IN A PHOTO taken sometime in the late fifties, the sizing-up gaze from dark-pool eyes, the Buster Keaton–like, chiseled cheekbones (Bellow the schoolboy was nicknamed Buster), the knowing mouth with its gap tooth, the wide, ready lips. Happy strong and open, which makes us happy too, this face, but just maybe about to take some advantage. The face of someone who lives on talk, appetite, settling accounts, and writing, writing himself and writing other people.
“HE WAS GOING to take on more than the rest of us were,” Alfred Kazin wrote about the young Saul Bellow, newly arrived in 1940s New York. “He was wary—eager, sardonic, and wary.” Bellow, Kazin noted, was then not yet a novelist, much less a great one, but he had a pressing sense of his own coming destiny, “like an old Jew who feels himself closer to God than anybody else.”
A hundred years after he was born, Bellow may seem to us a figure from the past, a vigorous old uncle in danger of being forgotten by readers. But we cannot let go of him, because he has lessons for us that we need to hear. Few novelists have ever given us such a wealth of high-wire verve, the excitement of funny, passionate, overwrought people seeking and squabbling and contending. Bellow’s sentences live on the page, even burst from it. “Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not,” Emerson wrote. Bellow’s lines are loaded, every one.
The first lesson Bellow teaches is attention to personality. Bellow is our novelist of personality in all its wrinkles, its glories and shortcomings. Only through personality, he tells us, can we know the world. Bellow writes people in a way that’s rare among novelists. His universe is physical: people are their bodies and their faces, and their souls shine through their flesh. Take the actor Murphy Verviger in Humboldt’s Gift, rehearsing at a Broadway theater that looks “like a gilded cake-platter with grimed frosting”: “Verviger, his face deeply grooved at the mouth, was big and muscular. He resembled a skiing instructor. Some concept of intense refinement was eating at him. His head was shaped like a busby, a high solid arrogant rock covered with thick moss.” Or Humboldt himself in his desperate last days: “He wore a large gray suit in which he was floundering. His face was dead gray, East River gray. His head looked as if the gypsy moth had gotten into it and tented in his hair.” Every Bellow fan has a mental list of such gloriously precise human pictures. In each one, Bellow shows how the psyche is right there in the flesh, ready to be seen. In Bellow’s descriptions, as James Wood comments, every detail is essential. He rivals even Dickens in his power to locate us through observation, to explain how appearances tell who we are.
Readers who love Bellow’s books are sometimes a little embarrassed, as if Bellow caters to an indulgence, a mere taste for excitable people and hyped-up talk. Bellow fans fear they might be out for gossip rather than some more respectable nourishment. But there is no reason for embarrassment. In Bellow personality is an exalted thing, and the novels have a mood of restless discovery. Every face, every line of dialogue, can be a revelation.
Personality is different from cultural identity, though cultural identity helps to form and shape personality. Nation, tribe, sex, all are part of us. These identities, as Bellow understands them, are the product of real, sometimes brutal historical experience rather than any deliberate choice. Sammler, in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, never chose to be a Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe. Chicago’s poor urban blacks, in The Dean’s December, didn’t choose their particular misery either. When Sammler looks out on the sixties youth performing their hip ideal selves—guerrilla, long-haired cowboy, black panther—he sees something that we twenty-first-century readers recognize. We can make ourselves interesting, we think, by putting on a style, a stance, an identity: we are what we wear, how we look, what we buy, what we tweet. Bellow is here to tell us that this is all an empty fantasy. Personality is marked in every face we meet, long before we begin our social role-playing.
THIS BOOK IS CALLED Bellow’s People because it describes some of the pungent, unforgettable personalities that Bellow knew and transformed in his books—his friends, family, wives, sworn enemies: Morrie Bellows, his eldest brother; Ralph Ellison (who barely shows up in Bellow’s writing, but who influenced him greatly); Sondra Tschacbasov and Jack Ludwig, Bellow’s wife and best friend, whose affair he fictionalized in Herzog; Chanler Chapman, Delmore Schwartz, and Allan Bloom, the originals of Bellow’s Henderson, Humboldt, and Ravelstein; Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea Bellow, his wife during his late middle age; and two more best friends and intellectual influences, Isaac Rosenfeld and Edward Shils. Many more characters from Bellow’s life appear in these pages. These men and women impelled him to become the writer he was.
Some accused Bellow of betraying the friends whose lives he used in his fiction. Joseph Epstein makes this charge in his portrait of the perfidious “Noah Danzig,” which appeared in Commentary in 1990 (“Another Rare Visit with Noah Danzig”). Danzig is, transparently, Bellow. Danzig/Bellow, says Epstein, exploits the lives of others to make his ruthless art. He is only interested in people because they are fictional material. After mining their lives for his books, he discards them.
Epstein’s Danzig has an “expansive, toothy smile,” just like Bellow. As Epstein’s attack gathers steam he displays a Bellow-like flair for portraying physiognomy, this time Bellow’s own: “One of his front teeth was slightly longer than the other. And Gogol would have greatly enjoyed describing his thin, high-bridged nose with its large and dark nostrils, faintly quivering, as if taking the scent of something vaguely disgusting.” That “great quivering, bony, black-holed nose,” Epstein continues, “was dark red at its tip. It was nearly the same color as the maroon of his tie and matching socks. He was wearing a checked suit, with sharply cut lapels and small, high pockets cut into the trousers. The effect was lavish but somehow resembled the combination of a best man at a lower-middle-class wedding and a racetrack tout.”
These withering lines are not a bad description of Bellow’s characteristic natty attire. But they are crueler than anything Bellow himself ever wrote, which somewhat cuts the high ground out from under Epstein’s feet. Epstein suggests that Bellow’s point is to reduce people in his writing, to satirize them. Yet this is far from the truth. Somehow, magically, Bellow’s own characters are never diminished to caricature but rendered more greatly themselves, even when Bellow pierces them through with his novelist’s eye.
Epstein’s case against Bellow is in part petty—Bellow insulted his friend Hilton Kramer in Humboldt’s Gift, and Epstein’s essay was a form of payback—but it is also quite serious. He writes, “When one went to hear Heifetz play Beethoven, after all, it was more for the Heifetz than for the Beethoven. Similarly, one read a Danzig novel less for the normal pleasures of fiction than to watch Noah perform on the page.”
Bellow is indeed a performing writer, but the people he depicts always share in the performance. I return more than a few times in this book to a comparison between Bellow and Nabokov, because Nabokov too is a performer, an enormously brilliant one. Nabokov, however, often works at the expense of his characters; Bellow works for them. As Joan Ullman, whose affair with the art critic Harold Rosenberg Bellow describes in his short story “What Kind of Day Did You Have,” told me, “He brought Harold back.” Elephantine flaws and all, Rosenberg was bigger than life, and Bellow proved it in his story (which was written after Rosenberg’s death; the two men, longtime friends, both taught at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought).
Bellow was a remarkable short story writer, one of the best of the twentieth century, but I’ve focused on his novels, where he had the large canvas he needed for his vision. I say little about his first two books, Dangling Man and The Victim, because Bellow himself regarded them as his apprentice work. Throughout I interweave vignettes of the people in Bellow’s life with my sense of his books. Bellow wanted us to think about the real lives that he used in his work. Instead of simply exploiting the people he knew, as Epstein charged, Bellow, like Proust, was trying to understand them by turning them into fictions.
IN 1964 Bellow became an influential presence in America, a wealthy man and a famous one, through his novel Herzog, the best seller that introduced a distinctively Jewish overexcitement to the culture. The personality of Bellow’s hero is what made the splash. Herzog teetered both intellectually and emotionally, exulting and then nearly breaking down. Comic and serious at once, never fragile or skittish, he was a vital, insightful wreck. His life was a mess he had made, but he had integrity too, and an odd dignity. He would have been at home in a Russian novel—perhaps Goncharov’s Oblomov or Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.
Bellow’s Jewish hero Herzog hit a nerve. In Herzog’s wake came Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, and, of course, more books by Bellow. As Jonathan Liu comments in a review of Witz, Joshua Cohen’s recent burlesque monument to the Jewish novel, in postwar American fiction Jews were the small slice of the population that came to represent the whole. Nervous stunts of self-definition, bold tightrope walking over pits of “self-alienation, historical dislocation, sexual neurosis, survivor’s ambivalence”: these traits, Liu remarks, proved basic to the postwar American novel, whether it was written by a Jew or not. In the decades after World War II, the fictional Jew let all that restrained WASP anxiety rise to the surface and made it burst open.
