The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  11. ​Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1987), p. 51. According to Alfred Kazin, in Starting Out in the Thirties (1962; London: Secker & Warburg, 1966), pp. 72–73, Hook was “the most devastating logician the world had ever seen.… Humorless but never petty; obstinate but not malicious; domineering but not self-centered.”

  12. ​Howe’s reference to Rosenfeld as “golden boy” (also “wunderkind”) comes from A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 133; Bazelon’s Yiddishing of “golden boy” comes from Nothing but a Fine Tooth Comb: Essays in Social Criticism, 1944–1969 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969), p. 19.

  13. ​Bazelon, Nothing but a Fine Tooth Comb, p. 18.

  14. ​Lionel Trilling, “Four Decades of American Prose,” Nation, 7 November 1942.

  15. ​Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), p. 40.

  16. ​Ibid., pp. 40, 41.

  17. ​Ibid., pp. 41, 42.

  18. ​Ibid., p. 42.

  19. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 83.

  20. ​Howe, Margin of Hope, p. 169.

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

  22. ​William Phillips, A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life (New York: Stein & Day, 1983), pp. 118, 119.

  23. ​Janet Richards, Common Soldiers: A Self-Portrait and Other Portraits (San Francisco: Archer, 1979), p. 119.

  24. ​Eileen Simpson, Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir (1982; New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 218.

  25. ​Ann Birstein, What I Saw at the Fair: An Autobiography (New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2003), p. 121.

  26. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 101.

  27. ​Kazin, New York Jew, p. 42.

  28. ​In the second Guggenheim application, SB adds Edmund Wilson to his list of referees. His dual reference for SB and Randall Jarrell is discussed in note 101 of the previous chapter. More fulsome praise comes from Kazin and Farrell, though Farrell also puts SB second in comparison with another applicant for whom he is writing. “I consider Mr. Bellow to be the most honest, the most serious, the most gifted of what seems to me to be a group of writers and intellectuals, younger than myself, whose attitudes and values are quite different from my own,” Farrell confesses. The “note of disillusionment” SB shares with others of his generation, “for instance, the writer and critic, Mr. Isaac Rosenfeld,” is not to Farrell’s taste, but is sounded “honestly, and with a real literary gift.” For Henle, SB is “of all the young men who in recent years have come under my observation … the most gifted, the most intelligent and the most sincere.” Kazin calls him “one of the most talented writers of our generation, and one who brings to the novel a background of genuine learning.”

  29. ​Atlas, Biography, pp. 86–87. These reviews, for which SB received “five bucks apiece” (according to reminiscences recorded in a transcript of remarks made on 15 October 1985 at the Whiting Foundation Writers’ Program Ceremony), were unsigned. Among New York Times Book Review articles written by SB in the 1940s are “A Revolutionist’s Testament,”21 November 1943, a review of Arthur Koestler’s novel Arrival and Departure; “Irish Egoist and Patriot,” a review of Harold Nicholson, The Desire to Please, 3 October 1943; and “Belgian Picaroon,” a review of Charles De Coster, The Great Adventures of Tyl Ulenspiegl, 31 October 1943. Atlas, Biography, p. 85, says “one of his first assignments was Maurice Samuel’s The World of Sholom Aleichem (1943).”

  30. ​SB, foreword to William Phillips, ed., Sixty Years of Great Fiction from Partisan Review (Boston: Partisan Review Press, 1997), p. viii.

  31. ​See SB to Victoria Miller, 16 July 1996: “What Eleanor Clark and I had in common before her marriage to Red Warren were our literary interests. We wrote for the Partisan Review and met occasionally at its offices in the Village. I know little or nothing of her personal life at that time. She did put me up for a job at the O.S.S. and I went down to Washington in a train compartment with two Intelligence gentlemen. The trouble then was that I was still a Canadian citizen and therefore ineligible for the job. The gentlemen in the train, smooth and experienced operatives, had nothing to offer me except entertainment. One of them had been in Russia in 1917. There he had known Lenin and Trotsky and numerous lesser Bolsheviks. His impersonations were very funny.” SB fictionalizes this encounter in one of the “Zetland” manuscripts, “Zetland and Quine,” pp. 38–40.

