The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Arno Karlen in particular aroused in Bellow memories of his youth. Karlen was so upset by Bellow’s treatment of him at the conference that he wrote to tell him so, though he also described Bellow as “an absolutely brilliant reader of people’s fiction, utterly apposite and penetrating—a brilliant teacher.”28 Bellow’s response, in a letter of August 17, echoes what Dworkin overheard. He begins with an apology: “I’m sincerely sorry if I offended you at the conference.” He understands why Karlen is upset: “I myself have often been indignant with older writers, and I know how you must have felt.” That Karlen is talented “was so obvious to me that I fixed at once on the things that were less satisfactory. Among these were tendencies present in me, and superabundantly present, at your age [Karlen was twenty-four in 1961]. In scolding you, was I perhaps correcting myself a long generation ago? ‘Perhaps’ is just rhetoric. It was positively so.” Karlen was right to claim that his writing was on a “parallel track” to Bellow’s. “I noted at once in your writing the power to cut through superfluities, the hardness of attack that I favor.” That Karlen heard only Bellow’s criticisms was easy for Bellow to understand, being similarly quick to take offense. If Bellow was tactless in his criticisms, it was partly because Karlen himself was so tough on his fellow students: “You had it all over most of the people there anyway, and weren’t denied publication, and you might therefore have gone a little more softly with them, less gifted and less lucky as they were. An odd tightness or hardness came over you when they criticized you. I saw my own pale face twenty years ago, and I spoke and no doubt said the wrong thing.” Bellow also admits to less laudable motives. He was angry with himself for having agreed to go to the conference: “To deal with seventeen people within ten days was not easy. And the financial reward was negligible.” Also, “I frankly and willingly admit that to interrupt the writing of Herzog irritated me and possibly made me bearish.” What he would not admit, however, were “failures of instruction.” “I was there to make my own views clear; that’s all anyone can do in this enterprise. To the best of my ability I did make them clear.” Here and throughout the letter Bellow’s tone is matter-of-fact, unembarrassed. “People who write,” he tells Karlen, “tend to be despotic in life, as they often are towards their characters.” The letter ends with him wishing Karlen luck.

  According to Elinor Bergstein, another student at the conference, later author of the screenplay for the film Dirty Dancing, Bellow’s attitude to the women students was formal and wary.29 Bette Howland, also in the class, remembers things differently. Bellow took to Howland from the start, “since I’m from Chicago and probably reminded him of his relations, and actually I can write,” and she and Bellow became lifelong friends, reading and commenting on each other’s writing. Howland was raised in Chicago, in Lawndale, near Humboldt Park. Her father was a factory worker and her mother a “sometime social worker.” After Marshall High School, she went to the University of Chicago on scholarship, “mainly to get out of the house.” Then she enrolled in law school at the university, dropping out to marry “the first person who asked me,” a neurophysiologist with whom she had two sons. The marriage lasted six years. By the time of the conference she was a single mother, had published several stories, but had never read anything by Bellow. Dworkin identifies Howland as the author of a harrowing story about an abortion, but Howland says the story was written by another student in the class. Dworkin describes Bellow as dismissing the story; Howland remembers Bellow praising it, though he did make a crude crack—a “Him with His Foot in His Mouth” crack—about not approving “women writers who wear their ovaries on their sleeves.” Bellow the teacher, Howland recalls, “was in general, as I saw it, rather kind … liking the people there, mainly the ladies. It was fun.” He was charming and the women found him attractive, though whether he made a pass at any of them she does not know. “Many of us heard his line,” she recalls, “we were all exchanging it.” Later, at a reading Bellow gave at the University of Iowa, where Howland was studying for an MFA, they met up again. “It did start out as it usually started out with women,” Howland recalled, but “I soon realized there was no percentage in this, it was quite senseless, and we just became friends. He was a real pain in the neck in another kind of relationship.”

  Once back in Tivoli, Bellow was overwhelmed with Noble Savage tasks. As he wrote to one of the magazine’s contributors, Louis Gallo, in a letter of June 15, “Editing has been more than I bargained for. I took it on with the usual good intentions, familiar underfoot en route to hell, and now it has become a full-time unpaid job, with all the troubles and injustices and errors for which executives get high salaries.” There were worries about the magazine’s future. On June 15 Bellow wrote to Botsford to say that Arthur A. Cohen of Meridian was willing to pay them each $1,500 per issue and “very much wants the magazine to continue” (like Aaron Asher, who was preoccupied at the moment “with an expecting wife”). Meridian was prepared to take a loss (“five or six thousand a year”) but Bellow and Botsford had “to convince people that we were worth losing money on,” especially since Meridian’s funding company, World Books, was undergoing “a new upheaval.” Ultimately, unless the magazine came close to selling thirty thousand copies its future would be precarious. The first three issues had gotten nowhere near this figure. On July 24 Bellow wrote again to Botsford. “The world, assailed by crisis, is not fighting over the Noble Savage at the bookstores.” All he could advise was that they knuckle down, though “we might also attempt to spend less money, both of us.” Six months later, on January 19, Bellow confessed to Susan, “I must abandon The Noble Savage. Can’t handle the mail,” and a year later, after sales of issue 4 showed no improvement, Meridian called it quits. On January 22, 1962, Aaron Asher wrote to say that “nothing is coming to you and Keith until 20,000 of an issue are sold, a pipe dream.” On February 20, Asher wrote again to say “it’s hopeless to continue with it.” Issue 5 would go ahead and if it was to be the last issue, “let’s really make the ‘public’ regret its disappearance.”

  ASHER’S LETTER WAS RECEIVED BY Bellow in Chicago, where he was “Celebrity in Residence.” Susan remained in New York, having taken a job at the Dalton School, where she had been teaching all autumn. She was now Mrs. Saul Bellow. They had married in November, the month divorce terms were finally settled between Bellow and Sasha. On December 1, 1961, the Chicago Tribune published a brief marriage announcement:

  Dr. and Mrs. Frank Glassman of Lake Shore Drive were in New York recently for the marriage of their daughter, Miss Susan Alexandra Glassman, to Saul Bellow of Tivoli, N.Y. The new Mr. and Mrs. Bellow will make their home in New York City.

  Neither the decision to marry nor the wedding is described in correspondence or interviews. In More Die of Heartbreak, Kenneth Trachtenberg offers an account of his Uncle Benn’s decision to marry Matilda. “I ran through the facts as I then knew them: A beautiful woman unites herself with a world-famous botanist. He may think it will serve his needs. No, all the while she has been thinking what she can do with him.… Benn was a botanist looking for a wife, and he found a wife who wanted just such a botanist to be a host to celebrities.… Matilda had quite clear objectives. She knew what she wanted and she got it. He didn’t know what he wanted, and he was going to get it” (p. 147). Bellow may have seen his marriage to Susan in this way, but their loving correspondence at the time paints a more complex picture. Benn Crader’s motive for marrying is described by his nephew as “longing. Such longing! You can’t expect longing of such depth to have, or to find, definitive objectives” (p. 107). In the autumn of 1961, while Susan taught and lived in Manhattan, and Bellow spent much of the week writing in Tivoli, they exchanged few letters. The letters he wrote to her from Chicago during Winter Quarter are full of longing, but are playful and affectionate rather than deep. Often they’re about sex. “I miss you in the sack,” he writes in a newsy letter postmarked January 9, 1962, “and I love you.” Two days later: “Herzog is about to enter the final
stages, not much else gets done, between teaching and writing and check-signing. When you come, perhaps I can catch up on reading as well as fucking. I begin to have erotic dreams about you.” Later in the same letter: “now I’m off to fetch Adam, to take him to Lesha’s party, take him home, come south, to lie down and wait for more dreams.” On February 26 he writes “I miss you,” signing off “Your loving Husband.”

  The University of Chicago made a big deal of its new “Celebrity in Residence.” The Development Office sent out a press release describing Bellow as “one of the leading American writers of his generation,” winner of “more awards than any prose writer of his time.” There were further items about the course he would teach, “The Modern Novel and Its Heroes.” It would be held on Mondays and Wednesdays from 3:30 to 5:00, limited to twenty-one third- and fourth-year undergraduates. Over the Winter Quarter, some ten weeks, it would discuss novels by Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Hardy, Samuel Butler, Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Thomas Mann. One of the students in the course, Michael C. Kotkin, kept the notes he took in class. In an article about the course, he described Bellow as “simpatico,” “charismatic,” entering the room “with a twinkle in his eye” and an “engaging smile.” Kotkin was struck by how little reference Bellow made to secondary sources. The sole critical work he mentioned was Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), a work of great learning, which ends, in a chapter on Virginia Woolf, by subtly disparaging modernist fictions.30 The course’s lone requirement was a five-page paper on the construction of character in one or several novels of the student’s choosing. Here, too, Bellow “recommended that we look not at criticism but at essays written by the author or authors in question.”31 Bellow frequently discussed novels in pairs, reading Père Goriot with Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina with Notes from Underground. Themes familiar from recent essays—the decline of the hero, the interiority of modern fiction, the need to balance world and self—appear in Kotkin’s notes. In discussing D. H. Lawrence, Bellow claimed, according to Kotkin’s notes, that “the novel of the twentieth century becomes more personal—the writer trying to solve in his book the problems he is trying to solve in his life,” a claim that clearly applies to Herzog.

  During the Winter Quarter Bellow stayed at an apartment on Ingleside Avenue, a minute’s walk from campus. Shortly after he arrived, he reported in the letter of January 9, 1962, to Susan, he saw his brother Maury and sister, Jane. Maury gave Bellow “a handsome Irish tweed coat, the houndstooth check which seems to fit” (Kotkin describes Bellow as having a “middle-aged man’s body, formerly slight and athletic, now spreading”). Relations between the brothers were tricky. “Apparently I insulted him bitterly,” Bellow reported to Susan, “when he said he couldn’t read any of my books, except a few chapters of Augie; the rest was nonsense to him and he couldn’t understand how they could be published profitably. I said that after all he was not a trained reader, but devoted himself to business and love. He was offended and said I didn’t respect him, and that I was a terrible snob. I thought I was being angelically mild and put my arms around him and said I was his loving brother, wasn’t that better than heaping up grievances?” Maury had other reasons for being upset. He was soon in the papers again. On February 10 the Chicago Daily Tribune ran an article reporting that he and Marge had divorced. Marge was to receive a settlement of $312,000, plus their home in Florida. Maury’s assets, she claimed, exceeded $2 million. She also testified that he “struck her on numerous occasions. Once, she said, he ‘split my head open,’ and she was hospitalized. On another, he blackened an eye.” Yet the divorce pained her. Three months later, on May 18, after Bellow’s return to Tivoli, she wrote from Florida: “I was divorced legally but not emotionally. But I suppose this too will pass. After all, I’m not broke. I wish money was my only problem, this I could handle.” In the letter she invites Bellow and Susan to come to Florida when brother Sam Bellows and Sam’s wife, Nina, were there, adding that “friends of mine are friends of the Glassmans and have known Susan for many years. They only say nice things about her and if a bunch of Canasta playing Lake Shore Drive women say nice things she must be nice.”

