April 13: Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
I'll let Augie do most of the talking on this one.
"But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles."
Some authors work glacially, building ideas and themes over the course of many pages. Some prick us with voice--momentary words, instant but lasting images, piquant prose. Some leave us with indelible characters. It is a genius among geniuses who accomplishes all three.
Bellow is a titan, even if Augie March is all-too-human. No matter that the book's other characters are most frequently foils, creations whose functions are illustrative, who do not strike with the blows of real-life individuals. No matter that the last two hundred pages or so seem disjointed and unjustified by the preceding four hundred. No matter that Bellow's imaginative linguistic permutations and juxtapositions are not sustained as thoroughly as might be desired. No matter that there is no heroic, legato resolution to the staccato existential crises that pepper Augie March.
This is a great book, and further evidence that ideas and not plots are the stuff of greatness. Augie does have a life, which in many ways mirrors the author's own; but the sum of it is not relate-able, however touching it may be in certain particulars. The sheer force of ideas, expressed with right-cross clarity, are what make Augie March a universal alter ego.
“But in the modern power of luxury, with its battalions of service workers and engineers, it’s the things themselves, the products that are distinguished, and the individual man isn’t nearly equal to their great sum. Finally they are what becomes great—the multitude of baths with never-failing hot water, the enormous air-conditioning units and the elaborate machinery. No opposing greatness is allowed, and the disturbing person is the one who won’t serve by using or denies by not wishing to enjoy.”
“…we human creatures have many reasons to believe there’s advantage and profit for someone in everything, even in the worst muds, wastes, and poison by-products; and a charm of chemical medicine or industry is how there are endless uses in cinders, slag, bone, manure. But in reality we’re a long way from being able to profit from everything. Yes, and besides even a truth can get cold from solitude and solitary confinement, and doesn’t live long outside the Bastille; if the rescuing republican crowd is the power of death it doesn’t live at all.”
“I didn’t keep up these arguments with her. And although not convinced by her, I wasn’t utterly horrified for the unborn either. To be completely consistent in that kind of economy of souls you would have to have great uneasiness and remorse that wombs should be unoccupied; likewise, that hospitals, prisons, and madhouses and graves should ever be full. That wide a spread is too much.”
“But then with everyone going around so capable and purposeful in his strong handsome case, can you let yourself limp in feeble and poor, some silly creature, laughing and harmless? No, you have to plot in your heart to come out differently. External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it.”
"Guys may very likely think, Why hell! What's this talk about fates? and will feel it all comes to me from another day, and a mistaken day, when there were fewer people in the world and there was more room between them so that they grew not like wild grass but like trees in a park, well set apart and developing year by year in the rosy light. Now instead of such comparison you think, Let's see it instead not even as the grass but as a band of particles, a universal shawl of them, and these particles may have functions but certainly lack fates. And there's even an attitude of mind which finds it almost disgusting to be a person and not a function."
These, and innumerable minor strokes of the brush--"the bourgeois ambering of adventuring man in parlor upholstery;" "the tame-ape nature promoted to pants and offices;" "the office stinking of cigars and of his sedentary career in old black leather;" "function is a substitute of a deeper despair"--make this a perennial book, one to glean again and again.
I will return to this book in years to come, and I am sure that every time, no matter how many times, I will start and finish by wondering:
Will Augie make out all right in the end?
"But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles."
Some authors work glacially, building ideas and themes over the course of many pages. Some prick us with voice--momentary words, instant but lasting images, piquant prose. Some leave us with indelible characters. It is a genius among geniuses who accomplishes all three.
Bellow is a titan, even if Augie March is all-too-human. No matter that the book's other characters are most frequently foils, creations whose functions are illustrative, who do not strike with the blows of real-life individuals. No matter that the last two hundred pages or so seem disjointed and unjustified by the preceding four hundred. No matter that Bellow's imaginative linguistic permutations and juxtapositions are not sustained as thoroughly as might be desired. No matter that there is no heroic, legato resolution to the staccato existential crises that pepper Augie March.
This is a great book, and further evidence that ideas and not plots are the stuff of greatness. Augie does have a life, which in many ways mirrors the author's own; but the sum of it is not relate-able, however touching it may be in certain particulars. The sheer force of ideas, expressed with right-cross clarity, are what make Augie March a universal alter ego.
“But in the modern power of luxury, with its battalions of service workers and engineers, it’s the things themselves, the products that are distinguished, and the individual man isn’t nearly equal to their great sum. Finally they are what becomes great—the multitude of baths with never-failing hot water, the enormous air-conditioning units and the elaborate machinery. No opposing greatness is allowed, and the disturbing person is the one who won’t serve by using or denies by not wishing to enjoy.”
“…we human creatures have many reasons to believe there’s advantage and profit for someone in everything, even in the worst muds, wastes, and poison by-products; and a charm of chemical medicine or industry is how there are endless uses in cinders, slag, bone, manure. But in reality we’re a long way from being able to profit from everything. Yes, and besides even a truth can get cold from solitude and solitary confinement, and doesn’t live long outside the Bastille; if the rescuing republican crowd is the power of death it doesn’t live at all.”
“I didn’t keep up these arguments with her. And although not convinced by her, I wasn’t utterly horrified for the unborn either. To be completely consistent in that kind of economy of souls you would have to have great uneasiness and remorse that wombs should be unoccupied; likewise, that hospitals, prisons, and madhouses and graves should ever be full. That wide a spread is too much.”
“But then with everyone going around so capable and purposeful in his strong handsome case, can you let yourself limp in feeble and poor, some silly creature, laughing and harmless? No, you have to plot in your heart to come out differently. External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it.”
"Guys may very likely think, Why hell! What's this talk about fates? and will feel it all comes to me from another day, and a mistaken day, when there were fewer people in the world and there was more room between them so that they grew not like wild grass but like trees in a park, well set apart and developing year by year in the rosy light. Now instead of such comparison you think, Let's see it instead not even as the grass but as a band of particles, a universal shawl of them, and these particles may have functions but certainly lack fates. And there's even an attitude of mind which finds it almost disgusting to be a person and not a function."
These, and innumerable minor strokes of the brush--"the bourgeois ambering of adventuring man in parlor upholstery;" "the tame-ape nature promoted to pants and offices;" "the office stinking of cigars and of his sedentary career in old black leather;" "function is a substitute of a deeper despair"--make this a perennial book, one to glean again and again.
I will return to this book in years to come, and I am sure that every time, no matter how many times, I will start and finish by wondering:
Will Augie make out all right in the end?
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