by James Atlas
Kazin and I had quarreled, often bitterly, but a strong bond held us together: my literary and emotional involvement in his work, and the pleasure he derived from it. He approached literature not as a job or career but as a vocation. His books on American literature—the only subject that interested him—are less critical assessments of the canon than celebrations of it, hymns to the greatness of Melville and Hawthorne and Dreiser, the “big” writers who had taken as their theme the nation’s boundless immensity, its physical and spiritual largeness, its implacable grandeur, and above all, its capacity for intensifying our experience of life in all its infinite possibility. Big was one of Kazin’s favorite words: he was always at work on a “big” book, never just a book. The scale of his ambition was large. The titles themselves—The American Procession, Bright Book of Life, A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment—give a sense of his tireless and urgent quest to make literature matter.
This dedication had come through powerfully in a letter he wrote me years earlier, when I was working as an editor at the Times Book Review. I had written asking him to review a book, and he had replied from Indiana, where he was teaching at Notre Dame:
The winter is so peculiarly harsh here (yesterday coming back from a lecture at Washington U in St. Louis it was “minus 12” and minus is just le mot juste) that I am torn between gratitude for having a chance to work from dawn to midnight on my big book, certain characters like H. Adams and E. Dickinson etc. etc. between the two great wars—1865-1915—and a feeling of total emptiness, unreality. New York may be awful in many ways but at least people talk there….
Since my favorite character in history is A. Lincoln, who detested vindictiveness, I have to admit that I forgot long ago about your article*1 and have long wanted to clear up certain things. But having also a highly Jewish sense of the absurd, I cannot help laughing at the contrast of my “apparatchik” self in South Bend, Ind., the land-bound icebound frozen and already numb and numbskull capital of nothing, with New York and especially New York Times Book Review, where the railroad men direct and redirect the switches that make it possible for certain prominent books to come roaring down the rails. Man, that is power! Or is it? But I never wanted to be on any magazine or review.
Now, on the phone, Kazin sounded as shy as I felt. The New York Review of Books had asked him to review Bellow’s new novel, The Actual, which he “didn’t like,” but it occurred to him that it would be “a natural tie-in” with my biography. When was it coming out? “I’m dying to read it.” I was chilled by his choice of words. I’d heard that he had cancer—now he alluded to it himself. “I’m sure you’ve done a wonderful job, but I’m not going to be around that much longer.” Could I at least send him a few chapters?
“I’m writing as fast I can,” I assured him, “but there’s just so much stuff.”
“I’d appreciate it,” he said humbly. “Sorry to bother you. It was nice to talk to you.” A shudder of grief coursed through me as I hung up the phone. How time wastes everything in its path! I wanted Kazin to read the book, but I was afraid—I wasn’t sure I was ready to have my work-in-progress commented upon by one of the most important literary critics in America. Then again, he might have liked it.
I would never know. A year later he was dead.
Others were eager to see the book for the same reason: time was running out. Bellow’s old Chicago friend Al Glotzer had written me: “I shall soon be 88 but I’m hanging on till you finish your biog. on Saul simply because I want to read it and who knows, the Cubs [Chicago’s famously hapless baseball team] might take it all, or just a division title.”*2 But he was dying of lung cancer. “I know you are basically finished with the book, I know there are corrections, additions, deletions, sculpturing the syntax and so on, but is there not some light at the end of the tunnel saying the book will appear on such and such a date? You understand now why I ask.”
I did, Al. But he, too, died before the book was done.
—
Bellow’s portrait was beginning to darken, like a negative exposed to light. Even his friends had unkind things to say. Their testimony was often harsh, and they didn’t seem to care if it was on the record. His Tuley classmate Sam Freifeld told a reporter for Newsweek that Bellow was “a great writer but a lousy friend.”*3 And I had a disagreeable interview with Mel Tumin, a professor of sociology at Princeton who had been a member of the Tuley crowd. Tumin was hostile; he dwelled on his recent gallbladder operation, disparaged biography (“There’s no such thing as truth”), and assured me that Bellow’s girlfriends at the University of Chicago “weren’t pretty.” He was no fan of Bellow’s work: “I fell asleep reading his books.” And he was no fan of Bellow the man either: “I don’t like him.”
Tumin was only one witness out of the two hundred or so I interviewed. Clearly his ill-tempered testimony was unreliable, but at least he had made his position clear. What about the others? What if they hadn’t stated their feelings so bluntly? How would I know how to “read” them? I sorted my interlocutors into categories: “likes,” “dislikes,” “admires but dislikes,” “loves,” “hates,” “loves and hates,” and so on. It was a highly imprecise system, but it helped to organize the storm of random feelings that pelted me from every side as I went about my research.
That I was writing a biography of a living person was beginning to give me doubts. It wouldn’t be the final word, for one thing, and it might cause embarrassment to people in the book—including the subject, who would live to see himself depicted as a philandering misogynist, and the author, who would be scolded for providing the evidence. There were times when I wondered if knowing Bellow in the flesh offered any advantage. “If a man has not supped with his subject, he cannot know him well enough to write his biography,” proclaimed Dr. Johnson. Was he right? I had never met Delmore, but I was floundering with Bellow, whom I had supped with on more than one occasion. Somehow knowing him was proving a hindrance to understanding him. I had conducted many hours of interviews, but instead of bringing my subject closer, they had distanced him from me. It was as if his own huge personality was getting in the way, obscuring my sightlines. He loomed over me like one of those carved wooden bears you see at the entrance to national parks, casting his giant shadow. The bear who doesn’t go with me…
Then there was the matter of our relationship. Bellow protected himself by subterfuges—fidgeting, laughing insincerely, displaying unfelt modesty, grimacing when he had meant to smile, losing his temper, raising his voice, pretending not to hear. Being human: in other words, impossible to understand. It would have been fine if I had been writing a memoir, but I was writing an “objective” biography, and Bellow wouldn’t sit still. Biography, he once said, was “a spectre viewed by a spectre.” And here we were, two ghosts invisible to each other: one determined to see, the other equally determined not to be seen. The blind misleading the blind.
“I will make the record in my own way,” says Augie March. So would I. And if it turned out to be a little tough at times, well, what could I do about that? Bellow had said his job was to study the clover flowers; mine was to study him. And as Augie noted, “in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”
*1 In my callow literary youth, I had insanely referred to him in The New York Times as a “culture apparatchik”—as if I even knew what the word meant.
*2 He would have had to live until the age of 108.
*3 Of course you could write a whole book about their relationship (you could write a whole book about anything) and not get to the bottom of it. Freifeld’s worst offense, apparently, was to warn Bellow against underestimating his income in one of his divorces—advice Bellow disregarded, almost ending up in jail. For Freifeld’s trouble, Bellow depicted him in Humboldt’s Gift as a chiseling lawyer with “a broad can, Roman nose, and mutton-chop whiskers.” The point being: Is any quote fair? Isn’t the truth of every utterance compromised by the circumstan
ces in which it was uttered? The history behind it? The unconscious animus that shades its expression? Saul Bellow may have been a lousy friend to Sam Freifeld, but at what stage in their lives and why? They had been friends at Tuley High School, members of the Russian Literary Society that met at a hot dog stand on Division. Saul Bellow was a lousy friend when Freifeld was being interviewed by a reporter from Newsweek. Had he been a better friend in their hot dog–stand days?
Saul Bellow Credit 26
XXVI
It was August 1998, time for my annual summer visit to Bellow. For some reason—he wanted to make it short? to get out of the house?—he had asked me to meet him in Wilmington, the little town a few miles from his house. Wilmington isn’t a picturesque Vermont village, though it has its charms: a bookstore, tchotchke shops, and a white-pillared hotel with wicker rocking chairs on the porch. We had agreed to meet at a bar called Poncho’s Wreck, and I arrived there promptly at two, only to discover that it didn’t open until four.
I was apprehensive about the meeting. The New Yorker was planning to run an excerpt from my book, and it was all about Jack Ludwig’s affair with Sondra. Why would Bellow want to be reminded of that ignominious episode in his life? The very one that had—or so he claimed—made him resist a biography in the first place?
When he pulled up in his dark green Range Rover, I pointed out that Poncho’s Wreck was closed, adding, “It looks a little rough, even for Chicago boys.” (I briefly wondered if it was presumptuous to link myself with Bellow in this way, but he didn’t seem to mind.) We agreed upon a restaurant whose name I can’t recall despite trolling through Yelp and TripAdvisor; anyway, it would have had a different name in that pre-gentrification era. (It wasn’t the Cask & Kiln or Harriman’s Farm to Table: that much I know.)
The restaurant was empty. The chairs were vinyl upholstered, and the red carpet was threadbare—just the kind of place Bellow liked. We sat down at a table by the window, and he tossed a manila envelope containing my latest “submissions” onto the table. “I don’t have any problem with this,” he said.
The only letter he declined to initial was one written in his twenties to his Tuley classmate Oscar Tarcov about a quarrel with his father at the family shop. Beneath it, Bellow had written: “No because it’s so boring.”
“Boring!” I protested. How could he say that? For one thing, this happened sixty years ago. And it was a moving letter: it showed the passion and intensity of their relationship, the young man’s proud assertion of independence, the fierce conflict between his insistence on becoming a writer and his father’s demand that he go into the family business. In fact, it said a lot about both of them; it was a precious snapshot of a father and son at odds but not grimly beyond reconciliation. When, sixteen years later, Bellow published The Adventures of Augie March to great acclaim, his father Abram wrote him a kvelling letter in the best Jewish tradition of paternal pride. So what if they’d had an argument? Shouting at each other was what fathers and sons did (especially businessmen fathers and literary sons).
I was mildly annoyed; by this time I was spoiled by Bellow’s genial concurrence with my quotations from his letters. But I was also touched: he’d given me permission—incredibly, I sometimes thought—to quote letters from his girlfriends, his enemies, his enemies who thought of themselves as friends, his friends to whom he confided about his children, his financial chicanery, his literary feuds, even his infidelities—but not this innocuous document. I tried to argue him out of it, but nothing doing. I guess he still had “dad” issues, even at eighty-two.*1
—
In April 2000, six months before the publication of my book, Brent Staples, my colleague at The New York Times who had written about his non-encounters with Bellow in Hyde Park, published a piece on the editorial page about my collaboration with Edward Shils, describing the thirty-one-page single-spaced memo Shils had written me shortly before his death. “I sat at a keyboard with this memo, communing with a dead man,” I had told Brent, as always failing to be on my guard.
Like Dwight, Shils had become emotionally involved with my book out of powerful feelings for an estranged friend, intellectual curiosity, devotion to the Great Ideas, and a wish to keep thinking and working in his health-dampened last days. All this was in Brent’s piece, but its last line struck an unexpectedly sinister chord: “We have known for half a century what Mr. Bellow thinks of Mr. Shils.*2 Come the biography, perhaps we can glimpse, at least after a fashion, what Mr. Shils thinks of him.”
What fresh tzimmes was this? As far as I was concerned, Brent’s piece was about Shils and Bellow: What had Shils thought of Bellow? What had Bellow thought of Shils? It was a fascinating question, and my book addressed it from both sides. Brent made it sound as if Shils were rising up out of his grave to avenge himself on his former friend, poised to plunge his green felt-tip pen, like a dagger, into Bellow’s heart.
Bellow was apoplectic over Brent’s piece, as I learned when his agent called me the morning it appeared. It was the last straw; he’d had enough of this biographer; he would rescind permission to quote from his papers.
I immediately sat down and wrote him an apologetic letter, explaining that I had asked Shils to walk me through the historical issues and people I had written about in the book—to do what Dwight had done for Delmore: “I sized up Shils as a guy who would say exactly what he thought about my work-in-progress, and that’s exactly what he did.” I added that I had put in that Bellow had tried to see Shils on his deathbed and been turned away—an act that showed him in a highly favorable light.
Amazingly, he got over it. Bellow’s grudges, which could last a lifetime, were for some reason—fear? indifference?—of short duration with me. I sometimes wondered if he forgave me so easily out of reluctance to pick a fight with his biographer.
—
I am putting the finishing touches on my biography (having a little trouble writing the last chapter, as you can imagine),” I wrote Bellow early in the summer of 2000. “Every time I come up with a good ending, some new and remarkable event transpires in your life.” First there was the baby, Naomi Rose, born just before Christmas 1999—new life, but a heavy responsibility for a man of Bellow’s years. This momentous event would receive only a passing mention in my book: should I lean over the infant’s crib with my notebook in hand, recording each mewl and puke?
I worried that he had taken on too much, but he still had lots of energy, and his capacity for provoking uproars was as robust as ever. In the spring of 2000, he published Ravelstein, a slender novella about Allan Bloom. Basing a character in his work on a real-life figure was nothing new for Bellow; it was the revelation that the charismatic professor Ravelstein “liked pretty boys” and appeared to be dying of AIDS that got him into serious trouble. As Bloom’s acolytes saw it, Bellow had “outed” his dear friend.
Bellow insisted that Bloom had urged him to write an honest book, but he also admitted to “a feeling” that Bloom might have minded his candor.*3 In any event, the fallout was heavy—though I was glad to see there were still critics around capable of recognizing Ravelstein for the great book it was, especially when you considered that its author was eighty-five years old.*4 For me, it was a vindication of biography as a literary form that could attract the greatest writers of fiction—even those who questioned its legitimacy. The book was in essence a brief life on the model of Johnson’s Lives—Bellow mentioned it as a source and constructed his portrait of Bloom out of what Boswell called “the minute details of daily life,” the specific features that bring a person before us in all of his contradictions and complexity. “If these are left out of my account of his life we’ll see only his eccentricities or foibles, his lavish, screwy purchases, his furnishings, his vanities, his gags, his laugh-paroxysms, the marche militaire he did as he crossed the quadrangle in his huge fur-lined coat of luxurious leather.” Here were the minute details—in spades.*5
One afternoon that same summer, we sat around the kitchen table in Ver
mont, papers spread out before us, like two real estate brokers closing a deal. I just needed permission for two last items: a letter to a girlfriend, written in 1947, in which Bellow tried to extricate himself from their affair; and a lengthy quotation from a random note (he seldom kept a journal) that I’d found among his papers. I prized it for its candor; in just over a hundred words, Bellow provided a portrait of his character—a difficulty establishing emotional connections “because of attachment to something in childhood”; an inability to accept the responsibilities of parenthood (“a brother rather than a father to the children”); and most revealing of all, a revelation of how much his struggle to become a writer had cost him: “And the great fatigue of a struggle of 50 years. Feel it in my arms, in the very fists.” There was also a note of self-forgiveness in this frank appraisal of his failings: “Miraculous to have accomplished so much in the world while in such bondage.”
It was miraculous; Bellow had worked so hard against himself that the magnitude of his achievements as a writer was all the more impressive. He had often sabotaged his genius—the multiple marriages and general chaos of his life exacted a high toll—but he had just as often persisted. He let me quote the whole thing. On the matter of the off-putting love letter, he demurred, at least for the moment, on the grounds that “the context [had] vanished.” (In the end, he allowed it.)
