We tend to think of young artists as a wild and crazy bunch, but often they are the opposite—depressed, grouchy people who sit around wondering why all those older artists are getting the grants and the contracts. Their work bespeaks their mood. They imitate their elders, and not admiringly, but grudgingly, in the spirit of “I can do it, too.” In fact, they can’t do it, because they don’t really believe in it, but neither can they do what they’re meant to do, because the moment of courage has not yet come. And so, for a while, they produce tight, hard things.
A textbook illustration has just been published: the Library of America’s “Novels 1944-1953,” by Saul Bellow ($35), comprising “Dangling Man,” “The Victim,” and “The Adventures of Augie March.” The Library has now run out of dead Americans, and so, for only the second time, it has devoted a volume to the living. Bellow is an obvious choice—he is a classic—and this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of “The Adventures of Augie March.” Many people, I would guess, think of “Augie” as Bellow’s first novel, or, if they know that it was preceded by two others, they may imagine that the career-announcing glories of “Augie”—the grand, cascading sentences, the juxtaposition of Chicago hoodlums with Plato and Spinoza and Rousseau, and, by extension, the ennoblement of crude, new America as a worthy arena for the working out of life’s great questions, formerly considered addressable only in nice, old Europe—can also be glimpsed in the early books. They can’t be.
“Dangling Man” (1944), Bellow’s first novel, is set in Chicago, his home town, in 1942 and 1943, when Americans were finally leaving to serve in the Second World War. But Joseph, the author of the diary that constitutes the book, has not yet been inducted. So he just sits in his room, thinking. What he is thinking is that social and historical forces—war, for example—cause people to renounce their freedom, much to their satisfaction. People hate freedom, Joseph says: “We choose a master, roll over on our backs and ask for the leash.” But, until the draft board calls, Joseph will hang on to his independence, and use it, he says, to find out who he is. Actually, he wants to know what humankind is—“what we are and what we are for”—but though he ponders this question night and day, he makes no progress. Staring out his window at the busy streets, he gets even more depressed. Capitalism is hell. People are hell. Nature is ugly, not to speak of Chicago. Where, in all this, was there “a particle of what, elsewhere, or in the past, had spoken in man’s favor?” He never finds out, because in the end, losing patience, he goes to the draft board and demands to be inducted. His freedom now cancelled, he leaves for the war, with a sarcastic envoi: “Hurray . . . for the supervision of the spirit!”
“Dangling Man” is a respectful tribute to its models—Dostoyevsky and Rilke, plus Sartre, I believe—and at points it is handsomely written. But looked at today, through the lens of “Augie,” it is amazingly constrained—stingy, even. The dialogue is often inert, the pace hypnotically even. There are no memorable characters. If I didn’t know the book was by Bellow, I would never guess it.
The next novel, “The Victim” (1947), was braver. In 1945, soon after “Dangling Man” came out, the Allies liberated Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald, and the facts discovered there would change what had been, till then, America’s pervasive, taken-for-granted anti-Semitism. That sentiment is the subject of “The Victim.” The hero, Asa Leventhal, is an editor at a small trade magazine in New York. One night, as he is walking through the park, he is buttonholed by a down-and-out man who says that his misfortunes—he has no money, he’s a drunk—are Asa’s fault. The story may be true, or partly. Asa once knew this man, whose name is Kirby Allbee. Some years earlier, when Asa was looking for a job, he asked Allbee for an introduction to his boss, the editor of Dill’s magazine. At the ensuing interview, the editor treated Asa rudely, whereupon Asa, normally a restrained, cautious person, blew up and told the man off. Later, he heard that Allbee had been fired from Dill’s, but he never gave much thought to this: Allbee had already started drinking, and was only barely hanging on at the magazine. But Allbee now reminds him of an episode that occurred before the job interview. The two of them were at a party where one of Asa’s friends, Harkavy—a Jew, like Asa, and given to what Asa sees as Jewish behavior (volubility, wisecracking)—was singing old American ballads. Allbee interrupted him, saying that he shouldn’t try to sing such songs: “You have to be born to them.” Harkavy should sing something else instead: “Any Jewish song. Something you’ve really got feeling for.” The incident ended in awkwardness all round, but Asa says that he soon forgot about it. Allbee says that Asa didn’t forget about it, and that he staged the explosion with the editor precisely in order to get him fired. Asa ruined his life. Now he owes him.
