That way of talking is unlike anything in The Victim or Dangling Man, but it is close to the way Augie talks. Pep’s observations and coinages also recall Augie, as in the tame cat “eating her way wag-headed into a mackerel with her nice needles” (p. 459) or the “bedoldrummed” Greek fleet at Aulis (p. 461). Augie’s descriptive phrases, often hyphenated, are comparably striking: “Aeneas-stirred Mediterranean” (p. 944), “a coal-sucking Vesuvius of chaos” (p. 582), “a tremendous Canada of light.” (p. 577). “Notations” like the “wag-headed” way Pep’s cat eats appear on every page (in a letter of November 28, 1953, Bernard Malamud praises Bellow’s ability in Augie “to call all things by some name”). Sitting up naked in bed in Mexico, Augie and Thea look out their hotel window and see the manager’s tiny father “mouse around in the enormous flowers.” His two little granddaughters appear in the garden “like white birthday cake” (p. 780). The girlfriend of Guillaume, the “dog-coiffeur” and trainer, is “a great work of ripple-assed luxury” (p. 597). In the old folks’ home where Grandma Lausch ends up, the inhabitants have “rashy, vessel-busted hands” (p. 491). Augie in the pool hall listens to “frying jazz and the buzz of baseball broadcasts” (p. 473). Augie’s vitality is different from Pep’s: Pep’s is vatic, manic, Augie’s resilient, picaresque; both are comic. Pep is small in stature (“not the star-browed Apollo measuring one noble foot of space between the eyes”) but large in spirit, like Whitman: “I partake of everything in my own flesh; I strum on Venusberg and float in the swamp. I do a one-leg schottische along Clark Street and buff the friendly public with my belly” (p. 459).
Sergeant Flavin lacks Pep’s erudition but makes up for it in street smarts. On his way to a “Retreat for Catholic Men of the Chicago Police Force,” he can think of better ways to pass a gloomy February weekend—“not that I’m disrespectful.”4 The police officer who comes to a religious retreat straight from brawls and knifings and fights in pool rooms needs time to adjust: “you won’t float him out of that on sweet smoke and tinging bells so easy” (p. 48). The retreat, Flavin tells us, is not far from the Sunset Ridge golf course near Wilmette, where, like Bellow, he used to caddie; also nearby is the Garden of Allah, where the boxer Tony Canzoreri used to train. “There was plenty of sporting money around in those days,” Flavin recalls, “and those big handsome women, they’d throb you up with a look as if they put their hand on you” (p. 49). Sergeant Flavin admires priests (he could be a character in James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy): “There’s nobody smarter. They know the wildness of the world and how it has to be stood off and what the state of things is and what our line of work is like and with who. You can’t loose or bind, as they say, without strong hands and studying knots. That’s the old wisdom that’s held the world steady two thousand years and will be with it to the last shake, you can give odds” (p. 51). “Give odds,” “with who,” “throb you up,” “float him out”; these are the locutions or notations forcing their way into Bellow’s prose in the late 1940s, along with everything else he knew and read.
In November 1949 Bellow published a third monologue, “Dora,” in Harper’s Bazaar (where Pearl Kazin, Alfred’s sister, worked). A forty-five-year-old spinster, Dora is neither street nor erudite. Orphaned early in life, with no close family connections, she lives in a rooming house in Manhattan. Dora is pleasant enough, but keeps to herself. She is devoted to her work as a dressmaker, at which she excels. Her language is plain, neither Augie-like nor Flaubertian, though the story she tells implicitly affirms Bellow’s motives in adopting the Augie style. One night the man next door, “a typical-looking individual you hardly ever notice” (p. 190), has a stroke; Dora hears him drop “with his whole weight” (p. 198). Entering his room, she finds him naked on the floor, unconscious. She has never spoken to this man, though they knew each other by sight. No one knows much about him, the police have no one to notify. The man’s nakedness leads Dora to focus on him for the first time, really to see him. “There is a difference between one and another. Making garments, you get to realize that. It sinks in in the most peculiar ways, by the hips and bosom of one person and the shape of another, that the difference between this one and that one is a very important thing, almost like a sign from God” (pp. 198–99). Later she thinks: “if you don’t care about the differences one thing might as well be another, meat candy and candy meat. It might as well be the trunk falling as the man falling” (p. 199). She begins to visit the man in hospital, where he remains unconscious. The episode leaves her “shaken out of myself” (p. 199), by which she means, out of her closed-off self.
