The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Around the beginning of July 1958, Leya Ludwig and the children left to visit family in Winnipeg. “And that’s when I really started having the affair,” Sasha recalled. Bellow, meanwhile, was working flat out on Henderson. Soon after Sasha left for Brooklyn, fourteen-year-old Greg arrived to spend the summer with his father. When he asked Bellow where Sasha and Adam were, “my father, in a dead-pan tone of voice, announced that she was moving to Brooklyn ‘to get away and think.’ Meanwhile Jack Ludwig was driving down to Brooklyn on a regular basis, ostensibly to ‘mediate’ between Saul and Sasha.”4 Jesse Reichek, Bellow’s painter friend from Paris, was also staying at Tivoli at this time, while his wife, Laure, visited her family in France. “Jesse drew and Saul wrote all morning,” Greg recalls, “but by then I had a rickety bicycle to get me to the local swimming pool.” Laure Reichek remembers Jesse telling her of fierce arguments that summer between Bellow and Greg over Greg’s interest in the stock market. “Apparently Saul was so distressed about the affinity I expressed for capitalism,” Greg writes in his memoir, “that it brought him to tears.”5 Reichek also recalled tensions with Sasha, as well as moments when Bellow expressed pride in her looks. On one occasion when she appeared in a bathing suit he whispered “Doesn’t she look beautiful? Isn’t she beautiful?” Bellow’s account of the summer (his nonfictional account, that is) was reported in an interview of March 16, 1972, in the Chicago Sun-Times: “He had written ‘Henderson’ with the help of a stenographer because it was overdue and he owed the publisher $10,000. ‘I dictated it from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day. Then I’d do the dishes, do the shopping and cook supper. After supper I’d dictate again for the rest of the evening. I worked this way for an entire summer during a time of great personal difficulty. The worse things grew for me personally the more amusing I began to think the whole thing was.”6

  Bellow’s correspondence from the summer of 1958 is sparse, mostly undated, and unrevealing. On July 15 he wrote to Josephine Herbst, who lived in Pennsylvania, suggesting a visit: “Let’s get together at least once before Sasha and I take off for Minnesota.” On July 24 he wrote to Berryman: “When may we see you and Ann and Paul? Tivoli stands open.” Only in the letter of January 31, 1959, to Herbst, quoted at the end of the last chapter, does he go into detail about the summer. It is not clear whether the unperturbed references to Sasha in the letters of July 15 and 24 signaled a rapprochement; they may have been a way of avoiding having to explain matters. At some point in the summer, Sasha did return to Tivoli. While vacationing in New Hampshire, Oscar Tarcov, whose health had long been a worry, had his first heart attack. Bellow offered to take in the Tarcov children, Nathan and Miriam, for the period before they went off to summer camp. When he asked Sasha if she’d return to Tivoli to help look after them and Greg and then drive them to camp, she agreed, though there seems to have been no talk of returning to Bellow or resuming the marriage.7 All Greg recalls of this period is that “eventually Sasha moved back to Tivoli, where she and I grew closer in rural isolation.”8

  Before Sasha’s flight from Tivoli, Bellow, who was running short of money, had accepted an offer from Ralph Ross to teach Humanities at the University of Minnesota for the coming academic year. Whether he did so before Ludwig’s declaration of his feelings for Sasha is not clear. He had a condition before accepting the job: Ludwig, his good friend, must also be offered a post. “I had to understand one very peculiar complication,” Ross told Atlas. “Ludwig was so close a friend that they had made a pact: neither one of them could go unless both of them could go.” With the exception of an anthology of stories coedited with Richard Poirier, Ludwig had not yet published a book, but he had a PhD, was chair of the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard (which, nevertheless, was unwilling to keep him on), and had references from F. W. Dupee and Ted Weiss. Ross’s suspicion was that “Bellow was conned into this arrangement because Ludwig wanted to be where Sondra was.”9 In 1972 on a visit to Bellow in Vermont, Ruth Miller, his old friend and biographer, heard him talk about Ludwig’s betrayal and the breakup of his marriage “as if it were a week ago.” The impression she received was that it was Sasha who urged Bellow to tell Ross “that he wouldn’t go unless they hired Ludwig, too.”10 This impression was shared by Mitzi McClosky, recalling a visit she and Herb paid to Tivoli early in the summer, around the time of the fight and Sasha’s flight. “Saul said, ‘We’re having a lot of trouble. She doesn’t really want to come back to Minnesota.… We have to bring our friends back, because otherwise Sondra would be unhappy. It would be too much of a change for her.’ ” Sasha makes no mention, either in her memoir or in our interviews, of how or when Ludwig’s appointment was arranged, or of pressuring Bellow to get Ludwig a job. All she says of the end of the summer is that “Leya left for Winnipeg, and [Jack] was getting signed up for Minnesota in September” (p. 101).

  Sasha and Ludwig now had a plan, or what passed for one. “I would go to California, and then we would be able to have a life together after his stint in Minneapolis. He’d get another teaching job and we would start fresh” (p. 101). In an interview she remembered Ludwig saying, “Adam’s going to have a real father, I’m going to have a real husband.” Looking back on the plan in the memoir, Sasha admits its impracticality: “I never thought about money, about divorce proceedings, about Adam and his father.… I was in a bubble of love and sexual discovery, in a fantasy world about a happy life to come” (p. 101). If Ludwig and Bellow were to be colleagues at Minnesota, the affair had to be hidden; it made sense for her to live away for the year, to avoid gossip, discovery, confrontation. Why did she choose California? Why not Chicago, where she had relatives and where it would be easier for Bellow to visit Adam and for Ludwig to visit her? The reason she gives in the memoir is that “Cookie had remarried and there was no room in the house for me and Adam” (p. 102). But Lester did not die until September 1960 and Cookie did not remarry until 1968. In an interview Sasha revealed that Cookie “did not like Jack at all,” thought him “bad news, he’s using you.” The decision not to go to Chicago, however, remains puzzling: Sasha had other relatives there and at least a few contacts, and Cookie would still have been a support. She says Bellow accepted the California plan, but it is hard to believe that he did so thinking it was for a whole year. All that is known for certain is that at the end of the summer Bellow left Tivoli and Sasha wrote to her friend Sand Higson to say that she and Adam were coming to California and “would be grateful for a visit with her until I could get myself and Adam settled” (p. 102). Once Bellow left Tivoli, Sasha returned to pack and ship a trunk of clothing to Malibu.

  Just before this point, terrible news arrived for Bellow from Chicago. Larry Kauffman, his nephew, the elder of his sister Jane’s two sons, had committed suicide in San Francisco. Bellow drove directly to Chicago from Tivoli upon hearing the news.11 Sam Bellows was dispatched by the family to find out what had happened, but the more details he uncovered, according to Greg in his memoir, the more sordid the story became. So he simply “stopped asking questions.”12 On August 22, 1958, the night before he was scheduled for release, Larry hanged himself in his cell. He was twenty-four. That he had been arrested for stealing came as no surprise to Bellow and Greg. During a visit Larry paid to Tivoli, money began to disappear from handbags, though not, strangely, when left out in the open. Bellow asked Greg what he knew about the missing money, “no doubt hoping to dispel his worst fears about his nephew.” Greg, a prickly teenager, was “outraged” at the suggestion that he might be involved (in a letter to Bellow of June 27, on the eve of Greg’s visit, Anita described Greg as in good spirits: “He is still plenty fresh, but his overall manner is not so sullen and angry”).13 On August 25 Larry’s body was flown back to Chicago for burial. Months later, in a letter of November 13, Richard Stern wrote with information about him. Stern had met the college friend who’d accompanied Larry on his visit to Tivoli. “I asked him about the suicide, and he said that Larry was a kleptomaniac and had tried to kill himself a coupl
e of times, and he’d been in trouble with the Army for stealing fencing equipment and that he’d stolen stuff from the fraternity house where he and friend lived.”

