The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Ludwig’s sympathy for Bellow was accompanied by outright flattery. According to Hecht, “Saul was always a sucker for flattery, and Jack would lay it on with a trowel.”100 Joseph Frank and his wife, Marguerite, known as Giguitte, remembered Ludwig as sycophantic in the extreme, but then much about Ludwig was extreme. He had a loud basso voice, a hearty laugh, thick black hair, heavy black eyebrows, a strong, square jaw. “He had a powerful presence,” Phil Siegelman recalls, “a great gift of the gab, a willingness to engage.” Botsford describes him as having “a stature, a sheer physicality, that suggests coal-mining or combine harvesting, anything requiring brawn and that peculiar explosive intensity that so marked his loves (of great writers) and his disapprovals of what wasn’t echt, that didn’t conform to his ebullient sense of what counted in life” (p. 4). When Ludwig arrived at Bard he had written almost nothing, his only book being an anthology entitled Stories, British and American, coedited with Richard Poirier, a lifelong friend. His self-assurance, however, was as eerie as Chanler Chapman’s. In Herzog, when at last the scales fall from Moses’s eyes, he sees Gersbach’s confidence, his readiness to answer all questions, for what it is: “the infallible sign of stupidity. Did Valentine Gersbach ever admit ignorance of any matter? He was a regular Goethe. He finished all your sentences, rephrased all your thoughts, explained everything” (p. 572). “With pinochle players he plays pinochle, with rabbis it’s Martin Buber, with the Hyde Park Madrigal Society he sings madrigals” (p. 635). Herzog’s lawyer, Simkin, partly modeled on Sam Goldberg, takes issue with this interpretation:

  “Well,” said Simkin, “he’s nothing but a psychopath on the make, boastful and exhibitionistic. A bit clinical, maybe, except that he’s a recognizable Jewish type. One of those noisy crooks with a booming voice. What kind of car does this promoter poet drive?”

  “A Lincoln Continental.”

  “Heh, heh” (p. 635).

  Ludwig was a popular teacher, if not always a conscientious one, according to Phil Siegelman, who remembers him boasting “about never having to prepare for classes.” With students, he could be embarrassingly familiar. Ted Hoffman recalls him loudly advising passing Bard students “on the best kind of condoms.”101 In such stories Ludwig resembles Gersbach, “that loud, flamboyant, ass-clutching brute” (p. 518). Other witnesses, especially from later years, paint a different picture. At Minnesota, where he taught after Bard, he was very popular with students. When his contract was not renewed in 1961 after three years as a temporary lecturer, three hundred students signed a petition on his behalf, and dozens of newspaper articles and letters to the editor were written by parents and faculty as well as students in protest against the decision.102 After Minnesota Ludwig went to Stony Brook, at the time the State University College on Long Island, where he was also popular with students. The writer Carolyn McGrath, who was taught by him in the early 1980s, remembers him as “one of the finest teacher I had in college.” Far from answering or explaining everything, he was “utterly Socratic, he would pose a question, let the class deliberate it, but withhold his own opinion.… He once asked a class, ‘Which is the more modern author: Joyce or Pynchon?’ Everyone else answered ‘Pynchon.’ I answered ‘Joyce,’ but Ludwig didn’t tip as to his opinion. I’m still pondering the question, which is as it should be.” In his dealings with McGrath outside of class he was “always a gentleman, always respectful,” nor did she ever hear other students complain about him.103 “Jack could be boorish and overweening,” concludes Botsford, “but he was also a friend and, if not prodded, far from being stupid or unpleasant.”104

  BELLOW’S PROBLEMS WITH Anita tormented him while he was at Bard. When he left her, she went into a depression. Writing to her mother, she admitted that the marriage was over, but she refused to grant Bellow a divorce.105 In a letter of February 21, 1954, to the Tarcovs, however, she suggests that it was Bellow who was holding things back. “Saul was supposed to go out to Reno around Christmas but delayed so long that he couldn’t. He is supposed to go this summer but I doubt if he will. I don’t think he wants a divorce it is more convenient for him this way.” Anita was a more reserved correspondent than Bellow and her upbeat accounts are sometimes oddly phrased.106 She writes of having “run around dating a lot” in the fall, but that “I really wasn’t happy doing it—so I quit.” Her current “happiness and good spirits” come “from within” rather than being “dependent on someone else.” “Too often I am so happy to be alone and uninvolved.” “Too often”? Conflicting emotions sound also in the sentences that follow:

  Not to have to worry if someone else is depressed, hungry or sick is a real pleasure. Then I begin to feel guilty for feeling so good and wonder if I don’t ever want to get married again. Then I quit worrying about it and enjoy my good feelings. I get up every morning feeling happy—what else can one ask from life?

  Sometime after receiving this letter, Edith Tarcov wrote to Bellow about Anita. After filling him in about Oscar’s heart trouble, a “constant anxiety,” she describes Anita much as Anita describes herself. She begins by hoping that “matters between you … are settled now.” Then she writes of recently seeing Anita: “she seemed so willing to be sensible … she as a whole seems fine, much freer than I ever saw her, much gayer and more direct. That terrible obsession, of feeling constantly as your inferior, admiring you and resenting it too, that has hold of her these many years, has left her. But by some other things she expressed most vividly and heart-breakingly how hard it was for her, not to love you anymore.”

  Meetings with Bellow accomplished little. Something of their difficulty can perhaps be seen in Bellow’s depiction of the meetings between Tommy Wilhelm and his wife, Margaret, in Seize the Day. Having walked out on Margaret and their children, Tommy wants a divorce. He has a much younger girlfriend, Olive, a Catholic, whom he wishes to marry. Tommy claims Margaret is resisting; she claims “he did not really want a divorce; he was afraid of it.” When he asks Margaret “Don’t you want to marry again?” she answers “No.” “She went out with other men, but took his money. She lived in order to punish him” (p. 79). Margaret has Anita’s good looks, her hair “cut with strict fixity above her pretty, decisive face” (p. 94). Her voice fits Bellow’s description of Anita’s character, being “measured and unbending, remorselessly unbending” (p. 93). Hearing Margaret’s voice awakens in Tommy “a kind of hungry longing, not for Margaret but for the peace he had once known” (p. 93). Margaret prides herself “on being fair-minded” (p. 94), but in arguments over money, over having to chase Tommy for money, she is hard, vindictive: “she brooded a great deal and now she could not forbear to punish him and make him feel pains like those she had to undergo” (p. 95). Arguments between Bellow and Anita seem to have been no less charged and intractable. It was agreed that Bellow could see Greg every other weekend and for a month in the summer; otherwise, nothing was settled. In addition to the issue of divorce there were arguments about child support. At one point, Anita, strapped for cash, appealed to Abraham for money to buy a winter coat. Greg suspects that “she intended to make Saul look bad, but crying poverty did not endear her to the Bellows.”107 For years Anita had been the main breadwinner in the family. Now that Augie March was a success, she felt that she had a right to expect something in return, or at least not to have to fight Bellow over money for Greg. But Bellow worried about his capacity to produce another windfall. As he wrote to Oscar Tarcov, in an undated letter of April 1954, he was “in the ridiculous term people have reported, an avant garde writer,” but one “with a slick writer’s requirements.” What guarantee was there that such an author could make a living at writing? “For one year it may be possible, and after that—who knows?” Bellow was also reluctant to hand over the first real money he’d made through his writing to the person he thought of as blocking his freedom. Although his correspondence in this period shows flashes of feeling for Anita, it makes her out as unreasonable about money. “Still being sheared of my earnings by my dear wife of the f
ormer incarnation,” Bellow writes to Sam Freifeld on April 25, 1954; “I am being stripped,” he writes to John Berryman in an undated letter of the same month, “Anita B. has not let up in her campaign to get me crucified.” Greg describes Bellow as behaving spitefully in this period. After custodial visits, “it was rare that he left without taking a piece of fruit from the fridge, fruit for which he felt he was paying, and putting a few books under his arm. And he needled Anita.” He could also be possessive. When Lillian Blumberg McCall invited both Bellows to a party in Greenwich Village, and a man flirted with Anita, “Saul got so upset that the two men got into a fight in the street.”108

