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'Our Difficult Bellow'
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19182 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1991 |
2,898 Words |
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Melvin J. Friedman
Melvin J. Friedman, professor of comparative literature at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is the founding editor of
Contemporary Literature and Comparative Literature Studies. He
is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, his most
recent title being Joycean Occasions (1991). |
SAUL BELLOW
A Biography of the Imagination
Ruth Miller
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991
385 pp., $24.95
Nobel laureates have attracted the attention of literary biographers despite the known frustrations experienced by those who attempt to chronicle the careers of living writers. Deirdre Bair wrote an early version of Samuel Beckett as a Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation and finally published it in an enlarged and revised form as Samuel Beckett: A Biography (1978). She frustratingly mentions in her preface: "He [Beckett] repeated that he would neither help nor hinder me and I was free to do as I wished in the matter." Bair assumes an emphatic tone early in her work--often aggressive and confrontational, especially toward Beckett's critics--which was probably ill-advised. While Beckett himself apparently never offered an opinion about his biographer's labors, reviewers consistently greeted the work with distrust and dismay, describing it in such terms as "a collection of learned gossip" and "a mosaic of baffling glimpses."
A more modest Paul Kresh tried his hand in Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Magician of West 86th Street (1979), wondering in his introduction: "How does one write a book about a living man, who is active, pursuing his star as an author and as a person?" He went on to comment on the uncertainty of the enterprise: "One cannot properly call such an effort a biography in the conventional sense at all. I have tried in the pages that follow to paint a living, tentative picture of Isaac's life and work." The picture he offers is indeed tentative, although Kresh seems to be at ease in his biographical journeys with Singer, who proves to be a cooperative and affable companion.
The novelist Mark Harris turned his attention to another Nobel laureate in his Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck (1980). He chose "our difficult Bellow" for the honorable reason that "he made me want to write better, he enlarged and extended my imagination." From the start, he was aware of the difficulties of his undertaking because his subject was proving to be of no assistance; he "applied," as he said, to be Bellow's Boswell and was roundly rejected. Harris leads us through labyrinthine corridors: "I would be eavesdropping on him. I would dog his steps." Bellow did all he could to evade, to frustrate him, which made Harris understand "why biographers prefer dead subjects." One should say that Harris is very good at matching events in the author's
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