Saul Bellow:

An appreciation of The Adventutres of Augie March and Herzog

By Lee Andrew Weiss

When Saul Bellow passed away in April 2005 at the age of 89, he left behind his fifth wife and four children—the eldest born in 1944, the youngest, in 1999. He also left behind eighteen books, (beginning with Dangling Man in 1944 and concluding with the masterful Ravelstein in 2000) novels, novellas, short story collections, and occasional journalism. Like most of America’s best writers he was an autodidact. An omnivorous reader, he, like his Augie March, shaped himself freestyle, as he saw fit. Born in Montreal, fluent in French, he traveled widely, lived in the Midwest, New York, New England, Paris.

Bellow grew up in, and for long stretches of his life returned to Chicago, the city he most vibrantly recreated in his fiction, especially in major portions of his best novels: The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog.
Bellow’s first published novel, Dangling Man, is a diarist’s account of almost four months during World War II. Joseph, the diarist, is a young man dangling—unemployed, unsure of his place in society, waiting to be drafted into active duty in the Army. His second novel, The Victim,focuses upon Asa Leventhal, a magazine editor in New York City. Leventhal’s wife Mary has gone South for a few weeks to visit her mother. In her absence, Asa struggles with family hardship, anti-Semitism, and a man named Kirby Allbee, who claims he has been victimized by Leventhal, fired because of disrespect Leventhal had shown to Allbee’s boss. Currently without work or home, Allbee shadows Leventhal, gives him a hard time: whether or not Leventhal actually caused any of Allbee’s problems (it’s not entirely clear to the reader), Allbee victimizes Leventhal. The Victim is taut and well executed, but also derivative, with a plot nearly identical to Dostoyevsky’s The Eternal Husband (and also thematically similar to The Double). As influential to Bellow was Flaubert, whose principles of le mot juste, and stylized, tightly controlled narrative are evident in The Victim’s corseted, polished prose. 

Dangling Man and The Victim justly earned Bellow praise in literary circles, but his name was basically unknown to those who didn’t read Partisan Review; both sold poorly and went out of print as their author struggled financially. 

In 1953, Bellow broke through. The Adventures of Augie March, boundless where Dangling Man and The Victim areconfined, is the result. Several hundred pages longer than his first two novels combined, Augie March is a big book, as bold and light-filled and crammed with characters and experiences as Bellow’s earlier novels were contained and claustrophobic and gloomy; like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Augie March is a resounding affirmation of American life. Itoverwhelms the reader with intense, lengthy, jazzy sentences loaded with description atop description, words bursting into image like a fireworks show, each observation immediately following and followed by another. The famous opening paragraph sets the tone:

“I am an American, Chicago-born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitis, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”

With Augie March, Bellow worked past his initial influences in creating something new: the colorful, colloquial, pre- and post-Depression Chicago, America, and beyond that is the backdrop for Augie’s adventures. A picaresque, Augie March is basically unplotted, episodic, a cousin of Don Quixote and Tom Jones, held together by the vibrancy of Bellow’s language, his immense gift for storytelling, and his Dickensian characterizations of eccentrics whom Augie describes collectively as, “persons who persistently arise before me with life counsels and illumination throughout my entire early pilgrimage.”

The son of a weak, nearly blind single mother and an absent father Augie doesn’t really remember, he and his brothers Simon and Georgie were mostly raised by a boarder, Grandma Lausch, who is not a blood relation. Georgie, large and mentally incapacitate, is institutionalized. Lausch has the two able March boys working from the age of twelve; she hoped to sponge off of them once either became a financial success, though her plan never pans out and she ends up in an old folks’ home. To Augie she is, “One of those Machiavellis of small street and neighborhood my young years were full of… Wrinkled as an old paper bag, an autocrat, hard-shelled and Jesuitical, a pouncy old hawk of a Bolshevik… She was impossible to satisfy.” After high school, Augie’s strong, handsome older brother Simon sets off first, in search of a fortune—either earned by his wits, or aided by a wealthy woman. Augie soon follows, though without objective.

“What did I, out of all this, want for myself? I couldn’t have told you… I touched all sides, and nobody knew where I belonged. I had no good idea of that myself.” What is it Augie wants from life? His older brother Simon, as large an influence over Augie as any, wants money, status. As Augie makes his way in the world, it becomes clear that his appetite is for adventure, for knowledge and experience: acquaintance of the book smart and the street smart, of beautiful girls and small-town Machiavellians. And for literature, erudition—Plutarch, Martin Luther, Darwin and so on—his first taste coming from the set of waterstained Harvard Classics he acquires from an early mentor, wheelchair-bound William Einhorn whom Augie calls,“the first superior man I knew.” In Chicago, from adolescence on Augie works at a host of jobs he takes and then quits, including stints as a paperboy, personal assistant, and union organizer. Later, he co-trains an American eagle to hunt iguanas in Mexico with a beautiful heiress he’d previously met at a Lake Michigan resort. He then leaves her for another girl he helps escape from Mexico, Stella Chesney, who later becomes his wife.

