To Leslie Fiedler, in a letter of October 25, 1953, he complained of having to discuss the novel in such terms: “Though I was always of the opinion that people were hard to give pleasure to, it was nonetheless a shock to see how many suffered from low seriousness—my new favorite description of the ‘earnestness’ of deep readers. What makes people so sober? We’ve sunk a great depth if the funnyman also finds it necessary to be a prophet. I have my own share of low seriousness, of course, but I think of it as a curse.” To Bernard Malamud he complained of people missing “the fun of the book. They suffer from culture-gravity. They say ‘picaresque’ and don’t laugh. The baseball people landing on your Natural with both feet are in the same league.”20 Trilling replied to Bellow in a letter of November 4, 1953. “You mustn’t ignore the doctrinal intention of your book—I mean its cultural, characterological, moral point, whether or not it was consciously made.… I think that the difference between us in our view of what is implied [about function versus fate] makes a sounding cultural fact, which we ought to prize and keep ringing.” The only lightness in Trilling’s letter occurs at the end, where he expresses “great pleasure from seeing Augie on the best-seller list so regularly,” though this “no longer means what it used to, alas.”
IN THE MONOLOGUES as in Augie, not all the risks Bellow takes pay off. On the level of the sentence, colloquialism at times veers into incoherence. Here is Gooley on the Hasbeen charter: “While as to being dry on the chaos waves by the management and steering of wit, haven’t we taken care of that in our charter, declaring nobody can trust knowing the angles to obtain salvation?” (pp. 226–27). There are a number of sentences like this in Augie; they are the price Bellow pays for a prevailing brilliance. The new style was liberating, he later confessed, but “I was incapable at the time of controlling it and it ran away from me.” “Looking back,” he elsewhere explains, “I think I took off too many [restraints], and went too far.… I had just increased my freedom, and like any emancipated plebeian I abused it at once.”21 When asked what the novel was about, he would sometimes answer, “it’s about two hundred pages too long.”22 In mitigation, he could cite American as well as Joycean precedents: not just what Roth calls “the engorged sentences of Melville and Faulkner,”23 but the excesses and irregularities of American naturalism, of Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, James T. Farrell, and John Dos Passos, staples of the courses and lectures Bellow offered while at work on Augie. Dreiser’s influence has already been discussed. While admitting the inelegance of his style, Bellow praised him for “depth of feeling,” “profound respect for his characters,” and the range of his interests. “He was fascinated with everything,” Bellow remarked, an observation that recalls Malamud on Bellow’s ability “to call all things by some name.”24 Dreiser, like Five Properties, like Bellow himself, was “hipped on superabundance” (Augie, p. 406).
The influence of Anderson, Farrell, and Dos Passos is clear from the profiles Bellow wrote of them for the Federal Writers’ Project.25 Anderson’s life as well as his work inspired Bellow. “About 1910, the successful president of a flourishing paint company, he walked abruptly out of his office and never returned.… Now he set out to repudiate and undo those years.” Bellow quotes Anderson’s explanation: “I must quit my buying and selling, the overwhelming feeling of uncleanliness. I was in my whole nature a taleteller. The taleteller cannot bother with buying and selling. To do so will destroy him” (p. 4). After seven novels, Anderson had still not properly expressed his “whole nature,” or as Bellow puts it, he had “still not become too adroit a novelist” (p. 7). Anderson himself said of his early novels, “they were not really mine.”26 In the linked stories of Winesburg, Ohio, however, Anderson “looses himself from the restrictions of the novel and does wholeheartedly the work he is really fitted for. He no longer blunders or struggles among ideas with incomplete mastery, and for the first time he can be read without irksome reservations” (p. 9). Irksome awkwardnesses, however, remain, as Anderson himself admitted. In “An Apology for Crudity,” published in The Dial (November 8, 1917), he declared that the “true novelist is a man gone a little mad with the life of his times.… If he be at all sensitive to the life about him, and that life be crude, the figure that emerges will be crude and will crudely express itself.… We shall, I am sure, have much crude, blundering American writing before the gift of beauty and subtlety in prose shall honestly belong to us.”27
