“The book of ballads published by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the Thirties was an immediate hit”
(opening line).
The year 1976 was an extraordinary year for Saul Bellow. Having already thrice won the National Book Award, the only novelist to do so (his winning novels were The Adventures of Augie March in 1954, Herzog in 1965, and for Mr. Sammler’s Planet in 1971), he also won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Humboldt’s Gift. And that same year, he also became the fifth American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (previous American winners included Sinclair Lewis in 1930, William Faulkner in 1949, Ernest Hemingway in 1954, and John Steinbeck in 1962 –each of whom were fellow Pulitzer Prize-winners, as well). Suffice it to say, in 1976 Saul Bellow had reached the zenith of his literary career. At the time, he was often compared to American literary giants like William Faulkner and in some cases Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain.
However, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Humboldt’s Gift is an extraordinarily dense and, dare I say it, even pretentious novel. It is cluttered with a collection of meandering reflections, digressions, philosophical musings, and academic essays (with no formal chapter breaks). Displaying all the neuroticism of a Woody Allen film, Humboldt’s Gift is also peppered with sophisticated literary allusions (I noted Proust, Marx, Wharton, Yeats, Joyce, Goethe, Pound, Dante, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Brecht, Blake, Locke, Whitman, Plato, Toynbee, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Mill, Durkheim, Malthus, Tolstoy, Freud, Hobbes, Stein, Eliot, Melville, Tennyson, Trotsky, Cocteau, James, Keats, Mozart, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and so on).
Humboldt’s Gift is told from the first-person perspective of Charlie Citrine who is writing as an “elderly fellow now” with a returned child-like spirit. Charlie is a Chicago writer and intellectual who recounts his Jewish family’s emigration from Kiev to the United States. He was born in Appleton, Wisconsin (where Harry Houdini was raised), and he was brought up in Polish Chicago before attending the University of Wisconsin. A lover of current trends in literature, he once penned a letter to an eccentric, avant-garde poet named Von Humboldt Fleisher who had published a popular collection of poems entitled Harlequin Ballads. Charlie winds up borrowing money to visit Humboldt in Greenwich Village and the two quickly spark a friendship (in certain respects Humboldt’s Gift is a tale of two cities –Chicago and New York—though Bellow always regarded the more crass, quintessentially American of the two cities). At the time, Humboldt is regarded as the harbinger of a new generation of literary lights –he was handsome, fair, large, serious, witty, and learned. His success arrived in the 1930s when his name seemed to suddenly appear everywhere, but his popularity began to wane in the 1940s and 1950s when Charlie got famous and wealthy, and Humboldt later grew too depressed to talk. He gained weight, suffered from mania, took pills, and fell into alcoholism before he was eventually locked up in a “loony bin.” But Charlie fondly remembers a younger Humboldt: a “wonderful talker, a hectic nonstop monologuist and improvisator, a champion detractor.”
“The noble idea of being an American poet certainly made Humboldt feel at times like a card, a boy, a comic, a fool. We lived like bohemians and graduate students in a mood of fun and games. Maybe America didn’t need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we. So Humboldt behaved like an eccentric and a comic subject. But occasionally there was a break in his eccentricity when he stopped and thought. He tried to think himself clear away from this American world (I did that, too). I could see that Humboldt was pondering what to do between then and now, between birth and death, to satisfy certain great questions. Such brooding didn’t make him any saner. He had tried drugs and drink. Finally, many courses of shock treatment had to be administered. It was, as he saw it, Humboldt versus madness. Madness was a whole lot stronger” (5).
