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The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March is the third book in my current Saul Bellow kick. Like Seize The Day and Herzog, I first read Augie’s Adventures when I was high school. It is a Chicago book, more of a Chicago book than Herzog, possibly the best Chicago book Bellow wrote. The book was published in 1953 and won the National Book Award.

Lilac buds press on
Augie March and Huckleberry Finn

Augie’s adventures beg to be compared to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which was published sixty five years earlier in 1885. Both are picaresque novels, both are unequivocally American. Augie’s adventures are a chronicle of Augie’s loves and occupations as he grows from mannish boy to boyish man. Huck’s adventures are a float down the river to escape from Huck’s Pa and and emancipate Jim.

For Huck Finn,  the escape from Pa and emancipation of Jim are eventually resolved. The resolutions are not tidy– they occur off the stage, not from the action of the novel itself. Hemingway, among others, criticized the closing chapters of Huck Finn for descending into burlesque. I also feel some disappointment with the end, but I am crudly delighted with the Tom Sawyer camp town humor. However, I am profoundly disturbed by the deus ex machina grinding away in the background, resolving the plot that structures the great theme of freedom that flows through the heart of the novel. The end disappoints me because Widow Watson’s deathbed emancipation of Jim and Pa’s death are insignificant on the mighty river where Huck and Jim are condemned to float.

Chicago and the River

The Adventures of Augie March has scant plot and no river. Bellow sets out to tell us something about the life of an immigrant family on the west side of Chicago. Augie March is a long book (600 plus pages of compact print), that does not resolve itself. Saul Bellow repeatedly challenges the reader to examine the meaning of success for Augie as he experiences amazing adventures, in hobo camps, hunting giant lizards with an eagle, with Trotsky’s cadre in Mexico, but Augie at the end of the book is the same amiable, impressionable boy he was in the beginning. Although the reader has been challenged, the book is content to repeatedly raise the issue without pronouncing judgment.

For many, this is unsatisfying, perhaps more unsatisfying than the close of Huck Finn, which at least delivers a tidy package, but the incompleteness of the endings for both Huck and Augie comes from the peculiar resistance to endings in American life. Everything in America is in preparation for a new frontier and the next deal of the cards; there is no end to Huck’s and Augie’s adventures because the adventures both depend on the next deal. Huck looks at freedom as emancipation from Pa, from the Widow Watson, and Jim’s emancipation from the institution of slavery, but Huck’s emancipations do not resolve the problem of freedom, they only prove its fragility as Huck observes the king and the duke put Jim back in chains, but the cards are redealt and the king and the duke are tarred and feathered themselves. Immigration emancipated Augie from the empires of Europe, but Augie finds freedom elusive, hard to define and understand, and– most of all– impermanent. There is no satisfactory ending.

The Secret of Life

Reading The Adventures of Augie March is an immense pleasure. Einhorn the crippled real estate wheeler-dealer, Padilla the mathematician-book thief, and Thea the eagle trainer all are memorable and entertaining. Even minor players like Clem Tambow, Ten Properties, and Dingbat stick in the mind and command smiles and pangs. And, most of all, Augie is likable, intriguing– much like old Huck. You just might wring the secret of life out of either one of them if you read their book one more time.

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Seize the Day

February 2010 might not be a good time to reread Seize the Day. Unemployment is troubling everyone this month, and the book questions whether unemployment, or adversity in general, is simply chance, or do those who suffer adversity actually control their fate. The novel has an answer, but the answer is not easy to accept.

Rose leaflets

Seize the Day is a short (119 pages in the Penguin edition) and frequently praised novel by Saul Bellow. I finished reading it for the second time this morning. I don’t recall exactly when I first read it, but it must have been when I was high school in the sixties, some time after I read Herzog, but before I left for college. Although I don’t remember much from my first reading, it stayed with me as a disturbing and moving novel: one that I did not want to reread, but could not forget.

Synopsis

The book is easy to summarize. Tommy Wilhelm has lost his job and and has left his wife and two sons. He is almost out of money, the rent is due, his wife demands money, his father won’t lend him a cent. Impetuously, Tommy hands his last seven hundred 1956 dollars to Dr. Tamkin, a quack psychiatrist, to invest in the commodities market. On the fateful day of the novel, Tamkin loses Tommy’s money and leaves town. Chasing after Tamkin, Tommy stumbles into a funeral and breaks down into ecstatic tears. End.

