The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Bellow left the wedding arrangements to Sasha, except for the guest list and the actual date, February 1, 1956, chosen to coincide with a visit to California by the Covicis, Reno being only a short drive from San Francisco. Pat Covici was a crucial figure to Bellow in this period. In To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Journey (1976), he describes him as a recognizable type:

  One of those men in broad-brimmed fedoras who took drawing rooms on the Twentieth Century Limited in the John Barrymore days, people who knew headwaiters and appreciated well-turned-out women. There were many Jews of this sort, big butter-and-egg men who made and lost fortunes. My late friend Pascal Covici, the publisher, was one of these. Pat knew how to order a fine dinner, how long to let wine breathe, how to cherish a pretty woman, how to dart into the street and stop a cab by whistling on his fingers, how to negotiate a tough contract—not so tough, perhaps, since he paid out too many advances and lost his shirt (pp. 71–72).

  The other outside guests were Jack and Leya Ludwig. Sasha explains Bellow’s choices: “I guess it was important to him to have a father and a brother present, and of course he couldn’t wait to unveil Henderson.” Sasha invited no one. “I didn’t even think of it. Where would we put them? Not even my mother was invited because I knew she would have to stay with us for more than a few days and I couldn’t imagine it and so, with a thoughtlessness I was to be deeply ashamed of later in life, I told her not to come” (p. 89). Sasha set about the wedding preparations with great energy. She found a rabbi in Reno (an English rabbi, who knew Bellow’s novels, and was eager to talk with him about Commentary and Jewish American fiction). She scrubbed the pink house till it was “spotlessly clean,” cooked and laid out the wedding feast. She accompanied Covici as he drove all over Reno in search of a drinkable brand of champagne (“when it was still a small town with just two biggish hotels and two clubs” [p. 89]). After the Reno ceremony, the party drove back to the pink house for the bridal supper. The local invitees—Peggy, the Pattridges, Harry and Joan Drackert, and Red the ranch hand—came “respectfully to the synagogue and then, rollicking, to the house.” After consuming what Sasha describes as “a fine, noisy meal,” the locals disappeared and “Saul read Henderson aloud, for a very long time, and then he went to bed; I washed dishes for hours and thus passed my wedding night. I thought it perfect.” In the week that followed, Sasha bought engraved wedding announcements (“I had my etiquette lessons firmly in place on that score”) and sent them to all their friends. In early spring, Bellow wrote to Sam Goldberg to tell him “I’ve never seen Sondra so well. You wouldn’t know her. I can’t congratulate myself enough.”

  Anita and the lawyers agreed on a settlement not long after the wedding. She was to receive $100 a month in alimony until she remarried and $150 a month in child support. Bellow was to pay all legal fees for both sides, stretching back to October 1955. The plan now was for bride and groom to remain at Pyramid Lake till early summer, returning to New York in time to spend a month with Greg. On March 15, Bellow received a letter from Arthur Miller, who was also published by Covici. He was coming to Nevada “to spend the fated six weeks and [had] no idea where to live.” Could Bellow advise him, especially in the light of a problem “of slightly unusual proportions”? This problem concerned the occasional visits of a person “who is very dear to me, but who is unfortunately recognizable by approximately a hundred million people, give or take three or four.” It was Marilyn Monroe, who had herself come to Reno ten years earlier to divorce her first husband. “She has all sorts of wigs, can affect a wig, sunglasses, bulky coats, etc., but if it is possible I want to find a place, perhaps a bungalow or something like, where there are not likely to be crowds looking in through the windows. Do you know of any such places?” Bellow did, offering what Miller calls “one of the two cottages facing the lake.”21 Soon Miller was accompanying Bellow, or Bellow and Sasha, on their weekly trips into Reno, walking down to the telephone on the main highway to receive daily calls from “Mrs. Leslie,” Monroe’s code name, and keeping a keen eye out for reporters. Miller stayed at Pyramid Lake for eight weeks, not six, and was especially struck by Bellow’s “emptying his lungs roaring at the stillness,” which he called “the day’s biggest event.” Monroe was shooting Bus Stop in Los Angeles, and never got to Nevada; instead Miller flew into L.A. on weekends, staying with her at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood.22

