The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  The Bellows did a lot of entertaining at 58 Orlin Avenue. Through the McCloskys they made friends with political science faculty, graduate students, Humphrey aides and acolytes. Mitzi remembers Bellow playing music at gatherings at the house; on Wednesday nights he regularly played duets with a political science graduate student named John Sandstrom (Bellow on the recorder, Sandstrom on the violin).47 Though money was tight, Anita “would always have some cake and some coffee for people,” with friends often staying for dinner. The lodgers were treated as part of the family. Bellow’s friends had to be careful not to be too admiring. On the one hand, Mitzi remembers, “he hated people who fawned on him”; on the other hand, he “had to feel … that they somehow saw that he was special.” “I always felt the fragility of his ego,” says Mitzi. The people who interested Bellow were surprising to her. Though he didn’t suffer fools, he did suffer oddballs. “He really loved strange people,” Mitzi recalls, people with “something unusual” about them, people who were larger than life. The McCloskys entertained frequently, often on Saturday nights (Kampelman remembers baby-sitting for Greg on such evenings). Before the move to Prospect Park, they lived in a second-floor apartment in a large Victorian house at 701 University Avenue South, near the campus. Often, late in the evening, after official dinners and receptions, Mayor Humphrey would show up, alone or with an entourage. Though no oddball, he was hardly ordinary. Siegelman, an admirer, describes him as “a machine of volubility and good will. Remembering everybody’s name … incredible animal vitality” (like Teddy Kollek, another politician to whom Bellow was drawn). “I liked Hubert Humphrey a lot,” Bellow recalled to Norman Manea. “I knew him when he was Mayor of Minneapolis, when I was a young instructor at the University of Minnesota. He was very intelligent, amiable, good-natured, warm-hearted, a real prairie Democrat, friend of the people and so on. He wasn’t faking it. He was really like that, and he was a charming person, always, to be with, and he didn’t have any airs, not even when he was vice president.”48 In 1964 Bellow seriously contemplated writing a book about Humphrey, “taking for my model Liebling’s job on Earl Long.” The problem was that “I like the man too well to do him any injury but I don’t want to paint the conventional oil picture either.” When Johnson picked Humphrey as vice president, Bellow’s enthusiasm for the project cooled. As he recalled in a letter of November 23, 1983, to Carl Soberg, “I came to see him when he was Vice President and he was willing to have me follow him about. Seeing that LBJ kept him on so short a tether, and anticipating no pleasure from junkets to Michigan to crown Cherry Queens I dropped the whole matter. There was no point in writing about poor Hubert’s misery as Vice President. He was LBJ’s captive.”

  In his second year at Minnesota, Bellow was asked to take over Robert Penn Warren’s creative writing seminar. Warren had won a Guggenheim and was in New York consulting on a stage adaptation of All the King’s Men (1946), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Bellow was also scheduled to teach Humanities I (Voltaire, Paine, Goethe, Rousseau, Burke, Tolstoy et al.), as in the previous year, but was run-down from the push to finish The Victim and the summer’s exertions and anxieties. After he failed to shake persistent illness, on doctor’s orders his autumn teaching was restricted to a single course, Warren’s seminar. In Winter and Spring quarters he would return to a full load of three quarters, teaching Humanities and composition courses as well as the seminar. In the letter to Warren of October 5 he reports on the students in the seminar. One student in particular has caught his eye. “I agree with you that he may turn out tremendously good or a tremendous bust,” Bellow writes to Warren. “Just now I believe he feels his desire to become a writer may be a dishonorable desire, treason to his savagery and his anger. I think he still has very much a bum’s view of the settled, established, comfortable and fat, and looks at us all with grim, undergroundling eyes, hectic, hungry, resentful and somewhat pathetic. Vulcanically proud, too. I think he may be a very fine writer if he doesn’t resist the idea of organization as part of the comfortable and fat.” This student draws Bellow not only because he’s talented, but because he’s torn in ways Bellow was torn: between “organization,” both away from the desk (the ordered family life Anita offered) and at it (the “Flaubertian standard”), and an “undergroundling” view, in which “savagery and anger” are seen as “gift,” “heritage,” part of his “individual humanity.” “His feet went into that shrimp little dance of his,” Bellow reports to Warren of the student, “he began to look pinched.… ‘I’m not interested in being a great novelist. You be the great novelist.’ Und so weiter. I finally got him to stop this by a kind of cold cautery.” In a letter to Warren of November 17, Bellow reports of another student that “the seminar has produced one complete schizophrenic already. Perfectly clinical. He writes well, too.” Unfortunately what this second student writes is surrealist and “the sun of surrealism is set.” As for the efforts of the other students, “the rest you know: novel of political corruption, dream utopias, etc.” Bellow here is clued in, canny, “organized,” while also drawn to extremity, anger, oddity. Siegelman remembers him as “a reluctant teacher,” Herb McClosky as “a clock-watcher,” reluctant to lose writing time, especially when deadlines loomed. Atlas quotes the recollection of a former student, Douglas LaRue Smith, on Bellow’s approach: “Just look on me as your friendly barber. I’ll lather you, but you have to shave yourself,” which seems a good way of describing a writing teacher’s role (Atlas quotes it to show that Bellow “wasn’t one to nurture talent”49). Not all would-be writers can write, no matter how much nurturing they receive.

