The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  When Augie came out in 1953, Maury was angry to discover that the novel contained a version of the Marcie affair. He and Bellow stopped talking for a period, though Joel does not believe it was as long as five years, as has been claimed.6 “Saul wasn’t that important to my father,” Joel declares, flatly, woundingly (Joel loved his uncle but his feelings are complicated by a history of legal and business disputes). Why Bellow included the episode, risking Maury’s displeasure, can be explained thematically. Simon was “the greatest Machiavellian of them all” and the novel rejects Machiavellianism, with its limiting “realism” about human possibility, happiness, freedom. In Paris, Charlotte explains to Augie the origins of the affair with Renée: “If he didn’t have such an abnormal idea about being happy in the first place it wouldn’t have happened. Who told him he had any business to expect all that? What right has anybody? There is no such right.” Augie hates talk like this, won’t have it. “How much of this did Simon have to hear? If she didn’t stop she’d turn him into stone. He’d have turned into stone long ago if it hadn’t been for these Renées. What are you supposed to do, lay down your life? That’s what she wanted from him and what she meant by ‘right.’ ” Simon is ashamed of the scandal the affair brings, “stony with shame,” wants to keep the whole thing quiet, but what, Augie asks, do Simon’s sins amount to? “All they were about was his mismanaged effort to live. To live and not die. And this was what he had to be ashamed of” (pp. 991–92). These words also had a personal meaning for they were written in the midst of Bellow’s break with Anita.

  At the end of the fictional account of Maury’s affair, Augie declares: “I love my brother very much. I never meet him again without the utmost love filling me up. He has it too, though we both seem to fight it” (p. 991). In the letter to Dean Borok, Bellow offers advice, a present of sorts. Borok’s initial letter seems to have included an account of his sufferings, what elsewhere, in a letter of October 15, 1996, he calls the story of “a child left to the elements and continually kicked in the teeth by a rich and influential family.” Bellow advises his nephew to write this story, “if you can find the right way to do it.… To get rid of it, as it were. In writing it successfully, you will forgive everyone in the process. Yes, all those who sinned against you will be forgiven. (That’s what I would call a successful effort to get one’s life down on paper.)” Maury may have been angry with Bellow for fictionalizing the affair with Marcie, but Simon is depicted as suffering and he is pitied. Augie forgives him his sins, including his sins as a brother, seeing them, as he sees his own sins, as attempts to be free.

  THAT THE FORM OF freedom the novel emphasizes at the end is sexual—as if it held the key to other forms of liberation—is a product not only of Bellow’s own unhappiness in his marriage but of the New York milieu to which he returned in 1950. Had he stayed in Paris, to be further provoked by the French left, the political material that he cut in draft might have been retained (“I had to throw away about two hundred pages at the end,” Bellow wrote to Robert Penn Warren on November 27, 1952, “and re-write them”). That material concerns Hooker Frazer, the graduate assistant in political science whom Augie meets in Chapter 11 and who turns up again in Mexico with Trotsky in Chapter 20 and then, briefly, in Paris in the final chapters. Had the Frazer material been kept, the liberation emphasized at the novel’s end would have more likely been from dogma, the cult of “hardness,” or the belief in politics as panacea. In the discarded pages Augie joins Frazer’s political movement, the Committee for a Reconstituted Europe (CRE), funded by the millionaire Robey (a more serious figure in draft than the one Augie meets in Chapter 21 of the finished version). Frazer gets Augie to read political theory: the Greeks, Rousseau, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, John Stuart Mill.7 In the course of discussing this material, Frazer criticizes liberals for their lack of “hardness.” He calls the concentration camps a sign of serious intention as well as hateful. At this point Augie snaps, already disillusioned by his experiences working for CRE in Spain (experiences later made use of by Bellow in “The Gonzaga Manuscripts”). What is now clear to Augie is that “the Germans were destroying the subject itself of politics.” He will have nothing more to do with Frazer and CRE.

  Daniel Fuchs thinks Bellow cut this material from the final version of Augie because it was too serious, both for the novel as a whole and for its hero. Augie’s response to Frazer “sounds more like Artur Sammler on Hannah Arendt than it does Augie March of the final version.”8 But the cut may also reflect new thinking on Bellow’s part. By ending with Simon’s shame, the novel emphasizes the power of internalized social constraints rather than political ones, a power Bellow calls “tragic” in the letter to Volkening. Augie alludes to this power in his initial description of Renée. In her role as mistress, Renée presents herself in the line of “femmes galantes, courts of love, Aquitaines, infantas, Medicis, courtesans, wild ladies.” That she only partly succeeds in doing so comes as no surprise to Augie: “You may think that for this all you have to do is surrender to instinct. As if that were so easy!” (p. 911). The difficulty of surrendering to instinct, of overcoming inhibition, is not a major theme in Augie, though it became a central preoccupation in the novels that followed. In Augie external impediments, material needs and values, predominate. In New York, however, where the political material was discarded and the final chapters rewritten, it was the internal obstacles to life and freedom that mattered most to Bellow, money worries notwithstanding.

