“You’re sticking to the actual novels, the text” [said the producer].
“I thought that was what we were supposed to be discussing,” I said.
“No no, that’s not what I want. I want something about the status of the novel in general, its place in society and so on.”
Tony said, “We don’t care what you want. We’re going to do what we want. And if you don’t like it we’re walking out of this studio. Now.”
What impressed me about this utterance, even more than its style and content, was its placid, conversational delivery. That’s the upper classes for you, I thought to myself; I might have been able to summon the guts to say something along those lines, but I should have had to lose my temper to do it. Anyway, that short speech of Tony’s knocked all the fight out of the producer.
“There’s no need to take that tone,” he said.
“Oh, good,” said Tony appreciatively. [p. 152].
The equivalent of this last exchange (“ ‘Oh, good,’ said Tony appreciatively”) in the SB story is the way he calmly resumes eating, though in this case sangfroid or self-possession is no product of social class. SB met Anthony Powell once, in London in 1949, according to Thomas Barnard, his insurance agent, in an unpublished memoir he gave me entitled “Saul Bellow, a Gift for Friendship” (2015). “Bellow had pronounced his name Powell,” Barnard writes, “but Powell, nose to the sky, said it was pronounced Pole. ‘I thought the hell with you.’ ”
5. Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (London: Atlantic Books, 2010), p. 398.
6. Ibid., p. 399.
7. Martin Amis, Experience (2000; London: Vintage, 2001), p. 261.
8. Ibid., pp. 261, 267.
9. Edward Said, “An Exchange on Edward Said and Difference III: Response,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 15, no. 3 (Spring 1989).
10. In the unedited typescript of “A Talk with Saul Bellow,” Israel Scene, April 1988, an interview conducted in Haifa between SB and Leila H. Goldman and Ada Aharoni, SB comments on Gore Vidal: “I’ve known Gore Vidal a long time. I know he is a bit meshuggah [crazy]. He is a good writer in his way which is not as good a way as he thinks. He has certain gifts which are not as imposing as he would like them to be…and he is one of these people who feels that he belongs to patrician America, to the old America, and he takes the view of immigrants and the melting pot [that] old America…very often preferred to take, namely that we are an intrusion, a barbarian and hybrid population, we’re dragging the country down and lowering its ancient and holy standards and all the rest of that. Well he’s full of it.” This passage is cut from the published interview, where its themes are woven into other questions. The interviewers liken Vidal to Allbee, the anti-Semite in The Victim, and SB concurs: “Allbee does remind one in many ways of Vidal.”
11. Hitchens, Hitch-22, p. 400.
12. Janis Bellow’s account of the European trip comes from entries in the journal she kept from 1987 to 2002.
13. For these and other quotations from the interview, see Leila H. Goldman and Ada Aharoni, “A Talk with Saul Bellow.”
14. Atlas, Biography, p. 534, where Atlas claims that SB “read every word of the Saul Bellow Journal,” though in a letter of 5 August 1987 to A. B. Yehoshua, SB says of the editors of the Journal, “I shrank from reading their publications.”
15. Andrew Gordon, “The Ancient Mariner, and Other Encounters with Saul Bellow,” Saul Bellow Journal, vol. 10, no. 1 (1991), pp. 64, 65.
16. Ann Cheroff Weinstein, Me and My (Tor)mentor, Saul Bellow: A Memoir of My Literary Love Affair (New York: iUniverse, 2007), p. 25.
17. Amis, Experience, p. 201. SB, “A Matter of the Soul,” Opera News, 11 January 1975, reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 76.
18. Ellen Pifer, email to the author, 25 August 2016.
19. For Amis’s account of the Haifa conference and the subsequent stay in Jerusalem see Experience, pp. 221–26.
20. Atlas, Biography, p. 539, misdates SB and Janis’s European holiday as after, not before the Haifa conference. He also claims that, upon returning to Vermont, SB immediately set off for Montreal, where he gave a speech at the Montreal Council of Foreign Relations, was interviewed at the Jewish Public Library, and visited Lachine with Ruth Wisse on his way to the airport. Janis Bellow, however, has no record in her journals of a visit to Montreal at this time, nor has the Jewish Public Library a record of such an interview, nor is there any record of SB’s giving a talk at the Montreal Council of Foreign Relations (their records don’t go back that far). In an email to the author of 17 August 2016, Shannon Hodge, of the Jewish Public Library in Montreal, attributes the misdating to a file in the library that “was horribly misdated.” The talk Atlas refers to was given in 1990. Ann Weinstein says its title was “What Does It Mean to Be a Jewish Writer?” But Atlas quotes a passage from this talk, a copy of which was given to him by Weinstein, that clearly refers to the April 1987 trip to Europe, and seems to suggest that SB really did deliver it in 1987:
I became very tired and went to take a holiday in Europe. I ended up by flying from place to place and tried to catch up with the train from Avignon to Lyon which was determined to leave me behind and then I got on to the railroad station in Lyon and asked where the hotel where I had a reservation was located….I shot up in an elevator to the 48th floor and there I found myself sealed in one of these modern hotel rooms where you couldn’t even open a window, where you could scarcely breathe and I thought, “This is Lyon: Is this the holiday where I regrow my depleted tissues?” The answer was No and flying around from place to place was all a big mistake and then I came back to the U.S. I land in Boston. I go to Vermont. I drive up to Lachine because it is impossible for me to refuse an invitation from M. Descary [the mayor of Lachine] and so here I am still on the run, on the lam, so to speak [p. 539].
21. According to Adam Bellow, Sonya Freedman’s brother, a musician, was also initially opposed to the relationship, telling Adam at one point, “We’re all very upset. I’m very upset.”
22. SB, “All Marbles Still Accounted For,” p. 21, in SB Papers, Regenstein. In some ways, Hilbert Faucil is like SB: He grew up on the West Side of Chicago and had an education like SB’s. That his paper concerns itself with highbrow literary and philosophical matters as well as lowbrow tabloid fare suggests a range like that of SB’s fiction.
23. The idea of writing down notes about her life with Bellow came to Janis at the suggestion of Sophie Wilkins, an editor at Knopf, a translator, and the wife of the poet Karl Shapiro.
24. George Walden, Lucky George: Memoirs of an Anti-Politician (1999; London: Penguin, 2000), p. 328.
25. The quotations from “Marbles” about ninety-three-year old Hilbert Faucil, the hero, being cheated by his accountant come from p. 23 of the “Marbles” manuscript. The cheating accountant, “the man who took full charge of my financial affairs,” is called Rupert Tarquino (p. 21), a boyish-looking man in his mid-thirties. “Looking for signs of honesty in his face you could never be really certain; if you looked for the other thing all you could fix upon was his mouth and especially the swell of the lower lip when he stared at you during the intervals of fluency. Lip and stare were connected, asserting honesty but unable to eliminate certain traces of guile” (p. 22). Here is how Rupert Tarquino talks:
At this point in time we should go into condominium sharing on the gulf coast. The group down there is over-extended, with a second-mortgage problem. To invest smartly at this point in time would yield special advantages, taxwise and futurewise, and with your retirement capital setup this one would be a sweetheart. Because we could do it extended, willing to reinvest capital gains. By conceding on distributions you can get special terms from the Firefly Group which is into this up to its kazoo [p. 21].
Among the SB Papers in the Regenstein are letters from his lawyers to Jeffrey W. Krol, his accounta
nt and financial adviser, along with a “Verified Complaint in Chancery for Accounting and Other Relief” filed with the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, Chancery Division. Krol had first served as SB’s accountant while at Peat, Marwick and Mitchell in the 1970s. From 1981, having left the firm, he continued to act as SB’s accountant and adviser. From 1981 to 1989, the Chancery Complaint reads, SB, “as a result of Defendant’s suggestions, recommendations and urgings, invested substantial sums of money in various real estate and other investment vehicles and securities including several partnerships and limited partnerships.” Unhappy with his returns, or lack of returns, from these investments, SB made repeated demands to see Krol’s books and records. When Krol failed to produce these, SB filed his complaint. According to Janis Bellow, SB lost a very large sum of money and had great difficulty extricating himself from various bad investment deals. “ ‘Very truly yours,’ he would sign off,” Janis remembers.
26. For SB on the Egypt-Israel Treaty ceremonies see SB, “Saul Bellow’s Account of the Mideast Peace Ceremony,” Newsday, March 31, 1979.
27. Paul Glastris, “The Powers That Shouldn’t Be: Five Washington Insiders the Next Democratic President Shouldn’t Hire,” Washington Monthly, October 1987.
28. See SB, “All Marbles Still Accounted For,” pp. 113–14 (of the 279-page manuscript), for a fictionalized version of the incident with Schlesinger. Former Secretary of Defense Brushmore is introduced to Hilbert Faucil at a White House dinner:
He didn’t stumble, it was no accident, for he picked up my necktie and spilled red wine on it. The cause, I never actually determined….One thing that may have displeased the Secretary was that the tie, I admit, was a very loud one covered with sprigs of cherry blossom. This is not the kind of thing you can easily get over. He picked it up from the bottom as if he had studied the doing of this for years and tipped his wineglass over it all the way to the knot. Who can know why? The custodian of atomic bombs and missiles took against me….“Why did you do that?” I said. And as he was already turning away I let fly at him with my fist. But I never touched him because I was caught from behind, under the arms. This incident was witnessed by the President’s mother, Miz Lillian, who said “See here! None of this!” She wasn’t scolding, she gave me her protection. “What did you do to that fella to make him do a thing like that?”
“I only asked him how he was.”
“Maybe he’s drunk.”
“He’s one-hundred percent sober. They shouldn’t have stopped me.”
“Well, for a senior citizen you are a gutsy fellow, you don’t take any whatchamacallit.”
“I should have smashed him one.”
“It would have been in all the papers so I’m glad you didn’t.”
29. SB, in Manea, “Conversation,” p. 32.
30. Adam Bellow, in Gloria L. Cronin, “Our Father’s Politics: Gregory, Adam, and Daniel Bellow,” in Political Companion to SB, ed. Cronin and Trepanier, p. 201.
31. Ibid., p. 216.
32. Walden, Lucky George, p. 272.
33. The television program Bloom appeared on was The Late Show with Clive James, BBC, 17 February 1979. The other guests were Anthony Burgess and Carmen Callil.
34. Walden, Lucky George, pp. 274, 275.
35. Ibid., pp. 275, 276.
36. In addition to the Kennedy op-ed piece, I have drawn on articles in The New York Times by Dirk Johnson, “Black-Jewish Hostility Rouses Leaders in Chicago to Action,” 29 July 1988, and “Racial Politics: Chicago’s Raw Nerve,” 19 February 1989; and Anthony Lewis, “A Dangerous Poison,” 31 July 1988.
37. Cokely not only believed that Jewish doctors had injected black children with AIDS, he claimed to have uncovered a number of corporate conspiracies, including by the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Rothschilds, and the Rockefellers. He also said that Jesse Jackson and the CIA had conspired together to assassinate Martin Luther King, Jr.
38. These quotations are reported in excerpts from the speech published on 25 April 1989 in the Chicago Tribune under the title “Bellow Sees Good Signs for Future.” According to Kennedy, one reason Daley asked Bellow to speak at the inaugural was that his wife, Maggie Daley, was a fan of Bellow’s novels.
39. Robert D, McFadden, “John Silber Dies at 86; Led Boston University,” New York Times, 27 September 2012, the main source also of accounts of Silber’s tenure as president of Boston University. For this tenure, see also Roger Kimball, “John Silber, 1926–2012,” New Criterion, vol. 31, no. 3 (November 2012), and three letters, 18 June, 23 October, and 6 November 1980, to New York Review of Books from prominent BU faculty denouncing, defending, then again denouncing Silber.
40. Botsford’s and SB’s friend John Hunt had something to do with the appointment at Texas. Hunt, who worked undercover for the CIA, and was later to head the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton and the Aspen Institute, had known Botsford when they were both at the University of Iowa. In 1962, Hunt invited Botsford to join the Congress for Cultural Freedom and become its “permanent roving representative” in Latin America. After three years based in Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, Hunt sent Botsford to London, to work as deputy secretary of International PEN. There Botsford helped to organize PEN’s first Bled Congress in Yugoslavia, to which Soviet writers were invited. In 1965, less than a year after arriving in London, Botsford got the Texas appointment. See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cold War (1999; Granta Books, 2000), pp. 241–43, 348.
41. According to Atlas, The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale (New York: Pantheon, 2017), p. 186, when question-and-answer periods followed SB’s readings the procedure “was always the same: members of the audience would write down their questions on file cards that had been included with their programs and hand them to the ushers going through the aisles….When the stack of cards arrived, Bellow leafed through it and picked out the ones that interested him, muttering aloud, to great laughter from the audience, the best of the rejects (‘What are you doing tonight after the reading?’).”
42. See Harriet Wasserman, Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow (New York: Fromm International, 1997), p. 164, where she names only Esquire and the Atlantic Monthly as having declined to publish A Theft. “What to do? I certainly didn’t want to risk another turndown,” she adds on the next page, before discussing the decision to publish as a paperback original. Atlas, Biography, p. 542, mentions Vanity Fair and The New Yorker as also having turned the novella down. In an interview, Janis recalls waiting for the New Yorker decision. Also, Alan Cheuse, in his review of A Theft in the Chicago Tribune (“Saul Bellow’s Ring of Truth,” 5 March 1989), mentions The New Yorker’s decision.
43. Edwin McDowell, “Trade Paperbacks Gaining in Role of a Happy Medium,” New York Times, 17 October 1988.
44. Wasserman, Handsome Is, p. 165.
45. Atlas, Biography, p. 543. John Updike reviewed A Theft in The New Yorker with Anita Brookner’s Latecomers, under the ironic title “Nice Tries” (1 May 1989); Robert Towers reviewed it in The New York Review of Books, 27 April 1989, with Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Susanna Moore’s The Whiteness of Bones, under the title “Mystery Women.” Joyce Carol Oates’s review, “Clara’s Gift,” appeared in The New York Times Book Review on 5 March 1989.
46. Henry James, Collected Novels and Tales, 24 vols. (1907–9; New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1935), vol. 20, p. viii.
47. SB, A Theft, in CS, p. 124. Henceforth cited within the text by page number.
48. John Banville, “International Tale,” London Review of Books, 30 March 1989.
49. Maggie Staats Simmons, email to the author, 14 September 2016, the source also of the earlier description of the novella as “an act of expiation.”
50. Maggie Staats Simmons, email to the author, 5 September 2016.
51. Maggie St
aats Simmons, email to the author, 6 September 2016.
52. Ibid. Fanny Assingham, referred to as a sort of Clara, is a character in James’s The Golden Bowl. Also Jamesian is a strand of the novella concerning Clara’s young daughter, Lucy, who proves another exceptional character. Like a child in a Henry James story, Lucy is involved in adult machinations, being the one Gina chooses to get the ring back to Clara. “I see how you brought it all together through my own child,” Clara tells Gina. “You gave her something significant to do, and she was equal to it. Most amazing to me is the fact that she didn’t talk, she only watched. That level of control and observation in a girl of ten…how do you suppose it feels to discover that?” (p. 171).
53. Ithiel “was committed to high civility, structure, order; nevertheless he took chances with women, he was a gambler, something of an anarchist” (p. 138).
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