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Canadian-born American novelist and educator Saul Bellow is known for his insightful, often humorous considerations of contemporary culture. He came to prominence in the 1950s. In his fiction Bellow draws heavily from his heritage as the son of Jewish emigrants from Russia. Many of his works concern protagonists trying to find meaning and order in a dehumanized world. This 1988 profile from Current Biography recounts the struggles of Bellow’s youth and his development as a novelist.
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When President Ronald Reagan presented the National Medal of Arts, awarded to those who have enriched the cultural life of the nation, to Saul Bellow in August 1988, it was the latest in a stream of honors that the man whom many consider America's finest living writer has received over a period of some thirty-five years. Bellow is one of the few American novelists who has consistently produced work of enduring quality over a sustained period of time. A Nobel laureate, admired for his wit and erudition, the force of his ideas, his craftsmanship, storytelling ability, and comic gifts, Bellow has devoted himself in his writings to the effort of keeping the positive aspects of the human spirit alive in the face of the destructive and dehumanizing forces of modern life. 'In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul,' he commented in an article in the New York Times Book Review (March 8, 1987). 'It may be difficult to find.…But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves—to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make final judgments, and put everything together.'
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Saul Bellow was born on June 10, 1915 (his birth date was officially recorded as July 10, 1915) in Lachine, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal, the youngest of the four children (three boys and a girl) of Abraham and Liza (Gordon) Bellow, who had immigrated to Canada two years earlier from what was then St. Petersburg, Russia. His father, an onion importer in the old country, became involved in several business ventures in Canada that were not always successful. Bellow's mother, who died when he was fifteen, wanted her youngest son to become a violinist or a rabbi.
Until Bellow was nine, the family lived in the impoverished and tough environment of a predominantly immigrant district in Montreal. 'I saw mayhem all around me from an early age,' Bellow has recalled, as quoted by Joshua Hammer in People (June 25, 1984) magazine. 'At the age of eight I understood what sickness and death were.' In 1924 the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where Bellow spent his formative years. As a boy he learned Yiddish, Hebrew, French, and English, and he was steeped in his Jewish religious heritage. But eventually he found himself unable to flourish within what he felt to be a 'suffocating orthodoxy,' and he turned away from purely Jewish concerns, immersing himself in the works of such writers as Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson. He soon developed the ambition to become a writer, and he would read from his early literary efforts to his school friends, to elicit their reactions. When he was seventeen, he and a friend ran away to New York for a brief period, trying to gain acceptance for their writings, but without any success.
In 1933 Bellow graduated from Tuley High School and entered the University of Chicago, where he was, according to his own account, 'an enthusiastic… but erratic and contrary student.' Two years later, he transferred to Northwestern University, and in 1937 he graduated with a B.S. degree, with honors in anthropology and sociology. He had initially wanted to study English literature in graduate school, but he was advised that anti-Semitism might damage his career, because at that time university authorities often practiced discrimination in making faculty appointments. Instead, he obtained a scholarship to undertake graduate study in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, but he found that the subject did not suit him. 'Every time I worked on my thesis, it turned out to be a story,' he has recalled. In December 1937 he gave up his graduate studies and decided to pursue his literary ambitions. He worked briefly for the federal WPA Writers' Project, preparing short biographies of Midwestern novelists. Then, after teaching from 1938 to 1942 at Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College in Chicago, he became a member of the editorial department of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, where he worked from 1943 to 1946 on [American scholar] Mortimer J. Adler's 'Great Books' project.
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While serving with the merchant marine during World War II, Bellow completed his first novel, Dangling Man (Vanguard, 1944). Written in the form of a journal, it relates the experiences of a dissatisfied young man from Chicago who spends an anxious year waiting to be drafted. The book captured many of the tensions of wartime, and it was well received by critics. He followed it with The Victim (Vanguard, 1947), written, in his words, 'under the spell of Dostoevsky's The Eternal Husband.' Its mentally unstable Jewish protagonist, Asa Leventhal, has to wrestle with his feelings of guilt and responsibility when a destitute non-Jewish acquaintance demands that he find work and shelter for him. Leventhal casts himself in the role of victim, feeling that his downfall is caused by external forces beyond his control.
