Five years after his death, Saul Bellow’s literary reputation has yet to suffer the usual post-mortem slump, and publication of these lively letters should help sustain his standing.
Five years after his death, Saul Bellow’s literary reputation has yet to suffer the usual post-mortem slump, and publication of these lively letters should help sustain his standing. It’s less likely to boost his reputation as a man.
Bellow was never humble about his talents, and the surviving early letters show an intellectual precocity leavened by the vernacular of melting-pot Chicago. Yet initially he was reluctant to plumb home-grown strengths for his work. His first two novels were constructed on what he called a ‘Flaubertian model’ — modest, polished efforts, which were critically well received but sold poorly. It was only with The Adventures of Augie March that Bellow discovered the naturally cadent narrative voice that also runs throughout his correspondence — the book was written, he later wrote, ‘in a jail-breaking spirit’. Liberation came to him, Eureka-like, in Paris, where a fellowship took him for 18 months after the war. He did not enjoy abroad:
I badly miss American energy … Here most everybody knows the year of Molière’s birth and what François I said to Henry VIII on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, but it’s a weary satisfaction. Really weary.
With the success of Augie March came a fame that was fortified by the success of Henderson the Rain King, an extended fantasy about an American’s foray to Africa where, remarkably, Bellow had never set foot. Despite this success, he continued to struggle financially, and his letters are full of complaints about the alimony demands that grew with each new ex-wife (he was married five times in all).
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