The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  In The Dean’s December, Albert Corde’s friend from boyhood, the journalist Dewey Spangler, is given something of Harris’s background and character (also something of Richard Rovere’s background and character), including a fictional equivalent of the whole “Herbert Sanders” episode (the novel he and Corde cowrite is titled “Death on the El”). When Corde’s dresser drawer was forced open by “Uncle Harold,” who lived upstairs, he “called everyone together and read Dewey’s letters to the gathered family. Corde’s mother was then dying.” Among the letters Dewey writes to Corde from New York is one that says “The reader at Harcourt loves my part of the book, but says that you should go into the hotel business with your dad” (p. 241). In “I Got a Scheme!,” Bellow recalls a similarly hurtful passage, and something of his family’s reaction: “In the judgment of the publishing illuminati I would do well to enter my father’s business. Only my mother grieved for me. Everybody else was delighted to see me go down in flames.” When Harris returned to Tuley, he did so in triumph: on a Greyhound bus in the memorial speech version of the episode, on a train in the version to Roth, “with a hundred bucks in his pocket [two hundred in the Roth version] and a signed contract from Covici.” As Bellow puts it in “I Got a Scheme!,” “Famous and rich, [he] was far too busy now to write a book for Covici. He soon became the leg-man for Milton Mayer who covered Chicago for P.M., the New York paper founded by Marshall Field. Eventually, Sydney became a Chicago Daily News columnist who specialized in the education of adolescents.”

  Bellow’s Tuley pals had a reputation, one they cultivated. According to Harris, they saw themselves in opposition to what he called the “Ra Ra boys, who, of course, got all the pretty girls.” They ran the Scribblers’ Club and the Debating Club and the Tuley Review; they invented names for their circle: the Division Street Movement, the Russian Literary Society. Harris wrote a poem about the group, making fun of its rivalries and pretensions. To the dismay of his friends it was published by Harriet Monroe in Poetry magazine in December 1935. Harris was eighteen when the poem appeared, though he claimed he wrote it when he was sixteen. It was called “I Come to Bury Caesar” and subtitled “Being a litany, an anecdote, and an adolescent assertion of bravado.” Nicely self-reflexive, the poem traces the reaction of a circle much like Bellow’s to the news that one of their number, Farefield, has had a poem accepted by Poetry magazine.

  … Farefield, with an expression

  Not quite like anything I had ever seen before,

  Turned to us and casually said,

  “I’ve just been accepted by Poetry,”

  Eliot laughed, and Isaac turned quite red,

  And I smiled stiffly, clearing the burned

  Charcoal fumes from my dolichocephalic head.

  Farefield’s poem is called “Heil, Hamlet,” and Harris, or the speaker of his poem, thinks it “quite possible” Poetry accepted it only because “Harriet” was “out of town” (“But all the same I could have died”). His friends put a brave face on (“Isaac had regained his poise, / And sneered sedately at the boys”), as Farefield preens (“Smoothing the sleek / Black curls back of his left ear”), but Farefield gets it in the end:

  The dinner, of course, was a fiasco

  Even Lasco, (the incorrigible showman)

  Sensed that the scene was definitely extra-Roman.

  For Caesar-Farefield lay inert upon the floor,

  And Brutus-I knelt down to tie an errant lace,

  And Casca-Isaac’s face

  Was a study in anthropology;

  And Pound and Eliot, intending no malice,

  In delicate rages delicately tore

  Their respective pages

  From dear Harriet’s …

  Intellectual

  But highly ineffectual

  Anthology …

  Ambition should be made of much

  Sterner stuff.

  Q.E.D.

  “Lasco” is Louie Lasco, closer to Bellow and Peltz than the others, and only loosely part of the group. In an interview, Harris called his poem “a little parody” and claimed it was “all about Saul,” though Bellow is hard to identify as any one character. “Pound and Eliot” might be Tarcov and Bellow, for no reason other than that Isaac, presumably, is Rosenfeld, “I” is Harris himself, and “Farefield” is Freifeld, whose one claim to intellectual fame at Tuley, at least according to Sidney Passin, is that he wrote a poem called “Heil, Hitler,” “before others were writing” (though Passin may be confusing Freifeld with Farefield, or with Harris).109 What is clear is the general character of the group, of all such groups, like the Auden circle at Repton, with its youthful posturing (“Eliot stretched in a chintz-covered chair, / While Pound sat around / Sipping a sloe gin fizz”), ambition, and art worship.

