ellauri052.html on line 83: In his survey of Bellow’s work, Philip Roth writes of Herzog, “In all of literature, I know of no more emotionally susceptible male, of no man who brings a greater focus or intensity to engagement with women than this Herzog,” a man “as lavish in describing the generous mistress as Renoir.” No siinä on pukki kaalimaan vartijana, Roth on mikäli mahdollista pahempi narsisti kuin Sale.
ellauri052.html on line 89: Harold Bloom is right to dismiss Bellow’s female characters of the later novels as “third-rate pipe dreams.” When a reader, holding Humboldt’s Gift in his hands, looks back at Augie March, the journey Saul Bellow has taken in his depiction of people is a very sad one. There is no way to compare the daring, principled Mimi Villars, Augie March’s one equal in oration, to the simple Ramona (Herzog), or to the comically shallow Renata (Humboldt’s Gift). Where is a woman equal to Augie’s Thea in these later books?
ellauri052.html on line 104: Bellow’s most merciless and eviscerating tormenter was his third wife, Susan Glassman, who defeated him in a long, acrimonious and expensive divorce suit. In 1974, after he had fraudulently misrepresented his projected income, the court, hostile to a successful Jewish intellectual, “ordered him to pay Susan $2,500 a month in alimony, backdated to 1968, plus $600 a month child support, plus lawyers’ fees.” Ignoring his own lawyer’s sound advice to settle the case, he surrendered to a self-destructive impulse, continued to appeal and deliberately prolonged his agony.
ellauri052.html on line 112: Leader defines Bellow’s recurrent themes as “the relative claims of life and work, the intensity of childhood experience, sexual insecurity.” He could have added Jewish life and identity, the perils of matrimony and the defects of modern civilisation.
ellauri052.html on line 851: Bellow’s great subject is his own subjectivity. “If I had as many mouths as Siva has arms and kept them going all the time,” says Joseph, the novel’s Bellow-like protagonist, sounding a little like Walt Whitman, “I still could not do myself justice.”
ellauri052.html on line 865: Leader (se elämäkerturi) defines Bellow’s recurrent themes as “the relative claims of life and work, the intensity of childhood experience, sexual insecurity.” He could have added Jewish life and identity, the perils of matrimony and the defects of modern civilisation. The highly disciplined fellow devoted almost every morning to the sacred writing hours from nine to one. Sale ostettiin loppupeleissä Chicagosta Bostoniin. Jasu ja Sale kehu izeään varmaan kilpaa BU:n kekkereissä.
ellauri052.html on line 934: Ultimately, much of the book revolves around a perceived opposition between “young Saul,” the politically radical, amorously multitasking free spirit who raised him, and “old Saul,” the reactionary, race-baiting friend of authority and Allan Bloom who occupied his father’s body for its final 40 years. Greg had a front-row seat for Bellow’s supposed conversion, after the rise of black power and the Six Day War, to the unfashionable conservatism that remains the unspoken reason his books aren’t read much in America today. He is thus well-placed to describe how that change—dramatically evident in Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), the neo-con novel par excellence, but also in Herzog—manifested itself in private.
ellauri052.html on line 942: It may be helpful to note here that Bellow’s fame, already growing after The Adventures of Augie March, exploded after the publication of Herzog in 1964—the same year Daniel, his youngest son, was born. By the time the newly rich writer, urged by his third wife, moved into a fancy co-op on Lake Michigan, Greg already possessed enough of what he thought were his own opinions to dislike the white plush carpets, the 11 rooms “filled with fancy furniture and modern art.” Reminding the reader he was “raised by a frugal mother and a father who had no steady income,” Greg says that he “found the trappings of wealth in their new apartment so repellent that I complained bitterly to Saul,” who replied that he didn’t care about the new shiny things so long as he could still write—which he could. “As I always had, I accepted what he said about art at face value,” Greg admits, but he stopped visiting the new place. After the marriage deteriorated and Saul moved out, 3-year-old Daniel, in the words of ex-child-therapist Greg, “took to expressing his distress” by peeing on the carpets. “I have to admit that the yellow stains on them greatly pleased me,” Greg writes—for once showing off the Bellovian touch.
ellauri052.html on line 944: Zachary Leader’s work, though superior to Atlas’s and better than his first volume, still has some serious flaws. He swallows Keith Botsford’s absurd claim that his subject “is a direct descendant of Machiavelli”. Leader constantly tries to connect every person and event in Bellow’s life to their fictional counterparts instead of emphasising his imaginative transformation of experience. Literary agent Andrew Wylie, well named “The Jackal,” poached Bellow from his longtime agent Harriet Wasserman.
