Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  38. James Atlas, email to the author, 30 November 2016. In The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale, p. 262, Atlas describes SB’s failure to “remember the name of the journalist who went on to become your biographer…[as] what Annie [his wife, a psychoanalyst] would call a narcissistic injury. And I resented being called the ‘interviewer.’ I was the biographer.” At the same time, “I was pleased to see Bellow fighting back against the bullying strictures of political correctness. And maybe he really didn’t remember that I’d interviewed him.”

  39. In an email of 28 November 2017 the journalist and writer Rhoda Koenig comments: “He made the remark nearly ten years earlier at the PEN conference that I covered for New York magazine in 1986. I quoted it in my piece. I remember, clear as a bell, that I was very surprised that, when he said it, there were no noises of protest or even indignation. There were no gasps, much less anyone calling out an angry remark, even among all those liberals.”

  40. Sarah Lyall, “Saul Bellow’s Words,” New York Times Book Review, 16 March 1994.

  41. “Political corrector” comes from an unsigned Wieseltier editorial in The New Republic, 28 March 1994 (which Lyall presumably saw before publication). It is titled “Mr. Staples’s Planet” and begins with a quote: “ ‘I don’t think Bellow’s work is sufficiently tainted with anti-black attitudes that it poisons his whole work.’ Tainted, we are to infer, but not sufficiently tainted. This, according to The Boston Globe a few weeks ago, was how Cambridge novelist Paul Buttenweiser explained his decision not to withdraw an invitation to Saul Bellow to appear as a guest at a Boston Library dinner. In his own eyes, no doubt, Buttenweiser is a hero of political incorrectness; but with friends like this, a writer needs no enemies. The political corrector, in this case, was Brent Staples, whose recent memoir, Parallel Time, recounts his years as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where, among other distinctions, he stalked Saul Bellow.” Later in the New Republic piece, which appears as one of several items under the heading “Notes,” the anonymous editor refers to Rinaldo Cantabile, who utters the “crazy buffaloes” and “pork chops” epithets, as “a tawdry little hood.” Of Staples’s objection to Bellow’s depictions of black sexuality and violence, the editor observes that the objection occurs in a chapter “riddled with black pimps and black prostitutes, compared to whom Bellow’s little menaces are quaint.”

  42. Hilton Kramer, “Saul Bellow, Our Contemporary,” Commentary, June 1994.

  43. For a clearer and more straightforward, if hardly problem-free, account of multiculturalism, see SB’s answers to Robert Fulford in “A Thousand Years to Be Born: Robert Fulford Speaks with Saul Bellow,” Books in Canada: The Canadian Review of Books, September 1996: “We always had multiculturalism in America. The melting pot was multicultural. People seem to forget that. Only those who hated the immigrants, or had some impossible idea about WASP purity, like Henry Adams, were shocked by this. Everybody else took it as a matter of course….I think it’s natural to this civilization to be multicultural, but I don’t think that this means that all cultures are clearly equal. It’s a crazy distortion of the idea of equality. I always tell students when they ask me about multiculturalism that they don’t know their own culture yet.”

  44. See Manea, “Conversation,” p. 18; SB, “The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them,” in IAAU, pp. 45–46 (for full bibliographical details of the Dostoevsky piece, plus further discussion of SB’s sense of the claims of the novel, see the introduction to To Fame and Fortune, pp. 8–10).

  45. See chapter 8 and note 85 for the titles of Atlas’s New Yorker and book-length memoirs. In Atlas’s reading, the tombstone in “The Shadow of the Tombstone falling across [or “in”] the Garden,” is a biography and the shadow a biographer, later “the gravedigger.”

  46. Atlas, Shadow in the Garden, p. 256.

  47. See James Atlas, “The Biographer and the Murderer,” New York Times Magazine, 12 December 1993: “That Saul Bellow, two weeks after his 21st birthday, officially changed his name from Solomon provides a clue to the name changes of his characters.”

