Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  Others were more openly approving. Fast’s fiction led to his being awarded the Stalin peace prize in 1954, at the height of the Cold War. Two years later, as for other fellow travellers in the West, the Soviet god failed for Fast with the brutal invasion of Hungary. Although never an open critic, he defected from active Communist partisanship and became what might be called a ‘fellow floater’. In addition to his many historical novels, Fast wrote a string of detective novels as ‘E. V. Cunningham’, featuring the Japanese-American detective, Masao Masuto. Fast’s most comprehensive effort in fiction is the socialist-realist trilogy comprising The Immigrants (1977), Second Generation (1978) and The Establishment (1979). The multi-volume saga covers the interlocking fortunes of four families (WASP, Irish Catholic, Jewish, Chinese) over the course of a hundred years in San Francisco. The central character, Dan Lavette, who builds a corporate empire, marries a Nob Hill heiress, but remains emotionally attached to his oriental mistress. The six-part sequence did well and supplied Fast with a comfortable last few years to what had been a turbulent life. Those last years were passed in Connecticut. He had never received a penny, he liked to say, which had not been earned by ‘the sweat of my brow’ – just like, he might have said, his most famous creation:

  This, then, is Spartacus, who does not know the future and has no cause to remember the past, and it has never occurred to him that those who toil shall ever do other than toil, nor has it occurred to him that there will ever be a time when men do not toil with the lash across their backs.

  If he knew nothing else, Fast knew the lash.

  FN

  Howard Melvin Fast

  MRT

  Spartacus

  Biog

  A. MacDonald, Howard Fast: a Critical Companion (1996)

  207. Saul Bellow 1915–2005

  Fiction is the higher autobiography.

  Born Solomon Belov, near Montreal in Canada, Bellow’s family was first-generation immigrant, embarked from St Petersburg. Originating in the Baltic states, his father got to Russia on forged papers. More forged papers (fictions, if one wants to be ingenious) had enabled the Belovs to get to the New World in 1913. Saul was the only one of the four children to be born there, but aged eight, he was hospitalised for six months with breathing problems. He read precociously in English and dated his lifelong love affair with literature from those months of enforced idleness. Relatively well off in Russia, Saul’s father, Abram, kept the family afloat in the New World with a variety of menial jobs. At one particularly low point, he was a bootlegger – supplying liquor to the Prohibition-parched US. After the disastrous hijacking of a consignment, which led to Abram being severely beaten up, the family followed the booze to Chicago – Bellow’s home town as it was to be – in the early 1920s. They had relatives there. Yiddish was spoken at home; English in the world outside.

  Bellow’s youth in Chicago – a wild city in those Prohibition and Depression years – is depicted vividly in The Adventures of Augie March (1953). The early sections of that novel are dominated by Augie’s mother. Bellow’s mother Liza (manifestly Mrs March) died when he was seventeen. A devout woman, she had wanted her youngest child to be a violinist or a rabbi. His later relationship with Judaism was always vexed. Music, however, was second only to literature as the love of his life – he was more faithful to it than to any woman. But his father did not encourage his son’s musical or literary bents: ‘You write and then you erase,’ he once said, ‘You call that a profession?’

  At the city’s universities (Chicago and Northwestern) Bellow studied literature and anthropology. This was the period of the ‘numerus clausus’ when Jews were regarded as troublesomely clever outsiders and their entrance was restricted. There were no American-Jewish writers on the American university literary syllabus and the head of his English department, Walter Blair, advised Bellow not to pursue graduate studies in English: ‘You’ve got a very good record, but I wouldn’t recommend that you study English. You weren’t born to it.’ Another version of the story has it that Bellow was coolly informed, ‘No Jew could really grasp the tradition of English literature.’ Dubious as that was, even then (Lionel Trilling would conclusively disprove the proposition at Columbia), Bellow evidently felt something along the lines of ‘Well, then, damn you, I’ll create a new literary tradition.’ Defiance is the driving force in all his writing, and his life. It is expressed, fists clenched against the world, in the famous opening declaration of Augie March:

  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 Heraclitus, 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.

  In other words, I’ll do it my way, to quote another great Canadian (Paul Anka, if you didn’t guess).

