The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  VIKING DID WELL by Augie March, spurred on in part by Lynn Hoffman, whose job as a reader for the press Bellow helped her to obtain (the Hoffmans had returned to the States in 1951, Ted to get an MA in English at Columbia, where he’d been taught as an undergraduate by Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling, Lynn to the job at Viking). Lynn was determined to see that Augie was not outshone by Steinbeck’s East of Eden, “a vastly inferior book” which she remembers being presented to sales representatives “in a florid mahogany box carved by the master himself.”59 The launch party Viking gave for Augie was a grand affair, the occasion of what Sasha calls “my finest social moment.” In a black dress, hair tucked into a large black fox hat, with a matching fox muff (courtesy of Maximilian furs), “I stood with Saul in the receiving line as people congratulated him. Ah, the look on William Phillips’s face! ‘It was never my idea, you know,’ he whispered to me as he shook hands. Rahv said nothing.”60 Bellow was excited at the party but exhausted, having just begun a new job at Bard College, a small liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson in Dutchess County, a job Ted Hoffman helped him to get. After finishing his MA at Columbia, Ted turned to the theater, a passion he’d developed in Paris and Salzburg, partly under the influence of Bellow’s old Minnesota colleague Eric Bentley, now teaching at Columbia and writing theater criticism for The New Republic. During this period, according to Lynn Hoffman, “Ted became a sort of Consigliori to Saul,” in the line of Sam Freifeld and Herb McClosky. That spring Hoffman had been appointed head of drama at Bard and when he learned of a vacancy in the Division of Languages and Literature, recommended Bellow.61 The chair of the division, the poet Ted Weiss, approved the recommendation and on June 6 Bellow received an official letter from the president of the college, James H. Case, offering a one-year appointment at a salary of $4,500. Bellow was pleased to take the job for several reasons: he could pretty much teach what he wanted (“Studies in American Literature, English 201,” Hawthorne, Melville, Dreiser, Dos Passos), the attractive country setting would compensate for low pay, and “I could entertain my little boy there—take him out of the city, keep him with me on holidays and long weekends. Much nicer than dragging him around to museums and zoos in New York. Nothing is more killing. To the divorced, the zoo can be a Via Crucis.”62

  Bard College was quite unlike the places Bellow had previously taught. It was founded in 1860 as St. Stephen’s College, “a pre-theological school with high educational standards and an emphasis on the classics.”63 In 1928 St. Stephen’s affiliated with Columbia University. By 1933 it had begun to adopt progressive educational practices, and in 1935 it changed its name to Bard College. During the war, under the guidance of a dean, later president, from Bennington College, Bard “continued its pioneering efforts in the field of educational experiment.” By 1944, it retained only the loosest of ties with the Episcopal Church, and when it began to admit women as well as men it severed its connection with Columbia. President Case was appointed in 1950 and a year later Blithewood, a beautiful Hudson River estate, was gifted to the college. It added 825 acres to the “old” campus and gave Bard wide frontage on the Hudson River. In 1953, when Bellow arrived, the ratio of staff to students was one to seven. The average size of any teaching group was less than ten students, and full-time faculty were asked to devote at least six hours a week to individual counseling and instruction, in addition to six hours devoted to group instruction.64 It was, Bellow wrote on September 22 to Simon Michael Bessie, Kappy’s publisher, the “roughest” teaching job he’d ever had: “Progressive for the students, reactionary for the enslaved teachers.” “Never have I worked so hard at teaching,” he wrote to Edith Tarcov in a Thanksgiving Day letter. “Small colleges demand infinitely more of you, and it is a thankless and poorly paid labor. On Fridays I generally have to go to New York to have my teeth—preserved: they are in that stage. And when I have finished running around the City and have returned from my visit to Forest Hills I reach Barrytown on Sunday in a state of exhaustion.”

