In the words of the SwedishNobel Committee, his writing exhibited "the mixture of richpicaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age."[5] His best-known works includeThe Adventures of Augie March,Henderson the Rain King,Herzog,Mr. Sammler's Planet,Seize the Day,Humboldt's Gift, andRavelstein.
Bellow said that of all his characters, Eugene Henderson, ofHenderson the Rain King, was the one most like himself.[6] Bellow grew up as an immigrant from Quebec. AsChristopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle "to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses."[7][8] Bellow's protagonists wrestle with what Albert Corde, the dean inThe Dean's December, called "the big-scale insanities of the 20th century."[page needed] This transcendence of the "unutterably dismal" (a phrase fromDangling Man)[9] is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a "ferocious assimilation of learning" (Hitchens)[citation needed] and an emphasis on nobility.
Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows[10][11] inLachine, Quebec, two years after his parents, Lescha (née Gordin) and Abraham Bellows,[12] emigrated fromSaint Petersburg, Russia.[10][11] He had three elder siblings - sister Zelda (later Jane, born in 1907), brothers Moishe (later Maurice, born in 1908) and Schmuel (later Samuel, born in 1911).[13] Bellow's family wasLithuanian-Jewish;[14][15] his father was born inVilnius. Bellow celebrated his birthday on June 10, although he appears to have been born on July 10, according to records from the Jewish Genealogical Society-Montreal. (In the Jewish community, it was customary to record theHebrew date of birth, which does not always coincide with theGregorian calendar.)[16] Of his family's emigration, Bellow wrote:
The retrospective was strong in me because of my parents. They were both full of the notion that they were falling, falling. They had been prosperous cosmopolitans in Saint Petersburg. My mother could never stop talking about the familydacha, her privileged life, and how all that was now gone. She was working in the kitchen. Cooking, washing, mending ... There had been servants in Russia ... But you could always transpose from your humiliating condition with the help of a sort of embittered irony.[17]
A period of illness from a respiratory infection at age eight both taught him self-reliance (he was a very fit man despite his sedentary occupation) and provided an opportunity to satisfy his hunger for reading: reportedly, he decided to be a writer when he first readHarriet Beecher Stowe'sUncle Tom's Cabin.
When Bellow was nine, his family moved to theHumboldt Park neighborhood on theWest Side of Chicago, the city that formed the backdrop of many of his novels. Bellow's father, Abraham, had become an onion importer. He also worked in a bakery, as a coal delivery man, and as a bootlegger.[11] Bellow's mother, Liza, died when he was 17. She had been deeply religious and wanted her youngest son, Saul, to become a rabbi or a concert violinist. But he rebelled against what he later called the "suffocating orthodoxy" of his religious upbringing, and he began writing at a young age. Bellow's lifelong love for the Torah began at four when he learnedHebrew. Bellow also grew up readingShakespeare and the greatRussian novelists of the 19th century.[11]
Bellow attended theUniversity of Chicago but later transferred toNorthwestern University. He originally wanted to study literature, but he felt the English department was anti-Jewish. Instead, he graduated with honors inanthropology and sociology.[20] It has been suggested Bellow's study of anthropology had an influence on his literary style, and anthropological references pepper his works. He later did graduate work at theUniversity of Wisconsin.
Paraphrasing Bellow's description of his close friendAllan Bloom (seeRavelstein),John Podhoretz has said that both Bellow and Bloom "inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air."[21]
In the 1930s, Bellow was part of the Chicago branch of theFederal Writers' Project, which included such future Chicago literary luminaries asRichard Wright andNelson Algren. Many of the writers were radical: if they were not members of theCommunist Party USA, they were sympathetic to the cause. Bellow was aTrotskyist, but because of the greater numbers ofStalinist-leaning writers, he had to suffer their taunts.[22]
In 1941, Bellow became anaturalized United States citizen, after discovering, on attempting to enlist in the armed forces, that he had immigrated to the United States illegally as a child.[23][24]In 1943,Maxim Lieber was his literary agent.
DuringWorld War II, Bellow joined themerchant marine and during his service he completed his first novel,Dangling Man (1944) about a young Chicago man waiting to be drafted for the war.
