Love and Strife (1965-2005)
Page 16
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AT THE END OF JULY, Maggie and Bellow went their separate ways. Bellow’s old girlfriend Rosette Lamont arranged for him to rent an apartment in August on Sunset Hill on Nantucket, not far from her summer cottage. Rosette was now married to Frederick Farmer, her second husband, but she kept a framed photograph of Bellow in the cottage inscribed “à ma chère cousine.” When five-year-old Daniel came to stay with his father for a summer visit, Bellow spent his time “dealing with little boys, ex-wives, lawyers, fishhooks in the fingers, sunburn, car rentals.”9 To Richard Stern, in a letter of August 1, 1969, he described his time in Europe: “Maggie caused me grandes dificultades in England and in the south, but I finished [Sammler] just the same. I am obstinate.” Three days later, he wrote to Maggie to put off a proposed visit to Nantucket. “It seems too soon. Europe has left me with still raw hurts, not likely to heal in a short time. I don’t want them reopened, nor do I want you to be hurt again, and my heart tells me to let things ride, to recover first and not to force anything. For the sake of continuing friendship, we ought to keep away from each other.” Maggie came anyway, and described the visit as “a disaster.”
They did not see each other again until early December, a separation that was difficult for Maggie. “I had no way to get away from him, I couldn’t escape this guy”—they would break up, get back together, break up again. “It kept going like that. There was always somebody else. I’d just get out the door and he’d pull me back.” Early in November, Maggie had an operation that kept her in the hospital for nearly two weeks. When Bellow came to New York at the end of the month, partly to look for property to buy in the Hamptons, they saw each other again. He stayed at first at the Hotel Meurice, and Maggie went there to pick up a suitcase for him. In addition to the suitcase, she was passed a phone message that had been left for Bellow. It was from Frances Gendlin. That night, at Maggie’s apartment, she and Bellow “had a rip-roaring fight and he stormed out.” Maggie, very upset, fell apart completely. In despair, she called Sasha, who in turn called Bellow. Maggie’s psychiatrist later ordered Bellow neither to see nor to call her, orders she believes “saved” her. They did not meet again for some nine months. At Barley’s invitation, Maggie returned the next summer to Carboneras, this time staying on her own at Casa Alison. In August, after attending Gregory’s wedding in San Francisco, Bellow returned to Nantucket, spending part of the month there with Adam (“in the end Adam condescended—he gave his hand like a princess”10). When the Nantucket stay was over, he went to New York for a few days, where he saw Maggie, then returned to Chicago. In a letter written on September 27, 1970, almost a month after the meeting, Bellow wrote to say, “I was delighted to see you looking so well and talking so sensibly and the affection we felt for each other was a great improvement over states we’ve known. Barley wrote a letter of pure praise; she loves you dearly and wants you to come to London.” A year and a bit later, in December 1971, Maggie married her first husband, Paul Brodeur, the New Yorker science writer. Three years later, the marriage was over and she was married to Nico Rozos, a Greek shipping magnate. Maggie remembers receiving a telephone call from Bellow in 1974, when she and Rozos were in the Hamptons. “I’ve written this book,” he announced, “and you need to know about it.” It was Humboldt’s Gift, with its loving and laudatory portrait of Demmie Vonghel. The fight that led to her breakdown, Maggie believes, had “filled him with guilt, made me an angel.”
In A Theft (1989), Bellow offers a fictional expansion of these events. Clara Velde, the Maggie figure, begins to assert herself “unreasonably,” or so her lover, Ithiel Regler, believes. Ithiel, a Washington foreign-policy adviser, “told himself it would be a bad precedent to let her control him with her fits.” It is Clara who is jealous, not Ithiel. “They had bad arguments—‘It was a mistake not to let him sleep’—and after a few oppressive months, he made plans to leave the country with yet another of his outlandish lady friends” (p. 132). When Ithiel’s ex-wife, Etta, lets Clara know he’s in New York, about to fly off with the lady friend, Clara takes a cab to the hotel where she’s been told he’s staying, identifies herself as his wife, says he sent her, and checks him out, paying his bill and taking his luggage. “She waited until after dark, and he turned up at about seven o’clock. Cool with her, which meant that he was boiling.” They fight—“Where do you get off, pulling this on me?”—and Ithiel storms out with his suitcase. “ ‘Don’t go now,’ ” Clara pleads, “ ‘I’m in a bad way. I love you with my soul.’ She said it again, when the door swung shut after them” (p. 133). Later that night, in the new hotel he’s checked into, Etta, the ex-wife, calls Ithiel to say Clara has attempted suicide. At the hospital, Clara’s minister (not her psychiatrist) informs Ithiel that “she had no wish to see him, and had no wish to hear from him, ever.” “After a day of self-torment,” Ithiel cancels his trip abroad, fends off the sympathy of his ex-wife, “avid to hear about his torments” (p. 135), and returns home. He accepts none of the “handy fixes” about suicide (as “power move,” “punitive,” “the drama of rescue”) offered by friends:
You could tell yourself such things; they didn’t mean a damn. In all the world, now, there wasn’t a civilized place left where a woman would say, “I love you with my soul.” Only this backcountry girl was that way still. If no more mystical sacredness remained in the world, she hadn’t been informed yet. Straight-nosed Ithiel, heading for Washington and the Capitol dome, symbolic of a nation swollen with world significance, set a greater value on Clara than on anything in this place, or any place. He thought, This is what I opted for, and this is what I deserve….I got what I had coming [pp. 134, 135].
For all Bellow’s “unforgivable” behavior (Rita’s word, used of Halsband), Maggie shared with him a sense of soulful connection, the sense Clara feels for Ithiel. “I am his truest friend,” Clara says of Ithiel, “and he understands that and responds emotionally” (p. 155). “It had become a permanent connection,” Maggie says of her relationship with Bellow, one that lasted “till he died.”
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MAGGIE IS NOT SURE WHY she contacted Sasha after Bellow stormed off. Sasha was “more worldly, a little older, more of the mother role, and clearly I must have identified with her at this point.” In an interview, Sasha described Maggie as “a good-hearted person,” “very broken-up” after the separation with Bellow. The two women had first met in January 1968, at the French consulate in New York, when Bellow received his Croix de Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. Sasha’s initial impression of Maggie was that she was “very cute, but ditzy, off the wall.” Although “never a beauty,” she was “so sexy” (“one after another,” men fell for her). Later, Sasha realized that Maggie was not only “very, very smart” but “highly organized” (like Frances Gendlin, Maggie would later work at magazines, first as features editor of Condé Nast Traveler, then as editor in chief of Travel Holiday); she was quite capable of taking charge of Bellow (“That, to him, was love,” Sasha claimed). Maggie also deserved credit, Sasha felt, for helping to smooth relations not only between father and son but between father and ex-wife. That Susan was “pinning him to the wall, big time, over money,” played its part as well; Susan had taken the baton from Sasha as demon wife.11
When Sasha and Adam moved from Great Neck to the Upper West Side, and Adam enrolled in the Dalton School, where Susan had once taught, Bellow willingly paid Dalton’s fees (it helped that he’d been unhappy with Adam’s schooling in Great Neck). In addition, he paid the costs for Adam’s bar mitzvah on March 7, 1970, and for further Hebrew lessons (Adam had been learning Hebrew since he was nine). Sasha “signed Adam up” at the Park Avenue Synagogue and made all the arrangements for the reception, which was held at their apartment on West End Avenue. She ordered smoked fish and other delicacies from Zabar’s and cooked “pots and pots” of food. Sam, the younger of Bellow’s two brothers, with his wife, Nina, came, bu
t Maury’s side of the family was not invited. Anita did not come, nor did Susan—Adam suspects they weren’t invited—or Maggie or Greg (“mad at me because Saul had given him his version,” presumably of the breakup, and/or fights about money). Nearly the entire congregation of the synagogue turned out for the bar mitzvah, as many as a thousand people, Sasha estimated. Everyone wanted to see the famous author and his son.
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THE FAMOUS AUTHOR HAD BEEN much in the news. On February 1, 1970, five weeks before the bar mitzvah, Mr. Sammler’s Planet appeared in book form, having previously been published in its entirety in two installments of The Atlantic (November and December 1969). The novel’s critical reception was mixed, but the critics agreed about Bellow’s standing in American literature, a consensus summed up by Joseph Epstein in “Saul Bellow of Chicago,” a profile in The New York Times Book Review (May 9, 1971):
Saul Bellow is the premier American novelist: the best writer we have in the literary form that has been dominant in the literature of the past hundred years. He has come to his eminence not through the mechanics of publicity, self-advertisement or sensationalism, but through slowly building up a body of work, an oeuvre, that with each new novel has displayed greater range, solidity, penetration and brilliance.
