Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Arlette felt closest to Bellow after she had spent a weekend alone in Paris. She had gone there in search of her father, as does Renata Koffritz in Humboldt’s Gift. Arlette’s background was as exotic as Renata’s. Her mother was born in Amsterdam into a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family. When the war broke out, she was living in France and was imprisoned by the Nazis. She managed to escape and fled the country on a ship bound for Santo Domingo and Cuba. She was forty-one at the time, unmarried, and eight months pregnant with Arlette, her first and only child, the result of an affair with a married Parisian. Arlette spent her infant years in Cuba, where she and her mother were supported by the mother’s wealthy brother, who lived in New York. When the brother died, the money ran out, and Arlette’s mother moved to New York to look for work, leaving her daughter in the care of a Cuban nurse. The mother, who had never worked a day in her life, took a stenography course and ended up as secretary to the Dutch ambassador. She earned enough money to bring three-year-old Arlette to New York, and after the estate of her brother was finally settled, she received a small inheritance, quit her job, and moved with Arlette to a one-room apartment on Park Avenue. Arlette went to the Jewish Community School at 103rd and Manhattan Avenue, then to a professional children’s school, where she studied ballet under George Balanchine, then to the High School of Music & Art on West 135th Street. When she was ten, she and her mother went to Paris to see her father, who refused to see them. When a hip-joint problem ruined Arlette’s hopes of becoming a ballerina, she turned to painting.

  Bellow paid for Arlette’s trip to Paris, as he paid for everything in Europe. She stayed at a hotel on the Rue du Bac; visited Jesse and Laure Reichek, Bellow’s friends from his first visit to Paris, in the late 1940s; and set out in search of the shop she knew was owned by her father, a furrier. He was not there when she arrived, though she met his wife of many years. “I left two photos, one of me and one of my daughter, and I never laid eyes on him.” On her return to London, Bellow was “nice to me,” considerate, sympathetic. When he asked her to join him the following summer at Casa Alison, Barley Alison’s house in Carboneras, Andalusia, in southern Spain, she refused. Barley liked Arlette, and Arlette liked Barley, but she would not have been comfortable there, Arlette said. Bellow’s world was not for her. When she returned to Chicago alone, to take care of her daughter, she started up again with the man she would marry, a doctor (in Humboldt’s Gift, the equivalent figure is an undertaker). Bellow was upset when Arlette declined his summer invitation, and he refused to accept that the affair was over.66 Although they corresponded while he was still in Europe—he did not return until mid-February 1969—on his return she would not go out with him. For a period, “my bell would ring at one a.m., or the phone, and I wouldn’t answer it.”67 In explaining her decision to break off with Bellow, Arlette tells a story about shoes. Shortly after her return from London, she was in a shoe shop and couldn’t decide between two pairs of shoes, one with high heels, one without. The salesman said, “Buy both,” but she couldn’t afford both. So she bought the shoes “I could actually wear.” In 1970, she married the doctor, to whom she remains married. There was another factor involved in her decision not to stay with Bellow. “He could not satisfy me.” The sexual side “meant a lot to me….I couldn’t settle….My body was a tyrant,” an admission that recalls something Bellow told Dick Stern, that Arlette “wanted to pitch her erotic tent and keep it up all night.”68

  Bellow’s difficulties with Arlette were matched by earlier difficulties with Maggie. In his visits to New York, Bellow mostly stayed with Maggie on Fifteenth Street, and they led a busy social life. “It was a day in the sixties in which everybody knew us and we didn’t know them; he enjoyed all that.” On the whole, they saw Bellow’s friends, and Maggie missed seeing her contemporaries. She remembers many outings in which they were joined by Sam Goldberg, the bibliophile lawyer. “I spent my life in the Strand Bookstore.” Although she often felt out of touch with her generation (“I sort of heard of it”), she certainly flew its female flag, the miniskirt. When Bellow took her to the Century Association, she wore hot pants: “a very conservative blue suit with pearls, except the bottom was missing.” Early in 1967, Bellow pressed Maggie to leave The New Yorker, less because his relations with it were uneasy, more because he wanted her free for summers. She left just when the magazine offered her a promotion. In March 1967, she went on holiday with Bellow to Oaxaca, staying in a hotel high above the city. “We had an idyllic time,” Maggie remembers. They swam and sunned, and Bellow wrote the whole of the story “Mosby’s Memoirs” on the hotel terrace, drawing on visits they’d made to the tombs at Mitla and on their discussions of a Wyndham Lewis book Maggie was reading. Bellow remembered the composition of the story in a letter of April 30, 1969. He wrote the story “on six successive mornings in the Mexican town of Oaxaca without the aid of tequila. I seemed to need no stimulants. I was in a state of all but intolerable excitement, or was, as the young now say, ‘turned on.’ A young and charming friend typed the manuscript for me. Reading it I found little to change. The words had come readily. I felt as they went into the story that I was striking them with a mallet. I seldom question what I have written in such a state. I simply feel gratitude and let it go at that.”69 The theme of “Mosby’s Memoirs,” in Maggie’s words, is “the humor that can be derived from fucking someone over, and the consequences of doing so.”70 When asked what Bellow’s attitude was to such behavior, she replied “mixed.”

  After his return from reporting the Six-Day War of June 1967, Bellow rented a house at 145 Old Stone Highway, in the artists’ colony of Springs, in East Hampton. It was near the bay, and he and Maggie spent July there, the first of two East Hampton summers they spent together. It was “very romantic,” she remembers. Bellow “wrote and wrote,” and in the evenings “we’d sit at home and cook and read.” Alfred Kazin sometimes dropped by, and there were visits with the Rosenbergs, who “looked on me as their daughter,” Willem de Kooning, Saul Steinberg and Gigi Spaeth, Benjamin Nelson, Jean Stafford, Penny and Joe Ferrer, and a host of painter friends.71 Bellow was careful with Steinberg, who could be cruel. “He [Bellow] thought I was young and vulnerable, which I was, and he really thought I needed protection.” Maggie remembers reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique that summer and becoming a convert, while acting as Bellow’s “handmaiden…because that’s what you’re supposed to do.” Ten-year-old Adam came to stay, and she “adored” him; she also made an effort to get to know Sasha, and to smooth relations between her and Bellow. A tricky moment occurred when her parents came east. Although she had secured a job for the autumn, teaching English at St. Hilda’s & St. Hugh’s, a private Episcopal day school near Columbia, she was still receiving money from her father. Neither parent knew about Bellow, and had they known, “they wouldn’t have approved at all.” So Maggie moved her things to the Rosenbergs’ and pretended she was staying there. She remembers Bellow spying on her parents from a distance.

  What Maggie especially valued about her summers with Bellow was the talks they had. She loved the way he thought; she also liked that she could keep up. Bellow was at work on Sammler, and they talked a lot about the Second World War and about the Holocaust survivors he had interviewed. The metaphysical questions at play in “The Old System” and Mr. Sammler’s Planet preoccupied them both, for Maggie shared Bellow’s sense that “this can’t be the beginning and the end.” For Maggie, however, such a sense was a source of dread: “My whole life was wrapped up with the question of whether I was going to go to hell,” a question Bellow had “never run into before” but one he took seriously. Bellow respected Maggie’s religious feelings, saw her fear of damnation as “a real problem.” Like Clara Velde in A Theft and Demmie Vonghel in Humboldt, Maggie had terrible nightmares. She walked in her sleep and once nearly walked off a roof. Demmie’s nightmare voice “was low hoarse and deep almost mannish. She moaned. She spoke broken words. She did this almost every night
. The voice expressed her terror….This was the primordial Demmie beneath the farmer’s daughter beneath the teacher beneath the elegant Main Line horsewoman, Latinist, accomplished cocktail-sipper in black chiffon, with the upturned nose, the fashionable conversationalist” (pp. 145–46). For Maggie, fear of hell was like “fear of flying, and it was very bad at this date.” What joined her to Bellow “wasn’t just the sex, it was the death”; “the question of death joined us from day one.” Bellow’s concern with the soul or spirit, she believes, was his one “true” connection to the world of thought, pursued “without bias for the rest of his life,” a view supported in part by Humboldt’s Gift, The Dean’s December, and Ravelstein.

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  IN THE AUTUMN OF 1967, during her first year of teaching, Maggie made frequent weekend trips to Chicago, where Bellow introduced her to his friends. She did not like Dave Peltz, finding him sycophantic, but she liked Shils, who “maybe gets a bad rap….I remember him as a very gentle man.” Shils was away that autumn, and Maggie stayed in his apartment, presumably to avoid detection by Arlette (Maggie does not remember the reason Bellow gave her for staying at Shils’s). One of Bellow’s graduate students, a model for Lionel Feffer, recalls several occasions on which Bellow enlisted his help to keep one girlfriend occupied while he was with the other. On January 15, 1968, Bellow came to New York to receive the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres at the French consulate. Maggie was at the ceremony, along with Sasha, Sam Goldberg, and Ben Nelson and his wife.72 Later in the spring, she met up with Bellow in Texas, where he’d gone to visit Keith Botsford, now at the University of Texas at Austin. Maggie liked Botsford, “a character who really was a character,” “somebody Saul was constantly warned about,” “a terrific cook.” Before the Texas visit, she and Bellow talked about marriage. “Finally, he said, ‘All right, we’ll get engaged.’ ” Maggie even chose a ring, an opal surrounded by thirteen diamonds. They had a small engagement party in Hyde Park. David Grene was there, and other members of the Committee. Maggie had interviews at New Trier High School in Winnetka and at other Chicago-area schools, “because he wanted me to move to Chicago.” It was not until Austin, however, that Bellow gave her the ring, “the same ring that figures in A Theft.” It was also in Austin that Maggie read Portnoy’s Complaint, “and he made me put a brown paper around it.” Later that spring, Maggie accompanied Bellow to California and to the ill-fated talk at San Francisco State.

  It was most likely in the spring of 1968, sometime before the trip to California, that Bellow told Arlette that he would be spending a second summer with Maggie. When Arlette discovered that Maggie was in town, she went to Bellow’s apartment to see “who was this other woman.” There were other people present in the apartment, but when she saw Maggie “padding around…I was incensed, enraged.” Bellow tried to calm her, whispering in an aside, “This is just a business arrangement” (Maggie had been doing secretarial work for him at this period). “Business is conducted in an office!” Arlette answered. She then asked Bellow directly, in front of Maggie, “Do you want to marry me?” After a long pause, he said, “No.” “So I left.” What Maggie remembers of this encounter is that when Arlette walked into the room she immediately took her sweater off over her head. Maggie thought, “Wow, this is really out of my league,” by which she meant showy, vulgar. She also remembers that, before Arlette was let in, Bellow grabbed his manuscript and hid it in the refrigerator.

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  RELATIONS BETWEEN Bellow and Maggie were as fraught as relations between Bellow and Arlette, even during their “idyllic” summers and vacation trips. Bellow “lived on turbulence,” according to Maggie; “he caused it, and he set scenes.” “He would create stories about fidelity,” she remembers, “he was jealous of me.”73 She remembers being “afraid of Saul. He could be very harsh in his judgment; in his condemnation about everybody.” “Charming and funny,” he could also be “condescending and cruel.” What was clear to her by the second summer was that “he couldn’t stay in a relationship, he couldn’t remain faithful.” He began visiting nearby Amagansett to receive as well as to send mail—from Arlette, Maggie assumed, or some other woman. Harold Rosenberg, Maggie’s protector, “went after him for this. ‘You can’t do this when you have her living with you.’ ” The memory still rankles: “Why would he fool around? Why would he do that? How stupid! What would make him so destructive, to himself, to me?” During Adam’s stay, he and Bellow flew to Martha’s Vineyard for a brief visit with Daniel (“I flew from East Hampton in a chartered bumblebee with short wings, through a gale,” he wrote in an undated letter to Dick Stern, “we were scared but in heaven. Then we got down on the ground to Daniel’s cheers”). At the end of August, while Maggie stayed on in the Hamptons before the school term began, Bellow went off to Italy for a month, to stay at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, on Lake Como, on a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. Here he worked on Sammler and had an affair with the poet Louise Glück, who was then twenty-five. As Atlas tells it, quoting another guest at the Villa: “Before post-lunch coffee was served he approached Louise and asked her to show him the grounds. On which walk he kissed her. Fast work. They’d never met.” Glück herself recalled Bellow’s attentions as “based on the fact that I was nubile rather than intelligent.” She was also struck by “something imperial in his manner.” His seduction technique, she told Atlas, was “more literary than physical: He read to her from the manuscript of his new novel, and she read him a poem.”74

  Shortly after Bellow left for Italy, Maggie had a checkup and the doctor discovered a lump in her breast. She was taken to the hospital at Southampton by Saul Steinberg’s wife, Hedda Sterne, and an operation was scheduled to remove the lump. That Bellow did not return to help her upset Maggie deeply. As she now sees it, “The man was cruel, selfish, and the minute you pressed him he was gone, you make any demands on him, he’s off.” Their correspondence at the time complicates that picture. On September 4, 1968, Bellow wrote to Maggie praising Bellagio: “It couldn’t be better. The very bathroom is situated in a Romanesque tower. Everything is simply beautiful. I am beginning to recover from the flight.” That night, he got her phone call telling of the discovery of the lump, and the next day wrote a brief note: “Dearest Maggie—This is very rough, but you can do it. You have the love of many people—it’s not just me. You don’t need to go through this alone. I know the doctor gave you a bad scare, but it’s about two hundred to one that the tumor is benign. If you badly need me, I can fly back, but I will wait for news on Monday.” On the telephone, Maggie had stressed to Bellow how alone she felt, and Bellow urged her “not to isolate yourself from friends—don’t lose your head, honey. These will be four grim days. They have to be faced. That’s not easy. But don’t send people away….I wish I were there with you, but since we’ve got the Atlantic between us I’ll wait for the results of the biopsy. It should be just that, only that—a biopsy. Harold [Taylor, her friend, the former president of Sarah Lawrence] will advise you. Take his advice. Bless you, honey. Love, Saul.”

  On September 11, two days after the biopsy, Bellow had still not heard from Maggie. “Honey, tell me what happened. I was up all night Tue. praying I would not get a call, but this morning I am still in the dark, really. Send me a wire, at least, saying you’re okay, if the thing was harmless. But don’t lie to me. If it was not harmless I’ll want to fly straight back.” He wondered if she’d been getting his mail. Was it a good sign that he’d heard nothing? The next day, on September 12, Maggie wrote to say that she was still “a little dopey,” still in pain from the operation, but that there was no cancer and she was back in her own bed. She had been terrified before the operation. A woman in the hospital had just had a breast and a leg amputated and “moaned and prayed out loud all night.” The nurse who prepared her for the operation “started to shave the wrong breast and then almost cut off the nipple of the right one.” N
evertheless, she’d grade her behavior “about 8 on a scale of 10.” Although she had no family with her and he was not there, she was not alone the whole time. Friends from the Hamptons visited and brought food and “a beautiful white nightgown.” The letter ends by thanking Bellow. He had “really stuck by me,” “your name was the first thing I said when I came to in the recovery room.” Now that there was no threat of cancer, she hoped he would “be able to concentrate on the novel a little better.”