  IN ADDITION TO intellectual rivalry among Bellow and his friends, there was rivalry over girls, and in this respect Bellow, the best-looking member of the circle, and the oldest, was the acknowledged champion. The girls in question seem not to have shared the boys’ intellectual or literary interests, at least none are reported to have done so, though they were often political. Chief among the political girls was Yetta Barshevsky, a year above Bellow, though born in 1915, the class orator at her June 1932 graduation ceremony. Barshevsky was slight, high-voiced, and good-looking. George Reedy, a fellow Tuley graduate, later press secretary to Lyndon Johnson, recalled her as “one of the most beautiful … women I have ever seen and her beauty was accompanied by one of the finest minds I have ever encountered. To top it off, there was not the slightest case of arrogance that would be common in almost anyone else with such endowments.”110 To Bellow, in a three-page speech, “In Memory of Yetta Barshevsky,” delivered at her memorial on September 22, 1996, Yetta “always seemed to me to have a significant sort of Jewish beauty.” She was also “fearless and formidable.” Before the graduation ceremony, she submitted her speech as class orator to be vetted by the school authorities, who approved; then she gave a wholly different and more radical speech. According to Bellow, “the immigrant parents at the graduation ceremonies were delighted with Yetta’s oration”: she used words like “penury” and “mitigate,” which of itself impressed them, as it impressed Bellow (“I knew ‘mitigate’ only from books. I had never heard it spoken”), and she used them in the service of a fiery pledge: “ ‘We will do right by you,’ was what she was telling them. ‘We will give you mitigation.’ ”

  Yetta Barshevsky lived on Spaulding Avenue, just north of Division Street, around the corner from 3340 Le Moyne Street, and Bellow was “a frequent visitor” at her home. She played a part in his political education, earnestly lecturing him on Leninism and Trotskyism as they walked home across Humboldt Park after school, or sat talking on the steps of the Humboldt Park boathouse or in its Rose Garden. Bellow had a crush on her, but she was already engaged to Nate Gould (né Goldstein), also a political radical, recently graduated, whom she would marry (as she would marry Max Shachtman, the Trotskyist leader, after her marriage to Gould ended).111 Whether Barshevsky gave Bellow much encouragement romantically is unclear. The wildly self-conscious letter he wrote to her from South Haven, Michigan, on May 28, 1932, shortly before his seventeenth birthday, mixes poetic hyperbole (“I am thinking, thinking Yetta, drifting with night, with infinity, and all my thoughts are of you”) with ironic deflation (“I hate melodrama. The only thing I hate more than melodrama and spinach is myself. You think perhaps I am insane? I am”). Bellow threatens jokily that “I the young idealist will lay his woes and his heart at Pearl’s feet” (Pearl was Oscar Tarcov’s girlfriend). If Pearl won’t have him he’ll “go home and write heart-rending poetry and play the violin.”112

  Bellow’s great love in the Tuley years was Eleanor Fox, but their relationship was stormy, partly because he was playing around, partly because she was playing around to get back at him. Eleanor lived on Kedzie Avenue, on the western edge of the park, just a few blocks from the Bellow apartment on Le Moyne. As she explains, “Saul, Isa
ac Rosenfeld, all those guys lived on our side of the park. So we all had to cross every day to go to school, to come back from school.… They would all come to my house. My mother was a very gregarious lady, so they lived at my house, all those guys did. My mother would feed them and keep them and treat them so well.” Eleanor, a beauty, entertained the guys but “had a separate thing” with Bellow, which, of course, the guys envied. So they “snitched” on him when he met other girls, either in the park or in one of the “English basements” which served as places of assignation. According to David Peltz, English basements, sometimes “Polish basements,” were cheap ground-floor apartments that could be rented for as little as $5 a month. A group of boys would pool their money for rent, furnish the place with a sofa or some chairs from the Salvation Army, and use it as a clubhouse, often with a jokey name (“The Humboldt Park Athletic Association” is a name Peltz remembers). Here they also arranged meetings with girls, though any sex they engaged in was mostly petting (“We didn’t have sex in high school,” Peltz told Atlas, “that all happened later. We talked about it, but we didn’t do it).”113 Fred Glotzer, another Tuley friend, remembers freezing on the pavement in front of one such basement, waiting for Bellow to raise the blind and give the all-clear.

