The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  In “What Kind of a Day Did You Have?” (1984), Rosenberg, who died in 1978 at seventy-two, is clearly the model for Victor Wulpy, a seventy-year-old intellectual who, like many in the PR circle, had “so much to say that he overwhelmed everybody who approached him.”69 Victor’s mistress, Katrina, no longer talks to him of the children’s book she is writing, since it makes him “cross-eyed with good-humored boredom” (p. 291). “Kingly,” “withering,” several cuts above what he called (“when he got going”) “the animal human average,” or, to quote Wyndham Lewis, a favorite author, “the dark equivocal crowd saturated with falsity” (pp. 306, 324), Victor’s concern is ideas, his respect is “reserved for people who lived out their idea” (p. 306). He was “not the type to be interested in personality troubles. Insofar as they were nothing but personal, he cared for nobody’s troubles. That included his own” (p. 305). Though capable of political naïveté (as during the May 1968 French student crisis, “when he agreed with Sartre that we were on the verge of an inspiring and true revolution” [p. 333]), for the most part his ideas, his living for ideas, even his manners, are treated with respect. That his behavior can seem comical at times, in its indifference to feeling or convention, makes him like Socrates in the Symposium, admirable yet not quite human. Nowhere is this Socratic mixture of qualities clearer than in Victor’s demeanor when facing death. He and Katrina are aboard a small private plane flying from Detroit to Chicago in a violent snowstorm:

  As was his custom, he sketched out a summary. It included Katrina and took the widest possible overview. They were in a Cessna because he had accepted a lecture invitation, a trip not strictly necessary and which (for himself he took it calmly) might be fatal. For Katrina it was even less than necessary. For her he was sorry. She was here because of him. But then it came home to him that he didn’t understand a life so different from his own. Why did anybody want to live such a life as she lived? I know why I did mine. Why does she do hers? It was a wicked question, even put comically, for it had its tinge of comedy. But when he had put the question he felt exposed, without any notice at all, to a kind of painful judgment. Supposedly, his life had had real scale, it produced genuine ideas, and these had caused significant intellectual and artistic innovations. All of that was serious. Katrina? Not serious. Divorcing, and then pursuing a prominent figure—the pursuit of passion, high pleasure? Such old stuff—not serious! Nevertheless, they were together now, both leaning far over in the banking plane; same destiny for them both (p. 348).

  As Victor thinks about Katrina, he seeks to explain her hold over him. Though composed, like Socrates, in the face of death, unlike Socrates he’s also in thrall to Eros. A flurry of images of Katrina “both commonplace and magical” flit through his head; as he drives toward their meaning, toward the “idea” of Katrina’s “sexual drawing power,” the Cessna begins to tumble, its metal sides crackling “as if the rivets were going to pop like old-time collar buttons.” Katrina then interrupts, like Alcibiades:

  “Now listen, Victor. If it’s death any minute, if we’re going to end in the water … I’m going to ask you to tell me something.”

  “Don’t start that, Katrina.”

  “It’s very simple. I just want you to say it … ”

  “Come off it, Katrina. With so much to think about, at a time like this, you ask me that? Love?” Temper made his voice fifelike again. His mouth expanded, the mustache widening also. He was about to speak even more violently.

  She cut him off. “Don’t be awful with me now, Victor. If we’re going to crash, why shouldn’t you say it? … ” (p. 349).

