Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  86. Bailey, Cheever: A Life, p. 530. As Gioia, “Meeting Mr. Cheever,” p. 421, puts it: “January 1976 marked the nadir of Cheever’s literary reputation. His last novel, Bullet Park (1969) had received poor reviews….His work had stopped appearing in The New Yorker and now appeared at the rate of about one story per year only in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Playboy….He was not so much discussed as dismissed as a dated suburban satirist, and he had become a sort of ceremonial scapegoat for all the real and imagined sins of The New Yorker.” As for SB, “he had accompanied [his wife] to tease the University with the prospect of a package deal. The Administration exhibited no hesitation in swallowing the bait” (p. 429). SB’s testiness also may have owed something to his schedule: “The Administration had eagerly crammed Bellow’s short stay with meetings, parties, speeches, and public appearances” (p. 429).

  87. John Cheever to SB, 25 April 1982, Letters of John Cheever, ed. Benjamin Cheever, p. 378.

  88. See John Cheever to SB, 3 April 1982, in ibid., p. 377: “I was told last week—one could have guessed it—that the miracle worker who can cure my cancer is in Bucharest. I can see him watering his dying cyclamens between administering huge doses of horse urine.”

  89. SB, “John Cheever” (1972), in IAAU, p. 273. This seems to have been mostly true, though Bailey, Cheever: A Life, p. 576, records that, “on the bleak autumn day when Bellow was named the winner [of the Nobel Prize], Cheever took a dejected walk with Gurganus [Alan Gurganus, the novelist]…starting a little when they came to the statue of the nineteenth-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt: ‘Oh my God!’ he said. ‘They’re already putting up statues!’ But once his dismay had passed, he gladly conceded the ‘exemplary and tireless grace’ Bellow had shown as laureate.”

  90. SB, “John Cheever,” pp. 273–74.

  91. SB to Jessica Burstein, July 16, 1966, a student at the time, later an English professor at the University of Washington.

  92. According to a letter of 13 November 1983 by Andreas Brown, who purchased the Gotham Book Mart from Steloff in 1967, a purchase engineered by Goldberg.

  93. Interview with Curt Suplee, “Getting It Right,” Washington Post, 20 May 1984.

  94. These and other details come from Joshua Hammer, “Saul Bellow Returns to Canada, Searching for the Phantoms That Shaped His Life and Art,” People, 25 June 1984; “Bellow Returns to Lachine,” Gazette, 7 June 1984; and Harriet Wasserman, Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow (New York: Fromm International, 1977), pp. 103–10.

  95. Wasserman, Handsome Is, pp. 109, 110.

  96. Marvin Gameroff was among the speakers, each of whom was supposed to speak for three minutes maximum. Poems were recited and songs sung between the speeches, and the brunch did not conclude until 3:00 p.m., when everyone sang “Happy Birthday.”

  97. According to Ruth Wisse, “Bellow’s Gift—A Memoir,” Commentary (1 December 2001), “The one thing you could not raise with him was anything about his books, he did not take offense at political matters.”

  98. Wisse, ibid., adds: “The Talmud says, ‘Who is a hero? He who resists his evil urge’—meaning, according to some, his sexual urge. Yiddish speakers add, ‘he who resists his urge to pun,’ thereby identifying a besetting sin of their civilization.” In Bellow’s present case, both fit. At this party, Wisse also discovered a bond between herself and Alexandra, who knew the Romanian city of Czernowitz (now part of Ukraine), where Wisse was born in 1936. Alexandra not only knew the city but knew the obstetrician who, Wisse later discovered, had saved her mother’s life and given Ruth her name. “Tamara” was her mother’s choice, but the obstetrician advised her that “now is not the time for a Jewish name.” So her mother chose “Ruth,” or “Rut,” “a good Romanian name.”

  99. See, in particular, laudatory reviews by Cynthia Ozick, “Farcical Combat in a Busy World,” New York Times Book Review, 20 May 1984; Peter S. Prescott, “Him at His Most Impressive,” Newsweek, 14 May 1984; Robert M. Adams, “Winter’s Tale,” New York Review of Books, 19 July 1984; D. J. Enright, “Exuberance-Hoarding,” Times Literary Supplement, 22 June 1984; Eugene Goodheart, “Parables of the Artist,” Partisan Review, vol. 52, no. 2 (1985).