Allbee, Bellow’s first really interesting character, is not so much a man as a dybbuk. He has a yellow gleam in his eye; he turns up everywhere Asa goes, and he knows all about him. But he is not just diabolical. He is also piteous—bruised, begging, weeping. Then, in a flash, his tears vanish, and he is telling Asa how the dirty Jews have taken over the city. The problem is worse than that, however, for while Asa is repelled by Allbee he also identifies with him, sees him as his double. When the man is not with him, he still feels his nearness: “He could even evoke the odor of his hair and skin. The acuteness and intimacy of it . . . oppressed and intoxicated him.” Soon Allbee has moved into Asa’s apartment, where he wears his host’s bathrobe and reads his mail. In a culminating scene, Asa comes home one night to find Allbee in his bed with a prostitute. (The daybed was too narrow, Allbee explains.) As the woman hurriedly dresses, Asa stares at her breasts. The whole business is appalling.
I think it is meant to convey the appallingness of anti-Semitism for a second-generation Jew of the time. Reading the book, one fairly hops up and down with frustration that Asa doesn’t just tell Allbee to get lost. His failure to do so, Bellow seems to say, is part of the neurosis of assimilation. Asa remembers that his immigrant father faced the world squarely as a foe. He had a favorite saying: “Ruf mir Yoshke, ruf mir Moshke, aber gib mir die groschke.” (“Call me Ikey, call me Moe, but give me the dough.”) He didn’t hope for decent treatment, only for survival. But Asa, like other immigrants’ children, wants a respected place in the Gentiles’ world, and there his troubles begin: social discomfort, fear of seeming Jewish (hence his stolidity), resentment of slights, self-hatred for ignoring slights, worry that he is imagining slights. Then comes the guilt—for example, survivor guilt. Asa, who came of age during the Depression and has had his jobless periods, can’t quite believe that he is gainfully employed. “I got away with it,” he thinks. And Allbee plucks exactly this string in his mind. Why should Asa, a Jew, an outsider, have a job when Allbee, a Gentile, a real American, is out of work? Indeed, as this stew thickens, one starts to question which one is the Jew. After the episode with the prostitute, Asa finally throws Allbee out, but in the middle of the night Allbee sneaks back into the apartment and tries to kill himself in Asa’s kitchen. The method he has chosen is gas. It’s as if he were doing a parody of the Jews. The book’s ambiguous title—which man is the victim?—underlies this reversal.
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"The Victim” is a novel of ideas, and, accordingly, much of it takes place in the mind. (Now and then you wonder whether Allbee isn’t something Asa has imagined.) The world is still there: apart from Allbee, there are a few vivid characters—all of them very Jewish, by Asa’s lights—and when they talk we hear real, breathing human speech. The descriptions of the city, in keeping with the spell that Allbee casts over the book, have a certain sulfurous force. But Asa’s personality applies a counterforce. He is an unimaginative man. Bellow presumably made him so in order to tell us what anti-Semitism is like for the average Jew, but since all the narration is from his point of view it can get pretty average, too. The book is like a boiler; the center is burning, but the walls are thick. Bellow seems to have known this as he was writing. At one point, Asa says to himself that for most people living is like running “in an egg race with the egg in a spoon . . . watching the egg, fearing for the egg.” Sometimes we get sick of our caution, he thinks. But “man is weak and breakable,” so he goes on watching the egg.
