Saul Bellow (1915-2005)

Saul Bellow was born on June 10, 1915, in a multiethnic suburb of Montreal called Lachine, the younger son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Lescha and Abraham Bellow. Bellow’s parents moved to a Jewish neighborhood in Montreal a few years after his birth to escape their hardscrabble existence in working-class Lachine. Although Bellow was born in the New World, his family’s recent immigrant past would haunt the author throughout his life. The youngest of four children, he was the only member of his family to be born in Canada; his elder brothers, Sam and Maurice, and his sister, Jane, were born and spent their earliest years in St. Petersburg, Russia, during one of their father’s ill-fated attempts to start a business outside the Pale of Settlement usually reserved for Jewish habitation.

Even the author’s name was marked by this immigrant Jewish past. A meddlesome Canadian border bureaucrat changed the family’s name from Belo to Bellow in 1913, and Saul himself transformed his name from the more traditionally Jewish Solomon to Saul when he decided to embark upon a writing career. Most notably, though, the imprint of Bellow’s early life can be felt in the remarkable innovation of his prose, which many critics have argued is inflected with the Yiddish spoken during his childhood by his parents and others in their Jewish neighborhood in Montreal. Bellow returned to this early life once and again in his prose. In works from the semiautobiographical The Adventures of Angie March, perhaps his most celebrated work, to a number of fragments of memoir, Bellow details his childhood.

In a speech given in 1970, he described his early life in Canada as “blessed with a sense of the exotic.” He goes on: “I don’t see how this could have been avoided. Say in my case: I was born in a French-Canadian village of Russian-Jewish parents in 1915. We had Indians, French-Canadians, Scottish and Irish, Ukrainians, Jews, Russians and so on. Every language was spoken in the streets—from Iroquois to Hebrew. How could you avoid the feeling that you were in an enchanted place?” (“Saul Bellow on America and American Jewish Writers”). Bellow carried this “exotic” upbringing throughout his life, making it the prototype for many of the enchanted landscapes he would paint in his fiction, as well as the launching pad for the standpoint of alienated observer he would often adopt for his gifted raconteur protagonists.

In 1924 the Bellow family moved from this exotic multiethnic space to the great American city of Chicago—itself a city defined by its plurality of nationalities and diversity of languages. It was the heyday of the city’s industrial might, an era during which the midwestern Mecca played host to a number of waves of immigration, Jewish and other. Bellow and his siblings fit right into the Humboldt Park immigrant neighborhood where his family settled in search of higher wages and more job security.

The local toughs and spectacular urban beauty that feature in Bellow’s novels and short story collections from The Adventures of Angie March to Him with His Foot in His Mouth arose from the author’s romanticization of his upbringing in this archetypal American city, where the smells wafting from the slaughterhouses and the many ethnic bakeries competed for attention.

The fact that Chicago was simultaneously a business and manufacturing center of the United States and a locale far from the intellectual and cultural elitism of the East Coast metropolises, New York and Boston, combined to influence Bellow’s democratic vision and the petty criminals and autodidactic intellectuals who swam through his work. As James Atlas has noted in his definitive biography of the author, Chicago played the urban muse for many of Bellow’s most popular works.

Along with a number of would-be young Jewish artists and intellectuals from his neighborhood, Bellow attended Tuley High School in Chicago, where academic achievement and literary ambition were prized far above athletic prowess or social acumen. A competent student who wrote a newspaper column, Bellow was nonetheless overshadowed by his brilliant best friend, Isaac Rosenfeld, who had early success as a writer in New York City after college, only to die young and without the clout of his fellow Tuley grad. When Bellow was in his last year of high school, his mother, Lescha—the parent to whom he was closer— died. As Bellow puts it, “I was never the same after my mother died. . . . I was grieving” (Atlas 35).

The theme of unceasing grief for a lost mother would recur in many of Bellow’s later works, most notably his novella Seize the Day (1956). After high school the melancholic Bellow worked intermittently at his father’s coal transport company, encountering the colorful characters and rogue’s gallery of grotesques he would depict in his fiction, particularly the autobiographical The Adventures of Augie March. Bellow also became a perennial student at this time, first at the University of Chicago and later at Northwestern, where he received his B.A. in anthropology in 1937.

Bellow studied with the famous anthropologist Melville Herskovitz at Northwestern; a short time after Bellow was his student, Herskovitz would compose his famous work, The Myth of the Negro Past, often seen as the foundation of African-American studies. Bellow was profoundly influenced by his professor’s work on race, as well as the work of the earlier anthropologist Franz Boas, whose study of the Inuit tribes of the North inspired Bellow to write his senior thesis on what he perceived as a fascinating “primitive” Eskimo tribe. Although Bellow did not graduate from the University of Chicago and often mocked the pretensions of its Great Books curriculum, he often returned to it in both his fiction and his personal life. For many years, he served as a professor in the Committee for Social Thought at the esteemed Chicago university, developing friendships with a number of well-known academics who resided at the school, such as Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss.

After graduating from Northwestern, Bellow began graduate work in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. Bellow’s preoccupation with describing the minutiae of daily life and social interactions from an anthropological remove in his fiction resulted from this period of study. Although he was interested in pursuing graduate studies in English literature, he chose anthropology, he later said, because it was a field of study friendlier to working-class Jewish boys like him. At the time that Bellow attended university, literature departments were still primarily the domain of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite, self-conscious gatekeepers of the English tradition. Many future critics agreed that it was precisely Bellow’s eschewal of the hallowed halls of the English literary tradition that led to his own literary freedom and sense of linguistic play, as well as the pluralistic viewpoint of his fiction.

After a short time at Wisconsin, Bellow dropped out to pursue his creative passions. On winter break, he married the University of Chicago student Anita Goshkin and decided to stay on with his new wife in Chicago. Bellow soon found work, a part-time teaching post at a local teacher’s college that paid little but allowed the budding artist time to concentrate on his craft. It was the depression, and Bellow was happy to have a position that would allow him to leave the ranks of the city’s many unemployed. Despite the fee he earned teaching, however, Bellow applied for and received federal aid from FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). Along with noted Chicago writers such as James Farrell, Bellow worked at the Federal Writers’ Project, composing biographical entries on famous authors to keep busy. Soon after his first piece of fiction, entitled “Two Morning Monologues,” was published in Partisan Review, Bellow’s wife, Anita, gave birth to their son Gregory.

Dangling Man, Bellow’s first novel, was loosely based on his young economically strapped married life in Chicago as the inhabitant of a claustrophobic home with his wife and her parents. Bellow finished the novel during his brief service with the U.S. Merchant Marine. The novel, published in 1944, relates the story of a young wannabe writer, Joseph, who is living with his wife and her family and dreaming of a career as an exemplar of American letters.

In this novella Bellow evinced his first engagement with a theme that would recur throughout the pages of his fiction: the collision between the individual and world history. In Dangling Man, Bellow’s protagonist waits in existential limbo to be drafted into war, trying to carve out an artistic life in the shadow of staggering global events. In this early work and The Victim, published in 1947, Bellow manifested his devotion and indebtedness to the 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Originally called Notes of a Dangling Man, Bellow’s 1944 work was written as a clear homage to the Russian great’s Notes from Underground, a meticulously rendered novella about one disaffected young man’s search for meaning and the tortured consciousness that results from his quest. The Victim, too, tells a Dostoevskian story, this time of an individual and the doppelganger, or double, that haunts him.

In Bellow’s second work— his first to be published after the global catastrophes of World War II—he hints at the offstage tragedies and mass victimization of the war, focusing on how a Jewish man named Leventhal is made a victim by his passivity and the guilt he feels about not being able to help his increasingly anti-Semitic double, Albee. In an interview with Philip Roth, Bellow later called these early short novels “apprentice works,” analogous to the master’s degree one must complete before beginning to work on a Ph.D. thesis. In order to impress the Partisan Review crew, the Trotskyite New York intellectuals who edited and wrote for the small, intellectually rigorous magazine and literary tastemaker of the time, Bellow also wrote and published a short story about the exile of Stalin’s former second in command called “The Mexican General.”

In The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Bellow dazzled readers with a new tone far from the formal one he had employed in his early works. While Bellow sought to demonstrate his capacity to mimic the masters of 19th-century European prose, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, in his young prose, The Adventures of Augie March marked the moment when the author developed a voice of his own.

The voice that narrates the picaresque adventures of young Augie March, a Jewish boy growing up in a Chicago neighborhood much like the one in which Bellow spent his youth, is a mature, yet rollicking one, inflected with tones of immigrant life and the spirit of play that characterized much subsequent Jewish-American fiction from Philip Roth’s to Cynthia Ozick’s. The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow’s third novel, won the National Book Award for fiction in 1954.

During this period, Bellow began to engage with historical questions in his work, an unsurprising fact given how often he was just offstage during the major events of 20th-century world history. Bellow went to Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948, not long after the end of World War II and the occupation of France by the Nazis. Bellow’s fellowship allowed him to spend two years living in Paris and traveling in Europe, including Spain, the nation so central to the consciousness of socialists during its civil war in the 1930s. It was during this time, while witnessing the aftereffects of the war and struggling to write his later-abandoned manuscript “The Crab and the Butterfly,” that he began The Adventures of Augie March.

Later, during the 1967 Six Day War in Israel, he served as a correspondent for Newsday, a move that inspired his first extended nonfiction work, To Jerusalem and Back, as well as the Israeli travelogue of Arthur Sammler in Bellow’s controversial 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Bellow’s next work, Seize the Day (1956), too, engaged with history. Seize the Day was a shorter work, a tour-deforce novella about the strained relationship between a father and his ne’er-do-well son and the historical forces of 1950s America that keep them stuck in conflict with one another.

Like many intellectuals of the time, Bellow was influenced by the popularity of Freud and psychoanalysis and transcendental movements, such as those led by Wilhelm Reich and Rudolph Steiner. Under the sway of these theorizers of the self, Bellow went on to write the experimental Henderson the Rain King (1959). Henderson details the adventures of a Hemingwayesque hero who travels to Africa to find himself. Henderson’s encounters with an African tribe and a Western-educated Reichian African chief provide comic relief and philosophical speculation in equal measure.

While Bellow was achieving success in his career during this period, his relationship with his wife, Anita, was experiencing unprecedented strain. Bellow was plagued by romantic trouble throughout his life; his novels and stories are filled with men and women who are either terribly unlucky in love or afraid to commit themselves. Bellow married four times after his marriage to Anita dissolved in 1953 and was famous for casting his dramatic relationships in print. Soon after he divorced Anita, he married Sondra Tschachasov, the model for the histrionic Madeleine in his later novel Herzog. His son Adam, from this first marriage, was born in 1957. His marriage to Sondra soon foundered, and Bellow married the writer Susan Glassman, with whom he had his son, Daniel. Later, he shared a brief marriage with the Eastern European mathematician Alexandra Tulcea. He spent his last years married to his former student Janis Freedman, with whom he had a daughter Naomi in 2000, five years before his death.

Throughout his life, Bellow looked to colleagues and literary friends for the stability and companionship he never received from wives and lovers. In New York, where Bellow moved for a time early in his career, the author tried to reignite old friendships and to meld with the Partisan Review circle, which included the editor Philip Rahv and the young future critical superstar Alfred Kazin. It was not, however, until he moved back to Chicago and began keeping company with the writer Richard Stern and his childhood friend Sam Freifeld that Bellow truly felt at home.

Bellow returned to Chicago after he experienced great success as a writer. Herzog marked a turning point in Bellow’s career. While he had some degree of renown before his 1964 novel, Herzog catapulted the middle-aged author into the pantheon of American literary stars. In 1965 Bellow was awarded the International Literary Prize for Herzog, becoming the first American to receive the prize. In January 1968, the Republic of France awarded him the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, the highest literary distinction awarded by that nation to noncitizens.

Later that year, he received an award from an organization that recalled his origins in Montreal’s Jewish neighborhood when he was given the B’nai B’rith Jewish Heritage Award for “excellence in Jewish literature.” Both Herzog and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) were awarded the National Book Award for fiction. Humboldt’s Gift (1975), a thinly veiled parable about the writer Delmore Schwartz and his experiences with artistry and madness, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 1976, Bellow received the Nobel Prize in literature. In his oft-quoted acceptance speech, Bellow discussed his indebtedness to great modern authors, particularly Joseph Conrad, who dealt with what he called “the essence” of things, the large existential questions that weave through and motivate much of Bellow’s fiction, from the plight of the individual in a mass society to the painful split between body and mind.

