The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Bellow

  When Lehmann wrote back in protest, Bellow softened somewhat, while insisting on the special character and value of the novel. Writing on July 19, with Lehmann’s letter in front of him, he passionately and without embarrassment forwarded his own and Augie’s claims:

  I know you haven’t seen anything like my book among recent novels. I’ve been reviewing them; I know what they are. They’re for the most part phoney, or empty-hearted, banal and bungling. I should have thought it would do something to you to see Augie. By your own admission you had almost finished reading the manuscript, and yet you had nothing to say about it. You were cool; businesslike, merely; you were terribly patronizing and you put me in a rage. In London you had made me feel—or tried to make me feel—that you had done me an immense favor in publishing my novels. I will not be made to feel that about Augie March. It damned well isn’t necessary.

  The letter ends with Bellow admitting the difficulties caused by the novel’s length: “but I don’t want to hear about the difficulties exclusively. As to your being treated as a salesman, I think you’re under a misapprehension. It wouldn’t have made any difference to me what a salesman thinks of my book.”

  It is possible to see the influence of Wilhelm Reich at work in these letters. In the letter of July 19, immediately after denouncing Lehmann, Bellow writes: “I think that, having blown my top, I have, for the most part, cleared the air.” So sudden a mood change recalls the therapy session in “Far Out,” as does Bellow’s assumption that with catharsis all is forgiven. He was hardly alone in this assumption. “In recent years I have unwittingly given offense,” Bellow wrote to George Demetriou on April 5, 1990. “In my day, however, hardly anybody was ostracized for speaking his mind.” From the start, however, Bellow was soupe au lait (“the type that comes down as fast as he boils up” [Augie’s self-description, p. 441]). His volatility, like the “mad fear of being slighted and scorned” felt by Joseph in Dangling Man, was an inheritance from his father and his family (“a people of tantrums,” to use Joseph’s phrase) (p. 107). It was a tendency exacerbated by early struggles against father and family, by the restrictions of his background, by prejudice, and by his immediate circumstances in the early 1950s (the protracted dissolution of his marriage, guilt over his son, worries about money). Over and above these factors, however, stood a perfectly defensible conviction that Augie March was a work of power and originality. He was damned if he would let pass any slighting or lesser valuation.

  BELLOW’S SENSE OF his importance as a writer, of the importance of writing itself, and of the suffering it entails, was fed at Princeton by those to whom he was closest, beginning with Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz’s doomed charisma, as Humboldt’s Gift memorably attests, fascinated and moved Bellow, and was clear early on. When William Phillips first met Schwartz, shortly after Partisan Review published “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” (1937), he “felt immediately … in the presence of a strange and possessed being, endowed with some extraordinary nervous and intellectual energy.… He was always moving, twitching, talking, intense and excited, his eyes looking for your response to him. Yet he was affable and friendly, almost ingratiating, with a kind of clumsy and persistent charm.”66 “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” was written when Schwartz was twenty-two. When William Barrett read it, he was taken aback by how good it was and how mature: “here was something completely formed and wonderfully perfect.”67 The dust jacket to Schwartz’s fourth book, The World Is a Wedding (1948), a collection of stories, bore praise from Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Hannah Arendt, John Crowe Ransom, and Mark Van Doren.

  Blackmur had known Schwartz in Cambridge in the 1930s, when Schwartz was a graduate student at Harvard and Blackmur a freelance critic and poet. In 1949, shortly after Blackmur arrived at Princeton, he invited Schwartz to give one of the first Gauss Seminars (Schwartz spoke on T. S. Eliot, who had himself been “much impressed” by “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”68). Schwartz was teaching creative writing at Harvard and in the summer of 1950 was invited to teach at the Kenyon College School of Letters, with William Empson, Robert Lowell, L. C. Knights, Kenneth Burke, and Allen Tate. He returned to Kenyon the following summer, where his students included Richard Howard, John Hollander, and Hilton Kramer. He himself, however, was blocked. The World Is a Wedding had been his first book in five years, and included stories long in print, among them “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” He could not finish the novel or any of the stories he was working on, producing dozens of unfinished drafts. Though in 1950 he published a volume of poems, “by 1952 he was confessing to John Berryman that he hadn’t written a line of verse in years.”69 He quarreled with Philip Rahv and broke with William Barrett. He attacked his great booster Allen Tate (for awarding the 1949 Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound, a decision Bellow also deplored). Chief among Schwartz’s many grievances was the failure of his writing to make any money. When Time magazine praised The World Is a Wedding, according to James Atlas, in his biography of Schwartz, Schwartz calculated that “even if only 10 percent of Time’s three million readers read the review, and only 10 percent of those purchased the book, he would sell 30,000 copies.”70 Only 3,500 copies had been printed, but “two years later less than half the edition had been sold.”71 That serious writers went unrewarded in America, despite their heroic struggle against what he saw, in Atlas’s phrase, as “the seductions of mass culture and middle-brow culture,”72 became an obsession with Schwartz. As his own power to write receded, he devoted more and more time to fantastical schemes to secure literary funding, sinecures, influence, for himself in the first instance but for others as well, including Bellow.

  In early December 1951 Schwartz and his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Pollet, moved from New York to a dilapidated three-bedroom farmhouse in rural New Jersey, a few miles from the village of Baptistown. The aim of the move was to lead a quiet writing life, away from the distractions of literary society. But at the time Schwartz was neither quiet nor capable of writing anything but letters. As Atlas puts it, “once they settled in, he became as harried as ever.”73 Schwartz had borrowed money to buy the farm and a used car, and to cover expenses Elizabeth had to find a job in Princeton. James Laughlin of New Directions, Schwartz’s publisher, advanced him $1,000 toward the farm and went on to help in other ways, prompted in part by the many manic letters Schwartz sent him. Here’s a representative passage from a letter of January 19, 1952, written before the job at Princeton materialized:

  My life at present consists of an imitation of all the difficulties encountered by Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Hercules, John Berryman, and anyone who was ever drafted into the army. I must rise at 5:30, drive 33 miles with Elizabeth to Princeton’s Art Museum where she is employed, waste my diminishing life and day gassing away with the literati all day while my wife works for our food, gasoline, and kerosene, lunch lavishly at Princeton’s most expensive restaurant at my own or my wife’s expense since the installed literati won’t eat anywhere else and think it rude of me not to go with them, etc. At 5, I drive Elizabeth back to our country estate and when we get home after driving over unfamiliar country roads in the dark I am so enervated and exasperated and exacerbated by all that occurred that I get good and drunk which makes me feel untroubled by the fact that the pump has broken down every other day, the windshield wiper on the car does not work, there is no heater in the car, and I am not in all truth a native country boy.74

  In addition to getting good and drunk, Schwartz took drugs, both barbiturates and amphetamines, as he had for many years. By the time of the Princeton job, he had developed such a tolerance for amphetamines that on some days he needed twenty Dexedrine pills just to counter the barbiturates. To quote Atlas again: “hyperactivity and compulsive talking were not simply character traits, as Delmore’s memoirists have supposed, but symptoms at least in part induced by his dependence on Dexedrine. Moreover, the notorious paranoia that dominated his last years was aggravated—and could even h
ave been induced—by amphetamines. His violent rages and suspiciousness conform to patterns of what is known as amphetamine psychosis.”75 The effect of drugs and alcohol on Schwartz’s appearance was marked. Eileen Simpson, Berryman’s wife, recalls seeing him for the first time after several years rushing to catch a train at Princeton Junction: “The little running steps propelling him forward in jerky starts and stops were slower now that he had put on weight. The head was as noble as ever, and the shy smile of greeting as engaging, but the hangover he said he was suffering from (a quotidian affliction now) only partly accounted for the puffiness in his cheeks, his mottled complexion and, most disturbing of all, a haunted look in his darting over-alert eyes that I had never seen before.”76

  That Blackmur could hand over his fiefdom at Princeton to a man in such a state, and that the Princeton English Department approved the appointment, is variously explained. Schwartz could be brilliantly funny and smart. In Irving Howe’s words, “he was still a wonderful talker, a first-rate literary intelligence—the sort who can light up the work of a poet or novelist with a single quick phrase.” He could also be gentle and tactful when dealing with young writers, as Howe knew from personal experience. As a literary mover and shaker, he had influence, for all his instability, boasting, again as Howe recalls, of “holding down five jobs without working at any of them.”77 In the summer before Bellow came to Princeton, Schwartz had become what Atlas calls “an impresario of journals and committees.”78 Laughlin invited him to serve as a “confidential literary consultant” to Perspectives U.S.A., a Cold War periodical funded by the Ford Foundation. His salary as a consultant was $100 a month. Laughlin also invited him to serve as guest editor of a future issue, with a budget of $2,500. Later in 1952, he upped the salary to $550 a month, recommending Schwartz as consultant to “Intercultural Publications,” the Ford Foundation subsidiary set up to oversee its Cold War publications. At some point Schwartz received a further $220 a month to serve as consultant to Diogenes, a journal published in four languages by the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies, and funded by UNESCO. One day a week Schwartz hurried to Princeton Junction to catch a train to the city, as on the occasion Eileen Simpson recounts. There he’d rush from the cramped Partisan Review offices in Astor Place to the Hotel Pierre on the Upper East Side, home to Perspectives. It was not true that he did no work at these jobs: in addition to weekly visits, he sent out a stream of long advisory letters. Counseling foundations and editors and moneymen about articles and authors fed Schwartz’s hunger for wealth and power.

  Schwartz was hardly alone in his instability: Romantic notions of the poet as tortured genius were in vogue in America. “Ted was not in his right mind,” Eileen Simpson wrote of Roethke. “Cal [Lowell] in Salzburg, had gone clear out of his again. Delmore had changed so heartbreakingly one could no longer use the word ‘crazy’ in the old innocent way when talking about him.”79 John Berryman was the least stable of the lot. To Leslie Fiedler, “they were all Stradivarius violins … and at any moment a string could snap.”80 Simpson quotes Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence,” from which she drew the title of Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir (1982), on her years with Berryman: “We poets in our youth begin in gladness / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness” (lines 48–49). She might also have quoted earlier lines: “As high as we have mounted in delight / In our dejection do we sink as low” (24–25). Or in our rage: “Where the rage comes from I don’t altogether understand,” Berryman wrote to his mother in a letter of April 12, 1953: “I think it may be an unavoidable concomitant of a certain kind of intolerably painful, exalted creation. Any artist not a saint, that is, who loves humanity as much, while torturing himself as much, as I did during parts of the composition of the poem … may be bound to take it out on humanity.”81 For Schwartz, the extremes suffered in creation were in the service of mankind, offering “deliverance” or “redemption” from a debased modernity, what Wordsworth calls “a state of almost savage torpor.” Hence his conviction that poetic suffering was a product as much of neglect as of heightened sensitivity, poets being, in Shelley’s phrase, “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”82 In “The Vocation of the Poet in the Modern World,” an essay published by Karl Shapiro in the July 1951 issue of Poetry, Schwartz exhorts the poet to “dedicate himself to poetry, although no one else seems likely to read what he writes; and he must be indestructible as a poet until he is destroyed as a human being.”83 Irving Howe recalls being dismayed by such notions. Schwartz and Berryman made him feel “deplorably, even amusingly, sane: if they wrestled with chaos, I surrendered to coherence.… I resented being categorized as rational: it seemed to foreclose possibilities of glamour.” As Howe saw it, “Berryman, Schwartz, and Bellow formed a haughty young aristocracy of letters, devoted to the stress of their temperaments, bound together by a fraternity of troubles.”84 These troubles were what art demanded of the artist. Bellow had his share of troubles but his life was nothing like as unstable or tormented as those of Schwartz or Berryman. Yet Howe is right to see all three writers as “devoted to the stress of their temperaments.” “Not anything I’m terribly proud of” is how Bellow recalled his Reichian therapy when interviewed by Philip Roth, “but you could not keep your respect for yourself if you had not faced the ultimate rigors.”85

  BELLOW’S TROUBLES CAME to a head over Christmas. In the late spring and summer of 1952, sometime after he returned from the trip west, relations with Anita briefly improved. While at Yaddo in June (for two weeks not five) he instructed Volkening’s secretary “to go back one address on her list and send my mail to 6608 102nd St. Forest Hills. Wish me luck at that address. I’ll do all I can to make it permanent, and hope it is where happiness means to lead me.” In the September 10 letter about turning the cap shut on Augie, he reported to the McCloskys that “all the Bellows live and flourish.” The letter to Volkening on November 10, however, ends disquietingly: “You know what makes everything happen? Love, Henry. You ought to know that by now. Only Love is married to Hate, isn’t it? You know, a new mythology ought to go good. Ambivalence is their little daughter who lives on the shores of the Superego, etc.” By the end of the year the little daughter had disappeared. On December 28, just out of the hospital, having been laid up over Christmas with viral pneumonia, Bellow wrote to Sam Freifeld that “the situation is bad. Her rigid unlovingness has driven me out—that and nothing else. I’ve done my best to stay and often I’ve felt that either going or staying threatened me with death. So I tried to choose the braver and at least less ignominious death.”86 To Robert Hivnor, now teaching in Portland, he wrote that he was “trying to make life tranquil and not think of my family, of the last chapter of Augie which needs redoing, of various assignments, of money, of education or of love.” In an attempt to discuss less painful subjects, he writes of Bart Leiper, who has turned up as an editor at Bantam Books. “He seems fine,” Bellow reports, adding “if only he didn’t gossip about me to Anita!—but here I go again.” When the breakup finally came, Greg Bellow recalls, “my mother was shattered.” Though it “had been coming for years,” Anita “hoped, in vain, that the marriage would not end.”87 Sometime in this period, Anita’s seventy-nine-year-old mother, Sonia, alarmed at her daughter’s unhappiness, took the train east to try to sort things out. It was too late: Bellow had left for good. He and Anita had been married for almost eighteen years. They were both thirty-seven and Greg was eight.88

  In Princeton, Bellow boarded in the spare room of a large ground-floor apartment belonging to an associate professor of English named Thomas Riggs III. According to Eileen Simpson, it was this room Roethke took over “for a week or so” at Christmas when Bellow was in the hospital with pneumonia, and to which he was hustled back after knocking down Percy Wood. The address of the apartment was 12 Princeton Avenue, minutes from the campus; Bellow’s room was furnished with a cot and towering bookcases. Blackmur also had an apartment in the house, as did R. W. B. Lewis, who lived
across the hall; the Berrymans lived around the corner at 120 Prospect Avenue, directly opposite Mel and Sylvia Tumin. Early in the term, until the final break with Anita, Bellow lived with Riggs only on teaching days; there was also a period when he was nomadic, moving between Riggs’s place, the Schwartzes’ farm, and friends in the Village. When eventually he moved in full-time, he and Riggs became close friends. “He was a heavy drinker—multiple personal defeats, a despairing character. He died in the next year—the year following—when I was no longer at Princeton. I was laid low by his death—by the circumstances of his life.”89

  Bellow made several attempts to depict a Riggs-like character in his fiction. Riggs is the model for Kit Quine in “Zetland and Quine,” with whom Zetland boards, and for Christopher Rood in “Far Out,” with whom Vallis boards. Both Quine and Rood teach in the Princeton English Department, both drink too much, suffer from failed marriages, are shaky and depressed. According to local gossip, Rood, in “Far Out,” “married an angel who gave him the works”; he also had “a very bad war … was finally sent back from Italy on a Section Eight,” much to the distress of his stern father, who “served with distinction in 1917” (p. 43). Rood is Old Princeton, WASP in manner, though his family background is Catholic. Riggs, too, was Old Princeton; his father, Thomas Riggs Jr., studied engineering at Princeton and, like Rood’s father, “had been on Pershing’s staff, and later was Governor General of something or other—Alaska, perhaps” (Riggs’s father was governor of the Alaska Territory, appointed by Woodrow Wilson). Like several WASP characters in Bellow’s fiction (Ilkington, for example, in “The Old System,” who enters into a property deal with Isaac Braun), Rood is reserved, especially about his feelings, “could never in the world tell Vallis what his trouble was. Or anyone” (p. 55). He has a sister, Claudine, a “flaming hardnosed woman” (she served in the Marine Corps during the war) who seems to have inherited their father’s character, “but with the accident of a single chromosome. Unsex me here!” (p. 60). The sister looks after their aged mother, who drives her mad; she wants her brother to take over the mother’s care. In “Zetland and Quine,” Kit’s mother lives “about a block up the way” and his sister tells him: “If you can put up your Jew chum, you can take mother off my hands” (p. 30). Riggs, too, had a difficult elderly mother who lived in Princeton and was looked after by his sister, Elizabeth, as also by helpers, one of whom, a young Irish girl, recalled her over twenty years later, in a letter of March 1, 1976: “I didn’t like the lady (most people didn’t) and I didn’t stay with her too long.”90 The helper remembered playing Scrabble and Snap with Riggs and Bellow. In “Far Out,” Sally Flavin, also Irish, looks after Rood’s mother, and occasionally drops by after dinner to play Hearts or Old Maid with Vallis and Rood. “She shuffled the deck with pre-nubile innocence and told Irish anecdotes with the Irish turn of phrase which pleased Vallis, and Rood even more [Rood teaches Synge and Yeats at Princeton]. She was the blessed pure-in-heart, to them” (p. 35).