The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  75. ​In a letter of reference to the Social Sciences Research Council, Melville J. Herskovits, professor of anthropology, praised SB’s independence as well as his ambition, the ability “to make his own appraisals of what for him are worthwhile objectives” (Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University Archives).

  76. ​See Cavett interview for Hungerford not handling SB; Koch interview for Hungerford as “loveable.”

  77. ​Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (New York: Doubleday Doran, 1935), pp. 25, 28.

  78. ​Delmore Schwartz, “A Man in His Time,” Partisan Review 11 (1944): 348.

  79. ​Leon Trotsky, “War and the Fourth International,” Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1933–34, volume 6 of Writings of Leon Trotsky, eds., George Breitman and Sarah Lovell, 14 vols. (New York: Pathfinder, 1947–78), pp. 306–7. See also Trotsky’s “The Imperialist War and the Proletarian Revolution,” in volume 13 of Writings, 1929–1933, p. 183: “Differences undoubtedly exist among the political regimes of bourgeois society, just as there are degrees of comfort in different class railway carriages. But when the whole train is heading for the precipice, the contrast in comfort between the different carriages loses all significance. Capitalist civilization is sliding toward the precipice. Differences between decaying democracy and barbarian fascism disappear in the face of the collapse of the entire capitalist system.”

  80. ​See Manea, “Conversation,” p. 15, for the quotation’s continuation: “Somehow it didn’t come through, as it would have for a European, because we had no immediate contact with it. It went into the historical record as a horror but it was not—I didn’t recognize it, from my Jewish side, for what it had been. It took a long time for me to get a grip on it. I don’t know what that was. It remained the Jewish Question instead of the horror it should have been. I ask myself often nowadays: why were you so slow in picking this up? I don’t know why. Maybe because it didn’t accord with the main themes of my life.”

  81. ​At Northwestern, it was simply assumed that Arthur Behrstock was a Communist. When Julian wrote an admiring profile of him for the student magazine, The Gadfly, its editor changed the title from “Portrait of a Rebel” to “Portrait of a Communist.” When confronted, Julian recalls, the editor “brushed off my protest, said he had been a friend of Arthur’s as an undergraduate and that his title was a more accurate description than mine.” Details of Arthur Behrstock’s life come from p. 2 of a memorial address by Julian Behrstock, among the Bellow Papers at the Regenstein. The address is undated but Arthur Behrstock died in 1985.

  82. ​After the war Harris taught anthropology at the University of Chicago until Ralph Bunche invited him to become part of his staff at the United Nations, working on African issues.

  83. ​Harris, like Arthur Behrstock, lost his job after pleading the Fifth; unlike Arthur, however, his appeal was upheld. He never returned to the UN.

  84. ​The FBI report is among the Harris Papers in the Northwestern University Archives.

  85. ​He also enlisted big names to serve on the magazine’s Advisory Board, including Robert Hutchins, Harold Ickes, Philip La Follette (the governor of Wisconsin), and Robert Morss Lovett (an English professor at the University of Chicago and an associate editor of The New Republic).

  86. ​Though Farrell’s novel is hardly “the finely turned product of a skilled craftsman,” SB praises it for its “acute characterization … and a feel for the quality of the milieu of the dramatis personae.” If the crude speech of its characters offends, “that fault is not with Farrell but with stomachs accustomed to more delicate fare.”

  87. ​For these and other details, see Jerry Gershenhorn, Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); also Joseph H. Greenberg, “Melville Jean Herskovits,” in volume 42 of Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), pp. 65–77.

  88. ​Gershenhorn, Herskovits, p. 15.

  89. ​Ibid., p. 17.

  90. ​As Gershenhorn puts it, “by attacking racist science, which concluded that blacks were inferior to whites, Boas was able to mount an indirect challenge to the anti-Semitic belief that Jews were an inferior race” (p. 20). Herskovits’s decision to concentrate on the relations between African culture and African American culture was similarly motivated, a product of a shared experience among Jews and blacks of being considered, in his words, “different, or inferior, or something to be disdained” (p. 21).

  91. ​Gershenhorn, Herskovits, p. 139.

  92. ​These are the words of Suzanne Blier, professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies at Harvard, in an article entitled “Field Days: Melville J. Herskovits in Dahomey,” History in Africa 16 (1989): 1. According to Greenberg, “Melville Jean Herskovits,” Biographical Memoirs, p. 69, “it is not too much to say that … Herskovits virtually founded Afroamerican studies as a scientific field in its own right.”

  93. ​As SB put it in an undergraduate limerick, “There was a guy named Melville J. / Who does oodles of work every day / To prove that Brer Rabbit / And blues on the Sabbath / Came from Old Dahomey” (Atlas, Biography, p. 49).

  94. ​Kevin A. Yelvington, “A Life In and Out of Anthropology: An Interview with Jack Sargent Harris,” Critique of Anthropology 28, no. 4 (2008): 453.

  95. ​There were problems with Herskovits, particularly after SB abandoned graduate work. See SB to Melvin Tumin, in an undated letter of 1942: “Even Hersky has aimed his little boot at me. Last week he called me up at two thirty in the afternoon. It seems I had used him as a reference in connection with the national roster of scientific and specialized personnel. He had phoned to tell me how much trouble it was to fill out the forms. He was a busy man, a busy man! In some detail he insulted me on each of the following: 1. The fact that I am unemployed and at home at 2:30 p.m. 2. My lack of qualification as an applicant for any consideration from the national roster. 3. The fate of my novel. (He had anticipated what would happen, he gave me to understand.) And at last, in algemein [in general], my wasted life” (Taylor, ed., Letters, pp. 25–26).

  96. ​Koch interview.

  97. ​For accounts of such prejudice among English Departments, see Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey, especially pp. 273–80 and 319–22, which contain Lionel Trilling’s memorandum of his 1936 dismissal from the Columbia University English Department and reproduce part of Diana Trilling’s account of his reinstatement, from her 1979 essay, “Lionel Trilling: A Jew at Columbia,” reproduced in Speaking of Literature and Society (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989). Harold Kaplan tells a similar story to that of SB about the University of Chicago. When he applied in 1937 from the University of Illinois to read for a PhD in English at the University of Chicago, he was turned down. Kaplan’s father was a carpenter and had just gone into bankruptcy. Without a scholarship, graduate work was out of the question. When he told his professors at Illinois how disappointed he was not to have been awarded a scholarship by the Chicago English Department, those who taught him French, a subject he was also good at, asked friends in the Chicago French Department to consider him for a scholarship. These friends, two professors from the École Normale, invited Kaplan to Hyde Park, interviewed him, and gave him a scholarship. Many years later Kaplan told Lionel Trilling the story: “When I told him I hadn’t got a scholarship, he said, ‘I know why,’ because he was an expert” (from an interview with Philippe Meyer, broadcast on 23 July 2010 on France Culture, and published as “Conversations avec le vieil Harold (II),” Commentaire 33, no. 130 (Summer 2010) (translation is courtesy of Kaplan’s son, Roger).

  98. ​Presumably saving him $200, the fee for nonresident graduate students being $100 per semester.

  99. ​Letters of reference of 10 February 1937 to Professor E. A. Ross, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, and 11 February 1937 to Dean E. B. Fred, the Graduate School, University of Wisconsin,
in Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University Archives. Whether SB applied anywhere else aside from Wisconsin is unclear: according to files at Northwestern, a copy of his transcript was sent to New York University, but no letter of reference from Herskovits has survived, nor are there records of a completed application.

  100. ​The address given on SB’s graduate admissions form at Wisconsin, dated 22 September 1937, is 112 South Mills Street, which is the address found on SB’s letters to Oscar Tarcov, from September through November 1937. In December, however, SB writes to Tarcov from a new address, 1314 St. James Court. This is the address on Isaac Rosenfeld’s graduate registration form, though all the letters he wrote to Tarcov, from September through December 1937, are addressed from 11 North Mills Street. According to Atlas, Biography, p. 56, “In September 1937, Bellow moved into a boarding house on North Mills Street.… They [SB and Rosenfeld] shared a room.” If the two friends shared a room, when, where, and for how long is not clear from surviving records and correspondence. Steven J. Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion and the Furies of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 39, says the two friends “roomed at Madison,” though “they soon moved into separate apartments close to each other.”

  101. ​Information about SB’s courses and grades comes from his graduate record, provided by the Office of the Registrar, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Both Vivas and Young would eventually move to Northwestern.

  102. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 57.

  103. ​SB to Jean Pool, 3 June 1989.

  104. ​These jobs, according to the university’s files, were menial, involving “clipping, dating, and sorting items,” work SB was spared when he left for Chicago in December.

  105. ​SB, “Isaac Rosenfeld,” Partisan Review 23, no. 4 (Fall 1956): 566, and SB’s foreword to William Phillips, ed., Sixty Years of Great Fiction from Partisan Review (Boston: Partisan Review Press, 1997), p. vi.

  106. ​Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives, p. 41.

  107. ​SB calls “Twin Bananas” “a play by Oscar,” in “Isaac Rosenfeld,” Partisan Review 23 no. 4 (Fall 1956): 566, though Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives, p. 40, says the three friends wrote it together.

  108. ​For Ruth Wisse’s text, translation, and commentary, see “Language as Fate: Reflections on Jewish Literature in America,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 12 (1996): 129.

  109. ​Pinsky’s praise is cited in Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives, p. 43, from Francis X. Clines, “Laureate’s Mission Is to Give Voice to a Nation of Poets,” New York Times, 17 March 1998.

  110. ​Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (New York: Free Press, 2000), p. 298.

  111. ​Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives, pp. 42–43.

  112. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 56.

  113. ​Rosenfeld to Tarcov, 25 September 1937, in the Tarcov Papers, Regenstein Library.

  114. ​SB, To Jerusalem and Back, pp. 94, 130.

  115. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 299.

  116. ​Taylor, ed., Letters, p. xix.

  117. ​Tom Fitzpatrick, “Bellow’s Books Too Deep?,” Chicago Sun-Times, 16 March 1972. The “time of great personal difficulty,” as we shall see, involved his second wife, Sondra (Sasha) Tschacbasov.

  118. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, pp. 303–4.

  119. ​Nina A. Steers, “Successor to Faulkner?,” Show 4 (September 1964), p. 36, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 28.

  120. ​For this quote and the preceding resemblances, see Eusebio L. Rodrigues, “Bellow’s Africa,” American Literature 43, no. 2 (May 1971): 242–56; the quote itself, about SB’s genius, is on p. 249.

  121. ​ Sheila Fischman, “Saul Wanders Streets of His Montreal Past,” Montreal Star, 3 May 1976. What “it” means in SB’s quote is not clear. “Arnewi and Wariri custom”? Not “Africa,” surely.

  122. ​Koch interview.

  123. ​The first of the reasons given for not continuing with anthropology (having to measure skull sizes) comes from ibid.; the second (SB’s and Goldenweiser’s, about his being too literary) comes from Atlas, Biography, p. 57, and Harvey Breit, “A Talk with Saul Bellow,” New York Times Book Review, 20 September 1953, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 4.

  124. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 304.

  6. ANITA/DANGLING

  1. ​According to Greg Bellow, Beatrice “Beebee” Schenk (1914–2000) first met SB when they were “seventeen or eighteen.” At the time he met Anita, Beebee was a student at the University of Chicago. She got her MEd in 1941 and eventually became a well-known author of children’s picture books, including books illustrated by Maurice Sendak and Edward Gorey.

  2. ​To SB and others, Anita was variously described as pretty, beautiful, attractive. “She was very pretty,” remembers Oscar Tarcov’s daughter, Miriam, “always very attractive, but if you compare her to Sasha or Susan [SB’s second and third wives] there wasn’t, maybe, the dramatic flair.… [She was] not particularly exotic, mysterious or fetching in that way.… She was salt of the earth, steady, you couldn’t rock her, she understood things, she had her point of view. Your first comment about her wouldn’t be ‘Oh, she was such a beautiful woman.’ ”

  3. ​These and other details of Anita’s life come from interviews with Greg Bellow and from “Anita Goshkin Bellow Busacca—A Biographic Sketch,” a fourteen-page memoir of his mother written by Greg in 2007 and deposited among SB’s papers in the Regenstein.

