The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  THOUGH AVANT-GARDE IN their sympathies, few of the writers and editors of Partisan Review could be called bohemian. Bellow’s experience of bohemian life in Greenwich Village came mostly through Rosenfeld and Vasiliki and their friends. Rosenfeld’s circle included Partisan Review writers and NYU and Columbia academics; there was as much talk of Marx, modernism, and Freud in the Rosenfeld parlor as at the Rahvs’ or the Phillipses’. But the manners of Rosenfeld’s circle were different, hipper, more cynical, not much bothered about getting things written or done, or making it. In “An Exalted Madness,” the shortest of the “Zetland” manuscripts (“Charm and Death” is the longest), the circle is described as “a group of bohemians, college graduates carrying on their education without much discipline in an extended adolescence.” In this circle, the writers who mattered were Kierkegaard, D. H. Lawrence, and Baudelaire, the Baudelaire who believed “that human beings are made equal through sin and shame, each man knowing in his heart of hearts how weak, hypocritical, corrupt and ignoble he is” (p. 4). Such knowledge, the narrator thinks, licenses wickedness, which “becomes the basis of fraternal feeling” among Zetland’s friends. The narrator, however, is “a brand-new Ph.D., and an Assistant Professor at Princeton.” Zetland’s friends think him uncool. “The prominent intellectuals I met in the Village considered me a goose,” he recalls, “known in the Village only as a friend of the Zetlands” (p. 5).

  Like Rosenfeld, Zetland is only in part bohemian. When Bellow challenged Rosenfeld about his behavior in the Village years, his friend was quick to defend himself. In an undated journal entry from the early 1940s he recalls “how after making a thorough fool of myself, I am asked (by Saul?), ‘Why do you have to be such a fool?’ I flare up; I cry it is better to be a fool than not a fool, to dare ridicule.” A later journal entry sketches out the “climactic scene” of a story Rosenfeld is considering writing set in the Village: “A seder, which soon degenerates into a cocktail party. The Haggadah is burlesqued, no one can read, no one understand. The host (I?), who has made an effort to reform, to fly right, live straight … also succumbs to the degeneration. They light up tea; a fight (Calder [Willingham, the writer]?); he [the host, “I?”] makes a play for the chick, leaves with her when the guests leave. Comes home very late. His wife is up.… She says very calmly she is going to leave him the next day. No tears. The children are still up. They are amused by everything.”89 In “Charm and Death,” Zetland is caught up in Village ways in just this fashion, while seeking to resist them:

  He was a family-man; that was not bohemian. But he was a bohemian also, in his manner, in his easy way with money, in the hours he kept. But the Village had an orthodoxy of its own, Modernist orthodoxy. He didn’t accept that fully either. He had his standards (from adolescence, A. Z. Crocker said). These went back to Plato, to Tolstoi. He applied them to himself and to his own writing. It was a high-principled ragged life and until he was thirty or so he was as he seemed (p. 46).

  The Rosenfelds, like the Zetlands, kept open house. While Vasiliki went to work, Rosenfeld spent the day writing or working or walking the dog, the unattractive, constipated Smokey (“Zet put her in the bath-tub and gave her an enema. A terrible, necessary, comical event” [p. 49]).90 People dropped by all the time, but especially on Friday and Saturday nights. Among those frequently found at 85 Barrow Street were David Bazelon, from Chicago, who introduced Rosenfeld to his friend Calder Willingham; Ray Rosenthal, an editor and translator; the beat writer Milton Klonsky; the brothers Herb and Willy Poster (né Bernstein), well-known Village characters; Alfred Kazin, who stayed for a period in the Rosenfeld apartment, after breaking up with his first wife; Manny Farber, a painter and film critic; his wife, Janet Richards; Farber’s psychoanalyst brother, Leslie; Leslie’s wife, Midge, with whom Bellow was having an affair; James Agee; and the poet Weldon Kees, who lived on the Lower East Side, on St. Mark’s Place, in an apartment below that of Harold Rosenberg and his wife. In another “Zetland” manuscript, the narrator describes his friend’s circle as made up of “painters, musicians, economists from the New School, academic philosophers, self made intellectuals, surrealists, off beat journalists, original girls, stockbrokers, even, whose university education had given them a taste for conversation they couldn’t satisfy on Wall Street.”91 A Wall Street type like one of these stockbrokers is found in “An Exalted Madness.” The narrator is stopped by an executive who says: “ ‘Oh, you’re Donald Rich, Zetland’s pal from Chicago. Wasn’t he something—a blood-bank. When I was low, I’d go to Bleecker Street [for Barrow Street in all the manuscripts], that hegdisch, for a transfusion.’ A good word, hegdisch: it refers literally to the destruction of the temple, but more familiarly it is reserved for domestic squalor” (p. 2).92

