Saul Bellow gave it all away in his books.

If you’ve read Herzog and Ravelstein, you don’t really need his just-released letters. I mean, enjoy them by all means, as UD just did; but you don’t need them.

Most reviewers of them admit as much. While respectful and appreciative, they clearly find the Letters rather disappointing.

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Bellow himself, in a 1987 note to Cynthia Ozick, helps explain their anemia. Ozick is one of many correspondents who complain that he doesn’t answer when they write to him.

I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? Because I have become such a solitary… [I’m] a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key… By now I have only the cranky idiom of my books – the letters-in-general of an occult personality, a desperately odd somebody who has, as a last resort, invented a technique of self-representation.

Yet the business of withdrawing into yourself as you get older started young for Bellow. In an earlier letter, he writes:

[O]ne of my friends tells me, truly, that I am the solitary of solitaries, a combination of a glacier and a volcano, that I have perfected the power to be alone.

That solitude was partly a revulsion against modernity, post-modernity:

I make no claim to be special. I haven’t been at all special. I made all the plainest, most obvious mistakes. But all the large “cultural” trends… are so obviously wrong that I don’t have to act to isolate myself. I am passive, registering what’s wrong in what this civilization of ours thinks when it speaks of Nature, God, the soul, and it cuts me off from all organized views. It doesn’t cut me off at all from the deeper being of people – in fact that’s where my reaction against these organized views begins.

Cut off from all organized views, Bellow fashions what he calls his cranky idiom, his odd, occult technique of self-representation. But he neglects to add that this seemingly eccentric writing in fact speaks to millions of readers and is therefore not occult at all. It is original; it is true; it gets at the occult depths of human experience. For most of his life, Bellow, an intensely committed fiction writer, was engrossed in transforming his life into art, in giving beautiful clarity to what would otherwise be a blizzard of events. And letters. Blizzard life, life untransformed, had rather weak claims on him.

In a letter to John Cheever, Bellow captures the motive and force of great fiction writers:

You were engaged, as a writer should be, in transforming yourself. When I read your collected stories I was moved to see the transformation taking place on the printed page. There’s nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul.

Transformed, the soul of a great writer becomes an incredibly sensitive receptor/transmitter of things human.

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Bellow seems to have rolled through life restlessly generating personal turmoil in order to write about it. His best novels happened in the aftermaths of atrocious divorces.

I don’t mean that he consciously spun himself around in the direction of calamity; I mean that his combination of experience-hunger and innocence, visceral passion and aesthetic curiosity, made him as much of a chump as Ted Hughes. Or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Like them, he hurled himself forward, insistent on passion and insistent on the truth; like them, he took a lot of falls.

Janis Bellow says, in an interview in Tablet:

He was direct. There was nothing he wouldn’t say and not just in a letter to another writer but in company or among colleagues, or to students. He had a clean, pure, open way of being in the world. And maybe some of that will emerge for people reading this book — his fearlessness may impress young people who are longing to be that way themselves.

As he says in a 1981 letter to Philip Roth, “I discovered some time ago that there was nothing to stop me from saying exactly what I thought.”

The fearless instinct for saying exactly what you think; the courageous insistence on following your heart; yes. But frequently what he thinks turns out to be wrong; what he feels is mistaken. The most compelling series of letters in the collection records, for instance, Bellow’s outrageous adoration of one of his lovers, Maggie Staats. You can read these letters and feel entirely convinced that she was the one. Yet Bellow’s fanatic passion alters… Maybe she’s a little unstable? Demanding? There are hints in his glaciating (though Bellow was, as his friend up there observed, as much a volcano as a glacier; he ran hot and cold) letters to her; but what matters is that Bellow was a headstrong, heartstrong man who threw himself into things and then, with rather a lot of damage, fashioned an exit strategy.

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In the perfection of the life or the work sweepstakes, in other words, Bellow was always way ahead of the field on the work. The Letters record what was left over for life.

The work, the literary work, flashes out in these letters; and that’s what makes them worth reading. There’s his inimitable mordancy:

Well, [Bernard Malamud] did make something of the crumbs and gritty bits of impoverished Jewish lives. Then he suffered from not being able to do more. Maybe he couldn’t have, but he looked forward to a fine old age in which the impossible became possible. Death took care of that wonderful aspiration. We can all count on it for that.

And of course there’s the way he found words, combinations of words, no one else could find:

[The] young dons [at Oxford] practiced their snob-judo on me at High Table…

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I … go out of doors [in the Vermont winter] and rinse my brains in God’s icy air…