Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  With the exception of the Sinaiko case, and periods of tension with Redfield, Bellow succeeded in negotiating the internal affairs of the Committee efficiently and with good humor. His manners, according to Redfield, were “formal and generally excellent.” At meetings and elsewhere, he was often very funny and “never rude by accident.” He was much helped within the Committee by his secretary or administrative assistant, Esther Corbin, who worked for him throughout his tenure as chair. Mrs. Corbin, a kindly person, four years older than Bellow, never had a bad word for anyone. According to her, Bellow was “loved and respected and looked up to” by all his colleagues. “He had such a wonderful relationship with every faculty member.” Was he ever prickly? “Oh, no.” Was he considerate? “Always…he never said a cross word.” Did he have enemies? “None I knew of.” Was he a good boss? “Good, kind, thoughtful.” His relations with Mrs. Corbin were warm but formal. Although he called her Esther, she always called him Mr. Bellow. She soon learned his routine. He was inaccessible until 11:00 a.m., at home writing. Then he would call to find out what was happening and was available to receive calls. He’d come into the office later in the afternoon, to deal with correspondence or to have Mrs. Corbin transcribe something he had written. Only once did Mrs. Corbin undertake research for him. He asked her to find the name of the most expensive woman’s watch in the world. The answer she came up with was “an Audemars Piguet with jeweled Peruvian butterfly wings,” as worn by sexy Renata in Humboldt’s Gift (p. 39).

  Mrs. Corbin’s efficiency meant that Bellow’s travels were only slightly curtailed during his tenure as chair. When he was away, she wrote to him daily with Committee business. She also kept him up-to-date with personal and family business. Bellow gave her access to one of his bank accounts, and she paid bills for him. She kept records of all business transactions with his brothers and other relations. Maury, she remembers, was “always calling about investments.” She had excellent relations with Sam’s secretary and passed on messages from Sam’s daughter Lesha, often about business, and from her husband, Sam Greengus (“They were darling”). Joel Bellows, Maury’s son, who was Bellow’s accountant for a period, was often in touch as well, about tax and other matters. Although Mrs. Corbin had little contact with Adam and Greg, who lived, respectively, on the East and West Coasts, she was very close with Daniel, sometimes picking him up from the Lab School when Susan was busy or unwell. She was on good terms with Susan, who would call her when there were emergencies with Daniel. These were the years of bitter recrimination between Bellow and Susan, and Mrs. Corbin remembers telling Susan early on, “I’ll be there for you, but don’t say anything to Mr. Bellow.” As for Committee faculty, she spoke warmly of David Grene and “loved” Harold Rosenberg and Edward Shils. It was “ ‘Mr. Shils’ and ‘Mrs. Corbin,’ but he would always stop to see me on his way to the office and we would talk.” When she had a serious operation, Shils sent her flowers and “wrote a letter to my husband.” After Shils’s brother died, Mrs. Corbin knocked on his door and told him she knew how he felt. She, too, had lost brothers. “I put my arms around him and said, I’m so sorry.” When her husband had a serious heart attack, both Bellow and Shils were especially good to her. Once, she complained to Bellow that she wished she could lose weight. He told her not to worry: “There’s more of you to love.” That Bellow was a considerate boss and admired by his secretary is worth recalling.

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  ONLY ONCE WAS Mrs. Corbin made uncomfortable by tensions within the Committee, in this case between Shils and Bette Howland, who played an important part in Bellow’s life at this time. Bellow had known Howland since 1961, when she was a student in his fiction class at a summer writers’ conference at Wagner College in Staten Island (discussed in chapter 10 of To Fame and Fortune). He valued her writing and her advice as a reader of his work. At his suggestion, she became a student at the Committee in 1972. Two years later, she passed her fundamentals examination and was ready to begin a dissertation. Shortly before entering the Committee, Howland had published a short story in Commentary entitled “Blue in Chicago,” the title eventually given to a collection of her stories published in 1978 by Harper & Row. A year or so later, in November 1973, she published a second story in Commentary, entitled “To the Country.” In 1974, she published a book with Viking entitled W-3, about the patients in a psychiatric ward in a large university hospital. The book’s unnamed narrator is a patient who has swallowed a lethal dose of sleeping pills. According to the book’s dust jacket, “Bette Howland was one of those patients, and her chronicle of that experience is at once her own story and the close-focus, moving depiction of the lives of the community in W-3.” The dust jacket describes the book not as a novel but a “journal.”39 It contains a blurb from Bellow praising Howland’s writing as “admirably straight and thoughtful, tough-minded but full of powerful feeling.”

  One striking feature of W-3 is that it tells us almost nothing about why the narrator—she will be Howland from now on—has tried to kill herself. She had spent a lot of time in hospitals with “various mysterious physical ailments, finally diagnosed as a kidney infection.”40 These ailments “had been going on for years,” and eventually she came to see them as symptoms of “what was meant by a breakdown” (p. 125). All she has to say of her mental state in the period just prior to the attempted suicide is the following:

  For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin—real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business; time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life could begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. I was always rolling these stones from my grave.

  These last weeks I had been alone in my apartment, packing up. I had spent the summer months in the hospital, flat on my back; and lost my job, my two sons were staying with relatives. Then a large hand reached out—grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, scooped me up: I was notified of a grant from a foundation to finish a book. We were moving again—we moved very often—this time to a better climate, for our health. Our old flat was bare, dark, curtainless now, the windows gloomy with their long, torn paper shades [pp. 12–13].

  Later, Howland describes what it had been like for her as a divorcée with two small children: “A dingy flat, crummy job, constant money worries. Everything you earn goes to doctors and baby-sitters. Then the baby’s got a runny nose, the sitter doesn’t show, you can’t get to work. A life full of reproaches, self-hatred; a woman supporting a manless (unconsoled) existence, beside herself with fear, worry, managing alone.” Of another divorcée in W-3, she wonders “where she had managed to find someone who was ‘serious’ about her and wanted to marry her. That was certainly a preoccupation of mine” (p. 22). She can’t stand the impression she gives to men “of being the unattached, available woman, walking around like a sort of sexual time bomb” (p. 24).41

  Howland had great trouble sleeping in the days before her attempted suicide. Once asleep, she dreamed repeatedly of razor blades digging into her wrists. When she got a prescription for sleeping pills, to cure the insomnia, thoughts of suicide became “constant; I dragged them like a weight” (p. 14). When she swallowed all the pills, “I pretty quickly regretted what I had done and called the doctor; he couldn’t be reached. I told the voice of the answering service what had happened” (p. 14). Then she undressed and lay down between the sheets “in an orderly fashion” (p. 15). When the doctor got her message, he called the police. She woke up in the university hospital. According to David Peltz, in real life Howland took the overdose of pills in Bellow’s apartment. Bellow found her unconscious, she was rushed to Billings Hospital on campus, and later, again according to Peltz, Bellow “had to go to the inner resources of the university to take care of these matters” (which might mean keeping them quiet or keeping himself out of them). Like Clara Velde in A Theft, Howland had come close to dying. />
  Howland’s W-3 is a powerful work and was widely and well reviewed. A year after its appearance, in April 1975, she published a third story in Commentary, entitled “Golden Age.” Like W-3 and the other stories in Blue in Chicago, it is a hybrid, reportage in fictional form. Its subject is the treatment of old people in Chicago, focused mostly on Howland’s aunts and grandmother, but it begins with an account of “Professor Alonzo” and his aged mother, who lives in the apartment above him. Professor Alonzo’s apartment is “furnished in books, top to bottom, leather library chairs—billiard table green—curdling cigar smoke, whiskey decanters.” Professor Alonzo’s mother is proud of her son, showing the narrator clippings about him: “ ‘He’s a famous man you know.’ Well he was, he was, much more than she thought. For what could his dry-as-dust essays have meant to her? What could she make of them?”42 Howland describes Alonzo as “froggy-eyed” and red-faced: “Bluster was Alonzo’s trademark, he shouted down everybody. His brilliance bordered on apoplexy….His handful of hairs bristled. You couldn’t help being scared of him when he got started” (p. 121). When Mrs. Alonzo becomes unsteady on her feet after a heart attack and begins falling, the professor hears the thud when she lands on the floor. They devise a system for emergencies: “She was supposed to pound on the floor—his ceiling—if she wanted anything.” Soon he was listening “to every creaking overhead, and imagined her tripping on her shaggy carpets. She was giving him a hard time” (p. 122). Mrs. Alonzo is then put in a nursing home “in the thick of a desolate black slum” (p. 125) (not far, presumably, from Hyde Park, where she lived in the apartment above her son). The move is inevitable, no sign of coldness or lack of concern on the part of the son. By now she is bedridden, unable to speak.

