Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Ravelstein points to Chick’s indulgence of Grielescu as an example of observational irresponsibility. “The fact was that I enjoyed watching Grielescu” (p. 125), Chick admits, as opposed to avoiding or attacking him, or doing what Ravelstein calls “the unpleasant work of thinking it all through” (p. 167). In company, Grielescu was a performer, “off inwardly on some topic from myth or history about which you had nothing to tell him.” This monopolizing, Ravelstein claims, was “how he steered the conversation away from his fascist record” (p. 126).34 Although Chick accepts Ravelstein’s criticism, he later defends himself by recalling an argument with Grielescu, who was proposing myth as a complement to “ideas” or “culture.” For Chick, all three are of less value than “a gift for reading reality—the impulse to put your loving face to it and press your hands against it” (p. 203).

  As Ravelstein nears death, his intellectual allegiances shift perceptibly. “If he had to choose between Athens and Jerusalem, among us the two main sources of higher life,” Chick declares of Ravelstein, “he chose Athens, while full of respect for Jerusalem. But in his last days it was the Jews he wanted to talk about, not the Greeks” (p. 173). As he saw it, the Jews “had been used to give the entire species a measure of [that is, a way of measuring] human viciousness” (p. 174). On his deathbed, “I could see that he was following a trail of Jewish ideas or Jewish essences….He was full of Scripture now….Sometimes he was coherent. Most of the time he lost me” (p. 178). Ravelstein urges Chick to take Rosamund to synagogue on the approaching high holidays. He disparages myth, Grielescu’s great subject, not as a Platonist but as a Jew. “The Jews had better understand their status with respect to myth,” he reminds Chick. “Why should they have any truck with myth? It was myth that demonized them” (p. 127). What matters to a Jew is history: “A Jew should take a deep interest in the history of the Jews—in their principles of justice, for instance” (p. 179).

  * * *

  —

  AFTER THE ST. MARTIN EPISODE, the novel ends by returning to Ravelstein. That it does not end with Ravelstein’s death is one of the reasons we don’t see the cutting short of his life as tragic, for all his great-souled virtues and attractions. As Helen Small puts it, in Ravelstein “we are invited to see the quality and the intensity of the engagement with life, not the duration of the life, as paramount.”

  Relatedly, we are continually aware of Chick’s age, but he is (until the very end of the novel) fit, still working, still held in high public esteem, still enjoying life. This is not quite the Epicurean disconnection of the good life from temporality, but it shares something of the Epicurean disregard for longevity, and much of the hedonism. What matters is immersion in the present and, to a degree, comic insouciance about the inevitable end point.

  …

  [Chick’s] resistance to the forward drive of the life-story is, finally, a refusal to accept that proximity to the end must structure how one lives in old age. It would be impossible to live happily on those terms, Bellow suggests. This rejection of chronological progress takes additional support from his refusal to see his own (or Ravelstein’s) life as an isolated unit, closed in on its own narrative form.35

  Hence the novel’s last pages. Chick recalls that Ravelstein “ordered me to write this memoir, yes, but he didn’t think it was necessary for me to grind away at the classics of Western thought,” an order Chick approves, declaring, “I would rather see Ravelstein again than to explain matters it doesn’t help to explain” (p. 231). The novel ends, therefore, with a picture of Ravelstein. I quote the description in full, as it is among Bellow’s richest endings, a marvel for an author at any age, let alone one in his eighties. The setting is Hyde Park. Ravelstein is dressing to go out and talking to Chick at the same time, walking from room to room.

  The music is pouring from his hi-fi—the many planes of his bare, bald head go before me in the corridor between his living room and his monumental master bedroom. He stops before his pier-glass—no wall mirrors here—and puts in the heavy gold cufflinks, buttons up the Jermyn Street Kisser & Asser striped shirt—American Trustworthy laundry-and-cleaners deliver his shirts puffed out with tissue paper. He winds up his tie lifting the collar that crackles with starch. He makes a luxurious knot. The unsteady fingers, long, ill-coordinated, nervous to the point of decadence, make a double lap. Ravelstein likes a big tie-knot—after all, he is a large man. Then he sits down on the beautifully cured fleeces of his bed and puts on the Poulsen and Skone tan Wellington boots. His left foot is several sizes smaller than the right but there is no limp. He smokes, of course, he is always smoking, and tilts the head away from the smoke while he knots and pulls the knot into place. The cast and orchestra are pouring out the Italian Maiden in Algiers. This is dressing music, accessory or mood music, but Ravelstein takes a Nietzschean view, favorable to comedy and bandstands. Better Bizet and Carmen than Wagner and the Ring. He likes the volume of his powerful set turned up to the maximum. The ringing phone is left to the answering machine. He puts on his $5,000 suit, an Italian wool mixed with silk. He pulls down the coat cuff with his fingertips and polishes the top of his head. And perhaps he relishes having so many instruments serenading him, so many musicians in attendance. He corresponds with compact disc companies behind the Iron Curtain. He has helpers going to the post office to pay customs duties for him.

  “What do you think of this recording, Chick?” he says. “They’re playing original ancient seventeenth-century instruments.”

  He loses himself in sublime music, a music in which ideas are dissolved, reflecting these ideas in the form of feeling. He carries them down into the street with him. There’s an early snow on the tall shrubs, the same shrubs filled with a huge flock of parrots—the ones that escaped from cages and now build their long nest sacks in the back alleys. They are feeding on the red berries. Ravelstein looks at me, laughing with pleasure and astonishment, gesturing because he can’t be heard in all this bird-noise.

  You don’t easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death [pp. 231–33].

  The wonderful parrots, “noisy green birds from the tropics,” have appeared before. “Doesn’t the snow get them down?” Ravelstein asks on a first sighting. Chick is struck by how long the birds hold Ravelstein’s attention, as Ravelstein “had little interest in natural life.” Perhaps they do so, he conjectures, “because they were not merely feeding, but gorging, and he was a voracious eater himself” (pp. 141–42). Perhaps, also, because he was noisy, colorful, no less incongruous and amusing a presence in gray Chicago. In a later sighting, Ravelstein grins and tells Chick: “They even have a Jew look to them,” and Chick compares their sacklike nests to “Eastside tenements” (p. 170).36

  Janis, Marje Horvitz, SB, and Beena Kamlani, Vermont, 2000 (courtesy of Janis Bellow)

  13

  Love and Strife

  RAVELSTEIN APPEARED SIX MONTHS before the publication of James Atlas’s biography of Bellow, just in time for Atlas to discuss it. He calls it “the most compelling book Bellow had written in years” and “Bellow’s greatest act of literary portraiture,” adding a characteristic qualification: “He could finally share the stage with someone else.”1 Other deflating or negative remarks appear in the biography. In The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale, Atlas admits to a dozen, a number later whittled down to six.2 Bellow always feared Atlas would recount instances of bad behavior, but that these would be accompanied by moments of authorial animus he seems not to have anticipated, at least not until April 22, 2000, the week Ravelstein was published. That morning, in The New York Times, Brent Staples, Bellow’s stalker, published an op-ed article entitled “Mr. Bellow Writes On, Wrestling with the Ghost of Edward Shils.” The article begins by recounting Shils’s career, his friendship with Bellow, the possible causes of their falling-out, and his depiction in Ravelstein as Rakhmiel Kogon. The possible causes of the falling-out, according to people “who knew both me
n” (Atlas? Joseph Epstein?), are “that Shils had tired of being caricatured in the novels, that Bellow was angered that the man he ‘admired and adored’ did not take him seriously as an intellectual—and even that the two of them had argued over a woman [Bette Howland?].” Shils died in 1995, so it seemed that, in their mutual hostilities, Bellow would have the last word. This, Staples now announced, might not be the case:

  When Mr. Bellow’s biographer, James Atlas, publishes the writer’s biography next fall, the book will have been shaped to some degree by none other than Edward Shils, who read a draft—annotating it in that famous green ink—and disgorged on his death bed a 16,000-word edited memorandum. In revising the book, Mr. Atlas told me recently, “I sat at the keyboard with this memo, communing with a dead man.”

  We may have known for half a century what Mr. Bellow thinks of Mr. Shils. Come the biography, perhaps we can glimpse, at least after a fashion, what Mr. Shils thinks of him.

  Two days after these words appeared in the Times, Atlas wrote to Bellow to apologize, prompted by a call from Andrew Wylie, his and Bellow’s agent. As Atlas recounts the call in his memoir, Wylie told him that the Staples piece was “the last straw” for Bellow: “He’d had enough of this biographer; he would rescind permission to quote from his papers. I immediately sat down and wrote him an apologetic letter.”3 Atlas begins this letter—actually a fax, dated April 26—by saying that he had no intention of causing Bellow pain and that his aim in asking Shils to read the manuscript (as he’d asked others “of that generation” to do) was “to give me an accurate sense of the period, its issues and social history, its feel.” He describes himself as no friend of Shils, who didn’t like him; he claims he chose Shils as a reader because he knew he’d be tough (as he chose Dwight Macdonald to read the manuscript of his Delmore Schwartz biography, “and you know what he was like”). Atlas then offers Bellow a “general sense” of what Shils had to say about the manuscript: he criticized its length and the inadequate attention it gave to anti-Jewish prejudice at that time; he offered factual corrections; and he congratulated Atlas “on having got so far.” What Atlas does not mention, understandably, are the many disparaging remarks Shils makes about Bellow in his memo. The fax ends: “Will you like everything about this portrait? Will I have gotten everything right? I doubt it. But I’m doing the best I can; my book is fair and—I like to think—generous.”

  This is not quite what Atlas says of the biography in The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale. Prompted by what he calls the “splenetic reviews” his biography received (“There were also many positive ones,” he adds in a footnote), he reread it in search of the bias identified by his critics: “Had I disparaged Bellow’s intellectual pretensions? Was I as hostile to my subject as my critics claimed? Had I gone on too much about the women?” The dozen places “where I felt I had gotten it wrong—not in fact but in tone,” he identifies, variously, as “ungenerous,” “judgmental,” “neurotic,” “small-minded.”4 Their presence in the book he attributes in part to the cumulative effect of the interviews he conducted, many of which were with witnesses whose “testimony was harsh, and they didn’t seem to care if it was on the record.” He also considers the possibility that his personal contacts with Bellow may have had a deforming effect—understandably, given how difficult and changeable Bellow was with him, alternately wary, welcoming, snappish, warm, evasive. “Somehow knowing him was proving a hindrance to understanding him.”5 Then there was the “servile role” Atlas found himself adopting in Bellow’s presence. This role he claims not to have minded at the time, though “normally” he was “a proud and stubborn person, bristling, easily wounded, short-tempered when ‘dissed.’ ” In Bellow’s presence, he reverted “to a second-grade self, afraid of girls, sports, Skate Nights.” “Could it be that I feared my own aggression? That the chauffeur might inadvertently slam his passenger’s fingers in the door?”6 What is striking about this image is how close it is to one used by Barnett Singer in his memoir, recounted in chapter 7. Singer is chauffeuring Bellow around Victoria, British Columbia, and as Bellow digs about for his seat belt, Singer thinks: “Wouldn’t want the great author flying through the windshield.” There is an element of aggression in the feelings of both men: admiration, even reverence, mixes with hostility. Earlier in Shadow in the Garden, Atlas quotes Richard Holmes, the British biographer and theorist of biography, who writes “of the biographer extending ‘a handshake’ toward his subject.” “At some point,” Atlas admits, “without realizing it, I had withdrawn my hand.”7

  * * *

  —

  BELLOW DREADED THE APPEARANCE of the biography. On October 6, 1999, in the letter in which he explained to Werner Dannhauser why he had stuck with AIDS as the cause of Ravelstein’s death, he claimed to be “taking heat on three fronts: i) Paternity—a fresh start at the age of 84, ii) The messy explosive mixture that James Atlas is preparing for me in the form of a biography, iii) The hue and cry about my book against which I must brace myself. Janis occasionally says to me that maybe we should move to Uruguay.” Ten months later, on August 12, 2000, Bellow wrote to Richard Stern, declaring, “I don’t intend to read Atlas. There is a parallel between his book and the towel with which the bartender cleans the bar. What strikes me uncomfortably about Atlas is that he has a great appeal for my detractors. He was born to please them.” When Stern read the biography, which he admired in part, he wrote to Bellow, in a letter of July 28, 2000: “I don’t think you and Janis need to read it. Would Hector and Andromache read their story if Thersites had written it?” This crack he repeated in a review, though, as a friend of Atlas as well as of Bellow, he also called the biography “fascinating, sometimes brilliant.”8 “When is this book of yours coming out,” Bellow wrote to Atlas a few weeks before publication. “I feel I should go off to Yemen.”9 According to Ruth Wisse, before the book was published, “he [Bellow] and Janis talked about moving to France. I don’t think they were serious. But he was terrified….They were sure they were going to be pulverized.” Wisse was distressed at Bellow’s distress.

  Philip Roth, who had originally suggested to Atlas that he write Bellow’s biography, was also worried, and had been for several years. In the summer of 1998, while visiting the Bellows in Vermont, he proposed to Bellow “that he and I do an extensive written interview about his life’s work.” He would reread Bellow’s books and “then send him my thoughts on each, structured as questions, for him to respond to at length however he liked.” In the end, the project was not completed, “despite Saul’s willingness and my prodding.” What answers Bellow did provide—about the novels up to and including Humboldt’s Gift—were full of interest, which partly explains Roth’s reluctance to “let [Bellow] be.”10 But he was also reluctant for the reason that had prompted him to suggest the project in the first place. As he explained to Bellow in a letter of July 28, 1998, “I would like this interview to do everything that Atlas isn’t going to do,” by which he means as an interpreter of Bellow’s works. In an undated letter of September 1998, Roth praises Bellow’s full comments on Augie March, “because you more than likely never told this to Atlas. Let’s just load this thing up with stuff that [he] doesn’t know.” A year later, in a letter of September 27, 1999, having not heard from Bellow, Roth is disappointed: “I remind you that it’s now over a year since we launched this project. And I continue to think, as I did at the outset, that it is terribly important—when Atlas’s book appears, and there is a long overdue public discussion of your work as a result—that our interview be a central part of that discussion….David Remnick at the New Yorker is eager to publish the interview when it is completed. I think it would be a good idea for it to appear there in the spring of 2000, when Atlas’s book is scheduled to be published.” In the end, an edited version of what they had completed of the interview was published in The New Yorker on April 25, 2005, three weeks after Bellow’s death, in similar hopes of being at the center of a discussion of
Bellow’s writing. When Atlas’s book was published in October 2000, it appeared a week after Roth published an article in the October 9 issue of The New Yorker entitled “Re-Reading Saul Bellow,” a discussion of the novels from The Adventures of Augie March to Humboldt’s Gift.

  * * *

  —

  ROTH’S FRIENDSHIP WITH Bellow blossomed in the early 1990s, though, as we have seen, he had admired him from his earliest days as a writer. In 1975, he dedicated a collection of essays and interviews, Reading Myself and Others, to Bellow, described as “the ‘other’ I have read from the beginning with the deepest pleasure and admiration.” In the 1980s, the two men saw each other only occasionally, in part because Roth was living half the year in London with Claire Bloom, whom he married in 1990. After he and Bloom moved back to the United States, he would see Bellow when he came to Chicago to visit his older brother, Sandy. Roth believes it was Janis’s enthusiasm for his fiction that led Bellow at last “to read me seriously.” He also believes that she urged Bellow to be more openly friendly toward him. “What’s the matter?” he imagines Janis saying. “This guy really likes you, he really admires you, he wants to be your friend.” When Operation Shylock (1993) was published, Bellow phoned Roth, “saying, basically, ‘Kid, that was terrific.’ ” He was similarly enthusiastic about American Pastoral (1997). In the late 1990s, Roth paid several summer visits to the Bellows in Vermont, sometimes with friends (Norman Manea or Ross Miller, an English professor at Columbia, the nephew of Arthur Miller). For Janis, Roth and Martin Amis were “twin pillars” in Bellow’s last years. She also believes her role in bringing them together has been exaggerated. “It’s not like I was kicking him under the table”; he was “hungering for a connection to Philip.”