Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  11. Mark Harris, Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 21.

  12. Atlas, Biography, p. 360.

  13. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 119.

  14. Atlas, Biography, p. 360.

  15. Quoted in Harris, Drumlin Woodchuck, p. 15, where no date is given.

  16. Ibid.

  17. This portion of the letter is quoted in ibid., p. 18.

  18. Ibid., p. 20.

  19. Ibid., p. 21.

  20. Ibid., pp. 23, 29, 30.

  21. Atlas, Biography, p. 365.

  22. Harris, Drumlin Woodchuck, pp. 35, 36.

  23. Ibid., p. 41.

  24. Ibid., p. 40.

  25. Ibid., p. 42.

  26. Quoted in ibid., p. 14 (see also p. 157 for SB’s disapproval of The Goy as a title). On pp. 55–56, Harris lists several woodchuck references in Bellow’s writing. Grandma Taube in Herzog has “teeth like a woodchuck.” “Thoreau saw a woodchuck at Walden,” we learn in Humboldt’s Gift, “its eyes more fully awake than the eyes of any farmer.” Woodchucks are smart as well as alert, and sensibly hibernate “when Humboldt comes ‘skedaddling dangerously’ in his Buick.” In Seize the Day, Tommy worries “that all my life I had the wrong ideas about myself and wasn’t what I thought I was. And wasn’t even careful to take a few precautions, as most people do—like a woodchuck has a few exits to his tunnel.”

  27. Ibid., p. 56.

  28. Ibid., p. 23.

  29. Ibid., p. 182.

  30. See Henry Brandon, “Writer Versus Readers,” Sunday Times, 18 September 1966; Terry Coleman, “Saul Bellow Talks,” Guardian, 23 September 1966; for the anonymous Observer profile, 25 September 1966, see Atlas, Biography, p. 359.

  31. SB was introduced by Malcolm Bradbury at the Cochrane Theatre on Sunday, 25 September, according to Carver’s note of 16 September. Carver’s note also mentions various people eager to meet him or have him to dinner, including Peter Brook, Lawrence Gowing (of the Tate Gallery, also a painter and an art historian), and Julia Strachey, Gowing’s former wife (a writer and member of the Bloomsbury circle).

  32. Among the services Weidenfeld performed for SB was lobbying and jockeying on his behalf for the ten-thousand-dollar Formentor Prix International de Littérature. As Barley Alison predicted in a letter of 28 October 1963: “I must tell you that the Prix Formentor will be a good deal less Moravia dominated when George [Weidenfeld] is the President than in the past….Also the Americans bring Herbert Gold who is an old friend….I long for you to win it, partly because I think you deserve it, partly because…you would then have to go to the meeting in 1965 in order to make a gracious, modest little speech.” SB’s friend Mary McCarthy was chairman of the judges for the 1965 competition (though she spoke in favor of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s A God and His Gifts). SB narrowly beat Witold Gombrowicz when the French jury changed its vote from Yukio Mishima to SB. The competition was held at Valescure, on the French Riviera, and publishers from thirteen different countries (Weidenfeld was the English publisher) provided teams of judges (among Weidenfeld’s judges were John Gross and Francis Wyndham). Despite Alison’s hopes that SB would come to Europe to collect the prize, in fact he did not receive it until 1966, at a ceremony in the offices of the Grove Press in New York (Barney Rosset of Grove Press had headed the American delegation). Herb Gold, who presented SB with the award, remembers Rosette Lamont arguing with him, “The really great writer, the one who should have been given the prize…is Ionesco. He’s international.” (Herbert Gold, Still Alive: A Temporary Condition: A Memoir [New York: Arcade, 2008], p. 15.) In “Bellow Observed: A Serial Portrait,” Mosaic, vol. 8, no. 1 (Fall 1974), pp. 256–57, Lamont recalls an episode on the morning before the ceremony. SB went out to buy a new pair of shoes for the occasion, accompanied by Paolo Milano and Lamont, but was reluctant to carry the old pair to the Grove offices. The old pair was still in good condition, and, finding himself in front of the New York Public Library, SB decided to place it on the front steps. Then he and his friends stood aside, waiting to see if anyone would pick the shoes up. No one did. “As we boarded the number 4 on the way downtown,” writes Lamont, “Paolo Milano reflected: ‘I guess there isn’t anyone ready to step into Saul Bellow’s shoes.’ ”

  33. Weidenfeld had made a similar offer, Alison wrote to SB on 5 February 1967, but his terms were “a non-starter and likely to bankrupt me sooner rather than later.” After the move to Secker, she thanked Bellow in a letter of 4 March. His praise and support had led to all sorts of offers, the best of which was Secker’s.

  34. He was back in time to deliver the keynote address at a University of Chicago conference on “The Arts and the Public” (16–21 October) as part of the celebration of its seventy-fifth anniversary. In his talk, SB argued that New York was not the literary capital of America, though it was the capital of literary business in America. Granville Hicks’s report on the conference in the Saturday Review (“Mass Media’s Gifts to the Muse,” 19 November 1966) quotes the address: “ ‘The literary life of the country is concentrated mostly in university communities. The university has come to be in the Sixties what Paris was to Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the Twenties.’ ” Whether SB attended subsequent sessions is unclear. He is unlikely to have listened to Anthony West, Leon Edel, or Studs Terkel, though he might have stayed for William Arrowsmith, Wright Morris, and Harold Rosenberg.

  35. Perhaps the earliest of the Sammler-related manuscripts is an undated and unpublished story among the SB Papers in the Regenstein entitled “Out of Bounds,” about a magazine writer and failed playwright named Alex Goodkin (author of a play entitled Trenck, later used as the title for Charlie Citrine’s hit in Humboldt’s Gift). Like Oscar Tarcov, Alex has a heart condition, has had a coronary, and has witnessed a black pickpocket on the Riverside Drive bus (it was Tarcov who first told SB about having seen such a pickpocket). Alex tells his wife, Erna, what he’s seen, and after a second sighting is confronted by the pickpocket, who deals with him “as a tomcat might deal with a fish head.” His feelings about the pickpocket are contrasted with those of his truculent, hip daughter, Patsy. “He had been greatly frightened by that Negro,” who to Patsy was “someone who was with it, on top of things. In short, a master spirit. Which her daddy was not. In some respects he thought her right. He had the Thirties’ playwrights’ outlook, and old-fashioned compassion. To her, though not in those words, the Humanistic crap.” Another possible early version, the earliest discussed in Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984), pp. 209ff., takes the form of manuscript material related to a story entitled “The Future of the Moon,” in which Pawlyk is attacked by “two slim negroes” and there is “no pickpocket, no Columbia scene, no Feffer, no Wallace.” This material was deposited in the Regenstein in a gift of 1967, which leads Fuchs to conclude that “it was not until the late sixties that the novel’s subject matter really presented itself” (p. 209).

  36. As Atlas, Biography, p. 126, suggests, the Holocaust is alluded to twice more: in Leventhal’s nightmare dream of a crowded railway station with blaring loudspeakers and guards pushing people onto trains, and in Allbee’s turning on the gas stove in Leventhal’s kitchen.

  37. Earlier in the same passage, one of the effects of the Holocaust on Jews of the New World, including those who suffered before emigrating, is said to have been to silence any claims to exceptional suffering, the sort Father Herzog used to make: “We are on a more brutal standard now, a new terminal standard, indifferent to persons” (p. 565). “It took a long time for me to get a grip on it,” Bellow admitted to Norman Manea, when asked about the Holocaust. “I ask myself often nowadays: why were you so slow in picking this up? I don’t know why” (“Conversation,” p. 15).

  38. Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision
, p. 226.

  39. SB offers examples of these facts in the letter to Wieseltier, by way of the testimony of a survivor: “I once asked Alexander Donat, author of The Holocaust Kingdom, how it was that the Jews went down so quickly in Poland. He said something like this: ‘After three days in the ghetto, unable to wash and shave, without clean clothing, deprived of food, all utilities and municipal services cut off, your toilet habits humiliatingly disrupted, you are demoralized, confused, subject to panic. A life of austere discipline would have made it possible for me to keep my head, but how many civilized people lead such a life?’ Simple facts—had Hannah had the imagination to see them—would have lowered the intellectual fever that vitiates her theories.” Donat’s views find their way into the novel as Sammler reflects on his shooting of an unarmed German soldier: “The thing no doubt would have happened differently to another man, a man who had been eating, drinking, smoking, and whose blood was brimming with fat, nicotine, alcohol, sexual secretions. None of these in Sammler’s blood. He was not then entirely human….Not much there for human appeal” (p. 114).

  40. Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, p. 19.

  41. Ruth R. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (New York: Free Press, 2000), p. 303.

  42. “The Old System” is reprinted in SB, CS, p. 90. Further references to the story itself are cited within the text by page number.

  43. They are both discussed in chapter 2 of To Fame and Fortune, in connection with Bellow’s Canadian cousins the Gameroffs.

  44. The deal is described in detail in chapter 2 of To Fame and Fortune.

  45. SB, “Zetland: By a Character Witness” (1974), reprinted in SB, CS, p. 243.

  46. The choice of this figure was coolly calculated, and no less coolly analyzed both by Braun in retrospect and by Isaac: “He must have known all along that he would have to pay the money….Tina from the deathbed had made too strong a move. If he refused to come across, no one could blame him. But he would feel greatly damaged. How would he live with himself? Because he made these sums easily now. Buying and selling a few city lots. Had the price been fifty thousand dollars, Tina would have been saying that he would never see her again. But twenty thousand—the figure was a shrewd choice” (pp. 113–14).

  47. SB, “Cousins” (1974), reprinted in CS, p. 206.

  48. For a related sense of the Old System contract and of the importance of family, see Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 269: “Again and again I would ‘fail’ my father through what he took to be my disordered life—a broken marriage, a sudden unexplained stay in California. But his solidarity never wavered, and I came to feel that it was a solidarity more than familial, deriving from some unexpressed sense of what a Jew owed his son.”

  49. Wisse, Modern Jewish Canon, p. 298.

  50. A likely source for the episode with the black pickpocket, also for the phone conversation with the police officer, is “The Pickpockets” (1961), a story by Oscar Tarcov. The narrator of the story, Mr. Karpen, lives on the Upper West Side (like Tarcov himself, who lived at 37 Riverside Drive at the time he wrote the story) and takes the “Riverside–Fifth Avenue bus” to and from work. Karpen’s neighbor also takes this bus and recounts having seen two black pickpockets, a tall one and a short one, plying their trade on the bus (Tarcov himself had witnessed something like this). The outraged neighbor is no liberal, and Karpen thinks to himself: “In this day and age, goddammit, can’t Gabler view a couple of thieves simply as men—lousy men, O.K.—and not as two niggers?” Some days later, Karpen himself spots the pickpockets, watching them “intently.” The two thieves go about their work coolly. When one of them only just misses snatching a wallet, quickly exiting the bus, Karpen lets the other one know he’s been spotted. “When the small man started to move to get off the bus, Mr. Karpen said to him, ‘Tell your friend that he’s too obvious.’ The small man smiled and said, ‘I don’t know that man but I sure wished I did.’ ” Then he gets off the bus. When Karpen’s wife asks why he didn’t do something about the pickpockets, he replies: “ ‘I’ll make a fuss in the bus and nothing will happen. I can’t arrest them and search them.’ ” After several more such sightings, Karpen sees them attempting to rob “an elegantly dressed, very old man who had palsy. They made no effort to use their skills. The tall man shamelessly jostled the old man to the point of utter bewilderment while the small man openly went through the helpless old man’s pockets until he found his wallet. The two pickpockets calmly got off the bus, for the first time together.” Karpen thinks back on this moment, “smoldering.” Previously, he’d been impressed by the smooth professionalism, the “craftsmanship” and imperturbability of the pickpockets. Now he thinks: “The dirty bastards—they threw their skills, their finesse, out the window and shamelessly and ruthlessly frisked the old man—they didn’t care if he knew what was happening because he was too helpless to stop them.”

  Karpen feels shame not only at having been too cowardly to intervene but at having admired the pickpockets. He calls the police to complain, and “after several transfers” finally gets through to a lieutenant, who politely tells him “they were short of staff in his detail but after the summer they would put someone on this….Was there anything else he had to say that would be helpful?”

  “They were Negro,” Mr. Karpen said.

  “Oh, nigger pickpockets,” the lieutenant said.

  “Negroes,” Mr. Karpen said strongly. “Negroes.”

  And as he said this, hating the lieutenant, he imagined himself on a bus pointing to the two pickpockets and yelling thieves! And he saw the passengers’ faces looking at the small man and the tall man and saw their lips spitting out the words, dirty niggers.

  The connections between SB’s novel and Tarcov’s story are obvious, particularly in relation to feelings of shame, guilt, fear, prejudice, and the inadequacies or weaknesses of liberal sentiment.

  51. A personal memory: In graduate school, I attended a series of lectures by Northrop Frye on the Bible as literature. At one point, Frye digressed to tell us about an argument he’d had with a radical student at Berkeley in the late 1960s. Frye did not specify the topic of the argument, or if he did, I do not recall it. What I recall is the quiet contempt with which he described the student’s refusal to continue arguing: on the grounds that Frye had more knowledge than he did and thus put him at an unfair disadvantage. A different view, more in connection with the students, is offered in an entry of 15 April 1967 from Alfred Kazin’s Journals: “Youth and age…Saul and his hatred of the young. I was thinking, too, going up to Stony Brook Thursday morning, about the pompous oily look of success worn these days by Professor Leon Edel, Professor Oscar Handlin, Professor Richard Hofstadter, Professor Saul Bellow, goodness what successes we all have become, and how successful and happy and pompous some of us look.”

  52. Wisse, Modern Jewish Canon, p. 302.

  53. Harris, Drumlin Woodchuck, p. 136.

  54. Ibid., pp. 136–37.

  55. Ibid., p. 137.

  56. Ibid., p. 138.

  57. Ibid., p. 139. See Jane Howard, “Mr. Bellow Considers His Planet,” Life, 3 April 1970, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 78, when Howard adds: “Bellow the public figure can be acerb, aloof and elusive. But in private he is different.”

  58. Harris, Drumlin Woodchuck, p. 146.

  59. Ibid., p. 156.

  60. Ibid., p. 159.

  61. Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction 1945–1970 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 175; the quotation from Mr. Sammler’s Planet is from p. 25. For an intelligent comparison of Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Mailer’s An American Dream (1965), also a novel in which a Jewish intellectual is threatened by a sexually powerful black man, see
Susan Glickman, “The World as Will and Idea: A Comparative Study of An American Dream and Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” in Saul Bellow in the 1980s: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Gloria L. Cronin and L. H. Goldman (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1989), pp. 209–23. Bernard Malamud has an interesting relation to SB and Mailer over these issues. According to a friend of Malamud’s, Claude Fredericks, quoted by Philip Davis in Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 267, “Bernard increasingly questions in himself the validity of the kind of order his own writings, he thought, demanded: the sacrifice of a life—like Flaubert. And the animal energy of the black is the image of that very life he hungers for now too late.” A year after Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Malamud published The Tenants, a novel about two writers, a Jew named Harry Lesser and a black named Willie Spearmint. The two writers, tenants in the same decaying building, argue about art. Lesser accuses Spearmint’s writing of lacking form, Spearmint hits back, in Davis’s words, that his individualism “was the art; form and genre were Jewish coercion. In the battle between content and form, ideology and art, this is an extreme and transmuted version of the muddled controversy between Ralph Ellison, the author of The Invisible Man, and the Jewish critic Irving Howe that simmered on throughout the 1960s.”

  62. My comparison of SB and Mailer draws on David Mikics, Bellow’s People: How Saul Bellow Made Life into Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), pp. 78, 160–62. In addition to discussing the Ellison and Howe essays, Mikics quotes Edward Shils’s attacks on the Mailer line: “Blacks, according to this view, were entitled to exemption from the obligations of law-abidingness and of assimilation of the higher culture of American and Western society. They gained merit from the fact that they lived in slums, in wretched dwelling” (“Learning and Liberalism,” in The Selected Papers of Edward Shils, vol. 3 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980]). Ellison’s essay, “The World and the Jug,” appeared in The New Leader, 9 December 1963.