‘Saul Bellow’s Heart’, by Greg Bellow – review

Greg Bellow, a retired child psychotherapist in his late sixties, is the eldest of the novelist Saul Bellow’s offspring. Bellow Sr (pictured above in 1984), as we already knew from his part-autobiographical fictions and a readable, well-sourced critical biography by James Atlas published in 2000, was a fairly dutiful, not unaffectionate father but didn’t see affection as an impediment to truthfulness and always put his writing before anything else. He claimed that he had never heard of ‘an honest working man’ on either side of his Lithuanian Jewish family: ‘My forefathers were Talmudists. My maternal grandfather had 12 children and never worked a day in his life.’ Bellow himself toiled at his writing but no one around him, at least in the early days, saw it as any kind of a job. Famously, when he stopped for the evening, Anita — Greg’s working mother — was known to say: ‘So it shouldn’t be a total loss, why don’t you take out the garbage?’

After Bellow’s death in 2005, the son set himself to reading all his father’s books in the hope of understanding him better. One can sympathise, but there are obvious problems. Greg Bellow isn’t, and doesn’t claim to be, a more sophisticated reader, let alone writer, than any other of the (literally) thousands who have offered interpretations of the Nobel Prize winner and his work. And it’s hard not to think it’s time for the son to get over their sadly unequal relationship.

Saul Bellow’s intellectual and emotional career was both complex and, in outline, simple enough. ‘Young Saul’ broke away from his origins into passionate, convinced secularism and socialism and an absorption in psychoanalysis. (During much of Greg’s childhood, instead of a pram in the hall there was a Reichian orgone box, described in one of the book’s few really vivid passages.