Hitchens on Bellow

Christopher Hitchens's review in the November issue of The Atlantic is not online, but it's worth paying the $6.99 cover price to read. The first two volumes of the Library of America's Saul Bellow edition give him a chance to deliver one of his typically personal, erudite and insightful readings of a great writer's work.

At the start of the review, Hitchens asks an interesting question, one I've been turning over for some time, too:

"At Bellow’s memorial meeting, held in the Young Men’s Hebrew Association at Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street two years ago, the main speakers were Ian McEwan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Martin Amis, William Kennedy, and James Wood (now the editor of this finely produced collection). Had it not been for an especially vapid speech by some forgettable rabbi, the platform would have been exclusively composed of non-Jews, many of them non-American. How had Bellow managed to exert such an effect on writers almost half his age, from another tradition and another continent?"

I, too, have been puzzled and concerned by the way in which Amis and McEwan have shown their enthusiasm for Bellow. It seems to me that they've somehow deracinated him.

When I was young, Bellow was thought of not just as a Jewish writer, but as the prototypical Jewish writer, moreso even than Philip Roth, who was perhaps too controversial to hold that title. The worldview of Bellow's novels seemed predicated on his Jewishness, a Jewishness that speaks to the anxieties and paradoxes of assimilation, the pride in and defensiveness of a towering intellect, the ironies that undercut anything that sounds like a grand pronouncement. Not to mention that prose, which never seems far from the cadence of Yiddish-inflected English.

For instance, Martin Amis's famous appreciation of The Adventures of Augie March ("A Chicago of a Novel," The Atlantic Monthly, October, 1995), in which he crowns that book as "the Great American Novel," manages to avoid ever using the words "Jew" or "Jewish" in its thirteen laudatory pages.

How can that be? After all, Jewishness suffuses that book, and all of Bellow's oeuvre. Augie's voice, according to Irving Howe, is "a mingling of high-flown intellectual bravado with racy-tough street Jewishness." (Howe's comment is quoted in James Atlas's Bellow, p. 191.) And as James Atlas puts it so well: "Like Bellow, Augie played down his ethnic status, but it permeated everything he did." (p. 192) For Atlas, Augie March is a synthesis of "two vital cultural strains."

"As a Canadian and as a Jew," Atlas writes, "[Bellow] would always be an outsider, but that same ancestry enabled him to renovate the language, bringing to American literature the legacy of Babel and Chekhov, whose stories he remembered his father reading aloud--in Yiddish--at the dinner table. 'It is the poetry of the Jew that makes his hero what he is,' wrote Karl Shapiro, 'in Chicago, in Mexico, wherever Augie happens to be.'" (p. 193)

Similarly, Ian McEwan's heartfelt memorial, which ran as an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times in 2005, also avoids the words "Jew" and "Jewish."

I have to admit, I find this all very strange. Hitchens's explanation, and he could be right, is that Bellow's work is universal, transcending its ethnicity. And indeed, Atlas says much the same, but note that he does so in a way that does not seem to hide or ignore Bellow's roots: "Yet The Adventures of Augie March wasn't a 'Jewish' novel, Bellow insisted strenuously. It was a novel by an American writer who happened to be a Jew. To claim otherwise would have diminished its universality." (p. 193) I think those scare quotes around "Jewish" are telling. Just because Bellow didn't write a "Jewish" novel, doesn't mean his work wasn't the product of what Atlas calls a "Jewish voice."

It is simply misleading at best--and perverse at worst--not to refer to the identity that informs all of Bellow's work. It would be like talking about James Joyce without mentioning he was Irish.

I would love to see the brilliant minds of Mssrs. Amis, Atlas, Hitchens, and McEwan hash this all out. Maybe in a public forum, such as a New Yorker panel. That would be a literary event worth paying cash money to see.