Saul Learning to Bellow

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow.  Penguin Classics.  586 pp.  $17.00  ****1/2

When I was a teenager in Pittsburgh in the Sixties, I made up my mind that I wanted to be a writer (without telling anybody, in case I failed), and set about trying to educate myself.  The writers we studied at school didn’t seem much help (unless I wanted to be Joseph Conrad, the only novelist we seemed to study).  I couldn’t get much help from my teachers, who would have found my ambitions pretentious.  I spent hours just wandering the stacks of the library, looking at everything, also—more fruitfully—the shelves of Jay’s Bookstall, where the books had the imprimatur of the store’s owner. Jay had read everything.

I also watched a Public Television show called Book Beat, which I found absolutely thrilling, and heard interviews with many a writer I would read later, like Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, Tim O’brien.  One week there was an interview with a man who had just published his sixth novel, which would become a huge critical and commercial success, Herzog (my father, a huge reader, opened the novel and burst into laughter at the famous opening sentence, “If I am out of my mind it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog”).

I didn’t learn much from the interview about how to be a writer; Bellow was guarded and careful with his answers (Toni Morrison was much more forthcoming, talking about her Writers’s Group, about struggling to find time to write while raising a child.  And as she read from her book, she stared directly into the camera, as if looking right at me.  She was the only writer I’d ever seen do that).  I somehow didn’t want to start with Herzog, which would involve borrowing the book from my father.  I wanted to keep my literary ambitions, and my reading, secret.  I went to Jay’s and bought Bellow’s slender and much less intimidating first novel, Dangling Man.

That novel—about a man who is awaiting his draft notice for the Korean War—seemed somber, restrained, almost existential in its effects.  I was trying to figure out what made a good book, a successful writer, and Dangling Man seemed incredibly withdrawn and depressing.  It reminded me a little of The Stranger, which I’d also just read.  I remember the narrator living in some kind of rooming house, and getting annoyed that one of his neighbors always peed directly into the water of the bowl, making the maximum sound (apparently the guy pissed like a stallion), which the narrator, the Dangling Man himself, found rude.

Important novels were somber, it seemed to me.  My God these guys were serious.

Then, in my first or second year of college, I read The Adventures of Augie March.

What happened? I thought.  What happened to the somber depressed intellectual in the rooming house who spent his days obsessed with someone’s urination habits?  Augie—the protagonist and narrator of this book—didn’t care how anybody pissed.  Nothing came close to making him depressed.  He jumped into the middle of life.

Let’s take the famous opening, for instance:

“I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.  But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

“Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.”

What a thrilling opening, especially for a young man who wanted to be a writer; here was a man who kicked away all the traces, saying whatever he wanted.

On the other hand, what exactly in the hell was he talking about?  I can still remember the moment when my sophomore roommate, David Somerville, who also ached to be a writer, confessed to me that he had loved the novel too, but had no idea what that opening meant.

So now, after my friend Sally sent me a list of the best Chicago novels and Augie March wasn’t on it (she thought these works were just since 2000; otherwise the compiler made a dreadful error), I decided to read the book again, with another fifty years of reading under my belt.  At this point I should be able to understand anything.

I still have no idea what those words mean.  Along with any number of other paragraphs in the novel, which sit above and below perfectly comprehensible paragraphs.  Something about Bellow finding his voice meant that, in this novel at least, he was going to write by instinct and intuition, going by feelings more than rational explanations.  He also ignored the niceties of the American novel; if he wanted to spend page after page going into detail about one character or another, without advancing the plot in any way, by God he’d do it.  He’d be his own man to a fault.

The adventures are amazing, thrilling, unforgettable, completely open about all of Augie’s foibles and failures, of which there are many.  American picaresque, is the genre I would assign this too, though I don’t know of another novel like it.  There’s no feeling at the end that the story is really over, that Augie has arrived somewhere.  He’s just gotten to a certain moment in his life and taken a pause.

Even in Bellow’s books there’s nothing particularly like it.  Herzog is a great novel, but nothing like Augie.  Humboldt’s Gift comes closest, and that book, about a whole literary scene, and the elusive and mysterious Delmore Schwartz, is probably my favorite of all Bellow’s novels.  But at a certain point in his life, to become the artist he wanted to be, Bellow needed to cut loose and forget about everything, even making sense.  It was how he found who he was.