The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  At Tuley, Kafka was much in the air, and Bellow was influenced by him early in his writing career, as unpublished works from the late 1930s and early 1940s, and Dangling Man, his first novel, suggest. In recalling these years, however, Bellow rarely mentions Kafka, and when he does it is with misgivings. In the interview in which he talks so eloquently of his childhood faith in close observation (“The abstraction came later. Actual life was always first”), Bellow mentions having read Kafka on Balzac. Kafka couldn’t bear Balzac’s novels because they “contained too many characters. He’s asked, aren’t you interested in characters? And he says, No, I’m only interested in symbols. And I could see that as a source of dramatic power. Especially when I was growing up, I found that a ‘personality’ could also be constructed of something artificial. Something of conceptual origin. On the other hand, the number of types and roles were really limited: they soon became tiresome because they were derivative.” Elsewhere, Bellow associates Kafka with Joyce, whom he greatly admired, and Gertude Stein, as key figures from the 1920s who “took the novel into an impossible blind alley.”95

  Though fascinated by theories and concepts, Bellow drew strength and meaning as a novelist from particulars, the streaks of the tulip. When assessing each other’s writings, this difference contributed to tensions between the friends. There were differences also in their sense of writing as vocation or mission. Bellow’s single-mindedness was clear to all his Tuley friends. As David Peltz puts it (in words quoted in note 89 in Chapter 3), “he was focused, he was dedicated to becoming what he was, from the beginning. I mean, he never veered.” To Bellow’s thinking, both Rosenfeld and Tarcov veered: Rosenfeld was too scattered, too unstable for such single-mindedness, and in the post-Tuley years, as Bellow wrote to George Sarant, Rosenfeld’s son, “his liberation degenerated into personal anarchy.”96 Tarcov, Bellow implies, was too responsible, too much the mensch. When Tarcov died, Bellow wrote a moving letter of consolation to Nathan: “I hope that you will find—perhaps you have found—such friends as I had on Le Moyne St. in 1933. Not in order to ‘replace’ your father, you never will, but to be the sort of human being he was, one who knows the value of another man. He invested his life in relationships.”97 As with Rosenfeld, Bellow takes the blame for tensions in the friendship with Tarcov. In the letter he writes: “Oscar and I had an unbroken friendship for thirty years, and since I was sometimes hasty and bad-tempered it was due to him that there were no breaks.”

  Bellow, Tarcov, and Rosenfeld formed a triumvirate. Sam Freifeld, the richest of Bellow’s Tuley friends, was slightly apart. Freifeld’s family was a model for the Einhorns in The Adventures of Augie March (“personages like them appear in Augie March,” Bellow wrote to Freifeld on July 12, 1950, though “someone else is in your place”).98 In the copy of the novel Bellow gave to Freifeld, the inscription reads: “To Sam, the historian of the Einhorn family.” Sam’s father, Ben, described by Bellow in the same letter as “too rich to be held by oblivion,” ran an insurance business, Freifeld and Son, located at 2610 West Division Street; the “Son” was Ben, the business having been founded by his father, Harry, who came to Chicago from what is now Romania. Harry Freifeld’s nickname, as in Augie, was “the Commissioner,” and according to his granddaughter, Judith Freifeld Ward, who never met him, but heard many stories of him from her father, he was “very flamboyant … a bit of a con man and an operator as well.” The Commissioner made money through property and development deals, often highly leveraged, as well as through insurance, mostly on the northwest side, and his son made more money again, which he managed to hold on to through the early years of the Depression. Sam grew up in affluence, in a large apartment in a forty-unit apartment building owned by the family. The Freifelds had a maid and a fancy automobile (in Augie, the “big red Blackhawk-Stutz” [p. 452]). They also owned a pool hall, where Sam and his friends often hung out. In the 1983 essay “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt,” Bellow recalls how his “boyhood friend Fish” (Freifeld) “who was allowed to help himself to a quarter from the cash register in his father’s poolroom, occasionally treated me to a hotdog and a stein of Hires root beer on Randolph Street.”99 Though wheelchair-bound, unable to use his legs, and with limited use of his arms, dapper Ben Freifeld had great style, “pizzazz” in his granddaughter Judith’s phrase; he could dominate a room, and Sam had something of his father’s largeness of personality. In a biographical sketch, Rosenfeld praised the youthful Sam Freifeld for “his energy, high esteem of himself, inviting all to share in his being.” Judith’s sister, Susan Freifeld, describes their father as “a very vivid personality, loved to hold forth and tell stories.… A great talker.” “He’s in danger of losing his great gift of life,” writes Bellow of Freifeld (for reasons unspecified) in a letter of 1947 to a mutual friend, Melvin Tumin, “I hate to see it happen to Sam who was so full and so overfull.”100