From 1946 to 1949 Bellow taught English at the University of Minnesota, and he was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to travel to Paris and Rome in 1948. In Paris he began to work on The Adventures of Augie March (Viking, 1953), a novel that established his reputation as a major new voice in American fiction and brought him the 1954 National Book Award. It is an exuberant, picaresque tale set in Jewish Chicago, just as James T. Farrell's writings had their setting in Irish Chicago. In theme and tone it is quite different from Bellow's earlier novels. Its resilient comic hero takes all the buffets that fortune can throw at him and still manages to keep afloat. He is not defeated by his environment, however hostile it might be—and here Bellow sounded the note of affirmation that marked his departure from the pessimistic outlook of many modern writers.
In the novella Seize the Day (Viking, 1956), Bellow returned to a more somber mood. It is set in the Upper West Side of New York City and features Tommy Wilhelm, an ex-salesman beset by a series of failures, who attempts to turn his life around by gambling on the commodities market. But this venture ends in disaster, and everyone to whom he turns fails him. The novella was published in a volume with three short stories—'A Father-To-Be,' 'Looking for Mr. Green,' and 'The Gonzaga Manuscripts'—and a one-act play, 'The Wrecker.'
With reference to Seize the Day, Bellow later commented that he did not care much for 'these victim types,' and his next work, a novel entitled Henderson the Rain King (Viking, 1959), again struck an affirmative note, with a hero more after his own heart. Henderson is an American millionaire who outwardly has everything he needs but suffers from spiritual desolation. Traveling to Africa in search of regeneration, he recovers his vitality and joy in life through a series of encounters with African tribal leaders, who show him how to use his own imaginative, life-giving powers. Bellow has said that of all his heroes, Henderson, the seeker after a higher truth, most resembles his own self, and the book remains one of his favorites.
In the meantime Bellow had been teaching at various institutions. From 1950 to 1952 he was a visiting lecturer at New York University, and from 1954 to 1959 he was an associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He also served on the faculty of Princeton University in 1952-53, and of Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York, in 1953-54. In 1961 he was a visiting professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico. Bellow left New York in 1962, in part because of what he saw as the 'increased politicization of writers,' which in his view meant that an independent writer no longer had a place. He returned to Chicago in 1963 and became a professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, a position he has held ever since. He was chairman of the committee from 1970 to 1976.
A major landmark in Bellow's career was his novel Herzog (Viking, 1964) … which earned him a National Book Award and the Prix International de Litterature and is regarded by many critics as Bellow's finest work. The protagonist, Moses Herzog, a Jewish 'Everyman,' accurately describes himself as 'a learned specialist in intellectual history' who is 'handicapped by emotional confusion.' Demoralized because his second wife has left him for another man, Herzog tries to attain self-understanding by writing impassioned letters—to family, friends, and famous public figures, including many of the great minds of the past. Through that process of introspection he struggles to a new understanding of his own condition and the condition of twentieth-century man. Bellow later commented that many readers had complained that Herzog was 'difficult,' but he asserted that he had intended it as a comic novel designed 'to show how little strength 'higher education' had to offer a troubled man.'
In 1965 Bellow joined other American intellectuals in a protest against the arrest of writers in the Soviet Union. In the same year he served on an ad hoc committee that helped to arrange a march on Washington, D.C., aimed at ending the Vietnam War. He declined, however, to take part in a boycott, organized by some members of the cultural establishment, of President Lyndon B. Johnson's White House arts festival in 1965, as a protest against American involvement in the Vietnam conflict. 'The president intends, in his own way, to encourage American artists,' Bellow said at the time. 'I consider this event to be an official function, not a political occasion.'
After release of his collection of short stories Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories (Viking, 1968), Bellow published his seventh novel, Mr. Sammler's Planet (Viking, 1970), in which an elderly survivor of the Holocaust dispassionately observes life on New York's Upper West Side and speculates on the decline and fall of Western culture. The novel is highly critical of 1960s America, and it is perhaps Bellow's most pessimistic work. Joseph Epstein, in his review in Book World (February 1, 1970), thought that it was 'guaranteed to offend whole categories of the reading public' and called it 'an onslaught on the way the vast majority of Americans live.' C. T. Samuels in the New Republic (February 7, 1970) described it as 'an angry meditation on modern libertarianism,' and in some circles Bellow was labeled a reactionary. The novel won him his third National Book Award.
