tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Herzog (1964) won several literary prizes when it was first published, and was voted one of the best 100 novels written in English by Time magazine. As in the case of other major novels by Saul Bellow, it has a strong biographical basis. Herzog and Bellow were both Jewish academics and intellectuals from Chicago; they were the same age; and both had been twice married and divorced. Most tellingly, both their second wives had been involved in affairs with a husband’s best friend.

The main feature of the novel which makes it very entertaining is the series of letters that Herzog writes to famous people, living and dead. He shares his hopes and fears with people he has never met (including God) and discusses abstract concepts with philosophers who were writing in the eighteenth century.

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Herzog – critical commentary

Historical note

When it first appeared in 1964 Herzog was received generally as a comic novel – a knockabout story of a character who was disoriented and wrote letters to well-known political and historical figures. Herzog interrogates his relatives and friends, gives advice to famous politicians, and poses philosophic questions to writers who have been dead for centuries.

Bellow had invented earlier a new kind of free-wheeling narrator in his previous novel The Adventures of Augie March (1954) and he was perceived as a fresh voice from the well-educated streets of Chicago and New York. His novels offered ideas, rumbustious events plucked from modern American life, and lots of linguistic fun. He seemed willing to take an off-beat, radical approach to characterisation and his subject matter. As his protagonist Moses Herzog announces in the opening paragraph: ‘If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me’.

But reading Herzog half a century later, it seems that the sense of fun has receded. Now it is quite clear that the novel was written out of a very painful experience of marital breakdown and the bitter consequences of divorce.

Bellow was also carving out what was to become the central issue of his later novels – the history of the Jewish immigrant experience in America. In Herzog he covers two generations – the first who arrived from Russia (and elsewhere) and endured poverty and hardships in order to make a new life for themselves in the New World. Then the second generation, who stood on their shoulders and had the choice of continuing the family’s Jewish traditions, or becoming fully assimilated as Americans

Biography

It’s quite clear on even the most cursory reading of this novel that it was based upon deeply felt personal experiences. Bellow makes very little effort to conceal the proximity of events in his narrative to the details of his own biography. Herzog is born in Canada of Russian Jewish immigrants, lives in Chicago, and becomes an academic, specialising in literature and intellectual history – exactly the same as Bellow himself.

Bellow had been married twice when he wrote the novel. He had also recently discovered that his second wife Sondra had been having an affair with his best friend Jack Ludwig. Many novelists use elements from their own lives as materials for their fiction. The question is – how does this affect our understanding and interpretation of their work?

The first thing to say is that novelists are under no obligation to be truthful, fair, accurate, or even-handed in their use of this autobiographical material. Fiction has its own rules, and novelists are at liberty to use their life experiences in any way they wish.

But the corollary for the reader is that the fictional results must not be taken as an accurate account of the writer’s life. Just as good biography should be an accurate account of events, and should not include fictional inventions, good fiction should not be taken as the base material for biographical interpretation.

However, it has to be said that this is a somewhat purist approach to literary interpretation. Most literary critics and commentators will use any information they have to pass judgement on writers and their work. Many people might argue that Bellow’s depiction of the character Madeleine reveals his deep-seated misogyny and is a form of fictional ‘revenge’ for the personal affront he felt from his wife’s betrayal.

The same could be said for the character of Valentine Gersbach – though interestingly, there is much less venom heaped upon him, and in general he is depicted as a more benign character. It is Madeleine who Herzog thinks he would like to murder, not his love rival Gersbach.

The letters

At the beginning of the novel we are led to believe that Herzog is writing letters to friends and relatives about the break-up of his marriage. Then as he becomes more desperate he starts writing to public figures and historical philosophers, many of whom died centuries earlier.

Then gradually it becomes clear that the letters are never posted, and finally that they are not written at all. The ‘letters’ are Herzog’s internal dialogue with friends, family, and ‘the dead’ – as well as a form of critical dialogue with the intellectual history of which he feels a part. In other words the ‘letters’ function as a metaphor. They represent one of the three strands of the narrative which focus attention relentlessly on Herzog and his state of mind:

• third person omniscient narrator
• Herzog as first person narrator
• Herzog’s letters to others

Herzog’s actions, thoughts, and feelings are sometimes presented by a third person omniscient narrator, but Saul Bellow seamlessly blends this presentation of events with Herzog’s first person account of his experiences, and even his commentary on his own thoughts. These two narrative strands are then supplemented by the ‘thought letters’ – which are presented in the printed text by italics

Philosophy

The principal weakness in Herzog as in many of Bellow’s other novels, is the long-winded ‘philosophising’ that goes on in the protagonist’s search for a resolution to the contradictions he finds in his life. To these speculations he also adds what have been called ‘reading lists’.

These are long references to western writers and philosophers by which Bellow suggests he has a detailed knowledge of political thinking from Greco-Roman classics, through Renaissance thought, to Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and anyone else worth mentioning in the twentieth century These names are offered up in a thick porridge of vague abstractions – a process which adds up to no more than a form of self-indulgent intellectual name-dropping. Bellow is far more successful when he sticks to deadpan (and very typically American) humour:

I am diligent. I work at it and show steady improvement. I expect to be in great shape on my deathbed.

Will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.

Herzog

There is something of an embarrassment for the reader in dealing with Herzog as the protagonist – who is quite clearly a cipher for Saul Bellow and his concerns. Herzog is being offered as something of a loveable rogue – a man who has warm ties to his Jewish immigrant family and its traditions, who has been badly treated by his second wife and friends such as Gersbach and Himmelstein. He is also in the tradition of the holy fool – the naive intellectual with his mind on higher matters who repeatedly makes bad decisions on his own behalf and does absurd things such as painting a piano green.

But by the same token we can say that he is self-obsessed; he is erotically incontinent; he has established his home with money inherited from his father, and spends most of the novel living off his brothers; and it’s even possible to argue that he is something of an intellectual snob. He certainly spends lots of mental energy railing against the beautiful but clever woman who has deceived him (Madeleine). Yet he discounts and feels sceptical about the beautiful and loving, but not-so-clever woman whom he believes wants to ‘snare’ him (Ramona).

There is no shortage of self-criticism in Bellow’s characterisation of Herzog, but it’s also impossible to escape a certain sense of smugness and self-regard, even if his soul-searching is wrapped up in multiple references to western philosophers – or maybe even because it is.

Kafka

There are distinct elements of Franz Kafka at work in Herzog. Both writers feature protagonists in search of justice who at every turn of events seem to make their own predicaments worse. They both create heroes with friends who protest their support but then undermine or betray the protagonist in some way. Both Kafka and Bellow explore the dilemmas of characters who seek to maintain high ethical ideals in a world founded on lying, greed, and deception – characters whose efforts often result in comic misunderstandings or grotesque embarrassment.

Herzog gives himself up to shysters such as Sandor Himmelstein, but when offered genuine sympathy and comforting friendship from Phoebe Sissler and her husband, he runs away from their kindness, thinking it is a ‘mistake’. He is full of contradictions – and he knows it.

Herzog is also like a Kafka figure in that many of his problems have been brought on because of his erotic behaviour. He has had two wives, and chosen for the second a woman who has validated all his worst fears about entrapment and persecution. Madeleine is the vagina dentata writ large. She has stripped him of his material assets and humiliated him sexually by adultery with his best friend. Yet when he is offered comfort and sexual healing by his very attractive lover Ramona, what does he do but run away from her. All this is very neurotic behaviour.