“Dora” connects with Augie and “A Sermon by Dr. Pep” in stressing the integrity of individuals, the importance of particulars of character and appearance (often identical for Bellow), and the deforming influence of social construction or categorization. In Augie March, this theme is reinforced by allusions to Chicago as Babel. “On warm days I went up to the roof and had a look at the city,” Augie recalls. “Around was Chicago. In its repetition it exhausted your imagination of details and units, more units than the cells of the brain and bricks of Babel” (p. 906). The desire to reach heaven by material means (bricks) or human reason (brain cells) is hubris and the nemesis it begets is not only a confusion of tongues, the inability to understand one another or to connect, but a tendency to see people as units, indistinguishable bricks or cells. Augie, in defiance, is “one of a humanity that can’t be numbered” (p. 745), can’t be ground up, which is partly why he resists or evades the many “reality-instructors” he faces: Grandma Lausch, Einhorn, Mrs. Renling, Simon, Thea Fenchel, Manny Padilla, Clem Tambow. In discussing the origins of Augie with Philip Roth, Bellow recalls his experiences in Mexico: “The challenge was to emerge intact from these would-be dominators. To extract the secret of their powers from them while eluding their control became my singular interest.”5 In a letter of November 1953 to Edith Tarcov, Bellow admits to feeling “that the world asks an undue degree of control over us. At any rate, I am constitutionally unable to accept so much control and have passed this inability along to Augie.”
A fourth and final pre-Augie monologue, the “Address by Gooley MacDowell to the Hasbeens Club of Chicago,” was published in the summer of 1951 in The Hudson Review. Gooley is like Dr. Pep, a breathless autodidact (Atlas calls him “an early incarnation of Herzog”6). Though ideas have long been Gooley’s province, his address concerns the inadequacy of “intelligence connected to human advancement” (p. 223). In school “I sprung my elbow waving to answer questions” (p. 223); more recently “I’ve been starting to reconsider to what end I hoped to be so smart” (p. 222). The “Hasbeens Club,” friends from the reading room of the Crerar Library on Randolph Street, “our homespun Bodleian,” “will want to know why I have it in for thought, suddenly” (p. 224). Gooley’s answer is that thought obstructs: “as you get better by the correction of intellect you may lose your nature” and cease to experience “feelings of being that go beyond and beyond all I ever knew of thought” (pp. 226, 227). Learning also obstructs: “What a load you can buy for a buck, in anthologies, out of Augustine, Pascal, Aristotle, Nicholas of Cusa, super-brain Goethe, and it’s a confusion for us” (p. 226). Gooley’s advice is like Wordsworth’s in “The Tables Turned”: “quit your books.” As the Wordsworth speaker, “William,” tells his friend “Matthew”: “Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife,” “Our meddling intellect / Misshapes the beauteous forms of things.” What is needed, William says, is “spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,” “a heart that watches and receives.” This advice is like Whitman’s advice in “Song of Myself”: “loafe” (“I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass”). For ideas men like Gooley, however, or Pep or Augie or Bellow, loafing is labor; the search for a true self or soul, “a furthest creature that wears various lives or forms as a garment, and the life of thought one of the greatest of these” (p. 227), is, in Augie’s words, “hard, hard work, excavation and dig
ging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done” (p. 979).