Varmaan lupas Salelle pyllynamia.


ellauri052.html on line 952: Bellow’s portrait of the Romantic author was self-reflective: “The artist is a spurned and misunderstood genius whose sensitivity separates him from and elevates him above the rest of philistine humanity.”
ellauri052.html on line 958: During an awkward sexual encounter with Harriet Wasserman, she remembered “asking him for permission, as if it were a museum objet d’art, ‘Can I touch this?’” Many of his mistresses remained in love and in touch with him. Scott Fitzgerald said that Hemingway “needed a new woman for each big book”; Bellow lost a woman with each big book. He spilled sperm as he spilled ink, and sex both interfered with and inspired his writing. Bellow created and lived on turbulence, thrived on chaos, courted conflict and was inspired by personal cataclysm. He reported that one lover (mies vai nainen?) “caused me grandes dificultades in England and in the south, but I finished Sammler just the same.” The bearers of erogenous zones (either sex) made him feel younger, “it was a way of avoiding the Angel of Death,” and he cherished their provocative bitchiness. Bellow’s emotional upheavals — his guilt and remorse, multitudinous failings and need for self-condemnation — made him beat his breast at his private Wailing Wall. Se oli kuin kunkku David jolle tuotiin neitosia pyllynlämmittimixi.
ellauri052.html on line 967: Bellow’s most merciless and eviscerating tormenter was his third wife, Susan Glassman, who defeated him in a long, acrimonious and expensive divorce suit. In 1974, after he had fraudulently misrepresented his projected income, the court, hostile to a successful Jewish intellectual, “ordered him to pay Susan $2,500 a month in alimony, backdated to 1968, plus $600 a month child support, plus lawyers’ fees.” Ignoring his own lawyer’s sound advice to settle the case, he surrendered to a self-destructive impulse, continued to appeal and deliberately prolonged his agony.
ellauri052.html on line 969: The rap against Bellow is that he maligned four of his five wives, especially in his fiction. This is true, and Leader is savvy enough not to take Bellow’s word about them. Wife No. 1, Anita, is shown as the underappreciated mainstay she obviously was. As for wife No. 2, Sondra Tschacbasov Bellow (Bellow called her Sasha), the model for the evil Madeleine, Leader has a scoop: an unpublished memoir shared with him after Bellow’s death. By her own account, Sasha was a vulnerable child-woman lacking basic life skills. From childhood and into her teens, she says, she was the victim of incest committed by her father. When Bellow took up with her, he was 37 and she was 21, a Bennington graduate and a secretary at the Partisan Review. His friends treated her with a sniggering sexism unfortunately unremarkable in the 1950s. At a party Bellow took her to, the critic R. W. B. Lewis, her former professor, drunkenly demanded to
ellauri052.html on line 970: know whether she was sleeping with Bellow yet; “they were all placing bets.” She started an affair with Bellow’s friend Jack Ludwig (the prototype for Gersbach in Herzog) only after she learned of her husband’s many infidelities.
ellauri052.html on line 977: The most important person in Bellow’s life—Maury, his oldest brother. As Leader shows, Maury was both the driving force in Bellow’s Americanization and a major presence in his work. Parents and wives came and went, but Maury remained: Simon in Augie March, Shura in Herzog, Julius in Humboldt’s Gift. As peremptory and violent as their father but more competent, Maury epitomized the cult of power and material success that both fascinated and repelled Bellow. “I recognized in him the day-to-day genius of the U.S.A.,” Bellow said in an interview with Philip Roth. In the same conversation, Roth observed that Maury’s reckless, angry spirit was “the household deity of Augie March.” By the time Maury finished law school, he had already started collecting graft for a corrupt Illinois state representative, skimming off the top for himself and his mother. A charismatic ladies’ man with an illegitimate son, Maury was “very proud of his extraordinary group of connections, his cynicism, his insiderhood,” Bellow told Roth. Maury was disdainful of his brother’s nonremunerative choice of profession, which he considered luftmenschlich—frivolous, impractical.
ellauri106.html on line 621: Mailer was hugely popular at his peak, but now he’s probably best known for that whole stabbing-his-second-wife awkwardness; Updike is regularly derided as “a misogynist”; and Bellow’s female characters are often, at best, thinly drawn, or full-on bitches and shrews. Now, inevitably, it’s Roth’s turn. Roth’s women were either “vicious and alluring” or “virtuous and boring”.
