Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Saul hadn’t risen to greet me. I noticed he was deeply tanned. “What’s new in New York?” was the first question he put to me. Before I could answer, Barley piped up. “Well, we’re all going to convince Harriet to stay, even though Saul is leaving tomorrow.” Everyone looked embarrassed, obviously they already knew the big news.

  I turned to Saul, who was gazing at the tile floor, and asked, “Is that true?”

  Without looking at me he nodded his head.43

  Later, driving to his villa, Bellow asked: “Are you sore at me? This is good for you. You’re not social enough.” At lunch, they talked mostly about Bette Howland, whom Bellow had recommended to Wasserman as a client, and who was distressed when Viking complained upon discovering that W-3 was not a work of fiction. Wasserman attributes this misunderstanding to Bellow, who had described W-3 as fiction both to her and to the editor at Viking, though “for self-protection” she couldn’t say so to either author or editor. (“To have confessed to him would have made his situation no better, only mine worse.”) Bellow asked, “Why did they take it if they thought it was a novel?” and Wasserman replied: “You have tremendous power over Viking. If you suggest it, they’ll take it. They can’t say no to you.”44 Bellow’s ignorance about business matters is a theme in Wasserman’s memoir. The next day, before his departure, he asked Wasserman if he could borrow some money, suggesting that when she arrived in Barcelona she could ask his publishers, Plaza y Janes, to “advance you against my next earnings.” But Plaza y Janes had not been Bellow’s publisher for several years: “He didn’t know that. He doesn’t follow business. With a few important exceptions, he doesn’t know who his European publishers are, let alone the local subagents.”45

  In Wasserman’s memoir, Bellow’s business ignorance combines with a penchant for Machiavellian plotting. After he left Almeria, Wasserman stayed on for several days, enjoying Barley’s company. “Barley was a truly generous hostess….Often she kept me by her side, wanting to talk.” When she returned to New York, however, she was greeted with a furious letter from George Weidenfeld: “Barley had written to him that I had come to Almeria to discuss moving Saul from Weidenfeld! The trip to Almeria had been a setup. But I took the hint. Saul’s way of making his will known is reflected in one of his favorite jokes: ‘Let’s you and him fight.’ Now I knew what he wanted. I was the one who strong-armed him to leave Weidenfeld and move to Secker.” A second motive for luring Wasserman to Almeria, she thought, was that “Saul wanted Barley to check me out as an agent.”46

  Here, as elsewhere in Wasserman’s memoir, doubts arise. Why would Bellow need Barley to check her out? Wasserman had been acting as Bellow’s agent for several years at this point, and as her memoir makes clear, she was devoted to him. It is true that Bellow valued Barley Alison’s advice, on everything from linens and handmade shoes to foreign publishers. It is true also that he had her check out new girlfriends. But Wasserman was not a new girlfriend. If he wanted to shift the blame onto Wasserman for leaving Weidenfeld & Nicolson, he hardly needed the plot she describes to do so. Nor does it sound like Barley Alison to lie about Wasserman’s role in Bellow’s move to Secker. “Barley had recently changed firms, to Secker and Warburg,” Wasserman writes, before declaring that the stay at Casa Alison had been a “setup.” But Barley had left Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1967, seven years earlier.

  An alternative account of the episode is possible. For reasons he did not wish to disclose to Wasserman, Bellow had suddenly to leave for Madrid. In trying to soften her upset at his departure, he called upon Barley for help. Would she put Wasserman up for a few days? It would be a good thing for agent and publisher to get to know each other; they could talk about his move to Secker & Warburg. Wasserman says nothing of the reason Bellow gave for having to leave so suddenly. If she asked for one, did he evade answering, gazing at the floor as at Casa Alison (or at the ceiling, as when pressed by Mark Harris about writing his biography47)? Perhaps “for her protection,” Wasserman did not press Bellow about his reasons for leaving. She presents Bellow as unaware of his power, but the guilt-inducing high-handedness of his behavior in this period can in part be seen as testing this power. In the memoir, there is little evidence of Wasserman’s criticizing Bellow’s behavior, whereas Barley Alison told him what she thought of it directly. Though no less devoted to Bellow than Wasserman, Barley could tease and cajole him, as in an undated thank-you letter of 1972, written after a visit to Chicago. The letter begins by praising the decoration of Bellow’s apartment in the Cloisters, “the rugs particularly, but I also liked the mixture of modern chairs, old chests and tables and antique sculpture with gay modern prints.” It then moves to Bellow’s personal life. “I still worry, of course, about the monstrous regiment of women who surround you but I cannot see what you could really do about it. If you were fat, ugly and dull your reputation would still attract them….If you got rid of the present collection there would be another lot forming up behind them immediately I fear. But just don’t marry them at the moment or let them move in on you even if it means constant trips to Japan, London, Yugoslavia or Israel to keep you one jump ahead.”

  A similar letter, written shortly after Wasserman’s stay at Casa Alison, holds a key both to Bellow’s sudden departure and to his reluctance, spoken or signaled, to explain its cause. On July 23, 1974, Barley wrote to Bellow, “We all got very fond of Harriet W. And I think that towards the middle of her stay she got over her shyness and enjoyed herself.” The letter ends: “I do hope Madrid was a success, I do hope Alexandra agreed on a definite date, I do hope Chicago was not harrowing, and I hope, above anything else, that Aspen is as good to work in as the [Casa] Pillet tower proved to be.”48 “Alexandra” here is Alexandra Bagdasar Ionescu Tulcea, Bellow’s houseguest before Wasserman’s arrival, the woman who would become his fourth wife. He had gone to Madrid to be with her. “I do hope Madrid was a success, I do hope Alexandra agreed on a definite date.” Bellow had at last produced a girlfriend Barley Alison approved of as a possible wife. Alexandra recalls Barley as “a woman of sterling character. She was completely devoted to Saul, a trusted friend. Later she became my friend too. Saul undoubtedly wanted Barley to check me out. The line in Barley’s letter very likely refers to a wedding date.” As for Bellow’s attitude to Harriet Wasserman, “it became clear to me that Saul did not want us to meet, whence the complicated arrangements. After this somewhat awkward episode, if my memory serves me right, Saul and I met again in Madrid for a few days.”49

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  ALEXANDRA IONESCU TULCEA WAS in some ways an unlikely choice for Bellow. She was not literary, she was not Jewish, and she was not American, having been born and educated in Bucharest, the daughter of prominent Romanian physicians. She was very intelligent, however, a professor of mathematics at Northwestern (she’d come to Carboneras from MIT, where she’d been teaching for six months). She was also attractive, elegant, refined in manner and appearance, and recently divorced. They had met in 1969, when Alexandra was thirty-four, some nineteen years younger than Bellow. Her ex-husband, Cassius Ionescu Tulcea, had been her mathematics professor at the University of Bucharest, and when, in 1957, he was invited to participate in a special two-year mathematical program at Yale, she enrolled to study for a mathematics Ph.D. at the university. They had left Romania, she told Greg Bellow, “determined not to return.”50 Two years later, Alexandra received her doctorate in mathematics, under the direction of Shizuo Kakutani, “famous already for his fixed-point theorems” (famous also, in later years, as the father of Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times book critic). After Yale, the Tulceas went on to teach at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Illinois and then, in 1967, became members of the mathematics faculty at Northwestern. According to Arthur Copeland, Alexandra’s friend and colleague from Northwestern, her husband received the senior appointment because he was older and better known, “but she was the better mathematician.”

>   Alexandra’s interest in mathematics was partly inherited. Her father, Dumitru Bagdasar, a brain surgeon trained in the United States, founded the first neurosurgery clinic in Romania, and became minister of health in the first communist government. “When he wanted to relax, he would either work out an integral, read poetry, or work on his embroidery—to keep his fingers nimble for surgery.”51 He died of cancer in 1946, when Alexandra was eleven. Her mother, Florica, a child psychiatrist, “was keenly interested in child education, particularly the teaching of arithmetic.” She was a great admirer of Hypatia, the female mathematician of antiquity who taught at the Academy in Alexandria. Florica’s maternal grandfather, an engineer, had taught mathematics in high school. Her younger sister, Minna, studied mathematics at university and “according to family legend…she would first put on a string of pearls and then sit down at her desk to study. She was a woman and she was a mathematician: the two were not incompatible.” When Alexandra was little, her mother teased her “that the love of mathematics was in our genes.”52

  When Alexandra’s father died, shortly after his appointment as the first Romanian ambassador to the United States, a post he was never able to take up, her mother was appointed in his place as minister of health. Two years later, she “fell in disgrace,” the victim of a campaign that would reach its climax in the early 1950s, “the peak of the Stalinist terror in Romania.” There was a real threat that she would be arrested or even executed. Her crime was having “dared” to accept help from the West after the war, shipments of medicine and food.53 “My mother and I had become pariahs, Untouchables.” Their Bucharest friends dropped them. At school, Alexandra’s teachers “were afraid to be seen talking to me.” She became extremely guarded, rarely speaking or voicing her opinions. Alexandra’s sense of danger from the state fed her commitment to mathematics. “I came to realize that of all the disciplines, Mathematics is perhaps the most immune to political pressures and it made Mathematics tremendously attractive, even more attractive than before.” As a student at university, she had taken courses in astronomy, mechanics, and thermodynamics. For a while, she was attracted to astronomy, “but I soon realized that none of these other disciplines could compete with Mathematics in clarity, precision, elegance.”54 Nor would they be as free from government surveillance and interference.

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  BELLOW AND ALEXANDRA MET at a party in Hyde Park given by Mircea Eliade, a professor of comparative religion at Chicago and a member of the Committee on Social Thought. Eliade and his wife were Romanians, but Alexandra had only recently gotten to know them, and this was the first time she’d been to one of their parties. She knew none of the other guests at the party, nor did she have “the faintest idea of who Saul Bellow was. People were fawning all over him.” When introduced, she told him that she’d never read any of his books. He told her he’d never read any of hers. Then he asked her to marry him. “I was speechless. Of course I was very flattered but I was also taken aback. Later I learned that it was one of his favorite opening lines with the ladies, a sure ice-breaker.” Bellow told Alexandra about meeting Bertrand Russell, who complained about the women in his life. “Saul said, You know why he had so much trouble with women? Because they didn’t know any mathematics.”

  It was some time before Bellow and Alexandra met again. “I should tell you, I was charmed by him. I was also frightened.” They didn’t start “seriously dating” until 1973, before Alexandra went off to teach at MIT. Gathering her courage, she called to tell Bellow her news, “and that piqued his interest.” In the short period before she left Chicago, as Alexandra puts it, “we became close.” Once she was at MIT, “he came and visited me; there were telephone calls and visits” (though no letters—she was not comfortable writing letters to Bellow). “We were attracted to each other. I remember thinking, This is the world outside of mathematics, which I know very little about, and he was indeed very charming, very funny, very witty, and he knew an enormous amount of things and he had a fabulous memory. He had read everything, and he offered such a contrast to the mathematicians I had known and to the life I had led before, and it really made an enormous impact.” Like those of many mathematicians, Alexandra’s cultural interests were musical rather than literary. Also like many mathematicians, she had “a very strong sense of the aesthetic, because really good mathematics is elegant, perhaps even austere.” Elegance for Alexandra “means streamlined simplicity….An ideal proof is a string of words in which every word counts and is irreplaceable.” Shortly after they married, she gave Bellow G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology (1940), which stresses the aesthetic appeal of mathematics, “and he was absolutely fascinated by it.” What especially struck Alexandra about life with Bellow was how exciting it was: “One of the most striking statements that he made to me is that life isn’t really black-and-white, life is essentially gray most of the time, but there are these surges of color that make life worthwhile. That stayed with me. That was an eye-opener.”

  Adam Bellow was seventeen when he first heard of Alexandra. He was in Aspen with his father in the late summer of 1974 and knew that, after he was due to leave, a woman he hadn’t met was coming for a visit. About this woman Bellow “was very reticent.” All he told Adam was that she was “closer to his [Bellow’s] age, she was a foreigner, quite an accomplished person in her own right, and she was different.” Later, having met Alexandra, and seen her with his father, Adam sensed “that he respected her and that he wanted to be the man that she saw in him. He wanted to be that guy” (roughly, a distinguished figure, which is what Barley Alison and Edward Shils also wanted him to be). “He sort of did the Dido and Aeneas routine. He came to her like a refugee from a burning city. He told her the story of his trials and sufferings. She was very receptive and provided a high-octane sympathy.” Alexandra, in turn, saw Bellow “as a truly serious man. Someone she could look up to like her father,” the father she lost at the age of eleven. The desire to be seen in this way had a powerful appeal to Bellow, Adam believes. “If you’ve been through three failed marriages and a bunch of long relationships…and knowing that you haven’t been at your best, I can really understand Alexandra’s appeal….She brought out a side of him—courtly, indulgent, fond, paternal—I hadn’t seen.”

  “Courtly” is the word Joseph Epstein uses in recalling Bellow’s demeanor with Alexandra. Despite her distinction as a mathematician, there was something childlike and vulnerable about her. Epstein thought Bellow treated her at times “like a daughter who didn’t pick up on things.” Partly this was because Alexandra came from a very different world (one Richard Stern said “amused Bellow and then alienated him”), partly because of the abstract nature of her concerns, partly because she was a non-native English speaker. Her speech was slow and precise (“actually” is pronounced as four distinct syllables), with odd emphases (Epstein, a friend, recalls her telephoning “to touch base”). The Copelands, also with affection, describe her as “notoriously absentminded.” When Bellow first visited Alexandra in her apartment, she asked him if he’d like a drink. As Lynda Copeland remembers the story: “So he went to the refrigerator, and not only was it empty, but there were no ice cubes.” Yet, as Adam Bellow puts it, “she had, still has, an unspoiled sweetness…a wonderful capacity to be just thunderstruck by a sunset.” To teenage Adam her formality was a virtue: “She set a tone of civility and aesthetic values”; she was considerate, wrote thank-you notes, made sure Bellow remembered his sons’ birthdays. All the Bellow family, with whom she remains close, took to Alexandra, and she took to them. “It was a wonderful feeling to know that I belonged to a new family, having left everyone behind. They were wonderful to me.”

  Adam first got to know Alexandra in Carboneras in the summer of 1975. “They were staying in this house [Casa Pillet, near Casa Alison], and she was independent,” he recalled. “She’d go into her study, doing her mathematics….You respected her.” Alexandra remembers the s
ummer as “very relaxing, very easygoing.” There was household help, and after the morning’s work at their desks, there were visits to the beach, then a late lunch, a siesta, a late dinner: “We had a wonderful time.” Bellow’s description of the summer comes in a letter of July 2, 1975, to David Peltz: “Adam smiles at his peevish pa and goes on reading science fiction and thrillers”; “the queen” (Alexandra) is “in her parlor eating mathematical bread and honey.” “For a long time it worked,” Adam says of the relationship: “the match was a good one, and Saul did live up to her expectations” (which partly means he didn’t stray). As Adam sees it, “He was delighted to have an opportunity to redeem himself. I was seventeen. He told me all about this. He got some strength and a sense of personal redemption out of this.” Alexandra had “existential depth,” a product of “having lived her early life under communism.” Bellow had read all he could about the Gulag and the camps, and “it gave him a salve to his wounds to meet the standards and the expectations of a woman like Alexandra, who had lived through that.”

  Bellow and Alexandra were married in November 1974, after signing a prenuptial agreement on October 22. The ceremony was low-key. “Saul didn’t want any publicity. One day he took me to Marshall Field and bought me a beautiful Victorian ring, which was very unusual, and told me this is what ladies used to wear in Victorian times as a wedding band. It was not your standard wedding….He had been married three times before, and his name had been in the papers a great deal.” They were married by a Circuit Court judge in front of what Alexandra describes as “Joel Bellows and someone else.” “I did not tell my mother we were getting married till not long before….I knew she would be worried sick, and she was worried until she actually saw us together.” Alexandra owned, still owns, an apartment on Sheridan Road, on the North Side of the city, not far from Evanston; Bellow’s apartment was on the South Side. “For a while we lived in both places, but for me it was increasingly difficult.” Alexandra had numerous obligations at Northwestern: many Ph.D. students, a heavier teaching load than Bellow, committee meetings. Bellow’s apartment in the Cloisters was “beautiful,” and he “took great pride in having done it himself without the help of an interior decorator or any adviser of any kind,” but it was very much his apartment. “I felt like a permanent visitor in this place.”