In discussing Winesburg, Ohio, Bellow says less about the crudity of Anderson’s writing than about its strangeness. “Anderson’s characters in Winesburg,” he declares, “are far from being real. They need not be entirely so; they need only be credible. And so, to the point of credibility he exaggerates them” (p. 10), which is what Bellow does with the characters in Augie and in the monologues. Anderson’s characters are often oddly learned, like Bellow’s characters, mixing high culture and low. Bellow quotes Joe Welling, the Standard Oil agent in Winesburg, clearly a reader of Heraclitus. Joe stops young George Willard in front of the Winesburg feed store:
“You carry a little pad of paper in your pocket, don’t you? I knew you did. Well, you set this down. I thought of it the other day. Let’s take decay. Now what is decay? It’s fire. It burns up wood and other things. You never thought of that? Of course not. This sidewalk here and this feed store, the trees down the street—they’re all on fire. They’re burning up. Decay, you see, is always going on. It don’t stop. Water and paint can’t stop it. If a thing is iron, then what? It rusts, you see. That’s fire too. The world is on fire.”28
George Willard, to whom everyone speaks, resembles Augie in several respects. “He is groping about trying to find himself,” his mother explains. “Within him there is a secret something that is striving to grow” (p. 25). This “secret something,” like the “whole nature” Anderson sought to realize in becoming a writer, is an equivalent to Augie’s “axial lines.” In the last tale in Winesburg, George leaves for the city. Here are the final words of the book: “when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window, the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood” (p. 230). The implicit identification of hero and author recalls the ending of Augie. Augie, too, will “paint” or recount his discoveries, as “a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand.”29
The language of James Farrell, another influence, is if anything cruder than Dreiser’s and Anderson’s, but then so are his characters. He writes, as Bellow puts it, “about things he knows absolutely,” the corners and prairies of South Chicago; his fiction “is undisguisedly autobiographical” (p. 1). Farrell, too, was inspired by Anderson. “If the inner life of a boy in an Ohio country town of the nineteenth century was meaningful,” Farrell declares in “A Note on Sherwood Anderson,” “then perhaps my own feelings and emotions and the feelings and emotions of those with whom I had grown up were important.… I thought of writing a novel about my own boyhood, about the neighborhood in which I had grown up.” This neighborhood “possessed something of the character of a small town,”30 as did Bellow’s Humboldt Park. Augie’s settings, however, range widely, lending variety and dynamism to his adventures; Farrell’s characters in Studs Lonigan stay put, which is partly why his fiction, even at its best, “moves slowly … carries superfluities” (p. 5).
For dynamism and variety, the Chicago novelist—or Chicago-born novelist—who comes closest to the Bellow of Augie, as several reviewers remarked, is John Dos Passos, the subject of the last of the profiles Bellow wrote for the Writers’ Project. The Dos Passos profile also begins by relating the life to the writing. Dos Passos is described as “travelling constantly—the Near East, Russia, Italy, Turkey, the Balkans. Something of this constant moving finds its way into his writing, making it fluid, rapid—country, people, lives are seen from express trains, portholes, fast cars” (p. 7). In Manhattan Transfer (1925), where Dos Passos’s style “makes its first full appearance,” the characters “ap
pear to live under an impossible electric pressure.… It is bewildering, this pressure of lives and courses, but it catches as nothing else can the thick, beating, composite life of the city itself” (p. 7) (the pressure under which Farrell’s characters labor, though also impossible, is wearing rather than electric). Hence the compacted language of Manhattan Transfer, an obvious influence on the language of Augie, though nothing like as subtly deployed. Bellow singles out “the typographical running together of words: ‘nilegreen,’ ‘redbrick,’ ‘but in pit-blackness something inside clangs like a fire engine,’ ” the way Dos Passos “combines, welds, pushes forward like an engine himself. His raciness and daring are more than simply experimental. He is not merely an ‘experimental novelist.’ He is a stirring writer. Skyscrapers, smoke, machines are new things; they call for a new language” (p. 9).
