The Terms of His Contract:
Saul Bellow (1915-2005)

Ben Siegel
President, The International Saul Bellow Society

I

Saul Bellow passed away on April 5, 2005, surrounded by loving family and friends. The members of The International Saul Bellow Society would like to offer its collective condolences to the Bellow family. We cannot share the depth and intensity of their sorrow and sense of loss for a husband and father, but we can share their pride in the singular achievements of a major, internationally acclaimed literary figure of our time.

II

I was in graduate school when The Adventures of Augie March (1953) appeared. I remember my pleased astonishment when this "Jewish novel" received a rave front-page review in the New York Times Book Review and many glowing acknowledgments in all the other literary publications. In those years following World War II, the New Criticism reigned supreme, and "serious students" of literature were expected to concentrate on English, not American literature, and certainly not on any contemporary work. Much time was needed, our professors assured us, for a poem, play, or novel to gain major literary status.

Indeed, my professors at both UCLA and USC (Ivy Leaguers and Johns Hopkins' Ph.D.s, for the most part) were then only grudgingly adding post-Victorian or "Edwardian" works to their reading lists. American literature itself was viewed as an area of study suitable only for the weaker or more frivolous students orCas one of my undergraduate professors warned me--for "lazy" ones. And yet here was a new American novel being hailed as a literary masterpiece on a level with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Jewish fiction, it now seemed, was suddenly a genre to be taken seriously.

How had this come to pass? Who was this Saul Bellow? His was certainly a strange name for a Jewish novelist. But when, in subsequent years, he gave us Seize the Day (1956), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), and Humboldt's Gift (1975), along with other compelling works following regularly, my colleagues and students stopped asking, "Saul who?" The world had come to know Saul Bellow and his novels (and short stories). In addition to developing a taste for Bellow's vaunted prose style and memorable characters, careful readers became aware that at the center of all his long and short narratives was an ongoing themeCor perhaps "concern" is more exact: the importance of the individual besieged by an age of political and economic and religious turmoil, of changing science and technology, and of shifting national and international borders.

An old-style humanist shaped by the Great Books program at the University of Chicago, Bellow believed that only our writers could lead both society and its members out of the morass that was modern life. It was not only their obligation but also their reason for being. A respectful, patient, and long-suffering public awaited the leadership of the writers in their midst. "The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them," Bellow warned in his Nobel Prize Lecture. In fact, the public continues to read them and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. At the center humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul. If writers do not come again into the center it will not be because the center is pre-empted. It is not. They are free to enter. If they so wish.

True to his word, Bellow repeatedly entered the very center of the struggle for the individual's identity and soul. Indeed, he did so with every novel and story, essay and interview.

But now he is gone, I remind myself. I will miss him and the light he shed for six decades on man=s foibles and posturing. Above all, I will miss the humor with which he depicted these failings. Yet a moment's thought reassures me: I can reread his works, and continue to hear the laughter behind the magic of each page.

III

A final word from Artur Sammler on Bellow's life and legacy: He was aware that he must meet, and he did meetCthrough all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speedingCthe terms of his contract.