Thwarted in his efforts to write a biography of Saul Bellow a decade ago, novelist Mark Harris compared the author to the drumlin woodchuck, a creature that is especially agile at eluding predators. But with scholars and journalists stalking him from every direction lately, this might be open season on Bellow, who seems resigned to the clamor outside his burrow door.
”If you get to be an elderly well-known author, then your life is up for grabs, and there`s nothing I can do about that,” said the 74-year-old Bellow, sounding a little bemused about all the writers who want to rummage through his relatively public private life. ”It`s too late for me to cover up. All my sins are visible; there they are, and it`s a question of help yourself. But don`t expect me to hand you the silverware.”
As he spoke, via telephone from his Hyde Park apartment, Bellow was in the midst of reading a proof copy of a new biography, sent to him as a courtesy by the author, Ruth Miller, a friend since the 1930s. ”I`m having a little trouble with that one,” he said. At least for now, he has no problem with another biographer, James Atlas, who has just started researching a book about Bellow that may occupy him for 10 years.
Besides the biographies, Bellow has been the target of two recent but separate overtures from Esquire. Mimi Swartz, a Houston writer, asked to interview him for the magazine`s summer literary issue, but Bellow has so far ignored her letter. Meanwhile, Swartz has been seeking audiences with his close friends, most of whom have turned her down, not always politely.
”Before they even know what I`m doing, they say no,” lamented Swartz, who said one of Bellow`s friends accused her of plotting a ”National Enquirer-type” story, even before she could explain her mission. ”I only want to write about how the themes of his life and his work play off each other. There must be something I don`t know about him for people to be this protective.”
However mistakenly, Bellow may have associated Swartz with Esquire`s forthcoming ”literarysex survey.” Along with 99 other American writers, the magazine asked the Nobel laureate such questions as, ”How many times do you have orgasm during the week?” and, ”What`s the best place you ever had sex?” Bellow did not respondto the questionnaire, explaining (to USA Today),”Since my service days, I haven`t dropped my pants on command.”
Bellow`s differences with Ruth Miller over her ”scholarly” book, ”Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination,” apparently arose because the author dug more deeply into his private life than he had anticipated. ”But I don`t think I should talk about it,” Bellow said of the biography, which will be published in May, ”because it wouldn`t be fair to Ruth Miller.”
An adjunct professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Miller is described by her publisher (St. Martin`s Press) as a friend of Bellow`s since she was his student at Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College. ”This is basically a literary biography,” said Michael Denneny, Miller`s editor, ”and it`s about Bellow`s work. But of course with Bellow, the work is very much drawn from his life, so it gets a little tricky. He may not agree with her interpretations, but he`s repeatedly said that he has no intention of trying to affect those interpretations.”
Despite the vague tremors of unrest from Hyde Park, Bellow said: ”I don`t mind people trying to get ahead professionally. I would like to save whatever I can remember for my own memoir, but I`m not stingy about it. There`s no use saving all the riches for myself.
”But I don`t want them to interfere with what I`m doing now,” said Bellow, who is working on a novella, similar to the two he published in paperback last year, ”A Gift” and ”The Bellarosa Connection.” ”Let me put it this way. I still consider myself a growing tree, and I`m not ready for the sawmill yet.”
According to some reports, Bellow felt as if he`d been put through the mill by Mark Harris, best known for his baseball novels (”Bang the Drum Slowly” and ”The Southpaw”). Ignoring numerous rebuffs, Harris went ahead and wrote a book, ”Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck,” that was less a biography than a ”fan`s notes,” a comic and plaintive account of Harris`
frustrated attempts to play Boswell to Bellow`s Samuel Johnson.
Unwittingly enough, it was Bellow who suggested the book`s title to Harris, when he likened himself to the evasive woodchuck in a Robert Frost poem. ”No, I wasn`t happy about the book,” Bellow acknowledged, ”but it was written without my cooperation and published without my blessings.”
Humboldt`s model
Bellow isn`t quite willing to extend his blessings to James Atlas either, but he did indicate that he`ll be more cooperative than he was with Harris.
”I think he`s very capable,” Bellow said of Atlas, the author of a respected 1977 biography of poet Delmore Schwartz, ”and I`m willing to talk to him from time to time. But I`m not terribly keen on getting involved.”
A New York Times editor and critic, Atlas talked to Bellow during a recent trip to Chicago, not for the first time. The novelist figured prominently, both as a source and a presence, in Atlas` book about Schwartz, who was the model for the roisterous but self-destructive poet Von Humboldt Fleisher in Bellow`s novel, ”Humboldt`s Gift.”
”I`ve had some wonderful visits with him,” Atlas said. ”We drove around the old neighborhood, and he showed me the house where he lived, the house where Augie March lived. He has a photographic memory, and he`s very good company, but I don`t want to crowd him. I think I have a mandate that he will neither help nor hinder me.”
Eventually, Atlas does hope to hunker down with Bellow forsome extensive conversations, butfor the moment he`s warily circling his subject, confining his interviews to such old and closefriends of Bellow`s as novelistRichard Stern, bookseller Stuart Brent, public-relations executive Morris Rotman, and lawyer Sam Freifeld, who, Atlas said, ”has many cameo roles in Bellow`s books.”
In several respects, Atlas considers himself a ”born Bellovian.” His mother was a classmate of Bellow`s at Northwestern University. Atlas grew up in Highland Park and Evanston and graduated from the University of Chicago, experiences he dealt with in his autobiographical novel, ”The Great Pretender.” From Bellow`s books, Atlas said, he first got the notion that
”you could come out of this world, which seemed totally remote from European and even New York culture, and be a writer.”
More than a narrowly focused biography, Atlas` book will be almost as much about Bellow`s world as about the novelist himself, a sociocultural history, reminiscent of Irving Howe`s ”World of Our Fathers,” which tracks the Jewish exodus from Europe to the East Coast, then to the Midwest. ”I`ve always wanted to tell the story of what it was like to grow up Jewish in Chicago,” he said.
Intimidating research
Atlas is less intimidated by Bellow than by the mountain of research awaiting him at the University of Chicago`s Regenstein Library, where Bellow`s manuscripts, letters and papers are stored. ”The index to the Bellow collection alone runs 140 pages,” said Atlas, who listed among the treasures an unpublished novel about the cult Chicago writer Isaac Rosenfeld and 6,000 pages of Bellow`s early drafts for ”Mr. Sammler`s Planet.”
”The enviable thing about Bellow`s life,” Atlas said, ”is that it has a social coherence that is rare these days. Bellow and his cronies all grew up and stayed in Chicago. This is one of the great stories of our time, and it deserves to be told in as complete and accurate a way as it can.”
For that and other reasons, Atlas is in no hurry to finish his biography. Though his contract with Random House calls for a manuscript in four years, Atlas expects it will take him a decade, a prospect that doesn`t cause him any anxiety. ”What interests me is living this book,” he said, ”the chance to spend time among Bellow`s work and his friends. I can`t imagine sitting down and actually writing it.”
No gossipy profile
Mimi Swartz would welcome the chance to spend some time with Bellow and his friends, too, for her Esquire story, but she`s mystified by the stone wall that surrounds the author. ”People have talked to me,” she said, ”but it`s been more difficult than I thought. And they didn`t want to be identified.”
Though the Esquire article was partly occasioned by news of Bellow`s fifth marriage, to Janice Friedman, a 31-year-old doctoral student at the University of Chicago, Swartz said she had no intention of writing a gossipy profile of the author, but one that concentrates as much on his work as his life.
Swartz speculated that the ”misunderstanding” may be the result of Esquire`s notorious sex survey, which is not connected with her article. Or it may be because she`s identified with her last effort for the magazine, about the popularity of vibrators. ”But that was a business story, not a sex story,” said Swartz, who took a leave from her job as senior editor at Texas Monthly to undertake the Esquire assignment.
If the Esquire story does have to be scrubbed, Swartz might take small consolation in the example of Liela Goldman, founder of the Saul Bellow Journal. While she normally confines the semiannual magazine to academic matters, Goldman did put together a ”personal” issue for Bellow`s 70th birthday in 1985. But when she solicited contributions from friends, Goldman found they were extremely reluctant to get involved, ”fearful of the wrath of Bellow.”
As a result, Goldman won`t do a tribute to Bellow on his 75th birthday in June. ”I had such trouble the first time that it seemed self-defeating to even try,” said the editor, who`ll stick to more cerebral and impersonal topics, like the recently published lecture, ”Saul Bellow and the Values of the Western World,” by Brigitte Scheer-Schaezler.
As for Bellow himself, it`s not as if he has grave objections to biographies of writers, only those of living writers that try to wrap up their subjects ”with an air of finality.”
”It`s like saying, `This is the closing round of a fight, it`s going to be over by the next bell, you might as well talk to the guy,` ” he said.
”But that`s not the way I feel. I don`t think the game is over till it`s over. So I do drag my feet a bit, but it`s not out of ill will. My attitude is, I`m busy, let me be. I`m still struggling, battling, fighting, whatever you want to call it, to get it right. I haven`t hung up my gloves yet.”
