70. Wasserman, Handsome Is, p. 133. Lehmann-Haupt’s “Books of the Times” review of 23 March was followed by Roger Kimball’s review of 5 April, “The Groves of Ignorance,” in The New York Times Book Review. Kimball called the book “genuinely profound,” “essential reading for anyone concerned with the state of liberal education in this society.”
71. Wasserman, Handsome Is, pp. 133–34.
72. Ibid., pp. 140–41.
73. Sales details from ibid., pp. 133–43.
74. Ibid., p. 135.
75. SB, foreword to Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, p. 13. Henceforth cited within the text by page number.
76. Werner J. Dannhauser, “Allan Bloom and His Critics,” American Spectator, October 1988. According to Nathan Tarcov in an interview, it took a while for the book to be adopted by the right. The early rave reviews, by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the daily Times and Frederick Starr, the president of Oberlin College, in The Washington Post, were written by liberals: “It was only later, six months, nine months later, that conservatives started saying, ‘this is our book,’ and some people on the left saying, ‘well, then it isn’t ours.’ ”
77. Robert Pattison, “On the Finn Syndrome and the Shakespeare Paradox,” Nation, 30 May 1987, in a review of The Closing of the American Mind and E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy.
78. Dannhauser, “Allan Bloom and His Critics.” Bloom was also accused of being un-American as well as undemocratic, in David Rieff, “The Colonel and the Professor,” Times Literary Supplement, pp. 153–54, reprinted in Essays on the Closing, ed. Stone: “He hates American mores, decries American families, despises American teenagers, and takes no notice of the beauty of the American landscape….The real glories of American culture, which, whether Bloom likes it or not, are Hollywood movies and pop music, come in for the professor’s special scorn.” Rieff, at the time an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, compared Bloom in the review to Colonel Oliver North and described The Closing of the American Mind as a book “decent people would be ashamed to have written.”
79. Martha Nussbaum, “Undemocratic Vistas,” New York Review of Books, 5 November 1987, reprinted in Essays on the Closing, ed. Stone. Richard Rorty, in “Straussianism, Democracy and Allan Bloom I,” makes a similar objection to Straussians in general, who “typically do not countenance alternative, debatable interpretations…but rather distinguish between their own ‘authentic understandings’ and other ‘misunderstandings.’ In this respect they resemble the Marxists and the Catholics. The tone in which Bloom writes about Plato is the same as that in which Althusser and Fredric Jameson write about Marx.”
80. Atlas, Biography, p. x.
81. Ibid., p. xi. The title of Atlas’s 1986 novel was The Great Pretender. In his memoir, The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale (New York: Pantheon, 2017), p. 175, when he describes the novel as having “annoyed the critics,” Atlas elaborates: “The protagonist, Ben Janis, turned out to be a pretentious jerk.”
82. Atlas, Biography, pp. xii–xiii.
83. James Atlas, “The Shadow in the Garden,” The New Yorker, 3 July 1995, the source of all unattributed quotations in this paragraph.
84. SB was unbothered by a throwaway line Atlas had attributed to him in the Bloom profile, taken from a telephone conversation: “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” Bellow had asked. This flip question was to lead, as we shall see, to accusations of racism, a charge SB vigorously denied.
85. The corrected title is given in Atlas, Biography, p. 556; the misremembering from notes is described in Atlas’s book-length memoir, The Shadow in the Garden, p. 293, where the “shadow of the tombstone” is said to be “in” the garden, not “falling across” it.
86. More Die of Heartbreak was published by William Morrow and Company, the publishers SB moved to after his disappointment with Harper & Row over their promotion of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. According to Atlas, Biography, p. 527, SB had had little rapport with his editor at Harper & Row, Ed Burlingame, who he thought was insufficiently attentive: “One day Harriet Wasserman called him up and said, ‘Saul will never speak to you again.’ What infraction had Burlingame committed now? He had failed to call Bellow to commiserate about a negative review ‘in the Hartford Courant (or it may have been the Sacramento Bee).’ ” Atlas also quotes a letter Burlingame wrote to Barley Alison on 12 February 1986, which attributes SB’s unhappiness to Wasserman: “Our problems with Harriet worsen every week. She is utterly impossible to do business with and she seizes every opportunity to create worry on his part, so that her role as watchdog and defender is magnified” (p. 528).
