SOLOMON (SHLOIMKE) BELLOW, later Saul, was born in Quebec in 1915 and smuggled nine years later under the unwatchful eyes of border police to dark, immigrant-packed, blustery Chicago. Bellow’s father, Abraham, who had escaped from prison in czarist Russia, was a bootlegger, a baker, and, later, a coalyard owner. Solomon, the youngest child of Abraham and his wife, Liza Gordon, had three older siblings, Jane, Maurice (called Morrie or Maury), and Sam. His brothers became businessmen, and both later changed their last name to Bellows, just as Bellow renamed himself Saul. The eldest brother, Morrie, was a hard, echt Chicago get-ahead man who boasted about money and slapped the shoulders of famous gangsters. Bellow, by contrast, early on sensed his readiness for a cash-poor writer’s career, and was much mocked by Morrie on account of his teenage cultural pretensions.
While Morrie, seven years older, was working for a living, young Solomon spent his free days at the public library reading Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, and considering ways that a Jewish boy who spoke Yiddish, English, and French, who played stickball and kick-the-can in the streets of Humboldt Park (a Jewish enclave), might compare with these two working-class masters of American letters. Bellow especially loved Dreiser. He valued the way Dreiser put his arms around his characters, was so eager to accept and understand them, no matter how ragged or common their desires. But he recognized that Dreiser’s style was flawed: at once too crude and too dressed up, full of strokes of fate and wooden editorializing. Above all, Dreiser was a tragic writer; Bellow wanted to go comic.
On a bitter cold morning in 1938, the twenty-three-year-old Bellow started out for his first day of work in Morrie’s coalyard. A recent dropout from his anthropology master’s program at the University of Wisconsin, Bellow had just come back to Chicago and had gotten married to a local girl, Anita Goshkin. Morrie, who surfaces in Augie March as Augie’s rage-filled, sneering older brother, often quarreled with Bellow. Morrie was adamantly a money Jew rather than a culture Jew. Alone among the Bellow family, Morrie refused to attend Saul’s Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm. (Bellow later complained that his sister, Jane, fell asleep during his acceptance speech, but at least she made the trip.) He was to Bellow the ultimate reality instructor (a favorite term in Bellow): hard and unforgiving, an enemy of imagination.
Bellow’s father, Abraham, was, like Morrie, a harsh reality instructor: for Abraham, life was business. In a 1937 letter to his high school friend Oscar Tarcov, Bellow wrote,
My father, spongy soul, cannot give freely. His business conscience pursues him into private life. . . . He started giving me a Polonius, berating all my friends, warning me, adjuring me, doing everything short of damning me. . . . I blew up and told him precisely the place he occupied in my category of character, what I thought of his advice, and that I intended to live as I saw fit. . . . The coalbins resounded with my shouts and imprecations.
Bellow said to Tarcov that his father “boasts of having read the complete works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov, Tolstoi, Turgenev, and Dostoievsky. I believe him. But how has he been able to look open eyed at these men and act as he has shown himself capable of acting[?]”
Bellow was quickly fired from Morrie’s coalyard for absenteeism. A few years earlier, in 1934, Morrie had fired him for reading on the job. There was to be no pact between the demands of art and those of the hardscrabble companies run by Abraham and his firstborn son, Morrie. Abraham also passed on his fierce anger to Morrie: both father and son were at war against the world.
“FUCK MORRIE. I only met Morrie once. What kind of family [member] is that?” Adam Bellow, Bellow’s second son, said to me about his uncle. Morrie with his rages, his touchy arrogance, stood at the beginning and end of Saul’s angry ambition as a writer. “He wanted to show Morrie,” Adam remarked. “ ‘Revenge is a perfectly good motive for a writer to have,’ he once said. You know, he just didn’t go in for the whole Parnassian thing—it was all there, high and low; the low was the self too.” Daniel Bellow told me that, like his brother Adam, he met Morrie just once. “He terrified me; he scared the living daylights out of me. He was a brilliant man in his way: his business head. Janis [Bellow’s widow] said Pop’s last words were ‘I showed them’ ”—“them” being his father and Morrie. Daniel added, “Morrie was even more Pop’s father than his father.”
Morrie was his father’s son. The fury that impelled Abraham also fired Morrie’s restless moneymaking ambition. Near the beginning of his magisterial biography of Bellow, Zachary Leader describes a crucial moment in the family life of the Bellows in Montreal. In 1923 Abraham was badly in debt and desperately trying to make a living as a bootlegger. Abraham and his partner decided to go for broke. They borrowed some money and loaded up a rented truck with whiskey, ready to make a big sale to some gangsters from New York who would meet them when they crossed the border. But they never made it: somewhere near Montreal the truck was hijacked and stolen, along with the bootleg whiskey. The hijackers beat up Abraham and threw him in a ditch. Abraham climbed out of the ditch and started home on foot. The next morning Abraham’s wife, Liza, sent out fifteen-year-old Morrie to find his father. As Leader tells the story, Morrie
ran to the partner’s place of work and waited. Eventually, he saw a figure in the distance, running “like the demons of hell were following him.” It was his father, in torn clothes, bloody, in tears. Reaching out to him, the boy said, “Pa, Pa! What’s wrong?” In the version of the story told by Maury’s [Morrie’s] son, “then my grandfather just beat the shit out of my father.”
