SAUL BELLOW
(1915 – 2005)
Since an early moment in the nineteenth century the writer has felt the obligation not to repeat what has been done before, and to strike some peculiar note of modernity.
Modern fiction has taken it upon itself to show experience as ever-new and ever-valuable. The very form of fiction is that of experience itself. Everything is to be viewed as though for the first time. The representation of things is imperative, for the things of a modern man’s life are important. They are important because man’s career on this earth is held to be important. Literature has been committed to the importance of this assertion for a long time.
– Quoted in English Teaching Forum, July-August 1966, p. 21
BIOGRAPHY
He was born Solomon Bellows (nicknamed “Sollie”) in Lachine, Quebec (now part of Montreal), shortly after his parents had emigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia. It is unclear if Bellows (who later dropped the ‘s’ from his last name) was born in June or July of 1915, because at the time of his birth, immigrant Jews tended to be careless about the Christian calendar (Bellow celebrated his birthday in June). A period of illness from a respiratory infection at age 8 both taught him self-reliance (he was a very fit man despite his bookishness) and provided an opportunity to satisfy Bellow’s hunger for reading: reportedly he decided to be a writer when he first read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Bellow grew up in Chicago after his parents moved from Canada to the United States. Unlike most leading American writers, he not only went to college but did graduate work. In that way he represents the new, more formally-educated generation of American writers. He is an intellectual, unusually thoughtful and widely read. In 1976 Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was a professor at the University of Chicago but his post allowed him, out of respect for his reputation as an author, to do whatever teaching he liked. Correspondingly, his novel, Herzog, is about a professor, though a less fortunate one than Bellow.
In The Adventures of Augie March, the professor-hero has not yet emerged. Augie is a Chicago boy, brought up poor and fatherless, educated chiefly on the streets but also at home, which is a place both of love and discipline. The novel, episode by episode, incident by incident, shows Augie during the Depression, breaking away from his home and making his own way. He does many different jobs and gets something of an education from the textbooks that he steals to sell. He encounters many kinds of men – crooked, honest, rich, and poor. He meets several girls who fall in love with him as he travels through the United States, into Mexico, and on to Europe.
But whatever he does, wherever he goes, he remains his own person. People like him, and want to help him and form lasting relationships with him. A rich couple, for instance, wishes to adopt him even though he is already a young man. A rich girl wants to keep him as a lover. They do not succeed, nor does anyone else. He refuses to be bound.
SELECTION I
In the excerpt from Augie reprinted below, we see a meeting between him and his older, highly successful brother Simon. Augie has broken up with his rich mistress of several months and has just come back from Mexico, where he and his mistress have been living. Simon, married into a wealthy family, is arrogant with success. He buys and sells, bullies and pushes. Yet Augie makes him uneasy. Augie has nothing, but he is free. The two brothers have not met for a long time, and the scene shows how they respond to seeing one another again.
The account of the meeting is given in the direct, personal, and vital style which Bellow perfected in Augie. It seems almost a speaking style, pungent and vital. Though crammed with particulars, with details of description, the story moves briskly.
The Adventures of Augie March
Chapter 21
Simon did want to see me. As soon as he heard my voice over the phone he said, “Augie! Where are you? Stay put. I’ll come and pick you up right away.”
I was calling from a booth near my new place, which wasn’t far from the old, on the South Side. He lived in the vicinity and was there within a few minutes in his black Cadillac, this beautiful enamel shell coming so softly to the curb, inside like jewelry. He beckoned and I got in. “I have to go right back,” he said. “I left without a shirt; I just put on this coat and hat. Well, let’s look at you.”
He said this, but actually didn’t much look, despite his rush to get down. Of course he was driving, but just the touch of manicured hands on the valuable stones on the wheel – something like jade – did the trick. The thing pretty well ran itself. I thought he was sorry about the fight we had had over Lucy and Mimi. I wasn’t angry any more but was looking ahead. Simon was heftier than before. The light raglan with its chestnut buttons came open on his hard bare belly. Also his face was larger, and rude, autocratic. The fat of it was not clear, as it is in some faces. Mrs. Klein, Jimmy’s mother, had had a fat face, almost oriental, but there the fat illuminated something. However, I found out that I couldn’t be critical of Simon when I saw him after a long interval. No matter what he had done or what he was up to now, the instant I saw him I loved him again. I couldn’t help it. It came over me. I wanted to be brothers again. And why did he come running for me if he didn’t want the same?
Well, now he wanted to know how rugged things had been for me, and I didn’t have any intention of telling him. What was I up to in Mexico?
“I was in love with a girl.”
“You were, uh? And what else?”
I didn’t say anything about the bird or my failures and lessons. Maybe I should have. He criticized me anyway in his mind for my randomness and sentiment. So what did I stand to lose by telling him the facts? However, something haughty kept me. That was how brief the first warmth of love turned out to be. So he was judging me – what of it? Let him. Wasn’t I busted down, creased, head-damaged, missing teeth, disappointed, and so forth? And couldn’t I have said, “Well, all right, Simon, here I am.” No, what I told him was that I had gone down to Mexico to work out something important.
