The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  IT DID NOT TAKE LONG for Bellow and Ludwig to find a house, nor did they have to travel far to find it. It was in Tivoli, a village just north of Bard. Bellow purchased the house for $12,000 (a $6,000 deposit plus a $6,000 mortgage). “ ‘House’ is not the word for it,” he wrote. “It was, or had once been, a Hudson River mansion. It had a Dutch cellar kitchen of flagstones and a kitchen fireplace. There was a dumb-waiter to the dining room above. The first floor had a ballroom, but according to my informants, Tivoli’s townspeople, no one had danced in it for eighty years. Tivoli had been the birthplace of Eleanor Roosevelt. The villagers were the descendants of the servants and groundskeepers of the Dutchess County aristocrats.”34 The house dated from 1824 and had three floors and fourteen rooms, including the ballroom with its elaborately corniced floor to ceiling windows. On the same floor there were two sitting rooms off a central hall and staircase. Upstairs were eight bedrooms, each with its own fireplace, and three bathrooms. In the basement, in addition to the kitchen, now defunct, there was space for a dining room and lavatory. Broad crumbling porches and open fields surrounded the house. The rooms were large and airy, reminding Sasha of the Lincoln house in Springfield, Illinois. To Bellow, the place had a Russian feel, like a dacha, though he also likened it to “an old Faulkner mansion that had drifted north.”35 After a period in which the house was used as an old folks’ home and a summer camp, it became a private residence again in the 1940s, the home first of a Hollywood scriptwriter then of a couple of antique dealers.36 It was from the antique dealers that Bellow bought the house.

  Sasha was impressed. “Of course, I knew nothing at all about houses, or what you should pay attention to before you buy one, and to my untutored eye this was one grand manor, and I could easily and happily see myself as the great lady to the manor born” (p. 92). By early August Bellow was addressing letters from Tivoli, though Sasha believed they did not move in until September 3, Labor Day.37 Only after the sale went through did they realize how much work had to be done on the place. “We needed to drill a well [at the cost of $1,000], the external decorative carvings were dangerously decayed, there was no [working] kitchen, no heating, no furniture, no way to move into this without major work” (p. 93). Did Bellow himself not check on these matters? Or Ludwig? Bellow’s explanation, in an undated letter to Ralph Ellison, was that “a couple of beguiling fairies sold us the place and lied about the water, the roof.” At the time of writing, he was “not sure I’ll have enough to keep things going.”

  To get them going, at least, he hired a contractor, described by Sasha as “a wiry Scandinavian with three hefty tall sons, whom I called the ‘Vikings’ ” (p. 93). To pay for the Vikings, again according to Sasha, Bellow asked Esther, her mother, for a loan of $5,000, money she’d saved without Tschacbasov knowing (rather as Bellow’s own mother had saved money for her brothers in Russia). This money was to become a source of dispute in the marriage, for Bellow believed it had been given as a gift not a loan. As the Vikings hammered away, climbing over the house, ripping off the rotting cornice along its top, the decaying balconies around the sides, installing miles of copper tubing, cutting down blighted elms, and drilling the well (“at 175 ft. the drillers did strike some veins but I don’t know yet whether they didn’t give enough water,” he wrote to Ellison in the undated letter), a stream of late summer visitors arrived from the city, among them Vasiliki Rosenfeld, only recently divorced from Isaac, and “in no condition to be left alone.”38 “All of this cost tons of money,” Sasha recalls in the memoir, “and Saul was trying to write amid the noise and confusion of the Vikings. So he handed me the checkbook (I had never had one of my own in my life) and said, ‘I’m going to Yaddo, pay the Vikings—but watch them’ ” (p. 93). Bellow stayed at Yaddo from September 3 to 22. Sasha, meanwhile, got the house in order and by Thanksgiving was able to cook a big turkey dinner for Bard friends as well as several recently arrived refugees from the Soviet invasion of Hungary (they were on campus to learn English). Though more work remained to be done on the house—only part of it was habitable—Sasha was proud of what had been accomplished. At Yaddo, Bellow had also been productive, “doing more and better work [on Henderson] than before,”39 traveling to New York City on Thursdays to teach a course at the New School. At Yaddo he also forged an important friendship with John Cheever, who was finishing The Wapshot Chronicle (1957). Once settled at Tivoli, Bellow wrote to John Berryman on December 6 with a report on how things were going. Though distracted by money and house worries, struggling with work (“I put Henderson on me like a plumber’s level. The bubble is usually in the wrong place, so I sigh and knock off for the day”), and surrounded both by friends low in spirits and by ghosts, “large numbers of highly individualized ghosts,” there were important compensations: “Sondra is a beautiful mother-to-be, and Greg gave me much pleasure last month, so my life is far from barren.”

  IT IS ODD THAT Bellow says nothing of Seize the Day, published in book form in November 1956. The novella was born out of important and painful relationships and its publication history was difficult. After The New Yorker turned it down in 1955 but before it appeared in the summer 1956 issue of Partisan Review, Viking offered to publish it in a volume with six short stories, an offer Bellow suspected was less than enthusiastic. “My friend in Chicago will send Covici his damn stories,” he wrote in an undated letter to Volkening. “I’m in no mood for any nonsense from Viking.” On November 1, 1955, he had written to Covici to say that he knew that “some of your editorial colleagues” weren’t pleased with Seize the Day. These colleagues, “indispensable to you, whereas I am not,” had been grumbling about his “unpleasantness”: “I hear the echo from you.… And should I be happy when it is necessary to submit my stories, like any lousy beginner, before a contract can be drawn? The stories should have come to me for reworking, and when I was satisfied with them it is my opinion that Viking should have received them and published them without a single damn syllable of protest. If you don’t want these stories you needn’t take them.” He was not going to leave Viking, he reassured Covici, but he wanted to be treated “honorably.” The letter ends: “You old bat, if I didn’t love you like a parent I’d never get so worked up.”

  Covici’s reply, on November 8, opens: “Before I begin spanking, as a parent I should, belonging to the old school, please bear in mind that my colleagues are no more indispensable to me than I am to them.” He then asks: “Who grumbles about you? The firm did a brilliant job with AUGIE MARCH and are proud of it and proud of you. As to complaints of your unpleasantness—I haven’t heard of any, and that is no double-talk either. Not that I put it past you being unpleasant when and if you choose.” Covici denies that his colleagues disliked the novella: “they both liked it, but agreed with me that it should not be published as a short novel, certainly not by itself.” A possible source of Bellow’s suspicions, one deduces from the letter, was Henry Volkening, who had met with Covici to discuss terms: “When I asked Henry to gather your short stories,” Covici writes, “I made a luncheon date with him. At our meeting we discussed the advance.… I am proud to be your editor, your mentor, your conscience. Your function is to make life worth living, and may God help you.”40 Covici promised to read the stories over the weekend and send them to Bellow for final revision. Volkening may have relayed grumbles from Covici’s colleagues, though these could equally have been relayed by Lynn Hoffman. Sometime after Covici’s letter of November 8, Bellow wrote again: “Please don’t fiddle around with me about small sums of money.… I’m in no mood to be trifled with. In fact, I’m damned sore about everything, and down on everyone—no exceptions. I’ve been idiotically timid and meek, and I begin to feel it’s time I made a fight.”

  Six months later, after the marriage to Sasha, the divorce settlement with Anita, and a period of post-wedding harmony and productivity, Bellow’s suspicions resurfaced. It was his impression that Covici and others at Viking not only thought Seize the Day “depressing” but that they didn�
�t much like the stories either. “I wouldn’t dream of asking you to publish something of which you don’t approve,” Bellow wrote to Covici in a letter in early May. “On that score I want to make myself absolutely clear. If you and Harold [Guinzburg] and Marshall [Best, the editorial director of Viking] don’t like these stories of mine then don’t print them.” Covici claimed to have no idea what Bellow was talking about. As he wrote in an answer of May 11: “I thought I made myself clear over the telephone when I told you what a brilliant job of revision you did with ‘Seize the Day.’ Please tell me why Viking should want to publish it if we do not approve of it?” In reply, Bellow admitted that he had been “a little nutty” in the letter of early May but also reminded Covici that he, the author, had to telephone to learn of his editor’s approval, which “naturally grieved me.”41

