Him With His Foot in His Mouth

“Why don’t you write a biography of Saul Bellow? The question was posed to me by Philip Roth.” The first words of his introduction reveal the youngish James Atlas in search of a burden to shoulder. The formal word “posed” warns that this is to be a serious undertaking. A more important question, not posed, is why do you write about Bellow? Can it be simply that the most reliable way of making an impression is to enter the literary arena riding a white elephant? Or is some vigorous attack to be mounted on a sacred cow?

The ambitious modern biographer concerns himself less with the innate quality of his subject’s work than with his marriages and infidelities (no shortage with S.B.), his briefer sexual activities (ditto), his success (scads of awards, doctorates, et cetera) and his financial consecration (the Nobel Prize is worth $160,000, tax free, need we say more?).

This diligent tracking of the man, his work and his workings, proves that Bellow’s skeletons are not kept in cupboards; clothed in swatches of often ruthlessly revealing descriptive prose, they are paraded, and humbled, in the author’s fiction. Bellow himself leads the band, laureled like a triumphant Roman general, followed by a train of captives. His biographer is the attendant slave, who whispered in the general’s ear, “Remember you too are a man.” Here he merely informs the public of the details of the laureate’s mortality and only incidentally brings him down, bumplessly, to earth.

Atlas tells us that he once embarked on a book about Edmund Wilson, but was put off by his “bullying proclamations . . . tedious self-revelations, the drinking and the philandering.” Bellow drinks only in moderation, but his charming proclamations, the quality of his self-portraits and his eternally boyish amorous pursuits must be what make him so much more attractive than Wilson. Nevertheless, if Bunny was a pig, he was a very well-read and informative example of the breed. A biographer might have learned some lessons in terms of attention to texts and contexts.

Atlas tells us that Bellow was, for him, “experience-near” (his own complacent emphasis on an ugly phrase). “To write a biography of Saul Bellow would be, in a sense, to write my own autobiography, a generation removed.” Think so? Bellow is half a century older and Atlas, to my knowledge, has published no fiction. Presumably he is relying on Augie March’s famous remark, “I am American, Chicago-born--Chicago that sombre city.” Well, so am I American, Chicago-born, and now what are we going to do? In any case, didn’t Bellow make his character say this because it was not true of his author? The project was to avoid the fate which Mordecai Richler wittily encapsulated when he declared himself “world-famous in Canada.” Bellow proposed to be world-famous, period.

Born in 1915 and working out assiduously, Bellow has not only dominated his (often self-destructive) generation; he has largely outlived it. Now he is the unopposed obituarist of his times, his own virility advertised by his polyphiloprogenitive abilities and by the frequency of his publications. Chateaubriand once said, “I know that I am nothing but a machine for making books.” The same might be said of Bellow, though he is also a machine for making love (so, to a degree, was Chateaubriand, but he was more discreet about it).

Edward Shils, one of the many friends with whom Bellow contrived to have terminal quarrels, is cited saying, “For Bellow, an artist was the same as being a saint, an ‘unacknowledged legislator of mankind,’ one who was consecrated to the highest function of which any human being was capable, namely, to be an artist.” This high-minded circular argument in favor of benefit of clergy, with its romantic mixture of tosh and unattributed Shelley (who was talking about poets not saints), has been very handy for any number of writers, some good, some not, who find it convenient to exempt themselves from decencies and obligations which can be left to unsainted businessmen, judges, plumbers, wives and mothers. It’s one thing to behave like a bastard; it’s another to announce that it puts you in line for a halo.

Bellow’s career is, in many ways, both exemplary (for its industry, energy, duration, achievement and self-deprecation) and distasteful (for its egotism, calculation, ruthlessness and self-advancement). One of the master’s earliest published works was a translation, from the Yiddish, of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool.” Just as Russian fiction was said to have emerged from “underneath Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’ ” so American Jewish writers have, more or less openly, assumed Gimpel’s mantle. Atlas fails even to hint at the degree to which Bellow habitually apes his wise folly; yet Herzog is manifestly Gimpel’s offspring.

Bellow likes to give the impression, as Byron did when he spoke of himself as “poor dear me,” of being the put-upon victim of female guile. All his many wives (except for the latest) seem to have treated him badly; he is adept at being bruised by the blows, including low ones, which he delivers.

Atlas roots his subject’s sustained emotional immaturity in the death of his mother when he was 18. Even in his 80s, we are told, he “groped for words to convey the vast and devastating import of the loss. ‘I was grieving,’ he stressed.” The dry-eyed reader is entitled to wonder whether bathos could go much shallower. “Vast and devastating” is a phrase so charmlessly banal that you wonder if Atlas has an editor, or an ear. And who uses the word “import” today, except in a poshed-up study of a--let’s hear it for Saul--genius?

Bellow’s modest origins, his conflicts with his materialistic family and almost illiterate father (who once advised him, in a Joycean misprint of “good,” to be “god”), are the stuff of the realistic look-what-we-have-come-through novels of any number of second- generation Americans who regarded the Old Country (Russia in the case of Bellow’s parents) and the old home with enough dismissive nostalgia to fuel them on a long journey to where they had not come from but longed to be. During the trip, we are not surprised that Bellow was sometimes in “dire financial straits” (though we might have been spared the platitude), but in his case a very happy ending is, of course, in store.

The desire to be a saint and an artist was, I dare say, more naive than pretentious. Bellow’s early work was emulous with solemn purpose and inspired more by earnest reading (though he was never a remarkable scholar) than by personal experience. Only later did he teach himself how to infiltrate the latter into his art, at first dolefully, in “Dangling Man” and “The Victim,” and then with trumpeting pro-life salesmanship in “The Adventures of Augie March,” the “big book” which enabled him to become “the leading American novelist and possibly the greatest. . . . “ et cetera.

This breakthrough was achieved, to a degree which Atlas never cares, or dares, to examine, at the cost of abandoning, or at least abridging, his artistic principles. Earlyish in his career Bellow both proclaimed his virtue and prepared to sell it dearly. In a letter to Dwight Macdonald, who had just rejected a story, he says, “What I find heartbreakingly difficult in these times” (toward the end of World War II) “is fathoming the reader’s imagination. . . . And so I find myself perpetually asking, ‘How far shall I take this character? Have I made such and such a point clear? . . . Should I destroy a subtlety by hammering it?’ ”

Are these questions which anyone consecrated to “art” would or should consider? T.S. Eliot said of the English historian Macaulay that he demonstrated what happened to a great style when it was corrupted by journalism. Over and over again Bellow has revealed what happens to a potentially remarkable talent when compromised with yearning for success. This concern may be appropriate to that ubiquitous secret policeman, a novelist’s editor, but it is unworthy of genius, and genius should know it.

Bellow’s mature fictions continue to try so hard to be sure that the stragglers are not left behind that you are tempted to drop out yourself. “Humboldt’s Gift” lost me with its repetitions, its witless satire on Hollywood (not even the crassest studio would have paid a dime for the movie treatment which it contains) and its rambling vanities. Atlas’ previous subject, Delmore Schwartz, was triumphantly mourned in a protracted account of his fall and Bellow’s rise.

Even the subsequent Nobel Prize has not generated the confidence to write like a grown-up for grown-ups. Too much is explained; the back of the class too generously taken care of. For instance, in that late bloom “Ravelstein,” we can read, “That was, in part, due to the influences of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the political theorist and reformer.” Oh that Jean-Jacques Rousseau; thanks, chick!

The rupture with old-style literature, aimed at The Happy Few, began with “Augie March.” Augie has a kind of decided jauntiness which seems much less genuine than the glum tone of the earlier work, in which Bellow declared himself to have “accepted a Flaubertian standard.” In the long run, Flaubert’s punctilious program--the artist concealed in the art--did not suit Bellow’s audience or purposes. His later, prolific self could be compared more aptly with Alexandre Dumas, though “Henderson the Rain King” owes more to H. Rider Haggard than to Joseph Conrad.

Atlas tells us that he took time to find “the voice that eventually came to be identified by the adjective Bellovian.” I never saw or heard this adjective in use, nor do I quite know what it should mean--verbose? irrepressible? inflated? life-affirming? Jewish-American-but-never-parochially-so? Don’t we know much better what kind of shameless, pugnacious, cruelly comic and highly-literate-yet-vernacular style would be indicated by “Rothian”? Philip Roth’s latest trio of novels shows small sign of consideration for the reader or tactful angling for sales: he sticks it to us, and we can like it or not as we choose. That, when it’s good, is the writer’s art.

Bellow is a handsome, cultivated fellow who, at the time of “Humboldt’s Gift” at the latest, elected to write handsome, cultivated books. As early as the 1950s, his announced ambition was to change the course “not of the American novel. The American language.” Has he succeeded? At the center of his work, I sense a kind of aesthetic slipperiness which is matched, it seems, by his morals. We are assured that he thinks a lot, aloud and sententiously, about “the human condition” (Atlas spares us few grand cliches), but how imaginatively does he inhabit it, except by being all too human himself? What should be made of his “Jewish regret that his children should be growing up without him”? Crocodiles also cry. One cure might be not regularly to dump his kids, or the mothers that went with them. Too radical? Too old-fashioned? How Jewish does a guy have to be?

The nature of Jewishness haunts, perplexes and fails, so we are promised, to define Bellow. We know the feeling, some of us, but isn’t there a shortage of Rothian self-awareness in the willingness to use anti-Semitism (and even anti-Chicagoism) as an accusation to scourge critics? As with Mary McCarthy, “satire” is a fancy name for settling old scores with unappreciative friends, lovers and society. Fiction is not just a matter of changing the names (Mircea Eliade is manifestly portrayed in “Ravelstein”). Should favored, flattered, laurel-wreathed authors continue to make a greedy diet of the hands that feed (and applaud) them?

In the course of this Bellovianly--there’s an adverb for the ages!--verbose biography, compounded of adulation and modest quibbles (betraying fear of ostracism from the great man’s register of intimates?), there is a zeal for gossip and a want of literary acumen which will, I dare say, enable Atlas to reach our old friend “a wide audience.” That none of the many women (said to be stunning, gorgeous et cetera) is lent specificity by Atlas proves only how closely he tracks the steps of his subject, whose male characters, demonic or no, can have inner lives conspicuously lacking in his bitches.

Atlas’ anthology of received opinions is as wanting in insight as it is in malice. He fails to understand the Ezra Pound case (in which Bellow certainly said what had to be said) and he never remarks that “Herzog” is, to a marked degree, a remake of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pnin” (when writers express mutual antipathy, they are always likely to have similarities). Zinoviev and Kamenev are said to have been “disaffected Bolsheviks,” which is true only in the sense that Stalin lost his affection for them and had them murdered. Atlas seems not to recognize a direct crib from Einstein and to think that Spengler is an intellectual heavyweight. He deems Jack Miles’ “God: A Biography” a “classic.” Perhaps he imagines that his own book is a sequel to it. To me, however, his Bellow resembles less a divinity than Bernard Malamud’s tenant, marooned on the top floor of a cultural rooming house, all the other stories of which have collapsed and in which Atlas functions as a lonely elevator boy, aching for an encouraging word on the way up.