ellauri109.html on line 539: Roth mined his life for his characters from the beginning. He also found himself liberated, as the fifties wore on, by the example of two older Jewish-American writers. Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March” helped “close the gap between Thomas Mann and Damon Runyon,” Roth recalled. Bernard Malamud’s “The Assistant” showed him that “you can write about the Jewish poor, you can write about the Jewish inarticulate, you can describe things near at hand.”
ellauri109.html on line 581: in 2000, James Atlas’s biography of Bellow appeared. It was a book that Roth had urged Atlas to write, but Bellow hated it, and so, in the end, did Roth. An acidic trickle of disenchantment, especially regarding Bellow’s inconstancy with women and family, runs through it. Oma vika pikku sika.
ellauri185.html on line 857: Bellow’s bad temper in the late ’60s was by no means directed exclusively at would-be biographers, radical students and aggrieved wives. Bellow had so many targets to attack, whether insulting them face to face or in blistering letters or put-downs circulated through intermediaries. One of his favorite one-liners ran: “Let’s you and him fight.” The most salient recipients of Bellow’s bad temper in this biography were his three sons, each from a different mother — the oldest 21 when this volume starts, the youngest just 1 year old and about to be abandoned after yet another divorce.
ellauri185.html on line 863: The irony in Bellow’s soul was that he craved love and experience, and learned to view people coldly and clinically. The writer Amos Oz recalled most vividly from his friendship with Bellow an exchange that they shared privately about death. “I said I was hoping to die in my sleep, but Saul responded by saying that, on the contrary, he would like to die wide awake and fully conscious, because his death is such a crucial experience he wouldn’t want to miss it.”
ellauri222.html on line 70: Bellow’s bad temper in the late ’60s was by no means directed exclusively at would-be biographers, radical students and aggrieved wives. Bellow had so many targets to attack, whether insulting them face to face or in blistering letters or put-downs circulated through intermediaries. One of his favorite one-liners ran: “Let’s you and him fight.” The most salient recipients of Bellow’s bad temper in this biography were his three sons, each from a different mother — the oldest 21 when this volume starts, the youngest just 1 year old and about to be abandoned after yet another divorce.
ellauri222.html on line 76: The irony in Bellow’s soul was that he craved love and experience, and learned to view people coldly and clinically. The writer Amos Oz recalled most vividly from his friendship with Bellow an exchange that they shared privately about death. “I said I was hoping to die in my sleep, but Saul responded by saying that, on the contrary, he would like to die wide awake and fully conscious, because his death is such a crucial experience he wouldn’t want to miss it.”
ellauri222.html on line 83: “I am an American, Chicago born” begins the famous first sentence of “The Adventures of Augie March.” The author of that sentence was actually an illegal immigrant, Canada born, and the words were written in Paris. Bellow’s father, Abraham Belo, was born in a shtetl inside the Pale of Settlement. He began his career in St. Petersburg as a produce broker, specializing in Egyptian onions and Spanish fruit. The family seems to have been quite well off. Abraham had used a forged document to work in St. Petersburg, and, when this was discovered, he was arrested and convicted. He may have gone to prison. But he managed to escape and, in 1913, to get his family to Canada.
ellauri222.html on line 97: “In college I behaved as though my career was to be a writer, and that guided me,” Bellow later said. There was also the fact that his principal interest was literature, and, until after the war, Jews were rarely hired by English departments. “You weren’t born to it” is the way the chairman of the department at Northwestern clarified the matter when Bellow inquired about graduate school. Leader thinks that this encounter “produced a lifelong antipathy, mild but real, to English departments.” It’s true that there was antipathy. But Bellow would have been interested in a university career only as a means to support his writing. Fiction was his calling. “He was focused, he was dedicated to becoming what he was, from the beginning,” David Peltz, Bellow’s oldest friend, told Leader. “I mean, he never veered.”
ellauri222.html on line 99: Bellow published his first short story in 1941. It came out in Partisan Review—marking the start of a relationship that was key to establishing Bellow’s reputation as the intellectuals’ chosen novelist. Bellow visited New York frequently, and lived there at various points, but he was never comfortable in the city. “I congratulated myself with being able to deal with New York,” he told Philip Roth near the end of his life, “but I never won any of my struggles there, and I never responded with full human warmth to anything that happened there.”
ellauri222.html on line 105: So even “Dangling Man,” an awkwardly written book about which Bellow later said, “I can’t read a page of it without feeling embarrassed,” was received as a sign that the novel might after all be up to its historic task. “Here, for the first time I think, the experience of a new generation has been seized,” Delmore Schwartz wrote, in Partisan Review. In The New Yorker, Edmund Wilson called “Dangling Man” a “testimony on the psychology of a whole generation.” When Bellow’s second novel, “The Victim,” came out, in 1947, Martin Greenberg, in Commentary, explained that Bellow had succeeded in making Jewishness “a quality that informs all of modern life . . . the quality of modernity itself.” In Partisan Review, Elizabeth Hardwick suggested that Bellow might become “the redeeming novelist of the period.”
ellauri222.html on line 107: This notion that Bellow’s achievement as a novelist was redemptive of the form was a consistent theme in the reviews up through “Herzog.” So was the notion that his protagonists were representatives of the modern condition. After “Herzog,” those reactions largely disappeared. People stopped fretting about the death of the novel, and Bellow’s protagonists started being treated as what they always were, oddballs and cranks. But the critical reception of Bellow’s books in the first half of his career funded his reputation. It cashed out, ultimately, in the Nobel Prize. Nobels are awarded to writers who are judged to have universalized the marginal.
ellauri222.html on line 135: At Bard, Bellow became close friends with a literature professor named Jack Ludwig. As Leader describes him, Ludwig was an oversized personality, a big man, extravagant, a shameless purveyor of bad Yiddish, and an operator. Ludwig idolized Bellow; people who knew them said that Ludwig wanted to be Bellow. He flattered Bellow, went for long walks with him, started up a literary journal with him, and generally insinuated himself into Bellow’s life. Bellow accepted the proffer of adulatory attentiveness. The couples (Ludwig was married) socialized together. This was the period when Bellow wrote “Seize the Day,” which Partisan Review published in a single issue, in 1956, after The New Yorker turned it down, and “Henderson the Rain King,” published in 1959, a novel whose hero was based on a neighbor of the Bellows in upstate New York.
ellauri222.html on line 143: In November, Bellow learned from a possibly overly conscientious babysitter that Sasha and Ludwig were sleeping together. It turned out that the affair had been going on for two and a half years, since the summer of 1958. And although Ludwig was still married, it continued. Adam was living with Sasha while it was going on. Given Bellow’s vulnerabilities, the double betrayal was his worst nightmare come to life. According to Atlas, he talked about getting a gun.
ellauri222.html on line 151: “Herzog” was nevertheless received the way all Bellow’s novels had been received: as a report on the modern condition. Many of the critics who reviewed it—Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Richard Ellmann, Richard Poirier—knew Bellow personally and knew all about the divorce. (Poirier was an old friend of Ludwig’s; the review he published, in Partisan Review, was a hatchet job.) None of these reviewers mentioned the autobiographical basis of the book, and several of them warned against reading it autobiographically, without ever explaining why anyone might want to. The world had no way of knowing that the story was not completely made up.
ellauri222.html on line 159: And it got even better. Jack Ludwig reviewed the novel. He informed readers of Holiday that “the book is a major breakthrough.” By no means should it be read as autobiography—“as if an artist with Bellow’s enormous gifts were simply playing at second-guessing reality, settling scores.” No, in this book, Ludwig wrote, “Bellow is after something greater.” The greater something turns out to be “man’s contradiction, his absurdity, his alienation,” and so on. It was pretty chutzpadik, as even Bellow had to admit. But by then he was laughing all the way to the bank.
ellauri222.html on line 161: You can see the biographical problem. From the beginning, Bellow drew on people he knew, including his wives and girlfriends and the members of his own family, for his characters. In “Augie March,” almost every character—and there are dozens—was directly based on some real-life counterpart. Most of “Herzog” is a roman à clef. Leader therefore decided to treat the novels as authoritative sources of information about the people in Bellow’s life. When Leader tells us about Jack Ludwig and Sondra Tschacbasov, he quotes the descriptions of Gersbach and Madeleine in “Herzog.” In the case of the many relatives with counterparts in “Augie March,” this can get confusing. You’re not always sure whether you’re reading about a person or a fictional version of that person.
