BELLOW'S AUGIE AT SIXTY

3 0 Y B E L L O W ’ S A U G I E A T S I X T Y D A V I D M I K I C S ‘‘In American literature there were all these strange and homeless solitaries, motherless and fatherless creatures like Natty and Huck and Ishmael. Didn’t they know where life came from and returned to?’’ The question was asked by Irving Howe in ‘‘Strangers ,’’ a 1977 essay about the Jewish immigrants who, like Howe himself, had grown up speaking Yiddish at home but reading and writing American English, who couldn’t stop devouring the great American books but all the time wondered why their own lives were so crowded with family (its happiness, its aches and moanings , its staggering disputes) while the lives they were reading about were so stranded and lonely. All the proud Emersonian declarations of individualism, whether pioneer or New England genteel, seemed, by pledging the sublime benefits of isolation, to be a doubtful bill of goods to these hopeful Jewish authors and intellectuals: a denial of mishpocheh and neighborhood, of the speech-fed chaos that they breathed in and out all day long. One of the Jewish newcomers who wrestled with the question Howe raised – how could the Jews, the people of home and family, fit into American fiction, with its outward-bound loners? – was Saul Bellow, who was born Solomon Bellows in Quebec in 1915 3 1 R and smuggled nine years later under the unwatchful eyes of border police to dark, immigrant-packed, blustery Chicago. Bellow in his remarkable writing career would explore the intersection of Jewish and American, the home-bound mensch and the lone adventurer . The work that catapulted Bellow into his position as our greatest Jewish-American author was The Adventures of Augie March, which appeared sixty years ago, in September 1953. Augie March was a revelation to writers and readers of American fiction: it was looser, more energetic, more packed with nervous excitement than anything they had seen before. Augie was a constantly surprising all-night party in book form, a riposte to the staid New Yorker fiction of its day (in a 1951 essay on Dreiser, Bellow attacked ‘‘the ‘good’ writing of The New Yorker’’: ‘‘Finally what emerges is a terrible hunger for conformism and uniformity’’). Bellow distanced himself too from the ongoing, artless furies of the Beats: his was a fashioned vividness. Bellow, in his long writing career, discovered that the solitary traveler and the family man could mingle in odd, unprecedented ways; so did Howe, who in his ‘‘Strangers’’ essay jokingly unmasks Melville’s Ishmael as a mama’s boy. He’s really the Isaac of Genesis , Howe claims, doted on endlessly by his mother, Sarah, but he remakes himself into a wild man headed for the far seas: an Ishmael stirred by the jumbled, dangerous world that will lure him away from home forever. Ishmael-Isaac lights out for the territories, but within him all the while is his covenant with the things he first knew, the childhood memories that tell all. So in Bellow, too, every exotic explorer and every intellectual high-flyer feels the tug of home. Nostalgia binds us all back to our earliest years. Bellow’s father was a bootlegger, a baker, and, later, a coalyard owner. His brothers became businessmen: his eldest brother, Morrie , was a hard, echt Chicago get-ahead man who boasted about money and slapped the shoulders of famous gangsters. Bellow, by contrast, early on sensed his readiness for a cash-poor writer’s career, and was much mocked by Morrie on account of his teenage cultural pretensions. He spent his free days at the public library reading Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, and considering ways that a Jewish boy who spoke Yiddish, English, and French, who played stickball and kick-the-can in the streets of Humboldt Park 3 2 M I K I C S Y (a Jewish enclave), might compare with these two working-class masters of American letters. Bellow especially loved Dreiser. He valued the way Dreiser put his arms around his characters, was so eager to accept and understand them no matter how...