Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  THE BOSTON RESIDENCE the university made available to the Bellows was an apartment at 73 Bay State Road, a few doors down from the palatial apartment they’d lived in during the autumn of 1989. The new apartment was also palatial; Silber would eventually take it over himself. The Chicago Tribune described it as “baronial,” with a grand staircase, high ceilings, polished wooden floors, plush rugs. Bellow told the Tribune it was “almost too grand.” His office, in contrast, on the sixth floor of a nondescript building housing the Department of Theology, was described in the Tribune as “grimy,” with “cardboard boxes on the worn purple carpet. It felt like the office of a cheap detective.”25 On September 21, Bellow made one of the public appearances he had told Silber he “didn’t mind…too much,” addressing the Inaugural Convocation of the Boston University Academy, the university’s equivalent of the Lab School at Chicago, on the topic of education. Once again, Bellow began autobiographically, with his years at Tuley High School, but he soon went on to lament current trends: the marginal role of literature in modern culture, the malign influence of historicism and cultural relativism in universities.

  In January 1994, when spring term began, Bellow taught an undergraduate lecture course entitled “An Idiosyncratic Survey of Modern Literature.” “I’ve never taught this sort of class before,” Bellow admitted. “I got tired of having people say to me, ‘You old-timers never pay attention to the younger contemporary writers.’ ” The course met on Wednesday afternoons for two hours and was devoted to novels by “living writers I find especially interesting.” Among the novels assigned were Denis Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1991), Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper (1965), Martin Amis’s Money (1984), and Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock (1993). As with his courses at the University of Chicago, students wishing to attend had first to be interviewed by him. There were some twenty-five students in the course, undergraduates and graduate students, plus a few auditors, Janis among them, and although Bellow mostly lectured, he also answered questions. One student, Josh London, a senior English major, described Bellow as “very relaxed, very accessible….Everyone’s given ample time for their opinions, whether they agree with him or not.”26

  Another student, Chris Walsh, in the second year of a Ph.D. program in American studies, became an important figure in Bellow’s life. After graduating from the University of Rochester, Walsh spent two years in the Peace Corps in Africa. While in Africa, he read all of Bellow’s novels he could lay his hands on, starting, naturally enough, with Henderson the Rain King. In 1992, he came to BU, and in the next academic year signed up for Bellow’s first course: “Rarely has a student been so well prepared to write a paper for Saul Bellow.” The preparation paid off; Bellow was impressed with Walsh’s work, and in the spring, at the end of the course, invited him up to Brattleboro “for a beer.” They talked about politics, Walsh remembers, and when he asked Bellow why he bothered keeping up with them, he was struck by the answer: “Well, as a novelist you have to.” In the summer, Walsh was invited up to Vermont a second time, and brought his girlfriend. The visit was relaxed and friendly. Next academic year, in the spring of 1995, Walsh audited a Bellow course on Conrad, and at some point that semester Bellow asked him if he could recommend anyone to replace his secretary, who was leaving in the summer to join a jazz group in New York. As Walsh remembers it, “I wound up appointing myself.” His job title was as “personal assistant” or “executive secretary”; Bellow assured him he’d be able to write his dissertation, adding that he expected him to go on “to great things.” His duties were to deal with correspondence, type manuscripts (including the whole of Ravelstein), keep the checkbook, drive Bellow to social and other appointments, and let him know who had called or come to the office.

  Walsh was struck by how robust Bellow was for a man of seventy-eight, his age in 1994, when they first met. When crossing the street, Bellow “wasn’t one to heed traffic; he sort of barreled along.” He was also “very down-to-earth,” “a small-‘d’ democrat with other people—the electrician, for example.” Bellow was drawn to Walsh, he told him, because he wasn’t “cultic,” by which he meant “professionalized,” the kind of graduate student who used expressions like “resonant paradigms.” Like all the students and secretaries who worked for Bellow, Walsh thought him a good boss, considerate, never rude or angry to underlings or employees. He remembers no illiberal remarks, and the only comment about race he recalls was when Bellow expressed “great disappointment” at learning of a racist remark made by one of the Southern Agrarian writers (which one Walsh cannot remember). As they got to know each other better, Walsh came to recognize a wary or embattled side to Bellow’s character, his sense that forces were ranged against him. He would joke about this, but he was also serious. “There’s a big black line running down the middle of my life,” he told Walsh, “and you’re either on one side or another.” Janis shared this them-or-us sense.

