[Essay] [Assignment #7] [Selected Bibliography]
SAUL BELLOW (1915- )
The 1976 Nobel Laureate was born in Quebec, the fourth child of Russian immigrant parents who moved the family to Chicago in 1924. Bellow grew up in that city, going to its public schools and browsing through its public libraries. Much of the novelist's life has been spent in Chicago; much of his fiction exploits life there. Educated at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, Bellow graduated with honors in anthropology and sociology and for a time did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. Essentially he grew to manhood in urban America of the Great Depression where he became acquainted with the conflicts and dilemmas of men in big-city jungles haunted by poverty. Bellow was employed for a time by the Works Progress Administration with the assignment of writing biographical sketches of Midwestern men-of-letters. As a member of the editorial staff of the Encyclopedia Britannica he was involved in the famous "Great Books" project. He taught at a teacher's college and briefly served in the Maritime Service during World War II.
By the early 1940's Bellow had begun to publish. In 1944 he brought out his first novel. His life, thereupon, assumed the academic-literary pattern it has continued to follow till the present. Bellow taught English at the University of Minnesota; continuing to publish he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948, traveling to Paris and Rome to write. In the 1950's he continued to teach, lecturing at Bard College, New York University, and Princeton. When in 1953 he won the prestigious National Book Award for The Adventures of Augie March, he had arrived as a major force in American fiction. Saul Bellow presently is chairman of the Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago; he has come to represent the new archetype of the American novelist: one who not only is college educated but who also has found a satisfying sanctuary behind the "ivy covered walls" in the "groves of academe." Such background and literary lifestyle contrasts markedly with that of earlier American Nobel Laureates Hemingway and Faulkner who had comparatively little formal education, especially in creative writing, and no great love for the give and take of classroom rapport of the people who taught therein. Saul Bellow has received numerous national and international honors. His books are released to enormous critical success as well as to great popular sales. Such all-around acclaim is unusual. Thus, we might just mention his notable creative failure: Bellow's play The Last Analysis opened on Broadway September 29, 1964. It folded after twenty-eight performances. (I suppose even Nobel Prize winners have a tough time in show biz.)
Alienation, anxiety, the psychological collisions of modern life, and the victimized persona beset by confusion and doubt in a world suffering from social disintegration and personal dislocation: these are recurring themes in Saul Bellow's fiction. We will meet a character taught by "reality instructors"; all individuals must examine the nature of commitment versus non-commitment in the political and social matrix of our time. Bellow's novels are all, actually, about "dangling men," searchers who are momentarily suspended between a world of meditation and a world of action. Like other Nobel Laureates, he seals in Absurdity and Existentialism: man cannot help but be torn apart by one's innate feeling for freedom (the Rebel) and the social pressure to acquiesce and conform (the Victim).
Dangling Man (1944), his first novel, established the metaphor for all his work: man in conflict with society and with his essential self. On the literal level, Joseph, the hero, is "dangling" because he had quit his job to prepare for what he thought would be quick induction into the army; the induction is delayed and Joseph cannot find another job. Thus, while everyone is busy, when war effort activity is at a feverish pace, Joseph, totally free to reflect on his life, but suspended in time, becomes a kind of wartime casualty. Isolation and freedom, imagination and the purpose of existence find their way into Joseph's sensibility. Immobilized but rational, he is prototype for Bellow's "dangling men."
In The Adventures of Augie March (1953) Bellow composed a picaresque novel which many critics compared to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for in both works the heroes must try to improvise their lives by their instincts and wits. They must, furthermore, travel in disguise and suffer baptism (initiation) into the real world of depravity, evil and sin. Both must learn to take the emotional risks life demands, and both eventually are inclined toward a tender understanding of community. Part con-man and part saint, part victim and part victimizer, Augie March is created in the tradition of characters who strike out for the virgin land, the unexplored, uncharted territory where innocence reigns supreme.
With Henderson the Rain King (1959) Saul Bellow moved easily to another hero who seeks his identity in the uncharted, unspoiled; the major setting here, though, is Africa, and Eugene Henderson, fifty-five and a millionaire of a distinguished family, finds life in America spiritually unsatisfying. A pilgrim in search of himself, he journeys amidst the primitive peoples: first among the simple Arnewi and then among the more modern and sophisticated Wariri. A traveler like Lemuel Gulliver, Henderson achieves a series of illuminations into the human condition: "Maybe every guy has his own Africa," he muses. In any event, Eugene Henderson is no macho Hemingway hero. He is just another of Bellow's dangling men and a close precursor of Moses Herzog, hero of the novel we will be reading in this course.
Bellow followed Herzog (1964) with Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) and Humboldt's Gift (1975). Sammler is a seventy-four year-old partially blind displaced person, an intellectual who has been persecuted and whose wife was a victim of the Nazi death purges in Poland. The life of this honorable survivor of the holocaust, alienated in a modern-day setting - campus militants even curse at him! - exhibits a frequent recurring motif in Bellow: the history and backgrounds of a fundamentally romantic sensibility surrounded by (engulfed by?) the abrasive and polluted waters muddying through contemporary American urban life. And Humboldt's Gift explores many familiar Bellow themes - guilt, responsibility, emotional and intellectual sickness, this time in the world of a writer. The author takes this opportunity to pay literary homage to and examine his relationship with Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966), superbly talented American critic and poet who was an early advisor to Bellow when the Chicagoan was first seeking his literary voice. Von Humboldt Fleisher, "dying of unwritten poems," is a moving portrait in sadness.
Characterized by a marvelous sense of invention, an aura of Jewishness, and a slight bias toward the sentimental, Bellow underscores man's self-hood and integrity in the midst of the world's despair and chaos. His style is simultaneously relaxed and intense. David Galloway offered one of the best summaries of Bellow's literary strategy in a 1973 Modern Fiction Studies article:
The Bellovian hero is a dangling man, suspended between worlds, between ideas, institutions, commitments or value systems. He is not a rebel in the conventional, romantic sense, although he may possess the instincts of rebellion; but he characteristically has a sense of separation from a world of treasons. . . . The Bellovian character moves through a series of recognition scenes, muted epiphanies, in which he learns to recognize these treasons; he often finds that his contemporaries accept them as "reality," that they are content to live with shabbiness, chicanery, violence and imposture. Bellow's heroes, however, all possess a deep, almost mystical impulse to resist such a vision of life. . . . Bellovian man resists limiting commitments, is suspicious of secondhand versions of reality, and struggles - often clumsily, comically - to defend his inner voices. Such a man is doubly the outsider, for he is an outsider first by spiritual circumstances and second by intellectual choice. Having made his choice, having declined to accept treason as his accomplice, the hero then faces the ultimate Bellovian dilemma, for simultaneous with his willed divorce from the world comes a gnawing sense that only through community, through acceptance of reality, can man achieve definition (17-28).Bellow's essential question then is, whence alienation? Is it inner, or is it foisted upon us from the world's external pressures?