One means is those sons. I found myself reading for the reappearances of Gregory Bellow, Adam Bellow and Daniel Bellow, who are richly realized as characters and emerge as thoughtful commenters on their father’s life. The sons’ humiliations climax with the oldest, Gregory’s, tumultuous speech at a luncheon after Bellow accepted the Nobel Prize. He announced, generously, that he finally realized his father loved him after all, but his father’s way of loving was to work so hard and single-mindedly. Bellow, rather than embrace his firstborn, walked in front of the crowd to his middle son, Adam, shook his hand, and said: “‘Thanks, kid, for not saying anything.’ And off he went, in a stretch limo, entourage at his side.”

Equally vibrant are the characterizations of the adult women who intersected with Bellow. Two of his five wives, Alexandra Tulcea and Janis Freedman, sat for wide-ranging interviews and come through admirably. So do many women Bellow dated in the 1960s and 1970s. The celebrated writer kept romances alive in different cities, two or three at any given time — with students and faculty divorcées at the University of Chicago, assistants at The New Yorker, even his housecleaner. Half a century later, women like Maggie Staats and Arlette Landes are affectionate but frank in remembering the half-liberated ’60s milieu, and make the otherwise dreary train of affairs surprisingly captivating. The same incidents come to us through different eyes, immediately and in retrospect. From Bellow’s archives, Leader might quote a letter in which Bellow described the frenetic writing of “Mosby’s Memoirs” while on vacation in Oaxaca in 1969: “I was in a state of all but intolerable excitement, or was, as the young now say, ‘turned on.’ A young and charming friend typed the manuscript for me.” But then he can give us the benefit of that friend’s memories, too: As Staats describes it, “Mosby’s Memoirs” is about “the humor that can be derived” from screwing someone over, “and the consequences of doing so.” (Leader adds: “When asked what Bellow’s attitude was to such behavior, she replied ‘mixed.’”)

This is a social or “crowd” biography of a quietly provocative kind. It is brilliantly calibrated to explore Bellow’s own central theme as a novelist: the conflict between solitary genius and the constraints of community. The latter, Bellow ambivalently portrayed in his novels as the “potato love” of the family, the “humanity bath” of the streets, and the rough-edged, criminal temptations of the 20th-century city.

Image

The vein that successfully keeps one focused on Bellow, and enchanted, is the novelist’s excerpted prose. It knocks you back on your heels. Not just in the novels and stories, but in letters to every sort of addressee, from intimates, to fans, to politicians, Bellow’s prose is electric.