365betÓéÀÖ

SAUL BELOW AND HIS NOVELS

Y. VENKATRAMAIAH

I

The classic American is one who opens the windows of his house to let in fresh air and the moment he feels that life is stale, he leaves his family at home and goes in search of a meaning for life and returns as a new man. Personal freedom is an obsession with the American and he opposes institutionalization. The great American novel, Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn� concludes with the sentences: “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and civilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.�

“The classic American novels have dealt with the life of a solitary man, man alone and wrestling with himself. Whitman’s line ‘I was the man, I suffer’d, I was there� echoes through much of the best American fiction.� (Walter Allen) Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, Twain’s Finn, Fitzerald’s Gatsby and Bellow’s Henderson are the characteristic American heroes. Hence Richard Chase calls the American novel “romance-novel� and says that it “is freer, more daring, more brilliant fiction that contrasts with the solid moral inclusiveness and massive equability of the English novel.� The American is not only a new man but also a self-­created man. He is a Dedalus in Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,� who says: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy ofmy soul the uncreated conscience of my race.�

II

Saul Bellow (formerly Solomon Bellows), the sexagenarian, is America’s finest living novelist. Alfred Kazin says of him: “Here was an American Jewish writer who had a powerful sense of his own experience as imaginative, yet could beat other Jewish intellectuals at putting the universe in a sentence.� Born in 1915, Saul Bellow, the son of emigrant Russian parents, is now on the Committee of Social Thought, Chicago University. His novels are: Dangling Man (1944), Victim ( 1947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964); Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) and Humboldt’s Gift (1975).

For 1976, Bellow was the unanimous selection of the Nobel literature panel which felt that his fiction “is a paean to life to the indomitable nature of man.� His writings represent “a desperately affirmative view of human experience and possibility.� His novels are an intellectual testament of his faith that “the value of life depends on its dignity, not on its success.� To Bellow, art is “a purgation of consciousness.� He feels that the great obligation for art is to “try to restore the magic enchant­ment of life � the sense of strangeness and beauty innate in every human being.� (Chirantan Kulashreshta) With arch humility, he calls himself “just an old-fashioned writer.� He has had “intellectual romances� with various ideologies, including Marxism. In an age when many writers plunge themselves into active politics. Bellow prefers to be apolitical. Detachment and disinterestedness are the two qualities that make Bellow the most remarkable author of this age. Even the Soviet critics hail him as “a realist of the flesh, who is sensitive to all the idiosyncracies of American society.�

III

Joseph, the hero of “Dangling Man�, is a representative of the frustrated generation. A university graduate, married, leaves his job and is awaiting his call up for the U. S. Army. Feeling himself alienated from society, he writes a diary in which he objectively describes his quarrels with friends, in-laws, his wife Iva by whom he is supported and his brother Amos. He strongly believes that “I must know why I myself am.� His talks with, his alter-ego “Tu As Raison Aussi�, finally convince him that man is his own star. He volunteers into the army, without dangling indefinitely any more.

Hypersensitive as he is, “he is alone, putting questions to society that society cannot answer.� (Walter Allen) Human lives are organized and man strives to fit himself in it. Whether, the likes it or not he is involved in the business and politics, movies, assaults, divorces and murders. Descartes said: “I think, there­fore I am.� To think is to live. “If you have feelings, emotion and an inner life, they need introspection� and so he records his feelings faithfully. Weariness of life � a narcotic dullness � creeps into him. His neighbour Mr. Vanaker coughs to draw attention to himself; his wife Iva likes to be called a good wife and Kitty “Wants a companion –our plans and idealizations, like parasites, consume us. He blames the spiritual climate: “Bread and butter come first. Personal choice does not count for much these days.� Money � it can buy a woman; it can win respect from people; it can give you confidence. Strangely he finds freedom unbearable.

