The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  He lies still and hears his clock, the tread of the train on the Grand Trunk, hollow whistling on the corner. These too are a part of it [the ever-changing or irrevocable nature of existence], since they can never come again. He sees his life as pieces of cloth fed under the falling and again falling needle of a machine. All of these, he thinks as he sets his alarm for six, are part of one apparatus. The train, the clock returned to the table in the night’s center, the whistling, all are stitching shut long seams, drawing in—to close it forever—all of past life” (p. 20).

  77. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 19.

  78. ​William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1982), p. 49.

  79. ​In Dangling Man, which takes place in the four months between mid-December and mid-April 1942, the induction of Joseph, the protagonist, is delayed first because of his Canadian birth, second “through a new clause affecting married men” (p. 4). “The papers say no husbands have been drafted from Illinois since last summer,” he writes in his journal in February 1943. “But now the supply of men is lower, and married men without dependents will soon be called up” (p. 97). The dates of these particular changes in Joseph’s status fit those of SB.

  80. ​Henle may have been encouraged to ask to see future works by Farrell, a supporter of SB’s, who had dedicated the Studs Lonigan trilogy to Henle and his wife. Some at Vanguard had second thoughts about rejecting the novel: there is an undated memo from “E.S. [Evelyn Shrifte] to Henle: “Re Saul Bellow, I wonder if it would be worth looking at that Negro ms. again—since Saul is going into Merchant Marine and we won’t get another ms. soon. What do you think?” Henle’s answer on the same memo reads: “I’d say yes if I hadn’t read that Kafka story. It’s so MUCH like it. But let’s discuss.” The Vanguard material can be found in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

  81. ​Koch interview.

  82. ​That Dangling Man is short, less than two hundred pages, fits this hypothesis.

  83. ​In an undated letter to Melvin Tumin, SB announced that “Two weeks ago I stopped work on my novel—it was not direct enough—and have since solaced myself with a book called The Notebook of a Dangling Man.”

  84. ​Melvin Tumin (1919–94), a distinguished sociologist at Princeton, wrote on race relations, in part the subject of his PhD; crime and violence; social stratification; and education. He received BA and MA degrees in psychology from the University of Wisconsin (in 1939 and 1940, respectively), and a PhD in anthropology from Northwestern (in 1944). SB and Tumin met in Madison when Tumin was a senior at Wisconsin and SB a graduate student. They were introduced by Tumin’s roommate, Leslie Fiedler, a friend from Newark. Fiedler, who would become a well-known critic, was studying for an MA in English and introduced Tumin to several literary friends at the university.

  85. ​This assertion is made by Chambers himself, in Witness (New York: Random House, 1952), p. 44.

  86. ​In his memoir, Good-bye, Union Square (New York: Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 70–71, Albert Halper claims that Lieber’s client list included, at one time or another, Louis Adamic, Erskine Caldwell, Katherine Anne Porter, John Cheever, Josephine Herbst, Albert Maltz, John O’Hara, James Farrell, Nathanael West, Maxim Gorky, Theodore Dreiser, and Langston Hughes. As for SB’s reference to the army, on December 10, 1942, Harold Kaplan had written to Mel Tumin reporting that “Sol wrote [to Isaac Rosenfeld] (rather mysteriously) of going off to the army around January first.” He would not, in fact, be called up for another year and a half.

  87. ​From the archive of Story magazine in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University.

  88. ​When SB’s friend, the writer and sociologist David T. Bazelon, told him he’d sold a story to politics (founded by Dwight Macdonald in 1944, after his split with PR), SB reassured him in a letter of 22 March 1944, in terms that make clear his sense of PR and its readers as primary audience: “I don’t think it makes much difference where a story appears just so it reaches the people you want it to reach, and politics is read by pretty much the same people as PR.”

  89. ​SB to Dwight Macdonald, undated, in Taylor, ed., Letters, p. 34.

  90. ​Maggie Simmons, “Free to Feel: Conversation with Saul Bellow,” in Quest, February 1979, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 161.

  91. ​Gordon Lloyd Harper, “The Art of Fiction: Saul Bellow,” Paris Review 9, no. 36 (1966), reprinted in ibid., p. 63. SB also thought perfectionism had kept him out of print. When proofs of “Two Morning Monologues” arrived, he told Tarcov in a letter of 20 February 1941 he could not “look at them long enough to make the needed corrections. This is no exaggeration. I would much rather have published something else. Maybe I am too demanding and exacting; maybe I lack what is essential: the careless attitude of journalism which teaches you to throw into print anything you scribble off; maybe it is wrong to be so painstakingly careful and perhaps I might have been in print long ago but for that scrupulous observance of standards.” In later life SB would refer to Dangling Man and The Victim as “formal requirements,” like an MA and PhD (see Michiko Kakutani, “A Talk with Saul Bellow: On His Work and Himself,” New York Times Book Review, 13 December 1981, reprinted in ibid., p. 184). See, in comparison, Philip Roth in The Facts (1988; New York: Vintage, 1997), p. 60, on his own earliest stories, which “were intended to be ‘touching’; without entirely knowing it, I wanted my fiction to become ‘refined,’ to be elevated into realms unknown to the lower-middle-class Jews of Leslie Street, with their focus on earning a living and raising a family and trying occasionally to have a good time. To prove in my earliest undergraduate stories that I was a nice Jewish boy would have been bad enough; this was worse—proving that I was a nice boy, period. The Jew was nowhere to be seen; there were no Jews in the stories, no Newark, and not a sign of comedy—the last thing I wanted to do was to hand anybody a laugh in literature.”

  92. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 34. See also the profile by Steve Neal, “The Quintessential Chicago Writer,” Chicago Tribune Magazine, 16 September 1979, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 179: “Since young writers are and should be imitative, in my first book (Dangling Man), I imitated Rilke’s Journal of My Other Self [the novel’s title in the 1930 translation by John Linton].” Malte, the protagonist of Rilke’s novel, like Joseph, is in his twenties, and at the loosest of loose ends (the following quotations are from a translation by Burton Pike [Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008]): “I think I should learn to work on something,” Malte declares in an early notebook entry, “I am twenty-eight and just about nothing has happened. Let’s summarize: I have written a study of Carpaccio, which is bad, a drama called Marriage that tries to prove something false by ambiguous means, and poems” (p. 13). “No-one” knows about Malte (p. 15). He wanders Paris aimlessly, or lies in bed all day, “and my day, which nothing interrupts, is like a dial without a hand” (p. 46). His thoughts turn to art and ideas, but he lacks power in both realms. Malte also shares Joseph’s complex feelings about modernity. The world he inhabits is Joseph’s modern world: “we have no theatre, as little as we have a God: for that you need community. Everyone has his own particular ideas and fears” (p. 171). Like Joseph, Malte is torn between resistance to this world, and a concomitant sense of loss, on the one hand, and a desire to fit his art, or artistic sense, to it, on the other. His isolation or alienation is not just from friends and, especially, family, but from the twentieth century, which he nonetheless feels he must embrace, again like Joseph. In addition to these resemblances, the novel, like Dangling Man, is dominated by its narrator’s feelings and thoughts rather than his actions and it has hardly any plot.

  93. ​Harold Kaplan to Melvin Tumin, undated, but from autumn 1942. Kaplan’s letters are in the possession of Melvin Tumin’s widow, Sylvia.

  94. ​See Chapter 1, note 17, for a description of the photograph.<
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  95. ​Bruce Cook, “Saul Bellow: A Mood of Protest,” Perspectives on Ideas and the Arts, 12 February 1963, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 14.

  96. ​SB, IAAU, pp. 61, 61–62.

  97. ​Though the letter to Tumin is undated, it was probably written sometime in the first half of 1943, perhaps as late as April–May, since in it SB predicts “I shall be finished in a month, for certain and perhaps sooner,” and Vanguard accepted the novel in early July. But this is also the letter in which SB says he’s written “twenty-thousand words already and not come one third of the whole way.”