  Bellow found the students at Bard bright, bohemian in style, and demanding, “terribly earnest in every sense of the term.”65 Bard was “like Greenwich-Village-in-the-Pines,” he later recalled; or, as Sasha put it, “Bennington with boys.”66 Mary McCarthy, who taught at Bard in 1945, when it had only eighty students, and subsequently at Sarah Lawrence, another progressive college, wrote a novel, The Groves of Academe (1952), set in a college “quite a bit like Bard,” with recognizable fictional portraits of several faculty members still in place when Bellow arrived. The male students at the novel’s Jocelyn College are divided into a “beer-and-convertible crowd—the ex-bootleggers’ and racketeers’ sons, movie-agents’ sons, the heavy-walleted incorrigible sons of advertising geniuses who had been advised to try Jocelyn as a last resort” and “an unusual number of child prodigies, mathematical wizards of fourteen, as well as … cripples of various sorts” (mental as well as physical). The female students, in contrast, are mostly pretty and healthy, “with the usual desires and values, daughters of commercial artists, commercial writers, radio-singers, insurance-salesmen, dermatologists, girls who had failed to get into Smith or nearby Swarthmore … narcissistic, indolent girls wanting a good time and not choosy, girls who sculpted or did ceramics of animals, or fashion-drawing, hard-driving, liverish girls, older than the rest, on scholarships.” “Unlike most advanced young women,” McCarthy writes of a young idealistic member of the literature department at Jocelyn, “she dressed quietly, without tendentiousness—no ballet-slippers, bangles, dirndls, flowers in the hair.”67

  In A Trip into Town (1961), a novel by Michael Rubin, who had been a student at Bard when Bellow was there, Suki Goodman, one of McCarthy’s “advanced young women,” falls for Leon Kossof, a newly arrived professor, author of the recently published The Fortunes of Shlomo O’Brien, about a hero “trying by turns to identify himself with one ‘meaningful’ cause after another, and then to escape all his influences.” Kossof’s novel, which is described as a “picaresque saga,” traces its hero’s fortunes “the length and breadth of the Western Hemisphere.” It makes its author famous. Suki goes after Kossof not only because he’s a literary celebrity but also because “he’s gorgeous.” To the narrator, Kossof seems “a prototype of confidence and strength, a definition of poise and purpose.… This was a very successful man, an author at the peak of his creative powers, the darling of literary cocktail parties, a book club selection.” Hence the crowd he attracts at his first lecture: “at least a dozen girls were there.… Oddly enough, they were all very pretty.”68 Kossof has a tendency to wander in lectures, barely mentioning the text, and attendance soon dwindles, though the loyal followers who stay with him hear brilliant lectures on Dostoyevsky. When away from the lectern, on walks with the narrator, he “tended to turn gloomy. He rarely talked intimately about himself … but dealt in broad generalizations, as though his personal problems were indicative of the state of the world.” When Kossof breaks off with Suki, it is to marry the woman he’s been living with throughout the affair. “Let me be frank,” he confesses to Suki, “and tell you outright that you flattered me.… What veteran would not take advantage when offered a lovely young lady?” At the same time, “I also flattered you. I am a fairy tale for you. What young girl does not want to sleep with an ‘artist’ at least once in her life.” Though Suki is “dear” to him, Kossof is “deeply in love with Hannah.… It was still always my bond to Hannah that touched my imagination.”69 There is clearly something of Bellow in the character of Kossof. Sasha asks in her memoir: “Were there other women at this time? Apparently, if what I read and heard later was true, but it never occurred to me to think so at the time or for some time to come” (p. 82).

  If the style of the students at Bard was bohemian, the style of the faculty was conservative or Ivy League. “Castaways from ships that had foundered en route to Harvard or characters who had fallen from grace at Yale” is how Bellow described his colleagues, “still refining the airs they had
acquired in the great Ivy League centers.”70 On visits over the summer, Bellow and Sasha had met some of the faculty. Both were particularly fond of the Weisses (Ted’s wife, Renée, was the sister of one of Sasha’s freshman roommates at Bennington). Bellow’s colleagues in the Division of Languages and Literature were eight in number71: Keith Botsford, a twenty-six-year-old writer, educated at Yale and the University of Iowa, was, like Bellow, a new appointment (this was his first full-time job); Irma Brandeis, a Dante scholar, the muse of Eugenio Montale, was ten years older than Bellow and the most senior member of the staff; the poet Anthony Hecht, eight years younger than Bellow, came via Bard itself, where he’d been an undergraduate, but also Kenyon College, Columbia, and the University of Iowa, where he’d taught in the Writers’ Workshop; Andrews Wanning, a poet and literary scholar (Choate, Yale, Cambridge), was a seventeenth-century specialist; the Swiss-German Willie Frauenfelder (“a nice, gentle man,” according to Botsford) taught languages; Warren Carrier, cofounding editor, with Weiss, of the Quarterly Review of Literature, taught writing; and Texan novelist William Humphrey, no Bellow favorite, taught American literature. Jack Ludwig, from Winnipeg, another aspiring writer, a self-professed “Joycean,” came to Bard via both UCLA, where he’d recently received his PhD, and a brief teaching stint at Williams College.

