Love and Strife (1965-2005)
Page 42
For I now began a totally one-sided correspondence with the master, at first mailing one out of every ten or twenty letters I wrote. The ones I did send were sometimes prefaced with an apology—“Excuse previous crappy letter, sir”—and in most of the letters I put myself down plenty. What counted was that the epistolary mode allowed me to say what I wanted in the way I wanted, and to someone I felt sure would understand….It began to consume my existence….At first I was super-imitative of Bellow himself; only gradually did I rely more on my own idiom. Eventually I became wilder, bolder, I started mailing most of what I wrote. I used swear words, I used weird paragraphing techniques, I went farther and farther with free associations, and yet I also made the letters compact, gave myself limits.23
Every six months or so, Bellow would reply, usually on a card or in a short note, though each reply contained “a bit of verbal gold.” Singer describes himself smiling “compulsively” as he read Bellow’s letters, “my lips softened, and my heart opened, and I went back to the masterpieces—to the Herzog, to the Sammler.” Bellow became for him, as he became for other young male admirers, “a kind of invisible father-figure; but I was also having plain fun.”24 The charged nature of Bellow’s prose, Singer believes, attracts “an awful lot of nuts, a lot of quivering schmucks….But I think I took the cake.” “With me the Bellow thing was an absurd passion, a compulsion to connect and to repeat. Eventually I must have read Herzog a thousand times [by 1982 “maybe closer to 2,000”], to the point where I could recite great chunks with pretty accurate fidelity….At least I wasn’t picking through garbage.” There was also, he admits, “an element of self-hate” in the compulsion.25
In the spring of 1975, before stopping in Chicago on his way to a meeting of historians, Singer gathered the courage to ask Bellow if they could meet. At this date, Singer estimates, he had sent Bellow something like three hundred letters. The reply he received from Bellow’s secretary, as he remembers it, was that “Mr. Bellow would be ‘delighted’ to meet one of his ‘principal correspondents.’ ” In “Looking for Mr. Bellow,” Singer conflates the 1975 visit with two subsequent ones. Like Mark Harris, another obsessive, in Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck, Singer is open about his flaws and weaknesses, at one point paraphrasing a letter Bellow had written to him from Spain: “No wonder you like Herzog—you resemble him, being always after yourself, a kind of self-persecution. Objectively that’s funny. Sub., not.” It is also irritating, judging by the acid nature of some of the responses Singer recalls provoking, and by the lack of response (Harris, too, records Bellow’s discomfiting silences). Before the first meeting, Singer describes himself as “brimming with fears.” Sitting in Bellow’s office, awaiting his arrival, he could barely credit the mundanity of the scene, but, then, “I refused to believe that he ate or smelled or paid his parking tickets or opened his bank account.” When invited to Bellow’s apartment on a later visit, Singer was bowled over: “This is an author’s apartment floor; this is his Windex, these are his Atlantics and Commentarys, his pre-Columbian artefacts, his bar selection, his book shelves, his view of Chicago, his alarm system. My overvaluing intensity bordered on insanity.”26
Singer is good on Bellow’s appearance and manner. Not just the neat suit and silk vest, but the “wide smile” he gives his secretary. Bellow speaks “without pedantry,” “frugally,” “normally and humbly,” with “the slight lisp of a fine-grained intellectual.”27 “I was flabbergasted by how natural he was; there was not a hint of inflation in what he said,” a trait Alfred Kazin noted when meeting Bellow for the first time, when both were in their twenties. Singer asks if he’s boring Bellow and Bellow replies no, “with a charming hint of irony in his large eyes. Think of the look in Tony Randall’s eyes and you will have it.” This look leads Singer to describe Bellow (a description anyone who knows Bellow’s papers will confirm) “as having eternally to say ‘no’ to people; a man of real social instincts and sympathy forcing himself because of his art to keep aloof.” When Bellow finds Singer irritating, he says so without embarrassment. Singer complains of the conventions of scholarship, and Bellow replies, “almost negligibly,” that “stock brokers must remember their hog belly prices.” Was there much crime by the lake? Singer asks. “Enough to keep me away,” Bellow answers. When Singer refers to the “big-wigs” of the English Department, Bellow registers “a definite message of irony; I knew exactly what he thought of mediocre professors. Worse than mediocre ball players or plumbers, or even racketeers.” At one point during Bellow’s stay in Victoria, Singer complained of feeling “restricted” by how much time he had to spend with his girlfriend. Bellow claimed to have been faithful to Alexandra during their marriage. “Why does it restrict you?” he asked. “Well she’s jealous.” “What do you want to do,” Bellow snapped, “fuck every woman in Victoria?”28
Bellow’s refusal to let Singer know that he was coming to Canada or to get in touch may have derived from an increasing unease with Singer’s letters, the source also, perhaps, of the vehemence of his response to Singer’s complaints about his girlfriend. Singer himself describes his letters of this period as “entirely out of control—too personal, too sexual.”29 On February 12, 1979, in a letter quoted in part in chapter 5, Bellow sent him what he took as a “warning.”
Dear Barney,
Stone walls may not a prison make but I have enough manuscripts here for a lockup. Today I was presented with three, yours and two other of the same dimensions. All required reading sous peine d’amende [under threat of punishment]. When am I supposed to cook curry, wash the dog or examine my toes? I do expect to be in Chicago on the 25th of March and if I have not disappeared under hundreds of reams of paper I’ll be glad to talk. In moderation. I don’t grudge you the time but I don’t want to be discomfited by your hurricane breeziness. You probably don’t know what I’m talking about but I will give you a clue: my father, an old European, was incensed when one of my brothers complained to him (my father was then in his seventies) that he had never been a pal to his sons. My father justifiably exploded. “Pal! Had he gone mad? Has he no respect for his father?” I was taught to be deferential to seniors. If historians can’t understand that, who can?
Yours in candor,
“Finally he’d blown the whistle,” Singer comments, “as I guess I’d always wanted him to do.”30 Yet his unwelcome breeziness persisted, as in a letter of April 5, 1980, which begins with “advice” to Bellow (to put in more “very open” passages in his writing, like those found in Sammler), then reports on his sex life (“all of a sudden, broad-wise, it doesn’t rain but it pours”). The “warning” letter of February 5, 1979, was, unsurprisingly, the last Singer heard from Bellow before the Victoria visit.
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AT THE END OF Bellow’s first week in Victoria, Singer decided to seek him out. He found him in the UVic Library, where he had been spotted by Singer’s girlfriend, who worked there. “Surprised, he looked up quizzically from beneath his glasses, as placid as Lawrence’s snake at the trough. ‘Hello, Barney.’ ” With his finger still on the open page, Bellow apologized for not getting in touch. “Said he’d been tired and he’d been laying low.” When introduced to Singer’s girlfriend, Bellow gave her “a soft glowing courteous smile. Though he was always tamping it down, his excessive humanity could easily flare up, especially around females.” Singer was struck again by “how very anchored and committed” Bellow was, “something I’d known from the books, but around him you really feel it. It’s the same impulse that in one story makes him celebrate the first moment of opening a container of coffee—‘only a moment, but not to be missed.’ I mean he’s right here. Everything counts and can end up potentially processed as art.”31
Observations like these help to explain why Bellow never fully broke with Singer, also why he encouraged him to write.32 In Victoria, however, his reservations were clear. “His cool glance seemed to say: I went thro
ugh that Herzog stage once. Now I want peace. I don’t need to be around messy characters anymore.” Singer, though, couldn’t stop confessing his problems and obsessions, “the very worst thing I could bring him, the absolute evidence of being a child in search of a better parent.”33 “I enjoyed your shy yet not so shy visit,” Bellow wrote to Singer in a letter of June 6, 1978, after their second meeting in Chicago. The letter ends: “No I don’t need the thirty bucks, but you need to send it to me. You put me in loco parentis. I’ve already got my Oedipal work cut out for me with my own children and am not in a position to offer you the same relationship.” Singer’s “breeziness,” what he himself calls his “passive-aggressive manner,” also figured in Bellow’s wariness.34 In “Looking for Mr. Bellow,” Singer recalls driving Bellow to the center of town. Bellow has difficulty digging out his seat belt. “Wouldn’t want the great author flying through the windshield,” Singer writes.35
As Singer himself realizes, he is a type. “I knew that Bellow had attracted, by his seeming stability and understanding, by his softness and talent, a slew of terminal literary neurotics, headed, I suppose, by the poets Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton.” In addition, Bellow has had “half a lifetime of dealing with amateurs and sycophants and self-servers, trying to get close. As soon as these artist-nudgers came too near he’d obviously arch the old pincers, mostly in a civilized way, to be sure; but mostly he wanted to protect himself.”36 Singer likens his relation to Bellow to Richard Aldington’s relation to D. H. Lawrence. In Aldington’s words, Lawrence “needed cool handling and not too close an intimacy. Unluckily it was nearly always over-sensitive and emotional persons like himself who were most drawn to him, whom he was as bound to hurt as they hurt him.” That Bellow “has hurt me or I him” Singer denies, even as he evokes “all those needy hearts in Chicago [who] must sometimes feel his cool wrath at being invaded.” But Singer suffers humiliations in the great man’s presence, as when, after dinner, “clumsily, I took Alexandra’s small hand and kissed it; she did not seem pleased by the gesture,” or when he describes himself, after Bellow complains that he’s “always switching,” as being “either too uptight or too saucy” when with him, failing to “be myself.”37 At the end of the visit, at a pleasant farewell dinner with the Bellows, Singer continued to feel ill-at-ease. The dinner was held at a restaurant owned by Singer’s friend Howie Siegel, a local celebrity. Bellow found Siegel amusing and was in good spirits at the dinner. Why, then, couldn’t Singer show “what I really feel about this delicious couple….I mean they are so goddamn nice—so informed, so polite, so witty, so receptive, so handsome! Suddenly I realize how lonely I’ll be when they’re gone.”38 When “Looking for Mr. Bellow” was published, Singer wrote to Bellow to apologize. Bellow replied on January 17, 1983: “Dear Barney, Why should I be mad at you? I’ve got my hands full with the major lunatics.”
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HE WAS NOT EXAGGERATING. For all his neuroses, Singer belongs on the saner end of a line of unstable correspondents whose letters Bellow felt worth reading and keeping (in files labeled “Abuse,” “Problem Mail,” “Nuts”). At this time, Bellow grouped Singer with clever, vituperative Dean Borok, Maury’s illegitimate son. “Send this back, please, in silence,” Bellow instructs his secretary, after receiving a hostile letter from a poet whose poems he was late in returning. “Signs of hysteria here, and I already have Singer and Borok.”39 Borok was in high spirits at the time The Dean’s December was published, declaring in a letter of January 1, 1982: “The world is gonna have to brace itself for a new generation of Bellows. When it sinks in that you named your new book after me, nobody’s ever going to oppress me again, which is what I wanted all along. THE DEAN’S DECEMBER. That’s outasite….Now I can build myself a pedestal and climb up on it, and everybody will have to accept it because I am the artist nephew of a Nobel Prize–winning author who named his latest hit after me. I feel better already. I’ll never write you another rude letter (you shouldn’t hold those letters against me. I mean, really, who else was I going to complain to? I take it all back)….Nobody’s going to doubt that you are my uncle, and that you care about me. That’s all I wanted. Love, Dean.” The rude letters soon resumed.
Borok was unbalanced and Singer was obsessive. Others of Bellow’s obsessive correspondents were certifiable. One young man warns him of the dangers of computers, which give you headaches and make you vomit blood. He asks Bellow to introduce him to Norman Mailer, whose diet he wishes to study. Another writes that he has been “robotized by brain radio manipulators…causing me to urinate and defecate in my clothing and to suffer a robotized flow of sperm while I was sleeping.” In 1976, a delusional twenty-six-year-old student contacted Bellow about applying to the Committee on Social Thought. He continued to write to Bellow for a decade, voluminously, in French and Italian as well as English. He also sent Bellow manuscripts of novels and stories, among them “A Jewboy Answers” and “Loving Your Country, a Novel in Five Segments, Less Two Unknown,” a work of some 344 single-spaced pages. In one letter, the student expresses a willingness to be circumcised in order to marry Bellow’s daughter Junie (the name of Moses Herzog’s daughter). In another, he confesses: “Oh Mr. Bellow I’m so confused. I thought I was dead last night, and most of the day yesterday.” When Bellow’s secretary tells him that Bellow is finding it impossible to keep up with his correspondence, the student writes that he understands, because he, too, has been under great stress. Another secretary writes to Bellow to inform him that the student has phoned and left a message: “Some of his letters to Mr. Bellow are not to his own satisfaction, and he apologizes for any inconvenience caused to you Lillian or to Mr. Bellow or to his daughters. He hopes that Mr. Bellow is receiving the mail that he is sending because he is making commitments that rely on his requests to Mr. Bellow. If [the student] has not heard to the contrary within two weeks, he will take that to mean that Mr. Bellow has agreed to assume the requested obligation.” At one point, a few months after this message, the university legal counsel, Raymond Kuby, wrote to the student to warn him not to use Bellow’s name on his letterhead. The student’s letters to Bellow sometimes end with the salutation “Votre fils à l’esprit.”40
One of the earliest and most promising of Bellow’s obsessive correspondents, eccentric rather than unstable or deranged, closer to Barnett Singer than to the “major lunatics,” was Louis Gallo, a proofreader who lived with his mother in Queens, and who submitted a story which Bellow and Botsford published in the fourth issue of The Noble Savage. The story was titled “Oedipus-Schmoedipus” and was about a proofreader who lived in Queens with his mother. Gallo could hardly believe it when he received a letter of January 15, 1961, which began, “Dear Louis Gallo—You have a friend and admirer—Saul Bellow. ‘Oedipus Schmoedipus’ will appear in The Noble Savage #4, unless I perish in the plane [to Puerto Rico].” Gallo replied on January 30, and again on February 12, before receiving a second letter from Bellow, written on February 15: “Your letter was a little sassy but it was amusing, too, and on the whole I thought you meant well but were being awkward, and what’s the good of being a writer if you must cry every time someone makes a face.” Gallo’s “sassiness” included criticisms of The Adventures of Augie March, the only Bellow novel he had so far read (“your hero wasn’t someone I could take seriously”), criticisms Bellow described as “pretty sound,” admitting that in writing Augie “I became so wildly excited I couldn’t control the book and my hero became too disingenuous.”
The “sassiness” Bellow identifies in Gallo’s letter is like Barnett Singer’s “breeziness.” Bellow’s initial letter was followed by eleven long letters from Gallo, from the end of January 1961 to the end of June. In these he presents himself as alienated and unhappy, much preoccupied with the way writing cuts the writer off from life. Of his time as a student at Columbia, he writes on February 17: “It never really ‘took.’ The education didn’t; the City didn
’t.” He has had four pieces published in magazines and is at work on “something that may not (probably won’t) be published until after we’re both dead (a journal).” He has an older brother who sounds like Bellow’s brother Maury, “a powerhouse of a personality.” The letters refer often to friends, several of whom read his work and to whom he has read Bellow’s letters. These friends aren’t writers and are sometimes rude not only about his writing but about Bellow’s letters. Bellow chides Gallo for his Waste Land views: “I—we—can’t believe, ugly as things have become, and complicated, that human life is nothing but the misery we are continually shown.” But Gallo is unconvinced, describing himself in a letter of February 15 as “not just miserable, I’m living in torture….I’ve gone further, I think, than you….I stopped affirming altogether: myself, life, the universe, everything,” a comment he asks Bellow to take “in the correct spirit of comedy.” This spirit Bellow acknowledges in a letter of April 4, praising Gallo’s “knotty and bitter sense of comedy,” which, “far more than position [about life’s “meaninglessness,” for example], is what gets me.”
Like Singer, Gallo skates close to the edge. He begins reading other Bellow novels, partly at Bellow’s suggestion, and tells him what’s wrong with them. In the first half of Seize the Day, “I was against you…and I had reasons, I could enumerate them, good reasons, concerning method, how you were going about doing your job, how you could do it better.”41 Only the first hundred pages of Henderson the Rain King work. “The primary disappointment for me is that my attention is on you, on the writer, sitting at his desk.” Although drawn to writing, Gallo sees writing as psychosis. In a letter of April 7, he claims “our particular psychoses attract each other.” Writers hide their real selves. How can Bellow claim to be Gallo’s “friend,” as he does in the original acceptance letter, on the basis of a single story? Gallo approves of the way his nonwriting friends put down his writing “without a second thought,” interacting with him as persons, “who they are separated from their social roles (their psychoses).” When Bellow, in a letter of April 4, claims he shares Gallo’s feelings, in that “I’ve never known what it was to live an accepted life,” Gallo and his friends find his claim ludicrous. “There you are,” Gallo explains, “a professor, a magazine editor, twice married, a father, published in The New Yorker, Partisan Review, and Esquire—who are you kidding.”42 When the friends advise Gallo not to write this to Bellow, he does so anyway, then the next day regrets having done so. “They were right. That letter (also this) is madness.” Bellow takes no offense, but begins to withdraw. “I have a taste for bluntness, just like yourself,” he admits in a letter of May 9, “but I don’t want to write you the story of my life. I haven’t the time even if I had the inclination. I’m writing a book [Herzog].” The letter closes with reiterated praise of “Oedipus-Schmoedipus,” which he calls “the stripped model, every superfluity carefully removed and nothing but the essences allowed to stay.” At the end of the last letter he writes to Gallo in 1961, Bellow repeats this praise, after commenting briefly on Gallo’s reflections on “the hatred of art among great writers” (Tolstoy, Rimbaud), a topic that “interests me enormously.” “Now and then,” he says, your writing “hits the mark with a real clang. You’re erratic but you have a true aim.”43