Trying to enjoy Bellow

Saul Bellow has the kind of literary reputation that makes you feel guilty if you don't enjoy his work -- Nobel Prize, Pulitzer prize, and three Natonal Book awards. And he has continued to produce new work for the 25 years since winning the Nobel.

He's the kind of author that wakes you up to the fact that the enjoyment of fiction is, in fact, a subjective matter: there are no absolute standards. For this reader, his works are hard to read and easy to forget. They are "hard" not because of complexity, but rather because of the lack of anything compelling -- in character or plot -- to get you involved and pull you along. You read them because you feel you should. It's hard work overcoming the boredom. And when you're done, the work seems to be for naught, because even the books with the best reputation -- like Herzog and Augie March -- are totally forgettable.

There are exceptions: the wacky quirky exuberant creativity of Henderson the Rain King is great fun. And Humboldt's Gift has an interesting plot and interesting characters.

But Bellow's central characters typically wallow in their mental misery rather than trying to get out of it. They define themselves by their misery, they cling to it. They are mental masochists, who make themselves miserable and then act proud of their suffeing, as if Prometheus had chained himself to his rock. They are the sort of people that I would go out of my way to avoid, who I'd never want to have to listen to.

Their claim to fame seems to come from an identification of their personal woes with the state of modern civilization. Their personal problems of identity become society's problems -- or at least that's what the critics claim.

Perhaps some of his appeal, back in the 1950s and 1960s, came from the fact that his approach to fiction was the complete opposite of the materialist realism of the Soviets. Others might show characters being shaped by their environment. Bellow's characters seem almost self-constructed, figments of their own imaginations. Their self is their destiny. They are who they are, and they shape the world around them based on what goes on in their minds. Their heroic misery is largely self-inflicted.

His approach, perhaps, also felt fresh and new because it was the opposite of freudianism. His characters remember the past not to free themselves from it, to cure themselves of psychological damage caused by past events. Rather they remember in order to savor the pain over and over again, to value it, and to value themselves as sensitive, suffering individuals.

In his latest novel, Ravelstein, we get a double dose of Bellow, with two central characters, both authors -- one playing Boswell to the other. But there is nothing admirable about Ravelstein, an author at the peak of success. He is a totally disgusting, self-centered pedant, who treats his "friend" like an annoying pet. And the friend is only memorable for his lack of self-confidence and lack of gumption. You don't care that Ravelstein is dying, you just wish he'd hurry up and get it over with.

So why do I keep going back for more? In part, it's an aftermath of having gone to Yale in the 1960s, when Bellow's reputation was huge. The opinions of professors from back then still loom large, and my inability to appreciate Bellow still feels like a defect on my part -- a fault I should try to fix. And in part it's because his fans are so eloquent. For instance, in the Oct. 9, 2000, issue of The New Yorker, Philip Roth eulogizes Bellow's works (but doesn't mention Ravelstein) in "Re-reading the Novels of Saul Bellow." His accounts of Bellow's novels are fascinating. For instance,

"In Augie March, a very grand, assertive, freewheeling conception of both the novel and the world the novel represents breaks loose from all sorts of self-imposed strictures, the beginner's principles of compositon are subverted, and, like the character of Five Properties in Augie March, the writer is himself 'hipped on superabundance'."

And again "The character of Moses Herzog, that labyrinth of contradiction and self-division -- the wild man and the earnest person with a 'Biblical sense of personal experience' and an innocence as phenomenal as his sophistication, intense yet passive, reflective yet impulsive, sane yet insane, emotional, complicated, an expert on pain vibrant with feeling and yet disarmingly simple, a clown in his vengeance and rage, a fool in whom hatred breeds comedy, a sage and knowing scholar in a treacherous world, yet still adrift in the great pool of childhood love, trust, and excitement in things (and hopelessly attached to this condition), an aging lover of enormous vanity and narcissism with a lovingly harsh attitude toward himself, whirling in the wash cycle of a rather generous self-awareness while at the same time aesthetically attracted to anyone vivid, overpoweringly drawn to bullies and bosses, to theatrical know-it-alls, lured by their seeming certainty and by the raw authority of their unambiguity, feeding on their intensity until he's all but crushed by it -- this Herzog is Bellow's grandest creation, American literature's Leopold Bloom, except with a difference: in 'Ulysses,' the encyclopedic mind of the author is transmuted into the linguistic flesh of the novel, and Joyce never cedes to Bloom his own great erudition, intellect, and breadth of rhetoric, whereas in 'Herzog' Bellow endows his hero with all of that, not only with a state of mind and a cast of mind but with a mind that is a mind."

What serious reader could possibly resist a book described with such exuberant and loving eloquence? I would love to read the books that Roth describes. Unfortunately, I have read them already, and, to me, they bear no resemblance at all to these descriptions.

I got another very different view of Bellow from the book-sized periodical Granta -- issue #41 "Biography." That included an excerpt from an early unfinished and previously unpublished autobiographical novel of Bellow's -- "Memoir's of a Bootlegger's Son" -- and also a biographical essay by James Atlas about Bellow's early years as a struggling unknown author. In those pieces I find it easy to sympathize with and get involved in the struggles of the young Bellow -- to cheer him on and hope he might overcome the impossible odds he faces. And it seems totally extraordinary that this ambitious and talented nobody from nowhere became today's cultural icon.

But despite this marvelous and unlikely success story, Saul Bellow, today's grand-old-man of American letters, remains, for me, an author who drains, rather than one who refreshes and restores, an author whose works you read because you feel you must, even though you don't enjoy them.

PS -- I just read Mr. Sammler's Planet. Much of it is a setup for conversation between Mr. Sammler and Govinda Lal about the nature of man, and followup observations about what makes a "good man," somewhat like a Plato dialogue, somewhat like My Dinner at Andre's. It works remarkably well.

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