ellauri222.html on line 163: One reason for reading biographies of writers like Bellow, who draw from people in their own lives, is to learn what those people were really like, or at least what they were like to someone who is not Bellow. You often can’t do that with Leader’s biography. Leader also wants to assess Bellow’s accomplishment as a novelist. He has to keep three balls in the air at once: the biographical story, an interpretation of the fiction as autobiography, and a consideration of the fiction as fiction. That’s why his book is so long.
ellauri222.html on line 165: Structure was always Bellow’s weak point. One of his first editors at Partisan Review, Dwight Macdonald, worried about what he called a “centerless facility.” Podhoretz was not wrong about the problem of shapelessness in “Augie March.” The novel’s antic style is like a mechanical bull. For a few hundred pages, Bellow is having the time of his life, letting his invention take him where it will. By the end, he is just hanging on, waiting for the music to stop. It takes the story five hundred and thirty-six pages to get there.
ellauri222.html on line 175: The decorum in Bellow criticism is to acknowledge the original of the fictional character when the person is famous, and otherwise to insist on treating it all as fiction. Thus everyone knows that, in “Humboldt’s Gift,” Von Humboldt Fleisher “is” Delmore Schwartz, and that, in “Ravelstein,” Abe Ravelstein “is” Allan Bloom, the Chicago professor who wrote “The Closing of the American Mind” and was a good friend of Bellow’s.
ellauri222.html on line 177: But “Ravelstein” is a revenge novel, too. It’s not really about Ravelstein/Bloom. It’s about the narrator, a writer named Chick, who has been treated cruelly by his wife, Vela, a beautiful and brilliant physicist—a wicked caricature of Bellow’s fourth wife, the mathematician Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea. There are also a couple of drive-by take-downs along the way—of Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion at Chicago rumored to have been involved in the fascist Romanian Iron Guard, and of the owner of a restaurant on St. Martin, in the Caribbean, where Bellow contracted a case of food poisoning that nearly killed him. He brings them into the story just to skewer them.
ellauri222.html on line 179: Podhoretz told Leader that he considered all of Bellow’s characters puppets. And there is something animatronic about them. This is especially true in “Augie March,” where the extended procession of too vivid personalities is like a Wes Anderson movie. Bellow tended to make his characters look the way a child sees grownups, unalterable cartoons, weirdly unself-conscious in their one-dimensionality.
ellauri222.html on line 181: But there is usually one fully imagined character in Bellow’s books, one character whose impulses the author understands and sympathizes with, whose sufferings elicit his compassion, and whose virtues and defects, egotism and self-doubt, honorable intentions and less than honorable expediencies are examined with surgical precision and unflinching honesty. That character is the protagonist—Augie, Herzog, Chick, even Tommy Wilhelm, in “Seize the Day,” who tries to leverage his pain to win respect. Their real-life counterpart is, of course, Saul Bellow, whose greatest subject was himself.
ellauri222.html on line 803: British critics tend to regard the American predilection for Big Novels as a vulgar neurosis — like the American predilection for big cars or big hamburgers. Oh God, we think: here comes another sweating, free-dreaming maniac with another thousand-pager; here comes another Big Mac. First, Dos Passos produced the Great American Novel; now they all want one. Yet in a sense every ambitious American novelist is genuinely trying to write a novel called USA. Perhaps this isn’t just a foible; perhaps it is an inescapable response to America – twentieth-century America, racially mixed and mobile, twenty-four hour, endless, extreme, superabundantly various. American novels are big all right, but partly because America is big too. You need plenty of nerve, ink and energy to do justice to the place, and no one has made greater efforts than Saul Bellow. In 1976 Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, praised by the Swedes ‘for human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture’. Many times in Bellow’s novels we are reminded that ‘being human’ isn’t the automatic condition of every human being. Like freedom or sanity, it is not a given but a gift, a talent, an accomplishment, an objective. The busiest sections of the Chicago bookstores, I noticed, were those marked ‘Personal Growth’.
xxx/ellauri224.html on line 147: This is a situation often found in Bellow’s work: the alliance between the shady millionaire and the intellectual. As a teenager, Trellman had been in love with Amy Wurstin, who had eventually chosen as her second husband Trellman’s best friend in high school, Jay Wurstin. Huom toisexi aviomiehexi, ei tää ole ihan se tavallinen tarina. Throughout the years, Harry Trellman had kept firm to the inner image of Amy in his mind even as he went through his varied career moves. Sitten kotirouviintunut Amy petti Jayta jonkun "Ankan" kanssa ja jäi erossa pennittömäxi. Siitä tuli sisustaja.
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