The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  39. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 316.

  40. ​Adam Bellow’s memories of visits with his father during the warring period between his parents are understandably disturbing. What he remembers of relations with his father when he was three is that “I would somehow find myself in the Loop. There’d be a handoff, like a football. He’d take me somewhere.… We wouldn’t talk very much and he’d ask me questions as though I were a stranger, and then there would always come a point when my mother would come up, as a subject … and then he’d become very angry.” At this period, “I was very jittery and scared of my father. I would usually wet the bed after I saw him.”

  41. ​See Daniel Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), p. 141.

  42. ​Reviews of Herzog: Stanley Edgar Hyman, “Saul Bellow’s Glittering Eye,” The New Leader, 28 September 1964; Irving Howe, “Odysseus, Flat on His Back,” The New Republic, 19 September 1964; Philip Rahv, “Bellow the Brain King,” New York Herald-Tribune, 20 September 1964; Richard Ellmann, “Search for the Internal Something: Herzog,” Chicago Sun-Times Book Week, 27 September 1964.

  43. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 328.

  44. ​See William Blake, “The Divine Image,” Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Here are the poem’s closing stanzas:

  For Mercy has a human heart,

  Pity a human face,

  And Love, the human form divine,

  And Peace, the human dress.

  Then every man, of every clime,

  That prays in his distress,

  Prays to the human form divine,

  Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

  And all must love the human form,

  In heathen, turk, or jew;

  Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell

  There God is dwelling too.

  In an early draft of the novel, Herzog calls Blake “the only writer he could bear reading nowadays” (Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, p. 177).

  45. ​Philip Roth, from p. 26 of Roth SB interview transcript, dated 2 December 1999 (in the Regenstein), one of several interviews from which “I Got a Scheme!” is drawn.

  46. ​See Hyman’s review of Herzog, “Saul Bellow’s Glittering Eye.”

  47. ​Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, p. 158.

  48. ​This striking phrase is Fuchs’s, ibid.

  49. ​SB, “The Civilized Barbarian Reader,” New York Times Book Review, 8 March 1987.

  50. ​Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, p. 130.

  51. ​This phrase is quoted in an interview by Walter Pozen, SB’s friend, a lawyer and an executor of his estate. Sales figures and best-seller figures from Atlas, Biography, p. 339.

  52. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 23. Early in the novel, the zoologist Luke Asphalter expresses naive surprise that Herzog hadn’t guessed about Madeleine’s affair, because, as he tells him, “your intelligence is so high—well off the continuum” (p. 460).

  53. ​Botsford interview, “A Second Half Life,” reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 322.

  54. ​John Bayley, “By Way of Mr. Sammler,” Salmagundi 30 (Summer 1975), quoted in Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, p. 162.

  55. ​Ellen Pifer, Saul Bellow Against the Grain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p. 126.

  56. ​Rosette Lamont, “The Confessions of Moses Herzog,” Massachusetts Review 6, no. 3 (Spring–Summer 1965): 635. Early in the novel, Lamont recalls, Herzog writes to Gandhi’s disciple Dr. Vinoba Bhave, leader of the Bhudan Yajna movement. In the letter he describes himself as having always wanted “to lead a moral, useful, active life” (p. 464). The letter breaks off mid-thought, but we are told that “what he had vaguely in mind was to offer his house and property in Ludeyville to the Bhave movement,” though he then thinks “what could Bhave do with it? Send Hindus to the Berkshires?” (p. 465). Lamont sees Herzog at the novel’s close as “divesting himself of personality” rather than property, reaching out “to God, and to all others.”

  57. ​Ibid., p. 633. In Herzog, pp. 488–89, it is Madeleine, in the role of eager graduate student, who is enthusiastic about Soloviev and Berdyaev.

  58. ​Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, tr. David Magarshack (1877; New York: New American Library, 1961), p. 807.

  59. ​Ted Solotaroff, “Napoleon St. and After,” review of Herzog, in Commentary, December 1964.

  60. ​Roger Sale, “Provincial Champions and Grandmasters,” review of Herzog, in The Hudson Review 17, no. 4 (Winter 1964–65): 618.

  61. ​Richard Poirier, “How Far Shall I Take This Character?,” review of James Atlas, Saul Bellow: A Biography, in London Review of Books, 2 November 2000. This is the source of further quotations from Poirier about his relations with SB. Leya is sometimes Leah in correspondence.

  62. ​William Phillips, A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life (New York: Stein & Day, 1983), p. 275.

