The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Bellow thought Paul Meehl gave Sasha the courage to ask for a divorce. “I don’t know why she waited until we settled down in Minneapolis, holding a lease, etc.,” he writes in the November 1 letter to Covici. “I guess she leaned somewhat on her psychiatrist. With his support, she was able to tell me she didn’t and couldn’t love me, and perhaps had never loved anyone except as a child. The psychiatrist doesn’t approve of what she’s doing, but he’s bound to help her and so she’s able to make use of him.” In Herzog, Mady, the Sasha character, kicks Moses out after he has “built shelves, cleared the garden, and repaired the garage door,” then “put up the storm windows” (p. 423). “That would be the last thing that I would do,” Sasha said, laughing. “It is just such bad manners. I would never do that.” She admitted “it might have happened, but I wouldn’t have thought of it. Had I thought about it I never would have done it.” “That’s his suspicion,” she added. “He thinks everyone’s out to get him.” Madeleine might do such a thing, but she was not Madeleine. In a memorable scene in the novel, Moses watches Madeleine put on her makeup and arrange her hair, “with unhesitating speed and efficiency, headlong, but with the confidence of an expert.” She is at this time working at a Catholic university:

  First she spread a layer of cream on her cheeks, rubbing it into her straight nose, her childish chin and soft throat. It was gray, pearly bluish stuff. Over this she laid the makeup. She worked with cotton swabs, under the hairline, about the eyes, up the cheeks and on the throat. Despite the soft rings of feminine flesh, there was already something discernibly dictatorial about that extended throat.… She put on a pale powder with her puff, still at the same tilting speed.… Still without pauses or hesitations, she put a touch of black in the outer corner of each eye, and redrew the line of her brows to make it level and earnest.

  The full description is two pages long. At one point Madeleine “picks up a large tailor’s shears and puts them to her bangs”: “She cut as if discharging a gun, and Herzog felt an impulse of alarm, short-circuited. Her decisiveness fascinated him” (p. 527). According to Sasha, Bellow “never saw me put on my makeup.” Adam, however, who admires the accuracy of the description, claims to have seen her do so “countless” times.60

  Banished from the house, Bellow moved in with a lawyer friend, Jonas Schwartz, an early supporter both of civil rights and of Hubert Humphrey, whom he’d met through the McCloskys.61 Ralph Ross picked Bellow up and drove him to Schwartz’s house. There Bellow stayed for a few days before moving to a hotel, where Adam was allowed to visit him once a week, ferried by third parties. Schwartz originally represented both Sasha and Bellow in the divorce, an arrangement Ross warned Bellow against (Schwartz also represented Ann Berryman in her divorce, around about the same time). It was not until February, however, that Bellow took Ross’s advice, retaining John Goetz as counsel on Ross’s recommendation. “You were absolutely right,” he wrote on February 4, “I can’t trust Jonas Schwartz, and I don’t know what arrangements he will think just” (why he couldn’t trust Schwartz he does not say). According to Goetz, as reported by James Atlas, “it wasn’t just greed that made Schwartz long for a piece of the action; it was vanity. In the fall of 1959, the Bellows’ marital crisis was the best show in town. ‘Everyone wanted to get into the act,’ said John Goetz,”62 including Ludwig, who played the loyal and saddened mediator, counseling Bellow, presiding over meetings between Schwartz and Goetz (“I know nothing of this $1,000 loan from Sondra’s mother,” writes Ross to Bellow on May 12, 1960, “but you can scarcely claim it was anything else because Jack told Goetz it was indeed a loan”).63 Sasha thought Schwartz was motivated by friendship for Bellow as well as herself. In Herzog, as discussed in this book’s introduction, Schwartz becomes Sandor Himmelstein, Moses and Madeleine’s choleric and misshapen lawyer.64

  It was a terrible time for Bellow. “The best show in town” was not just for friends and acquaintances, but for readers citywide, with Bellow as male lead. “Novelist’s Wife Seeks Divorce” read the headline to an article of November 29 in The Minneapolis Tribune. Under the circumstances—with no teaching, limited access to Adam, and a hotel room for a home—it made sense for Bellow to leave town, at least for a while. Over the summer, he had been invited by the State Department to travel to Eastern Europe, lecturing in an “Experts and Specialists” program administered by the United States Information Agency. The tour was scheduled to begin on January 1, would last for three months, and on it Bellow would be accompanied by a second speaker, Mary McCarthy. In mid-November he set out for the East Coast, staying briefly at Yaddo, then for a while in Herb Gold’s apartment on the Upper West Side while Gold was at Yaddo. On November 26, he flew to London and from London to Paris. On November 27, after Bellow’s departure from New York, Covici wrote to him care of Eileen and Stanley Geist, on the rue de Verneuil. “It was nice having you for a bit. Any man who has made the journey through all the circles of Purgatory as you have and can still write farce that shakes me into uncontrollable laughter [The Last Analysis], is nothing but a genius.” On February 13, well into the trip, Bellow explained its appeal in a letter to Harvey Swados: “I’d never have consented to be a world-tour-bum or cultural functionary without the need to wear myself out so that I could bear the misery of divorce.”

