Saul Bellow, Augie March and me

Have finished reading Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel, The Adventures of Augie March (TAOAM).

I have previously read the following novels by Saul Bellow, in this order:

1. Seize the Day (1956)
2. Humboldt’s Gift (1975)
   
3. Herzog (1964)
   
4. Henderson the Rain King (1959)
   
5. More Die of Heartbreak (1987)
   
6. Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970)
   
7. Ravelstein (2000)

This list represents books read whilst they could be characterised as having been written by a living author. Saul Bellow is now dead (RIP), so TAOAM is the first Bellow novel I’ve read that represents a corpus of work that will not be added to. Ravelstein was written in 2000 and I think I read Seize the Day in about 2003, and I don’t know of any Bellow fiction being published after Ravelstein, so technically nothing changed between my reading that list of novels and reading TAOAM. But it is different.

I think it’s different because when you’re reading work by a living writer, you’re engaged with the writer’s project in progress. It’s the difference between partaking of the feast, and clearing up after it. Reading Philip Roth now is a good example of partaking of the feast – there’s a certain thrill in reading another energetic and angry book from the big PR, because you know, in his bare, spare NY apartment, he’s still scribbling with a pencil, studiously not admiring the view the better to concentrate. When he passes on, you’ll be reading a book that was written by a great writer around which and whom the dust has settled – there’s no more kicking the dirt up around your boots, in the writerly sense that Roth does this with each new book.

If you get me, great. If you don’t… well, you’re not the first. Moving on to Bellow’s big book:

TAOAM is a massive, varied and sprawling novel about all sorts of things. It’s a stab at the great American novel, for sure. It’s about nobility and squalor, wealth and poverty, women and men, sex and shopping, and everything in between. Augie, by his character and his situation, is drawn into one after another of the American myths of the hero* (and the self). He’s a thief, a rich kid, a lord, a hunter, a drunk etc.

Augie, when challenged with, “Well, come on, what are you trying to prove?”, replies:

I don’t want to prove a single thing, not a thing. Do you think I have this kind of ambition to stand out and prove something? Almost everybody I ever knew wanted to show in some way how he held the world together. This only comes from feeling the strain of holding yourself together, and it gets exaggerated into the whole world from the hard labour you put into it. But it doesn’t take hard labour. Or at least shouldn’t. You don’t do that. The world is held for you. So I don’t want to be representative or exemplary or head of my generation or any model of manhood. All I want is something of my own, and bethink myself. This is why I’m sounding off now and am excited.

And by his tender, failing heart and his light-headed love of fate, Augie’s a portrait of myths of man as well. He falls at women’s feet, and he is captured by their beauty, their vulnerability, and their craziness.

Meeting again, years after a night spent together on a cliff in Mexico, Augie falls for Stella:

My body, which is maybe all I am, this effortful creature, felt subject to currents and helpless. I wanted to go and hug her by the legs, but I thought I’d better wait. For why should I assume it would be right?

What I want to say most clearly about this novel is this: it’s big and difficult in places, but you will come to love Augie March.

I’m not sure if this is the Everyman effect that the blurb on the back cover refers to or not. It’s not so much that I identify with Augie, or with one of his myths; it’s more, as he says of another character, a difficult man named Einhorn, that I’m kinda in love with him.

Bellow is a very good writer. This has been said all over the place, and you feel it to be true with an early book like TAOAM (see JM Coetzee’s essay regarding Bellow’s first three novels in the NYRB). You know it to be true with later work like Herzog. And of course, for what it’s worth, he won the Nobel prize for literature.

So the man has skills. And he uses them to good effect in creating the character of Augie March. I want the best for him, and I worry that he gets himself into one scrape after another, either job-wise or lady-wise, or both. And the more Augie’s discourse turns to marriage, land ownership, children, and vocation, the more my heart swells and I long for him to sort his life out and settle into the patterns that most of us live in. Some people live in mansions and palaces, and some people live in the dirt; but most of us live in-between.

Grandma Lausch, an early figure in Augie’s shaping, will not read a book that’s not a roman. This book, The Adventures of Augie March, is a roman, in the lovely, resonant sense of that word: a book that sound romantic, that’s about growing up and living, that’s about loss and gain, life and death.

If you were to read only one Bellow novel, then it would have to be, in my opinion, Herzog (for reasons I hope to go into another time). But this one’s good too.

* John Barth, in a footnote (p309) in his autobiographical novel Once Upon a Time (1994), tells how he worked out the heroic dimensions of his character Ebenezer Cooke, poet laureate to Maryland, from his novel, The Sot-Weed Factor. Barth describes a list created by Lord Raglan used to measure the salient features of the mytho-heroic character pattern. Raglan lists, in chapter 16 of The Hero (1936), 22 features of the hero myth, including such things as the hero’s mother is a royal virgin, his father is a king, and he meets with a mysterious death, often at the top of a hill. Oedipus scores 21 points. Jesus would score 19, comparable to Theseus and King Arthur. Depending on how you score him – literally or allegorically – Augie scores either 2 (the everyman score) or about 15. (Of course, if you re-wrote the measures to characterise the American myth of the hero, the score would be different again. But I think you get the idea.)

Filed under: Criticism, Writers/Their Writings