Saul Bellow in 1953
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by Philip Gambone

Two weeks ago, I wrote about an early short story by Saul Bellow, "The Mexican General," set in Mexico and inspired by his three-month trip here in 1940. After that youthful dip into fiction writing—Bellow was 25—Mexico continued to work on Bellow's imagination. His earliest surviving manuscript is a 66-page fragment of an abandoned novel, called Acatla, also set in Mexico. A decade or so later, when he turned to writing The Adventures of Augie March, the novel that established his reputation as one of the masters of twentieth-century fiction, Bellow again incorporated material from his visit to Mexico.

Augie March is a tour de force, the first of Bellow's great succession of novels that eventually won him the Nobel Prize. In scope and reach, it rivals Balzac and Dickens, while its language gloriously melds the modernist complexity of James Joyce with the streetwise lingo of Damon Runyon. It was a novel, said Philip Roth, himself a great American prose stylist, that gave voice to "the language you spoke and the stuff you heard, the American argot you heard on the street."

Accepting the Nobel Prize
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The son of Jewish immigrants, Chicago-born Augie comes into a world that is diminished by "world-wide Babylonishness" and "deep city vexation." Despite the dreariness of so much of his life—what he calls, in one of Bellow's numerous breath-taking turns of phrase, the "usual, second-order, oatmeal, mere-phenomenal, snarled-shoelace-carfare-laundry-ticket plainness, unspecified dismalness"—Augie understands that America is also a place of "energetic people who build against pains and uncertainties." For him, a "triumphant life" is a real possibility. He aspires to a "share in grandeur." Augie's bumbling odyssey to discover what a triumphant life might be is at the heart of his picaresque saga.

As the first-person narrator, Augie sets out to give an account of himself, to chronicle "all the influences [that] were lined up … to form me." And what a cavalcade of influences they prove to be. A "goodhearted and affectionate" guy, he casts about, trying to find where he belongs. He resists the notion that—as a Jew, as the son of immigrants, as a boy headed for a job as soon as his high school education is done—his fate is determined: "I wouldn't become what other people wanted to make of me." There is simply too much world he is eager to "catch up with."

Chicago 1935
*

After several false starts in life, Augie is hired by a wealthy couple, the Renlings, to work in their shop. He becomes their unofficial adopted son. When they take him to a swanky hotel in Benton Harbor, he meets Esther and Thea Fenchel, two wealthy socialites. Thea, who uses "sheets as towels and towels as shoe rags or mats or to wipe the kitten's messes," becomes smitten with Augie, and he, "never before so taken up with a single human being," falls under her singular spell. Thea is on her way to Mexico to get a divorce, and invites Augie along. "Everybody warned me," Augie says, but he goes anyway.

Thea has another reason to go to Mexico: she confesses that an indiscretion with a sailor has put her in bad favor with the uncle who controls her allowance. So Mexico will also be the place where she will make some money. Her scheme involves hunting lizards with a pet eagle, then selling articles about it to the National Geographic. As a consequence, Mexico also becomes the place where Augie, a fellow who "don't know the score yet," comes to experience the underbelly of life: betrayal, deception, death.

The Mexico caper takes up chapters 15-20 of the novel. At first, everything goes well. "We had all the luck in love we could ask," Augie says, "and it was improved by the foreignness we found in each other." But the "gilded and dallying part" of the excursion ends in Texarkana, where they pick up the eagle. "Caligula" turns out not to be what Thea expected. The bird is old and has never been outside his cage. When they arrive in Central Mexico and test out the eagle's hunting abilities, he turns out to be a coward, shying away when a small lizard bites him. Thea is furious: "He's supposed to have instincts. I'll wring his neck. How is he going to fight the big ones if a little nip does this to him?"

Daniel and Jule Mannix with their eagle, the model for Caligula
*

Augie sees that her outraged attitude toward the poorly-performing bird might have parallels with her attitude toward him. Did she expect him to snap to her commands? Would she not accept that birds of prey, as well as human beings, might have some "humanity" mixed in with their wild nature?

