by James Atlas
Bellow said a benediction in Hebrew—I didn’t understand it but was embarrassed to let on. Then he asked me what I’d learned over the last ten years.
I quoted Herzog’s axiom—identifying the source in case he didn’t remember—“Each man has his batch of poems.” It worried me a little to recite this phrase, which could have been construed as suggesting that Bellow repeated himself. (Also, I’d searched through the book the night before and hadn’t been able to find it.) I’d learned something else, too: “That you can never really know another person, no matter how hard you try.”*6
“That will do,” Bellow said. Meaning: That’s enough to justify your labors. Or, if said in a stern voice, which it might have been but I don’t think was: That’s enough out of you, young [not so young] man.
—
It would be our last encounter.*7
We had agreed to meet at the Vermont House in Wilmington. I was standing out front when Bellow drove up.
“Punctual as usual,” he said with a smile.
We sat in the back room. Bellow ordered Sprite, and I ordered a Coke. I handed him a present I’d bought at Austin’s Antiquarian Books down the street: a fine old edition of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Blake was one of Bellow’s favorite poets: for many years he carried around a copy of The Portable Blake, and he had once confided to his friend Richard Stern that he’d had in mind the lion imagery of “Little Girl Lost” when he was writing Henderson the Rain King. He looked pleased.
He still wasn’t going to let me quote from his high school poem, but he gave permission for all the letters, signing the bottom of each page with his initials: SB. He didn’t want to grant permission for me to use the family photos: “I’ve given it a good deal of thought. It would mean I was authorizing the book, and I don’t know what’s in there.”
He hadn’t read the excerpt in The New Yorker. “I make it a point not to read about myself,” he said. “I find myself boring. That’s why I write fiction.” He was proud of the newsletter that he and Keith Botsford, who had been his co-editor on The Noble Savage, put out on an irregular schedule; it had only four hundred subscribers, but Bellow preferred it that way: at least they were loyal.
He talked for a while about the death of American culture: no one read books, no one cared about classical music. We were inundated with pointless information—“crisis chatter.” I’d heard it all before, but it didn’t matter. I sat and listened, like the little dog with his ear to the phonograph speaker.
Our hour was up. Like a psychiatrist, I kept track of the time; I was always nervous about keeping Bellow too long, even when he seemed to be enjoying himself. Afraid of counter-transference?
The bill came to $3.30. Bellow reached for the check, but I got there first. “Now we’re going to have a fight about who pays,” I said. He gave a brief laugh.
Before we parted, he told me, for what must have been the third or fourth time over the decade-long course of our conversations, the joke about the soprano in the opera house, where the raucous audience cries ancora! until the exhausted singer can sing no longer. Finally someone cries out, “You’re going to sing it until you get it right!”
This time, though, Bellow added, “One of the great tragedies of human life is that you have to get off the stage before you’ve gotten it right, and leave those cracked notes lingering forever.”
*1 He must have relaxed in the end, because I quote from the letter at length in my biography.
*2 Bellow’s literary portraits of Shils had soured considerably since Mr. Sammler’s Planet, in which he was depicted as a worldly and world-weary refugee from the ruins of postwar Europe, a deep-thinking polymath at home with the whole of Western culture. In Humboldt’s Gift, in the person of Professor Richard Durnwald, he was still imposing, “one of the most learned people on earth,” and a decent character, “cranky” but “kind.” By Ravelstein, Bellow’s last book, Shils would metamorphose into Rakhmiel Kogon, an eminent sociologist and closeted gay (there was no evidence whatever for this in Shils’s own life), “a dangerous person, ruddy, with a red-eyed scowl and a face in which the anger muscles were highly developed.”
*3 I was stunned to learn from Zachary Leader’s biography that Bellow had claimed my own eagerness to out Bloom as a defense for doing so himself. In a letter to Clifford Orwin, a disciple of Bloom’s, he explained that his biographer (“James Atlas”) “would have liked nothing better than to break the story of Allan’s illness to a public of scandal-consumers.” ALLAN BLOOM DEAD OF AIDS—read all about it.
*4 I can’t think of a major novelist who accomplished anything important at that age, or even close to it, except Thomas Mann, whose expanded version of The Confessions of Felix Krull was published after his death; and even in that case an earlier version had appeared a quarter of a century earlier in a collection of short stories. As for becoming a father at eighty-five, I had to search the Internet to find someone who had beaten Bellow’s record: a ninety-six-year-old Indian farmer named Ramajit Raghav. (“I do it three or four times a night.”)
*5 The detail that sticks most vividly in my mind from Bloom’s last years is described by Bellow in his eulogy. As he lay dying, a saleswoman from Loeber Motors called him at the hospital to discuss the details of the Mercedes he had ordered. Did Bloom want a CD player? Gray upholstery or black?
*6 “Never say you know the last word about any human heart,” warned Henry James.
*7 Dwight Garner, in his review of Leader’s biography in the Times, wrote that Bellow “lost faith in Mr. Atlas and stopped co-operating with him before the book was published.” Whether he’d lost faith in me or not, he co-operated right up to the end.
Lou Reed Credit 27
XXVII
“When is this book of yours coming out?” Bellow wrote me a few weeks before publication day. “I feel as if I should go off to Yemen.” When Ruth Miller’s biography was on the verge of publication, he had expressed a wish to disappear into “a remote part of Madagascar.” In the end, he would stay put.
As for me, I had already returned from my exotic travels: it had taken me eleven years to write my biography of Bellow, and now I was at the mercy of critics who would spend a few days—if I was lucky—reading it and writing their reviews under the pressure of a deadline. Even more irritating, they would pass off my research as their knowledge; I used to do it all the time in my youthful days as a critic.
Things started off with a bang. John Leonard, in the crucial New York Times Book Review, gave the book a rave—or what I thought was a rave. Heralded by a black and white photograph of the Bellow family in Montreal on the cover, it occupied two whole pages within and showed, as always with Leonard, a tremendous depth of learning casually displayed. It was also very funny: “If you know Bellow and aren’t dead, Atlas will have talked to you. If you had an opinion but bought the farm, he’s read your diaries, your F.B.I. dossier and maybe your genome.” Friends wrote to congratulate me on “a dream review,” “a spectacular review,” one that amply rewarded my long labor. It was one of the happiest days of my life.
The critical honeymoon didn’t last. A phrase from Leonard’s review—“wary disapproval”—should have put me on alert; he was describing my general attitude toward my subject. Then there was this arresting sentence toward the end, after an ecstatic riff on his love of Bellow’s prose: “Atlas must have felt the same way before he began this long journey into knowing too much.” Yes, I thought: If only I could have preserved that innocence of early discovery.
Then it all blew up. Flames of rage engulfed my book. Reading the splenetic reviews,*1 I thought of something Carlyle had written:
The English biographer has long felt that if in writing a man’s biography anything appears that could possibly offend any man, he had written wrong. The plain consequence was that, properly speaking, no biography whatever could be produced. No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways, he has to elbow his way through the world, giving and r
eceiving offence.
My subject had done both, but so had I, and I would have to pay.
However hurtful the critical lashings, the misery they caused me was insignificant compared to my own self-review. Had I disparaged Bellow’s intellectual pretensions? Was I as hostile to my subject as my critics claimed? Had I gone on too much about the women? Whenever I walked past the shelf in my living room where my book stood wedged between Deirdre Bair’s Beckett and Fred Kaplan’s Carlyle, I winced at its thick spine, its presence as malign as the heart of the old man, murdered by the narrator in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” that beats loudly beneath the floorboards: “Dissemble no more! I admit the deed!”
One day I sat down with a stack of yellow Post-its and went through my book page by page, marking the places where I felt I had gotten it wrong—not in fact but in tone, a thing much harder to get right. I referred to these as the Twelve Errors. (The number has a canonical sound, but that’s how many I discovered.) Some were ungenerous assertions: “Bellow wasn’t a nurturing person—to students, children, wives, or parents. He wanted the nurturing.” Others were snotty: “Writers who posed a threat to Bellow’s hegemony got the cold shoulder.” A few were judgmental, the worst sin of all: “In Bellow’s self-serving and sanctimonious account…” How I longed to edit these sentences. Like the pockmarks from a medieval ague, they would disfigure me forever, unsalved by the ointment of self-knowledge.
Over the years, I would take the book down from the shelf and study these Post-its, curled and faded by time, revisiting the outbursts of spite that had occasioned them; every few years, in a fit of charity to myself, I would peel one off, convinced that my sharp criticism had been right after all. That Bellow “wasn’t a nurturing person” was a fact, however unpleasant to a sympathetic reader or critic or family member of Bellow it might be. I had also written: “As he grew older, the bones of a deeply conservative, xenophobic vision of life emerged more clearly.” Eventually the Post-it identifying this sentence was removed, along with several others (“Leave before you’re left,” “The genius and the self-regard are of a piece”), on the grounds that they were true. By the end, only six Post-its remained, marking statements too neurotic and small-minded to be forgiven, even by their author. (“For admirers, the busy novelist had plenty of time.”) Subsequent efforts to further reduce their number have proved of no avail.
—
I pick up the phone, and the voice on the other end of the line says: “Is this James Atlas? It’s Elizabeth Pollet.”
It is 2008, and thirty-one years have passed since the publication of Delmore. Why is his widow—one of his widows; the first wife, Gertrude Buckman, must almost certainly be dead*2—calling me? Her voice is faint, enfeebled…the voice of an old woman.*3 She must be…I do a rapid calculation, biographer’s math: nine years younger than Delmore, 1913 + 9, b. 1922 would make her…eighty-six. She had been just over fifty when I interviewed her at Westbeth, the artists’ residence in the West Village. She was beautiful then, blond and blue-eyed—“like an airline stewardess,” a friend recalled.
I greet her in a friendly way, but I have no idea why she’s calling. “I just read the biography,” she says.
Why did she wait so long? “I couldn’t bring myself to read it until now.” She liked it, she tells me. I really captured Delmore. She learned a lot.
“He was my first love. I devoted fourteen years of my life to him. I had twenty years of the best relationship I ever had until my partner died a year ago.” Wait: What does the “twenty years” refer to? Is she telling me about someone else? Her most recent—probably her last—relationship? And what does she mean by “partner”? Her late husband? Or did they never marry? Or could it be that she was gay?
Elizabeth has a grievance. (Who doesn’t?) “I felt you didn’t make an effort to talk to me. You only came once.”
“Maybe I was shy,” I venture. I often was in those days with my subjects’ wives and girlfriends. What right did I have to ask all these questions?
“You’re wrong to say I was living in a state of siege….I didn’t take the car….I was more worried about the cat than about Delmore….”
I’ve stopped listening. “I’m fifty-nine,” I say. “I’m not going to correct the record.”
A year later I hear from a friend of hers that she’s dead.
—
I am not done with Delmore.
A letter arrives in the mail.
The writer identifies herself as Trina Doerfler, and she…but let her explain:
My biological father was Delmore Schwartz and I was conceived in 1956 while Delmore was married to Elizabeth Pollet. My mother, Eleanor Goff, married my stepfather Walter Doerfler when she was seven months pregnant with me and he raised me as his own. Out of respect for him and a desire to remain out of the spotlight, I have not come forward until now.
A physician in Seattle, Trina had—as everyone does—a story. She was “coming out of the closet” in midlife because her fifteen-year-old daughter, gifted like her grandfather, had aspirations to be a writer. “I am looking for her to connect to her lineage, at least the part of this one that has lent her the gifts she demonstrates in writing.”
I knew some of the story. We had met. After a lecture, a young woman had approached, and the unmistakable apparition of Delmore’s face, with its sensuous eyes and lips, its faintly Slavic features, a face I had never seen but instantly recognized, loomed up out of the crowd. She had introduced herself as Delmore’s daughter.
I wrote her back, recalling our encounter, only to discover that Trina had no memory of it. She did have other memories:
I can tell you that your book came out while I was studying dance at Brooklyn College in Flatbush, and had the extraordinary experience of seeing for the first time pictures of my grandparents, Rose and Harry, in your book, while sitting on the steps of Brooklyn College, a stone’s throw away from where it was all lived. It was an extraordinary moment and that book was the family album for me for that side of the family.
“There is but one notation in Delmore’s journals in the spring of 1956 that mentions me,” she continued. “ ‘Baby this summer,’ and there is a mysterious dedication in a poem of that last book to little Katherine Schwartz, dated 1961. My given name was Katherine. I believe that poem also has a line in it, ‘Where is my father and Eleanor?’ ”
Trina was still on a quest: “I met Delmore’s brother Kenneth in Los Altos, California, in 1986 or so, but we lost touch and I understand he died in 1993. I am looking for Albert Schwartz, who I believe to be a cousin, and who may be living in Seattle, lecturing on theosophy.” Albert Schwartz? Who? And theosophy? I could have introduced him to Bellow. If you find Albert, let me know. Actually, don’t.
Trina’s daughter sounded like a remarkable person. “She wrote a novella for her eighth grade project last year based on Entanglement, a principle of quantum physics and surely human psychology as well.”
They would be coming to New York that summer, Trina informed me. Would it be possible for us to meet?
I was excited by the prospect, but I never heard from her again.
—
Another day a letter arrives in the mail from a person named Jerome Weinberger: he’s writing in regard to Delmore’s grave plot. I had contributed a hundred dollars toward its maintenance, and Mr. Weinberger is bringing the account up to date:
Mr. James Atlas $100.00
Mr. Saul Bellow $300.00
Mr. Lou Reed $300.00
Mr. Jerome Weinberger $495.00
Perpetual Care Trust Fund—Cedar Park Cemetery
Westwood, New Jersey
Block 36, Line G, Grave 18
Emes Wozedek
C 34483 T12
Estimate for Perpetual Care
Endowment: $1,200
Plant Taxes: $300.00
Seasonal Care: $385.00
I was in good company: not only Bellow, who had fixed Delmore forever in the pantheon of great characters i
n literature, but Lou Reed, founder of the Velvet Underground, the gritty Lower East Side band that was such a defining presence in the 1960s. Reed had been a student of Delmore’s at Syracuse.*4 How cool was that? The endowment must be long gone now, as are two of its benefactors—if not three. I never did find out anything more about Mr. Weinberger except what I learned from his letterhead: that he lived at 15 East Ninth Street, apartment 18M, and had two phone numbers, work and home/fax. But I’m grateful for his ministrations to Delmore. I wonder if Mr. Weinberger, if he is alive, continues to pay the “seasonal care” fee, or if the grave has gone to seed, tufts of tall grass growing over the stone. And what about Emes Wozedek—is he still alive? And if so, is he still the grave tender at Cedar Park Cemetery? Or does Mr. Wozedek have a grave tender of his own?
—
Bellow, too, elicited correspondence and the occasional phone call long after my book had disappeared from the shelves.
I heard from a contemporary of his, Olga Adler Titelbaum, who, like Bellow, had once been a writer for Encyclopaedia Britannica. Over several closely argued paragraphs, she rehearsed her grievances against this apparently heartless bureaucratic project (which eventually “terminated” her): “I resent (as Bellows [sic] would have done) the fact that text written by me stands in many EB articles without an iota of credit to me.” Furthermore, she informed me with the kind of tedious precision that often attends recounting of wrongs, however long ago committed: “I reviewed and edited all language, culture, and ethnolinguistic articles to resolve any discrepancies between maps and texts.” “I rewrote…” “I compiled a list of queries…” And yet! “My name appears in the EB list of credits only in the 1974 volume, and even then, my maiden name (which is part of my identity) is not given. It’s not right.” I agree, Mrs. Titelbaum. Life isn’t fair. But what can I do about it? I’m Saul Bellow’s biographer, not a member of the editorial board of Encyclopaedia Britannica half a century ago. Go complain to them. (But of course, you can’t, which is why you’re writing to me.)