  Edward Shils lived in the apartment below his mother until she had to be put in a nursing home. His apartment, as described by Joseph Epstein in the introduction to Portraits, was very similar to Professor Alonzo’s apartment. His appearance and personality could also be said to resemble those of Professor Alonzo. The story deeply offended Shils. As Redfield told Atlas, “He felt personally invaded, and thought it was all Bellow’s fault.”43 Why he felt it was Bellow’s fault is not clear. Perhaps because Bellow introduced Howland to Shils and his mother, or took her with him when he visited the mother during the son’s absences in England. Perhaps because, having read the piece, Bellow did not dissuade Howland from publishing it (how could he, given the closeness to life of his own writing?). Shils was a very private person, even with close friends. Joseph Epstein, one of his closest friends, perhaps “the last person to call him by his first name,” never knew he’d been married twice, something he only learned “from an enemy of his who told it to me to spite him.”44 As Epstein put it in an interview, Shils steered clear of personal detail and, except when denigrating enemies, he “operated at an…elevated sphere of generality.” In Portraits he says almost nothing of the personal lives of his subjects; one has no idea if they married or had children or what their families were like. Epstein believes an element of malice underlies the opening of “Golden Age,” which he attributes to Shils’s treatment of Howland. In an interview, he recalled a time in 1973, before “Golden Age” appeared in Commentary, in which Bellow brought Howland to Shils’s apartment. Epstein was there as well, and remembers that “Edward did not give her a moment’s attention….I felt bad about it.” Howland didn’t fit Shils’s notion of the sort of company Bellow should keep. “He wanted Saul to be a great man—Thomas Mann with added jokes.” Epstein thinks the Alonzo passages in “Golden Age” were written “in retribution.” In an interview, however, Howland told me that though “Shils was a curmudgeon…I kind of like curmudgeons.” When, in the early 1990s, Bellow put Howland forward for a job at the Committee, Shils objected strenuously. By then he and Bellow had fallen out, but the story also may have put paid to her chances. When Howland gave a job talk in the early 1990s—“a damned good talk,” she claimed—Shils’s anger was obvious. Mrs. Corbin recalls running into him one afternoon. She was carrying a copy of Blue in Chicago and he asked her, “Why would you ever buy such a book?” Thinking quickly she answered, “So no one else will buy it.” But she liked Howland, and she liked the book.

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  HOWLAND’S RELATIONS WITH Bellow at the time of her attempted suicide were complicated. In an interview quoted in the last chapter of To Fame and Fortune, she claimed that they had had an affair early on, sometime after they’d met in 1961, but soon became friends rather than lovers. This was not the impression others had, nor is it borne out in correspondence. As late as September 1968, Howland wrote to Bellow, in a letter quoted in the previous chapter, that it was “agony” to be reminded of his affairs with other women. She had spent the summer of 1968, while he was in East Hampton with Maggie, doing secretarial and editorial work for him and looking after the decorating of his apartment in the Cloisters. In the letter, she teases Bellow about how it “amuses” him to think a mutual acquaintance incompetent, “as it amuses you to think of me as a diamond in the rough,” adding, “I shouldn’t mind if you wanted to hone the edges and polish it yourself.” By January 21, 1970, on the eve of Bellow’s trip to Africa with Peltz, she is refusing to handle his mail while he’s away. The thought of it “makes my heart ache. It reminds me of many sad things in the past. And as a matter of fact, going to your apartment is still a gloomy experience for me. I know it is really a fine and tasteful place, the bachelor’s apartment which you really ought to have….To you it is a sanctuary but to me a mausoleum….It would just be unsuitable for me to take on the responsibility of making the circuit between your apartment and office. It would be gloomy.”