Jews also represented something “gravely universal,” even “world-historical,” Liu adds. Ancestry was destiny, and so American Jews carried a heavy double burden: they were connected to the Holocaust, the emblematic mass-scale barbarity of the twentieth century, and yet they had escaped that catastrophe, much as America itself had escaped the traumas of Europe.
For Bellow, who was born in a Yiddish-speaking home in Lachine, Quebec, Jewishness was simply a fact of life, something to be grateful for rather than to be puzzled over. Bellow was sent to heder at the age of four, where he began to learn Hebrew and, he said, “to memorize most of Genesis.” He remarked late in his life that “it would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself. One may be tempted to go behind the given and invent something better, to attempt to re-enter life at a more advantageous point. In America this is common, we have all seen it done, and done in many instances with great ingenuity. But the thought of such an attempt never entered my mind.” Bellow was no new-made Gatsby: he was Jewish to the core, and spoke a fine Yiddish to his last days.
What does it mean to be a Jew? Am I really a Jew? Am I too much a Jew, or too little?—these questions, so basic to Bellow’s younger rival, Philip Roth, never appear in Bellow’s writing. Roth was the herald of the new identity game; he made Gatsby-like self-invention the essence of Jewishness. For Bellow, by contrast, a Jew was a Jew, just as an American was an American. Bellow’s confidence about Jewishness belongs to an earlier era, but it has much to teach us: sometimes being a Jew is a simple fact, rather than, as in Roth and Bernard Malamud, an agonized one.
In the mid-sixties Bellow edited a book titled Great Jewish Short Stories. In the introduction, he wrote, “I would call the attitudes of these stories characteristically Jewish. In them, laughter and trembling are so curiously mingled that it is not easy to determine the relations of the two. . . . At times the figures of the story, or parable, appear to invite or encourage trembling with the secret aim of overcoming it by means of laughter.”
This is a radically different idea of Jewishness in literature from the social-identity idea voiced by the critic Leslie Fiedler, in a famous 1949 essay in Commentary entitled “What Can We Do About Fagin?” Fiedler issued a call to arms. He wanted to counteract the bad images of “the Jew” in English and American literature; he called for new, positive myths of Jewishness. Later that year Commentary printed responses to Fiedler by, among others, Harold Rosenberg, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Philip Rahv, Harry Levin, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling—and Bellow. Bellow’s answer to Fiedler was, in essence, that literature is not PR: there is no point in wrangling over stereotypes, and especially not in order to make new stereotypes. Creating praiseworthy images may be the task of socialist realism, but it is not real exploration. We need to dig deeper, Bellow implied, to discover what the word “Jewish” might mean.
For the routine nostalgic decorations that are thought to make a novel “Jewish,” Bellow in his introduction to Great Jewish Short Stories has nothing but disdain. He dismisses “prayer shawls and phylacteries and Sabbath sentiment, the Seder, the matchmaking, the marriage canopy; for sadness the Kaddish, for amusement the schnorrer, for admiration the bearded scholar.” Bellow goes at Jewishness free-style, his own way; the myths that comfort others have no appeal for him. But he doesn’t want a bold new image either, unless it’s the reality he knows best, the ravenous Jewish intellectuals he lives among.
BELLOW IS a natural comedian, and so his piece on Jewish short story writers becomes an argument for the depth of their comedy. Clearly, he is thinking of his own work too when he writes, “The real secret, the ultimate mystery, may never reveal itself to the earnest thought of a Spinoza, but when we laugh (the idea is remotely Hasidic) our minds refer us to God’s existence. Chaos is exposed.” With his practice of serious comedy in his books, Bellow makes us think not just of Jewish authors like Sholem Aleichem or Isaac Babel, but of Dostoevsky, with his frantic, hugely entertaining sufferers.
Bellow is one of the most personal and intimate of fiction writers. What he values most of all is the battered heart, and its dealings with the world. Yet his work is not at all grim: he might be the funniest of our major writers. “ ‘I have suffered,’ he said, and then he laughed as if nothing could be funnier”: so Susan Cheever in one of her memoirs remembers Bellow at a party. He tells us something that cannot be told by the intellectual, the editorialist, the historian, or the political commentator—something that sparks the soul, and wants to wake it up.
