Saul Bellow has died

[Guest Chaney]

April 5, 2005

Author Saul Bellow Dies at 89

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, a master of comic melancholy who in "Herzog," "Humboldt's Gift" and other novels both championed and mourned the soul's fate in the modern world, died Tuesday. He was 89.

Bellow's close friend and attorney, Walter Pozen, said the writer had been in declining health, but was "wonderfully sharp to the end." Pozen said that Bellow's wife and daughter were at his side when he died at his home in Brookline, Mass.

Bellow was the most acclaimed of a generation of Jewish writers who emerged after World War II, among them Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick. To American letters, he brought the immigrant's hustle, the bookworm's brains and the high-minded notions of the born romantic.

"The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists -- William Faulkner and Saul Bellow," Philip Roth said Tuesday. "Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century."

He was the first writer to win the National Book Award three times: in 1954 for "The Adventures of Augie March," in 1965 for "Herzog" and in 1971 for "Mr. Sammler's Planet." In 1976, he won the Pulitzer Prize for "Humboldt's Gift." That same year Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, cited for his "human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture." In 2003, the Library of America paid the rare tribute of releasing work by a living writer, issuing a volume of Bellow's early novels.

In spite, or perhaps because, of all the praise, Bellow also had detractors. Norman Mailer called "Augie March" a "travelogue for timid intellectuals." Critic Alfred Kazin, a longtime friend who became estranged from Bellow, thought the author had become a "university intellectual" with "contempt for the lower orders." Biographer James Atlas accused Bellow of favoring "subservient women in order to serve his own shaky self-image."

Old-fashioned, but not complacent, the author strove to ward off the "Nobel curse," to be softened by literature's highest honor. He kept writing into his 80s and, hoping to make his work more affordable, had his novella "A Theft" published as a paperback original in 1989.

His recent works included "The Actual," a sentimental novella published in 1997, and "Ravelstein," a 2000 novel based on the life of his late friend, Allan Bloom, author of "The Closing of the American Mind." Also in 2000, Bellow was the subject of Atlas' acclaimed biography.

"If the soul is the mind at its purest, best, clearest, busiest, profoundest," Ozick wrote in 1984, "then Bellow's charge has been to restore the soul to American literature."

Bellow had a gift for describing faces, and the author's own looks -- snowy hair, aristocratic nose and space between his front teeth -- were familiar from book jackets.

Bellow's personality was equally distinctive. In "Humboldt's Gift," the narrator's childhood sweetheart refers to him as a "good man who's led a cranky life." His longtime agent, Harriet Wasserman, once described him as being as "deeply emotional as he is highly intellectual and cerebral."

He had five wives, three sons and, at age 84, a daughter. He met presidents (Kennedy, Johnson) and movie stars (Marilyn Monroe, Jack Nicholson). He feuded with writers (Truman Capote, Mailer), and helped out writers, notably William Kennedy, on whose behalf he lobbied to get his work published.

After teaching for many years at the University of Chicago, Bellow stunned both the literary and academic world by leaving the city with which he was so deeply associated. In 1993, he accepted a position at Boston University, where he taught a freshman-level class on "young men on the make" in literature.

Like his characters, Bellow's life was an evolution from the unbearable, but comic passion of the Old World, to the unbearable, but comic alienation of the New World.

The son of Russian immigrants, he was born Solomon Bellows on July 10, 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, outside Montreal. He dropped the final "s" from his last name and changed his first name to Saul when he began publishing his writing in the 1940s.

When he was 9, his family moved from Montreal to Chicago.

Hebrew was Bellow's first language. His family life was one of violence (his father), of sentiment (both parents) and of humor (everyone). Nothing was left unsaid.

The classic Bellow narrator was a self-absorbed intellectual with ideals the author himself seemed to form during the Depression. While he would remember the fear most people had during those years, Bellow found them an exciting and even liberating time.

"There were people going to libraries and reading books," he told The Associated Press in a 1997 interview. "They were going to libraries because they were trying to keep warm; they had no heat in their houses. There was a great deal of mental energy in those days, of very appealing sorts. Working stiffs were having ideas.

"Also, you didn't want to waste your time getting a professional education because when you finished there would be no jobs for you. It seems that the time of the Depression was a suspension of all the normal activities. Everything was held up."

Bellow did study at the University of Chicago for two years and then transferred and got an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University in nearby Evanston.

He was a contributor to the Partisan Review, along with Kazin, Mary McCarthy and the poet Delmore Schwartz, whom he would re-imagine as Von Humboldt Fleisher in "Humboldt's Gift." He worked on a novel he ended up destroying and eventually debuted with "Dangling Man," in 1944.

From the beginning, Bellow was determined to tell a different kind of American story, to depart from the tight-lipped machismo of Ernest Hemingway.

"Do you have emotions? Strangle them. To a degree, everyone obey this code," Bellow wrote in "Dangling Man." While the Hemingway hero keeps his problems to himself, Bellow declared "I intend to talk about mine."

While the Bellow themes were in place from the start, his prose matured later. As the author himself would acknowledge, his early books were too prim, too careful. Only in 1953, with "The Adventures of Augie March," would readers see another Bellow: the funny Bellow, the immigrant Bellow, Bellow the son of a bootlegger.

"Well, `Augie March' was a sort of Niagara of freedom that poured over me suddenly. I thought of myself as an imperfect writer who needed to perfect himself, perfect his language and style, and all of a sudden that was a suffocating project that I had to break with," he said.

"There was a way for children of European immigrants in America to write about this experience with a new language. I felt like a creator of a language suddenly and was intoxicated. It was truly intoxicating and I couldn't control it. It took me several books to rein it in."

"Augie March" and the books that followed -- "Seize the Day," "Henderson the Rain King," "Herzog" -- established him as a major writer. In each work Bellow lived up to Augie March's idea of imaginative power, of inventing "a man who can stand before the terrible appearances."

Bellow's men stood before the New World, and trembled. Nonbelievers amid the worship of machines and money, they shook with existential despair. They did everything from compose letters to dead people in "Herzog" to running off to Africa in "Henderson the Rain King."

"There is something terribly nervous-making about a modern existence. For one thing, it's all the thinking we have to do and all the judgments we have to make. It's the price of freedom: make the judgments, make the mental calls," Bellow said.

Among his most personal novels was "Humboldt's Gift," which Bellow described as "a comic book about death," culminating in a graveyard scene as emotional as anything he wrote.

The novel was also personal in other ways. The main character, Charlie Citrine, is an aging Chicago writer chasing a younger woman while trying to keep a former wife from ruining him financially.

Two years after the book was published, Bellow faced a 10-day jail term for contempt of court in an alimony dispute with his third wife, Susan Glassman Bellow. An Illinois appeals court overturned the sentence.

In December 1999, Bellow's fifth wife, Janis Freedman, gave birth to their daughter, Naomi. Bellow, 84 at the time, also had three grown sons from prior marriages, and quipped about finally having a girl: "If I didn't succeed at first, I'll try again."

[Chuck Nessa]

DAMN!

and a big thank you.

[chuckyd4]

Just discovering him a few years ago, I've only had the time to get to three of his novels: The Dangling Man, Adventures of Augie March, and Herzog. But I love all three, and especially love how different they are, despite the underlying themes.

One of those defining voices of the 20th Century in America. What a loss.

[BruceH]

Well, it had to happen. RIP

I didn't know he lived in BROOKLINE, MA of all places. Looks like he moved in just as I moved out.

[ghost of miles]

Sad to say that I've read only the novella SEIZE THE DAY; I have an Everyman hardback of AUGIE as well the LOA of the first three novels, plus paperbacks of HUMBOLDT'S GIFT and HERZOG... gotta get around to reading them one of these days.

[J.A.W.]

DAMN!

and a big thank you.

Indeed.

One of the all-time greats.

[Larry Kart]

The level of journalistic commentary on Bellow's death has been pretty low I think, especially in the New York Times, where cultural journalism has pretty much gone ga-ga in recent years, with the exception of former Times music critic Paul Griffiths' dispatches from London. Dig this gem of pure lunacy about Bellow from Joseph Berger's piece in Thursday's Times, "A Writer Captivated By the Chaos of New York":

"His publishers and his agent, Harriet Wasserman, were here, and so were his girlfriends, and he often combined business with pleasure -- or whatever pleasure a man often at war with women could take."

(After such knowingness... And aside from that, only in New York did Bellow have girlfriends?)

As a corrective, and a reminder of what we don't seem to have much if any of anymore, here's a piece a friend sent me that Alfred Kazin wrote about Bellow in 1965:

One day in 1942 I was walking near the Brooklyn Borough Hall with a young writer just in from Chicago who was looking New York over with great detachment. In the course of some startlingly apt observations on the life in the local streets, the course of the war, the pain of Nazism, and the neurotic effects of apartment-house living on his friends in New York, observations punctuated by some very funny jokes and double entendres at which he was the first to laugh with hearty pleasure for things so well said, he talked about D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, not as great names but as fellow artists. He said, as casually as if he were in a ball park faulting a pitcher, that Fitzgerald was "weak," but Dreiser strong in the right places. He examined Hemingway's style like a surgeon pondering another surgeon's stitches. And citing D. H. Lawrence with the intimacy of a brother-in-arms, he pointed to the bilious and smoke-dirty sky and said that like Lawrence he wanted no "umbrella" between him and the essential mystery.

The impression this conversation made on me was very curious. Bellow had not yet published a novel, and he was known for his stories and evident brilliance only to a small intellectual group drawn from the Partisan Review and the University of Chicago. Yet walking the unfamiliar Brooklyn streets, he seemed to be measuring the hidden strength of all things in the universe, from the grime of Brooklyn to the leading stars of the American novel, from the horror of Hitler to the mass tensions of New York. He was measuring the world's power of resistance, measuring himself as a contender. Although he was friendly, unpretentious, and funny, he was serious in a style that I had never before seen in an urban Jewish intellectual: he was going to succeed as an imaginative writer; he was pledged to grapple with unseen powers. He was going to take on more than the rest of us were.

As Bellow talked, I had an image of him as a wrestler in the old Greek style, an agonist contending in the games for the prize. Life was dramatically as well as emotionally a contest to him, and nothing of the agony or contest would be spared him. God would try him in his pride and trip him up, and he knew it; no one was spared; he had been brought up an orthodox Jew, and he had a proper respect for God as the ultimate power assumed by the creation. A poor immigrant's gifted son, he had an instinct that an overwhelming number of chances would come his way, that the old poverty and cultural bareness would soon be exchanged for a multitude of temptations. So he was wary--eager, sardonic, and wary; and unlike everybody else I knew, remarkably patient in expressing himself.

For a man with such a range of interests, capacities, and appetites, Bellow talked with great austerity. He addressed himself to the strength of life hidden in people, in political issues, in other writers, in mass behavior; an anthropologist by training, he liked to estimate other people's physical capacity, the thickness of their skins, the strength in their hands, the force in their chests. Describing people, he talked like a Darwinian, calculating the power of survival hidden in the species. But there was nothing idle or showy about his observations, and he did not talk for effect. His conceptions, definitions, epigrams, apercus were of a formal plainness that went right to the point and stopped. That was the victory he wanted. There was not the slightest verbal inflation in anything he said. Yet his observations were so direct and penetrating that they took on the elegance of achieved thought. When he considered something, his eyes slightly set as if studying its power to deceive him, one realized how formidable he was on topics generally exhausted by ideology or neglected by intellectuals too fine to consider them. Suddenly everything tiresomely grievous came alive in the focus of this man's unfamiliar imagination.

Listening to Bellow, I became intellectually happy--an effect he was soon to have on a great many other writers of our generation. We were coming through. He was holding out for the highest place as a writer, and he would reach it. Even in 1942, two years before he published his first novel, Dangling Man, his sense of his destiny was dramatic because he was thinking in form, in the orbit of the natural storyteller, in the dimensions of natural existence. The exhilarating thing about him was that a man so penetrating and informed should be so sure of his talent for imaginative literature, for the novel, for the great modern form. We all knew brilliant intellectuals, academic conquistadores, geniuses at ideology, who demanded one's intellectual surrender. Every day I saw intellectuals clever enough to make the world over, who indeed had made the world over many times. Yet Bellow who had been brought up in the same utopianism and was himself a scholar in the formidable University of Chicago style, full of the Great Books and jokes from the Greek plays, would obviously be first and last a novelist, a storyteller, creating new myths out of himself and everyone he had ever known, fought, loved, and hated. This loosened the bonds of ideology for the rest of us. It was refreshing to be with a man who so clearly believed himself headed for power in the novel: it disposed of many pedantic distinctions.

[Gary]

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/ge...1454512,00.html

The work of Saul Bellow rejected the constraints of modernism and helped define the 20th century. Ian McEwan pays tribute to a novelist who set a generation of writers free

Thursday April 7, 2005

The Guardian

When a great writer dies - an unusual event, for this is a rare breed - we pay our respects by a visit to our bookshelves, library or bookshop; mourning and celebration merge honourably. It will be some time before we have the full measure of Saul Bellow's achievement, and there is no reason why we should not start with a small thing, a phrase or sentence that has become part of our mental furniture, and a part of life's pleasures. After all, good readers, Nabokov advised his students, "should notice and fondle details". Bellow lovers often evoke a certain dog, barking forlornly in Bucharest during the long night of the Soviet domination of Romania. It is overheard by an American visitor, Dean Corde, the typically dreamy Bellovian hero of The Dean's December, who imagines these sounds as a protest against the narrowness of canine understanding, and a plea: "For God's sake, open the universe a little more!" We approve of that observation because we are, in a sense, that dog, and Saul Bellow, our Master, heard us and obliged.

In fact, the very freedom that Henry James claimed for the novelist in his essay The Art of Fiction ("all life belongs to you") was generously embraced by Bellow; he set himself, and succeeding generations, free of the formal trappings of modernism, which by the mid-20th century had begun to seem a heavy constraint. He had no time for Virginia Woolf's assertion that in the modern novel character is dead.Bellow's world is as densely populated as Dickens's, but its citizens are neither caricatures nor grotesques. They sit in memory like people you could convince yourself you have met: the hopeless racketeer Lustgarten ("partly subtle, partly ill") in Mosby's Memoirs, who brings financial ruin to his family by importing a Cadillac into postwar France; the excitable low-lifer, Cantabile, waving a gun in Humboldt's Gift - in his agitation he suddenly needs a shit, and forces his victim, Charlie Citrine ("a man of culture or intellectual attainments") into the stall with him. Citrine distracts himself with reflections on ape behaviour while Cantabile "crouched there with his hardened dagger brows".

And most vivid of all, for me at least, Moses Herzog, Bellow's most achieved dreamer, the least practical of men in an America of vigorous, material pursuits. In Herzog Bellow brought to perfection the art of fictional digression. When the hero goes to visit his lover, the lovely Ramona, he waits on the bed while she goes off to change into what Martin Amis would call her "brothel wear". In those moments Herzog reflects on the way the entire world presses in on him, and Bellow seems to set out a kind of manifesto, a ringing checklist of the challenges the novelist must confront, or the reality he must contain or describe. It also serves as a reader's guide to the raw material of Bellow's work. I came to know this passage by heart through re-reading, and borrowed it for the epigraph of a novel. It was a risk, because the pulse of this prose was likely to make my own sound puny.

"Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanisation. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs ... "

Bellow's city, of course, was Chicago, as vital to him, and as beautifully, teemingly evoked, as Joyce's Dublin; the novels are not simply set in the 20th century, they are about that century - its awesome transformations, its savagery, its new machines, the great battles of its thought systems, the resounding failure of totalitarian systems, the mixed blessings of the American way. These elements are not dealt with in abstract, but sifted through the vagaries of character, of an individual trying to figure where he stands in relation to the mass of which he is a part. And always, the past is pressing in, memories of childhood, the crowded streets and tenements, shared rooms, overbearing and eccentric relatives and neighbours - the immigrant poor, attending to the call to American identity.

The American critic Lee Siegel wrote recently that every British writer with an intellectual or emotional connection to America wants to lay claim to Bellow. "He is their Plymouth Rock, or maybe their Rhodesia ... " There is some truth to this. What is it we find in him that we cannot find here, among our own? I think what we admire is the generous inclusiveness of the work - not since the 19th century has a writer been able to render a whole society, without condescension or self-conscious social anthropology. Seamlessly, Bellow can move between the poor and their mean streets, and the power elites of university and government, the privileged dreamer with the "deep-sea thought". His work is the embodiment of an American vision of plurality. In Britain we no longer seem able to write across the crass and subtle distortions of class - or rather, we can't do it gracefully, without seeming to strain or without caricature. Bellow appears larger, therefore, than any British writer can hope to be.

Another reason: in a literary culture that has generally favoured the whole scheme of a novel against the finely crafted sentence, we honour the musicality, the wit, the lovely beat of a good Bellovian line. An example, rightly favoured by the critic James Wood, is the description of Behrens, the florist in the story Something to Remember Me By: "Amid the flowers, he alone had no colour - something like the price he paid for being human." Another example, of special significance to me because I paid tribute to Bellow by making a variation on it: in Herzog, we read of Gersbach with his wooden leg, "bending and straightening gracefully like a gondolier".

It is not surprising then that some of the best celebrations of Bellow's writing have originated in Britain. Certain essays may already be on your shelves, and in this time of taking stock, it might be enlivening to reach for them. One is Martin Amis's magnificent advocacy of The Adventures of Augie March as the definitive Great American Novel in the introduction to the Everyman edition; another is the James Wood introduction to the Penguin Collected Stories, in which joy is a central element in his response to the work.

Writers we admire and re-read are absorbed into the fine print of our consciousness, into the white noise of our thoughts, and in this sense, they can never die. Saul Bellow started publishing in the 40s, and his work spreads across the century he helped to define. He also re-defined the novel, broadened it, liberated it, made it warm with human sense and wit and grand purpose. Henry James once proposed an obvious but helpful truth: "The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer." We are saying farewell to a mind of unrivalled quality. He opened our universe a little more. We owe him everything

[ghost of miles]

I imagine the NY Review of Books will do right by him when they come out with something.

Thanks for posting the Kazin piece, Larry. Haven't read much of his criticism, but greatly enjoyed STARTING OUT IN THE THIRTIES. (The section with Otis Ferguson--o great lost writer of that decade!--coming to Kazin's parent's place for dinner is worth it alone.)

[Guest Chaney]

Rereading Saul Bellow

by Philip Roth

Issue of 2000-10-09

Posted 2005-04-06

The author and Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow died on April 4th, at the age of 89. In this piece, from 2000, Philip Roth reflects on a selection of Bellow’s works.

“The Adventures of Augie March” (1953)

The transformation of the novelist who published “Dangling Man” in 1944 and “The Victim” in 1947 into the novelist who published “The Adventures of Augie March” in ’53 is revolutionary. Bellow overthrows everything: compositional choices grounded in narrative principles of harmony and order, a novelistic ethos indebted to Kafka’s “The Trial” and Dostoyevsky’s “The Double” and “The Eternal Husband,” as well as a moral perspective that can hardly be said to derive from delight in the flash, color, and plenty of existence. In “Augie March,” a very grand, assertive, freewheeling conception of both the novel and the world the novel represents breaks loose from all sorts of self-imposed strictures, the beginner’s principles of composition are subverted, and, like the character of Five Properties in “Augie March,” the writer is himself “hipped on superabundance.” The pervasive threat that organized the outlook of the hero and the action of the novel in “The Victim” and “Dangling Man” disappears, and the bottled-up aggression that was “The Victim” ’s Asa Leventhal and the obstructed will that was Joseph in “Dangling Man” emerge as voracious appetite. There is the narcissistic enthusiasm for life in all its hybrid forms propelling Augie March, and there is an inexhaustible passion for a teemingness of dazzling specifics driving Saul Bellow.

The scale dramatically enlarges: the world inflates, and those inhabiting it, monumental, overwhelming, ambitious, energetic people, do not easily, in Augie’s words, get “stamped out in the life struggle.” The intricate landscape of physical being and the power-seeking of influential personalities make “character’’ in all its manifestations—particularly its ability indelibly to imprint its presence—less an aspect of the novel than its preoccupation.

Think of Einhorn at the whorehouse, Thea with the eagle, Dingbat and his fighter, Simon coarsely splendid at the Magnuses and violent at the lumberyard. From Chicago to Mexico and the mid-Atlantic and back, it’s all Brobdingnag to Augie, observed, however, not by a caustic, angry Swift but by a word-painting Hieronymus Bosch, an American Bosch, an unsermonizing and optimistic Bosch, who detects even in the eeliest slipperiness of his creatures, in their most colossal finagling and conspiring and deceit, what is humanly enrapturing. The intrigues of mankind no longer incite paranoid fear in the Bellow hero but light him up. That the richly rendered surface is manifold with contradiction and ambiguity ceases to be a source of consternation; instead, the “mixed character” of everything is bracing. Manifoldness is fun.

Engorged sentences had existed before in American fiction—notably in Melville and Faulkner—but not quite like those in “Augie March,” which strike me as more than liberty-taking; when mere liberty-taking is driving a writer, it can easily lead to the empty flamboyance of some of “Augie March” ’s imitators. I read Bellow’s liberty-taking prose as the syntactical manifestation of Augie’s large, robust ego, that attentive ego roving and evolving, always in motion, alternately mastered by the force of others and escaping from it. There are sentences in the book whose effervescence, whose undercurrent of buoyancy leave one with the sense of so much going on, a theatrical, exhibitionistic, ardent prose tangle that lets in the dynamism of living without driving mentalness out. This voice no longer encountering resistance is permeated by mind while connected also to the mysteries of feeling. It’s a voice unbridled and intelligent both, going at full force and yet always sharp enough to sensibly size things up.

Chapter XVI of “Augie March” is about the attempt, by Thea Fenchel, Augie’s headstrong beloved, to train her eagle, Caligula, to attack and capture the large lizards crawling around the mountains outside Acatla, in central Mexico, to make that “menace falling fast from the sky” fit into her scheme of things. It’s a chapter of prodigious strength, sixteen bold pages about a distinctly human happening whose mythic aura (and comedy, too) is comparable to the great scenes in Faulkner—in “The Bear,” in “Spotted Horses,” in “As I Lay Dying,” throughout “The Wild Palms”—where human resolve pits itself against the natural wildness. The combat between Caligula and Thea (for the eagle’s body and soul), the wonderfully precise passages describing the eagle soaring off to satisfy his beautiful fiendish trainer and miserably failing her, crystallize a notion about the will to power and dominance that is central to nearly every one of Augie’s adventures. “To tell the truth,” Augie says near the end of the book, “I’m good and tired of all these big personalities, destiny molders, and heavy-water brains, Machiavellis and wizard evildoers, big-wheels and imposers-upon, absolutists.”

On the book’s memorable first page, in the second sentence, Augie quotes Heraclitus: a man’s character is his fate. But doesn’t “The Adventures of Augie March” suggest exactly the opposite, that a man’s fate (at least this man’s, this Chicago-born Augie’s) is the impinging character of others?

Bellow once told me that “somewhere in my Jewish and immigrant blood there were conspicuous traces of doubt as to whether I had the right to practice the writer’s trade.” He suggested that, at least in part, this doubt permeated his blood because “our own Wasp establishment, represented mainly by Harvard-trained professors,” considered a son of immigrant Jews unfit to write books in English. These guys infuriated him.

It may well have been the precious gift of an appropriate fury that launched him into beginning his third book not with the words “I am a Jew, the son of immigrants” but, rather, by warranting that son of immigrant Jews who is Augie March to break the ice with the Harvard-trained professors (as well as everyone else) by flatly decreeing, without apology or hyphenation, “I am an American, Chicago born.”

Opening “Augie March” with those six words demonstrates the same sort of assertive gusto that the musical sons of immigrant Jews—Irving Berlin, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, Leonard Bernstein—brought to America’s radios, theatres, and concert halls by staking their claim to America (as subject, as inspiration, as audience) in songs like “God Bless America,” “This Is the Army, Mr. Jones,” “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” “Manhattan,” and “Ol’ Man River”; in musical plays like “Oklahoma!,” “West Side Story,” “Porgy and Bess,” “On the Town,” “Show Boat,” and “Of Thee I Sing”; in ballet music like “Appalachian Spring,” “Rodeo,” and “Billy the Kid.” Back in the teens, when the immigration was still going on, back in the twenties, the thirties, the forties, even into the fifties, none of these American-raised boys whose parents or grandparents had spoken Yiddish had the slightest interest in writing shtetl kitsch such as came along in the sixties with “Fiddler on the Roof.” Having themselves been freed by their families’ emigration from the pious orthodoxy and the social authoritarianism that were such a great source of shtetl claustrophobia, why would they want to? In secular, democratic, unclaustrophobic America, Augie will, as he says, “go at things as I have taught myself, free-style.”

This assertion of unequivocal, unquellable citizenship in free-style America (and the five-hundred-odd-page book that followed) was precisely the bold stroke required to abolish anyone’s doubts about the American writing credentials of an immigrant son like Saul Bellow. Augie, at the very end of his book, exuberantly cries out, “Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand.” Going where his pedigreed betters wouldn’t have believed he had any right to go with the American language, Bellow was indeed Columbus for people like me, the grandchildren of immigrants, who set out as American writers after him.

“Seize the Day” (1956)

Three years after “The Adventures of Augie March” appeared, Bellow published “Seize the Day,” a short novel that is the fictional antithesis of “Augie March.” In form spare and compact and tightly organized, it is a sorrow-filled book, set in a hotel for the aged on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a book populated largely by people old, sick, and dying, while “Augie March” is a vast, sprawling, loquacious book, spilling over with everything, including authorial high spirits, and set wherever life’s fullness can be rapturously perceived. “Seize the Day” depicts the culmination, in a single day, of the breakdown of a man who is the opposite of Augie March in every important way. Where Augie is the opportunity seizer, a fatherless slum kid eminently adoptable, Tommy Wilhelm is the mistake maker with a prosperous old father who is very much present but who wants nothing to do with him and his problems. Inasmuch as Tommy’s father is characterized in the book, it is through his relentless distaste for his son. Tommy is brutally disowned, eminently unadoptable, largely because he is bereft of the lavish endowment of self-belief, verve, and vibrant adventurousness that is Augie’s charm. Where Augie’s is an ego triumphantly buoyed up and swept along by the strong currents of life, Tommy’s is an ego quashed beneath its burden—Tommy is “assigned to be the carrier of a load which was his own self, his characteristic self.” The ego roar amplified by “Augie March” ’s prose exuberance Augie joyously articulates on the book’s final page: “Look at me, going everywhere!” Look at me—the vigorous, child’s demand for attention, the cry of exhibitionistic confidence.

The cry resounding through “Seize the Day” is Help me. In vain Tommy utters, Help me, help me, I’m getting nowhere, and not only to his own father, Dr. Adler, but to all the false, rogue fathers who succeed Dr. Adler and to whom Tommy foolishly entrusts either his hope, his money, or both. Augie is adopted left and right, people rush to support him and dress him, to educate and transform him. Augie’s need is to accumulate vivid and flamboyant patron-admirers while Tommy’s pathos is to amass mistakes: “Maybe the making of mistakes expressed the very purpose of his life and the essence of his being here.” Tommy, at forty-four, searches desperately for a parent, any parent, to rescue him from imminent destruction, while Augie is already a larkily independent escape artist at twenty-two.

Speaking of his own past, Bellow once said, “It has been a lifelong pattern with me to come back to strength from a position of extreme weakness.” Does his history of oscillation from the abyss to the peak and back again find a literary analogue in the thoroughly dialectical relationship of these two consecutive books of the nineteen-fifties? Was the claustrophobic chronicle of failure that is “Seize the Day” undertaken as a grim corrective to the fervor informing its irrepressible predecessor, as the antidote to “Augie March” ’s manic openness? By writing “Seize the Day,” Bellow seems to have been harking back (if not deliberately, perhaps just reflexively) to the ethos of “The Victim,” to a dour pre-Augie world where the hero under scrutiny is threatened by enemies, overwhelmed by uncertainty, stalled by confusion, held in check by grievance.

“Henderson the Rain King” (1959)

Only six years after “Augie,” and there he is again, breaking loose. But whereas with “Augie” he jettisons the conventions of his first two, “proper” books, with “Henderson the Rain King” he delivers himself from “Augie,” a book in no way proper. The exotic locale, the volcanic hero, the comic calamity that is his life, the inner turmoil of perpetual yearning, the magical craving quest, the mythical (Reichian?) regeneration through the great wet gush of the blocked-up stuff—all brand-new.

To yoke together two mighty dissimilar endeavors: Bellow’s Africa operates for Henderson as Kafka’s castle village does for K., affording the perfect unknown testing ground for the alien hero to actualize the deepest, most ineradicable of his needs—to burst his “spirit’s sleep,” if he can, through the intensity of useful labor. “I want,” that objectless, elemental cri de coeur, could as easily have been K.’s as Eugene Henderson’ s. There all similarity ends, to be sure. Unlike the Kafkean man endlessly obstructed from achieving his desire, Henderson is the undirected human force whose raging insistence miraculously does get through. K. is an initial, with the biographylessness that that implies—and the pathos—while Henderson’s burden is a biography that weighs a ton. A boozer, a giant, a Gentile, a middle-aged multimillionaire in a state of continual emotional upheaval, Henderson is hemmed in by the disorderly chaos of “my parents, my wives, my girls, my children, my farm, my animals, my habits, my money, my music lessons, my drunkenness, my prejudices, my brutality, my teeth, my face, my soul!” Because of all his deformities and mistakes, Henderson, in his own thinking, is as much a disease as he is a man. He takes leave of home (rather like the author who is imagining him) for a continent peopled by tribal blacks who turn out to be his very cure. Africa as medicine. Henderson the Remedy Maker.

Brilliantly funny, all new, a second enormous emancipation, a book that wants to be serious and unserious at the same time (and is), a book that invites an academic reading while ridiculing such a reading and sending it up, a stunt of a book, but a sincere stunt—a screwball book, but not without great screwball authority.

“Herzog” (1964)

The character of Moses Herzog, that labyrinth of contradiction and self-division—the wild man and the earnest person with a “Biblical sense of personal experience” and an innocence as phenomenal as his sophistication, intense yet passive, reflective yet impulsive, sane yet insane, emotional, complicated, an expert on pain vibrant with feeling and yet disarmingly simple, a clown in his vengeance and rage, a fool in whom hatred breeds comedy, a sage and knowing scholar in a treacherous world, yet still adrift in the great pool of childhood love, trust, and excitement in things (and hopelessly attached to this condition), an aging lover of enormous vanity and narcissism with a lovingly harsh attitude toward himself, whirling in the wash cycle of a rather generous self-awareness while at the same time aesthetically attracted to anyone vivid, overpoweringly drawn to bullies and bosses, to theatrical know-it-alls, lured by their seeming certainty and by the raw authority of their unambiguity, feeding on their intensity until he’s all but crushed by it—this Herzog is Bellow’s grandest creation, American literature’s Leopold Bloom, except with a difference: in “Ulysses,” the encyclopedic mind of the author is transmuted into the linguistic flesh of the novel, and Joyce never cedes to Bloom his own great erudition, intellect, and breadth of rhetoric, whereas in “Herzog” Bellow endows his hero with all of that, not only with a state of mind and a cast of mind but with a mind that is a mind.

It’s a mind rich and wide-ranging but turbulent with troubles, bursting, swarming with grievance and indignation, a bewildered mind that, in the first sentence of the book, openly, with good reason, questions its equilibrium, and not in highbrowese but in the classic vernacular formulation: “If I am out of my mind.” This mind, so forceful, so tenacious, overstocked with the best that has been thought and said, a mind elegantly turning out the most informed generalizations about a lot of the world and its history, happens also to suspect its most fundamental power, the very capacity for comprehension.

