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1915 -- 2005

Saul Bellow
His work is at once cosmic and sharply observed, framed by the search for life's meaning
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By Patrick T. Reardon and John Blades

April 6, 2005

Saul Bellow, a literary giant who conducted a lifelong love affair with Chicago and employed the city as a major character in many of his novels, died Tuesday at his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 89.

Bellow, the Nobel prize winner who left Chicago a decade ago to live in Massachusetts nearer his Vermont retreat, was considered by many critics the greatest American novelist of his era, on a par with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

"What he did was create a new American idiom, what he did was infuse the native American idiom with his own Jewish, Western European inflection," said James Atlas, whose 2000 book "Bellow: A Biography" was widely praised. "He always said he was a writer first, an American second and Jewish third. But all three were elements of his genius."

In more than a dozen works of fiction, ranging from "Dangling Man" in 1944 to "Ravelstein" in 2000, Bellow's characters struggled with questions forced on them by the overwhelming abundance of life--questions at once intensely personal and universal, physical and spiritual, down-to-earth and cosmic.

"They are," wrote novelist Cynthia Ozick, "knocked out by the volcanic multiplicity of human thought, ... they roll, burn, quake with cosmic hunger. This makes them, sometimes, jesters, and sometimes only sublime fools."

Despite the darker shadings of so much of his fiction, Bellow was a seriocomic writer. In some passages, his work was as robust and outrageously funny as Mark Twain's and Faulkner's, but with a distinctly urban and ethnic twist to that humor.

"His greatest contribution was that he was able to write fiction that had tremendous philosophical depth," Atlas said.

Bellow won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976. He was also the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards and many other honors.

Yet, throughout his career, he worked against the grain of literary fashion. In a cynical age, his works were filled with optimism, zest and even joy. Not that he saw late 20th Century America as paradise. But he found meaning in the struggles of his characters to find meaning.

He was the antithesis of everything blase. "I felt from the beginning of my life that to exist is something of a miracle," he told an interviewer in 1982. "I have never existed before; and this existence is so engaging, so passionately interesting that I could never stand away from it sufficiently to take a sophisticated view of it."

His books are thin in plot and action and thick in ideas and descriptions. For Bellow, thought, feeling and conversation were action. He was both an intellectual and a sensualist. His characters, like Bellow himself, were constantly trying to understand life, knowing always that they would come up short.

"All my books," he once told his friend and fellow novelist Richard Stern, "are about education and have therefore a somewhat boyish spirit."

Bellow's characters are also, at all times, awash with the physicality of life--the touching, smelling, tasting, hearing and seeing. Consider this description from "Humboldt's Gift," published in 1975: "Chicago, this night, was panting, the big urban engines going, tenements blazing in Oakwood with great shawls of flame, the sirens weirdly yelping, the fire engines, ambulances and police cars--mad-dog, gashing-knife weather, a rape and murder night, thousands of hydrants open, spraying water from both breasts."

Sandra Cisneros, who, like Bellow, has rooted much of her fiction in Chicago, said the loss of Bellow was like a death in the family.

"It's another generation of Chicago writers that's making their passing. If you write about Chicago, they're your fathers," she said. "We think of writers as immortal--and, in a way, they are. So when news like this comes, there's a little gasp."

Novelist and short-story writer Stuart Dybek said, "I'm in shock. I was in awe of him. The man's ability to write a sentence was unparalleled. Some people write good books. That man wrote at a minimum three or four masterpieces."

Bellow was such a stylist, Dybek said, that his prose was as densely nuanced as poetry. "`Augie March' is one long, spectacular poem. The first 150 pages of `Humboldt's Gift' is an extended poem. And `Henderson the Rain King' would be right up there," Dybek said.

An author's contrariness

Bellow's choice of Chicago as a home base for much of his career was an expression of his contrariness. As a young man, he lived nearly two decades in and around New York and its literary scene, rooming with Ralph Ellison and rubbing shoulders with Manhattan's cultural elite.

But, in 1963, he returned to Chicago, where he had spent much of his youth, to take a professorship at the University of Chicago. He remained there for 30 years before leaving, at age 78, for a teaching position at Boston University to be near his retreat in rural Vermont.

"The main thing about Chicago," Bellow said in 1975, "is that it's not New York." But he only half-meant the remark.

Bellow liked the fact that he wasn't lionized by Chicago as a cultural institution--that he could walk the city's streets and dine in its restaurants and shop in its stores without being recognized, at least most of the time.

"I really do prefer the untroubled vulgarity of Chicago, where, when my wife gives her name to a department store clerk, the clerk asks, `Bellow? Doesn't your husband swim in the Olympics?"'

It was a story he often repeated--usually in tandem with this one: "A Negro bus driver on Halsted Street once pulled to the curb when he saw me, opened his window and said, `Hey, you're Saul Bellow!"'

Bellow loved Chicago not simply as a non-New York but for itself. It was an eyes-wide love that took in, even embraced, the grit and ugliness and stupidities of the city as well as its beauty and aspirations.

"Chicago oppresses me in a way only another Chicagoan can understand," he wrote in a memoir published in 1992. "It terrifies outsiders ... but it haunts the natives."

Yet, for all its grit and graffiti, Chicago was also the embodiment of the yearning and hopes of its people.

"The Chicago that makes my nerve endings tingle," Bellow said in a 1982 interview, was a city of immigrants, united by a certain set of basic beliefs: "the idea that you can lead a free life, that you don't need to fear the authorities; the idea that you had entered into a contract with a hundred million others, to be an American, to forget your own history and start over again."

Chicago, he said, was "an American city." It was his highest compliment.

The son of Russian immigrants, Solomon Bellows was born June 10, 1915, in Lachine, an impoverished suburb of Montreal. (He changed his name to Saul Bellow when he began being published.)

A sickly child, Bellow was hospitalized at age 8 with a combination of peritonitis (inflammation of the membrane in the abdomen) and pneumonia. A year later, his family moved to Chicago, settling in the neighborhood east of Humboldt Park on the Near Northwest Side.

"I chose almost consciously not to be a weakling," Bellow wrote more than 70 years later. "I turned up a book by the famous coach Walter P. Camp on physical fitness. And I did, as the famous football coach himself had done, carry full coal scuttles up and down the stairs at arm's length. I chinned myself. I ran. I worked out with a punching bag and with a pair of dumbells. . . . The truth is I had no gift whatever for sports."

Bellow's life in those early years centered around the local public library branch, settlement house and schools. At Tuley High School, his classmates included Sydney J. Harris, the future newspaper columnist, and Julius Echeles, who became a noted criminal lawyer.

After graduating in 1933 from Tuley, Bellow enrolled at the University of Chicago. But feeling "restless and confined" after two years on the Midway, he transferred to Northwestern where, in 1937, he graduated with honors in anthropology and sociology.

Bellow briefly attended graduate school in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin but dropped out and returned to Chicago, where he took a job with the Federal Writers Project. In the early 1940s, he taught at the now-defunct Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College, worked as an editor for Encyclopaedia Britannica and then migrated to New York.

His first novel, "The Very Dark Trees," never made it to print because its small-press publisher was drafted. (Bellow later burned the manuscript.)

"Dangling Man," which documented the anxieties of a Chicagoan waiting to be drafted, was Bellow's first published novel, arriving on the scene in 1944 as its author awaited news of his own draft status. It was an auspicious debut, described by famed critic Edmund Wilson as "one of the most honest pieces of testimony on the psychology of the whole generation who have grown up during the Depression and the war."

After serving in the Merchant Marine, Bellow published his second novel, "The Victim," in 1947, another spare and formal "European" book. The more grandiose Bellow style finally emerged in "The Adventures of Augie March" (1953), a voluminous work that followed the errant and rambling path of a young man coming of age during the Depression.

The novel opens with these words: "I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and got 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."

Novelist and critic Martin Amis has called the book the long-sought Great American Novel.

`Seize the Day'

Next came the novella "Seize the Day" (1956) and then, three years later, another overflowing book also considered one of Bellow's boldest and finest: "Henderson the Rain King," about a middle-age Connecticut millionaire who goes off to Africa on a spiritual safari.

"Herzog" (1964) was equally long and spirited but more static and academic, as the title character, Moses Herzog, agonizes over his ex-wives and other troubles, writing frantic letters to friends, relatives and public figures that he never bothers to mail. In that same epic but cerebral mode, in which the words spoke much louder than actions, were "Mr. Sammler's Planet" (1970) and "Humboldt's Gift" (1975), whose title character, a destitute poet, was based on Bellow's friend, Delmore Schwartz.

A year later, when notified that he had won the Nobel Prize, Bellow responded, "The child in me is delighted, but the adult is skeptical."

The Nobel Prize seemed to mark a turning point in Bellow's writing, a retreat from the big, ambitious books. Afterward, his novels were not only shorter but less adventurous, physically and intellectually, beginning with the somber, wintry "The Dean's December" in 1982, and followed six years later by "More Die of Heartbreak," a modest but charming tragicomedy of eros.

Bellow's next book, "A Theft," came out as a deluxe paperback in 1989, after two magazines declined to publish the novella without substantial cuts. For so eminent a writer to publish in paperback, rather than hardcover, was considered a bold move, but it was one that Bellow duplicated later in the same year with "The Bellarosa Connection."