  48. Atlas, Shadow in the Garden, p. 268.

  49. Rebecca Sinkler’s offense was to ask SB to cut three pages from an article he had offered her for the Book Review. Among the unpleasing observations in Peter S. Prescott, “Mr. Bellow’s Planetoid,” New York Times Book Review, 10 April 1994, is the following: “Mr. Bellow has recently been bombarded for remarking that the Zulus and Papuans seem disinclined to write three-decker novels in the best 19th-century European tradition. Something sounds phony about both the attack and Mr. Bellow’s defense of himself, simply because no one who has read his novels could possibly be surprised that he would say such a thing.” Atlas’s remark about SB’s anger and about his saying that The New York Times was “out to get me” come from Shadow in the Garden, p. 269.

  50. Atlas, Shadow in the Garden, p. 271.

  51. Ibid., p. 293.

  52. See James Atlas, “Starting Out in Chicago,” in Granta 41: Biography (5 November 1992), an issue that also contains an extract from “Memoirs from a Bootlegger’s Son.” Granta was at the time edited by Bill Buford, and it was while preparing the excerpt from Atlas’s biography that Buford learned of the existence of the journals (according to Atlas’s letter to SB of 24 May 1995).

  53. Atlas, Shadow in the Garden, pp. 294, 293. That Atlas was right to fear the consequences of publishing the journal entries is clear from SB’s interview with Robert Fulford, “A Thousand Years to Be Born.” Fulford asks SB what he feels about Atlas’s impending biography: “I don’t like it one bit. I have nothing to do with this biography. Atlas has given people to understand (so they’ve told me) that his book is being written with my consent. That’s not true. I did talk to him a few times, but I stopped because he had begun to publish notes about his work-in-progress and I could see that he had misunderstood many of the things I’d said to him. He is inclined to doubt everything he hears and behaves as if his informants were trying to put something over on him. The whole thing is very uncomfortable.”

  54. Atlas, Shadow in the Garden, p. 295.

  55. See, for example, SB to the political sociologist Paul Hollander, 7 September 1995: “He [Atlas] has given the impression that he was writing this book of his with my blessing—that it was ‘authorized.’ Nothing of the sort. He simply informed me that he had signed a contract to write a book about me. For years now he has done nothing but depress me—nosing out facts about sexual activities and startling me with his incredible ‘analyses’ of my motives.” According to Atlas, however, in an email of 5 February 2018 relayed by his agent to the author, “to others he [Bellow] described the biography as ‘neither authorized nor unauthorized,’ and continued to meet with Atlas up until the summer before publication.”

  56. James Atlas, “The Quest for Bellow,” New York Times Book Review, 16 November 1980.

  57. See Atlas, Biography, pp. 486–87.

  58. See Edward Klagsbrun, of Deutsch Klagsbrun & Blasband, SB’s lawyers, to Michael Denneny of St. Martin’s Press, 1 February 1990 (the letter is copied to the St. Martin’s lawyer, David N. Kaye). SB’s objections are keyed to manuscript pages and instruct Miller to remove quotes or assertions or attributions variously deemed “untrue,” “misunderstood,” “inaccurate,” “misrepresented,” “utterly absurd,” “totally false,” “preposterous,” “riddled with untruths,” “extremely disagreeable,” and “highly irresponsible” (phrases gathered from the first two pages of SB’s objections alone). Michael Denneny had been a student at the Committee on Social Thought. He was the editor to whom SB recommended Roger Kaplan’s novel. SB’s threat to refuse Miller permission to quote from unpublished works may have owed something to two recently publicized cases: Peter Ackroyd’s attempt to write T. S. Eliot’s biography, which was radically altered and diminished when he was forbidden by the Eliot estate to quote not only fro
m all unpublished work and correspondence but from published work (the resulting book, T. S. Eliot, was published in 1984); and Ian Hamilton’s attempt to publish “J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life,” which had to be scrapped when Salinger sued (Hamilton then published In Search of J. D. Salinger [New York: Random House, 1988], about his difficulties attempting to write the biography).

