Saul Bellow

Canadian-American writer

• Born: June 10, 1915
• Birthplace: Lachine, Quebec, Canada
• Died: April 5, 2005
• Place of death: Brookline, Massachusetts

In his novels and numerous short stories and articles over several decades, Bellow, as an American writer, achieved international recognition signified only in part by his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976.

Early Life

Saul Bellow (sawl BEH-loh) was born in Lachine, Canada, the fourth child of religious Jewish parents who had emigrated to Canada two years earlier from Russia. He grew up speaking English, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew. While recovering from a serious respiratory illness at age eight, he acquired a profound love of reading and a sense of self-reliance. A year later, he moved with his family to Chicago, where he spent all of his spare hours in the public libraries. By the time he entered Tuley High School, he had already made his first efforts at writing fiction. His mother’s death when he was seventeen was a lasting emotional shock to him.

After graduation from high school in 1933, he enrolled in the University of Chicago, transferring two years later to Northwestern University, where he founded a socialist club and received, in 1937, a bachelor’s degree with honors in anthropology and sociology. Thoroughly engaged in the leftist intellectual ferment of the times, Bellow considered himself a follower of the Soviet theorist Leon Trotsky; he even traveled to Mexico City to meet Trotsky in exile but arrived just after Trotsky was assassinated.

Bellow entered graduate school at the University of Wisconsin but soon dropped out. On December 31, 1937, he married Anita Goshkin, a social worker; they would have one child, Gregory, born some years later. Bellow had continued to write since high school, publishing his first story in 1941. He also wrote biographies of American authors for the Works Progress Administration Writers Project and participated in Mortimer Adler’s “Great Books” program for the Encyclopœdia Britannica. He did some teaching as well. While serving in the merchant marine during World War II, he wrote his first novel, Dangling Man . It was published in 1944, and in 1947 his second, The Victim, followed. The novels had a mixed critical reception but were highly regarded by antiestablishment intellectuals, especially for their existentialist themes and apparent European influences, notably that of Fyodor Dostoevski.

A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948, allowing him to begin work on his next novel, launched young Bellow on his brilliant career a career more successful, perhaps, than that of any other contemporary American writer. Yet as often happens with successful people, Bellow’s private life was turbulent: Soon his marriage to Anita failed, and following an unfriendly divorce, he remarried a pattern he would repeat four times. His dark and beautiful wives, with all of their faults and virtues, would find their way into his novels, as would Bellow himself. The characters representing the author were often larger and stronger than Bellow but not necessarily more handsome. Bellow had deep-set brown eyes, a “theatrically chiseled” nose, and hair that turned to silver somewhat prematurely. He looked physically slight and boyish he was about five feet, nine inches tall, weighing perhaps 150 pounds in his younger years but he also had an athletic quality in his build, with a very sturdy chest. Altogether, these physical and psychological aspects of Bellow’s life offered an unexpected parallel to those of Ernest Hemingway, a writer whose influence on Bellow was not great.

Life’s Work

Bellow’s first important success was The Adventures of Augie March , published in 1953 a partly autobiographical bildungsroman, modeled in part on its picaresque predecessor, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). This exuberant, stylistically innovative novel was both a best seller and a critical success, and after thirty-five years remains a favorite among Bellow’s extremely broad and varied readership. For this work, he won the National Book Award for Fiction, the first of three such awards he received. In 1955, he received a second Guggenheim Fellowship, and the following year he married Alexandra Tschacbasov; they had one child, Adam.

Bellow’s novella, Seize the Day , was published in 1956, together with three stories and a one-act play. The style of Seize the Day is beautifully sparse and tight (in marked contrast to the sprawling energy of The Adventures of Augie March); Bellow delineates the defeat of middle-aged Tommy Wilhelm, jobless, penniless, his marriage a failure. The concluding paragraphs are as famous as any in contemporary literature. Tommy chances into a funeral parlor, stands by the coffin of a stranger, and begins to weep. “Soon he was past words, past reason, coherence. He could not stop. The source of all tears had suddenly sprung open within him. . . .” The controlled emotional power of this novella places it in contrast to most of Bellow’s other works, which tend to be dominated by intellectual argument.

Bellow himself has said his own favorite among his writings is Henderson the Rain King , published in 1959. It is a deliberately composed “quest romance” that takes the protagonist (Bellow’s first who was not Jewish) to Africa, a place that Bellow had not yet visited. The gigantic, blustering, crazed, and comic Henderson was not universally popular among reviewers and critics, but the novel nevertheless testifies to Bellow’s remarkable creative diversity.

After a stay of ten years in the were chosen area, Bellow returned permanently to Chicago. Having divorced Alexandra, he married Susan Glassman in December of 1961; their son, Daniel, was born in 1963. From 1960 to 1962 Bellow co-edited the literary magazine The Noble Savage, and in 1962 he joined the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His novel Herzog , a best seller like all of his books from The Adventures of Augie March onward, was published in 1964; for it, he won four major prizes, including the National Book Award for Fiction for the second time. More than one critic found this novel “brilliant” its almost pure realism was the mode in which Bellow worked best.

In 1968 appeared Mosby’s Memoirs, and Other Stories, the title work proving that Bellow is a master of the realistic short story as well. In that year, Bellow was awarded in France the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. By this time, Bellow was separated from Susan; great bitterness would remain between them, as alimony payments would be contested following their divorce, culminating in an open fight in court in 1977. During this same period (from the mid-1960’s), Bellow lost the favor of most leftist American intellectuals following his attendance at the same White House dinner in 1965 that Robert Lowell had refused to attend in political protest against United States policy in Vietnam. Bellow’s conservatism consisted chiefly in not accepting the ideas and manners of the radicals, but since that time, he has nevertheless come to be identified by many as an establishment figure.

Although Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) was not enthusiastically received by reviewers, it won for its author a third National Book Award for Fiction. The protagonist, an old Polish Jew who is trying to cope with life in a huge metropolis, effectively criticizes the insanity of American culture from the point of view of rational conservatism. What is of most interest here, perhaps, is the dissimilarity of this novel to Bellow’s other works.

In Humboldt’s Gift (1975), Charles Citrine, the protagonist, reminisces about his friend Humboldt, who is based on the poets John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz, whom Bellow had known in his younger years. In this novel, the plot is casual, the style uneven, sometimes careless, but the attention to detail, one of Bellow’s strongest points, is superb. The same criticism applies to The Dean’s December (1982), though now the protagonist, Albert Corde, dramatizes through his own experience the contrast between Eastern (Romanian) communism and Western (American) capitalism. The focus is chiefly on their faults, with those of communism seeming to be most intractable. Bellow’s conclusion here is similar to certain implications in his nonfiction work To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976), in which he suggests that the struggle between Jew and Arab could somehow be dealt with in an orderly way if only each side did not continually act irrationally, against its own interests.

In 1974, he married Alexandra Tulcea, a professor of mathematics at Northwestern University. It seems very likely that Albert Corde’s wife, Minna, a professor of astronomy, born in Romania, was based on this new woman in Bellow’s life. The last scene in The Dean’s December places husband and wife together so as to show their mutual love, respect, and concern; perhaps this scene reflects a certain happiness in marriage that Bellow, now in the fullness of his career, had not earlier known.

In 1976, Bellow received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His seventy-minute address at the awards ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, urged writers worldwide to awaken civilization from a deadening intellectual indolence. His later writing sought to do just that, and although gradually identified with neoconservatives, he showed little interest in adhering to a single political philosophy as he addressed such topics as feminism, post-modernism, Jewish-African American relations, and crime among the impoverished. A collection of short stories, Him with His Foot in His Mouth, appeared in 1984, followed by the novel More Die of Heartbreak . Its protagonist, Kenneth Trachtenberg, is an intellectual distraught by his inability to reconcile his philosophical leanings with his past and mortality. The Bellarosa Connection (1989) is a dialogue in the Fonstein family about the Holocaust, and A Theft , published the same year, concerns a woman raised in a traditional midwestern religious environment who must cope with the modern business world as a publishing company executive and who despairs of achieving romantic love. The Actual (1997) tells of an art lover, Harry Trellman, who is reunited with his adolescent ideal woman (his “actual”) late in life, and their elderly love affair. Bellow’s last novel, Ravelstein (2000), considered by many critics to be his finest, is based in part on his friend and colleague at the Committee on Social Thought, Allan Bloom. The story follows the friendship of two university professors and its complications from erotic relations into their old age. His collection of nonfiction, It All Adds Up (1994), emphasizes the importance of literature to society.

During his career, Bellow taught at the University of Minnesota, New York University, Princeton University, the University of Puerto Rico, Bard College, and Boston University in addition to the University of Chicago. In 1989 he married Janis Freeman, with whom he had a daughter, Naomi, in 1999. They moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, from Chicago in 1993, because, he said, he was tired of watching old friends there die. Bellow himself died in Brookline on April 5, 2005. He is buried in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Significance

Bellow’s impact on American culture came through his novels, which reflect his sense of himself and his relationship to his society. Bellow partly represents that older sense of America as a haven for European émigrés first as the son of Russian-Jewish émigrés to Canada, then as a French-Canadian himself, newly arrived in Chicago. He tells of the pain of adjustment in The Adventures of Augie March. The pain of being Jewish in a nation that does not really love Jews is a frequent theme in his work, although, ultimately, Bellow accepts casual assimilation as a suitable choice for himself. In this respect, he could be said to symbolize the diversity of the United States without testifying to a false harmony.

Bellow saw himself as an American writer who happened to be Jewish, not as a Jewish writer though he identified profoundly with Jews, including Israeli Jews. Yet Bellow was not a practicing or religious Jew. He sought religious experience primarily within the realm of ideas. His first loyalty was that of the intellectual to the world of ideas, and it was this special world that is chiefly dramatized in his novels. In so doing, Bellow had an important impact on Americans. In a nation where intellectual novels are uncommon, Bellow made a career writing such works, almost all of them best sellers. He helped Americans examine their role as individuals in relation to society often in opposition to it and as individuals in conflict with themselves.

Bellow seldom spoke of patriotism but rather tended to relegate “society” to a sort of naturalistic background. Bellow’s vision was clear and honest: His characters are sensitive, aware, and vital. His perceptions were sufficiently compelling that even many of those who have ideologically “rejected” him still read his books faithfully. He always opened up new worlds. Thus he compelled citizens of the whole world, not only Americans, to read his works. His international recognition, in turn, made his impact on Americans all the greater, offering them some hope of attaining the greater sophistication that he felt that they needed. In fact, he is often credited with introducing intellectual modernity into American literature.

Bibliography

Atlas, James. Bellow: A Biography. New York: Random House, 2000. Thorough and balanced biography of the author, placing the events of his life in a larger historical context.

Braham, Jeanne. A Sort of Columbus: The American Voyages of Saul Bellow’s Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Although biography appears only incidentally, this monograph is of interest for its emphasis on the strictly American themes in Bellow’s work.

Cronin, Gloria L. A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in the Novels of Saul Bellow. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Cronin presents a feminist appreciation of Bellow’s work by viewing his texts as a self-ironical search for the “absent mother, lover, sister, female friend, female psyche, and anima” in the lives of his male protagonists.

Fuchs, Daniel. Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984. Biographical references occur only incidentally in the text, but two chapters are of special interest: “Bellow and the Modern Tradition” and “Bellow and the Example of Dostoevsky.” There is also a good final chapter on The Dean’s December.

Harris, Mark. Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. Anecdotal yet well-documented account of Harris’s dealings with Bellow in the 1960’s. Shows how certain characters in the novels are based on Bellow and certain women in Bellow’s life. Harris admires the writer very much, but not the man.

Turow, Scott. “Missing Bellow.” The Atlantic, December, 2005. In this profile of Bellow, Turow, himself a novelist, describes his admiration for and personal relationship with Bellow.

Wasserman, Harriet. Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow. New York: Fromm International, 1997. In this memoir, Wasserman, Bellow’s literary agent for twenty-five years, presents a close friend’s view of Bellow, his literary habits, and his interests.

Wilson, Jonathan. On Bellow’s Planet: Readings from the Dark Side. London: Associated University Presses, 1985. Original, perceptive discussion of nine of Bellow’s novels. Biographical details are given only casually. Good selected bibliography.