54. For David Denby, in a review of A Theft and The Bellarosa Connection in The New Republic (“Memory in America,” 1 January 1990), “Bellow’s eager new sophistication [about the world of East Side privilege] fits badly with the highfalutin, morally strenuous tone of the exchanges between Clara and Gina….The irony of a noble character triumphing in such worldly and gilded circumstances doesn’t come through with any force.”
55. I am drawing from a typed copy of the speech, “A Jewish Writer in America,” April 1988, in the SB Papers in the Regenstein. Appended to it is an alternative ending of several sentences and a handwritten note dated 18 May: “Dear Cynthia [Ozick]—This is the added paragraph for the end of the Philadelphia paper. I sent a typed copy.” Henceforth, this copy will be cited within the text by page numbers. Versions of the speech were reprinted in The New York Review of Books (27 October and 10 November 2011) and in SB, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York: Viking Penguin, 2015), pp. 356–73.
56. For the theory of the egregore, see Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell (Amity, N.Y.: Amity House, 1985).
57. P. 30 of the typed copy is the one with the added paragraph sent to Cynthia Ozick.
58. SB to Cynthia Ozick, 18 May 1988: “Among the other speakers I make exception for Potok, who gave a very good talk, and gave it in his own words.” Chaim Potok, the novelist and rabbi, had been editor-in-chief of the JPS.
59. Janis Bellow’s account of this dinner party is mentioned in the introduction to To Fame and Fortune, in a discussion of SB’s use of sources.
60. SB to Evelyn Nef, 15 November 1998: “I’m glad you liked the novellas. I can’t say that I ever had any real contact with Billy Rose, but I was staying in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem when Billy turned up with Noguchi [Isamu Noguchi, the Japanese American artist and landscape gardener]. They had come to lay out Billy’s great gift to the city, a sculpture garden. Noguchi was in charge of this project. This is where I saw and heard Billy screaming with rage in the lobby because his luggage had been lost by El Al. The performance was terribly enjoyable. I had no other contact whatever with this pair but I kept them in my sights for a couple of weeks and enjoyed every minute of my vigil.”
61. SB, The Bellarosa Connection (1989), reprinted in SB, CS, p. 35. Henceforth cited within the text by page numbers.
62. For “distraction” as a key theme in The Bellarosa Connection, see Ezra Cappell, “Sorting the Vital from the Useless: Holocaust Memory in Saul Bellow’s The Bellarosa Connection,” Saul Bellow Journal, vol. 23, nos. 1–2 (Fall 2007 / Winter 2008).
63. David Denby, in his review of A Theft and The Bellarosa Connection (“Memory in America,” New Republic, 1 January 1990), thinks the admiring depiction of Sorella extraordinary because SB’s descriptions of her body are “grounded so firmly in sexual disgust.” The passage he quotes in support of this view, however, shows nothing of the kind: “She was very heavy and she wore makeup. Her cheeks were downy. Her hair was done up in a beehive. A pince-nez, highly unusual, a deliberate disguise, gave her a theatrical air” (p. 37).
64. SB to Michael Alison (Barley’s brother), 12 June 1989.
65. SB, “In Memory of Robert Penn Warren,” September 1989, written for Warren’s memorial service, SB Papers in the Regenstein.
66. Atlas, Biography, p. 550.
67. SB to Sanford Pinsker, 25 July 1988.
68. Andrew Patner, “Dr. Demopoulos Sells a ‘Fountain of Youth’ to Rich and Famous,” Wall Street Journal, 8 November 1989. See also SB to Harry B. Demopoulos, 9 August 1994: “Joking aside I have been taking your vitamins and antioxidants for about ten years and in that time I have had no serious diseases. An early benefit of the Health Performance Packs was that I was able to give up beta-blockers or whatever it is cardiologists give for the control of high blood pressure. I have registered 130/70 for a decade now. The only disorder I have to cope with is an arrhythmia for which I take Quinine tablets. At the age of 79 I am therefore virtually drug free and know how well I have been protected by your vitamins. I am willing to say as much at a banquet, before a professional meeting or in print.”
69. The “Zetland” manuscripts and SB’s relations with Reichian therapy are discussed in chapter 10 of To Fame and Fortune.
