The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Herzog progressed nicely on the island, had “grown big and fat,” Bellow wrote to Richard Stern in another undated letter. “The first pages you saw were only throat clearings. I amaze myself. I don’t recognize myself. So meek and yet so terrible. As for P.R., it does its stuff: sun, oranges, bananas, fish, incredible noise.” To Susan, on February 2, Bellow describes going “a little faster with the book, and a little carelessly because I think it’s better just now, invites variety … it’s necessary now to stick out my neck a bit more.” On February 15, again to Susan, he confesses that “I feel so much about this story, I can’t accept the formal limits, and yet those formal limits were set to protect the book from the desperate feelings themselves.” When classes began in March progress on the book was unimpeded. The syllabus for the literature course Bellow taught, “Character in the Novel,” was made up of books he knew well (by Stendhal, Flaubert, Dreiser, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky). According to a fellow instructor in the English Department, Bernard Lockwood, who sat in on the course, Bellow would “stand in front of the classroom, kind of shy, folding his arms over each other, look at the ceiling, and start to talk.… If someone had taped those lectures, they could have been published as is, without changing a comma or semicolon.”7 Bellow’s creative writing course was enlivened by the presence of at least one strong writer, William Kennedy, at the time managing editor of the San Juan Star, later a Pulitzer Prize winner (for Ironweed, one of a series of novels set in his native Albany, New York). In 1961, Kennedy, who had not yet published any fiction, sent Bellow a manuscript and was accepted immediately on the course. “You don’t need instruction,” Bellow remembered telling him. “What you need is a publisher.”8 In class, Kennedy took Bellow’s criticisms of his work “very seriously”:

  He would explain that my writing was “fatty”—I was saying everything twice and I had too many adjectives. He said it was also occasionally “clotty”—it was imprecision he was talking about.… When he pointed that out to me, I would go back through the whole book and slash—it turned me into a real fiction editor of my own copy, and it later helped when I became a teacher.… Bellow also talked about being prodigal. He said a writer shouldn’t be parsimonious with his work, but “prodigal, like nature.” … I never became that kind of writer, but I think the effusion, the principle was important. I was never afraid of writing too much, never thought that just because you’ve written a sentence it means something, or it’s a good sentence just because you’ve written it.9

  Bellow also stressed the importance of not giving up. One needed talent, certainly, “but after that, it’s character.” When Kennedy asked what Bellow meant by character, he “smiled at me, and never said anything,” a silence Kennedy interpreted as meaning “character is equivalent to persistence.” In addition to giving advice, Bellow played a part in getting Kennedy’s earliest fiction published. He was also instrumental in finding a publisher for Ironweed (1983). After at least nine publishers had turned it down, Bellow wrote to Viking to say that “he didn’t think it was proper for his [Bellow means his own] former publisher to let a writer like Kennedy go begging.” As Kennedy remembers it, “two days later I got a call from Viking saying they wanted to publish Ironweed and what did I think of the possibility of publishing Legs [1975] and Billy Phelan [1978] again at the same time.”10 Only Bellow’s performance as a lecturer disappointed. In Botsford’s words, the public address he was required to deliver was “desultory and off-hand.” When the rector expressed dismay, Botsford told him to “blame Herzog; his head is full” (p. 453).11

  BOTSFORD MIGHT ALSO HAVE told Don Jaime to blame Susan Glassman, with whom Bellow was falling in love, or more deeply in love, while in Puerto Rico. Susan had first met Bellow at Bard in the summer of 1956, but the meeting that led to their affair took place several years later, at the University of Chicago, where Bellow had come to deliver a talk at Hillel House, the Jewish campus organization.12 Susan had been brought to the talk by Philip Roth, whom she was dating.13 Roth had met her in a class at the university. “She was very glamorous, certainly for a university classroom and she was very pretty.” Like everyone who met her, Roth was immediately struck by Susan’s eyes, “startling eyes. She was a beautiful girl. Slender and she dressed very well. She looked ‘dressed.’ I remember she wore gloves sometimes, long, long gloves.”14