Near conclusion, with Augie married to Stella and living in Europe, Augie March rebounds. “Look at me, going everywhere!” Augie says toward the end of these adventures. Now in his thirties, a man of the world (and a successful war profiteer), he is driving from Paris to Bruges. Pages earlier he informs the reader that while sitting at a café in Rome he’d, “written out these memoirs of mine since, as a traveling man, traveling by myself, I have lots of time on my hands… I sat at a table and declared that I was an American, Chicago born, and all these other events and notions.” The story he tells is the book he’s written. So all along perhaps part of him knew he was a writer, his reading and adventures preparation, a search for material for his memoir. Is Augie a reliable narrator? The National Book Award winner for 1954, Augie March was Saul Bellow’s first widespread success. Though not a runaway bestseller, Bellow’s national reputation was established: he was an American writer to watch, a successor to Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck.
By the early 1960s, with Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King also added to his backlist, literary circles and national publications alike were abuzz: Bellow was the focus of numerous articles: praised by V.S. Pritchett, Philip Rahv, Robert Penn Warren and others as America’s best working writer. When John Steinbeck received the1962 Nobel Prize for Literature, he sent Bellow a copy of the program, inscribing it, “You’re Next.” It would be another fourteen years before Steinbeck was proved right, but at the time, Bellow was at work on his best book.

Herzog is Saul Bellow’s masterpiece. Stylistically innovative, it showcases the enormous talents of a first-rate novelist at the height of his powers. Moses Herzog, a character of Shakespearian amplitude, a mind and personality rife with complication and contradiction, gives the novel his surname. Itis the portrait of a man in the middle of life’s journey, told in full. A life of hopes, regrets, imaginations, complications and desires, eloquent, rich with humor and pathos, the literary equivalent of a blue moon, where substance, style and structure meld seamlessly.

From the start, he questions his sanity: “If I am out of my mind, it’s alright with me, thought Moses Herzog.” As with Hamlet, the reader is never quite sure of Herzog’s mental state: does he know a hawk from a handsaw? Herzog cannot make sense of the world—but who can? Where does all this contemplation get you? Moses doesn’t know, but it keeps pouring from him: “For Christ’s sake,” he says, “don’t cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don’t poison everything.” Still, he tries—he cannot help but try to pinpoint his condition, his suffering and confusion and his place in the world:

“And why? Because he let the entire world press upon him. For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist?  Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you-yourself enjoyed old-fashioned values? You—you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.”

A philosophy professor, for years he’s been living off of his reputation; his brilliant PhD thesis and early publications have secured him grants, ensured him teaching appointments, but lately he’s produced little. Obsessively, he writes letters: “endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.” These letters, to his wives, parents, and mistresses, to politicians, professors and philosophers, some heartfelt, some nonsensical, most peppered with wit and erudition, brilliantly and deceptively give Herzog its innovative structure.
When the reader meets Herzog it is the peak of summer and he is alone—“out in the sticks”—in the Berkshires. He’s sunk much of his money into a country house he now shares only with mice. Reviewing his character he sees himself as dreamy, narcissistic, masochistic and anachronistic. Unlike King Lear, he is deeply introspective, knows himself well, though perhaps he knows himself too well, is too self-deprecating:

“His clinical picture was depressive—not the severest type; not a manic depressive. There were worse cripples around… To his son and his daughter he was a loving but bad father. To his own parents he had been an ungrateful child. To his country, an indifferent citizen. To his brothers and his sister, affectionate but remote. With his friends, an egotist. With love, lazy. With brightness, dull. With power, passive. With his own soul, evasive.”

A cuckold, his second wife Madeline has run off with his friend and Berkshire neighbor, Valentine Gersbach. Herzog believes Madeline has treated him as poorly as he had treated his first wife, Daisy. Like Augie March, Moses Herzog travels widely: to New York City, the Hamptons, Europe, the Berkshires, Martha’s Vineyard, Chicago. There are psychologists to see, lawyers to deal with. Wives, parents, children, money, sex. However, Herzog is far more introspective than Augie: a constant questioner, much of the “action” of the novel takes place inside Moses Herzog’sagitated, far-reaching mind.

Utilizing an innovative marriage of first and third persons, (a perfected version of a narrative technique Joyce used for certain sections of Ulysses, with variations employed by Faulkner and Woolf, among others) Herzog is continually moving both backward and forward in time. In the present he questions and attempts to deal with his life as it now is: his crackup, his second wife leaving him, the requests of his first wife Daisy, his legal and financial affairs, his young son Marco and younger daughter June, his attractive mistress Ramona, his more financially successful brothers and sister. In his past he recalls his deceased parents, childhood sexual abuse, growing up in Chicago, the disintegration of his marriages. Shifting, often within the same paragraph, past and present fuse in Herzog’s letters to his mother, his mistress, to Eisenhower and Nietzsche, covering manifold topics: remembrance, request, recommendation, the nature of mankind and suffering and civilization. 
           

In the end, after an eventful trip to Chicago he is back in the Berkshires. For two or three days he does, “nothing but send such messages, and write down songs, psalms, and utterances, putting into words what he had often thought but, for the sake of form, or something of the sort, had always suppressed.” This final binge is cathartic. From page one until the final sentence, this is his first moment of peace. He sits in silence. One of Kafka’s aphorisms fits the occasion:

“It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.”

Nothing has changed, and everything has changed. He has, somehow, made his breakthrough, at least for the time being come to terms with it all. There are still loose ends, problems for Herzog to face if not today then tomorrow. Yet as a cleaning woman stands by him and sweeps clouds of dust from the floor of his long empty house, the reader cannot help but think Herzog a new man, his silence golden. So he sits, satisfied: “At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.”