“I am an American, Chicago born,” begins Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March, “and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; somethings an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Though he was born in Montreal, it was “that somber city” on Lake Michigan where Bellow acquired his American voice, in ample evidence through the propulsive swagger of his most celebrated novel’s first sentence.Article continues after advertisement
Bellow has long had a reputation for being conservative, stodgy, and tweedy, which is not undeserved. But in The Adventures of Augie March (long appreciated more in Europe than the country where it was written) there is a distinctive style of voice simultaneously tough and tender, a focalized first person narration that, with its combination of Biblical parallelism and wryness, is distinctly of the United States’ eternal second city.
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Every American writer, if that adjective is to mean anything, must in their prose or poetry pen their own Declaration of Independence, almost as if it’s something in the collective unconscious, some seething and hidden mind that animates the national genius. As brilliant as The Adventures of Augie March, a picaresque novel about its titular protagonist as he perambulates through the Chicago of the Great Depression, its voice is not sui generis. Instead, its genesis comes from “Song of Myself,” where the poet provides self-encomium to “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos.” That was the Big Bang in poetry for American first-person narration, and the influence of Whitman on Bellow is obvious. It’s a declaration not just of independence, but of existence.
