On June 30, the Bellows moved out of 58 Orlin Avenue, staying with the McCloskys at 701 University Avenue South till July 20. They would be in Chicago with Anita’s family from July 20 till August 20, then on to New York and Paris. In the letter of July 5 to Taylor, Bellow was still trying to book passage to Le Havre. On September 15, after several weeks in Manhattan, he, Anita, and Greg set sail for Europe on the De Grasse, a ship of the French Line. Before leaving New York, according to Atlas, Bellow had a clandestine meeting with Betty, the Wisconsin student from the previous summer. Atlas quotes from a letter Bellow wrote to Betty while abroad. She had written to him care of American Express under an assumed name—“M. Bacalao, Spanish for codfish. (Bellow had in mind a line of García Lorca’s: ‘Ya te veo, bacalao, dunque nienes disfragado’—‘Now I see you, codfish, under your disguise’).”78 Betty still entertained hopes, which, from the evidence of the letter Atlas quotes, Bellow understood but sought to discourage. “Though I’ve always kept clear of promises and commitments,” there was “a kind of chemistry in the soul” between them, “where hopes are in the mixture.” “I feel it isn’t good enough to be ‘legally’ fair,” he admits, not where “the most complex and subtle things happen.” Hence “my writing now … because I neither forgot you nor want to be forgotten—but remembered en quelque sorte.” “It was a typical letter from a married man to a girlfriend,” Atlas writes, “gently equivocating but with the clear signal that the relationship had no future.”79 It might also have been simply sincere.
SB and Herbert McClosky on the Marine Tiger, September 1947 (ill. 8.1)
9
Paris
I SEEM TO BE UNABLE TO accustom myself to ships,” Bellow wrote to Henry Volkening on September 27, 1948, shortly after the De Grasse docked at Le Havre. “A very light sea made me sick the second day out and it wasn’t till we were nearly on the other side before the feeling left me.” The voyage took nearly two weeks and among the passengers were “about a hundred Southern college girls practicing their French on stewards and deckhands.”1 Once on land, life was calmer, “save for the robberies we’ve been subjected to. Prices are doubled as soon as [one] opens one’s mouth, [as] though one were to have two heads and a beret on each.” Bellow and Anita and Greg settled into an apartment at 24 rue Marbeuf, in the Eighth Arrondissement. It was owned by “an old English gentleman who used to race automobiles and who still writes articles for the racing magazines in London.” The gentleman’s name was Pope and at the turn of the century he “had broken all racing car records between Nice and the English Channel.” Bellow was struck by his clothes, in particular “a dull mulberry colored lounge suit which made him look as if he had been laid out for burial but had risen from the coffin to complete unfinished business.”2 Pope with his rapacious French wife were off to Cannes for the winter, to write a book using the typewriter Bellow had brought over from New York “for a bribe” (“a new Remington portable typewriter, which the landlady absolutely demanded as a gift”).3 The period of rental, he wrote on October 20 to Henry Allen Moe, secretary of the Guggenheim Foundation, was uncertain, anywhere from two months to seven, “though the coal strike will induce [the Popes] to remain, I think.”
Five days later, Bellow was reporting to Monroe Engel that “I’ve already been at work for two weeks,” interrupted only by “the occasional fusillade of French under the window or at the back of the house.” The window in question was in Mr. Pope’s study, which Bellow had taken over. So solitary was his life in those first few weeks that he might have been in Minneapolis, “except that Minneapolis houses are much better heated.” Once the threatened strikes took effect, there would be no heating at all; already “three million tons of coal were lost and everyone expects cuts in electric power and gas. In some parts of the city the electric coupures have already started and Paris pitch black is no place for us.”
What Bellow called the “encapsulated” nature of his early days in Paris was partly willed.4 “You have to draw in from the beauty of the place to accomplish anything,” he wrote to Volkening on October 25. “And then the beauty is very much complicated by the terror of the strikes and the rattle of scrapping that many people fear may turn into a booming civil war.” Janet Flanner, of The New Yorker, was one of these people, reporting in a journal entry of October 5 that France’s condition was “dangerous,” its strength “flowing away” in “choleric politics,” “falling money,” “strikes in French mines, banks, government services.”5 Conditions were better for Americans in France than for the French. The summer of 1948, Flanner predicted, would see “the biggest influx of American tourists since the great season of 1929.” These tourists would be treated—by the state if not its citizens—“as shiploads of precious metal.”6 Dollars were much in demand (the Popes insisted that the Bellows pay their rent in dollars); tourists, even tourists without automobiles, were entitled to unlimited gasoline coupons, which could then be sold on the black market to the French, whose gas was rationed. Bellow complained of being cheated, yet was able to rent a room to write in, in a modest Left Bank hotel, for a dollar a day. The Bellows were relatively well off in Paris. They had $5,000 to live on, combining the Guggenheim grant and the Viking advance for “The Crab and the Butterfly,” and the rate of exchange was 550 to one.7 They ran a car, employed a full-time maid (called a bonne à tout faire), and after Anita found work, a Danish au pair named Lilian Bodnia. They even kept a dog, a French poodle named Malou, later taken over by the Kaplans. In December, according to a letter of January 2, 1949, to Volkening, the family had enjoyed “a very pleasant holiday on the Riviera, at Nice and San Remo.”
One drawback to living in Paris was having to deal with the French, beginning with Mme Pope, the landlady. Upon their arrival, she presented the Bellows with a detailed inventaire: “An amazing document! A catalogue of every object in the house, from the Chippendale chair to the meanest cup, fully and marvellously described.” When at last the list had been gone through, ending in the kitchen with “three lousy tin spoons,” and the landlady departed, Bellow “turned a somersault over the Chippendale chair and landed thunderously on the floor. This lightened my heart for a time.”8 The apartment was cluttered, “a gilded cage”9; the building “fussy”10; the neighborhood too far from what Bellow came to think of as “my Paris,” “between the boulevard du Montparnasse and the Seine.”11 Four-year-old Greg was a threat to Madame’s objets; he needed room to run around. At the end of April or early in May, with the imminent return of the Popes, the family moved, at which point Mme Pope took them to court. One of her objets had been broken. Atlas recounts the proceedings, as remembered by Bellow: “Sortez les mains de vos poches,” the magistrate ordered: “Ce n’est pas Amérique.”12 Found guilty of damaging property, Bellow was ordered to pay compensation, though when the Popes failed to produce receipts, the money was refunded. The family had lived at 24 rue Marbeuf for almost eight months, though after the December holiday on the Riviera, Bellow had absented himself for a further six weeks, spending January in Rome, looking for somewhere to live (“next April we’ll move there together,” he explained in a letter to Volkening of December 17), and simply getting away from home, because “I want to get off and think through a novel, or novels, for there are several in my mind.”13 Shortly after returning to Paris, he rented the room to write in, at the Hôtel de l’Académie on rue des Saints-Pères, just above boulevard Saint-Germain; the study at rue Marbeuf depressed him.14 At the end of The Adventures of Augie March, Augie finds himself in an apartment very like 24 rue Marbeuf, on rue François-Ier, which crosses Marbeuf near the Champs-Elysées: “I’d pass days trying to get used to this moldy though fancied‑up apartment, somewhat obstinate, seeing that it was now my place. But there was no getting anywhere with the carpets and chairs, the lamps that looked as if grown on Coney Island, cat-house pictures, alabaster owls with electric eyes, books of Ouida and Marie Corelli in leather binding, smelling like spit” (pp. 975–76).
It was Kappy who foun
d the Bellows the rue Marbeuf apartment, assuring them that, though not cheap, it was worth the money. Kappy and Celia lived on the Left Bank, like almost everyone Bellow knew or wanted to know, in an eighth-floor apartment at 132 boulevard du Montparnasse, directly above Matisse’s studio. The vast living room of the apartment, also once an artist’s studio, was perfect for parties, and became, if not quite a salon, then what Kappy called “an unofficial American cultural center.”15 After long years of occupation and war, he recalled, “now suddenly there was this cheery place with balconies overlooking the city and this sense that everything was open” (the view stretched all the way to Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre).16 Among the guests the Kaplans entertained at boulevard du Montparnasse were Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Queneau, Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, David Rousset, Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Guilloux, Jacques Lacan, Miles Davis, Arthur Koestler, Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender, Alberto Moravia, Ignazio Silone, Norman Mailer, Czeslaw Milosz, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Theodore White, Saul Steinberg, Truman Capote, James T. Farrell, Mary McCarthy, Lionel Abel, Herbert Gold, Joseph Frank, and Nicola Chiaromonte. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir stayed away, angry at William Barrett’s negative review of Being and Nothingness in the “New French Writing” issue of Partisan Review, which they’d helped to assemble. Sartre refused to accept Kappy’s protestations that he’d had nothing to do with Barrett’s review, hadn’t been consulted about it or seen it in advance. Soon Beauvoir was spreading rumors that Kappy was a CIA agent.17
When the Bellows moved to Paris in September 1948, Kappy was employed by the United States Information Service (USIS) as an unofficial press and cultural attaché at the embassy. He had arrived four years earlier, on the heels of General Leclerc’s liberation of the city in August 1944. Previously he’d been stationed in North Africa in a unit broadcasting Allied propaganda to France, which had grown out of a comparable unit in New York, headed by the French journalist Pierre Lazareff, later editor of France-Soir. The New York unit was small (about ten people), secret, and sponsored by General Eisenhower under the auspices of the army’s Psychological Warfare Branch. Kappy was assigned to it partly on the recommendation of his professors at the University of Chicago, Robert Vigneron and René Etiemble, both on leave from the Ecole Normale Supérieure.18 The North African unit was headed by Pierre Schaeffer, a composer, journalist, and broadcaster. Kappy was the only member never to have been to France. His colleagues—writers, artists, newspapermen—mocked his academic French, which helped to perfect it, and provided many contacts. Among New York colleagues, he mentions André Breton, who presented the broadcasts, and Simon Michael Bessie, who was to become his publisher at Harper Brothers. When Kappy arrived in Paris, he was detached to the United States embassy, helping to set up its consulate on the rue Saint-Florentin. He found the Montparnasse apartment “by luck”; when he moved in, there was a German uniform hanging in the closet. Within a year, he was joined by Celia and three-year-old Leslie (their daughter, named after Leslie Fiedler, a close friend since high school). One of Kappy’s jobs at the embassy, in addition to advising the ambassador, was to organize tours for new colleagues or visiting writers, politicians, and intellectuals (Senator Fulbright, Richard McKeon, Sidney Hook, who was scandalized when taken to the Bal Nègre). He also encouraged students from the grandes écoles to study in the United States. In the late 1940s, he recalled, “the great schools came under heavy Communist influence, if not control” and the hope was that “simply by getting acquainted with our country, they [the students] would become more favorably disposed toward it. It was perhaps an illusion!”19
Despite temperamental and other differences, Kappy and Bellow shared important interests. In “A Minor Scandal,” his “Paris Letter” for the December 1947 issue of Partisan Review, Kappy criticizes both Sartre (elsewhere called “a generous man, but incredibly stupid about politics”20) and the opinions of French intellectuals, mockingly identified by the writer and polymath Boris Vian as “Simone de Merlartre, Sarleau de Pontrevoir, Merloir de Beauvartre, etc.” The minor scandal of the title involved “my friend Patrick” (the poet and art critic Patrick Waldberg, whom Kappy met in North Africa). At a party given by Claude-Edmonde Magny, a “femme de lettres,” Waldberg threw a glass of Armagnac in the face of Curzio Malaparte, the Italian novelist, prisoner of war, and onetime fascist sympathizer. Kappy had no use for Malaparte and the “characteristically slick and abject” way he “jerked facile tears” over the victims of the camps. “We live in our history, not above it,” Kappy writes at the end of the “Paris Letter,” “and we finally choose between drinking our armagnac or throwing it into someone’s face” (pp. 492, 505). Kappy’s anger came from a year reading “books, brochures, and articles about concentration camps” (p. 493). The most impressive of the books he read were by David Rousset, a survivor of Buchenwald. Rousset records the horrors of the camps but also looks beyond or behind them, showing that “even in such hells as Dora and Matthausen, social groupings were formed, the struggle for power took place between Poles and Germans, for example, or between the political and the common-law prisoners” (p. 494). Kappy was particularly struck by Rousset’s account of collaboration among the inmates, without which Buchenwald could not have functioned: “the S.S. were far too few to staff any but the top posts of the bureaucracy” (p. 499). Chief among collaborators were the German Communists and because Rousset had been a Trotskyist and could speak “the Marxist language,” he learned their story. By the time of his capture in 1944, the Communists were “virtually in complete control of the camp … after a long, costly, bloody struggle against the common-law criminals, who had ruled the camps from their inception until the outbreak of total war” (pp. 499–500).
Rousset’s first book, L’Univers concentrationnaire (1946), ends on what Kappy calls a “note of strength.” This note Bellow was bound to have heard, just at the time he was at work on “Who Breathes Overhead,” the germ of “The Crab and the Butterfly” (first mentioned in a letter to Bazelon of January 5, 1948, a month after the appearance of Kappy’s “Paris Letter”). Rousset finds in the camps, in Kappy’s translation of the book’s final sentences, the “dynamic realization of the power and the beauty of the fact of living, in itself, brutal, entirely devoid of all superstructures, of living even through the worst collapses, or the gravest retreats. A sensual freshness of joy constructed on the completest knowledge of the ruins and, in consequence, a hardening in action, a stubbornness in decisions, in short a deeper and more intensely creative health” (p. 501).21 The moral complexities of this “health” recall Bellow’s idea for “The Crab and the Butterfly,” quoted in the previous chapter, in which the crab is “human tenaciousness to life” and the butterfly “the gift of existence which the crab stalks.” In the “Paris Letter,” “human tenaciousness to life” is admirable when associated with Rousset, despicable when associated with Malaparte, and both when associated with the kapos of Buchenwald, who in “saving from physical destruction a larger percentage of Communists,” created a population of survivors who “can only function today as the docile instruments of another police-power in Germany, namely the N.K.V.D.” (p. 501).22
FROM THE START, Bellow granted Paris its architectural beauty, but he had little to say in favor of its weather, the Parisian grisaille or gloom. “Depressed and sunk in spirit,” he writes of himself in this period, “I dwelt among Madame’s works of art that cold winter. The city lay under perpetual fog, and the smoke could not rise and flowed in the streets in brown and gray currents. An unnatural smell emanated from the Seine.”23 This passage comes from “The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them” (1955), the foreword Bellow wrote to Dostoyevsky’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), published in French under the title Le Bourgeois de Paris. Bellow came across the book on the stand of a bouquiniste near the Châtelet, and immediately took to it, “unable to suppress certain utterances of satisfaction and agreement.” Dostoyevsky’s jaundiced view
of Parisians was his view; “the French in 1862 were not substantially different from those of 1948.”24 Nor were Bellow and Dostoyevsky alone in their view: “Gay Paris? Gay, my foot! Mere advertising. Paris is one of the grimmest cities in the world. I do not ask you to take my word for it. Go to Balzac and Stendhal, to Zola, to Strindberg—to Paris itself.” In 1948, Bellow admits, he “was a poor visitor and, by any standard, an inferior tourist.”25 He attributes these deficiencies to defensiveness, a background like Dostoyevsky’s: “I, too, was a foreigner and a barbarian from a vast and backward land” (that is, he was treated as such). In explaining the indifference and inaccessibility of French Parisians, he “often” reminded himself that “old cultures are impermeable and exclusive—none more so than the French.” It was naive of him to “expect these people to take you to their hearts and into their homes. They have other and more important things to think about. Food, for one.”26 Nevertheless, the behavior of the French offended him, as he had been offended in the summer of 1947 by the similar behavior of the Spanish.
France aroused Dostoyevsky’s “profoundest hatred.” Bellow’s antipathy was milder, and not a product of disillusion. “There is not a nation anywhere that does not contradict its highest principles in daily practice,” he writes in “The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them,” “but the French contradiction was in his eyes the very worst because France presumed to offer the world political and intellectual instruction and leadership.” In his youth, Dostoyevsky suffered exile for his faith in those presumptions, as a participant in the “Petrashevsky ‘conspiracy,’ ” inspired by the writings of “Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Sébastien Cabet among others.”27 Bellow had no such faith, not after reading Harold Rosenberg’s “The Fall of Paris.”28 Nor, he claims, was he susceptible to the glamour of the city’s prewar past. “I was not going to sit at the feet of Gertrude Stein. I had no notions of the Ritz bar. I would not be boxing with Ezra Pound, as Hemingway had done, or writing in bistros while waiters brought oysters and wine. In simple truth, the Jazz Age Paris of American legend held no charms for me.” He was equally immune to the allure of Henry James’s Paris, citing James’s The American Scene (1907), with its descriptions of the “unnatural squawking” of Lower East Side Jews in New York: “You wouldn’t expect a relative of those barbarous East Siders to be drawn to the world of Madame de Vionnet, which had, in any case, vanished.”29 Only an odd undated letter to Volkening, written early in 1949, suggests a susceptibility to the Paris of American legend. In it Bellow describes running into F. Scott Fitzgerald, “your old college pal and fellow Princetonian,” at the Casino in Montreux. He writes that he and Fitzgerald hadn’t seen each other since a bibulous lunch in Paris, which had ended “at ten that night at the Ritz bar.” Bellow says he was involved with a woman Fitzgerald knew, and after detailing his difficulties with this woman, who was pursuing him, he tells Volkening of a recent visit from his English publisher (“a very fine fellow—he took me out and I met some of the celebrities—Mr. Michael Arlen, and some of the Left Bank people”), then of a trip to Provence, then of a subsequent meeting with Fitzgerald in Geneva, where they talked of Zelda’s recent committal to an asylum.
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 45