  Full of himself as well as of life, Freifeld could be pompous, could talk through his hat, often about books of which he’d read only the first chapters. Sid Passin remembers being taken under Freifeld’s wing for a short time: “he ‘taught me about life’ … taught me how to drink. First he taught me how to smoke. Sam had his own private pipe tobacco and he had thirty-three different kinds.” Freifeld’s ebullience kept him at the center of the group, but so, too, did his relative wealth, like that of Charlie Citrine’s boyhood friend, later lawyer (as Freifeld would become Bellow’s lawyer), Alec Szathmar in Humboldt’s Gift, “not big-rich, only neighborhood-rich” (p. 202). David Peltz, a close friend of Bellow’s, but more distantly acquainted with Tarcov and Rosenfeld, remembers that Freifeld “always managed to have more money than anybody else. Sam had the library, the records, and the record-player, and his mother made the hamburgers, and we used to meet there and talk sex and philosophy and Marxism and Freud.” Peltz remembers Freifeld as Citrine remembers Szathmar, who “in boyhood had had bikes and chemistry sets and BB guns and fencing foils and tennis rackets and boxing gloves and skates and ukuleles” (p. 202). Peltz worked for the Freifelds, carrying Ben Freifeld on his back like a sack of Carroll coal (down the front stairs, into the car, off to the movies or the beach), which is how Augie carries William Einhorn. He remembers Freifeld in the Tuley years as generous but also “an arrogant ass with his opinions.” Bellow, too, had mixed feelings about Freifeld, as does Charlie Citrine about Szathmar, whose “warm brown eyes” are described as both “full of love and friendship” and “not especially honest” (pp. 203–4). Szathmar’s plush office contains framed portraits of his father and grandfather, reminding Charlie “of old days on the West Side.” Charlie’s feeling toward Szathmar “was after all family feeling” (p. 204), even though he could see through Szathmar’s sense of their respective characters: “In Szathmar’s breast there was a large true virile heart whereas I had no heart at all, only a sort of chicken giblet—that was how he saw things. He pictured himself as a person of heroic vitality, mature, wise, pagan, Tritonesque. But his real thoughts were all of getting on top, of intromission and all the dirty tricks that he called sexual freedom” (p. 205). When Szathmar memorizes “Prufrock” in college, he does so “as one of his assets,” to get girls. Citrine feels bad about noticing such defects in his friend: “to atone I let him go on denouncing me” (p. 205). His last word on Szathmar, toward the end of the novel, is that “Szathmar is a good fellow in his own way. From time to time I speak harshly of Szathmar, but I really love him, you know” (p. 441).

  These words are from a novel published in 1975, at which point Bellow and Freifeld were barely speaking. By 1982 and the publication of The Dean’s December, animosities had hardened (as we shall see, there were wrangles over money and lawyer’s advice, accusations on both sides of being used). Albert Corde’s lawyer is, literally, family: his cousin, Maxie Detillion. In high school, Maxie shared Corde’s and Dewey Spangler’s literary interests: “He said he did, anyway. A showman even then, Maxie used to recite ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’ … Dewey Spangler had
made wicked fun of him. ‘Fat-ass lowbrow … gross and dainty … Arse Poetica’—these were some of the cracks he used to make. But later Dewey turned tolerant.… Corde’s opinion had followed the reverse pattern” (p. 67). By 1997, in The Actual, Bellow gives his heroine, Amy Wustrin, a gross and familiar-sounding husband, Jay Wustrin: “a stout man, dancing, he swung his broad backside, but his feet were very agile” (p. 32). In his school days, according to Amy, Jay would memorize bits of poetry to recite, “when he was putting the make on girls. After we were married, I looked up all his source books. The passages were underlined, and just from Chapter One. He never read an entire book in his whole life” (p. 55). In the Tuley years, such defects were viewed, for the most part, affectionately.