At his peak, Humboldt is amusingly described as the “first poet in America with power brakes” (20), and appropriately, Charlie’s character study of Humboldt is a portrait of a masochistic oddball who embraces Marxism, yet who also believes that the election of Adlai Stevenson in the United States will bring about a revival of civilization –for example, Humboldt believes that Stevenson could come to personify Aristotle’s great-souled man and that his joint chiefs will all be versed in Thucydides. Here, Bellow’s characterization of Humboldt is based on the late Delmore Schwartz, a self-destructive poet and short story writer who was a friend of Saul Bellow. In fact, Bellow briefly served as Schwartz’s protégé for a spell (Schwartz died in 1966). Perhaps Humboldt’s Gift should best be interpreted as an enduring tribute to the artistic debt Bellow felt he owed to Schwartz. At any rate, as time goes by, Charlie achieves his own spectacular success with his Broadway play “Von Trenck,” along with two celebrated biographies on Woodrow Wilson and Harry Hopkins, in addition to two accompanying Pulitzer Prizes to go with them. Then Charles De Gaulle makes him a knight of the Legion of Honor (a chevalier), Kennedy invites him to the White House, and he becomes a close acquaintance of Bobby Kennedy (much of this is semi-autobiographically based on Bellow’s own life). With all this success, Humboldt continues to grow embittered (he joins a picket line outside Charlie’s play, arguing that true artists and intellectuals will not pursue things solely for the sake of money). Ironically, Humboldt once chided Charlie for also winning the Pulitzer: “They gave Citrine a Pulitzer prize for his book on Wilson and Tumulty. The Pulitzer is for the birds –for the pullets. It’s just a dummy newspaper publicity award given by crooks and illiterates. You become a walking Pulitzer ad, so even when you croak the first words of the obituary are ‘Pulitzer prize winner passes’” (3). Oh irony that Saul Bellow won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel!
Reflecting on all these things from his later years in the 1970s, Charlie remembers the big fight he had with Humboldt in which Humboldt called Charlie a “sell-out, Judas, fink, suck-ass, climber, hypocrite.” Humboldt admits that he stole thousands of dollars from Charlie in a bizarre friendship ritual wherein they both embraced a “blood-brother” pact which granted each other carte blanche to withdraw from each other’s bank accounts if needed. This was followed by fifteen years of estrangement before Humboldt died of a heart attack in a flophouse. Meanwhile, as Charlie recalls this flood of painful memories, he has also been dealing with a multitude of personal crises. For starters, he is in the midst of being shaken down by a fairly silly would-be Al Capone gangster named Rinaldo Cantibile over an unpaid gambling debt (Charlie’s prized Mercedez-Benz has been “mauled with ferocity” in the course of the disagreement); he likely will be unable to make an insurance claim on it; he is also being ripped off by the IRS; his ex-wife Denise (with whom he has two daughters) is suing Charlie for more money; his lawyers are fleecing him; the judges don’t take him seriously, his millionaire brother has apparently abandoned him; and his business partner in California has run their joint literary magazine “The Ark” into the ground. Is this what the pinnacle of success looks like for Charlie? Has he made it in America yet? Or was Humboldt right all those years ago that Charlie has sacrificed artistic passion for financial security only to lose both? Will Charlie simply fall into the same traps as Humboldt? This whole amusing panorama shows us a high-minded intellectual who has become swept up in a string of low-level scandals with a gang of hoodlums and other financial vultures who are draining his wealth and success –Charlie’s disarray compels us to question the nature of his artistic integrity and its conflict with a rapaciously capitalistic society. Is it possible for someone like Charlie to pursue both “glory and gold?”
At any rate, as Charlie struggles with all these interpersonal and financial difficulties, albeit from a distant, detached vantage point, we often see him completely lost in thought, absorbed in his own philosophic interludes, wandering into extensive lectures amidst pages of cosmic diatribes about the larger questions in life –such as love, sex, boredom, death, and numerous other diatribes on the human condition. He is especially interested in communing with the dead and in anthroposophy (a spiritualist practice which also fascinated Saul Bellow). These passages, which are far too numerous to count, serve to highlight Bellow’s comic commentary on the intellectual’s devotion to theory. As one small example, Charlie writes the following reflections on death:
“On esthetic grounds, if on no others, I cannot accept the view of death taken by most of us, and taken by me during most of my life –on esthetic grounds therefore I am obliged to deny that so extraordinary a thing as a human soul can be wiped out forever. No, the dead are about us, shut out by our metaphysical denial of them. As we lie nightly in our hemisphere asleep by the billions, our dead approach us. Our ideas should be their nourishment. We are their grainfields. But we are barren and we starve them. Don’t kid yourself, though, we are watched by the dead, watched on this earth, which is our school of freedom” (142).
The idea of death seems to be intimately connected to friendship and love for Charlie, especially because he once had a relationship with a woman named Demmie who then died in a plane crash in South America. This has caused him to morosely meditate on the nature of death and the afterlife thereafter. He has romances with numerous other women throughout the book, such as Naomi and Sylvie, though he is primarily dating a woman named Renata, a divorcee with a son named Roger. She is a voluptuous woman who is a lover of sex and is desperate for Charlie to propose to her, but Charlie seems uncommitted for most of the novel (partly due to his money woes). In the end, when he is finally ready to commit to her, Renata tragically runs off with another man. In her quite sorrowful final letter to Charlie in Europe, Renata laments his unwillingness to get married and she says, “your passion for Von Humboldt Fleisher speeded the deterioration of our relationship” (438).
