The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  In August, Bellow “took my Minnesota show on the road,” visiting Segovia, Granada, Córdoba, Málaga, and Ronda. Anita was alarmed when she received a letter from Bellow saying he was going to Granada and Cádiz. “On Monday night there was a terrible explosion in which hundreds of people were killed and thousands injured,” she wrote to Shrifte on August 21. “Now maybe he never even got to Cádiz but maybe he did. I go on thinking he is all right as we are fortunate people and I am hoping our luck will hold out this time.” Before the trip south, Bellow traveled with an acquaintance from the American embassy to Alcalá de Henares, birthplace of Cervantes. There he attended a political trial of tramway workers accused of distributing Mundo Obrero, a Communist newspaper. The trial, held in a courtroom lined with soldiers and presided over by army officers, was a travesty. “The doctrines of 1789 are for us like the morals of Christianity,” a Spanish acquaintance told Bellow, “pieties. We are not strong enough to enjoy the Rights of Man” (“Spanish Letter,” p. 193). Resistance to Franco was now confined to “isolated mountain districts in the north and in Andalusia” (“Spanish Letter,” p. 190). On the trip south, Bellow spent much time with his student Robert Johnson, who had become a friend as well as a follower. A native Minnesotan (like 90 percent of the university student body in 1946), Johnson was funny, easygoing, and smart. “It’s a hard lot, in America, to be born in the blonde and decent Midwest,” Bellow wrote to him on February 13, 1950, “but you’ve stood up to it beautifully and I love you for it.” Bellow inscribed Johnson’s copy of The Victim: “To the Sancho Panza of our Spanish travels.” “Saul tilted at windmills and I came along,” Johnson explained, describing himself as “a goy with a Yiddisher kopf [a Jewish head].”37 During the last weeks of Bellow’s stay in Madrid, he and Johnson sublet an apartment in Plaza de la Independencia, on the northwest corner of the Retiro, and when the summer was over, Johnson joined Bellow and the McCloskys on a ten-day holiday in Paris.

  In Bellow’s story “The Gonzaga Manuscripts” (1954), set in Madrid, Alcalá de Henares, and Segovia, the central character, an ardent young Midwesterner, is much like Johnson. Clarence Feiler, a graduate of the University of Minnesota, is described as having a small blond beard, blue eyes, and “a rosy beard-lengthened face,” like Johnson’s face, according to Mitzi McClosky. Feiler studied Spanish at the university, as did Johnson, and develops a passion for the verse of Manuel Gonzaga, “one of the most original of modern Spanish poets, and in the class of Juan Ramón Jiménez, Lorca, and Machado.”38 In California, where Feiler now lives, and where Johnson moved after college, he hears from a Spanish Republican refugee about lost Gonzaga manuscripts containing more than a hundred poems. The manuscripts are reputed to be somewhere in Madrid, which Feiler first visited as a student at Minnesota, and he sets out to find them, powered by a desire “to do a decent and necessary thing, namely, bring the testimony of a great man before the world” (p. 114). Feiler is self-consciously anti-religious, another Johnson trait, and the intensity of his commitment to Gonzaga is “Romantic” in Wyndham Lewis’s sense, a species of “spilt religion” (to Atlas, Johnson described himself as a “ ‘pagan’ who claimed the only commandment he’d never broken was the one that forbade worshiping a graven image”39). Feiler travels to Madrid and takes a room in a pension with views overlooking the Retiro. Pension La Granja is within easy walking distance of the Puerta del Sol, “with its crowd of pleasure-seekers, beggars, curb-haunters, wealthy women, soldiers, cops, lottery-ticket and fountain-pen peddlers, and priests, humble door-openers, chair-menders, and musicians” (p. 124). Here Feiler finds the same attitudes to America that Bellow and Johnson encountered. “I hope you won’t mind if I tell a story about Americans and the size of things in Spain,” begins Gonzaga’s literary executor, a suave member of the Cortés, “with his irony and his fine Spanish manners” (p. 125). “Have you come to study something?” asks Feiler’s landlady, “there’s a great deal here to interest people from a country as new as yours” (p. 115). At dinner with the executor, Feiler sits next to “an Italian Monsignore” (from the Nunciatura, presumably) and “a German gentleman.” When asked “Was American really a sort of English,” Feiler replies, “I’ve seen people cry in it and so forth, just as elsewhere.” The executor makes it clear that he thinks Feiler incapable of comprehending Gonzaga’s poems, and in response Feiler feels an “ugly hatred” grow and knot in his breast: “He wanted to hit him, to strangle him, to trample him, to pick him up and hurl him at the wall” (pp. 127–28). When asked, yet again, why Gonzaga interests him so much, he replies: “Why shouldn’t I be interested in him? You may someday be interested in an American poet” (p. 134).

