The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Yet Beach was good to Bellow. At Warren’s urging, he got him both a raise and a chance to teach literature courses as well as composition courses. After Bellow complained to Warren about having to mark freshman composition papers, Beach turned up to one of his classes unannounced: “I was terrified out of my wits, but I got through it somehow.”14 Shortly afterward, he advanced Bellow from the rank of instructor to assistant professor, raising his salary by a thousand dollars. Nor could Beach be called narrowly academic. He helped to found the interdisciplinary Humanities Program, wrote books on James, Hardy, Meredith, contemporary American fiction, Auden’s revisions, and eighteenth-century English poetry. He also wrote poetry, publishing his second volume two years before Bellow arrived. Educated at Harvard, where he later taught, and patrician in appearance (Warren described him as “a grand old gent”), a hiker, swimmer, tennis player, and enthusiastic dancer at parties, Beach could be warm and open in his friendships.15 Bellow was never an intimate, but he got on with Beach. With Alburey Castell, cofounder of the Humanities Program, in Mitzi’s words, “Saul actually became close.” He also had good relations with the eighteenth-century scholar Samuel Holt Monk, successor to Beach as chair of English, and author of an influential book on the sublime. “Sam Monk is wonderful,” he reported to Warren in a letter of November 17, 1947, “as you probably know” (to Bazelon, in an undated letter from autumn 1948, he called Monk “a very decent, generous and intelligent guy”). Mitzi took a graduate course in nineteenth-century poetry with Monk and describes him as “richer and fuller in person than some of the others … and he was warm.” Henry Nash Smith, a Texan with graduate degrees from Harvard’s pioneering American Civilization program, founder of the myth and symbol school of the interpretation of American literature, helped to establish American Studies at Minnesota, another interdisciplinary program. In 1949, Leo Marx, also from the Harvard program, joined the English Department, mostly to work with Smith in American Studies. Marx was Jewish and Smith had taught him in 1945–46 at Harvard as a visiting professor.

  Other factors aside from ethnicity and scholarly narrowness played a part in Bellow’s wariness of English Department types. Senior faculty at Minnesota lived comfortably, often in what Warren’s biographer, Joseph Blotner, calls “English cottage-style houses.”16 The Minneapolis suburbs are rich in parks and lakes, with excellent facilities for swimming, riding, picnicking. The professors socialized together: Warren and Brown were lakeside neighbors, often walking the paths along Lake Calhoun or Lake of the Isles; Beach’s wife, Dagmar, and Warren’s wife, Cinina, shared confidences and early afternoon drinks. The Bellows lived in a Quonset hut. “Mpls. is the middle bourgeois kingdom,” Bellow wrote to Bazelon on November 12, 1946, “it is fat, it shines, it gleams by day and smells of low pleasures by night.” “There were several worlds,” Mitzi McClosky reports. “Ours was one where he was very comfortable. We had a lot of displaced Easterners and people that Saul could easily mix with. But then there was the English Department.” Bellow left no record of English Department colleagues snubbing him or treating him discourteously, “but Saul always felt like he was on display, not paranoid, because he was justified in knowing those feelings were there.” Parties were particularly difficult. “The Beaches had a lot of social life,” Mitzi recalls, “and I remember one day we went to a picnic that the Beaches provided and all the time Saul was just so fearful of insult and feeling out of place. I just remember the look on Saul’s face, the nostrils would quiver, the lips would quiver. He was like a sensitive race horse ready to bolt.” These were the months when Bellow was at work on the last chapters of The Victim, delivered on January 7, 1947.17 The gathering paranoia and prejudice in the novel may have been exacerbated by comparable feelings in Bellow, or they may have helped to produce those feelings.

