Saul Bellow, 1915-2005

[imomus]

I was 15 when my mother took me up to McGill University to see Saul Bellow speak. We were a two-person culture club in those days, my mother and I, combatting the boredom of life in a Montréal suburb with trips to art movies and literary events in our dark blue Volvo.

It was 1975. Bellow still had black hair. He'd just published Humboldt's Gift, his thinly-disguised account of his relationship with the poet Delmore Schwartz, and he was preparing To Jerusalem and Back, his non-fiction account of several months spent in Israel. At that point I hadn't read any Bellow, but I would. In fact, Bellow would become my favourite North American writer. In the 80s I devoured Herzog, Humboldt's Gift, Dangling Man, The Victim, Seize The Day, The Dean's December and To Jerusalem and Back one after the other. After initial attempts at tightness, existentialism and poetic economy, Bellow let everything billow and spill. His books sprawled like America itself does. Appetite for language, and through it life, sprang from every page. Someone in The Dean's December is described as having "a parboiled face". A tree in Dangling Man is "a diagram of itself".

Bellow in his books is sociologist, gossip, scrupulous inquisitor of his adopted culture (he was born in Lachine, just outside Montréal, but adopted Chicago as his home), historical painter, commentator, journalist, wry comedian, flowing poet... He restores some of the urbanity, invention, liveliness and humour of the 18th century novel. He's as chatty and witty as Lawrence Sterne. He's cosmopolitan and intelligent, with good object relations and an ear always cocked to his "primitive prompter", the automatic word-deliverer in his lower cortex, the instinctual poet. Like his famous character Herzog, Bellow is looking always for the "five cent cigar, the five cent synthesis" that will make 20th century America click into meaning.

Bellow was born Solomon Bellows, to immigrants of Russian extraction. You catch some of the Yiddish energy of Isaac Bashevis Singer from him, and there's something of Woody Allen there too. The Associated Press says "The classic Bellow narrator was a self-absorbed intellectual with ideals the author himself seemed to form during the Depression." Being a self-absorbed intellectual myself, I fell profoundly under Bellow's influence in my own "depression years", my early 20s, when I assumed I would become a novelist. He was my next stop after Kafka and Brecht. What I found valuable in his work was the lack of a division between intellectuals and the daily American life he described. I guess the effect of the Depression was super-flattening:

"There were people going to libraries and reading books," Bellow told The Associated Press in a 1997 interview. "They were going to libraries because they were trying to keep warm; they had no heat in their houses. There was a great deal of mental energy in those days, of very appealing sorts. Working stiffs were having ideas."

My big anxieties in those days (and eventually they led me to choose pop music over literature as a career) were of being cut off from the mass of humanity and from "objects". I was much given to poring over books by the Object Relations school of British psychoanalysis--Fairbairn, Guntrip, Klein--for whom the big first object was the breast and the bigger second object the world. Bellow seemed to correct my natural tendency to asceticism. He showed that an intellectual could be appetisingly worldly, and that language used concretely, intelligently and passionately was a bridge to life, to inclusion, to involvement.

And so I worked on never-to-be-finished novels with Bellowesque titles like Pang's Compass, or wrote journalism for the music press under the Bellowesque pseudonym "Lee Citrine", or sang in my Complete History of Sexual Jealousy (Parts 17-24) about "the dangling men you know you'll never go to bed with..."

Saul Bellow, who died yesterday sharp as a pin and perhaps "serene", might be the closest I've come, personally, to having a pope. A humanist pope, a pope whose church is life itself, and people, and the world. Like popes, great novelists never really die. They just enter the canon.

Comments

[ortho-bob.livejournal.com]

Well put. You're a scholar and a gent.

[alisgray.livejournal.com]

thanks.

he was one of my father's favorites too, along with Spinoza, Margaret Mead, Conrad Lorenz and Joseph Campbell.

I guess the effect of the Depression was super-flattening:
what would Norman Rockwell have thought of Superflatness, do you think?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

what would Norman Rockwell have thought of Superflatness, do you think?

I think he would have thought the Kaikai Kiki crew were a bunch of no-mark perverts, funny yellow Jap monkeys fit only to illustrate children's books. Then again, he might have been sent along to draw them for the NYT magazine, in which case he would just have shut up and got on with the group portrait.

[jozefpronek.livejournal.com]

Very strong obituary piece! I myself was also a fan of Bellow for some years (between around 1998 and 2002) - I devoured the same novels, except To Jerusalem and back and The Victim. At some point (perhaps when I spent a year working in the US), what you call the "sprawl" in Bellow got me fed up - for a while. Thanks for this piece, imomus, and thanks for bringing back to mind the Yiddish energy and the sheer size of Bellow's persona - as you say, a humanist pope.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, I hink a week ago you quotes the five center cigar synthesis! Is there some telepathy going on...?

Adam

[(Anonymous)]

Small correction: if he was the son of immigrant Russian Jews, Hebrew couldn't have been his first language, since modern Hebrew developed in British Palestine (as it was then). He would have been speaking Yiddish, which is a Germanic language and has no linguistic relationship with Hebrew.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you're right. You know, I did wonder about that when I read in the Houston Chronicle (http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/ae/books/news/3119674) that Hebrew was his first language. All the other accounts I read said Yiddish was the language spoken in the family household. I'll change my account -- feel free to write to the Chronicle to tell them about their error!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Hmm, the Houston Chronicle report is actually just the standard Associated Press report. And if you google Saul Bellow Hebrew you get this (http://www.bookrags.com/biography-saul-bellow/):

"Saul Bellow, born of Russian immigrant parents in Lachine, Quebec, on July 10, 1915, grew up in Montreal, where he learned Hebrew, Yiddish, and French as well as English."

The Literary Encyclopaedia (http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=350) clarifies:

"In 1918, the family moved to St. Dominique Street, Montreal, a slum neighborhood of poverty, rats, and colorful, mostly Jewish immigrants. Here, Liza enrolled Saul in Hebrew-class, hoping her brilliant son would become a Rabbi or a Talmudist, and by the age of four he had memorized large passages from the Old Testament."

So I think it's likely that Yiddish was his first language, and perhaps Hebrew his second.

[(Anonymous)]

Modern Hebrew is pretty interesting. Basically Hebrew died out as a spoken language around 200 BC or so (Jesus and his contemporaries would have spoken Aramaic). It remained in use for Jewish liturgy (a bit like Latin did for Catholics until the Vatican Council). It was revived as a spoken language in the 19th C by a Zionist immigrant Eliezar Ben Yehuda, who invented a whole new "modern" vocabulary for it, started newspapers, and generally promoted it as a sort of Jewish Esperanto. Except unlike Esperanto, it actually caught on among the Jewish immigrant communities of Palestine as a sort of lingua franca, and is now widely spoken as a mother tongue in Israel. This might be the only case of an extinct language being successfully revived. Very pomo!

[alionunderaw.livejournal.com]

I found Bellow a little bit late, maybe (I was 20), and went through the roughly the same books you mentioned.

I even had a similar response to his books, but I think there's only sort of elliptical ways of emulating Bellow; following the spirit, as it were, rather than the style. I'm surprised to hear this regardless, he seemed incredibly vital--having kids at 85 and so on. I hope at least the inevitable critical re-reevaluation will be kind to him.

[(Anonymous)]

End of last month, American poetry lost its pope-figure: Robert Creeley.

[fusis.livejournal.com]

Thank you for mentioning this.

"And I believed there was something between the stones and me."

[becki1111.livejournal.com]

"He showed that an intellectual could be appetisingly worldly, and that language used concretely, intelligently and passionately was a bridge to life, to inclusion, to involvement."

I couldn't have said this better myself.

He has been a staple for me, a form of sustenance just as vital as food or water. He not only used language in the manner you suggested, but made it exciting, dimensional. He had an uncanny ability of tying it to our familiar, collective human conscious without weighing its matter down with the usual cliches and constraints of familiarity.

I remember vividly sitting in a seminar while still in university, discussing "Henderson the Rain King". I was becoming more and more frustrated at my classmates as they ignored the substance of the book, instead leading the conversation toward his characterization of the African tribe Henderson encountered. Being young and far too sensitive (is the depression of the early twenties a modern rite of passage?), I took personal offense at the fact that the only thing these people had walked away from after reading this book was the idea that Bellow, of all people, was a racist. I felt sad for them...Bellow had laid it all out there for the taking and they had accepted none of it.

Nowadays, I can never look at frogs without remembering the wrenching cistern scene. Nor can I forget the amazing passage where he makes the distinction between being and becoming.

I discovered him at the same time I discovered Bowles, Anne Carson, (a professor of Classics at Mcgill), Salter, H.D., Duras, Forster and Jim Crace (to name a few that still stand out the most). I would pour over these while at the same time reading Thucydides and Herodotus and Suetonius' wonderfully gossipy history of the Caesars (double major in English and Classical Civ). The mixture seemed eclectic, but it wove into a beautifully intricate and formative shell that provided comfort at the time and a firm belief in the interrelated nature of all expressive arts. Watching "The Passion of Joan of Arc", I found the same state of maddening grace as when I read Carson's Artaud poems (coincidently the actor who played the only sympathetic priest in the movie). In the Artaud poems she juxtaposes entries from Augstine's confessions (another book I was reading at the time) with brilliant descriptions of Artaud's time in Mexico ("Like many a white man here he wants to believe in / God's birth. / Stare at it for hours.) to his eventual lock up in a mental institution (Everything loathesome is the mind, / which God screws into the body with a lascivious thrust."). When seeing these eloquent and sensual passages on the same page of Augistine's spiritual meditations on grace and the like, it all came together.

As much as I would love to ramble on, I should at present, be working.

Bellow's writing was captivating, challenging and reassuring. Thank you for such a post, as much as the news saddens my day, it was wonderful to see someone encapsulate (far more articulately than I can manage) why his work matters so much.

Re: "And I believed there was something between the stones and me."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that, Becki... I actually wish I'd done Classics and English together. I went through a Loeb Classics phase, but I bought them mainly for the covers, and read them on my own time, for my own pleasure, after I'd graduated. But it might have been good to have a structured approach. And yes, Augustine's Confessions figured at about the same time!

If you want to put something non-musical on your new iPod, there's now an RSS feed for my radio programmes:

http://www.imomus.com/momusradio.rss

You can use that in an application like iPodder, basically.

Re: "And I believed there was something between the stones and me."

[becki1111.livejournal.com]

I will definitely use the link.

Thank you.

I am a big fan of the Loeb series too. There size is perfect and the paper, while thin, still has that great old-school texture to it that makes reading as much a tactile experience as an intellectual one.

As far a structured approach...like all else it had its good points and bad points. My fondest memories are of Professor Roy Swanson. He spoke 14 languages fluently (even though most of them were dead), was a leading expert on the Hellensistic period, and was the biggest Elvis fan I've ever encountered (He was in his late sixties when I had him and still wore the side burns and these worn out blue-suede doc martens).

If you haven't already, you should really check out "Men in the Off Hours" by Anne Carson. It opens with an essay which compares the use of time as a structural format in Virginia Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall" and Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War". The Hopper poems are so-so, but then she regains her stride in the TV Men Series and especially in the Artaud/Augustine poems.

Thanks again for the link.

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

A moving encomium.

I was introduced to Saul Bellow's work in university by a friend from one of Florida's small and very southern rural towns. It was, however, large enough for a public library, and there he'd discovered Herzog as a teenager. I was the first Jew whose acquaintance he made, and he was continuously disappointed that I (of banally suburban background) in no way resembled the urbane delicatessen philosophes who inhabit some of Bellow's books . Consequently, I tried harder to speak French and like art and stuff like that, which ended up being worthwhile. Yay for Saul Bellow!

Montreal

[(Anonymous)]

I'm from Pointe-Claire.
I've read Bellows. I did not know he was from Lachine.
I did not know Momus grew up in Montreal.
Which municipality did you live in?

Re: Montreal

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Beaconsfield... Thompson's Point. Went to school in St. Anne de Bellevue (Macdonald High School).

[(Anonymous)]

I had not even seen this or heard this in the news. If it isn't about the "Papa" it has not been in the news as of late.

Thanks for posting it. Sadly, I think the majority of Americans don't even know who Saul Bellows was, despite his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Growing up in Montréal with Scottish parents might account for Momus' nice "unrecognizable" accent.

[(Anonymous)]

"I think the majority of Americans don't even know who Saul Bellows was, despite his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature."


Or how to spell his name: Saul Bellow(s)!

piedepágina

[reflejos.livejournal.com]

I loved your note about Bellow. Here in colombia I am editor of the magazine: piedepágina, you can see the website: www.piedepagina.com
¿Do you think we could publish a translation of it?

I began doing the magazine when I first came to find your blog and it has been a very strong influence in looking for the tone of the writting.

[thebestweapon.livejournal.com]

As a young Chicagoan obsessed with words rather than design and flash animation, I'd never have expected you to mention anything of Bellow's death in your journal.

The Chicago Tribune ran five or so pages of rambling praise that don't manage to say as much as you did in this post. Thanks for the surprise, iMomus!