Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Amis’s Bellow profile was a big hit with The Observer, which ran it as a “Review” front. Its subject was pleased with it as well, at least according to Harriet Wasserman, who told Amis that she’d read it to him over the phone. “The whole thing?” Amis asked (the piece was “like 4,000 or 3,000 words”). “Yes,” Wasserman answered, “and when I finished he said: ‘Read it again.’ ” “That impressed upon me that with all his prizes and distinctions, the right kind of praise is tremendously important. Because he’d been duffed up a bit, too. And it’s terribly nice for a novelist to have a young [novelist] admirer, it’s a sort of guarantee of limited immortality.”

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  THE MOST RECENT DUFFING had come from John Updike, reviewing The Dean’s December in The New Yorker.67 Updike had been critical of Bellow before. His review of Humboldt’s Gift, also in The New Yorker, complained that the novel had too many characters, all of whom sounded alike, that its incidents were “abstract and hurried,” that the writing was “not always grammatical, feels fallen away from a former angelic height.” On the morning the Humboldt review appeared, Bellow’s lawyer friend Sam Goldberg called him to ask “whether I had read the review in the New Yorker by that anti-Semitic pornographer.” Bellow had, and it had hurt. As he told Maggie Staats (not yet Maggie Simmons), in a letter of September 15, 1975, “No one has ever accused me of writing bad English—I’m sure I slipped up here and there, in a book of five hundred pages that would be inevitable. This morning I’m actually frozen, covered with a thick ice of Jewish inhibitions. Shall I write my next book in Yiddish? But perhaps the grammatical lapses were all Charlie’s. Besides, did H. W. Fowler ever write an American novel?”

  Updike’s criticisms, characteristically, were balanced by praise. “Of course there are passages that no one but Bellow could have perpetrated—scenes that are, in the flow of their wit and felt detail, simply delicious.” “Bellow is not only the best portraitist writing American fiction, he is one of our better nature poets.” The review of The Dean’s December has a similar mixture, but is tougher. “Literature can do with any amount of egoism, but the merest pinch of narcissism spoils the flavor. And [here] there is more than a pinch.” “We are told much and shown little in the course of the narrative, and if Bellow’s eye is still magical his ear seems dulled, allowing the voice of exposition to overwhelm the voices of character.” “The switching back and forth between the two cities, both demoralized but in such different ways, is as wearying as the effort of holding in the mind’s eye an image of Albert Corde different from the one on the back of the jacket.” Most tellingly, given Bellow’s several references to Henry James’s The American Scene, with its offensive remarks on the Jews of the Lower East Side: “One wonders if to, say, Henry James the ethnic neighborhoods of Chicago so engagingly particularized in ‘Augie March’ might not have seemed as much a hopeless wasteland as black Chicago appears to Albert Corde.”68

  Bellow rarely mentions Updike in letters or essays, invariably a sign, according to Adam Bellow, that a writer mattered or was a potential rival. There are only two references to Updike in Benjamin Taylor’s edition of Bellow’s correspondence.69 In addition to the letter to Maggie Staats, Bellow writes on May 18, 1988, to Cynthia Ozick, explaining why he won’t be attending an American Academy meeting: “New York is a ten-hour round trip from Vermont and I can’t face that. Not for the privilege of sitting next to John Updike.” Only once does he discuss Updike’s fiction in print, in a published version of a lecture of January 21, 1963, at the Library of Congress. This lecture, entitled “Recent American Fiction,” was subsequently reprinted as a pamphlet by the library, but also, slightly altered, in Encounter, as “Some Notes on Recent American Fiction.” About the title story in Updike’s collection of stories Pigeon Feathers (1962), Bellow voiced reservations, while praising its “virtuosity”:

  There is nothing to see here but the writer’s reliance on beautiful work, on an aesthetic discipline and order. And sensibility, in such forms, incurs the dislike of many because it is perceptive inwardly, and otherwise blind. We suspect it of a stony heart because it functions so smoothly in its isolation. The writer of sensibility assumes that only private explorations and inner development are possible and accepts the opposition of public and private as fixed and indissoluble.70

  Whether Updike saw this judgment is unknown. Nor is what he said of Bellow outside of reviews recorded, at least not by his most recent biographer, Adam Begley, who also has nothing to say of the reviews.71 Updike’s sunny public persona masked as competitive a streak as Bellow’s. For John Cheever, writing in a letter of June 1, 1965, to the novelist Frederick Exley, Updike was “a brilliant man,” but after traveling with him in Russia in the autumn of 1964, Cheever decided that in the future he “would go to considerable expense and inconvenience to avoid his company. I think his magnanimity specious and his work seems motivated by covetousness, exhibitionism and a stony heart.”72 Before the trip, Cheever was an active Updike supporter, not only nominating him to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, but championing Updike’s novel The Centaur over Thomas Pynchon’s V for the 1964 National Book Award for Fiction. If Cheever really had turned against him—for more than the moment of the 1965 letter to Exley, that is—Updike had no idea that he had. Cheever saw a good deal more of Updike than he did of Bellow, and relations between the two men were always cordial.73 When, in 1988, a posthumous collection of Cheever’s letters was published, Updike reviewed them in The New Yorker. The collection contained the Exley letter, which “chastened” Updike, but which he claims to have found “edifying,” attributing its malice to an all-but-universal competitiveness among writers. “The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instincts when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard [Cheever was born in 1912, Updike in 1932] is to stamp on his fingers.”74

  On the Russia trip, Cheever and Updike “joked about being the last non-Jewish writers in America.”75 They also joked about the Soviet literary figures and functionaries they’d encountered. Cheever made up little stories about them, turning them into what Updike remembered as “a bright scuttle of somehow suburban characters”—or “Cheever characters,” as Begley puts it.76 What Updike came away with from the trip was a story titled “The Bulgarian Princess,” about a “fortyish young man, Henry Bech, with his thinning curly hair and his melancholy Jewish nose.” Bech, Updike’s composite version of a New York Jewish novelist, is described by Begley as “less wholesome” than Harry Angstrom of the Rabbit novels. In later stories, Bech’s experiences recall those of Bellow, though also of Malamud, the Roths (Philip, Henry), Mailer, Singer, Salinger. In Cheever’s June 1, 1965, letter to Exley, Bellow figures as a foil of sorts to Updike: “My admiration for Bellow’s works is genuine; but Updike…” The malice that follows leads Cheever back to Bellow, whose “mind is, of course, erudite, bellicose and agile and as a companion I find him one of the most difficult men to part with.” After a month in daily contact with Cheever in Russia, in the year Herzog topped the best-seller list, it is likely that Updike heard at least something of Cheever’s admiration for its author.

  When the Bech stories were gathered into Bech: A Book (1967), Updike introduced them, in the manner of Nabokov, with a “foreword” by Bech himself, who suavely congratulates his creator while noting “something Waspish, theological, scared, and insulatingly ironical” in the collected stories. He doubts that “your publishing this little jeu of a book will do either of us drastic harm.” Not all Jewish readers—certainly not Samuel Goldberg—will have liked the “jeu” joke here, cleverly insulated by being “Bech’s.” That Bech and Updike in some respects resembled each other, says Begley, as Harry Angstrom and Updike did, “dawned on Updike only gradually.”77 A similarly gradual recognition dawned on Philip Larkin, admired by both Bellow and Updike, in respect to Jake Balokowsky, the Jewish American biographer Larkin imagines for himself in the poem
“Posterity.” Jake is fed up with working on Larkin and wants to go to Tel Aviv to study “Protest Theater,” but “ ‘Myra’s folks’—he makes the money sign— / ‘Insisted I got tenure.’ ”78 There is affection and good fun in Updike’s creation of Bech (more than in Larkin’s creation of Jake), but it is not hard to imagine Goldberg’s crack about “that anti-Semitic pornographer” striking a chord with Bellow, both the “anti-Semitic” bit and the “pornographer” bit, given the relative absence of explicit sex in Bellow’s writing.79

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  JOHN CHEEVER WAS as much a WASP as Updike, but he and Bellow loved each other and never fought or fell out. Cheever had admired Bellow’s writing from the start, years before they met, praising him as “the first American novelist of parts who writes neither in sympathy with nor in opposition to the Puritan tradition. He writes as if it didn’t exist.”80 Of Dangling Man Cheever declared: “Here is the blend of French and Russian that I like.” It wasn’t until The Adventures of Augie March, however, that Cheever was offered “the experience, that I think of as great art, of having a profound chamber of memory revealed to me that I had always possessed but had never comprehended.” For all their superficial or social differences, Cheever sensed similarities. “His optimism I share, having reached it by my own, crooked, lengthy, leaf-buried path. We cannot spend our lives in apprehension.”81 When finally they met, in September 1956 at Yaddo, Cheever’s excitement was registered in his journal. “I am conscious of being in the same room with Saul,” he writes, describing Bellow as “about my size,” with “that sometime tragic fineness of his skin, that tragic vitality. His nose is a little long, his eyes have (I think) the cheerful glint of lewdness, and I notice his hands and that his voice is light. It has no deep notes.”82 On a long walk after dinner, the two men forged what Cheever thought a “mystical” bond. “I cast around for some precedent of two writers with similar aims who are strongly drawn to one another….I do not have it in me to wish him bad luck: I do not have it in me to be his acolyte.” The rapport Cheever felt with Bellow was on several levels. “We joke, fool, as I like to,” he reports. Both were drawn to eccentrics, particularly as fans: “Why, I wonder,” asks Cheever, “should my admirers always be mad.” Their attraction to the luminous, Cheever called “very near botanical”: “It seems to me that one’s total experience is the drive toward light—spiritual light,” a drive increasingly prominent in Bellow’s writing.83

  The two men saw each other infrequently. In October 1971, during a time of marital discord and creative blockage, Cheever flew to Chicago to participate in Playboy magazine’s International Writers’ Convocation. During his stay, he and Bellow met at the Riviera Health Club, where Bellow played racquetball. Cheever arrived while Bellow was still on court and agreed to meet him for a steam after his match. Six years later in New York, on February 23, 1978, while presenting Bellow with the Gold Medal of Honor at the National Arts Club, he recalled the meeting. “Saul appeared from the clouds, stark naked and wearing a copious wreath of steam. I stood in my own cloud. As we shook hands I said, as I am pleased to say tonight, that our friendship is obviously not of this world.”84 The two writers met again at Bellow’s sixtieth birthday (described in chapter 5), then, in January 1976, when both were visiting Stanford, Cheever with his son Federico, who was thinking of applying there as an undergraduate, Bellow with Alexandra, who was considering an appointment in the Math Department. During their visits, the novelists gave readings. Bellow was testy at the time and, when asked by Dana Gioia, a graduate student looking after Cheever (later a poet and chair of the National Endowment for the Arts), which contemporary novelists he most admired, snapped: “Literature is not a competitive sport.” He then listed “Wright Morris, J. F. Powers, and a man standing in this room…John Cheever.” To Gioia, Bellow was “intimidatingly confident,” projecting “unapproachable dignity and reserve.” “At sixty he was still trim and handsome….A king’s haberdashery would not have surpassed his wardrobe.” Cheever, in contrast, struck Gioia as modest and self-effacing, easy with undergraduates, none of whom seemed to have heard of him.85 As his biographer Blake Bailey puts it, Cheever behaved, “in the best possible sense, like a man who realized his books were out of print.”86

  Cheever had only six years to live, but in these years his reputation rose dramatically. He had stopped drinking in 1975, a year before the Stanford visit. In 1977, he published Falconer, which Bellow read and praised in galleys, and which reached number one on the best-seller list. Cheever’s face appeared on the cover of the March 14 issue of Newsweek, the first writer’s face to appear on the front cover since September 1, 1975, when the face in question was Bellow’s. In 1979, Cheever was awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard, along with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who used the occasion to denounce the degenerate West. Two years later, in the summer of 1981, he was diagnosed with cancer, only a few months before The Stories of John Cheever were published to universal acclaim (they would go on to sell 125,000 copies in hardback). In March 1982, Oh What a Paradise It Seems, a novella, was published. Bellow wrote to call the novella charming. The next month, on April 27, 1982, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature at the American Book Awards ceremony at Carnegie Hall, where his shrunken appearance shocked the audience. Two days before, he had written to Bellow about the ceremony. Whenever he received a prize, it was his habit to dig out “a yellowed newspaper copy of your beautiful Nobel Prize speech and crib from this.” As the copy was very fragile, he’d neatly packed it between boards. Now he couldn’t find it. “I can’t very well say that I’m unable to thank them because I lost Saul Bellow’s Nobel Prize speech. I have another day.”87 The speech Cheever came up with, at moments, resembles Bellow’s Nobel speech, as when he declares that “a page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women can carry on today.”

  Cheever died on June 18, 1982. Six months earlier, Bellow had learned of his friend’s cancer and wrote movingly of their closeness, in a letter of December 9, 1981:

  What I would like to tell you is this. We didn’t spend much time together but there is a significant attachment between us. I suppose it’s in part because we practiced the same self-taught trade. Let me try to say it better—we put our souls to the same kind of schooling, and it’s this esoteric training which we had the gall, under the hostile stare of exoteric America to persist in, that brings us together….Neither of us had much use for the superficial “given” of social origins. In your origins there were certain advantages; you were too decent to exploit them. Mine, I suppose, were only to be “overcome” and I hadn’t the slightest desire to molest myself that way. I was, however, in a position to observe the advantages of the advantaged (the moronic pride of Wasps, Southern traditionalists, etc.). There wasn’t a trace of it in you. You were engaged, as a writer should be, in transforming yourself. When I read your collected stories I was moved to see the transformation taking place on the printed page. There’s nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul, I loved you for this. I loved you anyway, but for this especially.

  The letter ends with an offer to fly to New York “whenever it’s convenient for you.”

  The themes from this moving letter were sounded in Bellow’s eulogy for Cheever, delivered at a service in Ossining, New York, on June 23, 1982. Bellow agreed instantly to the Cheever family’s request that he come and speak at the funeral (something he had been unable or unwilling to do at the deaths of Isaac Rosenfeld and Oscar Tarcov). Picking up on Cheever’s image of the “nearly botanical” attraction the two writers had to light, and on a later comment of Cheever’s, in a letter of April 3, that the chief authority on his sort of cancer lived in Bucharest (Cheever imagines him there “watering his cyclamens,” plants that feature in The Dean’s December), Bellow describes their friendship as “a sort of hydroponic plant [which] flourished in the air…healthy,
fed by good elements…a true friendship.”88 On both sides, “there was instant candor,” also understanding, since “each of us knew what the other was up to. We worked at the same trade.” Cheever is praised for being “not in the least grudging or rivalrous.”89 Their differences helped rather than hindered the friendship, more, even, than their similarities:

  He was a Yankee; I, from Chicago, was the son of Jewish immigrants. His voice, his style, his humor, were different from mine. His manner was reticent, mine was…something else. It fell to John to resolve these differences. He did this without the slightest difficulty, simply by putting human essences in first place: first the persons—himself, myself—and after that the other stuff—class origins, social history. A fairly experienced observer, I have never seen the thing done as he did it—done, I mean, as if it were not done at all. It flowed directly from his nature.90