Lesson 4:   SAUL BELLOW

1READING ASSIGNMENT:
Mr. Sammler's Planet (entire novel)
The Modern Jewish Canon, pp. 296-310

WHO WAS SAUL BELLOW?

Born in Lachine, (Canada), and raised in Chicago (US), Saul Bellow grew up in a traditional Yiddish-speaking home, and continued to speak Yiddish with his brothers long after he had become the most honored writer in American history (he received three National Book awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1976). Bellow developed a voice that was recognizably Jewish and utterly American at a time when Jews were entering the American mainstream no longer as immigrants, but as an integrated minority. Whereas earlier Jewish writers had tended either to tell a "Jewish story" or to omit the Jewish subject entirely, Bellow's characters were Jewish the way they were males, or tall or short — as a function of their being rather than a necessary element in the plot.

INTRODUCTION TO STORY

Bellow's fiction stayed very close to the perspective of his main character-usually a man much like himself, with similar experience, intelligence, and way of looking at the world. The hero of Dangling Man (1944) was a young man the author's age, waiting to be inducted into military service, and the hero of Herzog (1964) had the very same marital problems that Bellow was known to have in his own life. These main characters were thoughtful and brainy, but also down-to-earth in the American sense of trusting "the actual" — in the intricate reality of which they formed a part.

The first exception to this pattern was the title character of Mr. Sammler's Planet, who was fifteen years older than the author at the time of writing. Artur Sammler is a Polish Jew who had spent much time in England and arrived in America after the Second World War. He is also a survivor of that war: Sammler had crawled out of the mass grave where he and his wife were shot. "Like many people who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Sammler entertained the possibility it might collapse twice." During a two-day period in New York City in the late 1960s, what he sees makes him worry that American civilization is on shaky grounds. Nonetheless, he is committed to this planet earth, and tries his best to help preserve it.