  The Bellows saw a number of old friends in Boston: Monroe and Brenda Engel, Eugene Goodheart, Ruth Wisse. They also saw a good deal of Keith and Nathalie Botsford. Nathalie, Keith’s second wife, was French, but she grew up in New Jersey and lived for long periods in London and Paris. She met Botsford in Paris in 1984, while working as a translator at Grand Prix magazine. Botsford had moved to London in 1971, to become a full-time journalist (when Silber brought him to BU, it was as a professor of journalism). He was a sports reporter for the Sunday Times—hence the visit to Grand Prix—a food columnist for the Independent, and a features writer and U.S. correspondent for La Stampa. As Nathalie remembered it, a taxi was booked to pick him up and take him to the airport after his visit to Grand Prix. He was off to Goa, he told her, “to marry a child bride, because he was fed up with uppity Western women.” The taxi never arrived, he missed his flight, and he and Nathalie went to a nearby café for a drink. After what she remembered as “a couple of bottles of wine,” Nathalie volunteered that she “didn’t think his child bride would like life in London with Keith and his seven kids [five from his first wife, who described marriage to him as “like taking a course in comparative gynaecology”] and that he should marry me instead, and he agreed.” They were married a week later, eventually moved into an old stone house in Italy, a disused mill, cold and drafty, where “we were broke all the time.” Silber rescued them in 1988 when he hired Botsford to teach at BU. That autumn, they moved to Boston with their son, Thomas, Botsford’s eighth child.

  Nathalie was interesting on the relations between Bellow and Botsford. “I’m a snob and Saul was a snob,” Botsford declared in an interview. “If someone said they’d been to the symphony,” Nathalie recalled, “Keith would say, ‘I can’t possibly go to the symphony in this country.’ ” Or he’d say, “I never go to the theater in this country, not after the theater in London in the 1940s.” “It was always better somewhere you couldn’t possibly get to yourself” (Walsh remembers Botsford telling him, “You wouldn’t have stood out at Chicago”). Bellow’s snobbery, Nathalie thinks, was different. “He could veer between being very approachable and very haughty and arrogant, and I believe Keith brought out the haughty, arrogant side of Saul—there was a little bit of a sense of always having to put Keith in his place.” Once, at a dinner party, Nathalie accused Botsford of having a streak of anti-Semitism. “Keith looked horrified and said, ‘I can’t believe you said that,’ and Saul said, ‘Well, I understand why she said it. It’s true.’ ”27 Once, she heard Bellow call Botsford “his sidekick, and Keith was very offended,” having “always struggled to accept that he’d never made it as Bellow had.” “Keith revered him,” Christopher Ricks recalls, “but you don’t have to be Harold Bloom to think that there is a parricidal side to these things.”

  There was genuine affection between the two men, as there was affection in Nathalie’s and Walsh’s memories of Botsford. “It was fascinating being married to Keith,” Nathalie said, “and had there not been a child involved I probably
could have continued to be married to him.”28 Bellow was drawn to Botsford not only because they went back so far but because of his great stories, a number of which are true or partly true. Bellow admired Botsford’s nerve and originality, his flouting of rules, his erudition and talents. Botsford really does, as he claims, speak many languages (he reads eleven, he told The New York Times), know the literatures of most European countries, write concertos and choral works as well as novels. He really did work in the theater with John Houseman and train as a lawyer in London. Janis remembers how he would recommend writers one had never heard of, and how they invariably turned out to be worth reading. In literary conversations with Bellow, Nathalie believed, “Keith brought an international dimension.” This dimension is seen in his lineage as well as in his exotic life. On his mother’s side, one quickly learns, he is a direct descendant of Machiavelli; his father, Willard Hudson Botsford, was a tennis-playing American expatriate who lived in Brussels (where Keith was born) and London. According to Botsford, “He kept his own plane at Croydon and flew to his matches. He won the Coupe Lambert (Belgian Rothschilds) against Gottfried von Cramm…played doubles with [Bill] Tilden, and slaughtered [Jean] Borotra.” The Botsford family immigrated to America in 1639 and “founded Connecticut.”29

  Bellow has great fun with Botsford in Humboldt’s Gift, where he becomes Charlie Citrine’s pal Pierre Thaxter. When Thaxter fails to pay his share of a defaulted loan, Charlie forgives him, explaining, “I love Thaxter, whatever he does.”

