Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

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  A THEFT WAS THE FIRST of the two novellas Bellow published in 1989. It appeared in March in an unexpected format, as a paperback original rather than a hardback, published by Viking at $6.95. Harriet Wasserman had offered the novella to Esquire and Atlantic Monthly, also, according to Atlas and others, to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. All turned it down, ostensibly on the grounds of length (it is approximately twenty thousand words long, around a hundred pages in book form). When Bellow was asked to trim, he refused. As Wasserman puts it, its “length fit the story perfectly; it could not be cut.”42 The decision to publish as a paperback original was daring. The New York Times speculated that only “Mr. Bellow, a Nobel laureate in literature, and a very few other novelists,” could publish their books first in paperback without putting their reputations “at risk.”43 Bellow himself had concerns about his reputation, worrying to Wasserman whether the reason given for the magazine rejections was “just the reason they gave you.” Wasserman writes that she offered the novella to Viking in part because it had been Bellow’s original company, in part because it was headed by Peter Mayer, who had bought the paperback rights to Humboldt’s Gift for Avon and made a huge profit out of the deal.44 To The New York Times, Bellow speculated that by publishing first in paperback he would reach well beyond his normal readership, estimated as between 100,000 and 250,000, though in the event sales remained at around 100,000.

  On March 13, 1989, Viking launched A Theft at Hubert’s Restaurant on Park Avenue, in the Beekman apartment building. Review coverage was disappointing. The New York Times Book Review failed to give it the usual front-page coverage, though Joyce Carol Oates reviewed it at length on page 3. The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books grouped it with books by other writers, which Atlas describes as “unheard-of for a work by Bellow.”45 The book’s shortness may explain this treatment, along with related grumbles about thinness: “skimpy” was the adjective used by both John Updike in The New Yorker and Robert Towers in The New York Review of Books. Joyce Carol Oates, like Updike, began by praising Bellow (for Updike, “our preeminent fiction writer”; for Oates, “consistently brilliant and defiantly risky…our genius of portraiture”), but found A Theft “strangely lacking in the richly textured and sharply observed ground bass of reality that has always been his strength.” Oates also voiced reservations about the novella’s depiction of women, as when the heroine prepares an elaborate meal for her lover in the nude, something she thought would cause women readers to “smile, or wince.”

  A Theft is not among Bellow’s stronger works, but it is interesting biographically. It is also unusual. To begin with, it has a female protagonist. According to Updike, “Until A Theft [Bellow] had not presented a woman as an autonomous seeker rather than a paradise sought” (presumably Updike is excluding older women such as Grandma Lausch in The Adventures of Augie March or Hattie in “Leaving the Yellow House,” or the various fictional incarnations of Rosa Gameroff, in Herzog, “The Old System,” and “By the St. Lawrence”). The setting of the novella is the Upper East Side in New York, more Edith Wharton or Henry James than Saul Bellow (it was James who called the novella “the beautiful and blessed nouvelle”46). The main characters are moneyed and powerful, inhabitants of the Washington and Manhattan circles Bellow had been moving in for some years. The story is more tightly plotted than most Bellow narratives, with carefully laid surprises. The writing is less street than in other Bellow works, and larger social and political concerns are mostly pushed to the margins. There is relatively little theorizing or esoteric/mystical speculation (though the male protagonist “more than half expects” to see his loved ones “in the land of the dead…because we loved each other and wished for it”47). As in a James novel or nouvelle, the story turns on a small but symbolically important item, an emerald ring, like the golden bowl or the spoils of Poynton. As the critic and novelist John Banville puts it, the ring “increases steadily in significance, turning from a trinket into a talisman,” the source, the narrator tells us, of the heroine’s “very stability” (p. 155).48

