SOURCE: Dutton, Robert R. “The Adventures of Augie March.” In Saul Bellow, pp. 42-74. Boston, Mass.: Twayne Publishers, 1982.

[In the following essay, Dutton surveys a range of critical interpretations of The Adventures of Augie March, arguing that Augie's failures throughout the novel act “as a depiction both of a human condition and of contemporary literature and the artist.”]

The Adventures of Augie March (1953) must be read as a multilevel work if the reader is to comprehend fully its significance. First, the novel is to be seen as a story in which a picaresquelike hero, who is also the narrator, advances through a series of adventures which, in varying degree and nature, are relevant to a general life experience. Second, the work is to be regarded as Bellow's strictures on an existing relationship between literature and society. More specifically, on this second level, Augie March is a fictional history of American literature; it serves as an evaluation of a literary attitude, whose existence is reflected in the experiences of the protagonist and his reactions to those experiences. Third, the character and experiences of Bellow's hero may be seen as encompassing a contemporary human condition as well as dramatizing a wider and deeper comment on literature and society.

As a character in his own right on the first level, Augie plays the role of the philosophic picaro. A man of no commitments,¹ he wanders from incident to incident and from place to place, never getting so deeply involved in any experience that he cannot continue in search of what he insists is his “better fate.” Since his experiences are endless in number and infinite in variety, the following examples are only the highlights: he works as a stock boy in a department store, sells trivia in a railway station, steals and sells textbooks, begins a university education, becomes a coal salesman, enters the fringes of the underworld, helps to manage a professional fighter, takes care of dogs for the socially elite, falls in love twice, becomes a union organizer, trains an eagle to catch giant lizards in Mexico, skirts the edges of joining Trotsky's cause, joins the Merchant Marine; and he finally marries and settles in Paris, where he is last seen participating in some form of shady international business. Augie is, as he says, “varietistic.” Early in the novel he confides, “Saying, ‘various jobs,’ I give out the Rosetta stone, so to speak, to my entire life.”²

The reader is likely to feel some confusion when he finishes the story of Augie March, for Bellow's protagonist ends with the same attitude with which he set forth: he still lacks commitment. Still without purpose or direction, he continues his uninvolved existence. The main source of this confusion lies in the reader's inability to penetrate Augie's attractive personality, through his keen awareness and obvious intelligence, and through his independent objectivity down to the blunt facts of his total experience: Augie is one of life's failures. It is a difficult conclusion to reach, for the reader sees in Bellow's hero many of the traits that have long been assumed to be heroic—heroic in terms of what may be called a modern mythology of heroic behavior. This heroism is founded on a rebellion from and on an opposition to, even a separatism from, established institutions. This mythology tends to blind the reader to the facts of the text inasmuch as—given this opposition and rebellion, and other qualities to be pointed out later—there seems to be a predisposition on the part of the reader to judge Bellow's protagonist, both as to character and function, on the basis of issues apart from his actual experience.

AUGIE'S APPEAL

For the reader, Augie is certainly a sympathetic character; he has abilities and qualities often thought to be necessary for integrity, nobility, and intellect. One of the most obvious and most immediately apparent of these abilities is his clear vision. A keen observer, he has all the insight of Huck Finn, with whom he has been compared as many times as the novel has critics. A case in point is evinced in Augie's reactions to one of the major characters of the novel, Einhorn, the shrewd, rapacious, cantankerous, lecherous, old man who employs Augie to run his errands and to carry around his crippled body. Of him, Augie says:

And Einhorn? Jesus, he could be winsome—the world's charm-boy. And that was distracting. You can grumble at it; you can say it's a ruse or feint of gifted people to sidetrack you from the viper's tangle and ugly knottedness of their desires, but if the art of it is deep enough and carried far enough into great play, it gets above its origin. … I every time had high regard for him. For one thing, there was always the fight he had made on his sickness to consider. … weighing it all up, the field he was put into and the weapons he was handed, he had made an imposing showing and, through mind, he connected with the spur gear. … So why be down on poor Einhorn, afflicted with mummy legs and his cripple-irritated longing.

(99-100)

Such keen descriptive insight, along with the objective ability to see all sides of a person, helps to convince us of Augie's reliability. Then his sympathetic fairness—his ability to see the good in people—comes to light. Finally, if it is true that the ability to generalize is a mark of intelligence, Augie must be seen in this passage as a figure of intellect.

Augie is also trusted and admired for his knowledge of the limits of his understanding and for his measurable honesty to self. When he is reflecting upon Einhorn's fear of death, he states, “Often I thought that in his heart Einhorn had completely surrendered to this fear,” but he quickly adds: “But when you believed you had tracked Einhorn through his acts and doings and were about to capture him, you found yourself not in the center of a labyrinth but on a wide boulevard; and here he came from a new direction …” (83).

And then Augie says of the simple and natural Willa, who is one of his many romances: “I think I could have been perfectly happy with Willa and lived all my life in a country town if the chance had ever presented itself. Or, anyhow, I sometimes tell myself that” (204). We cannot help being impressed with such candor, such an open willingness on Augie's part to suspend judgment even when his own ideas and conclusions are the subjects of consideration. Understood also is his yearning for simplicity.

Moreover, there is an admiration for Augie in his generous acceptance of people for what they are. “However, I had a high regard for him,” he says of Einhorn. And, when he sees Joe Gorman, a thief with whom he has been involved over a stolen car, sitting dazed and beaten in the back seat of a police car, Augie laments, much in the fashion of Huck to the tar-and-feather fate of the King and the Duke, “I felt powerfully heartsick to see him” (165). Augie is an unconditional humanitarian, for he knows that Gorman had lied to him, that he was carrying a gun and would have used it, which would have implicated Augie far more than was anticipated. But Joe Gorman is a human being; therefore, Augie accepts him as such and feels for him.

And so it is with Grandma Lausch; his mother; his brother Simon; the frank and rebellious Mimi; the Renlings who wish to adopt him; Thea, his sweetheart; Bateshaw, the ship's carpenter; and all the rest. Augie sees them clearly, sympathetically; he knows what they are and what they want; he accepts them; and, without malice, he removes himself from their spheres of influence: “He has a better fate.”

Augie makes one of his strongest appeals for the reader's sympathies when he philosophizes about his personal destiny of high ideal—a destiny peculiarly American in its virtuous optimism, and immediately recognizable. Early in the story he recalls his reactions as a young boy to the plans of his Aunt Anna that he will someday marry her daughter, Freidl: “Even at that time I couldn't imagine that I would marry into the Coblin family. … My mind was already dwelling on a better fate” (28). These words, “a better fate,” or their equivalents, are asserted by Augie again and again—each time, in fact, that some person or institution attempts to convert him. Whether marriage, a career, or money, nothing stands in the way to his future. Bellow's protagonist certainly seems a figure of strength, courage, and foresight.

His view of life, his weltbild, reinforces this favorable image. He simply refuses to see the world as a Valley of Despair, in spite of the obvious painful wounds and the scars of thunder sitting entrenched around him: age and deterioration are catching Grandma Lausch; his mother is growing blind; his younger brother Georgie is born an idiot; Simon's early ideals have been replaced by his mad and dismal search for money and power. Augie is surrounded by the greedy, the cynical, the shameful, the ignorant, the hopelessness of the poor, the arrogance of the rich, and by other elements that would undermine the most reasonable of stoics. Yet Augie does not despair. When he explains why he will not stop reading, even though he knows nothing will come of it, he states:

Why, I knew there were things that would never, because they could never, come of my reading. But this knowledge was not so different from the remote but ever-present death that sits in the corner of the loving bedroom; though it doesn't budge from the corner, you wouldn't stop your loving. Then neither would I stop my reading. I sat and read. I had no eye, ear, or interest for anything else. … Why everybody knows this triumphant life can only be periodic. So there's a schism about it, some saying only this triumphant life is real and others that only the daily facts are. For me there was no debate, and I made speed into the former.

