The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  The Freudians were only interested in the mind to the neglect of the body and the theory of this analysis was that your neuroses took some physical form, some muscular form. So if you wanted to know who you were and what you were going through and all the rest of it, then you had to take off every scrap of clothing until you became familiar with the physical expression of your neurotic characteristics. A lot of foolery, but at the time it held a lot of appeal for me. I don’t know why it did. I know it was very destructive.… It had a very bad effect on me. First you learn to give in to your temper and then you find you can’t control it. So there were some bad scenes on subway platforms, when people would challenge me and I was ready to fight at any minute. Absolute nonsense. I’m lucky I wasn’t killed.

  Rosenfeld’s therapist, Richard G. Singer, practiced on the Lower East Side.31 Bellow’s therapist, Chester Raphael, practiced in Queens, in Forest Hills, near Bellow’s apartment and Reich’s first American residence, where he set up the Orgone Energy Laboratory in his basement.32 Raphael and Singer had been pupils of Reich and both were MDs. Bellow began therapy with Raphael early in 1951, two years after Rosenfeld began with Singer. In a letter of August 11, 1990, to Demetriou, who had also been a patient of Raphael’s, Bellow confessed that he had long tried to write about his therapy: “Chester and his room have been going round and round in my head for decades now. I can’t say that I came away empty-handed.” What he came away with were some eight hundred pages of unpublished manuscript. These pages comprise draft material for two unfinished attempts at a “Zetland” novel, “Charm and Death” and “Zetland and Quine,” and the unfinished “Far Out,” discussed in Chapters 4, 6, and 7. In the “Zetland” novels the patient in therapy is Zetland himself, a character based on Rosenfeld; in “Far Out” he is Peter Vallis, whose character and situation resemble Bellow’s. All three novels are set in the early 1950s, and all three depict a therapist named Dr. Edmund Sapir. The manuscripts are undated but were mostly composed in the 1970s, twenty or so years after Bellow’s sessions with Dr. Raphael.33

  “Far Out” begins by reflecting on the postwar period, a time when “the world seemed to pause and breathe awhile” and “here and there” people “took it on themselves to diagnose the dreadful trouble and find remedies for it—generous people, often very thoughtful, often greatly deluded, but intent nevertheless on doing the right thing, the thing that would deliver us.… ” The ellipsis here is Bellow’s; it ends the novel’s first paragraph. What follows is an eighteen-page account of a therapy session, versions of which appear also in the two “Zetland” manuscripts. As Peter Vallis journeys on the subway to Dr. Sapir he tries not to prepare himself: “Anxious trying was part of his problem. What was needed was that he should be entirely and naturally himself. There was your challenge” (p. 1). Vallis takes off all his clothes and lies down on the plastic couch “still warm from the body of the large girl who preceded him.” Dr. Sapir sits beside him on a low chair. In Reichian therapy, talking alone is inadequate. “The methods were violent, the treatment was harrowing. And the breaking out was sexual because the locking in was sexual.” The therapist is trained to uncover “character-neuroses … physically expressed in muscular tensions.” These tensions are revealed “in your posture, your face, your eyes, your breathing, your voice, your sexual performance. Everything about you, what you liked or disliked, whether you were open or disguised, true or phony depended on the degree to which you were armored. Hence nakedness” (p. 2). Vallis knows the theory behind the therapy, has “studied the major books, Dr. Reich’s Character Analysis and The Function of the Orgasm, and mastered the underlying principles” (p. 5). Reichian therapy involves “taking great risks, gambling with his sanity.… So he was not toying.” “To go back to the base, the creature of flesh and blood, and make another start, biologically” is its aim; to succeed is possible only if “you were not used up, if your instincts were still by some miracle alive after so much starvation and abuse” (p. 6).

  Dr. Sapir’s office and consulting rooms are in the basement of his house, a nondescript brick villa in a street of nondescript brick villas (a style Vallis describes as “Mick Tudor”). The consulting room is “windowless, insulated, soundproof,” so that “you could rant, curse, sob, scream, kick or pound with your fists” (p. 5). Sapir’s manner impresses Vallis, being “always earnest … medical and correct” (p. 7). When he speaks doctrine or theory, however, he becomes “a True Believer and a jargon-grinder.” Vallis takes only what he thinks he needs: “the vital aura, the large alert eye, the incredible strength and rootedness of the out-twisting hair. No secret filth. No Mask” (p. 8). His own mask is hard to unfix, hence his discomfort on the couch:

  Immediately he was not himself. He was artificial. That was the paradox. Nudity produced a crisis. Heart pounding, dimming sensations in the head, muscles stiffening, genital shrinking, shortness of breath, sweating, distraction. Gripped by intense anxiety he lay on the couch and waited. Here a common man would be superior, more master of his natural self. Any animal, cat, dog, could lie calmly breathing. When Vallis took his small son to the zoo, there was the tiger in luxurious heavy rest, fully, calmly, drawing breath (p. 9).

  “Heavy” is good, what Keats called “a fine isolated verisimilitude.” It recalls Dahfu, king of the Wariri, in Henderson the Rain King (1959), “sumptuously” at rest (p. 241).34 Henderson’s faith in Dahfu’s methods of instruction (he’s being readied to succeed Dahfu) is unillusioned, like Vallis’s faith in Dr. Sapir’s method. That Dahfu’s teachings are “Reichian” has frequently been noted:

  For his sake I accepted the discipline of being like a lion. Yes, I thought, I believed I could change; I was willing to overcome my old self; yes, to do that a man had to adopt some new standard; he must even force himself into a part; maybe he must deceive himself a while, until it begins to take; his own hand paints again on that much-painted veil. I would never make a lion, I knew that; but I might pick up a small grain here and there in the attempt (p. 373).35

  In Henderson the Rain King, Dahfu’s “therapy” is physically life-threatening: he insists on Henderson entering the den of Atti, a lioness. Vallis’s therapy in “Far Out” is threatening psychologically. “You don’t look well, Mr. Vallis,” Sapir begins. Vallis admits to feeling mean, cramped, knotted, out of control. Sapir surveys him again: “I see a sullen, closed-up, vindictive looking man.” When Vallis tries to explain, Sapir cuts him off. “Are we going to have a conversation of general interest? I’ve noticed how helpful you are. You supply the other person with the words he’s looking for, and you finish sentences for him. You want to please, and be civil” (p. 11). The interruption annoys Vallis, which was its aim. Sapir now describes Vallis as “stung, glaring. It comes into your eyes but the rest of you is indifferent.… You feel nasty and venomous but you don’t know how to discharge the venom.” Vallis claims he is merely trying, reasonably, to consider what Sapir says. Sapir returns to the attack: “Reasonable to swallow venom? It’s cowardly and dead. You’re afraid to burst out. You appease me.” He then describes the naked Vallis as looking like a pig: “you are quite a fellow in your suit and tie, but here, lying on your back, you look self-indulgent, overfed, without tone, porky. You lie there like a pig. How do you feel about giving such an impression?” As Vallis lies “naked and at a disadvantage” (p. 13), Sapir asks: “Is that how you lie in bed with your wife?”

  “Why don’t you shut up?”

  “Why don’t you tell me to.”

  “Well, shut up. You’re a sadistic man, a bastard.”

  “Well, don’t choke on it, get it out.”

  “You’re a shit, Sapir.”

  “You don’t like me much.”

  “Fucking right, I don’t. You’re a sadist and a nasty shit.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  “I will. I’d like to see you dead. I could kill you myself.”

  “Yes, but you’re afraid of it. Why can’t I hear it with some real fire, and why can’t yo
u put some voice into it?”

  Vallis cried out wildly, suddenly, “Aaaaaah!” He split his dry lip.

  “Come on, you’re stifling it. I want to hear the full voice.”

  “Haaaah! Aaaaa! AaaaaH!”

  “Open the throat up. You’re not getting there. I want your voice to reach your feelings. Real, for once” (p. 14).

  Sapir notices a purple blotch on Vallis’s chest: “You’re congested there” (p. 15) (the word “congested” figures prominently in descriptions of Tommy Wilhelm and Eugene Henderson, the heroes of the two novels after Augie March). “Then as Vallis began to think how to reorganize himself (reorganize what?) the Doctor said, ‘Are you beginning to see how it is with you?’ Vallis was beginning to see” (p. 16).

  If therapy served only personal ends for Vallis, “it wouldn’t be worth the bother.” Like his creator, he seeks the widest possible understanding or context for his condition, “in continual pursuit of the highest frame of reference” (p. 53). Why is he the way he is? Because of his past, his family, his marriage, but also because “essential elements were gone from civilized life, and the rest going fast. The moral nature become so flabby it accepts murder.… In short, right and wrong are dying. Each human being an object in a universe of objects, clearly outlined by false definition, shrunken in affect, living in mysterious monstrous cities that are culturally desert and wild” (p. 17).36 There is a parallel here with Wordsworth, who, like Vallis, denied that his return to nature, literally to the countryside after residence in France and London during the early years of the French Revolution, was a withdrawal from politics. For Wordsworth, no humane or workable politics was possible unless it was grounded in nature or human nature, much contested terms in late-eighteenth-century political polemic. Vallis, too, seeks a return to nature or the natural, through therapy, which he sees as a way of facing or understanding rather than evading recent horrors, more horrific even than the horrors of the French Revolution and Terror. For Vallis, no move against evil “could be made by a cold mind, however good its understanding. Those who believed they were thinking were only brooding about their sexual defeat. To think you had to recover potency. Your thinking now was poisoned from beneath” (p. 17).

  The therapy session at the beginning of “Far Out” concludes with Sapir asking: “And how is it with your wife, Mr. Vallis?” which prompts the thought: “Oh, what a sad subject that was!” (p. 18). In a later chapter, Vallis, an academic, is quizzed by his mentor, Liston Huff, a professor of politics at Princeton, with whom he is collaborating on a book provisionally titled “A Political History of Modern Europe.” Professor Huff is an extreme rationalist, has “a cold mind” (he’s like Willis Mosby of “Mosby’s Memoirs,” who is also from Princeton). He understands the underlying rationale of Reichian therapy: modern man must return to nature, access to nature is sexual, the sexuality of modern man is blocked. What he leaves out, Vallis suggests, is what being blocked feels like, by which Vallis partly means, what marriage to Nettie, a character much like Anita, feels like: “It’s not a matter of seeing stars when you have an orgasm, but rather getting nothing but disappointment from the embrace, only bitterness and ashes in your mouth. That’s where the funk is, absolute crippling funk, hysterical dread, emptiness and panic.” Earlier Vallis tells Huff: “I start with this state of funk. The creature as a creature sees it can’t do what’s demanded of it, is at the end of its tether” (pp. 86–87).37

  GIVEN A COMPARABLE STATE of funk, Bellow was quick to accept an invitation from Ted Hoffman to return to Salzburg at the beginning of 1952, this time to deliver public lectures as well as to conduct seminars. On December 17, 1951, he set sail for Paris, spending the week between Christmas and the New Year with the Kaplans. The subject Bellow chose to lecture and conduct seminars on in Salzburg was “The American Novel from Hawthorne to the Present,” with discussion not just of major American novels but of D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), William Carlos Williams’s Life Along the Passaic River (1938), Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days (1892), and the essays of Henry James (on Zola, Flaubert, and Maupassant). Bellow was not always an inspired or inspiring public speaker. At Salzburg, he sometimes read passages from Augie March instead of lecturing. John McCormick remembers him laughing delightedly while reading an episode from Augie’s adventures in Mexico: “He was having a wonderful time … better than the rest of us.”38 Bellow was aware of his deficiencies at the podium. In unpublished manuscript material titled “Don Juan’s Marriage” and “A Lover from America,” attempts at what in 1953 Bellow described as “a novelette to be titled ‘A Lecturer in Vienna,’ ”39 the Don Juan of the title is a handsome expatriate from Minnesota named Bernage (in various manuscripts, Herman, Julian, and Ralph). In 1948 Bernage comes to Vienna with a much delivered lecture on “The American Character.”40 This lecture bores him and on the train from Paris he decides to talk instead on “Individuality in America.” As a speaker, Bernage’s “best was not always too good,” partly because he spent little time on his lectures. In Vienna, “as usual, he was unprepared” (pp. 20–21, “A Lover from America”). “Prolific in ideas but not strong in organization” is how Bernage describes himself (p. 18). As he neither possesses nor especially values the qualities that make for good public speaking (“a clear head and a simplicity of motive”), he finds lectures “always a struggle and an ordeal.” In a café in Vienna he jots down notes for “Individuality in America.” These notes raise themes central to Augie March:

  “Individuality in America—further remarks,” he began. “The pursuit of happiness, correctly interpreted, does not signify chase. Not as ‘hunting bears.’ ” … “Meaning more like this: broadest instincts of creation, productivity, harmony, love and so forth, are capable of fulfillment. No guarantees against pain by Founding Fathers, but submission to pain not required. Concept of sin rejected. ‘Pursuit’ may be interpreted as ‘Right to hope.’ Many a downfall, yes. But hope returns” (p. 28, “Don Juan’s Marriage”).

  When Bellow arrived at Schloss Leopoldskron on this second visit, McCormick was struck by his luggage: a single suitcase and “the largest typewriter I’ve ever seen in my life.”41 Bellow had come to write. Each morning, after a breakfast of porridge and coffee left at his door at 7:45, he worked on Augie. Lectures and seminars were in the afternoon, and in the evening there were concerts and social events. “I begin to love hotel rooms,” he reported in a letter of January 25, 1952, to Robert Hivnor, who was taking over his courses at NYU. “Or these baroque rooms at the Schloss. Wonderful painted furniture, Bavarian flowers, etc. But they won’t let me stay.” If Bellow’s rooms were like the poet Karl Shapiro’s, which were on the same floor, they consisted of a small sitting room and an adjoining bedroom, with a view of the lake below and of high snowy mountains, one of which housed Hitler’s Berghof, his Berchtesgaden mountain residence. As on his previous visit, Bellow was impressed by the students. To Volkening in an undated letter he pronounced Salzburg “good for my nerves” (though “I’ve paid a price daily in the classroom”). Once out of the classroom, as one student put it, Bellow “was at his best when just talking with a few people.” There were writers and aspiring writers among the students: the British novelist William Sansom, several years older than Bellow, had already published a novel and a collection of short stories; Pearse Hutchinson, an Irish poet living in Geneva, especially impressed Bellow, who recommended him in an undated letter to Katie Carver, an editorial assistant at Partisan Review, later Bellow’s editor at Viking. Bellow also got on well with the other lecturers. Shapiro, editor of Poetry, became a lifelong friend. In Reports of My Death (1990), volume two of Poet: An Autobiography in Three Parts (1988–90), Shapiro claimed that two female students at Salzburg had fallen for Bellow, and that one “might have spent a night with him.”42 This possibility was reported to the administration by a drama professor named N. Bryllion Fagin, who was promptly ostracized by the other lecturers.

  Bernage is more Byron’s
Don Juan than Mozart’s. In “Don Juan’s Marriage,” he intends to return to Paris after his lectures to marry “Françoise”; in “A Lover from America,” he’s already married to her. On the train from Salzburg to Vienna, in both manuscripts, he finds himself engaged in conversation with an Austrian girl who makes an obvious pass at him. This pass he reluctantly responds to: “it saddened him that habit, or conditioning so betrayed him, and yet he felt an extremely full, hot, delightful streaming and pulsating sensation, and there could be nothing wrong with that in itself” (p. 5). In Vienna he encounters Adelaide, “a girl he had met in Nice.” “It might not be right for him to see Adelaide in his present state of feelings about Françoise, but there could be no harm in it provided they had an understanding.” The satire here recalls Donna Julia in Canto 1 of Byron’s poem: “Yet still she must have thought there was no harm, / Or else ’twere easy to withdraw her waist. / But then the situation had its charm, / And then—God knows what next—I can’t go on” (stanza 15). Later, Bernage describes Adelaide as warm, boisterous, but also demanding, in a way that recalls Bellow’s difficulties with “the lovely American lady” in Barcelona. “She was critical of him the first time; he made it up to her later.… He had only spent a few nights with her in Nice but that was enough” (pp. 12–13).

  ON FEBRUARY 1, 1952, the day before he was to sail back to New York from France, Bellow wrote to Volkening instructing him to stop forwarding his mail to Forest Hills: “I have some sad things to tell you of Forest Hills … probably none that will surprise you.” On March 18 he wrote to the McCloskys from 17 Minetta Street, off Washington Square, an apartment he found through his friend Lillian Blumberg McCall.43 “As you can see from the above address, things are not going terribly well. Nor yet desperately unwell.” Two days later he wrote again, explaining more fully: “I don’t know how serious 17 Minetta St. is; I’m in the process of finding out. In November when I moved here I considered myself divorced. Now I simply consider myself calm.” Bellow had spent little more than a year with Anita and Greg in Forest Hills, a year that included the trip to Salzburg and a summer during which he mostly stayed in Greenwich Village while they were at the seashore near Patchogue, Long Island (“I have to teach. I have to work on my book,” he explained to Tarcov in an undated letter of 1951, “and I have some matters to work out alone”). He seems also to have given up his writing room on MacDougal Alley, taking over a cold-water flat on Hudson Street from Rosenfeld, in a shabby building known in the Village as the Casbah.44