The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  IF BELLOW’S INTEREST IN anthropology was lifelong, his interest in a career as an anthropologist was short-lived. As Indian summer faded, the demands and pressures of the autumn term crowded around him. By December 7 he had moved closer to campus. He was now at 1314 St. James Place, near Rosenfeld, at 11 North Mills Street. It is not clear how they were getting on. In the December 7 letter, in exasperation, or mock exasperation, Bellow calls Rosenfeld “intolerable,” obsessed with a paper “on the Absolute as conceived by Josiah Royce.” If the paper pleases his professor, Rosenfeld “will stay. If not he will return.” Rosenfeld himself was pleased: “I wrote a paper this week-end on Royce,” he tells Tarcov in a letter postmarked December 9, “wherein I disembowelled him thoroughly, clean as a whitefish, and disposed of Absolute Idealism to such satisfaction, that I hesitate now, to subscribe to the best of all possible tenets: metaphysics is nonsense.” The paper was composed in a period of “happy, suppressed existence … hearing neither bird-call, flesh-call, telephone-call.” Bellow, too, was furiously writing papers at this period, or furiously not writing them: “I have several on my hands, more than I should perhaps have undertaken. The result is, of course, that I bear more than my normal load of fretting. I know I waste more time fuming and bustling than I spend in work. But I can’t break the habit.” He completed only one of his courses, Goldenweiser’s, for which he got an A. Bellow gave several reasons for his decision to leave graduate school and return to Chicago: “My interest in anthropology began to run out when I was told I had to take archaeology courses, physical anthropology courses, and linguistics courses. I didn’t want to get into that. I didn’t see the point of it. I didn’t mind measuring people’s skulls for a bit, but I didn’t want to fool with bones for a year. I left at Christmas to come back to Chicago.” Elsewhere, he attributed his impatience with anthropology to the magnetic pull of fiction: “Every time I worked on my thesis it turned out to be a story.” This was the view also of Goldenweiser, who thought him too much of a literary stylist to be an anthropologist. “It was a nice way of easing me out of the field,”123 Bellow thought. But Goldenweiser, himself “more literary than anthropological,” identified a key incompatibility between Bellow and “the field.” The trouble with anthropologists, Bellow acknowledged, was that they weren’t writers. Hence the reductive nature of their attempts to describe the mystical dimension, also the feel of primitive cultures. “You knew when you met these scholars that they would never understand what they had been seeing in the field. To me they were suspect in part because they had no literary abilities. They wrote books but they were not real writers. They were deficient in trained sensibilities. They brought what they called ‘science’ to human matters; matters of human judgment, but their ‘science’ could never replace a trained sensibility.” This sensibility, Bellow continues, “was what I acquired without even knowing it.”124

  In the letter of December 7 to Tarcov, Bellow announces that he will be back in Chicago on December 17. Nothing is said about quitting graduate study. Bellow may only have decided not to return to Madison after he left. Romantic motives, as well as intellectual ones, underlay the decision. In an earlier letter to Tarcov, postmarked October 13, Bellow says he cannot accept anthropology “wholly,” not only because he’s a writer, but because “just now I am deeply in love, and I think I shall continue in love, because it is my salvation.” The person he was in love with would become his wife. In returning to Chicago to stay, he was committing himself not just to a life of writing but to life with her.

  (ill. 5.1)

  6

  Anita/Dangling

  THE GIRL’S NAME WAS Anita Goshkin and Bellow met her in Hyde Park in the summer of 1936, before the start of his senior year at Northwestern. By the spring of 1937 they were engaged. Anita had been at the University of Chicago only a year, having transferred from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as a junior (shortly after the death of her father, which suggests the move may have been motivated by family or financial considerations). The “grimy” sociology books she carried at their first meeting were for a summer course at the university. She was six months older than Bellow, born on December 12, 1914, and like him lived on the North Side, in Ravenswood, a modest suburb of small courtyard apartment buildings. Bellow told his son Greg that he’d had his eye on Anita for some time, before gathering the courage to speak to her. Her cousin and childhood playmate, Beebee Schenk (later de Regniers), was a friend of Bellow’s, and may have told him to look out for her.1 On their first date, they went swimming in Lake Michigan off the Point, a Hyde Park landmark. In Herzog, Bellow fictionalizes the moment they met. Moses sees Daisy, who will become his first wife, under the El at 51st Street. Pretty and fresh in appearance, with large “slant green” eyes, she wears a simple seersucker dress and small white shoes. Her “golden but lustreless” hair is held in place by a barrette and her legs are bare. Moses sees the square-cut neck of her dress as expressive of character: “stability, symmetry, order, containment were Daisy’s strength.” Her “laundered purity” also strikes him, as does her coolness and regular features, those of “a conventional Jewish woman.” As Moses stands behind her on the El platform, a “fragrance of summer apples” rises from her bare neck and shoulders (pp. 542–43).2

  This fragrance is also expressive, for Daisy is a country girl of sorts, raised near Zanesville, Ohio. Anita came from a similar background, in Lafayette, Indiana, not exactly the country, but not Chicago either. Her parents, like Bellow’s, were Russian immigrants. Her father, Morris, arrived from the Crimea after the pogroms of 1905, settling in Lafayette for the same reason the Bellows settled first in Lachine then in Chicago: because he had relatives there. He worked as a milkman, then opened an ice cream parlor. What Greg Bellow remembers hearing of his maternal grandfather is that he was “quiet, kind and gentle.” It was Sonia, Morris’s wife, a forceful, opinionated, modern woman, a suffragette in Russia, who ruled the roost, encouraging her daughters to be independent and insisting that they go to college.3

  Like Bellow, Anita was the only member of her family to be born in the New World. A late arrival, she was much doted on. She had two brothers, Jack (also known as J.J.) and Max, seventeen and ten years older, and two sisters, Catherine and Ida, sixteen and fourteen years older. The sisters became librarians, earned higher degrees in library science, traveled in Europe, were lovers of high culture, and never married. When they retired, they moved to New York, living together in an apartment close to Lincoln Center, to be near the ballet. Of the brothers, Jack, the eldest, had an affair in college with a non-Jewish girl. When she got pregnant, he married her. According to Greg, Anita’s mother was so scandalized by these events, “that, basically, she forced Jack to divorce … and move back in.” Jack’s son, Jack Jr., was raised out of state by his mother and on rare visits to Lafayette “was kept on the back porch, incommunicado.” When the Goshkins moved to Chicago and the son visited, his father “checked into a hotel.” Anita’s other brother, Max, a machinist, also lived at home, well into his forties.

  Anita was political at college. When Greg was a student at Chicago, “with great pride” she pointed out to him the spot in the lobby of the Social Sciences building where she had once sold a hundred copies of Soapbox in an hour. She attended political meetings and regularly spoke at them. She went to Gary, Indiana, to organize steelworkers, was arrested, and spent a night in jail, along with Bellow’s friend Oscar Tarcov. Her interest in politics was practical; she had little patience for theoretical or doctrinal dispute. The two-year MA program she entered in March 1937 in Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration involved fieldwork at the Michael Reese Hospital, one of the oldest and largest teaching hospitals in Chicago. There Anita met Bruno Bettelheim, who later remarked to Greg on his mother’s beauty. Anita finished the first year of the course but not the second, which required that she write a dissertation. She could not write, or thought she could not write, a conclusion she’d been led to as an underg
raduate. “My father told me he wrote most of her term papers,” Greg recalls. After abandoning her MA in 1939 she got a job at the Chicago Relief Administration giving out welfare checks. By this date she and Bellow had been married over a year.

