The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Vallis’s description of himself in this passage recalls Joseph in Dangling Man, as volatile as a character from Dostoyevsky. Joseph’s wife, Iva, is reduced to tears by his impulsiveness, quickness to anger and to take offense, and by the force of his personality (“I had dominated her for years,” [p. 69]). Joseph sees Iva’s virtues and insists that he loves her, “yet she is as far as ever from what I once desired to make her. I am afraid she has no capacity for that,” by which he means no capacity for “worth-while ideas” (p. 111). Vallis has similarly mixed feelings about Nettie, “who could spend whole decades trying to figure out what would satisfy him, what he wanted. He was so theoretical, notional, cultural, so fluent, came at her from so many sides, produced so many arguments that he made her feel—he strengthened her secret judgment on herself—that she was a slow, stupid woman, and sullen” (p. 73).

  In the October 1937 letter to Tarcov, Bellow declared himself “deeply in love” with Anita and for some years seems to have remained so, but there were problems in the marriage from the start. These problems bewildered Anita, and Bellow left no clear account of them in interviews or written reminiscences. In the fiction, however, some suggestive patterns emerge. In Seize the Day (1956), Tommy Wilhelm, a very different character from Joseph and Vallis, describes the failure of his first marriage: “I just couldn’t live with Margaret. I wanted to stick it out, but I was getting very sick. She was one way and I was another. She wouldn’t be like me, so I tried to be like her, and I couldn’t do it” (p. 42). As Vallis watches Nettie, he senses fear beneath her composure. To live with this fear, to live with Nettie, was to be “housebroken to evil” (p. 62). (Like Bellow in the early 1950s, Vallis is much influenced by Wilhelm Reich’s notions of sickness and evil, in particular of the deforming fear of death.) When Vallis contemplates leaving Nettie, or lies to her about his feelings or what he’s up to, his heart aches and he suspects he might be crazy, “one of the heavily justified lunatics” (p. 73). Yet the fact is, she cannot be like him, and he cannot be like her.

  “I HAD A DISCIPLINE to learn at the bedroom table,” writes Bellow of his time in Ravenswood. As he strove to make himself a writer, he paid close attention to his brother-in-law Jack, a determined self-fashioner, “dark, grim, kindly and reserved.”15 Jack’s project was to become the “complete American, as formal, as total in his fashion as a work of art,” words that describe Cousin Mendy, his fictional alter ego in “Cousins.”16 In “Starting Out in Chicago,” Bellow describes Jack as “a Republican, member of the American Legion, a golfer, a bowler; he drove his conservative car conservatively, took the Saturday Evening Post, wore a Herbert Hoover starched collar, trousers short in the ankle, and a hard straw hat in summer. He spoke in a pure Hoosier twang, not like a Booth Tarkington gentleman but like a real Tippecanoe dirt farmer.”17 Mendy has most of these traits, plus others described by his cousin Ijah Brodsky as “the idiocies and even the pains of his Protestant models, misfortunes like the estrangements of husbands and wives, sexual self-punishment. He would get drunk in the Loop and arrive swacked on the commuter trains” (p. 230). Mendy’s self-fashioning is doomed. “In the eyes under that snap-brim fedora there had always been a mixture of Jewish lights, and in his sixties he was visibly more Jewish” (p. 230). So, too, Jack: “All this Americanism was imposed on an exquisitely oriental face, dark with curved nose and Turkish cheekbones.” In the act of making themselves, both Mendy and Jack become vulnerable, calling to mind Cousin Arkady, from the Old Country, who decided his new name was now and henceforth “Lake Erie.” Cousin Arkady appears in both the fictional “Cousins” and the nonfictional “Starting Out in Chicago” at exactly this point, after describing the ultimate failures of Mendy and Jack. “As I was making a writer of myself,” Bellow writes of Jack, “this exotic man was transforming his dark oriental traits and becoming an American from Indiana.” In “Starting Out in Chicago,” Bellow sees himself with comparable irony. In Ravenswood his aim was “to enjoy my high thought and to perfect myself in the symbolic discipline of high art. I can’t help feeling that I overdid it.”18

