Saul Bellow was the first American master of wallowing.CORBIS/Reuters
When Herzog came out in 1964, the poet John Berryman sent Saul Bellow, his friend, a note: "Nobody has ever sat down & wallowed to this extent in his own life, with full art," he wrote, and then added, "I mean novelists." As if to say: poets, sure, we do it all the time, we're the wallow kings, but you prose men are all about action, gun play, choreographed redemption. Until Herzog. For Berryman, Bellow was the first American novelist to roll in his own grievances and humiliations, the muck of his life and make it art. Like the Russians, who knew from grievance and humiliation. Readers can decide if Berryman's right about the art, but the muck is there for all to see: heartbreak, one divorce after another, petty jealousies, academic dustups, betrayals, rivalries and the chronic grumpiness of the disappointed egomaniac, or at least of the man who flirts with his own high opinion of himself. For some it's too much: who cares if Saul Bellow had another bad day. For others, though, the novels feel real. That's because they are. Names and hairstyles change but The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog and Humboldt's Gift are all drawn from Saul Bellow's life, with a crucial qualifier: as Bellow said, facts are just facts until they are electrified by the current of imagination, at which point magic happens. But the facts matter.
They matter to Zachary Leader, whose biography The Life of Saul Bellow is more than 800 pages (including endnotes) of the facts, the minor and major muck, which takes us from the writer's birth in Lachine, Que., in 1915 to the publication of Herzog in 1964, so until the next volume we're more than halfway there. Bellow once told the novelist William Kennedy that the writer's job is to be prodigal: pile it on. Leader has taken the advice. The book is not short on detail. After the family's move to Chicago, young Bellow "spent two years at Lafayette Elementary School, entering in the third grade … Then he transferred for a year to the Columbus School, presumably because of the family's move to the first of two apartments on Cortez Avenue, one street north of Augusta. This apartment, at 2226 Cortez, was on the ground floor of a three-flat just east of Oakley Boulevard." One waits for signs of the genius to emerge. Bellow was bad at baseball. Will this prove important to the first draft of Henderson The Rain King? The thing is, as Leader shows quite cleverly, you can't be sure it won't. From trivia, the novels grew.
Leader's book works best when he lines up the fact and the fiction side by side, to see how well they match. We learn about Bellow's friend Jack Ludwig, a Winnipeg writer who insinuates himself into the New York scene in the fifties. They trade ideas on the state of American fiction and on the states of their marriages. Things are not going well with Saul and his second wife Sondra (also called Sasha). Sasha and Jack become friends. She confides in him. They have an affair, Sasha leaves Saul, and at once the whole tale becomes familiar: it's Herzog. In the book, Moses Herzog (born in Canada) is on the edge of a breakdown, he writes angry letters in his head that he never sends, to friends, family and eventually to Martin Heidegger and the President of the United States. The subjects: humiliation and grievance. His wife has left him for his best friend, Valentine Gersbach. Always a fan of the particulars, Bellow gives Gersbach a wooden leg. Moses watches him walk, "bending and straightening gracefully like a gondolier." Is it a symbol? A gimmick for pathos? Maybe, until Leader tells us that Jack Ludwig, the not-so-veiled model for Gersbach, also walked with a limp. These a-ha moments in the biography, and they pile up, are not meant to simplify the art but rather to deepen it: they fit the real with the work, to show not just how Bellow electrified facts with the current of the imagination, but how he saw fiction as a second chance. "[T]he novel of the twentieth century," Bellow said, in discussing D.H. Lawrence, "becomes more personal – the writer trying to solve in his book the problems he is trying to solve in his life."
The Life of Saul Bellow is the life of a skilled wallower: Bellow held grudges, treated people (especially wives and other women) badly and vice versa. This was his raw material. Other wallow-ists followed: Thomas Bernhard in Austria, Philip Roth, certainly David Foster Wallace and most recently, Karl Ove Knausgaard, who's rolled in enough of his own muck for six volumes of My Struggle. But as Berryman said, and as Zachary Leader goes to some length to demonstrate, Saul Bellow was the first American master of the brood.
Tom Jokinen is a writer and radio producer in Ottawa.