The self-embedded quality of Bellow’s prose heightens the challenge of writing about him as a man.

Without Bellow’s fury, this demonic creation could never have achieved her unforgettable malevolence.

The magnificently bitchy Madeleine, an unmistakable attack on Bellow’s actual second wife, was “drawn with pure venom,” as Irving Howe wrote in his review of the novel. But they too come off as figures in Bellow’s internal dramas, unlike, say, Dickens’s grotesques, who were identifiable as social types. Bellow’s great subject is his own subjectivity.īellow’s secondary and minor characters tend toward caricature-marvelous cartoons, most of them, sharply etched, wittily dissected, and fully alive. Herzog is the most loquacious victim among Bellow’s protagonists, but a similar note of aggrievement is audible in all of their voices, beneath the overtones of wry self-mockery. Readers get no respite from the howls of humiliation and self-pity he sends up after being betrayed by his second wife, Madeleine, and his best friend. Moses Herzog’s interiority is relentless, wounded, claustrophobia-inducing-as well as mordant, brilliant, and hilarious. (I use the masculine advisedly Bellow didn’t go deep enough into women’s heads to need to get out of them.) The torrential inner disputation that made Herzog feel so original when it was published in 1964 makes it uncomfortable to read now. Well into his career, Bellow combined the confessional with a mid-century notion of alienation, which meant, for Bellow, man’s inability to get outside his own head. He aimed to dispense with the Hemingway-esque cult of “hardboiled-dom” and introduce a literature of exuberant self-involvement: “If I had as many mouths as Siva has arms and kept them going all the time,” says Joseph, the novel’s Bellow-like protagonist, sounding a little like Walt Whitman, “I still could not do myself justice.” He announced as much on the first page of his first novel, Dangling Man (1944). Bellow’s great subject is his own subjectivity. The thoughts and feelings of Bellow’s fictional counterparts don’t track his exactly, but they represent acts of self-mimesis.

Nor could a biographer add nuance to Bellow’s maniacally elaborated portrait of his inner life. No biographer could ever bring Bellow-level wattage to his two main settings, the nostalgia-brightened streets of Chicago and the feverishly ratiocinating salons of American intellectuals. Bellow didn’t write autobiography, but he pulled the best details in his novels and stories out of his prodigious memory. Writing a biography of Saul Bellow must be like taking a test you’re doomed to flunk: Describe the life of a great self-describer.

ჰენდერსონი, წვიმის მეფე by Saul Bellow