  59. Ruth Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. xxiii. According to John Blades, “Stop the Presses: Bellow’s Clout Delays Biography,” Chicago Tribune, 18 April 1990, SB “had initially cooperated, assuming it would be a purely academic exploration of his work.” After SB objected, St. Martin’s agreed to postpone the book, and Miller, now at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—previously, for twenty-two years, a professor of English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (where she was a colleague of Jack Ludwig)—agreed to make changes. According to Blades, she described the changes as “minor revisions,” clearing up “problems with footnotes, chapter titles, quotations,” but she also talked of “depersonalizing the book, changing the point of view from the first to the third person, which would suggest that the alterations would be more substantial than she indicated.” She told Blades that it was SB who had urged her to write the book, having been “impressed with her similarly constructed biography of Emily Dickinson.” She described the biographical passages in the book as “based on lengthy conversations with Bellow [over] four decades, many of which [she] recorded in her journal.”

  60. Atlas, Biography, p. 557, quoting from Miller’s journal.

  61. She was not the first person to have such an idea. SB signed a contract with Harper & Row for just such a collection, to be titled “Occasional Pieces”—on condition that it be edited by Ruth Miller (a signed copy of the contract exists in the Regenstein, dated November 1982, as does a revised draft of Ruth Miller’s proposed preface to the volume). On 8 February 1983, Aaron Asher of Harper & Row wrote to SB in praise of his travel piece “My Paris,” New York Times Magazine, Part 2, The Sophisticated Traveler, calling it “good enough to be an Occasional Piece.” It is unclear not only whether the essays for the volume were ever selected and compiled by Miller, but also why Harper & Row dropped the book. Though the Regenstein contains galleys of a volume to be entitled “Occasional Pieces,” these galleys were created in the early 1990s by Viking, not Harper & Row, for a volume that started off with the title “Occasional Pieces” but eventually became It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future—A Nonfiction Collection. According to Beena Kamlani of Viking Penguin, who worked on the book with Bellow, “We got many individual essays from Harriet Wasserman that were then collated to form the volume It All Adds Up. I sent Saul a suggested structure for the essays, based on part heading that he approved, and most of the pieces naturally fitted into one or other of the sections. Those that didn’t were discarded. I am sure there was a lot of overlap between [the Harper & Row “Occasional Pieces”] and It All Adds Up, but I never saw the earlier volume” (email to the author, 15 March 2017).

  62. Wasserman, Handsome Is, p. 166.

  63. For Wasserman’s quotes on the genesis of IAAU, see Handsome Is, pp. 167–69.

  64. Wasserman, Handsome Is, p. 176.

  65. These and other details of the stay at St. Martin come from Janis Bellow, email to the author, 14 December 2016.

  11. INTENSIVE CARE

  1. See SB to Joe Cuomo, a lecturer in English at CUNY Queens College and a friend of Norman Manea, 1 March 1995: “The doctors tell me that 40% of people in intensive care never make it, that an additional 20% who do make it are forever basket cases. Coming out intact I belong to a lucky minority.”

  2. When Rachel says she “insisted that they make the switch” and “really pushed” for it, she means with both doctors and family: “I don’t think the family was all that concerned about the extra cost. They just wanted to do everything to get Saul better. The hospital gave us a bit of a push back, because valium is a much cheaper drug than versed. And also Saul would need more doses of the versed than the valium because the valium has a longer half-life. But valium also has metabolically active metabolites that hang around and especially in older people, they can accumulate, making extubation from a ventilator more difficult” (Rachel Greengus Schultz, email to the author, 24 March 2017, the source also of her quotes from the main text).

  3. See Harriet Wasserman, Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow (New York: Fromm International, 1997), pp. 178–79.

  4. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 193. SB’s lawyer at the time was Ed Klagsbrun. Among the friends and colleagues in this last ring, who called for updates, were Philip Roth, Saul Steinberg, John Auerbach, Bette Howland, Nathalie Botsford, Mary Ann McGrail (a fellow University Professor at BU), and the Hillmans from Vermont. To this list Janis adds: “my entire family” (those who came to help were “my mother, my sister Wendy, my brother Robert, my uncle Michael”), “Delba and Harvey Mansfield [both of Harvard], the Wisses [Ruth and Len], my friend Gayle McKeen…Walter Pozen, Cliff Orwin, the Kleinbards, Martin Amis” (email to the author, 17 January 2017).

  5. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, pp. 193–94.