Dos Passos may also be a source for Bellow’s view of Chicago as Babel. In the Writers’ Project profile, Bellow quotes the beginning of Chapter 2 of Manhattan Transfer, entitled “Metropolis”: “There were Babylon and Nineveh, they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like Great Candles round the Golden Horn. Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscraper” (p. 8). Bellow’s Chicago is as electric as Dos Passos’s Manhattan, but when Augie looks out at it from Simon’s apartment he is dismayed. In “Looking for Mr. Green” (Commentary, March 1951), the most powerful of the stories Bellow published pre-Augie (the only one he reprinted in 2001 in his Collected Stories), Chicago as Babel terrifies. Set in the Depression, the story concerns an ex-student of the classics, George Grebe, whose job is to deliver relief checks to the South Side, “in the Negro district,”31 an all but impossible task. Everywhere Grebe inquires he meets incomprehension and obfuscation; nothing he encounters is stable or familiar. “Nobody would get to know even a tenth of what went on among these people” (p. 184), says a white store owner who lives among them. Grebe’s supervisor is an educated man but he’s also a lawyer, and money, he claims, is the ground of all appearance: “I’ll tell you, as a man of culture, that even though nothing looks to be real, and everything stands for something else, and that thing for another thing, and that thing for a still further one—there ain’t any comparison between twenty-five and thirty-seven dollars a week, regardless of the last reality. Don’t you think that was clear to your Greeks? They were a thoughtful people, but they didn’t part with their slaves” (p. 181). The language of real things and last realities, the language of Plato, recurs in the story, with the black slum standing for a world not so much of matter as of flux, instability. The store owner who warns Grebe about the impossibility of his task works himself into a fury: “It was a long speech, deepening with every word in its fantasy and passion … a huge, hugging, despairing knot, a human wheel of heads, legs, bellies, arms, rolling through his shop” (p. 184). Though written at the time of Augie March, “Looking for Mr. Green” points beyond it, to Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) and The Dean’s December (1982).
THAT AUGIE IS JEWISH and speaks an English in which Yiddish inflections, constructions, and expressions are heard, is part of what makes him a Columbus. In recounting his adventures, he discovers an American speech largely absent from high culture.32 The guardians of this culture, Bellow told Philip Roth, were “our own WASP establishment, represented mainly by Harvard-trained professors.” “These guys infuriated him,” Roth later commented. “It may well have been the precious gift of an appropriate fury that launched him into beginning his third book not with the words ‘I am a Jew, the son of immigrants,’ but rather by warranting that son of Jewish immigrants who is Augie March to break the ice with Harvard-trained professors (as well as everybody else) by flatly decreeing, without apology or hyphenation, ‘I am an American, Chicago born.’ ” Roth calls Augie’s decree “precisely the bold stroke required to abolish anyone’s doubts about the American credentials of an immigrant son like Saul Bellow.” At the end of the novel when Augie says “Look at me, going everywhere!” Roth describes him as “going where his pedigreed betters wouldn’t have believed he had any right to go with the American language.”33
The influence of Yiddish on Augie March is more than a matter of phrases or of familiar character types. In “Laughter in the Ghetto,” a review of Sholom Aleichem’s last novel, The Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son (Saturday Review, May 30, 1953), Bellow notes how “the most ordinary Yiddish conversation is full of the grandest historical, mythological and religious allusions. The Creation, the Fall, the Flood, Egypt, Alexander, Titus, Napoleon, the Rothschilds, the sages, the Laws may get into the discussion of an egg, a clothes-line, or a pair of pants. This manner of living on terms with all times and all greatness contributed, because of the powerlessness of the Chosen, to the ghetto’s sense of the ridiculous.” It seems likely also to have contributed to Bellow’s depiction of Einhorn as Caesar. Then there’s the hardness or harshness of Yiddish. “You may have heard charming, appealing, sentimental things about Yiddish,” Herschel Shawmut writes in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” “but Yiddish is a hard language, Miss Rose. Yiddish is severe and bears down without mercy. Yes, it is often delicate, lovely, but it can be explosive as well. ‘A face like a slop jar,’ ‘a face like a bucket of swill.’ (pig connotations give special force to Yiddish epithets.) If there is a demiurge who inspires me to speak wildly, he may have been attracted to me by this violent unsparing language.”34 The force or bite of Bellow’s depictions of street types and Machiavels owes something to the example of Yiddish, as does the freedom with which he mixes idioms. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg describe Yiddish as “always in rapid process of growth and dissolution … a language drenched in idiom, and therefore a resourceful term in a dialectic or tension in which the thesis was Hebrew and the synthesis a blend of speech so persistently complex and ironic—really a kind of ‘underground’ speech—as to qualify severely the very values it was dedicated to defend.” Yiddish stories are comparably mixed, drawing simultaneously on a Hebrew base and the fiction of Europe. They are high/low, traditional/modern, solemn/jocular, moving “from the Hasidic wonder tales and the grotesque fiction of Gogol; from the comic legends about Hershel Ostropoler, a kind of Jewish Till Eulenspiegel, and the fiction of Chekhov; from folk stories about the Rothschilds and the world-view of Cervantes.”
These quotations are from A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1953), published by Viking, the first of six such editorial collaborations between Howe and Greenberg.35 Among the stories collected in the Treasury is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” translated by Bellow. In A Margin of Hope, Howe explains how the translation came about (in the year he and Bellow were at Princeton): “Bellow had a pretty good command of Yiddish, but not quite enough to do the story on his own. So we sat him down before a typewriter in Lazer’s apartment on East Nineteenth Street. Lazer read out the Yiddish sentence by sentence, Saul occasionally asked about refinements of meaning, and I watched in a state of high enchantment. Three or four hours, and it was done. Saul took another half hour to go over the translation and then, excited, read aloud the version that has since become famous. It was a feat of virtuosity and we drank a schnapps to celebrate.” Howe sent the story to Rahv and Phillips, who published it in the May–June 1953 issue of Partisan Review. At the time, Singer was known to readers of the Yiddish press but to relatively few Partisan Review readers. “Hey, where’d you find him?” Rahv asked Howe.36 The story made Singer’s name. In a letter of July 12, 1995, to Janet Hadda, Singer’s biographer, Bellow explained what he felt he’d brought to it and learned from it: “what was perhaps lacking in my own work back in the early 50s was a full and satisfactory immersion in the Eastern European Jewish subject matter; what was necessary in translating Gimpel was a rich and complex English style. Singer had the one, I had the other.” The translation worked because the story was so good and because Bellow valued it—this was no “shtetl kitsch”—but
also because, disclaimers notwithstanding, Bellow had a feel for the shtetl, through the Orthodox and authoritarian components of his own upbringing in Montreal and Humboldt Park.
On a more local level, the level of the phrase or sentence, Bellow was well-suited to translation from the Yiddish. According to Howe and Greenberg, “parts of speech enjoy a fluidity in Yiddish that is almost impossible to render in English. In one story that the editors translated, a goose is described as having beryed herself towards a food pail. The word beryed is a noun referring to a super-efficient, even fanatical housewife.… The author, by twisting berye into a verb that describes the busy movements of a goose, has brought to the sentence an aura of suggestiveness that may be said to give the natural environment a distinctive Jewish shade. The best equivalent we could find was ‘bustle,’ but it was hardly very brilliant.”37 Bellow might have done better, judging by coinages such as “bedoldrummed,” which are “Yiddish” in the freedom with which they reconfigure fixed or usually fixed parts of speech in English. The language Bellow gives Gimpel is idiomatic (“so I made tracks,” “I never want to start up with them”), delicate (“I saw the newborn child’s face and loved it as soon as I saw it—immediately—each tiny bone”), and direct (“She ate and became fat and handsome”).38
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