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07 April 2005
Author Saul Bellow Dead At 89
Nobel laureate was one of America's great 20th century novelists
Washington -- He was a portraitist of people, a chronicler of society, a writer with an arch sense of humor and irony, a novelist with a supreme gift for the English language and, ultimately, a careful craftsman with the word.
The career of Saul Bellow, who died at 89 on April 5, spanned six decades, from World War II-era America through the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and on to the beginning of a new century five years ago.
He was popularly known as an American Jewish writer by dint of his roots and many of his preoccupations and even obsessions. But, as the Royal Swedish Academy noted in 1976 when presenting him with the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was of even greater repute for what it termed "the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work."
Canadian by birth -- the son of a Russian émigré businessman and a social worker -- and Chicagoan by residence and perspective and affection for most of his life, Bellow, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was part of the generation of writers that included Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever and Bernard Malamud.
For much of his career, Bellow operated on the most expansive of canvases, in works such as The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog and Mr. Sammler's Planet. In recent years, he concentrated on what have been called "miniatures," yet he still produced -- as his final work -- an epic, if controversial novel, Ravelstein, a thinly veiled portrait of the late philosopher and critic Allan Bloom.
His characters, in the main, were idealists -- dreamers and visionaries of sorts. Yet invariably, they operated in the streets, with all their scruffiness and raffish realism.
Following college at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University and graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, Bellow spent the latter years of the Great Depression teaching and writing biographies of American novelists for the Works Project Administration created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Although he'd written steadily from his preteen years on, Bellow’s literary career burst forth in earnest in 1944 with Dangling Man, a taut, existential novel whose protagonist is an alienated young Chicagoan confronting military service. If it possessed a Kafkaesque sensibility, as many critics have noted, his second story, The Victim, focusing on anti-Semitism but with mythological as well as existential undertones, was, by his own description, Dostoyevskian.
Still indebted to his European literary forbears, Bellow, in 1953, produced his breakthrough volume, The Adventures of Augie March, a Chaucerian tale whose protagonist clearly reflected the man the author believed himself to be -- an intellectual, a Jew, and at the same time, someone who was down-to-earth and as subject to hard times as the next person.
His only other novel of the 1950s, Henderson the Rain King, was even more ambitious -- the story of a physically towering, unfulfilled American millionaire's journey of discovery among African tribes, whose c central figure, Bellow said, shared the author's own yearnings and sense of incompleteness.
In the 1960s, he returned, to an extent, to his Jewish roots, introducing readers to a series of characters in the throes of personal, ideological or universal crises. Herzog, in 1964, was followed in 1969 by Mr. Sammler's Planet. In 1976, a year after the appearance of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Humboldt's Gift -- whose hero was modeled on American poet Delmore Schwartz -- Bellow became a Nobel laureate.
In the years that followed, as his themes and canvases telescoped, with short stories and novellas forming the bulk of his output, he remained in the pantheon of writers of his generation -- assuming a larger and larger presence as his colleagues and counterparts passed from the scene. Bellow also shifted from fiction to nonfiction, transposing his insightfulness and creative precision from one genre to the other, most notably in the essays of the 1994 collection, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future.
Bellow likely will be remembered most for fiction that overflowed with unforgettable characters, bristling realism and -- conversely -- the capacity to escape the mundane for flights unknown.
"A novel moves back and forth between the world of objects, of actions, of appearances, and that other world from which these `true impressions' come and which moves us to believe that the good we hang onto so tenaciously -- in the face of evil, so obstinately -- is no illusion," Bellow said in his Nobel address.
"A novel," he said, "is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony and even justice."
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