For its shortness and simplicity, many people consider it to be Bellow’s best work. The characters are vivid, bizarre.

Tamkin

Tamkin, whose “bones were peculiarly formed, as though twisted twice where the ordinary human bone was turned only once, and his shoulders rose in pagoda-like points,” writes illiterate doggerel that he tries to pass as poetry and delivers psychological homilies whose only point is to goad Tommy into acquiring money for Tamkin to embezzle away.

Guy in the Newsstand

The guy in the newsstand “had poor eyes. They may have not been actually weak but they were poor in expression, with lacy lids that furled down at the corners.”

Maurice Venice

Tommy found Maurice Venice, the talent scout turned pimp who lured Tommy into a short and failing career as an actor in Hollywood, to be “huge and oxlike, so stout that his arms seemed caught from beneath in a grip of flesh and fat; it looked as if it must be positively painful. He had little hair. Yet he enjoyed a healthy complexion.”

Is Tommy Wilhelm a Dope?

The comic characters that surround Tommy are no help to him. Tommy’s father resolutely refuses to take on any of Tommy’s burdens, thus avoiding Tommy’s fate for himself. Tamkin urges Tommy to take risks, but when Tommy does risk his last bit of money with him, Tamkin promptly takes his own risk, grabs the money and runs. Is Tommy just a dope?

The Funeral

The answer comes at the funeral of a stranger. Tommy’s breakdown at the funeral does not offer a resolution and there is no clue that his problems will abate. His adversity, tragedy, even suffering, is inevitable and endless. Comic figures like Tommy’s father and Tamkin avoid suffering with ploys that avert disaster but they are no better prepared than Tommy when the dime drops.

The novel ends and we are amused, left thinking that when all the conniving Tamkins have been blown away by the futility of their squirming, Tommy will struggle on.

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Saul Bellow, Herzog

Last week, I read Herzog by Saul Bellow for the second time. The first time I read it, I was fifteen, maybe fourteen. I read it then because I had convinced my mother to subscribe to the Book-of-the-Month-Club and Herzog was either the selection of the month or one of the generous premiums the BOMC gave out for joining. I read it this time because I read an article in the New York Times about sex scenes in popular literature and I happen to have registered for a creative writing class on writing love scenes. (What will this sixty year old grandpa do next?)  John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Phillip Roth were held up as authors of pre-women’s liberation sex scenes.

Early quince

I was reminded that Herzog was the first book I read that addressed sex openly. I discount certain scenes in Heinlein and Horatio Hornblower, which were certainly exciting to a fourteen year old in the sixties, but were suggestive cartoons, not passion.

Hyde Park and the University of Chicago play as background to Herzog, and I wonder if reading Bellow had anything to do with the fact that I chose to go off to Chicago for college. I’m not sure. While I was a student at the UC, I did not seek out Bellow, although I met him and his poodle on the street, probably Dorchester Ave, every morning one quarter when his dog walk and my class schedule happened to intersect. After the first few encounters, we began to nod, but our relationship never went farther than a nod. At the time, I am not even sure I connected the man with the poodle to the author of Herzog.

Rereading Herzog, I now realize how funny the novel is. Herzog is a buffoon in a straw boater hat and an unreliable narrator. The sex scenes are suggestive, but not graphic. The bawdiest moment it the entire book is when Herzog recounts an old joke about the Shakespearian actor who, when complimented for his physiognomy, replies “Madame, I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” I trotted this chestnut out several times to show off my fifteen year old worldliness, but failed to calibrate the audience properly every time, and got only uncomprehending stares and shaking heads instead of sophisticated laughter.

Now, I wonder what it was that I enjoyed in the novel in 1965? Certainly the character of Herzog, who in some ways foreshadows some of my own intellectuality and passion for history of ideas and I think there is a certain amount of resonance between my own European heritage and Herzog’s Jewishness.

Of course, I missed entirely the bizarre absurdity of Herzog’s life and the preposterousness of twentieth century United States seen as a logical consequence of the enlightenment mixed with Nazi extremism and American materialism. But I can’t say that I understand the book now. I feel there is something I should understand, but it is all unclear.

Consequently, I feel compelled to re-read Saul Bellow’s entire corpus and figure out what it is that I almost understand. Over the years, I have read most of his books, but now I must reread them all.