  32. ​Kaplan’s comments come from an undated letter to Mel Tumin, in the possession of Tumin’s widow, Sylvia. Allanah Harper (1904–92) founded Echanges: Revue Trimestrielle de Littérature Anglaise et Française in 1929 with the express purpose of introducing English writers to the French and vice versa. Among the English authors she published were W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Ivy Compton-Burnett; among her French authors were André Gide and Henri Michaux.

  33. ​Dana Tasker to Ik Shuman, 13 August 1943, in the New York Public Library, Records, Manuscripts and Archives section, quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 91.

  34. ​SB television interview with Melvin Bragg, reprinted as “Off the Couch by Christmas,” in The Listener, 20 November 1975.

  35. ​SB interview, “The Quintessential Chicago Writer,” in Chicago Tribune Magazine, 16 September 1979, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 175.

  36. ​Phillips, A Partisan View, p. 110. For Agee’s reputation, see Morris Dickstein, who knew him, in Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), p. 108: “Agee was a legend in his own time: an incandescent, self-consuming personality, a bohemian in the 1920s style, by then out of style, a poet trapped at Time, Inc., a hard drinker and luminous talker who could describe a movie lovingly, frame by frame, yet also a Christian gentleman from Tennessee by way of Exeter and Harvard who felt compelled to do penance for his mildly privileged background.”

  37. ​Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 196.

  38. ​For SB on Agee, see the “Zetland” manuscript, in which Zetland gets a job at Time: “Jim Agee was one of Zetland’s Village friends. Chambers valued and trusted Agee and hired Zet on his recommendation but was intensely suspicious of him. Not on political grounds; he knew that Zet was an anti-Stalinist; but Zet was too odd, too kinky for him.… Princely Agee, a gentleman (Exeter, Yale [Harvard, in fact]) wooed Chambers for him.… Zet granted that Agee was a man of talent, and generous, and amiable, and handsome.… He sometimes added that Agee was too High Church for him. Too much T. S. Eliot business. Zet didn’t care for the professoriate, for culture heroes, for Wasp humanists and solemnities of tradition which he considered phoney” (pp. 8–9).

  39. ​SB, foreword to Phillips, ed., Sixty Years of Great Fiction from Partisan Review, p. vii.

  40. ​Phillips, A Partisan View, p. 13. John Reed Clubs, named after the American journalist, poet, and activist John Reed (1887–1920), were literary, artistic, and intellectual clubs encouraging young or unknown writers from the working classes. The first such club was founded in New York in 1929 by staff from New Masses magazine. Originally independent organizations, in 1930 they formally affiliated with Moscow, as did New Masses.

  41. ​Ibid., p. 36.

  42. ​Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties, p. 5.

  43. ​Phillips, A Partisan View, p. 38.

  44. ​Examples of abhorrent party policies include the defense of the Moscow trials; of Communist attacks on the Spanish workers’ party, POUM; of Popular Front alliances with so-called progressive capitalists; of the makers of soppy Hollywood films.

  45. ​Phillips, A Partisan View, pp. 47, 48.

  46. ​For Barrett’s portrait of Mary McCarthy, see The Truants, pp. 65–69. Here is Kazin on McCarthy: “Herself an orphan, with none of the pusillanimous d
ependence on family love that was the besetting weakness of so many anxious intellectuals, she turned the very outrageousness of her judgments into a social virtue. She operated on her circle, in Provincetown and New York, with open scorn, and impressed them—they who were so solemn—with her power to make them ridiculous” (Starting Out in the Thirties, p. 156).

  47. ​Frances Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 268.

  48. ​Phillips, A Partisan View, p. 48.

  49. ​Barrett, The Truants, p. 49.