Even his struggles with society at a political level have elements of what we now call the ‘Kafkaesque’. Franz Kafka’s protagonists struggle to understand the byzantine processes of the powers that control them (largely the bureaucracy of the Hapsburg empire). Similarly, Moses grapples hopelessly as an individual with the complexities of a society controlled partly by democracy, and partly by a ‘political machine’ which includes graft, corruption, vote-fixing, and gangsters. Even his own father was a bootlegger.

Moses is also grappling intellectually with issues of the western European philosophic traditions and their inability to grant him some sort of overarching understanding of the modern society in which he lives. He is lost in a world of Locke, Hume, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (so we are asked to believe) but meanwhile he doesn’t have the common sense to know that his wife is having an affair with his best friend.

Moses claims to be seeking resolution and peace of mind in a world full of conflicts – yet he positively embraces difficulties and hardship, even feeling the loss of them when they are not there. And this neurotic behaviour is expressed in distinctly Kafkaesque language and metaphors, including one of Kafka’s favourites – the vulture:

When a man’s breast feels like a cage from which all the dark birds have flown – he is free, he is light. And he longs to have his vultures back again. He wants his customary struggles, his nameless, empty works, his anger, his afflictions, and his sins.

Reflecting on the level of antipathy Herzog feels towards his ex-wife Madeleine who has betrayed him with his best friend, Bellow coins an epigram that could come straight out of Kafka’s diaries or notebooks:

It’s fascinating that hatred should be so personal as to be almost loving. The knife and the wound, aching for each other.

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Herzog – study resources

Herzog – Penguin – Amazon UK

Herzog – Penguin – Amazon US

Herzog – Library of America – Amazon UK

Herzog – 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

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Herzog – plot summary

Moses Herzog is a Jewish academic who has moved from a large house in Berkshire to Chicago at the behest of Madeleine, his second wife. When Madeleine suddenly wants a divorce he leaves his home and his job and moves back to New York. City where he starts compulsively writing to people – both living and dead.

He consults a doctor, but there is nothing physically wrong with him. His lover Ramona invites him to take a holiday in her house, but fearing ‘commitment’ he travels instead to stay with some friends at Martha’s Vineyard.

He buys sporty summer clothes and thinks about Wanda, a married woman with whom he had an affair on a trip to Poland. He also reflects on relations with his mother in law and discussions about her with Simkin, his divorce lawyer.

On the train he thinks over Madeleine’s affair with his friend Gersbach and ‘writes’ to her aunt Zelda who has conspired in his deception.

His friend the zoologist Lucas Asphalter reveals Madeleine’s adultery with Gersbach. Herzog recalls analysis under Dr Edvig which spills over to include Madeleine. She becomes ill, goes on wild spending sprees, and finally attacks Herzog physically.

Herzog turns for help to his best friend Gersbach (with whom Madeleine is having the affair). Gersbach lectures him on dignity and suffering. Herzog writes letters to public figures, offering them advice.

He recalls a discussion between Madeleine and his old friend Schapiro about Russian culture. His letter to Schapiro is about political philosophy, but he also complains that Madeleine has been trying to take his place in the academic world. He borrows money from his brother Shura.

After the split with Madeleine, Herzog goes to stay with old friend Sandor Himmelstein, whose attitude becomes more and more critical. Sandor even tries to sell him some insurance., then hits him hard with Jewish sentimentalism.

Herzog arrives chez Libbie and her new husband Sissler in Martha’s Vineyard. They welcome him very warmly, but he immediately thinks the visit is a mistake. He leaves them an apologetic note and flies back home.

In New York he receives news of problems with his daughter who is living with Madeleine and Gersbach. He thinks back to a period when he was married to Daisy, involved with Japanese girl Sono, and preparing to leave them both for Madeleine.

In the early days of his relationship with Madeleine, she is a recent convert to Catholicism and full of guilt about adultery. But she gives up the Church, they get married, and go to live in the country, with the Gersbachs as neighbours. Madeleine squanders money, and they start to argue.

He looks back nostalgically on his first marriage to Daisy and reflects on his Jewish childhood. His father was a first generation immigrant and a small time bootlegger. The family have a drunken lodger and relatives who die back in Russia. Moses affectionately recalls the poverty yet warmth of the family in its early immigrant years.

Ramona phones with an invitation to dinner which he reluctantly accepts. He drifts into writing letters on political philosophy and drafting a proposal for an essay on ‘transcendence’. Then he recalls his relationship with Sono, his Japanese lover. She warns him against Madeleine, and in his imaginary letter to her he admits that she was right.

Ramona showers him with affection and understanding – but deep down he is reluctant. They discuss at length his problems with Madeleine and Gersbach.

He consults lawyer Harvey Simkin who urges him to take Madeleine and Gersbach to court and seek revenge. Herzog visits a courtroom where he witnesses a trial for child murder and he has a form of mild heart attack.

He flies to Chicago and visits his parents’ old house, recalling an argument with his father. Whilst there he secretly retrieves his father’s old pistol.

Fearing his own daughter might be at risk, he drives to Madeleine’s house with murder in mind. But when he sees Gersbackh bathing June, he cannot pull the trigger. He visits Gersbach’s wife Phoebe instead. She is in denial and claims that Gersbach is still living with her

He goes to stay with Lucas Asphalter with whom he discusses attitudes to death. He takes his daughter June out for the day, but becomes involved in a traffic accident. The police arrest him for carrying a loaded gun. Madeleine arrives at the police station, full of hostility. His brother Will is called to post bail.

After borrowing money from Will, he goes to his abandoned house in the Berkshires and sinks into eccentric behaviour. He begins a new series of letters to his psychiatrist, to Nietzsche, and to God.

His brother Will arrives, sees that Herzog is cracking up, and recommends medical care and rest. Herzog refuses and plans to invite his son Marco to stay.

Ramona visits a nearby town. He goes over, invites her to dinner, and begins cleaning up the house. He also finally decides to stop writing letters.

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Herzog – principal characters

Moses Herzog	a confused academic dreamer with marital problems
Madeleine	his second wife, a beautiful and clever ball-breaker
Valentine Gersbach	his neighbour and best friend, who has an affair with Madeleine
Dr Edvig	psycho-analyst to both Herzog and Madeleine
Ramona Donsell	a flower shop owner, Herzog’s attractive lover
Fritz Pointmueller	Madeleine’s father, a theatrical impresario
Trennie Pointmueller	his wife, Madeleine’s mother
Harvey Simkin	Herzog’s divorce lawyer
Lucas Asphalter	a zoologist and boyhood friend of Herzog
Schapiro	an old friend of Herzog
Sandor Himmelstein	a Chicago lawyer and friend of Herzog

© Roy Johnson 2017

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More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
More on short stories
Twentieth century literature

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Humboldt’s Gift (1975) was Saul Bellow’s major follow-up to his two previous best-sellers, Henderson the Rain King (1959) and Herzog (1964). It is also his affectionate yet tongue-in-cheek tribute to his friend the poet and short story writer Delmore Schwartz who died in obscurity in 1966. Bellow had already won three National Book Awards for fiction, but Humboldt’s Gift propelled him in 1976 to both a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Humboldt’s Gift – critical commentary

Biography

The novel is a fictional memoir of Von Humboldt Fleischer – a Jewish American poet and philosopher of precocious talent. But the narrative is also a double portrait – both of Humboldt and of Charlie Citrine, his one-time friend who is telling the story, writing the memoir, and revealing the serio-comic events in his own life at the same time.

