The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  FROM SALZBURG, the Bellows traveled on May 2 to Venice, then on to Florence, arriving in Rome in mid-May. There they saw much of Paolo Milano, with whom Bellow was close in these years. Milano was a decade older than Bellow. He was Jewish, born and educated in Rome, but in 1939, a year after Mussolini’s adoption of the Manifesto della raza (Manifesto of Race), he left Italy for France. When France was occupied, he fled to New York, arriving in the United States in 1940, a year before Chiaromonte. Fluent in French, German, Spanish, English, and Italian, Milano soon found work at the New School and then as professor of Romance Languages at Queens College, CUNY. He also began writing for Partisan Review and The New York Times Book Review. Although living in Rome in the summer of 1950, he did not return permanently until 1955, when he became chief literary critic for L’Espresso. Bellow valued Milano for his critical acumen, urbanity, and wide knowledge of European books and writers. It was Milano who introduced Bellow to Ignazio Silone, Elsa Morante, and Alberto Moravia. He also, Bellow later declared, introduced him to Rome, the January 1949 visit notwithstanding. Bellow was a reluctant sightseer. In a letter of May 22, 1950, to Volkening, he admits to being “already weary of touring and admiring. I can’t abide passing through a place and visiting all the monuments as listed. Also the kid has put his ban on churches and won’t enter another one. He’s now seen St. Peter’s, the biggest of them all, and feels he understands the principle.” In a letter of June 18 to Robert Hivnor, however, Bellow writes: “This time I saw Rome, Paolo Milano leading.” He was also, of course, writing. Every morning, for the six weeks he was in the city, he sat and wrote at an outdoor table at the Casina Valadier in the Borghese Gardens, overlooking the city from Pincian Hill. Wholly absorbed in Augie’s adventures, “I happily filled several student notebooks and smoked cigars and drank coffee, unaware of the close Roman heat as long as I did not move about. A waiter later told me that the poet D’Annunzio had enjoyed working in this same place.… Latterly, reading Goethe’s ‘Conversations with Eckermann,’ I learned that the great poet composed one of his tragedies in the Borghese Gardens.”116

  In addition to guiding the Bellows around Rome, Milano recommended that they visit Positano, a picturesque fishing village near Sorrento on the gulf of Salerno, described by Bellow in a letter of July 15 to Engel as “four thousand feet of mountain descending to the Gulf in a width of about eight hundred yards.” Bellow spent three pleasurable and productive weeks there, staying at the Pensione Vittoria, at a rate negotiated by Milano (“At American prices we couldn’t have afforded it”).117 His morning routine at Positano was little different from that at Rome, according to the Hivnor letter: “write from eight in the morning, swim at noon; and then that lethal lunch which I’m too hungry to turn away; at three, when I’m supposed to read Hegel, my lids are coming down.” “By rising early to beat the heat,” he wrote to Engel, “I’ve written a long lot of Augie March; at four hundred pages it’s nothing like finished. It may be again as long.” A week before arriving in Positano, on June 15, Bellow wrote to Volkening about an invitation he’d received to travel to Berlin to attend “a conference of the most lofty anti-Stalinists.” This was the conference out of which grew the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Bellow seriously considered going, worried that “five lotus eating weeks [in Positano] would not agree with me.” His decision to stay was a wise one, given how much he got done. He even managed a rare poem, “Spring Ode,” which owes as much to the inaugurating “Augie” moment as to the beauties of the Amalfi coast. It opens with a cleansing that recalls the Paris streets: “Thunder brings the end of winter, / Rinsing the yellow snow from the gutter.”118

