When I heard the second volume of Zachary Leader’s mammoth biography (1,600 pages!) of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow had been published, I raced to the nearest bookstore to see if my name appeared in the index. I was shocked, and a little disappointed, to find that it did not. How could the author consider his research complete when he left out the fateful day on which I had lunch with Bellow?
Okay, I didn’t actually have lunch with Bellow, but I have—as they say—been dining out on the story for half a century. I ate right before he was scheduled to eat at the faculty club at the University of Chicago, where Bellow was teaching at the time. Full disclosure time: I was lunching there because I was a waiter, not part of Bellow’s circle of friends, or even his circle of enemies, which was a slightly larger group if you read his works as romans à clef.
