From Elizabeth Sifton, “Editing Saul Bellow,” Slate magazine, April 8, 2005 (via RSB):

I kept on reading — all the later books, especially Ravelstein, since Saul and I had gabbed so often about Allan Bloom, David Grene, and his buddies on the Committee on Social Thought. I was happy to run into Bellow with his new wife, to learn of his new publishing arrangements. I couldn’t stop paying attention to him. He had become a constant presence for me in a different way. I never tried — still don’t want — to escape his influence, to lose his incomparable, uproarious, devastating comprehension of the mess we’re in. I hear a new joke or learn of some crazy new detail in our national life or meet a new kind of phony, and I need Saul Bellow. Wherever we are, it’s somewhere Saul has been before us, and I can’t help registering the ways that his novels transformed our ordinary American scenery into radiant loci of intense human meaning. Without him? It can never be.

Mark is correct, I think; Bellow’s not a perfect-sentencer.

Holy c%$# do I love this:

Augie March’s Chicago has vanished, surely. Augie’s generation is dead (like his creator Mr. Bellow) or dying, their children moved to the suburbs, and the city neighborhoods where Augie played and worked have undergone many transformations.Re-reading The Adventures of Augie March, I heard references to places I knew, streets that still cut their way across Chicago. Sensing an opportunity for a little literary archealogy, fellow Gapers Block staffer Alice Maggio and I set out to explore the differences between the places Bellow describes and what you see today. The following photographs attempt to marry Bellow’s text with Chicago today.

John Hankiewitz is one of the artists featured in the Chicago Reader’s annual Comics Special (pdf). His contribution, called “A Paragraph by Saul Bellow (1915-2005)” is about an English grad student and writing instructor at Ohio University who is enthralled by a paragraph in Bellow’s Augie March.

The comic doesn’t share more than a few words of Bellow’s paragraph — hey it’s a comic, not an essay — so I thought I’d share the whole thing with you:

I brought Mrs. Renling here a few times to dance and drink spring water; the mosquitoes, though, were too active for her. Afterward I sometimes went alone; she didn’t see why I should want to. Nor did she see what I strayed into town for in the morning, or why I took pleasure in sitting in the still green bake of the Civil War courthouse square after my thick breakfast of griddle cakes and eggs and coffee. But I did, and warmed my belly and shins while the little locust trolley clinked and crept to the harbor and over the trestles of the bog-spanning bridge where the green beasts and bulrush-rocking birds kept up their hot, small-time uproar. I brought along a book, but there was too much brown stain on the pages from the sun. The benches were white iron, roomy enough for three or four old gaffers to snooze on in the swamp-tasting sweet warmth that made the redwing blackbirds fierce and quick, and the flowers frill, but other living things slow and lazy-blooded. I soaked in the heavy nourishing air and this befriending atmosphere like rich life-cake, the kind that encourages love and brings a mild pain of emotions. A state that lets you rest in your own specific gravity, and where you are not a subject matter but sit in your own nature, tasting original tastes as good as the first man, and are outside of the busy human tamper, left free even of your own habits. Which only lie on you illusory in the sunshine, in the usual relation of your feet and fingers or the knot of your shoestrings and are without power. No more than the comb or shadow of your hair has power on your brain.

Christopher Hitchens was apparently able to shake George Galloway off his pant leg for long enough to attend last week’s “Celebration of the Life and Works of Saul Bellow” at the 92nd Street Y in New York. He wrote about it in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (subscribers only):

I absolutely do not remember Ian McEwan putting on a tie in all the decades I have known him, but there he was as a suited and respectable master of the farewell rite, saying that he had taken the risk of opening his fantastically successful novel, “Saturday,” with an excerpt from Bellow’s “Herzog.” The risk, as he modestly but sincerely said, was that his own prose would suffer by comparison. Martin Amis described the awe he felt at his first meeting with “Saul” — an awe inspired by the uncommon experience of finding that someone is just as good as you dared to hope they might be. James Wood, whose criticism is normally mordant and unsparing, spoke with great diffidence of the honor he felt at co-teaching a class with Bellow at Harvard. Part of this is a respect, perhaps more easily glimpsed by outsiders, for the huge immigrant and American Dream triumph that was announced when Augie March opened his narrative with the blunt claim of right: “I am an American, Chicago born.”

Part of it, too, is a respect for a more English quality of irony and understatement: Bellow coined a silken and deadly phrase that all his fans repeat at every meeting (”The Good Intentions Paving Company”) and was fond of telling how seldom anyone, even on the streets of Chicago, knew exactly who he was, even after he had become a Nobel Laureate. And part of it is the way that, even as he could write with such fluency in American demotic speech, he always had the classical literary tradition at his fingerprints.

Lest you think Chicago can’t memorialize its own, there’s a similar event this afternoon at 4 pm down at the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel. The roster doesn’t feature the same high-powered literary talent — speakers include Mayor Daley, Bellow’s son Greg, Jeffrey Eugenides, Richard Stern and some of Bellow’s other pals — but there’s a religious service and a musical performance by personnel from the Lyric Opera, so you know Bellow would appreciate the effort to class things up a bit. More details here; it’s open to the public.

Been meaning for weeks to post about James Marcus’s interview with Richard Stern, who is perhaps the least visible of Chicago’s fiction masters. (Outside Hyde Park, at least.) Stern contributes an occasional book review to the Trib and appears now and again at local literary events, but in general his profile around here is much lower than one might expect.

Marcus talks to Stern about his novels Stitch, Other Men’s Daughters, and Natural Shocks, recently reissued; Ezra Pound; real-life vs. invention in the writing of fiction; how journalism differs from novel-writing. It ends with Stern describing the novel as “one of the great human attempts to make beautiful sense out of the intricacies, difficulties and paradoxes of human experience, especially of its emotional heights and depths.”

Marcus’s interview also gave me the excuse to dig up some interesting Sterniania, including this review of James Atlas’s biography of Stern’s good friend Saul Bellow, from the The Nation back in December 2000.

Perhaps as a Bellow admirer I’m just more attuned to it, but it seems to me that the amount of press generated by Bellow’s death has been really extraordinary. Looking for yesterday’s piece by A. O. Scott on the New York Times website this morning, I notice that the Times — just one paper — has done nine pieces on Bellow since his death on Tuesday:

Saul Bellow, Who Breathed Life Into American Novel, Dies at 89
By MEL GUSSOW and CHARLES McGRATH, Published: April 5, 2005

A Parade of Humanity: The Complete List of Saul Bellow’s Books
BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, Published: April 5, 2005

Saul Bellow, Poet of Urban America’s Dangling Men
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI, Published: April 6, 2005

Saul Bellow: A Writer Captivated by the Chaos of New York
By JOSEPH BERGER, Published: April 7, 2005

Master of the Universe
By IAN MCEWAN, Published: April 7, 2005

Mr. Bellow’s Planet
By BRENT STAPLES, Published: April 7, 2005

Saul Bellow, Saul Bellow, Let Down Your Hair
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, Published: April 9, 2005

Bellow’s Democratic Nobility of the Intellect
By DAVID BROOKS, Published: April 10, 2005

Saul Bellow, America’s Poet of Urbanity
By A. O. SCOTT, Published: April 10, 2005

Anyhow, Scott’s piece, though otherwise not exceptional, included this observation:

The postwar American novel resembles, for the most part, a suburb, populated by standardized ciphers who dream of becoming characters and wonder (along with their readers) why they can’t quite succeed. But Bellow’s books, refusing to flee the cities — even in the face of nihilism and social crisis — are like cities unto themselves: densely populated, often messy and full of the contradiction and cacophony that make up the true noise of civilization.

I thought about this again this morning when I was reading — the Times again — an article about a new series in the Atlantic in which French philosopher Bernard Henri Lévy — retraces Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1831 journey through America:

I thought about this again this morning when I was reading — the again — an article about a in the in which French philosopher Bernard Henri Lévy retraces 1831 journey through America:

And in the deserted factories and office buildings of Cleveland and Detroit and Lackawanna, N.Y., he sees an enigma about America, something missing that is taken for granted in Europe: “a love of cities.”

Saul Bellow, thought by many to be the greatest English-language novelist of the second half of the 20th century, died today at age 89. [Update 1: Mark Sarvas has collected some links.] [Update 2: Michael Orthofer has national and international stories. Le Figaro: "Entre Dieu et la rue."]

I’m sure a lot of great tributes are forthcoming. For now I’ll simply reflect on the incredible, inexhaustible joyfulness of his prose, and quote one of his favorite poems: Thomas Traherne’s “Wonder”:

How like an angel came I down!
How bright are all things here!
When first among his works I did appear
O how their glory me did crown!
The world resembled his eternity,
In which my soul did walk;
And ev’ry thing that I did see
Did with me talk.

The skies in their magnificence,
The lively, lovely air;
Oh how divine, how soft, how sweet, how fair!
The stars did entertain my sense,
And all the works of God, so bright and pure,
So rich and great did seem,
As if they ever must endure
In my esteem.

A native health and innocence
Within my bones did grow,
And while my God did all his glories show,
I felt a vigour in my sense
That was all spirit. I within did flow
With seas of life, like wine;
I nothing in the world did know
But ’twas divine.

Harsh ragged objects were conceal’d,
Oppressions tears and cries,
Sins, griefs, complaints, dissensions, weeping eyes
Were hid, and only things reveal’d
Which heav’nly spirits, and the angels prize.
The state of innocence
And bliss, not trades and poverties,
Did fill my sense.

The streets were pav’d with golden stones,
The boys and girls were mine,
Oh how did all their lovely faces shine!
The sons of men were holy ones,
In joy and beauty they appear’d to me,
And every thing which here I found,
While like an angel I did see,
Adorn’d the ground.

Rich diamond and pearl and gold
In ev’ry place was seen;
Rare splendours, yellow, blue, red, white and green,
Mine eyes did everywhere behold.
Great wonders cloth’d with glory did appear,
Amazement was my bliss,
That and my wealth was ev’ry where:
No joy to this!

Curs’d and devis’d proprieties,
With envy, avarice
And fraud, those fiends that spoil even Paradise,
Flew from the splendour of mine eyes,
And so did hedges, ditches, limits, bounds,
I dream’d not aught of those,
But wander’d over all men’s grounds,
And found repose.

Proprieties themselves were mine,
And hedges ornaments;
Walls, boxes, coffers, and their rich contents
Did not divide my joys, but all combine.
Clothes, ribbons, jewels, laces, I esteem’d
My joys by others worn:
For me they all to wear them seem’d
When I was born.

From Saul Bellow’s Herzog(1964):

He did not know these new sections of Chicago. Clumsy, stinking, tender Chicago, dumped on its ancient lake bottom; and this murky orange west, and the hoarseness of factories and trains, spilling gases and soot on the newborn summer. Traffic was heavy coming out of the city, not on Herzog’s side of the road, and he held the right lane looking for familiar street names. After Howard Street he was in the city proper and knew his way. Leaving the Expressway at Montrose, he turned east and drove to his late father’s house, a small two-story brick building, one of a row built from a single blueprint — the pitched roof, the cement staircase inset on the right side, the window boxes the length of the front-room windows, the lawn a flat mound of grass between the sidewalk and the foundation; along the curb, elms and those shabby cottonwoods with blackened, dusty, wrinkled bark, and leaves that turned very tough by midsummer. There were also certain flowers, peculiar to Chicago, crude, waxy things like red and purple crayon bits, in a special class of false-looking natural objects. These foolish plants touched Herzog because they were so graceless, so corny. He was reminded of his father’s devotion to his garden, when old Herzog became a property owner toward the end of his life � how he squirted his flowers at evening with the hose, and how rapt he looked, his lips quietly pleased and his straight nose relishing the odor of the soil.

From the latest New York Review of Books, J. M. Coetzee on Saul Bellow:

Among American novelists of the latter half of the twentieth century, Saul Bellow stands out as one of the giants, perhaps the giant. His noontime stretches from the early 1950s (The Adventures of Augie March) to the mid-1970s (Humboldt’s Gift), though as late as 2000 he was still publishing notable fiction (Ravelstein). The Library of America has now republished Bellow’s three earliest books in a single thousand-page volume: Dangling Man (1944), The Victim (1947), and Augie March (1953). Bellow thereby becomes the first writer of fiction to receive the Library’s imprimatur during his lifetime.

New literary blogger Rake’s Progress spots an Amis tribute to Saul Bellow in the March 6 Guardian, but haven’t we seen this particular piece before? Reading on I realize that it’s the same piece that appeared in The Atlantic in December, which I linked to back on Nov. 19. However, two cool things about this: a) by now the Atlantic link is dead, so I can fix my Nov. 19 post with a working link, and b) I get the chance to enjoy the piece again, particularly a Bellow quote I hadn’t noted previously:

At home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life.

ADDITION 3/11: Jessa links to the Amis piece today, also without noting its previous appearance. Sometimes reading blogs is like watching Memento. Anyhow, I was reminded of this today as I read the article about Amis in the Times, with its reference to Amis’ reselling an article to Talk that had already been published in the UK. I did wonder, when I noticed it last month, why the Amis article was one the few dead links on the web page for the December Atlantic, after originally being a live link. Now it’s clear that Amis had an understanding to resell the piece to the Guardian, along with the online rights to same.