Over the next two days, she fell apart, or so a letter from Bellow of September 14 suggests. He had been short with her on the telephone, for which he apologized. “The reason was we had just had a phone conversation and I wasn’t expecting it to be your call. I thought that certainly something had happened to one of the children, for why would anyone else call. And thinking it over, though I don’t excuse myself, I think you did not do well to call me. I know your need is great, but this is no way to meet it….You are in pain, yes, but you have just escaped a horrible operation. You don’t have cancer. Instead of relief and gratitude you have—this [hysteria, presumably]. It’s not good. Not good for you, not good for me. Don’t you think, after all this time, that I feel for you, sympathize with you? Waiting here was hellish also. I went to talk to Dr. Bryant, the foundation’s doctor here, about your prospects and I sat it out on Tuesday without sleep, or letting up in my panic waiting for an answer to my wire.” She obviously needed comforting, but “to give the help you want I would have to come back.” And what would that accomplish? “I have written, and we have spoken on the phone three times, or is it four, so it’s not as if we haven’t been in contact. As for your schoolwork, what can I do about it? If you’re sick, what can you do? What can anyone do? That’s not a thing to phone across the Atlantic about either. Please, Maggie, don’t do that anymore, I beg you.” He tells her to leave his belongings, including his car, in East Hampton; he’ll deal with everything when he gets back. “I’ve been here now for two weeks and there are only two more, which I don’t want to goof up. I want to get something out of them. It’s not your fault that the first two haven’t been ideal but now, if only for a bit, I want to turn off the heat. I’ve had a frightful letter from Sondra—just wicked, a horror.” (This is the letter that prompted his denunciation of “the abuses I suffered at your hands,” discussed in chapter 14 of To Fame and Fortune). The letter closes: “You know what our relationship is. It’s not what you want, but it is a great deal. It is everything that I can make it. When I put my arms around you it is all there. You know I am YD [Your Darling]. And don’t blame the US mails on me. Calm yourself. And honey, lay off the telephone.”
In describing his time at Bellagio to Dave Peltz, in a letter of September 20, Bellow is tough and coarse. After the good news about the tumor “came hysterics: all kinds of transatlantic telephone oddities. Time out for sobbing. I thought the whales and the winds were talking to me. The Lord sent relief in the form of a wet dream or two. I’ve had no other. All my ladies seem furious. Not one of them has written, not even Bette [Howland].”75 (When Bette did write, on September 24, 1968, she explained that she “didn’t know you had gone to Italy alone, and therefore didn’t realize that you really wanted mail….I am very tactful with the little girls who call here—those who don’t hang up in my face. I tell them that I don’t know Mr. Bellow personally, that I am subletting his apartment from the University, and that they should leave their messages with the Committee. They are grateful for this, so grateful that they want to tell me all about you, not realizing of course that even to hear their names would be agony for me.”) Around the same time, Arlette wrote (this is several months before the London trip), declaring, “Your being with Maggie was a horror for us. This is a basic fact.” The angry letters they had exchanged over the summer and Bellow’s refusal “to visit me even once” made her “physically sick”: “Somehow I had given you the key to my sense of balance and happiness. I don’t think you knew this. Perhaps you did—but it is important that you know it now.” It is clear from this letter, dated September 23, 1968, that Arlette had not given up hope of their getting back together, and that Bellow was still involved with her. As for why Bette hadn’t written, “she must have done research in my apartment and found sinful evidence….I feel the hook down in my gullet, and I hear that old reel spinning.”
In the letter to Peltz, Bellow reports: “Maggie’s line with me now is that I must mark time while she tries to develop other interests, especially, she says, since she does this out of rejection and therefore I owe her perfect fidelity. Seeing her twice a month is perfectly adequate. I have no more real needs.” On returning from Italy at the beginning of October, he discovered that Maggie did not want to see him at all, or said she didn’t, although they continued to communicate in highly charged phone calls and letters. It was at this point that Bellow took up again with Arlette and invited her to come to London with him. Maggie’s intensity was wearing him down, he claimed, and on December 9, 1968, he called for “an Armistice, a moratorium, some pause.” He loved her and respected her and wished her every good, “but I am trying to save my sanity right now—just probably my very life. I feel it threatened. We must stop. I can’t go on without a breather.” In A Theft, Clara Velde describes a comparable retreat on the part of Teddy Regler: “I turned on so much power in those days, especially after midnight, my favorite time to examine my psyche—what love was; and death; and hell and eternal punishment….All my revivalist emotions came out after one a.m., whole nights of tears, anguish and hysteria. I drove him out of his head” (p. 129).
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WHEN ARLETTE DISTANCED HERSELF from Bellow after his return from London in February 1969, Bellow went back to Maggie. He was, she remembers, “desperate” to resume their relationship. He would ring up from the airport and ask to see her. “I can’t, I’m seeing someone,” she told him, “I need you out of my life.” Once, he walked in a blizzard all the way from the Plaza Hotel to Fifteenth Street “to plead his case.” The person Maggie was seeing was a young Frenchman, Jacques, “a figure of raw sexuality….He was young and he was great and he was everything that Saul wasn’t.” One way he differed from Bellow was in personal hygiene (“Flower children are neither as innocent nor as loving as they pretend to be,” Bellow told his friend Rosette Lamont, “and they mistake uncleanliness for holiness”76). Maggie describes Jacques in a way that recalls Jean-Claude, the young Frenchman Clara takes up with in A Theft. Jean-Claude “seldom washed. His dirt was so ingrained that she couldn’t get him clean in the shower stall. She had to take a room in the Plaza to force him into the tub” (p. 130). Bellow “was obsessed with this guy,” Maggie says of her French lover. When Maggie mentioned that Jacques was uncircumcised, Bellow “went nuts,” pressing her for details, about size, shape, color, what he was like in bed, what they did there. When she read Sammler, Maggie immediately recognized that Bellow had turned her Frenchman into the black pickpocket. “In my mind,” Bellow told her, “the pickpocket was this man.” Why did he make him black, she asked? “You can use what you want,” he answered.
Maggie’s testimony suggests that personal history or biography, in the form of sexual jealousy and insecurity, fed into the novel’s most controversial episode, charging or intensifying larger and more generalized concerns. Even at moments when Sammler considers the pickpocket’s sexual display in its widest context, a note of authorial insecurity can be heard, as at the beginning of the following passage:
In the past, Sammler had thought that in this same biological respect he was comely enough, in his own Jewish way. It had never greatly mattered and mattered less than ever now, in the seventies. But a sexual madness was overwhelming the Western world. Sammler even now vaguely recalled hearing that a President of the United States was supposed to have shown himself in a similar way to the representatives of the press (asking the ladies to leave), and demanding to know whether a man so well hung could not be trusted to run the country. The story was apocryphal, naturally, but it was not a flat impossibility, given the President, and what counted was that it should spring up and circulate so widely that it reached even the Sammlers in their West Side bedrooms [p. 53].
As Bellow’s own sexual history suggests, neither authorial prurience nor repression underlaid Sammler’s reaction to the “sexual madness” of the sixties and to female eroticism in particular. Bellow was never more promiscuous than during
the sexual revolution the novel deplores. Nor is there anything like Sammler’s language in Bellow’s letters at this time. None of his letters to Arlette survives, but on the very rare occasions when his love letters to Maggie allude to the body and to sex they do so tenderly. “My pleasure in life,” he writes on November 28, 1966, “to think about you. The white valentine. Face when making love. Hair when hands are raised to comb it. Teeth, lips, eyes, all music for my metronome.” Maggie and Arlette are thinly and affectionately fictionalized in Humboldt’s Gift, where their sexuality is a source of pleasure. “I inhaled her delicious damp,” Charlie recalls of a morning in bed with Renata (described as “a grand girl,” though “I couldn’t see her behind my wheelchair” [p. 12]). As Renata secretly pleasures herself in public, when “the company annoyed or bored her,” she looks at Charlie with “amusement” and “affection.” “How easy and natural she made everything seem—goodness, badness, lustfulness. I envied her this.” In describing the moment of climax, there is nothing of distaste. Charlie and Renata are in the Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel, with the oblivious Thaxter, a Botsford character. While Thaxter propounds his latest new scheme (“you’d get fifty thousand bucks on signing”), Renata is at work under the table. Charlie notes “the dilation of her eyes and the biological seriousness in which her fine joke ended. She went from fun to mirth to happiness and finally to a climax, her body straightening in the French provincial Palm Court chair. She nearly passed out with a fine long quiver. This was almost fishlike in its delicacy. Then her eyes shone at me” (p. 351).
Renata is praised by Charlie for her naturalness and vitality. She is very much a person at one with herself. As Charlie puts it, “Some people are so actual that they beat down my critical powers” (p. 347). But she isn’t just or wholly a sex goddess, she’s no mere idea or symbol. Like Ramona in Herzog or Katrina in “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” some part of Renata’s sexual allure is worked up, a product of calculation (of what Charlie likes, his antique or French-maid notions of sexiness). “I didn’t really believe it was all so natural or easy,” Charlie admits. “I suspected—no, I actually knew better” (p. 351). In Humboldt’s Gift, “the modern sexual ideology” is no panacea, “Programs of uninhibited natural joy could never free us from the universal tyranny of selfhood” (p. 39). But there is nothing disgusting about the female body here, none of the repugnance expressed in Mr. Sammler’s Planet. In early versions, written while Bellow was still at work on Sammler, Renata is shown, in Daniel Fuchs’s words, “in a light less flattering than that of the novel,”77 but even in early versions she is associated with vitality, health, strength. In other works, moreover, as we’ve seen, female fleshiness is anything but disgusting. In “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” Katrina, Victor Wulpy’s “manifest Eros,” is described as “the full woman, perhaps the fat woman, woman-smelling”;78 Sorella, the heroine of The Bellarosa Connection, is courageous, clever, formidable, attractive, and massive: “The more I think of Sorella,” the narrator says, “the more charm she has for me.”79 On the evidence of his writing, any feelings of disgust Bellow had about female physicality were more than matched by feelings of attraction. The unqualified repugnance Sammler, Elya, and Wallace express about women’s bodies gives a transgressive power to the novel; Bellow means it to shock readers. But it also limits, according to Bellow’s own standards. In Sammler, a “case” is being made against the culture of the day, and the novel’s characters are made to fit the case, particularly the women characters; the fierceness or “fanaticism” of the case is not, in respect to the depiction of women, tamed by truth; there are no complicating, humanizing particulars in the characterization of Angela.80 Hence Bellow’s letter of April 10, 1974, to Daniel Fuchs, in which he claims, “Sammler isn’t even a novel. It’s a dramatic essay of some sort, wrung from me by the crazy Sixties.”81
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A DAY AFTER the coarse letter to Peltz, Bellow wrote warmly to Maggie. Two days later, on September 23, 1968, he asked her how her job was going. She was now teaching at a new school, one closer to where she lived, the Grace Church School in Lower Manhattan. Bellow also recounted the sad news of the death from cancer of his Tuley friend Lou Sidran, who had visited East Hampton that summer with his son, Ezra.82 “Terrible things keep happening,” Bellow writes from Bellagio; “from the peaceful mountains it’s all like the plague, down below.” After dinner the night before, sitting by the fire, one of the scholars, “John Marshall, Harvard 1921, told me I had meant a great deal to him. My books, and myself. Then he began to weep. He’s such a decorous Wasp I hardly knew how to interpret this. He simply said that I was one of the people he loved. And he wept. I wept myself, partly at the oddity of human relations. That there should be so much to jump over—so much apparent difference or distance. And then, in people who are not old, whose flesh isn’t dead, one could live a life of Harvard or Chicago (dateless horror, Chicago) until love reclaims one for reality.”
In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, it has been suggested, Bellow was unable or unwilling to jump over racial difference or distance, portraying the novel’s sole black character as exclusively other, animal.83 Like Angela, according to this line, the pickpocket is unclaimed for reality. What goes against such a reading is the novel’s penultimate scene. In a rush of plot common in Bellow’s fictions, Shula’s ex-husband, the Israeli sculptor Eisen, attacks the pickpocket by smashing a bag of metal sculptures or medallions into his face. These medallions are made out of iron pyrites from the Dead Sea and depict “Stars of David, branched candelabra, scrolls and rams’ horns, or inscriptions flaming away in Hebrew: Nahamu! ‘Comfort ye!’ Or God’s command to Joshua: Hazak!” (later described as “the order God gave before Jericho, to Joshua: ‘Strengthen thyself’ ”) (pp. 139–40). Sammler is horrified:
“Don’t hit him, Eisen. I never said that. I tell you no!” said Sammler.
But the bag of weights was speeding from the other side, very wide but accurate. It struck more heavily than before and knocked the man down. He did not drop. He lowered himself as though he had decided to lie in the street. The blood ran in points on his cheek. The terrible metal had cut him through the baize [p. 241].
What enters the novel at this moment, as the dazed pickpocket lowers himself to the street, is a long history of African American suffering, a link between the black man and the Jew. What also enters the novel, in the symbolic person of Eisen, is Bellow’s warning of the dangers not only of fear and fury but of “realism,” the line Eisen takes in his defense: “You can’t hit a man like this just once. When you hit him you must really hit him. Otherwise he’ll kill you. You know. You fought in the war. You were a Partisan. You had a gun. So don’t you know?” This reasoning “sunk Sammler’s heart completely” (pp. 241–42). The passage is aimed not only at intransigent Israelis and despairing artists, but at Sammler and at Bellow himself. Sammler because it recalls what is now a moment of shame, when he killed an unarmed German soldier in the Zamosht Forest: “ ‘Don’t kill me,’ ” cried the soldier. “ ‘I have children.’ Sammler pulled the trigger” (p. 114). Bellow, provoked and dismayed by increasing tensions in the late sixties between blacks and Jews, especially in Chicago, home of the Black Muslims and other Black Power separatists, by outlaw worship, youth worship, and intellectual primitivism, pulls back from hatred at the end, as does the mature Artur Sammler. Having survived the horror of the Holocaust, the murder of so many Jews, including his wife, at the hands of the Nazis, Sammler takes pleasure in giving in to hatred. When he killed the German soldier, “his heart felt lined with brilliant, rapturous satin.” The feeling is addictive: “When he shot again it was less to make sure of the man than to try again for that bliss. To drink more flames. He would have thanked God for this opportunity. If he had had any God. At that time, he did not. For many years, in his own mind, there was no judge but himself” (p. 115). In describing the novel’s sole black character as an animal, and disparag
ing blacks in several passing references, Sammler dehumanizes a race, as the Nazis dehumanized Jews. Sammler’s talk of “sexual niggerhood” (p. 133) recalls Nazi talk of “instinctive” Jewish licentiousness, what Adam Kirsch, alluding to Sammler’s phrase, calls “sexual Jewhood.”84 Eisen’s attack on the pickpocket puts such talk and the hatred that breeds it into focus, partially redeeming both Sammler and his creator.
Maggie Staats in New York, late 1960s (courtesy of Maggie Staats Simmons)
3
Bad Behavior
EARLY IN 1969, after hearing of Arlette’s decision to break with Bellow, Barley Alison sent him a letter of consolation:
I am really sad about Arlette—I liked her and thought she probably did have a soul tucked away somewhere….But you are not lucky in your choice of women are you? Perhaps you should take up cards? I am not suggesting that it will prove an acceptable substitute, but merely that, with your present record, it should prove immensely financially profitable and enable you to keep more wives in the style to which they hope to become accustomed. No wonder you are upset about Arlette and no wonder that you cannot go straight on with the book you were writing when you were together in London. You did have a premonition that she was not going to prove very durable, however, didn’t you? And for all I know, you may have got her back again by now. Or replaced her?1
Love and Strife (1965-2005) Page 14