[In the following essay, Pinsker elucidates the central concerns of Bellow's fiction, contending his novels and short stories matter “not only for those who care about the state of American fiction but also for those worried about the spiritual condition of America itself.”]

An artist, Saul Bellow once remarked, is a person obliged to see, and then to note what has been observed with a certain style. Bellow's greatness as an American writer rests on the clarity of his vision and the lively, thickly textured paragraphs his vision produces. In an age when the American novel often seems to have fallen on thin times, Bellow is a notable exception, not only because fiction remains for him what it always was—namely, “a sort of latter-day lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes shelter”—but also because he is one of the few contemporary writers unembarrassed to use the word soul or to talk about the need for spiritual exercises in a shoddy cultural moment. These preoccupations speak to his Jewishness much more than do his urban Jewish characters or nostalgic reminiscences of an immigrant Jewish childhood, for there is a strongly religious component to Bellow's intimations of higher spheres and the ways that they touch on the dailiness of daily life.

That Bellow's protagonists struggle, often comically, to make connections between the metaphysical and the quotidian is true enough; but the fact that they continue their efforts to discover and act upon what one character calls “the terms of our human contract”—which in our hearts “we know we know we know”—is even truer. Bellow's protagonists collect data about the mental designs that, taken together, comprise an urban landscape; Bellow himself always submits that data to the inevitable question underlying his most important fictions: “What, in all of this, speaks for man?” The rumination appeared, significantly enough, in Bellow's first novel, Dangling Man (1944), and it has remained an abiding concern ever since.

Ironically, because Bellow does not flinch from bringing a full measure of his considerable intellect to the conduct of soulful investigations, he has been both unduly praised and unfairly damned as a “novelist of ideas.” Granted, a portion of Bellow's characters are bona fide intellectuals, and they go about their business in heady ways that some readers find off-putting; but to stop at, say, Moses Herzog's “mental letters” to significant dead thinkers or Artur Sammler's memories of the Mitteleuropean culture before the Holocaust is to miss the human comedy that invariably surrounds and then ambushes Bellow's brainier protagonists. The truth is that Bellow regards most intellectuals with healthy doses of skepticism and nearly all political thinkers with a deep distrust. A recent essay entitled “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence” charts the course of his early reading in Lenin and Trotsky, his dalliance with Marxist politics, and finally his conviction that none of this feverish activity had much to say about the condition of man's soul—and, indeed, often evolved in ways that thwarted that soul's growth. Intellectuals do not fare much better, although they at least showed him the giddy directions that a “struggle for conversation” could take; but these same intellectuals were wrong (he now thinks) to equate cultural heroes with the ideas at their command, as if intellectuals and writers were the same breed. They are not, Bellow insists, largely because each has a very different agenda:

Science has postulated a nature with no soul in it; commerce does not deal in souls and higher aspirations—matters like love and beauty are none of its business; for his part, Marx, too, assigned art, etc. “to the superstructure.” So artists are “stuck” with what is left of the soul and its mysteries. … The powers of the soul, which were Shakespeare's subject (to be simple about it) and are heard in Handel or Mozart, have no footing at present in modern life and are held to be subjective. Writers here and there still stake their lives on the existence of these forces. About this intellectuals have little or nothing to say.

We have art, the poet Theodore Roethke once observed, so that we might experience other people's experiences. Much confusion and a good deal more mischief have resulted because many readers continue to equate an author's creations with their creator, as if fiction were merely a species of autobiography. If Asa Leventhal, the testy and hypersensitive protagonist of The Victim (1947), strikes readers as a difficult sort, or if Artur Sammler, the blunt critic of sixties' counterculture in Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), gives vent to politically incorrect thoughts about women and blacks, some readers are quick to blame the sentiments on Bellow himself. Moreover, they often wonder how is it that a writer so drawn to metaphysical realms and so intrigued by the project of the soul's reclamation should populate his fictions with such stinkers. Bellow's answer—namely, that perfect characters, like perfect people, are in short supply—is a good one. If that will not suffice, the only other choice is to look at Bellow's oeuvre, for it is there, in novel after novel, story after story, that one can see how a vision and style achieve definition.

Granted, reading Bellow's life work (a dozen novels and three collections of short fiction, along with assorted plays, essays, and nonfiction) can be a daunting proposition; fortunately, there are a number of entry points that are both accessible and highly revealing. One is Seize the Day (1956), an elegiac tale of fathers and sons that is arguably Bellow's tightest, most perfectly executed fiction. Set in an Upper West Side hotel that caters to well-heeled retirees, the story recounts a day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm, a middle-aged man whose misspent youth and bad adult decisions reduce him to childish dependence. He pleads for his father's help, but the stiff-necked, no-nonsense Dr. Adler will have none of it. If Tommy can change his name from Adler to Wilhelm (this in the days when he fancied himself an actor), then he will have to look elsewhere for the money, the patriarchal blessing, and—most of all—the fatherly love he demands. Not surprisingly, Tommy finds a willing candidate for these roles in Tamkin, who is simultaneously surrogate father and psychotherapist, quack and con man. From Tamkin, Tommy receives ambivalent, highly comic instructions in the arts of “seizing the day” and, then, putting the results to good use by playing the commodities market. For Tommy, Tamkin represents the last, desperate straw, and the former stays with the latter's speculations in rye and lard until the last dime. When Tamkin's foolproof system fails, most readers are hardly surprised. Tommy has seized the day and found it bone dry.

What makes Seize the Day so remarkable, however, is not its plot line, but rather the Olympian detachment Bellow brings to Tommy's sloppy sentimentality and the highly structured patterns of imagery that surround Tommy's “drowning.” Tommy himself is a marvelous creation, for while he is certainly an antihero, a man emblematic of his disaffected, alienated age, he genuinely cares for his loved ones and bears the burdens of experience with depth and sensitivity. Tommy, in short, has measures of heart (however misdirected or misapplied) his father seems never to have felt; and at the end of the novella, the reservoirs inside that heart break in a catharsis Bellow's cadenced but ambiguous prose calls “the consummation of his heart's ultimate need.” As for Tamkin, he will reappear in a variety of guises as the essential arithmetic of sensitive losers and dangerously attractive con men plays itself out in novels such as Herzog, Humboldt's Gift, The Dean's December, and The Bellarosa Connection.

Another entry point might be “The Old System,” a story that critics single out (along with “The Silver Dish”) as among Bellow's most accomplished short fiction. Like Seize the Day, it has a soulful, elegiac quality, this time set into motion when Dr. Samuel Braun, a distinguished scientist, looks at the lives of his dead cousins Tina and Isaac. He is trying in particular to make sense of what the “old system,” through which they exercised their furious, immigrant passions, might mean “within the peculiar system of light, movement, contact, and perishing in which he tried to find stability.”

Since Bellow's most congenial turf is the large canvas of the novel, it is not surprising that many regard “The Old System” as a dress rehearsal for Mr. Sammler's Planet. Both works feature elderly protagonists, and both are extended meditations on life's ultimate meaning. Even the ambiance and essential attitude of its respective protagonists seem similar. Moreover, because style is always at the center of Bellow's work, much can be learned by comparing his description of Samuel Braun on the winter afternoon recounted in “The Old System” with that of the Artur Sammler who paddles around his New York City apartment. First, Braun:

… every civilized man today cultivated an unhealthy self-detachment. Had learned from art the art of amusing self-observation and objectivity. Which, since there had to be something amusing to watch, required art in one's conduct. Existence for the sake of such practices did not seem worth while. Mankind was in a confusing, uncomfortable, disagreeable stage in the evolution of its consciousness. Dr. Braun … did not like it. It made him sad to feel that the thought, art, belief of great traditions should be so misemployed. Elevation? Beauty? Torn into shreds, into ribbons for girls' costumes, or trailed like the tail of a kite at Happenings. Plato and the Buddha raided by looters. The tombs of Pharaohs broken into by desert rabble. And so on, thought Dr. Braun as he passed into his neat kitchen. He was well pleased by the blue-and-white Dutch dishes, cups hanging, saucers standing in slots.

