Herzog
Lives on
By Dr Afzal Mirza
CA
I first heard of Saul Bellow in 1968. I must say
for a person interested in literature it was rather
a late introduction to the writings of a novelist
who was destined to provide a new dimension to literature.
In former Yugoslavia’s small industrial town
of Sisak there was a gentleman named Ivo Sebelj
who was living in my neighboring flat. One evening
he invited me for a chat over coffee and I found
that he had much interst in art and literature.
He told me that those days he was reading a book
called Herzog by Saul Bellow. Ivo was enormously
impressed by the writer and recommended to me that
I should also read him. Incidentally it was a Croatian
version of Herzog. I liked it even in the Croatian
language though it reminded me of one of the sayings
of famous Italian writer Italo Calvin who was once
told by a friend that he immensely liked Calvin’s
certain book. Calvin in return asked him in which
language had he read the book, Italian or English.
“English….,” replied the friend
and Calvin said, “I wish you had read it in
Italian.”
So I bought a copy of Herzog when I found its English
version -- a rare thing in one of the bookshops
of a communist country. It impressed me more. It
reminded me of the time when I had first read Dostoevski’s
Crime and Punishment. Though there was no resemblance
but the character of Herzog became much engrained
in my mind like that of Raskolnikov of Dostoevski.
Herzog was suffering from conusmption and would
in frustration write letters to celebrities of the
world. Saul Bellow’s style reminded me of
the Russian writers of the pre-revolution era. Then
I had no inkling that Saul Bellow was actually Solomon
Belov. Bellow's parents had emigrated in 1913 from
Russia to Canada. In St. Petersburg Bellow's father,
Abraham (Abram), had imported Turkish figs and Egyptian
onions. Solomon was born on July 10, 1915, in Lachine,
Quebec, outside Montreal. He changed his first name
to Saul and Americanized his surname when he began
publishing his writings in the 1940s.
The family moved to Chicago when Saul was 9. Being
Jewish he learnt Hebrew and Yiddish as a young man.
The family life of his parents was not a peaceful
one. His father was violent and unpredictable. The
period of Depression in America had a profound effect
on every young writer who had to grow up during
a period of economic uncertainty resulting in poverty
and unemployment. So the nature of Saul Bellow as
a self-absorbed philosophic intellectual was the
result of those trying times.
However Bellow later on wrote that those years were
exciting and even liberating. He once talked of
those times in an interview, “There were people
going to libraries and reading books. They were
going to libraries because they were trying to keep
warm; they had no heat in their houses. There was
a great deal of mental energy in those days, of
very appealing sorts. Working stiffs were having
ideas. Also, you didn’t want to waste your
time getting a professional education because when
you finished there would be no jobs for you. It
seems that the time of the Depression was a suspension
of all the normal activities. Everything was held
up.”
Until the age of nine Bellow was raised in an impoverished,
polyglot section of Montreal, full of Russians,
Poles, Ukrainians, Greeks, and Italians. In 1924,
his family moved to Chicago. His mother’s
death when he was 17 was a deep emotional shock
for him. "My life was never the same after
my mother died," Bellow said. In 1933, Bellow
entered the University of Chicago, but transferred
to Northwestern University, where he studied anthropology
and sociology and graduated in 1937. During the
Christmas vacation Bellow fell in love, married,
and abandoned his postgraduate studies at Wisconsin
University to become a writer. Writing was the only
way of giving vent to his sensibilities and he started
to write a novel which he destroyed, and later in
1944, came out with his first novel “The Dangling
Man”. He himself acknowledged that his earlier
writings were too priggish and stiffly precise.
So when he published his second novel “The
Adventures of Augie March” in 1953 the readers
came across a new and different Bellow. He once
wrote, ”There was a way for children of European
immigrants in America to write about this experience
with a new language. I felt like a creator of a
language suddenly and was intoxicated. It was truly
intoxicating and I couldn’t control it. It
took me several books to rein it in.” “Augie
March” was followed by his other books “Seize
the Day,” “Henderson the Rain King,”
but it was “Herzog” that established
him as an important writer.”
Saul Bellow taught at Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers'
College, Chicago, from 1938 to 1942, and worked
for the editorial department of the Encyclopedia
Britannica from 1943 to 1944. After the outbreak
of WWII, he was first rejected by the Army because
of a hernia, but in 1944-45 Bellow served in the
US Merchant Marine. After the war Bellow returned
to teaching, holding various posts at the universities
of Minnesota, New York, Princeton and Puerto Rico.
Novel of characters was for a long time the hallmark
of literature till in the contemporary European
novels by Sartre, Camus and Kafka the characters
were relegated to the secondary position. But Saul
Bellow’s characters of Herzog and Humboldt
of Humbodl’s Gift and even Ravelstein of his
last novel were living characters.. In his speech
at the time of receiving the Nobel Prize Saul Bellow
said, “Characters, Elizabeth Bowen once said,
are not created by writers. They pre-exist and they
have to be found. If we do not find them, if we
fail to represent them, the fault is ours. It must
be admitted, however, that finding them is not easy.
The condition of human beings has perhaps never
been more difficult to define. Those who tell us
that we are in an early stage of universal history
must be right. We are being lavishly poured together
and seem to be experiencing the anguish of new states
of consciousness. In America many millions of people
have in the last forty years received a ‘higher
education’ - in many cases a dubious blessing.
In the upheavals of the sixties we felt for the
first time the effects of up-to-date teachings,
concepts, sensitivities, the pervasiveness of psychological,
pedagogical, political ideas.”
His long career as a writer did land him in polemics
and troubles sometime. As he stated in his Nobel
address he found the characters of his books from
people around him. So his Humboldt was actually
modeled on the poet Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966)
and Ravelstein's character was based on Allan Bloom,
Bellow's colleague at the University of Chicago
and the author of The Closing of the American Mind
(1987), who died in 1992. The cause was officially
announced as liver failure but Bellow showed Ravelstein
as a homosexual who suffered from AIDS and died
from that disease.
To answer his critics he once said in an interview
appearing in Time weekly, "This is a problem
that writers of fiction always have to face in this
country. People are literal minded, and they say,
'Is it true? If it is true, is it factually accurate?
If it isn't factually accurate, why isn't it factually
accurate?' Then you tie yourself into knots, because
writing a novel in some ways resembles writing a
biography, but it really isn't. It is full of invention."
Bellow’s comments on blacks also caused a
debate. Ravelstein observes while passing out slices
of delivered pizza to his students at NBA parties
in front of television, that jazz and basketball
are two Negro contributions to the higher levels
of American culture It is again in Ravelstein that
he comments ,"Odd that mankind's benefactors
should be amusing people. In America at least this
is often the case. Anyone who wants to govern the
country has to entertain it."
Bellow left Chicago in 1993, tired of passing the
houses of his dead friends, as he said, and settled
in Boston, where he began teaching at Boston University.
In 1994 he became seriously sick after eating a
toxic fish on a Caribbean vacation. Bellow had three
sons from his first four marriages. In 1989 he married
Janis Freedman. They had one daughter, Naomi, born
in 1999 when he was 84. Bellow died on April 5,
2005, at his home in Brookline, Mass.
