Bellow: A Biography

Dear friends,

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I hardly think we've overlooked Bellow's capacity for aggression. What Atlas locates in the man--the monumental self-pity, the moody vanity, the megalomania--is richly evident in the work. That's why these metaphors of cannibalism, kidnapping, and vampirism keep occurring to us. But I'm not sure that the naked display of literary ambition is necessarily a bad thing--it's a matter of taste, I guess, but also a matter of historical context. I'd argue that there's plenty of self-congratulation in Flaubert (there's very little else in his letters): His sentences practically sigh at their own perfection. But of course Flaubert's unyielding self-regard was chastened by the aesthetic discipline of impersonality, an idea that to Bellow no doubt would have smacked of the worst kind of high-goyishe repression. It's unfair to measure Bellow against the realists of the 19^th century (and in any case Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, not those French guys, are the points of reference he'd prefer) because his method and his subject are different. Like a number of other (mostly male) novelists and critics who were influenced by Freud, Reich, and existentialism--and also like his great precursor, Dreiser, who wasn't--Bellow never engages the world other than through the medium of the self.

I think you're quite right, Katha, that this self often comes across as preening, vainglorious, and desperate, in an almost feverishly infantile way, for attention and approval--for love, but the kind of love a parent might lavish on a cosseted only child. Henderson's cry--"I want! I want! I want!"--sounds through many of Bellow's books and certainly through Atlas'. When he doesn't get what he wants, he throws a tantrum, turning on friends and supporters for insufficient devotion, declaring that his wives don't love him, deciding that Western civilization and American literature are in terminal decline (and that his publishers have betrayed him) because his books don't sell enough copies. ("Literature was over because he was over," writes Atlas, rolling his eyes at Bellow's blooming pessimism of the '80s and '90s). But that same self is also funny, perceptive, thrillingly mean, full of gusto for language and experience, and fascinated, as only the very ambitious can be, by the varieties of failure.

Atlas quotes a review of The Dean's December by John Updike, never a big admirer of Bellow's. "Literature can do with any amount of egoism," Updike wrote, "but the merest pinch of narcissism spoils the broth." This is a supersubtle distinction, and it sent me to my dictionary, which defines egoism as "the habit of valuing everything only in reference to one's personal interest" and narcissism as "inordinate fascination with oneself." Just about everything Bellow has written seems to me to be poised on the razor's edge that separates these qualities--between the self as medium and the self as subject. (Let's organize a symposium! "Saul Bellow: Egoist or Narcissist?" and invite the man himself to be the keynote speaker.)

"Saul is to Chicago what Balzac is to Paris," effused Allan Bloom after Bellow had helped make him a cultural celebrity (and a very rich philosopher). Brent, I think you've made a convincing case against this judgment: Bellow has been, at his best, the Trolloppe of Hyde Park and, in Augie March, the Proust of the Northwest Side--which I don't mean as a knock, just a description. The larger Chicago exists for him mainly as the mirror for his own preoccupations. His "Chicago book"--an abandoned nonfiction project he worked on in the mid-'70s--ultimately became The Dean's December, which views the blighted condition of the city as something like a personal affront. You never have the sense, as in Balzac, of an active interest in how the world is organized, how cities work, how other people--other kinds of people--experience their own lives. He lacks both curiosity and sympathy, which are the ethical foundations of realism. Thus the specter of black criminality--sexual criminality in particular--that haunts The Dean's December (and Mr. Sammler's Planet also) feels more like an emanation of Bellow's own hysteria than like an attempt to grapple with a supposed social problem. It's always, with blacks, with wives, with critics, with the New York intellectuals (and now, perhaps, with Slate Book Clubbers) "why are they doing this to me?" And of course it's a rhetorical question. He's not interested in the answer, just the complaint.

And yet ... to appreciate a writer fully, Norman Mailer once wrote (about himself, natch), you must risk "liking him at his worst." And in spite of everything we've said about Bellow over the past few days--in spite of the racial myopia, the selfishness, the bullying neediness that dominates Atlas' book--I still love him for the same reasons you do, Brent. We both came to him late in the game--his game, I mean, missing out on the thrill of reading Augie March as ambitious young men of the '50s. (I was amused to read, by the way, that Bellow at 80 taught a course at BU called "The Ambitious Young Man.") The first book I read was Humboldt's Gift, a fat, spavined yellow hardcover (Bellow was rightly furious about the cheap paper and glued binding Viking used to save money on it) I plucked from my parents' shelves more or less at random, which is how I conducted my adolescent literary education. I certainly didn't know who any of those characters were supposed to be, though around the same time I heard Lou Reed's tributes to Delmore Schwartz on the first Velvet Underground record and on The Blue Mask ("Sylvia and I got out our Oiuja board. ..."). But I thought, I would give anything to be able to write like that and to live like that. Not dying drunk and mad in a fleabag hotel like Humboldt, and not hounded by gangsters and ex-wives like Charlie Citrine, but in the mess and splendor of those sentences.

I'll end it there. See you around the office.

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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