“Things around Saul were magical,” Leon Wieseltier told me. “He noticed more so I noticed more. The vitality was off the charts; it was physical, it was intellectual. The thing that offended Saul more than anything was drowsiness.” Wakefulness was Bellow’s constant goal, Wieseltier said. “He lived in the present in a ferocious way. The New York intellectuals were always looking for masters who weren’t themselves. Saul didn’t do that. There was something so deeply unsubservient about Saul. His mind was as good as anybody’s mind, he thought. He didn’t have reverence. He blew the whole thing up, even though he was one of them. He gave you this feeling of being primary, which is a very rare feeling.”
Bellow is sometimes called a novelist of ideas, but he sensed that ideas can block life. His particular target was the New York intellectuals, the gang he ran with but also the frequent object of his attacks. In a letter to Fiedler in June 1955, he wrote, “I don’t consider myself part of the Partisan group. Not those dying beasts.” He delighted in introducing the eminences of Partisan Review to Dave Peltz, a colorful and louche pal whom he’d known since he was a teenager. He assigned Peltz to show Hannah Arendt around Chicago when she was considering a job at the university (in the end, the meeting between Peltz and Arendt never took place). Once Bellow and Peltz took Lionel Trilling slumming after a lecture, standing him drinks in a dive bar. “A cold coming we had of it,” Bellow joked in a letter, likening these three diverse Jews to T. S. Eliot’s Magi.
The intellectual’s doom occurs when he chooses ideas over the lively world. In Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow reluctantly judges that the madcap and mad Von Humboldt Fleisher, based on his friend Delmore Schwartz, has succumbed to ideas. He has made himself boring, and so turned his back on life. “Humboldt had become boring in the vesture of a superior person, in the style of high culture, with all of his conforming abstractions. Many hundreds of thousands of people were now wearing this costume of the higher misery.” Bellow’s task is to shake us out of this straitjacket, the higher misery of ideas. Yet he loved ideas, too: you had to go through them to get out of them. His son Adam recalled that Bellow “once told me that he’d worked through all the ideologies of the twentieth century so that I wouldn’t have to. I still did, though.”
A little-noticed article that Bellow wrote for Encounter in 1963, “Some Notes on Recent American Fiction,” is his declaration of independence as a writer, or at least the place where he declared what he wasn’t. He wrote the essay as he was finishing Herzog, and it shows: his tacit job is to figure out how this book, in which Bellow truly comes into his own, outdoes its rivals. American fiction seems narrow to Bellow, which makes him ask some old-new questions: What can a novel tell us about ourselves? And what has the self become anyway in the twentieth century?
In his Encounter essay Bellow rejects what he calls the writers of “sensibility,” the craftsmen (and women) of inwardness. He remarks, “The individual in American fiction often comes through to us, especially among writers of ‘sensibility,’ as a colonist who has been sent to a remote place, some Alaska of the soul. What he has to bring under cultivation, however, is a barren emptiness within himself.”
Bellow’s chief example of sensibility is John Updike, who would become a long-running critical foe, a habitual negative reviewer of Bellow’s books in The New Yorker. What Updike’s self-cultivation really amounts to, Bellow says, is “the rearrangement of things in new and hostile solitude.” About Updike’s story “Pigeon Feathers” Bellow remarks cuttingly, “We suspect [sensibility] of a stony heart because it functions so smoothly in its isolation.” And the “stoicism of separateness” in Hemingway or John O’Hara also seems arid to Bellow, much like Updike’s method. Like the writer of sensibility, the stoic is an obsessive craftsman. Bellow wants something wider and freer.
Bellow showed an intense concern with Lolita in his 1963 Encounter essay. Nabokov’s scandalous tour de force had taken the literary world by storm with its American publication five years earlier; Herzog would achieve a similar victory. But Bellow was determined to make Herzog a far different book from Lolita. Bellow compares Lolita to Death in Venice and is troubled by the decline of desire from Mann to Nabokov. Mann’s “sad occurrence involves Apollo and Dionysus,” he writes, whereas “the internal life of Humbert Humbert has become a joke.” Humbert “is a fourth- or fifth-rate man of the world and is unable to be entirely serious about his passion.” Bellow adds, “The earnestness of Mann about love and death might be centuries old. The same subject is sadly and maliciously comical in Lolita.” Nabokov’s Quilty doesn’t take his own death seriously, and so loses “a life that was not worth having anyway.”
Nabokov, of course, poked fun at what he considered Mann’s plaster-of-paris pretense to great themes and ideas; his ironies were more corrosive, and also easier, than Mann’s. But the Nabokovian magician’s hat looked to Bellow disturbingly like an empty vessel. Bellow was never interested in the solemn Old World pacing that Mann perfected, the languor and the Abendland mood, but he was not one of Nabokov’s game players either. The sensitive inwardness of an Updike and the hard-boiled stoic stance he had already rejected. What was left was Bellow’s own pathway, the one he carved out most memorably in Herzog: a comic seriousness, an overspilling desperate gusto, the crazy turmoil of a life.
Comedy like Nabokov’s, Bellow knew, likes to lacerate the staid and bourgeois, but the artistic types don’t come off much better. Humbert hilariously explodes respectable Charlotte Haze, but Humbert himself is a shabby rather than a gay monster. There is no one to champion, unless it be the defensive and somber married Lolita, seen briefly after her escape from Humbert: but she is only glimpsed, not allowed to influence the later course of the story, which is governed by Quilty’s and Humbert’s restless antics. Bellow’s unspoken question in his essay, fully embodied in Herzog, is: How can comedy build something up, rather than just being a way to knock the self down? As Bellow saw it, in his books before Herzog he had not truly reached the soul. He had been exuberant, in The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King. He had been intense, even dire, in Seize the Day and his first two novels. But his work fell into these two halves—it was either freewheeling or deliberately confined—and therefore the work was incomplete. With Herzog Bellow would break through, complete himself, and readers realized the difference right away.
In his novels Bellow refuses most of the usual themes of fiction: there’s no Julien Sorel–like remaking of identity, and no puzzles of inwardness to solve, as with James or Tolstoy, who make us try to figure out who their characters really are (James does it teasingly, Tolstoy satisfyingly). Bellow’s characters are who they are from the beginning; they seldom grow or decline. In Bellow personality is performance, and its way is basically comic: self-delighting, unfolded all at once.
Bellow’s comedy is, like all the best comedy, neither too naïve nor too knowing, and so it takes a stand against irony, which always knows too much. Irony is the novel’s achievement but also, as Bellow recognizes, its danger. Stendhal and Flaubert pioneered novelistic irony: they lovingly absorbed romantic idealism in their work but corrected it with a dose of cynicism, and by doing so suggested that romanticism was nothing so special, but rather common currency. Ever since these two French titans wrote, some major novelists have, in the name of realism, deliberately—ironically—allowed the way the culture talks and thinks to infect their style. For Joyce, realism meant being able to take seriously the cheapest clichés about love and success, and even to give new life to these clichés. But Joyce retained the ironist’s privilege: he looked down on the popular speech that he also caressed. The privilege was handed down to Nabokov, Pynchon, David Foster Wallace. An alternative was to achieve something purer and sparer than the popular dialects that swirl around the writer, and this way of writing has flourished too, from Kafka and Camus to Marilynne Robinson.
Bellow sounds nothing like any of the authors I have just mentioned. His style is an original creation, fully colloquial but all his own. It is wrought from Yiddish as well as English and is just as precise as it is headlong. Bellow stirs in the pot some minor touches of eighteenth-century archaism, too. Consider a sentence from Augie March (the character Mimi has just endured a back-alley abortion): “She bled very swift, and she tried to keep it secret, but presently she had to tell me, as she herself, astonished, tried to keep track of it.” Note the choice of “swift” rather than “quickly,” and the faint starch of “presently”: the sentence would be at home in Fielding.
Yiddish syntax and rhythm animate Bellow, but quietly, so that a reader unfamiliar with Yiddish will hardly sense its presence. Here is a monumental sentence from, again, Augie March. Bellow is describing that Armenian supermaven, Mintouchian: “He had legs on him like that statue of Clemenceau on the Champs Elysées where Clemenceau is striding against a wind and is thinking of bread and war, and the misery and grandeur, going on with last strength in his longjohns and gaiters.” The slangy “he had legs on him” and the “a” in “against a wind” surely come from Yiddish. How perfect the “the” before “misery,” also a Yiddishism! Add or subtract a “the” from the string of nouns (bread, war, misery, grandeur) and the rhythm of the sentence would collapse. “Erratic is nothing,” says Mintouchian to Augie: just behind these words lurks the Yiddish iz gornisht. Bellow did with Yiddish what Ellison did with African American English: he let it inflect his writing subtly, pervasively. To call Bellow a great stylist is the kiss-off of death, too faint a compliment. Instead, style tells who he is, and, in his books, who everybody is.
