“The pictures stop.” That's how Saul Bellow liked to imagine death. Eighty-nine years is a good haul, to be sure, a lot of pictures. Still Bellow's death comes as a kind of surprise -- partially because great fiction is always young but also because, as recently 2000, Bellow was able to publish Ravelstein, a lovely paean to friendship among intellectuals.
About a year ago, I had a dream in which I traded my life for Bellow's. A regrettable dream for any writer to have -- to some extent I forgive myself because of the exquisite pleasure his books brought me. The rest I trace to guilt -- I'd been among those writers who had tagged him in 2000 for outing the late neoconservative University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, the eponymous Ravelstein, as gay and an AIDS victim. It turned out Bloom may well not have had AIDS, and, as I sat in Bellow's office at Boston University to interview him, pen at the ready, looking at his 84-year-old parchmenty face, I asked him, “Is what I'm doing wrong?” and he smiled a much younger man's smile and said, “You haven't done yet.” And of course I loved him, even as I put a little spear in his side. Bellow knew the score, and he loved knowing that you knew it too.
About Bellow as a writer, I really think there can be no doubt. If any recent American novelist is going to be read 50 years from now, it has to be Bellow. Roth? -- too rococo, except when he tries to be middlebrow, in which case he succeeds. Updike? -- maybe the Rabbit books, but there's an urgency missing from them. Toni Morrison? -- great themes, but her books aren't fun enough to read. It's significant that we naturally compare Bellow with writers so much younger than he was. His generation, in fact, is not that of Updike and Philip Roth but Henry Roth (the author of Call It Sleep), as well as the short story writer Bernard Malamud, authors of work that already feels dated.
Not Bellow's -- he had the muscle, the scope, the verbal flexibility, the humor, the curiosity, and the cruelty to create great art. And he did it in a way that fits beautifully into the American grain. As a young writer, he couldn't find his voice. He felt stymied by the perfection he found in the European novel. In the early 50s, he solved the puzzle by rejecting the Flaubertian model, instead writing fiction that trumpeted its origin in the New World in the same way that, say, Frank Lloyd Wright did in the architectural idiom. The first of Bellow's truly American novels, his third published one, The Adventures of Augie March, from 1953, begins: “I am an American, Chicago born.”
For what it's worth, I've never believed this biographical narrative, told by Bellow to countless interviewers; it's far too neat. If Bellow -- and his writing -- existed as uniquely American, they were also intertwined with what was being left behind -- the old world, the old Europe -- but Bellow knew how to sell himself, and what more American trait is there, after all?
More importantly, I think Bellow's narrative of his life throws the spotlight on the wrong part of Bellow's fiction. For me, Augie March -- showy, glorious, loose-limbed, full of the joy of action -- is a wonderful book but inferior to Herzog, written a decade later, an astonishing novel whose intellectual heart is undoubtedly European. Herzog is a failed professor of romanticism, a man who thinks rather than acts -- that's his problem, after all -- he's the Jewish Dane, searching for redemption.
He finds it by transcending his own suffering and realizing he is not so important as the society to which he belongs. "I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And then? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And what next?" he says, rewriting Shelley.
Politically, that's a stance that inevitably put Bellow in opposition to the predominant strain of liberalism of the past 25 years with its emphasis on self-fulfillment; for if liberalism began as a strategy for communal self-improvement, it developed into something more individual over time. I'm not sure his opposition to that trend really made Bellow a neocon -- though they claimed him happily and he liked to hang out with them. To me, he was more a liberal who feared any intellectual involvement in politics. The formative event for him was Stalinism -- by chance, he was supposed to meet Trotsky in 1940 during the week in which Stalin murdered him; Bellow walked in to Trotsky's Mexico City villa to find a corpse instead of an interview. In that moment, he understood communism, and it taught him that nothing was so dangerous as a bad idea. He believed intellectuals should reconsider everything they had to say at least 10 times and then not say it. He liked the American political process precisely because writers played almost no role in it (plus, it was full of characters to steal for his fiction). He once asked Gunter Grass -- no stranger to bad ideas -- why he got so involved in politics, and Grass looked at him, Bellow remembered with delight, like he was “a village idiot. Only in America! he may have thought.”
I also think that, had Bellow been young enough in the 1990s to rethink his principles, he might well have wound up back in the liberal camp before his end. Liberalism has become more empirical, more communal, more united to what worked rather than to what ought to work. Certainly one imagines Bellow more of an admirer of Clinton, with his anti-theoretical mind and priapic delirium -- a true American -- than the current President Bush, who always reminds me of Tommy Wilhelm in Bellow's Seize the Day, the perpetually childish son always looking for his father's approval. But that, on my part, of course, is speculation. Because when the pictures stop, the words stop too.
D.T. Max, a contributing editor for The Paris Review, is at work on The Dark Eye, a cultural and scientific history of mad cow, fatal familial insomnia, and other prion diseases. It will be published in spring 2006.
