The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  72. ​Atlas, Biography, pp. 353–54.

  73. ​SB, IAAU, p. 105. In Dorman, Arguing the World, p. 71, SB distinguishes between two kinds of PR critics: “one the professorial type and the other, the free-wheeling type. Harold Rosenberg was a free-wheeling type, whereas Lionel Trilling was a professorial type. And I didn’t take too much interest in the professorial ones and I was mad for Harold Rosenberg. On every subject under the sun he has developed a view.”

  74. ​From a note by SB entered in a small undated spiral notebook among his papers in the Regenstein. In A Margin of Hope, p. 114, Irving Howe describes meeting Rosenberg in 1947, shortly after publishing his first review in Commentary (of Rosenfeld’s Passage from Home): “At a party, I was approached by a giant of a man who looked like a pirate, complete with a game leg. In a rasping voice he said: ‘You’ll write better ones.’ From Harold Rosenberg, encouragement of sorts.” Howe recalls Philip Rahv’s comparably rough good humor: “In a gesture I later recognized as his way of opening a conversation, Rahv started poking his finger into my chest, establishing a tradition in which mockery served as a token of friendliness” (p. 118), a tradition that recalls Kazin wagging his finger under Philip Roth’s nose and telling him “You don’t understand a word I say. You don’t even understand when I say you don’t understand.”

  75. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 44.

  76. ​SB first encountered Rosenberg in person around the same time he encountered him on the page, through Philip Rahv, who “had a sense of responsibility towards the young writers he published in the Partisan Review. Fresh from Chicago, I was under his protection, and he said that I must meet Harold Rosenberg. We walked along Second Avenue, the three of us, and stopped for a cup of coffee at the Cafe Royal. There followed a long discussion of some problem in Marxist theory. This did not interest me greatly” (SB, in Rosenberg, Maser, and SB, Abstract Expressionism—A Tribute, p. 9).

  77. ​SB, IAAU, p. 134.

  78. ​Harold Rosenberg, “The Fall of Paris,” Partisan Review (November–December 1940), pp. 441, 442.

  79. ​Ibid., p. 448.

  80. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 308.

  81. ​Kazin, New York Jew, p. 152.

  82. ​The quotations from Abel and Rosenberg are from Howe, A Margin of Hope, pp. 135, 290. The term “action painting” was coined by Rosenberg in the essay “American Action Painters” in the December 1952 issue of ARTnews, reprinted in The Tradition of the New (1959; New York: Grove, 1961). In this essay Rosenberg describes action paintings as “events” rather than “objects,” “processes” rather than “products”: action painting “has broken down every distinction between art and life” (p. 28); the meaning of such a painting lies in how “the artist organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation” (p. 29). The task for the spectator or critic of abstract painting is “to think in a vocabulary of action: its inception, duration, direction—psychic state, concentration and relaxation of the will, passivity, waiting” (p. 29).

  83. ​Phillips, A Partisan View, p. 68.

  84. ​Greenberg’s essay is reprinted in Art and Culture: Criticial Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1961), where the quotation can be found on p. 208.

  85. ​Barrett, The Truants, p. 134.

  86. ​SB, foreword to Phillips, ed., Sixty Years of Great Fiction from Partisan Review, pp. viii, ix.

  87. ​T. J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1 (September 1982): 139.

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

  89. ​Quoted in Mark Shechner, ed., Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), p. 437, from a selection of undated entries from the journals Rosenfeld kept between 1941 and his death in 1956.

  90. ​The narrator of “Charm and Death” can’t help “poking fun” at “the little zoo” (p. 47) in the Zetlands’ apartment. In the manuscript entitled “Zetland,” this zoo consists of Smokey the dog, plus “gerbils, hamsters, Siamese cats, tropical birds and fishes.” It was so big because “friends who were moving or divorcing could give their animals to the humane Zetlands” (p. 33).

  91. ​SB, “Zetland,” p. 34.

  92. ​Before he turned against Rosenfeld, Alfred Kazin found visiting him exhilarating: “Going down the steps from that Barrow Street tenement,” he writes in New York Jew, “the sound of Isaac’s impeccable phrasing still in my ears, I felt that some promised beauty in my life waited for me” (pp. 52–53).

