When Saul Bellow emerged and solidified as an intellectual presence—in Chicago and New York during the 1940s—he seemed formidably, enviably, indeed inexcusably well equipped to flourish in the spheres of literature and love. “Extremely handsome,” according to one observer; “stunning,” “beautiful,” “irresistible,” according to others. After his first novel appeared, in 1944, Bellow got a call from MGM: although he was too soulful-looking for a male lead, they explained, he could prosper as the type “who loses the girl to … George Raft or Errol Flynn.” We may be sure that Bellow hardly listened. And it doesn’t sound quite right for him, does it—aping a series of sexual inadequates (Ashley to Gable’s Rhett?), in makeup and fancy dress, under the hot stare of the kliegs?
No, from the start Bellow radiated what Alfred Kazin called in his 1978 memoir, New York Jew, “a sense of his destiny as a novelist that excited everyone around him.” Electrically sensitive to criticism, Bellow had a chip on his shoulder—but it was what one critic called “the chip of self-confidence.” As Kazin wrote, “He expected the world to come to him.” And it did. To quote from the opening sentence of Zachary Leader’s magisterial biography The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964, Bellow would go on to become “the most decorated writer in American history.” He faced only one serious obstruction, and this vanished, as if at a snap of the fingers, on a certain day in 1949, when he was 33 and discovered “what I had been born for.” As for women and love, on the other hand, he didn’t get it right until 1986, when he was 71.
To round out the panoply of the young Bellow’s attractions, he had about him the glamour and gravitas of turbulent exoticism. When his family crossed the Atlantic from Russia (St. Petersburg) to Canada (Lachine, then Montreal) in the early teens of the century, Saul was no more than a twinkle in his father’s eye. Well, Abraham’s eyes were capable of twinkling; far more typically, though, they blazed and seeped with frustration and rage. A versatile business flop, he struggled as a farmer, a wholesaler, a marriage broker, a junk dealer, and a bootlegger. “His talent,” Saul would later write, “was for failure.” Bellow Sr. eventually thrived (peddling fuel to bakeries), but he got angrier as he aged, and had fistfights in the street well into his 60s. The aggression was intelligible: Abraham knew what it was to wear the moral equivalent of the Star; Russian autocracy had condemned him to outlawry, imprisonment, ruin, and flight; later, too, he lost three sisters to the mechanized anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany.
In the end, Abraham was grateful to America (and even came to enjoy the novelty of paying his taxes), yet his assimilation was always fragmentary. “Wright me,” he wrote to Saul, late in life: “A Ledder. Still I am The Head of all of U.” And his wife, vague, frail, dreamy Liza, a figure of quiet pathos, simply didn’t live long enough to adapt. As Leader records (and this is a typically luminous detail): “A great treat for Liza was a movie matinee on the weekend. Bellow sometimes accompanied her and remembered a low rumbling in the theater, that of dozens of child translators, himself included, whispering in Yiddish to their mothers.”
Home life, then, was archaic, violent, loudmouthed, and “wholly Jewish.” A mixed blessing, you might say, but that’s the kind of blessing that all writers hold most dear.
At the start of 1924, Abraham made his way to Chicago, and six months later the rest of the family was “smuggled across the border by bootlegging associates,” arriving on the Fourth of July in the capital of American “hard-boileddom” (Bellow’s epithet). And of all the “reality instructors” who lined up to shape Saul’s sensibility, the most dominant was that exemplary Chicagoan, Maury, the oldest of the brothers. Maury bestrides Bellow’s fiction, making no fewer than five undisguised appearances—as Simon (The Adventures of Augie March), Shura (Herzog), Philip (“Him with His Foot in His Mouth”), Julius (Humboldt’s Gift), and Albert (“Something to Remember Me By”). “You don’t understand fuck-all,” Albert characteristically informs his bookish kid brother. “You never will.” Originally a bagman (and a skimmer), Maury married money and set about amassing a fortune in that hyperactively venal fringe between business and politics (one of the guests at his daughter’s wedding was Jimmy Hoffa). As he saw it, all other concerns were mere snags in the engine of materialism.
“Enough of this old crap about being Jewish,” Maury used to say. In Herzog (1964), when the hero weeps at his father’s funeral, the senior brother, Shura, snarls at him, “Don’t carry on like a goddamn immigrant.” Brazen American plenitude was what Maury championed and embodied—with his “suburban dukedom,” his 100 pairs of shoes and 300 suits. When Bellow won the Nobel, in 1976, Maury was at first affronted (“I’m really the smart one” was his attitude), then indifferent, despite a brief interest in the prize money—Was it tax-free? Could Saul stow it offshore? Yet Maury, a secret reader, harbored depth and convolution, and Bellow always believed that there was something tragic, something blind, headlong, and oblivion-seeking, in his drivenness. It was the revenge life takes on the man who knowingly chooses lucre over love.
And what about Bellow and love—the many affairs, the many marriages? Before we turn to them, we have to acknowledge a unique peculiarity of Bellow’s art. When we say that this or that character is “based on” or “inspired by” this or that real-life original, we indulge in evasion. The characters are their originals, as we see from the family froideurs, the threatened lawsuits, the scandalized friends, and the embittered ex-wives. Leader deals with this crux immediately, in his introduction, and partly endorses the verdict of James Wood (one of Bellow’s most sensitive critics), which invokes “an awkward but undeniable utilitarianism…. The number of people hurt by Bellow is probably no more than can be counted on two hands, yet he has delighted and consoled and altered the lives of thousands of readers.” Bellow himself conceded that the question was “diabolically complex.” But who in the end would wish things otherwise? That the characters come alive, or remain alive, on the page is not the result of artistic control so much as the sheer visionary affect of the prose. Bellow is sui generis and Promethean, a thief of the gods’ fire: he is something like a supercharged plagiarist of Creation.
In his dealings with women he could be glacially passive, and he could be skittishly precipitate. “Somewhere in every intellectual,” the brutal lawyer, Sandor, tells Herzog, “is a dumb prick.” Bellow would have wholeheartedly agreed.
He got engaged to his first wife, Anita, in 1937; he was 21. And the only surprise is that the relationship took so long to wind down—after 15 years, 22 changes of address, and numberless infidelities. “I have no intention,” he then wrote to his agent in 1955, “of bouncing from divorce into marriage.” But that of course was exactly what he did, homing in, despite a fusillade of warning shots, on the naïve and volatile Sasha. Early on, a female friend noted that Bellow “was the kind of man who thought he could change women…. And he couldn’t. I mean, who can? You don’t.” This is well said. But one surmises that the answer, if there is one, had more to do with literature than with life.
Happiness, noted Montherlant, writes white; it is invisible on the page. And the same is true of goodness. Anita was upstanding and altruistic, and is therefore a pallid presence in the novels; Sasha, by contrast, would be mythologized, demonized, and immortalized in Herzog as the terrifying emasculatrix, Mady. The terms of divorce No. 2 were settled in 1961, and within a month he was married to the equally glossy and unpromising Susan. It seems that his creative unconscious was attracted to difficulty—to make his fiction write black. This time he did at least manage an interlude of what Leader calls “strenuous womanizing”: he returned from a tour of Europe “trailed by letters not only from Helen, Annie, Jara, and Alina” but also from Maryi, Hannah, Daniela, Maude, and Iline. As the first volume of The Life closes, Bellow is halfway through his matrimonial career; we know that there are two more divorces to go (Susan, Alexandra) before all is solved and salved with Janis, his true Platonic other. Hope triumphed over disappointment, and innocence triumphed over experience.
Something similar unfolded in the fiction. Again and again in his Letters (assembled in 2010), Bellow describes himself as a “comic” novelist, and this feels just. But there was little sign of such a cheerful self-assessment, and such an outcome, in his “prentice works” of the 1940s, Dangling Man and The Victim, which epitomize the sullen, cussed earnestness of the midcentury mood. His life-changing moment came with the conceptual birth of The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and took place, fittingly, in Paris—the world HQ of cerebral gloom. Bellow was in despair about his third novel, and with good reason: it was about two invalids in a hospital room. As he paced the streets one day Bellow watched the gutters being sluiced in “sunny iridescence.” And it was a comprehensive epiphany: that was that. Marx, Trotsky, Sartre, *cafard,*nausée, alienation, existential woe, the Void, et cetera: all this he canceled and cursed. From here on he would commit himself to the free-flowing, and to the childhood perceptions of his “first heart” and his “original eyes.” In short, he would trust his soul. And now the path was clear to the exuberantly meshuga glories of Augie March, Henderson, Herzog, and all the rest.
I knew Saul Bellow for two decades; I have known Professor Leader for three, and he is the author of a much-praised biography of my father, Kingsley Amis. So, full disclosure. It is, however, certain that I will not be alone in the expectation that The Life of Saul Bellow will prove definitive. Leader is respectful but unintimidated, balanced but never anodyne, and his literary criticism, like his prose, is unfailingly stylish and acute. The book is very learned and very long—the author happens to be a putter-in, not a leaver-out. But readers who enter into it will find a multitude of various fascinations: the gangland machine of Chicago, for instance; the tremors and prepercussions of the sexual revolution; Bellow’s Romantic lineage (the affinities with Blake and Wordsworth); and the currents and commotions of the American cultural terrain, with its factions and rivalries, its questing energies, its fierce loyalties, and its fiercer hatreds.
The really fit biography should duplicate and dramatize a process familiar to us all. You lose, let us say, a parent or a beloved mentor. Once the primary reactions, both universal and personal, begin to fade, you no longer see the reduced and simplified figure, compromised by time—and in Bellow’s case encrusted with secondhand “narratives,” platitudes, and approximations. You begin to see the whole being, in all its freshness and quiddity. That is what happens here.
Right up to his death, in 1955, Abraham Bellow described Saul as a chronic worry to the family, the only son “not working only writing.” Not working? He should tell that to Augie March (for Augie, it turns out, is the author of his Adventures):
All the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.
