“Just as, according to Proust, all Dostoevsky’s novels could well be called Crime and Punishment and all Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale, so all Bellow’s could be called Dangling Man.”

I don’t know how difficult it was for Saul Bellow to find a publisher for his first book, Dangling Man. Reading his memoir and biography comes later into my planned immersion into Bellow’s work. At any stage in a writer’s oeuvre, this book would stand out, as a debut it is breathtaking. It makes Josipovici’s quote, above, a compliment.

Written as a journal, there is no identifiable plot, merely a few set pieces and the words of a broadly sympathetic but not always likeable narrator. It is necessary to ask to what end the journal is kept? Who is the expected reader? There is always an anticipated audience, however private a journal. Although the journal format could be limiting, Bellow uses it creatively to open up space for this remarkable story to be unfold.

Aside from narrator Joseph, the other large character in Dangling Man is 1940’s Chicago. I’m not sure that I can wait for my scheduled 2012 assignment in Chicago. Bellow, as I mentioned before, deftly gives a sense of time and place. I was eagerly Googling pictures of Chicago during 1942-44 to establish my presence in the city during my reading of this book. The smells, sounds and weather of the city came to life, and I rode invisibly beside Joseph on the trams, the ‘El’ and ate in the diners. Here a brief establishing shot, and a few pictures I found:

At eleven I had a haircut. I went as far as Sixty-third Street for lunch and ate at a white counter amid smells of frying fish, looking out on the iron piers in the street and the huge paving bricks like the plates of the boiler-room floor in a huge liner. Above the restaurant, on the other corner, a hamburger jar with arms and legs balanced on a fiery wire, leaned toward a jar of mustard. I wiped up the sweet sediment in my cup with a piece of bread and went out to walk through large melting flakes. I wandered through a ten-cent store, examining the comic valentines, thought of buying envelopes, and bought instead a bag of chocolate creams. I ate them hungrily. Next, I was drawn to the shooting gallery. I paid for twenty shots and fired less than half, hitting none of the targets. Back in the street, I warmed myself at a salamander flaming in an oil drum near a newsstand with its wall of magazines erected under the shelter of the El.