Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  54. Alexandra Bellow, “A Mathematical Life,” p. 4.

  55. According to SB’s friend Walter Pozen, Alexandra “just didn’t understand” SB’s writing: “ ‘Why is he so good?’ ” To her mother, she “was clearly an equal [to SB], if not more so”; the mother thought of him as “a trophy husband.”

  56. Alexandra Bellow, “A Mathematical Life,” p. 7.

  57. Atlas, Biography, p. 423.

  58. Alexandra Bellow, “A Mathematical Life,” p. 8.

  59. And later in The Dean’s December: “He had got into the habit of attempting whatever Minna needed. He no longer asked whether this suited him, whether he was risking his dignity by pushing a cart in the supermarket, reading recipes, peeling potatoes” (p. 258).

  60. Corde’s bad behavior, principally with women, is alluded to by others in The Dean’s December. According to Corde, “It was because people said such things about the wicked Dean that [Minna] was attracted to him. She wanted to marry a wickedly experienced but faithful man, a reformed SOB, a chastened chaser, now a gentle husband; and she got what she wanted” (p. 260).

  61. A “refusenik” was a person, usually a Jew, who was denied permission to emigrate by the Soviet authorities.

  62. See SB to George McGovern, 20 January 1971: “Dear Senator McGovern, I heartily endorse your candidacy for the office of President and shall do everything possible to help. We badly need you. I am convinced of that and trust that the voters will agree.” McGovern replied on 19 April, saying he was “honored that you will be with me in the challenging months ahead.”

  63. SB, To Jerusalem and Back, p. 129. The acronym “PEN” stands for “Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Novelists.”

  64. Ibid., p. 9. In addition to alluding to his letter of 15 October 1973 to Le Monde, SB devotes several pages at the beginning of To Jerusalem and Back to Le Monde’s pro-Arab bias: “It supports terrorists. It is friendlier to Amin than to Rabin. A recent review of the autobiography of a fedayeen speaks of the Israelis as colonialists. On July 3, 1976, before Israel had freed the hostages at Entebbe, the paper observed with some satisfaction that Amin, ‘the disquieting Marshal,’ maligned by everyone, had now become the support and the hope of his foolish detractors. Le Monde gloated over this reversal” (p. 9).

  65. SB frequently took advantage of opportunities to visit Florida, as in November 1974, when he accepted an invitation from Mel Tumin to attend the Palm Court Symposium, sponsored by ITT. SB was on a panel entitled “Human Nature and the Control of Human Destiny,” with the scientist James Watson, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, and the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. “Just tell them about Kierkegaard and Spinoza, à la Sammler,” Tumin wrote to SB on 31 May: “we should have a lovely time.” For his contribution, SB was paid twenty-five hundred dollars plus travel expenses and was free to leave the symposium immediately after the panel. In January 1976, he flew to Miami to accept the S. Y. Agnon Gold Medal for Literary Achievement from the American Friends of the Hebrew University, and spent several days with Maury. In November, he agreed to give a public reading at Southern Methodist University in Dallas at the invitation of Pat Covici’s son, Pascal Covici, Jr., chair of the English Department, visiting Miami first to discuss property deals with Maury.

  66. “My relations with you,” SB writes on 27 June 1973 to Charles Strauss, of the accountants Laventhol, Krekstein Horwath and Horwath, “have always been cordial and I regret bringing them to an end. But business, as people always tell me, is business.”

  67. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 135.

  68. Ibid., p. 136.

  69. In his first year at Dalton, according to Sasha, Adam was so unhappy he suggested that he needed a psychiatrist. Sasha, too, went to see this psychiatrist, and SB “came in when requested…He really resisted this and did not like the psychiatrist at all. But it was clearly proving enormously helpful to Adam” (Sondra “Sasha” Bellow, “What’s in a Name?,” p. 118).

  70. Ibid., p. 120.

  5. DISTRACTION/DIVORCE/ANTHROPOSOPHY

  1. From SB, “Remarks,” 55th Annual Board of Trustees’ Dinner for the Faculty, 8 January 1975, reprinted as “A World Too Much with Us,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 2, no. 1 (Autumn 1975). See Regenstein for both the original typsescript and printed galleys of the “Remarks.”

  2. SB, To Jerusalem and Back, p. 31; in addition, see “An Interview with Myself,” New Review, vol. 2, no. 18 (1975), printed also in Ontario Review, vol. 4 (1975), and in IAAU, pp. 80–87.

  3. SB, To Jerusalem and Back, p. 31.

  4. Ibid., p. 32.

  5. Ibid., p. 33.

  6. For an early airing of this theme, see SB, “Distractions of a Fiction Writer,” opening essay in The Living Novel: A Symposium, ed. Granville Hicks (New York: Macmillan, 1957), discussed in chapter 12 of To Fame and Fortune, pp. 531–32.

  7. SB, “Nobel Lecture,” IAAU, pp. 92–93.

  8. SB, “An Interview with Myself,” in IAAU, p. 82.

  9. “I have become a sort of public man,” SB later complained to Nathan Gould, in a letter of 4 August 1982: “I thought, in my adolescent way, that I would write good books (as writing and books were understood in the Thirties) and would have been happy in the middle ranks of my trade. It would have made me wretched to be overlooked, but I wasn’t at all prepared for so much notice, and I haven’t been good at managing ‘celebrity.’…I can’t do the many things I’m asked to do, answer the huge volume of mail, keep up with books and manuscripts and at the same time write such books as I want and need to write.”

  10. Irving Howe, “People on the Edge of History—Saul Bellow’s Vivid Report on Israel,” New York Times Book Review, 16 October 1976. An abbreviated version of the book had appeared on 12 and 19 July in The New Yorker.

  11. He did not accept. SB had been seriously considered for the Nobel Prize in 1975. On 25 October 1975, Harriet Wasserman wrote to his secretary, Esther Corbin, to express her disappointment: “I had a call from Sweden saying that the panel could not decide between Bellow and Graham Greene and so put off the English-language for another year.” SB was invited to give the Jefferson Lectures in the Humanities on 30 May 1977 (in Washington, D.C.) and on 1 April (in Chicago, in the Gold Coast Room at the Drake Hotel). The lectures were sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and brought a ten-thousand-dollar honorarium. These lectures had been given since 1972 (for a list of previous speakers, see To Fame and Fortune, p. 685n5). SB requested that the following guests be invited to the lecture in Washington and the dinner afterward: Mr. and Mrs. Morris Janowitz, Mr. and Mrs. Wayne Booth, Richard Stern, Harriet Wasserman, Edward Shils, Mr. and Mrs. Victor Turner, Mr. and Mrs. John U. Nef, Dr. Sanda Loga (a Romanian refugee, and friend of Alexandra’s), Adam Bellow, Katharine Graham, and Joseph Alsop. As for other honors and awards: The American Academy of the Arts Gold Medal for the Novel, awarded once every six years, was bestowed in March 1977; the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature was awarded in February 1978 (introduced by speeches from Bernard Malamud and John Cheever); and the Emerson-Thoreau Medal was also awarded in 1977, by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (the prize was established in 1958, and the previous recipient was Robert Penn Warren). In addition to these major awards: in January 1976, SB was awarded the S. Y. Agnon Gold Medal for Literary Achievement, by the American Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; in March 1976, he received the Merit Award from the Decalogue Society of Lawyers; in April 1976, he was appointed to the Advisory Council of the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton (the lengthy correspondence with its chair, the classicist Robert Fagles, suggests SB was almost never free to do any advising); in May 1976, he was awarded a doctorate of letters from the University of Dublin (using the occasion to visit David Grene on his farm in County Cavan); in October 1976, he was presented with the Distinguished Service Award for Humboldt’s Gift f
rom the Society of Midlands Authors; in November 1976, he received the America’s Democratic Legacy Award from the Anti-Defamation League, the league’s highest honor; in January 1977, he was made an honorary member of the Covenant Club (his brother Maury’s club) and was named Chicagoan of the Year by the Chicago Press Association; and in February 1977, he was made an honorary doctor of letters by the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. According to Atlas, Biography, p. 476, “Now that he was a Nobel Prize winner, the English Department [at the University of Chicago] had grudgingly invited him to become a member, though he never attended a department meeting.”

  12. W. J. Weatherby profile, “Saul Bellow,” Guardian, 10 November 1976.

  13. Walter Clemons, with Chris Harper in Chicago, “Bellow the Word King,” Newsweek, 1 November 1976.

  14. Timothy McNulty, “Saul Bellow: ‘Child in Me Is Delighted,’ ” Chicago Tribune, 22 October 1976.

  15. “A Laureate for Saul Bellow,” Time, 1 November 1976.

  16. McNulty, “ ‘Child in Me Is Delighted.’ ”

  17. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 457; Richard Stern also heard SB say to Greg, “You’re a good son, I love you.”

  18. “Bellow’s ‘Betters’ Are Glad He Won,” Chicago Daily News, 22 October 1976. Constance Davis, later women’s news editor of the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram, won first prize in the 1936 contest; Mary Zimmer, who went on to work in advertising, won second prize.

  19. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 39.

  20. Harriet Wasserman, Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow (New York: Fromm International, 1997), p. 54.

  21. SB to Baron Stig Ramel, 26 November 1976.

  22. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 36.

  23. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 137. At the banquet following the ceremony, Daniel joined in the toasts and got tipsy. In the lobby of the hotel, he played “fall down” with the children of Baruch S. Blumberg, co-winner of the prize for medicine, and was reprimanded by hotel staff (Wasserman, Handsome Is, p. 64).

  24. Morton Narrowe, En tretvinnad trad: Amerikan Jude Svensk (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Forlag, 2005), p. 215, trans. for this book by Marion Helfer Wajngot.

  25. According to SB, in Manea, “Conversation,” p. 36, Sam “just accepted the charge. It was embarrassing.” As Joel Bellows puts it, “The story in the family is that Sam took the fall.” “They’re all holier than [thou],” he explains, but the general feeling was “It’s a victimless crime. If God didn’t want them shorn [the patients in the nursing home] he wouldn’t have made them sheep.” Joel believes Sam was hurt badly, “but he did the right thing.” Did he know what was going on? “Yeah.” Neither he nor Maury was a crook, but “did they pay every last penny? No.”

  26. SB, quoted in Manea, “Conversation,” p. 36.

  27. Greg was less impressed than Alexandra with the Swedish royals. “The recently crowned queen of Sweden, a former German beauty queen, far outshone the king, who for a moment stood alone during the reception. I felt a rough pull, was dragged over to His Highness, and was told to make conversation. Later, Count Something-or-other, the man who had grabbed me, apologized and explained that it was not seemly for the king to have no one with whom to speak” (Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 139).

  28. Atlas, Biography, pp. 461–62.

  29. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 36.

  30. Ibid., p. 37.

  31. Atlas, Biography, p. 460.

  32. Wasserman, Handsome Is, pp. 67–68.

  33. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 138. In James Atlas, The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale (New York: Pantheon, 2017), p. 332, Greg recalls how uncomfortable he was during the Nobel festivities: “I had a bad time in Stockholm, when Bellow won the Nobel. My feeling was, ‘Fuck that. I’m not going to put up with that shit.’ ”

  34. Manea, “Conversation,” pp. 36–37.

  35. These quotations come from Ingemar Lindahl, “A Day with the Nobellows,” his translation of an article he published in what he described, in an email of 27 March 2015 to the author, as “A now defunct [Swedish] magazine, ARK, no. 2, March 1977.”

  36. Wasserman, Handsome Is, p. 61.

  37. Ibid., pp. 65, 66–67.

  38. Ibid., p. 45.

  39. Timothy McNulty, “Saul Bellow: ‘Child in Me Is Delighted.’ ”

  40. Martha Fay, “A Talk with Saul Bellow,” Book-of-the-Month Club News, August 1975.

  41. John Aldridge, “Saul Bellow at Sixty: A Turn to the Mystical,” Saturday Review, 6 September 1975.

  42. Alfred Kazin entry of 23 July 1975, in Alfred Kazin’s Journals, ed. Richard M. Cook (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 435.

  43. In the Spring 1978 issue of Dissent, the Israeli historian Shlomo Avineri published an article entitled “A Meeting with Saul Bellow” in which he took strenuous objection to SB’s account in To Jerusalem and Back of a meeting they had at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on November 10, 1975. In that meeting, according to Avineri, SB pressed him on “the aggressive designs of the Soviet Union against Israel.” Avineri’s position was that Soviet aggression “reinforces Arab hostility” but “is not the source of the conflict.” The source of the conflict is “the stubborn position of the Arab countries, which refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist as a sovereign Jewish state.” In To Jerusalem and Back, p. 43, SB presents Avineri as complacent about Soviet influence, not only in the Middle East but in Eastern Europe, where “life has immensely improved.” In SB’s opinion, this misguided optimism is characteristic: “Israel’s utter dependency upon the United States leads Israeli intellectuals to hunt for signs of hope in the Communist world.” Avineri complained that this account of his views was completely distorted, “misconstrues the whole tenor of our meeting,” being the work of a novelist rather than a researcher. For the novelist, “reality is like clay in the hands of the potter; he can expand or contract it as he sees fit.”

  44. See Shils to SB, 12 February 1976: “While it must be admitted that Israel did less than it should have done to indemnify and help settle those who elected to leave their homes and property and to flee from what became Israel, the Arab states deliberately—and where not deliberately, through incompetence—made the Gaza strip into a running sore.”

  45. Isabella Fey, “Strategic Withdrawal,” Jerusalem Post, 16 November 1976.

  46. Noam Chomsky, “Bellow’s Israel,” New York Arts Journal, Spring 1977, reprinted as “Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back,” in Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There (New York: Pantheon, 1982), pp. 299–307.

  47. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 369.

  48. These figures come from court records, Bellow v. Bellow, no. 61454. On 14 July 1974, Susan successfully petitioned that the original 1968 divorce settlement be set aside; on 25 July 1974, SB appealed. Two years later, on 14 July 1976, SB’s appeal of this judgment was rejected. The figures I have cited come from p. 3 of Bellow v. Bellow, no. 61454, the 14 July 1976 rejection, delivered by Mr. Justice Dieringer. There are differences between the figures listed here and the figures listed in chapter 1, which come from Atlas, Biography, pp. 368–69, and derive from tax records and court records, as well as from the files of Marshall Holleb and Miles Beermann. I have let the discrepancy stand because, throughout the divorce papers, reported income is calculated differently. The figures quoted here are also reported in Edward I. Stein, “Today’s Institute Report on Family Law: Divorce/Sec. 72 of the Civil Practice Act,” Daily Law Bulletin, 16 August 1976.

  49. The quotation from Susan Bellow is from an undated typescript entitled “Mosby’s Memoirs and the Manuscript,” presumably intended for her lawyers. It is among divorce papers given me by Daniel Bellow to be deposited in the Regenstein among the SB Papers.

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p; 50. SB to Barry Freeman, one of his lawyers, 14 September 1973.

  51. Atlas, Biography, p. 381.

  52. Henry L. Mason, III, to SB, 9 November 1982.

  53. Michael Zielenzigar, “Saul Bellow Sentenced to Jail in Alimony Hassle,” Chicago Sun-Times, 20 October 1977; Charles Mount, “Bellow Appeals Jail Term, Posts Bond in Alimony Fight,” Chicago Tribune, 20 October 1977.

  54. Atlas, Biography, p. 367.

  55. Ibid., p. 494.

  56. Susan Bellow to Miles Beerman, 29 June 1982. In a letter of 31 January 1983 to her accountant, Susan was certain “there is an old-fashioned Chicago answer to your puzzlement as to how my lawyers received $125,000 in fees, $33,999+ in interest and that I got a ‘settlement’ of $8,000 taxable to me.”

  57. Atlas, Biography, p. 381.

  58. The undated document from Susan is among the divorce papers given to me by Daniel Bellow, to be deposited among the Saul Bellow Papers at the Regenstein. Susan, too, could be late with or reluctant to write checks, as correspondence with her lawyers indicates. She, however, had nothing like Bellow’s resources. See Burton Joseph, of Lipnick, Barsy and Joseph, to Susan Bellow, 28 January 1972.