Nobel Winner Penned Flawed Heroes

Saul Bellow, next to fellow author Susan Cheever, listens during a writers conference in Boston. He moved to Massachusetts in 1993 and worked at Boston University, continuing his long tradition of teaching. (1999 Photo Steven Senne -- AP)

That was a quintessential Saul Bellow rejoinder. He was notoriously impatient with overblown and exaggerated analyses of his work. "The deep reader is apt to lose his head," he had written five years earlier, in a facetious and mocking New York Times Book Review essay, critical of a tendency to overemphasize symbolism in his novel "Henderson the Rain King."

That book told of Eugene H. Henderson, a manic Connecticut millionaire with a second wife and seven children who sought an answer to the riddle of human existence in a journey to Africa.

There Henderson rid the fictitious country of the Arnewi of a plague of frogs but in the process destroyed their cistern. He sought to redeem himself at the court of the fierce Wariri, ended a drought, became the rain king and learned to assume the qualities of a lion.

"Deep readers of the world, beware," wrote Bellow, warning against the critic who "falls wildly on any particle of philosophy or religion and blows it up bigger than the Graf Zeppelin. . . . You had better be sure that your seriousness is indeed high seriousness and not, God forbid, low seriousness."

Like many, if not all, Bellow heroes, Henderson never found the precise formula for his life but learned that he could live without it. He journeyed almost halfway around the world and back to make this discovery, far from the familiar haunts of Chicago and New York where the author had a sharp eye and a keen ear for the idioms and folkways, and a vivid sense of place.

It was to Chicago that Saul Bellow moved from Canada with his family at age 9, and it was there that he grew up. As a teenager he decided he wanted to be a writer, and Chicago in those years was a good place for an aspiring writer to be.

"Chicago, for as much as half a century after the World's Fair of 1893, was a focus for all rawness and power of American capitalism. Yet it was a human scene, still open to a single novelist," Kazin wrote in a piece titled "My Friend Saul Bellow" in the Atlantic Monthly in 1965.

After high school, Bellow entered the University of Chicago and later transferred to Northwestern University, where he graduated in 1937 with honors in anthropology and sociology. He did graduate study in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin but quit to pursue his ambitions as an author. "Every time I worked on my thesis, it turned out to be a story," he said.

For a period he worked for the WPA Federal Writers' Project, preparing short biographies of midwestern novelists, then taught at a teachers college in Chicago and served on the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, where he worked on Mortimer J. Adler's "Great Books" project.

He served in the Merchant Marine during World War II and in that period completed his first novel, "Dangling Man." It was written in the form of a journal and told of the experience of a discontented young man from Chicago who spent an anxious year waiting to be drafted for wartime service.

This was followed in 1947 by "The Victim," which explored such themes as guilt, fear of failure, death, evil, responsibility and anti-Semitism through the life of Asa Leventhal, a middle-aged Jew who unknowingly caused a gentile, Kirby Allbee, to lose his job.

In 1946 Bellow joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota, where he taught English. On a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948 he traveled to Paris, where he began working on "The Adventures of Augie March," which with its 1953 publication would establish his reputation as a major new voice in American fiction.

"I am an American, Chicago-born -- Chicago, that somber city -- and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way," Augie March declared in the opening paragraph of the novel, which was written while Bellow was in Italy, Austria, Long Island and New Jersey, as well as Paris.

Comic, robust and resilient, the Augie March of Bellow's novel tells his own story from his boyhood in Chicago to his wanderings in Michigan, Mexico and the African sea; his attainment of maturity and his experience as an import businessman in Paris. Augie was sometimes described as a 20th-century version of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. His life and times in Bellow's Jewish Chicago inevitably invited comparisons to the stories of author James T. Farrell, which were set in an Irish Chicago of an earlier period.