Things continue to fall apart. Augie's horse throws him and he ends up with a cracked skull. Thea sends Caligula away. She and Augie, "under the shadow of disappointment and anger," quarrel, and Thea declares that they are "washed up." Augie begins to wish that Mexico "would come in and kill me and that I would be thrown in the bone dust … for the insects and lizards." Nevertheless, he decides to go to Chilpancingo, where Thea has fled, and plead with her to return to him.

Chilpancingo
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When he arrives, the town is a miserable disappointment: "Filthy walls sunk toward the ground and rat-gnawed Spanish charm moldered from the balconies, a horrible street like Seville rotting, and falling down to flowering garbage heaps." The reckless and flighty Thea, announces that she's quitting Chilpancingo and going to Acapulco and the Yucatán. "I'm supposed to see where some rare flamingos have migrated from Florida." Augie asks her to allow him to go with her. No, she says.

Hopeless and despondent, Augie languishes "in neglected pants and dirty shirt." He gives up waiting and goes to Mexico City, where he knocks about and thinks things over. There he learns that the chief of the Russian police has arrived to take over the campaign against Trotsky, "the Old Man." Augie is invited to serve as Trotsky's bodyguard, posing as the Old Man's nephew from the States. But is he, he wonders, being foolishly flattered "by the chance to be with this giant historical personality, speeding around the mountains" while behind them would be "a team of international killers pursuing and waiting for their chance"?

"Please God!" he thinks, "keep me from being sucked into another one of those great currents where I can't be myself." In his youthful, leftist fervor, Augie wants to help: "rescue and peril attracted me." But he decides that he isn't up to the task. There is nothing more dreadful, he tells himself, than to be forced by another to feel his persuasion. "Of all the impositions, this was the worst imposition. Not just to be as they make you but to feel as they dictate." He is greatly relieved when the whole scheme falls through.

As the Mexican interlude ends, Augie concludes, "I felt now that there was something about the effect of Mexico on me, that I couldn't hold my own against it any more and had better get back to the States." With a loan of two hundred pesos, he buys a ticket back to Chicago.

In his excellent book, American and British Writers in Mexico, 1556-1973, Drewey Wayne Gunn says that it is difficult to understand what significance Bellow intended the Mexican chapters in Augie March to have. "Augie returns to Chicago, apparently unaffected by his sojourn in Mexico in spite of all his turbid activities there," Gunn writes. "True, he has rejected and been rejected by the way of life offered by Thea, but the fact leaves no discernible mark on his personality."

This strikes me as a shallow reading. Like all picaresque novels, Augie March is part of a tradition of storytelling that consists "mainly of one damned thing after another sheerly happening," as Ralph Ellison, himself the author of a picaresque novel, once said of the genre. What seems like just a string of gratuitous events thrown in for color and novelty is, in fact, an integral part of Augie's pilgrimage through the world. "I had gone down to Mexico to work out something important," he tells his skeptical brother.

Gunn thought that Bellow could not "respond vitally" to Mexico. He was, says Gunn "far too intellectual to comprehend such an emotional country, too involved with a sense of city life to appreciate the awesome Mexican landscape, too tied to his own code of values to enter easily another, and finally too even-tempered to react with either great delight or hatred." But this is criticizing a novel Bellow didn't write. The novel he did write, The Adventures of Augie March, which includes Augie's reckless digression into Mexico, does not tie Mexico to a stock set of responses. Bellow's depiction of Mexico is a legitimate one, an honest one, one that takes off the rose-colored glasses. What I love about Mexico, and what I love about Augie March, is how both the country and the novel refuse to be pigeonholed. They are bigger than any easy, off-the-cuff characterization.

The Adventures of Augie March is a great book, in some respects an astonishing book, but it is not a perfect book. It's not a breezy read—you have to do a little work to enjoy it. There are long, wordy passages that even Bellow thought should have been cut. Nevertheless, the sheer energy and vibrancy of its prose; Augie's affirmation of life in all its bewildering messiness; and the chutzpah, if you will, of Bellow's artistic reach establish it as a masterpiece of twentieth-century American literature.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of six books, including As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, has just come out.

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