The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Sasha came up from New York on weekends only. For the most part, Bellow was in sole charge of Greg, which meant that Greg, ten that summer, was on his own in the mornings. On weekend visits Bellow would take a morning off writing, on monthlong visits he wrote every day. Once the morning stint was over, afternoons were mostly spent at the beach, swimming, playing, chatting. In the evenings, there were cocktail parties, as interminable for Greg as the mornings. Ann Birstein was struck by how attentive a father Bellow was at Wellfleet, and how handy he was with domestic chores. She recalls him watching with disapproval as she ironed one of Kazin’s shirts. When she asked if he thought he could do it better, “he whipped expertly through several of Alfred’s shirts, long-sleeved ones too, having learned how from being the youngest child and following his mother around as she did the housework.”117 Both father and son needed this time together for emotional or personal reasons, but fathering in general may have mattered to Bellow because of what he was writing, a novel that grew in part out of a conspicuous absence from Augie March. In the interview he gave to Harvey Breit in The New York Times Book Review, Bellow described his father as “a fascinating character.” When Breit asked him if his father appeared in Augie, Bellow said “No, I’ve saved him.” The novel he saved him for was the one he was writing that summer, “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” much quoted in the opening chapters of this book. In a letter of December 7, 1954, to John Berryman, Bellow describes the novel as “a handsome new book, which is so far highly satisfactory.” He then gives it the jokey title “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son, or The Song of the Oedipus Complex.”

  In his application for a second Guggenheim Fellowship, Bellow described “Memoirs” as being about “the fortunes of an immigrant and his eldest son; I follow their lives for forty years, from Canada to the States, and describe the efforts of the father to make a fortune and those of the son to remain a son. In the end, it is the old father, perhaps, who has become the American?” At the very end of the summer of 1953, shortly before the publication of Augie, Bellow took Greg with him to visit Lachine, a bonding trip that was also a research trip: the two purposes went together, as did Bellow’s fathering and his reflections on fathering, both on Abraham’s fathering and his own (when he and Greg got to Lachine, Bellow told Bernard Kalb in Saturday Review, he was dismayed to find “the street pretty much monopolized by a supermarket”). Why Bellow gave up on “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” which in its most finished form consists of 172 typed pages and contains many powerful and moving passages, is not clear. Atlas, as was mentioned in Chapter 1, says he thought it too sentimental, presumably repeating what Bellow told him.118 In the letter to Berryman immediately after the “Song of Oedipus” subtitle, Bellow writes: “I don’t worry about that either. Do you know, though, as I creep near the deepest secrets of my life, I drop off like a lotos-eater. I am being extremely lazy.” This passage can be read in two ways. On the one hand, it can be said to support the view Atlas offers, as if Bellow sensed something easy or escapist about the novel. To be immersed in the earliest experiences of childhood was for him like being in lotos-land, pleasurably drugged (earlier in the letter he says “I’m growing so lazy, John, it appals me. I don’t even worry. My anxieties are like old dogs. They no longer run after rabbits. They only dream and whine, asleep”). The lotos-land glow that suffuses “Memoirs,” according to this line, is like Moses Herzog’s “potato love,” a sentimentality he deplores.119 In such a reading, the phrase “I drop off like a lotos-eater” might suggest not only “I fall asleep” but “I grow slack or ‘lazy’ as a writer,” as in “even Homer nods.” On the other hand, the passage might suggest that Bellow abandoned the novel because of its closeness to forbidden material (“the deepest secrets of my life”), even though he implies this is not the case (“that” in the phrase “I don’t worry about that either” must refer to the Oedipus Complex), a reading supported by Bellow’s reply to a letter from Berryman of April 8, in which he complains of finding correspondence difficult because “my heart is lazy, and I am tired. Also, I am loath to say what I think.” In addition to these admittedly fine-spun readings, practical or down-to-earth considerations may also figure. The manuscript breaks off at the point when the Lurie family departs for the United States. How, in what is to follow, was Bellow to avoid repeating material from Augie (his mother’s isolation, relations between the Lurie brothers, especially between Joshua, the Maury figure, and “Bentchka,” the Bellow figure, urban life during the Depression)? There was also Bellow’s family to consider. “Memoirs” was drawn more closely from life than anything Bellow ever wrote. Though loving about Pa Lurie, it is also highly critical. Abraham might not read it, but if he learned of its contents, as he learned of Augie’s contents, he would not be pleased.

  Abraham’s health was poor at this time; he had heart trouble. His granddaughter Lesha remembers him as “a big smoker … always hacking.” In the September 23 letter of congratulations he wrote to Bellow about Augie, he mentions having recently been in the hospital for observation: “The X‑rays come—and very good with the exception the[y] find I had a slight heart attack. Still I hope to be good for the next ten years.” In the year before he died, from the spring of 1954 onward, he complained of ill health. On February 7, 1955, he wrote from the Waverly Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas, that “Two weeks we improved a little. Stil we no so well. We are not anymore young—I am 75. Also aunte [Fannie, his second wife] is not more a spring chicken.” On March 17, 1955, he went in for a complete checkup at the Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, where he was found to have had a slight coronary thrombosis, hardening of the arteries, and an enlarged heart. Though comfortably off, living in retirement on the North Side with Fannie, a shrewd, even-tempered woman, in a modest house at 6135 North Rockwell Street (described with uncanny precision in Herzog),120 active at the local synagogue (its president, for a time), visited dutifully every Sunday by children and grandchildren, he remained difficult and quarrelsome. Like Father Herzog, he got “stormier and more hot-headed and fractious as he aged” (p. 633). According to Greg, “Abraham found financial threats the best way to reassert his waning authority.” He frequently announced changes in his will when displeased with one or other of his children. As Greg describes it,

  He would go so far as to call his lawyer, often in the middle of the night.… Morrie tired of this routine early on and turned up his nose at his share to emphasize its paltry size, but Abraham’s mercurial threats had serious consequences for Sam, Jane, and Saul, whose fragile finances made him particularly vulnerable. My father would rush back to Chicago to learn about the new will. By the time the family had assembled at Grandpa’s insistence to hear of the new asset division, he and the offending child had patched things up and the crisis would blow over until Abraham pulled the same stunt again and the whole scene was repeated.121

  Keith Botsford, SB, Irma Brandeis, Anthony Hecht, Willie Frauenfelder, Warren Carrier, Jack Ludwig, Andrews Wanning, Bill Humphrey (ill. 11.1)

  These episodes took place during the period when Bellow was at work on “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son.” He was also at work on “Memoirs” when Abraham died, on May 2, 1955, of a heart attack. The death shattered Bellow. “When my father died I was for a long time sunk,” he wrote to Mark Harris, author of Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck (1980). Ruth Miller came to pay a condolence call at Bellow’s apartment at 333 Riverside Drive and “when Saul opened the door, he was weeping.”122 At the funeral in Chicago, he wept so conspicuously that he embarrassed Maury, who told him not to “carry on like an immigrant.” Maury had business friends there “and he was ashamed of all this open emotionalism,” an inheritance from Abraham.123 As Bellow wrote to Martin Amis on March 13, 1996, on the occasion of Amis’s father’s death: “Of course you are your father, and he is you. I have often felt this about my own father.… I’m obviously very like him: out of breath with impatience—and then a long inhalation of affection.” At some point in the year before Abraham’
s death, Bellow put “Memoirs” aside and began work on the story that would become Seize the Day (originally titled “Here and Now—Here and Now,” after also considering “One of Those Days” and “Carpe Diem”). Seize the Day was published in the 1956 summer issue of Partisan Review (The New Yorker passed on it because of its length), a little over a year after Abraham’s death. It is as concerned with fathers and father-son relations as the unfinished “Memoirs,” but is much tougher in its depiction of both. Tommy Wilhelm, the son, is at times repellently weak (“In him we see the failures of ‘feeling’ ”124); his father, Dr. Adler, is repellently hard, as autocratic as Pa Lurie but with none of his redeeming features. How, readers have wondered, did Bellow move from The Adventures of Augie March to Seize the Day, works so different in mood, register, and form? The answer is he didn’t. Seize the Day grows out of “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” a work written during a period of intense preoccupation both with Abraham at the end of his life and immediately afterward, and with Greg following the family’s dissolution. As Bellow wrote to Leslie Fiedler, explaining the effect of the separation on Greg, “I doubt that he will suffer as much from our divorce as I suffered from my parents’ ‘good’ family life. I love Gregory and I know how to make him feel my love. He is injured, but not really seriously injured and his position also has its advantages.” Hence Bellow’s refusal of an invitation from Fiedler to visit Montana: “I couldn’t arrange to have Gregory travel from his summer camp all by himself, and the time we spend together in summer is too important. It is the only time during which I live with the kid, and we both look forward to it.”125 In a letter of May 23, 1953, to Freifeld, he reports that he almost bought a house in Sag Harbor, on Long Island: “I need a place of my own very, very badly. I am nearly ready to sit and be Columbus’s chronicler not one of his crew. It would do Gregory good, too, he loves to be with me, and it makes him happy to come to me in a settled place.” Yet after a month of full-time single parenting—a month in which he also wrote every day, “for a living” as well as posterity—he confessed to Robert Hivnor, in an undated letter of August 1954, that “I am completely worn out from acting as G’s tutor, governess, cook and baseball buddy, and can’t wait to get back to New York.”