  98. ​The letter from which this quotation comes is also undated. Erich Fromm (1900–1980) was a German Jewish psychoanalytic theorist, educated in Germany and associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. After fleeing the Nazis in 1934, he arrived in New York, obtaining a teaching post at Columbia. In Escape from Freedom (1941), the first of his books to be published in English, Fromm distinguishes modern man from medieval man, who, though “not free in the modern sense,” was neither alone nor isolated: “In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social world from the moment of birth, [medieval] man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need for doubt” ([New York: Rinehart, 1941], pp. 41–42). As SB paraphrases Fromm in the letter to Tumin, modern man has lost this security, and with it a connection with nature, “inward and outward.” He has done so, however, through a hard-won and ennobling battle for freedom, which produces “loneliness and anxiety,” feelings often too frightening and painful to bear. Seeking to escape anxious isolation, through what Fromm calls “automaton conformity” (as in Joseph’s submission to “regimentation”), results in both psychological conflict and destructiveness, in which one simultaneously hates and seeks to destroy the world in a “desperate attempt to save myself from being destroyed by it” (p. 177).

  99. ​Chief among these questions is how best to respond to fallen modernity, whether to resist it or resign oneself to it (with Flaubertian or Hemingwayesque sangfroid). It is possible that the balance is tipped in resistance’s favor by resignation’s most eloquent spokesman in the novel, Joseph’s alter ego, the Dostoyevskian “Spirit of Alternatives,” called also “On the Other Hand” and “Tu As Raison Aussi.” This “Spirit” is an equivalent of, or nod to, Ivan Karamazov’s “Grand Inquisitor.” Daniel Fuchs, in Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), p. 42, calls the Inquisitor “a representation of [Ivan’s] own worst, his own ‘stupidest’ ideas and tendencies,” implying a similar valuing of Joseph’s “Spirit.” Dostoyevsky ultimately looks down on Ivan for his ideas, as he looks down on the Underground Man, whom Joseph also resembles, and whom Dostoyevsky treats comically. Whether a similar distance separates SB from Joseph is less certain.

  100. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 99. Evidence for Rahv’s view comes early in the novel, when Joseph admits that dangling is “only one of the sources of my harassments,” only “the backdrop against which I can be seen swinging” (p. 5).

  101. ​Edmund Wilson, “Doubts and Dreams: Dangling Man under a Glass Bell,” New Yorker, 1 April 1944. SB had met Wilson in Hyde Park, sat in on a course he was offering at the University of Chicago on Dickens, and greatly admired him, but they were never close. After the review of Dangling Man, SB asked Wilson in 1945 if he’d be a referee on his second application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, and Wilson agreed, but he was never again to write about SB’s fiction in public. Wilson’s brief reference was for both Randall Jarrell and SB. In it he calls SB “a first-rate candidate. He hasn’t yet shown himself to be so remarkable as Jarrell, but he is younger, I believe, and has written one interesting and rather original novel.”

  102. ​Compare Schwartz’s account of his generation’s disillusion, as depicted in Dangling Man, with Dwight Macdonald’s essay “Reading from Left to Right,” Partisan Review 8, no. 1 (January–February 1941): 30: “By now, bourgeois democracy is broken down so completely as a social and economic system that increasingly large sections of the population have lost all faith in it. They just don’t believe the words any more.”

  103. ​According to Atlas, Biography, p. 101. Diana Trilling’s review appeared in the issue of 15 April 1944, under the heading “Fiction in Review.”

  104. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 309.

  105. ​This quotation is from the Koch interview. More fully: “I wasn’t called up for the draft until 1943 or so. I meant to take part in the war but I was writing. So I kept saying well all right I’ll do it. Then I had the surgery and then I decided to go to the Merchant Marine.”

  106. ​Botsford interview, SB, IAAU, pp. 309–10. The moment Hitler was recognized for “what he was” was reached at different points by SB’s contemporaries. Alfred Kazin, in New York Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), pp. 26–27, recalls coming to it at an earlier date: “1943. Now began the nightmare that would bring everything else into question.… The Nazis had organized the killing of every Jew within their grasp.… The systematic killing of Jews had not begun by the time we entered the war. But by the end of 1942 and especially the terrible spring of 1943, when the Warsaw ghetto was destroyed after its last desperate attack on the Nazis it was clear.” In contrast, Lionel Abel seems to have come to his realization about Hitler even later than SB. As he explains in Intellectual Follies, pp. 270–71, “when a Polish refugee in 1941 told the American Supreme Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter, of having witnessed mass executions of Jews, Frankfurter replied, ‘I don’t say you’re lying, but I don’t believe you.’ In Trotskyist circles, it was generally assumed that stories of mass executions were allied propaganda.… For their position was that there was equal lying on both sides, and this naturally created on the left an additional difficulty in assessing the truth of stories of Nazi mass murder, and when the war was over there were other embarrassments for the left. How was it that the Polish Socialists had not generously provided arms to the Jews fighting the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto? How was it that the Russian Red Army had remained on the other side of the Vistula—thus giving the Nazi army time in which to put down the Polish resistance movement and execute its leaders—before advancing into Poland? … But I had no real revelation of what had occurred until sometime in 1946, more than a year after the German surrender, when I took my mother to a motion picture and we saw in a newsreel some details of the American army going into the concentration camps at Buchenwald.”

