Part Wise Man, Part Wiseguy

Sunday, Apr. 10, 2005 By JAMES ATLAS
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His work traversed the history of his century. In the '30s, as a student at the University of Chicago, he wrote for a local Socialist journal,the Soapbox; in the '40s, he was on the fringes of theleftish Partisan Review crowd. Two decades later, he found himself at odds with the student movement, anathematized by radicals as a reactionary--the eponymous émigré intellectual of Mr. Sammler's Planet. In the late '80s, when the culture wars erupted, the Nobel laureate was forced to defend the canon of Western literature against "politically correct" students and professors eager to indict that tradition as a syllabus of dead white males. But he actually belonged to no faction, identified with no cause. Like Ijah Brodsky, the lawyer in his story Cousins, he did no marching. Not even to a different drummer, like Thoreau. No marching, period.

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In the decade that I worked on Bellow's biography, I often rode around Chicago with him in his olive green Range Rover. It was a joy to see the city through his eyes. One day we drove over to an apartment on the Northwest Side where he'd lived as a child, and loitered in front of a burgundy-brick three-flat with a concrete stoop and a tiny yard surrounded by necklace-like chains. We stood on the cracked sidewalk as if contemplating a shrine.

In a memoir of growing up in Chicago, Bellow described listening to one of Roosevelt's fireside chats on a summer evening at the height of the Depression: "Just as memorable to me," he wrote, "was to learn how long clover flowers could hold their color in the dusk." Politics was for politicians. Bellow's job was to observe the world around him and make us see its beauty. •

James Atlas is the author of Bellow: A Biography and, most recently, of My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale