The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Among the people Bellow met at Paco’s were Joseph Hilton Smyth, the publisher of The Saturday Review of Literature, and his girlfriend, an African American cabaret singer named Hazel Scott. The cadaverous Smyth was the author of pulp novels (I, Mobster; To Nowhere and Return), who in 1938 emerged from bohemian obscurity in Greenwich Village to purchase two venerable American magazines, The Living Age and North America Review. He then bought a third, Current History, plus a large interest in Saturday Review. The source of Smyth’s wealth remained mysterious until 1942, when the FBI arrested him, along with two associates, and accused him of spying for the Japanese. Smyth pled guilty, confessing that he had received $125,000 over the previous four years for serving as a Japanese agent.58 When Bellow met him in Taxco in the summer of 1940, he was flush, accompanied by the beautiful, light-skinned Scott, already a star on radio and in the clubs of New York. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Scott trained at Juilliard, was mentored by Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson, performed as pianist and singer with Count Basie, starred on Broadway, played twice at Carnegie Hall, and later married the African American pastor and politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr. An outspoken critic of racial injustice, later of McCarthyism, she was often accused of having Communist sympathies. When Bellow met her with Smyth she had just turned twenty.

  Smyth and Scott are the likely inspiration for the interracial couple in a novel Bellow worked on in 1940 entitled “Acatla,” the name he gives to the Taxco-like setting of the Mexican scenes in Augie (taken, perhaps, from the town of Acatlán, in Puebla, a state to the southeast of Taxco). “Acatla,” the earliest surviving Bellow manuscript, consists of 66 pages, in three fragments, from a work of at least 106 pages. It describes the consequences of an interracial couple, the Hobarts (an assumed name, they’re not married), booking into a hotel in Acatla. The hotel, Las Palmas, is managed by Scinatti, “of Piedmontese heritage” (p. 26), and when some American guests complain about the presence of the interracial couple, Scinatti decides, “from a business standpoint” (p. 21), that the couple will have to go. After all, “I can’t tell them [the protesting Americans] what to like. It is not for me to tell them” (p. 45). Later Scinatti argues that “one man cannot change everything.… You will not change anything. I will not change anything” (p. 48). When two young students, one a political radical, protest at the decision, Scinatti remains firm. Another guest in the hotel recognizes Mrs. Hobart as Emma Paulas, whom he used to see “in New York at the Kangaroo Club” (p. 29). Among the bigoted American residents at the hotel are the Alexanders, like something out of Lawrence (“He stood tensely on the stirrups as if determined to overmaster his horse, to make it submit to his will” [p. 53]). The first and longest fragment ends with the Hobarts ejected from Las Palmas. The second much shorter fragment, titled “Chapter III,” consists of little more than preliminaries to an account of Hobart by a character named Bartell. “There have been times when I would have paid to be unable to remember a single thing about Richard Hobart” (p. 77), Bartell begins, sounding like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, or John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, at which point the fragment breaks off. The third fragment, “Earl Huner,” is comparably brief and teasing. A character named Jacoby begins telling the early history of Hobart and his brother, Jay, who were involved in a failed scam of some sort in Europe. And again the fragment breaks off.

  The writing in “Acatla,” a third person narrative, is controlled, polished, nothing more. Rare moments of life occur in description, as when a character feeds a doe and feels “the humid, massy softness of the creature’s muzzle” (p. 40), or when Mrs. Hobart breakfasts in the hotel with “the trained composure of a person who had mastered the secret of imperturbable privacy under the public stare” (p. 32). It is the content of “Acatla” rather than its style that is noteworthy, in particular its preoccupation with racial injustice, the subject of “The Very Dark Trees,” the novel Bellow would finish the following year. Bellow’s interest in race was fostered by his studies not only at Northwestern but at the University of Chicago, which had a tradition of research into “Negro-White relations.” Passin, too, was interested in race. Redfield, his teacher at the University of Chicago, was an authority on the subject, and immediately before coming to Mexico, Passin had worked on a University of Chicago excavation project at Kincaid, Illinois, a poor farming region in the center of the state in the Ohio River Valley. The WPA employed impoverished black and white farmers from the area to do the digging at the site, and Passin became interested in the racial makeup of the community, as well as in the ethnological peculiarities of the region. In addition to their work on the excavation site, he and a fellow graduate student, Robert Bennett, with the encouragement of Redfield, decided to interview the diggers at Kincaid about a range of issues, including their attitudes to race.59 In Taxco, therefore, when Bellow talked of or read from a work in progress, something he did throughout his life, he would have found in Passin an informed and interested listener.

  The most memorable of Bellow’s adventures in Mexico occurred late in the trip. Through Al Glotzer and a European woman Bellow had met in Taxco, an interview with Trotsky was arranged for Bellow and Herb Passin, for the morning of August 20. The meeting was to take place at Trotsky’s villa at 19 Avenida Viena in Coyoacán, now a district of Mexico City, at that time a village just to the south. “One of my reasons for going to Mexico,” Bellow told Norman Manea, “was to have some conversation with Trotsky.” When he and Passin arrived at Avenida Viena, they noticed “an unusual amount of excitement.”

  We asked for Trotsky and they said who are you, and we said we were newspapermen. They said Trotsky’s in the hospital. So we went to the hospital and asked to see Trotsky and they opened the door and said, he’s in there, so we went in and there was Trotsky. He had just died. He had been assassinated that morning. He was covered in blood and bloody bandages and his white beard was full of blood.60

  In fact, Trotsky did not die until the evening of August 21, after an operation, and more than twenty-four hours after the attack. The assassin was a mysterious Soviet agent, Ramón Mercader, who had infiltrated Trotsky’s inner circle.61 Trotsky was in his study reading, when Mercader, standing behind him, took an alpine axe from beneath the raincoat he was carrying and smashed it into the back of the Old Man’s head. The blow penetrated seven centimeters into the skull. Trotsky screamed and struggled with the assassin; bodyguards rushed in and would have beaten Mercader to death had Trotsky not stopped them.

  In “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence” (1993), Bellow gives a slightly different and more detailed account of his and Passin’s visit to the scene than the one he gave to Manea:

  It was on the morning of our appointment that he was struck down. Arriving in Mexico City, we were met by the headlines. When we went to his villa we must have been taken for foreign journalists, and we were directed to the hospital. The emergency room was in disorder. We had only to ask for Trotsky. A door into a small side room was opened for us, and there we saw him. He had just died. A cone of bloody bandages was on his head. His cheeks, his nose, his beard, his throat, were streaked with blood and with dried iridescent trickles of iodine.62

  According to Passin, in an interview with Atlas, the meeting with Trotsky was arranged for August 21 not 20. News of the attack on the previous day reached them when they arrived in the city and they immediately hurried not to the hospital but to the morgue, on Calle de Tacuba. It was in front of the morgue that the police waved them through the gathered crowds. “They went up a flight of stairs, Passin recalled, ‘and there, by God, was Trotsky.’ The open coffin was surrounded by a crowd of photographers on ladders.”63

  Bellow drew on this episode both in Augie and in “The Mexican General,” the second of his fictional contributions to Partisan Review, published as the lead item in the May–June 1942 issue.64 The story grew in part out of the visit to Coyoacán, in part out of a visit to Janitzio, the main island in Lake Pátzcuaro, in the state
of Michoacán. In an undated postcard to Al Glotzer, Bellow described Janitzio as “the wildest place I have ever seen … el presidente’s private reserve—muy primitive you know, with pigs underfoot.” It was here that he encountered the model for the general, “a police official I met in Pátzcuaro accompanied by two ladies”65 (according to Atlas, the general was Colonel Leandro A. Sánchez Salazar, jefe [chief], the title given to the general in the story, of the Mexican secret police, later, with Julián Gorkin, coauthor of Murder in Mexico: The Assassination of Leon Trotsky [1950]).66 The story’s setting is the tourist town of Pátzcuaro, and the general is accompanied by three ladies, his “nieces,” with whom he is on intimate terms. He has come to Pátzcuaro to recuperate from the stress of managing the scenes surrounding the assassination of Trotsky (the viejo or “the old Russo”). “It didn’t all happen in Coyoacán,” the general’s lieutenant, Citron, explains, “it merely began there: the rest took place at the Cruz Verde hospital and at the mortician’s at Tacuba 4 and elsewhere” (p. 244). The general has political ambitions and parades his authority at the murder scene, the hospital, and the morgue, allowing photographers and journalists inside (“ ‘But no noise,’ he said. ‘Please respect the presence of the Señora [Trotsky’s wife, Natalia Sedova]’ ” [p. 247]), making statements, inserting himself into photographs, showing up at ceremonies and memorials, always in uniform, “always next to the old woman” (p. 250).

  No one in the story is equal to the occasion of the great man’s death. Citron’s job is to watch the sobbing assassin: “I have seen better behaved murderers than that one. I felt sorry for the viejo. He deserved a more manly antagonist” (p. 245). The general has little sense of the importance of Trotsky: “he could feel no more than his own part of it. He knew nothing at all about the rest, the two old people and the murderer and what it meant to have an enemy at the other side of the world at whom you could never strike back” (p. 248).67 Citron, a thoughtful man, “a man of superior education” (p. 180), is depressed by the distance between the event’s importance and his experience of it, “a lack of fitness that throws suspicion on everything and makes us sure there must have been precisely such vanities and blunders in the greatest Passions. Although it would be cheap to discredit them for that” (p. 249). He feels “carried along” by events, distressed by and vaguely complicit in the vulgarity over which the general presides. In this, he is like his creator. Before Bellow decided to meet Trotsky, he worried over his motives. “I thought, how could I go see the great man and take up his time by discussing theoretical questions that he understood a thousand times better than I, especially since he invented the theory himself. I couldn’t possibly have argued with him.”68 Though “always a little reluctant to push myself on people,” he nonetheless decides to go, for reasons he lamely justifies: “Finally, I thought, I have an introduction now to him, and I am in Mexico, and will take the bus and make an appointment.” The funeral, which he attended with Passin, was “the usual Trotskyite oratory.”69

  In Chapter 20 of Augie, Bellow sends his hero, heartbroken over the failed love affair with Thea, to Coyoacán, where a Trotskyist friend from Chicago, Hooker Frazer, is part of the Old Man’s inner circle. Augie arrives sometime after an earlier assassination attempt of May 1940 (the Mexican painter and Stalinist David Siqueiros was one of its leaders), and Frazer tries to enlist him as a bodyguard. The plan is for Trotsky to take off his beard and mustache, cut his hair, and travel incognito through the country as a tourist. To do this, Frazer explains, “he’s going to need a nephew from the States” (p. 858). Though “rescue and peril” attract Augie, he is wary of being “sucked into another one of those great currents where I can’t be myself” (p. 858). In the end, he agrees on the plan, but is relieved when the Old Man vetoes it. What persuades him is proximity to greatness. He was “flattered by the chance to be with this giant historical personality, speeding around the mountains” (p. 859). Something similar seems to have motivated Bellow, both in attempting to see Trotsky and in attending his funeral. After the funeral, he and Passin returned to Acapulco where they met Anita and Cora and stayed some days at the Excelsior Hotel, high above the bay. There they swam, sunbathed, and watched local boys dive for coins from the rocky cliff. Passin then went off to his fieldwork with the Tarahumara Indians and the Bellows and Cora climbed into her Ford, the car they had eloped in, and headed back to Chicago. The only thing the Passins’ son, Tom, remembers hearing of the Mexico trip was that his mother fearlessly negotiated the mountain roads on the journey home.

  ONCE BACK IN Hyde Park, the Bellows rented an apartment at 5235 Kimbark Avenue, one street closer to the campus than Kenwood Avenue. Anita returned to social work and Bellow resumed teaching at Pestalozzi-Froebel (among the courses he taught were Anthropology I and American Minority Groups70). The war and the draft figure prominently in his correspondence. In a letter postmarked December 9, 1940, Bellow writes to Tarcov with news of his draft number: 282, which means that even “with every possible deferment I can’t hope to stay out of uniform longer than a year.… At best I can only make class 2 [deferred from the draft because of occupational status].” Bellow professes not to be fussed by this news: “I was surprised that I personally was getting away with it so long.… It’s a rather heavy-footed irony that I who hate so much and fear so much anything of a ‘kill’ or ‘crush’ connection should be drawn into army service so quickly.”

