Saul Bellow, Wifebeater

[ndrosen]

I once had dinner with the elderly Saul Bellow, I think in 1997 or 1998, when he and his much younger wife came to my parents’ house for an evening. They either had, or would later have, a baby, and what I heard about it was that Mr. Bellow had let his wife know that infant care would be solely her responsibility, not his. He was old, and if the woman wanted to reproduce with the supposedly great man of letters on those terms, she knew what she was getting into.

I reminisce about this because Alec Nevala-Lee has an article in Slate about Bellow’s violent behavior to an earlier wife, Sondra; a fictionalized version of her appears in his novel Herzog. Granted that we cannot be certain just who did what to whom on what provocation, Nevala-Lee makes what seems to be a strong case that Bellow engaged in both physical and financial abuse. He wouldn’t be the first supposedly great artist to have serious faults as a human being.

Speaking of which, I did pick up and read a novel of Bellow’s (not Herzog) years ago, and found it readable, but not something which I found very interesting, or which made me want to read more by the author. The people who award Nobel prizes in literature probably have tastes differing from my own.