(194)

So Augie's reality lies in a vision of life as triumphant, a goal that he is ever speeding toward. He is the soul of cultural optimism and great self-destiny—to him, all is possible, even in a world not the best possible. This generous, high-minded spirit is seen when Mimi urges Augie to agree or disagree with her negative opinion of Einhorn, to speak up, and to say what he thinks: “‘No,’ I said, ‘I don't know. But I don't like low opinions, and when you speak them out it commits you and you become a slave of them. Talk will lead people on until they convince their minds of things they can't feel true’” (209).

While there may be other truths to consider in what Augie says, he is right. Low opinions are uncomfortable companions, and not those of nobility. Of course, Mimi does not accept his “speak no evil” attitude, which he seems to have retained from Grandma Lausch's strictures on the three idols that sat in their house (9); but Mimi has a heatedly cynical view of life and society and of man's goodness. As for Augie, even if Mimi's cynicism is well founded, he “couldn't think all was so poured in concrete” (225) that change is impossible. He quite understandably observes with pleasure Thea's snakes as they shed: “Toughest of all was the casting of the skins. … But then they would gleam out, one day, and their freshness and jewelry would give even me pleasure, their enemy, and I would like to look at the cast skin from which they were regenerated in green or dots of red like pomegranate seeds or varnished gold crust” (369). Augie refuses to see a world of deterministic ugliness and low opinions. Such a world is not compatible with his “spur-gear” of enthusiasm nor with his anticipation of a better fate.

Part of the mythology of our cultural hero is his opposition to whatever would cause him to lose his individuality, and it is a proud and exciting moment for Augie when Einhorn discovers that such a distinction is an element of Augie's personality. When Einhorn is lecturing him to stay away from the likes of Joe Gorman and “those thieves,” Einhorn suddenly exclaims: “But wait. All of a sudden I catch on to something about you. You've got opposition in you. You don't slide through everything. You just make it look so” (117). Augie is delighted to hear this, and so is the reader; for the reader, also an admirer of opposition, would be an individual, indifferent, unique, not on the market of malleable commodities as is the world around him.

Another source of pride in Augie is his refusal to become really involved in any action or cause that does not arouse his enthusiasm. He will go along, for a time, but with only a passive acceptance; all depends on how he feels about the particular issue. It is a part of the convention of the hero that he remain detached and coolly observant until he feels a strong emotional call to involvement.

Bellow's drawing on the voices of America's literary past and assigning them to his protagonist also increases Augie's prestige with the reader. Through these faint echoes, especially to the literary minded, Augie acquires an added depth, wisdom, authority, and, equally important, a certain nostalgic and romantic aura of courage and integrity. The presence of Twain's Huck has already been noted, and he is omnipresent throughout the story. When the fear of one of Einhorn's lectures is upon Augie, he describes his fright: “the candles were now as genial to me as though they had been the ones stuck into loaves of bread by night and sailed on a black Indian lake to find the drowned body sunk to the bottom” (180).

When Mimi becomes sarcastic over Augie's letting Simon lead him to the practice of having his nails polished, Augie merely thinks, “I let it be done. I didn't consider my fingers much” (223). Then reminiscences are sung of Whitman when Augie is forced to remember his “parentage, and other history, things I had never much thought of as difficulties, being democratic in temperament, available to everybody and assuming about others what I assumed about myself” (147). Echoes of Emerson (and perhaps of Thoreau) are heard when Augie looks out over the landscape: “Meanwhile the clouds, birds, cattle in the water, things, stayed at their distance, and there was no need to herd, account for, hold them in the head, but it was enough to be among them, released on the ground as they were in their brook or in their air. I meant something like this when I said occasionally I could look out like a creature.” Then, immediately thereafter, Augie asks in Emersonian terms, with the style of Huck Finn, “How is it that human beings will submit to the gyps of previous history while mere creatures look with their original eyes?” (330).

There are other voices of the past, as is later shown. For now, the point is that the reader tends to identify Augie with the free-wheeling style and with the independent spirit of these eminent figures. Their honesty, integrity, and courage are judged to be part of Augie's character. Their heroic stance becomes his.

THE FAILURE OF AN IDEAL

Bellow gives to Augie other “advantages of the American folk hero”: he comes from a poor family; he does not know the identity of his father; he refuses to be trapped by fine clothing, social position, or wealth; he admits that he “gives his affections too easily” and that “he has no grudge-bearing power.” Bellow has endowed his narrator with the entire list of requisites to a folk hero of our time and culture; consequently, it is difficult for us to imagine Augie as one of life's failures.

But Augie does fail. In spite of his objective insights, his intelligence, his self-knowledge, his generous and humane spirit, his personal ideals and sought-for destiny; in spite of the nobility of his opposition and his discriminating enthusiasm; and, finally, in spite of the powerful and impressive voices of the past, through which he often states his case, he fails. In fact, as is seen in more detail later, there are implications at the end of the novel of a general deterioration not only of Augie's purpose but of his character.

And any confusion over Bellow's final intentions, at least one of them, is centered in this irony of the failure of greatness; for it is all too easy, once again, to see Bellow's protagonist in the light of what we have called “the mythology of heroic behavior,” and to close our eyes to the obvious deficiencies of that mythology, as—strangely enough in view of the textual facts that leave Augie in a position of ignominy—Irving Malin seems to have done when he states that “He [Bellow] favors Augie's ideal, without completely noting its inadequacies.”³ Malin is misled by what Augie says, not noting carefully enough what he does.

But Bellow knows that, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction; for every strength, the possibility of a weakness or a disability. Or, as he has Augie say on the opening page of the book, “Everybody knows there is no fineness nor accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining” (3). As a result, Augie's keen ability to observe accurately seems to carry with it the curse of estrangement: his clear insight into the characters and motivations of others has as its companion an emotional and, therefore, a functional immaturity of purpose. Consequently, as he drifts from incident to incident, he uses his “better fate” as his rationale.

Augie's generous and humane acceptance of others is, therefore, questionable. At one point, when Mintouchian, the shady and cold lawyer, asserts, “You think I'm a bandit, only you wouldn't say it on a bet. You fight your malice too much,” Augie replies, somewhat proudly it seems, “Everybody says so. It's as if you were supposed to have low opinions. I'd never say I was angelic, but I respect as much as I can” (479). Perhaps Augie respects too much, or at least too widely; for his nondiscrimination—his life without malice—permits him to dissipate his ideals through his objective passivity toward every one of his confrontations with people or with institutions. From the very beginning he passively and acceptingly joins, first, Grandma Lausch and her deceptions; second, with Simon's misplaced ambitions; third, with his aunt's plans for his marriage to Freidl; and so on through the novel—with the plans and teachings of Joe Gorman, Einhorn, the Magnuses, the Renlings, Thea, and Mintouchian. In each case he refuses to take a stand, to assert his ideals in the form of action and positive commitment. When someone calls him to join a parade, he does so; and he stays—until someone calls him to join another.

The enthusiasm that Augie calls his “spur-gear,” as he terms Einhorn's wellsprings to resolute commitment, is also double-edged. There is little doubt as to its worthwhile function in great and little enterprises; but Bellow seems to say that, as a key to the action, it may open the wrong doors. Augie manages a deep enthusiasm just twice in the novel: he falls in love twice—first, with Thea (his infatuation with her sister Esther is only temporary); second, with Stella. The first experience fails completely; and the second, as the novels ends, is failing. Evidently Bellow is saying that, with or without enthusiasm, some work is to be done, some direction and function assumed.

We have noted that Augie is proud of what he likes to think of as his “opposition,” or his refusal to be drawn into the plans of others, unless they are temporary plans, of course, or unless they have the sanctions of his enthusiasm. Here again Bellow depicts the hero of rebellion, one who will not be deprived of his individuality. But also, again, he depicts the consequences: one can alienate himself to the point of uselessness and absurdity, even grotesqueness, by pushing this rebellion to its furthest extensions.

Bellow makes this consequent alienation quite clear. At the end of the novel, one of Augie's missions for the cynical Mintouchian can only be described as grotesque: “And what have I been doing? Well, perhaps I had a meeting with a person who used to be in Dachau and did some business with him in dental supplies from Germany. That took an hour or two.” And then he adds, “After which I may have gone to the cold halls of the Louvre and visited in the Dutch School …” (522). Bellow could only intend a comment on the dismal and useless existence of Augie. What kind of life casually profits from the dentistry that took place in Dachau? And surely the sensuous painting of the Flemish Rubens and the Dutch Vermeer's depiction of the isolated, comfortable burgher, removed from the world of involvement and interested only in his pipe and lucrative shipping trade, are reflections of Augie's life.

In any case, we wonder about Augie's “better fate” and about his enthusiasm, about his high-spoken ideals concerning man's potentialities, about his generous acceptance of all living things, and certainly about his pride of opposition. We think about his language and words, noble and courageous; and we wonder if they are not mere tools to a self-betrayal.

But this view is an overly bleak and slightly distorted picture of the way in which Bellow wants us to see Augie. He is not a figure of fatalistic determinism; for, through Augie, Bellow is not saying, “Look at man with all of his endowments, to these depths he comes.” Instead he is saying that man comes to these depths only through his mistaken goals and wasted abilities. For Bellow endows Augie with all of the weapons needed to achieve a better fate, “to overcome ignominy,” if he will only see the contradictions between his ideals and reality. And at times, Augie does see. When Thea and he come to the end of their romance, Augie makes an attempt at self-examination:

Now I had started, and this terrible investigation had to go on. If this was how I was, it was certainly not how I appeared but must be my secret. So if I wanted to please, it was in order to mislead or show everyone, wasn't it, now? And this must be because I had an idea everyone was my better and had something I didn't have. But what did people seem to me anyhow, something fantastic? I didn't want to be what they made me but wanted to please them. Kindly explain! An independent fate, and love too—what confusion!

(401)

So Augie is willing to examine his own life honestly. And in this particular passage it is evident that he at least has a temporary insight into the center of his problem. Augie, for the most part, sees himself clearly; and he sees others with a fine facility. His whole difficulty is in seeing himself in relation to those others: he does not take the rest of the world into consideration when he is asserting his better fate, his ideals, and his “spur-gear” of enthusiasm. When thinking of the causes behind his break with Thea, he concludes, “My real fault was that I couldn't stay with my purest feelings” (402). Exactly! The real as opposed to the ideal is not an uncommon problem. The only way that one can stay with his purest feelings is by living in a cave. “An independent fate and love too” is as impossible as a marriage of purest feelings and a functional existence. Something must give, or one ends in a cave, useless and isolated, as Augie does.

But Augie can and does learn, even though such self-insights are partial in self-revelation. Intermittently throughout the novel he summarizes a reflection by adding that he did not know “that” at the time, as when he says, “You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever. … I see this now, at that time not” (285). And then, describing his feeling for Thea, he says: “Not even the eagle falconry distressed me as much as that what happened to her had to happen to me too, necessarily. This was scary. This trouble of course wasn't clear to me then …” (323). This ability, the capacity to grasp even a piece of the significance of experience, is a structural cornerstone of Bellow's subangelic ideology.

Augie still does not see that the thing everybody has that he does not have is direction and purpose, involvement with life, even though these involvements might be criticized. The full meaning of his experience is lost to him, as his rather pathetic assertion, while not one of hopelessness, at the end of his story indicates: “It must be clear, however, that I am a person of hope, and now my hopes have settled themselves upon children and a settled life. I haven't been able to convince Stella as yet. Therefore while I knock around … it's unborn children I pore over far oftener than business deals” (529).

Augie will probably go his picaresque way with hope and with children still unborn; for hope alone creates nothing but despair or an “animal ridens,” as Augie describes himself at the end of the book (536). Yet perhaps Augie will come to know, even as does Joseph in Dangling Man, that there is no identity, no integrity, no better fate, no creation, of children or anything else, without a social commitment, without an understanding of one's relationship to others. It is only hoped that he comes to his knowledge with less hysteria and less despair than did Joseph. Bellow leaves Augie, for the time being, in a position that seems to be a comment on those who rest on the claim that the game is not to their liking, not to their enthusiasms, and that they are waiting for a higher, freer reality. But Bellow also leaves them Augie's abilities and his hope, pathetic or otherwise.

Bellow makes his position clear when Augie closes the story: “I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America” (536). All of which is to say that Augie knows his ideals are right, in spite of his less-than-high fortune. In Augie's view of himself as Columbus, Bellow intends an illumination for his protagonist—a discovery of likenesses between himself and another explorer. While both seem to have failed, their hope, vision, judgment, and courage are realities of their natures which give to them powers and potentialities that allow them the possibilities of a “better fate.” Bellow leaves it to the reader to understand that Augie's failure lies not in his high ideals but in his refusal to live them through positive action and personal involvement—and in his seeming willingness to be used by those who are actively involved but who do not possess his vision of existence as subangelic.

LITERATURE AND SOCIETY

In his introduction to Literature in America, Phillip Rahv states: “Art has always fed on the contradiction between the reality of the world and the image of glory and orgastic happiness and harmony and goodness and fulfillment which the self cherishes as it aspires to live even while daily dying.”⁴

The statement expresses the theme of the second level of The Adventures of Augie March, a theme seemingly of primary importance in Bellow's conception of the novel. For, although Augie March is a meaningful work in its depiction of a human condition, much of its significance is to be found in the ideas of its protagonist, in his reflections, and not in his confrontations with life. To be sure, reflection follows confrontation; but we sense that something is out of balance, that perhaps reflection outweighs confrontation, giving philosophy a major role and literature a minor one.

Somehow incident fails to support the weight of narrative, as Robert Penn Warren concludes: “if Augie plunges into the aimless ruck of experience, in the end we see that Saul Bellow has led him through experience toward philosophy. That is, the aimless ruck had a shape, after all, and the shape is not that of Augie's life but of Saul Bellow's mind. Without that shape and the shaping mind, we would have only the limited interest in the random incidents.”⁵

Although Warren is rather vague, inasmuch as he does not trace the “shape” of Bellow's mind, the statement has a general validity—if the novel is confined in meaning to its first level: the depiction of a human condition. In that case, there is an “aimless ruck of experience”; therefore, the incidents in Augie's life would indeed be “random” and of “limited interest.” Once again, Bellow's philosophy seems to hold the work together. Furthermore, if the novel is read with Augie as a fictional creation, it is difficult to place much value, in spite of National Book Awards, on either the theme or its dramatization. It is the old theme of nonconformity, the refusal to be trapped in social quagmires, the commitment to self and the exploration of that self. In American letters, such breast-beating goes back at least to Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau; it grew to tribal orgies in the 1920s; it still has an army of adherents.

Moreover, the ignominious state in which the protagonist ends, owing to the age-old conflict of the individual against society, is hardly a revelation to the reader schooled in Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, James Farrell, and their many disciples. As Frederick Hoffman says of the novel, “In the end there is something wrong with the picture: there is too much to know, and the knowing and living have too little to do with each other.”⁶ Once again, we do not say that Bellow's novel on a first level is not meaningful; at the very least it is an intellectual picaresque that cannot be ignored no matter how thin the total structure and development, no matter how tired the theme, and no matter if the philosophy exceeds the rendered life.

In any case, we must examine the work as something other than a philosophical travelogue, as something more than an “aimless ruck of experience” and “random incidents.” We must consider Augie March as presenting not so much the “shape of Bellow's mind” but as showing the relationship between literature and society in general and the condition of American literature in particular. As for the novel's concern with American literature, Maxwell Geismar's comment and question are to the point: “Thus the novel which opens in the Chicago slums ends with the exotics and expatriates of Mexico and Europe: which is also a curious parable of the course of American literary realism during the last half-century. But what can we really make of all this?”⁷

Geismar's question deserves an answer, for Bellow has included within the story of Augie some materials that can best be accounted for only in metaphoric terms. As we stated earlier, Augie March may be read as a study of the relationship between the artist, or literature, and society. What Bellow does is to show that relationship as it exists universally, through a dramatized depiction of American realism. Bellow has made his position clear on this subject of the artist and society in works other than fiction. In his acceptance speech for the National Book Award (1964) for his novel Herzog, he said:

The fact that there are so many weak, poor, and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.

