Saul Bellow, who died last week at the age of 89, is considered one of the greatest American writers. Not only was he a Nobel Prize winner, but also a best-selling author in the 1960s and 1970s.
His work is rich, nuanced and awash with ideas. But, nowadays, relatively few college and high school courses study Bellow.
To find out why, Tempo spoke with an array of experts. Here’s what they told us:
Steven J. Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish Culture and History at Stanford Uni-versity, now writing a biography of writer Isaac Rosenfeld, Bellow’s childhood friend:
“My two boys are athletes, and I was at the soccer field a couple years ago reading ‘Humboldt’s Gift,’ and someone came by and said, ‘Oh, it’s so good to see someone’s still reading Bellow.’ It was as if I was reading George Eliot!
“In asking that question, you touch upon a nerve ending in contemporary American culture. Philip Roth is read by young readers and young writers. Bellow is not. Why is something of a mystery.
“I think it’s the cerebral nature — almost the uncompromising cerebral nature — of Bellow’s fiction that gives him a somewhat more old-fashioned feel.”
Erin G. Carlston, an English professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:
“The truth is I dislike Bellow so don’t teach him myself. I’d guess from informal conversations with friends that my dislike for Bellow is fairly widely shared among women scholars, at least. But it’s also highly idiosyncratic and all about gender and ethnicity, for me.
“I’d say in a general way that most post-World War II literature by American white men strikes me as incredibly whiny. It’s trivial and narrowly focused, and they go on and on about how it’s the end of Western Civilization because they can’t get wom-en to pick up their socks anymore.
“Bellow, being Jewish, is less offensive to me on these grounds than [John] Updike and his ilk, for whom I have no patience at all — I mean, American Jewish men have actual cause to be insecure . . . and their relationship to power is much more complicated than it is for WASPs.
“But he still fits, in my mind, with a kind of writing I think of as self-absorbed and trivial. There’s no real tragedy, no joy, no relish in humanity. It’s all kind of flat.”
Richard Stern, novelist, retired University of Chicago English professor and close friend of Bellow’s:
“His work is too rich, too complex, apparently, to be digested by the instructors and the students. The action is sort of hidden. I remember when he was halfway through writing ‘Mr. Sammler’s Planet,’ he called me and said, `Richard, I just found a plot.’ Plot wasn’t his chief concern.
“His advanced narrative technique is masked by the passion and force and sensuousness of the books. There’s an intellectual music in the works. You have to be a little bit advanced yourself to take it in.”
Marilyn Reizbaum, an English professor at Bowdoin College in Maine:
“I was moved by the news [of his death], despite very rarely using his work. The kind of ’50s, ’60s novels he wrote went out of fashion, with their `muscular’ male protagonists.
“In a way, he exchanged places with Roth who was, I think, underrated and underread for a long time. Not that Roth does not have `muscular’ characters, for goodness’ sake, but they are less romantic, quirkier, funnier in a profound sense, more suitable to a late 20th Century sensibility. Also, Roth really made the Jewish character into a certain kind of American hero. Bellow did not.”
James Atlas, Bellow’s biographer:
“Anecdotally, I get the sense that he’s not taught nearly as widely as he used to be. The Bellow canon is unfamiliar to this generation. I think Bellow felt a certain sadness and nostalgia about this. I think people would gain a great deal [by reading Bellow]. I’m enjoying Bellow on my own — with thousands of other people. And, if they don’t read him in college, too bad.”
Steven Gevinson, chairman of the English division at Oak Park-River Forest High School, was a student in two classes taught by Bellow at the University of Chicago:
“I don’t think he’s ever been taught much in high school. There may be a short story or two that’s been anthologized. I taught `Henderson the Rain King’ for an honors American literature class, and half of the kids maybe really liked it, and the rest couldn’t get into it.
“Ian McEwan had an op ed piece in the New York Times last week in which he said that non-American writers and readers come at Bellow with a sense of wonder because he’s so American. Here, he seems a little quirky and odd rather than quintessentially American.”
Brian Edwards, a Northwestern University English professor:
“When you win the Nobel Prize, there seems to be a sense that you’re around to stay. That’s not true. People don’t really read [John] Steinbeck anymore. But everybody reads Toni Morrison.
“I don’t think that Bellow will get lost. Because of his high status, the scholars are more likely to deconstruct his work. He won’t be ignored.”
