Sacred Categories: Saul Bellow, Friendship, and the Novel

Abstract

This thesis traces through the sixty-year career of Saul Bellow a dynamic interdependence between forms of friendship and forms of the novel. Just as other types of relation demand particular narrative structures - such as the much-discussed marriage plot or the family saga - friendships call for accommodation within certain forms, and my thesis argues that Bellow masters what might be called the ‘friendship novel’, that is, a subgenre in which friendship largely determines plot and structure. While the novel provides, moreover, a versatile site of discourse for analysing the valences of friendship, notions of friendship lend thematic and narrative patterning to the novel. By taking a chronological approach through Bellow’s work, I also consider how the role of friendship shifts, for personal and historical reasons, through the course of a life. Each of my three chapters, accordingly, examines how - in a fairly steady progression between youth, middle age, and old age - different kinds of novel are shaped by different models of friendship. Having in my introduction accounted for Bellow’s political and literary awakening within a precocious circle of high-school friends (Isaac Rosenfeld among them), and having sketched out several key themes that emerge from his early work, I move into Chapter One. Here, I argue that The Adventures of Augie March (1953) advances a model of casual, sportive friendship that determines the novel’s form as a ‘freewheeling’, picaresque Bildungsroman; I then demonstrate how this vision of friendship is challenged, continued, and modified in Seize the Day (1956) and Henderson the Rain King (1959). Chapter Two explores a different model of friendship, and hence a different form. Against a backdrop of critical appeals (from Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and others) to the novel’s dialectical workings, two of Bellow’s important mid-career works - Herzog (1964) and Humboldt’s Gift (1975) - allude to an aphorism from William Blake: ‘Opposition is true friendship’. Such oppositional friendship, I argue, offers Bellow a loose and yet elegant dialectic by which the novel can balance such opposing aims as philosophical depth and psychological verisimilitude. Chapter Three considers questions of mourning, preservation, and memorialisation. Although these pressures were on Bellow at least as early as 1956 (the year of Isaac Rosenfeld’s death), they become central in his last novel, Ravelstein (2000), which responds to the pain of lost friendship with a blend of fiction, biography, and elegy. As I consider Ravelstein’s emergence in the wake of several unfinished novels about Rosenfeld, several disappointing attempts to write a biography of Bellow, and contemporary debates about the purpose and import of life-writing, I argue that Bellow makes a consistent case for the novel’s superiority as a form in which to capture the importance and the idiosyncrasy of worthy friends. In a coda, I finally point to some of the ways in which two of Bellow’s most committed enthusiasts and literary ‘sons’ - Philip Roth and Martin Amis - took into their own work lessons from Bellow’s visions of friendship.