Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  A more troubling reaction came from Ted Hoffman, Bellow’s old friend from the Salzburg Seminars and Bard College, who wrote to Bellow in a letter of November 8, 1976. Hoffman was now at NYU, and he and Bellow had been out of touch. His letter is rambling, ill-judged, and long, six single-spaced typed pages. It begins by briefly acknowledging the award, which “surprised me, given literary politics on a grand scale; I’d have expected there would have to be two Arabs, a Bulgarian, and an Asian South African to be taken care of first.” Perhaps there was some truth in “the contemptible suggestion made in some indefensible quarters that quality of some sort was involved in the deliberations, but we’re above that sort of nonsense, aren’t we?” Then Hoffman turned to his many trials and tribulations. Four pages later, when Bellow is next mentioned, it is to contrast his good fortune, personal as well as professional, with Hoffman’s current state. How, Hoffman asks, has Bellow, “the old Tripartite loser of love,” managed to find a “paragon” (Alexandra) or at least “a plausible solution, since one of the givens of the humanistic tradition is that a Bellow could never find the right woman”? Might Alexandra “possibly know someone for me, someone outside the conditions in which I exist, an Albanian physicist, a Macedonian horticulturalist, a Bosnian biologist?” If Bellow’s “extraordinary career in Saint Sebastianism” can end in “serendipity,” maybe there’s a chance for Hoffman. “I don’t want an astrological projection. Or a Poor Saul’s Almanac. I just want some household hints.”

  At the letter’s close, Hoffman moves from heavy irony to “truth-telling,” the sort Bellow associated with the therapy culture of Greenwich Village.

  I wish I still knew you. I wish you were concerned with me. I don’t like, at heart, your literary exploration of geriatric experiencers of a world going down the drain, of loves and energies dissipated in an enervating society. I read Herzog as a fool. I think Sammler had a bad education. Humboldt’s gift was a treachery. I never identified with Tommy. Augie March always extracted more out of me than he gave.

  “What the hell am I doing here?” Hoffman then asks, breaking off the beginning of his answer with an ellipsis: “Oh yes, of course…” The ellipsis turn out to be a setup.

  Oh yes, of course…I trust you have not lost that minor curse of finishing the ridiculous sentences of others, of extending and completing inane rhetoric, of topping some egregious narrative with the ultimate punch line, which ends with the summary Bellow characterology of combined visceral defiance and abysmal sinking into the floor. (Can I ever forget Ada Green: “Oh, Mr. Bellow, in that cap you look just like an archaeologist.” Bellow: “And you look like something I just dug up.” Yes you actually said that, I testify. Five Andrew Jacksons, in a plain brown wrapper, and I’ll promise never to retail it at a cocktail party at which Jason Epstein or Norman Podhoretz are present….So I guess I will be discreet about your infamous relationship with Ada Green, of whom I have not heard since that puissant afternoon in 1953.)

  The letter ends “on a querulously affectionate note.” Although Hoffman assumes that Bellow is “still preternaturally vulnerable,” he trusts that his Nobel address “will subsume this formidable element of your essential mettle. Love, as ever. Ted.”

  * * *

  —

  IT IS POSSIBLE THAT Hoffman had been drinking when he wrote this letter. Six years after receiving it, Bellow published “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” which takes the passage about Ada Green as its starting point. As so often in Bellow’s life, a wounding experience—not just Hoffman’s aggression but the bad behavior he makes Bellow recall—is put to artistic use. On the heels of a great popular success, the musicologist Herschel Shawmut receives a letter from his old friend Eddie Walish. Walish recalls a moment in the 1940s when he and Shawmut were teaching at Ribier College, a thinly disguised Bard. Shawmut, new to the faculty, owes his job partly to Walish, as Bellow owed his job at Bard partly to Hoffman. Shawmut describes himself as “keen to learn” from Walish, “because I have never seen a progressive college, never lived in the East, never come in contact with the Eastern Establishment, of which I have heard so much” (p. 377). All of which was true of Bellow in the 1940s. Like Hoffman, Walish has a Harvard background and a limp, and is prone to “clever intricate analysis,” the sort popular in Greenwich Village in the 1940s. Walish, Shawmut admits, “gives me the business in his letter”:

  Why was it, he asks, that when people groped in conversations I supplied the missing phrases and finished their sentences with greedy pedantry? Walish alleges that I was showing off, shuffling out of my vulgar origins, making up to the genteel and qualifying as the kind of Jew acceptable (just barely) to the Christian society of T. S. Eliot’s dreams. Walish pictures me as an upwardly mobile pariah seeking bondage as one would seek salvation. In reaction, he says, I had rebellious fits and became wildly insulting. Walish notes all this well, but he did not come up with it during the years when we were close. He saved it all up. At Ribier College we liked each other. We were friends, somehow. But at the end, somehow, he intended to be a mortal enemy. All the while he was making the gestures of a close friend he was fattening my soul in a coop till it was ready for killing. My success…may have been too much for him [p. 379].

  Bellow’s treatment of Hoffman in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth” is typical. He exaggerates the aggression in Hoffman’s letter partly in revenge, partly as a way of making a larger observation, throwing into relief the complex feelings aroused by literary success. Bellow was rarely disposed to let slights and insults pass, including half-conscious ones such as those in Hoffman’s letter. A comparable vigilance, again involving the Nobel, can be seen in his response to a letter of February 27, 1979, from Isaac Bashevis Singer. When Singer won the Nobel Prize in 1978, Bellow sent him a note of good wishes: “My wife and I happily congratulate you” (October 5, 1978). But relations between the two writers were never easy. Singer resented Bellow’s part in the success of “Gimpel the Fool,” his first story to be published in English, the story that, in Bellow’s words, “got him started.” The story appeared in Partisan Review in May 1953, the year The Adventures of Augie March was published, having been brought to Philip Rahv’s attention (“Hey, where’d you find him?”) by Bellow (in fact, it was Irving Howe who found him, enlisting Bellow as translator). That Singer neither thanked Bellow for his translation of the story (discussed in detail in chapter 11 of To Fame and Fortune) nor ever asked him to translate anything else of his was nettling and ungracious. “I think he cherished his eccentricities a little bit too consciously,” Bellow told Norman Manea. “I was not one of those people who found them charming. I thought he was a conniving old Ganev [thief].” Bellow told Manea an anecdote about Singer he had heard from Philip Siegelman. When Siegelman was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, Singer came to give a talk, and it was Siegelman’s job to look after him during his visit. On the way to the talk, Singer asked Siegelman a favor. Would he, during the question period, ask him a question, one Singer particularly wanted asked? Siegelman said he would, and duly asked the question. Singer began his reply with the words “That’s the stupidest question I have ever been asked in public.”19

  The letter Bellow received from Singer in 1979 was relayed through his secretary. It began: “Mr. Singer has been meaning to write to you for some time now. It was told to him that you felt uneasy about his comments in Stokholm [sic] concerning your speech [the newspapers reported that Singer had found Bellow’s speech boring]. He never meant to comment on the text of the speech, but rather and this is what he said, that the speech was read very quickly and it was difficult to understand. Mr. Singer is sending his very best personal regards and hopes that this misunderstanding has been cleared.” A week or so later, on March 8, Bellow replied:

  Dear Miss Menashe,

  I don’t believe everything I see in the papers, I know what troublemakers journalists are. On the other hand, I did not read the speech quick
ly. I read it slowly and carefully and distinctly, and none of the papers I read reported faulty delivery. Besides, Mr. Singer was not in the audience. This is, however, a trivial misunderstanding and I propose to say no more about it. I avoid making disobliging comments about my colleagues in public.

  May I call your attention to the fact that you have misspelled Stockholm.