  In June, after nine months for Bellow and six for Sasha, the newly weds said goodbye to the pink house and slowly drove back to the East Coast, a honeymoon of sorts, also a parading of the bride. Sasha, though, was feeling poorly, so much so that she forgot Bellow’s birthday, his fortieth. En route they stopped in Boulder, Colorado, where Lillian Blumberg McCall had moved. In Chicago, proofs of Seize the Day awaited Bellow. Here, for the first time, Sasha met the Bellow relatives: Sam, Maury, Jane, and their families, as well as the Dworkins. She was not impressed, particularly by Maury, “a big fat pig of a vulgar man” is how she described him to Atlas. “I said to Saul, ‘Lose my number: I don’t need these people.’ ”23 (“I only met them one time,” she told me, “heavy-set, gross people.… They ignored me completely, they were so full of themselves, in their entirely white apartment … and Saul was like the little pisherkeh [squirt, bedwetter].”) She mentions nothing of Maury’s recent troubles, which had gotten his name in the papers again. He and Marge now owned and managed the Shoreland Hotel, in which Jimmy Hoffa, head of the Teamsters Union, had an interest. Whenever Hoffa or his people were in town, they stayed at the Shoreland. In November 1956, in front of the cashier window of his hotel, Maury confronted a Teamster enforcer, Robert “Barney” Baker, to complain that his unpaid bill was too high (it included cash advances of $1,200). Baker took offense and tried to strangle Maury. Maury was fat but Baker weighed 370 pounds, much of it muscle. It took several bystanders to drag him off Maury. When the incident was reported in the press, Marge was quoted as calling Baker “a killer.” Later, at a Senate Rackets Committee hearing, Baker conceded that “he might have ‘argued’ with Bellows.”24

  What Sasha recalls of Sam Bellows is that he was “very neat, very together, quiet but with a good sense of humor.” His wife, Nina, however, was “arrogant … very proud of herself.” Sister Jane was “easy, placid, pleasant” (a view not shared by the rest of the family) and husband Charlie was “a shlub [clumsy, graceless, an oaf].” Maury’s and Marge’s self-absorption notwithstanding, the family “were all perfectly nice to me.” She was less harsh about Bellow’s friends, Dave Peltz (“I loved Dave”), Sam Freifeld (“a nice jolly guy”), and Isaac Rosenfeld, who’d left New York shortly after she’d arrived on the scene. The Tarcovs no longer lived in Chicago, having moved to New York in the spring of 1955. Freifeld and Rochelle, his wife, were in crisis at the time of the visit. He had moved out of the house, and she had had a breakdown. In an undated letter written just before leaving Pyramid Lake, Bellow asked Sam if there was “anything I can do for you? You realize that if you were to tell me to fly to Lima Peru tonight, I’d depart without question.” Freifeld wrote back that Rochelle thought of Bellow as having taken sides, Sam’s side, and Bellow wrote back that she wasn’t wrong, but that he should “remind her that far from being her enemy I am very much concerned about her. I should like, if possible, to talk with her.”

  Isaac Rosenfeld was also in a bad way. After splitting from Vasiliki, he had been turned down for a second Guggenheim. He had failed to get the job at Bard and was teaching in the basic Humanities program of the University of Chicago, a Loop adjunct of the main university, a step down from the university proper. He wrote to Oscar Tarcov to see about a job with the Anti-Defamation League. There was none. He tried and failed to get a job at Brandeis. When Bellow and Sasha met him he was living in the same whitewashed coal cellar on Woodlawn Avenue that he’d lived in as an undergraduate. Later in the summer he moved to a furnished room on the North Side, which an unnamed friend described to Atlas as “the kind of place where you expected to see Raskolniko
v sharpening his axe.”25 In the journal entries for this period quoted by his biographer, Steven Zipperstein, Rosenfeld describes himself as both depressed and sickly.26 Within a month, on July 14, 1956, he was dead of a heart attack, at thirty-eight. When Bellow failed to attend Rosenfeld’s funeral in Chicago, Isaac’s father, Sam, was furious. Atlas offers several theories for why Bellow stayed away: “he was afraid to confront his own mortality”; “to fully grieve would have been to recognize his dependence on Rosenfeld”; and not to attend fit “a lifelong pattern: to deny and run away from pain.”27 Other explanations are possible. Perhaps he did not attend because he was overcome with grief and/or guilt (at having prospered when his best friend failed). What Sasha remembers of the decision is that Bellow “was too distraught to go to the funeral.” What Greg remembers is that he was “inconsolable” (for which he criticizes him in his memoir: “my father was unable to see beyond his own grief”28). Perhaps also Bellow was reluctant to leave Greg so soon after returning to New York. He hadn’t seen him in nine months and leaving for Chicago would cut into their time together.29

  In Minneapolis, Bellow and Sasha stayed with John and Ann Berryman. Bellow read portions of Henderson to Berryman and Berryman read portions of the The Dream Songs to Bellow. Bellow also visited with friends from the English Department and Humanities, including the head of the Humanities program, Ralph Ross, his old boss at NYU, who offered him a job in the Spring Semester. Sasha, meanwhile, continued to feel unwell, though it was not until they arrived in New York that she discovered why: she was pregnant, a condition “unexpected, unplanned, and, for nine pain-filled, stomach-wrenching months, unwelcome” (p. 91). Once back in New York, they settled in the country rather than the city, renting Andrews Wanning’s house in Germantown in Columbia County, just north of Dutchess County. (Wanning, Bellow’s colleague at Bard, was away for the summer.) Here Greg could spend time with his father in a rural setting, one from which a more permanent home could be scouted. Bellow was keen on buying a property in the Hudson Valley. Sasha would have preferred Manhattan but was happy enough with the Bard area. Above all she wanted to settle: the pregnancy unnerved her and almost any place would do. “I definitely wasn’t ready, I felt like a teenager, still, and I was revolted by the idea of something growing in me, and petrified of pain” (p. 91). What she remembered of Germantown is feeding enormous meals to twelve-year-old Greg, described by Bellow as “52 and physically a man,” while feeling queasy with morning sickness, and playing many games and sports with him, “when I wasn’t in the bathroom.”30 What Greg remembered of his Hudson Valley summers is volleyball and swimming at the Bard pool, shooting baskets with Sasha in the Bard gym, and tennis lessons with Keith Botsford, an excellent player but in Greg’s account a hopeless teacher: “ ‘Tennis lessons’ consisted of his hitting shots difficult even for a skilled adult to return and me running after tennis balls.”31

  Bellow made clear from the start his feelings about the impending birth. “He was too old to take on the care of a child,” he told Sasha, “it was going to be my job, solo” (p. 91), a position she accepted, and one not unusual for the times. Bellow was forty, the sole breadwinner in the family, and while drawn to women of strong character, wholly conventional in his view of gender roles. Sasha neither earned nor possessed any money, so “Saul paid the bills, made the decisions, negotiated contracts, free-lance assignments, and teaching or lecture gigs without ever consulting me.” Sasha, however, was used to such dependence, having always lived “from day to day, on very little” (p. 92). In an interview, she adds: “We were just married and we’d survived living alone in the desert for a number of months … I was perfectly content with Saul at that time, we were fine.” With rare exceptions—she names Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt—most women she knew were the same, and those who weren’t often found themselves subjected to crude accounts of Freudian theory, “the religion of the intellectuals at the time,” with much talk of castrating women and penis envy. Though Sasha eventually went on to live an independent life, when newly married, “I was perfectly happy to cook and clean and bear his young and type his manuscripts and listen to him; it was my job description, to be there to fulfil his needs. That was perfectly reasonable to me.” All she knew at this time, the summer of 1956, of Bellow’s finances was that he had inherited enough money from his father to buy a house. How much money she only learned when reading Atlas’s biography forty-four years later. Bellow himself gave a figure of $16,000, part as a direct legacy, part as stock (the figure Atlas gives is $20,000, the amount Moses Herzog inherits).32 Whatever the exact amount, that the money came from Abraham gave Bellow another reason to resent divorce payments. “I don’t like to hand my father’s money over to Anita,” he wrote to Ralph Ellison in the letter of April 2, 1956, “since they hated each other, but I tell myself that it does something for Greg.”

