Saul Bellow's third novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953) was the one that propelled him to fame when it won the (US) National Book Award for Fiction, and it's been on my 1001 Books I Must Read wishlist for a while, so I was quite pleased when it turned up on the display shelf at my library. (The only other Bellow I've ever read was his last novel Ravelstein, (2000) which didn't really excite me, so I hadn't exactly been hunting for Bellows to read). #TrueConfession: I borrowed it expecting not to like it very much, perhaps to eliminate it after 50 pages if it didn't engage me as Ravelstein had failed to do. How nice it is to be so wrong about a book!
The Adventures of Augie March gets its place in 1001 Books because:
This lavish, bustling narrative written in the picaresque tradition reinvents the hero as a modern day Huck Finn. Augie is a handsome and contemplative character who becomes embroiled in a series of increasingly exotic escapades. In an odyssey that takes him from Chicago to Mexico, from Europe to an open boat in the mid-Atlantic, the footloose hero is recruited to a series of crackpot scams that include book stealing, arms trading and being appointed the task of guarding Trotsky.
(1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Edited by Peter Boxall, 2001 ABC Books edition, p.475)
In the Penguin edition that I read, Christopher Hitchens hesitates in the Introduction to bestow the title of The Great American Novel, but he admires Augie March for its scope, its optimism and its principles:
... 'the universal eligibility to be noble' (eligibility connotes being elected as well as being chosen) is as potent a statement of the American dream as has ever been uttered. (p. viii)
Augie's ambition to be noble on his own terms, like his quest to be an educated man on his own terms, seems like an anachronism in the proudly ignorant amoral era of Trump, but the expression of an ideal, even though largely unrealised, seems refreshing even though the book was written more than half a century ago. The Sensational Snippet that I posted about the possibilities of sharing the great moments of nobility through reading tells us that a triumphant life can be real, even for a poor boy living in Depression era Chicago.
The nobility Augie aspires to can seem lost in the murk of what he actually does. Most of Augie's enterprises, right from when Grandma sends him out for part-time work when he's barely into his teens, involve dishonesty at the least. As a boy he creams off small amounts from a Christmas lucky-dip stall; as a man he's involved in all kinds of shonky business, though he would say that he gets manipulated into it by others. But there are moments: he stops his all-powerful brother kicking a dog; he rescues his mother from a sordid old age; and he loses the prospect of marrying a rich woman when he shoulders responsibility for a girl (who's not his girlfriend) when she needs an abortion and then it's assumed he's the father. She's a friend, and she needs support, and he doesn't just risk criminal prosecution when things go badly wrong for her, he also risks the one relationship that sustains him, the love of his brother Simon.
A critical moment occurs when he finds he admires an American eagle that won't cooperate with his girlfriend's plans for it. He's a man who keeps his thoughts very much to himself, but he can't conceal his dismay about her behaviour with the creatures she wants to exploit, and that's the catalyst for another failed relationship. We see this inclination towards nobility in extremis too, when in the Merchant Marines his ship is blown up by a torpedo and he finds himself stranded in a lifeboat with a madman. It's a gripping episode in an episodic book, probably the one that I will best remember...
The aspiration to be an educated man is curious. He has numerous opportunities to get to college, (and perhaps then to a professional career) and he doesn't take them. He could have been a teacher, but passes that up too. But he reads voraciously, and the book is full of all kinds of allusions, some of which, I bet, made the book frustrating to read in the days before we could Google "wise old man walking in empty fields", +"Netherlands painting" + "Italian gallery"... to find The Misanthrope by Pieter Bruegel the Elder...
There's an old, singular, beautiful Netherlands picture I once saw in an Italian gallery, of a wise old man walking in empty fields, pensive, while a thief behind cuts the string of his purse. The old man, in black, thinking probably of God's City, nevertheless has a foolish length of nose and is much too satisfied with his dream. But the peculiarity of the thief is that he is enclosed in a glass ball, and on the glass ball there is a surmounting cross, and it looks like the emperor's symbol of rule. Meaning that it is earthly power that steals while the ridiculous wise are in a dream about this world and the next, and perhaps missing this one, they will have nothing, neither this nor the next, so there is a sharp pain of satire in this amusing thing, and even the painted field does not have too much charm; it is a flat piece. (p. 190-1.)
This painting is held at the National Museum of Capodimonte in Naples and once I found it at Wikipedia I realised that I'd seen it before somewhere, because it's a famous painting with a moral still very relevant for our times. Vanity tries to steal from a man who wants to relinquish the world. He's not aware of the thief behind him, and he hasn't noticed the caltrops in front of him. But when he finds his purse is gone and he stumbles into those traps, he's going to have to face up to the world he lives in and is part of. He (and we) can't abandon responsibility for the world's difficulties. Like the shepherd guarding the sheep in the background, he has to do his share.
Bellow doesn't just reference paintings: Augie laments that his brother Simon had gotten hold of some English schoolboy notions of honour and that Tom Brown's Schooldays for many years had an influence we were not in a position to afford. Well, most people my age would be familiar with that book. But other allusions are not so obvious. Grandma doesn't want to read Tolstoi on religion. She didn't trust him as a family man because the countess had such trouble with him. Would I have known what this meant if I hadn't read War and Peace and Sonya by Judith Armstrong, a reimagining of Countess Sonya Tolstoy's relationship with her exasperating husband? And this one, selected at random as I write this?
School absorbed [Simon] more, and he had his sentiments anyway, a mixed extract from Natty Bumppo, Quentin Durward, Tom Brown, Clark at Kaskaskia, the messenger who brought the good news from Ratisbon, and so on, that kept him more to himself. (p. 12)
I've looked these up now that I'm online but I didn't recognise them when I was reading the book in bed and I certainly wasn't going to crank up the laptop in the middle of the night to find out. I just let them (and others) wash over me with a vague idea that I might look them up later but of course I haven't because I didn't write them down. I don't think it matters: I enjoyed the allusions I recognised and I passed on the ones I missed.
I liked this book very much, and will one day get to the rest of the Bellows listed in 1001 Books. (He's got seven novels listed in my edition). A good start to my reading year!
Author: Saul Bellow
Title: The Adventures of Augie March
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics, 2001
ISBN 9780141184869
Source: Kingston Library
© Lisa Hill
Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.
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