  50. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 308. To Daniel Bell, SB’s attitude was uncomplicated: “Saul never liked the New York intellectuals, just really never liked them. Didn’t like Phillips or Rahv and others. He thought they were prattlers.”

  51. ​SB, “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” in IAAU, p. 105.

  52. ​Botsford interview, “A Second Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 326.

  53. ​Howe, A Margin of Hope, p. 159.

  54. ​Barrett, The Truants, p. 29.

  55. ​Ibid., p. 42.

  56. ​Howe, A Margin of Hope, p. 130. In rejected passages from an early draft of Humboldt’s Gift, a novel originally conceived of, according to Daniel Fuchs, whose work SB commended, as “a fusion of two separate novels, one about Humboldt and New York, one about Swiebel and Cantabile and Chicago,” SB offers satirical portraits of Rahv and Phillips, thinly fictionalized as Ablove and Sharfer, editors of Avantgarde, a left-wing literary magazine. Citrine, the narrator, praises Ablove, the Rahv character, for publishing important European writers in his magazine. Humboldt, modeled on Delmore Schwartz, cuts him off: “You’ve missed about ten essentials. What about the social climbing, the craze for upperclass gentile women, the big, declamatory fist, the ideas lifted from Wyndham Lewis, the funny deals with publishers?” Here is Citrine on Sharfer: he’s “Miaow Tse Tung, the revolutionary kittycat. Silly, also canny, weakly, hypochondriac, overpsychoanalyzed.” According to Citrine, Sharfer thinks “that the GPR is seeking his life because he was one of five hundred signers of a statement about the death of General Krivitsky.” (General Walter Krivitsky was a Soviet intelligence officer who revealed plans for the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He defected before World War II began and was found dead in New York in 1941, either having committed suicide or been murdered by Soviet intelligence. The largest Soviet foreign intelligence agency was GRU not GPR.) When Ablove turns down Humboldt’s request for a third share in Avantgarde, Humboldt accuses him of being in the pay of the State Department, an allusion to the CIA’s funding of Encounter and other European magazines. “All the anti-Stalinist radicals are being offered funds. Whittaker Chambers is Nixon’s pal and he advises him. Jay Lovestone is a big man in Washington now. He’s got all the ex-communists into this.” Humboldt then threatens Ablove: “Do you want me to tell your wife whom you’ve been sleeping with?” (“ ‘So you’ve switched from poetry to blackmail?’ said Ablove”). Later Ablove does down Humboldt behind his back, describing him to Citrine as “really a very misanthropic and cynical person who took you in by his kidding, his routines, his wide-ranging mind, his mad sense of fun, his charm, all camouflage for gloom, envy, hatred.” These passages, written by SB in the early 1970s, confirm accounts by other acquaintances of Rahv, Phillips, and Schwartz; their harshness, however, may misrepresent SB’s feelings in the 1940s, reflecting a later disaffection with left intellectuals, particularly in the 1960s. That SB chose not to include Ablove and Sharfer in Humboldt or any other published work ought also to be noted. Fuchs’s discussion of the passages is to be found in Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), pp. 234–45 and 252.

  As this episode suggests, there was much internal bickering and jockeying for position at PR. “I wasn’t very good at it,” SB admitted, in the second of two videotaped interviews he gave in 1987 to Sigmund Koch, “mainly because I didn’t have any interest in it. I didn’t see the point, and if they were going to write then they should be writing,” especially if they were good. Delmore Schwartz was more than good: “those early things of his were among the best things in this century by any American, but especially his story ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.’ ” As the Ablove and Sharfer passages suggest, however, Schwartz was among the magazine’s chief schemers. “So one was greatly stirred up,” SB recalls. “It is true that some of the people had more academic talent or more organizational talent than literary talent and some of them were tremendous promoters in the field of art and much of it was just fun. You just enjoyed watching them in action.”

  57. ​Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain, p. 267.

  58. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 112.

  59. ​Joseph Dorman, Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words (New York: Free Press, 2000), p. 102.

  60. ​Ibid., p. 102.

  61. ​Lionel Abel, The Intellectual Follies: A Memoir of the Literary Venture in New York and Paris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 52. Phillips’s account of his relations with Rahv is understandably different: “At first we did get along, at least enough to collaborate, or I thought we did. We were constantly arguing, sometimes violently, but there was sufficient basic agreement for the arguments to be settled by persuasion or compromise, or by a shifting of terms—a tactic at which Rahv was a master” (p. 271); “I did become aware early on that he would claim most of the credit for finding new writers and for other achievements of the magazine, leaving him free to deal with contributors and publishers and thus to be in on the more visible and the more rewarding activities. He was able to do this mostly by preserving his incompetence in the financial and other practical aspects of Partisan Review—and by my tolerance of this division of labor.… I had a general distaste for his almost reflexive reaching for the limelight and what amounted to a constant push for power” (pp. 271–72).

  62. ​Barrett, The Truants, p. 46.

  63. ​These entries from Alfred Kazin’s Journals, ed. Richard M. Cook (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), are from 10 January 1942 (p. 28), 30 August 1944 (p. 62), 30 August 1944 (p. 63), 30 September 1948 (p. 121), 3 January 1952 (p. 163), 23 September 1955 (p. 196), 31 January 1949 (p. 126), 3 October 1961 (p. 274), 24 January 1954 (p. 176), and 18 December 1958 (p. 238).

  64. ​Howe, A Margin of Hope, p. 140.

  65. ​Birstein, What I Saw at the Fair, pp. 106–7.

  66. ​Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), p. 335.

  67. ​In an untitled and undated manuscript among the Bellow Papers in the Regenstein, recalling a train trip SB took on the Long Island Rail Road with Rosenberg.

  68. ​SB, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth” (1982), reprinted in SB, CS, pp. 384–85. In Abstract Expressionism: A Tribute to Harold Rosenberg: Paintings and Drawings from Chicago Collections, by Harold Rosenberg, Edward A. Maser, and SB (Chicago: University of Chicago Press and David and Alfred Smart Gallery, 1979), p. 10, SB attributes Kippenberg’s remark to Rosenberg, who uttered it “many years ago in Chicago [when] he said he wanted to listen to something I had written. The hour was late, and after I’d read aloud for fifteen or twenty minutes and observed that he was nodding, I said, ‘I’m putting you to sleep.’ He said, ‘On the contrary, you’re keeping me awake.’ ”

  69. ​SB, “What Kind of a Day Did You Have?” (1984), reprinted in SB, CS, p. 288 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  70. ​Journey to the End of the Night was much pondered and referred to by SB, as well as frequently chosen for “Fundamentals” or qualifying examinations by graduate students in the Committee on Social Thought, where he taught for over thirty years. For the episode referred to here, in which Robinson is shot dead by his mistress, see SB to the Canadian psychoanalyst and writer Norman Doidge, in a fax transcript of a telephone interview, 26 April 2000: “What got [Allan] Bloom especially about Céline was the conclusion of the Journey to the End of the Nigh
t, where Robinson’s girlfriend, a tramp, insists that he say, ‘I love you.’ Robinson is a nihilist, and he says, ‘No, I won’t say that.’ She says, ‘You do get a hard on as do other men!’ But Robinson says, ‘I refuse to say the phony thing.’ On this matter of love, Robinson had a rigorous principle: he wouldn’t say I love you to a tramp who would pump herself up with self-importance. She takes her gun out of her purse, and says, ‘Are you going to say it or not.’ ‘No,’ he says. So she shoots him dead. Bloom takes from this that even nihilists can’t sustain nihilism. No matter how much they have abused their lives with ideas, they still have principles. But I would say to him, ‘Maybe this nihilist was tired of life, and only too pleased to be shot.’ ”

  71. ​Richard Kaye, “Art Critic Harold Rosenberg Memorialized,” Chicago Maroon (University of Chicago student newspaper), 12 October 1979, p. 3.