The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  When the war in Europe ended, on May 8, 1945, VE Day, Bellow was still in boot camp in Brooklyn. In June, he was sent to Baltimore for three weeks of “boat drills, brine, heavy meals, sun, hell-raising.”108 On the Chesapeake Bay, trainee merchant mariners practiced raising and lowering lifeboats, rowing, firefighting drills, abandon-ship drills. In Augie they are described as “rambunctious, mauling and horsing around, prodding with boat hooks, goosing and carrying on, screaming about female genitals.” Rowing went on for “hours and hours” across the curling waters of the Chesapeake Bay, likened to “a huge bed of endive.” On Saturdays, the trainees were allowed into Baltimore, “where the tramps of the port were waiting on Clap Hill, and the denominations with printed verses” (p. 919). After Chesapeake Bay, Augie and his fellow trainees are returned to Sheepshead Bay, where he studies bookkeeping and ship’s medicine before embarking on the ill-fated Atlantic voyage that leaves him stuck in a lifeboat with a deranged ship’s carpenter, Basteshaw. Bellow, by contrast, was returned to Sheepshead Bay to be put to work for the Maritime Commission, living in barracks within easy reach of Manhattan, staying for weekends with David Bazelon in the Village. During this period, on August 6, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On August 15 the Japanese surrendered, signing the instruments of surrrender on September 2, officially ending the war. Less than two weeks later, on September 15, Bellow was released to inactive service. He had been a merchant mariner for less than six months.

  Now began a year of much movement in Bellow’s life. At the end of September, two weeks after his release, he returned to Hyde Park, to Anita and Greg (who was known as Herschel in the family, “a fine old Yiddish name”).109 Bellow was determined that the family leave Chicago. The plan, he wrote to Sam Freifeld, was to “move East” and “make my way Rosenfeld-style, as a free lance.”110 Chicago, he wrote to James Farrell on September 15, the day of his discharge from active service, “grows more like Siberia all the time.” He was now in the midst of “one of my annual drives to get out,” which in the past followed the same pattern: “I come in, petition the Czar to free me from banishment, he refuses and I get into the Pacemaker [the Chicago–New York train] with the other condemned and return.” For whatever reason (because the Britannica job, to which he could return, would finish on January 1, because he and Anita were tired of lengthy separations and he missed his son as well as wife), this time the drive to get out worked. The Czar (Anita?) acceded to a move East.

  Toward the end of September, Bellow returned to New York to find a place for the family to live. In the Atlas biography, Anita and Greg accompany him, the whole family arriving “on the doorstep of Arthur and Victoria Lidov”111 at the end of September. Arthur Lidov, a painter and illustrator, had graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in sociology in 1936, overlapping with Bellow. After nine months in Palestine, he returned to the university to do graduate work in art history. He also worked for the Chicago WPA art project on murals and sculpture commissions, and showed his paintings at Art Institute select exhibitions. He, too, moved to New York in 1945, immediately after marrying Victoria, less than a year before the Bellows. According to Lidov’s second wife, Alexandra, recounting “what I heard from my husband,” Bellow and Lidov had not known each other in Chicago, meeting for the first time in New York, when Afred Kazin introduced them one afternoon.112 Kazin’s biographer, Richard M. Cook, says it was Bellow who introduced Kazin to Lidov.113 In any event, at some point the three men met at 91 Pineapple Street, in Brooklyn Heights, an old run-down family house on the edge of Fulton Street, where the Lidovs rented a fifth-floor studio apartment, which they later sublet to Kazin. According to Kazin, the building smelled of “burned out pasta and indecipherable Greek salad,” but the studio had a fine view of the Brooklyn Bridge.114

