Saul Bellow

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Saul Bellow chronology

August 14, 2017 by Roy Johnson

1915. Saul Bellow born Solomon Bellows in Quebec, Canada to immigrant Jewish parents from St Petersburg, Russia.

1918. Family moves to Montreal. Bellow begins religious training and speaks French in the street and Yiddish at home.

1923. Childhood illness. His father is a bootlegger across the Canadian/USA border.

1924. Family moves to Chicago as illegal immigrants into the USA.

1928. Childhood friendship with writer Isaac Rosenfield.

1933. Reads Trotsky and Lenin. Death of his mother from breast cancer. Enrols at University of Chicago.

Saul Bellow chronology

1935. Transfers to Northwestern University, reading literature and anthropology.

1937. Appointed associate editor of the monthly journal The Beacon. Friendship with James T. Farrell. Graduates with BA in anthropology.

1938. Returns to Chicago. Marriage to Anita Goshkin. Working as college teacher in literary studies.

1940. Travels to Mexico to interview Leon Trotsky – arriving on the day of his assassination.

1941. First published story in Partisan Review. A novel accepted but not published. Meets Alfred Kazin and Delmore Schwartz in New York.

1943. Works part time writing for Encyclopedia Britannica.

1944. Dangling Man his first published novel – praised by Edmund Wilson.

1946. Associate professor of literature at the University of Minnesota.

1947. Publication of his second novel, The Victim.

1948. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Moves to live in Paris for two years. Meets European writers and intellectuals. Critical of their political naivete.

1950. Returns to USA and lives in Queens, New York City.

1952. University lectureship as assistant to Delmore Schwartz. Friendship with Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man).

1953. Publication of The Adventures of Augie March to great critical acclaim.

1955. Death of his father, Abram. Second Guggenheim fellowship. Residence in Reno, Nevada for divorce.

1956. Publication of Seize the Day. Marries Sondra Tschachasov. Teaches at Yado writers’ colony. Friendship with John Cheever. Buys house in New York with inheritance from father.

1957. Teaching at University of Minnesota and University of Chicago. Meets John Berryman and Philip Roth.

1959. Publication of Henderson the Rain King which is criticised for his abandonment of urban and Jewish themes.

1960. Founds literary magazine The Noble Savage with his friend Jack Ludwig, who is having an affair with his wife Sondra. Divorce from Sondra.

1961. Teaching at University of Puerto Rico. Marries Susan Glassman.

1962. Honorary degree from Northwestern University. Five year professorship at University of Chicago.

1964. Publication of Herzog which has great critical and commercial success. His play The Last Analysis fails on Broadway.

1966. Further theatrical failures. Separation from his wife Susan.

1968. Publication of Mosby’s Memoirs. Divorce from Susan Glassman.

1969. Publication of Mr Sammler’s Planet.

1972. Honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale Universities. Death of John Berryman.

1973. Six week residency at Rodmell, Sussex, the home of Virginia Woolf.

1974. Marries Alexandra Ionesco Tulcea, a Romanian professor of mathematics.

Saul Bellow chronology

1975. Publication of Humboldt’s Gift. Travels in Israel.

1976. Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature.

1977. Protracted legal problems over divorce settlement to Susan Glassman.

1978. Travels to Romania with Alexandra to see her dying mother. Court orders Bellow to pay $500,000 to Susan Glassman.

1982. Publication of The Dean’s December. Death of John Cheever.

1984. Publication of Him with his Foot in his Mouth, a collection of stories.

1985. Death of two brothers and Anita, his first wife.

1987. Publication of More Die of Heartbreak. Travels in Europe with Janis Freedman.

1989. Begins work on two novels, both left unfinished at his death. Publication of A Theft. Marries Janis Freedman. Publication of The Bellarosa Connection.

1990. Begins a study of Latin.

Saul Bellow chronology

1992 His friend Allan Bloom dies of AIDS.

1993. Publication of It All Adds Up, a collection of essays. Leaves University of Chicago after three decades and moves to Boston.

1994. Hospitalised after food poisoning contracted in Caribbean island of San Martin.

1997. Publication of novella, The Actual. Death of former wife Susan.

2000. Publication of Ravelstein, novel based on the life of Allan Bloom.

2005. Bellow dies at his home in Brooklyn, NYC.

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

Saul Bellow Chronology

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Saul Bellow generated a prodigious output as a writer of novels, stories, novellas, travel books, even plays – though these were largely unperformed. But in addition he wrote essays, book reviews, memoirs, lectures, and towards the end of his life he produced lengthy surveys of the culture and politics of American life at the end of the twentieth century.

He published his own selection of non-fiction in It All Adds Up (1994) which was issued whilst he was still alive. There is Simply Too Much to Think About is a collection of book reviews and occasional essays from Partisan Review, Commentary, and The New York Times Book Review. The selection also includes interviews – one of which he conducts with himself.

He takes almost as a recurrent theme the issue that illuminates all of his mature fiction – that he is the son of an eastern European immigrant who has grown up in the United States (and Canada). He feels both passionately attached and occasionally divided by the two cultural traditions these sources of his identity represent.

One the one hand his intellectual roots are in Europe and he is dismayed by what he sees as unbridled Western capitalism. On the other hand he does not wish to be held back by his family’s traditional Judaism, and he relishes the liberty and the free-wheeling culture afforded to him as a successful immigrant.

Stylistically his great strength lies in having the courage to combine fine writing with the language of the street. His mental hinterland is furnished by the Great European Classics, but he is prepared to combine their prose rhythms with the cadences and vocabulary of the inner-city tenement, the Russian bath house, and the interstate highway diner.

He’s at his best with character sketches. A Talk with the Yellow Kid is a marvellous account of the Chicago confidence trickster Joseph ‘Yellow Kid’ Weil, who is like a figure from one of Bellow’s novels. Weil is a man who made millions from rackets, scams, and Ponzi schemes, then lost it all in legitimate business investments.

There are some marvellous bon mots. He observes ‘Hemingway detested tourists – other tourists’. And of film writer Ben Hecht he says ‘He is one of the creators of Spectre of the Rose, a picture I would rather eat ground glass than see again’.

If there’s a weakness in his approach it’s a tendency to discuss large issues in rather abstract terms with lots of generalising. I found myself mentally supplying the concrete examples I wished he had mentioned as evidence to support his arguments.

His survey of ‘Recent Fiction’ (1963) throws up some interesting judgements. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is … ‘A pedestrian work, lacking in colour and passion, in dramatic vision’. And James Baldwin’s Another Country … ‘should perhaps be judged as a document and not a novel. It is hard to believe that Baldwin, with his talents, could himself take it seriously as a piece of fiction’. But for J.D. Salinger he has nothing but praise: ‘a brilliant performer, easily the best’ of modern American writers.

Being a self-confessed humanist and a writer who has enjoyed many invitations to lecture and write on the ‘modern condition’, he has a tendency to repeatedly drift into a lot of social anthropology – a subject he studied at university. And yet he is very sceptical about received opinions and philosophies – even about his former heroes Freud and Marx. However, his social anthropology is put to excellent use when explaining the lack of intellectual culture in New York City or the flight of modern writers into the universities.

And we need to take his critiques seriously, for they are built on an intimate knowledge of the basics. He was reading Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky in the 1930s, and he sees, rather perceptively I believe, that Freudianism is a form of literary criticism, an analysis or close reading of the text of someone’s life. It is certainly not a science, with objective tests, measurements, and repeatable experiments.

He writes with great feeling about the formation of his own cultural history – growing up in Chicago conscious of his Russian family heritage, his sympathies for its revolution, and his identity as a Jew in America. He became a Trotskyist, and even went to interview the revolutionary in Mexican exile, only to arrive on the day of Trotsky’s death at the hands of Stalin’s assassin.

This is an intellectually bracing collection that throws interesting light on the background to Bellow’s greatest works of fiction. It also confirms that most of his novels have distinctly biographical origins for their plots – both from his own life history and those of others.

Buy the book from Amazon UK
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Saul Bellow, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, London: Penguin/Viking, 2015, pp.532, ISBN: 0670016691

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Saul Bellow letters

August 31, 2017 by Roy Johnson

an essay-review of the collected letters

Saul Bellow left behind a sizeable body of fiction , travel writing, and essays on his departure in 2005 – but he was also a prolific correspondent. This huge selection of his letters includes examples from seven decades of his adult life. He writes to friends, fellow writers, academic colleagues, lovers, wives, and even fans.

The earliest letters date from the 1930s when he was a student and a Trotskyist. They deal with political issues arising from the world economic depression, the gathering war in Europe, splits on the Left, and then problems with his first marriage.

His spiritual and intellectual home was Chicago, where he had grown up, but he migrated to New York to pursue his literary ambitions. He earned his living as a teacher and a journalist, and had the usual difficulties getting his early work accepted. There were a couple of false starts before his first novel Dangling Man was published in 1944.

His skills as a writer come into shining prominence when he writes a long and superbly entertaining letter to his literary agent Henry Volkening. It describes several weeks of his ‘exile’ in Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship. He travels between Paris, Geneva, and Marseilles, pursued by a rapacious, opium-smoking socialite vamp, gets drunk with Scott Fitzgerald, and is thrown out of hotels – all of which turns out to be pure fantasy (Fitzgerald having died ten years previously).

The letter dates from around the time that he began writing The Adventures of Augie March, a novel that was to prove his big break-through success in 1953. This free-wheeling approach to narrative invention and verbal exuberance is precisely what established his distinctive voice as a modern novelist.

However, it’s not all fun. Some of the letters make for quite uncomfortable reading. Bellow had friendships with fellow writers which sometimes included elements of rivalry. When differences become apparent he can take a lofty, holier-than-thou tone with correspondents. His childhood friend Isaac Rosenfeld is the object of a spiteful clash over merely teaching in the same university (New York). And he was downright rude to his English publisher, John Lehmann.

If you can find nothing better to say upon reading Augie March than that you all “think very highly of me”, I don’t think I want you to publish it at all … Either you are entirely lacking in taste and judgment, or you are being terribly prudent about the advance. Well, permit me to make it clear once and for all that it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference to me whether you publish the novel or not. You have read two-thirds of it, and I refuse absolutely to send you another page. Return the manuscript to Viking if you don’t want to take the book.

On the other hand he is very loyal to many of his friends – to John Berryman, Philip Roth, Ralph Ellison, and John Cheever in particular. Even to Delmore Schwartz, his early mentor who eventually descended into paranoia and turned against him (and everyone else).

It’s amazing to note how he goes on writing, no matter what the circumstances. Whilst holed up in an isolated shack outside Reno, Nevada (waiting for his first divorce to come through) he was finishing off Seize the Day (1956) and starting work on Henderson the Rain King (1959) at the same time.

In a single year he published Henderson, underwent psycho-analysis, started a magazine (The Noble Savage), and received a huge grant ($16,000) from the Ford Foundation, which he spent on a holiday in Eastern Europe. He also started writing plays – which were not successful when staged – and his second marriage came to an end when his wife Sondra filed for divorce.

Even this cornucopia of events had its further complications. He was devastated by the split from Sondra, but she assured him that there was ‘nobody else’. The truth was that she was having an affair with his friend and co-editor, Jack Ludwig. Bellow took his own revenge for this betrayal in his next novel Herzog (1964).

This use of real lives as the material for fiction became something of a leitmotiv in his work. The letters confirm that he repeatedly used events from his own life and the experiences of others as the basis for what he wrote. It is well known that Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and Ravelstein (2000) featured characters based on his friends Delmore Schwartz and Allan Bloom. Moreover, anyone reading The Dean’s December (1982) cannot fail to conclude that the story is a fictionalised account of his own visit to Bucharest which he made with his Romanian-born third wife.

This list goes on, even into shorter works such as Him with His Foot in his Mouth (1982) which is something of an apology for an insulting remark he made to a colleague years before. Similarly, What Kind of Day Did You Have? (1984) is an account of an illicit affair between his old friend Harold Rosenberg and a woman called Joan Ullman.

Some of the people concerned who recognised the origins of these stories were outraged by Bellow’s unauthorised use of biographical details in this way. Joan Ullman didn’t take kindly to having her personal life used in this way and she published her own account of events. Bellow responded with a literary shrug of the shoulders.

Suddenly in 1966 whilst still married to Susan Glassman, he fell in love with the young and single Margaret Staatz. Not surprisingly, this episode was rapidly followed by Susan’s filing for divorce.

He was an obsessive traveller, even though he often complained of the places he visited. The letters have postmarks from Lake Como, Uganda, London, Tel Aviv, Athens, Puerto Rico, and Belgrade. He was also endlessly critical of Chicago, but regularly went back there.

It’s obvious that he found teaching a necessary evil to pay the bills, yet he continued in a variety of university lectureships even after becoming commercially successful and winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature in the same year (1976). However, his multiple marriages were an expensive form of self-indulgence. The final divorce settlement from Susan Glassman left him with a bill for $500,000, plus $200,000 legal costs. Confessing to his own extravagances he says of himself “I’ve always lived like a sort of millionaire without any money”.

There is one rather curious strand to this correspondence – his lengthy exchanges with the English academic (and solicitor) Owen Barfield on the subject of Rudolf Steiner’s ‘anthroposophy’. This was a form of quasi-mystic ‘philosophy’ dealing with the condition of the human soul – the vague and abstract ruminations on which Bellow had padded out Humboldt’s Gift.

It’s a curious part of the correspondence because it is difficult to accept that Bellow took these ideas seriously when they sit so ill-at-ease with the very practical and concrete nature of his perceptions of everyday life. In his most deeply felt writing Bellow is dealing with money and sex; politics and history; gangsters, lawyers, and real estate developers; crime, violence, and shysters of all kinds. Rudolf Steiner’s notions of ‘spiritual science’, ‘esoteric cosmology’, and ‘the second coming of Christ’ simply do not fit convincingly alongside such matters. The letters confirm Bellow’s sincere personal interest in these matters, but they are not at all persuasive when he attempts to embed them in his fiction .

In 1985 his first wife Anita and his two brothers Maurice and Sam died, then his third wife Alexandra divorced him. He faced yet more draining legal costs, but without breaking his stride and at seventy years of age, he simply married his secretary Janis Freedman, who had previously been his student. A decade and a half later at the age of eighty-four he became a father for the fourth time. His eldest son Gregory was at that time fifty-five years old.

In 1994 whilst on holiday in the Caribbean, Bellow contracted a virulent strain of food poisoning that left him unconscious in a coma and on the point of death for four weeks. Recovery was slow and left him with coronary and neurological complications. From this point onwards he felt he was living on borrowed time, and his correspondence reads like a series of medical bulletins. Nevertheless he manages to throw off some thought-provoking cultural observations:

Let me add my name to the list of Freud’s detractors. If he had been purely a scientist he wouldn’t have had nearly so many readers. It was lovers of literature (and not the best kind of those) who made his reputation. His patients were the text and his diagnoses were Lit. Crit. The gift the great nineteenth century [pests] gave us was the gift of metaphor. Marx with the metaphor of class struggle and Freud with the metaphor of the Oedipus complex. Once you had read Marx it took a private revolution to overthrow the metaphor of class warfare – for an entire decade I couldn’t see history in any other light. Freud also subjugated us with powerful metaphors and after a time we couldn’t approach relationships in anything but a Freudian light. Thank God I liberated myself before it was too late.

As the years go on his letters become lengthy apologies for not having written sooner – or not having replied at all. He turns politically towards the right, and the death of one old friend after another makes him (understandably) concerned about his own mortality. Yet he goes on being creatively productive into his eighties. Many people see his last novel Ravelstein (2000) as amongst his finest.

Of course the selection of letters tend to be chosen to show the Famous Author in the best possible light – but Benjamin Taylor’s editorship presents Bellow as cantankerous, considerate, hard-working, vain, ambitious, and engaged – so we have no grounds for complaint. We are presented with The Man in Full.

Saul Bellow Letters – Viking – Amazon US

Benjamin Taylor (ed), Saul Bellow: Letters, New York: Viking, 2010, pp.571, ISBN: 0670022217

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Something to Remember Me By

August 11, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, web links, further reading

Something to Remember Me By (1990) first appeared in Esquire magazine. It then became the title story in a collection of three novellas published in 1992. The two other stories in the collection are The Bellarosa Connection and A Theft.

Something to Remember Me By – commentary

The main theme

At a superficial level this story could easily be perceived as a comic farce. An adolescent boy is duped by an unscrupulous prostitute who steals his clothes. He is forced to return home dressed as a woman. But when the elements of the story are viewed differently, it can be seen as almost a Biblical parable of descent into shame and personal humiliation. Beneath the comic-grotesque surface there is a deadly serious purpose.

The story is set during the Depression; young Louie’s mother is dying of cancer, and Chicago is in the grip of midwinter ice and snow. He is not particularly successful at school; and he is forced to miss the Discussion Club meeting to do his after-school job as a delivery boy. He sets out on his journey in a bleak mood and hostile weather.

His assignment takes him straight to a house of mourning where he is confronted by a dead young girl in her open coffin. Then the friendly relative he hopes to meet is not in his office, but Louie is confronted instead by another female lying down, but this time completely naked. Her appearance is disturbing to Louie, but she appears to hold out some sort of sexual promise.

He is taken to a sleazy boarding house and a featureless room where his expectations are quickly shattered. She not only tricks him by reneging on her erotic signals; she steals all his clothes and money, leaving him as naked as the condition in which he found her. He is then forced to dress in women’s clothes to make his way home.

As he descends into what he calls at the outset of the story as ‘a whirlpool, a vortex’, his principal fear is the wrath of his father:

If I were to turn up in this filthy dress, the old man, breaking under his burdens, would come down on me in a blind, Old Testament rage.

The drugstore attendant takes him for a female, and Louie begins to feel that he is losing his identity. At this point he is referred to a destination even lower down the social scale – an illegal drinking den or speakeasy. The bartender points out the errors in Louie’s behaviour: “In short, you got mixed up with a whore and she gave you the works”. But the bartender is prepared to help him, by giving him a further degrading task – carrying home the habitual drunk McKern.

When Louie reaches yet another sordid boarding house, he is confronted by two further sources of humiliation in the form of two young girls – McKern’s daughters. The younger girl follows him into the bathroom and sits on the edge of the bath, watching him whilst he lifts up his dress to pee into the toilet. Then the elder girl invites him to join the meal of three pork chops he has cooked for them – which as an orthodox Jew he finds nauseating:

All that my upbringing held in horror geysered up, my throat filling with it, my guts griping.

So he has been cheated, robbed, degraded, shamed, and humiliated at a personal, social, and even a religious level. And when he finally arrives back home his father greets him with a blow to the head – which Louie receives with gratitude, because it suggests his mother has not died during the day.

The novella

This story appears in a collection whose sub-title is ‘Three Tales by Saul Bellow’. At just over 10,000 words in length it might well be considered as a long short story. Certainly there are many stories and tales of this length, and many are longer. But it has all the structural and the thematic density of a novella and has a good claim to be regarded as such.

What are the defining factors of the novella? How does it differ from the long short story or even the short novel? The critical consensus seems to be loosely based on the Aristotelian notion of the unity of elements in a single work. That is, the character, the events, their duration, the location, and the main theme or issue should be as tightly concentrated as possible.

The events of the story are concentrated on a single character – the younger Louie. The incidents take place over a single day – starting from his breakfast and ending back home in the early evening. The drama takes place in a single location – Chicago. Even the tone of the story is remarkably consistent – its atmosphere dominated by the bleak winter weather and the ice-bound streets of the city.

The central metaphors of the story are sex and death, which the elder Louie flags up at the beginning of his narrative:

In my time my parents didn’t hesitate to speak of death and the dying. What they seldom mentioned was sex. We’ve got it the other way round.

The young Louie has a girlfriend (Stephanie) whose body he fondles under her raccoon-skin coat, and he is powerfully excited by the sight of the whore’s naked body on the gynaecologist’s examination table. We are also given to understand that the prostitute has been used in some sort of sexual experiment: Louie’s brother-in-law tells him about the doctor:

“He takes people from the street, he hooks them up and pretends he’s collecting graphs. This is for kicks, the science part is horseshit.”

But the very sight of the woman’s breast only serves to remind the young Louie of his mother’s mastectomy – and she is dying of the cancer that was its cause. Moreover the very purpose of his after-school errand is to deliver flowers to a family whose young daughter has died – a daughter who he sees, lying in her coffin.

Death even hovers over the composition and purpose of the narrative itself. The elder Louie, at the age of a ‘grandfather’ and prior to his own death, is passing on the story to his only son as a supplement to a reduced inheritance:

Well, they’re all gone now, and I have made my preparations. I haven’t left a large estate, and that is why I have written this memoir, a sort of addition to your legacy.

The story acts as a very dark and negative sort of ‘coming of age’ parable, an initiation into the basic facts of life (sex and death) for young Louie. The older man has decided to pass on the episode to his own son – though given that the older Louie is now the age of a ‘grandfather’ it might come as a warning too late.

Aristotle also believed that one of the most important elements of tragic drama was that the action of the story should be continuous. That is – a unity of time and events. Louie’s experiences unfold in one continuous movement – from his home, to the other side of the city, and then back home again. There are no digressions or interruptions, no temporal shifts or extraneous elements in the action. The story forms, as one critic claims (echoing the American dramatist Eugene O’Neil) one Short Day’s Journey into Night.

The symbolic significance of these events and the successful unity of their design outweigh the brevity of the narrative to make this a powerful candidate for a remarkably short novella

Kafka

There are distinct similarities between Louie and any number of Kafka’s protagonists, and many of the issues in the story (and the themes in Bellow’s other works) explore elements of the Jewish experience.

Louie is something of the Holy Fool figure. He is well intentioned, but he keeps making matters worse for himself. He prepares an explanation for turning up to his brother-in-law’s dental surgery, then asks himself:

Why did I need to account for my innocent behaviour when it was innocent? Perhaps because I was always contemplating illicit things Because I was always being accused.

Later, carrying the drunk McKern in a fireman’s lift on his shoulders, he thinks of ‘This disgrace, you see, whilst my mother was surrendering to death’. Finally, when summarising his experiences, he reflects in similarly telling language: ‘The facts of life were having their turn. Their first effect was ridicule … [then] I could have a full hour of shame on the streetcar’.

This combination of the grotesque with self-criticism and an acute sense of embarrassment is very similar to the scenes which are abundant in Kafka’s work. Indeed they seem to reflect a particularly Jewish experience and perception of the world – and they are also present in the work of writers such as (Polish) Bruno Schultz and (Italian) Italo Svevo – real name Aron Ettore Schmitz.

Something to Remember Me By – resources

Something to Remember Me By – Penguin – Amazon UK

Something to Remember Me By – Penguin – Amazon US

A Saul Bellow bibliography

Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin – Amazon UK

Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin – Amazon US

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays & studies – Amz UK

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays & studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

Something to Remember Me By – summary

As an old man Louie is recalling an incident from his youth, offering the account to his only son as an ‘addition’ to a meagre legacy.

He remembers being a seventeen year old boy, going to school on a freezing day in a Chicago winter when his mother is dying. He is an indifferent scholar, but an avid reader. After school he has a part-time job making deliveries for a local florist.

He travels across town with a bunch of lilies for what turns out to be the funeral of a young girl, who he sees lying in her coffin. Afterwards he calls at the practice of his brother-in-law Philip, a dentist.

Philip is not there, but next door in the office of a gynaecologist he encounters a naked woman on an examination table. He is excited by the incident, especially when she then invites him back to her apartment.

In a sleazy boarding house she asks him to take off his clothes and get into bed. But then she throws his clothes out of the window to an accomplice in the alley and runs off, leaving Louie naked.