  If the girl he was with wasn’t Eleanor, Eleanor would soon hear of her. “The women would tell me a little,” Eleanor remembered, but it was the boys who were “all on my side.” When Eleanor herself snuck off with another boy, “because [Bellow] was sneaking,” his pals quickly let him know: “They loved telling him I had other dates, you see, and that would infuriate him.” Once Bellow hitchhiked out to Eleanor’s summer house in Michigan City, Indiana, arriving unannounced, saw her wearing the fraternity pin of an older boy, the son of a prominent Chicago politician, and ripped it off, tearing her dress. “I mean, the fury this guy would go into.” David Peltz recalls a comparable episode when Bellow discovered that Eleanor had written him a love letter, accompanied by a crushed flower. Bellow “came running up the steps to my bedroom,” Peltz recalls, “and he saw the letter and he said, ‘Me she sends weeds; you flowers.’ Then he took the letter and he ran out of the house.” In a letter of July 24, 1994, to Louis Echeles, another Tuley acquaintance, later a prominent criminal attorney, Bellow recalled giving his track team letter to Eleanor: “she sewed it on her sweater. But whatever pleasure there was to be got out of her she gave to somebody else.”

  Eleanor remembers Bellow as critical and superior “but charming as all hell: he could have anybody he wanted.” “He sure had something I cared about,” she recalls, “otherwise I wouldn’t have gone out with him all those years.” Bellow’s male friends also felt this something. To Eleanor, “it was sort of like a sexual thing, almost. He was the best-looking one of the bunch. He was the best-dressed, not expensive, necessarily.” The passion Bellow felt for Eleanor in high school he vividly memorializes in his fiction. “In my highly emotional adolescence,” Charlie Citrine recalls, “I had loved Naomi Lutz [Naomi was one of Eleanor’s given names]. I believe she was the most beautiful and perfect young girl I have ever seen, I adored her, and love brought out my deepest peculiarities.” When he was sixteen, Charlie continues, “I had my own little Lake Country, the park, where I wandered with my Modern Library Plato, Wordsworth, Swinburne, and Un Coeur Simple. Even in winter Naomi petted behind the Rose Garden with me. Among the frozen twigs I made myself warm inside her raccoon coat. There was a delicious mixture of coon skin and maiden fragrance. We breathed frost and kissed” (p. 76). Another version of Eleanor is Louie’s girlfriend, Stephanie, in “Something to Remember Me By,” with whom he necked in the park “in the dead black night … my hands under her raccoon coat, under her sweater, under her skirt, adolescents kissing without restraint.… She opened the musky coat to me to have me closer” (p. 415). Amy Wustrin, in The Actual, Harry Trellman’s adolescent love, is also remembered for her raccoon coat, her distinctive swaying walk, and a sexual appeal that made subsequent women mere approximations. When Harry sees her again after many years apart he wonders “whether she would wear a raccoon coat if I were to buy one for her” (p. 103).

