BELLOW, Saul

(b. 10 June 1915 in Lachine, Quebec, Canada), Nobel Prize–winning novelist, several of whose novels—The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet—have secured for him a place in the American literary canon.

Bellow was the youngest of four children born to Abraham Bellow and Liza Gordon, Russian Jewish immigrants who arrived in Canada two years before his birth. The father was a businessman, often unsuccessful, whose lines of trade were many, not all of them legal. He moved the family to Chicago when Bellow was nine, and by the time Bellow graduated from Tuley High School and entered the University of Chicago in 1933, the father was the owner of the Carroll Coal Company. A suit against the temporarily un-insured company, following the death of one of its workers, saddled the family with long-term debt, and forced Bellow to withdraw from the university. He picked up his studies first at the University of Wisconsin and then at Northwestern University, from which he graduated with a degree in anthropology in 1937.

Between Bellow's taking of his degree and the period of his greatest success, the 1960s, he worked at making himself a writer. In 1941 Partisan Review published his first story, "Two Morning Monologues," and in 1943 it published an excerpt from Bellow's novel in progress, Dangling Man, itself published in 1944. In its opening pages, the book famously put the Hemingway cult of reserve and silence to rest: "If you have difficulties, grapple with them silently, goes one of their commandments. To hell with that! I intend to talk about mine, and if I had as many mouths as Siva has arms and kept them all going at the same time, I still could not do myself justice." It was Bellow's first public act of braying, something that he turned into an art form in succeeding novels such as The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), and Henderson the Rain King (1959).

Bellow's contribution to our understanding of the 1960s is chiefly connected with the publication of two novels, Herzog (1964) and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970). About the former, it has been said that "the prose is charged, rich, full of the specifics and precisely defined impressions that create the feel of the mid-1960s American life." Of the latter, a critic has written, "Bellow captures better than anyone the feel of American society in the late 1960s, with its blend of social rebellion, sexuality, racial unrest, and personal aggrandizement."

The 1960s also saw Bellow try his hand at drama, with the Broadway production of The Last Analysis in 1964 and the Spoleto, London, and New York productions of Under the Weather (1966), a group of three short plays (A Wen, Orange Soufflé, Out from Under). The Last Analysis is the story of a formerly successful comedian, Bummidge, who attempts to resuscitate not so much his career as his life by engaging "on an expedition to recover the forgotten truth," and in the process sets out to hold up a mirror to society's unspoken desperation and angst: "Only a comic," Bummidge muses. "Bummidge—he doesn't know Greek or calculus. But he knows what he knows. Have you ever watched audiences laughing? You should see how monstrous it looks; you should listen from my side of the foot-lights. Oh, the despair, my son! The stale hearts! The snarling and gasping!" The play failed to find an audience, closing after twenty-eight performances. Its failure with both audiences and critics led Bellow to rewrite and publish it in book form, and to try to defend it. "The Last Analysis," he wrote, "is not simply a spoof of Freudian psychology, though certain analysts have touchily interpreted it as such. Its real subject is the mind's comical struggle for survival in an environment of Ideas—its fascination with metaphors, and the peculiarly literal and solemn manner in which Americans dedicate themselves to programs, fancies, or brainstorms."

As for Under the Weather, the most notable of its three one-act plays, A Wen, concerns a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Solomon Ithimar, whose obsessive recall of a high-school sweetheart's birthmark upon her thigh compels him to seek her out. Middle-aged, heavy-set, and married to a chiropodist, she clearly is no longer the woman of his fantasies, but she is part of his past and the play is as much about the longing for this, his past, as it is for the birthmark itself. The critics, however, thought no better of Under the Weather than they did of The Last Analysis. Edith Oliver, writing in the New Yorker, tartly remarked: "Apparently, Mr. Bellow believes that it is a good idea to earn while you learn, and although his first full-length exercise, 'The Last Analysis,' was a full-blown disaster when exhibited on Broadway in 1964, he has gamely come on once again to show us how he is progressing in his studies." Thus, playwriting proved for Bellow what it had also proved for Henry James, who also famously suffered a serious defeat when he took it up in mid-career.

Bellow's dramatic successes during this period were not recorded in the theater but in fiction, especially with the phenomenally successful Herzog, which his biographer James Atlas refers to as the author's "passport to great fame and wealth." For good reason: the novel was on the bestseller list for forty-two weeks, selling 142,000 copies in hardcover. It also earned the author his second National Book Award. Part roman à clef, part cultural critique, the novel struck a nerve in the American psyche, anticipating, as the critic Keith Opdahl writes, "the mood of the coming decade." What it especially anticipated was the faltering collapse of marriage as the centerpiece of American social existence—as well as the centrality that divorce itself would assume in the American realistic novel of the last third of the twentieth century. The eminent critic Tony Tanner has said of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century realistic novel that in it one finds testimony to the fact that "For bourgeois society marriage is the all-subsuming, all-organizing, all-containing contract. It is the structure that maintains the Structure." By contrast, its late-twentieth-century counterpart offers itself as testimony to a contrary truth: the fissiparous nature of contemporary life. "Things fall apart," wrote Bellow, echoing the poet W. B. Yeats's "Second Coming," in Mr. Sammler's Planet; and the thing most noticeably falling apart, in both the contemporary world and novel, is marriage. It comes as no surprise, then, to hear that upon the publication of Herzog, Bellow "received two or three thousand letters from people pouring out their souls to me, saying, 'This is my life, this is what it's been like for me.' "

