Remembering Bellow

Saul Bellow was quite simply the reigning master of American fiction during the second half of 20th century, writes Binay Kumar.

- Saul Bellow's "Herzog" (1964)

It is difficult not to turn our attention to Pope John Paul II this week as he lies in state in the St Peter's basilica in Rome. On second thoughts, however, we shall postpone our discussions of his great legacy to next week and focus for now on another man whose passing away yesterday is an equally big loss to the world of literature, if not humanity. I am referring to Saul Bellow, the American Nobel Laureate who passed away Tuesday at the age of 89.

It is no exaggeration to say that we cannot think of American literature in the second half of the 20th century without him as its foremost pillar. He was quite simply the reigning master of American fiction, the most acclaimed novelist and playwright of that period.

Along with Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud and other writers of the postwar era, Bellow took Jewish writing out of its ghetto into the American mainstream. As Roth noted in his tribute yesterday, "The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists - William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century."

Bellow was prolific in his output and continued to publish until few years back. In 2000, at the age of 84, he produced "Ravelstein," one of his most accomplished works in years. The Nobel Prize for literature, awarded to him in 1976, was the ultimate recognition for a an artist whose contributions also won him three National Book Awards, a record unmatched by any, a Pulitzer Prize and the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Delivering the acceptance speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony on December 12, 1976, Bellow summed up his vision in these words: "The essence of our real condition, the complexity, the confusion, the pain of it is shown to us in glimpses, in what Proust and Tolstoy thought of as "true impressions". The value of literature lies in these intermittent "true impressions". A novel moves back and forth between the world of objects, of actions, of appearances, and that other world from which these "true impressions" come and which moves us to believe that the good we hang onto so tenaciously - in the face of evil, so obstinately - is no illusion"

Is there really a connection between the primacy of human feelings and its manifestations on the world stage? Is it ludicrous to make such a jump from something so seemingly personal-a conflict that is confined to one's own heart and mind-to conflicts that can have public faces? Bellow would say "no, it isn't".

"If you don't give literature a decisive part to play in your existence, then you haven't got anything but a show of culture," Bellow once said in an interview.
His immigrant experience shaped much of Bellow's inner psyche. Born in Quebec to Russian immigrant parents on July 10, 1915, and smuggled at the age of 9 across the Great Lakes into Chicago across the border from Canada, it wasn't until several years later when he tried enlisting in the U.S. Army that he discovered he had been an illegal immigrant all this time, and had to go back "home" to start applying all over again. This deep insecurity is the subtext of his writings sharply focused on in Dangling Man and The Victim. His genius lay in sculpting hope out of hopelessness, and a spiritual promise in pain.
On another note, his prolificacy also extended to his personal life. Bellow married five times and at the ripe old age of 84, fathered his first daughter, Naomi, by Janis Freedman, his fifth wife, who was 43 years his junior. He had three grown sons by earlier marriages. Even at that age, his indomitable spirit was well in place. Commenting on the birth of his daughter, the grand old man quipped, "If I didn't succeed at first, I'll try again."

As Dan Cryer noted in his comments, "What made Bellow great was his mastery of a unique combination of audacious comedy, street-smart urban wit and dazzling intellectuality. He created fiction that was earthy and rambunctiously wiseacre, yet large-spirited and unabashedly cerebral, pure pleasure that enticed the reader into the realms of philosophical speculation."