  100. Anatole Broyard, review of SB, Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories, New York Times, 11 May 1984.

  101. According to an email to the author, 1 July 2011, from Rosemarie Sanchez-Fraser, who worked with Anita at Kaiser for nearly forty years, she was a tough but fair boss, who “respected you as long as you were honest with her.” Sanchez-Fraser worked under Anita for her first sixteen years at Kaiser, and Anita “became like a mother to me and taught me to appreciate horticulture, art, opera and politics (she was the most liberal woman I’d ever met).”

  102. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, pp. 158–59.

  103. Georgia death records say Maury died on 1 May 1985. Atlas, Biography, p. 516, says he died a week or so later. Atlas also says he died of liver cancer. Rachel Schultz, a physician, and her mother, Lesha Greengus, are certain Maury died of colon cancer, though the cancer may also have spread to the liver.

  104. Ruth Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 303.

  105. Ibid.

  106. Ibid. According to Maury’s son, Joel, who received a similar call, it was Joyce, not Maury, who told Bellow to “come now.”

  107. Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination, p. 302.

  108. Joel Bellows, email to the author, 1 April 2016.

  109. Ibid.

  110. Ibid.

  111. Ibid., the source also of Joel’s respectful inquiry about Maury’s health, quoted in previous paragraph.

  112. Leonard reacted to Maury’s reneging on his promises by quitting work for Maury and starting a rival company, taking with him “every single person” from the old firm. According to Mark Rotblatt, when Maury told Lynn what he intended to do, “my mother said, You can’t do that, and my grandfather just said, I’ll do what I want.” Then he told Lynn she should leave her husband, move to Florida, and live with her mother (Marge, his first wife). “I’ll get you a nursemaid to look after the kids. You’ll be fine.” Lynn, pregnant with Maureen, Mark’s sister, refused.

  113. Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination, p. 304. For Greg Bellow’s earlier reference to Sam’s being “no fool,” see Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 160.

  114. Quoted in Ruth Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination, p. 304. Sam Bellows’s obituary in the Chicago Tribune, “Samuel Bellows, 74, Jewish Leader,” appeared on 4 June 1985.

  115. When news of the seriousness of Sam’s illness reached Daniel in Paris, he wrote to his father, on 25 April: “I had a wonderful time with Dave Peltz when he came here, we went walking around St. Germain and Chatelet, getting drunk in cafés. His goodness is so self-evident, he melted the ice in the hearts of Parisian café waitresses—he can walk as fast as I can in the street. He’s the greatest, I like him even more now than I did when I was little. I hope things are better with Uncle Sam. I can only imagine how difficult that is for you. Tell him I send love. Also tell Lesha. I’m sorry, Pop. I wish there was something I could do or say for you to make it any better, but there ain’t. Just know that I am fine and healthy, and that I love you.”

  116. For the Asher quotation, see Atlas, Biography, p. 517; for SB’s upset over the marketing of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories, see chapter 12 of To Fame and Fortune, p. 505.

  117. Atlas, Biography, pp. 492–93, describes the workings of the MacArthur “genius” program, naming other members of the board during SB’s tenure as Kenneth Keniston, Jonas Salk, Jerome Wiesner, Edward Levi, Leon Botstein, and Murray Gell-Mann (to which number could be added Marian Wright Edelman and John Hope Franklin). Botstein, the president of Bard College, remembers: “I got the composers, t
he musicians, and Saul got the writers.” Botstein got on well with SB, sharing his amused view not only of “this genius award thing” but of their fellow evaluators, in particular the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, “a man who knows everything better, what in Yiddish is called a besserwisser.” Gell-Mann not only “knows everything better,” but “what he doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing.” As Botstein puts it: “Saul was not modest, but Gell-Mann drove people nuts.” On one occasion, SB and Gell-Mann joined forces to tease their fellow evaluator Jonas Salk, who had a chip on his shoulder about never having won the Nobel Prize. When a Nobel Prize–winning economist was under consideration for an award, the two laureates made snide comments about how the economics prize was not a real Nobel Prize, not being one of the original prizes, like theirs, created in Alfred Nobel’s will (a view taken by some of Nobel’s descendants). Despite making jokes and cynical remarks, SB took his duties as evaluator seriously, according to Botstein. He made every effort not only to help his friends, arguing successfully on behalf of Robert Penn Warren, William Kennedy, and Bette Howland, but to veto those whose views and talents he disapproved of or questioned (Amiri Baraka, Edward Said, Susan Sontag). Freund’s successor, Kenneth Hope, in a letter of 14 December 1984, praised SB as the “longest-standing” of the program’s evaluators: “You, in fact, helped us get this program going, and your wisdom and charm have made us both more confident and, more simply, more able to make this Program work.”

  118. Alfred Kazin, review of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, “Though He Slay Me…,” New York Review of Books, 3 December 1970. After the Freund dinner, in a journal entry of 1 June 1985, Kazin describes his and SB’s cronies as “a lost generation—poor boys, ‘intellectuals.’ To their fingertips, brought up to be adversaries of power types and the ‘established order’—who now turn out to be the voices of ‘privilege,’ messengers, auxiliaries, ‘conservatives.’…O my! How our social opinions reflect our top lofty incomes, and what excuses we do find (we who once had no trouble execrating everyone in power…).”

  119. Alfred Kazin, entry of 8 May 1979, in Alfred Kazin’s Journals, ed. Richard M. Cook (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 470. According to Judith Dunford, there was a second meeting in Chicago, not recorded in Alfred Kazin’s Journals (Dunford thinks it might have been in 1984). The Kazins came to tea at the Sheridan Road apartment, where Dunford met Bellow for the first time. She recalls finding him “so intensely intelligent it was hard to resist.” Alexandra, who had known Dunford’s brother, a mathematician, she recalls as “very gracious, very nice.” She remembers that Bellow did a lot of “smiling at [Alexandra] and hovering.” Although Kazin was apprehensive before this visit, “which always made him combative,” the Bellows “were very polite.” There was no talk of politics.

  120. Richard M. Cook, Alfred Kazin: A Biography (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 369, 368 (for Kazin’s hatred of Likud).

  121. Leon Wieseltier’s two-part essay, “Hannah Arendt and the Jews,” was published in consecutive issues of The New Republic, 7 and 14 October 1981. Part I was titled “Understanding Anti-Semitism,” Part II “Pariahs and Politics.”

  122. Cook, Alfred Kazin: A Biography, p. 368. In a letter of 13 April 1999, Kazin’s friend Morris Dickstein wrote to SB to thank him for shedding light on “that ill-fated dinner.” SB’s account “sounds all too much like Alfred at his most uncensored. But it was equally in character for him to feel hurt and bewildered afterward.” Dickstein tries to explain the upset caused by SB’s remark about Franco: “As he was a child of the 30s, hatred of Franco and grief over the Spanish Civil War were matters of faith to him. Coincidentally, last week on cable we saw a low-budget documentary on ‘Franco’s Jews.’ It seems Franco had no policy toward the Jews, except to protect those who had any claim to Spanish nationality. This led to contradictory actions and inaction. But the lack of a policy enabled a few individual diplomats in occupied cities like Paris, Salonika, and Budapest to dispense Spanish papers to Jews, which sometimes provided a temporary shield against deportation.”

  123. Alfred Kazin, entries of 29 May 1985 and 1 June 1985, in Alfred Kazin’s Journals, ed. Cook, pp. 522, 523.

  124. SB was later to soften toward Kazin. See his letter of 26 October 1988 to Margaret Mills of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, who had asked him to serve with Eudora Welty and Kazin on a panel to recommend candidates for the Gold Medal in Fiction: “I don’t mind chatting with Eudora Welty on the phone. Alfred Kazin and I, who have known each other from the beginning of time, always found it difficult to agree. I like to think, though, that while he has grown more rigid I have grown more flexible. I shouldn’t be surprised if he were to accuse me of rigidity and claim flexibility for himself. Still, I see no reason why we shouldn’t produce a good list.”

  125. Alexandra Bellow, email to Benjamin Taylor, 20 June 2010.

  126. Alexandra Bellow, “A Mathematical Life (Una Vida Matematica),” p. 8, an 11-page typescript dated 29 September 2001, published as “Un vida matematica,” La Gaceta de la Real Sociedad Matematica Española, vol. 5, no. 1 (January–April 2002), pp. 62–71.

  127. Alexandra Bellow, email to the author, 18 April 2016.

  128. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, pp. 162, 161. See SB to Mark Smith, 17 October 1982: “I have no clear picture of the coming spring. My wife and I will have an empty house in Vermont and it appears that I will be in charge of furnishing it because she always goes into a mathematical trance towards April in preparation for June math conferences in Germany and France.”

  129. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 161.

  130. Alexandra Bellow, email to the author, 10 April 2016.

  131. These anecdotes are from Wasserman, Handsome Is, pp. 117–21.

  132. Quotations in Atlas, Biography, p. 519.

  133. The date of SB’s speech, “The Mind of the Reader and the Expectation of the Writer in America,” is given in the 6 September letter to Barley Alison, in which he asks if he can stay with her when he arrives in London on the fifteenth. On 6 October, he writes to William Kennedy that he is departing for Dublin on the ninth. However, in a letter of 15 October to Robert Hivnor, SB says, “I can’t sign this because my secretary is taking this from dictation and I am going to Dublin day after tomorrow.” Kennedy writes to SB on 25 October, “By the time you get this you will have returned from Ireland.” So it appears that the dates of the talk and trip were rescheduled.

  134. A typescript of SB’s talk, entitled “Transcript of Remarks of Mr. Saul Bellow Made on October 31, 1985 at the Whiting Foundation Writers’ Program Ceremony,” in SB Papers.

  135. For “pressed into attending,” see SB to John Auerbach, 18 November 1985. Who did the pressing is not identified.

  136. Maggie Simmons, email to Benjamin Taylor, 21 January 2011, remembers Alexandra’s asking SB for a divorce much earlier: “What I vividly remember is Saul’s calling me on the evening before or on his 70th birthday to tell me that Alexandra was asking him for a divorce right on the heels of his brothers’ deaths. He was desolate. I remember thinking that he must have done something remarkable (that he wasn’t telling me) to anger/upset Alexandra enough to end the marriage on that day. I was living on Central Park West at the time. It sticks in my mind. I thought he was in Chicago when he called but I’m not sure about that part.” This can’t be right, given SB’s correspondence in the autumn, in which he reports on his and Alexandra’s movements and plans, in letters addressed from the Sheridan Road apartment. SB’s friend Eugene Kennedy recalls the final split as coming after his return from California, remembered by Greg Bellow as “around the New Year,” recollections which fit with Alexandra’s insistence that she asked for a divorce and for SB to move out of the Sheridan Road apartment in December. It is possible that Maggie is conflating an unhappy phone call on 9 June 1985 from Vermont, perhaps one in
which SB told her of a threat of divorce, with one in December, after his return from California.

  137. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 521.

  138. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 162.

  139. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 521.

  140. Quoted in David Mikics, Bellow’s People, pp. 215–16. According to Eugene Kennedy, SB complained about Alexandra’s absenting herself in the evenings as well as the mornings: “She had her own life and left him. She would go into her room in the evening and talk on the phone. I might as well have been living here alone.” To Kennedy, “there was something crushing in the loneliness he was feeling.” That SB would complain about Alexandra’s working in the morning is odd, given that he also reserved mornings for work.

  8. JANIS FREEDMAN/ALLAN BLOOM/POLITICS

  1. See SB to Harvey Stein, assistant director, International Student Services, University of Chicago, in an undated draft.

  2. SB to Fellowships Division, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 4 November 1981.

  3. Allan Bloom, 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. 243. Henceforth cited in the text by page number.

  4. Quoted in James Atlas, “Chicago’s Grumpy Guru: Best-Selling Professor Allan Bloom and the Chicago Intellectuals,” New York Times Magazine, 3 January 1988; an abridged version of this article is reprinted in Essays on the Closing of the American Mind, ed. Robert L. Stone (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1989). Henceforth abbreviated as Essays on the Closing, ed. Stone.

  5. See Caleb Rossiter, “Cornell’s Student Revolt of 1969: A Rare Case of Democracy on Campus,” Progressive, 5 May 1999. Rossiter writes sympathetically of the protesters, but throws doubt on one of the chief causes of the 1969 revolt. “The takeover was spurred by a faculty-student judicial board’s decision to punish black students for a disruptive protest the previous December, and by a cross-burning at a black women’s dorm that most black students believed was the work of whites (although it may have been a closely-held provocation by a small cell of blacks).”