The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Rogin’s imagined dull son signals the indifference of the life force to “significant pattern” (or “personal aims,” “individual humanity”). To the extent that women are in tune with the life force—embody it, are driven by it, identify with it—they share this indifference, finding their men mystifying. Bellow sees comedy as well as pathos in this situation, sometimes siding with the women, by depicting their men as childish, whiny, impossible; sometimes siding with the men, to whom the women are variously stolid, limited, endearingly vulnerable.26 The situation the men put the women in is unfair. Bellow’s male characters seek them out because they promise order, stability, certainty, the pleasures of wife, lover, homemaker, and mother combined. The closest of these women to Anita is Daisy in Herzog, “an utterly steady, reliable woman, responsible to the point of grimness.” As we have seen, Moses blames himself for her increasing rigidity and stolidity: “By my irregularity and turbulence of spirit I brought out the very worst in Daisy. I caused the seams of her stockings to be so straight, and the buttons to be buttoned symmetrically. I was behind those rigid curtains and underneath the square carpets. Roast breast of veal every Sunday with bread stuffing like clay was due to my disorders, my huge involvement—huge but evidently formless—in the history of thought.” Daisy does not scoff at this involvement—“She took Moses’ word for it that he was seriously occupied”—but she does not understand it, respecting it as “a wife’s duty” (p. 543) rather than a human duty. Anita was proud of Bellow’s fiction, made material sacrifices for it, for the “significant pattern” it represented to him and to his readers. Nor was the order or meaning she sought in life merely domestic or personal. She sought it in her work as well, and she worked all her life (excepting Greg’s first five years), as an administrator in hospitals, with health providers, welfare agencies. She sought it also in politics, to which she remained committed, as Bellow grew increasingly disenchanted.

  What makes “A Father-to-Be” memorable is its willingness to enlist our sympathy for a father who subordinates paternal love to “higher values,” despising the son he imagines. Dr. Adler in Seize the Day despises Tommy Wilhelm, his son, but is himself despicable. Elsewhere in Bellow’s fiction, love or care of children, not always one’s own children, is itself the higher value. In the final pages of Henderson the Rain King and Humboldt’s Gift, recovery or growth is signaled by protection of a child (the orphaned Persian boy Henderson cares for on the flight back to the United States, the son Renata leaves with Charlie at the Ritz in Madrid). In The Victim, Leventhal’s concern for his nephews is wholly admirable: “He traveled two hours in order to spend ten minutes in Mickey’s [hospital] room” (p. 269); “he would go to any lengths” (p. 356) to save Philip, Micky’s older brother. In Herzog, Moses’s return to sanity is set in motion by episodes involving the welfare of Junie, his daughter, but his deficiencies as a parent are also emphasized, a product in part of concern for the survival of “his heritage” (Rogin’s term, a preoccupation also of Joseph in Dangling Man, whose obnoxious niece, Etta, “must be aware of the resemblance she bears to me” [p. 42]27). In Moses’s outings with Marco, the child of his marriage to Daisy, both father and son are awkward and bored. Moses prepares for these outings by memorizing facts and stories to entertain the boy, otherwise “the time passed heavily” (p. 519). Marco tries his best to look interested: “The child would not reject his well-meant gift. There was love in that, thought Herzog.… These children and I love one another. But what can I give them? Marco would look at him with clear eyes, his pale child’s face, the Herzog face, freckled, his hair crew-cut, by his own choice, and somewhat alien. He had his Grandmother Herzog’s mouth.” Moses measures Marco for Herzog traits, seeking out his heritage in his son. “Well, okay, kid, I’ve got to go back to Philadelphia now,” he tells him, though “he felt, on the contrary, nothing necessary about this return to Philadelphia” (p. 520).