  BELLOW’S PREOCCUPATION WITH anti-Semitism in the mid-1940s was theoretical as well as personal or historical. It was also shared by the intellectual world that mattered most to him. In the spring of 1946, his friend Harold Kaplan, “Kappy” to all who knew him, edited a special issue of Partisan Review entitled “New French Writing.” Kaplan had served in North Africa during the war, and after VE Day was seconded to the American embassy in Paris, where he was to stay for many years. He had written his doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago on Proust, spoke fluent French, and had published stories and articles in PR in addition to its most recent “Letter from Paris.” The “New French Writing” issue contained contributions from Camus, Sartre, Malraux, Valéry, and Genet, among others, and reviews of and about French writers (by William Barrett, Delmore Schwartz, and Clement Greenberg). Camus’s contribution was “Two Chapters from ‘The Myth of Sisyphus,’ ” Sartre’s was “Portrait of an Anti-Semite,” an English translation of the first half of Réflexions sur la question juive (1946), published in English in 1948 as Anti-Semite and Jew. Sartre’s contribution provoked much debate in intellectual circles, as did further installments that appeared in Commentary the following year, with influential responses from Sidney Hook and Bellow’s friend Harold Rosenberg.18 Lionel Abel describes the Sartre essay as “more talked about than any other intellectual effort of the period.”19 “I shared immediately in the excitement,” Irving Howe recalls of the debate it sparked, “it was tremendously stimulating.”20 What helped to make “Portrait of an Anti-Semite” so controversial, according to Howe, was the “pungent detail which is Sartre’s specialty.” In illustrating the prevalence of anti-Semitism in France, Sartre offers a scattering of remarks and acts attributed to unnamed acquaintances. These include the talentless young actor “who asserted that the Jews kept him from having a career in the theatre by always giving him servile jobs”; the classmate at the lycée who lost his scholarship to a Jew (“You’re not going to try to make me believe that that fellow whose father came from Krakow or Lemberg understood one of Ronsard’s poems or one of Virgil’s ecologues better than I”); the fishmonger who denounced competitors as Jews, a fact they were hiding, thus exposing them to deportation to the camps; the woman who took a Polish Jew as a lover, but only let him caress her breasts and shoulders. “She got enormous pleasure,” Sartre explains, “from the fact that he was respectful and submissive and also from the fact that she divined his violently frustrated and humiliated desire.”21

  In a letter of July 15, 1983, to the composer George Rochberg, Bellow picks up on a point implicit in Sartre’s anecdote about the anti-Semitic woman. “Not long ago,” Bellow writes, “I was reading a chapter from the memoirs of a goofy old pal of mine, Lionel Abel. He writes that he went to the movies with his mother in 1946, and in the newsreel they were shown the corpses of Jews rotted and falling apart as the bulldozers pushed them towards excavated pits. Abel’s mother said, ‘We Jews will never survive the disgrace of this.’ To be victimized in this manner brought the Jews into disgrace. Others have no use for people who have been victimized to such a degree, and they have no use for themselves.” Before the newsreels and firsthand accounts, what happened to the Jews in Europe, Bellow elsewhere recalls, “remained the Jewish Question instead of the horror it should have been.”22 As Hook put it, in his review of Anti-Semite and Jew in Partisan Review (May 1949), the truth of the Holocaust changed everything: “That they died was one blow; how they died another; the way the rest of the world reacted to the news a third” (p. 465). Bellow was never one to turn the other cheek, but in 1946 he was especially vigilant, powered by a visceral sense of the disgrace, the humiliation, of the blows Hook enumerates. The vigilance had its dangers. In The Victim they are seen most vividly in a passage describing Leventhal’s father:

  Ruf mir Yoshke, ruf mir Moshke,

  Aber gib mir die groschke

  “Call me Ikey, call me Moe, but give me the dough. What’s it to me if you despise me? What do you think equality with you means to me? What do you have that I care about except the groschen?” That was his father’s view. But not his. He rejected it and recoiled from it. Anyway, his father had lived po
or and died poor, that stern, proud old fool with his savage looks, to whom nothing mattered save his advantage and to be freed by money from the power of his enemies. And who were the enemies? The world, everyone. They were imaginary (p. 232).

  Bellow, like Leventhal, was determined to call out his enemies, but he also wanted to avoid paranoia, with its resulting alienation. Father Leventhal’s “view” is clearly self-defeating. At the same time, Bellow writes this view with relish, as in the relish he brings to Father Zetland’s “furious Jewish snobbery.”23

  IN DECEMBER, after Bellow’s promotion and raise, the family was able to move to a modest shingle house at 2225 Hillside Avenue in St. Paul. They stayed here for less than a year, the owner having put the house on the market in May. Greg was now two, the age at which Bellow taught him to point first to his ass, then to his elbow, declaring him “Smarter than most Harvard graduates.” Earlier, he’d taught him to eat herring. In his “Biographic Sketch” of his mother, Greg paints the first year in Minnesota as a harmonious time. “Saul and Anita were seen as a team—two stars much equal and admired—though Saul shone above all.” Drawing on recollections from his mother and friends of his parents, he describes Bellow as “very considerate and respectful with Anita at home and in public. He took a role in household duties and came home to play with me while Anita made dinner.” Mitzi McClosky recalls, “No matter what, around 4pm Saul would get up and say ‘I’ve got to go home and play with my kid.’ ”24 Mitzi describes the Anita of these years as steady and straightforward: “always herself … very solid. She wasn’t afraid of anyone, I don’t think, and she would just be herself.” At social occasions Anita usually talked with the women, “and a lot of times she just didn’t go [because of Greg].” But when present, “she held her own, she was a very truth-telling person. What she thought, she said, and she said it clearly and bravely.” She was “a formidable woman.” This is an impression shared by Max Kampelman, who boarded with the Bellows the following year: “She was a wonderful wife, in my judgment, she balanced him. She needled him, little digs to him, but a wonderful person.” The digs were teasing not cruel: “Anita was tolerant of him, it seems to me”; “Saul was not an easy person.”

  In 1955 Bellow published a story in The New Yorker that reveals something of his ambivalence about marriage and fatherhood. By this date the marriage to Anita was over. Gregory was eleven. The story, “A Father-to-Be,” concerns a man quite unlike Bellow, in circumstances quite different from Bellow’s. Rogin, a thirty-one-year-old research chemist on his way to supper at his fiancée’s apartment, is burdened with responsibilities: the fiancée has debts and bills that he’s helping to pay, he’s putting his younger brother through college, his mother’s annuity doesn’t cover her expenses. Joan, the fiancée, is beautiful, well educated, happy, and “aristocratic in attitude”: “She didn’t worry about money. She had a marvelous character, always cheerful.”25 At Christmas, Joan buys Rogin “a velvet smoking jacket with frog fasteners, a beautiful pipe and a pouch.… Before she was through she had spent five hundred dollars of Rogin’s money” (p. 144). Neither Anita nor the woman Bellow left her for, the woman he was involved with when writing “A Father-to-Be,” was like this woman. It is the larger feelings in the story that are revealing.

  On the subway to Joan’s apartment, Rogin takes note of a young man sitting next to him:

  This was a man whom he had never in his life seen before but with whom he now suddenly felt linked through all existence. He was middle-aged, sturdy, with clear skin and blue eyes. His hands were clean, well formed, but Rogin did not approve of them. The coat he wore was a fairly expensive blue check such as Rogin would never have chosen for himself.… There are all kinds of dandies, not all of them are the flaunting kind; some are dandies of respectability, and Rogin’s fellow passenger was one of these. His straight-nosed profile was handsome, yet he had betrayed his gift, for he was flat-looking. But in his flat way he seemed to warn people that he wanted no difficulties with them, he wanted nothing to do with them (p. 150).

  The “gift” the young man betrays, his good looks, he chooses to mute or flatten, as he does his clothing, which is blandly conservative and expensive; he “seemed to draw about himself a circle of privilege, notifying all others to mind their own business” (p. 150). What most upsets Rogin about the young man’s appearance, however, is its familiarity:

  His clear skin and blue eyes, his straight and purely Roman nose—even the way he sat—all strongly suggested one person to Rogin: Joan. He tried to escape the comparison but it couldn’t be helped. This man not only looked like Joan’s father, whom Rogin detested; he looked like Joan herself. Forty years hence, a son of hers, provided she had one, might be like this. A son of hers? Of such a son, he himself, Rogin, would be the father. Lacking in dominant traits as compared with Joan, his heritage would not appear. Probably the children would resemble her. Yes, think forty years ahead, and a man like this, who sat by him knee to knee in the hurtling car among their fellow creatures, unconscious participants in a sort of great carnival of transit—such a man would carry forward what had been Rogin (pp. 150–51).

  This vision frightens and moves Rogin, “the pity of it almost made him burst into tears” (p. 151). He thinks of the effort required to negotiate a life and the tricks life plays on one: “The whole thing was so unjust. To suffer, to labor, to toil … only to become the father of a fourth-rate man of the world like this, so flat-looking with his ordinary, clean, rosy, uninteresting, self-satisfied, fundamentally bourgeois face. What a curse to have a dull son! A son like this, who could never understand his father. They had absolutely nothing, but nothing, in common, he and this neat, chubby, blue-eyed man” (p. 151). Rogin considers the wider implications of having such a son: “personal aims were nothing, illusion. The life force occupied each of us in turn in its progress towards its own fulfillment, trampling on our individual humanity, using us for its own ends like mere dinosaurs or bees” (p. 152). So exercised does Rogin become by these thoughts that he arrives at Joan’s apartment determined to break off the engagement. For a woman, he thinks, being used like this by biology is “inevitable”: “But did it have to be inevitable for him? Well, then, Rogin, you fool, don’t be a damned instrument. Get out of the way!”; “I won’t be used, he declared to himself. I have my own right to exist. Joan had better watch out” (p. 152).