  Bellow’s feelings about Sydney J. Harris were more rivalrous. In “I Got a Scheme!,” he describes Harris as “my closest friend, in early adolescence.”101 Harris lived east of the park, on Iowa Street, just east of Robey (now Damen), only blocks from where the Bellows once lived on Cortez. He, too, went to Columbus Elementary School and Sabin Junior High, although Bellow was two years older and believes they only met in “1929, perhaps 1930,” at the Association House. Here, in addition to playing basketball, they started a little newspaper. “I was the editor of it,” Harris remembered, “and Saul was the assistant editor.” “We worked on that paper for most of one year,” Bellow wrote in a memorial speech given shortly after Harris’s death in December 1986, “doing the whole thing from scratch, even making up the dummy and taking it to the printer.”102 At Tuley, Harris was also editor of the school paper, The Tuley Review, “the only freshman who had ever been the editor,” and Bellow was a staff writer, a pattern that, as Harris put it, “repeated itself a few years later, when in 1937 I started a magazine called The Beacon,” on which Bellow worked briefly as literary editor. Bellow seems to have been happy to let Harris take the lead in these ventures. Harris was obsessed with newspapers and worked on them all his life. He left Tuley without graduating, became a copyboy “on the old Hearst newspaper when I was fifteen,” worked on the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times, and for thirty years wrote a column entitled Strictly Personal, which was syndicated throughout the United States and Canada.

  Looking back on the friendship, Harris claimed that he “knew at once that Saul had an imaginative capacity that I never had. I have no imaginative abilities. I never have tried to write a short story in my life, much less a novel.” This assertion is untrue. At Tuley, Harris wrote stories, a novel, even poetry, and was as ready as Bellow to discuss Huysmans, Verlaine, Baudelaire, “all that stuff.” As Bellow puts it in the memorial speech, “we didn’t shrink from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, we didn’t shrink from Spengler’s Decline of the West. We were willing to try our hand at everything.” When Bellow and Harris were together in the Tuley years, Mencken was the presiding spirit: “we were devoted to the American Mercury and our mouths were full of Menckenian profanities and irreverences.” The two friends spent whole evenings walking each other back and forth across Humboldt Park, between their two houses, “talking up a storm but especially about literature and about how bad everything was and about our prospects as writers.” In later life, much to Harris’s embarrassment, Bellow would recite from memory passages from his friend’s adolescent poems. In the memorial speech, he offered the opening lines of “Rebellion”: “I rebel against this living hell / This form of mockery sublime.” He recalled arguing with Harris until two in the morning, then pooling their pennies (Bellow’s “daily allowance” while in high school was 10 cents)103 to share a nickel hot dog “at a joint called MGM” (“Many Good Mouthfuls”). For the nickel one got the hot dog, “plus potato chips, plus lettuce and tomatoes, plus all the pickle, relish, mustard and so on you could load into [the bun]” (p. 5). The subjects the two friends debated were literary, intellectual, and political; they also talked about girls, whom they chased “indiscriminately on Division Street and in the corridors of Tuley High School” (p. 8). In retrospect, Harris was struck by how little Bellow had to say about the supposed master themes of his fiction, Jewishness and Chicago. “We looked toward the East all the time,” he recalled, “and we would have thought it very provincial to be concerned about the city very much. And as far as the Jewishness was concerned, that was a complete blank. That was just something not discussed or talked about.” Rosenfeld was the one in the group, according to Harris, who was concerned with Jewishness.

  Bellow spent a lot of time at the Harris apartment during his high school years, and often slept over, partly to escape tensions at home. Harris’s father was a Russian Jewish immigrant, his mother English, from London. In the memorial speech, Bellow remembers Harris’s father as “a charming man,” with an original, quirky sense of humor; his mother was also charming and funny. Harris was an only child and Bellow was amazed at the way he was allowed to speak to his parents: “Skinny Sydney with his wild ways, his tics and his rages ran the show—he lied, he threatened and he stormed, he played the genius and the dictator.” Partly this behavior was “theater,” the rages put on, but Bellow was still shocked by his friend’s language: “Get back to the kitchen you old Cockney bitch,” he remembers Harris shouting when his mother entered the parlor where he and Bellow were at work, “How dare you interrupt?” To which the mother, angry, but also performing, would answer, “Yer no child of mine.… They switched yer on me in hospital.” Had Bellow tried such language at home, his mother “wouldn’t have let me get away with it, and my father would have knocked me down.”104 On other occasions, Mrs. Harris would enter the parlor and recite “very well” passages from Shakespeare’s history plays, which she’d had to memorize at school in London. Bellow remembers the relations between Harris and his mother as having “a very liberating effect on me, especially hearing him swear at his mother from time to time was extremely uplifting.” Though “kindred spirits,” they “fought all the time and we swore profanely … and Sydney could be very abrasive and I was abrasive with him.”105

