by Herbert Gold
Piteously disillusioned at this desertion by his master, the dog let go a flood, a sheet, an avalanche of dog piss. I leapt out of the car and the dog followed. Now the dog was zestfully leaping about on the green. My flanks were dripping. Ralph reappeared, and commented with extreme irritation:
“I told you not to let him out.”
Later, while I stood naked in the yard of the house, hanging my soaked clothes on a line to dry, Saul talked about the state of his career. “I want to be like Tolstoy,” he said, “more philosopher than anything else.”
“More than a great novelist?” I asked, shivering, watching the steam rise from the clothes I had dipped into a soapy bucket.
“One more book,” he said, “and my position will be impregnable.”
In the house in Tivoli he read aloud from the manuscript of Henderson the Rain King while I tried to stifle my impatience, sometimes asking, “Couldn't I just read it by myself?” But he needed to hear his own voice, test his rhythms, bounce them off others. Since I was there, I would do.
In this novel I missed the gritty blues of his other books, his authentic monologuing plaint, and it seemed to me he was trying to put himself into a WASP aristocrat body, which he did not in fact possess. I wondered if he was competing with the New England writers he reacted against, while creating a fable indebted to Kafka and Melville. Was this part of constructing that “impregnable position”? I thought he was doing what he said not to do: writing from the head, not the heart—idea-writing, although in the end his heart's cry interrupted the plan.
As to building his reputation, Henderson the Rain King seems not to have been a mistake, even if the book had less appeal for some of his admirers. There are those who think it his best work. As he said of another writer's novels, it became a favorite for university instruction in American Lit courses. Professors enjoyed teaching it because there was so much to explain.
Himself, he didn't like to explain his writing, but he loved to read it aloud. “I'm a bird,” he said, “not an ornithologist.”
Until I came to live in San Francisco, our friendship went through ups and downs, with periods of intense intimacy; that is, Saul confided his troubles, I listened and felt warm about being invited in. Occasionally he stayed with me in New York and gave me the difficult gratification of hinting that I stood between him and some desperate act at the high window. These threats didn't interfere with his intent sessions bent over the notebooks with their ruled lines upon which his fountain pen tracked his imagination and indignation. I learned that folks don't usually kill themselves in the middle of composing the suicide note.
I sought his approval for my own writing and sometimes got it. His words were used in advertising my books. I was still a young writer; he was a maestro; I was both grateful and privileged to share his life's disasters.
When I left the East Coast, thereby becoming unavailable during crises, the ups and downs or our friendship transformed themselves into a prolonged down. We exchanged letters for a while, but he needed regular nursing care. Others filled the requirement. I was irritated that he didn't include “The Heart of the Artichoke,” a story that he had praised so highly, in an anthology he edited. “I forgot,” he said, shrugging. “Why take such a thing seriously? I just forgot.”
He was right. It was merely my own writer's vanity that was aggrieved, but the advice not to take it seriously was hard to accept, coming from a writer whose spirit could be broken by a slighting review in the Deseret News.
In the early sixties, as a member of the international jury meeting in various European locales to award the Formentor Prize, I argued for Saul Bellow to receive the award. One year the favored French candidate was Nathalie Sarraute, a leader of the fashionable nouveau roman grouplet. As a friend of her daughter, I had known her during my student days in Paris. (The daughter's husband pro tem was the journalist Stanley Karnow. He and I bought little Renault 4CV automobiles at the same time, and our wives had in common resentment of our rude habit of running outdoors when it rained, sometimes raining on them in our leaky rooms, to make sure our cars were not melting. Stan and I were enjoying the simultaneous strains of first wives and first vehicle ownership.)
The Formentor deliberations were supposed to be secret; they were, of course, not, especially since the French delegation did not get its way about Nathalie Sarraute. Saul Bellow received the prize.
Later, when I saw Nathalie Sarraute in Paris, the grand old lady looked me keenly in the eye and greeted me with a mantra that she repeated fairly frequently that Paris season: “Ah, ‘Airbair’! C'est vous le gangster.”