  Larry’s death devastated the whole family, including Bellow. Worn to the bone by the rush to finish Henderson, the knowledge that he’d sunk his legacy in a collapsing Hudson Valley mansion, the quarrel and breakup with Sasha, the news of Oscar Tarcov’s heart attack, and the grief of his family in Chicago, Bellow was near collapse. In Minneapolis, where he went directly from the funeral, he rented a small apartment at 1408 West 28th Street near Lake Calhoun, about a twenty-minute drive from campus. From there he wrote to Sasha. “Would I come and spend some time with him on my way to California? Just a couple of weeks, to get him through the grief and horror. He would pay for my tickets and give me some money to get settled in California—$300” (p. 102). Sasha accepted the offer. When she and Adam arrived in Minneapolis they stayed at the McCloskys’. Bellow was “grateful to see Adam” and pleaded with Sasha not to end the marriage. “He was at rock bottom, he said, he understood what he was losing and asked for another chance” (p. 102). Meanwhile, the McCloskys were “pressing me not to take his son away from him.” Ludwig was in Winnipeg still and Sasha began to worry. As she put it in an interview, “Jack is being very peculiar now about it. He’s not giving me a solution, no guidance. I was thinking maybe he was having second thoughts.” Then a letter arrived from Sand Higson. “She was sorry things were falling apart in my marriage, she would be happy to have us stay for a few days, but … she and Jim were not willing to have a young child around the house for longer than that” (Adam was eighteen months). Sasha was thrown, having expected to spend several weeks with the Higsons, “long enough to find work, get settled, etc.” Her only money was the $300 Bellow had sent her. “How long would $300 last?” Moreover, “Saul was so unbearably and touchingly sad” (p. 102). After a long talk, she gave in:

  I would stay, at least for a while, no guarantees. But I had conditions: he needed to go into therapy, but not some Reichian scream thing. And I was not willing to resume the physical relationship unless we could get past these problems. I was in despair. Jack arrived to a done deal. I told him that Saul needed me, that there was no money for me to leave the marriage, and that I had awakened to the fact that I couldn’t so easily take his son away. I could not have a love affair on the side, I told him, and I needed to commit to the marriage, and so we had to end it. I even suggested that he bring his family to Minneapolis and that we should both try to make our marriages work” (pp. 102–3).

  Before leaving for Chicago and Minneapolis, Bellow had made arrangements for Tivoli. At his urging, Ralph Ellison had applied for and accepted a teaching job at Bard. For several years now, Ellison had sought Bellow’s advice about a range of problems—money, an affair he’d started in Rome that he needed to break off, what he called a “writer’s block as big as the Ritz.”14 Bellow’s advice was to make a clean break. He pooh-poohed Ellison’s fears that teaching would harm his writing and offered free residence at Tivoli in exchange for looking after the house. Ellison was an admirer of Bellow’s writing and shared many of his views. In “Society, Morality and the Novel,” Ellison’s contribution to the 1957 Granville Hicks volume, The Living Novel, he questions Trilling’s sense of the novel’s “classic intention … the investigation of the problem of reality beginning in the social field.”15 Trilling’s view, according to Ellison, is that “American novelists cannot write French or English novels of manners” (p. 83). Ellison accepts this view, but argues that they can write “the picaresque, many-sided novel, swarming with characters and with varied types and levels of experience,” like The Adventures of Augie March or Invisible Man. “We love the classics,” Ellison declares, but “have little interest in what Mr. Trilling calls the ‘novel of manners,’ and I don’t believe that a society hot in the process of defining itself can for long find its image in so limited a form. Surely the novel is more than he would have it be, and if it isn’t then we must make it so” (p. 89). In addition to these shared literary beliefs, the two writers were similar as men, refusing to be restricted by or to hide their backgrounds, alternately difficult and charming, good-looking, much concerned with appearance and dress, hard dogs to keep on the porch, to use an expression applied to President Clinton.

  Bellow’s defense of writers as university teachers was voiced publicly as well as privately. In “The University as Villain,” an article of November 16, 1957, in The Nation, he begins by rehearsing familiar complaints about the condescension and narrowness of literary academics—“discouraged people who stand dully upon a brilliant plane, in charge of masterpieces but not themselves inspired.” He then canvasses the alternatives for writers, calling into question the determining character of any setting or environment. “It is not easy to find the right way,” he admits, by which he means the right way to live one’s life away from the desk, but whatever the nonwriting existence the writer chooses, “you must learn to govern yourself, you must learn autonomy, you must manage your freedom or drown in it.” Some writers put a premium on “experience,” others on “culture,” but “you can make a fool of yourself anywhere.” Encouraged by Bellow’s advice, Ellison accepted an offer to teach two related courses on American literature at Bard, one in each semester, leaving plenty of time to write. He settled into the Tivoli mansion and used his skills as a handyman to help with upkeep and repairs.16 He fixed broken windows, plugged leaks, replaced a garage door when the wind blew it off. “I’m used to cleaning the apartment in the city,” he wrote to Bellow, “and have vacuumed and scrubbed and dusted and am quite concerned that the place be and remain shipshape.”17 Chanler Chapman gave him permission to shoot on his land, and he joined the Rod and Gun Club of Red Hook. When teaching began, he was careful to steer clear of Bard coeds, with their “aching blue-jeans, short-shorts, padded bras, and adolescent adventurism.”18 Weekends were spent with Fanny, his wife, who worked in the city, either at Tivoli or at their apartment on Riverside Drive.

  Bellow’s correspondence with Ellison in the academic year 1958–59 mixes practical and personal matters with literary gossip. On September 5, he described his tumultuous August, beginning with news of Larry’s suicide. “It was a considerable trip, and the arrival was considerable, too. My sister is in a state I won’t undertake to describe. But then, with Sasha’s aunt’s help, I’ve made good progress out of my own difficulties. At least Sasha and Adam and I are together in Minneapolis. We’re temporarily at 1408 W. 28th St., which isn’t like Chelsea in the least.”19 Before answering questions about the house, Bellow passes along a request from Sasha: that Ellison find and send on to Minneapolis an untied carton of her winter things “near the marble fireplace at the north end of the ballroom.” The date of the letter makes clear that Bellow and Sasha were back living together before Ludwig left Winnipeg. When Ludwig arrived in Minneapolis, outwardly he was his usual ebullient self. Mitzi McClosky’s first impression was that he was Bellow’s “greatest fan, he just adored him, they had such fun together”; “he and Saul had so many jokes together … they were just buddies.” The McCloskys liked Ludwig, “he was a raucous good fellow and lots of fun, lots of excitement.” They thought he was good for Bellow, who arrived in Minneapolis “depressed and down and very worried,” also “drinking a lot.” Ellen Siegelman thought Ludwig funny and lively, but when she said she found him “crude” in comparison to Ralph Ross (described by Philip Siegelman as “having the great misfortune to look like John Barrymore”), she earned, inexplicably, Sasha’s “terrible ill-will.” As for Bellow, he not only enjoyed Ludwig’s company but, as Mitzi puts it, “thought Jack was on his side. He told us, you know Jack is very helpful in presenting my point of view to Sondra and making my case with her.” When Ludwig was alone with Sasha, his ebullience disappeared. As she recalls in the memoir, he “brooded and looked at me with his heart in his eyes, showed up when I was alone in the house, and sorely tested my resolve” (p. 103).


  THE THERAPIST BELLOW AGREED to see, as a condition of Sasha’s returning to the marriage, was Paul Meehl, the McCloskys’ friend, chair of the Department of Psychology at Minnesota. Meehl was a clinician as well as an eminent researcher in social psychology. Although he knew Bellow through the McCloskys, he took him on, in Mitzi’s words, because he “was entranced with Saul” (in his defense, Meehl pointed out that Freud also saw patients he knew). On October 2, Bellow wrote to Covici to say he’d had a month of sessions with Meehl and that he’d been pronounced “normal after all. It makes me sorry for the rest of you guys. So this is life? What I’ve got? And normal life, too? How sad for every body!” When Meehl suggested that Sasha also see him, another unorthodox practice, she agreed. In a letter of March 18, 1959, Ellison responded to the question of Bellow’s “normality” with a suggestive theory, one that connects to a view, at times entertained by Bellow himself, that he somehow concocted or needed his difficulties. “Surely we, you and I, must be as nutty as Cal Lowell or Berryman or Roethke, we just aren’t the type to enjoy exploiting it. Mythomania compels [us] to seek extreme relationships as a means of affirming our reality. Thus we fight and argue and produce wild fictions inhabited by wild men. But perhaps we’re hopelessly sane.”