Bellow: A Biography

Dear Tony and Katha,

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First off, Katha, I share your distaste for Bellow's writing when he uses it as a weapon. However, as Tony pointed out earlier, Saul's ability to sketch people physically is 1) magical and 2) absolutely essential for writing that makes a movie play in your head when you read. The best writing is visual--and sensual (viz Proust); it brings you through the page into the world inside the writer's head. Mr. Bellow is without a doubt the best at visualizing persons and things; no living writer even approaches his ability to render characters down to a single, telling physical truth. And Katha, what's wrong with literary ambition? Every man jack among us (or woman jack, in your case) writes out of the desire to be read and heard--preferably in perpetuity, down and down through the ages. In the parlance of baseball, my dear, we are swinging for the goddamn fence! And one more thing, Katha: As a liberal, you ought not denigrate the stevedore (as in your comment about Bellow "working like a stevedore"). Some of us come from a long line of sweating men who loaded and unloaded ships; some of us are proud of that; and some of us see sweating over the printed page as much the same thing. Hard work that plants aches all over your body. The book is the perfect metaphor for that ship we loaded. Filled with our dreams--our messages to the future--it stands at least a chance of outliving us, of being there when we have turned to dust.

Now, dearest Tony. I agree that Bellow is the narcissist. But could anybody be more narcissistic than Philip Roth? All those novels about the writer writing, the writer coming upon his double in the street, the writer writing about the writer writing about writing. I was relieved when American Pastoral came along. Before then, I worried that Roth would to disappear into, well, an infinite regress.

Like you, Tony, I encountered Saul Bellow first in Humboldt's Gift. While you were reading that novel as a tike, I was a graduate student, standing at the window of the University of Chicago bookstore, watching Bellow as he signed copy after copy of that bright yellow book. I was seduced by that screaming yellow book jacket, which glared out from every window in the store; that pyramid of yellow books that dominated the retail space; the way the stack dwindled as he signed one book after another. I still have my copy--a miracle, as you say, given how cheaply the publishers put it together. But when I opened that book in 1976, I had the sense that he was writing the very ground beneath my feet. The more I read of him, the more deeply I felt this and the more I determined to do the same if I could. This, I told myself, is for me.

The value of this biography is that it allows us to see how Saul Bellow's character was made in the straightforward, psychoanalytic sense. His mother died in the early 1930's--before he had achieved psychological independence. This left him permanently insecure, permanently suspect of affection, and permanently on the lookout for his next mother figure. This need for a mother accounts tidily for all those marriages, all of that philandering--and that "putting it in and taking it out," as one ex-lover summed it up. As the youngest son, Bellow was in competition with his older bothers, who were successful in business while Saul cast about like a vagabond. He was well into middle age--and living hand-to-mouth--before he landed a permanent job at the University of Chicago and probably would not have survived as a writer without the shelter of that job. It was surprising to read of the great-man-to-be, chasing around after temporary teaching jobs, a drifting adolescent well into adulthood. After the Nobel Prize in 1976, he thought back to his older brothers. At last he was somebody; at last he'd shown them. As he told his friend the novelist Richard Stern: "All I started out to do was show up my brothers. I didn't have to go this far."

Remember, Tony, the older we become, the more we become who we are. Bellow's tendency to rip his life and start a new became an addiction. Each new wife was a change of skin, a new source of ignition for the next book, a new source of "strange," as sexual conversationalists say in Brooklyn. In the end, of course, each new wife represented an attempt to outrun death.

Anon, my friend.

See you around.

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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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