In 1948, Bellow was awarded aGuggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to move to Paris, where he began writingThe Adventures of Augie March (1953). Critics have remarked on the resemblance between Bellow'spicaresque novel and the great 17th-century Spanish classicDon Quixote.[25] The book starts with one of American literature's most famous opening paragraphs,[26] and it follows its titular character through a series of careers and encounters, as he lives by his wits and his resolve. Written in a colloquial yet philosophical style,The Adventures of Augie March established Bellow's reputation as a major author.
In 1958, Bellow once again taught at the University of Minnesota. During this time, he and his wife Sasha received psychoanalysis from University of Minnesota Psychology ProfessorPaul Meehl.[27]
Bellow lived in New York City for years, but returned to Chicago in 1962 as a professor at the Committee on Social Thought at theUniversity of Chicago. The committee's goal was to have professors work closely with talented graduate students on a multi-disciplinary approach to learning. His students included the poet,Tom Mandel. Bellow taught on the committee for more than 30 years, alongside his close friend, the philosopherAllan Bloom.
There were also other reasons for Bellow's return to Chicago, where he moved into theHyde Park neighborhood with his third wife, Susan Glassman. Bellow found Chicago vulgar but vital, and more representative of America than New York.[29] He was able to stay in contact with old high school friends and a broad cross-section of society. In a 1982 profile, Bellow's neighborhood was described as a high-crime area in the city's center, and Bellow maintained he had to live in such a place as a writer and "stick to his guns."[30]
Bellow hit the bestseller list in 1964 with his novelHerzog. Bellow was surprised at the commercial success of this cerebral novel about a middle-aged and troubled college professor who writes letters to friends, scholars and the dead, but never sends them. Bellow returned to his exploration of mental instability, and its relationship to genius, in his 1975 novelHumboldt's Gift. Bellow used his late friend and rival, the brilliant but self-destructive poetDelmore Schwartz, as his model for the novel's title character, Von Humboldt Fleisher.[31] Bellow also usedRudolf Steiner's spiritual science, anthroposophy, as a theme in the book, having attended a study group in Chicago. He was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1969.[32]
Propelled by the success ofHumboldt's Gift, Bellow won theNobel Prize in literature in 1976. In the 70-minute address he gave to an audience in Stockholm,Sweden, Bellow called on writers to be beacons for civilization and awaken it from intellectual torpor.[31]
Bellow traveled widely throughout his life, mainly to Europe, which he sometimes visited twice a year.[31] As a young man, Bellow went toMexico City to meetLeon Trotsky, but the expatriate Russian revolutionary was assassinated the day before they were to meet. Bellow's social contacts were wide and varied. He tagged along withRobert F. Kennedy for a magazine profile he never wrote, and was close friends with the authorRalph Ellison. His many friends included the journalistSydney J. Harris and the poetJohn Berryman.[37]
While he read voluminously, Bellow also played the violin and followed sports. Work was a constant for him, but he at times toiled at a plodding pace on his novels, frustrating the publishing company.[31]
His early works earned him the reputation as a major novelist of the 20th century, and by his death he was widely regarded as one of the greatest living novelists.[38] He was the first writer to win three National Book Awards in all award categories.[3] His friend and protegePhilip Roth has said of him, "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."James Wood, in a eulogy of Bellow inThe New Republic, wrote:[39]
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.
Bellow was married five times, with all but his last marriage ending in divorce. Bellow's wives were Anita Goshkin, Alexandra (Sondra) Tschacbasov (daughter of painterNahum Tschacbasov[40]), Susan Glassman,Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea, and Janis Freedman.
