Atlas Shrugs. - Review - book review

National Review, Nov 6, 2000 by Christopher Hitchens

Bellow: A Biography, by James Atlas (Random House, 688 pp., $35)

When told that all great men had their disciples, Oscar Wilde sighed his assent, while adding that it always seemed to be Judas who wrote the biography. It might not have been overstating matters to call James Atlas a disciple of Saul Bellow; he himself tells us that when he rose from the table where he had been reading "Charm and Death"-Bellow's unpublished story about Isaac Rosenfeld-he knew he would write its author's biography. And he had already produced an excellent life of Delmore Schwartz, the poet and dreamer and drunk who inspired the eponym of Humboldt's Gift. If not a disciple in the acolyte sense, then certainly a "follower"; an exegete, even a "maven." In the New Testament, Judas's principal role is to identify Jesus (a superfluous task, one might agree with Kierkegaard, in the case of the most celebrated preacher in Palestine). So the joke can be turned upon Wilde if the biographer succeeds well enough in making us feel we know the subject. Atlas, however, seems to have developed a slight disdain for his chosen subject, without quite refining this disdain into a critique.

Bellow's life has been reasonably full of incident, to be sure, but its essential interest inheres more in the battle of ideas than in the struggle for survival. The edifice of his work is notable, among many other things, for the way that it synthesizes the two. In one way, it's a tale worn smooth in the telling: Bright Jewish kid is born in the first generation of overworked refugees from the Pale or the shtetl, learns early that life is tough, flirts with radical and collectivist ideas, gets an omnivore's education, makes good and becomes more rooted, more conservative. This part-sentimental Hester Street parabola, classically described by Irving Howe in World of Our Fathers, sometimes airbrushes such matters as crime and family dysfunction. Bellow has never been much inclined to any sort of euphemism, and Atlas's strong opening section is faithful to its subject in this respect. When the Bellows arrive in Quebec just before the Great War, they go down in the world rather than up. (Young Solomon, the future Saul, isn't even sure of his precise date of birth.) Disproving yet again the ancient rumor that Jews are mainly good at business, the senior Bellows fail at venture after venture, turn to bootlegging and petty larceny, eventually do a flit to Chicago and stiff their landlord on the rent. By the time he is grown, the young man has had a near-death experience, lost his mother, and learned that the world is a cynical place. He has also demonstrated great aptitude for liturgy and literature, in Yiddish as well as English.

Quoting Isaac Rosenfeld on the next stage of Bellow's life-the ideological brawling of the years of Depression and Fascism-Atlas has him saying: "One ate and drank it; and sleep gave no escape, for it furnished terror to our dreams: Hitler, Mussolini, the Moscow Trials, the Spanish Civil War, the plaguey bill of Stalinism, the stopgaps of NRA, WPA, and the New Deal, and the approach of inevitable war." Yet this is exactly the atmosphere of combat and urgency and excitement that Atlas fails to evoke himself. His account of Bellow's involvement with various Trotskyist sects (which culminated in a visit to Mexico to see the Old Man himself; arriving the day after he had been assassinated but nonetheless glimpsing him in the morgue-such raw material!) is a perfunctory one. And this skimpiness is a disappointment for two reasons. First, as Atlas has good reason to know, such dialectical disputations were the surrogate, to many brilliant young men and women, for the intense Talmudic exercises of their ancestors. Second, the brush with revolutionary politics supplies a good part of the hectic energy of Bellow's masterpiece, The Adventures of Augie March. But the two strands of literature and life are not combined by the narrator. Missing an obvious trick, and substituting "research" for research, Atlas digs up a journalistic piece by the young Bellow from the same period, entitled "Pets of the North Shore," about suburban females and their absurd dogs. While patronizing Bellow for drawing conclusions about "decadence" from this very amusing feuilleton, Atlas fails to notice that it is also the provenance of the funniest section of Augie March: the young man's pooch-grooming days.

The next time that a Bellovian relationship with an intellectual guru or mentor comes up, it receives much fuller treatment. I must confess that I was amazed to learn that Bellow had a Reichian period in the early 1950s; sitting in an "orgone box" and cogitating The Function of the Orgasm. But here, Atlas feels himself on-what to call it?-surer ground. He can describe the decay of a marriage and a sexual relationship. If you want to know about the novelist's wives, mistresses, indiscretions, alimony grudges, and alleged shortcomings in the sack (and if The Dean's December and Ravelstein haven't furnished you with sufficient clues) then Atlas is your man. This is all a matter of taste, I quite appreciate, and there's no doubt that details of this kind are useful and can sometimes be indispensable. It's just that they take up so much room, and that they aren't always justified, if I can employ such a pompous term, by any real bearing on the life or the work.