Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  50. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 114.

  51. Adam’s sense of being handed off owed something to the frequency with which he and Sasha moved in his early years. “My experience of the world was just of being yanked around.”

  52. In a letter of 24 October 1966, Sasha wrote to SB to complain about his bad-mouthing her in front of nine-year-old Adam: “Adam expresses the problem this way, and I quote directly: ‘Papa wants me to love him more than I love you, but he doesn’t understand that I want him to love me more than he does Daniel.’ ”

  53. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 116.

  54. Ibid., p. 117.

  55. SB, More Die of Heartbreak (1987; New York and London: Penguin, 2004), p. 125 (henceforth cited in the text with page numbers).

  56. Atlas, Biography, p. 359.

  57. The book seems never to have been published. CORE’s papers are held at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and its files on “They Shall Overcome” contain correspondence, several copies of Bellow’s introduction, and what appears to be a rough draft of the book itself. According to the letters on file, the book was to be published by Norton in the autumn of 1965, but correspondence stops abruptly with discussion of Bellow’s introduction. SB’s contribution was not the problem. “Thanks so much for your introduction to the CORE book,” wrote Marvin Rich on 9 September 1965. “It was really very much to the point.” The reason the book was never published is suggested by two letters from George Brockway, president of W. W. Norton and Co., one to SB, the other to Henry Volkening. To SB, Brockway wrote on 12 October 1965: “In my opinion, THEY SHALL OVERCOME, the CORE book to which you have contributed an introduction, will sell about 6,500 copies. On this sale, CORE will realize about $7,000. As you know, the bookstores have been flooded with books on the race problem. If it were not for your introduction, we doubt very much whether this book would sell even as well as STEP BY STEP, a volume we published last year for a Cornell committee, which has earned them less than $1,000. We should, therefore, value your contribution at about $6,000.” On 27 April 1966, Brockway wrote to Volkening: “Dear Henry: Here’s the Bellow introduction. Sorry. Yours, George.”

  58. In email to the author, 15 January 2014, Lee Grady, reference librarian at the Wisconsin Historical Society, writes of “They Shall Overcome” that it is “described as a ‘documentary’ of ‘the movement’ with an emphasis on the three civil rights workers who were murdered in Mississippi (Goodman, et al).”

  59. Michiko Kakutani, “A Talk with Saul Bellow: On His Work and Himself,” New York Times Book Review, 13 December 1981, reprinted in Conversations with SB, ed. Cronin and Siegel, p. 187.

  60. Susan Crosland, “Bellow’s Real Gift,” Sunday Times, 18 October 1987, reprinted in Conversations with SB, ed. Cronin and Siegel, pp. 233–34.

  61. Undated draft of the letter, in the Regenstein.

  62. When Lowell heard of Bellow’s plan to attend the festival and to publish his opposition to the Vietnam War in the papers, he several times telephoned “to concert a strategy for the afternoon. I gathered that he and his group were giving me a clearance to participate—somebody like me should be inside.” (Quoted in SB, “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” National Interest, Spring 1993, reprinted in SB, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future—A Nonfiction Collection [1994; Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1995], p. 110 [henceforth abbreviated as IAAU]).

  63. Ibid., p. 110.

  64. Atlas, Biography, p. 346.

  65. Mark Harris, Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 59.

  66. Details of Califano’s meetings with the academics are found in a memo to President Johnson dated 9 August 1966. Attached to the memo are “a few of the better letters” Califano received. The memo and a list of the academics consulted can be found in the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas. If Bellow answered Califano’s three questions, the answers are not among LBJ’s papers in Austin, according to the library’s archivist, Barbara Cline.

  67. Among the SB Papers in the Regenstein is a letter of 12 November 1969 from Frederick M. Kravitz on stationery of the University of Chicago Festival of the Arts Committee. Two days earlier, SB had declined to participate in the festival. Kravitz’s letter reads in part: “I am sorry to note your gastro-intestinal disorder, which if memory serves, did not stop you from feasting at Lyndon Johnson’s table while the abomination of the war in Vietnam was being executed.” SB forwarded Kravitz’s letter to “Tom” (there is no last name) with a note at the bottom reading: “This has to do with our last talk. What I said in the first place was that I w’d not participate in a festival with the above-named artists [“artists” is ironic; the speakers named in Kravitz’s letter were Paul Goodman, Jimmy Breslin, Dwight Macdonald, and Studs Terkel]. What a provocation, eh? Please return this. SB.”

  68. See Cecil Woolf to SB, 17 August 1966. Among the book’s dozens of contributors were Kingsley Amis, W. H. Auden, Isaiah Berlin, Graham Greene, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Powell, Bertrand Russell, Stephen Spender, and Leonard Woolf.

  69. For the student occupations and sit-ins of 1966 and 1967, see especially issues of the University of Chicago student newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, for 13 and 27 May 1966, 24 and 28 January 1967; and the University of Chicago Library Special Collections Web site entry for “University of Chicago—Student Activism,” http://www.lib.uchicago/​e/scrc/​collections/​subject/​activism.html [inactive]. The quotation from Edward Levi was reported in Jeffrey Blum, “The Sit-In: Three Days That Made UC History,” Chicago Maroon, 30 September 1966.

  70. Email to the author, 5 October 2008.

  71. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, pp. 386–87.

  72. Harris, Drumlin Woodchuck, p. 82.

  73. For Irving Howe’s views on the New Left, see his Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 309: “Each day the New Left kept moving away from its earlier spirit of fraternity toward a hard-voiced dogmatism, from the ethic of nonviolence toward a romantic-nihilist fascination with a ‘politics of the deed.’…To see the Leninist-Stalinist contempt for liberal values elevated to Herbert Marcuse’s haughty formulas about ‘repressive tolerance’—formulas used to rationalize the break-up of opponents’ meetings by some new Left groups—made one despair of any authentic Left in America.”

  74. “How is the Kristol movement coming?” wrote Shils to SB on 20 September 1965. “I am very eager that it should be successful.” That SB was spearheading this effort is suggested by a letter of 19 July from James Redfield detailing objections to Kristol. The attempt to bring Himmelfarb to Chicago was foiled by objections from the History Department, though there were also objections from some members of the Committee on Social Thought. See Edward Shils to SB, 3 March 1966: “I do not think anything about the University of Chicago and my association with it has ever depressed me as much as the performance of the History Department in the Kristol case. Of course I do not gainsay the right of any scholars to pass judgment on the work of other scholars, but they have a powerful obligation to behave like gentlemen in doing so, whether they do in writing or orally….I doubt whether the Kristols would now consider coming to the University of Chicago.” This letter was accompanied by the letter to Levi, of the same date, in which Shils complained in particular of “the case of Mrs. Kristol…[who] was treated, I am reliably told, with a degree of discourtesy which one would not even expect at a meeting of the mafia.” Shils also complained of the treatment of Daniel Moynihan, turned down for an appointment in the Department of Sociology. Moynihan, he concedes, might, indeed, be “good enough to be the Director of the Harvard–M.I.T Joint Center for Irving Studies and not good enough to be appointed to the very remarkable Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago,” but it was not the failure to appoint that he objected to
(wrong as he thought it, as he thought the failure to appoint the Kristols wrong), but “the crudity of manners” of the departments in question.

  75. SB’s four Newsday dispatches were dated 9, 12, 13, and 16 June. The last three are reprinted in IAAU, under the general title “Israel: The Six-Day War.” This quotation is from the 13 June dispatch, p. 208.

  76. Ibid., pp. 206–27.

  77. Ibid., p. 209.

  78. Ibid., pp. 214–15.

  79. Ibid., p. 216.

  80. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, pp. 369–70.

  81. SB to Maggie Staats, 7 June 1967. Maggie Staats will figure prominently in the next chapter.

  82. SB, To Jerusalem and Back (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1976), p. 133 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  83. This woman was Arlette Landes, who will also figure prominently in the next chapter.

  84. SB, interview, San Francisco Chronicle, quoted in Harris, Drumlin Woodchuck, p. 24.

  85. Ibid., p. 25.

  86. Quoted in Walter Clemons and Jack Kroll, “America’s Master Novelist: An Interview with Saul Bellow,” Newsweek, 1 September 1975, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations, p. 129.

  87. Sabina Mazursky email to the author, 3 May 2010.

  88. “Are Many Modern Writers Merely Becoming Actors Who Behave Like Artists?,” reprinted in Observer, 7 December 1968, under the title “Perils of Pleasing the Public.” See also SB, “Skepticism and the Depth of Life,” in The Arts and the Public, ed. James E. Miller, Jr., and Paul Herring (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), reprinted in SB, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Reflections from Seven Decades, ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York: Viking Press, 2015): “Writers of talent do occasionally manage to make a beginning in New York, but their tendency is to compensate themselves too handsomely and too fully for the hardships they endured on the way up. They are often transformed into Major Literary Figures and for the rest of their lives do little more than give solemn interviews to prestigious journals or serve on White House committees or fly to the Bermudas to participate in international panel discussions on the crisis in the arts. Often the writer is absorbed by the literary figure. In such cases it is the social struggle that has been most important, not the art” (p. 227).

  89. See also SB to Gloria Steinem, in the 1965 profile in Glamour magazine, reprinted in Conversations with SB, ed. Cronin and Siegel, pp. 51–52: “It is difficult,” Bellow went on, “for writers to escape the temptation to be exemplary. The public wants them to be heroes, philosophers, to point the way….The hard thing to do—the thing few Americans think is necessary—is to make the choice, close the door, and say ‘this is it, this is all I can do.’ ”

  90. See Bill Cooper to SB, 9 December 1966, in a letter containing a list of ten talks for the spring of 1967: “We will set up the entire itinerary, hotels, flights, etc., and, as I told you, you can get out on 30 days notice on any of these dates.”

  91. Harris, Drumlin Woodchuck, p. 119.

  92. These comments come from an interview with Salas.

  93. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 376.

  94. The other woman was Maggie Staats. Carol Stern—the girlfriend, now wife, of SB’s friend and pupil Jay Stern (the model for Feffer in Mr. Sammler’s Planet)—recalls a similar encounter a year later, on 2 May 1969, when SB gave a talk at Roosevelt University in the Loop, where she taught. The talk was entitled “The Artist and the University,” and SB “was given the Sammler treatment.”

  95. SB, quoted by Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, 2 January 1983; Atlas, Biography, p. 376n., quotes an account of the San Francisco State episode published the following day in the San Francisco Chronicle. In the account, SB is described as “prematurely old and cranky,” “an alienated super-intellectual afflicted with defensiveness and hostility.”

  96. This quotation and the account that follows come from an eleven-page typed transcript of an unpublished talk by Salas entitled “The Sit-in at State—68.” The transcript is dated 30 October 1999.

  97. For Atlas’s account, quoted from in the following paragraphs as well, see Biography, pp. 374–77.

  98. When asked why he made the comment about Bellow’s not being able to come, Salas answered: “This was the beginning of the summer of love,…Fuck don’t fight—that’s probably where the come thing came from.” In “Mr. Sammler’s Planet: Saul Bellow’s 1968 Speech at San Francisco State University,” in A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria L. Cronin and Lee Trepanier (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), p. 157, Andrew Gordon provides useful background to the incident: “Then called San Francisco State College, now San Francisco State University, it was a commuter school, largely working class, multi-ethnic, including some black, Chicano, and Filipino students who banded together under the label of the ‘Third World Liberation Front’ (echoing the North Vietnamese Liberation front or NLF) and called for Black Studies and Ethnic Studies programs.” To Gordon, Salas was “a working-class Chicano writer in the vanguard of a movement of students and teachers who were trying to transform the university and the society to make it more culturally inclusive” (p. 160).

  99. Salas provided me with a copy of an email of 11 June 2001 from Richard Hanlin, to be used in possible legal action against Atlas and Random House: “All I can tell you about Floyd’s confrontation with Bellow is this: Floyd was standing in the aisle less than six feet from where I was sitting. The whole thing lasted less than forty seconds. He did not swear. I recall what he said and there was no profanity unless one considers the word ‘come’ as a swear word. Other witnesses: my guest Lee Combs who is now close to eighty years old…Maureen Putnam, the wife of Floyd’s teacher and colleague, was there and doesn’t recall Floyd or anyone swearing.” Hanlin had been in correspondence with Random House about the incident: “In my last phone call to them they told me they’d talked to Atlas and he stood by his account and for them the issue was over” (they would not, therefore, be supplying the “transcript” of the confrontation Atlas refers to in an endnote on p. 642).

  100. Atlas, Biography, p. 376.

  2. “ALL MY LADIES SEEM FURIOUS”

  1. This quotation comes from p. 72 of Sasha’s unpublished memoir, “What’s in a Name?” (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers). The memoir consists of two parts, 121 typed pages written sometime in 2006, and a postscript entitled “The Years Between” written in 2008. This postscript, which deals with Sasha’s life from age twelve to twenty, goes on to p. 130, and is followed by a letter to her son, Adam, dated May 2008, in which she explains how difficult it was “to dredge up memories” of what she calls the “dark ages” of her life. The memoir, she tells Adam, “is not an autobiography. In fact, it is fairly fragmented, surprisingly incomplete in many respects and, significantly, does not even touch on the last thirty plus years (my best) at all.” The letter is numbered as though part of the memoir (pp. 131–32). My dating of the first two parts of the manuscript is conjectural, based on the May 2008 letter to Adam and the first sentence of the postscript: “I spent nearly two years trying to tackle the years 12–20 that are missing in the memoir.” Sasha gave me a copy of the memoir in 2010, the year before she died. The memoir records the difficulties she encountered over her various names when at Bennington. In her second year, she needed a birth certificate to travel to Mexico with a roommate: “Because I had no other recent, official record of my legal existence, I had to get signed and notarized affidavits from my mother and my aunt, attesting that Saundra and Sandra Richter, Sondra and Alexandra Tschacbasov were all the same person” (p. 2).

  2. SB, Humboldt’s Gift (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1965), p. 19 (henceforth cited in the text with page numbers); SB, A Theft (1989), published as a paperback original by Penguin; reprinted in SB, Collected Stories (New York: Viking, 2001), p. 117 (henceforth cited in
the text by page numbers).

  3. Atlas, Biography, p. 347. See also, on p. 348, this quotation from Hanson’s diaries: “Mr. Bellow is one who loves his family, and as far as I can see it, his family now consists of himself and his sons….He is the only connecting link between his three sons, and his family life will always be a bit incomplete.”

  4. SB’s letters to Maggie are in her possession.

  5. Walter Kerr, “Saul Bellow’s ‘Under the Weather,’ ” New York Times, 28 October 1966.

  6. Eleanor Fox is discussed in chapter 4 of To Fame and Fortune.

  7. The “Olduvai” manuscripts and SB’s decision to give them up are discussed in the introduction to To Fame and Fortune.

  8. This episode is also mentioned in the introduction to To Fame and Fortune.

  9. James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977; New York: Avon Books, 1978), p. 315.

  10. See, for example, SB to Meyer Schapiro: “It’s possible that Edward Honig at Brown may know of a job. I heard of one there, but I was told that John Berryman would probably be taking it. Perhaps it’s still open. But I’d guess that Syracuse was Delmore’s best bet. I hope he’s well enough to function. Teaching makes him more stable, but Syracuse is a small town where he would be continually observed by people who had heard of his troubles etc….But then I haven’t seen Delmore since ’57 or ’58, the year of the crisis, and I’ve no idea what he’s like. But I wish him well.”