An authentic life

If I am out of my mind, it8217;s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog8221;. That8217;s how Saul Bellow, who resuscitated the American ...

If I am out of my mind, it8217;s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog8221;. That8217;s how Saul Bellow, who resuscitated the American novel in the post-War, second half of the 20th century, embarks on Herzog, his 1964 classic. Herzog is trying to find out what it is 8220;to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanisation. After the late failure of radical hopes.8221;

In a sense, this 8212; quest for one8217;s identity in an alien world where 8220;we stand open to all anxieties8221;, where 8220;the decline and fall of everything is our daily dread8221;, where 8220;we are agitated in private life and tormented by public questions8221; 8212; is the heart of Bellow8217;s matter. Right from Dangling Man 1944, The Victim 1947, Seize the Day 1956, Henderson the Rain King 1959 to Herzog and Humboldt8217;s Gift 1975.

Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Montreal in 1915, the family moved to Chicago, the soul of Bellow8217;s fictional world. As he wrote in 1983, 8220;Chicago builds itself up, knocks itself down again, scrapes away the rubble, and starts over8230; To count on stability here is madness.8221;

Bellow8217;s worldview was established as much by the Old Testament, Mozart, Shakespeare, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Proust, Flaubert, Conrad, as by his studies in anthropology, American masters like Melville and the street talk of Chicago. As he writes in It all Adds Up, a collection of his non-fiction: 8220;In Augie March, I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence. Something like a fusion of colloquialism and elegance. What you find in the best English writing of the 20th century 8212; in Joyce or E.E. Cummings. Street language combined with a high style.8221;

His critics found him sexist, racist, elitist 8212; but as Bellow said in his Nobel lecture 1976, all he wanted to do was dismiss 8220;merely respectable8221; opinions and 8220;try to discern what I have really lived by and what others really live by.8221; It is essential 8220;to dump encumbrances, including the encumbrances of education and all organised platitudes, to make judgements of our own, to perform acts of our own 8230;8221;

If there8217;s one strand tying all his novels, it is mortality, or the perennial fear of it. It8217;s more than evident in Ravelstein 2000, inspired by the life of his friend Allan Bloom, who died of AIDS.

I never tire of reading the master novelists, he said in his Nobel lecture. 8220;Can anything as vivid as the characters in their books be dead?8221; Bellow may have passed on, but want Something to Remember him by? Delve into the Hendersons, the Herzogs and the Humboldts.