by Mark Harris
A critic and novelist (Bang the Drum Slowly, The Southpaw), Harris began nearly 15 years ago to assemble a biography of Bellow, his sometime mentor and the Nobel Prize-winning author of Herzog and Mr. Sammler's Planet. The subtitle is from a Robert Frost poem about a secretive creature who is "so instinctively thorough/about my crevice and burrow." In any case, he found Bellow a maddening tease who coyly avoided deciding if he would cooperate with the book. Harris even admits at one point to half hoping Bellow would be jailed for nonsupport of one of his three ex-wives so that he could be cornered for an interview. In 1978 Harris gave up his pursuit and wrote this compromise. It includes enough snippet sketches of Bellow to make him seem a churlish, self-important womanizer who refers to an acquaintance as "a Harvard kike," gripes about his former spouses and often cuts off conversations with sarcastic comments. Mostly, though, the book portrays Harris, himself a talented artist, flirting with self-abasement to win Bellow over. He ends up with a curiously alluring book. He obviously reveres Bellow's work—which is copiously and, at times, confusingly excerpted—but Harris' admiration for the man has apparently frayed. (University of Georgia Press, $10.95)
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