  63. ​SB resigned from the Century Association on 27 June 1977. His letter of resignation read: “Gentlemen: I am afraid it is time for me with great regret to resign from the Century Club. In recent years people have been elected to membership whom I would avoid in the street, much less wish to greet as fellow Centurions. I have of course many good friends in the Club, but I can arrange to meet these privately on my infrequent visits to the city. Sincerely yours, Saul Bellow.” See also SB to Fred Kaplan, 10 February 1978: “I resigned from the Century Club because Poirier and Wm. Phillips were admitted to membership. I am, after all, some sort of snob myself. You and I used to discuss snobbism; it was one of our subjects, do you remember? I said in resigning that there were people I simply didn’t care to meet in the club rooms. My letter was posted on the bulletin board as evidence of my unbelievable effrontery. All this gave me the greatest pleasure.… I am not one of your resigned types. One fights on.”

  64. ​Richard Poirier, “Bellows to Herzog,” Partisan Review 2 (Spring 1965): 271 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  65. ​The Montherlant quotation is a well-known abbreviated form of a line from his play Don Juan (1958): “Le Bonheur écrit à l’encre blanche sur des pages blanches” (2.4.1048); the Blake quotation about Milton is from plate 5 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93).

  66. ​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. 7. Mailer was somewhat less pugnacious in private, as in a letter to William Styron of 7 October 1954, quoted in J. Michael Lennon, Norman Mailer: A Double Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), p. 174: “I found it impressive but somehow unexciting. Really the damndest book—I have to admire his courage, his ambition, his ‘openness’ to try anything and everything, but the pieces are more exciting than the whole, and nothing in it really disturbs one.”

  67. ​See Norman Mailer, “Norman Mailer Versus Nine Writers: Further Evaluations of the Talent in the Room,” Esquire, July 1963. The article was accompanied by a full-page photo of Mailer by Diane Arbus. He is shown in suit and tie standing in the corner of a boxing ring with a belligerent expression on his face.

  68. ​Nina Steers, “Successor to Faulkner?,” Show 4, September 1964, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 35.

  69. ​These quotations are from Lennon, Norman Mailer: A Double Life, p. 348, drawn from reports of a press conference on 11 March 1965 arranged by the Publishers Publicity Association as part of the National Book Award events. Herzog had won the fiction award the day before. The first quote is from a report in The Kansas City Star (date not given), the second from the Boston Herald, 14 March 1965.

  70. ​Phillips, A Partisan Review, pp. 117–18.

  71. ​James Barszcz, “Introduction: The Work of Knowing Richard Poirier,” in College Hill Review 5 (Winter–Spring 2010), reprinted in http://www.collegehillreview.com/005/print/p0050101.html.

  72. ​Lewis Nichols, “In and Out of Books,” New York Times Book Review
, 10 January 1965, quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 340.

  73. ​L. C. Knights, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism” (1933), reprinted in Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century (1946; New York: George P. Stewart, 1947).

  74. ​Jack Ludwig, Above Ground (1968; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974) (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  75. ​The letters Mavra sends are about other lovers. In real life, Sasha claims, Ludwig’s paranoia took the form of jealous suspicions. In the period just before she moved to Tarrytown, these suspicions were especially intense, she recalled in an interview: “And finally I said I have to do something.… So I came east and I lived in Tarrytown and it started to get worse and worse and I saw nobody. Then … I made a really critical and stupid decision. I decided to confess. Confess what? I decided—it’s so embarrassing … [this has] got to be one of the most bizarre things … if I could enter into this madness we could work through it.… He managed to convince me that all I had to do was confess [to “adulteries,” thus showing he wasn’t crazy].… It was a kind of brainwashing that I was susceptible to—[he had a] very powerful way about him.… And I was extremely vulnerable.” Did Sasha’s “confessions” of going with other men take the form of letters? When SB described the Mavra letters as written by her, she denied it in an undated response, written sometime after September 4, 1968: “I never saw a word of the manuscript beyond the first third, and my first view of it was an inscribed copy sent from England. I was your friend, truly, when I told you never to read it.… I wanted to spare you the shock and horror I experienced.… Can you imagine what I must have felt thinking I was loved and respected and honored only to open to a sheer act of murder? I was all alone with that, Saul, and thought I would completely lose my mind. If there had been a grain of truth in it, if I had deserved it even on a symbolic level, I could have coped with it somehow.… But this thing is not merely a distortion, but a vicious crucifixion of the humanity involved. I am surprised you fell into his trap. He is clever enough to hit upon my tone, rather convincingly, and the only quality the book has is in the occasional level set by the various women who all tend to talk in my voice here and there. But you know I don’t and never did write letters like that, and that I may be angry and sometimes ugly but not coarse and vulgar.”