In Herzog Bellow tames the anecdote by leaving out the father’s beating of his son.
Abraham’s hot temper bore down on Morrie, who was almost always, as in the bootlegging anecdote, the first target of his father’s wrath. Bellow once described his father in a letter as “a furious man, whirling with impatience . . . a heavyweight tyrant.” Abraham Bellow was a man of passion, a volatile troublemaker who even in his sixties would sometimes get into street scraps. Changeable like a Dostoevsky character, Leader remarks, he could melt with emotion too. Bellow remembered that Abraham would read Sholem Aleichem to the family in the evenings, and he liked to watch the antics of his children.
Morrie was even more volatile than Abraham. Pa should have slapped you around like he did me, he liked to tell Saul, it might have wised you up. Morrie took pride in his know-how, his connections. “Enough of this crap about being Jewish,” he would say (unlike his brother Sam, who married a rabbi’s daughter, Morrie early on stopped observing dietary laws). But Morrie’s toughness went along with a vulnerability that was with him from childhood on. Morrie was a greedy, overweight child, Bellow remembered; the first son bore the brunt of his father’s anger and survived by trying to amuse Abraham. Bellow wrote to his third wife, Susan Glassman, in 1962, that Morrie “freezes when he’s offended, and if you think I’m vulnerable, I recommend you study him.”
When Bellow was in third grade, Morrie was already a student at Tuley High School. Along with Sam, three years his younger, Morrie sold chocolate bars on the L and newspapers on the street. He was also a “baggage-smasher,” heaving luggage onto trucks for American Express. He enrolled at a downtown law school, what Sandor Himmelstein in Herzog calls a “kike college,” but never finished. Instead Morrie worked for one of Al Capone’s lawyers collecting graft payments. Eventually he took over Abraham’s coalyard, and then became a real estate tycoon, cutting a substantial figure in Chicago life. Sam also made money in Chicago real estate—he owned a chain of nursing homes—but his profile was much lower than his brother’s.
After Morrie and his wife bought the Shoreland Hotel on the South Side, where Al Capone had done his business, it became a Teamsters headquarters. Jimmy Hoffa, who came to the wedding of Morrie’s daughter, kept an apartment there, as did the economist Milton Friedman. In 1956, in front of the Shoreland, Morrie was nearly strangled by a Teamster whom he had unwisely challenged over an outstanding bill; the incident made the papers. In his retelling of the event in the short story “Cousins,” Bellow remembered that the Teamster’s Cadillac had a clergy sticker for parking purposes.
“He liked to abuse waiters, I saw him do it,” Greg, Bellow’s eldest son, said of his uncle Morrie. “He loved to lord it over people.” Morrie regularly hit his children Joel and Lynn, just as Abraham had hit him. He was a man of appetite, an overeater his whole life; he owned three hundred suits and a hundred pairs of shoes. When Morrie visited Saul he would play the buffoon, pulling a book off the shelf and demanding, “Who’s this guy Prowst?” (Ulick, the Morrie character in Humboldt’s Gift, shuts himself in his office where he eats fistfuls of raisins and reads Cecil Roth and Salo Baron on Jewish history, but whenever high culture names come up in conversation, he makes sure to mispronounce them.) Once, when Bellow and his first wife were struggling to pay the bills, Morrie came to visit and hurled down a pile of his old shirts for his brother; this happens too in Augie, where Morrie plays a crucial role as Augie’s brother Simon.
Morrie’s most spectacular scandal stemmed from his affair with Marcie Borok, a nightclub dancer. In 1947 Marcie gave birth to a son, Dean, and then another son two years later (the second boy was not in fact Morrie’s son, but another man’s). Morrie, Marcie claimed, was the father and had agreed to adopt both children, but then changed his mind. She pursued Morrie to Miami, where he was staying with his wife, Marge, in the Saxony Hotel, partly owned by the Bellowses. Then the scandal broke: in December 1949 the Miami Herald ran a story headlined “Blonde Serves Club Owner as Father of Her Children.” Marcie was only twenty, Morrie forty-one in 1949, when Marcie took Morrie to court. She may have also run after him with a loaded gun and even fired some shots at him, though the facts of the case remain in dispute.
In 1980 Dean Borok, who was living in Canada, read Augie March and discovered it contained a version of his mother’s affair with Morrie. Borok began writing to Bellow, and Bellow wrote back at least once. Bellow said to Dean Borok about Morrie,
He sees none of us—brothers, sister, or his two children—neither does he telephone or write. He had no need of us. He has no past, no history. . . . I tell you all this to warn you about the genes you seem so proud of. If you’ve inherited them (it’s possible you have) many of them will have to be subdued or lived down. I myself have had some hard going with them.
Morrie met his son Dean Borok, chatted brusquely, and gave him money, but that was the end of it.
Borok is the spitting image of a Bellow, at least judging from the photos on his website. Not only his looks but his larger-than-life temper testify that he is Morrie’s son. Borok kept writing to Bellow for over twenty years, and the letters, as Leader describes them, are vituperative, funny, and disturbing. Leader reports that in 1992 Borok sent Bellow two photos of himself, one in a tuxedo and another in a Speedo, along with a note saying, “You never looked this good.” Borok ran an S-and-M leather store in Montreal and later became a stand-up comedian in New York. Bellow kept his letters. Brim-full of adrenaline and resentment, hacking away at Saul and Morrie alike, Borok might have been auditioning for a part in a Bellow novel. Leader’s description calls to mind the savage, preening Cantabile in Humboldt’s Gift, a handsome, cracked, testosterone-fueled goon, vindictive, exuberant, and unstoppable. Dean was a wild shard chipped from Morrie’s block.
As Dean Borok discovered when he read Augie March, the novel contains a full, bruising, but also admiring portrait of his father, Morrie. Augie’s brother Simon is a bully and adulterer, crass and aspiring. He coldly marries for money, not love, and he violently derides Augie’s feckless nature, just as the unforgiving Morrie scorned Saul’s lack of business acumen. Simon gives off a whiff of the unstable macho, the potent crazy: at one point he rips the cheap dress of his mother-in-law, telling her that she has embarrassed herself by wearing rags, with all her money. The mother-in-law, laughing appreciatively, forgives him. But the incident reveals a disquieting brutality in Simon.
There was more than a trace of Simon’s—that is, Morrie’s—passionate and reckless traits in the young Bellow. Dave Peltz remembered the teenage Saul’s jealous rage over his high school girlfriend Eleanor Fox. Once Bellow hitchhiked to Fox’s summer house in Indiana, burst in, saw her wearing another boy’s frat pin, and ripped it off. Naomi Lutz, the Eleanor character in Humboldt’s Gift, reminds the grown-up Charlie Citrine of his uncontrollable jealousy. But the mild Augie completely lacks such off-kilter emotions; instead his brother Simon is the dress-tearing, mouth-foaming man of passion. In Augie March only Simon displays ominous masculine aggression. Augie’s gallery of tomcats is extensive, but except for Simon they are all charming rather than frightening.
Simon siphoned off all the anger that Bellow felt and feared in himself. In Dangling Man and The Victim, his first two books, the long-suffering heroes’ rages are shameful, sudden, and unexpected. But Augie, like Henderson, doesn’t have a truly angry bone in his body. Not until Herzog would Bellow dare to put his own sheer rage into his books and recognize his true kinship with Morrie.
The sadness of Augie’s portrait of Simon is clearly Bellow’s own sadness toward Morrie: he displays a loving younger sibling’s deeply disappointed judgment. But he also makes a case for Simon, as Leader remarks. He makes Morrie’s anger seem vital rather than ruinous. In Augie Bellow remade his brother into a rough apostle of life, in place of the thwarted ogre that Morrie actually was.
While he was writing Augie March Bellow wrote to the editor Monroe Engel that the final section of Augie was going to be “a final, tragic one on the life of the greatest Machiavellian of them all, Augie’s brother Simon.” But the book doesn’t end this way. Simon is not a tragic figure, and neither was Morrie. Bellow’s rash, violent eldest brother was no Dreiser hero. He was not shadowed by ruin; with no past at his back, he just threw off any misfortunes. Remarried and living in Thomasville, Georgia, Morrie gave no signs of being haunted by grief.
“He overpowered me and in a sense he led me to write The Adventures of Augie March,” Bellow remarked about Morrie in an interview with Philip Roth. Was Morrie an intriguing Machiavellian or was he what Bellow’s second wife, Sondra, called him, “a big fat pig of a vulgar man”? He was, of course, both: his strenuously willed ignorance, the way he swatted down culture and ideas, made him the Chicago man of power he wanted to be.
Simon tells Augie about Renee, who is transparently Marcie Borok. “Smiling,” Simon says, “ ‘She left her husband the same night we met. It was at a night club in Detroit. . . . I said, “Come along,” and she’s been with me ever since.’ ”
Augie says, “I was fascinated by him, by them both.” But the line rings a little hollow. Augie’s unruffled, calmly interested stance toward his brother is really Bellow’s fantasy of keeping his distance from the turbulent Morrie.
Bellow started thinking about power under the influence of anxious, overbearing Morrie. But Augie March was a way of freeing himself from Morrie’s influence: Bellow planted Augie’s own happy-go-lucky instinct for freedom in the center of his book. By coloring Simon with some of Augie’s own vitality, his fresh aptitude for more life, Bellow redeemed his brother. This is true of the book’s other males on the prowl too. The powerful men in Augie March are winning rather than dangerous, from the clumsy Five Properties to the lustful, flirtatious William Einhorn; Einhorn’s father, the roosterish Commissioner; and his goofball half brother, the perfectly named Dingbat.
Bellow commented once that the most memorable character in The Brothers Karamazov was not Ivan or the saintly Alyosha, but their father, old man Karamazov, that repulsive yet entrancing buffoon. “The boldest comedians are the ones who, like Old Karamazov, have revised all social and traditional fictions in the clear light of first principles as they see them,” Bellow insisted. Bellow turns wild, brutal Fyodor Karamazov into the true hero of Dostoevsky’s great novel in part because the old man resembles in his reckless éclat his own father, Abraham, and his elder brother Morrie. On a diminished scale, the Bellows echo the most renowned family in the novel’s history, with Bellow himself as the turbulent, doubt-daring Ivan, and his brother Sam as the strong and wholesome Alyosha.
Bellow also names Fyodor his favorite because the Karamazovs’ father is a pure hero of personality. The most embarrassing father in literature, far outstripping King Lear, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is cunning, silly, perverse, pretending always to be stupidly sure of himself, mocking fancy ideas, and hating the respectable more than anything. Like the rough Chicago types Bellow knew from childhood on, old Karamazov barges ahead, a ham actor and man of appetite.
Bellow’s own self-confidence was far more canny, more controlled, than that of a reckless Karamazov, or of Morrie with his battering-ram macher’s will. Dave Peltz said about the future novelist, “He was focused, he was dedicated to becoming what he was, from the beginning. I mean he never veered. He believed in himself.” Morrie was just as implacable, but unlike Bellow he wanted to get rid of the past, the childhood memories that were for Bellow the core of his being. Thirsting for success, he was willing to crush anyone who got in his way. Morrie was the man on the make, the American aspirant to riches and power.
Morrie lacked the Karamazov drive to question everything and so become original. Instead he was trapped by the dull character of his goals: money and power. Bellow wrote that his aim in his work was to join low seriousness with high seriousness. The recipe is a traditional one for the novel, and, as in Don Quixote, it usually leads to comedy. Morrie had the low seriousness, the thirst for success, but not the high. Not until Herzog would Bellow find the winning comic combination of low and high seriousness, in the shape of his autobiographical hero Moses Herzog. But Augie was a move in the right direction.
WHEN The Adventures of Augie March hit the bookstores in 1953, Bellow was still a struggling young writer. His first two novels had been praised by eminences like Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin, but had sold little. Dangling Man and The Victim were constricted exercises in modernist angst, adroit and deliberately airless; their heroes were visibly indebted to Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and Kafka’s Joseph K. Bellow seemed to be in the running to become a grim spokesman for high culture in its tense existentialist mode, a favorite of the Partisan Review crowd. Suddenly, his view changed, and with it the future of American fiction. Augie was an explosive, shaggy picaresque that offered a comic escape hatch for American writers, an alternative to the recently canonized Faulkner with his tragic, grandly obsessive view of America (Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner had appeared in 1946, seven years before Augie).
Bellow decided to jettison the ardent, pure style of existential heroics along with the strict sobrieties of naturalism. He had made a passionate break with the high modernist agenda. Augie seemed to its first readers a book that delivered a startling, unkempt newness: the writer was doing things in a new way because this was what reality demanded.
The genesis of Augie March occurred in the fall of 1949, when Bellow was living in Paris, his marriage to Anita slowly falling apart. He was working tepidly on a novel about two talkative invalids who conduct a dialogue from their hospital beds (he had tentatively titled the book “The Crab and the Butterfly”). The novel wasn’t going well; what Bellow had written was full of long-winded philosophy, and he was depressed over his lack of progress. But another idea for a book kept bothering him, prodding him to attention: something about his early life in Chicago. He called it, for a while, a “speculative biography” rather than a novel; its early chapters resembled a memoir, with all the names changed. Bellow’s school friends and their parents appeared, in thinly disguised form; his own family was there too, most of all the hard-driving Morrie. Soon Bellow was sitting in the cafés of Paris and writing furiously, a chapter a week in rough draft. He was having a “wild time,” he reported, “stirred to the depths” by his memories.
“IN AMERICAN LITERATURE there were all these strange and homeless solitaries, motherless and fatherless creatures like Natty and Huck and Ishmael. Didn’t they know where life came from and returned to?” The question was asked by Irving Howe in “Strangers,” a 1977 essay about the Jewish immigrants who, like Howe himself, had grown up talking Yiddish at home but reading and writing American English, who couldn’t stop devouring the great American books but all the time wondered why their own lives were so crowded with family—its happiness, its aches and moanings, its staggering disputes—while the lives they were reading about were so stranded and lonely. All the proud Emersonian declarations of individualism, whether pioneer or New England genteel, seemed, by pledging the sublime benefits of isolation, to be a doubtful bill of goods to these hopeful Jewish authors and intellectuals: a denial of mishpocha and neighborhood, of the speech-fed chaos that they breathed in and out all day long. How could the Jews, the people of home and family, fit into American fiction, with its outward-bound loners?
Bellow’s answer, long before Howe wrote his essay, was Augie March. The book was a revelation to writers and readers of American fiction: it was looser, more energetic, more packed with nervous excitement than anything they had seen before. Augie was a constantly surprising all-night party in book form, a riposte to the staid New Yorker fiction of its day (in a 1951 essay on Dreiser, Bellow had attacked “the ‘good’ writing of The New Yorker”: “finally what emerges is a terrible hunger for conformism and uniformity,” he wrote). Bellow distanced himself too from the ongoing, artless furies of the Beats: his was a fashioned vividness.
In his long writing career, Bellow discovered that the solitary traveler and the family man could mingle in odd, unprecedented ways; so did Howe, who in “Strangers” jokingly unmasks Melville’s Ishmael as a mama’s boy. He’s really the Isaac of Genesis, Howe claims, doted on endlessly by his mother, Sarah, but he remakes himself into a wild man headed for the far seas: an Ishmael stirred by the jumbled, dangerous world that will lure him away from home forever. Ishmael-Isaac lights out for the territories, but within him all the while is his covenant with the things he first knew, the childhood memories that tell all. So in Bellow, too, the exotic explorer and intellectual highflyer might feel the tug of home. Nostalgia binds us all back to our earliest years.
The Adventures of Augie March is a shaggy-dog story, a cock-and-bull tale, and it wears its shapelessness on its sleeve. In Augie, Bellow gives us his most buoyant hero, who combines aspects of Melville’s Ishmael, Dickens’s David Copperfield, Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, and Twain’s Huck Finn. When Augie has a dream in which he owns three grand pianos, this flummoxes him, “as I can’t play any more than a bull can sew cushions,” he says, and we hear Twain’s homespun, extravagant Huck.
Augie resembles no other Bellow hero. In his next two big novels, Bellow would invent Henderson, boisterous, large hearted, and utterly out of control, and then manic, sorrowful Herzog, trammeled by two ex-wives and weighed down by the history of ideas. Augie is fresher and more free than these later protagonists: the quintessential young man, a bold yet yielding naïf out to make his way in the world.
Some reviewers found Augie, who bounces back from every mishap, too resilient. Norman Podhoretz in Commentary remarked that “Augie reminds us of those animals in the cartoons who get burned to cinders, flattened out like pancakes, exploded, and generally made a mess of, yet who turn up intact after every catastrophe, as if nothing has happened.”
Podhoretz missed the unique qualities of Augie March. Bellow had brought to a fine pitch what Howe called the “American Jewish style,” a style fulfilled, Howe said, in Bellow’s work. Howe singled out as key aspects of this style the “forced yoking of opposites: gutter vividness and university refinement”; a “strong infusion of Yiddish” with its “ironic twistings” of phrase; the “deliberate loosening of syntax”; and a technique of playing with common talk so that it “vibrates with cultural ambition, seeking to zoom into the regions of higher thought.” In later books like Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow was able to transmit the verbal somersaults of the lecturer gripped by ideas, ravished by his passion for truth and light. And this intellectual questing was combined, as in the great Russian novelists, with a sense of the savage importance of feeling. Augie is relatively isolated from such sufferings and ecstasies, defended by his innocence from the lacerations that ideas can inflict on the soul. But his distinctive patois still marries low and high, with an odd and offhanded range of high cultural references. The piquant Augie sounds grand but not grandiose; his large way of talking is homemade, but never clumsy or pretentious. Bellow’s sublime turns are sometimes strangely mated to his reluctant though plucky hero, but they feel right. Bellow ennobles the American language as he skewers it on the spike of immigrant speech. There had been immigrant novels before, from James T. Farrell’s brash, jazzy Studs Lonigan to Henry Roth’s dreamy and impacted Call It Sleep, but nothing like this.
Augie is Bellow without the wariness—a little too close, in Bellow’s later judgment, to one of Sherwood Anderson’s “gee whiz” young men. As Podhoretz noticed, Augie lands on his feet time after time without being especially clever; unlike Bellow himself, he is not canny, he does not keep his eye on the ball. For most of his life, it was hard for Bellow to grasp the link between his own gusto, his greedy taste for experience, and his rapid-fire intelligence, the way he sized up people, places, and ideas for his own purposes. So he created heroes who were either too innocent, like Augie, or too knowing, like Sammler in Mr. Sammler’s Planet. To be a hard-driving intellectual and an innocent at once was a recipe for trouble: Herzog, Humboldt. Not until his last hero, Ravelstein, did Bellow portray childlike enjoyment and intellectual shrewdness happily married in the same human being. Ravelstein is really just a big kid, one who wants to rule the world.
The question of shrewdness and innocence goes back to how important Morrie was for Bellow. Morrie wanted control, he believed in hard reality, but he lacked the innocence that imagination needs: this, he believed, could only get you in trouble. Morrie’s knowingness had nothing intellectual about it, and nothing childlike either. Bellow had to confront his big brother, the most imposing reality instructor in his life, in order to create his later work. He had to overcome the hard realist Morrie, imagination’s enemy, so that he could release his later heroes of imagination.
