Readers of Bellow’s novels will recognise the seeds of one of the twentieth century’s greatest prose writers from the very first letter, in which a callow Bellow declares ‘I am thinking, thinking, Yetta, drifting with night, with infinity, and all my thoughts are of you.’ There is in that line not just a foreshadowing of the rhythm and repetition that Bellow would later deploy so masterfully, but also in that reaching outwards to infinity, the sudden poetry in the mundane that would consistently recast reality into the magical.
As the volume progresses, Bellow fans will see more and more of the familiar. There is the readiness to engage with serious philosophy, the ability to dish out a putdown (‘It’s too bad that you, a devotee of the truth, can’t stand it sometimes.’), the seeming determination to seek out and perceive victimhood wherever he was (‘Last summer, there were so many knives drawn round me that it’s taken several months to get the dazzle of them out of my eyes.’), and the sentimentalist who, when he wasn’t busy divorcing a woman, was so wildly in love with one he lost control of his style (‘I long to see you again. I miss you so much, it’s like sickness, or hunger.’).
But reading this sprawl of letters from 1932-2005, one grows increasingly aware of how much of the events and people Bellow writes about here are also to be found in his fiction. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Bellow may have sought out crises in order to deliver the plot of the next novel, and that his declining powers in later life may have had as much to do with finding marital happiness as age.
Yet despite this overlap between fiction and letters, not all of Bellow’s fans may be overjoyed with what they find here. For although Bellow was constantly praised for his humanity in his fiction, the Bellow that comes across here is, as often as not, spiteful and preening, increasingly dismissive of anyone who doesn’t toe the Bellow party line. He was an author who clearly grew to love his own power and control and the power it gave him to bear grudges without having to resort to forgiveness. (And who can tell how long a grudge will last? Whether by demand of his estate or not, it’s noticeable that only one of his ex-wives is allowed a space in the photograph section, though even that is of the back of her head.)
A similar arc was discernible in James Atlas’ biography of Bellow, which was subsequently derided by all of Bellow’s close friends; however, reading the letters, one can’t help suspecting that Atlas may have had a point. Certainly, by the time Bellow falls under the spell of Allan Bloom, a switch seems to have flicked that turns him from the generous spirited writer of the novels to a professional grump who bemoans everything. It is a long journey from visiting Trotsky to having tea with Thatcher, but Bellow manages it, physically and spiritually. The consolation for the reader of these letters is that some other switch seems to have flicked whenever he sat down to write fiction, one that fortunately allowed him to still celebrate life in all its aspects. These letters may tell us more about the man than we previously knew, and they definitely contain some fantastically well-wrought sentences, but they only confirm that Bellow’s real legacy are his novels. We may not always find the real Bellow there, but we will find the Bellow that’s really worth knowing.