Chicago Dostoyevsky.(Review)

Saul Bellow, our most intellectual writer, mainlined the European novel of ideas into the veins of American literature and infused it with a high-octane style. His prose is exuberant, energetic, torrential; his voice intimate, learned, and allusive. His characteristic hero, a flawed, high-spirited highbrow, is--as he wrote in More Die of Heartbreak--" a genuinely superior individual, susceptible of course to human weakness and unable to manage his sexual needs ... his love longings."

James Atlas--who convincingly argues that "to read his books in consecutive order is to follow the contours of his biography"--has done exhaustive research, uncovering, for example, a well disguised description of Bellow in Heinz Kohut's psychoanalytic case studies. He has mastered the sprawling material, and written an intelligent and perceptive, lively and absorbing narrative.(1) There are remarkably few errors, though some minor mistakes have sneaked into the text: Jimenez and Cadiz have accents; Tri-Quarterly and The Nigger [sorry!] of the "Narcissus" are mis-punctuated; socks don't have tassels; and the quote on Mozart is by Alfred, not Albert, Einstein. Nathanael West was not going to a funeral (except his own) when he fatally crashed his car near the Mexican border; Richard Poirier is Catholic, not Jewish; Robert Hatch was literary editor of The Nation, not editor of The New Republic; George Walden, PPS to the British Secretary of State for Education and Science, was not "minister of higher education." Atlas frequently misuses the word "comfortable" and he misses Bellows allusions to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, to Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, to the artist Christo, and to Jack Warner's "writers are schmucks with typewriters."

There are several confusing contradictions in the book. Was Bellow unsure of himself "when he ventured into the realm of ideas" or did his great erudition allow a "mastery of ideas"? Was the compulsive womanizer an indifferent sexual performer who "didn't know a clitoris from a kneecap" or satisfyingly "passionate and virile"? Was his second wife resentful in her role as Mrs. Bellow or did she "love being Mrs. Saul Bellow" and "aspire to have a salon"? Was his girlfriend Maggie Staats a "gorgeous blonde" or "not beautiful"? Is his young fifth wife, Janis Freedman (Bellow is much older than his current mother-in-law), attractive or "willfully plain"? And though Atlas is often commendably thorough, I would have liked to know much more about Bellow's enforced exile with Arthur Miller while they both waited out their divorces in the remote Nevada desert.

Atlas's book is marred by two flaws Like Kingsley Amis and V. S. Naipaul, Bellow delights in bellicose remarks--exhibitionistic, outrageous, provocative. He said of a well-endowed black woman at the U.N.: "It was her country that was undeveloped, not herself" which Atlas quotes with humorless, archly correct, and solemn disapproval. Bellow's notorious but hilarious challenge--inspired by Wyndham Lewis's Paleface--"Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?" dared to ask a question that no one has ever answered.

This query cuts to the heart of his late political beliefs, to his distress about the irreparable damage done to higher education by the radicals of the 1960s:

 
   In the women's movement, the Black Power movement, the student uprisings on 
   campuses across the country, he saw an insurrection against all the things 
   he valued. His whole identity as an intellectual, a representative of the 
   high culture that had celebrated his own work ... was suddenly under 
   violent attack. 

"You don't found universities in order to destroy culture" Bellow asserted. "For that you want a Nazi party." With a keen eye for intellectual phoniness and pretense, he blackballed LeRoi Jones, Edward Said, and Susan Sontag for MacArthur Fellowships.