Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  He’d not got her back. He’d got Maggie Staats back. She returned to Bellow sometime that February, having split up with her French lover. But Maggie lived in New York, and in the spring Bellow started an affair with a woman in Chicago, a recently divorced faculty wife, like Arlette. Her name was Frances Gendlin, and she, too, had married young, at seventeen, “just on the cusp of women’s liberation.” Frances had met her husband, Eugene Gendlin, at the University of Chicago, when she was an undergraduate and he was a graduate student. After they married, he took a job at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he taught for five years. In 1963, he was offered a joint appointment in philosophy and psychology at the University of Chicago, and in 1968, the year Frances and Bellow met, she and her family were living in a house at Fifty-eighth and Dorchester, just across the street from the Cloisters. In suburban Madison, Frances had been bored. She took up gourmet cooking, she took flying lessons, like Katrina Goliger in “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” In Hyde Park, she found life more stimulating. She was hired as managing editor of Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, her husband’s journal (later, she would edit the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Sierra magazine). She took courses in Freud and had Italian lessons. “I wasn’t a subservient wife anymore.”

  Frances and Bellow had met at a Christmas party. He was sitting by himself, and the first thing he said to her was “ ‘Tell me what you do to take care of those handsome legs?’ So I said, ‘Well it’s a grave responsibility.’ I realized who he was, and we talked the whole evening. We flirted. It was nice. It made me feel different about myself.” Bellow asked Frances if she wanted to go to Mexico with him: “It was clearly nonsense.” The flirtation, though, was not idle; Frances’s marriage was unhappy and would soon be over. At a later party, which she went to alone, “I was walking up the steps and Saul and David [Peltz] were walking down them, and I said, ‘Why are you leaving just when I’m coming?’ And he laughed, but it was clear that we were both interested in each other.” Some months later, before Bellow went off to Italy for a second stay at Bellagio, he pulled his car over to chat. “I said, ‘Where are you going, can I come along?’ And that’s when it started.” A few weeks later, Eugene Gendlin moved out: “He had found someone else.” When Bellow flew to Austin in late March, to consult with Botsford over their magazine, Frances accompanied him. While he was at Bellagio, she went to Rome for a week’s vacation. Although she didn’t visit him, they spoke on the telephone. Bellow was working steadily on Mr. Sammler’s Planet. “Toil until 3 P.M.,” he wrote to Maggie, “then tennis, a drink, dinner and a book in bed.” On his return to Chicago in September, Bellow called Frances and asked, “ ‘Are you divorced?’ and I said, ‘Not yet,’ and he said, ‘Well, I can’t go out with a married woman.’ ” When told that she and Gendlin had separated, however, Bellow was reassured. “Then we had an affair for six years.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER BELLOW’S SECOND STAY at Bellagio, Maggie and Adam joined him in London, where he had rented a house for three weeks from June 22, 1969. Father, son, and girlfriend were together for the first two weeks. In week three, Maggie and Bellow left for Casa Alison, Barley’s house in Carboneras in Andalusia, and Adam was joined in London by Sasha. “If you think we can trust Sondra not to break any lousy dishes,” Bellow had written to Maggie from Bellagio on June 7, 1969, “she is welcome to finish out week III, while we escape.” The house Bellow rented was in Putney, near the Fulham Road. It had three cramped stories and three bedrooms. Adam was “wildly excited” at the prospect of the visit. At twelve, “I already knew more about England than I did about my own country. My Anglophile mother had brought me up on English children’s classics. She dressed me up for school in white buttondowns and gray flannel pants, as though I were going to Harrow, not Tarrytown Elementary….She read to me from the Cambridge Shorter History of the Eighth Century and fed me a steady diet of Chaucer, Malory, Scott and historical novels about the Black Prince and the boyhood of Alfred the Great.”

