By Stuart Mitchner

Saul Bellow, who was born 100 years ago today in a suburb of Montreal, began his breakthrough novel The Adventures of Augie March in Paris in 1948 and finished it four years later in Princeton, in an office at Firestone Library.

Besides winning the National Book Award, Augie March has been named by Time and the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels in the English language. Writing in 1995, Martin Amis declares it “The Great American Novel” and Salman Rushdie seems to agree (“If there’s a candidate … this is it”). In the context of the GAM, Christopher Hitchens compares Augie March to The Great Gatsby, another perennial candidate, observing that its great advantage “lies in its scope and its optimism” as “the first time in American literature that an immigrant would act and think like a rightful Discoverer, or a pioneer.”

On those terms, Bellow’s personal history as an infant illegally smuggled over the border from Canada clearly qualifies him. He stakes his claim in one of the great American opening sentences, a legend in itself:

“I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”

No Turning Back

I’ve gone at Augie March numerous times over the years in one edition or another, including the Popular Library Giant with the sexy cover (“Ribald  … Vital … Virile”), but I never got much beyond that powerful opening paragraph; first to knock, first admitted, and each time I turn back. Why? I suppose it’s a combination of too much prose and too little plot. Even now, I might not have completed this 536-page expedition but for my determination to meet the 100th birthday deadline.

Big, complicated, densely written novels like Augie March offer a challenge comparable to a long trek in the mountains, with the goal of a literary Shangri-La shining somewhere on the other side of a No Man’s Land of devious challenges, the prose equivalent of deadly crevasses and threadbare rope-bridges that may scare you into turning back. And even if you slog it out and get there you may not last, if, say, things begin to go south after the golden arrival, the glow fades with a spell of lousy weather, a Himalayan air-inversion, the potential for a plague or an avalanche, until you panic and take the first helicopter out, only to find that right after you left an unheralded, unimaginable event cast everyone and everything in Shakespearean radiance, making poetry of the air and opening all the closed doors of the mystic city for the first time in a century.

With Augie March — and the word “adventure” in the title is more than a picaresque convention, it’s what happens to you the reader — the experience is a lot more subtle than that high-altitude analogy. Around about page 420, after a long sequence in Mexico vicariously training an eagle and losing a lover, you may make the mistake of thinking that Bellow is folding up his tent, winding things down, ready to cruise through the last 100 pages toward the dreaded Curse of the Denouement. Far from it — a torpedo blows your doubts at the moon as the curtain rises on a mad and masterful scene wherein two Chicagoans adrift in a lifeboat have an endgame conversation somewhere to the far side of Strindberg, Beckett, and Mary Shelley — “You didn’t create life!” “In all humility, that’s exactly what I did. Six universities have thrown me out for claiming it.”

A Sea of Prose

In his New Yorker review of Zachary Leader’s new biography The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune (Knopf), Louis Menand suggests that the first 200 pages of Augie March contain “the best writing Bellow ever did,” which is to say “the best prose” since a quick random count suggests that only around 40 of those first 200 pages appear to contain dialogue.

Writing in Advertisements for Myself (1958), Norman Mailer states the obvious when he calls Bellow’s style “self-willed and unnatural.” It’s easy enough to find examples of what Mailer’s talking about, like: “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.”

As it turns out, the long paragraph in Chapter Six containing that passage is a journey worth taking, in spite of the borderline self-parody, you go from Eden and shepherd-Sicily to “deep city vexation” and studying Greek in Bogotá to temples, pool rooms, “musical milk-dreaming innocence,” fiddle lessons, and Robinson Crusoe. On top of that, Bellow’s “unnatural” prose seems to have driven Mailer off the rails into tortured equivalents (Bellow’s “narrative disproportions are elephantiastical in their anomaly”) and nonsensical declarations (“I do not think he knows anything about people or himself”)
culminating in a dismissal of Augie March “at its worst” as “a travelogue for timid intellectuals.”

A Bloody Genius

In Princeton, where his friendship with John Berryman seems to have coincided with the composing of the extraordinary lifeboat chapter, Bellow gave the poet the finished manuscript, and according to Berryman’s wife Eileen Simpson in Poets in Their Youth, Berryman spent a weekend “immobile for hours except to light a cigarette while he trained his intelligence on The Adventures of Augie March, giving it the kind of reading every writer dreams of having.” When Berryman finished, he announced “Bellow is it!” and went off to tell the author that he was “a bloody genius.”

Removing Restraints

“My earlier books had been straight and respectable,” Bellow said in a 1991 interview. “But in Augie March I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence. Something like a fusion of colloquialism and elegance.” In the Winter 1966 Paris Review (Art of Fiction No. 37), Bellow admitted being afraid to let himself go in The Dangling Man and The Victim. “I was timid. I still felt the incredible effrontery of announcing myself to the world (in part I mean the WASP world) as a writer and an artist. I had to touch a great many bases, demonstrate my abilities, pay my respects to formal requirements …. When I began to write Augie March. I took off many of these restraints.” In 1991, he mentioned “reckless spontaneity” as he “began to write in all places, in all postures, at all times of day and night. It rushed out of me. I was turned on like a hydrant in summer. The simile is not entirely satisfactory. Hydrants are not sexually excited. I was wildly excited.”

Celebrating Mimi

You don’t have to read far in the reviews of Leader’s biography to learn that Augie and his creator have in common a compelling weakness for women. For all that might be said on the lofty theme of immigrants, discoverers, and pioneers, the point where I bonded with the novel is when Augie goes all out, against odds, to help a female friend through a botched abortion that might have proved fatal had he not been there for her. The most appealing of all the memorable women in Augie March, Mimi is a feisty waitress in a student hash house who had been expelled from the University of Chicago “for going beyond the bounds of necking,” which became “a favorite subject for her ferocious humor.” The beauty of her relationship with Augie is that being platonic, it’s free of “formal requirements,” developing outside the norm (everyone thinks they’re lovers anyway since they share rooms in the same boarding house); at the same time their life-or-death intimacy during the crisis has a sexual tension, so passionately does Augie give himself to the cause of her salvation.

More than any other character, “hard and spirited” Mimi, “editing her words for no one,” expresses the conceptual passion in which Bellow discovered and composed the book, the letting go, the freedom from restraint, she who “led a proclaimed life, and once she got talking … held back nothing,” with her “tough beauty,” her “large mouth, speaking for a soul of wild appetite, nothing barred; she’d say anything, and had no idea what could hinder her.” The sense of excitement and excess are in her “long and narrow hips,” her large bust, and “high heels that gave a tight arch of impatience to the muscles of her calves; her step was small and pretty and her laughter violent, total, and critical.” When she slams down the phone on the man who got her pregnant “it was as a musician might shut the piano after he had finished storming chords of mightiest difficulty without a single flinch or error.”

No wonder the novel rips itself open to make room for Mimi’s crisis, Chapter 12 sprawling for almost 50 pages while previous chapters, at their longest, rarely go beyond 20. Saving Mimi, Augie follows the courage of his heart and Bellow’s art, that “reckless spontaneity,” as he sacrifices his chance to marry into a wealthy family by breaking a New Year’s Eve date with his fiance, the heiress, to take care of this hash house waitress with “her round face of tough happiness.”

A Long Time Coming

It’s time to admit that I have a tough, intelligent, “hard and spirited” Chicago woman to thank for giving me this long overdue reading assignment. In an email exchange with an old friend who has lived most of his life in Chicago and recently began rereading Augie March, I reminded him that it was his mother’s favorite book, she who one day looked a certain high school senior sternly in the eye and told him to read The Adventures of Augie March. Now, a senior again, long out of high school, he’s finally done it and wishes he could call her up and talk about her favorite book.

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By the way, Bellow’s was not the only famous Chicago novel to have been finished in Princeton. About 50 years earlier, out on Province Line Road, Upton Sinclair was writing The Jungle.