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Bulletins of His Own Condition
Al Ellenberg
In his magisterial biography of America's most honored writer, James Atlas succeeds in the tricky task of separating the facts about Saul Bellow from the fiction
Saul Bellow is America's most honored writer. At the age of 85, he has earned, with his twelve novels and dozens of short stories and novellas, three National Book Awards (a record), a Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature and a trunk full of lesser encomiums. He likes to crack that he has so many medals, he feels like a Russian general.
Bellow is also America's most notoriously autobiographical fictionalist, plundering his own past and character with passionate precision, often to the chagrin of ex-wives (four), mistresses (aplenty), colleagues, rivals, friends and foes.
James Atlas, in his exhaustive, frequently touching, frequently judgmental, totally engrossing biography, tells of an old Bellow chum who was so fearful of finding himself caustically immortalized that he had his wife pre-read each new novel so as to forestall the shock of recognition.
But the process of self-ransacking can be just as painful for Bellow as it is for his unwitting prototypes. In the fall of 1981, I interviewed him in Chicago for Rolling Stone magazine. The occasion was the publication of "The Dean's December," a novel in which he himself, his fourth wife, a beautiful Romanian mathematician, her mother, and a number of Chicago figures were undeniably portrayed. Like most of Bellow's novels, this one appeared within a few years of the seminal events and characters limned in the work. I asked Bellow about this process of mining his own reality to create his fictions.
"I get very agitated," he said. "I get so high that I'm out of access even sometimes to myself. And I feel as if I am the ground on which some frightful football game is taking place. And I'm feeling every thump."
At the time, I described Bellow's novels as bulletins of his own condition. This predilection began early. When Bellow was 8 years old, he spent long months in the dreary children's ward of Victoria Hospital in Montreal, near death from peritonitis, "with kids dying left and right in the night," he told me. "There were these sudden huddles of doctors and nurses, and then the kid being covered and wheeled out on the stretcher and an empty bed. Well, I was eight years old, but I was a pretty sharp kid. I could read the chart on my own bed. It's not exactly lightweight experience."
Atlas spent 10 dogged years on this book, and it had to be one of the most daunting tasks in modern biography, as formidable as writing a life of Proust. What strategy do you employ to tell the story of an enormously prolific writer whose every passage is a descant on himself?
WHAT ATLAS SET OUT TO DO, and overwhelmingly succeeded in doing, was to separate fact from fiction, both in detail and in broad context. While Bellow poured his life into his books, he always stirred the contents up with dollops of fiction to achieve particular dramatic potency. Atlas sharply points out that the opening line of one of Bellow's most famously autobiographical novels, "The Adventures of Augie March," contains two assertions that were simply not true of Bellow: "I am an American, Chicago-born ..." Bellow was not an American, he was a Canadian; he was not born in Chicago, he was born in Lachine, a gritty town just outside of Montreal. But Augie's assertion in Bellow's breakthrough novel contained a truth greater than biographical detail: Both Augie and Bellow were determined to realize the American dream of self-realization despite the constraints of origin, going at things in their "own way."
One of the sources of Bellow's autobiographical penchant is his prodigious memory, which, combined with his acute observational powers, endows his fiction with its detailed flavor of authenticity. Atlas provides many examples of Bellow's recollective powers. One came in 1987, during one of his frequent visits to Montreal.
"While Bellow was being interviewed at the Jewish Public Library, a man introduced himself as a person from the old neighborhood. Bellow questioned the man closely about where he'd lived, then began to describe his interlocutor's father, his uncle, everyone in his household, 'as if it had all been yesterday,'" as the elderly ex-neighbor put it. At the time, Bellow was 72.
But Bellow is also a compulsive teller of jokes and anecdotes, sometimes at the expense of the same old-timers who dwell so vividly in his memory. (Freud once observed that there are three parties to a joke: the teller, the listener and the victim.) When an old friend would spot himself as the butt of a recollected incident, Atlas recounts, Bellow would apologize, but explain that memories are his stock in trade and friends should forgive and accept his use of these tales. He would even suggest that they go ahead and write their own recollections of him, rather disingenuously ignoring the difficulties these obscure folk would face in finding a publisher.
The truth is that most of Bellow's memorable wisecracks are pithy attacks on others. I once asked him what he thought of Philip Roth. "What hath Roth got?" was Bellow's reply, delivered with a timing worthy of Jack Benny.
There is no question that Bellow has pondered this acerbic tendency. His short story, "Him With His Foot in His Mouth," is a very funny and frequently vicious double-edged apologia for his barbed witticisms. Bellow's stand-in contrives a number of tortuous rationales for his hurtful remarks, but gets to repeat dozens of them, recognizable as vintage Bellow, throughout the story. One of these rationales is breathtaking in its nerviness: The protagonist suggests that his mastery of Yiddish may be to blame. "If there is a demiurge who inspires me to speak wildly," the character says, "he may have been attracted to me by this violent unsparing language." Bellow himself, of course, is a superb Yiddishist, an attribute Atlas marvelously illustrates by quoting a few lines from a spoof of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," written in Yiddish by Bellow and his Chicago sidekick Isaac Rosenfeld. The lines are so much fun, I will yield to the temptation to rehearse them here for the delight of mame-loshen enthusiasts:
In tzimmer vu di wayber zennen,
redt men fun Karl Marx un Lenin...
Ikh ver alt, ikh ver alt,
un mayn pupik vert mir kalt ...
Atlas renders these lines as: "In the room where the women go,/ they talk of Marx and Lenin.../I grow old, I grow old,/ and my belly button grows cold."