Barney Rosset of Grove Press, organizer of the American delegation, asked me to present the award at a ceremony in New York. I felt pleased to have made a case, pleased for Saul, although at that point in our long friendship, we were not close. We were not really friends anymore. But as always when I saw him, the old warmth and gratitude welled up.
I handed him the check. Photographs were taken for the newspapers. We ate canapés, drank wine. A woman showed up who had been a lover of Saul's, then found employment as a character in one of his books, and she picked an argument with me. “The really great writer, the one who should have been given the prize”—the writer she was currently studying—“is Ionesco. He's international.”
“I like his plays.” I said. “The Lesson, The Bald Soprano, they've been running forever at the Théâtre de la Huchette. When I'm in Paris and I see the posters, I know nothing has changed around there, no matter that everything has changed.”
“Rhinoceros!” she cried. “The metaphors, the mythos! Compared to Ionesco, Saul is only…” She wouldn't say it. She shook her curls with that ferocity that he captured in his fictional portrayal. “And take it from me, I know,” she announced, mandibles compressed, teeth gritting.
I remembered his image of a woman hiding a dagger in her stocking.
“Saul was, let me tell you how that bozo treated me—compared to Ionesco —”
Maybe it was in her garter belt, that dagger.
Herzog turned out to be Saul's most popular book, his best selling novel after The Adventures of Augie March, which had first broken through for a large public. Comic and sad, spiced with rants in the form of letters, Herzog was drawn directly from his personal travails, cuckoldry, a turbulent divorce, treason by a protégé. He put the wife, the protégé, and friends into the book with hardly any disguise, as if the story was intended not so much to be about them as against them. The letters Herzog wrote to world figures were entertaining, garrulous, alternately wise, crazed, and self-mocking. He poured himself into the man-with-heart, Herzog, ranting, wronged, the seeker betrayed.
Self-justification gave an aspect of troubling ambiguity to the book. He intended to be the American Dostoyevsky, but funny; the American Tolstoy, but a close witness to the times. But neither of his Russian masters would have portrayed himself as innocently aggrieved and yet fatally attractive to women. Most men know from experience that, when overwhelmed by jealousy, they are in a mood to grovel, whine, and smell bad—not very attractive to women. They may find nurses, but the sexy and delightful women tend to cross the road when they slump into view.
Herzog, despite his frenzies, remains the most charming man in the world; or so Saul seemed to hope; or so he wrote him. This made his revenge on life too perfect. The novel was flawed by its special pleading, its lyric of self-love.
Perhaps what made me uneasy appealed to both the public at large and the Nobel committee. Herzog's dire suffering didn't get in the way of fun. The letters to the great, alive and dead, were elegant paranoid monologues, marinated in Saul's learning and his moral passion to change the world, or at least punish it. The challenges of disaster in love and friendship, divorce laws and night sweats, were given chipper colors and a style that reached for the lugubrious in a middle-aged scholar's yearning. Bathroom spying approached French farce mechanism, with no French farce mechanism cool. Yet the book allows readers to perch on the
benches as spectators at a circus of pain. It didn't disturb too much. The trapeze whirled, and the clown fell safely into the sawdust. The elephants danced, dropped their elephant doo on the fallen clown, and he arose as a hero, covered with flowers, embraced by all. The book was an original and intelligent entertainment, a consolation.
A mutual friend of ours, call him Professor X, wrote to Saul to congratulate him on his Nobel Prize and also to give his response to Herzog. Professor X, a man with severe and incurable physical problems, in lifelong pain, wrote admiringly of the book and with delight about the acclaim from Sweden, but added a fateful sentence: “Of course, your novel doesn't solve my problems.”
Saul cut off all connection. Professor X was bewildered and hurt. He was about to retire from his job; his body was rapidly giving way. I hoped to be an intermediary, described the troubles of our friend, and asked Saul why he was so angry. “I can't be interested in what goes on with him,” he said.
“What happened?”
“He wrote me a poison-pen letter.”