  In a letter to Tarcov of January 21, 1941, Bellow is silent about the draft, and apologizes for not being able to repay a loan. He needs money for a trip to Windsor, Ontario, the southernmost city in Canada, for reasons he does not specify. The purpose of the trip is revealed in a “Petition for Naturalization” issued by the Department of Justice on June 2, 1943. According to the petition, Bellow entered the United States on January 31, 1941, from Windsor, arriving at Detroit and seeking naturalization under Section 311 of the Nationality Act of 1940. In a subsequent letter to Tarcov, of February 8, Bellow writes: “I’m completely legalized now and there is no danger for me as long as aliens are not touched, and even then it is safe to suppose that Canadians will have relative immunity when they start filling the camps (for I believe there will be camps). So far indications are that since I am a non-citizen I am not draftable and, while I don’t feel exactly comfortable and secure, it is reasonably permissible for me to make some plans for next year.” The reference to “camps” recalls “The Hell They Can’t!” and suggests a continuing Trotskyist doubt about the war, in spite of Bellow’s opposition to Trotsky’s views on other political issues.71

  Bellow’s attitude to the war was reinforced by Partisan Review, which as he told Keith Botsford in his interview, “had considerable influence with me.” People he admired at the time, such as Dwight Macdonald and Clement Greenberg, “kept saying, ‘Don’t kid yourself, this is just another imperialist war. Don’t be seduced by propaganda as people were in World War I.’ ”72 The formal position PR took on the war was no position at all, or no single position. In “A Statement,” published at the front of the issue of January–February 1942, the first to appear after Pearl Harbor, the editors (Clement Greenberg, Dwight Macdonald, George L. K. Morris, William Phillips, and Philip Rahv) agreed to disagree. “No two editors,” they admitted, “hold the same position on all major issues. The actual outbreak of hostilities has not altered this line-up. It is clear, therefore, that Partisan Review can have no editorial line on the war. Its editors will continue to express themselves on the issue as individuals.” If readers find the views expressed by individual editors “radical” (“in the literal sense of ‘going to the roots’ ”) so be it: “No intelligent decisions can be made without a full consideration of alternatives.” Behind this staunch endorsement of freedom of expression, it has been suggested, lies an element of calculation, especially after the cooperation of Allied forces with Stalin, from 1941 when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, to the end of the war in 1945. As Hugh Wilford puts it in The New York Intellectuals: From
Vanguard to Institution (1995), “even Macdonald recognised the need for editorial self-restraint lest the government crack down on PR as an anti-war publication.” But opinion was genuinely divided, as it was with Bellow. Though “sobered up” by the fall of France, as earlier by the Nazi attacks on Jews in Warsaw in 1939, “I was still in the grip of leftwing ideology.”73

  There were also temperamental and career reasons for Bellow’s ambivalence about the war, in addition to his hatred and fear of “kill” and “crush.” When “Two Morning Monologues” was published in the May–June 1941 issue of PR, Bellow was only twenty-five, proud to be appearing in the same pages as T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, James Burnham, Clement Greenberg, and Dwight Macdonald. Earlier that spring, Philip Rahv and his wife had come out to Chicago, accompanied by William Barrett. Rahv was introduced to Bellow by Barrett and was impressed, as he was with Harold Kaplan, characterizing them both as “the Delmore Schwartz type: brilliant and yet at the same time methodical and responsible.”74 “Two Morning Monologues,” however, was the sole fiction Bellow had published in five and a half years75—despite spending the last three and a half of those years as a full-time writer, or almost a full-time writer, taking on only part-time work, dependent for financial support on his wife and on handouts from his family. Since his marriage, Bellow’s stories had been rejected not only by well-known publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and The Kenyon Review, but by obscure periodicals, most recently, Accent, published out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.76 Had PR not accepted the monologues, and later “The Mexican General,” he told Norman Manea, “I don’t know what I would have done.… I would have been very deeply discouraged.” Yet he was not proud of the stories (“I thought I could do better”),77 a characteristic reaction, evidence of confidence in his powers. Though he might doubt his ability to support a writing life, Bellow rarely doubted his potential as a writer. His extreme sensitivity to criticism in these years—throughout his life, some would say—had less to do with authorial anxiety than with wanting his due. As William Barrett, late of Wieboldt Hall, put it, the “chip” Bellow carried on his shoulder in the 1940s was “of self-confidence.”78