  IN A LETTER of May 13, 1947, Bellow told Henle that he did not know if his contract at Minnesota would be renewed. By mid-June, all was well. Not only had the renewal come through, but Bellow was invited by Russell Cooper, associate dean of SLA (Science, Literature, and the Arts), to accompany a group of students traveling to Spain for the summer. It was just what Bellow needed, he wrote to David Bazelon, “a marvellous break.” “Henle’ll probably kill me for skipping out without reading proof of The Victim, but I can’t pass up the opportunity to take a paid trip, just as I couldn’t pass up the opportunity Britannica offered me of a paid education.”28 Bellow had been working flat out to finish The Victim, he wrote to Henle, living, as was quoted previously, “on benzedrine tablets”; to Mitzi McClosky he complained of feeling “old and worn down.” He had been impossible to live with for months, Anita complained to the McCloskys, irritable, inaccessible. When Herb said something like “Don’t worry, it’s what you get with genius,” Anita replied, “Genius, shmenius, his father’s the same way.”

  The McCloskys heard complaints from both sides. Those from Bellow they heard on board ship, for they, too, were taking a student group to Europe, to England not Spain. There were, in fact, three groups of students traveling to Europe, one to Spain, one to England, one to France. Each group was accompanied by a faculty advisor nominated by the students. When the students chose Herb McClosky for the England trip, he suggested Bellow for the Spain trip, or seconded a student suggestion that Bellow be chosen, probably from Robert Johnson, who had taken one of Bellow’s Humanities courses and was a great admirer. Johnson was among the oldest of the student leaders who devised the study abroad program, one of the first in the United States (today arranging exchanges to more than seventy-five countries). The name he and his fellow students chose for the program reflected their idealism: Student Project for Amity Among Nations (SPAN). Its aims, as described in publicity material, are to “satisfy [a] growing curiosity about the world outside the United States and simultaneously make a contribution to a better world.”29 The program was funded by local businesses and had an academic component, which had to be approved by the university. Students were required to devise a project, supervised by a faculty member, for which they received course credit. Bellow’s duties were to meet with his students once a week in a café in Madrid to discuss their projects. There were ten of them, six men and four women. Some of the male students, like Johnson, were not much younger than Bellow; as he recalled to Barbara Probst Solomon in a letter of September 26, 1997, they “had no need of my guidance.” The female students “did need my guidance, but never asked for it. There was only one pregnancy.”

  This was Bellow’s first trip to Europe. It would have been Anita’s first trip, too, but shortly before departure the faculty advisors were informed that the ship, the Marine Jumper, a converted cargo vessel, would not be safe for small children. Anita was forced to stay behind with Greg, an arrangement she may have welcomed, given Bellow’s recent irritability, or so Mitzi suspected. Once the ship set sail, on June 21, Anita and Greg went off to Wisconsin for a two-week holiday, described in a letter of July 23, 1947, to Evelyn Shrifte of Vanguard as “at a Kosher resort with my in-laws—it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.” Mother and son returned to Chicago rather than Minneapolis after the holiday, living with the Goshkins. “I shall be staying here till Saul comes back,” she wrote again to Shrifte. “I don’t see much point in staying in Minneapolis alone for the rest of the summer.” In Chicago, Anita spent her days looking after Greg, visiting friends from Hyde Park, and dealing with Bellow’s correspondence. A publication date for the novel had to be set. The galleys of The Victim were missing the opening quotation from The Arabian Nights, she reported to Shrifte in the letter of July 23. “I know Saul would be very much upset if this was not in the book.”

