Tenacity is an admirable trait in anyone, particularly an athlete or explorer, but not the first quality that one looks for in a biography, where insight, cohesion, clarity of thought, sensitivity, astute social history and the all-saving grace of humour are vital. Sadly, Zachary Leader has brought a deluge of research (much of it already known), extraneous detail, quotes, digressions, petty score-settling with a previous biographer and diligent righteousness to his overblown raid on the life of the great American writer Saul Bellow. At more than 800 pages it is curiously diffident and feels akin to climbing a very steep mountain which is minus a view. This is not Bellow’s fault; the finest moments are provided by Bellow’s prose, which so often resonates with the glorious bombast of a Beethoven symphony.
Somehow Leader has assembled a stream-of-consciousness narrative that reads like a lecture that lasts several days, and all delivered in a listless monotone through a drab prose style that hinges on “according to’’ and “as so and so reports”.
Most of the unpleasantness is usually attributed to a remark made in an interview by James Atlas, who published a single-volume biography in 2000. When Atlas refers to Bellow writing a note to a woman in the practised tone of a married man ending an affair, Leader counters with: “It might also have been simply sincere.”
The signs were wrong. Leader’s agent suggested he write a biography, and this may explain the lack of passion. Bellow is the mid-20th-century literary giant who reinvented the American language. Narrative structure was never his concern. Bellow, a formidable intellectual, wrote to explain human experience as well as the Jewish assimilation into American culture. He fashioned sentences that make reading a physical act; humour, pathos, confusion and regret are his themes. “On warm days I went up to the roof and had a look at the city,” recalls Augie March, Bellow’s Huck Finn. “Around was Chicago. In its repetition it exhausted your imagination of details and units, more units than the cells of the brain and bricks of Babel.”
Irritating coincidence
Even more painful is the fact that this huge book brings Bellow only to the age of 49 and the publication, in 1964, of Herzog, his masterful self-satire. By an irritating coincidence Leader leaves the philandering Bellow shaken by the discovery that his second wife had betrayed him with his best friend. These things happen, even to brilliant writers, even to men who sleep around and then shrug charmingly.
Bellow did that a great deal; Leader repeatedly announces that Bellow was handsome, irresistible to women, charismatic, petulant, vulnerable and driven. The restless man who emerges from this forensic march through every available scrap of archival matter remains elusive; he sought sex and approval and set little store on love. Bellow was many things, but he was never complacent. Most of all he wanted his books to be read. Language was his music; he was reading the Bible in Hebrew at four, spoke Yiddish with his parents, heard them speaking Russian; and he spoke English in the streets – all the while shaping a vibrant, rhythmic American language.
There are ways of getting through this book, most of them supplied by Bellow's comments or quotes from his fiction: "I have always had a weakness for footnotes," confides Chick, the narrator of Ravelstein, Bellow's final novel about his friend Allan Bloom, the critic. "For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text." For all 116 pages of Leader's footnotes there is no redemption.
It is such a dull book. I love Bellow’s work, and once intercepted a note being sent home to my mother advising that Bellow was unsuitable reading for a schoolgirl. Leader makes a virtue out of his having met Bellow at a garden party in 1972, at Harvard, and, having listened to him, makes a point of reporting: “I remember nothing of what he said.”
I also once met Bellow. It was 17 years later. Bellow was old and seemed weary. But I was lucky; he had advised taking a cab, as the university was bordered on three sides by a tough ghetto. Naturally I disobeyed and came by bus. This impressed him. He laughed his big, loud laugh and asked: “What kind of stuff do you like to read?” The 19th-century Russians, I answered, adding Dickens and Austen. Bellow smirked engagingly and was off, a wonderful talker, funny and sorrowful about his life, claiming never to have figured out women – and he made me hot chocolate that was as thick as cake mix. “Books, good books, always deliver,” he said. “People don’t.”
Leader follows Bellow’s family from the old world to the new, to where he was born in Montreal and then on to Chicago. The problem is that Atlas got there first in a much-criticised study in 2000 that reads pretty much as a hit and run, yet its harsh candour convinces. However much Bellow hated the book, he remained on speaking terms with Atlas, a Chicago Jew who knew the Bellow terrain and writes well.
Leader, who is also American yet has spent most of his life in Britain, does not look to Bellow’s US and ignores the rich street life that so inspired Bellow. He is far too busy repeating snippets of conversations and providing details about people other than Bellow. Unlike Atlas, Leader has the entire life to examine. Bellow died on April 5th, 2005, weeks before his 90th birthday. His life was long; his beloved mother died before he became famous. He went to interview Trotsky in Mexico only to arrive just after the exiled Russian had been murdered; he almost got to fight in the second World War. He had five wives, three sons and a daughter young enough to be their grandchild, let alone his.
Unpublished
So Leader has the whole story with which to work, all the writing, published and unpublished, and the letters – published in 2010 – which are revealing. Another source that he has had access to is an unpublished memoir by Sasha, Bellow's erring second wife, immortalised as Madeleine in Herzog.
Nowhere in his tedious 812-page opus does Leader convey true insight, whereas Sasha expresses multitudes in a few sentences: "Saul was . . . more of a solitary personality . . . There was always a kind of distance, he always looked at the world sideways. His head was always [slightly] turned away from you . . . He literally did not turn his head straight on . . . Like a bird, very bright, observant . . . Going to take something and use it." Leader also draws on Saul Bellow's Heart (2013), by Bellow's eldest son, Greg, a loving yet bitter account of his self-absorbed father.
Atlas and Greg Bellow wrote tough books, leaving it obvious that Bellow was no saint. Yet their Bellow is far more real; Leader the indefatigable researcher is either detached or intimidated and consistently looks to novels, resulting in a chaotic methodology that seems to suggest, If in doubt, quote.
Bellow’s prose is the best thing in the book. The prospect of a further volume from Leader is unexciting; his achievement here may be to encourage a reassessment of the Atlas biography. Best of all, though, read Bellow. Hear the artist in the fiction.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
