IN LATER YEARS, Bellow’s view of the French and of Paris mellowed. In “My Paris” (1983), written for The New York Times Magazine, he recounts several warm memories of the city from the late 1940s, mainly of the Left Bank, to which the family moved in late April or early May 1949, when “the old auto-racer and his wife came back from the Côte d’Azur.”50 On the Left Bank there were cheap bistros, small bookstores, “dusty old shops in which you might lose yourself for a few hours,” stationers who carried “notebooks with excellent paper,” an umbrella merchant with “sheaves of umbrellas and canes with parakeet heads and barking dogs in silver.” It was enjoyable “wandering about, sitting in cafés, walking beside the liniment-green, rot-smelling Seine.” At such times Bellow could feel, as the French put it, “aux anges in Paris.” But there was no question of the city molding or “finishing” him: “I was already an American, and I was also a Jew. I had an American outlook, superadded to a Jewish consciousness. France would have to take me as I was.”51 As he wrote to Sam Freifeld in a postcard of May 28, 1949, not long after moving to the new neighborhood: “we’re here still and not Frenchified”; he himself was “more stubbornly barbarian than ever.”
According to Laure Reichek, the French wife of Bellow’s painter friend Jesse Reichek, the new apartment the Bellows moved to at 24 rue de Verneuil in the Seventh Arrondissement, was “warm, comfortable, full of old French furniture.” It was five minutes from Bellow’s writing room in the Hôtel de l’Académie on rue des Saints-Pères, and a further five minutes from the cafés of Saint-Germain: Deux Magots, Flore, and Le Rouquet, Bellow’s favorite, at the corner of Saints-Pères and Saint-Germain.52 Bellow’s routine in Paris was to write until late afternoon, lunching in his room on sandwiches put up for him at home by the bonne à tout faire and carried to work by him in his briefcase. Then, as he explains in a letter of December 5, 1949, to Oscar Tarcov, “I go home, shave, play with the kid a while, go out along the Seine, read in a café, etc.” Two afternoons a week Bellow and Reichek would meet at Le Rouquet to play casino, speak Yiddish, drink cocoa, and discuss art and culture, discussions remembered affectionately by Bellow as lectures from Reichek “on Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command and on the Bauhaus” (Reichek had been a student of Moholy-Nagy in Chicago).53 Saint-Germain in the late 1940s, as Janet Flanner describes it, sounds a little like it is today. In a journal entry of June 23, 1948, she likens the area to “a campus for the American collegiate set. The Café de Flore serves as a drugstore for pretty upstate girls in unbecoming blue denim pants and their Middle Western dates, most of whom are growing hasty Beaux-Arts beards.” The bar at the Pont Royal, “which used to be full of French Existentialists,” is now full of American tourists “often arguing about Existentialism.”54 A year later Bellow echoes her description in a letter to Bazelon of July 10, 1949: “You’re lucky not to be in the big tidal crowd that washes the stones of St. Germain des Prés. The French complain that they can’t hear French in the Quarter any more. The Americans complain of the same thing. The ‘old residents’ are sore about the influx, and everybody is ungrateful.” In the same letter he lists the New York intellectuals who have been through: “Milano [Paolo, a friend from Greenwich Village and Partisan Review circles, the dedicatee of The Victim] arrived two weeks ago. Now, Will Barrett is here. Uncle Clem [Greenberg] and Phillips are expected soon, so we’re not out of touch with the old country. I’ll never be a real expatriate because I’m always glad to see them.”
Most of Bellow’s friends in the Paris years were American. After serving in the war, Jesse Reichek arrived in 1947 from Ann Arbor, where he’d briefly taught first-year design. He came to Paris to paint, but in order to qualify for the GI Bill he enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. When he discovered that he would be required to attend classes five days a week, he transferred to the Académie Julian, in the rue du Dragon, which was happy to take his money and leave him alone to paint. Reichek met Bellow through another painter, Charlie Marx, described by Laure Reichek as “the only New York Jew in the group who had money.” Marx and his wife, Caroline (née French, from the pharmaceutical company, Smith, Kline, and French), lived in a spacious two-bedroom apartment at 33 rue Vaneau, where the Bellows would eventually live.55 In a letter of December 5, 1949, to Oscar Tarcov, Bellow blamed his lack of French acquaintances on the fact that “you have to make an enormous effort to justify yourself to the French and prove that you’re not a barbarian at best and a pain in the ass at worst.” In the unpublished story “Nothing Succeeds,” set in Paris in 1948, the narrator describes the French as “irritable, rancorous, tremendously susceptible to boredom, tremendously equipped for bickering, infighting, vexation and spleen.”