  Bellow was accompanied in his house hunting by Jack Ludwig, a frequent correspondent over the Nevada months (though Sasha remembers “some kind of rift” for a period, “because he [Ludwig] wasn’t properly appreciative of something Saul wrote”). The letters from Ludwig are gossipy, ingratiating, and full of feeling. On October 7, he sends the latest Bard news, much of it involving Sam Goldberg, his rival for Bellow’s friendship. Goldberg had business of some sort with Bard, which Ludwig distrusted. He refers to Goldberg as “slippery Sam” (“Who profits? Goldberg!”). He also reports on Isaac Rosenfeld’s job interview at Bard, which did not go well (though Ludwig himself needed only “one look” to see Rosenfeld as an “ally”). The letter closes with “love and sustaining schmotchkehs” (a Ludwig coinage?) from wife Leya and daughter Susie. “From me I send strength and love and joy.” Earlier in the letter, in Ludwig’s version of “free-style,” he enjoins Bellow: “Joy find. Why not? When we weep doesn’t the sound of our weeping reach Nevada? Twang here and there a heart string and tell me about the music you hear.” On November 16 Ludwig writes of Greg, who had recently spent a weekend with the Hoffmans. “His routine in the city is the same as before (Anita, incidentally, didn’t get a woman to come in for the afternoons).” The letter contains no other Anita gossip, as “neither Ted [Hoffman] nor I wanted to pump the kid since we wanted his time here to be a holiday all the way.” As for Bard colleagues: “these guys depress the life out of me.” In a letter of March 15 Ludwig asks for a reference: “The one blight on our friendship, the yearly appeal for a letter, come round again.… You don’t know how I hate the intrusion of a note that isn’t disinterested.” On April 7, after the trip west for the wedding, Ludwig offers advice about teaching posts at Bard and places to rent for the summer (it was Ludwig who arranged rental of Wanning’s Germantown house). The letter closes with news of his novel, abbreviated alternately as Shlomo or Solomon, and of a visit to Bard by Harry Levin, the Harvard English professor: “a nice enough guy, I suppose, but … what will it come to, when being a Jew is a quiet closed chapter in your past, reopened only by anti-semitism too blatant to be ignored?”

  The determination to please would not have been missed. Sasha, however, discounts the view that Bellow sought an acolyte in Ludwig. Precisely the qualities Bellow lacked were the ones that attracted him to Ludwig. “Their personalities were so different that they were complementary. Ludwig was very expansive, warm, big, big-hearted.… He just simply was a larger-than-life character, which was everything Saul was not. Saul was more intellectual, refined, more ascetic, more of a solitary personality.… There was always a kind of distance, he always looked at the world sideways” (even with Ludwig, she is implying). “His head was always [slightly] turned away from you … he literally did not turn his head straight on … like a bird, very bright, observant, like a magpie, going to take something and use it.” Ludwig, in contrast, was a tactile person, as were other close friends of Bellow’s: Schwartz, Freifeld, Covici, Peltz. “Saul was not one to initiate that sort of thing but he enjoyed it. These were men who were expansive and affectionate.” In addition, Ludwig was eccentric and B
ellow “always liked eccentric people,” not only “because you knew he was going to use it,” but because “he was also charmed by it.” Sasha’s analysis recalls Herzog on his attraction to Gersbach, the Ludwig character: “Herzog had a weakness for grandeur, and even bogus grandeur” (p. 479).

  Early after their return from Pyramid Lake, Bellow and Sasha had dinner with Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. Miller had been back from Nevada since the end of May.33 The dinner was to be preceded by a drink at Miller’s place. According to Sasha, when she and Bellow arrived, Monroe was in the bedroom getting ready. By the time they’d finished their drink she still hadn’t emerged. Miller went back to check on her and returned to say she’d be out in a minute, offering a second drink. This drink, too, was finished and still Monroe had not emerged. Sasha then asked Miller if he thought Marilyn might need her help. Miller thought this a good idea. When Sasha entered the bedroom she found Monroe sitting naked on the bed surrounded by discarded items of clothing. She had been unable to decide. With Sasha’s encouragement an outfit was chosen and the two couples set off for dinner. A table had been booked at Rocco’s, a popular Italian restaurant in the Village. It was near a window and visible from the sidewalk. Soon a large crowd of gawkers gathered in front of it, threatening to push it in. The diners were forced to retreat. On July 8, Miller wrote to Bellow to apologize for Monroe’s behavior that night. “Marilyn was ill, and much troubled by something which, thank God, got settled next day. She felt badly that she hadn’t her energy and hopes you two understand. She is now cooking, waxing floors, and treating me like a pasha.”