In the end, Charlie is left alone when suddenly he is gifted an unexpected “legacy” from Humboldt’s will. Part of it is the script for a comedy about a cannibal which was conceived of by Humboldt and Charlie together many years earlier, their so-called “Princeton idea” (in his letter, Humboldt hilariously writes that he handed the script over to a fellow named Otto Klinsky in the RCA Building, who promised to get it to Sir Laurence Olivier’s hair-dressing cousin who was sister to the scrubwoman at Time and Life who was the other beautician who did Mrs. Klinsky’s hair). The story has received a copyright from Humboldt (this legal hurdle later allows Charlie to receive a settlement since another film has already plagiarized the story). But this is not the only gift. Humboldt also offers Charlie another treatment, a script for a film about a Corcoran author who has an affair with a woman named Laverne and they travel to an island together (perhaps somewhere in Polynesia, or New Guinea, or Abyssinia –an allusion to Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas) but the Corcoran is unable publish a novel he has written about the affair for fear that it will ruin his wife Hepzibah. So to cover his tracks and hide the truth of the affair, he decides to take the very same trip with his wife which amusingly forces him to relive all the same experiences again with his wife Hepzibah that he once did with his lover Laverne. In the end, both women leave the Corcoran after he publishes the book. And in some ways, Charlie’s own predicament mirrors Humboldt’s story treatment. Humboldt ends his letter to Charlie with a few ribbing sentences: “You are lazy, disgraceful, tougher than you think but not yet a dead loss. In part you are humanly okay. We are supposed to do something for our kind. Don’t get frenzied about money. Overcome your greed. Better luck with women. Last of all –remember: we are not natural beings but supernatural beings. Lovingly, Humboldt.” This gift will presumably bring Charlie out of his debt spiral and impending impoverishment, but one wonders to what extent Humboldt’s true gift to Charlie was actually the lasting impression he left and the importance of artistic integrity he inspired. Taken in a certain light, Charlie’s belief in anthroposophy is validated as, in the end, the late Von Humboldt Fleisher manages to communicate with his former friend and protégé from beyond the grave after all.
********
Despite being a chaotic, comedic novel crammed full with a dizzying array of references –almost to the point of absurdity (in some ways, Bellow’s haphazard pace reminded me a great deal of Sinclair Lewis’s novels)– Humboldt’s Gift is also a deeply somber novel, saturated with themes of existential despair. Charlie has numerous ruminations on death, metaphysics, the “immortal spirit,” and even anthroposophy, which all weigh heavily on Charlie’s mind throughout the novel. Personally, I am wrestling with fairly mixed views of Humboldt’s Gift –at points I found myself drawn to Bellow’s prose, mining the periodic gold nuggets from his vast ocean of digressions, but on the whole, reaching the last page of Humboldt’s Gift felt like an incredibly burdensome labor. Somehow, I managed to bring this one over the finish line. Notably, Bellow seemed to agree with this assessment. In a letter to Joyce Carol Oates in April of 1975, Bellow later apologized for taking so long to respond to her because “I sent off Humboldt’s Gift, an amusing and probably unsatisfactory novel.”
Critics also published mixed reviews, as well. Jeffrey Eugenides called it “the funny, bubbly, unflinchingly esoteric book that Bellow published on the eve of his sixtieth birthday.” Philip Roth praised it but called it “far and away the screwiest of the going-every-which-way out-and-out comic novels.” Anatole Broyard wrote in the New York Times: “While the random contents of Saul Bellow’s mind make better reading than most novels, they do not make for a good novel in this case because they are not integrated into the action, such as it is. When the plot sags, as it all too often does, the author inserts a compensatory little essay on boredom, identity, beauty or sloth.” Jack Richardson wrote in Commentary (1975) that Bellow’s novels “do not so much end as wear themselves out,” he later wrote that “Humboldt’s Gift is a sad, shallow book, a statement of intellectual and artistic surrender that has as its only interesting quality that crude sense of humor a writer can sometimes wring out of the willful abasement of his characters.” In Richard Rayner’s 2009 review in the Los Angeles Times he called it “both a crazy mess of a novel and an abiding testament to the vital exuberance of Saul Bellow’s genius.”
Notable Quotations:
“Whenever his mind was sufficiently clear he used his gifts to knock me. He did a great job… And money wasn’t what I had in mind. Oh God, no, what I wanted was to do good. I was dying to do something good. And this feeling for good went back to my early and peculiar sense of existence –sunk in the glassy depths of life and groping, thrillingly and desperately, for sense, a person keenly aware of painted veils, of Maya, of domes of many-colored glass staining the white radiance of eternity, quivering in the intense insane and so on” (2).
“I have a hunch that in life you look outward from the ego, your center. In death you are at the periphery looking inward” (10).
“Was Santayana right? Was modern poetry barbarous? Modern poets had more wonderful material than Homer or Dante. What they didn’t have was a sane and steady idealization. To be Christian was impossible, to be pagan also. That left you-know-what” (11).
“We crave more than ever the radiant vividness of boundless love, and more and more the barren idols thwart this. A world of categories devoid of spirit waits for life to return. This mission or vocation was reflected in his face. The hope of new beauty. The promise, the secret of beauty. In the USA, incidentally, this sort of thing gives people a very foreign look” (16).
“I saw the position into which Humboldt placed Kathleen and I put it into words: Lie there. Hold still. Don’t wiggle. My happiness may be peculiar, but once happy I will make you happy, happier than you ever dreamed. When I am satisfied the blessings of fulfillment will flow to all mankind. Wasn’t this, I thought, the message of modern power? This was the voice of the crazy tyrant speaking, with peculiar lusts to consummate, for which everyone must hold still. I grasped it at once” (22-23).
“There came a time (Early Modern) when apparently, life lost the ability to arrange itself. It had to be arranged. Intellectuals took this as their job. From, say, Machiavelli’s time to our own this arranging has been the one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project. A man like Humboldt, inspired, shrewd, nutty, was brimming over with the discovery that the human enterprise, so grand and infinitely varied, had now to be managed by exceptional persons. He was an exceptional person, therefore he was an eligible candidate for power. Well, why not?” (29).
“Humboldt wanted to drape the world in radiance, but he didn’t have enough material. His attempt ended at the belly. Below hung the shaggy nudity we know so well. He was a lovely man, and generous, with a heart of gold. Still his goodness was the sort of goodness people now consider out of date” (108).
“Often I sat at the end of the day remembering everything that had happened, in minute detail, all that had been seen and done and said” (118).
“What are we doing with each other in the sack? Love is being disgracefully perverted” (298).
“She wished to punish me. But really I couldn’t lose on Renata. I was pleased with her even when she was cross. People looked after her as she passed. Walking behind her I admired the action of her hips. I might not have cared to know what went on behind that beau front; and her dreams might have shocked me but her odor alone was a great solace in the night. The pleasure of sleeping with her went far beyond the ordinary pleasure of sharing a bed. Even to lie beside her was a distinct event. As for insomnia, Humboldt’s complaint, she made that agreeable, too. Energizing influences passed into my hands from her breasts during the night. I allowed myself to imagine that these influences entered my finger bones like a sort of white electricity and surged upward to the very roots of my teeth” (331).
“I was thinking that life was a hell of a lot more bounteous than I had ever realized. It rushed over us with more than our senses and our judgment could take in. one life with its love affairs, its operatic ambitions, its dollars and horse races and marriage-designs and old people’s homes is, after all, only a tin dipperful of this of this superabundance. It rushes up also from within” (336).
“In the racketing speed of the howling, weeping subway I began to read the long letter, the preface to Humboldt’s gift…” (343).
“Actuarially speaking, I had only a decade let to make up for a life-span largely misspent. There was no time to waste even on remorse and penitence. I felt also that Humboldt, out there in death, stood in need of my help. the dead and the living still formed one community. This planet was still the base of operations. There was Humboldt’s bungled life, and my bungled life, and it was up to me to do something, to give a last favorable turn to the wheel, to transmit moral understanding from the earth where you can get it to the next existence where you needed it” (412).
“Genteel America was handicapped by meagerness of soul, thinness of temper, paucity of talent” (427).
On the 1976 Pulitzer Prize Decision
Saul Bellow was previously denied the Pulitzer Prize in 1965 for his novel Herzog, losing out to Shirley Ann Grau’s The Keepers of the House. In fact, one juror called Herzog “overwritten and undisciplined… a pretentious bore.” He was then rejected again for Mr. Sammler’s Planet in 1971 (a year in which no prize was given) before winning the prize for Humboldt’s Gift in 1976.
The 1976 Pulitzer jury consisted of the following three members:
- Eudora Welty (1909-2001, chair) was a successful, award-winning American novelist and short story writer. Her short novella The Optimist’s Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction several years earlier in 1973. Her major works included: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980), winner of the National Book Award; On Writing; One Writer’s Beginnings; and other novels like Delta Wedding, Ponder Heart, The Bride of the Innisfallen, The Robber Bridegroom, and many short story collections. Ms. Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi where she continued to live for many years until her death in 2001. Click here to read my full review of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novella The Optimist’s Daughter.
- Walter Clemons (1930-1994) was a book critic and writer who was on the staff of Newsweek in the 1970’s and 80’s. He was born in Houston, graduated from high school there. He received an A.B. with highest honors in English from Princeton in 1951 and a master’s degree with first-class honors in English in 1953 from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. After Oxford, he went to work as a seaman in the Gulf of Mexico, in offshore seismic exploration. He also worked as a nightclub pianist in New York City and Rome, where he went in 1960 as a recipient of a Prix de Rome. Author of a Volume of Stories. Mr. Clemons was a freelance writer from 1955-65 and was the author of a book of short stories, “The Poison Tree and Other Stories,” that came out in 1959. He was an editor with McGraw-Hill in New York from 1966-68, and an editor and writer with Vanity Fair magazine in 1982 and 1983. He worked with Newsweek from 1971-82 and from 1983-88. In those years, he was an editor, a book critic and a senior writer; he also occasionally wrote criticism of ballet. He wrote a number of cover stories, most of them about authors, including Joyce Carol Oates, Saul Bellow and John Cheever. After 1988, he continued to write reviews for the magazine from time to time. He also wrote criticism for The New York Times, where he was an editor of The Book Review from 1968-71, and for other publications. At the time of his death due to diabetes in 1994, he was in the midst of writing a biography on Gore Vidal.
- Guy Davenport (1927-2005) was a multi-faceted man –a painter, author, teacher, and scholar. He was a professor of English at the University of Kentucky for some three decades and wrote voluminously, from critical essays to translations to poetry. Per his obituary in the New York Times, he was perhaps most admired for short stories in the modernist tradition of Pound and Joyce which earned him a MacArthur genius grant in 1990. Earlier in life he was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford where he studied Old English under J.R.R. Tolkien and wrote his thesis on James Joyce. He served in the US Army in the 1950s and befriended Ezra Pound. He was married briefly in the 1960s and lived with a companion (“Bonnie Jean” Cox) until his death of lung cancer in 2005. He does not appear to have had any children. Amusingly, in one of his essays he claimed that he survived “almost exclusively off fried baloney, Campbell’s soup, and Snickers bars.” He previously served as a Pulitzer Fiction juror in 1973 when Eudora Welty won the prize.
According to Guy Davenport’s letter to Pulitzer Prize Administrator John Hohenberg, Humboldt’s Gift was the first choice of Walter Clemons, it was the second choice of Guy Davenport, and the fourth choice of Eudora Welty. Nevertheless, they all agreed to nominate it for the prize (albeit following a lengthy joint phone call). The first choice of Davenport and the second choice of Clemons was Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father (though Welty did not care for it at all); and E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime was the third choice of both Clemons and Welty (though it was not even on Davenport’s list because he found it to be “simplistic and incoherent”). Eudora Welty’s top choice was Diane Vreuls’s Are We There Yet?, and her second choice Reynolds Price’s The Surface of Earth (though Clemons felt it was “overlong and a trifle turgid except for its torturous narrative technique”).
Additionally, Guy Davenport sent a supplementary report from the fiction jury in which he further explained “that Humboldt’s Gift is a triumphant handling of a strong theme with rich understanding, compassion, sharp insight, and a splendidly sane sense of comedy. His two chief imaginary writers, Humboldt and the narrator Citrine exemplify the trials and temptations of the artist in America, the ambiguities of success and adulation, the problem of identity and fulfillment in our complex society. Artistically the novel is a wonderful return to a style closer to Dickens than to a more contemporary, naturalistic, absurdist, and despairing modes. Bellow is satiric without being harsh, warm without being sentimental, humanistic without being didactic. The novel has integrity and invention. It projects with masterly imagination a complete world about which the author is convincingly informed, and can thus enlarge and deepen our understanding… As in all his novels, Bellow writes essentially as a critic of society and as a philosopher. His concern is to understand rather than to excuse or condemn. As a master of fluid, witty, busy prose he has few peers, and as a master of tone and effect, fewer still.”
John Hohenberg responded to this detailed supplemental letter with gratitude, confessing that he sometimes submits brief notes of jury recommendations to the Pulitzer Board with trepidation. He also took this opportunity to share his retirement plans.
In 1976, a special Pulitzer citation was awarded to John Hohenberg, who served for 22-years as Administrator of the Prizes. It also came with an antique plaque inscribed by all members of the Advisory Board.
Who is Saul Bellow?
Saul Bellow (1915-2005) was born “Solomon Bellows” in Lachine, Quebec to a Russian-Jewish immigrant family who soon moved to Chicago in 1924 where Bellow grew up. The city of Chicago was to become the fictional center of his universe. Bellow grew up reading the Old Testament, Shakespeare, and many classic works of literature. After rejecting his mother’s wish for him to become a rabbi or concert violinist (Bellow rebelled against his mother’s religious orthodoxy, she died when he was 17), he decided to be a writer after reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
He attended the University of Chicago, transferred to Northwestern University (graduating with honors in anthropology and sociology because he felt the English department was anti-Jewish), and he completed graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. In this milieu, he became friends with philosopher and intellectual Allan Bloom, as the pair taught together for many years at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. Bellow initially identified himself as a Trotskyist (in a time when many radical intellectuals associated themselves with Stalin), but later became an opponent of radicalism.
Bellow took a teaching post at Bard, the University of Minnesota, the University of Victoria (British Columbia), the University of Chicago, Yale, New York University, and even the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship which allowed him to publish The Adventures of Augie March (1953), his breakthrough novel. He became a surprise bestseller with the publication of Herzog (1964). His later novels especially seemed to have an autobiographical tone to them. As mentioned in the above review, Humboldt’s Gift (1975) was written as an homage to the late Delmore Schwartz, and Ravelstein (2000) was written as an homage to the late Allan Bloom (published when Bellow was 85). His editor was Harvey Ginsberg, the same editor as John Irving. Bellow famously won the National Book Award three times, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Of his Nobel Prize, Bellow said: “The child in me is delighted… but the adult in me is skeptical.” He was also awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1988 and in 1990 he was presented with the National Book Award Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American letters (he was given the honor of delivering the Jefferson Lecture).
Bellow’s novels often dealt with the tension between intellectuals in society. He was a lifelong student –he taught at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He didn’t drink much, and although he was analyzed four times, his mental health was as robust as his physical health (despite leading a fairly sedentary lifestyle). He was close friends with many leading literary lights, such as Ralph Ellison and Philip Roth (who was also Bellow’s protégé).
He was married five times and had numerous affairs. His wives were Anita Goshkin, Alexandra Tsachacbasov, Susan Glassman, Alexandra Ionescu Tuleca and Janis Freedman (all of Bellow’s marriages ended in divorce except his last marriage to Janis Freedman). He was known to maintain romances alive in different cities, even two or three at a time —with various women, or students, or faculty divorcées at the University of Chicago, assistants at The New Yorker, and even his housecleaner.
He had three sons from three different women. Gregory Bellow, Adam Bellow and Daniel Bellow. Suffice it to say, Bellow had a complicated relationship with his children. For example, at Bellow’s Noble Prize luncheon, his eldest son Gregory announced that he finally realized his father loved him after all, but his father’s way of loving was to work so hard and single-mindedly. Bellow, rather than embracing his firstborn, instead walked into the crowd and shook hands with his middle son, Adam, before saying: “Thanks, kid, for not saying anything.” And off he went, inside a stretch limo with his entourage at his side.
Bellow’s frequent literary collaborator was Keith Botsford, a globe-trotting, multilingual and multifaceted man of letters who founded literary magazines with Bellow including “News from the Republic of Letters.” The magazine took its name from Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, first published in 1684 by the French philosopher Pierre Bayle. Writing under the Bayle-inspired byline “P. B.,” Mr. Botsford contributed sharp opinions on everything from drone attacks to crime fiction. Agatha Christie, to his way of thinking, “can’t write for toffee.” Bellow called the magazine, published twice a year, “a tabloid for literates,” and said that he and Mr. Botsford were “a pair of utopian codgers who feel we have a duty to literature.” Bellow often called him his “sidekick.” In 2001, Mr. Botsford and Bellow collaboratively edited “Editors: The Best From Five Decades,” a 1,000-page mosaic of stories, poems, articles and essays by writers as diverse as Victor Hugo, Martin Amis, S. J. Perelman and John Berryman, most of the material had never before been published in book form. Bellow and Botsford had a half-century of friendship. Botsford said he had helped Bellow craft his Nobel acceptance speech, and he visited Bellow’s bedside shortly before he died. Apparently, Bellow’s last words to him were, “One good thing in my life was that I loved you.”
Bellow relocated from Chicago to Brookline, Massachusetts in 1993 where he died in 2005. Apparently, Bellow inquired from his deathbed: “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” While his question was never answered, many a biographer has sought to portray him one way or another. Since Bellow’s death, several acclaimed biographies have been released. Most recently in 2018 and 2019, Zachary Leader published a two-part biography which explored the many sides of Bellow in his complex life and personality.
In 1966, Saul Bellow was interviewed over a period of many weeks by Gordon Lloyd Harper for the Paris Review between his apartment and cluttered office at the University of Chicago. While the collected interview is worthwhile, it was Bellow’s insistence on editing and re-editing the transcripts which remain perhaps the most notable insight into the man and his writing habits.
Film Adaptations:
- None.
Further Reading:
- The Adventures of Augie March (1953) *National Book Award Winner
- Henderson the Rain King (1959)
- Herzog (1964) *National Book Award Winner
- Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) *National Book Award Winner
- The Life of Saul Bellow (two part-biography) by Zachary Leader
Literary Context in 1975-1976
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1975): awarded to the Italian poet Eugenio Montale “for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions.”
- National Book Award Winner (1976): J R by William Gaddis.
- Booker Prize Winner (1975): Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1975 was Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow. Other novels in the top-ten bestsellers included Curtain by Agatha Christie, The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton, Shogun by James Clavell, and Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow.
- English-born comic writer P. G. Wodehouse received a knighthood, six weeks before he died in the United States.
- The 20-year time limit stipulated by Thomas Mann upon his death expired, thus allowing for 32 of the author’s notebooks to be unsealed in Zürich, Switzerland.
- Milan Kundera emigrated from Czechoslovakia to France.
- Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt was published.
- Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany was published.
- Salem’s Lot by Stephen King was published.
- JR by William Gaddis was published.
- Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow was published.
- Shogun by James Clavell was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
If, for some reason, I had ever been given the chance to sit down for coffee with Saul Bellow, I undoubtedly would have found the conversation incredibly illuminating (I would have loved to hear his perspective on the Committee on Social Thought and listen to stories of his friendship with Allan Bloom) but admittedly I lost interest in Humboldt’s Gift fairly quickly. I found myself more naturally drawn to the writer than the novel itself. While Humboldt’s Gift is littered with little gems worth cultivating for intellectual inquiry, they were often crammed into lengthy, indulgent paragraphs, and Humboldt’s Gift left me feeling somewhat unsatiated and overwhelmed by the absurd volume of academic theories exposited in its pages. And perhaps this was partly Bellow’s goal in writing the novel –exposing the hollow pretentiousness of academic name-dropping. Still, Bellow’s thematic exploration of the tension between artistic integrity and commercial success in Humboldt’s Gift was well-taken, and in some small ways it reminded me of other Pulitzer Prize-winners, such as So Big by Edna Ferber, for it’s nuanced critique of American materialism. I would very much like to read Saul Bellow’s other great novels, particularly The Adventures of Augie March and Mr. Sammler’s Planet, and while I cannot say I have much affection for Humboldt’s Gift on the whole, I am not sure of any other great work that I would easily have selected for the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 –unless, of course, the Pulitzer Prize wished to take a huge risk and honor William Gaddis’s JR, but celebrating postmodern literature has not traditionally been the modus operandi for the Pulitzer.
Bellow, Saul. Humboldt’s Gift. Penguin Books. NY, NY, 2008 (originally published in 1975).
The edition I read included an introductory essay by fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Eugenides.