The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Sasha’s sense of Bellow as businessman is hard to square with notions of the writer as outsider. Was Howe right to group him with Schwartz and Berryman, neither of whom was likely to be thought of as businesslike?105 In “The Distracted Public,” a Romanes Lecture delivered at Oxford University on May 10, 1990, in a passage partly quoted in Chapter 4, Bellow identifies with the Romantic view. In school in Chicago, memorization figured prominently, particularly in English classes:

  I memorized many of Wordsworth’s poems. “The World Is Too Much with Us” may, for all I know, have been my introduction to the subject of distraction, for Wordsworth’s warning not to lay waste our powers by getting and spending was not lost on me (although I had so little to spend). Nor did I miss his point about emotion recollected in tranquillity—or his emphasis on the supreme importance of a state of attention or aesthetic concentration that would put the world of profit and loss in its place.106

  The world of profit and loss impinged more directly on Bellow than on Wordsworth. Putting it “in its place” meant putting it below what in the lecture he calls “human essences,”107 but it also meant putting it center stage, to convey its power to attract and distract. As Philip Roth explains, speaking of Humboldt’s Gift, in a passage quoted in Chapter 3: “business … that’s what’s at the heart of your book, which is the small-time lawyers, the owners of the middle-sized businesses, the conniving and cheating. You were not ashamed of Jewish aggression because you saw it as American aggression.”

  America was to be criticized, but it was also to be defended, especially in the face of European condescension. Here is Bellow’s response to another questionnaire, sent in 1976 by the German writer Heike Doutiné: “Nothing would please me more than answering the list of questions you recently sent me but I am unfortunately so occupied that it is impossible for me to give myself this pleasure,” a sentence that might almost have been written by the enraging Frenchman in “Nothing to Declare” (smiling as he claimed not to know the location of the rue de Berri). “I will say this, however, there is much to criticize in America, of course. I, myself, am something of an expert in this line and it is as an expert that I tell you that most European criticism of American culture is itself terribly banal.” In “An Interview with Myself,” published in 1975 in the New Review, Bellow recalls entering the Restaurant Voltaire in Paris with the novelist Louis Guilloux. The waiter addressed Guilloux as “Maître,” which left Bellow unable to decide “whether to envy him or to laugh up my sleeve.” Later he says, “in America we have no Maîtres, no literary world, no literary public” (an odd assertion coming from what was then America’s most respected novelist, who must, at least once, have been comparably greeted by an American waiter, a Chicago waiter). “Many of us read, many love literature,” Bellow continues, “but the traditions and institutions of literary culture are lacking. I do not say that this is bad. I only state it as a fact that ours is not a society that interests itself in such things.”108 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bellow was especially skeptical about European traditions and institutions, as in “The Gonzaga Manuscripts” or his accounts of postwar Paris. Even in the Guilloux anecdote, which leaves him not knowing what to feel, he calls the waiter “smarmy.”

  FROM ITS OPENING WORDS and Mark Twain title, to its closing reference to Christopher Columbus, The Adventures of Augie March trumpets the strength and vitality of American culture. This is partly because it was inspired by firsthand experience of Europe—of its exhaustion, political naïveté, ignorance of America, and recent horrors. That Bellow was not alone among American writers and intellectuals in expressing patriotic sentiments played an important part in the reception of Augie. In the May–June 1952 issue of Partisan Review, the editors ran the first part of a three-part symposium on the topic “Our Country and Our Culture.” Over successive issues twenty-four contributors addressed the topic, for the most part agreeing with the “Editorial Statement” that opened the symposium.109 This statement was written by William Phillips and Delmore Schwartz, a collaboration Schwartz engineered “because he wanted to avoid what he thought was Rahv’s clumsy and ostentatious style.”110 The editors began by announcing the “apparent fact” that American intellectuals “now regard America and its institutions in a new way,” as no longer “hostile to art” (p. 283). To bolster this apparent fact supporting quotations were provided, stretching from 1879 to 1947. “We are the disinherited of art!” is the first quotation, from Henry James, “the soil of American perception is a poor, little, barren, artificial deposit.” Ezra Pound, writing in 1917, begins: “O helpless few in my country / O remnant enslaved! / Artists broken against her, / Astray, lost in the villages, / Mistrusted, spoken against.” The quotations from Van Wyck Brooks and John Dos Passos, written in 1918 and 1937, respectively, are comparably discouraging. With Edmund Wilson, however, writing in 1947, all is changed:

  My optimistic opinion is that the United States at the present time is politically more advanced than any other part of the world.… We have seen in the last fifty years a revival of the democratic creativeness which presided at the birth of the Republic and flourished up through the Civil War. This began to assert itself strongly during the first two decades of this century, was stimulated by the Depression that followed the blowing‑up of the Stock Market, and culminated in the New Deal. It was accompanied by a remarkable renascence of American arts and letters.

  According to Phillips and Schwartz, the renascence Wilson identifies has come about for two reasons. The first recalls Harold Rosenberg’s 1940 Partisan Review essay “On the Fall of Paris”:

  For more than a hundred years, America was culturally dependent on Europe; now Europe is economically dependent upon America. And America is no longer the raw and unformed land of promise from which men of superior gifts like James, Santayana, and Eliot departed, seeking in Europe what they found lacking in America. Europe is no longer regarded as a sanctuary; it no longer assures that rich experience of culture which inspired and justified a criticism of American life. The wheel has come full circle and now America has become the protector of Western civilization, at least in a military and economic sense.

  The second reason for the renascence Wilson identifies is more concisely stated: “there is a recognition that the kind of democracy which exists in America has an intrinsic and positive value: it is not merely a capitalist myth but a reality which must be defended against Russian totalitarianism” (p. 284).

  The optimism of the editors is not without qualification. To begin with, “American economic and political institutions have not suddenly become ideally beneficent.” There is also the problem of mass culture, which makes the serious artist “feel that he is still outside looking in” (p. 284). The concept of mass culture was popularized in America in the 1940s and 1950s by Dwight Macdonald, in influential essays published in politics and Diogenes (the quarterly for which Schwartz acted as consultant).111 But the authority the editors quote is Ortega y Gasset, for whom the mass “crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated” (p. 285). The mass figures prominently in Schwartz’s contribution to the symposium, which brings its third and final installment to a close. For Schwartz, the writer or artist must remain an outsider, although the term he now uses is “non-conformist.”112 The “chief prevailing fashion” today is “the will to conformism,” founded on “the startling discovery that the middle class is not entirely depraved, that liberalism does not provide the answer to all social questions, and that a state of perpetual revolution in literature and art is neither an end in itself nor the chief purpose of either literature or revolution” (p. 595). The sole point of connection between Schwartz and the prevailing fashion is his acceptance that “only America can any longer guarantee the survival of that critical non-conformism without which the very term intellectual—and the reality of the intelligen
ce—is meaningless.” In the past, the nonconformist, whether writer, artist, or intellectual, had a choice “between exile in Europe, which was a kind of non-conformism, and the attitude exemplified in America in every period and in a variety of ways from Emerson to Mencken. Now that there is no longer a choice, the tradition and the vitality of critical non-conformism is more important than ever” (p. 597).

  In such a way Schwartz squared his Romantic view of the poet with current trends, freeing himself to accept various jobs for the Ford Foundation and to allow his name to appear on the masthead of the Committee for Cultural Freedom.113 According to William Barrett, the other associate editor at Partisan Review, Schwartz had little choice, given the direction the magazine was taking. In the summer of 1952, Barrett was invited to lead an International Seminar at Harvard, nominally directed by Professor William Y. Elliot, but in fact managed by a young graduate student named Henry Kissinger. The aim of the seminar was “to give a certain number of chosen foreign intellectuals a more adequate picture of American cultural life. Above all, it was to show that there could be an opposition to Communism from the Left, that American attitudes were not summed up in McCarthyism, and that there were in fact American intellectuals of the Left who were vigorously anti-Communist.” Barrett got the job because “Partisan Review was now publicly recognized as the leading magazine expressing this point of view, and I was hired to lead the Seminar as a representative editor.”114