It was also like that for Bellow himself, now in his second marriage, for the impulse for the novel sprang from Bellow's rage at being cuckolded by a man, Jack Ludwig, whom he had thought of as his best friend. Not without cause, then, does the novel begin, "If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog." Alternating between third person and first person, the novel ostensibly takes place in Herzog's head, as he recalls the events surrounding his own cuckolding by Valentine Gersbach and sends off letters to friends and foes, famous and not, living and dead, to anyone who might help him achieve escape and relief from the state of being "incoherent with anger." In time, Herzog does come down from the heights of his rage, and the novel ends with him deciding to write no more letters, a sign of his sanity reasserting itself: "Perhaps, he'd stop writing letters. Yes, that was what was coming, in fact. The knowledge that he was done with these letters. Whatever had come over him during these last months, the spell, really seemed to be passing, really going." But before the novel concludes, Bellow, in the voice of Herzog, offers up a picture of contemporary American reality that is inimically opposed to the integrity of the individual soul, to its cries for meaning.

Mr. Sammler's Planet picks up this theme, viewing a late 1960s urban culture—that of New York City—through the eyes of an aging Holocaust survivor, the eponymous Mr. Arthur Sammler. The culture itself is found enmeshed in a Bataille-like notion of the real, wherein sex and violence are understood as authenticity's fundamental factors. Mr. Sammler has experienced evil firsthand, not only by being forced to dig his own grave, but also by being shot by the German guards and then, after his miraculous escape from amidst the freshly buried corpses (including that of his wife), by being hounded in the forests by Polish resistance fighters. And having experienced evil as such, he thinks it neither "banal"—the term applied to it by the American philosopher Hannah Arendt—nor emancipatory, in the spirit of the French intellectual Georges Bataille. (Both thinkers are mentioned, and dismissed, in the novel.) In fact, "like many people who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Sammler entertained the possibility that it might collapse twice."

And late 1960s New York provides its full share of evidence to influence apocalyptic thoughts: "New York makes one think about the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end of the world wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it." Mr. Sammler doesn't bank upon it; his spiritual longing for completion won't permit such an acquiescence to despair. But he is frightfully taken aback by a culture that does not acknowledge that one can become the prisoner of one's vaunted freedoms, of one's appetites and lusts. Released from feelings of puritanical guilt, cosmopolitan culture offers up manifest examples of why it might benefit from reinstating guilt to its proper place in defining human nature: "The labors of Puritanism now was ending. The dark satanic mills changing into light satanic mills. The reprobates converted into children of joy, the sexual ways of the seraglio and of the Congo bush adopted by the emancipated masses," ending in a scenario of "libidinous privileges, the right to be uninhibited, spontaneous, urinating, defecating, belching, coupling in all positions, tripling, quadrupling, polymorphous, noble in being natural, primitive, combining the leisure and luxurious inventiveness of Versailles with the hibiscus-covered erotic ease of Samoa."

Mr. Sammler speaks in the thinly veiled voice of Bellow himself, and the novel has often been singled out as offering a too reactionary view of 1960s culture. Yet when read many decades later, the novel, so independently conceived, seems remarkably acute in its social critique, more penetrating than many a novel whose author simply purveyed the decade's shibboleths. It is for his independent spirit that Bellow is valued, the spirit that writes out of the conviction "that the truth is not loved because it is improving or progressive. We hunger and thirst for it—for its own sake." It is the conviction that Mr. Sammler, praying over the corpse of his dead nephew, memorably voices at novel's end: "He was aware that he must meet, and he did meet—through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding—he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it—that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know."

By the time of Mr. Sammler's Planet's publication, and certainly by 1975, with the publication of Humboldt's Gift, Bellow's reputation had solidified. He was among the pantheon of great American novelists, as well as a leading figure in the subset of American Jewish novelists, whose notables included Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976. Other books would follow, including The Dean's December (1982), Him with His Foot in His Mouth, and Other Stories (1984), More Die of Heartbreak (1987), and Ravelstein (2000). They have been fine additions to a magnificent oeuvre.

Biographies of Bellow include Ruth Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination (1991), and James Atlas, Bellow (2000). Studies of Bellow's work include Tony Tanner, Saul Bellow (1965); Keith Opdahl, The Novels of Saul Bellow: An Introduction (1967); Irving Malin, Saul Bellow's Fiction (1969); Sarah Blacher Cohen, Saul Bellow's Enigmatic Laughter (1974); G. I. Porter, Whence the Power? (1974); John Jacob Clayton, Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man (1979); Daniel Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (1984); Jeanne Brahm, A Sort of Columbus: The American Voyages of Saul Bellow's Fiction (1984); Ellen Pifer, Saul Bellow: Against the Grain (1990); and Peter Hyland, Saul Bellow (1992).

Christopher J. Knight