The Graduate English Journal of Hunter College

           It's a bizarre thing when a Brit tells you to stop reading in search of the Great American Novel. It's almost insulting. Shouldn't there be something unique, something native about the American experience that makes such foreign declarations impossible? Yet, Martin Amis, the cantankerous British novelist, did such a thing when he proclaimed, in an Atlantic Monthly review, Saul Bellow's novel The Adventure of Augie March to be the Great American Novel. I can just hear - in a high British accent, with a scowl hushing the audience before him - Amis plainly declaring, “Search no further. All the trails went cold 42 years ago. The quest did what quests rarely do: it ended.” Well, excuse me, Martin, but who the f--- are you? And why are you - a European - telling me - an American - what defines my experience and my national literature?

            And the appropriation doesn't stop there: the contrarian, commentator, and critic Christopher Hitchens - a transplanted Oxonian now living in America - takes a similar liking to Saul Bellow, the American novelist who died this past April. In the introduction, no less, of Adventures of Augie March, he nominates the novel for that grand prize with only slightly more hesitancy than Amis, ready to knock The Great Gatsby off it's pedestral. Another Brit deciding for the American reading population: “I do not set myself up as a member of the jury in the Great American Novel contest, if only because I'd prefer to see the white whale evade capture for a while longer. It's more interesting that way. However, we do belong to a ranking species, and there's no denying that this contest [between Augie and Gatsby] is a real one.” Why thank you for settling that score Msrs. Hitchens and Amis. How kind of you. In turn, I have nominated P.G. Wodehouse's Right Ho, Jeeves to be the English novel to end all English novels. Blimey!

            Truth be told, I really enjoy Martin Amis's fiction and I respect Christopher Hitchens's opinions immensely. As a matter of fact, while I suspect their presumptions, I nod in agreement with their conclusions. Instead of bemoaning the outsourced GAN, perhaps it's more relevant (and diplomatic) to ask why these men and so many other figures from Europe see the late Saul Bellow as the twentieth-century American voice. What is it about the creator of Augie and Herzog and Henderson and Humboldt and Sammler that attracts Euros to America faster than a weak dollar? And why, goddammit, has not one of my professors ever mentioned Saul Bellow?

            Maybe, to be harsh, it's because Saul Bellow, well, isn't quite American. He was born in Montreal and was not able to enlist in the American armed forces. Coming from a Russian Jewish family, his first language was Yiddish and the ties to the Old World are omnipresent in Bellow's work. His characters exist on an immigrant periphery of what was traditionally defined as the American literary setting; they do not find themselves wading in the Mississippi nor are they traipsing through Ivy League universities. They scrape through hard-wrought, industrial Chicago; they walk timidly through Manhattan streets; they fast-talk their way from town-to-town; they balance precipitously on the line between being neighbor and stranger. Even for bold, energetic, always-assimilating characters like Augie March, the reminders of the Old World are indelibly written onto memory and language. As Jews, they are outside of the American ruling class. As the children of immigrants, they struggle to define themselves - both individually and economically - in a burgeoning, rapidly changing society.

            Yet it would be simply ignorant to call either Bellow or his planet anything but American. Truly, this must be what the European critics see in his work: a belief not that every character can really “make it” in America, but, at the very least, every character has an “eligibility for nobility.” One can easily surmise why British writers are especially attracted to his novels. Throughout Bellow's work, there seems to be a faith, a deep acknowledgement that there is still room in the American society for each man to carve out a space for himself. And, as Augie March so vigorously believes, it is the individual man that would carve that space out, not class nor education nor lineage. No matter how teeming Bellow's Chicago and New York can be, the luminosities of his characters burn brightly.

            The American reader knows this is the classic story of America, one which we are spoon-fed from our very youths to the point that it becomes almost myth. Yet that faith in possibility, a myth - however aggrandized by our historians - that serves its purpose in the structure of society, is utterly necessary for both how we see ourselves and how Europe sees us. With immigrants pouring into Western Europe from Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, it's no wonder Bellow still speaks profoundly to the foreign set. As Europe confronts a new, rapidly developing plurality in its nations, the American model still reigns supreme as the place where the son of immigrants can knock at the door, as Augie does, sometimes “innocent,” sometimes “not so innocent.” In the un-sentimental hands of Saul Bellow, the social mobility of immigrants is shown not to be unlimited or freely given or even guaranteed. But, it is, once again, a possibility, a chance that Augie March is willing to take in order to determine his own fate in his own way.

            I'm willing to bet that just about every post-1960 review of Saul Bellow has applied the adjective “freewheeling” to the style of his novels, most especially Augie March. Indeed, it is a choice word for the author's wordplay, capturing both the freedom of the immigrant pioneer and the kinetic gyrations of a Bellow sentence. Sentences are overbrimming, spring-loaded, wheeling about the page freely, as in this description of the pool hall owned by Augie's mentor, Einhorn: “Me on the shoeshine seat above the green tables, in a hat with diamond airholes cut in it and decorated with brass kiss-me pins and Al Smith buttons, in sneakers and Mohawk sweatshirt, there in the frying jazz and the buzz of baseball broadcasts, the click of markers, butt-thumping of cues, spat-out shells and blue chalk crushed underfoot and dust of hand-slickening talcum hanging in the air.” Bellow takes incredible license with language, yet never loses sight of his character, carving, determining, shaping his environs.

            It is the language of Saul Bellow's novels that also embodies the “the universal eligibility to be noble.” In novels such as Herzog and the more recent Ravelstein, Bellow nimbly captures the anxieties and spiritual wanderings of academics. Yet, his words never seem wholly complacent in American vernacular alone: peppered with Yiddishisms, Russian references, and the banter of the Jewish intellectual, Bellow's voice seems to make “a record in [its] own way,” to borrow a phrase from Augie March. It's neither American nor European. His narrators speak not in the native, wholesome vernacular of a Twain nor in the voice of the transplanted European, but somewhere in between: Americans more than familiar with their surroundings, yet still struggling to understand, to explore, to define, and, finally, to become part of the grand experiment. Perhaps Amis and Hitchens are so attracted to a character who is distinctly American but not crudely so, who is hopeful but not naﶥ, who remembers but does not sentimentalize. Perhaps, in essence, a character like Augie March is a fascinating version of the American self, sometimes a flop, sometimes a success, but never willing “to be what [Einhorn] called determined.” When Augie declares, as an opening salvo, “I am an American, Chicago-born,” he unabashedly calls the shots, yet inevitably reminds us why he must do so. Undeniably, today's American, at home or abroad, has a similar self-conscious pride in the brash declaration. Like Augie, we Americans, well, we've got opposition in our blood.

            Yet, should we be alarmed that Saul Bellow doesn't speak so widely to our students, to our canon? If indeed Msrs. Hitchens and Amis are correct, it seems a puzzling thing that the Great American Novel is conspicuously absent from high school and college curriculums. Are the only flag-bearers allowed in the American pageant Gatsby, Ahab, and Huck Finn? Perhaps, we ought to take, however begrudgingly, the advice of the European literary establishment more seriously. In the age of multi-culturalism and non-Western literature curricula, the literary representations of the wheeling-free Jewish son of immigrants no longer seem to be vanguard, but rather almost archaic. Be that so, we are in danger not only of losing a vital piece of literary history, but we also risk a further estrangement of understanding what brings Bellows and Herzogs to the United States in the first place. When writers like Bellow are excluded from university syllabi and reading lists, we lost the talent to read how Europe reads America.

            So is the late Saul Bellow the new ambassador to Europe? Surely not. No matter how many Brits deign The Adventures of Augie March to be the Great American Novel, a fifty year old novel will never alleviate the very serious tensions between our nation and the rest of the world. Yet, on our part, the novel serves as an exuberant reminder of what is worth fighting for in this country: a free society, with an ever-expanding, always-rotating cast of drifters, con-men, thinkers, oil riggers, radicals, machine politicians, musicians, gamblers, and survivors. It's the “freewheeling” America we still want and they still want, a place of originality and tolerance and ingenuity, the country that sits in such distinctive opposition to staid Europe. It's Augie's “eligibility for nobility” - despite the obstacles - that both Americans and Europeans so admire. And it's his unwillingness to be held down - by law, lineage, or ideology - that we must mirror in our civic lives, proving, as Augie says, that “Everyone knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.”

Amis, Martin. “The American Eagle.” The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000.       New York: Vintage International, 2001.

Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March. New York: Viking Penguin, 2003.

---. Herzog. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Hitchens, Christopher. Introduction. The Adventures of Augie March. By Saul Bellow.
       New York: Viking Penguin, 2003. ix-xix.

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