The making of a great US novelist

The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortuna, 1915-64 by Zachary Leader (Cape, £35)

I am an American, Chicago-born,” begins Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, whose travails were seen as a “quest for identity”. The hero was of course an alter ego, who knew exactly who he was: originally Solomon Bellows, he was born in Quebec after his father emigrated from St Petersburg, and became an American-Jewish writer (though he detested the label) who after Augie was seen as one of the greatest of his day — something he never denied — and the Nobel Prize was eventually to confirm.

“A very handsome boy, with a thoughtful, analytical and often brooding expression and a somewhat sardonic smile that gave him an air of superiority.” That was how he appeared aged 12, and when I got to know him more than 60 years later he looked much the same, though with more humour in the smile.

A bookish youth in a non-intellectual family — his father tried a number of trades, from baking to bootlegging — he read more widely and deeply at high school than the average student reads at university today: Schopenhauer, Spengler, Kafka, Huysmans.

And Marx. These were the Thirties and the adolescent Bellow’s Trotskyist sympathies were natural: belonging to a dissident minority appealed, and the Trots were the highbrows, the Stalinists political hoodlums who smashed up meetings. Never really at home discussing “surplus value” or the “fetishism of commodities”, like the hero of Dangling Man he didn’t enjoy being a revolutionary (“I hated, but I didn’t enjoy”) and grew out of it faster than many of his fellow intellectuals.

Early works like Dangling Man and The Victim showed that he could write but they didn’t feed him, or pay the alimony when he began his multiple divorces. The long years of university jobs teaching literature in return for low wages and somewhere to live and write are testimony to the depth of his self-belief; a critic was to speak of his “chip of self-confidence”.

There were colourful escapades, such as a trip to Mexico to interview Trotsky (he found him in hospital, with an ice pick in his head) and a spell of Reichian sexual therapy that for a while had him naked in his Orgone box or howling like a wolf to the wind. He could be so witty and beguiling that “even his egocentricity added to his charms”, though Leader is frank about his less attractive sides.

The children of first-generation Jewish immigrants had a tough time with their fathers, which contributed to his prickly nature. Then there was his serial unfaithfulness to serial wives and his treatment of his three boys, whom he both loved and emotionally neglected.

Unlike his most recent biographer, James Atlas, Leader has not, however, taken against his subject, recognising that a man of his origins, ambition and genius was always going to be what someone called a “sensitive racehorse”, and another “a hard dog to keep on the porch”. Foreign travel brought out the defiant American in him. In postwar Paris he found himself striving to prove he was “not a barbarian at best and a pain in the ass at worst”, while in Britain, at a party given by Cyril Connolly where “everyone was drunk or homosexual or both”, he was cut or patronised.

Chicago remained his spiritual home, and the source of many a streetwise character: one of his baseball pals became chief executioner to the mob. He painted from the life so that a high proportion of his family and acquaintances ended up on his pages. Maury, his businessman brother, was a poster-boy for American boosterism.

In discussing the novels, Leader finds himself juggling the originals and their literary depiction in parallel, not least the wives. Women’s voices come across loud and strong, especially Sasha Tschacbasov, successor to Anita Goshkin, his first, so we get the lowdown on his husbandly conduct, some of it pretty low.

Leader is an English professor, and as well as telling a story his book is an education, a literary cornucopia featuring everyone from the critics Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe to John Berryman and Philip Roth. What comes across is what distinguishes Bellow at his American best: the multiplicity of registers, from philosophical musings and delicacy of perception to street-talk and humour.