The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  GIVEN THE SPLIT with Anita, the push to finish Augie, and anxieties about its reception, Bellow was not always the easiest of companions in this period, at least for those closest to him. Anthony Hecht remembers gracious and friendly Saturday night dinner parties at the carriage house in Barrytown: “Saul and Sondra entertained wonderfully,” he told Atlas. Bellow was “very genial, open, accessible, full of fun.”83 Sasha’s memories were more mixed. She had never run a household, having grown up in hotels “where they changed the sheets for you every day.” She didn’t know how to cook. She had never lived with a man. She found life with Bellow exciting but testing. In New York, on weekends, there were glamorous dinners and parties with celebrities: Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, John Steinbeck (at a party given by Pat Covici for Alberto Moravia). At Bard, Sasha learned how to set up a household and “soon got the hang of it in the kitchen and began to enjoy the challenge” (p. 77). Bellow was loving but he was also critical. She remembers his anger when she returned to Barrytown from Manhattan with two champagne glasses from Baccarat to celebrate “our making a home together.” He had given her money to buy household items and thought she’d used it for the champagne glasses. When she unwrapped the glasses, he was furious. “He flared his nostrils at me and thrust out his lower lip and accused me of being ‘extravagant,’ ‘spoiled,’ ‘thoughtless’ ” (pp. 75–76). She began to cry, explaining that she’d used her own money to purchase the glasses. Bellow apologized but accusations of extravagance persisted, in part a product of anxieties about the impending divorce and payment of alimony. “He complained about money all the time,” Vidal recalled in an interview, convinced that “no matter what happens there isn’t going to be any.”84 In her memoir, Sasha defends herself against accusations of extravagance, while quoting a friend who once said of her: “She would give you her last dime, even if she only had a nickel” (p. 76). There were also accusations and arguments about sex (“you expect too much,” Bellow told her), accompanied by Bellow’s insistence that Sasha see a Reichian therapist, “both to fix me up, and to help me understand him (his words, not mine).” Reichian therapy mystified Sasha, particularly when her therapist discouraged her from using an orgone box (“I had heard scary but intriguing things about it”), advice that annoyed Bellow: “Why did I not need it and he did?” (p. 82).

  Bellow’s suspicions about Sasha’s truthfulness were especially hurtful in respect to her painful stories of her upbringing. At the heart of these stories stood her father, the painter Nahum Tschacbasov, who had even more names than his daughter. He was born Nahum Lichter in Baku, Russia. When his family moved to Chicago in 1905 after the pogroms, he was seven or eight. There he was known, variously, as Nathan Richter, H. H. Richter, Hanathan Richter, Nate Lichter, and Nathan Lichterman. “The way I heard it,” she writes, “the original family name was Georgian, something like Cherbachev or Shebashoff” (p. 3). It was her paternal grandfather who first changed the name, buying a forged German passport in the name of Lichterman to get out of Russia. “Tschacbasov,” an approximation of the Russian original, was the name Sasha’s father adopted in Paris, where he moved the family the year after she was born, determined to become a painter (he thought the new name would look impressive on canvas). In Chicago, he had been a businessman, though of what sort is not clear. Sasha believes he made a fortune in the 1920s and 1930s as an “efficiency expert,” the term then for management consultant, under the name Hanathan Richter. Always a big spender, his fortunes fluctuated wildly. Sasha’s mother, Esther, his second wife, had been his secretary. In Sasha’s memoir, she is described as “a shy, studious, sweet-natured girl” (p. 9), valedictorian at Tuley High School (some half dozen years before Bellow attended). She married Sasha’s father in 1929, when she was nineteen or twenty. When Sasha was born, in the Michael Reese Hospital (where Anita Bellow once worked), the family lived at the Edgewater Gulf Hotel, a “swanky address in Chicago at the time.” To celebrate, her father went out and bought a yacht, which he named the Sondra. After her mother’s death, an uncle offered Sasha an alternative explanation both for the move to Paris and for the family’s change of name: “My father had been a well-known con man in Chicago and had fled when things got hot” (p. 10). He may also have fled to avoid paying child support for the children of his first marriage, whom he abandoned after their mother died and custody was awarded to her parents.

  In France, Tschacbasov (“Nate” to his wife, “Chuck” to his friends) studied with Adolph Gottlieb and Fernand Léger and began to have exhibitions. When he returned to the States it was to Brooklyn Heights rather than Chicago, to a brownstone on Pineapple Street, the first of the family’s “many transient dwellings around the boroughs” (p. 21) (where Alfred Kazin and Arthur Lidov later lived). Here he established a reputation in artistic circles as a painter and political activist. “My parents were definitely Communists,” Sasha writes, “not that they ever joined anything officially” (p. 21). “Chuck” was a volatile figure, and among gallery dealers gained a reputation for being hard to handle. Sasha describes him as “a man of enormous energy … difficult to head off when he set his mind to something” (p. 8), “a dark and dominating presence, often erupting without warning, a demon, really, clever and wicked.” He had a Svengali-like manner, “a practiced, seductive air, with a challenging edge towards women that some found irresistible.” In the early years in New York, “before he went over the edge completely,” he had good relations with other artists, including the Soyer brothers, Milton Avery, William Gropper, David Burliuk, and Philip Evergood (p. 23). In 1935 his paintings appeared in a show at the Gallery Secession with those of Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and other modernist and expressionist painters who formed a group called “The Ten.” Though he eventually broke with this group, he retained the support of a loyal coterie, including the lawyer-collector Sam Goldberg, who also entered Bellow’s life in this period, quite independently. Tschacbasov was single-minded and obsessive as a painter (by one estimate he produced more than seven thousand canvases) and resolutely bohemian in his habits. Eventually, after yet another move (“I think I can count 12 moves in New York alone between 1935 and 1942” [p. 28]), it was thought best to give Sasha a more settled environment. In 1940, at the age of nine, she was enrolled in the Manumit School (from the Latin “manumission,” freedom from bondage), a progressive Quaker and socialist school located near Pawling, New York, about an hour from the city. Sasha adored the school: “I don’t ever recall being homesick” (p. 31).85 When, after several years, money difficulties forced the Tschacbasovs to move to Oklahoma, where relatives promised work, and they had to withdraw Sasha from the school, she was devastated.

  In the main body of her memoir, Sasha skips the years between twelve and twenty. Only in a postscript, probably written two years later, does she describe them, beginning with a paragraph recounting how difficult they were to write about and how much she has repressed. The second paragraph begins: “Here’s what I definitely know: my father began to come to my bed in the night either in Oklahoma or just after our return to New York” (p. 122). She was twelve. By the time she started high school, when the family was back in New York living in the Chelsea Hotel, “there was no way I could keep him from me if I was alone with him” (p. 125).86 He told her that what they were doing “was not really wrong, it was bourgeois to think so, look at ancient Egypt, and furthermore, it was my fault, I had been provocative (at eleven or twelve?). And I had better keep quiet or there would be real trouble, my mother would never believe me, guaranteed. He said he would give me the weekly allowance I had been asking for.… The bargain was clear: keep very quiet, let it happen, get the money. I learned to negotiate like a fishwife” (p. 126). The abuse continued through high school and was accompanied by threats. Only in 1955, shortly before she and Bellow married, did Sasha tell her mother what had happened. This was when her parents were separated for a time, over her father’s affairs with other women. Sasha’s mother listened to her daughter’s tale of abus
e in teary silence but “just couldn’t accept it” (p. 123). Later that day she called Tschacbasov, who denied everything. “ ‘He says you are a pathological liar. I don’t know what to believe.’ It was the first time I heard that phrase, but not the last. I was stunned. We never spoke of it again” (p. 123). Her mother then returned to her father, who “was brutal to her, demanding she renounce me utterly.… She just couldn’t do it, any more than she could accept my truth fully” (p. 124).87

  Could Sasha have resisted? “It seems now that I should have been able to, but at the time I saw him as all-powerful, looming, frightening, and yet in some way hard to explain, there was some guilty pleasure mixed in with the disgust and horror.” She coped with these feelings by burying them: “I was good at pretending.… I perfected passivity, was later to be famously aloof with men, ruthlessly suppressing my sexual instincts.… I was a mess” (p. 127). One of the reasons she went to Bennington, she suggests, was that it was “unencumbered by male students” (p. 129). She had only a single brief romance while in high school and “had not been willing to think about men in that way, not one time, for the entire next five years” (p. 69). “It isn’t that I was timid,” she said in an interview, “I was passive.” “Men would just really have to come in and get me and I tended not to notice a lot of it because I didn’t want to.” When Bellow first met her in 1952, she was “a demi-vierge” (p. 69), sharing an apartment with one of her father’s students. This student her mother had introduced her to, not knowing that Tschacbasov was sleeping with her. Tschacbasov was often at the apartment—the girls were now in the Ansonia—and when Sasha found out what was going on, she moved out, to live at 25 Fifth Avenue with Anita Maximilian, recently separated from her husband.

  In the months before the move, shortly after beginning work at Partisan Review, Sasha “seriously began to think about Catholicism,” an interest she had developed at Bennington while studying medieval history with Franklin Ford. She contacted the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, where Bishop Sheen, “the first ‘televangelist,’ ”88 gave weekly instruction to small groups. Bishop Sheen was “mesmerizing and dynamic.… Handsome, too.” Sasha “quickly caught his particular attention. Soon enough I was his spiritual daughter, his ‘dushka’ as he began to call me … he described it as a Russian word for Soul.” At chaste weekly dinners, Sasha and the bishop “talked cozily of Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Merton and, marvellous bonus, he even knew of a number of the ‘little’ literary magazines. And, at times he slipped me a little extra spending money. Finally, a good father! Money without favors.” In December 1952, Bishop Sheen baptized Sasha at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, giving her a new name, Maria Kristina. “That Bishop certainly knew how to win me over—give me an exotic name, a beautiful antique rosary (his baptismal gift), a chaste embrace, and I was sold on the whole thing” (p. 64). When Partisan Review let Sasha go, Bishop Sheen offered her a job editing the Catholic magazine World Mission.

  In wooing Sasha, Bellow had two fathers to overcome. At some point in the wooing, he enlisted the help of Ted Hoffman, a lapsed Catholic, a tactic Hoffman described as “a fool’s errand.”89 What worked was Bellow’s persistence: he and Sasha spoke on the phone “for hours”; his trips to the city from Princeton grew more frequent. That Bellow seemed to take Sasha’s Catholicism seriously was crucial: “He was fascinated by my conversion, my yearning for the spiritual experience” (though she also admits “maybe it was mostly about sex or the chase and he just wanted to get me into the feathers”) (p. 68). Dealing with Tschacbasov, the literal father, was easier. In May 1953, at a party at the Ansonia to celebrate Sasha’s twenty-second birthday, Bellow met her parents for the first time, along with members of her father’s entourage. There was dancing at the party and Tschacbasov danced with Sasha “too much, too close, smirking at Saul; I was stiff and miserable, couldn’t get out of his grip without a scene.” Later Tschacbasov baited Bellow, calling James Joyce “too baroque,” T. S. Eliot “a fag writer,” Augie March “too rococo” (he had read a few pages of the novel in one of the magazine excerpts). Bellow responded “very smoothly,” with cutting sarcasm, “and Chuck left in a fury, my mother running after him.” Several days later, Tschacbasov told Sasha that Bellow was too old for her and that she should consider going out with the brother of her roommate (whom he had propositioned at the Chelsea Hotel, she later learned) (p. 68). Bellow’s cool besting of Tschacbasov made Sasha “feel safe … he was an anchor, a haven, a North Star.” She was a damsel in distress, he a knight in shining armor.

  When at last she consented to go to bed with Bellow, shortly after Bellow read her “the better part” of Augie, which she found “dazzling,” Sasha assumed a second identity: “Now it was sex, sin and literature. An irresistible brew. I was hiding from the Bishop as well as my father, and at the same time enjoying the public role as Saul’s girl” (p. 72). (She was also hiding, for legal reasons, the fact that she and Bellow were mostly living together.) As she got to know him better, Bellow, too, seemed to change: she saw how needy he was, for praise, reassurance; what she calls his “melancholic, suspicious, furious” side emerged.90 Sasha wanted Bellow “to continue his role as my rescuer, but this fantasy was starting to crumble.” In the memoir, she recalls an angry outburst in which Bellow called her whole history into question. “Maybe being with a young girl was beginning to feel like a lot of work, perhaps he was too exhausted from his own worries to listen willingly to my stories of growing up at the Chelsea. So he really shocked me one day when he lashed out, saying that he wasn’t sure he entirely believed any of it” (p. 82). Sasha’s tendency to fantasize fed such suspicions. While at Bennington, she was mortified when it was discovered that Tschacbasov was not her birth name. “At nineteen, I was attempting to live up to or, at least with, this grand (counterfeit) Russian name by embellishing family history to suggest, if not actually promote, a romantic image of Russian emigres fleeing the Revolution. How humiliating was the predictable response from my roommate and her mother to the unveiling of the Richter name” (p. 2).91