It is generally accepted that the character study of Humboldt Fleischer is based upon the figure of Delmore Schwartz – an American writer whose collection of poems and short stories In Dreams Begin Responsibilities was published in 1938 when he was only twenty-five years old. He was widely admired and at first very successful; but then later his life and reputation went into decline, and he died in poverty, an alcoholic with paranoid delusions.

Saul Bellow was a protegé of Schwartz, and Citrine has many of the features of Bellow’s own life – problematic relationships with ex-wife and mistress, great success as a writer, and a fashionable life as an intellectual who mixes with politicians and celebrities.

Bellow seems to invite readers to make close comparisons between his own biography and the details he supplies of his fictional narrator. Despite this however, readers should keep in mind that in terms of literary interpretation, a clear distinction should be maintained between biographical and textual evidence.

Characterisation

Without doubt, one of Bellow’s strongest points as a novelist is his creation of vibrant and amusing characters, many of whom combine sophisticated intellectual lives with tempestuous passions, rash behaviour, and modes of expression laced with street language and profanity.

Citrine is an intellectual show-off and a dreamer who wishes to keep the memories of his family and friends alive, long after they are dead. Yet he is driven by his sexual desire for young women; he is impractical and fails to see what is going on around him; and he is lost in a metaphysical haze of Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy. But he is driven by the need to talk and reveal himself at the same time as discussing his friend Humboldt. His observations are offered in a mixture of rich cultural reference, compressed philosophy, and street talk.

He was a wonderful talker, a hectic nonstop monologuist and improvisator, a champion detractor. To be loused up by Humboldt was really a kind of privilege. It was like being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso, or an eviscerated chicken by Soutine. Money always inspired him … But his real wealth was literary. He had read many thousands of books. He said that history was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night’s rest. Insomnia made him more learned.

Humboldt on the other hand is a man striving for the ideals of beauty and art amidst the harsh environment of modern American capitalism – yet he threatens people with a gun, tries to run his wife over with a car, and ends up in a psychiatric hospital. He too is an unstoppable fountain of talk, wisecracks, and cultural philosophy – even when it is directed against his old friend Citrine:

he went about New York saying bitter things about me and my ‘million dollars.’ “Take the case of Charlie Citrine. He arrived from Madison, Wisconsin, and knocked on my door. Now he’s got a million bucks. What kind of writer or intellectual makes that kind of dough—a Keynes? Okay Keynes, a world figure. A genius in economics, a Prince in Bloomsbury … Married to a Russian ballerina. The money follows. But who the hell is Citrine to become so rich? … There’s something perverse with that guy. After making his dough why does he bury himself in the sticks? What’s he in Chicago for? He’s afraid to be found out.”

One curiosity of characterisation is Bellow’s introduction of named characters who do not appear in the narrative, are not dramatised, and in some cases have no part to play in the drama at all. For instance, Citrine pokes a lot of fun at his sexual rival Flonzely, whom his mistress Renata eventually chooses to marry. Flonzely is named but never appears: Citrine simply make lots of jokes about the fact that he is an undertaker.

A more acute case of the same phenomenon is Richard Durnwald. He is an old friend of Citrine, by whom he is held in great respect. Yet we never learn anything about him; he plays no part in the story; and has no relevance to the themes or the structure of the novel. In a story that is already over-crowded with named characters, one wonders why he is introduced at all.

Weaknesses

The weakest parts of the narrative are the very repetitive passages of Citrine’s ruminations about the state of his soul. It is understandable that he wishes to keep alive memories of his family and friends who are now dead, but the dwelling on Rudolph Steiner and ‘Anthroposophy’ is somehow unconvincing. It does not sit coherently within Citrine’s other interests and his intellectual background.

Since it is very difficult to escape the feeling that Citrine is a fictionalised account of Bellow himself, it is very disconcerting that he is presented as very successful character, very well educated, and enormously popular with women. Small elements of occasional deprecation aside, the overall impression is one of enormous self-congratulation – of a kind very reminiscent of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who also created fictionalised accounts of himself falling into the clutches of love-hungry women at every turn of his stories.

There may be an element of biographical truth in this. Famous male writers may well have lots of female admirers, law suits, and self-inflicted money problems – but they do not necessarily constitute the material of serious fiction,

The other principal weakness – perhaps inherited from the success of his earlier novel The Adventures of Augie March (1953) a work in which Bellow claimed he found his true voice as a writer – is that of amusing but rather improbable incidents. Citrine within the space of two or three days is kidnapped by a gangster, mixes with underworld figures, is harassed in court proceedings, goes to jail, travels from Chicago to New York and Texas then to Madrid, and finally (and very improbably) makes tens of thousands of dollars from a successful movie treatment he has co-written.

Saul Bellow may have had a colourful personal life (awards, wives, divorces) but this sort of intellectualised bohemianism simply isn’t persuasive as serious fiction – even though it is orchestrated to create some very amusing passages.

It also has to be said that the opening scenes of the novel where Citrine is menaced and taught a lesson by the gangster Rinaldo Cantabile are remarkably similar to the beginning of Norman Mailer’s An American Dream which was published ten years earlier in 1965. The parallels and similarities are quite striking. Mailer’s protagonist Stephen Rojack is a war hero, former politician, and television star, and just as Citrine is menaced on the sixtieth floor of a building site, Rojack goes on a frightening challenge around the parapet of a skyscraper.

Similarly, in a later scene of Humboldt’s Gift Citrine and his lover Renata engage in orgasme a pied under the cover of a dining table – a scene which replicates exactly a passage in An American Dream. Mailer was strongly criticised for his depiction of women in his novel, and Bellow has also been the target of feminist claims that the women in Humboldt’s Gift are either sex objects (Renata) or shrieking harpies like his ex-wife Denise.

The question of plagiarism is one that can be decided in the long term, as the critical reputations of Mailer and Bellow stabilize. At the moment (2017) Bellow’s is in the ascendant and Mailer’s in decline.

The sheer exuberance and verbal fecundity of Bellow’s literary style is enormously attractive, and his concerns for tolerance and what are generally known as ‘liberal values’ make him a distinguished and very talented novelist. But he is not beyond criticism.

Chronology

The novel has a very complex sequence of events – primarily because it is presented in the somewhat rambling mixture of Citrine’s memories of Humboldt, recollections of his own boyhood in Chicago, abstract reflections on Anthroposophy, and the narrative of the events of two or three days as he prepares to fly to Europe with his mistress Renata. These are worth tabulating for the purposes of clarification:

• the history of his relationship with Humboldt
• memories of a Chicago boyhood
• reflections on Rudolph Steiner and Anthoposophy
• conflicts with gangsters, lawyers, and an ex-wife

This is a very skilful arrangement of the events in a novel. It encompasses the historical background to its milieu, the presentation of a character, philosophic reflections on the nature of life and death, and a concentrated account of dramatic events over the space of a few days. There are not many novelists who could orchestrate this chronological complexity without resorting to a more clumsy structure.

Bellow keeps these four separate strands of narrative alive at the same time by having them all presented via the very engaging narrative style of his principal character and narrator, Charles Citrine.

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Humboldt’s Gift – study resources

Humboldt’s Gift – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Humboldt’s Gift – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Humboldt’s Gift – Library of America – Amazon UK

Humboldt’s Gift – 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

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Humboldt’s Gift – plot summary

Rich and successful writer Charlie Citrine gives an account of Von Humboldt Fleischer – an American poet and philosopher who has recently died. Humboldt was prodigiously intelligent, very widely read, and a great talker, but after a meteoric rise to success as a young man, his later life has collapsed into poverty, neglect, and alcoholism. Humboldt has high-flown, semi-delusional ideas about Art and Politics, and in his hey-day he secured a teaching post for Citrine at Princeton University.

Years later, a very successful Citrine has his Mercedes-Benz sports car vandalised over a gambling debt. He is heavily criticised by his ex-wife Denise for moving back to live in Chicago. He feels guilty about having avoided meeting Humboldt just before his death, and he resents the money he pays in taxes and in divorce settlements on Denise.

Citrine recalls friendships and his love of Chicago’s run-down urban landscape. He is menaced and humiliated by gangster Rinaldo Cantabile, to whom he owes money and towards whom he feels a certain sympathy. They go to the Playboy Club and mix with dubious elements of the underworld. Cantabile reveals that Citrine was boasting at the original poker game, and the humiliation was a lesson in hubris. He also wants Citrine’s help for his wife’s academic aspirations.

Citrine plans to write a study of boredom. He recalls Humboldt’s anger at being snubbed as a Jew, and his ambition to become a tenured professor at Princeton. They exchange blank cheques as a symbol of brotherhood against an uncertain future, and even though Citrine supports Humboldt’s bid for promotion, his friend takes money from Citrine’s account shortly afterwards.

Humboldt manages to wangle a chair at Princeton, but then the funding for it is withdrawn. He cracks up and tries to run over his wife Kathleen in a car. She leaves him and files for divorce. He starts threatening people with a gun, is taken into police custody, and is then sectioned in Bellevue mental hospital. On release he turns against Citrine and hires lawyers and psychiatrists. Citrine too goes into therapy, and his lover Demmie dies in a plane crash.

Citrine is visited by Cantabile, who claims to have his interests at heart but tries to drag him in to all sorts of criminal schemes. Citrine fears that Renata and her mother the ‘Senora’ are trying to trap him into a permanent relationship. He offers further reflections on death and questions his friend Szathman about Renata. Szathman arranged their first date, at which Renata passed out after too many Martinis.

In court Citrine distrusts his own defense lawyers. Denise is critical, yet proposes that they re-marry. Citrine is harassed by divorce judge Urbanovich. He meets Thaxter, his profligate business partner, and they are ‘kidnapped’ by Cantabile. Citrine reproaches Thaxter for his mismanagement of their publishing venture. Cantabile takes them to menace a crooked financier, who has them arrested. Citrine is rescued at the police station by the daughter of his childhood sweetheart.

He visits Naomi Lutz, who criticises him affectionately about his attitude to women. On the flight to New York he recalls George Swiebel’s advice to marry Renata whilst he still has a chance. He discusses Humboldt’s legacy with Orlando Huggins, who is Humboldt’s official executor. Then he collects the remnants of Humboldt’s papers from his uncle Waldemar in a Coney Island nursing home.

Humboldt’s legacy turns out to be no more than a letter to Citrine excusing his bad behaviour and an amateurish treatment for a movie script. Citrine then discovers that his brother is to have open heart surgery. Thaxter calls with news of new publishing contracts. He meets Kathleen, who has been given the same movie-plot gift from Humboldt – but she has actually placed it with agents.

He visits his rich and successful brother Julius on the eve of his heart operation. Julius offers to cut him into property development deals and advises him to be more realistic and self-protective. The operation is successful, so Citrine flies to join Renata at the Ritz in Madrid. However, he is joined by Renata’s mother, who dumps her grandson Robert on him. Renata meanwhile writes from North Africa to say that she has married undertaker Flonzely.

Citrine is running short of money, and he spends his time trying to communicate with people who are dead. Cantabile suddenly arrives with news that the movie scenario has been turned into a very successful film: he wants a stake in the copyright. Citrine flies with him to Paris where they watch the film. They negotiate a deal with lawyers for the film, and Citrine splits the proceeds with Humboldt’s uncle Waldemar. Thaxter is kidnapped in Argentina, and uses the event to generate money for himself. Citrine uses his share of the film money to re-bury Humboldt and his mother.

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Humboldt’s Gift – principal characters

Von Humboldt Fleischer	a celebrated Jewish writer who dies in obscurity
Kathleen	Humboldt’s wife, who leaves him
Charles Citrine	Humboldt’s friend and protegé – the narrator
Denise	Citrine’s ex-wife, who is suing him for more alimony
Renata Koffritz	Citrine’s young lover
the Señora	Renata’s mother – the ‘procuress’
Julius Citrine	a millionaire property developer
Demmie Vonghel	Citrine’s girlfriend in adolescence
George Swiebel	a building contractor
Rinaldo Cantabile	a flamboyant small-time gangster
Alec Szathmar	a lawyer, Citrine’s boyhood friend
Forrest Tomchek	a lawyer acting for Citrine
Solomon Flonzaley	an undertaker, Renata’s lover
Roger	Renata’s young son

© Roy Johnson 2017

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More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
More on short stories
Twentieth century literature

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

More Die of Heartbreak (1987) comes in the middle of Saul Bellow’s mature period as a novelist. He had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the previous decade, and obviously felt confident as the chronicler of modern American society. However, he continued to keep alive the folk memories of his heritage as the son of Jewish immigrants and his connections with European society from which his grandparents had emigrated.

The novel features many of his characteristic tropes and character types – corrupt lawyers, businessmen, and politicians; the violence of modern urban centres; rapacious females; and the dominance of the metropolitan city in contemporary American life.

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More Die of Heartbreak – commentary

Saul Bellow’s novels very often feature a central character who is trying to make sense of the world in which he lives. These protagonists can be slightly tragic figures such as Tommy Wilhelm in the novella Seize the Day (1956) or the comic Moses Herzog who writes letters to dead philosophers in Herzog (1964).

Frequently the central character or narrator will be presenting a second larger-than-life character who is being held up as a role model of some kind. Humboldt’s Gift (1975) is narrated by Charlie Citrine, but it is the figure of his friend Humbolt Fleischer who provides a great deal of the novel’s amusement and interest. Bellow does the same thing: in Ravelstein (2000) where the narrator Chick is searching for meaning, but the novel is dominated by the portrait of his colleague Abe Ravelstein.

More Die of Heartbreak follows the same pattern – but in surprisingly muted tones. Neither the narrator Kenneth Trachtenberg nor his uncle Benn Crader are large scale comic figures, and they are beset by no more serious problems than entanglements with the opposite sex.

Benn Crader is supposed to be a world-class botanist – but this characterisation is never fully persuasive, just as Kenneth Trachtenberg’s role as a professor of Russian literature is not convincingly realised. We simply do not see these characters at work sufficiently to give them full fictional credibility. Moreover, there is never sufficiently persuasive evidence provided for Ken’s obsessive interest in his older uncle’s welfare.

The main theme

Kenneth is surrounded by conflicting influences and role models. His father is a successful playboy, and his mother has turned herself into a Saint Theresa missionary figure in response. Ken admires his uncle Benn, and he has other relatives who include a corrupt politician who has swindled his own family.

Ken sustains himself in this social maelstrom by his belief in the humanising influence of his academic discipline – Russian literature. He also employs what is now called cultural history as a lodestone as he finds himself dragged into more and more complex entanglements generated by modern American life.

There is also a surprisingly understated element of his being trapped between the position of an insider and outsider. He is from a Jewish immigrant family, but was born and raised in France. He keeps modern European history firmly in mind – the Russian revolution, the Nazi death camps – as he tries to steer his uncle Benn through American waters infested by legal sharks and property speculators. All of this will be familiar territory to those acquainted with Bellow’s other major novels.

The secondary theme

However, a secondary or sub-theme emerges from just about every part of the novel’s events – and that is a surprisingly explicit interest in sexuality. It should also be said that although it is articulated via Ken as the narrator, this almost obsessive interest must be attributed to Saul Bellow. He depicts a world shot through with an almost obsessional interest in sexuality at every level.

This begins with the slightly unpleasant and barely credible interest Ken takes in his uncle Benn’s sex life following the breakdown of his marriage. The idea of two adult males from different generations sharing erotic technique tips is as aesthetically toe-curling as it is improbable.

Ken also gives full accounts of his father’s adulterous sexual activities – which are not only successful, but are endorsed by Ken and tolerated by his wife. Ken himself is involved with Trekkie, a young woman whom he suspects of being engaged in sado-masochistic practices with other men which leave her with bruises on her legs.

Benn is being vigorously pursued by the rapacious cougar Caroline Bunge, who spices up her sexual attractions with pornographic videos and drugs. And when Benn courteously changes a light bulb for a lonely neighbour, she pursues him saying “What am I supposed to do with my sexuality?”

When Ken and Benn make a sudden trip to Japan, the outstanding element of the visit is not Benn’s lectures on plant biology but a visit to a strip club which culminates in two girls displaying their vaginas to the crowd. Later, when Benn meets his prospective father-in-law Doctor Layamon, the gynaecologist’s principal topic of interest is the sexual relationship Benn has with his daughter Matilda.

Every one of these incidents can be justified on grounds of narrative relevance and the context of post sexual revolution writing in the 1980s. But responsibility for their volume and insistence lies clearly at Saul Bellow’s own door. It leaves behind a slightly unpleasant impression.

It is not easy to take seriously a concern for the victims of Stalin’s show trials and Hitler’s death camps, with a prurient interest in the bedroom positions and practices of a middle-aged couple during copulation. But it seems that these contrasting or even contradictory issues are precisely what Saul Bellow wishes to present as the challenge of modern consciousness.

The Flight from Woman

The other side of this coin of sexual obsession is the theme of escaping from the clutches of rapacious women. At the start of the novel Ken is in flight from Trekkie – a woman to whom he is sexually attracted but regards as perverse, since she seems to be engaged in sado-masochistic behaviour with other lower-class men.

Uncle Benn on the other hand is being pursued by Caroline Bunge, from whom he escapes on the very day they are due to be married. He then falls into the clutches of the ambitious Matilda Layamon, who is part of a rich and successful family. However, they wish to use Benn as a status-gainer on their social circuit. Benn marries Matilda – but shortly afterwards escapes from her and flies off to the ‘North pole’ to join a research project.

The logic of the narrative is that women are attractive and desirable as sexual partners, but that socially they are demanding, expensive, and uncontrollable. It is significant that Ken finds his only relaxing connection with Dita Schwartz, who has been virtually de-sexualised as a result of a horrendous dermatological operation on her face.

The setting

It is quite clear from the incidental details that the novel is set imaginatively in Chicago. Yet Bellow for some reason avoids a specific location for the events of the narrative. The main focus of attention is on the fictional ‘Radio Tower’ – which is fairly obviously the mammoth Willis Tower in Chicago

Straight ahead of us stood the Electronic Tower, with its twin masts like the horns of a Viking helmet – it was very nearly as tall as the Sears building in Chicago.

This is something of a literary joke, because the giant Willis Tower in Chicago is commonly referred to as the Sears Tower. But why should Bellow adopt this sleight of hand? Maybe because in other parts of the novel he is exposing all sorts of corrupt practices in the legal and political life of what is obviously Chicago. He gives himself a certain protection by the creation of a fictional city – which is never named.

The conclusion

Saul Bellow’s novels are unusual in that their narratives rarely culminate in a dramatic finale or even a resolution to the conflicts they have been exploring. More Die of Heartbreak concludes with Benn Crader running away from his unsuitable wife to pursue his scientific interests in a remote place. The narrator Kenneth Trachtenberg remains where he was at the beginning of the novel – a teacher of Russian literature who might have occasional custody of his daughter.

They both seem to have undergone a certain amount of erotic-based heartache, and they have theorised about their attitudes to women ad nauseam. There is a sense in which Bellow’s novels do not offer dramatic narratives: they explore states of mind and a portfolio of contemporary beliefs. Nor do they offer any comforting certainties or resolutions: there is very little sense of closure here.

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More Die of Heartbreak – study resources

More Die of Heartbreak – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

More Die of Heartbreak – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

More Die of Heartbreak – Library of America – Amazon UK

More Die of Heartbreak – 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

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More Die of Heartbreak – synopsis

Young professor of Russian literature Kenneth Trachtenberg gives an account of his uncle Benn Crader, a Jewish botanist who has recently become divorced. Ken also describes his ambivalent relationship with his womanising father Rudi, who is disappointed with his son’s lack of ambition and panache.

Ken’s relative Harold Vilitzer is a crooked politician who has defrauded his own family, yet Benn still feels an affection for him. Ken wonders why his uncle has chosen botany as a vocation, and he tries to generate a coherent understanding of life from his disparate collection of relatives.

Ken has problems with his partner Trekkie, who refuses to marry him, lives like a student even though she has money, and has a taste for sexual masochism. Benn is being pursued by Caroline Burge, a rich and fast-living vamp with a taste for drugs and celebrities. Ken and Benn take a holiday in Japan to escape from these problems on the day Benn is due to get married.

Ken has visited his mother who is working in a Somalian refugee camp. She too is disappointed in her son. He talks to her about the Gulag archipelago and Russia’s talent for suffering. In Kyoto Benn finds a visit to a strip club rather upsetting. 

Without telling Ken during his absence, Benn marries Matilda Layamon, a rich young woman with a celebrity doctor father. Ken disapproves of his choice and is severely critical of the Layamons’ vulgar ostentation. Benn moves into the Layamons’ appartments, and Matilda is revealed as a spoiled and ambitious dilettante socialite. Doctor Layamon’s wealth is founded on dubious favours from his rich clients.

Benn and Matilda look over the enormous apartment she has inherited. Layamon takes Benn to an expensive lunch where he reveals that he has had Benn investigated by a private detective. He also wants Benn to recover the money Vilitzer owes him to pay for the refurbishment of the old apartment.