70. Atlas, Biography, p. 554.
71. Philip Roth to SB, 11 June 1990. SB replied on 24 June: “I am very fond of Cousin Volya, who was something of a hero in the Old Country, serving in the Russian cavalry from Leningrad to Berlin. It’s easy to mistake him for somebody else. When he explained the difference between Latvia and Lithuania to Steinberg, Steinberg said it was like a piece of dialogue out of a Marx Brothers’ movie.”
10. PAPUANS AND ZULUS
1. Details of the party come from Jerry Nemanic, “Politicians Sing of Bellow’s Gift to Fiction, City,” Chicago Tribune, 9 October 1990; Mary A. Johnson, “Bellow Marks His 75th,” Chicago Sun-Times, 8 October 1990; and John Blades, “Birthday Salute,” Chicago Tribune, 4 October 1990.
2. Furet was president of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. The school was in some ways like the Committee on Social Thought: it prided itself on standing apart from the formal university world, the world of the Sorbonne, and encouraged interdisciplinary study. Furet’s own research on the French Revolution brought him into bitter conflict with the Marxist historians of the Sorbonne. He had been a communist in his youth but left the party in 1956, later becoming a significant anti-communist commentator on contemporary French politics.
3. Clifford Orwin, “Remembering Allan Bloom,” p. 8 of a 23-page typescript of an essay published under the same title in The American Scholar, vol. 62, no. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 423–30; I quote from the typescript, which is labeled “The Final Version.”
4. Spiekerman’s recollections, here and elsewhere, come from emails to the author, 5 and 17 August 2016.
5. In an interview with the Canadian psychiatrist Norman Doidge, later used in a profile Doidge wrote for Saturday Night magazine in 2000, SB is asked if Bloom “changed” him. I quote from a fax Doidge sent SB on 26 April 2000, which contains his answer to this question (it had been answered over the telephone): “Bellow: He lightened me up, and cleaned up my mental life very considerably….He made me take myself much less seriously. So that I stopped being so serious beyond my own depth. He made me see I didn’t have as many options as I thought I did, and that I couldn’t expect to render verdicts on all the questions we faced, and that it was comical to be straining for answers I didn’t have. There were things he allowed me to get away with because I was a dear friend and because I was a writer. I became interested in Rudolf Steiner, a thinker, and he thought this was just baloney, and he’d say, ‘This is inappropriate; I give you license to do it at the back of your mind, for working up some literary themes, but don’t expect me to take it seriously.’ I thought he was unfair. But according to him I was not a hundred percent serious person.”
6. Allan Bloom, Love & Friendship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), pp. 208, 209.
7. According to Atlas, Biography, p. 564, Bloom’s return to normal activities was “sustained by the cartons of Marlboros that he had dispatched Janis to bring him.”
8. As recalled by Richard Stern, quoted in ibid., p. 653.
9. Orwin, “Remembering Allan Bloom,” typescript, p. 22.
10. SB to Rosanna Warren, 21 October 1992.
11. Andrew Gordon, “Choosing the Necessary: Remarks by Saul Bellow to Padget Powell’s Graduate Class in Fiction Writing at the University of Florida, Gainesville, February 21, 1992,” http://users.clas.ufl.edu/agordon/beluf.htm. My account of SB’s visit to Florida also draws on a fuller draft of the article in the SB Papers in Regenstein, one sent to SB by Powell.
12. Gordon himself calls SB’s re
marks Wordsworthian; they recall the sonnet “The World Is Too Much With Us” (1807), with its complaint that, “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”
13. SB, “Mozart: An Overture,” Bostonia, Spring 1992, delivered at the Mozart Bicentennial, 5 December 1991, in Florence, Italy, reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 3. Henceforth cited in the text by page numbers.
14. See Teddy Kollek to SB, 26 January 1992; the description of Kollek as “schemer,” etc., is from SB to Ruth Wisse, 20 February 1992.