Bellow had reason to do so. He, too, was a second-generation Jew, and he was entering a field, the English-language novel, in which Jews were felt to have no place. (When, after graduating from Northwestern, in 1937, he was thinking of doing graduate study in English, the chairman of the department said to him what Allbee says to Harkavy: “You weren’t born to it.” Do something else.) Today, Philip Roth can fill a novel with Newark Jews and posit their generational history as the story of America—indeed, call the book “American Pastoral”—and we don’t blink an eye. But such a situation was unforeseen in the nineteen-forties. In that context, it was courageous of Bellow, who longed to enter the big leagues, to make anti-Semitism the subject of his second novel, but the only way he could see to do it was by imitating European models: Dostoyevsky (the interiority, the Devil, the double), Flaubert (the factuality, the polished sentences). When he was older, he described both “The Victim” and “Dangling Man” as “victim literature,” by which he meant that he was victimized, by his insecurities, as a Jewish nobody from Chicago: “I was restrained, controlled, demonstrating that I could write ‘good.’ ”
But he didn’t know that in 1947. All he knew was that he was vaguely dissatisfied with “The Victim,” and crushed by its poor sales. Then his luck changed. Viking, a prestigious firm, came after him, and offered him a flattering three-thousand-dollar advance on his next novel. He also won a Guggenheim fellowship, after having been turned down twice. He and his wife decided to spend the fellowship year in Europe. In 1948, they moved to France, where Bellow applied himself to a new book, called “The Crab and the Butterfly.” Only one chapter of that novel survives. According to James Atlas’s biography of Bellow, it is a bleak narrative about two men talking to each other from adjacent beds in a Chicago hospital. Bellow was soon having trouble with it. Furthermore, he hated Paris. The weather was gray; the French were snotty. “I was terribly depressed,” he later said.
Then, as he recalled, he experienced an epiphany: “I had a room in Paris where I was working, and one day as I was going there after breakfast, a bright spring morning, I saw water trickling down the street and sparkling.” The shining stream, he said, suggested to him the form of a new novel. Perhaps so, but a few other circumstances should be taken into account. This was the time, the postwar years, when American art came into its home country. Not just Bellow but many others walked out from under the shadow of the European masters and invented new, personal styles. Bellow was part of a Zeitgeist, and the stay in Europe encouraged his enlistment. The more he hated France, the more he loved America, and wanted to make an art that was like America—big and fresh and loud.
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Furthermore, he had received a great deal of encouragement. When he was starting out, Bellow was friendly with New York’s intellectual community, both the Partisan Review crowd and a more louche gang in Greenwich Village. These people, many of whom were Jewish, and pained at the exclusion of Jews from America’s mainstream intellectual life, were very impressed by Bellow—by his brio, his erudition, his ambition, his seeming confidence. “He examined Hemingway’s style like a surgeon pondering another surgeon’s stitches,” Alfred Kazin remembered. The New York crowd stumped for him. When I read what Elizabeth Hardwick wrote about “The Victim” in Partisan Review—“It would be hard to think of any young writer who has a better chance than Bellow to become the redeeming novelist of the period”—it seems to me that she is hoping as much as describing. Manhattan’s young literati desperately wanted a redeeming novelist to rise from their ranks, and they all but begged Bellow to take the job.
Finally, simply, the time had come. For years, Bellow had been old; now, in his thirties, he could be young. He laid “The Crab and the Butterfly” aside and started a new novel, “The Adventures of Augie March.” He wrote the first half very quickly, revising little. “The book just came to me,” he said. “All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.”
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No halo, but only the miasma from Chicago’s smokestacks, hangs over the little house in Humboldt Park—a Jewish working-class neighborhood—where Augie March grows up (as did Bellow). Still, we are looking at a holy city. This is the first and probably the most admired beauty of Bellow’s book, that it takes the dirty old world and, combining a child’s capacity for awe with an adult’s sense of loss, makes of it a paradise: that is, not just a place of happiness but one in which the most serious principles of life are already present, as symbol—the apple, the snake. The trick had certainly been done before—Proust’s Combray, Cather’s Black Hawk. It had even been done with a big city, Joyce’s Dublin. But Chicago was different. With its automobile-assembly plants and slaughterhouses, it was widely considered the most hard-bitten town on earth, the very picture of industrial capitalism’s ability to crush the human soul, and that was the tribute paid to it by its earlier chroniclers: Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, James T. Farrell, Nelson Algren. Then came Augie March’s Chicago, hopping and pulsing with human souls of every possible variety, all of them gesticulating and shouting, demanding dinner and love and money, expounding their philosophy of life, urging its universal adoption, and generally acting as though industrial capitalism had been invented for their own personal use.