  Sincerely yours,

  Saul Bellow

  * * *

  —

  ALTHOUGH ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER was not at the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm to hear Bellow’s speech, many of Bellow’s family were. In addition to Alexandra, all three of Bellow’s sons accompanied him, dressed for the ceremony in white tie and tails. Alexandra’s mother came from Bucharest, along with Alexandra’s aunt, and the aunt’s daughter and son-in-law. Sam and Nina Bellows came, as did their daughter, Lesha, and son-in-law Sam Greengus, plus the three Greengus daughters: Dina, Rachel, and Judith, ages eighteen, sixteen, and fifteen, respectively. Maury’s family stayed at home, but Bellow’s sister, Jane, came. For Bellow’s speech, Jane insisted on a seat in the first row, just in front of the podium. She soon fell asleep and had to be prodded awake several times, thus exemplifying its warnings about distraction, the difficulty of reaching an audience “agitated in private life and tormented by public questions” (Jane’s agitation was mostly a product of having had to fly from Florida to Chicago to get her mink coat out of storage). All together, sixteen family members came to the event, “an unprecedented number that made front-page news in the Stockholm papers.”20 Adam had T-shirts printed up for the Bellow party with the words “Nobel Savages.” What Bellow described to a Nobel official as “this huge contingent of Bellows” pretty much took over the Grand Hôtel, located on Stockholm’s waterfront.21 “There wasn’t anybody there who wasn’t called Bellow. It became a kind of joke.”22 Bellow and Alexandra had a suite, with two bedrooms separated by a sitting room. Greg, now thirty-two, slept in the second bedroom. The two younger boys, Adam, nineteen, and Dan, twelve, shared a room. As Greg recalls, Adam and Harriet Wasserman “were chiefly responsible for keeping Dan under control, but he still managed to order a great deal of food from room service, which infuriated Saul when the bill arrived.”23

  The presentation of the prize took place in the late afternoon on Saturday, December 12, 1976, which meant that Sam and Nina, Orthodox Jews, and other members of their family had to walk from the hotel to the concert hall at Hötorget, where the ceremony was held. The walk was not long, perhaps fifteen minutes, but it was snowy and cold. Earlier, the family had taken a trial walk, also attending a Sabbath Morning Service at the Great Synagogue of Stockholm and a Kiddush Service in the community hall “in honor of all the Jewish Nobel Prize Laureates.” The economist Milton Friedman, Bellow’s fellow University of Chicago laureate, and Baruch S. Blumberg, co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, were present; Bellow was not, nor had he responded to a personal invitation from Rabbi Morton Narrowe of the Great Synagogue, sent on behalf of the city’s Jewish community. Rabbi Narrowe complains in his memoirs about Bellow’s rudeness, “but it is of course the Nobel Prize for Literature and not for manners that he is about to receive. His brother, on the other hand, lets us know that several other family members will be glad to come.”24

  Bellow’s polite, civic-minded brother, Sam, was in serious trouble at this time. In November, after a lengthy trial, he was convicted of defrauding patients in his nursing homes by selling them drugs from companies offering kickbacks. “I can’t go into the details of this,” Bellow told Norman Manea in their interview, “but it really wasn’t his fault; it was somebody else in the family for whom he was covering.”25 Sam’s sentence was sixty days in the Metropolitan Correctional Center and a fine of two hundred thousand dollars. Before he served his sentence, however, the judge allowed him to fly to Europe to watch his brother be awarded the Nobel Prize, also to visit with Lesha and her family, who were living in London at the time (Sam Greengus, a Biblical scholar at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, was on a research grant). That all the Greenguses were in London made it possible for them to join Sam and Nina in Stockholm. According to Lesha, in an undated letter written before sentencing, “This ordeal has certainly aged my poor father.” To Bellow, Sam’s presence in Stockholm was a “last opportunity to make public his attachment to a famous brother, to lessen the sting of the fact that he was going to prison.”26

  For Alexandra, the week in Stockholm “was like a fairy tale”: the ceremony itself was “absolutely gorgeous,” the Swedish king and queen “this most handsome young couple,” the banquet and ball a flurry of “beautiful gowns, beautiful music, everybody had a wonderful time.” “I was so proud of Saul and so proud to be at his side.” Greg, too, was proud of his father, telling him so “just before we left for the ceremony.”27 The next morning, December 13, was St. Lucy’s Day. Bellow and Alexandra were woken up by the St. Lucia ceremony, a Swedish tradition in which white-clad maidens carrying candles, coffee, and saffron buns serenade sleepers with songs in honor of St. Lucy. The hotel manager had let them into Bellow’s suite, along with a troupe of photographers. “We thought it was a joke,” Alexandra recalls, “someone was putting something over on us. Pulling our legs. It was quite a shock.” Bellow barely composed himself. As he recalled to Atlas, “They came bearing a tray of bad coffee and some buns which they set down on my bathrobe so that I couldn’t reach it. And behind them was the press, in force. I scowled, and then my face formed the smile which is obligatory on such occasions.”28 There would be other such smiles during the week. “I found I was carrying my entire family on my back,” Bellow recalls. “I had to take everyone else into consideration.” It was “a kind of family circus.” “The prize officials were very amused by this circus. They knew all about it and were signaling each other behind my back. That’s all right. They have to get something out of it, too.”29 In addition to the Bellow circus, there were tensions with Alexandra’s mother, who “didn’t approve of me.” “She had this competitive streak in her,” Bellow recalled. “If they gave the Nobel Prize to mathematicians,” she told him, “my daughter would surely get one.” “Well of course she would,” Bellow replied.30

  Bellow’s publishers were also at the ceremony, in boisterous good humor—Tom Rosenthal and Barley Alison representing Secker & Warburg, Thomas Guinzburg representing Viking. Atlas quotes Guinzburg: “It was only light for about an hour and a half a day. Everyone was drunk all the time, knocking back little glasses of schnapps. Bellow looked great. It was the one time I saw him really happy.”31 But looks can deceive, as with Bellow’s smile on the morning of the St. Lucia ceremony. The day after Bellow gave his speech, his Swedish publisher, Gerald Bonnier, gave a luncheon in Bellow’s honor at his country home, Manila, attended by the whole Bellow family plus a host of American, British, German, and other European publishers. Harriet Wasserman describes the scene:

  The house had lofty rafters throughout and, in the dining room, oil portraits of the numerous Nobel Prize winners Bonnier published. The portraits hung all around the room—even on the beams. There were four round tables, with ten guests at each. I was sitting with Alexandra, who was quite happy, composed, and elegant. One of Saul’s sons sat at each of the remaining three tables.

  At the end of the luncheon, Bonnier gave a short speech, offered a toast, and sat down. Daniel clinked his glass with his fork. When he had gotten everyone’s attention, he said: “I’d just like to say my father has been so busy, but he still had time for me. Thanks, Pop.”

  Up stood Greg, who was at his father’s table. “My young brother has given me the courage to say something I’ve always wanted to say.”

  Greg’s voice was cracking. Alexandra put her elbows on the table and her face in her hands. Adam was at the table across from Saul’s. He didn’t blink. He didn’t move. I looked at both of them, Adam and Saul, they were absolutely fixed and still.

  Greg was standing th
ere, his walrus mustache trembling slightly. “I never thought you loved me, and I never understood what the creative process was. You were behind a closed door all the time, writing, listening to Mozart.” He was looking straight at his father. “I was young. I didn’t know what you were doing behind the closed door. I didn’t understand the creative process.”

  All the European publishers, all of them men, were sitting very stiff and upright….Looks of total shock—horror almost—on their faces. They’d never seen a father and son like this before, and you could sense them experiencing a vicarious pain and embarrassment at this public display.

  “And then…” Greg was barely controlling himself. “And then I had my own child. I witnessed the birth of my own child and I understood what the creative process was, and I understood then that you really did love me.”

  No one moved. All eyes turned away. Greg sat down and after a stunned silence people began to leave their tables. Saul was one of the first. He stood up quickly and went straight over to his middle child, put out his hand, and shook Adam’s. “Thanks, kid, for not saying anything.”

  And off he went, in a stretch limo, entourage at his side.32

  “Do you have emotions? Strangle them,” says Joseph, the hero of Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man, published the year Greg was born. “To a degree everyone obeys this code,” except Joseph: “To hell with that! I intend to talk about mine.” According to Greg, “My father told me the only thing he enjoyed about the week in Stockholm was a quick visit to August Strindberg’s study on his way out of town.”33 To Manea, Bellow claimed that the Nobel Prize “had absolutely no effect on me. Especially when I saw how my family misbehaved…My mother would have liked it very much. She was the one person who I would’ve been interested in telling it to. Or my father—he would’ve liked it.”34