Looking for grace under pressure? Don’t pick up Saul Bellow. You crack one of the novelist’s fictions only to be accosted by a stranger in manic contemplation of experience. Modernism’s stream of consciousness gives us preternatural hearing to capture unspoken musings. But with Bellow there is no need to strain our ears. His characters clamor for consideration. Their interior monologues are not desultory fragment but purposeful argument, their urgent voices closer kin to the dramas of Arthur Miller and David Mamet than to the novels of Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner. Of varying vocations, these characters all wish to sell us on the soul. Impatient and impassioned and on the verge of panic at the shortness of life, they demand we give them all our time. Through their meditations—one-sided conversations—they communicate to us their desire for presence and their sensuous metaphysics. Overheated and undignified, often thrice-married and mostly over fifty, they are cognizant that the world remains indifferent to human improvement. Still they stumble forward, overtired and joyful. Think. Love. Act, they tell us, like a chorus of modern-day Marvells coaxing readers away from coyness. Better devour your time, they urge, than waste a second with consciousness set on idle.
Such energetic cheerfulness flies in the face of Jewish American literary custom. Since the late sixties, bookstore shelves have groaned under the weight of Holocaust publishing. These days, writers announce their virtuosity by grappling with this central negation early in their careers: Nathan Englander’s first story collection included “Tumblers” (the Shoah as told by the Fools of Chelm), Lara Vapnyar’s debut opened with “There Are Jews in My House” (the Shoah as witnessed from inside Russia), Nicole Krauss cracked the bestseller list with The History of Love (the Shoah as narrated through a kvetch), and Jonathan Safran Foer garnered a movie deal with his first novel Everything Is Illuminated (the Shoah as foretold from the shtetl). But the well-established also persistently sound this subject. Novelist Michael Chabon won a Pulitzer with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, as did artist-writer Art Spiegelman for Maus. Francine Prose’s A Changed Man featured a Holocaust survivor, and Philip Roth time-traveled back to the 1940s in The Plot against America. In 2005, sixty years after the close of World War II, Cynthia Ozick named “the effect of the mass murder of one-third of the world’s Jewish population” our most “profoundly Jewish theme.”
Throughout his distinguished career, Bellow merely swatted away talk of authorial obligation. Had he lived long enough to read Ozick’s doleful essay, “Tradition and the Jewish Writer,” he would have wasted no time lancing its bombast. Sententiousness set his teeth on edge (“Major statements are hot air,” Charlie Citrine scolds in Humboldt’s Gift), while the crawling pace of grave pronouncements irritated his mercurial intelligence. In Herzog, Bellow chides gloom as self-indulgence, reproaching lugubriousness in his tartest voice. Our collective sense of “grievance” has become a “murdering imagination,” Moses reflects in this novel’s pages. “Well, there is a piece of famous advice, grand advice even if it is German, to forget what you can’t bear.” Like Grace Paley’s flippancy in “The Immigrant Story” (“Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world,” a character remarks there), Bellow’s offhandedness was a study in noncompliance. He simply had no truck with language that touted disaster writ large. Suffering he understood—as what feeling person does not?—but despair was intellectual sloth. “Nothing ‘normal’ holds the slightest interest,” he complained in a 1991 interview with Boston University’s literary magazine Bostonia. “Spare us the maiden joys of Tolstoy’s Natasha. . . . The top ratings are permanently assigned to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the Gulag.”
Rather than eulogize the victims of the death camps, Bellow celebrated the lives of their American relatives through unrepentantly exuberant characters such as Herzog, Humboldt, and Ravelstein. Augie March, whose picaresque adventures rival the freewheeling exploits of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, inaugurated this approach in 1953. “Evidence of a decision not to surrender to horror,” as Bellow mused in Philip Roth’s 2000 essay for the New Yorker, Augie does not so much deny history as tell it slant, fictionalizing the Bellow family’s immigrant experience rather than chronicling the story of their extended family who never left Russia.
Even Mr. Sammler’s Planet, the author’s own Holocaust book, is markedly short on trauma. Polish-born Artur Sammler has no use for mourning. Indicting the foolishness of Americans who insist upon venerating him as a “symbolic character,” Sammler is more concerned with the state of late twentieth-century America than with Europe’s catastrophe. Indicted by critics as callous upon its publication in 1970, the novel still managed to garner Bellow a third National Book Award (because, one wonders, it invoked the Shoah, however glancingly?). Yet Mr. Sammler’s Planet represents the Holocaust only to contextualize its devastation. “I don’t know whether humankind is really all that much worse,” the ex–Auschwitz inmate reflects toward the book’s close. “In one day, Caesar massacred the Tencteri, four hundred and thirty thousand souls.” Like Hitler, his twentieth-century successor, the Roman dictator launched his politically self-aggrandizing attack during an armistice, Sammler explains. For Bellow, modern trauma merely reiterates ancient genocide. To readers who expected this disaster to be rendered as singular “stain” upon our “moral nature,” he had little to say.
In a 1965 interview for Glamour—Herzog’s many months on the bestseller list had made him a household name—Bellow shepherded Gloria Steinem around Chicago. Under his eye and her pen the place looked urban and upbeat, hard-edged but soft-hearted. Along Maxwell Street, “a district full of . . . cheap merchandise,” she recalled, Bellow bantered with Yiddish-speaking shop owners. A salesman lingering in a doorway exchanged a few words and shook the novelist’s hand. Bellow translated for Steinem: “I asked him if he was praying.” The shopkeeper wasted no time returning his rejoinder with Old World aplomb: “God is an old man who sleeps all day. Why should I disturb him?” Farther down the street, the writer exchanged Talmudic quotations with a pushcart peddler. Turning away from his display of plastic jewelry, the peddler offered this parting shot: “Death awaits us all.”
The same wry humor sustains Bellow’s characters, who understand death as prosaic fact rather than the occasion for operatic wailing. Philip Roth praises Herzog as a “richer novel” than Augie March and Henderson the Rain King because it offers “a brand of suffering . . . largely precluded” from the later novels. But just listen to Moses’s admission at the opening of Herzog: “I hate the victim bit.” And after retreating to his house in the Berkshires: “Grief, Sir, is a species of idleness.” Later still, “suffering is another bad habit. . . . We must improve.” And finally: “I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart.”
In line with conventionally lachrymose accounts of Jewish history, Roth abbreviates experience as affliction. But Bellow’s characters rarely speak in the melancholy accent many Jews and non-Jews alike take to be characteristic of Jewish sensibility. For the chronic Murphy’s Law sigh of acquiescence, we need to go to a novel like Nicole Krauss’s History of Love. In this book, octogenarian survivor Leo Gursky sings the blue-toned notes Zero Mostel’s Tevye made famous on Broadway, cadences that have provided Americans with their cheerfully mournful key signature for Jewish living since the debut of Fiddler on the Roof. Krauss provides deft illustration of drag-yourself-forward-another-step-though-it-means-scuttling-crabwise-on-your-hands-and-knees Jewish stubbornness. Poster boy for osteoporosis, Gursky splutters into high gear when provoked. Larger than life, someone says; and, like an old battery with a charge alive at its corroded core, he jumpstarts himself forward: “What is larger than life?”
Gursky is delightful, but were he in a Bellow drama he would never occupy a central role. His body slumped expressively in a Yiddish shrug of the shoulder before the inevitable gall and wormwood, Gursky sports little of Herzog’s energy or Ravelstein’s extravagantly sensual aesthetic. Even in Seize the Day, a book Bellow would come to reject for its “victim” mentality, the writer refuses to drag his characters to the “wat’ry” depths of Lycidas he quotes within its pages. From first page to last word, his people are all inquiring spirits whose panoply of humiliations never dims the expectant gaze they turn upon experience. Conceived fifty years apart, Augie and Ravelstein share a knockabout roughness. Despite their calluses, they are enamored with the mystery of their own existence. Open either novel and watch language gush like water from a hydrant. These characters hum with energy, they blaze with unsuppressed curiosity, they radiate hope the way suns make hydrogen. Moderns, they do not refuse marvel but remain as oblivious to the age’s boredom as if they had been born into the sixteenth century.
This is Bellow’s gift, to offer you the ridiculously open hearts of men over fifty who begin each day with the high expectations a ten-year-old brings to a birthday party. Cheerful crazies whom the more self-contained edge away from and the decorous view askance, his characters are always characters. But watching them run spastically forward toward their windmills, you cannot help but trail after them with an involvement akin to faith. Backhanded by a century whose ill will swells to pandemic proportions, they refuse hardness. In the face of the spiritless, they speak without embarrassment of the soul.