IV

The Russians have a proverb: The heart of man is a dark forest. Who knows what cruel animals are roaming in the dark forest of the human heart? Asa Leventhal, a journalist, is the son of Jewish immigrants who have been never assimilated into American life, solitary and suspicious by temperament. His father is always for “dough�; his wife is away. He is persecuted, exploited and terrified by Kirby Allbee, an obnoxious, half-mad, yet pathetic Gentile. Allbee accuses Leventhal that he has once lost his job due to the latter and forcefully lives upon him. Their complex relation makes Leventhal realize that “Everyone committed errors and offences.�

Walter Allen remarks that, “From one point of view Allbee is Leventhal’s ‘doppel ganger�, his shadow, in Jungian terminology. His condition represents everything Leventhal fears he might fall into himself.� Like being a Negro, being a Jew is a much ­discussed situation in the United States.          Which of the two­ � Leventhal or Allbee � is the real victim? As Montaigne says, “Man is the obedient servant of customs, prejudices, self-interest and fanaticism; he is the victim of circumstances and of the impressions which these circumstances make upon him.� Neither science, nor reason, nor philosophy can guide us much. Bellow believes that in this desperate struggle for life, salvation is in thinking well.

V

Like Fielding’s “Tom Jones� and Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn�, “The Adventures of Augie March� is a picaresque novel, describing the adventures of a young Chicago Jew. Episodic in nature, the novel satirises the corruption and hypocrisy of all social classes. Leaving his mother, tyrannical grand-mother and mentally­-retarded brother, Augie ventures into the world in quest of personal freedom. His boyhood friend, Einhorn, a crooked businessman reveals the ways of the world. His nature keeps him perpetually open to experiences. He takes part in a robbery, tries to smuggle immigrants, steals and sells expensive books and is briefly a union organiser in a Chicago hotel and later secretary and ghost-writer to an eccentric millionaire.

But he has “depth of involvement and identity� in him. He is deeply upset when his mother and George are institutionalized. His love affair with Thea Fenchal convinces him that independence and love cannot be reconciled. Later he marries Stella but re­cognizes that “everyone got bitterness in his chosen thing.�

VI

The title of the novella “Seize the Day� is a translation of a Latin phrase carpe diem, from Horace’s Ode I, XI, 8. Often compared to Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,� the novella vividly portrays the attempts to discover pattern and meaning in the hidden fantasies of man in a mechanized urban world.� (Edward Schwartz) Tommy Wilhelm, a failure in films and­ business is separated from his wife and children. Jobless, he lives in a hotel near Columbia University inhabited mainly by the aged and the retired. He hands over all his remaining money to Dr. Tamkin, a phoney-psychiatrist who has promised an income from gambling with it on the stock exchange. Heloses it, as he knew he would. When he is ruined, Tommy happens to come to a huge funeral. Searching for Dr. Tamkin, he comes across a corpse and weeps. By identifying himself with the dead body, he con­fronts the depths of his suffering. Wilhelm recognises that “there is something more than himself to weep for, that his particular destiny is tied up with the general fate of mankind.� (Joseph Epstein)

VII

Henderson, the middle-aged millionaire, feels an inner urge for fulfilment of self –� “I want, I want� � which drives him to primitive Africa where he encounters fantastic experiences. “Go out in the world and try to find the wisdom of life.� At the age of fifty, with Romilayu, a faithful African guide, he goes to the Arnewi, a place of drought, where his attempt to help the people ends in a fiasco, and then to Wariri, another place of drought. He challenges the king, Dahfu, that there will be no rain, but likes to do something and so moves an immense idol of the goddess of clouds. A deluge follows and he is made Sungo the Rainking. He becomes a close friend of Dahfu and learns the value of nobility in human life. When Dahfu is killed, Hen­derson succeeds him. Sensing the trickery of Bunam, the priest, he and his guide make an escape to home. His inner voice is quieted and he becomes a medical student at the age of sixty. Henderson is “a man who is capable of honestly contemplating his nature but incapable of changing it.� A man needs a vital, soul-shattering experience to “wake the Spirit’s sleep.� Hender­son is at once a Don Quixote and an Odysseus. His stay in Africa is only a sojourn and after a life “discontinuous with civilization� once again he returns to the civilized society. We may dislike this world, but we have to live in this world as it is ours.