  Bellow is very funny about Schwartz’s dealings with foundation bigwigs and the panjandrums of the Cultural Cold War, particularly in connection with his campaign to become a permanent member of the Princeton English Department. The campaign began with Schwartz cajoling Bellow into serving as emissary to Carlos Baker, now the English Department chairman. Bellow was to suggest to Baker that if the department agreed to give Schwartz tenure, the Ford Foundation would underwrite a chair for him. He was also to stress Schwartz’s work as a consultant to the foundation and his relationship with James Laughlin, who oversaw many foundation-sponsored literary enterprises. These points Bellow duly made, presenting them, as instructed, as his own. Then Schwartz wrote to Laughlin, asking for his help. “Since one of the purposes of the Ford Foundation is to spend rather than to make money, I can’t imagine that there would be any objection on the Foundation’s part or any difficulty for you whatever.”115 Laughlin agreed to help, by which he meant writing on Schwartz’s behalf. Schwartz took this agreement as a guarantee that the foundation would come up with the money. When, to Bellow’s astonishment, the Princeton English Department agreed to offer Schwartz a tenured post, Schwartz turned his attention directly to the foundation, writing letters to Robert Hutchins, late of the University of Chicago, now the foundation’s associate director. He also telephoned Hutchins in Pasadena, offering to come out to talk with him. Hutchins was not encouraging. Eventually he turned Schwartz down and the scheme collapsed. In Humboldt’s Gift, Humboldt receives a comparable rejection on the day of Citrine’s Princeton party.

  The Hutchins figure in Humboldt’s Gift is Wilmoore Longstaff of the Belisha Foundation. Bellow has him say yes to Humboldt, a decision later overturned by the Belisha trustees. He also has Humboldt actually meet Longstaff, whereas Schwartz never met Hutchins. Unauthorized, Humboldt steps into Longstaff’s private elevator and pushes the button to his penthouse office. When confronted by Longstaff’s secretary, he admits he has no appointment, “but he was Von Humboldt Fleisher, the name was enough. Longstaff had him shown in.” The Belisha Foundation is richer than the Rockefeller or Ford Foundations and Longstaff has “hundreds of millions to spend on science and scholarship, on the arts, and on social improvement” (p. 136). Citrine imagines Humboldt in Longstaff’s office, “swooning with wickedness and ingenuity, swollen with manic energy, with spots before his eyes and maculations of the heart” (p. 137). When Longstaff approves Humboldt’s scheme for a chair at Princeton, Humboldt rushes by cab to visit a certain Ginnie in the Village, a Bennington graduate to whom Citrine’s girlfriend has introduced him:

  He pounded on her door and said, “It’s Von Humboldt Fleisher. I have to see you.” Stepping into the vestibule, he propositioned her immediately. Ginnie said, “He chased me around the apartment and it was a scream. But I was worried about the puppies underfoot.” Her dachshund had just had a litter. Ginnie locked herself in the bathroom. Humboldt shouted, “You don’t know what you’re missing. I’m a poet. I have a big cock.” And Ginnie told Demmie, “I was laughing so hard I couldn’t have done it anyway.”

  When I asked Humboldt about this incident he said, “I felt I had to celebrate, and I understood these Bennington girls were for poets” (p. 138).

  Sasha’s Bennington roommate, Anita Maximilian, the daughter of a wealthy Manhattan furrier, was taking classes at the New School at the time this scene is set. She lived in a lower Fifth Avenue apartment near the Partisan Review offices, and Sasha was a frequent visitor. Maximilian described the apartment to Atlas as “like Partisan Review headquarters.… I’d come out of the shower and there would be Paolo Milano … or John Berryman or Saul.”116 According to Sasha, Maximilian had affairs with the poets Louis Simpson and John Berryman, and had “a perfectly undisciplined dachshund called Schatzie” (p. 80).

