobody: The Letters of Louis Gallo to Saul Bellow, 1961-62. 1966.

Plus Oedipus-Schmoedipus, The Story That Started It All. 1966.

Technology and the Frontiers of Knowledge, with others. 1973.

The Portable Saul Bellow, edited by Gabriel Josipovici. 1974.

To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account. 1976.

Nobel Lecture. 1977.

Conversations with Saul Bellow, Novelist, Author of Short Stories and Plays. 1987.

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:

Bellow: A Comprehensive Bibliography by B. A. Sokoloff and Mark E. Posner, 1973; Bellow, His Works and His Critics: An Annotated International Bibliography by Marianne Nault, 1977; Bellow: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources by F. Lercangee, 1977; Bellow: A Reference Guide by Robert G. Noreen, 1978; Bellow: An Annotated Bibliography by Gloria L. Cronin, second edition, 1987.

Critical Studies:

Bellow by Tony Tanner, 1965; Bellow by Earl Rovit, 1967, and Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Rovit, 1975; Bellow: A Critical Essay by Robert Detweiler, 1967; Bellow and the Critics edited by Irving Malin, 1967, and Bellow's Fiction by Malin, 1969; Bellow: In Defense of Man by John Jacob Clayton, 1968, revised edition, 1979; Bellow by Robert R. Dutton, 1971, revised edition, 1982; Bellow by Brigitte Scheer-Schazler, 1973; Bellow's Enigmatic Laughter by Sarah Blacher Cohen, 1974; Whence the Power? The Artistry and Humanity of Bellow by M. Gilbert Porter, 1974; Bellow: The Problem of Affirmation by Chirantan Kulshrestha, 1978; Critical Essays on Bellow edited by Stanley Trachtenberg, 1979; Quest for the Human: An Exploration of Bellow's Fiction by Eusebio L. Rodrigues, 1981; Bellow by Malcolm Bradbury, 1983; Bellow: Vision and Revision by Daniel Fuchs, 1984; Bellow and History by Judie Newman, 1984; A Sort of Columbus: The American Voyages of Bellow's Fiction by Jeanne Braham, 1984; On Bellow's Planet: Readings from the Dark Side by Jonathan Wilson, 1984; Bellow by Robert F. Kiernan, 1988; Bellow in the 1980's edited by Gloria Cronin and L. H. Goldman, 1989; Bellow and the Decline of Humanism by Michael K. Glenday, 1990; Bellow: Against the Grain by Ellen Pifer, 1990; Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination by Ruth Miller, 1991; Saul Bellowand the Feminine Mystique by Tarlocahn Singh Anand, 1993; The Critical Response to Saul Bellow edited by Gerhard Bach, 1995; Character and Narration in the Short Fiction of Saul Bellow by Marianne M. Friedrich, 1995; Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow: A Memoir by Harriet Wasserman, 1997; Figures of Madness in Saul Bellow's Longer Fiction by Walter Bigler, 1998.

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Although the novel remains Saul Bellow's most congenial form, the one most hospitable to the range of ideas and thickly layered style that are his trademarks, his two collections of short stories prove that Bellow is not only a consummate story writer but also an author well served by the constraints of the short story. Novels such as The Dean's December or More Die of Heartbreak suffer from Bellow's growing impatience with showing rather than telling and his increasing habit of allowing stump speeches to wax ever longer and more tedious.

By contrast Bellow's short stories remind us of how humanly rich his fiction can be. As a character in "Cousins" puts it, "Why were the Jews such avid anthropologists?… They may have believed that they were demystifiers, that science was their motive and that their ultimate aim was to increase universalism. But I don't see it that way myself. A truer explanation is the nearness of ghettos to the sphere of Revelation, an easy move for the mind from rotting street and rancid dishes, a direct ascent into transcendence."

Bellow's short fiction moves easily from the quotidian to the higher realms. Childhood memory retains a special poignancy (one thinks of the Napoleon Street sections of Herzog), and there is the same sense of anthropological accuracy coupled with transcendental musing in such stories as "The Old System," "Mosby's Memoirs," "A Silver Dish," and "Cousins." Each is concerned with the mysteries of family and those painful steps one takes through memory and meditation toward reconciliation.

