The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Bellow wanted to get out of his contract with Vanguard, which had rights to his next two books. He also wanted to get out of teaching for the coming year (“three years of teaching straight is more than flesh and blood can endure”). The aims were related. To finance a year without teaching he would need a much bigger advance than Vanguard could offer. If he won the Guggenheim he might just survive on the $2,500 stipend, but he had been turned down twice and wasn’t sanguine about his chances. When Bellow asked Henle if he had “a right to devote all my time to writing,” Henle’s answer, as reported to Volkening, was that “I had indeed. No more. Other publishers have offered me the opportunity. One wanted to give me enough money for a year.”60 Shortly after receiving Henle’s reply, Bellow made up his mind to change publishers. Then he won the Guggenheim. Henle wrote to congratulate him, and as Bellow told Frank Taylor of Random House, one of the publishers pursuing him (Random House was Warren’s publisher, and Taylor had visited Bellow’s creative writing seminar in Minneapolis, searching for new authors), “you simply can’t answer a letter of congratulation with a sharp appeal for release.”61 On April 23, however, three weeks after the Guggenheim announcement, Bellow wrote to Henle asking to be let out of his contract. Six days later, Henle agreed, in a letter Bellow described to Volkening as “quite bitter.” Henle’s response ends: “you may take this letter as Vanguard’s formal assent to your placing your succeeding—I hope the pun is justified—works elsewhere.” Bellow’s decision was spurred by preceding Henle communications reported to Volkening: “last week a royalty statement arrived from Vanguard and I learned that as of the first of January I still owed $170 on my original advance of $750 for The Victim”; “I still owe him money,” he complained to Volkening, “and doesn’t he seem pleased in his letter.” In the letter congratulating Bellow on the Guggenheim, Henle had offered a $1,200 advance on a new novel: “The Fellowship, Henle understood, would not be enough and he was offering me this money because Vanguard also desired that I should devote myself exclusively to writing. This last phrase was taken from a letter I had sent Henle quite some time before I knew anything of the Guggenheim. No particular note had been taken of it by him then.”62

  Volkening played no part in the break with Vanguard, had counseled restraint, and Bellow apologized to him for the reproaches he was sure would come his way from Henle. “None of this was your doing.… I apologize in advance for any bad feeling between you that I may cause.”63 But there was none. Volkening was a hard man to dislike, charming, honest, and devoted both to literature and to his authors; he remained Bellow’s agent until his death in 1972. He was thirteen years older than Bellow, born in 1902. His background was German—his grandfather had served in the German army in World War I—and he grew up in Yorkville, the German section of Manhattan. According to Harriet Wasserman, who was hired by him as an assistant in 1960, Volkening had been teased in school for his German background and “was haunted for the rest of his life” by the anti-Semitic treatment received by a classmate at Princeton (whether he joined in this treatment is unclear from Wasserman’s account, though she says “he wished he could redo and make amends”).64 After Princeton, Volkening went to Fordham Law School and worked in real estate, which he did not enjoy. He was literary and managed to get a post teaching English literature at night school at New York University. There in 1927 he befriended a fellow instructor, “a huge, black-haired man at a desk nearby,” the novelist Thomas Wolfe, about whom he wrote a long profile in 1939.65 It was Wolfe who introduced Volkening to Maxwell Perkins, who was his editor at Scribner’s, midwife to Look Homeward, Angel, the enormous novel Wolfe was working on at the time, and Perkins who told Volkening he ought to consider becoming an agent (after first telling him that he had no editorial openings at Scribner’s). Some weeks later, Diarmuid Russell, a young editor recently fired from G. P. Putnam’s Sons, came to see Perkins, and was given the same advice, along with Volkening’s name. In May 1940, after several meetings, the two young men decided to go into business together, forming Russell and Volkening Literary Representatives, each putting up a stake of $5,000. Russell’s title in the new business was president, Volkening’s treasurer.

  Diarmuid Russell would have been consulted by Volkening over Bellow’s contracts and manuscripts, certainly in the early years of the agency. He was born in Dublin in 1902, the son of the Irish poet and visionary AE (George William Russell). A tall, handsome man, an outdoorsman, he immigrated to the United States in 1929 after working in the editorial offices of the Dublin periodical The Irish Statesman, edited by his father and his father’s good friend William Butler Yeats (“Uncle Bill”). After a spell in Chicago, working in the book department of Marshall Field, he returned to New York in 1935 to take up an editorial position at Putnam, where he was unhappy about the firm’s treatment of its authors. Almost as soon as Russell and Volkening opened for business, Russell had secured its first author, Eudora Welty. Welty was “Diarmuid’s” author, as was Bernard Malamud, signed four years later; Bellow was “Henry’s,” as was Ralph Ellison, acquired in 1943. But within house, certainly in this period, the divisions were not strict. “I know I should have written to you earlier,” Russell wrote to Welty on October 8, 1940, “but I had to wait till Henry and John [Slocum, secretary to the firm] had read the book too.… Henry thinks it is going to be taken and will sell well.”66 Malamud came to Russell through Volkening, whose first client was a Manhattan high school English teacher named Michael Seide, author of a collection of stories entitled The Common Thread. Seide recommended Volkening to Malamud, a teaching colleague previously represented by Maxim Lieber, Bellow’s old agent. When Malamud called, Russell happened to answer the phone and thus became his agent. Seide never published another book, although Volkening stuck with him. Both agents were unshakably loyal to their authors and determined to represent only writers of quality. Their list was small and distinguished. Thomas Wolfe eventually joined it, as did Wright Morris, Peter Taylor, J. F. Powers, May Sarton, A. J. Liebling, Barbara Tuchman, and Anne Tyler.

  Henry Volkening was a city type, one of several ways in which he was unlike Diarmuid Russell (another was in height; Volkening was short). He wrote frequent, newsy letters to authors and editors, full of gossip, shrewd advice, and praise. When his authors came to New York he took them for lengthy “drunches” at the Century Association, a club with a distinguished literary history, located on West 43rd Street. Volkening liked to drink and the “Drenchery” served supersized martinis and other cocktails, with second portions in little silver jugs. Authors were advised that they need not keep up, and Bellow often took the precaution of eating before lunch to survive the drinks. Yet Volkening was a careful businessman, kept the firm’s records (in pencil, without benefit of an adding machine), and advised on a range of issues, personal and financial as well as literary. Bellow liked and counted on him, and judging by correspondence there were almost no spats or accusatory moments in their lengthy association. The association began inauspiciously, however, before publication of Dangling Man. After reading one of Bellow’s stories in PR, Volkening wrote asking to see other work. Bellow sent him a story entitled “On the Platform,” now lost, which was “curtly dismissed.” A few weeks later, after Dangling Man came out, Volkening wrote again, asking to see something else, if Bellow could “forgive the wham we gave the short story.” Bellow sent something that wasn’t whammed and Volkening became his agent, though it was only after the break with Vanguard that Volkening felt free to represent Bellow the novelist.67 “The way’s open and we can begin to consider proposals,” Bellow wrote after receiving Henle’s letter of release.68 These proposals, it turned out, were for a quite different novel from the one Bellow described in the Guggenheim application. The new novel, already in the works, was to be titled “The Crab and the Butterfly.”

  Volkening’s advice was that Bellow should pitch the novel either to George Joel at the Dial Press or Harold Guinzburg at Viking. There was also Frank Taylor, of Random House, to
consider, with whom Bellow had been in correspondence, and whose boss, Bennett Cerf, had also written.69 On May 13, Bellow wrote to Bazelon to say that he would be in New York “on Monday Tuesday and Wednesday to do some sharp trading.” He arrived on the Pacemaker on Monday morning, in time to have lunch with Volkening “and spend a few hours plotting.” At Viking he met with a young editor, Monroe Engel, to whom he’d been recommended by a mutual friend (Engel is not sure, but thinks the friend might have been Isaac Rosenfeld). Engel, himself a writer, had come to Viking from Reynal and Hitchcock, where in his first week an unsolicited manuscript crossed his desk entitled “Under the Volcano” by Malcolm Lowry. It had been turned down by “quite a few” publishing houses but Engel rated it, as did his fellow editors, when he brought it to their attention. It was a good way to begin a publishing career. Engel knew all about Bellow, not just from the mutual friend but from Bellow’s novels and stories: “ ‘The Mexican General’ in Partisan Review was important in giving publishers a sense that Saul Bellow was a coming man,” he recalled. “I had no doubt whatsoever that I wanted us to give him a contract, which we did, and I remember the advance was $3,000, which was then considered very generous”—it was more than double what Henle had offered.

  Engel’s first impressions of Bellow were that he was “confident, already rather witty,” but also realistic about his situation. “He knew that he was not a commercial success and didn’t know what a larger publishing house would do.” When Engel’s wife, Brenda, first met Bellow it was at the Rosenfelds’ apartment on Barrow Street. “Isaac was telling stories and they seemed to me just superb and when Saul jumped in and started telling a story I thought to myself how can he interrupt, who is he? He told a wonderful story, very funny.… It surprised me that he had the confidence.” On May 23, Bellow signed a contract with Viking, which would remain his publisher for the next thirty years. “It reads wonderfully,” he wrote to Volkening on the same day. “I hope my novel reads half as well.” On July 5, 1948, he wrote to Frank Taylor in response to a letter whose tone relieved him “more than I can say.” He had been tempted by Random House, took to Albert Erskine, Taylor’s colleague, “no less than to Monroe Engel. Believe me, there was absolutely nothing personal about the reasons for my choice.” These reasons are vague in the letter, something about “an unlaid prejudice having to do with large houses and small.” Bellow was sorry “to have had—how to say it without presumption!—to disappoint.… But, on the scene, in New York, I found things so working themselves out as to convince me that I had no other alternative. It was all like radar acting on my intuitions.”70

  The origins of the newly contracted novel are clouded. That it was an expanded version of a “novelle” or “novelette” is clear. “Just at present I’m working on a novelette called The Crab and the Butterfly which maybe Partisan will publish. Rahv has an idea that something should be done for the novella and has written to say that he plans to run one a year—in imitation of Horizon.”71 The work promised Rahv was to derive from neither of the two novelettes Bellow described in his Guggenheim application, but from a third, at the time titled “Who Breathes Overhead” (from Schiller: “Who breathes overhead in the rose-tinted light may be glad”), described in a letter to Bazelon of January 5, 1948.72 Henle had agreed to publish a volume of stories after The Victim. Sometime before Bellow broke with Vanguard, he mentioned to Volkening in an undated letter that he had “a collection of three novelettes,” as well as some shorter works, actual short stories. Perhaps, Bellow speculated in a letter of December 7, 1947, to Volkening, Henle might actually “prefer to publish a novelette singly, as a very short novel. Originally my last novel [The Victim] was to have run about forty thousand words; it somehow got out of hand.” This tendency for works to get out of hand, short stories becoming novelettes (or novelles or novellas), then novels, was lifelong. In the same letter, as well as in another undated letter, Bellow mentions that he had promised Rahv and Partisan Review “first crack at” one such novelette, unnamed. “It’s now about 25,000 words and not yet done.… Another novelette, Children of Light and Children of Darkness is finished but wants rewriting.”73 In a letter dated simply December 1947, Bellow writes to Volkening that the story he had promised Rahv, as early as the summer of 1947, was tentatively titled “Amor Fati” (soon to become “Who Breathes Overhead”). It was the sort of story “no other magazine would touch … I’m convinced because of the title, plus a certain freedom of expression.” The title comes from Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, section 10: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different.… Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.”74

  All that survives of “The Crab and the Butterfly” is a chapter published in the November–December 1950 issue of Partisan Review entitled “The Trip to Galena.” The setting of this chapter is a hospital room in Chicago (the trip to Galena is recounted). There are two characters in the present of the story, both invalids: Weyl, who talks, and Scampi, who listens. Scampi is in the hospital with a broken wrist. He is not Weyl’s roommate. Weyl’s roommate, Mr. Charney, is only referred to in the story; he is seriously ill, just barely “holding his own,” and Weyl has “put up [a] battle” over him of an unspecified nature.75 In his interview with Philip Roth, Bellow described “The Crab and the Butterfly” as about “two men in a hospital room, one dying, the other trying to keep him from surrendering to death.”76 Of these two, “The Trip to Galena” gives us only Weyl, who ponders the possibility of a noble life, a life of greatness, but cannot decide whether our “original nature is murderous” or “there’s something redeemable in the original thing” (p. 788), an opposition that suggests the contrast implied in “Who Breathes Overhead” between those “down below” and those who “breathe overhead in the rose-tinted light,” though it may also suggest the opposition of “Children of Light and Children of Darkness.” In the letter to Tumin, Bellow explains the title: “The crab is human tenaciousness to life, the butterfly is the gift of existence which the crab stalks. The crab cannot leap or chase but stands with open claws [like Grandma Lausch?] while the creature flaps over him.” How or if this opposition is embodied in the two roommates is unclear. Is Weyl the butterfly or the crab? Or is he drawn or torn by qualities or propensities associated with both creatures, as suggested at moments in “A Trip to Galena”? One cannot tell. On March 8, 1948, Bellow wrote to Bazelon that “since October I’ve done nothing but a novelette of about thirty thousand words—a dazzlingly white elephant, too short for a book and too long for a magazine.” A month later Bellow decided it would become his next novel, and Viking not Partisan Review or Random House would publish it.

  WITH A $3,000 ADVANCE in hand, $2,500 from the Guggenheim, and a year’s leave of absence from Minnesota, Bellow pondered his options for the coming year. In the March 8 letter to Bazelon, after he’d gotten leave but before the Guggenheim or the Viking contract, he laid out several possibilities: “We wanted to go to Europe, but the putsch in Czechoslovakia [backed by the Soviet Union] makes the war seem too close and the next long night (the final?) about to start. We thought of going to New Mexico but they test atom bombs there. Let me not breathe neutrons. Or the West Indies. Have you any ideas?” For a while there was a plan to live in Guatemala (where Tumin had been researching), then in the country outside New York, but on June 4, 1948, Bellow wrote to Henry Moe, of the Guggenheim Foundation, that “the house we had been promised in New York had fallen through.” The plan now was to live in France, “as we have received an invitation from friends in Paris to join them and have been assured of living-quarters by them.” These friends were the Kaplans: Kappy had written to say that “it would cost about 5 grand to live in Paris for a year,” and with the Guggenheim and the Viking contract they could afford it. Anita was keener on Paris than Bellow; she “has a severer travel bug and won’t be happy till she’s crossed the Atlantic,” he told Frank Taylor of Random House in the letter of July 5, 1948, where
as “I’d still prefer a Jamaica-like place.” To Mel Tumin, Bellow worried, in an undated letter, that France or Italy would be “too exciting and disturbing,” a hindrance to his writing: “I came back last fall exhausted and sick and for three months was good for nothing.” He wanted to stay put, “settle for good.… I’m weary of milling around, living in a different house each year.” There were also disturbing memories from the Mexico trip: “Anita did so badly in Mexico with the language; she was terrified and clung with all her weight to me; I couldn’t tolerate that. The results, though I haven’t said so before—perhaps didn’t really understand—were disastrous. Nearly fatal. But she promises to behave differently in France.”77