  Around about the time Bellow and Lidov met, Lidov’s career as a commercial artist illustrating feature articles for magazines and designing covers for Fortune had begun to take off, and he and Victoria moved from Pineapple Street to a house in upstate New York, in Patterson, rented from the heiress wife of his agent. Bellow himself was in search of a place in roughly the Patterson area, not inconveniently far from Manhattan but not in suburbia, and “on an impulse,” according to Atlas,115 Lidov invited the Bellows to use his house as a base while searching for a place of their own (whether Lidov’s wife, Victoria, with whom he was soon to separate, was consulted is unclear). This is when Kazin, having separated from his wife, Natasha (“Asya”) sublet the Pineapple Street studio, where he was to stay until 1952.116 Bellow then returned to Chicago, he and Anita packed up the apartment at 5400 Dorchester Avenue (which Daniel Bell and his wife were to move into, Bell having been recruited to teach sociology at the university by the economist Maynard Krueger117), and Maury and Marge agreed to store their furniture and belongings at the grand Lake Shore Drive hotel they now owned, managed, and lived in, the Shoreland, today a University of Chicago dormitory. On October 3 Bellow sent “fraternal greetings” to Bazelon “from the Old Sod,” reporting his “triumphal” homecoming: “Whatever I do or fail to do I have the blessings of love and happiness in marriage. I don’t have to ask whether the world is real or whether it is food enough for me; I can ask no greater blessing for myself or anyone dear to me.” “We are not staying in Chicago,” he then adds. “As soon as we hear from the Lidovs we move.” They heard within the week. “We had an easy trip,” Anita reported in a postcard to the Tarcovs, on October 10, 1945, “and are fairly well settled here.”

  Anita’s initial impression of the Patterson area and the Lidovs’ place was positive. “It’s a swell house on a hill—with simply beautiful grounds—it’s like living in the middle of a Park.” During the time the Bellows lived with the Lidovs—between four to six weeks, Lidov told Alexandra—relations between the two families were mostly good. No complaints survive about household expenses or crying babies or the Lidovs’ two cats and dog. There was not, however, much contact between the couples: Bellow was writing hard, deep into The Victim, or reading, for reviews or for publishers, or house hunting. He worked in the living room, while Lidov worked in the attic, painting flat out “sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.” Lidov rarely saw Anita and the baby, there were no joint meals, few leisurely conversations, except for during the very occasional train rides the two men took together into Manhattan (Bellow took the train into the city once a week, Lidov only rarely, so busy was he with deadlines). “It is a long way to New York,” Anita wrote to the Tarcovs, “1½ hours by fast train—2 hours by slow, and most of them are slow. It’s an all-day affair when you do go in.”

  Arthur Lidov was a generous man, with a big personality. In New York Jew, Kazin writes of his “sweet pomposity.” In his Journals, always more caustic, he calls him a “pompous jerk,” “an inordinate man in every sense.” Kazin praises Lidov for looking after his dying brother-in-law (Kazin’s, that is), notwithstanding accompanying “officiousness and blather.”118 Lidov was serious about his art, including his commercial art, which he thought capable of depth and meaning, no mere advertising. Part of what kept him at his easel, painting continuously, was the decision to work in egg tempera, not an illustrator’s medium. He was also a master carpenter, constructing handsome bookshelves in the Pineapple Street studio and subsequent dwellings, and an inventor of sorts, holding a patent for a spoke-less bicycle wheel meant to be impervious to flats, developing a new technique for bas-relief. Only after Lidov left Patterson, relocating in a converted brownstone on the Upper West Side, did he and Bellow became close. In 1951 Bellow wrote part of Augie in a small side room off Lidov’s main studio. During this period, Lidov painted Bellow’s portrait (two preparatory drawings for the portrait were purchased by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.), perhaps while Bellow was creating the character of Basteshaw, the ship’s carpenter, in Augie, a late addition to the manuscript.119 “Did you recognize the man in the lifeboat?” Bellow ask
ed Kazin. “He was astonished, outraged that I hadn’t seen the exact resemblance. ‘It’s your landlord.’ ”120 Basteshaw is “built like a horse.… His poise was that of a human fortress, and you could never catch him off balance” (p. 951); much of his conversation was medical and scientific (Lidov became a specialist in medical and scientific illustration); Basteshaw was full of theories, convinced of his genius. When stuck in the lifeboat with Augie, Bastsehaw does not want to be rescued: he wants to be interned by the Spanish so that he can continue his experiments in biochemistry (with Augie as his assistant, he hopes to “understand the birth of life and be in on the profoundest secrets” [p. 963]). Not surprisingly, Augie thinks he’s mad. “The fellow was really out of his mind,” Augie declares after their rescue. “But even then, in anger, I thought, what if he really was a genius too” (p. 965).

