Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  A few days after his return to New York, Atlas received a call from Adam Bellow, reporting that Bellow was “very sore at me. According to Adam, his father thinks that I’m trying to make a career out of him.”83 But when the Bloom article came out, Adam called again to say that his father had liked it, also that he “appreciated the unctuous letter I sent him stressing that my article really was about Bloom while acknowledging that I hoped to write about B later. All is forgiven; I am back in B’s ‘good graces.’ So far so good.”84 Atlas then told Adam that he intended to go ahead with the book, and he wrote to Bellow for permission to examine his papers. He received no reply. In the spring of 1989, however, “on an impulse,” Atlas flew to Chicago and called Bellow, who suggested that he come to his apartment. Atlas found Bellow “formal,” “wary.” He told Atlas he felt “burned” by Ruth Miller’s book, about to be published, adding: “I’m not ready to be memorialized. I don’t have all the answers. I’m still trying to figure things out.” (Ruth Miller’s book will be discussed in chapter 10.) He agreed to see Atlas “from time to time…but doesn’t want to become too involved.” As for his papers, Atlas could see manuscripts but not correspondence. “Maybe I’ll simmer down,” he added. For the next ten years, Atlas was a presence in Bellow’s life, “The Shadow in the Garden,” the title Atlas gave to a memoir which appeared in The New Yorker on June 26 and July 3, 1995 (and from which I have been quoting). The memoir worried and upset Bellow and increased his wariness. The title came from Bellow himself, misremembered from notes Atlas had taken from an interview with Eugene Kennedy. What Bellow actually told Kennedy, according to Atlas’s checking of his notes, was that biographers were “the shadow of the tombstone falling across the garden.”85 The story of the biography and of Bellow’s shifting feelings about it is taken up in subsequent chapters.

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  MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK was published in June 1987.86 The book had taken Bellow only six months to write; it was begun in the summer of 1986, six months after Alexandra insisted that he vacate the Sheridan Road apartment.87 Its botanist hero, Benn Crader, is another “outstanding ‘noticer’ ” (p. 184), though what he notices is plants, in particular arctic lichens. Benn’s noticing, like Bellow’s, moves through surface detail to inner meaning. He “saw into or looked through plants” (p. 19), “sure that nature has an inside” (p. 128); “there was something visionary about the distinctness with which ‘plants came before him’ ” (p. 97). Benn’s appearance suggests both perceptual power and otherworldliness. His eyes are “cobalt blue” (p. 157), “marine-blue, ultramarine” (p. 6), his face “like the moon before we landed on it” (p. 114). Benn’s thirty-five-year-old nephew, Kenneth Trachtenberg, the novel’s narrator, is an assistant professor of Russian literature who teaches at the same unnamed Midwestern university as Benn. Kenneth calls Benn “a contemplative, concentrating without effort” (p. 245), a description that recalls the infant Bentchka, a fictional representation of the infant Bellow, in “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” “dreaming at” phenomena.88 Benn’s problems occur when he looks or dreams at human beings rather than at plants, at women in particular: “He couldn’t make the psychic transfer to human relations” (p. 98).

  The reason for Benn’s failure with women is that, for all his otherworldliness, he, too, has been infected by modernity, in particular by modernity’s debasement of love into sex. After fifteen years as a widower, “dredged in floury relationships by ladies who could fry him like a fish if they had a mind to” (p. 22), he is still in thrall to “love longings” (p. 270).89 To Kenneth, watching “Uncle” seek for love is like watching “a bad driver fail to back into a parking space” (p. 5). The love Benn longs for is love “in a classic form” (p. 15), Plato’s form, the form of Diotima in the Symposium. This was also the ideal of love Allan Bloom espoused, in his teaching and his writing, and which devoted students, including Janis, embraced. Benn is like Abe Ravelstein: “not one of those people for whom love has been debunked and punctured—for whom it is historical, Romantic myth long in dying but today finally dead. He thought—no, he saw—that every soul was looking for its peculiar other, longing for its complement….Love is the highest function of our species—its vocation….He never forgot this conviction. It figures in all his judgments” (Ravelstein, pp. 139–40).90 In his mid-fifties, Benn falls disastrously in love with a “perfect” beauty, a woman twenty years his junior. He marries this woman, Matilda Layamon, despite misgivings from the daimon-like clairvoyant power that allows him to see into plants, a power he wrongly distrusts when focused on humans. As he tells Kenneth: “I was warned…not to marry. It was a sin to disobey the warning. But a man like me, trained in science, can’t go by revelation. You can’t be rational and also hold with sin” (p. 290).

  In marrying Matilda, Benn enters what the critic Ellen Pifer calls “the maelstrom of American greed, ambition, desire.”91 The Layamons are a family straight out of Balzac, scheming about power and money. Some part of Benn, Kenneth conjectures, “had wanted to come down…had a special wish to enter into prevailing states of mind and even, perhaps, into the peculiar sexuality associated with such states” (p. 158). What draws Benn into the Layamon world is “admiration of beauty; desire to be bound to a woman in love and kindness; and finally, sexual needs, which, let us speak frankly, are seldom if ever free from crotchets, if not downright perversities” (p. 186).

  It is not only his daimon that warns Benn. Matilda’s appalling father, Dr. William Layamon, describes her, in a passage quoted earlier, as “a real bitch,” though one whose bitchiness “will be working for you….[She’s] great with brilliant people and she can invite them because of you, a big name in your field” (pp. 154–55). (Benn’s supposed status as a “world-famous botanist” [p. 147] recalls the improbable Bellow-like status of Chick in Ravelstein, or Albert Corde in The Dean’s December.) To be married to Matilda, her father warns Benn, he’ll need to make a good deal more than the sixty thousand he earns as an academic. “If you’re going to share the bed of this delicious girl of high breeding and wallow in it, you’ll have to find the money it takes” (p. 163).92 Will Matilda take care of Benn? Fortunately, this is not what Benn needs, since with her “classic face” and “hyacinth hair” (terms from Edgar Allan Poe) Matilda “wasn’t going to do the dishes” (p. 45). Benn can do the dishes, in fact “rather liked” housework, a trait he shares with his creator, who was as happy to parade the names of cleaning products as of philosophers. “He poured blue Vanish into his toilet,” Kenneth tells us. “He preferred 409 to all other kitchen cleaners. He did his socks with Woolite. Jobs that drove other men wild, like peeling spuds, cleaning out the cheese grater, scrubbing scorched saucepans, doing the floors on his knees, didn’t bother him at all” (p. 44).93 How to get the money to keep Matilda has already been worked out by the Layamons. Benn must win back the inheritance he has been cheated of by his eighty-year-old uncle, Harold Vilitzer, an “old-time pol and ward boss, a machine alderman…as crooked as they came” (p. 32). If he succeeds, Dr. Layamon adds, speaking colloquially of money alone, “we think you can be made whole” (p. 163).

  The corruption of Benn’s longing for love is partly explained by Bellow in an interview of May 31, 1987, with Eugene Kennedy in the Chicago Tribune.94 The interview appeared only days before the novel’s publication. “In sexual relationships people have become extremely literal,” Bellow told Kennedy. “They don’t view each other as persons but only as bearers of erogenous zones.” The result is disastrous, since “you cannot excise human nature and not expect people to die of heartbreak.”95 Hence the new novel. “In More Die of Heartbreak, I am trying to deal with the fact that the more we become objects to one another, the less well we get along together….People act like trunk murderers in their relationships, dismembering everybody they meet, taking the part they want and discarding the rest.”96 This view of modern sexuality goes some way toward explaining one of the strang
est features of the novel. Bored during a visit to the Berkshires, Matilda badgers Benn into taking her to see Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Benn hates the movie and becomes obsessed with the resemblance between Anthony Perkins’s shoulders and those of Matilda, also by how far apart her breasts are (“She isn’t wide only across the shoulders but also in front….The distance between them has an effect on me” [pp. 254–55]). Kenneth’s explanation is that “these defects jump out at you because love punishes you for drafting it against its will; it’s one of those powers of the soul that won’t be conscripted. It makes beauty, it makes strength….Without it, critical consciousness simply reduces all comers to their separate parts, it disintegrates them” (p. 257).

  One consequence of Benn’s insistence that what he feels for Matilda is love is that he loses something of his clairvoyant power with plants. Decked out in custom-made tweeds from his father-in-law’s tailor, his hair done over by Matilda’s “stylist” (p. 156), Benn wanders through the alien glamour of his in-laws’ enormous apartment, his only comfort a beautiful azalea glimpsed through the open door of Matilda’s mother’s private study. When at last he sees the flower up close, he is shocked to discover that it is a fake, a silk replica. This shock he registers in an idiom hard to square with his supposed otherworldliness:

  A stooge azalea—a stand-in, a ringer, an impostor, a dummy, a shill! I was drawing support for weeks and weeks from this manufactured product. Every time I needed a fix, a contact, a flow, I turned to it. Me, Kenneth! After all these years of unbroken rapport, to be taken in [p. 292].

