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The US' dean of letters dies at 89

By Mel Gussow and Charles McGrath
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Thursday, Apr 07, 2005, Page 15

Saul Bellow, the Nobel laureate and self-proclaimed historian of society whose fictional heroes -- and whose scathing, unrelenting and darkly comic examination of their struggle for meaning -- gave new immediacy to the American novel in the second half of the 20th century, died Tuesday at his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 89.

His death was announced by Walter Pozen, Bellow's lawyer and friend

"I cannot exceed what I see," Bellow once said. "I am bound, in other words, as the historian is bound by the period he writes about, by the situation I live in."

In novels like The Adventures of Augie March, his breakthrough novel in 1953, Henderson the Rain King and Herzog, Bellow laid a path for old-fashioned, supersized characters and equally big themes and ideas.

All his work, long and short, was written in a distinctive, immediately recognizable style that blended high and low, colloquial and mandarin, wisecrack and aphorism, as in the introduction of the poet Humboldt at the beginning of Humboldt's Gift: "He was a wonderful talker, a hectic nonstop monologuist and improvisator, a champion detractor. To be loused up by Humboldt was really a kind of privilege. It was like being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso, or an eviscerated chicken by Soutine."

While others were ready to proclaim the death of the novel, he continued to think of it as a vital form. "I never tire of reading the master novelists," he said. "Can anything as vivid as the characters in their books be dead?"

In a long and unusually productive career, Bellow dodged many of the snares that typically entangle American writers. He didn't drink much, and though he was analyzed four times, his mental health was as robust as his physical health. His success came neither too early nor too late, and he took it more or less in stride. He never ran out of ideas and he never stopped writing.

The Nobel Prize, which he won in 1976, was the cornerstone of a career that also included a Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, a Presidential Medal and more honors than any other American writer.

This most American of writers was born in Lachine, Quebec, a poor immigrant suburb of Montreal. Named Solomon Bellow, his birthdate is listed as either June or July 10, 1915, though his lawyer, Pozen, said Tuesday that Bellow customarily celebrated in June.

He was the last of four children of Abram and Liza Bellow, but as he was always quick to point out, the first to be born in the New World. His parents had emigrated from Russia two years before, though in Canada their luck wasn't much better.

In 1924, when their son was nine, the Bellows moved to Chicago, where the family began to prosper a little as Abram picked up work. The family continued its old ways in the US, and during his childhood, Saul was steeped in Jewish tradition, learning Hebrew and Yiddish.

But eventually he rebelled against what he considered to be a "suffocating orthodoxy," and he found in Chicago not just a physical home but a spiritual one. Eventually Chicago became for him what London was for Dickens and Dublin was for Joyce -- the center of both his life and his work, and not just a place or a background but almost a character in its own right.

In 1933 he enrolled at the University of Chicago, but two years later transferred to Northwestern. He had hoped to study literature but was put off by what he saw as the tweedy anti-Semitism of the English department, and graduated in 1937 with honors in anthropology and sociology, subjects that were later to be instilled in his novels. But he was still obsessed by fiction. While doing graduate work in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, he found that "every time I worked on my thesis, it turned out to be a story." He added, "I sometimes think the depression was a great help. It was no use studying for any other profession."

Quitting his graduate studies at Wisconsin after several months, he participated in the WPA Writers' Project in Chicago, preparing biographies of Midwestern novelists, and later joined the editorial department of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

He came to New York "toward the end of the '30s, muddled in the head but keen to educate myself." He tried to write fiction, aimlessly and with little success at first. He later joined the merchant marine and, during his service, he completed Dangling Man, about the alienation of a young Chicagoan waiting to be drafted. It was published in 1944, before the author was 30, and was followed by The Victim, a novel about anti-Semitism that he said, was influenced by Dostoyevsky.

In 1948, financed by a Guggenheim fellowship, Bellow went to Paris.

His first major novel, The Adventures of Augie March, was published in 1953, and it became Bellow's breakthrough, his first best seller and the book that established him as a writer of consequence.

The beginning of the novel was as striking and as unforgettable as the beginning of Huckleberry Finn, and it announced a brand-new voice in American fiction, jazzy, brash, exuberant, with accents that were both Yiddish and Whitmanian.

"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: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so

innocent."

In addition to his wife Janis, he is survived by three sons, Gregory, Adam and Daniel; a daughter, Naomi Rose; and six grandchildren.
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