THE CAR BELLOW USED for the Illinois journey was the one he used to drive out west to Nevada, an old Chevrolet. He did not travel alone. Sasha came along on the trip, not to stay with him in Reno, but to be driven to California, to Malibu, to be the guest of a friend, Sand (Suzanne) House, now married to a Hollywood executive named James Higson, a producer of the popular television game show Queen for a Day. After Sasha quit working for Bishop Sheen’s World Mission, she found a job writing press releases for a small public relations firm. The job bored her and when she lost it, as Bellow wrote to Kazin on June 29, 1955, it was “to great delight. First she was affronted, and then it made her, as it should have done, happy.” In addition to being without a job, she was soon to be without a place to live; the Kazins were returning to New York from Massachusetts (Alfred had been teaching at Smith College) and needed their apartment back. At this point it was proposed that Sasha help Bellow and Delmore Schwartz with a publishing project Schwartz had wangled for them at Viking. The project was to produce an anthology entitled “What the Great Novelists Say About Writing the Novel” to be used as a textbook. By July 1955, the manuscript was six months overdue and Pat Covici wrote to ask when it would be submitted (this question Schwartz evaded, while procuring an advance for another project, the “Portable Heine”).3 Sasha, the editors decided, was just the person to hunt down passages for the anthology. While Bellow settled in Nevada and got his divorce decree, she would work at the library at UCLA. Since she had no money, Bellow agreed to pay her expenses. Though the anthology was never completed, the job was real enough, and Sasha had the requisite literary skills, or so Schwartz seems to have thought. “Please tell Sasha that I’ve read her review,” he wrote to Bellow on December 19, 1954, “and would be delighted to have her write my reviews for me at the usual rates.”
To Sasha the drive west was among the best times she and Bellow had together, “a wonderful carefree trip … once we got past the endless cornfields of Nebraska, with spectacular drives through the Badlands (where the car broke down) and Yosemite, talking, laughing, and snuggling in at night in rustic motels.” As she put it in an interview: “we’d have a lot of hot sex at night and then get into the car in the morning.”4 The motels were mostly little cabins with kitchenettes. They’d stop in the late afternoon, buy groceries, and Sasha would cook dinner, leaving something for the next day’s lunch. At Mount Rushmore, “I remember trying to slice a pot roast in the car with his penknife on a winding road past those enormous presidential stone faces” (p. 84). Bellow did all the driving. Although Sasha had driven in college, she had no driver’s license. (Bellow liked to drive and liked cars, and when he could afford them, bought good ones.) After a few days in Malibu with Sasha and the Higsons, he left for Nevada, arriving in Reno on September 27. Shortly afterward, as arranged, Sasha rented a room in Westwood, just off the UCLA campus, buried herself in the library during the week, and spent weekends at the Higsons’ beach house on Malibu Colony Road. She remembers that Bellow called her “nearly every night” (p. 85).
When Bellow got to Nevada he stayed initially at the Pyramid Lake Guest Ranch, a dude ranch about an hour northeast of Reno. The ranch, on the southwestern shore of the lake, was owned by Harry Drackert, a former rodeo champ, and his wife, Joan, a prizewinning trapshooter. The Drackerts were among a dozen or so guesthouse operators in the Reno area catering to wealthy out-of-state residents waiting for divorce. The Thoroughbred and quarter horses Harry raised at the ranch, for both racing and ranch use, grazed untethered by the lakeside. A. J. Liebling stayed at the Pyramid Lake Guest Ranch in 1949 when seeking his divorce, returned to the area frequently, and wrote several New Yorker articles about the lake and his experiences there. He described the guesthouse business as “a cash crop in the summer,” involving peculiar requirements for its cowboy proprietors, some amatory, others less demanding (for example, “the daily corvée of bringing a detail of the women in to shop [in Reno] and have their hair done”).5 When Bellow arrived, most of the summer residents had gone, and there were few new guests in the months to follow (the Drackerts were to close the business the following year). Writing to Volkening a day after arrival, all Bellow says of the place is that it’s windy—“this wind I’m sitting in threatens to carry me and my thin paper over the next mountain”—and that he plans to stay only until he finds an apartment to rent. But he stayed several weeks, leaving because it was too expensive to stay.
