He was the dean of American letters. A genius with the voice of the America of the mid and late 20th century. Had he been the writer of and the embodiment of the American "everyman"; then 89 would have been a "ripe old age."
But that he was not. We mourn the passing of a master novelist who, said the New York Tmes, "... laid a path for old-fashioned, supersized characters and equally big themes and ideas..." They were all men trying to come to grips with what Corde (Albert Corde the dean in The Dean's December) called "...men trying to come to grips with...'the big-scale insanities of the 20th century'."
Saul Bellow died at 89. Too soon to have figured out the meaning of the century nor to have prepared our souls for the 21st which promises to have even larger- scale insanities. He was a genius of American literature and left behind both books and the characters he created that stay in our heads for a lifetime.
The Adventures of Augie March was one of my favorites and one of Bellow's searchers lost in a world that swirled and eddied around him. . It was not an easy century and Bellow began with Charlie Chapin in Modern Times and ended in post 9/11. It was a century of both change and rootlessness. Knowledge and doubt, religious zealots and wars without end. We lived it and it was violent and threatening and his bigger-than-life heroes "...fought the battle for courage, intelligence, selfhood and a sense of human grandeur in the postwar age of expansive, materialist, high-towered Chicago-style American capitalism."
The efforts of making characters live and words follow on words and plots that kept up the pace that was the pace of the century accorded him the Nobel Prize in 1976, a Pulitzer, three National Book Awards and a Presidential Medal.
The amazing story I learned (and should have known) from the Times was that this voice of America and icon of Chicago was "born in Lachine, Quebec, a poor, immigrant suburb of Montreal, and named Solomon Bellow"...(born)... "either June or July 10, 1915..." He was the fourth child but the first to be born in the USA.. His mother wanted him to be a violinist or a rabbi (so did my great-grandmother of my grandfather) but when he was eight he spent six months in a Canadian hospital "...reading Uncle Tom's Cabin and the comics..." And there and then he decided he was to be a someone and not an American anyman.
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