The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Bellow wanted to be an intellectual, but he wanted to be a writer as well. Hence in part the pull of New York, for reasons of “business” as well as “literature” (his distinction from the undated letter to Philip Roth about “The Very Dark Trees,” quoted in Chapter 6). “I came to New York toward the end of the thirties,” he says in “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence” (1993), by which he means on short visits, like the one he and Anita made in the summer of 1940 before going to Mexico.8 Charlie Citrine of Humboldt’s Gift makes his first visit to New York in 1938, riding the Greyhound bus from Madison, taking “the Scranton route” in a trip of “about fifty hours” (p. 55). These visits increased for Bellow after the autumn of 1942, when Isaac Rosenfeld was given a small stipend to study in the graduate program in philosophy at NYU, in the department of Sidney Hook and James Burnham. Rosenfeld was newly married, to Vasiliki Sarantakis, whom he’d met two years earlier, while both were students at the University of Chicago. Vasiliki was lively and attractive, a great tonic to Rosenfeld, boosting his confidence as a writer and a man. Within months of arriving in New York, Rosenfeld was writing to Tarcov with news that he’d sold a short story and a poem to The New Republic (“I wish something of Saul’s had appeared too”).9 Vasiliki found work at the magazine, as secretary to Alfred Kazin, its literary editor. It was at this point that Bellow began to visit the city more frequently, traveling on his own because Anita could not leave her job at Michael Reese Hospital. Bellow stayed with the Rosenfelds on his visits, first in their cramped ground-floor apartment on the Upper West Side, on 76th Street near Riverside Drive (two and a half rooms, bathtub in the kitchen, bugs, dirty clothes and dishes everywhere), then at 85 Barrow Street in Greenwich Village (no less cramped and squalid), to which they moved in 1943. If there were such a magazine as Bad Housekeeping, Bellow has Zetland, the Rosenfeld character, say, in several of the unpublished manuscripts devoted to him, then Lottie, his wife, would be its editor.10

  Rosenfeld lasted only a year as a philosophy student, much of which he spent writing stories, poems, and reviews for Partisan Review, Commentary, and The New Republic. These reviews were sharp, learned, and bold. Soon after leaving NYU, he wrote a New Republic article attacking the work of his teacher, Sidney Hook, the most influential Marxist theorist in the country and a ferocious polemicist, “with a street-brawler’s willingness to jump into a fray at the slightest provocation.”11 In 1944, as mentioned in Chapter 4, Rosenfeld won the first Partisan Review–Dial Press novelette award for “The Colony,” a Kafkaesque fable. The award brought $1,000 and Rosenfeld was seen as a “golden boy” (a phrase used of him by Irving Howe), “shoyne boychick” (its Yiddish equivalent, used by David T. Bazelon, a friend from Chicago).12 Rosenfeld was generous with his contacts among New York literary circles. When Bazelon arrived in New York from Chicago in 1943, Rosenfeld, in the words of his biographer, “introduced him to nearly everyone he knew of intellectual importance.” Being with Rosenfeld, as Bazelon put it, ‘you could take your life seriously, any part of it you wanted, and he would really help—he really wanted to help.’ ”13

  Bellow needed no help in taking his life seriously, but he clearly benefited from Rosenfeld’s introductions. Among the first of these was to Kazin, who writes about meeting Bellow in his memoir New York Jew (1978). Kazin was Bellow’s exact contemporary, only five days his senior, but had been writing for The New Republic for almost a decade, from the age of nineteen. He became the magazine’s literary editor at twenty-seven, succeeding Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson, and published his first book, On Native Grounds (1942), a study of American literature from the 1880s to the present. Lionel Trilling, writing in The Nation, called it “quite the best and most complete treatment we have of an arduous and difficult subject.”14 Kazin’s first impression of Bellow, who had published almost nothing at this point, was that “he carried around with him a sense of his destiny as a novelist that excited almost everyone around him. Bellow was the first writer of my generation … who talked of Lawrence and Joyce, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, not as books in the library but as fellow operators in the same business.” Kazin was an operator himself, in the New York intellectual scene, combative and rivalrous. Yet Bellow’s confidence impressed rather than antagonized him: “He was putting himself up as a contender. Although he was friendly, unpretentious and funny, he was ambitious and dedicated in a style I had never seen in an urban Jewish intellectual. He expected the world to come to him.”

