Astonishing novelist, divisive controversialist

Brian Morton hails the ‘magnificent’ second volume of Zachary Leader’s biography of Saul Bellow

SAUL Bellow was an obsessive who attracted obsessives. Some of them stalked him reverentially, some convinced that he was racist, misogynistic, engrainedly conservative, some with a bitter and inexplicable hostility that seemed to be compounded of envy and thwarted love. He left behind a litter of broken friendships, bruised family relationships (a wife per book, it looked like at one stage) and some of the greatest and most potent novels of the past century, in any language, but emphatically in an American tongue that he did much to reinvent.

Now he has attracted another obsessive biographer. Zachary Leader is not the first. James Atlas, who Bellow came to dislike, was before him, and there is a strange sub-genre of “me and Saul Bellow” books, like Mark Harris’ strangely titled Drumlin Woodchuck, Barnett Singer’s Looking for Mr Bellow and Brent Staples’ admission of plotting to ambush Bellow in a real-life rendering of a scene from Mr Sammler’s Planet when a black pickpocket exposes himself to Artur Sammler in a scene that has troubled readers and tarnished Bellow’s reputation ever since. Several of these texts are discussed in a chapter significantly headed Nadir, which also covers divorce (from the mathematician Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea, his fourth wife and the model for Albert Corde’s Romanian wife in The Dean’s December), grievous family loss, but also the beginnings of a shift that saw Bellow move out of the books pages and into the opinion columns. In that guise he proved a divisive controversialist who stirred and alienated friends and colleagues by equal turns.

Love and Strife begins where To Fame and Fortune left off, with the publication of Herzog, a zenith rather than nadir. Not an uncomplicated one, though. His third wife Susan Glassmann Bellow pursued him through the courts. An early chapter is headed All My Ladies Seem Furious, which would be plaintive if the “all my ladies” weren’t so alarmingly quantifiable. Bellow makes Norman Mailer seem like a monk, and relatively colour-blind, too, when one thinks about the incident with the pickpocket’s cock. Why wouldn’t they be furious, given some of the attitudes? One can pretend that certain opinions are the character’s rather than the author’s, but there is something of a running obsession with “female generative slime”, odours and organs, and the hypocritical implication that multiple partners makes a woman promiscuous while they merely confirm a man’s fame and success.

There has always been a tiny suggestion that Bellow’s friendship with the classicist and social critic Allan Bloom, celebrated in the late Ravelstein, had a homoerotic edge. Maybe. They certainly shared a horror in the face of what Bloom diagnosed as the “closing” of the American mind and the loss of high culture and intellect, but Bellow actually seems a more conservative figure even than the much pilloried Bloom. His tenure at the Committee on Social Thought, within the University of Chicago, gave him a non-fictional platform to discuss the city and its ills and an opportunity to proselytise the classical culture he and Bloom both admired. A friend who audited one of his courses there said they were a charismatic partnership, who seemed to know what the other was about to say even before it was spoken. It was in one of these seminars that Bellow met his fifth and last wife Janis Freedman.

IF some of his social commentary was edged with mania, that was in keeping with a lifetime of obsessive commitments: to Trotskyism and Reichian orgone therapy in earlier manhood, to Rudolf Steiner anthroposophy and vitamin therapy in later life; but in Leader’s account these seem like incidental distortions of a mind that was wide open to experience, as greedy for it as his character Augie March had been.

Bellow could come on like Wyndham Lewis, but largely because there was always someone at his elbow taking down his most casual comments in shorthand and firing them back at him in profiles and think-pieces. Perhaps the most notorious was a remark quoted (parenthetically, so it didn’t seem that important at the time) in a profile by Atlas. It came in a paragraph about Bloom who complains about an initiative at Stanford University to do away with the Western civilisation class because it is hypothetically or actually racist. Condemned to be joined at the hip with Bloom, Bellow says in his brackets “(‘Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? ... I’d be glad to read them’).” Cue a torrent of protest, and some rather lame temporising from Bellow himself, who pretends he can’t remember when and to whom he made the remark. On the face of it, the remark seems highhanded rather than high-minded, but as a general point about the difference between oral and literate cultures it’s fairly innocuous and unexceptionable. The point here is that any Bellow remark comes weighted with an expectation of controversy, which is inherently self-fulfilling. Leader gives many, many pages to the “Papuans and Zulus” issue, so likewise.

In among all this, it is easy to forget that we value Bellow primarily for his novels. They are revered particularly by a certain generation of British fiction writers. Martin Amis is the most filial of the obsessives. One might argue that there is more insight into Bellow as a novelist in his 3,000 word Observer profile of October 1983 than in Leader’s two volumes, which stand on the shelf like Gog and Magog, but a literary biography is not the same as literary criticism and may actually be its opposite. One can’t accuse Leader of being less than sedulous in presenting a balanced and sympathetic account of his subject. Bellow is capable of astonishing pettiness. He even sulks at being surprised by the Saint Lucia ceremony that preceded his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in