SOURCE: Frohock, W. M. “Saul Bellow and His Penitent Picaro.” Southwest Review 53, no. 1 (winter 1968): 36-44.

[In the following essay, Frohock challenges the traditional idea of The Adventures of Augie March as a picaresque novel, perceiving Augie March to be more of a penitent than a picaro lead character.]

In one way, Saul Bellow's novels are very much alike: the stories focus on the special predicament of a single individual, the importance of the other characters is relatively small in comparison, and such glimpses as one gets from them of a surrounding society or of the world at large are relatively incidental. The hero's essential discomfort comes from the trouble he has in coping with life itself, the overwhelming job of just living: the central figure in Dangling Man (1944) is unhappily suspended while he waits for the draft to come and get him; The Victim (1947) has a man tortured by his personal guilts who sounds somewhat as if he had wandered in from a novel by Dostoevski; The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and Henderson the Rain King (1959) exploit heroes trapped in the quirks of their own personalities; Moses, in Herzog (1964), gets so entangled in who he is that he has to be rescued from the slough. All have trouble dealing with women who, on the whole, do not sound very hard to deal with, and each in his own special way has a talent for saying and doing the wrong thing.

Enough of us recognize ourselves, apparently, in these confessions to give Bellow a reputation for superior achievement. Over the last decade and a half it has become something of a critical cliché that he is the most accomplished of current American novelists. Doubtless he deserves the distinction, at least so long as we refuse to count among our compatriots such part-time residents as Vladimir Nabokov. Once Nabokov has been excluded, Bellow wins almost by default, at least in the field of novelists of his own generation, emergent shortly after World War II and arriving in commanding positions during the early fifties. The two most likely to challenge him in public esteem, J. D. Salinger and Ralph Ellison, have written much less than he and are even in danger of being forgotten.

Still, it is somewhat ironic that we should be telling Bellow that he is the best in the business at the present writing, and saying almost in the same breath that we like him best for books written fifteen or twenty years ago. And this we do almost invariably: Dangling Man and The Adventures of Augie March are the common favorites, with, it would seem, the preference, as between these two, falling quite regularly on the second.

There may be a perfectly simple historical reason why Herzog and Henderson should not please us as deeply as do the earlier books. The climate was different when the earlier ones appeared. We had just caught on that we had been living through The Age of Anxiety. From the Existentialists we had picked up the idea that Angst is a standard part of the human condition. We had become aware of books like Fear and Trembling, and had come to think of Notes from Underground as speaking especially to, and of, us. Kafka had convinced us that we had a broad streak of insect in us all. But twenty years have accustomed us to living with our neuroses, and today no one protests much when someone like Norman O. Brown defines, and even glorifies, the human as the one animal capable of being “sick.” The change in atmosphere perhaps explains why the common reaction to Herzog and Henderson is one of amused indifference, when not of vague annoyance, at having to listen to so much talk about so little. These books may be a little out of date.

But such a reason should not be enough to explain the disposition of truly responsible criticism, since anyone pretending to critical responsibility should be able to see through himself well enough to make allowances for the pressure exerted by the mood of a given moment. If recent intellectual history is an adequate explanation of what has happened, critics as such should go out of business. If I am not ready to do so, it is because I think that there is another aspect of Bellow's present status with the literate public to be looked into.

Herzog and Henderson reflect Bellow's growing suspicion of literary form as such. Whereas Dangling Man is tightly organized on the revered model of the diary-novel, with the narrator telling his story installment by installment and not knowing what the outcome will be, and whereas Augie March adopts and adapts the equally established picaresque form, it would be hard to affirm that the novels Bellow has published more recently follow any recognizable model at all. The novelist himself has made it clear that the change was intentional.

Now Bellow is anything but a frivolous type. Between novels he has served on college faculties and frequented various think-tanks. His occasional pronouncements on literary subjects reveal acute awareness of the issues involved, and make it quite clear that if he cared to take the time he could be as successful a critic as he is a novelist. In him—and several others of his generation—we have what has been said from time to time not to flourish in America, a Man-of-Letters, and the exact opposite of the once popular stereotype who holds himself to be, as Faulkner once put it, “just a writer, not a literary gent.” And in consequence one has to take seriously, and with respect, his reaction against our contemporary overconcern with technique and form.

Yet, unless I am mistaking mere coincidence for a matter of cause and effect, the record seems to show that his decision was wrong. In either case the facts are the same: Augie March is the latest of Bellow's novels to show a marked concern for form, and it is also the last in which a hero does not ultimately submerge under the incessant flow of his own gabbiness.

For the weakness of the kind of confession novel we so often get today is that the hero-narrator behaves as if he had mistaken his reader for either a psychiatrist or a priest. He expects something more than an interested hearing of his story, some kind of relief, some sort of absolution. The difference between Augie March on the one hand and Herzog and Henderson on the other is that while Henderson gets out of breath from beating his own breast, and Herzog is terribly wound up in the knowledge that there is something he should accuse himself of if he can only find out what it is, Augie is aware of himself as a storyteller with certain obligations toward his audience. Augie talks; the others blurt.

Accordingly, the reader of the latest novels finds himself increasingly tempted to masquerade as psychiatrist. “Herzog, do you want to know why it is you can't stop writing all those letters? Of course you don't, but here are a few suggestions you may want to think over some time. You can even figure out for yourself why you slapped your brakes on so hard in Chicago.” “Henderson, put down that nasty kitten a minute and we'll figure out the real reason for your running off to Africa.” It is even somewhat frustrating to know that Herzog and Henderson will never stop to listen, because their hope of therapy is in their own words, not in ours.

Catholic seminarians learn before they are ordained about a type of penitent who just loves to confess, to paint himself several shades blacker than he is, and, unless cautioned, to fish up any amount of circumstantial detail. (Aldous Huxley has a female in one of his novels who feels defeated because a priest interrupted her confession just as it was getting interesting, with a gentle “No details, please.”) What else is a Herzog?

Some wit has asked what you call it when you have what the trade calls guilt-feelings and know jolly well that you deserve to have them. A less sophisticated age than ours might talk about unquiet conscience: you know you have been a louse and feel compelled to do something about it. But what can you do? In one way or another, the answer has to be that you talk.

And if you are just talking about yourself, everything you feel a need to say is relevant. You just babble along. A recent reviewer has referred to Bellow as “an old gossip.” This is a case of guilt by association: it isn't Bellow who gossips, but those characters of his. Anyone who confesses is very likely to confess not only for himself but for everyone whose life happens to touch his. (But for Jean-Jacques Rousseau's melodious yawp, for example, Madame de Warens would have gone on the records simply as a kindly, hospitable, and sanctified lady with a penchant for aiding the youthful poor.) Hence the feeling one gets of listening to gossip; it is inseparable from the logorrhea that afflicts the confessing characters.

Obviously it is not the choice of first-person narration, in itself, that releases this gabbiness. Herzog is actually in the third person, but oh those letters! Certain first-person narrators, like Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, are downright inarticulate in comparison. But the difference between Barnes and the later heroes of Saul Bellow is an absence of compulsion. The voice in The Sun Also Rises is more like the sound of written discourse than like what in Henderson becomes an endless dramatic monologue. Henderson, in other words, is a bore talking about his favorite subject—himself—but Barnes is politely telling a story that would interest him even if he had not been a participant in it.

That this is also the case of Augie March explains in a very considerable degree the superiority of his Adventures to Henderson, and is owing, I think, to Bellow's awareness of the demands of the picaresque form. And this last, of course, despite the fact that a picaresque novel with a Jew for a hero has to be seen to be imagined.

For it is very hard to remember any kind of novel having a Jewish character at or near the center of the action that does not overflow with moral concern. Even Budd Schulberg's Sammy, whose claim on being the most complete stinker in modern fiction is strong, is condemned, intentionally, by everything his author makes him do and say. The picaro, on the other hand, is invariably marked by a kind of moral indifference to his own doings—an arrested development of moral sense—that is his most constant, if least winning, characteristic. From Lazarillo de Tormes down to Gil Blas he is eminently indifferent to the matter of right and wrong, and monumentally incapable of self-examination. Consequently the concept of a Jewish picaro is hard to accept.

Actually, there is very little in The Adventures of Augie March to make the idea more acceptable. A picaresque novel is the pseudo-autobiography of a character who in childhood is pushed out of his home by the poverty of his parents, takes to the road in order to keep himself alive, falls into knavery and crime because such a life promises to feed him, and as a result meets with a variety of adventures. Not even in such respects is Augie a complete picaro. It is true that his mother is poor, but not so poor that he has to leave home early: welfare agencies are there to be tapped, the family eats, and while Augie falls into criminal ways his elder brother, subjected to all the same conditions, does not. Possibly such differences as these, as well as Augie's inability to avoid getting more education than the old picaros could ever find, are merely the result of putting the new picaro in a modern urban, and democratic, culture. But at the same time it must be admitted that the culture of Chicago is not responsible for Augie's discovery, which begins early in the story, that he has taken to picaresque ways because of a defect in himself. He is the kind of guy who falls in unresistingly with what other people want, or, as he put it himself at one point, is “too easy to recruit.”

In other words, he has the moral sensitivity that the old picaros always lack, and The Adventures of Augie March becomes, among other things, a modern novel of self-recognition. In a way, Augie's attitude toward the criminal parts of his career is authentic. Like the Spanish picaros, he wouldn't insist on stealing if another way of making a living were as convenient; he isn't a determinedly vindictive enemy of society; and he has the picaro's characteristic indifference to disguising the nature of his behavior. He doesn't dispute the going values of the culture he lives in or try to transmute them into something else: theft is a crime, and for a crime you get put in jail: he doesn't question the rightness of the system, but does refuse to let the thought bother him unnecessarily. Yet at the same time it is true that he says at one point, “He was largely willing to be honest but not over strapped by conscience.” And one also finds him saying, “On the other hand I lacked a true sense of being a criminal, the sense that I was on the wrong side of the universal wide line with the worse or weaker side of humanity, carrying brow-marks or mutilated thumbs and split ears and noses.” Despite his conformity to the traditional pattern in some respects, such remarks remove him decisively from the ranks of the orthodox.

The old picaros simply did not say such things, or take such a tone. Either of these statements would be reasonably applicable to characters like Lazarillo or Marcos de Obregon. But it is entirely impossible to imagine their saying such things either about themselves or about someone else, simply because to them the idea would not seem relevant to anything. And the fact of its relevance for Augie March, as much as his discovery of his own moral defect, puts his story in a completely different moral climate.

This presence of moral awareness is accountable for the immense human richness of Bellow's novel as contrasted with those of the picaresque tradition. The old picaro, once he is off on his journeying, does indeed meet all sorts and conditions of men. They are social or professional types: thieves, scamps, and rascals like himself, servants, soldiers, lawyers, priests, judges, doctors—the whole gamut. So, in his way, does Augie March meet a wide variety. But of the numerous dispositions one can take toward one's fellow men the old picaro is largely limited to one: they are adversaries whom he must trick before they can trick him, beat before he is beaten, and whom it would be folly to trust. Seen from this one angle they tend to become the rapidly sketched, stereotyped representatives of large groups rather than individuals. In contrast, Augie's interest in the people around him, although it invariably includes the practical and prudential, normally transcends these: he is curious about the people he meets, and often without reference to whatever effect they may have on his own life. Such curiosity is contagious and infects readers. Augie's affection for the human race is catching.

So too is his awareness of the situations in which people live and work. For example:

… In Woolworth's cellar we unpacked crockery from barrels so enormous that you could walk into them; we scooped out stale straw and threw it in the furnace. Or we loaded paper into the giant press and baled it. It was foul down there from the spoiled food and mustard cans, old candy, and the straw and paper. For lunch we went upstairs. Simon refused to take sandwiches from home; he said we needed a hot meal when we were working. For twenty-five cents we got two hotdogs, a mug of root beer, and pie, the dogs in cotton-quality rolls, dripping with the same mustard that made the air bad below. But it was the figure you cut as an employee, on an employee's footing with the girls, in workclothes, and being of that tin-tough, creaking, jazzy bazaar of hardware, glassware, chocolate, chickenfeed, drygoods, oilcloth and song hits—that was the big thing; and even being the Atlases of it, under the floor, hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling weight of hundreds, with the fanning, breathing movie organ next door and the rumble descending from the trolleys on Chicago Avenue—the bloody-rinded Saturday gloom of wind-borne ash, and blackened forms of five-story buildings rising up to a blind Northern dimness from the Christmas blaze of shops.

I take it that the unmediated, experiential realness of such a passage needs no comment. What is relevant here is that such intense and almost uncomfortable closeness to the phenomena of life is not characteristic of the Spanish picaresque, since the old picaros do not linger so long over the brute-stuff of existence, but take it more or less for granted. Ultimately, of course, such closeness is a moral matter, and testifies to a most unpicaresque concern for people and for the quality of their lives. The same concern is reflected in Bellow's style.

In telling his own story, the old picaro was, of course, limited by his lack of education. For him to use a style of any noteworthy elevation would immediately put him out of character. (The unknown author of the Lazarillo, aware of both Aristotle and the limitations of his central character, apologizes gracefully and elaborately for the style his subject imposes upon him.) Hence a tone of extreme matter-of-factness relieved not by occasional mounting into a higher emotional register but by an almost constant play of wryly ironic, often satirical humor.

Here, once more, Bellow takes what he wants and leaves the rest. The fundamental tone of his novel is as matter-of-fact as that of any of the Spaniards. But Augie's hit-or-miss and at the same time extensive education permits a somewhat wider range of variations, especially when he falls into one of his occasional moments of despair, and, as well, a freer and at the same time more specific use of descriptive language—witness the last sentence of the passage quoted above. In this Bellow takes certain liberties with the Spanish model, but on the whole remains remarkably faithful to it.

What one misses is the humor. Unless I am being completely imperceptive, there is next to none in The Adventures of Augie March. Augie's similarity to the picaresque hero does not include any capacity for enjoying his own trickery, or for seeing the joke in his own misfortunes. He has much more of the morose masochism of the schlamazel—the type who, when the schlemiel spills the soup, is always sitting where it will land in his lap. And accordingly irony is absent.

The old Spanish model worked on the assumption that his particular experience of life would have been impossible if the world were what the affluent say it is. The church, for example, gives him a set of principles he would not be displeased to live by—if he could only do so and go on living. Likewise there would be nothing really wrong with living within the law—if he could afford it. This disparity between what is said to be, and what in fact is, strikes the picaro as eternally funny. Augie March is possibly too aware of his own deficiency, too ready to take the moral responsibility for what happens to him, for him to enjoy the humor of his situation. Hence, he has more in common with Herzog and Henderson than with any picaro whomsoever. Whatever else may be said about picaros, such characters are completely at home in their own skins, and live at peace with their own personalities as Augie does not. He takes part in a robbery, lives by stealing textbooks, helps a girl get an abortion, baby-sits his lady friend's American eagle, helps another girl run away from her husband, simply because he is Augie March; as he sees it, a man's character is his fate, and his own fate has nothing to recommend it.

When he puts together the notes that make up his story, he has been through World War II and he and Stella are in France, where she is working in movies and he operates in the black market as agent for their friend Mintouchian, having once more been “recruited.” By the time he reaches this point his idea of the nature of his weakness is complete. I am more and more inclined to read The Adventures a little as if it were one of those novels like Absalom, Absalom!, in which the narrator grasps the meaning of his story only as he is telling it. If this is the right reading, we are miles away not only from the picaresque in its pure state—since the picaro has no trouble understanding himself—but even from such corrupted picaresque stories as Moll Flanders and Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus.

The narrators of this last pair are reformed characters. They have been through the mill, and now know that what they did was wrong. The cautionary tone is recurrent: their kind of conduct is something the reader should avoid. They now avoid it themselves, being older and wiser, and also better, people. But Augie is only older and wiser.

Augie's unassuaged discomfort is what makes this novel so typical of its time, in the sense that The Invisible Man and Catcher in the Rye are also typical. But whereas Ellison's and Salinger's heroes are preternaturally innocent, pre-Adamic characters who are tortured by a world where innocence is out of place, Augie is the prisoner of his knowledge of his own un-innocence. Holden Caulfield is driven underground by his having to live with other men; Augie's trouble comes from his having to live with himself.

So, in the last analysis, The Adventures is not a picaresque novel, but a confession that adopts a picaresque structure. Augie is not a picaro so much as a penitent—one of those penitents who are making European criticism ask repeatedly whether American fiction has not “gone Russian.” But the obligations imposed on the narrator by the structure he is made to appropriate, the structural decorum he is forced to observe, keep him from becoming what penitents so often are, neurotic blabbermouths. This makes the great difference. Henderson and Herzog are good novels, and the fate of merely good novels is to be forgotten; but The Adventures of Augie March, perhaps by accident but I think by design, is one of the three or four memorable ones we have had in the last two decades. And the design includes the fortunate conjunction of structure and material—or call it, baldly, of form and content—that Bellow has chosen not to try to achieve again.