In an entry from December 1973, Bellow complains of women. He is having problems with Frances Gendlin, “who was nervous, making him nervous. He also has complaints about Karyl Roosevelt and a new girlfriend in Chicago named Gugu, a Romanian mathematician.” Salter offers advice about Frances:
You must calm her, I suggest.
I thought the way to calm them / the way to calm them, I thought, was to go to bed with them.
That does calm them.
Not for long, he says.
It must be repeated.
More generally, Salter’s advice is “not to marry unless you are absolutely certain, unless it is impossible not to.” In the same entry, he writes of Bellow: “His concerns, his sorrows seem so childish. He will find a woman, I assure him. The world is filled with them.”
On another occasion, in Chicago, Bellow takes Salter to the Italian Village, the restaurant where Ijah Brodsky meets his gangster cousin Tanky in “Cousins” (1974). Bellow had eaten there the previous week with the conductor of the Chicago Symphony, Georg Solti. “The head waiter doesn’t seem to remember him, but hides it. Signore, he calls Saul. Professore, Saul corrects.” Back in Bellow’s apartment, they have a drink “in his large, comfortable, faintly bare living room,” then retire to bed. Bellow has given Salter 150 pages of Humboldt to read. Salter is struck by the “marvelous names, descriptions. Demmie Vonghel, Uncle Waldemar.” He describes Bellow’s writing as “compelling, witty, extra-ordinarily kind. His treatment of his ex-wife, Denise (Susan, in life) is incredibly fair (‘just,’ he says). The mafia boss whose little dog’s paws are infected…It is intensely human and at the same time weak.” Salter calls it “a book seen naked with its flaws, wanderings, ineptness. An important writer’s work in progress.” He praises Bellow’s “excellent, succinct, honest style. Use of homely accurate phrases and words. Also, he often digresses in the midst of things, digresses, not pans away. Very effective.” But of the finished book, Salter said in an interview, he was less certain, thought it “flopped around a lot,” was “forced.”
The friendship between Bellow and Salter at one point included a third party, Bellow’s friend Walter Pozen, briefly referred to in earlier chapters. Pozen was younger than the other two men, born in 1933 in East Orange, New Jersey. He went to the University of Chicago, in the same class as Susan Sontag, then to the University of Chicago Law School. He married at twenty-one and in the summer of 1956 got a job in a New York law firm in later years called Fried, Frank. As soon as he arrived, however, he was asked to move to Washington, D.C. Among the firm’s Washington clients were several Native American nations: the Sioux and the Laguna Pueblo Indians.
There were three partners in the Washington office, one of whom was Bellow’s old lodger from Minneapolis, Max Kampelman. Through his contacts with Hubert Humphrey, Kampelman did all sorts of political work, and Pozen was assigned to take on several jobs for Humphrey. Soon he “got the political bug,” took leave from the law firm and went to work for a New Jersey congressman named Harrison Williams, who was running for the Senate. After Williams won, the Kennedys recruited Pozen to work as their campaign advance man in New Jersey. Pozen got to know Congressman Stewart Udall, whom JFK appointed secretary of the interior. Pozen was then asked to be Udall’s assistant, because Kenny O’Donnell, the Kennedy aide, knew he’d worked with Indians, and because the Kennedys, who didn’t have close ties with Udall, wanted someone in the Department of the Interior whom they knew.48
Although Pozen’s job was in the Department of the Interior, he frequently did legal and other work for the White House, especially when he and Udall stayed on after Lyndon Johnson became president. Under LBJ, Pozen estimates, he spent almost half his time in the White House. One day, in the autumn of 1965, while at work on a speech for the president, he walked to Lafayette Park for lunch, carrying with him a copy of the New York Herald Tribune. The paper contained an article by Bellow on political biography (the article appeared first on October 3, 1965, in the Chicago Sun-Times Book Week, under the title “On Chronicles and Partisans,” and is quoted from in chapter 1). Pozen was greatly impressed, and when he returned to the White House, instead of resuming work on the speech, wrote a lengthy letter to Bellow, about urban policy and the fate of the inner cities (this was at the time LBJ was thinking of forming the Department of Housing and Urban Development). “I didn’t go to the University of Chicago for nothing,” Pozen recalled. “I talked about Athens and so forth.” Pozen wrote the letter on White House stationery and addressed it to “Professor Saul Bellow, University of Chicago, Chicago.” A week later, he received a reply from Bellow, telling him that he’d raised very interesting questions in his letter and that the next time he was in Chicago he should come to see him. “He was most forthcoming, and the long and the short of it was that we more or less kept in touch weekly.” Eventually, Pozen went to visit Bellow in Chicago (“my only reason was to go see Saul”), and they struck up a friendship. Now when he received invitations to come to the University of Chicago to talk about government policy he accepted them, and he and Bellow would have lunch at the Eagle or Jimmy’s, hangouts Pozen knew from his student days. They talked politics but also money, women, marriage. Bellow was between Sasha and Susan at this period, and Pozen’s marriage was in trouble. Like Bellow, Pozen was handsome; both men, in Pozen’s phrase, were “chasers.”
By the time Pozen came to visit Bellow in Aspen in 1973, he had returned to the law and had a new wife, Joan Kennan, daughter of George Kennan, the Cold War diplomat often called “the father of containment.” Bellow gave the Pozens dinner in his “glorious” cabin on Red Mountain—Frances was not there at the time—and read them pages from Humboldt (the scene with Cantabile at the Russian Baths).
He also introduced Pozen to James Salter. The three men got along well. This was a time when Bellow, as Pozen puts it, “was always doing these crazy-ass investments,” and now he got it in his head to buy a cabin in the Aspen area with Salter, one they would time-share, though Salter, who already had a house in town, would make most use of it. So the three men set out in Salter’s rackety VW for Basalt Mountain, which, according to Pozen, had even better skiing than Aspen and was more beautiful. At one point, in their ramble over mountains and through mining towns, in the middle of “absolutely nowhere,” the VW broke down. Salter calmly took out a screwdriver, a hammer, and some tape and repaired the thing, while Pozen watched and Bellow sat by the side of the road and read.
In the end, Bellow and Salter failed to find a suitable cabin, but they did find beautiful property—in Missouri Heights, near Carbondale—eighty-one acres, with views of Aspen and the distant mountains. The price was a hundred thousand dollars, and Pozen, too, wanted a piece of the deal. The plan was to divide the property into three ten-acre lots, each with undisturbed vistas, reserving the remaining fifty or so acres for “tasteful development.” Each man put up a third of the cost, and Pozen worked out the deal with the realtor, a man straight out of a Bellow novel, totally untrustworthy. Pozen subsequently served as lawyer and banker for the scheme, sorting out water rights and reclamation rights, a more time-consuming business than he’d bargained for. Salter did eventually build a cabin on his acres, but Bellow and Pozen simply retained their plots as an investment, along with the acres held in common by all three. When, eventually, they decided to sell, they had trouble finding a buyer, or a buyer at the right price (“Saul kept thinking it would be worth a fortune,” Salter recalls). Finally, over a decade later, in need of money and fed up with handling problems associated with the property (“I was the only one in Aspen”), Salter convinced Bellow and Pozen to accept an offer of $130,000, described by Pozen as “a loss, considering the costs.” As soon as they sold it, Salter recalls, “the land went well up in value.”
There were no recriminations. The differences between the friends produced only minor or short-lived tensions. On one of Salter’s visits to Chicago in
1973, Pozen came as well, shortly after they’d purchased the land. Over lunch at the Eagle, the three men discussed their joint agreement. For a moment, according to a notebook entry, Salter felt, “I am not really among friends.” But he was. There were no double-crossings. Later, Bellow drove him around the city in his new Mercedes, showing him the old neighborhood: Louis Dworkin’s bakery, the Russian Baths. During the visit, driving along the Midway, Bellow and Pozen praised its beauty and the many activities that took place there. “Tennis, for instance,” said Pozen, “ice-skating.” “Rapes,” Bellow added. Salter describes Pozen as Bellow’s “devoted, admiring friend.” Salter, too, was admiring. Although he did not always agree with Bellow about writing, nor did he like all Bellow’s books (Salter believed that Pozen admired Bellow’s books “beyond all reason”), he thought him “a great figure and a great writer.”
