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Story Lines Midwest Transcript
Music. Keith Taylor: It's Chicago, the 1930s. A young man, born in poverty, is living the American dream. Charity Nebbe: Using his intelligence and ingenuity he can become whatever he wants to be. The problem is he has to decide just what that is. Music. Charity Nebbe: From Michigan Radio in Ann Arbor this is Story Lines Midwest. I'm Charity Nebbe. Keith Taylor: And I'm Keith Taylor. Today, The Adventures of Augie March, Depression-era Chicago, and the life of Saul Bellow. Music. Charity Nebbe: It's Story Lines Midwest. Saul Bellow grew up in Quebec and Chicago. He lived and wrote through the Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War, and he is still living and writing. He's married for the fifth time, he has a very young daughter, and last year he published his latest novel, Ravelstein. His collected short stories have just been released. He's won almost every prestigious award an author can win: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award (three times), and in 1976 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He's also had a number of best sellers, including The Adventures of Augie March. Keith Taylor: The Adventures of Augie March is not like other novels. It is hard to pick out a plot from this big book and say, "See, this is the story." British novelist Martin Amis, who considers Augie March to be the great American novel of the 20th century says "Augie March often resembles a surrealist catalogue of apprenticeships." Augie tries on fifty different jobs, some legal, some a bit more marginal, trying to find the one that suits him. But always there is the complete sense of confidence that Augie shows right in the first sentence. Daniel Pinkwater reads: I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted. Sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and, in the end, there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles. Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining. Music. Keith Taylor: Augie's fate is to wander around Chicago trying to figure out who he is and what he should do. He never seems to feel lost. He enjoys himself. His sheer exuberance for living is the reason this book was a best seller in the 1950s and it's what keeps bringing people back. Charity Nebbe: About a generation after Saul Bellow, James Atlas grew up in Chicago, also a part of the Chicago Jewish community. He is highly respected for his biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, and his other work. He is the founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives series, a series of short biographies of major historical and religious figures. Just last year he published Bellow: A Biography. In the introduction to Bellow, James Atlas writes that "a major biography takes ten years to write." We had an opportunity to speak with him recently and I asked him what it was that made him decide to commit such a significant part of his life to documenting Saul Bellow's life. James Atlas: I suppose, on a very basic level, I identified with him and I was very excited by the fact that he had written about a world that was, in essence, my world a generation earlier. So, there was a very strong autobiographical association that I had. Also, I'd been reading his work for many years and admiring it. My first biography of Delmore Schwartz was intertwined in a very interesting and complex way with Bellow's own life because they had been friends in the 1940s and Bellow then, several decades later, wrote Humboldt's Gift, which was really modeled on Delmore's life. So, in effect, this was a continuation of the story that I told in my first biography. And, finally, I was very excited by the way in which Bellow's life really recapitulated the themes and history and major episodes of the entire twentieth century. It was really a way of writing what Bellow's friend Rosenfeld--Isaac Rosenfeld--called social history. So, there are a lot of motives. Keith Taylor: When you say "autobiographical," is that simply Chicago, or is there more than just the relationship to the city? James Atlas: Well, I don't have five wives. [laughter] That's a very good question. It's Chicago, and it's also the idea of Bellow's vocation that excited me. Here was somebody who not only wrote about the city, which many great writers had written about before, among them Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, but he kind of dramatized the whole effort to become a writer. This is what I found really vivifying, that he was struggling to find his identity through his work, struggling to find his voice, and this effort to become an American writer out of that background, out of that Midwestern world which was so far from Europe and so far from what one would imagine were the centers of vibrant literary culture, that I was impressed with it as a model. Charity Nebbe: Had you met Saul Bellow before you decided to write this book? James Atlas: I had met him, not in any sustained way. But, I went out to interview him in Chicago in the mid-70s when I was writing my biography of Delmore. And then I found myself in a cameo role in Humboldt's Gift, a paragraph on about page ten where he describes the young biographer flying into Chicago to interview him about the poet Humboldt and, as he put it, "fabricating cultural, social, textile rainbows." [laughter] So it was this kind of satire. You have to be careful around him. He's a dangerous guy with a pen. So, I knew him just in that way. But I also was very familiar with his family and with his background. You have to understand that the Jewish community in Chicago is a very small cohort, and Bellow used to describe himself as an anthropologist. He actually studied anthropology at Northwestern in the 30s, and it's a wonderful metaphor for what the writer does, that he's going to study his own tribe. I myself, I guess, was transfixed by this tribe of Chicago Jews. I mean, to be specific about it, I myself am from Evanston. I'm from the comfortable suburbs and grew up in the 60s, and so I was fascinated by the example of this earlier generation who had--he was exactly the age of my father and mother and in fact went to Northwestern with them--so I knew people in his world and I wanted, in the spirit of an anthropologist, to go back and study my tribe and its antecedents. Keith Taylor: That would certainly explain Bellow's appeal to you. But now we take a look at some of these books that seem to have been enormous best sellers. They've reached out to a very broad community, much more than the north side Chicago Jewish milieu, for instance, that you write about. What's the appeal of Bellow's books to this larger audience? James Atlas: Well, I think what was so exciting to me was precisely the fact that he did escape from this rather narrow, though very rich, Chicago world and speak to a very large audience. I mean, he did, as I mentioned before, have this close friend Isaac Rosenfeld, who also aspired to be a writer and, in fact, wrote a novel about Chicago that was published in the 1940s, and he didn't have the reach, he didn't have the range and voice that Bellow had. Obviously, the reason that Bellow won the Nobel Prize and is read all over the world is that he deals with universal themes. He's really a fantastically rich novelist in his ability to capture not only states of mind but periods in history, starting with his first book, Dangling Man. That was a book that would seem to be very narrow in its themes. It was about Chicago Jewish intellectuals in Hyde Park in the 1940s. But it deals with the whole sense of anxiety about the war, about the impending war and what would happen to the world in its aftermath. It's really about questions of identity and the individual in relation to huge historical developments over which we have no control. And, in this sense, he's universal, and all of his books can be...you can find these major themes in his work. That's why he's a major novelist. Charity Nebbe: Do you think that his early work is still relevant to people today? James Atlas: I think his first two books, which are not read perhaps as much as some of his later books like Herzog--Dangling Man and The Victim--are really among his greatest works. They're very European in their tone and texture. He really captured in those early books a sense of anxiety that would become pervasive. I've already said something about Dangling Man, but The Victim is a book that's written right after World War II and it's about the Holocaust, really, although it doesn't mention it in any direct way, and about the sense of anxiety produced by this event. What are humans capable of? How can we bear witness? What is our responsibility? As he says at the end of that novel, a character asks the protagonist, "Who really runs things?" That's what he wants to know. He's really interested in the largest themes of power and the role of the individual in history. And yet, he's not abstract. I've mentioned these themes, but they're all played out in this wonderful story about people embedded in the texture of their own lives, so they're not abstract at all. Keith Taylor: And then we get to Augie March, which is his third book, or third novel. You look at it and it's a very different book. It's much bigger. It sprawls across pages and pages and pages. If you look for a plot sometimes it's hard to find it. But yet, I think it's pretty clear from your biography that was his breakout book. That was the book that got him the big audience. How do explain that appeal of Augie? I mean, it seems so daunting in the abstract. James Atlas: Yeah, the book was a huge success. You're right about plot, by the way. I mean, plot has never been Bellow's strong suit. He's not great storyteller in that sense. He's a great ruminator. He likes to deal with large themes and his characters are always walking around meditating on what he likes to call the "big issues." But, his first two novels sold very modestly, and he had, after them, acquired a reputation among New York intellectuals. Augie, which came in 1953 when he was 38, was indeed his breakout book and it appeared on the best seller list. This was a book that he had a really hard time writing. He went to Paris on a Guggenheim fellowship after the war, and he was struggling to write a book that he called his "hospital novel." It was a very earnest, grim book. I've read a chapter of it, about two guys lying in hospital beds talking about the meaning of the universe. But he was in despair over this book, and it wasn't until he left Chicago and was in Paris that he finally found his theme. Now, Augie, as plotless as it is, is a fantastic book because it's really--I think, and so do other writers and critics like Martin Amis think--it's the great American novel, certainly of the twentieth century in the sense that Augie, as he says in the opening sentence, "I am an American, Chicago born...First to knock, first to enter, and I will make the record as I see fit." So that, in this opening of the book he is declaring his independence from other people's expectations. Now, I think that's a great theme right there. And when you combine that with his American journey and his struggle to find out who he really is in life, it's not a Jewish book, certainly. I mean, none of his