VivaSync

The later years, from 1965 to 2005, of an irreverent philanderer, whose rich, phrase-making novels remained thinly veiled versions of his personal life

When the first volume of Zachary Leader’s monumental biography of Saul Bellow appeared in 2015, many who loved Bellow’s fiction for its humanity as well as its verbal fireworks were dismayed. What a catalogue of betrayals and revenges! All the worse because Leader wrote as an evident admirer of Bellow’s work and had done his best to explain the novelist’s actions. His endless sexual infidelities were one thing, his use of everyone he knew – especially anyone who had crossed him – as fiction fodder was quite another.

Things do not get nobler in the second volume, which is as minutely researched and clear-eyed as Leader’s first. It begins with the publication of Herzog, at the end of 1964. The novel had been made out of the collapse of his second marriage to Sasha, who had been having an affair with his friend and academic colleague, Jack Ludwig. Bellow, the incorrigible philanderer, was appalled. In fiction, Sasha became the deadly Madeleine: a monster, though an undeniably vivid monster. Ludwig became the brutish Valentine Gersbach, in Dickensian fashion given a wooden leg for extra measure. Bellow became Herzog, the clever fool, the intellectual chump, the victim.

Herzog made Bellow famous as he turned 50. It was an immediate bestseller, enabling lucrative sales of the paperback rights for some of his backlist. In 1965 his income was $140,000 – well over $1m in today’s money. And it stayed like this through the 1960s. The honorary degrees (Harvard, Yale, NYU) started arriving. Bellow was lionised and stayed lionised. He was married to his third wife, Susan Glassman, with whom he had a son, Daniel. But, of course, he was unfaithful. Readers of the first volume will be prepared not just for the number of Bellow’s liaisons, but for the slight weariness with which Leader passes over many of them.

In one typical paragraph we find out that, in 1968, while finishing Mr Sammler’s Planet, he had one lover in Chicago, his home town, when not visiting another in New York. Simultaneously, he was beginning an affair with the young mother of a child at school with his son, and also having sex with his cleaner. “All my ladies seem furious,” he observed, with what sounds like a kind of delight, to his friend Dave Peltz. Whenever he went off on one of his many lecture trips or visiting fellowships, he looked for a new affair. He specialised in young women with literary enthusiasms: one seduction technique was to read passages from work in progress to the latest object of his attention.

Yet love kept turning to resentment. When Susan began divorce proceedings in 1968, Bellow told the circuit court that his annual income was $30,000. In fact, that year he earned at least five times as much. By the mid-70s, still fighting her in the courts, he was earning even more. In 1976, with the proceeds from Humboldt’s Gift and the Nobel prize, he cleared nearly half a million dollars, before tax. In Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow’s meanness is alchemically transmuted in Charlie Citrine’s ordeal in front of a genial but unsympathetic judge as his ex-wife, Denise, strips him of his assets. This wonderful, verbally rich, humorous novel was also, it has to be said, another act of vengeance.

Leader’s careful account of the long, long fight over the divorce settlement – not finalised until 1981 – also reveals Bellow to be oblivious to the true interests of his son. (He had a son with each of his first three wives and to none of them was he exactly attentive.) Leader does not conceal Bellow’s evident conceitedness. “I am bristling with Lilliputian arrows, they itch horribly.” The great man sees himself assailed by moral pygmies. Yet all his bad legal experiences were creatively energising. His fiction gives us a wonderful array of ghastly lawyers – men like Hansl Genauer, in the story “Him with His Foot in His Mouth”, his eyes “like the eyes you glimpse in the heated purple corners of the small-mammal house”.

Leader finds it rather easier to conjure sympathy for Bellow’s increasing ructions with liberal acquaintances. It began with his distaste and then scorn for the campus activists of the late 60s. He became increasingly spiky in leftish circles. There was a memorable confrontation with Günter Grass at a PEN Congress in New York. As he moved from one lucrative visiting professorship to another, he relished quarrels with bien pensant academics. He never lost what one witness to a dinner party spat called “a sort of electric halo of intelligence … as though you’re near a live wire”. He himself remained a part-time academic into his late 80s, relishing teaching the “great books”, first at the University of Chicago and then at Boston University. Leader deals intelligently with what he calls “Bellow’s willingness to offend”. There was self-regard, but also an understandably irritable desire to challenge what he called “the obstinate stupidities of the educated in intellectual professions”.

Even as the world treated him as a sage (invitations to the White House, à deux tea with Margaret Thatcher, evenings with one Israeli prime minister after another) Bellow remained thin-skinned. He was certainly conscious of his conversational pugnacity, seeing it as an essential part of his American Jewish identity. “You had to train yourself in infighting and counterpunching,” he declared in A Jewish Writer in America, a lecture he gave in his 70s. “Irreverent, prickly, rude”: those were the adjectives such a writer should expect – and, implicitly, glory in.

He calmed down a bit for a decade with his fourth wife, the Romanian-born mathematician Alexandra Tulcea, and idealised her as Minna in The Dean’s December. But this marriage, too, ended in divorce. In his last novel, Ravelstein, Bellow, as was his way, paid his ex-wife back via the character of Vela, a chilly astrophysicist who has treated his protagonist, Chick, so very badly. In 1989, after they had been together three years, he married his fifth wife, Janis Freedman, his former graduate student and secretary, 42 years his junior. Aged 84, after a series of IVF treatments, he fathered a daughter. In his late 80s, Bellow drifted slowly into dementia – slowly enough to gauge what was happening, and reflect ruefully on it. “My heart appears to be in the right place but my mind is only lightly attached.” After a series of minor strokes, he died, aged 89, in 2005.

Very near the end, slipping in and out of consciousness, he asked the question with which Leader began his first volume. “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” He sounds like one of his own characters, mixing the high-minded and the demotic. But then Leader has shown, often disconcertingly, how the fiction was made out of the life. Not just wives, but friends, colleagues and friends-of-friends would catch themselves in the pages of the latest Bellow novel and not often be flattered. Every one of his novels was a roman à clef. Leader is wholly steeped in Bellow’s oeuvre and able to find all the fictional equivalents of the real people who filled his life. Leader does not attempt much critical analysis, but he does include plenty of apt quotation – just as great a skill. You keep stumbling from some ignoble episode on to some of Bellow’s sentences, with their fearless phrase-making and hilarious metaphors. And then, maybe, you forget your dismay.

This article was amended on 21 November to include the reviewer’s name.

The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife 1965-2005 is published by Vintage. To order a copy for £30.80 (RRP £35) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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