Remembering Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow, who died on April 5 at age 89, has received praise suitable for a Nobel Prize winner who was perhaps the greatest American novelist of the past half-century. Much of the commentary has focused on his longstanding ties to Chicago, and some of it has emphasized the importance of his Jewishness.

For me, Bellow's death has opened the floodgates of memory, bringing me back to a time when, as a 20-year-old undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I had the remarkable opportunity to be his student in a class on the modern novel.

Before coming as a "Celebrity in Residence" for that three-month quarter, Bellow had lived outside the city for most of the previous two decades. But his Chicago roots were intact. He and his family had moved to Chicago from Montreal when he was a child, and he had grown up in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. A graduate of Tuley High School, Bellow attended both the University of Chicago and Northwestern.

His breakthrough novel, "The Adventures of Augie March," published in 1953, chronicled the coming of age of a Jewish young man in Chicago. I had studied it as the closing work in a class at Chicago taught by another notable American novelist, Ralph Ellison, who had preceded Bellow as a "Celebrity in Residence" there.

Reading a passage from Bellow's novel out loud, Ellison (who I've since learned was a good friend of Bellow's at the time) looked up at the class and, with a knowing look in his eye, asked us to identify the nature of Bellow's prose. Surprised by the absence of a response, he talked about the Yiddish qualities of the rhythms and digressions.

Close to the time when he produced "Augie March," Bellow had demonstrated his grasp of Yiddish by translating Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story "Gimpel the Fool"—a step that did much to put Singer himself on the literary map.

I looked forward to Bellow's coming for a number of reasons. My father's family, with an Eastern European Jewish background similar to that of Bellow's, had also moved to the Humboldt Park neighborhood, in their case from western Canada, just one year before Bellow's family did. Five of Bellow's novels had already been published, most recently "Henderson the Rain King," and he had already established himself as a major writer.

A teacher in the English department from whom I took several courses, Richard Stern, had talked enthusiastically about the novel Bellow was working on at the time. Having read the manuscript, Stern predicted that whenever that book, which came to be called "Herzog," was released, that would be the publishing event of the year.

When the class began, I found it and Bellow to be everything I was anticipating and more. It met in Cobb Hall, where about 20 or so of us sat around an oblong table. I can still picture him entering the room and looking around, ready to sit down and talk with us. I vividly remember the twinkle in his eye and his engaging smile. It struck me that he exuded a unique "simpatico" quality, with an aura of what has come to be called charisma.

Looking into the old class notebook I've saved in a now-mildewing carton with a handful of other such relics from my academic past, I find that one day, rather than taking notes, I spent a few minutes describing "a middle-aged man's body, formerly slight and athletic, now spreading." I see a reading list that went from Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" to Thomas Mann's "Dr. Faustus." In between were Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy; Thomas Hardy and Samuel Butler; James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence; William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. They were writers who formed a literary tradition in which Bellow no doubt saw himself, though in his comments he rejected aspects of the modernism that they promulgated.

Over and over again, my notes show, Bellow's focus was on the creation of character and the use of language. He was preoccupied as well with the role of the artist and the nature of art, and with the relationship of modern fiction to both earlier literary traditions and contemporary reality. A contemporary scholar might find it of particular interest to note that, while teaching about D.H. Lawrence, Bellow talked of how the "novel of 20th century becomes more personal—the writer trying to solve in his book the problems he is trying to solve in his life."

Bellow approached literature by talking about the text itself, not about what others had to say about it. He often referred us to other novels rather than criticism as a means of deepening our understanding and appreciation for the works we were studying. In assigning the lone paper required for the class (on the conception of the hero and the nature of character in whatever novels we chose to write about), he recommended that we look not at criticism but at essays written by the author or authors in question.

The one external work that he did recommend and cite was "Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature," by Erich Auerbach. When a member of the class who appeared older than anybody else asked him the meaning of the book's title—something that would have been well known to any product of the Aristotelian environment that prevailed on campus—Bellow looked up with a particularly active twinkle in his eye, implying that this was surely an "outsider" who somehow had gotten in there with the rest of us.

After the academic year, I was off to graduate school at the University of Minnesota, where Bellow himself had taught for a couple of stints during the previous decade. He was about to move back to the University of Chicago with a full-time appointment that he maintained for the next 30 years. The publication of "Herzog," which came two years later, in 1964, was indeed a major literary event, as were the publications of his subsequent novels, many of them with Chicago as the setting.

While Bellow always resisted being pigeonholed as a Jewish writer (and belittled the frequent linking of himself with Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth as what he jokingly called "the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of American literature"—using the name of a Chicago Jewish clothing manufacturer), his Jewishness continued to matter to him. He was, the records show, a donor to the Jewish United Fund annual campaign. As is revealed by his journalistic coverage of the Six Day War and a subsequent visit memorialized in "To Jerusalem and Back," he was significantly connected to Israel. And in 1988, when the vicious anti-Semitism of mayoral aide Steve Cokeley (who accused Jewish doctors of deliberately spreading AIDS in the black community) surfaced, he spoke out forcefully in the Chicago Tribune.

Though Bellow left Chicago and lived "out East" during the final dozen years of his life, his Chicago roots were always basic to his identity and his art. That can also be said of his Jewishness, which informed not just the rhythms of his prose and the background of his characters. Auerbach's "Mimesis" begins by discussing texts from Homer and the Bible, representing the two traditions that Bellow derived from.

At the core of his work is a fusion of different, disparate modes—of the cerebral and the physical; of the sophisticated and the earthy; of the cultured and the everyday; of what, in our class, he labeled "low seriousness." (There is also the combination of "ebullience and gloominess" that the writer Paul Berman talked about while memorializing Bellow at a JUF community forum.) This anti-dualism, I would suggest, is not only a defining attribute of Bellow's work and of the ideas it contains, but is essential to the perspective on life and reality that Judaism has offered the world.

While in Lithuania a decade ago, I was speaking with a local Jewish writer who, upon learning that I was from Chicago, excitedly wanted to talk about Bellow. When I told him that I had once had Bellow as a teacher, it was as if I had said that I had personally been at Sinai and had studied with Moshe rabbeinu himself.

As we celebrate the contributions that Jews have made to American life and culture in the 350 years that have passed since the first of us came to this land, high on that list stand the literary achievements of a gifted hometown writer, Saul Bellow.

Michael C. Kotzin is an executive vice president of the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.