Bad news on the domestic front mixed with brighter professional news. For several years a steady stream of stories and reviews—in Commentary, The Hudson Review, Penguin New Writing, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Leader, The New York Times Book Review, and Partisan Review—helped to spread Bellow’s name in the literary world. A play based on The Victim was produced off-Broadway at the President’s Theater and described as “not uninteresting” by Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times (the reviewer for Billboard was comparably muted in his praise, pronouncing the play “definitely not a commercial product for Broadway”).45 Less mixed good news arrived on February 27: the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded Bellow a $1,000 grant “in recognition of your creative work in literature” (the judges were W. H. Auden, Van Wyck Brooks, Malcolm Cowley, John Hersey, and Mark Van Doren). On March 17, Elizabeth Ames, of Yaddo, the retreat for artists in Saratoga Springs, New York, replied enthusiastically to Bellow’s inquiry about a stay. Since “the members of the committee are familiar with your work,” she wrote, it would not be necessary to call on referees; she herself had admired his writing “for a long time.”46 One afternoon when Bellow was in Monroe Engel’s office at Viking, the receptionist announced that Marianne Moore was outside; as Engel recalls, “so I walked out into the waiting room with Saul and I said, ‘Miss Moore, this is Mr. Bellow,’ and she said, ‘Saul Bellow?’ and I said ‘Yes,’ and she said “I like your stuff,’ and he was flabbergasted and said, ‘Well, I like your stuff, too.’ ”
The news about Augie was also good. In the letter of March 18, 1952, to the McCloskys, Bellow reported that the novel was “nearly done” and that the publishers had advanced him more money ($500 in January, “so I have no $ worries this summer”). At nine hundred pages, however, it would need to be cut, especially as Viking had finally decided to publish the book in one volume not two. In December an extract from Augie appeared in the Christmas issue of The New Yorker.47 That same December, at a dinner given by John Marshall of the Rockefeller Foundation, Lionel and Diana Trilling described Bellow as the most talented novelist of his generation (Marshall had previously turned Bellow down for a grant, after others at the Rockefeller had encouraged him); Lionel Trilling thought Bellow “virtually certain” to produce four or five significant novels over the next ten years.48 On March 3, 1953, The New Yorker sought to secure Bellow as a regular writer, sending a $100 check “in consideration of your entering into a ‘first reading’ agreement,” one involving “all fiction, humor, reminiscence, and casual essays” (for which accepted pieces would receive a higher than normal fee). As for the job at NYU, though it paid little (just over $2,000 after taxes), it left Bellow’s days free. Meanwhile other universities came calling. In early April Bellow accepted a six-week post as “Visiting Writer” at Reed College in Portland, the University of Oregon in Eugene, and the University of Washington in Seattle. NYU was “miffed” when told of the acceptance, refusing to allow Hivnor to take over Bellow’s classes again; to make them up, Bellow would have to cut short visits to Chicago and Minneapolis en route.
The trip out west was successful but tiring. As Bellow wrote to Volkening on April 19 from Portland, “they have me talking all day and drinking at night. At four AM they bring me home, at eight one [i.e., of his academic hosts] [is] on the phone. They get their money’s worth. I sure as hell will need those five weeks at Yaddo.” In Seattle Bellow met a client of Russell and Volkening, the poet Mary Barnard, a protégée of sorts of Ezra Pound. He found her a “very dim, smooth, sloping, scattered-snow type. Echoes that take their time coming back.” Theodore Roethke, at the University of Washington, a bear of a man, was more voluble, especially when making the rounds of Seattle bars with Dylan Thomas, also visiting at the time. “Roethke I adored,” Bellow recalled in a letter of November 9, 1972, to Barnett Singer, a young Canadian historian; Dylan Thomas, who would be dead within the year, “I admired and pitied. I couldn’t keep up with them, though, for I’m not a real drinking man” (also because early each morning he was at work on Augie, both at the Hotel Meany in Seattle and the motel in Portland where he was put up by Reed). In Portland, Bellow had a brief affair with Alice Adams, an aspiring author, twenty-six at the time. Adams was to become a well-regarded novelist and a regular New Yorker contributor and Bellow supported her throughout her career. When she published her first novel, Careless Love (1966), he wrote on February 23 offering both praise and criticism. “It gave me a good deal of pleasure,” he writes, though its concerns were narrow, about “women who live completely in relationships.… The woman who ends the trend will be gratefully remembered.” He also admits to reading “as though the woman had been you.” “It made me think of Oregon and that drunken night when you told me that I came on compulsively as a heymish [cozy, unpretentious] type.” Adams was not the only woman to succumb to Bellow’s heymish charms. While he was away, his Minetta Street neighbor Lillian Blumberg McCall collected his mail: “and soon my living room began to fill up with stacks of perfumed letters on expensive note paper. I could tell from the postmarks when he was getting farther from New York and when he was on his way back” (p. 113).
The most important of the literary contacts Bellow made on this first trip west was with another aspiring novelist, Bernard Malamud. In 1952 Malamud was an instructor at Oregon State in Corvallis, a land grant college that became Oregon State University in 1961, the year he took up a teaching post at Bennington. A year older than Bellow, Malamud had not yet published his first novel, The Natural. They met at a reading Bellow gave at the University of Oregon, got on well, and when The Natural was published, Bellow praised it warmly in a letter of July 28, 1952: “Every page shows the mind and touch of a real writer. The signs are unmistakeable.” When Malamud died in 1986, Bellow recalled their first meeting. What struck him at the time were Malamud’s “expressive eyes” and the oddity of finding so obvious a New York type in inland Oregon: “It did Corvallis great credit to have imported such an exotic. He was not an exotic to me. We were cats of the same breed.”49 The two novelists remained friends and were often linked in the public imagination. Bellow joked that Malamud, Bellow, and Roth were the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of the American novel.50 Had it not been for Augie, he might have seen a great deal of Malamud in the 1950s. In an undated letter to the McCloskys, he explains: “The U of Oregon offered me an associate professorship and a lot of money but I couldn’t have set aside Augie March.”
SOMETIME AFTER Bellow’s return to New York in May 1952 he received a job offer from Princeton, “last” among prospective employers in the undated letter to Volkening quoted in the previous chapter. The offer came via Delmore Schwartz, who had recently been appointed to take over the university’s creative writing program for the academic year 1952–53. R. P. Blackmur, who ran the program, had been awarded a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to lecture in the Middle East.51 Blackmur was a friend of Schwartz’s and recommended him as his replacement; Schwartz in turn recommended Bellow as his assistant. Schwartz had been angling for a job at Princeton for several years. On learning of Blackmur’s leave, he suggested John Berryman as a replacement. If Berryman wasn’t available, however, “you might do worse,” he wrote, than hiring “one of the children of Israel.”52 Berryman was on a Guggenheim, hence not available, Blackmur took the hint, and Schwartz got the job, at a salary of $5,000; Bellow’s job, an instructorship, paid $4,200, and was agreed over lunch at Lahiere’s, a French restaurant and Princeton institution (it figures, thinly disguised, in J. D. Salinger’s 1955 story “Franny”). At the lunch, Blackmur talked almost exclusively to Schwartz; both were big talkers and big drinkers. Bellow was a big noticer (“saw your old pal Blackmur at Yale,” he wrote to John Berryman in a letter postmarked November 23, 1960. “He drops lighted cigarettes in the furniture and slowly searches for them. This made good sport for the sober watchers. I was one”). At parties, according to the English writer Al Alvarez, Blackmur served whiskey “in tumblers big enough to wash your hands in.”5
3 Bellow didn’t much like Blackmur, who could be nasty when drunk. In Humboldt’s Gift, he fictionalizes him as Professor Martin Sewall, head of creative writing at Princeton. Sewell is an old friend of Von Humboldt Fleisher’s, a character closely modeled on Schwartz, though also drawing on aspects of Rosenfeld and Berryman. Sewell appoints Humboldt as his replacement, and Humboldt suggests Charlie Citrine as his assistant. The three men meet for lunch at “the French restaurant” in Princeton, for Charlie to be vetted by Sewell. But Sewell “had little to say to me … I was an apprentice and a bit player and Sewell had treated me like one.” This treatment, Citrine confesses, “made me sore. But such vexations always filled me with energy as well.” Here is Citrine’s initial description of Sewell: “a muttering subtle drunken backward-leaning hollow-faced man” (pp. 35–36).54
Once Blackmur gave the okay, Bellow’s appointment had to be approved by the English Department, which tended to look down on creative types. Blackmur himself, though formidably learned, was not a scholar, had no university degree, not even a high school diploma. When appointed in 1946 as Resident Fellow in Creative Writing, he was already a literary celebrity, as both poet and critic, which counted against him; that he kept the department at arm’s length also counted against him. In 1951 he was made a full professor, though unusually for professors of his day he was never offered a chair. When Bellow’s appointment came before the department, it was vetted by the acting chairman, Robert R. Cawley, a Miltonist. It sailed through. Cawley talked to Robert Penn Warren, now at Yale, who assured him that Bellow “did excellent work at Minnesota”; he also interviewed “several other people, mostly students, who worked under Bellow at NYU. All reports were excellent.” In person, Bellow impressed. “He has the right experience, is of the right age, and has the right prestige of publication to be a sound influence on the students here.”55
Bellow’s few recollections of teaching at Princeton are flat and unmemorable, perhaps defensive. “I met my classes and taught my pupils,” he told Botsford. “Some of them seemed likeable. I wasn’t overwhelmed by the Ivy League. I was curious about it. I had heard of these ivy-college compounds for class and privilege. I didn’t assume a posture of slum-bound disaffection.” To another interviewer, Robert Gutwillig, he remarked that “it was the first time I was socially inferior to my students. But that was good too” (though in what way, Bellow did not say).56 The life that mattered for him at Princeton, as elsewhere, was at his desk, cutting and polishing Augie. “This week,” he wrote the McCloskys in a letter postmarked September 10, 1952, “I turn the cap shut on Augie in his pickling mason jar and am ready to play peek-a-boo again with the universe.” On November 10, however, writing to Volkening, he still had five chapters to go: “Thus the Liberation comes this month” (it wasn’t till January 7, 1953, in a letter to Warren, that he announced “Augie’s finished, thank God”).
The universe of Princeton which he was about to play peek-a-boo with, mostly at parties, was especially starry. Schwartz himself was a star, a fiery meteorite burning itself to bits. John Berryman, at Princeton on a Guggenheim, would soon shine forth with “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” published in Partisan Review in 1953, “the poem of his generation,” according to Robert Fitzgerald.57 Edmund Wilson, a sort of Hesperus, and his wife, Elena, had taken a house in town for half the year (“an unchallenged eminence,” Bellow called him, though also “a bit like Mr. Magoo … [not] literally short-sighted, but he had eyes only for what was useful in his projects. He also had the same gruff Magoo strained way of speaking. Partly colloquial, partly highbrow”).58 Wilson was in Princeton to deliver the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism, begun by Blackmur in 1949 (there were four sets of Gauss Seminars that year, each consisting of six weekly lectures followed by an hour’s discussion). Paul Tillich delivered the opening set of lectures (in October–November) on “Love, Power, and Justice”; Wilson’s lectures (in December–January) became Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962); Leon Edel’s lectures (February–March) were on narrative subjectivity in fiction, particularly in modern “stream of consciousness” novels; and Irving Howe (April–May) lectured on the political novel. The audiences for the Gauss lectures were small and select; attendance was by invitation only, issued by Blackmur. Those at Edel’s lectures included Robert Fitzgerald, who helped administer the sessions in Blackmur’s absence; Bellow; Berryman; Schwartz; Schwartz’s wife, Elizabeth Pollet; Erich Kahler, the historian; R. W. B. Lewis, a resident fellow at Princeton;59 and the year’s other lecturers, Wilson, Howe, and Fitzgerald. Edel’s recollections of the audience begin with Berryman:
Clean shaven then, he seemed off on some other planet, and looked like a bright young corporation executive in his business suit, necktie, and glasses. Saul Bellow was working on his Augie March—short, slim, with his quick wit that bounced and bounded as if he were playing a fast game of tennis. Delmore Schwartz’s interventions with tangential questions nearly always seemed a fireworks display. It was a high-powered group.60
Other literary visitors to Princeton in the academic year 1952–53 included Randall Jarrell, who had taught there the previous year, and Allen Tate and his wife, the novelist Caroline Gordon. Tate had taught at NYU with Bellow, and he and Gordon often came to Princeton to visit their daughter, Nancy, and her husband, Percy Wood, a wealthy psychiatrist. At a Christmas party at the Wilsons’, when Wood extended his hand to Theodore Roethke, who was visiting over the holidays, Roethke knocked him to the floor. Someone had told him Wood ran a residential care center for patients with psychological problems and Roethke thought he had come to commit him. He had been committed before and was frantic not to be so again.61 Arthur Koestler was a less frantic visitor. He and his wife, Mamaine Paget, had recently moved to nearby New Hope, Pennsylvania (to the excitement of Wilson, who’d been in love with Mamaine in 1945 in England). Bellow knew Koestler from Paris, where, with five-year-old Greg, he once encountered him on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Koestler said: “Ah? You’re married? Is this your child? And you’ve come to Paris?” He was teasing, but only partly. “To be Modern, you see,” Bellow explained to Botsford, “meant to be detached from tradition and traditional sentiments, from national politics and, of course, from the family.”62 Also on the Princeton scene was Ralph Ellison, whose first novel, Invisible Man, had just won the National Book Award, and who “came down regularly to attend our parties.” Bellow not only wrote a glowing review of Invisible Man in Commentary, but was on the committee that chose it for the National Book Award over Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Steinbeck’s East of Eden. He and Ellison were soon to become close friends and housemates.63
In addition to these starry figures, Princeton was the home or place of work of several old friends, including William Arrowsmith, Monroe and Brenda Engel, and Mel and Sylvia Tumin. Bellow had known Arrowsmith in Minnesota, when Arrowsmith was a GI studying Japanese. At Princeton he was at work on a PhD in classics. “I was very happy in his company,” Bellow recalled to Botsford.64 As for the Engels, they were around Princeton because Monroe had given up his job at Viking to write and to study for a PhD in the English Department (Pat Covici, a more senior editor at Viking, was now looking after Bellow, as he looked after John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, and Malcolm Cowley). To Monroe Engel, who had been an undergraduate at Princeton, the local literati constituted “a real scene … not without its sillinesses and its troubles, but offering a lot of amiable talking, drinking, and other amusements, and occasionally some pretty aggressive moments of education.”65 One such moment involved Mel Tumin, now a professor of sociology at Princeton. Bellow had known Tumin since graduate school in Wisconsin; they had been friends for more than fifteen years. Then Tumin read Augie in proof, sometime in the spring or summer of 1953. “Mel was not crazy about it,” Sylvia Tumin recalled, “and with Saul if you weren’t crazy about it that really soured the friendship, for a long time.” To the McCloskys, Bellow complained of Tumin’s reaction: “too much s
ociological and literary analysis, I suppose, crippled him, as they do many others in reading.” From 1953 onward, according to Sylvia, Bellow only “now and then” kept in touch. Though the friendship revived in the 1960s, it never recovered its intimacy.
Others who undervalued Augie received similar treatment. When John Lehmann, Bellow’s British publisher, read the first six hundred pages of the manuscript, his focus was mostly on problems of length. Bellow exploded in a letter of July 10, 1951.
Damn, what a letter! It surpasses anything I’ve ever seen. Not a word about the quality of the novel. If you can find nothing better to say upon reading Augie March than that you all “think very highly” of me, I don’t think I want you to publish it at all. I’m not selling you a commodity. Your attitude infuriates me. Either you are entirely lacking in taste and judgement or you are being terribly prudent about the advance. Well, permit me to make it clear once and for all that it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to me whether you publish the novel or not. You have read two-thirds of it, and I refuse absolutely to send you another page. Return the manuscript to Viking if you don’t want to take the book.
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 53
