Pound advocated in his poems and in his broadcasts enmity to the Jews and preached hatred and murder. Do you mean to ask me to join you in honoring a man who called for the destruction of my kinsmen? I can take no part in such a thing even if it makes effective propaganda abroad, which I doubt. Europeans will take it instead as a symptom of reaction. In France Pound would have been shot.… What staggers me is that you and Mr. Steinbeck who have dealt for so many years in words should fail to understand the import of Ezra Pound’s plain and brutal statements about the “kikes” leading the “goy” to slaughter. Is this—from the Pisan Cantos—the stuff of poetry? It is a call to murder. If it were spoken by a farmer or a shoemaker we would call him mad.
Bellow’s position on Pound’s incarceration was exactly that of his friend Karl Shapiro in an earlier Pound controversy. Shapiro was the only judge to vote against awarding the 1949 Bollingen Prize in Poetry to Pound for the Pisan Cantos. The other judges were Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken, Louise Bogan, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Penn Warren. Bellow was in Paris at the time of the controversy over the award, but would have followed it in the pages of Partisan Review. After publishing an attack on the judges’ decision by William Barrett in its April issue, PR published an article in its defense, by Auden and Tate, in the issue of May–June (the issue in which Bellow’s “A Sermon by Dr. Pep” appeared). Shapiro then replied in the November issue (which contained “From the Life of Augie March,” an early version of the novel’s first chapter). Allen Tate had been the most active of Pound’s defenders, aided by John Berryman, who helped to collect seventy-three signatures for a letter defending the award.101
Almost as enraging for Bellow as the question of Pound’s release was a second literary controversy concerning the supposed death of the novel. Granville Hicks had asked Bellow to contribute an essay on modern fiction for a volume of essays pointedly titled The Living Novel: A Symposium (1957). Bellow wrote back on March 16, 1956, from Pyramid Lake commending the idea of the anthology and sketching out his views about “the state of fiction today.”
Of course we are continually aware, while working, that we are under attack, and so perhaps it is wiser not to pretend that we are a species without enemies. I am familiar with Lionel Trilling’s attitude, of course. It is one of the historical blessings of Jewish birth that one is used to flourish in the face of hostile opinion.… The modern world is full of people who declare that other people are obsolete. Stalin and the Kulaks, Hitler and the Jews and Slavs and gypsies, and Trilling and T. S. Eliot and several others have decided that novels are done for historically.
Stalin, Hitler, Lionel Trilling, T. S. Eliot. In “Distractions of a Fiction Writer,” the essay Bellow eventually produced for the anthology, he qualifies but repeats the conjunction. The distractions in question are of several sorts, beginning with those of the reader. “The Ancient Mariner” is invoked by way of example: “The Wedding Guest is distracted when the Ancient Mariner stops him.… The Guest can only tear his hair out as he hears the loud bassoon. He is cut off from his beloved distractions by the power of art, and he cannot choose but hear. This is the position we [modern readers] are all in.” In place of the loud bassoon and the wedding feast we have the distractions of American materialism, mass communication, and mass cult (the factors Wordsworth singles out in the 1800 preface to the Lyrical Ballads as “acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor”). As Bellow puts it, “the giant producers of goods need our defenseless attention. They catch us on the run and through the eyes and ears fill us with the brand names of cars and cigarettes and soaps. And then news and information distracts us. Bad art distracts us.”102
These distractions act upon authors as well as readers, and it is the role of authors, novelists in particular, to winnow and order them to artistic purpose. “The novelist works more deeply with distractions than any other kind of artist,” Bellow argues. “The novelist begins at a great depth of distraction and difficulty. Sometimes, as in James Joyce’s Ulysses, he risks total immersion in distraction.” Today, it is claimed, distraction “has reached its limit.… And so we are told by critics that the novel is dead” (p. 6), a message disseminated in universities as well as newspapers and literary periodicals, by now a species of common wisdom. “You go to a party and a psychiatrist tells you that his analyst believes literature is dying” (p. 15) (Bellow hated such parties, hated listening to the literary opinions of psychoanalysts, architects, cultured real-estate agents).103 To Bellow the opinion that literature or the novel was dying was “an act of aggression,” bad enough when voiced by nonliterary people, worse when voiced by people in the know, “the subtlest of enemies … those who get you over to their own side. You read the authoritative words of an eminent critic; they sound reasonable; you half agree, and then you are distracted and stiflingly depressed” (pp. 15–16). Who are these critics who say the novel is finished? “We have heard this from Valéry and from T. S. Eliot, from Ortega and from Oswald Spengler, and most recently from the summit of Morningside Heights” (p. 16).
Morningside Heights was the home not only of Columbia but of Lionel and Diana Trilling, whose approval Bellow distrusted. The year before the Trillings praised Augie March, Diana wrote an article in the “Speaking of Books” column of The New York Times Book Review (June 15, 1952) lamenting the demise of American fiction in general, the result of what she saw as the nation’s “cultural situation.” Her view was seconded a week later (June 22) by John Aldridge, again in a “Speaking of Books” column, who identified the novel’s demise with a breakdown of class boundaries, the lack of any coherent social order. A related account of the decline of fiction is cited by Bellow in the “Distractions” essay. In J. M. Cohen’s 1956 Penguin survey, A History of Western European Literature, the order that is lacking is religious or metaphysical rather than social: “The novel has died a victim to an agreed picture of the Universe, which has faded with the stifling of Christianity by non-dogmatic idealism and crude materialism” (p. 17).
It was Lionel Trilling who recommended that Bellow read his wife’s New York Times piece and the Aldridge follow-up, and on June 23 Bellow wrote to Trilling to tell him what he thought. It would take no “Swami powers … to divine the fact that I disagree most violently.” There have always been weak or deficient novels, Bellow wrote, nor is there any proof that proportionately more of them are being written or read today than in the past. “Really, things are now as they always were, and to be disappointed in them is extremely shallow.” This is not to say that living in the present is easy for a writer; Bellow would hardly say such a thing, given his views on the influence of American materialism. “We may not be strong enough to live in the present. But to be disappointed in it! To identify oneself with a better past! No, no!” The manner in which critics pronounced the novel’s death also rankled. “How odd it is that these words ‘obsolete’ and ‘finished’ should never be spoken with regret or pain,” Bellow notes in the “Distractions” essay. “The accent is rather one of satisfaction” (p. 16).
Three pages later Bellow brings out a sledgehammer, perhaps suspecting that he and others like him were being seen as the unspoken agents of decline:
A lot of things have been called obsolete. I brooded over Spengler in college. As a Jew, I was, in his vocabulary, a magian and therefore obsolete. Toynbee, unless I am mistaken, has a similar view of Jews, that they are a sort of fossil. Marx and Engels, too, were prophets of obsolescence. For Stalin the kulaks were obsolete; for Hitler, all the “inferior” breeds of men.… I don’t mean to say that there is no such thing as obsolescence. I merely wish to show that the term “obsolete,” derived from evolutionary thought, has a place of some importance in the history of modern persecution. Far, far down in the scale of power, far from Rome and Berlin and Leningrad, in certain academic and critical circles we hear it said that a particular kind of
imagination is now obsolete (p. 19).
The personal or autobiographical element at work in Bellow’s defense of the novel accounts for its violence. The novel’s “enemies” have gone over to the other side, capitulating to American society’s measure of its “leading activities.” “Sometimes it is the lawgiver who is in the highest place, and sometimes the priest, and sometimes the general. With us it is the businessman, the administrator, the political leader, the military man. These have the power; they are the representative men; in them manhood is mirrored” (p. 8). The novelist refuses this measure, at some cost. “Chances are that he is working, bitterly working, in an effort to meet his brothers of the office and factory satisfactorily. The odds are good that he is literally a brother and comes out of the same mass. And now for some strange reason he is trying to throw a bridge from this same place, from a room in Chicago to, let us say, Ahab, to Cervantes, to the Kings of the old Chronicles, to Genesis. For he says, ‘Aren’t we still part of the same humanity, children of Adam?’ ” (p. 10). In their prophecies of cultural decline, the Trillings and T. S. Eliot are linked in Bellow’s mind not only to Hitler and Stalin but to his scoffing businessmen father and brothers. Bellow’s reaction, as always when threatened, was to attack.
BEFORE BELLOW RETURNED with Adam and Sasha to Tivoli in April 1958, he went to California. From there he wrote a letter to Covici on the morning he’d begun typing the finished longhand version of Henderson. He was exhausted, had worn himself out “between Evanston and Henderson.” He thought the novel needed cutting. “I’ve got to work it out at leisure, now that I’ve got all the facts down. Leisure, I said. Not to be confused with idleness.” San Francisco—where he gave lectures and visited Alice Adams and other friends—was “all right, I guess, although it makes you feel that after a journey of three thousand miles you might at least have gotten out of America.” What he needed back in Tivoli was “a couple of weeks of sleep.” Only then would he “be fit to start the final campaign.” For this campaign, Covici provided Bellow with a secretary. Bellow read out the handwritten manuscript of his novel to the typist, altering, adding, and cutting as he went along.104
Covici was anxious to get Henderson in print and Bellow was under pressure. In a letter of January 31, 1959, to Josephine Herbst, a writer he’d gotten to know and like at Yaddo in the summer of 1953, he recalled “working eight, ten, twelve and fourteen hours a day for six weeks. By mid-August, I was near suicide.” Exhausted on their return to Tivoli, Bellow grew increasingly moody, impatient of interruption and distraction and hard on Sasha. “He was either distant or lashing out at me,” she recalled. “I irritated him mightily, he lost his temper over the house, grabbing me by the shoulder like an unruly child, marching me to the scene of my latest failing (the dust in front of the door, the pot I forgot to clean, the socks in the sink)”—like Henderson’s complaints about “kids’ diapers under the bed and in the cigar humidor. The sink … full of garbage and grease” (p. 216) or Herzog’s complaints about “eggshells, chop bones, tin cans under the table, under the sofa” (p. 475). On occasion, Sasha claims, the lashing out was physical, though he was “always contrite afterwards.” In addition, his trips to the city were becoming more frequent. Absorbed with household chores, visitors, and Adam, Sasha admits that she “was too exhausted to care, and certainly didn’t realize he was seeing other women” (p. 98). She spent a lot of time with the Ludwigs, who “were sympathetic to my problems in the marriage; I unburdened myself—Saul was disapproving, constantly finding fault, selfish beyond belief in every way in bed and out. And Saul, apparently, I learned later, was confiding in Jack about his disappointment with me: I was too demanding, imperious, too centered around the baby, immature, spoiled, a sexual flop” (p. 100).
The Ludwig marriage was also in trouble at this time. Although Leya Ludwig was pregnant with a second daughter, Brina, they had agreed to split up, or so Jack told Sasha. When Leya went into labor in early May, both Bellow and Sasha waited at the hospital. The labor was long and difficult and eventually Bellow returned to Tivoli to get some sleep. Sasha stayed with Jack in the waiting room and sometime that night “with a brotherly and comforting hug,” he revealed to her the many complaints Bellow had made about her, including sexual complaints, as well as how disappointed he was in the marriage. Then he told Sasha of Bellow’s infidelities, known, he claimed, by all their friends (in Sasha’s words: “the Hoffmans, the Botsfords, Ellisons, Dupees, the New York and Princeton pals—you name it” [p. 99)]). In the weeks that followed Sasha brooded over Ludwig’s revelations. She said nothing to Bellow of what she had been told, partly out of confusion and shock, partly at Ludwig’s urging. Ludwig became her counselor and confidant, “friendship personified, comforting, concerned, caring, with his brotherly hugs, feeding me more gossip, but asking me not to reveal the source of this information to Saul” (p. 100). Ludwig began showing up at Tivoli in late mornings while Bellow was still at work. He and Sasha would talk over coffee and when Bellow emerged from his morning’s writing she would serve the two men lunch. Then Bellow and Ludwig would go off together. One day when Bellow was in the city Ludwig showed up at the usual time. “He stood very close to me, staring. I was uneasy. He kissed me. I was still. He said, ‘Don’t you know what this means?’ ‘What,’ I asked, confused. ‘My feelings for you.’ ” Before this moment, Sasha claims, she had had no interest in Ludwig “as a man.” Now, though, “I looked into his eyes, really looked, and somehow fell into them. A coup de foudre” (p. 100).
Another view of the Pyramid (Gus Bundy Collection, courtesy of Special Collections Department, University of Nevada, Reno Library) (ill. 12.1)
13
Betrayal
THE AFFAIR BETWEEN Sasha and Ludwig began soon after his declaration of May 1958, fueled for Sasha by a new set of fantasies. “I was flying in the stratosphere, I was Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, all the fairy tale figures awakening at last.”1 Meanwhile, relations between Bellow and Sasha were deteriorating under the pressure of work on his side and guilt and resentment on hers. In June they had a serious fight, involving the money from Sasha’s mother, perhaps heated by recent bad feeling over a photograph the mother had taken of Bellow, one he didn’t like and about which Sasha says he was rude.2 In the memoir, she describes the fight as though it happened the day Ludwig made his declaration. After describing her Sleeping Beauty fantasies, she writes: “We [she and Ludwig] talked about the future. Leya was returning to Winnipeg. I knew I would have to make some plans, but before I was able to think clearly enough to do so, Saul came back and we had a violent quarrel” (p. 100). Sasha’s mother had inquired in a letter about the $5,000 they’d received from her for repairs to the house, and when Sasha mentioned the letter to Bellow he got angry. “ ‘That was no loan,’ he shouted. ‘She gave us that money.’ ” Sasha was dumbfounded, calling her mother’s money “everything she had” (p. 100). Then she lost her composure completely:
We were in the dining room, he pounded on the table, the dishes rattled and slid around. “I won’t be made a fool of by the two of you!” he roared, and in that moment I saw him through a red haze of fury and, in an adrenalin surge, lifted the table at my end and flung it at him. I ran upstairs, hoisted Adam and grabbed the car keys, downstairs in a flash. I jumped in the car. He stood in the driveway, daring me. “Get out of the way, Saul, now, or I’ll run you over,” I shrieked, and started up the car—he jumped away, and I went to the Ludwigs (pp. 101–2).
In an interview, Sasha gives the impression that some days at least had intervened between Ludwig’s declaration and the quarrel with Bellow. “I started up with him in May,” she recalled, though “I couldn’t bring myself to be entirely unfaithful.… I’m seeing Jack a little bit, a little hugging and kissing in the backroads, and I’m thinking what am I doing.” In this period, Ludwig, at times in the presence of his wife, fed Sasha more stories of Bellow’s infidelities. He told her about a Japanese lover Bellow had in New York, about how Bellow slept with Elsa
, the Bard student, in the marital bed in Tivoli. “He told me some really ugly stories” (p. 101).
By the time of the fight, Sasha was not only furious with Bellow but had fallen for Ludwig. “I gave him no encouragement initially,” she recalled, but he was “supportive and sympathetic” and the tales he told her about Bellow left her “wounded and vulnerable and susceptible.” She and Ludwig talked about a future together and he opened up “a whole new world for me emotionally which I hadn’t experienced.” “I did love him,” she admitted. “I couldn’t eat or sleep.” The lovers concealed their feelings from their spouses. When Bellow called at the Ludwigs’ after Sasha stormed out, she refused to see him. Some days later, when he was away from Tivoli, she sneaked back into the house and gathered up clothes for herself and Adam. Her friend Anita Maximilian agreed to take the two of them in until Sasha found a place of her own. Before boarding the train for the city, Sasha told Jack that “he needed to be honest with Leya, she deserved the truth, although Saul did not” (p. 101). It seems that in this instance he did as instructed. “Leya had said for years that their marriage was not working out,” Sasha said in an interview, “and she said to him I can understand.” Leya also understood “how no one could talk to Saul.”3 In Manhattan Sasha found a job standing in at an art gallery for the summer (the gallery belonged to the mother of her roommate from the Ansonia, the one who was having an affair with her father). She then sublet an apartment in Brooklyn from a friend of Anita’s who was away for the summer, using a nanny agency to look after Adam during the day. The job at the gallery was undemanding: “Nobody really came in—except Ralph Ellison … always on the verge of saying something, but I never knew what he wanted. Of course I knew he really liked me and was probably attracted to me, but I was also sure he was there to report back to Saul. I said not a word to him or anyone about Jack,” including her mother, who was “frantic with alarm over the rift with Saul, but didn’t really want to know what the problem was” (p. 101). Others had their suspicions. Richard Stern visited New York in the summer of 1958 and when he learned Sasha was working at a gallery in the city, called her up. She invited him and his wife over and “we went out to Brooklyn and who should be there but Jack Ludwig. Obviously something was going on. I don’t think Saul knew.”
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 70
