Bellow: A Biography

Dear Brent,

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James Atlas' long-awaited biography of Saul Bellow certainly gives us a lot to talk about. There is, for starters, the book itself, a thorough and classy example of a genre too often marked by the worst kind of hackwork. Then there is Mr. Saul Bellow--provocateur and dandy, serial monogamist and tireless ladies' man, sensitive child of Chicago's Northwest Side and éminence grise of Hyde Park. We could also talk about books he wrote, with their grouchy exuberance and form-smashing vitality, and the parade of schmucks, schnorrers, schnooks, tummlers, momsers, and tenured professors who march through them (and also ex-wives, a lot of those). We could even talk about you since, in addition to appearing in the acknowledgements (in the midst of a list of names so compendious that it seems designed to make the task of finding a reviewer without an evident conflict of interest impossible), you have a walk-on (stalk-on?) part in chapter 31 of Bellow, emerging from the Gothic shadows of Hyde Park to give the old man a taste of his own racial paranoia.

But let's start with the book--with, that is, a brief conspectus of the dangers and temptations of literary biography. The principal sin of modern lifers is the fetishizing of comprehensiveness. These avid dung beetles of the publishing ecosystem spend years hunched over in archives, flying hither and yon to interview friends and relations, and a good many of them are reluctant, once it comes time to write it all up, to leave anything out. Thus each publishing season disgorges 800-page monstrosities that as often as not consist of dinner-party rosters, hasty thumbnail sketches of people nobody's ever heard of, and clumsy decodings of novels and poems, which get composted as further evidence. (Atlas is guilty of this--using Bellow's words about a character based on someone he knew as a way of characterizing the real-life model--but here it seems like a venial sin, not least because Bellow's comic sketch work is unmatched in 20^th-century American fiction.) The subjects of these books tend to emerge from them somehow diminished, cast back into the purgatory of ordinary life that their own writing, as often as not, had transformed into vivid hell or radiant heaven. The lives of 20^th-century American writers, in particular those still alive or recently dead, pose special risks. You tend to get a lot of warmed-over gossip (shorn of the malice that might make it interesting and carefully vetted for libel--and what fun is gossip without the possibility of libel?) and lives that look, from a distance, remarkably similar--early frustration (or early success) followed by the va et vien of publishers, agents, spouses, and children; the hectic moves from teaching jobs to summer places; the State Department-sponsored trips abroad; the lecture circuit; the prizes; the reviews. Everything a given writer used, transformed, and overcame is restored to him (or her)--a dubious gift. "Cured, I'm shriveled, stale, and small," wrote Robert Lowell (subject of two defiantly mediocre "lives" since his death), and that's the state to which biography, almost inevitably, reduces writers. (Statesmen are another matter, of course, but we're not talking about statesmen.)

Atlas himself, by the way, has been behind a heartening countertrend. He's the general editor of a series of biographies from Penguin, which seeks to overthrow the dictatorship of the gray-faced swots and their tote-bag ripping product. The Penguin/Lipper Lives are about 250 pages long and are written by actual writers--Larry McMurtry on Crazy Horse, Edmund White on Proust, Elizabeth Hardwick on Melville, and so on.

Bellow is the more usual kind of biography: thick (more than 600 pages), heavily annotated, and aiming at, if not definitiveness, than comprehensiveness. And it does suffer from some of the expected infelicities--sometimes too much detail, sometimes not enough, a prose style more clunky that graceful, and a tendency to presume on the reader's ignorance by overexplaining in a way that a novelist, or even a historian, wouldn't find necessary. So, for example, when young Saul switches from the University of Chicago to Northwestern, we get a paragraph that begins in typical biographese:

Founded by Methodists in 1851, Northwestern sat on a pastoral tract of land overlooking Lake Michigan and was devoted, in the words of one of its founders, to educating men and women "Full of enterprise and hope and Christian zeal."

Which is how, minus the Christian part, Atlas commenced this project. And I have to say that, small reservations (and metaphysical doubts about the nature of biography) aside, he's done a splendid job with a thorny and not always cooperative subject. His great virtues (in addition to stamina and patience) are his intellectual self-confidence and his competence as a literary critic. He's not afraid to judge Bellow's work, to argue with his ideas, and to tell us when and how (as in Mr. Sammler's Planet, a book I have a feeling we'll be saying more about) Bellow goes wrong. But what makes this book, for me, an unexpectedly thrilling ride is what will likely drive Bellow and his defenders to apoplectic rage--namely that Atlas just doesn't like the guy all that much.

Now, Atlas protests, in his introduction that this is not the case. He cites Mark Schorer's dyspeptic life of Sinclair Lewis and Lawrance Thompson's brutal takedown of Robert Frost as examples of what not to do. But his own book, while giving praise when praise is due and clearly admiring of the work (more the early than the late), doesn't give the guy a break--and, more, makes a hard-to-challenge case that he doesn't deserve one. With his critic's eye, Atlas performs explications de texte on Bellow's letters, on discarded drafts of novels, on answers to journalists' questions and finds telltale traces of the selfishness, the narcissism, and the cowardly tendency to blame everyone but himself that form Bellow's essential temperament. And that's not all. In spite of his compulsive skirt-chasing,

As a lover, Bellow received indifferent marks. He was "the put-it-in-and-take-it-out type," noted the poet Sandra Hochman.

Thank you, Ms. Hochman. Well, I see I've (as usual) exceeded the word count and started us off on the low road. I leave it to you, dear colleague, to help us find a more exalted path.

All the best,
Tony

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This week, Brent Staples and A.O. Scott take on Bellow: A Biography, by James Atlas. Click here for a word on our format and here to buy the book.

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