  Bellow impressed Kazin in other ways. He could make someone see “the most microscopic event in the street” and think it worth seeing “because he happened to be seeing it.” He thought up “very funny jokes, puns and double-entendres,” laughing through them “fast, with hearty pleasure at things so well said.” His voice, when telling stories, was one of “careful public clarity,”15 yet he never talked for effect: “His definitions, epigrams, were of a formal plainness that went right to the point and stopped.… There was not the slightest verbal inflation in anything he said.” Almost as impressive to Kazin was the range of Bellow’s observations, extending well beyond “topics generally exhausted by ideology or neglected by intellectuals too fine to consider them.”16 Bellow’s attention to details of physiognomy and appearance was as striking in life as on the page: “he liked to estimate other people’s physical capacity, the thickness of their skins, the strength in their hands, the force in their chests.” Though “a nimble adept of the University of Chicago style, full of the Great Books and jokes from Aristophanes,” he was also an unembarrassed Yiddishist, a proud Yiddishist, as well as an aficionado of “big-city low life”: “Saul was the first Jewish writer I met who seemed as clever about every side of life as a businessman. He was in touch.”17

  That Bellow seemed at ease with his Jewishness—that Jewishness seemed the source of his ease—also impressed Kazin. “He was proud in a laconic way,” Kazin writes, “like an old Jew who feels himself closer to God than anybody else.” When challenged, however, Bellow “could be as openly vulnerable as anyone I ever met. Then he would nail with quiet ferocity someone who had astonished him by offering the mildest criticism.” To Kazin, Bellow was “a man chosen by talent, like those Jewish virtuosos—Heifetz, Rubenstein, Milstein, Horowitz.”18 These descriptions were recorded thirty-five years after Kazin and Bellow first met, and may well be colored by a sense of the later man. When he read New York Jew, Bellow could not recognize himself. “I didn’t have an air of success,” he protested. “I felt as weak in the knees as everyone else. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”19 Though a similar retrospective projection may distort the accounts of other witnesses, they are largely admiring, particularly of Bellow’s self-possession and reserve. “Very strong-willed and shrewd in the arts of self-conservation” is how Irving Howe remembers him.20 Though “civilized and gentle” in manner, in William Barrett’s phrase, “the chip of self-confidence was there on the shoulder just the same.”21 To William Phillips, of Partisan Review, Bellow’s “strong sense of being set apart” was clear from the start. Though subject to “episodes of suspicion, when he questioned someone’s loyalty or attitude towards his work” (“I bite people’s heads off when they cross me,” he tells Tumin in an undated letter of 1942), his manner was “self-assured, almost relaxed.… Saul was extremely sweet and gentle, and, when he felt at home, extraordinarily charming. Even his egocentricity added to his charms.” Phillips recalls Bellow as “extremely handsome, with soft, large eyes and long lashes, giving focus to a soft, quizzical look that was not entirely lost on women,”22 an impression women corroborated. In Common Soldiers: A Self-Portrait and Other Portraits (1979), the bohemian artist Janet Richards describes him in 1942 as “irresistible, rather small and slight but strong, with curly black hair and large black eyes that missed nothing. They were ironic and sweet and not so much intellectual in impression as shrewd.”23 In Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir (1982), Eileen Simpson, John Berryman’s first wife, recalls that it was “gener
ally agreed” among the women in her circle that Bellow “was ‘a dish.’ ”24 Ann Birstein, Alfred Kazin’s second wife, describes him as “stunning, the ultimate beautiful young Jewish intellectual incarnate.”25 After seeing the author photograph on the jacket of Dangling Man, an executive from MGM offered to make him a movie star, playing what Bellow called “the guy ‘who loses the girl to the George Raft type or Errol Flynn type.’ ”26 In Kazin’s words, Bellow had “the conscious good looks of the coming celebrity.”27

  IN ADDITION TO TRYING to place novels and stories on his visits to New York, Bellow sought money from foundations. In 1943, while working on the Syntopicon, he applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Kazin and James Henle of Vanguard wrote on his behalf, along with James Farrell. In a brief statement of accomplishments, Bellow admitted that he’d had little success until he began publishing in Partisan Review three years earlier, at the age of twenty-five. His first novel, Dangling Man, would not appear until 1944, and he was then at work on a novel about “a middle-class individual” named Victor Holben. The theme of this novel was “the meaning of those capacities by which man at his best is distinguished: love, generosity and genius.” (No traces of it have survived, nor does The Victim, which Bellow soon began, fit its description.) He was turned down, like many first-time Guggenheim applicants, especially fiction writers who had not yet published a book. Two years later, bolstered by additional references from Edmund Wilson and Eliseo Vivas, he applied again, after Dangling Man had appeared to mostly good reviews. In this second application, nothing was said of Victor Holben. The Victim was announced as Bellow’s next novel, contracted to be published by Vanguard. Again he was turned down.28

  Through connections with literary journalists and publishers in New York, Bellow picked up reviewing and other paid assignments. According to Atlas, Robert Van Gelder, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, commissioned him to review a range of books, which Bellow then sold on (he also had an affair with Van Gelder’s assistant, Marjorie “Midge” Farber, who later identified herself as the model for Thea Fenchel).29 Victor Weybright, of Penguin Books, employed him to read for the imprint’s first list. He was interviewed for staff jobs at Time magazine and The New Yorker. Through Partisan Review he met foreign writers and editors. In a letter of September 11, 1942, Harold Kaplan writes to Mel Tumin about a day he and Bellow spent with the art critic Clement Greenberg, an editor at PR, and “his gal, Jean Connolly, wife of Cyril Connolly.” The day was not a success. “Bellow, catastrophically, paid no attention to the two English women who had been summoned largely for his benefit (and theirs to be sure).” Bellow later recalled that Greenberg thought it “important [for a young writer] to come under the influence of an older woman. She would prepare him for the world, teach him about sex, cure him of brashness—she would civilize you, French-style.”30 On this occasion, Greenberg lectured the two young men “paternally, on how European women expect little attentions and how lucky we were to meet people like that at our age and what the hell was wrong with us.” What was wrong with Bellow was that he had expected to meet the writer Eleanor Clark, who was “reputed to be very lovely and very fatal” (they eventually met in the offices of PR, only becoming good friends after Clark married Robert Penn Warren).31 When Kaplan discovered the name of one of the Englishwomen he and Bellow had ignored, “a rather handsome middle-aged citizenness in red hair, cigarette-holder and slacks,” he was much chagrined: “she was the Allanah Harper, former editor of Echanges [the French quarterly, which she founded], friend of Virginia Woolf, Valéry, Gide, Joyce, Eliot and Cocteau and on and on. I wept bitter tears.”32

  Bellow’s interview for the job at Time was a disaster. The editor in charge of personnel, Dana Tasker, had been favorably impressed with Bellow, leading him to believe that he would be hired. “It seems agreed that I will get a job,” he wrote to Freifeld on June 12, 1943. “The question before the editors is whether I should write domestic or foreign stuff. I may do Art or Religion. (They like to put you in a field you know nothing about.) Or Education. I’m not sure. All novices start at 75 and after three months go to $100—formerly my average monthly earnings.” A job at the magazine, Bellow told Freifeld, would give him “more money than I ever had in my life and I won’t know what to do with it.” The letter closes with an invitation to Freifeld’s wife, Rochelle, and daughter, Judy, “to stay with us [in New York, when he gets the job],” while Freifeld is away from home, serving in Army intelligence. Through James Agee, the film critic at Time, a meeting was arranged between Bellow and Whittaker Chambers, the former Soviet spy, who edited the books and arts pages of the magazine. When Bellow entered his office, Chambers was sitting in a wingback chair facing away from him. Chambers asked him what he thought was Wordsworth’s best poem and Bellow replied by asking what Wordsworth had to do with his getting a job in journalism. When Chambers persisted, Bellow named “Ode: Intimations of Immorality.” For Chambers, the only Wordsworth poem that mattered was The Excursion (in Byron’s words, “writ in a manner which is my aversion”), a work anti-Romantic in both style and content, thus acceptable to the conservative Chambers, who had become a ferocious anti-Communist. There was no job for Bellow, Chambers announced. On his way out, Bellow was approached by a man in the office, a disgruntled employee, who shook his hand, and told him it was his “lucky day.” Tasker felt bad for Bellow, and through his friend Ik Shuman, an editor at The New Yorker, got Bellow an interview at the magazine, again with no result.33

  Bellow frequently told the story of his meeting with Whittaker Chambers, often altering details. In one version, he is given a job writing film reviews, but it lasts only a day. Here is the account he gave in a 1975 television interview in Britain, reprinted in The Listener:

  I was fired at the end of the day by Whittaker Chambers. I came into Chambers’ office, and he took one look at me. He was obviously determined to get rid of me and he said: “Do you know who Wordsworth was?” I said: “Yes.” He said, “I want to know what sort of poet he was.” I said: “Well, he was a romantic poet. But I don’t see what that has to do with reviewing moving pictures.” He said: “Never mind that, there’s no room for you in this organisation, you’re fired.” My friends told me: “Chambers hates the romantic Wordsworth—he cares only for The Excursion, he adores The Excursion, which is not a romantic poem.” So I lost my job.34

  A similar account was offered by Bellow in a later interview, in which the firing took place on his second not his first day in the job.35

  Bellow fictionalized the episode in The Victim, published five years later. In the novel, Asa is interviewed by the editor of Dill’s Weekly, a Chambers-like bull of a man named Rudiger, who keeps him waiting for an hour, has his back to him when he enters, is red-faced as well as red-haired, and cuts him off as soon as he begins to speak with the words “No vacancies, no vacancies here. We’re filled. Go somewhere else.” Leventhal answers back, a heated exchange follows, creating “an atmosphere of infliction and injury from which neither could withdraw” (p. 177). After the interview, Leventhal worries that “Someone like that can make trouble for me”; Rudiger might “have me black-listed” (p. 179), a possibility Harkavy, Leventhal’s friend, makes light of, before going on to caution Leventhal against paranoid suspicion:

  “There isn’t a thing he can do to you. Whatever you do, don’t get ideas like that into your head. He can’t persecute you. Now be careful. You have that tendency, boy, do you know that? He got what was coming to him and he can’t do anything. Maybe that Allabee, what-do-you-call-him, put him up to it, wanted to play you a dirty trick. You know how it goes: ‘There’s a fellow bothering me. Do me a favour and give him the works when he comes around.’ So he does it. Well, he fouled his own nest. You follow me, boy? He fouled his own nest. So by now he realizes it was his own fault and he had it coming. How do you know it wasn’t rimmed?”

  “You really think they did? I don’t know. And I didn’t bother that Allbee. I only asked him once.”

&n
bsp; “Maybe he didn’t put him up to it. But he might have. It’s a possibility. Something like that happened to another friend of mine—Fabin. You know him. They gave him the works, and it was a put‑up job. Only he didn’t talk back the way you did. He just let them fling it at him. No, you did right and you haven’t got a thing to worry about.”

  Nevertheless, Leventhal was not reassured (pp. 179–80).

  Allbee is the Dostoyevskian double who haunts Leventhal throughout the novel, partly because he thinks Leventhal deliberately lost him his job. “You were sore at something I said about Jews.… You wanted to get even” (p. 170). Just as Leventhal suspects that Allbee and Rudiger set him up, so Allbee thinks Leventhal set him up: “You went in and deliberately insulted Rudiger, put on some act with him, called him filthy names, deliberately insulted him to get me in bad. Rudiger is hot blooded and he turned on me for it. You knew he would. It was calculated. It worked” (p. 169). After Allbee was fired, “I couldn’t get a job” (p. 203); hence his present deplorable state: drunk, disheveled, broke, alone. Allbee is from an old New England family, once had money (through his wife, now deceased), and deplores New York, where “it’s really as if the children of Caliban were running everything. You go down in the subway and Caliban gives you two nickels for your dime. You go home and he has a candy store in the street where you were born. The old breeds are out. The streets are named after them. But what are they themselves? Just remnants … last week I saw a book about Thoreau and Emerson by a man named Lipschitz” (p. 259).