The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  He came to give a reading—he arrived in Chicago in freezing weather. High-shouldered in his thin coat and big homburg, bearded, he coughed up phlegm. He looked decayed. He had been drinking, and the reading was a disaster. His Princeton mutter, once an affectation, had become a vice. People strained to hear a word. Except when, following some arbitrary system of dynamics, he shouted loudly, we could hear nothing. We left, a disappointed, bewildered, angry audience. Dignified, he entered a waiting car, sat down, and vomited. He passed out in his room at the Quadrangle Club and slept through the faculty party given in his honor. But in the morning he was full of innocent cheer. He was chirping. It had been a great evening. He recalled an immense success. His cab came, we hugged each other, and he was off for the airport under a frozen sun.90

  ON MAY 27, 1957, shortly before leaving Minnesota, Bellow wrote to Ralph Ellison with news and plans for the summer. “The new kid” (Adam) was sitting up and taking notice of things: “He seems to have a sense of humor. Having survived the birth trauma he finds life a laughing matter.” The time in Minneapolis had been enjoyable: “It was just what we needed. On the farm [in Tivoli] the year round we’d both go nuts.… I find the Midwest agrees with me. Here I recognize things. And I’m near Chicago.” The plan now was to return to Tivoli for the summer, but to spend the following winter in Chicago. Bellow had accepted a ten-week teaching stint at Northwestern. The Tivoli house would then be free and open to Ellison “for as long a time as you like or need” (Ellison and his wife, Fanny, were in Rome, where for the past two years he’d been a fellow at the American Academy). Once back in Tivoli, Bellow and Sasha entertained a stream of visitors. Sasha returned to a life of household chores, cooking, and wifely duties, and was happy at first. “I typed, grew my own herbs, made jams, canned peaches and plums. Saul grew corn, huge zucchini and lots of tomatoes.… It was similar to Pyramid Lake, except with electricity and people” (p. 96). Bellow did chores in the afternoon, or walked in the fields surrounding the house, or drove into town on errands. He did push-ups to keep in shape, made sure Rufus, the cat, was fed, checked on the garden. Herb Gold and Keith Botsford “were there a lot,” Sasha remembers, “both somewhat flirtatious, but while Herb flirted with me in a light, harmless way, Keith appreciated me. I mean, he liked my clothes. Keith was one of the few men in our world I found familiar. He, too, did ‘dress up’ … playing ‘English Aristocrat,’ while I was doing Russian Countess.” As the summer wore on, however, cooking and cleaning for houseguests began to exhaust Sasha. Her gall bladder problem resurfaced and she was confined to bed for ten days. “We called a halt to visitors, and I began to regain my health” (pp. 95–96).

  The letter to Ellison mentions several visits to Chicago during Bellow’s time in Minnesota. In one of these visits, in May, Maury was back in the news, having been threatened with a lawsuit by the city for unlicensed property dealings. “ ‘As one of the largest land holders in the Calumet area,’ ” he was reported as saying by the Chicago Tribune, “he had no intention of jeopardizing his future by operating a disreputable enterprise.”91 Bellow had come to Chicago on this occasion at the invitation of Richard Stern, who taught at the University of Chicago.92 Stern was a writer not a scholar, the first to be appointed to the English Department at the university (Thornton Wilder, whose lectures Bellow attended as an undergraduate, had been a Hutchins or “college” appointment). In his second year in charge of the department’s creative writing courses, Stern obtained funds from the dean to bring well-known novelists and poets to campus. For a stipend of $500 visiting writers were asked to give a talk and sit in on classes. Bellow was the first writer Stern invited: “I thought he was the best writer of his time” (later invitees included Berryman and Robert Lowell). Stern and Bellow had met once before, briefly, at a party given for Bellow by the critic Morton Dauwen Zabel, an older colleague in the English Department. The party was at the Quadrangle Club and Stern remembers being struck by Bellow’s gray hair, elegant dress, and large prominent eyes (a feature he claims Bellow was drawn to in others, women in particular). It was not until the May visit, however, that the two writers got to know and like each other. On later visits and during Bellow’s time at Northwestern they often met for coffee and doughnuts at Pixley and Ehlers, a cafeteria at Randolph and Michigan, opposite the old location of the Chicago Public Library. Bellow liked the place for its mixed clientele. “He would always have the details [concerning Chicago types],” Stern remembered, including stories of “who had been shot nearby.”

