The Life of Saul Bellow
Page 85
Though Bellow may have been right in thinking Mailer saw himself as rudderless, to many observers the ultimate course he was steering was clear—toward the counterculture and the New Left. The contents of the spring 1965 issue of Partisan Review, containing Poirier’s review of Herzog, give a sense of the controversy this direction or trend was stirring in intellectual circles and of the way Mailer and Bellow were being positioned in relation to it. The lead article was a debate between Nat Hentoff and Michael Harrington on “The New Radicalism.” The next article was by Susan Sontag on “Marat/Sade/Artaud.” Poirier’s attack on Bellow was balanced by Elizabeth Hardwick’s attack on Mailer’s An American Dream, which she described as “an intellectual and literary disaster, poorly written, morally foolish and intellectually empty” (“Fixes for Fiction,” p. 291). Opposite the review was an advertisement for the next issue, listing Jack Ludwig among the contributors. Before the review appeared Philip Rahv wrote to Bellow on April 6, 1965, registering both his disapproval of the decision to publish it and his suspicions of the political as well as personal motives behind the decision:
Dear Saul,
I am extremely sorry to tell you that the next issue of PR has a review in it of your novel by Dick Poirier which is negative and hostile. Given my present rather tenuous relationship with the magazine, I could do nothing to stop it. It’s a ridiculous review, full of sophistries. What Dick is doing is practicing one-upmanship, trying to differentiate himself from me. It’s an attack on my judgment. Entre nous, what William and Dick are doing is lining up with the swingers, particularly the camp culturati led by Susan Sontag. Being plainly a heterosexual type, you are typed as a square by those people, just as I am typed in the same manner. In my view, the magazine is done for, especially since I’m going back to Brandeis in the fall and to Europe this summer. It won’t be long before I get off it altogether …
Cordially, Philip
In later years, William Phillips regretted the decision to publish Poirier’s review. “We did think of him [Bellow] as part of the new alignment of writers, and there was a good deal of affection and respect for him.” The decision to publish involved “a conflict between literary sympathy and adverse criticism. I now feel the claims of community and loyalty to the history of the magazine may be more important than an abstract principle of objectivity.”70 This was certainly what Bellow felt. Poirier, in contrast, by the report of friends and supporters as well as enemies, had no such regrets. “One had the impression that he [Poirier] was fearless, at least in professional and social contexts,” writes James Barszcz, an ex-student, loyal friend, and colleague at the literary magazine Raritan, of which Poirier was founding editor (Poirier was also, with Edmund Wilson, the founder of the Library of America series, the edition used here for many of Bellow’s writings). “He was certainly unapologetic; he would not allow himself to be bored and he didn’t care what people thought when he showed it.… He is said to have fought ferociously in administrative political battles at Rutgers and elsewhere.… He was said to have ruined people’s professional lives through caustic letters of recommendation, and to have brought opponents to tears during debates in faculty meetings.”71 But Poirier also helped many students, had a wide circle of literary acquaintance, and was a founder with Reuben Brower of the storied Hum 6 course at Harvard, which encouraged students to read “in slow motion,” in the manner of New Critical close reading.
That Poirier and Ludwig discussed both Herzog and the relative merits of Bellow and Mailer is more than likely. In December 1964, before Poirier’s review appeared, Ludwig, now at Stony Brook (Poirier was now at Rutgers), spoke on a panel at the MLA Convention in New York on “Topics in Modern Literature,” taking as his title, “Bellow, Mailer, and Ellison.” The panel was chaired by Irving Howe, and according to Lewis Nichols in The New York Times Book Review, “preliminary rumors hinted that [it] would set off fireworks, and almost 1,000 members turned out to watch them.”72 Bellow’s marital difficulties had become an item of intellectual and academic gossip far beyond Minneapolis. Two months after the MLA Convention, with characteristic chutzpah, Ludwig wrote a long review of Herzog in Holiday magazine. Like his MLA talk, the review was fulsome in praise of Bellow, an artist “of enormous gifts.” It also anticipated several of the criticisms in Poirier’s review. Herzog’s spiritual transformation at the end of the novel was snidely dismissed: “Moses on the Berkshire Mountain can contemplate the Promised Land secure in the knowledge that on the flats brother Shura is playing the necessary footsie with the Golden Calf.” The review also made much of Herzog’s tendency to whine and complain, then to criticize himself for doing so, a move seen, as in the Poirier review, as protective on Bellow’s part as well as Herzog’s. Ludwig begins by disapproving of readers who “confound the author with his hero,” but his own reading is at moments biographical. After warning that Bellow’s “superbly intricate novel needs a reader who will not take any of Herzog’s wooden nickels,” by which he means not take his claims at face value, he describes how the character’s perspective is all-controlling:
He describes a universe in which he is the center and source of light, the universe being a set of revolving, whirling characters—wives, children, family, friends, colleagues—each reflecting as much light as Herzog allows. There is no Eisenhower but Herzog’s Eisenhower, no Mady but Herzog’s, no Doctor Edvig but his. Herzog has woven a web; all who enter are caught. In Herzog’s universe the moon has no other side. Those who are brought in come as testi monials to a Herzog who smells sweet, tells great stories, loves with fervor. From time to time Herzog’s great double perspective, which sees suffering and its possible absurdity, reasserts itself, and in so doing makes a novel of great richness.
Why talk here of Mady’s “other side” unless you’re thinking of a real-life model? Or unless you’re the sort of critic who asks how many children Lady Macbeth had, a question no self-respecting literary academic would ask in 1965.73 Why, elsewhere in the review, complain of Herzog’s “mysterious depth of tastelessness” in describing the hunchbacked Himmelstein as a “humped rat”? Herzog is furious with Himmelstein, the description is something he thinks, not says, and Himmelstein is a “rat” (professing love for Herzog while siding with Madeleine, as well as acting for her). Jonas Schwartz might not have been a rat, Sandor Himmelstein was. The cruelty of the phrase, it should also be said, is funny, a product of the energy Poirier admires, as is Herzog’s description of Ramona’s lovesick admirer, George Hoberly, as “that sobbing prick!” (p. 626). A personal or extraliterary note is also struck when Ludwig wonders how “Herzog, with his Japanese girlfriend Sono, differed so radically from his wife, Mady,” or “what brought about a divorce between two such obviously ‘nice’ people as Herzog and his first wife, Daisy.” That Herzog was, as he says of himself, “brought up on moral principles,” is for Ludwig one of the “wooden nickels” he claims Bellow wants the reader not to buy. The review is clever and when Bellow read it he was impressed as well as appalled. In a letter of January 28, 1965, to Alfred Kazin, he called the review “a masterpiece in its own way—a great virtuoso performance on the high-wire of self-justification. Ingenious, shrewd, supersubtle, shamanistic, Rasputin-like. I’m really proud of the man. His cast-iron effrontery is admirable, somehow.”
Three years later, in 1968, Ludwig produced his own fictional account of the real-life incidents out of which Herzog grew, in a novel entitled Above Ground.74 The hero of Ludwig’s novel is Josh, a literary academic who has a bad leg, the result of a poorly treated fractured hip that never mended. Josh has known excruciating pain, which he bears stoically. He lives life to the full because he knows suffering and because he is afraid of death (his goal is to stay “above ground” for as long as possible). Fear of death also explains Josh’s promiscuity, every bit as pronounced as Herzog’s. He falls in love frequently and has many serious lovers, both before and after marrying Maggie, with whom he has a daughter. He loves Maggie but he also loves all the other wome
n in his life because he has a big heart. The most dangerous of these women is Mavra, a neighbor married to a neurotic sculptor named Louie. Mavra latches onto Josh and Maggie. She is promiscuous, self-destructive, in therapy (with a Paul Meehl/Edvig figure), a congenital liar and fantasist, self-centered, and contemptuous of Louie. Mavra and Louie live in a “carriagebarn” (p. 245). When Mavra gives birth to Dov, their son, Louie, “a small bugeyed man” (p. 255) later said to have a “hairyknuckle hand” (p. 262), sobs and carries on: “The kid—did you see the kid? His feet! Dusty. He walked all the way. Mavrie, sweet girl. She looks just like Ma. Ma gave birth—hair like that—I can’t stand it. Those feet. My kid!” (p. 255). Louie and Mavra don’t get on in bed. Louie accuses Mavra of being frigid, partly because she’s been sexually abused by her father. There’s a fight in which Mavra flees with Dov in the car and Louie accuses her of trying to run him down.
Louie is a secondary character both in Mavra’s life and in the novel, as Sasha claimed Bellow was in her life (she and Bellow were only briefly married, she reminded me several times, while her second marriage, according to her son and others, was strong, happy, and lasted more than forty years, until her death in 2012). Brave, loving Josh is the focus, torn between Maggie and Mavra. Maggie is steadfast, true, and long-suffering; Mavra is like Madeleine, only worse, being a nymphomaniac as well as psychotic (there are lengthy extracts from soft-porn letters “concocted” by Mavra, she says, to amuse Josh, which Bellow claimed Ludwig lifted from Sasha’s own letters75). “Look at her victory!” Maggie cries. “She has you. Louie has the story of his maim” (p. 340) (this story is spoken of as an asset, like the story of Bellow’s “maim” at the hands of Sasha and Ludwig, turned to profit in Herzog, Ludwig implies). There are connections between Maggie and Gersbach’s wife, Phoebe, who accuses Herzog and Madeleine of corrupting Gersbach. The difference is that Maggie’s decision not to leave Josh signals love and intelligence, whereas Phoebe’s staying with Gersbach is seen mostly as weakness. “With Gersbach she could still be a wife. He came home. She cooked, ironed, shopped, signed checks. Without him, she could not exist, shop, make beds. The trance would break” (p. 683).76 These and other differences in plot and characterization pale before the gulf in talent and competence between the two novels. Ludwig’s novel is terrible, as bad in the sections on Josh’s childhood in Winnipeg, pale equivalents of the Napoleon Street scenes in Herzog, as in scenes from the narrative present. When Bellow read it, he was disgusted, as he makes clear in an undated letter to Sasha, quoted in part in the introduction to this book. Sasha had written to him to complain about money and about his rudeness to her at a recent meeting. After apologizing for the rudeness, he turns to money and the question of humiliation:
First of all, then: I wrote a successful book. I owe you nothing for that. You damn near killed me. I’ve put that behind me, but I haven’t forgotten the smallest detail. Nothing, I assure you. I made something of the abuses I suffered at your hands. As for the “humiliations” you speak of, I can match you easily. There is another book, isn’t there? It is the product of two minds and two spirits, not one. Kind acquaintances and friends have made sure that I would read it. The letters of the heroine are consciously superior in style, but the book is garbage. It is monstrous to be touched by anything so horribly written. The worst thing about it, to a man who has been faithful to his art for thirty years, is the criminal vulgarity of the thing. I don’t worry too much about my reputation, the “image” (I don’t think you pay much attention to that, either), but I loathe being even peripherally involved with such shit. Now I’ve gotten a foot in the cesspool. Enough of that. But suppose the book had been good, successful. Can you see me demanding damages? I don’t think you can. So now … let the thing stop there. I want you to say nothing more to me about money, and I don’t want any hints about damages and indemnities.
An undated photograph of Susan Glassman Bellow (b. 1933) (ill. 14.1)
The tone of command here would be heard with increasing frequency in the years to come. The letter was written in 1968, by which time Bellow was rich, famous, internationally acclaimed, a figure of power and influence in literary and intellectual circles. The struggle to be recognized as a writer, then as a writer of greatness, had been won, but he remained embattled, at war with his wives, outraged by the excesses of the 1960s. Recognition itself now threatened his freedom; he was hounded by the demands of fame, distracted by its many temptations. Though his personal life was in turmoil, he was writing some of the best things he’d ever written. He would remain in Chicago, his routine for the most part the same, he continued to teach, to travel, to see old friends and family, but his life had changed: he had arrived at the pinnacle of American letters, and he knew it.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Andrew Wylie, who first suggested that I write Bellow’s biography and who has been a staunch supporter of this book throughout. I am indebted also to the Saul Bellow Literary Estate, to Janis Freedman Bellow and Walter Pozen. Bellow’s sons, Gregory, Adam, and Daniel, have been generous with their knowledge and time, granting lengthy interviews and enduring numerous queries. Bellow had five wives. His first and third wives, Anita Goshkin Bellow and Susan Glassman Bellow, died before I began work on the biography. His second wife, Sondra “Sasha” Tschacbasov Bellow; his fourth wife, Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea Bellow; and his fifth wife, Janis Freedman Bellow, generously granted me interviews, as well as helping in innumerable other ways with queries and introductions. Bellow took a keen and loving interest in his larger family and I have been much helped by a number of his relatives, in particular by his nephew Joel Bellows and his niece Lesha Bellows Greengus, together with her husband, Sam Greengus. The children of Bellow’s nephews and nieces also granted interviews and answered queries. Other Bellow relatives were generous with their time as well. Soon after I began work on the biography I was put in touch with Benjamin Taylor, who was editing Bellow’s letters and is now at work on a volume of Bellow’s essays, published to coincide with the centennial of Bellow’s birth. Ben has been a friend of this book since its inception. A full list of those who agreed to formal interviews, subsequently helping with inquiries, is provided in the Note on Sources.
For advice and assistance I am grateful to the administration and staff of the Special Collections Research Center at the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, in particular to Dan Meyer, Alice Schreyer, Eileen Ielmini, David Pavlich, Barbara Gilbert, and Julia Gardner. Eileen Ielmini not only helped me to navigate the enormous Bellow collection, with its complicated inventories, but was unfailingly helpful before and after my several stays in Chicago. In Winter Quarter 2008 I was a visiting professor at the Committee on Social Thought, where Bellow taught for more than thirty years. There I conducted a seminar on his novels and stories and learned a great deal from the responses of my students, both those from the Committee and those from other departments. I am especially grateful to Robert Pippin, chair of the Committee, for arranging my visit, to Anne M. Gamboa, the Committee’s administrative assistant, for smoothing my way once I’d arrived, and to those Committee members who knew and worked with Bellow, offering me interviews, advice, and assistance, among them Nathan Tarcov, Paul Friedrich, Wendy Doniger, Ralph Lerner, James Redfield, and Leon Kass. David Nirenberg arrived at the Committee after Bellow but was a friendly and informative colleague throughout my stay. The late Richard Stern, Bellow’s great friend from the English Department, also welcomed me, as did W. J. T. Mitchell, another English Department member. Finally, I am grateful to Donna Sinopoli of the University of Chicago’s Housing Services, who found my wife and me an apartment on the twelfth floor of the Cloisters, the splendid 1920s apartment building where Saul Bellow lived for more than a dozen years. Although wary of the “footsteps” approach to biography, it was inspiring to live in a building Bellow lived in, to share much the same view he had, and to walk each morning to an office at the Committee on Social Thought along the routes he would ha
ve taken.
I am grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for a Fellowship in 2009 to free me from teaching. I am also grateful to the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton for Research Leave in 2014. The first chapter of the biography was written outside Genoa at the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities, on a monthlong fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation. At the University of Roehampton I am grateful for the support of my colleagues, in particular Jenny Hartley, Laura Peters, and Jenny Watt, of the Department of English and Creative Writing. At the Wylie Agency I owe thanks to Jeffrey Posternak and Jessica Henderson in New York and James Pullen in London. At Jonathan Cape I am indebted to the continued support of Dan Franklin and at Knopf to the continued support of Erroll McDonald, both of whom published my biography of Kingsley Amis. Caroline Bleeke and Nicholas Thomson of Knopf were especially helpful in the preparation of the manuscript, but I also owe thanks to Meghan Hauser, Kathleen Fridella, Jessica Purcell, Cassandra Pappas, Lisa Montebello, Fred Chase, George Wen, Bert Yaeger, and to Douglas Matthews, who prepared the index. At Jonathan Cape I owe thanks to Clare Bullock, Kris Potter, and Joe Pickering.