  ON MAY 11, 1962, Bellow and Susan were invited to a dinner at the White House in honor of André Malraux, at that time the French minister of culture. Over two hundred of the nation’s leading writers, artists, musicians, and painters were invited, among them many old friends and colleagues: Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark, Arthur Miller, Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon (no longer married, though they remained friends), Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Bellow wrote an “Aria” about the dinner for issue 5 of The Noble Savage, identifying himself only as “one of the editors” and explaining that he’d been invited “because the magazine has made so important a contribution to American culture.” Surveying the other guests, he noted the presence of “several novelists and poets at one time strongly alienated, ex-intransigents, former enemies of society, old grumblers, and lifelong manger dogs, all having a hell of a good time, their faces beaming, their wives in evening gowns (could they afford them?).” Though not much taken with the orchestra, which played “a sort of Catskill-intercourse music,” he was impressed by the Marines in braid, the butlers. Everyone was on their best behavior: “Only Adlai Stevenson preserved a shade of intellectual irony. Everybody else seemed absurdly and deeply tickled.”32 At one point the painter Mark Rothko “whispered privately to me that of course this is all a lot of crap and meant nothing to him. ‘But my sister!’ he said.” When Bellow asked where she was, Rothko answered, “Home with the kids. But absolutely beside herself with excitement. It’s a great day for my sister” (p. 70). The “Aria” ends by reflecting more generally on the relations between politicians and intellectuals, including artists. Malraux in his speech claimed that “America had not sought imperial power,” to which Edmund Wilson “exclaimed irascibly, in the tones of Mr. Magoo, ‘Hooey!’ ” (p. 71). Suppose Wilson was right: “What is to be done? How shall we behave toward the mighty in Washington?” (as opposed, one notes, to how shall we challenge the power of the mighty). Historical precedent offers little help: Descartes, Pushkin, Voltaire, Pound all suffered misery or humiliation at the hands of the mighty. The figure to emulate, Bellow decided, was Samuel Johnson, engaged in private conversation with King George in the library at the Queen’s House:

  To the king’s questions about one Dr. Hill, Johnson answered “that he was an ingenious man, but had no veracity.” Urged to say more, he declined to louse up Dr. Hill. “I now began to consider that I was depreciating this man in the estimation of his Sovereign, and thought it was time for me to say something that might be more favourable” (p. 72).

  In Humboldt’s Gift, Charlie Citrine, in the course of lousing up Denise, recalls her preparations for what sounds very much like the Malraux dinner. At the beauty salon Denise speed-reads Time and Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report. On the flight to Washington, she and Citrine review “the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis and the Diem problem.” Watching Denise corner the president after dinner, as Susan had cornered him in real life, Citrine “tittered to myself when I saw them together. But JFK could take care of himself, and he liked pretty women. I suspected that he read The U.S. News and World Report, too, and that his information might not be much better than her own” (p. 59) (in real life, Bellow recalled to Atlas, Susan “was sizing him up as an influence for the good; he was sizing her up as a lay”33). Citrine was amused by the dinner, remembering “the impressive hauteur of Charles Lindbergh, the complaint of Edmund Wilson that the government had made a pauper of him, the Catskill resort music played by the Marine Corps orchestra, and Mr. Tate keeping time with his fingers on the knee of a lady” (p. 59). In the “Aria,” Bellow adopts a similarly amused pose, while entertaining no illusions that artists or intellectuals would be much use or more liberal as politicians or statesmen. When the Han dynasty was governed by men of letters, the state pas
sed into “a long torpor of orthodoxy and dogmatism” (p. 72). The “Aria” accurately reflects Bellow’s attitude to politics in this period. There are almost no references to current affairs in his letters from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Politicians who professed a love of culture were no different from operagoing businessmen or bankers. At the Malraux evening, the president was witty and graceful, calling it “the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”34 After the dinner and the speeches and the Schubert recital, however, Kennedy spent most of his time deep in conversation with “Mr. David Rockefeller of the Chase Manhattan bank” (p. 72).35

  The incompatibility of high culture and political power is seen also in Herzog. In the grip of mania, Herzog writes letters to all sorts of figures, including politicians. The poignancy and humor of the letters he writes to General Eisenhower and Governor Stevenson derive in part from their abstract or philosophical idiom, as ill-fitting as the idiom used to address Nietzsche, Spinoza, Heidegger, and God (to Heidegger: “Dear Doctor Professor, I should like to know what you mean by the expression ‘the fall into the quotidian.’ When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?” [p. 465]; or “Dear Herr Nietzsche—My dear sir, May I ask a question from the floor?”; later, “some of these expressions, I must tell you, have a very Germanic ring” [p. 740]). After complaining that Eisenhower’s Committee on National Aims was composed of “corporation lawyers, big executives, the group now called the Industrial Statesmen,” Herzog invokes “the old proposition of Pascal (1623–1662) that man is a reed but a thinking reed,” reinterpreting it (not all that clearly) to fit “the modern citizen of a democracy. He thinks, but he feels like a reed bending before centrally generated winds.” When Moses decides that “Ike would certainly pay no attention to this,” he tries again: