The Adventures of Augie March (1953), by Saul Bellow

 

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.

Herzog (2015), by Saul Bellow

 

Within a page or two of opening Saul Bellow's masterpiece Herzog, I began to wonder how I might write about it.  It has an authoritative introduction by Phillip Roth, it's a classic of American literature, it's by a famous Nobel Laureate (i.e. distinct from the obscure ones we've never heard of) and it's listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.  What could I possibly say about it that hasn't been said before?

So I've decided not to write in my usual format.  If you want to know what the book is about, visit Goodreads or Wikipedia.  And here is an excerpt from 1001 Books as well:

The novel that made Saul Bellow's name as a literary best-seller is a comedy of manners and ideas, loss and partial redemption.  The cuckolded academic Moses Herzog is neurotically restless, a pathological condition that notably manifests itself in his habit of composing unsent letters to the great and good of past and present times.

[...]

We follow Herzog's musings on the events that have brought him to this state, most notably his amatory betrayal at the hands of his former friend Valentine Gersbach, and we follow him physically as he heads into Chicago for an abortive attempt at bloody revenge.  (p.565)

On the back of this centenary edition, there's a quotation from Dave Eggars, and what he says there is true: there is something to make a reader stop and think on almost every page.  So I'm just going to share my thoughts about pages 102-3, which stopped me in my tracks...

What Bellow is on about on these two pages is the burden of selfhood and self-development. 

Herzog was first published in 1964, and it was not long after Hannah Arendt had published her ground-breaking book The Human Condition (1958) and even more relevant to the preoccupations of this novel, her report called Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). The website Brain Pickings summarises her point that while acts of evil can mushroom into monumental tragedies, the individual human perpetrators of those acts are often marked not with the grandiosity of the demonic but with absolute mundanity.  And whether or not Arendt's thinking is misunderstood, it seems to have triggered a great deal of post-Holocaust soul-searching about the possibilities of evil in all of us.  In Herzog, Herzog the character is constantly reflecting on his own nature and moral qualities - and in this part of the novel the reader finds him not only exhausted by the struggle to interrogate his own being but also resentful of the quest.

He knows himself a failure in need of a cure:

But this was becoming the up-to-date and almost conventional way of looking at any single life.  In this view, the body itself, with its two arms and vertical length, was compared to the Cross, on which you knew the agony of consciousness and separate being.

He interprets what has happened to him (his wife Madeleine's betrayal) and his lawyer Sandor's advice as...

a collective project, himself participating, to destroy his vanity and his pretensions to a personal life so that he might disintegrate and suffer and hate, like so many others, not on anything so distinguished as a cross, but down in the mire of post-Renaissance, post-humanistic, post-Cartesian dissolution, next door to the Void. 

One modern idea that excites his terrible little heart is that

you must sacrifice your poor, squawking, niggardly individuality - which may be nothing anyway (from an analytic viewpoint) but a persistent infantile megalomania, or (from a Marxian point of view) a stinking little bourgeois property - to historical necessity.  And to truth.  And truth is true only as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon human beings, so that if it shows anything except evil it is illusion and not truth.

 Well, #musing what do I think about this?  If we interrogate ourselves - our moral values, our actions, our beliefs about ourselves and our loved ones and the world - and we don't come to the conclusion that any and all of us have a capacity for evil, is that illusion?  Is it self-delusion?  Must that be the wrong conclusion to come to?

Herzog goes on to castigate himself:

But of course he, Herzog, predictably bucking such trends, had characteristically, obstinately, defiantly, blindly but without sufficient courage or intelligence tried to be a marvellous Herzog, a Herzog who perhaps clumsily, tried to live out marvellous qualities vaguely comprehended.  Granted he had gone too far, beyond his talents and his powers, but this was the cruel difficulty of a man who had strong impulses, even faith, but lacked clear ideas.  What if he failed? Did that really mean there was no faithfulness, no generosity, no sacred quality? Should he have been a plain, unambitious Herzog? No. And Madeleine would never have married such a type.

Because he's in such emotional pain, he goes on to say with bitterness that she only wanted an 'ambitious' Herzog in order to trip him, bring him low, knock him sprawling and kick out his brains.  But his question lingers.

Did that really mean there was no faithfulness, no generosity, no sacred quality?