  What Mrs. Harris interrupted when she entered her parlor were writing sessions. “We wrote at opposite ends of the big table, on yellow second sheets from the Woolworth ten-cent store. At this square borax table, its surface protected by a carpet-like cover, we wrote stories, poems, essays, dialogues, political fantasies, essays on Marxism—on subjects we didn’t really know too much about.”106 They also criticized each other’s work, “unsparingly and often cruelly and there was a great deal of yelling back and forth.” Harris impressed Bellow by having a typewriter, a tiny one he borrowed from his cousin, and by knowing that you were meant to provide future editors with a word count.107 One of the pieces they worked on together was a novel called “Herbert Sanders.”108 In interviews, Bellow described this novel as a joint venture, but in the memorial speech he attributes it to Harris alone: “Then about 1931, it must have been, Sydney wrote a book. I think he was then sixteen years old.” Bellow remembered “Herbert Sanders” “very well, it was a combination of automatic writing and all kinds of … surrealistic insights. It was a very free-wheeling work.” The introduction Bellow wrote to accompany the novel was “at least as long” as the work itself. When both novel and introduction were finished the two authors were determined to see it in print. “On a street corner on a very cold day in February,” they flipped a coin to see which of them would take the manuscript to New York to find a publisher. Harris won the toss and immediately set off with the manuscript. “He tucked it under his sweater on the spot. He started thumbing his way down Division Street and then he was gone.” Bellow is unsure about dates in the memorial speech. He says Harris wrote the book “about 1931,” which means the February trip to New York must have taken place in 1932. At this date Harris, who was born on September 14, 1917, was fourteen and Bellow sixteen (“I think I was sixteen at the time,” Bellow writes in the speech. “Sydney was about a year my junior”). Amazingly, Harris not only reached New York but managed to meet John Dos Passos, who invited
him to stay in his apartment on Riverside Drive. He also managed to contact Pascal “Pat” Covici, who had come to New York from Chicago, where he had run a successful publishing company and bookstore, the haunt of Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht, Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, and other Chicago writers. In New York, Covici joined forces with Donald Friede, publishing works by Wyndham Lewis, Clifford Odets, and Nathanael West, among others. Two years after Harris’s trip to New York, Covici-Friede signed John Steinbeck, and twenty or so years later, after Covici moved to Viking, he became Bellow’s editor, shortly after publication of The Adventures of Augie March.

  Though he refused to publish “Herbert Sanders” and “wouldn’t spare so much as a glance at my Hemingway [i.e., Hemingwayesque] introduction,” Covici was impressed with fourteen-year-old Harris, offering him a contract to write a novel about revolutionary high school students in Chicago. Meanwhile, back in Humboldt Park, Harris’s parents were distraught, having been given no warning about the trip and few details about where Sydney had gone. Mrs. Harris called Bellow repeatedly “for information which I, of course, wasn’t about to give”; then she came to the Bellow apartment to make her case to Bellow’s parents. In “I Got a Scheme!,” Bellow remembers the interview taking place “in my mother’s sickroom.” Still he refused to say anything: “I was very sorry for Sydney’s mother, who was in tears, but there was nothing I could do without violating the code. So I said—no, I know nothing.” Maury got involved at this point and “was very threatening.” He insisted that Saul be questioned at police headquarters. Bellow remembered the streetcar ride to 11th and State Street, “Sydney’s mother weeping, my bossy brother determined to tag me hard and teach me a lesson.” At the station, Bellow underwent interrogation in the Missing Persons Bureau, “but I still didn’t talk. I tried to convey to Mrs. Harris that her boy was all right. There wasn’t something that had gone wrong. I wanted her to know that he had gotten to New York safely but we had taken an oath so I couldn’t do anything.” To Roth, Bellow explained: “Adolescents in those days were bound by gangland rules. You didn’t rat on a buddy.” After the Missing Persons Bureau, Bellow “felt that I could tough it out with the best of them.” On the journey home, Maury lit into him, and as soon as they got back to the apartment he broke open the single locked drawer of Bellow’s dresser and discovered all Harris’s letters, with their excited accounts of his journey, of John Dos Passos, of the contract with Covici.