Oh! C’est marrant, agaçant, emmerdant. Il a du front, du toupet. Il me rase, il me casse les pieds.… As pleasantly as I knew how I asked a man on the Champs Elysées to direct me to the rue de Berri. He said with a terrific smile that he hadn’t the slightest idea where it was. Actually it was about fifty feet ahead, the next street up.… Where was the rue de Berri? He said smiling, in a perfect rapture of nastiness and capturing a splendid opportunity “Je n’ai aucune idée!” But this was typical, and it was real.56
Rue Vaneau, five or so streets southwest of rue de Verneuil, had a distinguished literary and intellectual pedigree. Karl Marx had lived at number 38, Ernest Renan at number 29, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry at number 24. When the Bellows lived at number 33, a large apartment building, André Gide lived nearby, at 1 bis rue Vaneau, where Camus had briefly lived; Eduardo Paolozzi, the Scottish sculptor, and Nicola Chiaromonte also had apartments in number 33.57 Bellow got to know the street while still at rue de Verneuil; sometime toward the end of 1949 he gave up his writing room at the Hôtel de l’Académie and rented a room at number 33.58 The building was owned by the French wife of a Swedish sea captain, Janine Lemelle, a “jolly” woman who not only liked Americans but was a decent landlady. That she once owned a bookshop (“hers was a literary house”) was also in her favor, as was the fact that she brought Bellow coffee twice a day. At some point, Bellow struck up a deal with her, agreeing to install a gas hot-water heater in her kitchen in exchange for two months’ rent: “It gave her great joy to play with the faucet and set off a burst of gorgeous flames. Neighbors came in to congratulate her. Paris was then in what Mumford called the Paleotechnic Age.”59 Among the congratulating neighbors were two American painters, Margaret Stark and Jane Eakin, who also rented rooms from Madame Lemelle and who became friends with Bellow. Other artists Bellow met, again mostly American, belonged to a set centered on Jean Hélion, a French painter long resident in the United States, and his wife, Pegeen Guggenheim, also a painter, the daughter of Peggy Guggenheim. Ulrich “Jimmy” Ernst, another painter, the son of Max Ernst and Pegeen Guggenheim’s stepbrother, was connected to the Hélion set. Laure Reichek remembers meeting Richard Wright and the choreographer Merce Cunningham at parties at the Hélions’, which were less grand than Kappy’s parties in Montparnasse. “Kappy was upscale,” recalls Laure. “I remember seeing on the grand piano a spray of roses in a crystal vase. Who can afford a whole branch or spray of roses, something you buy in a fancy flower shop?” Bellow was on the periphery of the Hélion circle but Laure remembers him engaged in animated discussions with her husband and other painters on such topics as “the function of art in the modern world, the limits, if any, to artistic subject matter.”
Nicola Chiaromonte became a good friend of Bellow’s in this period. They had known each other in New York, through both Partisan Review and the Europe-America Groups. Chiaromonte was ten years older than Bellow, a man of great charm and warmth, though as William Phillips puts it, “given to periods of silence especially with talkative people—a trait that reinforced the role of saint assigned to him by many of his friends.”60 This role William Barrett, Phillips’s coeditor at PR, explains: Chiaromonte “had lived through, or actually fought in, all the major conflicts of the time about which most of the intellectuals in New York had onl
y argued.”61 In 1934, he left Rome for Paris, where he was briefly associated with anarchist movements; two years later he flew with André Malraux’s Republican squadron, becoming the model for the character Scali, an art-historian-turned-bomber, in Malraux’s novel Man’s Hope (1937). After fleeing occupied France for Algeria, where he befriended Albert Camus, Chiaromonte came in 1941 to New York, where he met his second wife, Miriam, and supported himself by writing not only for PR but for The New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, and Dwight Macdonald’s politics. After the war, in 1947, he returned to Italy, where he wrote theater criticism for the liberal weekly Il Mondo. When Bellow visited Rome in February 1949 to get away from rue Marbeuf, he looked Chiaromonte up.62 Later that year, Chiaromonte returned to Paris to live, writing the “Paris Letter” for the February 1950 issue of Partisan Review.
In addition to living in the same apartment building as Chiaromonte, Bellow saw him at parties at the Kaplans’, in the cafés of Saint-Germain, and on visits to the Russian-born Italian writer and political philosopher Andrea Caffi, who occupied rooms below Bellow’s room in the Hôtel de l’Académie. It was Chiaromonte who brought Caffi to Paris from Toulouse, where he had been active in the French resistance. Chiaromonte was the courier for monies from the Europe-America Groups, and it was these monies that in 1948 helped to pay for Caffi’s relocation to Paris and subsequent rent and expenses. Caffi interested Bellow because he so thoroughly fitted the image of the European intellectual émigré. Born in 1887 in St. Petersburg to Italian parents, he was trained as a historian (in Berlin, with Georg Simmel), was fluent in several languages, an accomplished Greek scholar, devoted to books and learning. Caffi had formal manners, loved conversation (with men, he disliked women), and passed most of the day “in bed drinking coffee and writing learned notes to himself.” What money he earned came from work as a reader for Gallimard and from articles for Dwight Macdonald’s politics, written under the signature “European.” “He was tall but frail,” Bellow recalled, with “an immense head of hair, and a small nervous laugh, but he was a serious man.”63 To Lionel Abel, “Caffi represented, and tried in his own way to re-establish, the kind of atmosphere that may have prevailed in the circles of atheists and libertines in the seventeenth century, and the salons of the philosophes in the eighteenth.”64 “Caffi was the guru,” said Kappy, speaking of the older man’s relationship with Abel and other disciples. “For a year,” Abel wrote, he saw Caffi at the Hôtel de l’Académie, “almost every day at lunch and dinner.”65 Bellow took Caffi seriously. “I listened to Mr. Caffi when he described America as the new Rome,” he told Roth. “I was deferential and respectful, aware that he was trying to do good, to raise my mental level. He did as much for his Italian disciples—his helpers. They brewed his coffee and moth-proofed his winter clothes.”66 Much of Caffi’s talk was political or historical. His bête noire was what he saw as the nineteenth-century notion that genius was unsociable or even antisocial. He spoke and wrote eloquently of the miseries of life in Russia under the Stalinists. In 1917, as an Italian journalist in St. Petersburg, he spent much of his salary feeding starving children.67 Abel recounts how the Italian poet Ungaretti came to visit Caffi at the Hôtel de l’Académie with Italy’s ambassador to France. Ungaretti’s mission was “to ask Caffi’s forgiveness for the poet’s support of Mussolini under fascism.”68 Kappy—known to Caffi as “Ka-Plan Marshall”—was no disciple, but he, too, was a frequent visitor. Soon after Bellow began work on Augie he gave Caffi pages to read. “He’s a real writer,” Abel remembers Caffi saying, pleased to find the young American novelist free of what, speaking of Joyce, he called “the hubris of modernism.”69 “When one of his visitors said that I did not seem to be getting what an American should get out of Paris,” Bellow recalled, “M. Caffi wisely replied that it was only natural that I should be thinking of America most of the time.”70
IT WAS DURING the Paris years that Bellow paid his first visit to England. In the autumn of 1949, William Phillips came to Paris on a Rockefeller grant, accompanied by his wife, Edna. The Phillipses saw a lot of the Bellows that autumn, and just before Christmas they and Bellow traveled to London together. Anita’s work, as well as the needs of five-year-old Greg, kept her in Paris, where she had a job at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), a relocation agency for European refugees. At first she worked in its child care department, visiting orphanages, “trying to teach the directors what we do in America … [though] I never even saw an orphanage in America” (Greg remembers accompanying her to work one day and visiting an orphanage, a place with “long, bleak, frightening corridors”). After six months she was “promoted to the medical dept … conducting a survey of the chronically sick in France—who are receiving aid from J.D.C. It brings me into contact with all the Jewish clinics in Paris.”71 Greg, meanwhile, enrolled for a second year of kindergarten, to avoid a French elementary school, though he remembers being “completely bilingual and able to entertain adults by imitating Americans trying to speak French.”72 In a letter to the McCloskys, the source of her quotes about the JDC, Anita writes of Greg that he “goes to school in the morning and I am home for lunch”; that he adores the Danish girl who takes care of him; and that Anita feels guilty about being away during the week and spends “all Saturday and Sunday with him—as a result I have no time for myself.” This is as close as she comes in the correspondence to complaining about her circumstances, about missing trips or being stuck at home.
Arriving with the Phillipses in London on December 16, Bellow planned to stay for “five or six days.”73 Shortly thereafter, Cyril Connolly, editor of Horizon and a PR contributor, threw a party for them. “The room was filled with bright talk,” Phillips remembered, “which the English appeared to have invented, and the overall effect was a spirited cadence in a language that was both familiar and foreign.” Phillips felt “like the mythologized American primitive abroad.”74 Some months earlier, in the May 1949 issue of PR, the one in which Bellow’s monologue “A Sermon by Dr. Pep” appeared, Connolly’s “London Letter” gave some indication of what Bellow might expect. “Let us suppose,” writes Connolly, “that a young novelist, we will call him Harold Bisbee, whose first novel so perfectly shaded off the social boundary between the Far and Middle West, has collected enough prize money to visit his London and Paris publishers” (p. 523). What will greet him at the party his English publisher throws for him? “As he looks round the crowded cocktail party, hugging a thimble of something warm and sweet with a recoil like nail polish remover, he will certainly observe four facts about English writers. They are not young, they are not rich, they are even positively shabby; on the other hand they seem kind and they look distinguished, and their publishers look hardly more prosperous and hardly less distinguished than they do” (p. 525). Connolly ranks the writers likely to be present: “the Sitwells are generally in the country but Mr. Eliot will probably be there, accompanied by Mr. John Hayward.… Towering over the rest are Mr. Stephen Spender and Mr. John Lehmann, two eagle heads in whose expression amiability struggles with discrimination.… About nine inches below them come the rank and file, Mr. Roger Senhouse, Mr. Raymond Mortimer, Mr. V. S. Pritchett, Miss Rose Macaulay, Miss Elizabeth Bowen, Quennell, Pryce-Jones, Connolly, we are all there” (p. 525). If he is lucky, young Mr. Bisbee will meet an English girl “struck by something poetical in his fading youth.” She will take him to bed “ ‘sauter pour mieux reculer,’ as is the English way, and after talking about frigidity there for an hour and a half she tells him about her former lovers, and bursts into tears” (p. 526).
What Bellow reported about Connolly’s party and the party thrown for him by his English publisher, John Lehmann, is that he was either patronized or cut by the people he met, and that everyone seemed to be homosexual or drunk or both.75 “I wish I had stayed in a temperance hotel with the temperate,” he wrote in an undated letter to Robert Hivnor. “Although I don’t judge the inverted with harshness, still it is rather difficult to go to London
thinking of Dickens and Hardy, to say nothing of Milton and Marx, and land in the midst of fairies. My publisher is one; all the guests at his cocktail party were ones; all the Horizon people, with the single exception of a man who apparently suffered from satyriasis, likewise at their cocktail party. This single exception was chasing Sonia Brownell Orwell.… It was confounding. Modern life is too much for me.”76 Bellow had not met Lehmann before; when the publisher visited Paris in September, he was out of town and Lehmann had to make do with the “inverts” Gide and Truman Capote, who had just published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms.77 Though Bellow didn’t think much of London literary life, he liked London: “There was a fire in the Covent Garden basement, carol-singing in Trafalgar Square led by a spontaneous girl who stood on the base of a statue.”78 He records no patronizing anti-Americanisms, though William Phillips writes of being greeted by Geoffrey Gorer, whom he had never met before, with the words: “You have destroyed the monuments of Europe” (by which Gorer meant they had been marred by American GIs carving their initials or names or slogans on them). Phillips answered, as Bellow might have done, that American GIs “kept Europe out of concentration camps.”79
IN PARIS, Bellow’s American friends were mostly writers and intellectuals. He became especially close with Herbert Gold, an ambitious young novelist from Cleveland, Ohio, who was nine years his junior. Gold came to Paris in 1949 on a Fulbright Scholarship, on the eve of finishing his first novel, Birth of a Hero (1951). His wife, Edith, was also on a Fulbright, to study literature at the Sorbonne. Gold remembers Bellow in 1949 as “already a figure.” In a 2008 memoir, he calls him, along with Richard Wright, “the most esteemed American writer in residence during my three years there, 1949–1951.” Bellow was “destined to be America’s new great novelist,” an impression supported by his “confident and graceful lounging, on view especially at the café Le Rouquet near Saint-Germain-des-Prés.” The younger writers in Paris—Gold names James Baldwin, Evan Connell, Terry Southern, Otto Friedrich, George Plimpton, and Max Steele—looked on admiringly: “We would-bees on our G.I. Bill money, our Fulbright money, our selling our clothes, cigarettes, and dollars on the black market, saw him as an Old Master in his early thirties. He had climbed the heights while some of us were still peddling hashish to gullible Frenchmen under the chic American name ‘marijuana,’ or serving as gigolos to existentialist millionaires, or worst of all, cadging handouts from family grinds back home.”80
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