But Atlas is after more serious game than nailing Bellow for his wisecracks, which he clearly regards as a subtext in Bellow's autobiographical impulse. In my Rolling Stone piece, I described Bellow as a "jealous Jewish god" to characterize his well-known displays of temper when he felt his pride was under assault. Repeatedly, Atlas sees Bellow as a man suffering from a "shaky self-image," prompting a need to avenge himself on those whom he perceives as betrayers and victimizers. "In the beginning, at least, revenge fueled his narrative," Atlas says of "Herzog," the novel that confirmed Bellow's stature as a huge literary figure and, not incidentally, as a writer who could make the big bucks. I can confirm Atlas's judgment.
Bellow and I entered Bard College together in 1953, I as a freshman, he as a teacher fresh from the enormously well-received publication of "The Adventures of Augie March." I idolized him and managed to talk my way into his American lit class, but my style was what you might call Bronx-punk-intellectual, and my efforts to gain his attention were unsubtle and insulting. Once, he even took a swing at me, and I regret to this day that he didn't connect. One could eat out for a lifetime on being decked by Saul Bellow. Eventually, we became kind of friendly; I think he understood my identification with him and we would swap Yiddishisms.
Bellow didn't hang around Bard for long, and I got kicked out in the middle of my senior year for a raft of good reasons. By 1960, I was back, finishing up my last term. One afternoon, there was a knock on my door. There stood Bellow. He was visiting some faculty friends. "I heard you were here," he said. "Let's take a walk."
As we ambled down a campus path, Bellow, clearly agitated, exploded: "You heard about my wife?" He was referring to his second wife, Sondra Tschacbasov, who had been with him at Bard. I remembered her as sloe-eyed, olive-skinned and sexy as an odalisque, but I'd never talked to her and I wasn't privy to any gossip. "She ran off with Jack," Bellow announced, referring to Jack Ludwig, a boisterous fellow professor of literature, also Canadian, also Jewish and a guy perceived as a bosom Bellow buddy.
"But that's okay," Bellow kept going. "I'll fix him. I'm going to stick him in my new novel. By the time I'm through with him, he'll be laughed right out of the literature business." The new novel was "Herzog," and Jack Ludwig was reinvented as the deviously buffoonish Valentine Gersbach.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS LATER, I am interviewing Bellow in his spacious, heavily furnitured, Old World-style apartment overlooking the churning, stone-gray waters of Lake Michigan. I ask Bellow about his vow to "fix" Ludwig.
"Well, there's a strange thing about 'Herzog,'" Bellow answered. "When I found myself 'fixing' people, I decided that this was not right. I was determined not to fix anybody. I wrote the book so many times because I was determined to do justice to a subject as a writer. I wasn't going to get involved in it this way, as if I were in the clear and everybody else was at fault. In the early versions of the book, I was simply blind with rage and hurt, and I was simply going pell-mell after my prey. Then I thought, 'This is dishonorable.' I began to write an altogether different sort of book."
What sort of book? I pressed.
"It became a book about a man who uses his pain to find out what he's all about, and realizes that it's not only a question of just self-appraisal but of doing justice."
Atlas has pored over Bellow's archives, and confirms a certain softening of Bellow's initial version of Herzog. That will forever be of little consolation to Jack Ludwig, whose own literary career subsequently was as airborne as a turkey; Valentine Gersbach, on the other hand, is an immortal American literary clown.
There is no question that Bellow's life has been full of pain - physical pain from a number of life-threatening illnesses, psychological pain from rebuffs, early failures, the agonizing death from cancer of his mother when he was a boy, and that disconcerting marital track record, all of which Atlas documents in detail and with a measure of empathy, but also with some reservation. Atlas appears to view Bellow as an overwhelmingly self-preoccupied artist who compulsively sacrifices human relations to his muse. He even suggests that Bellow, consciously or not, manipulated those relations to provide grist for his creative mill. He pointedly quotes the writer Herbert Gold as suggesting "half-facetiously" that Bellow "set up" Ludwig's pursuit of his wife "so that he could write his book." And Atlas approvingly quotes a physician who knew him, who said that "Bellow has a tendency to set up situations and study them. He sets them up and knocks them down again - like a pinsetter."
Atlas is clearly uncomfortable with large hunks of Bellow's character. He cites disapprovingly Bellow's evolution from self-styled Trotskyite "revolutionist" to neo-conservative. He points to Bellow's foolhardy stereotypical remarks, particularly a crack that still haunts Bellow: "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read him." Atlas is appalled by Bellow's libidinal excesses. He faults Bellow's attentiveness as a father to his three sons. He deplores Bellow's cruel depictions of his four ex-wives (though his fifth and current wife, Janis Freedman, 44 years his junior, is rapturously portrayed in "Ravelstein"). He hints that there is something pathological about Bellow's frequent portrayal of himself as the victim. All true, drearily true.
But a man's character is not a simple thing, and Atlas also dutifully records Bellow's shining public moments, such as his opposition to Faulkner's call for the release of Ezra Pound from an insane asylum: "Do you mean to ask me to join you in honoring a man who called for the destruction of my kinsmen ... better poets than he were exterminated ..." Atlas's account of Bellow's friendship and deep respect for Ralph Ellison undercuts intimations of racism. Atlas describes Bellow bursting into tears upon hearing of the death of his third ex-wife, Susan Glassman. I remember Bellow back in the 50s turning white as a sheet when his youngest son stepped on a nail and had to be rushed to the hospital. Bellow has made his peace with all three of his sons; in fact, they were all present when he became a Nobel laureate in 1976.
In the end, we are left with the work itself, and that collection of characters in his novels and stories: experience-hungry Augie, Herzog mad with the desire to explain himself to the world, Henderson the insatiable, the brilliant Humboldt sucked into the vortex of his insanity, Sammler striving to survive his own survival, Ravelstein, the sybaritic philosopher, and so many others who remind us and inform us of our own humanity.
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