Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  63. Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple, p. 175.

  64. SB’s womanizing was common knowledge. See Norman Rosten, 11 September 1967: “Did your nice friend from the New Yorker come out? Saul, I think of you juggling all those oranges—girls, wives, children—and I think, Is God nice to him or just fattening him up for some fearful retribution?” Or Paolo Milano, 18 September 1968: “My ‘lovely acquaintances,’ who are also ‘impressionable’ as you prefer them, are already impressed by the sheer possibility of meeting il cantor di Ramona.”

  65. Arlette’s husband was four years older than she was and had been a graduate student in economics at Columbia. After a spell at Stanford on a Ford Foundation grant, he got a post at the University of Chicago, teaching law and economics.

  66. Barley Alison sought to comfort SB about Arlette in a letter of 26 February 1969, quoted at the beginning of chapter 3.

  67. Arlette’s letters from late January 1969 report on the controversy at the University of Chicago over Marlene Dixon. On 30 January, she wrote: “The university is being attacked again by those great democratic forces the mob and equality. A sociology instructress, Marlene Dixon, has been dismissed because she was not doing what instructors must do to stay on: publish. Instead, she taught and was politically vocal. As I see it, these kinds of teachers are still half-way between student and teacher. Endearing to the student and hateful to the teacher.” The next day, she wrote that Bruno Bettelheim, the child psychologist, a University of Chicago professor, had called a news conference “in which he said the student upheaval paralleled German pre-Nazi student behavior.” Bettelheim had spent eleven months in Dachau and Buchenwald. Arlette also had a theory about black militants and Jews. She thought “the real hatred and resentment” came from the pressure to act and achieve: “Fighting the Jew with whom he has always dealt is fighting the representative of social participation.”

  68. My interview with Arlette took place in the garden of her home in Bethesda, Maryland. She is a serious painter, smart, funny, down-to-earth. A handsome woman off to work, she wore jeans, running shoes, and a fleece, not exactly the dress of a sex goddess.

  69. This letter was written to Whit Burnett, editor of Story magazine.

  70. For a discussion of “Mosby’s Memoirs,” see chapter 6 of To Fame and Fortune.

  71. Maggie still has her engagement diary from the second (1968) summer at East Hampton, and among painter friends lists Ben and Jean Gollay, Herman Cherry, Warren Brandt and his wife, Grace, and Syd and Annie Solomon, presumably friends also from the previous summer.

  72. Ben Nelson, an acquaintance of SB’s from Hyde Park days, was a historian and a social theorist. He and SB became good friends at the University of Minnesota, where Nelson was a colleague. An authority on medieval usury and immensely learned, Nelson was the model for the scholar-theorist Egbert Shapiro in Herzog.

  73. See, for example, SB to Margaret Staats, 18 June 1966: “For the first time, I feel out to a dangerous depth with you. Friday P.M. gave me a bad shock. You didn’t tell me you were going out with anyone….The Friday man did not seem to me a casual date, but, judging from your changed tone towards me, one that means something to you. You didn’t want to express feeling towards me in his presence. I thought, in fact, that you wanted to get rid of me. I’ve never before felt that you were anything but straight with me; but these last twenty-four hours I’ve felt it, terribly, wondering whether my being in love with you isn’t my ticket to destruction….When I guessed what the doorbell meant, you sounded guilty. You sounded ashamed. Maggie—what are you up to?”

  74. See Atlas, Biography, pp. 380–81.

  75. They had been furious for some time. As SB wrote to Richard Stern on 16 July 1968: “Toujours poursuivi des femmes, pourtant tracassé. Des circonstances assez marrant. Elles sont toutes fâchées—au nord, ouest, et ici même. Mais je continue tout de même de faire mes devoirs.” In Benjamin Taylor’s translation: “Still pursued by women: worried nonetheless. An amusing situation. They’re all furious—north, west, and even here, but I continue to do my duty” (Letters, p. 274n).

  76. Lamont, “Bellow Observed,” p. 254.

  77. Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, p. 250.

  78. SB, “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” (1984), reprinted in SB, CS, pp. 312, 335.

  79. SB, The Bellarosa Connection (1989), reprinted in SB, CS, p. 68.

  80. Another way to look at characters like Angela (or Wallace or Eisen), and hence at the novel itself, is to see them as different in phenomenological type from Sammler or Elya. To Mark Shechner, in After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish American Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 146–47, “these caricatures are ‘humors’ characters, flat figures with one or two exaggerated tendencies, as in the plays of Ben Jonson.”

  81. In “Mr. Sammler’s Planet: Saul Bellow’s 1968 Speech at San Francisco State University,” in A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria L. Cronin and Lee Trepanier (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), p. 154, Andrew Gordon makes the fair point that the novel “never mentions Vietnam.” He goes on to argue, “The absence of any mention of the Vietnam War, the motor for much of the widespread political protest and questioning of authority during the late 1960s, turns the young radicals in the novel into lunatics, running amok and tearing down the universities for no apparent reason.” Adam Kirsch makes a related observation in “Flower Children,” an essay on Mr. Sammler’s Planet in the Jewish online magazine Tablet (14 March 2012): “For a man who survived the Holocaust, Sammler seems very little interested in social and political questions. The disaster he sees unfolding around him is, instead, spiritual, moral, and above all sexual.” Kirsch objects to this emphasis on novelistic rather than moral grounds: “What Bellow is criticizing in the 1960s—the topsy-turvy elevation of youth over age, energy over wisdom—really has nothing to do with what Sammler experienced in the 1940s. As an American Jewish novelist, Bellow tries hard to seek a point of imaginative contact with the Holocaust, but the concerns of the present overshadow the realities of the past. Indeed, one feels that a man with Sammler’s experiences would not condemn the American present in quite such absolutist terms. At the intersection of Broadway and 96th Street, for instance, Sammler feels that the dismal scene seems to say ‘that the final truth about mankind was overwhelming and crushing’: But surely a man who was buried alive under the corpse of his wife would not need Broadway and 96th Street to enforce such a feeling.”

  82. See SB to Margaret Staats, 27 September 1968: “Shirley [Sidran] kept saying that he was so happy to have come to East Hampton before, and talked of nothing else. He had come to say goodbye to me, and knew it. He got my card from Bellagio and hoped I’d get back before too long.” Lou Sidran worked in advertising but had previously been an associate editor at Esquire, for which he wrote. He also wrote for Reader’s Digest and Coronet magazines and had literary interests (according to Atlas, Biography, p. 378, his library “boasted complete sets of transition and Scrutiny”). That summer, SB, Maggie, Sidran and his son, and Gore Vidal watched the Democratic Convention together, appalled by the violence in the streets.

  83. See, for example, Ethan Goffman, “Between Guilt and Affluence: The Jewish Gaze and the Black Thief in Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” Contemporary Literature, vol. 38, no. 4 (1997), pp. 705–25.

  84. Kirsch, “Flower Children.”

  3. BAD BEHAVIOR

  1. Barley Alison to SB, 26 February 1969.

  2. A copy was given to me by Adam Bellow. An edited version of the essay was published in the London Sunday Times, 5 June 2005, under the title “Lost and Found, My Nobel Father.”

  3. Shortly before SB’s death in April 2005, Adam took his wife and two daughters to visit London, his first trip there in thirty years. In the memoir, he contrasts his father’s irritation and impatience about the s
ouvenirs with his own generosity toward his girls, who “thought nothing of asking me to stop for a rest or a snack, to see (or not to see) a given monument, to buy them souvenirs and other things their hearts desired. And it was my pleasure to do so.”

  4. In an email to the author, 24 January 2018, Adam Bellow writes: “It…seems worthwhile to note the letter [SB] wrote to Sasha describing my ‘little prince’ routine and making me out to be spoiled and arrogant pertained to a conversation we had had at a restaurant in Great Neck in which he had started to get wound up about my mother and I told him, following her own well-meaning advice, that I would rather not discuss my mother with him. He exploded in a rage and hurled the Ten Commandments at me as a result of which I knocked my ice cream sundae to the floor where it smashed with a loud bang. I was seven or eight at the time.”

  5. Email to the author, 2 June 2014.

  6. Telephone interview with Toby Eady, 7 July 2014.

  7. The manuscript is in the SB Papers in the Regenstein. Its dating is in Janis Bellow’s hand: “Unfinished Rita manuscript summer ’90.”

  8. That SB himself was a good friend to Barley Alison is suggested not merely by her loyalty to him and by the warm memories her family—including her brother, his wife, and their daughter Rosie—have of him, but also by a long letter of 4 November 1974, in which she tells him about her problems concerning her mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer. The letter was clearly written to someone she felt she could count on for sympathy, comfort, and understanding.

  9. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 392, presumably from a letter but not identified.

  10. SB to Margaret Staats, 27 September 1970. See also SB to Benjamin Nelson, 11 September 1970: “Le Destin has been against me, using its familiar agents—children, hostages to fortune. I longed to go to Montauk, but Gregory announced that he would be married in August, in San Francisco. He chose the middle of the month, just to make things interesting—a little test of his value to his dear Pa, with a slender golden edge of the will to Power. To pass this new test I had to spend a large part of August in San Francisco. Next it was the turn of Adam, who is thirteen, to do his stuff. His choice fell on Nantucket. No, it hasn’t been one of my better summers.”

  11. Sasha Bellow, “What’s in a Name?,” p. 116.

  12. SB, “Mr. Wollix Gets an Honorary Degree,” Anon, December 1970, reprinted in SB and Keith Botsford, Editors: The Best from Five Decades (London and Connecticut: Toby Press, 2001). See also Rosette Lamont, “Bellow Observed: A Serial Portrait,” Mosaic, vol. 8, no. 1 (Fall 1974), p. 253: “Early in the summer of 1970, Bellow was awarded an honorary doctorate by New York University. He flew in from Chicago to receive it. Mrs. Vincent Astor was appointed his sponsor, and arrived in her chauffeured car to call on the writer at his hotel, the Plaza. Together, they went on to the ceremony. There, reports Bellow, the main speaker began to mouth the kind of elegant liberal clichés he thought he was expected to produce. The parents of the graduating students, all hard-working, middle of the road members of the bourgeoisie, soon broke into hisses and boos. Mrs. Astor who was sitting next to the writer seemed highly amused: ‘Are we going to have a bit of a scuffle?’ she inquired, a gleam in her eyes. Saul Bellow appreciated the great lady’s defiant wit. He himself could not feel as objective, faced as he was with the misanthropy he deplores on the day of being signally honored.”

  13. SB had been a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters since 1958, a separate body from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, founded by National Institute members in 1908. In 1976 the American Academy and the National Institute merged; SB was by then a member of both. The American Academy Web site lists him as having been a member since 1958.

  14. The essay was “Culture Now: Some Animadversions, Some Laughs,” delivered at Purdue University on 30 April 1970, reprinted in Modern Occasions, vol. 1 (1971). Among those attacked in the essay are William Phillips and Richard Poirier, editors of Partisan Review, from whom Philip Rahv, editor of Modern Occasions, had parted acrimoniously.

  15. In a review of Eduard Hitschmann’s Great Men: Psychoanalytic Studies (1956) in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, vol. 26 (1957), reprinted in The Search for the Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut, 1950–1978, 2 vols., ed. Paul Ornstein (New York: International Universities Press, 1980), vol. 1, p. 89, Kohut takes issue with Hitschmann’s view of Albert Schweitzer. For Hitschmann, Schweitzer’s moral scrupulousness derives from “an unconscious guilt feeling which originated in early years and was renewed by regression.” For Kohut, Schweitzer’s “keen awareness of the misery existing in the world and the determination to live a life devoted to the suffering are the autonomous attitudes of a mature ego.” Schweitzer’s work in Africa as a medical missionary was for Kohut a product of control and compassion rather than conflict and unconscious psychic compromise. This attitude was bound to appeal to Bellow, a fierce opponent of the view, as Herzog puts it, that “what a man thinks he is doing counts for nothing. All his work in the world is done by impulses he will never understand” (p. 28).

  16. For Kohut’s views on artistic creation, see his essays on Thomas Mann, Beethoven, and creativity and childhood, also in volume 1 of The Search for the Self, ed. Ornstein.

  17. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 384.

  18. Both Kohut and SB quotations are from ibid., p. 385.

  19. Peltz’s first trip to Africa was to visit a relative, a State Department official working in Dar es Salaam; his second was to see Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa.

  20. SB to Edward Shils, n.d.

  21. Deirdre Bair, Saul Steinberg: A Biography (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2012), p. 421.

  22. Ibid., p. 422. Bair’s quotations come from a marked transcript of an interview Steinberg had with Grace Glueck, “The Artist Speaks: Saul Steinberg,” Art in America (November–December 1970), pp. 110–70. There is a good deal more about the symbolic properties of crocodiles in the published interview. There are also slight differences in quotation.

  23. This address, among the SB Papers in the Regenstein, is where he reports having been advised by lawyers in Nairobi to get out of town. A version of it was published in Republic of Letters, vol. 7 (November 1999), reprinted in SB and Botsford, eds., Editors, p. 422. For Steinberg’s account of the visit to Murchison Falls with SB and Peltz, see “Saul Bellow in Uganda,” Saul Bellow Journal, vol. 4, no. 2 (1985).

  24. SB, “Saul Steinberg,” in SB and Botsford, eds., Editors, p. 448.

  25. Bair, Saul Steinberg: A Biography, p. 422.

  26. SB, “Saul Steinberg,” in SB and Botsford, eds., Editors, p. 449.

  27. Atlas, Biography, p. 396.

  28. SB, “Saul Steinberg,” in SB and Botsford, Editors, p. 449.

  29. SB, “A Silver Dish,” reprinted in SB, CS, p. 13 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  30. According to Atlas, Biography, p. 405.

  31. The nature of these tensions seems to have been personal; on Shils’s part, it did not preclude recognition of Grene’s intellect or of his importance to the university and the Committee on Social Thought. On 8 January 1987, Paul Wheatley, at the time chair of the Committee, wrote to Shils to thank him “for raising the question of the University’s lack of recognition of David Grene. Of course, I am entirely in agreement with you that the University should formally honor a lifetime of devoted and inspiring teaching, and I shall make representations to the Provost in the manner you suggest.” But see Shils to SB on 4 June 1975: “I am pleased that you are going ahead with a dinner in honor of John Nef. I myself find him utterly repulsive, but he was a very outstanding scholar, and in his unpleasant way he was a most valuable member of the University.” In an undated letter from the summer of 1974, SB writes to his secretary: “Dear Esther: Take out of Mr. Shils’s memorandum the clause ‘ass though he is.’ Let that sentence read ‘It would please
Nef and he does deserve some recognition from the University and the Committee.’ For God’s sake, don’t fail to suppress the ass.”

  32. Before joining the Committee, Sinaiko had held teaching posts in the Department of Oriental Languages at the university and at the college. He had studied Chinese for ten years and taught it for seven, originally intending to write a Ph.D. dissertation on Plato and Confucius. While still teaching in the Department of Oriental Languages, he decided, at David Grene’s urging, to drop the Confucius part of the dissertation, writing on Plato alone. The resulting work was good enough to be published by the University of Chicago Press but counted for little when Sinaiko came up for tenure in the Department of Oriental Languages. He was then hired to teach in the college, which awarded him tenure. In 1964, Marshall Hodgson, a Sinologist, was chair of the Committee. With the support of Redfield and Grene, he obtained a junior appointment for Sinaiko. When Redfield became chair, after Hodgson, he made Sinaiko executive secretary.

  33. When the Committee was canvassed about Sinaiko, it was split: Grene and Redfield in support, Bellow and Shils opposed, with a middle group made up mostly of part-time faculty (Harold Rosenberg, Victor Turner, Hans Jonas, Hannah Arendt), who tended to defer to the majority.

  34. Sinaiko could have fought the decision, since he had been awarded tenure in 1964, while still teaching in the college, but decided it wasn’t worth it. He returned to the college, where he had a long and successful career teaching undergraduates.

  35. At one point, in a letter to Shils of 27 February 1972, SB says he can “no longer bear James Redfield,” who has written “a long emotional letter…to Adams [the dean of social sciences] complaining of my high-handedness in the Committee. I would say pure nonsense if that weren’t a tautology—nonsense is pure by nature.”