Books: What Makes Augie Run?

THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH (536 pp.)—Saul Bellow—Viking ($4.50).

Augie March had not yet attained the age of immorality when his father abandoned Augie’s simple-minded mother and her three sons, one an idiot, in a Chicago slum. The impoverished Jewish family lived on charity and the wits of Grandma Lausch, an imperious boarder who tried to teach Augie principles of good behavior. But Augie tailed along with neighborhood hoodlums, stole pennies from newsstands, quarters from a shop where he briefly worked, ladies’ handbags in a planned robbery. While older brother Simon, out to get rich, was learning to knot a bow tie and be charming to ladies, Augie was working the angles at some very odd jobs (coifing dogs, stealing books, smuggling immigrants over the Canadian border) and wondering what life was all about.

Augie became nurse and companion to William Einhorn, a lecherous, conniving old paralytic. To Augie, Einhorn was in a class with Caesar, Machiavelli and Ulysses (“I’m not kidding when I enter Einhorn in this eminent list”). Einhorn’s idea of buying his wife a new living-room suite was to burn the old one and pay with the insurance money. Before being ruined in the Crash, he gave Augie a damaged, set of the Harvard Classics and assured him that Augie himself could determine what he would become.

The Adventures of Augie March is concerned with Augie’s quest to learn his own character and destiny. Novelist Saul Bellow (Dangling Man, The Victim) has handed over his typewriter to his hero, to let him tell his own story in his own way. As a result, the book, which has a kind of self-generating power and authenticity, reads more like fictionalized memoirs than a novel. Self-educated, slum-bred Augie writes with a combination of raw, breezy slang and literary allusion that is often bouncy and effective, although too frequently his overenthusiastic prose is merely bloated. But Augie is a bubbling, vivacious fellow who knows how to smile at the world-and laugh at himself, and despite its faults of narrative, style and taste, the story is good enough to push 38-year-old Saul Bellow to the forefront of the younger, postwar U.S. novelists.

Love & Lizards. Augie is a union organizer when, one night, true love knocks on his door in the form of Thea Fenchel, a rich girl with a predatory eye and a penchant for reptiles. Thea is the big thing in .Augie’s life; he feels “threaded to her as if through the skin.”

They go to Mexico to hunt lizards with an eagle, a passion of Thea’s that Augie scarcely questions. While they train the eagle, love waxes. But the eagle is a craven; when a lizard bites him, he flaps off. Love wanes as Thea takes to collecting snakes and Augie takes to poker. It dies completely after Augie spends a night with Stella, a beautiful tart.

Back in Chicago, brother Simon has married for money and made more, but Augie still doesn’t know what he wants. An intellectual friend tries to guess: “O King David! O Plutarch and Seneca! O chivalry! . . . O Strozzi Palace. O Weimar! O Don Giovanni, O lineaments of gratified desire! O godlike man! Tell me, pal, am I getting warm?” He is. But by this time, war has come, and Augie, joining the merchant marine, goes to New York. He sees Stella there, marries her and reflects that he doesn’t envy his brother, “seeing I was married to a woman I loved and therefore I was advancing on the only true course of life.”

Everybody Is Inside. At war’s end, Augie is living in Paris with Stella and, as usual, is deep in illicit business. But he feels he has arrived at wisdom. A man’s character is his fate, Augie believes, and “this fate, or what he settles for, is also his character.” The real battle, unseen from the outside, is internal, where “you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin.”

Augie knows that what he has been running after is to stop running. (“When striving stops, the truth comes as a gift—bounty, harmony, love . . .”) He asks: “Is the laugh at nature—including eternity—that it thinks it can win over us and the power of hope?” And answers, Chicago-style: “Nah, nah! … It never will.”