Bellow: A Biography

Saul Bellow is tiny man. But his eyes are big enough for someone three times his size. He generally hides these eyes beneath the downwardly turned brim of his hat. But sneak up on him in a crowd, and you can see those peepers working--scanning for the asses, crotches, breasts, and hips that he grafted onto his characters. Those eyes are saucerous, overlarge and hungry--with spider-legged squint lines that radiate up into the temple and downward into the jaw. Saul Bellow has described himself as "a first class noticer"--which is understating the case, if you ask me. This man is the artist as a kind of cannibal.

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I learned all this by watching Bellow when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. I studied psychology. He taught at the vaunted Committee on Social Thought--which viewed itself as the center of comprehension in the Western world. I learned to write by comparing Bellow's novels to the people and circumstances he drew on when writing them. I watched from a distance, by the way, avoiding that ravenous gaze. I did not want to end up as others had. Nor was I pleased with the way he portrayed his black characters. And oh, by the way, yes, I am black.

James Atlas seems hesitant to take on Bellow's shortcomings directly--leaving the task to third parties. This hesitance is understandable since Bellow is alive and litigious and could probably have barred disagreeable material from publication. But James Atlas captures utterly the extent to which Bellow uses people--including five wives, his childhood friends, and his academic colleagues--as "material" for his novels. Does this pose a moral problem, Tony? Bellow's third wife, Susan Glassman, thought so--and was mightily pissed about being used. Such cannibalism, she wrote, was "ironic ... at a time when the artist has attributed to him the magical properties of a priest.'' Fourth wife, Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea, a mathematician and force of nature, was similarly enraged. The scene in which she throws him out of the fabulous, four-bathroom house they shared is the best scene in this biography (Page 520). As a friend of Bellow's reports: "She used the first bathroom to get dressed, the second to put on her lipstick; the third to put on her stockings, shoes and gloves; then she came out of the fourth and said: 'You used me for your fucking novels and you drained me dry; go ahead and sue me. I want you out of the house in 24 hours.'" Man, Alexandra was white-hot.

But it takes one to know one, doesn't it? I was a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago in 1976 when Bellow received the Nobel Prize for Humboldt's Gift--loosely based on the life of the crazed but vital poet Delmore Schwartz. The rest of the world waxed eloquent about Bellow's uses of philosophy and his comments on the condition of man. But around the university, students referred to the philosophical sections of the novel as "Saul, belching." I was drawn mainly to the deftness of his physical sketches; the features he focused on tended to crystallize the person's basic character.

The big scandal at the time was that Bellow had broken with his longtime friend--and the person who got him hired at the University--the sociologist Edward Shils. "Mr. Shils,'' as we called him, had been the model for Mr. Sammler in Mr. Sammler's Planet. Mr. Shils is said to have asked Saul not to put him in Humboldt and got his nose seriously out of joint when Bellow violated their friendship by doing it anyway. The grudge lasted until Mr. Shils' death in 1994. When Bellow asked to see him on his deathbed, Mr. Shils declined. He had no choice; with those hungry eyes in the room, the sociologist's last days on the planet would have been grist for the next novel.

I dissected the novels, comparing them to the reality of Hyde Park, the community around the university in which the best books were at least partly set. I watched Bellow as he signed autographs at the university bookshop, as he came and went from his Hyde Park apartment--but never put myself in his sights. The results of my intensive noticing were published in 1994 in my memoir, Parallel Time, which was serialized in the New York Times Magazine. Bellow was apoplectic; "Why didn't he come see me, introduce himself?" he asked a friend. He was especially angry about the time in the 1970s when I followed him down a darkened street, keeping a distance and letting him sweat. Never meant to harm him, just to give him a dose of those menacing black characters he produced in Mr. Sammler's Planet, The Dean's December, Humboldt's Gift, and so on. I am probably the only person to see Saul without being seen. As a first-class noticer, he was unsettled by that.

In any case, Tony, what do you make of this literary cannibalism? Is there a moral problem here as those former wives suggest? Is it ethical to use your wives and friends as a literary chop shop?

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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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