by James Atlas
I have heard many times that Saul was unkind to other writers. I have heard that he was not too great as a father, or a husband and I’m sure what I heard was correct. He was a Don Juan; a vain man who made serious mistakes and was often foolish. That he was brilliant, yes; a wonderful writer yes; disciplined, hardworking, yes—funny, yes—all that and more has been written about him and is certainly true. But when I look back I see that no matter how foolish my actions, how bizarre my letters, he never deserted or abandoned me—he was there—patient, generous, and kind….Here was a man who never ceased growing, searching, loving and no matter how high he soared, kept in touch with old friends, old loves, old times and matters of the soul.
There was a vulnerability in Markels’s portrait of Bellow that I hadn’t encountered before, a longing for others’ approval: “Though he often asked for sympathy, understanding, even pity, what he wanted more was approbation…that people should think he was right, had the right tie, suit, woman, shoes, briefcase, bottle of wine, to make him look good.” His jauntiness concealed a darker side: “There was something about him that was sad. The natural state of his deep dark eyes—when he wasn’t laughing—seemed to be not just looking in neutral but imploring. His face was deeply weathered; he had the look of an older man and when he was in repose there was something infinitely sad in him, wrecked and disappointed.” Wrecked. Being Saul Bellow wasn’t easy.
One of the most fascinating things about this newly discovered manuscript was its depiction of Bellow’s sex life. It’s not that Markels was explicit (although she was); it’s that for the first time I got what made Bellow’s experience in this department so difficult, so charged with failure and anxiety. He himself had once intimated to me that his therapeutic sessions with Dr. Ellis focused on the problem of ejaculatio praecox (Herzog’s problem, too). Markels provided plenty of corroborative evidence. But her account of a memorable night they spent together awarded him high marks:
It was wonderful. He was so present, he was so there. He was not a great lover; it was not great sex, whatever that means, but it didn’t matter, it was of no consequence; for the first time we really kissed the way people do who are going to make love, who love and passionately want each other, all the time saying, “I love you. I love you so much,” until finally we lay with our arms around one another and he kept saying, I love you and I kept saying I love you and then we fell asleep.
The next morning, as he was getting ready to go back to Sasha, Bellow started to cry. I found this disturbing. I’d never heard of Bellow crying before.
Markels had told me everything I needed to know—and more—about this aspect of Bellow’s life and why it caused him so much anguish. Her manuscript validated my own sometimes maladroit speculations. And yet reading about their carnal activities made me uneasy. What if I had gotten my hands on it (or rather, it had come into my hands) while I was writing my book? The biographer is determined to know everything, but everything sometimes feels like too much. Boswell claimed of his Life that it would depict his subject “more completely than any man who has ever yet lived.” But he also believed, as he wrote in his dedication to Sir Joshua Reynolds, that “the whole truth is not always to be exposed.”
The more I read about Bellow’s grappling bouts with Markels, the more I began to see how desperate he was. In one frightening story, when Sasha announced that the marriage was over, he told her he had tried to kill himself. Saul Bellow a suicide? I couldn’t think of anyone who loved life more.
Markels never stayed angry with Bellow for long. “He was Saul and that was the way he was.” They were often quietly happy together, their lives in Tivoli out of a Seurat: “He painted [screens,] and I sat with the sun on my face filled with joy and admiration and love.”
Bellow’s own letters sound a rueful note. It “depresses” him to be apart from Markels; she is “dearer” to him than his own siblings; she should come to Tivoli: “Bring the kids, we’ll raise lettuce and tomatoes.” But was it Markels he needed, or just a love object? There was no “chemical rush,” she noted. “Little did I know at that time that Saul didn’t have to have a ‘chemical attraction’ at first play, or deep affection later. You had merely to be a woman and alive.”
She had her needs, too, mostly literary, and often got her way: “I wanted to be a writer. That was my goal.” Bellow gave in to her pestering requests: he referred her to his agent, submitted her book to his editor, and tried to get her published in The Noble Savage, while noting tartly that she had never asked him one thing about himself. He had his own problems. Two of his brothers—“the only ones I had”—had died within a month of each other. He’d gotten divorced again. “I seem to have a bad character—a character that demands a test, and then after a struggle fails.” At the same time, he saw himself as a victim: “I didn’t invent my faults. Many were inherited.” He had a “disorder,” he explained. “Do you think I want to be like this?”
Their last meeting, when both are deep in old age, is at the San Francisco airport. “We don’t have much time and I want to tell you something,” Bellow says. “All that sexual business. You had nothing to do with that. It was my fault. Not yours. It was my dysfunction. Not yours. There was nothing wrong with you. It was all me.”
Her account of their last phone call made me laugh out loud:
He says something I wouldn’t expect him to say—ever. I am almost 79 and he, what? 91? 92? [89, probably: he died just short of 90] and he uses a phrase so current, so hip, it charges through my mind like lightning and I am filled with the same spirit and energy and optimism that he poured into me years ago. He says, “You go, girl.”
When I get to the last page of this incredible manuscript, I have an impulse to look up its author online. To my great shock, the first entry that comes up when I type in her name is: Roberta “Bobby” Markels Obituary. She had died, according to the Fort Bragg Advocate-News, “in the wee hours of Friday, Feb. 28, 2014,” just two months earlier.
It’s a well-written obit, full of interesting facts: she had grown up in a wealthy Chicago family, been a “wild” girl,” was packed off to live with friends of her parents, been married and divorced, had an affair with Bellow, moved to Mendocino and bought a house for a thousand dollars that she made welcome to “an ever-shifting assortment of boarders, guests, pals, suitors, vagabonds and waifs.” She was a Buddhist. She wrote a children’s book called I’m a Human Bean and was at work on a novel called The Seduction of Nony Stein when she died. She suffered from a chronic autoimmune disorder called scleraderma. “She was annoyed at the prospect of approaching death,*1 but not at all afraid, and was serene and fully conscious in her last hours.”
There’s also an interview on a local TV show, Senior Perspectives (is there anything you can’t find on the Internet?), in which Markels makes it clear that time is running out. “You have to clean up your bathroom shelves, clean out your closets,” she tells her interviewer, an affable, white-bearded guy maybe a few years younger who’s dressed in a blue warm-up jacket; he reminds me of my high school tennis coach. “I’ve got to get rid of everything,” she says, including a book she’s been working on for “forty or fifty years”—probably some version of the one I’ve just read.
How old is Markels at this point? I do the biographer’s math—1926 to 2014. That would make her eighty-eight. She looks terrific: a well-coiffed head of brown/platinum hair, a long face, a strong jaw. She’s wearing an elegant sea-green chemise. She’s so charming, so alive, that I miss her without having known her. Though, having read her book, I feel as if I did.
On the show, Markels mentions Bellow only once, to note that he endorsed her book. This is about her.
*1 I liked the idea of being “annoyed” at the prospect of death, as if it were some minor nuisance to be waved away.
XXX
Not long after my biography of Delmore came out, I had received a letter from his dear friend William Barrett. “I wish you godspeed on your journey,” Barrett wrote, “a
nd may you safely avoid the shoals and reefs that wrecked your protagonist.”
Looking back, I mostly have, though I ran aground a few times and nearly went under once. It turned out that in writing about Delmore forty years earlier, I had drawn on knowledge I didn’t know I had. My own susceptibility to the biological and mental illnesses that destroyed him enabled me to understand Delmore better than I understood Bellow, whose afflictions, excruciating as they had been to him, seemed to me of a different and less extreme kind.
My collision with the shoals and reefs Barrett had warned me against occurred when I was in my mid-sixties and struggling not to drown in a cascade of career reversals. Depression seized me in its grip and wouldn’t let go; it confirmed for me Leon Edel’s observation that “an individual who hasn’t been in the depths of depression has no conception of what depression means.”
