Bellow’s affair with Maggie Staats was the longest-lived and most turbulent of his life. Maggie is the model for two female characters in his fiction: Demmie Vonghel in Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and Clara Velde in A Theft (1989). Like them, she is warm, generous, charming, and smart. Physically, she was unlike Bellow’s wives or the other women with whom he had significant affairs. Like both Demmie and Clara, she has short blond hair, fashionably cut, blue eyes, slightly protruding teeth, a small upturned nose, and a slim, sturdy figure. Demmie’s legs are singled out for praise by Charlie Citrine: “These beautiful legs had an exciting defect—her knees touched and her feet were turned outward so that when she walked fast the taut silk of her stockings made a slight sound like friction”; Clara’s eyes, “exceptionally large, grew prominent when she brooded,” as attractive a feature to Ithiel (“Teddy”) Regler, her much older lover, as to Bellow.2 Both Demmie and Clara are given minimally disguised versions of Maggie’s upbringing. Maggie grew up in Malvern, Pennsylvania, “at the end of the Main Line,” almost in the countryside. Her mother was from a prominent Philadelphia family; her father was from a farm in Delaware. In her mother’s family, education was important; Maggie’s aunts and uncles went to Princeton and Smith. There was money on her mother’s side of the family; her father, an only child, went from farming to business and made a fortune in gas and real estate.
Her father was the important influence in Maggie’s life. She describes him as “a Bible Belt type,” “a ferocious activist and person.” She and her older sister and brother were instilled with a deep conviction of hellfire and brimstone. Her father’s parenting philosophy was simple and clichéd: “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” “It was a terrifying home to grow up in,” Maggie recalls. “My father would wake me up and spank me in case I did something wrong,” which she immediately proceeded to do. “I wanted to get back at him.” Although overweight as a child, at twelve she grew five inches, slimmed down (a family doctor gave her thyroid pills and Dexedrine to depress her appetite), and “became a beauty.” Her initial education was at a Friends school, where she continued to misbehave. As a teenager, she “hung out with hoody Elvis types,” had boyfriends who stole cars. “I was a really bad girl. I had realized how to get to him [her father].” Then she went to the local high school and became “Miss Normal, little Miss High School,” though she continued to meet with rough friends away from school.
Like Bellow, Maggie went to Northwestern as an undergraduate. There she led another kind of double life, joining a sorority yet “secretly” becoming an intellectual. She remembers only two books in her home: “the Bible and Nancy Drew.” At university, she studied Greek and German and read many difficult works of literature and philosophy. “If it looked hard I would take the course,” she recalled. “It was the Protestant view of the curriculum.” She also had an affair with a faculty member, one of the editors of the literary magazine TriQuarterly. In 1965, she went on to Yale to do graduate work in English. There she took courses from R. W. B. Lewis, who had taught Sasha at Bennington; Louis Martz, whom she liked; and Harold Bloom, whom she “couldn’t stand.” She had a “full-time” (i.e., nonsecret) boyfriend at Yale, a law student who was moving to New York. Unhappy in graduate school, she quit and moved to New York herself. Through a relative on her mother’s side, she got a job at The New Yorker, in the typing pool, but her typing was poor and she was moved to the reviews section, where she worked happily under Gardner Botsford, a senior editor. New York was an eye-opener. “I had never lived in a city. I’d never stayed in an apartment. I’d never been in a subway. I’d never eaten in a coffee shop.” She found an apartment at 113 East Ninetieth Street, a building that now houses the Alpine Club, but when her roommate, Margaret McKee, objected that she was dating “too many Jews,” she moved out. Bellow then helped Maggie to find an apartment at 230 East Fifteenth Street, not far from Union Square.
Bellow made frequent visits to New York in the spring of 1966, and Maggie went “all over the place with him. There was no question we were a couple.” He told her that he was separated from his wife, “but I assumed it wasn’t true.” “I had no idea what was going on in Chicago,” she recalls. “He was much older, he’d been divorced….He just seemed so powerful.” In fact, he was still living with Susan, but the marriage had been on the rocks for many months. In the summer of 1965, the second summer he and Susan spent on Martha’s Vineyard, they took a house in Chilmark, on Menemsha Pond. Atlas quotes the opinion of Barbara Hanson, the au pair from that summer, who was no fan of Susan’s (“She just sort of swanned around; she loved being Mrs. Saul Bellow. It was her career”) but was sympathetic to Bellow (“constantly reading,” affectionate to Adam, whom he hadn’t seen since Christmas, “cheerful”).3 In August, the Hollebs accepted an invitation to join the Bellows in Chilmark for a couple of weeks, electing to stay at a nearby inn rather than in the house. When Susan picked them up at the ferry, she was wearing curlers. “Saul was furious,” Doris recalls. “It was clear that they were fighting all the time,” Marshall adds; “It was not pleasant.” That night, at dinner, just the Hollebs and Robert Brustein were present. Bellow and Susan “were testy with each other, snapping at each other,” according to Doris. “It was clear they couldn’t control themselves.” The only social life the Hollebs had during the visit was “daytime social life, not with the Bellows.” After ten days, they cut the holiday short and returned to Chicago, certain the Bellow marriage was doomed.
In fact, it dragged on for sixteen more months, for some ten of which Bellow was passionately in love with Maggie. “I didn’t believe it possible,” begins a letter of April 7, 1966, written after a second meeting (Bellow, Maggie recalls, “was here all the time, every other week”).4 “I thought I had been damaged, or self-damaged, too badly for this. I didn’t expect that my whole soul would go out like this to anyone. That I would lie down and wake up by love instead of clocks.” He kept himself busy with work and trips “because I need activity and concealment”; though “oppressed and heavy-hearted,” he was “grateful”: “It’s a case of amo quia absurdum [“I love because it is absurd,” a play on Tertullian’s Credo quia absurdum, “I believe because it is absurd”]—the absurdity is mine, not yours. My age, my situation! It is absurdity. But what a super-absurdity not to love you.” Five days later, Bellow professed himself in love with “everything I can remember of you,” declaring, “Although I don’t know you I believe that going any distance in every direction with you I can never find anything to disappoint me. I expect to love you whatever happens.” This letter was written “instead of prayers. Now I can go about my business.” Four days later, in a note written in his office and interrupted by the arrival of his students, he worries about the risks he is running: “In spite of my desire to ease up, I can’t let things alone, and I think I’m behaving badly; close to blindness; I sense it. It can’t be right to aggravate the disorders at the most disorderly painful stage [of his marriage, presumably]….I think it would be best to force myself to stop, and wait. Only I keep thinking of you.” A day later, on April 21, he gives an example of what he means by “the most disorderly painful stage”: “One gets home late afternoon and rages inside till midnight, falling into bed and sleeping like a stone in the exhaustion of anger and disappointment….In conversation there have been no holds barred but one. To hear and say such things is degrading. But perhaps everything ought to come out.”
Part of the reason Bellow was able to visit New York so frequently was that he had business on Broadway. In April 1965, two of his one-act plays, “A Wen” and “Orange Soufflé,” were performed at the Loft on Bleecker Street. In May, they were produced at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, directed by Charles Marowitz. The plays were well enough received at the Traverse to earn a London production, at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre in Holborn. Marowitz, best known for his collaborations with Peter Brook, was again the director, and this time a third play, “Out from Under,” was added to
the evening. The Bellow Plays, as they now were titled, got strong reviews. Eric Shorter, in The Daily Telegraph, writing on May 27, claimed, “Not since J. P. Donleavy turned his hand to the stage a few years ago has there been such an enjoyable switch by a novelist to the theatre as Saul Bellow’s London debut last night.” Three months later the plays opened in the West End proper, at the Fortune Theatre. They were now titled Under the Weather, since a hurricane figures in “A Wen,” a fog in “Orange Soufflé,” and a snowstorm in “Out from Under.” Once again, the reviews were favorable, giving impetus to talks of a Broadway production. These talks provided a pretext for Bellow’s presence in New York, in the period both before and during rehearsals.
Under the Weather opened at the Cort Theater on October 27, 1966, to an audience that included a large party of Bellow’s friends and acquaintances, among them two of the plays’ backers, Marshall Holleb and David Peltz. Bellow himself put up five thousand dollars to finance the run. This time, neither Susan nor the Glassmans nor any of the Bellow children were present. Just before the curtain rose, Bellow and Maggie slipped into their seats at the back of the stalls, directly behind the investors and critics. At Sardi’s afterward, they did not appear until late in the evening. “None of us knew the young lady who worked at The New Yorker,” commented Doris Holleb, who recalled her as “very attractive.” Bellow was “still married to Susan,” and the Hollebs thought him “sheepishly protecting himself” by arriving late. When the reviews came in, they were bad. “We all waited around till one or two. It was terrible.”
Walter Kerr, now at The New York Times, was less caustic about Under the Weather than he’d been about The Last Analysis, but he was hardly positive, calling the plays “a cerebral construction rather than an easy creative flow”; he thought, rightly, that they lacked “straight-forward comic crackle.”5 Three days later, Richard Cooke in The Wall Street Journal (“Trio by Bellow,” October 31, 1966) described the trilogy as confirming an impression created by The Last Analysis: “that Mr. Bellow’s gifts as a novelist [did not extend] to playwriting.” In a review in The New Yorker entitled “Look, Ma, I’m Playwriting” (November 5, 1966), John McCarten accused Bellow of writing plays “without submitting to the discipline of the theatre.” As with The Last Analysis, the plays were accused of being too wordy and of uneasily combining farce and high seriousness. Richard Gilman in Newsweek (“Bellow on Broadway,” November 7, 1966) was dismayed “to see how manfully short he falls, to see the greater part of his literacy going to waste and his special kind of shrewdness about contemporary manners and mores displaying itself in a thoroughly misconceived framework.”
The play that most troubled the reviewers was “A Wen,” which Kerr thought “may come to be called ‘that second play’ as theatergoers get to gossiping about it.” Cooke in The Wall Street Journal described it as “not only inept but downright unpleasant.” Set in Miami in hurricane weather, it revolves around two characters, a man and a woman (only “Out from Under” has a third performer, a cop who appears briefly at the beginning). In this case, the man, Solomon Ithimar, is a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who pays an unexpected visit to a matronly Jewish housewife, Marcella Vankuchen. As adolescents, Solomon and Marcella had played a game called “Show,” in which what Solomon saw he never forgot: an apricot-colored birthmark or wen high up on Marcella’s inner thigh. In Miami for a conference, he seeks her out, after an interval of thirty years. What he wants is a second view, partly because he remembers their game as the most powerful erotic experience of his life, partly as a release from a life of intellect rather than feeling. After much comic pleading on his part and dithering on hers, the bewildered but flattered housewife accedes to the physicist’s request, a scene enacted behind a sofa during a partial blackout caused by the hurricane. Kerr thought this staging a cop-out: “If we’re really going to be brave enough to have fun and games crawling beneath a lady’s skirts, the sofa is a cheat.”
Although “A Wen” and “Orange Soufflé” were published in 1966 by Penguin in a collection titled Traverse Plays, they were never republished, and “Out from Under” was never published at all. But they are not without biographical interest. The woman in “A Wen” is a prototype of several characters in Bellow’s fiction, all modeled on his high-school love, Eleanor Fox: Naomi Lutz in Humboldt’s Gift, Amy Wustrin in The Actual, Stephanie (Louis’s girlfriend) in “Something to Remember Me By.”6 The sexual appeal of these characters to the boys who fall for them makes other women mere approximations. That Bellow had Eleanor Fox in mind when writing “A Wen” is suggested by several details in the play: the wife is married to a chiropodist who insists upon being called doctor, as did Eleanor Fox’s podiatrist father, and the physicist’s “high class discussions” are as baffling to her today as they were thirty years ago, which is what Eleanor Fox felt about Bellow’s talk. Eleanor Fox is also evoked in “Out from Under,” the play that precedes “A Wen.” Harry, a widower, is engaged to Flora, his childhood sweetheart. Like Charlie Citrine in Humboldt, Harry Trellman in The Actual, Louis in “Something to Remember Me By,” and Bellow himself, Harry remembers being “in the park, in winter, under your fur coat—beneath your clothes, it was so warm.” “I loved you. First love,” Harry recalls (though now he has second thoughts about their being engaged). Flora’s first husband was like Eleanor Fox’s husband, “nice, but a gambler,” in debt to “the syndicate itself.” “You’ll be driving home one night, but you won’t make it. Or you’ll turn on the ignition one morning and blow up. They’ll find your tongue in a tree.”