  These obstacles also predominated in the lives of Bellow’s friends. The late 1940s and 1950s were for Isaac Rosenfeld “the most painful in his life.”9 His literary star was fading, his fiction was stalled, his personal life was a mess. Steven Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s biographer, summarizes the journal entries for these years: “Among his more persistent themes was his fear of homosexuality. He connected it to his aggression towards men, his jealousy, his incessant womanizing. This fear meshed with periods of dark depression. He fell ill with maladies that seemed psychosomatic, suffering flus and fevers that were often accompanied by frustratingly long periods of listlessness.”10 Bellow was Rosenfeld’s colleague at NYU from 1950 to 1952 and a frequent object of his envy and aggression. “I’m jealous of him,” Rosenfeld wrote in an undated letter of 1950 to Tarcov, “and I think he is of me; I’m ready to admit it, but I don’t think he is.… He’s poured everything into his work, which seems to be all he lives for. He’s really very sad and the ‘literary figure’ and the self consciousness don’t hide it.”11 According to Zipperstein, Rosenfeld felt burdened “by Bellow’s sense of him as having failed literature; he spoke of Bellow with anger and disappointment, something akin to the hurt of a failed lover.”12 Bellow speaks of Rosenfeld in comparable terms. “As to Isaac,” he wrote to Tarcov on March 26, 1952, “you know how I’ve always felt about him. But … this past year, I changed considerably toward him, tired of being envied and grudged every bit of success or imagined success. I finally became angry. Making every allowance possible, his bad luck and difficult life, my own vanity and conceit, I still resent his not too well hidden hope that I fall on my face.”

  Before Bellow got to this point, he made several attempts to rekindle the friendship. The most important of these attempts was to take seriously Rosenfeld’s enthusiasm for the theories of Wilhelm Reich. As he explained in the interview with Norman Manea: “Some of the most extreme eccentrics in Greenwich Village were doing it [Reichian therapy] at the time, including a very close friend of mine, Isaac Rosenfeld, whom I loved dearly. I did almost everything he did, or he did what I did.”13 To Atlas, Bellow downplayed his Reichianism: “I enjoyed it as a game then being played … I didn’t want to lose Isaac when all that was happening. So I went through the analysis, too, just to stay close.” To Philip Roth, he said he undertook the therapy “because [Rosenfeld] insisted that I had to have this done, since he was doing it. About three years. Once or twice a week.… And it was a link between Isaac and me. I felt that I c
ould not let him go through this without going through it myself so that I would know what was happening to him.” The evidence, however, suggests other motives for Bellow’s involvement, motives connected both to the wider application of Reichian theory and to personal difficulties on Bellow’s part, including difficulties of a sexual nature.14

  The appeal of Reichian theory was widespread and fascinating. Reich, whose parents were Jewish, arrived in New York in 1939 at the age of forty-two, only days before the outbreak of war. In Vienna and then Berlin, he had gained a reputation as an apostle of sexual liberation. Such liberation, he claimed, would cure mental illness; it would also defeat fascism. In The Function of the Orgasm (1927), a book well known in the 1940s in Greenwich Village (it was translated into English in 1943), Reich declared that “there is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients, the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction”15 (his italics). This satisfaction was to be attained through the right kind of orgasm, sometimes referred to as “total orgasm.” Soon after arriving in the United States, Reich invented a device he called an “orgone energy accumulator,” a five-feet-high wooden box or cabinet, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool. This box, he claimed, could improve a person’s orgasms, increasing the body’s capacity to absorb what he called “orgone energy,” a mysterious life force circulating in the atmosphere in the form of waves or currents or rays. The orgone box trapped orgone energy (“How the energy penetrates the metal, we do not know,” he conceded).16 By sitting naked in the box, a patient “accumulated” this energy in concentrated form, in the process dissolving social and cultural constraints, known as “character armor.”17 Reich claimed that one could feel “sexual excitation” when absorbing orgone energy. He also claimed that the orgone box was effective in treating cancer, radiation sickness, and minor physical ailments such as varicose veins and psoriasis. When cures to these ailments failed to materialize, Reich blamed atomic energy, everywhere feared at the time, which he said “aggravated” the orgone energy.18 Reich was convinced of the scientific basis of his theories. He lobbied the Atomic Energy Commission at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to test the orgone box as a possible cure for radiation sickness. He even persuaded Albert Einstein to investigate the box. It took Einstein two weeks to dismiss Reich’s theories.19

