Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005), was an acclaimed Canadian-born American Jewish writer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 and is best known for writing novels that investigate isolation, spiritual dissociation, and the possibilities of human awakening. While on a Guggenheim fellowship in Paris, he wrote most of his best-known novel, The Adventures of Augie March.

Examples of Prose

This is the famous and often quoted beginning of Augie March:

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: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. But a man?s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn?t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

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::Everyone knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.

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Adam Mars-Jones's gloss on this is: 'Maybe the fact that he starts low and goes high, rather than starting high and going low, in terms of cultural reference, was a breakthrough in its own way.'

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This longer excerpt from James Wood's review of the Atlas biography is an attempt to explain Bellow's genius (for the full article see Bibliography, 'On Bellow'):

Related Topics:
James Wood - Bibliography

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:Perhaps nothing is more movingly comic in the whole of Bellow than the scene in The Adventures of Augie March, in which Einhorn, a Chicago autodidact, writes an obituary of his father for the local newspaper. Stiff, clumsy, noble, the obituary is foolishly, ambitiously 'intellectual,' and the reader is able to see, in a paragraph, the quavering pretensions of a generation of intelligent American Jews:

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::Einhorn kept me with him that evening; he didn't want to be alone. While I sat by he wrote his father's obituary in the form of an editorial for the neighborhood paper. 'The return of the hearse from the newly covered grave leaves a man to pass through the last changes of nature who found Chicago a swamp and left it a great city. He came after the Great Fire, said to be caused by Mrs. O'Leary's cow, in flight from the conscription of the Habsburg tyrant, and in his life as a builder proved that great places do not have to be founded on the bones of slaves, like the pyramids of Pharaohs or the capital of Peter the Great on the banks of the Neva, where thousands were trampled in the Russian marches. The lesson of an American life like my father's, in contrast to that of the murderer of the Strelitzes and of his own son, is that achievements are compatible with decency. My father was not familiar with the observation of Plato that philosophy is the study of death, but he died nevertheless like a philosopher, saying to the ancient man who watched by his bedside in the last moments. . .' This was the vein of it, and he composed it energetically in half an hour, printing on sheets of paper at his desk, the tip of his tongue forward, scrunched up in his bathrobe and wearing his stocking cap.

Related Topics:
Pharaohs - Peter the Great - Neva - Plato

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:I doubt that this could be bettered by Dickens or Joyce, and when we read it we are splashed by the antique streams of the greatest comedy. We begin the obituary in laughter and end it in tears, in a sublime dapple of emotions. Everything is here: the ungrammatical pompousness of the unpracticed writer ('leaves a man to pass through the last changes of nature who found Chicago a swamp'. . . 'saying to the ancient man who watched by his bedside'), the rambling, feebly chanelled anarchy ('he came after the Great Fire, said to be caused by Mrs. O'Leary's cow'), the intellectual hauteur that crumbles into non-sequitur ('my father was not familiar with the observation of Plato that philosophy is the study of death, but he died nevertheless like a philosopher'), the historical allusions hanging off the sentences like sloths ('in flight from the conscription of the Habsburg tyrant'), and finally Einhorn's affecting, foolhardy American optimism, whereby this new land proves that 'great places do not have to be founded on the bones of slaves.' Such care, such favoring finesse! Note that Bellow does not have Einhorn write 'Plato's observation that,' which is the formulation that a real intellectual would use, but the more upholstered and uneasy 'the observation of Plato,' a phrase whose awkwardness enshrines a certain distance from Plato. And what a delicious word 'observation' is here—as if Plato were someone who tossed off mots like Wilde.

Related Topics:
Dickens - Joyce - Wilde

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