The author of Herzog, with a protagonist who poured his advice, suggestions, and complaints into the mails, had received a letter from an old friend, which ended a long association. This seemed a bizarre twist on the novel. I believe the letter must have been ruder than Professor X had said. I asked to see a copy, and of course like a good academic, Professor X had made one. The letter was dense with praise and goodwill. But it did contain that offense: your novel doesn't solve my problems…
All the honors available worldwide couldn't relieve Saul's touchiness. Receiving hundreds of clippings with rave notices, he was still the man who could be thrown into a raging funk by that bad review in the Deseret News of Salt Lake City (it may have been the Rocky Mountain News of Denver, Colorado).
Among the later books, Humboldt's Gift—not a favorite of many critics—stood out for me as a comic and terrified riff on desperation and madness. It was intended partly as a tribute to Saul's friend and contemporary, the poet Delmore Schwartz, who in his paranoia turned against Saul as he turned against almost everyone. Saul tried to help him, contributed money for treatment, but could not escape the wrath of a man spinning out of control. Schwartz died miserable and alone in a seedy Manhattan hotel.
The book celebrated the charm of a manic talent; it also memorialized the friendship of Bellow and Schwartz, contemporaries and buddies. The engrossing persuasiveness of Schwartz, the ranting and pathos, were named; and the book expressed the helplessness of those around him. What Saul couldn't do was to evoke the great gifts of Delmore Schwartz, the brilliance of his best writing, the loopy wit and the elegiac mourning. He named the madman; he couldn't name the perverse genius.
This is a most daunting task for a novelist, to suggest genius in one of his characters. But it also seemed that Saul couldn't really allow the competition from his friend, and instead needed to hold him up for regard as a pathetic specimen, a loser.
Out of the quarrel with ourselves, Yeats said, we make poetry; and out of the quarrel with others we make war. In his novels, Saul made both poetry and his own kind of war, which could have resulted in mere vengeful tale-telling. At his best, he managed to transmute his antagonists, wives, lovers, and failed friends into grand sports and aberrations. Early on, he preserved in this circus world the sense of himself as a tragic clown, dancing amid the wreckage. Later, he seemed to feel that this image was beneath his dignity, and as his books became more severe, they lost some of their grace. Mr. Sammler's Planet, tense and controlled, was a parable of withdrawal, rejection of a world that lets us down. Through the optic of the aging survivor, Sammler, he makes a case for depression as the proper response to the disaster of modern history.
Still later, the wintry authenticity of The Dean's December is a confession of hopeless yearning. Flashes of the old comedy raise ironic signposts as the writer charts a continuing devolution into disappointment.
In the early seventies I found myself in Chicago with the woman who had become my second wife. I loved her, I was proud of her—called her the “statistical miracle” because it seemed such extraordinary good luck to find her—and I wanted Saul to appreciate my good fortune, too. He invited us to lunch at the club where he played racquetball. It was elegant and sparkly, with a panoramic view of the city, Saul's city.
The three of us had a polite and affable meal; fish, a good wine. In my pride I waited impatiently for a word alone with him. At last she stood up to go to the bathroom, and I watched him as he watched her. The he turned to me with his wide smile and said, “She has a sense of humor. I like that in a woman.”
I was chagrined. I wanted him to express enthusiasm for my statistical miracle; this smug and bland okay was surely not enough. But it was all he had to give me just then. My joy was no pleasure to him during another crisis in his life. I was no longer one of his intimates.
Melissa returned to the table and my heart leapt with love and pride, and Saul's opinion didn't matter.
I was no longer an acolyte or disciple. The ten-year difference in our ages was becoming irrelevant as the years rolled by. Saul mattered, but not enough to spoil my time with the woman I loved. And also not enough to make me read his novels without judgment. The supple prose was engrossing; how he danced with ideas! Sometimes I didn't like the vision behind the prose.
At various times he championed the work of younger writers like Edward Hoagland, William Kennedy, and Cormac McCarthy, and he was often moving and generous in praise of suffering contemporaries like Isaac Rosenfeld, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, and John Cheever, especially after they died. He acutely felt the loss of his contemporaries, those who fought to stay afloat and failed at it, as he had fought and succeeded.