books are Jewish books in that sense. It's a book about finding your way in life, finding out who you are. What could be more appealing and universal than that? Charity Nebbe: I want to talk to you about the writing style that Saul Bellow used. It's been noted that it was a major departure from what other writers of his time were doing, and the sentences are long and sprawling sometimes. Can you tell us what Saul Bellow was rebelling against? James Atlas: He liked to refer to his first books as his M.A. and his Ph.D. To my mind that's an underestimation, a comic underestimation of those books which remind me of Dostoevski. They in themselves are not dutiful and earnest, but they do have a kind of moral patina about them. They're narrow and confined, and the writing is spare and unadorned. With Augie, he has this fantastic breakout where, as he liked to describe it, he was walking down a street in Paris one day and he saw water running down along the curb-- you know, how when they wash the streets there the water courses in rivulets through the gutters--and maybe he was just being fanciful and mythifying his breakthrough, but said when he saw that rivulet he realized that was his style, that he wanted freedom. He wanted freedom to write in his own voice which was full of these jazzy rhythms and borrowed as much from Swift and Fielding as from the more narrow constraints of the nineteenth century novels of, say, Dostoevski's The Dead. He really wanted to break out and write in his own way, and when he realized that he didn't have to be literary, as it were, when whatever he decided was literary was literary, that's when he found his freedom. So, the book is great. He said later on that is was too sprawling, too exuberant, but that's part of its charm. Charity Nebbe: You're listening to Story Lines Midwest. Our guest to day is James Atlas, author of Bellow: A Biography. I'm Charity Nebbe. Keith Taylor: And I'm Keith Taylor. Now, you're from Chicago, and Bellow will always be associated with Chicago, whether he wants to be or not, and I think he wants to be. Is it fair for us to characterize him as a Midwestern writer, and if it is, what would that mean to you? James Atlas: First of all, you're right. He was very proud of Chicago. He had a real love affair with that city. And if you look at his biography, he was always coming back to the city. It was a place that really appealed to him and he felt very much at home in, more than in the east. But he liked to say that he was a writer, an American, and a Jew. I mean, it was very important to him not to have other identities. For example, when he won the Nobel Prize somebody said to him, "Did you win it for being a Jewish writer?" and he said "I believe I won it for being a writer." So, he's very wary of any identification of him, very wary of any effort to be pinned down. If you were to say, "Are you a midwestern writer?" he would say, "I'm a writer from the Midwest." I happen to also love being from Chicago. I take tremendous pride in it. And there's even a theory which I quote in book, by Milton Friedman, the economist from the University of Chicago who also won a Nobel Prize, about how Chicago, because of its geographic distance from New York, was in a way more independent from the European influence and was able to establish its own freedom and independence. And I think one of the great things about the city, and about the Midwest in general, if one can generalize in this way, is that it tends to produce a very hardy strain of individualism and independence. And I really see that in other Chicagoans I know. We just don't buy into it, basically. I admire that. Charity Nebbe: I want to talk for just a moment about Saul Bellow as a human being. You worked with him during the writing of this book. What was your working relationship with him like? James Atlas: It was a really complicated relationship. I've written about it some, and I hope to write about it again. I'm meditating writing an essay called "The Shadow in the Garden" about this whole experience of being a biographer, which was just unbelievably complicated because I was there to be his biographer, not his friend, and we had what you might call a business-like relationship, not uncordial. I would come into Chicago periodically, three or four times a year, and set up an interview with him, and he took me for a drive once to his old neighborhood. I also saw him in the summers in Vermont because we had homes near each other, and summer was kind of time off, time out. I would go over there and just visit, but of course I was always taking notes and asking questions. The book was not authorized. That was very important to me and to him. I didn't want write his official biography. On the other hand, I was working with him, so he liked to describe it as neither authorized nor unauthorized. But, in the end, I did have a relationship with him and I wrote the book that I wanted to write, with, again, very complicated results. He was in many ways charming, in many ways difficult. We had our ups and downs, and a few storms down along the way. But I have to give him credit. He really let me do this book, and in the end I'm sure he didn't care for it too much, but it's a very honest portrait and it's Bellow as I see him. Charity Nebbe: Think about the Bellow that you thought about when you started writing the book, and then through the many years that you worked on the book and got to know him. How did he change in your mind? James Atlas: That's a really difficult question to answer. One problem I had was that, as I got to know him better, he became less the great novelist and more a person like everyone else. This obviously influenced my book. There were things he did that I didn't write about in my book that annoyed me: the misrepresentation of things I said, or he would write accounts in print of episodes that just weren't the case, or he would make veiled attacks on me once or twice without really being direct about it and saying what was up. So, these were problems, and then I had to deal with my own feelings about him. It was unbelievably hard to do because, obviously, I suffered a certain amount of disillusionment about his character. At the end, my estimation of his work, if I have to summarize, went up. I think Ravelstein is an unbelievable book for him to write at any time, much less in his mid 80s. My estimation of him as a person, I don't know if I'd say it went down, but it became more clear-eyed in the way that anyone's relationship becomes. You learn more about them, their human failings become more evident. Now, if you go and write about this and other people don't know about those failings, they're going to resent you for doing that. So, it was pretty tough in that way. But, in the end, I still felt great sympathy for him. And, just to summarize, I was never bored. I mean, I think that's pretty amazing. It's interested me all the way through. One or two critics have said "Well, by the end, Atlas is fed up." I don't know. I was probably fed up with certain things, but I loved writing it every step of the way. Keith Taylor: The Schwartz biography, which is a brilliant book, and was very important to me when I was a young man, is a somber book and it's a sad story. The feeling at the end of it, for somebody who wanted to be young writer anyway, this was a scary thing. The Bellow book, on the other hand, feels to me much like Augie feels. It feels like an exuberant book at the end. I still even get that feeling at the end of the book, that it feels so exuberant. James Atlas: Well, I'm really so delighted to hear you say that. I must say, that's terrific if that's true, because, with the Delmore book, I felt the same way, even though I wrote it, that you did. I decided I didn't want to be a poet after that. I used to be a poet when I started out, and I thought "I don't have the stomach for this, probably also not the talent." But, you know, it was a somber book, as you say, and a somber story. With Bellow the challenge was, you can't write a book that's too happy. You can't have this Horatio Alger feel: Boy from the slums of Chicago wins Nobel Prize. That was difficult for me. I mean life isn't like that, except for one guy. But, yeah, he's funny. He has a sense of humor and he has had much pain in his life and much suffering, most of it caused by himself, but he also, I think, does feel, in a way, that he's led a very rich life. He said this, I think, after my book came out: "I've had a rich feast at life's banquet." And then he says-- I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember the exact words-- "Maybe I hogged too much of it" or something, "Maybe I was gluttonous." You do get that feel that he's lived to the hilt. Charity Nebbe: James Atlas, thank you so much. James Atlas: Thank you very much. Keith Taylor: James Atlas is the author of Bellow: A Biography. You're listening to Story Lines Midwest. Keith Taylor: In The Adventures of Augie March, Augie has a faith in the real world and he thinks it's his responsibility to find his place in it. Here's Daniel Pinkwater reading another passage from Bellow's novel. Music. Daniel Pinkwater reads: Everyone tries to create world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond then, even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed ???? actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising. If miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent. Music. Charity Nebbe: You're listening to Story Lines Midwest. I'm Charity Nebbe. Saul Bellow and his character Augie March grew up in the same neighborhood in Chicago, and we've asked Irving Cutler, the author of The Jews of Chicago, to join us briefly to tell us about that neighborhood. Irving, in the 1920s and 30s, what was that Wicker Park area like? Irving Cutler: Well, the Wicker Park area goes back to the late 1800s when some wealthy non-WASPS--Poles, Scandinavians, some Italians, some Jews--moved into the area because they weren't accepted by the very rich people who lived along the lake. They were businessmen, bankers, and they built some very nice homes on a few of streets in the Wicker Park area. Charity Nebbe: Now, in the 30s it was kind of a bastion of Jewish intellectuals in Chicago, wasn't it? Irving Cutler: Yeah, there was a Jewish presence in the area. They lived among the Poles and the Scandinavians and others. Among those that I could think of that lived there: Saul Bellow, Nelson Ahgren (who is half-Jewish I understand--his father was Jewish; he lived in the area, and wrote about the area quite extensively); Michael Todd (you know, the movie impresario, one of the husbands of Elizabeth Taylor; he came from the area); and there were a couple of Jewish families who started out in the Wicker Park area and made it big to the extent that they're exceedingly rich, and they're well known in the Chicago area. Actually, they're probably well known nationally. One family are the Pritzgers, the owners of the Hyatt Regency hotels and many other things. The other is Henry Crown, and he was owner of railways and, I think, part owner of General Dynamics and other companies. Charity Nebbe: Thank you so much for talking to me tonight. Irving Cutler: OK Charity Nebbe: Irving Cutler, the author of The Jews of Chicago.
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