Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Early in May, Bellow and Janis traveled to New York, where he was to participate in a panel discussion at the 92nd Street Y on anti-Semitism. The other participants were Cynthia Ozick, John Gross, and William Phillips of Partisan Review, then located in Boston. The proceedings were taped, and Partisan Review was keen to publish Bellow’s talk, an abbreviated version of “A Jewish Writer in America,” his 1988 speech in Philadelphia. At its end, Bellow briefly discusses Black-Jewish relations:

  I do give a lot of thought to the special and in some ways occult place assigned to Jews. To me, this is of course more than a theoretical curiosity. My interpretation of the recent increase of hostility among American blacks toward Jews is that the blacks have a clear reason for dissociating themselves from these eternal expendables, for they see that in making common cause with the Jews they would risk exchanging transitory disadvantages for permanent ones. Jew-hatred, moreover, is never wholly unpopular, and this is as clear to black demagogues as it was to Germans, Russians, Frenchman, Rumanians, and others in the past. I have a very particular sympathy for what I see as the distortions in black life, a sympathy rooted in my lifelong familiarity with deformities in Jews produced by their experiences in the pale. I think often of an essay by Rebecca West in which she discusses the Jewishness of Kafka: “Russia,” she observes in an aside, “has succeeded in oppressing its Jews until they have become nightmare figures which the Western Jew did not like to recognize as brethren….” But what she sees as a Russian deformation has existed in other forms for centuries.

  At the end of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, as the black pickpocket is beaten to the ground, Bellow reminds his readers of the shared suffering of blacks and Jews, and of the damaging effects of prejudice and discrimination, both psychological and material. This, say his defenders, is the real Saul Bellow, not the “off the cuff ” Bellow grousing to friends about the preferential treatment of black workers. “In daily life,” Bellow told Norman Manea, in a quotation cited in To Fame and Fortune, “I don’t ask myself what is honorable and what is dishonorable but I do when I’m writing.” The novelist, he says elsewhere, with Dostoevsky in mind, “cannot permit himself to yield to cruel, intemperate, and arbitrary personal judgments,” the sort made in an interview or to friends. “The writer’s convictions, perhaps fanatically held, must be tamed by truth. The degree to which you challenge your own beliefs and expose them to destruction is a test of your worth as a novelist.”44

  On the morning of the 92nd Street Y panel, the young journalist David Remnick came to the Lotos Club on the Upper East Side to interview Bellow for the “Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker. Bellow “looked fit (he is seventy-eight), and was outfitted like a moderate dandy. But he was glum.” He missed Chicago: “Janis does, too.” New York depressed him, particularly the Upper West Side. Walking down Broadway “doesn’t necessarily scare me, but it’s disgusting….There’s an obvious drug scene now, the hustle of the homeless….You try to take an over-all view of the thing that is more elevated, benevolent. But the fact is you resent it and you think it’s degrading.” Despite Bellow’s growing reputation as a conservative, he thinks of himself as “some sort of liberal, but I don’t like where liberalism has gone in this country in the last twenty years…these terrible outbursts from people whose principles are affronted when you disagree with them.” When Remnick asked Bellow “about today’s racial politics, he had winced, saying he hoped we could find ‘an undangerous way’ to talk about it all.” He was preoccupied with Louis Farrakhan, of the Nation of Islam, a figure he had been watching “for many years.” Black anti-Semitism in Chicago might not be deep, “but it is certainly conspicuous. There is this sort of attitude among the blacks; whatever else we may be, whatever handicaps we may labor under, we are, nevertheless, not Jews.” Saying such things, Bellow realized, could get one into trouble. “There seems to be such a taboo on open discussion that no habits of discussion have developed, no vocabulary for discussion, no allowance made for intellectual differences, because you are immediately labelled a racist.” He lists Ralph Ellison, the sociologist William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago, and Stanley Crouch as exceptions, “blacks with whom you can talk openly. And they do the same….But there are very few people in general who don’t respond to the taboo.” Remnick asks Bellow if this new atmosphere “affected his writing? Would he hesitate for fear of attack?” He would not. “I write as I write. If I’m going to take heat from it—well, that’s the name of the game.” Away from his desk, he was also fearless, and, in the case of the Papuans-and-Zulus remark, heedless, to the cost of his reputation and the fortunes of his fiction.

