LIFE AND WORKS OF SAUL BELLOW

 LIFE AND WORKS OF SAUL BELLOW

A Brief Sketch

Saul Bellow (1915-2005), the youngest of the four children of Jewish-Russian parents, was born in French Canada in 1915. Bellow moved with his family to Chicago when he was nine. He grew up in an intensely verbal environment as three languages, English, Yiddish and French were spoken with a bit of Hebrew thrown in good measure in the household. Bellow learnt to admire people and scenery of urban America naturally while growing in the streets of Chicago and from the novels of Theodore Dreiser, whom he came later to admire. Later he studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and North Western and Wisconsin universities, though he never harboured ambition to become a scholar. Novel, he knew, was his tea-cuppa. Dave Peltz, a friend of the novelist's school days remembers Salomon Bellows, lovingly called 'Sally', dropped 'S' from his surname and took the name Saul to become Saul Bellow, when he began to publish. He was a prominent member of the group of Tuley High School friends who dreamt of becoming famous writers. Dave Peltz recounts that the group of precaucious Chicago kids used to go to the Mission House every Friday to hold sessions in which any of them could speak on politics and religion. He recollects, "Sally Bellows was the most precaucious of the lot-a good runner on the track team, a fair swimmer, middling tennis player, but a remarkable writer." Another school friend of Sally Bellow.
Freifeld, recalls, "Sally was fond of reading his work out loud among friends. In the back leaf of a copy of Oscar Wilde's poems, Bellow and his friends scribbled the titles of the books they would someday write, copying their favourite lines from Wilde's verse. Sally was particular fond of the pharse 'Black leaves whirling in the wind,' which he thought would make terrific book title." Obviously, Sally Bellow had made up his mind to become a novelist.

Contacts with School Fellows

Saul Bellow continued his contacts with his school fellows, and like his school days, he would discuss literary matters with them, even when some of them had ceased to be literary buffs His friend, Peltz, came to own a home-improvement company in Gary, Indiana. Naturally, he had no interest left in literary discussions, yet Sally would meet him once a week, as in his school days, on lunch to discuss literature with him. Peltz recollects that last week he gave him Diderot's 'Romcau's Nephew' to read. When Peltz said that he didn't have time to educate himself in literary matters, Saul gave him proper material and discussed that with him when he had finished that. Peltz on his part told him stories of the people and incidents that he had met with in course of his visits to different places in connection with his business to keep him connected. It was a help of its own kind to keep the novelist close to life. 

Man of Integrity

It was due to his closeness with life that Saul Bellow drew on the raffish Chicago scenes. Peltz told him once that he had lost heavily in a poker game with novelist, Nelson Algren, columnist Studs Terkel and two underworld characters. Terkel advised Peltz not to pay, but he promply received threat to his life. Therefore, Peltz paid the money. Peltz thinks that it was this incident which suggested Charlie Citrine's encounter in 'Himboldt's Gift' with the exquisite mobster Ronald Contabile. 

Humour

Saul Bellow was humorous in nature, like Dickins and Mark Twain. Bellow himself explained his method of narration offhandedly as "Kidding my way to Jesus". He said once, "Hamboldt is very much a comic book about death. There is a lady who says to Charlie Citrine that he is laughing and kidding and having a wonderful time, but life will come, crush him like empty beer can. Saul Bellow recollected, "Well, that was actually said to me by a very tough, existential lady, who is a critic. She's the type who, if she got some handsome young man to sleep with her, would rake his face with her finger-nails, just to prove an existential point."
His humour was a sort of camouflage for the serious designs underneath. Alfred Kazin, a literary critic of Bellow's own generation says to describe his first meeting with Bellow-
"Walking the unfamiliar Brooklyn Streets, he (Bellow) 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 himself as a contender. Although he was friendly, unpretentious and funny, he was serious in style I had never before seen in an urban Jewish intellectual: he was going to succeed as an imaginative writer; he was pleased to grapple with unseen powers. He was going to take on more than the rest of us."
Bellow was a prolific writer. He wrote several, full scale novels, short stories and articles, and won several national and international prizes, including the coveted Nobel Prize. He died on 5th April, 2005 with the honour of being a first ranking novelist of America, nay, of the world. 

