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MAN IN THE CITY: A STUDY OF SAUL BELLOW'S URBAN NOVELS

By

Tung-jung Chen

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1987

ABSTRACT
MAN IN THE CITY: A STUDY OF SAUL BELLOW’S URBAN NOVELS

By

Tung-jung Chen

This dissertation aims to study the role of the city, the city-
country dialogue, and the manZgity dialogue in Saul Bellow's eight
urban novels. Bellow's urban hero has to come to grips with the city
in order to assert his selfhood and to create order out of chaos. The
city is more than the arena for the Bellovian human drama: it mirrors
the hero's inner life, sets the mood and tone for the novel, becomes a
metaphor for modern society, and is a character in its own right.

The Bellow hero refuses to be defined by his environment. His
ambivalence toward the city is due to its simultaneous desolation and
vitality. Oppressed by the city, the Bellow hero occasionally
entertains idyllic dreams. However, country life never provides a
viable alternative to the urban-oriented Bellow heroL_who remains in
the city or returns to the city after brief excursions away. Despite a
tendency to withdraw out of fear of losing his individuality, he
realizes the dangers of excessive subjectivity and is always drawn back
to human conditions. Through human interactions, he comes to accept
the city as reality and embraces brotherhood.

Through a chronological study of Bellow's novels, the evolution of
Bellow's heroes and cities can be observed. My conclusion is that the
city is one of Bellow's best creations. Greatly concerned about the
plight o§_gggern~m§njs~inner and outer cities, Bellow_bgligyes that

only poetry andfltheflimagination can rescue the city from‘decay. Bellow

‘~‘___W“_____
M” _ W..—

Tung-jung Chen
expresses his faith in that possibility by locating flowers at unlikely

places in the dreary cityscape.

TO MY PARENTS, MY WIFE, AND MY DAUGHTERS

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my dissertation
director, Professor Barry Cross, for his untiring patience, expert
editorship, and valuable advice in the stages of my writing this
dissertation. I also wish to extend my appreciation to the other
members of my committee--Professors Victor Howard, William Johnsen,
Douglas Miller, and Joseph Waldmeir--for their careful reading of and
insightful comments on my draft.

My heartfelt thanks go to the Foundation for Scholarly Exchange
in Taiwan, ROC, and the Fulbright Foundation in the United States for
their generous financial support. I also owe my thanks to the Chinese—
American Educational Foundation and the Community Volunteers for
International Programs of Michigan State University for giving me
tuition scholarships.

Professor Leila Goldman deserves my special thanks because she has
given me not only her books and papers, but her sound advice and warm
friendship. I also want to thank Professor David Anderson and
Professor Ann Weinstein for giving me valuable articles related to my
topic. I am also indebted to Professors Alan Hollingsworth, Linda
Wagner-Martin, Harry Reed, and Morris W. Tien for their encouragement
and assistance.

Finally, I wish to thank my beloved wife Pi-fen for her exemplary
patience and unfailing support during my study.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CONCLUSION

Dangling Man: Joseph's Winter in Chicago .
The Victim: Leventhal's Summer in New York .

The Adventures of Augie March: Augie, Chicago's
Native Son .

Seize the Day: One Day in the City of Babel .

Herzog: Professor Herzog in the City and Country .

Mr. Sammler’s Planet: Mr. Sammler in New York .

Humboldt’s Gift: Citrine in Chicago and New York .

The Dean’s December: Dean Corde in Bucharest and
Chicago .

BIBLIOGRAPHY .

27

. A6

67

96

112

143

172

209

233

246

INTRODUCTION

Well, for instance, what it means
to be a man. In a city. In a
centufy. In transition. In a
mass.

The most relevant, the most gifted, and the most sustainedly
creative of contemporary American novelists, Saul Bellow (1915- ) has
to date published nine novels, two collections of short fictions, a
non-fiction book, some plays, and many uncollected short stories and
essays which form a consistent, carefully nurtured oeuvre, brimming
with beauty, dignity, profundity, and humanity. Having won almost all
the literary honors and prizes an American writer can aspire to, he was
awarded the most coveted, the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1976, for
"the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture
that are combined in his work.”

Varied as they are in the narrative techniques employed, in the
human experience explored, and in the central characters portrayed, all
Bellow's novels, from Dangling Man (1944) to The Dean’s December

(1982), have one feature in common: each centers upon_a.character

who, caught up in the_ghags of mogg;n_civilization, is in quest of
_fl_fl,fl,_wilw--- . ._
order, love¢_equilihriumlland the meaningeofihuman_2£l§£§nce. These

central characters share so many common preoccupations that they have
become a recognizable character type, the Bellow hero.

1

2

All Bellow's heroes, Henderson excepted, live in the modern urban
environment and they are all concerned with the following questions:
What does it mean to be a man, a good man, in the modern city, which is
characterized by chaos, clutter, craziness, commercialism, and cultural
nihilism? How can one keep intact one's individuality in an anomic,
massive, dehumanized, contemporary society? By what means can one re-
main one's Sovereign Self in the technological, totalitarian, topsy-
turvy modern world?2

Indeed, the Bellow hero, as Henderson in Henderson the Rain King
does, laments, "Nobody truly occupies a station in life any more.

There are mostly people who feel that they occupy the place that be-
longs to another by rights. There are displaced persons everywhere"
(32). Feeling displaced in the modern world, the Bellow hero, like
Moses Herzog in Herzog, asks:
Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city.
In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by
science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous
controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the
late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no
community and devalued the person. Owing to the multipled
power of numbness which made the self negligible.
(247-48)

Acutely conscious though he is of the integrity of his self in the
massive, dehumanized modern world, the Bellow hero realizes, however,
that he is ”a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest" (H
248). Mysteriously, he feels that he is "always, and so powerfully, so
persuasively, drawn back to human conditions" (MS? 118). That is to
say, even though his selfhood is endangered by the city en masse, the

Bellow hero is at the same time greatly concerned with moral responsi-

bility and the brotherhood of humankind, because he believes that only

3
in society, despite its faults, can he become truly human, and he takes
society for granted as the ground of his humanity. Joseph in Dangling
Man recognizes that escape into one's self yields neither peace nor
definition: "I had not done well alone. I doubted whether anyone

could. To be pushed into oneself entirely put the very facts of exist-
\‘__,,,_Hiwl

 

 

ence in doubt" (DM 190); he discovers that fanyflggggng§§_is achieved
not in a vacuumL4Qut_initheicompany_gf_othaxamen¢_§£;ended_hy_lgy§f (DM
61). To him, as to other Bellow heroes, "the highest ‘ideal construc-
tion' is the one that unlocks the imprisoning self" (DH 102).

Thus, the self and society are engaged in an on-going dialogue,
the Bellow protagonist oscillating between individuality and community
or, in Marcus Klein's terms, ”between alienation and accommodation"
(34).3 Whereas he zealously guards his own individuality lest it be
engulfed by the mass, the Bellow hero also dismisses the vogue of
alienation and isolation, which, to his mind, are almost tantamount to
selfishness and irresponsibility. 0n the one hand, the Bellow hero
fears the oppression of modern society (as symbolized by the modern
city); on the other, he embraces humanity as a whole because they are
"his brothers and his sisters" (SD 92).

Daniel Fuchs (3-27) and Gloria Cronin have noted that Bellow has
been going against the grain of Modernism ever since he published his
first novel in 1944. Although in his youth he was strongly influenced
by such Modernists as Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, and Hemingway, as
early as the 19405 Bellow began to question the validity of the
Modernists' estimates of Man and Society.

Underlying Bellow's rejection of Modernism is his strong disagree-
ment with the Modernists' attack on the Self. Bellow does not believe

in the extinction or bankruptcy or disintegration of the Self in the

A
modern world, even though he realizes the lurking danger of the Self.
That is why he cannot agree with Rimbaud when the French poet says,
"Car l’Homme a fini! L’Honme a joue tous les rolles. [Man is
finished! Man has played all the roles.]" ("Skepticism" 24). Nor can
he accept Bertrand Russell's logical positivist or Sartre's existen-
tialist view of the Self: according to the former, "I” is a grammatical
expression; according to the latter, "There are no essences, and there-
fore no human nature" (see Fuchs 158).

Bellow celebrates the Emersonian Sovereign Self, especially its
virtues of independence, self-reliance, freedom, and sanctity. Like
Emerson and other Transcendentalists, he is convinced that each indi-
vidual contains within himself the means to truth: for his high school

class oration, Herzog quotes Emerson: "The main enterprise of the

world, for splendor . . . is the upbuilding of a man. The private life
of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy . . . than any kingdom
in history. . . . [E]very man should be open to ecstasy or a divine

illumination" (H 198-99).

Despite his celebration of an independent, self-reliant Romantic
Self, however, Bellow does not blindly accept all the tenets of Roman-
ticism. He is able to perceive the errors of Romanticism when it goes
to extremes. For instance, Herzog agrees with T. E. Hulme's rejection
of Romanticism because of its "dampness" (as Hulme called it) and
sympathizes with Hulme's demands that things should be "clear, dry,
spare, pure, cool and hard" (H 160). Bellow also sees the possible
dangers when the Sovereign Self turns into the "Imperial Self" (to use
Quentin Anderson's term), with its vices of over-sentimentality, self-
indulgence, aloof narcissism, misused freedom, moral cowardice, irre-

sponsible selfishness, and wanton sexuality.a In Mr. Sammler’s Planet

5
we see a degraded Romanticism ("dark romanticism" [MSP 33]) running
rampant among the youth of the sixties to whom the world was made not
for man, but for me and me only. In Mr. Sammler's opinion, they embody
the very vices mentioned above.

Thus, through his heroes, Bellow expresses his dualistic view of
the Self. Whereas Bellow/Herzog is repelled by "the swamping of Roman-
tic feelings" (H 161) and considers the French philosopher Rousseau a
villain, he does not see what we can answer when Rousseau says, "Je
sens mon coeur et je connais les hommes" (H 161). On the one hand,
Bellow realizes the importance of possessing a Sovereign Self; on the
other, he takes issue with the Romantics about the dangers inherent in
over-emphasizing the uniqueness of the Self. That is why Herzog aims
to show how life can be lived by "reviewing universal connections;
overturning the last of the Romantic errors about the uniqueness of the
Self; revising the old Western Faustian ideology” (H 53).

For all his concern with the Self, Bellow never forgets to ground
his Self in the modern condition. He does not place his hero in a
narcissistic, isolated, exclusive, elitist world walled off from the
”outside" world. In fact, he tries to deal, as the Spanish filmmaker
Luis Bunuel does, with "the fundamental problems of today's man, taken
not as a particular case, but in relation to other men" (Bellow,
"Bunuel's" 112).

In fine, all Bellow's heroes, like their author, try to explore
what it means to be human. In increasingly baffling circumstances,

‘_______,,
they try to grapple with the key questions of human existence with a
view to discovering liberating, ennobling truths. In their quest for
humanity and truth, in the self-society dialogue, the city plays a very

significant role.

6
II

This dissertation deals with the theme of man in the city in
Bellow's eight urban novels, with focus on the role of the city. Ever
since his first short story, "Two Morning Monologues," was published in
1941, the motif of the city has always been present in Bellow's
fiction. In fact, except for Henderson the Rain King and some short
stories, all Bellow's works are set against the backdrop of the city
environment, and in each work the image of the city prevails, even
though its physical constructs may not be immediately present. The
city is the society in the dialogue between the self and society
Bellow's heroes engage in.

From the beginning, Bellow's theme of man in the city has never
escaped from the critics' attention. Be it in a brief book review or
in a book-length study, Bellow critics, from Alfred Kazin to Daniel
Fuchs, have singled out the importance of the city in Bellow's fiction.
Almost all of them agree that Bellow is one of the greatest city
novelists of this century and that his cities are among his most
impressive creations.

Among early Bellow critics, Marcus Klein, devotes many pages to
Bellow's "city imagination" and concludes that Bellow, "unlike the past
masters, Hemingway and Faulkner, is entirely a city writer" (47).
Chester Eisinger points out that Bellow's characters "struggle in the
iron-bound landscape of urban America" (341). Keith Opdahl says that
Bellow uses "the city the way earlier American writers used the forest
or sea: the city symbolizes the world's destructive power. Bellow
shifts to an urban primitivism in which the city represents reality
itself" (63). Edward Schwartz likens Bellow to James Joyce--"a

chronicler of the city" (20)--in that both portray modern man questing

7
for his identity in a city. Robert Joseph Nadon maintains that Bellow
is "unquestionably the most city-conscious of American writers" (60).
Alfred Kazin comments that "this air of having lived, of experiencing
the big city in every pore, of being on the spot, is the great thing
about Bellow's fiction" (129) and that "he is a key to something that
would emerge in all the American writings of this period about cities,
the ‘mass,’ the common life" (129-30).

Calling Bellow a "novelist of the city," Robert Dutton compares
him with other city novelists such as John Dos Passos, Theodore
Dreiser, James Farrell, Nelson Algren, and Nathaniel West. According
to Dutton, although they all "see the city as oppressive and stultify-
ing, as a force of alienation and distraction, and as a setting in
which man is caught up in a confusing jungle of distorted aims and
values" (191-92), there is an important distinction:

The distinction is that, while these writers see that en-
vironment as central to and definitive of man's ignominy,
Bellow sees it as only a peripheral factor to man's fate.
This is a key distinction: for Bellow's protagonists, through
their experience, learn that they need not be defined by the
grey ugliness of the city, by its stolid indifference and
powerful drives toward corruption and greed. They manage to
escape such a definition when they learn the meaning of self.
(192)

Sanford Pinsker claims that "Saul Bellow has been our most
articulate geographer of the urban landscape, charting its assets and
liabilities against the cunning that is History and those continuing
needs which comprise the human spirit” (25). Joyce Carol Oates writes,
"Bellow's masterful novels all address themselves to ‘the lessons and
theories of power' in a great American city. Bellow is obsessed with

the riddle of what it means to be an urban man in a secular, mass-

market culture that appears to be vertiginously extraverted, without a

8
coherent sense of history or tradition--in which, in fact, ‘all the
ages of history' can be experienced as simultaneous" (12). Steven
Marcus comments, "In the work of Saul Bellow, urban experience is
rendered consistently in extraordinarily self-aware terms. From the
outset Bellow seems certain that urban experience is modern experience
--that the two define each other" (228).

However, most studies of Bellow's connections with the city are
either cursory or not comprehensive enough: some of them focus on the
city in a particular work or in a number of works, while others, on a
particular city in certain works. Three dissertations have dealt
directly with the function of the city in Bellow's works. These
dissertations, however, do not deal with Bellow's cities alone: they
study Bellow along with other writers for comparison and/or contrast.
Moreover, they fall short of comprehensiveness: Nadon (1969) ends his
study at Herzog, Dickstein (1973) and Durham (1974) at Mr. Sammler’s
Planet.

With the publication of The Dean’s December (1982)--a great city
novel in Bellow's canon-~and several recent essays on his connections
with various cities, the motif of the city in Bellow's novels deserves
a more systematic and comprehensive study than has been attempted.
This dissertation is an attempt at it. I will study in detail Bellow's
eight urban novels, from Dangling Man to The Dean’s December. Since
Henderson the Rain King is not a city "novel" but a "romance" about
adventures in a fantasyland-like Africa (see Chase 25), I have excluded
it. However, it should be noted that even deep in the heart of the
African continent Henderson the Yankee farmer is unable to shuck off
the urban influence: he constantly thinks in city terms, and the whole

African episode is sprinkled with urban imagery from New York City

9
scenes. Although this dissertation does not deal in detail with the
city in Bellow's non-fiction, short stories, and plays, I will refer to
them whenever pertinent.
III
The first purpose of this dissertation is to study the function of
the city in Bellow's eight urban novels by examining its relation to
theme, tone, plot, form, and characterization. As a masterful realist,
Bellow has brought the city alive by evoking sounds, sights, and im-
pressions; the reader seems to be able to see, hear, smell, and even
feel the texture of the city described. It is the fitting setting in
which the plot unfolds and the characters develop.
However, the city does not function merely as a physical setting,
a locale, or an arena for human drama to be enacted in. It helps ex-
press the theme and personify the central character. The facets of
environment-~the complexity and chaos inherent in contemporary urban
society-~obsess and objectify the Bellow hero.
Marcus Klein has noted the symbolic importance of clutter in
Bellow's novels from Dangling Man to Herzog (39-70). Molly S.
Wieting, in her unpublished dissertation, has commented that Bellow's
congested urban milieu, in all its multiplicity, functions as the
concretion of an external harshness with which the Bellow hero must
come to terms (158). As she writes:
Regardless of the specific social condition, each [Bellow
hero] is bombarded by a clutter of things, people, and events
which are indicative of what he considers to be a hopelessly
fragmented world. This bombardment assumes a position of

psychological importance which is out of proportion to the
actual situation. (158)

Ralph Freedman (50-56) and Marcus Klein (33-70) have also noted that

10
Bellow has used the urban environment as an external projection of a
repressed aspect of the Bellow hero's character. The Bellow hero has
internalized the environment: Bellow uses place as a metaphoric re-
flection of the hero's consciousness.

Although most of Bellow's heroes are Jewish and although he deals
extensively with Jewish immigrant childhood experiences in the ghetto,
the Jewish family circle, and Jewish intellectuals, radicals, dreamers,
and explorers of lowlife, his work is not parochical or partisan. His
characters achieve universality. His city is not Jewish but American;
it is a metaphor for the modern world.

By orchestrating the physical constructs, weather changes, and
human interactions, by juxtapositing the feelings of desolation and
excitement, ridiculousness and sublimity, Bellow, in a Dostoevskian
way, invests his city with metaphorical import. Kazin's phrase "what
desolation amidst wonders" is a fit description of Bellow's urban world
(129). It is a symbol of modern society with which the Bellow hero has
to come to grips in order to achieve his identity, sanity, tranquil-
lity, and humanity. The urban experience as represented in his novels
is emblematic of modern human experience or, more specifically,
twentieth-cenutry American experience.

IV

The second purpose of this dissertation is to deal with the city-
country dialogue in Bellow's novels.5 Weighed down by an oppressive
urban environment and haunted by a nightmarish city life, the Bellow
hero occasionally entertains idyllic dreams or has pastoral impulses.
Wieting has pointed out that the pastoral is a cohesive motif in
Bellow's fiction: "in each of the novels one finds a corresponding

pastoral element, an excursion, either physical or mental, to an

11
environment that is free from the clutter and chaos of the protag-
onist's urban existence" ("Symbolic" 359). On the other hand, David
Galloway writes that Bellow's heroes "must work out their destinies
against the brutalized cityscape; they have no recourse to the fishing
trips, the rural idylls, or the pastoral dreams of the Anglo-Saxon
imagination" (21).

As I will argue in this study, despite his ambivalence toward the
city, the Bellow hero never seriously considers the country an ideal
place to live in, because he never finds genuine refuge or gains com-
plete recuperation in the countryside. To him, escape from the city
into a rural environment is never a viable alternative. Even Henderson
the Rain King--the only novel that is not set against the backdrop of
the muddled, chaotic modern city--does not speak eloquently for the
country in the city-country dialogue, in spite of its rural settings.
In fact, its first part, set in the New England countryside, reads like
a parody of the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal.

In general, the Bellow hero either remains in the city or even-
tually returns to the city after brief excursions out of the city. It
is in the urban setting that the Bellow hero acts and reacts to other
human beings and it is through all these human interactions that he
strives to find a sense of order, maintain his sanity, or achieve
equanimity.

The Bellow hero's attitude toward the city and the country re—
flects the author's own attitude. Bellow himself is both attracted to
and repelled by the city. _He does notmlikeithe city's chaos, madness,
crime, ugliness, and philistinism, a9§~h9a3§325§_3t is good to go to
the countryside to_get_f£esher air. However he does not believe that

—-———...___.___.__2..

escape from the city can solve WQQ§EBWESDL5 problems.6 He accepts the

12
city as a "neutral space" in modern America where "people might dis—
cover or create themselves" ("A Writer" 186).

Despite the constant threat the deteriorating urban milieu poses
to his integrity and his personal safety, Bellow remains in the city
and even feels at home in it. This has much to do with Bellow's own
urban background. Bellow admits that his life cannot be separated from
the city: "I don't know how I could possibly separate my knowledge of
life, such as it is, from the city" (Harper 358). A child of Russian
Jewish immigrant parents, Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, and lived
in Montreal until he was nine years old. In 1924 his family moved to
Chicago where he grew up and received his education through college.
Although not born in Chicago, he, like Augie, considers himself a
Chicagoan, out and out (Kunitz 73). After living in New York,
Minneapolis, Paris, and other places for more than ten years, he came
back to Chicago in 1963 to teach at the University of Chicago.

Bellow told an interviewer that he has lived in more than two
hundred places (Howard 58). Wherever he is, be it Chicago or New York,
Paris or Bucharest, Jerusalem or Montreal, Bellow has made minute and
sharp observations of the city and many of his discernments and com-
ments have found artistic expression in his works. As a result, in
addition to his non-fiction To Jerusalem and Back, we have such
wondrous city novels as The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March,
Seize the Day, Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, and The
Dean’s December.

Bellow's view of the city is also related to his view of life and
reality. Bellow is an essentialist. This is derived from his Jewish
cultural heritage, as critics such as Fuchs and Goldman have pointed

out. Kazin has noted, "In scripture this world is God's world; Jews

13
must be grateful and obedient for being allowed to share it. In Jewish
fiction this world is always someone else's world, though it is one in
which Jews call themselves Jews and remain Jews" (133). To Bellow,
life is a miracle, no matter how intense is the suffering on earth. As
Schlossberg in The Victim exclaims, "If a human life is a great thing
to me, it is a great thing" (V 122). Life is worth living notwith-
standing many woes and tragedies in human life. That is why Bellow
believes in the here-and-now and tries to live his life fully in a big
city cluttered with confusion and ugliness, sordidness and madness. As
he writes in the Introduction to Great Jewish Short Stories, "We are
all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply
appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition
with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it--
the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it" (519). He does
not complain about the city per se as he knows that it is created by
and made up of people. While criticizing the city as an entity, he
places the final responsibility on the individual human being: it is
human beings who create or corrupt the city.

In his works Bellow has time and again expressed his deep and
nearly sentimental feelings toward Montreal and Chicago, two cities
having particular significance for him. In these cities are reminders
of his boyhood, his family, his old neighborhoods, his relatives, and
his friends.7 However, he has not deliberately tried to sentimentalize
or sweeten the ghetto. He has recorded faithfully the life in such
places of exile and suffering, the harsh and sweet, the ordinary and
extraordinary.

Even though he has on several occasions criticized his own city

Chicago incisively, that does not mean that he does not love his city.8

14
When he complains about the lack of culture in Chicago and calls it a
cultural desert, he also criticizes other cities as well. As he
writes, "Let me first try to make clear what that question really is--
and when I speak of Chicago and its Culture Bus, of its industries,
skyscrapers, neighborhoods, its slums, its crimes, its courts, I am
also speaking of New York, and Philadelphia, or of St. Louis or L.A.:
of America, in a word. I am referring in some sense even to London,
Rome, and Paris" ("A Writer" 178). It is under the sway of his deep
feelings for his city that he has written his great Chicago novels
Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift, and The Dean’s December, as well
as the minor classic, "Looking for Mr. Green."

Bellow's attitude toward the city is clearly manifested in the
city-country dichotomy/dialogue in his works. His deep connection with
the city produces in him an ambivalence toward the city and, even
though he occasionally treats the city quite negatively, he has not
treated the country in wholly favorable terms. In his view, the
country in its present-day version is not a place for the pastoral
ideal and is not a symbol for Nature. He thinks that ”America is now
all city" ("A Writer" 183); under the influence of modern technology,
the countryside of the present has become almost as modernized and
mechanized as any city and it has been invaded by many problems which
used to be located in cities only. In other words, Bellow does not
believe in a popular theory in American intellectual history, the
dichotomy between the natural world of God in the countryside and the
artificial world of man in the city. He does not resolve the city-
country dialogue in favor of the country.

V

Bellow's works are in the realist tradition. However, as

15
Kulshrestha points out, his realism is not a social or a naturalistic
realism but what George Woodcock calls "true realism" (54), which is a
comprehensive and inclusive realism, aiming to take stock of the
totality of reality and the entirety of human experience.

Bellow says, "But how realistic can an American writer be? He is
inevitably a solitary who is by origin one of the great mass. He is
distinguished from that mass when he practices his trade. When he does
this, writing or painting, he must necessarily believe that it is
possible to send in the forces of style to subdue its chaos” (”A
Writer" 177). Believing in "the forces of style“ which can subdue the
city's chaos, Bellow persistently uses his imagination to create
artistic works which are the best proof against the fragmentation,
depersonalization, and pollution of the city.

In many of his essays, Bellow emphasizes that the writer should
look at life steadfastly and try to write as authentically and faith-
fully as possible.9 As an artist living in the city, Bellow always
looks at the facts of the city without recoil and tries to redeem the
ugliness and chaos of the city with his art. His aesthetic view is
similar to that expressed in Keats' famous epigram, "Beauty is truth,
truth beauty.” He believes that truth in its intensest moment can
become beauty. That is why he has never avoided looking at the evil
and seamy side of modern society, nor has he easily succumbed to the
wasteland outlook.

Despite the degradation, clutter, dismalness, and annoyances he
sees in the modern city, Bellow knows that only by the transcending
power of poetry, art, or imagination, can man save himself, the city,
and the whole civilization from decay or destruction. Here he is

very Blakean. In Dangling Man, John Pearl, Joseph's artist friend,

16
contends that "the real world is the world of art and of thought.
There is only one worthwhile sort of work, that of the imagination" (DH
90-91). Like Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow admits that he is
"sentimental about urban ugliness” (HG 72), but he, like Citrine,
decides to ransom "the commonplace, all this junk and wretchedness,
through art and poetry, by the superior power of the soul" (HG 72).

VI

Bellow loves to repeat a joke about a novice tenor who made his
debut at La Scala, Italy's most prestigious Opera house. The audience
kept applauding and asking him to sing the opening aria over and over
again. After singing it a number of times, this singer, greatly
touched, asked when he could proceed to sing the main part. The
audience replied, "Until you get it right." Like every other American
writer who aspires to write the great American novel, Bellow has been
trying to write the great American novel all his life. Bellow's
attempt to ”get it right” can be clearly seen in the strenuous efforts
he puts forth in his numerous manuscripts.10 If in Bellow's canon
there is no single novel which itself can be duly called the Great
American Novel, his works as a whole deserve that title.

Although he may be, consciously or unconsciously, telling a
story about the Bellow hero in the modern city all his life, Bellow the
ever-conscious artist tries hard to surpass himself each time.
Accordingly, he has created better and better novels which employ
different narrative techniques, adopt different perspectives, and
portray myriad faces of humanity. As Siegel notes, "In each novel he
not only records meticulously his evolving responses to setting and
culture, but he also ventures beyond his previous imaginative peri-

meters to make playful use of shifting narrative styles and forms. His

l7
realism often shades into romanticism and the absurd, into social
comedy and black humor, into psychology and the picaresque, into phil-
osophy and satire" (159). Despite their common concern with human
existence in modern society, Bellow's urban novels differ in their
portrayal of central characters, in their literary techniques, and in
their use of city settings. He has come a long way from Joseph's weak
attempt to break out of his "imprisoning self" in Dangling Man to Dean
Corde's courageously provoking his fellow city dwellers and thus jeop-
ardizing his academic career by writing muckraking essays about the
city's ills in The Dean’s December.

The third purpose of this dissertation, then, is to study the de-
velopment of the man-city dialogue in Bellow's fiction. I will study
Bellow's eight urban novels according to the order of their publication
dates, with the view to seeing how he portrays his characters in their
relations to the cities and to mapping out the transformations, modu-
lations, and variances therein. To me, reading Bellow's novels chro-
nologically has one advantage over other approaches: it will not only
yield the recurrent motifs but also reveal the way Bellow tries to
outdo himself each time by changing the style, form, setting, and
character-type from one novel to another.

It is my contention that Bellow's use of the city is not static.
Just as Bellow's central characters change from the early victim-type
heroes to the later wise-observer heroes, the city in Bellow's oeuvre
also undergoes transmutations. It changes from the early indifferent,
anomie-ridden, unaccountable, and hostile environment for such protag-
onists as Joseph, Leventhal, and Wilhelm to the epitomization of
modern society such wise observers as Sammler and Corde perceive, its

enormous evil forces and vicious social problems threatening not only

18
the protagonists but the whole civilization. Such changes can be
traced to Bellow's own views of various cities: the later Bellow does
not hold the same views toward such cities as New York, Chicago, Paris,
and London as the early Bellow.

I will contrast and/or compare the cities in different novels as
the discussion goes on so that I can show the differences between
Bellow's earlier and later works. For instance, how does Joseph's
Chicago differ from Augie March's or Dean Corde's? How differently
does the New York affect the protagonists of The Victim, Seize the Day,

and Mr. Sammler’s Planet?

Notes

1 Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964; New York: Fawcett, 1969) 247;
further parenthetical page references will be preceded by H.
References from other Bellow works and their respective abbreviations
will be from the following editions:

DM Dangling Man (1944; New York: Avon, 1975);

V: The Victim (1947; New York: Signet, 1965);

AM: The Adventures of Augie March (New York: Viking, 1953);
SD. Seize the Day (1956; New York: Avon, 1977);

HRK: Henderson the Rain King (1959; New York: Fawcett, 1965);
MSP: Mr. Sammler’s Planet (New York: Viking, 1970);

HG: Humboldt’s Gift (New York: Viking, 1975);

DD: The Dean’s December (1982; New York: Pocket, 1983).

2 The term "totalitarian" is used here in the sense described by
Norman Mailer in his book The Idol and the Octopus, 199-200. By
"totalitarianism” Mailer means more than merely the political system of
an authoritarian government. "Totalitarianism" includes any means
which, physically or mentally, dominate or manipulate an individual's
life style.

3 I have adopted R. W. B. Lewis's notion of dialogue as the
basis for my discussion of the self-society and the city-country
dialogue. In The American Adam, Lewis writes:

Every culture seems, as it advances toward maturity, to
produce its own determining debate over the ideas that
preoccupy it. . . . The debate, indeed, may be said to be
the culture, at least on its loftiest levels; for a culture
achieves identity . . . through the emergence of its peculiar
and distinctive dialogue . . . the [intellectual] historian
is likely to discover that the development of the culture in
question resembles a protracted and broading ranging
conversation: at best, a dialogue-~a dialogue which at times
moves very close to drama. (1-2)

For a discussion of Bellow and the Romantics, see Daniel Fuchs,
155-78; Allan Chavkin, ”Bellow's Alternative to the Wasteland: Romantic
Theme and Form in Herzog,“ and ”Bellow and English Romanticism.“ See
also Gilbert Porter and R. Michael Gold for Bellow and the American
Transcendentalists.

5 The city-country dialogue is a complicated issue in American
intellectual history. The terms "city" and "country" get drained of
denotative function and serve instead as poles around which are
gathered clusters of meanings associated with civilization and a
primitive or a traditional earthbound culture (Stout 11). In American
intellectual history, the assumption of an anti-urban consensus
persists, which views the city as the creation of man and places the
city in the emblematic locus of evil in the moral landscape. On the

19

20

other hand, "The pastoral ideal has been used to define the meaning of
America ever since the age of discovery, and it has not yet lost its
hold upon the native imagnation" (Marx, The Machine in the Garden 3).
Yet, the claim made by Morton and Lucia White in The Intellectual
Versus the City--the unvarying current of anti-urbanism in American
thought--has been challenged by several later critics such as Stout,
Spears, Pike, Marx ("Puzzle"), and Susman (237-51). They counterargue
that nineteenth century American writers such as Hawthorne, Melville,
Emerson, and even Cooper can be more accurately described as ambivalent
than as anti-urban. The dream of Arcadia dies hard in American thought
(Miller 25), however, and most American intellectuals and writers are
prone to express their anti-urbanism in their works. Bellow seems to
be among the minority of American writers who feel much at home in the
city, despite his ambivalence toward the city.

As early as 1967 Rovit points out that Bellow's heroes are
"urban-bred and urban-oriented. Their native habitat is the modern
metropolis. . . . In the city the Bellow hero is almost at home; he
can take the city for granted because he knows its ways. . . . His
heroes feel a great sensuous joy in nature, but nature fails to become
for them a dictionary or a bible for life. Nature remains always
outside-~a spectacle--for the Bellow protagonist" (23-25). Later
Robert Nadon (1969) and Joyce Dickstein (1973) continue this argument
in their studies of Bellow's fiction.

In an interview with Boyers Bellow says:

I think the evils can reach people everywhere very easily
now. They aren't restricted to the city-~people can have
them out in the country. They can annihilate their minds and
souls just as well out in the sticks as they can in New York.
As a matter of fact, the characteristic life of the city
today, as drawn by Joyce in Ulysses at the latest, is not
really visible in America at this moment. People are not out
in the streets as Leopold Bloom was in 1904, they're in the
suburbs. The inner city is blighted, the scene of violence,
crime and horror. . . . All the same, I think these bucolic
dreams are rather touching and I think that it's nice to go
where the air is fresher. Destroying your brain with dope
out in the quiet countryside is probably more agreeable than
doing it in the city. (Boyers 15)

7 For Bellow's ties to Lachine and Montreal, see Hammer and
Weinstein. For his attachment to Chicago, see, for example, his
essays, "Starting Out in Chicago," "A Matter of the Soul," and "A Writer
from Chicago," as well as interviews with Boyers, Illig, Medwick, and
Roudane.

8 Bellow's relationship to Chicago is best reflected in the
following passage from his latest essay, "Chicago: The City That Was,
the City That Is”: "You can't be neutral about a place where you have
lived so long. You come to recognize at last how much feeling you have
invested in. It's futile to think, like Miniver Cheevy, that you might
have done better in another time, in a more civilized city. You were
assigned to this one, as were your parents, brothers, cousins, class-
mates, your friends--most of them gone into death's dateless night“

21

(23).

9 See, for example, "The Writer as Moralist," "The Thinking Man's
Wasteland,“ "Skepticism and the Depth of Life," "Machine and Story
Books: Literature in the Age of Technology," and "A Writer from

Chicago."

0 Fuchs, Chavkin, Nault, and Keith Cushman, among others, have
studied Bellow's various manuscripts located in the libraries of the
University of Chicago and of the University of Texas, Austin.

Works Cited

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---. "Bunuel's Unsparing Vision." Horizon 5 (1962): 110-12.

---. "Chicago: The City That Was, The City That Is." Life
October 1986: 21+.

---. Dangling Man. 1944; New York: Avon, 1975.

---. ”Distractions of a Fiction Writer." In The Living Novel. Ed.
Granville Hicks. New York: Macmillan, 1957. 1-20.

---. The Dean’s December. 1982; New York: Pocket, 1983.

---. Henderson the Rain King. 1959; New York: Fawcett, 1965.

---. Humboldt’s Gift. New York: Viking, 1975.

---. "Introduction to Great Jewish Short Stories." In Jewish American
Literature: An Anthology. Ed. Abraham Chapman. New York: Mentor,

1974. 513-19.

---. ”Machine and Story Books: Literature in the Age of Technology.”
Harper's Aug. 1974: 48-59.

---. "A Matter of the Soul.“ Opera News 11 (1975): 28.

---. Mr. Sammler’s Planet. New York: Viking, 1970.

---. "My Paris." New York Times Magazine 13 March 1983: 36+.

---. Seize the Day. 1956; New York: Avon, 1977.

---. ”Skepticism and the Depth of Life." In The Arts and the Public.
Ed. James E. Miller, Jr., and Paul D. Herring. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1967. 13+.

—--. "Starting out in Chicago." American Scholar 44 (1974-75): 71-77.

---. "The Thinking Man's Wasteland." Saturday Review of Literature 3
April 1965: 20.

---. To Jerusalem and Back. New York: Viking, 1976.
---. "Two Morning Monologues." Partisan Review 8 (1941): 230-36.

---. The Victim. 1947; New York: Signet, 1965.

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---. "A Writer from Chicago." In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values,
III, 1982. Ed. Sterling M. McMurrin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1982.

---. ”The Writer as Moralist." Atlantic March 1963: 58-62.

Boyers, Robert, et a1. "Literature and Culture: An Interview with
Saul Bellow." Salmagundi 30 (1975): 6-23.

Bradbury, Malcolm. Saul Bellow. New York: Methuen, 1982.

Brans, Jo. "Common Needs, Common Preoccupations: An Interview with
Saul Bellow." In Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley
Trachtenberg. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. 57-72.

Chase, Richard. "The Adventures of Saul Bellow: Progress of a
Novelist." In Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin.
New York: New York University, 1967. 25-38.

Chavkin, Allan. "Bellow and English Romanticism." Studies in the
Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 7-18.

---. "Bellow's Alternative to the Wasteland: Romantic Theme and Form
in Herzog." Studies in the Novel 11 (1979): 326-237.

---. "‘The Hollywood Thread' and the First Draft of Saul Bellow's
Seize the Day." Studies in the Novel 14 (1982): 82-94.

Clemons, Walter, and Jack Kroll. "America's Master Novelist."
Newsweek 1 Sept. 1975: 32-40.

Cronin, Gloria. "Saul Bellow's Rejection of Modernism." Diss.
Brigham Young U, 1980.

Cushman, Keith. "Mr. Bellow's Sammler: The Evolution of a Contemporary
Text.” Studies in the Novel 7 (1975): 425-44.

Dickstein, Felice W. "The Role of the City in the Works of Theodore
Dreiser, Thomas Wolfe, James T. Farrell, and Saul Bellow." Diss.
City U of New York, 1973.

Durham, Joyce Roberta. "The City in Recent American Literature: Black
on White: A Study of Selected Writing of Bellow, Mailer, Ellison,
Baldwin, and Writers of the Black Aesthetic." Diss. U of
Maryland, 1974.

Dutton, Robert. Saul Bellow. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

Eisinger, Chester E. Fiction of the Parties. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1963.

Freedman, Ralph. "Saul Bellow: The Illusion of Environment."
Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 1 (1960): 50-65.

Fuchs, Daniel. Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Durham, NC: Duke UP,

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1984.

Galloway, David. "Mr. Sammler’s Planet: Bellow's Failure of Nerve."
Modern Fiction Studies 19.1 (1973): 17-28.

Gold, R. Michael. "The Influence of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman on
the Novels of Saul Bellow." Diss. New York U, 1979.

Goldman, L. H. Saul Bellow’s Moral Vision: A Critical Study of the
Jewish Experience. New York: Irvington, 1983.

Hammer, Joshua. "Saul Bellow Returns to Canada, Searching for the
Phantoms that Shaped his Life and Art." People's 25 June 1984:
114-116.

Harper, Gordon Lloyd. "Saul Bellow--the Art of Fiction: An Interview."
Paris Review 36 (1965): 48-73. Rpt. as "Saul Bellow: An Interview
with Gordon Lloyd Harper." In Saul Bellow Herzog: Text and
Criticism. Ed. Irving Howe. New York: Viking, 1975. 345-64.

Howard, Jane. "Saul Bellow Considers His Planet." Life 3 April
1970: 57-60.

Illig, Joyce. "An Interview with Saul Bellow." Publisher’s Weekly 22
October 1973: 74-77. Rpt. in Dictionary of Literary Biography:
Documentary Series. Vol. 3. Ed. Mary Bruccoli. Detroit: Gale,
1983. 44-48.

Kakutani, Michiko. "A Talk with Saul Bellow: On His Work and Himself."
New York Time Book Review 13 Dec. 1981: 28-30.

Kazin, Alfred. "The Earthly City of the Jews." In Bright Book of
Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to
Mailer. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973. 127-38.

Klein, Marcus. After Alienation: American Novels in Mid-Century.
Cleveland: World, 1962.

Kulshrestha, Chirantan. Saul Bellow: The Problem of Affirmation. New
Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1978.

Kunitz, Stanley. "Saul Bellow." Twentieth Century Authors: First
Supplement. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1955. 72-73.

Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition
in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1953.

Jaye, Michael, and A. C. Watts, eds. Literature and the Urban
EXperience. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1981.

Mailer, Norman. The Idol and the Octopus. New York: Dell, 1968.
Marcus, Steven. ”Reading the Ilegible: Some Modern Representations of

Urban Experience." In Visions of the Modern City. Ed. William
Sharpe and Leonard Wallock. New York: Proceedings of the Heyman

25
Center for the Humanities, Columbia U 1983: 228-243.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford, 1964.

---. "The Puzzle of Anti-Urbanism in Classic American Literature."
Jaye and Watts 63-80.

Medwick, Cathleen. ”A Cry of Strength: The Unfashionably Uncynical
Saul Bellow." Vogue March 1982: 368+.

Miller, Perry. Nature’s Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1967.

Nadon, Robert J. "Urban Values in Recent American Fiction: A Study of
the City in the Fiction of Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth,
Bernard Malamud, and Norman Mailer." Diss. U of Minnesota, 1969.

Nault, Marianne. Saul Bellow: His Works and His Critics An Annotated
Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1977.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Imaginary Cities." Jaye and Watts 11-33.

Opdahl, Keith. The Novels of Saul Bellow. Univ. Park: Pennsylvania
State UP, 1967.

Pinsker, Sanford. "Sustaining Community of ‘Reality Instructor': The
City in Saul Bellow's Later Fiction." Studies in American Jewish
Literature 3 (1979): 25-30.

Pike, Burton. The Image of the City in Modern Literature. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1981.

Porter, M. Gilbert. "Hitch Your Agony to a Star: Bellow's Transcend-
ental Vision." In Saul Bellow and His Work. Brussels: Centrum
voor taal-en literatuurwetenschap, Vrije Universiteit, 1978. 73-
88.

---. "Is the Going Up Worth the Coming Down? Transcendental Dualism
in Bellow's Fiction." Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2
(1984): 19-37.

Roudane, Matthew C. ”An Interview with Saul Bellow." Contemporary
Literature 25.3 (1984): 265-80.

Rovit, Earl. Saul Bellow. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1967. Rpt.
Taipei: Student Review Magazine Press, 1978. Bilingual ed.

Schwartz, Edward. "Chronicles of the City." New Republic 3 Dec.
1956: 20-21.

Siegel, Ben. "Artists and Opportunists in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's
Gift." In Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley
Trachtenberg. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979. 158-174.

Spears, Monroe K. Dionyses and the City: Modernism in Twentieth-
Century Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1970.

26
Susman, Warren I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American
Society in the 20th Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

Stout, Janis P. Sodom in Eden: The City in American Fiction Before
1860. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1976.

Weinstein, Ann. "Bellow's Reflections on His Most Recent Sentimental
Journey to His Birthplace. Saul Bellow Journal 4.1 (1985): 62-71.

Wieting, Molly Stark. "A Quest for Order: The Novels of Saul Bellow."
Diss. U of Texas, Austin, 1970.

---. "The Symbolic Function of the Pastoral in Saul Bellow's Novels."
Southern Quarterly 16 (1978): 359-74.

CHAPTER I

Dangling Man: Joseph's Winter in Chicago

Any goodness is achieved not in a
vacuum, but in the company of other
men, attended by love.

Before the appearance of Dangling Man in 1944, Bellow had pub-
lished two short stories, the earliest of which "Two Morning Mono-
logues” (1941) anticipates Dangling Man in many essential aspects. In
fact, the brief story contains many ideas germane to Bellow's later
works.2 For instance, it sets up the monologue as a major form in
Bellow's canon.3 And it treats subtly one of the most salient themes
in Bellow's works: the theme of man in the city.

The protagonist in the first monologue entitled "Without Work" is
an embryonic Dangling Man. Called by his neighbors "Mandelbaum's boy,"
the introspective and brooding protagonist lives in an alienated
society, feeling that he is "nearly sunk": "Total it any way, top to
bottom, reverse the order, it makes no difference, the sum is always
sunk."4

His monologue is mainly about his relationships with his parents
and his city-cum-sogiety. Suspended between college and work during

the Depression, he is "driven" out to the street to look for a job

because he feels uncomfortable staying at home. His parents, espe-

27

28
cially his money-concerned father, are "pushy"; they cannot understand
why he, unlike others, cannot locate a job.

If under the strong pressure of his parents he finds it hard to
breathe at home, he faces an even more menacing environment--the city--
once he is out of the house. Set against the dreary urban environment
of Chicago, the story gives us glimpses of the city in the late
thirties. Taking the Cottage Grove car every morning, the first mono-
logist observes the city on his way to the Loop:

It's a long ride. Often, when there's no special hurry, I
get off and walk. In this way I have covered the whole
distance on foot. I know every part of it--garages,
laundries, re-sale stores, house foundations, autoparts,

weeds--a11 in two colors, sand and gray. There are no
others; seasonal colors, I mean. (TMM 232)

/\ ‘\
\

The sand and{gray emphasized here also color the city picture in
.\\v//
Dangling Man.
Approaching the Loop, the protagonist stops his reading once in a
while to look at the cityscape and watch the sun, if it shows up:
Near Twenty-second Street there are several new factories
with slick fronts and neon piping in the office windows. And
then, when the line turns down Wabash, past the movie
distribution houses, you see huge tableaux of kiss and thrill
and murder. But usually I read a book and pay little
attention, while the car wobbles toward the Loop, except to
see what the sun is doing. I watch it occasionally. Just
before we creep under the elevated lines it appears for a
moment. Not much hope for it, I remark to myself. If it
outlives me it won't be for long. (TMM 232)
To the protagonist, the city is both a familiar turf and a vast
jungle, full of concrete buildings and slick billboards. His familiar-
ity with the city is reflected in his almost nonchalant attitude toward

the sexuality, crime, murder, vulgarity, and cheap commercialism sug-

gested by those huge tableaux and commonly associated with Chicago. He

29
seems to accept the modern city and its concomitants as part of reality.
Like his later counterparts--Joseph, Herzog, Citrine, Sammler, and
Corde--he tries to forget his external environment by losing himself in
his own consciousness or burying himself in his books. Only occasion-
ally does he raise his head to look at the city and the sun. The image
of the sun is important in Bellow's fiction; it will appear again and
again later in other works. Although in this first short story his
looking for the sun here does not carry the same moral weight as, say,
George Grebe's looking for Mr. Green in the desolate wintry urbanscape
of Chicago ("Looking for Mr. Green"), the gesture is unmistakably
Bellovian.

11
Like the jobless, alienated young man in "Two Morning Monologues,"
the protagonist in Dangling Man is also suspended in time and place,
not through choice but through circumstance. Waiting for the draft
call into the U.S. Army, he finds himself in limbo. He is in a
situation of painful waiting, of ambiguous dangling, and of an airy
suspension between two worlds.
(iWritten in the journal form with entries from December 15, 1942 to
April 9, 1943, the novel is the record of 27-year-old Joseph who,
(bereft of all political and social certaintie%, tries to come to terms
with his own self and with the world around him. Seven months of
waiting have gone by before the first entry of the diary. The diary
comprises not only the day-to-day accounts of his experience and
reflections, but the recollections of incidents which, preceding the
keeping of the diary, tell us much about Joseph's "older self" and help
explain his present plight.

Though mainly about Joseph's existential problem before his giving

30

up his civilian life at the end, the novel also shows the collective
psyche affected by the distant battles and reflects the contemporary
political and social atmosphere>(ghich is why it has been considered a
novel about the Second World War despite the absence of comb;§. Edmund
Wilson praised it as "one of the most honest pieces of testimony on the
psychology of a whole generation who have grown up during the war"
(78). And Delmore Schwartz thought Joseph remarkable in that "he has
the strength (and it is his only strength) to keep his eyes open and
his mind awake to the quality of his experience" (3) at a time when

every conceivable temptation not to be honest, not to look

directly at experience, not to remember the essential vows of

allegiance to the intelligence and to human possibility and

dignity--every conceivable temptation and every plea of

convenience, safety and casuistry has presented itself. (3)

In other words, although the novel, like all Bellow's novels,
centers upon the consciousness of a single individual, the gloomy
environment as represented by war-time Chicago is a haunting force in
his life. The theme of self versus society in this novel is chiefly
the dialogue between Joseph and his city, Chicago.
III
In the very first entry of his journal Joseph relates his con-

nection with his city: "In a city where one has lived nearly all his
life, it is not likely that he will ever be solitary; and yet, in a
very real sense, I am just that. I am ten hours a day in a single
room” (7-8).5 The room where Joseph spends most of his time is the
first and most important image related to the city motif in this
novel. So claustrophobic is Joseph's single room, which he calls his

"six-sided box" (61), that he feels himself imprisoned: "I, in this

room, separate, distrustful, find in my purpose not an open world, but

31
a closed, hopeless jail. My perspectives and in the walls. One room
holds me" (61).

Joseph's alienation is mostly self-willed. Having resigned his
job at a travel agency to be ready for military induction, he,
supported by his wife, really has nothing to do but wait. Most often
he stays in his single room in a South Side rooming house near the
University of Chicago. He finds he has more free time than he can
handle. As he admits, he does not know what to do with his freedom,
because he has "no resources--in a word, no character" (9). He talks
to himself, listens to music, reads the newspaper, and keeps his
journal, but he cannot concentrate on anything more serious or
meaningful. He has given up his project of writing biographical essays
on the Enlightenment philosophers, a project he initiated a year ago.
He has even stopped reading books, which until this time ”had stood as
guarantors of an extended life, far more precious and necessary than
the one [he] was forced to lead daily" (8).

Examining his present life Joseph finds himself suffering from a
"narcotic dullness" (13); life is a "loathsome burden" (13) to him. As
he confides, "There is nothing to do but wait, or dangle, and grow more
and more dispirited" (9). His dangling existence leads him to think of
himself as a "moral casualty of the war" (13) and "a sort of human
grenade whose pin has been withdrawn" (98). Compared with his older
self, he is "deteriorating, storing bitterness and spite which eat like
acids at my endowment of generosity and good will" (9). The nullity of
his life makes him feel that his mind is "as vacant as the street"
(11).

The dominant mood of "narcotic dullness" from which Joseph suffers

can be explained by a passage from Goethe's Poetry and Life:

32

This loathing of life has both physical and moral causes.

A11 comfort in life is based upon a regular occurrence of ex-

ternal phenomena. The changes of the day and night, of the

seasons, of flowers and fruits, and all other recurring

pleasures that come to us, that we may and should enjoy them

--these are the mainsprings of our earthly life. (13)
Later in the entry for December 28, 1942, with Goethe's passage in
mind, Joseph looks out of his window at the city. He asks, ”What would
Goethe say to the view from this window, the wintry, ill-lit street, he
with his recurring pleasures, fruits, and flowers?" (52-53). The main-
springs of Joseph's life, as viewed from his window, are not Goethe's
natural fruits and flowers. There are, instead, "the street, the
yards, the masses of snow like dirty subs" (104).

One night, after a quarrel with his wife over a missing book--
Dubliners--Joseph leaves the room in anger.6 Once out on the street he
immediately detects the sharp contrast between their warm and comfort-
able room and the dark and wintry street: "Our windows, with their
glowing shades, set two orange rectangles, trade-marks of warmth and
comfort, against the downpour and the dark, the glitter of the trees,
the armor of the ice on the street” (63). There is a correspondence
between Joseph's inner weather and the outer weather; the city street
scene effectively mirrors Joseph's mood at the moment.

On such a foggy, rainy night, Joseph's subjective view of his city
leads him to envision Chicago as a jungle: "It was not hard to imagine
that there was no city here at all, and not even a lake but, instead, a
swamp and that despairing bawl crossing it; wasting trees instead of
dwellings, and runners of vine instead of telephone wires" (64).

Chicago is imaged as an ugly, wind-swept wasteland, one of the dark

places of the earth: ”The clouds were sheared back from a mass of stars

33
chattering in the hemispheric blackness--the universe, this windy
midnight, out on its eternal business" (71).

IV

Despite his reluctance to go out, Joseph does leave his "six-sided
box" when necessary, though he rarely takes long walks and his "average
radius" is three blocks. During his occasional excursions in the city,
he has to come to face the aspects of the urban complex.

On their wedding anniversary, for instance, Joseph goes downtown
in order to celebrate with his wife. As he descends from the E1 at the
Randolph and Wabash station, in a smoky alley alongside the library, he
witnesses a man suddenly collapse in front of him. Such an incident,
fraught with a mythic quality, gives Joseph a "prevision" of urban
man's fate, the blackness of death which strikes suddenly without

7 ,
warning.

When his father-in-law is ill, he goes to help his mother-in-law
in their apartment on the Northwest Side of Chicago. From their third-
story apartment, Joseph looks out of the window at the city before him:

The sun has been covered up; snow was beginning to fall. It
was sprinkled over the black pores of the gravel and was
lying in thin slips on the slanting roofs. I could see a
long way from this third-floor height. Not far off there
were chimneys, their smoke a lighter gray than the gray of
the sky; and, straight before me, ranges of poor dwellings,
warehouses, billboards, culverts, electric signs blankly
burning, parked cars and moving cars, and the occasional bare
pale of a tree. (17)

Viewing the ugliness of the city, Joseph tries to explore the
relation of ”billboards, streets, tracks, houses, ugly and blind" to
the "interior life.” He resists the idea that the interior life is

wholly shaped by or directly related to the city, even though he

concedes that there may be some connection:

34

Where was there a particle of what, elsewhere, or in the
past, had spoken in man's favor. There could be no doubt
that these billboards, streets, tracks, houses, ugly and
blind, were related to interior life. And yet, I told
myself, there had to be a doubt. There were human lives
organized around these ways and houses, and that, they, the
houses, say, were the analogue, that what men created they
also were, through some transcendent means, I could not bring
myself to concede. There must be a difference, a quality
that eluded me, somehow, a difference between things and
persons and even between acts and persons. Otherwise the
people who lived here were actgally a reflection of the
things they lived among. (17)

Joseph believes in man's transcending power over his environment,
however sordid the environment is; yet, at this point he cannot rightly
name it.9
Notwithstanding the evasion of the naming or understanding the
transcending power at this point, Joseph does come to an illumination
that he is connected to ”common humanity" (18). Behind his fellow
Chicagoans' business and politics, their taverns, movies, assaults,
divorces, and murders, as the above quote shows, Joseph tries to ”find
clear signs of their common humanity" (18).
Reflecting on the city scene leads him to admit that he is
closely tied to his fellow citizens:
because I was involved with them; because, whether I liked
it or not, they were my generation, my society, my world. We
were figures in the same plot, eternally fixed together. I
was aware, also, that their existence, just as it was, made
me possible. (18)
This sudden moment of illumination and discernment shows that he is
time-bound and history-ridden; he cannot escape the society in which he
is born and the challenge it poses. His declaration of a shared

humanity with others, however temporary or fanciful, is unmistakable.

As an essentialist, he believes that "In all principal ways the

35

human spirit must have been the same" (18) and that all men are drawn
into the "same craters of the spirit" (26). Thus arises one of his
"ideal constructions": his longing to build "a ‘colony of the spirit,’
or a group whose convenants forbade spite, bloodiness, and cruelty"
(27), because "the world was crude and it was dangerous and, if no
measures were taken, existence could indeed become--in Hobbes's phrase,
which had long lodged in Joseph's mind--‘nasty, brutish, and short'"
(27). As Gilbert Porter points out, "What he [Joseph] wants is a form
of utopian Brook Farm to set over against the harsh realities of World
War II, which threaten both his personal identity and his private
vision" ("Is" 23). However, he discovers that the colony of the spirit
is impossible because "his associations in formal categories of love,
with his wife, with his mistress, with his family, with friends and
with neighbors, those whom he might make colonists of the spirit, are
steeped in real spite, spite in which Joseph shares, and so he is
shunted back again and again into the imprisoning self" (Klein 35).

His ruminations on the cityscape convince him that if "the giants
of the last century" had "their Liverpools and Londons, their Lilles
and Hamburgs to contend against" (18), he and his contemporaries have
"our Chicagos and Detroits" (18). In order to keep the integrity of
his self, Joseph has to contend with a formidable antagonist--Chicago.

V

However, in Dangling Man Chicago is not the only city to contend
with. To Joseph's friend John Pearl, New York City is a formidable
antagonist.10 Going from Chicago to New York to pursue his artistic
career, Pearl works at an advertising company for a living. In the
fifty-three-story office building, nobody except Pearl seems to care

about the drabness and meaninglessness of working there. As he writes

36
to Joseph, it is
the adult, commonsense, wise world. I am exhilarated by the
tremendous unimportance of my work. It is nonsense. My
employers are non- sensical. . . . I am the only one in this
fifty-three-story building who knows how childish it is.
Everybody else takes it seriously. Because it is a fifty-
three-story building, they think it must be serious. ‘This
is life!’ I say, this is pish, nonsense, nothing! The real
world is the world of art and of thought. There is only one
worthwhile sort of work, that of the imagination. (61;
italics mine)
Joseph envies Pearl who, through the sustaining power of art, "can keep
a measure of cleanliness and freedom" in spite of "the calamity, the
lies and moral buggery, the odium, the detritus of wrong and sorrow
dropped on every heart" (61). Through art and the imagination, "he is
connected with the best part of mankind. . . . He has a community"
(61). Joseph is not an artist; his talent, if he has one at all, is
"for being a citizen, or what is today called, most apologetically, a
good man" (61).

Pearl's second letter reveals his repugnance for New York City and-
his nostalgia for his home city. Living in South Brooklyn and
surrounded by a "peeling environment," he is distraught with "the
treelessness" and the "natural, too-human deadness" (101) of the city.
Though feeling sorry for Pearl's difficult situation, Joseph is buoyed
up by the letter because it shows Pearl's common recognition of the
dread and sorrow in the environment that others see as "merely neutral"
(102).

Pearl's nostalgia for his home city is a longing shared by almost
all Bellow's heroes. As Joseph points out, what Pearl actually misses
is not the present Chicago, which is no less inhuman than New York, but

the familiar neighborhood around his father's house.11

37

Joseph, like Pearl, misses his childhood neighborhood in Montreal.
One day while polishing shoes in his room, he suddenly falls into a
Proustian-like memory of his days on St. Dominique Street.

In Montreal, on such afternoons as this, I often asked
permission to spread a paper on the sitting-room floor and
shine all the shoes in the house. . . . The brown fog lay in
St. Dominique Street; in the sitting room, however, the stove
shone on the davenport and on the oilcloth and on my fore-
head, drawing the skin pleasantly. I did not clean shoes
because I was praised for it, but because of the work and the
sensations of the room, closed off from the wet and fog of
the street, with its locked shutters and the faint green of
the metal pipes along the copings of its houses. Nothing
could have tempted me out of the house.

I had never found another street that resembled St.
Dominique. (57; italics mine)

St. Dominique Street, located in a dingy slum area between a
market and a hospital, was "the only place where [he] was allowed to
encounter reality" (57). This first city in Joseph's life taught him
much about the harsh reality of life, such as sexuality, misogyny,
cruelty, poverty, sordidness, alienation, and deformity. With such
"city-bred memory" (114), he is bound to find the atmosphere of the
city "natural."

This typically Bellovian kind of memory is important to the Bellow
hero, be it Augie, Herzog, or Citrine, in that it often provides an
emotional anchor or brings spiritual revitalization to the troubled
hero. In Herzog, the Napolean Street episode, an amplified version of
the St. Dominique Street experience, is one of the most memorable
episodes in Bellow's oeuvre.

John Pearl's second letter also introduces an important theme in
the novel, the dialogue between the city and the country. Though

sympathizing with Pearl's suffering "the kind of terror, and the danger

he sees of the lack of the human in the too-human" (102) and though

38
recognizing the time-honored "bolt for 'Nature'" (102), Joseph nonethe-
less concludes that cities are "natural," too. Escape from the city to
a rural environment is never a viable alternative in Bellow's novels.
Man must come to terms with modern life, with the city itself that is a
"natural" part of modern life.

VI

Toward the end of Joseph's long winter in Chicago, he witnesses a
seasonal change at work. Aware of nature's processes, Joseph, like
every Bellow hero, responds eagerly to the arrival of Spring: ".
spring begins on Sunday. I always experience a rush of feeling on the
twenty-first of March" (113).

When spring does come, Joseph is out of his "six-sided box," in
the street, walking the neighborhood: "It was warm in earnest at one
o'clock, with a tide of summer odors from the stockyards and the sewers
(odors so old in the city-bred memory they are no longer repugnant)"
(114). Joseph's sensibility, formed out of the "city-bred memory,"
accepts that which has traditionally been found repugnant.

With the coming of spring nature asserts itself and struggles to
transform the winter-ravaged city:

In the upper light there were small fair heads of cloud
turning. The streets, in contrast, looked burnt out; the
chimneys pointed heavenward in openmouthed exhaustion. The
turf, intersected by sidewalk, was bedraggled with the whole
winter's deposit of deadwood, match cards, cigarettes, dog-
mire, rubble. The grass behind the palings and wrought-
iron was still yellow, although in many places the sun had
already succeeded in shaking it into livelier green. And the
houses, their doors and windows open, drawing in the fresh-
ness, were like old drunkards or consumptives taking a cure.
(114)

However, this is, as Joseph says, "an impossible hope, the hope of an

impossible rejuvenation" (114). It seems to find an objective

39
correlative in the appearance of "an untimely butterfly, out of place
both in the season and the heart of the city, and somehow alien to the

whole condition of the century" (114). As Robert Nadon oberves,

This butterfly image, the butterfly in the heart of the city,
crystalizes Bellow's attitude toward the dominant personal
force of the nineteenth century, nature, and the dominant
social force of the twentieth, the urban complex. Beautiful,
delicate, ephemeral, the butterfly is a nostalgic reminder of
a world that was but can never be again. It can not contend
with the "brick passageway" of the urban landscape. (79)

Yet, as Porter points out,

Like the untimely butterfly he saw in a brick passage, Joseph
is capable of harboring an impossible hope . . . to come to
terms with the actual world and its war and still retain a
sense of his personal identity, a plan that will allow him
to reconcile the ideal world with the real world." (Whence
24)

Joseph finally comes to choose his own destiny, which means the breakup
of his isolation, release from the imprisoning freedom, and return to
community, however imperfect it is. As he says, "The war can destroy
me physically. . . . But so can bacteria. But as long as I am alive,
I must follow my destiny in spite of them" (112).

On the penultimate day of his civilian life Joseph visits his

father and goes up to his old room. There he experiences an epiphanic

moment I

It was suddenly given me to experience one of those
consummating glimpses that come to all of us periodically.
The room, delusively, dwindled and became a tiny square,
swiftly drawn back, myself and all the objects in it growing
smaller. This was not a mere visual trick. I understood it
to be a revelation of the ephemeral agreements by which we
live and pace ourselves. I looked around at the restored
walls. This place which I avoided ordinarily had great
personal significance for me. (125-26)

40

Thus through his rediscovery of his valuable past, his reattach-
ment to the old place which has "great personal significance," his
understanding of the dangers of self-estrangement, and his realization
of the transitoriness (hence preciousness) of the life-span, Joseph is
going to accept life as it is and forsake the freedom of self-determi-
nation.

Though Joseph at first appears to be a victim of his dangling
existence and his ugly urban milieu, he tries to maintain a sense of
himself and refuses to be corrupted by the war-time situation and
defined by the deterministic environment. He is a man with weaknesses
which keep him from applying his insights to his actions, but he is
also a man constantly thinking in terms of ethical imperatives. The
novel charts how an honest young man, caught between two worlds (the
ideal and the actual) and two lives (the military and the civilian),
gradually becomes a prisoner of his own isolation while he tries to
keep his autonomous self. At the end of the novel, his final move to
return to community through enlisting in the regimentation, though not
without irony, manifests his realization of the dangers or ineffective-
ness of alienation or isolation and his decison "to stop living so
exclusively and vainly for our own sake" (102).12

In this short first novel Bellow introduces many of his major
concerns. While treating the theme of man in the city, he employes
much urban imagery which constitutes in large part the sense of
reality. The city, in such various forms as buildings, streets,
weather, people, history, and other psychological entities, is both the
background and an active force in the novel. Though acknowledging the
time-honored "bolt for ‘nature'," Joseph does not consider escape into

the country a viable option. He remains in his city, which to him is

"natural"

COO .

41

Notes

1 Bellow, Dangling Man (1944; New York: Avon, 1975) 61. In this
chapter, further references will be cited in the text.

2 As Malin points out, "Perhaps the best introduction to Bellow's
world--to its themes, characters, and images--is his first piece of
fiction, ‘Two Morning Monologues'" (3).

Tanner has commented that all Bellow's fiction illustrates the
movement from monologue to dialogue. See "Saul Bellow: the Flight from
Monologue."

4 Bellow, "Two Morning Monologues," Partisan Review 8 (1941): 232.
Further references will be cited in the text after the abbreviation
TMM.

‘5 Durham comments that "Bellow dramatizes here what Desmond Morris
has acknowledged, that the loneliness of city life is a well-known
hazard in . . . contemporary American culture" (52). Morris writes:

It is easy to become lost in the great impersonal crowd. It
is easy for natural family groupings and personal tribal re-
lationships to become distorted, crushed or fragmented.

In a large city many people do not even know the names of
their neighbors. (Qtd. in Durham 52)

6 In Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, Fuchs writes, "Full of
modern disgust and self-pity, [Joseph] is cast as a victim in a
landscape out of Flaubert or Dubliners" (11). Unfortunately, Fuchs
does not elaborate the connection between Dangling Man and Joyce's
novel. In a sense, Bellow in this novel is also describing the "moral
paralysis" of his Chicago in much the same style (that of "scrupulous
meanness") as Joyce does in his book.

See Porter, Whence 21-23, for the Dantesque and Eliotian
allusions therein.

Steven Marcus comments that "what the character is wrestling
with is the fear of a simplified classical view, in which men and
objects will be reduced to one another, or in which human efforts will
be reified in a vision of the world of objects. Yet the power and
integrity of the classical vision was such that it could make out the
analogy between city and people without diminishing or reducing one
into the other" (229).

Throughout Bellow's canon, the Bellow hero has invariably been
groping for such an understanding and even going further to assert such
a power. Although in this novel Joseph has come close to naming it
when he receives John Pearl's letter and reflects upon the possible
force of art or imagination, it has to wait until his later heroes such
as Herzog, Citrine, Sammler, and Corde to pin it down and to assert it.

42

43

10 For an interesting discussion of Pearl the artist, see Jonathan
Wilson 45—46. For a discussion of the limits of imagination, see
Dutton 16-17.

11 It is important to note that in the early decades of the
century, the neighborhoods in the American big city, especially those
ethnic districts, used to form sort of "islands" to the residents, who,
through the sense of togetherness and through their racial bound, felt
that they could somehow resist the encroachment from the evil big city
which are beyond their "islands". Unfortunately those closely-bound
neighborhoods have broken down nowadays and become the terribly
isolated inner cities of the inner city. This social problem is ex-.
plored time and again in Bellow's fiction. See Bellow's essays on
Chicago and his novels, such as Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift
and The Dean’s December.

12 Ever since the publication of this novel, critics have been
proposing different interpretations of its ending. Klein and Clayton,
for instance, see it as a surrender. Klein writes, "Joseph must given
himself to idiopathic freedeom, and that way is madness, or subject to
the community's ordinary, violent reality. He hurried his draft call.
He surrenders" (35-36). Tanner claims it is a defeat (Saul Bellow 23).
Scheer-Schazler, among others, thinks it ambiguous, making readers
suspended. Porter sees it as a kind of affirmation (Whence 26),
Goldman reads it as a responsible and positive gesture (5), and
Galloway maintains that it is "a profoundly religous need to reaffirm
the values of community" (29). ‘

Works Cited

Bellow, Saul. Dangling Man. 1944: New York: Avon, 1975.

---. "Looking for Mr. Green." In Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories.
New York: Viking, 1968.

---. "Two Morning Monologues." Partisan Review 8 (1941): 230-36.

Clayton, John. Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man. Rev. ed. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1979.

Durham, Joyce Roberta. "The City in Recent American Literature: Black
on White. A Study of Selected Writings of Bellow, Mailer,
Ellison, Baldwin, and Writers of the Black Aesthetic." Diss. U
of Maryland, 1975.

Fuchs, Daniel. Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Durham: Duke UP,
1984.

Galloway, David. "Saul Bellow: Novelist." In Essays on The
Contemporary American Novel. Ed. Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim.
Munchen: Hueber, 1986. 27-42.

Goldman, L[eila]. H. Saul Bellow's Moral Vision: A Critical Study of
the Jewish EXperience. New York: Irvington, 1983.

Klein, Marcus. After Alienation. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1965.

Malin, Irving. Saul Bellow's Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
UP, 1968.

Marcus, Steven. "Reading the Ilegible: Some Modern Representations of
Urban Experience." In Visions of the Modern City. Ed. W. Sharpe
and L. Wallock. New York: Proceedings of the Heyman Center for
the Humanities, Columbia U, 1983. 228-43.

Morris, Desmond. The American Zoo. New York: Dell, 1969.

Nadon, Robert Joseph. "Urban Values in Recent American Fiction: A
Study of the City in the Fiction of Saul Bellow, John Updike,
Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Norman Mailer." Diss. U of
Minnesota, 1969.

Porter, M. Gilbert. "Is the Going Up Worth the Coming Down:
Transcendental Dualism in Bellow's Fiction." Studies in the
Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 19-38.

---. Whence the Power? The Artistry and Humanity of Saul Bellow.
Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1974.

Schwartz, Delmore. "A Man in His Time." Rev. of Dangling Man.

44

45

Partisan Review 11 (1944): 348-50. Rpt. in Stanley Trachtenberg,
ed. Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.
1-3.

Tanner, Tony. Saul Bellow. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965.

---. "Saul Bellow: The Flight from Monologue." Encounter 24 (1965):
58-70. Rpt. in Herzog: Text and Criticism. Ed. Irving Howe.
New York: Viking, 1976. 445-65.

Wilson, Edward. Rev. of Dangling Man. The New Yorker 1 April 1944:
78+.

Wilson, Jonathan. On Bellow’s Planet: Readings from the Dark Side.
Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1985.

CHAPTER II

The Victim: Leventhal's Summer in New York

"If a human life is a great thing to
me, it is a great thing. Have
dignity, you understand me. Choose
dignity."

In The Victim, Bellow shifts the locale from the gloomy, wintry
Chicago of Dangling Man to hot, sultry New York in which myriads of
faces moves around as if in the opium-induced trance depicted by Thomas

De Quincey, whose description Bellow chooses as the novel's epigraph.

Be that as it may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of
the ocean the human face began to reveal itself; the sea
appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the
heavens; faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing; faces that
surged upward by thousands, by myriads, by generations.

The Pains of Opium

The novel opens with an arresting description of New York's
summer. Not only does it specify the novel's locus but it creates a

right mood for the story.

On some nights, New York is as hot as Bangkok. The whole
continent seems to have moved from its place and slid nearer
the equator, the bitter gray Atlantic to have become green
and tropical, and the people, thronging the streets, barbaric
fellahin among the stupendous monuments of their mystery, the
lights of which, a dazing profusion, climb upward endlessly
into the heat of the sky. (11)

46

47

With two fitting epigraphs and this carefully-wrought opening
paragraph, Bellow prepares the reader to enter Asa Leventhal's urban
world, which is permeated with a bizarre, eerie atmosphere. This urban
world is no less claustrophobic and threatening than Joseph's Chicago
or later Corde's Bucharest. It is against this background that
Bellow's story of "[i]llness, madness and death" (142) unfolds.

From the outset, Leventhal is presented as a victim of his urban
environment. The first scene in which he squeezes through the shutting
door of a moving bus is a fit index to his position in that densely-
packed metropolis, to his efforts to find a foothold in that tottering,
topsy-turvy urban world. The city of New York, with its huge crowds of
people, oppressive high-rise buildings, and lurking, unnameable forces,
has always been an ominous, suffocating threat to him. This summer,
however, his feelings of loneliness, alienation, and insecurity are
intensified by the enervating heat, the constant noise, and the clut-
tered, unrelated density of New York. He has the feeling that "he
really did not know what went on about him, what strange things, savage
things" (89). His feeling of "overwhelming human closeness and thick-
ness" brought about by the crushing presence of Allbee and the "too-
humanness" of the city makes him feel that "there was not a single part
of him on which the whole world did not press with full weight on his
body, on his soul" (226).

To show Leventhal's struggle to safeguard his selfhood or simply
to eke out a living among the huge crowds of New Yorkers, Bellow takes
great pains to depict the city not merely as a setting for the novel
but as an active actor. Metaphorically, it is representative of the
modern world with which Leventhal, the modern Everyman, must come to

terms if he is to achieve his equanimity and humanity.

48
II

The plot of the novel is simple. Asa Leventhal, a middle-aged
Jew, is an editor of a small trade magazine in lower Manhattan. While
his wife is away helping her recently widowed mother, Leventhal spends
his summer in New York alone. A few days after his wife leaves, two
events occur which complicate his normal life. One of his nephews
falls seriously ill and, at the request of his sister-in-law, he goes
to Staten Island to help look after him. Also, a man named Allbee
suddenly comes into his life, charging Leventhal with deliberately
ruining his career. Down and out now, he wants Leventhal to help him
out of his trouble.

On the surface, this is no more than a story about an ordinary man
bothered by his brother's family troubles and harassed by an anti-
Semite's crazy accusation and disagreeable intrusion. Yet, by por-
traying Leventhal's fears, hopes, dreams, desires, and hallucinations,
and by depicting complicated human relationships which involve love,
hate, mishap, ignorance, infidelity, misunderstanding, victimization,
prejudice, and family ties, Bellow renders Leventhal's story a tale of
a modern Everyman who tries to break out of his alienation into an
acceptance of others.

The two disconcerting events force the hitherto complacent pro-
tagonist to reflect upon his past, present, and future and to become
seriously engaged in a dialogue with his self and with the world at
large in the process of which he comes to recognize that he is closely
connected to others and bears responsibility for them. As Tony Tanner
puts it, "In this novel Bellow is again probing down into the problem
of what the self owes the self and what the self owes the rest of the

world; to what extent should a man permit himself to be limited by the

49
claims of other people; where does the privilege of individuality run
up against the responsibilities of inter-relatedness?" (27).

III

Leventhal had a difficult relationship with his father, who was
"harsh and selfish toward his sons" (20). Like the first monologist's
father in "Two Morning Monologues" and Joseph's father in Dangling Man,
Leventhal's father is also practical-minded and money-worshipping: "his
father had lived poor and died poor, that stern, proud old fool with
his savage looks, to whom nothing mattered save his advantage and to be
freed by money from the power of his enemies. And who were the
enemies? The world, everyone" (102). Leventhal is haunted by the
"abstracted look" of his mother, who, according to his father, died in
an insane asylum. Leventhal's fear that his mother's insanity might be
hereditary has greatly affected his composure as well as his relations
with others.

Without adequate schooling for a professional career, Leventhal
tried many jobs in New York city before landing his present position as
a magazine editor. For a time he was so "stony broke" (67) that he
lived "in a dirty hall bedroom on the East Side, starved and thin"
(21). He has witnessed how people who are down and out try to live in
the shadow of the city, a picture he cannot blot out:

There rose immediately to Leventhal's mind the most horrible
images of men wearily sitting on mission benches waiting for
their coffee in a smeared and bleary winter sun; of flophouse
sheets and filthy pillows; hideous cardboard cubicles painted
to resemble wood, even the tungsten in the bulb like little
burning worms that seemed to eat up rather than give light.
(68)

Leventhal's memories of those miserable people haunt him no less

often than those of his insane mother. Just as he fears some day he

50
might crack up as his mother did, he dreads that he might be black-
listed, and that he might be cast into that part of humanity that "did
not get away with it--the lost, the outcast, the overcome, the effaced,
the ruined" (26).

These fears, symptoms of his hypochondria, guilt complex, and
paranoia, so gnaw at him that they affect his external appearance,
which is "rather unaccommodating, impassive" (20). Although he accuses
his father of suffering from a persecution complex, he himself feels
constantly threatened and spied on, constantly beset by misgivings and
apprehensions.

Leventhal's fears can be seen as peculiarly Jewish, the result of
centuries of suffering from all sorts of bitter experiences--the
diaspora, the ghettos, religious persecutions, pogroms, and the Holo-
caust. Yet Leventhal's fears are also not atypical of modern man's, of
his fearful, hostile urban environment. Tanner has insightfully
pointed out:

His [Leventhal's] deeper fear comes from an uncertainty about
his position and stability in the cruel, indifferent chaos of
the modern city. He puts it to himself this way: if his
friends believe Allbee rather than him "then the turn he
always feared had come and all good luck was cancelled and
all favors melted away. . . . The currents had taken a new
twist, and he was being hurried, hurried." This sort of fear
is endemic to life in the modern city. The securities of
traditional status, identity, and position no longer obtain;
all the old definitions are being washed away leaving only
two categories--the successful, those get away from it; and
the failures, those who go under. (28-29)

IV

Allbee's insistence that Leventhal give him his "due" plunges
Leventhal into a penetrating exploration of intricate human relation-

ships. The interrelations between Leventhal and Allbee, which form the

focus of the novel, are those of victim and victimizer, the Jew and the

51
gentile, or, simply, man and man.

For Allbee's first clandestine appearance in the novel, Bellow so
orchestrates the atmosphere, tone, style, and imagery that it has the
same effect as the appearance of Old Hamlet's ghost or the forest
scene in "Young Goodman Brown." The time is a hot summer night, the
setting the packed, noisy park near Leventhal's flat, a small, dark
forest in the midst of the large-scale moral landscape of the modern
city:

The park was even more crowded than before, and noisy. There
was another revivalist band on the corner, the blare of the
two joined confusingly above the other sounds. The lamps
were yellowed, covered with flies and moths. . . . The
fountain ran with a green, leaden glint. Children in their
underclothing waded and rolled in the spray, the parents
looking on. Eyes seemed softer than by day, and larger, and
gazed at one longer, as though in the dark heat some inter-
space of reserve had been crossed and strangers might
approach one another with a kind of recognition. You looked
and thought, at least, that you knew whom you had seen. (31)

It is in such an atmosphere that Allbee suddenly appears before
Leventhal to blame him for his downfall. It is against such a backdrop
that Leventhal, amidst the crowds, is singled out for the
responsibility of another man's fall.

Allbee's sudden entrance into his life takes Leventhal by utter
surprise and fills him with unaccountable fear: "Leventhal suddenly
felt that he had been singled out to be the object of some freakish,
insane process, and for an instant he was filled with dread" (36). He
tells Allbee, "I haven't thought about you in years, frankly, and I
don't know why you think I care whether you exist or not. What, are we
related?" (34). Asa and Allbee are not related by blood, but Allbee

does function as a double (doppelganger) of Leventhal.2 He is what

Leventhal might end up if he is not lucky enough to "get away with it":

52
"Until now he had not noticed how seedy he looked, like one of those
men you saw sleeping off their whiskey on Third Avenue, lying in the
doorways or on the cellar hatches, dead to the cold or the racket or
the straight blaze of the sun in their faces" (33).

At first Leventhal refuses to accept any responsibility for the
ruin of Allbee's career, the breakup of his marriage, and the reverse
of his fortune. He thinks Allbee's accusations preposterous and be-
lieves Allbee has only himself to blame. However, after many en-
counters with Allbee, after talking with his friends, and after his own
self-reflection, Leventhal begins to accept some of the responsibility
and even to suspect that he might unconsciously have tried to get even
with Allbee for his anti-Semitic remarks.

Leventhal first met Allbee at his benefactor Williston's parties.
One night, an obviously drunk Allbee makes detestable anti-Semitic
remarks against Harkavy and his girl friend at Williston's house.
Leventhal is very angry, but since--he believes--he is not a man to
carry a grudge, he does not take it to heart for long. Desperately
looking for a job, Leventhal, on Williston's suggestion, asks Allbee to
introduce him to Rudiger, Allbee's boss at Dill's Weekly. At the
interview Leventhal blows up when Rudiger, a man notorious for his
nastiness, treats him savagely. There is a cross-fire of harsh words.

Leventhal is at fault for losing his head on this occasion: his
unsuccessful job-hunting has worn him out and made him hot-tempered and
helpless. Yet, from another angle, his losing his temper in Rudiger's
office is, in effect, no more than a desperate attempt to keep the few
remaining shreds of his dignity. At that juncture he is terribly
afraid that "the lowest price he put on himself was too high and he

could scarcely understand why anyone should want to pay for his

53
services" (110).

In any case, even though he does not intend to take revenge on
Allbee for his anti-Semitic remarks at Williston's, his disastrous
interview does produce unforeseeably bad conseqences: Allbee is fired
by Rudiger. Allbee blames Leventhal because he thinks Leventhal
plotted to get even with him.

After losing his job, Allbee loses his wife, who later is killed
in an auto accident. In great despair Allbee drinks even more. Having
spent the money left by his wife, Allbee, down and out, is on the bot-
tom of society. At the end of his rope, he comes to seek Leventhal's
help, which he thinks Leventhal owes him. Thus the victim and the
victimizer meet. The victim becomes the victimizer and vice versa.

But who is the victim?
V

The most particular form of victimization in the novel is anti-
Semitism.3 It is not coincidental that Bellow sets the novel in New
York, a city with numerous immigrants from different countries, and a
particularly large population of Jewish immigrants. The theme of anti-
Semitism is introduced even before Allbee appears in the first chapter.
Leventhal overhears his boss Mr. Beard criticize him in an anti-Semitic
remark: "Take unfair advantage. . . . Like the rest of his brethren.
I've never found one who wouldn't. Always please themselves first"
(13).

But the theme of anti-Semitism is fully embodied in the person of
Kirby Allbee, a descendant of a New England aristocratic family who
counts Governor Winthrop as one of his ancestors. His decline can be
seen as related to Leventhal's--the ordinary Jew's--rise socially,

economically, and spiritually. Governor Winthrop wished America to

54
become a model country as a city upon a hill so that people all over
the world could see: ". . . for we must consider that we shall be as a
City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us. . . ." The
cities built by Winthrop and his Pilgrim followers on the new continent
did catch the eyes of all people so that numerous immigrants from all
nations came to America's cities in quest of freedom, equality, pros-
perity, and happiness. However, Winthrop could not have imagined that
more than three hundred years later his own descendants would not be
able to find jobs in the modern American city.
Allbee complains that New York has become "a very Jewish city":
I've lived in New York for a long time. It's a very Jewish
city, and a person would have to be a pretty sloppy observer
not to learn a lot about Jews here. You know yourself how
many Jewish dishes there are in the cafeterias, how much of
the stage--how many Jewish comedians and jokes, and stores,
and so on, and Jews in public life, and so on. (70)
Living in New York, he sometimes feels as if he were living "in a sort
of Egyptian darkness" (131). As a New Englander who "thought it would
be daylight forever" (131), he cannot accept the differences and
changes in American society. His prejudice makes him unable to believe
that a man with the name of Lipschitz could write a book about Thoreau
and Emerson. His bitterness at the dominance (or what he would con-
sider conspiracy) of the Jews makes him say that, since "the old breeds
are out," New York is now run by "the children of Caliban" (131).
Allbee's strong bias against Jews reflects his own narrow-minded-
ness, impracticality, and decadence. His anti-Semitism, as Tanner
points out, is "only a more exaggerated paranoid vision of reality than

Leventhal's conviction that there was a ‘black-list' which operated

against him while he was unemployed" (30).

55

Imagining that he is victimized by Jews in the city, Allbee adopts
a Calvinist, deterministic view of life: "We do get it in the neck for
nothing and suffer for nothing, and there's no denying that evil is as
real as sunshine" (132). He is convinced that the world is a place
where the individual has little or no control over his own destiny.
Vociferously he tells Leventhal, "I feel it's bunk, this self-made
business. . . . Now it's all blind movement, vast movement, and the
individual is shuttled back and forth" (68). His paranoia is just a
reverse of the historical pattern in which Jews were victims rather
than victimizers: Leventhal has to remind him of the horror of the
Holocaust--"Millions of us have been killed" (133).

Although he perceives the world as hostile, Leventhal does not
agree with Allbee's deterministic point of view. Although he refuses
to shoulder the whole responsibility for Allbee's ruin, he does take
Allbee, his antagonist, into his home when he learns that Allbee is so
down and out that he has been evicted. Playing the role of a good
Samaritan, Leventhal takes a decisive step toward integration into the
society of man.

After taking Allbee in for the night and treating him as a friend
(or, at least, as a fellow human being), Leventhal has a dream. At the
end of the dream, he has "a sense of marvelous relief" (151). This is
a quintessentially Emersonian moment: "He was, it seems to him, in a
state of great lucidity, and he experienced a rare, pure feeling of
happiness. He was convinced that he knew the truth, and he said to
himself with satisfaction, ‘Yes, I do know it, positively. Will I know
it tomorrow? I do now'" (151).4

It does not matter whether he will know it tomorrow; Leventhal

knows it is not common to get to the truth. He gets it only after he

56
kind-heartedly receives his adversary into his apartment and treats him
as a man with dignity. It is his good deed done under the dictates of
his good conscience that elevates him into an Emersonian illumination:
"But it was supremely plain to him that everything, everything without
exception, took place as if within a single soul or person" (151).

Bellow the skeptic knows that distractions in our daily life often
prevent man from knowing the truth which should be plain to everyone.
Thus the moment of reaching the truth is rare and the Emersonian
"crystal ball-eye" state is nearly "untenable" (151) to ordinary
people. It is Leventhal's emphatic vision that makes him see in
Allbee's eyes "the double of something in his own" (151).

In the last analysis, through the combined illumination (dream
plus recognition) Leventhal comes to realize that "the truth must be
something we understand at once, without an introduction or explana-
tion, but so common and familiar that we don't always realize it's
around us" (151). This view is Bellovian, which, in turn, is also
transcendental and Jewish.

However, Allbee the Jew-hater is too degenerate even to strive to
redeem himself. He abuses Leventhal's hospitality by bringing in
disorder and dirtiness, by reading Leventhal's private mail, and
finally by bringing a whore into Leventhal's marriage bed. The "kind-
hearted" Leventhal tells himself that he can no longer tolerate his
nuisance and victimization. He does not kill him as Odysseus killed
those suitors who abused Penelope's hospitality in Odysseus' court: our
modern hero (or anti-hero) only drives his enemy out of his flat. The
denouement comes when Allbee tries to gas himself (and Leventhal) in
Leventhal's kitchen. Despite his sympathy for Allbee as a fellow human

being, Leventhal feels he has done his duty and will not accept

57
victimization any longer.

In the modern city, human relationships have become so intricate
that sometimes it is difficult to distinguish who is the victim and who
is the victimizer. Though Leventhal did not intend to ruin Allbee's
career, he has to pay for the damage he indirectly caused him. As
Bellow's first epigraph suggests, this moral is obviously plain. In
the novel he does pay his dues, finally meets the demands of retribu-
tion for the past mistake he made in Rudiger's office by being pursued
by Allbee's crushing presence, by entertaining his antagonist in his
own home, and by trying his best to help him, until Allbee himself
outwears Leventhal's hospitality.

Allbee, however, is evidently victimized by his own weaknesses as
well as his social and urban environment. He is a pathetic figure in
the novel because he believes the deterministic view too much to take
up the challenge of fate. His becoming a parasite on both his wife and
later on Leventhal is a strong example of the abuse of social responsi-
bility. He is the victim turned victimizer par excellence.

VI

Leventhal is also involved in his brother's family troubles. His
first trip to Staten Island shows his moral seriousness: he wants to
help his relatives, although he realizes that leaving his work in the
middle violates his sense of conscientiousness and may result in his
losing his job. He is greatly disturbed by his sister-in-law Elena's
hysterical phone call during his office hours and immediately puts down
his work and sets out to Staten Island, only to learn that the baby is
not as seriously ill as Elena thought.

When the ferry boat takes Leventhal to Staten Island, he faces

another cluttered, sordid cityscape not unlike the one in Manhattan.

58
His brother's stuffy flat is even shabbier than his own and Leventhal
finds it hard to breathe: the windows have been tightly shut, pre-
sumably for the baby's health.

If Leventhal is greatly disturbed by Elena's hysterical phone
call, he is even more upset by his face-to-face confrontation with her,
his incompetent, ignorant, over-emotional Italian in-law. Leventhal's
relation to her is marred not only by his prejudice but by his doubts
about Elena's mental health. He is afraid that she might crack up. In
many respects she reminds him of his own insane mother.

Although Mickey is not as seriously ill as Elena thought,
Leventhal feels sorry for the baby because of his mother's suffocating
and foolish "love" and his father's irresponsible and neglectful ab-
sence. What further disheartens him is the estranged family relation-
ships. His older nephew Philip does not even know him, his own uncle.
His sister-in-law does not know his wife's name. Later, after several
visits, he still remains a visitor to, rather than a relative of, the
family.

The recognition makes him resolve to commit himself more to his
brother's family. Consequently, despite his complaints about his
brother's irresponsibility as a father and about Elena's incompetence
as a mother, Leventhal decides to do his best to help his brother's
family and to make amends to his nephews for his past neglectfulness.

Leventhal's family feelings awakened by the visit trigger him to
make his trips to Staten Island almost a routine in the following
weeks. He even tries to make amends by taking Philip for an outing in
Times Square and in the city park and zoo.

His involvement with his brother's family also forces him to

ponder the parent-child relationship. Just as Tommy Wilhelm laments

59
that "the fathers were no fathers and the sons no sons . . ." (SD 91),
Leventhal is saddened to know that while some children are not doing
what they should do (e.g., Schlossberg's sons and daughters who, in
their thirties, still depend on their father for their living), other
children, much less fortunate, are not well taken care of by their
parents. Mickey is an example of the latter.

His trips between Manhattan and Staten Island thus mark his deep
moral commitment to his brother's family and his genuine love for his
nephews. Although owing to his difficult relationships with his in-
laws, he is reluctant to meet Elena and her mother in their flat, on
many occasions he spends two hours getting to Staten Island just to be
with his dying nephew for a few minutes in the hospital. His deep
feelings for his kindred manifest themselves most eloquently when he
learns of Mickey's death. Unable to control himself, he cries bitterly
for some time in the lavatory of the office.

Leventhal's last trip to Staten Island is on the occasion of
Mickey's funeral, where he mourns the child's early death and re-unites
with his long-absent brother. The city scene then adopts a mourning,

elegiac mood for the occasion:

The sun had come round to a clearer portion of the sky and
its glare was overpowering. Leventhal took off his jacket.
The heat of the pavement penetrated his soles and he felt it
in the very bones of his feet. . . . He had a momentary
impression of being in a foreign city when he saw the church

--the ponderousness, the gorgeousness, the decay of it,
the fenced parish house, the garden, and the small fountain
thick with white lead and flimsily curtained with water.
(160; italics mine)

In addition to showing Leventhal's moral commitment, the ferry
trips to Staten Island are also mythical. In "an almost Dantesque"

manner (Tanner, 30), Bellow describes the ferry crossings: "The ferry

6O
crawled in the heat and blackness of the harbor. The mass of
passengers on the open deck was still, like a crowd of souls, each
concentrating on its destination" (63).

The scenes depicted on the ferry trips fittingly reflect
Leventhal's mood. For instance, the last trip back from Staten Island
after Mickey's funeral occurs after sunset and is suffused with an
elegiac pathos. The whole harbor is enshrouded in darkness:

The boat went slowly over the sluggish harbor. The splash of
a larger vessel reached it and Leventhal caught a glimpse of
the murky orange of a hull, like the apparition of a furnace
on the water. The searchlight on the bridge passed over it
and it was lost in a moment, put out. But its giant wading
was still audible seaward in the hot, black air. (163)

Most important, these trips provide Leventhal with opportunities
to observe more closely the people, the harbor, and the city surround-
ing him and to reflect upon human life in general and his own life in
particular. Waiting at the ferry station or on board the ferry boat,
he experiences sudden illuminations which not only contribute to his
recognition of his role in life and his duty as a man but to our
understanding of the themes of the novel.

Take one of his trips to Staten Island, for instance. On board
the ferry boat, Leventhal watches the water, the gulls, the trafficking
boats and tankers on the harbor, and the towers on the shore which
"rose up in huge blocks, scorched, smoky, gray, and bare white where
the sun was direct upon them" (52). Suddenly he has an awe-inspiring,
almost naturalistic epiphany:

The notion brushed Leventhal's mind that the light over [the
towers] and over the water was akin to the yellow revealed in
the slit of the eye of a wild animal, say a lion, something

inhuman that didn't care about anything human and yet was
implanted in every human being too, one speck of it, and

61
formed a part of him that responded to the heat and the
glare, exhausting as these were, or even to freezing, salty
things, harsh things, all things difficult to stand. (52-53)

Descriptions such as this have led critics to comment on the
naturalistic element in this novel. What I want to point out here is
that the sun motif, important in Bellow's canon, is used in this novel
to give lights of illumination or to emit unbearable, tropic-like heat.
Here the sun, which is "no hotter in any Singapore or Surabaya" (52),
is both "something inhuman that didn't care about anything human" and
the source of light that dawns upon Leventhal's mind. However, as
revealed in the above quote, Leventhal has only a vague notion of a
common humanity and a mysterious relation to nature. He will see
things more clearly only when his involvements with his brother's
family and with Allbee deepen.

Another of Leventhal's illuminations occurs while he is waiting
for his nephew in a square near the South Ferry gates. There he
ruminates about his own character and about life in general. He
discovers that, after his several encounters with Allbee and his
involvement in Mickey's illness, he has changed. The changes are
reflected in his susceptibility to feelings whereas in the past he was
inclined to be "short and neutral" (92) to everyone except his wife.
Now he recognizes that he has been neglectful of his nephews and
others.

It is during his waiting there that Leventhal is engaged in a
self-society dialogue: it is impossible to identify with others and to
be liked by everyone, but it is also impossible to shut oneself up and
to love oneself narcissistically. How to keep a balance between the

two extremes--that is, without incurring an imperial self and without

62
losing a sovereign self--is a real issue for Leventhal and, indeed, for
every Bellow hero to ponder.

After this self-society dialogue Leventhal begins to compare life
to an egg race: "We were all the time taking care of ourselves, laying
up, storing up, watching out on this side and on that side, and at the
same time running, running desperately, running as if in an egg race
with the egg in a spoon" (93). Life is precarious, man is fragile,
subject to all sorts of influences, personal and environmental.

VII

Throughout the novel the hot, sultry, stultifying city exacerbates
Leventhal's intensely strained, overstrung nerves. The whole urban
environment is imprisoning in its effect. Yet, unlike Tommy Wilhelm in
Seize the Day, Leventhal does not express a strong urge to leave the
city. When he tries to cool his body off and to soothe his disturbed
psyche he goes to the parks in the city.

The parks, however, with their green suggestive of a country-like
scene, fail to give the solace and coolness Leventhal needs, because
they are usually as densely packed with humanity and as full of hustle
and bustle as the city streets. Furthermore, his visits to the parks
are often thwarted or affected by Allbee's ubiquitous apparition-like
intrusion.

Instead of giving Leventhal the soothing effect normally asso-
ciated with the countryside, the parks, like other physical constructs
of the city, oppress Leventhal. Allbee first appears to Leventhal in
the small park near his apartment. After Mickey's funeral, Leventhal
stops there before going home. There he is surrounded by "an over-
whelming human closeness and thickness" (163) and is "penetrated by a

sense not merely of the crowd in this park but of innumerable millions,

63
crossing, touching, pressing" (163). To Leventhal, this scene of his
fellow New Yorkers at play brings to mind a soul-chilling image of the
Dantesque hell: "Hell cracking open . . . and all the souls, crammed
together, looking out" (163-64).