  7. NEW YORK

  1. ​According to Irving Kristol, in an interview. See Chapter 11 of The Adventures of Augie March (1953), reprinted in Saul Bellow: Novels 1944–1953: “The house where I was living on the South Side was a student house within range of the university chimes and chapel bell when the evenings were still, and it had a crowded medieval fullness, besides, of hosts inside the narrow walls, faces in every window, every inch occupied. I had some student book customers and even several friends here” (p. 613). That house is operated by Owens, an old Welshman, and his spinster sister, not Mrs. Huppeler.

  2. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 104.

  3. ​Ibid., p. 92.

  4. ​For the Syntopicon and Great Books series, see Herman Kogan, The Great EB (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Mortimer Adler, Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography, 1902–1976 (New York: Macmillan, 1977); and Mary Ann Dzuback, Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); see also Dwight Macdonald’s devastating attack, “The Book-of-the-Millennium Club,” New Yorker, 25 November 1952.

  5. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 89. Himmelfarb had hoped also to get a job at the Committee. She was interviewed for a position by Nef but turned down: “he really wanted a medievalist.”

  6. ​See “Syntopicon Booklet Draft,” Box 4, Special Collections, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago; for rejected topics, see Mortimer J. Adler to Bruce Barton, 22 April 1950, also Spe
cial Collections, in the Adler Papers.

  7. ​For the topics SB oversaw, see his annotation to the manuscript of Ruth Miller’s Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination, among the SB Papers; for the works and authors he indexed, see Atlas, Biography, p. 93.

  8. ​First published in The National Interest, Spring 1993, reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 105.

  9. ​Steven J. Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion and the Furies of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 55.

  10. ​There are five substantial manuscripts in the Regenstein concerned with the Zetland character. All are undated but seem to come from the late 1960s and the 1970s. The longest, titled “Zetland and Quine,” is 117 pages. What seems to be an earlier version of this manuscript, labelled “Z & Q,” is one hundred pages long. A third manuscript, titled simply “Zetland,” is also one hundred pages. SB has written on the first page of this manuscript: “Harriet—kindly keep this copy. There’ll be more.” “Harriet” is Harriet Wasserman, who worked in the office of SB’s literary agents, Russell and Volkening. By the early 1970s, with the decline of Henry Volkening’s health (he died in 1972), she became SB’s sole agent. The fourth manuscript, “Charm and Death” (ninety-seven pages), is referred to in a letter to SB of 1 December 1970 from Volkening: “Alan Williams [of Viking] has had this morning delivered to me the first 91 pages of Charm and Death.… I will, of course, bear in mind that this is a first draft.” Finally, there is “An Exalted Madness,” a twenty-six-page manuscript. Zetland is basically the same character in all the manuscripts and there is much overlap of material, but there are differences. “Charm and Death” is probably the most finished of the manuscripts. The short story “Zetland: By a Character Witness” is the only portion of the Zetland material to be published in SB’s lifetime. In early versions of what would become Humboldt’s Gift, Zetland material was included; the novel was to be more evenly split between New York and Chicago settings. Atlas conjectures that when in the fall of 1978 Harriet Wasserman had lunch with Erwin Glickes, the editorial director of Harper and Row, and Glickes offered SB a two-book contract for “A Non-Fiction Book About Chicago” and “a Greenwich Village love story,” that the latter was “probably the ‘Zetland’ manuscript” (Atlas, Biography, p. 481). The “Bad Housekeeping” reference comes from Chapter 1 of “Zetland and Quine.”