  Eleanor Fox’s father was a respectable podiatrist, like Naomi Schultz’s father, with a practice on Randolph Street in the Loop, and wealthy theatrical clients. He didn’t like Bellow and Bellow didn’t like him. Her mother, however, thought Bellow charming. Shortly after graduating from Tuley, Bellow asked Eleanor to marry him (“He didn’t want to leave me with all these guys, these people who were always at my house”). She turned him down, saying she wanted to finish high school and become a teacher (she became a high school principal, unlike Naomi Lutz, who only becomes a crossing guard). After she graduated, he tried again: “He went to my mother, who adored him, and said I want to get married to your daughter. She said, ‘Oh, wonderful! You’re going to get married!’ ” But again Eleanor refused: “I said I wouldn’t marry him for anything. How do I know he isn’t going to have five wives?—which is exactly what happened.” Also, Bellow was quick to the boil, combustible, like his father. (“You were a violent kid,” Naomi tells Charlie. “You almost choked me to death because I went to a dance with some basketball player. And once, in the garage, you put a rope on your neck and threatened to hang yourself if you didn’t get your way” [p. 291].) Then there was Bellow’s talk, which often confused Eleanor, and the sharpness of his tongue. Eleanor was a good student, but no intellectual. She wrote a style column for The Tuley Review and arranged lunches and fashion shows for high school girls at Marshall Field’s department store, a job that made her “the most popular lady in the school.” Adolescent Bellow looked down on these activities, as he looked down on her father (because he was a podiatrist, she says; because he was a “pretentious” podiatrist, the fiction suggests, furious if called “Mister” not “Doctor”).114 Bellow gave her books to read, saying “this will do you more good than Marshall Field.” They’d go to the movies and he’d sneer: “very few of them, none of them, were at his level—Hollywood, you know.” He’d take her to Trotskyist meetings: “Terrible.” “He was educating me all the time,” she recalls, much as Naomi recalls being educated by Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift. “You were thrilling,” the adult Naomi tells him, “but I never knew where you were at with your Swinburne and your Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde and Karl Marx” (p. 291). Charlie’s defense is Bellow’s: “Those were intoxicating books and I was in the thick of beauty and wild about goodness and thought and poetry and love. Wasn’t that merely adolescence?” Naomi smiles and answers “I don’t really think so,” then quotes her father’s opinion: “your whole family were a bunch of greenhorns and aliens, too damn emotional, the whole bunch of you” (p. 292).

  In 1994, after the publication of her book on Bellow, Ruth Miller received a letter from Norman Dolnick, a Tuley classmate of Bellow’s (a basketball player in high school, as it happens, though Bellow did not know this). Dolnick relayed some of Eleanor’s objections both to the Naomi Lutz character in Humboldt’s Gift and to Miller’s identification of the character with Bellow’s third wife, Susan Glassman. In the letter he also reveals that, urged on by Sydney Harris, he had a fling with Eleanor: “In a vengeful turn, he introduced me to Eleanor, as he said, to take her away from Saul. It was a delightful assignment. Eleanor has many charms so I was a beneficiary. Eleanor later told me she had tired of Saul’s need to dominate. My more casual manner was easier to take.”115 Bellow was sent a copy of the letter and wrote to Dolnick on October 10, to say that he’d never known “you were one of her lucky favorites” or that Harris had urged him to seduce Eleanor. As for his own behavior: “I can’t actually say what I was like at seventeen—mixed up, unable to absorb the shock of my mother’s death and the breaking up of the family. I must have been a bit frantic, and Eleanor apparently saw this as a ‘need to dominate.’ ” Later he admits that he was “explosive now and then—she seemed to me—no, she really was—a beauty, and I loved her. More, perhaps, than any of my lucky rivals.” He
describes Eleanor as “quite clear about the life she wanted: a house in Evanston, a convertible, a charge account at Field’s, membership in the country club. A boy preparing to write stories and novels could never satisfy wants like those. And she’d never have put up with my many, many failures.” When Dolnick showed Eleanor what Bellow had written, she expressed amusement “that you and Norm are rehashing events that took place sixty years ago” (a line Bellow himself took in his letter). She hadn’t been upset by Humboldt’s Gift, though she objected to his characterization of the life she wanted: “You are wrong in saying I needed materialistic satisfaction. At that time I wanted gentle love, and kind treatment and trust.” What she remembers is that “you were mean, and volatile. I recognized your genius, great emotional need and capacity to love. I was unable to cope.” Had she married him at an early age, “I would have been one of your five wives.” She is sorry if he “felt mistreated or that I didn’t care—I probably loved you more than any other man in my life but it was not to be.”