No Success Like Failure:
An Appreciation of Augie March

April 2005

I needed a book to take with me for a summer in Damascus. Something I could not finish too quickly, but also something which would be meaningful in an environment where American values are suspect. What better than The Adventures of Augie March, a book that begins: “I am an American…” I had already read Saul Bellow’s novel, but a return to it seemed the perfect pleasure.

Augie March, whose voice narrates the novel, comes of age at the beginning of the Depression, and the central events of the novel fall into that period. Yet for a novel that includes scenes of hopping freight trains, there is little that resembles some dust bowl ballad. And for a novel that includes divers scenes of work in and around Chicago , there is little of the “city of big shoulders” blue collar heroism. Which is to say, this is a different kind of Depression era novel, one which looks forward to who we would become as Americans.

There are two distinct visions of that American destiny, embodied in two brothers, Simon and Augie, with two distinct visions of the good life. Simon is acquisitive from the start and learns to construct a personality that could win in America. Told by a different narrator, less attuned to spiritual values, Simon’s story could have been a rags-to-riches success story. But for Augie the story of his millionaire brother is a cautionary tale of a man with big goals, who learned the American arts of success, but failed at love and meaning.

Augie is on a different path. We follow him through episode after episode and only slowly learn how to appreciate the sensibility of the character. Simon represents the business school ideal, always working for something up ahead, but Augie is a type not so often idealized. One notices a certain rhythm of failure as the novel progresses. Here is Augie losing jobs, getting caught up in movements for which he is unsuited, failing at relationships, not interested in school, just getting by. Recounting talented people he has known, aimed at various professions, Augie notes:

I had no special eagerness of this kind and never had been led to think I should have, nor gave myself anxious cares about being revealed a profession. I didn’t feel moved to take it seriously.

This is not to say that Augie is a dropout in the sense we have become accustomed to since the 60’s; he is working hard and engaged with the people around him. It is just that he keeps telling everyone “no,” and refusing to go down the life paths that individual after individual points out to him as the correct way to go.

Eventually this ability to say “no” is transformed into a philosophy of life. Augie finally puts words to the way he sees the world:

[humanity is] made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe. The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that’s what their power is. There’s one image that gets out in front to lead the rest and can impose its claim to being genuine with more force than others, or one voice enlarged to thunder is heard above the others.

And for a novel that advocates a gentle “no” to all the recruiters and adopters and visionaries that cross our paths, there is remarkably little recruitment directed at the reader. Augie’s narrative voice is not the type that delimits and impresses the reader with a unified version of the world.. which is simply another path to recruitment. At one point Augie provides a rationale for his attempt to set down his life, freestyle: “…my pride has always been hurt by my not being able to give an account of myself and always being manipulated. Reality comes from giving an account of yourself…”

Augie is a different kind of American success story. There are no riches at the end of his personal journey, unless one counts love as some foreign currency. Love had always been on Augie’s mind, and he follows the wealthy and beautiful Thea down to Mexico on a mission to train a proud eagle—these are some of the most colorful passages in the book. We root for the couple, but slowly learn that love can be another form of recruitment when it demands some ideal strength, when it wants more than what is faulty and human.

Love comes with Stella, and it is a love that is without effort or demands: “Nothing could be put over by effort any more, and there was nothing to try.” Each morning in Damascus I read a little more of this long novel, and with the entrance of Stella near the end I could not help but think about my own new love, with whom I was daily corresponding by e-mail. We had only met once, but everything was coming so effortlessly that we both knew where the relationship was going.

Clem had urged me to be engaged for six months, in view of my personality and make-up. But this advice was good for people who were merely shopping, not for someone who had lived all his life with one great object.

Augie had no desire to waste time, and neither did I. We were engaged two weeks after my return from Damascus , and married about two months later. I knew Augie would approve. I knew that life was not about effort and acquiring things—whether wealth or knowledge. It was acceptance of human imperfection and willingness to love.

The novel is one that I should re-read every year.. and perhaps someday I will attempt something like that. I should since it is so easy to forget the terms on which Augie succeeds, and his acceptance of failure. If I read through the novel regularly, I would recall more often that my goal is not to specialize.

I always believed that for what I wanted there wasn’t much hope if you had to be a specialist, like a doctor or other expert. If so, as an expert, you’d be dealing with other experts. You wouldn’t care for amateurs, for experts are like that about amateurs. And besides specialization means difficulty, or what’s there to be a specialist about? I had Padilla’s slogan of “Easy or not at all.”

It is a slogan that queasily fits with an academic life, as I know. And maybe that is why in six years of graduate work I have yet to encounter a class for which Augie March or any other novel by Saul Bellow is assigned. Perhaps it is different in other regions of the country, but I also have an idea that Bellow’s non-specialist evocation of human choices and values is deeply contrary to the spirit of today’s academy.

Obviously an appreciation of Augie March is simultaneously an appreciation for Saul Bellow, his creator. I never met Bellow, who died last week, but from his insistence throughout his career on drawing these passive and personally searching characters, I can hazard the guess that he embodied some of these same traits. And certainly Bellow was never a recruiter, always a gentle no-sayer.