If a novel like The Dean's December tries to make sense of Chicago's corruption, its noisy, public face, a story like "A Silver Dish" announces its intentions in quieter, more reflective tones: "What do you do about death—in this case, the death of an old father? [Woody Selbst, the story's protagonist asks]…. How, against a contemporary background, do you mourn an octogenarian father, nearly blind, his heart enlarged, his lungs filling with fluid, who creeps, stumbles, gives off the odors, the moldiness or gasiness, of old men." Selbst, a tile contractor, may be an exception (the feisty Hattie Waggoner of "Leaving the Yellow House" is another) to the beleaguered intellectuals who figure in stories such as "Zeitland: By a Character Witness" (modeled on Bellow's boyhood chum Isaac Rosenfeld), "What Kind of Day Did You Have?" (a novella revolving around a New York Jewish intellectual who is a dead ringer for the art critic Harold Rosenberg), or "Him with His Foot in His Mouth" (a tale about an academic whose biting sarcasm is balanced by his capacity for lingering regret). Memory and the heart's deepest need for love is what gives these protagonists—and their stories—enormous power.

This is particularly true of "The Old System," a story in which Dr. Samuel Braun, an aging scientist, spends a "thoughtful day" remembering a family quarrel between his cousins Isaac and Tina. Braun discovers, much to his surprise, that he had loved them after all. But, like Bellow, he cannot keep from asking what in this low, dishonest time speaks for humans.

In "Mosby's Memoirs" Dr. Willis Mosby also broods about the past, but his is a slightly different problem. He is in Mexico, desperately trying to write his memoirs and finding himself stuck at the point where one ought "to put some humor in." At first the story of Lustgarten serves as comic relief, a way of priming the pump. After all Lustgarten was the archetypal schlemiel, a schemer whose plans for success always managed to go awry. A former shoe salesman from New Jersey, Lustgarten had belonged to a seemingly infinite number of fanatical, bolshevisitic groups. Lustgarten had also given up politics, but his luck was no better as a capitalist than it had been as a Marxist. For example, he was an incompetent manipulator of the black market and had once imported a Cadillac only to find himself without a buyer or even enough money for gasoline. On another occasion he visited Yugoslavia expecting to be given V.I.P. treatment, only to end up on a labor brigade in the mountains. Like "A Father-to-Be" (in which a prospective husband imagines, in a dream that turns nightmare, what a projected son might be like), "Mosby's Memoirs" is a tale of extended secret-sharing. Readers of Bellow novels, such as The Victim, Humbolt's Gift, or More Die of Heartbreak, are familiar with this impulse toward psychic doubling.

In the stories "Looking for Mr. Green" and "The Gonzaga Manuscripts" Bellow replaces characters who brood about the past with protagonists whose quests expand into symbolic meaning. For the George Grebe of "Looking for Mr. Green," the search involves delivering a government check to an invalid named Green. At first glance it looks like an easy job: Grebe is more conscientious than the usual run of state employees, and, moreover, anxious to do well. But his search for the elusive Mr. Green turns out to be harder than he had imagined as Bellow's plot moves him through a series of irritations to a full-blown obsession. Nobody in Chicago's Negro district will give him any help, and soon looking for Mr. Green takes on the look of a Kafkaesque problem. The story itself ends on a properly ambivalent note: Grebe hands over the check to a woman without the certainty that she is, in fact, Mrs. Green or that he has even found the right apartment.

In "The Gonzaga Manuscripts" a sense of quest takes Clarence Feiler to Madrid in search of some lost manuscripts by the Spanish poet Gonzaga. To Feiler, Gonzaga's poetry has been the only truly meaningful thing in his life. But (alas) Clarence soon discovers that the world at large cares very little about Gonzaga's poems, either published or in unpublished manuscript. At every turn he reminds himself of the sacredness of his mission, of how Gonzaga's poems must be recovered in the true spirit of the poet himself, but it soon becomes clear that Gonzaga's vision makes for better poetry than it does for a life.

The results are a series of serio-comic complications: Feiler is surrounded by the insensitive and the slightly clandestine. At various points he is cast as the ugly American by British guests at his hotel or as a CIA agent by his black-market contacts. Worse, Gonzaga's manuscripts are lost forever (presumably buried with the woman to whom they were dedicated), but the quest itself has had its effects on Feiler. He returns to the hotel empty-handed, knowing full well the scorn he will face at dinner, and yet, curiously enough, he also knows that he will be able to face his detractors—this time without need of the psychic crutch his quest had become.

Bellow's characteristic style is a marriage of gritty urban particulars and an itch for transcendental release, a blending of high-brow ideas and tough-guy postures, classical allusions and Yiddish quips. In short he turned deliberate roughening of syntax into a personal voice and, in the process, added a distinctive note to American prose rhythms. Bellow made a serious literature about the memories and continuities of Jewish American life possible in much the way that Faulkner made it possible to write about the South.

—Sanford Pinsker

See the essays on "Looking for Mr. Green" and Seize the Day.