The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  THOUGH BELLOW WAS ADAMANT in resisting the label of Jewish American writer, he was perfectly aware that his Jewishness would play a part in the reception of Augie March. The reviews in general were strong. Trilling’s admiring notice in The Griffin and Warren’s review in The New Republic were followed by a rave from Delmore Schwartz in Partisan Review, in which he declared Augie a greater novel than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.39 The New York Times Book Review gave Augie a front-page review, by Robert Gorham Davis, a professor of English at Smith College. It also ran an interview with Bellow by Harvey Breit, the editor.40 Davis, like Warren, praised Bellow for the richness and variety of his character drawing, and for not being afraid “to seem more interested in life than in art.” He also compared Augie favorably to Dos Passos’s U.S.A. (for its “enormous range of discriminating reporting”). Breit begins the interview with Bellow by describing him as “fanning out” from “the tough, tight literary magazines” and “the severer literary critics” to “broader and brighter domains,” what Bellow, after Wyndham Lewis, called a “big-public” readership. Later, on December 13, the New York Times Book Review published John Berryman’s “A Note on Augie,” which discusses Bellow’s debts to and differences from Dreiser, while suggesting that the American naturalist he most resembles is Stephen Crane. On the one hand, though Bellow rarely mentions Crane (and only then to see him as an ancestor of Hemingway, a quite different sort of writer), his style, like Crane’s, is “powerful,” “singular,” and “salutary.” On the other hand, in being “inclusive and tidal” it “clearly belong[s] on the Dreiser side.”

  Two other strong reviews are worth noting. In The Saturday Review, which ran a full-page drawing of Bellow on its front cover, and a sidebar interview, Harvey Curtis Webster, a professor of English at the University of Louisville, compared the experience of reading Augie to that of reading Ulysses when it first came out in 1922.41 In the New York Post, Harvey Swados called Augie “very possibly the most significant and remarkable novel to have been published in the United States in the past decade.”42 The commercial reception of the novel was also gratifying. Sales were boosted by several prepublication deals. The Griffin, where Trilling’s notice appeared, was a publication of the Readers’ Subscription, a high-end book club he, W. H. Auden, and Jacques Barzun had founded; Augie was a featured selection. The Book-of-the-Month Club selected Augie as an alternate. In December Bellow received a check for $2,000 from Viking, as an additional advance against earnings. Henry Volkening, meanwhile, was forwarding offers from foreign publishers.43 Early in the New Year, Augie won the National Book Award for Fiction, and on January 31 the Times Book Review published Bellow’s “How I Wrote Augie March’s Story.”

  AMONG THE FEW less favorable notices, two stuck out. In The New Yorker, the novelist Anthony West, son of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West, wrote a symbol-mongering review that Bellow thought “disgraceful,” so much so that on September 25 he wrote to Katherine White, the magazine’s fiction editor, to complain.44 White, who had not read the novel, forwarded Bellow’s letter to the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, recently appointed successor to Harold Ross. When Shawn received Bellow’s letter, according to White in a letter of October 13, “he immediately got hold of the book and read it.… Mr. Shawn agrees with you that Anthony West was flatly wrong in his statements about the symbolism.” Though The New Yorker had no letters page, Shawn agreed to break precedent and publish a response from Bellow, provided “it was written as a calm correction, not as a general and heated attack on the critic.” The response would appear “under our usual heading ‘Department of Correction.’ ” At the end of the letter relaying Shawn’s decision, White added: “How seriously we take this mistake you can judge by the fact that this is the first time in the history of the magazine—if my memory is correct—that we’ve asked an author to write a reply to a book review.” In the end, Bellow decided against replying, partly because he was satisfied “that Mr. Shawn agrees with me that I have been done an injustice,” partly because he couldn’t be bothered: so “vast, involved and peculiar” was the confusion of West’s review, he declared in a letter to White on October 27, “that I don’t feel brave enough or capable enough to deal with it. There are some misunderstandings that simply weaken you when you contemplate their complexity.”45

  The second distressing notice Augie received was the Norman Podhoretz review in Commentary (“The Language of Life,” October 1953), behind which Bellow saw conspiracy rather than confusion. Podhoretz was twenty-three in 1953, recently returned from Cambridge, where he had studied with F. R. Leavis. Although a rising young man in New York literary circles, he was not yet well known. He was given the assignment to review Augie by Robert Warshow, an editor at the magazine, “because almost every other possible reviewer they could think of was either a friend of Bellow or had read the novel in manuscript and praised it privately to him.” Bellow was a contributor to Commentary and, as Podhoretz puts it in his memoir, Making It (1967), “the staff admired him and was entirely in sympathy with what they took him to be trying to do in this new book.… But they did not want to ‘set up’ a review, and they had chosen me as a disinterested party.” Podhoretz had read The Victim, which impressed him, knew Bellow was the “White Hope” of what he calls “the family” (i.e., the New York literati), but had never met him. He set about his task conscientiously, reading Dangling Man and rereading The Victim, “before going on to Augie, which I had every expectation of admiring. But to my dismay, the further I got into it, the less I liked it: it seemed forced, strained, shrill, and finally even tiresome.” As a student of Leavis, Podhoretz told me in an interview, “I had very stern ideas about what a good novel is and this wasn’t a good novel.” Podhoretz was frightened by his own reactions, since he’d been told by Warshow that Lionel Trilling, his teacher and mentor as an undergraduate at Columbia, thought the novel extraordinary; Trilling, he knew from experience, “was far from promiscuous in distributing praise.” In addition, “everyone else I respected was reportedly overwhelmed.” Making It is very frank in detailing Podhoretz’s ambitions. In the case of Augie, however, “try as I may and aware as I am of how hungry I was for attention, I can unearth no such motive in the piece I eventually wrote.… The most powerful impulse I remember having, in fact, was to fake the review or not write it at all, for I was in terror of the scorn that might be heaped upon me for making a mistaken judgment.”46

  The review was far from wholly negative. In its penultimate paragraph Podhoretz calls Augie “an impressive tour de force, impressive enough to earn the right to be criticized as a criticism of life.” The last sentences of the review read: “Mr. Bellow has the very genuine distinction of giving us a sense of what a real American idiom might look like. It is no disgrace to have failed in a pioneer attempt.” Podhoretz’s grounds for criticizing Augie derive partly from the previously quoted passage about Augie’s lack of development, partly from a reviewer’s sense that there was something willed in its high spirits: “the book is almost bursting at the seams in its effort to be exuberant.” Even in passages Podhoretz quotes approvingly, “the strain is apparent.” Bellow admitted similar flaws in later years.47 Where the review seems perverse is in its claim that “we are more aware of the words than the objects, of Mr. Bellow than of the world.” Awareness of Mr. Bellow and his words no more prevents most readers from finding Grandma Lausch or Five Properties or Einhorn or Caligula (the eagle) memorable than awareness of Dickens and his words prevents readers from finding Magwitch or Micawber or Betsey Trotwood or Bull’s-Eye (Bill Sikes’s vicious dog) memorable, though as a 1950s Leavisite, Podhoretz would probably have been stern about Dickens as well. One is always aware of the writing in Augie, but the novel is also full of things, places, thoughts, characters, “objects” not only perfectly captured but present “for themselves,” as both Penn Warren and Robert Gorham Davis suggested. In a later essay, “The Adventures of Saul Bellow, 1953–1959” (1964), Podhoretz drops that particular obje
ction, confining his criticisms to the novel’s picaresque form and the forced nature of its exuberance. (When I interviewed him in 2008, however, he returned to the criticism of Bellow’s intrusive presence, confessing that “not a single character in his novels has ever come truly alive for me; they just all seem to me marionettes, puppets, figures through which to manipulate arguments.”) In the 1964 essay, Podhoretz offers an explanation for what he sees as the forced quality of the novel’s high spirits. Though Bellow is praised for being the first writer of the postwar period to give expression in a novel “to a new phase of American cultural history,” one marked by “an exhilarating new impulse to celebrate the virtues of the American system and of American life in general” (as in the Partisan Review symposium “Our Country and Its Culture”), unfortunately, “like the ethos of which it was the most remarkable reflection, Augie was largely the product not of a state of being already achieved, but rather of an effort on Bellow’s part to act as though he’d already achieved it. As a test case of the buoyant attitudes of the period, in other words, Augie fails.”48

  Podhoretz’s review infuriated Bellow and turned its author into a figure of controversy. In Making It, Podhoretz claims that “everyone at Commentary was much impressed with the piece,” even those, like Warshow, who admired both Bellow and the novel. Bellow then orchestrated “a campaign to discredit me.” Warshow had sent Bellow a copy of the review in advance of publication, “with a dissenting and mollifying covering letter.” Bellow was unmollified. In a two-page single-spaced reply, which he copied “to a dozen or more people,” Bellow protested the charge of false spontaneity, mocked “your young Mr. P.” with his fancy Cambridge and Columbia education, and dismissed Warshow’s proffered dissent. Trilling, Bellow decided, had been behind the review. In Podhoretz’s words, Bellow suspected that “Trilling had for some dark purpose been completely insincere in his own glowing review of Augie March … then, in collusion with the editors of Commentary, he had put me up to writing a piece which represented what they all really thought about Augie but were afraid to come out and say. Not only did Bellow apparently believe this fantasy; he actually persuaded many of his friends that it was true.” There was, however, “some foundation” in Bellow’s suspicions, Podhoretz admits: “the family actually felt somewhat less enthusiastic about Augie than his famous touchiness, and their genuine desire to see one of their own make it as an important American novelist, had bullied them into pretending to feel.”49

  Although there is no evidence that Trilling himself did any conspiring, “there might have been a grain of truth,” according to James Atlas, in Bellow’s belief that he’d been targeted. In an interview with Atlas, Clement Greenberg, an editor at Commentary at the time, admitted that “we told Podhoretz not to like it,” while Podhoretz described himself to Atlas as “the designated hit man.”50 In Ex-Friends (1999), a second memoir, Podhoretz writes of having “the misfortune shortly after the piece had appeared to run into John Berryman, who was one of Bellow’s most ardent boosters. Staggering drunkenly over to me at a party in the apartment of William Phillips, he snarled: ‘We’ll get you for that review if it takes ten years.’ ” Bellow and Podhoretz were not to meet “until many years later (by which point he had still not forgiven me, and never really would).”51 Though Bellow later wrote for Podhoretz at Commentary, corresponding with him about articles and potential articles, and once shared a platform with him in Washington, D.C., at a meeting to mobilize support for Soviet Jewry (at which his whispered insults about Alfred Kazin, who was also present and whom he’d turned against, brought them closer), he never abandoned his suspicions. In a letter of August 18, 1991, to Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg’s biographer, he recalled the episode: “Norman was Lionel’s protégé and Norman had tried to do me in. He says as much in his autobiography. It did seem that Lionel was playing a double game since he had praised the very same book extravagantly. He and I had a sharp exchange about this.” In 1999, as mentioned in Chapter 3, Bellow told Philip Roth that Trilling had been “dead against” Augie; at the same time he recalls Trilling’s reaction to reading the first hundred pages: “It’s very curious, it’s very interesting, but somehow it’s wrong.” If this recollection is accurate, it may have played some part in suspicions about the sincerity of the Griffin review. Bellow was eighty-four at the time of the interview with Roth, however, and it may be that he is recalling the review itself, with its complaints about function versus fate.