Then he started to talk about himself.
He had built up his business and sold it at a whopping profit. Since he didn’t want to have to do with the Magnuses he had gone into other kinds of business and he was very lucky. He said, “I certainly do have the gold touch. After all, I did start in the Depression when everything was supposed to be over and done with.” Then he described how he had bought an old hospital building at auction and turned it into a tenement. Inside of six months he had cleared fifty thousand bucks on this, and then had organized a management company and run the place for the new owners. He had a large interest in a Spanish cobalt mine now. They sold the stuff in Turkey, or some place in the Middle East. He also had a potato-chip concession in several railroad stations. In fact, Einhorn himself couldn’t have dreamed up such deals, much less have made them pay off. “How much do you think I’m worth now?”
“A hundred grand?”
He smiled. “Let yourself go a little,” he said. “If I’m not a millionaire soon there’s a hitch in my arithmetic.”
It impressed me; who wouldn’t be impressed? He couldn’t help seeing this. Nevertheless, with his autocratic blues eyes darkening, he looked at me and asked, “Augie, you don’t think you’re superior to me because you have no money, do you?”
The question made me laugh, and maybe I laughed more than I should have. I said, “That’s a strange thing to be asking. How can I? And if I can, why should you care?” Then I said, “I guess it’s true that people fix it to come out better than those near to them. Why, sure I’d like to have money too.”
I didn’t say that I had to have a fate good enough, and that this came first.
My answer satisfied him. “You’re wasting a lot of time,” he said.
“I know it.”
“You ought to quit stalling. You’re not a boy. Even George is something, he’s a shoemaker.”
You know, I did admire Georgie for the way he took his fate. I wished I had one that was more evident, and that I could quit this pilgrimage of mine. I didn’t feel I was better than Simon, not at all. If there had been real ease in me, he might have envied me. As it was, what was there to envy?
Bodily overbearing, his fashionable pointed shoe on the rubber pad of the accelerator, he drove over the streets. This proud car, it had heraldry, it was royal, and wasn’t my brother like a prince of Detroit, full of force and darkness? Why, what was the matter with that, to be a power of the world of machinery? Wasn’t it good enough? And to what should you go rather? I wasn’t proud of myself, believe me, and my stubbornness about a “higher,” independent fate. I was no wizard, for sure, nor gazetted as anything illustrious, nor billed to stand up to Apollyon with his horrible scales and bear’s feet, nor slated to find the answer to all my shames like Jean-Jacques on the way to Vincennes sinking down with emotion of the conception that evil society is to blame for all that happened to warm, impulsive, loving me. There was no such first-rate thing that I could boast, and who was I, not to make up my mind and be so obstinate? The one thing I could say was that though I wanted this independent fate it wasn’t merely for my own sake I wanted it.
Oh, but why get too earnest? Seriousness is only for a few, a gift or grace, and though all have it rough only the favorites can speak of it plain and sober.
“So when are you going to start what you’re going to do?”
“I wish I knew. But it seems to be one of those things you can’t rush.”
GLOSSARY:
stay put — remain in one place
was up to — was doing, was occupied with
bird — here, slang for “girl”
busted down — slang for “failure”
Apollyon — king of hell and angel of the bottomless pit, i.e., the devil
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Swiss-born philosopher and writer
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
A.
1. Is Simon really glad to see Augie? Explain your answer.
2. What does Simon’s question: “Augie, you don’t think you’re superior to me because you have no money, do you?” reveal about Simon?
3. Augie remarks that Simon is “like a prince of Detroit, full of force and darkness.” Do you think he feels that Simon is somewhat satanic in nature? Explain your answer.
4. Do the two March brothers have what you would call a typical brotherly relationship?
B.
1. Augie is obviously a rather independent spirit. Do you feel that society generally prefers conformity in a person and views the strongly individualistic citizen with a distrust bordering on fear? Give the reasons for your belief.
2. At the end of this excerpt, Augie observes: “Seriousness is only for a few, a gift or grace, and though all have it rough only the favorites can speak of it plain and sober.” What does this observation mean to you? Do you agree or disagree? Why?
SELECTION II
Chapter 21 (continued)
“Well, people don’t trust you if they don’t know what you do, and you can’t blame them.”
He pulled up before his apartment, and he left the Cadillac triple-parked in the street for the doorman to worry about. Rising up swift and soundless in the elevator, we came to the ivory white door of his flat. As he opened it he was already yelling for the maid to cook some ham and eggs right away. He took on like a king, a Francis back from the hunt; he swelled, hollered, turned things round, not so much showing me the great rooms as dominating them typically. Well, there were vast rugs and table lamps as tall as lifesized dolls or female idols, walls that were all mahogany, drawers full of underwear and shirts, sliding doors that opened on racks of shoes, on rows of coats, cases of gloves, of socks, bottles of eau de cologne, little caskets, lights lining the corners, water hissing criss-cross in the showerstall. He took a shower. I went alone into the parlor; a huge China vase was there, and in secret I got up on a chair to lift the lid and look down, where I saw the reverse white bulge of the dragons and birds. The candy dishes were full of candy – I had some coconut balls and apricot marshmallows walking around while Simon took his shower. Then we went to eat, on a hand-some marble-topped round table. The chairs were red leather. The metal circle that held up the marble was worked all around with peacocks and children’s faces. The maid came from the blazing white of the kitchen with the ham and eggs and coffee. Simon’s hand with its rings went out to test the heat of the cup. He behaved like some Italian Lord Moltocurante, jealous over the quality and exacting all he had coming.
I knew we had gone way up in the elevator but hadn’t noticed to what floor. Now, after breakfast, when I strayed into one of the enormous carpeted rooms, dark as a Pullman when it sits with drawn blinds in the station, I drew a drape aside and saw we were on the twentieth story at least. I hadn’t had a look at Chicago yet since my return. Well, here it was again, westward from this window, the gray snarled city with the hard black straps of rails, enormous industry cooking and its vapor shuddering to the air, the climb and fall of its stages in construction or demolition like mesas, and on these the different powers and sub-powers crouched and watched like sphinxes. Terrible dumbness covered it, like a judgment that would never find its word.
Simon came looking for me. He cried, “Hey, what the hell are you doing in a dark room, for Chrissake? Come on, you’re going around with me today.”
He wanted me to know what his life was like. And maybe he thought I’d run into something that would appeal to me, for my future’s sake. “Wait a minute though,” he said. “What kind of clown’s suit are you wearing there? You can’t go among people dressed like that.”
“Listen, a friend of mine picked this out for me. Anyway, just feel the material. There’s nothing wrong with this suit.”
But this face was impatient, and he pulled the jacket from me and said, “Strip!” He dressed me in a double-breasted flannel, very elegant soft gray. It certainly was my fortune to be poor in style. From the skin out he reclothed me in swell linen and silk socks, new shoes, and called the maid to have my old suit cleaned and sent to me – it was sort of shiny on the elbows. The other stuff he ordered her to throw down the incinerator. So it plunged down into the fire. I wiped my face with the monogrammed handkerchief, now mine, and felt around with my toes in the narrow shoes, trying to accustom myself to them. To top it off he gave me fifty bucks. I made efforts to refuse this, but my tongue got in its own way. “Go! Stop mumbling,” he said. “You have to have a little something in your pocket to live up to this outfit.” He had a big gold money-clip and all the bills were new. “Now let’s go. I have things to do at my office and Charlotte wants to be picked up at five. She’s at the accountant’s, going over some of the books.” He called down for the Cadillac, and we drove away, stopping for scarcely anything in this lustrous hard shell with radio playing.
In his office Simon wore his hat like a Member of Parliament, and while he phoned his alligator-skin shoes knocked things off the desk. He was in on a deal to buy some macaroni in Brazil and sell it in Helsinki. Then he was interested in some mining machinery from Sudbury, Ontario, that was wanted by an Indo-Chinese company. The nephew of a Cabinet member came in with a proposition about waterproof material. And after him some sharp character interested Simon in distressed yard-goods from Muncie, Indiana. He bought it. Then he sold it as lining to a manufacturer of leather jackets. All this while he carried on over the phone and cursed and bullied, but that was just style, not anger, for he laughed often.
Then we drove to his club for lunch, arriving late. There was no service in the dining room. Simon went into the kitchen to bawl out the headwaiter. Seeing some pot roast on a platter he broke off a piece of bread and sopped the gravy, covering the meat with crumbs. The waiter hollered and Simon yelled back, furiously laughing in his face too, “Why don’t you wait on people then, you jerk!”
Finally they fed us, and then Simon seemed to find the afternoon dragging.
We went into the cardroom where he forced his way into a poker game. I could tell he was hated, but no one could stand up to him. He said to some bald-headed guy, “Push over, Curly!” and sat in. “This is my brother,” he said as if bidding them to look at me in the opulent gray flannel and button-down collar. I lounged just behind him in a leather chair...
GLOSSARY:
triple-parked — of an automobile, parked (usually unlawfully) alongside two other automobiles, only one of which is properly parked parallel to the curb
Francis — King Francis I of France (reigned 1515–1547)
Lord Moltocurante — the author’s fanciful term for one who affects aristocratic attitudes and manners
in on a deal — involved in a transaction, usually financial
distressed — here, seized and held as security or indemnity for a debt
yard-goods — cloth which is sold by the yard (3 feet)
bawl out — scold or reprimand loudly
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
A.
1. How does Simon act when he gets to his apartment? Do you expect this of him?
2. Why did he make Augie put on other clothes? What does this reveal about Simon’s character?
3. What does Simon do for a living? Do you think he likes his job? Explain.
4. How does Bellow want us to feel about Simon and Augie?
B.
1. In a composition discuss Bellow’s writing style or compare the two brothers.
2. What writer in your national literature uses themes similar to those of Bellow? Prepare a short speech in which you make this comparison.
Compiled by Erin Bouma
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