The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  A Wen, in Traverse Plays, ed. Jim Haynes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). One of three one-act plays performed on Broadway and in London in 1966 as Under the Weather.

  Orange Soufflé, in Traverse Plays, ed. Jim Haynes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). One of three one-act plays performed on Broadway and in London in 1966 as Under the Weather.

  Out from Under (unpublished in English). Italian translation, C’è speranza nel sesso (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1967); English version cited in manuscript, in Saul Bellow Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

  ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES

  Atlas, Biography James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2000)

  Botsford interview, “A Half Life” Keith Botsford, “A Half Life,” the first of two interviews conducted by Botsford, Bellow’s friend and sometimes colleague, orginally printed in Bostonia magazine (November–December 1990), reprinted in Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future

  Botsford interview, “A Second Half Life” Keith Botsford, “A Second Half Life,” the second of two interviews conducted by Botsford, originally printed in Bostonia magazine (January–February 1991), reprinted in Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future

  Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel, eds., Conversations with Saul Bellow (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994)

  “I Got a Scheme!” “ ‘I Got a Scheme!’: The Words of Saul Bellow,” The New Yorker (25 April 2005), an edited and rewritten interview between Saul Bellow and Philip Roth

  Koch interview An eight-hour interview Saul Bellow gave in 1987 to Sigmund Koch, a “University Professor” (as Bellow would himself become) at Boston University, one of seventeen such interviews with writers Koch conducted between 1983 and 1988 as part of the Boston University Aesthetics Research Project. The interviews were videotaped and are held at the Geddes Language Center at Boston University.

  Manea, “Conversation” Norman Manea, “Saul Bellow in Conversation with Nor man Manea,” Salmagundi 2007, 155/156 (Page numbers from the Literature Online version, http://lion.chadwyck.com)

  PR Partisan Review

  Regenstein The Special Collections Research Center at the Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago

  Roth/SB interview typescript Typed transcript of conversations between Saul Bellow and Philip Roth out of which came The New Yorker article “I Got a Scheme!” The typescript is among the Bellow Papers in the Regenstein. For details, see Chapter 3, note 11.

  SB Saul Bellow

  SB, “CB” Saul Bellow, “Chicago Book,” an unfinished manuscript Saul Bellow worked on in the late 1970s, located in the Regenstein. It exists in several parts: a manuscript in eighty-four numbered pages; shorter sections, often just notes, numbered differently or not numbered at all; and sixteen background folders on a range of Chicago topics and personalities. The title comes from the heading of a section dated 5 April 1979: “Notes for Chicago Book.”

  SB, IAAU Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Distant Future: A Nonfiction Collection (1994; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995)

  SB, “Memoirs” Saul Bellow, “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” an unfinished manuscript among the Bellow Papers in the Special Collections Research Center at the Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago

  Taylor, ed., Letters Benjamin Taylor, ed., Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010)

  “What’s in a Name?” An unpublished memoir by Sondra “Sasha” Bellow, Saul Bellow’s second wife, copies of which she gave to the author and to her son Adam Bellow, Saul Bellow’s second son

  INTRODUCTION: ​BELLOW AND BIOGRAPHY

  1. ​See, for example, James Wood, “Give All,” review of James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography, in The New Republic, 13 November 2000, p. 30, where he calls SB “probably the greatest writer of American prose of the twentieth century,” a view he characterizes as “relatively uncontroversial.”

  2. ​This quotation comes from Norman Manea, “Saul Bellow in Conversation with Norman Manea,” in Salmagundi 155/156 (2007): 131–211. Here and throughout, my page numbers come from the Literature Online version, http://lion.chadwyck.com, in this case, p. 37 (henceforth cited as Manea, “Conversation”). Eugene Goodheart is an emeritus professor of English at Brandeis University. He and SB became friends in 1960 when Goodheart taught at Bard College in upstate New York. SB lived nearby in a house in Tivoli, the model for the Ludeyville house in Herzog, which SB was writing at the time.

  3. ​W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Choice” (1932) begins: “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work, / And if it take the second must refuse / A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.”

