“Herzog” is the book that made Saul Bellow famous. He was forty-nine years old when it came out, in 1964. He had enjoyed critical esteem since the publication of his first novel, “Dangling Man,” in 1944, and he had won a National Book Award for “The Adventures of Augie March” in 1954. But “Herzog” turned him into a public figure, a writer of books known even to people who don’t read books—an “author.” At a ceremony honoring the success of “Herzog” at city hall in Chicago, Bellow’s home town, a reporter asked the mayor, Richard J. Daley, whether he’d read the novel. “I’ve looked into it,” Daley said.
You get enough people saying that and you have a best-seller. “Herzog” sold a hundred and forty-two thousand hardcover copies and remained on best-seller lists for forty-two weeks. Paperback rights to that novel and Bellow’s earlier books were bought for big advances, and, for the first time in his life, Bellow had money. A house he owned in upstate New York that he had complained about for years as a white elephant he gave away, to Bard College, to get the tax deduction.
“Herzog” also marks the moment when, in terms that Bellow’s son Greg later used to describe his father, “young Saul” began to turn into “old Saul.” Authors are objects of cathexis, some of it idolizing, some of it envious, a fair amount both. Their names are on every short list; their views are solicited on every topic. Bellow ended up with the most impressive trophy haul in his generation of American writers: three National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and a Nobel. He also got drawn into political, generational, and culture-war-type disputes of the sort that, as a young man, he had been careful to avoid. Bellow was sharp, well read, and observant, and he prided himself on his street smarts. But he was a fictionalist, not an editorialist—a bird, as he liked to say, not an ornithologist.
Recognition magnifies idiosyncrasies. Personality traits affectionately condoned “in the family” display differently on the big stage. A characteristic of Bellow’s mentioned by nearly everyone who knew him was his touchiness. He cut people who commented critically on drafts he sent them for comment, and he imagined conspiracies operating behind negative reviews or press coverage that he regarded as less than flattering. He broke with old friends after political disagreements over dinner. These reflexes did not serve him well out in the arena. After he got in trouble with multiculturalists for asking an interviewer “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus, the Proust of the Papuans?,” he published a Times Op-Ed piece in which, while attempting to distance himself from the remark, he called his critics Stalinists. This did not clear the air.
There’s something else that people who knew Bellow almost always mention, which is that he was uncommonly good-looking. Also charming, seductive, and totally game: he fell for beautiful women and beautiful women fell for him. Sexual attention matters to everybody; it mattered exceedingly to Bellow. He was described by women who knew him intimately as domineering but needy. Successful seduction seems to have been a form of validation, and a prescription refillable as necessary.
In short, Bellow was a man who liked to be stroked, and who was suspicious of strokers. Factor in brains and an exceptional gift and you get a fairly complicated piece of work. And every book that has been written about Bellow by someone who was close to him is to some degree hostile toward its subject. This is true of books by Bellow’s literary agent Harriet Wasserman (“Handsome Is”: title says it all), his son Greg (“Saul Bellow’s Heart”), and his first biographer, James Atlas. Two biographers-in-waiting, Mark Harris and Ruth Miller, eventually admitted defeat and published books in which Bellow figures as an enchanting but exhausting tease.
Zachary Leader met Bellow only once. That was in 1972, at a party near Harvard, where Leader was a graduate student and Bellow was being awarded an honorary degree. Leader says that Bellow seemed bored, and he remembers nothing of what Bellow said. In the genre of Bellow biography, this counts as a credential.
Leader’s “The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune” (Knopf) is the story of young Saul. It opens in Russia, where Bellow’s parents and his three siblings were born, and it closes with “Herzog.” (A second volume is promised.) As a piece of research and writing, the book is worthy in multiple ways. The best thing about it is that Leader understands literature—he is a professor of English who teaches in London—so he’s interested in Bellow for the right reasons, and his critical assessments are informed and disinterested. He knows his way around the inbred worlds of the little magazines where Bellow made his name and the college literature departments where, for many years, he earned his living.
Not the best thing about the book is the length. Together with the unusually informative notes, the text is more than seven hundred and eighty pages, and there are forty years still to go. That’s over a hundred pages longer than Atlas’s biography—which is also well researched and well written, and which Leader cites and acknowledges frequently. The trouble is not that Leader is verbose. The trouble arises from the central problem of Bellow criticism, which is how to pull the life apart from the art. Leader is alive to the problem; he devotes much of his introduction to it. But he hasn’t entirely solved it.