The country, in the form of the American West, appeals more to
Allbee than to Leventhal. The New Englander Allbee, who feels New
York has been usurped by Jews, compares himself to "an Indian who sees
a train running over the prairie where the buffalo used to roam" (203).
(Cf. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden). Now that the buffalo on the
prairie has become an endangered species, he wants to get off the pony
and be a conductor on that train (203).

To the displaced Allbee, the myth of the West, of the frontier,
then, is not linked to Nature but to racial struggle, which is valid
historically with reference to that between the Indians and the white
immigrants. In the last scene, some years after the denouement,
Allbee meets Leventhal in the theater. He says to Leventhal, "I've
gotten off the pony. . . . I'm on the train" (255). Still believing
that the new world has changed hands, he tells Leventhal he is just a
passenger on the train, not even in first class. In other words, he is
not among those who run things. Leventhal tries to ask him who does
run things but fails to.

Perhaps his job as a trade magazine editor confines him to the
city and offers him no alternative. Perhaps his urban Jewish back-
ground has educated him to be at home in the city. (Allbee once jests
that the Jews are "right at home in this [modern city], like those
what-do-you-call-'em that live in the flames--salamanders" [128].) In
any case, Leventhal never entertains the dream of leaving the city for

the country. However oppressive the city appears to him, Leventhal

64
remains in the urban complex, doing what he has to do. He works in his
office, helps take care of his brother's family troubles, and tries to
deal with the anti-Semite Allbee's pestering. It is through such human
interaction in the city that he comes to the recognition of human
commonality and human responsibility. During this long hot summer in
the city, he has tried to take to heart Schlossberg's advice not to try
to be more than human or to allow himself to become less than human.
By accepting human limitations and life's hardships he has discovered
the meaning in life and learned to come to terms with himself and with
the world at large.

Through two unusual events, Leventhal's life in the city in this
particular summer transforms him into a different person, which is
visible at the end of the novel. Tanner points this out:

The most important thing that happens to Leventhal is that he
is stirred out of his "indifference" and "recalcitrance" into
a sense of general injustice and suffering, and thence to an
awareness and confession of specific blame and responsibility.
Instead of timidly wrapping himself up in his too-simple
concept of "good luck" he must emerge and be exposed to the
problems of environmental pressure, cruel chance, mixed de-
servings; he must move beyond his paranoid sense of himself
as simple victim and realise that there are more complex and
subtler forms of "victimisation." (31)

This novel is remarkable in its depiction of modern man's re-
lationship with victimizing urban and social forces. Perhaps what
makes Leventhal's New York stand out in Bellow's canon is that it has
been invested with an atmosphere that is primordial and infernal.
Jonathan Wilson has commented that "symbolically, Leventhal's journeys
in the novel, on foot, by subway, or on the Staten Island ferry, seem

to take him back in time, or down into a Dantesque nether world or into

a jungle" (59).

65
Compared with Dangling Man, The Victim provides a more vivid
example of man as a victim of social and urban environment. The city
of New York in The Victim exerts a more formidable influence on
Leventhal than Chicago does on Joseph in Dangling Man. Joseph's
Chicago and Leventhal's New York, however, contrast markedly with
Augie March's Chicago in Bellow's next novel, The Adventures of Augie

March.

Notes

1 Bellow, The Victim (1947; New York: Signet, 1965) 122. In this
chapter, further references will be cited in the text.

For discussions of the parallels between Dostoevsky's The
Eternal Husband and The Victim, see Klein, Clayton, Opdahl, Tanner, and
Wilson. For the latest reading of Leventhal and Allbee as doubles see
Wilson, Chapter 3.

For discussions of anti-Semitism in this novel, see Kremer,
Goldman, and Aharoni.

4 . .
This moment of gaining the truth, however temporary, can be

compared with Tommy Wilhelm's in the subway epiphany section. See
Seize the Day, pp. 91-92.

Works Cited
Aharoni, Ada. "Saul Bellow's Introspective Fiction." Diss. Hebrew U,
Israel, 1975.
Bellow, Saul. The Victim. 1947: New York: Signet, 1965.

Clayton, John J. Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man. Rev. ed.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

Goldman, L. H. "The Holocaust in the Novels of Saul Bellow." Modern
Language Studies 16.1 (1986): 71-80.

Kremer, S. Lillian. "The Holocaust in The Victim." Saul Bellow
Journal 2.2 (1983): 15-22.

Klein, Marcus. After Alienation. Cleveland: World, 1965.

Opdahl, Keith. The Novels of Saul Bellow: An Introduction. University
Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1967.

Tanner, Tonny. Saul Bellow. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965.

Wilson, Jonathan. 0n Bellow’s Planet: Readings from the Dark Side.
Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1985.

66

CHAPTER III

The Adventures of Augie March: Augie, Chicago's Native Son

"I have a feeling . . . about the
axial lines of life.

Truth, love, peace, bounty,
usefulness, harmony!"

I

"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 . . ." (3); thus speaks the hero of The Adventures of
Augie March (1953). Recalling Santayana's statement--"To be an
American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a
career"--Augie's announcement not only reveals his larky and independ-
ent character but pinpoints his tie to his native city--"Chicago, that
somber city."

The novel--Augie's memoir written during his travel abroad--in
large part recounts his fond memories of his city and its people.
Combining the forms of the picaresque and the Bildungsroman (or the
Entwicklungsroman, to use Scheer-Schazler's term [57]), Augie March
presents Augie both as the narrator and experiencer, the protagonist
and commentator. Structurally, the novel is divided in two, the first
half set in Chicago, the second in Mexico and elsewhere. It starts
with his recollections of his childhood and adolescence in Chicago,
proceeds to his exotic adventures in Mexico, and ends with his sojourn

67

68
in European cities. The time span is the 1920's to the late 40's and
early 50's.2

As a native son of Chicago, Augie, from his boyhood on, has been
open to all varieties of people and experiences: "I was and have
always been ready to venture as far as possible" (76). His picaresque
adventures take him to almost every corner of the city and he experi-
ences the different walks of life, from the well-to-do to the down-and-
out. In employment alone, he is a movie house handbill distributer,
newspaper deliverer, street vendor, railroad station concession attend-
ant, burglar, department store helper, real estate agent's handyman,
coal yard manager, dog valet, luxury store agent, WPA worker, immigrant
smuggler, rubber-paint salesman, book thief, student-house helper,
ghost-writer, and CIO organizer.

He is acquainted with a wide variety of urban personalities, from
intellectuals to criminals, "an immense sampling of a tremendous host"
(125). He is quite at home anywhere and everywhere in his city and
seems to belong everywhere and nowhere. As he describes his own
character, "I touched all sides, and nobody knew where I belonged. I
had no idea of that myself" (113).

Most importantly Chicago provides Augie with an invaluable demo-
cratic education. The theme of Augie indeed echos back that of Walt
Whitman's Leaves of Grass: "One's-Self I sing, a simple separate
person, / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse."3

Augie's Chicago is full of opportunity, "America's yet unfulfilled
maturity, a maturity that insists that around the next corner, beyond
the next hill, in the next block lies the realization of the promise"
(Anderson 2). With its sprawling backdrop and variegated people, the

city, rather than being a bleak, smothering, naturalistic environment,

69
turns out to be an open sphere for Augie's adventures. Throughout much
of the novel, Augie remains youthful, innocent, optimistic, dynamic,
and adventurous and is able to accept his city as it is, including its
squalor, vice, and shortcomings.

Augie's strong attachment to his city is evidenced by the fact
that, wherever he goes, the city is always on his mind. In places far
away from his home city-- Mexico, New York, or Europe--he thinks about
his city and frequently runs into fellow Chicagoans with whom he re-
minisces about their city. Even adrift on a boat in the African Sea,
Augie finds a fellow Chicagoan (Basteshaw). So much does the city
haunt him that in his dream he gladly returns to his old neighborhood;
as he says to himself in his dream, "Among other things it is good to
see the West Side of Chicago again" (506).

As a child of the city, the near-orphan Augie is inevitably
susceptible to all kinds of urban influences. Early in the novel,
Augie says, "All the influences were lined up waiting for me. I was
born, and there they were to form me, which is why I tell you more of
them than of myself" (43). These influences all try to convince Augie
of the authenticity of their particular visions. The novel, however,
is not about how Augie is formed by these influences but rather about
how the "adoptable" Augie, like his literary predecessor Huck Finn,
tries to evade the effects of all these influences. His ultimate aim
being to seek a worthwhile, higher, and independent fate, he does not
want to be determined by his environment or to become what other people
(those "reality instructors," to borrow a phrase from Herzog) want to
make of him. Among the dominant "influences" are Grandma Lausch,
William Einhorn, and Mrs. Renlings, who, together with people cluster-

ing around them, represent forces coming from, respectively, the lower,

70
the middle, and the upper-middle class in Chicago. In addition to
these three influences, his brother Simon also tries to exert his will
on him.

II

The story begins with the 9-year—old Augie living with his mother,
brothers (Simon and George), and Grandma Lausch, on the Northwest Side
of Chicago in the 1920's. Augie's Chicago is that of immigrants and
neighborhoods. The neighborhood Augie grows up is predominantly
Polish. Surrounded by Catholic Poles, Augie, like the urbanite Asa
Leventhal, suffers anti-Semitism: "And sometimes we were chased,
stoned, bitten, and beat up for Christ-killers, all of us, even
Georgie, articled, whether we liked it or not, to this mysterious
trade" (12). However, unlike Leventhal, Augie is "by and large too
larky and boisterous to take it to heart" (12).

Grandma Lausch, "one of those Machiavellis of small street and
neighborhood" (4), is only a boarder, "not a relation at all" (A). It
is under Grandma's command and dominance that the Marches survive
Prohibition and the Depression without a patriarch in the household.
The grotesque and scheming Grandma enjoys making the Marches "take a
long swig of her mixture of reality" (51). She tries to give Simon and
Augie the "best" education she can; for instance, she teaches Augie to
lie convincingly at the public health clinic. She preaches cynicism
and calculation as the only means of survival. Meanwhile, she debunks
Augie's innocence and optimism.

Through Grandma Lausch's networking Augie comes to know many other
common Chicagoans, such as the soldierly Kreindl, Lulov the retouch
artist from Division Street, Lubin the welfare caseworker, Dr. Wernick

the dentist, Mr. Anticol the old junky and atheist, and Sylvester the

71
cinema house owner turned communist. These unforgettable Chicagoans,
together with many others later introduced, impress the reader with
their unique qualities, their idiosyncracies, and their zest for life;
it is these people who speak for the exuberance and vitality of the
city.

To improve the financial condition of the March family, Grandma
Lausch sends both Simon and Augie out to work when they are still very
young. Augie's first summer job away from home is with the Goblins on
the North Side. In the Goblin household, Anna Coblin (Mama's cousin)
and her brother, Five Properties, still retain strong Jewish immigrant
traits, whereas Hyman Goblin, Anna's husband, is a typical man of the
city in the thirties. He knows his Chicago very well and is always
"ready for any conversation with up-to-the-minute gang news of the
bloody nights of the beer barons and the last curb quotations" (26-27).
Bellow describes how he prepares himself for a trip downtown:

In his snap-brim detective's felt and large-toed shoes, car-
rying accounts and a copy of the Tribune for the Gumps, the
sports results, and the stock quotations--he was speculating
--and also for the gangwar news, keeping up with what was
happening around Colossimo and Capone in Cicero and the North
Side O'Bannions, that being about the time when O'Bannion was
knocked off among his flowers by somebody who kept his gun-
hand in a friendly grip--with this, Coblin got on the Ashland
car. For lunch he went to a good restaurant. . . . Then to
the [carriers'] meeting. . . . Afterward, pie a la mode and
coffee at the south end of the Loop, followed by a burlesque
show at the Hay-market or Rialto, or one of the cheaper
places where farm or Negro girls did the grinds, the more
single-purposed, less-playful houses. (22)

Later when Augie plays truant and goes to the Loop with Jimmy
Klein on various errands, they frequent shows "to hear Sophie Tucker

whack herself on the behind and sing ‘Red Hot Mama,’ or see Rose La

Rose swagger and strip in the indolent rhythm that made Goblin her

72
admirer" (38). Many times he runs into Coblin standing in theater
lines.
With his buddy Jimmy Klein, Augie rides the elevator at City Hall
and observes a cross-section of his fellow Chicagoans:
In the cage we rose and dropped, rubbing elbows with bigshots
and operators, commissioners, grabbers, heelers, tipsters,
hoodlums, wolves, fixers, plaintiffs, flatfeet, men in
Western hats and women in lizard shoes and fur coats, hot-
house and arctic drafts mixed up, brute things and airs of
sex, evidence of heavy feeding and systematic shaving, of
calculations, grief, not-caring, and hopes of tremendous
millions in concrete to be poured or whole Mississippi of
bootleg whisky and beer. (39)

By use of Whitmanesque cataloguing such as the above, Bellow effect-

ively renders the city in all its multitudinous variety.

Being larky and footloose, Augie, like Huck Finn, refuses to be
"civilized" by Grandma Lausch. In fact, the tender-minded Augie (to
use William James's term) often finds it hard to agree with Grandma's
decisions or maneuverings. For instance, while he can follow her
instructions to con free glasses for his mother, he cannot agree with
her realistic but cold-hearted way of arranging the institutionalizing
of his idiot brother George. Despite their disagreements, however,
Augie still has a deep affection for the old lady. When he hears of
the news of her death, he feels terribly lost.

Next to Grandma's influence comes that of Augie's crippled
employer William Einhorn, a superbly drawn character. As a junior
factotom to Einhorn, Augie has a chance to come into contact with the
tough, masculine world of Chicago. It is in Einhorn's pool room that
he meets all sorts of tough city guys:

Along with the blood-smelling swaggeroos, recruits for mobs,
automobile thieves, stick-up men, sluggers and bouncers,

73
punks with ambition to become torpedoes, neighborhood cowboys
with Jack Holt sideburns down to the jawbone, collegiates,
tinhorns and small-time racketeers and pugs, ex-servicemen,
home-evading husbands, hackies, truckers and bush-league
athletes. (81)

The indomitable Einhorn leaves deep imprints on the adolescent
Augie. As Augie writes:

William Einhorn was the first superior man I knew. He had a
brain and many enterprises, real directing power, philo-
sophical capacity, and if I were methodical enough to take
thought before an important and practical decision and also
(N.B.) if I were really his disciple and not what I am, I'd
ask myself, "What would Caesar suffer in this case? What
would Machiavelli advise or Ulysses do? What would Einhorn
think?" (60)

To many people, Einhorn is a genius, a wizard, or a guru. By his
wits, he accumulates a considerable fortune before the Depression. He
compares the American businessman to "the organizer coming after the
conqueror, the poet and philosopher succeeding the organizer" (67). To
Einhorn, the "typically American" system of free enterprise is "the
work of intelligence and strength in an open field, a world of possi-
bilities" (67). The atmosphere of hope and accomplishment in the
Einhorn household reinforces Augie's inherent optimism.

Yet, as Augie observes, Einhorn, for all his superior qualities,
is also a petty con man who indulges in numerous small swindles. He
and his wife are selfish. Like Grandma Lausch, he knows how to use
large institutions. He sends away for everything that is free, from
samples of food, soaps, medicine, and the literature of all causes, to
reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology and publications of the
Smithsonian Institution.

And Einhorn has a craving for every woman he meets. It is the

lecherous William Einhorn who first initiates Augie into love in the

74
manner of a city business transaction. For a high school graduation
present, Einhorn takes Augie to a brothel. After the visit, Augie
reflects on this city experience, "Paying didn't matter. Nor using
what other people used. That's what city life is. And so it didn't
have the luster it should have had, and there wasn’t any epithalamium
of gentle lovers" (124). It is the kind of initiation the city offers
to Augie: a paid-for and second-hand love.

After the funeral of the Old Commissioner, Einhorn's Russian
Jewish immigrant father, Einhorn pens an obituary to eulogize him.
This cliche-ridden article sums up a man's history in concert with the
city's:

The return of the hearse from the newly covered grave leaves
a man to pass through the last changes of nature who found
Chicago a swamp and left it a great city. He came after the
Great fire, said to be caused by Mrs. O'Leary's cow, in
flight from the conscription of the Hapsburg tyrant, and in
his life as a builder proved that great places do not have to
be founded on the bones of slaves, like the pyramids of
Pharaohs or the capital of Peter the Great on the banks of
the Neva, where thousands were trampled in the Russian
marshes. The lesson of an American life like my father's

is that achievements are compatible with decency. (104)

When the Depression comes, it hits everybody. The bank failures
and the collapse of Insull's watered investing schemes give rise to
"the suicides by skyscraper leaps" (106) which take place in La Salle
Street. William Einhorn loses most of his properties and becomes "a
stinking Jew cripple" to tenants evicted from his apartments, but he is
not destroyed.

Augie is greatly touched when Einhorn tells this truth about his
character: "You've got opposition in you. You don't slide through

everything. You just make it look so" (117). With such opposition in

him Augie simultaneously admires and rejects Einhorn.

75
When Einhorn cannot afford to hire Augie, Augie attends the city
college in order to prepare for the civil-service exams. The college
is a meeting ground for various students from all parts of the city:
The students were children of immigrants from all parts,
coming up from Hell's Kitchen, Little Sicily, the Black Belt,
the mass of Polonia, the Jewish streets of Humboldt Park, put
through the coarse sifters of curriculum, and also bringing
wisdom of their own. They filled the factory-length
corridors and giant classrooms with every human character and
germ, to undergo consolidation and become, the idea was,
American. In the mixture there was beauty--a good propor-
tion--and pimple-insolence, and parricide faces, gum-chew
innocence, labor fodder and secretarial forces, Danish
stability, Dago inspiration, catarrh-hampered mathematical
genius; there were waxed-eared shovelers' children, sex-
promising businessmen's daughters-~an immense sampling of a
tremendous host, the multitudes of holy writ, begotten by
West-moving, factor-shoved parents. 0r me, the by-blow of a
travelling man. (125)

This passage graphically illustrates the democratic idea of bountiful

America as a melting pot.

Augie works as a shoe-dog in a clothes shop for a while before he
is employed by the Renlings as a salesman of luxury goods in Evanston.
The job takes him to the wealthy districts of the Chicago area: he is
"on a peculiar circuit, for a while, of the millionaire suburbs--
Highland Park, Kenilworth, and Winnetka-—selling things, a specialized
salesman in luxury lines and dealing with aristocrats" (129).

Mrs. Renling is the only "influence" who openly wants to adopt
Augie. As her protege, Augie does pick up some pointers as to dressing
and manners. However, when Mrs. Renling wishes to adopt him as her
heir, he declines the offer, because, as he says, it is not "a fate
good enough for me" (151).

After leaving the Renlings and bidding farewell to his prospective

upper-class life, Augie begins his wandering among the lower classes

76
again. He tries several jobs before he runs into Padilla and becomes a
book thief. Selling stolen books to college students, Augie lives in a
South Side student house near the University of Chicago, where Augie
comes to know many other characters who leave distinct impressions on
him. In the meanwhile he reads books voraciously.

Augie's elder brother, Simon, is an ambitious young man whose
single goal is to make good in America. Unlike Augie, he is seriously
intent on his pursuit of success, wealth, and power. Partly through
marriage to a wealthy woman but mainly through his own shrewdness, he
becomes a business tycoon in Chicago. In his portrayal of this
acquisitive and exploitive character, Bellow, though not completely
condemning him, does highlight the suicidal and almost insane aspect
of his pursuit. In an American city like Chicago, Bellow implies, it
is possible for an illegitimate son of immigrants such as Simon to
achieve the American Dream, but the price he has to pay may be
killingly high.

After Simon's marriage to Charlotte Magnus, Augie goes to various
luxurious hotels, restaurants, barber shops, and clubs in Chicago.
Mainly through Simon's encouragement, Augie also pays attention to
Lucy, a rich heiress in the Magnus family. During his engagement to
Lucy, Augie is exposed to the elite of Chicago, but despite the lure of
women, wealth, and luxury, he refuses the way of his hard-hearted and
practical brother.

While simultaneously working for Simon in the coal yard and
courting Lucy, Augie moves between the two worlds of Chicago, the
wealthy and the impoverished, and is keenly aware of their co-

existence:

77
All that opulence, the strength of cars in the great rout of
cars in the cold-lit darkness of the North Side Drive, and
that mobile heraldry on soft tires rushing toward the
floating balls and moons of the Drake Hotel and the towers
around it; the thick meat, solid eating, excitement of
dancing. Following the lake shore, you left the dry wood and
grayed brick of thick-built, jammed, labor-and-poverty
Chicago standing apart, speedily passed to the side. Ah no!
but the two halves of the prophecy were there together, the
Chaldee beauties and the wild beasts and doleful creatures
shared the same houses together. (245-46)

Augie does not become Lucy's husband, despite Simon's expecta-
tions. (Out of kind-heartedness, Augie accompanies his friend Mimi to
an abortionist and there he is mistaken for Mimi's lover.) After his
breakup with Lucy and Simon, Augie becomes a labor organizer.

When he is slugged by the enemy union men, Augie's disillusionment
with Chicago crystallizes: with "the dry snot of fear in [his] blood-
clotted nose," he is "hallowed by [his] hate for it [the dull hot brute
shit of a street], as well as for the creeping of the trolley" (308).
He flees to Thea Fenchel, whom he met in the summer resort of St. Joe,
and his passionate love for Thea results in their exotic journey to
Mexico. Thus concludes the Chicago section of the novel.

III

By and large, the Chicago section, the first and best part of the
novel, is essentially a celebration of Chicago and its people. None-
theless, despite its openness and exuberance, the city is not all
brightness and opportunity. Neither is Augie, for all his larkiness
and innocence, blind to the gloom of the city, which persists through-
out the novel as much as the lingering smell from the stockyards.

Augie notices the gloominess of his city even in his early years.

When he goes to the free dispensary on Harrison Street to get glasses

for his mother, he immediately detects:

78

a thundery gloom in Harrison of limestone county buildings
and cumbersome red streetcars with metal grillwork on their
windows and monarchical iron whiskers of cowcatchers front
and rear. They lumbered and clanged, and their brake tanks
panted in the slushy brown of a winter afternoon or the bare
stone brown of a summer's, salted with ash, smoke, and
prairie dust, with long stops at the clinics to let off
clumpers, cripples, hunchbacks, brace-legs, crutch-wielders,
tooth and eye sufferers, and all the rest. (7-8)

Much later in the novel, when Augie has his hernia operated on in
the County Hospital on the same Harrison Street, he finds the same
"thundery gloom, bare stone brown, while the red cars lumbered and
clanged" (458). Between these two passages, "gloom" is mentioned
frequently. Often, the city's darkness mirrors Augie's mood, espe-
cially when he confronts the dismal aspects of his life. The marriage
of the inner and outer weather is seen when he and Mimi are caught out
by Weintraub in the abortion clinic and Augie feels "general darkness
and fear, like the unlighted cloud that hung outside" (273).

Growing up in a poor immigrant neighborhood during the twenties,
Augie is, of course, not a stranger to the grim reality of city life.
He understands that he was "forced early into deep city aims" (84) in
an environment that can turn against him at any time. Later Augie
observes the down-and-out side of Chicago.

As a C10 organizer hunting for the union members to organize,
Augie goes to their moldy rooms, where he reflects, "No use assuming
that I had reversed all and was now entering these flophouse doors from
the side of light, formerly from that of darkness" (292).

While working in Simon's coal yard, Augie descends into the
despicably dark and sordid places when he tries to recruit hands for

the yard and takes the coal-and-ice deals into taverns in order to get

business:

79

in those sleepy and dark with heat joints where the very
flies crept rather than flew, seeming doped by the urinal
camphors and malt sourness, and from the heated emptiness and
woodblock-knocking of the baseball broadcast that gave only
more constriction to the unlocatable, undiagnosed wrong. .
But in such places the slow hairy fly-crawl from drop to drop
and star to star, you could pray the non-human universe was
not entered from here, and this was no sack-end of it that
happened to touch Cook County and Northern Illinois. (227-
28)

While working on the WPA program as a housing surveyer, Augie goes

to lower-class areas and into houses in the slums, which, as he admits,

. 4
are "terrra incognita" to him.

I was with a housing survey, checking on rooms and plumbing
back-of-the-yards. . . . Also, the going into houses
satisfied my curiosity. It was finding ten people to a room
and the toilets in excavations under the street, or the rat-
bitten kids. That was what I didn't like too much. The
stockyard reek clung to me worse than the smell of the dogs
at Guillaume's. And even to me, as accustomed to slums as
Indians are to elephants, it was terra incognita. The
different smells of flesh in all degrees from desire to
sickness followed me. (286-87)

This is an unmasked and relentless picture of the poor during the
Depression.
The darkness crystallizes into a significant symbol in the novel

when, as Simon's assistant, he goes to the police station:5

But the dark of this West Side station! It was very dark.
It was spoiled, diseased, sore and running. And as the mis-
minted and wrong-struck figures and faces stooped, shambled,
strode, gazed, dreaded, surrendered, didn't care--unfailing,
the surplus and superabundance of human material--you
wondered that all was stuff that was born human and shaped
human, and over the indiscriminateness and lack of choice.
And don't forget the dirt-hardness, the dough fats and raw
meats, of those on the official side. And this wasn't even
the big Newgate of headquarters downtown but merely a
neighborhood tributary. (229)

It is the harsh reality Augie has to face on his way to seeking a good

80
enough fate.
In addition to the gloom and darkness, the dehumanizing material-
ism of the city is also dreadful to Augie. As he observes in the hotel

reserved for Simon's wedding:

But in this modern power of luxury, with its battalions of
service workers and engineers, it's the things themselves, the
products that are distinguished, and the individual man isn't
nearly equal to their great sum. Finally they are what
becomes great-~the multitude of baths with never-failing hot
water, the enormous air-conditioning units and the elaborate
machinery. No opposing greatness is allowed. . . . (238)

After leaving the Renlings and working as a rubber paint salesman,
Augie goes around the city on the streetcars and E1 in winter. The
uniform "thingness" of the city seen from his car rides sickens him:
"there was something fuddling . . . in the mass piled up of uniform
things, the likeness of small parts, the type of newspaper columns and

the bricks of buildings" (159). Augie fears that he may be reduced

into insignificance:

To sit and be trundled, while you see: there's a danger in
that of being a bobbin for endless thread or bolt for yard
goods; if there's not much purpose anyway in the ride. And
if there's some amount of sun in the dusty weep marks of the
window, it can be even worse for the brain than those iron-
deep clouds, just plain brutal and not mitigated. There have
been civilizations without cities. But what about cities
without civilizations? An inhuman thing, if possible, to
have so many people who beget nothing on one another. No,
but it is not possible, and the dreary begets its own fire,
and so this never happens. (159; italics mine)

Augie's disillusionment with his city grows even more acute in the
second half of the novel. After returning from Mexico, he observes his
city from the window of a high building:

this gray snarled city with the hard black straps of rails,
enormous industry cooking and its vapor shuddering to the

81
air, the climb and fall of its stages in construction or
demolition like mesas, and on these the different powers and
sub-powers, crouched and watched like sphinxes. Terrible
dumbness covered it, like a judgment that would never find
its word. (425)
The images of the above passage, as Clayton notes, evoke a sense of
inhuman terror oppressing the individual (lll).
Staying in County Hospital before he goes to war, Augie goes up to
the roof to look at his city. Chicago's urban sprawl, with its massive
details and units, gives rise to his feeling of nada:
Around was Chicago. In its repetition it exhausted your
imagination of details and units, more units than the cells
of the brain and bricks of Babel. The Ezekiel caldron of
wrath, stoked with bones. In time the caldron too could
melt. A mysterious tremor, dust, vapor, emanation of
stupendous effort traveled with the air, over me on top of
the great establishment, so full as it was, and over the
clinics, clinks, factories, flophouses, morgue, skid row. As
before the work of Egypt and Assyria, as before a sea, you're
nothing here. Nothing. (458-59)

The gloomy atmosphere and the repetition of details and units here

represent the inhuman forces of urban circumstances.

A novel that celebrates Chicago as an American city is pervaded
with such somber pictures! The reader hears two voices simultaneously
--yea and nay. While most of the time Augie celebrates the city's
vitality and exuberance, he also notes its desolation, squalor, and
darkness. His attitude toward his city changes from early acceptance
to later disappointment and even disillusionment.

The change of Augie's attitude toward his city is not surprising
if we remember that Bellow is essentially a realist and that the novel
is an honest record of Augie's ties to his city. In his youth Augie,

in his innocence and exuberance, is able to accept his city in its

totality, including its vice and squalor. As he matures and experi-

82
ences vicissitudes in life, however, it is inevitable that he starts to
feel disappointed with his city, especially when his luck goes sour.

Moreover, as the novel is Augie's memoir, the narrator and
commentator Augie tends to brood and qualify whereas the protagonist
and experiencer Augie enjoys his adventures in his city. Augie's
qualification of his city as "that somber city" at the very outset of
the novel is deliberate, preparing the reader for the somber picture of
the city in the pages to follow.

From the viewpoint of what E. M. Forster calls "fiction-technical-
ities" (Cowley 25), Bellow establishes the basic contradiction inherent
in the novel by combining the forms of bildungsroman and picaresque in
the novel and by having his picaro protagonist roam in an urban envi-
ronment traditionally associated with naturalism. This accounts for
the dialectics (and tension) between self and society, optimism and
pessimism, freedom and boundary, celebration and condemnation, bright-
ness and darkness, as well as energy and ennui in the novel.

Augie's attitudes toward his city more or less reflect Bellow's
own. Like his author, who claims himself "a Chicagoan out and out"
(Kunitz 73), Augie, a native son, of course knows that Chicago is a
rough place: there are "heathen, stupes, and bruteheads" (81), muscle-
minded apes, gangsters, corrupt politicians, tough policemen, and
swindling businessmen. There are sensational news stories of gangsters
~killing each other, and Augie himself sometimes yields to the
temptation of stealing.

He is taught well by his surrogate father Einhorn:

The city is one place where a person who goes out for a
peaceful walk is liable to come home with a shiner or bloody

nose, and he's almost as likely to get it from a cop's
nightstick as from a couple of squareheads. . . . Because

83

you know it's not the city salary the cops live on now, not

with all the syndicate money there is to pick up. (82)
This picture of the brutish reality of the city reflects Einhorn's (and
Bellow's) unsentimental attitude toward Chicago and cities in general.6
Bellow has Einhorn tell Augie that perhaps the greatest advantage of
living in that brutish and somber city of Chicago is that one does not
embrace any illusion about the city or about life: "But there is some
kind of advantage in the roughness of a place like Chicago, of not
having any illusions either. Whereas in all the great capitals of the
world there's some reason to think humanity is very different" (82).

Bellow believes all cities are alike. He does not believe that in

Rome, London, Paris, or Athens life is less dangerous than in Chicago.7
While the New York City in The Victim is compared to Bangkok and
Singapore, Chicago and other cities in Augie are also associated with
London, Messina, Rome, and Calcutta. The implication is clear: all
cities are alike and all human beings share the same condition. The
satellite cities of Chicago (Gary and Hammond) invite comparisons with
London and Alpine Torino: "If you've seen a winter London open
thundering mouth in its awful last minutes of river light or have come
with cold clanks from the Alps into Torino in December white steam then
you've known like greatness of place" (90). And one night in a Detroit
police station cell, Augie reflects on man's fate: "However, as I felt
on entering Erie, Pennsylvania, there is a darkness. It is for
everyone" (175; italics mine). Thinking back about some ancient
Greeks, who thought they were in the light but were in fact in darkness
too, Augie reflects, that compared with modern man, they are still "the
admiration of the rest of the mud-sprung, famine-knifed, street-

pounding, war-rattled, difficult, painstaking, kicked in the belly,

84
grief and cartilage mankind, the multitude, some under a coal-sucking
Vesuvius of chaos smoke, some inside a heaving Calcutta midnight, who
very well know where they are" (175).

Bellow's descriptions of Chicago's "thundery gloom" and its
alienating reification paint a realistic rather than a romantic picture
of Augie's city, but Augie March is not a naturalistic novel empha-
sizing the conditioning forces of the city. Chicago is characterized
by both vitality and despondence, optimism and darkness, fluidity and
restraint, the former always overriding the latter.

That is why Augie, though a down-and-out rubber paint salesman at
the moment, remarks, "And once I was under way, streetcars weren't
sufficient, nor Chicago large enough to hold me" (160). Augie will
not, as the novel shows, succumb to the confining forces of the city,
no matter how formidable they are.

IV

Inasmuch as Augie does not embrace a romantic idea about his city,
he is not easily disillusioned by his city. If he is not sentimental
about the city, neither is be about the pastoral ideal.

Occasionally Augie laments that his life in Chicago has no
pastoral elements but only "deep city vexation" and "deep city aims."
After asking himself what he wants in life and saying, "I know I longed
very much, but I didn't understand for what" (84), he goes on to
ruminate:

Before vice and shortcoming, admitted in the weariness of
maturity, common enough and boring to make an extended
showing of, there are, or are supposed to be, silken,
unconscious, nature-painted times, like the pastoral of
Sicilian shepherd lovers, or lions you can chase away with
stones and golden snakes who scatter from their knots into
the fissures of Eryx. Early scenes of life, I mean; for each

separate person too, everyone beginning with Eden and passing
through trammels, pains, distortions, and death into the

85

darkness out of which, it is hinted, we may hope to enter
permanently into the beginning again. There is horror of
grayness, of the death-forerunning pinch, of scandalous mouth
or of fear-eyes, and of whatever is caused by no recollection
of happiness and no expectation of it either. But there is
no shepherd-Sicily, no free-hand nature-painting, but deep
city vexation instead, and you are forced early into deep
city aims, not sent in your ephod before Eli to start service
in the temple, nor set on a horse by your weeping sisters to
go and study Creek in Bogota, but land in a poolroom--what
can that lead to the highest? And what happiness or
misery-antidote can it offer instead of pipes and sheep or
musical, milk-drinking innocence, or even merely nature walks
with a pasty instructor in goggles, or fiddle lessons?
Friends, human pals, men and brethren, there is no brief,
digest, or shorthand way to say where it leads. Crusoe,
alone with nature, under heaven, had a busy, complicated time
of it with the unhuman itself, and I am in a crowd that
yields results with much more difficulty and reluctance and
am part of it myself. (84-85; italics mine)

This is an important passage in our understanding of the city-
country dialogue in Bellow's fiction. Though lamenting that his
childhood is devoid of pastoral elements, Augie does not embrace the
illusion of the pastoral in the midst of the modern world. He would
rather be part of humanity and receive everything from it: "I am in a
crowd . . . and am part of it myself" (85).

He is able to find tranquillity even in the midst of urban clutter
and noise. Even in the very urban Einhorn household, Augie finds some
idyllic moments: "Quiet, quiet, quiet afternoon in the back-room study,
with an oilcloth on the library table, busts on the wall, invisible
cars snoring and trembling toward the park, the sun shining into the
yard outside the window barred against house-breakers . . ." (75). On
another occasion he wakes up to a "brilliant first morning of the year"
(283) after a frantic quest the day before, which happens to be the
darkest in the whole year. He observes a rare moment of beauty in a

Greek church:

I passed over the church too and rested only on the great

86
profound blue. The days have not changed, though the times
have. The sailors who first saw America, that sweet sight,
where the belly of the ocean had brought them, didn't see more
beautiful color than this (283).
This is an example of how Bellow deftly contrasts futile efforts and
bountiful harmony, darkness and brightness.

Before leaving for Mexico, Augie notes how detached city dwellers
are from the natural environment. In a typically Bellovian gesture, he
looks out of the window at the evening city:

The trees grew in the little yard, which was covered with
white gravel. Some big insect flew in and began walking on
the table. I don't know what insect it was, but it was
brown, shining, and rich in structures. (313)
The insect, like the untimely butterfly in Dangling Man, gives Augie
some insight into the world of nature: "In the city the big universal
chain of insects gets thin, but where there's a leaf or two it'll be
represented" (313).

"Things were too complex," Tommy Wilhelm thinks to himself in
Seize the Day, "but they might be reduced to simplicity again.

Recovery was possible. First he had to get out of the city" (85).
Oppressed by the gloom, chaos, clutter, and complexity of the city,
Augie, like Wilhelm, does think of escaping from his city, at least for
a while. He leaves his city a couple of times but never in deliberate
search of the pastoral ideal.

More often than not, the countryside and small towns are no less
hellish or sinister than the city. The city is at least his own turf
where he feels at home; out of the city, he feels like a fish out of
its own water.

During the Depression, Augie, down and out, joins Joe Gorman in

the illegal trafficking of immigrants over the border from Canada. One

87
reason he goes along is because he wants "a change of pressure, and to
get out of the city" (162). However, his decision to join Gorman turns
out to be nightmarish.

When they arrive at Lackawanna in a stolen car, the countryside,
far away from his city, seems hell-like: "This place, for sure, had a
demon; it was blue, lump-earthed, oil-rank, and machinery was cooking
in the dark, not far back of us, into heaven, from the Lackawanna
chimneys" (163). Leaving Gorman, who is caught by the state police,
Augie heads back to Chicago. Stranded in Buffalo and waiting for Simon
to wire him some money, he makes an excursion to Niagara Falls, where
he sees:

only a few strays beside the crush of the water, like early
sparrows in the cathedral square before Notre Dame has opened
its doors; and then in the brute sad fog you know that at one
time this sulphur coldness didn't paralyze everything, and
there's the cathedral to prove it (165).

When he realizes that Simon is not going to send any money, he
starts to hitch-hike back to Chicago. An industrial sub-town near
Detroit, factory smoke filling in the wind, seems to him war-ravaged:
"battlefield, cemetery, garbage crater, violet welding scald, mountains
of tires sagging, and ashes spuming like crests in front of a steamer,
Hooverville crate camps, plague and war fires like the boiling pinnacle
of all sackings and Napoleonic Moscow burnings" (170).

After four days' wandering in the states east of Chicago, Augie
finally returns home. He compares his feelings to a Neapolitan
sailor's return to Naples and then to a fish's return to its native
water: "You enter your native water like a fish. And there sits the
great fish god or Dagon. You then bear your soul like a minnow before

Dagon, in your familiar water" (176).

88

The Mexico episode does not speak for the country in the city-
country dialogue. As Gerson points out, "Bellow surrounds Augie's trip
to Mexico with portents and eventually depicts Mexico as a pseudo-
paradise [for Augie as the American Adam] which is actually hellish"
(124). It is in Mexico, according to Clayton, that Augie "begins
really to touch inhuman energy, to plunge into the Darkness, to find
what lies under the [social] sugar" (123).

Augie goes to Mexico, not in search of a possible paradise, but
out of love for Thea, who wants to get a divorce there. On their way
to Mexico, Augie does experience some moments of union with Nature.

For instance, while camping near the Mississippi, which Augie is eager
to see, Augie is as "terribly excited" (326) as Huck Finn and he
experiences an Emersonian/Whitmanesque moment:
We lay beside a huge tree. Such a centuries' old trunk still
had such small-change of foliage. . . . And soon you distin-
guished the sound of the leaves, moved by the air, from the
insects' sound. First near and loud; then farther and moun-
tainous. And then you realized that wherever it was dark
there was this sound of insects, continental and hemispheric,
again and again, like surf, and continuous and dense as
stars. (326)
Another such moment occurs when they are making love under some pines
in the Ozark foothills, while "the clouds, birds, cattle in the water,
things, stayed at their distance, and there was no need to herd,
account for, hold them in the head, but it was enough to be among them,
released on the ground as they were in their brook or in their air"
(330).

At moments such as these Augie regrets having grown up in the

Chicago of junkyards and El pillars: "And sometimes misery came over me

to feel that I myself was the creation of such places" (330). However,

such moments as these are few. In fact, the farther south they go, the

89
more disastrous goes the trip. Mexico does not provide Augie with
idyllic escape or arcadian pleasure. As Sarah Cohen writes, "Augie's
escape to the Mexican wilderness offers him no asylum from the wilder-

ness of the city" (142).

The Valley of Mexico is a land of darkness and death:

coaly bubbles of the underworld, dangerous red everywhere
from the sun, and then coats of snow on the peak of the
cones-~gliding like a Satan--. . . . Instead of racks or
pyramids of skulls still in their hair and raining down
scraps of flesh there are corpses of dogs, rats, horses,
asses, by the roads; the bones dug out of the rented graves
are thrown on a pile when the lease is up. . . . Beggars in
dog voices on the church steps enact the last feebleness for
with ancient Church Spanish, and show their old flails of
stump and their sores. . . . Which is all to emphasize how
openly death is received everywhere, in the beauty of the
place, and how it is acknowledged that anyone may be roughly
handled--the proudest--pinched, slapped, and set down, thrown
down; for death throws even worse in men's faces and makes it
horrible and absurd that one never touched should be roughly
dumped under, dumped upon. (338)

The town of Acatla is not bucolic. Thea's villa, Casa Descuitada,
is not the Carefree House its name suggests. The Mexican scenes--
kaleidoscopes of fiestas, bands, cossack chorus, Indian circus, card-
playing, and drinking--give Augie neither solace nor comfort. After
Thea leaves him, Augie ruminates:

Suddenly my heart felt ugly, I was sick of myself. I thought
that my aim of being simple was just a fraud, that I wasn't a
bit goodhearted or affectionate, and I began to wish that
Mexico from beyond the walls would come in and kill me and
that I would be thrown in the bone dust and twisted, spilky
crosses of the cemetery, for the insects and lizards. (401)

Mexico does not provide Augie with an alternative to his city life
in Chicago. In that far-away country, Augie still clings to memories

of Chicago and its people. He even runs into fellow Chicagoans,

Sylvester and Frazer Hooker.

90
V
When he laments that "the world is too much with us," Augie feels

overwhelmed by the immensity of the modern city:

Anyway, there's too much of everything of this kind, that's
come home to me, too much history and culture to keep track
of, too many details, too much news, too much example, too
much influence, too many guys who tell you to be as they are,
and all this hugeness, abundance, turbulence, Niagara Falls
torrent. Which who is supposed to interpret? Me? I haven't
got that much head to master it all. I get carried away.
(455) -

An excess of information and details deprives modern man of a chance
for reflection. Like Wordsworth, Augie makes a plea for feelings. A
romantic adventurer, he has an epiphany approximating Laotze's no-

action wisdom or Keats' "negative capability" (Scott xiii):

I have a feeling . . . about the axial lines of life, with
respect to which you must be straight or else your existence
is merely clownery, hiding tragedy. I must have had a
feeling since I was a kid about these axial lines which made
me want to have my existence on them, and so I have said ‘no'
like a stubborn fellow to all my persuaders, just on the
obstinacy of my memory of these lines, never entirely clear.
But lately I have felt these thrilling lines again. When
striving stops, there they are as a gift. I was lying on the
couch here before and they suddenly went quivering right
straight through me. Truth, love, peace, bounty, usefulness,
harmony! And all noise and grates, distortion, chatter,
distraction, effort, superfluity, passed off like something
unreal. And I believe that any man at any time can come back
to these axial lines . . . if he will be quiet and wait it
out. . . . the man himself, finite and taped as he is, can
still come where the axial lines are. He will be brought
into focus. He will live with true joy. (455—56; italics
mine)

It is when the striving stops, the axial lines can be found.
After knocking around for some time, Augie longs to have a place
of rest and to be still. He dreams of setting up an academy and

foster-home: "I aim to get myself a piece of property and settle down

on it. . . . What I'd like most is to get married and set up a kind of

91

home and teach school. I'll marry . . . and then I'd get my mother
out of the blind-home and my brother George up from the South" (456).
This dream smacks of the Arcadian myth, the pastoral ideal. He tries
to follow the examples of Thoreau and Yeats: "What I had in mind was
this private green place like one of those Walden or Innisfree wattle
jobs under the kind sun, surrounded by velvet woods and bright gardens
and Elysium lawns sown with Lincoln Park grass seed" (515).

Augie's dream remains only a romantic idea, however, never to be
realized. First it is postponed by the war; then it is destroyed by
his marriage to Stella, who thinks it impractical. Augie knows that
Stella envisions his foster-home as:

a beaten-up frame house of dead-drunk jerry-builders under
dusty laborious trees, laundry boiling in the yard, pinched
chickens of misfortune, rioting kids, my blind mother wearing
my old shoes and George cobblering, me with a crate of bees
in the woods. (515)

Thus Augie's plan turns out to be "only one of those bubble-headed
dreams of people" (515). As he admits, his foster-home and academy
dream is not "a preoccupation but one of those featherhead millenarian
notions or summer butterflies. You should never try to cook such
butterflies in lard" (516).

The novel ends in the European countryside. On his way to Bruges,
Augie gives his maid Jacqueline a ride to Normandy for a Christmas
visit. As they are getting close to her destination, the car engine
breaks down, and they walk and sing toward the farm across the fields.

In this wasteland-like setting, where battles of the Hundred
Years' War had been fought, he hears that the life-battered
Jacqueline's life-long dream is to go to Mexico and he begins to laugh.

Against such a dismal picture there arises Bellow's wry affirmation.

92

The last passage of the novel reveals the optimistic undertone of the

novel:
That's the animal ridens in me, the laughing creature,
forever rising up. What's so laughable, that a Jacqueline,
for instance, as hard used as that by rough forces, will
still refuse to lead a disappointed life? Or is the laugh at
nature--including eternity-~that it thinks it can win over us
and the power of hope? Nah, nah! I think, it never will.
But that probably is the joke, on one or the other, and
laughing is an enigma that includes both. Look at me, going
everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at—
hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra
incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a
flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a
flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which
didn't prove there was no America. (536)

Augie March, a novel in rebellion against the naturalistic and
modernist tradition, is about a protagonist who seeks a worthwhile,
higher, and independent fate, in spite of his impoverished Jewish
immigrant background and his gloomy urban milieu. Augie is a survivor,
though unable to live fully according to his ideal "axial lines of
life." At the end he is optimistic and exuberant, "a sort of Columbus
of those near-at-hand," a defiant, laughing creature, still exploring,
still adventuring.

If the United States is "essentially the greatest poem" (Whitman
5), then Chicago, a quintessentially American city, is a great novel
waiting to be written. The Adventures of Augie March is Bellow's
attempt to write that novel. As a Chicago novel, Augie March is more
an exaltation than a condemnation of the city. Though not without gloom
and darkness, Augie's Chicago proves to be an open arena for his

adventures. The result of the dialectics is that freedom triumphs over

constraint, optimism over despair, and the city over the country.

Notes

1 Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (New York: Viking, 1953)
515. In this chapter further references will be cited in the text.

2 In "Chicago: The City That Was, The City That Is," Bellow
writes, "A fiction writer by trade, I view myself also as a historian.
More than 30 years ago I published The Adventures of Augie March, a
novel that is in part a record of Chicago in the '205 and '305. I see
by the college catalogues that my book is studied in a considerable
number of schools. It is read in Yugoslavia, too, and in Turkey and
China, so that throughout the world people are forming a picture of
Chicago, the setting of Augie's adventures. But that Chicago no longer
exists. It is to be found only in memory and in fiction. Like the
Cicero of Al Capone, like Jack London's Klondike, like Fenimore
Cooper's forests, like Gauguin's Pacific paradise, like Upton
Sinclair's Jungle, it is an imaginary place" (21-22).

3 Bellow always loves Whitman ("A Writer From Chicago" 200). He
writes, "I suppose that I had tried as a young writer to come to terms
with Chicago in Whitmanesque terms. ‘I hail with joy,’ wrote Whitman
in Democratic Vistas, ‘The oceanic, variegated, intense practical
energy, the demand for facts, even the business materialism of the
current age, our States'" ("A Writer" 188).