Salter did not envy Bellow as a man. “I felt he was harried. He was beset by problems of guilt and behavior.” Bellow’s breakthrough after The Victim, the development of a distinctive voice, set him apart. “I’m never going to be able to do that,” Salter admitted, “to bust through to the way I speak and think.” This admission was not difficult for Salter. “I’m not like Norman Mailer, I didn’t feel that with Saul. It was easy to be friends.” When Salter gave Bellow a draft of his novel Light Years (1975), Bellow read it carefully, pointing out flaws and weaknesses. In a notebook entry, Salter records his disappointment but also “the accuracy of what he tells me, the knowing, direct appraisal.” When the finished novel was published, Bellow read it again, and was full of praise. This time, Salter records Bellow’s reaction wryly: “He loved the book. He read the book with delight. The changes I’d made, he said (!) (I’d made very few and those delicate). The deletions! Additions! (I had taken out two meal descriptions). Everything helped tremendously. His main reservation was that there was no objective voice anywhere pointing out the meaning of the high esteem these people seemed to have for themselves, the real value of privilege” (a reservation others would share, though what Salter thinks of it, why he underlines it in the notebook, is not clear). With Salter, Bellow was good company, helpful and encouraging, as he was, for the most part, with colleagues on the Committee, with his secretary, who thought him the perfect boss, with other friends. His personal life, however, in particular his relations with lovers and ex-wives, remained turbulent, exacerbated by the gathering pressures of Susan and her lawyers.
SB with English Department students at Sir George Williams University, Montreal, 1968 (courtesy of Alex Dworkin/Canadian Jewish Archives)
4
A Better Man
IN BELLOW’S CORRESPONDENCE from the early 1970s, bad behavior is frequently seen as a product of character as well as a response to external irritants. Faults and vices are acknowledged, at times indulged, as well as excused or denied. In a letter to Edward Shils of February 27, 1972, Bellow enumerates the things that, “as young people say, ‘turn me off,’ ” beginning with James Redfield’s “nonsense,” continuing with “lawsuits, taxes, business dealings, stock markets, female weakness (in men and women), the gnawing volume of daily mendacity, the obstinate stupidities of the educated in intellectual professions, and my own persistent and wicked habits of soul.” “Probably because proximity breeds contempt,” he writes on August 3, 1972, to Julian Behrstock, his old friend from college, “I throw away all communication from Northwestern. All the sorority girls who snubbed me—it’s them I want to see at class reunions in the full decay of their middle age. I have no other incentive to attend.” In June 1971, a revised version of The Last Analysis was restaged Off Broadway, at the Circle in the Square, on Bleecker Street, and “handsomely” received by the critics. Clive Barnes in The New York Times (“Bellow’s Psychology of ‘The Last Analysis,’ ” June 24, 1971) described it as a “peculiar mixture of brilliance and promise, of wild humor and cheerfully careless craftsmanship…one of the funniest comedies written during the last few years.” In a letter of June 25, 1971, to Constance Perin, Bellow professed himself “delighted” with the reviews, adding, “These are the victories that gratify my litigious character, my vengeful Jewish heart.”1 In a letter of March 5, 1973, to a Tuley High School pal, Louis Lasco, he describes an encounter at the University of Missouri with “Benny Shapiro’s brother Manny…with his frau and an elegant young son in a Smith Bros. beard. We reminisced about old times on Cortez St….The young man asked what he should do to become a writer. I said ‘Shave!’ He was much offended, nettled, and turned away from me.”
In his denunciation of the editors of Partisan Review in “Culture Now: Some Animadversions, Some Laughs” (1971), in the first issue of Philip Rahv’s journal Modern Occasions, a new violence enters Bellow’s polemical prose. In a letter quoted in the previous chapter, Bellow refers to the essay’s “fulminations,” its “wickedness.” Reading William Phillips on Susan Sontag, he says, “is much like going scuba diving at Coney Island in ruinous brine and scraps of old paper, orange rinds, and soaked hot dog buns.” Richard Poirier has “made PR look like a butcher’s showcase, shining with pink, hairless pigginess and adorned with figurines of hand-carved suet which represent the very latest in art, literature, and politics.” When Poirier and Phillips were admitted to the Century Association, as mentioned in chapter 14 of To Fame and Fortune, Bellow resigned. In the “red letter” or negative appraisal he wrote to the club’s Committee on Admissions, he accused the two editors of having “repudiated entirely” the values of Philip Rahv, Phillips’s cofounding editor. “Standards have become rather soft, I know, but it’s nevertheless difficult for me to understand how anyone who has looked into recent numbers of P.R. could think of its editor as a member of the Century Club.”2 “Red letters” were meant to be destroyed once they’d been read by members of the committee. After Phillips and Poirier were admitted, Bellow reported to F. W. Dupee, “my letter was posted on the bulletin board as evidence of my unbelievable effrontery.”3
In the publishing world, Bellow’s reputation as a difficult author was well established. Like all writers, he wanted his work properly treated. Unlike most writers, he had the power to see that it was. This power he exercised freely, sometimes fiercely, as in his anger with Penguin over the covers of his reissued paperbacks, discussed in chapter 2. Weidenfeld & Nicolson felt his wrath on other grounds as well. On November 30, 1972, he wrote to his British agent, Mark Hamilton of A. M. Heath, with instructions. Although Bellow said he was “very fond” of George Weidenfeld and reluctant to upset him or lose his friendship, “it seems to me as a publisher he leaves almost everything to be desired.” Bellow could not find any of his books in the bookstores. His books had not sold well in Britain, though his reputation could not have been higher. “It seems to me that George and Tony [Godwin, of Penguin] have not taken me very seriously. I have repeatedly tried to discuss matters with them but they elude me with a drink or a pleasant chat. In any case, I am tired of this pursuit and of this nagging.” Secker & Warburg, where Barley Alison had gone in 1967, would publish his next novel in Britain in 1975. This time there would be no reprieve, as there had been in 1966, when Weidenfeld flew to Chicago to deliver in person a deal Bellow was unable to refuse.
Bellow’s power with his American agents was indicated by the nickname they gave him: “God.” “God’s on the phone at La Guardia Airport. He wants you to meet him in front of the Westbury at six-thirty to pick up the manuscript pages” was a message relayed to Harriet Wasserman in the early 1970s, soon after she began handling Bellow at Russell & Volkening. According to Wasserman’s memoir, Henry Volkening would “break out in sweats when Saul came to town.” Nor was Volkening alone in this reaction. Bellow “intimidated everyone. Years later, the photographer Tom Victor, who took many wonderful pictures of Saul, said to me, before a photo session…‘Saul looks at you like the strictest teacher you ever had in school. The one you were most afraid of.’ He has a way of giving a look—sharp and penet
rating—that can scare you to death, a no-place-to-hide feeling.”4 Joseph Epstein marveled at Bellow’s capacity to instill fear in those who crossed, denied, or let him down. Though physically unintimidating, Bellow somehow managed to convey the impression “that he had strangled a bulldog with his bare hands.”5
* * *
—
IN 1971, BELLOW AGREED to be a Booker Prize judge, persuaded by the publisher Tom Maschler, a member of the prize’s organizing committee. The other judges that autumn were the historian Antonia Fraser, the critic Philip Toynbee, the novelist John Fowles, and John Gross, an English don at King’s College, Cambridge. Gross, the chair of the judges, was the author of The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969) and James Joyce (1970) and would become editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 1974. Gross had met Bellow once before, at an informal dinner at the London home of W. G. (“Garry”) Runciman—Viscount Runciman of Doxford, the sociologist—and his wife, Ruth, an adviser to and administrator of charities, quangos, and inquiries. Gross was there with his wife, Miriam, the deputy literary editor of The Observer. Edward Shils had arranged for Bellow to attend the dinner. Like Gross, he was at the time a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge; he had also played a role in recruiting Runciman to the Department of Sociology at Cambridge.6 What Gross remembered of the dinner was that Bellow spent much of the evening “canoodling” with a young woman he’d brought along (none of the guests can remember her name). When not canoodling, “he would come out with dazzling remarks.” Miriam Gross remembers only the canoodling. Gross was also struck by how “neat and dapper” Bellow was, “a very snappy dresser,” reminding him of “various uncles on my mother’s side, who were always very good dancers.”7
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