Bellow's Best and Worst

...He is always the writer who takes himself as a sample of one in dealing with the world...

...Indeed, all of Bellow's heroes, from Joseph in Dangling Man through the jaded but intractable Sammler, have been unequivocally certain about their personal assessment of an extraordinarily complex range of issues and events, and this outspokenness, this absolute lack of ambivalence, has been among the major delights of Bellow's fictional achievement...

...Why life, why death...

...Finally, he made the time-honored American migration to the big city, to seek out the glittering new star of poetry, Von Humboldt Fleisher...

...It was in this way that Humboldt, with his skeptically rational City College education, stubbornly faithful to the "failed ideas'' that constipate our souls, had lost his poetry and his life...

...Augie describes this as "a feeling about the axial lines of life, with respect to which you must be straight or else your existence is merely clownery, hiding tragedy.' Tommy Wilhelm, in Seize the Day, weeping uncontrollably in the rubble of his hope, continues to yearn for "a promise that mankind might comprehend why it lives...

...As a young man in the 1930s, mad for literature as he sat amid the alien corn of the Middle West, Charlie panted to belong to the glorious cultural vortex of New York...

...What has given such redoubtable weight to the work of Saul Bellow, from his remarkable beginning with Dangling Man, more than 30 years ago, to his new novel, Humboldt's Gift (Viking, 487 pp., $10.00), published this summer shortly after his 60th birthday, has been this risk in the celebration of mind as passion...

...At the age of 60, a writer of ideas should be more than ready to make his richly earned statement about the "axial lines" of life and death, but in Humboldt's Gift Bellow is curiously detached, reluctant to be completely candid about Charlie's embrace of Steiner's "spiritual science" and mystical arithmetic...

...Sammler's Planet, and Moses Elkenah Herzog, who is a one-man Circumlocution Office—Humboldt is an instant classic...

...He never published a second book, went berserk and tried to kill his wife, was dragged in and out of loony bins, and turned violently against his good friend Charlie in envious contempt for his success...

...I had neither vivid actuality nor symbolic clarity," he admits, "and for the time being I was utterly nowhere...

...I can think of no other 20th-century American author whose work, drawn entirely and inexhaustibly from his life and his exploration of the perilous landscape of philosophic and cultural ideas, has so fully and clearly reflected his own opinions and judgments...

...Long festering with vengeful revulsion against rationalist intellectuals, especially the arrogant New York makers and shakers whom he (like Bellow) had rejected in favor of bleak, cultureless Chicago, Charlie has become possessed by a sense of mission?as if I had been stamped and posted and they were waiting for me to be delivered at an important address...

...And what comes through by the end is that—depending on the part of Humboldt's Gift one is reading?this is Saul Bellow's best and also least satisfactory novel...

...Yet it is not in fact late-middle-age nostalgia that compels Citrine's nagging recollection of Humboldt in both his prime and his madness...

...But now, in his early 60s, Citrine's life and soul, too, are infested with disorder—his writing is no longer a sure thing, he is being persecuted by his ex-wife—and he remembers with shame how he avoided Humboldt, fat aid rank with decay, on a New York street a few months before the poet's recent death...

...Bellow, more than any other contemporary writer, is the exuberant novelist of ideas, pursuing his difficult, hard-earned vision amid the oppressively distracting and comic turbulence of urban Jewish life in the United States...

...His heroes are constantly asking not who they are—they know who they are, identity is never their crisis—but what they are metaphysically part of...

...I may contain unusual information...

...Even his least intellectual hero, the picaresque Augie March, is intoxicated with the cerebral elixir of first principles, immutable as the tides, that convert the racketing chaos of America into constraining notions about destiny, character and fate...

...Nothing in Bellow's earlier work—or, for that matter, in brilliant parts of Humboldt's Gift—begins to persuade me that his skeptical intelligence can be in agreement with Steiner's pompous elaborations of the invisible...

...Bellow is the only novelist equal to the task of creating memorable caricatures that match those of Dickens, and in his brilliant gallery of eccentrics and grotesques—Einhorn and Mintouchian in The Adventures of Augie March, Dr...

...As a bonus, Humboldt has outlined a film scenario that at first sight is ridiculous but eventually turns into a hit which solves all of Charlie's financial problems...

...In fear and trembling before the riddles of human existence, Citrine has been exploring the anthroposo-phical ideas of Rudolf Steiner and seriously brooding about reincarnation, immortality and the transmigration of souls, in reaction against "fellow intellectuals of my generation who had lost the imaginative soul...

...When Charlie ultimately comes into Humboldt's legacy—a letter written in the fresh air of sanity not long before he died—the clear voice of the master talker affirms Citrine's faith in his theosophical efforts ("Remember: we are not natural beings but supernatural beings...

...Rich boys, poor boys, jewboys, goyboys, chorus girls, prostitution and religion, old money, new money Henry Adams, Henry James, Henry Ford"—he was scarcely out of breath at the dawn's exhausted light...

...To be sure, Citrine is another of Bellow's obsessively speculative and much-put-upon protagonists...

...unfortunately, somewhere around the moment Charlie opens Humboldt's letter from the grave, the novel itself goes askew, spinning out of control with erratic implausibility, creaking with bizarre and mechanical improvisations that seem either astonishingly sentimental and out of character for Bellow, or desperately inventive...

...What I miss here is the persuasive resonance of conviction that has always been an essential part of Bellow's vigorously sardonic genius...

...To understand these troublesome words is, for Bellow, to be that much less at the mercy of capricious experience...

...An irrepressible, nonstop Jewish talker, he was "a Mozart of conversation" who in a single evening could with virtuoso authority cut his way like a machete through "Polish socialism and Arnold Toynbee, and (somehow) the used-car business...

...Sammler's brutally earned assurance is still far beyond Citrine's grasp...

...Bellow's eye and ear for the human comedy of pretentious significance have always been too acute, too reasonable, to let me equate Citrine's "mission" with that of the author...

...And Artur Sammler, the oldest of Bellow's representative men, spent and weary, with only a short time remaining to his long and parched survival of Hitler's Europe, feels obliged to ask, in the end, whether he has met the terms of his contract...

...But Humboldt was unable to sustain a youthful dazzle, and "never became the radiant center of his age," while Charlie went on to riches and Pulitzer glory as a playwright and popular historian...

...he knows he must never allow himself to forget why he has been put here?to do what was required of him...

...What makes the book particularly puzzling is that for the first time one cannot hear the voice of a principal Bellow character asserting the confident moral and intellectual opinions of the novelist himself...

...Because contemporary man has refused to confront the possibility that human consciousness survives the physical oblivion of death, that there is an "inner being" separate from the deceptive finalities of nature, he is suffocating with boredom ("a kind of pain caused by unused powers") and has debased his language to "babbling and grunting and TV commercials—the dog-food level of things...

...Writers & Writing BELLOWS BEST AND WORST BY PEARL K. BELL The great novelist is one who is willing to take intellectual risks, daring to impose his own uniquely wrought order on the offerings of imagination and memory without being rigid or sentimental...

...Tamkin in Seize the Day, Shula in Mr...

...Slick and evasive, Charlie was unable to confront the dreadful contrast the years had imposed between himself and his former idol...

...Bellow's names, as usual, are inspired...

...In another time-honored American custom, Humboldt fell apart even faster than he could talk...

...The powerful moral conviction contained in each of Bellow's novels, however, becomes a form of torment to Charlie Citrine, the questing narrator of Humboldt's Gift, who has not yet made his way through a recently sighted metaphysical maze...