Why We Should Read Saul Bellow
In 1913, two years before the birth of Saul Bellow, Franz Kafka responded to his fiancée, Felice Bauer, about her request to sit near him while he wrote:
For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind — for everyone wants to live as long as he is alive — even that degree of self-revelation and surrender is not enough for writing … This is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.
Bellow — who won, in order, three National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize — revealed himself completely in his writing. Friends, family members, and ex-lovers regularly appeared in his novels. He feared lawsuits, and consulted lawyers prior to publication. But the biographical facts which seep into his work — his first novel, Dangling Man, follows Joseph, who, like Bellow, had a delayed induction into WWII — are not the revealing facts which make Bellow a literary power.
To Kafka, writing is the “utmost of self-revelation,” not because it exposes an author’s personal life or opinions or prejudices. If Kafka believed that, he would reject The Metamorphosis for not being autobiographical. And he wrote Amerika without ever having been there. Writers reveal themselves, rather, by showcasing their imagination. For the imagination is the most unique and revealing weapon in the mind’s arsenal.
Bellow’s main contribution to literature is his moral imagination. He navigates the depths of personhood with ancient wisdom, with contemporary philosophy, with personal experience. He arms us with a new vocabulary to confront the Biblical-flood of information crashing over us.
Long time friend and colleague Philip Roth, in the documentary The Adventures of Saul Bellow, labeled Bellow’s ability to pivot from the highbrow to the lowbrow — to talk about hotdogs and Nietzsche not only in the same novel, but in the same scene — as the “Bellovian glide.” This is from Bellow’s third novel, The Adventures of Augie March:
I was around people of other kinds too. In one direction, a few who read whopping books in German or French and knew their physics and botany manuals backwards, readers of Nietzsche and Spengler. In another direction, the criminals. Except that I never thought of them as such, but as the boys I knew in the poolroom and saw also at school, dancing the double-toddle in the gym at lunch hour, or in the hot-dog parlors. I touched all sides, and nobody knew where I belonged. I had no good idea of that myself. Whether I’d have been around the poolroom if I hadn’t known and worked for Einhorn I can’t say. I wasn’t a grind certainly, or a memorizing eccentric; I wasn’t against the grinds and eccentrics either. But it was easier for the gangsters to take me for one of them.
Bellow could glide from Dingbat — a mediocre gangster turned boxing promoter in Augie — who dismissed children with, “Beat it, you little jag-offs,” into Augie’s views on boredom: “Boredom can arise from the cessation of habitual functions…It is the shriek of unused capacities, the doom of serving no great end or design….” Bellow is Machiavelli in a poolroom. A Kierkegaard in a Chicago alleyway.
He’s smart without being a snob.
You should read Bellow for his extreme moral depth and matchless prose. He will lull you into re-reading his characteristically long paragraphs. He will stun you with short sentences. “I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness,” from Herzog. “Maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end,” from Henderson the Rain King. Bellow’s literary magnitude places him alongside the other American godhead — Henry James.
Moral Depth
Bellow began writing during the Great Depression. He asks in There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, “And what was the most impractical of choices in somber, heavy, growling, lowbrow Chicago?” Answering in the same prose style found in his fiction,
Why, it was to be the representative of beauty, the interpreter of the human heart, the hero of ingenuity, playfulness, personal freedom, generosity and love. I cannot even now say that this was a bad sort of crackpot to be.
Indeed, Bellow’s family was business oriented. Both his father and his elder brother became millionaires in Chicago, and regarded him as a, “schmuck with a pen.”
Bellow confronts this 1940’s American attitude — the militaristic dog eat dog entrepreneurship — in Dangling Man. It is written as a journal with entry dates serving as chapters. The protagonist, Joseph, says he lives in an era of, “hardboiled-dom,” that condemns any artistic sensibility. Having a journal in the world of mass genocide, labor camps, and gas chambers is seen as a weakness. “Do you have an inner life?” Joseph asks, mocking his contemporaries, “It is nobody’s business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them.” Bellow, like Joseph, disagreed with the prevailing attitudes. To them, artistry was not merely an aesthetic exercise.
When Roth, for instance, first published his novella Goodbye, Columbus, he was criticized for including Jewish stereotypes. Roth denied doing so. And Bellow, who is Jewish, defended him, arguing that “the loss to our sense of reality is not worth the gain (if there is one) in public relations.” Bellow thought, then, that art could be used to gain a sense of reality. And Bellow’s entire opus is a testament to his muscular clutch on reality. As Walter Kaufmann wrote of Nietzsche: “He challenges the reader not so much to agree or disagree as to grow.”
For what other novel captures paranoia and madness as brilliantly as Herzog? It follows Moses Herzog, a Romantics professor who is abandoned by his wife for his best friend. Herzog writes, “endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to the people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.” Though received by reviewers as if Bellow was writing for intellectuals, he intended to mock them.
“If your wife leaves you,” Bellow asked in an interview, “do you go pulling Spinoza off the shelf?” The irony in Herzog, however, is punctuated with seriousness. Learning that his wife left him for his closest friend, Herzog admits, “At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them.” He has long stints of introspection:
I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And then? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And what next? I get laid, I take a short holiday, but very soon after I fall upon those same thorns with gratification in pain, or suffering in joy — who knows what the mixture is! What good, what lasting good is there in me? Is there nothing else between birth and death but what I can get out of this perversity — only a favorable balance of disorderly emotions? No freedom? Only impulses? And what about all the good I have in my heart — does it mean anything? Is it simply a joke? A false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth? And so he goes on with his struggles. But this good is no phony. I know it isn’t. I swear it.
And short stints of introspection: “On the knees of your soul? Might as well be useful. Scrub the floor.” Paying homage to his work, Herzog wrote to Nietzsche: “Any philosopher who wants to keep his contact with mankind should pervert his own system in advance to see how it will really look a few decades after adoption.” Bellow quotes philosophy in all of his novels, but his characters spend more time creating their own. Some of their views, though, are close to Bellows.
Bellow was a deist, but his piety was not dogmatic. He considered prayer as “above all an act of gratitude for existence.” And believed that everything was not “resolved with the destruction of the body.” His religious attitudes and skepticism are littered in his work.
In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Sammler asks if God is “only the gossip of the living?” And Herzog says that history is, “cruelty, not love, as soft men think… If the old God exists, he is surely a murderer.” And Charlie Citrine, from Humboldt’s Gift, spoke to the dead: “When the dead answered it was really your own soul speaking,” and that, “such a mirror-image reversal was difficult to grasp.” As he mourns the loss of his friend Humboldt, he remembers Humboldt’s philosophy.
One of Humboldt’s themes was the perennial human feeling that there was an original world, a home-world, which was lost. Sometimes he spoke of Poetry as the merciful Ellis Island where a host of aliens began their naturalization and of this planet as a thrilling but insufficiently humanized imitation of the home-world. He spoke of our species as castaways.
The views of Bellow’s characters should not be conflated with his personal ones. But it does show Bellow’s intense meditation on them. In his last novel, Ravelstein, his hero Chick believes that death is, “when the pictures stop.” Bellow wrote convincing religious and irreligious characters. He did not want his readers to take a position. He was demonstrating what it is like to be — or not to be — a religious person.
Bellow met the complex, multifarious world with an equally developed inwardness. He was not to be outmatched by the world in containing multitudes. His moral depth is staggering, and his novels are a compulsory re-read. And what American writer has better prose than Saul Bellow?
Matchless Prose
Bellow traced the origins of his want to write. “All that appeared was a blind obstinate impulse expressing itself in bursts of foolishness.” He wanted to study English literature at Northwestern, but believed the department was anti-Jewish. Bellow recalled his advisors saying he was not “born to it.” He decided to study anthropology, but was told that his essays read like short stories.
He began writing fiction — both Dangling Man and The Victim are considered his apprentice work — and rose to literary fame with his 1953 The Adventures of Augie March. Its opening is a literary classic.
I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles. Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.
Augie has prose nowhere else to be found. Bellow allows himself complete freedom within a sentence without it being stream of consciousness. He is not Joyce or Woolf. His talent is being able to create a list, not of items, but of experience. By laying all of it within the confines of a single sentence, Bellow is able to capture the all-at-onceness of being alive. Living is not a partitioned thing. It is continual and overwhelming. This is Augie relating what it is like to be human:
Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.
The world does not let you catch your breath, so Bellow does not either. And Bellow writes from all perspectives equally well. In a diner, Bellow can be the flirtatious waitress or the gangster by the jukebox or the sweaty chef barking at co-workers.
Bellow’s awareness of detail reaches atmospheric heights. It’s like he’s shapeshifting. Having such a remarkable description of a dilapidated building in Herzog seems only possible if Bellow magically granted consciousness to the inanimate and swapped lives:
At the corner [Moses] paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire, fed by the wreckage. Moses heard the air, softly pulled toward the flames, felt the heat. The workmen, heaping the bonfire with wood, threw strips of molding like javelins. Paint and varnish smoked like incense. The old flooring burned gratefully — the funeral of exhausted objects.
Bellow’s prose can, “snatch from life more than it can give,” as Chekhov once wrote. It is a bare faced confrontation with what is. He does not shy away from eccentrics, and does not take his own views too seriously. His style is not naturally amorous like Nabokov, and it is not sexually explicit like Roth or Updike; when Bellow touches on sex, it is humorous. Humboldt knocked on doors to announce “I’m a poet. I have a big cock.”
Bellow is naturally moxie and urbane. His prose reflects the oceanic depth of his mind. His characters were moral without being didactic. His prose did not preach, but did not merely impress. His novels contain so much humanity that his opus cannot help but live.
Like the dog in The Dean’s December, Bellow “protests against the limitations of experience.” He is, simply, an American force.
