578 The American Century: Literature since 1945capacity to feel or do can really have dwindled or that the quality of humanity has
degenerated,” he went on. “I rather think that people appear smaller because society
has become so immense.” This catches something of the concern that lies at the
heart of Bellow’s own novels, which navigate the two rivers of American history in
their own agonized yet corrosively comic way. Bellow was scornful of those writers
who believe that, as he put it, “fiction cannot leave current events without withering
away.” Yet he was also convinced that no novel could satisfy without what he called
“a firm sense of the common world.” He was equally contemptuous of those who
believed it should be “the intent of the writer to pull us into an all-sufficient
consciousness which he, the writer, governs absolutely.” But he also clearly believed
that the novelist could and should be a historian of the consciousness, especially at
a time when the apparatus of society threatened, as he saw it, to overwhelm both
consciousness and conscience. His aim, throughout his career, was to steer between
two kinds of novel: the novel of information, with its exclusive interest in externals,
things, process, and documentation, and the novel of sensibility written out of the
assumption that “the important humanity of the novel must be the writer’s own.”
He tried to assimilate and understand his times without surrendering to the hideous
facts mongered by the mass media – what is called in his 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s
Planet “the anarchy of the streets.” He tried, in short, to be a historian of civilization
as well as consciousness.
No novel by Bellow is exactly exemplary because a key feature of his achievement
is his ability to dramatize his concerns in a variety of fictional forms. His two earliest
novels gravitate toward the condition of nightmare and the leading character as
victim. His second novel, actually called The Victim (1947), is about the agonizing,
equivocal relation between a Jew and gentile who, despite their radical differences,
seem “dependent for the food of spiritual life” upon each other. His first, Dangling
Man (1944), shows us a man caught precisely between the life around him and the
life within him, as he waits for induction into the army. With his third novel,
The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Bellow adopted a picaresque, far more
extrovert form; as he was also to do for his fifth book, Henderson the Rain King
(1950). “The great pleasure of the book,” Bellow recalled of Augie March, “was that
it came easily. All I had to do was to be there with the buckets, to catch it. That’s why
the form is loose.” “I am an American,” Augie announces on the first page of the
book, “Chicago born ... and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style.”
Adventuring through several countries, Bellow’s larger-than-life mythic hero
pursues, just as his other protagonists do, a search for identity. “I have always tried to
become what I am,” he insists. And his story is a quest to discover what the right
relationship between his self and his society should be: what will enable him to
realize what he calls the “universal eligibility to be noble.” Typically of this extroverted
novel, the extremes he has to maneuver between are dramatized in two characters,
his brothers. The one, his older brother, has become a social success but at the
expense of brutalizing, even destroying, himself. The other, his younger brother, is
pure of spirit, sweet, simple-minded, helpless – and terrified of leaving the enclosure
of the self, just as much as he is of venturing outside the walls of the asylum in whichGGray_c05.indd 578ray_c 05 .indd 578 8 8/1/2011 7:31:32 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 32 PM