Saul Bellow

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Bellow as depicted in his Nobel diploma.

Saul Bellow (June 11, 1915 – April 5, 2005), was a writer who achieved world wide acclaim and recognition throughout his career. His awards and prizes are numerous, and his efforts in the written word are astounding. Although he was born in Canadian, his nationality was American, but his writings traverse gender, race, and country. His novels echo the ideas of isolation, spiritual dissociation, and the importance of the human awakening. He remains one of the forerunners in shedding a positive light on writings about Jewish-American heritage, and his characters are humorous, charming, a bit disillusioned, and slightly neurotic. Thus his novels survive the passing of years as the universal themes continue to be applicable. Unpopular at the time, Bellow cherished Judeo-Christian religious values and he scorned such studies as absurdism and nihilism. He thought nothing was as important as simple, ordinary lives being lived as best the person could live.

Saul Bellow's best known work is The Adventures of Augie March, however, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 for Humboldt's Gift.

"I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent." (from The Adventures of Augie March, 1953)

Early life

Solomon (nicknamed 'Sollie') Bellows was born in Lachine, Quebec (now part of Montreal), in 1915. Bellows has customarily celebrated his birthday on June 10, but he was always a little doubtful of the actual date because his original birth certificate was burned when a fire destroyed Lachine's City Hall. Bellow's parents were both immigrants from St. Petersburg, Russia and had traveled to Canada in 1913. Bellow's father had imported Turkish figs and Egyptian onions while in Russia, but life proved to be very difficult in Canada. Thus Bellow's father resorted to bootlegging and other activities. The small family lived in the most impoverished section of the city of Montreal with other immigrant families from Poland, Greece, Italy, and Russia.

In 1924, Bellow's father was beaten almost to death because of his dealings with questionable people. Thus the family decided it was best to leave Montreal and move to America. They moved south, settling in an equally impoverished region in the Chicago slums. Saul, already nine years old, began school for the first time. His childhood, far from innocent and serene, provided Bellow with so much to think about, he formed early ideas about society, America, and the world. These ideas provide the backdrop to many of his novels.

Although Bellow did not receive the most academic of educations as a young man, he was a highly intelligent person. His mother, Lescha (Liza) was adamant that Bellow learn Hebrew and Yiddish, as well as English. She was very religious and the first book Saul remembers reading was the Bible. His desire to read was fed in his youth when he faced many different illnesses that kept him indoors, one particular bout changed his life. Bellow decided that once he recovered, he would work harder at not becoming sick again. Although he was bookish by nature, he worked hard at his physical fitness and lived for optimum health. Along with the Bible, he loved other religious texts and they comforted him during many hard times. Bellow was very close to his mother, and when she died suddenly, he was emotionally distraught for many months. Liza Bellow died when Saul was only 17, and about this event he said, "My life was never the same after my mother died."

In 1933, Saul Bellow entered the University of Chicago. One of his fellow classmates, John Podhoretz said that Bellow and his good friend, Allan Bloom "inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breath air." Early on in his studies at Chicago, he found that he was accepted to Northwestern University. Bellow immediately transfered schools and began in depth studies in anthropology and sociology, graduating in 1937. Although his emphasis was not Literature, Bellow took many writing and English classes. During these studies, the English-department chairman told Bellow that "Now Jew could really grasp the tradition of English literature." And thus, he warned Bellow not to waste his time on Literature classes. Many, including the famous Professor Melville J. Herskovits, wanted Bellow to become a concert pianist. But, Bellow knew his first love, it was literature. He knew from a young age that he wanted to be a writer, during his youth when he was sick and he would laying bed ready Uncle Tom's Cabin and other great American novels, he just knew it was his destiny. While recounting these events of his education, Bellow said that his Jewish heritage is "a gift, a piece of good fortune with which one does not quarrel," but he also insisted that he was not a "Jewish" writer but an American writer who happens to be a Jew.

Career

After completion of his degree at Northwestern, Bellow went on immediately to his postgraduate studies at Wisconsin University. However, it was during his first Christmas break at Wisconsin that he fell in love and got married, all very impetuously. Because of his whirlwind romance, Bellow left his studies at the university and decided that since her now had a family to support, he would work immediately on becoming a writer. When met with censure from his acquaintances, he often them that his writing was too stylistic to pursue anything in a scientific field.

Beginning a career as a writer was s low and difficult. It took several years before Saul Bellow had a novel published, and during this time he wrote book reviews for ten dollars apiece. He taught school at Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers' College, Chicago,l from 1938-1942. After that he worked as an editor for the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1943 to 1944. These years were hard year for America, after the shock of Pearl Harbor, Bellow tried to enlist in the Army, but was rejected because he suffered from a hernia. After a few months of healing, he went to enlist again and served as a US Merchant Marine during the last year of World War II. It was while Bellow was serving in the Merchant Marines that he wrote his first full novel, Dangling Man. The book dealt directly with emotions and struggles that Bellow saw around him in the various faces of the soldiers he served with, and no doubt, which existed in his own psyche. The main character in Dangling Man struggled with intellectual and spiritual questions while he waited to be drafted into the war. Bellow claims that the novel was loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground (1864).

When his service ended, he returned to teaching, although his main love was writing, he was still not having much success getting anything published. This would all change. As he traveled to various posts at the Universities of Minnesota, New York, Princeton, and Puerto Rico, Bellow constantly worked on his own writing. Thus, in 1947, he followed his first novel with The Victim, set in New York city, it was a story based on the paranoia of doppelganger. The book more deeply addressed the issue of man's fate. Does man have a right to choose his fate, or is it chosen for him? This was a theme that has coursed through many of Bellows stories. After The Victim, Bellow changed the settings of his future stories to a city he called home, a city that is typically associated with Saul Bellow, that city was Chicago. In the New York Times, July 6, 1980, Bellow was quoted as saying, "The people of Chicago are very proud of their wickedness. This is good old vulgar politics, despite the pretensions."

Saul Bellow's most famous work, The Adventures of Augie March has topped many peoples list as one of the all time greatest books in history. It was this novel that Bellow freed himself. He let go of previous ideals and restrictions he had placed upon himself in his earlier writings. The novel deals with the lives of two brothers carried on different paths after similar childhoods. The brothers, Augie and Simon were raised in a fatherless household in the slums of Chicago. Though the novel is comedic in parts, and deftly entertaining, it also portrays Bellow's childhood world in tragic, specific detail. This would be the novel that immortalized Chicago in a specific time. However, Bellow began the book while living in Paris (1953) and finished it up while traveling to other places. He says that, "not a single word of the book was composed in Chicago."

With these three early novels, Saul Bellow created a name for himself. His reputation grew across the country and he was soon regarded as one of the foremost novelists of the 20th century. He is comparable to Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. He became the first novelist to be awarded the National Book Award three times. Upon his death and the completion of his career, many people throughout the western world regarded him as the greatest living novelist in English. Although comparable with the great authors of his time, he differed greatly in style and subject matter. Bellow fiercely rejected Hemingway's notorious 'tough guy' model of American fiction. Instead he focused on illustrating various cultures and traditions, with emphasis on his Russian-Jewish heritage, the deep ideas of Nietzsche, Oedipal conflicts, and popular cultures of various places. Another characteristic that Bellow relied heavily was the usage of first-person narrator. He explored the relationship of author-character-narrator and explained his concept of his books, "No writer can take it for granted that the views of his characters will not be attributed to him personally," he once said. "It is generally assumed, moreover, that all the events and ideas of a novel are based on the life experiences and the opinions of the novelist himself." (Bellow in The New York Times, March 10, 1994).

Saul Bellow is well-known for inspiring and guiding writers such as Philip Roth. Roth, who worked closely with Bellow for several years, said, "The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists—William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century." To add to this praise, James Wood, in his eulogy of Bellow in The New Republic, wrote:

I judged all modern prose by his. Unfair, certainly, because he made even the fleet-footed—the Updikes, the DeLillos, the Roths—seem like monopodes. Yet what else could I do? I discovered Saul Bellow's prose in my late teens, and henceforth, the relationship had the quality of a love affair about which one could not keep silent. Over the last week, much has been said about Bellow's prose, and most of the praise—perhaps because it has been overwhelmingly by men—has tended toward the robust: We hear about Bellow's mixing of high and low registers, his Melvillean cadences jostling the jivey Yiddish rhythms, the great teeming democracy of the big novels, the crooks and frauds and intellectuals who loudly people the brilliant sensorium of the fiction. All of this is true enough; John Cheever, in his journals, lamented that, alongside Bellow's fiction, his stories seemed like mere suburban splinters. Ian McEwan wisely suggested last week that British writers and critics may have been attracted to Bellow precisely because he kept alive a Dickensian amplitude now lacking in the English novel. [...] But nobody mentioned the beauty of this writing, its music, its high lyricism, its firm but luxurious pleasure in language itself. [...] [I]n truth, I could not thank him enough when he was alive, and I cannot now.

During the 1960's, Bellow's major work was Herzog, it focuses on the life of a middle-aged Jewish intellectual, who, like Bellow's other characters, is dissatisfied with where his life has taken him. The main character, Moses E. Herzog, is contemplating ending his life. He writes letters to various friends and philosophers, including is ex-wife Madeleine, Heidegger and Neitzche. After an entire novel composed of letters, Bellow ends the work, "At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word." Ian McEwan, a prestigious British writer has long considered Herzog to be the most important post-war American novel.

In 1975, Bellow won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature with his novel, Humboldt's Gift. The protagonist, Charlie Citrine, is a wealthy writer, very successful to the world, but deep inside he fears that he has failed. Charles Simic responded to Bellow's work in this way, "Bellow, too, is convinced that to have a conscience is, after a certain age, to live permanently in an epistemological hell. The reason his and Dostoevsky's heroes are incapable of ever arriving at any closure is that they love their own suffering above everything else. They refuse to exchange their inner torment for the peace of mind that comes with bourgeois propriety or some kind of religious belief. In fact, they see their suffering as perhaps the last outpost of the heroic in our day and age." (New York Review of Books, May 31, 2001)

Saul Bellow finished up his career as he had begun it, by teaching. Taking posts at various universities like New York University, Princeton, the University of Chicago, Bard College and Boston University. While teaching at Boston, he had the opportunity to coteach a class with James Wood ('modestly absenting himself' when it was time to discuss Seize the Day). His appointment at Boston was his last and he died on April 5, 2005, at age 89. He is buried at the Jewish cemetery Shir he harim of Brattleboro, Vermont.

During his life, Saul Bellow married five times. He had three sons from his first four marriages and in 1989 he married Janis Freedman. The couple had one daughter, Naomi, born in 1999.

Criticism

Many critics to Bellow's writings argued that his work was too conventional and old-fashioned for the modern world. The believed that Bellow desired to revive the 19th century European novel, instead of contemporary literature. Many thought his characters too inconceivable, that were "larger than life" and were simply the mouthpieces used by Bellow to spout his philosophical viesw and obsessions.

When Saul Bellow visited Israel in 1975, it sparked many ideas and feelings in the author. He wrote an account of this trip, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account. The admired intellect, Noam Chomsky, heavily critisized Bellow's work in his 1983 book Fateful Triangle: the United States, Israel & the Palestinians. Bellow, Chomsky wrote, "sees an Israel where ‘almost everyone is reasonable and tolerant, and rancor against the Arabs is rare,’ where the people ‘think so hard, and so much’ as they ‘farm a barren land, industrialize it, build cities, make a society, do research, philosophize, write books, sustain a great moral tradition, and finally create an army of tough fighters.’ In contrast, he met with more censure from the Palestinian people, when he praised Joan Peters's controversial book, From Time Immemorial, which challenged the conventional mythology of the Palestinian people.

Perhaps his most controversial moment came with the publication of his 13th novel, Ravelstein. The story was of Abe Ravelstein, a university professor and intellect, as well as a closet homosexual who dies of an AIDS-related disease. It was no secret that Ravelstein's character was based on Bellow's close friend and colleague (at the University of Chicago), Allan Bloom. When Bloom passed away in 1992, the officially announced cause of death was liver failure. But the novel sparked suspicion of a real-life drama. Bellow responded, "This is a problem that writers of fiction always have to face in this country. People are literal minded, and they say, 'Is it true? If it is true, is it factually accurate? If it isn't factually accurate, why isn't it factually accurate?' Then you tie yourself into knots, because writing a novel in some ways resembles writing a biography, but it really isn't. It is full of invention." (Bellow in Time, May 8, 2000)

In an interview in the March 7, 1988 New Yorker, Bellow sparked a controversy when he asked, concerning multiculturalism, "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?" This nonchalant attitude towards the blacks met with public scorn. Many thought the comment was an unheralded criticism against non-Western literature. Bellow at first claimed to have been misquoted and decided to write his side of the story in and publish it in the New York Times, he said, "The scandal is entirely journalistic in origin ...I may be one of the few people who have read a Papuan novel... Always foolishly trying to explain and edify allcomers, I was speaking of the distinction between literate and preliterate societies. For I was once an anthropology student, you see."

In his later years, Bellow became known for his curmudgeonly behaviour and his honest, curt responses. For example, he once said, "California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that."

Even though Bellow identified deeply with the city of Chicago, he often kept his distance from the city's conventional writers. Studs Terkel in a 2006 interview with Stop Smiling magazine said of Bellow: "I didn't know him too well. We disagreed on a number of things politically. In the protests in the beginning of Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, when Mailer, Robert Lowell and Paul Goodman were marching to protest the Vietnam War, Bellow was invited to a sort of counter-gathering. He said, 'Of course I'll attend'. But he made a big thing of it. Instead of just saying OK, he was proud of it. So I wrote him a letter and he didn't like it. He wrote me a letter back. He called me a Stalinist. But otherwise, we were friendly. He was a brilliant writer, of course. I love Seize the Day."

Quotations

"I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterises prayer too, and the eye of the storm."

"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep."

"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."

"Who is the Proust of the Papuans, the Tolstoy of the Zulus?"

Bibliography

Fiction

• Dangling Man (1944)
• The Victim (1947)
• The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
• Seize the Day (1956)
• Henderson the Rain King (1959)
• Herzog (novel)|Herzog (1964)
• Mosby's Memoirs (short stories also available in Collected Stories) (1968)
• Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970)
• Humboldt's Gift (1975), won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize
• The Dean's December (1982)
• Him with His Foot in His Mouth (short stories also available in Collected Stories) (1984)
• More Die of Heartbreak(1987)
• A Theft (1989)
• The Bellarosa Connection (1989)
• Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales (collecting the eponymous short story, A Theft and The Bellarosa Connection) (1991)
• The Actual (book)|The Actual (1997)
• Ravelstein (2000)
• Collected Stories (Bellow)|Collected Stories (2001)

Essays

• To Jerusalem and Back (1976)
• It All Adds Up (1994)

Editorialship

• News from the Republic of Letters (from 1997)
• Editors (Publisher's information)
• ANON
• The Noble Savage

On Bellow

• Saul Bellow, Tony Tanner (1965) (see also his City of Words [1971])
• Saul Bellow, Malcolm Bradbury (1982)
• Saul Bellow: Modern Critical Views, Harold Bloom (Ed.) (1986)
• Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow, Harriet Wasserman (1997)
• Bellow: A Biography, James Atlas (2000)
• 'Even Later' and 'The American Eagle' in Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché (2001) are celebratory. The latter essay is also found in the Everyman's Library edition of Augie March.
• 'Saul Bellow's comic style': James Wood, The Irresponsible Self (2004).(Online extract)

In music

• The 2006 album The Avalanche by Sufjan Stevens includes a tribute song, titled "Saul Bellow".

External links

• Nobel site with two speeches (one of which is an audio recording) & longer biography
• Annotated Bibliography of Criticism by the Saul Bellow Society
• JM Coetzee on the early novels
• Slate's assortment of other writers' takes on Bellow, mostly eulogistic
• Joyce Carol Oates on Saul Bellow
• Saul Bellow 'Bookweb' on literary website The Ledge, with suggestions for further reading.

Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates (1976-2000)

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