  Broke but grandiose [Thaxter] had ordered a check from his Italian bank for me, the Banco Ambrosiano of Milan. Why the Banco? Why Milan? But all of Thaxter’s arrangements were out of the ordinary. He had had a transatlantic upbringing and was equally at home in France and California. You couldn’t mention a region so remote that Thaxter didn’t have an uncle there, or an interest in a mine, or an old château or villa….Thaxter wanted people to believe that he was once a CIA agent. It was a wonderful rumor and he did everything to encourage it. It greatly added to his mysteriousness, and mystery was one of his little rackets. This was harmless and in fact endearing. It was even philanthropic, as charm always is—up to a point. Charm is always a bit of a racket [pp. 75–76].

  When Charlie receives a letter from Thaxter, whose letters, like Botsford’s, are often very long, he imagines it being written “in his orange grove near Palo Alto where he sat thinking in a canvas officer’s chair. He wore a black carabiniere cloak, his feet were bare, he drank Pepsi-Cola, he had eight or ten children, he owed money to everyone, and he was a cultural statesman. Adoring women treated him like a man of genius, believed all that he told them, typed his manuscripts, gave birth to his kids, brought him Pepsi-Cola to drink” (p. 195).

  Although unreliable, Thaxter is trusted with Charlie’s confidences. “Whenever Thaxter and I met we had at least one intimate conversation. I spoke freely to him and let myself go. In spite of his eccentric nonsense, and my own, there was a bond between us. I was able to talk to Thaxter. At times I told myself that talking to him was as good for me as psychoanalysis. Over the years, the cost had been about the same” (p. 270). Botsford was untroubled by his depiction as Pierre Thaxter: “A tiny part of me had been transformed magically, into a character in a novel, enlarged upon, recreated.”30 During Bellow’s Boston years, they taught together and even started a successor to the earlier periodicals, The Noble Savage and Anon. They would publish News from the Republic of Letters “as long as we have good enough material to fill it.” A statement on the contents page of their new collaboration reads: “If you would like to acquire your citizenship, Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford welcome your adherence.”31

  The Botsfords entertained frequently at their home in Dorchester, a suburb of Boston described by Nathalie as “un quartier mal formé.” Before their first dinner party for Bellow and Janis, the guest of honor telephoned to ask where Keith was, expecting him to guide them personally to the house. Nathalie answered that she thought he “had given you directions and that you’d find your way,” to which Bellow replied, “ ‘Oh, in that case let’s just forget it.’ That’s the arrogant side of Saul.” At dinner, Nathalie said she was serving rabbit. Bellow told her he didn’t eat rabbit. Fortunately, she had leftovers from a veal stew, a blanquette de veau, which she heated up for him. He was “very impressed.” Among the guests the Bellows saw at the Botsfords’ were Christopher Ricks and his wife, the photographer Judith Aronson; John and Kathryn Silber; the novelist Claire Messud and the critic James Wood; and Roger Shattuck and his wife, Nora, an ex–ballet dancer. The Bellows “tended to arrive quite early and to leave early.” Nathalie was pleased when she heard Bellow say of her, “She doesn’t talk much but she says a lot.” That he liked Nathalie “leavened some of Saul’s irritation with Keith.” At parties, she was struck by the way Bellow “had no need to make himself the center of attraction.” This quality Christopher Ricks also noted and approved, along with Bellow’s “desire not to talk about his work. He wanted to talk about other great writers.” “Remarkably,” Ricks adds, he and Bellow never had a disagreement in these talks; Bellow never took him to task, even over his defense of T. S. Eliot against the charge of anti-Semitism.32 “Bellow was a great anecdotalist,” Ricks believes, as opposed to someone who liked literary argument. He enjoyed Ricks’s company and was interested in him, Janis believes, because Ricks is clever and funny. It helped also that they were both, as Ricks puts it, “persona non grata with members of the English Department”—for what he calls “complicated reasons, some having to do with their deeply disliking Silber, or, rather, shallowly disliking him.”