The place he moved to, he wrote to Volkening on October 19, was a one-room “cabin or shack, decent and pleasant in its way, but its isolation is beyond anything you’ve ever seen. I thought it would be better to live like this for a while and study my soul, and I still think it is the wise course for me. I have even begun to work again, after weeks of idleness. But there are times when I must, and literally do, howl.” The shack was thirty miles from Reno on the edge of a Paiute Indian reservation, surrounded by low copper-colored mountains and overlooking Pyramid Lake. The American explorer John Charles Frémont named the lake after the most striking of the bizarre rock formations jutting from its changeable blue expanse: a six-hundred-foot-high tufa-encrusted pyramid near the eastern shore (tufa is a chalky sediment produced by a chemical reaction to algae). The lake was beautiful but otherworldly, like the surrounding landscape, which often appeared in science fiction movies set in outer space.6 One-sixth saline, it was home to strange fish, described by Arthur Miller (who is soon to enter the story) as “whiskery and forbidding, of an unevolved kind found only here, it was said, and in a lake in India.”7 These strange fish, the unevolved cui-ui, were discussed in Liebling’s New Yorker articles, titled “The Lake of the Cui-ui Eaters”; the species was two million years old. Less ancient but impressive in their own way were the lake’s enormous cutthroat trout, named for the red gill slashes just behind their heads.
Bellow’s shack, built out of old railroad ties, belonged to Margaret “Peggy” Marsh, the owner of a neighboring pink house. Electricity for both residences was provided by a Model T Ford engine; the place was silent except for the twice daily whistle and clack of a long freight train passing nearby. The air at Pyramid Lake was exceptionally clear. A rattlesnake-infested island a mile distant looked a hundred yards away. To make a phone call Bellow had to walk half a mile down a dirt road to a phone booth on the main highway, “a road travelled by perhaps three vehicles a day and none at night.” Once a week he would drive into Reno to buy groceries, do laundry, visit the library, have a meal out, or go to a movie. The drive in and out of Reno was featureless, all sand and sagebrush, but as Miller notes, “out on the desert, far from the vehicle track, there were sometimes signs of life underground … a pair of shorts hung out on a stick to dry in the sun, or a T‑shirt. They were men wanted by the law, for murder more often than not. The state police knew they were out there, and nobody enquired why they were not picked up, but payoffs were inevitably suspected.”8 The strangeness of the landscape sparked Bellow’s imagination, helping to produce the strangest of his fictions, Henderson the Rain King, a novel mostly set in Africa, a place he’d never been, with a desert landscape very like that of Pyramid Lake.9
In many ways Bellow’s time in Nevada was just what he needed. “You will be astonished not to hear complaints from me,” he wrote to Sam Freifeld in a November 5 letter, “but I haven’t any. And now the first six weeks are almost out, and I find myself almost regretting that they’ve gone so quickly. This sort of life suits me more than I would have thought possible. I fish and ride, and walk and read and write; at moments I even think.” Writing to Ralph Ellison on April 2, 1956, he was still high on Nevada. “I hope it’s been a good year for you and Fanny; for Sondra and me it’s been a remarkable one. You wouldn’t have known me, Ralph, with my casting outfit and a new reel pulling in rainbow trout. Sitting a horse, too.” Bellow liked the people he met at the lake as well as the life he was leading. Peggy was good company. Forty years earlier she had come to Reno for a divorce and never left. She was lively, warm, casual in
manner and appearance, a big woman, hard-drinking and smoking, with a heavy wheeze. Only when she began talking did one realize that she was well-born, from a “good” family in St. Louis but with plenty of wild stories about her past. She also told stories about the Drackerts, the Paiute Indians, most of whom lived at the other end of the lake, twenty miles away, her well-off friends Nora and Pat Pattridge, who lived up in the hills in what Sasha recalls as “a lovely, elegant farmhouse,” and whom Bellow also got to know and like, and several “elderly ladies who lived at mountain sides and in lonely canyons.”10 Like Peggy, Joan Drackert was both a talker and a heroic smoker. Liebling describes her as “a blonde with a good figure and an inquiring mind, and her wide gray eyes were slightly keener than a chicken hawk’s.”11 The Drackerts had a bar, little more than a shack, and a modest gift shop, the Indian Trading Post, on the main road, selling Paiute arts and crafts; it was here that the telephone was located. The bar was mostly tended by Joan and when there were calls for guest ranch residents or Bellow or Peggy, Harry or an old ranch hand named Red would be summoned to notify one or other of them.