4 Some jobs provided by the WPA were very monotonous and
purposeless. Bellow likes to repeat a joke related to the program: to
get paid, people were asked to pick up the bricks on the sidewalks in
the morning and lay them down again in the afternoon. See Bellow, "In
the Days of Roosevelt."

5 The symbolic significance of darkness in Bellow's canon has been
much explored by critics. It is often related to death, evil, and
misery. In his Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man, Clayton has highlighted
the role of the fear of death in Bellow's works. He writes, "Death is
the core terror and the ultimate cancel stamp on the ‘separate Self'
that Bellow defends in his address before the Library of Congress and
in all his fiction. Death is the ground of all that Bellow calls the
‘darkness,’ underlying the inhuman in nature and in the social world"
(108).

6 Augie's view of Chicago clearly reflects Bellow's: "I think
there's residual feeling of pride in the corruption in Chicago, and the
fact that it's Toughville. You have to have the guts and savvy to live
there" (Medwick 426).

7 This idea about the city extends through Bellow's canon. Even
in recent interviews and lectures (after the publication of The Dean's
December) Bellow still voices essentially the same opinion about the
city. See, for instance, his Tanner lectures at Cambridge University,
"A Writer from Chicago," and his "Chicago: The City That Was and The
City That Is." In his interview with Joyce Illig, he explains the

93

94

symbolic significance Chicago has in his novels:

All of civilized mankind is entering the peculiar condition
in which we were pioneers. That's why Chicago is
significant. We experienced it before the others did. We
experienced the contemoporary condition before others were
aware of it. . . . Chicago is, I believe, the symbol of it.
In Chicago things were done for the first time, which the
rest of the world later learned and imitated. Capitalist
production was pioneered in the stockyards, in refrigerator
cars, in the creation of the Pullman, in the creation of farm
machinery, and with it also certain urban political
phenomenon, which are associated with the new condition of
modern democracy. It all happened here. It happened early.

(47)

Works Cited
Anderson, David D. "‘That Somber City' Since MidCentury." Paper
presented at the 1985 MLA Convention, Chicago, 27 Dec. 1985.
Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March. New York: Viking, 1953.

---. "Chicago: The City That Was, The City That Is." Life October
1986: 21+.

---. "How I Wrote Augie March's Story." New York Times Book Review 31
Jan. 1954: 3+.

"In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt." Esquire Dec. 1983: 530-39.
---. "A Writer from Chicago." In The Tanner Lectures on Huamn Values,
III, 1982. Ed. Sterling M. McMurrin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1982. 177-219.

Clayton, John J. Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man. Rev. ed.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

Cohen, Sarah B. "Saul Bellow's Chicago." Modern Fiction Studies 24
(1978): 139-46.

Cowley, Malcolm, ed. Writer At Work: the Paris Review Interviews. New
York: Viking, 1959.

Gerson, Steven M. "The New American Adam in The Adventures of Augie
March." Modern Fiction Studies 25 (1979): 117-28.

Illig, Joyce. "An Interview with Saul Bellow." Publisher's Weekly 22
Oct. 1973: 74-77. Rpt. in Dictionary of Literary Biography:
Documentary Series. Vol. 3. Ed. Mary Bruccoli. Detroit: Gale,
1983. 44-48.

Kunitz, Stanley. "Saul Bellow." Twentieth Century Authors: First
Supplement. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1955: 72-73.

Medwick, Cathleen. "A Cry of Strength: The Unfashionably Uncynical
Saul Bellow." Vogue March 1982: 368+.

Scheer-Schazler, Brigitte. Saul Bellow. New York: Ungar, 1972.

Scott, Nathan A., Jr. Negative Capability: Studies in the New
Literature and the Religious Situation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969.

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. New York: Library
of America, 1982.

95

CHAPTER IV

Seize the Day: One Day in the City of Babel

He loved them. One and all, he
passionately loved them. They

were his brothers and sisters.

I

Seize the Day, a novella published in 1956, was probably not
written immediately before its actual publication.2 It has more
affinity to Bellow's first two novels than to its immediate predecess-
sor, The Adventures Of Augie March (1953), or to its immediate succes-
sor, Henderson the Rain King (1959). The affinity shows itself in its
concise form, its terse style, its abstract title, and, most important,
its thematic kernel: man as victim in the modern city-cum-society.

Like the heroes in the first two novels, Tommy Wilhelm, separated
from his wife and his two boys, feels very much alienated and displaced
in the big city. The novella depicts one day in his troubled life-~a
day when his luck seems to hit the bottom. All the present actions in
the novella, deftly compressed into a time-span of less than twenty-
four hours, take place in that "unnatural, too-human" city--New York,
which Bellow brings so vividly alive that Alfred Kazin called it "the
most living, throbbing character" (483).

Tommy Wilhelm's New York is no less impersonal, oppressive, and
menacing than the New York in The Victim. However, the specific locale
is different: not commercial lower Manhattan but the Upper West Side;

96

97
not thronged with strange faces moving as if in a drug-induced trance
but with old people:
Along Broaday in the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, a
great part of New York's vast population of old men and women
lives. Unless the weather is too cold or wet they fill the
benches about the tiny railed parks and along the subway
gratings from Verdi Square to Columbia University, they crowd
the shops and cafeterias, the dime stores, the tea-rooms, the
bakeries, the beauty parlors, the reading rooms and club
rooms. (8)
These old people, with his father Dr. Adler positioned in the most
conspicuous place, exert a stifling, authoritarian impact on Wilhelm.
The city, with its iron-bound landscape and its unfriendly, indiffer-
ent, grotesque, and money-obsessed people, constitutes a great oppres-
sive force upon Wilhelm.

Bellow highlights the theme of displacement by placing Wilhelm at
the Hotel Gloriana among those "having-nothing-to-do-but-wait-out-the-
day" retirees instead of in his Brooklyn home enjoying family life with
his wife and children. As the story opens, the dispirited and worry-
ridden Wilhelm has a presentiment that his luck is sinking as swiftly
as the down-going elevator. Once in the lobby, he gazes out of the
window at a building some blocks away.

As noted previously, the window scene is an important Bellovian
motif: it often gives us the Bellow hero's perception of his city and
the world at large. Although this window scene, unlike those in
Bellow's other novels, does not give us a broad vista of the city or
provide the hero with any insight into his own fate or the fate of
humankind, the brief description, placed at the beginning of the day

and of the novella, does provide an objective correlative to the text

and to the protagonist's psyche.

98

The building Wilhelm gazes at is the Hotel Ansonia, which Bellow
mistakenly attributes to Stanford White. The building looks like "a
baroque palace from Prague or Munich enlarged a hundred times" (9), but
it is not so grandiose: "black television antennae are densely planted
on its round summits" (9). The building is like a chameleon,
reflecting different images according to changes in the weather and the
mood of the beholder: "it looked like the image of itself reflected in
deep water, white and cumulous above, with cavernous distortions
underneath" (9).

The story begins with this drowning image. The hydrophobiac
Wilhelm spends the day trying desperately to hold on to the last few
shreds of his self and to the last few hundred dollars he has in the
engulfing big city. At the end of the day, he finds himself standing
in line before a stranger's coffin in a funeral parlor, crying:

The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in Wilhelm's blind,
wet eyes; the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It
poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of
a crowd by the great and happy oblivion of tears. He heard
it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries
toward the consummation of his heart's ultimate need. (128)

This final touching moment is not accidental. Before reaching it,
Wilhelm goes through a "day of reckoning" (92) in which he reviews his
past and re-examines his present. It is a day charged with frustra-
tion, suffering, disappointment, exasperation, and desolation.

II

Tommy Wilhelm has always been subject to the whims of his own

character, the caprice of his fate, and the manipulation of others. He

feels he has been a failure all his life. In the eyes of his parents,

his sister, his wife, and a talent scout named Maurice Venice, he is a

99
loser. He is not very intelligent or well—read. Compared with other
members of his family, he is poorly educated. Physically he is clumsy,
awkward, heavy, and sloppy.

In his sophomore year, he left college and went to the West Coast
to become a movie star. He ended up as an extra. His going to
Hollywood is an example of his being a victim (Venice's letter inviting
him for a screen test was written as a joke) and of his own mistake-
prone character.

He returned to New York and became a salesman. He married
Margaret, had two children, and seemed to lead a normal life. However,
when his marriage collapsed, he left his children with his wife and
moved into the same hotel his father lived in. Then, like Willy Loman
in Death of a Salesman, he lost his territory. Unemployed for several
months, he is in deep financial difficulty, unable to meet the
exorbitant demands of his estranged wife, who wants him to pay for his
"freedom."

He tries to solicit his well-to-do father's help but to no avail.
His retired physician father refuses to give him anything, not even
sympathy. In fact, he feels ashamed of his son "Wilky," mainly because
Wilhelm is not a success like him. Sometimes his shame grows into
anger when his son behaves like a slob, displaying detestable habits
and symptoms of hyphochondria.

Wilhelm's relationship with his father is relentlessly harsh. In
Wilhelm's eyes, his father is a man without family feelings. A vain
man, Dr. Adler loves himself more than anyone else. He does not even
remember in what year his wife died. "A master of social behavior," he
is affable toward others but cool to his own son who "could not speak

his mind or ease his heart to him" (15). He treats Tommy like one of

100
his ordinary patients. Dr. Adler's unsympathetic, detached, and
rational attitude toward his son leads the desperate Wilhelm to comment
bitterly that in New York "the fathers were no fathers and the sons no
sons" (91).

And Wilhelm is no son. Whereas he "would never willingly hurt any
man's feelings" (34), Wilhelm loses control in conversation with his
father. Furthermore, from Dr. Adler's perspective, which is occasion-
ally provided by the omniscient narrator, Wilhelm has been a great
disappointment. He disapproved when Wilhelm left college for Hollywood
and he hated it when he changed his name from Wilky Adler to Tommy
Wilhelm. Stupid, foolish, slovenly, and sloppy, Wilhelm, now in his
mid-forties, has never settled down or accomplished anything. A
prominent scientist, Dr. Adler cannot bear to see his son a failure.

It was lazy of him not to make good in life. It was inexcusable of him
not to be able to manage his own money. It was unscrupulous of him to
lose his job.

In his eighties Dr. Adler is concerned with his own future. His
children (Wilhelm and Catherine) are not people on whom he can depend
for a living, not to mention comfort. A self-made man with a brilliant
career behind him, he has always valued the virtues of self-reliance
and independence--financial and emotional--and does not want to ride on
somebody's back; neither does he want someone to ride on his.

However, despite his harsh relationship with his father, Wilhelm
does not really hate his father. Dr. Tamkin asks him, "You love your
old man?" and Wilhelm replies, "‘Of course, of course I love him. My
father. My mother--' As he said this there was a great pull at the
very center of his soul. When a fish strikes the line you feel the

live force in your hand" (101). Without the intellectual abilities of

101
later Bellow heroes, Wilhelm is unable to identify or articulate this
mysterious feeling, although he has arrived at an inner truth.

Despite Wilhelm's expression of his love for his father and his
affirmation of family ties, however, the fathers and sons are estranged
from or in conflict with each other in Seize the Day. Wilhelm admits
he is not a good father to his own sons.

According to Bellow one of the themes in Seize the Day is "the
city dweller's fulfillment of personal needs on strangers" (qtd. in
Opdahl 108). Wilhelm's relationship with Dr. Tamkin grows out of this
psychological need. Even though he dimly knows that Dr. Tamkin's
interest in him is not purely altruistic or even friendly, even though
he suspects Tamkin is a fake, a charlatan, he is grateful to him for
his personal concern and even entrusts him with his last savings to
invest in the commodities market. When his "clean and immaculate" (l6)
father treats him like a patient, when his father is solely absorbed in
his own future, when his father displays no family feelings toward him,
Wilhelm looks elsewhere for a man who can at least show sympathy or
friendship. In this short novel, Dr. Tamkin, however fraudulent he
actually is, plays the role of a father-surrogate and mentor to the
perennial son-figure Wilhelm.

For all his fakery, Dr. Tamkin does utter some truths (at least
they strike Wilhelm as truths). Wilhelm feels greatly touched when
Tamkin talks about the two main souls (the real one and the pretender
one) (77) and the importance of seizing the here and now: "That's the
present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of
anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day"
(73).3 And it is Dr. Tamkin who characterizes life in New York City:

"If you only knew one per cent of what goes on in the city of New York!

102
You see, I understand what it is when the lonely person begins to feel
like an animal. When the night comes and he feels like howling from
his window like a wolf" (73).4
III

In addition to his interactions with his family and Dr. Tamkin,
Wilhelm cannot avoid the intrusions of his fellow city dwellers.
Joseph the dangling man has the grotesque Mr. Vanaker as his trouble-
some fellow boarder in the rooming house and Asa Leventhal has the
anti-Semite Kirby Allbee move in with him, but Tommy Wilhelm is
surrounded by a throng of aged people, many of them characterized by
grotesqueness, deformity, greed, predatoriness, shrewdness, dilapida-
tion, callousness, hypocrisy, and even stone-heartedness. Most of them
are interested only in clothes, social codes, and money. Those who
catch money-fever go on the market "with murder in their hearts" (14).
Unlike Wilhelm, they seem to fit in perfectly with the philistine,
mercantile society as represented by the New York financial world.
They seem to know everything while Wilhelm seems to be always in the
dark.

As Fuchs points out, "Mainly a story of how the old prosper and
the young wither, Seize the Day focuses on the bizarre reality of
sartorial splendor in old men" (93). Wilhelm's father is the most
telling example. Another instance is Rubin, the newsstand tender, who
always dresses exceedingly well even though he is behind the counter
most of the time, and who, despite his poor eyesight, seems to know
everything.

Other elderly New Yorkers become Wilhelm's acquaintances. Mr.
Perls, a fellow hotel boarder, used to be a hosiery wholesaler. In

Wilhelm's eyes, he is a "damn frazzle-faced herring with his dyed hair

103
and his fish teeth and this drippy mustache" (36). He is greatly
concerned with social decorum and worldly--monetary--success even
though he is dying. Having breakfast with his father and Mr. Perls,
Wilhelm reflects, "Uch! How they love money. . . . They adore money!
Holy money! Beautiful money! It was getting so that people were
feeble-minded about everything except money. While if you didn't have
it you were a dummy, a dummy! You had to excuse yourself from the face
of the earth" (41).

A helpless Tommy flanked by stifling old men is best conveyed,
when, at the branch office of the commodities market, "Wilhelm sat
between Mr. Rowland, who was elderly, and Mr. Rappaport, who was very
old" (86). The former started to speculate in the market when he was
at Harvard in 1908. The latter is one of the nasty old men in Bellow's
canon: when Tommy tries to follow Dr. Tamkin to recover some money, Mr.
Rappaport insists that Tommy take him to the cigar store across the
street; a person who demands that others do something for him but never
gives anything in return, he is, in Wilhelm's eyes, selfishness itself.

The most conspicuous grotesque is Dr. Tamkin, who is so physically
mis-shapen that he is like a predatory eagle: "What a rare, peculiar
bird he was, with those pointed shoulders, that bare head, his loose
nails, almost claws, and those brown, soft, deadly, heavy eyes" (89-
90). The anthropologically-oriented Bellow describes him in great
detail:

What a creature Tamkin was when he took off his hat! The
indirect light showed the many complexities of his bald
skull, his gull's nose, his rather handsome eyebrows, his
vain mustache, his deceiver's brown eyes. His figure was
stocky, rigid, short in the neck, so that the large ball of
the occiput touched his collar. . . . He stood pigeon-toed,

a sign perhaps that he was devious or had much to hide. The
skin of his hands was aging, and his nails were moonless,

104
concave, clawlike, and they appeared loose. His eyes were as
brown as beaver fur and full of strange lines. (68-69)

Such a flawed character as Wilhelm is an easy prey in the
jungle-like city of New York, "with its complexity and machinery,
bricks and tubes, wires and stones, holes and heights," not only a city
of the old and the grotesque and the "killers" (commodities market
speculators and money-makers), but a city of Babel, where communication
is almost impossible. Although he is a native of New York, the city
seems strange to him because: "I'm not used to New York any more. For
a native, that's very peculiar, isn't it? It was never so noisy at
night as now, and every little thing is a strain" (38). As Fuchs
writes, "Vast, full of different styles, New York's towers are the New
Babel where ‘every other man spoke a language entirely his own'" (92).
Communication in New York has become so difficult that

you had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back
and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to
understand or be understood, not to know the crazy from the
sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the old or the
sick from the well. The fathers were no fathers and the sons
no sons. You had to talk with yourself in the daytime and
reason with yourself at night. Who else was there to talk to
in a city like New York? (91).
Wilhelm repeatedly complains that he cannot bear the city any more:
"New York is like a gas. The colors are running. My head feels so
tight, I didn't know what I'm doing" (37). Dr. Tamkin envisions New
York as "a kind of purgatory. You walk on the bodies. They are all
around. I can hear them cry de profundis and wring their hands" (78).
IV

It is not surprising, therefore, that Wilhelm has a strong

yearning to leave New York. At the beginning of the novel, Wilhelm

105
watches a pigeon alight and hears "the wings beating strongly" (8),
reflecting longing to fly out of the hellish city.
His yearning for a simple, pastoral life becomes especially acute

when he recollects his pre-divorce life in Roxbury: "in late spring

weather . . . he used to sit expanded in a wicker chair with the
sunlight pouring through the weave .'. . young hollyhocks . . . small
flowers. . . . This peace was gone" (49).5 In the commodity market

office, the heavily pressured Wilhelm recalls the small yard in
Roxbury: "He breathed in the sugar of the pure morning. He heard the
long phrases of the birds. No enemy wanted his life" (89).
In the midst of chaos and faced with financial troubles, Wilhelm,
much more than Joseph and Leventhal, feels the strong urge to leave the
city and go to the countryside. On Broadway, he sees a huge crowd,
which fills him with an inexplicable oppression:
And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of
millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round,
of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human
secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of
one particular motive or essence-~I labor, I spend, I strive,
I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I
long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. (124-25)

Wilhelm tells himself that recovery of a tranquil life is possible but

"first he had to get out of the city" (85).

Yet his pastoral longings are merely romantic. His rationalist
father sees this clearly and wants him to give up his stupid romantic
notions. His reminiscences of his days in Roxbury are idyllic; he has
forgotten that at that time he had his trouble too. Nice gardens are
not necessarily antidotes to horrible cities. At one point Wilhelm

himself knows that not all things are good and happy in the country-

side. When he was a salesman on the road, he passed chicken farms in

106

the countryside. The scene, as he recollects it, was by no means
idyllic: "Those big, rambling, wooden buildings out in the neglected
fields; they were like prisons" (93).

The country does not vouchsafe a viable alternative to Wilhelm.
At the end of the novella the reader is left in suspense whether
Wilhelm will stay in the city or go to the country.

V

Despite the incommunicability among city people, the anomic effect
of the big city, and his occasional lapses into idyllic dreams,
Wilhelm, like other Bellovian heroes, is essentially urban-centered.
It is through the human interactions in the city that he experiences a
moment of revelation about his place in the universe. Wilhelm's
epiphany of the universality of humankind, an Emersonian illumination
that he is part of "a larger body," is gained in the subway station:
"There is a larger body, and from this you cannot be separated" (91).
At this instant, he suddenly come to realize what it means to have what
Dr. Tamkin calls a "real soul." He knows that, despite the differences
among human beings, "far beneath such details, what Tamkin would call
the real soul says plain and understandable things to everyone.
There truth for everybody may be found and confusion is only-~only
temporary . . ." (91-92).

The famous subway scene is depicted as follows:

The idea of this larger body has been planted in him a few

days ago beneath Times Square. . . . He was going through an
underground corridor, a place he had always hated and hated
more than ever now. . . . In the dark tunnel, in the haste,

heat, and darkness which disfigure and make freaks and
fragments of nose and eyes and teeth, all of a sudden,
unsought, a general love for all these imperfect and lurid-
looking people burst out in Wilhelm's breast. He loved them.
One and all, he passionately loved them. They were his
brothers and sisters. He was imperfect and disfigured

107

himself, but what difference did that make if he was united

with them by this blaze of love? And as he walked he began

to say, "Oh my brothers--my brothers and my sisters,"

blessing them all as well as himself. (92)
Even though Wilhelm is a detestable slob in his father's (or his
reader's) eyes, even though he does not know how to manage his life,
money, and body, at this moment he shows his genuine feelings as a man,
however ephemeral these feelings are. He favorably contrasts with
those people around him who, while busy chasing "Holy money! Beautiful
Money!" (41), are "feeble-minded about everything except money" (41).

Of course, Bellow does not intend to portray Wilhelm as a moral
saint. Nor does he mean that truths can be comprehended at just any
time or by just anyone: immediately after the subway revelation, Bellow
observes that this "onrush of loving kindness," this brotherly love
towards others, is one of the "involuntary feelings. . . . Like having
a hard-on at random" (92) However, Bellow does value this spontaneous
onrush of genuine feelings and has Wilhelm continue to reflect on it:
"I must go back to that. That's the right clue and may do me the most
good. Something very big. Truth, like" (93).

This emphasis on brotherly love is a key to an understanding of
Bellow's fiction, especially his treatment of the theme of man in the
city. Later, in Herzog, Bellow will depict a similar subway scene in
which Herzog has a similar epiphany. These scenes tell us that,
despite the hostile force of the city environment, human beings have to
continue to live, and as long as they love one another, men can
prevail. The subway experience also prepares us to understand and
accept the meaning of "the consummation of his heart's ultimate need"

(128) in the last scene, the funeral scene.

The funeral scene is the climax of this short novel. It is also

108
the end or release of Wilhelm's "day of reckoning," his day of suf-
fering. He transcends himself through his suffering and misery and
losses. Even though tomorrow may never come or be known, Wilhelm
seizes the great moment of his day to reach deeper than his personal
sorrow and think about a stranger's death, which may be his father's or
his own, and to cry "toward the consummation of his heart's ultimate
need." Though Bellow does not specify here what his heart's ultimate
need is, the reader gathers that it is love, humanity, understanding,
sympathy, and bounty. It is similar to Augie's axial lines.

That is what makes Wilhelm a typical Bellovian hero. Even though
he is not brilliant in thought, he is a man of feeling: "From his
mother he had gotten sensitive feelings, a soft heart, a brooding
nature, a tendency to be confused under pressure" (30). As a failure
himself, he has great sympathy for Venice who is "the obscure failure
of an aggressive and powerful clan" (24). Indeed, compared with other
characters in the novella, Wilhelm is a man who has genuine feeling and
sensitivity. Even though he is not a highly introspective character,
like Joseph or Herzog, he knows his own mistakes and he tries to
correct them, although his weak will and error-prone inclinations
prevent him from doing so. His self-recognition often brings him
bitterness and grains of self-hatred; for instance, he sees himself as
resembling a bear and calls himself "Ass! Idiot! Wild boar! Dumb mule!
Slave! Lousy, wallowing hippopotamus!" (62). All these, of course,
reveal his self-awareness, however weak or frail that self is.

Even though many critics have criticized Wilhelm for his many
faults and weaknesses, I think he is pitiable because he keeps trying
and trying without the blessing of good luck.6 Even before his total

failure in Hollywood, he can empathize with the needs of the down-and—

109
out: he is greatly touched when Venice says, "Everywhere there are
people trying hard, miserable, in trouble, downcast, tired, trying and
trying. They need a break, right? A break through, a help, luck, or
sympathy" (26).

As is typical of the Bellow hero, Wilhelm gains a rejuvenating
power through examining his own self and his own past. Ultimately he
is able to reach the climactic scene in which he fully accepts his own
self and merges into the larger body which is common humanity. What
makes his pathetic character human and believable and what redeems his
tendency to be victimized is, his ability to go deep down into himself
and his attempt to find truth or truth-like recognition there. Finally
he is a typical Bellow hero because he can love; in the last scene, by
crying over the dead he learns to love himself and his fellow beings as
well.

Wilhelm is pathetic but has some sense of dignity because, like
Bellow's other heroes, he is concerned with self-identity, individual-
ity, and humanity. His life is in chaos and he has lost almost
everything he can call his own, but, amid the chaos, craziness, and
clutter around him, he is a man genuinely concerned about family ties,
love, humanity, and the "real soul." He wants to know how to lead a
worthwhile life and become a good man.

That is what makes Wilhelm morally superior to his fellow New
Yorkers. Despite his many flaws and weaknesses, Bellow does not cast
him completely in a dark light: Wilhelm at least possesses what makes
a man human--universal love, a feeling in his heart of love for all

humankind because they are related to him in a mystical sense.

Notes

1 Bellow, Seize the Day (1956; New York: Avon, 1977) 92. In this
chapter, further references will be cited in the text.

2 In Saul Bellow: The Problem of Affirmation, Kulshrestha makes
this surmise, at which Bellow himself agrees. Kulshrestha writes, "A
perusal of the Saul Bellow papers deposited with the Joseph Regentstein
Library at the University of Chicago led me to surmise that Seize the
Day may not have been written in the period immediately preceding its
publication" (20). See also Kulshrestha's interview with Bellow.

3 The original title for Seize the Day was Here and Now.

4 In "Dora," a short story published in 1949, Bellow has
illustrated this phenomenon in more detail. Dora is a woman who feels
sympathy or empathy with those who howl like animals at night in New
York City, because she herself is such a lonely woman.

5 The name Roxbury recalls Brook Farm, which was located in West
Roxbury, nine miles out from Boston.

6 Ada Aharoni, for instance, severely criticizes Wilhelm as a son,
husband, and father. Admittedly, he is really a flop, a slob, even an
unlikable person. Yet, Bellow does not portray him as a completely
negative figure. Whilelm does have some traces of humanity.

llO

Works Cited
Aharoni, Ada. "Saul Bellow's Introspective Fiction." Diss. Hebrew U,
Israel. 1975.
Bellow, Saul. "Dora." Harper's Bazaar 83 (1949): 118+.
---. Seize the Day. 1956: New York: Avon, 1977.

Fiedler, Leslie. "Saul Bellow." In Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed.
Irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 1-9.

Fuchs, Daniel. Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Durham: Duke UP,
1984.

Kazin, Alfred. "The Earthly City of the Jews." In Herzog: Text and
Criticism. By Saul Bellow. Ed. Irving Howe. New York: Viking,
1976.

Kulshrestha, Chirantan. "A Conversation with Saul Bellow." Chicago
Review 23.4 & 24.1 (1972): 7-15.

---. Saul Bellow: The Problem of Affirmation. New Delhi: Arnold-
Heinemann, 1978.

Opdahl, Keith M. The Novels of Saul Bellow: An Introduction.
University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1967.

Schwartz, Edward. "Chronicles of the City." Rev. of Seize the Day.
New Republic 3 Dec. 1956: 20-21.

Weiss, Daniel. "Caliban on Prospero: A Psychoanalytic Study on the
Novel Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow." In Saul Bellow and the
Critics Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 114-41.

111

CHAPTER V

Herzog: Professor Herzog in the City and Country

"I really believe that brotherhood
is what makes a man human. .
‘Man liveth not by self alone but
in his brother's face. . . . Each
shall behold the Ete al Father and
love and joy abound'"

As Bellow's sixth novel-~Herzog (l964)--begins, Moses E. Herzog,
protagonist of the novel, is reposing alone in his dilapidated country
house in the Berkshires. He has survived a crisis in his life and is
now in a state of equilibrium, feeling "confident, cheerful, clairvoy-
ant, and strong" (7), despite his occasional odd behavior. How has he
arrived at such a state of rest? What is his kit for survival? Why is
he alone in that run-down house in the peak of summer?

Like other Bellow protagonists--Tommy Wilhelm, Eugene Henderson,
and later Charlie Citrine--Herzog suddenly finds his middle-aged life
in great disorder. Herzog's crisis goes back to the breakup of his
second marriage, to Madeleine. At his psychiatrist's suggestion, he
takes a tour in Europe. After he returns, he learns from one friend,
Asphalter, that Madeleine has been cuckolding him with his "best"
friend, Valentine Gersbach. Shattered by this news, he is on the brink
of a mental breakdown. He feels an urgent need "to explain, to have it
out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends"

112

113
(8). In a frenzy, he is writing letters, most of them mental and
almost all of them unmailed, to all sorts of people, living and dead.

Through his deft use of the epistolary form and Proustian stream
of consciousness Bellow presents Herzog's story in great complexity.
The novel is mainly a record of his reminiscences of his past, remote
and recent, and his reexamination of his self, public and private.
Most of the "actions" in the novel occur in Herzog's mind while he
retrospects, ruminates, and scribbles.

Herzog's immediate past consists of the five days preceding his
retreat to his Ludeyville house. He returns from Europe, spends most
of his time alone in his New York apartment, takes a trip to Martha's
Vineyard by train and boat, and immediately returns to New York by
plane. Two days later he flies to Chicago, and then withdraws to his
house in the Berkshires.

During this period of near delirium and chaotic turbulence, Herzog
relives his past selves as a father, son, husband, friend, lover,
scholar, intellectual, college professor, and citizen. Finally he
comes to terms with life and reaches a state of rest. As the novel
approaches its end, he has no more letters to write.

During Herzog's quest for order and sanity, the city plays a very
significant role. Although the novel begins and ends in a rural
setting, it is to the city that Herzog's life, physical and emotional,
is intimately attached. The key scenes of the novel--those leading to
his direct confrontation with reality and eventually bringing about his
recovery--take place in the city.

Three cities figure prominently: the Montreal of his childhood,
the Chicago of his extended adolescence and manhood, and the New York

of "his creative crises, liberating deliverances and destructive

114
undergoings and apprehensions" (Marcus 234). In this chapter I will
address myself chiefly to Herzog's ties to these three cities,
especially how these cities have influenced him in achieving his final
recuperation, and to the city-country dialogue in the novel.
II

Five days before he sequesters himself in his Ludeyville house,
Herzog is in New York City, where he teaches at an evening college,
broods in his apartment sofa, has a medical checkup, goes shopping,
prepares a trip to Martha's Vineyard, is entertained by his lady friend
Ramona, goes to the courthouse, and then takes a flight to Chicago.

In his Manhattan apartment, Herzog's typical posture is to lie on
his couch and meditate, recollect, and compose mental letters.

Although Herzog spends most of his time thinking and writing, he is not
a complete solipsist in an ivory tower: he is always aware of "the
trembling energy of the city" (17).

Herzog's general response to the city is not essentially different
from his predecessors'. Like Joseph, Augie, and Wilhelm, he feels
threatened by the city's repetitious details: "Moses saw the brick of
those walls between these rods caked in asphalt black. Endless
repetition threatens sanity" (192). His lonely fellow New Yorkers are
no less desperate than those in Seize the Day: Dr. Tamkin tells
Wilhelm that lonely New Yorkers feel like howling from their windows
like wolves at night, and Herzog reads in the newspaper, "Lonely people
in New York, shut up in their rooms, had taken to calling the police
for relief. ‘Send a squad car, for the love of God! Send someone!

Put me in the lockup with somebody! Save me. Touch me. Come.
Someone--please come!'" (230).

Isolated in his highrise apartment, Herzog observes the city with

115
detachment: the lunch time crowds, for instance, look like "ants upon
smoked glass" (160). Yet on the streets or in public places he is
overwhelmed by the city's vastness, populousness, interminability,
anonymousness, and terrifying madness. Several scenes depict Herzog as
a voyager in the city: his trip to Martha's Vineyard, his visit to
Ramona's apartment and her flowershop, and the episode at the
Municipal Courthouse.

Herzog's trip to Martha's Vineyard turns out to be a "mistake"
(117): he cannot really "get away from all burdens, practical
questions, away also from Ramona" (38). Once there, he immediately
returns to New York. What intrigues us here, however, is not his brief
sojourn in Vineyard Haven but his trip to get there. On his way to
Grand Central Station, a taxi takes Herzog through labyrinthine
streets. Through the taxi window he watches the sights of New York.

At first, the crowded brownstone buildings on both sides of the
streets give him a mixed feeling: "The square shapes were vivid, not
inert, they gave him a sense of fateful motion, almost of intimacy.
Somehow he felt himself part of it all-~in the rooms, in the stores,
cellars--and at the same time be sensed the danger of these multiple
excitements" (38). On the one hand, he feels a communion with the
city; on the other, he fears its distracting commotions. Such an
ambivalence toward the city is characteristic of Bellow's heroes.

The cab ride soon becomes a trek through a hellish concrete
jungle. In the garment district, where the cab is held up by trucks,
Herzog hears a deafening noise from the sweatshops' machines: "Electric
madness thundered in the lofts and the whole street quivered," the
street is "plunged, drowned in these waves of thunder" (44). This

scene is an objective correlative to Herzog's torrential thoughts: as

116
he later admits, his thoughts are "like those machines in the lofts .
plunged and thundered with endless--infinite!--hungry, electrical
power, stitching fabric with inexhaustible energy" (205).
On Park Avenue, Herzog sees buildings being demolished and
erected. The scene is carefully wrought, with vivid images of sights,
sounds, and smells:
The Avenue was filled with concrete-mixing trucks, smells of
wet sand and powdery gray cement. Crashing, stamping pile-
driving below, and, higher, structural steel, interminably
and hungrily going up into the cooler, more delicate blue.
Orange beams hung from the cranes like straws. But down in
the street where the buses and the cars are crammed together,
it was stifling, grinding, the racket of machinery and the
desperately purposeful crowds--horrible! (44).

The city's horribleness reinforces Herzog's intent to escape, to go to

the seashore to breathe fresh air.

When he finally gets to Grand Central Station, Herzog cannot hold
onto his rationality amidst the crowds in the hellish underground. He
feels "it all slipping away from him in the subterranean roar of
engines, voices, and feet and in the galleries with lights like drops
of fat in yellow broth and the strong suffocating fragrance of
underground New York" (46).

After the train leaves the platform, it immediately enters the
tunnel, plunging Herzog into a temporary darkness which foreshadows
death; it is, in his words, "without religion" (56). But, it really is
prelude to a terribly dismal picture of the city's slums:

Then came a long incline and the train rose from underground
and rode in sudden light on the enbankment above the slums,
upper Park Avenue. In the east Nineties an open hydrant
gushed and kids in clinging drawers leaped screaming. Now
came Spanish Harlem, heavy, dark, and hot, and Queens far off

to the right, a thick document of brick, veiled in
atmospheric dirt. (56)

117

It is at this point that Herzog, thinking about Madeleine and her aunt
Zelda's betrayal of him, asks the famous Freudian question, followed by
his own bitter comment: "Will never understand what women want. What
do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood" (56).

If Madeleine is "his murderess" (312) in spirit, a fenme fatale,
"a frigid, middlebrow, castrating female" (228), his mistress
Ramona is quite different. According to Herzog, "Ramona truly was a
desirable wife. She was understanding. Educated. Well situated in
New York. Money. And sexually, a natural masterpiece" (86). Unlike
Madeleine, she has "genuine family feeling" (190) and knows the art of
love. She wants to help restore order and sanity to Herzog's life,
which Madeleine has devastated.

Ramona has an international background (Spanish, Argentinean,
French, Russian, Polish, and Jewish), international tastes in food and
music and she owns a flower shop. She embodies both the city's
culture, refinement, and internationalism and the country's bounty,
freshness, and fertility. She combines for Herzog the city's exoticism
and sophistication and the country's pastoralism and nourishment.

Ramona's voice on the telephone often brings Herzog back to
reality. In the middle of the novel, for instance, it is her phone
call that arouses Herzog from his reverie:

the cheerful voice of Ramona calling him to a life of
pleasure on the thrilling wires of New York. And not simple
pleasure but metaphysical, transcendent pleasure--pleasure
which answered the riddle of human existence. That was

Ramona-~no mere sensualist, but a theoretician, almost a
priestess. (186)

Going to visit Ramona means another city voyage of discovery which

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Herzog welcomes because it gives him a chance to leave his hot and
claustrophobic room. He expects Ramona to bring him transcendence and
transformation. Herzog's wish for change is mirrored in a scene he
witnesses after he comes out of his apartment. The "metamorphoric New
York" (206) is being transformed. At the street corner, he pauses to

watch the work of the wrecking crew:

The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily
through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight
browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched
wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil
cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the
widening area of demolition was a fire, fed by the wreckage.
Moses heard the air, softly pulled toward the flames, felt
the heat. The workmen, heaping the bonfire with wood, threw
strips of molding like javelins. Paint and varnish smoked
like incense. The old flooring burned gratefully--the
funeral of exhausted objects. Scaffolds walled with pink,
white, green doors quivered as the six-wheeled trucks carried
off fallen brick. The sun, now leaving for New Jersey and
the west, was surrounded by a dazzling broth of atmospheric
gases. Herzog observed that people were spattered with red
stains, and that he himself was flecked on the arms and
chest. He crossed Seventh Avenue and entered the subway.
(217-218)

Herzog's experience in the subway station is not a transcendence
but a "trans-descendence" (219). His descent into the subway brings
into focus a scene which reinforces the mythical quality of New York as

the "City of Destruction":

Waiting for his uptown express, Herzog made a tour of the
platform, looking at the mutilated posters--blacked-out teeth
and scribbled whiskers, comical genitals like rockets,
ridiculous copulations, slogans and exhortations. Hoslems,
the enemy is White. Hell with Goldwater, Jews! Spicks eat
SHIT. Phone, I will go down on you if I like the sound of
your voice. And by a clever cynic, If they smite you, turn
the other face. Filth, quarrelsome madness, the prayers and
wit of the crowd. Minor works of Death. Trans-descendence--
that was the new fashionable term for it. (218-219)

In Seize the Day, Wilhelm experiences an epiphany of universal

119

brotherhood in the subway, and Herzog has a similar experience.

Despite the hellish suggestion of the underground, Herzog discovers

human connectedness in the subway's turnstile:
He dropped his fare in the slot where he saw a whole series
of tokens lighted from within and magnified by the glass.
Innumerable millions of passengers had polished the wood of
the turnstile with their hips. From this arose a feeling of
communion--brotherhood in one of its cheapest forms. This
was serious, thought Herzog as he passed through. The more
individuals are destroyed . . . the worse their yearning for
collectivity. Worse, because they return to the mass
agitated, made fervent by their failure. Not as brethren,
but as degenerates. Experiencing a raging consumption of
potato love. Thus occurs a second distortion of the divine
image, already so blurred, wavering, struggling. (218)

Such "a feeling of communion," however, is "brotherhood in one of
its cheapest forms" (218); it is a "low-grade universal potato love"
(85).3 Herzog knows much better than Wilhelm that such a weak emotion
is not enough. We need "a true concern for humanity and the individual
being, including oneself" (Goldman 148).

After the train takes him uptown, he emerges from the subway exit
and finds himself among a teeming gallery of senile New Yorkers,
reminiscent of those retirees with whom Wilhelm has to mingle in Seize
the Day: "In midstreet, on the benches, old people: on faces, on heads,
the strong marks of decay: the big legs of women and blotted eyes of
men, sunken mouths and inky nostrils. . . . The crowd was traipsing
over the broad sidewalk" (221). Unlike Wilhelm, who feels himself a
victim of such people most of the time, Moses Herzog takes a keen
interest in the uptowners: "its theatrical spirit, its performers--the
transvestite homosexuals painted with great originality, the wigged

women, the lesbians looking so male. . . . Signs in almost every

passing face of a deeper comment or interpretation of destiny--eyes

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that held metaphysical statements. And even pious old women who trod
the path of ancient duty, still, buying kosher meat" (221-22). These
actor-like characters will emerge again in Mr. Sammler's New York City.
Unlike the detached and unsympathetic Mr. Sammler, however, Herzog
expresses interest in these people, which, in a sense, shows his moral
vision: as Simone Weil says, belief in the existence of others is love.

On the other hand, upper Broadway also suggests an an "amphi-
theater of Hell," and these people are "the inhabitants of this unreal
city" (Rodrigues 185):

A carnival crowd of actors wherein the sexes melt into each
other (with the anachronistic, orthodox women on its
fringes), these people are frantically defiant, frustrated in
their hunger for something real and genuine. . . . The signs
on their faces parallel the graffiti Herzog saw on the walls
of the subway which are the crazy outpourings of the soul of
the masses: "Filth, quarrelsome madness, the prayers and wit
of the crowd. Minor works of Death" (219). These are people
who are free but do not know to employ their freedom, which
has become a "howling emptiness" (53). Ramona suggests that
Herzog wash when he enters her apartment, and Herzog remem-
bers that one had to wash when one came back from Beth 01am,
the dwelling of the Multitude, the cemetery, Herzog has come
to Ramona from the necropolis. (Rodrigues 185-186)

In Ramona's large apartment on the West Side, where he is treated
like a king, Herzog finds a temporary haven. With a sumptuous supply
of gastronomic and sexual pleasures, Ramona makes the trouble-ridden
Herzog forget, at least temporarily, his inner turmoil. Her boudoir is
Herzog's sanctuary from the alienated, dehumanized, and exciting urban
jungle. As Joseph Nassar has pointed out, images which describe
Ramona's amplitude and ripeness strongly suggest a fertile field (27).
For instance, she is "as florid in her sermons as in her looks" (228).

As they make love with only the green lamp on, she becomes an Earth

Mother, offering her breast to Herzog.

121

When he kisses her outside her flower shop on Lexington
Avenue in midtown Manhattan, Herzog smells "the fresh odor of soil"
amongst the "stinking odor" of the buses:

On the sidewalk before the window of her shop were daisies,
lilacs, small roses, flats with tomato and pepper seedlings
for transplanting, all freshly watered. . . . In spite of
the buses which glazed the air with stinking gases, he could
smell the fresh odor of soil. . . . Within the great open
trench of Lexington Avenue, the buses pouring poison but the
flowers surviving, garnet roses, pale lilacs, the cleanliness
of the white, the luxury of the read, and everything covered
by the gold overcast of New York. (253-54)
Although her marriage proposal poses a threaten to Herzog's freedom,
Ramona is an Earth Mother figure to him, instrumental to his revital-
ization and final recuperation. By using Ramona in the midst of New
York City, Bellow suggests that even in the city it is still possible
to enjoy Nature. In Ramona Herzog finds the harmonious combination of
the city and country, which is why Bellow has her, a city's messenger,
appear in the rural setting at the end of the novel.

Herzog cannot consider marrying Ramona because he still has
unfinished business: he feels he owes himself and his child a justice.
In order to get custody of his daughter, he makes an appointment to see
his lawyer Simkin, who, like Herzog's Chicago lawyer friend,
Himmelstein, is a cruel "Reality-Instructor" (42), who knows his city
like his palm: he often takes Herzog to small restaurants, "the most
authentic places, Chinese, Greek, Burmese, the darkest cellars in New
York" (257).

On his trip to the courthouse and what he encounters when he
arrives there, Herzog is exposed to barbarity, brutality, callousness,

corruption, shabbiness, vice, vileness, and wanton sexuality: "Young

Jews, brought up on moral principles as Victorian ladies were on

122
pianoforte and needlepoint, thought Herzog. And I have come here today
for a look at something different. That evidently is my purpose"
(283). This episode is chiefly about sexuality at its most violent and
grotesque, perverse and degenerate. As Herzog tells Simkin,
"Emancipation result[s] in madness" (265).

The theme of sex gone awry is introduced as Herzog sits in a cab
on his way to the courthouse. The cab driver, who saw Herzog kissing
Ramona outside the flower shop, tells him,

"Well, boy, you're all right. When I get old I'm going to be
doing just like you. Why stop! And believe you me, I stay
away from young chicks already. You waste your time with a
broad under twenty-five. I quit on that type. A woman over
thirty-five is just beginning to be serious. . . . A broad
eighteen don't know even how to shit!" (273-74).

While waiting for Simkin, Herzog witnesses some trials. One case
is about a young German intern arrested for indecent conduct in the
lavatory of Grand Central. Herzog is surprised at how concerned the
magistrate is for the future of the German intern; the magistrate's
"human voice" (278) tells the intern's lawyer to consider the serious
consequences of pleading guilty. Herzog reflects: "You don't destroy a
man's career because he yielded to an impulse in that ponderous
stinking cavern below Grand Central, in the cloaca of the city, where
no mind can be sure of stability, where police . . . tempt and trap
poor souls" (278-79).

Another trial deals with a young male prostitute who, in order to
get money to buy narcotics, uses a toy pistol to rob a store and is
disarmed by the woman cashier. He unashamedly reveals the sordidness

of his life and mindlessly submits to the ridicule and the sentence of

the court. His story horrifies Herzog, reminding him of his friend

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Sandor's cynical remark: "every living soul was a whore" (281).

After this trial comes a climactical scene in Herzog's New York
voyages. A helpless child has been tortured and savagely slain by his
mother and her lover. The couple lived at the Montcalme Hotel on 103rd
Street, a flophouse Herzog often passed. According to Herzog, "You
could smell the misery of it from the street; its black stink flowed
out through open windows . . ." (289). During the trial, the judge,
lawyers, members of the jury and the accused "all looked utterly
unemotional" (290) while a witness from the hotel recounts the almost
incredible details of the murder.

It is too much for Herzog. As he stumbles out of the courtroom,
he says to himself, "Oh my God!" and suffers "a sick repulsive
headache, piercing and ugly" (293). His malady is "existential nausea,
Kierkegaard's sickness unto death" (Porter 153). Herzog the moralist
and humanist tries to pray or do something for the dead boy. But what
can he do? He feels helpless in the face of such horror:

The child screamed, clung, but with both arms the girl hurled
it against the wall. On her legs were ruddy hair. And her
lover, too, with longs jaws and zooty sideburns, watching on
the bed. Lying down to copulate, and standing up toakill.
Some kill, then cry. Others, not even that. (240).

This is the most horrible scene Herzog has ever heard. As Porter
notes, "Whirled violently in the void at last, Herzog finds nothing,
intellectual or emotional, to sustain him. In the reality of this
negation, intellect, justice, and compassion are merely empty words"
(153). Instead of crying or praying for the child, Herzog is "wrung,
wrung, and wrung again, and wrung again, again" (294).

The child murder scene has personal significance for Herzog.

Impulsively he identifies the remorseless child-killers with Valentine

124
annd Madeleine, whom he imagines are abusing his daughter June. This
leads to his sudden flight to Chicago to confront the villains.
III
Before he goes to Chicago, Herzog glimpses an old friend in a New
York street and remembers Montreal, memories which are vital to his

final recovery.5 His boyhood in Montreal is a golden time in his

life.6 It is the world of his unlucky but king-like father, his loving

and sacrificing mother, his ambitious brothers Shura and Willie, his
piano-playing sister Helen, his overbearing Aunt Zipporah, his quiet-
spoken Uncle Yaffe, his romantic friend Nachman, his cheder teacher Reb
Shika (Nachman's rabbi father), and the lonely, drunken boarder Ravitch
(Nachman's uncle).

In Dangling Man Joseph says that he has never found another street
that resembles St. Dominique: "It is the only place I was ever allowed
to encounter reality" (57). Napoleon Street is to Herzog what St.

Dominique is to Joseph:

My ancient times. Remoter than Egypt. No dawn, the foggy
winters. In darkness, the bulb was lit. The stove was cold.
Papa shook the grates and raised an ashen dust . . . The
chimneys in their helmets sucked in the wind. Then the
milkman came in his sleigh. The snow was spoiled and rotten
with manure and litter, dead rats, dogs.

The morning light could not free itself from gloom and
frost. Up and down the street, the brick- recessed windows
were dark, filled with darkness, and schoolgirls by twos in
their black skirts marched toward the convent. And wagons,
sledges, drays, the horses shuddering; the air drowned in
leaden green, the dung-stained ice, trails of ashes. Moses
and his brothers put on their caps and prayed together,

"Ma tovu ohalena Yaakov. . . ."
"How goodly are thy tents, O Israel."

Napoleon Street, rotten, toylike, crazy and filthy, riddled,
flogged with harsh weather-~the bootlegger's boys reciting
ancient prayers. To this Moses' heart was attached with
great power. Here was a wider range of human feelings than
he had ever again been able to find. The children of the

125
race, by a never-failing miracle, opened their eyes on one
strange world after another, age after age, and suffered the
same prayer in each, eagerly loving what they found. What

was wrong with Napoleon Street? thought Herzog. All he ever
wanted was there. (174; italics mine)

At five, Moses learned from Reb Shika to read the Bible in Hebrew.
At eight, Moses and Nachman shared a bench in the cellar of the
synagogue. He remembers Reb Shika's reprimanding him: "You watch your
step, Herzog, Moses. Your mother thinks you'll be a great lamden--a
rabbi. But I know you, how lazy you are. Mother's hearts are broken
by mamzeirim like you!" (164).

Herzog did not become a Talmudic scholar as his mother wished.
Moses's mother loved her husband and children most dearly and
sacrificed herself greatly, with the expectation that her children
might be successful and happy. Once a gentle lady in the Old World,
she labored hard in the Montreal slum for the sake of the family. She
endured all hardships and spoiled her children. Moses remembers
clearly his mother pulling him on his sled in the Montreal snow,
regardless of her own health. To Herzog, his mother, "a good spirit, a
good woman, a good heart," is the very embodiment of love and humanity.
Not only did she love her children affectionately, but she was kind and
warm to everyone around her. She fed Nachman when he was hungry and
she was kind and helpful to their drunken boarder, Ravitch.

Ravitch was a landtsman to the Herzogs. Unable to locate his wife
and two children in Russia after the Revolution, Ravitch tried to drink
his sorrows away. Every payday he returned to the Herzogs' household
drunk and disorderly. Moses cannot forget his heart-rending singing on

the freezing stairs of the hallway:

126
"Alein, alein, alein, alein
Elend vie a shtein
Hit die tzen finger--alein" (168)
The Herzogs took pity on him and it was Father Herzog who helped him to
bed.

Jonah Herzog, Moses's "unlucky father," had emigrated from Russia
to Canada, where he tried various jobs but he did not do well in any of
them until he became a bootlegger. Moses fondly recalls how he and his
brothers pasted Johnny Walker labels on the bottles to help their
father. But Jonah Herzog was not a successful bootlegger, either.
Trying to run bootleg whisky to the border, he is "hijacked, beaten up,
and left in a ditch" (182). To Moses the incident was incredible: "It
was more than I could bear that anyone should lay violent hands on him
--a father, a sacred being, a king. Yes, he was a king to us.

Whom did I ever love as I loved them?" (183). Although Father Herzog
was a failure as a provider, "his ‘I' ha[d] such dignity" (184).
The following vignette is one of the most touching of Herzog's
Montreal experiences:
The whole family took the streetcar to the Grand Trunk
Station with a basket . . . of pears, overripe, a bargain
bought by Jonah Herzog at the Rachel Street Market, the fruit
spotty, ready for wasps, just about to decay, but marvelously
fragrant. And inside the train on the worn green bristle of
the seats Father Herzog sat peeling the fruit with a Russian
pearl-handled knife. . . . Meanwhile, the locomotive cried
and the iron-studded cars began to move. Sun and girders
divided the soot geometrically. By the factory walls the
grimy weeds grew. A smell of malt came from the breweries.
(45)

Most unforgettable is his mother moistening her handkerchief with her

saliva and rubbing his face clean. Forty years later, Moses still

remembers the scene acutely and reflects, "All children have cheeks and

127
all mothers spittle to wipe them tenderly. These things either matter
or they do not matter. It depends upon the universe, what it is" (46).

The Napoleon Street sequence in Herzog is as impressive as the
Chicago section in Augie March: both are intended to celebrate the
ordinary people in the city, however somber the city is and however
humble the people are. Daniel Fuchs considers the Napoleon Street
section "a beautifully modulated narrative voyage along the axial
lines" (133) in which "Herzog affirms his own subjectivity through an
intuition of the primacy of family ties. These, in way of wonder,
transcend any abstraction. They are the essence of the amor fati,
Jewish style" (Fuchs 135).

It is full of memory, poignancy, and illumination. Forty years
later in New York City, Herzog looks back on Montreal as a symbol of
love, care, cohesion, and solidarity, as his haven, as his Eden.
Herzog's reminiscences of his Montreal childhood is, in Tonny Tanner's
words, a "mental regurgitation," a self-therapy, his positive attempt
to rediscover his essential self and to seek "some lost reality, some
necessary key which will help him to align himself with the norms from
which he has wandered and blundered into his personal chaos and
separation" (Tanner, Saul 93). In the end this memory contributes
greatly to his search for stability, order, peace, moral support, and
communal feeling.

IV

Herzog's trip to Chicago forces him to remember his past in his
home city and to confront reality without recoil. As Cohen points out,
Herzog's Chicago is "the locus of many poignant memories, the
repository of powerful emotions" (143). Moreover, "his long-standing

intimate knowledge of the place gives him a panoramic grasp of the

128
entire city, almost an encompassing vision of urban civilization.
These variegated sections of Chicago, with their myriad forms of
activity and non-activity, represent for Herzog the thick texture of
life, the dense reality he is struggling to embrace" (Cohen 144).

Herzog's memories of old Chicago are mainly of love, death,
friendship, and democracy. Herzog remembers that in 1934, he, as class
orator at McKinley High School, addressed "Italian mechanics, Bohemian
barrel makers, Jewish tailors" (198), among others, and chose his text
from Emerson:

The main enterprise of the world, for splendor . . . is the
upbuilding of a man. The private life of one man shall be a
more illustrious monarchy . . . than any kingdom in history.
Let it be granted that our life, as we lead it, is common and
mean. . . . Beautiful and perfect men we are not now.

The community in which we live will hardly bear to be told
that every man should be open to ecstasy or a divine
illumination. (198-99)

However, unlike the Montreal section which yields mostly memories
of his parents' love, Chicago, where Papa and Mama were buried, reminds
him time and again of their death. He remembers that his mother
started to die in the winter when he was sixteen. The young Herzog
chose not read the text of death: "As often as I could, I hugged the
laundry girls, down in the tub room" (286). Through those winter
nights, he read Spengler's The Decline of the West in the kitchen while
his mother was gradually dying.

The trip to his father's house, now occupied by his stepmother,
reminds of his troubled relationships with his father, who once tried
to shoot Moses with his pistol because he thought his son was too

wayward, too un-Jewish. He never knew that Moses, the prodigal son,

cried most bitterly at his funeral. The memory of his father's funeral

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and thoughts of death lead Herzog to ponder the connection between man
and the city--heavenly and earthly: "This same emotion, as Herzog the
student was aware, was held to the womb of cities, heavenly as well as
earthly, mankind being unable to part with its beloved or its dead in
this world or the next" (341-42).

Between the airport and his late father's house, Herzog observes
the unfamiliar sections of Chicago: "Clumsy, stinking, tender Chicago,
dumped on its ancient lake bottom; and this murky orange west, and the
hoarseness of factories and trains, spilling gases and soot on the
newborn summer" (296). To Herzog, in exile and cut off from family and
friends, this is "a most welcome sight" (Cohen 143).

Herzog's trip to his old home is similar to Joseph's prior to his
joining the army; they both want to find the roots of their selves.
Herzog's discovery of pictures of three generations of Herzogs placed
together leads him to reflect upon his ambitious youth as well as his
wayward adulthood which angered his orthodox Jewish father. In his
early recollections, Herzog confesses that he has "a fatal attraction
to the ‘City of Destruction'" (l3), and he sometimes sees himself as
"an unrecognized son of Sodom and Dionysus--an Orphic type" (26).

After getting his father's pistol, Herzog goes to Madeleine's
apartment to "protect" his little daughter and to kill Madeleine and
Gersbach. On his way he tries to justify his motives for killing the
traitors, but when through the bathroom window he sees Gersbach
tenderly bathing his daughter, his murder attempt vanishes. After the
aborted murder scene, Herzog goes to see Gersbach's wife, Phoebe. He
detects the massiveness, clumsiness, and amorphousness of his Chicago

on the way:

130

He drove directly to Woodlawn Avenue--a dreary part of Hyde
Park, but characteristic, his Chicago: massive, clumsy,
amorphous, smelling of mud and decay, dog turds; sooty
facades, slabs of structural nothing, senselessly ornamented
triple porches with huge cement urns for flowers that
contained only rotting cigarette butts and other stained
filth; sun parlors under tiled gables, rank areaways, gray
backstairs, seamed and ruptured concrete from which sprang
grass; ponderous four-by-four fences that sheltered growing
weeds. And among those spacious, comfortable, dowdy
apartments where liberal, benevolent people lived (this was
the university neighborhood) Herzog did in fact feel at home.
He was perhaps as midwestern and unfocused as these same
streets. (Not so much determinism, he thought, as a lack of
determining elements--the absence of a formative power.)
(317; Bellow's italics)

Despite all the negative adjectives, Herzog identifies himself with the

city and he does "in fact feel at home" (317). He identifies himself

with those streets which are "midwestern and unfocused" (137).

He stays that night with his old friend Lucas Asphalter with whom
he indulges in recollections of the Chicago of yore. They remember
that Lucas' father owned the flophouse on West Madison Street. During
the Depression, the Asphalters lived on the top story of the hotel.
Herzog used to cut school to watch the "bumps and grinds" (330) at the
burlesque house a few doors away. Lucas remembers seeing a fat-assed
old auntie saved from death during a fire and the chorus girls from the
burlesque house playing softball in the street. Their conversation
culminates in Herzog's revelation that "brotherhood is what makes a man
human" (333). Quoting from Blake--"Man liveth not by Self alone but in
his brother's face. . . . Each shall behold the Eternal Father and
love and joy abound"--Herzog goes on to expound, "The real and
essential question is one of our employment by other human beings and
their employment by us" (333).

The next day Herzog takes his daughter to the Museum of Science in

Jackson Park and then to the aquarium. On the way to the aquarium,

131
Herzog's heightened perceptions lead him to "instill something of his
own into his surroundings" (132). He has become identified with the
city, as if he has painted the city with "moisture and color taken from
his own mouth, his blood, liver, bowels, genitals" (339), an
identification of self and place that underscores the relationship

between man and the city in all of Bellow's works.

In this mingled way, therefore, he was aware of Chicago,
familiar ground to him for more than thirty years. And out
of its elements, by this peculiar art of his own organs, he
created his version of it. Where the thick walls and buckled
slabs of pavement in the Negro slums exhaled their bad
smells. Farther west, the industries; the sluggish South
Branch dense with sewage and littering with a crust of golden
slime; the Stockyards, deserted; the tall red slaughter-
houses in lonely decay; and then a faintly buzzing dullness
of bungalows and scrawny parks; and vast shopping centers;
and the cemetaries after these-~Waldheim, with its graves for
Herzogs past and present; the Forest Preserves for riding
parties, Croatian picnics, lovers' lanes, horrible murders;
airports, quarries; and, last of all cornfields. And with
this, infinite forms of activity--Reality. Moses had to see
reality. Perhaps he was somewhat spared from it so that he
might see it better, not fall asleep in its thick embrace.
Awareness was his work; extended consciousness was his line,
his business. Vigilance. (339-40)

As Herzog and June leave the aquarium, they have a car accident in
which he is injured. The police arrest him because he is carrying a
loaded pistol without a permit. As he is being taken to the station,
Herzog observes the "yellow ugliness of 22nd Street. He recognized the
familiar look of summer damnation. Chicago! He smelled the hot reek
of chemicals and inks coming from the Donnelly plant" (351). The car
accident gives rise to his bad mood and his bad mood conjures up nasty
pictures and sordid memories of the city.

In the dreadful police headquarters Herzog is ushered into another
real world where cops, bondsmen, criminals, and whores are hustling and

bustling. The day before he was in the New York courthouse as a

132
spectator, now in a Chicago police station he is to be charged with a
crime. This is one of the key scenes in the novel. His direct
confrontation with Madeleine in the station breaks the spell of his
obsession with her. Her "bitchy" eyes kill his illusion about the
possibility of salvaging the broken marriage: her eyes "expressed a
total will that he should die. This was infinitely more than ordinary
hatred. It was a vote for his nonexistence, he thought" (367). When
his brother Will bails him out, he feels "rather free" (368). He
decides to leave Chicago immediately and goes to his Ludeyville house.
After five days of frantic movements, compulsive letter-writing,
intense reminiscences, and dramatic confrontations in cities Moses
Herzog abandons "his version of the world" (Clayton 224) which he has
been carrying on his shoulders and retires to his country house in the
Berkshires, a place ideal for self-examination and recapitulation. It
is in this rural setting that the novel begins and ends. This retreat
is different, however, from his previous pastoral attempts. Instead of
dreaming about an ideal life in a rural setting, he goes there to
rehabilitate and to look things over.
V
The city-bred Herzog has a peculiar craving for the country. He
was first attracted by Daisy, his first wife, because she was a country
girl: "from her bare neck and shoulders he inhaled the fragrance of
summer apples" (157). With her and their child Marco, Herzog tried to
live in the country for the first time. They spent an icy winter in
the eastern Connecticut woods when he was finishing his book, Romantic-
ism and Christianity. Their cottage was in terrible condition. They
had to thaw the pipes with candles. Freezing blasts penetrated the

walls. Herzog, "a man deeply preoccupied" (9), made life even drearier

133
for Daisy and Marco. All that winter, be either brooded over his
Romantics or played the oboe. Later, Herzog feels guilty that he
forced Daisy and Marco to spend that winter in that lonely countryside.

Herzog tries again to live in the country with his second wife,
Madeleine. With the twenty thousand dollars he inherits from his
father, he buys a big old house in the Berkshires. Giving up his
respectable teaching position, he comes with his bride to this remote
countryside with an eye to leading a pastoral life and to finishing the
second volume of his book on Romanticism.

As Rodrigues points out, in so doing, Herzog gives his best
performance as an "intellectual and emotional clown" (178). Herzog's
comic pretensions manifest themselves in the reference to Louis XIV and
to Blake: "Herzog, mulling over these ideas as he all alone painted his
walls in Ludeyville, building Versailles as well as Jerusalem in the
green hot Berkshire summers" (154).

In addition to his attempt to please Madeleine and to satisfy his
ambitions, his decision to buy the house in Ludeyville is also an
attempt to join the mainstream of American society. A son of Jewish
immigrants, he dreams of having a piece of land in the new country. A
country house in New England is a good symbol of "his Jewish struggle
for a solid footing in White Anglo-Saxon Protestant America" (377).

The countryside in the Berkshires is rich in natural beauty.
Herzog's well-situated estate commmands a gorgeous view. Occasionally
he is able to appreciate its beauty: for instance, while Shapiro and
Madeleine engage themselves in intellectual dialogues, Herzog does not
join them but, instead, observes his surroundings. A "prisoner of
perception" (93), Herzog minutely takes in all of Nature's objects,

which, like the repetitious details of the urban scenes, are both

134

exciting and distracting, giving him no rest:
The lawn was on an elevation with a view of fields and woods.
Formed like a large teardrop of green, it had a gray elm at
its small point, and the bark of the huge tree, dying of
dutch blight, was purplish gray. Scant leaves for such a
vast growth. An oriole's nest, in the shape of a gray heart,
hung from twigs. God's veil over things makes them all
riddles. If they were not all so particular, detailed, and
very rich I might have more rest from them. But I am a
prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness. They are too
exciting. . . . Meanwhile the cicadas all vibrated a coil in
their bellies, a horny posterior band in a special chamber.
Those billions of red eyes from the enclosing woods looked
out, stared down, and the steep waves of sound drowned the
summer afternoon. (92-93)

Massive and distracting as those cicadas are, Herzog admits that he has

"seldom heard anything so beautiful as this massed continual harshness"

(93).

Such moments are few, however. As it turns out, that country
house is a big mistake and his pastoral life is no more than an
urbanite's illusion. Bought in "a dream of happiness" (64), the house
--"an old ruin of a place" (64)--is almost impossible to live in. Too
many repairs need to be made. Even though he invests a large sum of
money and a great deal of effort, the house is still, in Madeleine's
words, a "crappy old house" (154). As he admits, the house is "one of
his biggest mistakes" (64); it is "Herzog's folly! Monument to his
sincere and loving idiocy" (377).

Spending most of his time repairing and improving the house,
Herzog has no time for his scholarly work. His project--a book which
will wrap the whole subject up and pull the carpet from under other
scholars' feet--remains unfinished, "eight hundred pages of chaotic
argument which had never found its focus" (ll). Virtually a slave to

the rundown house, Herzog finds no familial happiness, academic

fulfillment, or spiritual transcendence in his rural experiences. At

135
most, he can only mock himself by saying, "I could be Moses, the old
Jew-man of Ludeyville, with a white beard, cutting the grass under the
washline with my antique reelmower. Eating woodchucks" (64). The last
phrase is a poignant parody of Thoreau, whose works Herzog reads but
cannot put into practice.

Life in the Berkshires is far from serene, idyllic, or fulfilling
for Madeleine, either. To her, being confined in a backwater sans
culture or social circle is unbearable. For her, the big old house is
not a sanctuary or a retreat; it looks more like slaves' quarters, a
prison. That's why she goes to town whenever possible.

Her husband is not as sympathetic and understanding as she thought
he would be. Her moody, hysterically nostalgic, depressive, demanding,
old-fashioned, narcissistic husband is a burden to her psyche and her
body. He never stops talking to her about his Romantics, his
preoccupations, and his family, but he has not the slightest interest
in her intellectual aspirations.

One year after they move to the Ludeyville house, they decide to
quit, because Madeleine considers it a total waste to bury themselves
in "this mourning countryside" (13), because she is "too young, too
intelligent, too vital, too sociable to be buried in the remote
Berkshires" (l3). Unaware of Madeleine and Gersbach's adultery then,
Herzog busies himself with job-hunting and house-renting in Chicago,
not only for his family but for the Gersbachs, for, as Madeleine says,
they cannot desert their best friends in that backwater. Thus, kept in
the dark about their duplicity and betrayal, Herzog abandons his
"backwater" (95) house and his pastoral dream for another life in the
city.

In retrospect, Herzog's life in Ludeyville is indeed a disaster.

136
Not only is he cuckolded there, but, as he tells Dr. Edvig, he is
"stoned out of [his] skull" (72). He admits that "life was very bad in
Ludeyville--terrible" (53), and several others tell him so, too.
Phoebe Gersbach says to him, "What a terrible thing you had done in
giving up your respectable university position and how reckless you
were, rushing out to the country with Madeleine" (319). Aunt Zelda
speaks for Madeleine, "You were a fool to bury yourself and her, a
young woman, in the Berkshires, with nobody to talk to" (53). One year
after the divorce, when Herzog goes to Chicago in order to avenge
himself, he recalls his life in the country, his "exile in Ludeyville"
(311) and recognizes that "that property was to have been his madhouse.
Finally, his mausoleum" (311).

Bellow does not let the country win an upper hand over the city in
Herzog. His implication is clear: human relationships and not locales
make life either agreeable or not. Living in the country is not
necessarily an alternative to living in the city.

Viewed from this perspective, Herzog's retreat at the end of the
novel is rather significant. Without dreaming of building a Versailles
or a Jerusalem or a Thoreauvian self-sufficient retreat, he withdraws
to his Berkshires able to appreciate its beauty: "The house was two
miles beyond the village, in the hills. Beautiful, sparkling summer
weather in the Berkshires, the air light, the streams quick, the woods
dense, the green new" (376).

Alone in his old and dilapidated house, Herzog now feels joyous.
Partly because of the country air and mainly because of the absence of
Madeleine, his solitude is "simply sweetness and lightness of spirit"
(381). Letting go of his previous foolish, hauteurish "social

climbing" (377) in the WASP world, he now greets his house and garden

137
with "Here I am. Hineni!" (377).7

It is almost a new world to him, like a Paradise Regained: "How
marvelously beautiful it is today. He stopped in the overgrown yard,
shut his eyes in the sun, against flashes of crimson, and drew in the
odors of catalpa-bells, soil, honeysuckle, wild onions, and herbs"
(377). But Herzog knows that it is not an Eden: he does not shut his
eye to the dangers of the decaying house. Since he comes "only to look
things over" (377) without asking too much, he can forget all the
repairs. No longer a slave to the house and to Madeleine, he feels in
close union with Nature.

In the wake of his past five days of frantic attempts to seek
sanity, clarity, order, and meaning in the chaotic city, the place,
dilapidated as it is, is far from the maddening crowd and is thus ideal
for recuperation, regurgitation, and self-scrutiny. Reliving his past,
immediate and remote, and reexamining his self, public and private, he
finally reaches a state of equanimity, chanting "Thou movest me." He
says to himself and to God: "I am pretty well satisfied to be, to be
just as it is willed, and for as long as I may remain in occupancy"
(414). As the book closes, he has no more messages for anyone.

VI

The city in Herzog is not only the main setting but a decisive
force in the protagonist's life, forming his sensibility, affecting his
psyche, prompting his thought-chains, and presenting naked reality to
him. Ambivalent toward the modern city whose masses of things, people,
and experiences both threaten and attract him, Herzog bears specially
significant relationships with three cities, Montreal of his childhood,
Chicago of his youth, and New York of his adulthood.

By using both the city and country as important settings for this

138
novel, Bellow dramatizes the city-country dialogue much more profoundly
than in any of his other novels. A master urban novelist, Bellow,
nonetheless, does not deal with the pastoral theme offhandedly; his
juxtapositon of Herzog's earlier pastoral attempts and his last retreat
exemplifies his subtlety.

As Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden has so well demonstrated,
the pastoral moment cannot be extended into a way of life; "what it can
do is provide a spiritual refreshment which may strengthen the
individual for his renewed encounters with the non-pastoral realities
of the city" (Tanner, City 303). Despite isolating Moses in the rural
setting, Bellow does not advocate pastoralism and underplay the force
of the city. Simultaneously, two powerful city messengers--Will from
Chicago and Ramona from New York--come to seek him, preparing him for
his reentry, because, like Bellow's other heroes, Herzog "really
believe[s] that brotherhood is what makes a man human" and that the
modern city--humanity in microcosm--is where he feels at home and
attached.8 Herzog accepts his life in nature only as an interim, for
he admits, "The bitter cup would come round again, by and by. This
rest and well-being were only a momentary difference in the strange
lining or variable silk between life and void" (397).

The three who meet in the small village in western Massachusettes
represent a commingling of different strands of American society.
Ramona (New York, culture, sexuality, marriage, fertility, love,
romanticism, internationalism), Will (Chicago, business, brotherhood,
Jewish, family ties, rationality, Midwesternism) come to meet Modern
Moses (rural-urban, moral vision, prOphetic leadership, intellectual-
ism, family man, scholar, and sufferer) who survives a humiliating

crisis in his life. They meet together with no strife, a little

139
uncertainty, and a lot of congeniality. It is a great picture of the
city meeting the country in Bellow's canon.

This congenial spirit manifests itself best in the final scene
when the rural-urban Moses, who used to be a male chauvinist accustomed
to ladies' service, is preparing dinner to entertain Ramona. He even
picks flowers for her. In spite of, or because of, the setting, the
ending depicting the convalescent survivor-hero with flowers in hand
and a half-painted green piano nearby (all signs of life, love, and
hope) is positive, affirmative, an ending which will find an echo in

Bellow's other great Chicago-New York novel, Humboldt's Gift.

Notes

1 Bellow, Herzog (1964; New York: Fawcett Crest 1969) 333. In
this chapter, further references will be cited in the text.

2 Fuchs has high praise for Bellow's fictional techniques used in
this novel. He writes, "The flexible third-person-I narrator .
gives us maximum illumination. We view Herzog and view Herzog viewing
Herzog. Yet the most brilliant innovation is the renovation of the
epistolary technique, allowing as it does a blending of discursiveness
and intimacy, the argumentative and the personal, kulturkamph and the
cri de coeur" (l6).

3 Saul Bellow defines potato love thus: "Potato love is a weak
emotion that people often have of friendliness and a melting heart
toward other people, the real source of which is terror. It's a low-
grade emotion, like potato sap" (Qtd. in Pinsker 977).

4 In Augie March, there is a similar story of infanticide. While
vacationing with Mrs. Renling in St. Joe, Augie learns that a fellow
hotel boarder, Ruth Snyder, "threw a child out of the window and killed
it. They [her family] used all their influence and got her free" (AM
137).

5 Bellow says, "Every writer borrows what he needs from himself"
(Boroff 38). Among Bellow's works, Herzog is most strongly
autobiographical, especially the Montreal section. See Howard,
Weinstein, and Hassan for accounts of Bellow's ties to Lachine and
Montreal.

According to Fuchs (135), Bellow originally wrote a separate piece
entitled "Memoirs of a Bootlegger's Son," a sort of Ur-Herzog.

6 In the manuscripts of "Memoirs of a Bootlegger's Son," Bellow
has the protagonist Isaac say, "Everybody looks back to his own golden
age or his own Garden of Eden. Sometimes I think the golden age is
only one's recollection of his youth" (See Fuchs 136).

7 See Goldman (116-117) for a parallel/comparison between the
biblical and the fictive Moses. See also Rodrigues 200-01.

As Rodrigues notes, "The Hebrew utterance, which a Jewish child
uses in cheder, is the word that Abraham repeated three times, to God,
to Isaac, and to his guardian angel. It is also the word the biblical
Moses uttered when God called unto him out of the midst of the burning
bush" (200).

Bellow says that at the end Herzog has come to a point of rest.
After that, "he's going to have to assume roles again, and deal with
people again. He's just come to a well-earned interregnum . . ." (Brans
71). See Braham (36-56) for a discussion of the theme of retreat and
reentry in American literature in general and in Bellow's novels in
particular.

140

Works Cited

Bellow, Saul. Herzog. 1964. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1964.

Boroff, David. "Saul Bellow." Saturday Review of Literature 19 Sept.
1964: 38+.

Braham, Jeanne. A Sort of Columbus: The American Voyages. Anthens: U
of Georgia P, 1984.

Brans, Jo. "Common Needs, Common Preoccupations: An Interview with
Saul Bellow." In Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley
Trachtenberg. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979: 57-72. -

Clayton, John J. Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man. Rev. ed.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

Cohen, Sarah Blacher. "Saul Bellow's Chicago." Modern Fiction Studies
24.1 (1978): 139-46.

Fuchs, Daniel. Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Durham: Duke UP,
1984.

Goldman, L. H. Saul Bellow’s Moral Vision. New York: Irvington, 1983.

Hammer, Joshua. "Saul Bellow Returns to Canada, Searching for the
Phantoms that Shaped His Life and Art." People 25 June 1984: 114-
16.

Howard, Jane. "Mr. Bellow Considers His Planet." Life 3 April 1970:
57-60.

Marcus, Steven. "Reading the Illegible: Some Modern Representations of
Urban Experience." In Visions of the Modern City. Ed. William
Sharpe and Leonard Wallock. New York: Columbia U Proceedings of
the Heyman Center for the Humanities, 1983.

Nassar, Joseph M. "The World Within: Image Clusters in Herzog" Saul
Bellow Journal 2.2 (1983): 24-29.

Pinsker, Sanford. "Saul Bellow in the Classroom." College English
34 (1973): 975-82.

Porter, M. Gilbert. Whence the Power? The Artistry and Humanity of
Saul Bellow. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1974.

Rodrigues, Eusebio. Quest for the Human: An Exploration of Saul
Bellow’s Fiction. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1981.

Tanner, Tony. City of Words. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
---. Saul Bellow. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965.

141

142

Weinstein, Ann. "Bellow's Reflections on His Most Recent Sentimental
Journey to His Birthplace." Saul Bellow Journal 4.1 (1985): 62-
71.

CHAPTER VI

Mr. Sammler’s Planet: Mr. Sammler In New York

"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 w know, we know, we

know."

I

Sammler's centrality sets Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1969) apart from
Bellow's previous works. Unlike Bellow's other protagonists who seek
sanity, order, meaning, and equanimity in urban America, the septua-
genarian Sammler, returned from the dead and the madness of the Holo-
caust, is mainly a sagacious, perceptive, and critical "foreign"
observer of urban America. If he is questing for something, it is
moral certitude.

Born in Cracow, Poland, to Jewish parents, Artur Sammler was an
Anglophile. During the twenties and thirties he lived in London as a
correspondent for Polish newspapers and magazines. He was acquainted
with the Bloomsbury Group and had a special connection with H. G.
Wells.2 Just before the Second World War, he, with his wife and
daughter Shula, went back to Poland where they were trapped. He and
his wife were buried alive in a death ditch. Miraculously, he, alone,
crept his way out from the corpses piled on top of him. Then he joined

the partisans fighting against the Germans. As the war was ending, he

143

144
escaped from a Polish anti-Semitic massacre by hiding himself in a
mausoleum for four months. After the war he and his daughter were
rescued from a DP camp by his nephew Dr. Elya Gruner and brought to New
York.

The immediate action of the novel focuses on three days in Mr.
Sammler's life in New York City in the late sixties. The pivotal
narrative sequence is Sammler's attempt to see his dying nephew in the
hospital, which is repeatedly delayed by different persons and
incidents, mostly related to two other major narrative sequences, the
story of an elegantly dressed Black pickpocket and the story of
Sammler's eccentric daughter Shula's theft of Dr. Lal's manuscript, The
Future of the Moon. Sammler's relations to the city are closely tied
to and borne out by these intertwined narrative sequences. Insofar
as the main intent of this chapter is to discuss how Sammler, as a wise
observer, relates himself to his city physically and metaphysically, a
close examination of the sequences and the minor characters involved
will shed light on our understanding of Sammler's observations of and
comments on American society in general and New York City in
particular.

First, however, it is necessary to note that Mr. Sammler is not
merely a mouthpiece through which the author voices his Opinions about
the turbulent decade of the sixties or about the specific city of New
York. Even though Bellow has said, "It's my first thoroughly non-
apologetic venture into ideas" (Howard 57), Sammler is not simply a dry
and aloof old man, a static character, as critics such as Kazin (134,
136-37), Galloway (23-24) and Clayton (234) have called him. He is a
character in his own right, as Ellen Pifer argues well, a man of

"divided consciousness." According to Pifer, "Superannuated, world-

145
weary and aloof as he is, Sammler nonetheless embodies the epitome of
the ‘passionate, conflicted, modern self.’ Through the dynamics of his
character's consciousness, forever troubled by and in confrontation
with the world, Bellow articulates the divided consciousness which is,
in his view, the marked characteristic of contemporary ‘intellectual
man'" (18).

It is true that in Sammler's psyche there are two modes of
consciousness: the analytic and the intuitive (Pifer 18). But there
are also two Sammler selves at work or in conflict that constitute the
dramatic and interesting story in the novel. The Holocaust experience
divides the earlier Sammler from the present Sammler. After the war,
he felt that he was "not necessarily human" (117) for quite a long
time, and showed almost no interest in others or in himself and never
thought of recovering earlier forms of himself. But after having lived
for ten years, he is starting to change his attitude. Instead of being
"disaffected" (117), he becomes interested and shows his concern: "In
the human setting, along with everyone else, among particulars of
ordinary life he was human--and, in short, creatureliness crept in
again" (117). Mysteriously, he feels that he is "always, and so
powerfully, so persuasively, drawn back to human conditions" (118).

Because of his interest in humanity and his concern about cultural
drift, he cannot remain aloof and withdrawn from current happenings,
despite his urge toward seclusion. Sammler admits that when his former
self asserts itself, it does so "disagreeably, weakly, disgracefully"
(118). But the present Sammler is essentially a person who "awakened
not to purpose but to aesthetic consumption of the environment. Even
if insulted, pained, somewhere bleeding, not broadly expressing any

anger, not crying out with sadness, but translating heartache into

146

delicate, even piercing observation" (44).

Despite the co-existence of two Sammlers--the earlier Sammler,
"the Sammler of London and Cracow" (118), the present Sammler, aged,
wise, moral, humane, detached, but powerless--it is the latter who
figures more prominently. Like Queen Willatale in Henderson, Sammler,
though blind in one eye, can see sharply through the puzzling veil.
Because of his ability to see with heightened clarity, he is referred
to as Mr. "Minutely-Observant Artur Sammler" (12). In addition to his
uncanny vision, he also carries a symbolic significance as a man from
the Old World and from the grave. To many characters in the novel, he
is a "judge and a priest" (91), a sage, and a prophet.3 Like a Lazarus
who "carries the knowledge of the unbearable" (Lamont 251), he says,
"Sometimes I wonder whether I have any place here, among other people.
I assume I am one of you. But also I am not" (230). As Fuchs points
out, "Old, androgynous, half-blind, Sammler is a Tiresias of the Upper
West Side. His moral judgments carry the weight of objectivity, his
prophecy the integrity of disinterestedness. He has come back to tell
us all. But Sammler can not be as ascetic as he may wish to be.
He is, after all, a Bellow character" (229-230). Only if we understand
the rift in Sammler's psyche, or the co-existence of two Sammlers, can
we can appreciate his dialogue with his city.

II

A man of culture, sensibility, and vision, Mr. Sammler has been
extremely conscious of the milieu in which he lives. Living on the
deteriorating Upper West Side of New York City, he often recalls his
days in London and other cities. For instance, he remembers that
Cracow, a city where he grew up, was noted for its dark environment and

that Poles tried to dispel the gloom by importing Catholicism. And

147
he loves London, particularly because of its cultural associations.
Living in Woburn Square, Bloomsbury, in the twenties and thirties, he
and his wife befriended the "cultural best of England" (28), Maynard
Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and H. G. Wells. They had "the most
distinguished intimacy with the finest people in Britain" (28).

His life in the insane landscape of urban America in the sixties
contrasts strikingly with the good old days in London. When the novel
opens, he and his daughter, Shula-Slawa, have been living in New York
for over twenty years, both completely dependent upon Elya Gruner.
Sammler remembers that when they first arrived in New York he and Shula
were put into an apartment house. Knowing that he, merely "a refugee
in Manhattan" (6), had to put up with whatever came his way, he
nevertheless found it unbearable living with his loony daughter, who
kept a chick in the bathroom and made the apartment messy. Even in
fine weather, with the bright sun and the blue sky, Sammler felt that
his room was "like a china cabinet into which he was locked" (27). The
room, most of all, reminds him of the time when he hid in a tomb during
World War II: "the yellow light of Polish summer heat behind the
mausoleum door. It was the light also of that china-cabinet in the
apartment where he had suffered confinement with Shula-Slawa" (92).

After moving in with his widowed niece Margotte, he gradually
feels at home in the city, which, as he says, becomes "his own turf"
(281). On the other hand, due to his previous experiences, he still
feels that he is no more than "a tourist" (281) visiting the city.

For all these years, Sammler has done little but live simply, read
extensively, and play the role of a curious, detached, observant city
philosopher.

Sammler, like other Bellow heroes, looks at his city through the

148
window: Joseph in Dangling Man looks at his Chicago from the third-
floor height, Sammler looks out at New York from his cramped room in an
Upper West Side apartment. They both look at the typical Bellovian
milieu--the sterile landscape of the modern city-~and like other Bellow
heroes, they refuse to accept it as the last statement of man's
spiritual condition.

For example, looking at the urban landscape from his apartment,
Sammler observes that, in an age when human beings are flying to the
moon, life is still very heavy on earth because people try to hold
tight to their houses ("forms of bourgeois solidity" [9]) for a sense
of permanence:

Brownstones, balustrades, bay windows, wrought-iron. Like
stamps in an album--the dun rose of buildings canceled by the
heavy black of grilles, of corrugated rainspouts. How very
heavy human life was here, in forms of bourgeois solidity.
Attempted permanence was sad. We were now flying to the
moon. (9)
Even though "attempted permanence" is illusory, Sammler thinks that
people have no reason to exaggerate "the tragic accents of their
condition" (9) and to justify "idleness, silliness, shallowness,
distemper, lust--turning former respectability inside out" (9).

With his one good eye, Sammler gazes at his city as if studying
paintings:

Such was Sammler's eastward view, a soft asphalt belly
rising, in which lay steaming sewer navels. Spalled
sidewalks with clusters of ash cans. Brownstones. The
yellow brick of elevator buildings like his own. Little
copses of television antennas. Whiplike, graceful thrilling
metal dendrites drawing images from the air, bringing
brotherhood, communion to immured apartment people. Westward
the Hudson came between Sammler and the great Spry industries

of New Jersey. These flashed their electric message through
intervening night. SPRY. But then he was half blind. (9)

149
Such a picture of urban life is, of course, disheartening: modern men
imprison themselves in their apartments and feel connected to other
human beings only through TV antennas and tubes.

A "meditative island on the island of Manhattan" (75) as he is,
however, Mr. Sammler is not a hermit, shutting himself up in his own
room overlooking his city and brooding all day long. Living in a big
city like New York, Sammler knows it is impossible to be "an old-
fashioned sitting sage" (74). As he tells himself:

You must train yourself. You had to be strong enough not to
be terrifed by local effects of metamorphosis, to live with
disintegration, with crazy streets, filthy nightmares,
monstrosities come to life, addicts, drunkards, and perverts
celebrating their despair openly in midtown. You had to be
able to bear the tangles of the soul, the sight of cruel
dissolution. You had to be patient with the stupidities of
power, with the fraudulence of business. (74)
Having been mysteriously drawn back "from disinterestedness to
creaturely conditions" (118), he is attentive to what is going on
around him. He reads diversely. Visitors come to him to confess or
converse; he has become a "confidant of New York eccentrics; curate of
wild men and progenitor of a wild woman; register of madness" (118).
For him, there are also visits to pay which take him out of his
claustrophobic room and force him to be in touch with his fellow human
beings on the streets.

Thus, despite his reclusive tendency, Mr. Sammler, through these
channels, keeps in touch with his city, his country, and his planet.
Consequently, although the novel is loaded with heavy intellectual
monologues and dialogues, it is also replete with meticulous

descriptions of the urban scene which Sammler observes with his

physical and mental eye from a bus window, from his strolls on the

150
street, from the hospital window, or from the window of Elya's Rolls
Royce.

The novel opens with Sammler awakening in a state of anxiety.
Thinking back on the events of the past few days, he fears that perhaps
he has seen too much. Because his "positively claustrophobic" (119)
feeling keeps him away from the subway, which always reminds him of his
past experience of entombment, Sammler regularly takes buses between
the 42nd Street Public Library and his West Side apartment. Recently
he has seen a Black pickpocket operate on city buses between Columbus
Circle and Verdi Square; the tall Sammler has observed the minutest
details of the crime. He tries to call the police to stop the crime,
but he cannot find a public phone booth that has not been vandalized.
When he goes home, he calls the police but they are not interested. On
this particular day, he again sees the pickpocket at work. In fear of
reprisal, he tries not to be seen watching, but he is followed home by
the pickpocket who corners him against the lobby wall and silently
exposes his genitalia to Sammler.

This episode introduces many major themes in the novel: crime, the
impotence of law (the police) and science (the telephone), the duality
of man, the pervasiveness of madness, violence, the failure of moral
fiber, hellish reality, and the ideology of sex, all of which permeate
the sick society, epitomized on Mr. Sammler's planet. For Mr. Sammler,
the Black pickpocket becomes an analogy for those "dark" forces of
limitlessness, lawlessness, madness, and chaos that threaten the modern
city dwellers.“

The Black pickpocket, as Sammler describes him, possesses
qualities of both an "African prince" and a "great black beast" (14).

Dressed "with extraordinary elegance" (8), he has a certain majesty

151
about him, but his face "showed the effrontery of a big animal" (9).
Like a puma (48), he never speaks and only acts. He is the embodiment
of "the primitiveness and barbaric nature of modern man who, behind the
external facade of elegance and regality, is really no more than a
beast. In the jungle of New York City, he preys upon the unsuspecting
quarry" (Goldman 185). While Sammler abhores the pickpocket's bold,
rude criminality and bestiality, he also considers the victim's
stupidity inexcusable: "What an idiot! Going around with some kind of
stupid mold in her skull. Zero instincts, no grasp of New York" (10).
Both attracted and repelled by the elegantly dressed brute, Mr.
Sammler deliberately takes the same bus to watch him committing crimes.
The former Sammler manifests himself, when he, like a curious voyeur,
"craved a repetition" (11). Unlike his niece Angela and others, he has
little attraction to the romance of the outlaw, but he admits that he
receives from the crime "the benefit of an enlarged vision" (12).
Bellow's attempt to use a phone booth to report the crime

brings forth his deprecation of "civilized" New Yorkers. The stink and
filth of urinal-phone booths with smashed phones leads him to draw
comparisons: "New York was getting worse than Naples or Salonika. It
was like an Asian, an African town, from this standpoint" (7).
Convinced that depravity does not know class distinction and squalor
and barbarity do not stop on the streets, he sees clearly that behind
the doors of luxurious apartments, slinks degeneracy, especially
sexually:

The opulent sections of the city were not immune. You opened

a jeweled door into degradation, from hypercivilized

Byzantine luxury straight into the state of nature, the

barbarous world of color erupting from beneath. It might

well be barbarous on either side of the jeweled door.
Sexually, for example. The thing evidently . . . consisted

152

in obtaining the privileges, and the free ways of barbarism,

under the protection of civilized order, property rights,

refined technological organization, and so on. (7)
From the urinal-phone booths to the degraded luxurious apartments to
the helpless police, Sammler does not see America as the city upon a
hill envisoned by John Winthrop. With irony and disappointment, he
says, "America! . . . Advised throughout the universe as the most
desirable, most exemplary of all nations" (l4).

Sammler's entanglements with the Black pickpocket continue
throughout the novel until he stands helplessly watching his crazy son-
in-law, Eisen, savagely smash the Black pickpocket's face with his bag
of medallions outside Lincoln Center. The confrontation is provoked by
Lionel Feffer, Sammler's former student reader, who takes snapshots of
the crime committed.

Sammler's connecton with Lionel Feffer brings forth his
castigation of the youth and university students of the sixties.
Although he is "quite interested in the radical movement" (36), Sammler
feels it a shame that the poorly-read student activists have learned to
respect no persons, not even their own selves:

More recent readers were student activists. . . . To judge
by their reading ability, the young people had had a meager
education. . . . Hairy, dirty, without style, levelers,
ignorant. . . . Some of the poor girls had a bad smell.
Bohemian protest did them the most harm. . . . These poor
kids may have resolved to stink together in defiance of a
corrupt tradition built on neurosis and falsehood, but Mr.
Sammler thought that an unforeseen result of their way of
life was loss of femininity, of self-esteem. In their
revulsion from authority they would respect no persons. Not
even their own persons. (36)

An "ingenious operator, less student than promoter" (38), Feffer

is a "bustling, affectionate, urgent, eruptive, enterprising character"

(38) and "a busy seducer, especially . . . of young wives" (39). In

153
Sammler's view, Feffer embodies "a high-energy American life to the
point of anarchy and breakdown" (39). He is an American salesman:
boastful, insincere, and enterprising.

It is Feffer who cons Sammler into speaking at a seminar on the
British Scene in the Thirties. It is a fiasco. Bellow's picture of
youth is severe. Offended by the students' "will to offend," Sammler
bemoans that they have "no view of the nobility of being intellectuals
and judges of the social order" (45):

What a pity! old Sammler thought. A human being, valuing
himself for the right reasons, has and restores order,
authority. . . . But what was it to be arrested in the stage
of toilet training! What was it to be entrapped by a
psychiatric standard (Sammler blamed the Germans and their
psychoanalysis for this)! Who had raised the diaper flag?
Who had made shit a sacrament? What literary and
psychological movement was that? (45)
Sammler has no use for this "confused sex-excrement-militancy,
explosiveness, abusiveneess, tooth-showing, Barbary ape howling" (43).
His brief encounter with modern American university life is
sickening.S

Although Sammler's direct confrontation with university youth is
brief, the meddling and untrustworthy Feffer keeps reappearing
throughout the novel and finally provokes the confrontation with the
Black pickpocket, which brings to Mr. Sammler a sudden recognition of
his vulnerability, isolation, and moral weightlessness. Horrified by
the dangerous lunacy of Eisen, he is further appalled by the lack of
moral courage of the bystanders: "But of course ‘some of you' did not
exist. No one would do anything, and suddenly Sammler felt extremely

foreign-~voice, accent, syntax, manner, face, mind, everything,

foreign" (287).

154

Simultaneously, Sammler has been obsessed with the impending death
of his nephew, Dr. Elya Gruner, whom Sammler loves and admires. Gruner
and Sammler are the two positive characters in the novel, representing
the Old System and moral presence in the chaotic New York of the
trouble-ridden sixties.6

Although Gruner left Poland when he was ten years old, he has
always felt closely tied to the "Old World" and to his relatives who
remain there. Even though he grew up in a tough neighborhood in New
York, he is "elaborately deferential, positively Chinese in observing
old forms" (76) and has "a passion for kinships" (82). On impulse, he
flies from Kennedy Airport, without a suitcase, to Jerusalem where he
does genealogies and engages in family reminiscences with old
relatives. '

Sammler attributes Gruner's rescuing him from the DP camp after
the war to the persistence of Gruner's "Old World family feelings"
(ll). Sammler's "historical significance for Gruner was considerable"
(76), as are his experiences, his suffering, the war, the Holocaust.
Sammler represents to Gruner elements of a meaningful past which have
not been totally destroyed.

Though not without defects, Dr. Gruner is an accountable person
who gives thought to others. Despite his dislike of his profession of
surgeon, he had been conscientious and done his duties before his
retirement. [To Sammler, "it is the strength to do one's duty daily
and promptly that makes saints and heroes" (93).] Despite his late
wife's bossiness, vulgarity, and snobbery, he tolerated her and
expressed his love for her. Elya has some kind of "stoical pride"
(Brooks 153) in himself and compassion for his fellow men. His

generosity reaches beyond his own family--to his chauffeur, to charity

155
houses. As Sammler whispers when he says yizkor for Elya's soul,
Elya Gruner is a man who has done "what was required of him" and
fulfilled "the terms of his contract" (313). As a man of the Old
System and of genuine family feeling, Dr. Gruner really is "a ray of
the light in the gloom" and "no one but Sammler seems to care much when
this ray is extinguished" (228).

Dr. Gruner's two wayward and dissolute children, Angela and
Wallace, do not care. Without ethical values and "absolutely wrapped
up in their narcissistic activities" (Brooks 153), they do not believe
that "there are things everyone knows, and must know" (307) and refuse
to come to terms with their father at the last opportunity because
that would be too "old-fashioned."

Angela represents the extreme case of the sexually liberated
modern American woman. Presented in the novel as promiscuous, the
Great Sinner "who suggested the sexual madness of the Western World,"
she carries on the theme of ideology of sex introduced by the Black
pickpocket: "Millions of civilized people wanted oceanic, boundless,
primitive, neckfree nobility, experienced a strange release of
galloping impulses, and acquired the peculiar aim of sexual niggerhood
for everyone" (162).

Bellow's depiction of Angela is totally negative.7 She is a
caricature in which all the sexual vices of the age are parodied. As
viewed by Mr. Sammler, Angela is a wealthy femme fatale let loose in
New York City. She is a rich, beautiful, spoiled nymphomaniac,
selfish, self-centered, and insensitive. She is among "millions of
corrupt ladies, Sammler saw, [who] had fortunes to live on. Foolish
creatures, or worse, squandering the wealth of the land" (178).

She uses Sammler both as a confidant, telling him her sexual

156
adventures, and as an intermediary to assuage her father's hurt
feelings toward her. She does not expect Sammler to comment on her
life-style, however, and she is insulted when he does. When Sammler
wants her to go to her father's bedside and act nicely, she refuses.
She says, "But how could I--It goes against everything. You're talking
to the wrong person" (306). Believing that "there are things everyone
knows, and must know" (307), Sammler laments that Angela can be
amorous, intimate with holiday acquaintances, but will not tell her
dying father that she loves him.

Angela is a catalyst to Sammler's denunciation of American cities,
especially New York City, and contemporary intellectuals. As her
confidant who has to hear her candid, bizarre, grotesque, sexual
adventures and experiments, Sammler recalls Saint Augustine's
statement, "The Devil hath established his cities in the North." He
used to love his Northern cities, especially London--"the blessings of
its gloom, of coal smoke, gray rains, and the mental and human
opportunities of a dark muffled environment" (32)--but now he thinks
St. Augustine's statement needs a new interpretation. To him, the
waning of Puritanism has changed "the dark satanic mills" into "light
satanic mills," dominated by "children of joy" and "the emancipated
masses of New York, Amsterdam, London" (32).

In Angela, a daughter of the vile city, he sees visions of modern
Sodom and Gomorrah: "New York makes one think about the collapse of
civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world" (304).
He laments that "dark romanticism now took hold":

He saw the increasing triumph of Enlightenment--Liberty,
Fraternity, Equality, Adultery! . . . the struggles of

three revolutionary centuries being won while the feudal
bonds of Church and Family weakened and the privileges of

157

aristocracy (without any duties) spread wide, democratized,
especially the libidinous privileges, the right to be
uninhibited, spontaneous, urinating, defecating, belching,
coupling in all positions, tripling, quadrupling,
polymorphous, noble in being natural, primitive, combining
the leisure and luxurious inventiveness of Versailles with
the hibiscus-covered erotic ease of Samoa. Dark romanticism
now took hold. (32-33)

Sammler's apocalyptic vision sees the dangers of "dark romanticism"
which has led people toward abysses of chaos, anarchy, craziness, self-

destruction:

The dreams of nineteenth-century poets polluted the psychic
atmosphere of the great boroughs and suburbs of New York.

Add to this the dangerous lunging staggering crazy violence
of fanatics, and the trouble was very deep. Like many people
who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Sammler entertained
the possibility it might collapse twice. He did not agree
with refugee friends that this doom was inevitable, but
liberal beliefs did not seem capable of self-defense, and you
could smell decay. You could see the suicidal impulses of
civilization pushing strongly. You wondered whether this
Western culture could survive universal dissemination.

Or whether the worst enemies of civilization might not prove
to be its petted intellectuals who attacked it at its weakest
moments-~attacked it in the name of proletarian revolution,
in the name of reason, and in the name of irrationality, in
the name of visceral depth, in the name of sex, in the name
of perfect instantaneous freedom. For what it amounted to was
limitless demand. . . . Enlightenment? Marvelous! But out
of hand, wasn't it?" (33-34)

Angela is promiscuous, but her "high I.Q. moron" brother, Wallace,
is almost devoid of any sexual interest. He is "the late sixties writ
large" (Fuchs 214); his originality "consists of being a professional
youth" (Fuchs 214). He is interested only in flying airplanes, looking
for stolen money, sports statistics, and touring Central Asia by horse.
He is always a "nearly": nearly a physicist, a mathematician, a lawyer,
an engineer, a Ph.D. in behavioral sciences, an alcoholic, a homo-

sexual. Like the child-like Bruch who plays with toys alone in his

room, Wallace is a permanent little brother.

158

Like Angela, Wallace subscribes to the cult of modern youth which
does not believe in virtues or roots. As Sammler sees it, "he
apparently has no use for priests, judges, or confessors" (93). To him,
"roots are not modern. That's a peasant conception, soil and roots"
(245). Even at his father's deathbed, he still asks his father for
money in order to invest in a crazy scheme. While his father is dying,
he is flooding his house and flying an airplane.

Oppressed by the hospital's atmosphere and disheartened by Angela
and Wallace's behavior, Mr. Sammler looks out through the window. The
scrawls on the windows of an empty building opposite the hospital lead
to a sequence of reflections; those "strange figures or nonfigures"
(89) suggest something to him:

Of what? Of future nonbeing. (Elya!) But also of the
greatness of eternity which shall lift us from this present
shallowness. At this time forces, energies that might carry

mankind up carried it down. For finer purposes of life,
little was available. Capacities, impressions, visions

amassed in human beings . . . were bound up largely with
vanities, negations, and revealed only in amorphous hints or
ciphers smeared on the windows of condemned shops. . . . And

in the meantime there was the excuse of madness. A whole
nation, all of civilized society, perhaps, seeking the
blameless state of madness. The privileged, the almost
aristocratic state of madness. (89)
The loops and curves--suggesting death and nothingness--recall his
Holocaust experiences, his hot summer months in war-time Poland hiding
in a mausoleum where he began to decipher the metaphysical messages of
all sorts of symbols and portents. He was engrossed in a "yellow
despair": "In this light, bad news for Sammler, bad news for humankind,
bad information. . . . Something hateful, and at times overwhelming"

(90). Nearly thirty years after his horrible trauma during the war,

Sammler, looking down at the street and at the scrawls on the window,

159
associates war-time craziness with sixties madness. He asks, "Is our
species crazy?" The answer is unequivocal as there is "plenty of
evidence" (92). Sammler does not believe that madness will lift one to
sainthood. He laments that only a few comprehend a simple truth: "it
is the strength to do one's duty daily and promptly that makes saints
and heroes" (93).

The episode that causes most of the complications that prevents
Sammler from visiting Elya in the hospital is his daughter's theft of
Dr. Govinda Lal's manuscript, The Future of the Moon. Sammler's
attempts to resolve this touchy problem, on the one hand, and to hasten
to Elya's hospital bed, on the other, force him to become an anxious
and disconcerted city voyager, shuttling between Elya's New Rochelle
suburban house and the hospital at the south end of Manhattan. The
trips bring him and the reader close-ups of New York street scenes.

Living in "the riotous city" (105) for more than twenty years, Mr.
Sammler of course knows that New York is monstrous. Its automobiles
are "foul, reckless, stinking" (123). Its public paths are "invariably
dog-fouled" (105). Its slums are hellishly dark. Its public phone
booths are vandalized. Its buses and subways are dangerous. Its
buildings are somber and oppressive. Its inhabitants are self-
imprisoned and divorced from nature.

Yet, in the sixties he particularly detects the deterioration of
the city. As noted above, he finds in the examples of Angela and other
youths that New York is a mad city, filled with hippies, muggings,
mini-skirts, wild business enterprises, Obscenities, riots, rallies,
and determined sexual circuses. It is a modern Sodom and Gommorah.

It is a modern wasteland, for its hold on civilization is extremely

tenuous .

160

This city image is confirmed and magnified during Sammler's city

voyages.

Walking along Broadway, Sammler observes and reflects on

those imitative hippies, those "dark romanticists":

What one sees on Broadway while bound for the bus. All human
types reproduced, the barbarian, redskin, or Fiji, the dandy,
the buffalo hunter, the desperado, the queer, the sexual
fantasist, the squaw; bluestocking, princess, poet, painter,
prospector, troubadour, guerrilla, Che Guevara, the new
Thomas a Becket. (147)

This is reminiscent of Augie's Chicago in the cataloguing of

multitudinous human types, but the passage above is not a celebration

but a fierce condemnation of modern man's imitative slavish mentality:

"modern man, perhaps because of collectivization, has a fever of

originality" (229).

Sammler's criticism of the radicalism of the Now Generation is

reflected in the following passage which portrays bohemian radicals of

the sixties crowding Broadway:

more actors, apes, copycats . . . more fiction, illusion,
more fantasy . . . this imitative anarchy of the streets--
these Chinese revolutionary tunics, these babes in unisex
toyland, these surrealist warchiefs, Western stagecoach
drivers--Ph.D.s in philosophy, some of them. . . . They
sought originality. They were obviously derivative. And of
what--of Paiutes, of Fidel Castro? No, of Hollywood extras.
(149)

Coming down from Elya's New Rochelle house, Sammler observes his

city from the window of a Rolls Royce. He feels terrified by the

brutality of reality and despairs at humanity's "poverty of soul"

(230):

Downtown on Broadway. . . . Tenements, the Puerto Rican
squalor. . . . And now . . . he inspected the subculture of
the underprivileged . . . its Caribbean fruits, its plucked

naked chickens with loose necks and eyelids blue, the
wavering fumes of Diesel and hot lard. Then 96th Street,

161

tilted at all four corners, the kiosks and movie houses, the
ramparts of wire-fastened newspapers bundles, and the colors
of panic waving. . . . Broadway . . . always challenged
Sammler. He was never up to it. And why should there be

any contest? But there was, every time. For something was
stated here. By a convergence of all minds and all movements
the conviction transmitted by this crowd seemed to be that
reality was a terrible thing, and that the final truth about
mankind was overwhelming and crushing. This vulgar, cowardly
conclusion, rejected by Sammler with all his heart, was the
implicit local orthodoxy, the populace itself being metaphys-
ical and living out this interpretation of reality and this

view of truth. . . . Broadway at Ninety-sixth Street gave
him such a sense of things. Life, when it was like this
was really a state of singular dirty misery. . . . This

poverty of soul, its abstract state, you could see in faces on
the street. And he too had a touch of the same disease.
(230)

Sammler's comments on the barbarism and degeneracy of New York
City are often expanded into broader, more universal comments. New
York City is not the only city that is sinking into madness and
barbarism; it is a national and universal phenomenon, a "whole nation,
all of civilized society . . . seeking the blameless state of madness.
The privileged, almost aristocratic state of madness" (89). At the end
of the novel, Sammler wonders if humankind is doomed. As he says to
Angela, "New York makes one think about the collapse of civilization,
about Sodom and Gommorrah, the end of the world" (304).

There are no moments of pastoral retreat for Sammler. When he
hears that Angela wants to take a trip to Mexico, a hot and green
place, because she is sick of New York and its winter, he cracks a
quotable quote: "Hot? Something green? A billiard table in hell would
answer the description" (94). As it turns out, Angela's Mexico trip,
like Augie's, is far from what D. H. Lawrence envisioned. It is
hellish.

Sammler does not "bolt for nature." He left New York once, not

for pastoral dreams but for concern about the fate of his fellow Jews

162
in Israel during the Six-Day War. Under the auspices of Dr. Gruner, he
flew to the battlefield as a war correspondent: not idyllic scenery,
but corpses and deserts.

Like Leventhal in The Victim, Sammler can only find some green (an
ersatz pastoral solace) in the city park, but even the park cannot give
him any rest. After his meeting with Wallace and his consequent
ruminations on the semiotic signification of those scrawls on the
window of an abandoned building opposite the hospital, Sammler goes out
to rest for a while in a little park. However, the daffodils and
tulips are sprinkled with the fallout of soot and the public paths are
"invariably dog-fouled" (105). The grass in the park is almost burned
by animal excrements and "the sycamores, blemished bark, but very nice,
brown and white, getting ready to cough up leaves" (105). Trying to
find a bench to sit on, Sammler sees a female bum drunkenly sleeping, a
wino urinating, and some "Bombay beggars"-like young hippies (106), who
immediately remind him of the £101 in Wells' prophetic novel, The Time
Machine: "Lovely young human cattle herded by the cannibalistic
Morlocks who lived in a subterranean life and feared light and fire"
(106).

Despite the almost impossible urban circumstances, however, Mr.
Sammler does have moments of transcendence: "Lilacs and sewage" (117).
To him, that is "bliss from his surroundings": "There were as yet no
lilacs, but an element of the savage gas was velvety and sweet,
reminiscent of blooming lilac" (117). Of course, it is not without
irony when Sammler calls it a bliss: "sewer gas edged with opiate lilac
sweetness. Bliss from bricks, from the sky! Bliss and mystic joy!"
(118). Yet, Sammler is truly "wooed almost comically by momentary and

fortuitous sweetness" (117) and now and then he gets "an appreciative

163
or fanciful pleasure, apparently inconsequent, suggested by the ruddy
dun of sandstone, by cool corners of the warmth" (117).

Even though there is no pastoral retreat for Sammler in the novel,
there are discussions of Wells' utopianism and moon colonies, another
version of the pastoral. This theme is brought forth by Shula's theft
of Dr. Lal's manuscripts.

Even though Sammler is no longer interested in the Bloomsbury
group, his eccentric daughter Shula is still obsessed with Sammler's
plan to write a memoir about H. G. Wells. She steals Dr. Lal's The
Future of the Moon for the sake of her father's project and thus brings
Dr. Lal and Mr. Sammler together for a long dialogue on the Bloomsbury
group and their conception of Utopia, the necessity of colonizing the
moon, technology, the Will and the Idea, and the problems of the world.

For Dr. Lal, the journey into space is the ultimate adventure:

As far as the organizers and engineers are concerned, it is a
vast opportunity, but that is not of high theoretical value.
Still, at the same time something serious happens within.
The soul most certainly feels the grandeur of this
achievement. Not to go where one can go may be stunting. I
believe the soul feels it, and therefore it is a necessity.
(217)
Sammler's answer to Lal is, "As an engineering project, colonizing
outer space, except for the curiosity, the ingenuity of the thing, is
of little interest to me" (237). Sammler wonders: should man con-
centrate his activities upon improving life on this earth, or is this
earth so corrupt that it is unredeemable and that he must seek to start
life anew preferably on a new planet?9
Sammler does not think man is able to "get out of spatial-temporal

prison" (53); however, he also understands the advantage of escaping

from the city, the earth, of "getting away from here, building plastic

164
igloos in the vacuum, dwelling in quiet colonies, necessarily austere,
drinking the fossil waters, considering basic questions only. No
question of it" (53). To Dr. Lal, who as an Indian is "supersensitive
to a surplus of humanity" (219), life on the moon seems to provide a
way of dealing with the problem of vast multitudes. To Sammler, how-
ever, it is a nihilistic attempt to escape the human condition. He
feels that the wish to end it all is mere rhetoric.

Even though "everything was being done to make it intolerable to
abide" (135) on it, Sammler still thinks that the earth is "a glorious
planet" (135). Sammler is not pessimistic but religious:

When you know what pain is, you agree that not to have been
born is better. But being born one respects the powers of
creation, one obeys the will of God--with whatever inner
reservations truth imposes. As for duty. . . . The pain of
duty makes the creature upright, and this uprightness is no
negligible thing. . . . There is also an instinct against
leaping into Kingdom Come. (220)

III

In his treatment of the theme of man in the city, Bellow's
creation of Mr. Sammler as the protagonist of "a crisis book for a
crisis year, 1969" (Bradbury 78) is remarkable. It is of unusual
significance that Bellow portrays this soulful, sage-like survivor of
the Holocaust as a representative of traditional humanism in an age
pervaded by nihilism, dark romanticism, and scientific rationalism. As
Cross has commented, Bellow's assertion of humanism--his concern with
the realities of the soul-~in this novel is almost heroic, considering
the harsh ideological rift of the age (75).

Compared with Leventhal, Wilhelm, and Herzog, Sammler is less
strident and personal in his relationship to New York City; he is

essentially a detached, sagacious, aged, foreign observer of the city.

Like other Bellovian heroes, he abhores crazy, chaotic, and cluttered

165
urban phenomena, but as a man from the grave and the Old World he is
less affected personally. His concerns are wider and broader. As
Durham points out,
Unlike prior Bellow heroes whose frames of reference remain
locked within their own egos, Sammler rises above his concept
of self and views humanity more philosophically, with broader
implications of man's role in his society. His concern is
not merely for what that particular city is doing to Artur
Sammler, but what civilization is doing to the masses he
observes in that environment. His thoughts are on a higher
plane; his concerns are those of a citizen of the human race,
not merely of New York City. As such, his environment is
almost mythicized into a condition of the world. (83-84)

In a modern city encroached on by anarchy, madness, waywardness,
and decadence, Mr. Sammler, "the most understanding, the most European-
worldly-wise-non-provincial-mentally-diversified-intelligent-young-in-
heart of old refugees, and really interested in the new phenomena"
(69), observes, reflects, laments, fears, and comments. In order to
counteract the onrush of new waves of madness, agitation, violence, and
waste, he holds fast to religious principles-~duty, obligation,
benevolence, love, responsibility, deep and abiding feeling for
immortality, desire for eternal peace, and lasting hope for salvation.

Like Herzog, Mr. Sammler believes in God. As Rodrigues points
out, "The awareness that there is in every human being a splash of
God's own spirit allows Mr. Sammler to recognize the psychic unity of
mankind, to accept the death of Elya Gruner, and to resist giving in to
a sense of imminent apocalypse" (98). That is why at the end of the
novel Sammler prays for Elya Gruner, who has fulfilled the terms of
his contract with God. Sammler's yizkor for Elya's soul is:

"Remember, God, the soul of Elya Gruner, who, as willingly as
possible, as well as he was able . . . was eager . . . to do

what was required of him. . . . He was aware that he must
meet, and he did meet . . . he did meet the terms of his

166
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." (313)

Seriously concerned with the possibility of the collapse of
civilization, Bellow has written a very serious novel, asking: Should
civilization be salvaged from its sinking? As he says in an
interview, "Civilization is standing on a tight rope over an abyss.
There are too many crushing and possibly insoluble problems. Now seems
a particularly chancy time to rock the boat merely for the sake of joie
de vivre" (Howard 60).

Mr. Sammler bemoans but does not yield. That is why he refuses to
give up and leave, despite the dog-fouled streets and parks, despite
the maddening militant students, despite the barbaric vandals and
criminals, despite the abominable subways, despite the bragging sham-
man, despite the unfilial grandnephew and niece, despite the junk-
collecting lunatic daughter, despite the rampant sexuality,
despite the traumatic Holocaust horrors, despite the death of his
kindly nephew, Dr. Gruner.

As Goldman insightfully points out, "It is a mad world Sammler
inhabits, where culture and education seem unrelated to one's way of
life. . . . Yet Sammler, as do most of Bellow's protagonists, believes
that chaos cannot determine human destiny. Chaos and madness may be
all-pervasive, but ultimately each person fulfills his contract, as did
Elya, which is a humbling and human experience" ("Saul" 94). What
Bellow/Sammler tries to tell us is quite simple: to embrace basic,
essential virtues, to search for eternal, unchanging truth, and to
build a decent, propriety-respecting, humanistic, healthy society,

emphasizing traditional values. Let the future and the moon wait.

167
Thus amidst the squalor of the city, in the steaming savage gas of
the sewage, he sees Whitmanesque lilacs blooming, soft and beautiful,
even though it is not the season for lilacs. Lilacs and sewage! What
a combination! Flowers-~symbolic of hope, rebirth, and beauty--are

going to triumph over urban despair, death, and ugliness.

Notes

1 Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet (New York: Viking, 1970) 313. In
this chapter, further references will be cited in the text..

2 Bellow corresponded with H. G. Wells in the forties when Wells
responded enthusiastically to Bellow's first novel.

3 Lionel Feffer tells his mentor Sammler: "You should denounce New
York City. You should speak like a prophet, like from another world"
(122). Using Abraham Heschel's definition of the prophet, Goldsmith
points out, "In a way Mr. Sammler does play the role of prophet, and in
a way he does not" (53), because "he rejects the values of his adopted
society, but Mr. Sammler never ‘raves' and never shows ‘breathless
impatience' or ‘hysteria'" (53). Goldman maintains that Bellow writes
in the manner of "an Old Testament prophet, for Bellow is essentially a
religious person and literature for him ‘is a way of coming closer to
God'" ("Saul" 95).

4 Bellow's depiction of the Black pickpocket here is stereo-
typical. While reading Bellow's works, I feel very uncomfortable at
his use of racist words, such as "Chinamen" (to describe Chinese
engineers who help send men to the moon). In this novel, the
derogatory term "sexual niggerhood" used to criticize the sexual chaos
of the sixties is racially biased. For a great humanist like Bellow,
such a bias is indeed regrettable.

However, it would be unfair to say this represents Bellow's total
view of the Black people or other minorities in the United States. I
think he is highly critical of everyone, including himself. He
portrays most of the women characters quite negatively in his works
prior to The Dean’s December, but we must remember that he also creates
many disgusting, sloppy, and narcissistic male fools, and many cold-
blooded or greedy lawyers and hypocrites. Take this novel, for
instance. Bellow is critical of almost every character. Even Mr.
Sammler and Elya Gruner are not without blemishes, because he does not
think any one is perfect. If the Black pickpocket is guilty of
pickpocketing, other people are not better than he. At least he has
some princeliness. (Curiously he never speaks a word throughout the
novel.) To Sammler, the crazy Eisen (his son-in-law) from Israel is
even more threatening and dangerous than the Black pickpocket.

Bellow's view of the Black people is not all negative. He is
discriminating in the sense that he respects good and moral people,
black or white. In Herzog, Herzog writes a letter to Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. to express his admiration for him and his disapproval of the
Powells and the Muslims:

Dear Mr. King, The Negroes of Alabama filled me with
admiration. White America is in danger of being
depoliticalized. Let us hope this example by Negroes will
penetrate the hypnotic trance of the majority. The political
question in modern democracies is one of the reality of
public questions. Should all of these become matters of

168

169

fantasy the old political order is ended. I for one wish to
go on record recognizing the moral dignity of your group.
Not the Powells, who want to be corrupt as white demagogues,
nor the Muslims building on hate. (H 87)

In The Dean’s December, Bellow depicts sympathetically the plight of
the inner city. He deplores such Blacks as Ebry and Mitchell who

rape and kill. But he respects highly the Black American ambassador

to Rumania and the black director of the County Hospital. In his
Harper's article, he finds only two men with exemplary moral initiative
in Chicago: Ridpath and Winthrop, both black.

Apparently Bellow used an incident that occurred when he
lectured at San Francisco State University. In a letter to Mark Harris
Bellow wrote: "The thing at S. F. State was very bad. . . . Being
denounced by Salas as an old shit to an assembly which seemed to find
the whole thing deliciously thrilling. Being told furthermore that
‘this is an effete old man--he can't come!'" (Harris 716).

6 The generation gap between father and children is really deep.
As Wallace says to Sammler, "I'm a different generation. I never had
any dignity to start with. . . . No natural feeling of respect" (241).
Like other rebellious children in the sixties, Wallace is doing all
kinds of crazy things as "protests against his father's ‘valueless'
success" (240). It can be read as a metaphor when Sammler meditates:
"prosperous families brought forth their anarchistic sons--these boy
Bakunins, geniuses of liberty, arsonists, demolishers of prisons,
property, palaces" (240). Bellow once wrote a short story titled, "The
Old System" (1967).

7 As Kazin, among others, points out, "He [Sammler] dislikes all
the women especially" (137).

8 In Pinsker's class, Bellow said, "I think the people in Western
countries live Romanticism all the time. They don't even know it, but
they do. They think of the proper mode of being highly stimulated,
ecstatic, a life of infinite possibilities, the individual utterly
free, his main responsibility to fulfill himself and to realize his own
desires as richly as he can. . . . It becomes a nightmare when you
have as many people on jun --of one sort or another--as you do in this
country. It's purely a Romantic thing" (Pinsker 975). What Bellow is
criticizing is the debased and vulgar form of romanticism. In Mr.
Sammler's Planet, it is "the dark romanticism," embraced by Angela,
Wallace, Bruch, Feffer, the Black-pickpocket, and many youths. It is a
bizarre romantic individualism.

Newman claims that Mr. Sammler's planet refers to the moon of
the future, the world of the concentration camp ("another planet") of
the past, and the earth of the present (133-34). In this chapter, I
interpret Sammler's planet to be the earth only.

Works Cited

Bellow, Saul. Mr. Sammler’s Planet. New York: Viking, 1970.
---. "The Old System." New York: Viking, 1968. 43-84.
Bradbury, Malcolm. Saul Bellow. London: Methuen, 1982.
Brooks, Cleanth. See Ditta.

Clayton, John J. Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man. 2nd ed.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

Ditta, Joseph M., and Ronald S. Librach. "Sounding the Past: A
Discussion with Cleanth Brooks." Missouri Review 6.1 (1982): 139-
60.

Durham, Joyce R. "The City in Recent American Literature: Black on
White. A Study of Selected Writings of Bellow, Mailer, Ellison,
Baldwin, and Writers of the Black Aesthetic." Diss. U of
Maryland, 1975.

Fuchs, Daniel. Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Durham: Duke UP,
1984.

Galloway, David. "Mr. Sammler's Planet: Bellow's Failure of Nerve."
Modern Fiction Studies 19.1 (1973): 17-28.

Goldman, L. H. Saul Bellow's Moral Vision: A Critical Study of the
Jewish Experience New York: Irvington, 1983.

---. "Saul Bellow and the Philosophy of Judaism." Studies in the
Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 81-95.

Goldsmith, Arnold L. "‘A Curse on Columbus': Twentieth-Century Jewish-
American Fiction and the Theme of Disillusionment." Modern Jewish
Studies Annual III (1979): 47-55.

Gross, Barry. "Willa Cather and the ‘American Metaphysic'."
MidAmerica VII (1981): 68-78.

Harris, Mark. "Saul Bellow at Purdue." The Georgia Review (1978):
715-54.

Howard, Jane. "Saul Bellow Considers His Planet." Life 3 April 1970:
57-60.

Kazin, Alfred. Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and
Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. Boston: 1973.

Lamont, Rosette. "Bellow Observed: A Serial Portrait." Mosaic 8.1
(Fall 1974): 247-57.

170

171

Newman, Julia. Saul Bellow and History. New York: Macmillan, 1984.

Pifer, Ellen. "‘Two Different Speeches': Mystery and Knowledge in Mr.
Sammler's Planet." Mosaic 18.2 (1985): 17-32.

Pinsker, Sanford. "Saul Bellow in the Classroom." College English 34
(1973): 975-82.

Rodrigues, Eusebio L. "Beyond All Philosophies: The Dynamic Vision of

Saul Bellow." Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984):
97-110.

CHAPTER VII

Humboldt’s Gift: Citrine in Chicago and New York

I am . . . sentimental about urban
ugliness. In the modern spirit of
ransoming the commonplace, all this
junk and wretchedness, through art
and poetry, by the superior power of
the soul.
I
Humboldt’s Gift (1975), Bellow's rich, funny, and ebullient eighth
novel has a typically Bellovian beginning: Charlie Citrine suddenly
finds his life "in great disorder" (43). His successful life in
Chicago has taken various turns for the worse. His home is no longer
"[his] retreat, [his] sanctuary, [his] Fort Dearborn deep in Indian
(Materialistic) Territory" (291). He is harassed by a minor Mafia
figure, Rinaldo Cantabile, enchanted by his mistress, Renata, tormented
by his litigious ex-wife, Denise, and racked by cannibal lawyers.
Citrine is also obsessed with the question of death, particularly that
of his poet-friend Von Humboldt Fleisher, who "acts from the grave" (6)
to change Citrine's life. Citrine's entanglements with Cantabile,
Renata, Denise, and others in Chicago and his reminiscences of his
friendship with Humboldt in New York City constitute this great tale of
two cities in Bellow's oeuvre.

In Herzog, Sandor Himmelstein entreats Herzog to settle in

Chicago: "Come back to the home town. You're a West Side Jew" (H 114);

172

173
Herzog, however, does not comply. Citrine, unlike Herzog, makes such a
move: he returned to Chicago to settle after his success in New York
City. His obstinate desire to live in Chicago greatly angered his ex-
wife, Denise. His friend Humboldt was so much irked by Citrine's
"perverse" act that he queried, "After making this dough why does he
bury himself in the sticks? What's he in Chicago for?" (2). Through-
out the novel Citrine asks himself again and again why of all cities he
chose Chicago to settle in. At times, he deems it an irony of life for
a lover of beauty like him to insist on living in Chicago (284).
Didn't he go to New York City in the late thirties because Chicago was
too boring?

At one point, Citrine reveals his "secret motive" (108) for
returning to Chicago: he wants to write a significant work on boredom,
to become "the Malthus of boredom" (114):

Chicago was the ideal place in which to write my master
essay-~"Boredom." In raw Chicago you could examine the human
spirit under industrialism. If someone were to arise with a
new vision of Faith, Love and Hope, he would want to
understand to whom he was offering it--he would have to
understand the kind of deep suffering we call boredom

(108).

All things considered, Citrine's move back to Chicago from New
York shows his dissatisfaction with New York City and his allegiance to
Chicago. After rising in the literary world in the
fifties, Citrine discovered that he did not like New York and its
literati that much. His bidding farewell to New York City signifies
his disenchantment with New York's ideology-polluted literary circle

and his persistence in going against the grain of the modernist/avant-

garde tradition.2 Moreover, as Goldman insightfully comments,

174
Charlie seeks confirmation of his essence. Like his fictive
ancestor, David Levinksy, he looks back upon his accomplish-
ments and finds them meaningless. Consequently, he returns
to his roots and tries, by means of association, to recapture
meaning in his life. (218)

As a writer from Chicago, Citrine is fully aware of his city's
vulgarity and materialism. He knows that Chicago, at least for the
present, cannot completely separate itself from associations with
business, industry, stockyards, skyscrapers, slums, gangsters, and
philistinism.3 Yet, for all this, Chicago remains his own turf,
however sensitive a plant he is (309) or however peculiar a soul he has
(37). By taking Chicago as it is, Citrine is able to tolerate and even
savor urban experiences which virtually constitute modern reality. As
he admits, "There were beautiful and moving things in Chicago, but
culture was not one of them. . . . I had accepted this condition long
ago" (66).

To a remembrancer like Citrine, the city means his childhood,
adolescence, and adulthood. Growing up in a closely-knit Jewish
immigrant family, he has strong family feelings, which weigh heavily in
his choosing to settle in Chicago. As his ex-wife Denise often
declares, he moved back to Chicago because his parents were buried
there.

Moreover, Citrine cherishes his old-time school chums; to him,
they are "a sacred category" (38) and he is noted for his "terrible
weakness or dependency on early relationship" (38). Through his
Chicago friends, he not only gets to know parts of the city condition
normally beyond his realm but also indulges in acts of recall and

shares advice, assistance, and friendship.

A writer by profession, Citrine knows he is in an unremitting

175
paradox--he needs to stand back from, and yet shares in, the struggle
of human life itself. He does not believe there is an ideal city or
place in the world for a writer, or for anyone. Even though Chicago
cannot boast of its culture as New York does, it is, with its charm and
problems, as much an American city as New York. Living in Chicago
gives him not merely an "at-home" feeling but a vantage point from
which to look at the First City-~New York--more objectively.

As the author of a Broadway hit play, Von Trenck, and biographer
of Woodrow Wilson and Harry Hopkins, honored by the French government
and the Zig-Zag Club, Citrine hopes that he can contribute to the
upgrading of his city and help "prevent the leprosy of soul" (136).
His move back to Chicago is an attempt to accept the mission, however
impossible or lofty, to bring culture, beauty, love, and poetry to the
"brutal Chicago" (297). As he says, he is "sentimental about urban
ugliness" and he hopes to ransom "the commonplace, all this junk and
wretchedness, through art and poetry, by the superior power of the
soul" (72).

Citrine is serious about his role as a poet/artist in the city.
His seriousness in the role of the poet-moralist once incurred acerbic
criticism from his modernist friend Humoldt. Nonetheless, he is firmly
convinced that only poetry, art, and the imagination can prevent the
modern city from becoming a cultural wasteland.

Citrine's ties to Chicago go back to the twenties when his family
moved from Appleton, Wisconsin, to the city's West Side, where he grew
up and received his education. Although the novel's depictions of
childhood do not equal in length or in effect the Napoleon Street
section in Herzog or the first half of Augie March, they do contain

typically Bellovian reminiscences of early family and urban life.4

176
Like other Bellovian heroes, Citrine is terribly nostalgic and tries to
justify his hysteria-like keenness in recollections by arguing that
"Love made these things unforgettable" (330) and "Plato links
recollection with love" (348). He remembers that he played softball
with Polish kids under the E1 tracks (5), that at eight he spent
Christmas in a TB ward, and that he spent a blizzard night with his
first sweetheart, Naomi Lutz, in her father's office.
Like Herzog, Citrine was greatly affected by his experience in the
TB ward:
I spent my eighth year in the public ward of a TB sanatorium.
Good people donated piles of colored funny papers to the
sanatorium. These were stacked high beside each bed.
In addition, day and night, I read the Bible. One visit a
week was allowed, my parents taking turns. . . . Kids
hemmorrhaged in the night and choked on blood and were dead.
In the morning the white geometry of made-up beds had to be
coped with. (65)
It is in the sanatorium that the young Charlie knew that he had "a TB
fever and also a love fever" (74), that he learned the value of being
alive and got the first illumination about the light-in-the-being:
"Owing to the TB I connected breathing with joy, and owing to the gloom
of the ward I connected joy with light, and, owing to my irrationality
I related light on the walls to light inside me" (65).5 Later Citrine
says confidently, "I speak as a person who had lately received light"
(177).
Four particular occasions in the novel offer forums for Citrine to
indulge in remembrances of things past: his trip to his old neighbor-
hood on Division Street; his sentimental get-together with his old

sweetheart Naomi Lutz in Chicago; his visit to his brother, Julius, in

Texas; and his running into his family's boarder Menasha Klinger in

177
Coney Island. Stimulated by these representatives of the past, he
fondly recalls his Chicago childhood.

Growing up in Polish Chicago in the twenties, Citrine comes from a
closely-knit Jewish immigrant family. They were so closely attached to
one another that Naomi's father, Dr. Lutz, called the Citrines "a bunch
of greenhorns and aliens, too damn emotional" (298). Citrine remembers
that they very much cared about one another: "Whether it was a lump on
my head, or Julius's geometry, or how Papa could raise the rent, or
poor Mama's toothaches, it was the most momentous thing on earth for us
all" (299). Whereas his father and brother, like Dr. Lutz, later
became "real" Americans and ceased to be emotional, Citrine persists in
his "immigrant loving" (299) and he hopes he has not lost "this intense
way of caring" (299). As Citrine tells his daughter Mary, "Oh, I loved
them [his parents and brother] all terribly, abnormally. I was all
torn up with love" (74).

Later, when he goes to Coney Island to retrieve Humboldt's gift,
Citrine runs into their boarder, Menasha, whom Citrine loved so much.
Menasha remembers that Charlie was the "best-hearted little kid on the
whole Northwest Side" (330) and the Citrines, perhaps with the
exception of Julius, were very kind people. Especially kind was
Charlie's mother who had come to be "a sacred person" (348).

In addition to teaching him astronomy and biology, Menasha
imparted to Citrine a reverent love for music. Although he worked at
Western Electric as a punch-press Operator, Menasha wanted to become a
dramatic tenor. He took Charlie downtown with him Saturdays for his
music lesson. As Citrine recalls:

In Chicago fifty years ago, we [Menasha and Charlie] had been
passengers on the double-deck open-topped bus down to the

178
Loop on Jackson Boulevard, Menasha explaining to me what bel
canto was, telling me, radiant, about Aida, envisioning
himself in brocade robes as a priest or warrior. After his
singing lesson he took me to Kranz's for a chocolate-fudge
sundae. . . . (330)
It is music that draws Citrine to Menasha. Citrine compares Menasha's
desire to be a singer to his quest for the "imaginative soul" (332) and
extols the power of music: "By means of music a man affirmed that the
logically unanswerable was, in a different form, answerable. Sounds
without determinate meaning became more and more pertinent, the greater
the music" (332).
II

However, Citrine's memories of his childhood cannot shield him
from the invasion of present distractions and anxieties. He has to
face reality--the "Chicago condition"--without recoil. Around him are
agents of distractions, unremittingly or potentially detrimental to his
gift, well-being, sensibility, and equanimity. Because of them, he
cannot lead a serene life nor can he concentrate on his essays on
boredom and other subjects, just as Herzog feels impotent before his
massive notes for his second book.

To a great extent, Citrine's loss of equilibrium is related to his
"Chicagoan" background. As Renata tells him pointedly, "Deep down,
you're from Chicago after all" (348). Not content with his lofty life
as an ivory-tower intellectual, he wants to be in touch and in
communion. Despite all his credentials as a scholar, a man of culture
and sensibility, and a student of Rudolf Steiner, Citrine is also a
"‘Chicagoan' with a taste for low pursuits, pneumatic young women, and

gangland excitement" (Cronin 272). His affection for big-city low life

leads him to be mistaken for a hit man. In the police car, Citrine

179
reflects on this unusual experience: "As a fanatical reader, walled in
by his many books, accustomed to look down from his high windows on
police cars, fire engines, ambulances, an involuted man who worked from
thousands of private references and texts, I now found relevance in the
explanation T. E. Lawrence had given for enlisting in the RAF--‘To
plunge crudely among crude men and find for my self'" (280).

Citrine knows that urban America is "the great mysterious book"
(266). For years, he says, "I was too fastidious and skittish to study
it closely-~I had used the conditions of life to test my powers of
immunity; the sovereign consciousness trained itself to avoid the
phenomena and to be immune to their effects" (267). His desire to know
more about real Chicago draws him close to his friend, George Swiebel,
who keeps him posted about the underworld; it is George's idea that
Citrine play poker with some real South Side people at his place.

As a self-proclaimed "urban psychologist" (35), Citrine thinks
that with "a deep no-affect belt, a critical mass of indifference"
(35), a man can get along in a big American city. However, when he
discovers his car pounded all over one December morning, his
theoretical "protective magic" breaks. The man who battered his car is
Rinaldo Cantabile, an elegantly dressed minor Mafia figure, whom
Citrine met at that fateful poker game. Citrine lost $450 to Cantabile
and, on George's advice, stopped payment on the check because Cantabile
and his cousin were seen cheating during the game. As a result,
Citrine’s car is mutilated and he is suddenly plunged into "the moronic
inferno" (35) of Chicago's underworld.6

An extravagantly comic and dazzling creation, Cantabile is a
demonic "agent of distraction" (180) from the city, his job being "to

make noise and to deflect and misdirect and send [Citrine] foundering

180
into bogs" (180). He is also a reality instructor. His constant
shouted "Wake up!" brings the dreamy and meditative Citrine back to
reality, and thus keeps Citrine alive; as Thoreau has exhorted, "To be
awake is to be alive" (67). Citrine admits that he has fallen short of
full wakefulness: as he tells Naomi, "As I was lying stretched out in
America, determined to resist its material interests and hoping for
redemption by art, I fell into a deep snooze that lasted for years and
decades" (306).

Cantabile takes Citrine to places beyond a bibliophile's normal
realm, such as the Russian Bath on Division Street, the Playboy Club,
the Hancock Building, and an unfinished sixty-story skyscraper, and he
also exposes Citrine to such people as his Radcliffe-educated wife, his
gorgeous mistress Polly, a gossip columnist, an old fence dressed as a
decent businessman, and a phony investor. The trips allow the
"minutely observant" (134) Citrine to walk out of his book-walled
sanctuary and become a city voyeur-voyager.

Cantabile wants Citrine to return his money at the Russian Bath on
Division Street.7 Citrine's taxi trip to Division Street brings back
memories of old Chicago:

Division Street where the old Bath stands used to be
Polish and now is almost entirely Puerto Rican. In the
Polish days, the small brick bungalows were painted fresh
red, maroon, and candy green. The glass plots were fenced
with iron pipe. . . . Tumbleweed is so melancholy.

In the old days of ice wagons and coal wagons householders
used to cut busted boilers in half, set them out on the grass
plots, and fill them with flowers. . . . The double rows of
rivets stood out like the raised-skin patterns of African
tribes. Here the women grew geraniums, sweet William, and
other low-grade dusty flowers. (71).

The old neighborhood was Citrine's "Lake District." The young Citrine

found the park his "own little Lake Country" (76) where he used to

181
wander and read "Plato, Wordsworth, Swinburne, and Un Coeur Simple"
(76). Now he is sad to see his "Lake Country" turned into "a tropical
West Indies slum" (77) and its landmarks demolished: "The old boulevard
now was a sagging ruin, waiting for the wreckers. Through great holes
I could look into apartments where I had slept, eaten, done my lessons,
kissed girls" (75).

Heart-rending as it is to see the disappearance of the old
neighborhood, the trip does evoke fond memories of his love for his
parents and old sweetheart, Naomi. He remembers that when he was a
kid, his father used to take him to the Russian Bath, which, almost
miraculously, remains as an anachronistic relic among the rubble.
Bellow meticulously describes the stinking, old-fashioned Bath, which
is still frequented by some Jewish people for the health of their
sacred bodies.

The Russian Bath episode contains a burlesque-like scene:
Cantabile drags Citrine into the Bath's filthy toilet and pushes him
into a stall to hear his rumblings and smell his stink. Cantabile
intends to punish him, but as a result of this farcical scene they
have become more intimate.

After the Russian Bath scene, Cantabile forces Citrine to go to
the Playboy Club to apologize before witnesses. Sitting in the Club on
one of the most "glamorous" corners of Chicago, he contemplates the
relationship between men and the setting and comes to understand that
man has conquered the emptiness of the land but not that of his heart:

We were on one of the most glamorous corners of Chicago. I

dwelt on the setting. The lakeshore view was stupendous. I
couldn't see it but I knew it well and felt its effect--the

shining road beside the shining gold vacancy of Lake

Michigan. Man had overcome the emptiness of this land. But
the emptiness had given him a few good licks in return. And

182
here we sat amid the flatteries of wealth and power with
pretty maidens and booze and tailored suits, and the men
wearing jewels and using scent. (93)

Then Cantabile repeats the scene in an apartment owned by a fence
in the Hancock Building. In a typically Bellovian gesture, Citrine
looks from the window of the skyscraper and reflects, taking no notice
of his human companions:

A ragged western sun spread orange light over the dark shapes
of the town, over the branches of the river and the black
trusses of bridges. The lake, gilt silver and amethyst, was
ready for its winter cover of ice. I happened to be thinking
that if Socrates was right, that you could learn nothing from
trees, that only the men you met in the street could teach
you something about yourself, I must be in a bad way.
(97)
Citrine's rational thinking tells him that he should be among street
people so that he can learn from them; yet, with Cantabile and other
underworld men beside him, he prefers not to be of their company. On
the one hand, he marvels at the collaborative efforts of experts in
different branches of modern technology to send him up to the sixty-
fourth story; on the other, he would rather harbor his Wordsworthian
fancy and find himself among trees, flowers, water, and sun.

No matter how reluctant he is to listen to his human companions,
Citrine is, nonetheless, gradually excited by "currents of criminality"
(99) going on around him. He admits that his "American, Chicagoan (as
well as personal) craving for high stimuli, for incongruities and
extremes, was aroused" (99). His Chicago education enables him to
accept the information about the seedy sides of the city: fancy
thieving, police corruption, drug-dealing, and old lechers' scandals.

After leaving the Hancock Building, Cantabile takes Citrine high

up on the catwalk of an unfinished sixty-story skyscraper where he

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makes origami planes of Citrine's fifty-dollar bills and sails seven of
them away. On the fast rising open elevator, Citrine tries to observe
his city: "On the east, violently was the water, icy, scratched, like a
plateau of solid stone, and the other way was a tremendous effusion of
low-lying color, the last glow, the contribution of industrial poisons
to the beauty of the Chicago evening" (101-02). However beautful
Chicago's evening is, tiptoing high up there in a high wind is a lethal
game.

Later, when Cantabile abducts him into his Thunderbird to threaten
Stronson, the phony investor, Citrine carefully observes his city along
the way. Cantabile's car waiting outside the Art Institute reminds him
of Eliot's Waste Land, of "the violet hour when the human engine waits
like a taxi throbbing, waiting" (253). The vehicles and people on
bustling La Salle Street call to mind what and who have helped create a
modern spiritual wasteland:

We turned into La Salle Street where we were held up by taxi
cabs and newspaper trucks and the Jaguars and Lincolns and
Rolls-Royces of stockbrokers and corporation lawyers--the
deeper thieves and the loftier politicians and the spiritual

elite of American business, the eagles in the heights far
above the daily, hourly, and momentary destinies of men.

(259)

Citrine's entanglements with Cantabile read like a movie story.
As Citrine's friend George says, Cantabile plays the gangster after the
fashion of The Godfather and Citrine knows that he is involved in "a
dramatization" (89). This is especially true in the Stronson episode,
which seems an episode in a comic gangster movie. Bellow's use of
cinematic scenes and effects in the Cantabile story foreshadows the
later movie scenarios written by Citrine and Humboldt.

Cantabile is an integral part of Citrine's education. As Citrine

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notes, "What we had [in Chicago] was a cultureless city pervaded
nevertheless by Mind" (66). In present-day Chicago, policemen take
psychology courses and are able to appreciate the comedy of urban life.
The wife of a mafioso is writing a doctoral thesis on the poet
Humboldt. And the mafioso, Cantabile, is not a crass hoodlum-
ignoramus; he is "drawn to culture, to thought" (105). He talks about
"Robert Ardrey, the territorial imperative, paleontology in the Olduvai
Gorge, and the views of Konrad Lorenz" (61), and he drags the highly
cultured celebrity-intellectual Citrine around town "to draw him
upward, to lead him to higher things" (174). Perhaps, as Citrine
comments, Cantabile has been in "the stage reached by bums, con men,
freeloaders, and criminals in France in the eighteenth century, the
stage of the intellectual creative man and theorist. Maybe he thought
he was Rameau's nephew or even Jean Genet" (174).8

III

Denise, Citrine's ex-wife, is another fierce "agent of
distraction" from the city who brings Citrine's mental work to a
standstill. Although both Herzog and Citrine are tormented by divorce,
they suffer in different ways. In Herzog Madeleine dumps Moses whereas
in Humboldt’s Gift, Citrine drops Denise. However, like Tommy Wilhelm
in Seize the Day, he has to pay dearly for his freedom, because Denise
is litigious, an "aggressive subtle resourceful plaintiff" (57). After
the breakup, they are engaged in endless alimony battles.

In a sense, Denise has taught Citrine an important "American"
lesson, for "Real Americans are supposed to suffer with their wives, and
wives with their husbands" (42). With the collaboration of cannibal
lawyers ("the sharks of Chicago" [173]), Denise squeezes away money

from Citrine and forces him out of his seclusion to face the chaotic,

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skirmishing urban world. From his dealing with these people, Citrine
learns "how universal the desire to injure your fellow man is" (270).
Sometimes, not without irony, Citrine feels indebted to Denise,
because, as he says, "Well, if Denise weren't suing me, I'd never get
out of the house, because of her I have to go downtown. It keeps me in
touch with the facts of life. It's been positively enlightening"
(270).

Citrine met Denise when his play Von Trenck hit Broadway. Ten
years later they married and they were once invited to the White House
to be guests of President Kennedy. Then, despite Denise's strong
opposition, Citrine brought her back to settle in somber Chicago.
Although both Denise and Citrine are from the West Side of Chicago,
their feelings toward the city are vastly different. Whereas Citrine
is "loyal to something" (43)--to his past, his dead parents, his
family, his Jewish tradition, and his city--Denise does not have
emotions for the past, the dead, or the vulgar city. Coming from a
Jewish nouveau riche family, the Vassar-educated Denise resents her
background and tries to cut herself off from her earlier existence.
She cannot bear Charlie's memories of his dead, his attachment to his
Jewish past, his association with his school buddies (those "ignorant
kikes" [43]), and his affection for his insane poet-friend Humboldt.
She often asks Citrine, "Why are you hung up on the past and always
lamenting some dead party or other?" (115). She says to Citrine, "At
heart you're a kid from the slums. Your heart belongs to the Old West
Side gutters" (41).

Unable to appreciate Citrine's ties to his roots, she keeps
complaining: "‘Why Chicago! We can live wherever we like, can't we?

Christ!’ She had in mind a house in Georgetown, or in Rome, or in

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London SW3" (114). As Goldman comments, "Denise wants to lose herself

by becoming part of the Washington social set or at least mingling with

the intellectual life of New York . . . while Charlie returns to
Chicago, which means to him . . . ‘Land where my Jewish father died'"
(218-19).

Denise is very displeased when Citrine abruptly returns to Chicago
from New York because he sees and dodges his dying friend Humboldt in a
Manhattan street that afternoon. Mooning in his room on that hot
summer night, Citrine, influenced by the apparition of Humboldt and by
the nagging of his wife, reflects upon the city's past and present.
His "feeling" the city gradually yields a picture of a hellish

wasteland:

On hot nights Chicagoans feel the city body and soul. The
stockyards are gone, Chicago is no longer slaughter-city, but
the old smells revive in the night heat. . . . The old stink
still haunts the place. It returns at times . . . to remind
us all that Chicago had once led the world in butcher-
technology and that billions of animals had died here. And
that night the windows were open wide and the familiar
depressing multilayered stink of meat, tallow, blood-meal,
pulverized bones, hides, soap, smoked slabs, and burnt hair
came back. Old Chicago breathed again through leaves and
screens. I heard fire trucks and the gulp and whoop of
ambulances, bowel-deep and hysterical. In the surrounding
black slums incendiarism shoots up in summer, an index, some
say, of psychopathology. Although the love of flames is also
religious. . . . Over the lake, steel mills twinkled.
Lamplight showed the soot already fallen on the leaves of the
wall ivy. We had an early drought that year. Chicago, this
night, was panting, the big urban engines going, tenements
blazing in Oakwood with great shawls of flame, the sirens
weirdly yelping, the fire engines, ambulances, and police
cars--mad-dog, gashing-knife weather, a rape and murder
night, thousands of hydrants open, spraying water from both
breasts. Engineers were staggered to see the level of Lake
Michigan fall as these tons of water poured. Bands of kids
prowled with handguns and knives. (114-15)

After his divorce from Denise, Citrine expects to find his "Fate"

whenever the elevator door opens. His yearning ceases when he meets

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Renata, his mistress, who wishes to take the place of Denise in a May-
December marriage.

Renata, like Ramona in Herzog, is an exotic woman who fulfills
Citrine's erotic needs. Whereas Denise, like Mady in Herzog, is a
castrating blue-stocking intellectual woman who wants to "knock
[Citrine] out of action" (328), Renata is a "carnal artist" who has
kept his "sex powers alive" (328). The voluptuous Renata is both a
comfort and a distraction to Citrine. She gives him love and life but
at the same time keeps reminding him of death (her ex-husband is a
grave-site salesman and another suitor is a funeral parlor owner). He
is sexually addicted to her but he is reluctant to lose his freedom in
marrying her.

It is because of her associations with sexual pursuits, luxurious
possesions, prospective confining marriage, and potential unfaithful-
ness that she is a source of distraction to Citrine. But Renata has
her own problems. For one, she does not know who her real father is.
Under the arrangements of her scheming mother, Senora, she has taken
several European trips with Citrine ostensibly to solve her identity
problem. Like Denise, she does not like Chicago that much. She thinks
the city is too boring for her or for Citrine. Her couplet for Chicago
is, "Without O'Hare, it's sheer despair" (308). When the plane takes
off, she has this to say: "So long, Chicago. Charlie, you wanted to do
this town some good. Why that bunch of low bastards, they don't
deserve a man like you here. They know fuck-all about quality. A lot
of ignorant crooks are in the papers. The good guys are ignored. I
only hope when you write your essay on boredom that you'll let this
city have it right in the teeth" (308).

IV

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While Denise and Renata do not like Citrine's friends, Citrine is
persistent in his love for his school chums and old-time acquaintances.
To him, they are "a sacred category" (37) and he enjoys their company
and love. His feeling toward them verges on "family feeling."

Citrine is generous to his friends. He lends money to his lawyer
friend Szathmar to buy a condominium. He entrusts money to his
journalist friend, Pierre Thaxter, and becomes a sort of patron to his
art. Although he suspects that Thaxter is conning him, he is extremely
fond of him; as he says, "I love Thaxter, whatever he does" (74). To
him friendship is more important than money: "Didn't I, myself, aim at
magnanimity, and wasn't friendship a far bigger thing than money?"
(242).

Among his Chicago friends, George Swiebel and Richard Durnwald are
closest to him. Like Naomi, Szathmar, and Menasha, George is a link to
Citrine's good old days in Chicago. Their friendship goes back to the
fifth grade. An ex-actor, George has wide connections with varieties
of people through his previous experiences in the theatre, Hollywood,
radio, TV, and journalism. A contractor now, he is in contact with
people from all walks of life. For years he has been Citrine's "self-
designated expert on the underworld" (39) and has kept him "informed
about criminals, whores, racing, the rackets, narcotics, politics, and
syndicate operations" (39). Despite his present occupation as a
contractor, George knows "his Ibsen and his Brecht" (46) and in South
Chicago he is "identified with Bohemia and the Arts, with creativity,
with imagination" (46).

A down-to-earth, practical, warm-hearted, genial, Nature-
worshipping, health-conscious, outgoing Chicagoan, George is a true

friend Citrine can count on: "George was wonderfully kind.

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Although George was in the building-repairs racket, he was utterly
honorable. You couldn't find a single cheating fiber in his heart"
(313). George shows his genuine friendship when Citrine has to go
abroad to escape his Chicago troubles. He says to Citrine: "I'll be
standing by you. Cable me from anywhere and I'll arrive. I liked you
all right when you were younger, but not the way I love you now" (314).
The friendship is mutual; Citrine loves him, too.

George's world-wide travel experiences bring up the theme of
universal brotherhood. Wherever he goes, he makes instantaneous human
contact and "the natives were always his brothers and were mad about
him" (445). He prefers Africa to Chicago because he would rather "meet
up with lions than use public transportation [in Chicago]" (447): it is
safer in Africa than in Chicago, where twenty-five murders are reported
over a weekend (445).

In addition to teaching Citrine how to stand on his head, he also
takes Citrine to his home for a poker game so that Citrine can meet
real Chicago people. Ranking people from "the putrid to the pure," he
places Citrine "well up among the pure" (39).

Citrine's friend Durnwald is another Chicagoan who is "well up
among the pure." Although he has been out of the city--at the
University of Edinburgh for half a year--he is constantly in Citrine's
mind and in other characters' conversations. Denise is staunchly
against Citrine's intimate relations with his old acquaintances but she
has nothing to say against Durnwald.

Citrine's respect and admiration for him is without irony or
ambivalence: "In crude Chicago Durnwald, whom I admired and even
adored, was the only man with whom I exchanged ideas" (60). Except

Durnwald, none of "the mental beau monde of Chicago" (59) interests

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Citrine. As George praises him, "Lots of good this guy Durnwald will
do you. He's the professor's professor" (60).

Durnwald's serious, analytical, cool, rational, disciplined
character serves as a foil to Citrine's romantic, eccentric,
passionate, impulsive, and metaphysical propensities. That is why
Citrine does not feel completely comfortable with Durnwald: "Look at my
relations with a man like Richard Durnwald. Much as I admired him, I
couldn't be mentally comfortable with Durnwald" (288). Despite their
different interests and inclinations, they are good friends.
Significantly, Durnwald, absent throughout the novel in the present, is
unable to extend his rational and sensible advice to Citrine in
trouble.

Citrine realizes that "America is an overwhelming phenomenon"
(306) and his Chicago is predominantly a city of distractions. He has
tried in vain to withdraw from the clutter-ridden city into his own
self. He feels that he is unable to grasp the "vivid actuality and
symbolic clarity" (260) of the city and to reach a state of equilibrium
in which "the listening soul . . . can hear the essence of things and
comes to understand the marvelous" (306). Citrine laments, "The more
so since society claims more and more and more of your inner self and
infects you with its restlessness. It trains you in distraction,
colonizes consciousness as fast as consciousness advances" (306).

Fortunately, Citrine's life in Chicago is a little more tolerable
because he has received brotherhood, love, sympathy, advice, assist-
ance, and support from his friends there. With them, Citrine has
formed a Whitmanesque "new city of Friends" against the attacks of the
brutal, impersonal physical city.9 Though the "new city" built by

Citrine and his friends is not as strong as Whitman dreamt it, it at

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least drives away part of the craziness, savagery, ugliness, and
alienation of the city.

Like other Bellow heroes, Citrine knows that goodness cannot be
achieved in isolation and that universal brotherhood should be
celebrated. However, like Mr. Sammler, who says, "You do not find
David and Jonathan, Roland and Olivier bosom buddies in these days"
(MSP 30), Citrine regrets that friendship or love in the present is too
often distorted into sexual degeneracy or perversity. As he says,
"Already the brotherly love [the Angels] put into us has been corrupted
into sexual monstrosity" (294).

V

Citrine's celebration of brotherly love culminates in his
intricate relationship with his late blood-brother, Von Humboldt
Fleisher.10 In Chicago, he constantly thinks about Humboldt,

"a precious friend hid in death's dateless night, a camerado from a
former existence (almost), well-beloved but dead" (110).11 To Citrine,
Chicago is a perfect place to remember him: "In Chicago Humboldt was a
natural subject for reflection. Lying at the southern end of the Great
Lakes . . . Chicago with its gigantesque outer life contained the
whole problem of poetry and the inner life in America. Here you could
look into such things through a sort of fresh-water transparency" (9).
His memory becomes all the more poignant when, engulfed in all sorts of
troubles, he is blessed by Humboldt's gift which removes many of his
problems.

Athough he grew up in New York City, Humboldt knew Chicago, too.
During the boom, Humboldt's real-estate broker father lived in Chicago;

in summers Humboldt came from New York to join his father. The Chicago

Humboldt knew is different from the one Citrine knows:

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In the days of Hack Wilson and Woody English the Fleishers
had a box at Wrigley Field. They drove to the game in a
Pierce-Arrow or a Hispano-Suiza (Humboldt was car-crazy).
And there were lovely John Held, Jr., girls, beautiful, who
wore step-ins. And whisky and gangsters and the pillared
doom-dark La Salle Street banks with railroad money and pork
and reaper money locked in steel vaults. Of this Chicago I
was completely ignorant when I arrived from Appleton. I
played Piggie-move-up with Polish kids under the El tracks.
Humboldt ate devil's food coconut-marshmallow layer cake at
Henrici's. I never saw the inside of Henrici's. (4-5)

Years ago when Humboldt came to Chicago to give a reading for
Poetry magazine, Citrine took him for a tour of the city. Citrine
recalls those memorable moments poetically:
I took Humboldt on the E1 to the stockyards. He saw the
Loop. We went to the lakeshore and listened to the foghorns.
They bawled melancholy over the limp silk fresh lilac
drowning water. But Humboldt responded mostly to the old
neighborhood. The silvered boiler rivets and the blazing
Polish geraniums got him. He listened pale and moved to the
buzzing of roller-skate wheels on the brittle cement. (72)

Both Citrine and Humboldt are urban-bred lovers of the good and

the beautiful, trying to discover beauty in urban ugliness and to

redeem the city by art.

But their relationships began not in Chicago but in New York City.
The novel opens with Citrine's elegiac memory of his pilgrimage
eastward in the late thirties to see Humboldt in Greenwich Village,
then a Mecca for young fledgling writers from all parts of the
country.12 Humboldt was a youthful celebrity in the Village. At the
age of twenty-two, Humboldt published his much acclaimed Harlequin
Ballads, a collection of poems, "pure, musical, witty, radiant, human"
(11).13 Citrine borrowed thirty dollars from his sweetheart, Naomi,

and took a Greyhound to New York to be close to his admired poet.

Humboldt invited Citrine to his apartment in Greenwich Village to

193
discuss literature and ideas. At their first meeting Humboldt found a
kindred spirit in Citrine, for both of them loved literature heart and
soul. Citrine recalls that they crossed the Hudson on the Christopher
Street ferry to eat clams in Hoboken. Centering on the topic of
"Success," Humboldt told him that "poets ought to figure out how to get
around pragmatic America" (11).

Soon Citrine became Humboldt's protege and intimate friend.
Humboldt introduced him to his literary friends in the Village and got
him books to review--all these, as Rodrigues points out, show that
Humboldt's love and assistance manifest themselves in practical fashion
(Quest 229).

Citrine was fascinated by the Village's literati, Meyer Schapiro,
Sidney Hook, Gumbein, Chiaramonte, Orlando Huggins, Paul Goodman,
Lionel Abel, Philip Rhav, and Humboldt. In the daytime, Citrine
eagerly peddled Fuller Brushes door to door and patiently listened to
hypochondriac Jewish women's stories; in the evening he eagerly went to
the Village to listen to the "finest talkers in New York" (13). "Under
their eloquence," Citrine recalls, "I sat like a cat in a recital hall"
(13).

Among those wonderful talkers Humboldt was the most remarkable: he
was "the Mozart of conversation" (13). Though the novel does not
record any of his talk verbatim, there are instances illustrating
Humboldt as "the brilliant golden master of conversation" (263). None
equals Citrine's recall of an "Evening of Conversation with Von
Humboldt Fleisher" in Humboldt's New Jersey farmhouse. At first their
conversation was "a double concerto," but presently Citrine was

"fiddled and trumpeted off the stage" (30):

Reasoning, formulating, debating, making discoveries

194
Humboldt's voice rose, choked, rose again, his mouth went
wide, dark stains formed under his eyes. . . . he passed
from statement to recitative, from recitative he soared into
aria, and behind him played an orchestra of intimation,
virtues, love of his art, veneration of its great men--but
also of suspicion and skulduggery. Before your eyes the man
recited and sang himself in and out of madness. (30)
Not only was Humboldt "a wonderful talker, a hectic nonstop monologuist
and improvisator, a champion detractor" (4), but he was also an "avant-
garde writer, the first of a new generation" (1). His poems are so
.beautiful and exquisite that Citrine thought he was going to be "the
great American poet of the century" (329).

A lover of the beautiful, Humboldt also directed Citrine's
attention to landscapes and expressed his disgust with the city. As
Citrine reminisces, "Late in the Forties, he and Kathleen, newlyweds,
moved from Greenwich Village to rural New Jersey, and when I visited
them he was all earth, trees, flowers, oranges, the sun, Paradise,
Altantis, Rhadamanthus. He talked about William Blake at Felpham and
Milton's Eden, and he ran down the city. The city was lousy" (17).

However, growing up in New York City, Humboldt, like Citrine, was
essentially an urbanite. His ideas about the pastoral were mostly
derived from books: Plato, Proust, Virgil, Marvell, and Stevens (17).
Living in the New Jersey back country did not make a hermit of him;
instead, he traveled to New York several times a week on business. To
Citrine's mind, it is a great irony and contradiction for Humboldt--"a
man of powerful social instincts" (284)--to bury himself in the dreary
countryside.

In 1952 when Humboldt headed Princeton's writing program, he
recommended Citrine to fill a vacancy. Before his Princeton interview,

Citrine was invited to spend one night in Humboldt's New Jersey house.

On their way to Humboldt's farmhouse, Citrine was showered by

195
Humboldt's torrential ideas and illusions. Like his Buick plunging
forward at high speed, the highly-charged Humboldt discussed, among
others, "machinery, luxury, command, capitalism, technology, Mammon,
Orpheus and poetry, the riches of the human heart, America, world
civilization" (21), as a prelude to the evening's conversation. As
they emerged out of the Holland Tunnel, Citrine noticed the dismal
landscape of New Jersey: "Tall stacks, a filth artillery, fired
silently into the Sunday sky with beautiful bursts of smoke. The acid
smell of gas refineries went into your lungs like a spur. The rushes
were as brown as onion soup. There were seagoing tankers stuck in the
channels. . . Far out, the massed bungalows had the look of a
necropolis-to-be" (22).

Situated "in the Jersey back country, near the Pennsylvania line"
(22), the house was beginning to tip, because the crossroads had eaten
into the small bluff it sat on. As Citrine observed, "This marginal
land was good for nothing but chicken farms. The approaches were paved
and we drove in dust. Briars lashed the Roadmaster as we swayed on
huge springs through rubbishly fields where white boulders sat" (22).
The slummish surroundings were far from being pastoral or idyllic:

The neighbors raised poultry on this slummy land. Burdocks,
thistles, dwarf oaks, cottonweed, chalky holes, and whitish
puddles everywhere. It was all pauperized. The very bushes
might have been on welfare. Across the way, the chicken were
throaty--they sounded like immigrant women--and the small
trees, oaks sumacs ailanthus, were underprivileged, dusty,
orphaned-looking. (23-24)

To the city-bred Citrine, Humboldt's cottage was "Greenwich
Village in the fields" (25): it was "exactly like Bedford Street.

except that the surrounding slum was rural" (22). Like the houses in

Greenwich Village, this house was "furnished from thrift shops, rummage

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sales, and church bazaars, and seemed to rest on a foundation of books
and papers" (25).

Despite the shabby surroundings, the Chicago-trained Citrine was
still able to "make something of such a scant setting" because "in
Chicago you became a connoisseur of the near-nothing" (24). Looking
around the country, Citrine enjoyed "the red sumac, the white rocks,
the rust of the weeds, the wig of green on the bluff over the
crossroads" (24). Furthermore, because of the influence of the poet-
host, Citrine's feeling for the place turned from appreciation to love:
"It was more than appreciation. It was already an attachment. It was
even love" (24).

Humboldt lived in the countryside not simply for pastoral beauty:
he wouldn't even allow Kathleen to grow flowers around the cottage.
His motives were complicated. Like Herzog's buying the Ludeyville
house, Humboldt's move to the barren backlands gave him a feeling of
entering the American mainstream. Moreover, as Citrine perceives, his
keeping Kathleen in the country was dictated by his paranoid and
tyrannical desire to keep her away from her "lovers."

Humboldt knew that to be a poet meant he was doomed to be
solitary. Yet, when he retreated to the countryside, his craving for
active life and social activity killed him. No longer able to produce
"poems of great wit and beauty" (25), he felt terrible. Consequently,
the place "sometimes looked like Arcadia to him and sometimes looked
like hell" (25).

For Humboldt and Kathleen, life in rural New Jersey brought no
simplicity, productivity, or contentment. What's even worse, the
paranoid Humboldt suffers illusionary anti-Semitism. As a son of

Hungarian-Jewish immigrants, Humboldt suffered "keen Jewish terrors in

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the country" (27), because, as Citrine reflects, “he was an Oriental,
she a Christian maiden, and he was afraid. He expected the KKK to burn
a cross in his yard or shoot at him through the window as he lay on the
Castro sofa reading Proust or inventing scandal" (27). His fear of his
back-country neighbors gave him nightmares: "In his nightmares they!
buried his house, he shot it out with them, they lynched him and
carried off his wife" (121).

As in his other novels, in Humboldt's Gift Bellow does not let the
country speak more eloquently than the city. Humboldt's country life
fares no better than his urban life, as far as its effects upon his
emotions, creativity, and marriage are concerned. The year Humboldt
and Citrine spend together at Princeton further testifies that
Citrine/Bellow does not praise life in rural America.

To Citrine, Princeton is an "academic music box" (128). It is a
beautiful college town, but Citrine does not think highly of it:
"Between noisy Newark and squalid Trenton it was a sanctuary, a 200, a
spa, with its own choochoo and elms and lovely green cages" (133).

Life there is not much different than elsewhere. Vices are the same:
professors there play Eskimo wife-swapping games; the crazy poet-in-
residence tries to run over his wife with his Buick. Citrine says that
he cannot "stand a whole lifetime of this drinking, boredom, small
talk, and ass-kissing" there (127-28).

It is during their Princteon days that Humboldt and Citrine became
blood brothers. As Humboldt later reveals in his posthumous letter, it
is Citrine who stimulated the oath, because Citrine is "one of those
people who arouse family emotions . . . a son-and-brother type" (328).
After exchanging blank checks [N.B. Money is blood] and shaking hands,

Humboldt said to Citrine, "This makes us blood-brothers. We've entered

198
into a convenant. This is a covenant" (130).

Affected by his manic-depressive tendencies and by great social
forces, Humboldt cannot recover his enchantment and write beautiful
poetry again. He complains: "But where's my equilibrium? There are
too many anxieties. They dry me out. The world keeps interfering.

I have to locate myself" (128). In the late fifties, Citrine's fame
begins to rise as Humboldt's sinks. When Humboldt's scheme to get
himself a chair at Princeton shorts and his wife Kathleen deserts him,
he starts to degenerate and never fully recovers. Citrine, on the
other hand, wins fame and money when his play Von Trenck hits Broadway.
At the premiere, Humboldt and his buddies riotously picket outside the
theatre.

The unproductive, maniacal Humboldt begins to make scenes in New
York. He repeatedly threatens a young literary figure whom he suspects
is Kathleen's lover. Consequently, he is arrested and sent to
Bellevue. As the police put him into a strait jacket and rush him to
Bellevue, he has diarrhea. The event leads Citrine to ponder the fate
of the poet/artist in American society. "Was this art versus America?"
wonders Citrine, to whom "Bellevue was like the Bowery: it gave
negative testimony" (155). If brutal Wall Street stands for power and
the nearby Bowery and Bellevue, weakness, should poets, like drunkards
and misfits and psychopaths, sink into weakness and find themselves
among the wretched and busted?

Discharged from the mental institution, Humboldt begins to visit
psychiatrists and lawyers. Meanwhile, he fills in Citrine's blood-
brother check and cashes nearly seven thousand dollars when Citrine was
mourning his fiancee's death. Years later, he wrote his last letter to

Citrine to explain why he did that. He said that he was outraged

199
because Citrine didn't go to Bellevue to see him: "I was suffering; you
didn't draw near, as a loving friend should" (328). The check was used
to punish Citrine because he had betrayed him and broken their "sacred
covenant" (130). He asked Citrine's forgiveness when he later learned
that Demmie, Citrine's fiancee, dissuaded him from going to Bellevue.
Both Demmie and Citrine did raise money for Humboldt's medical care and
Citrine tried in vain many times to get positions for Humboldt. To
acknowledge his indebtedness and to reassure his love for Citrine, he
left Citrine a legacy.

With his talent gone and his mind fallen apart, he ends up as a
bum living in a flophouse in Manhattan. When Citrine last sees him, he
is eating a pretzel for lunch in West Forties. Citrine does not have
the courage to walk up and face his buddy, but the scene torments him
thereafter. Years later he still feels remorseful: "On that day I made
a poor showing. I behaved very badly. I should have gone up to him.

I should have taken his hand. I should have kissed his face" (341).
Two months later Humboldt dies. The day Citrine learns of Humboldt's
demise from the Times's obituary, he is flying from New York to
Chicago; he shuts himself in the restroom and cries very sadly.

Despite their differences in literary views and in their fortunes,
Citrine has been strongly attached to Humboldt. For they both love
poetry and value the imagination. As Citrine says to Kathleen:

"I've been attached to Humboldt for nearly forty years. It’s
been an ecstatic connection. The hope of having poetry--the
joy of knowing the kind of man that created poetry. You know?
There's the most extraordinary, unheard-of poetry buried in
America, but none of the conventional means known to culture
can even begin to extract it. But know this is true of the
world as a whole. The agony is too deep, the disorder too big
for art enterprises undertaken in the old way. Now I begin to
understand what Tolstoi was getting at when he called on

mankind to cease the false and unnecessary comedy of history
and begin simply to live. It's become clearer and clearer to

200

me in Humboldt's heartbreak and madness. . . . Now we must
listen in secret to the sound of the truth that God puts into
us." (477)

Humboldt was not a complete failure, however. As he neared his
death, he revived his sanity and cast away rational orthodoxy. In its
stead, he came to reassert the power of the imaginative soul. He
refused to let the imagination be engulfed by the materialistic,
pragmatic, and rationalistic world. All this is clearly manifested in
his gift to Citrine.

To retrieve Humboldt's bequest, Citrine comes back to New York
City again. In his first trip to New York City in 1938, Citrine was
"showered by the green, within" because of the Pastorale-like scenery
on the way, and once he arrived at the city, he discovered that
"Manhattan was fine, too" (2). His revisit to New York this time,
however, is quite another experience, even though, as he did the first
time, he goes there for the sake of Humboldt.

Coming back to New York not as an aspiring, culture-crazed young
man but as a celebrated literary figure, Citrine looks at the city
scenes with a cool observer's eye. After leaving La Guardia Airport,
Citrine and Renata sit in the low seats of "one of New York's dog-
catcher taxis" (316-17), which make them feel that they "have bitten
someone and are being rushed to the pound, frothing with rabies, to be
put down" (317). He finds the subway to Coney Island "awful, the
filth, the spray-can graffiti were not to be believed" (326).

Nevertheless, the trip proves to be surprisingly rewarding. In
the nursing home on Coney Island, he not only successfully gets the
gift from Humboldt's uncle; he also runs into Menasha, who brings back
many wonderful memories of his early urban experiences in Chicago.

Leaving Coney Island on the subway, Citrine reads Humboldt's

201
loving, posthumous letter with avidity. He is moved to tears as he
reads along. The letter ends with a significant sentence: "we are not
natural beings but supernatural beings" (347). Although the letter is
only a prelude to Humboldt's gift, it testifies to Humboldt's power as
an imaginative poet. Writing with "end-of-the-line lucidity" (373), he
reiterates the importance of the imagination, the love of the good and
the beautiful, and the passion for literature. It is indeed a valuable
legacy to Citrine and to the world.

The box office success of the movie created out of a scenario by
Humboldt and Citrine proves that art still has a power to instruct, to
delight, and to move people. Moreover, it further testifies that if
the artist is not too naive in the "famous romance of business" (469),
he can make money, too, in cannibalistic, capitalist society. At the
end of the novel Citrine's shrewdness in business, ironically, converts
Humboldt's gift into great assets which relieve him, Kathleen, and
Humboldt's uncle of their financial troubles.

V1

Citrine and Humboldt love each other, despite their fight and
estrangement. Each figures prominently in the other's obsessions and
fixations throughout their lives. Their friendship is bound by their
love of poetry. To them, poetry is the Ellis Island to a "new city of
Friends" which, through the power of love, will stand firmly as a
fortress against the callous, philistine physical city surrounding
them. Both of them try to find beauty in the ugly city and dream of
rescuing the city with art.

Humboldt's Gift is a great novel of two cities, Chicago and New
York. Citrine has a fierce love for his city. No matter where he is,

in Madrid or in New York, he, like Augie, is always thinking about his

202
home city. He chose Chicago, instead of other places, to settle in
because of his loyalty to his past, his dead parents, and his city.
Chicago, a symbol of his roots, is his own turf where he can feel at
home.

Living in a modern city like Chicago--a city noted for its
criminality, violence, industrialism, and philistinism--inevitab1y
exposes him to many distractions, making it difficult for him to
concentrate on his great project or meaningful work. The turbulent
urban environment with its sounds, people, cars, things, smells, and
sensations, always poses a great challenge to his mind and heart and
body. He wishes he could stay serenely in his sanctuary.

However, a writer by profession, he knows that he cannot shut
himself up in an ivory tower. He needs to engage in urban experiences
and to be among street people. Caught in this paradox, Citrine begins
his man-city dialogue in Chicago.

Chicago is both a source of distractions and an emotional anchor
to him. Cantabile, Denise, and lawyers are major agents of
distraction, while his old sweetheart, his present mistress, his school
chums, his daughters, and his friends are the source of comfort and
love. In Chicago, Citrine is obsessed with the dead: among his
"significant dead" are his parents, his fiancee, Demmie, and his late
poet friend, Humboldt. His recollections of Humboldt also evoke his
memories of New York City.

Although New York is not the principal setting for the novel, it
is a very important setting. Bellow deftly exploits the symbolic
significance of the landmarks of New York City: Wall Street (money and
power), Greenwich Village (poetry and ideology), the Bowery (poverty

and wretchedness), Bellevue (insanity and terror), CCNY (rationalistic

203
and naturalistic education), the public library (imagination and
learning), the subway (anarchy and degeneracy), and Broadway (theatre,
glamour, and success). In fact, the novel begins and ends in New York
City. Although the novel ends in a graveyard scene, Menasha's singing
and a bunch of crocuses suggest hope and affirmation.

In this rich and profound city novel, Bellow celebrates love,
friendship, poetry, and the imagination, which he thinks can help
rescue the modern city from becoming a waste land or a "City of
Destruction." Through these, Bellow implies, we can build the "new
city," a city dreamed by Whitman, which will be "invincible to the

attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth."

Notes

1 Bellow, Humboldt's Gift (New York: Viking, 1975) 72. In this
chapter, further references will be cited in the text.

2 In an interview with Bellow, Kakutani records, "[Bellow's]
decision to leave New York and return to Chicago in the early 60's, he
says, was motivated, in part, by what he saw as the increased
politicization of writers in New York" (Kakutani 29). See also Boyers
12-13.

In Chicago money weighs much heavier than learning, art, even
science. As Bellow says in "A Writer from Chicago," "This fact of life
has never been disguised in Chicago" (187). After watching popular
culture in Chicago more closely, Bellow discovers that "the
overwhelming power in Chicago remains the power of money and goods"
(188).

4 In his study of Bellow's manuscripts, Fuchs points out that
Bellow deleted Citrine's recollections of his early family life before
publication (273). Fuchs comments, "In a number of Bellow works, the
author must cut down on his tendency to remember, on the enormous lure
of childhood. Humboldt's family history is central and quite enough.
Citrine, to be sure, has his persistent memories, but Bellow wants to
emphasize his worldly perceptions rather than his filial pieties. What
is appropriate to the subjective world of Herzog would be indulgence in
the relatively objective world of Citrine" (274).

5 As in Herzog, Bellow has drawn on the same personal experience
in depicting the TB sanatorium scene. His miraculous survival makes
him a devout worshipper of life. As he tells Brans, "I always had a
great piety about my life. . . . I always thought it the most
extraordinary, brilliant thing in the whole history of the universe
that we should be all together" (Brans 67).

As pointed out in Chapter I, light is an important image in
Bellow's fiction; the Bellow hero is always looking for sunlight. In
that somber city--Chicago--Citrine is no exception. At the Art
Institute, both Citrine and Thaxter love to look at Monet's painting of
a Norwegian winter landscape, which depicts a house, a bridge, and the
snow falling: "Through the covering snow came the pink of the house,
and the frost was delicious. The whole weight of snow, of winter, was
lifted effortlessly by the astonishing strength of the light" (252).
Citrine loves to listen to Dr. Scheldt explaining the light-in-the-
things to him.

See also Rodrigues, "Beyond" 100 and Wilson 159.

According to Clemons and Kroll (39), Bellow's school chum, Dave
Peltz, who now owns a home improvement company in Gary, Indiana, lost
heavily in a poker game with Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, and two
underworld characters. Advised by Terkel, Peltz did not pay and
promptly got two cement blocks through the windows of his home and a
threat on his life. From this incident came Citrine's encounter with

204

205

Cantabile.

Bellow's fascination with Chicago con men and mobsters such as
Yellow Kid Weil (Chicago's consummate confidence man) also helps him in
his depiction of such characters as the big-time hoodlum Vito
Langobardi, the minor mafioso Cantabile, and the swindler Guido
Stronson. See Bellow's interview with Yellow Kid Weil.

For Bellow's ties to that street, see Bellow's "Variations on a
Theme from Division Street," Second Part of "A Writer from Chicago" and
"Chicago: The City That Was, The City That Is." As he writes, "Division
Street . . . is the main stem of the neighborhood in which I grew up.
From 1924 until the Second World War, this was my turf" ("A Writer"
200-01).

In his interview with Jo Brans, Bellow says, "I know the common
people in Chicago; the bums, or whatever you like, in Chicago all have
these unfathomed cultural and intellectual ambitions, and they don't
know what to do about them really. They bring the greatest enthusiasm
and devotion to these things, but at the same time they're clumsy,
stupid, arrogant, ambitious" (Brans 69).

9 Walt Whitman's poem "I Dream'd in a Dream" is a perfect
description of "the new city of Friends" envisioned by the poet:

I dream'd in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the
whole of the rest of the earth,

I dream'd that was the new city of Friends,

Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led
the rest,

It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,

And in all their looks and words. (107)

10 As Bellow tells Robert Cromie, Humboldt is drawn from his late
poet-friends--John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, and
Delmore Schwartz, all noted for their passion for literature and their
tragic ends; undoubtedly, Schwartz is the main source for Bellow's
Humboldt. See Atlas and Fuchs.

11 In the novel Citrine is not precise when Humboldt died:
"Humboldt, who had been dead for five or six years, re-entered my
life. . . . I shan't be too exact about the time of this. I was then
becoming careless about time, a symptom of my increasing absorption in
larger questions" (34). According to Bellow's Chicago friend-
colleague Daniel Stern's recollection, the novel started as a memoir of
Schwartz. In early manuscripts, Bellow writes, "My friend the poet
Delmore Shwartz died last week in New York [1966], presumably of heart
failure, in a derelict's hotel in the Broadway area" (20.I, 1) [See
Fuchs 267]. According to Fuchs, Bellow had not seen him in ten years,
but two weeks before he died Bellow did see him in the street and
avoided him (267). For Bellow's description of Schwartz, see Fuchs,
267-68.

12 Bellow told Clemons and Kroll that "the history of literature
in America is the history of certain demonic solitaries who somehow
brought it off in a society that felt no need for them. In Chicago,

206

where I grew up, we dreamed of the literary 1ife--we were mad for it,
but never got a smell of it. I went to Greenwich Village like
everybody after college. It wasn't very glamorous, but I did get a
feeling in New York that you weren't a bum or an outcast if you wanted
to write" (Clemons and Kroll 33).

In an interview with Bragg, Bellow describes his experience of
Greenwich Village:

"Any self-respecting Chicago writer of my generation would
immediately cut out for New York as soon as he'd gotten his
college degree, to find the action. The action was in Green-
wich Village, and that was what I made a beeline for.

I found a group of people who were importing European culture
into the United States--that is to say, the Partisan Review
people. Philip Rahv, Delmore Schwartz and Dwight Macdonald
were the principle Americans. . . . There were very good
master-conversationalists in the Village in the Thirties, and
Forties, and Fifties." (Bragg 75-76)

13 As Kazin recalls, "He [Schwartz] had come on the scene in his
early twenties with stories and poems that astonished everyone by being
impeccably formally right in the prevailing Eliot tradition--emotional
ingenuity tuned to perfect pitch by gravity of manner" (37).

Works Cited
Atlas, James. Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet. New
York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1977.

Bellow, Saul. "Chicago: The City That Was, The City That Is." Life
October 1986:21+.

---. Humboldt’s Gift. New York: Viking, 1975.

---. "Starting Out in Chicago." American Scholar. 44 (1974-75): 71-
77.

---. "A Talk with the Yellow Kid." Reporter 6 Sept. 1956: 41-44.

---. "A Writer from Chicago." In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values,
III, 1982. Ed. Sterling M. McMurrin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1982: 177-219. [1. "Chicago: Once Over Lightly" (177-200); II.

"Variations on a Theme from Division Street." (ZOO-19)]

Boyers, et a1. "Literatue and Culture: Saul Bellow: An Interview."
Salmagundi 30 (1975): 6-23. '

Bragg, Melvin. "‘Off the Couch by Christmas' Saul Bellow on his New
Novel." The Listener 20 Nov. 1975: 75-76.

Clemons, Walter, and Jack Knoll. "America's Master Novelist."
Newsweek 1 Sept. 1975: 32+.

Cohen, Sarah B. "Saul Bellow's Chicago." Modern Fiction Studies 24.1
(1978): 139-46.

Cromie, Robert. "Saul Bellow Talks About the Autobiographical Element
in Fiction, Especially His Own." 0n Bookbeat. NET 24 Nov. 1975.

Fuchs, Daniel. Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Durham: Duke UP,
1984.

Goldman, L. H. Saul Bellow’s Moral Vision. New York: Irvington, 1983.

Kakutani, Michiko. "A Talk with Saul Bellow: On His Work and Himself."
The New York Times Book Review 13 December 1981: 1+.

Kazin, Alfred. New York Jew. New York: Vintage, 1978.

Rodrigues, Eusebio. "Beyond All Philosophies: The Dynamic Vision of
Saul Bellow." Studies in the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984):
97-110.

---. Quest for the Human: An Exploration of Saul Bellow's Fiction.
East Brunswick, N.J.: Associated UP, 1981.

Thoreau, Henry D. Walden. New York: Washington Square, 1966.

207

208

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. The 1892 Editon. New York: Bantam,
1983.

Wilson, Jonathan. 0n Bellow's Planet: Readings from the Dark Side.
Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1985.

CHAPTER VIII
The Dean's December: Dean Corde in Bucharest and Chicago

The first act of morality was to

disinter the reality, retrieve

reality, dig it out from the trash,

represent it anew as art would

represent it.

I
Like Humboldt's Gift, The Dean’s December (1982) is a tale of two

cities, Chicago and Bucharest.2 Albert Corde, its central character
and central consciousness, is a professor of journalism turned dean of
students in an unnamed Chicago college. With his Rumanian-born wife
Minna, Corde flies to Bucharest to be at the bedside of his dying
mother-in-law Dr. Valeria Raresh. Having made an unauthorized visit to
Valeria in the Party Hospital, the Cordes are prohibited from seeing
her again. As the novel opens, the Dean is cooped up in his wife's
room in wintry Bucharest, awaiting the death of Valeria. Having much
time at his disposal, he reflects on his personal history, especially
on two pieces of unfinished business back home in Chicago. One of the
Dean's students has been killed. The Dean has pressed murder charges
against two Blacks, thus evoking the antagonism of his nephew Mason, a
militant student, and his cousin Detillion, a publicity-chasing lawyer.
Meanwhile, the Dean has published articles in Harper's on the dete-
rioration of urban life in Chicago and has consequently stirred up much

trouble.

209

210

A man of searching intelligence and self-reflection, Dean Corde,
in his late fifties, is "continually attentive to his surroundings"
(232), "[a]s if he had been sent down to mind the outer world, on a
mission of observation and notation" (232).3 Like Herzog, Sammler, and
Citrine, Corde is a "hungry observer" (9), taking in signals from his
environments, brooding on the human predicament with eager zeal, and
longing to express the pain and wisdom that score his soul. As he
describes himself, he is "an earnest, brooding, heart-struck, time-
ravaged person . . . with his moral desires and taking up the burdens
of mankind [sic]" (135). Corde, the "moralist of seeing" (135), believes
that "the first act of morality was to disinter the reality, retrieve
reality, dig it out from the trash, represent it anew as art would re-
present it" (136). He attempts to find a journalistic poetry to
"recover the world that is buried under the debris of false description
or nonexperience" (270). Through the eye, mind, and soul of such a
"persistent, almost fixated observer" (268), Bucharest in Communist
Rumania contrasts sharply to Chicago in Free America; together they
form a bleak picture of the modern world.

II

Bucharest is a stark city, with a seemingly interminable winter.
Corde's impressions of it are mainly associated with death, cold, bore-
dom, dismalness, scarcity, and oppression. Before he flies in, Corde
imagines the city as "a Mediterranean sort of place, a light city not a
heavy one; rococo" (19). Upon arrival, however, he finds only "mass
after mass of socialist tenements and government office buildings" (19).
As a visitor from the free West, Corde feels displaced in this dreary,
comfortless, repressive, recently earthquake-ravaged city. Moreover,

he is strongly affected by his mother-in-law's imminent death, the

211
hospital superintendent's bureaucracy, his solitary brooding in his
wife's room, and the bleak December weather.
Describing the twilight of Bucharest, Bellow sets the mood for the
novel:
December brown set in at about three in the afternoon. By
four it had climbed down the stucco of old walls, the gray of
Communist residential blocks: brown darkness took over the
pavements more thickly and isolated the street lamps. These
were feebly yellow in the impure melancholy winter effluence.
Air sadness, Corde called this. In the final stage of dusk,
a brown sediment seemed to encircle the lamps. Then there
was a livid death moment. Night began. (3-4)

This passage effectively evokes a melancholy and depressive ambiance

which is in concert with the pivotal event in the Bucharest story--

Valeria's death.

Alien as the surroundings are, Corde feels an instant intimacy in
his wife's old room. In a distinctive Bellovian posture, Corde stares
from its windows at the city's "earthquake-damaged buildings, winter
skies, gray pigeons, pollarded trees, squalid orange-rusty trams hiss-
ing under trolley cables" (1). Shut up in the room, Corde does little
but read, muse, and sleep. The room-~"his refuge, his sanctuary, his
cell" (l93)--is often dark and cold. In the sadness of the afternoon,
he feels especially the mortifying chill; he even detects the "crystal-
line bitterness setting in" (115). When he opens the door of the
apartment, he feels "like being thwacked with the flat of a saber"
(58). As the sun goes down, the city, as if abandoned, becomes dis-
sociated. The unusually black and cold night gives rise to evil
visions about "the moronic inferno" (23).

Life in Bucharest goes on, however, while the earthquake damage is

being repaired. To the shut-in Dean, both the percussion of carpet-

212
beaters and the barking of the dog heard in the morning sound like
protests against totalitarianism: were people dogs, they would howl,
"For God's sake, open the universe a little more!" (11).

Since they are constantly under the surveillance of the secret
police, people go out on the street for private conversations. During
such walks, Corde minutely observes the city's people, scenes, weather,
and colors. His observations often blend poetic touches with realistic

details, as exemplified in the following passage:

Towards midafternoon, the December sun was ready to check
out. Below the winter beams there were violet shadows; these
were collected in the pitted surfaces of the stucco walls,
and made Corde think of choppy winter water. A similar color
gathered about the pollarded trees. The pigeons afoot on the
sidewalk had it, too, with iridescent variations. In mid-
street Corde noticed the remains of small rats. Here and
there amid the Balkan Haussmann blocks were earthquake ruins
or tumuli, and Corde assumed that they must also be graves.
The brick heaps exhaled decay. There were unrecoverable
bodies underneath. The smell was cold, dank and bad.

Coupled rusty-orange tramcars ran with a slither of cables.

Pale proletarian passengers looked out. . . . You saw the
decades in reverse. Even the emotions belonged to an earlier
time. (118)

The powerful image of the flattened rats' corpses sticks in Corde's
mind. Later, while walking with Minna on the street, he finds himself
looking for the rats' remains: "The street was gray. The piled earth-
quake rubble smelled moldy, even though refrigerating December checked
the decay. Corde found himself looking for the rat silhouettes in the
street, flattened like weathercocks by traffic" (283).

The oppressiveness of the city is embodied in the vindictive Party
Hospital director, a Colonel in the secret police, who, situated in
"his tall broom-closet office" (115), gives the Cordes lessons in the
Communists' "hard nihilism."a Just as Mr. Sammler is prevented by

various people and incidents from seeing Dr. Gruner alive, the Cordes

213
are thwarted by the Colonel in their attempts to see the dying Valeria,
who, like Dr. Gruner, is one of the most positive characters in
Bellow's canon. Shortly before Valeria's death, Corde and Minna are
allowed to visit her one more time. This death-bed scene--in which
Corde expresses his affection for Valeria--is the climax of the
Bucharest story.

On the day of Valeria's funeral, there is funeral weather: "No
more sun that was gone, only linty clouds and a low cold horizon"
(231). Sitting in a small car following the van-hearse over the gloomy
boulevards of the city, Corde looks out noticing, trying to penetrate
into the reality of the city. At the crematorium Corde rehearses
death. Having to go downstairs for final identification of the corpse'
before cremation, Corde is caught "between frost and flames" (236) when
he goes upstairs again. On the stairs, he suffers "the extremes of
heat and cold like two faces of an axe, splitting him in halves" (262);
his breast, "as narrow as a ladder, was crowded with emotions-~fire,
death, suffocation, put into an icy cold or, instead, crackling in a
furnace" (237).

In the bleak and freezing Bucharest, there is no pastoral moment
for Corde but he finds some solace in the cyclamens which, thriving in
his chilly room, are suggestive of the community of women that formed
around the matriarch Valeria. They try to make their difficult
accommodations within the system. The "mutual-aid female network"
(ll6)--or "feminine league" (143)--includes Valeria's sister Gigi, her
daughter Minna, old Cousin Dincutza, loans the concierge, Minna's
classmate Vlada, women doctors in the hospital, distant relatives,
neighbors, and even a male, Petrescu. By extending love, help, advice,

and sympathy to one another, they affirm the Old system, the old

214
European life. Like the cyclamens, their solidarity survives and
preserves humanity despite harsh and repressive political circum-
stances.5 This sisterhood, akin to the Blakean brotherhood and the
Whitmanesque "new city of Friends" extoled by Herzog and Citrine,
respectively, is what makes these Rumanian women human.

The Bucharest story tells us grim facts about orderly but oppres-
sive life behind the Iron Curtain. Despite his great depression,
however, Corde does not yield to pessimism or nihilism. As he says,
"If intensive care doctors could light candles for the dying, secret
agents could mourn their adoptive mothers. There was sentiment all
over the place" (203). He believes that "the inmost essence of the
human being must be making its own, its necessary, its unique arrange-
ment as it best could" (116). The flickering candlelight prepared by
the women doctors for Valeria emits hope, faith, and humanity, however
dim it is.

III

Terrible as Bucharest is, Corde is quiet because he is free of
Chicago's agitations. Yet he cannot keep his mind off his city. In
fact, he is engrossed in it. Besides, various people and things keep
reminding him of Chicago, among them two messengers from Chicago--his
friend, Dewey Spengler, and his colleague, Vlada Voynich. They not
only keep him informed about what's happening on his home turf but give
him chances for lengthy conversations during which he reminisces about
the city's past and reflects on its present. Thus, through Corde's
ruminations, recollections, readings, and conversations in Bucharest,
the Chicago story is reconstructed.

If Bucharest is cold, grim, dismal, and imprisoning, Chicago is

hot, chaotic, corrupt, and murderous. The Chicago story begins with

215
the death of Rick Lester, Corde's student, who is bound, gagged, and
pushed out of a window to his death by a Black prostitute and her pimp.
Lester's violent death is highlighted by "the crying ugliness of the
Chicago night" (48). Corde remembers it is a "rotten night" when he is
called to identify Lester's corpse:
The air was heavy with the smell of malting grain from the
kilns of Falstaff beer, near Calumet Harbor. This was better
than the hot sulfur and sewer gases vented by U.S. Steel.
That acid stink made you get out of bed to shut the windows.
Through an ectoplasmic darkness--night was lifting-~the Dean
rode to the hospital. There he viewed the murdered boy.
(30)

The circumstances of Lester's death are difficult to reconstruct,
because of many ambiguities related to the city's milieu. It is one of
"those choking, peak-of-summer, urban-nightmare, sexual and obscene,
running-bare times, and death panting behind the young man, closing in"
(42). Seeing Lester, barefoot, in the morgue, Corde cannot understand
why the youths of Chicago are so ignorant or naive about the dangers of
their city: "Many young people removed their shoes in hot weather--as
if they were surrounded by woods and fields, not these broken-bottle,
dog-fouled streets" (30).

The Lester episode brings out several themes of the novel: sexual
anarchy, robbery, murder, the Black "underclass," student militancy,
and the news media's noise. Through the entire episode, it is, ironi-
cally, Corde's own relatives who pit themselves against him. Mason's
alliance with Detillion against Corde in the law court contrasts
sharply to the family feelings Corde experiences in a foreign city in
Rumania. Yet, based on his conscience and sense of duty, Corde the

moralist demands justice for the victims in spite of all the agitations

and protests.

216

Corde's Harper’s articles are inspired by more complicated
motives. At first Corde seems to take up the task which Thaxter in
Humboldt's Gift urges on Citrine--to "go around Chicago like Restif de
la Bretonne in the streets of Paris and write a chronicle" (HG 269).
As a native son of Chicago, Corde, like Augie, Herzog, and Citrine, is
strongly attached to his city. He especially cherishes his memories of
Old Chicago's lovable neighborhoods. His reunion with his old pal
Spangler in Bucharest gives him not only "the pleasure of nostalgia"
(123) but the opportunity to explore the motives behind his writing
those Harper's articles.

In an exotic city, two journalists from Chicago indulge in re-
miniscences of the good old days of poetry and feeling they shared in
high school in the thirties. Corde recalls that they were drawn to
each other because of their passion for poetry and literature: "Of
course it was Swinburne, Wilde, Nietzsche, Walt Whitman, in high
school. Perfumed herbage, intoxicating lyricism and lamentation, rich
music, nihilism and decadence had made them pals" (74).

In Lincoln Park--their habitual haunt--they read their favorite
poets and philosophers: Blake, Wilde, Swinburne, Yeats, Shakespeare,
Shelley, Whitman, Pater, Spinoza, and Nietzsche. Corde remembers that
they often quoted to each other Shelley's line "An old mad blind
despised dying king" and they both were greatly stirred by "the
wonderful hard music of those words" (76). At times, they had the
company of Corde's cousin, Max Detillion, and the three read to one
another their own creative works. Corde enjoyed Spengler's company
because at that time nobody else was so interested in the poetry and
the philosophy that he loved. In a city noted for its gangsters and

stockyards, its industry and business, their love of poetry and phil-

217
osophy was indeed odd. Forty years later, they wonder if kids in the
present Chicago still get together in Lincoln Park and read the way
they used to read--"wallow in that good stuff: the Zarathustra, the
Phaedrus, that Brigge book by Rilke" (132).

Despite the presence of "Bubble Creek," which used to bubble in
the summer because of "the blood and tripes and tallow, the stockyards'
shit" (124), despite the absence of a place where youngsters could take
their intense passion, Corde and Spangler remember the Chicago of the
thirties as "a city of immigrants who had found work, food and freedom
and a kind of friendly ugliness around them, and they practiced their
Old World trades--cabinetmakers, tinsmiths, locksmiths, wurst-stuffers
from Cracow, confectioners from Sparta" (264).

Corde returned to Chicago ten years ago in his mid-forties after a
successful career as a journalist for the Paris Tribune. Like Citrine,
Corde tries to explain to himself and to others why he made such a
decisive move.6 According to his own analysis, he chose to become a
professor in Chicago because of his allegiance to his city, on the one
hand, and his desire to reorient himself in the classics, on the other.
After "a twenty-year interruption by ‘news,’ by current human business"
(208), he decided to give more attention to Baudelaire, Rilke,
Montesquieu, Vico, Machiavelli, Plato, Thucydides, and Shakespeare.

To his mind, an American city like Chicago is where the real
action is. Besides, as he tells his sister, "There's the big advantage
of backwardness. By the time the latest ideas reach Chicago, they're
worn thin and easy to see through. You don't have to bother with them
and it saves lots of trouble" (148). Corde's conversation with Vlada
in Bucharest reveals how seriously he takes to heart his home city, a

city he will be the last to see dying or ruined:

218

In Paris I was too busy doing art items and intellectual
chitchat. . . . I came back to Chicago to continue my
education. And then I had to write those articles. There
was no way to avoid it. The youngsters would say it was my
karma. Well, there's low-down Chicago and there's high-up
Chicago. There's Big Bill Thompson, and then there's
Aristotle, who has also had a longtime association with the
city. . . . A. N. Whitehead . . . believed that Chicago had
Athenian possibilities. . . . And then there was Aristotle:
A man without a city is either a beast or a god. Well,
Chicago was the city. Or was it? Where was it, what had
become of it? No cities? Then where was civilization? Or

was the U.S.A. as a whole now my city? . . . Cities could be
written off--dying generations, the blacks and Puerto Ricans,
the aged too poor to move. . . . Let them be ruined, decay,

die and eliminate themselves. There are some who seem
willing that this should happen. I'm not one of them. Not
me. (253-54)

After a ten-year's dormancy, Corde decides to walk out of his
ivory tower and see first hand what is happening in his city. Origin-
ally he plans to write about the Chicago that he knows, focusing on
"personalities, scenes, feelings, tones and colors." The articles will
be "more pictorial than analytical" (219), since his purpose is "to say
something about this Chicago scene drawing on his own experience,
making fresh observations, referring to his own feelings, and using his
own language" (180). Beginning in all innocence, Corde first takes a
light and nostalgic tone. He records his visits to his high school
zoology teacher, his schoolmates, and his old neighbors, such as a
self-educated Polish barber who used to lecture boys on Spengler's
Decline of the West. There are quiet and relaxed passages about "the
old neighborhoods, their atmosphere, their architecture, the trees,
soil, water, the unexpectedly versatile light of the place" (181).
Although he thinks Corde pushes poetry too hard in the Harper's
articles, Spangler admits that Corde does a good job in describing the

interior decorations of the apartment, immigrant life in the thirties,

219
the lakefront, parks, and the pre-war Loop.7 Like Herzog and Citrine,
Corde is saddened by the disappearance of old landmarks: "The Loop's
beaneries, handbooks, dinky dives and movie palaces were wiped out.
Gigantic office towers had risen everywhere. Good-bye forever to the
jazz musicians, and the boxing buffs who hung around the gymnasiums, to
the billiard sharks from Bensinger's on Randolph Street " (219).

However, as he probes into the present Chicago, his original plan
begins to take a twisted turn. As he discovers, the city that is is
not the city that was: Chicago is not "the old town anymore" (125).
While collecting materials for the articles, he finds at once "wounds,
lesions, cancers, destructive fury, death" (223). Chicago is the
"contempt center" of America, filled with chaos, insanity, violence,
sexual anarchy, and moral decay. As he says, there is a "curious lack
of final coherence, an environment not chosen to suit human needs .
favorable to manufacture, shipping, construction" (263). Believing
that no one in Chicago cares about the terror, about "the terrible
wildness and dread in this huge place . . . . About drugs, about guns"
(224), Corde decides that it is "high time to write a piece, since I
grew up here" (224).

Corde's essays begin with picturesque, charming, nostalgic recol-
lections, ending up with animadversions and exposes. He does not mean
to attack--as he says, "I'm attached to Chicago--I am speaking quite
seriously" (l31)--but he writes cutting polemics denouncing Chicago's
criminal-justice system, the corruption of local judges and lawyers,
and the violent, primitive conditions tolerated in the Cook County
jail. He fills his articles with "disobliging remarks about City
Hall, the press, the sheriff, [and] the governor" (13).

Under Corde's pen, the ugly and terrifying Chicago assumes a

220
composite of different images: a jungle, a garbage dump, a hell, a
desert, a waste land, a city of destruction (319), a Sodom, a maelstrom
with "whirling souls" (227). In order to see how justice is adminis-
tered in his native city, Corde spends many days in the courtroom,
where he witnesses exotic scenes and discovers that "all the exotics
were as native as himself. On his own turf, which was also theirs, he
found a wilderness wilder than the Guiana bush" (174). Despite the
gaiety of sartorial color, Corde perceives a very deep gloom: "dope
pushers, gun toters (everybody had a gun), child molesters, shoplift-
ers, smackheads, purse snatchers, muggers, rapists, arsonists, wife
beaters, car thieves, pimps bailing out their whores. People were all
dressed up. Their glad rags were seldom clean" (175). Whitmanesque
cataloguing is used here as in Augie March, but the picture evoked is
vastly different.
His visit to the County Jail gives him a picture of hellish
Chicago:
the crazy state of the prisoners in County Jail--the rule of
the barn bosses, the rackets, beatings, sodomizings and
stabbings in the worst of the tiers: in "Dodge City," "H-l";
the prisoners who tucked trouser bottoms into socks to keep
the rats from running up their legs in the night. Now there
was a red hell for the soul to stray into. (12).
The Jail is a City of Destruction where vandalism runs rampant and the
elevator serves not only as a urinal but as a place for murder and
sodomy.
The sexual madness of the time is embodied in Corde's cousin,
Detillion, who, considering himself a "personification of Eros .
bringing life," is actually "a sexual oppressor of tragic multitudes of

women (possibly also of men)" (105). His madness is revealed in his

desire to set up emergency "sexual comfort-stations" around the city.

221
Sexual epidemic spreads through the city. Even Miss Porson, Corde's
secretary, is a "lustful old frump" who has "her own sexual fat to
fry," who is going to "put the sex into sexagenerian" (158).

The Spofford Mitchell case presents a ghastly picture of Chicago
as a modern Sodom. Sally Sathers, a young suburban housewife, is
abducted by the recently released criminal Mitchell in a Loop parking
lot. He repeatedly rapes her and locks her in the car's trunk. After
taking her around the city for two days, he finally kills her and
covers her body with trash. Corde's heart is wrung not only by the
sexual frenzy of the age but by the callousness of people toward the
victim. Corde discusses this case with Mitchell's lawyer, Sam
Varenness, and refuses to accept the liberal (to him immoral) cant
invariably offered in such a case as this.

From the window of Varenness's office in the Criminal Courts
Building, Corde sees a nihilistic waste land sprawling below him:

Around the courts and prison buildings, viewed from the
superb height of Varennes' office, lay huge rectangles,
endless regions of the stunned city--many, many square miles
of civil Passchendaele or Somme. Only at the center of the
city, visible from all points over fields of demolition, the
tall glamour of the skyscrapers. Around the towers, where
the perpetual beacons mingled their flashes with open day,
there was a turbulence of two kinds of light. (227)
If prisoners go back to the jail "with homecoming spirits" (227), if
the police do not bother to check an Ivanhoe whose inside has been
carved out to conceal a gun, if lethal criminals are randomly released,
if pictures of sexually abused minors are taken merely for the sake of
procuring evidence, if hands are not extended to a desperate victim

asking for help, if denizens of the inner city continue to rape, rob,

and kill, if whores, pimps, pushers, junkies go unchecked on the

222
street, Corde sees little hope for the city or for civilization.

But Corde does not want to yield to nihilism. Nightmarish as his
experiences in the city are, he does find some people who are able to
love, help, and sympathize. In the County Hospital, Corde sees the
nurses and attendants, of Oriental origins, "manifest . . . a powerful
but somehow indiscriminate love" (185) for those living dead men and
women whose lives are linked to the kidney machine. Augie March's
County Hospital reappears, almost unchanged, in Corde's world, thirty
years later:

The ancient County Hospital, yellow, broad and squat. The
surrounding neighborhoods have decayed and fallen down. In
the plain of collapse, this mass stands almost alone. Beyond
the clearings the giant forms of the business district are
gathered close. Between the antennae of the Sears Tower a
rotating light blinks out. The weather is gray. The
pulsating signal is fluid, evidently made of metals and
crystals whose names only engineers might recognize. (183)

Corde admits that in his writing he is "often subject to fits of
vividness" (167) and then there comes "‘poetry,' ‘impressionism,’
‘exaltation'" (167); the result is "highly nervous, ragged, wild,
uncontrolled, turbulent" (167), especially in his writing about Black
Chicago. He uses terms such as "superfluous population" and "doomed
people" (213) to describe the plight of the Black "underclass," for
which use, he is accused of being racist.

Corde's true purpose is to awaken his fellow citizens' conscience
and make them look at reality without recoil. To him, both whites and
Blacks are responsible for the slums' terrible condition. Corde's
concern with the plight of American society in general and of the Black

"underclass" in particular is reflected in his interest in collabo-

rating on a project whose hypothesis is that lead poisoning is the

223

cause of urban deterioration:
Millions of tons of intractable lead residues poisoning the
children of the poor. They're the most exposed. The concen-
tration is measurably heaviest in those old slum neighbor-
hoods, piled up there for decades. . . . Crime and social
disorganization in inner city populations can all be traced
to the effects of lead. (151)

In Chicago, not all Blacks are economically "redundant." For
example, Dr. Fulcher, the capable County Hospital's chief, is a
positive character. In fact, looking for examples of moral initiative
in the city, Corde finds only two--both Black.

Rufus Ridpath, director of the County Jail, has genuine human
feelings for his inmates. He is the only one who tries to improve
conditions and help the prisoners. When Ridpath takes over the County
Jail, it is on the barn boss system, run by the gang chiefs. There are
drugs, rackets, homosexual rape, beatings, stabbings, torture, and
buggering. Not long after he takes charge, he cuts down the number of
murders and suicides and saves a million dollars out of his budget
which he refunds to the county. However, in his eagerness to clean up
the jail, he provokes the anger of the local politicians and is tried
for manhandling prisoners.

Toby Winthrop, ex-hit-man and ex-heroin addict, runs a detoxifi-
cation center to help drug addicts gain their new lives. Like the
protagonist in "Looking for Mr. Green" who goes out looking for a Black
man in wintry Chicago slums, Corde goes to the South Side, not to
deliver a social security check, but to see this redeemed ex-hit man-

turned-savior. His trip to Winthrop's Operation Contact one wintry day

brings him to the hellish district of the city:

He drove to the South Side on a winter day streaky with snow.

224
You could see the soot mingling with the drizzle. Corde
hadn't come to this neighborhood in thirty years. It was
then decaying, now it was fully rotted. Only a few old brick
bungalows remained, and a factory here and there. The
expressway had cut across the east-west streets. The one
remaining landmark was the abandoned Englewood Station--huge
blocks of sandstone set deep, deep in the street, a kind of
mortuary isolation, no travelers now, no passenger trains. A
dirty snow brocade over the empty lots, and black men keeping
warm at oil-drum bonfires. All this--low sky, wind, weed
skeletons, ruin--went to Corde's nerves, his "Chicago wiring
system," with peculiar effect. He found Operation Contact in
a hidden half-block (ideal for muggings) between a warehouse
and the expressway. . . . He parked and got out of the car
feeling the lack of almost everything you needed, humanly.
Christ, the human curve had sunk down to base level, had gone
beneath it. If there was another world, this was the time
for it to show itself. The visible one didn't bear looking
at. (208)
Corde's climbing the stairs to the center is, as Fuchs points out, "the
upward quest in a slum setting" (307). In such a dismal and dangerous
place, Winthrop and his colleagues try to save drug addicts from sink-
ing and drowning "in the shit" (212). Winthrop's humanitarian assist-
ance and his tropical plants in the office give out some hope to the
decaying city.

Despite the keening of the articles over the city's decline, Corde
notes that not all Chicago is blighted: there are "business Chicago
sitting in its skyscrapers, monumental banking Chicago, corporate
electronic computerized Chicago" (181). Corde also reports new housing
developments south of the Loop in the disused freight yards and the
mammoth Deep Tunnel engineering project. Yet, he dislikes the neigh-
borhood of North Michigan Avenue for its "commercial and promotional
smoothness. . . the showiness of the skyscrapers, the Bond Street and
Rue de la Paix connections" (92) and dubs it "The Malignant Mammonism
of the Magnificent Mile" (92).

The Harper’s articles, as he expects, provoke a lot of anger:

"Liberals found him reactionary. Conservatives called him crazy.

225
Professional urbanologists said he was hasty" (206). Students at the
college object to much that Corde has written, because he has described
"broad-daylight rapes and robberies, sexual acts in public places, on
the seats of CTA buses, on the floors of public waiting rooms, men on
Sheridan Road spraying automobile fenders with their urine" (179). The
student militants pass a resolution declaring that the Dean is a racist
and that he owes a public apology "to Black, Puerto Rican and Mexican
toilers for making them look ‘like animals and savages'" (180). His
articles also anger those indignant diehard Chicago boosters who are
commuters, who live in the suburbs and escape the race problems and
crime.

Corde does not see his articles on Chicago as attacks on his city.
He writes them not "because of the opportunities it offer[s] for
romantic despair, nor in a spirit of middle-class elegy or nostalgia"
(182), but because he wants "to prevent the American idea from being
pounded into dust altogether. And here is our American idea: liberty,
equality, justice, democracy, abundancy. And here is what things are
like today in a city like Chicago. Have a look!" (135).

Perhaps what offends his friend Dewey Spangler and other intel-
lectuals most is Corde's idiosyncratic way of writing. Unlike other
journalists or urbanologists who fill their reports with jargon and
cliches, Corde, motivated by "morality and justice" (182), decides to
write in his own language. Throughout the novel, Corde tries to
justify his incorporating poetry and philosophy into his essays. Since
reality does not exist "out there"--"It began to be real only when the
soul found its underlying truth" (295)--Corde decides to "pass Chicago
through his own soul. A mass of data, terrible, murderous" (294-95).9

To him, as to Bellow, "without art, it is impossible to interpret

226
reality" (Roudane 280). Thinking about virtue and vice, Corde main-
tains that in a crisis such as this we should use our imagination and
poetry, for "perhaps only poetry had the strength ‘to rival the at-
tractions of narcotics, the magnetism of TV, the excitements of sex, or
the ecstasies of destruction'" (207).

Corde does not accept his brother-in-law's claim that Chicago is a
Darwinian jungle where the survival of the fittest is the law. His
brother-in-law may be a beast in this jungle but he and other money
maniacs are not "animals fighting honorably for survival . . . they
were deeply perverted, corrupt" (293). To Corde, Chicago is "more like
a garbage dump" (293) than a jungle. He thinks Chicago's slums are not
that terrifying compared with "the slums we carry around inside us.
Every man's inner inner city" (229).

Not intimidated by the criticism and hatred of his colleages,
readers, and fellow Chicagoans, Corde will continue to write because he
believes in his own sense of existence and his obligation to defend
civilization. As he says, "I was speaking up for the noble ideas of
the West in their American form. . . . ‘This is your city--this is your
American democracy. It's also my city. I have a right to picture it
as I see it'" (136).

IV

In his last conversation with Vlada in Bucharest, Corde tells
her that he is eager to go back to Chicago although he does not anti-
cipate "order, beauty, calm, and peace" (312). Vlada replies, "Still,
you'll be glad to see Lake Michigan from your window again, I'm sure of
that" (312). The city he goes back to is the same: burglary, vandal-
ism, rapes, murders, and corruption. But Corde is indeed "glad to see

the lake from his window and have the freshwater ocean for company"

227

even though "at his back the city, unquiet, the slum and its armies
just over the day: blacks, Koreans, East Indians, Chippewas, Thais and
hillbillies, squad cars, ambulances, firefighters, thrift shops, drug
hustlers, lousy bars, alley filth" (314).

In his highrise apartment in Chicago, sitting "with his back to
the decayed city view" (316), the Dean looks down at the water of Lake
Michigan:

From his corner window he could see the Loop and its

famous towers, but he looked directly downward at the
working of the water, on bright days a clear green, easing
its mass onto the beaches, white. The waters bathing the
waters in sun, and every drop having its own corpuscle of
light, the light meantime resembling the splash of heavy
raindrops on paved surfaces--the whole sky clear, clear but
tense. On days of heavy weather you felt the shock of the
waves and heard their concussion through the building. Under
low clouds you might have been looking at Hudson's Bay and
when the floes came close you wouldn't have been surprised to
see a polar bear. Only when you didn't smell brine, you
smelled pungent ozone, the inland-water raw-potato odor.
(315-16)

Suddenly he attains a recognition of his relation to his city, to his

country, and of his motives for writing those Harper's essays:

But there was plenty of emptiness, as much as you needed to
define yourself against, as American souls seem to do.
Cities . . . cities were moods, emotional states, for the
most part collective distortions, where human beings thrived
and suffered, where they invested their souls in pains and
pleasures, taking these pleasures and pains as proofs of
reality. Thus "Cain's city built with murder," and other
cities built with Mystery, or Pride, all of them emotional
conditions and great centers of delusion and bondage, death.
It seemed to Corde that he had made an effort to find out
what Chicago, U.S.A., was built with. His motive . . . came
out of what was eternal in man. What mood was this city?
The experience, puzzle, torment of a lifetime demanded
interpretation. At least he was beginning to understand why
he had written those articles. Nobody was much affected by
them, unless it was himself. (318; italics mine)

The Dean's December, a tale of two dismal cities, presents a dim

picture of the modern world. As Fuchs has pointed out, "Whereas

228
Bucharest is debilitation and death, Chicago is full of depravity and
decadence, the ‘soft nihilism' of the west. Bucharest is cold, Chicago
is hot, and it seems that Bellow is posing his version of Frost's
question--will the world end in fire or ice?" (306). Yet Bellow does
not succumb to despair. As the novel's ending shows, Corde comes down
to the sublunary earth despite the temptation of ethereal, boundless
outer space, because "terra firms" (289) is his beat which needs his
observation and interpretation.

Corde is Bellow's "best balanced hero" (Cohen 53). Like other
Bellow heroes, he is in quest of equilibrium in the city, but, unlike
them, he is a wise observer and brave moralist who demands justice and
wants to right wrongs. The novel raises central questions about the
modern city and modern society. With its companion-piece Mr.

Sammler's Planet (Goldman), The Dean's December presents Bellow's
solemn "plea for humanities and humanity" (Weinstein).

Despite a mixed reception, the novel won unanimous acclaim for its
treatment of the city.10 Fuchs' comment was typical: "In the rendering
of urban place, Bellow is as superb as ever" (306). In The Dean's
December Bellow again demonstrates his dexterity in using the city as a
character, in catching the city's ambience to set the right mood, in
grappling with complicated urban issues, and in dramatizing the tension
between man and his city. Even though the novel lacks the Bellovian
comedy which characterizes Augie, Henderson, Herzog, and Humboldt’s
Gift, it is a great city novel by a Nobel Laureate who is determined to

tell the truth as it passes through his soul and to tell it with style.

Notes

1 Bellow, The Dean's December (New York: Pocket Books, 1982): 136.
In this chapter, further references will be cited in the text.

2 As Bellow told an interviewer, "My wife's mother was dying in
Bucharest, and I went with her to give her some support, which in that
place one badly needs. The old mother died while we were there. I had
been thinking of writing a book about Chicago, and as always when I go
abroad I brooded about the home town" (Kennedy 50).

Speaking about the genesis of the book, Bellow said that origin-
ally he planned to write a non-fiction book about Chicago after the
fashion of To Jerusalem and Back. However, after making hundreds of
pages of notes, he decided to abandon that approach and wrote a novel
instead (Kakutani 28). As he told Kennedy, "That's a subject for some
kind of poetry, not a factual account" (50).

Temperamentally an "image man," Corde sometimes considers
himself as a kind of God-sent seer, sent to observe, to interpret, and
to prophesy. For instance, he feels he is "(and how quirkily) called
upon for a special exertion--to interpret, to pity, to save!" (223).
To him, his writing the Harper’s articles is not a matter of choice,
because he feels that "something had come over him." In Humboldt’s
Gift, Humboldt suspects Citrine's uncanny visionary mission; in this
novel, Spangler does not like his mysticism when Corde says he is
"assigned" to write, thus making it "like a visionary project, or the
Voice of God saying, ‘Write this up, as follows'" (270).

For a discussion of nihilism in The Dean's December, see Newman.

5 Talking about the Bucharest setting, Bellow says that "in
Bucharest and Eastern Europe one can see a more old-fashioned sort of
human attachment. . . . This is the Tolstoyan sentiment of related-
ness, the Slavic mode of connection made famous by the geniuses of the
nineteenth century" (Roudane 271).

6 Both Corde and Citrine are, in a sense, two versions of the
fictionalized Bellow who tries to explain why he stays in Chicago and
why it is possible to combine art with Chicago. Ever since he moved
back to Chicago from New York in the early sixties, Bellow has repeat-
edly explained in interviews and essays why he has made Chicago his
home turf and held onto it. See the interviews with Illig, Boyers, and
Roudane. See also Bellow's essays "Starting out in Chicago," "A Matter
of the Soul," "A Writer from Chicago," and "Chicago: The City That Was,
The City That Is."

7 Unfortunately, Bellow does not include verbatim excerpts about
historical Chicago from the Harper's articles. Perhaps he should
publish the nonfiction book about Chicago as he originally planned.
Fortunately, after the appearance of this novel, Bellow has published
essays about Chicago: "A Writer from Chicago," "In the Days of Mr.
Roosevelt," and "Chicago: The City That Was, The City That Is."

229

230

8 Since the publication of The Dean's December, there has been
a new candor about race in America. For example, Bill Moyers's
documentary, "The Vanishing Family--Crisis in Black America," aired
January 25, 1986 on CBS, brings the message home via the mouths of
inner-city blacks.

9 Bellow tells an interviewer that "in The Dean’s December what
[he] did was to say, ‘Look!’ The first step is to display the facts.
But the facts, unless the imagination perceives them, are not facts.
Perhaps [he] shouldn't say ‘passionately takes hold.’ As an artist
does. Mr. Corde, the Dean, passionately takes hold of Chicago and
writes his articles like an artist rather than a journalist" (Roudane
273). To Bellow, no "technicians"--psychologists, sociologists, poli-
ticians, journalists, and economists-~have been able to tell us the
real condition of today's demoralized cities. They are only creating a
"Great Noise" ("Starting" 77) which destroys meaning, because these
people have no imagination of such urban evils as incoherence, sexual
disorders, robbery, rape, the abandonment of children, and murder.
"They don't even see them" (Roudane 273).

10 For a review of the reviews, see Chavkin.

Works Cited
Anderson, David D. "The Dean's Chicago." MidAmerica XII (1985): 136-
47.

Bellow, Saul. "Chicago: The City That Was, The City That Is." Life
October 1986: 21+.

---. The Dean’s December. New York: Pocket Books, 1982.
---. "In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt." Esquire December 1983: 530-39.

---. "Looking for Mr. Green." In Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories.
New York: Viking, 1968. 85-110.

---. "A Matter of the Soul." Opera News 11 Jan. 1975: 26+.

---. "Starting Out in Chicago." American Scholar 44 (1974-75): 71-77.

---. "A Writer from Chicago." In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values,
III, 1982. Ed. Sterling M. McMurrin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1982: 177-219.

Boyers, Robert, et a1. "Literature and Culture: An Interview with Saul
Bellow." Salmagundi 30 (1975): 6-23.

Chavkin, Allan. "Recovering ‘The World That Is Buried under the Debris
of False Description'." Saul Bellow Journal: 1.2 (1982): 47-57.

Cohen, Joseph. "Saul Bellow's Heroes in an Unheroic Age." Saul Bellow
Journal 3.1 (1983): 53-58.

Fuchs, Daniel. Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Durham: Duke UP,
1984.

Goldman, L. H. "The Dean's December: ‘A Companion Piece to Mr.
Sammler's Planet." Saul Bellow Journal 5.2 (1986): 36-45.

Illig, Joyce. "An Interview with Saul Bellow." Publisher's Weekly 22
October 1973: 74-77. Rpt. in Dictionary of Literary Biography:
Documentary Series. Vol. 3. Ed. Mary Bruccoli. Detroit: Gale,
1983. 44-48.

Kakutani, Michiko. "A Talk with Saul Bellow on His Work and Himself."
New York Times Book Review 13 Dec. l981:l+.

Kennedy, William. "If Saul Bellow Doesn't Have a True Word to Say, He
Keeps His Mouth Shut." Esquire Feb. 1982: 49+.

Moyers, Bill. "The Vanishing Family--Crisis in Black America." Aired
on CBS, 25 January 1986.

231

232
the Literary Imagination 17.2 (1984): 111-22.

Roudane, Matthew C. "An Interview with Saul Bellow." Contemporary
Literature 25.3 (1984): 265-80.

Weinstein, Ann. "The Dean’s December: Bellow's Plea for the Humanities
and Humanity." Saul Bellow Journal 2.2 (1983): 30-40

CONCLUSION

A literary artist is "the repre-
sentative of beauty, the interpreter
of the human heart, the hero of
ingenuity, playfulness, personal
freedom, generosity, and love."
(Bellow, "Starting" 71)

I

Man in the city is a salient theme that runs through Bellow's
fiction. In novel after novel, Bellow dramatizes the dialogue between
man and his city with subtlety and profundity. The city--the main
locus in Bellow's fictional world-~is the setting for all his novels
(Henderson excepted) because it embodies the reality of modern
existence and symbolizes modern society.

All Bellow's central characters, except for Henderson, are urban—
bred and urban-oriented and face more or less the same existential
problems. They keep asking: How should one orient oneself in a modern
city which is characterized by chaos, madness, ugliness, philistinism,
and cultural nihilism? How can one retain one's sovereign, autonomous
self under the weight of an oppressive and maiming mass urban society?
How does one relate oneself to others when alienation, fragmentation,
materialization, and mechanization are in ascendency? How can one
achieve serenity, spontaneity, dignity, and humanity in a fast-moving,
frenzy-bent, wastelandish urban construct? How can one maintain
equilibrium between self and society? In sum, how can one conduct a

successful dialogue with his city? These are demanding questions with

233

234
which Bellow's heroes--from Joseph to Dean Corde--have to come to grips
in their quest for order, equanimity, and the meaning of human
existence. The on-going dialogue between the Bellow hero and his city
constitutes the main substance for the celebrated Bellovian human
drama.

In his dialogue with the city, the Bellow hero tries to assert his
Emersonian Sovereign Self. Believing in the nobility of man, he cannot
accept the belittling or annihilation of Self. But the Bellow hero
also realizes the dangers of self-estrangement, which is imprisoning
and limiting. Caught in such a frightful dilemma, the Bellow hero
tries to achieve equipoise between preserving one's selfhood and relat-
ing oneself to others. In the end, he is always drawn back to the
human conditions, discovering that "any goodness is not achieved in a
vacuum" (DM 61). With his mind bent on becoming a good man, he chooses
to be among his fellow citizens--his "brothers and sisters"--because
brotherhood is what makes a man human. As the preceding chapters have
demonstrated, each of Bellow's novels dramatizes a Bellow hero's prog-
ress from his guarding his self to his breaking out of his self and
eventually to his embracing of human communion.

To dramatize the theme of man in the city, Bellow the artist has
successfully integrated form and content. His depiction of the city
especially testifies to the mastery of his art. The kaleidoscopic city
is more than a simple locale. Bellow often evokes the ambience of the
city to create the right tone for the novel, particularly in The Victim
and The Dean's December. The Bellow hero often finds objective cor-
relatives for his moods in the corresponding urban scenes. ("Cities
[are] moods," as Dean Corde reflects [DD 316].) The chaotic urban

scene often reflects the protagonist's personal crisis. Moreover,

235
through his wondrous evocation of the sounds, smells, sights, colors,
and tones of the city, Bellow has made it a character in its own right.

To all intents and purposes, the city in Bellow's fiction has
become an apt metaphor for modern society. Despite his ambivalence
toward the city, the Bellow hero has to accept it as part of reality.
It is mainly in the city, amidst the crowd, alone in solitude, or
during conversations, that the Bellow hero gains sudden illuminations
about man's place in the city, in the world, and in the universe.

Essentially a realist, Bellow, like Joyce, is a "chronicler of the
city" (Schwartz 20). As he says, "Every novelist is a historian, a
chronicler of his time" (Brans 67). His realistic description of the
city not only yields a faithful picture of the city being depicted but
gets really close to its contemporary facts. For instance, Augie March
delineates vividly the cityscape and life style of Chicago in the
thirties and forties. Through his examination of a cross-section of
life in New York City during the sixties, Bellow records his honest
vision about the Holocaust, the Moon exploration, and the counter-
culture of the sixties in Mr. Sammler's Planet. Although he uses
Chicago and New York City as the settings for almost all his novels,
Bellow is not a parochial writer. In fact, his oeuvre, which combines
"the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture,"
is a mirror that truthfully reflects the reality of society.

For all its realistic details, however, Bellow's city is often
invested with mythical import, suggesting or echoing Eliot's Waste
Land, the Biblical Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gommorah, Bunyan's City of
Destruction, the Dantesque Inferno, the Jungle, Whitman's Democratic
City, Poe's maelstrom with whirling souls, De Quincey's trance land,

City of Darkness, and St. Augustine's Northern Cities established by

236
the Devil. In his later works, such as The Dean’s December, the plight
of the inner city has been used to symbolize the inner crisis of modern
man.

Citrine has used the metaphor "the great mysterious book" (HG 266)
to characterize the American city. Perhaps the best approach to
Bellow's city is to look upon it as a mysterious text, which is to be
read, interpreted, and penetrated.

II

Several important motifs work together in Bellow's fiction to
illustrate, amplify, or highlight the theme of man in the city. Bellow
usually places a protagonist (in most cases an introspective man) in a
room, where he ostensibly wards off the infringement of the outer
world, where he feels safe. Yet, his social self, or his yearning for
communion, gradually makes his estrangement seem extremely uncomfort-
able. To the shut-in hero, the claustrophobic room is imprisoning; he
wishes to break down the walls of his self and his apartment. The
desire finds an artistic release in Bellow's one-act play, "The
Wrecker" (1954), in which the protagonist rejects the city's one
thousand dollars to vacate his apartment as soon as possible and
insists on wrecking the walls himself.

Through the window, the Bellow hero looks at his city, whose
repetitious details and ugly cityscape threaten his sanity and
equanimity. This Bellovian gesture epitomizes the Bellovian hero's
dilemma: to stay in the room or to go to meet the world. It suggests
that, despite his seclusion in his room, the Bellow hero does not
forget the outer world and that, despite his concern with his selfhood,
he is inseparable from his city. At heart he yearns to get in touch

with the city, however menacing it is to his quest for truth, goodness,

237
and beauty. Observing the city and reflecting upon its impact through
the window is like reading the mysterious text of the city: gazing at
the city often gives the Bellow hero epiphanies about his place in his
city, in the world, and in the universe.

Because of his recognition of the dangers of being shut in, his
sense of duty, his family feelings, his moral conscience, or his
entanglements with agents of distractions, the Bellow hero walks out of
his solipsistic, cell-like room and becomes a city voyager. Walking on
the street or riding on the ferry, subway, or bus, in a taxi or in a
car, the Bellow hero continues to read the text of the city. Through
his observations and musings during city voyages, the Bellow hero comes
in direct contact with the city and gains first-hand urban experience.

Like his author, the Bellow hero is ambivalent toward the city
because of its simultaneous desolation and vitality. At times
terrified by the chaotic condition of the city, the Bellow hero
embraces pastoral aspirations and longs to go out of the city for
fresher air or for solace. Despite his occasional idyllic dreams,
however, the Bellow hero never considers living in the country a viable
option, because escape from the city does not solve his problems. As
clearly demonstrated in Augie March and Herzog, living in the
countryside does not yield the happiness, transcendence, or tranquil-
lity the Bellow hero expects. In the city-country dialogue, Bellow
never lets the country win an upper hand over the city.

Thus the Bellow hero either remains in the city or returns to the
city after a brief flirtation with pastoral ideals. Oppressed by the
present city, the Bellow hero likes to indulge in memories of the old
city where he enjoys closely knit family life and congenial neighbor-

hoods. The older Bellow (and his hero) grows, the more striking the

238
contrast between the old and new cities becomes. However, remembrances
of city past cannot obliterate the grim realities of city present. The
Bellow hero has to accommodate himself to it, however terrible it is.

In the city of darkness, the Bellow hero is always looking upward
for slants of sunlight, as the first monologist in Bellow's first short
story tries to do. As Bellow's novels develop, the light gradually
assumes symbolic, religious, and metaphysical import, echoing the light
sought by the Wordsworthian persona or the Hemingway hero. It is
suggestive of cleanness, order, hope, salvation, and perfection. The
Bellow hero's quest for light--the light of joy, truth, hope, harmony,
mystery-~in the city of darkness is a key motif. Very often the Bellow
hero sees the light both from above and within: to Corde, "the light
was the light of warmer seasons, not of deep winter. It came up from
his own harmonies as well as down from above" (DD 321). Throughout his
canon, Bellow affirms that "the light of truth is never very far away.
and no human being is too negligible or corrupt to come into it" (H
382).

Drab as the city is, the Bellow hero tries to find moments of
transcendence. At times, he does find beauty in the ugliness of the
city. Most important of all, through human interactions he feels part
of humanity and learns to accept his fellow citizens as "his brothers
and his sisters" (SD 92).

Despite the turbulence and agitation of the chaotic city, the
Bellow hero never gives in to despair or nihilism. Bellow's affirm-
ation is often symbolized by the plants and flowers he places amidst
the dreadful and bleak urban setting. This is especially noteworthy in
such bleak novels as Mr. Sammler's Planet and The Dean's Deccember:

Sammler sees lilacs blooming in the sewers and Dean Corde finds

239
cyclamens thriving in chilly Bucharest and tropical plants flourishing
in Winthrop's office on the South Side of Chicago. Flowers are tokens
of rebirth and love: Herzog picks flowers for Ramona (a florist in New
York City), Citrine sees crocuses near Humboldt's graveyard, and Corde
buys azaleas for his wife.

Such recurrent motifs underscore the key theme of man of the city
and unify Bellow's eight urban novels. However, as the preceding
chapters have noted, there are variations of and transmutations to the
consistent major theme. Because of Bellow's growing insight into his
created characters and cities, his treatment of the theme varies.

III

In Dangling Man, The Victim, and Seize the Day, the heroes feels
themselves to be victims of their confining and oppressive urban and
social environments. Dangling in a wartime situation, Joseph shuts
himself up in his "six-sided box" room. He relates to the city only
from the room's window and through a few necessary excursions. He does
not venture far out of his familiar area. A special trip to the Loop
gives him a "prevision" of urban man's fate--a sudden death in the
darkness of the city. From his in-laws' apartment window, however,
Joseph does achieve an illumination which becomes a dominant motif of
Bellow's urban fiction: looking at the cityscape, he sees that man can
transcend his environment and that he is connected to "common humanity"
(DM 18). Although he acknowledges the "bolt for ‘nature'," he does not
consider escape into the country a viable option.

Leventhal's hot, sultry New York is a contrast to the gloomy,
wintry Chicago of Dangling Man. With its huge crowds of people,
oppressive high-rise buildings, and lurking unnameable forces, the city

has always been an ominous, suffocating threat to him. His feeling of

240
alienation is intensified by the enervating heat and constant noise of
the city. He finds no solace anywhere in the city, not even in the
city park. The appearance of Allbee further aggravates his sense of
insecurity and victimization. Leventhal's travels between Staten
Island and Manhattan carry great moral weight, give him epiphanies
about his place in the city, and help him relate better to his own
family and to the anti-Semitic victimizer/brother Allbee.

Wilhelm's New York City is a modern Tower of Babel where no
communication is possible. Living among senile retirees on the Upper
West Side of New York, Wilhelm is a failure in life, subject to the
whims, petty greeds, and manipulation of those who surround him. His
yearning to escape the net of the city is reflected in the flying
pigeon he sees at the beginning of the novel. Despite his occasional
lapses into idyllic dreams, Wilhelm is trapped in the city. However,
through human interactions in the city, he experiences an Emersonian
illumination that he is part of "a larger body" from which he cannot be
separated.

While Joseph, Leventhal, and Wilhelm are trying to sequester
themselves in self-created worlds, Augie is an adventurer in the city,
always opening himself to experiences. Bouncy, boisterous, easy-going,
and innocent, Augie celebrates his city's variety, vitality, spacious-
ness, and exuberance. Roaming around Chicago's crowded, colorful
streets and neighborhoods, he experiences city life in its great
diversity. Unlike Joseph, who is detached from Chicago, Augie absorbs
the city into his own being through his deep involvement. As a result,
despite its somberness and oppressiveness, Chicago proves to be more
liberating than confining for him.

Augie March is a breakthrough in Bellow's career. Writing in his

241
own style, Bellow celebrates Chicago as a quintessentially American
city of ample opportunity and vitality. However, it is not a romantic
celebration. Augie, especially Augie the memoir-writer, knows that his
city is not all bright and hopeful. The novel effectively dramatizes
the dialectics between brightness and darkness, independence and
determinism.

Augie is the first Bellow hero to leave the city. However, he
finds no solace in his Mexican trip. Nor is he able to realize his
dream of setting up a foster home in the countryside. Similarly,
Herzog's two experiences of living in the countryside fail to give him
the happiness, tranquillity, and simplicity he dreams of.

Travelling between Chicago, New York, and Montreal, Herzog finally
realizes how these three cities have affected his life. For his
recuperation he retreats to his country house in the Berkshires, not
for pastoral impulses, but to look things over. Yet, with sanity
restored and complex human relationships resolved, he finally reaches a
state of peace and rest in the rural setting, and is ready to return to
the city.

Sharing familial, urban, and intellectual backgrounds with Herzog,
Citrine also travels mentally and physically between Chicago and New
York, seeking to create order and meaning out of his chaotic life.
Unlike Herzog, however, Citrine does not live in the country for
pastoral ideals. Instead of staying in New York after his success, he
moves back to settle in Chicago. Whereas his connections with New York
belong mostly to the past, he is tied to the Chicago of the past and
the present. Several agents of distraction bring him out of his room.
His city voyages through the present city bring him not only direct

urban experience beyond his normal realm but also recall memories of

242
the old city.

In Mr. Sammler’s Planet and The Dean's December, Bellow creates
two wise-observer protagonists who, seriously concerned with the
deterioration of modern urban life, observe and comment on their
cities. While Sammler--a one-eyed Tiresias-like Holocaust survivor--
criticizes his fellow New Yorkers in the sixties, Dean Corde observes
and comments on the totalitarian Bucharest and the corrupted Chicago of
the seventies. To him, both cities are bleak, the former cold, dismal,
comfortless, and miserable, the latter hot, crazy, pleasure-driven, and
decadent.

Unlike his predecessors, who are mostly preoccupied with their
personal dilemmas, Dean Corde actively demands morality and justice in
a city which seems devoid of positive moral values. He tries to
uncover the truth that is hidden under the debris of falsehood. Like
Citrine, Corde moves back to Chicago in the early sixties. Throughout
the novel, he also constantly seeks the reasons for his move. The
ultimate reason for Citrine and Corde is their deep attachment to
Chicago: they both want to rescue their city from decay through poetry,
art, and the imagination.

IV

Bellow is deeply concerned not only about the plight of the slums
but also about the spiritual aridity of modern man. To Corde/Bellow,
it is "not so much the inner city slum that threatenls] us as the slum
of innermost being, of which the inner city [is] perhaps a material
representation" (DD 222-23). What needs our great concern are the
"slums we carry around inside us. Every man's inner inner city" (DD
229).

How to prevent one's "inner inner city" from deteriorating? All

243
through his career, Bellow has been exploring answers to that question.
To Bellow's mind, the only possible way is through poetry, art, and the
imagination. Only by renewing the child's light, by finding the axial
lines of life and living by them, by finding the wisdom of life in the
recognition of death, by breaking out of one's self, by achieving
universal brotherhood, by reinvigorating ethical values, and by
upholding moral initiatives, can man save his city--literal and
metaphorical--from decay.

Bellow's emphasis on love, feeling, imagination, and brotherhood
leads him to criticize vehemently the so-called "modern public
consciousness," which exemplifies itself in indifferent-bystander
attitude, bogus culturalism, wastelander's mentality, and nihilistic
philosophy. To Bellow, this "consciousness" is far more terrible than
frank philistinism, for it creates a "Great Noise" ("Starting" 77) that
drowns meaning, brings distraction, and distorts reality.

As Fuchs sums up well, as a novelist Bellow is "primarily
interested in the soul-quality of a work, its truth-telling capability,
the moral function of art" (14). When moral depravity and wayward
behavior follow in the wake of the blind pursuit of material and
sensual enjoyment, when human dignity is severely ravaged, when
rationalism, existentialism, and pragmatism are in vogue, when the
death of the city is proclaimed, when apocalyptic visions about the
future of civilization prevail, it is most significant that Bellow, one
of the best city novelists of this century, persists in writing about
the city, in emphasizing common feelings shared by humankind, in
rejecting the cent of pessimism and nihilism, and in believing in the
power of poetry and the imagination. Bellow is, as Spivey points out,

an Emersonian representative man who has "plunged into the chaos of the

244
soul" and has come up again "with the awareness of the meaningfulness
of all human existence, an awareness and belief, as [Simone] Weil tells
us, that is love itself" (Spivey 19).

As Bellow says in "A Writer from Chicago," the city's inexhaust-
ible details and pervading darkness can be released by a writer's
style, because the forces of style can subdue the city's chaos (197).
If under his pen the city is chaotic and ugly, Bellow has rescued it
through the power of his art. Like Dreiser, a writer he greatly
admires, Bellow has a "lifting power" to transcend the city's dark and
insidious forces (see Bellow, "Dreiser"). Bellow has wrestled all his
life with the forces of darkness and has tried to lift up the gate of
darkness so that the reader can see the light of truth behind.

As a writer living in Chicago--"the most American of all American
cities" (DD 333)--Bellow has tried to deal with "the American
Experience, that murky, heavy, burdensome, chaotic thing" ("Starting"
77). Having spent most of his life in that "business-industrial,
vital, brutal, proletarian, and middle-class city" ("Starting" 75),
Bellow has aspired to write about the elements of Chicago which no
previous city novelists have achieved, because the city is "this one
thing, so intimately known that not only nerves, senses, mind, but also
[his] very bones wanted to put it into words" ("Starting" 73). Bellow,

like Whitman, can be truly called "the poet of the American city."1

Notes

Clemons and Kroll have called Bellow "the most powerful poet of
urban America" (33). As Haffenden records, "On one occasion Bellow
remarked that he wanted to be a poet, Berryman, who avidly admired his
craftsmanship, responded brightly, ‘You are!’ Bellow replied, ‘Oh, I
mean short lines!'" (Haffenden 235). In other words, even though he
does not write poetry in its strictest sense, Bellow is a poet of the
city and his poetic ability is especially reflected in his descriptions
of the city. In the sense that the poet is the legislator of the mind
and the spirit, Bellow is a poet of the American city because he hopes
his power as a writer will prevent the city from becoming the waste
land.

Works Cited
Bellow, Saul. "Distractions of a Fiction Writer." In The Living
Novel. Ed. Granville Hicks. New York: Macmillan, 1957. 1-20.

---. "Dreiser and the Triumph of Art." Commentary 11 (1951): 502-03.

---. "Starting Out in Chicago." The American Scholar 44
(1974-75): 71-77.

--—. "A Writer from Chicago." In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
III, 1982. Ed. Sterling M. McMurrin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1982.

Brans, Jo. "Common Needs, Common Preoccupations." In Critical Essays
on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Boston: G. K. Hall,
1979. 57-72.

Clemons, Walter, and Jack Kroll. "America's Master Novelist."
Newsweek 1 Sept 1975: 32-40.

Fuchs, Daniel. "Saul Bellow: A Literary Reminiscence." Saul Bellow
Journal 4.2 (1985): 14-16.

Haffenden, John. The Life of John Berryman. Boston: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1982.

Schwartz, Edward. "Chronicles of the City." New Republic 3 Dec. 1956:
20-21.

Spivey, Ted R. "In Search of Saul Bellow." Saul Bellow Journal 4.2
(1985): 17-23.

245

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Aharoni, Ada. "Saul Bellow's Introspective Fiction." Diss. Hebrew U,
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Anderson, David. "The Dean's Chicago." Midamerica XII (1985): 136-47.

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---. "‘That Somber City' Since MidCentury." Unpublished paper,
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Anderson, Quentin. The Imperial Self. New York: Knopf, 1971.

Atlas, James. Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet. New
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Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March. New York: Viking, 1953.
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---. "Chicago: The City That Was, The City That Is." Life October
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---. Dangling Man. 1944; New York: Avon, 1975.
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---. "Distractions of a Fiction Writer." In The Living Novel. Ed.
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---. "Dora." Harper's Bazaar 83 (1949): 118+.
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---. "How I Wrote Augie March's Story." New York Times Book Review 31
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---. Humboldt’s Gift. New York: Viking, 1975.

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---. "Looking for Mr. Green." In Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories.
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-—-. Seize the Day. 1956; New York: Avon, 1977.

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---. "A Talk with the Yellow Kid." Reporter 6 Sept. 1956: 41-44.

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---. To Jerusalem and Back. New York: Viking, 1976.

---. "Two Morning Monologues." Partisan Review 8 (1941): 230-36.

---. The Victim. 1947; New York: Signet, 1965.

---. "The Writer as Moralist." Atlantic March 1963: 58-62.

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Bragg, Melvin. "‘Off the Couch by Christmas' Saul Bellow on his New
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Chavkin, Allan. "Bellow and English Romanticism." Studies in the
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---. "Bellow's Alternative to the Wasteland: Romantic Theme and Form
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---. "‘The Hollywood Thread' and the First Draft of Saul Bellow's
Seize the Day." Studies in the Novel 14 (1982): 82-94.

---. "Recovering ‘The World That Is Buried under the Debris of False
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