The novelists who published in the generation before Bellow were in their own ways hard on “society,” but they delivered their censure more composedly. Jay Gatsby, Jake Barnes, even J. Alfred Prufrock—such elegiac figures carry themselves with stoicism and dignity. By contrast, the charm of Bellow’s central characters lies in their ungainly vitality. Even Seize the Day’s Tommy looks out at the world without demanding from it the deceiving loveliness of lyricism. Here no mermaids comb the white hair of the waves blown back while singing each to each. In their place we are offered the brackish beauty of Lake Michigan, whose dank mop water smell mixes pleasingly with the sounds of “pianos, and the voices of men and women singing scales and opera, all mixed, and the sounds of pigeons on the ledges.” Awkward, foolish, and vibrant: this is experience, for Bellow. The sirens don’t sing to you, but pigeons will, their small heads cocked as they look for crumbs left by passersby on the pavement below.
Seize the Day eventually makes good on its carpe diem claim, if only to chart the collapse of its central character in a sumptuous display of grief. Bellow’s tongue is caustic and his eye merciless. Yet the lavishness with which Tommy mourns his failures testifies to the novelist’s buoyant energy. There is something transforming in the spectacle of such graceless sobbing, a triumphant embrace of feeling that refuses to be shushed into stillness. In a novel whose lyric correctness begins by internalizing as it scorns the well-bred austerity of 1920s modernism, the “great and happy oblivion” of its tear-blinded close refuses to be shamed into quietude. Within its pages, as more tellingly in Augie, Herzog, and Ravelstein, Bellow delights in Jewish volubility despite (or to spite) its dissonance with the self-contained severity of Puritan prose tradition. Seize the Day is his sardonic alternative to Miltonic and Eliotian elegy, an open-throated release whose sloppiness cheerfully rebukes the elegant withholding of their guarded hearts.
The American minds we inhabit in Bellow’s novels reject the poise we find elsewhere in midwestern and East Coast writers and everywhere in Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Frost, and Eliot. In style and substance the moderns are spare, crystalline, and beautiful, throwing out costly phrases such as Nick’s offhand description of Gatsby—“he dispensed starlight to casual moths”—as if these gems demanded no effort. Taking sprezzatura as their characteristic mode, the expatriates of the twenties and thirties affected lightness even as the twentieth-century sky turned dark. They favored the steely control of ballet, that lissome art of transforming hard work into liquid moves.
Jewish to the core, Bellow’s postwar characters seem bent on making what is simple look vastly complicated. They are all wasted energy and effervescent motion, their mobile faces expressive of a Shakespearean range of feeling, their fevered gestures bewildering listeners who try to follow their labile trains of thought. They stumble, fumble, and flail. They wave their arms, trip over furniture, and hyperventilate. They announce themselves rather than waiting to be introduced. And so we are treated to Augie March’s famous opening lines in the novel Bellow proudly and retrospectively called his first “incorrect” book: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.” Handsome and high-colored, peripatetic and itinerant, convinced they are destined for greatness but forever mistiming their approaches, such characters possess neither sangfroid nor serenity. Still, they have the wit to satirize their own shortcomings.
Bernard Malamud’s protagonists are equally concerned with ethical questions and Philip Roth’s narrators are often as clever. But in the post–World War II years, only Bellow’s people possessed a breezy shamelessness that appealed simultaneously to the children of immigrants and the daughters and sons of the native born. Throwing off the angst their Russian-born parents carried in the set of their bones, Bellow’s characters refused to take on the Puritan howling-wilderness inferiority complex, with its guilt over witch burnings and its ever-present sexual anxieties. Unabashed, they transformed the minor-keyed inflections of their Yiddish-speaking parents into a joyful secular idiom Americans heard as their own.
