Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Dita has little money and finds “a downtown fellow who made her a price to remove the top layers of dead skin right in his office, under a local anesthetic. He scrubbed her cheeks, her nose and her chin with a sander, a revolving disk.” When the novocaine wears off, the pain is terrible. Kenneth speculates on Dita’s motive: “It was her skin, she was convinced, that put me off” (p. 197); more cruelly, “When I saw my friend and pupil with the offputting rind removed, like a kiwi, alligator pear or Ugli fruit, I might fall in love with the angelic face of the real Dita” (pp. 198–99). After the operation, Kenneth drives her back to her apartment: “Dita’s bandages were already soaking with blood serum and I was afraid that the gauze would stick to her face and began to think of taking her directly to the nearest hospital. The doctor had given her sample packets of pain pills” (p. 199). She asks Kenneth to sit with her, which he does all day. He is not the best of nurses, but “you didn’t open the hand the sufferer reaches for, without touching a new level of familiarity, with warm attachment flowing in very quickly” (p. 200). Warm attachment but not love, or not the love Dita seeks, it is implied. When Kenneth takes off the bandages to change them, Dita looks “as if she had been dragged over the highway on her face.” He feels for her, for her bad luck, “because I was the cause of it myself. She wanted to be in a class with Treckie” (p. 200). What Kenneth concludes is that, “however you describe it, I wasn’t worth this suffering. Treckie wasn’t worth it either, as a rival. In most respects, Dita was effortlessly superior to us both. She had ten times more heart in her, and this produced a kind of beauty we were unfamiliar with” (p. 200).

  For the next two weeks, Kenneth nurses and feeds Dita: “I rather enjoyed this domestic stuff, and taking care of a patient.” When her scabs finally heal, “Dita didn’t have a new face. The extreme pallor went away; the coarse weave, however, remained.” The effect of the episode is narrowly or selfishly registered by Kenneth. That her face was not new “mattered less now, for if the experiment didn’t succeed, there was a broader relationship between us, we were on a more intimate footing” (p. 202). Bellow, like Kenneth, nursed Howland after her operation, changing her bloody bandages, feeding and taking care of her. If Kenneth’s nursing of Dita accurately recalls Bellow’s nursing of Howland, the unpleasant details, the blood serum, the scabs, suggest distance as well as intimacy, a novelist’s distance, and an increase rather than a diminution of the physically off-putting. “Why does she want me to see her like this?” Bellow asked Frances Gendlin at the time. In the years that followed, Howland’s relations with Bellow, according to the cultural anthropologist Constance Perin, a neighbor and friend, became what she claimed to hope they would be: truthful. Perin met Bellow through Howland, and joined them a number of times on social occasions. She and Bellow got on well. Of Howland in the early 1970s she recalled: “I did not experience her being in love with Saul, there was no agony between them, they were delightful and total friends, very easy together.”

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  BELLOW’S SUMMERS IN THE EARLY 1970S were spent in the mountains rather than at the sea. On November 27, 1970, he received a letter from the composer Nicolas Nabokov inviting him to spend the following summer in Aspen, Colorado, as writer-in-residence and Guest Fellow at the Aspen Institute for Humanities Studies. Bellow had known Nabokov since the early 1950s, in part through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose general secretary Nabokov was from 1951 to 1967. In 1970, Nabokov became composer-in-residence at Aspen, and the deal he offered Bellow was enticing. The institute would pay Bellow’s round-trip travel expenses “from wherever you happen to be,” give him use of a comfortable independent house, a car, and a monthly honorarium of a thousand dollars. Among the Guest Fellows scheduled for the coming summer were Henri Cartier-Bresson, Senator Jacob Javits, Irving Kristol, the physicist Jeremy Bernstein, and the Oxford historian Alan Bullock. Bellow’s duties would be minimal: to give a reading and to lead a discussion. Discussions at the institute were conducted for influential figures in business, government, education, labor, science, and the professions—men and women, mostly men, who had achieved a certain status in life but hadn’t had much time to reflect on larger issues, variously identified in publicity material as the nature of man, justice and the individual, the relation of science and technology to humanism, the accelerating rate of social change. These issues were to be discussed largely by relating them to “enduring ideas from the past,” as in a Great Books course. Participants were given readings from Plato, Aristotle, Tolstoy, Marx, and so forth, as well as from Eastern thought and culture, and invited to discuss them in groups of fifteen to twenty.45 The Great Books notion derived from the institute’s founder, a Chicago businessman named Walter Paepcke (1896–1960), chairman of the Container Corporation of America. Paepcke first visited Aspen in 1945 and, according to the institute Web site, was inspired by its great natural beauty to transform the town “into a center for dialogue, a place for ‘lifting us out of our usual selves.’ ” He had been a trustee of the University of Chicago and participated in its Great Books seminars. The philosopher Mortimer Adler, whom Bellow had known as an undergraduate at the university and later through his work on the Syntopicon (discussed in chapter 7 of To Fame and Fortune), was enlisted by Paepcke to design and administer the institute’s Executive Seminars and was much in evidence in summer sessions, “scowling at the inability of others to follow the ineluctable logic of his arguments.”46

  Bellow spent parts of each of the next five summers in Aspen, from 1971 through 1975. He went there to write, to hike in the mountains, to get away from Committee meetings and hassles, lecture tours, agents, editors, ex-wives, and ex-girlfriends, and to spend time with Daniel and Adam (Gregory was now married and working in San Francisco), as well as close friends and relatives. In the summer of 1971, his relatives Louis and Helen Gameroff and their daughter Myrna came to visit; two summers later, Joel and Priscilla Bellows visited, as did Walter Pozen and his wife, Joan. Fran Gendlin spent parts of several summers with Bellow in Aspen; she remembers Daniel crawling into bed with her one morning while Bellow worked. Daniel remembers doing so as well. He was eight and missed his mother, “and there was Fran in the bed, and I was, like, Okay, you’ll do.” “She was awesome,” he recalls, “and she had kids my age, too.” (When Bellow came into the room, “he was, like, What are you doing in there?” Gendlin said, “leave him alone.”) Like all Bellow’s girlfriends, Fran was nice to Daniel. “I was a cute kid, and I was his son.” She was also fond of Adam, whom she remembers as very smart, with a wonderful sense of humor. When Fran was not with Bellow, he hired babysitters for the mornings; Daniel remembers forcing them to play baseball with him “incessantly.” What Fran remembers of afternoons in Aspen, after Bellow’s stint at his desk, is that he wasn’t as attentive to Daniel or Adam as he ought to have been. “Daniel was always schlepping around after his life. He never took him anywhere where maybe Daniel wanted to go.” Nor did Bellow ever just “sit home and play with him.” “Saul was too formal….Daniel tagged along, I tagged along, people tagged along.” Daniel, however, remembers loving his Aspen visits, “hiking and fishing and jumping from rock to rock” (often across fast-running and dangerous bodies of water, without his father’s knowledge). By the second summer, Bellow had found a day camp for Daniel. In a letter of February 5, 1973, to Ferne Hudson, the Aspen Institute program coordinator, he specifies the sort of town house he needs: “A quiet and leafy street is what I would like, away from traffic and hippies. My little boy will be nine in March and if we are within walking distance of Carl’s Drug Store where the daycamp bus loads and unloads, I shan’t have to chauffeur him back and forth as I do when we’re on Red Mountain….I shall be working, working very hard in some cool back room during July and August. Three bedrooms would be best, one to work in, one to sleep in and one for the boy.”

  Aspen only partly succeeded in calming Bellow. In an unpublished story entitled “Away
for the Summer Again,” written in 2006, Gendlin fictionalizes an episode recalled from her stay with him in July 1972. To the annoyance of his wife, Julie, a figure who resembles Gendlin, Clay Lewes, a famous poet, invites Marshall and Linda Becker to join them for an afternoon hike in the mountains. The Leweses have already invited Wilson Jones, “a mystery writer who wants to be a poet,” to join them. When the story opens, Clay is in good spirits. “I am human with you,” he tells Julie. “I’ve never felt so human before.” He dismisses her complaints that the Beckers have been invited, “thinks he will not get riled today. ‘He asked if he could come, honey.’ His look is helpless as he spreads his hands. ‘What could I do?’ ” (a familiar Bellow gesture). Julie describes herself as “more forceful with people than her husband,” suspecting that “he wears out much of his day’s power in his early morning writing, while she is still asleep.” He often asks her “to handle things” for him, which is “one of the reasons they get along. Clay is not good at taking command.”

  What Clay and Julie like about Aspen isn’t the town, although they attend the music festival “with their summer friends, a few of the other writers and musicians.” It is the mountain air, the simple cabins they rent, with views down to the city and the mountains beyond, the grill in the garden, the freshly caught trout. “There are no black moods here,” or not many. What annoys Julie about the Beckers is that Marshall doesn’t stop talking; she worries about the effect his chattering will have on Clay. To calm her, Clay asks: “Couldn’t you hint to Marshall that we like to walk quietly, each with his own thoughts? Please?” Julie also dreads the presence of Linda Becker, with whom she’ll have to walk, since the men invariably lead the way. Linda would “stab me if she could, for she thinks ‘If only I were married to Clay Lewes, I’d be the one who could finally make him happy.’ ” “She just thinks your life with the famous poet is so glamorous,” Clay says. “But would she put up with me the way you do? Not for long.” What Julie thinks is: “No, not glamorous…Unpredictable is the word that comes to mind. Never anything sure. Rewarding, though.”

  When the Beckers arrive, Clay’s mood momentarily darkens, as does the sky, threatening rain. At the trail, Clay walks ahead, looks back, and calls: “ ‘We’ll meet at the meadow….I’ll see you all there.’ Then, taking a deep breath and feeling the cool, damp air all around him, he starts. His feeling of peace will return as he walks; this is why he has come.” Marshall, however, is hot on Clay’s heels as rain begins to fall. Thunder sounds, which makes Clay nervous, and now “he is not liking the walk today at all. He knows his mood is fragile, and he misses Julie’s presence.” When Marshall catches up to him and misquotes William Blake, Clay asks impatiently: “Please, Marshall…can we do without the great thoughts when we walk? Aren’t the mountains enough?” The story takes a melodramatic turn at this point, but is of interest for what it suggests of Bellow in dark moods. As the storm increases, Julie tries to persuade Clay to turn back. He won’t, because he’s in a state, furious that his walk is being spoiled. The reaction of the other characters is interesting as well, for what it says about the power of celebrity:

  “Are we going on?” Wilson’s question is the same as Linda’s. “I’ll defer to you Clay,” he says, smiling. “You’re the talent and we’re the hacks.”

  “Yeah, you’re the expert, Clay,” nods Marshall….“What do you say?”

  Julie sees a set look come over Clay’s face. She tenses. “I am not an expert here,” he snaps. He turns to the group. “Can’t you understand?” He gets no answer. It is clear they are waiting for him to decide.

  “So much for not being riled today,” he exclaims to Julie, his voice agitated, and she sees he is upset, more than she had thought. His chest tightens as he turns to the others and speaks. His voice is sharp. “Well, I am going on, rain or no rain.” He pauses and stares at them defiantly. “Talent is going up,” he blurts suddenly, and his voice is cold. “Hacks can do what they want!” It is almost a dare.

  “Oh no! Lewes!” Julie is frightened. “Don’t do this!”

  Marshall, his face drawn, looks down on the ground….He nods at Linda. “If Clay thinks it’s okay to walk on, I’m game.”

  “I did not say it was okay,” Clay’s voice is impatient, scathing. “I only said I was going on.”

  To Julie’s disgust, the others choose to follow Clay, with disastrous results. When the full horror of what has happened is revealed (verbose Marshall is hit by a bolt of lightning and killed), Clay returns, sobbing. On the drive back, the rain finally stops, the sky is blue in patches, and with Julie’s help Clay calms down. He is like nature itself, the story suggests: grand, terrible, unpredictable. He is also subject to nature, or his nature; neither he nor anyone else can resist his moods, Gendlin suggests, while she also suggests the corrupting as well as inflaming influence of admirers and sycophants.

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  UNPREDICTABLE BUT REWARDING. In Gendlin’s story, the rewarding part of Clay’s company is asserted rather than demonstrated. The rewarding part of Bellow’s company figures prominently in the recollections of the novelist James Salter, who first met him in Aspen in the summer of 1973. Salter (originally Horowitz) was ten years younger than Bellow to the day, having been born on June 10, 1925. After attending West Point, he spent ten years as a fighter pilot, from 1951 to 1961, flying over a hundred combat missions in Korea. His first novel, The Hunters, about his experiences in Korea, appeared in 1957, and was later turned into a movie starring Robert Mitchum. Two years later, Salter was invited to Aspen by a friend and at a party met the then director of the institute’s Executive Seminars, Bob Craig, who’d read The Hunters and encouraged him to attend one of the seminars. Salter became a regular visitor to Aspen, partly for the ambience of the town and the institute, partly for the skiing. In 1961, he borrowed money to buy a house in town, to be used for winter and summer visits. When he met Bellow in 1973, Lionel and Diana Trilling were also in residence. In an interview, Salter remembered the Trillings as deeply uncomfortable at Aspen (though they would return the next year). “They were not physical people. The altitude bothered them. They were thrown in with a lot of people who had never heard of Lionel Trilling and had never heard of Hawthorne and didn’t know about ‘authenticity.’…I could hardly find anything to talk to them about. They were on an extremely elevated level.” The only thing the Trillings seemed to approve of was Saul Bellow’s writing. Lionel Trilling “was tremendously enthused by, supportive of, and in every way a champion of Augie March.”

  Salter met Bellow at a dinner given by the writer and journalist Karyl Roosevelt, “an extremely good-looking woman, very clever.” Someone at the dinner showed Bellow a copy of Salter’s novel A Sport and a Pastime (1967), and Bellow opened it and started reading. The next day, “he came to my house, he came to the door. He had my book in his hand and said, ‘Well, I just wanted to talk with you.’ ” Salter does not remember what they talked about. (He would not say what Bellow thought of his writing, perhaps out of modesty.) What he remembers is being “a bit in awe” of Bellow but liking him. He had not read any of Bellow’s fiction and immediately began with one of the early novels, either Dangling Man or The Victim. He wasn’t impressed. Then he read Henderson the Rain King. “I just thought, This is simply a gorgeous, a wonderful book. So I esteemed him as a writer—no question about it—both because of his position and because of what he had written.” Soon he and Bellow were meeting every afternoon at the local swimming pool. Salter was married at the time, to his first wife, and had four children. “I was not running around.” Bellow “began to see Karyl,” presumably when Fran Gendlin was not there. “I should marry you,” Bellow told her, according to an entry in one of the notebooks Salter kept during the years Bellow visited Aspen. Then Bellow added: “You’d probably only deceive me about ten times in the first year.”47

  Bellow and Salter talked about women, books,
and travel, and contemplated a trip to Europe together. Salter’s earliest notebook entries about Bellow date from July 1973. On July 5, he writes that Bellow invited him for a drink. When he arrived, Bellow was cooking Daniel dinner, “paper-thin steaks.” While Daniel ate, the two novelists drank sour-mash whiskey on ice. They talked of John Berryman’s suicide in January 1972. Salter describes Bellow in a notebook entry as having “the face of a not-too-friendly tortoise.” He notes “strange silences, almost shyness, his eyes looking to the side as he talks. He’s reading Chekhov’s letters, The Kreutzer Sonata, a book on language and speech. The Idiot is open near his bed.” Two days later, on an expedition with the journalist Frances Fitzgerald to Roaring Fork River (“She’s a good girl, Frankie,” Bellow says), they talk of Tolstoy’s marriage. “Saul says he has made an exhaustive study of Tolstoy’s intellectual positions on marriage,” perhaps spurred by thoughts of Susan and divorce, topics he frequently raised in conversation. Salter carries Daniel across the river on his back, “an act he [Daniel] loves.” “ ‘My dear Dog,’ I say, repeating something Saul had quoted from a Chekhov letter.” Then Bellow says: “ ‘No, Chekhov can’t have said that. You don’t call a woman that. It’s badly translated. It might have been Dear Poochie, or something. Too bad Edmund Wilson is gone.’ ”

  In later notebook entries, made in both Aspen and Chicago, Salter characterizes Bellow’s talk as “lovely…nicely filled with real detail, sexual, sums of money, names of streets, all in the right proportion with an unfailing sense of humor and style.” In Chicago, on a visit of October 19–20, 1973, Bellow drives Salter through the city. “Move it, he calls to two black girls sauntering across the path of the car from the trolley platform. Their reply is left behind, fuck something. What’d they say, he asks?” They pass the Shoreland Hotel, once owned by Maury and Marge, then 5490 South Shore Drive, where he and Susan lived. “He’d given it to her as part of the divorce settlement. He’d had a $17,000 equity. She sold it for $40,000.” Salter stays in Bellow’s apartment in the Cloisters, in the room Daniel sleeps in when he spends the night. He and Bellow lie down in his bedroom to watch the television news: “Israeli generals being interviewed, tough, eloquent men. They speak in the manner of European police commissioners. They were all trained by the English, Saul explains.” Then they go for dinner at Gene and Georgetti, a restaurant said to be favored by the Mafia. They serve “the best steak in Chicago,” Bellow tells Salter, but they “won’t give him a good table.” The meal is enjoyable, eaten quickly, without wine, dessert, or coffee. They talk about Karyl Roosevelt, blacks, Israel. The next morning, Salter wakes up to the sound of Bellow typing, the radio blaring classical music.