The Tolstoy of the Zulus

The Tolstoy of the Zulus Ira Nadel (bio) Zachary Leader. The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife 1965-2005. Knopf, 2018. 767 pp. $40.00. Volume II of Zachary Leader's life of Saul Bellow is 45 pages shorter than Volume I, even though the life is more eventful and dramatic. Covering the period from the 1964 appearance of Herzog through to Ravelstein (2000) and Bellow's death in 2005, the biography surveys, comments on, and occasionally criticizes Bellow's actions. Events include a series of divorces and remarriages, the Nobel Prize, the birth of his daughter at age eighty-four, his decision to leave Chicago for Boston and Vermont, his near death from food poisoning in the Caribbean, and his final illness. He is anything but the forgotten "Tolstoy of the Zulus," a controversial quip attributed to him by Alfred Kazin (qtd. in Blades).1 Displaying the same indefatigable research and specifics seen in Leader's first volume, this work also shares the same fault: substituting undigested detail for literary analysis. Not only do we learn how Bellow dressed on the day of the Nobel Prize announcement (in a matching green turtleneck and black leather jacket), but that when a reporter from The Chicago Tribune arrived at his apartment for an interview, he found Bellow on the street surrounded by his furniture (all itemized) directing movers: he was preparing to leave his apartment and move in with Alexandra Tulcea, soon to be his fourth wife (Leader, Love 203). His first was Anita Goshkin, and his second Sandra (Sasha) Tschacbasov. Susan Glassman was his third, Alexandra his fourth, and his fifth, Janice Freedman, who was forty years younger than Bellow—his only marriage not to end in divorce. In the text, we also learn of his obsessive fans, his various affairs, and his frequent sense of frustration: "I hump along among unfinished works, promises unkept, things undone, lawsuits without end and the rest of the weak comic furniture of Life" he told a friend (Leader, Love 102). We also find Leader unearthing important if under-recognized sources such as an account by a Canadian historian, Barnett Singer, entitled "Looking for Mr. Bellow," in Jewish Dialog (Hannukah 1982). This narrates Singer's attachment to Bellow before and after Bellow visited the University of Victoria in Victoria, B.C. in [End Page 104] 1983 where Singer taught. Singer had written almost three hundred letters to Bellow beginning with a series of unsent letters in the manner of Moses Herzog (Leader, Love 311). In Volume I of his biography, Leader located the origin of Bellow's talent as a writer in his upbringing as the child of Russian immigrants, first in Lachine, Quebec, where he was born in 1915, and then in Chicago, where the family immigrated in 1920. His father, Abram, in particular, was a man who would angrily not be defeated, despite losing jobs and once, when a bootlegger, being hijacked. He did not, however, have a favorable view of his son's literary career: "You write and then you erase. You call that a profession?" he once derisively declared (qtd. in Atlas 60). In Volume II, the theme shifts to self-confidence, ambition, and, to a degree, intolerance. Bellow was very aware of his own importance, outwardly marked by his plethora of awards culminating in the Nobel Prize in 1976, inwardly by an expanding ego. This infected his personal relations beginning with his wives and extending to his children. And when critics dismissed his early work, he held resentments. Diana Trilling was an early recipient of such scorn for her negative comment on Dangling Man (1944). Yet for a biography of an author, there is little on Bellow as a writer, nor as a Jewish writer. It is Philip Roth who offers more insight when he remarks that unlike Malamud, Bellow found a new way "out of being a Jew," while "finding a [new] way as a writer into being a Jew" (qtd. in Leader, Fame 116). The orientation in this volume is not aesthetic but political, social, and certainly marital. The pain and suffering of Bellow's four divorces is almost never off the page, one of the...

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