The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Bellow seems to have entertained similar suspicions about the interview with Chambers. In a letter of April 10, 1982 to Eileen Simpson, he congratulates her on Poets in Their Youth. In the memoir Simpson recounts a comparably disastrous interview Berryman had with Chambers, one also arranged by James Agee. Bellow comments: “I suspect that Agee was aware that he was sending hopeless cases to Chambers who baited and dismissed them. Did these two have an arrangement? Funny that John and I should never have discussed this. Agee was saintly, and Chambers prophetic and both did the work of Henry Luce … John and I missed that one. Perhaps he would have disagreed with me, as he did about [Edmund] Wilson and, in some degree, [Allen] Tate. But we needn’t go into that here.” What Bellow and Berryman disagreed about in respect to Wilson and Tate is not specified. Though Wilson, like Agee, professed himself hostile, in print and in person, to the genteel and the established, Bellow seems to have suspected him, as he did Tate, of harboring Allbee-like attitudes toward Jews and other Calibans, immigrant types displacing “the old breeds” (who have streets named after them, as in Tate’s and Agee’s Old South or Wilson’s East Coast or Princeton). Agee was not Allbee, but like him he was well-born, expensively educated (Phillips Exeter, Harvard), a womanizer, and a hard drinker (“everyone drank heavily,” William Phillips recalls, “but Agee was in the top ten; perhaps he was an alcoholic”).36 He and Chambers were close friends, shared an office at Time, and reviewed books together; Sam Tanenhaus, Chambers’s biographer, describes them as “confidants, an oddly compatible pair.”37 Hence Bellow’s suspicions about Agee in the letter to Simpson, which suggest a source for Leventhal’s suspicions about Allbee. They also mirror Allbee’s suspicions about Leventhal. In other words, Bellow knew the suspicions of his characters from the inside. In his writing, however, he distanced himself from them, alert to their consequences: born of prejudice, they bred prejudice, in victim as well as bigot, another way Leventhal and Allbee are doubles.38

  AT THE CENTER of Bellow’s early experiences in New York were the writers and editors at Partisan Review. In his foreword to a 1996 anthology of fiction from the magazine, he makes clear what it meant to him in the 1930s and 1940s. In comparison to “the Southern, the Hudson, the Kenyon,” Partisan Review offered “what we longed for,”

  deep relevance, contemporary high culture, left-wing politics, avant-garde painting, Freudian mining of the unconscious or Marxist views of past and future revolutions. In Partisan Review you could read George Orwell, André Gide, Ignazio Silone—during the Civil War in Spain, I remember, Partisan Review printed a curious piece by Picasso, “The Dreams and Lies of President Franco.” These were Partisan Review’s European heavyweights. On our own side of the Atlantic Partisan Review’s contributors included Edmund Wilson, Sidney Hook, James Burnham, Paul Goodman, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, James Agee, and Harold Rosenberg.39

  The magazine was founded in 1934 by Philip Rahv and William Phillips, under the auspices of the Communist-controlled John Reed Club of New York (located at 430 Sixth Avenue between 10th and 11th Streets), which is where the two editors first met.40 Neither editor had any money, and the magazine would never have gotten off the ground without the assistance of established Communist writers like Mike Gold, author of Jews Without Money (1930), Joseph Freeman, the editor of New Masses, and John Strachey, the British Marxist, who agreed to give a talk organized by the editors (its subject was dialectical materialism), which raised what Phillips describes as “the unbelievable sum of eight hundred dollars, enough to run a little magazine for a year on a collapsed economy.”41

  From the beginning, PR mixed politics and culture. Although initially it supported the party’s call for a conspicuously proletarian literature, it warned against narrow or mechanical applications of Marxist doctrine, as when New Masses writers worried “whether Proust should be read after the Revolution and why there seemed to be no simple proletarians in the novels of André Malraux.”42 In an editorial in its third issue (June–July 1934), Rahv and Phillips warned that “zeal to steep literature overnight in the program of Communism results in … sloganized and inorganic writing.” What the editors sought was a Marxist aesthetic compatible with modernist and other formal innovations, an objective that brought them into increasing conflict with official Communist literary policy. Larger political pressures also came into play, eventually precipitating a break. In 1935, the party introduced its Popular Front or People’s Front strategy, a threat to the openly anticapitalist and pro-Soviet John Reed Clubs. A directive went out to dissolve the clubs and back more broadly liberal groups (the American Writers’ Congress, the League of American Writers), a move that effectively eliminated much of PR’s support. After a short-lived merger with Jack Conroy’s Anvil (short-lived, according to Phillips, because Conroy “was too populist and anti-intellectual”43), in December 1936 publication of the magazine was suspended entirely.

  The loss of party support was for Rahv and Phillips both a blow and an opportunity. If new money could be found, they would relaunch PR as an independent magazine, no longer muting or masking criticism of party policy, political as well as literary.44 It was F. W. Dupee, the literary editor of New Masses, who helped find the money. Like Rahv and Phillips, Dupee was disillusioned with Communist literary politics and in search of a less rigid, less bureaucratic journalistic home. He introduced the PR editors to a Yale classmate, Dwight Macdonald, a writer for Henry Luce at Fortune, but leaning “in the direction of the Communist party.” The daylong argument in which Rahv and Phillips battered Macdonald for this leaning, led him to join the effort to revive PR. “I still have a picture of Rahv and myself backing Macdonald up against a wall,” Phillips writes, “knocking down his arguments, firing unanswerable questions without giving him time to answer, and constantly outshouting him.”45 Macdonald and Dupee introduced Rahv and Phillips to a third Yale classmate, George L. K. Morris, a wealthy art critic and abstract painter. With Morris’s financial backing, PR was relaunched in December 1937, with editorial offices located in Macdonald’s apartment, and an editorial board consisting of Rahv, Phillips, Dupee, Macdonald, Morris, and one other friend of Dupee and Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, who was described by William Barrett as “the one woman whom the circle could not intimidate in any way.”46 When Bellow met McCarthy he thought her “beautiful in a sort of enamelled way,” “a little unnatural,” “charming,” and “very snappish. I was a little too timid for that sort of thing.”47 Phillips characterized the new board of PR as “remarkably aggressive and varied.”48

  Bellow’s attitude to the PR circle was complicated. As Barrett puts it, “he needed to observe the New York intellectuals, to be stimulated by them, and learn from them what he wanted—that was his job as a writer, and Bellow was a full-time writer. But he moved always at the edge of the circle.”49 “I wouldn’t belong to anything,” Bellow told Botsford. “I was never institutionally connected with any of these people. I was the cat who walked by himself.”50 His wariness was partly ideological, partly personal. “Our program is the program of Marxism,” the editors declared in an opening statement in 1937 in the first relaunched issue, “which in general means being for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society, for a workers’ government, and for international socialism.” In the 1930s and early 1940s, Bellow still endorsed this program, or at least gave it lip service. The magazine’s attitude to literature was another matter, revered contributors notwithstanding. “Marxism in culture,” Rahv and Phillips declared in that 1937 statement, “is first of all an instrument of analysis and evaluation” (p. 4). In “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” Bellow offers an anecdote illustrating the reductive consequences of this view. In PR circles, “small distinction was made between an intellectual and a writer. The culture heroes who mattered were those who had ideas. Sidney Hook, in many respects a sensible man, once said to me that Faulkner was an excellent writer whose books would be greatly improved by dynamic ideas. ‘I’d be glad to give him som
e,’ he said. ‘It would make a tremendous difference. Do you know him?’ ”51 In an interview with Botsford, Bellow recalls overhearing a conversation between Rahv and Phillips in 1942 in the magazine’s Astor Place offices: “Rahv enters and asks Phillips, ‘Has anything for the next number come in?’ Phillips says, ‘None of the important stuff,’ ” meaning political, critical, academic contributions.52 For Bellow, the important stuff was fiction, poetry, drama.

  The confrontational style of the PR crowd, which amused Bellow in small doses, also helped to keep him at a distance. Philip Rahv set the tone. He was born Ivan Greenberg in the Russian Ukraine, did not come to the United States until he was fourteen, after stays in Austria and Palestine, and made no attempt to lose his Russian accent. “He carried his ‘Russianness’ like a flag of pride,” Irving Howe recalls. “It meant being comprehensive, definitive, theoretical, overwhelming.”53 Rahv was self-taught, never graduated from high school; the New York Public Library was his alma mater. Here he gathered the materials of a formidable education. In the early years of the Depression, when not in the library, he stood in breadlines and slept on park benches, eventually finding work as a Hebrew teacher. Hebrew was one of his six languages: the others were Russian, German, Yiddish, French, and English. “Rahv” (meaning “rabbi”) was his party name, and soon began appearing over reviews in the Daily Worker and New Masses. These reviews were hard in several senses, and domineering, like their author. “One person took to himself the preponderant power in shaping the magazine,” recalls William Barrett, “and that was Philip Rahv. He did so by sheer self-assertion; by the power and force, and at times the sheer rudeness of his personality.”54 When charged by Clement Greenberg with denigrating friends and colleagues behind their backs, often to persons in positions of power (publishers, editors, heads of foundations), Rahv answered: “Everybody does it.” When told “but not like you,” and pressed to explain his behavior, he tried again: “I suppose it’s just analytic exuberance” (a phrase Delmore Schwartz characterized as “Philip Rahv’s euphemism for putting a knife in your back”).55 Irving Howe remembers that whenever he met Rahv “he would propose that I write something to ‘smash them.’ Always there was a ‘them,’ from Stalinists to New Critics.”56

  Social life in PR circles could also be daunting. “An evening at the Rahvs,” recalled the writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick of parties at their West Tenth Street town house, “was to enter a ring of bullies, each one bullying the other.”57 Rosenfeld described a gathering at the Rahvs’ as “like throwing darts.”58 Parties at the Phillipses’ were no less intimidating, according to Irving Kristol:

  I got a plate of food, and there was a couch, and so I walked over and sat down in the middle of the couch, not knowing who was going to join me, and not really much caring. Well, what happened was, Mary McCarthy sat down on one side of me, Hannah Arendt sat down on the other side of me, and then Diana Trilling pulled up a chair and sat facing me. And I was a prisoner, I couldn’t get out. And they then had a long hour-and-a-half discussion on Freud, in which they were all disagreeing. I don’t remember what the dispute was. All I know is that I sat there quiet and terror-stricken. And my wife was across the room giggling endlessly.59

  “These people didn’t know how to behave,” Diana Trilling recalled. “Intellectuals knew how to think but they didn’t know how to behave,” especially in respect to women. “Those parties were absolutely horrible if you weren’t on the make, sexually,” she continues, “if you were neither a name nor sexually available, you should have stayed home, because it was just a misery.… The wife of William Phillips, Edna Phillips, and the wife of Philip Rahv, Nathalie Rahv, both told me after I got to be friends with them in later years that they had had to take several stiff drinks before every one of those parties in order to get through them, they were so miserable.”60

  William Phillips was a less domineering figure than Rahv, though dealing with him could be tricky. Born in Brooklyn into a family of poor Russian Jewish immigrants (his father changed the family name from Litvinsky), he attended City College, did graduate work in philosophy at NYU and Columbia, but was put off an academic career because of difficulties or inhibitions in writing, a not uncommon experience for editors. In his memoir, Intellectual Follies, Lionel Abel describes Phillips as “more boyish than Rahv, mischievous, catty even, quite witty, and with a gift for subtlety.… It was Rahv who took the initiative in almost all serious matters, and William who made the jokes at Rahv’s expense.”61 Aiding Phillips in these jokes was Delmore Schwartz, who joined the PR circle in 1937, the year the magazine published “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” the story that made his literary reputation. To give a flavor of PR banter, here is William Barrett, an unoffical staff writer at the time, on an editorial meeting in which “the subject—or target” was Alfred Kazin. Phillips complained that Kazin “insists so much on his sincerity when talking to me, that he makes me feel insincere.” Rahv then recalled Diana Trilling’s characterization of Kazin as “the starry-eyed opportunist,” and Schwartz quoted Mary McCarthy wondering aloud why “when Alfred had been in Italy they didn’t press all the olive oil out of him.” PR was publishing pages from Kazin’s “Italian Journal” and when someone asked “Why an Italian Journal?” Schwartz answered “Well, Goethe wrote an Italian Journal, and Alfred decided he would do one too.”62

  Hostility to Kazin was partly a matter of style—Kazin was too earnest and intense—partly a product of his association with the rival New Republic, with whom PR had been at loggerheads politically (for its support of party causes and of the Soviet Union). Kazin was among the closest of the new friends Bellow made in New York, and himself no shrinking violet. “I was raised in a school of toughness,” he records in a journal entry of 1942, “and I’ve always lived militantly, thinking hard, working my life out hard.” “My aggressiveness has been terrible,” reads another entry; “all my life I have lived like a bullet going through walls: I have thought only of my own progress.” Kazin stuttered badly in his youth and “attained a tyrannical fluency so that I might never be found gaping and gapping.” When ill and tense, “ready to pick a fight,” he reminds himself in another entry, to “lay off, comfort yourself with every possible comfort; stop mauling yourself.” In later years, happy in bucolic Amherst, “I look for trouble, I long for discord.” In discussing fellow New York intellectuals in his journals, Kazin is as biting as his detractors: “I felt his own clumsiness, ruggedness, harshness” (of Clement Greenberg); “Always proving a point at the expense of others—always winning the little victory—always the provincial little Jewish boy putting his foot on the conquered antagonist” (of Sidney Hook); “that fatal particle of vulgarity … which gets between everything he says like sand” (of Irving Howe); “like hawks, waiting to pounce … what tenseness because of the control, the politesse, the civilizing and hold in leash of so much passion” (of faculty at the New School).63 To some, Irving Howe for instance, rudeness was seen as both Jewish and a matter of principle: “Rudeness was not only the weapon of cultural underdogs, but also a sign that intellectual Jews had become sufficiently self-assured to stop playing by gentile rules. At the least, this rudeness was to be preferred to the frigid ‘civility’ with which English intellectuals cloak their murderous impulses, or the politeness that in American academic life could mask a cold indifference.”64

  Kazin’s treatment of women was no different from that of the men Diana Trilling describes. Ex-wives are not always reliable about their ex-husbands, but here is Ann Birstein, the third of Kazin’s four wives, in her autobiography, What I Saw at the Fair (2003), recalling their first meeting. Birstein was twenty-three and had just published her first novel. Kazin was thirty-five and a power in literary-intellectual circles. He entered the room talking very fast, immediately patronized his host, who took umbrage; then the two men embarked on an argument that lasted over an hour. During this argument, Kazin barely acknowledged Birstein, the only other guest. “He was scary,” she recal
ls. At the end of the argument, he turned to her with a brief glance and said: “Nice legs.” Shown a copy of her book by their hostess, he asked: “Is that that first novel that was panned in Commentary?” At dinner, Kazin ignored her, although she was sitting opposite him. So absorbed in argument was he that at one point she felt impelled to lean across the table to prevent him from dipping his jacket into the spaghetti sauce, a courtesy he noted without thanking. Later he pocketed her packet of cigarettes. When she timidly asked him for one, he said: “Why don’t you buy your own?” When she told him they were her own, he replied: “Possessive, aren’t you?” (a joke presumably).65 The roughness of Kazin’s manners was noted by others as well, including those of equal or greater literary standing. At a PR party, Kazin walked up to Lionel Trilling and asked him: “When are you going to dissociate yourself from that wife of yours?” (he meant politically). Diana Trilling was standing behind her husband and only just managed, “perhaps mistakenly,” as she puts it in her autobiography, to restrain his lifted fist.66

  Bellow loved anecdotes like these and put several of them in his stories. In “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” he delights in a put-down originally uttered by the art critic Harold Rosenberg, perhaps the closest of the new friends he made in New York. Herschel Shawmut, the story’s narrator, who is prone to spasms of rudeness and aggression, recounts meeting “the late Kippenberg, prince of musicologists” at a conference. The night before Shawmut is to speak, he invites himself over to Kippenberg’s room to give the great man a preview of his paper. Kippenberg resembles Rosenberg physically, being “a huge man” (Bellow called Rosenberg “the only man I know who fills a telephone booth from top to bottom”),67 crippled (he walks with two sticks), with eyebrows “like caterpillars from the Tree of Knowledge.” As Shawmut reads from his talk, Kippenberg begins to nod. “I said, ‘I’m afraid I’m putting you to sleep, Professor.’ ‘No, no—on the contrary, you’re keeping me awake,’ he said. That, and at my expense, was genius, and it was a privilege to have provoked it.… I would have gone around the world for such a put-down.”68