Augie March begins in a house in “Chicago, that somber city,” as Bellow names it in his opening sentence (Dreiser in Sister Carrie had described Chicago wrapped in a “somber garb of gray”). Grandma Lausch (not a blood relation), who boards with the Marches, rules the roost, teaching Augie “to command, to govern, to manage, scheme, devise and intrigue” as she extracts discounts for the Marches from grocers and peddlers. In the opening pages of Augie, Bellow describes Grandma Lausch playing klabyasch, a card game, with a neighbor, Mr. Kreindl, a Hungarian who “was an old-time Austro-Hungarian conscript.” “Grandma Lausch played like Timur,” reports Augie in a typically far-flung comparison,
whether chess or klabyasch, with palatal catty harshness and sharp gold in her eyes. Klabyasch she played with Mr. Kreindl, a neighbor of ours who had taught her the game. A powerful stub-handed man with a large belly, he swatted the table with those hard hands of his, flinging down his cards and shouting, “Shtoch! Yasch! Menél! Klabyasch!”
(In rough translation from Yiddish and Polish: “Ouch, that hurts! The trump! You bum! Klabyasch!”) The scene will be instantly recognizable to anyone who grew up in an immigrant household where games like pinochle, chess and klabyasch (also known as clabber) provided a stage for high-handed theater.
Augie’s father has deserted the family and his mother is nearly invisible, so Grandma Lausch is the de facto head of the March family. She sends Augie running to the public library for the novels she devours, and reprimands him when he brings her back, by mistake, a Tolstoy religious tract (“How many times do I have to tell you if it doesn’t say roman I don’t want it?”) She reigns through intimidation, and is hard-hearted too: she consigns the Marches’ mentally disabled little brother, Georgie, to a home for the feeble-minded—and then is herself forced to move to an old age home, where she loses her memory along with her powers of manipulation. Augie is dismayed by Grandma Lausch’s signs of triumph after she has dispatched Georgie: “the old lady made of it something it didn’t necessarily have to be, a test of strength, tactless, a piece of sultanism,” the product of an “angry giddiness from self-imposed, prideful struggle.” Bellow might have been thinking of Morrie when he wrote these lines. Grandma Lausch’s greedy desire to triumph over others is like Morrie’s, and Augie rejects it. Instead he sides with the weak of the world, people like his poor brother Georgie. Augie himself is a drifter, passive and lucky. His interest in the powerful is tender and curious, but he can’t quite see their point. His innocence protects him from the rapacious schemers.
Early in his career Augie falls in with his cousins, the Coblins, and encounters Anna Coblin’s brother, the Cyclops-like Five Properties, so named for the landlord’s boast he prides himself on, part of his routine pitch to girls. (Was Bellow thinking of Dostoevsky’s Ptitsyn in The Idiot, who could never rank more than four houses?)
That would be Five Properties shambling through the cottage, Anna’s immense brother, long armed and humped, his head grown off the thick band of muscle as original as a bole on his back, hair tender and greenish brown, eyes completely green, clear, estimating, primitive, and sardonic, an Eskimo smile of primitive simplicity opening on Eskimo teeth buried in high gums, kidding, gleeful, and unfrank; a big-footed contender for wealth.
This passage reveals much about Bellow’s new style in Augie March, so radically different from the taut, measured rhythms of his first two novels. Bellow is here as rough and loping as Five Properties himself, and rhapsodic too. You can imagine Whitman delivering that “clear, estimating, primitive, and sardonic.” Bellow piles up adjectives as high as Five Properties’ bulky, clever head. He twines together Five Properties’ cunning nature with his fresh high spirits: both childlike and cynical, he is “kidding, gleeful, and unfrank.” Always in Bellow, someone’s body tells you all about his soul: physiognomy is destiny. So it is with Five Properties and his Eskimo mouth, which carries both smiling heartiness and strenuous, testing ambition. “What he had to say was usually on the Spartan or proconsular model, quick and hard,” Augie says of Five Properties; for a girl, he “had in mind a bouncing, black-haired, large-lipped, party-going peach.” Bellow’s portrait of Five Properties, in a few quick strokes, is complete: striving, sly, blunt, out for pleasure and power.
Five Properties is Morrie without his grossness and violence: a gentle brute. There’s a telling difference between Bellow’s attitude toward such a figure and that of his inheritor Philip Roth, who takes the will to personal power altogether more earnestly, more ascetically. For Bellow, those who want power necessarily court the outlandish. Five Properties is cartoonlike, but also winningly personable; there is nothing sterile or self-enclosed about him. By contrast, Roth’s people are brilliantly stunted. They nurture their desires like prize possessions, jealously guarding them.
In a telling 1984 letter to Roth, Bellow summed up the difference between them: “You seem to have accepted the Freudian explanation: a writer is motivated by his desire for fame, money and sexual opportunities. Whereas I have never taken this trinity of motives seriously.” There is a high romantic conviction in Bellow that never appears in Roth: Bellow thinks that the self aims for expression, on as wild and full a canvas as possible, rather than control. The characters Roth creates are tightly possessive as they pursue power over women, over themselves. Bellow’s people, by contrast, when they desire riches, fame or sex, seem like kids. They are set loose rather than cramped by what they want. It took time for Bellow to reach this freedom, and the first step toward it was to surpass the clenched, hungry egoism of Morrie, who was really a Roth character rather than a Bellow one.
