The Adventures of Augie March / Popular Birds of Poetry

I’ve been reading so much these past few weeks that I worry I’m not giving myself time to process. I’m the kind of person who needs to let information settle. For instance, when I’m revising a poem or essay I often don’t have ideas for change until I’m in bed trying to sleep. But, maybe there’s something to be said for complete (temporary) reading immersion. I haven’t been running, or writing, or visiting friends, or really doing anything other than reading and fulfilling the basic responsibilities the end of the semester requires, such as finishing grading and meeting with students. 

One of the books I recently finished is The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow. It’s another ambitious coming-of-age novel from the mid-twentieth century in the vein of You Can’t Go Home Again, but I think it’s far superior to anything by Thomas Wolfe. One of the ideas from The Adventures of Augie March is “Your character is your fate,” which is really interesting, and while it’s an easy concept to understand, the argument is really driven home over the course of the novel. I’ll be honest, when I initially read the jacket my drive to read the book was deflated because I felt that I had the whole story in two paragraphs. A kid from Chicago goes on a bunch of adventures, spends some time in Mexico, than returns home. The jacket even went so far as to interpret the novel, explaining that it illustrates "man's restless persuit of an elusive evening." Thanks, Penguin Publishing.

It was like a movie preview that shows a clip from every significant scene, so in two minutes you know everything that’s going to happen in the film and you’ve probably heard the funniest lines. BUT, one thing I know from reading and writing poetry is that what is said is often not as important as how something is said. The form and the message are inseperable. So I decided to trust in form, and begin reading.

When Augie is a kid growing up in Chicago he’s basically motivated by noble intentions, but he also has a dishonest streak if he feels he can get ahead with minimal risk. Augie skips school and steals from a department store, but he also loves his brothers and wants to take care of his mother. After a quarter lifetime of mishaps—spoiler alert—Augie ends of working for a black market business, doing quite well financially and with a clean conscience; because by the end of the novel, Augie has accepted who he is. His character is his destiny.

It’s unpopular, this idea that we can’t escape ourselves, but I think it’s true more often than not. Even radical transformation is often just external factors. For instance, I was just watching a documentary called Running the Sahara, about three guys who…you guessed it…run across the Sahara, from Senegal to Cairo, and the guy who’s spear-heading the expedition is kind of a control freak. In the beginning of the film he talks about how he used to be a coke addict, and how he lived on the streets for a while and basically ruined his life, but then there he is, leading his team across the desert. I imagine someone might say, “He changed his life,” but really that guy hasn’t changed, he’s just redirected himself. Same guy, new addiction, albeit one that’s healthier and more socially acceptable.

What makes Augie March better than You Can’t Go Home Again is that I was emotionally invested in Augie as a human being, and not just as a vehicle for Bellow’s ideas. That was my big problem with George Webber in You Can’t Go Home Again—he was never really a person, no one in that novel was. They were just puppets.

I was also thinking about how one of my professor’s told me that the form of the novel was ideal for showing the effects of society on the individual, and how that never really rang true for me until I started reading these fat twentieth century novels. Like I said, sometimes I'm slow on the uptake. Some of my favorite novels from this past year, such as Mating by Norman Rush, are perfect exampls of that paradigm, as is Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. In that novel, the setting of a modern advertising agency is just as important as the individual chracters.

I bring this up because one of Augie’s obsessions is how everyone is trying to manipulate him, or make them a part of their own plans. People try to adopt him, or marry him, or make him their business partner, and for a long time Augie has no direction so he’s just kind of caught up in these currents and swept along. But after a while he’s uncomfortable, and he moves on to something new. At one point, Augie’s employer Einhorn identifies Augie as having a spirit of “opposition,” that is, a kind of rebellious nature that will only allow him to be a part of something for so long before he becomes restless and has to leave. It’s a powerful passage, so I'll reproduce it. Here’s what Einhorn says:

But wait. All of a sudden I catch on to something about you. You’ve got opposition in you. You don’t slide through everything. You just make it look so.
This was the first time that anyone had told me anything like the truth about myself. I felt it powerfully. That, as he said, I did have opposition in me, and great desire to offer resistance and to say “No!” which was as clear as could be, as definite a feeling as a pang of hunger. (126 in the Penguin Edition)

I love this passage, and how it defines a part of Augie’s spirit, but I should probably admit that I also related to it in some way. During those times when Augie bails out onlife he often stows away in his apartment and reads, and in those moments I occasionally flashed back to when I was an undergraduate RA for summer session classes, and was supposed to be working on a university maintenance crew. I would stay up all night reading Graham Greene, or Ernest Hemingway, or I would walk through the muggy evening to the Family Video and check out three VHS tapes for my little TV/VCR combo.

One night I watched The Great Escape, Born on the Fourth of July, and To Sir, With Love, and when I finished the dark outside my window was washing out into gray so I drove to the airport where I drank chocolate milk and smoked cigarettes until the sun rose. That was the summer I went wild for Paul Newman and read Frank O'Hara for the first time after pulling Meditations in an Emergency off the shelf and buying it because I liked the title. Needless to say, I didn’t make it to work that morning, or a lot of mornings that ended in a similar fashion, and this continued off and on for a month or so until my boss sent word through a friend that I was fired.

As for poetry, I read James Wright’s first volume, The Green Wall. It’s easy to see why W.H. Auden picked it to win the Yale Younger Poets Prize, with its careful rhythms and religious imagery, but honestly, I wasn’t crazy about it. It felt sort of postured to me, and almost every single poem recycles the same five words: bough is the worst, I wanted to gag after the 29th time I saw it, but Wright also OD’s on stars, dark, and tanagers, a species of bird that comes up every third poem.

Interestingly, this seems to have been the popular bird to name drop in the 70’s because Robert Hass writes about tanagers in Field Guide (also a Yale Younger Poets Prize winner, though not selected by Auden) as did Michael Ryan in In Winter. Before writing about tanagers, poets stuck to generic but majestic birds such as hawks and eagles, sometimes mentioning falcons or seagulls. And you know what the cool bird is in poetry these days? It’s the starling. Everyone has a poem about a starling. But, I don’t want to dog on the Wright’s, James or his son Franz, because I like them both, and I’m actually in the middle of reading Shall We Gather at the River right now.

Also, Michael Ryan’s In Winter is extremely depressing. It’s a whole book of poems about death and loneliness and separation, and how sex is this selfish battle against death and no one can tell us how to be alone, and on and on, but what’s really funny is that the first depressing poem in the collection is called “Poem at Thirty.” Poem at THIRTY? Holy jeez, Michael Ryan needs to CHILL OUT, it makes me shudder to think of what kind of poetry he was writing at fifty.