Death, Saul Bellow once wrote, is the “dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.”
Apart from being a somber comment on the human condition, this tends to be sound, practical advice for biographers. Death provides, at the very least, a sure-fire ending for a biography.
But 11 years ago, literary journalist James Atlas embarked on the first comprehensive biography of Bellow, the notoriously publicity-phobic author whose Nobel Prize-winning body of work includes such monuments of 20th Century American fiction as “Herzog” and “Humboldt’s Gift.”
Bellow was 74, and he kept on living and writing during the long years that Atlas bore the weight of painstaking research, interviewing hundreds of Bellow’s acquaintances and reading, often several times, every word that he could find by or about the author.
Even this spring, with the publication of “Bellow” finally in sight, Atlas had to dash off a last-minute addition to include the remarkable fact that Bellow, now 85, had published another long novel, “Ravelstein,” which is generally considered his strongest work of fiction since “Humboldt’s Gift” appeared 25 years ago.
Defining Bellow For 11 years, biographer James Atlas absorbed the life and words of the man often called America’s greatest living novelist, and it nearly overwhelmed him Quote: “Yes, things about him wearied me, disappointed me,” he said. “No one can survive this kind of scrutiny. We all have our failings.”
“There was always something new, meeting some new friend of his or unearthing an old girlfriend,” Atlas said, explaining the thrill of the chase that kept him plugging away at a project that frequently threatened to take over his life. “And finally, there was the challenge of it, just the sheer challenge. Can he do it? Can this book be written? So that was sufficiently chilling to entertain me.”
The answers: He can and it was. “Bellow” (Random House, $35) is one of the season’s big books, a 686-page trek through the work and frequently messy life of the writer who is often called America’s greatest living novelist. Critics have praised Atlas for pulling off the improbable feat of getting Bellow to agree, however reluctantly, to give Atlas access to his papers and letters.
But Atlas, a Chicago native who will return to his hometown this weekend to talk about “Bellow” as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, has also been rebuked for his frequently tart judgments on his subject’s increasingly conservative views and politically incorrect statements about women and blacks.
With five wives and a raft of relationships, Bellow’s life would provide ample grist for a best-selling, tell-all romp. As Atlas quotes one former girlfriend, “He had a biblical Old World morality, but his fly was entirely unzipped at all times.”
But that’s about as salacious as “Bellow” gets. Atlas, a paid-up member of the intellectual branch of the New York literary world, is no Kitty Kelley.
“I’m not in this for titillation,” said Atlas, 51, slouching down in one of the guest chairs in his office at Lipper Publications, where he is the editor in charge of a series of brief biographies that are being published by Lipper and Viking Penguin. “You have to discuss [his relationships] because it shows up in his work. He’s always writing about relationships. What does biography accomplish? It helps us to read the work.”
Still, with all the ex-wives, old girlfriends, estranged friends and literary enemies that he has piled up over the course of a long life, Bellow’s reluctance to cooperate on a biography is little more than plain common sense. Who needs that kind of trouble?
Atlas, whose previous work includes the novel “The Great Pretender,” had several selling points to persuade Bellow that he was ideally suited to be the novelist’s biographer. There was, for starters, their common Chicago roots. Atlas’ parents grew up in the same Jewish immigrant milieu on the Northwest Side that Bellow had known in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, where the Bellow family moved in the 1920s from Montreal. His parents knew the family that sold a bakery to Bellow’s uncle.
Bellow had also read Atlas’ previous biography, a 1977 life of the poet Delmore Schwartz that had been nominated for a National Book Award. Schwartz was a friend of Bellow’s and the model for Bellow’s character Von Humboldt Fleischer, the subject of “Humboldt’s Gift.”
“He did like that book, and I think he also felt a certain amount of trust because I’m from Chicago and my parents grew up in the same world he did,” said Atlas, peering out the floor-to-ceiling window of his Park Avenue office. “He’s not the most trusting person in the world.”
The bow-tied, bespectacled biographer believes that a larger reason for Bellow’s wary cooperation with Atlas’ decade-plus project involved the novelist’s belief in individual freedom, one of the major themes of his work.
“He is strangely unwilling to interfere in what other people do,” Atlas said. “It’s not in his nature to say, `You can’t do this,’ and `You can’t do that.’ So, in a way, letting this biography happen is very characteristic of him. Although he’s very private, he’s also very laissez-faire.”
