BELLOW’S FAITH IN his powers is illustrated by the fate of “The Very Dark Trees,” the novel he was at work on for most of 1941. What we know of the plot of this novel comes primarily, via Atlas, from Nathan Gould, who remembers it as Kafkaesque, a fable about “an enlightened southerner,” a teacher at a Midwestern university, who suddenly, on the way home from class, turns black. Once home, his wife doesn’t recognize him, then locks him in the basement so as not to alarm the neighbors. Gould remembered the novel as funny. He also remembered that Bellow’s friends referred to it as “White No More.” On February 23, 1942, Bellow sent a draft of the novel to William Roth, editor in chief of the Colt Press, who had written to him a year earlier after reading the “Two Morning Monologues.” Except for a reworked opening chapter, the manuscript was a first draft, two hundred pages long, between sixty and seventy thousand words, and Bellow was sending it, he explained in a covering note, “at Rahv’s insistence.” The Colt Press was a small outfit in San Francisco, but had published books by Edmund Wilson and Henry Miller, as well as the first novel of Paul Goodman, also late of Wieboldt Hall. In his cover note, Bellow announced that “the Army is hot on my heels and I should like to have the fate of the book decided before I leave.” For reasons he does not specify, he was no longer immune from the draft.79
After hearing nothing from Roth for six weeks, Bellow wrote a second letter, on April 2: “The Army has just notified me that I will be inducted on June 15 [a date that allowed him to finish his term’s teaching at Pestalozzi-Froebel].… Please let me know how I stand at your earliest opportunity” (in a P.S. he asks Roth if he’s interested in “novelettes”: “I have several which I am very eager to publish”). The next day a letter from Roth arrived (his and Bellow’s letters crossed in the mail). Roth liked the novel, would publish it in November, and Bellow would receive an advance of $150 on date of publication. Bellow wrote back the same day “bowled over” by the news and agreeing to the terms. He had two and a half months to get the novel ready for publication and enough money from teaching not to need an advance right away. The next letter he wrote to Roth, on June 24, was less upbeat: “After rushing like the devil to get through in time, I was turned back temporarily at the induction center on a technicality.” He would not now be inducted until mid-July, but as he’d given up his teaching job he faced debts and “an incomeless month unless you can see your way clear to advancing me something.” Roth’s answer, which we know about from Bellow’s answer back, was worse than a refusal: he himself had been drafted, into the Office of War Information, was about to be shipped to Alaska, and was suspending all Colt’s publishing plans for the duration of the war. He enclosed a check for $50, offering more money if Bellow needed it. Bellow’s undated response was stoical and sympathetic. Though “terribly hard hit by the bad news,” he thanked Roth for the $50, which he would have returned “if I did not need it so badly, having gotten myself in debt.” As for the manuscript: “If you don’t think you can find someone to take it I should like you to send it back so that I can offer it to a few more publishers before the war snuffs out all my chances.”
Before Roth accepted “The Very Dark Trees” it had been turned down by James Laughlin of New Directions, who had seen only six or seven chapters. Laughlin later turned down Bellow’s suggestion, in a letter of April 2, 1942, about “novelettes” (“Since you publish a poem of the month why not also a novelette of the month? … I have several sixteen to twenty thousand word stories. They are not New Directions in your sense of it. But then I think originality is a better criterion than bizarre form”). After Roth closed down Colt, the manuscript was sent to the Vanguard Press, which had published Nelson Algren’s first novel and James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy. Vanguard started life in 1926 as a charitable foundation, underwritten by the American Fund for Public Service, better known as the Garland Fund (named after the radical philanthropist Charles Garland). Its first publications were cheap editions of the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, on the model of the Haldeman-Julius classics Bellow read as an adolescent. In 1932 Vanguard was purchased by James Henle, a journalist who had worked as an editor at McCall’s, and who aimed to preserve the imprint’s left-wing character while also making a profit. He received four reader’s reports on “The Very Dark Trees.” The first described the novel as “an extraordinary tour de force”; the second, from Evelyn Shrifte, who would become president of Vanguard in 1952, found it impressive but puzzling (she wanted Henle to read it to tell her not only what he thought of it commercially but “what you think [the] author is trying to say”); the third felt it didn’t come off, especially toward the end, where “the story of the negro witnessing the Trotsky episode is just too fantastic, and seems to be stuck in the book”; and the fourth “didn’t take to [it] at all,” illiterately complaining that its analysis of race “could have been done without the miracle hoi-polloi” (also that “the narrator, in spite of his symbolical tragedy, is singularly unattractive”). Vanguard turned the novel down, but Henle was impressed with Bellow, and asked to see future works.80
Bellow was as little satisfied with “The Very Dark Trees” as he had been with the Partisan Review stories. After Roth was forced to abandon publishing plans, Bellow informed him that “Rahv wrote in Macdonald’s name that he would undertake to peddle the novel for me.” In the same undated letter, Bellow explained that “I feel I am miles and centuries away from The Very Dark Trees—whole developmental heights. Oh, I still feel it deserves publication, in fact since I will never have time to finish any of the long things I have started I am determined it must be published, for it is to give me the right (in the postwar period, if we have one) to continue as a writer. But in a sense it is business, not literature. I am taking your word and am working over a novelette which is, well, fifty times better than the novel.” As the letter suggests, part of Bellow’s ambivalence about the war was its likely effect on his writing: it would prevent him from finishing long works and thus from having “the right … to continue as a writer.” Publishing “The Very Dark Trees” mattered for the same reason, a “business” reason. Soon after receiving Roth’s acceptance letter at the beginning of April, Bellow provided PR with a contributor’s note for the May–June 1942 issue, which opens with “The Mexican General” (followed by contributions from Kafka, James T. Farrell, Lionel Trilling, and Christopher Isherwood, among others): “Saul Bellow, a young Chicago writer, is now in the Army. Colt Press is bringing out his first novel, The Very Dark Trees.” By the time the issue appeared, Bellow was neither in the army nor was Colt bringing out his novel. Sometime after the rejection from the Vanguard Press toward the end of the year (one of the Vanguard reports is dated November 6, 1942), Bellow destroyed what seems to have been the sole manuscript of “The Very Dark Trees,” tossing it down an incinerator chute. “When I picked it up and read it through I got cold feet,” he recalled. “I thought it just wasn’t good enough. And I destroyed the manuscript. I thought—not this—I don’t want this albatross hung around my neck. I just threw it into the furnace.”81
The immolation was partly a product of changing circumstances. In the intervening months, “business” worries had receded, as “literature,” in the form of what was probably an expanded version of the “novelette,” looked the business.82 Early in June 1943, some six months after Vanguard’s rejection of “The Very Dark Trees,” Bellow was at work on the final revision of a novel with the Dostoyevskian title, “Notes of a Dangling Man,” the first chapter of which had been accepted by PR (it would appear under this title in the issue of September–October 1943).83 When Bellow finished the revisions he sent the novel off to Henle at Vanguard. According to a memo of June 27, Vanguard had all but promised to publish a book of short stories by Bellow “next year.” “I think we should do everything possible to keep Mr. Bellow happy,” reads a penciled note on the memo, “he is a writer of distinction and we shd. feel proud to publish his book.” On July 7 Bellow received a telegram from Henle reading
: “AM DEEPLY IMPRESSED BY DANGLING MAN BUT WANT TO GET ANOTHER OPINION.” On July 21 the novel was accepted. Henle offered a $200 advance, half upon signing. Seven months later it was published under the shortened title Dangling Man.
By this date, on the strength of the stories in PR, Bellow had acquired an agent. “His name is Max Lieber,” Bellow wrote in a letter of October 1942 to Melvin Tumin, a friend from the University of Wisconsin, now doing fieldwork in Guatemala (for a PhD in anthropology at Northwestern, under Herskovits).84 Lieber’s office is “a cold, dim cell on Fifth Avenue near 44th Street.” Though a Communist—Whittaker Chambers’s closest friend “after the Alger Hisses”85—his primary interest, Bellow reports in another undated letter to Tumin, is profit. “ ‘Balzac wrote for money,’ he says. ‘Oh, don’t sneer. So did Shakespeare and so did Beethoven. And you’ll either come around or remain obscure. We’ll see whether you sneer when you’re forty.’ I assured him it was an ineradicable trait and that I would sneer till eighty if I lived that long.” Lieber had well-known clients, “such talents as Erskine Caldwell and Albert Halper, etc.,” and “now that we have each other I may start appearing in print a little more often, providing, of course, that I have the leisure and power to write in the Army.”86 On February 24, 1943, as Bellow polished Dangling Man, Lieber offered a story titled “Juif” to Whit Burnett, editor of Story magazine. In a penciled note to Lieber’s letter, either Burnett or someone else at Story described its subject: “Anti-semitism in a children’s tb ward in Canada.”87 The story was rejected. “Juif” was the seed for “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” parts of which, including Joshua Lurie’s stay in the children’s ward at the Royal Vic, would find their way into Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift.
Though Bellow was right about “The Very Dark Trees” (that he could “continue as a writer” without it), even work he valued, “literature,” involved compromise. Another Bellow story from this period, “The Car,” was offered to Partisan Review and rejected, for reasons relayed to Bellow by Macdonald. Bellow’s response to this rejection makes clear the difficulties he was having fitting himself to the literary tastes of his audience, in the first instance, the magazine’s editors and readers.88 These tastes were European and modernist and “The Car” failed to meet them in part because of what Macdonald called its “centerless facility which destroys the form by excess elaboration.” Bellow was prepared to admit weaknesses in his writing (partly attributable, he felt, to his circumstances), but not exactly the weaknesses specified by Macdonald.
It is not because I write too easily that I sometimes fail. I would be more successful, perhaps, if I did write with more careless dash. But what I find heartbreakingly difficult in these times is fathoming the reader’s imagination. If he and I were both of a piece, it would not be so hard. But as it is I am ringed around with uncertainties and I often fail to pull myself together properly, banishing distraction and anxiety. And so I find myself perpetually asking, “How far shall I take this character? Have I made such and such a point clear? Will the actions of X be understood? Shall I destroy a subtlety by hammering it?” etc.89
In both Dangling Man and The Victim, his second novel, Bellow was, he later explained, “establishing my credentials, proving that a young man from Chicago had a right to claim the world’s attention, so I was restrained, controlled, demonstrating that I could write ‘good.’ ”90 As the response to Macdonald suggests, though, writing “good” was a strain, not only because Bellow was unsure of his audience, but because in seeking to meet its needs he felt he was losing touch with himself. The initial rush of composition—twenty thousand words in two weeks, he told Tumin—was followed, as so often in his career, by a period of torturous development and polish. In this period, he both pursued and resented what he called “letter-perfect” writing, a “Flaubertian standard.” “Not a bad standard, to be sure,” he admitted, but restricting: “because of the circumstances of my life and because of my upbringing in Chicago as a son of immigrants. I could not, with such an instrument as I developed in the first two books, express a variety of things I knew intimately.”91
Evidence of resentment and resistance is found on the very first page of Dangling Man, a novel made up of the journal entries of Joseph, among the least controlled of Bellow’s protagonists. In the following passage, quoted in part in Chapter 1 in connection with Russian openness of expression, Joseph takes aim:
Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody’s business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them. To a degree, everyone obeys this code. And it does admit a limited kind of candor, a closedmouth straightforwardness. But on the truest candor it has an inhibitory effect. Most serious matters are closed to the hardboiled. They are unpracticed in introspection, and therefore badly equipped to deal with opponents whom they cannot shoot like big game or outdo in daring.
If you have difficulties, grapple with them silently, goes one of their commandments. To hell with that! I intend to talk about mine, and if I had as many mouths as Siva has arms and kept going all the time, I still could not do myself justice.
Hemingway is the main target here, but behind him lies an army of the unfazed, with Flaubert at its head. Joseph is anything but unfazed, but that hardly makes him unique, certainly to readers of PR. He’s a figure out of European fiction, from Dostoyevsky, as we’ve seen, from Kafka, as the absence of a surname suggests, from Rilke, whose Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), “really hypnotized and turned [me] on.… Seemed to turn on a channel for me.”92 When Harold Kaplan was lent a copy of the first chapter of Dangling Man by Clement Greenberg, he pronounced it “very finished and professional,” but also “rather conventional.”93 In resisting prevailing tastes, Joseph reflects them, which makes him like his creator.
IN THE LETTER TO Macdonald about “The Car,” Bellow calls Dangling Man “a semi-autobiographical novel,” and Joseph is like his creator in a number of ways. He’s handsome and knows it, having been “brought up to think myself handsome” (p. 52). His eyes, “rather too full, a little prominent, in fact,” are guarded, even forbidding, as if “keeping intact and free from encumbrance a sense of his own being, its importance” (p. 16). He’s quick to anger, often puts his foot in his mouth (“I couldn’t help myself,” he explains, after an unfortunate remark, “I was suddenly in a state of mind that required directness for its satisfaction” [p. 12]), and he has “a mad fear of being slighted or scorned, an exacerbated ‘honor’ ” (p. 107). His circumstances are also like Bellow’s. Joseph has waited seven months to be drafted when the novel opens. Four months later, still dangling, he volunteers, on the novel’s last page. During this period, everyone tries to set him straight. His brother, Amos, a mixture of Sam and Maury, wants him to go to officer training, so he won’t be ordered about. “I’m used to that,” he replies (p. 44). Amos advises him to marry money and can’t “accept the fact that it is possible for a member of his family to live on so little” (p. 41). Joseph grew up on St. Dominique Street, with a Montreal childhood like Bellow’s (the photograph of his maternal grandfather is that of Bellow’s maternal grandfather, Moshe Gordin94). His politics, like his draft status, resemble Bellow’s: “as between their imperialism and ours, if a full choice were possible, I would take ours” (p. 59). For some years, he has lived in cheap apartments and rooming houses near the university, including one on Dorchester Avenue, where Bellow lived in 1944–45. His in-laws “live on the Northwest Side, a dreary hour’s ride on the El” (p. 10). Iva, his wife, whom he loves but cheats on and neglects, is pretty, patient, sympathetic, and “as far as ever from what I once desired to make her” (except in their quarrels, which give her a “brave, shaky, new defiance” [p. 70]). His circle of friends, a putative “colony of the spirit” (p. 26), is scattered by war and the lure of New York, its occasional gatherings tense with external as well as internal pressures.
These resemblances were clear to Bellow’s family and fri
ends (“absolutely, no question about it,” according to Sam’s daughter, Lesha); less clear was Bellow’s relation to Joseph’s state of mind at the novel’s end, an important question given Bellow’s later distance from what many reviewers thought of as the novel’s representative pessimism (“I can’t read a page of it without feeling embarrassed,” Bellow told an interviewer in 1963, “the ideas in it are the ideas of a very young man”95). As was mentioned in the introduction to this book, before dangling, Joseph had worked on “several essays, mainly biographical, on the philosophers of the Enlightenment. I was in the midst of one on Diderot when I stopped” (p. 5). He had also “made a study of the early ascetics, and, earlier, of Romanticism and the child prodigy” (pp. 17–18). Joseph’s intellectual background is like that of Moses Herzog, who succumbs to a sense of the failure or impossibility of Romantic—though not exclusively Romantic—notions of brotherhood or common humanity, greatness of purpose, honesty, agency, “pure freedom” (p. 112). In Herzog’s case, in a time of personal crisis, the result is breakdown; in Joseph’s case, in a time of world crisis, the result is resignation, bolstered by disillusion, or freedom from illusion, of the sort voiced by many of the contributors to Partisan Review, or by the writers and thinkers they wrote about and valued, not just Dostoyevsky and Kafka, but Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and Flaubert. “I am no longer to be held accountable for myself,” Joseph declares in the novel’s last words, written on his last day of civilian life:
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 32