  Yet the theories thrived, particularly among intellectual and bohemian types who were disillusioned with politics. Paul Goodman praised Reich in an influential article entitled “The Political Meaning of Some Recent Revisions of Freud,” published in July 1945 in Dwight Macdonald’s politics, a month before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941), which influenced Bellow’s Dangling Man, borrowed liberally from Reich, without acknowledgment. By 1947 Reich’s Orgone Institute Press was selling four to five hundred copies of his books a week. Orgone boxes were used by Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Christopher Turner, in Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex (2011), quotes Alfred Kazin: “Everybody of my generation had his orgone box, his search for fulfillment. There was, God knows, no break with convention, there was just a freeing of oneself from all those parental attachments and thou shalt nots.” Turner also quotes Philip Rieff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1961): “The artists and the writers who followed Reich were, like him, defeated men of the left; for the defeated who, nevertheless, retained their pride of alienation, Reich’s brave announcements of the end of politics turned failure into a kind of victory.” James Baldwin, looking back on the late 1940s and 1950s, offers a related account of Reich’s influence, in an essay entitled “The New Lost Generation” (1961):

  the discovery of the orgasm—or, rather, of the orgone box—seems the least mad of the formulas that came to hand. It seemed to me … that people turned from the formula of the world being made better through politics to the idea of the world being made better through psychic and sexual health like sinners coming down the aisle at a revival meeting. And I doubted that their conversion was any more to be trusted than that. The converts, indeed, moved in a certain euphoric aura of well-being, which would not last.… There are no formulas for the improvement of the private, or any other, life—certainly not the formula of more and better orgasms. (Who decides?) The people I had been raised among had orgasms all the time, and still chopped each other with razors on Saturday nights.20

  Bellow suspected that Rosenfeld was drawn to Reichianism by anxieties about his sexuality. “He was haunted … by an obscure sense of physical difficulty or deficiency, a biological torment or disagreement with his own flesh.”21 Rosenfeld was later to admit this openly. As he told Mitzi McClosky, in Zipperstein’s paraphrase, “never had he managed to satisfy Vasiliki sexually and she openly acknowledged that this was the case.”22 Atlas quotes an unnamed acquaintance on Rosenfeld’s therapy: “He goes to Queens for fucking lessons.”23 That related anxieties troubled Bellow in this period is suggested by his failure with the “lovely American lady” in Barcelona, a result of “fiasco at the moment of embrace” (a failure implicitly attributed to guilt: “Anita sent me off under some hex”). For both men, Reichian therapy also promised an end to more general anxieties. According to the writer and critic Ted Solotaroff, therapy helped Rosenfeld “struggle against the pettiness and defensiveness and prevarications of the ego for the larger claims and possibilities of existence,” claims and possibilities “of one’s instinctual life.”24 Bellow pursued the instinctual life warily. Rosenfeld pursued it recklessly, though self-consciously. “Isaac could be serious while clowning,” Bellow recalled in a letter of August 11, 1990, to George Demetriou, a lapsed Reichian who had written to ask about Rosenfeld’s therapy. “He half-laughed at himself while he declared that he was a fully orthodox Reichian.” So committed was Rosenfeld to Reich’s theories of sexual experimentation that he urged his four-year-old son, George, to touch the little girls he played with in Washington Square Park, to put his hand down their panties.25 He tested the beneficial powers of his orgone box by growing tomatoes inside it to improve their taste. He put his neighbors’ sick pets inside his box (he put his cat inside it to cure it of diarrhea, to disastrous effect). Friends with headaches were encouraged to wear a “shooter,” an absurd apparatus invented by Reich consisting of what Bellow described as a “tin crown” with an inverted funnel attached. A rubber hose issued from the spout of the funnel and connected to a small orgone box, enabling the shooter “to focus rays on colds, scratches, and cuts.”26 Reich invaded Rosenfeld’s work and his relationships. His book reviews, in Mark Shechner’s words, “appropriated Reich’s bioenergetics dualisms to gauge imaginative success: organism versus mechanism, potency versus rigidity, flow versus blockage, release versus restraint.”27 At NYU, Rosenfeld turned his literature classes into seminars on Reich’s theories. He talked about sex to everyone he met, took many lovers, and encouraged Vasiliki, his wife, to do likewise, to the detriment of their marriage (“It was,” recalls Monroe Engel, “very puzzling, because the night they announced they were going to split, they couldn’t take their hands off each other”). At one point, Vasiliki admitted to Mitzi McClosky, she was even “naughty with Saul.”28

  Some months after Bellow’s return to New York in 1950, he installed an orgone box in the apartment in Queens. Though Reich encouraged followers to purchase boxes through authorized agents, Bellow got his from Herb Passin’s brother, Sidney, a carpenter and set designer in New York, who built one for Rosenfeld as well (Kazin describes Rosenfeld’s box as like “a cardboard closet or stage telephone booth” standing “in the midst of an enormous confusion of bedclothes, review copies, manuscripts, children, and the many people who went in and out of the room.… Belligerently sitting inside his orgone box, daring philistines to laugh, Isaac nevertheless looked lost”29). Soon after installing his box, Bellow began Reichian therapy. “For two years,” he told Manea, “I had this nude therapy on the couch, being my animal self. Which was a ridiculous thing for m
e to have done.… What attracted me was that it was the mind-body idea, that it wasn’t just my mind but my body that made me what I was.”30 From childhood Bellow had believed facial and bodily features, gestures, and movements were indicative of character, a belief he never lost. The belief he lost—only entertained seriously in these years—was in the curative power of untrammeled instinct. In the interview with Manea, he recalls what initially attracted him to Reich’s ideas and what he soon came to see as their dangers: