Review: ‘There Is Simply Too Much to Think About’ by Saul Bellow

I had long taught Saul Bellow, and have long stopped teaching Bellow. “The Adventures of Augie March,” his 1954 National Book Award-winning novel, is an epic tale of Chicago imagined as an open grid of personal possibility edged by harsh economic (and erotic) realities, wherein the disadvantaged son of immigrants could make his way in the world, create his own American identity. Its opening line is endlessly quoted: “I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.” (So, I will emulate the master and go at this review in my own way.)

“Augie March” is a masterpiece. But fewer Bellow fans, Chicago-born or foreigners like British writer and Bellow aficionado Martin Amis, tout “The Dean’s December” (1982). The titular Dean (a stand-in for Bellow, as is so often the case in his fiction — he usually writes about himself, as either the protagonist or the involved bystander) despises Chicago for its myriad material and philosophical failures. Bellow depicts the city as “a wilderness, and damn monstrous, too,” with open warfare between the “black underclass” and the white power structure, each of which ignores the life of the mind, the great works of philosophers and artists.

The arc between these two novels (along with his essay “A Writer From Chicago”) has framed my own understanding of Bellow. After many years of teaching, and reading and re-reading, I saw Bellow as a bitter man who took out his resentments on the city that had marginalized him. The aspiring immigrant who made it into the ivory tower of the University of Chicago just could not accept Chicago’s disregard of the things that mattered most: art, culture, intelligence. Yes, the city of Chicago values the entrepreneur, the banker and the politician over the creative artist, the scholar, and the thinker.

Got a problem with that? Take a number, pal. Get in line.

He was just Nelson Algren with a University of Chicago sinecure and the official approval of the Swedes, I thought, and he lacked the empathy for the Other that distinguishes so many Chicago writers, from Carl Sandburg, James T. Farrell and Gwendolyn Brooks to Sandra Cisneros, Stuart Dybek and Aleksandar Hemon. And in actual fact, Bellow was honored by the city: Mayor Richard M. Daley threw a sort of literary Irish wake for him when he decamped to Boston in his later years.

Nonetheless, I taught Bellow for a decade because he was canonical (that Nobel Prize is hard to ignore). Eventually my students at Northwestern (Bellow’s alma mater, my employer) convinced me to drop him by asking me, year after year: Why do you make us read this novel if you don’t enjoy re-reading it yourself?

“The Dean’s December” had worn me down just as Chicago had worn down the Dean. I finally attended to the course reviews and eliminated Bellow from my syllabus.

But as I read “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About,” a new collection of Bellow’s nonfiction edited by Benjamin Taylor, I was reminded of why I taught Bellow in the first place, and perhaps why he won the Nobel Prize over other potential Nobel winners like Philip Roth or Norman Mailer: The man can write American English like no one else.

His prose sparkles, and even if you disagree with the point he makes, you smile at the turn of phrase, the vernacular spit and vinegar he absorbed on Division Street before that thoroughfare was territory more associated with Studs Terkel or Algren.

The man can flat-out write. Some examples:

He disputes the opinions of book reviewers: “Really, all that such critics have the right to say is that fine novels are few and far between. That’s perfectly true. But then fine anythings are few and far between.”

Referencing this publisher of this newspaper, Bellow says “Colonel McCormick’s files collected anti-Roosevelt facts as Atlantic beaches gather stones.” More on FDR, that contradiction, that patrician President-of-the-People: “The unemployed masses, working stiffs, mechanics, laid-off streetcar conductors, file clerks, shoe salesmen, pants pressers, egg candlers, truck drivers, the residents of huge, drab neighborhoods of ‘furriners,’ the greenhorns today described as ethnics — all these swore by him.”

Attacking a writer who praised a video by pop star Michael Jackson (yes, Bellow’s range is broad), he writes “The idea is to clobber everything that used to be accepted as given, fixed, irredeemable.” “Clobber” is the perfect verb.

Beyond such bon mots, Taylor’s selections should serve to remind readers that while Bellow is now something of an idolized avatar (or vilified punching bag) for Dead White Male Conservative power in literary circles, he was once the despised outsider, the immigrant Jewish kid who picked up the classics in public libraries and worked with the likes of Richard Wright, Farrell, and Algren on Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration’s Federal Writers Project.

The essay about Roosevelt quoted above, “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt,” is a delightful look back at the president from the perspective of that young immigrant, determined to be a writer. Other highlights include a recounting of a time when he and Ralph Ellison shared a house in rural New York, each writing at one end of a long table.

But there’s plenty of ammunition for the anti-Bellovians as well.

As you read essay after essay, from the 1940s to the 1990s, a theme emerges that makes Bellow’s literary and intellectual positions intelligible — and his current unpopularity in certain circles inevitable.

Bellow believes in a universal human nature, which it is the job of great writers to express. In one early essay, he claims that “the task of the novelist is still, as I see it, to attempt to fix a scale of importance and to rescue from styles, languages, forms, abstractions, as well as from the assault and distraction of manifold social facts, an original human value.” In his glowing review of “Invisible Man,” he asserts that “For (Ellison) this balance of instinct and culture or civilization is not a Harlem matter; it is the matter, German, French, Russian, American, universal, a matter very little understood.” Bellow embraces an ideal of a human nature that doesn’t merely transcend race, class, gender and other divisions between individuals and social groups: It makes such differences irrelevant, beside the point, and therefore makes any writer or thinker who explores such divisions misguided at best and barbarous at worst.

Such a belief in human universality can certainly be argued for, but Bellow does not argue for it: He takes it for granted. A universal essentialism is, to understate things a great deal, not the basic starting point from which most Western intellectuals (including novelists, professors and literary critics) approach the question of American identity nowadays.

To exacerbate this conflict between those who attend to difference and his universalism, Bellow’s rhetorical position in his essays all too often combines defensive what-you-gonna-do shrugging and passive-aggressive quoting of other authorities.

To give this a positive biographical spin, Bellow mastered one discursive world of high art and universal values that prevailed in his youth and young manhood, and then the world and the arbiters of its discourses changed gears, seemingly leaving him back in the gutters of Division Street, an outsider again.

Or so my reading of these essays suggests he felt. Which is a shame, because his insights into novelists, identity (especially but far from exclusively his own American Jewishness) and politics are much more complex and sophisticated than his reputations (positive or negative) would suggest.

More Top Picks Best Hardshell Backpacks

In short, nothing in this collection will change the minds of readers who don’t like Saul Bellow. Neither will anything in it convert Bellow’s fans to haters. Such balance suggests to me that Taylor’s collection honestly represents the monumental decadeslong career of a writer, thinker and (as much as Bellow would have despised such a designation) cultural figure whose body of work demands and rewards the attention of a wide range of readers.

To understand the divisiveness that Saul Bellow simultaneously created and critiqued, represented and resented, is essential to understanding Chicago, American literature and America. And so this book is essential as well.

Bill Savage is a distinguished senior lecturer at Northwestern University.

“There Is Simply Too Much to Think About”

By Saul Bellow, edited by Benjamin Taylor, Viking, 532 pages, $35