  Rogin arrives at the apartment dusted with snow, having walked from the subway. Joan greets him with a kiss and a smile, wearing an expensive housecoat that “suited her very well” (p. 153). After fetching a towel to dry the melting snow from his head, she insists on washing his matted hair. “Full of his troubled emotions,” Rogin rehearses the things he plans to say to her: “Do you think I was born to be taken advantage of and sacrificed? Do you think I’m just a natural resource, like a coal mine, or oil well, or fishery, or the like? Remember, that I’m a man is no reason I should be loaded down.” In the bathroom, Joan makes Rogin take off his shirt, then brings a stool in from the kitchen. She sits him down against the cool enamel of the basin as “the green, hot, radiant water reflecting the glass and the tile, and the sweet, cool, fragrant shampoo poured on his head.” This is how the story ends:

  “You have the healthiest-looking scalp,” she said. “It’s all pink.”

  He answered, “Well, it should be white. There must be something wrong with me.”

  “But there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you,” she said, and pressed against him from behind, surrounding him, pouring the water gently over him until it seemed to him that the water came from within him, it was the warm fluid of his own secret loving spirit overflowing into the sink, green and foaming, and the words he had rehearsed he forgot, and his anger at his son-to-be disappeared altogether, and he sighed, and said to her from the water-filled hollow of the sink, “You always have such wonderful ideas, Joan. You know? You have a kind of instinct, a regular gift” (pp. 154–55).

  Rogin’s anxieties—his fears of an
impersonal life force “trampling on our individual humanity”—are washed away by a loving, motherly woman: “She began to kiss him, saying, ‘Oh, my baby. You’re covered with snow. Why didn’t you wear your hat? It’s all over its little head’—her favorite third-person endearment” (pp. 152–53). Such women appear elsewhere in Bellow’s fiction. In Herzog, Ramona Donsell soothes frantic Moses, easing off his shoes, cooking him shrimp Arnaud, putting black lace panties on under her dress. Ramona promises Moses “comprehensive happiness” (p. 603), will lead him from “wild internal disorder” (p. 619), “hatred and fanatical infighting,” to married bliss, family bliss, for “she senses that I am for the family … I am a family type” (p. 616). Moses is a family type, loves his brothers and parents, loves his children, Marco and little Junie, when he thinks of them; like Rogin, he has a “secret loving spirit.” He also values domestic order: “clean shirts, ironed handkerchiefs, heels on his shoes” (p. 620). Ramona provides these services and more, like sexy Joan, who presses her body against Rogin’s back as she washes his hair. Renata Koffritz, in Humboldt’s Gift, is even sexier, a wild child of the 1960s, but Renata, too, is keen on marriage and family. George Swiebel, the David Peltz character in Humboldt, approves of Renata: “She’s a good cook. She’s lively. She has plants and knick-knacks and the lights are on and the kitchen is steaming and goy music plays” (p. 190). Charlie Citrine concurs, though what he most loves is Renata’s “cheerfulness” (p. 342). Yet for Charlie, for Moses, and, one suspects, for Rogin, the “comprehensive happiness” offered by such women is not enough. As Naomi Lutz, Charlie’s first love, puts it: “Do you think they’re really going to give you the kind of help and comfort you’re looking for? … It’s like an instinct with women.… You communicate to them what you have to have and right away they tell you they’ve got exactly what you need, although they never even heard of it until just now. They’re not even necessarily lying. They just have an instinct that they can supply everything that a man can ask for, and they’re ready to take on any size or shape or type of man. That’s what they’re like.… Then you award the contract. Of course nobody can deliver and everybody gets sore as hell” (p. 296). What Charlie wants, and Renata can’t deliver, is what Moses and Rogin want: a sense, to quote from one of Moses’s letters, “that life may complete itself in significant pattern. Some incomprehensible way. Before death. Not irrationally but incomprehensibly fulfilled” (p. 724).