Besides his novels, Bellow published two collections of short fiction and wrote several plays. Author of one book of journalism, "To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account" (1976), Bellow was an inveterate traveler who, in 1970, said, "I think I must have lived in upwards of 200 places in my life."

Even though Bellow's books were invariably best sellers, he was not universally admired by readers or critics, more than a few of whom found his work static, prolix and maddeningly discursive. Novelist John Gardner, for example, called Bellow as an "essayist disguised as a writer of fiction" and complained about Bellow's "self-indulgence" and "inordinate love of talk."

Yet novelist Philip Roth listed Bellow with Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Fyodor Dostoevsky as "the great inventors of narrative detail and masters of narrative voice and perspective."

Unpredictable, stormy

Slightly built, with silvery hair, protuberant eyes and a jaunty manner, Bellow had a volatile, unpredictable temperament, as both his fiction and his occasionally stormy private life seemed to suggest.

Four times divorced, he married his fifth wife, Janis Freedman, a former University of Chicago student, in 1989, and a decade later--when Bellow was 84--she gave birth to their daughter, Naomi. His wife and daughter were reportedly with him when he died.

Bellow was also the father of three sons, Daniel, Adam and Gregory, by each of his first three wives.

"He could be very engaging and entertaining. He loved to tell stories," Atlas said. "But he could also be very testy and out of sorts. He was a temperamental man and volatile. He had a thin skin."

Bellow could be charming or arrogant, witty or caustic, as the mood or the occasion dictated. Though he remained aloof from most civic functions, he did exhibit a curiosity about Chicago's political, cultural and even gangland affairs, which he transformed into fiction.

He was so intrigued by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley that he once secured a press card to attend one of his news conferences. When Daley's son ran successfully for mayor in 1989, Bellow, angered at what he believed were anti-Semitic comments by the opposition, joined the bandwagon, accompanying the candidate to campaign stops and speaking at his inauguration, where Bellow delighted the audience with tales of Chicago's politicians and rogues.

In one instance, Bellow's liberal use of real people for his fiction backfired. He once lived in the same apartment building with mob chieftain Gus Alex, who became the inspiration for gangster Vito Langobardi in "Humboldt's Gift." After the book was published, Alex, at his next encounter with the writer, suggested--politely--that Bellow, in the future, refrain from using him in any more novels.

Yet it was Bellow himself who was most often the model for his books' central characters, and it was the workings of Bellow's fervid mind that were, at heart, the subject of all his novels.

"He was the hero of his books, he was their only hero, he was his own hero," wrote critic Alfred Kazin.

It was a paradox, of course, that Bellow, the man who so closely guarded his privacy and had little truck with the celebrity-seeking of the modern literary scene, disclosed so much about himself in his fiction.

Novelist Stern once noted: "He has spelled out versions of himself on several thousand public pages. He is said to be exceptionally sensitive to criticism, but his books at least are full of what amounts to self-accusation, some of it put into the slanging mouths of enemies, friends, wives."

When one would-be biographer warned Bellow that he would be digging up unseemly details from the writer's failed marriages, Bellow said: "Who could reveal more than I already have about that?"

Walter Pozen, Bellow's friend and attorney, told The Associated Press that Bellow will have a private funeral. A public memorial is also planned.

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From Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift":

`Chicago, this night, was panting, the big urban engines going, tenements blazing in Oakwood with great shawls of flame, the sirens weirdly yelping, the fire engines, ambulances and police cars-- mad-dog, gashing-knife weather, a rape and murder night, thousands of hydrants open, spraying water from both breasts.'

Saul Bellow's books

Books by author Saul Bellow, winner of the 1976 Nobel

Prize for Literature.

"Dangling Man," 1944

"The Victim," 1947

"The Adventures of Augie March," 1953 (National Book

Award winner)

"Seize the Day," 1956

"Henderson the Rain King," 1959

"Herzog," 1964 (National Book Award winner)

"Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories," 1968

"Mr. Sammler's Planet," 1970 (National Book Award winner)

"Humboldt's Gift," 1975 (Pulitzer Prize winner)

"To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account" (nonfiction), 1976

"The Dean's December," 1982

"Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories," 1984

"More Die of Heartbreak," 1986

"A Theft," 1989

"The Bellarosa Connection," 1989

"Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales," 1991

"It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future,"

1994 (nonfiction)

"The Actual," 1997

"Ravelstein," 2000

Chicago Tribune. Patrick T. Reardon is a Tribune staff reporter. John Blades, now retired, was book editor of the Tribune
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune