Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  During the dinner in Jerusalem, Amis watched Bloom closely, attracted both by his demeanor “of constant expectation of amusement” and by “the physical greed with which he went through his Marlboros.” Noting “the pleasure Saul took in him” did not prevent Amis from engaging Bloom in “a loud, long, and in the end unrancorous argument about nuclear weapons” (Bloom was for them, as deterrent, Amis against them, having written a long prefatory essay about their use in Einstein’s Monsters, a collection of stories published that year). As the argument heated up, Amis backed off, as Bellow was to do two years later when arguing with Hitchens about Edward Said. Both Amis and Bloom resisted what Amis calls “the deep attractions of escalation.” “There are times,” he continues in Experience, “when manners are more important than the end of the world.” During their stay at Mishkenot, Amis asked Janis if she thought Bellow would like the idea of meeting with him for a little chat, the sort Yehoshua had ducked in Haifa. She advised him to drop Bellow a note. Over tea on the terrace at Mishkenot the next day, Amis felt they were moving beyond friendly acquaintance to genuine friendship.19 Antonia Phillips remembers that Bellow was “quite protective in a funny way with Martin.” There was “a tenderness between the two of them,” perfectly understandable on Martin’s side “from his relations with Kingsley; after all, Saul actually read things that Martin wrote.” The next summer, Martin and Antonia were invited to Vermont with their young sons, Jacob and Louis. In an undated thank-you note, Amis remembers Bellow “robustly carrying Jacob down the lane (I think that was more or less the only time he was unconscious for the whole of our stay). You were marvellously hospitable and beautifully patient. We must come again—and quickly, in the brief interlude before the boys start smashing cars and taking crack and knocking up their girlfriends.”

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  BY JUNE 1987, following not only their travels but the publication of More Die of Heartbreak, Bellow and Janis were back in Vermont and exhausted, Bellow in particular. The summer, however, was restorative, despite many visitors and a short trip to New York.20 Among the visitors were members of Janis’s family, several of whom Bellow had got to know on trips to Canada. Early in their courtship, before any question of marriage, Janis brought Bellow to the family farm outside Toronto, where he met her father for the first time. Her mother he had already met. When Sonya Freedman first came to Chicago to visit Janis, “before there was any romance,” she sat in on a Bloom-and-Bellow seminar and was introduced to both men. By the second visit, Janis had told her mother of the relationship with Bellow, and when they met up again, her mother says, “Bellow seemed nervous.” At a meal that night, though, “the conversation was fine, and afterwards I said to him: ‘Well, that wasn’t so difficult, was it?’ and he just burst out laughing, and that was sort of the end of the strangeness between us. And he came to the farm, many times, before they were married.”

  When the Freedmans first learned of a romantic relationship between Janis and Bellow, they were naturally concerned. For two reasons, according to Harvey Freedman: “He was a famous man, and there’s always some discomfort in a first encounter with a famous man, and he was sleeping with our daughter.” Although the Freedmans assumed the relationship would not last, after the first visit “it became obvious that this was more than a fling.” Janis’s sister, Wendy, also thought that the relationship would not last, that Janis was rebounding from Peter Ahrensdorf and Bellow from Alexandra. But, like her parents, she soon saw that Janis “was happy, very, very happy….I was convinced by Janis. I could see what she had.” The only member of the family to take serious objection to the relationship was Janis’s maternal grandmother, the family matriarch, “who was really upset…but not for long.” She was brought round by Bellow himself, as well as by Janis. According to Janis, Bellow made a concerted effort to win the old woman over. He traveled with Janis and her family to Hamilton, Ontario, where she lived, and, according to Sonya Freedman, “got all dressed up…and came to tea and charmed her. She was giggling.”21

  Harvey Freedman’s acceptance of Bellow was also quickly won, in his case on Bellow’s first visit to the farm. “We picked him up at the airport,” he remembers. “He came to the car, he sat down, and we had rather a large golden retriever, and it kept licking him.” Bellow did not complain; in fact, “he seemed rather at home.” That night, Sonya Freedman was nervous about dinner: “I was cooking, and I was a bit cowed, because this man had eaten at some of the best restaurants in the world. And he sat down at the counter in the kitchen and there was some kosher salami and some pickles and he just loved them….He was our kind of person.” “There were no airs about him,” Harvey recalls; “he spoke honestly, you were not getting a phony person….That was apparent from the first meal we had, that he was the straight goods, which we valued, and we were relieved. The other reassuring thing was that Janis is a pretty good judge of character…and if she was going to be involved with Saul Bellow it wasn’t just because he was Daddy Warbucks or a famous man, but that there was a human being of substance.” Freedman was also impressed by Bellow’s “capacity for clarity,” describing him as “the Michael Jordan of clarity.”

  The next morning, Bellow chopped wood with Freedman. “There he was [at seventy-one, fourteen years older than his future father-in-law], chopping up half a cord of wood. He was quite powerful….I couldn’t keep up.” Later that day, Sonya Freedman was struck by the appearance of Bellow and Janis together: “It was strange, as though we had two kids here. Janis wanted to show him all her favorite places on the farm. I remember watching them holding hands walking down the path, like two young lovers.” Later, the Freedmans felt, as Harvey Freedman puts it, that “there was a—I use the word metaphorically—spiritual union here. They were soulmates, they understood each other poetically and emotionally, sort of kindred souls.” The parents took the relationship on Janis’s terms, trusting in her happiness and certainty. They also recognized the benefits for Bellow. As Wendy puts it, “For Saul, here’s a young woman who is very bright, very knowledgeable about literature, very interested in ideas. From his perspective, he found somebody with whom he could share a lot of things…and Janis is a very loving person, an extremely warm and loving individual. And she really fell in love with the man. And they went for it.” This sense of Janis’s having committed herself wholly to Bellow was shared by her friend Alane Rollings, a poet, and also a friend of Alexandra’s. Rollings herself was involved with a much older man, Bellow’s friend Richard Stern, whom she later married. She stresses Janis’s seriousness about her relationship with Bellow, and her comparable seriousness about literature. Rollings believes Janis made “a conscious decision…to give up my life to this man.” Being with Bellow was exciting; providing and being what he needed was fulfilling, but it was also, Rollings imagines Janis thinking, “the thing I could do with my life, the most important thing I can do for society.” To Adam Bellow, Janis “couldn’t possibly have known what she was getting into, but she didn’t care….She went for the idealization of the couple….She had made a big statement.”

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  DURING THEIR FIRST YEARS TOGETHER, Bellow published two novellas, A Theft and The Bellarosa Connection, both in 1989. A year later, he published what many consider his finest short story, “Something to Remember Me By.” In these years, he was also at work on two novels, “A Case of Love” and “All Marbles Still Accounted For,” neither of which he completed. The longest and most finished of the manuscripts for “A Case of Love” is 207 typed pages. The comparable manuscript for “All Marbles Still Accounted For” is 279 typed pages. Both manuscripts were finished enough to be shown to publishers, as examples of work in progress. “A Case of Love” (henceforth “Case”) has a female protagonist and a female narrator. Its central concern, as Janis puts it, is “the idea of whether or not a woman’s love was at the center of life for her.” Another concern of the novel is what to do “if the guy tur
ns out to be a total jerk.” “All Marbles Still Accounted For” (“Marbles”) has a ninety-three-year-old protagonist, Hilbert Faucil, who ends up in New Guinea, a wealthy proprietor of a national tabloid, a cross, somehow, between the National Enquirer and a highbrow publication (said to offer “the soul’s real response to the crisis of modernity”).22 Both novels have wildly improbable plots, closer to Henderson than to any of Bellow’s other works.

  The record of Bellow’s struggles with these novels is drawn from excerpts from Janis’s journals. From 1987 to 2002, Janis wrote down notes about her life with Bellow.23 The notes provide information not only about “Case” and “Marbles,” but about several other unfinished works: a novella about Barley Alison; a novel about Allan Bloom, parts of which would find their way into Ravelstein; and a short story called “Imenitov.” Bellow himself used Janis’s notes as an aide-mémoire. At a dinner party in Paris in 1992, attended, among others, by the historian François Furet and the British politician George Walden, Walden was especially struck by Bellow’s “novelist’s instincts.” “When for some reason we got on to rabies, and someone mentioned that the only person in recent history who had died of the disease in France was said to have been a mayor in a small town who was inspecting his loft when a bat pissed in his eye, Bellow asked Janis to make a note.”24

  Here are entries about “Marbles,” the first from May 21, 1989. “I” in what follows is Bellow, who is also “B,” or sometimes “he.”

  I’ve been trying to find a person who will have the kind of wide-ranging consciousness, the diverse range of awareness that my ninety-year-old man has….I came up with Nathan Tarcov…someone who is also eccentric, quirky, whose life is complicated, full of irregularities, brilliant flashes, and who has the breadth of intelligence to see the whole picture….That isn’t to say that the ninety-year-old man has to be anything like Tarcov in what he has done with his life; he wouldn’t have taken a degree in political science. I’m talking about the core of the man. It helps to have a real person in mind, to zero in on the core of this person’s consciousness, to see what’s essential. It doesn’t have to be Tarcov, I was just running through in my mind types I had known with great intellectual powers….When I was writing Henderson I had someone clearly in mind. It wasn’t that this man was Henderson. He’d never done the things Henderson did. It was that this man could have, would have been capable of imagining these sorts of things.

  Now what I have in mind is that the ninety-year-old man used to tell stories to his granddaughter, stories dug up from his early incomplete anthropological training. She grows up and takes the whole business seriously in a way granddad never did. It’s her idea to send him off to New Guinea. He doesn’t particularly want to go on such a trip but he has other reasons for wanting to leave [these reasons concern his accountant, who has cheated him “of six or seven million bucks—as much as ten percent of my fortune,” a figure six or seven times greater than the one Bellow claimed he had lost, according to Janis, because of his accountant].25

  Yesterday after B read to me from “Marbles” again…he feels it isn’t right yet, it doesn’t check out. It’s very painful for him to write about Bobby, that’s the man sick with brain fever….Here’s all this human tragedy working its way into what’s supposed to be a Hendersonian novel about a man who goes off to New Guinea and discovers his reincarnated professor [Bellow’s old anthropology professor from Northwestern, Melville Herskovits, or a character based on him, was going to be reincarnated as a native]. The whole thing has to be done quickly, with a light touch….Meanwhile it continues to expand in these strange directions, the stuff about old age is quite grim, bitter.

  Today June 11 was another story altogether….He woke feeling well, went to the studio….He was redoing “Marbles” from page 1. The tone has shifted. It feels right. It had almost imperceptibly slid into place. I was trying to make it Hendersonian but that didn’t work. Henderson is a clown…and preposterous, actively preposterous, and that’s not at all to my present purpose….B’s old man is thoughtful….B hasn’t cut the fun from the story…but the tone will be all his own not Henderson’s.

  Janis’s notes give a flavor of her life with Bellow, as well as of his methods of composition. In an entry of August 19, 1988, Bellow discusses “Marbles” but also Billy Rose, from The Bellarosa Connection, which he is at work on at the same time. In addition, he has new thoughts about the heroine of “Case,” whose name is Ursula, and about the “total jerk” she falls for, named Milo. When Bellow thinks of Milo, he sees Jack Nicholson. On February 12, 1989, Bellow walks into Janis’s study and reads her the last three pages of the short story “Something to Remember Me By,” at the time titled “Louie—Words from an Ancestor,” with its thinly fictionalized account of his mother’s last days in wintry Chicago in February 1933. “His voice trembled. We both started to cry. Then he took a Kleenex from my pocket, and blew his nose, and put it back. And I started to laugh and cry and I embraced him and kissed his head. ‘It’s so simple,’ he said to me. ‘But it has everything in it.’ ” Weather had sparked the story. They had come to Vermont from Chicago for a little vacation, and all they found was snow.

  What entries like these make clear is that, while Bellow engaged in public controversy, gave talks, taught, wrote and published A Theft, The Bellarosa Connection, and “Something to Remember Me By,” worried about his family, mourned the deaths of friends and loved ones, and began a new life with Janis, he was thinking about the plots, themes, characters, registers, and settings of as many as half a dozen unpublished narratives. In a note of February 21, 1990, he explains to Janis that he thinks about these narratives simultaneously, “in a day-to-day way. None of them have actually been shelved, or put on a back burner. He described it to me this way: ‘I go around with all my pans in front of me, and every day something falls into each of them.’ ” That day, what fell into the “Case” pan concerned Ursula’s jerk lover. Bellow thought he should be a TV anchorman, not an actor. He and Ursula would meet years later at a White House reception. Her rich husband would leave the reception before her; then she and Milo would try to flag a cab in the pouring rain. “Can you imagine how she feels watching the face of the man she loved night after night on television—seeing the transformation of the features?”

  Several weeks later, in March 1990, Bellow’s thoughts were of “Kamo,” the manuscript about Barley Alison, later to be titled “Rita.” After a “brainstorming session” with Janis on the night of June 13, he returned to “Marbles.” Two days later, he was back with “Kamo,” which he mostly worked on through mid-July, “then more MARBLES.” At the end of June, Bellow told Janis he was ready to sign a contract. “I laughed: For which one?!” “ ‘Well I’ve got two sure things,’ he replied,” by which he meant “Case” and “Marbles.” “Now he’s on his way back from the studio. I can hear him singing below my study window….Yesterday he replied to my q. about how the morning had been with distinct enthusiasm: it went VERY well….But what is he working on? MARBLES or A CASE?” Through August, he worked on “Kamo/Rita” and “Marbles” simultaneously. On August 24, 1990, however, he began a new version of “Case.”

  He has a new slant, and a new start. Ursula will relate her tale from a detached perspective….He has worked out the whole episode in the White House in which Ursula runs into Milo and has a quickie with him in one of the State Rooms. Ursula has been through the love disease; the determination to live for love has gone sour on her.

  In addition to switching from one work to another, Bellow kept restarting works from the beginning. On December 17, 1990, it was “Marbles” he decided to rewrite: “Typing a fresh start has given him fresh energy,” Janis’s note reads. “He had been exhausted, dispirited, feeling old. CASE wasn’t drawing him sufficiently.” In January 1991, Bellow signed a contract for “Case,” to deliver a ninety-thousand-word manuscript by April, which in a later note Janis calls “a very bad idea”:
as soon as he signed, he found himself writing a new short story, “Imenitov.” This story he worked on “right through February 1991,” “all the while he’s worrying about CASE.” The story was never finished. The nature of Bellow’s worries is suggested in an entry of January 7, 1991: “He feels he doesn’t have time to get himself mired in a long story or book. It’s a gamble to be immersed in a work that may not pull together in the end. ‘I’ve always written that way,’ he explained. ‘I let what’s inside me unfold without too much external planning.’ ” A bewildered entry for February 12, 1991, reads: “A new start [for “Case”]. Really. All over again, from page one, in a hand-written version—hard cover—navy notebook. He’s tired.” In March, Bellow decides that “Case” should not be narrated by Ursula, the heroine, but by her friend Amanda, based on Lillian Blumberg McCall, a figure he knew from the Village and whose memoir he and Janis had been reading (McCall figures in chapters 10 and 11 of To Fame and Fortune). The book will now include episodes from Amanda’s backstory, including one in which she is asked to write the entry on “Love” for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (the Syntopicon volume, presumably), and is blocked by Hannah Arendt. “That’ll account for why a lot of her theories find their way into her ‘novel’ about Ursula instead. And this was something that happened to B. Edward Shils had put him forward as the best person to do the entry on love. And he didn’t want to, hadn’t the time for the research or the writing, but he never even had the chance to decline. Yammering Hannah stepped forward to nip the idea in the bud: How could B. be the one entrusted with such a subject?!”

  A second addition to this newest version of “Case” widened the story to include current affairs. As Janis records on March 11, 1991: “Milo goes off on some Middle East journalist romp and is kidnapped. Ursula goes to Syria to intercede with Hafez al-Assad….We had fun with this. I thought Carstens [the millionaire husband Ursula marries after splitting with Milo] might have a U.S. company that could provide something Assad needed for weapons manufacture, and that Carstens might agree to some awful, illegal deal in the negotiations to free Milo.” On April 3, 1991, Janis records that, “when we got to p. 24 of the computer version of CASE, B. decided that he was going to start typing a new draft from page one. And so it is this new typed version that I have been putting into the computer at night. Now Amanda is fully incorporated into the story, and B. was typing along with great enthusiasm until the past couple of days. He has been wildly excited, hasn’t been sleeping well. But it hasn’t been Ursula who has been keeping him awake, he just told me, and he feels that this is a ‘betrayal.’ This book [not “Case”] is still a sideline for him, and he must push on with it [“Case”] because he signed a contract. But what is at the center for him now is the Bloom book.”