(4 of 5)
The Terms of Life. The comedy ends with Sammler recommending his friend's soul to God. He did what was required of him, says Sammler. "He was aware that he must meet, and he did meet —through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding—he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As we all know. For that is the truth of it—that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know."
We all know. Perhaps; but Sammler is the first Bellow character who has not misplaced the information so thoroughly that an entire novel was required to follow him through the search for it. The earliest searchers found nothing. The hero of Bellow's accomplished but thin first novel, Dangling Man (1944), sleeps, eats, does nothing. There is little focus to his faint discontent, and while his paralysis of spirit is clearly a statement of some kind, it is not one that he understands.
A different Bellow came bursting out in 1953 with The Adventures of Augie March, a big, dizzy, exuberant book. Augie is tough, cheerful, naive, a searcher and an optimist. His problem: where to roost? The Jewish life of his Chicago boyhood? Wonderful! A spell as a thief? Why not? The university? That too. The book ricochets about the Chicago of Bellow's own young manhood; but if the author has a wild yarn to tell about a madman in a lifeboat, he ships Augie out on a tanker; if Mexico appeals to author or hero, off they both go.
Augie was a lucky book, as Bellow admits: he has said that his method of writing it was to stand ready with buckets waiting to catch what came. Augie's wistful, cheerful, aimless adventuring won Bellow his first National Book Award (the second came for Herzog).
Impersonating a Lion. The sensational fizz of the novel made its large flaws seem unimportant. But the big novel loosened Bellow's collar. His next important outburst was Henderson the Rain King (1959). He could not work twice the trick of making literary shapelessness a virtue. And he managed an enormous feat in leading the new novel —wilder and funnier than Augie March —toward resolution. It was one thing to leave young Augie, grinning and scratching his head at the end of the novel. But Henderson, the Yankee millionaire who charges off to Africa in a frenzy of exasperation and despair, is 55 years old. He has asked, in a roar, Bellow's central question—how can a good man, no weakling, live in the modern world?—and he must have some answer if the novel is to be more than a hideously bad joke. The roaring is that of personality, and a line of Sammler's applies: "Perhaps when people are so desperately impotent they play that instrument, the personality, louder and wilder." Henderson roars himself out literally—impersonating a lion—when the author's mad plot sends him into the bush with a tribe of lion worshipers. He returns to the new world calmed, ready to enter medical school.