  12

  Pyramid Lake

  IN LATE MARCH 1955, a little more than a month before Abraham’s death, Bellow received word from Henry Moe that he had been awarded a second Guggenheim Fellowship. When Moe asked for his estimated income for the coming year, Bellow answered on March 29 “about $3,000,” adding that “as you will perhaps recall, I have two dependents” and that “there may be other money coming in but I can’t be sure of it.” Bellow’s intention was to spend at least half the fellowship year in Rome, though in other correspondence he mentions spending time in Spain as well. He estimates travel expenses at “about $500,” living expenses at “about $3000,” and clerical and other smaller expenses at “about $300.” Given these figures, he asks the foundation “to consider my request for a Fellowship grant of $3800. This should enable me to finish my novel now in progress.”

  Bellow never made it to Rome. He went to Nevada instead to secure the divorce he was unable to obtain, or obtain on what he felt were acceptable terms, in New York. “I see no reason to pay tribute in order to remain in New York,” he explained to Henry Volkening. “I prefer the horse to the subway.”1 On June 3 he wrote to Sherry Mangan, the author and editor, then living in Málaga, to say that he hoped to get out of Manhattan soon, but that “before I (or we) come to Spain, a short stay in Nevada is required of me, divorce laws being of a near-Spanish backwardness. So we should be arriving in Europe in February of 1956.” In Nevada Bellow could obtain an uncontested divorce in six weeks, the shortest residency requirement in the country. To obtain a unilateral decree took three months, during which time he was meant not to leave the state. On the eve of the six-week deadline, negotiations with Anita remained deadlocked; Sam Goldberg, Bellow’s lawyer, had nothing positive to report. As Bellow wrote on November 5 to Ruth Miller, his old pupil, “unless Anita is converted I shall have to be here a good while longer; and if she’s on some Road to Damascus it’s odd she hasn’t reached it yet.… I don’t expect her to stop persecuting me.” He was not the sort to accept what he saw as persecution without hitting back. “She’s in for a bit of a shock herself,” he added in the letter to Miller, a remark explained in a letter to Freifeld, written the same day: “Anita should soon be served with my complaint. I love that.”

  Bellow’s plan after obtaining the divorce was to remain with Sasha but to stay single. “I have no intention of bouncing from divorce into marriage,” he wrote to Volkening on October 19, after a month in Nevada. “When I have lived for a year or so freed from my burden and still feel as I do about Sondra we will begin to think about marrying.” What he felt about Sondra (Sasha was still something of a private name, not yet adopted widely or consistently or by Sasha herself) is suggested in correspondence. “Sasha is infinitely more happy than she’s been in her life, I think,” he writes in the undated letter to Berryman in which he talks of Anita’s “campaign to get me crucified.” “A poor book by Arnold Bennett I read this a.m.—Lillian—had one good thing in it. A young girl requires making. A man makes her into a woman. Whither then? I hope she’ll become my wife, but it is a great thing to have waked someone into life, and Sasha is a very considerable human being.” There was, the letter suggests, an element of fantasy in Bellow’s as well as Sasha’s sense of their relationship, a Pygmalion element in Bellow’s case. Though there were tensions and arguments between them, they were a couple, and for the most part Bellow’s friends, certainly his men friends, approved (not that they were likely to have said so if they didn’t). “You seemed very happy with Sandra and she with you,” wrote Isaac Rosenfeld on May 25, 1955. “It is important that you learn to have fun,” wrote Sam Freifeld on June 3. “I think Sandra can do a good job if you will let her.… You know that if anybody is capable of giving you happiness, she is. She has my unqualified affection.”