  AFTER A MONTH OR SO of looking, the Bellows found a house in the town of Holmes in Dutchess County, ten miles from Patterson. By November 17, 1945, the family was well enough ensconced to issue invitations for Thanksgiving (Bazelon’s invitation advised him to catch a train from Grand Central Station and to dress warmly). The house represented a big change for the Bellows: it had eight rooms and they could entertain (because of the number of Thanksgiving guests, Bellow warned Bazelon, there was likely to be “a shortage of overnight space”). Almost as soon as the family moved in, however, Anita and Greg were forced to return to Chicago where Anita’s brother Jack was dying of cancer. On January 12, 1946, Bellow wrote to Henle describing himself as “holding down this eight-room house, a servitor to the pipes and heaters.” On January 15, he complained to Bazelon that he’d been “alone for a week” and invited him to come out to the house: “You can have one room to sleep in and another to work in. We have something resembling heat. We can gadabout in the car. I can promise you everything but swimming and women.”121 Bellow’s manner here masks anxieties about money, especially now that Anita wasn’t working (she did not work for the first five years of Greg’s life). In addition to reviewing (unsigned pieces for The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, and The New Republic), and selling the review copies on for one third the retail price, he was forced to take on editorial work, helping, as was previously mentioned, to choose titles for the first list of Penguin paperbacks to be published in the United States. The “three or four page” reports he wrote for his Penguin bosses, Victor Weybright and Eunice Frost, the latter “dove-like and forbearing,” were not especially remunerative: “I was paid five dollars for every work of fiction, and ten dollars for non-fiction books. I read them most attentively and carried a sack of books up and down the Harlem Valley. Of course, I preferred the non-fiction because it was easier to scan quickly and didn’t really hold my interest as deeply as a novel did.”122 Eventually, after Anita’s and Greg’s return from Chicago, it became impossible to meet the family’s expenses; in June 1946 the Bellows were forced back into “exile,” returning to Anita’s mother’s apartment in Ravenswood. Yet Bellow described himself at this period, in a letter to Henle, his publisher, as “in a high state of excitement”: the novel was going well. Shortly after they arrived in Ravenswood, moreover, the family was offered a free apartment in New York for the summer from Leo Spiegel, a psychiatrist friend of Lidov’s, The apartment was at 622 West 113th Street and the Bellows took it. Here they stayed for several months until Bellow at last found more permanent employment, as an instructor in the newly founded Humanities Division of the Department of General Studies at the University of Minnesota.

  HOW BELLOW GOT the post at Minnesota, and how he got on there, begins the next chapter. In the fall of 1946, while teaching, he put The Victim through a final revision. On January 7, Henle was sent a “first draft.” His less than rhapsodic response on February 3 elicited a wounded and wounding letter from Bellow. This letter Henle answered indignantly, defending Vanguard against Bellow’s complaints about lack of promotion for Dangling Man. On March 15, Bellow wrote a more conciliatory letter, though still upset by Henle’s lack of enthusiasm for the new novel. He was madly revising, he announced, “living on Benzedrine tablets.” By the end of the summer proofs arrived and the novel was published on November 6, 1947, at the beginning of Bellow’s second year at Minnesota. What it takes from New York, the use it makes of the city, is clear from the opening paragraph:

  On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok. The whole continent seems to have moved from its place and slid nearer the equator, the bitter gray Atlantic to have become green and tropical, and the people, thronging the streets, barbaric fellahin among the stupendous monuments of their mystery, the lights of which, a dazing profusion, climb upward endlessly into the heat of the sky (p. 145).