  In addition to being beautiful and glamorous, Susan was smart. After Wellesley College, she did graduate work in English at Harvard, continuing her studies at the University of Chicago. Though she got her MA, she never enrolled in a PhD program. According to her cousin, Stanley Katz, to whom she was close, “she didn’t quite know what she wanted to do” and “certainly never had a conventional academic ambition.” But she was serious. “She thought of herself as an intellectual, she presented herself as an intellectual.” When Bellow met her at Hillel House, she was living at home again, at 3800 Lake Shore Drive, on the North Side of the city. Her father, Dr. Frank Glassman, was a prominent orthopedic surgeon at Michael Reese Hospital, for a time the doctor to both the Chicago Bears football team and the Blackhawks hockey team.15 He was a big man, over six feet, large-boned, with red hair. Stanley Katz describes him as “hearty, garrulous, overbearing,” with a surgeon’s self-confidence, “a dominant presence in any room he was in.” Dominant and crude: in More Die of Heartbreak, a character very much like Glassman, a “medical big shot” (p. 106), takes his new son-in-law, the world-renowned botanist Benn Crader, along on his hospital rounds. “He had done this before and people got a kick out of it, mostly, masquerading as doctors” (p. 213). Benn and his father-in-law enter a ward filled with old women: “He had saved them up for me. They were all hip cases, pinned hips, and they didn’t need more than a glance.… He was barging in and out of the rooms, pushing away the door and everything else, yanking off the covers. The ladies’ hair was dyed and set, they had on lipstick, other makeup, they wore lacy bed jackets, and then there were the stitched scars, and short thighs, and warm, shiny shins, the mound of Venus and the scanty hair—all those bald mounds.” Later, in the corridor, the father-in-law says: “I get a pretty girl once in a while. As a patient, don’t misunderstand. It’s not always old snatch” (pp. 213–14). According to Daniel Bellow, Bellow and Susan’s son, Frank Glassman gave Bellow just such a tour at Michael Reese Hospital.

  Glassman was handsome, but it was generally agreed that Susan’s looks came from her mother, Dolores. According to Katz, all the women on her mother’s side of the family, including her aunts and grandmother, were “gorgeous.” Daniel Bellow says his grandmother was “drop-dead gorgeous; she’d make you drop dead.” Barbara Wiesenfeld, a lifelong friend of Susan’s, describes Dolores as “the epitome of style”; Katz remembers her as “very bright and very sophisticated,” “culture was very important to her.” Both mother and daughter, Katz adds, “cared a lot about social status.” Though the Glassmans lived in comfort, they did so on what Frank earned. Frank drove a Cadillac and belonged to the Standard Club (for German Jews, a cut above the Covenant Club, Maury’s club, for ostjuden). But the Glassmans could not afford a country club, Susan went to a public high school, unlike her friends, who went to private school (as did her younger brother, Philip), and the family did not take expensive vacations.

  “I had always heard about Susan when I was growing up,” recalls Joan Schwartz (who is in part the model for Katrina Goliger in “What Kind of Day Did You Have?”). Among “the professional Jewish families” of the North Side, she was “legendarily brainy and beautiful.” “She was the most beautiful girl in Chicago,” Katz says, “everyone knew that.… All the college men wanted to take her out.” When Schwartz first met Harold Rosenberg, with whom she later had a long affair, it was at a talk he gave in 1964 at the University of Chicago. Susan was there with Bellow. “I was much more interested in meeting Susan and Saul than Rosenberg,” Schwartz remembers. When introduced to Susan, “I was dumbstruck, she was blindingly beautiful,” also “utterly uninterested in me.” Another
close friend, Diane Silverman, recalls seeing Susan for the first time at a later talk given by Bellow at the University of Chicago. Silverman was an undergraduate, “one of a host of young female students who had ambitions to write.” After the talk she went up to meet Bellow. “There were all these young women sort of wanting to shake his hand, to flirt with him, and I looked around and I saw this incredibly beautiful young woman.” It was Susan, standing to one side, watching the women crowd around Bellow. She herself had been such a woman. Roth remembers Bellow at the Hillel talk as “very engaging, tremendously charming,” full of “self-delight, in the best sense, generosity.” When he finished speaking, Roth recalls, Susan said “I’m just going to go up and say hello to him. I said ‘fine.’ Turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me, and the worst thing that ever happened to Saul. I could see that Saul was very animated in talking to her. But I was so young it never even occurred to me that a man of forty [forty-two] would be interested in a woman of twenty-three. How could that be? Now I know about men of seventy-five interested in girls of twenty-three.”

  The relationship developed over the course of Bellow’s visits to Chicago and Susan’s to New York and can be traced in correspondence.16 After the terrible encounter with Sasha in Minnesota in April 1959, Bellow traveled to Chicago where he saw Susan, among others. In late May Susan was in New York for the reading of The Last Analysis. In July she came east again to stay at Tivoli, and in August she was with Bellow during his week in Chicago with Adam. Throughout this period Susan was thinking about a move to New York, a move that frightened her but which Bellow encouraged. She didn’t like Chicago and was depressed about having to live with her parents. In her letters from the summer of 1960, she admits to worries about Bellow’s feelings. “You never speak your mind on a subject at any given moment, do you?” she writes on August 27. In a second letter written the same day, she complains of his volatility: “that grim voice of yours that starts those announcements with ‘Now look …’ Then you call, day rates no less, and say you’re nutty about me.” She writes a lot about being depressed, and after one gloom-filled letter Bellow gently rebukes her in a letter of September 1. He’s sorry she’s low, but her being low makes it “all the more important” that he keep his balance (which is to say, that she not bring him down). As for the move east, it is “not so hard.… Besides, in me you have a friend. I’ve never refused my friendship, now have I?”

  Susan could be self-absorbed as well as somber. Roth found her “difficult,” “perhaps the first man or woman I’d met, I was still in my early twenties, who had an air of entitlement about her.” Barbara Wiesenfeld had known Susan since grade school and always wondered why she wasn’t “happier, more secure, lighter.” When she was in a good mood “she was great, but when she was in a dark mood it would spill over … there was some sort of heaviness about her.” Wiesenfeld thinks a physical condition underlay this heaviness. Susan’s paternal grandfather died at a relatively early age of an aneurism, a fact that, according to Stanley Katz, Susan’s father was “very aware of.” “He took out a large insurance policy on his life because he was convinced he was going to die young.” He died in his sixties of an aneurism. Susan, too, died of an aneurism in her sixties. “She always felt she was going to die early,” Wiesenfeld recalls. “She didn’t feel all that well. She was sweet and she was high-minded but she always had a little pressure on her brain.” In Humboldt’s Gift, Charlie Citrine’s wife, Denise, has something of Susan’s heaviness: “Her hair was piled on top of her head and gave it too much weight. If she hadn’t been beautiful you wouldn’t have noticed the disproportion.… She was a burdened woman. Getting out of bed to make breakfast was almost more than she could face. Taking a cab to the hairdresser was also very hard. The beautiful head was a burden to the beautiful neck” (p. 219). Like Susan, Denise is interested in politics, that is in electoral politics, Stevenson, the Kennedys. When Citrine is invited to the White House—as Bellow was—Denise corners President Kennedy. Citrine watches her animated conversation with Kennedy and thinks “she’d have made him an excellent Secretary of State, if some way could be found to wake her before 11 a.m.” (p. 59).

  Denise is not the only character in a Bellow novel to resemble Susan. Matilda Layamon in More Die of Heartbreak also has trouble waking: “she hated waking—hated it” (p. 136). According to her husband, Benn, “the trouble she had making the transition from sleep to waking suggested a struggle between two natures.” When Matilda “reluctantly” wakens, she needs silence: “Sometimes she shut Benn up altogether. She said, ‘Oh, for Chrissakes, Benno, don’t make heavy conversation before I’m awake. It gives me such a headache’ ” (p. 137). Matilda makes “a cult of deep sleep” (p. 285), a sleep “devoid of consciousness of any kind” (p. 137). There is a connection here between Denise and Matilda and Bellow’s fictional portraits of his brother Maury, especially as Simon in The Adventures of Augie March and Julius in Humboldt’s Gift (both characters are discussed in Chapter 3). When Simon dives into the waters of Lake Michigan, he does so, thinks Augie, “with a thought of never coming back to the surface alive, as if he went to take a blind taste of the benefits of staying down.… I knew it made a strong appeal to him to go down and not come up again” (p. 647). Earlier, as quoted in Chapter 3, Augie sees suicidal as well as attacking impulses in “the way [Simon] drove and the way he leaped forward in arguments, hit him who would; he kept a tire tool under the driver’s seat for his weapon in traffic arguments, and he cursed everybody in the street, running through lights and scattering pedestrians” (p. 640). Julius in Humboldt’s Gift is subject to similar impulses, figured, according to brother Charlie, in his search for “a seascape devoid of landmarks” (p. 411); “the inhuman water, the middle of the ocean, the formless deep, the world-enfolding sea” (p. 410) signify to Julius, or so Charlie believes, a “release from the daily way and the horror of tension” (p. 411)—that is, from the life he has chosen, or, as far as he’s concerned, from life.