  In the end, Seize the Day was published with three stories not six, plus The Wrecker. These stories were “Looking for Mr. Green,” “The Gonzaga Manuscripts,” and “A Father-to-Be.” Adding “A Father-to-Be” and “The Wrecker” to Seize the Day gave a certain thematic unity to the volume: three male protagonists with weak characters (“Mr. Bellow’s very subject is the transparency of human weakness,” declared Kazin in his November 18 review of Seize the Day in The New York Times Book Review), three failed or rocky relationships.42 Writing to Covici from Yaddo, in a letter received on September 12, two months before publication, Bellow asked to see a copy of the book jacket. “All the divorced men in America will buy a copy, mark my words, o ye of little faith. I expect Viking to sell it enthusiastically to those weary and surfeited hearts, the book-dealers.” Bellow was not alone in sensing uncertainty or insecurity (“o ye of little faith”) on the part of his publishers. In Saturday Review, Hollis Alpert described Seize the Day as falling somewhere between short story and novel length: “It is long enough, and interesting enough, to have been worth publishing between its own hard covers, but the publisher, or perhaps Mr. Bellow, has seen fit to offer three short stories and a one-act play as part of the package.”43

  Seize the Day looks back both thematically and formally to The Victim and Dangling Man. “That’s the way I think of it myself,” Bellow told an interviewer, “it really is true that Wilhelm belongs to the victim-group.”44 Its resemblance to Augie lies in its awkward length, to Viking at least (both works were too long, Augie as a novel, Seize the Day as a story). In his later years, Bellow published several novellas (A Theft, The Actual, The Bellarosa Connection), perhaps because he lacked the stamina for longer works. His attraction to the form, however, could be said to derive from lifelong habits of composition. In the course of his writing career, Bellow produced a number of novel manuscripts abandoned at novella length (“Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” the “Zetland” manuscripts, “Far Out,” “Olduvai George,” “A Case of Love,” “All Marbles Accounted For”). Philip Roth detects novella-length units within longer finished novels as well. “For all Saul’s tremendous deep intelligence,” he conjectures, “he was a very spontaneous writer. I think these things took shape as he was writing.… Usually about half way through the book the original impulse weakens and then he gets a mess in the middle.” In the case of Augie March, the first third of the novel, the Chicago section, came to Bellow in a rush, with few revisions; then problems developed, improbabilities, false starts, forced transitions. The example Roth cites is Mr. Sammler’s Planet, “a wonderful book,” in which “half way through he gets the moon guy [Professor Lal, author of “The Future of the Moon”]. Half way through it’s one kind of book and then in the middle it becomes another kind of book.… I don’t think Saul cared. I don’t know, maybe he suffered over those things. I don’t think so. Maybe he just pulled the trigger.” Another metaphor is that he just dove in, surfacing at novella length, looking up to see where he was, then trying to figure out where to go next. In an undated letter to Richard Stern, written from Tivoli sometime in autumn 1960 while at work on Herzog, he describes a process just like this: “Herzog has got me down. As sometimes happens by the hundredth page, my lack of planning, or the subconscious cunning, catch up with me, and so I’m back in Montreal in 1922, trying to get a drunk to bed and I’m not sure what I’ll do once he’s sleeping. God will provide. Consider the lilies of the field—do they write books?”

  There is little evidence that publishing constraints or conventions played much part in Bellow’s calculations as a writer. Toward the end of his life he talked openly of his attraction to the novella and the long short story (almost all his short stories are long; as he admitted to Covici in a letter of January 22, 1960, “they always turn into novels, because one thing leads to another”). After answering a question from Norman Manea about Seize the Day, he explained: “You know I’m very much attached to my short stories and novellas. I’ve written some of them at the top of my form, I feel, and sometimes I feel that maybe that’s what I should’ve been doing all the time. I’m freer in those things; in a way they’re less ambitious and I feel more liberated when I write them.”45 When the short story collection Him with His Foot in His Mouth (1984) was published by Harper, Bellow protested to his editor, Edward Burlingame, about the way it was being marketed. “You’re treating it like a book of short stories,” Burlingame remembered Bellow complaining. “But it was a book of short stories,” he wanted to say. Burlingame recounts Bellow’s remark by way of illustrating how difficult an author he could be, but at the same time he understood what lay behind the remark, calling the stories in the volume “among the best things Saul Bellow ever wrote, every one a gem.”46

  BELLOW’S REVERSION TO a more controlled or restrained style in Seize the Day was welcomed by reviewers, though not always in ways likely to please. Leslie Fiedler, in The Reporter (December 13, 1956), contrasted the book’s “slow solemn beauty” to “the almost hysterical need to assert joy” in Augie; Alfred Kazin praised its “plainness of feeling” in contrast to the “keyed‑up virtuosity” of Augie. The power of the cathartic ending, in which forty-four-year-old Tommy Wilhelm, having lost job, home, family, and the last of his money, is swept into a stranger’s funeral and breaks down weeping, was admitted by all, even by those, John Berryman among them, who claimed not to understand it. Bellow himself claimed not to understand the ending, at least not fully. “Thanks for your kind words about the story,” he wrote to Berryman on November 26, the day after Sasha’s Thanksgiving feast at Tivoli. “It is pitched high, but I am especially fond of it. That the last pages bewilder you I do not wonder, for I’m not ready to swear that I knew what I meant. Quite.” He offers a tentative reading:

  Perhaps something like this: in a city like NY a man must adopt an occasion or convert it to the needs of his heart when those needs become irrepressible. Thus the most private things are done, if need be, in public. And perhaps something like this: suffering is not a way of life but must have a culmination, and its highest culmination is in the passionate understanding. This sort of understanding belongs to the heart.… I thought I was putting this on the page, but if this is not what you got out of it I am ready to accept the responsibility.

  Bellow’s stress here on the New York setting is important. The action takes place in a single day on the Upper West Side, with scenes set in a residential hotel, the Gloriana, not far from the Ansonia. The hotel’s residents, mostly old Jews, include Tommy’s father, Dr. Adler, a retired physician, and Dr. Tamkin, a shyster psychologist and financial advisor, the man who encourages Tommy to speculate on the commodities market with disastrous results.47 New York does Tommy no good. “There’s too much push here for me,” he tells his disapproving father. “It works me up too much. I take things too hard” (p. 37). For Bellow, “the loneliness, shabbiness, and depression of the book find a singular match in the uptown Broadway surroundings.” Tommy’s sense of defeat derives in part from Bellow’s experiences in just these sur roundings: “I congratulated myself with being able to deal with New York, but I never won any of my struggles there, and I never responded with f
ull human warmth to anything that happened there.”48 He did, however, survive, unlike his friends Isaac Rosenfeld and Delmore Schwartz, models for Tommy. Atlas notes Tommy’s physical resemblance to Schwartz, both being “large, shambling insomniacs who popped pills, swilled Coke, and dropped cigarette butts into their coat pockets. Tommy’s small teeth and wavy blonde hair clearly belonged to Schwartz in his mid-forties.”49 Tommy’s resemblance to Rosenfeld is a matter of openness, gullibility. Rosenfeld “came to take the town and he got took. From his standpoint it proved to be a very dangerous place.” New York for Tommy, as for Rosenfeld, was a city where, as Bellow puts it to Roth, “there was nothing you could turn to. I mean, if you turn to somebody for help you’d make the biggest mistake in your life if you chose Dr. Tamkin.”50 Or if you chose Wilhelm Reich, whom Tamkin often sounds like, with his talk of “the real soul and a pretender soul” (p. 58), of living in the “here-and-now” (p. 55), of moneymaking as “aggression” (“That’s the whole thing. The functionalistic explanation is the only one. People come to the market to kill” [p. 57]).