There is nothing left for us novelists to do but think. For unless we think, unless we make a clearer estimate of our condition, we will continue to write kid stuff, to fail in our function; we will lack serious interests and become truly irrelevant. Here the critics must share the blame. They too have failed to describe the situation. Literature has for generations been its own source, its own province, has lived upon its own tradition, and accepted a romantic separation or estrangement from the common world. This estrangement, though it produced some masterpieces, has by now enfeebled literature.

The separatism of writers is accompanied by the more or less conscious acceptance of a theory of modern civilization. This theory says in effect that modern mass society is frightful, brutal, hostile to whatever is pure in the human spirit, a waste land and a horror. To its ugliness, its bureaucratic regiments, its thefts, its lies, its wars, and its cruelties, the artist can never be reconciled.

This is one of the traditions on which literature has lived uncritically. But it is the task of artists and critics in every generation to look with their own eyes. Perhaps they will see even worse evils, but they will at least be seeing for themselves. They will not, they cannot permit themselves, generation after generation, to hold views they have not examined for themselves. By such willful blindness we lose the right to call ourselves artists; we have accepted what we ourselves condemn—narrow specialization, professionalism, and snobbery, and the formation of a caste.

And, unfortunately, the postures of this caste, postures of liberation and independence and creativity, are attractive to poor souls dreaming everywhere of a fuller, freer life. The writer is admired, the writer is envied. But what has he to say for himself? Why, he says, just as writers have said for more than a century, that he is cut off from the life of his own society, despised by its overlords who are cynical and have nothing but contempt for the artist, without a true public, estranged. He dreams of ages when the poet or the painter expressed a perfect unity of time and place, had real acceptance, and enjoyed a vital harmony with his surroundings—he dreams of a golden age. In fact, without the golden age, there is no Waste Land.

Well, this is no age of gold. It is only what it is. Can we do no more than complain about it? We writers have better choices. We can either shut up because the times are too bad, or continue because we have an instinct to make books, a talent to enjoy, which even these disfigured times cannot obliterate. Isolated professionalism is death. Without the common world the novelist is nothing but a curiosity and will find himself in a glass case along some dull museum corridor of the future.

We live in a technological age which seems insurmountably hostile to the artist. He must fight for his life, for his freedom, along with everyone else—for justice and equality, threatened by mechanization and bureaucracy. This is not to advise the novelist to rush immediately into the political sphere. But in the first stage he must begin to exert his intelligence, long unused. If he is to reject politics, he must understand what he is rejecting. He must begin to think and to think not merely of his own narrower interests and needs.⁸

Augie March is a dramatic rendering of a good part of these same strictures. Bellow sets his protagonist-narrator in motion in order for these ideas to come alive: Augie, too, practices “separatism”; he, too, is one of the “poor souls dreaming … of a better life”; he dreams of “a perfect unity of time and place.”⁹ And there is good reason to doubt that he will create children (or works of art) through “declarations of alienation.” Moreover, Augie has “failed to make a clear estimate of [his] condition”; he “has failed in … function”; he “lacks serious interests”; and he has “become truly irrelevant.” Other parallels between Bellow's speech and the characterizations of Augie will be discussed later; for now, these serve to point out that, through his protagonist, Bellow is making the same observations concerning the state of contemporary literature in its relation to society that he made in his speech.

LITERARY INFLUENCES

If we accept Augie as a paradigm for artist, as that artist reflects the state of contemporary literature, then part of his role is that of the contemporary American writer who is a product of the roots of his own national literature. In order to cast his protagonist in this role, Bellow gives Augie what might be thought of as heredity and environment: past and present literary influences. Augie's heredity manifests itself in a mind and tongue highly reminiscent of nineteenth-century American authors, all of whom are representative of the kind of artistic integrity that would define them as rebels of one sort or another.

Such names as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Twain have already been mentioned earlier in this chapter; but there are others. When Augie is stranded after his abortive career in crime with Joe Gorman, he reports: “I took the excursion to Niagara Falls where nobody seemed to have any business that day, only a few strays beside the crush of water, like early sparrows in the cathedral square before Notre Dame has opened its doors; and then in the brute sad fog you know that at one time this sulphur coldness didn't paralyze everything, and there's the cathedral to prove it” (165). Augie finds proof in the cathedral of the existence of an active, warming force that sets itself against the numbing coldness of the fog, just as Henry Adams found proof in cathedrals of Europe of the driving force of the Virgin as against the cold, detached, godlike power of the steam engine or dynamo.

And, in Mexico while training the eagle Caligula, Augie philosophizes: “When Caligula soared under this sky I sometimes wondered what connection he made with this element of nearly too great strength that was dammed back of the old spouts of craters” (338). Melville's Ishmael, in the chapter in Moby Dick entitled “The Symphony,” ponders the relationship of the sun, “aloft like a royal czar and king,” with the sea and the sky; and Augie wonders at the soaring Caligula, this king of birds, and his connection with the earth and sky around him.

Of particular interest is the fact that all of the writers Bellow calls up from the past created works that speak for the same philosophic and idealistic alienation or rebellion that Augie brings into the world. From the beginning he sets a course of idealistic noninvolvement in the interests of a “better fate.” And Bellow points directly to Augie's environment when he has his protagonist state early in the novel: “All the influences were lined up waiting for me. I was born and there they were to form me which is why I tell you more of them than of myself” (43). For the most part, Bellow sets these influences in motion through the people with whom Augie associates. That is, these people, in a complex and at times confusing way, are symbols of literary movements, trends, ideas, fictive characters, and authors that have in one way or another made lesser or greater marks on American literature.

A few examples illustrate Bellow's technique in the treatment of symbolic function of character. Augie is born in Chicago, where he lives with his brother Simon, his mother, his idiot brother Georgie, and Grandma Lausch, who is the first influence to be reckoned with. This old woman is really no relation to the Marches: sometime earlier she had rented a room in their house and has stayed to exercise a dominant authority over the entire family. As Simon says to Augie, “She's really nothing to us, you know that, don't you, Aug?” (33). Her roots are in Europe, and Augie as a young boy is fearfully impressed: “That isn't to say that I stopped connecting her with the highest and the best—taking her at her own word—with the courts of Europe, the Congress of Vienna, the splendor of family, and all kinds of profound and cultured things as hinted in her conduct and advertised in her speech …” (30).

Grandma Lausch often sends Augie to the library after books: “Once a year she read Anna Karenina and Eugene Onegin [also Manon Lescaut, we learn later, p. 14]. Occasionally I got into hot water by bringing a book she didn't want. ‘How many times do I have to tell you if it doesn't say roman I don't want it?’” (11). Grandma Lausch is symbolic of the Victorian mores to which American literature was largely bound during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the references to “the courts of Europe,” “the Congress of Vienna,” “the splendor of family”—along with Grandma Lausch's stage appearance and her interest in Russian and French romances—Bellow intends this figure to represent a literary authority based on reaction and tradition. It is a fading authority, one that must find its comfort through the romantic past and by steadfastly denying the ugly present, or at least by not speaking of it. Augie recalls:

Monkey was the basis of much thought with us. On the sideboard, on the Turkestan runner, with their eyes, ears, and mouth covered, we had see-no-evil, speak-no-evil, hear-no-evil, a lower trinity of the house. … the monkeys could be potent, and awesome besides, and deep social critics when the old woman … would point … [and] say, “Nobody asks you to love the whole world, only to be honest, ehrlich. Don't have a loud mouth. The more you love people the more they'll mix you up. A child loves, a person respects. Respect is better than love. And that's respect, the middle monkey.” It never occurred to us that she sinned mischievously herself against that convulsed speak-no-evil.

(9)

In the last line Augie notes the duplicity and hypocrisy of his tyrannical Victorian grandmother. And, of course, Grandma Lausch's “speak-no-evil” monkey is the cultural primate that the artist had to battle during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

When Augie comments on Grandma Lausch's failing authority, he explains, “I never repudiated her that much [as much as Simon did] or tried to strike the old influence, such as it had become, out of her hands” (58). Here Augie might be seen as a paradigm of American literature; and it is particularly suitable to his passive character that he, like literature in general, accepts, for a while, all influences. He makes no direct attempt to hold aloof from them nor to diminish their influences on him: when Grandma Lausch simply grows old, she is sent to an old-folks home; and her loss of power is noted by Bellow through Augie: “The house was changed also for us; dinkier, smaller, darker; once shiny and venerated things losing their attraction and richness and importance. Tin showed, cracks, black spots where enamel was hit off, threadbarer, design scuffed out of the center of the rug, all the glamour, lacquer, massiveness, florescence, wiped out” (58-59).

This passage depicting a house of the realistic is at the close of chapter 4: the next chapter begins with Augie's statement that “Einhorn was the first superior man I knew” for whom Augie “went to work awhile … a high school junior, not long before the great crash” (60). While it is difficult to state the precise significance of Bellow's use of time, the publication dates of the following works are provocative: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Sartoris (1929); Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel (1929); Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929); Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925); Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925). In any case, the time was one for dispossessing the old and looking to the new; for with these novels—and, on the chronological fringes, the work of Anderson, Lewis, Dos Passos, O'Neill, and Mencken—the full tide of a new wave of literature was to flood the land: a realistic literature, something on the order of the personality and character of Einhorn, who becomes the second major influence on Augie.

Einhorn is a complete figure of the 1920s, or perhaps of the myth of the 1920s because of his pursuit of money, power, and sex; and, in spite of his crippled legs, he has absolute confidence in his own strength and abilities.¹⁰ His cynical view of life overrides all opposition. He is demanding, knavish, petty, and knowing, but he is confused and driven by a sexual greed that is without limits, “singlemindedly and grimly fixed on the one thing, ultimately the thing, for which men and women came together” (78). Einhorn, utterly devoid of illusions, knows the wellsprings of man and draws on them with staggering jerks and sly pulls. Above all social dictates, he tells Augie: “Besides, there's law, and then there's Nature. There's opinion, and then there's Nature. Somebody has to get outside of law and opinion and speak for Nature. It's even a public duty, so customs won't have us all by the windpipe” (67). In such a voice naturalism and realism announce their presence. When we think of Einhorn, we think of a powerful determinism, as does Augie when his “superior man” falls victim to the Depression: “I'm thinking of the old tale of Croesus, with Einhorn in the unhappy part” (106). And the story of Croesus is about the reversal of simple fate, the god of determinism.

Einhorn's activities are instructive. Primarily in real estate, his interests are without end, as Augie relates:

The stuff had to be where he could lay his hands on it at once, his clippings and pieces of paper, in folders labeled Commerce, Invention, Major Local Transactions, Crime and Gang, Democrats, Republicans, Archaeology, Literature, League of Nations. … Everything was going to be properly done, with Einhorn, and was thoroughly organized on his desk and around it—Shakespeare, Bible, Plutarch, dictionary and Thesaurus. Commercial Law for Laymen, real-estate and insurance guides, almanacs and directories; then typewriter in black hood, dictaphone, telephones on bracket arms and a little screwdriver to hand for touching off the part of the telephone mechanism that registered the drop of the nickel … wire trays labeled Incoming and Outgoing, molten Aetna Weights, notary's seal on chain, staplers, flap-moistening sponges, keys to money, confidential papers, notes, condoms, personal correspondence and poems and essays. …

(66)

And the end of his interests is nowhere in sight; for, as Augie concludes, “He had to be in touch with everything” (70). Through such a comprehensive and minute cataloging, Bellow's creation is to be seen as an embodiment of the naturalistic or the realistic, the distinctions between which are somewhat too fine for precise delineation. But Einhorn's drives are certainly reminiscent of the “chemisms” of Dreiser and the style in which Bellow indicates the activities of the old man is blatantly realistic in its enumeration of every last detail.

While Einhorn may be read as a generalized depiction of the new art and emerging culture of the 1920s, there is some evidence that Bellow means to be more precise—that he intends this figure to be representative of Hemingway, or, in part, to be seen as a Hemingway creation. Admittedly conjectural, the likenesses are interesting: Augie carries Einhorn on his back, even as Hemingway during this period was the master, guide, and controlling force of American literature. Einhorn's useless legs recall the wounds suffered by several Hemingway characters; his deep concern, perhaps even fear, of death is an everlasting omnipotent subject of Hemingway's; his stocking cap is in the Hemingway mode; Hemingway's almost fanatical emphasis on physical endurance and well-being is seen as Augie describes Einhorn at the table: “Then Einhorn took a white spoonful of Bisodol and a glass of Waukesha water for his gas. He made a joke of it, but he never forgot to take them and heeded all his processes with much seriousness, careful that his tongue was not too coated and his machinery smooth. … he was zealous about taking care of himself; and with this zeal he had a brat's self-mockery about the object of his cares …” (74).

But there is more at issue that Hemingway's stamina, and the further significance lies in the references to the “tongue” and “machinery,” as well as to the “self-mockery about the object of his cares.” While Hemingway's manner was to behave with a bravado in spite of his bodily fears, of more importance in this instance was his inclination to speak disparagingly of literary technique but to take an almost obsessive care with his own. Bellow shows this high degree of fidelity to art through Einhorn's son, Arthur, who attends the university and in whom Einhorn puts all his hope and trust, counting on him to carry on the Einhorn name. Augie is made ever aware of his position in relation to that of Arthur: “I wasn't ever to get it into my head that I was part of the family. There was small chance that I would, the way Arthur, the only son, figured in their references. … I don't think I would have considered myself even remotely as a legatee of the Commissioner [Einhorn's father] if they hadn't, for one thing, underlined my remoteness from inheritance, and, for another, discussed inheritances all the time” (72). And later, “Arthur's brainy authority made his dad occasionally sound off …” (293).

The threads of Bellow's intent are closely woven and of complex design; but the passages must be read as a specific comment on Einhorn as Hemingway or as a general comment on the writers of the 1920s, and perhaps as on both. In any case, Bellow indicates the weakness of these writers: they refused to admit into their thinking the uses and values of American literature (symbolized by Augie) as it had been handed down to them, inasmuch as their single-visioned emphasis on artistic technique (represented by Arthur) made them somewhat blind to their function as artist, a function that Bellow unfolds in his speech previously quoted.

At this point, it is necessary to say a word about the Commissioner who, again conjecturally, acts the role of Mark Twain. Hemingway's repeatedly acknowledged debt to Twain is a possible parallel to Einhorn's realization of his debt to his father. Augie states the case: “He [Einhorn] had his father to keep up with, whose business ideas were perhaps less imaginative but broader. … The old commissioner had made the Einhorn money” (66). Then, when Augie describes the Commissioner, the personality of Mark Twain is clearly evident:

The Commissioner, in a kindly, sleepy, warm-aired, fascinated way, petted and admired all women and put his hands wherever he liked. … You couldn't say it was a common letch he had; it was a sort of a Solomonic regard of an old chief or aged sea lion. … You could feel from the net pleasantness he carried what there had been between him and women now old or dead, whom he recognized, probably, and greeted in this nose or that bosom. … His sons didn't share this quality. Of course you don't expect younger men to have this kind of evening—Mississippi serenity, but there wasn't much disinterestedness or contemplation in either of them. … Einhorn … took the joking liberties his father did, but his jokes didn't have the same ring; which isn't to say that they weren't funny but that he cast himself forward on them toward a goal—seduction.

(76-77)

Evident in this passage is the literary relationship between the sensibilities of Twain and Hemingway. Furthermore, with Twain's renowned lack of business sense in Bellow's mind, the Commissioner, it is discovered upon his death, “had made loans to these men and had no notes, only these memoranda of debts amounting to several thousand dollars” (105). Then, in what may be Bellow's opinion of the relative merits of Twain and Hemingway, Augie says: “Kreindl, who did a job for him once in a while, thought he was as wise as a god. ‘The son is smart,’ he said, ‘but the Commissioner—that's really a man you have to give way to on earth.’ I disagreed then and do still, though when the Commissioner was up to something he stole the show” (61). Through Grandma Lausch, the Commissioner, Einhorn, and Arthur, then with Augie, Bellow shows the drift of literary influences; and those influences play directly upon his protagonist, the artist or symbol of American literature.

Even as naturalism or realism remains a force in literature, so Einhorn remains a figure throughout the book, but in a somewhat weakened condition, or changed position, from his earlier one of power. Augie reports the change: “His spirit was piercing, but there had to be mentioned his poor color, age-impoverished and gray; plus the new flat's ugliness; dullness of certain hours, dryness of days, dreariness and shabbiness—mentioned that the street was bare, dim and low in life, bad; and that there were business thoughts and malformed growths of purpose, terrible, menacing, salt-patched with noises and news, and pimpled and dotted around with lies, both practical and gratuitous” (155).

And Einhorn has grown bitter. When Simon, who is distracted by love, fails to send money to Augie so he can get back home, Einhorn contends that Augie should “take advantage” of the situation, should “have satisfaction” and not let Simon off easy. Augie guesses at the reasons for Einhorn's vindictive manner: “He intended that, as there were no more effective prescriptions in old ways, as we were in dreamed-out or finished visions, that therefore, in the naked form of the human jelly, one should choose or seize with force; one should make strength from disadvantages and make progress by having enemies, being wrathful or terrible; should hammer on the state of being a brother …” (183).

Finally, Bellow makes additionally clear what the realistic movement has become, how it has, in the words of his speech, “enfeebled literature,” through Einhorn's reaction to Augie's becoming a union organizer. When Augie asks him, “Then you think it's a waste of time, what I'm doing?,” Einhorn replies: “Oh, it seems to me on both sides the ideas are the same. What's the use of the same old ideas? … To take some from one side and give it to the other, the same old economics. … You think that with a closed shop you're going to make men out of slobs. … Look here, because they were born you think they have to turn out to be men? That's just an old fashioned idea” (293). The possibility of man bettering himself is an old idea, held by such romantic dreamers as Grandma Lausch. Einhorn is clearly preaching ideas of isolation here, a noninvolvement, the uselessness of effort—the same behavior that Bellow condemns in his speech and, ultimately, in his depiction of Augie's existence. Yet Einhorn has seen better days. Augie recalls that “you could always get part of the truth from Einhorn” (386). Much earlier he tells Augie: “But I'm not a lowlife when I think, and really think. … In the end you can't save your soul and life by thought. But if you think, the least of the consolation prizes is the world” (117). This is the voice of Bellow, it will be recalled, speaking to his fellow novelists and saying, “there is nothing left for us novelists to do but think.”

Through The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald left his mark not only on the literature but on the culture of this country; for Jay Gatsby embodies the sad estrangement, the disappointment, and the disillusion of those who feel that the 1920s witnessed the death of the American dream. In Augie March, Bellow gives this role to Augie's brother Simon. Like Gatsby, who in his childhood was faithful to Benjamin Franklin ideals and to dreams of self-improvement, Simon begins his adolescence. When Augie describes Simon's not participating in the deception of the Charities, he explains that his brother “was too blunt for this kind of maneuver and, anyway, from books, had gotten hold of some English schoolboy notions of honor” (4). Simon, unlike Augie, never has trouble with the neighborhood gangs; he has other interests: “School absorbed him more, and he had his sentiments anyway, a mixed extract from Natty Bumppo, Quentin Durward, Tom Brown, Clark at Kaskaskia, the messenger who brought the good news from Ratisbon, and so on, that kept him more to himself. I was a slow understudy to this, just as he never got me to put in hours on his Sandow muscle builder” (12).

Simon even gets odd jobs and works diligently. But one summer, and in this case, much in the manner of Dreiser's Clyde Griffith of An American Tragedy, Simon leaves home to work in a resort hotel. When he returns, Augie recognizes that something has happened: “he went through a change the summer he waited on tables … and came back with some different aims from his original ones and new ideas about conduct” (31). And Simon, like Fitzgerald's Gatsby or Dreiser's Griffith, begins his long road in search of power and wealth. Simon even talks like Gatsby; for, when he announces his engagement, he says to Augie, “Well, sport, we may be married in the next few months. You envy me? I bet you do” (150).

Augie also gets his chance to play the role of a Fitzgeraldian figure. When he takes up with the Renlings, we cannot miss the tone and flavor of indolent glamor. With chapter 8, Augie announces his new life: “From here a new course was set—by us, for us: I'm not going to try to unravel all the causes … I don't know how it all at once came to me to talk a lot, tell jokes, kick up, and suddenly have views. When it was time to have them, there was no telling how I picked them from the air” (125).

And Augie describes himself during this period: “There was a spell in which I mainly wished to own dinner clothes and be invited to formal parties and thought considerably about how to get into the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Not that I had any business ideas. … It was social enthusiasm that moved in me, smartness, clothes-horseyness. The way a pair of tight Argyle socks showed in the crossing of legs, a match to the bow tie settled on a Princeton collar, took me in the heart with enormous power and hunger. I was given over to it” (134).

Bellow's attempt to define Augie as a cultural and literary wind is obvious in the choice of words. “I picked them from the air” and “I was given over to it” appropriately describe Augie not only as character but also as a symbol of the way an institution such as literature adopts and is ultimately dominated by a particular inclination or influence.

Bellow depicts the Fitzgeraldian world in which Augie lives:

It was sundown, near dinnertime, with brilliant darkening water, napkins and broad menus standing up in the dining room, and roses and ferns in long-necked vases, the orchestra tuning back of its curtain. I was alone in the corridor, troubled and rocky, and trod on slowly to the music room, where the phonograph was playing Caruso, stifled and then clear cries of operatic mother-longing, that ornate, at heart somber, son's appeal of the Italian taste. Resting her elbows on the closed cabinet, in a white suit and round white hat, next thing to a bishop's biretta, bead-embroidered, was Esther Fenchel; she stood with one foot set on its point.

(142)

Making the portrayal complete, Esther turns out to be something of Gatsby's Daisy, a “deadhead,” as her sister Thea describes her, one incapable of accepting or fulfilling Augie's dreams.

But Augie leaves the Renlings for good reason: “Just when Mrs. Renling's construction around me was nearly complete I shoved off. The leading and precipitating reason was that she proposed to adopt me … Why should I turn into one of these people who didn't know who they themselves were? And the unvarnished truth is that it wasn't a fate good enough for me …” (151). So Augie is ready to leave the 1920s and its influences and to move into the 1930s and new pressures, new longings, new ideas, and new adoptive-minded people.

SEPARATISM AND SELF-APPRAISAL

The entire track that Bellow lays down cannot be traced here. But Augie's association with the Magnuses, the unions, his trip to Mexico, the near association with the dreams of Trotsky, Bateshaw, service in the merchant marine, Mintouchian, and all the rest are reflections of different literary and cultural interests at various times. Augie's function within this framework is highly complex; for he is both a part of it and outside it. He is outside it insofar as he fails to get enduringly involved with any particular force or influence. Pursuing “a better fate,” he moves on. In this role of wanderer, Augie is intended by Bellow to be what we may call the backbone of American literature, or, as he has been referred to here, the spirit of that literature. At the end of the novel, as will be seen, Bellow shows the present state of literature through his protagonist; when all of the literary influences finally come to rest on him, they make of Bellow's hero a symbolic figure of contemporary writing.

But, for now, the interest is in Augie as the participant who is inside the framework, and is responding to these influences. And there is added complexity to Bellow's protagonist in this role: for, on the one hand, he represents a specific trend in the particular literature of the period, as when he assumes a Fitzgeraldian guise; and, on the other hand, he represents what may best be described as the artist responding to these various pressures. Augie as artist may be seen, for example, when he is in that period of self-examination which was referred to in the first part of this chapter. It will be recalled that Augie is searching for his own character right after Thea has left him. For convenient reference, we cite the passage again: “Now I had started, and this terrible investigation had to go on. If this was how I was, it was certainly not how I appeared but must be my secret. So if I wanted to please, it was in order to mislead or show everyone, wasn't it, now? And this must be because I had an idea everyone was my better and had something I didn't have. But what did people seem to me anyhow, something fantastic? I didn't want to be what they made me but wanted to please them. Kindly explain! An independent fate, and love too—what confusion!” (401).