His son Greg by his first marriage became apsychotherapist; he publishedSaul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir in 2013, nearly a decade after his father's death.[41] Bellow's son by his second marriage,Adam, published a nonfiction bookIn Praise of Nepotism in 2003. Bellow's son by his third marriage, Daniel,[42] is a potter, a writer and a former journalist.[43] In 1999, when he was 84, Bellow had his fourth child and first daughter, with Freedman.[44]
He was a patron ofWoodlawn Tap, a Hyde Park tavern popular among writers and academics.[45]
Bellow's themes include the disorientation of contemporary society, and the ability of people to overcome their frailty and achieve greatness or awareness. Bellow saw many flaws in modern civilization, and its ability to foster madness, materialism and misleading knowledge.[46] Principal characters in Bellow's fiction have heroic potential, and many times they stand in contrast to the negative forces of society. Often these characters are Jewish and have a sense of alienation or otherness.
Jewish life and identity is a major theme in Bellow's work, although he bristled at being called a "Jewish writer". Bellow's work also shows a great appreciation of America, and a fascination with the uniqueness and vibrancy of the American experience.
Bellow's work abounds in references and quotes fromMarcel Proust andHenry James, among others, but he offsets these high-culture references with jokes.[11] Bellow interspersed autobiographical elements into his fiction, and many of his principal characters were said to bear a resemblance to him.
Martin Amis described Bellow as "The greatest American author ever, in my view".[47]
His sentences seem to weigh more than anyone else's. He is like a force of nature ... He breaks all the rules ... [T]he people in Bellow's fiction are real people, yet the intensity of the gaze that he bathes them in, somehow through the particular, opens up into the universal.[48]
ForLinda Grant, "What Bellow had to tell us in his fiction was that it was worth it, being alive."
His vigour, vitality, humour and passion were always matched by the insistence on thought, not the predigested cliches of the mass media or of those on the left, which had begun to disgust him by the Sixties ... It's easy to be a 'writer of conscience'—anyone can do it if they want to; just choose your cause. Bellow was a writer about conscience and consciousness, forever conflicted by the competing demands of the great cities, the individual's urge to survival against all odds and his equal need for love and some kind of penetrating understanding of what there was of significance beyond all the racket and racketeering.[38]
On the other hand, Bellow's detractors considered his work conventional and old-fashioned, as if the author were trying to revive the 19th-century European novel. In a private letter,Vladimir Nabokov described Bellow as a "miserable mediocrity".[49] Journalist and authorRon Rosenbaum described Bellow'sRavelstein (2000) as the only book that rose above Bellow's failings as an author. Rosenbaum wrote,
My problem with the pre-Ravelstein Bellow is that he all too often strains too hard to yoke together two somewhat contradictory aspects of his being and style. There's the street-wise Windy City wiseguy and then—as if to show off that the wiseguy has Wisdom—there are the undigested chunks of arcane, not entirely impressive, philosophic thought and speculation. Just to make sure you know his novels have intellectual heft. That the world and the flesh in his prose are both figured and transfigured.[50]
Kingsley Amis, father of Martin Amis, was less impressed by Bellow. In 1971, Kingsley suggested that crime writerJohn D. MacDonald "is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow".[51]
But what, then, of the many defects—the longueurs and digressions, the lectures on anthroposophy and religion, the arcane reading lists? What of the characters who don't change or grow but simply bristle onto the page, even the colorful lowlifes pontificating like fevered students in the seminars Bellow taught at the University of Chicago? And what of the punitively caricatured ex-wives drawn from the teeming annals of the novelist's own marital discord?
But Tanenhaus went on to answer his question:
Shortcomings, to be sure. But so what? Nature doesn't owe us perfection. Novelists don't either. Who among us would even recognize perfection if we saw it? In any event, applying critical methods, of whatever sort, seemed futile in the case of an author who, as Randall Jarrell once wrote of Walt Whitman, 'is a world, a waste with, here and there, systems blazing at random out of the darkness'—those systems 'as beautifully and astonishingly organized as the rings and satellites of Saturn.'[52]
V. S. Pritchett praised Bellow, finding his shorter works to be his best. Pritchett called Bellow's novellaSeize the Day a "small gray masterpiece."[11]
As he grew older, Bellow moved decidedly away from leftist politics and became identified withcultural conservatism.[31][53] His opponents includedfeminism, campus activism andpostmodernism.[54] Bellow also thrust himself into the often contentious realm of Jewish and African-American relations.[55] Bellow was critical ofmulticulturalism and according toAlfred Kazin once said: "Who is theTolstoy of theZulus? TheProust of thePapuans? I'd be glad to read him."[56][57] Bellow distanced himself somewhat from these remarks, which he characterized as "off the cuff obviously and pedantic certainly." He, however, stood by his criticism of multiculturalism, writing:
In any reasonably open society, the absurdity of a petty thought-police campaign provoked by the inane magnification of "discriminatory" remarks about the Papuans and the Zulus would be laughed at. To be serious in this fanatical style is a sort of Stalinism – the Stalinist seriousness and fidelity to the party line that senior citizens like me remember all too well.[58]
Despite his identification with Chicago, he kept aloof from some of that city's more conventional writers. In a 2006 interview withStop Smiling magazine,Studs Terkel said of Bellow: "I didn't know him too well. We disagreed on a number of things politically. In the protests in the beginning ofNorman Mailer'sArmies of the Night, when Mailer,Robert Lowell andPaul Goodman were marching to protest theVietnam 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 aStalinist. But otherwise, we were friendly. He was a brilliant writer, of course. I loveSeize the Day."
Attempts to name a street after Bellow in his Hyde Park neighborhood were halted by a local alderman,Toni Preckwinkle, on the grounds that Bellow had made remarks about the neighborhood's inhabitants that they considered racist.[55] A one-block stretch of West Augusta Boulevard inHumboldt Park was named Saul Bellow Way in his honor instead.[59]
Bellow was a supporter ofU.S. English, an organization formed in the early 1980s byJohn Tanton and former SenatorS. I. Hayakawa, that supports making English the official language of the United States, but ended his association with the group in 1988.[60]
^"Saul BELLOW, son of Abraham BELLOWS of Vilna".Jewish Genealogical Society-Montreal. RetrievedNovember 11, 2022.Date of birth was 10 June per his wife, Janis Bellow, in her Preface to Bellow's Collected Stories; wouldn't she know his birthdate?.
^abLeader, Zachary (2015).The Life of Saul Bellow: to fame and fortune, 1915–1964. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. p. 64.ISBN978-0-307-26883-9.OCLC880756047.
^The New York Times obituary, April 6, 2005. "...his birthdate is listed as either June or July 10, 1915, though his lawyer, Mr. Pozen, said yesterday that Mr. Bellow customarily celebrated in June. (Immigrant Jews at that time tended to be careless about the Christian calendar, and the records are inconclusive.)"
^Saul Bellow,It All Adds Up, first published 1994, Penguin edition 2007, pp. 295–96.
^The New York Times obituary, April 6, 2005. "He had hoped to study literature but was put off by what he saw as the tweedy anti-Semitism of the English department, and graduated in 1937 with honors in anthropology and sociology, subjects that were later to instill his novels."
^Menand, Louis (May 11, 2015)."Young Saul".The New Yorker. New York, NY. RetrievedOctober 18, 2016.
^Bellow, Saul (2010).Saul Bellow: Letters. redactor Ben Taylor. New York: Viking.ISBN9781101445327. RetrievedJuly 12, 2014.... Puerto Rico, where he was spending the spring term of 1961.
^The New York Times Book Review, December 13, 1981
^"National Book Awards – 1965". NBF. Retrieved March 3, 2012. (With acceptance speech by Bellow and essay by Salvatore Scibona from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
^"National Book Awards – 1971". NBF. Retrieved March 3, 2012. (With essay by Craig Morgan Teicher from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
Saul Bellow and American Transcendentalism, M.A. Quayum (2004)
"Even Later" and "The American Eagle" inMartin Amis,The War Against Cliché (2001) are celebratory. The latter essay is also found in theEveryman's Library edition ofAugie March.
'Saul Bellow's comic style':James Wood inThe Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, 2004.ISBN0-224-06450-9.
The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo, Stephanie Halldorson (2007)
"Saul Bellow" a song, written bySufjan Stevens onThe Avalanche, which is composed of outtakes and other recordings from his concept albumIllinois
The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964 (2015), and The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965–2005 (2018),Zachary Leader
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