7 May 2008
Pali

I wish I fully understood these posts of yours.

I just finished reading Bellow's 'The Adventures of Augie March' after being told by Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens that it is the greatest American novel of the 20th Century. Lots of great syncopation, Walt Whitmanesque rhapsody in lyrical prose, Bellow really can turn a sentence. But the greatest American novel of the last 100 years? How it sags and heaves and shudders at times.

When there is something as supple, lithe, playful, alive and mischievous as Lolita in the world, how can Bellow's jazzy and bloated picaresque be anointed so?

What was Nabokov's view on Bellow, Hugh? And how do you rate Augie March in the standing of 20th Century American novels? I find myself curiously impressed and unimpressed by it simultaneously.

 

7 May 2008
Hugh Fitzgerald

I recall some dismissive brief remark about "Herzog" in one of Nabokov's letters, and I recall an interview (with Israel Shenker) where that dislike is again mentioned. I don't think he paid much attention to Bellow, though I am sure he would have approved of "To Jerusalem and Back" (based on a trip prompted partly by Bellow's Israeli cousin, a merchant seaman and late-blooming writer, John Auerbach), and also, certainly, of Bellow's famous "but where is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?"

I'm not fond of either the English writer (Amis) or the transatlantic speaking-truth-to-power-at-The-Nation-and-The-Guardian transatlantic journalist (Hitchens). One way to explain their taste for Bellow is that they find a high-low raciness, an "energy" (god, I hate that word) in hogbutcher-to-the-world Bellow, who can link low-life bookies to what some like to call , smacking their mental lips complacently, "the life of the mind" -- that is, the life of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

But since I'm an American, and unconcerned about energy and raciness and stuff like that, I'm less impressed.

I'll ask my mother what she thought of "The Adventures of Augie March." I saw it on her shelf. If she remembers what she thought of it, she'll give me the straight dope, and I'll email it on to you. She's never wrong.  

7 May 2008
Pali

Thanks Hugh.

I think Augie March tickles Amis and Hitchens so much for another reason. Bellow's posturing in the novel enervates them, speaks alot about mythical America, integrates a son-of-immigrants picaresque verve into the high and low registers you mention, and thereby gives them a thrill in pallid English middle age as they seek ever more to associate themselves with the great polysyllabic immensity of AMERICA (that is, America in capital letters as written about by Bellow). It makes them feel alive, all the slightly pompous 'democracy embodied in prose' that they posit Augie March to represent.

On to Pale Fire next.

 

7 May 2008
Mary Jackson
That's a hell-of-a-lot-of hyphens.

7 May 2008
Hugh Fitzgerald
I like hyphens.  So did Keats. So did Isaac Rosenberg. Those "cool-rooted flowers," those "sigh-warm kisses." But I believe in pulling the collapsible folder, with its prefabricated partitions separated only by hyphens, all the way out, then stuffing each part with information. I'm a hyper-caffeinated and hyper-hyphenated American. Listen to my barbaric hyphenated yawp.

7 May 2008
Pali

That's a hell-of-a-lot-of hyphens.

I can't help it. They reflect me. I'm a British-Indian-Londoner.

It's called a hyphenated-identity, apparently.