On the surface, Augie's self-appraisal arises from his realization that he seems to be unable to commit himself, to become really involved with life. It is more important, however, to see Augie as an artist of whom Bellow is asking the same questions he poses in his National Book Award speech. When Augie asks, “But what did people seem to me, something fantastic,” Bellow is commenting on the theory of literature that seems to demand a theme of alienation, or, as he states, “This theory [that] says in effect that modern mass society is frightful, brutal, hostile to whatever is pure in the human spirit, a waste land and a horror.” Bellow questions the vision that sees only a society uninhabitable and grotesque, not only as to its validity, although “it produced some masterpieces,”¹¹ but for its consequence—“the separatism of writers.” Then Augie says, “I didn't want to be what they made of me but wanted to please them.”

Of course, Augie is posing the often contradictory position of the artist: he refuses to become actively and positively involved, either in his art or in his personal life, with the very group from which he seeks approval. As Bellow says more directly, “This is not to advise the novelist to rush into the political sphere. But in the first stage he must begin to exert his intelligence, long unused.” And Augie has every right to be confused in his impossible demands for “an independent fate and love too,” for here is the confusion manifested by the artist who, as Bellow says, exhibits “postures of liberation and independence and creativity.” Because love and independence are mutually exclusive, modification of one position or the other is an absolute necessity. So it is with independence and creativity: for, as Bellow makes clear, “vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.”

Augie's adventures in love are extremely germane to his role as artist. To Bellow, love is a symbol of creation; as such, he often equates love with the creative abilities of the artist. In his essay, “Distractions of a Fiction Writer,” he says:

“To believe in the existence of human beings as such is love,” says Simone Weil. This is what makes the difference. It is possible—all too possible—to say when we have read one more modern novel: “So what? What do I care? You yourself, the writer, didn't really care.” It is all too often like that. But this caring or believing or love alone matters. All the rest, obsolescence, historical views, manners, agreed views of the universe, is simply nonsense and trash. If we don't care, don't immediately care, then perish books both old and new, and novelists, and governments, too! If we do care, if we believe in the existence of others, then what we write is necessary. … A book, any book, may easily be superfluous. But to manifest love—can that be superfluous? Is there so much of it about us? Not so much. It is still rare, still wonderful. It is still effective against distraction.¹²

Ihab Hassan, while he does not pursue the significance of his observation, draws a useful distinction: “For Thea love is a preparation to a more exalted state; for him [Augie] it is a worthy end.”¹³ Love as an end in itself—all very romantic. But all for love or the world well lost is precisely the issue. Augie loves in a vacuum; he loves his ideas and ideals; but he does not “believe in the existence of human beings as such [italics mine].” His Emersonianisms and Whitmanisms are kept apart from the actual human condition. As Thea says to him, “But perhaps love would be strange and foreign to you no matter which way it happened, and maybe you just don't want it” (396). Real love would seem foreign to Augie because he would not be able to reconcile his ideals with reality.

And so it is, Bellow says, with the artist. He must care—and care, immediately and now—within the framework of the human condition, and not only in some abstract way. Caring in the abstract is worse than useless; it has a deteriorating effect. Bellow makes this effect clear in his essay: “But it is not only ideas of evil that become destructive. Ideas of good, held in earnest, may be equally damaging to the passive thinker. His passivity puts him in self-contempt. This same contempt may estrange him from ideas of good. He lives below them and feels dwarfed. On certain occasions a hero in thought, he has become abject in fact, and he cannot be blamed for feeling that he is not doing a man's work. … Men are active. Ideas are passive.”¹⁴

Although Bellow is talking to the novelist, he is describing Augie's condition. Because he lives below his ideas of good, he has become, at the end of the novel, abject in fact. His idea of love, high and noble, is barren and uncreative; indeed it is self-damaging because it is not based on the real condition of its object—the human condition. How ironic the statement of David Galloway: “Augie's point of view—the maintenance of an intention which is opposed at almost every turn by reality—begins gradually to define him as an absurd man.”¹⁵ So Bellow would define the artist who insists on a “separatism” until a “fuller, freer life” arrives, and who spends his time in “dreams of a golden age.”

This paradigm of Augie as artist, once understood, is evident throughout the novel. Indeed, in almost every word that Augie speaks we can see Bellow's dual intent: first, to develop Augie as a character in his own right; second, to use him as a symbol of literary issues.

AUGIE AND WESTERN LITERATURE

Up to this point, Augie March has been regarded as a comment on American literature, but Bellow has set his novel on a wider stage: he would have his work read as a depiction of the relationship throughout the Western world between literature and society. In his “Distractions” essay, he says:

But I should like to point out that impotence has received more attention from modern writers than any other subject. … Here is a brief list:

Oblomov: he spends his life in bed.

Moreau in Flaubert's The Sentimental Education: a life spent on trifles, utterly spoiled.

Captain Ahab: “I have lost the low enjoying power.” He means that he is distracted. Natural beauty is recognized by his mind but it doesn't move him.

Clym Yeobright in The Return of the Native: empty of the feeling which Eustacia desires.

The hero of Henry James's “The Beast in the Jungle”: empty of feeling.

Dostoevski's hero or anti-hero in Notes from Underground: his spite, his coldness, his venom, combined with the greatness of his mind, give him an exceptional stature.

Leopold Bloom: the distracted and impotent man.

I could add hundreds more to this list, from Lawrence or Proust or Hemingway and their innumerable imitators. They all tell the same story. The dread is great, the soul is small; man might be godlike but he is wretched. The heart should be open but it is sealed by fear.¹⁶

Bellow is not only concerned with American literature; he sees the stain on a larger canvas. For this wider picture, he turns to mythology.

Augie's travels and relationships have their counterparts in mythology; there are, for example, some striking similarities in Augie as archetype of both Aeneas and Apollo. It will be remembered that Augie, in his own words, is born the result of “the by-blow of a traveling man” (125) and that he has no father, at least none living with him. His mother is an object lesson “in her love-originated servitude” (10). Moreover, Augie says of his mother: “[She] occupied a place, I suppose, among women conquered by a superior force of love, like those women whom Zeus got the better of in animal form and who next had to take cover from his furious wife” (10). As far as the punishment which was administered to “those women” by the “furious wife. … Grandma Lausch was there to administer the penalties under the standards of legitimacy, representing the main body of married woman-kind”¹⁷ (10). This background parallels the birth of Apollo to Zeus and Leto, and Leto's subsequent difficulties. Inasmuch as Apollo is the god of poetry, it seems that Bellow means in this relationship to reinforce the view of Augie as a spirit of literature.

Augie is also Aeneas. First, both are travelers. Then, as Aeneas carries his father on his back from Troy, so does Augie carry Einhorn (literary father to Augie) on his. In fact, Augie speaks of this ancient event in connection with Einhorn (122). More than in any other way, however, it is the travels of Aeneas and his destiny that are of significance. Several times before reaching Carthage and Dido, Aeneas, whose fate is to found Rome, starts to build a city; but each time he, with his followers, is driven off by various omens and misfortunes. So it is with Augie as he tries his constructions on crime, education, social position with the Renlings, wealth with the Magnuses, on a career as a union organizer, and so on through his travels. Each time, he, too, moves on to his “better fate.”

There is also a close parallel between the stay of Aeneas with Dido in Carthage and the short time together of Augie and Thea in Mexico. Both Dido and Thea are beautiful widows, and both dress their men in lavish fashion (314). Of particular interest is the plan of Venus, mother to Aeneas, to contrive a plan which will make it certain that Aeneas' feeling for Dido is of no great depth so that he, at the proper time, has the strength of purpose to continue his fated journey to Rome. This situation precisely applies to Augie; he seems to exist with Thea not as a person but as a kind of extension, on her terms, as a passive but highly willing and obedient follower. He, like Aeneas again, has “a better fate.” Both Dido and Thea plan hunting trips for their men. Then, both Aeneas and Augie leave their women crying in anguish and despair: Aeneas, to build the foundations of Rome; Augie, appropriately enough, to reach for Stella (or “star”).

Another archetypal pattern springs from Aeneas' search for the Sibyl in order that she may guide him through the underworld where he is to seek his father for advice and guidance. The Sibyl tells Aeneas he must find in the forest a golden bough, break it off the tree, and carry it in his hand as a passport throughout Hades. When these actions are accomplished as fated, Aeneas, through the aid of the Sibyl and his father, is set on the right track to his destiny. Bellow, however, is not so generous to his protagonist. When Augie is in Florence toward the end of the novel, he gives one of his hours to visit the gold doors of the Baptistery on which one may see depicted the history of mankind. There, he is accosted by an elderly woman, “this aged face of a great lady covered by mange spots and with tarry blemishes on her lips” (517), who is carrying a stick with a purse on it. She wants to act as guide to Augie, to explain the story on the doors, but he doubts her knowledge. Besides, he does not want to be bothered. When he refuses her services, she begs: “Give me five hundred [lire] and I'll show you the cathedral and I'll take you to Santa Maria Novella. It's not far, and you won't know anything if someone doesn't tell you” (519).

But Augie dismisses her: “As a matter of fact, I have to meet a man right away on business. Thanks just the same” (519). So, unlike Aeneas, Augie turns away from his “better fate,” perhaps because he is drawn away by a very immediate personal fate. We may conjecture that Bellow intends a comparison here, not only in that Aeneas heeds the Sibyl and Augie does not heed his prophetess, but in the nature of their two goals: Aeneas is engaged in the creation of Rome, an act that extends beyond himself; Augie's goal has deteriorated to personal, even perhaps illicit, trivia. And Bellow's final words of his speech are to be heard again: “He [the novelist] must begin to think, and to think not merely of his own narrower interests and needs.”

Both Aeneas and Augie have the same destiny—to create. But the latter has lost his way. At the end, Augie, it will be remembered, spends his time in “the cold halls of the Louvre” (522). Bellow describes his fallen state, even as he speaks to his fellow novelists: “For unless we think, unless we make a clearer estimate of our condition [but Augie doesn't listen to the Sibyl] … we will lack serious interest and become truly irrelevant [surely Augie's job with Mintouchian fits] … he dreams of a golden age [as does Augie]. … Without the common world the novelist is nothing but a curiosity and will find himself in a glass case along some dull museum corridor of the future [and Bellow seems to have left Augie looking for a likely spot for his case].”

RETREAT FROM REALITY

The failure of Augie to estimate his condition is central to Bellow's meaning of Augie, as a depiction both of a human condition and of contemporary literature and the artist. Augie is still a man of hope despite the reality of sordid and irrelevant affairs. But his deterioration is almost complete. When he and his maid Jacqueline are walking across the fields in the freezing cold, she urges him to sing in order to prevent his stomach from freezing: “And because I didn't want to argue with her about medical superstitions and be so right or superior wising her up about modern science I decided, finally, what the hell! I might as well sing too. The only thing I could think to sing was ‘La Cucaracha.’ I kept up La Cucaracha for a mile or two and felt more chilled than helped” (535).

This passage reflects what Augie as modern man has become, and here, Bellows intends, is too often what modern literature has become—the victim of microscopic vision. Life is only what may be seen in the laboratory. Augie tries to sing, but all he can manage is a song reminiscent of Kafka's Metamorphosis in which the protagonist slips to a lower form of life because he has not recognized his condition, because he has refused to face reality and suffer his freedom. It is little wonder Augie feels more chilled than helped.

Bellow points to this alienation from reality when Augie and Jacqueline are approaching the farmhouse where her uncle lives, after their car stops and leaves them stranded: “Then she pointed. ‘Vous voyez les chiens?’ The dogs of the farm had leaped a brook and were dashing for us on the brown coat of the turf, yelling and yapping. ‘Don't you worry about them,’ she said, picking up a branch. ‘They know me well.’ Sure enough they did. They bounded into the air and licked her face” (536).

Jacqueline and nature are friends. They know each other. One does not fear not frighten the other. But immediately after, in the last paragraph of the novel, Augie says:

I cut out for Dunkerque and Ostend. Where the British were so punished the town is ruined. Quonset huts stand there on the ruins. The back of the ancient water was like wolf gray. Then on the long sand the waves crashed white; they spit themselves to pieces. I saw this specter of white anger coming from the savage gray and meanwhile shot northward, in a great hurry to get to Bruges and out of this line of white which was like eternity opening up right beside destructions of the modern world, hoary and grumbling. I thought if I could beat the dark to Bruges I'd see the green canals and ancient places.

(536)

Through a careful choice of words, Bellow equates the dogs running to greet Jacqueline with the landscape and its threat to Augie. Augie, still retreating from reality, is like fragmented modern man: he is frightened by his vision of a destructive nature. He yearns for what Wallace Stevens calls the “old complacencies” in his poem “Sunday Morning.” Augie would escape to the artificiality of Bruges, a city born of Hanseatic man; he feels comfortable with its canals and palaces of the past as he does with his coveted and protected philosophies. And he cannot help laughing at the image of poor, unattractive, middle-aged Jacqueline, “yet still hopefully and obstinately seductive”: “What's so laughable, that a Jacqueline, for instance, … will still refuse to lead a disappointed life? Or is the laugh at nature—including eternity—that it thinks it can win over us and the power of hope” (536). Augie, still fighting nature, still does not believe in the reality of the human condition; and he establishes his battle lines between the real and his ideal—ils ne passeront pas. Again, he is very noble but self-defeating.

Augie's state, Bellow would say, is too often the state of the contemporary novel and of too many novelists: they, like Augie, practice separatism from the world. Frightened by it, as if it would contaminate them, they hurry to their laboratories to gain evidence of the world's worldliness, and profess great single truths. Once again, they see only Sisyphus struggling up the hill with his task; they are blind to his trip back down. But Jacqueline lives on the hill and senses if she does not see; unlike Ahab, she has not lost the “low enjoying power.”

In the last few lines, Augie assumes the role of literature, as Bellow contemplates its present and future: “Why, I am sort of a Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America” (536). Augie's statement is, first, an interpretation of the function of literature—to establish lines of discovery and communication. At the present time, though, literature is in chains of denial, “in the bondage of strangeness for a time still” (523), as Augie describes himself, which does not prove that literature (or the novel) is dead. Everybody knows that August—March is a dormant period; and if winter comes. …

To return to Phillip Rahv's statement concerning the natural contradiction between art and reality, it is important to understand that Bellow is not asking for a dissolution of that relationship. Once again, the distinction between Augie's ideals and reality is not the problem: it is the failure on the part of the artist to “estimate his condition,” to see himself within the framework of the ideal-real nature of this world. Augie says that he does not claim to be angelic, but he turns out to be a fallen angel, what with his wasted ideals, because he removes his abilities from the human condition in the name of “a better fate” that has its roots only in his imagination. So it is with the artist of alienation. It is the subangelic attitude for which Bellow calls—an attitude that will create within the existing state, and not above or below it.

Notes

1. Robert Penn Warren originated the terminology in “The Man with No Commitments,” New Republic, 2 November 1953, p. 22.

2. The Adventures of Augie March (New York, 1960), p. 28; hereafter cited in the text.

3. Malin, p. 97.

4. (New York, 1957), p. 22.

5. Warren, pp. 22-23.

6. Hoffman, p. 90.

7. Geismar, p. 218.

8. “The Thinking Man's Waste Land,” Saturday Review, 3 April 1965, p. 20.

9. Augie is a great believer in what he calls his “axial lines”—the attainment of a life founded on “truth, love, peace, bounty, usefulness, harmony” (i.e., pp. 414, 454).

10. Einhorn's useless legs can be seen as symbolic of frustrated desires, much in the way that Hemingway uses physical disabilities to depict creative disabilities.

11. And Augie's words that “you could always get part of the truth from Einhorn” show Bellow's appreciation of the positive aspects of the literature of alienation.

12. “Distractions of a Fiction Writer,” p. 20.

13. Hassan, p. 309.

14. “Distractions of a Fiction Writer,” p. 13.

15. “The Absurd Man as Picaro: The Novels of Saul Bellow,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, (Summer 1964): 238.

16. “Distractions of a Fiction Writer,” p. 14.

17. Grandma Lausch is a good example of how Bellow builds and supports the functions of his characters. Grandma Lausch represents authority, both in the March household and in the history of literature. Here, Bellow widens her role by showing her as a figure of middle-class standards, likening her authority to that which held realism to be immoral.