Bellow: A Biography

Dear Tony,

PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...SINGLE PAGE

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

I agree that much of postwar fiction involves the kidnapping of people into the pages of books. (Edmund Wilson, by the way, deserved what he got. Philip Roth has Bellowesque tendencies when it comes to getting back at people in print.) But as Atlas points out in this biography, some people think Bellow abetted human wreckage in his life--so that he could write about it. That torrid affair between Jack Ludwig and the wife of that moment is an example. Bellow may have allowed that to happen--staging a "play" of his life--in order to write about it. He kept Jack around for years as a kind of literary Smithfield Ham for future consumption. Now Tony, you gotta give it to me here. Is that or is that not just too creepy for words?

I take your point as well that Bellow can be both a monster and a genius. The genius part was clear to me even as a young 20-something walking among the brainy scholars and Gothic towers of the University of Chicago. I imitated Bellow's style to the letter. My first newspaper and magazine stories--written as a graduate student in the 1970s--are full of Bellowisms, including a perfectly mimicked sentence style: both airy and compact, brutal in frankness. Funny you should bring up William Carlos Williams; as a young man in Chicago, I ate and slept him (in tandem with Bellow) for quite a while. I was this curious black guy who played basketball throughout the black South side. When I opened my gym bag, these Bellow books fell out. I was hired at the New York Times in the middle '80s primarily for magazine-length pieces I wrote at a Chicago free weekly newspaper called The Reader. These were heavily influenced by the Saul man. One of my biggest stories involved a portrait of an unwed mothers' clinic. I wrote about the place on the promise that I would conceal the clinic's location and use pseudonyms. The pseudonym for the clinic's chief social worker was "Demmie," taken from a love interest of Charlie Citrine, the novel's egghead star.

Charlie is university-smart but street-dumb. He gets taken to the cleaners by vindictive ex-wives who were based on the real ex-wives who made Bellow's life hell--and whose legal maneuvers were documented in the newspapers. Yes, I dig the novels, Tony. Like everybody else, I dig the hell out of the opening stanza of Augie March:

I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

Big, sprawling and unwieldy, Augie March is an anthem. Midwesterners are the most American people of all. They make themselves up from scratch--from what they have at hand. I especially like that insular first novel, Dangling Man (published in 1944; my Lord, what a run this guy has had as a writer of books), because it captured the low-hanging sky around Lake Michigan, the endless Chicago winter--those crusts of filthy ice lingering in the gutters into June. Before global warming, people died in surprise blizzards on Lake Shore Drive, the wind beating down on them from Lake Michigan and burying their cars just a few hundred yards from apartment towers where the rich cuddled up and watched the storm with a brandy.

But check it, Tony. I read the novels from the point of view of a nonfiction writer. I read them as well from the standpoint of a black Ph.D. student who was routinely cruised by the cops--presumed criminal until proven otherwise--and found that point of view reiterated in Bellow's novels. Every crime in every Hyde Park novel was known to me. The murder of the graduate student in The Dean's December. The savaging of Charlie Citrine's Mercedes in Humboldt--except that it was Bellow's Mercedes, deliberately battered by someone who hated him. I dug the verisimilitude most times--but hated it at other times because he lifted from the newspapers without deepening the stories. As you see, Anthony, I loved the guy and disliked him (ambivalence is the truest emotion), which goes back to your point about monster and genius.

About Chicago: Bellow's early life in poor Jewish Chicago certainly shaped his point of view. But the most important feature of that life for him, I believe, was the way it disappeared. It was swept away by The Great Black Migration, when blacks were imported to Chicago to work in industry there and jammed into warrenlike apartments in a ghetto with limits that were rigorously patrolled by the city fathers. To be black in Chicago was to be denied medical care, police protection, and especially schooling. I know, I know; that was everywhere. But trust me, brother Tony, life in black West Side Chicago was sheer Mississippi. Bellow wrote again and again about blacks as the barbarians at the gates. Forgive me, Lord, for speaking ill of the dead. But so did that dimwitted pretender Allan Bloom (a Bellow chum; another Chicago professor), whose idiotic book, The Closing of The American Mind did quite well in the Reagan '80s, thanks in part to Bellow's contacts and urgings. The novelist Richard Stern (a Bellow colleague at Chicago) explains in the Atlas biography that Bellow was obsessed with black-Jewish relations. He could not leave it alone, Stern says. The black criminals and killers at the edges of Bellow's plots confirm this view. What angered me--back when I was a young acolyte--was his inability to see anything but evil in Negroes. He speaks in this biography of love for Ralph Ellison, the black novelist who wrote Invisible Man and with whom he roomed for a time. But can you find a single representation of Ralph Ellison in any Bellow book? I cannot. I do not begrudge Bellow his fixations on crime. I do begrudge him his inability to see beyond the newspaper stories in which black people could only appear as criminals. As you point out, this is revealing in a man with X-ray eyes.

About the Chicagoness of Bellow: He captured crucial features of the landscape--the weather and the big Midwestern sky and the Midwestern flatness, which, as he wrote, made Chicagoans "connoisseurs of the near nothing." But he hated being seen as just a Chicago writer. Chicago's white politicians tried to claim him as one of their own, but this did not work; Farrell and the rest were to him a bunch of hometown ruffians who were to be forgotten, not memorialized. Bellow's writing about Chicago was Hyde Park-centric, disproportionately focused on one square mile of a huge, huge city that just sprawls and spreads along Lake Michigan. As a resident of Hyde Park for 10 years, I read Bellow's novels for their facticity--for the crimes that were novelized and for the shopkeepers, professors, and others who were kidnapped into his pages. For the wives immolated and discarded. For fellow students who stumbled into his gaze and were fixed in literary amber. Did I commit an injustice by doing so?

PRINTE-MAILRECOMMEND...RSS

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

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.

SPONSORED CONTENT