Lamming , George . “ A Way of Seeing . ” The Plea-
— — — . Eight Men . 1961. New York : Thunder ’ s
sures of Exile . 1960. Ann Arbor : University of
Mouth Press , 1987 .
Michigan Press , 1992 . 56 – 85 .
— — — . A Father ’ s Law . New York : HarperPeren-
Levine , Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Con-
nial , 2008 .
sciousness: Afro - American Folk Thought from Slavery
— — — . Foreword to George Padmore , Pan -
to Freedom . New York : Oxford University Press ,
Africanism or Communism . 1956 . Garden City,
1977 .
NY : Anchor , 1972. xxi – xxiv .
Locke , Alain . “ Self - Criticism: The Third Dimen-
— — — . Introduction to St. Clair Drake and
sion of Culture . ” 1950 . Rpt. in Napier , ed.,
Horace R. Clayton . Black Metropolis: A Study
African American Literary Theory , 58 – 61 .
of Negro Life in a Northern City . New York :
Margolies , Edward . “ Wright ’ s Craft: The Short
Harcourt, Brace , 1945 . xvii – xxxiv .
Stories . ” 1969 . Rpt. in Gates and Appiah, eds.,
— — — . “ Man, God Ain ’ t Like That … ” Eight
Richard Wright , 75 – 97 .
Men , 163 – 92 .
Richard
Wright
327
— — — . “ Man of All Work . ” Eight Men , 117 – 62 .
— — — . “ The Man Who Went to Chicago . ” Eight
— — — . “ The Man Who Killed a Shadow . ” Eight
Men , 210 – 50 .
Men , 193 – 209 .
— — — . Native Son . New York : Harper , 1940 .
— — — . “ The Man Who Lived Underground . ”
— — — . The Outsider . 1953 . Rpt. in Later Works ,
Eight Men , 27 – 92 .
367 – 841 .
— — — . “ The Man Who Was Almost a Man . ”
— — — . White Man, Listen! 1957 . Garden City,
Eight Men , 11 – 26 .
NY : Anchor , 1964.
21
Small Planets: The Short Fiction of
Saul Bellow
Gloria L. Cronin
Saul Bellow was one of four children born to Abraham and Lescha Bellow in Lachine,
Montreal, Canada, in 1915. The family lived in the poor Jewish community of Lachine
until he was 5 years old and, in 1924, left for the tenements of Humboldt ’ s Park,
Chicago, a Jewish immigrant neighborhood which boasted a population of about
225,000. Son of Russian Jews from St. Petersburg, the young “ Solly ” Bellow came of
age on the colorful streets of Lachine and North Side Chicago amid throngs of Jewish,
French, Polish, German, Italian, and Russian immigrants. Chicago in the 1920s was
rife with corrupt ward politicians and gangsters, and mired in Prohibition, bootleg-
ging, gambling, and street violence. It certainly did not nurture its writers within a
community of intellectuals. Like most American writers, Bellow was self
-
made,
emerging out of the same folkloric standards as did William Faulkner, Ernest Heming-
way, and Sinclair Lewis. His remoteness from the centers of culture was so profound,
he once told a friend that he would have kissed the fl oor of a caf é if there had been
one. Instead, he noted humorously, he grew up among “ greasy - spoon joints, cafeterias
and one
-
arm joints
”
(Atlas 4). As James Atlas, Bellow
’
s biographer, points out,
“ Culture in Chicago was a marginal enterprise. Dominated by the brute forces of
industry, reeking stockyards, farm machinery works and automobile assembly lines,
it was a city in Carl Sandberg ’ s famous line, of ‘ big shoulders ’ ” (5).
In Chicago, things were done for the fi rst time, which the rest of the world later
learned and imitated. Capitalist production was pioneered in the stockyards, in refrig-
erator cars, in the creation of the Pullman, in the creation of farm machinery, and
with it also certain urban political phenomena which are associated with the new
condition of modern democracy (74).
Charlie Citrine of Humboldt ’ s Gift (1975) says that, in Chicago, you could truly
“ examine the human spirit under industrialism ” (108) in all its agony and nightmare.
He, like his creator, knows he must continue to exert the equal sovereignty of the
human imagination over modern science. The small crocus growing out through the
cracks of the Chicago pavement convinces him that much of the spirit is still alive
Saul
Bellow
329
despite the urban nightmare. Such relentless mapping of the evidences of the human
spirit from within the nightmare of the twentieth century became, for Bellow, a
lifelong battle with the philosophical premises of the early modern writers.
Although Chicago was not Hemingway ’ s 1920s Paris, it was Bellow ’ s nineteenth -
century Paris. Before him were the indigenous traditions of William Dean Howells,
Theodore Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson, and behind him the European traditions
of Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, and the nine-
teenth - century American Transcendentalists. In Chicago ’ s public library he carefully
studied the social realism of Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, and Vachel Lindsay.
Later he would a study the prose style of Ernest Hemingway with what James Atlas
describes as a surgeon ’ s care. Saul Bellow ’ s fi ction emerges from these literary tradi-
tions plus the city ’ s sheer brute force and energy. The city as physical and metaphysical
backdrop to the fi ction appears almost as a character with its own horde of motley
immigrants, its smells, its massive industrial energy, its commercial crassness, and
its colorful gangsterism. Bellow ’ s Chicago is as recognizable as James Joyce ’ s Dublin,
but even more identifi able would be his uniquely Chicagoan, Jewish voice. It is this
uniquely contemporary distillation of contemporary Chicago street language, book
culture, and Yiddish family interchange with which these self - communing, home-
grown intellectuals express the spiritual essence of themselves and their place in time.
Saul Bellow emerged from a Jewish Russian immigrant community in which his
bookishness was encouraged by his doting mother Lescha (Lisa). She was descended
from a long line of Jewish rabbis and was the daughter of a prominent St. Petersburg
rabbi. Consequently, she was well read, and valued books. Lisa bequeathed to Saul
her two passionate loves, the classics of Russian literature and the sentimental “ sitcom ”
accounts of Jewish family life that appeared in the Jewish Daily Forward. Lisa hoped
her prodigy of a son would become a rabbi like his long line of grandfathers, given
his phenomenal memory and early proclivity for Hebrew, Russian, English, and
French. Bellow ’ s father, Abraham, however, had no patience with books and hoped
his sons would “ make good ” as American capitalists. While Saul ’ s brothers followed
Abraham ’ s often dishonest entrepreneurial obsessions, Saul, the sickly, nostalgic son,
inclined more to his rabbinical heritage. Throughout his diffi cult childhood, his long
ho
spitalization, and his near - death experience with tuberculosis, Lisa protected him
from his volatile, disapproving father and scoffi ng brothers. Her death when Saul was
barely 16 was a trauma from which he never recovered. Bellow ’ s fi ction is always
death - haunted and registers countless broken family relationships. Not one of the
heroes will successfully replicate the family of childhood; no son will negotiate the
repeated father
–
son impasses; no male brotherhood will succeed until
Ravelstein
(2000) ; no marriage will survive, and yet all Bellow ’ s nostalgic intellectual men will
yearn endlessly for the warm immigrant loving of the Old World Jewish family. But
despite this, Bellow ’ s fi ction is inhabited by numerous lovingly and shrewdly drawn
Hogarthian portraits of aunts, uncles, grandmothers, boarders, neighbors, in - laws,
operators, gangsters, business tycoons, gamblers, salesmen, minor criminals, bath-
house inhabitants, shrews, destructive lovers, voracious divorce lawyers, Holocaust
330
Gloria L. Cronin
survivors, and poolroom “ operators ” – all drawn by a writer with a prodigious memory
and a great gift for portraiture.
Despite Bellow ’ s permanent disorientation at the loss of his mother, he knew, even
in high school, that he belonged to the intellectual life, despite the improbabilities
of the Chicago scene. His fi rst short story, “ The Hell It Can ’ t, ” appeared in the Daily
Northwestern (February 1936), his Tuley High School student paper. Even before enter-
ing Northwestern in 1935, he had ambitiously decided to become not just a great
Chicago writer, or famous Jewish American writer, but a world - class writer. He would
follow in Hemingway ’ s footsteps by attempting to dominate the second half of the
twentieth century as Hemingway had the fi rst half.
The Early Years: 1933 – 1958
Bellow ’ s life as a writer begins and ends with short fi ction. In these early years, he
produced numerous short stories, three novellas, and a collection of short stories. In
1941, “ Two Morning Monologues ” appeared in the May/June issue of the Partisan
Review , the same issue in which one of Eliot ’ s Four Quartets , as well as contributions
by Clement Greenburg, Allan Tate, and Paul Goodman, appeared. It was an auspi-
cious beginning. Rather fi ne sketches, both pieces feature self - communing monologu-
ists. The intellectual monologuist now becomes a standard feature of Bellow ’ s fi ction.
Mandelbaum, unemployed, cerebral, and preoccupied with the phenomenological,
will become a prototype. He is a classic Jamesian noticer whose job it is to discern
the nature of things. Signifi cantly, as he wanders the streets, he tells us he has no
brothers. By this time, Bellow is thoroughly estranged from his father and brothers,
and, throughout the rest of his fi ction, whenever brothers appear, they will be rather
crass, obsessed American money - makers. All future fi ctions, with the exception of
Ravelstein
(2000)
, will lament the failure of male bonding. While the character
Mandelbaum in this story carries the pattern for all future Bellow heroes, the second
monologue contains the pattern of gritty Chicago street life that will become Bellow ’ s
recurring backdrop. Friefeld is only Bellow ’ s fi rst con artist, low - life, and fi rst - class
operator. In these fi rst two stories, Bellow is also beginning to fi nd his distinctive
Chicagoan - Yiddish voice.