  Frances Gendlin recalls an occasion, sometime in the 1970s, when she and Bellow were in the book section of Marshall Field. Howland walked in, saw them, and turned on her heels and left. According to Bellow’s lawyer friend Walter Pozen, Bellow and Howland “had a long romance, and when they broke up she tried to commit suicide.” David Peltz, however, believes that if rejection by Bellow played a part in Howland’s suicide attempt, it was of her “not so much as a woman but as a friend.” The letter of January 21, 1970, lends support to this view. Of the proposed Africa vacation Howland writes:

  It would have been different if you had said, “Look, I need this vacation now by myself; but this is what I am looking forward to doing when we are together.” And “this” could have been any number of things—our work on the magazine for instance. What I don’t understand is this—you misjudge me if you think it was necessary to tell me that you loved me, because I thought you understood that I belonged to the Truth Party too—I know how to honor it. I know how to respect. I am not only hurt in the way as usual between men and women; but as a colleague, an ally. That is the particular quality of bewilderment and indignation I hope you can distinguish as you file me away. I had hoped to have a real friendship, a life-long friendship.

  This friendship Howland and Bellow did have, almost to the end of his life. One sign of the seriousness of Bellow’s wish to be a friend to Howland was the help he offered her over a matter raised in the January 21 letter. As an adolescent, Howland had suffered from terrible acne, the facial scars of which were still visible. She now decided “to have that surgical procedure I discussed with you.” It would cost $250, and Howland asked Bellow for the money, as payment for her work on the magazine, or for future work on the magazine. This money he gave her. Her expectations for the operation were realistic: “Not that it will create a great change in my life and cause people to admire me and love me; I simply put it in the general category of hiding my light under a bushel basket. Which is sinful. And there is no virtue in ‘learning to live with’ a condition the solution to which is so trivial.”

  “Trivial” may not have been the best word to describe the operation, at least according to Bellow’s fictional account of a similar operation in More Die of Heartbreak (1987). Kenneth Trachtenberg, the
novel’s narrator, has a less complicated love life than Bellow’s, but it is not without complication. Among the women with whom he is involved is Dita Schwartz, an ex-student, a mature-looking woman from a “proletarian” background, the daughter of a Jewish foundry worker. Dita “had an eye on me,” a fact Kenneth “couldn’t help welcoming…for the sake of self-esteem” (p. 174), much needed after rejection by his ex-girlfriend, Treckie, the mother of his daughter. Dita’s breath “had a feminine flavor and the look of her dark eyes was a woman’s look entirely. You noted this because her skin was not distinctively feminine. It was not a good skin, it was like a mixed weave, a layer of scar tissue from some fiery adolescent disorder.” Because of this condition, Dita was always pale of complexion: “Her skin was too dense to show color.” Her face gave her “a sore heart.” When she sees a photo of Treckie, “the pink face was what Dita concentrated on” (p. 181). As far as Kenneth is concerned, he and Dita are “on friendly terms” (p. 181), “there were no love complications, so we could safely talk about all kinds of things” (p. 183); “she was willing to listen to my troubles, and to put up with my divagations and aberrations, my absurdities, which in fact pleased her” (p. 181). Kenneth admires Dita: “She was a superior woman, and on the basis of cleverness, dignity, feminine warmth, daintiness, princess-style behavior, capacity for attachment, I would disinterestedly have voted for Dita” (p. 196), but he isn’t physically attracted to her—rather as Harold Halsband isn’t attracted to Rita, the Barley Alison character.