Bellow
Atlas, James & Krupnick, Mark
A Chicagoan, born & bred Mark Krupnick James Atlas's long-awaited biography of Saul Bellow has been more than a decade in the making. Although ambitiously conceived, Bellow deals...
...The only right kind of biography for so great a novelist must be a biography of his imagination...
...There is also much new information about Bellow's close male friendships, which have been just as fraught as his relations with women, and about the nuts and bolts of his literary career...
...19 (Continued from page 4) Lived wisdom Luke Timothy Johnson's persuasive article on John Paul II's theology of the body is perhaps the finest article of its kind I have read in forty years...
...ANDREW GALLIGAN Tracy, Calif...
...On the contrary, the appearance of big ideas or intimations of visionary experience in a Bellow novel is often the sign of a lapse of literary imagination and its displacement by the pedagogic will...
...Is anybody listening to them...
...It is much the best work of fiction he had written in a long time, but it is a brilliant study in character, not a philosophical novel or a visionary work...
...GEORGE R. FITZGERALD, C.S.P...
...On different planets Luke Timothy Johnson's critique of Pope John Paul II's reflections on sexuality was the most theologically cogent and pastorally persuasive commentary I've read in years about Catholic sexual teaching...
...Ravelstein, Bellow's memorial to Bloom, appeared in 2000, in the novelist's eighty-fifth year...
...Although ambitiously conceived, Bellow deals more satisfactorily with the author's life than with his art...
...Herzog removes himself from society in order to recover, and he writes letter after letter to contemporary political leaders and thinkers and others who inspire his skeptical comments and questions...
...Oh well...
...24...
...Most of them have long ago put aside church teaching on birth control...
...It's exciting to read something like Johnson's refreshing insights...
...For instance, in the novelist's early phase there was Wilhelm Reich with his theories about the armored body and the need to liberate "orgastic" energy...
...Ambivalence seems a constant in his character...
...What had ensued for many of them was a riot of sexual affairs and messy divorces that had nothing like the dignity of 1930s debates in the agora (namely, Broadway cafeterias) about the fate of capitalism...
...Herzog's is the comic pathos of the intellectual rendered ineffectual: he has no audience, and his letters go unsent...
...Indeed, it contains more than most readers will want to know about Bellow's many wives and girlfriends...
...This is where we can see the aptness of Atlas's concern with the material conditions of Bellow's life...
...The documents issuing from Rome and diocesan offices come across as totally abstract and divorced from real life...
...The writer is Metropolitan Archbishop of the Orthodox Catholic Church of America...
...In Chicago, which is Atlas's hometown as well as Bellow's, spirit has always had to struggle against the grit, even the sewage, of materiality...
...That Bellow believed people might be acquiring a similar kind of wisdom from his novels suggests a misguided self-conception...
...Bellow seemed to speak for them as children of immigrants, victims of the Depression, and perhaps above all as onceradical intellectuals who had been deprived during the cold-war years of a public existence...
...To be sure, Bellow's antiheroes live in a world of ideas, but compared, say, to Thomas Mann or James Joyce, Bellow himself seems a kibitzer...
...Both of these Commonweal articles are priceless and full of wisdom from men who have actually "been there and done that...
...Augie March insists he is not "a candidate for adoption" in the 1953 novel named after him, but he would not be insisting so much on his freedom if he did not always feel tempted to surrender it...
...E. BRIAN CARSTEN Angola, Ind...
...REV...
...How long can we afford to lose this critically important segment of the Catholic church in favor of a moral theology of sexuality that appears so rigid and static...
...The critics have had one common theme: What they see as Atlas's materialism and reductionism is the wrong way to go at Bellow...
...But, alas, people like him who try to introduce fresh ways of looking at such questions, while preserving the deep values of our faith, often find the welcome mat snatched out from under 23 them...
...As Saul had been the youngest and dreamiest of the men in his immediate family, so has he all through his life been the naive, often the faux naive, outsider/beginner...
...At times he has appeared very dependent on others, and at other times fiercely protective of his independence...
...No red hat Luke Timothy Johnson's incisive critique of John Paul II's pronouncements on love, sex, and pleasure should be studied and openly discussed in every Catholi college and Newman Club in the nation—together with Paul Baumann's humorous reflections on George Weigel's biography of our pope ("Crossing the Threshold," December 3, 1999...
...That was a wrong call...
...One wonders in what spatial reality their authors live...
...In the years when Bellow was writing Henderson the Rain King (1959), he experienced a new creative power that inspired moments of ecstatic confidence...
...MOST REV...
...In Herzog the anguish of the eponymous hero was the anguish of a whole intellectual generation for whom the discrediting of left-wing politics had meant having to find their fulfillment in domestic life...
...One incident adduced by Atlas is revelatory in this regard...
...Herzog reveals in what limited sense Bellow has been a novelist of 18 ideas...
...Later, notably in Humboldt's Gift, Bellow offered himself as a spokesman for anthroposophy, Rudolph Steiner's early, Central-European forerunner of Scientology...
...It is to show the way things have been, to show what Bellow's creative imagination has had to wrestle with...
...incorporate it...
...Rather, it is about the church learning from the lived wisdom of her members and having the courage to (here is that word...
...Each time we gather at the Lord's table, I see in his eyes, lo these many years later, the struggling wisdom that is so evident in Johnson's words...
...Of course, both will be decried by those who believe Catholics should all walk in lock step with any current papal teaching, especially in matters of sexual ethics...
...To be sure, Luke Timothy Johnson will not be joining Avery Dulles at the next consistory...
...Have they ever had any firsthand, practical experience with marriage...
...Atlas observes that, for all Bellow's gifts as an artist, he has not been notable for his self-knowledge...
...Atlas's entertaining, well-paced, original account of the fate of the serious artist amid the welter of mid-twentieth-century history shows precisely the way to render Saul Bellow's American life...
...That is not to say that he did not ascribe to himself a profound philosophic-religious consciousness...
...I must admit, sadly, that in my thirty-six years as a priest, most married persons—and those to be married—with whom I have spoken feel that the church doesn't really address the complex problems couples face today...
...Bellow has had his own kind of greatness, but it has not been like that of William Blake or D. H. Lawrence...
...The problem is that most of the ideas he has promoted have not been very good ones...
...There have been so few American novelists with anything like European writers' interest in general ideas that the New York intellectuals were gratified by what they greeted as the creative fulfillment of their own and their generation's experience...
...Bellow's New York contemporaries, like the literary critics Philip Rahv and Irving Howe, tended to exaggerate his intellectual power...
...Maybe that's why there is such massive apostacy among young people of marrying age, as well as so many who are married...
...Atlas's emphasis on the material and matrimonial side of Bellow's life has disposed some reviewers to protest: What about the striving of Bellow's characters, and of their creator, toward a higher spiritual condition...
...The entire issue of human sexuality and the gospel tradition is, it seems to me, not so much a matter of church versus individual conscience...
...More frequently his readers were grateful to Bellow because the confusion of his characters legitimated their own...
...Few great cities can have been as indifferent to the effort of mind and imagination as Chicago...
...To the novelist Herb Gold, he burst out on one occasion: "Pretty soon I'll be unassailable, and I can write philosophy like Tolstoy...
...Why has Atlas not illuminated the development of the "firm metaphysical intelligence" that these reviewers claim to be Bellow's defining literary talent...
...It is about the cuckolding and subsequent psychological breakdown of a historian of ideas—it was the first novel of Bellow's in which the hero was by profession a thinker...
...the art critic Harold Rosenberg, whom Bellow memorializes in his novella "What Kind of Day Did You Have...
...His special vocation as a novelist could not have been more unlike that of Tolstoy, who could "write philosophy," as another philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, showed in his great essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox...
...That's understandable...
...and Allen Bloom, with whom Bellow co-taught in the Committee on Social Thought up to the time of Bloom's death...
...Atlas also helps us see how much Bellow has always been dependent for the ideas in his fiction on a succession of mentors—usually big-brother types...
...In my congregation there is a man who left his position as an active priest in the wake of Paul VI's Humanae vitae...
...Vail, Colo...
...One thinks of the gurus in Bellow's life, among them the University of Chicago sociologist Edward Shils...
...The letters are brilliant, and the novel is wonderfully funny in dramatizing the comedy of the emotionally distraught, unmoored intellectual drowning in a sea of ideas...
...To present Bellow's life in its gritty detail is not to be reductive...
...But a book about the development of Bellow's worldview and spiritual strivings would most like- Not quite a metaphysician ly have been a muddle because Bellow has been neither a clear thinker nor a prophetic visionary...
...Certainly Bellow has looked to ideas to orient his life and structure his fiction...
Vol. 128 • February 2001 • No. 4
