One's first reaction to Benjamin Taylor's edition of Saul Bellow's letters, despite the heft of its six hundred pages, is to wonder what has been left out. The volume includes 708 letters, about two-fifths of Bellow's known surviving output. There were originally a great many more, including the vanished correspondence with Isaac Rosenfeld and Delmore Schwartz and a lost cache of billets doux to Eleanor Fox Simmons, which are much to be regretted. One assumes that more may yet surface, despite the thoroughness of Taylor's trawl through the 140 linear feet of the Regenstein Library, plus a whole host of other collections and individuals, not to mention the fact that Bellow's widow photocopied every letter he wrote in the last twenty-three years of his life. Oddly no European collections are mentioned in the acknowledgements, and (pace Martin Amis) very few Europeans (all the letters are in English). It is not clear whether European correspondents are simply lacking, or remain unpublished for some other reason. And this is the problem with the collection. Taylor never gives any justification for the selection which he chose to publish. The volume is organized chronologically, implying a need to represent different decades with an even number of letters, but that is the only obvious rationale. The chronological approach pays off handsomely in the light shed on Bellow's early (and enduring) friendships. While Bellow was sometimes seen as irascible or tactless (a role he dramatized in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth”) the letters offer a portrait of him as a man with a real gift for maintaining close friendships, some for the better part of seventy years. There is no change of style between these epistles and the more “literary” letters. Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, Alfred Kazin, Cynthia Ozick, Robert Penn Warren and Philip Roth are on the same footing as his childhood friend, and fellow Trotskyite, Oscar Tarcov, to whom he writes that he is reading hard in order to reevaluate the principles of Bolshevism. Taylor's introduction majors on Bellow as a man who valued love and human relationships above the intellectual, but the letters demonstrate that the two went hand in hand for him, just as intellectual toughness runs through the comic verve of the fiction. The very first letter is written in 1932, aged seventeen, at the end of a relationship with Yetta Barshevsky, a fellow high-school student who introduced him to Trotskyism, and whose 1996 memorial by Bellow is also published here. Bellow was still thinking and reminiscing about Trotsky in the 1990s as his correspondence with Albert Glotzer reveals. Threads like this run through the collection, which reveals many of the intellectual continuities in Bellow's thought. This is not to say that Bellow did not value relationships. He is shown here as a generous reader and critic, and also a willing reference writer to various grant-givers on behalf of, among others, Grace Paley, James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud and Louise Gluck. He also nominates both Robert Penn Warren and Philip Roth for the Nobel Prize. Taylor spent every afternoon for three years with Bellow and is fulsome in his acknowledgments to Bellow's ten-year-old daughter (“cat lover, violinist, deep thinker”) and his widow (“the gifted and indefatigable Janis”), as well as acknowledging the wise counsel of Bellow's lawyer. Hardly any of the letters show Bellow in a less than generous light, excluding some dealing with ex-wives. Here there are lacunae. There are no letters to his first or fourth wife, and not many to his sons, though there are a great many to Margaret Staats, possibly the love of his life, and Bellow's adoration positively shines through them. The effect of these gaps in the record is sometimes rather odd. When he mentions his fourth wife in July 1975, a footnote informs the reader that they had married in the preceding autumn. She remains curiously absent, with most references to her concerning her career as a mathematician, at least until the divorce. A letter to his son (who had apparently written to him about his mother's alimony) makes painful reading. And while minor figures in his life are carefully annotated, one gets almost no biographical detail about his sons.

Despite these reservations, and given that the authorized biography is still some way off, the letters offer a host of autobiographical insights. They include fantasies (a very funny fiction of meeting Scott Fitzgerald); poems; a furious letter to Faulkner opposing the release of Ezra Pound (whose work he describes as “a call to murder”); a fair amount of scrapping with publishers, agents, lawyers, friends and acquaintances; letters which qualify as works of art in themselves (to his great friend John Cheever, who was terminally ill); well-meaning advice to apparently self-destructive friends (ineffectually to John Berryman); requests (asking Ellison to plant some corn and cucumbers in his garden for him); philosophical musings; and a wealth of one-liners (Candida Donadio “is to candor what bangs are to Bangor”). Bellow is also candid (he found Roth's I Married a Communist less than satisfactory, and described William Phillips as “always a devious rat”.) There are no great literary surprises for those who know his novels, though the sense of confidence and excitement once he starts writing The Adventures of Augie March is almost palpable. One wishes he had not been dissuaded from the original two-volume plan, covering black-marketeering in Europe and the stories of the minor characters of the first volume. There are photographs of Bellow from childhood to old age, along with some of his friends and family.