The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  With the pressure of Henderson off his back, Bellow’s spirits began to recover, and Sasha, too, began to enjoy herself. She enrolled as a graduate student in history and found her studies absorbing. “She reads Med. History sixteen hours a day and has little time for anything else,” Bellow reported in the letter of October 2 to Covici. “A kind sort of woman looks after Adam from 9 to 3:30 daily. It costs a little, but then I don’t know how to enjoy money, anyway.” In addition to her studies, Sasha was buoyed by a lively circle of friends. In the memoir, she singles out Ralph Ross and his young pretty wife, Alicia; Joseph Frank and his wife, Giguitte, “whom I liked enormously”; Allen Tate and his second wife, the poet Isabella Gardner (another beauty, in addition to being well-born and wild); the poet Howard Nemerov and his wife, Margaret (Nemerov was a visiting professor both semesters); and, of course, the McCloskys and Berrymans. There was much talk of politics and political personalities, especially at the McCloskys’ parties, where the most interesting of the political and social scientists at the university were to be found. Chief among these figures were Arthur Naftalin, chair of the Department of Political Science, later four times mayor of Minneapolis, and Ben Nelson, an acquaintance of Bellow’s from Hyde Park days. Nelson, a friend and pupil of Edward Shils’s, was an authority on medieval usury and immensely learned. He was Sasha’s teacher and figures in Herzog, thinly fictionalized as the gluttonous medieval historian Egbert Shapiro. The parties at the McCloskys’ were lively, with much drinking and dancing (Nelson, despite his girth, was an agile and enthusiastic dancer). To Ellen Siegelman, who describes herself as “hopelessly monogamous,” they were sexually as well as intellectually challenging. “When there wasn’t actual sex there was a lot of flirtation.”

  Paul Meehl and his wife, Alice, were regulars at these parties, even after both Bellows became patients. According to James Atlas, who interviewed Meehl about the Bellows’ therapy, “Jack Ludwig was a focal point for both of them—Sondra confessing her divided affections to Meehl while Bellow tried to find out what the doctor knew.” In Herzog, Bellow turns Meehl into Moses Herzog’s therapist, Dr. Edvig, “a fair, mild man,” “a calm Protestant Nordic Anglo-Celtic” (Meehl himself was a devout Lutheran). Moses is “encouraged by the kindness of Dr. Edvig’s bearded smile,” also by his diagnosis of him as “reactive-depressive” (as opposed to depressive for no reason), the sort who “tended to form frantic dependencies and to become hysterical when cut off, when threatened with loss” (pp. 471, 470). Meehl judged Bellow’s portrait of him as Dr. Edvig “not bad,”20 despite the fact that Edvig is later described as falling under the spell of Mady or Madeleine, the Sasha character. When Meehl was drunk, according to Mitzi McClosky, he became affectionate. At one party, she remembers, he kissed every woman in sight, including Sasha, his patient, who was wearing an enticing low-cut dress. Bellow “was enraged” and Sasha stopped seeing him. In an interview Sasha claimed Meehl “did admit to his attraction to me,” but judged he would neither act on it nor say anything to Bellow about her feelings for Ludwig; she was anxious not “to demean his professional position.” The Bellows’ doctor, A. Boyd Thomes, was also often present at the McCloskys’ parties. Thomes treated Berryman, the McCloskys, and others in the circle. Like Berryman, he had a highly stylized manner of speaking, described by Phil Siegelman as “sardonic,” “witty,” “very charming.” Siegelman remembers him as “a terrific doctor” though “rather careless about talking about his patients.” Sasha thought Thomes, too, came on to her, a revelation Mitzi McClosky found hard to believe. “I think he probably said you’re a very beautiful woman, and she interpreted this as a pass. He never did that with patients.” Mitzi describes Sasha, here and else where, as “dramatic and hyperbolic.” Her “singular fault was dramatic exaggeration.” As for Meehl, “I don’t think Paul sober would ever make a pass.”

  Sasha’s good spirits lasted through much of the autumn. “We entertained, we were entertained, I studied the Middle Ages with fervor. I finally entered into the marriage fully. Saul was charmed.” Partly he was charmed because “I had learned much during the summer in Brooklyn and had a more sophisticated idea of how to please him.” If she means in bed—sex being a topic, according to Mitzi, about which “both of them complained … something about being too needy and it not working all that well”—what she learned in Brooklyn, she learned from Ludwig. This possibility made a subsequent revelation particularly uncomfortable: “I did not know for many years that he was continuing to discuss our intimate life with Jack” (p. 103). Bellow’s assessment of the autumn of 1958 was guardedly optimistic. In the letter of January 31 to Josephine Herbst, he announces that “Sondra and I patched things up. Which means just about as much as it says. Patches, for two or three months, were all we had to bless ourselves with. More recently we’ve done better.… Anyway, life has brightened, if it doesn’t glitter, downright. But then there isn’t enough glitter in half a lifetime to dunk your toast in.” Four days later he offered a similar summary to Keith Botsford, now teaching at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan.

  Sasha and I stand much better now than we did before. She’s erratic, to put it modestly, and I’m a little nuts myself, and the house in Tivoli was just the priceless ingredient, the catalyst to our explosive mixture. So we had an explosion and it blew everything to bits except the essentials. Despite the shock of it it was rather profitable than no. We carry our relations on now in a propositional fashion—that is, each saying exactly what he thinks. No more dragging of the frills in the soup. It works very handsomely, 9/10ths of the conceptual interference having been trimmed away.

  Sasha’s “erratic” behavior refers to angry and unpredictable outbursts and rages, a product of repressed feeling and frustration with Bellow’s own “nuttiness,” his impatience, irritability, and “constant” complaining (among the many inexplicable aspects of Jack Ludwig’s behavior, Sasha said in an interview, was how he “was able to listen to this man complain about everything”). According to Atlas, the violence of Sasha’s anger led her doctor (it is not clear if he means Meehl or Thomes) to order tests “to see if she had a neurological condition.” In an undated letter to Covici, Bellow wrote of a diagnosis of “a small lesion of the temporal lobe,” suggesting that “she may have to take drugs to control it. Meanwhile she’s having treatment from my doctor. He says it’s not a dangerous illness but needs to be understood and watched.”21 Bellow said something similar to Herbst in the letter of January 31: “It turned out that Sondra has a nervous disorder, in itself not too serious. It doesn’t affect her health but it does account for our marital disorders to a considerable extent.”22 The intensity of Sasha’s bouts of frustration and fury, also of “queenliness,” bewildered Bellow.23 That he’d been unfaithful in the marriage she seemed to have gotten over. That he was sometimes selfish, demanding, critical, was hardly new. What was new was the violence of her complaints, a product of circumstances Bellow did not see or allow himself to see: she was in love with Ludwig and trying and failing, after only “a few months,” by December at least, to resist resuming their affair.

  BELLOW WAS MUCH PREOCCUPIED that autumn with a new venture, one he, Ludwig, and Botsford had been thinking about since Bard days: a literary magazine. Sometime after Bellow arrived in Minneapolis at the end of the summer, a backer was finally found for the magazine, the nonfiction paperback imprint Meridian, whose publisher was Arthur A. Cohen and whose chief editor was Aaron Asher. Asher’s background was like Bellow’s: he was raised on the northwest side of Chicago, a graduate of Marshall High School and the University of Chicago. He knew the world out of which Bellow’s fiction grew and liked and admired its author. According to his wife, Linda, Asher traced the magazine’s origins to Bellow’s troubled history with The New Yorker, in particular to its refusal to publish Seize the Day. Meridian agreed to a semiannual paperback publication with a first printing of 25,000 copies. After rejecting a range of titles—“New Orbit,” “Now,” “The Pinwheel,” “Chanticle
er”—the editors settled on The Noble Savage. The magazine’s notepaper listed its contributing editors as John Berryman, Ralph Ellison, Herbert Gold, Arthur Miller, Wright Morris, and Harvey Swados. Bellow had several aims for the publication: to encourage new talent, to get writers out into the world (as when he suggested Harvey Swados write about the Floyd Patterson fight with Ingemar Johansson, an article which appeared in issue 1),24 to get himself out into the world, and to get away from the notion “that literature is about itself.”25 “We hoped to break down specialization, let novelists write on politics and politicians on art (if they were literate): in short, to enlarge the scope of all the writers we knew and free them from the suffocating choice between the literary quarterly and the slick.”26

  Bellow’s models for the magazine were The Dial, The American Mercury, and The American Jitters (which featured Edmund Wilson’s writing “before he became the great blimp of The New Yorker”).27 At an initial organizing meeting at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, putative contributing editors and others were convened to shape the magazine’s character and content. In subsequent meetings the three coeditors decided on types of contribution: “Arias” (like “Talk of the Town” pieces), “Poems,” “Archives” (out-of-print or forgotten works by eminent authors, including Samuel Butler, D. H. Lawrence, Isaac Babel, Alexander Pushkin), “Investigations,” “Lives” (including memoirs of Greenwich Village in the 1940s and 1950s by Seymour Krim and Dan Wakefield), “Texts” (a type hard to characterize, often extracts from longer pieces, as in contributions from Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, Edward Hoagland). Ideas were to figure in the magazine as well as stories but in a manner accessible to general readers. “I love your review,” Bellow wrote to Richard Stern on November 3, 1959, “it’s written in the style I approve of (Biedermeier of ideas).” The magazine lasted five issues, from February 1960 to October 1962, and was of high quality. In addition to pieces from the contributing editors and the authors already mentioned, there were contributions from Harold Rosenberg, Philip O’Connor, Louis Simpson, Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov, Frederick Seidel, Louis Guilloux, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, S. J. Perelman, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Jules Feiffer, and Nelson Algren.

  Bellow mostly confined himself to “Arias” (a scene of comic rudeness and avarice on the Upper West Side in issue 1, a sardonic meditation on bomb shelters in issue 4), though “Ralph Ellison at Tivoli” in issue 3 was a longer piece. In issue 1 Ludwig contributed a story entitled “Confusions: Thoreau in California,” an extract from his first novel, Confusions (1963); Botsford contributed a piece entitled “Memoirs of a Russophile” in issue 2, “about my many connections with matters Russian, the language, friends, etc.”28 Botsford recalls only a single rule in the event of editorial disagreement: “each has one absolute right of inclusion and one of exclusion.”29 That so many of Bellow’s friends appeared in the magazine, famous ones but also nonfamous ones, including girlfriends and Tuley pals (Hyman Slate, Louie Lasco), can be seen in two ways: as a mark of the caliber of his friends (“I’m not printing Slate’s Proof for old times’ sake,” he wrote to Slate, soliciting further contributions), and as a mark of his editorial sway.30 “I’m one of the editors,” he wrote to Josephine Herbst on February 18, 1959, “primus inter pares,” an admission reiterated in a letter of August 15: “authority on the Savage is shared by three of us, but I holler most.” It was Bellow’s name that got the magazine published. Without his participation it would not survive. Though his younger, as yet unpublished, coeditors had strong voices, his prevailed. “I insist upon setting and bettering the editorial style,” he wrote to Botsford in an undated letter written late in the magazine’s life. “I should have been primus inter pares because it is obvious, if only in point of seniority and experience, that I should take the lead. When you surpass me I shall be glad to let you make these decisions on policy, I think you may count on me to draw back as soon as this happens. But until then you should abide without competitive bitterness by my judgment.” When Alfred Kazin read a piece in issue 3 by John McCormick, a friend of Bellow’s from Paris and Salzburg, he made the following entry in his journal (as much a description of himself as of the magazine’s contributors):

  I see something by John McCormick in the Noble Savage, and suddenly say to myself, why is it so right for him to be in that magazine. Answer: he is a bit of a shipwreck, a storm, an anger. There is a kind of special egotism of suffering and bitterness that I associate with writers for that magazine—Saul’s haughty and prophetic loneliness (without his gifts). A sort of snarling independence not so much of thought as of manner. They bristle with anticipatory defiance.31

  Ludwig and Botsford bristled a fair bit in the course of producing the magazine, while Bellow, in Botsford’s words, was its “unwobbling pivot” (a phrase from Confucius). Botsford was teaching in Puerto Rico and felt isolated from his coeditors. He also felt isolated because he wasn’t Jewish. It did not help that at times he could be dilatory and unclear. “You condemn the thing almost totally and yet conclude that he ought to publish it,” Bellow complains in a letter about a story under consideration.32 Ludwig was touchy and quarrelsome, more of a stirrer than Botsford. “Dear boychick and chickchick,” begins a letter of July 10, 1959, to Bellow and Sasha, a reply to a Bellow letter containing complaints from Botsford about a “faction” against him. “How you like that Botsford and his State Department bananas? We haven’t been each in our separate countries [Ludwig was in Winnipeg for the summer] long enough for even cold war and already he’s calling us to a Summit Conference! … Some spick laundry must have shrunk his double-breasted vest. What else could account for such a tone?” Later in the letter he complains: “Is this my reward for staying up till 5 a.m. listening to his ‘Fourteen Reasons for Becoming a Jew’—and me a Jew by birth, that is, for no reason at all? I’m going to withdraw my permission for him to call himself Botsfeld.” In a letter of July 25, Ludwig reports that “Keith wrote a very sharp analysis of Mrs. Goffman, pointing out things which are limitations to the story, and which, for the most part, I knew were limitations when I wrote it.… I hope he doesn’t further mistake things, and assume the criticism I wrote of his novel to be a kind of response in kind. That’s all we need. Paranoia on the masthead. I’m anxious to hear what you think of his MS.” The letter ends “Kiss Adam for me.”

  In an article in issue 3 of The Noble Savage Bellow recalls the skepticism with which friends and acquaintances greeted the idea of the magazine. “The wise money,” he begins, “was not on The Noble Savage.”33 There was also concern that editorial work was a waste of Bellow’s time. To a dubious Pat Covici he explained, in an undated letter of early 1959: “As for the magazine: The more I do, the more connection I feel with people, causes, the more fluently I write.” This argument he reiterates in a letter to Covici of February 19, a week after receiving a two-year $16,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, “the biggest gravy train of them all,” according to Ellison, to free him from teaching (it arrived, Ellison adds in the same letter of March 18, “just at the time when you were about to take off on the yakoyak circuit for dough”). “I can’t see what objection there is to the magazine. It excites me. Isn’t that as good as money? And since I won’t be teaching it’ll be highly beneficial because I need some other kind of interest even when I’m writing.” Having a life away from the desk was essential to Bellow, who not only taught throughout his career but for periods took on administrative jobs and committee work, in addition to serving on boards of foundations and prize and fellowship committees. In previous years the Ford money would have freed him for travel; now there were reasons to stay put: Sasha’s studies, but also, as he explains in the letter of February 19, “the psychiatry and neurology.… They tell me I’m making good speed, and Sondra too is much better.” The marriage, he felt, was mending: “All’s well in the sack, unusually well, and we’re beginning to feel much affection for each other. So it’d be ridiculous to depart for long from this base.” As he told the student
newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, on February 20, “I like Minnesota. I think the place you come from stamps you; I consider myself a mid-westerner.”

  FEBRUARY 1959 WAS an important month for Bellow. Some ten days after receiving news of the Ford Foundation Fellowship on the 12th, Henderson the Rain King was published to mixed reviews. These reviews Sasha filtered for Bellow: “She feels that I shouldn’t have to lick any more wounds than I received last summer, and I suppose she’s right.”34 “I was much criticized for yielding to anarchic or mad impulses and abandoning urban and Jewish themes,” Bellow recalled in his interview with Roth. “But I continue to insist that my subject ultimately was America,” a realization that only came to him in the course of writing. “I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote ‘The Rain King.’ I was looking for my idea to reveal itself as I investigated the phenomena—the primary phenomenon being Henderson himself, and it presently became clear to me that America has no idea—not the remotest—of what America is.”35 That Henderson was meant to personify America in some way was clear even to hostile reviewers. Elizabeth Hardwick in Partisan Review criticized the novel not so much for “abandoning urban and Jewish themes”—for Bellow, “America”—as for abandoning his “superb gift for characterization.”36 “Henderson the Rain King is a book deliberately without any characters at all. The hero is not a character in the usual sense” (despite all he tells us about his background and temperament). His symbolic identity, however, is clear. “Henderson, then, is not a ‘character’ but he is an ‘American,’ ” which leads Hardwick to conclude that he is simultaneously “thinly” and “deeply” drawn.