  These quotations come from a five-page, single-spaced typescript, “A Mug, a Map, and a Brush,” written by Adam about a year after Bellow’s death.2 While going through old papers, Adam had come across a diary he’d kept during the London visit. “Written in smudged pencil, the pages covered in a loopy childlike scrawl, it betrayed (among other things) a boyish obsession with minutiae like what time of day we went out, which buses we took, and what everything cost in pounds and shillings.” The diary led Adam to reflect on his feelings about his father. At twelve, he writes, he had anticipated the trip as “a sort of Arthurian quest. I had grown up thinking of myself as an exiled prince, stranded in the suburbs of Westchester and Long Island. My father, the famous writer, was the king. Surely one day he would summon me to court, knight me, and acknowledge me as his heir.” Arthurian legend deeply stirred Adam. In seventh grade, he recounted in an interview, he’d written his own version of the legend, taking “the point of view of Guinevere—Saul was Arthur, Jack [Ludwig, Sasha’s lover] was Lancelot.” His propensity to fantasize was fed by how little he knew of his father’s life. He had, he writes in the memoir, “no idea” what Bellow was doing in London. “His comings and goings were a mystery to me, and I had never dreamed of asking him about them. Not only was he much older than other boys’ fathers, but he was now an international celebrity, and I had gotten used to his jetting off to Europe at the drop of a hat.” Bellow and Sasha had separated when Adam was two, after which he saw his father “only intermittently on visits to New York and school vacations.” The two-week visit to London “would be our longest to date.” Although Bellow was “always affectionate” on these visits, he could also be “remote and intimidating, frequently erupting in anger at my mother.” “The lack of familiarity between father and son was unsettling for both of us.”

  Botsford and his family were in England that summer, and he and Bellow picked Adam up at Heathrow Airport. On the drive to town, Adam sat in the backseat while the two adults conversed, “making no effort to include me.” Both men, Adam came later to realize, had a “bohemian” attitude to children: “They were to be liberally begotten, raised by maternal-sexy wives, and treated with benign neglect until their minds had matured enough to be somewhat interesting.” The following day, Bellow walked Adam to the Thames. It was at low tide and looked and smelled “like a sewer.” Then they went to tea with Bellow’s literary agent in Dover Street. After tea, father and son walked to Buckingham Palace, where Adam was disappointed that there was no changing of the guard. Next they went to Westminster Abbey, where Bellow pointed out the memorials of famous men, mostly writers, and they bought postcards. They returned to the house in Putney in time to pick Maggie up for dinner at the Botsfords’. “That, it turned out, was the most active sightseeing day of the week.” Much of the rest of the visit was spent “shopping, doing errands, taking his friend Ed Shils to the airport, and browsing in bookstores while my father met with his publisher or talked to someone from the BBC.” All the entries in his journal, Adam notes, “begin at 1:00 PM because nothing ever happened before that”; the mornings were reserved for writing. In the afternoons, “I was either brought along or left to my own devices, wandering the streets of a foreign city for hours on end.”

  After describing himself as wandering the city alone, Adam mentions a tour to the Tower of London, a boat ride to Westminster, a visit to the British Museum to see the manuscripts (“I was fascinated by a scrap of paper with the handwriting of the eight-year-old Princess Victoria”), a day trip to Stonehenge and Salisbury, including a tour of the cathedral, and “a meal of venison at the local inn, stimulating visions of myself at Sherwood Forest,” but the impression that predominates is of neglect. The story behind the memoir’s title, “A Map, a Mug, and a Brush,” contributes to this impression. Before leaving for London, Sasha gave Adam a list of souvenirs to purchase, including a Kent hairbrush, an antique map of England, and a pe
wter mug. She also instructed him not to tell his father “that it was she who wanted these things, otherwise [he] wouldn’t buy them.” It was only with great reluctance that Bellow gave in to Adam’s nagging about the souvenirs. The pewter mugs Adam dragged him to see were always too expensive. Grudgingly, Bellow agreed to buy a fifteen-dollar Kent brush at Harrods. At the British Museum, “he surprised me by springing for a handsome reproduction of a sixteenth-century map of southern England.” This map, Adam now believes, Maggie shamed Bellow into buying. “Over the years I had relied upon an ever-changing cast of wives and girlfriends to act as intermediaries,” he writes, “and Maggie in particular had stood, like Hamlet’s mother, ‘between much heat’ and me.”3

  Relations between Bellow and Maggie were not always easy in London. There were fights and froideurs. When descending the narrow staircase in Putney, Maggie stepped into an alcove, assumed an Attic pose, and said, “Look, I could actually fit in here.” To which Bellow replied, “Why, then you’d be a bitch in a niche,” a remark Herschel Shawmut might have uttered in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth.” Maggie refused to speak to him for the rest of the day. That whole summer, Bellow was tightly wound, as if affected by the emotions powering Sammler. When with his sons, he did not hide his anger or irritation. “It is difficult always to be the jolly, uncritical paternal chum,” Bellow wrote to Sasha in a letter of November 2, 1966, when upbraided for telling Adam off. “When I think he is doing wrong, now and then, I feel that I must correct him.” Never, he claimed, did he do so “harshly or angrily.” Adam was “a gentle, marvelous little boy,” his “unusually good manners…do you credit.” But he “occasionally gives me the Little Prince bit. Generally, I let it pass. This time it was a bit much. It is not for Adam to tell me that he does not wish to continue a discussion.”4

  Adam ends the memoir by listing the most important things he learned from his father. “I now believe I got the best—the very best—of what my father had to offer…a habit of mind, a way of looking at the world, a feeling for language, and an irreverent attitude toward reigning intellectual authorities.” On this and later visits, he began to learn more about his father’s way of life, including his domestic habits and tastes, his sense of himself as a man. Like Abraham, Bellow was handy in the house. He liked to mend things, Adam recalled in an interview; he liked to wash dishes and clean up. When living as a bachelor, “he was perfectly capable of doing all the housework on his own.” He liked to cook and feed people. In addition to spaghetti sauce and carefully prepared but undrinkable coffee, he made good chili, cooked a good steak. He liked bourbon and he liked wine at dinner, though Adam never saw him drunk. He liked certain Jewish foods: black bread, pickled herring, smoked whitefish. He was a careful shopper. A friend recalls his taking forever to choose steaks at the market, closely inspecting each cut, making sure the marbling was just right. He read “a million things at once.” He was a good driver, and after the success of Herzog he bought expensive cars (Mercedes, Land Rover, BMW). He kept in shape and was physically active. When confronted or challenged, “he would have words with anybody, he would not stifle himself….But he would not look for trouble. He was not a high-testosterone type.”

  On holiday with Maggie in Carboneras, after a few blissful days in the Netherlands, Bellow was in a bad mood. Barley Alison had found a nearby villa for him to rent, but when he’d done his morning’s writing, he and Maggie spent much of the day at Casa Alison. Barley’s guests that July were the literary agent Toby Eady; the novelist Margaret Drabble and her husband, Clive Swift, an actor; their three young children; a businessman named David Erskine, an old friend of Barley’s; and his younger lover, David Manson. There was much joking about young versus old during the holiday. Bellow, Barley, and David Erskine were twenty or more years older than the other guests, and the joking, according to Maggie, “hurt Saul’s vanity.”5 While Barley and the young people stayed up late (Barley was an insomniac, said her friend the agent Gillon Aitken), Bellow retired early, having to write in the morning. If disturbed while writing, he could be “brutal and imperious,” once ordering Maggie to tell the maid not to sing while he was working. He was also “incredibly jealous” during the holiday, especially of Toby Eady, with whom he thought Maggie was flirting. One evening, after drinks on the terrace at Casa Alison, as the party headed inside for dinner, Bellow held Maggie back and slapped her so hard in the face “you could see the impact of his hand…all through the meal.” In recalling the incident over the telephone forty-five years later, Eady could barely contain himself. “I think he’s a complete shit,” he said. “The only man in my life who I have seen hit a woman…Having hit her, he made her sit through dinner.”6 That night, Bellow also made Maggie write a note to Barley, apologizing for flirting. In the morning, Maggie remembers, Barley came down to the villa and “just tore him apart for it, went after him.” She told him, “ ‘Maggie has perfect manners. I can’t believe you’ve done this. She is always invited to my house; don’t do this again, and don’t come to lunch.’ And he didn’t come to lunch. It was so bad.” Maggie tried to leave, threatening at one point to stab Bellow with a scissors if he didn’t let her go, but she was persuaded to stay.

  Bellow alludes to the Casa Alison stay in a 103-page handwritten novel fragment titled “Rita manuscript” and dated “summer ’90.”7 “Rita,” the central character, is clearly modeled on Barley Alison, who died in 1989. On the first page of the manuscript, we are told by the narrator, Harold Halsband, that after Rita’s death “her family in their unobtrusive insistent London way were after me to write something about her. Not an obit (I am not a journalist) but a memoir or reminiscence to be published privately. They appealed to me as an old friend, which indeed I was.” Halsband is a biographer, like many writers in Bellow’s fiction, and he shares much of Bellow’s history with women. Rita is keen for him to marry “Thalia,” a fictionalized portrait of Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea, Bellow’s fourth wife, whom he brought to Casa Alison in 1974, in part to be vetted by Barley. “You must do it,” Rita insists, which surprises Halsband:

  “Why must?”

  “She’s altogether different from your wives and the girls I’ve seen you with. What a procession of dogs. The one exception was Maudie, a delightful girl of real character—whom you humiliated.”

  “I had no idea. You never said so, Rita.”

  “I didn’t wish to interfere, then, but I thought you were unforgivable, Harold. A respectable, handsome and intelligent girl who followed you making no demands for marriage and had the courage to hold her head up under disgraceful circumstances” [pp. 63–64].

  Halsband tries to defend himself: “You accept irregularities of all sorts in your circle….Ferocious mad millionaires and young aristocrats running around in silk chemises, copulating in small airplanes with other girls’ husbands…You accept them as you accept Elliot [a homosexual] and his friends.” When Rita expresses relief that Maudie “gave you up,” “had enough sense to marry an upright Wall Street man. She has proper treatment at last,” Halsband again protests. She then alludes to a summer at her house in southern Spain when “you were composing your Wild Bill book here.” (Halsband has written books on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Duc de Vendôme as well as Wild Bill Hickok.) Maudie “would go around the district asking neighbors not to play the radio in the morning because it disturbed your work, and she had no more Spanish than I have.” “Maudie did that?” Harold asks. “I was unaware of it” (p. 65).

  Relations between Rita and Halsband recall those between Barley Alison and Bellow. “Considering your social origins you’ve done extremely well, and I expect you to become eventually a very distinguished person,” Rita tells Halsband. “You’ve got excellent instincts, you’re good looking, and when you’re not boorish you can be most considerate—less with women, I’m afraid, than with personal friends” (p. 67). Barley had similar expectations for Bellow, as suggested in a letter of July 23, 197
4:

  I am tetchy and give you a “hard time” (as you describe it) partly because I feel close to you and know you will forgive me, partly because I do love and admire you extravagantly and want you to be my idea of perfection (though I allow others to be human and fallible I cannot accept this in a man of your genius….I am afraid I shall always want your character and judgment to be as flawless as your prose)….I will continue to criticise you, of course, since I hope that some of my bossy, governessy advice is actually useful (being tougher with Susan, letting your family advise on business and legal matters, not marrying as soon as you were shed of Susan, marrying Alexandra as soon as possible, etc….) and I hope you know that, underneath the porcupine prickles, I really love you very dearly, and am deeply committed to your best interests. (And I am ashamed that I criticise you in front of others and determined never to do so again.)

  Early in their relationship, Rita, an agent, wants Halsband as a lover or husband as well as an author. Were he to marry her, she would cater to his every need—professional, domestic, erotic. Halsband, however, for unspecified reasons, “could never have made love to Rita. I never did make love to her. I did love her, though. She was dear to me” (p. 6). Rita remains devoted to Harold, despite his rejection of her as a lover. He trusts her advice, even when it takes the form of rebuke. Barley was comparably devoted to Bellow; she “absolutely adored him,” according to Rosie Alison, her niece, who added, “She liked difficult, creative men who she could give herself to intensely.” In a letter of June 12, 1989, to Michael Alison, Barley’s brother, written shortly after her death, Bellow describes her as “a dear and generous friend and one of the most generous persons I ever knew.”8