The great and good and controversial Saul Bellow, pre-eminent among American novelists of the second half of the 20th century and winner of the 1976 Nobel prize for literature, has died aged 89.
To identify him only with the last half of the century is unfair. He announced his presence as early as 1944 with Dangling Man and, as the century closed and the new millennium began, he was writing novellas. He said he had come to believe with Chekhov that he could not read a novel without wishing it were shorter.
The Actual, a love story tightly written but full of vintage Bellow touches, was published in 1997. That year, at the age of 82, he also turned his hand to a literary review, The Republic of Letters. With Ravelstein, in 2000, he returned to longer fiction. Inspired by the life of his close friend Allan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind, the book dealt with a professor dying of Aids.
Bellow had been part of the Greenwich Village literary scene in the late 1930s and 1940s. In the early 1950s he published stories in the New Yorker and Harper's Bazaar, and in Partisan Review and other magazines. In 1953 he produced The Adventures of Augie March with its marvellous opening: "I am an American, Chicago-born - Chicago, that sombre city - and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style", and was recognised as a new major American novelist.
In 1956 he published Seize The Day, an intense novella about the ruin of a New York Jewish salesman. This was overshadowed by Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman, but the Nobel committee gave Seize The Day special praise when awarding the prize to Bellow and it was made into a film with Robin Williams in 1986. In 1959, Bellow became an international bestseller with Henderson the Rain King, a marvellously comic fable about an eccentric American millionaire who finds his soul among tribesmen in Africa.
In 1964 came Herzog, a novel that was immediately accepted as a masterpiece, "a well-nigh faultless novel". Brendan Gill of the New Yorker called it. The story of Moses Herzog seemed on the surface to be yet another tale of mid-life crisis, but this time the story was in the hands of a magician. Herzog was the intellectual-as-comic-figure, a familiar hero in European fiction, but new to America: almost, one would think, un-American.
In 1975 Bellow produced another masterpiece, Humboldt's Gift. As with Herzog, a glance at the plot and characters suggests yet another colourful romp:
Charlie Citrine, a Chicago writer and academic, is enmeshed in a series of lawsuits from his ex-wife; his career has ground to a halt; he is involved with Renata, an expensive and unsuitable woman; he has fallen foul of a mafioso called Rinaldo Cantabile. Then news reaches him that Von Humboldt Fleisher, a friend of happier days, has died in poverty in New York, leaving him a legacy.
This is the stuff of a comic novel, but the Bellow trick was to make it also deeply serious. "The name of Dostoevsky immediately gives us our bearings," Philip Toynbee wrote in the Observer. "His best yet, and there is nobody writing novels in English who can match it," he added.
Bellow was essentially a satirist, very comic and often extremely vulgar, but his characters were in search of God. He said that until he was 40 he never earned more than $3,000 or $4,000 a year. The life of a poor Jewish scholar would have suited him, he said, but he became rich. He was handsome, dressed snazzily and became a ladies' man, although he denied the title; he said he wasn't frivolous enough, that he kept marrying them.
He was married five times, as much as a Hollywood star, Ernest Hemingway or Norman Mailer, and his personal life was reflected in the lives of his heroes. After Herzog, they became rich men of tortured sensibilities hemmed in by the vulgarity, lust and greed of those about them.
He won the Pulitzer prize (for Humboldt's Gift), he was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was awarded the Croix de Chevalier and given the Légion d'Honneur in France and in Italy he won the Malaparte prize for literature.
But there was a backlash. This came in 1976 after he won the Nobel and gained a wider non-literary readership in the US. He was accused of racism ("niggerlove" is an unfortunate word that crept into Herzog) and of antisemitism ("kikes" appears in Humboldt's Gift) and of being anti-women (there are no end of bitches in his oeuvre).
In his 80s, he said that he had always thought there would be a golden age, but "in the writer's life there is no golfing period . . . It is always the hard-backed chair and the next book."
Saul Bellow (Solomon Belov), novelist, born June 10th, 1915; died April 5th, 2005