In all three plays, the women (played by Shelley Winters) are physically stronger than the men (played by Harry Towb), and all the male protagonists fear losing their independence. “Why am I so afraid of slavery?” Harry asks in “Out from Under,” contemplating his impending marriage. The best of the plays and the harshest is “Orange Soufflé,” about a seventy-eight-year-old industrialist named Pennington and a “Polack whore” named Hilda. For the past ten years, Pennington has visited Hilda once a month, but now Hilda wants something more—she wants a social position, but also for Pennington to know her as a person. “You don’t bother yourself about me,” she complains. “You never took any personal interest in me.” Impersonality, however, is precisely what Pennington wants, as Hilda knows. From his perspective, she explains, the “whole point of a whore” is that “she frees your mind. If you flunk, she doesn’t get sore.” Flunking in bed is a Pennington worry because he is old; Bellow was only fifty-one in 1966, but his girlfriend was twenty-four. When Pennington learns that Hilda has given up all her other clients, he asks, with naïve vanity, “Am I so special?” “Smiling to herself,” Hilda answers, “You don’t have to ask.” This response, she knows, is what he needs: “Terrific, eh? I hoped it was like that. I had the feeling. Everything about me is wearing out, except.” Later, Pennington declares, “I was always virile,” which again Hilda plays expertly: “You break all the records.” Pennington is a horrible old man, his vanity and egotism like those of Mosby in “Mosby’s Memoirs,” written at roughly the same time. When Hilda asks, “Why shouldn’t we know each other better?” Pennington answers, “I know you plenty.” She means know each other as persons, not just sexually. But persons or personal relations don’t matter to Pennington:
What I was as a captain of industry, what I was on the board of directors, what I was on the stock market, that’s what I’ve been here. That’s the best of me there is, the truest, anyway. Not what I did with my wife and sons. With them I did what I had to do, not what I wanted.
* * *
—
THE RELATIVE CLAIMS of life and work, the intensity of childhood experience, sexual insecurity—themes familiar from earlier writings—all sound in Under the Weather. They also sound in Humboldt’s Gift, the novel Bellow was groping toward while at work on Sammler. Hilda the prostitute lives in Indiana, where Dave Peltz lived. Susan was right to think Peltz had taken Bellow to prosti
tutes, whose services, Peltz recalled, Bellow was too self-conscious to enjoy. Peltz was much on Bellow’s mind in the second half of the 1960s, when they were especially close, and not only away from the desk. In 1967, Bellow began writing, under the titles “Olduvai,” “Olduvai George,” and “Samson,” about George Samson, a prototype of George Swiebel in Humboldt, a character very like Dave Peltz. When Denver Lindley of Viking and Henry Volkening, Bellow’s agent, saw this material, they were deeply excited, despite knowing that it had meant Bellow put aside the Sammler or “Pawlyk” (sometimes “Pawlyck”) manuscript. On August 4, 1967, Lindley begged Bellow to “send along a chunk of OLDUVAI” to brighten his vacation. Four days later, he wrote to say that he’d “read your pages—with great excitement and pleasure and all those little shocks set off by the real thing. It’s beautiful, authentic and rich. Samson will be one of your big characters and vivid is a pale word for the supporting cast.”7
When Bellow told Peltz what he was doing, Peltz objected; he intended to use the same material in an autobiographical novel he was at work on at the time. Bellow was advised to keep writing, but friendship won out, for a while at least. Bellow put the “Olduvai” manuscript aside, a decision that left Volkening “very very sad.” On September 14, he wrote communicating this sadness, along with a worry that “just possibly [Peltz’s book] might not be unpublishable.” “At the very least,” he continued, “I would like you to make me a gift of my xerox copy.” When Peltz failed to secure a publisher, Bellow resumed work on “Olduvai.” On November 13, Volkening pronounced his new pages “electrically marvellous stuff”; George Samson was “a hero of shall we say Fielding dimensions and charm—transposed to Chicago.” Whether Peltz knew that Bellow had returned to the manuscript is not clear.
Love and Strife (1965-2005) Page 8