Years ago, at an age when I had fast and easy answers to those let's-define-ourselves, let's-stake-our-ground questions - Who's your favorite writer? Favorite director? Actor? Band? - the answer to that first question always came fastest and easiest: Saul Bellow. Humboldt's Gift, for me, was one of those right books at the right time, the kind that hit you so hard they leave a permanent scar. I'd just spent a couple of years in grad school reading poets, particularly Americans and particularly the moderns and the generation that followed. Not particularly Delmore Schwartz, though. Even so, Von Humboldt Fleischer, who stands in and stomps around for the poet in Bellow's novel, poses the challenges that seemed to me at the time most worth taking on, and within a framework of references I knew my way around in, too.

Few would argue that Humboldt's Gift is Bellow's best. Ultimately, tallying the scores, I suppose I wouldn't either, but reading and wallowing in the others afterwards, I'd always be mapping them in relation to that one thunderous moment of discovery. So: Discovery of what? Certainly not a shared sensibility. There are ideas at the very core of Herzog and Mr Sammler's Planet, say, that I not only simply do not understand, am not capable of understanding, but that also don't tempt me in the least.

It comes down to the voice. Naturally, that voice is inextricable from all that wrangled and knotty philosophy, but it's also so vigorous and life-giving, you can't get enough of it. It's addictive even, and almost dangerously absorbing. A writer as strong and fully prepared as Martin Amis, for example, can be heard so drunk with it at a phase in his career you wonder what it took to sober him up. Take a story like "God's Dice" from the 1988 collection Einstein's Monsters. It's not Martin Amis; it's Martin Amis doing Bellow. But: If that's what it took to get us from The Rachel Papers to London Fields, then we can be grateful - as I'm sure we must be to Bellow for rattling loose the true voices of countless other writers.

To relate this to film somehow; Seize the Day, to which Edward Rothstein wonderfully gives its rightful due in the "Audio Slide Show" accessible off that "Featured Author" page, is the only novel to be adapted, and that makes sense. It's slim, contained, manageable. For years, I'd imagined most of Bellow's work would be unfilmable, but now I'm not so sure. Because we're not as shackled to the 90-minute feature format as we once were and because so just plain happens in Augie March, that might work.

I remember reading that Jack Nicholson wanted to make Henderson the Rain King at some point - I remember reading that several times, in fact, though I don't remember exactly when, and of course, it obviously never happened. But at the center of that novel, the event that turns Gene Henderson into the Rain King, is an exceedingly strenuous physical act, the lifting and moving of this enormous statue of the Rain Goddess. Watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I can never help but think that Nicholson, in the end, got to do this one scene, only, of course, to play it as failure rather than triumph.

Either way, this severe test is a threshold. Fate's sealed right then and there. I haven't read a biography of Bellow, so I don't know if he considered any one of his novels the big tie-breaker. All I know is that he pulled it off.

A very thoughtful appreciation.. Well done!
Chris, www.marblevenus.net

Yes indeed, David! Well done. Why'd you so humbly put that in the comments section? ;-)

Strangely, after all these years, I finally read AUGIE MARCH a few months ago, after one of my favorite writers Aleksander Hemon said it was one of the best books he'd ever read. It's a monster, and hard to get through it all, there are a million characters, most of whom only appear for a few pages at most, but it's a terrific work, too, and so full of life. As he was. He was one of a kind.... Now I shall try Humboldt's Gift, too.

C

Many thanks, Chris - and what an intriguing site! - and Craig, it's a comment because... in part, to encourage more comments, but also, to be honest, because I was too thrown by the news this morning to write something, but also too thrown not to say anything at all, either.

I can't think of Humboldt's Gift as objectively as I can about the other novels, so I have no idea whether it's a good idea that that'll be your next Bellow but I'll be anxious to hear what you think.