Love and Strife (1965-2005)
Page 9
A year before Bellow began work on the “Olduvai” or “Samson” manuscripts, which provide versions of the Chicago sections of Humboldt’s Gift (those dealing with George Swiebel and Rinaldo Cantabile), he started work on what would become the book’s New York or East Coast sections, the sections dealing with Humboldt. In late June 1966, while walking in New York with Maggie, Bellow had spotted Delmore Schwartz.8 Bellow was riding high: in good health, dapper, money in his pocket, with Maggie on his arm. It had been ten years since he’d seen his friend, a period of precipitous decline for Schwartz, who in 1957 had been briefly committed to Bellevue Hospital. Bellow and Katy Carver had organized a fund to pay for his treatment after Bellevue, at the Payne Whitney Clinic, but the delusional Schwartz was convinced that Bellow was conspiring against him. He pocketed the money that had been collected on his behalf, hired a detective to trail Bellow, and began harassing him with phone calls. “He phoned me in the middle of the night,” Bellow wrote to James Laughlin on October 27, 1957, “using techniques the GPU might have envied, threatening to sue me for slander and frightening my poor wife.” According to Atlas’s biography of Schwartz, “No great significance can be attached to Delmore’s choice of Bellow as a prominent figure in the conspiracies he perceived, for he had by this time become indiscriminate in his suspicions.”9 In the ten years that followed, Bellow contributed to several efforts to help Schwartz, principally to find him teaching jobs.10 Schwartz, meanwhile, continued to mock and belittle Bellow’s success, as Humboldt mocks and belittles the success of Charlie Citrine.
When Bellow and Maggie saw Schwartz at the end of June 1966 they hid from him. He had only two weeks to live. On July 11, he died of a heart attack, collapsing in the hallway of a derelicts’ hotel in the Broadway area. According to an interview with Maggie, after the sighting in June, Bellow sat down and told her what would become “pretty much the whole of the Humboldt parts of Humboldt’s Gift.” When Schwartz died, he began writing down what he’d told her, in the form of a memoir, a partial manuscript of which can be found in the Regenstein. The memoir begins: “My friend the poet D.S. died last week in New York” and goes on to trace Schwartz’s life and his relations with Bellow up through the Princeton period, in passages of dialogue as well as description and reflection. When Bellow showed a portion of the memoir to Aaron Asher, now at Viking, and to Henry Volkening, they were more than impressed. In a letter of September 23, 1966, Asher described what he’d read as “astonishing. Within a few paragraphs, the richness of a novel—many novels, following your old dictum urging prodigality. Only you can judge whether to go on with it as fiction. All I can say is that it deserves to be more than a mere epitaph to the poor man.” Bellow took Asher’s advice. “I sense a lot of momentum in this V. H. Fleisher thing,” Asher wrote on December 13, 1967, a year and two months later, “which means that, despite my intention not to be, I’d be surprised if you return to Olduvai.”
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BELLOW’S PRODUCTIVITY in the second half of the 1960s coincided with an especially difficult period in his personal life. But the actual breakup with Susan was undramatic. Going through their monthly telephone bill, she noticed a large number of long-distance calls to someone named M. Staats. According to Daniel Bellow, recounting what Susan later told him, when she asked Bellow who M. Staats was, “my father said, ‘I’m not going to discuss Margaret Staats with you.’ ” Whether he willfully “failed to cover his tracks or just forgot,” Daniel does not know, nor does he know how much time elapsed between Susan’s discovery and his father’s moving out. Faced directly with evidence of Bellow’s womanizing, Susan’s response was “If you want to fool around that means I get to fool around, too,” which had been Anita’s response in Bellow’s first marriage (Sasha had just fooled around, a response both more and less direct). Bellow was outraged, Susan later told Daniel, and “almost called me a whore.” Two weeks before Christmas 1966, Bellow packed his bags and left. As Susan reported to Mark Harris, he “simply ‘moved out,’…it was time to go, the end had come, no particular explanations. Although he was a writer he was not on all occasions a man of words.”11 The end of the marriage left her, in Daniel’s words, “devastated. It was the great tragedy of her life. She loved him, she couldn’t get enough of him.”
“I don’t think he really liked being married” is how Daniel explains his father’s behavior. “He liked being taken care of….He liked beautiful, intelligent, spirited women. He didn’t like being bored.” According to Atlas, the nominal reasons Bellow gave for moving out were that Susan “nagged him, made unreasonable demands, and was ‘cold.’ ”12 Susan took the departure stoically, worn down by fights and stony silences, a home atmosphere Greg Bellow remembers as “poisonous.”13 Her friend Diane Silverman believes that, at the last, “she did want the marriage to end when the marriage ended.” Atlas quotes a letter Susan wrote to an unnamed friend: “Well, we haven’t even received all the furniture we ordered when we moved in here, but it’s a lot more pleasant with him gone.”14 Beneath this outward calm, Barbara Wiesenfeld, another of Susan’s friends, sensed bewilderment as well as devastation. Susan was unused to being rejected and “unprepared for [Bellow] and his attitudes.” What Wiesenfeld remembers of Bellow, whom she felt guilty about liking (“because he wasn’t being very nice to my friend”), is that “he was so sort of in charge of himself. It wasn’t a fair fight.”
Mark Harris was also a witness to the period of breakup, and in his book about Bellow, he gives a vivid picture of Susan, while depicting himself with disarming frankness. Harris first met Bellow in August 1961 in Tivoli, although they had been corresponding since 1959. In addition to writing novels and stories, and teaching writing at San Francisco State, Harris wrote for magazines. In the summer of 1961, after traveling to Vermont to interview Robert Frost for Life magazine, he stopped at Tivoli on his way back to New York. Bellow cooked him dinner, read to him from the unpublished Herzog, and gave him a bed for the night. Also at Tivoli were Adam and a young woman friend of Bellow’s, whose identity Harris does not disclose. Later in the same week, he and Bellow met for dinner in a restaurant in New York, and afterward visited the apartment of a second woman friend. “I hoped it would be the lady I had pondered in the night at Tivoli, but it was not, though it was another as fine.” At this second lady’s apartment he met seventeen-year-old Greg Bellow.
Bellow liked Harris’s profile of Frost, or said he did, and four years later, in 1965, Harris asked if he could write a similar profile of him. This “very good” offer Bellow declined: “The fact of the matter is that I’ve had about all the public attention I can safely absorb. Anyone who held a geiger counter on me now would hear a terrible rattling….What I want to do now is to lie low and gather a little shadow.”15 Harris’s next contact with Bellow came in January 1966, when he visited Chicago to write a profile of the baseball player Ernie Banks (Harris’s best known novel is Bang the Drum Slowly, about baseball players). Bellow invited Harris to dinner at 5490 South Shore Drive, and there he discovered that Susan “was neither the woman of Tivoli nor the woman of Manhattan but someone other, whose olive beauty made me restless. Her trousers snugly fit her hips.”16 Harris says nothing of marital discord at this time between Susan and Bellow. Later that year, in a letter of July 31, partly at the prompting of Richard Stern, Harris wrote to Bellow broaching the subject of a biography. “Great biography may be creative, too,” he wrote. All he asked of Bellow was that “you not say No to me now, nor Yes to someone else, until I have a chance to present my case in person.”17 Bellow did not respond to this letter, nor did he respond to two further letters, one accompanying a copy of Harris’s latest novel.
Undeterred, in March 1967, Harris returned to Chicago to plead his case. He telephoned the Bellow apartment and got Susan. Bellow was not there, and Susan had no idea when he would be back. “She was flustered….‘Mark!’ she said, deciding not to prolong things (her sharp, crac
kling firing-off of my name made my heart leap), delivering shocking news with speed, to reduce its impact—‘Mark! Saul and I are separated.’ ” This news, Harris confesses, made him feel “a kind of satisfaction…because Bellow had not replied to my letter”: “Failure humanized him….We welcome the humility one will acquire from a dose of everyday trouble”18 (a reaction that recalls Nathan Zuckerman’s feelings about Felix Abravanel in The Ghost Writer, discussed in chapter 12 of To Fame and Fortune). “How had all this happened?” Harris asked Susan. “They had seemed so happy in 1966. No, said Susan, they were not happy even then, their marriage had already begun to crack. It was her first marriage, she said, and she would never marry again.” This news makes Harris, though married, eager to meet up with Susan. “Was I interested in seeing Susan or in writing a biography of her husband? Doubtful that I could do both. On the other hand it was a feat worth trying.”19 Harris knows how he sounds here. Throughout the memoir, he presents himself as a comic or semi-comic figure—amorous, emulous, alternately stung, baffled, and amused by his quarry.
At lunch with Susan the next day, Harris wonders how a father can leave a child behind. “After the first one it’s easy,” Susan replies. When he suggests that Bellow seemed to have worked out his relationship with Greg, Susan replies: “No, Saul hasn’t changed. Gregory has worked it through.” Susan declares Bellow incapable of change, and when Harris disagrees—arguing, “We all make mistakes. We need to be informed by friends and lovers”—she answers, “Friends are harder to find than lovers.” She complains of Bellow’s neglect of Daniel, his unreliability about visits, a frequent complaint of Sasha’s about Bellow’s treatment of Adam. Harris mentions Robert Frost, “a man who was also hard upon wife and children, who placed his art before all other obligations,” and Susan replies by comparing artists to businessmen. When a businessman places money before other obligations, we “despise” him, “and yet we celebrate the artist for the same offense.” “Susan’s grief and anger excited me,” Harris confesses, fantasizing. “Suppose I were forced to choose between Susan and Bellow, whom would I choose? In that moment, Susan.” He quotes Herzog, contemplating Madeleine: “Such beauty makes men breeders, studs and servants.”20 According to Atlas, Harris did more than fantasize, “inviting himself over to her apartment late at night, inviting her over to his room, bombarding her with suggestive letters.”21
As for Bellow at this time, Harris depicts him as prickly and difficult to pin down. “He was witty, charming, and irritable. He scolds. He criticizes freely.” Yet he also “raised my consciousness and [gave] me enormously useful advice about writing and living.” It is not true, as has been said, “that Bellow is a great artist but a bad friend. Like Frost, he teaches by thorniness.”22 Harris visited Bellow in the small, cramped garden apartment he moved to after leaving 5490 South Shore Drive and staying briefly with Shils. The apartment was a few blocks from Susan and Daniel, in a handsome 1920s building called Windermere House. Here Harris was introduced to what he calls Bellow’s “companion, Bonne Amie, a woman who instantly charmed me in a number of ways.”23 The woman was Bette Howland. Stern was there as well, being much in evidence in this period. According to Susan, Bellow phoned the Stern home “four or five times a day,” which “must be agony” for Stern’s wife, Gay. “ ‘Saul is on the loose,’ said Susan, ‘dragging Dick through the streets at all hours of the night.’ ”24 When Harris, encouraged by Stern, raised the question of a biography, Bellow “was perplexed, or appeared so.” Had Bellow not received his letter? “ ‘What letter was that, Mark?’ ” When Harris explained, Bellow “looked at neither Stern nor me, staring off between our heads, his face whitening as he drew to himself either the idea for the first time, or his renewed resistance to it. Nothing in his face revealed either that he favored my idea or that he opposed it, or even that he heard it. He searched his mind for the letter, not for his response, saying so inaudibly he must have been speaking to himself, ‘I didn’t receive any letter.’ ” Harris likens this moment, when Bellow permits the idea of a biography simply to dissolve, to the moment when he moved out of the marital home: “undramatically, no particular explanations, as if now by the invisible power of his impassivity my idea would rise like an odor into the pores of the ceiling, or like a faux pas escape notice if we pretended not to have heard it.”25
Bellow’s evasiveness is seen by Harris as characteristic, part of what connects him to the Robert Frost poem “A Drumlin Woodchuck,” from which Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck, his book, gets its title (an ill-judged title, like the title of Harris’s fifth novel, The Goy, which Bellow urged him to change). It was Bellow himself who cited the Frost poem. “Very much liked your Sandburg-Frost article,” Bellow wrote to Harris. “How neatly you let Sandburg portray himself. One or two strokes of the dollar sign and the thing was done. Frost is a different kettle of woodchuck altogether. Woodchuck I say because he has more exits to his burrow than any man can count.”26 As Harris sees it, “Bellow knew what Frost was up to with those exits, tunnels, burrows. Escape! Spain, Rome, Yugoslavia, Italy, Dublin, the Dolomites, running off, fleeing, hiding, telephone down, mail mysteriously astray—What letter was that, Mark?”27
What Harris does not make enough of is the weight of obligation and expectation Bellow was subjected to post-Herzog, “in the nirvana of the harassed,” perhaps because he never worked through the bulk of Bellow’s correspondence. In addition to demands and requests, there were complaints, not only from wives, children, and friends in need, but from readers and fans: his writing was too popular, his writing was too esoteric, it was not political enough, it was undignified, it was too dignified, it was not Jewish enough. Harris’s form as biographer, as in the neat skewering of Sandburg, may also have contributed to Bellow’s evasiveness. Harris admired Bellow, but he was needy, by no means free of grievances or immune to slights. He was also, Bellow knew, writing down everything Bellow said. “How did you remember?” Greg asked Harris, when Harris told him they’d first met on August 23, 1961. “ ‘He didn’t remember,’ said Bellow, ‘he looked it up.’ ”28 When a prepublication extract from Harris’s book was printed in The Georgia Review (Winter 1978), Bellow was not happy. Harris asked why:
“I thought I looked like a turd in it,” he impatiently said.
I was astonished. “Really?” It was all I could ask. “Yup,” he replied. “Bad-tempered. Nasty, Snappish. I don’t see myself that way.”
“That’s because it’s not oneself,” I awkwardly said. “It’s my version of oneself.”29
This “version,” though, derived from the version Bellow presented him with, in part a product of understandable distrust. That Harris was “astonished” at Bellow’s reaction is hard to credit, given the memoir’s often acute observations. If he was so surprised, then Harris must have had a poor sense either of himself or of Bellow, or of both—though the same might also be said of Bellow’s poor sense either of the impression he was making or of Harris, or of both.
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BELLOW’S BAD TEMPER in the late sixties was by no means directed exclusively at would-be biographers, radical students, and aggrieved wives. On July 12, 1966, Tony Godwin, the editorial director of Penguin, his paperback publisher in Britain, invited him to come to London for two weeks in September and October to help to promote the relaunch of five of his novels: Herzog, The Victim, Henderson the Rain King, The Adventures of Augie March, and Seize the Day. A publicity campaign was planned, with public lectures at PEN, the U.S. Embassy, Edinburgh and Sussex Universities, “as many as possible” engagements on “serious” television programs, and a series of individual interviews “with feature writers and reporters with all the quality papers such as The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Observer, etc., and with the weeklies. We would also plan a small number of lunch parties in your honour, and a large evening party where critics, booksellers and other influential people would have the opportunity of meeting yo
u.” Penguin would make and pay for all travel arrangements, put him up at the Ritz, “and see to it that you are unobtrusively cossetted.”
Bellow was appalled. “Is cossetted the word? Two days of your proposed program would put me in the hospital, on tranquilizers for a month,” he wrote in an undated reply. “I was willing enough to give a lecture or two, hold one press meeting, tape one BBC program and attend a party. But your lunch parties, trips to Sussex and Edinburgh and ‘serious’ television programs are out of the question.” Although delighted to have Penguin launch his novels “with flame and thunder,” he had more than once seen writers “ride bicycles on the highwire, eat fire, gash themselves open to call attention to their books. They end up with little more than a scorched nose, a broken bone.” Faced with this reply, Godwin retreated. On August 3, he wrote again with “a reduced, more humane, and civilized programme for your visit,” allowing ample opportunity “of mooching around London for a few days on your own.” At the bottom of the reply, Bellow scrawled: “I write a silly arrogant letter, and the man capitulates.”
There was more trouble in store for Godwin. On September 6, in New York, Bellow was shown the new Penguin covers. According to a letter of September 7 sent by Henry Volkening to Bellow’s London agents, Michael Thomas and Cyrus Brooks of A. M. Heath, Bellow “was so outraged and revolted by the vulgarity, bad taste and irrelevance of the Penguin jackets of both AUGIE and HENDERSON that he absolutely refuses to have a damn thing to do with associating himself in any way whatsoever with either of them, or with Tony Godwin either, for that matter (and so of course also with inscribing copies).” The Augie cover is a photograph of a Mexican Day of the Dead figure playing a guitar. The Herzog cover features an open envelope inside of which the top half of a face, presumably Herzog’s, is visible. Candida Donadio of Volkening’s office had already phoned Godwin asking that “all public appearances, by TV or otherwise, be cancelled.” Godwin, Volkening reported, was “aghast and enraged” and had cabled “justifying the covers, etc., even though they are, we all agree, unjustifiable.” Bellow would still come to London, Volkening continued, but only to honor an appearance at a lecture for which tickets had been sold and to have lunch with the American ambassador: “Godwin has been asked at once to cancel all other engagements.” As for expenses, “Saul drily says that he’ll bear as much of them himself as Penguin might think he should.” Godwin’s protestations that the covers would sell books “are of no relevance whatsoever.”