“ The Mexican General ” (1942) , also published in Partisan Review , tells the story of
Trotsky
’
s assassination in Mexico, detailing the assassin
’
s attack, the scene at the
morgue, the chaotic events at the Patzcuaro Hotel, and a brilliant portrait of the self -
important, bustling general who steals the limelight at the press conferences which
follow. Citron, the lieutenant, through whose eyes the account is narrated, is a pro-
totype of future Bellow intellectuals with his academically Weberian accounts of
things. Bellow wrote the story after joining the Trotskyite socialist movement and
traveling to Mexico to meet Trotsky. To his great disappointment, he arrived the day
after the attack only to fi nd his hero dead and lying in state. Bellow ’ s philosophical
question in this story concerns historical contingency and the potency of the
Saul
Bellow
331
individual – does a man make history or does history make a man? It is a recurring
question throughout all of his subsequent fi ction. Questioning Nietzsche and Marx,
he wants to know if history is the record of public acts by great men or if some other
force, like nature, is at work.
“ Mr. Katz, Mr. Cohen, and Cosmology, ” written the same year, features two men
in a Montreal boarding house. Katz is a would - be intellectual, while Cohen is an
unimaginative tailor who thinks the world is fl at and who has never heard of the
Pacifi c Ocean. Both are prototypes for the inner dialectic between academic learning
and witty Yiddish street smarts which will characterize all of Bellow ’ s future thinkers.
Characteristically, it is the seemingly ignorant Yiddish comedian, Cohen, who
manages to best the autodidact ’ s theories with his wry Yiddish folk wit. These stories
were followed by more short fi ction: “ Dora ” (1949), “ Sermon by Dr. Pep ” (1949 ),
“ The Trip to Galena ” (1950) , “ Looking for Mr. Green ” ( 1951) , “ By the Rock Wall ”
(1951) , “ Address by Gooley McDowell to the Hasbeens Club of Chicago ” (1951) ,
“ The Gonzaga Manuscripts ” (1954) , and “ Leaving the Yellow House ” (1958) . Three
of these stories would eventually make their way into his fi rst collection, Mosby ’ s
Memoirs (1968) .
Bellow ’ s apprenticeship in short fi ction culminated during these early years with
three novellas, Dangling Man (1944) , The Victim (1947) , and Seize the Day (1956) . All
of these exemplify the form that ultimately expresses, for him, the contemporary
rather than the modern literary era. All three novellas feature the plight of the think-
ing man struggling to retain his sense of the preciousness of life, and the importance
of human feeling. Full of reverence, optimism, Yiddish humor, a Talmudic sense of
suffering, disgust with existentialist angst, and the hero ’ s general movement from
estrangement to acceptance, each of these novellas also echoes Bellow ’ s sense of the
discontinuities and fallen appearances of contemporary life. But they also register his
growing refusal to accept the “ wasteland ” mentality of modernist literature – the
philosophical protest that will shape all of his future writing.
Dangling Man (1944) contains, in miniature, the pattern of all his subsequent work.
It evidences the striking exclusion of the female voice, the staging of a male world,
and a narcissistic hero trapped within his own solipsism. Joseph is a would - be writer
and intellectual caught waiting for the Draft. A misplaced romantic, he believes that
he can make the old transcendental move to receive intellectual and spiritual enlight-
enment, a move that involves isolating himself
within the confi nes of a cheap New
York boarding house as he studies the great writers of the Romantic and Enlighten-
ment periods. As the months go by, Joseph quarrels with nearly all his friends and
relatives, lives off the earnings of his faithful wife, Eva, cruelly tries to control and
conform her to his expectations, succumbs to fi ts of paranoia and anger, engages in a
desultory affair, learns to hate the physical decay of his elderly neighbors, and is
haunted by death anxieties. Finally, he admits his intellectual experiment has been a
failure – that his perspectives have all dead - ended within the four walls of his shabby
room. Reduced to the same physical, social, and historical denominators as everyone
around him, he is last seen standing in a line of naked military recruits being prodded
332
Gloria L. Cronin
and poked by an elderly physician. His search for a special fate is temporarily sus-
pended in a common ignominy.
Dangling Man refl ects much of Bellow ’ s early life as a young, newly wed intellec-
tual. Poor, ambitious, and immersed in literature of all kinds, Bellow was isolated in
his in - laws ’ Ravenswood apartment while trying to write his fi rst novel on a card table
in the back room. The work is a lament by a young American artist who does not
know how to join the mainstream of Chicagoan or American life without losing the
spiritual value of his isolation. This novella also refl ects the preoccupation that 1940s
American intellectuals had with French existentialism. His fi rst three novellas all ask
profound questions about individual freedom, moral responsibility, death, and social
contract. Joseph expresses his spiritual ennui as an imprisoning and inadequate white-
ness during his dreams about the tantalizing space of the exotic and the spiritual that
is troped as exotically African. Bellow will continue to lace several of his books with
racial imagery from the colonial African literary archive as he explores a savage and
primitive urban modernity. Ultimately, however, it was the great European, British,
Irish, and American moderns – Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Lawrence, Eliot, and Joyce –
who directly infl uenced the form, content, and style of Bellow ’ s fi rst three novellas.
Dangling Man was immediately hailed as an important book written with style,
mastery, and sharp, cutting language, while The Victim (1947) , written in the after-
A Companion to the American Short Story Page 72