87. SB explained the novel’s genesis in a letter of 7 January 1987 to Martin Amis: “First my elder brothers died, both of them, and then Alexandra after twelve years of marriage decided to divorce me, releasing me at the age of seventy to begin a new life. These events left me reeling for six months. To stave off sordid depression—if not insanity—I went back to work last June and wrote a book—a short one called More Die of Heartbreak, in which, naturally, I make fun of heartbreak: with a familiar mixture of obstinacy and high-voltage absurdity.”
88. For Bentchka, see chapter 2 of To Fame and Fortune, p. 58. Ellen Pifer, Saul Bellow Against the Grain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 153, 200–201n1, compares Benn’s way of seeing to Rudolf Steiner’s account of “inward” vision. Kenneth is interesting on eyes: “One of my Russian philosophers says that human eyes fall into one of two categories, the receptive and the will-emanating….The first was Uncle’s category, of course” (More Die of Heartbreak, p. 47). For similarities between Bentchka’s and Benn’s and SB’s way of seeing and Wordsworth’s creative perception, see chapter 2 of To Fame and Fortune, pp. 53–57.
89. Although Benn, like Bellow, “couldn’t leave the women alone” (p. 190), it is hard to apply Kenneth’s account of Benn as “fried” by the women he took up with to SB, just as it is hard to see SB as “a sex-abused man, a mere victim of so many Dellas and Carolines, not to mention the Rajashwaris and other ladies of the Third World” (pp. 112–13).
90. As Kenneth puts it, about Benn’s love needs: “The demand then was for a sharer, a charming woman, such a woman as Swedenborg describes—made by God to instruct a man, to lead him to the exchange of souls. Maybe to teach him, as Diotima taught Socrates about love” (p. 46).
91. Pifer, Saul Bellow Against the Grain, p. 156.
92. As for Benn’s rivals, “According to Doctor, she passed up a national network anchorman, then a fellow who was now on the federal appeals bench, plus a tax genius consulted by Richard Nixon” (p. 126).
93. On 19 May 1983, in response to an unnamed article in which SB admitted that he liked to do dishes, Clarence Brown, professor of comparative literature at Princeton, wrote with advice: “Dear Mr. Bellow, I thought you might like to know about a product called Soft-Scrub, put out by the Clorox people (with whom I have no affiliation). It is a sort of white gunk that cuts grease out of a sink like nobody’s business. Same for pots. I sent Nadia Mandelstam, God rest her soul, a bottle and she had people in to watch it work. It does linoleum too. Yours truly, Clarence Brown.”
94. The title of the interview is “Saul Bellow Teaches an ‘Object’ Lesson.” That SB knew of the corruption of love from the inside is suggested in a letter to Bloom of 28 February 1983. After an exhausting trip to the market, SB recounts in the letter, “I took off all my clothing and got into bed for an hour of angelic purity and meditation, browsing in Pieper’s book on the Phaedrus. I saw how bad the sophists were, and it comforted me to be on the right side, faithful to Eros and repudiating spurious sexuality. I am old enough at last to see things in a true light.”
95. As SB puts it in “Saul Bellow Teaches an ‘Object’ Lesson,” his Chicago Tribune interview with Kennedy, the cause of this damaging lit
eralism is loss of faith in “the ageless truths of human nature….In the nature-nurture controversy, nurture has been regarded as everything. I never believed that. The Bible, Shakespeare, Homer and the Greek playwrights believed there was some stable character to human nature. Now, some people are trying to get rid of the very concept of a durable human nature. That is why the affective lives of people have changed, and why the bonds between persons have grown weaker.”
96. See also Pifer, Saul Bellow Against the Grain, p. 156: “By insisting that his fascination with Matilda’s alluring beauty is love, Benn undergoes his version of the West’s current ‘ordeal of desire.’ ” Matilda, too, sees only parts, not wholes, like Angela in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, seeking an impossible ideal made of them: “a little Muhammad Ali for straight sex, some of Kissinger for savvy, Cary Grant for looks, Jack Nicholson for entertainment, plus André Malraux or some Jew for brains. Commonest fantasy there is” (p. 176).