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  IT IS NOT HARD TO SEE why Bellow should create a character like Benn Crader, with his history of failed love relationships. Nor is it a mystery that he should imagine his falling for a perfect beauty like Matilda, a version, in part, of Susan Glassman. Most of the novel’s real-life correspondences are, however, partial, fragmentary, multiple. Benn’s unearthliness is as much Alexandra’s as Bellow’s; Matilda’s sexual allure is partly Alexandra’s as well as Susan’s. For Roger Kaplan, Harold Kaplan’s son, in part the model for Kenneth, Bellow “to some extent sees himself as Benn, meant to represent (not just ‘represent,’ I mean just be a story about) vulnerability despite superior brainpower. At the same time, Kenneth also has much of Saul in him [as in Kenneth’s relationship with Dita Schwartz, discussed in chapter 3, modeled in part on Bette Howland]. First of all, Kenneth is, like Benn, vulnerable despite his intellectual power. Second, Kenneth is to some extent Saul looking upon Saul and trying to give Saul advice.”97

  The novel’s plot—nothing much happens till halfway through—owes something to real-life experiences and people, in particular to the business conflicts between Bellow and Maury. Benn loves his swindling uncle Harold, despite Uncle Harold’s having robbed him of his inheritance (by undervaluing the land on which their family house stood and buying it from Benn and his sister for a fraction of its eventual worth). When Benn and Kenneth visit Uncle Harold to confront him over his swindling, he reacts angrily, as Maury did when confronted in Miami by Bellow and Joel. Like Maury’s, Uncle Harold’s “main objective was to pile up a huge personal fortune and the hell with everything else” (p. 189). Also like Maury, he had started out “on the street, right here in town,” in his case “taking bets, paying off the police. As a bookie, he was such a success out in the fresh air that when he had a big loss the cops collected 50,000 bucks among themselves to keep him in business. It was worth it to them. Next thing we knew, he was in politics” (p. 35). When Benn and Kenneth’s mother take Uncle Harold to court, they are bound to lose, since “there’s no saying how many judges he owned” (p. 36).98

  Uncle Harold’s son Fishl, as was mentioned in chapter 7, loves his father, though, like Joel, he has been cut off from him for years, in Fishl’s case fifteen years. When Benn and Kenneth urge Fishl to intervene with his father, as Bellow urged Joel to intervene with Maury, Fishl refuses indignantly, “in an overflow of feeling” that reveals an “inner” self or “soul” (p. 182). Fishl is not Joel, but Joel’s relations with his father and uncle provided Bellow with a starting point from which to imagine Fishl’s relations with his father. So, too, I suggest, did Bellow’s sons, Gregory in particular, judging by the speech Bellow gives Fishl explaining why all his life he felt that his cousin Benn “was better than me.”

  He didn’t invest his whole life in a struggle with his parents. I meet people of eighty who still are furious over their toilet training, or because their dad wouldn’t take them to the ball game. Imagine such an infantile life! Such bondage to papa and mama. A whole life of caca-pipi! No self-respecting person would submit. Part peacefully from your parents if you can, and if you can’t, tell them to fuck off. You have to go your own way at twenty, at least. I’m typical, still pursuing my father at the age of fifty, hating and loving and begging him to let the prodigal come back [pp. 171–72].

  Fishl sees himself as Edgar in King Lear, cursed by old Gloucester. “That’s why I’m in this shit-house office while my brothers are up in pig heaven. Bind fast his corky arms! Put out his eyes and spurn them with your foot! My dad has never been exactly a good guy, but I’m his son and long to save him….I want to prove that there’s only me, the rejected son, defending that rugged ogre, that I’m the devoted one” (pp. 173, 174).

  Ugly Harold Vilitzer, “deeply tanned,” with “clever” lumps in his face and white hair “combed straight forward to the edge of his forehead,” is as much in thrall to the material world as beautiful Matilda (p. 34). And just as Matilda’s love of sleep and hatred of waking allies her to death, so Vilitzer is allied to death. In extreme old age, his body a mere husk (“only the pacemaker under his shirt had any weight” [p. 280]), he is immovable, unrepentant. “Where money is concerned,” he declares, “the operational word is merciless” (p. 274). As Kenneth sees it, trying to make sense of Vilitzer, “Death is merciless, and therefore the ground rules of conduct have to include an equal and opposite hardness. From this it follows that kinship is bullshit….Fishl’s emotions towards his father were further evidence [to Vilitzer] of his unfitness, his ignorance of the conditions of existence” (p. 274). Vilitzer is like Dr. Adler in Seize the Day, as Fishl is like Tommy Wilhelm, a resemblance seen also in Fishl’s history of failed and dubious business ventures, “the credit card scam, the yoga, the acupuncture” (p. 167).

