Bellow was generous to Gold and other young writers: with money (“he would always pick up the checks”), introductions, invitations to parties; he introduced Gold to Jean Hélion, the Reicheks (“Laure was young, beautiful”), Kappy, whose novel, The Plenipotentiaries, he recommended (Gold “didn’t like [it] very much,” though Kappy himself was “clever and charming and funny”). Most important, Bellow read Gold’s novel in manuscript and praised it, not only to Gold but to Monroe Engel, who bought it for Viking. “Thanks to his generosity,” Gold writes, “I became a published writer.”81 Gold’s devotion to Bellow was noted by others in their circle. “He was like an acolyte,” remembers Eileen Geist, American translator of Louis Guilloux, a French novelist long admired by Bellow: “He knelt at Saul’s feet literally.” Geist recalls sniggering with James Baldwin over what they saw as Gold’s fawning; she also remembers Gold approaching them and saying: “I don’t think the two of you like me very much,” to which Baldwin replied: “Not particularly.” What Gold remembers of Geist is that she and her husband, Stanley, gave good parties. “We used to be invited to the Geists a lot. They would come over. We’re having Jean Genet, Saul Bellow, someone at Gallimard. We’re having them for dinner. Come and have a drink.” Years later Eileen told him: “If we’d known you were going to be important, we would have invited you to dinner more often.” What Gold remembers of James Baldwin, who was a twenty-five-year-old unpublished novelist at the time, is that “Saul was a little sarcastic about him.”82 American literary Paris, in other words, was not unlike literary New York. Yet it is the mildness of Bellow’s sarcasm Gold emphasizes: “He was hard on a dead writer like Henry James. He was hard on academic writers and critics, like Trilling. But on someone like Mary McCarthy he’d just be negligently sarcastic. I didn’t see him as vicious at all. In fact, when I was being hard on the late Sinclair Lewis he disciplined me, called me to order, and actually I learned to appreciate that.”83
Eileen and Stanley Geist, at whose apartment the Bellows were given dinner as well as drinks, moved to Paris in 1949, the same year as the Golds, renting an apartment diagonally across from the one the Bellows rented on the rue de Verneuil. Stanley Geist had been a Junior Fellow at Harvard and came to Paris on the GI Bill to write. The Geists had some money (“Our families gave us nice checks on birthdays”). Eileen worked for the Marshall Plan, the Paris office of which she remembers as “like a college campus, like the Ivy League. You had a princess—a French princess—who was the receptionist, filing. She’d gone to Bryn Mawr.” Eileen was outgoing and sociable, Stanley was quiet and reserved, especially about his writing. “He was a writer who wrote,” says Eileen, “but you never saw anything he wrote, except introductions and prefaces.” Bellow trusted Stanley’s literary taste, sent him pages, and was gratified when he praised them. “Even Mary McCarthy would show her stuff to Stanley,” Eileen remembers. “She, too, trusted his judgment.” What Laure Reichek remembers about parties at the Geists’ is that they were crowded and racy, with lots of flirting. Being young (eighteen in 1949) and French, she was also struck by the confidence and affluence of the expatriate crowd: “Those people had good clothes. Those people could afford the best things.” Kappy’s wit and charm impressed her, as did his French; Eileen, a translator, called Kappy’s French “perfect,” “amazing.” The Americans Laure met in Paris “had no inferiority complex about being unsophisticated”; their easy confidence seemed to say: “We’re so powerful; after all, we liberated you.”
Laure and Eileen speak fondly of Bellow in these years as sharp, attractive, full of “hilarious” jokes and stories. But they also remember him as dangerous with women. “Once I saw him with a woman,” Eileen remembers, “I knew that the last thing a woman with a brain should do is have something serious with Saul Bellow.” Not so much because he was promiscuous (in Kappy’s phrase, “already famous for being extraordinarily busy with ladies”), as because “he was the kind of man who thought he could change women. If they weren’t the way he wanted them, he could make them the way he wanted. And he couldn’t. I mean, who can? You don’t.” What Laure remembers of Bellow at parties is that “he would turn on the charm the minute a woman walked into the room; he expected every woman to fall flat on her back … and a lot of women did” (in Kappy’s words: “if a woman caught his attention, you’d have a lot of trouble getting it back”). Because Laure was living with Reichek, Bellow “didn’t try it on me except maybe once or twice. He couldn’t help it.” She attributes this behavior to “insecurity plus discontent in one’s own sexual life,” a view she calls “an assumption but also an observation, looking at other couples.” When asked if Bellow was more of a womanizer than other men in their circle, she replied: “Yes.” As for Anita, who was often at these parties, Laure remembers her as “a nice person” but “plain,” though “she could have [looked good], if she thought that was important.” She also remembers Anita as “not flirtatious at all.” Eileen Geist concurs: “I found Anita rather boring … but she was very nice … kind of a social worker type. I don’t mean that pejoratively.” Anita was a social worker, one whose days were spent helping concentration camp survivors and orphaned children. She wanted quiet, stability. In Greg’s words, she “was tired of the moving from here to there,” at one point so upset with all the changes “that she simply sat down on the baggage in some train station or wharf. Saul recalled, ‘I had to move the luggage and your mother’ ”; she could count twenty-two addresses in the fifteen years of her marriage to Bellow.84 Her mood must also have been affected, according to Mitzi McClosky, by Bellow’s refusal to give her another child, because he knew the marriage would not last. This knowledge he would not or could not bring himself to communicate to Anita, nor could he face it himself, though it was clear to all their friends.
KAPPY’S FICTION, which Bellow admired, sheds light on the sexual mores of the expatriate community during the Paris years, as well as on Franco-American relations in general. The Plenipotentiaries is set in Paris in 1947 and centers around a young American couple: Patricia, who works for the American Graves Registration Command, lectures on the Marshall Plan, and is mixed up in a shadowy political conspiracy; and Tony, her fiancé, recently demobilized in North Africa, who comes to Paris to study painting with Pierre Tarski, “the only new painter in the world.”85 Patricia is a New Woman, politically earnest; Kappy has described her in an interview as “the sort of liberal internationalist I was, very much a liberal, not a neoconservative, welcoming the fact that the United States had been cast in this role [as world power], which made me in my twenties an important figure in the Embassy here.” Tony is earnest intellectually, pestering everyone with deep questions “about the metaphysics of Picasso, and the philosophy of L’Etre et Néant” (p. 4). The novel’s narrator, P. W. Strauss, a much older American, is at work on a novel titled The Plenipotentiaries, part political thriller, part comedy of manners, like the work he narrates (the novel has several such self-reflexive touches).86 In the nonthriller part, Pat and Tony become romantically involved with Tarski and his wife, Marie. The Tarskis love each other but have a “French” attitude to marriage: Pierre seduces Pat and Marie seduces Tony, occasioning much damaging and instructive reflection on the part of the young Americans.
Tony and Pat are the “plenipotentiaries” of the novel’s title, because that is how they are treated by the French. “Will you please tell me,” André Gide asks Tony, after Tony has climbed six flights of stairs to the Great Man’s apartment (presumably at 1 bis rue Vaneau), “when you propose to allow the General [de Gaulle, that is] to come to Algiers?” “Like everyone else,” the narrator explains, Gide “was giving Tony full powers, appointing him envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary. We are all ambassadors” (p. 82).87 Kappy may not have been a literal government agent, as Beauvoir suspected, but French attitudes, his fiction implies, make him a figurative one, like all Americans in Europe. “We’re nothing but pretexts,” Pat tells Tony, speaking of their relation to the Tarskis.
“Don’t you see? They batten on us in some monstrous way! They use us, or rather they use some myth we inspire, god only knows what! Youth, vitality, America—it’s more gruesome than you think!” (p. 214). Contact with France endangers what the novel suggests is genuinely American about Tony and Pat, “a desire to be ‘right.’ ” Tony explains, speaking of Americans in general: “We push forth on our odyssey with our eyes fixed on principle, for we have not yet learned how many winds there are and how powerless we shall be in the currents. When we begin to realize, the principle becomes subtler and more endearing—and that is the onset of irony.” Picking up the figure of the double agent or plenipotentiary, he adds: “our mission becomes a mystery—and that, too, is the onset of irony.… The world’s order has frontiers and rivers, passports and regulations, territorial disputes and strained relations! The double agent acquires a sense of humor!” (p. 206).
The complications of The Plenipotentiaries recall James’s The Ambassadors. In Kappy’s second novel, The Spirit and the Bride (1951), Jamesian echoes give way to Sartrean ones, the sort Bellow drew on (along with those of Dostoyevsky, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche) in his first two novels, the sort he was to reject decisively in the Paris years. In an interview, Kappy described The Spirit and the Bride as “too ideological,” written under the influence of “Heidegger through Sartre and Lacan.” The difference between the two novels is seen in their endings. The Plenipotentiaries ends as Dangling Man does, with the issues it raises unresolved.88 At the end of The Spirit and the Bride, the protagonist, John Clifford, unlike the protagonists of The Plenipotentiaries, or Weyl in “The Trip to Galena,” seems actually to have found what he, like Rimbaud, seeks: “La vraie vie,” “real life” (p. 127). A familiar modernist/existential descent into the void leads to breakthrough rather than breakdown. Rimbaud went off to North Africa in search of “La vraie vie”; Clifford seeks it in the North African underbelly of Paris, in glamorized violence and extremity. At the end of the night, literally, he is reborn, a new Adam.
He walked up to the Place Maubert in search of a taxi. When a cat darted across the narrow street, he said to himself, gravely: Animal I name thee cat. The sun was already high and bright, which meant a hot day for Intra-European Payments. And there was a taxi, as Clifford saw it: I name thee taxi. A pity this was not Sunday, he thought wearily, as he got into the car. God rested on the seventh day (p. 245).
French thought offers a way through in the novel, perhaps because Kappy is American; for Bellow it leads to nihilism, perhaps for the same reason. The effect it has on relations between the sexes is dismaying. Clifford’s marriage is described at the beginning of The Spirit and the Bride as lifeless. He and his wife “lived undramatically together, rather dully, in an aura of tenderness, minor irritations and boredom” (p. 8). Whether the marriage will revive after Clifford’s breakthrough is left unclear.89 In The Plenipotentiaries, the Tarski marriage, though not loveless, is open, which means “authentic”; as a consequence, it causes pain. Though truthful it could not be called happy. Contact with French culture splits Patricia and Tony. As for Kappy himself, French in this respect as in others (judging by his own testimony, that of his friends, and that of his unpublished autobiography), though he “adored” his wife, he was almost as “busy with ladies” as Bellow. “For some reason,” he writes in the autobiography, “practically all the younger French men we knew (e.g. Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, René Leibowitz, Pierre Schaeffer, et j’en passe!) were inveterate Don Juans.”90 He and Celia “grew up together, we were children together. We were really in the Platonic sense one person.” But under the influence of “four years away, North Africa, and the sort of prevailing ideology among us,” he began having affairs. The prevailing ideology “was very stupid but very commonly accepted”; especially stupid was “the fact that you were supposed to tell all this, you had to be frank about it, that excused everything, which of course it didn’t, it excused nothing. So to the insult was added the injury of this openness, to the point where the women felt obliged to do the same thing” (as Marie Tarski does in The Plenipotentiaries). “They would sort of force themselves to have affairs, sometimes they were inclined that way. I felt that way about my wife.” The existentialist overlay to all this truth telling was clear: it was “exactly what Sartre meant when he said the world is divided, in a gross way, between the salauds [bastards] and the authentic people who were open about everything.… They all bought the whole business.… The most brilliant of that generation, they were all terrible philanderers. Camus behaved absolutely outrageously.”