The funding foundations, universities, and honorary societies agreed. In May 1969, Bellow was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston. In September, the Rockefeller Foundation gave him money to start a new magazine with Botsford. In October, he was appointed to the Salk Foundation’s Council for Biology in Human Affairs (along with James Watson, Jonas Salk, and Jacques Monod, among others). In June 1970, he received an honorary degree from NYU (in a ceremony unflatteringly described in December 1970 in what would prove the sole issue of his and Botsford’s new magazine, Anon12) and was flown to Israel as a guest of the English Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In Tel Aviv, he was the main speaker at a symposium sponsored by the U.S. Cultural Center, answering questions from a panel of distinguished Israeli writers, including A. B. Yehoshua and Yehuda Amichai. In Jerusalem, he attended a banquet with Golda Meir and Elie Wiesel, commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. In March 1971, Mr. Sammler’s Planet won the National Book Award, Bellow’s third. In May, Cornell University gave him an honorary degree. In September, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.13 A year later, in June 1972, he received honorary degrees from Yale and Harvard.
There were also personal tributes, including one Bellow received from a woman named Gusta W. Frydman, a New York psychotherapist born in Poland and living on the Upper West Side, “a graduate of Nazism and a Soviet labor camp.” Reading Sammler, she wrote to Bellow on March 16, 1970, made her “profoundly grateful….You are a testimony to the survival of our sad race.” The letter ends with a query: “I noticed that your Sammler occasionally talks seriously to men, but never to women. Why?” Bellow answered on April 1. He “greatly appreciated” Frydman’s letter and “was particularly touched by the ‘survival of our sad race.’ ” As for “the unserious conversations Mr. Sammler has with women, I too find them regrettable and I wish I had been able to imagine a woman equal to him in stature. One of these days perhaps I will get lucky.” Few if any of Bellow’s male characters are “equal” to Sammler in moral or intellectual stature, though whether his male and female characters are equally unequal, or one accepts his weighting of Sammler in the first place, are different questions.
Gusta W. Frydman was not the only female reader to question Bellow about the depiction of women in Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Edith Tarcov was especially upset about the character of Margotte Arkin, Sammler’s niece. Margotte’s intellectual and political views are dismissed by Sammler as “ridiculous” impersonations of the views of her deceased husband, Ussher, Sammler’s friend, to whose memory she is devoted. Edith Tarcov was devoted to the memory of her deceased husband, Oscar Tarcov, Bellow’s friend, and she had a sister named Margot, whose name she pronounced “Margotte,” from the German original. After Oscar’s death, Edith took on work as a freelance editor, was, as mentioned earlier, managing editor of Irving Howe’s magazine, Dissent, and wrote successful children’s books, including versions of several Grimm’s fairy tales. (“My sister and I still get a few thousand dollars a year through them,” Nathan Tarcov told me in 2008.) The character of Margotte is “devoid of wickedness,” but she is a high-minded bore, “full of German wrongheadedness,” “a bothersome creature, willing, cheerful, purposeful, maladroit” (p. 13), on the “right side, the best side, of every big human question: for creativity, for the young, for the black, for the poor, the oppressed, for victims, for sinners, for the hungry” (p. 15).
Reading about Margotte left Edith Tarcov feeling, in her son’s words, “humiliated and exposed.” He remembers her saying she felt she “couldn’t go outside—people would be laughing at her—and I think she didn’t speak to him for a while.” When Bellow learned that Edith was upset, he offered “some sort of apology or reconciliation,” but this placating was less important than Edith’s just “getting over it,” accepting that “it wasn’t all that terrible.” Terrible or not, dismissing the views of women like Margotte wasn’t uncommon. As Nathan puts it, “Women of that generation involved in intellectual circles…weren’t taken very seriously by the men.” As he also points out, the connections between the fictional Arkins and the real-life Tarcovs were “much more explicitly marked than many of the cases where characters are partly modeled after someone.” In later years, however, Bellow arranged for Edith to edit The Portable Saul Bellow (1973), and as their correspondence about the volume suggests, he took her opinions seriously.
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BELLOW KNEW THAT his reactions were often out of control in the late 1960s and early 1970s. On March 14, 1970, he wrote to William Maxwell, at the time president of the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, declining an invitation to deliver the organization’s annual Blashfield Address. Although “greatly honored” by the invitation, he was in altogether the wrong state to compose such an address: “For the past two weeks I have been writing a polemical essay—Contra Tutti. It is intemperate and names names. I’ve worked myself into a bad mood….If you had asked for fulminations, for wickedness, I’d have been able to accept.”14 The previous spring, according to Atlas, Bellow had sought help for his moods, entering into therapy with Heinz Kohut, an Austrian-born psychoanalyst and past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Bellow had known Kohut for some years and may have been treated by him earlier. Among the Bellow Papers in the Regenstein is a postcard from Kohut dated September 3, 1966, written from California, asking Bellow if he would be in Chicago on October 3. There are also bills for “professional services” dated November and December 1966, at the time when Bellow left Susan, and when he was involved with Maggie and others. Whether the services in question were for Bellow or Susan is unclear. In the spring of 1969, when Bellow again turned to Kohut, he was living in an eleventh-floor Cloisters apartment directly opposite Kohut’s apartment. To Atlas, Bellow described their sessions as “more literary than professional.” Kohut was interested in art and literature and admired Bellow’s writing. He had also begun questioning traditional analytic views. In The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Treatment of Psychoanalytic Narcissistic Personality Disorder (1971), his best-known book, Kohut deplores the narrow focus of traditional psychoanalysis on drives and internal conflicts, stressing instead the role played in character development by environmental and cultural factors, including relationships. Unlike many orthodox analysts, he was willing not just to acknowledge the role of deliberate or conscious thought and decision in behavior but to take it into account.15 Bellow would also have approved Kohut’s related view of artistic creation: as balance or integration, of inner and outer, perceiving subject a
nd perceived object, rather than as unconscious wish fulfillment.16
Bellow’s main problems in the late 1960s were not with art but with women, as well as with children, students, editors, and publishers. “I learned to organize my daily life for a single purpose,” Bellow wrote to Hyman Slate, looking back on his earlier behavior, in a letter of July 22, 1980. “There was one other drive, the sexual one, but even that presently gave way [Bellow writes in the sixth year of his marriage to Alexandra Tulcea, wife number four]. My erotic life was seriously affected, too, in that I diverted myself with a kind of executive indiscriminateness—without a proper interest in women.” What caused him to consult Kohut, he told Atlas, was “a period of turmoil,” by which he seems to have meant in the nation as well as personally, producing in him extremes of jealousy, paranoia, anger, and aggression. Atlas quotes him as playing down his treatment with Kohut, whom he claims to have seen “only a few times.”17 Kohut left no records of their sessions, but Atlas conjectures that Bellow may have been the model for a patient Kohut describes in one of his books, How Does Analysis Cure? (1984). This patient, “Mr. I,” is a professor, not a writer, and suffers from “a Don Juan syndrome,” described as “the attempt to provide an insecurely established self with a continuous flow of self-esteem.” Whether Kohut offered such a diagnosis to Bellow, and if so how Bellow responded to it, cannot be known. For Kohut, Mr. I’s problem was narcissism, a product of lack of empathy, poor attachment, in particular in relation to the mother. His chasing of women was “motivated not by libidinal but by narcissistic need,” the result of poor parenting. He had a “self-absorbed, attention-demanding father [who] had actively belittled and ridiculed him,” which could also be said of Bellow; whether Bellow’s mother was like Mr. I’s mother (“joyless, guilt-producing”), as Atlas suggests, is harder to accept, though the adolescent Bellow could not face the reality of her illness, and as a consequence felt guilty as well as bereft when she died (his reaction is discussed in chapter 4 of To Fame and Fortune). Bellow himself says nothing about narcissism in describing his behavior in the late 1960s. His womanizing was a product of the times, of the sexual revolution deplored in Sammler. “It was terribly destructive to me; I took it as entitlement, the path to being a free man.”18