Iwas hard on the first volume, The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964, in the June 2015 issue of The New Criterion. Let me summarize the charge sheet: A book promulgated by Bellow's agent, Andrew Wylie, and as such designed as damage control, minimizing Bellow's faults as writer and human being that James Atlas revealed in Bellow: A Biography (2000). Leader, it seemed to me, had not shaped his biography very well, shifting too much between different periods of Bellow's life, telegraphing the future before the narrative could adequately handle it. In short, too many narrative interruptions.
Well, either Leader has absorbed my criticism or I misread him in the first place. The second volume seems to me almost impeccable in its narrative drive, unsparing in its revelations of Bellow's failings, and most generous to Bellow's previous biographers, especially James Atlas. In this volume, Leader shows how Atlas drew out various aspects of Bellow's personality in their many positive and negative contacts. Leader has made splendid use of Atlas's memoir, The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale (2017).
All of Bellow's later works get their due, with Leader showing how expertly Bellow crafted fiction out of his biography. A case in point is Leader's treatment of Ravelstein (2002), inspired by Allan Bloom, famous as author of The Closing of the American Mind (1987), a jeremiad against the college curriculum that no longer took the classics seriously and made possible a culture of relativism and permissiveness. The book became a huge best seller with a great send-off by Bellow himself, who associated many of the ideas in the book with his own lamentations about the chaos of contemporary culture in novels like Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970). Bellow and Bloom taught together at the University of Chicago and evidently became so close that Bloom encouraged Bellow to write about him. Bellow had to decide whether to write a memoir or a novel. That he chose the latter is not surprising, since fiction gave him the freedom to write a book animated by his friend but not slavishly bound to facts in the manner of biography, a genre Bellow distrusted because it distorted truth by hewing too closely to fact. Only fiction provided a broad enough context to capture a figure as protean as Bloom.
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