PROFILE OF SAUL BELLOW

SAUL BELLOW, who died on 5 April 2005, at the age of eighty-nine, at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976, and received the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, and the National Medal of Arts. No American writer has garnered more honors.

He was born in Lachine, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal, on 10 June or perhaps in July 1915, the former date, however, being the one on which Mr. Bellow usually celebrated his birthday. His family-the parents and three older children-had emigrated from Russia to Canada only two years earlier. In 1924 the Bellows moved to Chicago.

Mr. Bellow's education was principally in Chicago: in the public school system, at the University of Chicago, and at Northwestern University, located in a suburb of Chicago. He graduated from the latter institution in 1937, having majored in sociology and anthropology. A short stint of graduate study of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin followed. Afterward, Mr. Bellow worked in Chicago on a WPA Writers' Project and for the editorial department of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

At the end of the 1930s Mr. Bellow left Chicago for New York and lived in the city and, in the 1950s, also in New York's Dutchess County, with time out after the United States entered World War II for the merchant marine (he had been rejected by the army), and for a two-year stay in Paris (1948-50) financed by a Guggenheim Fellowship. In the 1950s, although he had already become a full-time writer, he taught at New York University, Washington Square. In the early 1960s Mr. Bellow returned to Chicago, once more combining writing with teaching, this time at the University of Chicago as a member of its Committee on Social Thought. In 1993, he was invited to teach at Boston University and moved to Boston. Although he was the quintessential urban writer, Mr. Bellow had a deep feeling for nature, as is apparent from the beautiful descriptions of nature, for instance, in Herzog. He spent a great deal of time at his farm in Vermont.

Four of Mr. Bellow's marriages, to Anita Goshkin, Alexandra Tsachacbasov, Susan Glassman, and Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea, ended in divorce. His fifth wife, the former Janis Freedman; three sons, Gregory, Adam, and Daniel; a daughter, Naomi Rose; and six grandchildren survived him. Mr. Bellow once said that fiction is the highest autobiography. True to his word, he used freely models from his life. His wives, friends, and enemies, as well as he in his various avatars, populate the pages of his fiction.

Mr. Bellow's first novel, The Dangling Man, was written while he was in the merchant marine, and appeared in 1944, before he had turned thirty. It is a reflection of the author's life as a young intellectual living cheaply in a New York boardinghouse while he awaits the draft. The intellectual themes, including juxtaposition between the tawdriness of modern times and the world perceived through the works of the great masters of the Enlightenment, would find an echo in all of Mr. Bellow's later writing. The response of critics was remarkably favorable, and a bright future was predicted for the young novelist. The next novel was The Victim (1947), an important study of urban loneliness, anti-Semitism, and the despair and lassitude prevalent in American society in the 1940s. The great artistic breakthrough came in Paris, in 1948, with the conception of and beginning of work on Mr. Bellow's wildly exuberant Adventures of Augie March (published in 1953), a picaresque tale of a tough Chicago kid's coming of age. Mr. Bellow had learned that he could throw off the constraints of the form of the novel as it was then understood and was free to write whatever he wished. Equally miraculous, the language he needed to fit the subject-rich and muscular-was immediately available to him. The opening lines of Augie became justly famous:

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 not so innocent.

The manifest is the author's as well as the eponymous hero's. It took considerable nerve to issue it. At the time-in the late 1940s and early 1950s when Augie was composed-it was not unreasonable to believe, as Mr. Bellow clearly did, that a child of immigrant Russian Jews had to prove his authority, credentials, and fitness to write books in English. "Somewhere," he recalled,

in my Jewish and immigrant blood there were conspicuous traces of a doubt as to whether I had the right to practice the writer's trade. . . . [I]t wasn't Fielding, it wasn't Herman Melville who forbade me to write, it was our own Wasp establishment, represented mainly by Harvard-trained professors.

All questions about fitness were answered by Augie. It was a bestseller and won the National Book Award.

Mr. Bellow's third novel, Seize the Day (1956), is a masterpiece. A very short work, it is the opposite of Augie, and Mr. Bellow consistently claimed not to like it. Certainly in terms of subject matter, scope, and style it had marked a regression from the euphoria and color of Chicago and Mexico (the other site of Augie's adventures) to the grisaille of the Upper West Side. Precision and control had taken the place of joyously bold gestures; the dourness recalled The Dangling Man and The Victim. As contrasted with Augie, the "freest of the free," the protagonist of Seize the Day, Tommy Wilhelm, is indeed a loser-a quality that Mr. Bellow came to hold against him-but he is an anti-hero who breaks the reader's heart and cannot be expunged from memory. His lethally indifferent father and Doctor Tamkin, the sinister con man, are equally brilliant creations. Unlike the first four novels (and alone in this respect in Bellow's oeuvre), Henderson the Rain King (1959), which came next, has no Jewish theme, its protagonist being a gentile multimillionaire embarked on a zany African quest. Like Augie it is an unconstrained, rowdy, and comical work. Another masterpiece, ranking even higher than Seize the Day, followed in 1964: Herzog, a novel almost without plot built around the eponymous cuckolded professor who addresses urbi et orbi letters of dazzling erudition and wit until exhausted at last he falls silent in his hammock and contemplates the stars. Herzog has remained Mr. Bellow's "biggest" book; it was on the bestseller list of the New York Times for more than a year.

Already in Henderson, Mr. Bellow began to fire salvo after salvo at modernism, social sciences, Rousseau and the Romantics, Nietzsche, and Freud. During the 1960s, his positions with regard to issues of gender and race became increasingly neo-conservative if not reactionary, as reflected in his essays and public pronouncements as well as his later fiction. Thus Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), set in New York, is a Swiftian skewering of the young, women, blacks, and, more generally, the lower classes by an erudite, elegant, and often improbable Holocaust survivor. With Humboldt's Gift (1975), which followed, Mr. Bellow came back to his Chicago materials in a deeply moving and yet hilarious meditation on the forces that destroy an American artist. Mr. Bellow's friend, le poète maudit Delmore Schwartz, is personified by Humboldt and contrasted with the irrepressible narrator, Charlie Citrone, a spiritual brother of Augie. Philip Roth has aptly described Humboldt as "the screwiest of the euphoric going-every-way out-andout comic novels . . . that Bellow emits more or less periodically between his burrowing through the dark down-in-the-dumps novels, such as The Victim,' 'Seize the Day,' and 'The Dean's December.'"

A year after Humboldt came the Nobel. Defying precedent, Mr. Bellow continued to produce substantial work, including The Dean's December (1982), The Bellarosa Connection, and The Actual, at the same time keeping up his habitual production of essays and stories. There is no doubt that in the novels that followed The Dean's December, he was emitting, as he put it, a shorter signal. However, those who thought that his creative powers had ebbed were proved wrong by Ravelstein, published in 2000, when Mr. Bellow had reached the age of eighty-five. This fully achieved ribald book is an electrifying and complex elegy to his close friend, Allan Bloom, the conservative philosopher who had died of AIDS, and a hymn to male friendship.

"[A]nd my ending is despair," are words spoken by the magician king as he leaves the stage. Ravelstein was Mr. Bellow's farewell, the decline and death of Allan Bloom being juxtaposed to Mr. Bellow's own real-life brush with death following a severe case of food poisoning. Mr. Bellow's biographer, James Atlas, having attended at the end of 2002 a reading by Mr. Bellow from Ravelstein at the New York YWHA, his last public appearance, reported that, after forty-five minutes, Mr. Bellow "glanced up and murmured, 'That's all I've got.' He dipped his head in a strangely formal bow and trudged off the stage."

American and Chicago born-who is to gainsay him?-Mr. Bellow was also an improbable child of the Enlightenment. He endowed his protagonists, especially Herzog, Sammler, and Citrone, with intelligence as powerful and lively as his own, and domesticated in America's soil the philosophical novel, in which the intense play of ideas counts for more than the plot. It is too soon to discern Mr. Bellow's progeny among American novelists. Probably he hasn't any, although every novelist writing in English is his heir and shares in the bountiful richness and freedom of expression that is his heritage. Had Mr. Bellow wished to claim an ancestor among novelists other than the great nineteenthcentury Russians he admired so deeply, Diderot, as the author of Jacques le fataliste, would have been an apt choice.