[In the following excerpt, Bradbury perceives The Adventures of Augie March to be a turning point in Bellow's literary development, noting that the novel abandons the European angst of his earlier works.]

I looked in at an octopus, and the creature seemed also to look at me and press its soft head to the glass, flat, the flesh becoming pale and granular—blanched, speckled. The eyes spoke to me coldly. But even more speaking, even more cold, was the soft head with its speckles, a cosmic coldness in which I felt I was dying. The tentacles throbbed and motioned through the glass, the bubbles sped upward, and I thought, ‘This is my last day. Death is giving me notice.’

(Henderson the Rain King)

Bellow has often spoken of a change of style and perception that came into his work after his first two novels; it is an unmistakable feature of his fiction of the 1950s. Starting with The Adventures of Augie March (1953), he began to write a new kind of novel, one that broke out of the tight, Europeanized, soul-searching and Angst-ridden form of his first books and opened into an exuberant and positive comedy. Bellow has remarked that ‘modern comedy has something to do with the disintegrating outline of the worthy and humane Self, the bourgeois hero of an earlier age’; he has also seen that there is a modern comedy that ridicules the conditions of this misery, releasing pain as laughter.¹ He has remarked too on the power of the comic in the Yiddish tradition: ‘Laughter and trembling are so curiously mingled that it is not easy to determine the relations of the two’,² and this evidently has much to do with his own developing direction in comedy—one that sought to reach from the sad humour of human suffering to comic aspiration toward human grandeur, from the historical and diurnal world to the world of the transcendent and eternal. Bellow's heroes began to change; they became less victimized sufferers of insight and discovery, more positive, questing seekers after it. In the process, Bellow seemed to become a more affirmative writer, though in looking to that affirmation we must always observe the struggles and human pains out of which it grew.

As these new preoccupations shaped into matters of style and form, Bellow's novels changed. The old naturalist and existential containments did not by any means disappear, but they became a material to be contended with; his new books were texts of expansion and flow, novels of character-formation in which the heroes, especially Augie March and Henderson, became large mental travellers in quest through large social, psychic and neomythic landscapes to find the measure of their being, the nature of their human tenure. This released in Bellow a potential for mythic, fantastic and comic writing he had earlier contained, and along with it a Bellovian metaphysical vernacular, one of his larger offerings to the contemporary novel. In The Victim Bellow's style had already shown more suppleness, a freer motion between the hard social world and the world of thought and feeling. Now, by bringing a vital new energy and ebullience to his central characters, a new texture to his prose, Bellow was able to convert that social world into a landscape adequate to the enquiring spirit. Bellow's writing of the 1950s is thus a great opening out; in it he creates both a new form and a new kind and condition of hero. The form was that of picaresque metaphysical comedy; the heroes were self-creators, men who command large dimensions of their own fate, and move through expansive open landscapes and comic self-venturing into a growth of the spirit. The structural form expands toward contingency, toward vastly enlarged social content in The Adventures of Augie March (1953), toward mythic and psychological metaphor in Henderson the Rain King (1959), and the dominant rhetoric takes on vastly greater splendour, wit and comic self-awareness.

Bellow has since reflected that this release, coming in The Adventures of Augie March, was at first ‘too effusive and uncritical’. ‘I think I took off too many [restraints], and went too far, but I was feeling the excitement of discovery’, he said in an interview. ‘I had just increased my freedom, and like any emancipated plebian I abused it at once.’³ One form of release was to admit the voice of the extravagant self-narrator; the first-person mode of The Adventures of Augie March immediately opens out to display him as the first of Bellow's heroes who are larger than the world in which they live. Augie may have grown up in classic Chicago, that city of naturalism, ‘just plain brutal and not mitigated’, and come off its mean streets. But it is clear to him that the Studs Lonigan containments that have limited his predecessors in fiction are not meant for him, as his expansive opening utterance makes clear:

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that sombre 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.

(AM [The Adventures of Augie March], p. 7)

Augie is extravagant morally, intellectually and emotionally, and in a sense he has a character by becoming a character, fictionally dense and detailed, moving in a vastly more various and established world—unlike Joseph who retires into his room and has ‘in a word, no character’. As Augie feels he has all human history behind him, and wishes to embrace the quality and texture of life, to become a Columbus of the near at hand, so Bellow, with a Dickensian abundance, provides him with it. The book is Bellow's most specified and episodic, a rich, character-filled, sprawling account of ‘adventures’ where, in scenes of very broad texture and significance, Augie passes beyond the Machiavellians and instructors of his childhood who seek to enlist him under laws of control and limitation, and moves out into a wider kingdom of abundance where he learns not just from other men and women but from all to hand: animals, nature, books.

But, appropriately enough for a novel dealing in part with a massive, energetic, material and indeed ‘sombre’ Chicago during the Depression years, the battle of determinism and independence is an essential structure to the book. ‘All the influences were lined up waiting for me’, Augie notes. ‘I was born, and there they were to form me’ (p. 52). Indeed all things seem to intersect in him: the flow of history, the interaction of races and classes, intellectual theories and their ‘terrible appearances’ within the world. Historicism and romantic independence struggle: at one point he nearly becomes secretary to the exiled Trotsky in Mexico, the man of history and historicism who shares with Augie's other heroes the wish to navigate by the great stars. But the great stars are not quite enough for him, because there is also the matter of nature. Augie sees around him a great massed weight of human ideas, with as much bulk as the massing, in a world of endless random energy, of material and men, an exciting but excessive abundance of thought turned into life:

There's too much of everything of this kind, that's come home to me, too much history and culture to keep track of, too many details, too much news, too much example, too much influence, too many guys to tell you to be as they are, and all this hugeness, abundance, turbulence, Niagara Falls torrent. Which who is supposed to interpret? Me?

(p. 525)

It is this swamping, exciting mass of ‘it’ that becomes the point of anxiety for all of Bellow's later heroes, raising in new form the problem of trying to discover the human mean.

Augie's quest therefore takes him beyond the social and historical world and into nature, seeking to find the basis of his tenure there: ‘It takes some of us a long time to find out what the price is of our being in nature, and what the facts are about your tenure’, he reflects. ‘How long it takes depends on how swiftly the social sugars dissolve’ (p. 421). He tries to acquaint himself with biological and bodily laws, often in comic form (like the eagle-training session in Mexico), and with an openness far beyond that accessible to Joseph and Leventhal, both of whom are characterized by their suppression of emotional aspects of their lives. Augie struggles in sexual relationships and friendships, at the same time hoping to find a stillness somewhere that will afford access to life's ‘axial lines’, those angles of guidance and revelation where ‘life can come together again and man be regenerated’ (p. 524). But he is a comic hero, forced, like all Bellow's heroes, to mediate between the world of action and that of thought, to make some sense of the life constituted for him in the book. He ends, as he must, in contingency, knowing that no one is special, that mortality threatens, that there is no possession of anyone or anything, that man is both good and evil, that the historical amassing of the world and the anxiety it generates is real and cannot be refused. He acquires a chastened sense of history's powers, but also a ‘mysterious adoration of what occurs’.

He has learned, in short, the passion for self-constitution that permits him to constitute the narrative, lets him write as a chastened comedian of possibility, celebrating ‘the animal ridens in me, the laughing creature, forever rising up’. The laughter is against human hope, but also is that hope:

… is the laugh at nature—including eternity—that it thinks it can win over us and the power of hope? Nah, nah! I think. It never will. But that possibly is the joke, on one or the other, and laughing is an enigma that includes both.

(p. 617)

And this is exactly the enigma the book distils, as it looks both into the dark weighty claims of modern historical experience and the passions that might be expended against it.

Notes

1. Saul Bellow, ‘Some Notes on Recent American Fiction’, Encounter, 21 (November 1963), pp. 22-9; reprinted in Malcolm Bradbury (ed.), The Novel Today: Writers on Modern Fiction (Manchester and London: Manchester University Press and Fontana, 1977), pp. 54-70. Also, Saul Bellow, ‘Literature’, in Mortimer Adler and Robert M. Hutchins (eds), The Great Ideas Today (Chicago, Ill.: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1963), pp. 163-4. For Bellow's views of comedy and a reading of his comic methods see Sarah Blacher Cohen, Saul Bellow's Enigmatic Laughter (Urbana and Chicago, Ill., and London: University of Illinois Press, 1974).

2. ‘Introduction’, in Saul Bellow (ed.), Great Jewish Short Stories (New York: Dell, 1963).

3. Quoted in Harper, op. cit.