Now it may be imagined—or even insisted—that too much is being made of all this, that the emphasis here is disproportionate, and that there are other dimensions, more conspicuous and profuse, which can more readily define Bellow as writer. Or it can be said, justifiably, that he openly denigrated anything resembling special pleading—after all, hadn’t he brushed off as “a repulsive category” the phrase “Jewish writers in America”? And what was this dismissal if not a repudiation of a vulgarizing tendency to bypass the art in order to laud the artist as a kind of ethnic cheerleader—much as young Jewish baseball fans are encouraged to look to Hank Greenberg for prideful self-validation? Besides, he had long ago put himself on record as freewheeling, unfettered, unprescribed, liberated from direction or coercion. In words that will not be found in the correspondence (they derive from the essays, those publicly personal letters to readers), Bellow wrote, “I would not allow myself to become the product of an environment”—flaunting willful italics. And though he never failed to refresh his law of the unleashed life, it rang now with a decisive coda: “In my generation, the children of immigrants became Americans. An effort was required. One made oneself, freestyle.... I was already an American, and I was also a Jew. I had an American outlook, superadded to a Jewish consciousness.” To Faulkner’s indifference he could speak—powerfully, inexorably—of “my kinsmen.” And to history the same.

Say, then, that he was, as he intended to be, free, unstinting in what he chose to love or mourn or recoil from. The letters tell us whom and how he loved. He loved his sons. He loved John Berryman, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Martin Amis. He loved Alfred Kazin (whom he mostly disliked). He loved, to the end, Janis Bellow and their little daughter, Naomi Rose. He loved, even in death, Isaac Rosenfeld, the tumultuously inspired intimate of his youth (who nastily destroyed a hoard of his old friend’s letters). He revered—but not always—thought, civilization, and what he named “the very image of man,” all of which could be undone. He believed in outcry, and trusted the truth of his own. He was adept at witticism and outright laughter. He was serious in invoking whatever particle of eternity he meant by soul, that old, old inkling he was fearless in calling up from contemporary disgrace.

Like the novels and the stories, the letters in their proliferation and spontaneity unveil the life—those sinews of it amenable to utterance—almost to its final breath. What happened soon afterward came to something less. On September 21, 2005, five months after Bellow’s death, a celebratory symposium was convened at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The participants included British writers Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, and critic James Wood, the first two having flown from London for the occasion; William Kennedy and Jeffrey Eugenides completed the panel. Each spoke movingly in turn: joyfully reverential, heartfelt, intermittently (and charmingly) anecdotal, adoring—a density of love. There was mention of modernism, fictional digression, character, childhood, Chicago, crowded tenements, the immigrant poor. Riffing in homage, Amis delivered an imitation of Bellow’s laugh, the delight and self-delight of it, the lifted chin, the head thrown back. But all this was a departure from the culminating sentiment—it was a sentiment, a susceptibility, a rapturous indulgence—that captivated and dominated these writerly temperaments. Wood: “I judge all modern prose by his ... The prose comes before and it comes afterward.” Amis: “His sentences and his prose were a force of nature.” McEwan: “The phrase or sentence has become part of our mental furniture.... Sentences like these are all you need to know about Saul Bellow.” And so on. Understandable, plainly: superior novelists, stellar craftsmen, each one mesmerized by Bellow’s unparalleled combinations.

Yet, despite these plenitudes, Saul Bellow was missing on that platform and in that auditorium teeming with admirers—as much missing there as, clothed in living flesh, he is an insistent presence in the letters. It was as if a committee of professional jewelers, loupes in place, had met to sift through heaps of gems strewn scattershot on a velvet scarf—the splendor and flash and glitter of opal and ruby and emerald, the word, the phrase, the sentence, the marvelous juxtapositions, the sublime clashes of style, the precious trove of verbal touchstones!