  The creative writing class Bellow sat in on had approximately fifteen students, several of genuine talent (the poets George Starbuck and David Ray were among their number). When the class failed to provide an appropriate story for Bellow’s visit, Stern called upon a friend of his, a young instructor in the college, also a promising writer, and asked if he had a story the class could use. The instructor was Philip Roth, twenty-four at the time, and the story he came up with was “The Conversion of the Jews,” published the following March in The Paris Review and a year later in Roth’s first collection, Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1960 (and was favorably reviewed in Commentary by Bellow93). Roth had dropped out of the PhD program in English at Chicago to write (“I lasted half of a quarter, one eighth of a year”), teaching composition courses in the morning and writing stories in the afternoon. He’d read Bellow’s early novels while an undergraduate at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and in the summer before coming to Chicago read Augie March, which excited him greatly. “These were Jews and Jewish families and here was a guy making literature out of them, and that was a great revelation to me,” Roth recalled in an interview. “Coincidentally, my going to Chicago made it that much more interesting.” Once in Chicago, Roth read and admired Seize the Day, which Stern also admired. Roth’s memory of how he came to meet Bellow is slightly different from Stern’s: “Dick had read in manuscript my story ‘The Conversion of the Jews,’ and suggested using the story, and I was delighted. I said sure, and can I come to the class? So I came to the class and I just sat in the back and didn’t say anything.”

  Roth didn’t say anything partly because writers whose works were discussed in class were meant to remain silent, partly because he was in awe of Bellow. “I hadn’t met that many writers in my life. I hadn’t met any of his stature.” What he remembers of the discussion is that the students criticized the story solemnly “from the points of view that criticism came in in those days,” while Bellow laughed a lot when he talked about it. “He found it a comedy. I guess he admired the energy, the spirit in it. It’s a primitive story but it’s lively. He liked the scene with the kid going up on the roof. I was delighted, and afterwards Dick said do you want to have a cup of coffee and we went over to Reynolds Hall, I think it was called, a coffee place over in the university compound.… And we walked across the quadrangle to have a cup of coffee. As I remember it, Saul was very lively and good-natured and laughing and very kind to me.” In his novel The Ghost Writer (1979) Roth makes comedy of this encounter.94

  THE FICTIONAL MEETING BETWEEN Zuckerman and Felix Abravanel, the Bellow-like novelist in The Ghost Writer, is revealing as much for what it suggests about the effects of celebrity as about Bellow’s character. Zuckerman is a “writer-worshipping” college senior at Chicago (p. 57). It is his story that the creative writing professor has chosen for Abravanel to discuss in class. Abravanel was sent the story in advance and read it on the plane to Chicago (Stern remembers that Bellow arrived in Chicago by plane, the first flight of his life95). After class it is Abravanel who extends Zuckerman the invitation to come for coffee, along with the creative writing professor, a professor from the Sociology Department (a figure very much like Edward Shils, who would later maneuver with Stern to get Bellow a job at Chicago), and Abravanel’s “luminous” mistress. “They’re a rough bunch, Zuckerman,” Abravanel says. “You better come along for a transfusion” (p. 64). Over coffee, Abaravanel “said not a word,” l
eaning back in his chair “looking smooth and strokable as a cat in his teaching attire of soft gray flannel slacks, a light mauve pullover, and a cashmere sports coat. With hands and ankles elegantly crossed, he left it to his buoyant young companion to do the talking.” The buoyant young companion “was in ecstasy” (p. 64).

  Earlier, the mistress had reported that as Abravanel read Zuckerman’s story on the plane to Chicago, “he just kept throwing back his head and laughing.” She said she thought of telling him to recommend the story to “Sy” Knebel, “editor for twenty years of the New York intellectual quarterly that I had been devouring for the past two” (p. 63). This information she conveyed to Zuckerman at a reception for Abravanel, who was busy fending off hovering graduate students.96 When Abravanel leaves after coffee he says “Good luck” to Zuckerman but mentions nothing of the editor and the story. The mistress says “even less” (p. 65). Had she forgotten about Sy? Had she told Abravanel and he’d forgotten? “Or maybe she’d told him and he answered ‘Forget it.’ ” “I realized they’d had other things than my story to think about.” Young Zuckerman is left slightly deflated, resentful even, reactions often inspired by celebrity encounters. “Felix Abravanel was clearly not in the market for a twenty-three-year-old son” (p. 66), he concludes. The encounter is described by the adult Zuckerman from the point of view both of the younger aspiring writer and the older celebrated one.

  BELLOW’S TEACHING AT Northwestern was for the Winter Quarter, from January 6 to March 22, 1958. The appointment, arranged through his old teacher, Moody Prior, now dean of the College of Liberal Arts, was part of a program that brought “distinguished non-academic persons” to campus.97 Dwight Macdonald taught in it the year before and Sean O’Faolain would follow Bellow in the spring. In addition to professors from Bellow’s undergraduate days (Edward B. Hungerford, Bergen Evans), the English faculty at Northwestern included noteworthy new appointments (Richard Ellmann in particular, who in 1950 had tried to get Bellow a Briggs-Copeland Fellowship at Harvard). Bellow taught two courses: a creative writing course for seniors and a literature course, “The Hero in the Modern Novel,” examining the changing status of fictional heroes from the nineteenth century to the present “as reflected in selected works of continental, English, and American novelists.” In addition to teaching, Bellow delivered several lectures, including one in a series on “Religion and Art” at Hillel House. He and Sasha were also treated to a heavy schedule of dinners and receptions. “I cooked no meals, really,” Sasha remembers, “because we were dining out almost nightly.” Mornings, as usual, were sacrosanct, devoted to writing. “For months I’ve been absorbed in the remotest bush with Henderson,” Bellow wrote to Berryman on February 19. “From Labor Day I started de nouveau and have written about five hundred pages since. The last fantasy is taking place in Newfoundland. Crash fire—crash ice. I need to cool things off.”

  In the first weeks of the Evanston stay, all three Bellows were laid up. First Adam, then Sasha and Bellow “had pneumonia, more or less.”98 In an undated letter from late February, Sasha reported to the McCloskys that “we are barely making it what with relatives and constant colds. We country folk are not used to the big city battle with germs and I expect, like the Eskimos would probably die from chicken pox, measles and the common (all too common) cold.” This letter was written from the Evanshire Hotel, on the corner of Main and Hinman in downtown Evanston, which the Bellows moved to after staying briefly with Sasha’s relatives in nearby Skokie, a suburb west of Evanston. The Evanshire was a small residential hotel and the apartment they’d rented consisted of two rooms and a kitchenette. “Adam is walking,” Bellow reported to Ellison, in a letter of February 14, 1958. “Life is just one long country fair for that kid. He’s medicinal to me.” Except in the mornings. Then Sasha had to take Adam away for three and a half hours, she complained to Stern. Bellow was like Moses Herzog, who couldn’t think when his baby daughter, Junie, was crying and would rush from his room “hollering” (p. 455) (if Northwestern provided Bellow with an office, he seems not to have used it to write). Most days Sasha took Adam to visit relatives in Skokie, in particular Aunt Cookie, her mother’s sister, and Uncle Lester, Cookie’s husband, who had put them up upon arrival. Cookie was “generous with her love and admiration, always” (from early on she knew the secret of Sasha’s childhood, offering “wholehearted acceptance and protection” [p. 98]). Sasha describes Uncle Lester as “quiet, reserved, street smart, [with] an ethical code of his own, despite being a bookie, a contrast to Cookie who was sparkling, brash, a Ziegfeld type, Chicago style” (p. 97). She recalls Lester laboring through Augie March “night after night, sweating it out, cover to cover. ‘How would it look,’ he said to my aunt, ‘if I don’t read this book, now he’s in the family’ ” (p. 97). Bellow adored Cookie and Lester, Sasha remembers; they were just the Chicago types he liked, “the real thing” (p. 97).

  That Cookie and Lester doted on Adam and were happy to baby-sit allowed Sasha to accompany Bellow to various Northwestern social engagements, “part of the deal.” “We were both being courted,” Sasha recalls, “Saul because he was the visiting celebrity, and I because I was, by Evanston standards, glamorous. I was certainly young and lively and, as usual, exotic in my wardrobe” (p. 97). At a New Year’s Eve party thrown by Richard and Mary Ellmann, Sasha wore a white-fringed flapper dress, while the other women “wore tweed skirts and little sweaters.” When not being feted in Evanston or Skokie, they visited Bellow’s relatives: sister Jane, her husband, Charlie, and their boys, Larry and Bobby; brother Sam, his wife, Nina, and their children, Lesha and Shael. Presumably they did not visit Maury and Marge and their children, Joel and Lynn, since in the memoir Sasha says she saw Maury only once. To reciprocate all this hospitality, she and Bellow gave a party at Cookie and Lester’s, inviting everyone they knew. Stern remembers picking up Edward Shils and then Josephine Herbst to drive them to Skokie; stuffy English Department types mixed happily with Dave Peltz, Sam Freifeld, Lester the bookie. Atlas quotes a guest at the party who claims that Sasha at one point looked at Bellow “with fury in her eyes,” an incident she told me she did not remember.99 She recalled no arguments or coldness between herself and Bellow at the party; it was a great success. But she does admit that in this period “Adam had my whole heart and I gloried—no, wallowed—in motherhood, astonished I could ever have imagined not having this miraculous child. I felt whole, purposeful, grateful. And, in truth, motherhood and rediscovering family and my place in it, meant that I was not paying much attention to Saul. He didn’t seem to mind, then” (p. 98).

  ON FEBRUARY 5, 1958, about a month after Bellow arrived in Evanston, he received a telegram electing him as a life member to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, described in a Northwestern press release as “the highest ranking honor society of the arts in the United States.”100 The honor was accompanied by a request that Bellow help the institute determine its fiction awards. A day later, on February 6, Harold Rosenberg wrote inviting him to serve with Alfred Kazin and Marianne Moore on the literary board of the Longview Foundation. Rosenberg was the foundation’s program director, responsible for organizing schemes to purchase artworks from promising painters and sculptors, and to give awards to writers. “The way the awards are set up,” Rosenberg wrote to Bellow, “you will be able to bestow five of them on your own, besides your votes on ten others.” This influence Bellow exercised generously. He was now frequently asked to write Guggenheim letters (by 1959 he had written on behalf of James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, Leslie Fiedler, Mel Tumin, Herb Gold, and Harvey Swados). Elizabeth Ames asked him to sit on the Yaddo board to select fellows (there were twelve members of the board, which met twice a year). He wrote recommending authors or aspiring authors to Henry Volkening and Pat Covici. Though some Guggenheim letters (he wrote fifty or so over his lifetime) are more effusive than others, none is without praise and none seeks to undermine the applicant.

  Bellow also exercised influence in several literary co
ntroversies in the period. In October 1956 he received a telegram from Harvey Breit, editor of The New York Times Book Review, urging him to attend a meeting of the writers’ and publishers’ committee of “People to People,” a lobbying group set up by the Eisenhower administration to counter Soviet propaganda and promote American values. The meeting was to be held just after Thanksgiving in Breit’s apartment in Manhattan. Eisenhower himself had appointed William Faulkner chair of the committee. In a telegram of October 8 Bellow wired that he was “TOTALLY CONFUSED. UNDERSTAND NOTHING OF THIS FAULKNER-EISENHOWER BUSINESS. NEVERTHELESS AM WILLING TO RISE TO EMERGENCY.” At the meeting, Faulkner, who had had a lot to drink, so annoyed Bellow in a discussion of Hungarian refugees (the sort Bellow had just shared Thanksgiving turkey with at Tivoli) that Bellow left in disgust, missing a discussion likely to annoy him even more, in which Faulkner argued in support of a campaign to release Ezra Pound from Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he’d been held for treasonous wartime radio broadcasts. When Faulkner’s account of the issues discussed at the meeting was posted to committee members, Bellow wrote back from Tivoli on January 7, 1957. He had no objection to Eastern Europeans being invited to the United States to sample its freedoms “provided they are not harmed by the police of those countries when they return.” As for Pound, “if sane he should be tried again as a traitor; if insane he ought not to be released merely because he is a poet.” Bellow explained: