Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

"The ideal biographer would be a fine artisan." So remarked Saul Bellow in a 1994 interview, when asked, as he approached eighty, how he would want his life story as America's foremost living novelist to be transcribed and assessed. Bellow added a cautionary note: "I think that living biographies are a mistake."¹ Thanks to Zachary Leader's superb and surely definitive two-volume The Life of Saul Bellow, which together comes in at over 1,500 pages of richly detailed biographical narrative, shrewd literary criticism, and authoritative cultural analysis chronicling Bellow's long career in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we learn that Bellow was speaking from annoyed and characteristically anxious personal experience. At the time Bellow was worrying about James Atlas's biography-in-progress, which Bellow ultimately deemed—also characteristically—an act of betrayal; indeed, he anticipated the publication of Atlas's Bellow: A Biography (Modern Library, 2000) with shame and dread.

Leader recuperates in fascinating detail Atlas's own psychologically charged relation to his subject. It turns out that he was not alone in fixating on Bellow. Well before Bellow achieved tremendous "fame and fortune" after the publication of the best-selling novel Herzog (1964)—the career-transforming event where Leader ends the first volume of the biography—Bellow had always attracted readers who identified with his obsessive first-person narrators, alert, intent "noticers" of the human quirks and "kinks" jutting out from the behavioral landscape. ("Taking note is part of my job description," explains Bellow's stand-in Chick, the narrator of Bellow's final novel, Ravelstein [2000].) "I've got my hands full with major lunatics" (316), he reported to one such overactive admirer at [End Page 307] the height of his post-Nobel Prize (1976) fame. Moved by the antic edges of humanity on display all around him, Bellow organized his letter files with categories variously labeled "abuse," "unstable correspondents," "problem mail," or, simply, "nuts" (316). (Most famously, the African American writer and Times editorial page editor Brent Staples followed Bellow around his toney Chicago neighborhood in the 1970s and then in his memoir Parallel Time wrote about his own curious habit of stalking, much to Bellow's chagrin.)

For Leader, even a previous biographer's relation, however vexed, to his "living" subject deepens our understanding of what Leader calls Bellow's habitual "intensity," along with "his capacity to instill fear" (158). Looking back after Bellow's death in 2005, Atlas, who passed away in 2019, sensed that his fraught relation to his literary hero (including projections of Bellow as a surrogate father figure) ultimately had, in Leader's assessment, "a deforming effect." "Somehow knowing him," Atlas came to realize in Leader's view, "was proving a hindrance to understanding him" (605). "To write a biography of Saul Bellow," Atlas recognized, "would be, in a sense, to write my own autobiography, a generation removed" (401).

No such deforming psychodramas hinder Leader from getting to the core of his complex subject. Indeed, Leader's great advantage in conjuring the figure of Bellow in The Life of Saul Bellow is that he did not know Bellow personally (except for a brief encounter while a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1970s). In this respect, Leader is Bellow's "ideal biographer," "a fine artisan," artfully weaving materials from the Bellow archives (letters, memoirs, fiction manuscripts recently made available at the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago); incorporating interviews with scores of Bellow's friends, family, and ex-girlfriends; and drawing on journals kept by Bellow's fifth wife, Janis Freedman, recounting Bellow's final years teaching at Boston University and his struggle to keep writing in their beloved West Brattleboro home, what Bellow called "the good place."

Leader's comprehensive knowledge of Bellow's life is thus on display on every page. Among the tonic subjects/themes that shape Bellow's [End Page 308] career: Bellow's notorious prickliness ("Bellow was rarely...