  IN THEIR TEN DAYS in Paris, Bellow, the McCloskys, and Johnson spent a good deal of time walking along the Seine, going in and out of bookstores. They visited the Jeu de Paume, ate hamburgers and drank milkshakes at the American Legion Center (a special treat for the McCloskys after three months of English food), and studied passersby. They also spent time with the Kaplans. Mitzi and Kappy had gone to Weequahic High School together in Newark, though he was a grade ahead of her. She remembers him as president of the school’s “French Academy” and a force in student politics. By his own admission, Kappy was a fervent assimilationist. “From the beginning, I was absolutely determined to be a good American, WASP in style.” In Paris, he became more French than the French, like Kenneth Trachtenberg’s father, Rudi, in More Die of Heartbreak, a figure of “amiable superiority” (p. 3). Though Mitzi remembers Bellow as “clearly impressed” with Paris, Kappy found him wary and suspicious. “Bellow thought I was a patsy for a lot of things,” Kappy explains. “You had to be fiercely yourself and independent. He became madder and madder at me because I became more and more French. He thought I let them walk all over me.” What Kappy remembers from Bellow’s visit in 1947 is that he was “very pissed off with the Spanish,” in particular with Spanish intellectuals. “Who do they think they are? They haven’t done anything worthwhile in the arts since the sixteenth century.” Bellow and Kappy had known each other for almost ten years, first through their wives, then as Wieboldt Hall habitués. They were friends but Bellow was not easy with Kappy, partly because of Kappy’s Francophilia, partly because he was a rival of sorts. Kappy was tall, handsome, charming, as attractive to women as Bellow (like Rudi Trachtenberg, he was “biologically very successful” [p. 10]). He was also a talented writer, perhaps the most talented of Bellow’s early writer friends, Rosenfeld included. At the beginning of the 1950s, he published two novels with Harper and Brothers, The Plenipotentiaries (1950) and The Spirit and the Bride (1951), about sophisticated expatriates in Paris. “A remarkably gay and witty book and often very wise” is how Lionel Trilling described The Plenipotentiaries.40

  In addition to being a rival, Kappy was a disappointment, since writing, as both he and Bellow came to recognize, was not a vocation for him. If Kappy made Bellow uncomfortable, his wife, Celia, put him at his ease, in part because she was an excellent Yiddishist, always a plus in Bellow’s book. When Kappy decided in 1954 to make a career in the foreign service, he told a French interviewer, “my wife was strongly against it. She thought I should follow a literary trade, become a novelist like our friend Saul Bellow.”41 Bellow’s complex attitude to Kappy is revealed in a letter of April 21, 1948, to Mel Tumin. Tumin had complained about Kappy, and Bellow reports that both Herb McClosky and Isaac Rosenfeld had expressed “a like complaint.” The trouble, Bellow explains, is that “Kappy has made himself after his own image, has chosen to be the Parisian Kaplan and has put behind him the part of his history that doesn’t fit the image.” The desire “to free himself from the definition other men give him” Bellow associates with “the Nietzschean ‘Grand Style,’ ” and is not of itself to be condemned.

  Why should he be the Kaplan his mother bore and Newark stamped when he has the power to be the Kaplan of his choice? You have felt that, I have, Passin has. Only some of us have had the sense to realize that the man we bring
forth has no richness compared with the man who really exists, thickened, fed and fattened by all the facts about him, all of his history. Besides, the image can never be reyn [pure, in Yiddish] and it is especially impure when money and power are part of its outfit.

  This last point alludes to the privileged diplomatic circles Kappy had begun moving in, tempting him from a richer, truer self: “Kappy is an official. In justice to him, however, it must be said that it would be hard to resist exploiting such great gifts, it would be hard for anyone.” Presumably the gifts here are money and power. The next sentence, however, suggests that they may be Kappy’s gifts as a writer, which he is betraying: “It’s the best, the strongest, the most talented whose lives miscarry in this way. I deeply hope, for Kappy that he recovers before the damage to his power to feel goes any further.”

  BELLOW’S SPIRITS WERE LOW on the ship home. “He was really quite sober and thoughtful,” Mitzi McClosky recalls, weighed down by worries about his marriage and The Victim. He had put off looking at galleys and now had to face them. The job bored and dismayed him: “I want to throw them in the ocean,” he told the McCloskys. The worries he expressed about his marriage were of several sorts. He felt constrained, crowded in the marriage; Anita “kept him on a short leash”; he had married too young, had not had the adventures he needed. “I’m too old,” he complained to Mitzi. “I’m a young man but I’m old.” “He felt he was aging in the bourgeois family life that he had enjoyed.… Saul had a real thing about aging.” His ambivalence—wanting stability, solidity, not wanting it—Anita would not understand: “She had a strong set of values and they were very formed and not too negotiable,” recalls Mitzi. “I don’t think she had the tolerance for ambiguity that Saul did.” He could not communicate to her what he was after or how the order she provided and he enjoyed also impeded his search for freedom. Freedom from what? Fidelity? Domestic responsibility? He owed Anita a lot, he acknowledged. It was she who had made it possible for him to write Dangling Man: “Anita worked, he stayed home and wrote. She arranged the marriage, everything, she took care of him. She was a force, formidable, and he thought she was beautiful.… But that didn’t mean he didn’t see other women. He always did.” Partly Mitzi sees Bellow’s behavior as typical of the times. “Have you seen Mad Men? Then I need not say more.… Men did not feel they were manly unless every attractive woman wanted to sleep with them.” In Bellow’s case, frequently, “women came after Saul. He hardly ever went after a woman. It was a question of accepting.” (This is not an impression others have corroborated, as Mitzi realizes: “I’m not saying some women won’t say otherwise.”) At the same time, “Saul gave me some of the first lectures I heard on the beauty of monogamy.… He was a proponent of monogamy.”

  Those lectures occurred in the first months of the friendship between the Bellows and the McCloskys. Bellow talked of how he and Anita had worked through their early difficulties, how they’d come to an agreement. “The way they worked it through,” he told Mitzi, “was that Anita wouldn’t stand for it, and if he did [go off with someone else], she would. She was going to be his equal and she held him to that. Whatever he did, she would never have given him permission to be free.” Bellow accepted those terms, Mitzi thought, while also being incapable of living up to them. He was torn: “It [promiscuity, adultery] was not a happy thing entirely for Saul,” as it was for other men of his acquaintance. “He was uncomfortable.” What was clear to Mitzi on the voyage home was that Bellow’s sense of “being locked in, of his own volition,” was coming to the fore.

  In this state, Bellow embarked on a shipboard affair. When he, Johnson, and the McCloskys boarded the Marine Tiger at Le Havre, they noticed a group of students, not Minnesota students, talking animatedly on deck. Among them, Mitzi remembers, was “a very lovely, petite brunette, in jeans, with a red kerchief jauntily arranged around her head. She was very attractive, because of the animation in her face, very cute looking.” She was nineteen, a student at the University of Wisconsin, and Mitzi never saw her again on the journey home, nor did Bellow once mention her on board ship. That spring, however, he approached the McCloskys with a request: would they put the woman up for a night, as she was coming to Minneapolis. “He didn’t say much about it, he was extremely private about it, but what he did say was: ‘I have to let her know that Anita and I are not going to separate.’ ” The girl’s name was Betty and Mitzi guesses that Bellow had led her to believe, as he had himself begun to believe, that his marriage was over. “Whatever relationship they had,” Mitzi thinks, “it was not an ordinary one, because Saul did speak freely to us about other women. He might have thought that she was eligible for more than an affair.” When Betty arrived, she was “very reserved and contained.” Bellow came to pick her up for the afternoon and later that day, shortly after returning, she left for Wisconsin (“broken-hearted,” Mitzi assumes). The McCloskys never saw her again, although they heard that she went on to become an academic, a professor of English, Mitzi thinks. In later years, Bellow went to some lengths to protect her identity.

  The reunion with Anita took place on September 23, the day Bellow’s ship docked in New York. The omens were not good. Nothing survives of their correspondence over the summer (except snippets of news in Anita’s letters to Vanguard), but it can’t have been reassuring, given the state Bellow had worked himself into on the voyage home. In the event, the meeting was not at all what he expected. Anita was not resentful. She had enjoyed the summer. She, too, had needed a break. Her time in Chicago, she told Mitzi, had been fun, full of visits to friends, with lots of swimming for Greg. She had slimmed down, had a tan, looked “absolutely gorgeous,” “ten years younger.” Bellow’s doubts and fears washed away, like Rogin’s in “A Father-to-Be.” “When he got back, we had a honeymoon,” Anita confided to Mitzi. She and Bellow spent a week in New York seeing friends, consulting with publishers, and eating. Bellow had lost “about twenty pounds” while abroad, as well as developing what he thought was an ulcer. In an attempt to gain back some of the weight he went on an eating binge in New York. “No doubt there was an ideological reason for eating so much,” he suggested, in a letter of October 5 to Robert Penn Warren. “We may not be strong in Phoenician ruins but we do have steamed clams.” Having overdone the clams, he was now “living on milk and eggs, principally.” The family returned to Minneapolis three days after the start of the quarter, moving into a large old house at 58 Orlin Avenue in Prospect Park, a suburb full of professors, but with, in Philip Siegelman’s words, “an overlay of intellectuals who were learning how not to be Huntington Brown and how not to be Samuel Monk.”42 In 1950, the McCloskys would move to Prospect Park as well, to 70 Orlin Avenue, a few doors away from the Bellows’ old house.

