The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  According to Ruth Miller, his friend and biographer, “Bellow has always said Henderson was his favorite novel.”46 When asked in 1963 which of his books gave him the greatest satisfaction, he answered “writing Henderson stirred me more than writing any of the other books. I felt the sheer pleasure of release from difficulty.”47 A year later when asked which of his characters was most like him, he answered “Henderson—the absurd seeker of high qualities.” The resemblance, he explained, derived first from Henderson’s unwillingness to endure “continuing anxiety: the indeterminate and indefinite anxiety, which most of us accept as the condition of life” (the source of this anxiety, he reminds the interviewer, is “death”). The second point of resemblance between himself and his hero is the comical nature of Henderson’s determination to remedy his anxiety: “All his efforts are a satire on the attempts people make to answer the enigma [of existence] by movement and random action or even by conscious effort. This is why I feel Henderson and I are spiritually close—although there are no superficial likenesses.”48 The novel is thus a form of self-satire, as is its successor, Herzog, whose hero seeks “answers to the enigma” through learning and intellect as well as movement, random action, and conscious effort. Late in life, in his interview with Norman Manea, Bellow emphasized the novel’s satire, calling it “a very funny book,” “the only book I go back to, for amusement.”49 At the time of writing, he also emphasized its inventiveness. As he wrote to Josephine Herbst in a letter of August 15, 1959, “some of it is all right—the language mostly, and the physical imagination.” Philip Roth calls Henderson “the sport of all the books,” a product of “energy and aliveness and confidence” (Augie had given Bellow “a tremendous shot of B12.”)50 In his interview with Bellow, Roth describes the novel as a “screwball stunt,” though he admits its sincerity and “great screwball authority.” Bellow accepts the screwball description but asserts that “its oddities were not accidental but substantive.”51 At the time of publication, however, close on the heels of what Daniel Fuchs calls “the psychological vayizmir [woe is me] of Seize the Day,”52 he knew the work would baffle many readers. “I’m aware,” he told Herbst in the letter of August 15, “that it gets mixed up between comedy and earnestness, which is another way of saying that I’ve got literature mixed up with lots of other matters.” Hence “Deep Readers of the World, Beware!” published a week before Henderson. Don’t lose sight of the work as literature, Bellow is saying, let its humor and invention register before running after “other matters.” For many readers this advice was hard to follow. That Bellow felt the need to give it signals insecurity. “No amount of assertion will make an ounce of art,” he wrote to Stern on November 3, 1959. “I took a chance with Henderson. I can tell you what I wished it to be, but I can’t say what it is.” On April 2, 1959, Ted Hoffman wrote teasingly to cheer Bellow up. A review of the novel by Norman Podhoretz had appeared in the New York Herald Tribune: “I’ve been meaning to console you about the review—just because Podhoretz says Henderson is great doesn’t mean that it isn’t. Don’t you forget it—though I smell a Trilling plot to ruin your digestion.”53

  AFTER THE FORD FOUNDATION GRANT came through, Bellow stopped teaching and spent the spring at work on a play, a two-act farce that would eventually, after many drafts, be produced on Broadway in 1964 as The Last Analysis. He also did some traveling, lecturing in Chicago, in Urbana-Champaign, in Pittsburgh, where Hoffman was now teaching, and in Purdue, a tour that earned him $700. In Chicago, Bellow had dinner with Marilyn Monroe, in town to promote Some Like It Hot. They ate at the Pump Room of the Ambassador East Hotel, where she was staying. She signed the guest book: “Proud to be the guest of the Chicago writer Saul Bellow.”54 “Today the news sleuths are pumping me,” Bellow wrote to Covici after the dinner in an undated letter: “Marilyn seemed genuinely glad to see a familiar face. I have yet to see anything in Marilyn that wasn’t genuine.” In between Chicago and Pittsburgh, Bellow stayed for a few days in New York with the Covicis, “to see Greg and Lillian Hellman,” the latter about his play, and to visit Tivoli and Ralph Ellison. His mood was buoyed by praise for Henderson from fellow writers, including Bernard Malamud, Henry Miller, and John Cheever.55 The letter from Cheever, undated, but probably written in February, ends: “For powers of vision, perfect pitch, a fine concern with salvation and a grasp of cast-iron absurdity you have no equal.” Through Catherine Lindsay, the “big beauty” whom Berryman couldn’t remember pushing down the stairs (and with whom Bellow had had an affair), Bellow began a correspondence with an admiring young writer named Mark Harris, and printed one of Harris’s stories in issue 1 of The Noble Savage. Harris, as was mentioned earlier, would eventually write a book about Bellow, or about the difficulties of writing a book about him.56 Bellow also received a letter on February 27 from E. W. McDiarmid, dean of the College of Science, Literature, and the Arts at the University of Minnesota, congratulating him on the Ford Foundation grant—“even though our feelings are mixed, since it means that we may not have the benefit of your presence on the faculty”—and conveying “our great appreciation for your work here and our wholehearted desire to have you back.”

  Less pleasing was the meeting Dave Peltz arranged with Bellow and Nelson Algren at a tough Polish bar on the northwest side of Chicago. Bellow and Algren had been wary of each other since Writers’ Project days. Bellow thought Algren paraded his proletarian roots (unlike Peltz, who came from a similar background). When Algren arrived at the bar in Army fatigues, as if to say “You weren’t in the Army like I was,” they quickly got into an argument and Bellow left.57 There were also difficulties with Greg, who turned fourteen on April 16. Though Greg pleased his father by winning admission to Bronx High School of Science, also by mentioning that he’d seen Henderson on the bestseller lists, he was newly assertive. He missed his father and felt out of touch, wondering in a letter of January 7 “why don’t you write me?” On January 30, before the novel’s publication, he wrote again: “Mommy says ‘Please send check early because she had some dental work done and she needs the doe [sic].’ ” In his memoir, Greg describes how his attitude to his father changed in his teenage years: “my childhood sadness turned to adolescent anger … usually grounded in my high moralistic sense of right and wrong.” There were more arguments now than tears and sulks, and on occasion an accusatory tone in correspondence, to which Bellow responded in kind. Yet “for years Saul told me that he found an angry teenager much easier to deal with than a morose child,” a confession Greg attributes to guilt: “No doubt he was relieved to see me put the sadness caused by his departure behind me.”58

  THE BELLOWS RETURNED TO Tivoli early in June 1959. Some months before their return Bellow wrote to Ellison with requests for the garden. Would he go to the farmer’s co-op in Red Hook “and buy sweet corn, cucumber and squash seed and plant a few rows, please.… You can do all this in a few hours and oblige me greatly. It’ll keep us all in produce this summer, and give Sasha and me a good reason to go out in the sun.… I’d feel crazy to live in the country without corn and tomatoes. It’s bad enough not to have a cow.” On May 16 he turned from vegetables to plants and flowers. “The bush at the front of the house near the drive is mock-orange,” he wrote to Ellison, “and the three beds at the back are peonies. They flower the last week in May. At this time of year I miss the old place and as the lilacs and tulips appear I ask myself what state Tivoli’s in. We should have dug up the bulbs last fall.” He also jokes that Ellison will “need to show me how your shotgun loads. I hear by scuttle that Chanler has got it in his mind that he is Henderson and is on the warpath. Or is that one of those mad Annandale rumors? Do I need a switchblade, a judo book, a pistol? Ha, I’ll set Rufus [the cat] on him.” He was clearly looking forward to the summer.

  IT HAD BEEN a year since the start of the affair between Ludwig and Sasha. Bellow still had no idea. Nor had he any idea that, sometime in the spring, Sasha got pregnant and had an abortion. “Yes, I was sleeping with both of them
in Minneapolis,” she said in one of our interviews. “There was a period when I was running an affair and a marriage at that time.… How awful that was.” All Sasha says about the pregnancy in the memoir is that “there was no way to know whose child it was.… I secretly flew to New York to Anita [Maximilian] who arranged an abortion, and when I came back, revolted by my duplicitous life, horrified by my decision to end the pregnancy, an act that violated every principle I thought I had, I knew I had to end the marriage” (p. 103). Sasha lived with this knowledge through the summer at Tivoli, while Ludwig was in Winnipeg with his family and Bellow worked on his play. Late in the summer, Bellow went to stay with Lillian Hellman on Martha’s Vineyard to consult about the play, while Sasha left for Minneapolis with Adam to find a place to live, ostensibly with Bellow. She stayed with the McCloskys and according to Mitzi “after a day or two she announced that Jack Ludwig was going to come and stay with us, too, to find an apartment.” Sasha and Ludwig lived with the McCloskys “for at least two and a half weeks,” Sasha sleeping in the study, Ludwig on a couch in the living room. “As soon as Jack came,” Mitzi recalled, “she said we have to look for an apartment together; would you look after Adam.… She dragooned my daughter to take care of him.” The McCloskys were busy at this time, getting ready to decamp to Berkeley, where they were to spend the year, Herb on a Rockefeller Fellowship. Mitzi recalls stifling her anger as Sasha went off each morning, “assuming one of us would take care of Adam. She did that every day.”

  The house Sasha found was at 3139 East Calhoun in Minneapolis, “a very pretty house” with a view of the lake, twenty minutes from campus by car. By the time Bellow arrived in September, she had begun classes. Sometime in early October, she walked into the living room and announced to Bellow that she wanted a divorce. To Covici, in a letter of November 1, Bellow describes her tone as one of “icy control.” In other letters (to the Ellisons, Botsford, Richard Stern, as well as Covici), he claims to have been baffled by the announcement, while admitting recent difficulties. “Sasha and I are no longer together,” he writes to the Ellisons in an undated letter in October. “Not by my choice. You saw us together all summer, so you probably understand as well as I. She has no complaint to make of me this time. All she has is a decision. She says she likes me, respects me, enjoys going to bed with me—and no longer wants to be my wife. I have no explanations to offer, only the facts. I don’t know what she may have to say. I have to say only that I’m in misery, and especially over Adam.” What Sasha says in the memoir partly confirms this account. She left Bellow “not because Saul was so difficult—actually he had settled down—but because I was. I knew he was not really happy with me. How could he be? I was a zombie and he was ever sensitive to neglect” (p. 103). Bellow’s letter to the Ellisons ends with a plea that they “don’t speak of this to anyone.” To Botsford, writing on October 15, Bellow reports his difficulties in vague terms, “with the understanding that it remain entre nous.” He says nothing of divorce, only that “no one here knows that Sash and I have been going through another very bad—a desperate—period.” The letter ends: “Yesterday Sash cut her hand so badly with a coffee can that I thought her finger was severed and phoned an ambulance. The gash went to the bone. Five stitches and insanely painful. I’m taking care of Adam now.… Please forgive me for this note, and please say nothing to Ann.” Bellow’s efforts at secrecy were unavailing. Word of the breakup, and not just of the breakup, was soon circulating in Minneapolis. Ellen Siegelman remembers visiting with Ann Berryman on Thanksgiving weekend and being told about the affair with Ludwig, about which she’d already had suspicions.

  As the letter of November 1 to Covici makes clear, Sasha acted with dispatch. Her icy announcement was already three weeks old and “the divorce papers are signed. I’m to pay a hundred fifty a month for the baby, and till the end of the year I’ll maintain the house, since it was rented for a year.” (The word “signed” here must mean by Sasha alone, given that a final agreement would not be reached until May 1960.) Over the past three weeks, Bellow’s attitude had hardened. “If she were to change her mind again, I wouldn’t change mine. It isn’t that I don’t love her. I do. But she’d only take the rest of my life and I’m not ready to part with that. Not yet, even though I’ve lost her, lost the boy, lost almost everything.” Two days later he writes to Stern about Henderson, ending “on a personal note”: “I’m having an ugly time—suffering no end. Sondra and I are both in despair over the course things have taken and I don’t expect a happy ending.… There are no frigidities, impotencies, adulteries, only miseries. Poor little Adam doesn’t know he’s about to be sentenced. I can’t help him because it has nothing at all to do with me. I love Sash and respect her. But she has drawn the sword, and is just meshuggah [crazy] enough to swing it.” When Bellow says the sentence “has nothing at all to do with me,” he is speaking narrowly; he was willing to put up with things as they were. That these things were impossible for Sasha—turning her into a “zombie”—he seems not to have noticed, or so he claimed to Covici. Now, however, he understood: “last summer when things seemed at their best they were really, for her, at their worst.”

  Bellow accepted Sasha’s assurance that no third party was involved in her decision. “No frigidities, no impotencies, no adulteries.” In addition to Sasha’s adultery with Ludwig, there were Bellow’s earlier adulteries, which helped to drive her into Ludwig’s arms (gossip about his current adulteries seems not to have figured).59 In the November 1 letter to Covici, Bellow suggests explanations for Sasha’s decision: “She may not have loved me at all. She certainly doesn’t love me now, and perhaps even hates me. When I was weaker there was some satisfaction for her in being the strong one. But when I recovered confidence and loved her more than before, even sexually, she couldn’t bear it.” Bellow makes similar points in a letter of November 5 to Botsford: “No, there’s really nothing I can do—no remedy that pride prevents me from applying. Nothing can change Sasha’s mind. It’s she who’s doing this, cutting me off, taking away Adam. I can’t say for what failures of mine. Not the ordinary ones like money, sex, rivals or any of that. But maybe because there have been no such failures. If I were miserably weak she would pity or protect me. It’s what I am that’s unbearable to her. The essence of me.… Sasha is an absolutist. I think I’ve loved even that, in her. I believe I learned with her to love a woman, and I can’t see where or how my heartsickness will end.” By November 10, in a second letter to Covici, he tries to rein in rising anger: “I succeed best when I think of her as her father’s daughter. For she is Tschacbasov. She has a Tschacbasov heart—an insect heart. But really I love her too much and understand her too well to feel the murderous hatred that would help me (therapeutically). And there’s the child.”

  Looking back, almost fifty years later, Sasha underplays the drama. After a passage in the memoir in which she complains of Bellow’s insatiable and exhausting need for reassurance—the passage, oddly, comes right after she says he was no longer “so difficult—actually he had settled down”—she describes how she asked for the divorce:

  So one day, finally, I told him we needed to separate. “You’re not happy, with me, Saul,” I said, “And you deserve better.” He agreed, grateful, I think to have it out in the open. “But,” he said a little regretfully, “who’ll cook for me” (p. 104).

  In an interview Sasha repeated this account: “He was fine with it. He wasn’t unhappy”; “it really wasn’t working for him either.” When quizzed about Bellow’s question about cooking, Sasha admitted that it may not have been as bad as it sounds (she clearly meant it to sound bad, both in the memoir and initially in the interview). “I think maybe he was being uncomfortable,” she allowed, “a little discomfort, irony, humor, but more ‘I don’t know what else to say.’ ” Her final judgment of Bellow, as of herself at this time, is forgiving: “he wasn’t such a bad guy nor was I such a bad person.… He was a very selfish man and he wasn’t capable of loving a person.… He couldn
’t maintain a relationship that required him not to be at the center … it was his angst, his problems, his needs, his needs. If you’re a young woman, just starting out … there comes a point when you want something else. This is ordinary stuff.” The part that’s not ordinary involved Ludwig and the affair with Ludwig, which Bellow at this point knew nothing about. “The tragedies of my life were not over Saul. They were over Ludwig.”