The fulcrum on which the drama of the book’s adulterous triangle turns, the scene that sends Herzog racing off to Chicago to pick up a loaded pistol to kill Madeleine and Gersbach and instead initiates his final undoing, takes place in a New York courtroom, where Herzog, loitering while waiting for his lawyer to show up, comes upon the nightmare-parody version of his own suffering. It is the trial of a hapless, degraded mother who, with her degenerate lover, has murdered her own little child. So overcome with horror is Herzog at what he sees and hears that he is prompted to cry out to himself, “I fail to understand!”—familiar-enough everyday words, but for Herzog a humbling, pain-ridden, reverberating admission that dramatically connects the intricate wickerwork of his mental existence to the tormenting grid of error and disappointment that is his personal life. Since for Herzog understanding is an impediment to instinctive force, it is when understanding fails him that he reaches for a gun (the very one with which his own father once clumsily threatened to kill him)—though, in the end, being Herzog, he cannot fire it. being Herzog (and his angry father’s angry son), he finds firing the pistol “nothing but a thought.”

But if Herzog fails to understand, who then does understand, and what is all this thinking for? Why is all this uninhibited reflection in Bellow’s books in the first place? I don’t mean the uninhibited reflection of characters like Tamkin in “Seize the Day,” or even King Dahfu in “Henderson,” who seem to dish out their spoof-wisdom as much for Bellow to have the fun of inventing it as to create a second realm of confusion in the minds of heroes already plenty confused on their own. I’m referring, rather, to the nearly impossible undertaking that marks Bellow’s work as strongly as it does the novels of Robert Musil and Thomas Mann: the struggle not only to infuse fiction with mind but to make mentalness itself central to the hero’s dilemma—to think, in books like “Herzog,” about the problem of thinking.

Now, Bellow’s special appeal, and not just to me, is that in his characteristically American way he has managed brilliantly to close the gap between Thomas Mann and Damon Runyon, but that doesn’t minimize the scope of what, beginning with “Augie March,” he so ambitiously set out to do: to bring into play (into free play) the intellectual faculties that, in writers like Mann, Musil, and him, are no less engaged by the spectacle of life than by the mind’s imaginative component, to make rumination congruent with what is represented, to hoist the author’s thinking up from the depths to the narrative’s surface without sinking the narrative’s mimetic power, without the book’s superficially meditating on itself, without making a transparently ideological claim on the reader, and without imparting wisdom, as do Tamkin and King Dahfu, flatly unproblematized.

"Herzog” is Bellow’s first protracted expedition as a writer into the immense domain of sex. Herzog’s women are of the greatest importance to him, exciting his vanity, arousing his carnality, channelling his love, drawing his curiosity, and, by registering his cleverness, charm, and good looks, feeding in the man the joys of a boy—in their adoration is his validation. With every insult they hurl and every epithet they coin, with each fetching turn of the head, comforting touch of the hand, angry twist of the mouth, his women fascinate Herzog with that human otherness that so overpowers him in both sexes. But it is the women especially—until the final pages, that is, when Herzog turns away from his Berkshires retreat even well-meaning Ramona and the generous pleasures of the seraglio that are her specialty, when he at long last emancipates himself from the care of another woman, even this most gentle fondler of them all, and, so as to repair himself, undertakes what is for him the heroic project of living alone, shedding the women and, shedding with them, of all things, the explaining, the justifying, the thinking, divesting himself, if only temporarily, of the all-encompassing and habitual sources of his pleasure and misery—it is the women especially who bring out the portraitist in Herzog, a multitalented painter who can be as lavish in describing the generous mistress as Renoir, as tender in presenting the adorable daughter as Degas, as compassionate, as respectful of age, as knowledgeable of hardship in picturing the ancient stepmother—or his own dear mother in her slavish immigrant misery—as Rembrandt, as devilish, finally, as Daumier in depicting the adulterous wife who discerns, in Herzog’s loving and scheming best friend, Valentine Gersbach, her crudely theatrical equal.

In all of literature, I know of no more emotionally susceptible male, of no man who brings a greater focus or intensity to his engagement with women than this Herzog, who collects them both as an adoring suitor and as a husband—a cuckolded husband getting a royal screwing who, in the grandeur of his jealous rage and in the naïveté of his blind uxoriousness, is a kind of comic-strip amalgam of General Othello and Charles Bovary. Anyone wishing to have some fun in retelling “Madame Bovary” from Charles’s perspective, or “Anna Karenina” from Karenin’s, will find in “Herzog” the perfect how-to book. (Not that one easily envisions Karenin, à la Herzog with Gersbach, handing over to Vronsky Anna’s diaphragm.)

“Herzog” lays claim to being a richer novel even than “Augie March” precisely because Bellow’s taking on board, for the first time, the full sexual cargo allows for a brand of suffering to penetrate his fictional world that was largely precluded from “Augie” and “Henderson.” It turns out that even more is unlocked in the Bellow hero by suffering than by euphoria. How much more credible, how much more important he becomes when the male wound, in its festering enormity, ravages the euphoric appetite for “the rich life-cake,” and the vulnerability to humiliation, betrayal, melancholy, fatigue, loss, paranoia, obsession, and despair is revealed to be so sweeping that neither an Augie’s relentless optimism nor a Henderson’s mythical giantism can stave off any longer the truth about pain. Once Bellow grafts onto Henderson’s intensity—and onto Augie March’s taste for grandiose types and dramatic encounters—Tommy Wilhelm’s condition of helplessness, he puts the whole Bellovian symphony in play, with its lushly comical orchestration of misery.

In “Herzog,” there is no sustained chronological action—there’s barely any action—that takes place outside of Herzog’s brain. It isn’t that, as a storyteller, Bellow apes Faulkner in “The Sound and the Fury” or Virginia Woolf in “The Waves.” The long, shifting, fragmented interior monologue of “Herzog” seems to have more in common with Gogol’s “The Diary of a Madman,” where the disjointed perception is dictated by the mental state of the central character rather than by an author’s impatience with traditional means of narration. What makes Gogol’s madman mad, however, and Bellow’s sane, is that Gogol’s madman, incapable of overhearing himself, is unfortified by the spontaneous current of irony and parody that ripples through Herzog’s every thought—even when Herzog is most bewildered—and that is inseparable from his take on himself and his disaster, however excruciating his pain.

In the Gogol story, the madman obtains a bundle of letters written by a dog, the pet belonging to the young woman of whom he is hopelessly (insanely) enamored. Feverishly, he sits down to read every word the brilliant dog has written, searching for any reference to himself. In “Herzog,” Bellow goes Gogol one better—the brilliant dog who writes the letters is Herzog. Letters to his dead mother, to his living mistress, to his first wife, to President Eisenhower, to Chicago’s police commissioner, to Adlai Stevenson, to Nietzsche (“My dear sir, May I ask a question from the floor?”), to Teilhard de Chardin (“Dear Father . . . Is the carbon molecule lined with thought?”), to Heidegger (“Dear Doktor Professor . . . I should like to know what you mean by the expression ‘the fall into the quotidian.’ When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?”), to the credit department of Marshall Field & Co. (“I am no longer responsible for the debts of Madeleine P. Herzog”), even, in the end, a letter to God (“How my mind has struggled to make coherent sense. I have not been too good at it. But have desired to do your unknowable will, taking it, and you, without symbols. Everything of intensest significance. Especially if divested of me”).

This book of a thousand delights offers no greater delight than those letters, and no better key with which to both unlock Herzog’s remarkable intelligence and enter into the depths of his turmoil over the wreckage of his life. The letters are his intensity demonstrated; they provide the stage for his intellectual theatre, the one-man show where he is least likely to act the role of the fool.

“Mr. Sammler’s Planet” (1970)

"Is our species crazy?” A Swiftian question. A Swiftian note as well in the laconic Sammlerian reply: “Plenty of evidence.”

Reading “Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” I am reminded of “Gulliver’s Travels”: by the overwhelming estrangement of the hero from the New York of the nineteen-sixties; by the rebuke he, with his history, embodies to the human status of those whose “sexual madness” he must witness; by his Gulliverian obsession with human physicality, human biology, the almost mythic distaste evoked in him by the body, its appearance, its functions, its urges, its pleasures, its secretions and smells. Then, there’s the preoccupation with the radical vincibility of one’s physical being. As a frail, displaced refugee of the Holocaust horror, as one who escaped miraculously from the Nazi slaughter, who rose, with but one eye, from a pile of Jewish bodies left for dead by a German extermination squad, Mr. Sammler registers perfectly that most disorienting of blows to civic confidence—the disappearance, in a great city, of security, of safety, and, with that, the burgeoning among the vulnerable of fear-ridden, alienating paranoia.

For it is fear as well as disgust that vitiates Sammler’s faith in the species and threatens his tolerance even for those closest to him—fear of “the soul . . . in this vehemence . . . the extremism and fanaticism of human nature.” Having moved beyond the Crusoe-adventurousness of ebullient Augie and Henderson to delineate, as dark farce, the marital betrayal of the uncomprehending genius Herzog, Bellow next opens out his contemplative imagination to one of the greatest betrayals of all, at least as perceived by the refugee-victim Sammler in his Swiftian revulsion with the sixties: the betrayal by the crazy species of the civilized ideal.

Herzog, during his most searing moment of suffering, admits to himself, “I fail to understand!” But, despite old Sammler’s Oxonian reserve and cultivated detachment, at the climax of his adventure—with license, disorder, and lawlessness within the network of his vividly eccentric family and beyond them, in New York’s streets, subways, buses, shops, and college classrooms—the admission that is wrung from him (and that, for me, stands as the motto of this book) is far more shattering: “I am horrified!”

The triumph of “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” is the invention of Sammler, with the credentials that accrue to him through his European education—his history of suffering history, and his Nazi-blinded eye—as “the registrar of madness.” The juxtaposition of the personal plight of the protagonist with the particulars of the social forces he encounters, the resounding, ironic rightness of that juxtaposition, accounts for the impact here, as it does in every memorable fiction. Sammler, sharply set apart by his condition of defenseless dignity, strikes me as the perfect instrument to receive anything in society at all bizarre or menacing, the historical victim abundantly qualified by experience to tellingly provide a harsh, hardened twentieth-century perspective on “mankind in a revolutionary condition.”

I wonder which came first in the book’s development, the madness or the registrar, Sammler or the sixties.

“Humboldt’s Gift” (1975)

"Humboldt’s Gift” is far and away the screwiest of the euphoric going-every-which-way out-and-out comic novels, the books that materialize at the very tip-top of the Bellovian mood swing, the merry music of the egosphere that is “Augie March,” “Henderson,” and “Humboldt” and that Bellow emits more or less periodically, between his burrowings through the dark down-in-the-dumps novels, such as “The Victim,” “Seize the Day,” “Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” and “The Dean’s December,” where the bewildering pain issuing from the heroes’ wounds is not taken lightly either by them or by Bellow. (“Herzog” strikes me as supreme among Bellow’s novels for its magical integration of this characteristic divergence. If one wished to play literary chef and turn “Humboldt’s Gift” into “Herzog,” the simple recipe might go as follows: first, cut away and set aside Humboldt; next, extract from Humboldt his mad suffering and bind it to Citrine’s reflective brilliance; last, toss in Gersbach—and there’s your book. It’s Gersbach’s betrayal that stirs up in Herzog the murderous paranoia that is excited in Humboldt by, among others, Citrine!)

“Humboldt” is the screwiest, by which I also mean the most brazen of the comedies, loopier and more carnivalesque than the others, Bellow’s only joyously open libidinous book and, rightly, the most recklessly crossbred fusion of disparate strains, and for a paradoxically compelling reason: Citrine’s terror. Of what? Of mortality, of having to meet (regardless of his success and his great eminence) Humboldt’s fate. Underlying the book’s buoyant engagement with the scrambling, gorging, thieving, hating, and destroying of Charlie Citrine’s on-the-make world, underlying everything, including the centrifugal manner of the book’s telling—and exposed directly enough in Citrine’s eagerness to metabolize the extinction-defying challenge of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy—is his terror of dying. What’s disorienting Citrine happens also to be what’s blowing narrative decorum to kingdom come: the panicky dread of oblivion, the old-fashioned garden-variety Everyman horror of death.

"How sad,” says Citrine, ‘‘about all this human nonsense which keeps us from the large truth.” But the human nonsense is just what he loves—at least loves to recount—and what delights him most about being alive. Again: “When . . . would I rise . . . above all . . . the wastefully and randomly human . . . to enter higher worlds?” Higher worlds? Where would Citrine be—where would Bellow be—without the randomly human driving the superdrama of the lower world, the elemental superdrama that is the worldly desire for fame (as exhibited by Von Humboldt Fleisher, the luckless, mentally unsound counterpart of fortunate, sane Citrine—Humboldt, who wishes both to be spiritual and to make it big, and whose nightmare failure is the flip-side travesty of Citrine’s success), for money (Humboldt, Thaxter, Denise, plus Renata’s mother the Señora, plus Citrine’s brother Julius, plus more or less everyone else), for revenge (Denise, Cantabile), for esteem (Humboldt, Cantabile, Thaxter, Citrine), for the hottest of hot sex (Citrine, Renata, et al.), not to mention that worldliest of worldly desires, Citrine’s own, the hellbent lusting after life eternal?

Why does Citrine wish so feverishly never to leave here if not for this laugh-a-minute immersion in the violence and the turbulence of the clownish greediness that he disparagingly calls “the moronic inferno”? “Some people,” he says, “are so actual that they beat down my critical powers.” And beat down any desire to exchange even the connection to their viciousness for the serenity of the everlasting. Where but the moronic inferno could his “complicated subjectivity’’ have so much to take in? Out in some vaporous zip Codeless noplace, nostalgically swapping moronic-inferno stories with the shade of Rudolf Steiner?

And isn’t it something like the same moronic inferno that Charlie Citrine excitedly memorializes as it rages in the streets, courtrooms, bedrooms, restaurants, sweat baths, and office buildings of Chicago that so sickens Artur Sammler in its diabolic nineteen-sixties-Manhattan incarnation? “Humboldt’s Gift” seems like the enlivening tonic Bellow brewed to recover from the sorrowful grieving and moral suffering of “Mr. Sammler’s Planet.” It’s Bellow’s cheerful version of Ecclesiastes: All is vanity and isn’t it something!

What’s He in Chicago for?

Humboldt on Citrine (my edition page 2): “After making this dough why does he bury himself in the sticks? What’s he in Chicago for?”

Citrine on himself (page 63): “My mind was in one of its Chicago states. How should I describe this phenomenon?”

Citrine on being a Chicagoan (page 95): “I could feel the need to laugh rising, mounting, always a sign that my weakness for the sensational, my American, Chicagoan (as well as personal) craving for high stimuli, for incongruities and extremes, was aroused.”

And (further along on page 95): “Such information about corruption, if you had grown up in Chicago, was easy to accept. It even satisfied a certain need. It harmonized with one’s Chicago view of society.”

On the other hand, there’s Citrine’s being out of place in Chicago (page 225): “In Chicago my personal aims were bunk, my outlook a foreign ideology.” And (page 251): “It was now apparent to me that I was neither of Chicago nor sufficiently beyond it, and that Chicago’s material and daily interests and phenomena were neither actual and vivid enough nor symbolically clear enough to me.”

Keeping in mind these remarks—and there are many more like them throughout “Humboldt’s Gift”—look back to the nineteen-forties and observe that Bellow started off as a writer without Chicago’s organizing his idea of himself the way it does Charlie Citrine’s. Yes, a few Chicago streets are occasionally sketched in as the backdrop to “Dangling Man,” but, aside from darkening the pervasive atmosphere of gloom, Chicago seems a place that is almost foreign to the hero; certainly it is alien to him. “Dangling Man” is not a book about a man in a city—it’s about a mind in a room. Not until the third book, “Augie March,” did Bellow fully apprehend Chicago as that valuable hunk of literary property, that tangible, engrossing American place that was his to claim as commandingly as Sicily was monopolized by Verga, London by Dickens, and the Mississippi River by Mark Twain. It’s with a comparable tentativeness or wariness that Faulkner (the other of America’s two greatest twentieth-century novelist-regionalists) came to imaginative ownership of Lafayette County, Mississippi. Faulkner situated his first book, “Soldier’s Pay” (1926), in Georgia, his second, “Mosquitoes” (1927), in New Orleans, and it was only with the masterly burst of “Sartoris,” “The Sound and the Fury,” and “As I Lay Dying,” in 1929-30, that he found—as did Bellow after taking his first, impromptu geographical steps—the precise location to engender those human struggles which, in turn, would fire up his intensity and provoke that impassioned response to a place and its history which at times propels Faulkner’s sentences to the brink of unintelligibility and even beyond.

I wonder if at the outset Bellow shied away from seizing Chicago as his simply because he didn’t want to be known as a Chicago writer, any more, perhaps, than he wanted to be known as a Jewish writer. Yes, you’re from Chicago, and of course you’re a Jew—but how these things are going to figure in your work, or if they should figure at all, isn’t easy to puzzle out right off. Besides, you have other ambitions, inspired by your European masters, by Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Proust, Kafka, and such ambitions don’t include writing about the neighbors gabbing on the back porch. . . . Does this line of thought in any way resemble Bellow’s before he finally laid claim to the immediate locale?

Of course, after “Augie” it was some ten years before, in “Herzog,” Bellow took on Chicago in a big way again. Ever since then, the distinctly “Chicago view” has been of recurring interest to him, especially when the city provides, as in “Humboldt,” a contrast of comically illuminating proportions between “the open life which is elementary, easy for everyone to read, and characteristic of this place, Chicago, Illinois” and the reflective bent of the preoccupied hero. This combat, vigorously explored, is at the heart of “Humboldt,” as it is of Bellow’s next novel, “The Dean’s December” (1982). Here, however, the exploration is not comic but rancorous. The depravity deepens, the mood darkens, and under the pressure of violent racial antagonisms Chicago, Illinois, becomes demoniacal.

“On his own turf . . . he found a wilderness wilder than the Guiana bush . . . desolation . . . endless square miles of ruin . . . wounds, lesions, cancers, destructive fury, death . . . the terrible wildness and dread in this huge place.”

The book’s very point is that this huge place is Bellow’s no longer. Nor is it Augie’s, Herzog’s, or Citrine’s. By the time he comes to write “The Dean’s December,” some thirty years after “Augie March,” his hero, Dean Corde, has become the city’s Sammler.

What is he in Chicago for? This Chicagoan in pain no longer knows. Bellow is banished.

[Guest Chaney]

MR. BROOKLYN

by REBECCA MEAD

Marty Markowitz—the man, the plan, the arena.

Issue of 2005-04-25

Posted 2005-04-18

Brooklyn’s Borough Hall, a Greek Revival building with an Ionic colonnade clad in fine Tuckahoe marble and a roof topped, incongruously, with a Victorian cupola, is a monument to diminished expectations. The first plans for a City Hall—Brooklyn still being independent, at the time—were drawn up in 1802, and the imagined building was intended to rival the grander City Hall rising at that moment in downtown Manhattan. The boldness of that gesture was somewhat undermined by the fact that construction didn’t begin for another thirty-four years, and the building was not completed until 1848. When, fifty years later, Brooklyn merged into New York City, the building was downgraded from City Hall to Borough Hall; and this decline in importance has grown more pronounced in the subsequent hundred-odd years—right up to the present, when the building’s highest profile is, arguably, attained by the occasional appearance of its imposing courtroom in the television series “Law & Order.”

The Borough President’s office, in the southeast corner of the building, has recently undergone its own transformation. In the time of Howard Golden, who was Borough President from 1978 to 2002, the desk was positioned at the far end of the room, so that visitors were obliged to make a processional approach to the seat of influence. Under occupation by the incumbent, Marty Markowitz, the office looks less like a sober place of government than like Santa’s workshop. On every surface—shelves, tables, window ledges, and cluttering the desk—there are Teddy bears and toy trucks, balls and bats, dolls dressed in the regalia of the Caribbean parade that takes place on Eastern Parkway every Labor Day. The room has been painted a vivid teal; and at the many windows hang curtains of satiny teal fabric, printed with the seal of the borough of Brooklyn. There are enough logo-bearing baseball caps to outfit both major leagues, including a vintage Brooklyn Dodgers cap. Above one doorway hangs a plastic basketball hoop, and a store-window mannequin in a corner wears a basketball jersey bearing the numeral 1 and a name: the Brooklyn Nets. These last are testament to Markowitz’s enthusiastic embrace of the developer Bruce Ratner’s plan to build a $2.5-billion arena and housing- and-commercial-development complex, known as Atlantic Yards, in downtown Brooklyn, and to move the New Jersey Nets, which Ratner bought last year, to Brooklyn. Markowitz’s support of the Ratner project has been his most visible act as Borough President; depending on your political outlook, the plan is either a thrilling instance of Brooklyn’s economic and cultural resurgence or a shocking capitulation to the interests of Ratner’s multibillion-dollar development company, Forest City Ratner.

Markowitz was elected to the office of Borough President in 2001, after spending twenty-three years as a state senator representing first Flatbush and then Crown Heights and Midwood. (He is up for reëlection later this year but seems unlikely to face serious competition.) In the past three years, he has become Brooklyn’s most indefatigable promoter. One of Markowitz’s earliest stunts was the installation of signs at entry points to the borough saying “How Sweet It Is!” and “Believe the Hype!” and, on the Gowanus Expressway, approaching the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, another sign, reading “Leaving Brooklyn—Fuhgeddaboudit!” (A subsequent attempt to install signs on the Manhattan-bound side of the Williamsburg Bridge reading “Leaving Brooklyn—Oy Vey!” was rejected by the city’s Department of Transportation as distracting and uninformative.) Markowitz has also attracted attention less by design than by blunder. After his election, he announced his intention to take down some of the portraits of “old white guys”—former mayors and such—that hung in Borough Hall and replace them with portraits of blacks or women. One of the old white guys was George Washington, and Markowitz’s gesture was taken by some to be unpatriotic; others thought it was merely silly, particularly since he had not felt obliged to surrender his own Caucasian electoral ambitions to Jeannette Gadson, the black, female runner-up in the primary for Borough President.

Markowitz has made an art of trading in a familiar nostalgia for better times as a means of promoting the future of what he usually refers to as “the city of Brooklyn.” Ken Fisher, a former City Council member who was another of Markowitz’s opponents, says, “Marty can make people nostalgic for the Dodgers who weren’t even born when they left Brooklyn.” Since his election, Markowitz has attained a degree of omnipresence in the seventy-two-and-a-half-square-mile borough: if there’s a parade, he’ll be marching in it; if there’s a street fair, he’ll be eating at it. If there are Brooklynites to be honored—such as Cake Man Raven, a Fort Greene confectioner who replicated Borough Hall in sponge cake and frosting for Markowitz’s inauguration—Markowitz will be there, issuing a proclamation or a citation printed with gilded, archaic lettering. Markowitz, who is sixty and short and portly, can barely make a public appearance without cracking mournful jokes about his personal failings: his weakness in the face of Brooklyn’s multiplicity of ethnic restaurants and his inability to con-trol his weight; his remaining single until the age of fifty-four, when he married Jamie Snow, a graphic designer about a dozen years his junior, whom he met at a beach while handing out leaflets for a concert series (the Markowitzes have no children); his incapacity, on a salary of a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars a year, to enter the Brooklyn real-estate marketplace. (“Blessed are they who bought early,” he told participants at one street fair in Park Slope.) It is possible that he makes an occasional public appearance without mentioning Junior’s cheesecake, but very infrequently; and his references to a desire for Brooklyn’s secession are legion, if unsupported by any policy papers or economic analyses.

“An elected official, in my opinion, has to serve in several different capacities,” Markowitz said one morning not long ago in his office, sitting in a leather armchair in the half-cross-legged position he favors, with one foot balanced high on his opposite thigh. “Policy is very important; issues are very important, of course. But there is a spirit—making people feel good about themselves and where they live.” Markowitz’s commitment to keeping his constituents amused was illustrated by his launching of an annual “Lighten Up, Brooklyn” weight-loss campaign, for which he stripped to his shorts at Borough Hall for a weigh-in. He has since more than regained the eleven pounds he lost, perhaps in part because that fervent health-care initiative was followed, in subsequent months, by an official “How Sweet It Is! Sweet Potato Pie Scholarship Contest,” a bake-off among forty-nine groups.

Markowitz’s office, like that of New York’s other borough presidents, combines a grand governmental title with a slight portfolio and a very modest budget. (This year, Markowitz has an operating budget of five million dollars; the city’s over-all budget was fifty-one billion dollars.) The five borough presidents were not always the neutered beasts that they are now: for decades after Brooklyn became part of New York City, the occupants of Borough Hall, at 209 Joralemon Street, retained considerable political clout. They had the power of patronage; and, along with the presidents of the other boroughs, they sat on the eight-member Board of Estimate, which exercised oversight of city budgets, land use, and zoning. But in 1989 the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Board of Estimate was unconstitutional; the board was abolished after a new city charter was adopted. The Times, in endorsing Markowitz against his two primary contestants in August, 2001, acknowledged the comparative impotence of the office that he was seeking. Indeed, that was what made Markowitz, whom the paper described as “an ebullient public servant who could provide a refreshing boosterism for the sometimes beleaguered borough,” the right man for the job.

Markowitz’s ebullience is such that, among other city officials, he tends to be treated less as a political peer than as a cheery mascot for his borough. In mid-December, Markowitz shared a platform with Mayor Bloomberg at an event announcing an investment in the neglected Restoration Plaza, on Fulton Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, and the Mayor introduced him with an air of amused condescension.

“When they write the book on city government and say, ‘What does a borough president look like?’ I’m going to show you Marty Markowitz,” Bloomberg said. Markowitz bounded to the podium to announce the addition of five hundred thousand dollars for Restoration Plaza from his own office’s capital budget to the Mayor’s pledge of seven hundred thousand. “Only in Brooklyn, and only in New York, can two Jewish boys make this Christmas present to you tonight,” Markowitz bellowed, while Bloomberg stood to the side wearing a well-worn grimace, as if he were an audience member at a borscht-belt comedy show who had been dragged onstage and obliged to endure a few humiliating moments of audience participation.

While the borough is still beleaguered in many ways—more than twenty per cent of its two and a half million residents live below the poverty line—Brooklyn has also begun to serve as an overspill for Manhattan wealth, with development proposed for many formerly neglected stretches of territory, from the old Brooklyn Navy Yard, which now houses movie studios, to the industrial waterfront between Williamsburg and Greenpoint, where the city would like to see luxury apartment towers rise, to the piers below the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway just south of the Brooklyn Bridge, where new parkland has been proposed. Markowitz revels in a borough-based chauvinism: he claims not to see the point of leaving Brooklyn and has no interest in travel, although his wife insists on a cruise to the Caribbean once a year. “I never get off the ship,” he says. “I appoint myself Homeland Security chief, and watch to make sure all the food comes out on time.” But his self-appointment as Brooklyn’s chief nostalgist deflects attention from the surprising fact that, if the Atlantic Yards development gets built, he will have wielded far more influence over the shaping of Brooklyn’s future than anyone expected of him.

Markowitz was one of those Brooklyn children who rarely went to Manhattan: he grew up in Crown Heights, where his father worked as a waiter in a kosher delicatessen; his main entertainment was hanging out on the streets with other kids. His father died when he was nine, and several years later Markowitz’s widowed mother moved to public housing in Sheepshead Bay with Marty and his two younger sisters. He was educated in the borough, too, taking night classes for nine years at Brooklyn College. Markowitz got his start in politics by organizing tenants’ and senior citizens’ groups in Flatbush in the early seventies. He was elected to the State Senate in 1978, and held on to his seat through two redistricting processes, during which his constituency went from being fifty-five per cent white to ninety-two per cent black and Latino. He first ran for Borough President in 1985, against the incumbent, Howard Golden, who, he contended, was more beholden to Democratic Party powers than to Brooklyn at large. (“How long will the future of our neighborhoods be sliced up like a Junior’s cheesecake?” Markowitz said on the stump.) That bid for office resulted in Markowitz’s being charged with failing to disclose a campaign contribution from a local businessman: he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, paid a nearly eight-thousand-dollar fine, and performed seventy-five hours of community service.

Markowitz has always used his office in unusual ways: as a state senator, he organized free summer concerts featuring mostly crowd-pleasing, B-list bands and performers, at which he would appear as the m.c., dressed in a white tuxedo. (When in 1991 riots broke out in Crown Heights, part of Markowitz’s district, Markowitz was hosting B. B. King at a concert a few blocks away.) In Albany, he was better known for bringing bagels, dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day, to the Senate chamber than for any legislative innovations. In some respects, though, Markowitz’s actions as Borough President have revealed the reflexes of a parochial politician. To the New York City Panel for Education Policy, formerly the Board of Education, Markowitz named Donald Weber, a longtime schools superintendent, a decision that drew controversy on two counts: the position on the board, which had been newly restructured, was intended for a representative of Brooklyn parents, rather than for an education bureaucrat; and Weber’s school district had been investigated in the late eighties and mid-nineties by the Brooklyn D.A.’s office for cronyism. (Weber later resigned anyway, citing the panel’s impotence.) Another embarrassment occurred when it emerged that Dolly Williams, a co-founder of a construction company in Brooklyn, and Markowitz’s appointee to the New York City Planning Commission, had also invested a million dollars in Bruce Ratner’s Nets.

Markowitz’s public image of well-meaning haplessness is so refined that what might be seen as a calculated step by another politician is, in his case, taken to be misguided folly. Markowitz shrugs off some of his errors of judgment, such as backing Brooklyn’s candidate for leader of the City Council, Angel Rodriguez, who was defeated by Gifford Miller and some months later found guilty of bribery and extortion charges. “If anyone knew he was a crook, they wouldn’t have supported him,” Markowitz says.

When it comes to Democratic Party influence, Markowitz could not have ascended to the borough presidency at a worse time. “The peak of Brooklyn’s power was in the mid-nineteen-seventies,” says Markowitz’s electoral rival, Ken Fisher, whose father, Harold Fisher, was the chairman of the M.T.A. in the seventies. “Mayor Beame was from Brooklyn. Governor Carey was from Brooklyn. Tom Cuite, the head of the City Council, was from Brooklyn.” So, in Albany, were Mel Miller, Stanley Steingut, and Stanley Fink, all onetime speakers of the State Assembly; and all looked out for their home borough. The once-famed Brooklyn Democratic machine may be in abeyance; Markowitz has responded by turning his office into a public-relations machine instead.

On a bitterly cold Tuesday in December, Markowitz’s schedule took him to Kings Highway, where he attended a party hosted by an organization called the Federation of Employment and Guidance Services, which provides support to recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Sixty partygoers crowded into a conference room. Markowitz showed up just fifteen minutes behind schedule. Many in the audience, mostly elderly, appeared not to know who he was. He told the crowd that it was important to learn English and to stay young; and that he loved Georgian food, because it had a little spice; and that Brooklyn has always welcomed immigrants. He hoped that tourists would discover the variety and ethnic wealth that the borough had to offer. “Only in Brooklyn can you go from China to Russia in fifteen minutes,” he said, his enthusiasm overruling any memory of geography class, where he might have been taught that those two countries share a border for more than twenty-two hundred miles.

Markowitz’s car was waiting for him on Kings Highway, and he leaped in. (Having a driver is one of the perks of the job, and Markowitz uses his a lot; last year, one of his three drivers earned thirty-four thousand dollars in overtime pay, on a base salary of forty thousand dollars, while another driver was on a lengthy medical leave.) He met next with a group from Boerum Hill, the residential district of brownstones and town houses near downtown Brooklyn. The residents were campaigning for street plantings at the site of a recently restored subway kiosk dating from 1908, at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues. Markowitz’s driver approached the intersection from Fourth Avenue, heading down what was formerly an industrial strip that was recently rezoned to permit the construction of apartment buildings.

The gilded cupola of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank was gleaming in the late-afternoon sun. The tower, built two years before the Empire State Building, is Brooklyn’s most magnificent skyscraper from New York’s golden age of construction and, at the time it was erected, the tallest four-sided clock tower in the nation. Just south of the tower lies the proposed site of Atlantic Yards. The project, designed by Frank Gehry, is slated to include several towers, the tallest of which, at six hundred and twenty feet, will loom more than a hundred feet above the golden cupola. Markowitz claims to be confident that the older building will not be overshadowed—“From what I understand, there are ways in architecture to design a building in a way that enhances the view of the Williamsburgh building,” he says. (Forest City Ratner has provided few details of what the larger housing development will look like, though an architect’s model of the arena displays Gehry’s signature wavy metallic walls and a roof garden overlooking Flatbush Avenue.)

In the car, Markowitz’s cell phone rang, and the voice of a female assistant announced that “Bruce” was on the line.

“Yes, sir, how are you doing, Bruce?” Markowitz said, picking up the handset and falling silent as he listened. Bruce Ratner, it appeared from Markowitz’s responses, had some urgent questions about the way discussions concerning waterfront development in Williamsburg and Greenpoint might affect his own project. Markowitz, whenever he could get a word in, tried to be both conciliatory and upbeat. “I understand,” he said; and then, “I wish I knew, but I don’t know”; and “It’s hard for me”; and “That’s absolutely right.” Finally, he told Ratner to call someone in his office—better yet, he would have that someone call Ratner.

Across the street, a small huddle of Boerum Hill residents handed Markowitz a sheaf of plans showing an arrangement of planters and greenery they would like to see in front of the restored subway kiosk. Perhaps, a resident suggested, Forest City Ratner might be persuaded to contribute the funds.

“Does Ratner want to prove he cares?” someone asked.

“I haven’t asked him,” Markowitz replied testily. Then he went to look at the other side of the kiosk, which, another member of the group was telling him, would be a perfect place for a Christmas tree next year.

Last year, Markowitz went to a basketball game for the first time in his life, at the Meadowlands, with Ratner. “He bought his own ticket, as he is required to do,” Ratner says. “He might even have nodded off now and then. But he does call me when the Nets win. He is very encouraging.” When he was campaigning for the borough presidency, Markowitz said that he wanted to bring an N.B.A. team to Brooklyn, and the idea was taken about as seriously as his appeals for Brooklyn’s secession. But in the fall of 2002, when it became clear that the New Jersey Nets were likely to come on the market, Markowitz picked up the phone. He had done that before: during his first few weeks in office, he called Peter O’Malley, the son of Walter O’Malley, who had moved the Dodgers to California in the nineteen-fifties. “I heard that the team was up for sale, and I said, ‘Mr. O’Malley, it would be great for your family name and everything if you would consider moving the L.A. Dodgers back to Brooklyn,’ ” Markowitz says. “I must tell you, that conversation was very brief.”

Markowitz said of his Nets-related scheming, “I thought to myself, Who can I call who has a dedication to Brooklyn, and that has got the economic ability, because, let’s face it, someone who builds two-family homes is not going to be in a position to buy a team and to build an arena.” He considered Donald Trump, but feared that Trump might move the team closer to Atlantic City and his casino investments. Markowitz did, however, call Bruce Ratner, whose company, over the past two decades, has built the massive Metro Tech development—more than two million square feet of office space—not far from the proposed site of the arena. “Bruce had no interest, absolutely no interest,” Markowitz said. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at this fella and know that he’s not a jock.” (Ratner, who is sixty, looks more like the Consumer Affairs Commissioner he was during the Koch administration.) “But I was very persistent with him, and didn’t take no for an answer.”

“He called every two to three weeks,” Ratner says. “I would make up little white lies, and I would wait a day or two to call him back. I am sure I said to my assistant, ‘Oh, my God, it’s Marty.’ ” Eventually, Ratner was convinced of the wisdom of the notion, but not before augmenting the Borough President’s ambitions with his own calculations—“the recognition that there is an opportunity to do what my business is, which is real estate and large-scale economic development.”

Thus the arena imagined by Markowitz became only part of a much larger development, which will stretch six blocks along the border of Prospect Heights. Ratner says that he had looked at the site years ago, but dismissed the idea as unworkable. In the past five to seven years, however, the neighborhood’s profile changed, as the handsome brownstones attracted new residents. “A lot of it stems from the safety, and security, and resurgence of Brooklyn,” Ratner said.

Markowitz believes that the Atlantic Yards development will provide jobs for thousands of Brooklyn residents, particularly those for whom the much discussed rebirth of the borough has meant little more than being priced out of apartments they once could afford. But the proposal has strong opponents, too, including Letitia James, the council member whose district encompasses Prospect Heights, and who, while commending Markowitz for his general efforts on behalf of the borough—“If I had a party, the first person I would invite is Marty,” she says—is skeptical that Ratner’s project is in the borough’s best interests. “This arena is really for the executives who are employed at Metro Tech, and it is across the street from the largest transportation hub for Long Island in the borough,” she says, referring to the L.I.R.R. station at Atlantic Avenue. “It has nothing to do with Brooklynites.”

Neighborhood opposition to the project has ranged from anger at the suggestion that the state may invoke powers of eminent domain to the argument that a privately owned real-estate development is not the best use of the land, a large chunk of which is owned by the M.T.A., and will alter the character of the neighborhood. But the right of the gentrifying class to preserve its property values in blocks close to the arena is not one around which much mass support can be rallied in Brooklyn; and, meanwhile, Forest City Ratner has demonstrated a keen understanding of community politics in lining up support among representatives of the neighborhood’s less affluent populations. While fifty per cent of the housing will be for the luxury market, Ratner says, the rest will be set aside for residents whose incomes are between eighteen thousand and a hundred thousand dollars a year. (There have been similar promises that minority-owned and women-owned businesses will get priority when it comes to applying for construction contracts.) “I never want to see a time in Brooklyn when there are multimillionaires and there are those who live in public housing, and nothing in between,” Markowitz says. He does not mention that the wealthiest new property owner in the neighborhood will be Bruce Ratner.

One Saturday morning not long ago, Markowitz attended a coffee-and-dog-biscuits gathering, held by a group called fido, which stands for Fellowship for the Interests of Dogs and their Owners and meets once a month in Prospect Park. Later that day, he was due at the Christian Cultural Center, a mega-church in southern Brooklyn, where the houses are faced with plain brick or vinyl siding rather than with brownstone. After dropping in at a few community-group meetings on the way, he’d be rounding out his evening with dinner in Bay Ridge, courtesy of the Borough President of Staten Island, James Molinaro, to celebrate a victory over the Staten Island Yankees by the Brooklyn Cyclones, the immensely popular Mets farm team for which a stadium opened at Coney Island in 2001, and which regularly sells out its sixty-five hundred seats.

I joined Markowitz and his driver during a break between these appearances. We started out on Fulton Street, which, like so many stretches in Brooklyn, offers a patchwork of commercial activity: a pizzeria; a Chinese take-out; a row of Afrocentric stores and boutiques that have grown up over the past decade; and signs of more recent arrivals, such as a wine store and a bistro with windows that open to the street in summer.

Next, we drove a couple of blocks over to Forest City Ratner’s newest development, the Atlantic Terminal shopping mall, which is adjacent to the proposed site of Atlantic Yards. The mall is an unlovely green-and-brown hulk bordering streets of brownstones, the shape of whose sloped roofs its own much taller roof grotesquely mimics. It houses gleaming national franchises like Target, Starbucks, and Chuck E. Cheese. Shoppers scurried by.

The car looped west and turned up Pacific Street, into the footprint of the proposed arena. “Just take a look at what’s coming down,” Markowitz said. “I want you to look at this and tell me in any manner, shape, or form that this has historical significance.” On the block where we were, there were a few warehouses and row houses looking shabby and forlorn, as if they had resigned themselves to their fate. “You can see this is gorgeous—just a beautiful, beautiful sight,” Markowitz said, with undisguised sarcasm.

The car proceeded up Pacific Street, alongside the rail yards, and Markowitz said, “When you take a look and you close your eyes you can envision beautiful housing, and retail, and some commercial space, and an arena, and activity, and people here, and people excited about living here. . . . ” He trailed off into urban reverie. Developers like Bruce Ratner, he said, were necessary to bridge the housing gap, given that the government wasn’t going to do it. “The developers, unlike me, are not in the business of being public servants or social workers or do-gooders,” he said. “I hate to say it, but they are businesspeople, and they should be businesspeople.”

We drove up to Prospect Park, and continued into Crown Heights, where Markowitz grew up. “Good Shabbos!” he called out the car window to a passing Hasidic family, and muttered, “I’m not supposed to be in the car. But they’ll forgive me, they know I’m not religious.” Soon we were heading up Empire Boulevard, and at the intersection with Rogers Avenue Markowitz asked his driver to stop. He pointed to a small restaurant, Toomey’s Diner, on the corner of the block.

“It’s hard to believe that there used to be lines to get into this place,” he said, and he gestured in the other direction, toward a series of apartment towers a block or two away. “This place is also hard to envision,” he said. “This was our beloved Ebbets Field,” where the Dodgers once played, and where the Ebbets Field Apartments now stand. His father, he said, used to take him down Empire Boulevard to see games, and as a boy he and his friends would sneak into the grandstands.

“This had more seats, and played more games, than our proposed indoor arena,” he said. “It is in the middle of an urban area, and it worked. And there was less public transportation here than there is at Atlantic and Flatbush.” I asked Markowitz if the Ebbets Field Apartments—characterless postwar tower blocks that rose bleak against the cold sky—were public housing, and he explained that they had been built under the Mitchell-Lama program, launched in 1955, and named for a state senator, MacNeill Mitchell, and an assemblyman, Alfred Lama. Mitchell-Lama was the state’s effort to create housing specifically for low- and middle-income residents, and more than a hundred and five thousand apartments were built before construction under the program ended in the late nineteen-seventies. A nostalgia for that aspect of Brooklyn’s past was not, though, one in which Marty Markowitz, for all his egg-cream soliloquizing, could afford to indulge, and the car drove on.

[Guest Chaney]

“I GOT A SCHEME!”

The words of Saul Bellow.

Issue of 2005-04-25

Posted 2005-04-18

On a summer afternoon in 1998, while I was visiting Saul Bellow and his wife, Janis, in their rural Vermont home, I proposed to Saul that he and I do an extensive written interview about his life’s work. We had been talking for hours on the deck at the rear of the house, along with other friends who’d driven to Vermont to see the Bellows—the Romanian writer Norman Manea and his wife, Cella, who is an art restorer, and the writer and teacher Ross Miller. The four of us tried to get up to Vermont for three or four days every summer because Saul demonstrably enjoyed our visits, and we had a good time together staying at a nearby inn. The conversation was sharp and excited, lots of lucid talk directed mostly at Saul—whose curiosity was all-embracing and for whom listening was a serious matter—and much hilarity about the wonders of human mischief, particularly as we evoked them around the dinner table at the Bellows’ favorite local restaurant, where Saul would throw back his head and laugh like a man blissfully delighted with everything. The older Saul got—and in ’98 he was eighty-three and growing frail—the more our annual pilgrimage resembled an act of religious devotion.

Once I was home, I phoned Saul to suggest how we might proceed with the interview, if he was still interested in my idea. I would reread the books (some, like “The Adventures of Augie March” and “Herzog,” for the third or fourth time), then send him my thoughts on each, structured as questions, for him to respond to at length however he liked. As it turned out, we never got much beyond a beginning, despite Saul’s willingness and my prodding. Every few months, in response to a letter or a phone call from me, some pages would arrive in the mail or through the fax machine, but then months would pass without a word from him, and, despite a weeklong visit I made to his Boston home one December, when he and I sat together for several hours every day talking about the books in the hope of stimulating his memory and his interest, the project petered out, and, reluctantly, I let him be. In time, I enlarged my “thoughts” into an essay on his work, and filed away the pages that Saul had sent sporadically in the course of the two and a half years that I’d tried to keep the interview alive.

Only recently have I taken the pages out to reread. They appear here as he wrote them, without any editorial correction or alteration—his sentences like his memories left to stand as they are—and with bracketed material added by me only for the sake of clarity. They focus on the early books “Augie March,” “Seize the Day,” and “Henderson the Rain King,” published between 1953 and 1959. We got no further than that. Most of the pieces are about “Augie” or are recollections—of Saul’s Chicago childhood or of Paris in 1948, where the book was begun—motivated by his thinking about “Augie”; sometimes it appears that he has forgotten having already answered my questions about “Augie,” and zestfully, with great precision, begins to develop a new line of thought that repeats details and incorporates motifs from a previous response. The pages about “Seize the Day” arrived in May of 2000 and those on “Henderson the Rain King” several months later, and that was the end of it.

It’s too bad that I couldn’t get him to go on to “Herzog,” “Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” “Humboldt’s Gift,” and “The Dean’s December,” as I planned to do, but he just wasn’t interested enough in contemplating his own achievement anymore. Also, he was writing “Ravelstein” at the time, and the energy and concentration weren’t there for this sort of retrospective pursuit. It’s too bad, because what he wrote about the fifties books constitutes a singularly Bellowesque mix of mind and memory, the opening of an aged writer’s autobiography, unplanned, extemporized, and yet comparable in its vividness and evocative charm to Hemingway’s farewell to the world, the posthumously published memoir “A Moveable Feast.”

—Philip Roth

I certainly was transformed [by writing “Augie March”] and I’ll probably be the last to understand how this happened, but I am very willing to look for the cause. I had written two very correct books [“Dangling Man” and “The Victim”] and I shall try to explain what I mean by correct: I seem to have felt that I, as the child of Russian Jews, must establish my authority, my credentials, my fitness to write books in English. Somewhere in my Jewish and immigrant blood there were conspicuous traces of a doubt as to whether I had the right to practice the writer’s trade. Perhaps I felt that I was a pretender or an outlaw successor. After all, it wasn’t Fielding, it wasn’t Herman Melville who forbade me to write, it was our own Wasp establishment, represented mainly by Harvard-trained professors. I must say that these guys infuriated more than they intimidated me.

Well, I got a Guggenheim, thanks to Jim Farrell [James T. Farrell, the author of “Studs Lonigan”] and Edmund Wilson, and with wife and child I crossed the Atlantic on a ship named De Grasse carrying about a hundred Southern college girls practicing their French on stewards and deckhands with no intention of getting rid of their Southern drawl. The voyage lasted nearly two weeks. The men slept in the hold while the women and children had tiny cabins.

We got off the train in the Gare Saint-Lazare and went to the apartment Kaplan had rented for us (H. J. Kaplan, of Newark, N.J.). The Guggenheim grant amounted to five or six thousand dollars but the rate of exchange was five hundred and fifty to one. We were rather well-to-do.

I had brought several hundred pages of manuscript with me. This third book of mine was even more depressing than the first two. Two men in a hospital room, one dying, the other trying to keep him from surrendering to death.

O.K., the Americans had liberated Paris, now it was time for Paris to do something for me. The city lay under a black depression. The year, if I haven’t said so before, was 1948. The gloom everywhere was heavy and vile. The Seine looked and smelled like some medical mixture. Bread and coal were still being rationed. The French hated us. I had a Jewish explanation for this: bad conscience. Not only had they been overrun by the Germans in three weeks, but they had collaborated. Vichy had made them cynical. They pretended that there was a vast underground throughout the war, but the fact seemed to be that they had spent the war years scrounging for food in the countryside. And these fuckers were also patriots. La France had been humiliated and it was all the fault of their liberators, the Brits and the G.I.s.

Depressed like everybody else, I went around looking for traces of the old Paris of Balzac, et cetera. But Balzac had been pre-nihilistic. Of course, there was something in me perhaps of Jewish origin which had nothing at all to do with nihilism. But, if I wasn’t nihilistic, I was terribly downcast and writing about a hospital room, and coaxing a dying man to assert himself and claim his share of life, and thinking my gloomy thoughts beside the medicinal Seine and getting no relief from the great monuments of Paris, I sometimes wondered whether I shouldn’t be thinking about a very different course of life. Maybe I should apprentice myself to an undertaker.

Apart from Kaplan, I had no friends here. Kaplan, a French-speaking Francophile, was a writer with a job at unesco. We were never able to say anything that mattered to each other. I used to see Jimmy Baldwin quite often, mostly at mealtimes, and I had other acquaintances as well, Herb Gold [Herbert Gold, the American writer], a bohemian comedian named Lionel Abel, and the Italian philosopher Chiaromonte, whom I had known in New York. My general impression was that Europe was defying me to do something about it, and I was deeply depressed. I seem to have been a good solid sufferer in my youth.

We arrived in the fall and when spring came I was deep in the dumps. I worked in a small studio, and as I was walking toward it one morning to wrestle yet again with death in a Chicago hospital room, I made the odd discovery that the streets of Paris were offering me some sort of relief. Parisian gutters are flushed every morning by municipal employees who open the hydrants a bit and let water run along the curbs. I seem to remember there were also rolls of burlap that were meant to keep the flow from the middle of the street. Well, there was a touch of sun in the water that strangely cheered me. I suppose a psychiatrist would say that this was some kind of hydrotherapy—the flowing water, freeing me from the caked burden of depression that had formed on my soul. But it wasn’t so much the water flow as the sunny iridescence. Just the sort of thing that makes us loonies cheerful. I remember saying to myself, “Well, why not take a short break and have at least as much freedom of movement as this running water.” My first thought was that I must get rid of the hospital novel—it was poisoning my life. And next I recognized that this was not what being a novelist was supposed to have meant. This bitterness of mine was intolerable, it was disgraceful, a symptom of slavery. I think I’ve always been inclined to accept the depressions that overtook me and I felt just now that I had allowed myself to be dominated by the atmosphere of misery or surliness, that I had agreed somehow to be shut in or bottled up. I seem then to have gone back to childhood in my thoughts and remembered a pal of mine whose surname was August—a handsome, breezy, freewheeling kid who used to yell out when we were playing checkers, “I got a scheme!” He lived in the adjoining building and we used to try to have telephone conversations with tin cans connected by waxed grocery string. His father had deserted the family, his mother was, even to a nine-year-old kid, visibly abnormal, he had a strong and handsome older brother. There was a younger child who was retarded—a case of Down syndrome, perhaps—and they had a granny who ran the show. (She was not really the granny; she’d perhaps been placed there by a social agency that had some program for getting old people to take charge of broken families.) Now, just what had happened to handsome, cheerful Chuckie and to his brothers, his mother, and the stranger whom they called granny? I hadn’t seen anything of these people for three decades and hadn’t a clue. So I decided to describe their lives. This came on me in a tremendous jump. Subject and language appeared at the same moment. The language was immediately present—I can’t say how it happened, but I was suddenly enriched with words and phrases. The gloom went out of me and I found myself with magical suddenness writing a first paragraph.

I was too busy and happy to make any diagnoses or to look for causes and effects. I had the triumphant feeling that this is what I had been born for. I pushed the hospital manuscript aside and began immediately to write in a spirit of reunion with the kid who had shouted, “I got a scheme!” It poured out of me. I was writing many hours every day. In the next two years I seldom looked into Fowler’s “Modern English Usage.”

Perhaps I should also add that it has been a lifelong pattern with me to come back to strength from a position of extreme weakness: I had been almost suffocated and then found that I was breathing more deeply than ever.

It was enormously exhilarating to take liberties with the language. I said what I pleased and I didn’t hesitate to generalize wildly and to invoke and dismiss epochs and worlds. For the first time I felt that the language was mine to do with as I wished.

In writing “Augie March,” I was trying to do justice to my imagination of things. I can’t actually remember my motives clearly, but I seem to have been reacting against confinement in a sardine can and evidently felt I had failed to cope with some inner demands. Reading passages from “Augie,” I seem to recognize some impulse to cover more ground, to deal with hundreds if not thousands of combined impressions. To my cold octogenarian eye, it seems overblown now, but I recognize nevertheless that I was out to satisfy an irrepressible hunger for detail. The restraint of the first two books had driven me mad—I hadn’t become a writer to tread the straight and narrow. I had been storing up stuff for years and this was my dream opportunity for getting it all out. I was also up to my eyes in mental debt. By this I mean that in becoming a writer I hoped to bring out somehow my singular reactions to existence. Why else write? I had prepared and overprepared myself by reading, study, and fact-storage or idea-storage and I was now trying to discharge all this freight. Paris (Europe) may have set me off. I didn’t actually understand what had happened during the Second World War until I had left the U.S.A. I now seem to have been struck by the shame of having written my first book under Marxist influence. In 1939, I had seen the Second World War as a capitalist imperialist war, like the First World War. My Partisan Review Leninist friends (especially Clem Greenberg [Clement Greenberg, the art critic]) had sold me on this. Even in writing “The Victim” I had not yet begun to understand what had happened to the Jews in the Second World War. Much of “Augie” was for me the natural history of the Jews in America. The Jews in Germany, Poland, Hungary, French Jews, Italian Jews had been deported, shot, gassed. I must have had them in mind in the late forties, when I wrote “Augie.”

We the children of immigrants had lots of languages to speak and we spoke them with relish. We were prepared, braced, to answer questions in half a dozen tongues. The older children had not yet forgotten their Russian, and everybody spoke Yiddish. At the age of three, I was sent to Mr. Stein across the way to learn Hebrew. I was not aware as yet that languages existed. But I soon learned that in the beginning God created heaven and earth out of Tohu v’vohu. In Genesis 11, He decided that He did not want all of mankind to speak a single language, it was too dangerous. “Nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” Rabbi Stein was our neighbor on St. Dominique Street, Montreal. When the lesson was over, I went down and sat on the curbstone to think it over.

The French-Canadian kids as they marched by twos to their classes shouted obscenities and insults at us, and I soon understood that I was a Zhwiff—a muzhi (maudit) Zhwiff at that. At six, I was enrolled in the first grade at the Devonshire School. There we sang “God Save the King” and recited the Lord’s Prayer. On the way home we stopped on Roy Street to look at the Chinese in their laundry. They wore black pajamas and skullcaps as they painted their crimson labels with India ink. There was not a chance in the world that we would ever understand what they were writing or saying.

In 1924, we moved to Chicago and there we lived among Poles and Ukrainians. Everybody spoke a sort of English, and we learned certain key words, like piva—Polish for beer. Or dupa, backsides, or kapusta, pickled cabbage. On Division Street, the main drag, men carried office typewriters—we called them uprights—in their armsand for twenty-five cents the scribe would mount thismachine on a ledge and write letters to parents or sisters in the Old Country.

The larger community was of course American and at school you were told in textbooks and by teachers that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were your Presidents. You could not be excluded when the common language became your language—when you knew the National League standings, when you had learned about the Chicago gang wars. In the papers, you followed the events leading to the killing of Dion O’Banion, of the Northside bootlegging gang, and of the indictment of Al Capone for tax evasion. You knew all the facts about the death of Lingle, the Tribune’s gang reporter, who was shot down in the Illinois Central Randolph Street tunnel. The papers informed you that Big Bill Thompson, the mayor, was in the pocket of Capone. All this was available in the dailies, when you had become familiar with the language of the historians, chroniclers, and the lingo of the insiders. You didn’t know the full story from sober, reliable, dependable sources. You had come to know it by mastering the language in which it was gussied up by newspapers and by magazines like Ballyhoo, College Humor, and Henry Luce’s Time.

Chicago was big on gab in the twenties and thirties, and under the influence of gab you came to feel yourself an insider. Verbal swagger was a limited art cultivated in the Hearst papers by contributors like O. O. McIntyre and Ted Cook. On a higher level was H. L. Mencken, of The American Mercury. Mencken comically expressed the dissatisfaction of intellectuals with the philistinism and comical bourgeois provinciality of the “booboisie” American in the years of prosperity that followed the First World War. He found his largest public among schoolboys like me or village atheists and campus radicals. It seemed to me that he didn’t expect his prejudices to be taken very seriously.

At school, we, the sons and daughters of European immigrants, were taught to write grammatically. Knowing the rules filled you with pride. I deeply felt the constraints of “correct” English. It wasn’t always easy, but we kept at it conscientiously, and in my twenties I published two decently written books. In 1948, I went to Paris to write a third novel. But by the winter of 1949 it became miserably—hatefully—apparent that I was once again on the wrong track. I fell into a depression thicker than the palpable soddenness of Paris. In those early postwar days, the city defeated and recently occupied by the Germans was experiencing a second and even more disgraceful occupation by the dollar-proud Americans, moronically happy, stupid and mal élevés. But the French were not more unhappy than I was when I began to recognize the extent of my latest failure. I had come to great humanistic Paris to reach what was deepest in my nature and the best I was able to do was to begin to realize the scope of my failure. Proud of my freedom, I turned out to be the least free of all the people I met. Every morning when I walked to my rented workroom I stopped to watch the municipal workers who turned on the water for the daily street wash. In the streets there was just slope enough to sluice the gutters, and watching the flow of water between the curb and the barrier of wet burlap gave me the only ease I was getting on those gray days, and the release that came with this was inexplicably verbal in form. I was not much interested in explaining this transfer from fluidity and low sparkle to . . . well, to polyglot versatility. I discovered that I could write whatever I wished, and that what I wished was to get into words the appearance of a gallery of personalities—characters like Grandma Lausch or Einhorn the fertile cripple, or Augie March himself. Years of notation ended in the discovery of a language that made everything available. A language might be restrictive or it might be expansive. An excess of corrections caused shrinking. Philip Roth puts it well when he speaks of the teeming, dazzling “specifics” in the opening pages of “Augie March.” These specifics were not deliberately accumulated for some future release. They were revealed by the language. They represent the success of an unconscious strategy. You might put it that Mr. Einhorn had been in hock for years; for decades. He and I together had been waiting for an appropriate language. By that language and only that language could he be redeemed. I couldn’t have been aware of this development. It was not an invention; it was a discovery.

The novel I now began to write wrote itself: “I am an American, Chicago-born.” The narrator was a boyhood friend whom I had lost track of thirty years ago, when my family had moved from Augusta Street. I often wondered what had become of this handsome impulsive kid. The book I found myself writing was therefore a speculative biography.

There was something deeply unsatisfactory about the language used by contemporary writers—it was stingy and arid, it was not connected with anything characteristic, permanent, durable, habitual in the writer’s outlook. For as long as I could remember I identified body and limbs, faces and their features, with words, phrases, and tones of voice. Language, thought, belief were connected somehow with noses, eyes, brows, mouths, hair—legs, hands, feet had their counterparts in language. The voice—the voices—were not invented. And whether they knew it or not all human creatures had voices and ears and vocabularies—sometimes parsimonious, sometimes limitless and overflowing. In this way the words and the phenomena were interrelated. And this was what it meant to be a writer.

Before I forget the name of the man who trained the eagle: he was an American called Mannix who had materialized in Taxco. [Chapter XVI of “Augie March” is about the attempt by Thea Fenchel, Augie’s lover, to train an eagle to attack and capture the large lizards inhabiting the mountains of central Mexico.] My memory works by fits and starts and I didn’t want to have to grope through my head in vain. The late Mannix, no longer among us, was one of those American eccentrics who do great and also grotesque things and arrange somehow a wonderful press for themselves.

As so often, I begin with a footnote.

Day in, day out, I watched Mannix and his eagle on a sharp slope outside the town. But I think I should go back a bit and explain what I was doing in Mexico in the summer of 1940. My late mother had paid twenty-five cents a week to an insurance agent, a stout man who used to come by regularly to collect his money. He carried a very thick black portfolio secured with many rubber bands. He was a bookish type himself, and was forever trying to engage me in conversation about the books he saw in my mother’s kitchen. He was extremely keen to discuss “The Decline of the West.” Smart Jewish schoolboys in Chicago were poring over Spengler at night. But, to keep to the point, I was the beneficiary of an insurance policy on which my mother paid two bits weekly. She died when I was seventeen and the policy matured eight years later. My father wanted me to turn the money over to him, all five hundred bucks of it. He needed it badly, but I refused to part with it. Now, my father was a tyrant with a perfectly good claim to be one of the all-time gallery of great tyrants. Three years earlier I had defied him by getting married. Now I declared that Anita and I would go to Mexico. It was essential that we should go. Europe was out of the question since the Germans had just overrun Paris. Deprived of Paris, I simply had to go to Mexico. Looking back, I see more agony than boldness in this decision. I was, as kids were to say later, making a statement. I had spent most of my life in weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Chicago and I needed barbarism, color, glamour, and risk. So Anita and I took the Greyhound bus to New York. I can’t remember why we didn’t go directly to Texas, but there was some compelling reason to go to New York. Perhaps I needed to see my uncle, Willie Bellow, a brushmaker, unemployed and brooding his life away in Brownsville. I didn’t clearly understand at the time, but it is easy today for me to see that he had been punished by my grandfather for joining the Bund at an early age. The Bellows did not work with their hands, they were not tradespeople, and to apprentice Willie to a brushmaker was meant to be especially humiliating and punitive because he would be working with hog bristles. It seems that in my rebellion I turned to him for support. He was an affectionate uncle, but he was an unemployed worker with a family to feed. I ought to have shared the five hundred bucks with him. I was however headed for Mexico. We went by Greyhound by way of Augusta, Georgia, where my Uncle Max was selling schmattes on the installment plan to black field hands. Our next stop was New Orleans. After hanging around the Latin Quarter pointlessly for a few days, we went on to Mexico City.

Now, Mexico in those years was everything that D. H. Lawrence said it was, and a good deal more besides. Here there were no uncles, no family bonds. I was somewhat frightened, I must admit, but certainly not intimidated. It seems to me now that I was determined not to be made by my father in Chicago, nor by my older brothers. Uncle Willie in Brownsville illustrated what might happen to a Bellow who rebelled. He would be humiliatingly shot down. Uncle Max in Georgia was a cheerful, engaging hand-to-mouth ganef. And now here I was in Mexico to stay as long as my four hundred and fifty dollars lasted. After drifting around for several weeks in places like Michoacán, we were drawn to Taxco, which had a sizable foreign colony, mostly American, but also Japanese, Dutch, and British.

I had been brought up to worry, but the lesson seems somehow not to have taken. None of the people I met in Taxco had a very firm grip on anything at all. I never gave a thought to what would happen after my money had run out. We rented a very nice house with two servants for about ten bucks a week and the Indian women shopped, cooked, and washed our clothes. I have to say also that I very rarely gave my father a thought. I was very happy to submit to the influence of my betters. I was intrigued with what I took to be the imaginative powers of the people I met. I see all too clearly now how limited they were, but everybody has his own pattern for liberation and my own liberation took the form of an escape from anxiety. My mood was investigative. I wanted to see firsthand what the characters I was spending my time with were up to. I sent my wife away to Acapulco—then a beach with a few huts. My strong desire was to go it alone. It never occurred to me that it might be a danger to Anita to be shipped off. Evidently I discovered a talent for doing things in a headlong style. Perhaps I was fascinated by Mannix’s eagle because he was such a plunger.

The challenge was to emerge intact from the grip of these would-be dominators. To extract the secret of their powers from them while eluding their control became my singular interest. If I had any game it was this independence game. Perhaps it was not so much an interest as it was a spiritual exercise. I recognized that I did not have to do the will of others.

In Paris, where the book was being written, it was Charlie (Augie) who resisted influence and control. Childish and fresh, he sat at the checkerboard and shouted “I got a scheme!” I, the writer, might be hampered, depressed. Charlie, however, was immune, defying Grandma Lausch. She took a dim view of his schemes. He, however, was prepared to light out for the territory ahead.

In mountainous Mexico, where the sun shone so dramatically, so explicitly, you were never allowed to forget death. Women bought tiny coffins in the marketplace for their dead infants and carried them on their heads to the cemetery. After ten years, graves were dug up and bones thrown into a charnel house. The Day of Death was a national holiday. Although I was most keenly aware of this, I was too highly excited for any sense of fear to take a grip on me. And then the eagle was a death-dealing life force. Seven mornings a week I was out with Mannix. I also drank far more than was good for me with American buddies in the zócalo (the town square). I took riding lessons and I hung out with the hard-drinking professionals who wrote for Black Mask and other pulps. Mannix and his eagle were my antidotes to the low company of the pulp writers. It was hard for me to grasp the fact that the free could be taught to hawk. It surprised me to learn that such a predator would obey his trainer like any lesser creature. I felt a boundless respect for the eagle nevertheless. Mannix I saw as just another showman. Later, when “Augie” was published, Mannix demanded billing in his own name and Viking Press advised me to give him a footnote. I can’t recall whether this was mentioned in the text, but the eagle perched atop the water tank in Mannix’s toilet, just under the ceiling. Just another domestic fowl. On the mountainside a creature of boundless freedom and power, he caught lizards and brought them to his showman master.

Robert Penn Warren once said that he liked to write in a foreign country “where the language is not your own and you are forced into yourself in a special way.” I suppose it is essential that one should be forced into oneself and perhaps the foreign language is important—perhaps not. Plausible speculation, after the fact, can be pleasant. When I began to write “The Adventures of Augie March,” I was living in Paris and I now ask myself whether I was at that time forced into myself in a special way and find that I am able to answer in the affirmative. It seems to me that I felt very much as I had felt in 1923, when we, the family, were reunited with my father and his cousins in Chicago. My father, who had preceded us a year earlier, and Cousin Louie were waiting for us at the Harrison Street Station when the Montreal train arrived. The date was July 4th, Independence Day. The brick streets were hot. In the Midwest, everything was alien—nature itself was different—the air, the leaves and bushes, the soil, the water, the very molecules were unfamiliar. Breathing would not be here what it had been in Canada. My father, whom I had longed to see, was now clean-shaven. I had never seen him without his mustache, and the bareness of his upper lip was a shock to me.

In the street near the platform, Cousin Louie’s Dodge touring car was parked. Its celluloid panels were kept unbuttoned so that the air could circulate. Sitting at the wheel, Louie wore his hair in a long crest, like an Iroquois warrior. He belonged, physically, to a different branch of the species. He had a big thriving nose and a ruddy color. Louie had saved us, and brought us to the promised land.

We followed the trolley lines up Milwaukee Avenue to the northwest side of the city, and since this was July 4th the streetcars set off the powder caps the children had taped to the rails, and in this ripping noise and smoke we drove to Cousin Flora’s house. Flora, Louie’s sister, welcomed us into her bungalow and fed us on smoked Great Lakes whitefish. We had come by coach, sitting up all night, and were very tired. So the living-room furniture was pushed aside and we slept on the floor. The Chicago neighborhood was raw and new. The streets had just been paved and along the Sanitary District canals the newly planted trees were coming into meagre leaf. Orange striped awnings shaded the windows. Old Montreal lay one sleepless night behind us. Chicago with its stars and stripes was utterly new. Rummaging in Cousin Flora’s closets I found a coverless prose translation of the Iliad (Andrew Lang, Leaf and Myers). Achilles and Agamemnon therefore stood between me and the Chicago of Al Capone and Big Bill Thompson. It was up to me to find ways to reconcile the Trojan War with Prohibition, major-league baseball, and the Old Country as my mother remembered it. After school, in the cellar of the synagogue on Rockwell, I studied Old Testament Hebrew. At home I followed the Leopold and Loeb case in the papers. In 1926, there was the Dempsey-Tunney fight, and Charlie Chaplin’s “Gold Rush.” By 1930, I was an American entirely. I read The American Mercury, the novels of Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson.

I shall never understand how “The Adventures of Augie March” came to be written. I had arrived in Paris with wife and child to complete another novel—something about two men who shared a hospital room in Chicago and came to be close friends. The story was told by the survivor. I said to myself that I ought not to be writing such dreary stuff. What I needed was something more open and generous—a freewheeling, hang-loose book. But I was unable to shake off the hospital room and the dying man who had become my close friend. I was desperately depressed.

I had rented a room near the Place Saint-Sulpice, where the shops sold ecclesiastical goods, and I was walking heavyhearted toward my workplace one morning when I caught up with the cleaning crew who opened the taps at the street corners and let the water run along the curbs, flushing away the cigarette butts, dogs’ caca, shredded letters, orange skins, candy wrappers into the large-mouthed sewers. The sanitation sweepers dragged the soaking burlap downhill to keep the water from dispersing. Watching the flow, I felt less lame, and I was grateful for this hydrotherapy and the points of sunlight in it—nothing simpler. I did not have to kill myself in the service of art.

That “Augie March” happened in dismal postwar Europe (knowledge of the Holocaust was slowly coming to us back then) is evidence of an independent move of the mind, a decision not to surrender to horror. I discovered that I no longer wanted to be put upon by art seriousness.

My oldest brother was a lesson to me in this respect. He was determined to become a world-beater. He did, as a matter of fact, very well for himself. He became very rich. From the first he would say to me, when we moved from Canada, enough of this old crap about being Jewish. Also, my old man was oddly enough a great American patriot. He had no picture of himself as a man beating America, but my brother did. My middle brother, Sam, was also a successful businessman, and he was certainly American in hatching deals and multiplying bank accounts. But he was of the Old World with his wife and children, and granddaughters who had to be married off. There were no such compromises for Morris, the entirely American brother. We were united in our disapproval of brother Sam and his formal orthodoxy.

Paris was turning out to be a mistake. “Living up to it” consumed too much energy. Madame Lemelle, my landlady, told me that André Gide lived just down the way and if I had answered I would have said that competition was actually good for business. In any case, Mme. Lemelle was more interested in the automatic water heater I had bought and installed in her kitchen. This might have been the right kind of American gesture to make. But my real interests just then were not in the technological transformation (improvement) of Europe by America.

I had walked away from the street-washing crew saying under my breath, “I am an American—Chicago-born.” The “I” in this case was not autobiographical. I had in mind a boyhood friend from Augusta Street in Chicago of the mid-twenties. I hadn’t seen Augie since the late twenties; the forties were now ending. What had become of my friend, I couldn’t say. It struck me that a fictional biography of this impulsive, handsome, intelligent, spirited boy would certainly be worth writing. Augie had introduced me to the American language and the charm of that language was one of the charms of his personality. From him I had unwittingly learned to go at things freestyle, making the record in my own way—first to knock, first admitted.

Of course, I improvised freely from the events of my own life. Immigrants differed considerably in their attitudes toward America. Some continued to live mentally and emotionally in the Old Country. Others “Americanized” themselves. To Jews from other parts of the country, the Eastern Seaboard Jews seemed less confidently American, more cowed by old money and old names. My father understood the U.S.A. rather well. I discovered that Cahan of the Yiddish Forward made a serious effort to educate his immigrant readers. Though he was a socialist he understood that the older Europeans had little use for Marxism. My father knew quite a lot about the Constitution, the Congress and the Presidency. I remember being lectured by him on Roger Williams’s banishment from Massachusetts Bay Colony and his hospitality to the Jews and Quakers. My old man would say that in the Old Country Jews had to carry masses of identification papers—cartes de séjour. Here you were never stopped and asked for your papers.

I had an eighth-grade teacher—Mrs. Jenkins was her name, a wonderful old woman. Her father had been a prisoner in Andersonville, and in the mid-twenties she would tell the kids his Civil War stories. Mrs. Jenkins herself was white-haired. The G.A.R. was still a lively topic in Chicago. On Memorial Day, the old men lined up on Randolph and Michigan, in front of the public library. The public library was built on land given by the Civil War veterans. On the second floor of the north end there was a war museum. People were not familiar with it. They were at the south end, where the books were. But upstairs at the north end was an enormous display of regimental flags, guns, photographs, and on Veterans Day old soldiers lined up for the annual march. The G.A.R. was still represented. I read a lot about the Civil War, Grant’s memoirs and Sherman’s as well.

I took a tiny hotel room on Rue des Saints-Pères. Across the way pneumatic drills were at work on the construction of a hospital or medical school. The room below mine was occupied by an old Italian scholar named Caffi. He was tall but frail and had an immense head of hair and a small nervous laugh, but he was a serious man. In 1917, as an Italian journalist in Petersburg, he had spent the funds his paper sent him to feed starving children. Now he lived on the money raised by his devoted followers. His supporters kept him alive and would occasionally come from Italy to visit him. Apparently he was an accomplished Greek scholar. Most of the day he passed in bed drinking coffee and writing learned notes to himself.

I tried occasionally to be helpful. As he was washing his feet in the sink one day, the bowl of the washstand broke and a chunk of it fell on the instep of the supporting right foot. The wound was painful. He wrapped a large towel around it and did not leave his bed for an entire week. Among his acquaintances and followers there were some who said he had wounded himself on purpose, from resentment toward a friend who had tried to get him a job. A strange theory. When one of his visitors remarked that I did not seem to be getting what an American should get out of Paris, M. Caffi wisely replied that it was only natural that I should be thinking of America most of the time. It was Chicago before the Depression that I went to in my room in the morning, not misty Paris with its cold statues and admirable bridges. The book had taken off, writing itself very rapidly; I was coming to be strangely independent of place. Chicago itself had grown exotic to me. A descendant of Russian-Jewish immigrants, I was writing about Chicago in odd corners of Paris and, afterward, in Austria, Italy, Long Island, and New Jersey. To speak of rootless or rooted persons is all very well, but I felt that the cultural vocabulary of the university crowd should be avoided. I listened to Mr. Caffi when he described America as the new Rome. I was deferential and respectful, aware that he was trying to do good, to raise my mental level. He did as much for his young Italian disciples—his helpers. They brewed his coffee and mothproofed his winter clothes. Half-blind and often bedridden, Caffi directed his activities. He evidently saw that I was an American doing something characteristically American—a latter-day Roman. What I learned in Europe was how deeply involved I was with the U.S.A.

A major figure in Europe was an intellectual—poverty was one of his badges and he was supported by his followers. A young Italian had attached himself to Caffi as his delegate, representative, and helper. I was fascinated by this very different un-American version of a higher life, but I pursued very different aims. Sr. Caffi probably saw this more clearly. I think also that I was very lucky. For me, the overpowering brother was the totally American brother. He overpowered me and in a sense he led me to write “The Adventures of Augie March.” He didn’t like the book when he read it, but he granted that I had in my cockeyed way done something significant and it was necessary that he should figure in the book. He was aggressive and I recognized in him the day-to-day genius of the U.S.A.

In the opening sentence of my work-in-progress I don’t say that I am an American Jew. I simply declare that I am an American. My eldest brother was the first to point out the advantages of this. America offered to free us from the control of the family and of the Jewish community. After school he was a “baggage smasher,” loading trucks with suitcases and trunks for home delivery. He wore football jerseys with broad bands of orange and purple. In a few years, he had city-hall connections. He wore a derby and a velvet collar to his topcoat, a silk scarf with polka dots, and pointed shoes of patent leather. He was slick, savvy, and combative. He was preparing for the bar exam and he described himself as bagman for a member of the House of Representatives. He opened his gladstone bag for me once and showed me paper money it was crammed with.

He brought home copies of The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Liberty Magazine, and The Literary Digest. These influential papers gave you an idealized orientation to the mental life of the country—its farmers, its laborers, its wives and mothers, its mechanics and athletes, its heroes—its promoters and opportunists, its social climbers, its White Pants Willies and marketers of drowned Florida real estate, New England boy prodigies like Mark Tidd—Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd: images of what Americans were, or might become. There was a great demand for images or models of rough-and-ready frontier types such as Walt Whitman had offered to the country in “Leaves of Grass” and “Democratic Vistas.” In a country of immigrants, there was a singular need for prototypes, especially among the young.

In my father’s generation, there was a great sense of release from tsarist officialdom, not merely oppressive but downright crazy. My father believed that the U.S.A. offered the Jews unheard-of opportunities for development—the first rational government in history. And the law of the land, guaranteed in the founding documents. My father took an exceptional interest in the U.S. Constitution and the privileges of citizenship, for which Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy had prepared him. He said, “That’s what I call a deal. I’m glad to pay taxes in a country where the Constitution says I’m a citizen, not a Jew.” This put the work of the founders under some strain, he thought, but there was no danger in this since justice as the world acknowledges was taught to Israel by Moses under the direct supervision of God. But from the beginning the life of the Jews in America was not what it had always been in Europe, with the ghettos—the Jews in each country belonging to a separate community of Jews. They were taxed not as Jews but as citizens, nor were they subject to special levies. As a Jew, you have a connection of your own to the life of the country, and in many respects you could be as American as you pleased. Naturally, there were private organizations which excluded you from membership, but such conduct would force you to remember the mass murder, gassing camps, the contrast of seriousness with sophomoric provocation.

My old man was odd that way; he was a great patriot, seeing the safety of the Jews as dependent on the stability and balance of the rational founders.

My brother’s Americanism was altogether different. He was made for Chicago. He adopted the style of a racketeer and put himself over as a wheeler-dealer. An underworld coloration made legitimate business seem or sound crooked.

And, strangely enough, my father became a patriotic American. He knew quite a lot of U.S. history, though he read only the Yiddish papers. He often took me aback. He’d say, “Tell me about this man Roger Williams.” “Where did you find that name?” I said. “I read about him in The Forward,” my father said. “There was a series of articles on Rhode Island.”

Abraham Cahan, editor of the Yiddish paper, saw to it that his readers received instruction in the rights and duties of citizenship.

I remember that we arrived at the Dearborn Street Station in Chicago on July 4th. We were met by my father and his cousin and employer, Louie, who owned a bakery on Marshfield Avenue. A tall, vigorous man, with a red Indian strip of hair down the middle of his head. But I was truly astonished by my father—he had shaved his mustache and the nudity of his face shocked me. Among the alien phenomena of Chicago, this was, on that first day, probably the hardest to absorb. We climbed into Cousin Louie’s touring car with its flapping celluloid curtains and we followed the car tracks, on which the kids had laid small explosive devices that were set off by the trolley cars. The air smelled of gunpowder. War veterans were firing the guns they had brought home from France. I was too big a boy, at nine, to be dandled on my father’s knee, and, besides, the disappearance of his cigarette-saturated mustache had made another man of him, temporarily. Montreal was nice, it was old-fashioned, European, its parts were interconnected. The crude Chicago of those days was described by an English visitor as a string of industrial villages from factory to factory. The streets of the Polish neighborhood where we settled smelled of sauerkraut and home-brewed Prohibition beer. Mechanical player pianos everywhere played polkas and waltzes. In proletarian immigrant Chicago of the twenties there was little culture, but schoolchildren didn’t know what culture was, and I was in any case at a level of development below books, music, painting, and conversation. I found myself in a place where everything was strange—even the trees and their leaves. Colors, spaces, the air itself was different, clumsier, coarser—as if made of heavier molecules. I was now, as my parents had been earlier in Canada, an immigrant in an altogether different physical reality. Here everything demanded revision, and I was aware that my senses were being adapted to the chemical or tactile demands of the new place—its atmospheres, its hidden variations had to be absorbed.

The rest—classrooms, playgrounds, marching in the corridors—came easily. Baseball gave me a certain amount of trouble at first, because I had spent my eighth year in the hospital. [The eight-year-old Bellow was hospitalized with acute appendicitis and peritonitis that led to life-threatening complications.] I worked hard at physical fitness, but when a grounder passed one of the boys said, “You looked at that ball as if it was an object of idle curiosity.”

Pittsburgh was famous for steel, Detroit for automobiles, Akron for rubber tires, Swift and Armour exported beef and bacon from their Southside Chicago plants. Donnelly the printer published telephone directories of many cities, and in Chicago the educated classes thought of the city as a literary center. Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Edgar Lee Masters, Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay came here to study, to write for the newspapers or the ad agencies. The Chicago Journal, a paper that did not survive the Depression, published a weekly literary supplement. The two Hearst papers were hospitable to writers. High-school children also read Mencken’s American Mercury. One of the most notorious crimes of the mid-twenties was committed by Leopold and Loeb, university students whose heads were turned by the Nietzschean ideas they wildly misunderstood. They were defended by Clarence Darrow, whose courtroom speeches ran in the papers together with the gang killings and the urban sketches of Ben Hecht. In high school, at the age of fourteen, we were doing “The Merchant of Venice” and “Julius Caesar,” and, on our own, Dos Passos’s “Manhattan Transfer” and Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” We read the “Chicago authors,” of course, Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” and, a little later, Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan.” My closest friend, in early adolescence, was Syd Harris, who lived on Iowa Street, just east of Robey. An only child and a difficult one, he tyrannized his London-born mother and his Russian papa. Skinny Sydney, with his wild ways, his tics, and his rages, ran the show—he lied, he threatened, and he stormed, he played the genius and the dictator. A large dinner table occupied the little parlor and there we read our esoteric books. We wrote at opposite ends of the big table, on yellow second-sheets from the Woolworth ten-cent store. At this square borax table, its surface protected by a carpetlike cover, we wrote stories, poems, essays, dialogues, political fantasies, essays on Marxism—on subjects we didn’t really know too much about.

When well-meaning Mrs. Harris looked in on us to ask some harmless, encouraging question, Sydney would shout, “Get back to the kitchen, you old Cockney bitch. How dare you interrupt.” And, losing her temper, one eye jumping out of focus when she bristled, his mama would answer, “Yer no child of mine. They switched yer on me in the hospital.”

It was theatre, of course.

Mrs. Harris thought of me as a well-behaved boy of good family from whom he, Sydney, could learn to be civil and show proper respect. I was brought up to defer to my elders. Millennia of correct conduct, I thought, and much good they did us, I think today. But I am still shocked by Sydney’s false rages, as when he shouted at his ma, get out you old “whore.” This was pushing outrage and bohemian swagger too far. I thought, My mother wouldn’t have let me get away with it, and my father would have knocked me down.

At fifteen, we wrote a book together, and one winter day on Division Street we flipped a coin to see which of us would take the manuscript to New York City to be published. Sydney, when he won the toss, stuffed the pages under his sweater. We pooled our money—some sixty cents—and immediately he was in the street, with his thumb up. In a matter of days, he was in New York. He wrote that he was staying on Riverside with John Dos Passos, who was dazzled by Sydney’s gifts. Dos Passos had six white spitz dogs who were walked on triple leashes, twice a day.

Meantime, Mrs. Harris had reported the disappearance of her only child to the Missing Persons Bureau. She came to the house and questioned me in my mother’s sickroom. [bellow’s mother was dying of breast cancer.] I said I knew nothing. Adolescents in those days were bound by gangland rules. You didn’t rat on a buddy. My eldest brother said that I should be questioned at police headquarters. We went to Eleventh and State Streets, Sydney’s mother weeping, my bossy brother determined to tag me hard and teach me a lesson. I repeated my lies to the Missing Persons Bureau, and felt that I could tough it out with the best of them.

But my brother now broke into my locked drawer and found Sydney’s letters. After dinner that night he read them to the family. In the opinion of the New York experts who had read our manuscript, Sydney was an obvious winner. Covici the publisher had commissioned a book on Chicago’s revolutionary youth and paid Sydney an advance of two hundred dollars. In the judgment of the publishing illuminati, I would do well to enter my father’s business. Only my mother grieved for me. Everybody else was delighted to see me go down in flames.

Famous and rich, Sydney came home on the train. He was far too busy now to write a book for Covici. He soon became the legman for Milton Mayer, who covered Chicago for P.M., the New York paper founded by Marshall Field. Eventually, Sydney became a Chicago Daily News columnist who specialized in the education of adolescents. Sydney’s early schooling in avant-garde literature was singularly advantageous. Beneath his ivory tower there was a gold mine.

I don’t like that book, “Seize the Day.” I never think about it, I never take it up, I don’t touch it. But I have to admit that you ask the question of questions, and that I don’t know how I can possibly answer. [i’d asked him if he knew why, in writing “Seize the Day,” he’d moved from the euphoric openness of “Augie March” back into the dour ethos of the pre-“Augie” world of “The Victim” and “Dangling Man.”] Augie is the freest of the free, while Wilhelm is a full catalogue of repressions and civilized man-traps. I sympathize with Wilhelm but I don’t like him. Seated at the checkerboard, he has no scheme. The reader, however, is attracted to him because of his “sensibilities.” His is, of course, a common type—he calls on others to “give” or “encourage.” His is the commonest of stories. But my task was to represent him, not to recommend him. In him we see the failures of “feeling”—the characteristic American slackness of virtues and the inanity of good counsel.

Many readers assumed that as an enlightened person I would naturally be on Tommy Wilhelm’s side. On the contrary, I saw him as a misfit wooing his hard-nosed father with the corrupt platitudes of affection, or job-lot, bargain-sale psychological correctness. I thought he was one of these people who make themselves pitiable in order to extract your support. The clue to my true opinion about this may be found in the zany mental-health lectures of Dr. Tamkin. The absurd, phony Dr. Tamkin was a great help to me—the advice-giving phony we turn to for guidance, the false man of science who has all the answers.

I’ve thought quite a lot about the New York setting of “Seize the Day” and I’m inclined to agree that the loneliness, shabbiness, and depression of the book find a singular match in the uptown Broadway surroundings. I think that for old-time Chicagoans the New Yorkers of “Seize the Day” are emotionally thinner, or one-dimensional. We had fuller or, if you prefer, richer emotions in the Middle West. I think I congratulated myself on having been able to deal with New York, but I never won any of my struggles there, and I never responded with full human warmth to anything that happened there.

I lived on the Upper West Side for some time. Adam’s mother, Sondra, lived in the Ansonia before we were married, and I used to spend my nights there. That was in the early fifties, and that hotel lent itself to “Seize the Day”—the Insomnia, I liked to call it.

I found a nice apartment on Riverside Drive. But somehow it just didn’t work. I never knew any real comfort in New York. I always felt challenge and injury around the corner. I had always considered it a very risky place, where one was easily lost. And I think I saw New York through the being of Isaac Rosenfeld. [Rosenfeld, a fiction writer and essayist, was a Chicago native and had been a friend of Bellow’s since childhood.] He came to take the town and he got took. From his standpoint it proved to be a very dangerous place. He came with this pretty wife to qualify for his Ph.D. He came from Chicago and he got himself deeper and deeper into the pit.

Isaac would almost certainly have agreed that New York might save him. Chicago had no hope to extend to him. The just married pair, Isaac and his Greek-American bride, found a flat in Greenwich Village. His “carefree” circus on Barrow Street attracted the bohemian intellectual crowd. Isaac became one of the wits of this group, a serious person who allowed himself to play the clown following the example of the Dostoyevskian underground man. During the war, he was in command of a barge in the New York Harbor. An ingenious, playful father, he filled the apartment with cats, dogs, guinea pigs, parakeets with whom the two kids were on excellent terms. The son, like Isaac himself, died of a heart attack in his mid-thirties. The daughter is now a Buddhist nun and resides in a French convent. Isaac’s wife remarried when she was widowed and in her late eighties lives on in Honolulu. She’s partially paralyzed. His considerable gifts as a writer never matured in New York. He became a follower of the onetime Freudian Wilhelm Reich. This would not have been possible in any other American city. It took Isaac years to cast off the Reichian influence. This ideological ordeal, one might say, followed him from Vienna to New York.

Also, New York was the place where I did the Reichian therapy. That was really a horror. I didn’t realize how terrible it was, and that it happened under Isaac’s influence. Because he insisted that I had to have this done, since he was doing it. About three years. Once or twice a week. There was a box in the doctor’s office and you had to take off every stitch and lie on the couch. I think I probably was doing this during that “Seize the Day” period. Not anything I’m terribly proud of, but you could not keep your respect for yourself if you had not faced the ultimate rigors. And it was a link between Isaac and me. I felt that I could not let him go through this without going through it myself so that I would know what was happening to him.

I suppose I felt utterly isolated in New York. It was the sort of place that generated such feelings, and there was nothing you could turn to. I mean, if you turn to somebody for help you’d make the biggest mistake in your life if you choose Dr. Tamkin. I knew the original of Dr. Tamkin. He was a friend of two friends. The second friends were a European couple whom I liked very much, and their only child had been killed in an accident and “Dr. Tamkin” came and took charge, emotional charge, of the family, as he would. And I hated him for it. I saw what he was doing; he had no feeling for these people. He was just a scatterbrain, a poseur. Self-anointed helper of mankind, full of generosity to everybody. That was the real background of this foolish grotesque. She was a Jewish Frenchwoman. He was a German Jew. Their child, about fifteen years old, was knocked down in the street by a truck on his way home from school. She went to the hospital, where she was told that he was O.K. Then he had an embolism, as a result of this accident. And when she got home from the hospital the phone was ringing to tell them that he was dead. They had just lost their son whom they loved with all their hearts and he put himself forward as their protector and their guide, with all this psychological garbage of his.

It was a very bad time. Maybe what I was thinking is if you bring your hopes to New York this inevitably happens to you. There’s a connection between Tommy Wilhelm and Isaac. Because he does come to New York again, to reëstablish his connection with his father and his mother, his grave, and so on.

Still, having said all this, I can’t really see that I am so utterly place-dependent. I’ve never taken much stock in the notion that London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and other great capitals have made the literature of their respective countries. The cities are wonderful, but one must be wary of historicism. Historicism is an academic product whose premise is that urban multitudes make the culture of their countries. Together we share the high significance or glamour of Paris and London. During the Depression, I bought a set of Balzac and was taken over by the glamour of the great joint enterprise of the city of Paris and its triumphant capitalism, its erotic oddities and vices, the mixed legacy of its Revolution, its Napoleonic days of triumph. its jeune ambitieux, its inventive restless criminals, its bankers, its lovers. This wonderful mixture or compound had a glamour of its own. We wanted to know all that could be known about it.

Its attractions are boundless, but is it everything it claims to be? We are fascinated by it, but we are also wary of its claims to be the setting of settings and the formative power behind the phenomena. We had learned in our Chicagos and New Yorks that the great treasures of culture were not indispensable—that one can live without it.

It may be that the swing from “Augie” to “Seize the Day” was part of a lifelong pattern. It seems to have started when I was a kid in Montreal, dying in the hospital; when I was released from the Royal Victoria Hospital, we went immediately to Chicago. There I grew up, worshipped health, became muscular and chinned myself, and so forth. I was making it, emotionally, in Chicago. After that, when I got out of college and went to New York, it was more of the same. But I had an Uncle Willie Bellow, in Brownsville, who was a very gentle, depressed man. He was a brushmaker. He disappointed his father, my grandfather. My grandfather apprenticed him to a brushmaker. This apprenticeship contained a hidden disgrace, because as a brushmaker he would have to deal with hog’s bristles. This was actually my grandfather’s point. So there was poor Willie, an illegal immigrant in New York. I don’t know how he ever got there—he took a train with his family from Montreal to New York, but there was no record of his entry into the country, so he couldn’t apply for citizenship papers. I loved him dearly. He was a very very feeling, cheerful, generous humorist, without much power of self-expression. And he died in the early fifties in his place of work, at the brush factory, in Brooklyn. It’s true, many dark things were happening as I came to write “Seize the Day.”

"As much a disease as he is a man” perfectly sums up “Henderson the Rain King.” [bellow is alluding to a description of Henderson I’d used in my question.] Henderson is of course looking for a cure. But the bourgeois is defined by his dread of death. All we need to know about sickness as it relates to bourgeois amour propre and death we can learn from Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.” The difficulty in approaching Henderson following this outlook is that Henderson is so unlike a bourgeois. In his case, the categories wither away.

It seems to me that I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote “The Rain King.” I was looking for my idea to reveal itself as I investigated the phenomena—the primary phenomenon being Henderson himself, and it presently became clear to me that America has no idea—not the remotest—of what America is. Europeans would agree, enthusiastically, with this finding. They will tell you that America is inculte or nyekulturny. But how far does that get us? It is true that culture is not one of Henderson’s direct concerns. He could not compete with his father’s gentlemanly generation—his immediate ancestors who knew Homer and read Dante in Italian. He had a very different take on American life. You refer to this, rightly, as his wacky anthropology. To a young Chicagoan it seemed the science of sciences. I learned that what was right among the African Masai was wrong with the Eskimos. Later I saw that this was a treacherous doctrine—morality should be made of sterner stuff. But in my youth my head was turned by the study of erratic—or goofy—customs. In my early twenties I was a cultural relativist. I had given all of that up before I began to write “Henderson.”

Roth likes “Henderson,” and I am grateful to him for that. He sees it as a screwball stunt, but he sees, too, that the stunt is sincere and the book has great screwball authority. I was much criticized by reviewers for yielding to anarchic or mad impulses and abandoni

[ejp626]

A few years back, I read all of Bellow's novels in order. I even read a late collection of stories (forgot the title) but Ravelstein hadn't come out at that point, and I haven't read it. While there is something to be said for the intensity and focus of the shorter works - Hanging Man and Seize the Day in particular - I think it is in the longer novels that Bellow really stretched out. I like Auggie Marsh the best, in part because there is more optimism. It is a relatively young man's book, unlike Samler's Planet or certainly Ravelstein.

The main problem (or my main problem) with Bellow is that the characters become a little shrivelled and small of soul as they (and Bellow) age. I guess we saw the same progression in Kingsley Amis or Wordsworth for that matter. As you grow older, you have more opportunity to be disappointed in and by your family, your friends, your politicians and your society. (Unless you start out cynical and jaded.) Perhaps a bigger knock is that most of the novels really do seem the same -- there is always a nagging ex-wife in the background, some family member has a vendetta against another (usually an uncle has cheated the narrator), and some other details that I forgot. Once or twice is one thing, but I think there are five novels with the same basic plot and motivating force. It really makes you wonder if Bellow was just writing a bunch of roman a clef novels (we know that Ravelstein was based around Allan Bloom). One late novel that does escape this pattern is The Dean's December, so I actually like it more than other of his late novels.

[Dmitry]

On 4/5/2005 at 7:18 PM, Guest Chaney said:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/04/05/obituaries/bellow.184.1.jpg

 

April 5, 2005

Author Saul Bellow Dies at 89

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Hebrew was Bellow's first language. His family life was one of violence (his father), of sentiment (both parents) and of humor (everyone). Nothing was left unsaid.

 

 

I'm sure the writer meant Yiddish, not Hebrew. Yiddish was vernacular, Hebrew was reserved for the Scriptures and Shabbat prayers.

I had just re-read SEIZE THE DAY, which I first took in college, thirty-odd years ago. Tommy Wilhelm is a loser, and not a loveable, funny loser, but a dishevelled, self-pitying, angry kind. 
The catharsis of the ending, what do you think Bellow had there? Does Tommy find God, or does he realize that the solution is to kill himself?

Edited May 8, 2023 by Dmitry