saul bellow

Since Martin Amis is under discussion elsewhere, and since Herzog is on my mind: is it commonly known that Amis pilfered (though heavily parsed) the conversation in the Rachel Papers between Charles and his brother-in-law from the bit where Herzog hears the old potato love from his old friend and lawyer? The rewriting is excellent but the gist of the dialogue is lifted outright. Surely the young Amis was caught on it, right?

Speaking of M Amis, the notion of the "high-IQ moron" in Yellow Dog is taken from Mr Sammler's Planet, but then M Amis novels usually do include links to and from Bellow of that type.

I'm not a huge fan of Bellow. His major fault is that he is less interested in being an imaginative writer (for which he does have talent) than in being an intellectual/thinker (for which he has very little talent). There are obvious similarities with the younger Amis, who models himself on Bellow and also repeatedly refers to himself as an "intellectual" despite displaying little or no capacity for original or disciplined thought.

In Ravelstein Bellow portrays himself as a devoted admirer of Ravelstein (a thinly disguised portrait of his friend Allan Bloom). Bloom is painted as the bigger man because Bellow concedes him superiority as an intellectual/thinker who therefore ranks higher than a mere novelist. To get a measure of Bloom's credentials it's worth reading a couple of chapters of Bloom's nonsensical "The Closing of the American Mind", a poorly argued piece of self-serving bigotry about the primacy of Great Artists and Thinkers of Western Culture. Having realised who Bloom is and the extent of Bellow's lionisation it's difficult to avoid seeing Bellow as something of a buffoon. Fans may object that he's past his best in Ravelstein, but all these ingredients are already well in evidence in, say, The Dean's December.

This sounds very negative, but in fact it's an enjoyable read. But if you haven't read Philip Roth, I'd read him first, he's a much better writer.

'Humboldt's Gift' is a gd one to start with, I think, esp. if you know a little bit abt Delmore Schwartz (who Humboldt is based on). It's very funny, too.

The earlier novels in the main put you right in the thick of "it" (whatever "it" eventually turns out to be), in the midst of dense anthropological undergrowth & subtext. Ideas (even if only partially assimilated) get put through their narrative paces with verve - it's supposed to be, and usually is, fun (in particular, Henderson the Rain King).

Henderson, Herzog, Seize The Day, Humboldt's Gift, Augie March in that order, though that's just 'cause it's the order I read them in. Augie defeated me once or twice, before I read Henderson and understood what was to love. What Neil Willett says, above, is OTM: he smacks you down in the thick of it. "It" being an anxious, hypertrophied vitality. (Whitman and Allen Ginsberg being the two American writers who get close to matching him for this characteristic, and neither are--of course--nearly as funny. Amis' fatal flaw, in my opinion, is his total absence of this very quality.) Everything else--by which I mean "plot," and even "idea" (though I also agree with Neil he is, or was in his prime, a perfectly fine thinker)--gets swept along by this. Yet it isn't just language; it's *pulse,* for want of a better word. There's a marvelous riff in Henderson--though you can find this somewhere in all Bellow's work that I've read--on what the narrator refers to as the "grun-tu-molani," which means "I want I want I want." You gotta lock into the particular resonance he gives this, or rather that it gives him: a propelling, nervous passion.

Great writer. Roth too, but the vote goes to Bellow by a hair.

I am about to start Seize the Day, instead.

I just got a copy of his memoir of his visit to Israel, (I forget the name, something like "To Jerusalem and Back"), which I only just found out that he wrote. I've only read a few pages - just stuff about the Hassidic Jews on the plane. It's all well-observed but kind of obvious so far - the sort of stuff any smart, non-religious Jew would notice on such a trip. Then again, it was the 70s, and I don't know whether his trip was already as common then as it is now.

As for Roth, I liked Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy's. Couldn't really stay with Shylock - like oooh said, it was clever but detached.

I adore Bellow, but I couldn't finish Henderson or Mr. Sammler's Planet.

I loved Herzog, Seize the Day, and Humboldt's Gift, and a few of the short stories. Wasn't crazy about The Actual or Ravelstein.

xpost yeah biggie used more words than pac too

xpost

It doesn't have to be merely functional, but a lot of what I'm reading in Roth does strike me that way. I'd be curious to see a fan of Roth's style post a few sentences of his that to them seem particularly admirable or noteworthy in a beyond merely functional sort of way. There are so many passages in Bellow where an unexpected turn of phrase or metaphor leaps out at you as something you never would have used but seems wholly vivid, appropriate, and pithy once you've read it.