  She should know why, Victor having recently lent her Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, in which the adventurer Robinson refuses to tell his mistress that he loves her and she shoots him dead (“He couldn’t say ‘I love you,’ ” realizes Katrina, a Tinkertoy heavy thinker, “it would have been mauvaise foi”).70 Victor ponders: “Atheists accept extreme unction. The wife urges, and the dying man nods. Why not?” Then the plane levels off. “They had found smoother air again and were sailing more calmly” (p. 350). The fancy Chicago executives who sent the Cessna, send a limo, “all power and luxury”; Victor makes it to his lecture and Katrina is dropped off at her home in Evanston. As he exits the car, he squeezes Katrina’s fingers and she wishes him luck: “Not to worry. I’m on top of this,” he tells her, pressing ahead. At a memorial for Rosenberg, Bellow remembered his friend saying: “I’ve heard of old age, and sickness, and death, but as far as I’m concerned those are merely rumors,” a remark uttered when “he was visibly not well, not young … he refused to be affected by the contemplation of mortality.”71 Katrina, in contrast, feels “a clawing at her heart and innards—pity for the man, which he didn’t feel for himself” (p. 351).

  Bellow admires Victor, as he admired Rosenberg, not only for his energy and bravery, but for his honesty, a quality most clearly illustrated in Victor’s case by the serious thought he gives to Katrina. “As a subject for thought, [Katrina] was the least trivial of all. Of all that might be omitted in thinking, the worst was to omit your own being. You had lost, then” (p. 349). Katrina, or her appeal, has become part of Victor’s being, and he can’t figure out how; that is, he cannot reduce her/it to an “idea.” Admirable to keep trying, but as the story implies, mental effort takes you only so far. “I dislike making statements about a literary development that depends on the imagination and will have no real existence until imagination has brought it forth,” Bellow writes in a letter to Rosenberg, defending literature over criticism. “Herzog may change the picture, my arguments in Encounter, never.”72

  Rosenberg could be tough and overbearing, like others in the PR circle. In “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” Bellow describes him as “extraordinarily fluent, persuasive, domineering, subtle and sharp.”73 “It did not distress him,” Bellow writes elsewhere, “to think harshly about basic errors, and if he liked you he could say devastating things.… It was assumed that you were intelligent enough to think them over. For me, this was salutary—objectivity-building.”74 A similar toughness—objective, comic, unsparing—marks Bellow’s account, in a conversation with Norman Manea, of “What Kind of a Day Did You Have?”:

  Here is the woman throwing herself away on this super-intellectual who has a certain amount of charm, has a real wit, and even has a solid character despite the fact that he’s talking so much all his life. He’s a great talker, but he hasn’t talked himself into inanity. So he can still respond to her. He knows perfectly well what she’s talking about. She wants to use this crisis to force him to say I love you, and he’s thinking: What female madness is this, what a time to bring it up, we’re facing the end! And still I think there’s an amount of admiration for her, for her nerve, her chutzpah, her determination to make her pitch at the last moment.

  It’s very complex. The whole thing is very complex. For instance, why should he grudge her? They’re both going to die. He might as well humor her. So she might well say. So you ask.… Well, what good is it if you’re getting him to say I Love You under duress? That won’t do either.… Yes, he’s this sort of high-class intellectual, but as I say, it hasn’t destroyed his humanity entirely, if I may put it that way.… And there’s no coming between a Jew and his jokes—a sort of permanent love of paradox and funny occasions, even if it costs you. So he’s indignant that she should be using death to intimidate him at the very last moment—because it may be that they’re never going to end this flight in safety. Anyhow, the whole passage gives me naches [Yiddish: proud joy].75

  As this passage suggests, affinity as well as amusement and admiration played its part in Bellow’s attraction to Victor and his real-life model. Though careful to keep a distance from the Partisan Review crowd, his intelligence could be like theirs, hard, mocking, dismissive.

  BELLOW FIRST ENCOUNTERED Rosenberg in the pages of Partisan Review (though he may have come across his name while working on the Illinois volume of the Writer
s’ Project American Guides series, of which Rosenberg was national director).76 In the Jefferson Lectures, he writes of sitting on a bench in Jackson Park in 1940, reading Rosenberg’s essay “On the Fall of Paris” (in the issue of November–December 1940). At the time, Bellow was feeling particularly isolated, at odds with family and community, yet he also felt “intimately connected with the vital needs of them all.” The “all” in question, he acknowledged, were wholly ignorant of those needs, and would consider him “very curious indeed” if they knew what he thought they were. He, in turn, considered the needs of family and community to be curious, as he considered anyone “living without the higher motives of which I was so wildly, perhaps ridiculously, proud” (an admission that recalls Victor Wulpy’s incomprehension of “such a life as [Katrina] lived”). In his youthful idealism, the sentences from Rosenberg’s essay that most struck Bellow were these: “In all his acts … contemporary man seems narrow and poor. Yet there are moments when he seems to leap towards the marvellous in ways more varied and whole-hearted than any of the generations of the past.” Bellow was himself “narrow and poor” at twenty-five, but “I would, for the sake of us all,” he remembers vowing, try “to leap towards the marvelous.”77

  In 1940, such a leap might take a young man to New York. Though Paris had fallen, what it stood for might be revived. “The School of Paris,” according to Rosenberg, was distinguished by its internationalism; it was “world-wide and world-timed and pertinent everywhere,” epitomizing “the Modern in literature, painting, architecture, drama, design.” In this “magnanimous milieu,” artists of all nationalities “discovered in themselves what was most alive in the communities from which they had come.” Rosenberg’s vision of “a creative communion sweeping across all boundaries” was certain to appeal to Bellow, who knew what it was like to feel disadvantaged by his background, unsure of a place in the culture of his nation. Paris released artists from all such restrictions, “from national folklore, national politics, national career … from the family and the corporate taste,” thus freeing them to find value in local attachments.78

  In the concluding paragraph of “The Fall of Paris,” Rosenberg declares that, though Paris, or what it stands for, may rise again, “no one can predict which city or nation will be the center of this new phase.”79 To an ambitious writer from Chicago, New York was as good a place as any. Not only did it draw artists and intellectuals from all over the United States, but from the mid-1930s onward it sheltered an unprecedented influx of European artists and intellectuals, including prominent contributors to PR. For Bellow, PR itself was a virtual Paris: Rahv and Phillips “thrilled us by importing the finest European writers and familiarizing the American literary public with them. Where else would you find Malraux, Silone, Koestler and company but in Partisan Review?”80 On returning to the city from war duty, Kazin was in no doubt as to its cultural centrality: “New York was triumphant, glossy, more disorderly than ever, but more ‘artistic,’ the capital of the world, of the old European intellect, of action painting, action feeling, action totally liberated, personal, and explosive.”81

  Action painting was Rosenberg’s coinage. In Lionel Abel’s words, “Harold addressed himself to making clear that no alternative to, or ideological therapy for, our condition of homelessness has yet been found, and until something of that order is discovered, our only valid works of art, our only valid actions, must continue to express a certain distance from things, from others, even from ourselves.” As Rosenberg himself put it, “At a certain moment, the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an area in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or ‘express’ as object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”82 For William Phillips, this definition of the new painting “was a remarkably suggestive characterization of the spirit animating the artistic community at the time,”83 a spirit captured in Kazin’s typically overheated formulation: “action painting, action feeling, action totally liberated, personal, and explosive.”

  Rosenberg’s great critical rival, Clement Greenberg, shared this sense of the new painting’s explosiveness. What marks it off from the other arts, he writes in the essay “ ‘American-Type’ Painting” (Partisan Review, Spring 1955), is that it “continues to create scandal when little new in literature or music does.”84 PR’s support of literary modernism was hardly daring; by the early 1940s, T. S. Eliot and Joyce were as much heroes of the academy as of the avant garde. What was daring was aligning this support with Marxist theory. Rosenberg’s “new phase” would come, Greenberg argued, from the visual arts, which, more thoroughly than literature, sought meaning outside subject matter or representation. For Greenberg, the new painting found meaning in “pure form” rather than “action” or “event.” “Abstract expressionism,” the name Greenberg gave to the new painting, was seen as an endpoint of modernism, in the visual arts at least, what painting must inevitably become given the conditions of capitalism. Modernist painting, Greenberg argues in “Towards a Newer Laocoön” (Partisan Review, July–August 1940), began with Courbet, whose pictures were marked by a “new flatness” and “an equally new attention to every inch of the canvas, regardless of its relation to the ‘centres of interest.’ ” With impressionism, “painting becomes more an exercise in color vibrations than representation of nature.” Manet, similarly, “saw the problems of painting as first and foremost problems of the medium, and he called the spectator’s attention to this” (p. 302). Finally, cubist painting sought “the destruction of realistic pictorial space, and with it, that of the object” (p. 308). With cubism, painting was brought “to the point of the pure abstraction, but it remained with a few exceptions, for the Dutch, Germans, English and Americans to realize it. It is in their hands that abstract purism has been consolidated into a school, dogma and credo” (p. 309)—a school located in the studios and taverns of Greenwich Village, where Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and others lived and socialized; a credo or dogma formulated in the pages of Partisan Review, where Rosenberg and Greenberg addressed readers and editors whose primary interests were literary and political. Soon, in William Barrett’s words, the abstract expressionists and/or action painters were seen as “the first American artists to have created a truly international style, and with their arrival, it was claimed, the center of art had now definitely passed from Paris to New York.”85

  Bellow’s relations with Greenberg were problematic. Early in his time in New York they were close. In the foreword to the PR fiction anthology, he describes himself as “very briefly a protégé.” Greenberg’s high seriousness impressed him, though eventually it put him off, as his Marxism did. He had, Bellow explains, “no illusions about Stalin. Stalin was loathed; Lenin was idolized. Lenin was hard, strict, pure and stern—merciless as a revolutionist must be when he takes power. Clem was himself strict, doctrinaire, pure and hard and believed that he was doing in art what Ilyitch had done in politics.”86 This belief derived from Greenberg’s defense or account of abstract expressionism along determinist lines. “I have offered no other explanation for the present superiority of abstract art than its historical justification,” he writes at the end of “Towards a Newer Laocoön,” “what I have written has turned out to be an historical apology for abstract art” (p. 310). In both the “Laocoön” and an earlier PR essay, “Avant-garde and Kitsch” (Fall 1939), inspired in part by Macdonald’s film criticism, and edited by Macdonald, Greenberg laid out what the art historian T. J. Clark calls “a theory and history of culture since 1850—since, shall we say, Courbet and Baudelaire.”87 This date coincides with the thought of Marx. “It was no accident,” Greenberg writes in “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” “that the birth of the avant-garde coincided chronologically—and geographically, too—with the first development of scientific revolutionary thought in Europe” (p. 49). That the movement Greenberg describes was away from representation also played a part in the dis
solution of the friendship with Bellow, perhaps even more so than Greenberg’s rigidity and dogmatism, or his claim for the “scientific” nature of his theories or their service to the proletariat. In Bellow’s words,

  Clem planted his flag and claimed the “abstract” in the name of revolution. He gave historical reasons for this and told us that without a correct view of history our efforts would be barren.

  There was no room for the likes of me in this historical picture. I was obviously stuck between kitsch and avant-garde owing to my concern with persons and with the external world. Because of my unwillingness to yield to historical necessities I was struck from Clem’s list of the elect.

  Greenberg figures prominently in the foreword to the PR anthology, from which this passage is taken, because “for some years I had thought of him as the soul of the magazine.” Now, Bellow believes, he was mistaken, not only because Greenberg “could not associate himself with any group. No editorial board could ever be pure enough to suit him” (Greenberg resigned from PR’s board, as did Macdonald, in 1943, Macdonald to start politics, Greenberg to become art critic of The Nation); more important, the magazine itself was “eclectic, willing to be heterogeneous, open to new talent in every form,” cohesive only in that its editors “knew real writing when they saw it”—which is the sort of thing one says at the end of such a foreword, but also something Bellow believed.88