The Life of Saul Bellow by Zachary Leader, book review: The voice of new America

While with most writers it is a risky business looking for clues to their life in their art, for Saul Bellow the risk is somewhat lower, since the boundaries between his life and his writing are at times paper-thin. Cheating wives, backstabbing friends and annoying colleagues are condemned to appear in the pages of his novels, which he used as instruments of retribution.

“I’ll grind you to powder. Your name will be mud,” he is reported to have said to his third wife Susan, before ‘lousing her up’ as Denise in Humboldt’s Gift. And in Herzog the energy of the narrative is fuelled by the discovery of his second wife Sasha’s long term affair with his close friend Jack Ludwig. Few writers have played out their emotional lives so nakedly in their fiction as Bellow, nor drawn so deeply on lived experience.

The publication of Herzog in 1964 is where this volume ends. It was the novel that, midway through his life, brought the already well-established Bellow fame and fortune, although it marks a turning point in other ways. For the first time Bellow found himself at odds with the newly emerging counterculture. Warning him of a bad write-up in The Partisan Review, the left wing literary journal that had supported Bellow through his early years, the previous editor says “Being plainly a heterosexual type, you are typed as a square by those people." Norman Mailer said the Bellow wrote "like a college professor who had read all the good books and absorbed none of them."

Bellow himself loathed the new version of leftism that emerged in the sixties with its soft-centred individualism, a world away from the tough-minded radical politics of thirties Chicago that had shaped him. He was born a mere two years after his parents emigrated from Russia. His father Abraham was difficult, "a good raconteur, quick to anger…a passionate person." They settled first in Canada, running bootlegging operations across the border, before entering the United States illegally to join up with distant family in Chicago.

Precociously intelligent and creative, Bellow’s education was a mix of the literary and the anthropological, the latter subject attractive to him because of his own family’s outsider status and their preoccupation with how American and how Jewish to be. One of Bellow’s early pieces is a parody of Eliot’s Prufrock written in Yiddish, regarded by one critic as the founding moment for the emergence of a modern Jewish literary identity. It is the looming presence of Augie March, however, that defines the first half of Bellow’s life. It was in this "baggy monster of a novel" that he found a voice and a form that was up to the task of tackling what was to become his main subject - America itself. Mailer’s observation that Bellow had absorbed none of the great novels is surely countered by this Fieldingesque, Dickensian version of the twentieth century bildungsroman, the eighteenth century novel rewritten to address a reshaped United States.

Leader draws deeply on newly uncovered letters and journals, alongside a wealth of already existing interviews and autobiographical sketches to piece together this richly detailed life, so much so that it seems almost to have been written in collaboration with its subject. As such it is more forgiving than one might have supposed. Leader has a fondness for the serial seducers of modern letters (Kingsley Amis is his other big subject), and Bellow’s early marriages here are seen to fail through boredom and neglect rather than outright abuse. Never a big drinker or hell raiser (unlike his close friend John Berryman), his greatest crime was being too dedicated to his work. “You could set your watch by him" his first wife remarks. That he got the work done, even at the expense of four marriages (he was survived by his fifth wife), is something we should be thankful for.

Gerard Woodward’s latest novel, 'Vanishing' is now out in paperback (Picador)