  Two epigraphs precede this paragraph: one from “The Tale of the Trader and the Jinni,” in Sir Richard Burton’s Thousand and One Nights, a second from Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The first introduces a rich merchant, oppressive heat, and a cruelly arbitrary, or arbitrary-seeming, misfortune, of a sort soon to be visited on the novel’s protagonist; the second, from a section of the Confessions entitled “The Pains of Opium,” is part of a recurring laudanum-induced nightmare, that of a rocking ocean “paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens; faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing; faces that surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations.” These faces are “oriental,” arising, it has been suggested, from subconscious colonial guilt or anxiety on De Quincey’s part, as well as from the Eastern origins of opium.123 Together the epigraphs suggest qualities picked up in the opening paragraph and woven throughout the novel. To begin with, urban heat, heavy, burdening, suffocating: at dawn “the factories were beginning to smolder and faced massively, India red, brown, into the sun” (p. 171); at dusk “still a redness in the sky, like the flame at the back of a vast baker’s oven” (p. 159); at night “a new tide of heat … thickening the air, sinking grass and bushes under its weight” (pp. 229–30). This heat suggests the East or Orient—“surely the sun was no hotter in any Singapore or Surabaya” (p. 183)—as does the light of the city, very different from the “broadcast light” of Mexico. The “long lines of lamps” outside the “defile” of Leventhal’s street give off a sickly yellowish glow (p. 371), like the “yellowish hot tinge” (p. 361) of Allbee’s bloodshot eyes, “the yellowish-green water” on the journey to Staten Island, and the light that washes over the towers on the shore, like “the yellow revealed in the slit of the eye of a wild animal, say a lion, something inhuman that didn’t care about anything human and yet was implanted in every human being too, one speck of it, and formed one part of him that responded to the heat and the glare, exhausting as these were” (p. 183).124

  The heat of the city, a jungle heat as well as an oriental heat, is dazing. So are the city’s thronging crowds and crashing noises. For Allbee, New York is all pushing Calibans; Leventhal, similarly, is oppressed by the city’s “overwhelming human closeness and thickness … innumerable millions, crossing, touching, pressing” (p. 290). Then there’s the racket: “the swirling traffic too loud, too swift” (p. 226); “the tumultuous swoop of the Third Avenue train rising above the continuous, tidal noise of the street” (pp. 363–64); “the concussion of the train” (p. 338). Images of flood and drowning (“What was that story he had once read about Hell cracking open on account of the rage of the god of the sea, and all the souls, crammed together, looking out?” [p. 290]) evoke Schopenhauer’s vision of reality, quoted in Chapter 4: “a stormy sea that, unbounded in all directions, raises and drops mountainous waves, howling … a world of torments.” In such a world, the self, or its agent, the principium individuationis, is the frailest of boats. A comparably dark vision of New York is offered in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, which explicitly cites Schopenhauer. In Seize the Day, as in The Victim, Schopenhauer is unmentioned, but the world of New York is no less the world as described in The World as Will and Idea: “And the great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouri
ng out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence— I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give away, I envy, I long, I die, I hide, I want.” What sounds here in each voice is Schopenhauer’s “Will,” “the cosmic force … which drives all things,” the inner manifestation or dimension of the outer storm, “the inner creative fury of the world” (p. 96).125

  This fury sounds in Bellow’s Chicago as well as in his New York, but Chicago has enticements and excitements, and exhilarating power, even in Dangling Man. New York in Bellow’s fiction, certainly in The Victim, is almost unrelievedly grim (even on a morning the heat lifts, Leventhal witnesses a scene of crazy violence outside his window, leaving him feeling “he really did not know what went on about him, what strange things, savage things” [p. 219]). The intellectual ferment that drew Bellow to Partisan Review and the Village in the early 1940s, for example, survives here only as aggression and amorality: in the interview with Rudiger, Bellow’s version of the interview with Chambers, with its “atmosphere of infliction and injury from which neither could withdraw” (p. 177); in Allbee’s jeering despair, reminiscent not only of Rosenfeld’s Village friends, quoting Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky, but of the anti-Semitic Céline. Here is Allbee on Leventhal’s “Jewish” belief that “there’s no evil in life itself”: “It’s a Jewish point of view. You’ll find it all over the Bible. God doesn’t make mistakes.… But I’ll tell you something. We do get it in the neck for nothing and suffer for nothing, and there’s no denying that evil is as real as sunshine.” Leventhal’s Jewish righteousness is an ignoble, bourgeois fantasy: