The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  A third and related problem raised in the letter to Tarcov concerns politics. “This idea of ‘finish it’ is present,” Bellow tells Tarcov, “not only in ‘Ruben’ and in my marriage but also in the movement.” The split in the Socialist Workers Party occasioned by the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland left many party members, Bellow included, disillusioned. Trotsky’s defense of the pact, as was seen in the previous chapter, was supported by the majority faction in the party, led by James P. Cannon. The minority faction, led by Max Shachtman and James Burnham, and supported by Bellow’s friend Al Glotzer, denounced the pact, declaring the Soviet Union an imperialist aggressor and an enemy to socialism. “I was alienated before the factional fight,” Bellow writes to Tarcov, “but now the whole affair has become nauseous.” If the minority capitulates, “I am finished.” Rosenfeld has already quit the party, Bellow tells Tarcov, and Bellow himself is on the verge of doing so. But he will wait till the party convention in April 1940 before making his final decision. “It’s a goddamn crime that at the time that the war is on us the only revolutionary party in the country falls to pieces. We’ll be crushed too, I think.”37 When the Cannonite faction prevailed in April, Burnham, Shachtman, and Glotzer left the party, along with 40 percent of its membership, Bellow and Tarcov included.

  As Bellow’s worries mounted—over the novel, the marriage, politics, the gathering war—he received an unexpected stroke of good fortune. Almost eight years after his mother’s death, an insurance policy she had taken out in his name came due. Perhaps she put it in his name out of worry over his dreaming propensities, perhaps out of favoritism (though according to Lesha Greengus, Maury was the favorite, as is Shawmut’s businessman brother, “fat-assed Philip the evildoer,” in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth”38). Each week Liza had paid a quarter into the policy, collected by the bookish insurance agent Bellow remembered coming to the apartment on Le Moyne Street, “forever trying to engage me in conversation about the books he saw in my mother’s kitchen. He was extremely keen to discuss ‘The Decline of the West.’ ” The policy had now matured into the sum of $500. When news of the windfall reached Bellow’s family, Abraham immediately asked for the money, “all five hundred bucks of it. He needed it badly, but I refused to part with it.”39 Instead, Bellow decided with Anita to use the money to travel to Mexico. As early as the letter to Tarcov of December 5, he was alluding to the trip, which he thought would take place in February. They did not, in fact, set off until June. Bellow explained their decision in his interview with Philip Roth:

  It was essential that we should go. Europe was out of the question since the Germans had just overrun Paris. Deprived of Paris, I simply had to go to Mexico. Looking back, I see more agony than boldness in this decision. I was, as kids were to say later, making a statement. I had spent most of my life in weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Chicago and I needed barbarism, color, glamour, and risk.40

  Bellow gave notice at Pestalozzi-Froebel, recommending Tarcov as a replacement; Anita quit her job; then she and Bellow set about “get[ting] rid of all encumbrances: furniture, lease, et al.” In early June, instead of traveling directly to Mexico, they took a Greyhound bus to New York, arriving on the day Paris fell to the Germans, June 14, 1940. In New York, they visited friends from Chicago (several of the boys from Wieboldt Hall, and Al Glotzer, who had contacts with Trotsky and his protectors in Mexico). They also visited Bellow’s Uncle Willie, whom grandfather Berel had punished by apprenticing him to a brushmaker. “Unemployed, and brooding his life away in Brownsville,” Uncle Willie was affectionate to his nephew, but had a family to feed: “I ought to have shared the five hundred bucks with him.” The visit chilled Bellow: “Uncle Willie in Brownsville illustrated what might happen to a Bellow who rebelled [in Willie’s case by joining the Bund against his father’s wishes]. He would be humiliatingly shot down.” Much easier was the visit to Uncle Max in Augusta, Georgia, where Anita and Bellow stopped briefly before continuing on to New Orleans. Uncle Max, the cheerful “ganef” mentioned in Chapter 2, sold cheap clothing on installment to black field hands. As for New Orleans, all Bellow recalled to Roth was that he and Anita “[hung] around the Latin Quarter pointlessly for a few days before traveling on to Mexico City.”41

  THEY ARRIVED IN Mexico City on June 24, and stayed in the country for three months, as long as the $500, now $450, lasted, “passing from marvel to marvel and from amazement to amazement.… I was in a state of giddiness and rapture.”42 Under the influence of the travel essays in D. H. Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico (1927), which Bellow read on the bus journey south, he and Anita checked into the Hotel Monte Carlo (the hotel San Remo in Lawrence’s 1926 novel, The Plumed Serpent), in the city’s centro histórico, where Lawrence and his wife Frieda had stayed. The hotel turned out to be frequented by prostitutes; it was very busy at night but deserted during the day. Toward the end of the month the Bellows were joined by the Passins. Herb Passin had received a grant from the University of Chicago, where as an undergraduate he had been taught by the anthropologist Robert Redfield. The grant was to do fieldwork in the northern province of Chihuahua with the Tarahumara Indians, the subject of his proposed PhD dissertation.43 Herb and Cora spent the summer with the Bellows touring Mexico, before Herb’s fieldwork began in the autumn.

  From Mexico City the two couples headed first to Cuernavaca, to the south, then to Pátzcuaro, in the state of Michoacán, then to Taxco, where they stayed for some weeks, and where relations between Bellow and Anita were especially difficult. At one point, according to Atlas, Bellow went off for a week with another woman.44 Anita then had a very public retaliatory affair and after furious recriminations went off alone to Acapulco. In the interview with Roth, Bellow describes this episode circumspectly: “My mood was investigative. I wanted to see firsthand what the characters I was spending my time with [in Taxco] were up to. I sent my wife away to Acapulco—then a beach with a few huts. My strong desire was to go it alone. It never occurred to me that it might be a danger to Anita to be shipped off.”45

  Eleven years after the trip to Mexico, Bellow published a story in Harper’s Bazaar entitled “By the Rock Wall” (April 1951), which may shed light on this episode. “Willard,” the protagonist, recalls a moment, fifteen years earlier, when he and his wife, married only a year, went to Italy for “a delayed honeymoon.” After two weeks in Rome, Willard decides he wants to go to Siena by himself for a week. “Why can’t I come with you?” the wife asks. His answer is: “Well, I would like to go somewhere alone. We’ve been together for months now. Sometimes I feel I’d like to visit a place alone.” The narrator explains what Willard was feeling: “She had to be with him, had to be an encumbrance, he had to order for her, explain things for her in the hotels because she was too timid to try to speak Italian; he felt he could not see things for her putting herself between. It was miserable of her to fear being alone for a week.” All this was true, but as Willard also knows, his wife thought he was “getting rid of her so that he could chase women” (something he had done in the past). He encourages her to go off alone herself, to Amalfi (not a bad equivalent to Acapulco in 1940). The wife is terrified, but once she gets to Amalfi, she has an affair, presumably in retaliation. This affair she denies to Willard, though American friends knew of it. In the story’s present, fifteen years later, the wife finally admits to the affair, encouraged by a conversation Willard has initiated, full of confessions of his own. The next morning Willard is furious. “What did you do that to me for?” To which she answers, “What did you leave me for? What did you expect?”

  Bellow’s description of the Acapulco episode occurs in a paragraph that begins: “I had been brought up to worry, but the worry seems not to have taken.” Of the ingredients Bellow sought in Mexico—“barbarism, color, glamour, and risk”—the last was especially important, because it was connected to freedom, not just from external impediments but from internalized ones, the sort that made him fear a fate like Uncle Willie’s (the so
rt handed down through generations of Old Country experience, immigrant experience, Jewish experience). “Everybody has his own pattern for liberation,” Bellow told Roth of the time in Mexico, “and my own liberation took the form of an escape from anxiety.” In Mexico there were “no uncles, no family bonds,” also, he discovered to his delight, no worries, or fewer worries: “I never gave a thought to what would happen after my money had run out”; “I have to say also that I very rarely gave my father a thought”; “I discovered a talent for doing things in a headlong style.”46

  This talent led Bellow to Daniel P. Mannix, and to the eagle Mannix trained to hunt iguanas in the mountains around Taxco. Bellow met Mannix through the Australian pulp fiction writer Jack Champion, part of a circle of expatriate writers, artists, jewelers (Taxco is famed for its silver), and bohemians, who hung out in a cantina in town called Paco’s. Mannix was an author, a journalist, a photographer, an outdoorsman, an animal and bird trainer, and a side-show performer (sword swallowing, fire eating). Well-born and good-looking, from a Main Line family in Philadelphia, he came to Taxco in 1940 on honeymoon with his wife, Jule, rented a villa on the edge of town, and each morning set out from the villa to train Aguila (“eagle” in Spanish), an American bald eagle he had brought with him to Mexico. When Aguila was not in the mountains ripping lizards and iguanas apart, he perched in a bathroom in the villa, on a water tank just below the ceiling. According to Mannix, Bellow visited the villa only once and they did not talk together “for more than a few minutes.” According to Bellow, in the interview with Roth, “seven mornings a week I was out with Mannix.” Bellow’s memories of these outings—or his borrowings from published accounts by Mannix—underlay the most memorable and bizarre episode in the Mexican section of The Adventures of Augie March (in Chapters 15 to 17), when Thea Fenchel, Augie’s fierce girlfriend, persuades him to accompany her to Mexico to train the eagle Caligula. A condensed version of this episode was excerpted as a story entitled “The Eagle” in Harper’s Bazaar in its February 1953 issue, and when Mannix read it, he threatened to sue. In Bellow’s words, “Mannix demanded billing in his own name and Viking Press advised me to give him a footnote.”47

  What fascinated Bellow about Aguila, “a creature of boundless freedom and power,” was that so magnificent a predator, “a death-dealing life force,” could be made “to obey his trainer like any lesser creature.”48 Augie is comparably fascinated with Caligula. He watches spellbound as the eagle “ride[s] like an Attila’s horseman through the air”; yet he hates the kill, “to see the little lizards hit and squirt blood, and their tiny fine innards of painted delicacy come out under Caligula’s talons while he glared and opened his beak” (pp. 782, 781). When one of these lizards nips Caligula, the bird retreats, infuriating Thea. For Thea, “fierce nature shouldn’t be like that” (p. 782), fierce nature is pure, while the human world is full of fearfulness and deceit. Caligula’s “humanity” (i.e., fear and fallibility) is thus “hard to take” (p. 790). Like other “reality instructors” in the novel, Thea preaches hardness, what Grandma Lausch calls “a fighting nature of birds and worms” (p. 391).49 “You stinking coward! You crow!” (p. 789), Thea later shrieks at the bird. How can Caligula fight iguanas “if a little nip does this to him?” (p. 782). When Augie describes the iguanas, one sees her point:

  These beasts were as fast and bold as anything I had ever seen, and they would jump anywhere and from any height, with a pure writhe of their sides, like fish. They had great muscles, like fish, and their flying was monstrously beautiful. I was astonished that they didn’t dash themselves into pellets, like slugs of quicksilver, but when they smashed down they continued without any pause to run. They were faster than the wild pigs (p. 788).

  To fight and vanquish such beasts, Augie implies, is, on the one hand, a task worthy of an eagle, emblem of heroic nobility, emblem also of Mexico and the United States; the image of Caligula ripping at the painted delicacy of the smaller lizard’s innards, on the other hand, suits his Roman name.50

  In the mountains with Mannix and Aguila, Bellow recalls, “the sun shone so dramatically, so explicitly, you were never allowed to forget death.”51 Death and sunlight are twinned in the Mexican settings of Bellow’s fiction, as they are in Mexican or Aztec mythology. As Augie travels through Monterrey, all the objects he sees, “trees, bushes, stones,” are “as explicit as glare and the spice of that heat could make them” (p. 768). Prominent among these objects are “corpses of dogs, rats, horses, asses, by the road.… Which is all to emphasize how openly death is received everywhere” (p. 771). “Where they [the giant iguanas] hung out,” Augie tells us, “the light was very hot” (p. 778); “it was glorious how he [Caligula] would mount away high and seem to sit up there, really as if over fires of atmosphere” (p. 770). Later Augie talks of Mexico’s “broadcast or exposing versus discreet light.” What this light exposes, in addition to death or violence, is illusion. “What I want of the contrast of broadcast or exposing versus discreet light is to suggest what the claims are, or the illusions, the discreeter seems to allow” (p. 779). The sorts of illusions Augie has in mind are those Thea brings with her to Mexico, of pure or perfect being, of pure or perfect love. During his time with her, Augie finds a book in the villa which he reads throughout the Mexican episode, an anthology of utopias, including “Campanella’s City of the Sun, More’s Utopia, Machiavelli’s Discourses and The Prince, as well as long selections from St. Simon, Comte, Marx and Engels” (p. 791).

  When Caligula backs off after being nipped, as if “humanized” by pain, Augie grins. “ ‘Why, if you’re hurt, what do you expect?’ ” he asks Thea, “humanizing again.” “Don’t you grin about it,” Thea cries. “I’m not,” he replies, “it’s the sun making me squint” (p. 782); the sun that exposes all. In the story “Mosby’s Memoirs” (1968), Willard Mosby, on a Guggenheim grant, sits in a villa above Oaxaca writing his memoirs (Bellow wrote the story on a visit to Oaxaca in March 1967): “Stone-hearted Mosby, making fun of flesh and blood.”52 In his way, Mosby has been as fierce a reality instructor as Thea. But Mexico unsettles him. As he gazes below to the town, “bougainvillea pour[s] down the hillside, and the hummingbirds [are] spinning.” He feels “ill with all this whirling, these colors, fragrances, ready to topple on him.” It is death he senses in the exposing light: “Behind the green and red of Nature, dull black seemed to be thickly laid like mirror backing.” His “fine blue eyes,” in addition to being “direct, intelligent, disbelieving,” are “light-pained” (p. 355). Only at the end of the story, when he finds himself in the tomb of a temple in Mitla, a work of perfect mathematical calculation, does he seek the light. Inside the tomb, he cannot breathe: “His heart was paralyzed. His lungs would not draw.… I cannot catch my breath! To be shut in here! To be dead here.… Dead—dead. Stooping, he looked for daylight. Yes, it was there. The light was there. The grace of life still there. Or, if not grace, air” (p. 373).

  Stone-hearted Mosby has made a tomb of himself: “His doom was to live life to the end as Mosby” (p. 372). As his memoirs make clear, he has been inhuman in his treatment of others. In Mitla, the Zapotecs who built the temples practiced human sacrifice, “under Aztec influence” (p. 373) (Aztec sacrifice is mentioned in Augie as well [p. 771]). In the Aztec foundation myth, which Bellow would have known from Radcliffe-Brown’s course on Mayan and Aztec cultures, the promised land, a wished-for place of purity and perfection, is signaled by the sudden appearance of an eagle perched on an opuntia or cactus growing out of a rock. In a modern version of the myth, depicted in the coat of arms of Mexico, there is the added symbol of a snake being killed by the eagle. This snake is sometimes depicted with a ring of feathers around its neck, which makes it look like an iguana (as well as the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, Lawrence’s “Plumed Serpent”). The iguanas in Augie are described as “really huge, with great frills or sails—those ancient membranes. The odor here was snaky, and we seemed in the age of snakes.… As I pointed [one] out we saw the Elizabe
than top of him scoot away” (p. 788). Bellow weaves allusions to Aztec and later Mexican mythology into the Mexican chapters of Augie. These allusions, like Mexican light, reveal the cruelty and impossibility of Thea’s and Mosby’s dreams of perfection and invulnerability.53

  Like Mosby’s villa above Oaxaca, the villa the Bellows and the Passins rented while in Taxco was on a hill overlooking the town. It was owned by a Japanese painter, Tamiji Kitagawa, and came with a maid, who served breakfast on the terrace. In Mornings in Mexico, Lawrence writes of sitting outside on a patio at Christmas, in bright sunshine, “looking at a bit of sky and trees, then looking down at the page of his exercise book.”54 When not out with Mannix and Aguila, Bellow, too, according to Herb Passin, spent his mornings writing (not all that successfully: “I was groping”55). In the afternoons, he learned to ride, as Augie does. After a siesta, he and Anita used to stroll down into the town, eventually winding up at Paco’s. Here Bellow drank and played cards with the pulp writers and artists who were its habitués, and whom, in the interview with Philip Roth, he describes as “low company.” His attitude toward the crowd at Paco’s seems to have been like Augie’s attitude toward the crowd at “Hilario’s,” and his opinion of the pulp writers Wiley Moulton and Iggy Blaikie. It is at the poker table that we learn why Moulton calls Augie “Bolingbroke,” questioning his air of innocence.

  As was suggested in this book’s introduction, Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke becomes Henry IV partly through guile and simplicity, or feigned simplicity. When he defies royal banishment in Richard II, he says he has returned simply to “lay my claim / To my inheritance” (II.iii.134–35). His son is comparably guileful, hanging out at the Boar’s Head while also hanging back. For Bellow, hanging back was habitual, a writerly detachment, but in addition his time in Mexico helped him to see that he would never be as bohemian as the crowd at Paco’s. Although Herb Passin recalls that “we’d get so drunk we had to crawl up the hill,”56 Bellow was never a great drinker. Nor would he ever settle for the lowered ambitions of the pulp writer. He learned the language but he remained apart. “It’s certainly true that you have to lead a double life, maybe a quadruple life for that matter,” Bellow admits in his conversation with Norman Manea, a fellow novelist. “I know perfectly well that that’s the case because I experience it every day, just as you do.”57