Notes
EDITIONS OF SAUL BELLOW’S WORKS CITED (INCLUDING FIRST PUBLICATION DETAILS)
Novels
Dangling Man (New York: Vanguard, 1944); Library of America, 2003 (in Saul Bellow: Novels 1944–1953).
The Victim (New York: Vanguard, 1947); Library of America, 2003 (in Saul Bellow: Novels 1944–1953).
The Adventures of Augie March (New York: Viking, 1953); Library of America, 2003 (in Saul Bellow: Novels 1944–1953).
Seize the Day (New York: Viking, 1956); Library of America, 2007 (in Saul Bellow: Novels 1956–1964).
Henderson the Rain King (New York: Viking, 1959); Library of America, 2007 (in Saul Bellow: Novels 1956–1964).
Herzog (New York: Viking, 1964); Library of America, 2007 (in Saul Bellow: Novels 1956–1964).
Mr. Sammler’s Planet (New York: Viking, 1970); Penguin, 1972.
Humboldt’s Gift (New York: Viking, 1975); Penguin, 1977.
The Dean’s December (New York: Harper, 1982); Penguin, 1998.
More Die of Heartbreak (New York: Morrow, 1987); Penguin, 2004.
The Bellarosa Connection (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989); Penguin, 2002 (in Saul Bellow, Collected Stories).
A Theft (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989); Penguin, 2002 (in Saul Bellow, Collected Stories).
The Actual (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997); Penguin, 1998.
Ravelstein (New York: Viking, 2000).
Collected Stories
Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories (New York: Viking, 1968); Penguin 1996 (excluding stories reprinted in Collected Stories, Penguin, 2002).
Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (New York: HarperCollins, 1984); Penguin, 2002 (in Collected Stories, which contains all the stories in this volume).
Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales (New York: Penguin, 1990); Penguin, 2002 (in Collected Stories, which contains all three stories in this volume).
Collected Stories (New York: Viking, 2001); Penguin, 2002.
Nonfiction
To Jerusalem and Back (New York: Viking, 1976); Penguin, 1998.
It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future—A Nonfiction Collection (New York: Viking, 1994); Penguin, 1995.
Saul Bellow: Letters, ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York: Viking Penguin, 2010).
There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York: Viking Penguin, 2015).
Plays
The Wrecker, in New World Writing, no. 6 (New York: New American Library, 1954); reprinted in Seize the Day (New York: Viking, 1956).
The Last Analysis (New York: Viking, 1965); Viking Compass, 1969.
Orange Soufflé, in Traverse Plays, ed. Jim Haynes (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1966). One of three one-act plays performed on Broadway and in London in 1966 as Under the Weather.
A Wen, in Traverse Plays, ed. Jim Haynes (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1966). One of three one-act plays performed on Broadway and in London in 1966 as Under the Weather.
Out from Under (unpublished in English). Italian translation, C’è speranza nel sesso (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1967); English version cited in manuscript, in Saul Bellow Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES
Atlas, Biography James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2000).
Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel, eds., Conversations with Saul Bellow (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994).
“I Got a Scheme!” “ ‘I Got a Scheme!’: The Words of Saul Bellow,” The New Yorker (25 April 2005), an edited and rewritten interview between Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.
Koch interview An eight-hour interview Saul Bellow gave in 1987 to Sigmund Koch, a “University Professor” (as Bellow would himself become) at Boston University, one of seventeen such interviews with writers Koch conducted between 1983 and 1988 as part of the Boston University Aesthetics Research Project. The interviews were videotaped and are held at the Geddes Language Center at Boston University.
Manea, “Conversation” Norman Manea, “Saul Bellow in Conversation with Norman Manea,” Salmagundi 2007, 155/156 (page numbers from the Literature Online version, http://lion.chadwyck.com).
Regenstein The Special Collections Research Center at the Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.
SB Saul Bellow.
SB, CS Saul Bellow, Collected Stories (New York: Viking Press, 2001).
SB, IAAU Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Distant Future—A Nonfiction Collection (1994; Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1995).
SB, “Memoirs” Saul Bellow, “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” an unfinished manuscript among the SB Papers in the Regenstein.
Taylor, ed., Letters Benjamin Taylor, ed., Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010).
1. FAME AND POLITICS IN THE 1960S
1. See Julian Moynihan, “The Way Up from Rock Bottom,” New York Times Book Review, 20 September 1964; and Philip Rahv, “Bellow the Brain King,” New York Herald Tribune Book Week, 20 September 1964.
2. Kazin’s Journals are located in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Unpublished entries involving SB were kindly provided to me by Richard M. Cook, ed., Alfred Kazin’s Journals (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), and are reprinted here by permission of the Berg Collection. The entry for 22 September 1964 is printed on pp. 335–36 of Cook’s edition; subsequent entries are unpublished.
3. These figures come from James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2000), p. 339 (henceforth cited as Atlas, Biography).
4. These and other financial details come from Atlas, Biography, pp. 339, 368–69. But see also chap. 5, n. 47.
5. After Volkening had complained of Freifeld’s interference, SB wrote on 25 February: “When I do the mental balance of what people playfully call my ‘career,’ I find that my love for H. Volkening is among the biggest of the credits. You can never get into the Freifeld class. He’s a sort of brother I must always make allowances for, dependably incompetent Sam. He’ll never understand.”
6. According to Robert Goldfarb of CMA (Creative Management Associates), in a letter of April 1965 to Henry Volkening, forwarded to SB in a letter of 19 October 1965. “On the subject of movies agents…the three of us have chosen Mr. Goldfarb and CMA to work with us after long and careful thought.”
7. Atlas, Biography, p. 368.
8. Quoted in ibid., p. 339.
9. Letter of Robert Hatch to Dwight Macdonald, 14 July 1965, quoted in ibid., p. 347.
10. SB to David Goldknopf, n.d. Goldknopf, a writer, had known SB for over a decade. He was the author of Hills on the Highway (1948), a novel, and of a critical study, The Life of the Novel (1972).
11. In an interview, Mitzi McClosky recalled the following exchange. “How has success affected you?” she asked SB. “I used to get letters: ‘You should have done this, you should have done that in your book.’…I’d believe them but I’d feel terrible about it when I didn’t do anything about it. Now when I get these letters I say: ‘So! Write your own Herzog!’ ”
12. Tarcov’s letter has a penciled date of 1 March [1963]; it is, however, a reply to a letter from SB dated 2 March, though this date is not in SB’s hand.
13. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 114.
14. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 327.
15. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 114.
16. As it happened, Tarcov found lucrative part-time work as a freelance acquisitions editor at Collier Books, and eventually made more money than he’d earned at the Anti-Defamation League.
17. There is some confusion about Covici’s date of birth. He was born in 1888, though Wikipedia gives his date of birth as 1885 and Atlas, Biography, p. 339, says he was sixty-three when he died.
18. A copy of the privately printed tributes is among the SB Papers in the Regenstein.
19. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, pp. 339–40.
20. Kerr may have known Bellow from Northwestern, or at least known of him. Both wrote for The Daily Northwestern under the editorship of Bellow’s friend Julian Behrstock, and both graduated in 1937. Kerr was the paper’s drama-and-arts editor and an Evanston native. Perhaps (this is pure speculation) he harbored a grudge over Bellow’s mockery of Evanston types in his “Pets of the North Shore,” a humorous piece published in The Daily Northwestern on April Fools’ Day, 1936. Perhaps he also knew of and took offense at Bellow’s pseudonymous attacks on Northwestern in the December 1936 issue of Soapbox (Bellow’s student journalism is discussed in chapter 5 of To Fame and Fortune). Or he may simply have thought the play no good, or thought the play no good and harbored a grudge.
21. Quoted in Pete Hamill, “A Look at Saul Bellow, Writer at the Top,” New York Herald Tribune, 27 September 1964.
22. On 18 March 1962, Robert Lowell wrote to SB apologizing for not being able to attend a reading of The Last Analysis: he and Elizabeth Hardwick would be in Puerto Rico at the time. He was especially sorry to miss the reading since he had finally redone one of his own plays “to fit Lillian Hellman’s strictures….The process is back-breaking.”
23. SB, The Last Analysis (New York: Viking Press, 1965), pp. 77–78. Further quotations from the play and SB’s “Author’s Note” are cited within the text by page numbers.
24. Daniel Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984), p. 182.
25. The letter also expresses pleasure at the news that the play had been optioned by Giorgio Strehler, the theater director and cofounder of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.
26. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 331.
27. Quoted in ibid., p. 328.
28. David Boroff, “Saul Bellow,” Saturday Review, 19 September 1964.
29. John Barkham, “A Writer’s Diary,” Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin, 4 October 1964.
30. Robert Gutwillig, “Talk with Saul Bellow,” New York Times Book Review, 20 September 1964, reprinted in Conversations with Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), p. 24 (henceforth cited as Conversations with SB).
31. Pete Hamill, “A Look at Saul Bellow, Writer at the Top.”
32. Ruth Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 163.
33. See Atlas, Biography, p. 332.
34. Edward Hoagland, “The Job Is to Pour Out Your Heart,” New York Times Book Review, 4 October 1981, quoted in ibid., p. 332.