When he turned against old friends, such as a lawyer in Chicago whom he lampooned in one book, he was merciless, and they felt crushed. I know three people who wrote novels intended as revenge for what he had written about them (the books were not published; rage and frustration provided unreliable fuel for inspiration). When Saul wrote a book against, he had larger things in mind than self-justification and punishment of enemies. Freshets of soul and wit scampered through the prose, as if his essence were a glacier, the top warmed by the sun, chunks breaking off and sparkling streams pounding down the ice.
When asked at a lecture to explain something about one of his books, boyish irritation, that winsome flirtiness he could summon, arose in his voice as he grinned, seemed to search, rediscovered his mantra for a new audience: “I'm a bird, not an ornithologist.” Once again he was saying it for the first time. He threw back his head in laughter, encouraged others to relax and laugh, and even the questioner joined in.
In the fall of 1988 or 1989, I heard he was depressed about the breakup of another marriage, the death of a brother and a childhood friend, and telephoned him. We had a few meals together; I attended a lecture he gave at NYU. At first, as we caught up with his life, there was a warmth that recalled our old friendship. The morning he left Manhattan, he invited me to meet him for breakfast at One Fifth Avenue, so I was surprised to feel over the toast and eggs that I was imposing on him. He was withdrawn and chilly. Had I said the wrong thing about his lecture? Had I offended him again by mentioning Jack Ludwig?
The son who accompanied him seemed embarrassed by his father and made a point of being cordial to me. When we said good-bye, Saul stood there, nattily dressed as usual, in a stylish coat and hat like an international businessman, waiting stiffly apart from us as his son and I chatted. Finally he said impatiently, “Come on, we're going,” and that was good-bye.
I had written him no poison-pen letters, but somehow I fell into the category of those who offended. I tried to imagine how this happened—by growing up, by insufficient discipleship, by not being available to listen to his troubles since I lived in California, by admiring other writers besides him (he was annoyed by my enthusiasm for Vladimir Nabokov), by no reason that was clear to me. Like so many former friends, I was out of the privileged
circle.
Some of the friends he did keep played variations on the theme of disciplehood. One woman liked to say she only lived in Chicago “so I can be there for Saul.” As she murmured “Saul used to read his new pages to me every day,” or “When Saul's upset, I always tell him…,” or the ever-popular “Sometimes when Saul can't sleep, I…,” people formed the natural habit of asking if she was having an affair with him. It was a question urged upon them; rude not to ask. Primly she would fall silent, a silence that cried Yes! Yes! But having been urged toward the question, folks felt general relief that she was discreet enough not to admit to the affair she very likely hadn't had.
More than fifty years of friendship and non-friendship include too many harsh memories. They begin, after gratitude, with that ordinary puzzlement that a writer and a man who inspired part of a generation, altered the tone of a literary period, wrote with such grace, nonetheless lived his life with flaws both large and petty, like other people. The flaws seemed to be magnified by the fineness of his achievement. Saul wrote in the rhythms of city speech, stylized, pursuing the sense of his troubled American life. His anxiety made him frantic. He reflected upon each moment, defending himself with wit and charm. Again and again, he almost, temporarily, mastered his experience. And then the victory passed. He draped his life's story in a prose that served to calm him—almost, temporarily—by displaying his nakedness fetchingly clothed. The narrative sometimes had the innocence of a boyish daydream, sometimes of a boy's nightmare. The discourse both quickened and heartened his readers.
And it wasn't just style, the playful surface, the watchfulness. He really wanted to discover What It All Meant (he would never put it that way). His gifts enabled him to edge abruptly into scenes of vivid desire and grief, as in the last paragraphs of the great story, Seize the Day. During his best moments, he shared his sense of our lives in a way impossible for writers of mere self-justification and confession. The path of self-justification, he used to say, has been worn so deep that all you can see is the top of the heads of the writers who follow it.