In “Leaving the Yellow House” (1958), one of the most powerful of Bellow’s stories, the heroine, Hattie Waggoner, is based on Peggy Marsh. Hattie is admirable in her independence, despite many failings.12 She is seventy-two, divorced, a heavy drinker, and has lived at Sego Desert Lake for more than twenty years. She comes from money and was well educated but has been poor for some time. Her interest in ideas is “very small.”13 She is lazy and “never made any bones about it: an idle life was all she was good for” (p. 269). A friend and former employer, India, another hard-drinking woman, has left her the yellow house. As her friend Jerry Rolfe—a character based on Pat Pattridge—reminds her, “without it you wouldn’t have had a pot of your own” (p. 263). Yet living on the edge only intermittently bothers Hattie: “she was not one to be miserable for long; she had the expression of a perennial survivor” (p. 263). Bellow depicts her with sympathy and from the inside:
She was weak, she was old, she couldn’t follow a train of thought very easily, she felt faint in the head. But she was still here; here with her body, it filled space, a great body. And though she had worries and perplexities, and once in a while her arm felt as though it was about to give her the last stab of all; and though her hair was scrappy and old, like onion roots, and scattered like nothing under the comb, yet she sat and amused herself with visitors; her great grin split her face; her heart warmed with every kind word.
And she thought, people will help me out. It never did me any good to worry. At the last minute something turned up, when I wasn’t looking for it (p. 264).
Hattie’s existence at Sego Desert Lake is doomed, and her narrow prospects narrow further over the course of the story, but she knows her nature and refuses to heed the reality instructors (partly drawn from the Drackerts and the Pattridges) who advise her to sell up and leave. Looking back on her life she thinks: “ ‘Youth is terrible, frightening. I will wait it out. And men? Men are cruel and strong. They want things I haven’t got to give.’ There were no kids in me, thought Hattie. Not that I wouldn’t have loved them, but such my nature was. And who can blame me for having it? My nature?” (p. 278). There is something indomitable about this “nature,” which is depicted with what Daniel Fuchs calls “lyrical personalism,” a quality Bellow also brought to the depiction of Henderson.14 The story ends with Hattie putting off a decision about the house: “I’m drunk and so I need it. And tomorrow, she promised herself, I’ll think again. It’ll work out, for sure.” (p. 281).
It worked out for Peggy Marsh. When she found herself backed into a similar corner at Pyramid Lake, no longer able to live alone in her pink house, she sold it to buyers who guaranteed her life tenancy in the shack. “Now have agreeable companions,” she wrote to Bellow on June 6, 1959, “unlimited electricity and water, free gratis for nothing!” The pink house is now white with blue trim, the shack, too, has been painted: “and I don’t pay taxes, so I should worry.” Peggy had read Henderson, which she thought “superb.” She especially admired the ending: “The last chapter landing in Newfoundland is perfect. No maudlin meeting or reconciliation with Lily.” Though Henderson’s imperfections were “terrible,” they “endeared him to the reader.” Three years later, in a letter of October 10, 1962, Peggy writes from Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is staying with a niece: “I am not very spry these days. Have had gout and 3 heart attacks in ’62. But in spite of that, I have a pleasant and quiet life—I love bridge, as you know, and this city is famous for it.” Nora and Pat Pattridge reported the same news about the pink house, in a letter dated April 6 (without a year). They added that friends in San Francisco have given them “Leaving the Yellow House” to read. “Never realized you were studying us all so minutely—comparatively, you let us off very gently.”
In mid-November, before his three months were up, Bellow left Nevada sub rosa and drove to Malibu, stopping first at San Francisco and Palo Alto. The risk of leaving the state was minimal; as Arthur Miller puts it, “the whole business was a fantasy or formality anyway, patently devised to bring divorce-hungry visitors to the state and fees to the lawyers.”15 To Ruth Miller, in a letter of November 5, Bellow wrote of being “horribly excited” at the prospect of returning to civilization; to Sam Freifeld, on the same day, he admitted to being “in a state of rare excitement” at the prospect of seeing Sasha, “after [her] many weeks alone in L.A.” “He was lonely,” Sasha remembers, “he missed me, I missed him” (p. 85). Once together, they decided to stay together; she returned with him to Nevada for the remainder of the required three months. At Pyramid Lake, Peggy offered to swap residences: her comfortable pink house had two bedrooms, one of which Bellow could use for writing; she could manage happily in the shack. The items the pink house lacked, Sasha soon discovered, were a vacuum cleaner, a dishwasher, and any other electrical appliance. Housework was challenging. The routine was for Bellow to begin writing immediately after breakfast, while Sasha busied herself with domestic chores. When the chores were finished she walked over to the shack to listen to Peggy’s stories, then returned to the house to serve Bellow lunch. After lunch Bellow did more work and Sasha walked down to the bar to gossip with Joan, who spent most of her time there reading or going over paperwork. Several afternoons a week Sasha rode out into the hills with Red, the guest ranch hand; Bellow, too, rode in the afternoons, or went off by himself to fish or to hike in the hills and howl, a Reichian exercise. In Reno, on their weekly visits, they met some of the faculty at the University of Nevada, and developed a social life of sorts.16 They also gambled. “We’d each have ten dollars,” Sasha recalled, “and Saul always blew his ten dollars and I always won.”
The reason Bellow stopped in Palo Alto on his way down to see Sasha was that the McCloskys were there. Herb had a year’s fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, described by Bellow as “an Institute like the one at Princeton but for social scientists.”17 In late December, Bellow returned to Palo Alto with Sasha, to see in the New Year with the McCloskys. On New Year’s Eve itself, he looked especially gloomy, telling Herb: “Tonight is the eighteenth anniversary of my marriage to Anita.”18 The mood passed quickly. On January 2, 1956, back at the pink house, the writing was going well: he finished the Illinois piece (“It ran to forty pages and was much work”19); put the finishing touches to the expanded Seize the Day; and, most important, was working “like a miner” on a new novel, the “African Book,” Henderson the Rain King.20 Happy at his work he was happy away from it. Sasha was happy as well, reading D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, writing “little poems, sometimes, in the hills.” After they left, Arthur Miller reported in a letter of July 8 that their mailman had been “in love with both of you. He kept me standing there for twenty minutes while he praised you both, saying ‘They talk about Western hospitality. I found the Eastern people much better.’ ” The only difficult moment in the stay occurred when Joan
Drackert let slip that Bellow had had a brief fling with a woman guest at the ranch before Sasha’s arrival. “More shocked than angry,” Sasha confronted him, for what she called the first and only time. “I had never suspected him of being with other women and this badly rattled me.” Bellow was contrite: “he had been so ‘lonely,’ it was a moment of ‘weakness,’ a need for ‘comfort,’ I had to forgive him, I was all he ever wanted. I bought it all” (p. 87).
The winter of 1956 at Pyramid Lake was freezing and sometimes Bellow and Sasha huddled together in bed in their overcoats. Once they’d gotten over the revelation of the affair, “Saul and I did very well together. This was undoubtedly the best time of our life together. He was going great guns on Henderson, and this kind of concentrated energy would always help him be more centered, calmer, distracted but reasonable. I typed his manuscript, we talked over his ‘dailies.’ We had long conversations about whatever we were reading, especially about Hardy and Lawrence; we hiked down along the lake; we drove around a bit and did a little sightseeing” (p. 88). In this productive and harmonious state, Bellow asked Sasha to marry him. “Have you gotten the wedding announcement?” he wrote to Ruth Miller sometime in February. “I shall let a Yiddish word speak for me: glucklikh [lucky].” To Sam Freifeld, also in an undated letter, he described himself as Sasha had, employing an image from carpentry or plumbing that recurs in writing of this period. “I am perfectly satisfied with Sondra and marriage, with the house we live in and the work I am doing. In all my life I have never stood so level. The bubble is in the middle of me. Perhaps an uneven landscape like these mountains makes your head sit straight on your shoulders.” Bellow’s only complaints in the letter are of Anita’s demands and of being separated from Greg. “When can I come back? I wish I knew. Anita still wields her wicked power. She wants money, money, money, money, or failing money, blood. Now she wants to insure my life, too, with a term policy. This is her way of telling me that she is betting I will die soon.… Not even my death would improve her. The boy writes to me, and I to him. The separation is a bad business.”
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 64
