Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

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  SHORTLY AFTER HIS RETURN to Chicago from Japan, Bellow received a letter dated June 2, 1972, from Henry Volkening inviting him to “drunch” at the Century. Two years previously, Volkening’s wife, Natalie, had died of lung cancer, and, as Harriet Wasserman puts it in Handsome Is, “Henry was lost without Natalie.”21 Volkening himself then developed lung cancer. On January 10, 1971, he had written to Bellow to tell him he was about to be operated on and that the doctors were “as optimistic as they, professionally, can permit themselves to be. ‘We caught it early. It’s the size of a dime.’ ” On March 7, Bernard Malamud, also a Russell & Volkening author, wrote to Bellow saying that he had been in New York and “spoke to Henry, in full voice, and apparently coming along well. Speriamo.” Weeks later, in an undated letter, Bellow replied less hopefully: “Henry doesn’t seem very well. He calls up now and then to say he’s better, but he doesn’t really sound better. He’s putting up a good fight.”22 Both Volkening and his partner, Diarmuid Russell, “smoked like a chimney.” According to Wasserman, Natalie Volkening “died of secondhand smoke.” A week after Wasserman reported to Russell that Volkening’s cancer was inoperable, Russell called her into his office to say that “he’d just got the results of some tests, and his doctors told him he had the exact same kind of lung cancer as Henry.”23 In the summer of 1972, Russell and Volkening sold the agency to Tim Seldes, an editor at Doubleday. The “drunch” Volkening had proposed that June was to introduce Bellow to Seldes. “My sense is that he will be very good and successful,” Volkening wrote, “and you of course have long sensed that I won’t long be of the health to continue to function efficiently. So this will be a lucky break for me, and for my clients too.” Henry Volkening died within the year, on October 18, 1972, followed fourteen months later by Diarmuid Russell.

  According to Wasserman, by the time Seldes bought Russell & Volkening, she was “to all intents and purposes” Bellow’s agent.24 She had first met him in January 1969, in her fourth year at the agency, when he came to the office to pick up Volkening for lunch. Bellow stopped in front of her desk when she was on the phone. He “looked me over—up and down. I was skinny then, and I was wearing a great dress. He came behind me, to my free ear: ‘You know, you’re really very pretty. Do you think you could take care of me? Would you marry me?’ ” On returning from lunch, Volkening called out in a voice loud enough for the rest of the office to hear: “Saul says Harriet has a pure heart. He says we should pay attention to her—she’s got something there….And from then on they paid attention to me.”25 Wasserman became Bellow’s agent and remained so until 1996.

  Only some of these years were spent at Russell & Volkening. When forced to give up the agency, both its founders wanted Wasserman to purchase it. To do so, however, involved taking out a large bank loan, and “I simply wasn’t ready.”26 Seldes became the firm’s boss, promising Wasserman a partnership that never materialized. After almost ten years, she began to feel that he was trying to push her out. On September 14, 1981, she left Russell & Volkening to start the Harriet Wasserman Literary Agency, taking Bellow with her. When first she disclosed her plans to leave, “without missing a beat,” Bellow told her he’d go with her.27 This is Wasserman’s account. Seldes offers a somewhat different account. He and Wasserman “discussed” a partnership, but he never promised her one. At the beginning, he found her helpful, “very candid and welcoming early on and then sour and disgruntled—for no reason at all.” The problem was that “she thought she should have been the boss.” There were personality conflicts. She was “a really solitary person,” and “eventually she became so difficult that she had to go.” With Bellow, in contrast, Seldes’s relations were easy. Volkening had told Seldes that Bellow made him so nervous that “he had to go home and have a few drinks before he could talk to Saul.” Seldes found Bellow “about as engaging a man as you could want,” though also “full of electricity.”

  Wasserman was devoted to Bellow, her most important author (others included Reynolds Price, Alice McDermott, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and Frederick Buechner). Early in their relationship, author and agent spent a single disastrous night as lovers. Bellow came to dinner and made a pass, which unnerved Wasserman (“Is this good for business?”). When he discovered she was wearing a “black Lastex body suit” under her caftan, he told her, “You’re not coming to bed in that diving suit!” Once in bed, there were further embarrassments. “I almost laughed,” Bellow later confessed, “but I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” “I said I almost laughed too. But for me it had been a comic nightmare….That night was never mentioned again….There was no flirting anymore. It was strictly business—and a growing friendship.”28

  Wasserman was tough in defense of her authors’ interests, at times abrasive, as agents often are; but she was also insecure, a product in part, her sister Maxine Fields believes, of their father, a dominating, denigrating figure, in part of a childhood illness, scoliosis, which made her self-conscious about her appearance. As a child, Wasserman had a minor protrusion on the right side of her back, which made her think she was deformed, a term her father used about her. In 1954, at fourteen, she had an operation on her back, and had to wear a body cast for a year. After high school, she went to Hunter College, but lived at home, in Riverdale, New York, until she was twenty-five. Although she never married or had a steady boyfriend, she was pretty, smart, and personable. According to her sister, she did well at her first jobs out of college, as secretary to the head of surgery at a New York hospital, then, briefly, in the film business. At Russell & Volkening, both her bosses thought highly of her. With Bellow she was patient and compliant, although she claims always to have given him an “honest response” when asked to read work in progress. Bellow counted on her as “first reader,” she says, and when he sent manuscript material, “I’d call at once with a response, no matter what the time of day or night. And I’d tell him I’d get back to him after I read the draft twice more.”29 Early in their relationship, before the embarrassing night as lovers, Wasserman flew to Chicago to discuss a two-book deal Doubleday had offered Bellow. It was for two hundred thousand dollars and the promise of a summer house in Spain. Wasserman “was very cool” (the offer seems to have involved a possible split from Russell & Volkening), advising Bellow to beware, especially if the deal included “a provision that if book number one earns out before you deliver book number two, the contract separates into two individual contracts. Otherwise, the earnings from book number one will pay for the advance of book number two. I think he got it. A gleam came into his eye. ‘Oh.’ ”30 He continued to be represented by Russell & Volkening.

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  IN THE SPRING OF 1973, Bellow took an extended break from his duties at the Committee on Social Thought and spent six weeks at Monk’s House, in the village of Rodmell in East Sussex, the former home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf. The offer to stay at Monk’s House came from the historian Asa Briggs, vice-chancellor of the University of Sussex. The university had received the house from the painter Trekkie Parsons, the wife of Ian Parsons, Leonard Woolf’s colleague at Chatto & Windus. In the years between Virginia Woolf’s death in 1941 and Leonard Woolf’s death in 1969, the Parsonses had been companions to Leonard as well as neighbors. When Briggs came to give a talk at the University of Chicago in 1973, Bellow mentioned that he was having trouble finishing Humboldt’s Gift. Why not come to Sussex, Briggs suggested, deliver a lecture, and spend a couple of months living in Monk’s House? In addition to the attractions of the house itself—oak beams, wood fires, sunny conservatory—there were extensive grounds, including kitchen and flower gardens, rolling lawns, ponds, two tall elms (“Virginia” and “Leonard”), and an orchard filled with plum and apple trees. Rodmell was largely unspoiled, the university was nearby, five or so miles away, as were the South Downs, the River Ouse, and the attractive town of Lewes, home to many Sussex academics.
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br />   Bellow’s first impressions of Monk’s House were communicated in April in an undated letter to Fran Gendlin. “Well, it’s beautiful and spooky, the gardens are grand, the house cold, everything creaks but I was not haunted by the ghost of Virginia. I am exhausted, but well. I have no telephone and as yet no car, but I sh’d get the car. The phone is doubtful.” In subsequent letters, partly aimed at persuading Gendlin to join him, Bellow complains of loneliness. “I work hard and have made much progress,” he writes on May 8, “but the solitude of this existence is trying. I seem to feel quite sorry for myself when I’m alone, and I think Robinson Crusoe had more toys.” In other letters, Bellow emphasized the attractions of Monk’s House. A charwoman, Mrs. Willard, came daily and did all the washing and cleaning. The garden was “beautiful, and we can sit in the conservatory, which I have brought to life, and smell the jasmine.” Gendlin took the bait and has fond memories of their stay: of sunny breakfasts in the conservatory, Bellow tending the kitchen garden in the afternoon, evenings with friends in the cozy upstairs sitting room. To Edward Shils, in a note written on stationery headed “From LEONARD WOOLF,” Bellow writes on May 25 of the spring weather and of being happily immersed in his work: “The sun has begun to shine again, and the birds are amorous and the flowers open.” The house was not without its inconveniences—Gendlin remembers smacking her forehead on low-hanging door frames and having difficulty getting in and out of the bath without soaking the floor—but it was not true, as has been suggested, that cold and discomfort sent them fleeing.31

  Nor was it true that Bellow was isolated at Monk’s House, as his early letters suggest. The critic and novelist Gabriel Josipovici—thirty-two at the time, a lecturer in English at Sussex—saw a good deal of Bellow that spring. Josipovici was one of only a very few critics whose accounts of his work Bellow approved. Shils had drawn the young academic to Bellow’s attention, having been impressed by an essay he published on Herzog in 1971 in Encounter.32 On the strength of the essay, Bellow asked Josipovici to write the introduction to the Viking Portable Saul Bellow, a task which Marshall Best of Viking thought Alfred Kazin or Lionel Trilling might undertake.33 Josipovici lived in Lewes, and Bellow invited him over soon after arriving at Monk’s House. The two men got on well. Bellow “never looked down his nose at me,” Josipovici recalled, and was encouraging about his fiction. What Josipovici remembers of their weekly walks on the South Downs is Bellow’s fondness for Chicago stories and locutions.

  Josipovici met other guests on his visits to Monk’s House, including the South African novelist Dan Jacobson and the Biblical and Jewish-studies scholar Chaim (“Rab”) Raphael, a Research Fellow at Sussex. Bellow had known Raphael for many years, having met him in the 1940s, most likely through Alfred Kazin. In addition to writing books on Jewish history and culture, “Rab” (for “Rabinovitch,” his original name) wrote crime thrillers under the pseudonym Jocelyn Davey. He had also been a high-ranking Treasury civil servant, and from 1942 to 1957 was posted to the British Information Services in New York, where he and Bellow first met. Josipovici remembers arriving one day at Monk’s House to find Bellow entertaining Raphael and Miron Grindea, a Romanian-born journalist, founding editor of the literary journal ADAM International Review. Grindea was visibly nervous in the presence of the celebrated novelist, and when Bellow tried to calm him—“Relax, Mr. Grindea, just relax”—he replied: “I am relaxed. I’m just tapping out a little tune.” Fran Gendlin also talks of meeting the painter Duncan Grant, who contrasted her favorably with Valerie Eliot. The poet’s wife, Grant recalled, “wouldn’t deign to see me.”

  Only occasionally did Bellow play up to his status as literary celebrity. Arriving at the university arts center to give a talk, he refused to begin until a bust of Hemingway was carried from the room. “I’m a writer not a film actor,” Josipovici remembers him saying on another public occasion, “though he said it in a film actor’s way.” Josipovici saw nothing of Bellow’s unpleasant side. When asked to address one of Josipovici’s classes, Bellow offered a reading instead. “He read the opening of Henderson wonderfully and then came back to tea.” At tea, Bellow met Josipovici’s formidable mother, Sacha Rabinovich, a poet and translator. “She said, ‘He’s my sort of person,’ and she had no time for posturing.” When one of Josipovici’s research students showed up at Monk’s House with his small son, Bellow took the little boy on a tour. “This house belonged to a very strange woman,” he told the boy when they reached the bathroom. “This is where she had her bath and in the end it was water which did her in.”

  That Bellow spent only six weeks rather than the full two months at Monk’s House was partly the fault of Virginia Woolf, or the cult of Virginia Woolf, partly that of the University of Sussex. “He was very ambivalent about the fact this was Virginia Woolf’s house,” Josipovici remembers. “He wouldn’t sleep with me in the big room,” Gendlin recalled, because Leonard Woolf had slept there. “He slept in Tom Eliot’s room.” “It was the literary tourists who drove him out,” she believes. “One sunny morning, when Saul was sitting out in the garden writing, some strangers just wandered in through the gate, saw him, and asked whether he was getting his inspiration from Virginia Woolf. Well, we left two days after that.” Bellow may also have wanted to leave because the University of Sussex presented him with a bill for his stay. “He was furious that the university was making him pay,” Josipovici remembers. “Asa said, ‘Come, be my guest.’ Is this the way they treat you?” The day before the decision to leave Monk’s House, Bellow would not speak a word to Gendlin. He was in a state like the one fictionalized in her Aspen story. At dinner, she finally said, “Tomorrow you have to talk to me. I don’t care what you say, but you have to talk to me,” at which point he declared, “ ‘Oh, Frances, I can’t stand it here anymore.’ So we wound up spending a week in Barley Alison’s in London” (Barley was out of town at the time). In Gendlin’s view, “Virginia Woolf was oppressing him and Virginia Woolf just did him in.”

  The affair between Bellow and Gendlin had been going on for four years at this point and would last another year. “We had a good relationship,” she recalled. “It was domestic. We traveled or we didn’t. I had my life and my work, he liked that, though every once in a while it would make him crazy.” Their sex life was “extremely passionate.” “It was the first time I’d had a longtime sexual passion. Whether or not he was the best lover in the world had nothing to do with it….It was really something that meant a lot to me.” Socially and intellectually, life with Bellow was exciting; he was “showing me a new life. He was so funny, so smart.” They traveled to Italy together, meeting writers and celebrities. In Milan, Inge Feltrinelli, Bellow’s publisher, threw a party for him. Gendlin had no fancy outfits, and “there were all these elegant Italian ladies.” So Bellow took her shopping. After trying on a number of dresses, she came out with one they both liked. “This dress made me look long and willowy. ‘Oh, Frances,’ he said, ‘you look like the queen of a small country.’ Isn’t that wonderful?” The trip to Jerusalem was more somber, to attend the commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Gendlin remembers Golda Meir’s speech at the commemoration, which consisted of a single sentence in Yiddish: “No matter what they do to us, we will beat them.” Meir, the prime minister, looked to Gendlin “just like Lyndon Johnson.” It was Meir’s office that supplied Bellow with a car and driver, while Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, acted as their guide. Alfred Kazin was also present at the commemoration (along with Elie Wiesel), and when Bellow whispered to Frances during the speeches, Kazin thought he was translating for her. In fact, she told Atlas, “he was whispering, ‘Has Kazin made a pass at you?’ ”34

  While he was with Gendlin, Bellow became interested in the ideas of the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner. They frequently tried out exercises Steiner had developed to train what he called “spiritual perception.” “One of them was to walk down to the end of the block an
d say what we had seen. And it was totally different. It was great. And we’d do this exercise of trying to remember the day” (that is, from the present back to the moment of waking). During their time together, Bellow was at work on “Charm and Death,” one of the unfinished Zetland novels, and on Humboldt’s Gift, which in early versions contained Zetland-like Greenwich Village episodes. Partly to recapture the Village milieu, Bellow had David Peltz build an orgone box in the hall closet of his Cloisters apartment. Gendlin remembers taking turns with Bellow to sit naked inside the box. “He did it,” she recalls, “but he had humor about it. I thought it was a hoot.”

  In addition to including Gendlin in his spiritualist and other investigations, Bellow also, she claims, taught her how to write. She would come home from editing the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and he would read to her what he’d written that day. “I’d say, This is fabulous, and the next day he would change it, and it was better. The first day I wouldn’t understand why it was better, but the second day I knew it.” The process was not without its pains. Bellow could be undiplomatic in his reactions, crude as well. After reading a review Gendlin wrote of a biography of Einstein, “he put his hands on my breasts and said, ‘Oh, Frances, isn’t it lucky you have other things you do so very well.’ ” Yet she continued to show him her writing, which eventually improved. “The last thing I wrote was an article on climate change, and he read it and looked up and said, ‘Frances, there’s nothing wrong with this.’ I grabbed the paper and was running around saying, ‘There’s nothing wrong with this, there’s nothing wrong with this.’ ” Gendlin’s attempts to educate herself sometimes involved embarrassment. In her desire to keep up with Bellow’s range of reference, she was like Katrina in “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” (“There was a lot in that story which was about our relationship”). The first year they were together, “I kept reading in the encyclopedia about all these people I thought I should know. I read about Baudelaire and Stendhal one day and got them totally mixed up. He kept telling me I wasn’t good enough, and so I wanted to be good enough.” Eventually, she felt she was. “There was nothing to put down anymore.”