In the course of this new closeness, the novelists made a pact of “mutual candor” when discussing each other’s work.11 This pact Bellow tested when writing to Roth about his novel I Married a Communist (1998). Although it was always “a treat” to read a Roth manuscript, Bellow wrote on January 1, 1998, in this case “the overall effect was not satisfactory.” The problem with the novel, Bellow believed, was one of “distance….There should be a certain detachment from the writer’s own passions.” The irony of such a complaint coming from the author of Herzog, he fully recognized, but Herzog was “a chump—a failed intellectual and at bottom a sentimentalist,” an altogether different character from “the man who gives us Eve and Sylphid,” characters in I Married a Communist thought by many readers, certainly by Bellow, to be thinly fictionalized versions of Claire Bloom and her daughter, Anna Steiger. Bloom had written harshly about Roth in her memoir Leaving a Doll’s House (1996), and Bellow’s letter implies a revenge motive in Roth’s depiction of the characters of Eve and her daughter, Sylphid. Moreover, the communist of the title, Ira Ringold, is “probably the least attractive of all your characters. I assume that you can no more bear Ira than the reader can. But you stand loyally by this cast-iron klutz—a big strong stupid man who attracts you for reasons invisible to me.” Anticipating Roth’s response, Bellow continues: “You will say that all of that is acknowledged in IMAC. Yes, and no…One of your persistent themes is the purgation one can only obtain through rage. The forces of aggression are liberating, etc. And I can see that as a legitimate point of view. But Eve is simply a pitiful woman and Sylphid is a pampered, wicked fat girl with a bison hump. These are not titans.”
On January 10, Roth wrote back, beginning with Bellow’s point about “distance.” He and Bellow must be “broadcasting on different frequencies.” Two-thirds of the novel is narrated by “the brother of a Communist, the brother of a killer, who is himself opposed to his brother’s politics and spends a lifetime trying to educate and subdue his brother’s violent impulses. I believe Murray [the brother] is strongly there (as is his wife and his daughter) and that it’s impossible to understand this story separate from his/their presence. The remaining third of the story is narrated by the former protégé of the Communist and the killer [Nathan Zuckerman], who is neither of those things himself, and who explains what Ira’s appeal was to a certain kind of morally precocious boy in the 1940s….For some reason, in IMAC, you won’t see narrators anywhere, though mine don’t shut up from beginning to end, endlessly reflecting on the story.” When Bellow describes one of Roth’s “persistent themes” as “the purgation one obtains only through rage,” Roth replies that this is precisely the opposite of the theme of I Married a Communist, as it is the opposite of the theme of American Pastoral. Throughout the book, Ira “is trying to be liberated from violent rage. He fails, but the story is about the effort.” Roth also disputes Bellow’s account of Herzog: “You’re forgetting the intellectual ferocity, the sheer human ferocity, of that book….You were writing about betrayal and so you wrote about betrayers and the betrayed. You faced things. Everything. If Herzog was a sentimentalist none of us who think of that novel as a masterpiece would have bothered to read it. Herzog is a moralist, and, like any moralist with a brain, brokenhearted.”
At the end of his letter, Bellow anticipates and seeks to soothe Roth’s feelings. “There aren’t many people to whom I can be so open,” he declares. “You’ll be sore at me, but I believe that you won’t cast me off forever.” Roth’s letter ends with a comparable softening: “Cast you out forever? You’ve been in my bloodstream since I read Augie March. It’s going to take more than candor for me to cast you out for half an hour, let alone ‘forever.’ ” The great respect, the reverence, Roth feels for Bellow underlay his response to Ravelstein as well, occasioning what Claudia Roth Pierpont calls a slight “bending” of their pact of mutual candor. Roth thought Ravelstein “deeply flawed,” despite “some wonderful scenes and portraits.” “I knew what was wrong with it,” he said in an interview, “and I knew it was not right to tell him, because he didn’t have the strength.” He thought it was a mistake to make Ravelstein “wonderful from the first line of the story, so there’s nowhere to go.” He felt the same way about “the evil of the Eliade character.” Had Bellow been younger and stronger, he would have advised him to “mix them up.” “It’s hard to write a book at eighty-four,” he told Pierpont. “It’s hard to remember day to day what you’ve done” (something he himself would experience, retiring from writing fiction at seventy-seven). What he said to Bellow, he told Pierpont, was that “he couldn’t properly evaluate ‘Ravelstein’ because he was ‘out of sympathy’ with the character of Abe Ravelstein,” by which he also meant out of sympathy with Allan Bloom. Within the Bellow circle, some attributed Roth’s lack of enthusiasm for Ravelstein (wrongly, Roth insists) to his response to Bellow’s remarks about I Married a Communist.
Roth was not alone among Bellow’s friends to face candid criticism of their work. At Bellow’s request, Richard Stern submitted a story to News from the Republic of Letters, the literary journal Bellow and Botsford had founded in 1997. In a letter of June 18, 1998, Bellow rejected the story. “I’d be all for it if it had been written in a different way,” he explained. “It has too much extraneous data for a short story, too many lists of names….So much lavish documentation makes the reader (this reader, anyhow) impatient. But Botsford and I have set ourselves up to be the saviors of high culture—saving it from itself—so we’ve put extraordinary demands on ourselves and everybody else. I seriously doubt whether he and I could meet our own standards.” Stern, like Roth, was forgiving. A more pained response, one seriously damaging to their friendship, came from Bellow’s rejection of a story by David Peltz. The story, entitled “Side Effect,” was never published (Peltz gave me a copy). It is narrated by a man much like Peltz himself, a builder and ex–aluminum-siding salesman. Like Peltz, the narrator decides to produce his own version of a Jackson Pollock painting, which he hangs in a prominent place in his living room. The materials he uses for the painting come from his twin brother, with whom he’s always been competitive (unlike the narrator, Peltz had sisters but no brothers). This brother “was organized. He was focused. Without a misstep he went on to become highly achieved as an oncologist. The unexpressed comparison between us followed me like an albatross. I was the undeveloped one. The inferior half.” So good a painter was the oncologist brother that he put the narrator off painting for many years.
Bellow’s rejection of Peltz’s story came in a letter of July 10, 1997:
I’m sorry to say that Botsford and I can’t persuade each other to print your piece. The idea behind it is good but your handling of it is faulty. You make too much of your rivalry with the brother you never had. To have a rivalry with one’s brother is one thing, but to have it in for a brother who never existed is ill-natured. It’s like washing dirty linen in public; and furthermore washing sheets you never slept on. So your story toils on and you deal with problems nobody wants to hear about. After all, it’s a jolly inspiration to do a Jackson Pollock of one’s own to put it over on one’s wife as a work of genius. But you reveal throughout, one way or another, that at this light-hearted moment you have also brought a large burden of unsettled scores to church, and you drag every last one of them into the confession box with you.
Peltz’s story is not very good, certainly not good enough to go into a magazine aiming to save high culture from itself. But Bellow’s rejection is harshly personal. The passages about the narrator’s brother are, indeed, extraneous, but that the brother had no real-life model is irrelevant. Bellow, reading biographically, sees the brother as a figure for himself, and has taken offense: “To have a rivalry with one’s brother is one thing. To have it in for a brother who never existed is ill-natured. It’s like washing dirty linen in public; and furthermore washing sheets you never slept on.”
Peltz was wounde
d. Nor was he softened by the rejection letter’s concluding sentences: “Don’t hate me too hard or too long. Just ask yourself how many other contributors get a letter as long as this.” As Peltz interpreted the letter, “He is not my brother, is what he’s saying: Get off it! Are you pretending to be my level? I have a reputation, and I don’t want to taint it by publishing a work that’s not up to my level.” Peltz admitted that “the story was a metaphor of our relationship,” but it was in no way critical of Bellow; the story’s narrator is not critical of his brother, only envious of him. Peltz was upset not so much by the rejection, or the harshness of the criticism, as by the absence of any word of encouragement: “ ‘David, this is not good but stay with it. I want the best for you, but I cannot publish it.’ That’s all.” “I’m not anti-Bellow,” Peltz insisted in an interview. “I’m anti his not acknowledging me in terms of our relationship.” Bellow’s letter was “unforgivable” in its failure to acknowledge their friendship and history. “Outrageous. How petty…How I hungered for this, I hungered for him to say, Dave, show me what you’re doing, we’ll go over it together. He did it with students and strangers; why didn’t he do it with me?”
These are later reflections. At the time, Peltz was more conciliatory, though openly pained. “Since your letter,” he wrote to Bellow on August 12, 1997, a month after Bellow’s letter, “more than once I have pulled off to the side of the road to find that what I am really searching for is not the right house but the right response to the cruelty of having learned that I never had a brother and I shouldn’t be wasting literary efforts laundering feelings in a public way for a brother I never had….But I did have fun doing it. And I did try to make it readable and hoped it would earn a word of praise.” His letter ends: “Saul, it is built into my well-being not to hate at all. Pissed off, yes. But not for long. Happily, I am off the floor, upright again, and working on another story.” This was not quite true. Ten years later, he was still angry with Bellow in interviews with me, as he no doubt was when interviewed by James Atlas, and the harshness of Bellow’s letter figured prominently in his complaints.
Bellow had form in cases like this, where the claims of friendship seemed to him to impinge upon what he saw as the claims of literary merit, including the costs involved in creating works of literature and finding an audience for them. One thinks of his refusal to write an introduction to a collection of Oscar Tarcov’s stories. In the Tarcov case, discussed in chapter 9, Bellow’s refusal was more tactfully phrased than the Peltz rejection letter, but for Nathan Tarcov it was no less wounding and incomprehensible. In explaining his decision to Nathan, Bellow gestured toward the sacrifices required of a literary vocation. Oscar Tarcov was a better father and husband than he was, he told Nathan, but “he wasn’t that good a writer and I don’t really see any point in your doing this.” Nathan sees this answer as “petty” (a word Peltz also used), a resurfacing “of a long-ago teenage rivalry.” But it could also be a sign of the sole virtue Edward Shils allowed Bellow: “consecration to his art.” Another answer, a related answer, is that in life, including in correspondence, Bellow was not always as careful, sensitive, or thoughtful as he was in his fiction. When people are wounded by his fiction, on the whole they’re meant to be wounded. Neither Roth nor Stern nor Nathan and Miriam Tarcov were meant to be wounded. Peltz is another matter.
Bellow’s regrets figure prominently in the correspondence from his early eighties, often occasioned by the deaths of old friends and acquaintances. On March 20, 1997, he wrote to his old friend Al Glotzer (he figures in chapters 5 and 6 of To Fame and Fortune) with news of Bellow’s third wife, Susan’s, death. Susan died on September 17, 1996, at sixty-two, two days after collapsing from an aneurysm, the same sort that her father, Frank Glassman, had died of at fifty-eight.12 Daniel, who was thirty-two, was devastated. When he called his father, Bellow burst into tears, his first confused words being “Tell your mother I’m sorry.” What Daniel remembers of him at this time is that “he was never more kind to me.” Bellow offered to attend the funeral in Chicago, but he was frail, still not wholly recovered from the fish poisoning, and Daniel told him not to make the trip. As he explained to Atlas, “I didn’t want to lose both my parents in the same weekend.”13 Daniel remembers telling Bellow, “Pop, you’re a great guy. I really admire you,” and Bellow answering, “I’d like it if you were a better man than me.” In the same letter to Glotzer, Bellow comments on the death of Irving Howe. “We got off on the wrong foot,” he admits. “David Bazelon introduced us (in the Village days) and I was—well…[his ellipses] ungracious. For which I was never forgiven.”
Susan’s death in 1996 had been preceded in the same year by the deaths of two other people who had been important to him. Eleanor Clark, Robert Penn Warren’s widow, the mother of Rosanna Warren, died in February. In March, Meyer Schapiro died. Both were old friends and part of Bellow’s life in Vermont. The next year, in July, François Furet died suddenly, on the tennis court. On September 1, 1997, Bellow wrote to Werner Dannhauser, suffering from “pangs of conscience.”
I haven’t written to my correspondents because…because, because, because. I haven’t added up the deaths of friends during the past six months. Furet you knew and perhaps you remember Zita Cogan who died a few weeks ago. The others were long-time buddies: a college classmate, in Paris [Julian Behrstock]. In New York, Yetta [Barshevsky] Shachtman, the widow of the Trotskyite leader. She and I would walk back from school in Humboldt Park (Chicago) discussing Trotsky’s latest pamphlet on the German question….She was an earnest girl—the dear kind—Comrade Yetta. Her pa was a carpenter, and his old Nash was filled with tools, shavings and sawdust. And now she has gone—human sawdust and shavings. There was also a clever, clumsy man named [Hyman] Slate who believed (when we were young) that a sense of humor should be part of every argument about the existence of God. Laughing was proof that there was a God. But God in the end laid two kinds of cancer on him and took him away very quickly….Next came the news that David Shahar had died. So many women in his life. When I met him with yet another one on some Jerusalem street he would lay a finger to his lips as he passed….I did like him but my deeper sympathies went to Shula [his wife].
A month after this letter, in November 1997, Catharine “Katy” Carver died, at seventy-six. She and Bellow had fallen out over John Berryman. They were discussing him in a bar on Dover Street in London, and Carver angrily told Bellow, “This is no place to be talking about John,” to which Bellow replied: “ ‘On the contrary, John would have thought it appropriate to be mourned in a bar-room.’ After that she refused to meet me or return my telephone calls….I think she felt my introduction to Berryman’s posthumous novel was disrespectful.” Bellow remembered Carver in her youth as “a very pretty and lively young woman…kind and attractive.”14 A month later, to round off the year, Owen Barfield died, perhaps the most important of Bellow’s spiritual guides. He was ninety-nine. In the letter to Dannhauser, Bellow, at eighty-two, described himself as “dying piecemeal. My legs aren’t functioning as they ought. Day and night they ache. And I am this, that and the other in many respects, physically. It seems that my tear ducts have dried up, and the eyeballs feel gummy. The details are not worth going into. It’s possible that I may never recover from the damage done by cigua toxin.” The next summer, in June 1998, Alfred Kazin died. Born five days before Bellow, he died at eighty-three. The next year, in May 1999, Saul Steinberg died.
As old friends fell away, new ones entered the picture. Chief among these was the young British critic James Wood. When he first met Bellow, in 1990, Wood was twenty-five and a freelance book critic for The Guardian. In a letter to Harriet Wasserman, he described himself as a great fan of Bellow’s and asked if he could interview him for a Guardian profile. The interview, he assured Wasserman, would be literary, nonjournalistic, nonsensational. “And Wasserman said it was fine, just call him, and I did.” When he met Bellow in Chicago, he found him not at all th
e formidable figure he’d expected. “He was very warm, he laid the table for tea, Russian tea, and we had a free-ranging conversation for a couple of hours. At a mere twenty-six, or whatever I was [he was twenty-five], I felt I should be very serious, and in addition to discussing his fiction I thought we should talk seriously about the state of America, modernity, post-modernity, and so on. And I remember Bellow, charmingly at the end, saying this conversation has been a bit serious, and he wanted a bit more levity.” Then, “very thrillingly,” Bellow suggested that they walk together to a local bookshop, “and people were spotting Bellow on the street and whispering—I enjoyed that.” Bellow recommended Czesław Miłosz’s poetry and the Frances Steegmuller book Flaubert in Egypt, “which he said was a riot, a real laugh.” Then they got into Bellow’s Range Rover, and he drove Wood back to his hotel in the Loop. “So he could not have been nicer. I was absolutely nobody. I was just a young admirer. So as you can imagine it left a very nice impression.”
The resulting profile by Wood began as it meant to go on. “Why poke around by torchlight if there are stars to see by? It seems strange at times that anyone bothers with ordinary writers after reading Saul Bellow.” What followed was a Bellow-like description of Bellow’s face, which looks “as it should….Deeply grooved with creases of laughter, it is heroically formed. The brow is large, domed; it blazes, as do the eyes which are heavy-lidded and comically recessed—they suggest reserves of brilliant slyness. His nose is noble, elevated, slightly veined with age now; his mouth is voluptuous and resembles Mr. Sammler’s in Mr. Sammler’s Planet: ‘a heavy, all savouring, all-rejecting lip.’ ” The profile, “Einstein of the Common Life,” was published on April 21, 1990, and Wood sent a copy to Bellow. On August 15, 1990, Bellow wrote back saying he’d read and been impressed by Wood’s reviews in The Guardian and that he was “delighted with your visit and also of course by [the profile]….You gave me first-class treatment and I am not one of those monsters who are senselessly provoked by good deeds.”
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