  The horrors of modernity are seen also in Kenneth’s love life, which is almost as disastrous as Benn’s. Kenneth is more worldly than Benn, with his Parisian, UNESCO, Euroculture background (though, as Martin Amis puts it, “everyone is more worldly than Benn”99). He is estranged from his girlfriend, Treckie, who lives in Seattle with their young daughter, and with a ski-instructor lover. That Kenneth still adores Treckie, he realizes, opens him to the charge of falling from “l’amour propre to l’amour passion” (p. 57). (Kenneth may have taken a course from Allan Bloom.) What draws him to her is another “sexual peculiarity,” her childlike body. He is “turned on by a…child-woman” (p. 303). Like Bellow, especially in the period after the breakup with Alexandra, Kenneth is pursued by women.100 These include Treckie’s mother (“The pleasant nights we’d spend together would give us strength for anything. Would you like to try one to see what it might be like?” [p. 209]), and, as we’ve seen, Dita Schwartz, an ex-student of Kenneth’s who “had taken my Russian Seminar 451 on The Meaning of Love” (p. 247). After telling the story of Dita’s horrific operation, and his nursing of her, Kenneth flies to Seattle in a doomed attempt to revive the relationship with Treckie. Treckie, a masochist, “didn’t want any part of me. I failed to turn her on” (p. 304). What turns Treckie on is rough sex. She’s also into “California-type stuff,” “applied Zen,” “group psychotherapy” (p. 306), embodying many of the modern traits and symptoms deplored in The Closing of the American Mind. Ellen Pifer is good on Kenneth’s confrontation with Treckie: “As their daughter watches television cartoons in the n
ext room, [Treckie] tells Ken, ‘We’re a pluralistic society after all. Multiple acculturation is what it’s all about’ [p. 308]. To Ken, in search of ‘a desperately needed human turning point’ [p. 307], Treckie’s relativistic chatter is virtually indistinguishable from the ‘cartoon sound effects’ coming from the television set: ‘the bangs, whistles, buzzings, blams and tooting’ [p. 308].”101

  The reviews of More Die of Heartbreak were mixed, and the sales moderate.102 On May 24, 1987, in a review entitled “An Instinct for the Dangerous Wife,” William Gaddis praised the novel on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. He called it the product of “a mind not only at constant work but standing outside itself, mercilessly examining the workings, tracking the leading issues of our time.” On May 31, in a review in the Chicago Sun-Times entitled “Saul Bellow’s Magic,” the novelist Anne Tyler called Benn “Bellow’s most vibrant character since Henderson the Rain King…one of the most richly textured and endearing characters in recent fiction.” On June 15, in a review entitled “Victims of Contemporary Life,” Paul Gray in Time described the novel as “crackling with intelligence and wit,” “consistently funny,” “proof that Bellow, 72, can live up to his own standards.”

  Other prominent reviewers, however, saw the novel as a falling off. Alfred Kazin, in “Trachtenberg the Rain King,” a review of June 26 in The New York Review of Books, complained about Kenneth’s “exultantly sour views of modernity, sexuality, women, the local and international scene.” Kazin claimed his objections were not so much to Kenneth’s opinions (though the review ends, “This is a book fired by misogyny”) as to “the fact that he is always sticking them in your eye. The problem is familiar: Bellow does not always know what to do with his own overwhelming authorial presence.” Terrence Rafferty, in “Hearts and Minds,” a New Yorker review of July 20, also had trouble with Kenneth’s “punishing gusts of theory, history (global and personal), and physical detail,” especially in the first third of the novel, which he calls “phenomenally boring,” “like an impossibly long letter from a relative to whom not very much has happened in the years since we last heard from him.” Craig Raine, in the London Review of Books (“Soul Bellow,” November 12), begins his review by citing dozens of brilliant moments in Bellow’s earlier novels, “little miracles of particularity.” In More Die of Heartbreak, in contrast, far too many similarly striking perceptions turn out to have been recycled from earlier work. The novel “is ruined by repetitions and echoes.” There are other important flaws: the novel has “no form to speak of”; “the characters are mere tokens”; the main theme, about the centrality of heartbreak in Western as opposed to other cultures, is “nutty in its presentation” (since “suffering is manifold and it is very stupid to make meaningless comparisons”); the talk of “soul” and “daimons” is “hollow,” “irritating.” Raine is among the most ardent of Bellow’s British defenders, but More Die of Heartbreak is, he concludes, “a dismally thin performance.” Finally, in “Soul and Form,” a review of August 31 in The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier described the novel as “a sorry tale of male self-pity,” a description which soured relations between Bellow and Wieseltier for some time. “I missed him,” Wieseltier said of their estrangement, “because he was one of the most charismatic persons I’ve ever met….He was a magical Jew, a magical man.”103