VIII

Acclaimed by critics as a faultless novel, “Herzog� is Bellow’s magnum opus. This novel represents a culmination of Bellow’s many talents: his wit, intelligence, sympathy, comic ability and high seriousness. Deserted by his first wife, Moses Herzog marries Madeleine, a woman with a past who divorces him later. Madeleine is flirting with his friend Valentine, a cripple whom he has helped much. His family life wrecked, Moses resigns his post of professor. He falls under the spell of writing unmailed letters to the living and the dead.

Then Ramona enters into his life. She transforms his miseries into sexual excitements. Relaxed, he wants to solve the riddle of his life, even though he does not know what to do and has no power on his impulses. He gets a loaded gun from his father’s house, goes to Madeleine and Valentine bathing his daughter and feels that Valentine can be a better father than he, a neurotic. Helped by his brother Will, he wants to turn new leaf in his life. Now he has no messages for anyone. He wants to make sense of himself as a human being � to find coherence and peace, an understanding of his situation.

IX

Contemporary America is, in Alfred Kazin’s phrase, “a prig’s paradise�, a prosperous and lifeless civilization. In “Mr. Sammler’s planet� Bellow mirrors the contemporary decadent American society, stripped naked. Artur Sammler the pro­tagonist is a Polish Jew, a refugee from Europe. He is an old man, a widower, with only one eye left to him by the Nazis; his wife was shot dead in the Polish pit from which he managed to escape past many dead bodies. Invited by the Jewish millionaire Dr. Gruner, he with his daughter Shula, comes to the States.

Being one who belonged to the generation that believed in “honour�, “duty�, “order�, “decency� and “compassion�, Sammler finds that the ethical values have changed. What formerly was believed is now bitterly criticised. The criminals have become social heroes. A sexual madness is sweeping the western world! The children are setting fire to libraries. While there are madness, mad religions, L. S. D., suicide and crime on this planet, a group of technicians and engineers are trying to take this mad generation to the world of the Moon!_

Sammler meets Dr. Govind Lal the Punjabi scholar and Hindu scientist who in his note-book “The Future of the Moon� asks “How long will this earth remain the only home of Man?� He tells Lal that like Hindu Philosophy � Maya, the veil of appearan­ces, hangs over all human experience. Dr. Lal says, to desire to live without order is to desire to return from the fundamental biological governing principle ... The ant was once the hero, but now the grasshopper is the show. The Americans have always been wreckless spenders and the results are corrupt and vile profits, playboy recreation and building reactionary forces. So let them spend for a moon expedition. Sammler supports the scientific expedition as one of those irrational necessities that make up life � this life we fail to understand. But he asserts, “If it were a rational matter, then it would be rational to have justice on this planet first.�

The Old Sammler, upright and austere, refuses to become rich with the hidden treasure his daughter has found in his benefactor’s house. The novel ends with Sammler pondering over “all the confusion and degraded clowning of the life through which we are speeding.�

X

When Bellow wrote “Humboldt’s Gift� the life of the spirit is very much upon his mind. The theme of this recent novel is the fate of the artist in his quest for success in America. Van Humboldt Fleisher, a talented American poet dies early in poverty and despair. Charlie Citrine, a successful playwright and author, gets a mental jerk after the death of Humboldt and ponders over the meaning of life and death. Humboldt “wanted to be magically and cosmically expressive and articulate... ...he wanted also to be wise, philosophical, to find the common ground of poetry and science, to prove that the imagination was just as potent as machinery, to free and to bless mankind.� His message to Charles was: “Remember: we are not natural beings but super­natural beings.�

To conclude, all the novels of Saul Bellow attempt to find in this world “what is fundamental, enduring, essential.� He believes that “without the common world the novelist is nothing but a curiosity and will find himself in a glass case along some dull museum corridor of the future.� The novelist’s duty in this world of mechanization and bureaucracy is to fight for justice and equality. We should not become pessimistic that “the modern society is frightful, brutal, hostile to whatever is pure in human spirit, a wasteland and a horror.� He strongly believes that “the world is far more revolutionary in being simply what it is.� His novels show his invincible conviction in humanity “the significant human truth.