  The Bellows could only just afford the Orlin Avenue house. To meet expenses they took in lodgers. There were two extra bedrooms, one was rented by Ed McGehee, a Southerner and a poet, a friend of Robert Penn Warren’s, the other by Max Kampelman, an instructor and graduate student in political science. After a time, McGehee asked the Bellows if they would like a third lodger. His name was Bart Leiper,43 and McGehee said that he and Leiper could share a room. The arrangement meant more money for the Bellows and they agreed to it. “Saul thought two roommates unremarkable at the time,” Greg writes, “but later realized they were gay.”44 “They [the Bellows] didn’t treat them as a couple,” Mitzi remembers, “nor did they come out as a couple.” For a while, McGehee and Bellow were close, making plans for an anthology to be entitled “Spanish Travelers or something like that … from Casanova to Roger Fry. Random House has already expressed interest in this.”45 The other lodger, Max Kampelman, was a conscientious objector under Section 4(e) of the Selective Service Act, permitting alternative “work of national importance under civilian direction.” Kampelman came to Minneapolis in 1944 after volunteering for the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, a clinical study directed by a noted public health professor, Ancel Keys, under the auspices of the University of Minnesot
a Medical School, the Selective Service System, and the Civilian Public Service. The aim of the study was to determine the effects, physiological and psychological, of severe starvation, and to test and devise rehabilitation regimens and strategies. Kampelman, with whom Bellow became close at this time, was the only Jew among the thirty-six volunteers and at the end of the experiment resembled a concentration camp victim. “I went from 160 pounds to slightly more than 100 pounds.” Yet he suffered the least psychological damage of any of the volunteers, a fact he attributes to the courses he was allowed to take at the time. When the war broke out, Kampelman was two courses short of receiving his NYU law degree. By completing the courses at Minnesota he not only earned his degree, but managed to think about other things aside from food. He then took courses in political science, got to know Herbert McClosky, was invited to stay on at Minnesota as an instructor in political science and to pursue graduate studies, and through McClosky learned that the Bellows had a room to rent. “I don’t even remember how much rent I paid. We developed a warm friendship. It was not landlord/tenant.”

  Kampelman remembers lots of talks with Bellow about politics. They were both anti-Soviet, though Bellow was slightly to the left of Kampelman. Kampelman’s opposition to the war, despite being based on pacifist rather than Trotskyist grounds, “helped our relationship as far as Saul and Anita were concerned.” He, too, like McClosky, became an advisor to Hubert Humphrey, in the campaign “to recapture the Party [in Minnesota] from the Communists.” When Humphrey became a senator in 1949, Kampelman moved to Washington as one of his legislative assistants. In later years, he practiced law at the influential Washington firm of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, and headed diplomatic missions for both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, negotiating with the Soviet Union over nuclear and space arms. Kampelman recalls being teased by Bellow in their talks on Orlin Avenue: “There was a little dig once in a while, towards me, towards Herbie. You know, he wasn’t going to do what we were doing. We were cooperating with the establishment.… It was always with a smile … a kind of intellectual digging, probing.” Kampelman differed from Bellow, and McClosky, in being actively engaged with the Jewish community and Jewish organizations. Bellow and McClosky never hid their identity as Jews: McClosky was fully involved in the Humphrey administration’s efforts to combat anti-Semitism (in 1946 Kampelman was shocked to discover that Jews in Minnesota could not join the Automobile Club) and when The Victim came out on November 6, 1947, it was praised by Time as “the year’s most intelligent study of the Jew in U.S. society.”46 For Kampelman, however, they were “not active, not identified.… I mean on campus there was a Jewish organization. I identified myself with them, not Herbie,” nor Bellow, for whom such identification was restricting, such organizations bourgeois, too respectable.