97. Roger Kaplan, email to the author, 17 September 2008.
98. As Dr. Layamon explains to Benn, Vilitzer “was on the zoning commission and he did have advance information” (p. 158). He also has the judge who ruled against Benn and his sister in his pocket, in addition to giving him a kickback after the ruling. This judge is now being threatened with a federal indictment, and it would be a bad time for news of his crooked dealings with Vilitzer to be revealed. The prosecutor would like nothing better than to go after Vilitzer. “You send Vilitzer to jail and you have a clear path to the U.S. Senate. Or you become governor and you’re even mentioned for the presidency, maybe. That’s how our present governor did it” (p. 160).
99. Martin Amis, introduction, Penguin Classics edition (the edition used here) of More Die of Heartbreak, p. vii.
100. See Atlas, Biography, p. 530: “Women came and went from the apartment on Dorchester with unabated frequency….Both new and old flames were recruited to fill the gap left by Alexandra’s departure. Monique Gonthier [a journalist whom SB had met in James Jones’s apartment in Paris] arrived…to interview him for a French magazine. Zita Cogan, who had been in love with Bellow since their Tuley days and who kept prominently displayed on her bookshelves copies of his books inscribed ‘the second-story man’ and ‘second-story Bellow from Humboldt Park’…came to him with a proposition: ‘If you’re not married by the time you’re 78, I’ll take care of you if you’ll take care of me.’ ”
101. Pifer, Saul Bellow Against the Grain, p. 160 (the page numbers for Pifer’s quotations from the novel have been changed to those from the Penguin Classics edition, the edition used here; hence the square brackets). Kenneth’s child is a little girl, not an adolescent boy, but she functions, less crudely, in the role of Allan Bloom’s caricature in The Closing of the American Mind of a typical adolescent American: “Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music” (pp. 74–75), presumably Mick Jagger.
102. According to Atlas, Biography, p. 537, though More Die of Heartbreak was on the best-seller list for thirteen weeks, it sold less than half its six hundred thousand copies.
103. In an interview, Wieseltier claims that his initial motive in writing the review was “to defend Benn Crader…And then I wrote one fateful paragraph near the end….What I said was something like…he’s just afraid of women, uncomfortable with women.” What he said was this:
There is still another impediment to the American Contemplative in Bellow’s account….Specifically, it is women. More Die of Heartbreak is unrelenting in its disgust for women, who are portrayed as if their reason for being is the frustration of the better selves of men. Matilda, Treckie, Caroline, Della: they are all curses in makeup, utterly ridiculous figures, plotting predators, exploiters of desire. (There is also one Dita, with whom Trachtenberg finds respite, who is exempt from the great excoriation; but she is also exempt from sexual interest.) At one point Bellow’s horror of women is promoted into a theory of history: “The East has the ordeal of privation, the West has the ordeal of desire”—sort of a cross between Strindberg and Solzhenitsyn.
Wieseltier as champion of women has its ironies, given accusations made against him by female staff at The New Republic, a personal “ordeal of desire” that cost him dearly. Also costly was the belief that his defense of the metaphysical aspects of the novel would please SB. “I sent him the fucking galleys, like an idiot.” The result was disastrous. SB was “very angry and very hurt.” In a letter of 11 March 1990 to Wieseltier’s boss at The New Republic, Martin Peretz, labeled “CONFIDENTIAL,” SB complained: “Leon said that I was a misogynist, a racist, a sexist, a colonialist, a reactionary, and he charged me with disliking our country and just about everything else he could think of short of downright treason….But even this is not the whole story. Together with a copy of this ignoble review there came a syrupy letter from Leon filled with protestations of friendship and deep loyalty (despite my shortcomings and sins).” Later, Wieseltier recalls, SB appeared on television “and attacked the review as a trendy left-wing rant.” Wieseltier protested that all he “meant to say” was that the treatment of women in the novel “seemed like a lapse.” He was both “very wounded” and disappointed in SB’s reaction: “He was too smart for this reaction….Saul really didn’t need people to tell him he was a genius.” Here are the other passages of Wieseltier’s review (aside from the ones about women) SB took exception to in his letter to Peretz: “Though Bellow’s novel is brimming with American energies and American excesses, it is, in a sense, spiritually anti-American. America is presented as a disperser of the spirit, a commotion of deceits and distractions, a shallow, crowded, broken-down, tawdry shrine to money and power”; “His book is sprinkled, for example, with an unworthy scorn for what he calls ‘the Third World.’ It is saddening to see Bellow become a party to the fashionable neo-colonialist rant.”
