The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

After reading Henderson the Rain King and liking it, I decided I would read the rest of Saul Bellow. My local bookstore had nice used editions of this novel (Viking Press, 1953) and Herzog, so I bought them. I choose this one to read first because it was the earlier written. The Adventures of Augie March is Bellow’s third novel, published in 1953, and the one that made his career. Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) came first. Henderson the Rain King (1959), was his fifth novel following Seize the Day (1956). Herzog came sixth in 1964, followed by eight more. Bellow won the Nobel Prize in 1976.

The Adventures of Augie March is a Bildungsroman following the title character from boyhood into early mid-life. Augie (Augustus) is born in Chicago maybe a year or two older than Bellow himself who was born in 1915. He has an older brother, Simon, and a younger brother, Georgie, who is mentally disabled. The father has long vanished. The mother raises her three boys along with an older woman in the apartment whom they call Grandma but who is actually a lodger unrelated to the family. Grandma Lausch advises the family on how to make the most of the government assistance available to them.

At the novel’s start, Augie is a schoolboy, about ten. He gets a first job distributing handbills to advertise a movie theater. In chapter two, he’s “farmed out” to live with a family called Coblin (Anna Coblin is a cousin of Augie’s mother) to work with Mr. Coblin on a newspaper route. The early morning hours necessitate that Augie live with the Coblins. We also meet Anna’s brother, nick-named “Five Properties” because of his dream of what would make him financially secure for life. Augie works a series of odd jobs: unpacking crates at Woolworths, tending a newspaper kiosk at the train station, working with a friend at a department store Christmas promotion.

Through it all, we’re introduced to an ever-lengthening series of characters. My first feeling was that these people would come and go in his life, but as the book progresses the large cast recirculates, so some of his earliest friends and acquaintances are still around many years and many pages later. The novel, then, isn’t exactly a picaresque, because Augie’s adventures aren’t discrete episodes, but a single connected arc.

The first significant development is Augie’s work as an assistant to a Mr. William Einhorn. Einhorn is confined to a wheelchair. It isn’t stated but I assume as a result of polio. Einhorn is rich from enterprises that are sometimes legitimate, sometimes dubious, and often eccentric. Augie helps Mr. Einhorn with minor personal and business tasks. He’s still in high school at this point. Einhorn treats Augie as a sort of son, though he has a son of his own, Arthur, away at school. Einhorn has a half brother he calls Dingbat who gets Augie involved in a boxing promotion scheme that ends badly.

It was here I began to understand the additive nature of the narrative. The novel comes back to Augie helping his mother set up his brother Georgie in a state home. In another scene Grandma Lausch is moved to a home for seniors.

The crash of 1929 happens at the beginning of Chapter Seven. Einhorn tries a few schemes to protect his wealth but loses most of it. He lets Augie go, then hires Augie again at a lower rate after Augie, in his last year of high school gets enticed into a burglary scheme with a couple of his friends. Einhorn takes Augie to a prostitute to celebrate his high school graduation.

Augie starts school at city college. He also gets a job in a department store. From there, he makes a good impression and gets recommended to a Mr. Rengling who’s looking to hire someone in his sporting good’s store. Augie gets the job. The Rengling’s pay him well, dress him well, and begin to fold him into their household. To get Augie away from a girl she disapproves of, Mrs. Rengling takes Augie with her to a spa hotel in Benton Harbor and there, Augie is attracted to two wealthy sisters: Esther and Thea Fenchel. He likes Esther better, but Esther doesn’t care for him. Thea, though, is smitten. When the Fenchel’s check out of the hotel Thea tells Augie, “I love you. You’ll see me again” (p. 169).

Mrs. Rengling proposes to adopt Augie, which causes him to break away. He goes back to Einhorn, who now has a new helper: a girl named Mildred. He gets another marginal job, this time selling rubberized paint for use in bathrooms. He runs into Joe Gorman, the guy he’d gotten into the robbery job with and now gets recruited into another criminal scheme. This time they’re going to drive up to Canada and then smuggle a couple of immigrants back across the border. But it turns out the car Joe is driving is stolen and they get followed by the police. They abandon the car and split up to escape. Augie uses his last money on a hotel room, wires his brother for some more cash to get home, and then, hearing nothing from his brother makes his way back to Chicago hopping on a complicated series of trains.

A side note, here. Bellow narrates an incident when Augie is sleeping on one of the trains where he’s propositioned by one of the hobos. “And when I fell asleep I didn’t sleep long, for the man next to me began to press up, and I thought it was only his unconscious habit of the night, that he was used to a bedmate, and I just drew away, but he drew after. Then he must have worked long in secret to open his pants and first to touch my hand as if by accident and then to guide my fingers. I had trouble getting free because he finally held my wrist with both hands, and I knocked his head against the boards. That couldn’t have hurt much, the wood was so rotten it was almost soft, but he let me go and said almost with laughter, “Don’t raise a fuss.” He rolled back from me a space. I sat up and I reasoned that if I didn’t move he might think he wasn’t unwelcome to me” (p. 193). The incident reminded me of something I had read from Hemingway in A Moveable Feast where Hemingway says that he knew enough about homosexuality to carry a knife when he was in the company of tramps. So I guess that was a thing.

Back in Chicago, Einhorn helps Augie get a job with a luxury dog service: walks, day-care, grooming. He moves into an apartment of his own and meets a student at the University who pays his tuition by stealing expensive textbooks from bookstores and selling them at a discount to other students. Augie takes up the same line of work. Then Simon shows up, Augie’s older brother. He’s involved with a rich girl he plans to marry, Charlotte Magnus. Her family’s in the coal business and Simon’s plan is to marry Charlotte and then have the father put him in charge of a coal yard of his own. He needs Augie to come along. “I have to have some family. I’ve been told they’re family-minded people. They wouldn’t understand or like it, the way we are, and we have to make it look better” (p. 229). Simon goes so far as to hope Augie will make a match with Charlotte’s sister, Lucy Magnus.

Augie meets a girl at the apartment house he’s living in, Mimi Villars. Simon takes on the trappings of a rich person, funded by Charlotte. Augie starts dating Lucy.

We’re only halfway through the novel by this point.

Simon gets his own coal yard and starts to make money. Augie works with him. Simon marries Charlotte. Mimi gets pregnant by her boyfriend, Frazer, and Augie helps her arrange an abortion. Simon and the Magnus’ hear about it and cut him off because of the scandal. Mimi helps Augie get a job as a union organizer. Through that job he meets a woman named Sophie Geratis who he has a little affair with.

And then Thea Finchel shows up again, remember her? Martin Amis tells a story that he was teaching a class with Saul Bellow and the moderator asked Bellow what The Adventures of Augie March was about and Bellow answered, “it’s about two hundred pages too long.” After reading all six hundred pages of it I’m ambivalent. It is long. And I know exactly where I would cut (most of what comes next) but it’s also very satisfying to read, and structurally it has no logical endpoint, so I also wouldn’t mind if it just continued on and on. Somewhere else I read, and I think it was Bellow who said this, that with a novel it doesn’t matter what happens next, it matters what’s happening now. I think that’s true. The reading experience isn’t about building anticipation, it’s about engaging at every moment. The Adventures of Augie March is always engaging.

Or almost always. When Thea comes back into Augie’s life, she has been married and is divorcing her husband. She wants to ignite the romance she started with Augie previously, and also enlist his help in an adventure of her own. Her plan, which is ridiculous even to summarize but is even more so spread out over the next one hundred and twenty pages of the novel, is to buy an eagle, train it to catch lizards, then take it down to Mexico to hunt for a certain kind of rare lizard they can sell to collectors or zoos or something (I don’t know). It’s entirely harebrained. But off we go.

They drive down to Mexico, buying the eagle along the way, and training it. They end up in a town south of Mexico City, fictional, I think, called Acatla, where Thea owns a house. There’s a collection of ex-pats living there also. Another problem with this section of the novel, besides the silliness of it, is that it takes us out of Chicago and away from all of the cast of characters that the novel introduced earlier. For a novel that has already spread itself pretty wide, now it loses its shape altogether. Of course the lizard catching scheme doesn’t work. Augie gets injured in a horse-riding accident. Thea has an affair. Augie befriends an ex-pat woman named Stella and helps her run away from her husband. He drives her to Cuernavaca, but on the way the car gets stuck and as they spend the night together they make love. Back in Acatla, Thea and Augie break up, too, and then he makes it back to Chicago.

He checks in on his brother Georgie, and his mom, and his brother Simon, and Mr. Einhorn. Mimi Villars has married Mr. Einhorn’s son, Arthur. Arthur sets up Augie with yet another job, doing research on a history project for a very wealthy and deluded man, Robey. Sophie Geratis is married too.

“When all of a sudden-wham! the war broke out on that terrible Sunday afternoon, and then there was nothing but war that you could think about” (p. 519). Augie tries to volunteer but the accident with the horse left him with a hernia so that the army won’t take him, and he needs surgery. He has the surgery and signs up for the merchant marine, which requires training in New York City. There he reconnects with Stella Chesney, “the girl I had helped escape in Mexico” (p. 533). They fall in love. They get involved with some other friends in New York named Mintouchian and Agnes. Augie ships out. But…

“…on the fifteenth day out, when we were off the Canaries, the Sam MacManus was sent down by a torpedo” (p. 560). Augie survives in a life boat with one other man, Bateshaw, who turns out to be a kind of psycho-savant. Anyway, Augie survives that adventure (a second episode I would suggest cutting way down if I were Bellow’s editor) and gets back to New York and Stella. When the war ends Stella and Augie go to Europe where Augie does not quite legal work for Mintouchian, the man he met in New York. Stella lives in Paris working for a film company. Augie travels around doing his business, when he’s not in Paris with Stella. Some old troubles of Stella’s come up that cause a rift between her and Augie. His brother Simon shows up with his wife Charlotte. The book peters away, like a pop song with a fade-out. The final scene is Augie driving up to Bruges on business for Mintouchian.

Augie bumbles from one job to another. He has no passion for anything in particular. He has no ambition. His life is externally made, not self-directed. He’s steered into bad situations as often as lucky ones, and is captivated by ridiculous opportunities as well as reasonable ones. He’s exactly the same at the end of six hundred pages as he was at the beginning, older, but no wiser, still unmoored from true career or true love, not searching, to be truthful, but simply waiting for what comes next. It’s a novel with an acted-upon more than acting protagonist, and Augie isn’t motivated by any particular goal or desire or problem to solve, which gives the novel an amorphous shape. It’s all about discovering what he wants in life, rather than getting what he wants, and he’s no more clear at nearly forty when the novel ends as he was at ten when it began. So it’s a series of hopefully interesting enough incidents (most of them are) and a character study. And, for that, Augie is sufficient. He’s naive, but he’s not stupid. And he’s not mean, or selfish. He’s likable enough to spend six hundred pages with, and the funny, exciting, dramatic, frustrating, silly, strange stories he gets into are always well told.

I started the book while sitting by a pool in Palm Springs, my first post-retirement week. I finished it on a plane ride to Asheville, North Carolina to visit my father, two weeks ago.