“Was I a man or a jerk?” Saul Bellow asked on his deathbed in 2005, as depicted on the opening page of Zachary Leader’s two-part biography of Bellow’s life.
There is ample evidence to support either conclusion. Bellow’s writing certainly racked up several lifetime’s worth of plaudits — Leader calls him “the most decorated writer in American history, the winner, among other awards, of the Nobel Prize for Literature, three National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Forementor Prize...” and so on.
Add to that list being featured on a United States Postal Service stamp, to be unveiled Tuesday at his home base of more than half a century, the University of Chicago.
Of course, given that U.S. stamps have honored Tweety Bird, Raymond Burr and popsicles, that might not be the accolade it once was, and that too is somehow fitting for Bellow, who liked to gnaw on his prizes to gauge their authenticity.
If you read the James Atlas biography, the J-word certainly suggests itself. The moment burned into my brain is after Bellow won the Nobel Prize in 1976. In later years, when Nobel season rolled around again, he would fall into a funk.
“Better watch out for Saul Bellow today; he’s in a bad mood,” a friend once cautioned a mutual colleague. “The Nobel Prize is being announced, and you can’t win twice.”
Speaking of his “jerk” side, well, where does one begin? That he was married five times and had countless affairs is often mentioned prominently. He was an unaffectionate, absent father, according to his son Greg.
Bellow’s own father certainly agreed he was a jerk.
Then there was how Bellow was nasty to others, reacting savagely to any hint of criticism while cruelly lampooning his ex-wives and friends in his fiction.
He certainly mistreated his childhood friend, Sydney J. Harris. Longtime readers might remember Harris, a Daily News columnist I always admired for his intellectual, lying-under-a-cherry-tree-thinking-about-stuff writing style.
In “The Dean’s December,” Bellow parodied Harris as Dewey Spangler, a big-shot columnist wearing a colostomy bag, a not-very-subtle comparison of Harris’ output to excrement. Yes, journalism doesn’t have the polish or longevity of literature. But no need to rub our noses in it.
Then there was the time when Richard M. Daley declared himself a candidate for mayor in 1989 — the one time I met Bellow. He didn’t directly say he was a racist who backed Daley as a bulwark against the darker fellow citizens who so terrified him. But the novelist came close. A few years later Bellow fled out East and is buried in Vermont.
So besides getting on a stamp, how is Bellow’s work holding up?
In 2020 I caught up with Chris Walsh, head of the Boston University College of Arts & Sciences Writing Program, who was Bellow’s assistant for the last five years of the writer’s life, and asked.
“It seems to me he is totally passé,” Walsh said “He’s virtually disappeared. It’s a shame, because I think he’s worth reading.”
Bellow is indeed out of style — for his frequent misogyny, his trendy political philosophizing. When Bellow published his first novel in 1944, American Jews were intriguing outsiders, the persecuted Other. Now their minority card has been revoked and they have to go sit with the oppressors.
Myself, I was never much of a Bellow fan. I viewed him as John Cheever with a circumcision. I didn’t read “The Adventures of Augie March” until my son did and shamed me into doing so.
“Augie” captures a moment in the city’s history, and is still worth reading, as it embodies a certain Chicago confidence. Particularly its opening sentence, perhaps the epitome of Chicago literary swagger: “I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”
Although it is fiction; Bellow was born in Canada.
Harris, by the way, had his revenge, once pointing out that Bellow didn’t really have much to say about Chicago. “We looked toward the East all the time,” Harris said, “and we would have thought it very provincial to be concerned about the city very much.”
The stamp unveiling is at 11 a.m. at the Social Sciences Research Building, Tea Room 201, 1126 E. 59th St. The public is invited.
