Bellow: A Biography

Dear Brent,

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The question you raise about the ethics of appropriating other people's lives into works of literature may well be the central ethical conundrum of postwar American letters. Shocked to recognize himself as the drunken, abusive Miles Murphy in his ex-wife Mary McCarthy's A Charmed Life, Edmund Wilson contemplated taking her to court; the same thought had crossed her ex-lover Philip Rahv's mind when he detected his own features unflatteringly reproduced in the person of Will Taub in her novella The Oasis. In the early '70s, Robert Lowell infuriated his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick, and alarmed much of the literary world, by interpolating passages from her letters to him into The Dolphin without her permission. Nobody who's read about the demise of the Maples marriage in John Updike's Too Far to Go could doubt that, in general and in many particulars, it's the story of Updike's own first marriage. More recently we've had Claire Bloom's angry memoir of her marriage to Philip Roth and his revenge on her and her daughter in I Married a Communist. Literary cannibalism? We're all sitting around the stew-pot with blood running down our chins.

And this may be why Bellow is arguably the pre-eminent novelist of the era: He has used more people, feasted on the carcasses of more friends, lovers, and wives than any of the competition. Does this make him a monster? After reading Atlas--but even before that, as a result of reading Bellow himself--I have to say yes. Does it make him a great novelist? Well, also yes. Does the achievement of the novels excuse the ethical monstrosity of the thefts--"kidnappings," I think you've called them--that went into the making of the books? This is a question for philosophers, which is a polite way of saying "beats me." I don't think art excuses anything because if it's great it doesn't need to.

"They eat green salad and drink human blood"--thus Bellow, er, Moses Herzog, on women. This is surely a case of the kind of self-defensive psychological projection--in his own accounting, nothing is ever Bellow's fault--that Atlas collects with cunning patience and scatters throughout the book. Bellow's vampirism has always been applied with special alacrity to women--to the ex-wives who hound his poor heroes for alimony, the mistresses who love them too much or not enough, who are either too smart or too dumb, too ambitious or too passive to maintain the equilibrium of the delicate, depressive, anxious, wanting, vain, brilliant mama's boys who careen like pinballs through an ambient world of petty gangsters, great books, and lost opportunities. But as you point out with respect to Edward Shils, Bellow's male friends and rivals were hardly immune.

Recently, there was a minor stink about Ravelstein, in which Bellow, reminiscing fondly on his pal Allan Bloom, implied that Bloom had died of AIDS. But what you take away from Ravelstein is not a coroner's report but a portrait so indelible, so alive that it confers a kind of immortality on its subject. The espresso stain on the newly bought Lanvin overcoat, the phone calls from ex-students in high positions at the State Department, the chain-smoking--these are the details of a breathing, three-dimensional monument more reverent in its way than the dry, dutiful remarks at a memorial service could ever be. Even when he is being cruel, Bellow writes about people with a self-forgetting relish that amounts to love. To take an example, almost at random--here is Herzog meeting his soon-to-be father-in-law in the middle of the latter's dance class:

Pontritter, this immense figure of a man with single white fibers growing from his tanned scalp (he used a sun lamp all winter) was making tiny steps in his canvas, rope-soled slippers. His seat-fallen trousers moved from side to side as he swayed his wide hips. His blue eyes were severe.

This is the kind of "noticing" you were talking about, Brent. The eye for physical detail is unforgiving, but it serves what is the principal ethical ideal of Bellow's fiction, which is the preservation, in the midst of a leveling, dehumanizing mass civilization, of an image of human individuality--an image that is often necessarily comical, in the proud Jewish-fatalist tradition. (It's exactly Bellow's commitment to this ideal, by the way, that makes his inability to acknowledge the full humanity of black people especially unforgivable.) His high-blown philosophical pretensions (Atlas is right not to be suckered by the thick patina of Mortimer Adlerism Bellow smears on his books) are beside the point. Bellow's answer to William Carlos Williams' modernist slogan "no ideas but in things" is "no ideas but in people." And to read him alongside his younger contemporaries, especially those with an experimetal, post-modernist bent, is to notice how comparatively bloodless and undifferentiated their characters are, how depopulated even their most teeming landscapes seem. But of course, as you suggest, the price--paid by others, naturally--is cannibalism.

My own favorite character in the book is Jack Ludwig, a writer of dubious talent who attached himself to Bellow and then to Bellow's second wife, Sondra. Reading the excerpts from his letters and the accounts of how, on wintry walks through Annandale on Hudson, he gave Bellow sex advice, I kept thinking, "My God, this guy's like something out of a Saul Bellow novel." Which of course he is: He's the parasitical Valentine Gernsbach in Herzog.

I'd like to get back to Chicago. You were well-situated, in Hyde Park, to decode the roman à clef aspects of Mr. Sammler and The Dean's December. But what about the larger city, as a formative influence on Bellow's sensibility, as an antidote to the incestuous claustrophobia of literary New York, as a character in the novels? "I am an American, Chicago born" begins The Adventures of Augie March, and though Bellow himself was Canadian, Montreal-born, he's made a point of identifying himself with the big city by the lake, hog butcher to the world, etc., etc.--placing himself in the broad, big-realist tradition of Dreiser and James T. Farrell. From our cozy Times Square redoubt, perhaps we could cast our glances westward. Atlas certainly thinks that Chicago explains a lot about Bellow, and vice versa. Do you agree?

All 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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