104. These words from the New York Times article are also found on pp. 16–17 of SB’s foreword to The Closing of the American Mind.
105. “They all worked so hard to turn me around [into a schemer, that is] that I did turn around. At last I entered into it also….This once I’ve done it, and never again” (pp. 325, 326).
9. TO SEVENTY-FIVE
1. Philip Roth to SB and Janis Bellow, 22 October 1995. The quoted sentence is what the letter read in its entirety. Janis’s review of Sabbath’s Theater and Martin Amis’s The Information, under the title “Necropolis of the Heart,” appeared in the Fall 1995 issue of Partisan Review. She had defended Roth the year before, in an article in Bostonia taking issue with criticisms of Operation Shylock (1993).
2. SB, “Vermont: The Good Place,” Travel Holiday, July 1990, reprinted in SB, IAAU, pp. 250–51.
3. Joseph Epstein, “Another Rare Visit with Noah Danzig,” Commentary, October 1990. The story is narrated by “a biographer and literary man” interested in “the manifold connections between life and work—and especially the almost inevitable clash between decent behavior and the production of stellar art.” Noah Danzig is clearly to be identified with SB and Epstein with the narrator. They meet because the narrator has been commissioned to write a piece about Danzig for The New York Times, as Epstein had been commissioned by the Times to write a piece about SB. Their place of meeting is the Whitehal
l Club, where SB and Epstein frequently dined. Danzig has SB’s appearance, described as “like some prehistorical version of a Jewish eagle.” His clothes are SB’s clothes, as in the “checked suit, with sharply cut lapels and small, high pockets cut into the trousers.” The heroes in Danzig’s novels (Epstein takes the Updike line, or perhaps it’s the other way around) “were plainly himself, got up in various wigs, false noses and glasses, taped-on mustaches, and other easily penetrated disguises.” One of Danzig’s persistent themes in conversation is the irrelevance of the artist in modern society. And so forth. He is shown in a consistently bad light, and though the story concludes that he is of a type, he’s the worst of the type. “I took him for a man, when he was that quite different thing, an artist—less than a great one, to be sure, but psychologically a perfect type….But the larger point, I began to see, was that the more complete the artist the less complete the man. Men didn’t come much more incomplete than Noah.”
The source of the narrator’s animus is an unflattering portrait of him in one of Danzig’s novels, “a portrait of me as something of an updated Sammy Glick.” Epstein had never suffered such a fate, but he believed his friend the art critic Hilton Kramer had, when portrayed in Humboldt’s Gift as “just a careerist.” Epstein had introduced Kramer to SB at “a perfectly agreeable dinner” at the Whitehall Club. According to Epstein, the thinly disguised portrait of Kramer as a cowardly careerist character named Magnasco is both inaccurate (among other things, in its implied account of Kramer’s relations with Delmore Schwartz, Humboldt’s acknowledged model) and gratuitous. In a letter of February 12, 1991, to Ruth Wisse, Bellow characterized Epstein’s story as “gross, moronic and clumsily written.”
4. Shawmut’s and SB’s propensity to make wounding remarks is discussed in chapter 3 of To Fame and Fortune, pp. 103–4. It was a quality remarked on admiringly by his son Daniel: “He was truly Pop when he was saying something particularly wicked. You grow up with it and you think it’s normal, but I’ve never met anybody like him” (“Our Father’s Politics,” in A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria L. Cronin and Lee Trepanier [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013], p. 221). Kingsley Amis, no admirer of SB, tells a story in his Memoirs (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1991) about the novelist Anthony Powell that sheds light upon the “German-Jewish bullshit” story. When Amis and Powell were recording a radio interview at the BBC in 1955, it became clear to them that the interview had been set up as a sort of confrontation: Amis, the angry young man, versus the older, upper-class novelist Powell. What the producer did not know is that the two novelists were friends and admired each other’s work. They also took an instant dislike to what Amis calls the producer’s “autocratic” manner. Soon after the interview began, as Amis was reading out his introduction, a light flashed and the producer’s voice sounded from a loudspeaker; then he bustled in, “clearly dissatisfied.”
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