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  ON JUNE 1, 1994, in a letter to the Marxist historian Eugene Genovese, Bellow was still smarting. “The Times is a terrible topic. When I say that I hate it, it sounds to me as though I were saying that I can’t stand Nero or Caligula. It’s their empire. It’s also our ‘paper of record.’ In the Book Review Becky Sinkler is our muse and in the Sunday Magazine we have James Atlas and on the Editorial page that unsigned hero Brent Staples. I read The Wall Street Journal as an antidote to the Times and as a supreme antidote when the going is really rough I read a book of the Testaments. Old or New.”

  Bellow’s attitude to James Atlas, as was suggested in chapter 8, was fickle, changeable, hard for Atlas to read, sometimes warm and friendly, particularly early on, at other times prickly and grudging. Early letters begin with the salutation “Dear Mr. Atlas”; later ones begin “Dear James”; still later ones begin “Dear Mr. Atlas.” Atlas tracks Bellow’s mood shifts in his 1995 New Yorker memoir, “The Shadow in the Garden,” the title he later used in his book-length memoir. The New Yorker memoir takes the form of transcribed or reconstructed journal entries.45 At first, Bellow gave permission for Atlas to read manuscript material in the Regenstein but not letters. On a visit Atlas made to Chicago in February 1991, Bellow called him “Jim.” When, however, Atlas asked him “a bunch of factual questions,” Bellow wondered “Why do you want to know all this….B takes me in with that keen, appraising look of his, the wide saucerlike eyes suspicious: Who is this guy? It’s beginning to dawn on him: I’m really going to exhume his past, unearth and reconstruct it in every detail. I’m going to write his biography.” In October 1991, Atlas called Bellow and noted in his journal that “he seems pleased to hear from me.” At this point, Atlas had been at work on the biography for three years and asked Bellow again if he could see the letters. “ ‘I don’t want my last tatters exposed…my poor porous fig leaf,’ [Bellow] replies. He sits, silent, in the gathering dusk, then says, with feeling, ‘I don’t give a damn. It’s really for Janis’s sake. It hurts her to read about all this. She doesn’t think I should do it.” At the end of the interviewing session and a tour of the old neighborhood, Bellow told Atlas he “really enjoyed” the day, and tried to reassure him: “You’ll probably learn as much from me as from the letters. I don’t mind at all talking to you. I don’t want to get involved, but from time to time.”

  The next entry in Atlas’s New Yorker memoir is dated August 30, 1992. Bellow has invited him to dinner in Vermont. Janis is away. Bellow takes him to Le Petit Chef. It seems to Atlas that Bellow enjoys talking to him. When Atlas tells him over dinner that he thinks his life “interesting,” Bellow answers, “ ‘All you have to do to live an interesting life is be a damn fool.’ I babble something about how it’s a wonderful project for me. B, deadpan: ‘I’m glad I haven’t lived in vain.’ ” At the end of the evening, Bellow says “in a heartfelt way that he’s had a good time; asks what to call me, Jim or James. ‘There’s always business to conduct,’ I say, and hand him a letter I’ve drawn up, giving me permission to consult the files of Marshall Holleb, one of Bellow’s lawyers in Chicago. He hands the letter back: ‘It’s just legal stuff.’ ” As Atlas drives back home—he, too, has a house in Vermont, forty-five minutes away—he is exhilarated: “I’m shouting in the car
, ‘It’s fun! Fun!’ I don’t feel rejected by his refusal to let me see these papers. It is, after all, just legal stuff….I also realize that I don’t need his permission—the creative part, the original part, is my interpretation.” He then records his “greatest fear”: “that we’ll have a falling-out someday. The person with whom I used to experience a huge paternal transference doesn’t exist as powerfully for me anymore; I feel independent of him, but also sad. There is no Dad. Certainly not this difficult, prickly character.” Still, the next time they meet, Atlas records: “Bellow is wearing—guess what?—a railroad cap identical to mine.”

  In October 1993, Atlas visits Zita Cogan, Bellow’s old friend since Tuley High School. She has all sorts of materials to show him, but the only letter “is one in which I’m referred to disparagingly, and in which B makes clear his position about the book.” Atlas does not quote the letter, but it is written in reply to one Cogan wrote to Bellow on July 1, 1990, in which she alerts him that Atlas is coming to Chicago and will be staying with her (“because I remembered his two grandmothers”). She reassures him: “As usual, you can rely on me—as far as you’re concerned, I’m mum. Any suggestions?” Bellow’s reply, in a letter of July 18, is “You’re kind to Mr. Atlas. I am no more keen about a biography than I am about reserving a plot for myself at 26th and Harlem Avenue. I keep putting it off. I say this in order to make clear that I am not supporting Atlas, nor am I asking my friends to oblige him with recollections of my misconduct.” That night, after reading these words, Atlas had dinner with Edward Shils. “On impulse,” he asked Shils to read his manuscript, by now some seven hundred pages long. Shils agreed.46

  The next entry in Atlas’s New Yorker memoir is dated August 3, 1994, the summer after the Staples and Kazin articles and Bellow’s op-ed piece. The Bellows are in Vermont, and Atlas comes to visit. The entry has a title: “The Fight.” Although Janis is warm and welcoming, Bellow is described as “looking crabby.” He brings up the Brent Staples article, asking, “Why didn’t Brent come see him…instead of lurking in the dark?” He is “appalled” at having been stalked and calls Staples “barbaric.” The discussion takes place in Bellow’s study, and “he sharply rebukes me for putting my iced coffee on a book, then shows me again his mother’s old passport….He wants to make a point: ‘Why did you say that my name is Bellows?’ Suddenly I remember—the article I wrote in the Times Magazine last winter defending biography. I had referred to his change of name from Solomon to Saul, even though I knew he was incredibly sensitive about it. Why did I do that?”47 Then Atlas voices a grievance of his own. Why did Bellow deny that he made his controversial Papuans-and-Zulus remark “about the multicultural debate…and [say] that what he had said had been ‘misconstrued’ by ‘the interviewer’ ”? Bellow “doesn’t reply. Instead, he goes on about how he’s had a ‘brutal’ year: Brent’s book, an attack on him by Hilton Kramer in Commentary. (B is surprised there weren’t many letters to the editor: ‘They must be killing them in the office.’) He’s also annoyed about a piece by David Remnick that made him out to be a curmudgeon.” There then follows “a long wrangle over the papers. He won’t give me permission for this latest batch of excerpts unless I explain how the passages are being used. Finally, he relents a bit. ‘I’ll give you all the stuff that makes me look good,’ he says with a laugh. But he’s still mad. He looks at his watch, uncharacteristically; it’s something he’s never done before. He wants me to leave. They’re going out to supper. Janis is in the garden. I say, ‘We had a fight.’ ‘Bring your swimsuit next time.’ She’s cheerful. ‘It will be more fun.’ ”

  In The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale (2017), Atlas’s book-length memoir and meditation on biography, he incorporates and expands upon these journal entries, adding several striking details. At the August 3, 1994, “Fight” meeting, in addition to challenging Bellow about the context of the Papuans-and-Zulus remark and about his claim not to have remembered the identity of the “interviewer,” Atlas revealed the source of the Staples piece:

  As it happened, I had edited Brent’s piece in the Times Magazine….No, not as it happened. I had plucked the excerpt from the galley myself. It was beautifully written; it was about Bellow; it was news. A black journalist stalking a white Nobel Prize–winning novelist known for his controversial views on race through the streets of Chicago…what a story! But there must have been other factors involved in creating the awkward situation in which I now found myself. Could I have been making Brent’s aggression a stand-in for my own? Then there was the most obvious motive of all: it would be good for my book.

  I confessed to Bellow my role in the publication of Brent’s piece. There may have been a tangled web, but at least there was no deceit, just the usual murk of mixed motives—unconscious acting out, ambivalence, good intentions, bad faith, enthusiasm, opportunism, and a thousand other impulses, all of them imperfectly understood.48

  “I had never seen him so angry before,” Atlas writes in the book-length memoir, on the occasion of “The Fight.” Bellow spoke of being persecuted by The New York Times, citing, most recently, a slight from Rebecca Sinkler, the editor of the Book Review, and a lukewarm review of It All Adds Up, his nonfiction collection, by Peter S. Prescott. “They were out to get me,” Bellow claimed of people at the Times.49

  The final journal entry in Atlas’s New Yorker piece is dated August 26, 1994, three weeks after “The Fight.” It also has a title: “The Reconciliation.” Atlas had provided Bellow with thirteen pages of “content,” to show how he would be using the passages he wished to quote. Over the telephone, Bellow was “very conciliatory; the letters seem harmless. We agree to meet.” When Atlas arrives at the meeting, Bellow “tells me, giving me a direct and forthright look, that he never meant to interfere in my project; that I misunderstood; that he just wanted to know what I was quoting. B is concerned about what certain people are saying about him. How will I know to be fair? I answer that it’s my job, that I’m a writer, too; I know how to judge character. He says, ‘But you’re not the catcher in the rye.’ I reply, ‘It’s true, I can’t save you every time.’ We both laugh.” After two hours going over quotations and signing permissions, Bellow is tired. “He doesn’t want me to stay afterward; he gets up from the kitchen table.” Atlas, too, is tired, “drained.” In The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale, he describes returning home and looking up the passage in The Catcher in the Rye in which Holden Caulfield imagines himself standing by a cliff and saving children from going over it. “I sat on the couch and wept,” Atlas writes. “I was Holden. But I was also the cliff.”50

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  ONE FEELS SYMPATHY FOR both biographer and subject. Bellow never really wanted a biography, not while he was alive, but, having allowed Atlas to spend seven years on the book, he can’t stop him. But he doesn’t trust him. “It’s true,” Atlas tells Bellow, “I can’t save you every time.” But that’s what Bellow wants. Why should he want instances of misconduct recollected, or cooperate in their recollection? “He thinks I won’t be embarrassed about these things,” Chris Walsh remembers Bellow saying about Atlas. Whether Bellow considered or cared how his distrust and distance would affect Atlas is unclear, though his conciliatory tone after their fight suggests that he did. Atlas’s decision to publish journal entries showing Bellow as difficult, prickly, and inconsiderate he looks back on in the book-length memoir. “How could I resist? Or rather, how could I resist? A more prudent biographer would have considered the possible consequences and demurred. But I had become accustomed to thinking of Bellow not only as a father figure, but as a father, whose unconditional love—or at least forgiveness—I could count on no matter what I did.”51

  On May 24, 1995, a month or so before the journal entries appeared in The New Yorker, Atlas wrote to Bellow to tell him of their impending publication, reminding him that at one time (“on January 3rd, 1993, to be precise”) he (Bellow) had e
ncouraged him to write a book about his experiences as a biographer. Bill Buford of The New Yorker had learned of the existence of the journals and asked Atlas if he could see them, “so I showed them to him.” In the letter of May 24, Atlas recalls thinking, perhaps wishfully, that Bellow wouldn’t object to their publication, would at least tolerate them, and in places might even enjoy them. An extract from the biography had recently been published in Granta, which Bellow “seemed to have liked.”52 Atlas was on Bellow’s side, he assured him; he would be objective but sympathetic; he also had a deep appreciation of his writing. That his presence was “in many ways unwished-for (and perhaps resented),” he realized, but the resulting biography would serve “a positive function”; Bellow would not regret having allowed it to go ahead. In the book-length memoir, Atlas looks back on the 1995 decision to publish excerpts from his journal in The New Yorker. What he now feels, he sums up in a Yiddish phrase: “Gottenyu. Dear God.” Earlier, in a reference to the biographer as “gravedigger,” he describes himself in 1995 as seeming “in an awful hurry to bury the person I was raising up.”53

  It took some weeks for Atlas to gather the courage to call Bellow after the New Yorker piece appeared. Their conversation, reconstructed in The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale, is frosty. Here is how it ends: “ ‘I wish you well,’ I said, hoping to convey an apology without apologizing. Accept the consequences of your acts. I hung up, shaken. I had really done it this time.”54 Although they were to meet again, from this point onward, Bellow consistently disparaged Atlas in correspondence and discouraged his friends from cooperating with him.55