57. This anecdote, from Atlas, Biography, p. 277, was confirmed in an interview with Peltz, who admitted he had been unwise in trying to bring the two together again.
58. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, pp. 105, 106.
59. Atlas, Biography, p. 282, claims “Bellow had at least one fling with a student” at Minnesota.
60. Adam Bellow, “When My Parents Were in Love,” Talk Magazine, October 1999.
61. Schwartz was a specialist in bankruptcy and corporate reorganization. He was a longtime member of the Minneapolis Urban League and the Minneapolis United Negro College Fund and according to an obituary in The Minneapolis Tribune (27 June 1966) “was the leader in many civil rights battles including the integration of the armed forces.” With Walter Mondale, Schwartz successfully argued in the Supreme Court for the integration of the National Guard. He was also a union organizer and drew up Minnesota’s fair employment practices legislation.
62. Atlas, Biography, p. 283.
63. Whether this is what is left of the $5,000 loan from Sasha’s mother, or is another loan entirely, is not clear.
64. The caricature is cruel, but not wholly inaccurate, judging by the violence and volatility of Schwartz’s language, in person and on paper. In a letter of 19 October 1960, SB wrote to Schwartz to say that “I don’t want to get into an argument with you; I’m fond of you and I think your heart is in the right place” (he may have changed his mind over the course of the composition of Herzog). Toward the end of the letter he adds, “Greet the bourgeoisie of Minneapolis for me. They all come to your cellar to drink your whiskey and enjoy your emotional outbursts.” This letter had been written in response to a letter of 14 October from Schwartz: “My one hope is that with the passing of time you will appreciate the unenviable position I have been in during this last year, both with respect to yourself and with respect to your former wife. Each time I think of the trouble we have given each other I feel like kicking myself.… At least I, in my own mind, feel that I have maintained my integrity to Adam, for whom as a lawyer, I had a primary responsibility.” In an email of 20 September 2014, Schwartz’s daughter, Miriam Schwartz Shelomith, writes: “I do remember the screaming bouts between Saul and Father in the living room. They were followed by tears and hugs being shared by the two men.”
65. See Helen Grisky to SB, 21 April 1960: “Of course I knew Minneapolis wouldn’t be gay for you and from your letter it sounded dreadful.… You mentioned London again. Please don’t think I’ve kept a bad memory of our weekend. There was so much warmth in it, for me at least.”
66. Jara Ribniker’s letters are undated; she and SB stayed in touch into the 1970s. SB tried to get Alina Slesinska a show in the United States. See letter to SB of 18 April 1960 from Peter Selz, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: “I would be most happy to write her a letter welcoming her to NewYork.… I could also mention that I will try to find a gallery connection for her in this country.”
67. The Maude letter, dated 18 July 1960, gives no last name; she seems to have been an editor or publisher.
68. See SB, To Jerusalem and Back, p. 129. Maury and Sam Bellows helped the Westreichs to obtain their apartment and Lisa wrote to SB on 20 April 1960 sending kind regards to all “your noble family” and reiterating her thanks to “your dearest brothers.” In a letter to SB of 18 July 1960, Lisa writes of opening a small café in Holon called Café Riga.
69. Ibid.
70. SB, ed. and intro., Great Jewish Short Stories (New York: Dell, 1963), pp. 14–15. According to Philip Siegelman, his wife, Ellen, helped SB to choose stories for the anthology.
71. SB adds that Babel could have written in Yiddish, which he knew well, having been in charge of publishing the stories of Sholom Aleichem in Yiddish.
72. SB, ed. and intro., Great Jewish Short Stories, p. 16.
73. Ibid.
74. The house was designed by Edwin Lutyens and previously owned by Sir Simon Marks of Marks and Spencer (Weidenfeld’s first wife was a Sieff, a granddaughter of the firm’s founder).
75. The Drabble quotations come from an obituary in The Guardian, 2 June 1989.
76. These quotations were transcribed by McCarthy’s biographer, Frances Kiernan, and sent to SB on 28 February 1999 for checking. I have quoted from SB’s undated hand-corrected versions, now among his papers in the Regenstein. Kiernan’s biography was Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).
77. Atlas, Biography, p. 287.
78. After her mother’s death in February 1961 following a brain operation in Chicago, Sasha eventually received $11,000 in her will. This money she used to move to Skokie, partly to look after her aunt Cookie, devastated by the death of her sister. Her father tried to get his hands on the money, Sasha claims, with the help of Sam Goldberg. Sasha’s inheritance suggests that the $5,000 SB received from her mother, over which they fought so bitterly two years earlier, was unlikely to have been “everything she had,” as Sasha claims in the memoir (p. 100), though doubtless Sasha did not know this at the time.
79. From an interview with Atlas, who quotes him in Biography, p. 296. Paul Meehl may have suggested Ellis as a therapist; he wrote the foreword to Daniel N. Weiner’s Albert Ellis: Passionate Skeptic (New York: Praeger, 1988).
80. SB, “Ralph Ellison in Tivoli,” The Bardian (Spring 1999), p. 11. This article is the prime source of further details of the two writers’ time together at Tivoli; a second source is Rosette Lamont, “Bellow Observed: A Serial Portrait,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas 8, no. 1 (Fall 1974).
81. According to Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography, p. 252, “Ralph’s love of technological precision would extend even to brewing coffee, in which he would be schooled by a friend on the Tuskegee faculty. Saul Bellow remembered that ‘he had been taught by a chemist to do it with ordinary laboratory paper filters and water at room temperature. The coffee then was heated in a bain-marie—a pot within a pot. Never allowed to boil. Using a thermometer at every brewing, he precisely kept the water between 195 and 200 degrees fahrenheit.”
82. SB, “Ralph Ellison at Tivoli,” p. 11.
83. Atlas, Biography, p. 301.
84. Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography, p. 376; see also SB, “Ralph Ellison in Tivoli,” p. 12.
85. These quotations are from a typescript in the Regenstein of an address or tribute for Ellison written in 1996, different from SB’s remarks at the 1998 memorial service for Ellison at the 92nd Street Y in New York.
86. See Richard Stern to SB, 19 May 1960: “The comments on your reading all indicate that it went extremely well, despite your encounter with a couple of the creeps. The one who asked about ‘bad taste’ really is a sewer.”
87. Rosette Lamont, “Bellow Observed: A Serial Portrait,” p. 248.
88. Atlas, Biography, p. 301.
89. Berryman was reporting to SB in a letter of 10 October 1960 about his visit to Minneapolis in June.
90. In her memoir, Sasha identifies the dental assistant as “Pat.” Further identification may be provided in a letter to Ralph Ross, 12 June 1961, in which SB professes himself “surprised by your saying my wounds must be still raw. They seem to me fairly well-healed.… [Only] now and then a piece of ‘intelligence’ reaches me which re-opens old grievances. At Yale, last fall … I was accosted by someone who ‘knew’ from Pat Reeves etc., and that was disagreeable, of course.”
91. The details concerning Ross come from Atlas, Biography, p. 305. The “Be a mensch” anecdote comes from interviews with Phil Siegelman and Mitzi McClosky; “Be a man” is how Sasha remembers Ross’s advice in her memoir (p. 104).
92. As often in SB’s correspondence, there is a bravura character to the passage, also some unclarity. The coupling of Ludwig and Sasha is clear, but what does “the meek shall inherit the hearse” mean? “Fidelity” is ironic and applies to
them both, though to Ludwig in particular; “talent, character and fidelity” suggests him rather than her. The “matters” SB refers to in the letter are now clearly personal not editorial. “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (“Shame be to him who thinks evil of it” or “Evil be to him who evil thinks”) is also ironic; impossible not to think badly of the behavior of Sasha and Ludwig, though the effects of doing so, of giving in to anger and suspicion, can be corrosive, lowering.
93. See Don Morrison, “Educational TV: Work for Unemployed Minds,” Minneapolis Sunday Times, 3 July 1960.
94. Ludwig’s refusal comes in an email of 19 April 2013 to his friend and ex-pupil Carolyn McGrath, who had forwarded an email from me asking if she thought it worth my while trying one more time to contact Ludwig. In my email I mentioned that what I’d written about Ludwig “he wouldn’t like—it is all about people accusing him of being like Iago or in love with Bellow or overbearing or boastful.… It doesn’t seem fair to have only such sources to draw on.”