  The autobiographical impulse behind A Theft is celebratory rather than score-settling. The story was written between the breakup of Bellow’s marriage to Alexandra and the early years of his relationship with Janis, during or shortly after the period when Maggie Simmons briefly considered getting back together with him. Clara Velde (a Jamesian name) is given versions of Maggie’s appearance, upbringing, marital history, education, and professional career. The novella’s plot is based on a real-life theft or loss, also of a ring, an engagement ring Bellow gave to Maggie in the spring of 1968, on one of his visits to Austin. Clara Velde’s au pair, Gina, is, like Maggie’s au pair, a wellborn young woman from Austria. In A Theft, the au pair’s lover is Frederic, a good-looking young Haitian. Like Maggie’s lover from an earlier period, the young Frenchman named Jacques, and Clara’s early lover, Jean-Claude, Frederic is a figure notable for sexual stamina and poor hygiene. In a letter of April 9, 1989, written shortly after the novella’s publication, Maggie reported to Bellow that her au pair “called me yesterday. She’s living in Boston, and was listening to a radio show about the book and recognized the story. She was stunned, to say the least.”

  Clara Velde, like Maggie, is a “rawboned American woman,” “ruggedly handsome” (p. 117), also smart, stylish, and sexy (she’s the one who does the nude cooking). Clara is on her fourth husband, a version of Maggie’s third husband, described as “big, and handsome, indolent.” All Clara’s husbands are “gesture-husbands” (p. 118) or “utility husbands” (p. 136) or “dummy husbands, humanly unserious” (p. 143). Only number three, an Italian oil tycoon (Maggie also had such a husband), excited her much. At first she had “real feeling” for this husband, thought that “once he got to know my quality I’d mean more to him….I don’t say I’m better than other women. I’m not superior. I’m nutty, also. But I am in touch with the me in myself” (p. 136). The real love of Clara’s life, the figure with whom she has a “permanent connection,” she never marries. This real love is Ithiel “Teddy” Regler, a fictional version of Bellow. Ithiel, too, believes that “his attachment, his feeling for [Clara] was—to his own surprise—permanent. His continually increasing respect for her came over the horizon like a moon taking decades to rise” (p. 138). Given the resemblances between Clara and Maggie, it is hard not to see these sentences as an expression of Bellow’s own feelings, despite his inability to live with or stay faithful to Maggie, like Ithiel’s inability to live with or stay faithful to Clara. As Clara sees it, she and Ithiel “have this total, delicious connection, which is also a disaster” (p. 121). “We’ll never be man and wife,” she tells him. “You love me, but the rest is counterindicated” (p. 157). In fact, “you continued to love me because we didn’t marry” (p. 158). As Maggie sees it, the novella was “an act of expiation.” Bellow “considered our connection permanent and it was. He sent me an advance copy in June of ’89 with his inscription: ‘To Maggie—So need I say more? Love, Saul.’ That’s how he viewed it.”

  The reasons Teddy is given for his unwillingness to marry Clara are those Bellow gave when distancing himself from Maggie. In youth, Clara’s emotions were “so devouring, fervid, that they may have been suprapersonal” (p. 127). These emotions, “whole nights of tears, anguish and hysteria,” finally drove Teddy “out of his head” (p. 129). Although he gave her the emerald engagement ring, which “appeased her for a while,” he “was not inclined to move forward, and Clara became more difficult” (p. 129), “asserted herself unreasonably” (p. 132). The other element Clara sees as contributing to the dissolution of their relationship was “the insignificance of the personal factor” in Teddy’s life (p. 132), his preoccupation with “issues” and work, “his grotesque game theories, ideology, treaties, and the rest of it” (p. 132), the powerbroker’s equivalent of Bellow’s life at his desk. Bellow knew that Maggie would be upset by parts of the novella, for all its prai
se and affection for her. But “the personal factor,” her worries about “how my family was portrayed—and me,” if not a matter of “insignificance,” took second place to “work” or “the work.” Maggie acknowledges that she had been idealized (“his treatment of me was the opposite of his treatment of Susan”), but nonetheless “was very happy to see the book go out of print.”49

  Clara’s emerald engagement ring was bought for her by Teddy twenty years before the story begins. Twenty years before publication of A Theft, Bellow had bought Maggie her engagement ring, an opal surrounded by thirteen diamonds. Clara held on to her ring “through four marriages.” Maggie has held on to her ring through five marriages. In the novella, Frederic steals the ring. In real life, according to Maggie, her au pair “discovered what we used to call free love in my apartment while I was at work,” and her lover took the ring.50 “The circumstances Saul describes,” Maggie writes, “are almost identical except it was a girlfriend not a boyfriend that [the au pair] had become attached to and she stole the ring. According to Josie [Maggie’s housekeeper], [the au pair] realized there would be trouble because I had hired a detective to investigate and she saw him in the apartment and later got the ring back from the other girl.”51 In both the novella and real life, the rings are lost and recovered twice. “As I remember,” Maggie writes, “I lost the ring, got the insurance money, used it to go to Europe and then found it under my bed when I came home! This would be sometime after Saul. I actually called the insurance agent and they said they’d never had such a call and to keep the money!” In the novella, the insurance company isn’t notified: “Clara was not prepared to return the money” (p. 139).

  Although Clara is furious with Gina for allowing her boyfriend into the house, she also admires her. She, like Gina, had come to New York, “Gogmagogsville,” “to learn about such guys as Frederic” (p. 14); “Clifford, a convict in Attica, still sent Clara a Christmas card without fail” (p. 148). That Bellow chose to make Gina’s lover a young Haitian male rather than a white female is a provocation, like describing Michael Jackson as a “little glamour monkey” at the beginning of Ravelstein (p. 4). As with the pickpocket in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, other motives for making him black are in play: sexual insecurity, doom-laden theorizing about materialism and the body. Hence the uncharacteristic violence of the language Bellow gives Clara when she realizes the ring has been stolen:

  This love-toy emerald, personal sentimentality, makes me turn like a maniac on this Austrian kid. She may think I grudge her the excitement of her romance with that disgusting girl-fucker who used her as his cover to get into the house and now sticks her with this theft.

  Nevertheless Clara had fixed convictions about domestic and maternal responsibilities. She had already gone too far in letting Gina bring Frederic into the apartment and infect the whole place, spraying it with sexual excitement.

  …These people came up from the tropical slums to outsmart New York, and with all the rules crumbling here as elsewhere, so that nobody could any longer be clear in his mind about anything, they could do it [pp. 153–54].

  At the end of the novella, after the ring is recovered, Clara attempts to bring Gina into a relationship with Ithiel. This part of the story can be thought of as Jamesian, with Clara as a sort of Fanny Assingham. It also has a biographical dimension, since, after breaking with Bellow, Maggie remembers many intense discussions with him about Janis. “I think it’s right that I encouraged Saul’s feelings for Janis, but that was made easier because I had just come off of Saul’s and my attempt to get back together and he was entirely under Bloom’s spell and I knew I could never put up with that—or his political views. In other words, I’d lost any romantic interest. Over the years we talked a lot about our spouses in the way true friends do.”52 “You want us to meet,” says Ithiel of Gina, “and she’ll come under my influence. She’ll fall in love with me….And she and I will cherish each other, and you will have the comfort of seeing me in safe hands, and this will be your blessing poured over the two of us.” “Teddy, you’re making fun of me,” says Clara, “but she knew perfectly well that he wasn’t making fun, that wasn’t where the accent fell, and his interpretation was more or less correct, as far as it went” (p. 165). Maggie’s feelings for Janis were not Clara’s feelings for Gina, as Gina was not Janis, but Clara’s impulse to see Ithiel properly settled was in part Maggie’s impulse: “She wanted to find a suitable woman for Ithiel. It was a scandal, the wives he chose” (p. 169).

  Although Ithiel Regler resembles Bellow in several respects, notably in his messy sexual and marital history, he is also a figure of fantasy.53 He is what Bellow imagines he might have been had he gone into politics—powerful, influential, like Henry Kissinger only better-looking. Ithiel advises governments and large corporations, when he is in the mood. “He took on such assignments as pleased the operator in him, the behind-the-scenes Teddy Regler: in the Persian Gulf, with a Japanese whiskey firm looking for a South American market, with the Italian police tracking terrorists. None of these activities compromised his Washington reputation for dependability. He testified before congressional investigative committees as an expert witness” (p. 126). “He might have gone all the way to the top, to the negotiating table in Geneva, facing the Russians [like Max Kampelman, Bellow’s friend and lodger from Minnesota], if he had been less quirky” (p. 125). As his friend Steinsalz explains (Steinsalz is a portrait of Bellow’s lawyer friend Samuel Goldberg, according to Maggie), Ithiel “values his freedom, so that when he wanted to visit Mr. Leakey in the Olduvai Gorge, he just picked up and went” (pp. 130–31). Ithiel is closed-mouthed about his activities, which is part of his appeal. “Power, danger, secrecy made him even sexier. No loose talk. A woman could feel safe with a man like Ithiel” (p. 126). “I’ve always discouraged small talk about my psyche” (p. 144), Ithiel says, a description Maggie calls “disingenuous,” although she voices no complaint about Clara’s description of Teddy as “more plainspoken about his own faults than anybody who felt it necessary to show him up” (p. 124).

  In addition to being politically influential, Ithiel, according to Clara, “might possibly be a dark horse in the history of the American mind” (p. 169), knows “the big, big picture” (p. 173), “could be the Gibbon or the Tacitus of the American Empire” (p. 145). These claims the novella does little to support, except insofar as it tempts the reader to identify Ithiel with his creator. Ithiel’s sexual appeal is also exceptional. “When Ithiel comes to town and I see him at lunch,” Clara confides, “I start to flow for him. He used to make me come by stroking my cheek” (p. 121). Clearly, Clara, too, is exceptional, as she is in other ways, something she acknowledges. “I never feel so bad as when I feel the life I lead stops being characteristic—when it could be anybody else’s life” (p. 159). The people she values are exceptional, too. Gina is “a special young woman” (p. 164), no “sample from the population” (p. 165). What is uncharacteristic—for Bellow, that is—about these exceptional characters is how privileged they are, a product in part of the novella’s Upper East Side milieu. Gina’s specialness derives in part from her being “a young upper-class Vienna girl” (her fiancé, we learn at the end of the story, is a “man from Daddy’s bank” [p. 169]). The emerald ring itself is exceptional, “conspicuously clear, color perfect, top of its class” (p. 125). When it is recovered, the detective Clara hired to find it worries that she might wear it on public transportation. “She looked disdainful….He didn’t seem to realize how high her executive bracket was” (p. 161).

  The element of privilege in the novella is distracting, given the claims made for the depth and seriousness of the connection between Clara and Teddy. The “big, big picture” Teddy knows, in the passage quoted above, which accounts for his capacity to identify exceptional people like Clara, is meant to have nothing to do with money or status. Immediately after using the phrase, she adds: “he doesn’t flatter, he’s realistic and he’s truthful. I do see
m to have an idea who it is that’s at the middle of me. There may not be more than one in a zillion, more’s the pity, that do have” (p. 173). Clara’s privileged claims are distracting in another way, because not wholly convincing. Clara is believably exceptional in her powers of perception—about people, herself included—but her business acumen, like Ithiel’s world-historical intellect, is gestured at rather than dramatized. Although she devises the novella’s concluding twists and turns, and runs everything in her life “single-handed: mortgage, maintenance, housemaids, au pair girls” (p. 119), she never sounds like a business type. What she sounds like is Ithiel, an incongruity she acknowledges (as if Bellow were anticipating criticism). Here is Clara’s analysis of Gina’s affair with Frederic, which she calls “just another case of being at sea among collapsing cultures—I sound like Ithiel now, and I don’t actually take much stock in the collapsing-culture bit: I’m beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul” (p. 162).54 Clara’s openness, as in her belief in “soul,” is also incongruous in “a good corporate person” (p. 118), even one who works in fashion or publishing, as the narrator also acknowledges. It was “odd,” we are told, that Clara should become “an executive, highly paid and influential,” since, for all her sophistication, “at any moment she could set aside the ‘czarina’ and become the hayseed, the dupe of traveling salesmen or grifters who wanted to lure her up to the hayloft” (p. 137). Maggie Simmons might possess both business acumen and soulful self-awareness. In A Theft, it is hard to see this combination in Clara Velde, or to believe in it. What is missing is what Joyce Carol Oates calls “the ground bass of reality.” Hence the impression of skimpiness, a product neither of length nor of failing powers, but of the story’s imperfectly realized setting or world. A Theft lacks the vivifying particulars characteristic of Bellow, the product of affection as well as familiarity, as much for what is deplored as for what is valued.