Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (105 page)

There is much dispute about White, but little dispute that he wrote one major work of world literature.
Voss
is a novel of exploration: of Australia and of what White calls ‘the deep end of the unconscious’. Set in the mid-1840s, the hero is a version of an actual German, Ludwig Leichhardt, who died, it is assumed, in the desert on his third expedition across the island. Voss’s motives are uncertain even to himself. He is given to such utterances as: ‘If I were not obsessed … I would be purposeless.’ Australia cannot be explored, mapped or understood. It can only be imagined. Voss is sustained, on his final journey, by a Platonic relationship with a young girl in Sydney, Laura Trevelyan, whose uncle – a rich, vulgar draper – has financed him. It is Laura who understands his fascination with ‘desert places’ while the rest of Australia ‘huddles in its ports’. His ‘legend’, she asserts, ‘will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it’. ‘It’s tough being a genius,’ concludes Thomas Keneally, ‘thus, we Aussie punters could never quite love him. But, by God, his work still richly deserves our respect.’ White’s blunt verdict on his homeland is the hopeful observation that ‘it is possible to recycle shit’.

I was born and grew up in the greatest, the noblest achievement of the human race on this planet – which was called the United States of America.

Fast was born in the urban working class, to which he had lifelong allegiance. His father, a Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant (born ‘Fastovsky’), was a $40-per-week factory operative in the New York garment industry – a wage slave. Howard’s mother died in his early boyhood. He was educated to high-school level, selling newspapers on street corners to help his father support the family during the grim Depression years. He read voraciously and wrote effortlessly. At this early stage of his life, Jack London (particularly
The Iron Heel
) was a formative influence. The year he left school, 1931, he sold his first Wellsian fiction (‘Wrath of the Purple’) to
Amazing Stories
. It earned him $37. His first novel,
Two Valleys
(1933), an American revolutionary war epic, was written while Fast was an eighteen-year-old page at the New York Public Library. In the early 1930s slump years, he hoboed around America. His opinions were increasingly radical, verging on revolutionary.

Fast married and settled down in 1937. After the outbreak of war he was appointed to a clerical position in the US Office of War Information in 1942 and later worked as a war correspondent. Over this period Fast continued to turn out novels. His fiction, at this stage, had a preachy left-wing flavour, for example
The Last Frontier
(1941), a novel about the extermination of the Cheyenne Indian tribe in 1878, and
Citizen Tom Paine
(1943), a bestseller. The American public always prefer American heroes to American genocide. By 1943, he had formally allied himself with the American Communist movement. The result, in his writing, was protest fiction such as
Freedom Road
(1944), a novel admired by New Dealers and endorsed, as one of her favourites, by Eleanor Roosevelt herself.

After the war, any earlier connection with the Reds was dangerous. This was the period in which Fast wrote his best-known novel,
Spartacus
(1951), a highly embellished story of the slave revolt against Rome in AD 71, while incarcerated in prison, serving a sentence of three months for contempt of Congress during investigation of his so-called Un-American Activities. He declined to name names. Defiantly Fast ran for Congress himself the next year, under the American Labour Party ticket. Now a criminal – and too hot for legitimate publishers to handle – Fast was obliged to publish
Spartacus
himself. The novel was filmed in 1960 by director Stanley Kubrick (Dalton Trumbo, like Fast a politically radical author, wrote the script). It starred Kirk Douglas as the revolutionary leader and was much admired by
cinéastes
but regarded as ‘Marxian’ in right-wing circles. (Marx himself thought
Spartacus was ‘the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history’.) Typical of the universal timidity was the
New York Times
’s verdict: ‘
Spartacus
is a tract in the form of a novel … proof that polemics and fiction cannot mix.’

Others were more openly approving. Fast’s fiction led to his being awarded the Stalin peace prize in 1954, at the height of the Cold War. Two years later, as for other fellow travellers in the West, the Soviet god failed for Fast with the brutal invasion of Hungary. Although never an open critic, he defected from active Communist partisanship and became what might be called a ‘fellow floater’. In addition to his many historical novels, Fast wrote a string of detective novels as ‘E. V. Cunningham’, featuring the Japanese-American detective, Masao Masuto. Fast’s most comprehensive effort in fiction is the socialist-realist trilogy comprising
The Immigrants
(1977),
Second Generation
(1978) and
The Establishment
(1979). The multi-volume saga covers the interlocking fortunes of four families (WASP, Irish Catholic, Jewish, Chinese) over the course of a hundred years in San Francisco. The central character, Dan Lavette, who builds a corporate empire, marries a Nob Hill heiress, but remains emotionally attached to his oriental mistress. The six-part sequence did well and supplied Fast with a comfortable last few years to what had been a turbulent life. Those last years were passed in Connecticut. He had never received a penny, he liked to say, which had not been earned by ‘the sweat of my brow’ – just like, he might have said, his most famous creation:

This, then, is Spartacus, who does not know the future and has no cause to remember the past, and it has never occurred to him that those who toil shall ever do other than toil, nor has it occurred to him that there will ever be a time when men do not toil with the lash across their backs.

If he knew nothing else, Fast knew the lash.

Fiction is the higher autobiography.

Born Solomon Belov, near Montreal in Canada, Bellow’s family was first-generation immigrant, embarked from St Petersburg. Originating in the Baltic states, his father got to Russia on forged papers. More forged papers (fictions, if one wants to be ingenious) had enabled the Belovs to get to the New World in 1913. Saul was the only one of the four children to be born there, but aged eight, he was hospitalised for six months with breathing problems. He read precociously in English and dated his lifelong love affair with literature from those months of enforced idleness. Relatively well off in Russia, Saul’s father, Abram, kept the family afloat in the New World with a variety of menial jobs. At one particularly low point, he was a bootlegger – supplying liquor to the Prohibition-parched US. After the disastrous hijacking of a consignment, which led to Abram being severely beaten up, the family followed the booze to Chicago – Bellow’s home town as it was to be – in the early 1920s. They had relatives there. Yiddish was spoken at home; English in the world outside.

Bellow’s youth in Chicago – a wild city in those Prohibition and Depression years – is depicted vividly in
The Adventures of Augie March
(1953). The early sections of that novel are dominated by Augie’s mother. Bellow’s mother Liza (manifestly Mrs March) died when he was seventeen. A devout woman, she had wanted her youngest child to be a violinist or a rabbi. His later relationship with Judaism was always vexed. Music, however, was second only to literature as the love of his life – he was more faithful to it than to any woman. But his father did not encourage his son’s musical or literary bents: ‘You write and then you erase,’ he once said, ‘You call that a
profession
?’

At the city’s universities (Chicago and Northwestern) Bellow studied literature and anthropology. This was the period of the ‘numerus clausus’ when Jews were regarded as troublesomely clever outsiders and their entrance was restricted. There were no American-Jewish writers on the American university literary syllabus and the head of his English department, Walter Blair, advised Bellow not to pursue graduate studies in English: ‘You’ve got a very good record, but I wouldn’t recommend that you study English. You weren’t born to it.’ Another version of the story has it that Bellow was coolly informed, ‘No Jew could really grasp the tradition of English literature.’ Dubious as that was, even then (Lionel Trilling would conclusively disprove the proposition at Columbia), Bellow evidently felt something along the lines of ‘Well, then, damn you, I’ll create a new literary tradition.’ Defiance is the driving force in all his writing, and his life. It is expressed, fists clenched against the world, in the famous opening declaration of
Augie March
:

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: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. 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.

In other words, I’ll do it my way, to quote another great Canadian (Paul Anka, if you didn’t guess).

Bellow graduated from Northwestern in 1937 in the depths of the Depression. It ‘helped’, he later maintained, in that there was no Lorelei of a profession (a real job) to distract him. His aim, from the first, was to be a writer but he kept body and soul together with short-term teaching jobs. He always felt at home in universities, but never let himself be owned by one – even, in later life, Chicago. Tenure was for hacks. He was at this period moving between Chicago and New York – his next home town. For a year, 1943–4, he worked in the office of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
(richly evoked in
Augie March
) on a ‘Great Books’ project. An attempt to join the US Navy was turned down on the grounds that he was Canadian. An attempt to join the Canadian Army was also unsuccessful, this time on health grounds (he had a hernia). Eventually Bellow was accepted by the US Merchant Marine. He was still training when the bomb dropped and it was all over.

His first published novel,
Dangling Man
(1944) is set in this war-time limbo (the title evokes Villon’s poem, written before he was hanged, ‘Ballade des pendus’).
Dangling Man
is a journal novel by ‘Joseph’ (evoking ‘Joseph K.’ in Franz Kafka’s
The Trial
). Unable to face the agonising freedom of ‘dangling’, Joseph embraces ‘flunkeydom’ (what Philip Larkin elsewhere calls ‘the toad work’) – employment he despises. He does not, he concludes, ‘do well alone’, but loneliness, he accepts, is the human condition. Already Bellow’s ‘freewheeling’ style and his preference for Chekhovian brevity is evident – as is his preoccupation with self. Saul Bellow was always, in some form, Saul Bellow’s subject matter.

After the war, Bellow again took up short-contract teaching positions at various universities across the US. His second published novel,
The Victim
(1947), ponders anti-Semitism and anomie. The central character is Asa Leventhal. A Pooterish figure, working at a menial level in a publishing house, Leventhal is David Riesman’s ‘Lonely Crowd’ personified. ‘A small gray masterpiece’, V. S. Pritchett called the novel. He might write novels about cosmic loneliness but Bellow was part of a vibrant social network in the 1940s. He was by now prominent in the Greenwich Village scene which was redefining American modern culture. His Chicago youth was celebrated in the first of his novels to draw widespread critical attention,
The
Adventures of Augie March
(1953). ‘
Bildungsroman
’ and ‘picaresque’ were two terms American reviewers reached for in describing it. The action is set during the Depression years: Augie is born into a Jewish family which is falling apart. His mother is terminally disabled, and he is close to none of his siblings. Augie rejects the ‘Russian’ past which an older generation would impose on him and takes on the world. Bellow’s narrative, as Alfred Kazin noted, is flavoured with burlesque and idioms as sharp as the Yiddish of his childhood home.

By this stage Bellow had formally repudiated Europe, after a spell on a Guggenheim fellowship in post-war Paris, where he wrote the first part of
Augie March
and discovered Jean-Paul Sartre to be a ‘con’ (the American, not French word – although both might be applicable). Bellow was now the darling of the New York intellectual elite, conscious as they were that the era of the Southern novelists (Faulkner, Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter) had passed. As ever, the Great American Novel was in prospect and Saul Bellow was being groomed as the great (Jewish) American novelist. There were those who objected to what they saw as literary politicking. Norman Podhoretz reviewed
Augie March
sceptically in
Commentary
. In his indiscreet memoir,
Making It
, Podhoretz relates being approached at a literary party by a drunk and told: ‘We’ll get you for that review if it takes ten years.’ Bellow himself was mortally affronted.