95. Othello, V.ii.304–05.
14. SUSAN/HERZOG
1. See undated letter to Gregory Bellow, conjecturally dated February and printed in Taylor, ed., Letters, pp. 213–14.
2. SB to Susan Glassman, 16 January 1961.
3. Keith Botsford, Fragment VI of his memoirs, Fragments I–VI, p. 328 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers). For details of the memoir’s forthcoming publication see Chapter 11, note 73.
4. The sentence is from p. 25 of an earlier draft of Fragment VI. See also, from the revised version, “Saul was a pretty big flea to drop in Jaime’s ear” (p. 441).
5. Though SB smoked cigars early in his life, he had long given them up by 1961.
6. Lechoncito is the diminutive of lechón, meaning pig or suckling pig; so SB had not yet given up eating pork.
7. Atlas, Biography, p. 304. SB got on well with colleagues at the university, who were also friends of Botsford’s. He stayed in touch with Tom McMahon, who became chair of the English Department at Puerto Rico, and was a friend of Botsford’s from Yale, and his wife, Penny; with Robert “Sing” Stephenson, who ran the Humanities program, and his much younger wife, Halle; and with Joseph Summer.
8. SB in testimonial letter, 29 March 1991. The letter is typed on Boston University stationery with “Kennedy, William” written in the top right corner but is without an address line. SB was to recommend Kennedy to Pat Covici.
9. William Kennedy, “The Art of Fiction No. 111,” The Paris Review (Winter 1989): 5, online version.
10. Ibid., pp. 5, 3 online version.
11. Botsford can’t remember the subject of SB’s lecture.
12. Atlas, Biography, p. 254, says the talk was given “in the fall of 1957,” presumably on a visit from Minnesota, where SB was living and teaching. It might also have been delivered in January or February 1958, when SB was living and teaching in Evanston (from 7 January to 22 March). Susan Glassman was born in 1933 and in an interview Roth says she was twenty-three at the time of SB’s Hillel talk.
13. Roth thinks he’d seen SB once at a party at Richard Stern’s in the period between the Hillel talk and their first meeting in Stern’s creative writing class in May 1957. “I remember to this day his saying in response to something said in a jokey way, well Sondra keeps me on my toes, or something like that. And at the time, young stupid kid that I was, I sensed ‘bad marriage.’ ”
14. In Roth’s The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988; New York: Vintage, 1997), p. 96, he mentions that Josie, his tempestuous ex-lover, also attended the Hillel House talk: “Later in the evening, when I got back to my apartment, I found a scribbled note in my mailbox, tellingly succinct—and not even signed—to the effect that a rich and spoiled Jewish clotheshorse was exactly what I deserved.”
15. Frank Glassman also treated SB’s brother Sam and niece Lesha. He was a poker buddy of Sam’s doctor.
16. In the course of searching for his mother’s correspondence, Daniel Bellow showed me a thick packet of letters from rejected suitors. “All these guys going ‘I want to kill myself,’ all these tear-stained letters.”
17. See Susan Glassman to SB, 29 January 1961: “I will confess that your crack about my earnestness made me sore.”
18. Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007; New York: Vintage, 2008), p. 380.
19. Atlas, Biography, p. 310.
20. SB to Botsford, 7 June 1961.
21. These reviews appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, the newly founded New York Review of Books, and Saturday Review. His movie reviews appeared in Horizon in the issues of September and November 1962 and January and March 1963. Among the films he reviewed were Buñuel’s Viridiana (November 1962). For SB on film, see “At the Movies” in SB, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Reflections from Seven Decades, ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York: Viking, 2015), pp. 131–45.
22. SB, “Where Do We Go from Here? The Future of Fiction,” delivered as the Hopwood Lecture at the University of Michigan, reprinted in the Michigan Quarterly Review 1, no. 1 (Winter 1962): 27.
