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The Wisdom of Solomon: A Tribute to Bellow
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by Dale Ross
Ames, Iowa
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The "Strivings of the Human Heart"
Saul Bellow the man is no more. Saul Bellow the writer lives for the ages in the pages of the many novels and stories his genius bestowed on us over five decades. Those who came of age in the forties and fifties, for example, and who cared about America in the years after World War II found in novels like Dangling Man, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March, and Henderson the Rain King characters whose struggles on the "razor blade of life" resonated with their own quests for meaning or purpose. And Bellow's later work, peopled by the likes of Herzog, Humbolt, Sammler, Dean Corde, and Ravelstein, revealed still more of his gift for showing us the "strivings of the human heart," the wonder and terror of existence, the pity and the guilt, the price we pay for being.
Myriad chroniclers of American life and thought have long remarked the fundamental tension in American life: the desire to be an unfettered individual but one who lives in a well-organized, secure society. Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents understood that organized societies meant that citizens must surrender some freedom in return for security, postponing or giving up thereby some pleasure. And Huizinga in Homo Ludens (Laughing Man) observed that humans would rather play than work. Thus, American literature from 1800 forward reflects the growing restlessness and anxieties that accompany growth and its attendant responsibilities. And nowhere is this American angst more poignantly displayed than in the urban landscape on which Bellow's men (mostly men) experience the rising expectations and falling realizations that Thoreau meant when he remarked that "the masses of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
Optimism in the Search for Self
But Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellow) was not a poet limning poor, unfortunate individuals victimized by the system or by unscrupulous denizens of the city. In his world, the search for self -- a quest encouraged from the schoolroom and the pulpit -- promised much but delivered little. And in the aftermath of the Second World War, many were, like Dreiser's Carrie Meeber, "half-equipped little knights" serving neither a king nor a deity. Augie March, for example, the eponymous hero of the novel that earned Bellow the National Book Award in 1953, sets out to conquer Chicago by "knowing" it and by carrying out there a series of adventures. His is, ultimately, a chaotic and painful life, but one in which March retains his sense of humor and his positive outlook. And he epitomizes Bellow's recurring delight in the proposition that, on balance, we "refuse to lead a disappointed life."
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner remarked that the central concern of his work was "the human heart in conflict with itself." His contemporary, Saul Bellow, also worried about the human heart, but his concern focused less on the internal effects of conflict. His characters strive for things, material things that seem to confer meaning, and for companionship (of women) as a hedge against being alone. They are driven by wanting, an insatiable need. Gene Henderson of Henderson the Rain King is very wealthy but says, "I want, I want..." and leaves Connecticut for Africa to satisfy his quest for "wisdom." After a series of rather complicated relationships with African tribes, he returns with a renewed sense of who he is, a discovery made outside the boundaries of "civilization" as we know it.
Again and again, Bellow shows us people whose "maps" fail to describe the territories they find themselves in. And too often, these confused and frustrated souls attempt to change the territory instead of their maps of it. Like Sisyphus, they roll their rocks up increasingly steeper hills and watch helplessly as the rocks become too heavy and careen backward. But Bellow, unlike a number of his contemporaries, lets us see that it is often the effort that matters and not the result. That failure is a commonplace of human existence is a given in Bellow's America; what is not is what one does after failing, how one lives in the face of it.
Rejected All the "Isms"
Although he held teaching positions in a number of prestigious colleges and universities, Saul Bellow was not an "academic" writer. He abhorred classifications such as "realist" or "regionalist," and he rejected the role of the writer as social reformer or propagandist for this or that political "ism." His work attests to his belief that in himself -- as in his fellow human beings -- resided all the foibles, the strengths, the weaknesses, the fears, the guilt, the pain, and the joy that illuminate his work and draw us to it because we are. When we read him, we are in familiar territory. His Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and the Nobel Prize in 1976 serve as material rewards for his achievement, but they cannot measure what his work means to his readers. His world is our world, and the "willing suspension of disbelief" a dictum we need not heed when we go there.
Dale Ross taught literature and composition at Iowa State University for 30 years before becoming chair of the Department of English in 1992. Before that, he served as assistant chair and as director of freshman composition. He has been a Reader and a Table Leader for the AP English Language Exam. Currently, he is a consultant for the College Board's Midwest Regional Office, presenting AP English Language workshops in that area. His publications include articles on composition and popular fiction. He is also involved with the Iowa Library Association Foundation and the Ames Public Library Foundation.
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