"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." The opening words of The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow's masterpiece of 1953, are emblematic of his own life and character. Bellow, who rose from writing book reviews for $10 apiece to be perhaps the greatest American novelist since the second world war, died on Tuesday at home in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was 89.
In aliterary career of almost 60 years, Bellow won the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize and three National Book Awards. His work touched on the essence of human existence, the experience of immigrants and Jews, and class and social mobility in 20th-century America.
His father and his mother, prosperous Russian Jews, had emigrated to Canada from St Petersburg, in flight from the tsarist police. Saul was born in Lachine, Quebec, in 1915, the youngest of four children. In 1924 the Bellow family moved to Chicago, and so began the young Saul's special affection for Chicago street life of the 1920s and 1930s.
Bellow's place in the pantheon of American letters was secured by his first novel, Dangling Man, in 1944. With this subtle evocation of the experience of a young man in Chicago waiting to be drafted, Bellow coolly and deliberately presented his credentials as a novelist of stature. He would later refer to that novel and to his second (The Victim, published in 1947) as "two small and correct books".
He wrote The Adventures of Augie March in Paris and Rome while travelling on a Guggenheim grant. This book, which his friend John Berryman praised for the exuberance of its language, could not be less like Bellow's first two books. In it he eschewed the mandarin English of his apprenticeship: "In Augie March,I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence. Something like a fusion of colloquialism and elegance ...I felt that American writing had enslaved itself without sufficient reason to English models," he told a friend.
Augie March introduced most of its author's characteristic preoccupations: a keen sense of life's radical mystery and value; the American adventure; Russianness; Jewishness; the relationship of the life of the mind to the life of the senses. What Dublin is to Joyce or St Petersburg to Dostoyevsky, so Chicago is to Bellow. Augie March was Bellow's attempt to preserve for ever the Chicago neighbourhoods of the Depression era - an era he felt to be, paradoxically, one of unparallelled fullness of life.
Thereafter, Bellow's love affair with Chicago slowly cooled. The negative aspects of contemporary Chicago are foregrounded in The Dean's December (1982), which was attacked - mistakenly - as a pessimistic sociological treatise about inner-city racial violence. He moved to Boston in 1993, having lived for more than 30 years in the city by the lake.
Bellow felt keenly in the second half of his life the charge that he had ignored the Holocaust. The Bellarosa Connection (1989) was his reply, written three decades after he visited Auschwitz. Superficially about the celebrated Broadway producer Billy Rose, it is actually a profound meditation on memory and the history of individuals and races. "I have lived long enough to satisfy a few neglected demands," he said in a late interview.
Bellow's artistic gift survived his turbulent private life. Married five times, he leaves three sons and a daughter. Herzog (1964), the novel singled out for special mention when Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, records the insights and experiences of a sensitive professor enduring an agonising divorce. Moses Herzog notes that women "eat green salad and drink human blood". The novel has been read as autobiographical.
Henderson the Rain King (1959), begun while Bellow was teaching at Bard College, is the most openly anthropological of his novels. Set largely in Africa and with a comical stylistic hint of Hemingway, it reflects the direction his interests had taken as an undergraduate and later as a masters student. Its sociology anticipates Bellow's interests when a professor on the committee of social thought at the University of Chicago from 1962.
In the picaresque, Pulitzer Prize-winning Humboldt's Gift (1975), Bellow models his eponymous protagonist on his friend the doomed poet Delmore Schwartz, drawing heavily and satirically on his own experience of academic life. In More Die of Heartbreak (1987) he attacks contemporary mores and the "sexual anarchy" of the developed world (which he saw as a human ordeal on the scale of the Black Death or the world wars). Through the 1980s and 1990s Bellow concentrated on shorter fictions, notably the powerful novella The Actual. In Ravelstein (2000), his 13th and last novel, Bellow once again engages with an alter ego, Abe Ravelstein, a Chicago academic fighting the creeping vulgarisation of American life.
As thinker and artist, Bellow swam vigorously and successfully against the current of his times throughout his life. His work will be read for as long as there is a discerning literary community, a community he saw as threatened, particularly in contemporary America, by the invasive distractions of the electronic mass media.