  76. ​Ruth Miller, SB’s friend and ex-pupil, was on the English faculty at Stony Brook at the time, a colleague of Ludwig’s and a friend of the family. “In 1965–66,” she writes, in Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), p. 179, “the Ludwigs rented my house in Roslyn, Long Island, while my family and I went off for a Fulbright year in India; they remained in Roslyn on our return. It was curious to me to listen to Leah [Leya] Ludwig’s description of her situation, telling me as she formed the little dough packets for her verenikes, or tossed the crepes for her blintzes, that she really didn’t care about Sondra and Jack, or Herzog and Above Ground; she had a fine house, lovely children—so she did—a good income, and what did Sondra have? Jack.” Only Sondra didn’t, not for long. Miller remembered Ludwig at this time as “a popular and prestigious member of the English Department, driving a showy Jaguar, sort of moving and shaking students, faculty, and administration alike. Bellow sighed. He had probably paid for the Jaguar.”

  Index

  Works by Saul Bellow (SB) appear directly under title; works by others under author’s name. Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations in text.

  Aaron, Daniel

  Abel, Lionel, 1.1, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 9.1, nts.1, nts.2, nts.3; The Death of Odysseus, nts.4

  Abern, Martin

  “Acatla” (SB; novel fragments)

  action painting

  Actual, The (SB; novella), 2.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 12.1

  Adams, Alice: affair with SB, 10.1; SB visits in San Francisco, 12.1; and SB’s appointment at Puerto Rico, 14.1; Careless Love, 10.2

  Adams, Henry

  Addams, Jane

  “Address by Gooley MacDowell to the Hasbeens Club of Chicago” (SB; monologue), 11.1, 11.2

  Adler, Dankmar

  Adler, Mortimer, 5.1, 5.2, 7.1

  Adventures of Augie March, The (SB): characters, itr.1, itr.2, 3.1, 8.1, 9.1, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 11.1, 11.2; writing, 1.1, 7.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 11.3, 11.4, 12.1; publication and reception, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 11.5, 11.6, 12.2; and family emotions, 1.5; and family changes, 2.1; bodily description in, 2.2; mother figure in, 2.3; Flora Baron depicted in, 3.2; Ezra Davis praises, 3.3; on street ways, 3.4; Maury portrayed in, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 14.1; Roth on language of, 3.8; Benton Harbor in, 4.1; coal business in, 4.2; Freifeld family depicted in, 4.3; on Crane Junior College, 5.1; road trip in, 5.2; and SB’s political activities, 5.3; Evanston in, 5.4; and marriage for money, 6.1; Mexico episode, 6.2, 6.3, 10.8, 10.9, 11.7; service in Merchant Marine, 7.2; on American greatness, 8.2, 11.8; William Einhorn character, 8.3; original title, 8.4; on life in Paris, 9.5; liberating tone in, 9.6; opening chapter published in Partisan Review, 9.7, 11.9; SB’s satisfaction with, 10.10; Chicago in, 10.11, 11.10; plot and themes, 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, 10.15, 11.11; SB plans publication, 10.16; account of Maury’s illegitimate son in, 10.17, 10.18; SB cuts and alters, 10.19; extract published in New Yorker, 10.20, 10.21; Lehmann undervalues, 10.22; Tumin reads in proof, 10.23; SB defends as powerful and original, 10.24; on American culture, 10.25; language and style, 11.12, 11.13, 11.14, 11.15, 11.16, 13.1; loose narrative, 11.17; Jewish style in, 11.18; Podhoretz criticizes, 11.19; wins National Book Award for Fiction (1954), 11.20; Ellison on, 13.2; Caligula episode, 13.3; energy, 13.4; Mailer criticizes, 14.2; on smuggling immigrants over border from Canada, nts.1

  Africa: in Henderson the Rain King, 13.1

  Agee, James, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3

  Agnon, S. Y.

