Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Let me give you an example from a course I’m giving now on the ambitious young man in European literature….When we were doing Père Goriot, I asked the students what they thought of the behavior of Goriot’s daughters, who wouldn’t come to the deathbed of the father who had given them everything, ruined himself for them. I said it was true that he had an idée fixe, and like so many of the characters in Balzac, he went to the extreme with this; but he had done them a lot of good, and he had been a loving father. They didn’t come to his deathbed and they didn’t go to his funeral—and they sent their empty carriages to the funeral procession. And one of the students said, “Well, he had no self-respect and he didn’t esteem himself, and the daughters felt this, and they became estranged from him.” They didn’t become estranged from his money, but they did become estranged from him. I could see that this young woman spoke with the support of a great many of her classmates.

  18. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 197. The word “coup,” used by Greg to characterize Janis’s behavior, has been used of Greg himself, together with Lesha. I was told by friends of SB that during the period when he was in the hospital, Greg and Lesha briefly considered moving him from Boston to Cincinnati (where Lesha and her family lived, as well as Bellow’s sister, Jane). Neither Dan nor Adam knew anything of this story, says Greg, which he labels “ridiculous” in his memoir, a sign of “what extreme concern there must have been about the influence of Saul’s family.” In an interview of 23 February 2017, however, Adam told me he had heard Lesha and Greg raise the idea, though it was quickly rejected. “I remember it being mentioned, but it did not have an energy about it. Everybody was behaving a little crazily….That the possibility of such a move was considered was warranted by the circumstances.” Daniel can’t remember if he heard the idea raised at the time, but he heard of it after Bellow’s release from the hospital. The friends of SB who repeated the Cincinnati story were Jonathan Kleinbard, from the University of Chicago, Walter Pozen, and Will Lautzenheiser, who would take over from Chris Walsh in 2000 as SB’s assistant at BU.

  19. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 196.

  20. Atlas, Biography, p. 579.

  21. In The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale (New York: Pantheon, 2017), p. 235, Atlas describes Shils in the following terms: “Shils was not kind. He brutally disparaged his colleagues, both friends and enemies, as ‘idiots’ and ‘worthless fellows.’ He had a sour view of life, thought human beings were corrupt, showed contempt for the living and the dead. All the same, I enjoyed his company. He had one of the most penetrating minds I’d ever encountered, and there were times when I suspected his negativity was a pose. Intellectual challenges stimulated him; he was a natural pedagogue. As it turned out, I, too, would become a disciple of Shils.”

  22. This is one of a series of answers to questions posed by Figaro Littéraire, from a fax of 23 December 1997. In another answer, about writing short stories rather than novels, SB claimed, “It was not at all a challenge to write short. As one grows older, one eliminates superfluities of all kinds.” The fax is among the SB Papers in the Regenstein.

  23. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 577.

  24. SB, “By the St. Lawrence,” reprinted in SB, CS, p. 1 (henceforth cited within the text by page number).

  25. On the Gameroff cousins, see To Fame and Fortune, chapter 3.

  26. Wasserman, Handsome Is, pp. 180–94.

  27. As SB was in Chicago on 5 December, giving a speech, his call to Wasserman must have been after he returned to Vermont. See SB to Julian Behrstock, 19 January 1996: “Just as I was about to emerge from the woods and to feel approximately normal, the doctors caught up with me and back to the hospital I went for gall-bladder surgery. This imposed a second convalescence on the first, which wasn’t quite over. I found myself in the same hospital corridor, only two doorways away from the room I occupied last January….The surgery is about three weeks behind me now.”

  28. Adam Bellow describes Wasserman as “always difficult, very proprietary with Saul, and it was clear that she was very uncomfortable with the marriage to Janis….She would call and not even say hello to Janis.” He adds, “She was very nice to me.”

  29. Wylie tells a good story about how Atlas became his author: “Round the time of Salman Rushdie’s visit to the United States [while in hiding from the fatwa]…we made arrangements for a couple of conversations, one in print, one televised. The New York Times had a position, and 60 Minutes had a position. Everything was confidential, but there was a cocktail party, and of course everybody from the Times and everybody from 60 Minutes all went to it. And they all felt that they had somehow been given less than the full picture [Wylie had promised each an “exclusive” interview, by which he meant one exclusive for print and one exclusive for television]. I was brought into the Times and faced a semicircle of employees; in the semicircle was Gerry Marzorati, whom we represented; Jim Atlas, whom we did not represent. And I was told that the Times would no longer do business with the Wylie Agency….And then I said, ‘Well, thank you very much,’ and I left and went back to the office. And after a little while the phone rang, and it was Philip Roth, and he said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ And I told him, and he said, ‘Huh!’ Two weeks went by, and I had another phone call from Philip. He said, ‘Andrew, Jim Atlas from The New York Times says call me; they want to do a profile for the Times Magazine, so I want you to get back to me.’ I said, Philip, understandably, you’ve forgotten the conversation we had. He said, ‘No, I didn’t forget—why don’t you tell them we want the cover and the amount of money we should be paid.’ I said okay. So I called Atlas and I said [all this] and Atlas said…‘I can’t do business with you.’ I said, ‘Well, I guess you can’t do business with Philip.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ll get back to you.’ So he came back to me and he said, ‘Price is okay, but we can’t guarantee the cover.’ I said, ‘Well, then, there’s no deal.’ So then he called back and said, ‘We can guarantee the cover.’ And then, a week later, he called and said he’d like to fire Georges Borchardt [his agent] and would like to have me be his agent, and could I renegotiate the advance for the Bellow?” In an email of 27 July 2018, Atlas disputes this account: “I asked Judith Thurman if she would inquire of Andrew whether he was interested in representing me. He called…and said he had heard I was thinking of ‘changing representation.’ That’s the whole story.”

  30. SB, “Literature in a Democracy: From Tocqueville to the Present,” typed manuscript, in the Regenstein, p. 1 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers). The lecture was revised and published under the title “Problems in American Literature,” in Literary Imagination, Ancient and Modern: Essays in Honor of David Grene, ed. Todd Breyfogle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

  31. SB, “Problems in American Literature,” in Literary Imagination, Ancient and Modern, ed. Todd Breyfogle, pp. 387, 386, 388.

  32. Atlas, Biography, p. 582.

  33. See Sabrina L. Miller, “Bellow’s Return: It All Adds Up,” Chicago Tribune, 7 December 1995.

  34. “Final Paper Assignment: UNI ID 202 Professor Bellow,” in SB papers in the Regenstein.

  35. For these and other details of the wedding, see Margo Howard, “Hell’s Bells,” Boston magazine, September 1996. Howard was a friend of Susan Glassman, mother of the groom. For Daniel, the glitz of the wedding began with the limo driver hired for his stag party, who had been Madonna’s driver when she came to Miami. “He knew some places, but that’s another story” (email to the author, 5 February 2017).

  36. See SB to Martin Amis, 13 March 1996, on his Russian Jewish father: “I understand your saying that you are your dad. With a fair degree of accuracy I can see this in my own father. He and I never seemed to be in rapport: Our basic assumptions were very different. But that now looks superficial. I treat my sons much as he treated me: out of breath with impatience—and then a
long inhalation of affection.” See also Daniel’s contribution to “Our Father’s Politics,” in A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria L. Cronin and Lee Trepanier (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2013), p. 217: “He took a very keen interest in my literary education and was handing me things like David Copperfield to read when I was ten. He just said, ‘Oh, you can read that.’ I said, ‘Pop, it’s a huge book and it’s got all these tiny letters in it.’ And he would say, ‘You can read it.’ There was nothing better than hearing Pop read out loud. He read me Jack London’s The Call of the Wild when I was six years old. When Adam was a teenager, he read us both the Dudley Fitts translation of The Odyssey. I’ve never had to reread it because I remember it all so well—the Cyclops, Polyphemus, smashing the guys’ heads together. Adam and I after dinner would say, ‘Pop. What are we reading tonight? Pop, will you read to us.’ ”

  37. Daniel Bellow, in “Our Father’s Politics,” p. 217.

  38. Ibid., p. 220.

  39. Ibid. Daniel also used this image to describe his father’s behavior during the confrontation in Vermont, when he accused Daniel and his brothers of “sitting around in the hospital waiting for him to die” (Daniel’s email to the author, 24 March 2017).

