The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Zetland rooms with Quine two days a week. He thinks Quine needs therapy—but then he thinks everybody needs therapy. In “upperclass professorial gentile Princeton,” Zetland decides, “repression itself was repressed. Here genteel America pronounced itself guilty of failure and sentenced itself to boredom in these roomy, fusty, fine, gloomy houses.” Zetland is impressed by the trees in Princeton. Unlike the cottonwoods of Chicago, the “monumental Princetonian elms … rose beautifully over the streets and made a second interior of the street, under yellow and rust leaves.” The light they filter into Quine’s apartment is yellow. In late afternoon, “he and Quine sat with drinks in this yellow light” (p. 17). Zetland tells Quine about Dr. Sapir and Reichian theory and finds he can “talk more freely to Quine than to the intellectuals in the Village” (p. 32). One night he hears Quine sobbing in his sleep, and from that night no longer suspects him of “overdoing” his unspoken suffering. The sobs are “nightmare cries, yelps, soft yelps … sometimes doglike and sometimes resembled the weeping of a young girl” (p. 26). In “Far Out,” Vallis and Rood are comparably close; Vallis makes clear the difficulties in his life, particularly in his marriage:

  He must give up the settled life he had laid out for himself. Fundamental mistakes had been made.… Vallis had become accustomed to Nettie’s good order, but a kind of heaviness went with it which had to be resisted. Getting away from her was no bad thing, but Vallis was uneasy about the boy. Nettie invariably told him that Harry asked for him. She had reasons of her own for doing that (p. 24).

  Rood, too, sobs in his sleep and Vallis describes these sobs as an “appalling self-betrayal, this other voice.” In both manuscripts, the appearance of the Riggs character is conveyed in deft touches. Quine’s eyes “bulged slightly from his thin gentle face. He shaved carelessly. There were specks of dried blood on his chin and tufts of whisker on his throat” (p. 42); Rood, too, has “crusty scratches on his face, and his chin and jaw were burry, bristled” (p. 51). Both Quine and Rood are bald; as Rood sobs in his sleep, Vallis notes “the red vulnerable head sweating, too frightened even to turn” (p. 49).

  Nothing is said in either manuscript about parties, though Riggs, according to Bellow, loved giving them. In the Botsford interview, he describes these parties as “open-house … in the old-fashioned Greenwich Village style. People in large numbers tramped in and out, noisily eating and drinking and smoking, looking for useful contacts, gabbing, putting on the make.… Edmund Wilson was absolutely delighted with this Village revival; he adored Riggs’s parties.”91 The parties were for the Princeton literati, plus an occasional promising graduate student. Robert Keeley, one such student, later United States ambassador to Greece, among other countries, describes the parties as racy. His girlfriend, soon to be his wife, came along and was pursued by both Bellow and Berryman. The best known of the parties at 12 Princeton Avenue was given just before Christmas by Bellow rather than Riggs, to celebrate the publication of the excerpt from Augie in The New Yorker.92 Eileen Simpson remembers arriving at the party with Berryman, after a more typical Princeton gathering, “where there had been a lighted tree, milk punch and carol singing.” The music that greeted them at 12 Princeton Avenue “was the growl of a saxophone,” the atmosphere was raucous and charged: “We entered a dimly lit smoke-filled room where people were standing around with no-nonsense whiskey and gin drinks in their hands.” Bellow approached them “with an open-mouthed smile which made one smile in reflex. He seemed to be the only person present who was in a genial mood.” Argument was everywhere: “ripostes whizzed back and forth like tracer bullets through the murky atmosphere.”93

