A Chicagoan, born & bred.

Bellow
A Biography
James Atlas
Random House, $35, 686 pp.

James Atlas's long-awaited biography of Saul Bellow has been more than a decade in the making. Although ambitiously conceived, Bellow deals more satisfactorily with the author's life than with his art. Indeed, it contains more than most readers will want to know about Bellow's many wives and girlfriends. There is also much new information about Bellow's close male friendships, which have been just as fraught as his relations with women, and about the nuts and bolts of his literary career.

Atlas's emphasis on the material and matrimonial side of Bellow's life has disposed some reviewers to protest: What about the striving of Bellow's characters, and of their creator, toward a higher spiritual condition? Why has Atlas not illuminated the development of the "firm metaphysical intelligence" that these reviewers claim to be Bellow's defining literary talent? The critics have had one common theme: What they see as Atlas's materialism and reductionism is the wrong way to go at Bellow. The only right kind of biography for so great a novelist must be a biography of his imagination.

But a book about the development of Bellow's worldview and spiritual strivings would most likely have been a muddle because Bellow has been neither a clear thinker nor a prophetic visionary. That is not to say that he did not ascribe to himself a profound philosophic-religious consciousness. One incident adduced by Atlas is revelatory in this regard. In the years when Bellow was writing Henderson the Rain King (1959), he experienced a new creative power that inspired moments of ecstatic confidence. To the novelist Herb Gold, he burst out on one occasion: "Pretty soon I'll be unassailable, and I can write philosophy like Tolstoy."

That was a wrong call. Atlas observes that, for all Bellow's gifts as an artist, he has not been notable for his self-knowledge. His special vocation as a novelist could not have been more unlike that of Tolstoy, who could "write philosophy," as another philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, showed in his great essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox." That Bellow believed people might be acquiring a similar kind of wisdom from his novels suggests a misguided self-conception. More frequently his readers were grateful to Bellow because the confusion of his characters legitimated their own.

Certainly Bellow has looked to ideas to orient his life and structure his fiction. The problem is that most of the ideas he has promoted have not been very good ones. For instance, in the novelist's early phase there was Wilhelm Reich with his theories about the armored body and the need to liberate "orgastic" energy. Later, notably in Humboldt's Gift, Bellow offered himself as a spokesman for anthroposophy, Rudolph Steiner's early, Central-European forerunner of Scientology.

Bellow's New York contemporaries, like the literary critics Philip Rahv and Irving Howe, tended to exaggerate his intellectual power. That's understandable. There have been so few American novelists with anything like European writers' interest in general ideas that the New York intellectuals were gratified by what they greeted as the creative fulfillment of their own and their generation's experience. Bellow seemed to speak for them as children of immigrants, victims of the Depression, and perhaps above all as once-radical intellectuals who had been deprived during the cold-war years of a public existence. In Herzog the anguish of the eponymous hero was the anguish of a whole intellectual generation for whom the discrediting of left-wing politics had meant having to find their fulfillment in domestic life. What had ensued for many of them was a riot of sexual affairs and messy divorces that had nothing like the dignity of 1930s debates in the agora (namely, Broadway cafeterias) about the fate of capitalism.

Herzog reveals in what limited sense Bellow has been a novelist of ideas. It is about the cuckolding and subsequent psychological breakdown of a historian of ideas--it was the first novel of Bellow's in which the hero was by profession a thinker. Herzog removes himself from society in order to recover, and he writes letter after letter to contemporary political leaders and thinkers and others who inspire his skeptical comments and questions. The letters are brilliant, and the novel is wonderfully funny in dramatizing the comedy of the emotionally distraught, unmoored intellectual drowning in a sea of ideas. Herzog's is the comic pathos of the intellectual rendered ineffectual: he has no audience, and his letters go unsent. To be sure, Bellow's antiheroes live in a world of ideas, but compared, say, to Thomas Mann or James Joyce, Bellow himself seems a kibitzer.

Atlas also helps us see how much Bellow has always been dependent for the ideas in his fiction on a succession of mentors--usually big-brother types. As Saul had been the youngest and dreamiest of the men in his immediate family, so has he all through his life been the naive, often the faux naive, outsider/beginner. At times he has appeared very dependent on others, and at other times fiercely protective of his independence. Ambivalence seems a constant in his character. Augie March insists he is not "a candidate for adoption" in the 1953 novel named after him, but he would not be insisting so much on his freedom if he did not always feel tempted to surrender it.

One thinks of the gurus in Bellow's life, among them the University of Chicago sociologist Edward Shils; the art critic Harold Rosenberg, whom Bellow memorializes in his novella "What Kind of Day Did You Have?"; and Allen Bloom, with whom Bellow co-taught in the Committee on Social Thought up to the time of Bloom's death. Ravelstein, Bellow's memorial to Bloom, appeared in 2000, in the novelist's eighty-fifth year. It is much the best work of fiction he had written in a long time, but it is a brilliant study in character, not a philosophical novel or a visionary work. Bellow has had his own kind of greatness, but it has not been like that of William Blake or D. H. Lawrence. On the contrary, the appearance of big ideas or intimations of visionary experience in a Bellow novel is often the sign of a lapse of literary imagination and its displacement by the pedagogic will. This is where we can see the aptness of Atlas's concern with the material conditions of Bellow's life.

In Chicago, which is Atlas's hometown as well as Bellow's, spirit has always had to struggle against the grit, even the sewage, of materiality. To present Bellow's life in its gritty detail is not to be reductive. It is to show the way things have been, to show what Bellow's creative imagination has had to wrestle with. Few great cities can have been as indifferent to the effort of mind and imagination as Chicago. Atlas's entertaining, well-paced, original account of the fate of the serious artist amid the welter of mid-twentieth-century history shows precisely the way to render Saul Bellow's American life.

Mark Krupnick teaches literature at The Divinity School, University of Chicago.