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  • The Place You Come from Stamps You:Saul Bellow’s Midwest
  • Andrew Seal
A review of Zachary Leader’s The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015) and
Saul Bellow’s There is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, edited by Benjamin Taylor ( New York: Viking Press, 2015).

“I am an American, Chicago-born,” wrote Saul Bellow, in the opening line of The Adventures of Augie March. But while that simple statement was true of Augie, it was not true of Bellow, who was born in Québec, in Montréal. Bellow did not even become a naturalized American citizen until 1943, only ten years before Augie March was published. Bellow is therefore, among other things, the most decorated first-generation author in U.S. literary history—a distinction not often mentioned in his list of accolades. He is also perhaps the best-known undocumented immigrant writer in U.S. history (his family crossed the Canadian border on the Fourth of July, 1924, smuggled over by bootleggers).

Yet in the most important senses, Augie bore no false witness on Bellow’s behalf: if Saul was not a Chicagoan by nativity, he had what some Jews would call a Chicagoan neshama, a Chicagoan soul or spirit. Bellow brought a renewed wave of literary respect to the city of Chicago; he spoke often of it in public talks and affirmed how much it had shaped him. Although his fiction was set in many places over the years, Chicago was obviously an anchor, his axis mundi, a place to renew his literary gifts. The Chicago that people all over the world knew was the Chicago of the Bellovian imagination.

But if Bellow was unimpeachably a Chicagoan, was he also a midwesterner? In Zachary Leader’s first volume of a two-volume biography of Bellow, we are given Bellow affirming his affinity for the Midwest on a number of occasions, for instance in an interview with a University of Minnesota student newspaper: “I think the place you come from stamps you,” he remarked, [End Page 207] and added, “I consider myself a mid-westerner.” But generally Bellow discussed his midwesternness in connection with his love for the City of Broad Shoulders, as when he wrote to Ralph Ellison enthusiastically about his time spent in Minneapolis: “I find the Midwest agrees with me. Here I recognize things. And I’m near Chicago.”

A Chicagoan first, then, and a midwesterner second—perhaps not an uncommon form of nested identities, local and then regional. But even though a good chunk of the biography is set in Minneapolis and in Madison, Wisconsin, Leader’s biography of Bellow barely probes the question of region or regionalism in Bellow’s work or life, though that is not exactly a knock on his work, as most Chicago-centric lives and books seem to let the question of regionalism subside rather quickly, that jump from city to region left undefined. Those books which have been written about this question generally take a roundabout way of answering it. When that relationship is faced squarely—in a novel or a monograph or a biography—it is generally from the viewpoint of a migrant to the Windy City—which Bellow was, although not from the midwestern hinterland. Midwesterners become Chicagoans; Chicagoans, perhaps, are midwesterners by a kind of courtesy appointment.

To read the two books under review—Leader’s biography and Benjamin Taylor’s edited collection of Bellow’s nonfiction—simply to settle the case of Saul Bellow’s midwesternness, however, would be a poor use of their vast scope. Leader’s biography in particular is an extraordinary work of accumulation and organization—it is really one of the most complete pictures of intellectual life in the United States of midcentury that we have. It more than earns the title “authoritative,” although biographies which are considered authoritative are also often said to have “the last word” on their subject, and while the work is certainly the former, it does not really attempt to have the latter. It is comprehensive—enormously impressive in its breadth of context and in its diligence of detail—but it...

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