23. As SB puts it in the New York Times article, on the one hand, “the living heirs of Henry James and Virginia Woolf … have receded altogether too far from externals, from observation.… They give us very little information.… The novel of sensibility has failed to represent society and become totally uninteresting”; on the other hand, “those writers who wish to meet the demands of information have perhaps been successful as social historians, but they have neglected the higher forms of the imagination.” Among SB’s papers in the Regenstein is an essay entitled “On Fact and Feeling in the Novel,” which makes similar points: “On the one side books like Advise and Consent [by Allen Drury, winner of the 1960 Pulitzer Prize; a novel about the workings of the United States Senate]; on the other, Other Voices, Other Rooms [an autobiographical novel of 1948 by Truman Capote],” an opposition that leads SB to conclude that “the time may have come for the recombination of information and feeling in the novel.… The problem of the novelist in this generation … is to discover how to return, after his long absence, to the world.” I have been unable to discover if, where, or when this essay was published.
24. Alfred Kazin’s letter is undated; Ralph Ross’s letter is dated 21 January 1962; Harvey Swados’s letter was written on 10 August 1961. After Esquire published a second extract from the novel in August 1963, Edward Hoagland wrote on 12 September to say “You’re the very best we have, and, not only that, you’re my Sherwood Anderson and I will forever be grateful to you.” According to Volkening, in a letter to SB of 26 March 1963, SB received more for his extract ($1,000) than comparable extracts Esquire printed from Cheever ($750), Nabokov ($350), and Flannery O’Connor ($350).
25. Elizabeth Hardwick to SB, 13 January 1961.
26. SB to Keith Botsford, 24 July 1961.
27. Susan Dworkin’s comments on the Wagner State writer’s course come from her article in the March 1977 issue of Ms. magazine, “The Great Man Syndrome: Saul Bellow and Me,” republished in the Chicago Daily News, 5 May 1977.
28. Atlas, Biography, p. 310.
29. Atlas, Biography, p. 312.
30. See, for example, Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 551, with the novels of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce most immediately in mind: “There is often something confusing, something hazy about them, something hostile to the reality which they represent. We not infrequently find a turning away from the practical will to live, or delight in portraying it under its more brutal forms. There is hatred of culture and civilization, brought out by means of the subtlest stylistic devices which culture and civilization have developed, and often a radical and fanatical urge to destroy. Common to almost all of these novels is haziness, vague indefinability of meaning: precisely the kind of uninterpretable symbolism wh
ich is also to be encountered in other forms of art of the same period.”
31. Michael C. Kotkin, “Remembering Saul Bellow,” JUF News, May 2005 (a publication of the Jewish United Fund of Chicago).
32. The “Aria,” entitled “White House and Artists,” is reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 69.
33. Atlas, Biography, p. 317.
34. A remark not mentioned in SB’s “Aria.” For a recent acount of the remark and the evening, see Mark White, A Cultural History of an American Icon (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 44.
35. Atlas, Biography, p. 317, quotes SB as saying: “The next day I realized the president had spent the whole evening talking to David Rockefeller about fiscal matters.”
36. SB, “Literary Notes on Khrushchev,” Esquire, March 1961, reprinted in SB, IAAU.
37. Among the SB papers in the Regenstein are several Fundamentals lists circulated to Committee faculty, SB included. Here are two lists, the first from 1966, the second from 1967: List 1: Aristophanes, Clouds, Frogs; Aristotle, Ethics, Poetics; Augustine, De Ordine; Herodotus, History; Homer, Odyssey; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason; Paul, Romans; Plato, Apology, Crito, Republic; Ranke, History of the Popes; Sophocles, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus; Tolstoy, War and Peace; Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Adventures of Ideas, part one. List 2: Shakespeare, Richard III, Othello, Macbeth, The Tempest; Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, When We Dead Awaken; Faulkner, Light in August; Melville, Billy Budd; Plato, Apology, Crito, Phaedo; Aristotle, Ethics, Poetics; Spinoza, Ethics; Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals; Husserl, Cartesian Meditations; Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
38. Joseph Epstein, “My Friend Edward,” in Edward Shils, Portraits: A Gallery of Intellectuals, ed. and intro. Joseph Epstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 6, 23 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 109