Always a meticulous craftsman, given to frequent revisions of his work, Bellow spent eight years writing the novel Humboldt's Gift (Viking, 1975). He described it as a 'comic book about death,' and it was a major success, winning a Pulitzer Prize. The book's major themes are conflict between materialism and art and the place of the artist in modern society. Its protagonist, the writer Charlie Citrine, like many of Bellow's heroes a partly autobiographical figure, has to come to terms with the early death of his friend Von Humboldt Fleischer, a manic-depressive character based on the poet Delmore Schwartz. In the words of Bruce Cook, writing in the National Observer (August 30, 1975), the novel is a 'meditation on mortality and immortality that is interrupted intermittently and hilariously with farcical action. It is a crazy novel, deeply in earnest.' Walter Clemons and Jack Kroll in Newsweek (September 1, 1975) called it Bellow's 'funniest book, and his most openly affectionate, even in its satiric side glances.'
In October 1976 Bellow became the seventh American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In announcing the award, spokesmen for the Swedish Academy cited his 'exuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy and burning compassion' and applauded the typical Bellow hero 'who keeps trying to find a foothold during his wanderings in our tottering world, one who can never relinquish his faith that the value of life depends on its dignity, not its success.' In his acceptance lecture Bellow referred to Joseph Conrad's belief that the province of art is 'what is fundamental, enduring, essential.' He was critical of modern writers, who he felt were presenting a limited and distorted picture of mankind. They should aim for a 'broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for,' he said. The essence of our condition is revealed in what Proust and Tolstoy called 'true impressions,' he observed, and 'we never seem to lose our connection with the depths from which these glimpses come.' Although they are fleeting, they encourage us 'to believe that the good we hang onto so tenaciously—in the face of evil, so obstinately—is no illusion.'
To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (Viking, 1976), Bellow's first nonfiction book, was stimulated by a visit he made to Israel in 1975. It is a journal of his observations, conversations, impressions, thoughts, reflections, and, in particular, his ideas about the past and future of the Middle East. He came away deeply impressed by the intensity of life in Israel: 'These people are actively, individually involved in universal history,' he commented. 'I don't see how they can bear it.' Reviews of the book were respectful, with some reservations. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times (October 18, 1976) acknowledged that it was 'entertaining and endlessly intelligent' but regretted that there was not more of a 'unifying perspective on all the talk and theory.'
Bellow's next novel, The Dean's December (Harper & Row, 1982), focused directly on political and social issues. The protagonist, Albert Corde, the dean of a university in Chicago, travels with his wife to Bucharest, Romania to visit his dying mother-in-law. A petty and sinister Romanian bureaucracy makes their stay unpleasant. Corde also reflects on his difficult situation at home, where he has just published an explosive series of magazine articles about Chicago. Mark Harris, who reviewed the book for the Chicago Tribune (January 10, 1982) praised Bellow's 'lofty and intricate novel' which 'carries us once more toward an increased consciousness.' But some other reviews were not as favorable. Helen Dudar, commenting in the Saturday Review (January 1982) called the novel 'drab and tired,' and Walter Clemons of Newsweek (January 18, 1982) thought that it was Bellow's 'dourest, most dispirited book after Mr. Sammler's Planet,' and that it contained his most meagerly fleshed hero. Bellow himself commented that The Dean's December was 'a cri de coeur' and explained that he 'just could no longer stand the fact that the city and the country were in decay under our very eyes and people would not talk about the facts.'
In the fall of 1983 Bellow resigned from the neoconservative Committee for a Free World, objecting to some of the literary criticism that the organization published in its newsletter, which bore his name on its masthead. 'Who wants the opinion of a group? I've always been proud of being nonfactional,' he told D. J. R. Bruckner, as quoted in the New York Times Book Review (April 15, 1984). 'If I want to make enemies,' he added, 'I'll do it on my own.'
Another collection of short fiction by Bellow, entitled Him With His Foot In His Mouth and Other Stories (Harper & Row, 1984), deals with his familiar theme of the spiritual crisis of modern life. But in contrast to the austere atmosphere of his last novel, in these stories there are also hope and humor. As Cynthia Ozick noted in the New York Times Book Review (May 20, 1984) 'These five ravishing stories honor and augment [Bellow's] genius.' And Anne Tyler in the Chicago Tribune (May 13, 1984) commented that Bellow 'displays his special gift, an ability to act as a living camera. He observes with the greatest of care, he remembers every bit he observes and he records it indelibly.'
In his novel More Die of Heartbreak (Morrow, 1987), Bellow tried to face the questions: 'How do serious people hold their own against...nihilism?' The novel is also about 'friendship...the supremacy of certain powers of emotion over the details of self-interest.' Benn Crader, a distinguished botanist, is pressured by his young wife to extort millions of dollars from his uncle, a Chicago politician who had once cheated him in a real estate deal. Central to the book is the turbulent relationship between Crader and his wife, involving betrayal and deceit, and the connection between Crader and his nephew Kenneth Trachtenberg, a scholar of Russian literature, who acts as narrator.
Reviews of More Die of Heartbreak were almost universally positive. Roderick Nordell in the Christian Science Monitor (July 3, 1987) observed that Bellow 'remains the jauntiest kid on the block.' Paul Gray declared in Time (June 15, 1987) that the novel 'crackles with intelligence and wit,…proof that Bellow…can live up to his own standards.' And William Gaddis, writing in the New York Times Book Review (May 24, 1987), said he finished the book feeling that 'no image has been left unexplored by a mind not only at constant work but standing outside itself, mercilessly examining the workings, tracking the leading issues of our times and the composite man in an age of hybrids.'
In addition to his books, Bellow has contributed to such journals as Partisan Review, Hudson Review, Esquire, and Commentary, and to several collective works, including First Person Singular: Essays for the Sixties (Dial Press, 1963), and he was coeditor in 1960 of the short-lived magazine The Noble Savage. He has also written plays, including The Last Analysis, which ran for twenty-eight performances at the Belasco Theatre in New York City in October 1964. His fiction was presented onscreen for the first time when an adaptation of his 1956 novella Seize the Day aired on PBS-TV in May 1987, with Robin Williams in the leading role and Bellow himself making a cameo appearance.
Among numerous other honors, Bellow was awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. In the same year he gave the Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he has also presented the prestigious Tanner lectures at Oxford University. The municipal library in his birthplace of Lachine has been renamed the Bibliotheque Municipale Saul Bellow. He holds honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale universities and from several other institutions.
Eugene Kennedy described Bellow in the Chicago Tribune (May 31, 1987) as being 'trim and fit…with his finely carved ivory features and the turned-down coverlet of white hair on his prominent brow,…a gentleness in his deep brown eyes, and a dryness and lightness in his laughter and ironic good humor.' Bellow's four marriages—to Anita Goshkin in 1937, to Alexandra Tschacbasov in 1956, to Susan Glassman in 1961, and to the Romanian-born mathematician Alexandra Ionesco Tuleca in 1974—all ended in divorce. By his first three wives he has three sons, Gregory, Adam, and Daniel. Bellow now lives alone in an apartment in a high-rise in Hyde Park, near the University of Chicago. He also has a summer home in Vermont, where he does much of his writing. He is a private man who shuns publicity and does not care for the Chicago literary scene. At the age of seventy-three, he still keeps trim by playing racquetball, and he continues to teach. 'My life would be terribly abstract if I didn't have my students to talk with about what I am reading,' he has said. And he has no intention of fading away quietly. 'There are things stewing inside my head,' he told Walter Clemons, as quoted in Newsweek (June 8, 1987). 'A writer in his sixties and seventies always has subjects laid aside. Will they be ripe when I'm ninety? It's a good reason to hang in there.'
Source: Copyright (c) 1988 All rights reserved. From Wilson Biographies, reprinted by permission of the H. W. Wilson Co.
Appears in
American Literature: Prose; Bellow, Saul
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