“I am an American, Chicago born” begins the famous first sentence of “The Adventures of Augie March.” The author of that sentence was actually an illegal immigrant, Canada born, and the words were written in Paris. Bellow’s father, Abraham Belo, was born in a shtetl inside the Pale of Settlement. He began his career in St. Petersburg as a produce broker, specializing in Egyptian onions and Spanish fruit. The family seems to have been quite well off. Abraham had used a forged document to work in St. Petersburg, and, when this was discovered, he was arrested and convicted. He may have gone to prison. But he managed to escape and, in 1913, to get his family to Canada.
They settled in Lachine, outside Montreal, where Abraham tried farming, and where, in 1915, Saul was born. When the farm failed, the family moved into the city and Abraham took up bootlegging, a venture that ended even more disastrously. In 1924, he moved again, to Chicago, and engaged some bootlegging associates to smuggle his wife and children across the border to join him.
Abraham spent the rest of his life in Chicago, and he ended up running a retail coal business. But he never really learned English—Yiddish was the language at home—and he never became a citizen. He had no passport and no driver’s license (which didn’t prevent him from driving). Saul did not become an American citizen until 1943.
But Chicago was a city of immigrants. It also had a large Jewish population—by 1931, according to Leader, nearly three hundred thousand in a city of 3.3 million. All the Bellow children assimilated happily and all became well off. Saul is often associated with the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years as a member of the legendary Committee on Social Thought. He was a student there, but for less than two years. He had to withdraw for financial reasons (a truck driver was killed in an accident at his father’s coal yard and the insurance had lapsed), and he transferred to Northwestern, from which he graduated in 1937.
In his Op-Ed about the Zulu Tolstoy, Bellow made much of his academic training in anthropology. After leaving Northwestern, he did become a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. But he completed just one course before dropping out and returning to Chicago, where he married a woman, Anita Goshkin, who was studying for a master’s degree in social work, and began his career as a fiction writer and itinerant college teacher. His first job was at Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College, on South Michigan Avenue, in downtown Chicago.
He also worked for a time at the Encyclopædia Britannica, on the fifty-two-volume “Great Books of the Western World,” under the editorship of Mortimer J. Adler. Bellow was in charge of editing part of the “Syntopicon,” a two-volume digest of the Great Ideas composed by Adler. He had taken one of Adler’s courses at the University of Chicago and had concluded that it was “tomfoolery,” but he seems to have liked the job.
“In college I behaved as though my career was to be a writer, and that guided me,” Bellow later said. There was also the fact that his principal interest was literature, and, until after the war, Jews were rarely hired by English departments. “You weren’t born to it” is the way the chairman of the department at Northwestern clarified the matter when Bellow inquired about graduate school. Leader thinks that this encounter “produced a lifelong antipathy, mild but real, to English departments.” It’s true that there was antipathy. But Bellow would have been interested in a university career only as a means to support his writing. Fiction was his calling. “He was focused, he was dedicated to becoming what he was, from the beginning,” David Peltz, Bellow’s oldest friend, told Leader. “I mean, he never veered.”
Bellow published his first short story in 1941. It came out in Partisan Review—marking the start of a relationship that was key to establishing Bellow’s reputation as the intellectuals’ chosen novelist. Bellow visited New York frequently, and lived there at various points, but he was never comfortable in the city. “I congratulated myself with being able to deal with New York,” he told Philip Roth near the end of his life, “but I never won any of my struggles there, and I never responded with full human warmth to anything that happened there.”
Still, in New York and at Princeton, where he spent a year teaching creative writing, Bellow made friends with many of the critics who dominated literary life in the nineteen-fifties. They found him bright, congenial, and sufficiently bookish, and especially admired what they took to be his poise and real-world savvy. Irving Howe thought Bellow “very strong-willed and shrewd in the arts of self-conservation.” “Even his egocentricity added to his charms,” said William Phillips, the co-editor, with Philip Rahv, of Partisan Review. “Stunning—the ultimate beautiful young Jewish intellectual incarnate,” Alfred Kazin’s wife, Ann Birstein, remembered. Bellow maintained the allure by cultivating just the right amount of aloofness. “I was the cat who walked by himself,” as he put it.
In the culture of little magazines, friendship is the last thing to prevent one writer from reviewing the work of another. As a novelist happy to have well-disposed reviewers, Bellow had an obvious stake in these friendships. But the friends had a stake in Bellow, too. As Mark Greif points out in his important new study of mid-century intellectual life, “The Age of the Crisis of Man,” Bellow came on the scene at a time when many people imagined the fate of modern man to be somehow tied to the fate of the novel. Was the novel dead or was it not? Much was thought to depend on the answer. And for people who worried about this Bellow was the great hope. Atlas quotes Norman Podhoretz: “There was a sense in which the validity of a whole phase of American experience was felt to hang on the question of whether or not he would turn out to be a great novelist.”
So even “Dangling Man,” an awkwardly written book about which Bellow later said, “I can’t read a page of it without feeling embarrassed,” was received as a sign that the novel might after all be up to its historic task. “Here, for the first time I think, the experience of a new generation has been seized,” Delmore Schwartz wrote, in Partisan Review. In The New Yorker, Edmund Wilson called “Dangling Man” a “testimony on the psychology of a whole generation.” When Bellow’s second novel, “The Victim,” came out, in 1947, Martin Greenberg, in Commentary, explained that Bellow had succeeded in making Jewishness “a quality that informs all of modern life . . . the quality of modernity itself.” In Partisan Review, Elizabeth Hardwick suggested that Bellow might become “the redeeming novelist of the period.”
This notion that Bellow’s achievement as a novelist was redemptive of the form was a consistent theme in the reviews up through “Herzog.” So was the notion that his protagonists were representatives of the modern condition. After “Herzog,” those reactions largely disappeared. People stopped fretting about the death of the novel, and Bellow’s protagonists started being treated as what they always were, oddballs and cranks. But the critical reception of Bellow’s books in the first half of his career funded his reputation. It cashed out, ultimately, in the Nobel Prize. Nobels are awarded to writers who are judged to have universalized the marginal.
As everyone has said, Bellow not least, “Augie March” was the breakthrough book. Bellow ascribed its origin to a visionary moment. In 1948, he had gone with Anita to Paris for two years, supported by a Guggenheim fellowship. (Bellow hated Paris.) He was at work on a novel called “The Crab and the Butterfly,” which apparently concerned two men arguing in a hospital room. In the version of the epiphany he told to Roth, he was walking to his writing studio one morning when he was distracted by the routine Parisian sight of the street gutters being flushed:
Into his head popped the memory of a friend from childhood, a boy named Charlie August—and Augie March was born. The novel poured out of him. “All I had to do was to be there with buckets to catch it,” he said. Being abroad, he thought, encouraged the sense of compositional freedom. He wrote much of the novel in Europe—in Paris, Salzburg, and Rome. He later boasted that not a single word of it was written in Chicago.
The subject of “Augie March” is the same as the subject of “Dangling Man” and “The Victim”: the danger of becoming trapped in other people’s definition of you. In the case of “Augie March,” the person in danger of being trapped was Saul Bellow. “This was not what being a novelist was supposed to have meant”: he is referring to the expectations of his intellectual backers. He realized that he didn’t want to be the great hope of the novel or to give voice to a generation’s angst. He wanted to write up the life he knew in the way James Joyce had written up the life he knew, and to transform it into a fantastic verbal artifact, a book that broke all the rules.
The first two hundred pages of “Augie March” are the best writing Bellow ever did. He created an idiolect that had no model. “I am an American, Chicago born . . . 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.” Nobody speaks or writes that way—which is exactly what the sentence is telling us.
Augie is a street-urchin autodidact. Never taught how to write a proper sentence, he invents a style of his own. He is an epigrammist and a raconteur, La Rochefoucauld in the body of a precocious twelve-year-old, a Huck Finn who has taken too many Great Books courses. With this strange mélange of ornate locutions, Chicago patois, Joycean portmanteaus, and Yiddish cadences, Bellow found himself able to produce page after page of acrobatic verbal stunts:
That’s only an aside, and there are hundreds of them.
Jack Kerouac is not the first or even the tenth writer you would normally put in a sentence with Saul Bellow, but “The Adventures of Augie March” is a lot like “On the Road,” a book written at the same time. Stylistically, they both stretch syntax to make the perspective zoom from ground level to fifty thousand feet and back again. Augie is walking with a character called Grandma Lausch into an old-age home:
Both books are also “revolts into style,” protests against the formal and moral prudishness of highbrow culture. They are not well-wrought urns, and they do not propose a chastening of the liberal imagination. If they propose anything, it is that the liberal imagination is too chastened already.
Bellow must have guessed that “Augie March” would distress some of his admirers. It did. He showed a hundred pages of the manuscript to Lionel Trilling. “It’s very curious, it’s very interesting,” Trilling told him, “but somehow it’s wrong.” When the book came out, Trilling wrote a positive notice in the newsletter of the book club he directed but registered concern about a dangerous notion he detected in the novel, the notion that one could have a meaningful life independent of one’s social function. Bellow wrote to Trilling to say (disingenuously) that he had written the novel without much of a moral purpose in mind. Trilling wrote back. “You mustn’t ignore the doctrinal intention of your book,” he said.
In Commentary, Podhoretz complained that the novel lacked development and that its exuberance was forced. He called it a failure. Podhoretz was one of Trilling’s protégés, and Bellow always believed that Trilling was behind the review, although Podhoretz denied it. But Atlas says that the art critic Clement Greenberg, then an editor at Commentary, having recently come over from Partisan Review, claimed that the editors had put Podhoretz up to it. It was felt in New York circles, Greenberg said, that Bellow had gone a little too far.
Most reviews were enthusiastic, though. “Augie March” was not a best-seller, but it sold well and won a major award. The year it came out, Bellow took a job at Bard College. He and Anita were separated, and he had a new girlfriend, Sondra Tschacbasov, called Sasha. She was sixteen years younger and strikingly attractive. They met at Partisan Review, where she worked as a secretary.
At Bard, Bellow became close friends with a literature professor named Jack Ludwig. As Leader describes him, Ludwig was an oversized personality, a big man, extravagant, a shameless purveyor of bad Yiddish, and an operator. Ludwig idolized Bellow; people who knew them said that Ludwig wanted to be Bellow. He flattered Bellow, went for long walks with him, started up a literary journal with him, and generally insinuated himself into Bellow’s life. Bellow accepted the proffer of adulatory attentiveness. The couples (Ludwig was married) socialized together. This was the period when Bellow wrote “Seize the Day,” which Partisan Review published in a single issue, in 1956, after The New Yorker turned it down, and “Henderson the Rain King,” published in 1959, a novel whose hero was based on a neighbor of the Bellows in upstate New York.
Saul and Sasha got married in 1956, after Bellow had obtained a Nevada divorce. Sasha accepted the domestic role that Bellow insisted on without demur. She says that when they had a son, Adam, Bellow told her that the baby was her responsibility—he was too old to raise another kid. In 1958, Bellow was offered a one-year position at the University of Minnesota. He insisted that Ludwig receive an appointment as well; the university obliged, and the families moved to Minneapolis together.
Saul and Sasha fought. Some of the strains were apparently due to sexual dissatisfaction. Bellow began seeing a psychologist, a man named Paul Meehl; Meehl suggested that Sasha see him as well (a suggestion that Leader charitably calls “unorthodox”). Ludwig served as a sympathetic confidant to both parties. Then, one day in the fall of 1959, Sasha told Bellow that she was leaving him. There was no third party in the picture, she said. She just did not love him.
Devastated, Bellow went to Europe on a cultural-diplomacy junket for the State Department. While abroad, he engaged assiduously in what Leader calls “womanizing.” He returned to Bard, in the summer of 1960, and took up with a visiting French professor named Rosette Lamont. The divorce from Sasha went through in June. For a while, Bellow and Sasha had the same lawyer, who was pleased to be representing both parties in the hottest divorce in town, but eventually Bellow was persuaded to retain his own attorney.
In November, Bellow learned from a possibly overly conscientious babysitter that Sasha and Ludwig were sleeping together. It turned out that the affair had been going on for two and a half years, since the summer of 1958. And although Ludwig was still married, it continued. Adam was living with Sasha while it was going on. Given Bellow’s vulnerabilities, the double betrayal was his worst nightmare come to life. According to Atlas, he talked about getting a gun.
I have just given you the back story and the dramatis personae of “Herzog.” “Herzog” is a novel about a forty-seven-year-old man having a nervous breakdown after learning that his much younger wife, who has left him abruptly, had been cheating on him with his closest friend. The man seeks succor in the arms of a loving, patient, and understanding woman. There is at least one respect in which the novel is not based on real life: Bellow didn’t have a nervous breakdown. He wrote “Herzog” instead.
He also got married again, in 1961, to Susan Glassman, another celebrated beauty, this time eighteen years younger. (Glassman was a former girlfriend of Philip Roth, who said that the transfer of affections “turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me and the worst thing that ever happened to Saul.” The marriage lasted five years; she was still taking Bellow to court in 1981.)
“Herzog” is a revenge novel. The ex-wife, Madeleine, is a stone-cold man-killer. Her lover, Valentine Gersbach, is described as a “loud, flamboyant, ass-clutching brute.” Ludwig had a Ph.D. and a damaged foot; Bellow makes Gersbach a radio announcer with a wooden leg. The Herzog character is passive, loving, an innocent soul who cannot make sense of a world in which people like his estranged wife and her lover can exist. He is an ex-university professor, the author of a distinguished tome called “Romanticism and Christianity.” The Rosette Lamont character, called Ramona, is a sexpot with a heart of gold; she specializes in intimate candlelight dinners and lacy lingerie. She is a professor of love, not French.
“Herzog” was nevertheless received the way all Bellow’s novels had been received: as a report on the modern condition. Many of the critics who reviewed it—Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Richard Ellmann, Richard Poirier—knew Bellow personally and knew all about the divorce. (Poirier was an old friend of Ludwig’s; the review he published, in Partisan Review, was a hatchet job.) None of these reviewers mentioned the autobiographical basis of the book, and several of them warned against reading it autobiographically, without ever explaining why anyone might want to. The world had no way of knowing that the story was not completely made up.
Howe wrote that “Herzog” was a novel “driven by an idea”—the idea that modern man can overcome alienation and despair. Howe could see the appeal of this idea, but he was worried that it might not have been “worked out with sufficient care.” The reviewer in the Times Book Review thought that the novel offered “a credo for the times.” “The age is full of fearful abysses,” the reviewer explained. “If people are to go ahead, they must move into and through these abysses,” and so on.
Bellow must have been tickled to death. The inventive feature of “Herzog” is a series of letters that the protagonist, in his misery, composes not only to Madeleine and Gersbach but to famous people (like President Eisenhower) and philosophers (like Heidegger and Nietzsche). These long letters, unfinished and unmailed, are sendups of an intellectual’s effort to understand human behavior by means of the conceptual apparatus of Mortimer Adler’s Great Books. Herzog is a comic figure, a holy fool, a schlimazel with a Ph.D. The whole point of his story is that when you are completely screwed the best you can hope for is a little sex and sympathy. The Western canon isn’t going to be much help.
The determination to consider the novel strictly as fiction extended even to its characters. Rosette Lamont reviewed the novel. She, too, treated the book as pure make-believe. She breezed right by the Ramona character (“Her religion is sex, a welcome relief from Madeleine’s phony conversion . . . but Herzog is too divided in his mind, too busy with resentment to free himself from a heavy conscience. Besides he is suspicious of pleasure, having learned Julien Sorel’s lesson,” and so on). She concluded with the thought that at the end of the novel Herzog enters into “a theandric relationship with the world around him.”
And it got even better. Jack Ludwig reviewed the novel. He informed readers of Holiday that “the book is a major breakthrough.” By no means should it be read as autobiography—“as if an artist with Bellow’s enormous gifts were simply playing at second-guessing reality, settling scores.” No, in this book, Ludwig wrote, “Bellow is after something greater.” The greater something turns out to be “man’s contradiction, his absurdity, his alienation,” and so on. It was pretty chutzpadik, as even Bellow had to admit. But by then he was laughing all the way to the bank.
You can see the biographical problem. From the beginning, Bellow drew on people he knew, including his wives and girlfriends and the members of his own family, for his characters. In “Augie March,” almost every character—and there are dozens—was directly based on some real-life counterpart. Most of “Herzog” is a roman à clef. Leader therefore decided to treat the novels as authoritative sources of information about the people in Bellow’s life. When Leader tells us about Jack Ludwig and Sondra Tschacbasov, he quotes the descriptions of Gersbach and Madeleine in “Herzog.” In the case of the many relatives with counterparts in “Augie March,” this can get confusing. You’re not always sure whether you’re reading about a person or a fictional version of that person.
One reason for reading biographies of writers like Bellow, who draw from people in their own lives, is to learn what those people were really like, or at least what they were like to someone who is not Bellow. You often can’t do that with Leader’s biography. Leader also wants to assess Bellow’s accomplishment as a novelist. He has to keep three balls in the air at once: the biographical story, an interpretation of the fiction as autobiography, and a consideration of the fiction as fiction. That’s why his book is so long.
Structure was always Bellow’s weak point. One of his first editors at Partisan Review, Dwight Macdonald, worried about what he called a “centerless facility.” Podhoretz was not wrong about the problem of shapelessness in “Augie March.” The novel’s antic style is like a mechanical bull. For a few hundred pages, Bellow is having the time of his life, letting his invention take him where it will. By the end, he is just hanging on, waiting for the music to stop. It takes the story five hundred and thirty-six pages to get there.
Leader thinks that Bellow plunged into his books and wrote on sheer enthusiasm, then surfaced after a hundred pages or so and wondered how to get back to shore. There is very little moral logic to his stories. Things just happen. (A major exception is “Seize the Day,” which is formally perfectly realized. But that book is a novella, a day in the life. It doesn’t require a plot.)
“Herzog,” too, sags in the middle, a long episode in which Herzog reconnects with Ramona. But Bellow came up with a brilliant solution for the second half. Waiting in a courthouse to see his lawyer, Herzog sits in on a trial. A woman and her boyfriend are being tried for murdering her small child, whom they have tortured and beaten to death. The woman is mentally unfit; Herzog hears evidence that she has been diagnosed with a lesion on her brain. (A diabolical touch: Sasha had been diagnosed with a brain lesion.)
Horrified that Madeleine and Gersbach might be abusing his child (in the novel, a girl), Herzog rushes off to his deceased father’s house, finds a gun his father owned, and goes to Madeleine’s. It is evening. He creeps into the yard and watches Madeleine and Gersbach through the window, loaded pistol in hand. What he sees is an ordinary domestic scene. Gersbach is giving the little girl a bath. Herzog creeps away.
Actually, these episodes were not entirely invented. Bellow lifted them straight out of “The Brothers Karamazov.” A child tortured by its parents is Ivan Karamazov’s illustration of the problem of evil: what kind of God would allow that to happen? And Herzog with his gun at the window is a reënactment of Dmitri Karamazov, the murder weapon in his hand, spying through the window on his father. Dmitri is caught and convicted of a murder he desired but did not commit. “Herzog,” though, is a comedy. The next day, Herzog gets in a minor traffic accident and the cops discover the loaded gun in his car. But, after some hairy moments in the police station, he is let go. Desperately searching the Great Books for wisdom, Herzog briefly finds himself living in one. He can’t wait to get out.
The decorum in Bellow criticism is to acknowledge the original of the fictional character when the person is famous, and otherwise to insist on treating it all as fiction. Thus everyone knows that, in “Humboldt’s Gift,” Von Humboldt Fleisher “is” Delmore Schwartz, and that, in “Ravelstein,” Abe Ravelstein “is” Allan Bloom, the Chicago professor who wrote “The Closing of the American Mind” and was a good friend of Bellow’s.
But “Ravelstein” is a revenge novel, too. It’s not really about Ravelstein/Bloom. It’s about the narrator, a writer named Chick, who has been treated cruelly by his wife, Vela, a beautiful and brilliant physicist—a wicked caricature of Bellow’s fourth wife, the mathematician Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea. There are also a couple of drive-by take-downs along the way—of Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion at Chicago rumored to have been involved in the fascist Romanian Iron Guard, and of the owner of a restaurant on St. Martin, in the Caribbean, where Bellow contracted a case of food poisoning that nearly killed him. He brings them into the story just to skewer them.
Podhoretz told Leader that he considered all of Bellow’s characters puppets. And there is something animatronic about them. This is especially true in “Augie March,” where the extended procession of too vivid personalities is like a Wes Anderson movie. Bellow tended to make his characters look the way a child sees grownups, unalterable cartoons, weirdly unself-conscious in their one-dimensionality.
But there is usually one fully imagined character in Bellow’s books, one character whose impulses the author understands and sympathizes with, whose sufferings elicit his compassion, and whose virtues and defects, egotism and self-doubt, honorable intentions and less than honorable expediencies are examined with surgical precision and unflinching honesty. That character is the protagonist—Augie, Herzog, Chick, even Tommy Wilhelm, in “Seize the Day,” who tries to leverage his pain to win respect. Their real-life counterpart is, of course, Saul Bellow, whose greatest subject was himself. ♦
