WHAT STINGO KNEW:

Author Saul Bellow Dies at 89 (MEL GUSSOW and CHARLES McGRATH, 4/05/05, NY Times)

Saul Bellow, the Nobel laureate and self-proclaimed historian of society whose fictional heroes - and whose scathing, unrelenting and darkly comic examination of their struggle for meaning - gave new immediacy to the American novel in the second half of the 20th century, died today at his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 89.

His death was announced by Walter Pozen, Mr. Bellow's lawyer and a longtime friend.

"I cannot exceed what I see," Mr. Bellow once said. "I am bound, in other words, as the historian is bound by the period he writes about, by the situation I live in." But his was a history of a particular and idiosyncratic sort. The center of his fictional universe was Chicago, where he grew up and spent most of his life, and which he made into the first city of American letters. Many of his works are set there, and almost all of them have a Midwestern earthiness and brashness. Like their creator, Mr. Bellow's heroes were all head and all body both. They tended to be dreamers, questers or bookish intellectuals, but they lived in a lovingly depicted world of cranks, con men, fast-talking salesmen and wheeler-dealers.

In works like "The Adventures of Augie March," his breakthrough novel in 1953, "Henderson the Rain King" and "Herzog," Mr. Bellow laid a path for old-fashioned, supersized characters and equally big themes and ideas. As the English novelist Malcolm Bradbury said, "His fame, literary, intellectual, moral, lay with his big books," which were "filled with their big, clever, flowing prose, and their big, more-than-life-size heroes - Augie Marches, Hendersons, Herzogs, Humboldts - who fought the battle for courage, intelligence, selfhood and a sense of human." [...]

Saul Bellow was a kind of intellectual boulevardier, wearing a jaunty hat and a smile as he marched into literary battle. In spite of - or, perhaps, because of - his lofty position, he was criticized more than many of his peers. In reviews, his books were habitually weighed against one another.

Was this one as full-bodied as "Augie March"? Where was the Bellow of old? Norman Mailer said that "Augie March," Mr. Bellow's grand Bildungsroman, was unconvincing and overcooked; Elizabeth Hardwick thought that in "Henderson," he was trying too hard to be an important novelist. He was prickly about his reputation but also philosophical: "Every time you're praised, there's a boot waiting for you. If you've been publishing books for 50 years or so, you're inured to misunderstanding and even abuse."

He was an author whose books no one liked or read but everyone felt they should own and confer awards upon. Go to any book sale and pick up one of his books--the binding will be firm as a rock and not a page dog-eared.

MORE:
-FEATURED AUTHOR: Saul Bellow (NY Times)
-OBIT: Author Depicted Men's Spiritual Crises (Jon Thurber and Mary Rourke, April 6, 2005, LA Times)

[A]s Morris Dickstein, an English professor at City University of New York, said: "Bellow was important for the way he broke with the hard-boiled Hemingway-style tradition in American literature for one that was more interior, reflective and psychological."

Speaking of Bellow's characters, Ozick said Tuesday: They "were true presences, each one utterly idiosyncratic. His physical descriptions were so original. He once described somebody's head 'coated with flour.' It was a metaphor for white hair."

In novels like "The Adventures of Augie March," which many consider his masterpiece, and other works, Bellow explored monumental themes, from identity and fulfillment to morality.

In "Augie March," the title character drifts from job to job, dreaming up ever more grandiose schemes for making it big in the world without compromising his optimistic vision.

In "Herzog," Moses Elkanah Herzog, a cuckolded English professor, frantically tries to shore up his disintegrating life.

Charles Citraine, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and narrator of "Humboldt's Gift," faces his career in a free fall but finds some measure of peace through meditating on the life and death of his friend Von Humboldt Fleischer.

In "Henderson the Rain King," Eugene Henderson is a millionaire's son, violent in both love and hate who is squandering his life with drink while trying desperately to understand the voice in his head that proclaims, "I want, I want, I want."

"One of the key themes of his fiction," critic Alfred Kazin wrote early in Bellow's career, " … is the attempt of his protagonists to get a grip on existence, to understand not themselves (they know that this is impossible) but the infinitely elusive universe in which, as human creatures, they find themselves."

But for all the difficulties his characters face, much of Bellow's fiction is doggedly optimistic, a reproach to the prophets of the wasteland who proclaim life's absurdity.

In his Nobel acceptance speech, Bellow criticized modern writers for their limited view of mankind, commenting that the essence of our condition was revealed in what Marcel Proust and Joseph Conrad termed "true impressions." Although they may be fleeting, Bellow said, the impressions connect us to the fact that "the good we hang onto so tenaciously — in the face of evil, so obstinately — is not illusion."

In his view, modern writers should aim for a "broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are and what this life is for."

-OBIT: Author Saul Bellow dies at 89 (HENRY KISOR, April 6, 2005, Chicago Sun-Times)

Mr. Bellow was the undisputed leader of what often has been called the "Jewish literary mafia.'' Others included Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller. In the 1950s and '60s, they shouldered aside Ernest Hemingway and other white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as leaders of the American literary establishment -- just when American culture was beginning to take over the world.

Like his compatriots, Mr. Bellow could find a common humanity in the deprived Jews of the '40s and the wealthy urbanites of the '90s. Yet he wrote each novel in a different key. The only real similarities among his novels were his broad themes: the individual against indifferent urban society, the individual against oneself, the individual against the insanities of modern life -- all well-worked notions in American literature, but recast with freshness in Mr. Bellow's crucible of genius.

-OBIT: Saul Bellow, novelist who charted ironies of modern soul, dies at 89 (Gail Caldwell, April 6, 2005, Boston Globe)

He may still be most widely known and beloved for the two novels that displayed the full range of that commanding intelligence ''Herzog," in 1964, and ''Humboldt's Gift," in 1975, though he began his ascent in the world of letters with the 1944 publication of his first novel, ''Dangling Man." Mr. Bellow's next book, ''The Victim" (1947), confirmed the emergence of a new protagonist in American literature: modern, Jewish, as alienated from his surroundings as Kafka's Gregor Samsa in ''The Metamorphosis." Along with Bernard Malamud and Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow was soon to form the triumvirate of Jewish-American postwar fiction. Writing in the aftermath of Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's mythic self-inventions, Mr. Bellow and his contemporaries replaced that gentility with a far more equivocal, even precarious world view: If the new Augie Marches were worried to the point of anguish, they were also profoundly, sometimes profanely, alive. And they stood at the entrance to literature's shadowy post-atomic age, in a decade shared by Ralph Ellison's ''Invisible Man" and David Riesman's ''The Lonely Crowd."

-OBIT: Saul Bellow chastised America for its own good: He was a prose master who could bring to life any environment with a realism not limited to the surfaces of life. (Roderick Nordell, 4/07/05, CS Monitor)

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 5, 2005 8:47 PM