Him with His Heart and Temper in His Pen

Just as Herzog was overcome by the need “to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends,” so, too, did his creator, Saul Bellow, share this need. Not only did Bellow write in every genre, but he also wrote innumerable, often belated apologetic letters. Unlike Herzog, who “to keep sane in an insane world” wrote without sending to scholars long dead and alive, Bellow did write and send his more than 780 letters to those alive, his close childhood Humboldt neighborhood friends, fellow writers, four ex-wives, three sons, current and former lovers, students, publishers, agents, critics, and readers. In his letters written from age seventeen to eighty-eight, he kept up a warm, steady correspondence, in particular, with Isaac Rosenfeld, Louis Sidran, and Mark Harris, all Trotskyites, intellectuals, former members of their Tuley High School debating club. Bellow later wrote on and off to fellow writers Alfred Kazin, Philip Roth, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Martin Amis, Ralph Ellison, Cynthia Ozick, Delmore Schwartz, Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Karl Shapiro, and John Berryman, all with whom he shared “a colony of spirit,” offering encouragement, experienced advice, and criticism. To John Berryman, he wrote, “Your poems extended my life.” To Philip Roth, he wrote, “The exchange of letters did me a lot of good. Of course, the so-called fabricators will be grinding their knives. They (meaning critics), have none of that ingenious, possibly childish love of literature you and I have. There aren’t many people in the trade for whom I have any use. . . . I knew when I hit Chicago (was it 12 years ago) and read your stories that you were the ‘real thing.’”

Bellow, in turn, also similarly flattered and consoled Malamud, Cheever, and Ozick. In another letter to Roth, he wrote, “We are, to use the Chicago term of the 70s, ‘rooters and boosters.’” Of all the loving letters written to writer friends, one to John Cheever stands out: “We didn’t spend much time together but there is a significant attachment between us. I suppose it’s in part because we practiced the same self-taught trade . . . put our souls to the same kind of schooling and . . . had the gall, under the hostile stare of America to persist . . . that brings us together.”

Not only are Bellow’s letters a self-portrait of himself as a young and old man, but they are a portrait of his times. They are his way of explaining why he was as he was. His main characters are ideal versions of himself whereas many of his lesser characters are based on real people. According to his editor, Benjamin Taylor, Bellow’s collection of letters adds up to the “autobiography Bellow never wrote.” In his introduction, Taylor also points out, “Bellow’s characters are intellectuals who disclose how feeble their learning is once real life has barged in.” As I see it, the letters are rather the raw material Bellow polishes in his novels, the suffering he turns into art. Mind you, following the publication of his novel Augie March, Bellow instructed Malamud, “A novel, like a letter should be loose and cover much ground, run simply, take the risk of mortality and decay.” Yet in a later letter to Martin Amis, Bellow criticizes Augie March, the novel in which he found his voice and fame, as being too loose. Similarly, in further giving advice to Malamud, Bellow wrote, “there should be a certain detachment from the writer’s own passions. I speak as one who in Herzog committed the same sin. . . . There I hoped that comic effects might protect me.”

Bellow also had as great a need to “have it out” with rival writers such as John Updike, Gore Vidal, Nabokov, Graham Greene, Norman Mailer, Hugh Kenner, Christopher Hitchens, Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arrendt, Mary McCarthy, and James Atlas, some of whom were critical of his novels, others anti-Semitic. For example, in a letter to John Lehmann, early in his career, too hastily, Bellow gave as good as he got: “If you can find nothing better to say upon...