Saul Bellow’s third novel and winner of the National Book Award, The Adventures of Augie March, came easily to him. Indeed, says Bellow, he began the novel in Paris, writing in trains and in cafés, then moving to Rome: “The great pleasure of the book was that it came easily. All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it. That’s why the form is so loose” (Breit, 3).
Yet Augie March remains, especially for Bellow scholars, a significant turning point in his fictional techniques. Whereas his earlier novels Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) embrace, in the words of scholar and critic Robert F. Kiernan, “the cerebral style and Europeanized weltschmerz” of a more formal modernism (Kiernan, 40), The Adventures of Augie March seems by comparison an unrestrained, expansive, exuberant novel in the picaresque tradition of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). Yet it has unmistakable ties with 20th-century naturalism, particularly in its evocation of the grim poverty in which the young Chicago-born Augie March is raised, evoking the work of Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Nelson Algren, and James T. Farrell.
Bellow’s character, however, is no pawn of a deterministic worldview. Throughout his odyssey and his adventures, the highly intelligent and rebellious Augie (scholar Frederick Karl calls him a “quasi-picaresque” [141]) is aware of the manipulative nature of the many acquaintances he meets along the way, and ultimately he refuses to succumb to either social convention or individual attempts to mold him into another’s image.
The novel opens in Chicago and moves through Michigan, Mexico, and the sea off Africa, concluding in Paris. On one level, Augie, the first-person narrator, may be viewed as the colorful rogue or picaro: early in life he becomes proficient at feigning innocence and telling glib falsehoods in order to achieve his short-range goals; he also becomes adept at finding ways to make easy money and to attract a variety of women.
Author Saul Bellow. (Photo by Art Rickerby//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
On another level, however, Augie refuses to be compromised in the ways that matter in the long haul and remains an optimist who puts weakness and failure behind him. Those readers who subscribe to this view differ from those who see Augie as an antihero, an ultimately pathetic individual whose philosophy is meaningless and whose existence is therefore without worth or purpose.
Viewing the novel as a bildungsroman, the reader quickly sees that Augie’s education occurs through a series of meetings and relationships with a varied group of characters, each of whom would like to see Augie in his or her own image. Augie’s first mentor is Grandma Lausch, an elderly Jewish immigrant from Odessa, Russia, who boards with Augie’s family. She introduces Augie to the Horatio Alger ideal, underscores the fluidity of American society, and advises him on ways to survive on the street.
From the beginning, Augie proves resistant to the easy ways of climbing the social ladder as a path to prosperity, unlike his brother Simon, who learns Grandma’s lessons with alacrity and thus earns wealth and social respectability. To Augie, the “handsome and assertive” Simon, valedictorian of his class, is like a proud Iroquois, a Cincinnatus, the kind “who became the king of corporations” (29).
From the perspective of scholar Gloria Cronin, however, Augie recognizes in Simon the composite of “romantic models of masculinity” that are ultimately doomed to failure (Cronin, 92).
In his last years of high school, Augie falls under the influence of William Einhorn, a man of great intellectual, business, and sexual energy: although his arms and legs are crippled, he manages several successful business ventures and has no trouble finding women proficient at satisfying his sexual needs.
After high school graduation, Augie briefly attends college but falls under the influence of Mr. and Mrs. Renling, who not only employ him in their fashionable saddle shop but also teach him the dress and behavior of the wealthier classes. When Mrs. Renling tries to adopt him, however, Augie flees.
In Detroit, he joins the gangster Joe Gorman in illegal immigrant smuggling and, back in Chicago, with his new friend Padilla, he engages in petty book theft. Cronin suggests that, although at this point he has not yet discovered his elusive, true identity, Augie has at least recognized one of the most significant facts about himself: “he is the product of entirely new social forces that have forged a different kind of American masculinity” (Cronin, 93).
In this next Chicago phase, during the Great Depression, Augie is hired by his brother Simon, who has married into the wealthy Magnus family. Simon provides a job for Augie in the coal plant given to him by his new father-in-law.
Augie once again dismisses someone else’s plans for him—this time his brother’s plan to have Augie marry into the Magnus family. Instead, Augie scandalizes the Magnuses by helping Mimi Villars, a fellow boarder, find an abortionist after her lover abandons her.
When Simon fires him, Augie becomes involved with the wealthy Thea Fenchel, who is in the process of obtaining a divorce. He falls in love with her and moves into her house in Mexico; at her insistence, he hunts with a trained eagle named Caligula who clearly functions as a symbol of Augie himself.
Thea believes Caligula is a “cowardly” bird because, like Augie, he balks at killing or hurting even the tiniest of creatures. Augie, however—perhaps because he has not yet rid himself of romantic illusions—interprets the eagle’s behavior as emblematic not of cowardice but of love.
Augie extricates himself from this relationship by initiating an involvement with Stella Chesney, the mistress of an old friend. Although initially hurt and disoriented by Stella’s subsequent angry abandonment of him, he returns to Chicago for the final chapters of his journey.
Once again evading his brother Simon’s efforts to take over his life, Augie takes on several other jobs and, with the outbreak of World War II, enlists in the merchant marine. He finds that he has now fallen in love with Stella, and they marry on his first leave.
When his ship is torpedoed, Augie finds himself trapped in a lifeboat with Basteshaw, a mad scientist who attempts to force Augie to become his research assistant in the Canary Islands.
Rescued by a British tanker, Augie ends up, in the last chapter of the novel, residing in Paris with Stella and working for a black marketer named Mintouchian. He is still in love with Stella, despite her weaknesses, one of which, Augie discovers, is her involvement with yet another lover from her past.
Determined to have a family, however, Augie is able to forgive Stella, able to laugh, ready to resume his quest, and is openly optimistic about his future: “Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus,” he observes. “I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in his chains. Which didn’t prove there was no America” (536).
Readers will determine for themselves whether they accept Augie as one who has profited from his life’s journey and, having seen the worst of the world, is at ease with himself, or whether, like some critics, they detect a note of anxiety in his account that undermines the apparently positive denouement.
After all, one’s interpretation of Augie and his opportunities has much to do with one’s own vision of the American future. Bellow’s ending allows readers to struggle with their own interpretation.
Sources
Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March. New York: Viking, 1953. Reprint, with introduction by Lionel Trilling, New York: Modern Library, 1965.
Braham, Jeanne. A Sort of Columbus: The American Voyages of Saul Bellow’s Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.
Breit, Harvey. “A Talk with Saul Bellow.” In Conversations with Saul Bellow, edited by Gloria Cronin and Ben Siegel, 3–5. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
Cronin, Gloria. A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in the Novels of Saul Bellow. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001.
Cronin, Gloria, and Ben Siegel, eds. Conversations with Saul Bellow. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
Dutton, Robert R. Saul Bellow. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.
Gerson, Steven M. “The New American Adam in The Adventures of Augie March,” Modern Fiction Studies 25, no. 1 (1979): 117–128.
Goldman, Liela H. Saul Bellow’s Moral Vision: A Critical Study of the Jewish Experience. New York: Irvington, 1983.
Hyland, Peter. Saul Bellow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Karl, Frederick R. American Fictions, 1940–1980. New York: Harper and Row, 1983.
Kiernan, Robert F. Saul Bellow. New York: Continuum, 1989.
Rodrigues, Eusebio L. Quest for the Human: An Exploration of Saul Bellow’s Fiction. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1981.
Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Earl Rovit. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1975.
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