It was the fall of 1975. The cover story in that week's Newsweek was about Saul Bellow, "America's Master Novelist." I had to find out who this master novelist was. Humboldt's Gift was Bellow's latest novel, the one being celebrated in that issue. Reading it was one of my first introductions to great literature. Many other experiences would follow, but Bellow, along with Thomas Wolfe, was there first.
Few American writers have enjoyed so much acclaim for such an extensive period of time as Saul Bellow (1915-2005). In his long and productive career, Bellow won a Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards and in 1976, the Nobel Prize. The post World War II era was marked by a string of ambitious novelists, all striving to reach the heights scaled by Faulkner and Hemingway. Of that generation, Bellow was the only Nobelist. But the prize was not a "ticket to one's own funeral" (as TS. Eliot dryly observed). Bellow was productive for a good quarter of a century following that honor.
Longevity helped. It secured Bellow new generations of admirers. At first, Bellow was a star novelist, more or less, of the Partisan Review crowd and later, of leading New York critics in general. That road led to favorable publicity in such mass circulation publications as Life and, on a constant basis, in the New York Times. Bellow outlived one generation of critics and found new ones, especially the British novelist Martin Amis, who declared Bellow and Vladimir Nabakov to be the twentieth century's two leading fiction writers.
To me, Bellow was America's great urban novelist. His career took off with the 1953 publication of The Adventures of Augie March, a sprawling, picturesque novel, one of several in which Chicago-Bellow's hometown-emerged more as a major character than a mere backdrop. His most important work may be Mr. Sammler's Planet, a 1970 novel about a Holocaust survivor's spare observations of late 1960s life in New York City. The creator of Augie March hadio write a novel such as Mr. Sammler's Planet. City life in The Adventures of Augie March, a novel whose action begins in the 1920s, was fascinating, exciting, and full of possibilities. By the 1960s, such venues had changed dramatically. Now urban centers had become patently uncivilized. Bellow was the one novelist to chronicle that descent. In many respects, Mr. Sammler's Planet was the perfect 1960s novel: Violent crime, promiscuity, decadence, and greed all collide with a boiling, dangerous Manhattan now serving as a main character.
In politics, Bellow considered himself to be "some kind of liberal," an old-fashioned Al Smith Democrat. In literary matters, however, he was a strong traditionalist, a man of the West, a defender of the Western canon as it was being savaged by multiculturalist malcontents. Responding to the usual grievances, Bellow, in a soon-famous quip, wondered: "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? Who is the Proust of the Papuans?" It didn't make him many friends, and even such longtime admirers as Alfred Kazin scolded the new maverick.
As a prose stylist and master of narrative fiction, Bellow can stand with other American greats: Melville, Twain, Wolfe, and Faulkner. What did he have to say? Mr. Sammler's Planet was his signature "decline of the West" novel, a theme that is an absolute imperative for any serious writer. Possibly owing to the upheaval around him, matters of the soul were paramount in his writings. Or, to borrow from Reinhold Niebuhr, the quest was how to be a moral man in an immoral society. Following Bellow's death, several critics quoted from a passage from his best-selling 1964 novel, Herzog. The new questions, he wrote, were "[how] to be a man. In a city. In a century of transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous control."
Alienation is not the entire American story-even of the past century. But it is an important one. The enormities that Bellow wrestled with might drive one to traditionalism, even if it meant sounding-and acting-like a reactionary. At times, Bellow mourned the passing of the High Middle Ages. And for decades, he lived part of the year in rural Vermont, learning the ways of self-sufficiency. As befitting a man of great ambition, family life was a struggle for Bellow, but he found contentment in his final marriage to a muchyounger former graduate student.
What Saul Bellow had to say was of great significance. And his wide-ranging works, mixing comedy, high seriousness, and deep reflection among a colorful and full-blooded cast of characters will always be an inspiration to those who read them.
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