American underground spirit: Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground and the 20th century USA literature

F. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) exerted a considerable influence on American literature since 1940s. The works by outstanding authors beginning with Saul Bellow (Dangling Man, 1944) or Jerome Salinger’s prose and up to Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, 1991), Percy Walker, David Foster Wallace, show a persistent fascination of American writers with the novella and are based on re-reading and re-interpreting Dostoevsky’s ideas, motives and imagery.

5. Into the mainstream

“Into the mainstream” looks at immigrant Jewish writers in America, such as Abraham Cahan (The Rise of David Levinsky), Anzia Yezierska (Bread Givers), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories), all of whom transitioned from Yiddish into English, and analyzes Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as a transitional novel. We notice here the transition from “ethnic” to “national” writer in the careers of Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick. Much was gained and lost in Jewish literature as a result of Jews becoming a “successful minority” in America. Jewish readers have always been a voracious audience of international literature.

Conflicting Identities

This chapter traces Rahv’s role in forming the canon of 20th century Jewish writing: to use his words, works by writers of Jewish descent. It considers his championing of Franz Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow. The significance of modernism, Zionism, and Yiddish in their works is foregrounded. Their stories of Jewishness are interwoven with Rahv’s to illuminate his affirmation of Jewish language and culture, which was marked, however, with ambivalence and irony. To explain Rahv’s ambivalent Jewishness in the 1940s and 50s, this chapter considers what two of his closest friends and associates had to say about him: William Barrett and Mary McCarthy, whose satirical depiction of him in the 1949 “roman à clef” The Oasis provoked Rahv to initiate a law suit. The chapter closes with reflections on what Jewishness meant in Rahv’s world and my own during the 1950s.

Declaration of Independence

This chapter examines Roth’s struggles with his father, his decision to go to college at Bucknell University after a year at Rutgers Newark, and his early girlfriends; the influence of his early professors at Bucknell and his editing the campus literary magazine where some of his earliest writing appeared. Graduate study at the University of Chicago and early publications followed, as well as his meeting influential novelists like Saul Bellow and Richard Stern. New friendships also emerged, notably with Theodore Solotaroff, critic and later editor of the New American Review, and Arthur Geffen and Barry Targan. “Bibliography by day, women by night” was their motto.

Fictions of the Self and Nature: Reading Romanticism in Saul Bellow

This chapter examines how Bellow advocates an intuitive Romantic knowledge in Herzog (1964), Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970) and Ravelstein (1999) that recognises that the sacrosanct resides in the ordinary nature of things and teaches us that we have wider communal obligations to one another as fellow human beings. Such obligations in Bellow’s fiction, especially Herzog, recall William Blake’s emphasis on the divine within the human breast and the possibility of a Wordsworthian communion with nature. British and American Romanticism were decisive in shaping his aesthetic vision of the relations between the self and the urban and rural environment. Bellow’s brand of Romanticism is read as indebted to Emersonian and Wordsworthian reflections on the interconnection between the visionary and the natural world, as well as moving towards a darker, sceptical, even Shelleyan sensibility.

Saul Bellow

Over a career of six decades, Saul Bellow (1915–2005) published novels, short stories, essays, and plays that attracted immense attention from the public and the literary establishment. The value of his creative work was recognized with numerous awards, including three National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. The fourth child of Jewish parents who immigrated from Russia, Bellow spent the first years of his life in Lachine, Canada, before he and his family moved in 1924 to Chicago. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1937, he spent a semester at the University of Wisconsin studying anthropology but quit his graduate study to become a writer. In 1938 Bellow married the first of his five wives. In 1944 he published his first novel, Dangling Man, a novel of existential alienation. Three years later he published The Victim, a novel about anti-Semitism, but it was his next novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), that catapulted Bellow from relative obscurity to being regarded as one of the most important living American writers. This long picaresque novel was narrated by its larky eponymous hero in a vivid, colloquial style. Herzog (1964) secured his reputation as one of America’s foremost writers. With its complex style that captures the interior life, the novel was a surprising bestseller. The publication of Humboldt’s Gift (1975) was probably instrumental in his being awarded the Nobel Prize the following year. In this complicated novel with its inextricable blending of high and low culture and many flashbacks, the narrator ruminates on widely divergent subjects and describes his comic involvement with a variety of colorful people, especially the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, modeled on Delmore Schwartz, and the gangster Rinaldo Cantabile. Bellow continued to publish for the next twenty-five years, but like John Updike and some other white male writers of his generation, Bellow’s reputation was hurt to some extent by critics upset by his white masculine-centered orientation. His popularity with the public and with critics is less than it was at the high point of his career in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, but he is still regarded as one of the major 20th-century American writers. His fiction is known for its unique narrative voice, its ability to portray the intricacies of human consciousness, its metaphysical speculation, and its comedy.