Ken pumps the seedy entrepreneur Fishl Vilitzer for information about his father. and judge Amador Chetnick. Fishl wants to act on Benn’s behalf in an effort to retrieve the money he lost in the rigged court case. Fishl explains the financial and political corruption in local government – but obviously has mixed motives.

Ken looks after his ex-student Dita Schwartz who has drastic dermatological surgery on her face. He meets Trekkie’s mother – who suddenly proposes marriage to him.

Dr Layamon takes Benn on hospital rounds, then persuades him to challenge Vilitzer for the money he owes. Benn and Matilda see Psycho which upsets him because he identifies with Norman Bates. He regards this as a warning, but marries her anyway.

Ken has dinner with Dita Schwartz and lectures her about his Parisian childhood. Ken and Benn attend the rape case parole board hearing They confront Vilitzer, but he refuses to give them the money he has made from the family property.

Ken flies to Seattle, bent on ‘revenge’ He smashes up Trekkie’s bathroom, then they discuss sharing custody of their daughter Nancy. Benn flies to Miami, where Vilitzer has just died. He then tricks Matilda into flying on to Rio, whilst he jets off instead to northern Finland on an arctic research expedition.

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More Die of Heartbreak – principal characters

Kenneth Trachtenberg	the narrator, a Jewish professor of Russian literature who was born in France
Benn Crader	a midwestern botanist of Jewish origins with an international reputation
Rudi Trachtenberg	Ken”s father, a successful womaniser
Matilda Layamon	Benn’s rich and attractive second wife
Harold Vilitzer	a crooked politician who has cheated his own family
Fishl Vilitzer	his son, a seedy and incompetent ‘entrepreneur’
Treckie	Ken’s partner, who refused to marry him
Tanya Sterling	Trekkie’s mother – a cougar

© Roy Johnson 2017

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More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
More on short stories
Twentieth century literature

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tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading, web links

Mr Sammler’s Planet (1969) was first published in back-to-back issues of Atlantic Monthly. It was subsequently issued in one-volume novel form by Viking Press in 1970, and it won the National Book Award for Fiction the following year.

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Mr Sammler’s Planet – commentary

The main theme

Bellow’s previous novels The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Henderson the Rain King (1959), and Herzog (1964) had all been commercially successful and widely critically acclaimed – but it was with Mr Sammlers Planet that he located his main theme – one which he was to continue exploring for the rest of his life as a creative writer. That theme was the role of the immigrant Jew in twentieth century America

In Bellow’s work (fiction and non-fiction essays) the immigrant Jew has a cultural identity- but an identity that has been formed ‘elsewhere’. This elsewhere is likely to be middle, northern, or Eastern Europe. The person has been driven by poverty, war, or anti-Semitism (or all three) to find refuge in a land which proclaims on its welcoming statue (of Liberty)

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

The problem, as Bellow sees it, is that once on American shores, the immigrant is pulled between preserving his (or her) own culture, and becoming assimilated as an American. This is normally characterised as a choice between two ways of life. The first is a traditional respect for liberal humanism, human decency, a love of arts, intellectualism, and a deep sense of cultural and political history. It is also likely to involve close bonds with family members.

The second is a no-holds-barred pursuit of individualism and personal liberty, embracing free-market capitalism, dog-eat-dog competition, get-rich-quick schemes, and devil-take-the-hindmost greed and corruption at all levels.

It is quite obvious which of these two options Bellow supports. Sammler is a Holocaust survivor. He cherishes his relatives and friends. He is a man of culture and sophistication, even though he is living on handouts from his nephew (and war reparations). He is a living representative of twentieth century history – a man who has dug his own grave and miraculously survived a Nazi execution squad. He will not let that experience fade as a measure of how he will interpret the behaviour of others.

The following extract captures this multiple, overlapping approach to a form of stream-of-consciousness in dealing with one of his favourite themes – the immigrant faced with the multiple possibilities of American life:

And the charm, the ebullient glamour, the almost unbearable agitation that came from being able to describe oneself as a twentieth-century American was available to all. To everyone who had eyes to read the papers or watch television, to everyone who shared the collective ecstasies of news, crisis, power. To each according to his excitability. But perhaps it was an even deeper thing. Humankind watched and described itself in the very turns of its own destiny. Itself the subject, living or drowning at night, itself the object, seen surviving or succumbing, and feeling in itself the fits of strength and the lapses of paralysis – mankind’s own passion simultaneously being mankind’s great spectacle, a think of deep and strange participation, on all levels, from melodrama and mere noisedown into the deepest layers of the soul and into the subtlest silences, where undiscovered knowledge is.

Bellow does not offer this as a simplistic example of victimhood. At one point Sammler reflects on the case of Chaim Rumkowski, a Jewish ‘leader’ in occupied Poland who assisted the Nazis, arranged the deportation of children to the death camps, and even abused young girls – before he was beaten to death by fellow inmates on arrival at Auschwitz in 1944. Bellow’s message is quite clear: the full horror must be confronted, and not forgotten.

But Sammler is surrounded by every excess that modern America can throw at him: the black pickpocket who intimidates him with an aggressive sexual gesture; his ex-student Feffer whose instinct is to exploit everything that comes his way; Wallace Gruner, the son of his nephew, described by his own father as a ‘high-IQ idiot’ who is full of mad entrepreneurial schemes to make money

The 1960s and sexual revolution

This novel is basically Bellow’s response to the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s in America and Europe, coupled with his long-standing concern for the fate of immigrant Jews in post-Holocaust America

He takes a view that sides with what he sees as tradition and decency – Sammler is oppressed and appalled by the excesses of “a sexual madness [which] was overwhelming the Western world”. His young niece Angela is the living embodiment of the sexual revolution writ large. She dresses in provocatively in revealing clothes and flaunts her erotic life like a banner of defiance in a way Sammler clearly finds shocking.

The students on campus are in rebellion; beards proliferate; nobody gives a damn; and America is in full technological expansionist mood – preparing to put men on the moon. It captures the vibrancy and the excesses of the 1960s very accurately.

The planets

The novel was published in the same year as the first moon landings in 1969, and most readers will have little difficulty in appreciating the multiple symbols and references to planetary matters which run through the novel.

Artur Sammler inhabits the only planet he knows – the earth – and he tries to make sense of the gigantic contradictions that twentieth century history has thrown at him and his fellow survivors. He finds modern life – particularly in New York City – overwhelming.

But he reads Govinda Lal’s treatise on lunar colonisation with interest – largely as a symbolic suggestion that there might be alternatives to the horrors and unresolvable contradictions of life on earth.

His meeting with Dr Lal provides him with the one intellectually satisfying experience that occurs in the novel. Then throughout its events he catches glimpses of the moon which act as a reminder of this search for ‘alternatives’

Structure

Bellow is not normally strong on the structure of his novels. He seems to prefer a free-wheeling, improvisatory approach in which he introduces incidents and characters for their own sake, and does not (necessarily) tie them closely to his main theme. But it must be said that Mr Sammler’s Planet is a masterpiece of bravura plotting and organisation.

The content of the narrative is an amalgam of Sammler’s movements in New York, his reflections on political history, his slightly woolly and abstract ruminations on life, and the second-hand reports of activity from minor characters. But the amazing thing is that the entire events of the narrative take place over only two days.

This chronological compression is somewhat concealed, since so much of the narrative is taken up with flashbacks into Sammler’s earlier life. His ‘European’ experiences during and after the Holocaust are woven seamlessly into the account of events in 1960s New York. And since the narrative is delivered almost entirely from his point of view, the transitions between reminiscence and dramatic interaction between characters is almost imperceptible. It also has to be said that the resulting narrative is also padded out with generous passages of abstract reflection on Sammler’s part – a feature which one cannot help regarding as something of an indulgence on Bellow’s part, since it appears so frequently in all his other novels.

Things met with in this world are tied to the forms of our perception in space and time and to the forms of our thinking. We see what is before us, the present, the objective. Eternal being makes its temporal appearance in this way The only way out of captivity in the forms, out of confinement in the prison of projections, the only contact with the eternal, is through freedom.

Such passages become strangely heterogeneous, set as they are amongst events which sometimes border on the farcical – Sammler’s nephew flooding the house and crashing an aeroplane whilst taking photographs for instance. But fortunately, the novel as a whole is held together by the seriousness of Sammler’s search for meaning in a life composed of such disparate elements.

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Mr Sammler’s Planet – study resources

Mr Sammler’s Planet – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Mr Sammler’s Planet – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Saul Bellow bibliography

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

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Mr Sammler’s Planet – summary

I.   Artur Sammler is a seventy year old Polish Jew living in New York with his widowed niece Margotte. He has a semi-retarded and divorced daughter Shula who collects junk. They are all immigrant survivors of the Holocaust. He formerly lived in Bloomsbury London, and is something of an Anglophile. Shula has been urging him to write a memoir of H.G. Wells. She presents him with a scholarly paper on the colonisation of the moon written by a Dr Govinda Lal.

Sammler delivers a lecture on British politics in the inter-war years that is rudely challenged by students. Afterwards he is accosted by a black pickpocket he has seen on a bus journey each morning. The man follows Sammler home and exposes himself in a threatening manner in the lobby of the building.

II.   Sammler struggles to make sense of urban life, which he finds overwhelming. He is visited by his sixty year old nephew Walter, who has a fetish for women’s plump arms. Sammler finds his confessions oppressive, as he does those of his niece Angela, who recounts the sexual details of her affair with an advertising executive.

Sammler visits his nephew Dr Elya Gruner who is in hospital after suffering an aneurysm. Gruner has been giving financial support to Sammler and his daughter Shula, and he is closely concerned with family ties. Sammler assumes that Elya’s wealth comes from Mafia-controlled real-estate investments.

Sammler has survived the end of the war hiding in a Polish mausoleum after surviving execution by a firing squad. He discusses Elya’s slim chances of survival with Elya’s son Wallace, who is an improvident wastrel eager to get hold of his father’s money.

III.   He meets the fantasist Lionel Feffer who claims to be in a money-making scheme with Wallace. Feffer reports the theft of Dr Lal’s. manuscript by Shula and then exhorts from Sammler the story of the thief on the bus. He wants to sell the story to television, and at the same time he also brags about a bogus insurance claim he has made.

Sammler writes to Dr Lal, explaining that the manuscript is safe. He speculates about the interplanetary future of the earth and mankind, then recalls his survival from the Nazi execution squad and killing a German soldier during his escape. At the end of the war he was forced to escape from anti-Semitic attacks by the Poles. More recently, he has been to Israel to cover events in the Six-Day War

IV.   At the hospital Sammler meets Angela who unburdens herself of the problems she has with her father. Sammler reflects on his experience during the Six-Day War, and then is joined by his son-in-law Eisen who wants to be an artist but has only produced worthless junk. Margotte phones to say Dr Lal ‘s manuscript is missing. Sammler promises he will retrieve the manuscript from Shula

V.   En route to the Gruner house Wallace badgers Sammler about the black thief and other sex-related matters. Sammler finds Shula has Xeroxed the manuscript and put copies in safe deposit boxes at Grand Central Station. Margotte arrives with Dr Lal, who engages Sammler in a friendly discussion about H.G. Wells and space exploration. Their discussion then goes on to metaphysical considerations of human personality – which is interrupted by a flood of water caused by Wallace hunting for his father’s money, supposedly hidden somewhere in the house. When the fire brigade arrive Sammler goes outside and recalls his earlier visit to the Six-Day War and its heavy death toll.

VI.   Next day Sammler reflects
on the other characters – Shula, Wallace, and Elya. He is frustrated by a series of delays preventing his return to New York. He wishes to rejoin the terminally sick Elya, who has some unfinished business to discuss with him. Lal’s manuscript is located, but there is no copy of it.

En route to the hospital the car is held up by a street confrontation in which Feffer photographs the black thief on the bus. The thief demands the camera, but is fought off by Feffer’s accomplice Eiser, who clubs him with a bag of cheap iron medallions. Sammler is upset by the incident.

At the hospital Angela reports that Wallace has crashed a plane whilst taking photographs of houses. Sammler and Angela argue about her refusal to apologise to her father. Shula telephones to say she has found Elya’s Mafia money hidden at the house – and meanwhile Elya has died.

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Mr Sammler’s Planet – characters

Artur Sammler	a 70 year old Polish Jewish survivor of the Holocaust
Shula-Slawa	his slightly deranged divorced daughter who collects junk
Margotte Arkin	Sammler’s politically argumentative niece
Ussher Arkin	Margotte’s husband, killed in a plane crash
Dr Elya Gruner	Sammler’s nephew a retired gynaecologist and real estate owner
Angela Gruner	Gruner’s daughter, a sex pot
Wallace Gruner	Gruner’s son, ‘a high-IQ idiot’
Dr V. Govinda Lal	a professor of biophysics
Lionel Feffer	Sammler’s ex-student, a boastful spiv
Walter Bruch	Sammler’s nephew, a musicologist
Eisen	Shula’s estranged husband

© Roy Johnson 2017

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More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
More on short stories
Twentieth century literature

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Ravelstein (2000) was Saul Bellow’s last novel. It follows a pattern established by his earlier work, Humboldt’s Gift (1975) in being a fictional character sketch based on one of his real-life friends. In this case the novel is a homage to Allan Bloom, a philosopher and cultural theorist colleague with whom he collaborated at the University of Chicago.

And like the earlier work it is also a double portrait, since we learn as much about the first-person narrator, his biographer ‘Chick’, as we do about the subject Ravelstein. There is every reason to believe that Chick is a fictionalised version of Saul Bellow – who like Chick is a distinguished intellectual beset by problems with women, old age, and money.

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Ravelstein – critical comment

Biography

The novel raises interesting problems in the relationship between imaginative fiction and the lives of real historical human beings. Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow were colleagues at the University of Chicago, and like their fictional counterparts (Ravelstein and Chick) they ran joint seminars on political and social philosophy.

It is quite clear that, apart from changing a few names, Bellow makes little attempt to hide or blur the distinctions between fiction and reality. The novel becomes a sort of memoir-cum-documentary, and it should be said that it is very much a ‘campus novel’. Ravelstein might be a larger-than-life character – but the depiction of university life is perfectly credible. Ravelstein is hated by his colleagues because of his cleverness, and because he has produced a best-selling book.

Ravelstein promotes the interests of his favoured students, who remain faithful to him when they pass on to employment in the institutions of government and state. And both he and his friend Chick hold the rest of the staff in lofty disregard, honouring only a few eccentrics and originals.

Some of the more amusing excesses are clearly exaggerations of Allan Bloom’s personal idiosyncrasies. However, the difficulty for most readers is that the boundaries between literary invention and documentary memoir are quite blurred. Ravelstein is technically a fictional character, and should be interpreted as such – but the gravitational pull towards regarding the events and opinions of the novel as representing an accurate portrait of Allan Bloom are almost too strong to resist.

The novel was controversial when it was first published – largely because it presented a frank depiction of Allan Bloom’s homosexuality, which had not been widely recognised previously. Even more so, the novel presents an unsparing depiction of his death from HIV-AIDS, which many commentators felt was an unwarranted trespass upon his privacy.

Bellow’s defence is built in to the novel itself. Bloom (Ravelstein) had asked Bellow (‘Chick’) to write a memoir which was truthful and did not hold back on any unpleasant details. Both writers are now dead – so the debate on taste and accuracy can take place with time and distance from the historical events.

The subject

The novel is an amusing and very entertaining character study of the larger-than-life university professor Ravelstein. It is also a portrait of his friend ‘Chick’, the fellow academic who is composing the fictional memoir. Ravelstein is trying to keep alive classical erudition in the face of cultural vulgarity and what we now call ‘political correctness’.

Chick casts himself as a supportive colleague who appreciates Ravelstein’s ‘greatness of soul’ and who struggles in his own social wake of previous wives, financial problems, and worries about his own cultural identity. What they have in common, and what becomes the gradually emerging subject of the novel is their Jewishness. As Ravelstein approaches death he becomes more and more concerned with the standards against which he measures the people. He is particularly acute at spotting the faintest traces of anti-Semitism, and holds every suspect up against their record of political allegiance in the 1930s and the Second World War.

Chick is initially sceptical about Ravelstein’s demanding standards, but he too eventually reflects on the very big issues of Jewish identity in the twentieth century:

I’m thinking of the great death populations of the Gulags and the German labour camps. Why does the century—I don’t know how else to put it—underwrite so much destruction.

This is the real subject of the novel – and what makes it a powerful statement, almost a summation of Saul Bellow’s work over a quarter of a century. These are major world issues, and he does not shrink from including the Gulag with Auschwitz and Treblinka

In connection with the issue of race and American society, it might be worth mentioning 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 who exploited and persecuted them.

He was not obliged to cover every racial issue in the flux of American life in this one novel. But it is slightly surprising that the close parallels between European Jewish immigrants (fleeing from persecution) and Africans (imprisoned in a slave culture) did not occur to him as a fruitful point of comparison.

Structhure

The first three quarters of the novel are entirely homogeneous. The subject matter, tone, and location are skilfully integrated and fluently handled. But then following the death of Ravelstein there are switches in location and subject, which severely disrupt the unity of the novel’s effect.

At this point Ravelstein disappears as the central figure of interest, and the geographic location switches from Boston to the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. What was a study in intellectual history, a comic study of academic life, and a meditation on death becomes a satirical critique of shoddy popular tourism.

This part of the story leads to Chick’s gastric poisoning and his own confrontation with near-death. In this sense there is a continuity of the theme of ‘meditations on death’. But then the final scenes of the novel are packed with Chick’s hallucinatory fantasies which add very little to the novel’s central concerns.

Bellow describes Chick’s close encounter rather than lingering over the details of Ravelstein’s final days – and the parallels of the two acute medical experiences help to rescue the book’s structure in its final stages. But there is a very unnerving narrative wobble for fifty pages which almost ruins the book’s final effect.

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Ravelstein – study resources

Ravelstein – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Ravelstein – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Ravelstein – Library of America – Amazon UK

Ravelstein – 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

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Ravelstein – plot synopsis

Abe Ravelstein and his colleague Chick are academics from Chicago staying at the Hotel Crillon in Paris. Ravelstein wants someone to write an account of his life before he dies. His older friend Chick reflects on the nature of biography. Ravelstein is rich, successful, and has connections in high places.

Ravelstein has very expensive tastes in food, clothes, and home decor. Previously he was in debt, but Chick persuaded him to write a popular book on political philosophy. It was a big success and made him wealthy – but he has remained unpopular with his colleagues. In Paris Ravelstein buys an expensive jacket, but then spills coffee on it.

Chick is tolerant of his foibles, because he feels that Ravelstein has important issues in view and is maintaining high standards in cultural values. At the same time however, Ravelstein throws pizza parties and invites his students to watch sport on television, meanwhile taking phone calls from state department insiders on the progress of the Gulf War.

Chick’s English colleague Battle thinks that Ravelstein is looking even more ill than normal. Chick reveals that Ravelstein had an attack of an unspecified disease (HIV-AIDS) whilst in Paris. He recovers slowly, continuing to smoke whilst in hospital.

Ravelstein buys an expensive BMW for his lover Nikki. Whilst waiting for his discharge from the clinic, Chick reads a biography of John Maynard Keynes, which is focussed on Jews present at the Armistice negotiations in 1919 and anti-Semitism amongst the participants. Chick also reveals being divorced by his previous wife Vela.

Ravelstein arrives back from the clinic in a hospital bed, severely disabled by AIDS. Chick reflects on his childhood and what he has learned from life. Ravelstein was critical and jealous of Chick’s earlier marriage to Vela. He also criticises Chick as a fellow Jew for escaping into what he regards as a phoney arcadia of New Hampshire. And he is scathing about Chick’s socialising with a Balkan charmer who was a pre-war Nazi sympathiser.

Both Chick’s brothers die, and Vela sues him for divorce. Ravelstein again asks Chick to write his memoir. Chick prectises by producing sketches of their colleagues Rackmiel Kogan and Morris Herbst. Battle and his wife visit Ravelstein for advice about their planned suicide pact. Chick and Ravelstein discuss the onset of death and what it means.

Six years later Ravelstein is dead. Chick has problems starting his memoir. Instead, he considers mass exterminations in Russia and Germany in the twentieth century. He recalls Ravelstein’s last days and their discussions of anti-Semitic writers Kipling and Céline.

As he approaches death, Ravelstein turns to his Judaism and urges Chick to do the same. Chick reflects on ‘the final solution’.

After Ravelstein’s death, Chick and Rosamund take a vacation in the Caribbean. It is supposed to be a paradise of relaxation, but Chick describes it as a ‘tropical slum’. He falls ill with an infection that becomes quite serious. They fly back to Boston where he is taken into intensive care with pneumonia. He becomes delirious and starts hallucinating and at one point is put into a strait-jacket. He almost dies, but revives with the help of doctors and his wife Rosamund. On recovery he realises that he owes it to Ravelstein to start work on the memoir.

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Ravelstein – principal characters

Abe Ravelstein	a professor of philosophy and classics at the University of Chicago
Tay Lang (“Nikki”)	Ravelstein’s Malaysian gay lover
’Chick’	Ravelstein’s old friend at Chicago – the narrator
Vela	Chick’s previous wife, a chaos theorist
Rosamund	Chick’s current wife and former student
Radu Grielescu	a Balkan charmer and former fascist

© Roy Johnson 2017

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