Augie’s family consists of Mrs. March and her three sons. Augie is the middle child, an aimless, happy boy, who is maybe eight or ten years old when we meet him. There used to be a father, who drove a laundry truck, but he disappeared. In his place, the family has Grandma Lausch. Actually, she is not their grandmother; she is a boarder. Nevertheless, she runs the household. She comes from Odessa, where, she explains, she was married to a fine gentleman and her sons had German nannies. She still has her silk gown, her fur piece, her ostrich feathers. Now she sits in a shabby kitchen in Chicago, explaining to the feckless Marches how to chisel the city’s welfare system. Thus does history enter the novel: Europe, immigration, the pain of immigration. (Bellow’s mother also came from Russia with ostrich feathers in her trunk.) But Grandma Lausch is undiscourageable. She is a tsar, a Machiavel, full of force and pride and guile. When she’s finished bossing Mrs. March and the boys around, she summons Mr. Kreindl, a neighbor, for klabyasch, an old-country card game, which she plays with “sharp gold in her eyes.” She is the first great personage in a book that carries on for six hundred pages without producing a single dull character. Even the animals have interesting personalities.
As Augie grows, he takes various jobs. He delivers floral wreaths for murdered gangsters; at Christmas, he is one of Santa’s elves in Deever’s department store. Through his eyes, we discover Chicago in the twenties, and it is a dazzlement: swanky apartments, lousy apartments, pool rooms, dime stores, boxing gyms, music halls with girls playing the “Liebestod” on bagpipes. When Augie and his friends have nothing else to do, they go to City Hall and ride the elevator: “In the cage we rose and dropped, rubbing elbows with bigshots and operators, commissioners, grabbers, heelers, tipsters, hoodlums, wolves, fixers, plaintiffs, flatfeet, men in Western hats and women in lizard shoes and fur coats, hothouse and arctic drafts mixed up, brute things and airs of sex, evidence of heavy feeding and systematic shaving, of calculations, grief, not-caring, and hopes of tremendous millions in concrete to be poured or whole Mississippis of bootleg whiskey and beer.” Such sentences occur on almost every page. They are like hall closets; you open them and everything falls out. All of Chicago seems gathered into the book, and eventually all of America, and much of human history as well. People are compared to Peter the Great, Pasiphaë, Alcibiades, Cincinnatus, Sardanapalus, Cesar Romero. Chicago becomes the world. The fact that its citizens play klabyasch and express themselves in four or five different languages (James Wood’s notes to the Library of America edition could have given us more help with the Yiddish) does not mean that they are marginal. It means they are central—the inheritors.
Chief among the beneficiaries are the Jews. Bellow works an interesting game here. Most of the main characters are Jews, and many scenes, particularly those of family intimacy and of dealmaking, seem intended as specifically Jewish. (A few minutes before Augie’s brother’s wedding, we see the bride, in her gown and veil, on the phone with the photographer, trying to beat him down on his price: “Listen, Schultz, if you try to hold me up you’ll get no business out of any of the Magnuses ever again.”) And Augie speaks Jewish. Those long, baroque, history-swallowing sentences have their roots in Yiddish discourse, as do the following sentences, about a woman sitting on the beach: “If you want to know what she thought, it was that back home was locked. There were two pounds of hotdogs on the shelf of the gas range, two pounds of cold potatoes for salad, mustard, a rye bread already sliced. If she ran out, she could send me for more.”
But this is all done so easily, and so constantly, that you forget it’s Jewish. Bellow objected very much to being called a Jewish novelist. He wanted to be regarded as an American novelist who happened to be Jewish, and he bestowed that same decontextualization on his characters. Anti-Semitism, central to “The Victim,” is mentioned only in passing in “Augie,” nor is there any effort to make the Jews seem more high-minded, or more likely to suffer, than anyone else. On the contrary, most of the Jews in the novel are enthusiastic lowlifes, people who run bootleg (as Bellow’s father did) and have names like Dingbat, people who are just doing deals and trying to get by. Their very ignobility is a bid for respectability: Bellow doesn’t feel that he has to protect them. And by that route he made the lives of Jews a normal subject for American literature.
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The novel doesn’t really have a plot. Instead, it has a pattern, which is that Augie gets lectured by his family and friends on how he should wise up. He has a suggestible, delightable mind, and therefore he tends to drift. The people around him are steadier. They make plans, invent philosophies, and they try to enlist him. One after another succeeds. They hire him, hector him, buy him new clothes. But always, after a while, he says no thanks and moves on. In the early chapters, this is usually because something else has caught his eye. But, as Augie gets older, his resistance is increasingly a moral matter. He sees that human beings are all involved in a terrible struggle for power. The best description of this is provided by a man, Basteshaw, who turns up—during a shipwreck!—late in the book: “Go back to when I was a kid in the municipal swimming pool. A thousand naked little bastards screaming, punching, pushing, kicking. The lifeguards whistle and holler and punish you, the cops on duty . . . call you snot-nose. Shivery little rat. Lips blue, blood thin, scared, your little balls tight. . . . The shoving multitude bears down, and you’re nothing.” To become something, and overcome your fear, Augie says, you fashion a self that can frighten the world back: “You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances. This way he can’t get justice and he can’t give justice, but he can live.” Augie wants no part of it. As he watches his brother Simon, an American success story, screaming at people over the phone, meanwhile knocking things off the desk with his alligator shoes, something inside him is already out the door. He’s repelled by the unkindness, but, more than that, he can’t bear the renunciation of hope. He is looking “for the right thing to do, for a fate good enough.”
It is a tribute to his creator’s skill that Augie manages to be so virtuous, so idealistic, without getting on our nerves. Part of Bellow’s strategy is to allow Augie’s antagonists—his “reality” instructors—to express our doubts, with considerable mordant verve. “I know what you want,” one of his friends says to him. “O paidea! O King David! O Plutarch and Seneca! . . . O godlike man! Tell me, pal, am I getting warm or not?” But these people don’t change Augie’s course. In the last chapter, he is still drifting. The Second World War has just ended. Augie is living in France, because that’s where his new wife, who thinks she’s an actress, has been offered a film job. He’s doing deals, selling Army surplus, at the bidding of yet another of the book’s hundred and one gonifs. As before, none of this may last. The novel runs out of steam in its last quarter or so, but that is often the case with a bildungsroman (see “Huckleberry Finn,” “My Ántonia”), because it is the quest that is romantic, and no ending of that, no fall into adult life, will seem a worthy conclusion.
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It would be hard to imagine a book more embedded in its historical circumstances than “Augie.” In its vitality and cheer, it was a response to the grim view of modern life taken by the American naturalists, and also by the European modernists—the “Wastelanders,” as Bellow called them. Needless to say, the book meant a great deal to the Jewish literary crowd, but you didn’t have to be Jewish to care about Bellow. In the fifties, many American intellectuals, now disabused regarding the Soviet Union, began to look more kindly on their own country—“It is no longer the case,” Lionel Trilling wrote in 1952, “that an avowed aloofness from national feeling is the young intellectual’s first ceremonial step into the life of thought”—and it seemed to them possible that they might be given some voice in public matters. “Augie” ’s high-low character—its insertion of European culture into American street life—symbolized their aspiration, and the book’s commercial success encouraged it. As the fifties passed into the early sixties—with the civil-rights movement and the election of John Kennedy—that hope became almost a national movement. Augie March was one of its heralds, and when I read certain of his meditations I think of those times. At one point, Augie says that we should learn to take truth in mixed form: “If the highest should come in that empty overheated tavern with its flies and the hot radio buzzing between the plays and plugged beer from Sox Park, what are you supposed to do but take the mixture and say imperfection is always the condition as found; all great beauty too, my scratched eyeballs will always see scratched. And there may gods turn up anywhere.” This passage would have done very nicely as a reading at a Unitarian church service of the period, or as an epigraph to “The Family of Man.”
Today, “Augie” is no longer riding a wave of progressive politics. One must love the book on artistic grounds—for its comedy, its generosity, its density, its linguistic miracles—and also, still, for its hopefulness. Distant as we are from the uplift-minded fifties, we nevertheless get out of bed in the morning and put on our socks and our shoes and our hope. Bellow associated optimism with the United States, and it is very specifically as an American that Augie, in the last paragraph of the book, is speeding his car across Normandy so that he can arrive before nightfall in Bruges (where he has to “look up a guy . . . who had a big nylon deal on his mind”), and see the pretty canals. Beneath his wheels are the barely cold bones of the war dead. He knows this, but he can’t stop hoping—a habit that makes him think of Columbus. It also makes him think that, compared with Columbus, he’s something of a failure. But, he adds, “Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn’t prove there was no America.” In those sentences, the last in the book, America is the focus of hope, as well as its symbol. Columbus’s America, and Bellow’s, may now seem merely a symbol. Which doesn’t mean there’s no hope.
Published in the print edition of the October 6, 2003, issue.
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