  Neither Denise nor Matilda is explicitly linked with a death wish, as are Simon and Julius. Maury’s son, Joel, does not believe his father was a man in search of release or secretly despairing, like his fictional alter egos. Susan, however, in letters of August 27 and 28, 1960, writes of times “when I hardly had courage to get through the day, much less to be.” Her diary for the years 1955 to 1959, she tells Bellow, is full of despairing entries and “it took the death of Barbara’s mother to make me see how I was flirting with my own.” For both Julius and Simon, the desire for oblivion is linked to a choice of money and status over love. Matilda and Denise are also much concerned with money and status, as are their fathers. Denise’s father, like Frank Glassman, comes from “the West Side Chicago gutters” (p. 43); Matilda’s father “was raised near the old produce market” (p. 116) and “belonged to an earlier somatic type, that of immigrants and the first generation of their children” (p. 150). According to Stanley Katz, Frank Glassman was “bitter” about having to live off his salary, about not having as much money as richer friends and relations, “and Susan must have grown up with that.” Matilda and Denise have little patience with the spiritual or nonmaterial interests of their husbands, especially when these interests are linked to the intensity of childhood experience. “She doesn’t care for that far-away-and-long-ago stuff?” Benn’s nephew asks. “ ‘That’s it,’ said Uncle” (p. 116). In this impatience they are like Simon and Julius, who want only to forget their “gutter” emotions and origins. Susan’s letters convey deep feeling, but she, too, had little patience with her husband’s attraction to Humboldt Park, and to some of his relations and childhood friends, whom she thought of as crude. Charlie Citrine connects the intensity of his love for his earliest relations—his sense that they are still alive somewhere—to the possibility of an afterlife. “Love is gratitude for being. This love would be hate,” he tells Julius, “if the whole thing was nothing but a gyp.” Such a speech makes no impact on Julius, “one of the biggest build
ers of south-east Texas. Such communications were prohibited under the going mental rules,” rules sanctioned by “the many practical miracles” of American materialism: “To accept the finality of death was part of his package, however. There was to be no sign of us left” (p. 382). It is possible that Bellow’s reserve in the early correspondence with Susan owes something to his sensing in her this complex of thought and feeling.

  THROUGHOUT THEIR CORRESPONDENCE in the summer and fall of 1960, Bellow and Susan address each other as “Dolly.” “Be my sweet and balanced Dolly” ends Bellow’s letter of September 1. But there’s distance on his side. Susan is his “friend”; there’s not much talk of love until he goes to Puerto Rico. By the end of September, Susan had arrived in New York and was looking for a job and an apartment in Manhattan, writing to Bellow at Tivoli, visiting with him on the weekends. As he bucks her up, she bucks him up. When he worries that he’s treated Sasha badly (before he learns of the affair with Ludwig), Susan reassures him, in blunt terms, in a letter of October 3: “With Sondra you were stupid and unrealistic, but you were not seeking evil for her.” On October 19 she writes enthusiastically of Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959), an enthusiasm Bellow does not share (a decade later he has Artur Sammler condemn Brown along with the German-born political philosopher Herbert Marcuse, with whom Brown was often linked). Susan now had an apartment on the Upper West Side at 68th Street, and would soon have an unsatisfactory job at Horizon magazine (the American Horizon, launched in 1958, a magazine of literature and the arts, in its way as high-minded as the British Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly). Susan’s letters report dinners with the Covicis, the Ashers, the Tarcovs. There seems not to have been any question of her accompanying Bellow to Puerto Rico in January, another sign of hesitancy on his part, caused, perhaps, by his still carrying on with Rosette Lamont, who knew about Susan and thought of her as a rival.