The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, of Canadian-Jewish parents but has lived most of his life in Chicago, generally the setting of his fiction. He received an excellent college and uni- versity education, has taught at Princeton, Bard, and the University of Minnesota, and is, I believe, still connected with the University of Chicago. He is not ashamed of being an intel- lectual or of presenting in his work evolved rather than semi- barbarian minds.

Many of his characters are Jewish, but he hardly belongs to any ethnic school. While his creations are pure urban- American, his general temper often suggests the mainstream of European fiction. Perhaps his harmonious fusion of these traditions influenced the Nobel Committee when they con- ferred on him the Prize in literature for 1976.

Though any of his books will reward you, I have recom- mended three. The Adventures of Augie March (1953) is a

modern picaresque with scenes laid in Chicago, Mйxico, and Paris. The form is well suited to Bellow's sense of the free flow of big-city life. In it he exhibits masterfully a style peculiarly his own. The street vernacular of the period merges with more classical and elegant uses of the language. Two of his outstand- ing qualities—energy and a sense of comedy—here assert themselves as, under great control, they will in ali of his work to follow.

Most of his major characters have trouble with women, as is the case with Charlie Citrine, the writer whose memories gen- erate the structure of Humboldfs Gift (1975). The title derives from Citrine's friend Von Humboldt Fleischer whose sad life is said to be based on that of Delmore Schwartz, a remarkable poet and critic who died in sordid circumstances in 1966.

Many readers and critics feel that Bellow's finest work is Herzog (1964), perfect in its fugal form, impressive in its insight into our troubled time, and enormously skillful in the portrayal of a suffering human being whose irony is continually exercised on himself and the American scene against which he is limned. Moses Herzog is a forty-seven-year-old intellectual, a womanizer without being a libertine. He spends about a week in a crazy zigzag flight, searching for self-understanding, stability, comprehension of his country and his period. Part of the time is occupied in writing letters (unmailed) to those who have figured in his life, as well as to Adiai Stevenson, Eisenhower, and the eminent dead. He recollects his miser- able childhood ("a great schooling in grief'); tries to connect his surplus store of book learning with the baffling require- ments of real life; meditates on history; passes from "the dream of existence" to "the dream of intellect." He achieves almost archetypal dimensions, doing for the American intellectual what Babbitt did for the American businessman. Like many of Bellow's characters, he is an emotionally displaced person, but even those readers who consider themselves well adjusted will recognize in the comic-pathetic-heroic Herzog not a stranger but a part of their very selves.

"The soul requires intensity," thinks Herzog. We smile, but we cannot laugh off the sentence. It suggests what is perhaps Bellow's major distinction: the high charge of feeling and thought that vibrates in ali his work but most notably in this novel. At the center of his preoccupations lies a concern, often tinged with irony, with the impingement of the long humanist tradition on a "posthistoricaT culture.

C.F.

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ALEKSANDER ISAYEVICH SOLZHENITSYN

1918-

The First Circle, Cвncer Ward

If we exclude Nabokov [122], who was at least fractionally an American novelist, Solzhenitsyn emerges as the greatest mod­ern Russian writer. This is not in itself high praise: Soviet authors, though doubtless excellent employees, have not been greatly esteemed by the rest of the world. But Solzhenitsyn is major, even when compared with the towering Russians we have already met: Gogol [74], Turgenev [81], Dostoyevsky [87], Tolstoy [88], Chekhov [101]. He ranks not too far below them, both as an artist and as a human being passionately con- cerned with the welfare of Rъssia and with the idea of free­dom—though doubtless he attaches to this shapeless concept meanings not entirely identical with our own.

Descended from an intellectual Cossack family, Solzhenitsyn was educated as a mathematician, fought bravely in World War II, was arrested in 1945 for a letter criticizing Stalin ("the man with the mustache"), was imprisoned for eight years, placed in a detention camp for another three years, began to write after his "rehabilitation," and electrified thinking Rъssia when in 1962 Khrushchev permitted him to publish One Day in the Life oflvan Denisovich, a labor-camp novel that dared to tell the truth.