  That Bellow had been contemplating marriage for some time is clear from his letter to Tarcov of October 2, 1937, but the actual decision seems to have been made on the spur of the moment. Among Anita’s friends at the University of Illinois was Cora DeBoer, a psychology student. Cora was a pretty blond girl from a comfortable middle-class family; her father, a first-generation Dutch immigrant, was a successful Chicago physician, her mother belonged to the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution), as did Cora herself. After graduate work in psychology, Cora went on to a career as a counselor, both in the Chicago school system and in private practice. Through Anita and Bellow, she met Bellow’s friend, Herb Passin, a student of anthropology at the University of Chicago (where he would get his master’s degree in August 1941).4 Herb and Cora fell in love and sometime after Bellow’s return to Chicago from Madison for the Christmas holidays, the two couples hatched a plan to elope in a double wedding. On December 31 they climbed into Cora’s 1934 Ford and drove to Indiana, where it was possible to obtain a marriage licence without having to take the required blood test (for venereal disease); that the test took days to process and they were unwilling to wait is what suggests that the plan was hastily conceived. In Michigan City, sixty miles south of Chicago, they found a justice of the peace, lied about being Indiana residents, and were married that afternoon. Then they drove back to Chicago, celebrating over dinner at a Japanese restaurant on the near North Side, the only place they could find open.5

  When the newlyweds told their parents what they had done, neither the Goshkins nor the DeBoers seem to have objected, or to have objected much. Anita’s mother immediately took the couple into her home; the Passins’ only child, Tom, “never heard that Cora’s parents had any trouble with Herb being Jewish. If they did, it didn’t last long.”6 Herb’s parents, however, minded a great deal that Cora was not Jewish and Bellow’s father was also upset (“I had defied him by getting married,” Bellow told Roth7), not because he disapproved of Anita, but because he thought Bellow could not support himself, let alone a wife or family. As Lesha Greengus, Sam Bellows’s daughter, puts it, the family liked Anita, but “everybody worried about Saul making a living. That is what my grandfather worried about. This was a constant conversation and a genuine and loving worry between my father and grandfather.” Maury, too, worried about how Bellow would support himself, while also sneering at his poverty. In The Adventures of Augie March, Simon, Augie’s Maury-like brother, urges him to marry Lucy Magnus, his wife’s sister; to marry for money, in other words, as he had done. When Augie delays and demurs, “things became more tough for me at the yard” (p. 668).

  The family home Bellow entered into in the New Year was a crowded one. In addition to Sonia, there was Jack, now forty, Catherine, thirty-eight, Ida, thirty-five, and Max, thirty-three. Bellow briefly took a job working for Maury (as Augie does for Simon), but was soon fired for absenteeism. He was determined to become a novelist, and to their credit, Anita and her family were ready to give him a chance to do so. As Bellow puts it in “Starting Out in Chicago” (1974), his “affectionate loyal and pretty wife insisted that he must be given a chance to write something.”8 So each morning, after Anita and her siblings boarded the Lawrence Avenue streetcar or the Ravenswood El to go to work or study, Bellow retreated to a bridge table in a back bedroom and wrote. The table faced “three cement steps” and “the brick gloom of a passageway.” The only other person at home was Sonia, his mother-in-law. At half past twelve, they had lunch together. “The cooking was good. We ate together in the kitchen. The meal was followed by an interval of stone. My mother-in-law took a nap. I went into the street. Ravenswood was utterly empty.” For amusement he would wander over to the bridge on Lawrence Avenue and look at the Drainage Canal. Then he’d walk back home, “to the pages of bad manuscript, and the silent dinner of soup and stew and strudel, after which you and your wife, washing dishes, enjoyed the first agreeable hours of the day.” It was Anita’s family who paid both for her graduate study and for Bellow’s freedom to write, supplemented by handouts, often grudging, from the Bellows.9

  What agitated Bellow at this time was less what he was writing, about which we know nothing (“I am glad to say I can’t remember what I was writing in Ravenswood,” he says in “Starting Out in Chicago.” “It must have been terrible”), than the isolation writing entailed. “I had to learn that by cutting myself off from American life in order to perform an alien task, I risked cutting myself off from everything that could nourish me.” American life was indifferent rather than hostile: “it simply lacked interest in your sort of game.”10 As Bellow puts it in the first of the Jefferson Lectures, though, “no doubt, it was courageous to assert that a world without art was unacceptable,” he didn’t feel courageous. Writing of himself at twenty-two, he recalls that he felt at sea: “it was no more than the simple truth that the hero of art was himself unstable, stubborn, nervous, ignorant, that he could not bear routine or accept an existence he had not made for himself.”11 In addition, “the problem of those you loved was very keen. They didn’t know what you were up to. You yourself didn’t have a confident grasp of it.”12 This problem is the subject of Bellow’s first published story (in Partisan Review, May–June 1941), “9 a.m. without Work,” the first of “Two Morning Monologues.” Set in the 1930s, it is narrated by Mandelbaum, a recent college graduate, unemployed, waiting to be called into the Army, a “hero of art” like his creator and no less “unstable, stubborn, nervous” (“ignorant,” too, though bookish, reading Walter Scott and Malraux). Mandelbaum tries but cannot find a job, has difficulty “disposing of the day” (like Joseph in Dangling Man). His father, Jacob, pushes him out of the house each morning to search for work, puts embarrassing advertisements in the newspaper on his behalf, and can’t understand why he’s still unemployed. “So and so’s son is working for so much and so much. A dumbbell.… It seems simple to him. And he never tires. ‘You’re a teacher, aren’t you? Five years in college. The best. Alright, you can’t get a teacher’s job? … So get another job for a while’ ” (p. 231). Elsewhere: “ ‘A good boy, a smart boy, American, as good as anybody else—but he hasn’t got a job.’ One. Two: ‘Look at the money I spent on him’ ” (p. 230).

  In looking back at this period, Bellow focuses on Sonia, his mother-in-law, and Jack. Sonia kept a tidy house. One felt her “strength of will in all things. The very plants, the ashtrays, the pedestals, the doilies, the chairs, revealed her mastery. Each object had its military place.” The effect of this mastery was “to paralyze the spirit”; “the house had a tone which had to be resisted.” Some afternoons Bellow drove Sonia to the cemetery in Jack’s Hudson (Jack was a successful Loop lawyer, once even arguing a case before the Supreme Court). There she tended her husband’s grave, pulling weeds with her “trembling, but somehow powerful, spotty hand.”13 As several of Bellow’s fictions suggest, Sonia’s influence on Anita was strong. In “Far Out,” an unpublished novel he was at work on in the late 1970s, a Sonia-like character figures prominently. “Far Out” exists in a typed manuscript of a hundred pages, seen by Bellow’s agent and by his publisher. Set in the early 1950s, it concerns Peter Vallis, a hero in several ways like his creator, whose wife, Nettie (née Maslow), resembles Anita. Peter and Nettie meet as Moses and Daisy meet, under the El at 51st Street.14 They live in Manhattan in an apartment on West End Avenue, where Bellow and Anita briefly lived at the same period. Their marriage is in trouble, as was the Bellow marriage in the early 1950s. In Nettie’s ordering of the apartment, Vallis senses “a kind of preventive magic in the choice and deployment of every object.” This magic, he is convinced, Nettie learned “from her old mother, techniques of control direct from the master but without the old woman’s confidence.” Among the apartment’s unpleasi
ng objects is a rectangular fish tank holding two goldfish. “Life in a gallon of water.” In the highly organized kitchen, Nettie pins a row of brown envelopes labeled “Food, Maid, Travel, Tobacco, Entertainment, Allowance” (p. 59).

  Vallis accepts Nettie’s arrangements as he accepts the plain dinners she cooks him. “He took his pocket money from its envelope without complaint.” Nettie is “a most beautiful woman and a good one” and Vallis benefits from her orderly domestic regime even as he chafes under it. He also sees himself as part of its cause.

  He understood the difficulty. He knew also that if she was opinionated about the Consumer’s Union, or instalment buying or child psychology or socialism he was in part responsible. The moves he made were unsettling, mysterious, radical. You saw in the household the sympathetic magic by which she hoped [to] hold tight. If he would make, unmake, remake himself he could not fault her for the elaborate rigid forms her beauty had been taking, the tightness of the belts she wore, the squaw impassivity with which she smoked, the heavy roll of fair hair with which she surrounded her head, like Bach or Handel in court wig. Clearly he was responsible, insofar as she could not guess what was going on in her husband’s head. Her only recourse was to be wifely as wife was understood in Canton, Ohio. She could not rule by decree like her mother (p. 60).