AUGIE HOLDS DOWN a series of odd jobs, from dog walking to shoplifting textbooks. He also dallies with a number of women, including a Greek union organizer named Sophie and the wealthy, temperamental Thea Fenchel. Bellow had a deep crush on a girl really named Fenchel in high school; in Augie, he turned the tables, making her fall in love with him instead. (Decades later, at a Tuley High School reunion, Fenchel’s husband rose from his wheelchair to slap Bellow for flirting with his wife.)
Midway through the novel, Augie helps a friend, Mimi, get an abortion. It’s hard to think of another account of an abortion by a male writer that displays such sympathy and such realism, and such dark comedy. When Augie takes Mimi to a hospital, they are treated with contempt. In another part of the book, Augie rides the rails: a dusky, gritty Depression-era scene. Eventually he departs for Mexico with Thea, who is determined to train an eagle to hunt giant iguanas. When Augie heads for Mexico, the novel turns riskier and more rhapsodic, and at times feels rather aimless.
And so Bellow’s Augie keeps rolling. After his return from Mexico, he joins the Merchant Marine, as Bellow did near the end of World War II. He gets engaged to Stella, a girl he met south of the border, and through her he encounters Mintouchian, a high-powered Armenian lawyer. As it nears its end, Augie March revives tremendously with Mintouchian, a reality instructor to rival the Stein of Conrad’s Lord Jim. He is, Bellow writes, “a monument of a person, with his head very abrupt at the back, as Armenian heads tend sometimes to be, but lionlike in front, with red cheekbones.” Dressed usually “in evening clothes of Rembrandt blackness,” Mintouchian will give Augie a dose of dark yet vitalizing wisdom.
The sage Armenian macher Mintouchian tells Augie that “the thing that kills you is the thing that you stand for”: “What is the weapon? The nails and hammer of your character. What is the cross? Your own bones on which you gradually weaken. . . . The fish wills water, and the bird wills air, and you and me our dominant idea.” “You must take your chance on what you are,” he commands Augie, and—sounding like Emerson—“only system taps the will of the universe.” As a juiced-up, sharp-eyed lawyer, Mintouchian is supremely aware of the human bent for deception (much of his talk concerns philandering). Yet he convincingly recommends to Augie a magnificent self-trust. For a few pages, he solves the puzzle of Bellow’s protean, seemingly endless book, making it come to rest in a settled place, high romantic and sure of itself.
Even better is yet to come. A few pages later in Augie March, Bellow scuttles Mintouchian’s wisdom, replacing the grand Armenian with an uncanny zany out of Dostoevsky: a lunatic ship’s carpenter and autodidact scientist named Basteshaw. In an episode that seems sprouted from a New Yorker cartoon (and my own favorite stretch of the novel), Augie and Basteshaw find themselves adrift on the wide ocean after their Merchant Marine vessel is shipwrecked, and for days on end Basteshaw bombards Augie with his ardent theories. Basteshaw is something of a low-rent Nietzschean, who fantasized in college about being a Renaissance cardinal—“A wicked one, smoking with life, neighing and plunging”—but who then laid aside such titillation in order to pursue a scholarly project: to become the world’s greatest expert on boredom. Augie is “stupefied” by Basteshaw’s coolly assured lecturer’s manner: “I watched him climb around like an alpinist of the mountains of his own brain, sturdy, and with his calm goggles and his blue glances of certitude.” Finally, Basteshaw quietly reveals his secret: while monkeying around in his lab with protoplasm, he created life. (Here Bellow is spoofing the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, one of his early enthusiasms: Reich claimed he had discovered the elementary units of life, which he called “bions.”)
Like the addled Basteshaw—whose ideas are both insane and, in the end, rather infectious—Bellow created life when he wrote Augie. Lionel Trilling’s judgment of Augie March, expressed in a letter to Bellow’s editor, was glowing. “It’s Saul’s gift to see life everywhere,” Trilling wrote to Pat Covici. “He really believes in the living will. There isn’t an inert person in the book, just as there isn’t an inert sentence.” Trilling recommended the novel with enthusiasm in an essay that later became the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Augie. Bellow was grateful for such praise, but he knew that Augie wasn’t really Trilling’s kind of book. Neither judicious nor weighted with maturity, Augie March careens, often gloriously hits, but sometimes misses.
In a letter to Bernard Malamud Bellow admitted Augie March’s flaws: “I made many mistakes. . . . Yes, Augie is too passive, perhaps. Yes, the episodes do not have enough variety.” But Bellow was proud of what he had done, the form he had chosen. “A novel, like a letter, should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly,” he wrote to Malamud. “[In Augie] I backed away from Flaubert, in the direction of Balzac, Walter Scott and Dickens.” Bellow’s looseness of form made possible an appreciation of the human presences that inhabit a novel; in contrast, tightly controlled Flaubertian modernism privileged the author who loomed high over his characters. (In a 1960 essay, “The Sealed Treasure,” Bellow criticized the Flaubertian style’s “disappointment with its human material.”)