  4. ​Records of Passin’s education are unclear. According to an obituary in The New York Times (9 March 2003), as well as the headnote to Passin’s papers in Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he received a PhD in anthropology at Northwestern University in 1941. But Northwestern has no record of his being a student, though it does have a record of his being an instructor in the Anthropology Department, 1941–42, and there is a letter to Melville Herskovits (in the Herskovits Papers at Northwestern) in which Passin mentions, without giving dates, that he attended the University of Chicago as both a graduate student and an undergraduate. According to Rita Vazquez, assistant registrar at the University of Chicago, in an email of 21 December 2011, “It looks as if Mr. Passin began his studies with the University of Chicago by taking College courses during the Autumn 1936 Quarter (10/1/1936) though he chose not to take the undergraduate Bachelor of Arts degree.… He then transferred to the Division of the Social Sciences graduate program in the Winter Quarter 1937 (January) and completed his studies to receive a Master of Arts in Anthropology, awarded 8/28/1941.” According to the Columbia Daily Spectator obituary, Passin graduated with a BA from the University of Chicago in 1936. The obituary also states that Passin was “one of the only professors ever to receive tenure without having a PhD” (http://columbiaspectator.com/2003/03/14/former-prof-japan-expert-dies-86).

  5. ​Tom Passin, in an email of 29 December 2011: “Although my mother always called it a ‘Chinese’ restaurant, I see that my father wrote, in his book Encounter with Japan (p. 22), that it was actually a Japanese restaurant, which they went to at Saul’s suggestion.”

  6. ​This quotation and others from Tom Passin come from an email to Jeanne Passin, Herb Passin’s niece, 14 December 2009, in answer to questions Jeanne had passed on from me.

  7. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 76.

  8. ​SB, “Starting Out in Chicago,” The American Scholar 44 (Winter 1974–75), p. 73, originally delivered as a commencement address at Brandeis University on 22 May 1974. A nine-page typescript of the Brandeis address is in the Regenstein, as is the typescript’s source, a sixteen-page handwritten draft in the form of questions and answers, beginning “How, in the city of Chicago, does a young person become a writer?”

  9. ​“My father has had to give me money, to my shame,” SB writes in an undated letter of 1942 to Melvin Tumin. “You know h
ow full of ugly, bastardly pride I am, It really has embittered me.”

  10. ​Quotations about SB’s routine while living in Ravenswoood come from the typescript of his 1974 Brandeis University commencement address, pp. 4–6, reprinted as “Starting Out in Chicago,” in American Scholar 44 (Winter 1974–75).

  11. ​From the first of SB’s two Jefferson Lectures (1977), reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 127.

  12. ​SB, handwritten draft for Brandeis address, beginning “How, in the city of Chicago, does a young person become a writer?,” p. 7, the source of SB’s 1974 Brandeis address and “Starting Out in Chicago,” in neither of which this sentence appears.

  13. ​SB, “Starting Out in Chicago,” p. 74; the negative references to the paralyzing spirit of the house and the need to resist it come from p. 6 of the handwritten draft for the Brandeis address and were excised in the later versions; the trembling hand is from “Starting Out in Chicago,” p. 75. In both “Starting Out in Chicago” and the Brandeis address, SB refers to Sonia Goshkin as “Sophie.”

  14. ​They do so in five pages (27–31) of draft material separate from the main hundred-page “Far Out” manuscript:

  It was July and the weather was memorable. Anywhere else it would have been glorious, open summer but under the El structure in the Negro slum it was as if you had gone into a coal mine. Hoping for some open air to bring some freshness you waited for the trolley.… And there was a young woman waiting, pale skin, green eyes, darkish-blonde, in a seersucker skirt and jacket, fresh and clean. There was something slightly painful in this first impression, something to be sorry for. She was wiping at her eyes with a handkerchief. [H]e stepped up and introduced himself as a medical student, offered to take out the speck.… Nettie hesitated, but she smiled, too. He was waiting for the same car, holding a book, he was a student and she allowed him to look at her eye. He lifted the soot from her eyeball with the point of her handkerchief. As he bent over her face, with its Russian cheekbones, her warmth came up together with a clear sort of fragrance.… Nettie was on the small side but her figure was full and she was a very beautiful woman (pp. 29–30).