Bellow was sharp, well read, and observant, and he prided himself on his street smarts. But he was a fictionalist, not an editorialist—a bird, as he liked to say, not an ornithologist. Recognition magnifies idiosyncrasies. He cut people who commented critically on drafts he sent them for comment, and he imagined conspiracies operating behind negative reviews or press coverage that he regarded as less than flattering. He broke with old friends after political disagreements over dinner.
These reflexes did not serve him well out in the arena. This did not clear the air. Also charming, seductive, and totally game: he fell for beautiful women and beautiful women fell for him. Sexual attention matters to everybody; it mattered exceedingly to Bellow. He was described by women who knew him intimately as domineering but needy.
Successful seduction seems to have been a form of validation, and a prescription refillable as necessary. In short, Bellow was a man who liked to be stroked, and who was suspicious of strokers.
Factor in brains and an exceptional gift and you get a fairly complicated piece of work. And every book that has been written about Bellow by someone who was close to him is to some degree hostile toward its subject. Two biographers-in-waiting, Mark Harris and Ruth Miller, eventually admitted defeat and published books in which Bellow figures as an enchanting but exhausting tease. Zachary Leader met Bellow only once.
That was in , at a party near Harvard, where Leader was a graduate student and Bellow was being awarded an honorary degree. Leader says that Bellow seemed bored, and he remembers nothing of what Bellow said. In the genre of Bellow biography, this counts as a credential. As a piece of research and writing, the book is worthy in multiple ways. He knows his way around the inbred worlds of the little magazines where Bellow made his name and the college literature departments where, for many years, he earned his living.
Not the best thing about the book is the length. Together with the unusually informative notes, the text is more than seven hundred and eighty pages, and there are forty years still to go. The trouble is not that Leader is verbose. The trouble arises from the central problem of Bellow criticism, which is how to pull the life apart from the art.
Leader is alive to the problem; he devotes much of his introduction to it. He began his career in St. Petersburg as a produce broker, specializing in Egyptian onions and Spanish fruit. The family seems to have been quite well off. Abraham had used a forged document to work in St. Petersburg, and, when this was discovered, he was arrested and convicted. He may have gone to prison. But he managed to escape and, in , to get his family to Canada.
They settled in Lachine, outside Montreal, where Abraham tried farming, and where, in , Saul was born. When the farm failed, the family moved into the city and Abraham took up bootlegging, a venture that ended even more disastrously. In , he moved again, to Chicago, and engaged some bootlegging associates to smuggle his wife and children across the border to join him. Abraham spent the rest of his life in Chicago, and he ended up running a retail coal business.
But he never really learned English—Yiddish was the language at home—and he never became a citizen. Saul did not become an American citizen until But Chicago was a city of immigrants.
It also had a large Jewish population—by , according to Leader, nearly three hundred thousand in a city of 3. All the Bellow children assimilated happily and all became well off.
Saul is often associated with the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years as a member of the legendary Committee on Social Thought.
He was a student there, but for less than two years. After leaving Northwestern, he did become a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. You may take the word of a practicing novelist for it that not all novel readers are good readers. The ground rules of the art of fiction are not widely understood. No writer can take it for granted that the views of his characters will not be attributed to him personally.
It is generally assumed, moreover, that all the events and ideas of a novel are based on the life experiences and the opinions of the novelist himself. Our American preference is for the facts -- only facts count. A gold miner in Alaska watching an early film and running at the screen to hit the villain with his shovel is my favorite illustration of this low-level bondage to actuality.
Preliterate societies have their own kinds of wisdom, no doubt, and primitive Papuans probably have a better grasp of their myths than most educated Americans have of their own literature. But without years of study we can't begin to understand a culture very different from our own. The fair thing, therefore, is to make allowance for what we outsiders cannot hope to fathom in another society and grant that, as members of the same species, primitive men are as mysterious or as monstrous as any other branch of humankind.
It's no slander to describe a people as preliterate. In any case, preliterate societies are rapidly vanishing. Besides, as we all know, certain forms of literacy are decidedly repulsive. Anyway, the study of culture is our idea. Our civilized demand is for scientific discussions of everything. The socialist realism that dominated the literate U. Those who resisted were sent to die in Kolyma or locked away in psychiatric hospitals. Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation. Volume Article Contents.
Vidyan Ravinthiran Vidyan Ravinthiran. Oxford Academic. Google Scholar. Select Format Select format. Permissions Icon Permissions. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. Issue Section:. You do not currently have access to this article. Posted by Mal Warwick Memoir , Nonfiction 0. After all, we are all sons and daughters of mitochondrial Eve, who trod the savanna of East Africa more than , years ago.
His memoir is a brilliant analysis of racism today. No thinking person with even a trace of empathy for our fellow human beings can read Between the World and Me without a growing sense of anger at the cruel injustice that lies at the root of the American Dream. In Between the World and Me, Coates addresses his fifteen-year-old son. Coates is a survivor of the shocking reality of life in the crumbling, segregated neighborhoods of Baltimore, familiar to us all through the artistry of the long-running drama, The Wire.
The son of two hard-working, loving parents who valued education — with a grandfather who was a research librarian at the African Research Center at Howard University — Coates made his way from the ghetto to Howard, his personal Mecca, and later to hard-earned success as a writer.
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