Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005), was an acclaimed Canadian-born American writer of Jewish descent. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 and the National Medal of Arts in 1988 ^*.

He is best known for writing novels that investigate isolation, spiritual dissociation, and the possibilities of human awakening. While on a Guggenheim fellowship in Paris, he wrote most of his best-known novel, The Adventures of Augie March.

Early life

He was born Solomon (nicknamed 'Sollie') Bellows in Lachine, Quebec (now part of Montreal), shortly after his parents had emigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia. The family moved to the slums of Chicago, Illinois, the city where he received his schooling and that was to form the backdrop to many of his novels, when he was nine; Bellow's father worked there as an onion importer. His lifelong love for the Bible began at four when he learned Hebrew. A period of illness in his youth both taught him self-reliance (he was a very fit man despite his bookishness) and provided an opportunity to satisfy Bellow's hunger for reading: reportedly he decided to be a writer when he first read Uncle Tom's Cabin. John Podhoretz, a student at the University of Chicago, said that Bellow and Allan Bloom, a close friend of Bellow (see Ravelstein), 'inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air'.

Here is Podhoretz on Bellow's physical appearance (see links): 'Bellow was then 65, and even at the time was one of the best-looking men on earth—despite a set of sadly neglected teeth. (In the 1940s a Hollywood talent scout spotted Bellow’s photograph on the back flap of the dust jacket of his second novel, The Victim, and offered him a screen test.) He was neat, precise, slight and thin. He would speak for three or four minutes and when he had finished, you realised that what he had just done was spontaneously speak a beautifully written essay.'

Career

Bellow taught at the University of Minnesota, New York University, Princeton, the University of Chicago, Bard College and Boston University where he cotaught a class with James Wood ('modestly absenting himself' when it was time to discuss Seize the Day). In order to take up his appointment at Boston, Bellow relocated in 1993 from Chicago to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he died on April 5, 2005, at age 89. He is buried at the Jewish cemetery Shir he harim of Brattleboro, Vermont.

Bellow began his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago but left after two years to complete his degree not in English, but in anthropology at Northwestern University. It has been suggested that the study of anthropology had an interesting influence on his literary style.

Before Bellow started his career as a writer he wrote book reviews for ten dollars apiece. His early works earned him the reputation as one of the foremost novelists of the 20th century, and by his death he was regarded by many as the greatest living novelist in English. He was the first novelist to win the National Book Award three times. His friend and protege Philip Roth has said of him, "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." James Wood, in a eulogy of Bellow in The New Republic, wrote:

I judged all modern prose by his. Unfair, certainly, because he made even the fleet-footed—the Updikes, the DeLillos, the Roths—seem like monopode. Yet what else could I do? I discovered Saul Bellow's prose in my late teens, and henceforth, the relationship had the quality of a love affair about which one could not keep silent. Over the last week, much has been said about Bellow's prose, and most of the praise—perhaps because it has been overwhelmingly by men—has tended toward the robust: We hear about Bellow's mixing of high and low registers, his Melvillean cadences jostling the jivey Yiddish rhythms, the great teeming democracy of the big novels, the crooks and frauds and intellectuals who loudly people the brilliant sensorium of the fiction. All of this is true enough; John Cheever, in his journals, lamented that, alongside Bellow's fiction, his stories seemed like mere suburban splinters. Ian McEwan wisely suggested last week that British writers and critics may have been attracted to Bellow precisely because he kept alive a Dickensian amplitude now lacking in the English novel. But nobody mentioned the beauty of this writing, its music, its high lyricism, its firm but luxurious pleasure in language itself. ^*n truth, I could not thank him enough when he was alive, and I cannot now.Wood, James, 'Gratitude', New Republic, 00286583, 4/25/2005, Vol. 232, Issue 15

Criticism

Bellow's detractors considered his work conventional and old-fashioned, as if the author was trying to revive the 19th century European novel. The characters in his later novels did not ring true, his critics said. Herzog, Henderson, and the other "larger than life" characters in his later novels seemed to be fashioned from the author's philosophical obsessions, not from real life. His characters were seen as vehicles for his philosophical brooding or opportunities to display his erudition.

Bellow's account of his own 1975 trip to Israel, A Personal Account, was criticized by Noam Chomsky in his 1983 book the United States, Israel & the Palestinians. Bellow, Chomsky wrote, "sees an Israel where ‘almost everyone is reasonable and tolerant, and rancor against the Arabs is rare,’ where the people ‘think so hard, and so much’ as they ‘farm a barren land, industrialize it, build cities, make a society, do research, philosophize, write books, sustain a great moral tradition, and finally create an army of tough fighters.’ He has also been criticized for having praised Joan Peters's fraudulent book, From Time Immemorial, which denied the existence of the Palestinian people.

In an interview in the March 7, 1988 New Yorker, Bellow sparked a controversy when he asked, concerning multiculturalism, "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?" The taunt was seen by some as a slight against non-Western literature. Bellow at first claimed to have been misquoted. Later, writing in his defense in the New York Times, he said, "The scandal is entirely journalistic in origin ...I may be one of the few people who have read a Papuan novel... Always foolishly trying to explain and edify allcomers, I was speaking of the distinction between literate and preliterate societies. For I was once an anthropology student, you see."

In his later years, Bellow could be very curmudgeonly, as for example when he said, "California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that."

Chicago writer Studs Terkel in a 2006 interview with Stop Smiling magazine said of Bellow: "I didn't know him too well. We disagreed on a number of things politically. In the protests in the beginning of Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, when Mailer, Robert Lowell and Paul Goodman were marching to protest the Vietnam War, Bellow was invited to a sort of counter-gathering. He said, 'Of course I'll attend.' But he made a big thing of it. Instead of just saying OK, he was proud of it. So I wrote him a letter and he didn't like it. He wrote me a letter back. He called me a Stalinist. But otherwise, we were friendly. He was a brilliant writer, of course. I love Seize the Day."

Quotations

"I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterises prayer too, and the eye of the storm."

"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep."

Bibliography

On Bellow

Saul Bellow, Tony Tanner (1965) (see also his City of Words ^*)
Saul Bellow, Malcolm Bradbury (1982)
Saul Bellow: Modern Critical Views, Harold Bloom (Ed.) (1986)
Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow, Harriet Wasserman (1997)
Bellow: A Biography, James Atlas (2000)
'Even Later' and 'The American Eagle' in Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché (2001) are celebratory. The latter essay is also found in the Everyman's Library edition of Augie March.
'Saul Bellow's comic style': James Wood, The Irresponsible Self (2004).(Online extract)

External links

Nobel site with two speeches (one of which is an audio recording) & longer biography
Annotated Bibliography of Criticism by the Saul Bellow Society
JM Coetzee on the early novels
Slate's assortment of other writers' takes on Bellow, mostly eulogistic
Bellow's interview in The Paris Review

Early life

Career

Criticism

Quotations

Bibliography

Fiction

Essays

Editorialship

On Bellow

See also

Notes

External links

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Saul Bellow

Early life

Career

Criticism

Quotations

Bibliography

Fiction

Essays

Editorialship

On Bellow

See also

Notes

External links