Reading this in the 21st century, post 9/11 and when there are people - mostly men so shockingly young - who are perpetrating evil even on innocent children and people of their own faith, it's easy to lose faith in the fundamental goodness of human beings.  In the middle of the 20th century when Hannah Arendt was writing her books and intellectuals like Bellow were trying to make sense of a world that had changed irrevocably, the world had been shocked by the Holocaust and the crimes of Stalin (denounced by Khrushchev in 1956).  Yet Bellow, a Jew himself, is in Herzog asserting that at the personal level there could be 'faithfulness',  'generosity', and a 'sacred quality' to human interaction, and that there must be 'obstinate', 'defiant' people who - with or without 'sufficient courage or intelligence' try to be marvellous. 

It's a fundamentally optimistic view of the world, expressed in an exuberant characterisation and an often amusing plot.

Author: Saul Bellow
Title: Herzog
Introduction by Philip Roth
Publisher: Penguin, 2015
ISBN: 9780143107675
Source: Kingston Library 

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

 

 

 

Bellow, Saul "Humboldt's Gift"

1975

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read

I try to read the latest Nobel Prize winner for Literature and at least one former one every year. This was my fourth one since the last laureate was announced. I still need to get a copy of one of Abdulrazak Gurnah's books before the next announcements in October.

Apparently, this book didn't just get the Pulitzer Prize, it is also said that it won Saul Bellow the Nobel Prize. In his acceptance speech, he called on writers to be beacons for civilization and awaken it from intellectual torpor.

An intense book, there is so much to talk about. The relationship between Charlie Citrine, our protagonist, and his friend Von Humboldt Fleisher, a renowned author who takes Charlie under his wings. Whilst he is only at the beginning of this career, he tells us this story from the point of view when it has more or less ended.

When I was reading the book, I'd been wondering whether this might have been a biography, or at least partly a biography. I then found out, that this is a "roman à clef" (French for novel with a key), a novel about real-life events that is overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction. Aha! In this case, it's about the author's friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz with Bellow being Citrine. Well, I'd never heard of Delmore Schwartz and now I have learned a lot about him (not just form the book, I also looked him up on Google and Wikipedia.) Very interesting, read the information in the links.

While this is probably a good account of Bellow's and Schwartz' relationship, the book also tries to come to terms with the constant changes in the world, especially in culture. The difference between the ideal world and the real one is a big topic in this book that was only supposed to be a short story but then ended up with almost 500 pages.

Brilliant storytelling with lots of fields covered: literature, culture, divorce, relationships, parenting, alcoholism, madness … and also all types of characters from all levels social classes, including a Mafia boss. Oh, and there's quite a bit of humour in the story, as well.

The Times mentions that "Bellows is one of the most gifted chroniclers of the Western World alive today." Apart from the fact that he has passed away in the meantime, I totally agree. So, if you're in for a great read, this is worth picking up.

From the back cover:

"For many years, the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charlie Citrine, a young man inflamed with a love for literature, were the best of friends. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and Charlie's life has reached a low point: his career is at a standstill, and he's enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman and involved with a neurotic mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the grave, bestowing upon Charlie an unexpected legacy that may just help him turn his life around."

Saul Bellow received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976 "for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work" and the Pulitzer Prize for "Humboldt's Gift" also in 1976.

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

Original Post on "Let's Read".

Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

Originally reviewed by Edith LaGraziana

on Edith's Miscellany

The experience of the holocaust marked forever the lives of the survivors, no matter how much they would have liked it to be differently. Many of them will have pushed aside all thoughts of the past because they couldn’t bear the pain any more and they had to concentrate on building a future from virtually nothing. And yet, the indescribable suffering that they had seen and endured must have lingered on in their souls adding subconscious overtones to their actions, thoughts and ways of life. This is also the genesis of Mr. Sammler’s Planet as brought to literary life by Saul Bellow, the 1976 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the summer of 1969, Artur Sammler is a holocaust survivor well in his seventies who lives in New York City and indulges in intellectual musings on the increasingly vulgar and brutal comedy of modern life that surrounds him.

Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Québec, Canada, in June 1915, but the family moved to Chicago, USA, in 1924. He studied sociology and anthropology at Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin, before he became a naturalised American and joined the Merchant Marine during World War II. In 1944, Saul Bellow brought out his first novel Dangling Man, but after the war he started his long career as a university lecturer interrupted only by some time in Paris thanks to a Guggenheim fellowship and by numerous travels. Along with his work he kept writing long as well as short fiction, some non-fiction and even a play. The most notable of his works are the novels The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), and Humboldt’s Gift (1975). “For the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work” the Swedish Academy awarded him the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature. The most important among his later novels are The Dean’s December (1982), More Die of Heartbreak (1987) and Ravelstein (2000). Saul Bellow died in Brookline, Massachusetts, USA, in April 2005.
The morning in summer 1969 begins like any other on  Mr. Sammler’s Planet or more precisely in his room in the apartment of his late wife’s widowed niece in New York City. Sammler is past seventy and came to the USA with his daughter Shula two years after World War II. The family had gotten trapped in Poland while liquidating the estate of his deceased father-in-law, so instead of returning home to England, Shula had had to hide in a Catholic convent and Sammler had fallen into the hands of Nazi slayers with his wife Antonina. His world had changed.

“[W]hen Antonina was murdered. When he himself underwent murder beside her. When he and sixty or seventy others, all stripped naked and having dug their own grave, were fired upon and fell in. Bodies upon his own body. Crushing. His dead wife nearby somewhere. Struggling out much later from the weight of corpses, crawling out of the loose soil. Scraping on his belly. Hiding in a shed. Finding a rag to wear. Lying in the woods many days.”

Sammler feels that he lasted rather than survived, and yet, friends and family ascribe to him the authority of a judge or a priest. Financially, the well-educated Polish Jew who lived with his family in London between the wars writing for Polish periodicals now completely depends on the generosity of his wealthy nephew, the surgeon Arnold “Elya” Gruner, who brought him and Shula to New York. Apart from occasional guest lectures that he gives at Columbia University, Sammler frequents public libraries and observes the moral decline around him. The sight of a pickpocket at work on the bus captures him.

“[…] It was a powerful event, and illicitly—that is, against his own stable principles—he craved a repetition. One detail of old readings he recalled without effort—the moment in Crime and Punishment at which Raskolnikov brought down the ax on the bare head of the old woman, […]. That is to say that horror, crime, murder, did vivify all the phenomena, the most ordinary details of experience. In evil as in art there was illumination. […]”

On another occasion the pickpocket follows him home, corners him in the lobby and exposes his genitals as a threat. Not enough with this, Sammler has to return a manuscript that his half-crazy daughter stole from an Indian scientist who envisions Moon colonies like H. G. Wells decades earlier because she is obsessed with the idea of him writing a memoir about his friendship with the famous writer in interwar London. Moreover, their benefactor is hospitalised with an aneurysm that will kill him and Shula’s violent ex-husband arrives from Israel to settle down as an artist in New York City…

From a third-person perspective and against the backdrop of the first Moon landing in July 1969,  Mr. Sammler’s Planet portrays a Holocaust survivor who observes his surroundings, i.e. his closest relations and people who just cross his path. He mentally shakes his head in incomprehension and disapproval at the increasingly loose morals that in his opinion must lead to the end of human civilisation. For a person well advanced in age his isn’t a particularly unusual reaction to changed times, but Sammler also shows a mild form of racism attributing the ongoing decline to the influence of what are to him, the European intellectual with old Jewish lineage, the primitive or barbarian ways of Africa. The black pickpocket who fascinates him so strangely is the incorporation of the prejudice that up to a point clearly echoes the demonising Nazi stereotype of Jews although, in the end, his blood restores him as a human being. Also other characters represent aspects of the growing madness that Sammler perceives all around and some of their actions are so grotesque that they make laugh. The plot is of little importance compared to Sammler’s contemplations and a powerful language always spiced with irony, if not sarcasm.

For me reading  Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow has been entertaining, even funny in part, as well as thought-provoking which is something that only few books achieve. A couple of years ago, I read the en-NOBEL-ed author’s earlier (epistolary) novel Herzog and didn’t enjoy it half as much as this one. Although so much older than myself, I found it easy to relate to the protagonist because, in the final analysis, we all live on our separate planets shaped by experiences and emotions of our own in addition to objective knowledge. Besides, nobody will deny that, at least occasionally, the people around us seem to behave like clowns in a poor comedy and the feeling that the world is doomed to go to ruin isn’t entirely strange to any of us, either. In a nutshell, it’s a novel about the human condition with a holocaust extra that deserves my recommendation.

Original post on Edith's Miscellany: 
https://edith-lagraziana.blogspot.com/2019/01/sammlers-planet-by-saul-bellow.html