  The route the Bellows took to Paris was lazy and circuitous. They left Positano on July 20, briefly went back to Rome, then traveled to Siena, Florence, Turin, and Grenoble, returning to 33 rue Vaneau on August 1. A month later they set sail for New York, arriving on September 4, Labor Day. Anita and Greg traveled directly to Chicago; Bellow followed a few days later. In Chicago, he visited friends and family, returning early in October to New York to find a place for them all to live, a plan arrived at after months of fruitless inquiry and speculation, mostly about university positions. Over those months, Richard Ellmann tried to get Bellow a Briggs-Copeland Fellowship at Harvard; the McCloskys lobbied for him at Minnesota; Henry Volkening sounded out Princeton (“I put Princeton last,” Bellow wrote to him, undiplomatically. “I think there’d be too much chicken shit in it. My uninformed opinion!”119). Bellow also asked Volkening, in an undated letter, to inquire about teaching night courses at NYU. In addition, he asked him “to thank Trilling for his troubles in my behalf” (Trilling had written to Henry Moe in support of a renewal of Bellow’s Guggenheim). On March 27, Bellow wrote to Robert Penn Warren to ask if he knew anyone at the New School “who could throw a little evening work my way.” Meanwhile, he was waiting to hear from Bennington, Bard, Sarah Lawrence, and Queens College. On March 26, 1950, he wrote to Monroe Engel asking him to inquire of Harold Guinzburg, the owner of Viking, about apartments in the New York area (as Bellow explained in the undated letter to Volkening, “Mr. Guinzburg of Viking has real-estate in Queens and perhaps a flat for me”). If no full-time university post materialized, Bellow told Engel, he’d have to “piece out an income by teaching, reviewing, etcetera. That can’t be done anywhere but in New York.” Engel suggested Bellow contact Isaac Rosenfeld, at this point teaching in the Humanities Program at NYU. When Bellow did, Rosenfeld responded with “a remarkably cold note, asking me to explain why I had asked his consent to apply at NYU and at the same time had my agent approach Ross [Ralph Ross, head of the Humanities Program]. I ‘had my agent’ do no such thing, and I wonder why Isaac is so battlesome about it.”120 He would find out soon enough, for Ross offered him a one-year part-time job in the same program as Rosenfeld.

  When Bellow returned to New York from Chicago to search out a place to live, he stayed with the Lidovs, now in a spacious apartment/studio on the Upper West Side, at 44 West 95th Street. Here Bellow kept up his writing routine, working on Augie each morning in a small room off Lidov’s studio. Eventually, Harold Guinzburg came up with an acceptable four-room apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, and Bellow returned to Chicago in October to retrieve the family furniture from storage and help in the move east. The address of the new apartment, in a plain redbrick building, was 6608 102nd Street, a few blocks from Queens Boulevard. Herbert Gold described the building as “sad and awful and tractlike … a real comedown.”121 Bellow would not be there most days, having rented a room for writing in Greenwich Village, on MacDougal Alley, near Washington Square (“In those days you could rent one for three or four dollars a week”).122 That winter they were all hit by illness: “First there was a virus, and then the grippe,” he wrote to the McCloskys on January 30, 1951. “I had a bad case of the latter, aggravated by a penicillin reaction. I’m only one day out of bed—flat for nearly a week, and during the breather between semesters, too, when I had planned to do so much. And then I’ve been forbidden to smoke, too. Permanently; I can never again have a pipe or a cigar; not even a cigarette.” Soon after settling in Queens, Anita got a job at the branch of Planned Parenthood in Far Rockaway, running a birth control clinic (“another job close to her heart,” in Greg’s words).123 Greg, finally out of kindergarten, was enrolled for “a few miserable weeks” in the local public school, then moved to the private Queens School, recommended by Paolo Milano and his wife. The Queens School, according to Greg, was “progressive”: teachers were called by their first names, it admitted African American students (the sons of Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella), and “no one taught me to read or write.” For Anita, its chief attribute, or what would prove its chief attribute, was that it offered after-school day care: “allowing her to work after Saul moved out.”

  In a Paris boîte, Kappy Kaplan on the left wearing glasses, Celia Kaplan in the center in a white sweater (ill. 9.1)

  10

  Princeton/Delmore

  IN
THE FINAL TWO YEARS he spent writing The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow drew heavily on recent experience, especially his time in Paris and in the Merchant Marine. While at work in the small side room off Arthur Lidov’s Manhattan studio, he took the character of Basteshaw, the ship’s carpenter Augie finds himself marooned with in the novel’s penultimate chapter, from Lidov. In March 1950 Bellow sent Monroe Engel the first 100,000 words of the novel. Engel replied a month later with praise but also concern about control, design, shape. Bellow responded on April 30 reminding Engel that what he’d been sent was “raw mass” which hadn’t yet been read over consecutively. Bellow was buoyed by what he’d written, also by how much of it there was: “the abundance gives me confidence, and wherever that and the life, the feeling of the book, are connected there’ll be no pruning.” Though he’d “never had such a mass to knead and shape,” he had “an instinctive sense of what the finished thing will be.” He even had an image for the book’s shape:

  a widening spiral that begins in the parish, ghetto, slum and spreads into the greater world, and there Augie comes to the fore because of the multiplication of people around him and the greater difficulty of experience. In childhood one naturally lives as an observer. And it may be that Augie doesn’t sufficiently come forward at first; but in my eyes, the general plan of the book—its length—justified this. I have a further part in mind for almost all the characters introduced.… Another two hundred pages and the design will be almost entirely visible; and there will be still more—the second part will be again as long, with sections on the war and the life of a black-marketeer in Europe and a final, tragic one on the life of the greatest Machiavellian of them all, Augie’s brother Simon.

  It was Bellow’s plan, he told Volkening in a letter of March 26, “to have the first large part of Augie March (about 120,000 words) published as the contracted novel.” He thought this first half “could stand by itself,” and was anxious to reveal his plans for a second half of equal length. “I could never put over this half as the whole, saying nothing about the rest. If Viking wants to wait for the whole quarter of a million words, perhaps it will extend my subsidy for another six months.”

  Augie’s brother, Simon, makes his final appearance in the novel, the one Bellow calls “tragic,” after the Mexico chapters, in scenes set in Chicago and Paris. Simon is in a jam much like the jam Maury was facing when Bellow was at work on this chapter. After release from the Merchant Marine, Augie returns briefly to Chicago. Simon is now “making real dough.… When he told me how the money poured in he always laughed, as if astonished himself” (p. 909). With the dough comes a mistress, Renée, “a blond doll.… A zaftige piece too, in a mink stole,” whom Simon tells Augie he loves. They met in a nightclub in Detroit and “she left her husband the same night we met” (p. 908). Simon sets Renée up in a fancy apartment and sees her every day. Augie wonders about Simon’s wife, Charlotte, whom he married for money and whose family helped finance his businesses. “I didn’t think it would be so hard for you to understand how this is,” Simon replies. “This has nothing to do with Charlotte. I don’t tell Charlotte what to do. Let her go and do the same” (p. 910). Like other mistresses in Bellow’s fiction, Renée is vulnerable, her sexy persona only partly fits: “she looked immature, but maybe that means that she didn’t bear this gold freight with the fullest confidence” (p. 910). Nervous with Augie, Renée professes undying love for Simon. “As this may have been true,” Augie writes, “it was kind of a pity that she had to throw suspicion on it by extra effort” (p. 911).

  Simon is greedy, wanting both Renée and Charlotte. “I want no trouble out of you about her,” he tells Renée. “I respect her. I’ll never leave her under any circumstances. In her way she’s as close to me as anybody in the world.” As Augie puts it, “he was romantic about Charlotte too” (p. 912). Everything Simon buys Charlotte he buys Renée. He sends Renée to Charlotte’s doctor, “the best doctor” (p. 913). When he and Charlotte go to Florida on vacation, Renée arrives a day or two later, put up by Simon in “as swanky a hotel” (p. 916). The money Renée costs is not the problem, the problem is logistical, requiring “constant thought and arrangement-making.” Logistics poison Simon’s life: “Poor Simon! I pitied him. I pitied my brother” (p. 916). Charlotte puts up with Simon’s affair for a while, then demands that he end it. When he confronts Renée she screams at him and threatens him with lawyers, and when Charlotte turns up at Simon’s lawyer’s office, Renée curses her. Both Charlotte and Simon slap Renée (“You should have heard what she was saying,” Simon tells Augie. “You would have done the same” [p. 917]), then they all burst into tears. Only when Simon offers Renée a large sum of money does she agree to go off to California. Four months later she returns saying she is pregnant and Simon calls her a crook over the phone. After a silence, she hangs up, which alarms Simon. At the hotel where she’s staying, he discovers that she has tried to kill herself, and is four months pregnant. Augie learns all this from Simon in Chapter 22. Four chapters later, in the novel’s final pages, Augie asks: “Did she have a kid?” “No, no,” Simon answers, “it was just a bluff. There wasn’t any kid” (p. 989).

  But there was a kid. Charlotte takes Augie aside and explains. They are in Paris, where Augie now lives. Charlotte and Simon have come for a visit, staying at the Hôtel de Crillon.

  Simon’s trouble with Renée had been all over the Chicago papers, and she took it for granted that I had read about it.… Renée had sued him and made a scandal. She claimed she had a child by him. She might have accused three other men, said Charlotte, and Charlotte knew what she was talking about you can be sure; she was a well-informed woman. If the case hadn’t been thrown out of court right away she was ready with plenty of evidence. “I’d have given her a case!” she said. “The little whore!” (p. 989).

  Simon’s story was Maury’s story: Charlotte, a “solid and suspecting woman in her early thirties, handsome, immovable in her opinions” (p. 988), was, as we’ve seen, modeled on Marge, Maury’s wife; Renée was modeled on Maury’s mistress, Marcia Borok, known as Marcie. A child was born to Marcie in 1947, a son she named Dean. When approached by this son, Maury rejected him brutally (“The last time I saw my old man,” Dean wrote to Bellow, “he gave me fifty bucks and told me to get lost”).1 After the scandal, Bellow and the rest of the family heard nothing of Marcie, until the son read The Adventures of Augie March in 1980 and realized that it contained a version of his own birth. He then wrote to Bellow, who was moved by his letter, as was Bellow’s brother Sam when Bellow showed it to him. The letter, which does not survive, was written from Montreal, where Dean had gone to avoid the draft. Bellow’s reply, in a letter of June 17, 1980, is addressed to “Mr. Borok.” It was partially quoted in Chapter 3. In it he offers sympathy and a warning of sorts (about Maury’s character and how little his son should expect from him). After apologies for delay, Bellow admits that he and Sam found it difficult to picture the life led by their newly discovered nephew:

  But that’s hardly strange when you think that we have no clear picture of our eldest brother’s life, either. He sees none of us—brothers, sister, or his two children [by now Maury and Marge had split and he was living in Thomasville, Georgia, with his second wife, Joyce]—neither does he telephone or write. He had no need of us. He has no past, no history.… I tell you all this to warn you about the genes you seem so proud of. If you’ve inherited them (it’s possible you have) many of them will have to be subdued or lived down. I myself have had some hard going with them.

  Dean Borok had, indeed, inherited the family genes, judging by his looks and by the letters he wrote to Bellow over the next twenty-five years. These letters are increasingly vituperative, funny, and threatening, described by Borok himself as of “unbelievable venom and bitterness.”2 Why, Borok complains, hasn’t the Bellow family—“a bunch of insignificant, petit bourgeois assholes”3—done anything to help him? Has his uncle not recognized his talent? Why is his life so lonely and hard? “You
never looked this good,” he writes in 1992, in a letter containing snapshots, one of himself posing in a tux, another in a Speedo. Earlier, on November 24, 1990, he sent a snapshot of himself as a ghoul, with blood running from his mouth and a large knife in his hand. “I have got it all over you. Eat your heart out, you rube! In terms of talent I have got it all over you.” The 1992 letter ends “Eat my dust” (other letters end “Either pay me now or pay me later, you cocksucker,” “Ambiguously yours,” and “Love”). The letters were sent to Bellow c/o the Committee on Social Thought, on one occasion along with a box of pornographic films, sex toys, and photographs of Borok performing sex acts with women (in Montreal he owned a leather shop called Dean’s Boutique de Cuir, specializing in S&M; later in New York he worked as a designer of leather handbags, trained in martial arts, and performed as a stand‑up comedian, as he’d done in Montreal). Bellow, understandably on guard, stopped writing after the initial response, but kept Borok’s letters, for legal reasons, perhaps, or to make use of in a novel. Their anger is powerful, at times frightening, and often wittily expressed.

  Bellow knew about Marcie and Maury before he left for Paris in September 1948. Oscar Tarcov wrote to him about the subsequent scandal. In a letter to Tarcov of June 26, 1950, Bellow laments Maury’s sins “tumbling from the closet. I knew something about them, of course, but wasn’t abreast of them all and hadn’t heard about the suit till you wrote me of it. I’d like to know more. It moves me to think of my father in this, and of the kids.” Joel Bellows, Maury’s son, remembers meeting Marcie. On Saturdays, Maury would take Joel to the Covenant Club at 10 Dearborn Street (a thinly fictionalized version of the club appears in Chapter 21 of Augie, in a scene of memorable boorishness on Simon’s part). “We were walking out,” Joel recalls, and “I heard this voice saying ‘Maury’ … and there was this woman, red-haired, who began to make a fuss over me. He could not wait to get away from her. We got into the car and he said: ‘Son, you just cannot tell your mother about this. It wasn’t my fault. She came up to me on the street, blah, blah, blah.’ ” Several years later, “we’re down at the new Saxony Hotel [in Miami, a hotel part-owned by Maury and Marge]. We have adjoining rooms. My sister and I in one room, my parents in another room. ‘We gotta have a conversation .… There’s going to be a newspaper story that comes out and we all have to pretend that nothing happened.’ ” The Miami News printed the story on December 30, 1949, under the headline “Blonde Serves Club Owner as Father of Her Children.” Marcie was identified as “a twenty-year-old blonde nightclub entertainer” with two children, a two-year-old and a seven-month-old. Maury, she claimed, was the father of them both.4 She followed him to Miami because he’d agreed to adopt them, though when she arrived he backed out of the agreement. So she served him with a subpoena, granted by one judge, overturned the next day by another. On the night of December 30, Joel remembers, “we walked into the dining room of the Saxony Hotel and they had these strolling violinists and everything, and we walked in, there was always this big buzz, two hundred, two hundred fifty, three hundred people sitting there having dinner … and we walked in and there was silence, silence. We just walked in as if nothing had happened.”5