In the bombed-out bleakness of the post–World War II Paris streets, the winter damp possessed none of the beauty Hemingway knew in the 1920s and captured in A Moveable Feast. His city enraptured even in December. It was a place where the sighs of expiring poets breathed life into writers like him whose ears were keen to hear them. “All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter,” Hemingway remembered, “and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife—second class—and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.” In 1948, when Bellow arrived, the chill was Dickensian. The Paris “gloom,” he recalled to Philip Roth in a series of remarks the New Yorker published two weeks after Bellow’s death, lay everywhere “heavy and vile.” Even the Seine was unlovely, smelling “like some medical mixture.” In the wake of Vichy, there was no more poetry, only a self-contempt too enervated to muster spite. The concession of weakness had made the French descend from the high horse of the cavalier to the creeping life of cynicism. Collaboration showed in the guilty cast of the postwar faces, which, turned toward their American liberators, reflected only derision. Bellow had a Jewish explanation for this: “bad conscience.” Only too happy to pop the balloon of French glamour (“they pretended that there was a vast underground throughout the war, but the fact seemed to be that they had spent the war years scrounging for food in the countryside”), he refused to reinvigorate the modernist fable of the Jazz Age.
The visitor from Chicago was a greenhorn in this “sullen, grumbling, drizzling city,” he indicated to Monroe Engel, his editor at Viking. Paris was determined to depress him—no one could claim he lacked ego—and the novelist obliged for a while. “I seem,” he recalled dryly in Roth’s New Yorker essay, “to have been a good solid sufferer in my youth.” And yet, as Nicole Krauss’s appealing octogenarian Leo Gursky would say. The Americans had liberated the city; now, insisted the arriviste, “it was time for Paris to do something for me.” Halfway through the dismal hospital novel he was writing, Bellow underwent a change of heart. As he watched the street sweepers sluice the grimy roads, the water’s “sunny iridescence” transformed the gutter into a vision of beauty. “Just the sort of thing,” he remembered a half century later for Roth, “that makes us loonies cheerful.”
In The Adventures of Augie March, he translated this epiphany into an original American sentence that was philosophic and pragmatic—a “fusion,” he explained, “of colloquialism and elegance.” The ruins still smoldered. The reproachful eyes of six million ghosts were fixed on Europe. And Saul Bellow confirmed—what else?—that being Jewish was a gift. The supercilious faces around him quickly shuttered themselves in the presence of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Well then, he would write about these people whose verbal swagger did not successfully camouflage their efforts to appear habituated. Though they were American-born, his characters had been schooled in the quizzical accents of Russian, Polish, and Hungarian parents. “Everybody wished to be an American,” the author commented of the postwar generation in a 1984 interview with TriQuarterly. Their open “secret” was that they “hadn’t succeeded in becoming one.” Instead of apologizing for the emotional extravagance that kept them on the periphery, Bellow made their high color a central fact of American life.
No more gracefully subdued Winslow Homer watercolors or Sargent portraits in oil, their brushwork too fine to be examined. As Pollock’s wildly energetic drip paintings came to represent the postwar period, Bellow’s intemperate prose was claimed by the age. The only novelist to garner three National Book Awards, he also picked up the Pulitzer, the National Book Award Foundation Medal, and the Nobel along the way. In 1964 Herzog became a bestseller, and Bellow rich at last. Herzog (a Moses, after all), made American readers see the world through Jewish eyes—not the guttered stare of the death camps but the alert gaze of the sons and daughters whose lucky parents had escaped unscathed.
A liability becomes an asset, the ticket with which you hold the world at attention. Bellow perceived his Jewishness both as prosaic fact and marvelously unearned reward, the “piece of good fortune,” he told the Chicago Review in 1972, “with which one doesn’t quarrel.” In his novels, a tremulous joy in the beauty of this world—the same lightheartedness you see in Chagall’s shimmering canvases—also communicates reverence for the next. Herzog is “out of his mind” but “all right,” scribbling feverishly amid the scaling paint and rat droppings of his vacant house in the Berkshires with “a corner of his mind . . . open to the external world.” The body stays earthbound, sharing bread with the mice, sleeping on a grimy mattress without benefit of sheets, but the mind aspires for the violet beauty of the air. Opening his eyes in the dark, Herzog recognizes that “the stars were near like spiritual bodies. Fires, of course; gases—minerals, heat, atoms, but eloquent at five in the morning to a man lying in a hammock wrapped in his overcoat.” In this novel there is no chest-constricting swallowing of derision but rather expansion, a rush of feeling too strong to be thwarted. To be unmoored is not punishment but possibility.
The consciousness of a sixty-year-old is not a sales pitch most literary agents would salivate over, but Bellow holds readers accountable to his aging characters. Even more than their plotlessness (“a guy wanders around,” Scott Turow deadpanned in “Missing Bellow”), his books are distinguished by an effort to meet “the stubborn fact of death.” “Ignorance of death is destroying us,” the author wrote in The Dean’s December. How unlike the twenty-first century leering over its corpse-fetishes, obsessed with murder as spectacle, is this understanding. Prime-time television serves up the hospital theater and the crime drama, parading identical bodies etherized upon a table whose unresponsive tissues are probed by knife and scalpel. Numbed by the twin analgesics of television and technology, we worry less about death than we fret about aging—living, that is. Mortality understood as the outcome of experience remains beyond the reach and attention of television and film as it does most contemporary novelists. Stories of planetary extinction we have in abundance. But death writ small in fiction (aside from the work of a few authors such as Jim Crace and Alice Sebold) is merely the tease of plot that holds distracted readers in check. Bellow’s novels, on the other hand, offer serious contemplation of death as we must all finally come to it: the last day of our days, alarming in its inevitability, mundane to all but ourselves.
Mortality is to Bellow’s imagination what the Big Bang is to cosmology: its prime mover and mystery, its marvel and first cause. Intellectually ambitious people ask questions that test the limits of their own thought. Just as the challenge for Einstein was to work toward an understanding of time and space, the provocation for Bellow was to make sense of the cessation of consciousness, the one event we can never know firsthand. “A man can by habit and experience, fortify himself against pain, shame, indigence,” Montaigne wrote four centuries before Bellow came of age. “As for death, we can try it only once: we are all apprentices when we come to it.” Like the quicksilver moment of the “now” that divides past from future time, the end of consciousness remains beyond the periphery of understanding. Death deprives us of hindsight; we lose awareness just as we begin to obtain insight into its transformative power.
Following Bellow’s own lead, critics often liken the novelist’s characters to the nineteenth-century types we find in Dickens and Hardy, Tolstoy and Eliot. The persistence with which Bellow’s people think about their ends recalls that century’s exhaustive protocols of mourning. But the rituals epitomized in Queen Victoria’s forty-year funerary black compensate as much for the age’s grief over the end of belief—its reluctance to let go of heaven’s balm and its anxiety over the rise of technology—as for the eclipse of individual lives. Bellow’s characters confront mortality with a jaunty regard far closer to Montaigne’s energetic meditations than to the nineteenth-century’s solemner mien. The marvelously recorded “Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz –” Emily Dickinson’s speaker detects in “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –” recalls the paradox Tolstoy describes in War and Peace, where a soldier stupefied by the chasm between stories of the war and his own participation in it has but a second to wonder how inconsequentially his life has been dispatched.
Bellow is as respectful of death as these authors, but he renders neither the drowning lung’s last breath nor the heart’s final contraction. His understanding is closer to that of Stanley Kunitz, who described one of his “primary thoughts through the years” as a recognition “that I am living and dying at once.” Long-lived as his poet-contemporary, Bellow considers how death gives form and texture to the days that precede it. Or, again, Montaigne: “The greatnesse of the minde,” the French writer insists in “Of Experience,” “is not so much to drawe up and hale forward, as to know how to range, direct, and circumscribe it selfe.” Fearless cartographer of the highs, lows, and embarrassments of experience, the essayist seems close kin to Bellow. Admitting our irrelevance in time and space likewise prompts the novelist to record the loopy but lovely etchings thought creates before the next wave washes away the fine tracings in the sand.
In Ravelstein, Bellow borrowed from the fabulous world of the Renaissance to describe the self as a “protean monster.” Chick’s eulogy to his mentor (“you couldn’t be known thoroughly unless you found a way to communicate . . . your private metaphysics”) is Bellow’s as well. If the wisest man is the man who knows he knows nothing, then Bellow’s job is to reveal the beautiful shapes nothing can occupy in the minds of men. His fifth and last wife joked that his temperament belonged more to the medieval shtetl than to the modern city. (And what is there to say about Bellow’s women—real and fictional—except that here he was less than wise?) But his decision to represent experience writ small is an act of humility consonant with the temperament of ages rather than the Wagnerian grandiosity of our own.
Despite his contemporaries’ fascination for the rigid body of logic, Bellow’s abiding affection for the wispy shape of the unknowable sustained him. He found existentialism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism as arid as the Sahara without the desert’s heart-stopping beauty. “The superintellectuals of the twentieth century pride themselves on their coldness and their hardness,” he commented in a 1979 interview in Quest. “The real problem is that people now don’t lead a morally expressive life.” Openness to feeling and an absolute conviction in our shared human needs: these certainties left him exuberant in the small safety of the Chicago studios he rented to write in and agitated when he left them to travel home. In the crush of bus or subway (and no less than his elegant and reluctantly sympathetic character Artur Sammler), Bellow felt the impassioned hearts of fellow passengers huddled against the frigid wind off Lake Michigan or averting their heads from the dirty breeze in the tunnels disturbingly close despite the remoteness of their faces.
In Sartre and Brecht there is no such fascination with emotional life, or even regret for its lack, Bellow thought. In his books feeling breathes in vibrant prose as connected to the world as are the conceits of the metaphysical poets, Montaigne’s near-contemporaries across the Channel who made a discipline of yoking unlike things together. Or the seventeenth-century wit of Andrew Marvell: like the speaker in “To His Coy Mistress,” Humboldt, Herzog, and Ravelstein incite us to tear our “pleasures with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life.” Even regret is charged with an antic energy that renews hope. Montaigne’s confession—“there is nothing I have more continually entertained myself withal than imaginations of death, even in the most wanton time of my age”—is mirrored time and time again in the voluptuous, fevered anxieties of Bellow’s central characters, whose love lives flourish not despite but to spite the unchanging dread with which they look on approaching death.
If sickness offers a vantage on health, death illuminates life, its twin, Montaigne writes. “Thou diest not because thou art sicke, but because thou art living.” The trajectory of Bellow’s career might be described as a gloss on this tagline. His books are exercises in thinking profoundly about how intoxicating it is to see and to hear and to breathe. From Ravelstein: “You came into a fully developed and articulated reality from nowhere, from nonbeing or primal oblivion. . . . In the interval of light between the darkness in which you awaited your first birth and then the darkness of death that would receive you, you must make what you could of reality.” We live neither to prove the primacy of suffering nor to slog through a vale of tears. Instead, like gaudy fish weaving in and out of forests of kelp, we swim in a dapple of light.
Like Newton, whose obsession with the laws of physics did not forestall his attraction to the glister of worldly things (the scientist spent as much time tinkering with alchemy as developing experiments with gravitational attraction), Bellow possessed a capacious imagination more sympathetic to earlier ages than the cataloguing discipline of the modern mind. There is a glorious indiscriminacy about the novels, which juxtapose the astringent pleasures of skepticism alongside lush metaphysical yearning. The journeys Bellow’s quixotic wanderers make look more like the itineraries in Tristram Shandy or Tom Jones than the steady trek Frankenstein makes northward or the exhausted meandering of The Waste Land’s narrator alongside the refuse-strewn Thames. Bellow’s voices never dishearten. They disarm with the energy of a more enchanted realm. With his puckish frame and his dreamy gaze (in photographs he looks beyond you as if toward the wild isle of Prospero’s tempest-conjuring spirits), the author seems a closer relative to those who once wrote by the flickering light of candles than his twentieth-century fellows—who, safe in their centrally heated apartments, he chastised for voicing “cocktail-party” expressions of anxiety at the apocalypse. So says Bellow through Herzog, reflecting upon our taste for trauma.
No despair in this novel or elsewhere: the quality of feeling in Bellow’s fictions is as vividly colored as the world our eyes reflect. The figures who people Philip Roth’s books might act out their monologues on a stage devoid of props. In Bellow, by contrast, our diurnal cycles of happiness and sorrow play out in an urban world of surprising beauty. One character flushes with fear like aspen leaves twirling in a stiff wind, their bright sheen paled to sudden dullness in front of a Miracle Mile department store. Serenity steals over another like the noiseless flyover of migrating birds witnessed in the space between skyscrapers. The living and the dead, the heat of sex and the listless, disease-ridden body, the tang of red wine mixed with the rusty taste of blood: sumptuous thoughts glow inside the bodies of the middle-aged and elderly men in Bellow’s novels, men startled by the ease with which a little fuel makes the soul’s pilot light flare to incandescent brightness.