  The crossing took nine nights and was rough, both uncomfortable and tedious. Passengers slept in narrow bunks, twelve to a room, women and men segregated. Bellow was seasick for the first few days, though fine by the time the ship docked at Le Havre.30 From the do
ck the three groups traveled to Paris, where the Spanish group stayed for a week (the McCloskys and the English students went directly to London). Bellow was put up by the Kaplans and the students stayed at a hotel on the Left Bank. The train trip to Madrid took two days and began inauspiciously. “One of his students was left on the platform in Paris,” Anita reported in the July 23 letter to Shrifte, “two others left their luggage in the station and so on. He is having his troubles. He sounds rather lonely and depressed.” The journey itself was hard. For two nights Bellow got no sleep; the crowded compartment was filthy. In the “Spanish Letter” Bellow wrote for Partisan Review (February 15, 1948), he begins with the last link of this journey, on the express train from Irun, a Basque town on the Spain-France border, to Madrid. A Spanish gentleman suddenly engages Bellow in conversation, “not casually, by design, preventing me from looking at the ships in the silver, coal-streaked evening water” (p. 181). The man has “measuring, aggressive, melancholy eyes” and speaks to Bellow in minute detail about hydroelectric power, on the grounds that “we were American and therefore interested in mechanical subjects,” the first of several ignorant assumptions about Americans Bellow records. The man comes from a military family, is a Franco supporter, has fought in Russia and Poland “against the Reds,” and is now in the police. He makes the Irun–Madrid journey three times a week. “Tired of his conversation and of humoring him,” Bellow “refused to respond, and at last he was silent” (p. 183). On the station platform in Madrid, he sees the man taking careful note of the name on the side of his group’s hotel bus. When Bellow catches his eye, he looks away. “Presumably he had to know where I was staying in Madrid to complete his report” (p. 184). The opening sentence of the “Spanish Letter” reads: “The police come first to your notice in Spain, taking precedence over the people, the streets, and the landscape” (p. 181).

  ON THE Marine Jumper, Bellow met a passenger named Francisco García Lorca, a handsome, dapper professor of Spanish Literature at Columbia, the younger brother, editor, and translator of the poet Federico García Lorca, who had been shot and killed by anti-Republican forces in 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. According to Atlas, the brother provided Bellow with an introduction to a circle of Madrid intellectuals and writers “that gathered in a café near Bellow’s pension in the Puerta del Sol; its members included the Basque novelist Pío Baroja y Nessi, the literary journalist Ernesto [J]iménez Caballero, and various members of the anti-Franco underground.”31 In an interview with Keith Botsford, Bellow described what sounds like this circle as “a tertulia [a salon, usually held in a public place rather than a home] in the café near my pension, which was in the middle of Puerta del Sol. I had a letter to some people—Germans, who had been journalists during the Civil War. They received me and introduced me to people like Jiménez [sic] Caballero, a fascist and a literary man in the Cortes, with whom I had a few dinners.”32

  It is not clear from the Botsford interview whether “people like Jiménez Caballero” (Pío Baroja, for example, himself a sort of fascist, or fascist precursor) were part of the Puerta del Sol tertulia or belonged to a separate circle, the one described by Atlas, which numbered “various members of the anti-Franco underground.” It seems strange that members of the anti-Franco underground should be meeting at Puerta del Sol, a square in the heart of the city’s historical district, for in 1947 the most prominent building in Puerta del Sol housed the Dirección General de Seguridad, Franco’s security police. “The broad face of Seguridad,” Bellow writes in the “Spanish Letter,” “dominates the Puerta del Sol with barred and darkened windows” (p. 184). It was also strange that fascists and members of the anti-Franco underground should be members of the same circle. But Giménez Caballero was an unusual supporter of Franco, being both anti-Nazi and philo-Semitic, and if Pío Baroja was a fascist, he was a fascist much admired by John Dos Passos and Hemingway. These complications, together with the simple fact of being in Europe, with so much new to take in and assimilate, checked or softened Bellow’s quickness to take offense. He was storing up impressions, holding his cards close to his chest, as in Taxco. That Spain was impoverished, defeated, unthreatening, helped him to do so. “The place was still shot up,” he recalled to Botsford. “Madrid itself was like a throwback to a much earlier time. The streetcars, for instance, were strictly Toonerville trolleys.”33

  Bellow’s dinners with Giménez Caballero must have taken place at Horcher, an elegant wood-paneled restaurant with views over the Retiro, the city’s largest park. Horcher is a German restaurant, something of a Madrid institution. It was a favorite meeting place of German journalists and soon became a Bellow hangout. At Horcher he got to know “quite a few Fascists as well as the Papal Nuncio. And I had a lady friend who had been employed by the Nazi embassy. Very charming German lady and still quite young” (no doubt the “blonde, buxom girl” Atlas says Bellow had an affair with while in the city, “the secretary of the head of the Spanish secret police”). Horcher was also where Bellow met the son of the Prussian chancellor Bernhard von Bülow. “Since when does a kid from Chicago get to meet a papal nuncio?” Bellow recalled asking himself. Or have dinner at the “Nunciatura.” At this dinner, one of the nuncio’s assistants, an Italian, told him, “these Spaniards were not Europeans—son moros, they are Moors. They don’t really belong to the European community.” The German lady was similarly dismissive, claiming the Spanish “had no real feelings.… They really are heartless.” For Pío Baroja, in contrast, it was Germans who were heartless, though, as he told Bellow, “at first I could not believe that they were burning their captives in ovens” (“Spanish Letter,” p. 194). “Madrid in 1947 was a great eye-opener for me,” Bellow told Botsford. “I met a great many Spaniards; it was my first prolonged contact with Europeans and the European intellectual.”34

  The interest these intellectuals took in Bellow, he claimed, was mostly a product of his being an American. “People were curious. They hadn’t seen many Americans. Spain had been completely sealed off for years … even a trifling instructor from Minnesota was eagerly taken up by them.”35 Spanish attitudes to America were at once superior and envious. “All these discussions of national character were occasions of resentment,” Bellow writes in the “Spanish Letter,” “and the resentment was particularly strong when it was the American character that was discussed.” Hence comments like: “America is still looking for a soul; our soul is very old”; or talk of “American emptiness,” “unhistorical Americans who live only in the future” (p. 194). Yet everyone craved “American good things—Buicks, nylons, Parker 51 pens, and cigarettes” (p. 185). In the penultimate paragraph of the “Spanish Letter,” Bellow describes an encounter with the proprietor of a station restaurant in Bobadilla, a railway junction between Málaga and Granada. The restaurant was busy yet the proprietor “behaved toward me with iron dignidad.” Why? Because he “recognized me as an American, one of the new lords of the earth, a new Roman, full of the pride of machines and dollars, passing casually through the junction where it was his fate to remain rotting to death.” In the final paragraph of the “Spanish Letter,” the proprietor’s dignity is paired with that of a resident of Bellow’s pension, a “comandante” who had served with Franco in Morocco. “The comandante,” Bellow writes, “is, after all, the tyrant’s friend, and the tyrant, too, believes in organization and is trying to trade his way into the new imperium” (p. 195).

  Despite observations like these, Bellow relished his summer in Spain. “I felt I was returning to some kind of ancestral homeland. I felt that I was among people very much like myself, and I even had notions that in an earlier incarnation I might have been in the Mediterranean. I was absolutely charmed by it, by everything.”36 Domestic familiarities were especially striking: “people had Tolstoyan-style households, with a feudal servant class. Even their gestures, the way they smoked, reminded me of my father. And the heavy white table linen was like the table linen my parents had.” Spain energized Bellow,
even the heat energized him. A summer storm in Madrid—“una tormenta” to madrileños—“begins with a plunge, falling with the heaviness of drops of mercury. In ten minutes it is over; ten minutes more, and it has dried” (“Spanish Letter,” p. 187) (the only green grass Bellow saw in Madrid, he writes, was in front of the Prado). In the outlying slum districts along the Manzanares River, he was struck by the gente humilde (the humble) “choking the streets and bridges and lying on blankets on the dusty banks under the scanty acacias. It is like a vision of the first moments of resurrection, seeing those families lying in the smothering dust and milling in the roads.” He watches a father lead his infant daughter, a toddler, down to the dirty green water: “She has soiled herself, and he washes her with a certain embittered tenderness while she clings screaming to his lanky, hairy legs” (p. 188). The residents of Bellow’s pension are observed with equal closeness, beginning with Juanita, the landlady. Juanita is on terms of “obvious intimacy” with the one important resident of the pension, an admiral stationed in the ministry, which Bellow knows because he has seen her enter the admiral’s room without knocking. What he notices about the pension’s other residents, respectable middle-class types, is how difficult it is for them to maintain bourgeois standards. Without enchufes (contacts, influence, from enchufe, Spanish for electric socket) the inevitable drop in class is “measureless” (p. 187).