He opened a fresh can of coffee, much enjoyed the fragrance from the punctured can. Only an instant, but not to be missed. Next he sliced bread for the toaster, got out the butter, chewed an orange; and he was admiring long icicles on the huge red, circular roof tank of the laundry across the alley, the clear sky, when he discovered that a sentiment was approaching.

And now, Artur Sammler:

New York was getting worse than Naples or Salonika. It was like an Asian, an African town, from this standpoint. The opulent sections of the city were not immune. You opened a jeweled door into degradation, from hypercivilized Byzantine luxury straight into the state of nature, the barbarous world of color erupting from beneath. It might well be barbarous on either side of the jeweled door. Sexually, for example. The thing evidently, as Mr. Sammler was beginning to grasp, consisted in obtaining the privileges, and the free ways of barbarism, under the protection of civilized order, property rights, refined technological organization, and so on. Yes, that must be it.

Mr. Sammler ground his coffee in a square box, cranking counter-clockwise between long knees. To commonplace actions he brought a special pedantic awkwardness. In Poland, France, England, students, young gentlemen of his time, had been unacquainted with kitchens. Now he did things that cooks and maids had once done. He did them with a certain priestly stiffness. Acknowledgment of social descent. Historical ruin. Transformation of society. It was beyond personal humbling.

Bellow chooses his titles carefully, and “The Old System” is no exception, for it means to suggest a contrast between systems old and new, between the melodramatic excesses of the Jewish immigrant experience and the newer order represented by scientific inquiry. Dr. Braun would prefer a tidy, high-tech explanation that would account for an Isaac, a Tina, but none is forthcoming: “One could not help thinking what fertility of metaphor there was in all of these Brauns. Dr. Braun himself was no exception. And what the exception might be, despite twenty-five years of specialization in the chemistry of heredity, he couldn't say. How a protein molecule might carry such propensities of ingenuity and creative malice and negative power.” Braun's author, however, knows better. To understand human personality at the extremes of love and hatred—and perhaps more important, to understand how these emotions are inextricably connected—requires more than is dreamt of in philosophy or logged into a computer.

“The Old System,” then, is Dr. Braun's long, dark afternoon of the soul. Like Herzog, he means to “have it out, to justify, to put into perspective, to clarify, to make amends”—not by compulsively writing a series of mental letters (as Herzog does) but by narrowing his focus on his significant dead to Isaac and Tina. Mostly, though, he “dangles”—to use a charged word from the title of Bellow's first novel—teetering uneasily between attraction and repulsion, affection and disgust, certainty and doubt. He can neither give himself over to the expansive, volatile emotions that characterized immigrant Jewish life, nor entirely dismiss the tugs of memory. Images intrude: a sycamore tree beside the Mohawk River, a gray-and-blue hawk fish, an old coarse-tailed horse pulling a wagon, and with them vivid memories of Aunt Rose, the “original dura mater—the primal hard mother”—and his cousins Isaac and Tina.

Small wonder that he is overwhelmed by the sheer excess that memories of his extended family represent: “And Dr. Braun, bitterly moved, tried to grasp what emotions were. What good were they! What were they for! … Oh, these Jews—these Jews! Their feelings, their hearts!” Ultimately, Braun, like other Bellow protagonists, fumbles his way toward richer, albeit tentative, human truths: “It was only an intimation of understanding. A promise that mankind might—might, mind you—eventually, through its gift which might—might again!—be a divine gift, comprehend why it lived. Why life, why death.” A promise filled with qualifying “might's” is perhaps the best we have—it is certainly the most that Bellow's tough-minded honesty will allow for—but given our gloomy modern condition, such promises are infinitely precious.

Not enough has been said of Bellow's essentially religious vision, although much, probably too much, has been made of his Jewishness—as if he numbers himself in the long history of Jewish writers who wrote commentaries on the Pentateuch or the Talmud, rather than as one formed by the rhythms of American social-realists such as Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis. Bellow is a conspicuous case of immigrant gratitude, and should he find himself among writers a bit too eagerly and reductively glib in their America bashing, he has no qualms about announcing himself to be an unashamed patriot.

Does this imply that Bellow sees the American landscape through rose-colored glasses? Hardly. He can be a stubborn critic of all that is unworthy of the large promises on which our republic was founded, and his protagonists often find themselves at odds with all that is greedy, corrupt, and finally dehumanizing about modern urban culture. What we need, Moses Herzog half playfully insists, is a “good five-cent synthesis,” one that would provide “a new angle on the modern condition, showing how life could be lived by renewing universal connections; overturning the last of the Romantic errors about the uniqueness of the Self; revising the old Western Faustian ideology; investigating the social meaning of Nothingness.” It is a grand, nutty dream, the stuff that makes subsequent Bellow protagonists—Sammler, Charlie Citrine, and Benn Crader—tick, but this may only be to say that Bellow's urban comedians are men of moral vision rather than accountants of hard fact. They tend to be dreamy and easily distracted, quixotic figures tilting against the world's windmills. Taken together, their respective sagas are chapters in what one protagonist calls “the intellectual Comedy of the modern mind.” More than any other writer, Bellow elbowed characters of enviable intelligence and moral sensitivity into the pages of American literature; even more remarkable, he accomplished this high-wire act without sacrificing the pleasure that fiction ought properly to afford.

Bellow's style, one the late Irving Howe described as “a yoking of opposites, gutter vividness with university refinement, street energy with high-culture rhetoric,” became as identifiable as a thumbprint. One can luxuriate in the essential rhythms of this style by slipping into nearly any thickly textured paragraph from The Adventures of Augie March, for this was the novel that sprung Bellow free from his near bondage to the claustrophobic Russian novel and the ways that it confined his earlier protagonists to extended bouts of angst and recrimination. By contrast, Augie is Huck Finn set down in the Chicago slums and energized by America's sheer possibilities. “Look at me,” he joyfully proclaims, “going everywhere!” And, indeed, he does leave the pinch of immigrant circumstances to explore life in Chicago's opulent suburbs, to hunt iguana in Mexico, and finally to declare himself as the Columbus of the “close at hand” in postwar Europe.

Augie is charming, eminently adoptable, but as one character remarks, “There's opposition in him.” One might say the same about Bellow himself, not only because he is instantly suspicious when ten intellectuals share the same enthusiasm—whether it be for existentialism or metafiction, for fashionable brands of nihilism or trendy Continental theory—but also because he tends to play each new novel against the one that came before, balancing what he calls “a few true impressions against the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.” Meanwhile, The Adventures of Augie March is both romp and triumph, as well as the long novel one should savor before joining Henderson the Rain King on his comic misadventures through a mythic Africa cobbled from Bellow's graduate school days as an anthropologist and his sendup of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Then, and only then, should one go on to tackle works such as Herzog or Humboldt's Gift.

We read Bellow because his work matters—not only for those who care about the state of American fiction but also for those worried about the spiritual condition of America itself. Although Bellow largely shies away from public platforms—he is neither a talk-show gladiator nor the sort of writer who inspires a large cult following—his words have a way of cutting through the fog to define where we are as a people, and perhaps more important, where we need to go. He can be self-deprecating, as he is in the introductory remarks to It All Adds Up, his latest collection of essays, but one needs only to read the piece he wrote (composed, if you will) for a bicentennial tribute to Mozart to realize just how thin his disguise as a Mozart “amateur” in fact is. Bellow begins by “sizing up Mozart as if I were thinking of writing a novel in which he might appear as a character” and ends with a paragraph that says a great deal about who and what Mozart was, but even more about Bellow himself:

What is attractive about Mozart … is that he is an individual. He learned for himself the taste of disappointment, betrayal, suffering, the weakness, foolishness, and vanity of flesh and blood, as well as the emptiness of cynicism. In him we see a person who has only himself to rely on. But what a self it is, and what an art it has generated. How deeply (beyond words) he speaks to us about the mysteries of our common human nature.

Bellow is one of the few contemporary American writers one can confidently imagine still being celebrated at our tricentennial. As long as people care about the power of vision as transcribed into words (and, yes, beyond them), his work will continue to be read and studied—by would-be writers and would-be critics, but perhaps most of all, by that infinitely precious band of common readers who know the Genuine Article when they see it.