When I was a high school senior back in 1988 I went to some kind of college-night-for-prospective-English-majors event that was held at one of the other schools in my town. I don't remember what object I had in mind in going to this meeting, other than the sense that something might grab me--my college strategy was woefully undeveloped even for that era--or, if nothing else, that there would be some specimens of the kinds of girls I liked there to get me in the college mood, on which I was by that point banking all of my romantic hopes. One of the speakers, who was a graduate student somewhere pretty big, the University of Michigan, I believe, gave a little talk about university-level English programs. He was probably about 24, which at the time was to me almost the same as if he had been 38. That is, I considered him a full-fledged grown-up. Whatever he was, somebody had set him in a fury against the hegemony of European-descended peoples over every area of his field. This being in Maine, there was of course not a single nonwhite person in the room, including him, and he affected to be repulsed, even offended, by our complacent homogeneity, and advised us with much heat not to bother studying English if we weren't prepared to have our sheltered, safe little conceptions about its nature, and our illusions about ourselves and the society we lived in, shattered. Being always taken in by forceful anger as I am, I began earnestly to wonder if this were actually true, though my heart sank a little at the thought that my presence might be so offensive to the professors and the literary girls, both of which groups I had been so looking forward to being on good, if not intimate terms with. The speaker then went on to trash a number of famous white boy authors, as he called them--from which I gathered that in his mind almost any instance of a white person's picking up a pen was either a farce or resulted in some sort of serious cultural crime --and extol a fairly extensive list exclusively made up of people of color and a few white feminists as creating all the American language and art and literature that mattered. After he had exhausted most of his list of writers he considered admirable, he turned his glare upon the section of chairs where I was sitting and, as I imagined, looking right at me, said through his teeth with uncontainable contempt, "And I bet you thought Saul Bellow was the best writer in America."
Dear reader, I assure you I thought no such thing.
I did know, however, that when I was a boy, and first coming into general awareness of the existence of literature, that Saul Bellow was considered by a lot of important and serious people to be the best writer in the country, which, as a bookish child myself, I took due notice of, though of course I knew nothing about him, other than assuming that he was Jewish because his name was Saul. At some point in the early to mid 80s it seemed to become unfashionable to say he was quite the best writer in the country; my general take on the shift was that it was felt we needed somebody better, or at least smarter (Thomas Pynchon?), less white and male (Toni Morrison?), more pessimistic (Philip Roth?) or maybe just younger and more edgy, that being the kind of people we are. Not that Bellow was not plenty ornery, apparently, but having become the establishment, his work being met with most approval by the kind of comfortable older men in positions of authority that vital authors and artistic people are supposed to detest, and as well the entirety of the body of work that was taking shape not appearing to measure up to the real giants of world literature, it was probably inevitable that we would wish to try the mantle on someone else, as someone always has to wear it.
After avoiding him for the first 35 years of my life, I have had quite a lot of Bellow lately. I took up Henderson the Rain King in December of 2005, followed by Herzog in February, 2006, before getting to Augie March. I was also at a Christmas party a couple of years ago where I was not able to talk to anybody so I skimmed a considerable bit of Ravelstein which the host happened to have. I have found this author to be sort of an anti-Dickens, in that the images and remembrances that make the greatest impression on my memory are usually such as I consider to be negative, and the parts that I thought were good I tend to forget. One and a half years on I remembered not much liking Henderson, so I was surprised to discover this note I wrote December 22, 2005:"An interesting, and largely successful, attempt to reconnect modern men with elemental forces, particularly animals, water, sun, heat, insects, his sense of the mythological. The implication of some destructive force as necessary personified in the Henderson character is the most important idea put forward. For he has badly upset the stasis of the African societies he encounters in discovering his own place. Does this collison give them renewed meaning, or is their meaning dead and requiring a rebirth of their own? There are a lot of good touches here, namely the physical transformations of men into more animal-like beings, the absorption of the myths by the psyche (the only possibility for them?) and the regarding of people as earth-sprung. Man must find a mix between nature and civilization, yes?"
Herzog was another book that was engaging enough to read, though it seemed a little lumbering at times, and certainly did not strike me as a masterpiece or Nobel Prize worthy material. Bellow of course was an old U of Chicago man, famous friend of Allan Bloom's, very evidently schooled in some version of a Great Books type program, and any old St Johnny, as I am, will recognize where a great many of his allusions and namedroppings come from, and even why he chooses to employ them where he does, as if almost instinctively. Herzog's famous dialogues with himself and letters to Heidegger and so forth read just like one would imagine a St John's tutor would have under the circumstances--albeit one of the lesser ones. Also with Herzog the connoisseurship and critiquing he adopts towards women, which was apparent in Henderson also, really begins to get on my nerves. In part there is doubtless envy towards the easy confidence and sense of privilege men of that generation felt, even into middle and old age, when it came to talking about and pursuing women. I am 37 and I am certain that if I were to offer a 19 year old an assessment of her sexual type and possibilities or even remark on it to a male friend as we watched her jogging past the campus coffee shop that this would be considered an abomination, yet in Bellow's books and apparently his life the male characters carry on in such a manner into their 80s. It all makes me wonder at how I missed the boat on all these things--literature, women, success--so badly. Ravelstein, or at least the parts of it I read, are even more depressing in this regard, though the book is well-done for what it is. It is for me, at my present age and in my present circumstances however, mostly a demonstration of how far my idea of myself in youth was from any reality.
The Adventures of Augie March is a much earlier book though, set in a time and a country that I like, and that I suspect Saul Bellow liked, a lot better than the one the came later on. In England at least it seems to be considered his best book, and I certainly it is the best of the ones that I have read, though I would still refrain from calling it the Great American Novel, as a few people have suggested, or even the best American novel since WWII, even though it may be that, I don't know. It is a good book, an absorbing book almost all the way through, keeps up a pretty good pace, and I strongly recommend it, but ultimately it is not a monumental book, it does not achieve I don't think a variety of perfection that will enable it to stand as one of the main pillars in a really distinguished national library. It is in that library, maybe even on the first floor reading room, if not that certainly in the second floor lounge where the sofas are where the girls take their naps, which is not a bad room to be in either.
I have a lot of notes on this book that I will write up in other posts. This is probably a four or five post book.
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