  The Wrecker, a one-act play Bellow published in 1954 in New World Writing, a paperback literary anthology, reflects these feelings.109 The play was published about the time Bellow wrote a theater chronicle for Partisan Review (May–June 1954) and it marks the beginning of a decade-long intermittent interest in playwriting, which resulted in several productions both on and off Broadway.110 It concerns a married couple, Albert and Sarah, whose building is to be demolished and turned into a school. Like all the building’s inhabitants, the couple has been offered a thousand dollars to vacate their apartment early. Albert, however, is determined to tear down the apartment himself, their home for fifteen years (in effect, the length of the Bellow marriage). “Think what you could do with a thousand dollars,” Albert’s mother-in-law tells his wife. “You could get a new coat” (p. 195). Unheeding, Albert sets about his task with comic gusto. “I feel like Samson in the Temple of Gaza,” he cries, carrying a hammer on one hip, a hatchet on the other, and holding a crowbar. “Take cover, ye Philistines, your oppression is ended.… Though you took my hair and put out my eyes and bound me in your mill your walls are doomed” (p. 198). Sarah is hurt and bewildered by such talk. “I didn’t know you hated it so” (p. 199). When her mother attacks Albert, however, she leaps to his defense: “I know what he’s been through” (p. 201). As Albert wrenches the top off the mantelpiece, Sarah’s knickknacks scatter to the floor. “Oh, my things!” she cries. “The sea-shells! The little jug from Vermont! The little cups!” (p. 202). When asked if he has suffered in every room in the apartment, even the bedroom, Albert is momentarily taken aback: “No more than the others, probably” (p. 203). He invites Sarah to join him in the wrecking: “Didn’t it ever make you want to yell? Didn’t you ever feel here that you were in a cage?” She refuses. “I papered and painted these walls myself, and washed the floors and the woodwork” (p. 204). Albert’s response is pure Wilhelm Reich: “Sometimes you ought to give in to your violent feelings. It’s great to be angry. Anger is beautiful. It gives you a sense of honor. It brings back your self-respect” (p. 205).

  Matters come to a head over the bedroom. Sarah accuses Albert of not loving her. “Of course I love you,” he replies (p. 205). She puts her foot down: “if you wreck the bedroom, you’ll be moving into the new apartment by yourself” (p. 207). Again Albert presses her to join him in the wrecking. When she continues to resist, he accuses her of being “far too rigid—far, far. You have to learn to be more flexible. It’s a practical matter. For the sake of your health.… Let’s wipe out some of the falsehood. Let’s admit what our souls tell us is true and stop denying it” (p. 208). Only after Albert injures himself in the course of smashing his way to health, does Sarah agree to join in. As he watches her first delicate blows, a stage direction tells us, he “doesn’t look happy” (p. 210). He’s not sure he likes Sarah as wrecker (“On you it doesn’t look so good”), especially when she suggests they start on the bedroom together. “Is it really,” he asks, “I mean from your standpoint—such a good idea?” “You don’t want to wreck it?” she asks, before declaring: “I do, now when I think of some of the things that happened, all of a sudden I want to express what I never dared.” Albert asks what she’s trying to tell him. “What is there to tell? Do I have to draw pictures?” It is Sarah not Albert who now says “maybe the best way to preserve the marriage is to destroy the home.” In the last line of the play, Albert replies mildly: “It may well be.” This line is followed by the stage direction: “CURTAIN (After which, a thunderous crash)” (pp. 210–11). It is the husband who wrecks the marriage. He is, however, no Samson, being weak, wavering, insecure.

  There are connections here with “By the Rock Wall,” the story Bellow published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1951, discussed in Chapter 6. In this story, which contains a fictionalized version of the retaliatory affair Anita had in Mexico after Bellow went off with another woman, the protagonist’s insistence upon honesty almost wrecks his marriage. Neither Albert nor Willard, the husband in “By the Rock Wall,” can handle the truth, despite their supposed devotion to it. Nor, judging by his behavior during the wrangles over divorce, could Bellow the man. Bellow the author, however, could see unfairness, insensitivity, and comic selfishness in his protagonists, while approving their determination to live freely and honestly. In life, Bellow was often harsh and unforgiving with those who blocked him, even while acknowledging their claims or feelings. In a letter to Freifeld of May 23, 1954, he begins with accusations about Anita and money, then moves on to larger complaints: “She always took far more than she gave. I don’t reproach her with anything; her nature is her own reproach. I am genuinely sorry for her but I can feel more compassion as an ex-husband.”