  The most bohemian of Rosenfeld’s friends were Herb and Willy Poster. According to Janet Richards, Herb Poster had been a child prodigy at the University of Michigan, in line for a career as an academic philosopher. When the brothers inherited money—from their father’s property dealings in Brownsville, Brooklyn—Herb dropped out. Though he continued to think about philosophy, mostly at night with the aid of gin and dope (“tea” in the argot of the day), he did so to no demonstrable end. His brother, Willy, a close friend of Richards’s, was more outgoing, though only marginally more productive (writing the occasional article for Commentary and other publications). Both brothers spent a lot of time pursuing women (“they kept a special cash fund to pay for abortions,” according to Rosenfeld’s biographer, Steven Zipperstein; according to Kazin, they shared girlfriends and organized “public orgies”).93 Occasionally, late in the afternoon, Willy would bring Richards, who saw nothing of the rumored orgies, to the Hudson Street apartment the brothers shared. “Willy had to push Herb out of his nest of blankets,” Richards writes. “He would emerge silent, rumpled, strange in the extreme, but friendly. He would eat something extraordinary, like an Eskimo Pie or a couple of walnuts, wander around and then retire to the bedroom for his breakfast joint. Willy retired with him.”94

  Neither Willy nor Herb ever talked of the source of their income or of their father, who named them Herbert Spencer Bernstein and William Shakespeare Bernstein, though every Sunday they took the subway to Brownsville to visit their mother, whom they adored. As Richards puts it, Willy, in contrast to Herb, was “extremely sociable … a committed gadabout, seeking in the streets and his friends’ flats entertainment, while others worked at their disgusting jobs or toiled over their typewriters and easels.”95 The Posters’ attitude toward work was shared by others in Rosenfeld’s circle. When this attitude was held by writers, it was bound to irritate Bellow, given his fierce dedication to writing. In a letter to Bazelon of April 10, 1949, Bellow writes from Paris of Milton Klonsky, who was depressed. “I was a little low myself when he arrived, but in the Empyrean by comparison; hence no company for him. Besides, I was working. Do I say ‘besides’? That was the ray that blights, for Milton.”96

  In the “Zetland” and “Charm and Death” manuscripts, the Posters become Arlo Hahn and his brother, Waldo. When Zetland needs to borrow money from Arlo, arriving at his apartment “well supplied with suggestions from Russian literature” (Dostoyevsky seeking a loan from Turgenev at Baden, “the prophet gambler in one of his creepy phases, confessing perversion and vice”), Arlo is quick to spot his sources: “A reader himself, he would say: Don’t overdo this Dostoyevsky stuff—all this spleen-swallowing, sneaking Jesus, love-hate routine” (“Charm and Death,” p. 51). Then he’d give Zetland the money. Though Arlo despises conventional morality, he is generous and not without family feeling. “For a person who agreed verbatim with Marx and Engels on the bourgeois family and sex relations, it was curious how he doted on his cranky mother, his screwy brother Waldo” (“Charm and Death,” p. 25). To outsiders or the unhip, the Posters could be snide and superior. “Willy & Herb, schmuck-baiters” begins an undated entry in Rosenfeld’s journals.97 Wallace Markfield, who fictionalizes Rosenfeld and his circle in the novel To an
Early Grave (1964) (later a 1968 film by Sidney Lumet, Bye Bye Braverman), has them taunt the novel’s narrator for his respectable job and new suit. “A m’chyah … Look at the quality, look at the tailoring. How nice it hangs.”98 Despite their affluence, the Hahns despise appearances, or affect to despise them, living in worse squalor than the Zetlands, “in bleaker filth than anyone, on carpetless boards, grimy folding canvas chairs … pullchain toilet never washed” (“Charm and Death,” p. 51).

  The other prominent bohemian from the “Zetland” manuscripts is A. Z. Crocker (in one manuscript “Al Dinborg”), “a Marxian with a detailed interest in finance and bourgeois politics” (“Charm and Death,” p. 22). Crocker is modeled, in part, on David Bazelon, who moved from writing to finance to law. He, too, has money, compensation for an accident (railroad in “Charm and Death,” traffic in “Zetland”), in which he lost an arm, as had his model, who lost his arm at the age of seven. Crocker is smart, unillusioned, as much of a womanizer as the Hahns (in his journals, Rosenfeld alludes to “our famous phrase about ‘marriage as a base of operations’ ”99), and if anything tougher on Zetland’s “innocence” than they are. Bazelon shared this toughness, which he partly attributed to the loss of his arm: “This [the accident] stimulated my mind ahead of time, or out of sequence, and this led almost immediately, I think, to two different but simultaneous distortions of emphasis: (1) I sought too much outside my own physical being for compensatory jurisdiction (control in fact and by right) of my own body; and (2) I became both internally and externally imperialist as to the jurisdiction of the mind—my own and others.”100 The narrator of “Charm and Death” hates the cynical “imperialist” character of these friends of Zetland—hates the friends themselves, for contributing to Zet’s ruination—but gives their account of him its due:

  A. Z. Crocker and Arlo Hahn were advanced intellectuals, Modernists. They held a tough point of view. Zetland saw them clearly enough. He was not about to follow their example, not about to surrender the soul-beliefs and love-beliefs, but part of their harshness was realistic. One must stop faking. Acknowledge lack of feeling and be free from false feeling at least. Live in the shadow side of what used to be the soul. Be the dead man that in reality you are. Be dead to the old tyranny of the Good and step away from the metaphysical police of Moses and Mt. Sinai (p. 52).

  Crocker’s assault on Zetland’s beliefs is discharged “like an electrified iron mass through the trifling sociability of Village parties and encounters” (p. 21). He wants Zet to write porn, “Lots of good guys do,” partly for money, partly because “it was precisely the task of talent to dismantle itself, degrade itself as harshly as possible so as to elude exploitation and not to fool itself into collaboration with the social order” (p. 22). Here is Crocker on “enthusiasm,” a particular bugbear to Village bohemians: “He’s got that visionary, enthusiastic pastrami-fat gleam in his eye, the poor prick! Listen to him when he gets going about Transcendentalism. He gets that saleable glow. How do you think he got the job at Fortune?” (p. 23).101 In the “Zetland” manuscript, Zet is criticized by a Francophile Village type who complains, “Il nous fait la morale!” (p. 40). In “Zetland and Quine,” another “Zetland” manuscript, which combines elements of “Charm and Death” with “Far Out,” Zetland is accused by “opinion in the Village” of “lacking the iron of Modernism, in either Nietzschean or Leninist hardness” (p. 9). Throughout the “Zetland” manuscripts, the protagonist is too high-minded for his bohemian circle, clinging to his standards “in spite of all, even when he felt like chopping up everyone with an axe and hanging himself from the frontroom ceiling” (p. 50). For Partisan Review types, in contrast, he is lightweight, unserious, a disappointment after the initial wunderkind or shoyne boychick phase:

  Occasionally he published a bright essay, and wrote an unusually good style, but he got above himself now and then, tried to be serious beyond his means. The leading German and Italian refugee intellectuals didn’t think much of him. His culture was patched together, American style, no Greek and Latin; he was neither a native American Wildman nor a cultivated Wasp. The leading German bluestocking [Hannah Arendt comes to mind] dismissed him. It may have gotten back to her that he said she resembled George Arliss in the role of Disraeli. But if it didn’t it was sufficient that he had misbehaved at one of her evenings and he wasn’t asked uptown again to eat Dobuschtorte and to hear the lady speak of Heidegger or the Mass Society. In such circles, Xinnie [the Vasiliki figure] of course had no standing at all. She was only the pretty Macedonian woman married to that Ostjude Village character from Chicago. Such snubs put Zetland in a rage.… He swore he’d get this arrogant Krautess or that Dago litterateur who patronized him (“Zetland,” pp. 43–44).

  For all Bellow’s wariness of the Partisan Review crowd, he was closer to its view of Rosenfeld than to the views of bohemians like the Posters. He despised the flip sarcasms of Village types, their abyss mongering and self-absorption, their sloth, their sneering at bourgeois careerists, himself included.102 Above all he despised them for the effect he thought they had on Rosenfeld. “Village life, as he interpreted it,” Bellow wrote to Rosenfeld’s son, George Sarant, in a letter of September 9, 1990, “was his undoing. I don’t entirely blame the village, but his liberation degenerated into personal anarchy.” “He did not follow the fat gods,” Bellow wrote of Rosenfeld after his death. “I think he liked the miserable failures in the Village better than the miserable successes Uptown, but I believe he had not understood that the failures had not failed enough but were fairly well satisfied with the mild form of social revolt which their incomplete ruin represented.”103

  These accounts of Rosenfeld and his circle came decades after the 1940s. The “Zetland” manuscripts are from the 1970s and their disapproval of Village bohemianism may not accurately reflect Bellow’s feelings at the time, or so the correspondence suggests. In letters of 1948 and 1949 to David Bazelon, for example, Bellow writes as a friend of long standing, offering advice, helping Bazelon to find work, inviting him to visit (in Minneapolis, in Paris). Though he objects to some of Bazelon’s views, characterizing them as Village orthodoxy, he does so without rancor. In a letter of January 5, 1948, he defends The Victim against Bazelon’s strictures: “I do think that Village sensibility has peculiar dangers. In the Village where so much desire is fixed on so few ends, and those constantly narrowing ends, there is a gain in intensity and a leak and loss in the respect of solidity. The Village is too unfriendly to the common, much too Gnostic. Besides, the novelist labors in character, not in psychology, which is easier and swifter.… The Villagers are poetic theorists in psychology and consider a vision of character naive when it fails to satisfy their hunger for extremes.” The judgment recalls Bellow’s letter to Harold Rosenberg on the greater capacity of Herzog to change the world than any essay in Encounter. The letter ends “Love,” as does a letter of May 27, 1948, which makes the same point in respect to anthropology, which, Bellow tells Bazelon, “doesn’t consider people at full depth. Anti-poetic, therefore basically unfaithful. Mere botanizing.”

  Only at the end of 1949, on December 3, does Bellow’s friendly tone change, when he answers what he calls a “horrible and wolfish” letter from Bazelon (about a woman who had hurt Bazelon and with whom Bellow was on friendly terms). Bellow reacts angrily to the letter, characterizing Bazelon in terms that recall A. Z. Crocker and the Hahns. “Though I have often put up with your thinking me so,” Bellow writes, “I am not stupid.… Had our friendship rested, childishly, on ‘literary loyalty’ we’d have been through long before this. You must think me an idiot if you believe I haven’t known for years what attitude you took toward it” (his work, that is). Two days later, Bellow writes to Tarcov about Bazelon’s “hideous letter” and its naive assumption that he hadn’t known “what opinion his Hudson Street friends had of my writing.” From this moment on, the correspondence falls away, as does the friendship.104 What the correspondence makes clear is that in the 1940s, though Bel
low saw in Rosenfeld and his friends what the narrators of the “Zetland” manuscripts saw (the narratives are retrospective, hence “saw”), he was closer and more sympathetic to them, certainly to Bazelon, than the manuscripts suggest. This is particularly true in respect to a prominent plot strand in the manuscripts not yet discussed: their accounts of Zetland’s interest in the theories of Wilhelm Reich and in Reichian therapy. Bellow’s depiction of Reichian theory and therapy is devastating in the “Zetland” manuscripts (as it is in “Far Out,” where they also figure prominently), but in the late 1940s he himself was drawn to both. By 1951, he admitted to Norman Manea, he had “turned into a follower of Wilhelm Reich.”105

  IN 1945, when Bellow enlisted in the Merchant Marine, he was assigned to the Atlantic District Headquarters of the U.S. Maritime Service in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. He chose the Merchant Marine for several reasons: the recruiters had assured him he’d have plenty of time to write once training was over, certainly more than he’d have in other service branches (as Daniel Bell put it, “the merchant marine was an easier life,” with fewer “rigidities” than the navy or army); he knew he’d be stationed in New York, at least initially; and, as both Bell and Harold Kaplan suggested, there was a tradition of Trotskyists and ex-Trotskyists joining the Merchant Marine. Bell explains this last reason: “It was partly that you weren’t participating in an imperialist war. It was also—a curious thing—that the insurance was always handed over to the Party [in the case of unmarried men, who made up the majority of enlistees, the Party was named as beneficiary], a great potential source of income both for the Communist Party and the Trotskyist branch.” Great because insurance for the Merchant Marine was especially high, given the danger of wartime voyages: 733 American cargo ships were lost in waters off enemy shores during World War II; crew members died at a rate of one out of twenty-six.106 One final reason for choosing the Merchant Marine was offered by Bellow himself: “the war in Europe was then coming to an end,”107 effectively removing the principal drawback to the service: its extreme danger. In The Adventures of Augie March, Augie, too, becomes a merchant mariner. Although he shares Bellow’s political leanings and something of his history, he says he joined the service because of a recent hernia operation (like the one Bellow had in the summer of 1944), which meant “I still wasn’t acceptable to the Army or the Navy” (p. 914).