  BELLOW WAS FREQUENTLY called upon, from Augie onward, to advise foundations, sit on boards and committees, and interact with corporate types. In “What Kind of a Day Did You Have?” he makes clear the excitements and enticements of such a role, its fat fees, private jets, and executive audiences (“bankers, economists, former presidential advisers” [p. 288]). Many years after the collapse of Humboldt’s scheme to become a Princeton professor, Citrine finds himself in a helicopter with Wilmoore Longstaff, as handsome a figure as Robert Hutchins: “like a movie-star, like a five-star general, like Machiavelli’s Prince, like Aristotle’s great-souled man.” All his life, Longstaff “had fought technocracy and plutocracy with the classics. He forced some of the most powerful people in the country to discuss Plato and Hobbes. He made airline presidents, chairmen, governors of the Stock Exchange perform Antigone in boardrooms. Truth, however, is truth, and Longstaff was in many respects first rate. He was a distinguished educator, he was even noble” (p. 137). Bellow moved in and out of the world of such men, and was rewarded by them with fellowships, trusteeships. He became a figure of influence in literary and intellectual circles. As he grew in eminence, he was swamped with requests: for references, publishers, agents, fellowships, jobs in academe, writing assignments. These requests he answered conscientiously, while steadily producing novels and stories, bringing up pearls. He lived the life Schwartz dreamed of, while staying true to his gifts of perception and expression (about foundation heads as well as failed poets). In Augie March, the work that launched him on this life, he makes the case for his country and its culture, without ignoring its faults. In no respect is this case stronger than in the novel’s language, a language Bellow rightly saw as new and wholly American.

  Sondra “Sasha” Tschacbasov, early 1950s (ill. 10.1)

  11

  Augie/Bard/Sasha

  BELLOW KNEW THAT he was doing something new with The Adventures of Augie March. What he discovered with Augie, he told Philip Roth, was “that I could write whatever I wished, and that what I wished was to get into words the appearance of a gallery of personalities—characters like Grandma Lausch or Einhorn the fertile cripple, or Augie March himself. Years of notation ended in the discovery of a language that made everything available.”1 One of the “great pleasures” of this language, he elsewhere recalled, “was in having the ideas taken away from me, as it were, by the characters”2 (an admission echoed in a letter of February 15, 1961, to the writer Louis Gallo: “When I got the idea for Augie March—or rather when I discovered that one could free oneself”). The language of the novel overrides ideas and conventions of style. Martin Amis, Bellow’s great champion, calls its style one “that loves and embraces awkwardness, spurning elegance as a false lead, words tumblin
g and rattling together in the order they choose.” Among the examples Amis approvingly cites are “glittering his teeth and hungry,” “try out what of human you can live with,” “a flat-footed, in gym shoes, pug-nosed woman,” constructions that vivify the thing described or the describer or both.3

  The language of Augie had been pressing on Bellow for several years, as evidenced by the 1949 monologues “A Sermon by Dr. Pep,” published in May in Partisan Review, and “The Thoughts of Sergeant George Flavin,” published by John Lehmann in Penguin New Writing 38. “Dr. Pep” is based on the orators Bellow listened to in 1938–39 in Chicago’s Washington Square Park, known locally as Bughouse Square. Bellow was working at the Newberry Library at the time, across the street from the square, conducting research for the Federal Writers’ Project. Dr. Pep preaches vitality, Augie’s great quality; unlike Augie, however, he’s cracked, monomaniacal. After a long winter in the Newberry among nuns, antiquarians, and “young girls getting up assignments for Teachers’ College [perhaps the Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College, where Bellow taught at the time]—pale, hot-faced young girls whose laps were never meant for notebooks” (p. 455), Pep is ready to deliver his sermon: “on disease and health, and true and false nourishment, out of my readings in Galen and Hippocrates.” What sets the sermon going is the nearby smell of “White-Castle hamburger-onions” (p. 456). High/low juxtapositions like these, of hamburgers and Hippocrates, are the monologue’s meat and drink. The sermon begins with “the question of why the creature is ground up—not only in hamburger but in its allies chopped steak and Salisbury steak, and other euphemisms of the menu as well, and in croquettes and hash” (p. 458). “Bad conscience” results from such grinding, “a reality is subtracted along the way and something spoiling creeps in” (p. 458). Other cultures do a better job of acknowledging these subtractions: “the wild Melanesian and the Kalahari dwarf are in a better state than we. The Mithraic communion of bread and wine and the totem animal masks of the cult, almost all we have left, are hidden in a little trimming of St. Peter’s. The White Tower ketchup bottle is not enough of a symbol of the sacrifice of life” (p. 459).