  AT THE END of the teaching year, Bellow finally felt he had enough money to devote himself for a period wholly to writing, complaints about being “sheared” by Anita notwithstanding. He resigned from Bard in June and discouraged feelers from the universities of Iowa and Minnesota. To Ted Weiss, who had been on leave in Oxford, he summed up his time at Bard: “Since I had to be there, I ended by rejoicing in the experience. It was quite something.… I’d have made some compromise and stayed if I was a stronger character. But you’ve got to have stability somewhere to survive this pays de merveilles, cloud-cuckoo, monkey-on-the-back, avant-garde booby cosmos, and I’m afraid I just don’t have it—grit, gumption, spunk, stick-to-itiveness, values founded on rock.” There had been much to enjoy in the year: “the sight of a skinny, pallid little boy arriving in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac,” “excellent” conversations, walks, violin duets with Emil Hauser, who taught music at the college and was once first violinist in the Budapest String Quartet. “But I couldn’t survive meetings and in the end stopped attending. And if I had to choose between trichinosis and talking for an hour with F. Hirsch I’d—you know! Where’s that raw pork? And Case [the college president]—an Ivy League schlimazel [loser]!” The colleagues he would miss were Jack Ludwig, Ted Hoffman, Heinrich Blücher, and Andrews Wanning. Weiss had asked if Bellow would be coming to Europe and Bellow answered that he wouldn’t: “My son can’t do without my help this year.—It is also somewhat the other way around. But he’s starting at another school; I’m beginning another book.” These were also the reasons he would be living in New York in the coming year, a place, he told the McCloskys, he “despised”: “I stay because of Greg. But, also, I am writing a book and can’t undergo a dislocation now.”111 In his memoir, Greg confirms the impression created by such passages: of his father’s importance to him and of his importance to his father. He writes of looking forward to Bellow’s weekend visits, of trips to MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of lunches at the Eighth Street Delicatessen, double or triple features of W. C. Fields and Mae West or the Marx Brothers (“Saul and I knew every quip by heart and laughed until our sides hurt. For years my father used humor to jolly me out of the bad mood that always overtook me when it was time to say goodbye”). He describes Bellow as “the parent who understood me best”; after he left the family, “I felt like a deep-sea diver cut off from my oxygen.” He also says of this period: “I do not remember either parent criticizing the other.”112

  In the summer of 1954, Bellow rented a cottage near Slough Pond in Wellfleet, a fishing village at the far end of Cape Cod. He and Greg would spend the month of July there. Before the trip, Greg lobbied hard
with both parents for a dog, on the grounds that “If I got a dog, I’d never be sad.”113 Anita agreed on condition that Bellow did the housebreaking. Greg was then given a puppy from the litter of Anita Maximilian’s dachshund, Schatzie. It was Bellow who named the puppy Lizzie, after Elizabeth Barrett Browning (both dog and poet had sad eyes). Lizzie accompanied father and son for the month on the Cape, also for several days prior to the month, when Bellow lectured at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont.114 On July 7, Bellow wrote to the school’s director, Reginald Cook, to say that son, dog, and father had arrived safely at Slough Pond, finding the cottage “in a setting of pines, ticks and sun. Nevertheless we made ourselves comfortable and are happy.” Soon they were regulars on the beach at Wellfleet, “La Plage des Intellectuels,” where among the visitors that summer were Alfred Kazin and his second wife, Ann Birstein; Mary McCarthy and her third husband, Bowden Broadwater; Arthur Schlesinger Jr.; and Harvard English professors Harry Levin and Daniel Aaron. The beauty of the place—long white sand beaches, high dunes, freshwater lakes—washed the city away; the socializing brought it straight back. Of gatherings at Wellfleet, Alfred Kazin writes: “Upon the beach they sat, discoursing, and loud was the sound of battle, louder than the waves.”115 On August 10, Mary McCarthy reported to Hannah Arendt that Kazin “was here and cutting me dead, quite unjustly, since I don’t like him. On the other hand, I don’t dislike him so totally. Saul Bellow was here too, with son and dog, not very friendly either.”116