Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956)
Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, on June 10, 1915, the child of Russian immigrants. "My life in Canada
was partly frontier, partly the Polish ghetto, partly the Middle Ages." When Bellow was nine, his parents moved to
Chicago, "that somber city," where he went to the Univ. of Chicago and graduated from Northwestern. In New York
City in the 1940s -- see Dangling Man (1944) -- Bellow joined the writers identified with The Partisan Review (where
Seize the Day was first published) and, later, Commentary.
His early books The Victim (1947) and Seize the Day (1956) articulated a postwar existential malaise, at
once thwarted and driven, far from the half-assimilating suburban Jews that Philip Roth satirized. These
novels depict "the city man who feels that the sky is constantly coming down on him," as Alfred Kazin puts
it, and who seeks above all to know "the reason of things." 1
Bellow won the National Book Award three times: for The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964), and
Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970). Humboldt's Gift (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize. Bellow has written many other novels,
stories, plays and essays; he was awarded The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. In his acceptance address
Bellow said "we do not, we writers, represent mankind adequately." The novel, for Bellow, is "a sort of latter-day
lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes shelter. A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the
multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life." Bellow's most recent work is a novel, Ravelstein
(2000).
Frederick Karl complains that Bellow fails to fully fictionalize his tales, that he tells us what to think rather than
imaginatively dramatize his worldview. John Gardner charges that Bellow is "not actually a novelist at heart but an
essayist disguised as a writer of fiction." Malcolm Bradbury calls Seize the Day a classic schlemiel story, but Irvin
Stock suggests that Tommy becomes a man of sorrows to become the son of man. In On Bellow's Planet,
Jonathan Wilson argues that all of Bellow's heroes are dangling men, suspended between brooding self-absorption
and boisterous immersion in humanity. Tommy Wilhelm, Wilson thinks, mourns not for humanity at the end of
Seize the Day, but for his lost fathers, his own orphaned self.2 In his biography of Bellow, James Atlas finds in
Tommy echoes of Delmore Schwartz, a brilliant and self-destructive poet, and Willy Loman, the hero of Arthur
Miller's Death of A Salesman (1949), but Atlas also sees parallels between Tommy's and Bellow's problems with
their fathers and their father figures. Some of Bellow's friends see Tommy's expression of grief for humanity as
Bellow's elegy to his recently deceased Chicago friend, Isaac Rosenfeld, an intellectual whose promise was not
realized. However, most agree that Bellow transcended personal matters in Seize the Day. Leslie Fiedler, for
example, argues that this work freed Bellow from the label of Jewish novelist, "for he emerges at the moment when
the Jews for the first time move into the center of American culture, and he must be seen in the larger context." 3
Bellow’s novel The Actual written when he was eighty-one, has as its hero Harry Trellman, a dealer in “antiquities,”
another of Bellow’s “first-class noticers,” trying to “crack the cipher” of reality, unable “to rid himself of the habit of
watching for glimpses of higher capacities and incipient powerful forces.” In the last scene Trellman goes with Amy
Wustrin, a decorator, to the reburial of her divorced husband, where Trellman proposes. Bellow said he agreed with
Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living, “but sometimes the examined life makes you wish you were
dead.” In December, 1999 Bellow and his wife, Janis, became parents of a baby girl, Naomi Rose. In 1999, at age
eighty-four, Bellow finished Ravelstein, based upon his old friend, Allan Bloom. Bellow had written the forward to
Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), a denunciation of higher education and a defense of elitism and
individualism; at Bloom’s funeral service in 1992, Bellow said that he and his friend “come of a generation, now
largely vanished, that was passionate about literature, believing it to be an indispensable source of illumination of
the present, of reflective power.”4 Ravelstein is a biographical portrait in the manner of Macaulay’s essay on
Boswell’s Johnson, told by Abe Ravelstein’s friend, Chick – see Charlie Citrine’s narration of Humboldt’s life – about
a man Bellow admits is based upon Bloom. The novel is Bellow’s stand against death. He likes to cite the doomed
Claudio in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure:
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
1
Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, Kathryn Hellerstein, eds., Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (New York:
Norton, 2001).
2
Jonathan Wilson, On Bellow's Planet: Readings from the Dark Side (New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1985).
3
James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2000).
4
Saul Bellow, "Allan Bloom,” It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future (New York: Viking, 1994).
To what we fear of death.5
5
Atlas, 587-596.
