Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  The correspondence stops at the end of June 1961. What seems to have halted it was Gallo’s habit of showing Bellow’s letters to friends and relaying their comments. One of these friends, “Fred,” made a remark that was anti-Semitic, or so Gallo suggests in a letter he wrote to Bellow early in 1966, after he sought to revive the correspondence. “I’ve assiduously so far avoided discussing the main issue, Fred. He’s the villain. Because of him you told me—four and a half years ago—to drop dead.”44 Gallo deplores Fred’s remark while admitting that he and Fred have been friends for many years (“it’s complex…he demands love”). Gallo’s reason for getting back in touch with Bellow now is that he has decided to publish their 1961 correspondence, together with “Oedipus-Schmoedipus,” under the title The Bellow-Gallo Letters. A printer has been engaged, and the book is in production. On January 24, 1966, in a letter now lost but quoted by Gallo in a letter of February 9, Bellow accused him of behaving dishonestly by not telling him of his plans or gaining his permission to publish in an earlier letter. Gallo had admitted he’d been dishonest, but called his dishonesty “an incidental element, unintentional, deeply regretted….I won’t plead innocent, but I do feel the crime I’ve committed is capable of an interpretation that would show it to be less wicked than at first view it may have seemed.”45 If Bellow insists, and gets back to him in time, he will remove his side of the correspondence. Bellow never replied, nor did he answer two subsequent letters from Gallo, full of apology and self-recrimination. In the end, Gallo published only his side of the correspondence, which appeared in 1966 under the title Like You’re Nobody: The Letters of Louis Gallo to Saul Bellow, 1961–1962, plus “Oedipus-Schmoedipus,” the Story That Started It All.46 Like Singer’s letters, Gallo’s letters combine insecurity with aggression. Only in the clear bold hand of the originals, littered with spidery arrows, interjected phrases, circled words, blocks of text wholly inked out (visual equivalents of habitual self-checking), is their author’s true eccentricity revealed.

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  IN THE EARLY 1980S, Bellow’s relations with his real sons, as opposed to sons “à l’esprit,” were also tricky. Daniel was then at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, and smoking a lot of pot and taking LSD. He’d been reading Allen Ginsberg (praised by Herschel Shawmut in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth”47) and Jack Kerouac and believed that LSD “brought me face to face with the facts of my existence.” As for pot, “I loved smoking pot.” Daniel credits his father with trying to give him space: “He really did his best to conceal his expectations and his hopes for me, because he didn’t want to influence me unduly. He wanted to be fair, and it was confusing.” It was confusing not just because Daniel could see through these efforts but because he knew of his father’s own early years. “My old man was like the ultimate rebel. Wrote his own ticket through life. Never gave a shit what anybody thought and was so monumentally focused on his project.” How was Daniel to rebel, “to defy my parent”? “How do you rebel against somebody who is in a way the symbol of personal freedom? What was going to impress him?” All Daniel could come up with was “nihilism, drug use, refusal, a refusal to get my act together until well into my twenties.” Shortly after arriving in Pasadena in January 1980, Bellow wrote to Daniel, who was almost sixteen, and had been out of touch. “I wish that I could see you more, I often miss you and I think somehow that you have arranged matters so in your own mind that the absence is mine from you and not yours from me. But the move East was after all by your choice. No reproach, I just think you should bear it in mind along with other facts, realities, truths.”48

  Adam’s solution to the problem of impressing his father was partly intellectual. At Princeton, he had majored in Renaissance studies and done a fair bit of acting. After graduating in 1979, he took a year off to learn Italian “and read Dante in the original. I thought I’d either be a professor or writer.” After an internship at the New York Daily News he thought he’d be a journalist-writer, “like John McPhee or Paul Theroux.” He also began writing stories. He got a little apartment in Manhattan and “set up shop as a writer.” He’d always believed he’d be a writer. In high school, “I wrote very easily.” Bellow’s attitude to Adam’s literary ambitions was, “quite naturally,” mixed. Part of him was pleased. It was flattering that Adam wanted to be a writer: “It was a way of reassuring my father that I really loved him and really identified with him as a son. You could say it represented a symbolic victory over my mother. On the other hand, he knew that I was setting myself up for a difficult road….He also knew that I would suffer from comparison with him.” In addition, Adam suspects, there was the matter of privacy. “This is a guy who really did write from inside his life. He rewrote his story to get control—the Prospero story is very important to him, in that Prospero was also wounded and angry; he had a lot of material to work out.” For Adam to become a writer raised worrying questions. “Who’s writing the story? For someone within the family to do what he did, to tell the story, that’s threatening. I might expose certain things. I might contest his version of things.”

  When Adam showed Bellow his writing, he received qualified praise. “He said, You do some things very well and other things not so well.” Bellow was much more enthusiastic about the literature essays Adam sent him while at Princeton (on Ulysses and Madame Bovary). During visits, talk about books formed “the heart of our relationship”; they gave Adam, or so he felt, “access to my father.” “It was a relief to both of us not to be talking about family issues and the deficiencies in our relationship.” When Adam planned a visit to Kenya late in 1981, Bellow offered advice in a letter of November 17: “I don’t know whether you want a purely parental comment on your project. Chances are you don’t but it would give me too much trouble to repress it, so here goes.” Adam needed something to do when in Africa: “Without some sort of purpose the trip is just another trip….You don’t need anything elaborate in the way of a purpose. You might write pieces for a magazine but you must have something. You shouldn’t travel such a distance without a theme of some sort.” It was after this trip that Adam was to meet Bellow in Jerusalem, for their joint interview with Menachem Begin.49 “I was going to be John Quincy and he was going to be Adams. It was going to be the making of me.” After the interview was canceled, Bellow’s praise of Adam’s account of the Kenya trip (“this is very good, this is real writing”) was some compensation. Still determined to be a writer, Adam decided that what he needed was a greater sense of how the world worked, to learn something of “history, economics, some political theory….I needed a way of looking at the world.” He asked his father about applying to study at the Committee on Social Thought. Bellow “was flattered,” and Allan Bloom said, “Come to Chicago, we’ll fix all that.” At the Committee, Adam studied political science with Nathan Tarcov, dropped out of a class with Edward Shils after two sessions, and lasted only a year, returning to New York in 1983. He left partly to be with Rachel Newton, whom he’d met in New York the previous summer, and who would eventually become his wife. Although the Committee wasn’t quite right for Adam, the year in Chicago brought him closer to his father. Bellow “liked very much our relationship, which became more and more intellectual. He would have liked me to stay.”50 Adam attributes what he calls a “noticeable softening” in Bellow to Alexandra, “the only childless wife.” “All the sons felt that. She made sure that he remembered your birthday. You got a phone call, you got a check. It was a good period in all our lives. You felt it was a family.”

  This is not what Greg felt, though he, too, praises Alexandra. Greg was in his late thirties in the early 1980s, married, with two children. He had been living in California since 1970, first in San Francisco, then in Redwood City, just outside Palo Alto. The move to California, he writes, was “the first in what became a series of insulating layers that afforded me some protection from his [Bellow’s] demands for attention and control.”51 Both Greg and his wife, JoAnn, wer
e psychotherapists, Greg specializing in the treatment of children, and Bellow’s distrust of therapy and psychoanalysis had hardened over the years.52 Greg was hurt by what he describes as his father’s “discomfort and notable lack of interest in the priorities I gave to my family and my career as a psychotherapist….Saul maintained, with considerable pride, that he had decided to ignore his psychological problems. Long ago he had put his faith in willpower.” Looking back, Bellow described his experiences in therapy as largely unhelpful—harmful, even—and, as Greg puts it, “No doubt, he found Freud’s boiling down creativity to the sublimation of libido an offensive notion.” Greg, in contrast, describes his experiences in therapy as positive. Thinking about psychological problems, he believes, is “a valuable form of facing emotional truth, for my patients and for myself.”53 These disagreements were exacerbated by Bellow’s interest in Rudolf Steiner and spiritualism. Whereas Greg talked of “an ‘inner self’…limited to the secular realm,’ ” Bellow talked of “a ‘human soul,’ which included a spiritual dimension.”54

  Politics also played a part in the tensions between Greg and Bellow, in particular what Greg describes as “Saul’s refusal to consider the merits of disenfranchised groups.” This refusal he describes as “a reversal that was out of character.” Bellow’s political views “diverged from our family ethos of fairness, respect, and concern.” That Greg argued back “brought out the worst in my father. Arguing with him only increased his ferocity….I was appalled at what he said.”55 Bellow’s “repellent” views were voiced “with venom, ridicule, and contempt designed to obliterate opposing views.”56 Greg’s own quickness to anger and obvious upset were part of the problem, as was Bellow’s sense of how a son should speak to a father. “When he got older,” according to his niece Lesha Greengus, Bellow “didn’t like to be argued with. He was not happy when I disagreed.” Although Greg recalls Bellow as “plagued by self-criticisms,” racked with “regret and shame” over past mistakes, he also describes him as incapable of “admitting that he was wrong or even had once been so.” He needed “to alter, repudiate, and occasionally deny that past.” For Greg, these “revisions of his personal history compounded the reversals of his socio-cultural beliefs and became new hot spots in a long cold war that further eroded our already tenuous common ground.” When Bellow “went too far,” misrepresenting “people toward whom I felt loyal,” “I disinterred what he was trying to bury, which infuriated him because he knew I had a historical point.”57

  Greg’s daughter, Juliet, is interesting about Bellow and her father. That the two men loved each other was clear; it was part of what made the relation so fraught. Juliet’s earliest memories of Bellow are from when she was six or seven (she was born in 1973). She describes him then as “very warm, very sweet,” also as “difficult,” “changeable.” At one moment, “he’d call me kitty-cat and I’d sit on his lap”; then “he’d be very distant, he’d be disapproving”; “you didn’t know what to expect.” When Bellow was cold or critical, Juliet suspects, “he was trying to fight with my father through me, as a conduit.” She remembers Bellow’s complaining to her about her father’s move out west. “He took it personally” (not without reason, according to Greg’s memoir). When Bellow was proud of Juliet, “he would always say, ‘You look like my mother,’ which I think wasn’t true but which he decided was true….In a letter he’d say, ‘It’s great to have such a beautiful and clever granddaughter.’ ” “He was in many ways a very thoughtful and kind person, but I think his need to be the top dog, the best, was very deep.” He could be “incredibly acute about people’s characters,” while at the same time ignorant of “the complexities of his own motivations.” When Bellow described the faults of a relative or friend, “you had consciously to guard yourself. ‘I know these people, there’s more to it than this.’ ” Juliet remembers Bellow expounding the virtues of monogamy, which “took my breath away.” He also once said, “I don’t think my children ever suffered very much from my divorce.” Juliet was a teenager, or late teenager, when he said this. “I was shocked.”

  Bellow disliked visiting California, and mostly saw Greg and his family when they came to Chicago, which they did once or twice a year, for a week or so at a time. That they always stayed with JoAnn’s family irritated Bellow, as did Greg’s reluctance to have much to do with his paternal aunts and uncles. Greg resented the way the Bellows had treated him and his mother after his parents divorced. As Juliet puts it, “The Bellows wanted nothing to do with these people [the Goshkins], and my grandmother’s family took him in and took care of him” (as in later life Greg took care of them). According to Juliet, her father felt the Bellows had “written him off, and he didn’t really care.” Hence, as we’ve seen, Greg’s decision not to invite the wider Bellow family to his and JoAnn’s wedding in 1970, which made his father “sore as a boil.” Bellow’s bitter complaints further embittered Greg, who was “never completely free from being hurt by his displeasure, whether it was expressed, implied, or conveyed by others.”58 That Juliet “tried so hard” to have a good relationship with Bellow “was really about my father, trying to heal this wounded guy, and I realized that that’s never going to happen.” She cites a letter Bellow wrote to her in her last year of high school. “Your father says that when university decision time comes my opinion might be solicited. I am always very free with my opinions. They are to be had for the asking. I am sure that as I never forget the essentials you’ll not forget to ask my advice.” To Juliet, “the entirety” of what Bellow could be when interacting with her was suggested in such letters, which were “warm and funny and silly and difficult and demanding and sometimes mean.”59

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  THE LEAST TRICKY FILIAL RELATION, or would-be filial relation, Bellow had in the early 1980s was with Martin Amis, who came to Chicago to interview him for The Observer in the last week of October 1983. The idea for the interview had been Amis’s. In 1974, in Spain, he’d read his first Bellow novel, The Victim, and immediately felt, “Here’s a writer who is addressing me personally, doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. And I’m going to have to read everything,” which he then did.60 In Chicago, Bellow met Amis for lunch, informing him that he would be identifiable “by certain signs of decay.” In fact, what identified Bellow, according to the Observer profile, was “his dapper, compact figure” and “his expression—one of courteous vigilance.”61 At sixty-eight, Bellow’s hair was white, his “generous yet combative” eyes “the color of expensive snuff.” “It is clear from his books, his history, his face, that Bellow has weathered considerable turbulence.” In repose, Amis thought, Bellow looked “like an omniscient tortoise.” The profile begins with Bellow’s claims as a writer, which Amis thinks indisputable, unlike the claims of his contemporaries. “Saul Bellow really is a great American writer. I think that in that sense he is the writer that the twentieth century has been waiting for.”62 Amis believes this because “the present phase of Western literature is inescapably one of ‘higher autobiography,’ intensely self-inspecting,” and Bellow has not only made his own experience “resonate more memorably than any living writer,” but is “the first to come out the other side of this process, hugely strengthened to contemplate the given world.” So highly does Amis rate Bellow that he is willing to set aside the newspaper journalist’s traditional hope that his or her subject will manifest “lunacy, spite, deplorable indiscretions, a full-scale nervous breakdown.”63

  The talk at lunch began with Reagan’s recent intervention in Grenada, which Bellow declared “an opportunist PR exercise” meant to distract from the Beirut suicide bombing of the previous Sunday (in which at least 230 American marines were killed). PR, Bellow tells Amis, is now mostly in the hands of television, which is “ugly, ignorant, self-righteous and terrifyingly influential.” Ronald Reagan may be in “a long gallery of dumb-bells,” but he’s been “TV-tested.” Bellow’s own celebrity since winning the Nobel Prize has giv
en him a taste of that sort of testing. The “micro-inspection” is appalling; “one is asked to bare one’s scars to the crowd, like Coriolanus.” There’s also “the ingratiation, the danger of becoming a cultural functionary, the extra mail (‘suddenly even more people think that what I want to do is read their manuscripts’).” Staying in Chicago, which is “huge, filthy, brilliant and mean,” affords at least some insulation (“The main thing about Chicago is that it’s not New York”).64 Chicago’s other advantage is that it offers an unimpeded view of “money-mania, corruption, urban vileness,” the chief evils of American society. “You can say this for Chicago—there’s no hypocrisy problem here. There’s no need for hypocrisy. Everyone’s proud of being a bastard.”65 Proud also of their low literary tastes, in which novels, as Amis paraphrases Bellow, are treated “as how-to books about life, or about life-style. The writer is no curer of souls; he is on the level of the etiquette page and advice to the lovelorn.”66