  40. Daniel Bellow, in “Our Father’s Politics,” p. 215.

  41. On Arthur Lidov, see To Fame and Fortune, chapter 7, pp. 286–88.

  42. SB, “All Marbles Still Accounted For,” typescript in Regenstein, p. 204. The face that exactly resembles Nellie Bassix’s belongs to an American Airlines stewardess named Muriel, who knows nothing of Nellie and is no relation to her.

  43. SB, The Actual (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997), pp. 26–27 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers). Two other characters in the novella, Bodo and Madge Heisinger, are moneyed versions of Duane and Marlene Swimley, whose notorious divorce case Bellow wrote up in the “Chicago Book” and later fictionalized in The Dean’s December (where it is recounted in Albert Corde’s Harper’s articles). Like Marlene Swimley, Madge Heisinger tries to have her husband murdered; unlike Duane Swimley, Bodo Heisinger forgives his wife, welcoming her back to his home after her prison term. The Heisingers figure in the story because the Adletskys are trying to buy their apartment, which Amy is to decorate. Madge, however, is a dangerous woman and drives a hard bargain.

  44. When questioned, Harry describes the antiquities deal as “sufficiently legal” (ibid., p. 9).

  45. For Eleanor Fox, see chapter 4 of To Fame and Fortune, pp. 158–60. The persistence of Harry’s love for Amy relates to SB’s persistent fascination with Eleanor Fox, in life as in his fiction. “Even after I was married,” she told me in an interview, “he was always calling me. He never stopped calling me in all these years. Both my husbands said, Get rid of anything related to Saul Bellow and tell him to quit calling here….They weren’t concerned that I was going to go off and leave them, obviously, but what’s he bothering you for?”

  46. In an interview of 31 December 1999 with Thomas Petzinger, Jr., in The Wall Street Journal Millennium (http://interactive.wsj.com/​millennium/​articles/​flash-SB944523384413082346.htm), SB declares: “Lately, sex has done a lot of damage to love. By which I mean, sex is now so available that it has become a substitute for love. But on the other hand, I think of it as a mark of sanity that people should be capable of falling in love nevertheless, because in love we discover an unlimited generosity. You don’t often think of love as a generosity, but it is….It collides with self-interest, which is one of the springs of market theory. I used to have long conversations with [economist] Milton Friedman, who was a neighbor of mine back in Chicago in the old days. He used to say ‘Get real! This is a market problem.’ ”

  47. Almost exactly the same words are used in “Marbles” (p. 205) to describe Muriel the stewardess, the spitting image of Hilbert Faucil’s high-school love Nellie Bassix:

  There was a sexual message also in the imperfect application of her lipstick. That was the whole power of it. Just as mortal for me was the shape of her bottom as she carried trays back to the galley. She didn’t walk like a stewardess. The faulty management of her pumps, dropping on the minor beat—this syncopation was the telling idiosyncrasy which bound all the other traits together. Her swaying was not the movement of somebody in the service sector. Front or rear she brought back grippingly an earlier style of vision. But threescore ten and then some, with two world wars and about twenty presidential campaigns between, plus all the transformations of the present age had no power to change these looks—the size of her eyes or the brevity of her teeth. There’s the persistence of Eros for you: it runs its own show and it holds its own for all your dimming, graying, tooth loss, decay and the rest of it.

  The Muriel/Nellie episode takes up eight pages of the “Marbles” typescript (pp. 204–11) and is not referred to again.

  48. James Wood, “Essences Rising,” New Republic, 16 June 1997.

  12. RAVELSTEIN

  1. SB’s unfinished novel, “All Marbles Still Accounted For,” exists in its fullest form in a 279-page typescript dated June–October 1994; henceforth cited within the text by page number.

  2. Janis Bellow, email to the author, 11 April 2017.

  3. Rachel Cooke, “His Gift Was to Love and to Be Loved,” Observer, 10 October 2010.

  4. Malcolm Jones, “Odd Outing: A Conservative Critic Makes a Gay Appearance,” Newsweek, 7 February 2000.

  5. These words were quoted on p. 7 of the introduction to To Fame and Fortune, which contains an extended discussion of SB’s use of real-life models in his fiction. The words come from Ravelstein (New York: Viking Penguin, 2000), p. 13 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  6. Ravelstein shares some of this conservative uneasiness: “He despised campy homosexuality and took a very low view of ‘gay pride’ ” (Ravelstein, p. 160). Bloom also had professional reasons to be uneasy, as does Ravelstein, according to his friend Chick: “Teaching, as Ravelstein understood teaching, was tricky work. You couldn’t afford to let the facts be generally known. But unless the facts were known, no real life was possible” (p. 59).

