Saul Bellow , 1962, Photograph /Getty Images
Twenty years ago, the year of Saul Bellow’s death, I chanced upon an unusually clean copy of Ravelstein in a ramshackle bookstall in New Delhi. India is an unexpected place to wind up reading, for the first time, this midcentury urban intellectual, comic dissector of America’s moronic inferno. But, as it happens, amidst the street chaos and the tiresome pressures of train travel and seedy hostels, I found that my irked, overstimulated soul was peculiarly receptive to the master’s comforting genius. I consumed the book in a couple of hours at a restaurant counter. I remember thinking that I would not soon forget the experience. But, hardly in my 20s at the time, I’ve wondered since what I detected in it. What did the man have to offer me, so green, so goyish? This was Bellow’s very last novel, written in his 80s. Riffing on topics of Jewishness, sickness, aging, dying, marriage, politics, history, friendship; he was a very adult sort of thinker, a mature man’s writer. Yet I was so thrilled by this that upon my return home I read all of his work, and later his essays and letters, then the multitudinous biographies, memoirs, and studies that came out in the decades following his death. Today I am that rare creature: the millennial Bellovian.
The 2000s was an era with a certain showy yet wan style in literature. David Mitchell had bumbled onto the world stage with his egregious Cloud Atlas. The Big Writers with Big Initials — George R.R. Martin, J.K. Rowling — were pumping out their wearisome commercial blockbusters. David Sedaris was eking out a drearily comic thing seemingly every year. James Wood had coined the phrase “hysterical realism,” which correctly diagnosed a certain quality of prolific and anxious postmodern melodrama in then-popular novels by Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Junot Diaz and David Foster Wallace. The barely beating heart of American poetry, gluttonized upon the empty calories of flarf, was being bashed to death by carnival-barking anti-poets Dorothea Lasky and Kenneth Goldsmith. In nonfiction, the period was profusely Gladwellian, chockablock with lightly researched volumes that claimed to easily explain world phenomena. Every other person seemed to be carrying around a copy of Freakonomics. The only books that could have been considered popular foreign lit were two memoir-travelogues written in English, Shantaram and Eat, Pray, Love, stories that cozily revealed to bourgeois fans of the midlist the soul-awakening potential of global tourism.
But it wasn’t all bad. We were still talking about what would become known as Jonathan Franzen’s only good novel, and Alan Hollinghurst had put out his masterpiece. But the general mood in publishing was big and blustery. Editors and agents were on the hunt for big voices, big names, big business. Writers like Denis Johnson were still quietly working away, but even though it won its accolades, few actually read Tree of Smoke. Norman Rush’s superb Mortals (2003) wouldn’t be identified as a classic and his best novel for many years. It was the Rowlings who were getting the attention. Harry Potter, A Song of Ice and Fire, and Eat, Pray, Love were made into films and shows — and you’re not a success in American publishing until Hollywood options you.
The readerly soul chafed in such a context. For the soul was hungry. In the 1990s and 2000s, the values and aesthetics of television appeared to have colonized contemporary literature in toto. But I, a sad young literary lad, did not want television in my literature. I wanted literature. But what was literature? Saul Bellow seemed to be it.
Bellow Politicus
The persistent cultural resistance to Bellow, who remains popularly read yet broadly under-appreciated by the taste-making classes, comes in several flavors. Over the decades he’s come to be categorized by critics as a hundred different kinds of “too much”: too much of an intellectual, too European, too comic, too academic, too Chicago, too cosmopolitan, too much the poet and the aesthete, too modernist, realist, Jewish, un-American, too inspired by the Russians — and he does contain aspects of all of those (some would say this is a wonderful thing). The most common and lasting judgement, however, is the vague conviction that he was a neoconservative and a reactionary, and that his prose carries within it the deep grammar of unregenerate chauvinism. As we know, it has become uncouth to read books by writers whose politics we suspect we should abhor, lest our minds become infected. (And Bellow was, as Slate reported earlier this year, physically violent towards his wife, Sasha.)
To this, in part, I could respond that as a younger writer and for half his life, Bellow was a Marxist and a Trotskyist. In the 1930s and 1940s, this strongly political critique was a tough intellectual and social spot to put yourself in, for it made you vulnerable to threats of violence not only from the mainstream but from Stalinists. When Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, Bellow was there and saw his corpse just hours after he died. Why do we so easily forget that the majority of his early work, including a contender for the greatest American novel of the 20th century The Adventures of Augie March, was written by an anti-capitalist and fellow traveler of the left?
Because it’s simpler, I suppose, for Bellow’s books are not easily boiled down to simplistic ideas. They’re dense and rich and long, and they play with death, humor, social realities, and so, as Bellow once wrote, instead of confronting them we “contrive somehow to avoid them.” His novels require an adventurous and, above all, a literary mind. They make infinite reference to an infinite range of notions and writers and people. They also do what Stendhal said great novels should do: they hold up a mirror in the street reflecting back both the pearlescent beauty of the skies and the muck of the mud puddles below. In Augie March, there are many such mud puddles. In one extended sequence, Bellow describes a pre-Roe abortion. The ugly tools, the politics, the emotions, the aftermath. Mimi Villars, the patient in question, is an ass-kicking figure who could only be described as a “strong female character.” He goes into great detail, the arguments for and against, and the perspective of Mimi and the qualities of the low-rent doctor who performs the procedure, even his prices and the side effects of his treatments. I’ve yet to come across such a stimulating, empathetic description of this common practice in any other novel of the 1950s. Seen in this light, Bellow was a forward thinking commentator on the then-contemporary American social scene.
Yet the best way to approach all this, in my view, is to dispel with the political claptrap altogether. To accept that Bellow, like the rest of us, was from the very beginning a complex person containing a storm of ideas, impulses, views and politics. Left, center, right — these labels as I age feel increasingly less meaningful anyhow. His novels do not admit of a political program. They do not promote candidates or political worldviews. Instead they attempt to examine, in the manner of the writers of the Russian Golden Age, certain social realities as they stand. In later books especially — especially Mr. Sammler’s Planet — he attempts to give worldviews their best representative and allow them to articulate the best argument for their case. In this way Bellow was also sometimes considered a kind of moralist.
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