A few years ago, I had the idea of putting together a collection of essays. I already had a title for it - "Everything's Gonna Be Different", taken from a Bob Dylan song. The subject of these essays was going to be what it's like to write a masterpiece: the circumstances that make it possible, the feeling of doing it, the effect it has on the writer's life. Reading Saul Bellow's letters reminded me of this plan. When he begins work on The Adventures of Augie March, his correspondence takes on something of the "confess, confess – you dog" tone of Byron in the midst of writing Don Juan. The tone of someone who has opened up a new vein inside himself and is watching it draw blood and feeling it draw blood at the same time.
Before Augie, Bellow is still characteristically Bellovian, but only in starts. He reads a little like someone wearing Bellow's clothes, which don't yet fit him. In the first letter of this collection, written when he is 17 years old, to a girl – pretty, Jewish, a Young Communist-League member who converts him temporarily to the cause – he flexes his descriptive muscles: "It is dark now and the lonely wind is making the trees softly whisper and rustle. Somewhere in the night a bird cries out to the wind..." And so on. Only towards the end of the paragraph does a scrap of his future style emerge: "But my thoughts are not altogether kind, they sting, they lash. Or shall we talk business?" Already we get the characteristic abrupt movement from high to low, from poetical to practical.
You can see from this book that Bellow is a great writer; this does not make him a great letter-writer. On page after page, he scatters the kind of idea or image other novelists might have to save up for years to acquire. He writes to a young Philip Roth, thanking him for taking him out to listen to a Shostakovich quartet in London: "There's almost enough art to cover the deadly griefs with. Not quite, though. There are always gaps." Bellow is going through a painful divorce at the time. To an old student, he begins a confession about his father: "One must free one's soul from these parental influences." He added: "Only he was too busy with life's battles to remove his father's thumbprints and cleanse the precious surfaces. We've been luckier. We have the leisure for it."
But the effect of these is strangely repetitive and concealing. We learn a lot about Bellow's artistic development, his thoughts on style, his reactions to other writers and their books, but less about his marriages and children. His first wife, Anita, and their son hardly figure at all. This is Bellow pre-Augie March. He spends his letters arguing with friends, editors, publishers; applying for grants, complaining about sales, describing his frustrations with his work. Boasting, despairing, apologising, offending. Is it because he was still essentially a private man that the letters neglect his marriage and family life? Or is it because they counted for less in the scheme of things than his progress as a writer? Hard to say.
He published his first two novels with a small press. Sales stall in the thousands and you hear again and again the familiar cry of the talented man who deserves more recognition. Then he gets a Guggenheim fellowship and goes to Paris. When Augie March gets going, it begins to crop up in his letters like a woman who will later become a lover. "The first writing of The Crab should end in June, as I predicted. It has been a little slow these last two weeks for various reasons, one of them being that I have been unable to hold back from The Life of Augie March, a very good thing indeed..." The famous opening lines ("I am an American, Chicago born...") are supposed to have occurred to him while he watched French cleaners sweeping the streets.
When Augie March sells, Bellow becomes what he had always wanted to be – a big-shot writer. He becomes in effect a public man and the tone he has been practising in his letters suddenly has an audience and a purpose. Shortly after, he leaves his wife and a little later marries a woman he had met through the Partisan Review, one of the influential literary journals that defined his generation of writers, and brought together a number of the people who became Bellow's close friends and enemies: Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman.
In Bellow's youth, there seem to have been a lot of such journals. Whenever he feels short of cash, he consoles himself with the cupboardful of short stories that he can always send off to make a little money. The sales of Augie March don't solve his financial problems. He takes on first one, then two, then three households as the marriages end and new marriages replace them.
Even in his eighties, he fathers a child with his last wife, Janis, for whom he expresses in these letters only grateful and loving feelings. You get the sense of someone who never takes root, until he's too worn out to shift ground. He begins his families like he begins his novels, starting again and again from scratch. There's almost something admirable in such persistence.
Did I like him by the end? I don't know. He seems to have been an extraordinarily generous reader, warm and critical, who read and thought deeply about many of the thousands of books, essays, poems and journals sent to him. Though he is often critical of others, a skilled enemy-maker, he seems as capable of turning the harsh light inwards. He confessed near the end of his life to Martin Amis that he could hardly read a page of Augie March "without flinching". Yet it's also a little uncomfortable that we have to wait until he is 81 to find out where his sons live and what at least one of them does for a living. And you learn to dread those notes to women that suggest the break up of another marriage.
On the whole, though, the image of Bellow that emerges from this collection moved me much more often than it disappointed. And reading the letters, over a period of time (there are more than 500 pages of them), has a powerful cumulative effect. What stands out most clearly is Bellow's capacity for friendship, which is closely connected in his mind to the duties of memory. You befriend because you remember, you remember because you befriend. These letters lack the narrative vividness you get, say, from Byron's life. Bellow isn't quite selfless enough to pay attention to the things that don't matter much. But he's very good on some of the big things that do matter, an expert noticer, as he writes in his novels: of the painful escape from childhood, the decline of friendships, the deaths of friends.
His last letter, written when he was 88, describes his "pleasantest diversion": playing with Rosie, his latest child, just turned four. But he moves quickly from this present to a profounder past:
"It seems to me that my parents wanted me to grow up in a hurry and that I resisted, dragging my feet... we often stopped before a display of children's shoes. My mother coveted for me a pair of patent-leather sandals with an elegantissimo strap. I finally got them – I rubbed them with butter to preserve the leather. This is when I was six or seven years old, a little older than Rosie is now. Amazing how it all boils down to a pair of patent-leather sandals. I send an all-purpose blessing..."
Benjamin Markovits's latest novel, Playing Days, is published by Faber