I'd be curious to see a fan of Roth's style post a few sentences of his that to them seem particularly admirable or noteworthy in a beyond merely functional sort of way.

My concept of good writing wouldn't lend itself very readily to having a sentence or two pulled out of context to be admired. Almost invariably when critics do this in a book review, it's a sentence I actually think is bad, generally some tendentious, show-offy metaphor that doesn't really add anything to anything. Style is a question of taste of course, but I tend to wince at the look-at-me-Mum style of writing. Bellow is better than that, but there's a strain of American writing (that Amis and a lot of the seventies Brits ape) that turns style into this really self-conscious thing. The Hemingway-esque style is really just another variant of that. My feeling is that if style is done well, it shouldn't be drawing attention to itself, it should almost be doing the reverse, letting you get lost in another world and easing you through the conventions of fiction without your noticing how you're being manipulated. Someone like Patricia Highsmith I would rate as a great American stylist.

like having your knuckles rapped by Sister Mary Jerome's ruler.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1455215,00.html

Bellow was one, to my mind the greatest of American prose stylists in the 20th century - and thus one of the greatest in American fiction. It was a prose for all seasons; it seemed to do more of what one wanted from prose than any other competitor. It was intensely lyrical and musical, its rhythms a pressing mingle of Yiddish, American, English, and Hebrew (after Lawrence, Bellow was the most biblical of modern writers in English); but it was also grounded in speech, and seemed incapable of preciousness (unlike, say, the lovely but often pampered lustres of an Updike); it was witty, metaphysical, sensuous, playful. Above all, Bellow saw the world anew.

I mean, so what

sorry, I'm not being a prick; I just don't see that as recommending him to me

I found myself unable to finish the last 20 pages of Mr. Sammler's Planet. I enjoyed parts of it but couldn't care less about the characters and what happens to them.

is augie march a good one to start with?

It depends. It's amazing--truly wondrous language, characters, picture of America. But it's long, really long, and, although there's lots of action, there's not a lot of forward plot movement. So it kind of depends on what sort of reader you are--are you put off by really long books? etc.

Seize the Day is v v short, a perfect novella, although it's written in a completely different style. Augie March has the famous Bellow style (more, more, more of everything--a spilling out of descriptive joy); Seize the Day is much more controlled, spare, one day in the life of one character, instead of a whole world.

yeah I'd start w/Seize The Day, then Augie March and Herzog. Mr Smmler and Humboldt are optional.

right now I'm re-reading Ravelstein and it's really something -- wise, warm, an affectionate sketch of a dying friend and meditation on life and aging, profound in a much more low-key and "natural" way than his novels.

Arf Arf's narrow and overly politicized reading upthread is ludicrous. who the Ravelstein character is based on in real life makes absolutely no difference to the story being told.

Yeah, what Gooblar said seconded. I'd read Humboldt's Gift over Herzog though - HG is a bit more fun and raucous.

So although it's been a while since I've read Bellow, he's been on my mind recently. I'm wondering if anyone can reconcile what seems at times like outright racism in his novels. The black pickpocket in Sammler (who shows Sammler his dick!) seems like a representation of a perceived vulgarization of the country, and it's hard to see using a black character that way as anything other than racist, especially when there's a conspicuous absence of more nuanced black characters in his work, at least as far as what I've read. I seem to also remember a very insulting and condescending description of a black doorman in Humboldt's Gift (amounting to something not far from "look at this silly negro trying to sound smart by commenting on international affairs").

I guess I've mostly ignored these things because I enjoy his writing so much.

yeah, you just have to tough it out really

i think trying to construct a defence is worse than admitting that he is both good and a bit racist; if you wanted to, though, 'mr sammler's planet' does have an indian character who is not treated racist-ly

Just finished The Adventures of Augie March, my first Bellow. I'm afraid his prose style may ruin future books for me, that was some really great writing. I'm amazed he isn't talked about more as an "important" American writer in pop culture (as opposed to say, Salinger, etc.).

He blows so many other Big Writers out of the water on strength of his craftsmanship alone, but I also enjoyed his thoughtful ideas about life ... on a personal level, Augie March sorta tracked my own coming of age and concerns, but expressed in ways I could only dream of achieving. Gush over, definitely want to check out his other novels.

New book about him by his son.

that could be interesting. herzog is a masterpiece: the great american coming of age novel for middle aged people.

the victim is probably my favorite novel that features staten island

been meaning to re-read for years. I read most everything in my 20's and it would be fun to see how he and I have changed over the years. Henderson was the only dud for me. roth should have written that book! he was such an inspiration though. a revelation. that sort of thing. the conversational and the quippy and the big picture what does it all mean? questions rolled up into one sentence definitely my kind of thing. where would I be without that generation of American jews? I shudder to think.

The only post-Herzog I enjoyed was Humboldt's Gift, more for the exuberance of the last eighty pages. Henderson and Mr Sammler's Planet are such ponderosities – and they're shorter than Augie March! By the time he wrote The Dean's December he was a sour crank, although if you're like me fascinated by the transformation of the New Deal Jewish intellectual class into neoconservatives this is your book.

His short stories and novellas don't get enough attention imo. "What Kind of Day Did You Have?" is as generous and hilarious as his classic fiction.

I feel like finding out more about what he was like as a person from his son will just make me like him less. I get the impression that he was kind of an aloof jerk IRL.

Book by the son seems to be about telling the world about the "Young Saul" who he knew and loved when he was a boy as opposed to the cantankerous crank or "Old Saul" that he became. He didn't get along too well with Old Saul either.

Anyway, that's what he's trying to do. At least one reviewer is not convinced: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/13/saul-bellows-heart-greg-review

Nor this one: http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/8883681/too-many-keepers-of-the-flame/

is there anything in there about when ralph ellison lived with them for a while in tivoli, new york?

To Karl Shapiro

July 31, 1987

West Brattleboro

Every time I publish a novel it turns out that a test has been administered—no, two tests; in one I am graded by reviewers, while the other is mine, unintentionally given to my fellow Americans. Half of these are totally illiterate, thirty percent more are functionally illiterate, and the rest, while intellectually capable, are tremendously unwilling to go along. Democrat that I am, I write for everybody but as you well know not everybody gives a damn. Grateful for what I can get, I absolve one and all. We weren’t brought up, you and I, to feel superior. The idea of giving the entire U.S.A. a Rorschach test in the arts is horrifying. Still, the fatal facts (for example, that our souls are gasping for oxygen) can’t be covered up. Sometimes I see in the entire species a single animal as represented in the paintings of the Northwest Coast Indians. All the parts of the creature—eyes, teeth, belly, tail—have been separated and are arranged in the foreground so that teeth or ears or claws are hypertrophied whereas other important parts are diminutive. Well, everything is there, but the parts for whose development I pray are atrophied. One day they will be restored and judgment will occupy its rightful place.

Meantime my hopes are in people—like you and Sophie [Wilkins]—who, like me, have devoted their lives to novels, poems, music, painting, religion and philosophy. To most Americans we are respected freaks entitled, like everybody else, to live. They don’t have to eliminate curbstones for us, as for the blind. Like spastics whose brains outpace computers, or like those clairvoyants to whom the cops turn to find missing bodies when all police methods are exhausted, we have our place. On TV recently I saw a science prodigy with a strange disease, lecturing an audience of astrophysicists through an interpreter trained to understand him. He used a language only two could speak, and long formulas were written on the blackboard. This has got to mean something to you.

But there is nothing to complain about. I am lucky to find a few readers who actually approve. To have even a small minyan is ecstasy. (Do I catch myself saying, after so many decades of devotion to Anglo-American literature, that the Happy Few resemble the Jews!)

What I intended when I sat down to write was to thank you and Sophie for your assurance that I was indeed on track, doing what I thought I was doing and even directing my attention to things that had escaped me in my frenzy. And then enclosing the poem, which I reread several times a week, was magnificently symbolic, an act of certification from another initiate; going me one (or more) better. This is a poem Catullus might have written if he had reached your age—“Goodbye to all that.” Liberation ladies may be incensed when they read you, but the poem contains history, and history, as Lincoln assured us, we can’t escape.

My friend Janis and I will be leaving Vermont toward the end of September, but we can and will entertain you almost as splendidly in Chicago.

Yours ever,

One day they will be restored and judgment will occupy its rightful place.

nah

<3

ah, neocons

i always liked the short stories a lot. feel like they don't get enough love. i should buy the collected stories. i don't think i have a copy.

book almost totally forgotten: more die of heartbreak.

i was surprised recently when a journalist i really admire completely went off on bellow on facebook and then even more surprising was how many people joined in to stomp on bellow some more. never really experienced much bellow hate. don't know if its indicative of any critical tide turning or anything like that. but the vehemence surprised me.

only his politics are bad. the novels are good.

more skeptical every year that life is long enough for postwar american novelists

bellow has the best prose of all of them (pynchon aside) and it's still not enough anymore to make me curious what this week's vaguely fictionalized prominent intellectual thinks on the next page about the progress of civilization, or indeed whether he'll end up with the earthy unsophisticate or the castrating bitch, blah blah classical reference blah blah zesty colloquialism

i always liked the short stories a lot. feel like they don't get enough love. i should buy the collected stories. i don't think i have a copy.

The best thing he ever wrote is "What Kind of Day Did You Have?"

iirc that one's from the earthy unsophisticate's pov, which is an improvement

No, it's from the early '80s: his barely fictionalized valentine to Harold Rosenberg. The protagonist is his girlfriend, a muddled courtier having an affair with a cop. The best part is when the two of them are stranded in O'Hare during a snowstorm and must endure the intelligent babbling of an admirer who's become a multimillionaire thanks to a Star Wars-like project.

that one's from the earthy unsophisticate's pov

The protagonist is his girlfriend, a muddled courtier

what's up w all his barely fictionalized valentines to secular pontiffs anyway? rosenberg, bloom, googled humboldt's gift just now to be informed it's about delmore schwartz. reading him you're always having someone else's overeducated cock shoved in your face. and even when they're not obviously a clef they're still (from herzog on) always professors, because professors think about Culture and know about heraclitus. maybe all this has something to do with the literate 20% of america being "tremendously unwilling to go along".

idk if there's anyone better in 20c english at physical descriptions of people

you're always having someone else's overeducated cock shoved in your face

what's that like

I liked Humboldt's Gift when I read it in the early '00s, tried to reread it last November and couldn't finish it. The valentine gets plenty sticky.

it's the one i ran aground on during an enthusiastic high-school binge in which i'd even managed somehow to read the dean's december

the gruesome book is The Dean's December, in which Saul enters NeoConlandia.

i liked the dean's december, but i haven't read it in a million years.

^^it's a good late novel, best read in middle age.

x-post: iirc, there's also a missive in Saul's letters where he tells Midge Decter to fuck off for adding his name to some neocon statement or other.

i always mean to go back and re-read. it's been so long. some of those books were totally mind-blowing to me when i was younger. but so much to read...there are still stanley elkin books i haven't read. does ANYONE read stanley elkin anymore?

i do get what dlh is sayng about the post-war dudes. we should do a seach and destroy thread. who wants to read mailer anymore? but yates is post-war and sometimes you need someone to rip your heart out.

the best not-bellow i have read in recent memory would have to be barney's version. that book was a hoot. didn't see the movie.

Harlot's Ghost is worth the trouble, believe me

otoh The Executioner's Song was a bore.

Armies of the Night is also worth the trouble.

was in a bad mood last night. i bought an unspoiled old fawcett paperback of augie march just a couple weeks ago actually; it's my third copy and definitely the easiest to hold so maybe i'll read the last 150 pages this time. (the flyleaf has been inscribed thus: "PINETOP -- I LOVE YOU -- to my comrade in the party of the opposition called life -- MONK". gonna take this at face value.)

otm re harlot's ghost; miami and the siege of chicago should also be mentioned alongside armies more often than it is, and is an indispensable 68 book imo. less inclined than i used to be to recommend an american dream on the basis of just being singularly insane (tho it belongs to the one-night's-descent-into-hell genre i love everything in, like the man who was thursday, or after hours).

agree that mailer's in the club i was scorning, also obv anyone who casts aspersions on bellow's pretty generic gender politics the way i just did has to acknowledge that mailer is an evil cartoon. i do appreciate his urge to transmute his feelings about his ex-wives (and about the baroque existential implications of anal sex) into weird other forms, tho. his Great Writer Projects had probably reached self-parody by the time he hit jesus and hitler (or ramses) but this impulse was what led him to the cia, the protagonist he was born for. (funnily enough harlot's ghost is probably also his ex-wifiest book, and doesn't skimp on the anal either.) bellow was less adventurous, tho he had much more room than mailer to explore in his style itself.

Miami and the Siege of Chicago is in my queue for sometime in the next five or six weeks. Just as a refresher before this year's conventions.

well-picked!

maybe i'll do that. i was gonna reread fear and loathing on the campaign trail this year.

when hasn't Mailer skimped on the anal

skimps in practice; garrulous in theory

We/ve all been there. Also liked St. George and the Godfather, McGovern vs. Nixon. And most of the collection Cannibals and Christians, though not the dire self-interviews.
In college, I wanted to direct or get somebody else to direct his adaptation of The Deer Park. But that play had some of the best lines/scenes, and some of the worst. Was pretty sure he wouldn't go along with my drastic cuts, and the publisher's people sometimes showed up to check (you had to buy scripts from a specialized publisher, Samuel French or whomever, so they knew who was doing what). And the playwrights sometimes showed up too.

Saul Bellow wrote a good comedy, The Last Analysis. Serious or sympathetic, basically: things aren't going right, and "a clown is moved to thought." So he (I always pictured Zero Mostel) finagles a live TV State of the Universe address. His son gets in the way: "Why, you, you---ex-sperm, you!" Tell it.

I can't really argue with anything in dlh's fine posts in this thread yet none of it alters my love for Bellow

I can't imagine rereading Augie March. I like the closeted (heh) air and tautness of The Victim; it reminds me of contemporaneous poetry by Adrienne Rich and James Merrill in which they wrote verse steeped in their influences because they were afraid of revealing themselves. His sixties novels, which I've tried, are the real neocon fiction: Henderson and the Rain King, Mr. Sammler's Planet, ugh.

henderson baffles me because its one of the things he's most famous for and i find it a cringeworthy mistake. it would have taken roth or elkin to make it work for me.

my Penguin edition has a lion on the cover

I can't imagine rereading Augie March

Ha the only book of his i've re-read. So many high points of description and humor.

i read elkin (xpost). cousin stanley, my friend bobby called him. i think he was really his mom's cousin though. the same mom whose brother is eric bloom. so i guess stanley elkin would have been eric bloom's cousin too. fun fact.

i love elkin so much. another big influence on me along with saul.

"I am Push, Push the bully, God of the Neighborhood, its incarnation of envy and jealousy and need. I vie, strive, emulate, compete, a contender in every event there is. I didn't make myself. I probably can't save myself, but maybe that's the only need I don't have! I taste my lack and that's how I win — by having nothing to lose. It's not good enough! I want and I want and I will die wanting, but first I will have something. This time I will have something. I say it aloud. "This time I will have something!" I step toward them. The power makes me dizzy. It is enormous. They feel it. They back away. They crouch in the shadow of my outstretched wings. It isn't deceit this time but the real magic at last, the genuine thing: the cabala of my hate, of my irreconcilableness.
Logic is nothing. Desire is stronger."

http://utopianworlds.pbworks.com/w/page/7536344/A%20Poetics%20for%20Bullies

hero. i will re-read all that too at some point. i could use the inspiration.

Wow---I relate, though I don't think of myself as bully. Also makes me wonder: what do I want from life, from writing? Will have to re-evaluate. I think I really am teaching myself to make *best* use (esp. non-use) of commas, finally (mostly not on ilx, but this is just posting).

I quoted elkin on ilx the other day!

Feeling a lonely ILBer - I enjoyed both Executioner's Song and Henderson the Rain King (with the caveat that it's well over twenty years since I read either of them, and I might well feel very differently about Bellow's treatment of 'Africa' now. But it seems like Bellow is a bit dammed if he does, dammed if he doesn't, here - ie Henderson clearly an attempt to move outside his comfort zone, to write about somewhere other than Chicago/America, so I definitely liked the way that Bellow's creative process was echoed by the book's subject matter (ie an American living outside his comfort zone))