BOOK REVIEW: ‘Bellow’s People: How Saul Bellow Made Life into Art’

OPINION:

BELLOW’S PEOPLE: HOW SAUL BELLOW MADE LIFE INTO ART

By David Mikics

W.W. Norton, $26.95 269 pages

If writers of fiction use the people in their lives as well as themselves in their work, it is a fair statement that Saul Bellow did so not only more intensively but also in the full glare of the spotlight. To say this takes nothing away from the innate quality of his fictive output: Everything he wrote can be read on its own terms without reference to autobiographical or other external sources. Even by those critics trained in the New Criticism which sternly limited exegesis only to what was in the text. I have always been grateful that initially I was taught to use it at Yale, where it had flourished but was by then losing its dominance. It was good discipline and is a bit like learning to drive on a stick shift: you never know when you’ll need to do it.

The title and subtitle that David Mikics, Moores Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Houston, has given his book tells us right away that we are very far from New Critical strictures here. And it is confirmed in his text: “This book is called “Bellow’s People” because it describes some of the pungent, unforgettable personalities that Bellow knew and transformed in his books — his friends, family, wives, sworn enemies . Many more characters from Bellow’s life appear in these pages. These men and women impelled him to become the writer he was.”

Impelled? This word in itself served as an early warning that I was going to be skeptical of Mr. Mikics’ methodology in his lively, well-informed, excellently researched book. Is it really fair to a writer who, at his best, was one of the giants of American literature? Were Bellow’s people actually catalysts or rather useful tools in a much grander artistic enterprise?

Mr. Mikics is sensitively attuned to Bellow the man and to the literature he produced. His judgments are sound and his insights often accurate and intuitive. His research is well-grounded in the appropriate secondary sources, salted with some interesting, revealing and amusing primary sources, including interviews with Bellow’s sons. If you want to view Bellow’s novels and short stories through the prism of his friends, lovers, wives — most eventually deserving of the prefix ex — then this is a fine, reliable guide.

But to do so, I think, is not only putting the cart before the horse, as would be the case with reading the biographies which give us all this raw material in even greater detail before reading Bellow’s fiction. It is, to put it baldly, the wrong way to read both the high points of the writer’s achievement and his lesser efforts. That old saw from “Hamlet,” “the play’s the thing” applies yet once again. Yes, all those failed marriages and betrayals rise from the level of piquant gossip and prurient fodder precisely because they fueled great art. Yet, isn’t it perverse to concentrate on all these pinpricks and even wounds that never healed rather than on the pearls which all these bits of grit produced through Bellow’s preternatural talent for such feats?

I agree with Mr. Mikics when he writes that “The tangled lines than run between lived experience and the novelist’s reworking of life are unusually rich and dense and telling in Bellow.” But there are few passages more illustrative of where Mr. Mikics and I part ways in how to read Bellow than the sentences that follow: “The more we return to Bellow’s actual people, the more we learn about the characters they become — and usually, stunningly, the reverse is true too. Can anyone who knew Allan Bloom remember him without also remembering Bellow’s Ravelstein? Delmore Schwartz is now, at least in large part, Von Humboldt Fleisher?”

To read so reductively diminishes Bloom and Schwartz certainly, but even more Ravelstein and Fleisher, who have far outsoared their roots. Bellow’s achievement is what he was able to make of the raw material he picked, something transcendent: complex, complicated people who may be based on real folk but are brilliant realized fictional characters in and of themselves alone.

In his great elegy “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” W.H. Auden wrote “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” That is a great insight, although a partial one, for, like Bellow, Yeats was also stung into writing much of his greatest work by the love, eventually turned to all manner of less amiable emotions, of women. But, in the final analysis, it is Yeats’ poetry, not the madness, political and personal, that is paramount — and enduring. For both writers, their work is their true legacy, not their muse/nemeses and pain-filled lives.

• Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, Calif.