Ravelstein closes upon just such a blaze: “There’s an early snow on the tall shrubs, the same shrubs filled with a huge flock of parrots—the ones that escaped from cages and now build their long nest sacks in the back alleys. They are feeding on the red berries. Ravelstein looks at me, laughing with pleasure and astonishment, gesturing because he can’t be heard in all this bird-noise.” In Dickinson’s poem the failing senses blur into blue abstraction. Ravelstein refuses to yield sight or hearing. The long wavelengths of light from the scarlet berries reflect themselves in his filmed-over eye; the screech of birds knocks against his ear’s unyielding tympanum. Riddled with disease, Ravelstein is vital still. Joy, a moment of sun between thunderclouds, gilds the last of life.
In earlier ages, worship remedied the severance of consciousness from the infinite. Faith bridged the distance between the visible and invisible worlds, the steadfastness of ritual a simulacrum of eternity. The obligations of daily life were small pieties that rehearsed the unknowable. Journey to market in a boat that ships water and shimmies under the weight of new passengers, and you might be reminded of the final crossing, Charon’s craft pitching as shades settle to benches underneath which black water runs back and forth, a spirit balance. In past times, bed sheets billowed with wind on a clothesline like souls rising. At dawn, the silence between birdcalls conjured Genesis, the world not yet materialized out of the void. When Montaigne was writing, the prosaic could still metamorphose into the marvelous. The mineral taste of salt in your mouth recalled the wife of Lot’s tears. The climbing notes of a distant flute evoked the shades beguiled by Orpheus’s trespass into Hades. The ruby transparency of a pomegranate seed mirrored the longing heart of Persephone, strayed from the sunlit world of the living.
In the tradition of the American-born generation, Bellow felt the pull of ritual and refused it. But lack of observance only made the condition of reverence more necessary. “We long for enchantment, but we are too skeptical,” he wrote in a 1967 essay. The glazing lights of modern civilization have swallowed the dark and locked the doors left ajar in earlier times to mystery. Art’s obligation, Bellow thought, was to focus upon the dividing line between what is visible and what is not. Before our time, “artists routinely ventured farther than the eye could see,” he offered in his interview with Quest. Baroque audiences knew that the musical intervals of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart left an echo of the celestial harmonies in the listening ear. A candle illumines half a face in a Rembrandt canvas and leaves the rest in profounder darkness. Burnished by torchlight, a painted farm’s iron gate gleams gold. Rembrandt’s patrons understood the virtuosity of his chiaroscuro better than we. It was not mimesis but a mnemonic this painter was after, a visual sign with which to recall the metaphysical divide behind which we continue to stand baffled, the patterning of light and shade training our eyes on the place where human brilliance ends.
Few modern artists have devoted their energies to representing things beyond measure. Bellow was one. An orthodox spiritual life was refused him by temperament and time, but he consecrated a lifetime’s mornings of hard work to the moral questions prior ages recognized as religious. His interviews and essays are saturated with “revelation,” “mystery,” and “rapture”—the language of faith. His novels offer more direct counsel in mysticism, from the advice of the vilified Dr. Tamkin in Seize the Day to Charlie Citrine’s characterization of religion in Humboldt’s Gift, which “some people still speak of with respect. . . . It says we have ways of knowing that go beyond the organism and the senses. I’ve always believed that.” Too skeptical to labor toward proof of God’s existence, Bellow crafted sentences open to admitting the unknowable. The garrulousness of his narrators leaves a space, still, for mystery. Like Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro, Bellow’s writing drives toward the place where illumination gives way to shadow.
Though he laughed with relish at his own jokes, Bellow discussed his vocation with unapologetic piety. He likened the Montreal suburb where he spent his first decade to the shtetl in czarist Russia where his parents came of age and routinely described his upbringing as medieval. His childhood was shaped by his mother’s desire that he grow up to become a scholar like her brothers, who looked in photographs, he recalled in 1964, as if they were living in the thirteenth century. Schooled at four in Old Testament Hebrew, Bellow was ancient, an anachronism in the twentieth century. He approached literature with the same veneration rabbinical students bring to the Talmud. Imagination furthered exploration of “the mysterious circumstance of being,” he mused in a 1981 interview with Michiko Kakutani. Writing was “a spiritual activity” that allowed access to the state of absorbed openness that is the prerequisite for transcendence.
We assume that discomfort with religious culture is the outcome of modern philosophical systems and the twin revolutions of science and technology— so Bellow’s quip about being a medieval man. But faith, as we are reminded with increasingly ugly frequency, has never been absent—only vigorously segregated. We shake our heads at the rise of fundamentalism, then define modernity as spiritless, refusing to notice the discrepancy in logic. Secularism is not new, but illustration of an attitude that has endured over long centuries, the distaste of intellectuals toward their cultural inferiors. The pretentiousness with which academics claim immunity from revelation and dreaming would have led Bellow to endorse both even if he had not been steeped in the study of Torah as a young child or temperamentally unable to stop yearning for a glimpse of Dante’s other shore. His identification with his working-class roots constituted a form of faith, though the writer prospered in the academy. Significantly, his comfortable position at the University of Chicago did nothing to diminish his antipathy toward the people he saw as having inherited the forms and prejudices of upper-crust culture while he slogged away to create its street-smart substance. Inveterate competitiveness and a healthy narcissism no doubt added urgency to his sardonic asides, but the scorn he reserved for those he called in Herzog the “fashionistas” (intellectuals who shaped their ideas to suit the prejudices of the art marketplace) was genuine, motivated from the conviction that to waste even a moment of our short “interval of light” aping the despair that was de rigueur for the postwar period was the death of thinking.
Encouraging of young writers, generous with his time (a friend remembers leaving two short stories in Bellow’s Chicago office on a whim and then being ushered back to the office to speak about them), and compassionate toward the foibles of his colleagues, Bellow had no patience for those who reveled in apocalypse like the petty imps of sixteenth-century frescoes to preach what he called in Herzog “the luxury of Destruction.” “Not God is dead. That point was passed long ago.” But rather, “Death is God. This generation thinks—and this is its thought of thoughts—that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true power.” What Bellow saw as the essential soullessness of modernism and postmodernism persistently came in for rebuke. Jean-Paul Sartre, darling of the postwar media, he quoted only to dismiss. “People like Sartre understood less about left-wing politics than I had in high school,” biographer James Atlas records him tossing off to Harold Kaplan. In a letter to John Berryman composed in Paris while writing The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow invoked the French existentialist only to subject him to characteristic comic ridicule: “Vous avez peigne ze human situation more better than J. P. Sartre avec une seule strook.”
Bellow’s humor entertained. More profoundly, he brandished it to refuse what Herzog calls the “bad habit” of suffering. Comedy cauterized any tendency to adopt the despondency of the victim. Invited to a banquet in Jerusalem for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Atlas recalls, Bellow listened warmly to Golda Meir’s feisty introduction with the memory of the Six-Day War still fresh. But Elie Wiesel’s keynote lecture moved him not. While Alfred Kazin celebrated the speech in an effulgence of piety (it was a “soliloquy, a litany, a hymn, a Kaddish”), Bellow merely “looked bored.” Feeling guilty for wartime misery was for Americans intellectual laziness, he thought; merely “sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again,” as Charlie Citrine insists in Humboldt’s Gift. “We weren’t starving,” Bellow wrote there: “We weren’t bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind.”
Precisely. With a dismissive wave of the hand, the collective memory books turn into overstock. Ever the iconoclast, the Chicago writer refused to follow in the footsteps of American novelists who lingered beneath the tall smokestacks of that other world. Bellow went his own way: toward sunlight, not shadow; toward trees in leaf, not barbed wire. To settle for the smooth deceptions of big ideas, he repeatedly counseled, was to dwell in darkness rather than to delight in the “disorder” that Charlie Citrine knew “is here to stay.” However baffling, life is a blessing. There are small marvels to be noticed among the general misdeeds. Step into one of his novels and feel a stream of thought slip by you like the sinuous pull of life’s fast-moving current. It isn’t memory we need to enshrine as holy, but life that is sacred: the sunlit world Persephone returns to each year, the land of the living Dante recalls in the ninth circle of Hell, the marriage at the close of The Tempest.