Part Wise Man, Part Wiseguy

By James Atlas

I am an American, Chicago born," opens Saul Bellow's early masterpiece, The Adventures of Augie March, "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." For nearly six decades, Bellow kept that vow. Dangling Man, his first novel, published in 1944, when Bellow was only 29, heralded the arrival of a new voice. Defiant, brooding, charged with a shrewd irony about our human prospects, it was a novel of ideas, a Europeanized American book.

Not a great deal happens in the novel: a cerebral, surly young man awaiting induction into the Army loiters through his days and keeps a journal filled with gnomic entries: "We are all drawn toward the same craters of the spirit--to know what we are and what we are for, to know our purpose, to seek grace." There was an originality to this insight; it was possible to live a meaningful life on one's own terms, to secularize spirituality.

I have an eidetic memory of when I first read Dangling Man, a faded Penguin edition with an orange spine. I was 14 years old, Chicago born (like Augie; his creator was actually born in Montreal and came to this country when he was 9 years old). It showed me that literature could be fabricated out of the material of common life--in my case, common Chicago life. Bellow's work, from first to last, is the biography of a place, a map of his own consciousness as it evolves against the backdrop of the bleak industrial city, with its stockyards and sooty cast-iron buildings, shrouded in a midday gloom.

Dangling Man and The Victim, the strange allegorical novel that followed, were fine apprentice novels. But it wasn't until Augie, his big and vigorous coming-of-age novel, that Bellow discovered his voice, a voice so distinctive that it would earn its own adjective: Bellovian. It combined the rhetoric of a precocious University of Chicago student with the exuberant syncopations of Chicago street talk--high and low.

Herzog, his one great commercial success--it sold 142,000 copies and spent 42 weeks on the best-seller list--is his most difficult book but also his funniest. Herzog is an academic in the midst of a nervous breakdown: his wife has left him, he wanders aimlessly from New York City to Martha's Vineyard to Chicago and finally to his ramshackle farmhouse in the Berkshires, composing letters in his head to girlfriends and ex-wives, Heidegger and Willie Sutton, the living and the dead. His last letter is to himself. "This strange organization, I know it will die. And inside--something, something, happiness ... 'Thou movest me.'"

Like most of Bellow's novels, Herzog was in essence Bellow's story: woman-crowded, it reflected his fractious marital and personal history. He married five times, engaged in spirited, sometimes acrimonious quarrels with his three sons, lovers, other writers, old friends. In order to write, he claimed, he needed to tear up his life.

His work traversed the history of his century. In the '30s, as a student at the University of Chicago, he wrote for a local Socialist journal,the Soapbox; in the '40s, he was on the fringes of theleftish Partisan Review crowd. Two decades later, he found himself at odds with the student movement, anathematized by radicals as a reactionary--the eponymous emigre intellectual of Mr. Sammler's Planet. In the late '80s, when the culture wars erupted, the Nobel laureate was forced to defend the canon of Western literature against "politically correct" students and professors eager to indict that tradition as a syllabus of dead white males. But he actually belonged to no faction, identified with no cause. Like Ijah Brodsky, the lawyer in his story Cousins, he did no marching. Not even to a different drummer, like Thoreau. No marching, period.

In the decade that I worked on Bellow's biography, I often rode around Chicago with him in his olive green Range Rover. It was a joy to see the city through his eyes. One day we drove over to an apartment on the Northwest Side where he'd lived as a child, and loitered in front of a burgundy-brick three-flat with a concrete stoop and a tiny yard surrounded by necklace-like chains. We stood on the cracked sidewalk as if contemplating a shrine.

In a memoir of growing up in Chicago, Bellow described listening to one of Roosevelt's fireside chats on a summer evening at the height of the Depression: "Just as memorable to me," he wrote, "was to learn how long clover flowers could hold their color in the dusk." Politics was for politicians. Bellow's job was to observe the world around him and make us see its beauty. o

James Atlas is the author of Bellow: A Biography and, most recently, of My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale