Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  2. SB, foreword to Rudolf Steiner, The Boundaries of Natural Science (1920), trans. Frederick Amrine and Konrad Oberhuber (Spring Valley, N.Y.: The Anthroposophic Press, 1983), the translation of the fourth edition of the German text Grenzsen der Naturerkenntnis, consisting of shorthand notes of eight lectures given by Steiner in Dornach, Switzerland, from 27 September to 3 October 1920. It is available online at wn.rsarchive.org/​Lectures/​GA322/​English/​AP1983/​BndSci_index.html.

  3. This advice Walter Pozen strenuously opposed. Shawmut, in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” comes to see similar advice as “fatal” (p. 378).

  4. In the same letter, Roth also says, “You’ll find out now what it’s like to write for Harper’s,” by which he means Harper & Row the publisher, not Harper’s the magazine. Harper & Row published a book-club edition of The Dean’s December in 1981, before full trade publication in February 1982. SB was unhappy not only with the sales and marketing of The Dean’s December but with the firm’s handling of the collection Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984).

  5. The first of SB’s public lectures at the University of Victoria was in January, to an audience of six or seven hundred respectful listeners. After his experiences at San Francisco State and elsewhere, he had requested police protection at the event, but, as Alexandra puts it, “Things went well, and we were both pleased and relieved.”

  6. According to an email to the author, 3 December 2015, from Charles Doyle, a poet and member of the English Department. Basil Bunting, a previous Lansdowne Visiting Professor, had made a similar complaint.

  7. In an email to the author, 3 February 2016, Alexandra writes: “We were amused to discover that the study was filled with ‘rapid guides’ to all the cultures of the world, books containing resumés, plots of all the classics. ‘I told Michael Best,’ Saul said, ‘that the house is full of kitsch.’ I must have looked shocked, for he immediately reassured me: ‘Look, I have never been afraid to tell these characters what I really think. If that ever happens, it means I am finished.’ ” SB described the house as “dinky” to Barnett Singer, according to his memoir, “Looking for Mr. Bellow,” Jewish Dialog, Hannukah 1982, p. 15.

  8. Singer, “Looking for Mr. Bellow,” p. 15.

  9. Alexandra Bellow, “Victoria B.C.—Winter of 82: Comments and Answers by Alexandra Bellow (January 2016) to Zachary Leader’s Earlier Questions,” p. 1 of an email attachment sent on 3 February 2016.

  10. Charles Doyle, email to the author, 3 December 2015.

  11. This is Doyle’s description of P. K. Page, in ibid. “We saw quite a bit of her,” Alexandra writes. She was “the ‘grande dame’ of poetry in Victoria” (email to the author, 3 February 2016).

  12. Singer, “Looking for Mr. Bellow,” p. 23. It is on this page also that SB describes P. K. Page as taking “issue” with him.

  13. Barnett Singer, “More Proustian Memories of Bellow,” p. 11, addendum to “Looking for Mr. Bellow,” attachment to email to the author, 5 August 2015. It is not clear how Singer knows that this was the first time SB had used the line or that he put it in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth” that very night or the next morning.

  14. Alexandra Bellow, “Victoria B.C.—Winter of 82,” p. 2.

  15. Ibid., p. 4.

  16. Singer, “Looking for Mr. Bellow,” pp. 18, 26, 36, 27.

  17. Ibid., p. 16.

  18. At the suggestion of Ed Burlingame, his editor at Harper & Row, SB had written to Senator Patrick Moynihan, Burlingame’s friend and an admirer of SB’s books. Had Moynihan not interceded with the Romanian ambassador in Washington, SB wrote to him in a note of 14 July 1981, “I think Aunt Ana would still be in Romania.”

  19. Alexandra Bellow, “Victoria B.C.—Winter of 82,” pp. 4–5.

  20. Singer, “Looking for Mr. Bellow,” pp. 2, 3.

  21. Ibid., p. 4.

  22. See SB to Barnett Singer, 9 November 1972: “Dear Barney Singer—I’m awfully slow, but I do eventually acknowledge good letters, and yours was very good.” See also SB to Barnett Singer, 18 May 1976: “Throw your letters away? Never! I read them carefully and Esther [Corbin, SB’s secretary] saves them for me. I attach great value to them.”

  23. Singer, “Looking for Mr. Bellow,” p. 4.

  24. Ibid. When his girlfriend meets SB, walking with Singer, her reaction, Singer reports, is that they were “roughly the same height, and with roughly the same look in our eyes. Julia said later we could easily be father and son” (p. 14).

  25. Ibid., p. 4.

  26. Ibid., pp. 5, 8.

  27. Ibid., p. 8. Singer seems to be alone in thinking SB spoke with a slight lisp.

  28. Ibid., pp. 6, 7, 11, 7, 14, 15.

  29. Ibid., p. 14.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Ibid., pp. 16, 18.

  32. See SB to Barnett Singer, 25 August 1975: “In reading your mss my interest was greatly stirred. And I assure you that I’m a pitiless reader. I make allowances neither for myself nor anyone else. Not much less relentless than Jehovah was when he watched the children of Israel behaving inartistically with the golden calf. To be brief with you, you may be a natural writer, for you have the energy and you have a certain hectic charm. You are a buttonholing writer by whom the reader is quite willing to be detained.” See also SB to Barnett Singer, 8 November 1978: “I don’t know if the story is publishable, which means I rather doubt it, but there certainly are valuable glints in the ore you sent me. I wouldn’t give up yet….Look out for yourself and make sure that you are not overcome by your own charm. You emit so much of it that it returns to you in the form of radiation, and you think it’s the other party.”

  33. Singer, “Looking for Mr. Bellow,” pp. 19, 20.

  34. It recalls Mason Zaehner’s “hey-presto” insolence in The Dean’s December, though Mason is neither passive nor a complainer.

  35. Singer, “Looking for Mr. Bellow,” pp. 26, 22.

  36. Ibid., pp. 23, 31.

  37. Ibid., pp. 27, 30, 31.

  38. Ibid., p. 34.

  39. This undated note is written in pencil on a manila envelope dated July 1982. The poet in question was Alan Bell, whom SB had met in Victoria. The note continues: “A Xerox [of the poems] might be advisable. This seems to be the only copy (or is alleged to be, for purposes of menace). No more of this.” For Dean Borok, see To Fame and Fortune, chapter 10.

  40. The letter from Raymond Kuby is dated January 1981. I have decided against identifying these unhappy correspondents, all of whose letters are among the SB Papers.

  41. Louis Gallo to SB, 12 February 1961.

  42. Louis Gallo to SB, 7 April 1961.

  43. SB to Louis Gallo, 15 June 1961.

  44. Louis Gallo to SB, 19 February 1966.

  45. Louis Gallo to SB, 29 January 1966.

  46. The publisher of the 1966 edition was Dimensions Press. The ninety-eight-page book has been digitized.

  47. See “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” pp. 387–88.

  48. SB to Daniel Bellow, 31 January 1980.

  49. According to Adam, Bellow was planning a second book about the Middle East, though no mention of such a book exists among the SB Papers in the Regenstein.

  50. Adam also decided to leave the Committee because “I didn’t feel that I’d become part of Bloom’s inner circle. I felt I’d been held at arm’s length, and I was very sensitive to that.” “Allan didn’t want me in that circle, and he didn’t want anything to get in the way of the relation with Saul.”

  51. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 135.

  52. SB’s increasing doubts about psychotherapy may have owed something to the views of his colleagues at the Committee on Social Thought, principally Edward Shils, who thought Freud undervalued human solidari
ty, seeing it primarily as a product of fear rather than “respect, obligation, humane impulse” (as David Mikics puts it in Bellow’s People: How Saul Bellow Made Life into Art [New York: W. W. Norton, 2016], p. 155), and Allan Bloom, for whom the Freudian account was overly pessimistic, “as is apparent from his crude observations about art and philosophy” (The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987], p. 137). That Freudian theory calls agency, human will and freedom, into question, is another likely source of SB’s resistance, even hostility, to psychotherapy.

  53. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, pp. 183–84, 185.

  54. Ibid., p. 185.

  55. Ibid., pp. 149, 150.

  56. Ibid., pp. 155, 156.

  57. Ibid., pp. 169, 170.

  58. Ibid., pp. 135, 136.

  59. Juliet admits that Bellow could be playfully affectionate. In 1982, when she was nine, Bellow sent her a gift of stamps. “I don’t know whether you’re still collecting, but I assume you’re not one of those changeable girls who change their hobbies with their hair-ribbons. Much love from your sillybilly grandfather.” In 1986, on her thirteenth birthday, he wrote, “Dear Granddaughter, you are now—congratulations—a teenager, ready to be an adult or a dolt or an adult colt.”

  60. From an interview with Martin Amis. This was also the year in which Amis discovered Vladimir Nabokov, his other great literary idol.

  61. Martin Amis, “Saul Bellow’s December,” Observer, 11 December 1983, reprinted as “Saul Bellow in Chicago,” in Amis, The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), p. 201.

  62. Ibid., pp. 202, 201, 200.

  63. Ibid., p. 200.

  64. Ibid., p. 202.

  65. Ibid., pp. 203, 204.

  66. Ibid., p. 206.

  67. John Updike, “Toppling Towers Seen by a Whirling Soul,” The New Yorker, 22 February 1982. The novel made it to number six on the New York Times Best Seller list, though only briefly, and Harper & Row, which had paid SB a $600,000 advance, made back only $360,000 on sales and subsidiary rights. According to Atlas, Biography, p. 501, “Bellow, to his credit, was concerned about what he described as his ‘debt’ to Harper and Row and raised the possibility of extending the unrecovered advance to his next book, possibly a collection of short stories and novellas.”

  68. Updike’s criticisms of SB’s novels did not prevent him from praising later work. On 16 December 1983, in a letter to Rust Hills in praise of the fiftieth-anniversary issue of Esquire (December 1983), he added, “Of the things I read I especially liked the Bellow on Roosevelt [“In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt”]—beautiful, the way that image of the people sitting in their cars along the Midway smoking, especially for those of us who were alive in the Thirties and can remember the texture of the life then.” Hills sent SB a Xerox of Updike’s note in a letter of 20 December.

  69. Other comparably eminent figures are similarly ignored: Nabokov is referred to only once, Mailer four times.

  70. SB, Recent American Fiction: A Lecture Presented Under the Auspices of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1963), p. 6; see also SB, “Some Notes on Recent American Fiction,” Encounter, November 1963. William H. Pritchard, in Updike: America’s Man of Letters (South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 2000), p. 73, connects SB’s reservations about the story to “the fact that he was about to publish Herzog. His most ambitious attempt to connect public and private realms.”

  71. By “reviews” in the phrase “outside of reviews” I mean not only Updike’s reviews of SB’s fiction but of other novelists’ works, in which SB is a number of times mentioned in passing, always favorably, usually accompanied by a memorable quotation. SB’s name appears in Adam Begley, Updike (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), four times, in each case in a list of authors, without comment. In his review of To Fame and Fortune in the TLS (“Saul Bellow Squares Up,” 20 May 2015), Begley complains that Wordsworth is mentioned more frequently than Updike, Salinger, and Cheever combined. To Fame and Fortune ends in 1964, before Updike was much of a presence in SB’s mind (which was true also of Cheever). Begley has nothing to say of the relations between Updike and SB after 1964. Salinger is not mentioned once in Benjamin Taylor’s edition of SB’s Letters, and the single pre-1964 reference to him in the interviews and profiles collected by Cronin and Siegel in Conversations with SB appears in David D. Galoway, “An Interview with Saul Bellow,” Audit-Poetry, vol. 3 (1963), where he is unfavorably compared to William Golding. In the reference, SB calls Salinger “an excellent craftsman” but has little time for his “Rousseauian critique of society…as though civilization were something from which youth had the privilege of withdrawing” (p. 23). Updike is not mentioned at all. Wordsworth is mentioned in To Fame and Fortune more frequently than Updike, Cheever, and Salinger combined because he was more important to SB than Updike, Cheever, and Salinger combined, certainly pre-1964.

  72. Quoted in The Letters of John Cheever, ed. Benjamin Cheever (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989), p. 245.

  73. In later years, Cheever “was always courteous to me and increasingly friendly and kind” (John Updike, Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991], pp. 117, 118).

  74. To Adam Begley, in Updike, it was Cheever who was rivalrous: “Complicating matters was the fact that the pair of them were close friends with Bill Maxwell [of The New Yorker], who edited their stories and acted on occasion as mentor to both—there was in Cheever’s attitude toward Updike a hint of sibling rivalry” (p. 267). Cheever’s irritation with Updike on the Russia trip was sometimes recorded in his journals, as when he complains that Updike “hogged the lecture platform” at one of their events at the University of Leningrad. Begley thinks Cheever, a high-school dropout, “may have been intimidated by Updike’s intellect.” He also thinks that some of Cheever’s complaints about Updike in the Exley letter were fantasies, “obviously concocted for Exley’s amusement” (p. 268).

  75. Begley, Updike, p. 267; when Bech: A Book was published, Updike was startled by its good notices, joking, “As everybody treats Bech so courteously, I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t indeed a Jewish Mafia” (quoted in ibid., p. 322).

  76. Ibid., p. 267.

  77. Ibid., p. 265.

  78. Philip Larkin, “Posterity,” in High Windows (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 21. The poem was meant to provoke (as was Updike’s Henry Bech): “It gets in Yanks, yids, wives, kids, Coca Cola, Protest and the Theatre—pretty good list of hates, eh?” (Philip Larkin to Monica Jones, 30 June 1968, in Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica, ed. Anthony Thwaite [London: Faber and Faber, 2000], p. 387). But to the Irish poet Richard Murphy, Larkin wrote: “I’m sorry if Jake Balokowsky seemed an unfair portrait. As you see, the idea of the poem was imagining the ironical situation in which one’s posthumous reputation was entrusted to somebody as utterly unlike oneself as could be. It was only after the poem had been published that I saw that Jake, wanting to do one thing but having to do something else, was really not so unlike me, and indeed had probably unconsciously been drawn to my work for this reason, which explains his bitter resentment of it” (quoted in John Osborne, Larkin, Ideology, and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction [London: Palgrave, 2008], p. 211).

  79. For Pritchard, in Updike: America’s Man of Letters, p. 155, what Bech himself calls the Jewish writer’s “domination of the literary world” only in part inspired his creation as a character. Updike may well have said to himself, “Let me, a Protestant, churchgoing exception to the literary rule, get into the act,” but he had other motives: “to bring off something new and unexpected”; to indulge Nabokovian “formal highjinks” (the mock foreword, the appendices); to indulge “the metafictional playfulness of John Barth”; to give expression to st
rong opinions “under the protective guise of a fictional character superficially unlike John Updike.” Finally, “Bech was as useful an alter ego to his creator as Rabbit had been and would be; both characters exist at greater distance from the writer than do the protagonists of Marry Me and Couples.”

  80. Quoted in Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), p. 227. On 9 October 1957, Cheever wrote to Felicia Geffen, executive secretary of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, describing SB as “the most original writer in America. No one has done so much to display, creatively, the versatility of life and speech in this country” (quoted in Letters of John Cheever, ed. Benjamin Cheever, p. 209).

  81. Bailey, Cheever: A Life, pp. 227, 228.

  82. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 246.

  83. Quoted in Bailey, Cheever: A Life, pp. 228–29, 375, 661.

  84. Ibid., p. 455. Nine months earlier, Cheever had also presented Bellow with the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters.

  85. Dana Gioia, “Meeting Mr. Cheever,” Hudson Review, vol. 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1986), p. 431. See also Charlie Hall and Dana Gioia, “Bellow: A Nervous Hermit,” Stanford Daily, 29 January 1976, which begins as follows: “ ‘The problem with Saul Bellow,’ a former attorney of his once said, is that he is ‘a great artist but a lousy friend.’ Bellow, who appeared at Stanford last week in an unpublicized visit, consistently confirmed this view, giving the impression of a man able to write warm, compassionate prose, and yet unable to relax among a public that has admired his work for more than 20 years.” The authors recount two moments that may help to explain SB’s mood, or at least to explain why it never lifted. After a talk on his first night, “he bristled visibly when he had to answer such uninformed questions as ‘Who are you?’ and ‘I’ve heard your name; why should I know it?’ ” The second moment occurred the next morning. SB had requested that his visit—which was primarily for Alexandra—not be publicized. When the student newspaper reported the campus location of an informal talk he was to give that afternoon, SB “angrily cancelled the talk.”