Chicago's Own Saul Bellow
This column from the Weekly Standard was written by Andrew Ferguson.
I am an American, Hinsdale-born — Hinsdale, that lily-white suburb. It lies twenty miles west of Chicago, on the old Burlington commuter line, along which trains stop every twenty minutes or so during evening rush hour, coming to rest at Victorian stations with gingerbread trim to unloose a string of lawyers and bankers and brokers after a day's work downtown. To kids like me, growing up in suburban idylls in the 1960s, this is what Chicago meant, mostly: a terminus or a starting point for the trains our fathers rode. Beyond the terminus, we dimly knew, limestone skyscrapers marched straight to the edge of a lake. We saw the lake sometimes in pictures on the evening news.
When a place is so close, and at the same time so far away, you can't help but romanticize it, invent its details and dwell on its mysteries, which may be why, when I first opened the novels of Saul Bellow, in my mid-twenties, I was floored. They still floor me. They're best known for their discursiveness, their wild digressions and mad speculations — has anyone else written a novel, as Bellow did in "Humboldt's Gift," that meditates seriously on Swedenborgianism? — but what I cherish about them most of all is their sense of place. "I am an American," Augie March writes, "Chicago-born — Chicago, that somber city," and from that first sentence the city is not so much the novel's setting as its indispensable supporting character. By the time I read it I was living far away, but I thought I was getting the inside story about Chicago at last, with an almost scandalous intimacy, as though I was rifling the diary of an old acquaintance.
History, when it happens, can make a shrine of a cornfield or a tumbledown house, and books can do the same. Laid out flat as a griddle, sweltering in summer and packed in ice through its endless winters, Chicago the somber city is transfigured by its books, touched with magic. I can't order a beer at the Berghoff, in the Loop, without a slight lift at the thought that this is the place Dreiser had in mind when he invented Fitzgerald and Moy's, the restaurant managed by Sister Carrie's Hurstwood, the most heart-breaking character in American literature. Bellow's books touch every quarter of the city, and as a Chicagoan, Hinsdale-born, I'll be grateful to him forever. On Madison Street I mark the spot where McVicker's Theater stood, and think of Augie carrying crippled Einhorn up the back stairs to the balcony. Passing Western Avenue on the freeway into town I see the ancient streetcar Woody and Pop rode in Bellow's perfect story, "A Silver Dish": "an old red Chicago streetcar, one of those trams the color of a stockyard steer."
And once, in the late 1970s, I ventured in from the suburbs to the Division Street Baths, on the northwest side. I didn't want a shvitz, though I decided I'd submit to one if necessary. I'd just read "Humboldt's Gift," which had brought Bellow the Nobel Prize a few years before. I wanted to see where Charlie Citrine met up with Rinaldo Cantabile: "This old establishment has been there forever, hotter than the tropics and rotting sweetly."
The guy at the counter wore a strapped T-shirt and chewed a Swisher Sweet. He turned from his stack of towels to size me up. Fresh from the suburbs.
"You read that book, huh?" he said.
He looked just the way Bellow said he would.
Andrew Ferguson is senior editor of the Weekly Standard.
By Andrew Ferguson
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