Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  One of Bellow’s conditions on agreeing to be a Booker judge was that he be put up at the Ritz, a condition Gross imagined “must have put a big hole in the Booker budget.” When given a room not overlooking Green Park, he complained and was moved. The Booker winner that year was V. S. Naipaul, for In a Free State.8 The main competitor to Naipaul was Elizabeth Taylor, whose novel Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont was favored by Gross and Antonia Fraser. Although Gross thought Naipaul a more important writer than Taylor, he greatly admired Taylor’s fiction and thought Mrs Palfrey “one of her best novels.” He also thought Taylor had more to gain from the Booker than Naipaul. Taylor’s novels invariably received good reviews and favorable comments from fellow writers, but they never sold—a mystery to Gross, given her accessible style. As he later recalled, it was Bellow who “pretty much blew her out of the water. He said when the first round came…‘This is an elegant tinkling teacup novel of the kind that you Brits do very well, but it’s not serious stuff.’ ”9

  When it came to a vote, Gross remembered, the pro-Taylor judges “weren’t so weak that we lay down and died in front of him,” but the fact that Bellow “was going to be obviously so against it” played a part in their giving way. During the judges’ deliberations, Bellow was “not unamiable.” But he seemed to Gross to belong to a different species. “Bellow stood out. He was vivid. He seemed almost a Technicolor personality, where other people were in black-and-white….He had flown in, he was going to fly out.” Antonia Fraser recalls sharing a taxi back with Bellow “on a long, long ride from somewhere in the City: he was nattily dressed in a pale green shantung suit, blue shirt, green tie with large blue dots on it; his silver hair and slanting, large dark eyes made him look like a 30s film star playing a refined gangster. Suddenly he leaned forward and asked: ‘Has anyone ever told you that you’re a very handsome woman?’ I pondered on a suitable reply, modest yet encouraging. But having spoken the Great Man closed his eyes and remained apparently asleep for the rest of the journey.”10

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  HALF A YEAR LATER, Bellow went to Japan for five weeks, at the invitation of the Japan Society. A letter of March 29, 1972, to Nadine Nimier, a former lover from Paris, explains something of the attractions of travel. Bellow writes from Miami, where he has gone with Adam and Daniel “to cure myself.” Although blocked as a correspondent in Chicago, as soon as he lands in Miami: “Voilà!—suddenly I am able to reply to your note. Evidently I come back to life when I voyage. Next month I’m off to Japan. I don’t know a word of le Japonais—pas un seul mot.” Nor did he know much of the Japanese, as he explained in a letter of October 20, 1976, to the poet Richard Eberhart. “I was invited by the Rockefeller Foundation to participate in a conference on American-Japanese relations. It has always remained a sevenfold mystery to me why I was asked [his old friend Herbert Passin, an authority on Japanese–United States relations, is the likely answer], why I accepted, and why I observed silence throughout three days. I was mummer than a Trappist, and my silence so deeply impressed the Japanese that I was subsequently invited to Tokyo to determine whether I would ever say anything.”

  It was not quite true that Bellow knew nothing of American-Japanese relations. As Herzog makes clear, he knew a fair bit about Japanese women. Before his marriage to Sasha, and during it, according to Jack Ludwig, Bellow had an affair with a Japanese woman who was the model for Sono Oguki in Herzog. Paolo Milano implies as much in a letter of May 29, 1965, confessing, “I am most discreetly interested in the ‘Japanese chapter’ of your Herzog.” Moses’s evenings with Sono are both sensuous and comic, like evenings with Ramona Donsell. Sono has a wealthy father and has lived in Paris; in New York, she studies design and lives in a brownstone apartment on the Upper West Side, where she pads “back and forth busily on bare feet” (p. 586). She has “a tender heart,” and when Moses tells her he is unhappy she cries “instantaneous tears. They had a way of appearing without the usual Western preliminaries.” Bathing figures prominently in evenings with Sono. After settling Moses “in the swirling, foaming, perfumed water she let drop her petticoat and got in behind him, singing that vertical music of hers” (“vertical” is perfect, as is a later description of Sono’s songs as “sweet and odd, narrow, steep, at times with catlike sounds”) (p. 585). After bathing, Sono brings out her erotic scrolls, on which “fat merchants made love to slender girls who looked away comically as they submitted….She pointed to things, winking and exclaiming and pressing her round face to his” (p. 588).

  Although Sono has high connections in Japanese diplomatic circles (through whom she has met Nasser, Sukharno, and the secretary of state), all she wants of Moses is to be alone with him in her apartment. “ ‘T’es philosophe. O mon philosophe, mon professeur d’amour. T’es très important. Je le sais.’ She rated him higher than kings and presidents” (p. 589). As Moses puts it, wonderingly: “She did not want me to work for her, to furnish her house, support her children, to be regular at meals or to open charge accounts in luxury shops; she asked only that I should be with her from time to time. But some people are at war with the best things of life….Other men have forsaken the West, looking for just this” (p. 591). When Moses marries Madeleine, Sono returns to Japan. Ever since, as he puts it in an unsent letter, “When I pass Northwest Orient Airlines. I always mean to price a ticket to Tokyo” (p. 590). Whether Bellow looked up Sono’s real-life model in Japan is not known, but there is evidence he spent much of his trip looking for something like her.11

  Bellow’s responsibilities as Intellectual Exchange Fellow were to offer talks and attend receptions. When not touring the country, he stayed in Tokyo at the International House, in the city’s Embassy District. In undated letters to Fran Gendlin, he complains of how hard he is made to work. “I’m told there are castles and blossoms. Haven’t seen them myself. I’m kept busy with lectures, seminars and interviews. I get the weekends off for good behavior.” In a later letter, he complains of jet lag (“it took more than ten days to recover”) and of the drawbacks of celebrity, not just lectures but “interviews, radio programs and Japanese semi-state dinners.” To David Grene, in a letter of June 22, he calls Tokyo “a fuming, hissing metropolis,” embodying Henry James’s coinage “ ‘numerosity.’ There are no small gatherings, only mobs—everywhere mobs of every description.” To Gendlin, he complains about Japanese food and dining habits (“sitting on the floor, using chopsticks”), about drinking too much sake, then waking at 4:00 a.m. “utterly wretched most of the time.” It was two weeks before the pace slackened and he was allowed out of Tokyo. In Kyoto, “it was relatively tranquil,” and he enjoyed the old-style Japanese inn he stayed in, “sleeping on the straw mat and lying on the floors half the day, admiring the little moss garden. Being on the floor was childhood again, and childhood is still the most pleasant part of life.”

  In the first of the undated letters to Gendlin, Bellow makes an embarrassing confession. “I was disheartened—appalled is a probably more accurate word—to find that I had crab-lice. I felt peculiarly shaky and stupid to make that discovery. I’d had nothing at all to do with women here….Cured now, I feel lousy still. Anti-self, anti-others, but above all the old fool.” In the later undated letter, he reiterates the point about having nothing to do with women. He has been “perfectly straight, and non-adulterous. There’s no inclination, no temptation, and I seem to have lost touch with the seducer’s mentality.” These assertions are flatly contradicted by Atlas, who describes Bellow as “on the prowl for geishas.” He quotes John Nathan, a thirty-two-year-old American scholar of Japanese culture and history, also a filmmaker, later a professor of East Asian studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who was asked “to be Bellow’s Virgil” in Japan. “The man was obsessed with getting laid,” Nathan told Atlas; the claim that he was “straight” or chaste in Japan, he said in an interview, was “patently ridiculous.”12 At one point, it was reported, Bellow got in t
rouble for trying to smuggle a woman into a Zen monastery.13 If such reports are to be believed, they help to explain a second confession in the Gendlin letter, of a piece with other admissions of guilt and “wickedness” in this period. “The world seems to expect that I will do all kinds of good things,” he tells Gendlin, “and I spite it by doing all kinds of bad things.” These bad things, though not “striking sins,” produce “unhappiness for myself and others”; “the effect on others is a curse to me night and day.” Nathan recalls several such “bad things”—for example, how curt and dismissive Bellow was when interviewed by the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo¯ O¯e, who would himself win the Nobel Prize in 1994. O¯e was a great Bellow fan and excited to meet him. He’d carefully prepared a list of questions about The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King, but when he emerged from the interview he told Nathan, “Bellow had scarcely given him the time of day.”14 On another occasion, Bellow became sullen when he failed to get anywhere with the “dark, literary creature” who had been assigned to look after him before a lecture. He then “ripped through” the lecture (it was about narrative method in Joyce), reading so quickly there was little chance his Japanese audience, packed with admiring English professors, could follow what he was saying. He left without answering questions, a performance Nathan described as “passive/aggressive, hostile.”15