  After a second summer at the Cape with Greg, during which, at Pat Covici’s suggestion, he set to work expanding Seize the Day from thirty to forty thousand words, and before journeying to Nevada, Bellow accepted a well-paid assignment from Holiday magazine to write an article about Illinois. When he handed the article in, it was rejected, confirming his fears about writing for a living. “The editors told me to write the piece in my own way,” he complained to Sam Goldberg in an undated letter from Nevada, “and then were appalled by my long discussion of boredom in the Midwest. They wanted me to cheer things up a little, like a true native son. But I couldn’t do that.” The article, “Illinois Journey,” was eventually accepted in a shortened form almost two years after completion, appearing in the issue of September 22, 1957.

  What is immediately clear from “Illinois Journey” is how engaged Bellow was by the assignment, for all his stress on the boredom of the state. It offered him a way out: of New York, where he had been living for almost a year and which he’d come to abhor, and of himself and his problems. When he writes of the monotony of driving through the state it is the landscape, the thing seen, that preoccupies him. Here is the article’s opening paragraph:

  The roads are wide, hard, perfect, sometimes of a shallow depth in the far distance but so nearly level as to make you feel that the earth really is flat. From east and west, travelers dart across these prairies into the huge horizons and through cornfields that go on forever: giant skies, giant clouds, an eternal nearly featureless sameness. You find it hard to travel slowly. The endless miles pressed flat by the ancient glacier seduce you into speeding. As the car eats into the distances, you begin gradually to feel that you are riding upon the floor of the continent, the very bottom of it, low and flat, and an impatient spirit of movement, of overtaking and urgency, passes into your heart.2

  In describing the people he meets on his journey, so unlike the people at Bard or in New York literary circles, h
e neither sneers nor patronizes, even when he finds what they do or say odd or comical. In Nauvoo, in the northwestern part of the state, the Mormons built a city and erected a temple in 1839. When the prophet Joseph Smith was murdered in neighboring Carthage in 1844, his followers fled Nauvoo, leaving many vacant homes and businesses. Gradually, a steady stream of believers began to return, refurbishing its buildings, putting up historical markers, opening views onto the Mississippi.

  Nauvoo today is filled, it seemed to me, with Mormon missionaries who double as tourist guides. When I came for information I was embraced, literally, by an elderly man; he was extremely brotherly, hearty and familiar. His gray eyes were sharp, though his skin was brown and wrinkled. His gestures were wide, ample, virile, and Western, and he clapped me on the back, as we sat talking, and gripped me by the leg. As any man in his right mind naturally wants to be saved, I listened attentively, but less to his doctrines perhaps than to his Western tones, wondering how different he could really be from other Americans of the same type (p. 200).

  Bellow measures the places he visits in Illinois against their moments of influence. If the article has a theme it is the inexorable progress of American materialism. Almost a hundred years ago, Galena (the setting in part of “A Trip to Galena,” the only surviving portion of Bellow’s abandoned novel “The Crab and the Butterfly,” Augie’s immediate predecessor) was a center of commerce, as were other small towns Bellow visits, such as Cairo (pronounced “Cayro”) and Shawneetown. Galena is now “a remote place beside a shrunken river,” bypassed by the railroads. Ulysses S. Grant lived in Galena and his house has been turned into a museum, “but it is a museum within a museum, for the town itself is one of the antiquities of Illinois, and it has a forsaken, tottering look” (p. 198). In Shawneetown, Bellow is told a story about bygone days, when “representatives from a little northern community called Chicago once approached the bankers of opulent Shawneetown for a loan and how they were turned down because Chicago was too remote a village to bother with. ‘Well, look at us now,’ my informant said to me” (p. 201).