A Laureate for Saul Bellow

Why should writers wish to be rated --seeded--like tennis players? Handicapped like racehorses? What an epitaph for a novelist: "I won all the polls!"

Long before the Swedish Academy chose him as the seventh* American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, Saul Bellow was in a fine position to judge--and make light of--official literary honors. He had won most of them already: honorary degrees, citations from governments and academies, three National Book Awards (a record), and, last May, a Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt 's Gift. At a brief press conference after the Nobel announcement, Bellow remarked characteristically, "I'm glad to get it. I could live without it." His fellow countrymen appeared more pleased. Not only had the Nobel Committee picked a man whose literary works many Americans have read in the original, its choice had put an international imprimatur on an opinion that more and more U.S. readers and critics have come to share: Saul Bellow is the most accomplished home-grown writer at work in America today.

Constant Questions. Yet Bellow's progress as a literary figure has in some ways been circuitous. Readers who like the raging energy and fantasy of Henderson the Rain King (1959) do not always thrill to the hothouse introspection of Herzog (1964). Those who can get along with the serious, well-mannered author of Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) are likely to gasp at the wisecracking Borscht Belt comic who hoofs onstage during parts of Humboldt's Gift. The picaresque hero of The Adventures of Augie March (1953) is a brash New World kid, while a wise Old World man fills the title role of Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970).

Beneath the extraordinary range of Bellow's fiction, unifying his stretch from New World quest to Old World criticisms, from Rousseau to reason, lie several constant questions. How can a man lead a good life? What use is the new age's vaunted individuality if it turns society into a jungle and leaves human beings cut off from each other and the past? When he is advised to be himself, young Augie March replies: "I have always tried to become what I am. But what if what I am by nature isn't good enough?" Mr. Sammler, the aging survivor of European culture, contemplates the result of barely two centuries of galloping individualism: "The idea of the uniqueness of the soul. An excellent idea. A true idea. But in these forms? In these poor forms? Dear God!"

Not surprisingly, Bellow himself is the literal heir to two cultures. He was born in a suburb of Montreal in 1915, the fourth and last child of Russian Jews who had just emigrated from St. Petersburg. His father, an educated man, became a small-time trader and, in Bellow's phrase, "a sharpie circa 1905 in Russia." In 1924 the family settled on Division Street in Chicago; Bellow thus grew up speaking English, Hebrew, Yiddish and French. Twice-removed from the land of his parents--and a Jew in the predominantly Protestant Midwest --Bellow had good reason to wonder where in the world he belonged.

He read steadily, and with some high school classmates formed a loose literary circle, meeting on Friday nights to read their works aloud and argue. He received a B.S. degree from Northwestern in 1937, then began graduate work in anthropology, a field considered academically daring at the time. Anthropology, Bellow said later, "gave young Jews a greater sense of freedom from the surrounding restrictions." Before the year was out he quit, determined to devote his time to writing.

The array of celebrated American writers then was distinctly non-Jewish: Faulkner, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passes, Thomas Wolfe. Bellow's gradual emergence as a notable writer, which began in the 1940s, helped change all that--and opened the door to the phenomenal number of American Jewish writers who have since appeared. Bellow long ago grew weary of being pegged as the godfather of a Jewish literary revolution. "Over the years," he says, "I have been faintly amused at the curious linkage of Bellow, Malamud and Roth. Somehow it always reminds me of Hart, Schaffner & Marx."

He is on record as finding the label Jewish writer "intellectually vulgar, unnecessarily parochializing and utterly without value." Yet it would be wrong to ignore the massive influence that Bellow's ethnic talents have had on literature. His adaptation of Yiddish rhythms to English prose created a brilliantly supple mode of comic speech. Herzog talks it ("With this I think we can all sympathize"). He also weighs in with an Orthodox suspicion of womankind that crops up constantly in Bellow's work: "The man who shops from woman to woman, though his heart aches with idealism, with the desire for pure love, has entered the female realm."

Herzog might well be speaking for his author. Bellow has been married four times and had a son by each of his first three wives. But that is the only "modern" thing about his life. Even though the success of Herzog finally brought him financial security, he lives modestly and is reluctant to promote himself in public. The only thing he entertains lavishly is unfashionable opinion. At a time when plot and simple declarative prose are denigrated by critics, he has gone out of his way to praise the awkward realism of Theodore Dreiser: "I have great respect for his simplicities and I think they are worth more than much that has been praised as high art in the American novel."

Self-Deluders. Bellow's chief heresy has been committed against the century-old tradition of despair in Western literature. "I am quite prepared to admit that being habitual liars and self-deluders, we have good cause to fear the truth," he told the Paris Review, "but I'm not at all ready to stop hoping. There may be some truths which are, after all, our friends in the universe."

Bellow does not trade on hope in his writing. In fact, Bellow is one of the few serious novelists who have pleased precisely by not giving the public what it thinks it wants. The alternative, he says, is to "risk their displeasure by telling them what is really in their hearts and hope that, somehow or other, one will get through."

* The others: Sinclair Lewis (1930), Eugene O'Neill (1936), Pearl Buck (1938), William Faulkner (1949), Ernest Hemingway (1954). John Steinbeck (1962).

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