Word: bellows
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Like most of Bellow's novels, Herzog was in essence Bellow's story: woman-crowded, it reflected his fractious marital and personal history. He married five times, engaged in spirited, sometimes acrimonious quarrels with his three sons, lovers, other writers, old friends. In order to write, he claimed, he needed to tear up his life...
...American, Chicago born," opens Saul Bellow's early masterpiece, The Adventures of Augie March, "and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted." For nearly six decades, Bellow kept that vow. Dangling Man, his first novel, published in 1944, when Bellow was only 29, heralded the arrival of a new voice. Defiant, brooding, charged with a shrewd irony about our human prospects, it was a novel of ideas, a Europeanized American book...
...spine. I was 14 years old, Chicago born (like Augie; his creator was actually born in Montreal and came to this country when he was 9 years old). It showed me that literature could be fabricated out of the material of common life--in my case, common Chicago life. Bellow's work, from first to last, is the biography of a place, a map of his own consciousness as it evolves against the backdrop of the bleak industrial city, with its stockyards and sooty cast-iron buildings, shrouded in a midday gloom...
Dangling Man and The Victim, the strange allegorical novel that followed, were fine apprentice novels. But it wasn't until Augie, his big and vigorous coming-of-age novel, that Bellow discovered his voice, a voice so distinctive that it would earn its own adjective: Bellovian. It combined the rhetoric of a precocious University of Chicago student with the exuberant syncopations of Chicago street talk--high...
...decade that I worked on Bellow's biography, I often rode around Chicago with him in his olive green Range Rover. It was a joy to see the city through his eyes. One day we drove over to an apartment on the Northwest Side where he'd lived as a child, and loitered in front of a burgundy-brick three-flat with a concrete stoop and a tiny yard surrounded by necklace-like chains. We stood on the cracked sidewalk as if contemplating a shrine...