The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Barley Alison played a key role in Bellow’s life in Europe. Slight, fragile-looking, elegant, she came from a background very different from Bellow’s. She was born in 1920 in Cannes and grew up in France, Australia, and England. She had been a debutante. She joined the Land Army in 1940 and in 1941 she was posted to Algiers, where she worked in intelligence, briefing agents who were about to infiltrate France. In Algiers she befriended Albert Camus, A. J. Ayer, and Duff Cooper, who had her posted to the British embassy in Paris in 1944 when he became ambassador. In Paris she rose to third secretary, one of the first women in the foreign service to hold a full diplomatic post. In 1948 she returned to London, working in the Foreign Office until 1953. Then she traveled the Middle East for eighteen months as a freelance journalist. Weidenfeld met her at a lunch party and lured her into publishing in 1955 as an investor and temporary employee (she was independently wealthy, with money inherited from a grandfather who owned property in Australia). Within a decade she, together with Ed Victor, later a powerful agent, ran the firm’s general department, responsible for 150 titles a year. Among the authors Alison took care of were Margaret Drabble and Piers Paul Read, both of whom she discovered, Mickey Spillane, Umberto Eco, and Vladimir Nabokov. To Bellow, as to all her authors, she was fiercely devoted, an indefatigable letter writer (her correspondence in the Regenstein is voluminous), a fund of gossip and anecdote, and sound in judgment, both literary and commercial. She was famously stylish, loved entertaining—Margaret Drabble called her “recklessly hospitable”—and though never married (a femme seule, she called herself), had many affairs, often with married or otherwise unsuitable lovers. For Bellow, as for Drabble, she was “a one woman initiation ceremony,”75 quickly and tactfully taking him under her wing. “I am so glad Paris is being a success” begins a letter to Bellow of December 12, 1960, written only weeks after they’d met. “Will you give Pauline Graham [the actress and poet] a note? According to the English ‘Emily Posts’ you should write.… I could give you an equally unimportant list for France. I think it must be my diplomatic training.” Later she vetted Bellow’s girlfriends and advised him about the best places to buy handmade shoes and shirts.

  Bellow’s tour of Europe was just what he needed. It wore him out, distracted him, and deepened his understanding both of the world his parents came from and of the horrors of the war and of recent Jewish history. His complaints were few, mostly having to do with lack of news from home. He got on with Mary McCarthy, whose companionship brought unexpected benefits, particularly at receptions and social functions. “She had such an easy way with top officials,” Bellow told one of McCarthy’s biographers. “I remember when we were received by the Ambassador in Belgrade … she took charge. I was a sort of observer—the cat in the corner—which is my favorite position as a novelist. She marched me around Belgrade several days in a row. It was very cold and I was talking a mile a minute. She wanted to know the story of my life.” McCarthy’s way of finding out about a person, Bellow recalled, was “inquisitional. There was a battery of questions.” Her interest in him was solely intellectual: “I never connected it with any sexual motive she might have.” Not that she was without sexual motives. McCarthy, too, had been busy on tour, flirting with a cultural attaché in Warsaw, James West, whom she later turned up with in Paris and eventually married; going off “with some Serb or other in Belgrade. ” As has previously been mentioned, Bellow admired McCarthy’s “enamelled” beauty, but was put off by it as well. “I can imagine what it would be like to go to bed with her,” he told her biographer. “She’d put you through your paces. I didn’t feel like going through hoops for Mary or anybody else. I’d had that.” Intellectually, McCarthy was good company, though she could be rigid in her views. “Once she had developed a line she became inflexible.”76 McCarthy’s feelings about Bellow, conveyed at the end of the tour in a letter to Hannah Arendt, were comparably mixed: “Saul and I parted good friends, though he is too wary and raw-nerved to be friends, really, even with people he decides to like. He is in better shape than he was in Poland, yet I felt very sorry for him when I saw him go off yesterday, all alone, on his way to Italy, like Augie with a cocky sad smile disappearing into the distance.”77

  NOTHING IS RECORDED of Bellow’s time in New York after he returned from Europe, nor of his debriefing at the State Department in Washington. His stay in Minneapolis lasted eleven days and was horrible. “Adam apart,” he wrote to Ralph Ross, in an undated letter, it was “a nightmare.… Sandra threatened to call the cops if I came near the house, and I repressed the impulse to kill her so well I didn’t even want to see her. Then her lawyer tried to put me over the barrel, breaking every agreement we reached before I left in Nov.” Sasha was angry about the continuing legal wrangles with Bellow, especially over her mother’s loan.78 She insisted on keeping the car and most of the furniture and presented him with a bill of $400 from a local department store. Bellow still knew nothing of the affair with Ludwig, though when the two men met he sensed a change in Ludwig’s manner. As he wrote to Botsford, “towards me Jack behaved appropriately in Mpls. This is an observation rather than a complaint. He did for the most part what a friend should have done, but his compassion is spoken rather than shown. Once he has made his mind up over the issues, he tends to be the King and to speak from a throne. What I needed was good sense, not authority.” From Minnesota Bellow fled to Chicago, where he stayed for several weeks, partly to receive an award on April 23 from the Friends of Literature, an Evanston book club, partly to see family. Edward Shils, the sociologist, was in England and lent Bellow his office at the University of Chicago. It may have been at this time that Bellow started an affair with a writer named Roberta “Bobby” Markels, then living in Evanston. This seems also to have been the time when he started, or seriously started, an affair with an ex-girlfriend of Philip Roth’s, Susan Glassman.

  Once back in Tivoli in May, Bellow entered therapy with Albert Ellis, author of Sex Without Guilt (1958). Ellis described the “goal” of Bellow’s therapy as “to get him unangry, which wasn’t easy with a person like that because he was a novelist, and novelists think that all emotions are good.”79 Not surprisingly, Bellow quit the therapy after a few months. “It was pool-room grad work,” he told Atlas, “what to do, how to lay a girl, getting rid of character problems that are an obstacle to pleasure” (“how to lay a girl,” presumably, means once in bed, as opposed to getting them to bed, suggesting that sexual dysfunction or dissatisfaction as well as anger figured in their sessions). What helped Bellow most was returning to Tivoli and to work. “The only sure cure is to write a book,” he advised a depressed Alice Adams in a letter of September 10, 1960. “I’ve been so pressed, harried, driven, badgered, bitched, delayed,” he wrote to Susan Glassman on May 5, “that I haven’t even had time to sit down and cross my legs. Till now, in Tivoli. Good old Tivoli.” “I crept back to Tivoli,” he wrote the McCloskys around about the same time. “I’m winding up the play, The Last Analysis. I am getting ready to write a novel.… Greg and Adam are fine, and I’m not too bad.”

  It was a recuperative summer. Ellison was there with his dog, Tucka, a pedigree black Labrador, bought from John Cheever. Bellow got on well with Ellison but “the important thing was that the gloomy house was no longer empty—no longer gloomy.”80 They would meet for breakfast, Ellison dressed in an exotic Moroccan robe and slippers. Ellison taught Bellow how to brew drip coffee “properly” (an elaborate procedure, which, when tested by myself, was hard to see as worth the effort).81 After the day’s work they would meet for cocktails, to chat about their writing, or Bellow’s Noble Savage correspondence (Ellison had a contribution in issue 1), or current events, including the coming presidential election (both were Kennedy supporters). In addition, they exchanged literary and artistic views (“about Malraux, about Marxism, or painting or novel writing”) and personal histories. Bellow was struck by “the strength and independence” of Ellison’s mind. “Ralph, it was clear, had thought things thr
ough for himself, and his ideas had little in common with the views of the critics in the literary quarterlies.” Neither writer was prepared to accept “the categories prepared for us by literary journalists.”82 If not visiting or being visited—the summer brought many guests and invitations—they prepared supper together in the ground-floor kitchen, kept cool by thick stone walls. After supper there was drinking and more talk late into the evening. Like Bellow, Ellison played the recorder and liked classical music; they often listened to records after supper in Bellow’s upstairs study (Bach, Scarlatti, Poulenc). Gossip about the friendship was inevitable. According to Atlas, “one day, around the time Leslie Fiedler published his widely read essay about Mark Twain, ‘Come Back to the Raft [Ag’in], Huck Honey,’ making the case that Huck Finn and Nigger Jim were homosexual lovers, Herb Gold remarked that he’d heard Ellison was living in the Tivoli house. ‘Don’t tell Leslie,’ Bellow joked.”83

  In June, the divorce finally went through, and as Bellow reported to Berryman on July 4, 1960, he was “the better for it.” Sasha had not asked for alimony: Bellow was to pay $150 a month child support, the sum Anita received for Greg, and to set up a trust fund for Adam. That summer, only Tucka, Ellison’s dog, caused problems, being less than a year old and not fully housebroken. In addition to pissing on Bellow’s Persian rugs, shitting indoors and on the porch, he had a tendency to chew up furniture and books. “Stubborn about his dog’s rights,” Arnold Rampersad, Ellison’s biographer, writes, “Ralph refused to discipline Tucka or even to clean up after him,” complaining to John Cheever, as Bellow recalls it, that “with my upbringing, I was incapable of understanding, I had no feeling for pedigrees and breeds, and that I knew only mongrels and had treated his chien de race like a mongrel.”84 According to Gore Vidal, when relations were “edgy” between Bellow and Ellison, “Ralph’s beautiful wife would come up and smooth things.”

  THE SOCIAL LIFE AT Tivoli in the summer of 1960 involved Bellow’s children, Bard people, associated writers and critics, friends and relations from Manhattan and beyond, and Ellison’s beautiful wife, Fanny, who arrived regularly on Friday and returned on Sunday afternoon to her city job. It extended also to a few well-born river types, through Vidal and the Dupees. “Ralph and I in our slummy mansion could not entertain these far more prosperous literary country squires,” Bellow recalled in 1996, two years after Ellison’s death. “Gore viewed us with a certain ironic pity. Socially, we didn’t exist for him.” The two writers, however, were unperturbed. “ ‘A campy patrician’ said Ralph [of Vidal]. We were as amused by him as he was by us.” Bellow mentions Max Weber’s description of Jews as “aristocratic pariahs,” adding that “Ralph himself had an aristocratic demeanor.” In fact, “no one in our Dutchess County group was altogether free from pride. Gore had genealogical claims, and money as well. Dupee had affinities with Henry James and Marcel Proust. The presence of a Jew or a Negro in any group is apt to promote a sense of superiority in those who—whatever else—are neither Jews nor Negroes.”85

  In the afternoons, visitors might help Bellow tend the plants and vegetables. Ellison showed off the African violets and bonsai trees he cultivated in the ballroom, where he set up his study (Bellow worked at a long writing table upstairs, with a view of the river and classical music pouring from the record player). There were shooting and fishing expeditions. When not weeding, tending the vegetable garden, feeding Rufus, the rust-colored tomcat, entertaining, or doing repairs (roofs, windows, trailing vines), Bellow attended to his correspondence, or read Donne and Blake in the hammock at the front of the house. In May he gave a reading from The Last Analysis at a party at Aaron and Linda Asher’s house on the Upper West Side. Mike Nichols, Jules Feiffer, and Grace Paley were in attendance, as was Susan Glassman, who was visiting Bellow from Chicago, staying with him at Tivoli. At the reading, parts were assigned. Bellow played the lead, Mike Nichols volunteered to play the lead’s business manager, and Linda Asher took all the women’s parts. The reading was lively, often interrupted by laughter, from author as well as audience.86 After the reading, Bellow struck up a conversation with an attractive professor of French from Queens College named Rosette Lamont, who had been brought to the evening by Paolo Milano. “Bellow reads with charm and humor,” Milano had told her. “He likes to try out some of his work in progress on people he trusts.”87 Before leaving the party with Susan Glassman, Bellow asked Lamont for her phone number. A few days later, after Glassman’s return to Chicago, he invited Lamont to Tivoli. Fred Dupee remembers boating on the Hudson with the two of them: “It was rough, Saul was scared, and Rosette made fun of him. Nonetheless we liked her.”88 At some point during this period, Bellow also slept with the poet Sandra Hochman and the actress Helen Garrie, both in New York.