He finds a woman’s dress and a bed jacket in the wardrobe, puts them on, and goes to the local drugstore in search of Philip. The druggist treats him sardonically and recommends a nearby illegal bar.

At the speakeasy its bartender correctly guesses that Louie’s problems arise from his naive lack of experience. He predicts there will be trouble when he gets back to his family. But he offers him clothes from a rubbish pile in exchange for taking home a regular customer who is drunk.

At another run-down rooming-house, Louie is met by the man’s two young children. One girl follows him into the lavatory, then her sister asks him to cook their meal – which turns out to be pork chops.

Louie is late getting home, feels guilty and anxious about his mother, and is in fear of his father. He tries to regain the house undetected, but his father appears and immediately begins to beat him. Louie is relieved, because this suggests his mother is still alive.

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The Adventures of Augie March

August 8, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading

The Adventures of Augie March (1954) was Saul Bellow’s third novel. It was widely regarded as his ‘breakthrough’ work, in that it was not only different from his first two books but was a refreshingly new ‘voice’ in American fiction. That voice was a combination of urban vernacular speech with the sophisticated language of European literary and intellectual discourse. These elements were wrapped up in a freewheeling story that captures the modern city in all its vitality and the existential choices that faced man after the second world war.

The Adventures of Augie March – commentary

The picaresque novel

The Adventures of Augie March can be seen as a modern form of the picaresque novel. The picaro was a rogue or rascal who featured as the hero in many examples of post-Renaissance literature. He was usually of lower-class origins: his fortunes varied rapidly from success to failure and disaster; he skirted the edges of criminality; his adventures usually involved travel; and he recounted his own history in a language which was plain and realistic.

Typical examples of novels in this genre include Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605), Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull (1954).

Picaresque novels rarely have any tightly organised plot. They are constructed from loosely related episodes as the hero encounters a succession of secondary characters who draw him into a series of temptations. These may lead variously to danger, opportunistic self-indulgence, brief periods of triumph, or impoverishment.

Augie’s story certainly fits the stereotype, and he is at pains to stress his very humble origins. His father has deserted the family, his mother is virtually an invalid, and the household is run by an elderly matriarch they call ‘Grandmother’ but who is not actually related to them and seems to have been placed with the family by social workers.

Augie’s younger brother Georgie is mentally retarded, and both poverty and hand-me-down clothes dominate the early chapters of the story. Bellow is quite frank about the real-life origins of his novel:

I remebered a pal of mine whose surname was August – a handsome, breezy, freewheeling kid … His father had deserted the family, his mother was, even to a nine-year-old kid, visibly abnormal, he had a strong and handsome older brother. There was a younger child who was retarded – and they had a granny who ran the show … I decided to describe their lives.

Augie is pulled between his poor origins and the chances for enrichment and social improvement that are placed by chance before him. He comes from the lower echelons of society and keeps being pulled back towards the gutter. However, it is noticeable that no matter how glamorous or tempting the offers of social ease and material prosperity might be, it is his roots in lower-class Jewish Chicago life that keep drawing him back and providing him with a sort of moral and spiritual stability.

It is in this sense that the novel was also a ‘breakthrough’ for Saul Bellow – because in writing it he mapped out elements of fiction and social concern which he was to develop for the rest of his writing life. His principal theme in all the novels and stories produced in the next four and a half decades was that of the Jew in America. His protagonists are immigrants, urban, with a past in Europe and a future they must devise for themselves.

Literary style

Saul Bellow is renowned for his novels which have fast-talking first person narrators. They are stories told by fictional characters who deliver the events of the narrative, an amusing commentary on contemporary society, and quasi-philosophic reflections – all at the same time. He also employs a style of narration which is a fascinating admixture of street language, colloquial expressions, slang, and the vocabulary of intellectual and even philosophic discourse.

What’s more, this narrative voice was consciously developed, and is a reflection of Bellow’s desire to fuse Eurocentric culture absorbed via his higher education with the American demotic in which he had been raised as the son of first-generation immigrants. He describes the exhilaration he felt at inventing a narrative voice that was distinct and new.

What I found was the relief of turning away from mandarin English and putting my own accents into the language My earlier books had been straight and respectable. As if I had to satisfy the demands of H. W. Fowler. But in Augie March I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence. Something like a fusion of colloquialism and elegance … Street language combined with a high style.

The genesis of the novel

In 1948 Saul Bellow was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to spend time writing in Paris. He took with him the manuscript of a third novel on which he was working. Progress did not go well, so he abandoned the novel and

began writing about an ordinary family he had known years before, mixing with it elements from his own life history:

It poured out of me. I was writing many hours every day. In the next two years I seldom looked into Fowler’s Modern English Usage … It was enormously exhilarating to take liberties with the language … For the first time I felt that the language was mine to do with as I wished.

Like many other writers he created an indelible picture of his home town (Chicago) whilst living abroad – just as Joyce created a memorable literary version of Dublin whilst living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. Bellow also mined a rich seam of themes, topics, and incidents that would be expanded into a whole sequence of stories, novellas, and novels that followed The Adventures of Augie March.

He celebrates the sheer heterogeneous nature of Chicago urban life, and does so with a prose style that reflects its overwhelming vitality. Early in the novel Augie befriends fellow street urchin Jimmy Klein and they discover the excitement of city life:

After this it wasn’t hard for Jimmy to induce me to go downtown with him … to ride, if there was nothing better to do, in the City Hall elevator … In the cage we rose and dropped, rubbing elbows with bigshots and operators, commissioners, grabbers, heelers, tipsters, hoodlums, wolves, fixers, plaintiffs, flatfeet, men in Western hats and women in lizard shoes and fur coats, hothouse and arctic drafts mixed up, brute things and airs of sex, evidence of heavy feeding and systematic shaving, of calculations, grief, not-caring, and hopes of tremendous millions in concrete to be poured or whole Mississippis of bootleg whisky and beer.

The Adventures of Augie March – study materials

The Adventures of Augie March – Amazon UK

The Adventures of Augie March – Amazon US

The Adventures of Augie March – Classic Notes

The Adventures of Augie March – Study Guide

Saul Bellow – Essays – Amazon UK

Saul Bellow – Letters – Amazon UK

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

The Adventures of Augie March – plot summary

I. Augie recalls the poverty of his Chicago childhood. He is raised largely by his matriarchal grandmother. His father has deserted the family, leaving his mother with three sons. His elder brother Simon is very studious, and his younger brother Georgie is mentally retarded.

II. As a young boy Augie delivers newspapers and advertising bills. His aunt Anna wants him to marry her daughter. Her brother, Five Properties, is in search of a wife.

III. Augie’s family are ambitious for him, and are exasperated by his youthful misbehaviour. He works in Woolworth’s basement with his brother. Simon finds him a better job, but he is sacked for incompetence. He plays truant from school and goes to vaudeville shows.

IV. Augie and his friend Jimmy Klein are caught pilfering during their Xmas vacation jobs at a department store. He has a teenage crush on Hilda Novison, an unattractive girl. Georgie is put into a care home, and Grandma Lausch loses her authority in the family.

V. Augie is employed to look after William Einhorn, a crippled grandee in a family real estate business. Although he suffers from paralysis, Einhorn lusts after women and engages in slightly dubious commerce.

VI. Augie still has no real purpose in life. Dingbat manages an amateur heavyweight boxer. The grandmother is transferred to a care home. The commissioner fades away and dies. After the funeral Augie helps Einhorn take stock of his debtors.

VII. The great depression of the late 1920s arrives, and the Einhorn empire collapses. Augie gets a job as a soda jerk and sees his brother Simon become more socially sophisticated. Augie takes part in a petty robbery organised by a poolroom friend. Einhorn reproaches him, but on Augie’s graduation night he takes him out to a whorehouse as a celebratory treat.

VIII. Augie gets a job selling shoes in a department store, then progresses to work in Mr Renling’s luxury sporting goods shop. He escorts Mrs Renling to a holiday resort and falls in love with an attractive fellow guest. The girl rejects him, but he is pursued by her sister, Thea Fenchel.

IX. The Renlings want to adopt Augie, but he rejects their offer and takes a job selling paint. When that fails, he joins a childhood friend smuggling illegal immigrants from Canada. He discovers their car is stolen, and they separate. Augie is reduced to hitch hiking and ends up in jail.

X. On return to Chicago he finds the Grandmother has died, and his mother has been taken in by neighbours. His brother has sold the household furniture, borrowed money from Einhorn, and lost it in a betting syndicate. He has also lost his fiancée to Five Properties. Augie gets a job washing dogs. His Mexican student friend teaches him the art of shoplifting – but Augie reads the books he steals. His brother Simon shows up and announces his semi-arranged marriage.

XI. Augie works as a caretaker’s assistant in a student house and befriends Mimi Villars, a waitress with strong opinions. Simon introduces Augie to his new rich wife-to-be Charlotte Magnus and her all-embracing family. Simon gains money but loses personal integrity.

XII. Simon marries the rich Charlotte and wants Augie to profit from contact with this wealthy family. Augie takes up with Lucy Magnus but does not have marriage in mind. Simon puts more pressure on Augie in his work at the coal yard. Augie’s friend Mimi becomes pregnant by her married and absent lover. Augie helps her to secure an abotion, but he is spotted by a friend of the Magnus family. The family break off his relationship with their daughter Lucy. Augie spends New Year’s Eve in hospital, where Mimi is haemorrhaging.

XIII. Augie gets a job as a trade union organiser and he takes up with a Greek girl. But suddenly Thea Fenchel arrives in pursuit of him. He is sent to deal with an inter-union dispute and is beaten up.

XIV. He escapes, goes to Thea, then stays with her, giving himself up to a sudden passion. She is married, no longer rich, and is en route to Mexico to seek a divorce. She also has eccentric plans to hunt lizards with a trained eagle. His friends warn him against the plan.

XV. They drive to Mexico, recognising that they might have different goals in life. Thea purchases a wild eagle and they begin the laborious and painful process of trying to train it. In Mexico City, Thea has divorce proceedings with a lawyer.

XVI. They travel on to Thea’s old family home. Augie is humane and sentimental about the eagle, whereas Thea wants it to be a savage killer. They socialise with cosmopolitan residents in the town. When they take the eagle to hunt Thea is angry that it will not attack an iguana.

XVII. Augie has a riding accident. His horse is killed and he is badly injured. Thea sells the eagle then starts collecting snakes. She and Augie begin to drift apart, and he takes up gambling. Eventually, they decide to move on.

XVIII. There is a party the night before departure. Augie gets drawn into helping a woman escape her husband who is wanted by the US government. They spend a night together in the mountains. Next day on return he has a heated argument with Thea who is jealous. She breaks with him and leaves for Chilpanzingo.

XIX. Augie goes into an emotional collapse for several days, then convinces himself that he can repair the damage and make a success of a renewed relationship with Thea. He learns that she has gone to Chilpanzingo with Talavera, a former lover. Fuelled by hatred and revenge in mind, he tracks her down and asks for a second chance, but she refuses him.

XX. Augies goes back to Mexico City and is sheltered by a Yugoslav Bolshevik. He is asked to be a bodyguard for the exiled Leon Trotsky, who wants to evade Stalin’s GPU – but the scheme is called off.

XXI. After two years away, Augie returns to Chicago, calling to see his brother Georgie and his mother, who are both in care homes. His brother Simon has become a rich and successful businessman, but is loud and vulgar. Augie works as a research assistant for the eccentric millionaire Robey who wants to write a book about the history of happiness.

XXII. Time passes. Augie becomes a trainee teacher and takes up again with Sophie Geratis, who is now married. He has a quasi-Utopian dream to establish a model school for orphans. War breaks out, but he fails his medical examination. His brother Simon has an attractive mistress Renee. Simon’s wife Charlotte discovers the deception, and Renee becomes pregnant.

XXIII. Augie enlists in the merchant navy. He spends his first weekend leave with Stella Chesney whom he met in Mexico. On the strength of this he thinks he has fallen in love, and the following weekend he asks her to marry him.

XXIV. A week before the wedding, lawyer Mintouchian regales Augie withe stories of adultery, deceit, and lying. One tale of a stolen necklace is about his own lover, Agnes Kuttner.

XXV. On his first naval posting Augie becomes an unofficial confidante to the rest of the crew. His ship is sunk by a submarine. He drifts in a lifeboat with Basteshaw, a carpenter-philosopher who claims he has reproduced life in cell forms. He has deranged and paranoid plans, and overpowers Augie, putting their lives at risk. Eventually they are picked up by a British ship and taken to recover in an Italian hospital.

XXVI. After the war Augie and Stella go to live in Paris where she works in an international film unit. He becomes a travelling salesman, doing illegal deals for Mantouchian. He discovers that Stella had a rich former lover with whom she still has complex and legally dubious dealings.

The Adventures of Augie March – characters

Augie March	the narrator, a poor boy from Chicago
Georgie March	his younger brother who is retarded
Simon March	his elder brother who is studious and becomes rich
Grandma Lausch	a Jewish matriarch
Rebecca March	Augie’s mother, who goes blind
Anna Coblin	Rebecca’s cousin
Hyman Coblin	her generous husband
‘Five Properties’	Anna’s brother
The Commissioner	head of a property company
William Einhorn	his son, who has polio
‘Dingbat’	Einhorn’s half-brother
Arthur Einhorn	William’s son, a university student
Mr Renling	owner of a luxury sporting goods store
Mrs Renling	his wife, who acts as a mother to Augie
Padilla	a poor Mexican student, maths wizard, and book thief
Mimi Villars	a waitress with strong opinions
Charlotte Magnus	Simon’s wife, from a rich family
Sophie Geratis	a Greek chambermaid
Stella Chesney	a would-be actress, later Augie’s wife
Agnes Kuttner	Stella’s rich friend
Mintouchian	a rich Armenian lawyer

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The Bellarosa Connection

April 4, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Bellarosa Connection (1989) is a novella in which Saul Bellow examines three aspects of what he calls ‘Jewish history’ – and to which might be added the epithet ‘Jewish immigrant history’. It’s also the first major piece of his fiction in which he addresses the issue of the Holocaust. As he said of this topic in an interview, commenting on the absence of these topics in his earlier work:

Somehow I managed to miss the significance of some very great events. I didn’t take hold of them as I now see I might have done. Not until The Bellarosa Connection. So I have lived long enough to satisfy a few neglected demands.

In this novel (or novella) he looks at the plight of the Jews in Europe who in the twentieth century have been persecuted first by the Russians (and others) and then by the Germans. Many of them emigrated to America, where he examines two generations. The first was glad to escape persecution and worked hard to establish a new life. The second generation grew up as naturalised Americans, but they had a family background, a cultural tradition, and a ‘history’. They could either ignore this and become ‘Americanised’ or take on the burden of their social inheritance.

The Bellarosa Connection – critical comment

Literature and history

Whilst the characters in the novel are fictional constructs, Billy Rose was a real-life historical person. He was a famous theatrical impresario and a showman who amassed a huge personal fortune and founded a sculpture garden in Jerusalem. He also wrote the lyrics to popular songs such as Me and My Shadow and It’s Only a Paper Moon. However, suspicions exist that he paid ghost writers to do most of the work – a rumour that Bellow incorporates into the novella.

The rescue operation bearing his name is a fictional transposition of the fact that Billy Rose did become involved in organising fund-raising events in America for the aid of European Jews. Thus Saul Bellow is mingling fact and fiction here – in a way which became quite fashionable in post second world war American fiction.

The reader is being asked to ‘suspend disbelief’ – that is, to simultaneously accept information from a historical and an invented source. Questions arise such as “Did this really happen?” and “Is this really true?” and such doubts must be dealt with as a matter of aesthetic judgement by the reader. We ask ourselves – Are these events plausible? Do they make sense? Is the author pushing invention too far here?

We are being invited to accept the simultaneous existence of Billy Rose, a real-life historical figure whose biographical details can be looked up in Wikipedia, and the Fonsteins who are fictional constructs (even if they were based on people who Bellow knew personally).

The narrator

The reader’s dilemma in making these judgements is perhaps made easier by the sheer drive and panache of Bellow’s first person narrator. In most of his novels from Augie March onward he employs narrators who are clear substitutes for Bellow himself as a sophisticated intellectual with an enormous grasp of cultural history. He develops narrators who are witty, well-informed, and very entertaining. The result is that as readers we tend to believe what they are saying, even though we know they are fictional constructs.

He also employs a style of narration which is a fascinating admixture of street language, colloquial expressions, slang, and the vocabulary of intellectual and even philosophic discourse.

I was at the bar of parental judgement again, charged with American puerility. When would I shape up, at last! At the age of thirty-two, I still behaved like a twelve-year-old, hanging out in Greenwich Village, immature, drifting, a layabout, shacking up with Bennington girls, a foolish intellectual gossip, nothing in his head but froth—the founder, said my father with comic bewilderment, of the Mnemosyne Institute, about as profitable as it was pronounceable

What I found was the relief of turning away from mandarin English and putting my own accents into the language My earlier books had been straight and respectable. As if I had to satisfy the demands of H. W. Fowler. But in Augie March I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence. Something like a fusion of colloquialism and elegance … Street language combined with a high style.

Americanisation

Bellow sees the question of Jewish history in three phases. First is the flight of parents from anti-Semitism and poverty in Europe. Second is immigration and establishing an economic foothold in America. The third phase for their children is a choice between their Jewish heritage or assimilating as Americans. As his narrator makes quite clear:

“But if you want my basic view, here it is: The Jews could survive everything that Europe threw at them. I mean the lucky remnant. But now comes the next test—America. Can they hold their ground, or will the U.S.A. be too much for them?”

Immigration and race

In connection with the issue of race and American society,
as has been argued in a similar analysis of his late novel Ravelstein, it is slightly surprising that at no time does Bellow consider the subject of African-Americans who were also ‘immigrants’. They however were imported against their will into a protestant God-fearing society which then exploited and persecuted them.

Bellow is not obliged to cover every racial issue in the flux of American life, but the close parallels between European Jewish immigrants (fleeing from persecution) and Africans (imprisoned in a slave culture) did not seem to occur to him as a fruitful point of comparison. Bellow is very conscious of modern history, but the fact is that the Africans were made forcible ‘immigrants’ to American society from the sixteenth century onwards, whereas the Jewish diaspora affected America largely from the late nineteenth century.

The Bellarosa Connection – study resources

The Bellarosa Connection – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Bellarosa Connection – Penguin – Amazon US

The Bellarosa Connection – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Bellarosa Connection – Library of America – Amazon US

Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

The Bellarosa Connection – plot summary

A successful and un-named academic specialises in memory studies. He wishes to record a history of emotions and states of being, conscious of his poor Jewish immigrant background. He recalls the story of his relative Harry Fonstein who escapes Hitler and flees to Italy where he works as a waiter in Rome.

Fonstein is arrested at a fascist reception and jailed, but then his escape is arranged by a clandestine operation organised by Billy Rose (‘Bellarosa’). Rose is a flamboyant theatrical impresario and newspaper gossip columnist who collects fine art and has made a fortune from show business. He keeps his rescue operation secret and will not even meet the people he saves. The narrator assumes that the Mafia are also involved in his operations.

Fonstein escapes to America where he is detained on Ellis Island. From there he is exported to Cuba, and forbidden to mention Billy Rose. In Cuba he works as an assistant and educates himself through part-time study.

A marriage is arranged with an overweight woman from America, which gives him naturalisation papers. He moves to New Jersey where he becomes successful running a plumbing supplies business. When he tries to thank Billy Rose for saving his life, all his overtures are rejected..

The narrator discusses ‘Jewish history’ with Fonstein’s obese wife Sorella, but finds the Nazi horrors ‘burdensome’. He then meets the Fonsteins on holiday in Israel, where Billy Rose is staying at the same hotel. Sorella reveals that Rose’s assistant kept a secret journal and papers documenting all Rose’s personal foibles and shady business deals. The narrator declines the offer of seeing the documents.

Sorella arranges a meeting with Billy Rose and uses the documents as blackmail in an attempt to persuade Rose to give her husband a brief audience. Rose vigorously defends his reputation and refuses her request. She throws the documents at him – but they go out of the window..

Some years later the narrator is asked for Fonstein’s contact details by a Rabbi who is seeking help for an insane man who claims to be a relative of Fonstein. The narrator makes phone calls to people who might know – and gets short shift from them.

When he finally locates the address, a young man is house-sitting. He reveals that the Fonsteins were killed in a motor accident six months earlier. They were on their way to their mathematically gifted son who had taken up gambling and was in trouble.

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The Dean’s December

April 24, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Dean’s December (1982) was Saul Bellow’s first novel after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. Like many of his other works it has a strongly autobiographical basis. Between 1975 and 1985 Bellow was married to Alexander Ionescu Tulcea, a mathematician from Bucharest in Romania. Both of her parents were distinguished academics – as are those of Minna, the fictional wife in the novel.

The events of the narrative move back and forth between Bucharest and Chicago – two cities about which Bellow draws a number of subtle parallels. The totalitarian oppression of the ultra-Stalinist state in Romania results in corruption and inefficiency of one kind. The wild anarchy of free-market capitalism in the USA results in desperation and horrors of a different order. Bellow’s protagonist Albert Corde attempts to find an accommodation with both systems whilst struggling to retain his humanitarian system of values.

The Dean’s December – critical comment

Historical background

In the period covered by the events of the novel, Romania was in the ‘sphere of influence’ of the Soviet Union, and was ruled by the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The country was a police state, with extensive corruption, spying on its own citizens by the secret police (the ‘Securitate’) and a ‘cult of personality’ around the dictator and his wife. The country was depleted by food shortages, and both press and broadcasting media were state controlled. It was reputed to be the most totalitarian all the Eastern Block countries.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ceausescu was eventually overthrown in 1989. He and his wife escaped by helicopter but were captured fleeing the country. They were tried, found guilty of embezzlement of state funds and genocide, then executed on Christmas Day in 1989.

Chicago at the same time was governed by what is called ‘machine politics’. That is, political power and decision-making was controlled by a small elite who relied on a corrupt system of patronage, bribes, and collusion between political appointees, the police, trades unions, and gangsters. The city had a very high rate of violent crime, extensively related to the control of drugs amongst rival gangs.

The city was governed for twenty-one years by mayor Richard J. Daley. Many of the members of his administration were charged and convicted of corruption. He was notorious for his manipulation of the democratic process, and is remembered for the cynical piece of political wisdom: “Vote early—and often”.

Narrative style

Saul Bellow is renowned for his novels which have fast-talking first person narrators. They are fictional characters who deliver the events of the story, an amusing commentary on contemporary society, and quasi-philosophic reflections – all at the same time.

Technically. The Dean’s December has an outer third person omniscient narrator – who introduces Albert Corde as a character. But the truth is that the majority of the novel is taken up with Corde’s thoughts, his observations, and his first-person reflections on life in Bucharest and Chicago.

Bellow moves very skilfully from third to first-person narrative mode and back again. The following extract starts in third person omniscient narrative mode. It then moves into interior monologue, and switches to Corde’s point of view. It then goes back to an objective account of Corde’s thoughts – including comments on his own reflections – and ends in a first person narrative mode.

She gave him a fully open look. But he didn’t have the confidence he had once had in these open looks. It wasn’t that he distrusted Vlada, but people were never as sincere as they revved themselves up to be. They couldn’t guarantee that their purposes were fixed and constant. Yes, constancy. Love is not love which alters where it alteration finds. What did love have to do with it? She only wanted to show that he could really trust her. And what he thought was, I’m pale, I look unwell, I look rotten, I’m skittish and jumpy—I’m all over the place (quoting Shakespeare out of context). She wants to be nice to me. I had an especially blasting morning. It’s still with me. All right, I trust you, Vlada, but you want to get me to take on this job. Probably she’s somewhat surprised that I don’t jump at the chance.

The Dean’s dilemma

The novel can be seen as a series of discussions that Albert Corde conducts with the other characters in the novel – including an ongoing debate with himself, He finds himself at odds with the other figures in the narrative – even those who are close to him and with whom he shares what he thinks of as ‘core values’.

He is devoted to his new younger wife Minna, but she is a scientist, an astro-physicist dealing with issues he does not understand. He deals in literature and the humanities, and although she respects his standing as an academic and journalist, their intellectual worlds are foreign to each other.

He is very sympathetic to his sister Elfride, but her wayward son Mason puts a barrier between them. Mason represents a part of contemporary society that is very much at odds with Corde and all he stands for. Mason is the spoiled child of rich parents who has decided to be contrarian. He identifies with the black ghettos (whilst robbing his own mother) and challenges Corde’s defence of a young white woman whose husband has been murdered.

Mason claims that Corde is out of touch with Chicago reality – and so does the boy’s father, the tough lawyer Zaehner who accuses Corde of taking the soft option of a tenured academic professorship – comparing him with ‘an unmarried mother on welfare with ten kids’.

The implication is that Corde, for all his protestations of concern, is hiding in a privileged sector of society whilst others face up to the problems of modern capitalistic democracy and some of the horrors it creates. There is a certain amount of truth in this claim – which is partly why Corde renounces his professorship at the end of the novel and decides to help the scientist Beech with his work on environmentalism.

Corde is also not without a sense of self-criticism. He worries about his articles in Harper’s which have exposed unpleasant details about life in modern Chicago. Everybody is telling him that he has gone ‘too far’ and exposed too much unpleasantness. This criticism is brought to its most subtle and exquisite pitch in the character of Alec Witt, the college Provost. Witt appears to be sympathetic to Corde with his brilliant wife and a mother-in-law who is dying, yet he wraps all his supportive conversation in an invisible film of veiled threats.

It is quite clear that the novel is inviting us to accept Corde’s traditional, humanistic, and sceptical set of values. It contrasts those with the attitudes of time-serving bureaucrats – in both eastern Europe, where the difference is almost grotesque, and the West, where the differences are more nuanced.

It is worth noting that Corde is sympathetic to the socialist values of his relatives in Bucharest – even showing a degree of understanding to those who have been forced to become police informers in order to survive. He also appreciates the sacrifices and deprivations suffered by those who have been former Party members but kept their old allegiances and beliefs alive. He reflects on the elderly figure of Gigi, who is facing the death of her sister

She was studying her death, that was for sure. Corde thought of her with extraordinary respect. Her personal humanity came from the old sources. Corde had become better informed about these sources in Paris and London.

Those ‘old sources’ are the heart of what the novel wishes to promote – and they are the moral and social values based upon the canon of western philosophy and literature. This was something Bellow defended in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and the reason why he is regarded by some as holding conservative political values and by others as a defender of liberalism.

The essence of our real condition, the complexity, the confusion, the pain of it, is shown to us in glimpses, in what Proust and Tolstoy thought of as ‘true impressions’. This essence reveals and then conceals itself. When it goes away it leaves us again in doubt. But our connection remains with the depths from which these glimpses come.

The Dean’s December – study resources

The Dean’s December – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Dean’s December – Penguin – Amazon US

The Dean’s December – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Dean’s December – Library of America – Amazon US

Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

The Dean’s December – chapter summaries

i. Albert Corde is an American college dean and a professor of journalism. He and his Romanian wife Minna are in Bucharest, visiting her mother Valeria who is in hospital following a heart attack. They are confronted by bureaucratic intransigence, and the city is in the grip of shortages and the secret police.

Corde recalls his appreciative relationship with his mother-in-law, who has been a distinguished doctor. She has read his articles on Chicago, and he has escorted her on holidays in London, where he has sensed that she is getting too old for such trips.

ii. Corde and Minna devise strategies to circumvent the punitive rules denying them access to her mother. They think of employing a corrupt brain surgeon who was once her father’s student. They also hope for support from friends in Chicago.

iii. The previous summer Corde was called to identify a dead white student who was involved in an inter-racial murder. Corde raises a reward for information, and black suspects are arrested. His student nephew Mason accuses him of prejudice and misunderstanding. Corde tries to consider the evidence from the boy’s point of view, but fails. Corde is writing about Chicago, but Mason claims he doesn’t really understand the unpleasant truths of modern society.

iv. Corde is well looked after by Gigi, but they battle against rationing, shortages, and primitive social conditions. He is invited to the US embassy where he asks the ambassador for help in gaining access to Valeria. The. Ambassador reveals that a childhood friend and rival of Corde’s is in Bucharest on a journalistic assignment.

Receiving news from home, Corde recalls his last meeting with his sister. She seeks to defend her son Mason who has threatened trial witnesses and gone on the run. Corde also reflects on his cousin Max , a crooked lawyer who has cheated him out of a lot of money.

v. The hospital will allow only one further visit, for which bribes will be needed. Corde meets his old college friend Dewey Spangler who is now a well-connected reporter They reminisce about Chicago and Corde reflects on his own ethical values which have been formed by traditional literary culture.

vi. Corde and Minna bribe their way into a hospital visit where Valeria is clearly dying. Corde reflects on how his westernised values and behaviour must seem to his socialist relatives.

vii. Corde reads through the scientific proposal from geologist Beech. It is an environmental warning about lead poisoning. Corde’s secretary Miss Parsons sends a bundle of mail that rakes up all the problems back in Chicago. His defence of former county jail governor Rufus Redpath is held against him.

viii. Corde reviews some of the horrible crimes and court scenes he has reported in his articles. He also reads his own gruesome account of patients on kidney dialysis machines in the county hospital.

ix. Valeria dies in the hospital Corde and Minna are caught up in the bureaucratic procedures for the funeral. A telephone call from the college provost pretends to be supportive, but is full of veiled threats Corde recalls visiting a poor neighbourhood community centre run by two former drug addicts.

x. Corde re-reads his interview with a public defence lawyer in a particularly savage case of rape and murder. They discuss the philosophic basis of a criminal underclass in society and what can be done about it.

xi. Corde, Minna, and friends attend Valeria’s funeral. Many of her old comrades turn out to pay their respects, despite the Party’s disapproval.

xii. Corde and his friend Vlada discuss the Beech proposal on environmentalism. She tries to persuade him to collaborate: he remains sceptical and explains his reservations. This leads to global philosophies and her news that Corde’s sister is marrying judge Sorokin.

xiii. Corde and Spangler reminisce about their Chicago boyhood together. Spangler has been impressed by Corde’s articles, but he criticises him for hiding away as a tenured professor. He also reveals that he has medical problems and is using a colostomy bag.

xiv. The family are assembling heirlooms to smuggle out of the country. Minna is angry about her mother’s death. Conflicts of opinion arise with Corde, despite his wish to protect her. He reflects on differences between his own ideology and that of the business-based world of Chicago commerce.

xv. Minna becomes ill. Corde attends the interment of Valeria’s ashes at the cemetery. He discusses American and eastern European values with Vlada. The Chicago trial has found the defendant Lucas Ebry guilty.

xvi. Back in Chicago Minna goes into hospital. Corde hides away from the urban squalor and violence he has written about and which still surrounds him.

xvii. When Minna recovers they attend a swanky party given in honour of a dog’s birthday. It is revealed that his friend Dewey Spangler has written an embarrassing article about Corde.

xviii. Spangler’s article is a friendly stab in the back. He has used material Corde gave him during their conversations but has put it into a very negative context.

xix. Corde and Minna travel to Mount Palomar where she is doing research. He has been reproached by the college Provost and has resigned from the college. He decides to help Beech with his environmental work.

The Dean’s December – principal characters

Albert Corde	an American college dean and professor of journalism
Minna	his wife, a Romanian astro-physicist
Valeria	Minna’s dying mother,
Tanti Gigi	Valeria’s sister
Elfrida Zaehner	Corde’s sister
Mason Zaehner	Elfrida’s wayward son, a student
Dewey Spangler	Corde’s childhood friend, a rival journalist
Alec Witt	Corde’s college provost
Vlada Voynich	a Chicago scientist
Fay Porson	Corde’s secretary, a cougar

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What Kind of Day Did You Have?

August 2, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, web links, and further reading

What Kind of Day Did You Have? (1984) is one of five pieces in the collection Him with his Foot in his Mouth. It first appeared in slightly different form in Vanity Fair. The story is a fictional account of a single day in the lives of two real people Saul Bellow knew well. It reveals the personal tensions and the dramatic situations that arise during a clandestine love affair, set against the backdrop of a midwinter journey by plane between New York State and Chicago.

The four other stories in the collection are Him with his Foot in his Mouth, A Silver Dish, Cousins, and Zetland: By A Character Witness.

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – commentary

Fiction and biography

Saul Bellow often uses real historical figures as the models for his fictional characters. His friend and mentor Delmore Schwartz was the original for the protagonist of his early success Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and his colleague the philosopher Allan Bloom was the inspiration for his last novel Ravelstein (2000). The character Victor Wulpy in What Kind of Day Did You Have? is based on Harold Rosenberg, someone whom Bellow knew from his early days associated with left-wing magazines such as Partisan Review. Rosenberg was a writer, a social philosopher, and art critic for the New Yorker magazine.

These characters are often eccentric, larger-than-life, and an entertaining mixture of talent and gaucheness. Bellow pulls no punches in depicting both their strengths and weaknesses in unsparing detail. They all tend to be great talkers, and the narratives in which they feature are packed with their racy, egotistical monologues.

This blending of historical ‘fact’ and fiction raises a number of problems for literary interpretation and judgement. Readers will have an understandable inclination to believe that the portraits and episodes in the fiction are accurate, true, and based on ‘real events’. Yet the author is under no obligation to make them so. A novel or a story declares itself from the outset to be a fabrication, and there is nothing to prevent authors from blending fiction and historical ‘fact’ in any way they choose.

We know from external evidence that Wulpy and his mistress Katrina are based on Harold Rosenberg and a woman called Joan Ullman with whom he had an affair. But as a piece of writing, the story must be judged on internal (that is fictional) evidence alone. Any comment which takes into account evidence from the lives of the ‘originals’ of the characters becomes biographical comment.

It is also rather pointless searching in works of fiction for character studies of real historical people. Novels are not written for this purpose – and they should be taken at their own face value. Even serious biographies are literary constructs – though the best are founded on verifiable evidence.

Characterisation

It should be quite clear that Victor Wulpy is being offered to us as some sort of loveable rogue – an oversized rascal who speaks his mind and is quite prepared to offend others in doing so. He is also a famous intellectual who can earn enormous public-speaking fees.

But he was a talker, he had to talk, and during those wide-ranging bed conversations (monologues) when he let himself go, he couldn’t stop to explain himself … As he went on, he was more salty, scandalous, he was murderous. Reputations were destroyed when he got going, and people were torn to bits. So-and-so was a plagiarist who did not know what to steal, X who was a philosopher was a chorus boy at heart, Y had a mind like a lazy Susan, six spoiled appetisers and no main course.

But the problem in the case of Victor Wulpy is that his philosophic originality is largely told and not shown. That is to say, we are told how radical, freewheeling, and scandalous his private opinions are, but they are not dramatised. We are not sufficiently shown those opinions in action.

What we are shown is an enormous amount of self-centred, boorish behaviour, and male chauvinism bordering on the pathological.

Wulpy like the original Harold Rosenberg is a self-styled bohemian who pours scorn on all conventional opinions and behaviour. Rosenberg was the man who coined the expression ‘the tradition of the new’. And yet both the historical Rosenberg and the fictional Wulpy are living the life of an old-fashioned Victorian patriarch. Wulpy keeps a long-suffering wife in the background whom he refuses to divorce; and he has a lover/mistress whom he picks up and puts down again at his own convenience.

The female character Katrina Goliger is based on the journalist Joan Ullman, who has written her own account of the relationship with Rosenberg:

Bellow had pillaged key incidents from my life, which should have been mine to tell … It’s only been recently, that for the first time the true cost—the steep price I’d paid to be with Harold—struck home.

Yet despite the understandable outrage at having her personal life made the subject of fiction (for which permission was not sought) her own description of the affair is remarkably similar to that in Bellow’s story. The fictional Katrina comes across as a very willing doormat on which Wulpy wipes his size sixteen feet.

Is it a novella?

The strongest feature in favour of the piece being considered a novella is its unity of time and action. The events of the narrative take place over exactly a single day. They begin one evening in Chicago when Katrina is having dinner with her would-be suitor Krieggstein. On receiving a telephone call from Wulpy, she flies to Buffalo to join him. They then fly back to Chicago, with an enforced stop-over in Detroit. The story ends in the early evening, twenty-four hours later, back at her home, where she is reunited with Krieggstein.

The story has two principal characters, Wulpy and Katrina, who are locked in a very conventional power struggle. He is using her for sexual convenience whilst maintaining his independence from her – with a wife safely tucked away in the background. She feels vulnerable as a single mother and is looking for emotional commitment. This tension between them is brought to a climax when their return flight hits dangerous turbulence. Even as they think they might die, Wulpy refuses to say he loves her – because he thinks it is such a situational cliché.

The story ends in an apparently unresolved state. Wulpy goes on to give his lecture; Katrina is met by Krieggstein, who has been supervising her children after school. Krieggstein is present at the beginning and end of the story and the day, offering her devotion and support. This suggests in terms of fictional convention and logic that her future lies with him. As a policeman he might have a concealed firearm strapped to his leg, but at least he will come home every night – unlike Wulpy.

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – resources

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

A Saul Bellow bibliography

Harold Rosenberg at Wikipedia

Joan Ullman’s side of the story

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – synopsis

Famous but egocentric art critic Victor Wulpy is in an adulterous relationship with Katrina Goliger. Her husband has divorced her, and she is left with two teenage daughters. Whilst she is having dinner with her friend Lieutenant Krieggstein, Wulpy telephones, insisting she travel from Chicago to Buffalo to join him.

Katrina is vigorously chided by her sister Dorothea for tolerating Wulpy’s self-centred demands. Katrina gets up before dawn and flies to Buffalo. Wulpy is petulantly distressed because he will be sharing a conference platform with people he does not like.

In the VIP lounge he makes political analyses of America from what he claims is a Marxist point of view. He is powerfully attracted to Katrina even though he realises that there is an intellectual gap between them. They are joined by Larry Wrangel, an old bohemian associate of Wulpy’s who wants him to consider some hippy political views.

On the flight back to Chicago Katrina thinks about the children’s story about an elephant she is trying to write. Wulpy reflects on memories of his Jewish childhood. The plane is forced to land in Detroit because of heavy snow in Chicago.

Larry Wrangel turns up again and takes them to lunch, where Wulpy turns on his ingratiating host with insults. Katrina and Wulpy stay in a hotel room and have sex whilst they are waiting for an emergency rescue flight.

They then fly on to Chicago, Katrina recalling Wulpy’s recent near-death operation, and her being tolerated by his wife Beila. Their light plane hits turbulence, and they think they might crash, but even in what might be their last moments, Wulpy refuses to say “I love you” to Katrina.

She eventually reaches home to find that her friend Krieggstein has been looking after her children and is obviously hoping to become her suitor.

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – characters

Victor Wulpy	an egocentric art critic and theorist
Beila Wulpy	his stoical and ‘understanding’ wife
Katrina Goliger	his lover, a mother with two children
Alfred Goliger	Katrina’s ex-husband, a dealer in antiques
Dorothea	Katrina’s outspoken sister
Sammy Krieggstein	a war hero and lieutenant in the police force
Larry Wrangel	a writer and sci-fi film maker

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What Kind of Day Did You Have?

tutorial, study guide, web links, and further reading

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – commentary

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – resources

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – synopsis

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – characters

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