Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  36. That Shils never went after Redfield may, in part, be because he knew and admired Redfield’s father and grandfather, great figures in their fields and in the university. It may also have helped that Redfield was not as closely associated with Grene as Sinaiko, though he declared himself “devoted” to him.

  37. Atlas, Biography, p. 406. Joseph Epstein remembers Shils saying something like “Saul thinks he’s going to use the Committee on Social Thought as the farm team for his nafkas.”

  38. Edward Shils, Portraits: A Gallery of Intellectuals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 220, 231.

  39. In Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow (New York: Fromm International, 1997), pp. 33–34, Harriet Wasserman, SB’s agent after Henry Volkening, describes a conversation they had over a writer SB had “encouraged me to take on as a client. Her contract had been negotiated at Viking earlier in the year. The author was particularly high-strung and difficult. Unfortunately there had been a misunderstanding as to whether the manuscript was fiction or nonfiction. The editor had understood Saul to describe the work as a novel….I too understood it to be a novel….The author complained bitterly to Saul and then phoned me in a rage.” When SB wondered why Viking had accepted the manuscript if it proved not to be a novel, presumably forgetting that he’d been the one who’d described it as such, Wasserman answered: “You have tremendous power over Viking. If you suggest it, they’ll take it. They can’t say no to you.” This exchange took place early in the summer of 1974, the year in which W-3 was published. As Wasserman points out, “Viking had been Saul’s publisher since 1948, more than twenty-five years.”

  40. Bette Howland, W-3 (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 9 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers). In real life, SB’s inability to reciprocate Bette’s feelings—or to reciprocate them as she’d wish—was a motive for her attempted suicide. In an email of 18 December 2017, Joseph Epstein claims SB once told him that Bette “expected me to marry her. I would never marry a woman who attempted suicide.”

  41. One other circumstance tormented Howland: the fact of having to pretend all the time:

  I couldn’t take it any more, no longer could bear this burden of concealment. Things seemed bad enough without adding extra weight. I wanted to be rid of it all, all of it. I wanted to abandon all this personal history—its darkness and secrecy, its private grievances, its well-licked sorrows and prides—to thrust it from me like a manhole cover. That’s what I had wanted all along…what I hoped to obliterate. That was my real need [p. 25].

  42. Bette Howland, Blue in Chicago (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), p. 120 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  43. Atlas, Biography, p. 477.

  44. Joseph Epstein, introduction, in Shils, Portraits, pp. 27–28.

  45. Among the SB Papers in the Regenstein is “A Brief Overview” of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, from which my account is partly drawn. It was sent to SB together with a “Lecture and Film Series” schedule and a list of “Brief Biographical Sketches” of the 1971 “Scholars and Artists in Residence.” See also the current Aspen Institute Web site: http://www.aspeninstitute.org/​about.

  46. Robert Reingold, “Scholars Assay Meaning of ‘the Educated Person,’ ” The New York Times, 10 August 1974.

  47. There are five of these notebooks, Salter told me. The photocopied pages he gave me from them he gave “in the interests of Saul Bellow’s life being well written.” The joke-sarcasm of SB’s remark to Karyl Roosevelt is taken from the notebooks.

  48. Udall had been appointed secretary of the interior for delivering Arizona for Kennedy, as opposed to Johnson.

  4. A BETTER MAN

  1. The production was directed by Theodore Mann, opened on 23 June 1971, and closed on 1 August, after forty-six performances. For some reason, Walter Kerr also reviewed it in The New York Times (“Basic Freud, Bad Bellow,” 4 July 1971), after SB’s “delighted” letter to Perin. Kerr was as dismissive in 1971 as he’d been in 1964, calling the play “excruciating,” the work of an author with “no feel for the way the stage functions.” He was no kinder to Joseph Wiseman, who played Bummidge, than he’d been to Sam Levene. Wiseman went on to play Dr. Adler in the 1987 television film of Seize the Day, with Robin Williams as Tommy Wilhelm and Jerry Stiller as Tamkin. Wiseman’s best-known role was as “Dr. No” in the James Bond film of 1962.

  2. The letter to the Committee was written on 29 September 1972. In it, SB describes the Partisan Review under Phillips as “trivial, fashionable, mean and harmful. Its trendiness is of the pernicious sort. It despises and, as much as it can, damages, literature….I think it has become the breeding place of a sort of fashionable extremism, of the hysterical, shallow and ignorant academic ‘counter-culture.’ ”

  3. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 497n. See also SB to Fred Kaplan, 10 February 1978: “I resigned from the Century Club because Poirier and Wm. Phillips were admitted to membership. I am, after all, some sort of snob myself….I said in resigning that there were people I simply didn’t care to meet in the club rooms. My letter was posted on the bulletin board as evidence of my unbelievable effrontery. All this gave me the greatest pleasure….I am not one of your resigned types. One fights on.”

  4. Harriet Wasserman, Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow (New York: Fromm International, 1997), pp. 7, 9–10.

  5. See also Wayne Booth to SB, 21 September 1975: “My trouble with you is that though I am the ideal reader of your books…I am personally intimidated by you and therefore never speak out.”

  6. According to Gross, Shils had been brought to Cambridge not only to give academic credibility to sociology, a new department in the university, but to lure figures like Runciman to the faculty.

  7. Rosette Lamont is good on Bellow and clothes and furnishings, in “Bellow Observed: A Serial Portrait,” Mosaic, vol. 8, no. 1 (Fall 1974): “Now that he can afford it, Bellow enjoys a certain amount of luxury….He goes to London to pick up shirts he has ordered, and he may add to that a beautiful Rembrandt print for his otherwise pristine apartment. His Chicago tailor may line his jackets with Indian foulard, the same as that which he uses for his ties. But except for a glorious pale green Chinese rug on the living room floor, a beautiful Dutch tile in the center of his circular dining-room table, and rare editions of books, mostly in French or English, the place where Bellow lives is designed for the comfort of work. He has, of course, his small foibles, and is the first to laugh at them: he collects boots and borsolinos.” In Nairobi, Saul Steinberg turned to SB and inquired: “ ‘What, you don’t wear cashmere socks? A man in your position?’ So they bought cashmere socks.”

  8. There was much controversy later over Naipaul’s In a Free State, though it did not involve Bellow. Fowles publicly complained that it was a collection of stories rather than a novel, an issue Gross thought had been resolved in preliminary meetings. In the end, the panel stuck by its decision that the book’s three stories were closely enough linked to qualify as a novel.

  9. Aside from the Naipaul, the other novel Gross remembers Bellow praising was Goshawk Squadron by Derek Robinson, which Gross also “rather liked.” Bellow described it as “red-blooded unlike Elizabeth Taylor,” a judgment Gross called “a defect of taste. I don’t think he got that right.” His suspicion was that Bellow was irritated “by the Englishness” of Taylor’s novel. Mrs. Palfrey is an elderly woman living in a shabby-genteel residential hotel off the Cromwell Road. To Gross, the novel “is about old age, very, very touching; I think he didn’t get it.” But Bellow himself had written touchingly about old age and shabby gentility, in “Leaving the Yellow House,” also in “Dora” and “The Gonzaga Manuscripts.” Gross thinks it possible that with the Taylor novel Bellow may have “lost patience after twenty pages,” though in discussing the other short-listed novels Bellow seemed to have neither skimmed nor skipped.

 
10. Review section, Guardian, 6 September 2008.

  11. The Sono scenes in Herzog are recollected, and the novel’s present is c. 1960. In that present, we are told that Sono “had gone back to Japan long ago. When was it? He turned his eyes upward as he tried to calculate the length of time” (pp. 584–85). If SB’s Japanese lover was the model for Sono, she may have returned to Tokyo sometime in the mid-1950s.

  12. Atlas, Biography, pp. 416, 417.

  13. Nathan thinks the episode referred to was at International House, which had, still has, very strict rules and cell-like rooms for guests. In an interview, he conjectured that if SB was chaste while in Japan it was only because he mostly frightened or intimidated the young girls with whom he flirted. He wasn’t all that well known in Japan, Nathan explains, and “he was old and they were young.” In a letter of 5 September 1973 to Professor Yuzaburo Shibuya of Meiji University in Tokyo, SB recalls the visit as five weeks in which “I was guilty of no crimes. A charming young lady from International House, Miss Shizuko Asahi (against whom I committed no offense), sent me cards and presents for a time but I haven’t heard from her in many months now and am worried about the poor girl who disappeared so suddenly.”

  14. Although SB seems not to have known or admired Kenzaburo¯ O¯e’s fiction, he admired the novels of Junichiro Tanizaki (1886–1965), praising Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961) and A Blind Man’s Tale (1931) in To Jerusalem and Back, p. 137.

  15. Atlas, Biography, p. 417.

  16. Nathan found the remark especially wounding. As he explains in Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere: A Memoir (New York: Free Press, 2008), pp. 150–51, “His appraisal felled me like a crowbar. Seven years later, his words were still ringing in my ears when I resolved to distinguish myself with accomplishments that had nothing to do with exoticism and tried to put Japan behind me.” Later, he considers “the possibility that I possessed the wherewithal to distinguish myself only as an exotic foreigner in an insular island country. I was determined to prove myself on home ground” (p. 198). For “squaw man” as disparaging, see SB, Herzog, p. 519: “Sono wanted me to move in with her. But I thought that would make me a squaw man.”

  17. Atlas, Biography, p. 417. Before agreeing to visit Japan, SB sought assurances that he would be able to keep up his writing routine. “I said I had some work in progress,” he wrote to Yoichi Maeda, chairman of the Japan-U.S. Intellectual Interchange, reporting in a letter of 31 January 1972 an exchange with Professor Charles Frankel of Columbia about the visit, “and that I would not find it agreeable to suspend it for five weeks. He [Frankel] thought there would be no great objection to my continuing to work for two or three hours each morning. After that I would be entirely at your disposal.”

  18. From an interview with the author. For a description of Doris Scheldt, see SB, Humboldt’s Gift, p. 111; also pp. 254–55.

  19. Returning home to Chicago in the summer of 1970 after her junior year at Columbia, she got “a really interesting job” for the summer at the periodical Urban Crisis Monitor (the offices were located in the basement of the Shoreland Hotel, once owned by Maury and Marge). She transferred to the University of Chicago for her senior year partly to continue working at the Monitor.

  20. A second exception is suggested by James Atlas in The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale (New York: Pantheon, 2017), pp. 335–40. It concerns Roberta (“Bobby”) Markels (1926–2014), a voluminous correspondent of SB’s for nearly fifty years, though one who seems never to have figured in his letters to other correspondents or in interviews, either with him or his friends. She is mentioned once in To Fame and Fortune (p. 578) and Benjamin Taylor prints two letters to her in Letters, pp. 373, 434. Markels contacted SB in 1956 when she lived in Evanston and was working on a novel. They had a brief affair in the early 1960s and kept in touch after she moved to California later in the decade. In California, Markels wrote a column in the local paper titled “Babbling with Bubbela,” a title no less apt for her letters to SB. Many of these letters are in the Regenstein. They are very long and almost wholly self-involved. SB, however, was encouraging about Markels’s writing. In 2014, the year she died, Atlas obtained a manuscript of hers which he describes as “a kind of epistolary memoir—letters back and forth interspersed with commentary.” This manuscript, he claims, offers “a more vivid portrait of Bellow than any I had ever read” and describes a warm and lasting friendship. SB is remembered by Markels as “patient, generous, and kind.”

  21. Wasserman, Handsome Is, p. 23. See Volkening to SB, 17 June 1969: “It’s a slow and painful process, this trying to become used to being alone, after forty-three years of not being….Thanks for your having been so very thoughtful of me during all of the four terrible months since Natalie first went to the hospital.”

  22. Malamud’s letter was accompanied by a newspaper clipping headlined “Saul Bellow Wins Book Award,” below which Malamud’s photo appears with the caption “SAUL BELLOW.” After praising Sammler in the letter, Malamud adds: “My only regret—from what I see in the newspapers—is that you’re losing your looks.”

  23. Wasserman, Handsome Is, p. 23.

  24. Ibid., p. 6.

  25. Ibid., pp. 4, 6.

  26. Ibid., pp. 15, 16.

  27. Ibid., p. 85.

  28. Ibid., pp. 13, 14.

  29. Ibid., pp. 10–11.

  30. Ibid., pp. 25–26.

  31. That cold and discomfort drove SB from the house, a view taken from the letters, is repeated in Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), p. 437; and Joseph Epstein in “The Long, Unhappy Life of Saul Bellow,” a review of Taylor, ed., Letters, in New Criterion, December 2010.

  32. Gabriel Josipivici, “Bellow and Herzog,” Encounter, vol. 37, no. 5 (1971), later a chapter in Josipovici’s first critical work, The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1971).

  33. On 9 December 1970, Best wrote to SB that he “supposed” Kazin would make a good editor, though “I don’t like the grudging note in his admiration….On the other hand, at lunch with Trilling the other day, I learned of his extreme enthusiasm, especially for MR. SAMMLER….It was touching to hear him say that he had abandoned, at least for now, a novel he had been talking about for years, because you had done so perfectly what he had wanted to do.”

  34. Atlas, Biography, p. 402.

  35. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 135.

  36. Ruth Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), pp. 197–98.

  37. Gendlin thinks Ruth Miller’s account of the M*A*S*H episode “unfair,” but it is possible to see the two versions as compatible. SB returns to the hotel in a foul mood, compounded by Gendlin’s not being there. She returns full of praise for the movie and insists he must see it, an insistence that further infuriates him. He, in turn, insists that she see it again, with him. In no mood to approve what he sees, he finds the film debased and debasing.

  38. Reprinted in SB, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York and London: Viking Penguin, 2016).

  39. In David Mikics, email to the author, 6 July 2017, commenting on this exchange: “But there is a real argument here between SB and Trilling—not that it justifies SB’s misprision, but it’s there. Trilling and Benjamin think in terms of eras: modernity has put the kibosh on storytelling power. SB will have nothing of this waste-land theory (as he sees it). Technology is not the culprit, for SB; his reason for disliking movies was probably the insistence that movies are the twentieth-century art form, and that novels are passé.”

  40. Bellow’s lecture was to be reprinted in a volume of Doubleday Lectures entitled The Frontiers of Knowledge (1975), and Edith Tarcov may have forwarded the earlier Trilling letter because of
her involvement with the printing of the lecture in book form.

  41. This exchange was related immediately after it happened in an undated letter from Karyl Roosevelt to James Salter. For Atlas on the end of SB’s affair with Fran Gendlin, see Biography, p. 422.

  42. Wasserman, Handsome Is, pp. 30, 32.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Ibid., p. 34.

  45. Ibid., p. 36.

  46. Ibid., pp. 38, 39.

  47. See chapter 2 for an account of this episode, drawn from Mark Harris, Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 42.

  48. Edgard Pillet (1912–1996), a French artist, designed Casa Alison, as well as several neighboring houses. The “Pillet tower,” where SB and Alexandra stayed, was one of those houses.

  49. Email to the author, 23 September 2014.

  50. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 134.

  51. From p. 3 of an English translation given to me by Alexandra Bellow of “Una vida matemática” (“A Mathematical Life”), originally published in La Gaceta de la Real Sociedad Matemática Española, vol. 5, no.1 (January–April 2002), pp. 62–71, from a talk given at the Royal Academy of Sciences, Madrid, Spain, in September 2001, at the festive inauguration of the project “Estimulo del Talento Matemático” for the year 2001–2.

  52. Ibid., p. 2.

  53. Ibid., p. 3. See also Alexandra Bellow, “Asclepius Versus Hades in Romania: Some Facts About My Father,” pp. 15–19, for the details of her mother’s “disgrace” (for arranging aid from the United States) and subsequent removal from her post as minister of health in 1948. These page numbers are from an English translation given to me by Alexandra Bellow of her article, which appeared in Romanian, in two separate installments of Revista, vol. 22, no. 755 (24–30 August 2004) and vol. 22, no. 756 (31 August–6 September 2004): “I can still recall the disbelief on my mother’s face when, in a special New Year issue of Scanteia, the official party newspaper, she read a fulminating article against the ‘warmongering imperialist circles and their lackeys’ who were trying to enslave people economically and politically through their infamous ‘Marshall Plan’ ” (p. 18). Shortly after reading the article, Alexandra’s mother was removed from her post and “marginalized” by “an official campaign.” Later on, in her work as a child psychiatrist, she was hounded by the authorities. In 1953, “my mother was accused of: ‘cosmopolitanism,’ of ‘stooping obsequiously before the decadent imperialist ideology and pseudo-science’ (such accusations in those days were tantamount to treason), of introducing and promoting in child psychiatry ‘obscurantist tendencies, such as of Freudian type, which degrade man and at the same time serve…as a diversion…to distract the attention of the masses from the class struggle’ ” (p. 19). Alexandra’s mother lost her job and her husband’s pension, and she and Alexandra were obliged to share their apartment with another couple. At the time, Alexandra was in her last year of high school.