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  ON DECEMBER 1, 1993, Bellow wrote a letter to the MacArthur Foundation supporting Alfred Kazin’s nomination for a fellowship. Kazin’s curriculum vitae, which Bellow said he had never seen before, “was impressive,” and though he didn’t always agree with his views, “I read him with respect….His work is first rate.” The unnamed person who nominated Kazin compared him to Edmund Wilson, but Wilson, Bellow wrote, “did not always read contemporary literature; he frequently declared that he had no patience with most of it. Kazin has always been much more open and hospitable to innovation. I urge the Selection Committee to be generous with him.” Given their recent disagreements, Bellow’s letter was itself generous. Six weeks later, on January 14, 1994, a letter arrived from a fact checker at The New Yorker asking Bellow a series of questions in connection with an article by Kazin that was soon to appear in the magazine. Some of the questions were easy to answer. “Do you like teaching?” “Yes, of course.” “Do you consider yourself an ex-Trotskyist?” “Yes, I am an ex-Trotskyist. I became ex in about 1937.” Other questions irked him. “Do you like Reagan?” “I don’t [“know him” should appear here] well enough to like or dislike. I don’t froth at the mouth when his name is mentioned. I think he played a significant role in bringing the cold war to an end.” In a later response about Reagan: “How I vote is none of your business.” “Do you consider The New York Times, which publishes Anthony Lewis, is not a conservative newspaper?” “Only a nut would call the NYT a conservative paper. It’s our fountainhead of liberal clichés.” Bellow was not asked: “What did you mean when you said, ‘Where is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.’ ”

  When Kazin first read these words, he tells us in “Jews,” a memoir published in The New Yorker on March 7, 1994, “my heart sank.” The words Kazin had read were in a 1988 profile of Allan Bloom in The New York Times Magazine. Bellow had not written them; he had spoken them, in the course of an interview with the profile’s author, James Atlas, who quotes them parenthetically in a paragraph about Bloom and multiculturalism:

  Gleefully he [Bloom] shows me a clipping from The San Francisco Examiner that recounts the efforts of radicals at Stanford to do away with the Western civilization class on the grounds that it’s racist. (“Who is the Tolstoy of th
e Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” says Bellow. “I’d be glad to read them”).33

  Few words by Bellow have done more to alienate liberal and academic opinion than these, or to banish his fiction from college syllabuses. Robert Pippin remembers being “stunned that even at the University of Chicago so many people expressed contempt for Bellow, hated him, for that remark.” The impact of the remark was increased by another contemporary publication. On February 6, 1994, a month before Kazin’s article appeared, The New York Times Magazine published an extract from a forthcoming memoir by Brent Staples entitled Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White.34 Again, Atlas was involved, having picked out and edited the extract. Staples, an African American, also a member of the Times’s editorial board, had grown up in poverty, the son of an alcoholic truck driver. In the extract printed in the Times Magazine, he describes his years as a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1970s and his conflicted feelings about Bellow, whose works he revered but also recoiled from, because of their depictions of black men, particularly in Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Staples was not literary. The dissertation he was at work on at Chicago was in psychology, on “the mathematics of decision making. The cool indifference of numbers appealed to me.” In 1975, Bellow was approaching his zenith. Humboldt’s Gift, which would win the Pulitzer Prize the next year, the year Bellow was given the Nobel Prize, had just been published, “and copies were placed in every one of the university bookstore’s several windows.” The novel generated “endless gossip” among Staples’s circle of graduate students, especially about the supposed real-life models of its characters. Unlike other novels Staples had read, which he calls “merely” fictional, Humboldt was “local geography, people included.” It was also, he admits, “one of the first novels I’d read of my own free will. Most of the others had been assigned in college and I’d ransacked them for facts to be used in term papers and essays.”