Dangling Man

His first novel, Dangling Man, appeared in 1944 when he was only twenty-nine. It presents the character of Joseph, at young Chicago intellectual, expecting to be drafted into the army, but who spends nearly a year waiting for his draft board to act. This novel is written in the form of journal, in 'claustral tone, blank and chilly'. Joseph Epitein observes about this novel, "It resembles a little Albert Camus' "The Stranger". There is much the same abstract, crisply elegant intellectual language, the same kind of speculative quest for clarity, the same different inner battle to come to terms with the often abrasive equivocations of the modern world."
This novel prefigures the theme which he presented in his successive novels. Joseph is like heroes of his other novels who are unable to maintain relationships or enjoy anything in life. It therefore struggles with the question how to live like a good man and what he should do to make his life enjoyable. Joseph thinks of social utopianism like a philosopher but Hitler's aggression had almost shattered his dream, yet he does not alienate himself from the world because, he thinks, that alienation itself implies relationship "The very denial implicates you.... The world comes after you... whatever you do you cannot dismiss it." Bellow impressed the readers by his ideas, but made little impression by the art of a novelist in his first novel. He failed to evoke a real and palpable world, in which his ideas could grow in a natural ways.

The Victim

His second novel The Victim appeared in 1947. This distance of three years between his first and second novels shows itself vividly in his newly acquired art of novel. Whereas Dangling Man was set in the freezing atmosphere of Chicago winter, The Victim is set in scorching heat of New York summer. Leventhal, the protagonist in The Victim is, unlike Joseph, not an intellectual- he is a humdrum editor. He is aware of the precariousness, of fragility of his position in New York. Therefore he is cautious and self-protective, desperately afraid of being "drowned at too great a depth of life" Nevertheless, a man named Kirby Allbee, an anti-semitic, who is down on his luck, holds Leventhal responsible for it, because Leventhal had come into near violence with Allbee's employer during interview for a job which was arranged by Allbee. Therefore Allbee was sacked Allbee wanted Leventhal to make amends but Leventhal denied any responsibility for Allbee. But Allbee is one of those who would not be got away with it. Allbee threatens Leventhal who is spiritually timid. Leventhal does not admit complete responsibility for Allbee's troubles but he does recognize that he might be partially responsible. He also recogniges 'Cannbalistic' tendency in Allbee's character, feeling at the same time that the same spirit dwells in him. In the Epilogue to The Victim, Leventhal becomes a changed man-"His obstinately unrevealing expression had softened. His face was paler and there were some grey areas in his hair, in spite of which he looked younger. And as time went on, he lost the feeling that he had, he used to say, "got away with it." 

The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March (1953) marks a complete departure from the brooding melancholy of the earlier novels. This novel got its author the National Book Award in the first year of its publication and it has since been recognized as an American classic. The change in thinking of the novelist is well reflected in tone, style, form, ideas, etc. The hero of the novel, Augie is in the Picaresque tradition, having innocence of Fielding's Tom Jones, and invention of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, being prey to the disasters which beset Dickins' Oliver Twist-Augie is a petty thief, a tramp, a sporting-goods saleman, a labour organizer, a ladies man, and eagle tamer, a merchant seaman, a husband". The obvious message that novel gives is that "A man's character is his Fate". The action in this novel is not set in Chicago or New York like heroes of his earlier novels. Augie is basically rootless like a picaro. Naturally, he is always on the move, meeting incidents and multitude of sharpers grotesques. To go along with his new creation, Bellow devised a new style, which is party cultivated, partly street corner colloquial and partly American yiddish. 

