BELLOW
By James Atlas
Random House, 686 pages, $35
On Feb. 15, 1959, we learn in James Atlas’ new biography of Saul Bellow, The New York Times Book Review published on its front page an article by Bellow titled “Deep Readers of the World, Beware!” an admonition that reading a novel (“Moby Dick,” say) is different from hunting for symbols (the Pequod as factory or cathedral, Ahab as Oedipus, say). Meanings, Bellow wrote, are ” `a dime a dozen.’ ” Better to read literature ” `from the side of naivete than from that of culture-idolatry, sophistication, and snobbery.’ “
If naively is how to read literature — and I think it is — how about reading a life? A life is a life is a life, not remotely a “text,” let alone a code book. It is more than a sum of symbols and symptoms. As Bellow beautifully said in a eulogy, “There is something radically mysterious in the specificity of another human being.” Faced with this specificity, a biographer should be guileless, honest and self-aware. An executioner grinds axes, but a biographer should try to grasp the subject’s life from both inside and outside, to make us feel three things: what it might have been like to be X, what it might have been like to know X, and how X belongs and doesn’t belong to his or her time.
In the biography of a public person, a politician, diplomat, or a soldier, say, the real subject is action, and the biographer strives to fill in the motives and hidden acts, to tie up loose ends. Fair enough. In the case of a writer, though, the action that matters consists of words. The words are on the record. So a biographer may assess the published record, resurrect forgotten work, turn the critic’s discerning light on the oeuvre, relate it to the rest of the culture and — in the greatest achievement — try to grasp the writer’s spirit, experience, purposes, fears, emotions as if from the inside, to reconstruct a thinking and feeling life. What is not nearly good enough is to connect dots for a cartoon of the writer’s psyche, or to identify the writer’s character Y with real-world personage X.
Atlas, deservedly praised for his thorough, lucid biography of poet Delmore Schwartz, spent 10 years dogging the path of Schwartz’s friend Bellow, interviewing people who have crossed Bellow’s path, reading his manuscripts, collecting his letters, scavenging from other biographies (whose authors have beaten their own heads against Bellow’s psychic and legal walls). To make sure the reader takes his doggedness seriously, Atlas writes that he asked Bellow’s son Dan why Bellow had given him permission to quote from his letters. ” `He realized that you weren’t going to go away,’ ” said Dan Bellow.
Dogged Atlas is, indeed, a devoted haunter of libraries, a collector of letters. He is literate and writes breezily, so his book is that seductive achievement, a “good read.” He depicts intellectual ambience with some flair, and, with the aid of Bellow’s exuberant prose, evokes characters. He is a vigorous collector of tales, and has gotten a lot of Bellow’s friends, ex-friends, ex-lovers and others to dish — enough so as to grade his erotic life (“As a lover, Bellow received indifferent marks. He was `the put-it-in-and-take-it-out type’ “. . . ” `passionate and virile’ ” but not experimental. Someone “who knew a number of Bellow’s women” says he found women ” `overly demanding sexually.’ “). Bellow is an “assiduous” reader, but there is also a “pretense of reading.” Various former students are heard to complain of his “brutal” comments on their work, his “misogyny,” his rejections (one younger writer says with assurance that he “reminded [Bellow] too much of himself.” But the possibility that his witnesses might have complex motives too does not impress Atlas. He emerges as the Kenneth Starr of the literary life.
Atlas knows what he wants. Trouble is, much of the time what he wants is a theory. The biography lives in the pages when Atlas traces Bellow’s childhood in Quebec and Chicago and fills in the ambiance of his beloved and despised Chicago. It curdles when he goes harpooning symbols, turning Bellow’s life into a psychodrama pitting little Saul against his harsh father while mourning (by failing to mourn) his lost mother. Atlas shows us many a whorled, gnarled, or otherwise interesting tree in the forest of Bellow, but the forest he sees when he sums up–which is frequently–is scorched. We get, overall, a stripped-down Bellow, the superb writer who tries, fails, tries again, fails again to write himself out of the psychic corner that is the only home he knows. Here, in brief, is Atlas’ indictment:
– Bellow hides from responsibility for the personal damage he has done. “Bellow was a master of self-exculpation; he was never to blame for the breakups of his marriages or friendships, the books that found disfavor with the critics, the plans that went awry. He could always find an explanation–one that revolved around the notion of himself as victim.” In private, Bellow resorts to the passive voice: “For Bellow, the end of his marriage was another causeless event–`home blew up under me’ . . . canceling out any human agent.” Atlas repeats the theme–bellows it, you might say. Atlas is scrupulous enough to offer the contrary note that the aging Bellow is “willing to share the blame” for the troubles of his fourth marriage. But what share do his wives deserve? Is it uncommon to deny responsibility in this way? Atlas doesn’t inquire.
– Bellow’s promiscuity is the messy fruit of insecurity and mother loss. “Bellow needed . . . subservient women in order to serve his own shaky self-image. It was hard enough for him to deal with men who were his intellectual equals; women who challenged his dominance were profoundly threatening.” His interest in women was confined to “the cursory satisfaction of his own sexual and emotional needs,” with little thought given to his partners. “The way he saw matters, it was always the wife who left.” It would not be astounding if Bellow’s vexed relations with women were linked to his mother’s dying of breast cancer when he was 17, but does this mean that Bellow was condemned to “a bondage doomed to play itself out in five marriages and a string of failed relationships, as Bellow struggled to free himself from the intensity of his need by denying its primal hold over him”? That “[b]eating his breast over his failure to grieve was a way of remaining connected to his mother and to an Edenic childhood past in which his claim to a unique destiny in the world could thrive unchallenged”? If he had grieved more (and how does Atlas know how much Bellow grieved?), might that not have been, also, “a way of remaining connected”?
– Bellow’s need “to subvert determinism” amounts to his need “to deny dependency.” “Bellow’s argument on behalf of the primacy of art had its roots in his lifelong struggle to prove himself in the eyes of his `philistine’ father and brothers.” To his credit, Atlas acknowledges that these roots “don’t invalidate” Bellow’s convictions. Still, what is special about Bellow’s commitment to art? He’s a writer and as free a spirit as we’ve seen in the American literature of the last 50 years. Every major writer of the past 200 years has defended the primacy of art, including a number–Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Camus–who had a lot of social pressure to worry about but not especially a boorish father and brothers. The primacy of art is the West’s big idea about art, like it or not. The psychoanalytic reduction is not only a reduction, it is an unnecessary hypothesis.
Atlas’ confidence in his psychoanalytic interpretations is frequently breathtaking. A reviewer can play this game, too, with more or less indelicacy. “At forty-five,” Atlas writes, “Bellow was still living the way he’d lived when half his age: itinerant, unattached, provisional in his living arrangements, without a real job.” Aha! Atlas identifies with Bellow’s boorish father, a man who could write him a letter when Saul was 38, ostensibly to congratulate him on “The Adventures of Augie March” but closing, “Still I am the head of all of you.” Were Atlas writing about this, he might tie it to his relation with his own father.
Bellow’s crankiness in his 50s and beyond, his paroxysms of rage at what he memorably calls “the moronic inferno” of American culture, his blithe and frequent incuriosity about people greatly different from him, all warrant Atlas’ characterization of Bellow’s “deeply conservative, xenophobic vision of life.” He rightly accuses the Bellow of the late 1960s, the time of “Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” of “racism, misogyny, and puritanical intolerance.” He properly faults Bellow for shuddering at the sexual revolution while, in the words of a painter with whom Bellow had an affair, ” `his fly was entirely unzipped at all times.’ ” Cranky Bellow becomes “a full-blown reactionary, shrilly defending the very institutions he had once satirized and slyly undermined.” When making this case, Atlas is at pains to itemize times when Bellow bridles at the excesses of some of his neoconservative allies. Bellow’s bad-boy stridency–and its prefigurations and echoes in some of his novels–ill-serve his own earthy love of the weird and wondrous.
But as Atlas gets on in his story, he comes to sound like Bellow at his crankiest. By Page 500, he can barely control his acerbity. “Two new and disturbing elements emerge in [“The Dean’s December”]: explicit sex and violence.” Caramba! The novelist finds new human material! Around the same time, according to an earlier would-be biographer, Ruth Miller, he had been writing a story, never published, about a man who “goes on a murderous rampage.” Atlas, with his biographer’s search warrant, has got the goods. Atlas doesn’t shrug. When Bellow doesn’t go to each of the growing schedule of funerals for friends, acquaintances and ex-friends, he is “a selective mourner.” “He was tartly–sometimes brutally–dismissive of other writers,” Atlas writes, adducing a vicious remark about Nadine Gordimer, presumably from a letter, but to whom? Atlas tells us his practice is not to identify the recipients of Bellow’s letters, but in this case, among others, doesn’t it matter? Is Bellow more, or more vilely, dismissive than any other writer? Is this unusual ugliness, or the ugliness built into the writer’s game? One doesn’t know. Atlas doesn’t ask. While fully crediting his limping predecessors in the vineyards of Belloviana, Atlas cannot resist a gratuitous score-settling footnote at the expense of failed Bellow biographer Mark Harris. To return to Bellow’s 1959 polemic: Saul Bellow is no rube, so what did he mean, putting down symbol-hunting, then the academic industry’s bread and butter? Despite Atlas’ claim that Bellow is “not a complex thinker,” that his heroes “shared a penchant for belaboring ideas. They were the products of a provincial Chicago boy’s effort to show that he wasn’t provincial . . . a flight into abstraction,” of the major American novelists of the last century he is surely the best educated, the most curious and intellectually serious, the most delighted by the swoops, flows, collisions and ironies of ideas–one would have to say, the most stimulating. His ideas have often been inconclusive and sometimes primitive (as in “Henderson the Rain King” and “Mr. Sammler’s Planet”), but that is beside the point. What Bellow meant was that literature is a calling that is not a mask for a different calling, symbology. It deserves to be taken, loved, explored, or disliked as a human act, an achievement that is, in any event to be taken, taken in, taken to heart. But to Atlas, Bellow’s philosophizing “got in the way of his natural ebullience and prevented him from saying what he wanted to say.” This is sound-bite “culture” speaking. What chutzpah for Atlas to say he knows what Bellow “wanted to say.” To write that “what animates all of Bellow’s heroes [is] pure rage” is to grasp neither Bellow’s ebullience nor his philosophizing.
Despite the proliferation of prizes, there is national incuriosity about, suspicion of, even rage against art. Despite the proliferation of universities, there is disdain for intellect. Despite the penchant for biographies, gossip prevails. Pity that a biographer should indulge these prejudices and appetites. Reader, read Bellow.
James Atlas’ book offers a stripped-down Saul Bellow, the superb writer who tries, fails, tries again, fails again to write himself out of the psychic corner that is the only home he knows.