IN THE MONTH that “Dora” appeared, Partisan Review published “From the Life of Augie March,” an early version of the novel’s opening chapter. The British novelist Adam Thirlwell makes much of the differences between 1949 and 1953 versions. That the opening paragraph of the 1949 version is twice as long as that of the 1953 version leads him to argue that “free-style … is a consciously edited style.”7 (though the Chicago chapters of the novel show least evidence of revision8). Thirlwell cites the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon as an influence on the finished work, on the strength of a single reference made to him by a man Augie meets in New York, a descendant (his name is Alain de Niveau and he turns up in Paris at the end of the novel [p. 980]). Saint-Simon’s prose style, Thirlwell writes, “was not courtly: it was not stylish. Instead, it allowed itself contradiction, periphrasis, precision. It was a style based on an impacted note form, a concentrate of information and imagined information whose source was malice, was gossip.” A striking passage from the Memoirs describing Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s second wife, is compared with Bellow’s “great sharp packed description” of Grandma Lausch.9 That Bellow himself never mentions Saint-Simon as a source, either in correspondence or interviews, never names him as an influence, does not trouble Thirlwell. The larger point, about the worked nature of the style, however, is a good one (as long as “worked” is distinguished from “smoothed” or “regularized”). Robert Penn Warren, in a New Republic review of the novel (November 2, 1953), makes a related point when he claims that Bellow’s “long self-discipline in the more obviously rigorous method [the Flaubertian standard] made it possible for Bellow now to score a triumph in the apparent formlessness of the autobiographical-picaresque novel.” Warren draws a parallel with “the really good writers of free verse,” all of whom began “by practice in formal metrics.”
The European writers Bellow does mention as influences—he names no Russian novelists—are Joyce, Fielding, and the nineteenth-century masters Scott, Balzac, and Dickens. As he explains in an undated response to a letter of November 28, 1953, from Bernard Malamud, “I took a position in writing this book. I declared against what you call the constructivist approach. A novel, like a letter, should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of mortality and decay. I backed away from Flaubert in the direction of Walter Scott, Balzac, and Dickens. Having brought off the method as well as I could, I must now pay the price. You let the errors come” (a comment that recalls Randall Jarrell’s definition of the novel: “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it”10). That Augie is a “loose baggy monster,”11 Henry James’s term, is as clear as its “rebellion against small-public art” (“My real desire was to reach ‘everybody’ ”12); less clear is its connection to the Joyce of Finnegans Wake. Bellow explains: “I took what I was writing as a project with its own rules. You know, towards the end of his life, Joyce was writing sentences of a very curious kind. They contained a challenge to the world. It’s a question of how to provoke new responses and get rid of some of the old stuff that people thought they wanted. Anyhow, it was a wonderful game, I think. That was the way I saw I was doing and I think Joyce in his way was up to the same thing.”13
If late Joyce inspired Bellow as a maker of curious or challenging sentences, Fielding inspired him as a narrator. During the writing of Augie, Bellow told Daniel Fuchs, he read Joseph Andrews (its full title is The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams) “off and on.”14 Like Augie, Joseph is a good-natured and buoyant hero of low station whose adventures are couched in heroic terms. In Joseph Andrews these terms are mocking; in Augie they are ultimately serious. Clem Tambow makes fun of Augie’s “nobility syndrome.… You want there should be Man, with capital M” (p. 879), but Bellow does not. Here is Augie on Einhorn, “the first superior man I knew”: “I’d ask myself, ‘What would Caesar suffer in this case? What would Machiavelli advise or Ulysses do? What would Einhorn think?’ I’m not kidding when I enter Einhorn in this eminent list. It was him that I knew, and what I understood of them in him” (p. 449).15 Joseph Andrews proceeds episodically, like Don Quixote, an acknowledged influence. The narrative is loose, a model for the looseness of Augie. In both Augie and Joseph Andrews, episodes and characters appeal first because of their intrinsic qualities. As Robert Penn Warren puts it of the incidents in Augie, “awareness of their place in the overall pattern dawns late on us,” exactly the reverse, he claims, of the way incidents are presented in Bellow’s earlier novels.16 In Augie, moreover, respect for the integrity of characters and episodes (what Warren calls Bellow’s “fine old relish of character for character’s sake”) is thematically appropriate. Toward the end of the novel, however, the limitations of the picaresque or episodic form surface. Augie tires of adventuring. What he now seeks, in addition to freedom and love, is “use,” what Lionel Trilling, in a brief review of the novel in The Griffin, calls a “function” as opposed to a “fate,” terms drawn from the novel itself. This change in Augie’s outlook suggests development or maturity, qualities the picaresque is ill-suited to portray. In Paris with Stella, an early example of the Bellovian floozy, Augie hatches a scheme to run “an academy and foster-home … [a] private green place like one of those Walden or Innisfree wattle jobs under the kind sun, surrounded by velvet woods and bright gardens and Elysium lawns sown with Lincoln Park grass seed” (p. 970) (what exactly Stella will do in this paradise is hard to see). This fantasy collapses at the news that Stella is unfaithful to Augie. But was it ever seriously entertained? Augie has always held to the belief that “a man’s character is his fate” (p. 906); his problem has been to find and stick to that character, the “axial lines” he strives “to have my existence on,” free from “noise and grates, distortion, chatter, distraction, effort, superfluity” (pp. 901, 902). That others have little time for such striving, see it as hopelessly old-fashioned, he knows full well:
Guys may very likely think, Why hell! What’s this talk about fates? And will feel it all comes to me from another day, and a mistaken day, when there were fewer people in the world and there was more room between them so that they grew not like wild grass but like trees in a park, well set apart and developing year by year in the rosy light. Now instead of such comparison you think, Let’s see it instead not even as the grass but as a band of particles [like the cells or bricks of Babel], a universal shawl of them, and these particles may have functions but certainly lack fates. And there’s even an attitude of mind which finds it almost disgusting to be a person and not a function. Nevertheless I stand by my idea of a fate. For which a function is a substitution of a deeper despair (p. 971).
In the novel’s final paragraph, a second use or function is hinted at when Augie declares himself “a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand” (like Bellow, author of the novel just read). To some readers, including several reviewers, this declaration, like the earlier dream of an Elysian foster home, appears out of nowhere. Both schemes serve values Augie holds dear throughout the book: loving memories of Mama and “mind-crippled” Georgie, Augie’s brother, underlie the foster home idea; similarly loving memories motivate Augie’s “near-at-hand” discoveries, principally the novel’s “gallery of personalities.” “People will feel exposed, ridiculed, no matter how you deal with them,” Bellow wrote in a letter of November 30, 1953, to Sam Freifeld, whose father was the model for Einhorn: “They can’t think that perhaps it was my aim to love not shame them,” a comment recalling Bellow’s advice to Dean Borok, that in writing a successful account of his life “you will forgive everyone in the process. Yes, all those who sinned against you will be forgiven.”17 That the functions Augie comes up with at the end of the novel are consistent with his values, however, does not explain why he comes up with them when
he does. Norman Podhoretz, reviewing the novel in Commentary (October 1953), sees little sign of development in Augie. Though he “goes through everything, he undergoes nothing. He doesn’t change in the course of the novel; he doesn’t even learn, for all his great show of having learned. He merely resists the apparent lessons of his experience.”18
Trilling’s remarks about “function,” in an otherwise admiring review, disturbed Bellow. “As Mr. Bellow defines him,” Trilling writes, “a person has a fate rather than a function, and powers of enjoyment and of love rather than achievement,” a distinction Trilling thinks false, since “without function it is very difficult to be a person and to have a fate.”19 “People have accused me of asociality,” Bellow writes in the November 1953 letter to Edith Tarcov. “Trilling asserts that Augie is ‘wrong’ i.e. unprincipled.” This assertion Bellow denies, while also suggesting the deforming capacities of “sociality” or function: “Squeezed into ‘functions’ in which all higher capacities die of disuse, we are considered unprincipled if we comment on the situation by so much as a laugh. Can Augie be anything but, in his mild way, an outlaw? Only, instead of being outside, as a Cain or Ishmael are outside, his desire is to be an Augie” (or a Huck, resisting the culture that would “civilize” him). To Trilling himself, on October 11, 1953, Bellow wrote of Augie as representative, in the line of American or Emersonian individualism, certainly, but also as a man of his age: “I was constantly thinking of some of the best young men I have known. Some of the very finest and best intentioned, best endowed, found nothing better to do with themselves than Augie. The majority, whether as chasers, bigamists, forgers and worse, lacked his innocent singleness of purpose. They had reached the place where they fixedly doubted that Society had any use for their abilities.” Nor was Bellow prepared to accept that the values Augie stood out for were in any way impediments to function: “To love another, genuinely to love, is the inception of a function, I wished to say,” though he admitted that the position he was defending had not been consciously adopted. “On the whole,” he declared at the end of the letter, “I was fairly free of deliberate intentions.”
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 57