When Bellow was asked whether he thought he was awarded the Nobel Prize as a “Jewish writer” or an “American writer,” he replied that he thought he had been given the prize simply for being “a writer.” This discomfort with being defined as a Jewish writer is a theme that runs throughout Bellow’s work. In a letter to the writer Cynthia Ozick, Bellow acknowledged the ambivalence that Jewish writers of his generation felt when faced with their immigrant Jewish pasts. He admitted that he and his fellow post-World War II Jewish-American writers had been particularly uncomfortable when addressing the issue of Jewishness because of the association with the Holocaust that Jewishness carried in the postwar era.

Bellow wondered: How could American Jewish authors write about the Holocaust without casting Jews as eternal victims? How could Jewish-American writers compete in the world of high literature if they always had to be representative men, rather than individuals? While Bellow remained somewhat ambivalent about being described as a Jewish writer throughout his life, he increasingly engaged with explicitly Jewish themes in his fiction and analyzed how being Jewish had affected his own path as an author. Rather than mask the ethnic orientation of his hand-wringing intellectual antiheroes, as he did in his early work, the aged Bellow began to write autobiographical paeans to ambitious Jewish men not unlike him and the friends he had grown up with in Humboldt Park. In a speech he gave in 1970, he said:

The American Jews, the Jewish writers, are descendants of immigrants of the first part of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and they fell in love with English and American poetry and life.

It was a love affair, there was nothing contrived about it. You went to school, you read these great books and poems, and you were just shot down by them. The question whether they had a right to this language and to this literature was a lively question. In their own eyes they sometimes felt that they didn’t have the right because they weren’t born to the manor, and American society—at least its elite Anglo-Saxon elements— told them that they didn’t come by it naturally and that it didn’t really belong to them. But the evidence of the streets was different, because a new life was forming in American society which belonged to nobody, and therefore there was no reason why an American writer should accept the words of Henry James in his book The American Scene, for instance, in which he was so distressed by the Jewish East Side of New York and by what was happening to the English language on the East Side. . . . That is what I did and this is what many others like me did. (“Saul Bellow on America and American Jewish Writers”)

Bellow’s meditations on both the anxiety that being Jewish evoked in many young writers and the power that resulted from the fact that “a new life was forming in American society which belonged to nobody” are powerful ideas that echo in Bellow’s prose.

Bellow is renowned for many aspects of his literary gift, most notably his facility with language and the spirit of play and the “street” that he gave to his fiction. The lack of fear that Bellow gathered from his childhood in an America far from the world of Henry James allowed him to become the ultimate literary Renaissance man. While Bellow is best known for his work as a novelist and short story writer, he also wrote a number of plays, including The Last Analysis and three short plays, collectively entitled Under the Weather, which were produced on Broadway in 1966. Bellow also wrote a number of works of criticism and creative nonfiction during his literary career. He published a compendium of his essays, It All Adds Up, in 1994. His criticism appeared in such renowned publications as the New York Times Book Review, Commentary, and the New Republic. After a raucous life filled with failed marriages and unparalleled literary success, Bellow died in 2005 at the age of 90.

“Looking for Mr. Green” (1951)

“Looking for Mr. Green,” a short story Bellow published in Commentary magazine in 1951, tells the tale of George Grebe, an overeducated classics instructor who finds himself delivering relief checks during the depression. Grebe, the son of one of the last liveried butlers along Chicago’s wealthy Gold Coast, finds himself in reduced circumstances in Bellow’s celebrated story, forced to rely upon FDR’s WPA for a job during the economic downswing of the 1930s.

Assigned to deliver checks to the poorest of the poor in Chicago’s black neighborhoods, Grebe is admonished by his cynical superior, Raynor, that he will experience difficulty locating the aid recipients because of their distrust for authority figures, particularly white authority figures. Armed with a briefcase full of youthful idealism and little else, Grebe fails at delivering relief checks but becomes obsessed with his inability to find a particular recipient, Tulliver Green, the “Mr. Green” of the story’s title. Grebe’s desperate search for this man becomes a nightmarish Virgilian tour through the poorest districts of Chicago and a metaphor for the experience of aimlessness and lack of purpose experienced by the many unemployed during the era.

This short early piece foreshadows a number of the concerns Bellow explored in later works. Like Bernard Malamud, the Jewish-American author and relative contemporary with whom Bellow was most often linked, the Chicago-bred writer was deeply engaged with questions of race throughout his career. In “Looking for Mr. Green,” as in Malamud’s early short stories “Angel Levine” and “Black Is My Favorite Color,” Bellow manifests a belief in the possibility for profound interracial sympathy.

George Grebe scorns the racist Italian grocer he meets during his relief rounds and experiences a moment of poignant identification with an elderly black relief recipient and war veteran. As Malamud’s was, Bellow’s perception of the possibility for interracial sympathy was strongly challenged by the Black Power movement in the late 1960s. His later works that deal with race relations, most notably the controversial Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), a novel roughly contemporaneous with Malamud’s dystopian The Tenants, depict a grotesque land of urban decay where black characters are representatives of violence and the primitive.

The character of George Grebe prefigures, too, Bellow’s penchant for portraying down-on-their- luck intellectuals, who are unable to prosper in a culture where “the green,” money, rules. Most notably, Grebe could be likened to Bellow’s famously forlorn academic Moses Herzog, but he also resembles other Bellovian heroes, such as Humboldt von Fleischer, the Delmore Schwartzesque depressive of Humboldt’s Gift, and Ravelstein, the protagonist of Bellow’s last novel and a character closely based on the writer’s friend Professor Allan Bloom.

The philosophical speculation and engagement with the great thinkers of the 20th century for which Bellow would become known find early expression in “Looking for Mr. Green.” Particularly, Bellow creates lovely moments when the youthful Grebe pauses in his relief work to contemplate whether the poverty and degradation he sees are a part of the fleeting world of appearances or something more essential and immutable. Grebe’s conversations with his supervisor Raynor, in which he becomes a stand-in for the principles of idealism against Raynor’s jaded cynicism, often revolve around the question of whether the world, replete with poor relief recipients and dirty city streets, is a realm of appearance or reality.

The introduction of the large and noisy Mrs. Staika and her five dirty-faced children into the relief offices makes ironic these casual interrogations of the nature of reality. Juxtaposing meditations on the abstract with the might of his concrete descriptions of the poor living in what he calls the “city- wilderness” of depression era Chicago, “In Search of Mr. Green” proves an incomparable introduction to the early work of Saul Bellow.

For Discussion or Writing
1. “Looking for Mr. Green” is one of Saul Bellow’s most historically informed stories. The epigraph to Bellow’s story, “Whatsoever the hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might,” has particular resonance in the era in which the search for Mr. Green takes place. Look up the history of the WPA in an encyclopedia or trustworthy online source and discuss the implications of George Grebe’s simultaneous search for Mr. Green and a purpose in life in Bellow’s 1951 story. What does Bellow suggest is the fate of the idealistic intellectual in a moneymaking society?

2. Saul Bellow’s interest in the possibility for sympathy between people of different races is a primary theme in “Looking for Mr. Green.” It is also a strong element of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow’s 1970 novel set in New York City. How has Bellow’s attitude toward racial questions changed in this later work? How do racial questions become inscribed on the urban landscapes of Chicago and New York City in the detailed descriptive passages of these two works?

3. Invisibility is an important theme in “Looking for Mr. Green.” From the always-invisible Mr. Green to the many faceless aid recipients whom Grebe cannot begin to imagine, Bellow interweaves the idea of invisibility with race, poverty, and the death of the individual in society throughout his short story. How does Bellow’s use of the theme of invisibility in this story compare to the use of invisibility by his friend and contemporary Ralph Ellison in the famous novel Invisible Man?

4. The conflict between the worlds of appearance and essence is played out in a number of ways in “Looking for Mr. Green.” This conflict is dramatized particularly in the characters of Mrs. Staika, the demanding relief recipient, and the naked black woman who appears as a proxy for Mr. Green in the last pages of the story. Using these characters, analyze the importance of the disjunc- ture between appearance and reality in Bellow’s imaginary universe. What do these two characters have in common? How do they support or undermine the philosophical questions introduced in Grebe’s conversations with his supervisor, Raynor? Why are both these characters women?