  NOW BEGAN a period of strenuous womanizing. In Paris he had an affair with a friend of Eileen Geist’s named Helen Grisky, an expatriate New Yorker working in the film business. At some point they spent a weekend together in London, not altogether successfully.65 He seems also to have reconnected with a Frenchwoman named Annie Doubillon, whom he had known from Bard. She, too, worked in the film business. Whether he took up again with Nadine Nimier is not known. In Poland he had a fling with a married sculptor, Alina Slesinska, who spoke no English. In Yugoslavia he had an affair with a writer and translator, Jara Ribnikar, president of the Association of Writers of Serbia, whose letters (she and Bellow corresponded throughout the 1960s) are funny and endearing. “Darling friend brother, brother friend darling and friend darling brother,” begins one, “don’t lose the smell of my bitter flower. And my king I would not let you fight with a lion, please.… Please excuse all my stupidities. I can be reasonable if it is necessary, sure.” Another begins: “I kiss your nose.” In her own language, Ribnikar could write (as the Polish sculptor could sculpt, with solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States).66 Issue 3 of The Noble Savage contains her story “Copperskin,” originally written in Serbian, translated by the author, and revised “by Saul Bellow and Susan Glassman,” the latter soon to figure prominently in Bellow’s life.

  While on tour, Bellow received news from Minneapolis, particularly about Adam, from Schwartz and Paul Meehl. Schwartz, writing on January 4, had seen Adam, “my champion,” and would soon see Sasha; mother and son had only just returned from Chicago, where they’d stayed with Cookie over the holidays. Schwartz sent Bellow New Year’s greetings and encouraged him “to make an honest effort to stop annoying yourself.” A day later Meehl wrote in response to a postcard from Bellow. He hadn’t seen Sasha since a week or two before Christmas but “I believe everything is under control.” Meehl’s letter does not sound like the sort of thing a psychiatrist writes to a patient: “Just past my 40th birthday—whee! Working like a lunatic but not on what I am ‘supposed’ to be doing. Bad trait, that. Have fun, Paul.” On January 13, Bellow wrote to Oscar Tarcov from Frankfurt (“a sort of Chicago”). In Poland he’d visited Auschwitz “and understood that concern with my private life was childish. Before that I had forty nights of insomnia over Sondra; now I’m losing sleep over the camps, and the ghettos of Warsaw and Cracow.” From Warsaw Bellow returned to Bonn, from where he would travel to Yugoslavia in a few days. On the 18th he wrote to Covici from Belgrade, where he stayed until the end of the month. He was distraught: no mail awaited him upon arrival. Was everyone all right? None of the four people he’d written to in Minnesota had answered. “The universal silence makes me afraid.”
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br />   Two days later, in a letter to Ralph Ellison, Bellow pronounced himself “much better. I’m beginning to sit up and take nourishment, and I’d enjoy my convalescence greatly if I didn’t have to do this cultural functionary bullshit.” He and McCarthy were worked hard on the tour: sometimes they had to deliver several lectures a day, in addition to giving interviews and meeting literary officials and bureaucrats. Partly Bellow felt better because he’d phoned Meehl from Macedonia to find out about Adam, who was fine (“this was Macedonia’s first call to Minneapolis”), partly he felt better because he found Eastern Europe interesting. “It has told me a lot about my family—myself, even. It’s made a slavophile of me.” In a letter of August 18, 1993, to the food critic Mimi Sheraton he recalled visiting “the Polish hinterland.” Poznan´ “was the image of Scranton, Pennsylvania circa 1937. Except that the trolley cars were of an earlier time—say, 1905. I went also to Cracow and wandered through the totally empty ghetto there. My parents often spoke about mud in the old country. I had never really understood why it should have been described in such extraordinary terms. The mud was like a thick, old gray soup, cold of course and pouring into your shoes when you crossed the street. There was nothing in the shops except pages torn from Hebrew and Yiddish books. For the first time in my life I understood why Eastern European Jews drank tea with lemon. They needed it for warmth, and a slice of lemon was important not only for its flavor but also because it resembled the sun they never saw. Lemon played a figurative role here, something like a reminder of the absent cosmic radiance.”

  On January 22, in a letter to Covici, Bellow gave further evidence of recovered spirits: “I’ve even begun to sleep again, without drugs. And I met a young lady in Poland [the sculptor]—well, not so young, but lovely—who comforted me well. I thought she had also given me the clap, and I was very proud but the doctor in Warsaw said it was only a trifling infection.” He’d also been working—on the play and a story that sounds like the beginnings of Herzog: “The story is about Sondra, and it may be a trial run, who knows? … I’d better come home, I think, and file my taxes and move East and complete the play and start the book. And begin my life.” In the week that followed he went to Italy. On February 15, he sailed from Naples to Haifa. On March 3 he was back in Rome and on March 18 in London. He returned home on March 22, trailed by letters not only from Helen, Annie, Jara, and Alina, but from Maryi, Hannah, Daniela, Maude (from Milan, scared off by “your big red dressed romantic girl”), and Iline.67 “Home,” he explained in a letter of March 8 to Ellison, meant “two days to see Greg,” then “Washington and Chicago and Mpls. There I expect to stay a month (six weeks!), get divorced, kiss Adam, and towards the end of May join you in Tivoli.” In Venice, writing a day or two later (the postmark is illegible), he was greeted by a snowstorm. “God salts my every bite,” he wrote to Richard Stern. “Just the same it is Italy. Even the irrigation ditches are dug with sensitivity.” In a subsequent postcard to Stern he writes: “Israel and Italy sublime and gorgeous respectively,” but also exhausting. “I’m down about 20 lbs. and ready to go back to my business,” he writes to Covici on March 4 from Tel Aviv, “which is to be fatter and to write books. I’ve had too much of sights and flights, and girls. Still, I wanted to wear myself out, and I’m well satisfied with the results I’ve gotten.” He adds that he’s seen Billy Rose in Tel Aviv, a detail stored for nearly thirty years before put to use in The Bellarosa Connection. On March 16, no longer exhausted, he reported to Marshall Best of Viking: “I’m fit again.”

  In the letter to Best, Bellow defends the tour, which had caused Best embarrassment. This embarrassment was provoked by a Ford Foundation executive who was “distressed” to hear that Bellow was traveling rather than writing. Bellow replied that he was writing. “I always manage to keep at it,” he assured Best. “You know that I’m not reckless and irresponsible and that I wouldn’t go off on a toot abandoning all work and responsibility. An emergency arose and I met it as well as I could.” The next day he wrote a second letter to Best, still brooding over the implied rebuke. Far from being on a “gay lark in Europe,”

  I have been dutifully suffering my way from country to country, thinking about Fate and Death.… Will that do as an explanation? And if, here and there, I gave a talk in Poland and Yugoslavia, did I violate the by-laws? All jokes aside, what I saw between Auschwitz and Jerusalem made a change in me. To say the least. And that ought not to distress the Ford Foundation. I’m sorry to cause you an embarrassment, but there ought not to be any in my going to Europe and the Middle East for a few months. Now I’m coming back to write a book, and I see nothing wrong anywhere. I might have written a thousand pages in Minneapolis and thrown them away. I know I’ve done the necessary and proper thing and it annoys me to be criticized for it.

  Coming to Israel after Eastern Europe led Bellow to think hard about his identity as a Jew and an American. Several Riga cousins had survived German occupation, immigrating to Israel after the war. In Holon, near Tel Aviv, Bellow visited cousin Lisa and her husband, Baruch Westreich. Lisa’s mother, Rachel, adored Bellow’s mother, Liza, her sister, after whom she named her daughter. The Westreichs knew all about Bellow and his family, through correspondence with Abraham, who often urged them to come to the United States, offering to pay their way. According to Lisa’s daughter, Sabina Mazursky, Abraham described Bellow as a great worry to the family, the only son “not working only writing.” Sabina was twelve in 1960. On Bellow’s next visit to Israel, in 1967, to report for Newsday on the Six Day War, she “fell in love” with him: he was “good looking and full of charm and so clever,” also “a little bit sarcastic.” Bellow liked the Westreichs, who owned a small grocery store “no bigger than a pantry” and lived a hard life “on their feet ten hours a day.”68 On this trip he must also have met cousin Moshe Gordin, the son of Liza’s and Rachel’s brother, Hone (or Khanan or Aron). Moshe, according to his nephew, Mikhail Gordin, “was a bulldozer, stubborn—he only went his way,” and “like all the men in the Gordin family … got angry fast.” Moshe served in the Russian army in World War II. Before the war, he had been a welder, but he also drew and made steel sculptures. According to Mikhail, Moshe was the model for the Israeli sculptor Eisen in Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970). When Moshe read the novel, he “was insulted about how Saul Bellow depicted him.” The Riga cousins Bellow met in Israel led what he calls “plain” lives. These lives they accepted, having known “arrest, deportation, massacre and war” in Europe. As Bellow writes in To Jerusalem and Back, “they have, curiously, more rest in their souls than the American side of the family; they are less secure but also less fretful. Observing their temper and their ways [Bellow was writing in 1975, after a number of visits], I wonder about the effects of limitless expectation on the American sense of reality.”69

  Related thoughts about national and cultural identity were prompted by an encounter with S. Y. Agnon, “the dean of Hebrew writers,” an encounter described by Bellow in the introduction to Great Jewish Short Stories (1963). Agnon received Bellow at his house in Jerusalem, “not far from the barbed wire entanglements that divide the city.” As the two writers drank tea, Agnon asked Bellow if any of his books had been translated into Hebrew: “If they had not been, he had better see to it immediately, because, he said, they would survive only in the Holy Tongue.” Agnon was teasing but he was also serious. When Bellow mentioned Heine as a Jewish poet “who had done rather well in German,” Agnon replied, “we have him beautifully translated into Hebrew, he is safe.” Bellow had more patience for Agnon than for other champions of Hebrew—of Israel, ultimately, the only place, it was suggested to him, where a Jew could be fully Jewish. “With less wit and subtlety than Mr. Agnon, other Jewish writers worry about using the languages of the Diaspora,” Bellow writes in the introduction to Great Jewish Short Stories (and quoted in Chapter 1), but “Jews have been writing in languages other than Hebrew for more than two thousand years.”70 “It cannot be argued that the stories of Isaac Babel
are not characteristically Jewish,” he argues, though Babel wrote in Russian.71 Bellow disliked what he saw as a xenophobic strain in Israeli attitudes to the literature and experience of Diasporan Jews, shaming champions of Hebrew by linking them with Oswald Spengler’s limiting notions of Judaism. For Spengler, the Jews were permanently identified “with a period in culture which he calls the Magian, and will never belong in spirit to the modern order.”72 The champions of Hebrew, Bellow implies, are Magians. In 1975, in Jerusalem, Bellow met the Israeli novelist Amos Oz, who writes in Hebrew. Bellow peppered him with questions, many of them technical, about how he could possibly write a modern novel in an ancient language. Behind these questions lay a defense of Jewish writers of the Diaspora, as voiced at the end of the introduction to Great Jewish Short Stories: “We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it.”73

  Bellow’s “gay lark in Europe” ended where it began, in London, where he was entertained by his new British publisher, George Weidenfeld. On the advice of Sonia Orwell, Weidenfeld had taken Bellow on as an author when John Lehmann, his previous publisher, went bankrupt in 1953. The first Bellow novel published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson (Nigel Nicolson was the firm’s cofounder) was The Adventures of Augie March. In London, Weidenfeld hosted a party for Bellow attended by J. B. Priestley, Anthony Powell, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and Karl Miller, the literary editor of The Spectator. As Bellow was now famous, he was largely immune to the slights and offenses, real or imagined, he’d complained of a decade earlier after Lehmann’s party. He was also comfortable with Weidenfeld, who was shrewd, convivial, charming, and Jewish. Weidenfeld had escaped from Vienna in 1939, a virtually penniless law student. By 1960 he was rich and well connected in literary, political, and social, including aristocratic, circles. According to Weidenfeld, he and Bellow were politically compatible: “We both belonged to what you might call the NCL, Non-Communist Left.” Unlike Bellow, however, Weidenfeld was a passionate Zionist, much influenced in his youth by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the Zionist activist. Weidenfeld claims that Bellow “was amazed that I had these non-Jewish acquaintances and was totally committed to Israel.” “I didn’t have hang-ups,” he explained, “my mentality towards the English aristocracy was we are better than them.… Who are you? Robbers! Fourteenth century? My family are rabbis who came from Barcelona. Who the hell are you? And Saul Bellow was astonished by that.” In addition to entertaining Bellow, Weidenfeld put him up in a guest apartment in his house in Hyde Park Gate.74 Weidenfeld liked and admired Bellow but “had my reservations about some traits of his character. He was enormously self-absorbed.” Other factors prevented close friendship. For Weidenfeld, politics and history mattered more than literature; he had comparatively little to do with the firm’s fiction list. “I’ve never cultivated artists, with one exception, Mary McCarthy, a woman interested in affairs, a very intimate close friend. We talked about communism not Proust or James.” In addition, Bellow was well taken care of by Weidenfeld’s colleague, Barley Alison, who not only looked after his publishing needs but advised him on a range of personal matters. It was Alison who became a close and trusted friend.