Showing posts with label Saul Bellow. Show all posts

Friday, September 27, 2024

August Beach Reads

Don’t let your iPhones overheat in the sun. Read a book instead.

MARCO ROTH,

DAVID MIKICS,

AND

PARK MACDOUGALD

AUGUST 14, 2023

MARCO ROTH

Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

How does Saul Bellow’s 1959 novel—part satire, part fable—about an all-American goy losing and finding himself in a mostly magical Africa hold up? Bellow’s tribal princes, queens, and advisers would not be out of place in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Wakanda, nor, for that matter, at Leo Strauss’ University of Chicago seminars on Machiavelli and humanism. Crucially, for Bellow, the path to full humanity leads through a series of vivid, unsparing encounters with various animals: cows, frogs, lions, pigs. Henderson’s rambling story of an old carnival bear and a roller coaster—possibly the truest details in the novel apart from Bellow’s descriptions of flying over Egypt—crowns the book with a devastating coda.

“Love Between Writers” / Saul Bellow and Bette Howland

Bette Holland

“Love Between Writers”: Saul Bellow and Bette Howland

By Jacob Howland
Summer 2019

You and I are able to track each other in words to perfection. I guess that’s what love is between writers. Or perhaps what love is—period.

—Saul Bellow, March 30, 1990

My mother, the writer Bette Howland, kept among her possessions an old postcard with a photo of stained glass from Canterbury Cathedral. The 13th-century “Miracle Glass” shows men carrying shovels and digging into the ground. “WILLIAM OF GLOUCESTER buried beneath a fall of earth, is dug up alive,” the card’s legend explains. William had been excavating an aqueduct when the accident occurred; St. Thomas of Canterbury appeared in a woman’s dream to tell her that he still lived. Bearing a Southampton postmark of July 8, 1968, the card is inscribed as follows:

Book Review 073 / The Adventures of Augie March / Saul Bellow’s first novels

Finding Augie March

Saul Bellow’s first novels

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 73 / The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)

September 28, 2003

We tend to think of young artists as a wild and crazy bunch, but often they are the opposite—depressed, grouchy people who sit around wondering why all those older artists are getting the grants and the contracts. Their work bespeaks their mood. They imitate their elders, and not admiringly, but grudgingly, in the spirit of “I can do it, too.” In fact, they can’t do it, because they don’t really believe in it, but neither can they do what they’re meant to do, because the moment of courage has not yet come. And so, for a while, they produce tight, hard things.

Saul Bellow's Heart by Greg Bellow / Digested read

Saul Bellow's Heart by Greg Bellow – digested read

John Crace reduces the memoir written by the son of the American literary titan to a reputation-changing 600 words

John Crace
Sun 14 Apr ‘13 17.00 BST

n the painful days after Saul's death, I resolved to keep my grief private. But as I listened to yet more parvenus, such as the in-all-senses-diminutive Martin Amis, seek to claim my father as their own, I felt a need to put a halt to the absurd conflation of literary figure and family man. These self-appointed, self-serving narratives described a deified figure I didn't recognise. Saul was an intensely private man who would have hated to see his shortcomings ruthlessly exposed. But tough: he was a mean, cantankerous old sod, and it's about time I got some emotional and financial payback.

As a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist of some 40 years standing, you might have expected me to adopt a holistic approach to understanding my father. But I have found it much more helpful to divide his life into two: the Young Saul, who loved me greatly and was generally a good bloke; and the Old Saul, who found it hard to show how much he loved me and was generally a bit of a shit. This way I don't need to make sense of why he appeared to have a complete personality change. Or, indeed, examine the more troubling possibility that he never did care for me, and that I and the rest of his family were inconvenient physical manifestations of his narcissism.

The Young Saul was born in Canada in 1915 and, though his father was consistently abusive and his brothers bullied him, he came to look on his early years as "a very paradise", as even the most simplistic reading of Herzog will show you. The Bellow family moved to the coalyards of Chicago in 1924, where a loss of innocence ignited Saul's desire to be a world-famous writer; when he met Anita, they embarked on the Gypsy Years.

Saul loved Anita greatly, though his leftwing views forced him to rebel against petit-bourgeois monogamy by shagging almost every woman he met. I was born in 1944, and I clearly remember him saying: "My life is complete now I have a first-born son" as I appeared from the cosy, warm embrace of Anita's womb. Following my appearance, Saul's literary genius took wing and with The Adventures of Augie March he found a wealth and success that allowed him to leave my mother and have sex with even more women.

Before long, Saul had got remarried, divorced, remarried again, divorced again, remarried yet again and divorced yet again. "The reason I see so little of you," he would say, "is that my love for you is so intense that were we to meet more often my heart would explode with joy." How I enjoyed the 10 minutes I spent with Young Saul when he reluctantly invited me to Oslo for the Nobel prize ceremony – an award he never felt he deserved – and it is with great fondess I recall us discussing the failure of his Reichian therapy.

Such was the greatness and intensity of Saul's writing during this period (and it was with great reluctance that he changed the title of Greg's Gift to Humboldt's Gift) that he failed to notice I had got married and had children. Yet still I felt a unique filial bond between myself and the Young Saul. All this changed when he met Janis, a mere teenager with whom he had a daughter. Now he became Old Saul, a bitter and twisted, demented, mean old conservative who cast aside his old family and in whose last book, Ravelstein, it is clear that all his works were nothing but thinly disguised second-rate autobiography, a lashing out at all those whom he truly loved.

Yet, somehow, now I have completed my own book I feel reconnected to the father whom I truly loved and who loved me more than anyone else. The hatred and misunderstanding is past. The skies are clear. I forgive you, Father, for you know not what you did.

