The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964, by Zachary Leader
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The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964, by Zachary Leader
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For much of his adult life, Saul Bellow was the most acclaimed novelist in America, the winner of, among other awards, the Nobel Prize in Literature, three National Book Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Life of Saul Bellow, by the literary scholar and biographer Zachary Leader, marks the centenary of Bellow’s birth as well as the tenth anniversary of his death. It draws on unprecedented access to Bellow’s papers, including much previously restricted material, as well as interviews with more than 150 of the novelist’s relatives, close friends, colleagues, and lovers, a number of whom have never spoken to researchers before. Through detailed exploration of Bellow’s writings, and the private history that informed them, Leader chronicles a singular life in letters, offering original and nuanced accounts not only of the novelist’s development and rise to eminence, but of his many identities—as writer, polemicist, husband, father, Chicagoan, Jew, American. The biography will be published in two volumes. The first volume, To Fame and Fortune: 1915–1964, traces Bellow’s Russian roots; his birth and early childhood in Quebec; his years in Chicago; his travels in Mexico, Europe, and Israel; the first three of his five marriages; and the novels from Dangling Man and The Adventures of Augie March to the best-selling Herzog. New light is shed on Bellow’s fellow writers, including Ralph Ellison, John Berryman, Lionel Trilling, and Philip Roth, and on his turbulent and influential life away from the desk, which was as full of incident as his fiction. Bellow emerges as a compelling character, and Leader’s powerful accounts of his writings, published and unpublished, forward the case for his being, as the critic James Wood puts it, “the greatest of American prose stylists in the twentieth century.”
The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964, by Zachary Leader - Amazon Sales Rank: #706651 in Books
- Brand: Leader, Zachary
- Published on: 2015-05-05
- Released on: 2015-05-05
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.66" h x 1.63" w x 6.62" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 832 pages
The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964, by Zachary Leader Review “Since Saul Bellow--along with William Faulkner--constitutes the sturdy backbone of 20th century American literature, a biography as lavishly detailed and craftily organized as Mr. Leader's is a necessary addition to the library of major biographies of our strongest writers. Despite Bellow's every effort to find order and serenity in which to do his work, his life, as it is meticulously presented here, was no less wild and original than his novels , a turbulence of crises that might have killed him had they not been magically transfigured by a prose style as rich and roiling as Melville's into one of the liveliest, brainiest collections of vivid American fiction that is ours to treasure.”—Philip Roth“A dazzling piece of work—a tremendous achievement—it draws the reader in wonderfully well, with its almost manic attention to biographical detail, and its inspired interweaving of Bellow's autobiography with his fiction. It's shrewd and scholarly throughout; but also lavish, entertaining and frequently mischievous. Young Bellow himself comes steadily surging through, getting bigger and bigger: clever, ambitious, philandering, mordant, magnificent, dominating and always furiously typing, typing, typing. In a word, this Volume One has all the makings of an American epic. I enjoyed it immensely.”—Richard Holmes “Zachary Leader has written a multi-layered book about a colossal American literary life. His research is prodigious, his curiosity about Saul Bellow’s epic career limitless, and he reinvents biography as a four-dimensional narrative of time, space, perspective, and genre. Leader sets forth Bellow’s life history through his interviews and letters as well as those of his huge extended family, his wives, mistresses, children, friends, enemies, neighbors, colleagues, critics, rivals, teachers, students, agents, editors, and publishers, and through analyses of Bellow’s books and stories about them, and their books and stories about him. On a grand scale, as enthralling as it is masterful, The Life of Saul Bellow is one of the great biographies of our time.”—Elaine Showalter “Richly detailed, Zachary Leader's admiring but clear-eyed chronicle of Saul Bellow's youth, talent, and his struggle for recognition is nuanced, impassioned, and capacious; from him we meet Bellow as if for the first time, as friend, lover, father, husband, American, and Jew-- and of course as the writer who energetically resisted despair and cynicism with his profound commitment to literature and to life. An essential book-- more than a biography, it's the story of American letters in the twentieth century.”