  At some point during the party Schwartz walked into the kitchen to see Elizabeth, his wife, reach into the jacket pocket of Ralph Ellison for a match. Ellison was a handsome man. Both Schwartz and Elizabeth had been drinking, Schwartz heavily. In what Simpson calls “a frenzy of jealousy,” Schwartz grabbed Elizabeth’s wrist and yanked her out of the kitchen into a back room. Neither Simpson nor Berryman had been in the kitchen, but when they walked past the back room Berryman saw Schwartz “bearing down on” Elizabeth and rushed forward to stop him. Simpson then rushed forward to stop Berryman: “ ‘Don’t you see?’ John shouted, throwing off my hand, ‘He’s going to hurt her.’ … John’s shout alerted others. Elizabeth escaped. Delmore was subdued.”94 In Bellow’s fictional version of this episode, there is no such rescue. Citrine, unlike Simpson, is witness to the original offending act:

  I was present in the kitchen when Kathleen made a serious mistake. Holding her drink and an unlit cigarette she reached into a man’s pocket for a match. He was not a stranger, we knew him well, his name was Eubanks, and he was a Negro composer. His wife was standing near him. Kathleen was beginning to recover her spirits and was slightly drunk herself. But just as she was getting the matches out of Eubanks’s pocket Humboldt came in. I saw him coming. First he stopped breathing. Then he clutched Kathleen with sensational violence. He twisted her arm behind her back and ran her out of the kitchen into the yard. A thing of this sort was not unusual at a Littlewood party, and others decided not to notice, but Demmie and I hurried to the window. Humboldt punched Kathleen in the belly, doubling her up. Then he pulled her by the hair into the Buick. As there was a car behind him he couldn’t back out. He wheeled over the lawn and off the sidewalk, hacking off the muffler on the curb. I saw it there next morning like the case of a super-insect, flaky with rust, and a pipe coming out of it (pp. 143–44).

  What Brenda Engel remembers of the party is that Schwartz slapped Elizabeth and Ellison exclaimed “Delmore!” According to another witness, Schwartz “stormed off, literally dragging her along, handbag, shoes, cigarettes, hairpins flying.”

  THIS OTHER WITNESS WAS Bellow’s new girlfriend, Sondra Tschacbasov; the party was her introduction to his Princeton world. Sondra, at various times also Saundra (the name on her 1931 birth certificate), Sandra, or Alexandra (or Sasha, the name Bellow mostly called her, and the one to be used here), was young, twenty-one, very pretty, very confident in manner.95 They’d met at the offices of Partisan Review where she worked as a secretary, neither happily nor successfully. The meeting was sometime in the autumn of 1952. She’d gotten the job at the end of the summer after graduation from Bennington. One of her professors, Francis Golffing, a poet, translator, and PR contributor, recommended her; she was interviewed by Katie Carver, the magazine’s editorial assistant, and by Philip Rahv, who gave her the job “only because he thought I was pretty.” At the time, as she openly admits, she couldn’t type, spell, decipher proofreading symbols, or take dictation, “but I was a Bennington girl … and that had a certain cachet in those days. In general, it meant you were savvy, sophisticated and up to the mark on all things modern in art, dance, theater, literature, and sex” (p. 57).

  One office task Sasha was equal to was answering the telephone. When Bellow called and asked for Philip Rahv, the following dialogue ensued, as reconstructed in her unpublished memoir, “What’s in a Name?”

  “And who are you?” he asked, “I don’t recognize your voice—you must be someone new.”

  He had an easy flirtatious style and I responded in kind.

  “I am, and why should it matter”? I asked.

  “Well I know all the girls who work at Partisan Review” (p. 65).

  When Sasha told him her last name was Tschacbasov, spelling it out, he pronounced himself “enchanted” and said he’d soon be down “to see its owner.” They met, he telephoned her the next night, then took her out for dinner, “but I said ‘no’ that night, when he took me back to the Ansonia” (the handsome Upper West Side apartment building where she lived, the setting for Seize the Day). Bellow persisted in the weeks that followed and though Sasha remembers him as “boyishly charming, attentive, flattering and seductive,” she continued to say no. When he invited her to the party at 12 Princeton Avenue and to spend the weekend with him (“staying at the Princeton Inn—alone”96), she had still not slept with him. />
  The party was on a Friday, a workday for Sasha, and she arrived late. Though she knew very few people there, she was bolstered “by the knowledge that I was wearing my best (and only) black dress, hair up, a lot of makeup, and an enormous Maltese silver cross.” Her exotic appearance was enhanced by the cigarettes she smoked, gold-tipped black Sobranies (“I had given up on the pipe—although it attracted men, all they did was talk to each other about tobacco”) (p. 66). What struck Sasha right away about the party was how many more men there were than women. Of the few people she knew, the first to approach her was R. W. B. Lewis, who had taught her Melville at Bennington. “Already flushed with drink,” Lewis asked her “point blank if I was sleeping with Saul yet, because they were all placing bets.” It was “tough,” she recalls in the memoir, to see a person she looked up to “turn out to be a buffoon.” When Lewis went on drunkenly to say that at Bennington he’d seen “a glimmer” of what she would become, “it was clear he wasn’t talking about my intellectual development … I never forgave him.” Then Delmore Schwartz appeared, a friendly face familiar from weekly visits to Partisan Revew. He immediately told her that Rahv and Phillips “disapproved of Saul dating the ‘help.’ ” By eight o’clock John Berryman was on the floor drunkenly reciting from the unfinished “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” “while holding my shoeless foot and calling me ‘Miss Beauteous Sondra.’ I had no idea who he was and even less of what he was saying.” “In retrospect,” she adds, “it is amazing how many of them were alcoholics” (pp. 66–67).

  The women Sasha met at the party are remembered no more warmly. Schwartz’s wife “was drinking heavily and unapproachable.” Brenda Engel “was sober and unapproachable.” “There was no way I could be friends with these women,” Sasha realized. “I was not a wife, I was too young, clearly inexperienced, and too attractive to the men, and a lot of women found [Bellow] attractive, as well, and were annoyed to find me in place” (p. 67). She was not wrong in sensing the women’s hostility. Sylvia Tumin remembers their first meeting: “Saul came up—we were living in the next block—with this very young woman; obviously he’d already left Anita, and she comes and she’s wearing this huge cross. I mean it was huge. All right [said resignedly], ‘Not Sandra, Sondra.’ I guess I’d just had my first son, so he brought her up to the apartment. We chatted.” Brenda Engel’s sympathies were with Anita: “I thought she was getting a very raw deal. I thought she was a very worthwhile person, a very loyal person.… That’s about the same time Isaac [Rosenfeld] left Vasiliki.” Ann Birstein, Alfred Kazin’s wife, didn’t like Sasha at all: “She had big breasts and wore a big cross that hung down between them. Obviously, the combination did something for Saul.” She remembers Sasha saying “stupid” things, for example that “she could have had her choice between Saul Bellow and Philip Rahv” (no choice at all to Birstein, Rahv being “a gravel-voiced gorilla”). Whenever the date of some recent historical event was mentioned, Sasha would ask: “ ‘How old was I then?’ and we would have to marvel at how young she was. Actually she was only two years younger than I, which didn’t stop her making statements to me beginning with the phrase, ‘For people of my generation.’ ”97 Lillian Blumberg McCall, Bellow’s friend from Minetta Street, found Sasha “extremely pretty” but also “utterly baffling and selfish, and self-absorbed.” Part of what made her baffling was her “incredible sex appeal. The very thought of her made Philip Rahv drool.… Other men I knew were wiped out by Sash who seemed to always be thumbing her nose at life. It was an attractive quality of insouciance and irreverence.”98

  Sasha was “not often at ease” among Bellow’s circle, unsurprisingly. “I was still a college kid sitting in with a bunch of professors.” She was “Saul’s girl” and mostly ignored in conversation. “If I thought I was under the radar in Princeton,” she recalls, after meeting Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt in New York, “these ladies never took notice of me at all” (p. 70), treatment she both understood and resented. What she had going for her “in the eyes of some” (mostly men, one imagines) was “the way I put myself together, the personal style.” She had been raised “in the world of artists and performers” and knew how to present herself: “I had a ‘look,’ and Saul was hot for the Russian mystique.” None of his friends expected the relationship to last: “it was a fairly commonplace thing to sleep with one of your students or a recently graduated editorial assistant.” That Bellow continued to find her interesting, Sasha writes in the memoir, ought to have suggested to his friends that she was intelligent and articulate, “however, no one actually elicited an opinion from me about anything.” Meanwhile, she was falling in love with Bellow. “He was energetic and unflagging in his pursuit of me. That was flattering and, ultimately, successful.” She knew that he was married, that he had married young, and that he no longer lived with his wife. Though he sometimes talked of marrying her, “he had no real plans to divorce that I could see. Nor did I particularly care at the time” (p. 69).

  The quality that most drew Sasha to Bellow, in addition to his persistence, was his attitude toward his work, an attitude that seemed to her to contradict Romantic and bohemian stereotypes, distinguishing him not only from Schwartz, Berryman, and Rosenfeld, but from the artists she had grown up with, in particular her painter father. “What was most seductive,” she writes, “was the very workmanlike way he viewed himself in his craft. He was a writer, not an Artist. He ‘went to work’ so to speak, like it was a regular job, and he was obviously serious, committed, and as long as I lived with him (and forever after, as far as I knew) he followed the same daily routine consistently. You could set your watch by him—an early breakfast, work in his study, emerge for lunch (with a book—not his), and then edit the morning’s work” (pp. 71–72). The strictness of this routine is partly what had put off Nadine Raoul-Duval in Paris. Sasha thought it admirable, also intriguing. She saw Bellow as “part middle-class Jewish business man” (with an office at home), “part contemplative, scholarly rabbi” (with words as his religion). “What a relief from my whirling dervish of a parent, all untrammelled passions and unbridled habits and desires!” (p. 72).

  THOUGH OTHERS CORROBORATE Sasha’s account of Bellow’s daily routine, they recall the act of writing for him as strenuous, at times frenzied. In a letter of December 31, 1981, Bellow himself writes of composing The Dean’s December “in a kind of fit.” In 1964, speaking of Henderson the Rain King, he tells the interviewer: “I wrote it in a kind of frenzy.”99 He would head to his study with a towel around his neck, like a boxer, emerging with it soaked in perspiration from the effort of concentration.100 He liked to write with Mozart blaring.101 When asked in a questionnaire on the composing process if he worked out his plots in advance, or made charts, or began by writing out biographies of his characters, or used file cards, he replied “No” to each question.102 “Do you begin at the beginning?” asked the interviewer in 1964. “I always begin at the beginning,” he replied. “My ambition is to start with an outline but my feelings are generally too chaotic and formless. I get full of excitement which prevents foresight and planning.”103 He thought of Augie as a letting loose, a letting free, water sluicing down Paris streets (though when Sasha first knew him much of his time at the desk was spent pruning, polishing, proofing). His approach to writing was both Romantic and bourgeois, as was his facility or fecundity. “You’re not like John Berryman,” Bellow’s friend Richard Stern wrote to him in an undated letter from the mid-1960s: “You don’t dive for these pearls—they just come to you. The oyster breaking your nose as it snaps open. But then you bring pearls up. So few even know what a pearl is.” Bellow was rarely blocked or anxious about drying up; though often depressed and despondent, it was not because he’d “begun in gladness,” in a Wordsworthian blessed infancy (recall little Bentschke in “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son”); gladness did not of itself or “thereof” bring despondency, let alone the madness of a Berryman or a Schwartz. Though Bellow’s gifts of perception and expression came to him
naturally, they had to be properly attended to, by which is meant not just that they had to be ordered or shaped, but that he had to be in a position to receive them, concentrating, undistracted. First the oyster snaps open for him, as Stern puts it, “then you bring pearls up”; the spontaneous overflow is recollected in tranquillity. What Mozart teaches us, Bellow has written, is not simply that “there are things which must be done. Easily or not at all” (an allusion to Keats’s “If poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to the tree it had better not come at all”), but that “concentration without effort is the heart of the thing.”104