Remembering Saul Bellow: the legacy

Saul Bellow's death in 2005 has occasioned some four hundred critical final assessments, nearly all of which wrestle in some degree of puzzlement over such an eclectic twentieth-century American life. His obituarists note his long and brilliant life devoted to reading, writing, generating ideas, preparing haute cuisine, gardening, playing ice hockey, enjoying Mozart and Pergolesi, playing the recorder, and engaging in intellectual conversation. They marvel, sometimes with amusement, over the range of his personal acquaintances, spanning as it did presidents, elderly immigrants, neighborhood crooks, minor Mafioso, world-class intellectuals, international writers, and a most odd assortment of spiritual gurus. The majority agree that his status in the post-World War II period of American literature is comparable only to Hemmgway, O'Neil, Warren, or Faulkner, note his numerous writing awards, including the Nobel Prize (1976), and note also that Bellow has commanded serious critical attention for more than sixty years. Most recall his championing of spiritual intuition against mere rationalism and describe him as the principal defender of his time of a foundering Western Humanism. The majority noted what a great opponent of modernist philosophical angst he became, his break with utopian social thought and utilitarianism, and his ability to write sexual comedies deeply indebted to Yiddish humor traditions in order to reveal the high comedy of religious exploration and heterosexual relations in our age. Few could resist making mention of his four domestically chaotic marriages and noting that unlike the Pope's his was a messy volatile twentieth-century American life. From childhood to the last decade of his life Bellow was a colorful figure. Technically an illegal allen, Saul Bellow was born in 1915 in Montreal, Canada, the youngest and most intellectually precocious child of Russian immigrants, and the descendent of a noted Hassidic rabbi. As a very young child he was literally smuggled into Chicago by train with his family. Growing up in the immigrant neighborhoods of Northside Chicago, he slowly began to exchange Jewish orthodoxy for utopian radicalism. At age four the eidetically gifted Saul had studied Hebrew and memorized large amounts of the Torah. Soon thereafter, as a young child trapped in hospital bed, he received and read the New Testament. It was a gift from a missionary lady, and later in life he guiltily confessed he had read it with such fascination he had fallen in love with Jesus. When he died a wellused New Testament was found at his bedside. Having exchanged his Hassidic orthodoxy for socialism in his youth, he soon embarked on an intensive intellectual acculturation in its ideologies, which ultimately led him to Mexico to meet the great Leon Trotsky. Sadly, however, he arrived just one day after Trotsky was assassinated. Soon after this Bellow repudiated utopian socialism and became a devotee of Reichian therapy, going so far as to purchase one of the infamous Reichian orgone boxes for his Queens apartment. Along with no sexual limits theories of Wilhelm Reich, he also studied Freudian psychoanalysis and theosophy with equal avidity--that is until he eviscerated both systems of thought for comic yardage for the novels. His next set of gurus--the anthroposophists Rudolph Steiner and Owen Barfield--he courted and sacrificed in like manner, though this time on the pages of the great middle novels for the purpose of illustrating the sheer comedy of the transcendental quest in the late twentieth century. Always associated with the rough, stinking, industrial Chicago of his childhood and youth, Bellow became its great chronicler, brilliantly mapping in novel after novel its packed streets, crooks, eccentrics, neighborhood intellectuals, polyglot immigrants, and spiritual ugliness as meticulously as Dickens had mapped nineteenth-century London. He entered the 1940s knowing that as a Chicagoan and social realist he would be held to an exacting Dreiserian standard, and that as a rather slight zany Jewish intellectual and comic writer he would soon have to do battle with another mid-Westerner--the Anglo, hypermasculine, existentialist Hemingway--whose reputation by then was legendary. …

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