  7. Dinitia Smith, “A Bellow Novel Eulogizes a Friendship,” New York Times, 27 January 2000. What SB means here about Bloom’s not having anything to hide is unclear. Perhaps he meant to hide from Bloom himself. The quotation from Ravelstein in the preceding endnote, in which making “the facts” (his homosexuality) “generally known” is something one can’t afford to do, suggests otherwise.

  8. In Julia Keller, “Between the Covers, Bellow Sparks Firestorm,” Chicago Tribune, 30 April 2000, Frank Palella, “a physician who specializes in infectious diseases and an associate professor at the Northwestern University School of Medicine,” is quoted: “The presence or absence of AIDS on a death certificate is not a reliable indicator of whether or not AIDS was a contributing factor….A peptic ulcer is not HIV-associated. And liver failure can be associated with anything. It’s completely non-specific….Distressingly in our society…AIDS carries not just a clinical diagnosis, but a moral stigma. It implies a behavior.”

  9. Nikki, the Michael Wu figure, is described by Chick as having “the instincts of a prince, he dressed like one—in Nikki, Ravelstein saw a brilliant young man who had every right to assert himself. This was not a matter of style or self-presentation. We are speaking here of a young man’s nature and not his strategies” (p. 22). When he learns of Ravelstein’s illness, Nikki, “an accredited maître d’ ” (p. 19), is “at his hotel school in Geneva” (Wu was training to be a chef); he immediately returns to Chicago. “Nobody questioned the strength of Nikki’s attachment to Abe. Nikki was perfectly direct—direct, by nature, a handsome, smooth-skinned, black-haired, Oriental, graceful, boyish man. He had an exotic conception of himself. I don’t mean that he put on airs. He was never anything but natural.” Chick at first thought Nikki “somewhat spoiled. I was
wrong, there, too….He was more intelligent and discerning than many better-educated people. He had, what is more, the courage to assert his right to be exactly what he seemed to be” (p. 68). Nikki was physically brave. As Ravelstein tells Chick, “he’s always ready for a fight. And his sense of himself is such that…[Bellow’s ellipses] I’ve often had to hold him back” (p. 69). Chick describes Nikki as having “his own kind of princely Asiatic mildness, but if you were to offend him Nikki would tear your head off” (p. 145). For Nikki, Chick and Rosamund “were the people Abe talked to about matters he…was not interested in” (p. 77). He wasn’t supposed to look after Ravelstein’s finances, but when, from time to time, he did, “his only aim was to protect Abe. It was thanks to Nikki that a major swindler in Singapore was discovered” (p. 29). When it is clear that Ravelstein is mortally ill, Nikki drops the hotel training course. Chick describes him swabbing Ravelstein’s face in the hospital, leaving his side only for the medical staff. Back in the apartment, it is Nikki who turns away guests, politely but firmly, when Ravelstein isn’t strong enough to see them.

  In contrast, there is Nikki’s initial appearance in the novel, which comes early. When Chick and Rosamund are breakfasting in Ravelstein’s suite in the Hotel Crillon, “we kept our voices low because Nikki, Abe’s companion, was still sleeping. It was Nikki’s habit, back in the U.S., to watch kung fu films from his native Singapore until four o’clock in the morning. Here too he was up most of the night. The waiter had rolled shut the sliding doors so that Nikki’s silken sleep should not be disturbed. I glanced through the window from time to time at his round arms and the long shifting layers of black hair reaching his glossy shoulders. In his early thirties, handsome Nickki was boyish still” (p. 5). This initial impression, of Nikki as lounging catamite, deeply upset Nathan Tarcov. As Ravelstein is dying, Chick would come by his apartment after breakfast and, again, Nikki “would be fast asleep until 10, whereas Ravelstein dozed because he had no company and lay with his large knees asprawl” (p. 173).