Seize the Day

Seize the Day (1956) is Bellow's fourth novel. Unlike 'Augie March', it is compact, running only a little more than 100 pages. Tommy Wilhem is down on his luck; he is out of job and desperate at narrowing prospects. He has failed as a husband, failed as an actor, failed as a father and as a son.
In desperation, he gives his small saving to Dr. Tamkin who is a dubious character, like Allbee in The Victim-half charlatan and half seer. Tamkin is Bellow's most brilliant character. Tamkin loses money on commodities and disappears. Wilhe goes out in the hot New York streets to search for him. Instead of finding Tamkin, he gets jostled into a funeral parlour by a crowd of mourners, and walking by the dead man's casket, he sees his own symbolic death. The novel ends with the realization by Wilhem that there was something more than himself to weep for. 

Handerson the Rain King

His fifth novel, Handerson the Rain King came out in 1959. It is his first novel that revealed Bellow's special gift for comic writing. Eugene Handerson is another quester. He is a Hudson valley aristocrat, fifty five years of age. He is brute of man-six feet four inches tall, weighing two hundred and thirty pounds. He is a pig farmer who frankly admits being a 'bum'. He is strongly interested in mythical and mystical world. He goes to Africa, which he finds : marvellous fantasy land. He came across wariri tribe and their leader, king Dahfu who is in touch with nature and conversant with psychoanalytic jargons. Handerson thinks that he has been looking for such a spiritual leader. As he moves the statue of the Rain Goddess, he imagines to have become the Rain king. And as he was a pig farmer he thinks of himself as a pig. Under the guidance of Dahfu, he rehabilitates himself as a lion, the tribe's totem animal. Through repeated imitations he takes on lion-like qualities. The whole novel is uproarious. But it is interspersed with philosophical conversations. Eventually Handerson returns to America to take up study of medicines. 

Herzog

Bellow's next novel Herzog (1964) was the best seller in America for several months. Herzog is an exploration of mind. Moses Herzog is in his mid-forties. He is searching for an answer to the question posed in 'Damgling Man' "How should a good man live?" Herzog has been divorced by his second wife and has learnt that he has been cuckolded by his best friend and protege. In his crisis of nervousness, he chronicled his past failures. In the process, the novelist has revealed the mind and character of Herzog, a strange admixture of all that was absurd, fantastic and willy comic, but astonishingly penetrating at the same time. He wrote letters to such persons of high status and position as Hegel, Eisenhower, Nehru, Nietzche, Adlai Stevenson, but never finished them. This technique helps him evade the tedium of recalling the whole pact, yet it provides him opportunity to see the past in the light of present thinking.
Though Herzog dramatizes his sufferings he insists on the dignity of his sufferings. He ridicules and rejects those who would impose their own over-simplified versions of reality on him. Bellow's success lies in his power to depict the intensity of Herzog's emotions. 

Mr. Sammler's Planet

His next novel, Mr. Sammler's Planet is 'furiously contem- porary, sedulous in regard for the immediate situation which is its subject'. The hero of this novel, Arthur Sammler, is in his seventies, a Polish Jew, whose prime was spent as a journalist in London. The Nazis murdered his wife and he was left for dead. He limped out of the graveyard. He is meditative. He thinks that the world may collapse again as it had collapsed earlier. The question that the novel raises is how one can stay human in a world that seems to shed its humanity. But he is always hopeful. He thinks that every- one was born human. Sammler thinks that capacity to become human is natural but to become human requires work and effort. 

Hamboldt's Gift

Hamboldt's Gift is most American of all the novels of Bellow. That the fate of the artist lies in his quest for success is American. Nevertheless, Bellow's point of view remains cosmopolitan. Hamboldt's Gift has not one, but two heroes-Charles Citrene, the book's narrator, and Von Hamboldt Fleisher, who is a poet of great talent but he dies in poverty and despair. "Fleisher's death sets off Citrine's mental wanderings, searching for meaning of life, and indeed of death".
Hamboldt's Gift' is full of descriptions of urban life, a wide range of characters. This novel deals with the subject of death and the design and purpose of the universe. Bellow began his career with the questions how a good man ought to live and he asks after more than thirty years how to prevent the leprosy of the souls.