Augie March gives us the novel as an unruly creature, shining and messy; it lets in more of life, in unfiltered form, than readers had been used to. Neither Hemingway with his narrow artistic code (which, Bellow once complained, leaves so much of life out) nor Faulkner with his drenched operatic intensity, which seems to artificially heighten everything it touches, could have accomplished this. Bellow perfected a new, more open style: distinctively Jewish in the ways that Howe noticed but at the same time harking back to Melville, Twain, and Emerson.
Augie March eventually sold thirty thousand copies: not quite a best seller, but good; and it won the National Book Award. The novel made Bellow famous. Flush with his new success, he sent a copy of Augie to his father. Abraham Bellow wrote to his son proudly from Chicago, “The book made a hit all over America. I hope the next will be still better,” and continued: “Still from time to time send me few lines a letter. . . . Still I am the head of all of you. Pa Bellow.”
Bellow found his father’s praise less than satisfying. Writing to his high school friend Sam Freifeld in the fall of 1953, after the success of Augie, Bellow commented, “It’s just like my father to begin to be generous long after the rest of the world has begun. He’s impressed by my new fame and even more by the sales of the book and now he feels uneasy and wants, too late, to go on record as a good parent. I try to make him feel that there is plenty of time.”
Bellow avoided depicting his father’s furious temperament in his published work. But he continued his struggle with Morrie long after Augie March. In a book-length manuscript from the fifties, “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” Bellow tried to tell his family’s story through a narrator who combines aspects of Morrie and Saul, but the project was a failure, and Bellow published only a brief section from it. Two decades later, Humboldt’s Gift was another story: here Bellow produced a moving, elegiac study of the aging Morrie. In Humboldt the Morrie character, Charlie Citrine’s elder brother Ulick, becomes a sufferer rather than the manipulator he was in Augie. Bellow knew that Morrie had a self-punishing streak as well as a wish to punish others. He wrote to Freifeld in 1953, “A few years ago when my brother had cancer he cried out, ‘I pissed my life away!’ And now look at him. That’s all forgotten. But I didn’t forget the great pain of hearing a man condemn himself. . . . Of course, so long as our misery is secret our honor is whole.” Morrie had a nervous turmoil inside him, just like Bellow, who was also haunted by the specter of failure. Not until Herzog, published when he was nearly fifty, did Bellow become financially secure. Both brothers worried that their immense confidence might be covering a pit of self-doubt.
In Humboldt’s Gift Bellow produces his most affecting portrait of Morrie. In his sixties Ulick has moved south, as Morrie did—to Texas rather than Morrie’s Georgia. He has become a real estate man, “one of the biggest builders of southeast Texas.” Facing major heart surgery, he puts “on a shirt of flame-blue Italian silk, a beautiful garment,” and devours fish and persimmons with his brother Charlie, who has come down to see him before the operation. “We sat with him under a tree sucking at the breast-sized, flame-colored fruit. The juice spurted over his sport shirt, and seeing that it now had to go to the cleaner anyway he wiped his fingers on it as well. His eyes had shrunk, and moved back and forth rapidly in his head.” Ulick, in an “ecstasy of craftiness,” is still plotting real estate deals. “It seemed to me there were few faces like his,” Charlie says, “with the ferocious profile that brought to mind the Latin word rapax or one of Rouault’s crazed death-dealing arbitrary kings.” Charlie remembers Ulick the child: “I still saw in him the obese, choked-looking boy, the lustful conniving kid whose eyes continually pleaded not guilty. I knew him inside-out. . . . I knew the mole on the back of his wrist, his nose broken and reset, his fierce false look of innocence, his snorts, and his smells.” “If I die on the table,” Ulick tells Charlie, he wants Charlie to marry his wife, Hortense. (Ulick will survive the operation.) “Arrogant, haggard, he was filled with incommunicable thoughts.” In Humboldt’s Gift Ulick—Morrie—has become an isolated, proud king, self-shuttered, shadowed by death. His greedy eating habits have something desperate about them.
Bellow concludes Charlie’s meeting with Ulick with a few unsteady sentences: “Late noon stood like a wall of gold. And a mass of love was between us, and neither Ulick nor I knew what to do with it. ‘Well, all right, good-by.’ He turned his back on me. I got into the rented car and took off.”
The sentiment is overripe, as if to make up for Ulick’s silence. Charlie talks plangently about their “mass of love” because he knows that Ulick won’t. The novelist, faced with his hard, restless brother, cannot avoid the sentimental openness that Morrie scorned. Morrie turned his back on his brother. Was Bellow trying to reach him or exorcise him by evoking their shared childhood past in his work? Something of both, no doubt. As long as he lived, Bellow was still, like Augie, the innocent kid faced with a wised-up older brother, the original reality instructor.