The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964

Saul Bellow (1915–2005), Nobel laureate and one of the most recognized American writers of the twentieth century, contends that “through the reading of novels we come to know others with an intimacy otherwise unfelt” (Bellow, “Literature: The Next Chapter” [2000], There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, ed. Benjamin Taylor [New York: Viking, 2015]: 423). Zachary Leader takes on the role of novelist in providing us, in his biography, with an intimate portrait of Bellow, the man and the artist. In the first volume of what will become two volumes, Leader's biography, in painstaking detail and with meticulous scholarship, recreates the life of the man who became a major voice of American conscience and moral discernment from the postwar years into the new millennium. In doing so, Leader's study is itself an act of discovery and scrupulous candor by the biographer as writer, in Bellow's words, “motivated by a desire for truth” (“The Writer as Moralist” [1963], There Is Simply Too Much to Think About 159).Leader starts with Bellow's deathbed question to his friend Eugene Goodheart—“Was I a man or was I a jerk?” (3)—a question that speaks to the importance of character, to the disposition of the man who devoted his life to an exploration of the truth and to uncovering, in the words of his protagonist Artur Sammler, the “essence of experience” though an exposition of character, “eliminating the superfluous. Identifying the necessary” (Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet [New York: Penguin, 1970]: 274, 278). In getting at the essentials of Bellow's personal and literary lives, Leader moves immediately into Bellow's origins, to a time well before Bellow was Bellow, “the most decorated writer in American history” (3). Beginning with Bellow's Russian Jewish ancestors, his grandparents and immigrant parents, Leader sets the stage for the “competing claims of life and art” that pursued Bellow throughout his life (3). The opening chapters of the biography present Leader's case, made in considerable detail, for the ways in which the circumstances and conditions of “the great drama of the past” shaped the man and the artist (64). Leader achieves through his analysis of the first half of Bellow's life and work a kind of coalescence of Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). What finally emerges is an in-depth reflection of the making of Bellow the man and the modernist writer—through the fortuitous accidents of birth and upbringing—and the richness of a life fully and vigorously lived.The most thoroughly researched and documented biography of Bellow to date, Leader's study chronicles Bellow's life: his parentage, birth, formative years, education, employment, travels, lovers, wives, children, colleagues, friends; the travails of writing, of publishers, of reviewers, of critics; and the patterns and shifting landscapes of Bellow's physical, emotional, and intellectual worlds. Leader gives us, in both broadly sweeping, epic proportions and great detail, Bellow's life as it unfolds before us. But nothing here is trivial. Leader shows how the parts of a life—the smallest matters, influences, and contingencies—intersect in the formation of character. To this end, Leader has interviewed countless people who surrounded Bellow; he has delved into documents, archives, letters, conversations, reviews, and scholarly and critical accounts, and he intersperses this material with sharp analyses of Bellow's writing—his novels, short stories, and prose pieces—as his literary preoccupations and forms evolve.Anticipating criticism of the sheer bulk of what is only the first volume chronicling Bellow's life—“Long biographies are often deplored, especially by reviewers” (18)—Leader centers his own efforts in the context of the celebrated 1959 Joyce biography by Bellow's friend Richard Ellmann, which received the National Book Award for nonfiction. Ellmann's defense of his extensive work on the grounds that “an individual life … described too leanly” raises anxious suspicions about “distortion … we wonder if the essences are really there” (qtd. on 18) is taken up by Leader, who adds his own admonition: “The detailed attention given to Bellow's writing in this biography will show or remind readers how rich and deep it is, and how pleasurable” (18). This preemptive defense is less an apologia than an apt description of the stage upon which Bellow's life is played out in a succession of interlocking, uninterrupted scenes.In many ways, Leader's biography reads like a novel, a long, slowly developing epic novel worthy of Charles Dickens or Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the latter a writer considered by Bellow to have been deeply invested in truth telling and enormously influential on Bellow as a young writer. Bellow, in Leader's extended chronicle, is a wily, adventuresome, acutely perspicacious, prickly, combative, and quick-witted protagonist whose burgeoning life is set against the turbulence of an age, a period of American and world history that became fertile grounds for his literary productions. Leader and thus his readers follow in Bellow's footsteps from the Lachine, Quebec, of his birth to Montreal, to the lively if intemperate streets of Chicago and New York that figure so richly in his fiction, to the Paris years, and so forth, demonstrating Bellow's “ability to transform facts of experiences into great literature” (12). Leader's careful retracing of Bellow's steps as he moves from place to place—Bard, Princeton, the University of Chicago—and from marriage to marriage—Anita, Sasha, Susan—most closely resembles Norman Sherry's three-volume biography, The Life of Graham Greene (1989, 1994, 2004). Leader's approach, however, is far less anecdotal and episodic. Rather, in following Bellow's haunts, assignations, and the trajectory of his life and work, Leader keenly demonstrates the ways in which his writing was informed by the life he so vibrantly led. Moving seamlessly between life and art, Leader shows in Bellow's writing “the product of a thing brought perfectly to life,” prose “so rich with mimetic pleasures,” all the while acknowledging Bellow's own recognition of “the human costs of his service to literature” (13, 15). Indeed, Leader shows in engrossing detail how Bellow recasts the people and events in his life as thinly disguised yet compelling fictional reinventions.Leader's study of Bellow strategically detours into the lives of those who had the fortune—good or ill—of being a part of Bellow's world. Contained within the grand narrative of his subject are stories of other writers and personalities, minibiographies that take on lives of their own. The sections that focus on Bellow's fraught relationship with Delmore Schwartz (the model for the protagonist of Humboldt's Gift [1975]) and those involving his friend Ralph Ellison are brilliant evocations of time and place as well as of these pivotal literary figures. Leader consistently links place, and background to the fiction inspired by them. Some chapter titles demonstrate the connections: “Russia/Abraham” (Bellow's father), “Canada/Liza” (Bellow's mother), “Chicago/Maury” (Bellow's brother), “Anita/Dangling” (Bellow's marriage to his first wife and the writing of his first novel, Dangling Man [1944]), “Augie/Bard/Sasha,” and so forth.Against this panoply of incident and influence, Leader makes a case for Bellow as the intellectual's writer but also as a writer who lived the intellectual's life, avidly engaged in the life of the mind, “often embroiled in public controversy, over foreign affairs, race, religion, education, social policy, the state of the culture, the fate of the novel. He read deeply in a range of fields and literatures, and for over thirty years spent several afternoons a week discussing works of literature, philosophy, and social and political theory with graduate students and colleagues at the University of Chicago” (17). As Leader makes very clear, there was little of intellectual or political significance in the 1930s through the early 1960s that did not affect Bellow, a writer for whom the written word mirrored the internal and external combustion of twentieth-century American thought and culture. And here is where Leader skillfully brings us back to those earlier moments in the biography where he lays out the inheritance that Bellow carried with him throughout his life. Growing up the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Bellow was raised in an environment of competing and intersecting languages and cultural practices, and these variegated textures of language and thought informed his writing, as did the twin identities of American and Jew.Leader, in quoting Bellow, locates the tension between Bellow's Jewish immigrant roots and the developing American intellectual in terms of the “great struggle between the street and the home” (qtd. on 81). For Bellow, finally, there was no contest; the world of the streets, as Bellow himself put it in “The Civilized Barbarian Reader” (1987), was “so seductive” (Bellow, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About 351). The language of the streets, indeed the very makeup and comportment of urban America, like the language itself—gritty, insistent, unsentimental, an ironic interplay of self and other—are the hallmarks of Bellow's prolific literary enterprise. This affinity for and malleability of language, as Leader suggests, come to their force with the publication of The Adventures of Augie March, whose opening line reflects the coming of age of its novelist: “I am an American, Chicago born” ([New York: Viking, 1953]: 3). In Augie March we find the Jewish American voice that sets a new direction for both Jewish and American letters. The sections in Leader's biography devoted to Augie March are among the strongest, appropriately so, since that work changed Bellow's position in the literary world. For Bellow the language of the streets that we hear in Augie's celebration of his place in the world is, as Leader suggests, “English in which Yiddish inflections, constructions, and expressions are heard.” This swaggering voice stands alongside the contemplative, meditative, internal soliloquies of Bellow's loquacious characters, all of whom are engaged in making sense of the worlds they inhabit (444).Leader ends the first volume of The Life of Saul Bellow in the 1960s, an axial moment in which “[t]he struggle to be recognized as a writer, then as a writer of greatness, had been won”; he had “arrived at the pinnacle of American letters” (650). No doubt the second half of Bellow's life, the next forty years, together with the first, will contribute to Bellow's own prognostication in “A Jewish Writer in America: A Lecture” (1988): “I can do no more than describe what has happened, can only offer myself as an illustration. The record will show what the twentieth century has made of me and what I have made of the twentieth century” (Bellow, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About 373). Leader has managed in his first volume of the life of Saul Bellow both to lay out clearly the details of Bellow's richly complicated life and to account for Bellow's fiction in consistently complementary terms. This mixing of the complexities of life and literature is always the literary biographer's challenge, and Leader has met that challenge in an exemplary way.

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