35. Atlas, Biography, p. 331.
36. In SB, “Draft/Bellow to the Trustees,” 10 December 1965, in SB Papers, an appeal to the trustees of the University of Chicago for the creation of a university repertory company and two new theaters. Sam Levene shows up again disguised as Murphy Verviger in Humboldt’s Gift, where his girlfriend bothers Citrine just as Levene’s girlfriend bothered SB: “The Belasco was like a gilded cake-platter with grimed frosting. Verviger, his face deeply grooved at the mouth, was big and muscular. He resembled a skiing instructor. Some concept of intense refinement was eating at him. His head was shaped like a busby, a high solid arrogant rock covered with thick moss.” Verviger’s girlfriend, Denise, eventually Citrine’s wife, takes down rehearsal notes “with terrible concentration, as if she were the smartest pupil in the class and the rest of the fifth grade were in pursuit. When she came to ask a question she held the script to her chest and spoke to me in a condition of operatic crisis. Her voice seemed to make her own hair bristle and to dilate her astonishing eyes. She said ‘Verviger wants to know how you’d like him to pronounce this word’—she printed it out for me, FINITE. ‘He can do it fin-it, or fine-ite. He doesn’t take my word for it—fine-ite!’ ” (SB, Humboldt’s Gift [Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1977], p. 58) (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).
37. Howard Taubman, “ ‘Last Analysis’ of Saul Bellow Arrives,” New York Times, 3 October 1964; Robert Brustein, “Saul Bellow on the Drag Strip,” New Republic, 24 October 1964; John Simon, “Theater Chronicle,” Hudson Review, vol. 17 (1964–65), p. 557; Walter Kerr, “Bellow’s ‘Last Analysis,’ ” New York Herald Tribune, 3 October 1964.
38. Jack Gaver, quoted in “Saul Bellow’s First Play Draws Mixed Reviews,” Chicago Sun-Times, 3 October 1964.
39. For the Committee on Social Thought, see chapter 14 of To Fame and Fortune. SB was on the faculty of the Committee for thirty years, from 1963 to 1993. Other notable Committee faculty include Hannah Arendt, Mircea Eliade, Leszek Kołakowski, Friedrich Hayek, T. S. Eliot, J. M. Coetzee, Jacques Maritain, Paul Ricoeur, Adam Zagajewski, and Wendy Doniger.
40. Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, p. 181. SB himself came to share Grene’s view of The Last Analysis, as in a letter of 26 June 1971 to Edward Shils, written after the play’s 1971 revival by Circle in the Square: “I refused to go to New York for the revival of my revised farce. It seems to be having a succès fou. You don’t approve of it, I know, but it has a few Aristophanic moments.”
41. Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, p. 178. Three months after the play closed, SB complained to Tom McMahon, a friend from the English Department at the University of Puerto Rico, that “the profession of the theatre was anything but a profession” (quoted in Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination, p. 165).
42. Nancy Walker originated the role of Hildy Eszterhazy in On the Town and won Tony nominations for several Broadway hits, including Do Re Mi (1960) with Phil Silvers, a potential Bummidge. She was Ida Morgenstern on the Mary Tyler Moore show and its spinoff, Rhoda, directing episodes for both series. SB’s comment about having his imagination stirred comes in a letter to Toby Cole, quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 351, without a date. In another letter to Cole, written on 23 January, before Walker’s visit, SB announces “that a lady named Nancy Walker has been reading my dramatic works, and wants to direct ‘The Wen’ on Bleecker Street, in a loft. And that is probably where it belongs.” In the July 1965 interview with Gloria Steinem in Glamour, reprinted in Conversations, ed. Cronin and Siegel, p. 56, SB says he’s finishing off “the last of three one-act plays and looking forward to seeing them produced Off-Broadway….Nancy Walker…is doing a great job with them. She’s wonderful. Brains in the theatre are very rare.”
43. By 12 July 1965, SB was less sure about Walker, as he expressed in a letter to Toby Cole. He had written a new play: “I don’t know how Nancy and them others will like it. If they don’t, we might (Ted Hoffman suggests) turn the three plays over to Oliver Rea for off-Broadway. Though I love her dearly, I think the inadequacies come from her, not from the play.”
44. The two quotations preceding the 12 July quotation come from undated letters to Toby Cole. Atlas, Biography, p. 351, quotes the second, along with the subtitle to the unpublished and unproduced one-acter, “A Work of Art”: “Silliness in one act.”
45. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 116.
46. Ibid., p. 105.
47. Ibid., p. 106.
48. Ibid., pp. 108, 114, 113.
49. See ibid., p. 114, for Greg’s difficulties with Susan, Anita, and SB (over his failure to attend Oscar Tarcov’s funeral). On 12 January 1964, Ted Hoffman wrote to SB from Stanford, where Greg had been visiting. He and Greg “had a couple of man-to-man talks.” It was “the same old story—you’ve been rational when he wanted love, showered love when he wanted explanation, and manage to accept everything about him except what he wants you to accept. Same thing with Anita…What’s f
unny is how little he knows about you, how differently he interprets the past, how absent so many facts are—not radically different, just different. I kept wanting to say NO, look, here’s the life you lived; here’s what happened then; here’s what he believed, felt, tried to do, etc., but what’s the point? The boy doesn’t attack you or Anita. He accepts you. He appreciates your concern. But he’s making his own life, as we all do, and I guess we can only make our own life by assuming that its materials are beyond the comprehension of our parents.”
Love and Strife (1965-2005) Page 87