I was diagnosed with Delmore’s main impairment, bipolarity, after a parade of psychiatrists had missed the symptoms, or in fairness, had understood them as temperamental or characterological, the fashion throughout almost the entire period during which I was under treatment—one that spanned, alas, given the expense and its lack of meliorative effect, close to five decades.*1 It wasn’t until near the end of the twentieth century that antidepressants came to the rescue. In my case, they helped, restoring me to what Freud called “normal unhappiness” and often happiness itself. Anyone who has experienced clinical depression will know what a gift this is.
(PHOTOGRAPH BY ROLLIE McKENNA)
Delmore in Washington Square Park, 1961 Credit 30
There were times when I wondered if my obsession with biography had been unhealthy. Had I become Bellow’s Humboldt, “gray stout sick dusty,” eating a pretzel in the street? No, though I had the beginnings of a belly and sometimes wolfed down a hot dog from a cart, ashamed of my mustard-stained fingers as I shuffled up West 77th Street. Gray? It was closer to chalk white. Sick? Yes, if you caught me on a bad day, my face drawn and pinched with worry. Dusty? Maybe Humboldt had walked by a construction site. Even so, Bellow’s description of Delmore was unnervingly familiar, and not just in the literary sense. I identified with this character, both the one Bellow had brought to life and the one who had lived, in a primal way. It wasn’t a matter of Delmore c’est moi. I didn’t have his talent, and I hadn’t lived his life.*2 All the same, I knew him. The heavy bear who had gone with Delmore now went with me.
—
One day in the summer of 2006, I opened my Sunday New York Times to find a long article about the discovery of a diary from the 1930s recording “the life and times of a smart and headstrong New York teenager, a girl who loved Balzac, Central Park and male and female lovers with equal abandon.” Her name was Florence Wolfson, and I had mentioned her in my book. Now the diary, recovered from a dumpster on the Upper West Side, had been edited by a reporter for The New York Times and published under the name of The Red Leather Diary.
At last I could find out who Florence Wolfson was, and why Delmore had ended up at her “salon,” as the author referred to the group of young intellectuals who gathered at her parents’ apartment on Riverside Drive. When the book appeared, I leafed through the photographs at Barnes & Noble and put it aside. It was disconcerting to read about Delmore’s last meeting with his father, which Wolfson claimed had taken place with his brother in the rain in Times Square—how he “brushed against their father’s sandpaper cheek in a good-bye kiss through the window of the cab, which took off into the night.” Where did she get this rich material? But it was too late. Whatever I didn’t know I didn’t want to hear about now.
In 2004 New Directions issued a new edition of Delmore’s stories with an introduction by Cynthia Ozick. Her knowledge of the poems and stories was thorough; she quoted at length, reminding us of what was great in Delmore, and she captured the pathos of “a catastrophic life—turbulent, demanding, importuning, drinking, pill-swallowing, competitive, suspicious, litigious.” Ozick saved the bad news for last: “Delmore Schwartz, some*3 dare to say, is in eclipse. With the acceleration of the generations, his fame is long dimmed; the Wunderkind he once was is unremembered.” Whoa. So the half-life of Delmore’s reputation is less than thirty years? That’s it? Without my knowing it, he had come and gone, a victim of our brief attention span and hunger for the new.
My own fixation on Delmore was weakening its hold. There were times when I missed him, though I no longer grieved for him—a crucial distinction, for it meant that he lived on in my memory if not in my heart. Even so, he continued to exert his ursine power.*4 Whenever I took my biography down from the shelf (which wasn’t often), I felt a clutching sorrow. The copy I had was in Dorian Gray condition, the pages still white, the spine firm, the jacket unfaded and shiny. But Delmore was gone.*5
Or was he? One day I was walking across Washington Square in the weak sunshine of a late spring afternoon. As I strolled past the chess players at their concrete tables, the guitarists perched on the lip of the fountain, the couples hand in hand, my eye fell on the curved bench where Delmore once sat in a rumpled suit, a cigarette gripped between thumb and finger, staring out with paranoid eyes at the terrible future, and for one electrifying instant, he was there: a corporeal presence, resurrected, real, the one I had been seeking for nearly four decades. A line of Delmore’s flew into my head: “Calmly we walk through this April’s day.”
