The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  On September 30, Bellow replied, “On Labor Day you used the child to bargain for some supposed advantage and refused to let him come with me as we had arranged. Adam was greatly disappointed. The violence of that occasion was provoked by you, perhaps deliberately. You tore my clothing, bruised me, and had to be restrained by Ann Berryman from continuing your attack.” In a later paragraph he writes: “Your pugnacity is a matter of record. Even before the divorce you struck me with your fists. You tried to run me down with the car. On the day you claim to have been assaulted, I came home with bruises. You have been known to do things which you could not remember later. My ‘violence’ is probably another one of your hallucinations.” When Sasha refused to let Bellow see Adam on a subsequent occasion, she was “simply giving me the runaround.” She knew that he would be leaving soon for Chicago and gone for months and that this was one of his few chances to see Adam before departing. Bellow insists that some regular pattern of visits be established. “I shall be coming in periodically during my temporary residence in Chicago. You will have ample notice of my visits. I want to have Adam with me on all holidays—Christmas, Easter and part of every summer. If you do not agree to reasonable arrangements I shall have to go to law to try to obtain my rights.” The letter ends: “I plan to come to Tarrytown next Friday to pick him up, and I expect to hear from you that he will be delivered to me by someone other than yourself. I will not ask anyone to go in my place while I wait in a restaurant like a wrongdoer. I won’t send anyone for him. I will insist on my rights, and the thing will be done decently and in good order. I expect a reply from you before Friday. I hope you will not compel me to take legal steps.”

  Both parties were shading the truth. Sasha, Bellow claims, provoked the violence, thus admitting that there was some. By putting violence in quotation marks, however, and calling it “one of your hallucinations,” he suggests that it wasn’t real violence, wasn’t much of anything. In the memoir, Sasha admits that she slapped Bellow and provoked the violence, but in the letter to Schwartz she writes that “I did not provoke this attack nor did I make any physical gesture towards him which could even remotely [be] mistaken for an attack.” Here, too, there is room for equivocation, though only just. A slap might not be thought to constitute an “attack.” In a letter of October 11, written after Adam’s weekend visit, Bellow informs Sasha that he plans to return to New York from Chicago on the weekend of December 7. “With nearly two months’ notice I hope you will not invent any appointments at the last moment. Two weeks ago you told me Adam could not see me because he had to see the dentist. He told me last Saturday that he’s never been to the dentist.” In the memoir, Sasha remembers a circumstance that may have contributed to Bellow’s fury, one she hadn’t considered at the time: “Saul later said that he took the job at the University of Chicago to be near Adam, and that I had, instead, deliberately moved away to New York.” She defends herself against this accusation by saying that Bellow’s decision to move “was news to me when I heard it. He never asked me what my plans were, never told me he was thinking of returning to the Midwest.” This may be true, but just as Sasha may not have known of the move, Bellow may not have known she didn’t know.

  The physical violence of the Labor Day weekend had a symbolic sequel, occasioned by the return of Sasha’s belongings from Tivoli. Sasha had hired a trucker to collect these belongings—“an early American sideboard, a coffee table and a Mexican chair that had belonged to my mother, as well as a few paintings” (p. 108)—and to deliver them to Tarrytown. When the trucker arrived and Sasha asked him to unload the things and bring them into her apartment, he hesitated:

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Well, I don’t know if you want everything,” he said, uncomfortable. “You better look.” Saul had sent several barrels of ashes and trash, with a pair of men’s shoes on top. “There’s some mistake,” I said.

  “No, the gentleman was very insistent that I take these.”

  “Why did he send the garbage, Mama?” five-year-old Adam asked. I assured him it was a mistake, and sent the trucker off with the barrels, leaving me with more to fuel my anger. And that was the flavor of the relationship for the next few years (p. 108).

  In a letter of October 18, Sasha gives further details. Her mother’s clothes, she claims, were jumbled amidst the gravel and broken glass, “and to crown the whole with Jack’s shoes, is an evil act. In your blind desire to ‘even scores’ you are hitting out at a dead woman, a man’s infirmity, a little boy, —and by reference to that period in my life during which I experienced some mild form of epilepsy, you have only added to the wickedness.” She makes much of Adam’s reaction to the incident. If he was looking unhappy on a recent visit, “perhaps it was because he was angry with the trash you sent. Didn’t you know he would think you sent it to him as well, since he lives here? If you failed to realize this you were being quite stupid.” If Adam was angry, presumably he didn’t believe Sasha’s excuse about the trash being sent by mistake, or she eventually told him the truth.40

  In the letter of October 18, Sasha defends herself against Bellow’s accusations by accusing him, in turn, of inventing things, not only refusing to face the truth, but not knowing the difference between truth and fiction (an occupational malady for novelists, she suggested in an interview):

  You have often told a story of how I tried to run you down with the car in Tivoli. As you know perfectly well, I was trying to leave, with Adam in the car and you deliberately put yourself in my path knowing, of course, that I would not run you down, but stop. Unfortunately I did stop, for as you know, you dragged me from the car by my hair across the lawn, kicked me and whipped me with your cap. …

  On another and earlier occasion you report that I “went for a knife.” As you know, I was reaching for the telephone to call for help since we had been quarrelling violently. There was no knife about, but you somehow have had to justify these now three separate scenes of your beating or attacking me, with some physical provocation on my part which simply did not occur.

  You cannot take a thought that flashes, perhaps in your own mind, like, “I wonder if she will stop the car” or, “Would she like to kill me” and translate that into something that actually happened. These things did not happen. What is true is that I was in a car and trying to leave; that I was reaching, but for a phone; that I did not provoke or attack you in Peekskill, but that you were carrying out a threat you made in Minneapolis. Do you remember that Ralph Ross told you to “have an ulcer” since a man does not indulge his passions in this way, however hurt he may be?

  These accusations and counteraccusations are rehearsed here because they are part of the life Bellow lived as he wrote Herzog, in which marriage to Sasha, her adultery with Ludwig, and the mental state of a hero very much like himself are given fictional form. Real life is woven into fiction almost immediately. To look to the novel for what really happened—who did the provoking, how much violence there actually was, who lied or shaded the truth—or even what Bellow thought happened, is futile. The novel offers evidence of what Bellow made of his experience, by which is meant how he turned the thoughts and feelings it raised into art.

  CONSIDER THE DEPICTION OF violence in the novel. Sasha claimed to fear for her life; Bellow claimed her rages were so intense she was capable of murder. In early versions of the novel, Herzog uses physical force on Madeleine, who is less murderous than in the published novel.41 In the published novel, Herzog seriously contemplates murder. “I sometimes think,” he tells Harvey Simkin, the Sam Goldberg figure, “if she died I’d get my daughter back. There are times when I know I could look at Madeleine’s corpse without pity.” The thought that Herzog might murder Madeleine, a thought that excites Simkin, is pondered by Herzog: “Well, it’s true. I’ve tested it in my mind with a gun, a knife, and felt no horror, no guilt.… So perhaps I might kill them. But I’ll say no such thing to Harvey” (p. 632). Later, as Moses reflects on the injustice done to him, “his right as an Innoce
nt Party,” the thought of killing Madeleine and Gersbach returns: “now his rage is so great and deep, so murderous, bloody, positively rapturous, that his arms and fingers ache to strangle them. So much for his boyish purity of heart” (p. 638). Immediately he feels shame. As he looks in the mirror he thinks: “My God! Who is this creature? It considers itself human. But what is it? Not human of itself. But has the longing to be human. And like a troubling dream, a persistent vapor. A desire. Where does it all come from? And what is it? And what can it be! Not immortal longing. No, entirely mortal, but human” (pp. 638–39). For Moses, to be human, a man or mensch, is something one works at, a capacity or potential, as in the capacity to resist murderous impulse. When Moses retrieves Father Herzog’s pistol before setting out to confront Madeleine and Gersbach, he is “determined to act without clearly knowing what to do, and even recognizing that he had no power over his impulses” (p. 660). He is indulging his impulses, having “determined” to be guided by them. As he drives south toward Madeleine’s apartment in Hyde Park he still hasn’t decided what he will do. Madeleine “had threatened him with arrest if he so much as showed his face near the house. The police had his picture” (p. 673). He works himself into a fever on the drive: “It’s not everyone who gets the opportunity to kill with a clear conscience. They had opened the way to justifiable murder. They deserved to die. He had a right to kill them” (p. 674).