  The Ravenswood period lasted less than a year. Once Anita quit graduate school and began work for the Chicago Relief Administration, earning $25 a week, she and Bellow moved away from the Goshkins’ to a place of their own in Hyde Park, where they rented a second-floor apartment in a courtyard building on the corner of Harper Avenue and 57th Street, near the lake and half a dozen blocks from the quadrangles of the university. The apartment consisted of a large front room, with windows overlooking the courtyard, a tiny kitchen, and down a short hall a small bathroom and a small bedroom. The front room was furnished sparsely, with a couch, a desk, a large bookcase, and a card table placed between the windows. Anita left the apartment each morning for work and Bellow sat at the card table and wrote, as he had in Ravenswood. He also attended classes at the university, failing to complete “Introduction to Linguistics” in Winter Quarter, also “Economic History of the Middle Ages” in Summer Quarter (though he did manage a C in a course on Mayan and Aztec cultures taught by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, the English social anthropologist). Shortly after the move to Hyde Park, Bellow came down with pneumonia and every afternoon during his illness, Irving Janis, an undergraduate friend, later an eminent psychologist (originator of the term “groupthink”), “read to me by the hour, recognizing that I needed to be read to, just then.”19 Bellow depicts himself in this period as isolated, under pressure, as much from himself as from others, but at times he stresses how little money was needed to survive in the Depression: “I suppose it cost about $1,200 to be poor in those days.… Everybody was doing it, all my friends were doing it.”20

  Bellow found several part-time jobs after moving to Hyde Park. The first was teaching twice a week at the Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College, for aspiring primary schoolteachers, mostly young Jewish girls from immigrant families or Midwestern farm girls. The college was located in the Fine Arts Building on South Michigan Avenue (where he’d taken violin lessons with Grisha Borushek), convenient to the Chicago Public Library at Randolph Street, the Crerar Library, and the Art Institute. Among Bellow’s pupils was sixteen-year-old Ruth Miller, later to become a friend and the first of his biographers. Miller took “English Composition” with Bellow (who taught “Anthropology, English, anything; I was a troubleshooter”21) and kept the reading list for his course, which started with Crime and Punishment, then Madame Bovary; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Sons and Lovers; Chrome Yellow; Winesburg, Ohio; Sister Carrie; Manhattan Transfer; and A Farewell to Arms. Bellow’s teaching method was to read aloud one or two of his pupils’ weekly essays and then “tell us what he thought, not of our essays but of the book and its author.”22 When Ruth Miller went to his office to discuss her work, he would read from his own writing by way of example, usually from one of the novel manuscripts he carried about with him. Bellow thought highly of Miller and invited her to visit him in Hyde Park, which she did with a friend (Miller is the source of the description of the 57th Street apartment). The girls had never been to Hyde Park, and after a tour of the Midway and the university (“This is where you should be”), Bellow brought them back for tea with Anita. In her biography, Miller remembers that Bellow was proud of the apartment. What she remembers of Anita is the dirndl skirt and peasant blouse she wore, and the strudel she served, made by Sonia. When Miller mentioned that her aunt also made strudel, but without nuts, Anita was very firm: “No, no, that’s not possible. There have to be nuts.”

  The Bellows were proud of the freedom their apartment represented. An odd moment in the visit occurred when first Anita, then Bellow, took their tea bags out of their cups and whirled them over their heads, laughing and shouting. “ ‘I always wanted to do this,’ ” Miller remembers Anita saying, as the tea bag splattered “walls, windows, curtains, rug, couch, easy chair, the desk, and the books.”23 Miller and her friend were gratifyingly startled, especially when invited to join in. As Bellow wrote of himself at this peri
od, “he was as powerfully attached to silliness and squalor as to grandeur.”24 “He was always being talked about in our household as a bohemian,” Joel Bellows, Maury’s son, remembers, “he and Anita, sitting on the floor with their friends in the dark, listening to classical music. Can you imagine! In our family.” On a visit to a later apartment, on Kimbark Avenue, near 52nd Street, Joel remembers, “we took some of my father’s old clothes, monogrammed shirts. They opened the door, it was a formal visit.… I had been primed by my parents: they were poor people, don’t ask for anything, don’t bother them for anything. And my father came into the room, big handful of shirts, and he threw them on the floor, and it was a matter of lording it over him. I identified with my uncle.”

