Author Saul Bellow dies

A different kind of storyteller
From the beginning, Bellow was determined to tell a different kind of American story, to depart from the tight-lipped machismo of Ernest Hemingway.

“Do you have emotions? Strangle them. To a degree, everyone obeys this code,” Bellow wrote in “Dangling Man.” While the Hemingway hero keeps his problems to himself, Bellow declared “I intend to talk about mine.”

While the Bellow themes were in place from the start, his prose matured later. As the author himself would acknowledge, his early books were too prim, too careful. Only in 1953, with “The Adventures of Augie March,” would readers see another Bellow: the funny Bellow, the immigrant Bellow, Bellow the son of a bootlegger.

“There was a way for children of European immigrants in America to write about this experience with a new language. I felt like a creator of a language suddenly and was intoxicated. It was truly intoxicating and I couldn’t control it. It took me several books to rein it in.”

“Augie March” and the books that followed — “Seize the Day,” “Henderson the Rain King,” “Herzog” — established him as a major writer. In each work Bellow lived up to Augie March’s idea of imaginative power, of inventing “a man who can stand before the terrible appearances.”

Bellow’s men stood before the New World, and trembled. Nonbelievers amid the worship of machines and money, they shook with existential despair. They did everything from compose letters to dead people in “Herzog” to running off to Africa in “Henderson the Rain King.”

Price of freedom: Judgment calls
“There is something terribly nervous-making about a modern existence. For one thing, it’s all the thinking we have to do and all the judgments we have to make. It’s the price of freedom: make the judgments, make the mental calls,” Bellow said.

Among his most personal novels was “Humboldt’s Gift,” which Bellow described as “a comic book about death,” culminating in a graveyard scene as emotional as anything he wrote.

The novel was also personal in other ways. The main character, Charlie Citrine, is an aging Chicago writer chasing a younger woman while trying to keep a former wife from ruining him financially.

Two years after the book was published, Bellow faced a 10-day jail term for contempt of court in an alimony dispute with his third wife, Susan Glassman Bellow. An Illinois appeals court overturned the sentence.

In December 1999, Bellow’s fifth wife, Janis Freedman, gave birth to their daughter, Naomi. Bellow, 84 at the time, also had three grown sons from prior marriages, and quipped about finally having a girl: “If I didn’t succeed at first, I’ll try again.”

Bellow’s funeral will be private, Pozen said. A public memorial is also planned.

Books by Saul Bellow “Dangling Man,” 1944 “The Victim,” 1947 “The Adventures of Augie March,” 1953 (National Book Award winner) “Seize the Day,” 1956 “Henderson the Rain King,” 1959 “Herzog,” 1964 (National Book Award winner) “Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories,” 1968 “Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” 1970 (National Book Award winner) “Humboldt’s Gift,” 1975 (Pulitzer Prize winner) “To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account” (nonfiction), 1976 “The Dean’s December,” 1982 “Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories,” 1984 “More Die of Heartbreak,” 1986 “A Theft,” 1989 “The Bellarosa Connection,” 1989 “Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales,” 1991 “It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future,” 1994 (nonfiction) “The Actual,” 1997 “Ravelstein,” 2000

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