Digested read, digested: Oedipus Schmoedipus.

THE GUARDIAN

DIGEST READ / KISS
Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013 by Michel Houellebecq

The Poems of TS Eliot / The Annotated Texts, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue

The Letters of TS Eliot: Volume 4 1928-1929 (ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden)

Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney

DIGEST READ / DRAGON

1999

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling

2000

Mirror Image by Danielle Steel

Marrying the Mistress by Joanna Trollope

2013
Saul Bellow's Heart by Greg Bellow / Digested read

2016

Maestra by LS Hilton

The Voyeur's Motel by Gay Talese

The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1966-1989

2017

The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young

Love from Boy / Roald Dahl's Letters to his Mother

Letters to the Lady Upstairs by Marcel Proust

Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Origin by Dan Brown

Over and Out by Henry Blofeld

The Vanity Fair Diaries 1983-1992 by Tina Brown

Rude by Katie Hopkins

How to Stay Alive by Bear Grylls

Monday, February 9, 2015

The 100 best novels / No 73 / The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)

The 100 best novels

No. 73

The Adventures of Augie March

by Saul Bellow

(1953)

In the long-running hunt to identify the great American novel, Saul Bellow’s picaresque third book frequently hits the mark. Robert McCrum explains why

Robert McCrum
The Guardian, 9 February 2015

rom the get-go – “I am an American, Chicago-born” – this turbo-charged masterpiece declares itself to be a heavyweight contender; and for some,The Adventures of Augie March is a knockout. Delmore Schwartz called it “a new kind of book”. Forget Huckleberry Finn (nodded at in the title); forget Gatsby; even forget Catcher in the Rye. This, says Martin Amis, one of many writers under Bellow’s spell, is “the Great American Novel. Search no further”. Well, maybe.

In retrospect, both JD Salinger (no 72 in this series) and Saul Bellow, who declared their originality at the beginning of the 1950s, stand head-and-shoulders above a rising generation of young contenders, from Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal to Kurt Vonnegut, and James Salter. No question: the great American postwar fiction boom starts here.

Augie March opens in 1920s Chicago during the Great Depression. Augie is “the by-blow of a travelling man”, and his adventures, loosely patterned after Bellow’s experience, are picaresque. This odyssey, in Bellow’s own words, traces “a widening spiral that begins in the parish, ghetto, slum and spreads into the greater world”, much as his own life did. Augie finds his feet through his engagement with a kind of America that had not been run to earth in fiction before. A sequence of brilliant set pieces narrates the footloose Augie’s upward drift. He becomes a butler, a shoe salesman, a paint-seller, a dog-groomer and a book thief, even a trades union shop steward.

He also revels, like Dickens, in some memorable characters – Augie’s Jewish mother; Einhorn, the fixer and surrogate father – and some seductive women: Sophie Geratis, Thea Fenchel (and her eagle, Caligula), and finally, Stella, whom Augie will marry. It’s a long book, some 500 pages. “It takes some of us a long time,” says Augie, “to find out what the price is of being in nature, and what the facts are about your tenure.” Quite so.

Augie enlists in the merchant marine during the second world war. When his ship, the Sam MacManus, is torpedoed, Augie experiences a long quasi-surreal episode on board a lifeboat in which he confronts matters of life and death in the company of Basteshaw, a weirdo. In the end, with persistent questions about identity and reality unresolved, Augie, the “travelling man”, declares himself to be “a sort of Columbus”, one who discovered a new world but who may himself be a flop. “Which,” as Bellow jokes in a brilliant closing line, “doesn’t prove there was no America”.

A Note on the Text

Saul Bellow published his first novel, Dangling Man in 1944, followed by The Victim (1947) – two works of fiction that reflect his marginal status as a Canadian Jew living in the US – but did not find his true voice as a novelist until he wroteThe Adventures of Augie March. Later, looking back, he recalled: “I was turned on like a fire hydrant in summer.” He had begun to write the novel in Paris, having won a Guggenheim fellowship. According to his first biographer, James Atlas, from whom he became estranged, Bellow found the spectacle of water flooding down a Parisian street to be the inspiration for the “cascade of prose” that gushed after his famous opening line: “I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that sombre city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way…”

He was, he said, revelling in “the relief of turning away from mandarin English and putting my own accents into the language. My earlier books had been straight and respectable. But in Augie March I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence. Something like a fusion between colloquialism and elegance.” Philip Roth, who would sometimes struggle with Bellow’s influence, noted that this new style “combined literary complexity with conversational ease”. It was, like many literary innovations, from Mark Twain onwards, a high-low hybrid, and linked, in Roth’s words, “the idiom of the academy with the idiom of the streets (not all streets – certain streets)”.

The great, unfulfilled, hope of American fiction in the 1930s, Delmore Schwartz, put this explicitly: “For the first time in fiction America’s social mobility has been transformed into a spiritual energy which is not doomed to flight, renunciation, exile, denunciation, the agonised hyper-intelligence of Henry James, or the hysterical cheering of Walter Whitman.” Other critics, notably James Wood, have celebrated something equally universal – “the beauty of this writing, its music, its high lyricism, its firm but luxurious pleasure in language itself”.

The Adventures of Augie March encountered only one serious pre-publication critique (from Bellow’s British editor, John Lehmann, the celebrated founder ofPenguin New Writing). The upshot of this clash was Bellow’s determination to prevail. And he did. Augie March spoke directly to the new postwar generation, and would go on to influence writers as various as Cormac McCarthy, Martin Amis, Jonathan Safran Foer and Joseph Heller.

Bellow’s third novel was published by the Viking Press in 1953. In 1976 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, which identified this book as an important “novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age…”