Mort De Saul Bellow

[Taisei Yokusankai]

A près de 86 ans, ce n'est pas une surprise. J'espérais qu'il nous réserve un dernier bouquin, mais non…

The backbone of 20th century American literature has been provided by two novelists -- William Faulkner and Saul Bellow," Philip Roth said Tuesday. "Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne and Twain of the 20th century.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?…4/06/BELLOW.TMP

Fascinante histoire d'un prof juif atteint du sida. Bellow s'en fait attaché à faire le portrait fictionaliser de son ami Allan Bloom ("The closing of the American mind") http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom

L'histoire racontée par un tiers, des efforts d'un homme pour contacter celui qui l'a sauvé des camps.

Considéré comme un de ses trois chef d'oeuvres, je suis justement en train de le lire. Après la rupture d'avec sa deuxième femme, un prof s'enfonce dans une sorte de folie et écrit des lettres à ses amis, au gouvernement, à des célébrites.

Il semble que c'est la saison des décès…

[Punu]

L'article du Wall Street Journal à son sujet :

He Thrived on Chaos

Remembering Saul Bellow.

BY JEFFREY MEYERS

Thursday, April 7, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

The two greatest postwar American novelists--Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian exile, and Saul Bellow, a Montreal-born Jew--were intellectual outsiders. Both mainlined the European novel of ideas into the veins of American literature and infused it with a coruscating, high-octane style. Mr. Bellow's prose is energetic and torrential; his voice learned and allusive. He thrived on chaos and loved contention, courted conflict and was inspired by personal cataclysm. It's fascinating to see how Mr. Bellow, married five times, sublimated his misery and portrayed his wives, from goddess to bitch, before and after they divorced him.

His first three wives were "nice" Jewish women from the Midwest. But, as Gertrude Stein said of Ernest Hemingway, "Anyone who's married three girls from St. Louis hasn't learned much." His fourth wife, Alexandra (the second one with that name), he depicted as sophisticated and sexy in "To Jerusalem and Back," as refined and beautiful in "The Dean's December." After their acrimonious split, she appeared--transformed and transfixed--as Vela in "Ravelstein": cold, self-absorbed and emotionally constrained. Mr. Bellow also had scores of mistresses--the rock on which his marriages crashed.

Mr. Bellow was the exact contemporary of Arthur Miller: Both were born in 1915 and died this year. In the spring of 1956, they lived next door to each other during their enforced exiles in the desert outside Reno, Nevada, just after and before their divorces and while Mr. Miller fielded surreptitious phone calls from his intended, Marilyn Monroe. Though there's no record of their conversations, their stimulating and revealing weeks together would be a great subject for a play.

Lecturing at a PEN conference in London in 1986, Mr. Bellow was stiff-gaited and parchment-skinned, exhausted by jet-lag and depressed by his fourth divorce. He ranged widely and wildly, and could not make it all cohere. In 1990, in response to my inquiry, he replied with characteristic wit: "I feel about biography much as I do about buying a burial plot. It will come to that, of course, but I'm not quite ready for it." Defying the vogue for multiculturalism and delighting in deliberately provocative remarks, Mr. Bellow once dared to issue a notorious but hilarious challenge that no one has ever answered: "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?"

Mr. Bellow, whose first language was Yiddish, translated "Gimpel the Fool" into English in 1953 and introduced Isaac Bashevis Singer to American readers. His version of Mr. Singer's opening sentences--"I am Gimpel the fool. I don't think of myself as a fool. On the contrary. But that's what folks call me. They gave me the name while I was still in school"--has the same intimate and erratic tone as the opening sentence of Mr. Bellow's "Adventures of Augie March" (1953): "I am an American, Chicago-born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes not so innocent." Both openings instantly reveal their engagingly eccentric characters.

The opening of his psychoanalytic send-up, "Herzog" (1964), is equally brilliant: "If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog," whose name comes from a minor Jewish character in Joyce's "Ulysses." To achieve catharsis, Herzog writes anguished letters to his famous dead soulmates, in the hope of saving the world (if not himself).

In a stunning scene in "Mr. Sammler's Planet" (1969), a black pickpocket, following an elderly European intellectual into the lobby of his apartment building, intimidates him not by violence, but by unzipping his trousers and revealing his iridescent purple snake--a triumph of body over mind. "Humboldt's Gift" (1975), whose main character is based on the poet Delmore Schwartz, continues Mr. Bellow's dominant theme of sexual betrayal and energizing jealousy. His characteristic hero, a flawed, high-spirited highbrow, is, as he wrote in "More Die of Heartbreak" (1987), "a genuinely superior individual, susceptible of course to human weakness and unable to manage his sexual needs, or to be more accurate, his love longings."

The infinitely imaginative and vibrant Saul Bellow, our version of a Japanese "Living Treasure," was--with Eugene O'Neill, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Singer--a truly worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize. We can gratefully say of his impressive work what Dryden said of Chaucer: "Here is God's plenty."

Mr. Meyers, a literary scholar and critic, has written biographies of Ernest Hemingway and Somerset Maugham, among other authors.

[Taisei Yokusankai]

Je rajoute à son sujet quelques extraits de "Bellow in his own words" (http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1453304,00.html)

"Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize."

"I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture"

"Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated."

"She was what we used to call a suicide blond - dyed by her own hand."

"Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it - they should, because they put it all in beforehand."

Et pour finir, l'intéressant article de l'Independent:

Saul Bellow: The author of the modern world

By Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor

Published : 07 April 2005

Within four days, the world's two boldest neoconservative voices have fallen silent. Neither devotees of John Paul II nor admirers of Saul Bellow might wish to admit it, but the resemblance is striking. Both the Polish pontiff and the Jewish-American novelist - who died on Tuesday aged 89 - became strangely similar defenders of the embattled soul and time-honoured social principles against the snares of the contemporary world.

Both were at ease with attention and controversy, advocates and publicists for heritage and tradition in the din of a media-managed culture. Yet both believed that human reality lay within: in the individual struggle for meaning, identity and value.

In the case of Bellow, the "neoconservative" label is more than vague shorthand. An in-joke from his 2000 novel Ravelstein proves it. Abe Ravelstein is a gifted but troubled university teacher - a classic Bellow hero, in fact - facing death from Aids. Bellow (who once said that "fiction is the higher autobiography" and always practised what he preached) based the character on his friend Allan Bloom, the liberal-baiting author of The Closing of the American Mind.

Bloom had been a pupil of Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago's neocon guru. In turn, he inspired his disciples to form a new élite of power-brokers. In the novel, Ravelstein fields a call from a protégé, Philip Gorman, who's high up in the Pentagon, giving inside information on the first Gulf War. "Gorman" is, beyond doubt, Paul Wolfowitz, later the architect of Saddam's downfall. Bellow implies that Wolfowitz checked in with his old mentor all the time; Wolfowitz thinks he made those calls "once or twice".

Thanks to the neocon triumph in economics and politics, it could be claimed that the values of mid 20th-century Chicago - the commercial city and the university - now dominate the planet. So Bellow's great novels, with their matchlessly intense portraits of Windy City thinkers and doers, ought to be essential reading for allies, enemies and victims of Wolfowitz and friends.

The Canadian-born child of Russian Jewish migrants, Solomon Bellows (as he was) came to maturity in the Chicago of the 1930s and 1940s. In this political killing-floor and ethnic boiling-pot, a culture of dispute and dissent sent a generation of young intellectuals first sharp left, then hard right. Bellow took the same route. In summer 1940, the novice writer actually travelled to Mexico to find Trotsky (the expedition appears in his 1953 masterpiece, The Adventures of Augie March). Stalin's assassin, with the ice-pick, had got there a day before him.

Immensely well read but socially marginal, the young Bellow had to find his own way and his own voice: "free-style", as Augie says. Early novels such as Dangling Man (1944) combine existential questioning with a first taste of the vivid social realism that would make the flavour of Bellow's major works as sharp and sensual as anything in US literature. Augie March emerged from a sojourn in Paris, where Bellow shared a flat with the great black writer Ralph Ellison. Then, Bellow and Ellison were both fighting to enrich fiction with the voices and experiences of communities on the fringe of the American dream. Later, he would go to war in print against black and other cultural radicals (and they with him), part of his wholesale rejection of what he saw as a post-Sixties drift into relativism and mediocrity.

For some critics, he never improved on the joyful zest and punch of Augie March. Martin Amis, on whom Bellow is probably the greatest single influence, thinks the hunt for the Great American Novel "ends here". For others, the tormented but absurd mid-period heroes of Herzog (1964), Mr Sammler's Planet (1970) and Humboldt's Gift (1975) set a benchmark for moral and literary integrity in postwar fiction. Always anguished, often comic, Bellow's mid-career blunderers, moaners and doubters (all with real-life models) have one foot in the world of Woody Allen as well as that of Kafka and Dostoyevsky. After a clutch of Pulitzers and National Book Awards, they won Bellow the Nobel Prize in 1976. A fixture of Chicago campus life from the early 1960s, Bellow became less of a seeker and more of an ideologue. From the 1980s, starting with The Dean's December (1982), the angry conservative often comes to the fore, as characters rail against the decadence around them. Yet the late work seldom loses a taste for mischief, an eagle eye, and a spry style. Bellow's twilight gloom is fanned with laughter, best of all in More Die of Heartbreak (1987).