The most serious of Bellow’s infidelities in the Paris years came toward the end of his stay and was short-lived. At a party at Kappy’s he was introduced to Nadine Raoul-Duval. Nadine, who was twenty-three in 1950, came from a prominent French Protestant family. She had been unhappily married to Jean-Annet d’Astier de la Vigerie, a fighter pilot and hero of the resistance, himself the scion of a prominent French Catholic family. When Bellow met her, Nadine was recovering from an affair with Pierre Schaeffer (under whom Kappy had served in North Africa), having previously had a brief fling with Kappy himself (brief because Kappy, she told Atlas, was “très marié”91). Though miserable about the end of the affair with Schaeffer, she “came to my house and fell into Saul’s arms” (“Et lui?” she adds of Bellow, in response to Kappy’s quote). To Kappy, Nadine was “a smashing young lady, very dashing … a sort of smart-talking, very witty character who knew everybody and everything in Paris”; Eileen Geist remembers her as “beautiful and racy.… You just couldn’t help but like her.” At the time she and Bellow met, Nadine was working at Rapports: France–Etats Unis, a job she needed, having a small child and little income. The aim of Rapports was to provide what Sidney Hook called “informational re-education”: to counter French misconceptions about life in the United States, the Marshall Plan, international affairs, and American culture.92 According to Atlas, the affair with Bellow was serious enough for him to suggest to Nadine that they run off together to Africa. “He was very insistent,” Atlas quotes Nadine as saying, “and so attractive that I was strongly tempted to go,” though in a letter to me she insisted there was never any question of her doing so (“J’étais une maman très normale!”). Even had she been childless, she would not have gone.93 As she told Kappy, when Bellow spent the night after fights with Anita, they had “a very good relationship, we make love wonderfully.” In the morning, however, “feeling he should be only basking in me and thinking what he’s going to do with me,” she would wake to the sound of “tap, tap, tap, on the typewriter.” Bellow was downstairs at work on Augie: “He’d never stop writing.” Four years later she married the French novelist Roger Nimier.
Anita found out about the affair and was furious. Not only with Bellow but with the Kaplans. “She was outraged by all this,” Kappy remembers. “She had put him through the lean times. ‘I did all this. He owes me something.’ Well, that’s the wrong tack to take with Saul. He would not stand for that for one minute.” Anita blamed the Kaplans for the affair, accusing Celia, wrongly Celia claimed, of knowing about it; Kappy himself claimed to be “busy at the Embassy” at the time, “terribly overworked,” and not to have paid much attention to what was going on between Bellow and Nadine. Herbert and Edith Gold were privy to the aftermath of the affair, accompanying Bellow, who “needed to get away,” on a long car journey to Spain.94 According to Gold, Bellow “wailed and wept as we drove. He was also funny and full of curiosity about himself and knew the map.” Gold’s account of the trip, from his memoir, presents Bellow as miserable, furious, and wholly alert throughout, with “an almost metabolic perspicacity.” By the time they reached Banyuls-sur-Mer, near the Spanish border, where they would part, Bellow’s “unnerving claim for attention to his marital agonies” had exhausted the Golds: “His need was exclusive, unflagging, draining.” They left him at the hotel and sat down outside under an umbrella, dreading “the meal we were about to have with him before [he] drove on into Spain.�
�� Then they saw Bellow emerge from the hotel:
He was bounding towards us with a boyish grin, hair slicked down after his shower, eyes bright and skin fresh, chipper and restored. We were drained by the sufferings he seemed to shed. He was ready for a glass of wine and a good meal of the local fish stew, and his nose was twitching as he approved of the girls on their high wooden clogs in the town square of Banyuls-sur-Mer.95
In a letter to Oscar Tarcov, Bellow offered a quite different account of this trip. According to him, it was Gold who talked nonstop: “He went on for a thousand kilometers about his early days, his Papa, and his Mama and his favorite games and his school activities” (“I was trying to entertain him,” Gold later explained). Edith Gold’s memory of the trip, as recounted to Atlas, was that “they both talked: ‘He [Bellow] was in great spirits. We had a lot of fun.’ ” She remembered hearing nothing of Bellow’s difficulties with Anita, only that he said he “ ‘had to get away.’ ”96 In an interview, Gold recounted the substance of Bellow’s complaints about Anita, interspersed with comments of his own: “Partly that she was jealous and she had reason to be jealous, and he was just utterly bored with her. She was not literary. She was not particularly attractive, at least to me.… He was having a lot of affairs, he was available.… He married too young.” Later in the interview Gold described Bellow as “very negligent, he was very impatient of her.” What Bellow needed, he admitted to Gold, was to break with Anita, but he couldn’t. All that is reported of the rest of Bellow’s trip comes from his letter to Gold of December 16, 1997:
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 48
