STORYTIME TAPESTRY

Special Treat    

April 13, 2005

Today I am introducing Murtaza Danish Husaini, as writer # 197 for Storytime Tapestry.  After you read his wonderful piece you will be convinced like I am that Dan Hussain (pen name) will be a wonderful asset to our growing group of writers.

Dan??™s story has been selected as a special treat because his topic is near and dear to me.  Saul Bellow was a Montreal writer and his passing has affected Canadians as well peoples from all over the world as Dan explains.

Saul Bellow
1915 ??“ 2005
Murtaza Danish Husaini

It was a fading Nagpur evening in October, 1993 when aboard a bus to
Latur my friend, Chetan Ghate, turned towards me and asked, "Have you
ever read anything by Saul Bellow?"

I shrugged my shoulders, "No! Never heard of him! Who is he?"

His expression turned into disbelief, an expression that I have
oft-repeated when posing the same question to others, when he heard my
response.

"How could you not know Saul Bellow far worse than not reading him
ever? He is the greatest American novelist post WWII. He ended the
great American famine for a Nobel in Literature when he won the same
in 1976 ??“ fourteen years after any other American -John Steinbeck -
had won it."

I felt like an ignorant fool. He yanked a Bellow novel, Herzog ??“
perhaps his finest, from his knapsack and thrust it in my face. The
cover had a sketch of a crumbling face of a white middle-aged man.
When I looked at Bellow's photograph at the back cover, the sketch in
the front seemed like his only. The yellow-orange tint on the cover
made the Penguin paperback look arresting. I stared at the
recommendation below at the right-hand corner ??“ 'A Masterpiece ??“ The
New York Times Book Review'.

The musty rough-textured yellow pages were drawing me towards the
world folded within them. I must admit I started reading books
initially for the musty smell emanating from them. Whenever my uncle,
who fortunately worked for Penguins, would get a new book for me, I'd
snuggle in a corner stare at the cover and keep smelling the book.
It's only when I'd get over with the smell I'd start reading it. Even
today often when I am reading a book and I need a break I pause, smell
the book, stare at the images floating and then return back to the
book.

So, once back in Delhi I bought the book. Herzog is a story of a
middle-aged English Professor in an American university. His personal
life is in doldrums and he is slipping professionally too. The very
opening line is perhaps one of the most quoted lines in American
literature.

"If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me." (from Herzog, 1964)

Couple of pages later I run into a paragraph, which forever haunts me
when I reflect on my life.

"Resuming his self-examination, he admitted that he had been a bad
husband ??“ twice. Daisy, his first wife, he had treated miserably.
Madeline, his second, had tried to do him in. To his son and his
daughter he was a loving but bad father. To his own parents he had
been an ungrateful child. To his country, an indifferent citizen. To
his brothers and his sister, affectionate but remote. With his
friends, an egotist. With love, lazy. With brightness, dull. With
power, passive. With his own soul, evasive." (from Herzog, 1964)

The unabashed frankness of these lines shook me. And this had been a
characteristic of most protagonists in Saul Bellow's novels. His
characters were in pursuit of truth and dignity, as opposed to
success. In some sense they reflected his personal voice. Though
Bellow's stories were seldom autobiographical but many of his
characters share his biographical details like his childhood in
Canada, his Jewish heritage and his many divorces. His characters
whether Augie March, Moses E. Herzog, Arthur Sammler or Charlie
Citrine, in words of a critic , were 'a superb gallery of
self-doubting, funny, charming, disillusioned, neurotic, and
intelligent observers of the modern American way of life.'

This is best illustrated by Augie March in The Adventures of Augie March, 1953.

"I am an American, Chicago born??”Chicago, that somber city??”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; sometimes an innocent
knock, sometimes a not so innocent." (from The Adventures of Augie
March, 1953)

Saul Bellow was born as Solomon Bellows in Montreal, Canada in 1915.
His parents had moved from St. Petersburg, Russia to Canada in 1913.
His father was an importer of Turkish figs and Egyptian onions there ??“
some exotica! His childhood was spent in a rough shanty neighborhood.
Once his father was beaten up in a brawl for bootlegging and that led
them to shift to Chicago.

Bellow joined the University of Chicago in 1933 but was soon
transferred to the Northwestern University from where he graduated in
anthropology and sociology in 1937. He spent most of his life in
Chicago and it has been central in most of his novels. He
unsuccessfully tried to join army however; he did manage a stint with
the US Merchant Marine. While with the Marines he wrote his first
novel The Dangling Man, 1944, which has shades of his early years in
Canada. But the novel that brought him to center stage was The
Adventures of Augie March, 1956. Seize The Day, 1956 and Herzog, 1964
only established his reputation as the foremost writer of his age. It
seems funny in this context that his professor, Melville J.
Herskovits, wanted him to give up his pursuit for language as he
thought, "No Jew could really grasp the tradition of English
literature." He wanted him to be a pianist instead.

His most novels began with his protagonists at crossroads. Inflicted
with crises ??“ moral, financial, emotional, spiritual, etc. ??“ they had
to chart the graph of their lives from there onwards. The characters
were extremely human and often at margins of what may be hip-hop in
their lives. The struggles were mainly inwards and as they would
grapple with circumstances and people in their lives, Bellow would
paint most gripping tales of human survival. His characters offered
hope. They fought with grit and common sense. In this respect he
followed a blueprint that was very different from many authors: he
Americanized the idiom of the novel and made it uniquely American.

His influences ranged from Dostoevsky, Trotsky, Nietzsche, Oedipal
conflicts, popular culture to Russian-Jewish heritage. His voice
altered and evolved over the years and this is distinct in his
writings. Charles Simic comments the following on Bellow.

"Bellow, too, is convinced that to have a conscience is, after a
certain age, to live permanently in an epistemological hell. The
reason his and Dostoevsky's heroes are incapable of ever arriving at
any closure is that they love their own suffering above everything
else. They refuse to exchange their inner torment for the peace of
mind that comes with bourgeois propriety or some kind of religious
belief. In fact, they see their suffering as perhaps the last outpost
of the heroic in our day and age." (Charles Simic in New York Review
of Books, May 31, 2001)

Twelve years later as I sit and write this obituary I am thankful to
Chetan Ghate for introducing Saul Bellow to me. His is a voice that
remains within to haunt and give strength and serve as a beacon amidst
the cacophony that shuts our senses.

Saul Bellow died on April 05, 2005.

(c) Murtaza Danish Husain
April 10, 2005

Name: Murtaza Danish Husaini
Pseudonym: Dan Husain

Bio: Poet, writer and a freelance theatre actor based in Delhi, India. Dan is 34 years of age and had articles and poetry published in news magazines in India. Those who may be interested in his work may check his blog,

http://shamethepoem.blogspot.com/

or the collaborative blog he runs with few fellow poets and writers.

http://shakespeareandco.blogspot.com/

Currently, he is in the process of setting up a theatre repertory company in Delhi, India.

e-mail: dan_husain @yahoo.com

Meanwhile, I'll go and subscribe your newsletter. I also wrote couple of short stories recently. I guess they may interest you. You'll find them on my blog.

Thanks & best regards,

Dan