  Bellow graduated from Northwestern in 1937 in the depths of the Depression. It ‘helped’, he later maintained, in that there was no Lorelei of a profession (a real job) to distract him. His aim, from the first, was to be a writer but he kept body and soul together with short-term teaching jobs. He always felt at home in universities, but never let himself be owned by one – even, in later life, Chicago. Tenure was for hacks. He was at this period moving between Chicago and New York – his next home town. For a year, 1943–4, he worked in the office of the Encyclopedia Britannica (richly evoked in Augie March) on a ‘Great Books’ project. An attempt to join the US Navy was turned down on the grounds that he was Canadian. An attempt to join the Canadian Army was also unsuccessful, this time on health grounds (he had a hernia). Eventually Bellow was accepted by the US Merchant Marine. He was still training when the bomb dropped and it was all over.

  His first published novel, Dangling Man (1944) is set in this war-time limbo (the title evokes Villon’s poem, written before he was hanged, ‘Ballade des pendus’). Dangling Man is a journal novel by ‘Joseph’ (evoking ‘Joseph K.’ in Franz Kafka’s The Trial). Unable to face the agonising freedom of ‘dangling’, Joseph embraces ‘flunkeydom’ (what Philip Larkin elsewhere calls ‘the toad work’) – employment he despises. He does not, he concludes, ‘do well alone’, but loneliness, he accepts, is the human condition. Already Bellow’s ‘freewheeling’ style and his preference for Chekhovian brevity is evident – as is his preoccupation with self. Saul Bellow was always, in some form, Saul Bellow’s subject matter.

  After the war, Bellow again took up short-contract teaching positions at various universities across the US. His second published novel, The Victim (1947), ponders anti-Semitism and anomie. The central character is Asa Leventhal. A Pooterish figure, working at a menial level in a publishing house, Leventhal is David Riesman’s ‘Lonely Crowd’ personified. ‘A small gray masterpiece’, V. S. Pritchett called the novel. He might write novels about cosmic loneliness but Bellow was part of a vibrant social network in the 1940s. He was by now prominent in the Greenwich Village scene which was redefining American modern culture. His Chicago youth was celebrated in the first of his novels to draw widespread critical attention, The Adventures of Augie March (1953). ‘Bildungsroman’ and ‘picaresque’ were two terms American reviewers reached for in describing it. The action is set during the Depression years: Augie is born into a Jewish family which is falling apart. His mother is terminally disabled, and he is close to none of his siblings. Augie rejects the ‘Russian’ past which an older generation would impose on him and takes on the world. Bellow’s narrative, as Alfred Kazin noted, is flavoured with burlesque and idioms as sharp as the Yiddish of his childhood home.

  By this stage Bellow had formally repudiated Europe, after a spell on a Guggenheim fellowship in post-war Paris, where he wrote the first part of Augie March and discovered Jean-Paul Sartre to be a ‘con’ (the American, not French word – although both might be applicable). Bellow was now the darli
ng of the New York intellectual elite, conscious as they were that the era of the Southern novelists (Faulkner, Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter) had passed. As ever, the Great American Novel was in prospect and Saul Bellow was being groomed as the great (Jewish) American novelist. There were those who objected to what they saw as literary politicking. Norman Podhoretz reviewed Augie March sceptically in Commentary. In his indiscreet memoir, Making It, Podhoretz relates being approached at a literary party by a drunk and told: ‘We’ll get you for that review if it takes ten years.’ Bellow himself was mortally affronted.

  In 1956 Bellow published Seize the Day, a work which has clear resemblances to Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, with the difference that Bellow is unafraid to make his salesman protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm, clearly Jewish; something that Miller was too nervous, or too calculating, to do with Willy Loman. Bellow’s fantasia, the strangely Rider Haggard-like Henderson the Rain King (1959), about an American millionaire (enriched by pig-farming) who does a burlesque Hemingway in Africa, widened his international readership despite a slashing review in the New York Times, which pronounced the novel ‘silly’ and Henderson ‘a bore cursed with the most embarrassing flow of fancy talk in a library of recent fiction. Henderson’s ravings are almost enough to make one yearn for Tarzan’s subhuman dialogue (“I Tarzan. You Jane.”).’ None the less it was the comically quixotic Gene Henderson whom Bellow regarded himself as closest to.

  Bellow heeded the warning, and reined in his grotesquerie. With Herzog (1964), and its protagonist Moses Herzog, he tuned the Bellovian ‘voice’ which distinctively marks the fiction of the novelist’s prime – a kind of eloquent rant against the times, the United States, the human condition and the universe. Cuckolded by his best friend, Moses lets off steam with letters to, among others, President Eisenhower. The result is a blend of the classic epistolary novel and the Marx Brothers. The funniest of his creations, Herzog ends, unfunnily, ‘At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.’

  Humboldt’s Gift (1975) is a depiction of the literary life, with all the complexities (principally those to do with sexual relationships) that frustrate creativity. At this point in his career, Bellow’s fiction becomes even more autobiographical and the tenor of his thought more radically conservative. Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970) has a hero who is a Holocaust survivor and a jaundiced eye for young radicals and the decay of American civility. Bellow is estimated to have won more prizes than any other American novelist. The award of the Nobel Prize in 1976 would not, he insisted, sink him under its gravestone weight. Nor did it. But it complicated his writing. The dilemmas of establishment fame are depicted, ironically as ever, in The Dean’s December (1982).

  Bellow recorded himself as being poor until his early forties, and not rich until his later years. Alimony and child support drained those riches. He married five times (James Atlas, his biographer, believes that Bellow needed the crack-up of a good divorce to get his creative juices flowing for the next novel) and was analysed four times (like divorce, an expensive luxury). His later work is, much of it, concerned with the pathos of ageing, in such works as More Die of Heartbreak (1987) and The Actual (1997). One of the Partisan Review circle, Bellow had dabbled with Trotskyism in the wild days of his youth. In age he veered as far to the opposite political position. The older he got the less Bellow seemed to like the world he inhabited. He was often accused of racism and prejudice and seemed at times pugnaciously to invite controversy. In a New Yorker interview in 1988, he notoriously asked, apropos of Black and Multicultural Studies, ‘Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?’ When, in 1993, he left Chicago to take up a lectureship at Boston University, a delegation went to the Boston Globe and asked if they knew that the city was harbouring a racist. ‘Banned in Boston,’ as they used to say.

  He remained unusually vigorous in his old age, becoming a father (with the last and youngest of the mothers of his children) in his mid-eighties. It was at this period that he produced his late, and controversial, masterpiece, Ravelstein (2000), a portrait of the artist as a very old man. The Abe Ravelstein of the title was everywhere recognised to be the author’s close friend and colleague at Chicago University, Allan Bloom, the author of the bestselling jeremiad, The Closing of the American Mind (1987, 1994) – ‘woe upon this philistine country!’ Equally, the narrator Chick was recognised to be Saul Bellow. Bloom, a homosexual and, according to the novel, an odiously self-indulgent sybarite, had died in 1997 – of Aids, the novel asserted.

  Ravelstein provoked indignant protest on two counts. First, that Bellow had ‘outed’ Bloom, whom he claimed to love, which was disloyal. Secondly, that there was no evidence Bloom had in fact died of Aids (something that after the novel’s publication Bellow accepted), or that he bore any resemblance to the À Rebours, Des Esseintes-like hedonist that Bellow had portrayed. On the surface, nothing very much happens in the novel except hospitals, Jewish jokes and talk. A lot of Ravelstein is like overhearing two old codgers rabbit on about what it is like to be two old codgers. But major themes gradually emerge. The novel explores, in its attractively rambling way, two dauntingly large and touchy themes: death and American Jewishness. ‘What is it to die?’ the old men ask each other. ‘No more pictures’ is the best they can come up with.

  FN

  Saul Bellow (born Solomon Belov)

  MRT

  Herzog

  Biog

  J. Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (2000)

  208. Herman Wouk 1915–

  I felt there’s a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I’d be a jerk not to take advantage of it.

  Wouk (pronounced ‘Woke’) was born in New York, the son of first-generation Russian Jewish immigrants. He was raised in the Bronx, and at the precocious age of sixteen went to Columbia University, graduating in 1934. At college Wouk edited Columbia’s humour magazine, the Jester. An account of his childhood and young manhood during the Depression and New Deal years is given in The City Boy (1948) and, in greater detail, in Inside, Outside (1985). Wouk’s first employment was in radio and from 1936 to 1941 he was a gag writer for the comedian Fred Allen – this furnished the background to his novel, Aurora Dawn (1947). Snappy dialogue was to be a strength in his subsequent fiction. After a brief hiatus working for the US Treasury, he joined the US Naval Reserve in 1942, seeing active service (winning four campaign stars) on destroyer minesweepers and rising to the rank of lieutenant. It was on board ship that he began writing his first serious fiction in 1943, advised by his former Columbia teacher, Irwin Edman.

  Wouk was discharged in 1946, having married his sweetheart, Betty Brown, the previous year; they were to have three sons. On re-entering civilian life, Wouk became a full-time writer. Aurora Dawn, or, The true History of Andrew Reale (1947) is a satire on hucksterism in the radio industry. Written in a sub-Fieldingesque style, it was found ‘unbearably arch’ by the New Yorker. It was followed the next year by The City Boy: the Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder and his cousin, Cliff (1948). A story of life in the Bronx in the 1920s, the novel is a hommage to Booth Tarkington and Tom Sawyer.

  Wouk was finding his way. He established himself as a bestselling writer of literary substance with his fourth published novel, The Caine Mutiny (1951), subtitled ‘a Novel of World War II’. It narrates the story of a regular-service captain, Philip Queeg, who – after sustaining a protracted mental breakdown – is relieved of his command during a typhoon in which his obstinacy threatens to sink the Caine minesweeper on which they are sailing. The mutineer is a Princeton graduate who has recently joined the service, Willie Keith. In the subsequent court martial, Keith is successfully defended, and Queeg broken down on the witness stand, by a Jewish lawyer, Lieutenant Barney Greenwald. In a stroke of theatre, Greenwald subsequently denounces Keith and praises the Queegs of the US Navy as the saviours of Western civilisation from fascism. It was people like Queeg, he says, who had saved those like his grandmother from becoming soap with which to
wash Goering’s fat backside. Contemporary reviewers were slightly suspicious that – coming as soon as it did after the war – The Caine Mutiny smacked of something less than patriotism. But the novel made the bestseller list and earned its author a Pulitzer Prize. A successful, and faithful, film was made starring Humphrey Bogart as Queeg, in 1954.

  Marjorie Morningstar (1955) is the story of a stunningly beautiful Jewish girl from her late adolescence, through love affairs and a failed stage career, to respectably dull matronhood. It was, in terms of sales, the most popular hardback novel of 1955. Although praised by one critic as a ‘modern Jewish Vanity Fair’, others applied the term ‘soap opera’ (a recurrent slur on Wouk’s fiction) and the New Yorker, never a friend, labelled it ‘a damp and endless tale’. Youngblood Hawke (1961), even longer, is the story of a novelist, transparently based on the life of Thomas Wolfe. It attracted mainly negative reviews, but sold strongly and, like Marjorie Morningstar, was made into a successful film. The ease with which Wouk’s narratives converted to the screen fattened his wallet but did not raise his stock with the literary critics. His love of large, saga-like novels, his workmanlike, realistic narrative technique, and his adherence (in a world destabilised by existentialism and beatnik rebellion) to old-fashioned moral categories led one commentator to label him ‘the only living nineteenth-century novelist’.

  In 1971, Wouk returned to the subject which had been calling him since the early 1950s. The Winds of War (1971) inaugurated his Tolstoyan narrative of the Second World War, based on the career of Victor ‘Pug’ Henry, who rises from the rank of Commander to Admiral, and is an eye-witness to many great events and historical figures (including Churchill, Roosevelt and Hitler). The New York Times affected to find the work ‘long, mildly interesting, moderately informative’, but readers devoured it by the million. It was followed in 1978 by the sequel, War and Remembrance. Taken together, the 2,000-page narrative was – unironically – compared by the Christian Science Monitor to Thucydides, although the by now familiar ‘soap opera’ criticisms were levelled by less respectful commentators. The two novels were given vast popular currency by the fifteen-hour TV ‘miniseries’ made of them in 1983 and 1989. Wouk’s subsequent work, Inside, Outside (1985), a story of ‘being Jewish’ in America; The Hope (1993) and The Glory (1994) – two fictional accounts of the history of post-1947 Israel – reveal his twin interests in using fiction to explore his personal heritage and the vast geopolitical events of the twentieth century. In the 2008 presidential election, John McCain divulged that his favourite author was Herman Wouk. Obama went for Philip Roth. How many votes it swung either way is hard to say.