  Aiken, Conrad

  Albee, Edward

  Aldrich, Margaret

  Aldrich, Winthrop (“Winty”)

  Aldridge, John

  Aleichem, Sholom, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, nts.1; The Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son, 11.1

  Alexander II, Czar of Russia

  Alexander III, Czar of Russia

  Algren, Nelson: on SB’s portrayal of Peltz, itr.1; relations with Peltz, 5.1; Passin accompanies on road trips, 5.2; at Illinois Writers’ Project, 6.1; differences with SB, 6.2; SB meets in Chicago, 13.1

  Alison, Barley

  “All Marbles Still Accounted For” (SB; unfinished novel), 5.1, 12.1

  Alpert, Hollis

  Alvarez, Al

  American Committee for Cultural Freedom, nts.1nn34, 1.1

  American Communist Party, 5.1, 5.2

  American Guides (Writers’ Project)

  American Mercury (magazine), 4.1, 5.1

  Americans for Intellectual Freedom

  American Student Union (ASU), 5.1, 5.2

  American Writers’ Congress

  Ames, Elizabeth, 10.1, 12.1

  Amis, Martin: on SB’s style, 11.1, 12.1; SB writes to on father’s death, 11.2

  Anderson, Sherwood, 5.1, 11.1; Winesburg, Ohio, 11.2, nts.1

  anthroposophy

  anti-Semitism: in Montreal hospital, 2.1; at Northwestern, 5.1; in New York, 7.1; in Minnesota, 8.1, 8.2; Sartre on, 8.3; Humphrey’s campaign against, 8.4; Communists and, nts.1

  Anvil (magazine)

  Arbus, Diane

  Arendt, Hannah: tours Chicago with SB, itr.1; SB asks Peltz to show around Chicago, 5.1; in Partisan Review circle, 7.1; Sammler on, 10.1; Sasha meets, 10.2; at Bard College, 11.1; visits Wellfleet, 11.2; Sasha on independence of, 12.1; and Mary McCarthy’s view of SB, 13.1

  “Aria” (SB; Noble Savage piece)

  Aristotle

  Arlen, Michael

  Arrowsmith, William

  Ascania (ship), 1.1, 2.1

  Asher, Aaron, 13.1, 13.2, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3

  Asher, Linda, 13.1, 13.2

  Aspen, Colorado


  Astier de la Vigerie, Jean-Annet d’

  Atkinson, Brooks

  Atlantic Pact

  Atlas, James: biography of SB, itr.1, itr.2, 4.1; on accident at Carroll Coal, 5.1; on Goldenweiser, 5.2; on SB’s rejection for job at Hearst newspapers, 6.1; on SB’s infidelity in Mexico, 6.2; on SB’s “Very Dark Trees,” 6.3; on SB’s reviewing in New York, 7.1; and SB’s move to New York, 7.2; and Abraham’s disappointment in SB, 8.1; on Unger and SB, 8.2; on SB in Spain, 8.3; on SB’s teaching at Minnesota, 8.4; and SB’s affair with Betty, 8.5; on Nadine Raoul-Duval’s affair with SB, 9.1; and SB’s trip to Spain from Paris, 9.2; and SB’s Reichianism, 10.1; on Rosenfeld’s Reichian therapy, 10.2; biography of Schwartz, 10.3; Anita Maximilian describes apartment to, 10.4; on Gooley MacDowell, 11.1; on Trilling and Podhoretz’s review of Augie March, 11.2; on Jack Ludwig, 11.3, 13.1; on “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” 11.4; on Sasha’s reaction to SB’s family, 12.1; and Rosenfeld living quarters, 12.2; on SB’s inheritance from father, 12.3; on Sasha’s anger at SB, 12.4; and SB’s friendship with Ludwig, 13.2; interviews Meehl about SB’s therapy, 13.3; on Sasha’s violent behavior, 13.4; and SB’s therapy with Ellis, 13.5; on supposed homosexual relations with Ellison, 13.6; and SB’s learning of Sasha’s affair with Ludwig, 13.7; interviews Levi, 14.1; SB takes on tour of childhood neighborhood, nts.1; on Augie March, nts.2

  Auden, Wystan Hugh, 10.1, 11.1, 12.1

  Auerbach, Erich: Mimesis, 14.1

  Auerbach, John

  Auschwitz: SB visits

  Avery, Milton

  Ayer, A. J.

  Babel, Isaac, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 13.1; “The Story of My Dovecote,” 1.4, 5.1

  Bailen, Lazer

  Bailen, Mildred

  Baker, Carlos, 10.1, 12.1

  Baker, Lynn (later Hoffman)

  Baker, Robert (“Barney”)

  Baldwin, James, 9.1, 12.1; “The New Lost Generation,” 10.1

  Balzac, Honoré de, 5.1, 11.1

  Banowitz (Chicago baker)

  Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson: SB teaches at, 11.1, 11.2; SB resigns from, 11.3; Ludwig reports on to SB, 12.1; Ellison accepts teaching post, 13.1