Saul Bellow
New biography explores the man no one knew.
Saul Bellow, born 100 years ago, was dazzled in boyhood by his older brother Maury. Before Saul and his parents arrived in Chicago, smuggled across the Canadian border, Maury was already a busy street hustler. Later Saul would study anthropology in college, the right background for a novelist who would devote so much space to city life. But on the realities of Chicago Maury was his first teacher. He was bagman for a lawyer handling bribes that real-estate companies paid city councillors. Later Maury grew rich in real estate.
He gets a star turn in Zachary Leader’s new biography, The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964 (Knopf ). It runs 812 pages but, miraculously, never slows down. Leader’s tireless research make it absorbing and often surprising. He’s even unearthed an unpublished memoir by the wife whose adultery so appalled Bellow that he wrote Herzog in angry response.
Leader pulls characters like Maury out of the shadows. In Herzog the figure based on him expresses annoyance when the Saul-like character weeps at his father’s funeral. He orders, “Don’t carry on like a goddamn immigrant.”
Maury was always a flashy dresser, at his peak the owner of 300 suits. He was tough, angry, aggressive and (Saul remembered) “quite a collector of ladies.” He liked to read but didn’t like anyone to know it. If he saw a book by Marcel Proust on a shelf he would ask, “Who’s this guy Prowst.”
He appeared in five works of Bellow, three novels and two short stories, each time entirely recognizable. When the Nobel Prize for literature went to Bellow in 1976, Maury wasn’t impressed. “I’m really the smart one,” he said.
In the first of two volumes, Leader gives us an excellent account of Bellow’s life up to 1964. And what a life! Five wives, four children, a pile of books. Leader’s narrative cites a remarkable number of occasions when Bellow’s life intersects with frontpage names from several realms of American life.
During his school days, for instance, he has a crush on a piano student, finding her a lively flirt but out of his league. She turns out to be Rosalyn Tureck, who later emerges as a major interpreter of Bach on piano and harpsichord. In Reno seeking a divorce, Bellow arranges a discreet residence for his friend Arthur Miller and his wife-to-be, Marilyn Monroe. When he courts Sasha Tschacbasov she has recently converted to Catholicism, under the guidance of Fulton J. Sheen, whose TV sermons made him the most famous priest in America. Bellow looks for a house near his job at Bard College and buys the one where Eleanor Roosevelt was born. In 1956 Jimmy Hoffa, the corrupt and presumably murdered head of the Teamsters Union, was a guest at the wedding of Lynn, the daughter of Maury. Since Maury boasted of mob connections, that tends to authenticate the several places where Bellow’s writing indicates familiarity with the ways of the underworld.
In 1953, with The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow set himself a new course by embracing a style that combined ambitious thoughts with the slang of the streets. That was the book that turned American fiction on its head, ending one era and starting a new one. The decades-long reign of short, sharp Hemingway prose died and American novelists fell under Bellow’s influence.
It was his declaration of literary independence. He wanted to write as he thought and felt, freeing his self-contradictions and his wayward ideas, reaching into his past to depict with sometimes painful accuracy his family and friends. Following Yiddish writing, he made his work a mishmash (a Yiddish word, incidentally) of high and low, writing on the noblest of themes while framing them in street argot. He made brutal Chicago into a special sort of kingdom, where knights and grand ladies dominated the human landscape. In his youth he absorbed both the grandeur and the desperation of bootleggers, butchers and dreamers like himself.
His new, free-ranging style was, he said, “the discovery of a language that made everything available.” He was proud of that book, and a fierce defender of it. Many years later he would continue to fight with anyone who didn’t like it and anyone who seemed not to like it, such as Lionel Trilling, the most influential critic in America.
Even so, he occasionally looked back with certain misgivings. On many subjects, even including Augie, Bellow was a chronic self-doubter. When asked what the novel was about, he sometimes explained, “It was about 200 pages too long.”
In a sense Bellow’s story resembles Picasso’s. Critics explain that in 1944, when Picasso and the intellectual Dora Maar parted ways, a certain sharpness of focus disappeared from his art. She was replaced as mistress by a young art student, Françoise Gilot and Picasso’s work began to soften. It softened further as two babies, Claude and Paloma, appeared in their lives and then in his art. In 1953 the glamorous Jacqueline Roque moved into Picasso’s house and became his second wife. She so stimulated his interest in portraits that he painted 70 of her in one year.
Like art historians with Picasso, Leader teaches us to understand the nuances of Bellow’s life as it was influenced by five wives. He titles one of the chapters “Augie/Bard/Sasha.” That suggests we understand three events in his life. The appearance of his first successful novel, his temporary job at Bard College and his marriage to Sondra Tschacbasov, usually called Sasha, the second wife whose affair with his close friend Jack Ludwig, the Winnipeg novelist and teacher, would lead to the depiction of both lovers in Herzog, the 1964 novel that brought him fame and, for the first time, serious money.
Divorced from Sasha, Bellow married his third wife, Susan Glassman, who in due course served as model for “the shrewish Denise” (as Leader calls her) in Humboldt’s Gift, the 1975 novel. That put “me in the public domain,” Susan complained in an unpublished essay.
Maybe Maury didn’t want Saul to act like an immigrant but Bellow played out the immigrant story with a happy ending, the story of the struggling newcomer who uses whatever comes to hand and ends up achieving not only fame but greatness.
He wanted to write as he thought and felt, freeing his self-contradictions