  4. ​SB to Al Ellenburg, a former student of SB’s at Bard, undated, quoted in James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2000), p. 314 (henceforth cited as Atlas, Biography), p. 314.

  5. ​The SB quotations about Susan Bellow come from her unpublished and undated essay, “Mugging the Muse,” p. 7, a copy of which was lent me by Daniel Bellow and which he thinks might have been composed “around 1980.” The “lousing up” quotation comes from SB, Humboldt’s Gift (1976; Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1977), p. 122 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  6. ​Susan Bellow, “Mugging the Muse,” p. 7.

  7. ​These quotations are from an interview I conducted with Joan Ullmann Schwartz, who complained to SB about the resemblance between herself and Katrina in a letter of 26 January 1984, having been alerted by a friend to the forthcoming publication of “What Kind of a Day Did You Have?” in the February issue of Vanity Fair. SB wrote back on 26 March, calling Schwartz’s letter “intelligent and gentle” and quoting Alexander Pope’s letter to Arabella Fermor, the model for Belinda in “The Rape of the Lock”: “Pope said: ‘The character of Belinda … resembles you in nothing but Beauty.’ He adds that all the passages in his poem are ‘fabulous,’ and that ‘the Human persons are as fictitious as the Airy ones.’ … I feel extremely lucky to have found in a great master the total clarification of a diabolically complex problem.”

  8. ​For Humboldt on his prospects if Stevenson wins, see Humboldt’s Gift, pp. 29–30. The Falstaff quotation is from King Henry IV, Part Two, V.iii.132–33.

  9. ​Ibid., V.v.46.

  10. ​See SB, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), reprinted in Saul Bellow: Novels 1944–1953 (New York: Library of America, 2003), pp. 792, 805, 843 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  11. ​For William Hazlitt’s description of Bolingbroke, see his Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), in P. P. Howe, ed., The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1930–34), 4:275.

  12. ​Robert Penn Warren, SB’s friend, reviewed The Adventures of Augie March in “The Man with No Commitments,” The New Republic, 2 November 1953.

  13. ​Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (1979; New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 58. The Roth character in the novel is called Nathan Zuckerman, the SB character is called Felix Abravanel.

  14. ​See Hillel G. Fradkin and Nathan Tarcov, Bloom’s executors, authors of the acknowledgments page of Bloom’s posthumously published Love and Friendship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). SB seems also to have discussed Shakespeare’s history plays with David Grene, another colleague from the Committee on Social Thought, a classicist. See an undated letter from Grene among SB’s papers in the Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library, University of Chicago: “Dear Saul. This is not all that I have done, but it is all that I found time to revise and type. It’s also rather rough—and I haven’t got any of the stuff on Hotspur in. However, if you find the time to tell me whether you think it is the proper sort of continuation I would be glad.” For SB’s papers in the Regenstein, see the “Note on Sources.” Tim Spiekerman, a student of Bloom and SB, had transcribed Lov
e and Friendship from Bloom’s dictation. He also wrote a dissertation on Shakespeare’s history plays, including a chapter on “Shakespeare and Machiavelli.” In the spring of 2000, SB taught a course at Boston University entitled “An Idiosyncratic Survey of Modern Literature.” It started with King Henry IV, Parts One and Two.

  15. ​Bloom, Love and Friendship, pp. 405, 407–8.

  16. ​Ibid., p. 401.

  17. ​SB, Ravelstein (New York: Viking, 2000), p. 13 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers). According to Adam Bellow, on at least three occasions SB told him that Bloom had said he should do a portrait of him in some form or other, because he, Bloom, was a unique personality. As Adam recalls it, his father said: “Bloom had made it clear to me that he expects me to write about him and to tell the truth of it.” But Adam remains wary: “You can never be sure—you can never be sure—I wouldn’t declare that in court. He was trying to ascertain if I was okay about it” (notes taken after a meeting with Adam Bellow, 9 January 2009).

  18. ​In a letter of 11 August 2000 to Clifford Orwin, SB wrote: “As you are bound to suspect, it was no easy thing to decide whether Ravelstein should or should not be written. I can’t guess whether Allan would have been for it or against it.” The “it” here may refer specifically to the depiction of Ravelstein’s death from AIDS. Bloom may have encouraged SB to “do him” before his fatal illness: “There were special considerations also to take into account,” SB wrote to Orwin. “One of those considerations was the presence of James Atlas, my self-appointed biographer, on the margins. I did not want to give him a monopoly of the subject. He would have liked nothing better than to break the story of Allan’s illness to a public of scandal-consumers.”

  19. ​For quoted references to Citrine, or the Citrine figure, and biography, in early versions of Humboldt’s Gift, see Daniel Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), pp. 235–36.

  20. ​“Charm and Death” exists in a ninety-seven-page typescript in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago. Also among SB’s papers is a letter of 1 December 1970 from his agent, Henry Volkening: “Alan Williams has had this morning delivered to me the first ninety-one pages of Charm and Death.… I will, of course, bear in mind that this is a first draft.”

  21. ​See SB, Dangling Man (1944), reprinted in Saul Bellow: Novels 1944–1953 (New York: Library of America, 2003), pp. 5, 16 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  22. ​SB, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 21 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers); “Mosby’s Memoirs,” first published in The New Yorker, 20 July 1968, reprinted in SB, Collected Stories (New York: Penguin, 2001), p. 362 (henceforth cited as SB, CS).

  23. ​This quotation comes from notes for a lecture written around the time of Humboldt’s Gift in which SB discusses Paul Valéry’s hostility to novelists. It is quoted in Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, p. 279. When describing SB’s sense of mission as a novelist, Alfred Kazin, in New York Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), p. 41, invokes D. H. Lawrence: “Being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.”

  24. ​SB, “The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them,” foreword to Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (New York: Criterion, 1955); first published in The New Republic, 23 May 1955; reprinted in SB, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Distant Future: A Nonfiction Collection (New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. 45–46 (henceforth cited as SB, IAAU).

  25. ​SB, “Zetland: By a Character Witness,” originally published in 1974 in Modern Occasions 2, reprinted in SB, CS, p. 245 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  26. ​Manea, “Conversation,” pp. 20, 18.

  27. ​This letter, undated, was written sometime in September 1968, while SB was at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, on a monthlong Rockefeller Foundation fellowship.

  28. ​It was Volkening who used the word “crushed” in a letter to SB of 14 September 1967; his other comment comes from a letter of 13 November 1967. Lindley’s letter about SB being “at peak form” was written on 8 August 1967.

  29. ​This quotation is from an interview conducted with David Peltz by the journalist D. J. R. Bruckner, who was at work on a television documentary entitled “Saul Bellow’s Chicago,” aired on Channel 5 in Chicago on 27 March 1981. Bruckner conducted interviews in 1980 and his recordings are in the Regenstein.

  30. ​From SB, “Chicago and American Culture: One Writer’s View,” a talk delivered on 10 October 1972 at the Centennial Celebration of the Chicago Public Library, a typescript of which is among SB’s papers in the Regenstein (the quotation occurs on p. 18 of the typescript). A version of the talk was printed in the Chicago Sun-Times.

  31. ​Mark Harris, Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 97.

  32. ​SB, Herzog (1964), reprinted in SB, Novels 1956–1964 (New York: Library of America, 2007), p. 593 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  33. The excerpt appeared in the July 1961 issue of Esquire, pp. 116–30.

  34. ​James Wood, “Give All,” p. 35. See also Wood’s review of Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir (2013), “Sins of the Father: Do Great Novelists Make Bad Parents?,” New Yorker, 22 July 2013, in which he admits the brutality (to family, to friends) of the “storm of assertion” whereby the writer seeks to justify his or her existence as a writer: “The history of that private destruction is briefly alluring, sometimes appalling. In two or three generations, that story will have faded from memory, outlived by what it enabled.”

  35. ​Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), p. xiv. Naipaul on biography could not be more different from SB: “The lives of writers are a legitimate subject of inquiry; and the truth should not be skimped. It may well be, in fact, that a full account of a writer’s life might in the end be more a work of literature and more illuminating—of a cultural or historical moment—than the writer’s books” (from a speech given in 1994 at Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Naipaul’s papers are held, quoted by French, ibid., p. xi.).

  36. ​SB, More Die of Heartbreak (1987; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), p. 54 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  37. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 45.

  38. ​See Wood, “Give All,” p. 36, quoting Atlas: “ ‘While Bellow, the great novelist, went about the serious business of making art’—the phrase pulses with resentment. But Bellow is a great novelist, and making art is a serious business.” Or see Richard Poirier, “How Far Shall I Take This Character?,” a review of Atlas’s biography in the London Review of Books, 2 November 2000, on what he sees as Atlas’s damaging hostility to SB: “the development of such hostility over the long haul of a biography is not unfamiliar.” See also Atlas’s reprinted or reconstructed diary entries in a New Yorker article of 26 June and 3 July 1995 entitled “The Shadow in the Garden.” The article traces his relations with SB from the time he first broached the idea of a biography in 1987 to August 1994. In an entry of 10 May 1991, SB takes Atlas on a tour of his childhood neighborhood, which makes Atlas think of his own grandparents’ home. “In writing this book, I’m not just retrieving Bellow’s past,” he writes. “I feel a momentary twinge of resentment: why him and not me?” In an entry of 30 August 1992, Atlas “babble[s] something about how it’s a wonderful project for me. B, deadpan: ‘I’m glad I haven’t lived in vain.’ ” From the same entry: “The person with whom I used to experience a huge paternal transference doesn’t exist as powerfully for me anymore; I feel independent of him but also sad. There is no Dad. Certainly not this difficult, prickly character.” From 23 August 1993: “so much concentration, combined with the suppression of self.” From 23 October 1993: “For the first time, I feel i
mpatience; I want to get on with my story, live my life.”

  39. ​See SB to Edward Shils, 3 October 1975 (Shils was SB’s colleague on the Committee on Social Thought): “James Redfield’s new book on the Iliad has brought up the matter of his promotion. I am favorably impressed with it, after two chapters, and I should like you to have a copy of it and to know what you think of James’s scholarship and his eligibility for a full professorship. He should have it, I believe. Our collisions have not deprived me of objectivity. He is a young curmudgeon but mingled among his detestable qualities are many good ones. He is one of the few thoroughly thoughtful people around. In his books you can virtually see the thoughts coming through. I am not so besotted by my 12 years at this university that I cannot still recognize a working mind. Of course Redfield is quite perverse in his conclusions, as you will see for yourself, but he is ‘quality’ nevertheless.”

  40. ​In an interview with the author, 14 August 2008.

  41. ​Ellmann’s acceptance speech is available at http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaacceptspeech_rellmann.html.

  42. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 42.

  1. RUSSIA/ABRAHAM

  1. ​These are the words of Joel Bellows, Maurice (Maury) Bellows’s son, recounted in an interview. Maurice was the eldest of the three Bellow brothers. His words are from Joel in the same interview. Joel’s version of this story was heard also by his cousins, Greg Bellow, SB’s oldest son, and Lesha Bellows Greengus, the daughter of Samuel Bellows, the middle of Abraham Bellow’s three sons. The cousins heard the story from both Sam and Maury Bellows.

  2. ​This information comes from Louis Dworkin, a cousin of Abraham Bellow’s, who reported to his granddaughter, Susan Missner, that the grocer’s name was Frumkin. At the start of his career, Abraham also worked in the produce business, perhaps benefiting from his father’s contacts and expertise.

  3. ​The quote about red hair and the Bellow men comes from Joel Bellows. Charlie Citrine’s reference to his grandfather and the Talmud comes from p. 239 of Humboldt’s Gift. SB’s sons and Lesha Bellows Greengus, unlike their cousin Joel Bellows, remember being told that it was Moses Gordin, SB’s maternal grandfather who knew the Talmud by heart, not Berel Bellow.