  A week or so after Bellow received his appointment letter from President Case, he took the train from Grand Central Station to Rhinebeck, a picturesque journey up the Hudson, past wide vistas and grand estates, several of which are described by Henry James and Edith Wharton. There he was met by the Hoffmans, already in situ. Ted Hoffman, like McClosky at Minnesota, was happy to smooth Bellow’s way, directing him to the registrar, introducing him to Bard faculty, helping him to find a place to stay. The weekend before Fall Semester, Sasha remembers, there was a lawn party for the faculty followed by a cocktail party at the home of Felix Hirsch, who had come to Bard from Germany, where he had been political editor of the Berliner Tageblatt. Sasha was particularly struck by Jack Ludwig, though “not in the least for any romantic reason.” She had arrived for the weekend without party clothes, felt ill-dressed and ill at ease, and then “this very round faced, fat guy, wearing a hideous checked jacket that even a bookie might have rejected, gave me a joyful, humorous smile and I responded gratefully” (p. 74). Ludwig also made a strong impression on Botsford, who remembers seeing him at a party for new faculty “in Chanler Chapman’s tatty big farmhouse, roomy and reeking of drink.” Botsford arrived there straight from New York City. That morning, he’d gone early to Bloomingdale’s book department to purchase a copy of Augie March. By the time his train arrived at Rhinebeck, Augie was in Mexico (an episode “I didn’t believe”). At the party, Botsford spotted Bellow immediately; he was now famous thanks to reviews of Augie and accompanying profiles and portraits:

  He stood against a wall with a glass in one hand which he held before him protectively. What I took in first was his visibility: academic smart, but always as I remember him with a little gaud about him: in this case a bright foulard in his pocket. I kept looking. Of course I wanted my turn with him; Augie bubbled in my mind. His hair was still dark, way up on the temples; his lips were fleshy, his mouth generous, part of the animal ridens, a joke behind good teeth. But the eyes got me.… They were oblique, as at an angle to each other; the right eye was wary, like a permanent Id, the left gobbled up detail. It was with his left eye that he suddenly saw me.

  … There was an obstacle between us: a bulky Winnipeg hockey body, a heft arm leaning against the wall, a mass of hair that bristled, resilient and thick, hair by hair, and a flow of Yiddish, of back-slapping laughter. This was Jack Ludwig, also newly arrived at Bard, with its prey. And yes, I knew that then. I was watching a rape, an attempted possession. Jack backed off. “I need a drink,” he said and away he lurched: audible still, a very needy man. Saul said, “Thank God you rescued me from that butcher boy Yiddish! Let’s go get some fresh air.”72

  If Botsford is right about the party venue, Bellow was, in effect, at home, having rented an apartment above the carriage house (tractors, boats, cars) on the grounds of Sylvania Farms, Chanler Chapman’s estate in Barrytown, just south of Annandale. Chapman came from grandee stock, not that he looked it. He was a descendant of the Astors as well as the Chanlers; his first wife, Olivia, was a grandniece of Henry James; his father was John Jay Chapman, described by Gore Vidal as “easily the most original of American essayists.” A local “character,” Chapman affected a backwoods gruffness and slovenliness; he also possessed what Vidal describes as “an eerie and entirely unjustified self-assurance” (“eerie” is a Vidal staple, as in Richard Nixon’s “eerie but touching propensity to fuck up”).73 Chapman called his estate the “Piggery,” stomped around in muddy boots and overalls, but also enjoyed showing off his father’s library. He published a monthly broadsheet entitled The Barrytown Explorer, which printed his poems. The apartment Bellow rented from him had charm, but in Sasha’s words was “as bare as it could be. No toilet, even” (p. 75). Everything, toilet included, had to be purchased, mostly from local yard sales. Initially, in the early autumn, Bellow and Sasha made do with a mattress, a Mexican blanket, a rickety wooden table, four kitchen chairs, and an assortment of mismatched pots, pans, and kitchenware. Then it got cold. By November Bellow was freezing: the wind blew in from the Hudson, there was barely any heating, and Chapman refused to supply wood for the furnace. Bellow accused him of trying to freeze him out; he accused Bellow of being cold because he was a writer and didn’t move around enough.74 There were other tensions. “He complained that the drain didn’t work and that the place smelled,” Chapman recalled. “He was right, of course, because the whole place stank.”75 According to Winthrop (“Winty”) Aldrich, Chapman’s cousin, Bellow claimed that Chapman shot his cat.76

  At the end of December, Bellow cleared out, with Chapman protesting that he owed him rent. From December onward, from Monday through Thursday, Bellow stayed in a spare room in the Hoffmans’ house, a former rectory just below the Bard campus (described by Lynn Hoffman as “damp and wormy”).77 On weekends, when Lynn returned from her job at Viking, Bellow stayed in Manhattan in an apartment he’d rented at 333 Riverside Drive, near the Broadway apartment Pearl Kazin sublet from her brother Alfred. Pearl had left Harper’s Bazaar and was now working at The New Yorker. She needed someone to help with the rent, and because Sasha and Saul could not “cohabit” (for legal reasons, given divorce proceedings), Sasha moved in. Sasha liked Pearl: “I found her to be bright, good-hearted, the first one of the women I met through Saul who didn’t either ignore me, feel competitive, or just merely tolerate me” (p. 81). Bellow’s apartment was small and spare, though if one stood on the toilet one could just glimpse the Hudson. It was near Sasha, however, and at some point its Upper West Side location became an object of close scrutiny for Bellow, and the setting of his next published novel, Seize the Day.

  Bellow and Hoffman got on well during the week, sharing household chores and working quietly on lectures and classes and on their own writing. Bellow had good relations with most of his colleagues, especially the younger ones. “He was a handsome, very gentle fellow,” recalled Robert Koblitz, a professor of government, “extremely sensitive to people … very well liked.” Another colleague, William Wilson, remembered him as “extremely affable.… Curious about the world and interested in all sorts of things.”78 Outside the Division of Languages and Literature, Bellow admired Heinrich Blücher, Hannah Arendt’s husband (Arendt herself rarely appeared on campus). Blücher, a poet and philosopher, had been brought to Bard in 1952 by President Case to devise the college’s “Common Course” (a general humanities or “Great Books” course). To Alfred Kazin, in a letter of January 7, 1954, Bellow described Blücher as “good.… Maybe you could arrange to work with Heinrich. That would make Bard worth your while.” (Kazin was inquiring about teaching at the college.) The only colleague Bellow had difficulties with was the Texan novelist Bill Humphrey,
described by Botsford as talented but with “a small-town narrowness of vision, a Calvinist streak.” These difficulties came to a head, according to Sasha, in a fierce argument over Melville, although she records neither the cause of the argument nor the sides taken (p. 80).

  In addition to Bard faculty, a handful of outside writers and intellectuals lived in the area. Prominent among these figures, and a bridge to the old “river families,” was Gore Vidal, who in 1950 bought Edgewater, a grand Greek Revival house in Barrytown. The house was built in 1820 and once lived in by Chanler Chapman’s illustrious father (to buy it cost Vidal $6,000 plus a $10,000 mortgage). The political journalist Richard Rovere was part of Vidal’s circle, as was F. W. (Fred) Dupee, who taught at Columbia during the week, and had an apartment in New York on the Upper West Side near the apartment Bellow rented. Both the Roveres and the Dupees lived in Rhinebeck, the Dupees and their two children in a handsome old house called Wildercliff. It was Dupee who introduced Mary McCarthy to the Bard campus (and was the model for Howard Furness in The Groves of Academe). Rovere was described by Bellow as “the only genuine democrat in this literary set”79; Dupee, in contrast, was much taken by the river grandees, especially by Margaret Aldrich, a relation of Chanler Chapman, who had known Henry James. “Fred’s obsession with these characters,” Vidal writes, “was more than balanced by Saul Bellow’s loathing for them.”80 When taxed with arrogance by Keith Botsford, speaking many years later of their time at Bard, Bellow thought immediately of the grandees: “I made a point of speaking down to people (the nobs) who believed that I should look up to them. My lack of humility was aggravated by the rejections I met or expected to meet. Those confrontations were a part of my education.”81 Vidal, though a nob of sorts, was an intellectual rather than a social snob; he not only admired Bellow’s writing but liked his company. In addition to calling Bellow “the only intellectual who read books,” as mentioned in the Introduction, Vidal thought him “very funny, and we both saw the world from a satiric point of view.” Bellow’s hostility to the grandees, Chapman in particular, was entertaining to Vidal: “The rows between thick-skinned master and mutinous serf gave us all joy.” Vidal also remembers an evening at Edgewater to which the Dupees brought Lionel and Diana Trilling. “The Trillings follow me into the Green Room. Merrily, Saul greets Lionel. ‘Still peddling the same old horseshit, Lionel?’ ”82