Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Sammler’s treatment differs from Bellow’s in that it is unprovoked. Nothing in what he says or the way he says it is aggressive. All that offends about Sammler is his age, his “Polish-Oxonian” accents (p. 32), and his knowledge.51 Out on the sidewalk, Sammler reflects on the violence of the questioner: “How extraordinary! Youth? Together with the idea of sexual potency? All this confused sex-excrement-militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth-showing, Barbary ape howling. Or like the spider monkeys in the trees, as Sammler once had read, defecating into their hands, and shrieking, pelting the explorers below. He was not sorry to have met the facts” (p. 34). Sammler can see that his talk might have struck the audience as “downright funny. Inconsequent,” and that they might think him an old bore, but “there were appropriate ways of putting down an old bore….The worst of it, from the point of view of the young people themselves, was that they acted without dignity. They had no view of the nobility of being intellectuals and judges of the social order. What a pity! Old Sammler thought” (p. 36). These reflections recall Dr. Braun in “The Old System” on “Plato and the Buddha raided by looters.” Sammler is upset by the rudeness of the audience, but also by their contempt for thought itself. He is driven from the stage, as Ruth Wisse puts it, “in the process of trying to fulfill the mandate of the university, there being no one in the university to offer him protection.”52

  Other, more trivial aspects of Sammler’s treatment at Columbia have biographical origins. In Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck, Mark Harris recounts his attempts to persuade Bellow to speak at Purdue in 1969. For a second year running, at the behest of colleagues in the English Department, Harris is asked to invite Bellow to Purdue as guest speaker at its annual Literary Awards Banquet. Bellow did not answer his letter of invitation the previous year, so this time Harris phones him, offering a good deal more money: a thousand dollars for a thirty- or forty-minute speech and attendance at the banquet. As instructed, Harris tells Bellow that he is the English Department’s unanimous choice, and he mentions previous guest speakers, among them, in a list extending back to 1928, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, William Carlos Williams, and Eudora Welty. Bellow is in a jovial mood when he receives the call. “Why don’t you come up to Chicago once in a while,” he asks Harris, “and fool around with Dick and me?”53 When Bellow asks Harris what he’ll have to do at Purdue, Harris reads from a memorandum he’s been provided with:

  “Topic suggestions,” I said, “morning address.”

  “Then actually there are two talks,” Bellow said.

  “I didn’t realize that myself until this minute,” I said.54

  Bellow agrees to the morning session as well as to the banquet speech, as long as it’s “just a bull session. I don’t want to say the same thing over again. Free exchange in the morning session.” He has other conditions:

  “No radio stations,” said Bellow. “No TV stations.”

  “No, no, of course not,” I said.

  “No, no, of course not,” he replied, “but suddenly there were two speeches instead of one.”

  “Nothing between the morning and evening programs,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said.55

  Bellow tells Harris he is not coming to Purdue for the money: “I need the money like I need a hole in the head. It all goes for taxes.” He tells Harris, “I’m doing it for you.”56 In a subsequent phone call, Harris awkwardly informs Bellow that the morning session has changed. Instead of being for twenty or so students, it is now somewhat bigger: “There will actually be six hundred.” “I can handle it,” Bellow says. Harris tells him he’d be perfectly within his rights to cancel. “I can handle it,” Bellow replies, “I’m doing it for you.” In the interval between this exchange and Bellow’s arrival, Harris reads an article by Jane Howard in Life magazine reporting on a talk Bellow gave at Yale. Howard describes Bellow as relaxed and charming in person, but combative on stage, telling the Yale audience that “campus revolutionaries” were “destroyers…just as phony as what they’ve come to destroy. Maybe civilization is dying, but it still exists, and meanwhile we have our choice: we can either rain more blows on it, or try to redeem it.”57 The talk Bellow finally delivers at Purdue is in this vein: tough, provocative, intellectually demanding. Many in the audience have trouble following it and are bored (as the Yale audience had been, according to Howard), but Harris admires Bellow for his single-mindedness: “If he was going to say something he was going to say something. That was his radicalism—not to retreat from his aesthetic conviction even to please the crowd.”58 At the morning session the next day, Bellow is told that he will be taped, “yet the promise had been that Bellow was not to be on any tape.”59 At lunch after the session, Bellow is asked by a bearded teaching assistant what the relation is between the author of a novel and its characters or narrator, the very question that led to acrimony at San Francisco State. “I was glancing last night at Henderson the Rain King,” the questioner says. “You were glancing at it?” Bellow asks. The questioner persists. “What kind of criticism do you prefer?” he asks. “Criticism of a high order,” Bellow replies.60

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  THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL of the passages in Mr. Sammler’s Planet occurs in the scene that immediately follows the talk at Columbia. Sammler again spots the pickpocket on the bus, and the pickpocket sees that he’s been spotted. Heart thumping (Bellow began to experience bouts of tachycardia in the late sixties), Sammler quickly exits the bus, crosses Riverside Drive, and enters the first building he comes to, “as if he lived there” (p. 38). After hiding in the stairwell and trying to disguise his appearance, he walks down the street and at last enters the lobby of his own building. The pickpocket has not been fooled. He comes up behind Sammler in the empty lobby and pushes him against a wall. Without uttering a word (“He was never to hear the black man’s voice. He no more spoke than a puma would” [p. 39]), he pins Sammler to the wall, first with his body, then with his forearm:

  The pickpocket unbuttoned himself. Sammler heard the zipper descend. Then the smoked glasses were removed from Sammler’s face and dropped on the table. He was directed, silently, to look downward. The black man had opened his fly and taken out his penis. It was displayed to Sammler with great oval testicles, a large tan-and-purple uncircumcised thing—a tube, a snake; metallic hairs bristling at the thick base and the tip curled beyond the supporting, demonstrating hand, suggesting the fleshly mobility of an elephant’s trunk, though the skin was somewhat iridescent rather than thick or rough. Over the forearm and fist that held him Sammler was required to gaze at this organ. No compulsion would have been necessary. He would in any case have looked.

  The interval was long. The man’s expression was not directly menacing but oddly, serenely masterful. The thing was shown with mystifying certitude. Lordliness. Then it was returned to the trousers. Quod erat demonstrandum [pp. 39–40].

  What was being demonstrated was not merely the black man’s potency, but Sammler’s impotence. For Morris Dickstein, a severe critic of the novel, “Mr. Sammler’s Planet can be read as an inversion of [Norman Mailer’s] ‘The White Negro,’ inspired by the same fantasies and imagery. But Sammler gives Norman Mailer’s argument (and William Blake’s language) a racist spin: ‘The labor of Puritanism now was ending. The dark satanic mills changing into light satanic mills. The reprobates converted into children of joy, the sexual ways of the seraglio and of the Congo bush adopted by the emancipated masses of New York, Amsterdam, London.’ ”61

  The “racist spin” Sammler is said by Dickstein to give to outlaw worship, youth worship, and the intellectual primitivism of the sixties is plausible, given his background and history. But it does not originate with him. It originates with views like Mailer’s, which helped to create the conditions he deplores. Bellow voiced his opposition to intellectual primitivism as early as 1952, in a review of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (“Man U
nderground,” Commentary, June 1952): “It is thought that Negroes and other minority people, kept under in the great status battle, are in the instinct cellar of dark enjoyment.” This view Bellow describes as both untrue—he cites the novel’s depiction of Harlem as a place “at once primitive and sophisticated”—and dangerous, in that it “provokes envious rage and murder.” But Mailer endorses it in “The White Negro” (Dissent, Fall 1957), as Dickstein acknowledges. “By turning the Negro into a psycho-sexual metaphor for the hipster,” Dickstein writes, “Mailer ran the risk of distorting the actuality of race in America, which was already fraught with half-acknowledged sexual myths and fantasies.”

  This distortion is racist. The hipster or White Negro seeks out what Bellow in his Commentary essay calls the “instinct cellar” of the black man, and he does so, as Mailer puts it in “The White Negro,” “at no matter what price in individual violence.” He seeks the removal of “every social restraint,” affirms “the barbarian,” behaves like a “psychopath,” and “psychopathology is most prevalent with the Negro.” When Mailer writes of murderous black hoodlums “daring the unknown,” he gives them what David Mikics calls “existential panache,” precisely the panache Sammler and Bellow anathematize. Bellow’s opposition to views like Mailer’s was bolstered by his friendship with Ralph Ellison. In 1963, in an essay entitled “The World and the Jug,” Ellison took issue with a similar if more muted line adopted by Irving Howe in his essay “Black Boys and Native Sons,” published in Dissent (Autumn 1963). In Howe’s essay, Ellison’s comparative moderation in Invisible Man is criticized, while the brute fury of Richard Wright’s Native Son is praised. Ellison’s response was to accuse Howe of being “carried away by that intellectual abandon, that lack of restraint, which seizes those who regard blackness as an absolute and see in it a release from the complications of the world.” This abandon Sammler and his author abhor, are obsessed with, and, as we shall see, have been infected by.62

  More puzzling than Sammler’s racism is the violence of his references to female sexuality. “In the higher synthesis of Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” writes Dickstein, “sex belongs only to a constellation of moral degeneracy that centers on women, blacks, and young people in general. Sammler constantly thinks of women in terms of their foul odors, their corrupt natures, their unclean organs, ‘the female generative slime.’ There is no indication of what personal crisis may lie behind this insistence.” In the sentence that follows, Dickstein moves from character to author: “No writer since Swift has built his work on such a fascinated repugnance toward female odors and female organs, or expected them to bear the onus of representing a whole culture in decline.”63

  Sammler’s misogyny grows out of his traditional notions of women and physicality: “Some parts of nature demanded more control than others. Females were naturally more prone to grossness, had more smells, needed more washing, clipping, binding, pruning, grooming, perfuming and training” (p. 29). Connected to this is a belief in the intellectual inferiority of women. Sammler’s daughter, Shula, is one example. The “charming, idiotic, nonsensical girls” taught by Margotte’s deceased husband at Hunter College are another. Margotte herself is “a first-class device as long as someone aimed her in the right direction” (p. 12). The bright woman in the novel is the oversexed Angela, and it is Angela who most repels Sammler. “In Angela you confronted sensual womanhood without remission. You smelled it, too” (p. 24). Angela busies herself with “experiments in sensuality, in sexology, smearing all with her female fluids” (p. 230). “We’re going to fuck all night!” she cries to her boyfriend, the wonderfully named Wharton Horricker. First, though, she tells Sammler, in whom she often confides, “she had to have a bath. Because she had been longing all evening for him. ‘Oh, a woman is a skunk. So many odors, Uncle’ ” (p. 57). To Elya, her loving father, Angela is “a dirty cunt” (p. 145), “a woman who has done it in too many ways with too many men….Her eyes—she has fucked-out eyes” (p. 146). “I wonder if women really prefer that kind of thing,” asks Angela’s brother, Wallace, after Sammler describes the black pickpocket’s penis. “I assume they have other interests in addition,” Sammler replies. “That’s what they say,” Wallace answers. “But you know you can’t trust them. They’re animals, aren’t they” (p. 245). Angela has already told Sammler what women want: “a Jew brain, a black cock, a Nordic beauty” (p. 54). Sitting next to Sammler in the hospital, waiting for news of her dying father, Angela wears a low-necked satin blouse and “a miniskirt. No, Sammler changed that, it was a microskirt….Sitting near her, Sammler could not smell the usual Arabian musk. Instead her female effluence was very strong, a salt odor, similar to tears or tidewater, something from within the woman. Elya’s words had taken effect strongly—his ‘Too much sex’ ” (p. 245).

  Sammler’s disgust at Angela’s physicality and sexual freedom is partly explained by his upbringing. “He had been trained in the ancient mode of politeness. Almost as, once, women had been brought up to chastity” (p. 140). But nothing we are told of Sammler’s past, of his marriage or erotic experience, explains the intensity of his disgust. That it is shared by Wallace and Elya lends support to Dickstein’s suspicion that it originates in their creator. The evidence that their views are Bellow’s, however, except in the sense that they come from characters of his creation, is thin and indirect; there is little of it in Bellow’s correspondence. While at work on the novel, Bellow was being harassed by Sasha about money, in divorce negotiations with Susan, and in love with Maggie Staats, whom he frequently visited in New York. In Chicago he was seeing Bette Howland, described by Harris as Bellow’s “companion, Bonne Amie,” having an affair with his cleaning lady (a black woman, “about twice as tall as he was, and well built, striking,” according to Richard Stern), and in pursuit of another woman roughly half his age, Arlette Landes, whom he had met early in 1967, just months after having left Susan. (“It may be a little difficult for you to keep the various wives and girlfriends straight in your mind,” wrote Sasha to Bellow in the letter of September 4, 1968, “but do try to remember that I am neither Susan trying to strangle you financially, nor Margy [Maggie] to be read lectures like a misbehaving child, nor Madeleine, believe it or not.”64) Arlette was twenty-five, the same age as Maggie. She had married at seventeen, while an undergraduate at Hunter College, and had a daughter when she was twenty.65 Her marriage broke up after four years, when Arlette was twenty-two. When she met Bellow, he had already moved from Windermere House to the Cloisters, an elegant high-rise apartment building at the corner of Dorchester Avenue and Fifty-Eighth Street. Bellow was living in the very apartment, 11E, that Arlette had lived in with her husband and daughter, and they met when her daughter was visiting friends in the building. “You’re living in my apartment,” she said when she saw Bellow. She knew who he was, had not only read and loved Herzog (“I just found it so clever and so terrific, what a book”) but had audited one of his classes, though “as a teacher he was a dud, all he did was read from Mimesis.” Arlette and her daughter lived nearby, having moved to a less grand apartment building on Dorchester. Her daughter, like Daniel Bellow, attended the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, across the street from the Cloisters.

  “I was young and, according to my husband, I was gorgeous,” Arlette says of herself in this period, “and, according to his wife, I was very sexy (she said this later, when I must have looked old).” Arlette and Bellow soon began an affair, and Bellow introduced her to a number of his friends at the university, none of whom, she claims, liked her. She did not get on with Shils; Harold Rosenberg “couldn’t stand me” (he and his wife were protective of Maggie); Dick Stern described her as “brunette, buxom…sluttish,” “more overtly sexual than I’m comfortable with, and available” (which didn’t prevent him, she recalled, from making a pass at her). Arlette said very little in front of these friends: “I was silent, I was mute.” Although at work on a master’s degree in teaching at the University of Chi
cago, she felt “I didn’t know enough, I hadn’t read enough,” and it was not true that she scorned or put Bellow down for his philosophical or spiritual views, like her fictional alter ego, Renata Koffritz, Charlie Citrine’s “sex goddess” in Humboldt’s Gift: “We were kindred spirits in terms of outlook.” The only one of Bellow’s friends she liked was Dave Peltz: “He was terrific. I loved him.” She had very little money when Bellow knew her and very few clothes, though she recalls wearing a flared silver miniskirt and having “big hair.” Although she had sympathies with the student protesters, she was neither radical in politics nor countercultural in style; nor was she an advocate of free love. Dick Stern was not the only one of Bellow’s friends to make a pass at Arlette. Another friend raped her, she claims.

  How serious Bellow was about Arlette is not clear. When he met her mother, “he asked her to keep tabs on me because I was ‘vulnerable,’ ” by which he seems to have meant, according to the mother, vulnerable to the attentions of other men. “I’d like to marry your daughter,” he told her, “but I can’t unless you see that she behaves,” a remark that infuriated the mother. “He’s not the person for you,” she told Arlette. “He’s already thinking of you as giving him trouble.” Bellow, in turn, was angry with the mother for not agreeing with him. Nevertheless, Bellow did discuss marriage with Arlette, and for a period she wanted to marry him, “but he never formally asked me.” One reason he didn’t, she believes, is that “all his friends had got together to see that he didn’t marry again.” According to another woman Bellow took up with in this period, Frances Gendlin, who will figure in the next chapter, Bellow thought Arlette “a sex goddess.” He also admitted that he had treated her badly.

  The ending of the relationship with Arlette was neither simple nor clean. In the spring of 1968, Bellow told her that he would be spending the summer in the Hamptons, not with her but with his New York friend, Maggie Staats. “For me that was the emotional end,” Arlette believes, though she pleaded with him to change his mind. “I was trying so hard to make him take me.” Bellow’s excuse was that “the boys are used to [Maggie].” While Bellow was in the Hamptons with Maggie, Arlette spent the summer on Monhegan Island, in Maine, convinced that the affair was over. In the autumn, however, in a grocery store in Hyde Park, Bellow came up behind her, pinched her bottom, “and we started up again.” He was no longer with Maggie, he told her. He asked her if she wanted to go to London with him that December, and she said yes, “because he owed me.” Although Arlette had begun seeing the man who would become her second husband, “there was a part of me that wanted to be sure.” In London, they stayed at the Ritz for a week, then in a small “cottage” belonging to George Weidenfeld, at 42A Hyde Park Gate, near his house in Chester Square, Belgravia. As in Chicago, she was “mostly quiet” in the presence of Bellow’s friends: “There wasn’t a whole lot I could say to these people.” She met the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Roy Jenkins, at a reception he gave for Bellow at 11 Downing Street; Jenkins and Barley Alison had been lovers in the early 1950s and were still close. Arlette could see that Jenkins was wondering, “What are you doing with him?,” but all she said was “I met him in Chicago.” She claims she had “no designs on [Bellow] at that point, I no longer wanted to marry the man,” but she “wanted to see what life with him would be like.” “It was no longer the passion,” she recalls, “it was not enchanting to me.” During the visit, she and Bellow had lunch with Sonia Orwell, who had had several affairs with older literary men. She was not in good shape, and Arlette thought, “Oh my God, I am not going to end up like that.”