  At other times, Bellow could be cordial. When Nathan took him into a typical Japanese home, he was charming and seemed to enjoy himself. The cutting remarks he made struck Nathan as involuntary, “a kind of Tourette’s,” recalling Herschel Shawmut in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth.” Nathan was well connected in literary and artistic circles in Tokyo. A six-foot-four American with a Japanese wife, he spoke fluent Japanese, had translated Mishima and O¯e, and was at work on a film with Hiroshi Teshigahara, director of Woman in the Dunes (1964). He was “thrilled” to meet Bellow and to show him the city. “I was an avid Bellow fan. I wanted to be a novelist. I wanted to be Saul Bellow.” Bellow seemed to like Nathan, but at one point he “informed me that I was the best ‘squaw man’ he had ever met.” When Nathan asked what a squaw man was, Bellow explained: it was a white man who married a Native American woman and lived in her tribe. Nathan took the remark as a put-down, as though Bellow were saying, You’re a big deal here because you’re an oddity, with the implication that you’d be less of a big deal in your own culture.16 The remark recalls Bellow’s hostility toward his Paris-based friend, Harold “Kappy” Kaplan (discussed in chapters 8 and 9 of To Fame and Fortune), whom he accused of being more French than the French.

  Only at his desk, when such remarks were channeled into art, could one count on Bellow to acknowledge the pain they caused, which is not to say that his awareness would stop him from making them. In “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” Herschel Shawmut acknowledges “the evil I did” (p. 376), inexcusable remarks both “idiotic and wicked” (p. 378), but he sees these remarks as drawn “from the depths of my nature, that hoard of strange formulations” (p. 381). The remarks are made “for art’s sake, i.e. without perversity or malice….Yes, there has to be some provocation, but what happens when I am provoked happens because the earth heaves up underfoot, and then from opposite ends of the heavens I get a simultaneous shock to both ears. I am deafened and I have to open my mouth” (p. 390). Elsewhere, Shawmut enumerates the possible sources of these remarks: “seizure, rapture, demonic possession, frenzy, Fatum [from Nietzsche, meaning an essential nature “inaccessible to revision,” which “can be taught nothing”], divine madness, or even solar storm. The better people are, the less they take offense at this gift, or curse” (p. 412). For Bellow, as for Shawmut, cutting remarks, like other forms of bad behavior, were part of the package, connected in Bellow’s case to his power as a writer, his “gift, or curse.” When Nathan came to pick him up each day from International House, he would sometimes sit and watch Bellow writing at the little table in his room. “I was delighted to see it…the intensity with which he sat there.” “I do this to keep sane,” Bellow said of his writing routine.17

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  FRAN GENDLIN WAS NOT the only woman to receive a letter from Bellow during his visit to Japan. He also wrote to a young woman with whom he had been having an affair for over a year, to put an end to the relationship. This woman, who wishes not to be identified, recognized herself, or aspects of herself, in Doris Scheldt, with whom Charlie Citrine has an affair in Humboldt’s Gift. In depicting Doris, she wrote me, Bellow “describes my flat on the near North side of Chicago and my quirky way of dressing at the time. I had a bentwood rocker and though I did needlepoint whilst he read to me, I also knitted matching jumpers for him and Daniel. And yes, I was terrified of getting pregnant. It was before Roe v Wade.”18 The reason Bellow gave for ending the relationship was that he didn’t want the woman to end up having to “push him in a bathchair.” Bellow was fifty-six when she entered his office on a bet (that she couldn’t get into his graduate seminar on Ulysses), and she was twenty-one, a fourth-year undergraduate from Columbia, spending her senior year at the University of Chicago.19 Like Charlie’s Doris, she was, still is, petite, attractive, and funny, and after she explained to Bellow why she wished to audit his course, he admitted her. “He didn’t know what I could contribute,” he said, “but I’d be decorative.” At Columbia she had majored in English and urban studies and had ambitions to write. The seminar, to which she occasionally contributed, “was amazing, as you’d imagine.” After its penultimate session, she asked Bellow if he’d like a lift home, as it was raining. He declined. After the last session, “he asked if he could have that ride and so I drove him back to the Cloisters. He was obviously attracted to me and as it was the end of the course he asked me out and he made me supper and we went to bed. What can I say? I was terribly flattered.”

  From then on, they saw each other “about twice a week” for a year. In the summer of 1971, he flew her out to Aspen for a couple of days, shortly after Fran Gendlin’s visit. Daniel was there at the time, and he and the young woman were “the kids.” In Chicago, the affair was conducted at her apartment, to which Bellow frequently came after playing racquetball at the Riviera Club on East Randolph Street. Mostly they stayed in, though occasionally he’d take her to a restaurant or an event where he was speaking. She met Edward Shils several times and thought he was “a pompous ass,” though he treated her courteously. She heard a lot about David Peltz, though she never met him. On one occasion, she and Bellow had supper with her parents, eight years his junior. The family came from a wealthy North Shore township. In Humboldt’s Gift, Doris’s father, Professor Scheldt, is an anthroposophist; the real-life young woman’s father was in business. She describes her parents as outwardly establishment but with progressive views. “Their attitude was that I was free, white and twenty-one and if I wanted to get involved with someone thirty-five years older it might as well be a literary eminence. As long as I didn’t get hurt.” She didn’t. As she writes, in an email of June 19, 2015, “I can honestly say that he never hurt me either emotionally or physically in his behavior toward me or when he ended it. It was disappointing but my heart wasn’t broken.”

  She also believes she gained things from the affair. Bellow introduced her to Mozart’s operas. She learned how to make a vinaigrette and a martini. Bellow had interesting things to tell about books and writing. The summer after graduation, she got a job in Chicago with the educational publisher Scott Foresman, and sometimes she and Bellow would talk about her work, as when she was asked to prepare biographies of writers or to “expurgate” The Taming of the Shrew for students. Mostly, though, Bellow talked about what he was writing, not just Humboldt’s Gift but “Zetland and Quine,” an unfinished novel about Isaac Rosenfeld. When she discovered he had used her as a partial model for Doris Scheldt, “I was flattered….Doris was a pretty fair representation.” That Doris is nowhere near as sexy as Renata did not bother her. She’d had little sex
ual experience when she met Bellow, all of it with equally inexperienced contemporaries, a fact that accounts for her willingness to put up with what she now sees as Bellow’s “lousy” lovemaking: “I didn’t know any better.” Overall, however, she looks back on the affair with warmth and gratitude. “It was a very friendly relationship. I don’t think he was ever mad at me. My take on the whole thing is that…he was beginning to fear his mortality. His friends were dying. He talked about Isaac Rosenfeld all the time and about Delmore Schwartz and it was during our time that John Berryman died and he was really upset about that.” “I made him feel younger. It was a way of avoiding the Angel of Death.” Another reason Bellow never expressed anger or irritation toward her, she believes, is that he was “busy venting his feelings on Susan.” That he was seeing other women, referred to by her as “your grown-up lady friends,” was clear, though she never knew how many there were. She felt no guilt about the affair: since it took place “between Susan and Alexandra…the whole thing was kosher.” What the affair shows, why it is worth knowing about, is that not all Bellow’s relationships with women at this time were fraught and painful, the occasion of inexcusable behavior on his part. That said, exceptions often prove the rule.20