It was the title of a poem, I discovered when I got home and looked it up. Here are some lines:
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn…)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(…that time is the fire in which we burn.)
In a late journal, Delmore posed the question: “Why are people alive on earth?” The answer: “Because they are living and have not yet died.”
—
And Dwight? He wasn’t just dead, but more dead, receding further and further into the past. For a few years I had kept up with him—my savior with the red-felt-tip pen—but it wasn’t the same. Our bond, the source of our friendship, had been Delmore, and once Dwight had discharged his obligations as Delmore’s literary executor, we had less to talk about. Gradually we drifted apart, and by the time he died, I hadn’t seen him in years.
Another Sunday morning I opened the Book Review to find an essay by James Wolcott that startled me: it was titled “Dwight Macdonald at 100.” And there was a photo of Dwight with his omnipresent cigarette and billy goat beard—a dead centenarian. I still missed him, but I was glad he hadn’t lived that long. I wouldn’t have wanted to think of him in some nursing home where, forbidden alcohol and cigarettes, he spent his days thumbing through old New Yorkers with trembling hands. Wolcott’s thesis—no doubt correct—was that Dwight had been scrubbed from the record, a victim of history’s ruthless drive to obliterate from memory even the most vivid of our species: “Today, he and many of his concerns could hardly seem more dead.” He’d had plenty of other problems, too, Wolcott reported: “For years before his death in 1982 from congestive heart failure, Macdonald had been battened down by booze, pressing doubt and writer’s block; frustrated, fatigued and plagued by the feeling that he had failed to climb the masthead of his talent by writing a major, original work.”*6 To a young woman who came up to him at a cocktail party and asked him what he “did,” Macdonald replied with the stammer I remembered so well: “Well, I, I, I was a writer.”
Edmund Wilson, too, had become a diminished figure in his last years. As early as the mid-1950s, he identified himself with “a half-obsolete group of survivors from the Victorian age.” His later work is curmudgeonly to the point of self-parody; the journals of his sixties and seventies recount a desolate cycle of drink and depression, exacerbated by dwindling sexual powers. Wilson’s lifelong quest for sexual adventure had a poignant source: he confided to Mary McCarthy that at the root of his trouble with women was his fear “of not being loved, which I have carried all my life from childhood.” His biographer Jeffre
y Meyers conjures up a dolorous image of Wilson in old age—“the dark defile,” as he memorably called it—sitting on the toilet and reading old reviews of his books to boost his morale.*7
Whenever I walk past Wilson’s books on my shelf, the plump volumes lined up in a row, I think of how hard he found it to let go, despite a long life of suffering. In one of his last journal entries, he wrote: “I am glad to have had some share of the life of this planet.” I feel that way, too, on a starry night in summer, when the fireflies blink on and off in the field, or watching dark water swirl beneath a covered bridge on the Walloomsac River. But not so often now.
Should I have written Wilson’s biography? It would have been a propitious moment; he was recently dead but still important. His books were read by anyone who cared about literature. Today he’s out of fashion. Writing his biography at this point would feel as archaic as composing a book on a Smith-Corona typewriter.
His time may come again. Each generation needs its own biography, argued Virginia Woolf. The “facts” need to be reinterpreted: “These facts are not like the facts of science—once discovered, always the same. They are subject to changes of opinion; opinions change as the times change.” In the preface to his Shelley, Richard Holmes preemptively parried any objections that he might be going over familiar ground. Shelley’s life had been well trod by scholars and by the poet’s contemporaries, most notably his friend Edward John Trelawny (whose Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron Holmes dismissed, not unfairly, as “semi-fictionalized”). But these books belonged to another time, as did the musty volumes shrouded in what Holmes called “the penumbra of Victorian proprieties.” Holmes carried the story forward by making Shelley real for us. His Shelley, he insisted, “stands there for anyone who has eyes to see, ears to hear, or heart to feel, sometimes so close that Shelley’s life seems more a haunting than a history.” It exists in the present, not in the past.
