The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Whether Bloom would have approved the use Bellow makes of him in Ravelstein, Bellow’s last novel, has been a matter of dispute. To some, the novel’s portrait is a betrayal; to others, it is as much what Bloom would have wanted, as Chick’s portrait of Ravelstein is what Ravelstein wants. According to Bellow himself, the novel was, in effect, solicited by Bloom, just as Ravelstein solicits Chick to “do me as you did Keynes, but on a bigger scale. And also you were too kind to him. I don’t want that. Be as hard on me as you like. You aren’t the darling doll you seem to be.”17 In Chick’s case, if this meant outing his subject, so be it: “unless the facts were known, no real life was possible”; “When he asked me to write a ‘Life of Ravelstein,’ it was up to me to interpret his wishes and to decide just to what extent I was freed by his death to respect the essentials.… I suppose he thought it wouldn’t really matter because he’d be gone, and his posthumous reputation couldn’t matter less” (pp. 59–60). What would matter was the end, the truthful portrait.18

  In Ravelstein the form Chick’s portrait takes is a memoir, a work of biography. Whether Chick is a novelist, like Bellow, isn’t clear: he is a writer, a commercial success, has had books “on the low end” (p. 32) of the bestseller list; at one point, Ravelstein calls him an “artist” (p. 84) but he is never called a novelist. In fact, none of Bellow’s fictional surrogates is a novelist. The writers among them work in what Bellow thought of as lesser fields, often forms of what is now called “life-writing.” There’s Augie, there’s Chick, there’s Charlie Citrine, rich not just from Trenck, but from ghosting “people’s personal memoirs” (p. 297) (in early versions, Charlie is, variously, a “hack biographer,” “consultant to biographical dictionaries,” editorial director of “American Biographical Archives”).19 In an unfinished novel, “Charm and Death,” a thinly fictionalized portrait of Bellow’s great friend, Isaac Rosenfeld, the protagonist quits graduate work at Columbia and lives “by reviewing, editing, translating, teaching in General Studies programs,” but also by “writing commissioned biographies of pants-manufacturers and dealers in rare South American hides—lizard leather, crocodile. In the early days he would get five hundred dollars. He was fluent but the interviews, the study of materials took time.” Bellow imagines the hassles and diplomatic necessities, as well as the limitations, of life-writing: “Widows and daughters (oedipal daughters) were sometimes difficult, often interesting, sometimes charming, but as time went on the work became less intriguing and less rewarding. Early freshness wore off, spiky neuroses, hard-core obstinacy, boastfulness, family pride were thrust out at him.… Still, people trusted him on the whole. He had no visible strategy with them. They liked his warmth. He was simple, good, or seemed to be so.”20 This passage recalls Joseph in Dangling Man (1944), Bellow’s first novel: “About a year ago, I ambitiously began several essays, mainly biographical, on the philosophers of the Enlightenment. I was in the midst of one on Diderot when I stopped.” Like Augie, Joseph is “amiable … well liked, [but] does not have what people call an ‘open’ look.”21 The most formidable of Bellow’s life-writers is Artur Sammler, in Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), who has long been at work on a memoir of H. G. Wells, described as his “lifework”; the most despicable is “stone-hearted” Willis Mosby, of “Mosby’s Memoirs” (1968), whose recollections of life in Paris in the 1940s make use of the misfortunes of a friend for comic purposes.22

  FOR BELLOW the novel is “the highest form of human expression yet attained,” as worthy an end as kingship and crucial to the welfare of the state.23 “To answer artistically,” Bellow has written of Dostoyevsky,

  is to do full justice, to respect propositions and harmonies with which journalists and polemicists do not have to bother their heads. In the novel, Dostoyevsky cannot permit himself to yield to cruel, intemperate, and arbitrary personal judgements. The writer’s convictions, perhaps fanatically held, must be tamed by truth.

  The degree to which you challenge your own beliefs and expose them to destruction is a test of your worth as a novelist.24

  As for why Bellow should feel impelled to greatness and to the heroic life, one answer might be social. There’s a revealing paragraph in the story “Zetland: By a Character Witness” (1974) about the ambitions of young men like Bellow and his fellow high school intellectuals: “To be an intellectual was to be a parvenu. The business of these parvenus was to purge themselves of their first wild impulses and of their crazy baseness, to change themselves, to become disinterested. To love truth. To become great.”25 That Bellow sensed he could become great was another motive.

  Hence, in part, his single-mindedness, his ruthlessness. “I became very obstinate at a certain point in my life,” he told the Romanian novelist Norman Manea when he was eighty-four. “I knew what was necessary to remain a writer and I wasn’t going to let anything interfere with it, not for my own sake so much as for the game itself as I felt it should be played.” What might interfere were the demands of his life as a person, or of the lives of those around him. “In daily life,” he told Manea, “I don’t ask myself what is honorable and what is dishonorable but I do when I’m writing: I ask myself if it would be dishonorable to put the thing this way.”26 When Bellow’s second wife, Sondra, nicknamed Sasha, complained of her depiction in Herzog, Bellow defended himself in similar terms, invoking Jack Ludwig’s novel Above Ground (1968), which treats the central triangle of Herzog from the lover’s point of view:

  I made something of the abuses I suffered at your hands. As for the “humiliations” you speak of, I can match you easily. There is another book, isn’t there.… It is monstrous to be touched by anything so horribly written. The worst thing about it, to a man who has been faithful to his art for thirty years, is the criminal vulgarity of the thing. I don’t worry too much about my reputation, the “image” (I don’t think you pay much attention to that, either) but I loathe being even peripherally involved with such shit.… But suppose the book had been good.… Can you see me demanding damages? I don’t think you can.27

  Perhaps the longest of Bellow’s friendships was with David Peltz, who died in 2011 at ninety-six. Peltz was as remarkable in person as he was on the page, where Bellow thinly fictionalizes him as Woody Selbst in the story “A Silver Dish” (1978), George Swiebel in Humboldt’s Gift, and George Samson in “Olduvai” or “Olduvai George,” the novel Bellow abandoned in 1967 at Peltz’s insistence. Bellow’s editor at Viking, Denver Lindley, and his agent, Henry Volkening, were “crushed” when he gave in to Peltz’s wishes (Peltz wanted the material Bellow drew on for a novel of his own). “This is electrically marvelous stuff,” wrote Volkening, “the hell with … practical difficulties.” “I would have suggested that you drop it for a while,” wrote Lindley, “if these 50 pages had struck me as less than what they are: you at peak form.”28 Seven years after abandoning “Olduvai”—Peltz having failed to place his novel—Bellow wove one of its stories and its central character, now George Swiebel, into Humboldt. When an excerpt from the novel appeared in Playboy—the scene in which Cantabile threatens Citrine at the Russian Baths, based on a real-life episode Bellow had “given his word” he wouldn’t use—Peltz was outraged. As Bellow knew, Peltz was saving the episode for his memoirs (the very memoirs he told me he was still at work on when I went to interview him in Chicago in 2008 when he was ninety-two). “I’m sorry you feel hurt,” Bellow replied in a letter of July 14, 1974.

  Three years ago Bette [Howland] told you that I was writing about you. You were angry and forbid it.… What matters is that good things get written.… We’ve known each other forty-five years and told each other thousands and thousands of anecdotes. And now, on two bars suggested by one of your anecdotes, I blew a riff.… I created two characters and added the toilets and the Playboy Club and the fence and the skyscraper. What harm is there in that? Your facts are unharmed by my version.… Your facts, three or four of them, got me off the ground. You can’t grudge me that and still be Dave Peltz.

  Now David, t
he nice old man who wants his collection of memory-toys to play with in old age is not you.… The name of the game is Give All. You are welcome to all my facts. You know them, I give them to you. If you have the strength to pick them up, take them with my blessing. Touch them with your imagination and I will kiss your hands.

  In the end, Peltz gave in: “Dear Saul, It’s all right. When you find this note it’ll be easier for you to call. I’ve been so adrift. In a sea of shit unexpressed. Thinking every undeveloped happening will accrue into a spiritual bank account. But time like inflation is thinning it all out. You are right in this matter. And I will let be. See you soon, Love, David.” Later, in a 1980 interview with D. J. R. Bruckner, Peltz recounted an exchange with Nelson Algren about the anecdote. Speaking of Bellow, Algren declared: “He’s a goddamn fool if he doesn’t use it. Who do you think you are? You’re part of his environment and he has the right to use his environment.” As Peltz told Bruckner: “And he was right.”29

  The phrases I want to highlight here are: “What matters is that good things get written” and “You are welcome to all my facts.… If you have the strength to pick them up, take them with my blessing. Touch them with your imagination.” By “good things” Bellow means good fictional things; facts are mere starting points, nothing unless they are touched by imagination, brought alive by what Wordsworth called “the visionary gleam” (Wordsworth is often invoked in the pages that follow). For Bellow, “the fact is a wire through which one sends a current. The voltage of that current is determined by the writer’s own belief as to what matters, by his own caring or not-caring, by passionate choice. It is not in news that it matters whether a man lives or dies. The mattering or not mattering is not a product of facts, but of judgment, of caring.”30 Richard Stern, a novelist friend, “couldn’t write about me,” Bellow told Mark Harris, also a novelist, “because as a writer he couldn’t subordinate himself to me”; nor, presumably, could he subordinate himself to mere fact. I see this comment, which Harris records in Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck (1980), his biographical study of Bellow, as meant to put Harris off, and as a put-down.31 “I’m a bird not an ornithologist,” Bellow liked to say. Because he wrote so close to life, he always needed, his fifth wife, Janis, told me, a real-life face or character to get him off the ground, and because so many of his works—for example, all the stories in the collection Him with His Foot in His Mouth (1984)—take the form of fictional portraits, frequently of identifiable models, he was often ready to distance his works from life-writing, and to denigrate life-writing, as unworthy of the pain or betrayal it involved, not being art.

  What makes Bellow a bird not an ornithologist is his ability to transform facts or experiences into great literature, thus changing them. This view of art as new creation is often invoked as a defense against accusations of slander or defamation. Art can be viewed in other ways; for example, as imitation or mimesis, the oldest of aesthetic aims and pleasures. Mimesis, too, involves touching experiences or facts with the imagination. Bellow was a famed noticer and his novels and stories are packed with things perfectly seen. In Herzog, the novel that made him rich and famous, Moses Herzog, in sweltering Manhattan, comes in sight of a building being demolished:

  At the corner he paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire, fed by the wreckage (p. 593).32

  The pleasure afforded by this passage is of recognition or recollection: “that’s just how it is” or “just how it would be,” rather than “I’d never seen or thought of it like that,” more mirror than lamp. Or take a second example, from an episode in the aquarium in Chicago, which Herzog visits with his daughter June:

  “There is the turtle!” June shouted. The thing rose from the depths of the tank in its horny breastplate, the beaked head lazy, the eyes with aeons of indifference, the flippers slowly striving, pushing at the glass, the great scales pinkish yellow or, on the back, bearing beautiful lines, black curved plates mimicking the surface tension of water. It trailed a fuzz of parasitic green (p. 701).

  Imitation is not the only source of pleasure or art in this passage. The slow, ineffectual striving of the turtle’s flipper is lent poignancy by subjective coloring, the helplessness of Herzog’s own striving, just as the lazy weight of the wrecking ball gains resonance from Herzog’s breakdown, his sense of having been pounded. Both moments serve larger narrative and thematic purposes, those of design or unity, aesthetic values different from imitation. But the core pleasure is mimetic, the product of a thing brought perfectly to life. So rich with mimetic pleasures is Bellow’s writing that when he creates a character who resembles an identifiable person, the temptation is to believe that character is the person perfectly captured, as accurate or artful an imitation as the descriptions of wrecking ball or turtle.

  One such character in Herzog is Sandor Himmelstein, a choleric lawyer. Himmelstein is a “large dwarf” with a misshapen body and “a proud, sharp, handsome face.” Here he is in the morning, working himself into a rage over the mess left by his daughters the night before:

  Herzog heard a cry from Sandor at the kitchen sink. “Look at this crap! Not a pot—not a dish—there isn’t a spoon that’s clean. It stinks of garbage. It’s just a sewer here!” The old dog, obese and bald, escaped in fear, claws rapping on the tiles—clickclick, clickclick. “Spendthrift bitches!” he shouted at the women of his house. “Frigging lice! All they’re good for is to wag their asses at the dress shops and play gidgy in the bushes. Then they come home, and gorge cake and leave plates smeared with chocolate in the sink. That’s what gives them the pimples.”

  “Easy, Sandor.”

  “Do I ask for much? The old veteran runs up and down City Hall, from courtroom to courtroom—out to Twenty-sixth and California. For them! Do they care if I have to suck up to all kinds of pricks to get a little business?” Sandor began to rake out the sink. He threw eggshells and orange rinds into the corner beside the garbage pail—coffee grounds. He worked himself into a rage and began to smash dishes and glassware. His long fingers, like those of a hunchback, gripped the plates soiled with icing. Without losing beauty of gesture—amazing!—he shattered them on the wall. He knocked over the dish drainer and the soap powder, and then he wept with anger. And also at himself, that he should have such emotions. His open mouth and jutting teeth! The long hairs streamed from his disfigured breast (p. 505).

  In 1961, while Herzog was still a work in progress, Bellow sent an extract from the manuscript to Esquire.33 Himmelstein, then called Carlos, featured prominently in the excerpt. As soon as he sent it off, Bellow began to worry. “I had frightful nightmares,” he wrote to Susan Glassman, not yet Susan Bellow, in a letter of April 24, 1961: “I dreamt that Carlos was suing. He’s such a hornet, how would he not? And then I awoke and the prospect was even worse. It panicked me. And I’ve involved Esquire. Of course, I don’t really think he’d do anything, it would make him look like a real idiot. He can’t afford it professionally. Still. You know. It’s dreadful not to be able to write about real matters; it turns all this into real child’s play while industry and politics do as they like, drive us into the [bomb] shelters, make our lives foolish horrors and disfigure the whole world. Anyway, some of the facts have been fiddled with to place the scene in Chicago.” There would be more fiddling. In a later, undated letter to Susan, Bellow reports that “at the last minute I changed Carlos to a crippled war veteran, a hero of Omaha Beach. For the book itself I’ll have to consult long with Viking lawyers. Hate to lose Carlos comme il est.”

  Carlos comme il est was a lawyer named Jonas Schwartz, a tiny man with a misshapen body. He did not sue, but he was not pleased. He had been Bellow’s friend, had tried to represent both Bellow and his second wif
e in their divorce, and when forced to take sides chose the wife, while professing continued loyalty to Bellow. Himmelstein has that same history with Herzog and Herzog’s second wife, Mady. In a letter of December 6, 1975, the lawyer Bellow employed after Schwartz, John Goetz, recalled “my last meeting with our distinguished antagonist Jonas Schwartz, in a crowded elevator, shortly after Herzog came out. He gave me his characteristically friendly glare, and shouted. ‘Have you seen Saul’s book?’ Without waiting for a reply, he went on, red-faced, doing his best to jump up and down: ‘I’m in it! And he makes me a son of a bitch! ME, Jonas Schwartz, a son of a bitch!’ ” Goetz and Schwartz were not the only witnesses from this period for whom “making something” of Schwartz, putting a current through the wire of fact, meant capturing something real about him, bringing him alive, as well as turning him into a brilliant comic grotesque, a figure out of Dickens. I am not saying that Himmelstein is Schwartz, who was no doubt a more complicated, certainly a more serious, person than his fictional alter ego (he was, among other things, a prominent civil rights attorney who had argued before the Supreme Court). But his temperament, appearance, and situation were similar to those of Himmelstein and that was enough to lead others to see him as “a son of a bitch,” especially since that’s how Bellow, who saw things so clearly, might have viewed him. For James Wood, faced with instances like these, “an awkward but undeniable utilitarianism must be in play: the number of people hurt by Bellow is probably no more than can be counted on two hands, yet he has delighted and consoled and altered the lives of thousands of readers.”34 Though opinions will differ about the morality of this calculation, that Bellow accepted it is something worth knowing about him, as a man and as an artist.