  Alfred Kazin shared Bellow’s distrust of Trilling. In his memoir, New York Jew, “the barrier” between himself and Trilling is said to be the latter’s fondness for the words “scarcely,” “modulated,” and “our educated classes.” “The extent of Mr. Bellow’s success in these pages,” writes Trilling in the Griffin review, quoted by Kazin, “may be judged from the familiarity of the matter upon which he exercises his talents.” Bellow, Kazin suggests, could never get over Trilling’s “nerveless compromised accents,” a tone that owed much to a reverence for Henry James, and was shared by other Jewish literary intellectuals and professors of English in the 1950s, notably Philip Rahv and Leon Edel, James’s biographer and editor.52 That Bellow was at this time as much a rebel against what might be called the “Jamesian standard” as the “Flaubertian standard” is clear from the famous opening sentence of Augie March, with its proud patriotic declaration—about James’s great subject, “the whole American question.”53 The sentence is itself anti-Jamesian in its directness. Also anti-Jamesian is its Pep-like mix of registers: vernacular (“free-style” “go at”), biblical (“knock” is from “Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you,” Matthew 7:7). At the end of the opening paragraph, after a reference to Heraclitus, Augie tells us that “there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.” The knock is a knock: crude, hard, loud. The knock this novel is, is also jangling, jarring. The opening recalls a moment in James’s The American Scene, referred to by Bellow several times and alluded to in Chapter 9, in discussion of Bellow’s immunity to the Paris of James’s Madame de Vionnet. Returning to New York, after long absence in Europe, James is taken by friends to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a setting marked by “the hard glitter of Israel.” The Café Royal, with its many Yiddish-speaking authors and performers, is described by James as “one of the torture-rooms of the living idiom.” “Who can tell,” he asks, “in any conditions, what the genius of Israel may, or may not, be ‘up to.’ ” The quotation marks around “up to” suggest two unequally offensive meanings: “good enough for” or “equal to,” which is merely patronizing, and “conniving.”54 Leon Edel’s discussion of this passage is couched in—Kazin would say compromised by—the nerveless accents of a Trilling or a James: “His view of the Jews in the mass had always been distant; he had repeated the clichés by which their national distinctness was marked in the English novels.”55

  Augie March was published in the same year as the first volume of Edel’s five-volume biography of Henry James. As it happens, Edel was one of the judges of the 1954 National Book Award for Fiction (for novels published in 1953), along with Mary McCarthy, Arthur Mizener, Gerald Sykes, and David Dempsey. When the judges declared Augie March the winner, they also, unusually, declared their decision unanimous, a measure undertaken to counter rumors, spread by McCarthy, that Edel had argued against Bellow. These rumors Edel denied, explaining that at a first meeting of the judges McCarthy had been so convinced that the prize should go to Bellow that she declared there was no reason for them to meet again. The other judges disagreed, and as Edel puts it, “Mary construed our procedural discussion as hostility to Saul’s book.” Bellow believed McCarthy’s account, being as suspicious of Edel as of Trilling, seeing the standards of both not only as compromised but as a threat to his freedom as a novelist. When next he met Edel, he cut him (the Bellow version of turning the other cheek).56 He never cut Trilling, but many years later,
when Trilling came to Chicago to give a talk, he invited him out for a drink at a very rough bar, a location Diana Trilling describes as “a gathering place of drunks and deadbeats.… What other explanation of Bellow’s choice could there be than the wish to test Lionel’s ability to handle himself in such surroundings?”57 It is hard not to see Bellow’s behavior here as payback or punishment—for what he saw as collusion with the enemy. Bellow had to fight to become an author and thought himself in competition with those who doubted his claims. When Sam Freifeld implied, or seemed to imply, that Bellow had been presumptuous in criticizing T. S. Eliot’s play The Confidential Clerk, he replied as follows, in a letter postmarked May 23, 1954: “Do you mean that he’s a mighty Niagara and I a mere squirt? Possibly. But someone has to stand up for Jews and democrats, and when better champions are lacking, squirts must do what they can.” Bellow was not alone in this position, in being determined to fight his corner. In a journal entry of November 28, 1954, Kazin writes of opening his copy of the fortieth anniversary issue of The New Republic and discovering that the editors “hadn’t included a single piece by me or mention,” an omission that leaves him “furious with myself for not being militant enough, ‘like Saul’ say in fighting against the creepiness and conformity of the present.”58 Schwartz, too, thought of himself as embattled, but could joke about the cause, as in a letter of December 10, 1954: “It does seem as if the New-York-International style is winning out. A leading review in the London Times Lit. Supl. (of a biography of Gladstone) begins ‘What a sorry mishmash … etc.’ ” The letter ends: “Call me Mishmash.”