Bellow himself was a man of style, well put together in dress and speech and gleaming with wit. Thankfully, though, he stayed rough, not polished; he was tousled both emotionally and intellectually. “He reminded many people of their incompleteness, perhaps because he knew of his own,” writes Edward Rothstein, who was one of Bellow’s students at Chicago, in a New York Times article: “There was a rawness to him, almost like a wound, underneath the genteel polish and fiendish wit. His feathered fedora and striped shirts, his elegant manners and silken voice were enameled surfaces, under which he was, like his characters, at sea, the imposing intellect unable to ever lay down any reliable anchor—and not for want of trying, not for want of greatness.”
The man or woman of style aims at a never possible completeness. But style conceals, too: beneath it are the raw, unhealed emotions that Bellow knew well. Bellow in his work and life went for incomplete people, because he knew he was one of them.
BELLOW’S INTIMATELY FAST-PACED, thought-ruffled, and emotionally cadenced prose style from Augie March on was his way of getting close to the culture of the Jewish America he knew, talk-addled as it was and intoxicated with words. “At a most susceptible time of my life I was wholly Jewish,” Bellow once told an interviewer. “That’s a gift, a piece of good fortune with which one does not quarrel.” He meant his childhood in Montreal and, later, Chicago: the cramped, dingy heder; the march through aleph-beys and Torah; the treasures of his native language, Yiddish; and the range of Jewish personalities that populate his work. In a late-in-life interview with Norman Manea, the Romanian writer, Bellow remembered that when he was a small boy in Montreal “I went across the street to Shikka Stein,” the melamed who instructed the boys, “and he taught me my Alef-Beis and then we began to read Breishis [Genesis] and then we began to read Rashi and it was wonderful. . . . I was four years old and my head was in a spin. I would come out of Shikka Stein’s apartment and sit on the curb and think it all over in front of my house.” In his eighties Bellow was still thinking it over: he told Manea that every day he read in Hebrew a bit of Genesis or Exodus or the books of Samuel.
Near the end of his life, then, Bellow returned to reading the Hebrew scriptures he had first seen at age four. The older he got, the more he liked to speak Yiddish, the language his parents used with him. Jews, Bellow suggested, seem to know something that many other Americans don’t: you can’t really make yourself over, and so you remain bound to your earliest attachments. Bellow honors this first Jewish knowledge, with its undodgeable family ties, in his fine short story “The Old System.”
Bellow’s Jews stood in contrast to the much more anxious and constricted ones so artfully described by Bernard Malamud, just a year older and from a similar hardworking family. Bellow also differed from the shrewdly conniving fable-maker Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose story “Gimpel the Fool” Bellow translated in 1952, introducing Singer’s work to an English-speaking audience. Bellow improvised his lively translation of “Gimpel” in a few hours while Eliezer Greenberg read the story aloud in Yiddish. Bellow translated off the cuff and Irving Howe watched, he said, “in a state of high excitement” (“It was a feat of virtuosity, and we drank a schnapps to celebrate,” Howe added). But the hard edge of Singer’s story was foreign to Bellow, who trusted human desire in a way that Singer, who lived in a world ruled by demons of perversity and frustration, refused to do.
Bellow’s translation of “Gimpel” is a marvel: a few times he sounds more Yiddish than the original. Take Singer’s sentence Az Got git pleytzes muz men shlepn dem pak (“since God gives shoulders, you have to carry the pack”), which Bellow turns into this: “Shoulders are from God, and burdens too.” Singer resented Bellow for never translating another of his stories, and the relationship between the two writers did not flourish. Bellow later described himself as a collector of anecdotes about Singer’s abundant bad behavior.
The much younger Philip Roth was both closer to and further away from Bellow than any other Jewish novelist. Bellow strongly defended Roth’s controversial Goodbye, Columbus in a 1959 Commentary review, but combined his praise with a warning against wry sophistication. “Sometimes he twinkles too much,” Bellow wrote about Roth. Bellow sensed that Roth was out to make a statement about the material abundance of Jewish life in America. “Nothing like it has ever hit the world,” Bellow acknowledges, but it’s clear that he himself has no interest in sociological description—he doesn’t care what’s in the Patimkins’ refrigerator. Roth, who will be so taken up with the argument between the demands of artistic vocation and fleshly desire, differs enormously from Bellow. Both were conscious of the artistic qualities that separated them. Roth’s portrait of Bellow as the distinguished showman-like Jewish writer Felix Abravanel in The Ghost Writer, written in 1979, makes Bellow look like a lightweight next to his Malamud figure, Lonoff, the idolized central character of Roth’s novel and a saintly though crotchety expert in self-denial.
Bellow was deeply stung by the way Roth turned him into Abravanel, a proud dandy in a finely tailored suit whose “charm was like a moat so oceanic that you could not even see the great turreted and buttressed thing it had been dug to protect.” Abravanel is aloof, defensive, supremely guarded, and, Roth’s narrator remembers, he “seemed to prefer to look down at us from a long way off, like a llama or a camel.” Interestingly, Roth makes Abravanel a tall man, unlike the bantam-size Bellow. Roth himself is tall, and there is a bit of Abravanel in him, too—Roth has his own charm moat. But Roth was no doubt also alluding to the fact that so many of Bellow’s heroes are men of great height, even the ones clearly based on Bellow himself: Herzog, Citrine.
“I loved the depiction of Saul as Abravanel,” Bellow’s son Adam told me, but Bellow himself was offended. Roth and Bellow eventually patched up their friendship, but the damage had been done. Bellow’s sense of injury reverberated for some time: “What hath Roth got?” Bellow once asked on The Dick Cavett Show. Roth dedicated his book Reading Myself and Others to Bellow, but in it he expressed reservations about Bellow’s novels. Late in their lives, Roth and Bellow largely resolved their differences, and Roth was a frequent visitor to Bellow’s home in Vermont.
In his Nobel lecture in 1976, Bellow lamented the avalanche of high ideas that buried writers in the twentieth century. Such ideas, he said, had become nothing better than received opinions, preventing us from seeing what we really are, which is, as Bellow never tired of asserting, the one true task of the novelist. Bellow declared in his Nobel lecture that
essay after essay, book after book, confirms the most serious thoughts—Baudelairean, Nietzschean, Marxian, psychoanalytic, et cetera, et cetera . . . maintaining all the usual things about mass society, dehumanization and the rest. How poorly they represent us. The pictures they offer no more resemble us than we resemble the reconstructed reptiles and other monsters in a museum of paleontology. We are much more limber, versatile, better articulated, there is much more to us—we all feel it.
Bellow in his long life of writing did the most he could to confirm our feeling that there is much more to us than our Horatios, the men and women who swear by ideas, can ever show. “The essence of our real condition,” he announced in Stockholm, “the complexity, the confusion, the real pain of it, is shown to us in glimpses, in what Proust and Tolstoy thought of as ‘true impressions.’ ”
Novelists can glean such impressions only if they stop thinking of people from a distance. Bellow calls on writers to reject the revolution led by Flaubert, which elevated the artist-creator above the world he set out to depict. Instead, novelists must remain true to the origin of all novels: the people they know, the real-life characters who get turned into fiction.
Bellow well knew that such truth-bound realism often enough requires the writer to betray real people in order to remake them, so they can join a fictional world that resembles as nearly as possible the one we know. As much as Proust or Tolstoy, Bellow was a student of betrayal in his work, and he himself betrayed wives and friends. But he was also loyal to who they were, determined to see them totally, to know them and make them live in his work. Herzog’s Madeleine was not Bellow’s ex-wife Sondra Tschacbasov, as Tschacbasov herself declared: the fictional Madeleine was pure in her rage, a work of tempestuous art, never doubtful or wavering like the actual Sondra. Nor was Bellow himself Herzog. But we are right to be confused about this question of life and art in Bellow, since the confusion is so rewarding. The tangled lines that run between lived experience and the novelist’s reworking of life are unusually rich and dense and telling in Bellow. The more we return to Bellow’s actual people, the more we learn about the characters they became—and usually, stunningly, the reverse is true too. Can anyone who knew Allan Bloom remember him without also remembering Bellow’s Ravelstein? Delmore Schwartz is now, at least in large part, Von Humboldt Fleisher.
Bellow took liberties in his writing. Anger, not just affection, washes across his refashioning of lived fact into fictions. He was constantly involved, compromised; his quest was always a personal one. In this way he stayed true to what he saw as the novelist’s highest purpose: to make the people he had known and loved even more real, and more lasting.