  In mid-August Bellow and Susan drove from New York to Chicago, where Sasha and Adam were staying with Cookie in Skokie. Bellow was allowed a week’s visit with Adam (after what he describes, in a letter to Glassman of June 29, 1960, as “the regulation four-bladed duel” with Sasha). It was better seeing Adam in Chicago than Minneapolis, where, as John Berryman reported, “every academic louse and beetle in those parts [was] slavering over it [the divorce and attendant gossip].”89 In a letter of August 18 to Ellison, Susan described the time in Chicago as “splendid … tout va bien! Adam looks marvelous and remembers Rufus and you … in that order. He’s happy and he and Saul spent a lot of time kissing each other. C’est belle! The trip was joyous fun & Saul is feeling great … and therefore, so am I.”

  IT WAS MOST LIKELY in the autumn of 1960, on a visit to see Adam in Minneapolis at the end of November, that Bellow discovered the affair between Sasha and Ludwig. Sasha had taken on a lodger to help with the rent and with baby-sitting. The lodger was a fellow graduate student who supported herself by working a couple of days a week as a dental technician.90 “We got on well,” Sasha writes in the memoir, “we quizzed each other for our exams, and she was a pleasant housemate, fairly reserved.” One day, after a visit from Ludwig, the housemate said to Sasha: “ ‘I’m going after him.’ Startled and appalled I blurted out the truth about our relationship” (p. 104). The housemate said nothing, returned to her room, and some days later told Sasha she was leaving. She also said that she had called both Leya and Bellow “and told them about Jack and me.” According to Atlas, the night Bellow learned of the affair he rushed over to Ralph Ross’s house and announced “I’m going to catch that son-of-a-bitch Ludwig and beat him to a pulp.” Ross had to restrain Bellow physically, later telling him, “Be a mensch—have an ulcer.” In Chicago, again according to Atlas, at the Quadrangle Club, Bellow “talked wildly of getting a gun.”91 Bellow did not confront Sasha about the affair. She is “hazy about the fact” but thinks “I didn’t see him for a while and when the semester ended I couldn’t afford to continue my graduate studies and I got a job writing copy for a lumber company, and moved out of the house into an apartment nearer to campus” (p. 105).

  That Bellow did not learn of the affair until the November visit is suggested by letters he wrote that autumn. On September 24, in a letter to Botsford, he refers to a previous letter he’d written on the back of a letter from Ludwig, “in which [Ludwig] explains—or says, without feeling the need to explain—that a secretary at the University had buried ‘some things’ (all I had sent him for two months). I’ve been doing all that I could do under this handicap [he means for issue 3 of The Noble Savage].… In the near future we’d better have an understanding the 3 of us, on the meaning of the magazine.” It is unlikely that Bellow would have contemplated working with Ludwig if he’d known of the affair. On October 4 Bellow wrote again to Botsford with concerns about the magazine: “It’s not just that I’ve been unreliable, or you, or Jack, but the magazine hasn’t come alive.” He adds: “I go to Mpls in November to see Adam, and I shall have to have things out with Jack. Our relations are not good” (not good, presumably, since the April visit, when he sensed a change in Ludwig’s manner toward him). On October 12 B
ellow wrote to Botsford about issue 2, a great improvement on issue 1, and about the material for issue 3, which looked promising. He was editing “a Yugoslav manuscript of great power” (the Ribnikar story). “Meantime my problems with Jack continue. You must understand. I am not at all angry. Rather it begins to be funny. Does Jack think that he’s functioning as the ed. of a magazine? I can’t persuade him to do a thing—not even to return mss. he’s kept since August. I have to write apologetic notes to the authors. Somehow we’ll get by, but eventually Jack will have to decide whether he can really carry the editorial burden.”