  OVER THE COURSE of his year at Bard, Bellow began to spend more and more time with Jack Ludwig, described by Vidal as “Iago in permanent pursuit of an Othello.” Anthony Hecht made a similar comparison: “There was something very malevolent about Jack.… He took an Iago-like pleasure in double-crossing someone who didn’t know he was being double-crossed.”92 “Iago is a bit strong,” Phil Siegelman protested. “He was rotten to the core but he wasn’t Iago.” By the end of the year, Botsford was closer to Ludwig than to Bellow. He often had dinner with Ludwig and his wife, Leya, and daughter, Susie, in their tiny apartment. Frequently when Botsford came for dinner Jack was away, at other times he’d stay for a while, then “slope off noisily. He had to see Saul, to work at the office, to see a student. I felt it, but didn’t say so to Leya, as a kind of sexual urgency” (Fragments, p. 24). Atlas quotes a Bard student named Elsa, perhaps the Elsa whom Bellow had been sleeping with, or so Ludwig told Sasha, perhaps also “the other chick in the chickenyard,” in Ralph Ellison’s phrase, a girl pursued by both Ludwig and Bellow: “There was something very lacking in Jack.… He wanted to be Saul Bellow.”93 This remark recalls what Moses Herzog hears about Valentine Gersbach, the Ludwig character in Herzog: “People say that Gersbach imitates me—my walk, my expressions. He’s a second Herzog” (p. 608). Botsford sums up Ludwig’s relation to Bellow like this: “Young man, head stuffed with knowledge and responsibilities, takes up a new job and finds himself faced with The Real Thing, the man he always wanted to be” (p. 6).94

  To Alfred Kazin, who was fond of Ludwig “in a sort of way,” “Jack was not to be believed.… Nothing fazes him, nothing intervenes, in the unremitting drama of his self-advancement.… Only none of it is real. He reminds me of the actor-manager of some provincial repertory theatre, forever beating down the creditors.… He looks into one’s eyes, burrows his image into one’s consciousness. ‘Look at me! See how positive, how manly, how electric and alive!’
”95 To Greg Bellow, looking back, Ludwig was a familiar type: “My father would surround himself with people like that all the time, who were conflating reality and artistic notions. I didn’t think twice about it because everybody did that. Some were people of great talent, other people thought themselves people of great talent.”96 Botsford, whom Greg identifies as another of this type, makes much of Ludwig’s disability, “a visible blemish, a damaged foot, that kept him from play and a proper childhood.” This “blemish” became “a weapon in his armory; you weren’t allowed to feel sorry for him because he wasn’t sorry for himself. He had conquered all that bad stuff and was on the rise and he took you over—as he had tried to do with Saul, the night of Chanler Chapman’s party” (p. 4).97 Greg Bellow agrees: “In my view, Saul’s connection to Jack resided in the man’s tolerance for suffering, his capacity to absorb feelings, and his ability to appear sympathetic to Saul’s constant complaining. Jack suffered palpably every day. One leg was shorter than the other, and he walked with a pronounced limp. Worse, he suffered from a joint disease that flared up painfully and forced him to remain in bed until it subsided. Jack’s palpable suffering in silence made a deep impression on my father.”98 Other factors, in addition to Ludwig’s stoicism and sympathy, figured in Bellow’s attraction to him. As Botsford points out, Ludwig was both “a provincial youth” and “Jewish where there were not many Jews and none quite like him” (p. 4). During walks in the woods, Ludwig sometimes joined Bellow in performing Reichian exercises. As Anthony Hecht told Atlas: “He would take Jack with him and they would both roar.”99 Ludwig became a confidant and was soon dispensing advice on Bellow’s sex life.