A volatile writer ‘incapable of love’

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

By Zachary Leader, Knopf, 832 pages, $40

An illegal immigrant until he was 28, Saul Bellow died the most decorated writer in American history. Yet as his latest biographer puts it: “The story of his life is long and complicated.”

On his deathbed 10 years ago, Bellow slipped back into consciousness and, looking intently up at a friend, asked his final and prickliest question: “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” By “jerk”, Bellow meant someone such as Celine — “a superb writer, but humanly so impossible” — or, more particularly, says Zachary Leader, someone such as V.S. Naipaul, whom Bellow had met in 1982 (following their encounter, Bellow remarked: “After one look from him, I could skip Yom Kippur”).

By coincidence, I finished Patrick French’s biography of Naipaul only last month, overcoming a long resistance. French’s Naipaul comes across as a damaging narcissist who doesn’t go to his mother’s funeral, is proud never to use the word love in his work, extends not a crumb of comfort to the woman who aborts three of his children; in sum, appears to leave behind no joy.

Putting aside any argument that talent is its own justification, is this the kind of creature that Bellow feared he had become? Or was he “a man” — a word, Leader tells us, which “here means ‘mensch’, human being, someone to rely on, someone admirable, responsible, a person of character”?

“To Fame and Fortune” is the first half of Leader’s attempt to grapple with this cactus. Leader is an academic — his previous work includes a 1,200-page edition of Kingsley Amis’s correspondence with Philip Larkin — and as such he could be said to embody Bellow’s concern, several times reiterated in “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About”, that “the great danger for writers in the university is the academic danger”.

He is not encumbered with any personal knowledge of his subject, as were Bellow’s previous biographers. He met him once, inauspiciously, in 1972. “I remember nothing of what he said.” (Introduced to Bellow at a party in a basement flat in Maida Vale, I had a similar experience.)

Instead, Leader’s research draws on hitherto restricted material, including half-a-dozen fragments from unpublished novels, and 150 interviews with wives, friends and relatives, some of whom refused to speak to earlier investigators. The result is nothing if not comprehensive.

Bellow had an intriguing belief that genius was “the recovery of the powers of childhood by an act of the creative will”. His fidelity to his past was probably his only fidelity. While his flash elder brother Maury tried to forget his origins, Bellow made their recuperation his life’s project.

Right to the end, he struggled to obey George Sand’s dictum that in literature “the first condition of any worth is to be one’s self”. Because he wrote so close to life, said his fifth wife, he always needed a real-life character to get him off the ground.

Most of the time, his own volatile, touchy character provided the boost. As Bellow writes of fellow Nobel Laureate Hemingway, his was “a career of supreme egomania”, with the novelist’s self-absorption contributing a great deal to his dramatic power and his success. Only a rival egomaniac would think of asking: “Is it because he so persistently writes his own autobiography that he fascinates us?”

The Bellows were Russian Jews from Belarus who ended up in St Petersburg, where they had coaches, servants and silver samovars, until their prosperity was snatched away.

In 1913, Bellow’s violent, irascible father, Abraham, was imprisoned for “doing business with fake papers”. He escaped with his wife and children to Southampton, caught a boat to Halifax under the name of “Rafael Gordin”, and settled in Lachine near Montreal, where Bellow was born in 1915.

For Bellow’s parents, who spoke no English, the move was a comedown from which they never recovered. All that they carried with them from Russia was a steamer-trunk containing a top hat and some ostrich feathers. Abraham found work driving a bakery wagon.

In Russia, he had employed coachmen to harness his horse; now he had to learn to do it himself by lantern light, wrote Bellow, “in the cold Canadian nights, with freezing hands”. He soon branched out into bootlegging, young Saul pasting labels on the whisky bottles.

But when a consignment was hijacked near the American border and Abraham beaten up, Bellow’s orthodox mother rebelled. She decided the family had to emigrate south. Aged nine, Bellow was smuggled to Chicago, the city with which his name is most identified.

He did not shine at school, which he was put through by his father’s new coal business. “I doubt whether anyone could have detected anything special about him,” said a friend (we are on page 135). But clearly he was taking in everything with “almost metabolic perspicacity”.

His father got Bellow to go into the slums to collect debts. He came to know “the low-life, the tough guys the boys training to be hoodlums”. One of Bellow’s baseball pals became chief executioner of the Chicago mob. Maury went to work for Al Capone’s lawyer (Jimmy Hoffa would be a guest at the wedding of Maury’s daughter).

His mother hoped that Bellow would become a fiddler or a rabbi. But during a lengthy stint in hospital for appendicitis, he discovered books, including the Bible (“I was nuts about the guy,” Bellow said of Jesus). He decided to be a novelist.

His sense of destiny enabled him to write for two and a half years without getting published. By then, he was married to his first wife, Anita, a social worker. “There were problems in the marriage from the start,” says Leader, without itemising them.

When Anita complained that her husband was impossible to live with, she was told by a friend, “It’s what you get with genius.” She snorted: “Genius, shmenius.” It can’t have helped that he was a strenuous womaniser. At times, his biographer puffs to keep up. “It may have been at this time that Bellow started an affair with a writer named Bobby Markels. This also seems to have been the time when he started an affair with an ex-girlfriend of Philip Roth, Susan Glassman. At some point during this period, Bellow also slept with the poet Sandra Hochman and the actress Helen Garrie.”

One female friend told Leader: “the last thing a woman with a brain should do is have something serious with Saul Bellow”. It was in Paris, where he went in 1948 “to be educated”, that Bellow famously found his voice.

Stuck one morning on a “hospital novel”, he watched the street cleaners open the hydrants and let water run along the curbs. He said to himself: “Why not take a short break and have at least as much freedom of movement as this running water?”

His thoughts went back to childhood and to a “freewheeling” pal called August, last seen in the 1920s. “The language was immediately present ... it rushed out of me. I was turned on like a hydrant in summer.” So Bellow began writing “The Adventures of Augie March”, which the American poet Delmore Schwartz declared a greater novel than “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”.

The most gripping part of this volume features Bellow’s betrayal at the hands of a fellow university teacher, his close friend Jack Ludwig, the terribly humiliating circumstances of which gave Bellow his material for “Herzog”.

For a year and a half, Bellow had no inkling that his second wife, Sasha, was having an affair with Ludwig right under his roof or that she had had an abortion; none of the tight, incestuous circle of largely Jewish intellectuals for whom Bellow was the “unwobbling pivot” dared to tell him.

So much for his metabolic perspicacity. The great noticer had noticed nothing. When he discovered, despite his supposed devotion to truth, he couldn’t handle it — he wanted to beat Ludwig to pulp, even to shoot him. One friend, restraining him physically, advised: “Be a mensch, have an ulcer.”

As Sasha wrote to him: a real man “does not indulge his passions in this way, however hurt he may be”. She summed up Bellow with a forgiving, devastating simplicity. “He was a very selfish man and he wasn’t capable of loving a person.”

–The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015