15. See Janis Freedman Bellow, “Double Trouble in the Promised Land,” a review of Philip Roth, Operation Shylock, in Bostonia, Winter 1993. Bostonia was funded by BU and edited by Keith Botsford, who was transforming it from an alumni magazine to a publication of broader cultural appeal. Janis also discusses Roth’s fiction in “Necropolis of the Heart,” a review of Martin Amis’s The Information and Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, in Partisan Review, vol. 4 (1995), pp. 699–718. The quotation about the “manhandling” comes from SB, in John Blades, “Bellow’s Latest Chapter,” Chicago Tribune, 19 June 1994.
16. Roger Kaplan, email to the author, 12 September 2008. Attached to this email was a draft of a memoir of SB and Janis’s stay in Paris, “Bellow and Furet.” It is thirty-nine single-spaced pages long.
17. Roger Kaplan, email to the author, 20 July 2008; subsequent quotations from Roger come from this and other emails, and from “Bellow and Furet.”
18. Roger Kaplan, email to the author, 18 July 2008.
19. For the University Professors, a creation of John Silber, see chapter 9. The University Professors program granted both undergraduate and graduate degrees in fields that combined or fell between traditional disciplines. Students for both graduate and undergraduate degrees were interviewed by faculty and consulted closely with them in designing their course of study. The program was phased out in 2011. When SB joined the program in 1993, other University Professors in literature included Geoffrey Hill, William Arrowsmith, D. S. Carne-Ross, Roger Shattuck, and the poet Rosanna Warren, daughter of Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark. Christopher Ricks refused to join the program, but was more in sympathy with members of its arts-and-literature group than he was with many English Department colleagues.
20. The unnamed friends are quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 566.
21. See Jennifer Rossa, “Nobel Laureate Leaves for BU,” Chicago Maroon, 26 May 1993. In John Blades, “Bellow Leaving Chicago in Body But Not in Spirit,” Chicago Tribune, 25 May 1993, SB explains: “I thought I was due for a change. Lots of people leave Chicago in my time of life, and nobody thinks anything of it.” The article also quotes Mayor Daley, who called himself SB’s “good friend” and hoped he would keep a voting address in Chicago.
22. Manea, “Conversation,” pp. 20–21.
23. Atlas, Biography, p. 566.
24. For this SB quotation and details of the unveiling ceremony, see Charles Storch, “Bellow’s Defection No Match for Affection from Hometown,” Chicago Tribune, 9 November 1993.
25. Blades, “Bellow Leaving Chicago in Body.”
26. For these details of the “Idiosyncratic Survey,” see Blades, “Bellow’s Latest Chapter.” In addition to teaching his one course in the spring, SB was also listed as teaching “Directed Study” for most spring semesters, part of the University Professors program’s offerings. According to Chris Walsh, email to the author, 22 November 2016, “Typically the enrollment for those classes was zero, a couple of times he had one student. (The same is true for other University Professor Profs.)”
27. On Botsford and SB’s Jewishness, see To Fame and Fortune, chapter 13, pp. 551–52.
28. That Botsford was a “terrible, terrible parent,” Nathalie claims, all of his children “would agree, though they all love him.” She adds: “He’s the ideal parent to call at three o’clock in the morning if you’ve just been arrested, but he’s the worst possible parent to bring to the school play in which you’ve got the leading role, because he’ll say afterwards that everyone was dreadful including you, and what a waste of money it was to send you to the school.”
29. Keith Botsford, email to the author, 11 January 2017. The Botsford quote about reading eleven languages comes from Fred A. Bernstein, “In Costa Rica, Built for Books and Breezes,” New York Times Magazine, 1 October 2007, a profile not only of Botsford but of his house in Costa Rica.
30. Botsford’s tolerant response is quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 431. I first met Botsford in 2008 in Cahuita, Costa Rica, where he was living with his latest wife, an ex-student from BU, fifty-two years his junior. He seemed very much like Thaxter. When my wife and I arrived at his house, he was napping (there had been a “mix-up” about arrival times, and no one met us at the deserted airport, little more than a field with a single tiny “terminal”; we had no address, only a post-office box number). Botsford emerged from his house bare-chested, in red silk pajama bottoms, drank Pepsi (or was it Coke?) continuously, scattered cigarette ash everywhere, never slept, and took an unsettling interest in my wife. The house he lived in was spectacular. It had been designed by his architect son, Gianni, had won prizes, and was featured in a lavish spread in The New York Times Magazine (see note 29 above, www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/garden/04costarica.html). Everyone in Cahuita knew Botsford as “Kikay,” spelled, disconcertingly, “Kike” on the large mailbox at the beginning of his drive. At the local restaurant, the proprietor-chef greeted him with great affection. He always ordered off-menu. Generous with his time, he had much to say about SB, as well as about himself, and over the course of several days he must have mentioned the names of perhaps a hundred places, writers, and books I’d never heard of, let alone been to or read. He was generous in other ways, supplying me with photographs and with not-yet-published drafts of Fragments, his multivolume memoir. He was charming—endearing, even—as well as peremptory and condescending.
31. On 14 October 1997, in the course of asking James Wood if he’d received his copy of News from the Republic of Letters, SB explained its origins and aims. He and Botsford “have done this sort of thing in the past. In the Fifties we brought out a journal called The Noble Savage. The idea has always been to show how the needs of writers might be met….Botsford and I have no publishing house behind us [as they had with The Noble Savage]—no corporation, no philanthropical foundations, no patron. We pay for TROL ourselves. We do it on the cheap—printing no more than 1,500 copies. We tried to get Barnes and Noble to take it but B and N does not deal with magazines directly. Only with official distributors. We thought we’d run it for a year in the hope of attracting five or six hundred subscribers. Six or seven hundred good men and true would make it possible for TROL to survive. Nothing like a boyish enterprise to give old guys the shocks they badly need or crave. I feel I owe you this explanation, since you were good enough to let us publish your Ibsen-Chekhov piece. We couldn’t afford to pay you properly for it. So you are entitled to a description of what it is we are doing.” In the same letter, SB explains that Chris Walsh, who would become the magazine’s managing editor, would be helping out Botsford, described as “a very gifted man but he isn’t dependably efficient.” Botsford was in the south of France for the summer (where he at this time had a house), and also recovering from a car accident. See SB to Christopher Ricks, 7 July 1997: “Who but Keith could launch a magazine and immediately disappear for two months! Chris Walsh and I have to try to run the shop. I can’t even begin to guess when the next number (including your exchanges with Empson) will appear.” See also SB’s letters to Sophie Wilkins (17 June 1998), Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick (both 18 June 1998), soliciting pieces for the magazine and explaining its aims and character.
32. Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber & Faber, 1988).
33. In fact, these may not have been exactly the words SB spoke. In his memoir, The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale (Ne
w York: Pantheon, 2017), p. 178n., Atlas writes: “Alas, I have come across the notebook in which I scrawled this now-famous (or infamous) line, and it turns out that the word Bellow used was ‘Polynesians,’ unless I mistranscribed it—which is quite possible….If it turns out that ‘Papuans’ is a later embellishment (we’ll never know), apologies to untold numbers of journalists who may have misquoted Bellow’s comic and wildly offensive remark over the years.” In what follows, Papuans stay Papuans, as in public controversy.
34. The extract in The New York Times Magazine, from which all my quotations are taken, was titled “Into the White Ivory Tower.”
35. In The Shadow in the Garden, p. 268, Atlas describes Staples as “a big guy…and it was a point of honor for him to dress in scruffy clothes, as if to say this is who I am.”
36. In “When the Artist Is a Cannibal,” an entry in an online exchange with A. O. Scott about Atlas’s Biography (2000), Staples writes, “I never meant to harm him, just to give him a dose of those menacing black characters he produced in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Dean’s December, and Humboldt’s Gift and so on.” The exchange appeared in the online magazine Slate, 16 October 2000.
37. See Harriet Wasserman, Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow (New York: Fromm International, 1997), pp. 170–71. There were, of course, earlier accusations. When Esquire published “Something to Remember Me By,” the story SB thought had “everything in it,” the issue it appeared in (July 1990) also contained an article on American fiction by Edward Hoagland which rehearsed charges of racism against him. On 15 June, having seen an advance copy of the issue, Harriet Wasserman wrote to the magazine’s editor, Lee Eisenberg, to complain: “What a betrayal, what trickery, to buy the rights to publish a story and then put the story in a hostile and pejorative setting.” At the time of the Papuans-and-Zulus controversy, “Something to Remember Me By” was SB’s most recent publication.
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