The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  I share your recollections of our trip to Banyuls. Can it be that I was then driving my own car? Or was it your car? I ask because at Banyuls I hitched a ride to Barcelona from a … big-hearted businessman although he didn’t say what his business was. What he did say rubbing his chin was j’ai la barbe serrée. He took me to a cabaret in Barcelona with several exciting women. And I ate a fine dinner of seafood—to the horror of my ancestors, probably. All these nasty little creatures scraped up from the sea-mud. Next I took a ferry to the offshore islands where I chased after a lovely American woman. I’m sorry to say that this resulted in a fiasco at the moment of embrace. I am tempted to believe that Anita sent me off under some hex. Anyway, I made my way back chastened. But what really bothers me is that I can’t remember where I left my car.97

  In an undated letter to the McCloskys, written around the time of this trip, Bellow sheds indirect light on his feelings about Anita and his marriage. His subject is academic life, to which he was reluctantly contemplating a return: “I haven’t been able to resist safety, and I haven’t been able to rest in it.” Were he to return to Minnesota, “the greatest charm of it would be living with you and Mitzi once more. But I know that I’ll jump again; that I couldn’t permanently stay. Because I understand that the best of me has formed in the jumps.”

  BELLOW MIGHT WELL BE talking of his writing here as well as his marriage, and of the decisive jump he made some months before the letter, the jump that found him his voice as a novelist. In the spring of 1949, as he was walking to his writing room, “deep in the dumps,” his eye was caught by the municipal workers cleaning the Paris streets.98 Each morning the street cleaners “opened the hydrants a bit and let water run along the curbs.”99 Bellow often told the story of what happened next, but its fullest and most finished form is found in the interview with Philip Roth:

  Well, there was a touch of sun in the water that strangely cheered me. I suppose a psychiatrist would say that this was some kind of hydrotherapy—the flowing water freeing me from the caked burden of depression that had formed on my soul. But it wasn’t so much the water flow as the sunny iridescence.… I remember saying to myself, “Well, why not take a short break and have at least as much freedom of movement as this running water.” My first thought was that I must get rid of the hospital novel—it was poisoning my life. And next I recognized that this was not what being a novelist was supposed to have meant. This bitterness of mine was intolerable, it was disgraceful, a symptom of slavery. I think I’ve always been inclined to accept the depressions that overtook me and I felt just now that I had allowed myself to be dominated by the atmosphere of misery or surliness, that I had agreed somehow to be shut in or bottled up. I seem then to have gone back to childhood in my thoughts and remembered a pal of mine whose surname was August—a handsome, freewheeling kid who used to yell out when we were playing checkers, “I got a scheme!”

  Bellow decided immediately to write the imagined life of this pal and his family, last seen in the 1920s. The decision “came on me in a tremendous jump. Subject and language appeared at the same moment. The language was immediately present—I can’t say how it happened, but I was suddenly enriched with words and phrases. The gloom went out of me and I found myself with magical suddenness writing a first paragraph.” This suddenness he figures in the language of the inaugurating experience: “It rushed out of me. I was turned on like a hydrant in summer.”100

  There is a parallel here as before with the experience of Wordsworth. A comment of Robert Penn Warren’s, quoted by Bellow, explains the connection. Warren liked writing in foreign countries, “where the language is not your own and you are forced into yourself in a special way.”101 In the winter of 1799, Coleridge persuaded Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, to accompany him on a trip to Germany, nominally for work purposes: in Wordsworth’s case to collect materials for a long philosophical poem. Coleridge spoke German but Wordsworth did not. Depressed and isolated, Wordsworth suddenly found himself writing verse about his childhood, one passage after another. Incidents from his boyhood flooded back to him, crowding out crabbed and influence-inhibited false or abandoned starts, in which “either still I find / Some imperfection in the chosen theme, / Or see of absolute accomplishment / Much wanting, so much wanting, in myself” (The Prelude, 1.263–66). What set in motion Wordsworth’s sudden burst of creativity was a memory of himself at four, bathing in the River Derwent at Cockermouth, or standing alone, “A naked savage in the thunder shower,” an image resembling Bellow’s vision of “freewheeling” Charlie August yelling “I got a scheme!”102 When he writes about this creative breakthrough in The Prelude, Wordsworth, like Bellow, describes the inaugurating experience as coming from outside himself: a literal “sweet breath of heaven / Was blowing on my body, [I] felt within / A correspondent breeze, that gently moved / With quickening virtue” (1.34–37). What unites Bellow’s memory of Charlie August and Wordsworth’s “naked savage” is a sense of being at home in the world, untrammeled: “In Paris, where [Augie] was being written,” Bellow recalls, “it was Charlie (Augie) who resisted influence and control. Childish and fresh he sat at the checkerboard and shouted ‘I got a scheme!’ I, the writer, might be hampered, depressed. Charlie, however, was immune.” Bellow in Paris was less isolated than Wordsworth in Germany, knew plenty of people, had good French, but when he later asked himself “whether I was at that time forced into myself in a special way … I am able to answer in the affirmative.”103 “The Crab and the Butterfly” was put aside and Bellow began to write at speed what became The Adventures of Augie March. In an undated letter to Volkening, written shortly after he’d begun work on the new book, he says that though he hopes to have a first draft of “The Crab and the Butterfly” in June, “progress has been slowed, for various reasons, one of them being that I have been unable to hold back from The Life of Augie March, a very good thing indeed.”

  In subsequent letters, enthusiasm increases. On June 10 Bellow writes to Volkening to say that the first draft of “The Crab and the Butterfly” is “almost done,” and that “From the Life of Augie March is the best thing I’ve ever written. The first is a book such as I might have done two, three or five years ago—a good book but nothing transcendent. This is why I’ve had the notion that it would be better to publish Augie first.” As such passages suggest, whatever Bellow’s frustrations away from the desk—with French condescension, with Anita, with the European left—from the spring of 1949, when alone in his room at the Hôtel de l’Académie or later at rue Vaneau, he was flying; and “home” was Humboldt Park, Hyde Park, at dinner with the Coblins, at the beach with Einhorn. Although Volkening cautioned him against telling Viking that he was at work on a new and different novel, by October 24 Bellow was confessing to Monroe Engel that he had “dived into something else,” on which he was working “faster than I’ve ever been able to work before. I do one fairly long chapter a week, and I expect to have the length of a book in first draft by Christmas.” In the same letter, he announces that Partisan Review is to publish the first chapter of the new novel in its November issue.

  The decision to lay aside “The Crab and the Butterfly” was exhilarating; by the autumn, the consequences of having done so began to surface. If Volkening worried that Bellow was risking relations with Viking (Engel was alarmed at first, though “impressed” with the chapter in PR),104 Bellow worried that he was risking his chance of another Guggenheim (a renewal, something then possible). His worries were well founded: the evidence suggests that he was turned down for a renewal because he hadn’t finished the novel he said he would finish.105 Bellow’s sense of himself as author meant there were emotional con sequences to laying the novel aside. On October 21, some weeks after returning from Spain, he wrote to Herb and Mitzi McClosky describing his feelings. He says nothing about his relations with Anita or other women; what he talks about is having given up on “The Crab and the Butterfly”: “It was dismaying to falter when I had so much pride in going a steady pace—at le
ast! You can see that I have been rattled, not to say wounded, in Europe. The whole thing is hard to give an account of, but I’ve had a whole breastful of ashes, not merely the Ash Wednesday sign on the forehead of Milano when he read the last chapter of the book I abandoned, say[ing] it was maudite [horrible].… He was right, it is maudite.” To Monroe Engel, in the previously quoted letter of October 24, 1949, Bellow describes his agitated state. After reading over “The Crab and the Butterfly,” he concluded that the level of the writing “had to be raised”; if not, the book would have to be “scrapped”: “I was in a state.… All my cherished pride in being a steady performer took a belly-whop.”

  Engel associated Bellow’s unhappiness about giving up “The Crab and the Butterfly” with his unhappiness about his marriage. In an interview, he recalled Anita as “a very nice woman, a very capable woman and a good mother to Greg,” but the world she and Bellow grew up in “was not going to be his world and I think the switch when he went from that book he abandoned to Augie March was part of the same thing.… He started travelling in a much faster world. He became less and less interested in her.” At the time of the trip to Spain, Bellow may also have been anxious about Augie itself, for all its coming in floods (“All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it”).106 In a letter to Bazelon of September 7, he declares: “I’m learning now to write. The cost is awful, in health and, possibly, sanity.… I’m planning to drive South alone; perhaps to Barcelona to think things over while I soak in the Mediterranean.”

  Once in Spain, Bellow experienced the familiar symptoms he’d experienced late in the summer of 1947 when he was stressed. When he returned from Spain they were alleviated in ways that also recalled the earlier summer: “I couldn’t get any food down. I had too much heart pressure and I lost weight. I can’t explain it. As soon as I returned to France I was able to eat. It seems to me, as I write, that the feelings were like those of being in love. Quite weird.” In love with Augie? With Nadine or some other girl? Bellow’s symptoms suggest ambivalence, about abandoning “The Crab and the Butterfly,” about his marriage. As in 1947, he may have feared Anita’s anger and the fate of his family; not just whether the marriage would survive, but if it did, where they all would be living and on what. Presumably Anita forgave him when he returned. Very few of her letters from the Paris years survive, and those that do contain little in the way of personal revelation. In a letter of November 13 to the Tarcovs she announces matter-of-factly that “Saul has been working very hard.… The first chapter of his new novel is in the November P.R. I’ve just read chapters 2 and 3 and it’s terrific. Best work he has ever done. He put away the novel he was working on last year—he was not satisfied with it. He went to Barcelona for two weeks to freshen up and get away from us for awhile. We were in Paris all summer.” An undated letter to the McCloskys, written sometime early in 1950, is similarly matter-of-fact:

  Our plans for the next few months are as follows—Saul is going to Salzburg to teach at the American University then in April Greg and I are going to meet him and drive down to Italy for May–June and July and then back to Paris in August and to U.S. on Aug 29th. I’ve not been out of France since we’ve been here—I went to Nice last year—and I want to see a little of Europe before I leave—that’s why we are planning a tour. Saul went to England for Christmas and to Spain in October. Now he’s staying close to home as he wants to finish Augie March by spring. I don’t see how he can—it’s half done now and really wonderful—the best thing he has written yet.

  Nothing in the correspondence suggests that Anita had doubts about the marriage. As for Bellow, though Spain was no help to his digestion, it seems temporarily to have calmed his anxieties. On December 5, in a letter to Oscar Tarcov he writes as if at ease with his circumstances. “Speaking generally, I’m in an enviable position,” he admits. “I’m in France, extremely comfortable, comfortably employed, and want for nothing except some extremely necessary things which nearly everyone else lacks too.… When I come back from seeing Spanish cities or speak with deportees and survivors, I know there’s nothing in my private existence that justifies complaint, or melancholy for myself.” After quoting Genet, he declares: “Frankly, I’m sick and tired of all that kind of melancholy and boredom. France has given me a bellyful of it.”

  BELLOW’S SALZBURG JOB WAS in a program designed to provide “informational re-education.” The Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, as it was formally known, was held annually at the Schloss Leopoldskron, in a southern district of the city. The seminar was founded in 1947 by three Harvard men: Clemens Heller, a history graduate student originally from Austria, the son of Sigmund Freud’s publisher107; a senior named Richard Campbell; and a young English graduate instructor named Scott Elledge. The seminar’s aim was to encourage intellectual exchange between American and European intellectuals and students; it was sometimes referred to as a “Marshall Plan of the Mind.”108 Though Harvard University declined to fund the seminar, the Harvard Student Council raised money for it, and solicited private donations. Schloss Leopoldskron, an eighteenth-century rococo palace, had an interesting history. Originally the home of the archbishop of Salzburg, it passed through various hands in the nineteenth century, including those of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. After a period of dilapidation, it was bought and renovated in 1918 by Max Reinhardt, the theater director and impresario, cofounder of the Salzburg Festival. In 1938, Reinhardt, a Jew, was forced to flee Austria, and the Nazis confiscated the property. When at the end of the war ownership reverted to Reinhardt’s widow, she allowed the founders of the seminar to use it for their sessions, an arrangement brokered through Austrian relations of Heller. The first seminar was held in the summer of 1947 and included among its instructors Margaret Mead, Alfred Kazin, F. O. Matthiessen, and the economists Wassily Leontief and Walt Rostow.

  Ted Hoffman, the seminar’s program director in 1950, figured prominently in Bellow’s life in the following years. He was born in Brooklyn in 1922, studied with Trilling and Mark Van Doren at Columbia, and in 1946 took a job with MGM in its Foreign Title division. In the fall of 1947 Hoffman met and fell in love with Lynn Baker, a recent Radcliffe graduate. Baker had been awarded a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne and as luck would have it Hoffman’s MGM job involved a project in Paris, to make a series of educational shorts from old newsreels. When the project was completed, a Harvard friend of Baker’s, Kingsley Ervin, who knew and worked with Clemens Heller, asked her and Hoffman if they’d help run the winter program at the Schloss.109 Lynn cannot remember how she and Hoffman met Bellow, perhaps through Ervin, or another Harvard friend, John McCormick, a graduate student in comparative literature, who also worked with Heller (and was a friend of Delmore Schwartz’s), or one of Bellow’s colleagues at Minnesota, either the theater scholar and critic Eric Bentley or Henry Nash Smith, who taught at the seminar in 1949. It was McCormick who invited Bellow to come to Salzburg in April 1950. A second invitation, for the winter of 1951, was issued by Hoffman after the Bellows had returned to the States.110

  Bellow enjoyed his month in Salzburg, “in which there was less work than other things.”111 Though scheduled to deliver lectures, he wrote to Hoffman to say that he felt discussions were “more effective, and I’ve had considerable experience at Minnesota whipping them up, even in large classes.” The topic Bellow chose for these discussions was “American Fiction from Dreiser to the Present,” and the texts assigned were e. e. cummings’s The Enormous Room, Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt, Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Faulkner’s “The Bear,” and “perhaps also Fitzgerald’s Babylon Revisited and The Last Tycoon” (the inspiration, perhaps, of the joke letter to Volkening about meeting Fitzgerald in Montreux and Geneva). If pressed, Bellow wrote to Hoffman, he would add Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises to the syllabus, though “he’s discussed to tatters.”112 When not in class or writing, Bellow went sightseeing in Vienna as well as Salzburg. In Vienna “the Russians were still in occupation.… I was fascinated, of course, I we
nt to see the monuments … I didn’t like Vienna much.” In the pages of his memoir, New York Jew, devoted to the Salzburg seminar, Alfred Kazin describes the Austrians as “the most enthusiastic Nazis in German-speaking Europe.” Just “down the road” from Schloss Leopoldskron was Camp Riedenberg, a transient camp for Jewish displaced persons, which Kazin visited. The city’s elaborate cultural offerings unsettled him, especially those involving Jewish musicians, as when Yehudi Menuhin performed at the music festival “under the good German Furtwängler, who had led the Berlin Philharmonic all through the Hitler period.”113 Bellow’s correspondence has little to say of such matters, nor do they figure in later accounts. He says nothing of the many GIs in Salzburg, headquarters of the American military in Austria. Of the students he taught—Scandinavians, Sicilians, Viennese—he speaks fondly, describing them as “overjoyed and enthusiastic,” having “a hell of a good time”114 Kazin also liked his Salzburg students, describing them in ways that recall “The Gonzaga Manscripts” and Kappy’s fiction: “The European students watched the American lecturers with awe. They were the audience, and we in Europe were the main event, absorbed in ourselves, in the rich, overplentiful runaway society whose every last detail we discussed with such hypnotized relevance to ourselves. In this war-torn year of 1947, the Europeans could not help becoming aware that they were simply out of it. We were the main event. We were America.”115