Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  From the beginning, Bellow was open with Gendlin about his feelings, calling her his “best friend” but admitting he “could only love her so far,” that she “didn’t touch his soul.” At Monk’s House, as with Maggie in the Hamptons, “he was doing something strange with the mail. Hiding some letters.” It was no secret to Gendlin that Bellow was “juggling all sorts of relationships” (causing her, in turn, to go off at times with other men). He could, she admits, treat her “like crap.” Once, in Chicago, when Peltz and his wife, Doris, were over, Frances said, “You know, sometime I’d like to live in Rome.” Bellow said, “ ‘Well, why don’t you go now? Why don’t you leave?’ I said, ‘You want me to leave now?’ He said yes. It was so awkward. I should have left.” But she didn’t. “He was in a mood” is how she explains not leaving, the sort of state in which he made caustic and cutting remarks “about everyone.” David Peltz’s view was that Gendlin “was too nice, that I lacked an element of bitchiness Saul needed…There should have been more push and pull.” Gendlin recognized the masochistic element in her relationship with Bellow. “ ‘I want you, I don’t need you,’ ” Bellow warned her, “ ‘don’t get addicted to me,’ and I was on some level addicted to him.” “It was my responsibility. If I didn’t like it, I could leave.” But when she said she was leaving, “that’s when he’d come closer.” Once, her therapist asked her what name she thought would have best suited her, and she went off and asked Bellow the same question. “He answered right away. It should have been a Russian name: ‘Nearbyfaroff,’ ” by which he meant, as Gendlin puts it, “come closer, come closer, oops, you’re too close.”

  In the summer of 1970, Greg Bellow got married in California, and Bellow asked Gendlin to accompany him, though she hadn’t been invited to the wedding. While Bellow was at the ceremony, she went to the movies, and when he came back to the hotel, she had not yet returned. The wedding upset Bellow, not because he disapproved of Greg’s marrying, or of Greg’s bride, JoAnn, but because, as Greg explains in his memoir, it was small and “self-financed” and he had invited “all of the doting Goshkins and Saul, but none of the other Bellows—all of whom had ignored me during my childhood….Saul was sore as a boil and complained bitterly at having his family snubbed, being outnumbered by Goshkins, and seeing Anita happily settled in Los Angeles with Basil, while he was between marriages.”35 The movie Frances had gone to see was M*A*S*H, and when she finally appeared, Bellow “was furious.” He insisted that she see it again with him, and afterward said he “hated it.” In “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” Bellow fictionalizes this episode. As Katrina recalls it, “she got into trouble in San Francisco when she insisted that he see M*A*S*H. ‘I’ve been to it, Vic. You mustn’t miss this picture.’ Afterwards he could hardly bear to talk to her, an unforgettable disgrace. Eventually she made it up with him, after long days of coolness.” What Wulpy hated about M*A*S*H is not specified, but the anecdote is prefaced by Katrina’s saying that “he was unnervingly fastidious about language. As others were turned off about grossness, he was sensitive to bad style” (p. 292).

  Bellow’s friend and first biographer, Ruth Miller, recalls a conversation she had with him in 1979 about the real-life version of Katrina’s M*A*S*H “disgrace.” Gendlin, identified by Miller as “a woman he had once admired,” had “gone on and on explaining to him what the movie was all about. As he had sat there in the theater, he had said to himself, My God! What am I doing here?” Shaking his head, Bellow told Miller, “The most important thing in his life were his books and no one seemed to care at all about them.”36 Katrina’s praise of M*A*S*H in “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” identifies her with a level of culture which Victor Wulpy, like Bellow, not only despised but saw as a threat. In the story, movies in general get it in the neck. At the airport, Victor and Katrina run into an old acquaintance and admirer of Victor’s from Greenwich Village days, Larry Wrangel, now a big success in Hollywood. Victor remembers Wrangel as an ex–philosophy student from NYU, “a character who longed to be taken seriously. The type who bores you when he’s most earnest” (p. 308). He treats him with “angry restraint and thinly dissimulated impatience” (p. 315), qualities Susan Bellow’s friends noted in Bellow’s treatment of the talk of their husbands, wealthy real-estate agents, architects, and physicians. Bellow’s books were serious, and they grew, he felt, out of a more exacting or demanding culture than that of the movies, even movies at their best (he also hated Psycho and The Godfather). By eroding the standards of a wide literate audience, M*A*S*H was debasing as well as debased. The “unforgettable disgrace” Wulpy feels when watching the film (“What am I doing here?”) derives from his attraction to a woman whose erotic appeal, in addition to her niceness, causes him to lose sight of what is “most important.” “Her idiocies irritated me to the point of heartbreak,” Victor says of Katrina, a sentence Gendlin calls “beautiful,” but one that “made me feel sad.”37

  * * *

  —

  BELLOW’S QUICKNESS TO DEFEND not only his books, “the most important thing in his life,” but literature in general, and to see both as everywhere threatened, led in this period to an embarrassing contretemps with Lionel Trilling. On November 14, 1972, Bellow delivered a lecture at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., entitled “Literature in the Age of Technology.”38 The lecture was the first of five Frank Nelson Doubleday Lectures commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Doubleday publishing firm (the other lecturers were Daniel Bell, Peter Medawar, Arthur C. Clarke, and Edmundo O’Gorman). The Doubleday Lectures were black-tie events, accompanied by lavish dinner parties. Bellow’s fee was five thousand dollars plus expenses. In a letter of November 9, Ruth Boorstin, the wife of Daniel Boorstin, the Smithsonian director, wrote to report that Betty Beale had mentioned Bellow in her gossip column in The Washington Star, along with items about Jackie Onassis and Margaret Truman. Almost two years later, in the August 1974 issue of Harper’s magazine, Bellow republished the essay under the title “Machines and Storybooks: Literature in the Age of Technology.” Before it appeared, however, his attention was drawn to a damaging misreading it contained of an essay Trilling had published in Commentary entitled “Authenticity and the Modern Unconscious.” Trilling’s essay was drawn from the final chapter of his most recent book, Sincerity and Authenticity (1971), a book Bellow had not read. Although Bellow was unable to alter or remove the offending passages in the Harper’s version of the lecture, he wrote to Trilling in advance of its publication to express “regretful second thoughts” and “remorse” about what he had written.

  The starting point of Bellow’s lecture is that literary culture is under threat on a number of fronts. Among the figures he quotes as colluding in this threat, or complacent in reporting it, are novelists and poets as well as critics, including Arthur C. Clarke (his fellow lecturer), Theodore Roszak, André Malraux, Paul Valéry, his friend Harold Rosenberg (for whom, as Bellow puts it in the lecture, “most modernist masterpieces are critical masterpieces…Joyce’s writing is a criticism of literature, Pound’s poetry a criticism of poetry, Picasso’s painting a criticism of painting”), and Lionel Trilling. The high esteem accorded movies is symptomatic. Early on in the lecture, Bellow abruptly asks of the Stanley Kubrick film 2001, “Will this sort of drama replace Othello?” Everywhere he goes, he hears of the triumph of science and technology: “Now, as power-minded theoreticians see it, the struggle between old art and new technology has ended in the triumph of technology.” In defiance of these theoreticians, Bellow declares that “man is an artist and that art is a name for something always done by human beings. The technological present may be inhospitable to this sort of doing, but art can no more be taken from humankind than faces and hands.” Even those who deplore the present situation do so in ways that “narrow the scope of the novel…make the novelist doubt his own powers and the right of his imagination to range over the entire world. The authority of the imagination has dec
lined.” The effect of such jeremiads is either to silence the imagination or to drive it into overassertiveness: “Writers have capitulated to fact, to events and reportage, to politics and demagogy.”

  Trilling is the last of the lecture’s enemies of literature, but chief among those “who preside over literary problems.” Bellow cites “Authenticity and the Modern Unconscious,” beginning with the following quotation: “It is an exceptional novelist today who would say of himself, as Henry James did, ‘that he loved the story as story,’ by which James meant the story apart from any overt ideational intention it might have, simply as, like any primitive tale, it brings into play what he called ‘the blessed faculty of wonder.’ Already by James’s day, narration as a means by which a reader was held spellbound, as the old phrase put it, had come under suspicion. And the dubiety grew to the point where Walter Benjamin could say some three decades ago that the art of story-telling was moribund.”

  Bellow was not impressed. “Here one cries out, ‘Wait! Who is this Benjamin? Why does it matter what he said?’ But intellectuals do refer to one another to strengthen their arguments.” To Benjamin, as quoted by Trilling, stories have an “old-fashioned ring”; to Trilling, as quoted by Bellow, they are “inauthentic for our present time—there is something inauthentic in our time in being held spellbound, momentarily forgetful of oneself, concerned with the fate of a person who is not oneself.” This quotation leads Bellow to conclude that for Trilling “literature itself is now inauthentic.” After Bellow alerted Trilling to the Harper’s essay, and Trilling read it, he was not inclined to accept Bellow’s apology or to think of him, as Bellow imagined he would, as merely “silly.” “The adverse words which occur to me,” Trilling wrote to Bellow on July 25, 1974, “are, I am sorry to have to say, rather graver than that.” Nor would it do for Bellow to attribute his misreading of the article to a failure to read the book from which it was excerpted: “Reading the whole book would have done nothing to preserve you from the extravagant error of your treatment of it [the article].” What Bellow has done, Trilling claims, is to misinterpret his intention “to the point of exactly inverting it.”

  Let me put it this way: if someone were to say that in Mr. Sammler you had portrayed a voluptuary nihilist who despised England and nursed a secret admiration of Nazism, was gratified by all the manifestations of contemporary culture which deny the traditional pieties, and was incapable of love or solicitude for any fellow-being, your purpose would not have been more distorted than are my views in your representation of them.

  That Trilling’s article reports on the devaluation of storytelling “with regret” was something he claims “any passably intelligent reader will recognize.” “No part” of the description of Benjamin’s position, as derived by Bellow from Trilling, is true: “All the characteristics of the art of storytelling which you say explain Benjamin’s fancied objection to it are in point of fact the reasons for the love and admiration he gives it and for his thinking that something peculiarly human is lost when the telling of stories is no longer cherished.” How, then, to account for Bellow’s misreading? “On the one hand, that you should simply have failed to comprehend what I say and what Benjamin says in my paraphrase of him I can scarcely credit, given your known competence in the reading of texts far more difficult than mine. On the other hand, it is scarcely to be conceived, let alone believed, that you would consciously and deliberately pervert the meaning of what I had written.” He goes on to question why, in the months since the Smithsonian lecture, Bellow never asked himself if he’d dealt “fairly and accurately” with Trilling’s views. “To the best of your knowledge of me,” Trilling asks, “have you ever heard me say, either in my life or in my work, that I hoped ‘for the end of art as the surest indication that man had achieved maturity and ultra-intelligence’?” Bellow’s decision to publish his Smithsonian lecture in Harper’s was “tantamount to a conscious and deliberate intention not to comprehend or present truthfully what I have said.”39

  In late June, before Bellow received Trilling’s letter, Edith Tarcov, who was helping him not only with The Portable Saul Bellow but with other publishing tasks, forwarded to him an earlier letter, either written or forwarded to her, in which Trilling made his discontent clear.40 On June 28, after receiving the forwarded letter, Bellow wrote to Tarcov admitting that he’d “put my emphasis in the wrong place, like an idiot,” and suggesting that they insert the following footnote in reprinted versions: “Rereading Mr. Trilling’s essay with a calmer mind, I see that I misrepresented his position. I repent of my hasty error in attributing views to him which he does not hold. Those views are, however, held by others and although I may have been unjust to Prof. Trilling I have not entirely wasted the reader’s time.” Bellow then instructs Tarcov to “make what changes you like to save face for me, but I have a shamed face as big as the new harvest moon.” He also admits he’ll have to apologize directly to Trilling. The letter to Tarcov offers an explanation for the misreading: “I think I dislike T’s way of reading so much that it inflames my brain.” The upshot of Trilling’s angry letter of July 25, 1974, was a period of estrangement, made particularly difficult by the fact that the two men were to appear together later in the summer at an Aspen Institute conference entitled “The Educated Person in the Contemporary World.” The relationship never recovered. Trilling died on November 5, 1975. In an undated letter to Karyl Roosevelt written that autumn, Bellow confessed to being “upset abt Lionel. With all his faults I like him” (“like” versus “liked” suggests that the letter was written before Trilling’s death). It was in Jerusalem that he learned of the death and wrote a belated note of condolence, to which Diana Trilling responded in a letter of January 15, 1976. In her letter, Trilling reiterated her husband’s “astonishment” not only that Bellow should have so misread him but that he persisted in his misreading. Then she softened somewhat, admitting: “Both of us were aware in Aspen that you wished that none of it had happened. At least, when I undertook to bridge the gap you plainly knew that was my intention and responded with a warmth and simplicity that I much appreciated as Lionel did too.”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE LATE SPRING OF 1974, shortly after another trip to San Francisco with Gendlin, Bellow made a brief visit to London, before spending the early months of the summer in a villa near Casa Alison in Carboneras. The trip to California had involved a visit to his first grandchild, Juliet Bellow, daughter of Greg and JoAnn. In a letter of January 2, 1974, to Philip Siegelman, Bellow was undoting, or posed as undoting (later, he would become especially fond of Juliet, who is now a professor of art history). “Juliet was born about five weeks ago. I have a picture of her and she doesn’t yet look worth flying to California to see. But I don’t think I have the guts to break with conventions, so I suppose I’ll be coming out soon.” It was after the trip to California that Bellow and Gendlin broke up. Atlas says it was Bellow who ended the affair, after the trip to London. Gendlin says she ended it, deciding to move to New York to break her “addiction” to him. “I feel like I’m possessed by demons,” she told Karyl Roosevelt in the summer of 1973. “I had a lousy time while he was here [in Aspen, where she’d stayed on] and I’m glad he’s gone….I can understand why he loses a woman with every book—he’s certainly lost me with this one [Humboldt]. ‘Talk to me,’ I said to him, and he thought awhile and said, ‘Well, I think at this point, Charlie—.’ ‘Shut up,’ I told him, ‘I only want to hear things about me.’ Silence…He just couldn’t understand that I wanted to see if the relationship was going to lead to something.”41 Less than a year later, in an undated letter to Mitzi McClosky, Gendlin attempted to explain her decision to call it quits. In the past, “when there were lies and deceits I stepped back, when I could see them, and stayed away ’til they were over. But now I am in confusion and I can’t deal with that….I no longer understand the situation, so I have to leave, because it’s muddy and dirty….I feel so sad at losin
g such a dear dear person.” The withdrawal pains were severe: “I was devastated for a year….I missed our relationship.” Eventually, though, she recovered. “I remember him with love and gratitude and with appreciation,” she told me in an interview, “and with great relief that I escaped when I did….Our relationship had terrific ups and terrible downs.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER THE SPLIT with Gendlin, Bellow spent June and the early part of July in southern Spain, working toward the completion of Humboldt’s Gift. He was not alone there. When he learned that Harriet Wasserman was coming to Spain to conduct some business in Barcelona, he invited her to stay with him at his villa. There was difficulty coordinating dates, but finally Bellow cabled that he was “happy to put you up. Driver will meet you at airport and bring you to me. Saul.”42 When Wasserman arrived, the driver was waiting with a message: “Dear Harriet. Your driver Juan who speaks no English will take you to the home of Barley Alison where you’ll be her guest. My maid is too messy. I’ll meet you at Barley’s house at one o’clock and then we can go for a swim. Saul.” Wasserman had never met Barley Alison, who quickly brushed aside her apologies for intruding. After a shower and a rest, she went down from her room to pre-lunch drinks on the veranda. There Bellow sat, “flanked by Barley and her other houseguests,” none of whom Wasserman had met before.