  Herzog has this right, he believes, because Madeleine, for whom “hatred … is the most powerful element in her life,” has acted toward him like a “murderess”: “In spirit, she was his murderess, and therefore he was turned loose, could shoot or choke without remorse. He felt in his arms and in his fingers, and to the core of his heart, the sweet exertion of strangling—horrible and sweet, an orgastic rapture of inflicting death. He was sweating violently, his shirt wet and cold under his arms. Into his mouth came a taste of copper, a metabolic poison, a flat but deadly flavor” (p. 674). These physical symptoms signal “human” resistance, like an antibody fighting infection. In cover of darkness Herzog sneaks behind the house on Harper Avenue and peers in at Madeleine, Gersbach, and June, through a back window. He resembles Frankenstein’s monster, a wronged “creature,” peering in on a human scene from which he is excluded. As Gersbach bathes June, Herzog watches. What he sees and what he makes of what he sees are described in a justly famous passage:

  The man washed her tenderly. His look, perhaps, was false. But he had no true expressions, Herzog thought. His face was all heaviness, sexual meat. Looking down his open shirt front, Herzog saw the hair-covered heavy soft flesh of Gersbach’s breast. His chin was thick, and like a stone ax, a brutal weapon. And then there were his sentimental eyes, the thick crest of hair, and that hearty voice with its peculiar fraudulence and grossness. The hated traits were all there. But see how he was with June, scooping the water on her playfully, kindly. He let her wear her mother’s flowered shower cap, the rubber petals spreading on the child’s head. Then Gersbach ordered her to stand, and she stooped slightly to allow him to wash her little cleft. Her father stared at this. A pang went through him, but it was quickly done. She sat again. Gersbach ran fresh water on her, cumbersomely rose and opened the bath towel. Steady and thorough, he dried her, and then with a large puff he powdered her. The child jumped up and down with delight. “Enough of this wild stuff,” said Gersbach. “Put on those p-j’s now.”

  She ran out. Herzog still saw faint wisps of powder, that floated over Gersbach’s stooping head. His red hair worked up and down. He was scouring the tub. Moses might have killed him now. His left hand touched the gun, enclosed in the roll of rubles [the gun had been sent from Russia by Herzog’s grandfather, along with the rubles]. He might have shot Gersbach as he methodically salted the yellow sponge rectangle with cleansing powder. There were two bullets in the chamber.… But they would stay there. Herzog clearly recognized that. Very softly he stepped down from his perch, and passed without sound through the yard again. He saw his child in the kitchen, looking up at Mady, asking for something, and he edged through the gate into the alley. Firing this pistol was nothing but a thought.

  The human soul is an amphibian, and I have touched its sides (pp. 676–77).

  The fever broken, Herzog reflects on what might have been:

  To shoot him!—an absurd thought. As soon as Herzog saw the actual person giving an actual bath, the reality of it, the tenderness of such a buffoon to a little child, his intended violence turned into theater, into something ludicrous. He was not ready to make such a complete fool of himself. Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was “broken.” How could it be broken by such a pair? Lingering in the alley awhile, he congratulated himself on his luck. His breath came back to him; and how good it felt to breathe! It was worth the trip (p. 677).

  In future, Herzog will only come to Chicago “to do June good, genuine good. No more of this hectic, heart-rent, theatrical window-peering” (p. 724).

  Herzog is saved by human particularity, complication, individuality. His intended violence would have made him a figure out of melodrama or theater, the realm of Mady and Gersbach, “those two grotesque love-actors” (p. 677). When Mady “has an audience [she] begins spellbinding” (p. 608); “Conversation was a theatrical event for Madeleine,” Herzog writes to Monsignor Hilton, a Bishop Sheen figure, “Theater—the art of upstarts, opportunists, would-be aristocrats. Monsignor himself was an actor” (p. 529). As for Gersbach, “it’s perfectly plain to me the fellow is an actor,” Simkin says, “and I know damn well Madeleine is an actress” (p. 636), a knowledge gained from Simkin’s friendship with Madeleine’s father, Pontritter, “the American Stanislavsky” (p. 424). Had Herzog played his part, he would have become the creature in Frankenstein, a novel first made famous through theatrical adaptation. What stops him is what he sees: the way Gersbach rises “cumbersomely” after drying June, his scooping water over her “playfully, kindly,” the way the washing is “quickly done” (p. 676). With such details the external world breaks through Herzog’s interiority, or combines with that interiority, not only to bring him to his senses but to rescue the novel itself from melodrama and theater (the stolen pistol, the fevered drive south, the spying in darkness). In describing his “sharp senses” at this moment, Herzog attributes to them the familiar powers of the artist, as in Wordsworth’s description of poetic creativity, “an ennobling interchange / Of action from without and from within; / The excellence, pure function, and best power / Both of the object seen, and eye that sees” (Prelude, 1850, 12.376–79). Here is Herzog’s description of his newly charged perceptive powers:

  In these days of near-delirium and wide-ranging disordered thought, deeper currents of feeling had heightened his perceptions, or made him instill something of his own into his surroundings. As though he painted them with moisture and color taken from his own mouth, his blood, liver, bowels, genitals. In this mingled way, therefore, he was aware of Chicago, familiar ground to him for more than thirty years. And out of its elements, by this peculiar art of his own organs, he created his version of it.… Reality. Moses had to see reality. Perhaps he was somewhat spared from it so that he might see it better, not fall asleep in its thick embrace. Awareness was his work; extended consciousness was his line, his business. Vigilance. If he borrowed time to take his tiny daughter to see the fishes he would find a way to make it up to the vigilance-fund (pp. 698–99).

  Which he does, as when describing the turtle at the aquarium, quoted in the introduction to this book. Herzog’s immediate thoughts upon leaving the yard after spying on Madeleine, Gersbach, and June are genealogical, how much June looks like a Herzog, how genetic traits are passed on from “You and your children and children’s children” (p. 678). Moses recalls Father Herzog, taunted by scornful Tante Zipporah. “He could never use a gun on anyone,” Zipporah says, “never keep up with team sters, butchers, sluggers, hooligans, razboiniks. ‘A gilded little gentleman.’ Could he hit anyone on the head? Could h
e shoot?” Agreeing with his aunt, Moses “could confidently swear that Father Herzog had never—not once in his life—pulled the trigger of this gun. Only threatened” (p. 678). In the novel’s penultimate section, Moses, with June in the car, is involved in a traffic accident outside the Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park. No one is hurt. When the police arrive, they discover Father Herzog’s gun and take Herzog and June to the station. The police call Madeleine and Herzog calls his brother Will, the Sam figure. When Will arrives he asks Moses what he was doing with the gun. Moses replies: “You know I’m no more capable of firing it at someone than Papa was.… I remembered those old rubles in his drawer and then I took the revolver too. I shouldn’t have. At least I ought to have emptied it. It was just one of those dumb impulses” (p. 726).

  The violence of the novel is verbal as well as physical, and in the depiction of Madeleine, murderous impulses go unchecked, there are no softening or humanizing particulars. Madeleine is a bitch goddess, the sort of woman who really does “eat green salad and drink human blood” (p. 458). To Stanley Edgar Hyman, in a review of the novel in The New Leader, Madeleine “resembles no real or imaginable person, but is a vicious madwoman, based on the Poison Damsel of folktale.” To Irving Howe, in The New Republic, “Madeleine is drawn with pure venom, a sentiment capable of generating in writers, as in other men, great quantities of energy.… The portrait is unjust, an utter libel, but a classic of male retaliation.” To Philip Rahv, writing in the New York Herald-Tribune, “Mady, the treacherous wife, does not really come through except as an object of hostility, though a weirdly interesting one.” To Richard Ellmann, in the Chicago Sun-Times, Madeleine’s “ultimate malevolence is a mystery that refuses solution,” echoing larger inhumanities “that have been perpetrated during our time.”42 All these critics knew Sasha, which is partly why they use phrases like “utter libel” and “unjust”; not because they took her side but because they knew her as a person, with virtues as well as failings, and legitimate complaints. At the police station in Chicago, what Herzog sees in Madeleine’s face is “a total will that he should die. This was infinitely more than ordinary hatred. It was a vote for his nonexistence, he thought” (p. 722), like a vote for the nonexistence of a people.