THE LIFE OF SAUL BELLOW

LOVE AND STRIFE 1965–2005

ZACHARY LEADER

Jonathan Cape, 764pp, £35

This second volume of Zachary Leader’s acclaimed life of Saul Bellow left many reviewers awestruck by its subject’s ‘overflowing lust for life’ as well as his extraordinary unpleasantness. It begins in 1964 when Bellow was at his illustrious prime. As Tim Adams in the

Guardian put it: ‘Downhill now beckons for Bellow. He resists descent with every fibre.’

Bellow’s five-times-married private life was messy and litigious. As George Walden put it in the

Evening Standard: ‘Beyond the family strife, the travelling, the womanising and lawyering were the novels. His discipline and productivity were phenomenal.’ But he got up the nose of almost everyone. According to Benjamin Markovitz in the Spectator: ‘Bellow’s provocations fell roughly into three categories: the things he said because he had thought about and deeply studied the crisis of American cities, and the culture that came out of them, and wanted to utter hard truths; the things he said to get a reaction; and the things he said stupidly or worse. But it’s not always easy to tell them apart.’

Roger Lewis in the Times, never one to bob on the current of popular opinion, loved Leader’s book but loathed Bellow: ‘It is impossible to imagine a more successful novelist in worldly terms – Bellow was a Commander of the Légion d’honneur, a visiting professor and cushioned writer-in-residence here, there and everywhere – equally, it is not easy to picture a more horrible one.’ But in the Financial Times, Boyd Tonkin was forgiving: ‘Leader maps the whole fractured geology of Bellow’s

mind and, at the bedrock layer, finds a curious hankering not for fuss but peace.’