On His Way

Deference to his predecessor doesn’t mean that Leader has shirked the tasks of interviewing and consulting the libraries and archives. He spoke to three of Bellow’s five wives (the others have died) and was given a copy of Bellow’s second wife Sondra’s unpublished memoir, a lively account, so it appears, of a relationship that finally went bad. Bellow’s three sons were also cooperative. And Leader makes use of a short memoir, “Mugging the Muse,” written by Bellow’s third wife, Susan. Other new sources are very interesting transcripts of conversations between Bellow and Philip Roth, as well as Roth’s New Yorker essay “Rereading Saul Bellow.” Roth gave Leader a valuable piece of advice when he warned him about the interviews Leader would have to conduct: “Saul was no monster,” said Roth, “but he loved monsters and you’re going to have to interview them.”

One example may do to suggest the size of Leader’s enterprise and the leisurely pace of his narrative. It took only eight pages for Atlas to tell of Bellow’s birth in Lachine, Quebec. Thirty-five of Leader’s pages lead up to that event. In them are sketched the life in Russia of his parents and related family matters, the ship to Canada, and the settling-in of the parents and older siblings, culminating in the birth of Saul in 1915. Atlas writes of the “bibulous obstetrician” who (Bellow later claimed) delivered his mother Liza of the new boy: Leader, after describing the French-Canadian doctor as “quite drunk when he arrived,” thinks of the narrator of Bellow’s fine story “The Old System,” who is delivered by a similarly drunken doctor. Then there is a mention of Bellow’s 9-year-old sister, June, who, in a letter decades later, recalled “a beautiful white bundle with an angelic face .  .  . lying at the foot of Ma’s bed.” Leader also refers to Bellow’s unpublished “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son” for another instance of a child “being delivered after great trouble.”

Leader has committed himself to using scenes and characters from Bellow’s writings whenever they help to illuminate some “real life” event. This practice provides a fuller, rounded-out picture of things, but it also takes up more narrative time, and it is doubtful that even the closest student of Bellow’s life and work is going to pay careful attention to all of the illustrations. As for Leader’s scrupulosity of documentation, there are over 100 pages of single-spaced endnotes. The text itself contains (for better or worse, depending on your taste) plenty of documentation of Bellow’s erotic life. Particularly after the bitter marital breakup with Sondra—in Leader’s words, a terrible time for him—Bellow entered what Leader deftly calls “a period of strenuous womanizing.” As we read about the writer traveling throughout Europe on cultural business, his biographer provides a list of conquests with specific names and countries attached: Poland, Yugoslavia, and so on. Near the end of the trip, Bellow assures Ralph Ellison in a letter that he’s “much better, I’m beginning to sit up and take nourishment.” 

Perhaps the most memorable summing-up of Bellow’s sexual appetite was made by a painter, Arlette Landes, who remarked that “he had a biblical Old World morality, but his fly was entirely unzipped at all times.” It is to Leader’s credit that he doesn’t attempt to “explain” this by psychologizing.

Nor does he offer some hitherto overlooked interpretations of Bellow’s fiction, from Dangling Man (1944) through Herzog (1964). Instead, he gives us a full account of how the particular book was received and what academic critics, as well as Bellow’s fellow writers, had to say about it. This matter is of special interest when the account reaches Herzog. 

A generally admiring response to the novel was broken when Richard Poirier, then an editor at Partisan Review, a magazine that published Bellow more than once, wrote a “wounding” review titled “Bellows to Herzog,” which ridiculed the novel’s intellectual aspirations. An “insufferably smug book,” Poirier called it, while he found the much-praised letters, of which Herzog wrote so many, often “uninventive and tiresome.” But there was a hidden agenda behind this review, insofar as Jack Ludwig, like the novel’s Valentine Gersbach, who cuckolds Herzog, had cuckolded Bellow while presenting himself as a good friend. The fact that Richard Poirier and Jack Ludwig were close friends should be taken into account in assessing the negative thrust of the review. Leader notes that Norman Mailer, the contemporary whose An American Dream (1965) Poirier had just admiringly reviewed, couldn’t stay out of the fray, praising the depth of feeling in Herzog but finding it intellectually barren.

Looking back on the minor tempest of Herzog’s reception 50 years ago, it seems far away—the sense or belief that argument about the quality of a novel was a very serious matter indeed. (Bellow resigned from the Century Association when it admitted Poirier and William Phillips, the head Partisan editor.) 

Leader remains objective about the conflict between Bellow and Sondra, as when she hired a truck to pick up her belongings from the Hudson River house in Tivoli where they had lived. She wrote later that when the goods arrived, they included several barrels of ashes and a pair of men’s shoes on top, prompting their 5-year-old son, Adam, to wonder why his father had “sent the garbage.” Sondra also accused Bellow of inventing things, such as claiming that she had tried to run him down with the car. 

Leader justifies this rehearsing of “accusations and counter-accusations” as making up “part of the life Bellow lived as he wrote Herzog, in which marriage .  .  . adultery .  .  . and the mental state of a hero much like himself are given fictional form.”

If we look at the novel imaginatively, we see only “What Bellow made of his experience .  .  . how he turned the thoughts and feelings it raised into art.”

Before Bellow’s death, Philip Roth undertook the task of rereading and writing about the earlier books, and in so doing he produced original criticism, especially of Herzog. My own revisiting of the earlier novels resulted in a confirmation of what I had thought about them earlier: The first two, Dangling Man and The Victim (1947), are apprentice works of what Bellow later called “victim literature, in the main depressing work.” Matthew Arnold’s words about his own depressing (so he thought) poem, Empedocles on Etna, were that “the suffering finds no vent in action .  .  . a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or existence; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.” 

“Morbid” was Arnold’s adjective, and it is fairly applied to Bellow’s first books. But then came the breakthrough novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953). I have tried to admire (in Roth’s words) its “inexhaustible passion for a teemingness of dazzling specifics,” but found myself only able to endorse the words about Augie that Norman Podhoretz used in reviewing it: “forced, strained, shrill, and finally even tiresome.” (Bellow himself later said that the book is about 200 pages too long.) Yet for all its excess, it freed him from morbidity. 

Then came Seize the Day (1956), the novella that Roth suggests was undertaken as a “grim corrective” to Augie’s manic hopefulness. One notable thing about that book is the presence in it of poetry, beautifully employed in Tommy Wilhelm’s recollections of reading Milton and Shakespeare in college, but also in the impressionistic ring of many of Bellow’s sentences. Seize the Day seems to me endlessly rereadable, a great work of fiction that ranks with Joyce’s “The Dead” as a heart-stopper.

Roth called Henderson the Rain King (1959), which followed Seize the Day, a “screwball” novel, but liked it no less for that. To me, it is just a screwball book, not very funny and not profound—certainly Bellow’s strangest literary performance. As for Herzog, to which Leader devotes many observant pages, it is, for want of a better word, a masterpiece that holds up after repeated readings and teachings of it. In Mailer’s mixed response, admiring Herzog even as he deplored its “hopeless” protagonist, there is a moment that Leader doesn’t quote but that has always seemed to me a wonderful tribute: “Bored by Herzog, still there is a secret burning of the heart. One’s heart turns over and produces a sorrow. Hardly any books are left to do that.” 

In the novels that Leader will discuss in his second volume, one’s heart seldom, if ever, turns over; it is, rather, some of Bellow’s stories and novellas that have that effect. He once declared himself fond of these shorter writings: “Sometimes I feel that maybe that’s what I should’ve been doing all the time. I’m freer in those things; in a way they’re less ambitious and I feel more liberated when I write them.” In “By the St. Lawrence,” “A Silver Dish,” “Zetland: By a Character Witness,” and, especially, “Something to Remember Me By,” Bellow’s narrator, looking a long way back at his youthful past, mixes comic and poignant effects in a way that shows the writer at his best.

William H. Pritchard is Henry Clay Folger professor of English at Amherst College.