  93. ​Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives, p. 137; Kazin, New York Jew, p. 52.

  94. ​Richards, Common Soldiers, p. 153.

  95. ​Ibid., p. 155.

  96. ​“The ray that blights” might be Klonsky’s inability to work rather than work itself. Though relatively unproductive, that might be because, as he claimed, he suffered from writer’s block.

  97. ​In Shechner, ed., Preserving the Hunger, p. 443.

  98. ​Wallace Markfield, To an Early Grave (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), p. 16.

  99. ​Shechner, ed., Preserving the Hunger, p. 446. Here is Bazelon, in Nothing but a Fine Tooth Comb, p. 36, on women: “I can state this clearly: I always wanted conversation with women, primarily with women, and then to bed. Since women always take conversation as a form of weakness on the man’s part—and, this weakness coming from a ‘him,’ therefore status on their part—I was early in life called upon, painfully, to interrupt my own most desired conversation with women in a brutal manner, in order to get laid at all.… This was then held against me as exhibiting excessive carnal appetite and toward disinterest in Them-as-People.”

  100. ​Bazelon, Nothing but a Fine Tooth Comb, p. 25.

  101. ​A passage inspired by Kazin, who worked at Fortune, wrote about the Transcendentalists, and put people off with his intensity and earnestness. Kazin was not the only literary figure to work at Fortune: so, too, did John Chamberlain, Ralph Ingersoll, Dwight Macdonald, Archibald MacLeish, Robert Cantwell, Louis Kronenberger, and James Gould Cozzens. Writers who worked at Time, Inc. included not just James Agee but Robert Fitzgerald and John Hersey. According to Kazin, “the possibility of self-betrayal was as much a convention around Time, Inc. as it was in Hollywood” (Starting Out in the Thirties, pp. 111–12).

  102. ​SB shared something of Harold Rosenberg’s superior attitude to Greenwich Village, which he contrasted with the Tenth Street milieu favored by painters like de Kooning and Kline. As he explains: “In his ‘Tenth Street’ essay [Art News Annual, 1959] Harold shrewdly observes that modern Greenwich Village is a transplant, an imitation of Paris; its little trees, its crooked streets were meant to make painters feel more painterly. ‘Greenwich Village was the gate through which American artists entered the twentieth century as semi-Frenchmen,’ says Harold. In reaction to this, American painters ‘learned to speak in the modern idiom.’ The Village nevertheless had a good effect in a bad example. It was an eye-opener for ‘the artist who wished to begin with his own reality.’ Nobody could ‘mistake Tenth Street for an aesthetic creation.’ The artists’ block with its liquor shops, its poolroom and metal-stamping factory was identical ‘with rotting side streets in Chicago, Detroit and Boston.’ ” As SB puts it: “the setting chosen by the artist did reflect his conception of art. Simple location was unimportant. In a business society of advanced technology the artist must not expect to draw strength from an ‘art-life’ ” (Rosenberg, Maser, and SB, Abstract Impressionism—A Tribute, pp. 10–11).

  103. ​SB, foreword to Shechner, ed., Preserving the Hunger, p. 23.

  104. ​Though in a letter of 6 October 1965 SB seems willing to revive it, professing to be “dying to know what your fifth career will be—I’m not in a position to tease you about marriages [there were three], for perfectly obvious reasons.” After a period in the Village, Bazelon went to Yale Law School, became a corporate attorney in New York, worked brief
ly as a writer and interviewer for ABC television, taught law at Rutgers, then English and policy studies at SUNY Buffalo.

  105. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 37.

  106. ​These statistics come from http://www.usmm.org/casualty.html, which also states, in a revised posting of 26 August 2006, that “mariners suffered the highest rate of casualties of any service in World War II, but unfortunately, the U.S. Merchant Marine has no official historians and researchers, thus casualty statistics vary.” The figures supplied by the site are drawn from U.S. Coast Guard records, www.USMM.org; and Arthur R. Moore, A Careless Word—A Needless Sinking: A History of the Staggering Losses Suffered by the U.S. Merchant Marine, Both in Ships and Personnel, During World War II (Kings Points, NY: American Merchant Marine Museum, 1998).

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

  108. ​SB, in Atlas, Biography, p. 105.

  109. ​SB, in ibid., p. 109.

  110. ​From an undated letter of condolence of 1945 (over the death of Freifeld’s father), printed in Taylor, ed., Letters, pp. 39–40.

  111. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 108.

  112. ​Information about Arthur Lidov and his relations with SB in the 1940s and 1950s comes from Alexandra Lidov in emails to the author (28 August 2010 and 24 September 2010).

  113. ​Richard M. Cook, Alfred Kazin: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 109.

  114. ​Ibid. According to Alexandra Lidov, Kazin lived at 91 Pineapple Street at the time of SB’s initial meeting with Lidov, but in a different apartment.

  115. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 108.

  116. ​Where SB stayed in New York before the Lidovs’ invitation to join them in Patterson is unclear, perhaps with the Rosenfelds, perhaps with David Bazelon. Also unclear is the Lidovs’ financial situation at the end of 1945: Atlas describes them at this period as “so poor that whenever Arthur got paid by a magazine, Victoria drove the seventy miles to New York to pick up the check instead of waiting for it to arrive in the mail” (Biography, p. 108); Cook describes them as “suddenly in the money” (Alfred Kazin: A Biography, p. 109) because of what Alexandra Lidov calls “a quite spectacular entry into illustration.”

  117. ​Krueger had been the Socialist Party candidate for vice president under Norman Thomas in 1940.

  118. ​Kazin, New York Jew, p. 150; the harsh journal descriptions of Lidov come from an entry in Kazin’s Journals of 15 March 1983 (memories occasioned by Kazin’s chance meeting with Lidov’s first wife, Victoria, in a Chinese restaurant in New York). This entry is not included in Cook’s selection of Alfred Kazin’s Journals but he kindly supplied me with a transcript. The original can be consulted in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.

  119. ​According to Daniel Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, p. 65.

  120. ​Kazin, reporting SB’s question and astonishment, in New York Jew, p. 65.

  121. ​“The war had just ended,” SB recalled in a letter of 5 October 1998 to Steve Hare, who was researching the history of Penguin Books: “I was trying to write The Victim, my second novel, and I did all kinds of jobs to feed my sheep and stay alive myself.”

  122. ​SB’s quotations come from the transcript of remarks made on 15 October 1985 at the Whiting Foundation Writers’ Program Ceremony (see note 29 above).

  123. ​See John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); and Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  124. ​The sickly atmospherics of the city are also picked up in “the blink of the yellow light” of an approaching bus (after which “an eddy of exhaust gas caught him in the face”) (p. 262), and in the harbor at night, “the crimson and yellow spots hung from the cranes and hulls swinging between the slip and the incandescent low crust of the shore” (p. 268).

  125. ​Though young Charlie Citrine in Humboldt mentions nothing of Schopenhauer when he arrives for the first time in New York in 1938, he does allude to Nietzsche (and Shelley in Platonic mode). Charlie was then “a person keenly aware of painted veils, of Maya, of domes of many-coloured glass staining the white radiance of eternity, quivering in the intense inane and so on. I was a nut about such things” (p. 6).

  126. ​For an early example of such esteem, see SB to Mel Tumin, October 1942 [according to a penciled scrawl at its head, perhaps by SB]: “The East was a good thing for me. I went around receiving my accolades. It was such a relief to come out of the Chicago basin where two or three friends had made me subsist on their estimates and to find in the larger world of New York that I was regarded as an up-and-comer. Bertram D. Wolf said my story [“The Mexican General”] was one of the finest he had ever seen an American writer do on Mexico. Clement Greenberg said … I don’t want to quote all these testimonials myself, it would seem like such self-gilding. I will simply name the names: Mary McCarthy, Nigel Denis, Alfred Kazin, ad regurgitam.”

  8. MINNEAPOLIS

  1. ​Shortly after the war ended, Freifeld was sent overseas as a criminal investigator, first in Berlin, then in England, where he was discharged in February 1946. These and other details of his war service come from his daughter, Judith Ward, in an email of 17 March 2012.

  2. ​At the same time, as we shall see, as he treated SB’s second wife.

  3. ​SB’s objections to McClosky’s empirical or “scientific” psychology were related to comparable objections to the findings of anthropology and sociology: “I listen to them [sociologists] here,” he writes in a letter of 21 April 1948 to Mel Tumin, himself a sociologist, “with every effort to be fair and understanding but I can’t make out their Man. Surely that’s not homo sapiens, mon sembable! The creature the theologians write about is far closer to me.”

  4. ​ For McWilliams and anti-Semitism in Minneapolis, see Max Kampelman, Entering New Worlds: The Memoirs of a Private Man in Public Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 64.

  5. ​See Chapter 6, note 84, on the question of where SB and Tumin first met.

  6. ​A rationale for the Humanities Program is provided by its cofounder, Alburey Castell, in “The Humanities in the Modern World,” the first of three lectures delivered to the Machette Foundation, Purdue University, March 1948. The printed version of the first lecture is fifteen pages long, followed by an outline of Humanities I, II, and III. The topics and texts discussed are worth enumerating, since SB would be thinking about and teaching them, at least some of them, while at Minnesota. In Humanities I they were “God and the World” (Voltaire, Candide; Paine, The Age of Reason, Part 1; Goethe, Faust, Part I; Durant, Story of Philosophy, Chapters 5–7); “Man in Society” (Rousseau, The Social Contract, Parts I and II; Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France; Tolstoy, War and Peace; Becker, Modern History, Chapters 6–9); “Poetry and Art” (no texts specified). In Humanities II they were “Industrial Revolution” (Carlyle, Past and Present; Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto; Zola, Germinal; Becker, Modern History, Chapters 16–19); “Liberalism” (Mill, On Liberty; Ibsen, A Doll’s House and Other Plays; Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov); “Poetry and Art” (no texts specified). In Humanities III the topics and texts were “The Impact of Science” (Thomas Huxley, Agnosticism and Christianity and Other Essays; Turgenev, Fathers and Sons; Arnold, Literature and Science and Other Essays; Bury, History of Freedom of Thought, Chapters 6–8); “Civilization on Trial” (Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra; Shaw, Major Barbara and Back to Methuselah; Mann, The Magic Mountain; Durant, Story of Philosophy, Chapters 8–9); and “Poetry and Art” (no texts specified).

  7. ​For these and other statistics and facts about the University of Minnesota in 1946–48, see Stanford Lehmberg and Ann M. Pflaum, The University of Minnesota, 1945–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 4–30.

  8. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 115. Warren, a professor in the Department of English at Minnesota, was
on leave from the university; SB had met him before his appointment.

  9. ​Email, 25 November 2009.

  10. ​Atlas, Biography, pp. 115–16.

  11. Ibid., p. 115.

  12. ​SB to Robert Penn Warren, 17 November 1947, excerpted in Taylor, ed., Letters, p. 45.

  13. ​Atlas, Biography, pp. 114–15; Unger’s comment is on p. 115.

  14. ​Ibid., p. 116.

  15. ​For Beach and Warren on Beach, see Joseph Blotner, Robert Penn Warren: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 202.

  16. ​Ibid.

  17. ​See SB to Bazelon, 22 November 1946: “Gott sei dank, The Victim is in the penultimate stage. Only the epilogue remains to be written.”

  18. ​This second part of Sartre’s book—extended essay, really—focuses on the “Jew” rather than the “anti-Semite” and was even more controversial than the first, prompting immediate responses from Sidney Hook and Harold Rosenberg. Both were exercised by Sartre’s claim that the Jewish people “have no history. The sole tie that binds them is the hostility and disdain of the societies which surround them” (Anti-Semite and Jew, tr. George J. Becker [1948; New York: Schocken, 1965], p. 91). In SB’s words, “for Sartre, the Jew exists because he is hated, not because he has a history, not because he has origins of his own—but simply because he is designated, created, in his Jewishness by an outrageous evil” (quoted in Gordon Lloyd Harper, “The Art of Fiction: Saul Bellow,” Paris Review 9, no. 36 [1966], reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 74). Excerpts from Anti-Semite and Jew appear in Commentary in 1948 in the issues of April (“The Situation of the Jew”), May (“Portrait of an Inauthentic Jew”), and June (“Gentile and Jew”).

  19. ​Lional Abel, The Intellectual Follies: A Memoir of the Literary Venture in New York and Paris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 73.

  20. ​Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 254.

  21. ​Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 48.

  22. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 15.