  The letter of October 5 to Warren came with a request. Bellow was again applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship. It was his third attempt. The other referees were Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, and Eliseo Vivas, all of whom had written for him in the past.50 In the application, Bellow gives a fuller account of his plans than in previous years. He outlines several works, a novel and two “novelles” (later “novelettes”), none of which was written, though formal and thematic features of the works he outlines figure in later writing. The novel was tentatively titled “A Young Eccentric.” Its protagonist “has two outstanding characteristics. First, it is temperamentally necessary for him to create excitement and complications about himself. Secondly, he cannot bear to succeed but must always, after incredible stratagems, almost succeed.” This syndrome he explains at the end of the description: “My conception of the protagonist of this comedy is that he resists definition; he cannot endure to be committed, to see an end to his possibilities, and in this he is thoroughly modern and thoroughly American,” like Augie March. Then there’s the nature of the young eccentric’s adventures: hectic, oddball, picaresque, like Augie’s or Henderson’s: “He gives what amounts to a lecture at a gathering on ‘Themes in History’ and at the same time tries to promote a scheme for buying coffee fincas in Guatemala.” (Tumin had conducted his research in Guatemala.) The eccentric’s erotic entanglements are also hectic: he “makes advances to other men’s wives, proposes marriage to several girls at the same time … after courting [a] young woman for several months, he asks her younger sister to marry him.” In addition to the novel, Bellow briefly describes the “novelles.” The first, based on the life of Croesus, “as we know it from the anecdotes of Herodotus and Xenophon,” considers the idea of greatness. Bellow quotes de Tocqueville, a lifelong influence, who describes this idea as unacceptable in democratic societies. In keeping with the novelle’s theme, Bellow thinks big: “We have experienced in the last two centuries a considerable devaluation of man; the scope of the mind has, through science, been immensely extended while that of the personality has shrunk. That is what I would like to take up in Croesus.” As he says earlier in the proposal: “I am interested in considering a condition of mind in which the idea of greatness is acceptable.”

  “Croesus” never materialized, but over the next few years William Einhorn, from Augie March, did. Einhorn was Bellow’s tribute to Sam Freif
eld’s father, Ben, a figure “too rich to be held by oblivion.” For Augie, Einhorn, a Humboldt Park property magnate, is “the first superior man” he’d ever met, a modern-day Caesar, Machiavelli, and Ulysses. “I’m not kidding when I enter Einhorn in this eminent list,” Augie declares.

  It was him that I knew, and what I understand of them in him. Unless you want to say that we’re at the dwarf end of all times and mere children whose only share in grandeur is like a boy’s share in fairy-tale kings, beings of a different kind from times better and stronger than ours. But if we’re comparing men and men, not men and children or men and demigods, which is just what would please Caesar among us teeming democrats, and if we don’t have any special wish to abdicate into some different, lower form of existence out of shame for our defects before the golden faces of these and other old-time men, then I have the right to praise Einhorn and not care about smiles of derogation from those who think the race no longer has in any important degree the traits we honor in these fabulous names (p. 449).

  Nothing in the plans Bellow outlines in his Guggenheim application, nothing in anything he’d written before Augie, sounds like this; the voice of the novel is a later creation. But democratic or American greatness is a theme throughout his writing and his life (“You be the great novelist”), as are the forces that would deny or derogate greatness. These include not just “science” but “specialization,” as in the mockery and the pressure Augie faces for refusing to be tied down, displaced versions of the mockery and the pressure Bellow faced from his father and brothers for refusing to settle into a profession or business, persisting as a writer. “Specialization was leaving the likes of me behind,” Augie explains. “I didn’t know spot-welding, I didn’t know traffic management, I couldn’t remove an appendix, or anything like that” (p. 876). A similar refusal to specialize or be tied down, in addition to WASP prejudice, real or perceived, explains Bellow’s attraction to Humanities programs and the Committee on Social Thought; to all literature, not just English literature; to big ideas, great works of philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology. In describing the second proposed novelle, as yet untitled, Bellow labels the forces opposing greatness and freedom “the theology of ‘this world.’ ” He says very little about the novelle, since “I have already begun to write it and do not, for that reason, want to describe it further.” Its themes survive in later work, of course, notably in the teachings of Grandma Lausch in Augie, “one of those Machiavellis of small street and neighborhood” (p. 384). The original title of Augie was to be “Life Among the Machiavellians,” that is, life among what in the Guggenheim application Bellow calls “The Children of Darkness,” an allusion to Luke 16:8: “The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.”

  The Victim was published on November 6, 1947, and well received by the critics. In the Nation, Diana Trilling, who had irritated Bellow by calling Dangling Man “small,” judged it “hard to match in recent fiction, for brilliance, skill and originality” (the review made Bellow regret his “roughness” with her husband in a recent essay on novelists and critics in The New Leader).51 The reviews in the daily New York Times and in Time (the remark in Time about its being “the year’s most intelligent study of the Jew in U.S. society” came from an end-of-year roundup) were largely positive, though like the other reviews “singularly stupid” (Bellow’s judgment in a letter to Henle), “incredibly vulgar” (in a letter to Bazelon of December 1, 1947). Bellow was clear about the novel’s strengths as well as its limitations: “The Victim where it is successful,” he writes on December 18, 1948, to the novelist J. F. Powers, a friend, “is a powerful book. I take my due for it. There aren’t many recent books that come close to it and I can’t take seriously any opinion that doesn’t begin by acknowledging that. There you have it. I’m not modest.” When Bellow’s father saw the reviews, he was unimpressed: “The fact that I was a celebrity last week made no difference to him.… He doesn’t read my reviews, only looks at them.” Bellow was in Chicago for Thanksgiving, and Abraham offered to make him “a mine superintendent at ten thousand.… A mine’s a mine, but Time is a mere striving with wind.” The only reviewer Bellow exempts from criticism in the Bazelon letter is Elizabeth Hardwick, whose notice appeared in Partisan Review. He was glad she “didn’t take the axe to me. She’s very formidable.”52 Hardwick’s review, from a “Fiction Chronicle” in the issue of January–February 1948, leaves The Victim till last, after discussion of novels by Dreiser (The Stoic, in which “the writing … is worse than ever”), Sartre’s The Reprieve (“an achievement of some sort … [if] vague and rather superficial”), and Erskine Caldwell’s The Sure Hand of God (the work of an author with “no real interest in his subjects … frantic, bewildered, obviously disoriented as a writer”). Bellow, in contrast, is fiction’s great hope. His new novel is distinguished by its “thorough and exquisite honesty” and “many levels of meaning,” levels “contained in the situation in which the characters find themselves and not in the surrounding rhetoric.” On the basis of Dangling Man and The Victim, Hardwick declares, “it would be hard to think of any young writer who has a better chance than Bellow to become the redeeming novelist of his period.”

  But The Victim did not sell. After three months it had sold 2,257 copies, only about seven hundred more than Dangling Man, despite the fact that Henle had written in November to say he had secured an advance sale of 2,300 (also despite the novel’s eliciting inquiries from both Hollywood and Broadway). Bellow was upset. “I hardly know what to say,” he wrote to Henle on February 9, 1948, “after two years of wringing to pay bills and fighting for scraps of time in which to do my writing. Have I nothing to look forward to but two years of the same sort and a sale of barely two thousand for the next novel I write? And can it be worth your while to continue publishing books which sell only two thousand copies? I don’t understand this at all; I feel black and bitter about it, merely.”53 In an unsent letter to Henle, he elaborates on his disappointment: “This year I have been ill and teaching leaves me no energy for writing. I had hoped that I would be able to ask for a year’s leave but I shall have nothing to live on if I do, and I see next year and the next and the one after that fribbled away at the university. My grievance is a legitimate one, I think.”54 What prompted Bellow to put these grievances on paper, though he stopped short of sending them, was a note he’d received from Henle saying that “he expected the progressive Book Club to have The Victim as its March choice.” This news depressed Bellow, since the book’s cost for members would be seventy-five cents: “It seems to me that this is tantamount to remaindering the book and getting shut of it” (in the event, a thousand copies were sold by the club, earning Bellow $750). Why, moreover, couldn’t anyone find the book in bookstores? “Friends and acquaintances in various parts of the country who had seen reviews of The Victim and tried to buy it,” Bellow continues, were “told by local booksellers that they had never heard of it.… The University of Chicago bookstore and Woolworth’s didn’t even know I had published a book. As a Chicagoan and a Hyde Parker, I feel hurt by this.”55

  These unsent complaints survive as extracts in a letter to Henry Volkening, Bellow’s agent since 1944. Volkening had not been involved in the deals Bellow made with Vanguard, nor had Bellow’s previous agent, Maxim Lieber. When the Hollywood inquiry came in, Bellow forwarded it to Volkening without telling Henle. Henle and Volkening got along (after publication of Dangling Man, Henle recommended Volkening as a good agent for Bellow’s stories), but Bellow thought it best to wrangle over sales of The Victim himself. “[Henle] would probably prefer dealing with me,” Bellow explained to Volkening. “[James T.] Farrell has never had an agent and Farrell, it seems, has established the pattern for the ideal connection of publisher with author.”56 Volkening approved this strategy and cautioned Bellow to tone down his complaints, which he did (“I answered him, more mildly than the first time,” reads a letter of February 18), but still Henle responded defensively
. “He said that in the long run I couldn’t miss (but how long is long?) and that Farrell and every other serious writer in America had the same bad row to weed.” Bellow remained unpersuaded, answering that “Farrell’s books started to come out during the Depression and that these are fat years.” There was something “fundamentally wrong” with Vanguard, he concluded in the letter to Volkening. It was simply “too small an organization to push a book to the retailers.”57 To push this book in particular, he elsewhere suggests. “The fact is,” he declares to Volkening, in the letter received on January 9, 1948, that “Henle did not care much about The Victim and was inclined to treat it as a Jewish book.… His first letter on receiving the mss. simply flabbergasted me. I sat down, shaken, to write an exegesis. His tastes and sympathies are with the Farrell and Calder Willingham sort of novel and not with my sort.” Relations between the two men did not improve. “Henle and I haven’t unlocked horns yet,” Bellow writes to Volkening in a later, undated letter. “He wants to make peace but he’s nettled and, pacifying though his letters are on the whole, he can’t resist slipping in one more provocation. And hell, I have nothing to lose by speaking my mind.”58 To Bazelon, Bellow writes of having “sent Henle raging mad letters, but he holds he isn’t to blame.”59