Looking at Saul Bellow (1915-2005)

115 Looking at Saul Bellow (1915–2005) The backbone of twentieth-century American literature has been provided by two novelists—William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the twentieth century. For me as a writer The Adventures of Augie March remains the most inspiring American novel I’ve ever read. Nobody has topped Bellow at writing a novel about a city-bred American and probably nobody will. —Philip Roth, 5 April 2005, on the death of Saul Bellow Unlike those of us who came howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair and teeth, speaking coherently. At twenty-six he is skillful, witty, and energetic and performs like a virtuoso. [. . .] My advice to Mr. Roth is to ignore all objections and to continue on his present course. —Saul Bellow, July 1959, review of Goodbye, Columbus Editor’s Note: On the evening of 5 April 2005, I was putting the final touches on a paper that I was to deliver at the 19th annual MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.) Conference in Chicago. It was then, checking an online news source to discover the weather in the Windy City, that I learned of the passing of Saul Bellow. He had died earlier that day, and it struck me as a somber coincidence that in less than forty-eight hours, I would be in the city of Augie March. Bellow had not lived in Chicago for many years, but I was hoping to find a bit of him present at the conference. I did not. There were no papers on Bellow—he has never been the most popular figure among MELUS members, and besides, he had said many times that he disliked being called a Jewish, or “ethnic,” writer—but nonetheless, many there privately expressed their grief over the death of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist. Among friends, we talked between panels and over meals, sharing our various histories and experiences reading his works. It was not a scholarly eulogy, surely no organized retrospective , but it helped us to place the significance of Bellow in our reading lives. For this issue of Philip Roth Studies, I have asked a number of friends and colleagues to do just this: share their thoughts on Bellow, what he meant to us personally and what he meant to the literary world, including his influence on Philip Roth. As for me, it was through the novels and stories of Bellow that I first came to know Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint. He was my “gateway” to Roth. His name always seemed to be linked to Roth’s (and to Bernard Malamud’s—Bellow served as a gateway there as well), so perhaps my work with this journal is a logical outgrowth of my fascination with The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet. His fingerprints are here and all over the literary world, in places we cannot 116 Philip Roth Studies Fall 2005 Author Saul Bellow, from the July 1958 issue of the Northwestern University Alumni News. Photograph courtesy of the Northwestern University Archives. Bellow Philip Roth Studies 117 even detect. Roth apparently sensed them throughout his writing career, for he felt the need to issue an official statement, through his agent, the day after Bellow’s death. Those of us associated with Philip Roth Studies feel the same. Consider the paragraphs that follow a testimony to Saul Bellow’s legacy. —Derek Parker Royal * * * I was in graduate school when The Adventures of Augie March appeared. I remember my pleased astonishment when this “Jewish novel” received a rave front-page review in the New York Times Book Review and glowing acknowledgments in all the other literary publications. In those years following World War II, the New Criticism reigned supreme, and “serious students” of literature were expected to concentrate on English, not American, literature and certainly not on any contemporary work. Time was needed, our professors assured us, for a poem, play, or novel to gain major literary status. Indeed, my professors at both UCLA and USC (Ivy League and Johns Hopkins PhDs, for the most part...