Photograph by Stephen Kent; Styling by Angharad Bailey

Saul Bellow was of two minds about the academy. In a 1957 article for The Nation, entitled “The University as Villain,” he described English departments as being filled with “discouraged people who stand dully upon a brilliant plane, in charge of masterpieces but not themselves inspired.” He had by then spent two decades working as an itinerant English professor—at Bard, Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College, and the University of Minnesota, among others—in order to supplement his meager writing income. This was not an unusual career in a period when the business of writing fiction became increasingly intertwined with academia. Not only did MFA programs begin to turn novel-writing into something like a guild profession, but many writers—from Bernard Malamud at Oregon State University to Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell—relied on an academic paycheck to fund their works in progress. Though teaching obligations can be burdensome, for Bellow the university was more than a source of income; it allowed him to glimpse a fuller intellectual life.

Hidden behind his complaint in The Nation was the lament of a disappointed lover, for whom living among inspiring masterpieces was the summit of human achievement. If most ordinary professors couldn’t live up to his ideal, Bellow was still drawn to the minority for whom ideas were a matter of life and death. His best book was Herzog, his 1964 novel about the renegade professor Moses Herzog, who pens desperate letters to world dignitaries, all the time festering from the wound of his best friend running off with his wife. But Herzog contained, too, the seeds of Bellow’s future failures. It was the first of his professorial novels, which would portray intellectuals like Artur Sammler and Abe Ravelstein as exemplars of wisdom and insight. All but one (Humboldt’s Gift in 1975) of his subsequent novels would feature an academic hero.

Chicago, the city and the university, loomed large in Bellow’s consciousness. Hans Behm / Library of Congress

By 1981, Bellow had abandoned his earlier ambivalence and swung around to the conclusion that, as he told The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani, “It’s in the university and only in the university that Americans can have a higher life.” And in real life, Bellow had become a fixture of various academic haunts, most durably as a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, from 1962 to late 1993. But the novels Bellow wrote under the influence of the academy are some of his worst. It does little service to Bellow’s reputation to pretend that everything he wrote deserves preservation and revisiting. So arid are The Dean’s December (1982) and More Die of Heartbreak (1987) that inescapable questions emerge: Where did he go wrong? How did so gifted a writer lay waste to his talents?

Bellow was an early test case for novelists trying to get by in the academy, and a particularly telling case, since he was a more enthusiastic recruit than most. As last year’s n+1 anthology “MFA vs. NYC” demonstrated, the tension between academia and real life has only deepened and still defines the contours of literary life. Cagey and brainy, Bellow wanted to be the novelist of both the streets and the faculty lounge. Alas, in too much of his work, he serves as a cautionary tale of how schools can open minds but can also sometimes trap the soul.

Bellow had always been attracted to intellectual life and initially looked for it beyond the academy: Starting off as a writer in the late ’30s, he gravitated toward the most highbrow of the literary quarterlies, Partisan Review, with its dual and contrary loyalty to high modernism and political revolution. And like the New York intellectuals, Bellow aspired to be a master of all thought, not bounded by disciplines but happily jumping from literature to politics to sociology to philosophy. Yet it was Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought that provided the perfect niche for a wide-ranging polymath like Bellow.