Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  The key moment in the story occurs on the drive back home. Rexler and Albert are stopped at a level crossing: there has been an accident, a man has been hit and killed by a train, the scene has not yet been cleaned up, and when Rexler stands on the running board of the car, he sees “not the corpse, but his organs on the roadbed—first the man’s liver, shining on the white, egg-shaped stones, and a little beyond it his lungs. More than anything it was the lungs—Rexler couldn’t get over the twin lungs crushed out of the man by the train when it tore his body open. The color was pink and they looked inflated still” (p. 6). That night, at dinner, Aunt Rozzy notices Rexler isn’t eating. “I think it was the accident that took away his appetite,” says Cousin Albert, who recounts how the man’s body had “burst open….We came to a stop and there were his insides—heart, liver.” Young Rexler stares at his bowl of chicken soup and at the gizzard Aunt Rozzy has served him as a special treat: “It had been opened by her knife so that it showed two dense wings ridged with lines of muscle, brown and gray at the bottom of the dish.” The gizzard reminds Rexler the child not only of what he had seen that afternoon, but of the trussed chickens he had watched being slaughtered in St-Dominique Street, in the Montreal slum where his family once lived, as had Bellow’s family: “first fluttering, then more gently quivering as they bled to death. The legs too went into the soup” (p. 7).

  These memories conjure a much later memory, when Rexler was summoned to Lachine to say goodbye to Cousin Albert, now the last of his Lachine relatives. Albert is eighty and dying of skin cancer, “his legs forked under the covers like winter branches” (p. 11). He recalls nothing of the accident or the strewn body parts, and Rexler doesn’t press him. In Albert’s “still-shrewd eyes,” Rexler reads an awareness that the cancer “had metastasized and he hadn’t far to go” (p. 10). If Albert remembered anything from that day, Rexler thinks, it would have been what happened in the bungalow rather than at the level crossing: lying with a girl “chest to chest, his heart and lungs pressing upon hers” (pp. 10–11). Looking at the drip to which Albert is attached, Rexler notices “in the upside-down intravenous flask a pellucid drop was about to pass into his spoiled blood” (p. 11).

  The two memories—of dying Albert and the accident at the level crossing—come to Rexler as he walks “lopsided” through Monkey Park, along the Lachine Canal and the St. Lawrence. “He turned his mind again to the lungs in the roadbed as pink as a rubber eraser and the other organs, the baldness of them, the foolish oddity of the shapes, almost clownish, almost a denial or refutation of the high-ranking desires and subtleties. How finite they looked” (p. 10). The qualifications here—“almost clownish,” “almost a denial,” “how finite they looked” (as opposed to “were”)—suggest incredulity rather than equivocation. “In part the story had to do with anatomy,” Bellow told Werner Dannhauser in a letter of August 25, 1995, “the vital organs scattered on the tracks—all the absurd-looking parts on which the spiritual life rests.”

  In the narrative present of the story, Cousin Albert has been dead for years, buried with the rest of his family, among what Cousin Ezra, Albert’s older brother, called “my dead” (p. 11), an expression Bellow used of his own deceased relatives. Toward the end of the story, Rexler imagines that his crippled body “must have been formed by his will on the hint given that afternoon at the scene of the accident. Don’t tell me, Rexler thought, that everything depends on these random-looking parts—and that to preserve them I was turned into some kind of a human bivalve?” (p. 11). The question is rhetorical: “everything,” ultimately, depends on the body (even if Rexler is right about the role of his will in deforming his body). This is a truth the story faces squarely, as it is faced in The Dean’s December, most memorably at Minna’s mother’s funeral, when the roaring furnace of the crematorium “flashed away” her fat, “blew up” her organs. On the last page of “By the St. Lawrence,” Rexler turns his thoughts to death, only recently escaped. He likens it to “a magnetic field that every living thing must enter” (p. 11). This thought comes to Rexler beside the “platinum rush” of the St. Lawrence, a rush to the North Atlantic, into which it dissolves. The river is drawn to the sea like metal to a magnet, like Rexler and Bellow to Lachine. For both narrator and author, the St. Lawrence is sublime in its power, but unfeeling, inhuman, like Shelley’s Mont Blanc, or the night sky at the end of The Dean’s December. Lachine is the place from which they come, but there is little of Wordsworth’s sense in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” of the ocean as the place “which brought us hither,” an “immortal” place, which, consolingly, “Our Souls have sight of” in privileged moments. If the story is new, what makes it so is its unwavering focus on the vulnerability and dissolution of the body.

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  IN LATE MAY 1995, shortly before Memorial Day weekend, Harriet Wasserman picked up a message on her answering machine from the agent Andrew Wylie. He was calling about Saul Bellow and asked Wasserman to get back to him. Wasserman thought the call was about Saul Steinberg, a Wylie client, one of whose drawings (given to Bellow after their adventures in Kenya) was being considered as a cover for the Penguin Classics edition of Henderson the Rain King. When she returned it, Wylie immediately announced, as she reconstructs it in her memoir, “I’ve spoken with Saul Bellow, and I want to buy the backlist from Russell and Volkening and handle his foreign rights.” Wylie then went on to say that Bellow had described his relationship with Wasserman as “sacrosanct,” both as an agent and as a friend. Wylie could only handle the backlist and foreign rights “if it’s all right with you.” Wylie then asked if he could come to Wasserman’s office “to talk to you for about an hour.” The rest of the phone conversation was unpleasant. Wasserman had heard that Wylie had spat on a copy of More Die of Heartbreak and stubbed his cigarette out on it. This Wylie denied. She reminded Wylie that she had been Bellow’s agent “for twenty-five years,” to which Wylie answered: “I can do a better job than you can.” When Wasserman accused Wylie of wanting not only Bellow’s backlist and foreign rights but “all of him,” Wylie said he would provide her with a signed letter saying that this was not so, adding that he had taken on lots of estates recently and was good at revitalizing backlists. Wasserman returned to Wylie’s treatment of More Die of Heartbreak and asked him why he wanted to represent Bellow. He answered, “He’s the greatest writer we have.”26

  Wasserman was keen to know if Wylie had contacted Bellow or Bellow had contacted Wylie. “I called him,” Wylie answered. To Bellow, later, she was adamant that the proposed arrangement would never work. “You don’t divide up lists,” she said. “You can only have one agent.” He had to choose. Some months passed after this initial exchange with Bellow. “By the St. Lawrence” was sold to Esquire by Wasserman, and business continued “as usual.” In mid-September, however, Bellow called and asked her to reconsider Wylie’s scheme “about the foreign rights and the backlist.” Wasserman reiterated that there could be no division of the job. Bellow said he’d think things over. In a subsequent telephone call, before a reading Bellow was to give at the 92nd Street Y at the beginning of October, Wasserman pressed Bellow. He had still not made up his mind. She insisted, “I have to know where I stand!” and Bellow answered by telling her not to raise her voice. Then she hung up. Bellow called the Wasserman agency lawyer, Edward Klagsbrun, who also did work for him in connection with nonagency matters, and the lawyer advised Wasserman: “The poor guy, he hasn’t made up his mind. Call him up. He thinks you’re firing him. He thinks you’re resigning.” After the reading at the Y, Wasserman contacted Bellow. He had still not made up his mind. In the following days, she got several telephone calls from her lawyer saying that Bellow kept calling him to ask if Wasserman was still his agent: “Is she resigning? Is she firing me?”

  Despite these queries, Wasserman was convinced that Bellow had made up his mind to go with Wylie. On October 23, she sent him a fax saying: “It is my unders
tanding that you have dismissed me as your agent. It doesn’t all add up that you keep asking if I’m resigning, if I’m firing you.” Bellow did not answer until November, when a note from him informed her, she writes, “that a new lawyer would be requesting that I gather all his material, contracts, etc. The lawyer asked for a meeting. I came to his office. He told me that Saul hadn’t made up his mind yet, that he himself was a neutral third party, engaged to look over all my work and Wylie’s proposition and advise Saul.” In early December, Wasserman finally heard from Bellow, who told her he had to go into hospital again, for a gallbladder operation.27 As Wasserman remembers it, nothing was said about her fax or about Wylie. Bellow’s manner was friendly. After the operation, he telephoned to ask Wasserman to negotiate a contract with Viking Penguin for his collected short stories. A week later, the new lawyer told Wasserman that “Saul would like Andrew Wylie to handle his backlist and his foreign rights and for you to be his primary agent under Wylie’s supervision.” Would Wasserman be willing to meet with Wylie? She wouldn’t. On February 8, 1996, the lawyer tried again: “Saul has made up his mind. I hate to do this, it’s the kind of call I hate to make, but he’s going with Andrew Wylie.” The next week, on Valentine’s Day, an item appeared in the New York Times “Book Notes” column announcing that Bellow was about to join the Wylie Agency, among whose clients were Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Pat Barker, and Susan Sontag. The next day, Bellow rang to say it wasn’t true. According to Wasserman’s own account, she again hung up on him.

  “Saul, are you writing?

  “Yes.”

  “Write good, bye-bye.”

  A half hour later, the new lawyer called to say, “You know that article’s absolutely not true….I officially terminated you for the backlist and the foreign rights. You would still be Saul’s primary agent, under the supervision of Andrew Wylie.” The lawyer’s tone was now friendly. He had heard “many good things about you from a number of people.” Bellow asked the Times to print a correction, but nothing came of it, for reasons not altogether clear from Wasserman’s account. Wasserman then heard that Bellow was complaining that she no longer communicated with him, so she formalized the break. “I knew he wished me to infer and carry out a final duty on his behalf. In true Bellovian fashion, I was to fire myself.”

  Wasserman felt betrayed by Bellow, but her memoir suggests that she played her hand poorly, flying off the handle out of injured pride. “Her reaction to the call I made,” Wylie remembers, “was sort of crazy, because Saul could not have been clearer with me: If she’s not happy, it’s not going to happen. So he was completely honorable in regards to her interests, completely, and he was very distressed when she, as he put it, cast him into outer darkness.” She might have fought off Wylie, or addressed the issues Wylie raised when wooing Bellow. But at this stage she was unable to do so. Janis is hard on Wasserman. What she remembers of the split is that “she was both not effective and difficult to deal with.” She had “troubles”; “there was nobody who could really talk to her or get along with her.” The process of separating “was long overdue and painful….He did not want to do her in and hurt her.” Wylie has no memory of meeting Wasserman either before or after the split with Bellow, and claims to have no animus against her. “I don’t think she was a bad person. I think she was just scatterbrained and she had her passions.” Wasserman has stout defenders among her authors; she also had authors who have sued her.

  Wylie’s initial decision to contact Bellow came after browsing in a bookstore, something he often did, looking for the books of authors he admired. The way their books were displayed, what their covers looked like, often told a story. Bellow’s books were published by different houses and he could see little coherence in their presentation. “A lightbulb went on in my head, and I thought the reason why Saul’s books were not presented in a uniform format and with coherence is that Wasserman used to work as a receptionist for Seldes [Tim Seldes, who took over Russell & Volkening in 1972, by which time, Wasserman claims, she was already, in effect, acting as Bellow’s agent, hardly a receptionist]…and when she left [in 1981] Saul went with her.” Wylie knew Seldes, and called him up to say, “Tim, I’d like to buy the representation of those books of Saul’s you represent” (that is, all the books published while Bellow was with Russell & Volkening, the last of which was The Dean’s December). In the course of the call, Seldes made clear that “there was no love lost between himself and Harriet.” He asked Wylie what he would “like to pay” for the right to receive commission on the books. Wylie answered, “Whatever you’d like.” Seldes said that he’d think about it but that any deal would have to be approved by Bellow.

  So Wylie called Bellow in Boston—he got the telephone number from James Atlas—and asked if he could come to see him. He had never met Bellow, who asked what he wanted to see him about. As Wylie recalled in an interview: “I said, Well, I want to buy the representation of your backlist. He said, What does that mean? and I said, That’s what I’d like to come to talk to you about.” Wylie then called Martin Amis and Philip Roth (or perhaps he called them after seeing Bellow; he’s not sure) and asked them “to put in a good word.” In Boston, he told Bellow: “The reason your books aren’t presented coherently in the marketplace, not just here but abroad, is that you’ve got two people working on the case and the two don’t get along, so there’s no coordination….This is very damaging. So what I’d like to do is buy the representation to the early [books], because I don’t have a problem with Harriet—which was true” (recalling this moment, Wylie began to laugh). When Bellow asked Wylie why he wanted to buy out Seldes’s rights, Wylie answered, “Because I love your work and I want to make money. [Bellow] said, You think you’ll make money this way? I said, I know I’ll make money this way. He said, Well, why do you suppose Tim Seldes doesn’t want to keep hold of them [the rights]? And I said I guess he feels there’s a price at which it would make sense to unload [them], because he doesn’t have a connection with you…if the price is right.”

  When Bellow asked Wylie what the price was, Wylie said, “He hasn’t told me yet, but I’ve assured him that I’ll pay whatever he asks. And Saul said, Why would you do that? And I said, Well, Tim’s a gentleman, and he’ll ask less than it’s worth. So Saul said, very distinctly, The only way I would be okay with this is if you report to Harriet. So, if you can work out a deal with Harriet to represent the foreign rights for her books as well as Tim’s, if you acquire Tim’s, fine, but in any case you’ve got to report to Harriet.” Wylie began to push: “I said, Okay, I think I know more than she does….” Bellow cut him off: “You have to report to Harriet.” Wylie said okay, and Bellow said: “So you go back to New York, you call Harriet, and if she’s okay with it, we’re on.” Back in New York, Wylie came to an arrangement with Seldes (“He mentioned a price; I said fine”) and contacted Wasserman. Wylie’s account of this call is somewhat different from Wasserman’s. “I explained to her what I had in mind, and she said, Have you spoken to Saul about it? I said, Yes, I went to Boston and I explained to him. He said it was okay with him if it was okay with you.”

  Wylie claims he tried not to antagonize Wasserman, saying: “The problem, Harriet, was not with you, it was the fight you had with Tim….There’s this division in the work and division in the representation. You’ve got one person selling some books and another selling the others, and the two of you don’t talk to each other, so how the hell can you coordinate anything? The result is that Saul’s work is out of print all over the place, and nobody cares about it, because, with the more recent work coming along as it has, there’s no reference made to the earlier titles that Tim was representing. Because not only do you not represent them [this wasn’t quite true, as we shall see] but you don’t want them to do particularly well….It’s a broken system, and the unwitting victim in this is Saul.” In Wylie’s reconstruction, this is how the call ended: “She said, I know who you are. I said, W
hat do you mean? She said, You’re Mike Ovitz [the Hollywood agent]. I said, No, I’m not, I’m Andrew Wylie. And she said, Yeah, okay, I’ll get back to you, and hung up.” A series of emotional calls followed. “I understand why they were emotional,” Wylie says, “but the exchanges are a matter of record. I think Harriet’s account is not very accurate….And eventually she resigned, just resigned, said, That’s it.” When Wylie took over all Bellow’s representation, “I continued to send her every cent she was due…including half the foreign revenue [for post-1982 titles]. She never cashed any of my checks.” After three years of uncashed checks and unanswered letters and emails, Wylie stopped sending her checks, having first warned her that he would do so unless she got back to him within three months. As he puts it, “We wanted a record in case she went legal.”

  Wylie’s view is that Wasserman’s position was impossible: “She could never do what needed doing, because Seldes would never sell her the backlist. If you represent Saul Bellow and the receptionist leaves with Saul Bellow, you want to kill the receptionist, by means of severe torture if possible. That’s how I’d feel….Neither Tim nor Harriet wanted Saul to suffer, but no one had tried to solve the problem, and the problem was visible in the bookstore.” In a footnote in her memoir, Wasserman offers a different but comparably discrediting account of her position vis-à-vis the backlist, for which she claimed sole responsibility, a service she agreed to perform gratis, as a courtesy. If the footnote is correct, she alone was responsible for the incoherence Wylie drew to Bellow’s attention. That Seldes got the commission and Wasserman acted for free, may account for her lack of attention to old titles, though at the time of the split, she claims, a uniform reissue of all Bellow’s novels was in the pipeline, in the Penguin Twentieth-Century American Classics series. What Wylie remembers is that when he took over as Bellow’s agent, in February 1996, he discovered that there were two separate networks of foreign subagents for Bellow’s work, one for the Seldes titles, one for Wasserman’s. “In some cases, licenses had expired and not been renewed; there was no attempt to use new work to reinvigorate the presentation of older work…so the new work declined in value and the old work went out of print.” Wylie went to Paris to talk with Gallimard, Bellow’s French publisher, who agreed to retranslate his books and to put the new translations in the paperback La Pléiade series. “Basically, we just got things into print,” he recalls, “and used new works to make sure the old ones were still in print.”