Its tirelessly witty author would never have died of heartbreak, although he did have to be saved by his fifth wife from death by food poisoning after encountering a dodgy Caribbean fish in 1994. That he fathered his last child in 1999, aged 84, was treated by fans as a sort of genetic proof of his awesome creativity.

[walter-rebuttand]

Quel livre de cet auteur à lire en priorité?

[Taisei Yokusankai]

Tout dépends si tu lis en français ou en anglais. Tout a été traduit, mais plusieurs sont épuisés.

Les trois meilleurs sont supposés être Herzog, Le don d'Humboldt et les aventures d'Augie March. Je suis en train de lire Herzog et c'est vraiment excellent. Le dernier, Ravelstein, est très bon aussi.

Si tu lis en français, procure toi:

ou essaye de trouver un des trois que j'ai mentionné en occas'.

Si tu lis en anglais, c'est plus facile.

Augie March est celui qui a eu le plus d'influence sur la littérature anglo-saxone (Roth, Pynchon, Amis, DeLillo), mais on dit que Humboldt est le plus complet.

Etrangement, les liens amazon.com ne s'affichent pas. Vous les voyez, vous?

[walter-rebuttand]

Et selon ton avis à toi, faut lire lequel en premier? (cirtère = plaisir de lecture).

[Ronnie Hayek]

J'ai lu Ravelstein. Hormis que ce soit un roman à clefs, où l'on reconnaît en particulier les figures d'Allan Bloom (Ravelstein) ou Eliade (évoqué sous les traits de Grielescu), je trouve le récit d'une grande platitude. Et la seconde partie du roman est particulièrement faible et ennuyeuse.

[timburton]

She was what we used to call a suicide blond - dyed by her own hand."

Rien que ça, ça donne envie d'en lire +

[Ronnie Hayek]

Oui, bof.

Ceci dit, je suis dans ma phase: "la fiction m'emmerde momentanément, passons aux essais". En d'autres termes, j'ai vraiment eu du mal à m'intéresser à la peu passionnante existence de "Ravelstein" dépeinte par Bellow. J'ai eu l'impression d'un récit parfaitement inutile écrit par un écrivain surestimé. A la fin du bouquin, j'ai poussé un soupir: "So what ?" D'autant que, formellement, c'était ultraclassique.

Il s'agit d'un de ces moments - récurrents dans ma vie - où je me pose la question: "Ouais bon, et après ? Quelle perte de temps que la littérature !" C'est mon côté cyclothymique en matière artistique et culturelle… qui n'apparaît qu'après avoir lu un roman particulièrement décevant, je le précise.

Bon, de toute façon, j'vais pas vous bassiner davantage avec mes considérations à peine plus palpitantes que celles de Bellow.

Fin de la parenthèse.

[Punu]

Même avis. Je ne l'avais pas posté sur le site pour ne pas chagriner Taisei, mais j'ai été plutôt déçu. Je me suis arrêté vers la 80ème page. Très ennuyeux, tant romanesquement qu'intellectuellement. A tout prendre je préfère encore Roth, et c'est dire.

[Taisei Yokusankai]

J'ai eu l'impression d'un récit parfaitement inutile ecrit par un écrivain surestimé. A la fin du bouquin, j'ai poussé un soupir: "So what ?" D'autant que, formellement, c'était ultraclassique.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Là, tu me plonges un couteau dans le coeur.

Ravelstein est effectivement un hommage à l'ami de Bellow, Allan Bloom. Il a été reçu de façon assez inégale par la critique. Moi il m'a beaucoup touché.

Ce qui est vrai, c'est que la forme est très classique. Bellow n'a jamais été un révolutionnaire de la forme, par contre, dans les années '50, il a réellement ouvert les yeux à toute une génération d'écrivains sur ce qu'on pouvait faire avec les dialogues, en matière de réalisme, d'enrichissement de l'intrigue ou de jeu. Il se distingue aussi par un style impeccable.

Sinon, et c'est moins évident avec Ravelstein, il a un humour assez original, et, je trouve, très efficace.

Ce qui est sur, c'est que ses chefs-d'oeuvres ont été écrits avant les années '80, je les ai déjà nommés dans ce fil.

Et non, je ne crois pas qu'il soit surestimé. C'est une des principales influences de DeLillo, Pynchon, Moody, et autres Amis, ce n'est pas du au hasard.

Pour moi, c'était un tout grand.

[Taisei Yokusankai]

Erreur

[Taisei Yokusankai]

Même avis. Je ne l'avais pas posté sur le site pour ne pas chagriner Taisei.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Vous ne me chagrinez pas: il reste toujours vrai que je suis la référence indépassable en ce qui concerne mes propres goûts.

Le seul truc, c'est que maintenant, je vous méprise tous les deux.