—Brenda Wineapple“Zachary Leader has read everything, interviewed everyone, and woven it all together into a biography of Saul Bellow on a grand scale. Staggering in its research, rich with insight into the relationships between his family origins, the lives he pursued, the people he knew, and the books he wrote, this account lays bare the alchemy of Bellow’s imagination and the sources of his literary achievement in profuse and arresting detail.” — Morris Dickstein“This will stand as the definitive account of the making of Saul Bellow, an absorbing story of how a determined young writer emerged as one of the twentieth-century’s most celebrated novelists."—James Shapiro“It is, however, certain that I will not be alone in the expectation that The Life of Saul Bellow will prove definitive. Leader is respectful but unintimidated, balanced but never anodyne, and his literary criticism, like his prose, is unfailingly stylish and acute. The book is very learned,”—Martin Amis, Vanity Fair “Zachary Leader, the latest Bellow biographer, has found plenty… Leader is statesmanlike, fair-minded…He is particularly felicitous in his descriptions of Bellow’s parents and their struggles”—Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic “Unsurpassable. It is a valuable resource, and the prose is clear and poised.” —New York Review of Books“Leader gratifyingly shows how Bellow transformed his personal limitations into liberating art.” —New York Magazine“Will surely become the standard biography of Bellow for years to come.” —Washington Post“The most purely delicious literary biography that I’ve come across. Leader’s calm, gradual, but serenely excited prose vibrates with the joy of his thought coalescing with his subject.” —The New Yorker “Leader does full justice to both life and oeuvre in this chronicle of Bellow’s struggle. . . . Leader’s biography has the vital virtue of ringing true. . . . Leader’s life of Saul Bellow is not merely head and shoulders above its predecessors, but given the depth of his research and judgment and its broad scope, it is hard to imagine it being bettered anytime soon.” —San Francisco Chronicle“A fascinating analysis.” —BBC “A revelation.” —Barnes & Noble Review“Uncommonly good. . . . [Leader] has not only made himself familiar with all of Bellow’s facts. He has also made the vigilant reader welcome to them.” —Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel“Leader’s research here…is astonishing. It is a banquet, a profoundly serious and scholarly examination of an important American writer.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer“Leader’s Life of Saul Bellow is likely to remain the definitive biography. . . . Leader has our gratitude.” —Commentary “Authorized and judicious. . . . Excellent. . . . Leader has clearly done new and prodigious work.” —Jewish Review of Books“Will now stand as the definitive Bellow biography.” —Kirkus (Starred)“An impressive achievement, this biography gives noble due to one of the 20th century’s most significant writers.”—Publishers Weekly (PW Pick)
About the Author
ZACHARY LEADER is professor of English literature at the University of Roehampton in London. An American citizen, he has lived in Britain for more than forty years. In addition to teaching at Roehampton, he has held visiting professorships at Caltech and the University of Chicago. He was educated at Northwestern University; Trinity College, Cambridge; and Harvard University, and is the author of Reading Blake’s Songs, Writer’s Block, Revision and Romantic Authorship, and The Life of Kingsley Amis, a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. He has edited Romantic Period Writings, 1798–1832: An Anthology (with Ian Haywood); The Letters of Kingsley Amis; On Modern British Fiction; Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works (with Michael O’Neill); and The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and Their Contemporaries. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 6 Anita/Dangling The girl’s name was Anita Goshkin and Bellow met her in Hyde Park in the summer of 1936, before the start of his senior year at Northwestern. By the spring of 1937 they were engaged. Anita had been at the University of Chicago only a year, having transferred from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as a junior (shortly after the death of her father, which suggests the move may have been motivated by family or financial considerations). The “grimy” sociology books she carried at their first meeting were for a summer course at the university. She was six months older than Bellow, born on December 12, 1914, and like him lived on the North Side, in Ravenswood, a modest suburb of small courtyard apartment buildings. Bellow told his son Greg that he’d had his eye on Anita for some time, before gathering the courage to speak to her. Her cousin and childhood playmate, Beebee Schenk (later de Regniers), was a friend of Bellow’s, and may have told him to look out for her.1 On their first date, they went swimming in Lake Michigan off the Point, a Hyde Park landmark. In Herzog, Bellow fictionalizes the moment they met. Moses sees Daisy, who will become his first wife, under the El at 51st Street. Pretty and fresh in appearance, with large “slant green” eyes, she wears a simple seersucker dress and small white shoes. Her “golden but lustreless” hair is held in place by a barrette and her legs are bare. Moses sees the square-cut neck of her dress as expressive of character: “stability, symmetry, order, containment were Daisy’s strength.” Her “laundered purity” also strikes him, as does her coolness and regular features, those of “a conventional Jewish woman.” As Moses stands behind her on the El platform, a “fragrance of summer apples” rises from her bare neck and shoulders (pp. 542–43).2 This fragrance is also expressive, for Daisy is a country girl of sorts, raised near Zanesville, Ohio. Anita came from a similar background, in Lafayette, Indiana, not exactly the country, but not Chicago either. Her parents, like Bellow’s, were Russian immigrants. Her father, Morris, arrived from the Crimea after the pogroms of 1905, settling in Lafayette for the same reason the Bellows settled first in Lachine then in Chicago: because he had relatives there. He worked as a milkman, then opened an ice cream parlor. What Greg Bellow remembers hearing of his maternal grandfather is that he was “quiet, kind and gentle.” It was Sonia, Morris’s wife, a forceful, opinionated, modern woman, a suffragette in Russia, who ruled the roost, encouraging her daughters to be independent and insisting that they go to college.3 Like Bellow, Anita was the only member of her family to be born in the New World. A late arrival, she was much doted on. She had two brothers, Jack (also known as J.J.) and Max, seventeen and ten years older, and two sisters, Catherine and Ida, sixteen and fourteen years older. The sisters became librarians, earned higher degrees in library science, traveled in Europe, were lovers of high culture, and never married. When they retired, they moved to New York, living together in an apartment close to Lincoln Center, to be near the ballet. Of the brothers, Jack, the eldest, had an affair in college with a non-Jewish girl. When she got pregnant, he married her. According to Greg, Anita’s mother was so scandalized by these events, “that, basically, she forced Jack to divorce . . . and move back in.” Jack’s son, Jack Jr., was raised out of state by his mother and on rare visits to Lafayette “was kept on the back porch, incommunicado.” When the Goshkins moved to Chicago and the son visited, his father “checked into a hotel.” Anita’s other brother, Max, a machinist, also lived at home, well into his forties. Anita was political at college. When Greg was a student at Chicago, “with great pride” she pointed out to him the spot in the lobby of the Social Sciences building where she had once sold a hundred copies of Soapbox in an hour. She attended political meetings and regularly spoke at them. She went to Gary, Indiana, to organize steelworkers, was arrested, and spent a night in jail, along with Bellow’s friend Oscar Tarcov. Her interest in politics was practical; she had little patience for theoretical or doctrinal dispute. The two-year MA program she entered in March 1937 in Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration involved fieldwork at the Michael Reese Hospital, one of the oldest and largest teaching hospitals in Chicago. There Anita met Bruno Bettelheim, who later remarked to Greg on his mother’s beauty. Anita finished the first year of the course but not the second, which required that she write a dissertation. She could not write, or thought she could not write, a conclusion she’d been led to as an undergraduate. “My father told me he wrote most of her term papers,” Greg recalls. After abandoning her MA in 1939 she got a job at the Chicago Relief Administration giving out welfare checks. By this date she and Bellow had been married over a year.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful. Authoritative biography - but very, very long By Alan A. Elsner The author Saul Bellow loomed over the mid-to late 20th century American literary firmament like a colossus, the winner of three National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and in 1976 the ultimate accolade, the Nobel Prize for Literature. This new biography, covering the first half of his life, is suitably massive weighing in at 650 pages, not including the notes and index.Zachary Leader conclusively shows us that Bellow’s life was also his subject. Characters from his family, his childhood, friends, colleagues and rivals regularly show up in his novels and short stories again and again. His elder brother, Maury, to give one example, appears as Shura in “Herzog,” as Albert in “Something to Remember Me By,” as Simon in “The Adventures of Augie March,” as Philip in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” and as Julius in “Humboldt’s Gift.” There are many other examples. And Bellow was not above using his gift to extract revenge on those he believed had wronged him. Bitterly wounded by the infidelity of his second wife, Sasha, Bellow took revenge on her and her lover through his depictions of them in “Herzog.”Bellow seemed to have sensed early, before he had published a word, that he had a seed of literary greatness within him. But it took some time to emerge. He seems always to have had an acute gift for observation but it was perhaps not until the first, ringing sentences of “The Adventures of Augie March” that the world became aware that a new talent, speaking with a powerful, original and totally fresh voice had emerged.“I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”That voice – insistent, unapologetically both Jewish and American – came from somewhere deep within Bellow. As Leader notes, Bellow seemed at ease with his Jewishness and his Jewishness seemed the source of his ease. His contemporary, the writer and critic Alfred Kazin, wrote of Bellow: “He was proud in a laconic way like an old Jew who feels himself closer to God than anybody else.”In his first published novel, “Dangling Man,” Bellow took aim at the dominant Waspish protagonists of American literature, typified by the repressed, macho heroes created by Hemingway. “Do you have feelings?,” says Bellow’s narrator. “There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody’s business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them … To hell with that! I intend to talk about mine, and if I had as many mouths as Siva has arms and kept going all the time, I still could not do myself justice.”Unlike Augie, Bellow was not born in Chicago but in Lachine, near Montreal and his family later moved into the heart of the cramped, crowded city. His father, a smalltime bootlegger, found it expedient to get out of town when Bellow was eight and smuggled the family to Chicago. In this book of inordinate length, there is time to examine minutely every member of the extended family. Leader traces as well Bellow’s career through studies at the University of Chicago, Northwestern and his postgraduate studies in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. We move through the author’s initial struggles to publish; his first, second and third marriages and various affairs, friendships, rivalries and overseas trips. We see how everything that Bellow experienced became grist for his writing.Leader is very effective at explaining how incidents in Bellow’s life are transformed into art. He is less successful at painting a true, living picture of Bellow as a person. Despite the hundreds of letters quoted, interviews cited and testimonies mined, Bellow comes across as an abstraction. Ironically, the novelist who excelled in giving powerful and authentic life to his creations emerges at the hands of his biographer as a pale, elusive figure. This is surely a disservice to a man, who whatever his failings, was truly bursting with life.Scholars and students of Bellow will surely treasure this biography as the most exhaustive record of the author’s life that will ever be produced and will wait impatiently for the second volume describing the remaining 41 years of his life. The rest of us could do well to pick up one of the novels – I’d suggest “Augie March” – to remind ourselves of what a vibrant and compelling voice Bellow possessed and shared with the world.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful. Masterfully tracing Bellow’s growth to his eventual status in the 1960s as perhaps America’s greatest living novelist By Bookreporter I like to imagine that when Zachary Leader published his biography of English novelist Kingsley Amis in 2006 --- appropriately, and quite literally, titled THE LIFE OF KINGSLEY AMIS --- potential readers took one look at the volume, immediately about-faced, and broke into a dead run. The 1000-plus-page monster of a work provided an exhaustive portrayal of Amis, who, in the United States, is likely better known as the father of fellow English novelist Martin Amis than a writer in his own right. Those potential readers will be pleased to know that Leader’s latest volume, THE LIFE OF SAUL BELLOW: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964 (sensing a pattern here?), is only 650 pages --- provided, of course, that you’re the sort of reader who ignores the additional 115 pages of endnotes and the promise of a second volume covering the remaining 40 years of Saul Bellow’s life. It may also please those readers that Leader’s first volume is a masterpiece, and practically a free seminar in the art of the life study.To be fair, Bellow gives Leader quite a lot to work with. The “most decorated writer in American history, the winner, among other awards, of the Nobel Prize for Literature, three National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize,” and on, Bellow’s personal life was as juicy as his fiction --- the latter, unsurprisingly, having borrowed a great deal from the former. “In some novels and stories,” Leader writes, “people he knew, including friends and relations, were not only bound to see themselves depicted but they were meant to do so.” He used his fiction to praise and paint, to expose and condemn, and in the end, even the author questioned his own methods. On his deathbed, Bellow turned to a friend and asked, “Was I a man” --- a mensch, a worthy human being, a man of character --- “or was I a jerk?”Like Bellow biographers before him, Leader attempts an answer. Unlike them, he had the advantage of writing this biography after his subject’s death, and thus the freedom to conduct his research and form an opinion without Bellow’s interventions. When mentioning the struggles of his predecessors, Leader describes Bellow as “wary,” “prickly” and “evasive,” and his effect on previous biographer James Atlas as enough to help “produce the note of resentment some have heard” in his book.These stories may have led a lesser biographer to vote “jerk” from the start, but Leader’s assessment is remarkably level-headed and, in the end, all about the art. From his introduction: “What makes Bellow a bird not an ornithologist is his ability to transform facts or experiences into great literature, thus changing them. This view of art as new creation is often invoked as a defense against the accusations of slander or defamation. Art can be viewed in other ways; for example, as imitation or mimesis, the oldest of aesthetic aims and pleasures. Mimesis, too, involves touching experiences or facts with the imagination. Bellow was a famed noticer and his novels and stories are packed with things perfectly seen.”Leader’s noticing, too, deserves commendation. An academic’s biography of a fiercely intellectual author (also an academic) could easily go the way of… well, the academic, and many a plodding tome has been written detailing the life of a difficult 20th-century white male American novelist. Thankfully, this book, despite its length and subject, is anything but plodding. Masterfully tracing Bellow’s growth from precocious youth to his eventual status in the 1960s as perhaps America’s greatest living novelist, Leader fleshes out even the smallest details, yet all of these seem carefully chosen, deliberately unpacked: Bellow’s infancy in Canada; his childhood and adolescence in Chicago (no, he was not “Chicago-born”); his Russian-, Jewish-, immigrant-raised upbringing; his many marriages, flings and affairs, friendships and fallouts; his progressive yet often problematic politics; and, of course, the writing.The moment that serves as the climax of Leader’s book amounts to the springboard moment for Bellow’s writing life. Bellow was in Paris, and it was 1949. He had written two books by then, but writing hadn’t been easy --- his first story was published only after he had turned 25, and he would not succeed in making a living from writing alone (much more common then than now, I’m told) until near the end of this volume. Walking down the street one afternoon, sustained only by grant money and lamenting his state, he walked by some Parisian municipal workers cleaning out a hydrant.“I suppose a psychiatrist would say that this was some kind of hydrotherapy --- the flowing water freeing me from the caked burden of depression that had formed on my soul,” Bellow told his friend and fellow Jewish-American mega-novelist, Philip Roth, in a New Yorker interview in 2005. “But it wasn’t so much the water as the sunny iridescence…. I remember saying to myself, ‘Well, why not take a short break and have at least as much freedom of movement as this running water?’”That freedom resulted in THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH, an oft-cited candidate for that ever-elusive white whale, the “Great American Novel.” For Leader, Bellow proves quite the catch himself: a Great American Author with a life as big as his work. Lucky for us, we have a whole second volume to live it alongside him.Reviewed by John Maher
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Was enjoying the book, but when I got to ... By Lawrence Kart Was enjoying the book, but when I got to page 594, I discovered to my dismay that the next page was not 595 but 627 -- a signature was missing. This was a brand new library copy, so I have no beef with Amazon, but I wonder whether anyone else has had this problem. It sure looked like a printing plant error, and if so, it's not likely that it affected only one copy of the book.
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The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964, by Zachary Leader