  In addition to teaching, Bellow found work in the autumn of 1938 with the Illinois Federal Writers’ Project, part of Roosevelt’s WPA. The Chicago office of the Illinois Writers’ Project was a loft on East Erie Street, just north of the Loop, and its state director was John T. Frederick, whom Bellow had known at Northwestern. To be certified for relief, Bellow had to confirm that he was unemployed and had tried and failed to find work (according to Atlas, he was interviewed for a job at Hearst newspapers, where an executive with a nose “like a double Alaskan strawberry” claimed he had no aptitude for writing25). Fellow writers from the Chicago office included Richard Wright, at work on Native Son; Isaac Rosenfeld, who was turned down for a job at Chicago’s Yiddish Courier; Nelson Algren, a friend of David Peltz’s (also employed by the WPA, at the Federal Theatre Project); and Jack Conroy, like Algren, a published novelist, also editor of the left-wing periodicals Rebel Poet, The Anvil, and The New Anvil. Algren did not get on with Bellow: “He [Algren] disapproved of my politics and I didn’t care for his so we exchanged more hard looks than we did words.”26 As Bellow saw it, Algren and Conroy paraded their proletarian roots. In “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics, Mainly Reminiscence” (1993), he describes the personal style of the two men, “our stars,” as “dated,” though their Popular Front politics were still very much alive. To experience these politics today, he adds, “you need do no more than mention Whittaker Chambers or Alger Hiss or J. Robert Oppenheimer or the Rosenbergs at a dinner table.”27

  Writers’ Project employees were of two sorts: the writers themselves, who were on relief (and made up 90 percent of the staff), and the editors and administrators, who were on a salary. The editors and administrators came to the office every day; the writers came once a week, to report on the research tasks or “fieldwork” they’d been set by their editors. Bellow’s editor, a geographer named Nathan Morris, had been at Tuley two years before him. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in 1935, the year the Federal Writers’ Project was launched. As the major task of the Chicago branch of the project was to compile a state guidebook, eventually published in 1939 as Illinois: A Descriptive and Historical Guide, Morris’s knowledge of geography was an asset.28 Bellow was initially assigned to compile statistics about newspaper and magazine publishing (one of Rosenfeld’s assignments was to research pigeon racing), for Part 1 of the Guide, “The General Background” (Parts 2 and 3 are “Cities and Towns” and “Tours”). Bellow mostly conducted this research at the Newberry Library, across the street from the soapbox orators of Washington Square Park, known locally as Bughouse Square, to whom he’d listen on lunch breaks. The work bored him. When Frederick, “a very decent and imaginative man,”29 discovered Bellow was bored, he set him to work writing biographical profiles of “Midwestern” writers (elsewhere “Illinois” writers or “American” writers).30 “None of them,” Bellow suspected, “were ever meant to be used,” nor, mistakenly, did he think they’d survived. Had they survived, Bellow told an interviewer, “I’d be distressed. I was only 22 years old and I knew nothing.”31 Bellow was paid $24 a week at the Writers’ Project (“I never had it so good”), but the main benefit of working for the WPA, which he always praised, was that “I was able to justify the idea that I was a writer.”32

  THE BELLOWS’ SOCIAL CIRCLE in the late 1930s and early 1940s was close. Chief among their Hyde Park friends were Rosenfeld, working on an MA in philosophy at the University of Chicago (awarded in August 1941) and living in a grim, cramped attic apartment (“essentially, in perpetual darkness,” a state he found congenial); Oscar Tarcov; his sister Ruth, who would marry Herb Passin’s brother, Sid, move with him to New York, and eventually find work at The New Republic; the Schenks, Beebee and her husband, Peter; and the boys from Wieboldt Hall, especially Harold “Kappy” Kaplan, whose wife, Celia, had been close to Anita at the University of Illinois (Anita found Celia a job in Chicago as a social worker).33 Tarcov married Edith Hamberg in 1942, having been introduced to her by Bellow. “My mother was working in a bookstore downtown,” Nathan Tarcov explains, “and Saul walked in one day and said, ‘Want to come to a party tonight in Hyde Park?’ ” She said yes, and when she arrived “met my father and rather rapidly fell in love and got married.” Edith had been in the country for only a year or so, having escaped Germany in 1939 (before coming to Chicago at twenty-one, she spent a year in England). In Germany, she had been an active Zionist, in early adolescence joining a small youth movement called the Werkleute inspired in part by Martin Buber’s teachings. An American relative arranged for her to settle in Chicago. Her parents, German Jews from Hanover, affluent, cultured, patriotic (her father had been awarded an Iron Cross First Class for bravery at Verdun), had stayed on too late to survive. Within a year of the marriage, the Tarcovs’ first child, Miriam, was born.

  Bellow’s relations with these friends were often fractious. The effort required to overcome his family’s disapproval and incomprehension, to get into print and establish his identity as a writer, made him combative (“he had his dukes up all the time,” in Harold Kaplan’s words), resentful of slights, real or imagined.34 Nowhere is this touchiness clearer than in his correspondence with Tarcov, the mildest of his close friends. Tarcov was a junior when Bellow returned to Chicago from Madison in December 1937. Like Bellow, he was determined to be a writer. After taking his degree in the summer of 1939, he worked briefly as a bartender in a rough area west of Hyde Park, then moved for several months to New York (where all true writers lived), before returning to the Midwest at the beginning of 1940 and enrolling as a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He lasted a year in graduate school before returning to New York, but by the end of 1941 he was back in Chicago. “It was complicated,” Nathan explains, of the movements of his father, Bellow, and Rosenfeld in the late 1930s and early 1940s: “Oscar, Isaac and Saul went to New York at different times. It was almost like they took turns.… There was a sense that [New York] was the center of the world. There was the fear that the others would go to New York and you would be left behind in Chicago.”35

  Soon after Tarcov left Chicago for New York, Bellow wrote to him about their friendship.36 “You are perfectly right,” he admits in an undated letter (probably written in October 1939), “we should have had a talking out before you went away. But to be perfectly frank too, I didn’t care, at the time that you left, to talk to you. I was neither angry nor disgusted, but disaffected,” as he was also with Herb Passin, for falling under the influence of his Christian-pacifist father-in-law, “the terrible Doctor.” In a later letter, postmarked December 5, Bellow attributes his disaffection to “the condition our circle was in.” “You and Isaac and a few others were gummed into a very disagreeable relationship,” he complains, “but there was very little friendship in it actually and more jealousy, covert rage, detestation and in fact a need to use one’s friends as one should use one’s enemies.” As a consequence, Bellow “was shot into the Freifeld camp.” In response to “a lot of disagreeable buffoonery” on Tarcov’s and Rosenfeld’s part, “of course immediately I became a boor.” Only toward the end of the letter do Bellow’s complaints subside, or seem to subside. “In the last five months or so,” he admits, “there has been time
for the harder feelings to fall away and be replaced by some of my affection for you. I hate like all hell to have you estranged for the worst of all possible reasons; attempt at honest analysis.”

  Later letters to Tarcov describe tensions in the Bellow marriage. “A good deal of what you say about Anita I couldn’t dream of denying,” Bellow concedes in an undated letter, probably from early 1940. “I have had a great deal of trouble lately over her and several times in the last two months we have been on the verge of separating.” Their quarrels are “not out of trivial things but out of the fact that in numerous ways we are disagreeable to each other;” “the principal reasons for marriage have no existence any longer.” Bellow is determined, though, not to give up on the marriage, “because I don’t want another failure added to an already long list.” A similar determination underlies his persistence with “Ruben Whitfield,” a novel he hoped to have finished by the spring, but now finds “painful and sometimes even obnoxious.” This is Bellow’s only reference to “Ruben Whitfield,” unless it became “The Very Dark Trees,” a completed novel that was accepted for publication in 1942, but of which no trace survives. The trouble with “Ruben Whitfield,” Bellow confesses to Tarcov, is that its subject requires “a much better developed writer and a more fully developed individual. It wasn’t really my project. My views and interests changed so often in the course of the writing that every month I wanted to go back and do the whole thing over in a new way.” Some parts of the manuscript were revised as many as four times and the resulting inconsistencies are “so transparent and fatuous that I want to abandon it. But I am going to finish it.” He had been a writer for two years and had published nothing.