  6. Janis Bellow, email to the author, 17 January 2017.

  7. Ibid.

  8. It was Eugene Kennedy’s wife, Sara C. Charles, a professor of psychiatry and an M.D., who arranged for SB to address the conference, which was sponsored by the Council of Medical Specialty Societies. I quote from p. 4 of the transcript of the talk, a copy of which is among the SB Papers in the Regenstein (henceforth cited within the text by page number). “View from Intensive Care” was published in the first issue of News from the Republic of Letters, later excerpted in the September 1997 issue of Harper’s, and reprinted in full in SB and Keith Botsford, Editors: The Best from Five Decades (London and Connecticut: Toby Press, 2001), pp. 73–82 (henceforth cited within the text by page number).

  9. In a letter of 1 August 2000, to Jay D. Hoffman, chair of the Promotions Committee at the BU Department of Medicine, SB wrote of Dr. Barnardo: “To say that he saved my life would not be an overstatement, but my reasons for recommending him go well beyond personal gratitude. As an attending physician he is undoubtedly brilliant, energetic, devoted, but perhaps his qualities as a human being are even more rare and worthy of recognition. In the days following my extubation when I began to take note of my surroundings Dr. Barnardo emerged as something of a guardian angel….He was there as I took my first tentative steps towards recovery. He made time for me. He cheered me with his shy, dry and wry conversation….I knew that he was giving up personal time to tend me….Such things mean a great deal to a needy patient. For my wife, the fact that Dr. Barnardo was willing to wait extra hours to get the results of a catscan, or to calm us when the world seemed to be spinning out of control quite literally kept her from despair. Furthermore, we knew that we weren’t being singled out for special attention. Dr. Barnardo is exceptionally devoted to all of his patients.”

  10. Rachel Greengus Schultz, email to the author, 3 September 2010. “I knew Uncle Saul would never get off the vent if he was given Valium, so I spoke with the doctor in the ICU…about using a different more short acting sedative with no active metabolites, specifically midazolam (Versed). (A bit of background: Both Valium and Versed are benzodiazepines, anxiolytics that cause retrograde amnesia.)….[SB’s] memory would still have been challenged by the Valium, although he probably wouldn’t have remembered it because of all the active metabolites working in concert with the Valium. That bit of information stopped his complaining.”

  11. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 194.

  12. Ibid., p. 196.

  13. Daniel Bellow, email to the author, 24 March 2017.

  14. In Saul Bellow’s Heart, Greg offers a theory about why Janis might ha
ve sought to discredit the sons (a claim she denies): “I have come to believe that after caring for a husband in a weakened condition for six months and the prospect of having to do so perhaps for years, Allan Bloom’s notions about making sacrifices purely for love no longer proved a sufficient rationale,” and that “she came to feel a need to go beyond ensuring her primacy in Saul’s affection to exert a level of control that expanded well past his daily life to include financial, legal, and literary decision making” (pp. 195, 196).

  15. Ibid., p. 195.

  16. While Bellow was in the ICU, Walter Pozen received a call from Ed Klagsbrun, Harriet Wasserman’s lawyer, also SB’s, on occasion, who said, “We’re going to take over” (by which he meant take over financial matters). As Pozen remembered it: “I said, Look here, he has a wife, she’s the legal representative. You have no authority whatsoever and if you try to take any action we will immediately bring an action in the supreme court of the state of New York. I never heard from him again.” In an email of 29 June 2017, Lesha Greengus writes about the matter of financial advice: “Although Saul and I, on various occasions, discussed financial matters and concerns, I did not in fact act as his financial advisor. In 1986, Saul was planning to come to Cincinnati in December to attend my daughter Judith’s wedding. I arranged for him to meet with William Friedlander, who was at that time chairman of the investment firm of Bartlett & Co., which was founded in Cincinnati in 1898 (and still continues today). Mr. Friedlander agreed to act as investment manager for Saul’s account….Saul asked me to monitor his account and asked that Bartlett send me copies of his monthly statements, along with the personal statements that we were receiving for our own account at Bartlett.”

  17. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 194. That SB had matters of money, inheritance, and filial piety in mind is clear from an interview with Robert Fulford, “A Thousand Years to Be Born: Robert Fulford Speaks with Saul Bellow,” Books in Canada: The Canadian Review of Books (September 1996):