Saul Bellow passed away this week, after a career in literature spanning 56 years — from his first novel in 1944 (“Dangling Man”) to his last in 2000 (“Ravelstein”), written at the age of 84.
He received the National Book Award three times (for “The Adventures of Augie March,” “Herzog,” and “Mr. Sammler’s Planet”), the Pulitzer Prize (for “Humboldt’s Gift”) and the Nobel Prize (for novels about characters who, in the Nobel Committee’s words, keep “trying to find a foothold . . . in our tottering world . . . [based on] faith that the value of life depends on its dignity, not on its success”).
In appreciation of Saul Bellow, here are four brief quotations — one from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, one from his fiction, one about Israel, and one from an interview on his thoughts about death:
In his Nobel speech, delivered in 1976 after a decade of upheaval, Bellow said he wanted to direct attention to “the terrible predictions we have to live with, the background of disorder, the visions of ruin” — an era in which “[t]he decline and fall of everything is our daily dread:”
[We] 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.
Every year we see scores of books and articles which tell the Americans what a state they are in — which make intelligent or simpleminded or extravagant or lurid or demented statements. All reflect the crises we are in while telling us what we must do about them; these analysts are produced by the very disorder and confusion they prescribe for.
It is as a writer that I am considering their extreme moral sensitivity, their desire for perfection, their intolerance of the defects of society, the touching, the comical boundlessness of their demands, their anxiety, their irritability, their sensitivity, their tendermindedness, their goodness, their convulsiveness, the recklessness with which they experiment with drugs and touch-therapies and bombs.
Bellow concluded his Nobel address with a beautiful summation of what the novel as art sought to achieve:
A novel moves back and forth between the world of objects, of actions, of appearances, and that other world from which these "true impressions" come and which moves us to believe that the good we hang onto so tenaciously — in the face of evil, so obstinately — is no illusion.
No one who has spent years in the writing of novels can be unaware of this. The novel . . . is a sort of latter-day lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes shelter. A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony and even justice.
What Conrad said was true, art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential.
Can there be a more beautiful example of that “true impression” than the concluding paragraph of “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” — spoken by Mr. Sammler (the European refugee, living in New York City in the Sixties, deeply upset at the mores and morals of his relatives and friends) as he watches his benefactor, Dr. Elya Gruner, who rescued him from a D.P. camp in Salzburg, lying in a hospital bed:
Sammler in a mental whisper said, “Well, Elya. Well, well, Elya.” And then in the same way he said, “Remember, God, the soul of Elya Gruner, who, as willingly as possible and as well as he was able, and even to an intolerable point, and even in suffocation and even as death was coming was eager, even childishly perhaps (may I be forgiven for this), even with a certain servility, to do what was required of him. At his best this man was much kinder than at my very best I have ever been or could ever be. He was aware that he must meet, and he did meet – through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding – he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it – that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.”
Bellow visited Israel in the mid-1970s, and captured in a paragraph an impression of what it was like to be living in that land:
[Israel] is both a garrison state and a cultivated society, both Spartan and Athenian. It tries to do everything, to make provisions for everything. All resources, all faculties are strained. Unremitting thought about the world situation parallels the defense effort. These people are actively, individually involved in universal history. I don’t see how they can bear it.
Finally, in an interview in the late 1990s, asked about his thoughts on an afterlife, Bellow allowed that it was hard to have a rational belief about it, but said that he nevertheless had:
a persistent intuition – not so much a hope . . . call it love impulses. What I think is how agreeable it would be to see my mother and my father and my brother again. . . . So the only thing I can think of is that in death we might become God’s apprentices and have the real secrets of the universe revealed to us.
May it be a true impression for him, and for us. In the meantime, we have his words.