Saul Bellow, America's Poet Of Urbanity By A.O. SCOTT

Saul Bellow, America's Poet Of Urbanity

By A.O. SCOTT

Saul Bellow 

MANY, if not most, of the major American Realist novelists in the first half of the 20th century were, by birth or breeding, Midwesterners: Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, F.Scott Fitzgerald. In the second half, a large number of the nation's important writers -- literary critics, journalists and sociologists, as well as novelists -- were Jews. It was Saul Bellow's good fortune -- and the source, perhaps, of a portion of his greatness -- to have been both Midwestern (bred if not born, that happened in Canada) and Jewish.

Not that he put much stock in the determining power of origins or traditions. One of his first literary acts was to alter his name, from Solomon Bellow. But the act of creating a new identity is equally a prerogative of the sons of the heartland and the children of immigrants, and Bellow was almost unique among writers in claiming this double birthright. Recall the first lines of ''The Adventures of Augie March,'' one of the boldest and most memorable beginnings in literature:

''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.''

A bit later, Augie says, ''My own parents were not much to me,'' making clear that this will be his story, a story of self making rather than of inheritance. The freedom and self-confidence blowing through these sentences -- the bluster, the slightly show-offy diction, the chutzpah -- marked the beginning of something new for Bellow and also for the American novel. ''Augie March'' was his third book but his first fully to deserve the adjective Bellovian, a word able to encompass both the vulgarity of big cities and the wisdom of Greek philosophers. In ''The Victim'' and ''Dangling Man,'' composed under the influence of European existentialism and in the shadow of World War II, the protagonists are hemmed in and hung up, anxious and abused, anything but the masters of their own fates.

Augie and the men (and they were always men) who followed were not case studies or allegories but vital, unmistakable individual characters in both the literary and the vernacular senses of the word. They could be annoying, self-deluded, neurotic, impossible in a hundred different ways, but they were always real, and the novels that sustained Bellow's reputation bore their names: ''Herzog,'' ''Henderson,'' ''Mosby,'' ''Sammler,'' ''Humboldt,'' ''Ravelstein.''

Not that their labors of self-realization (to use therapeutic jargon Bellow would have mocked) were altogether heroic. Bellow's heroes were plagued by frustration and failure -- beleaguered by ex-wives, bad luck, disloyal colleagues, random crazies and the hectic, busy, disappointing rhythm of modern urban life.

These characters are unthinkable outside of the cities that tormented them, and in this they became something of a lost tribe. The postwar American novel resembles, for the most part, a suburb, populated by standardized ciphers who dream of becoming characters and wonder (along with their readers) why they can't quite succeed.

But Bellow's books, refusing to flee the cities -- even in the face of nihilism and social crisis -- are like cities unto themselves: densely populated, often messy and full of the contradiction and cacophony that make up the true noise of civilization. Many of these books -- the best of them: ''Augie March,'' ''Humboldt's Gift,'' ''Herzog'' -- can feel unwieldy, overpopulated, lacking clear boundaries. But then again, so can Chicago. Like the great American metropolises, Bellow's big novels have a way of making every place else feel puny and dull, characterless in comparison.

Even though his novels were thick with companionship and were, themselves, such rich and surprising company, he was also a somewhat lonely figure, not in his personal life but in the landscape of American letters. He had no shortage of admirers, of course, and a few peers, but not many followers. (His most visible and self-declared heir is Martin Amis, an Englishman.)

Just as he resisted the American novel's flight to the suburbs, he also stood indifferent to the political grandstanding, ethnic sentimentality and magpie historicism that preoccupied so many other writers. He was often funny but never ironic in the attenuated, timid postmodern sense of the word. He had political opinions and allegiances, some controversial, but his mind leaned away from abstraction toward the inexhaustible strangeness of life, toward an ideal of the novel not as a form or a tradition but as a vessel of personality.

Alfred Kazin, his longtime friend, put it nicely: ''The great thing was Saul's talent for the literature of direct experience. Every day, I saw intellectuals clever enough to make the world over many times. Yet Bellow, who had been brought up in the same utopianism and was himself a nimble adept of the University of Chicago style, full of the Great Books and jokes from Aristophanes, would obviously be first and last a novelist, a storyteller, creating new myths out of himself and every other intellectual he had ever known, fought, loved, hated. This loosened the bonds of ideology for the rest of us.''

By ''the rest of us,'' Kazin, thinking back to the early 1940's, means the passionate, contentious band of intellectuals, mostly Jews, who were emerging from the political fevers of the previous decade. But his words provide an apt epitaph in our own time, when the bonds of ideology threaten to strangle what remains of our civility to say nothing of our literature. The rest of us Bellow readers can take heart from his imperfect, immortal strivers, arguers, dreamers and failures and learn, once again, to go at things our own way. 

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00E10F83F5A0C738DDDAD0894DD404482&ref=saulbellow&pagewanted=print