Atlas’ aim was to interview Bellow at length over the course of many years and have access to his trove of papers, most of which belong to the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library. He also wanted to be able to interview Bellow’s friends, girlfriends, colleagues and enemies without hindrance. He wanted to include family photographs in Bellow’s possession. Although their relationship blew hot and cold over the years, Bellow agreed.
“He was non-interfering at every key moment,” Atlas said quietly, as if still unable to believe his good fortune.
Perhaps most important, Atlas sought permission to quote from the novelist’s letters as a way to give the book a sense of Bellow’s presence. Other literary biographies, notably Ian Hamilton’s life of J.D. Salinger and Peter Ackroyd’s biography of T.S. Eliot, were crippled because permission to quote from the subjects’ letters was denied.
“Bellow was truly, I think, the last great literary letter writer,” Atlas said. “So I knew I had to have the right to quote from his letters.”
One of the last tasks facing Atlas as he wrapped up 11 years of work was to show Bellow the excerpts of letters he wanted to use in the book. As Atlas describes this crucial encounter in his biography, they met in the empty dining room of a hotel not far from Bellow’s rural Vermont retreat.
“Bellow tossed the envelope (of letters) on the table and said, `I don’t have a problem with any of this,'” Atlas writes. “I was stunned.”
Later, he asked Bellow’s son, Dan, why Bellow had agreed. “He realized that you weren’t going to go away,” the son answered.
Through all the years of research, Atlas may not have gone away, but he had plenty of distractions.
“First and foremost, you have to make a living,” he said with a laugh. “Biography is a notably low-paying profession.”
For most of his Bellow years, Atlas worked as a writer and editor at the New York Times Sunday magazine. Toward the end of his work on the book, he was a staff writer at the New Yorker.
He did research at the New York Public Library on his lunch hour. He wrote at night, in the morning, on weekends and on vacation visits to his Vermont home. Grants helped him take time off for prolonged periods of biographical research, and magazine assignments for Vanity Fair and other magazines always had an underlying motive — to take him to some spot linked to Bellow.
“Anywhere I went over the last 10 years, there were people involved with this project who I could see,” Atlas said. “I took my daughter to camp in Vermont, and living down the road was an old Bellow girlfriend. He cast his net wide, so I was always working.”
As Atlas recounts the years of grunt work, he squeezes his eyes shut and pinches the bridge of his nose. His jovial, engaging manner sags.
“I enjoyed it, I honestly did,” he said. “But at the same time, I’m glad I’m done, and I’m never going to write another big biography.”
One benefit of working on the book was the chance it gave Atlas to feel a new connection with Chicago. Although he was born in the city, he grew up in Evanston and Highland Park and never knew firsthand the immigrant world of his parents. He left the North Shore for Harvard, then went to England as a Rhodes scholar, and has lived on the East Coast since the mid-1970s.
“Going back was a chance to have a whole second life in Chicago,” Atlas said of the roughly dozen visits he made to the city the last 10 years. “I didn’t just go there to do research but to absorb life in Chicago, and I do feel I got a sense of how that place works. And in the process, I got to know a great deal about my own past.”
Bellow has said he would neither read nor comment on the new biography. As for the opinions of others, Atlas, a veteran book critic, gives the impression he has read all the reviews of “Bellow.” The charge that rankles most is that he uses the word “racist” too freely in referring to such things as the fact that a pickpocket who exposes himself to the title character in “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” is black.
“There were certain things about his attitudes that seemed to me shrill and unforgiving when it came to his response to the issue of race in America,” Atlas said, but that does not mean he considers Bellow a racist. On the contrary, his 1982 novel, “The Dean’s December,” which includes a bleak view of the black underclass on the South and West Sides, shows that Bellow “experiences the ruin of these people’s lives as a kind of genocide, a crime against a people.”
But, as Atlas acknowledges, 11 years is a long time to spend digging through someone else’s life.
“Yes, things about him wearied me, disappointed me,” he said. “No one can survive this kind of scrutiny. We all have our failings.”
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Atlas will discuss his new book from 1-2 p.m. Saturday at University of Chicago’s Gleacher Center, 450 N. City Front Plaza Dr. For more information, call 312-661-1028, or see the Web site www.chfestival.org.
