The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  On November 21, in another letter to Botsford, Bellow again expresses irritation at Ludwig’s deficiencies as editor. “About Jack, you mustn’t think I’m putting you in the middle. I’m capable of dealing with all the difficulties myself, and my feelings about him are not what you have supposed. We can make out. It’s only that he’s not reliable in the editorial department. He keeps calling for editing continually but offers to do none of it. Every fourth time it happens I find it very funny.” In January Bellow took a job, arranged by Botsford, at the University of Puerto Rico, so letters between them stop. The first dated letter to suggest Bellow’s knowledge of the affair was written on January 29 to Ralph Ross, whom he addresses as if he knew all about it (something Ross later denied, in a letter of July 10, 1963). Several of Bellow’s students from Minnesota had asked Ross to pass on to him their hopes that he’d return to teach at the university, also to express their continuing loyalty. “The scandal on the grapevine from Mpls evidently isn’t all contra-Bellow,” Bellow responded to Ross. “Well, well—it has its amusing aspect, even. All these senseless old words like adultery and infidelity and love honor obey. Well, you told me I didn’t understand the fabric of society and a word to the wise has made a student of me. Not a cynic, but a student.” Bellow was writing from Puerto Rico, “a long way from the Jacks and Jills and Jonases. It suits me fine.” In a second letter to Ross, this one undated but also from January (“They’ll never carve 1960 on my tombstone, come what may”), Bellow wrote that he missed seeing Berryman when he came east in December. Sasha, too, had been east, but he saw neither her “nor Ludwig, our co-editor, who spent a week or more in these parts, but didn’t phone or reply to my call.” The letter continues:

  Honi soit qui mal y pense.

  The meek shall inherit the hearse.

  Well, I am greatly pleased at the way matters have turned out. My stupidity deserved far worse, but poetic justice has its own way with all us dumb joiks.

  Such a mixture of talent, character and fidelity—above all, fidelity.92

  VERY FEW LUDWIG LETTERS TO Bellow survive from the months leading up to late November 1960. Those that do are breezy, confident, full of opinion. On June 20 Ludwig pronounces himself “sorely pissed off at Meridian” for not honoring their contract with the magazine and for what he sees as a patronizing attitude to its editors. He has news of Adam: “terrific, tanning, a sand and water boychik evidently.” He also writes that Knopf has bought the contract for his novel, Confusions, from Viking, and that he’s doing “a five nights a week one hour TV show” (a broadcast version of his undergraduate course “Humanities in the Modern World”).93 On July 7, Ludwig sends Bellow a note saying that his mother died on June 30, and that he’s only just returned to Minneapolis from Winnipeg. “I’ll write you about all the things I should be writing you about as soon as I can do it.” If he did so, the letter has not survived. Nothing of what does survive before February 4, 1961, betrays the slightest unease on Ludwig’s part, though he must have been told, by Sasha if not Leya, that Bellow now knew of the affair.

  For whatever reason—fury, shame, embarrassment, a mixture of the three—Bellow avoided direct confrontation with Ludwig as well as Sasha. He and Botsford did, however, sometime in January demand Ludwig’s resignation, for on February 4 Ludwig wrote a letter in his defense. The letter begins by admitting that he was wrong not to get in touch with Bellow when he was in town in December (though he claims a mix-up explains his not replying to Bellow’s telephone message). He had come to New York to hand in the manuscript of Confusions to Knopf and feared being distracted from crucial last-minute revisions (“I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist an invitation to go up there [to Tivoli]”). What he calls “a turn in the manuscript” meant that he had to spend all of New Year’s Day revising the novel, “had an hour at Knopf’s the next morning and then took off for Mpls (I had a public lecture to give there).” He’s willing to resign if they insist, “but it’s one fuck of a way to wind up the effort that went into three issues of stacked-high material which I was involved with steadily (regardless of how long I was forced to hang on to the MSS because of the press of teaching duties here). I of course am saying I behaved like an asshole but realize that if my work on these three issues had been snuffed out by this unintended slight that’s how it will have to stand.… Just do me a favor, eh, mates or ex-mates? Knock off the bureaucratic horseshit about resignations and the letters that sound like IBM Watson sending a manager’s manager’s manager down. You want me off the masthead—O.K.? Don’t think that my commitment to what we were trying to do in TNS will be one bit lessened by that. I would still want it to work. And I would wish you guys the best of luck.” Ludwig signs the letter, “Yours in Coventry, Jack.”

  Bellow’s reply is undated. He begins by saying that he has “tried very hard” to avoid writing the sort of thing he’s about to write, but that Ludwig’s “phenomenal” letter of February 4 has forced him “to tell you a few of the things I feel about your relations to the magazine and me, personally.” Ludwig has neglected his responsibility as editor: “you have done nothing for months but read a few manuscripts. Others you have detained for periods up to half a year.… When I asked you to edit things, you said you couldn’t, you had TV programs, lectures and other obligations. Still the manuscripts kept coming back from you, when in their own sweet time they did come back, with scrawled notes recommending editing.” All through the summer and autumn Bellow had “carried” Ludwig, as correspondence would show, “those unanswered letters which were never without friendly inquiries.” It is true that he was absent when on tour in Poland and Yugoslavia. The reasons for his absence, “you understand as well as I do, and perhaps even better. By now I can’t be sure that I do know more about them.” The rattle in these sentences is audible, as is a reluctance to accept what he’s been told (“I can’t be sure”). Ludwig says he’s looking forward to contributing to issue 4, but “what can you, without hallucination, believe you have to do with TNS?” What, after all, did he do for issue 3? “You sent two inept and scarcely readable paragraphs for the arias which I threw out in disgust. I don’t think you are a fit editor for the magazine.… You are too woolly, self-absorbed, rambling, ill-organized, slovenly, heedless and insensitive to get on with. And you must be in a grotesque mess, to have lost your sense of reality to the last shred. I think you never had much of it to start with, and your last letter reveals that that’s gone, too.”

  Bellow then turns to the “personal” aspect of their relationship, “since we’re not only colleagues but ‘friends’ ”:

  In all this there is some ugliness, something I don’t want explained, though I’m sure that as a disciple of the Hasidim and believer in Dialogue and enthusiast for Heschel, and a man of honor from whom I have heard and endured many lectures and reproaches and whose correction I have accepted, you have a clear and truthful explanation. And all the worse for you if you are not hypocritical. The amount of internal garbage you have not taken cognizance of must be, since you never do things on a small scale, colossal.

  Ludwig will never see his behavior for what it is. Bellow wants no “Dialogue” with him, no explanations, no “Hasidic” sincerity. When he writes that “it wouldn’t do much good to see matters clearly,” “clearly” is meant ironically. It alludes to what he imagines will be Ludwig’s “clear and truthful explanation.” “With the sharpest eyes in the world I’d see nothing but the stinking fog of falsehood. And I haven’t got the sharpest eyes in the world.” These bitter sentences raise questions. If the fog of falsehood Bellow faced—from Ludwig, from Sasha—was so thick that even the sharpest eyes could not see through it, how was it that so many of his friends noticed what was going on, while Bellow himself, the great noticer, noticed nothing? One answer is that he wasn’t paying attention, or that it wasn’t in his interest to pay attention, at least in the short term. That Sasha had been desperately unhappy in the summer of 1959 Bellow failed to notice; that in the preceding spring she�
��d gotten pregnant and had an abortion he also failed to notice. He was working. He needed Sasha to be all right, as he needed Ludwig to be the friend and ally he presented himself as being. In not seeing or noticing, he was at fault, “not superman but superidiot. Only a giant among idiots would marry Sondra and offer you friendship.” Many years later, writing to Ralph Ross on March 22, 1977, Bellow attributed his blindness to “self-absorption”:

  Only it was no ordinary form of self-absorption because I could understand what I was determined to understand.… Evidently I was determined not to understand whatever was deeply threatening—allowed myself to know what conformed to my objectives, and no more. A tall order, to bury so many powers of observation. That sounds immodest; I mean only to be objective. But all the orders have been tall. If you had followed up your shrewd remark you might have saved me some time, but I assume you thought that if I couldn’t work out the hint I couldn’t be expected to bear a full examination either. I had to go through the whole Sondra–Jack Ludwig business, for instance. I gave them, and others, terrific entertainment.

  In the letter to Ludwig, Bellow admits he has faults. “I leave infinities on every side to be desired. But love her as my wife? Love you as my friend? I might as well have gone to work for Ringling Brothers and been shot out of a cannon twice a day. At least they would have let me wear a costume.” The letter ends: “Coventry, pal, is not the place.”

  THAT BELLOW AVOIDED CONFRONTING Sasha and Ludwig about the affair hardly means he couldn’t face the reality of their betrayal. By February 1961 he was well along in Herzog, whose hero resembles the clownlike figure he imagines himself to be in the letter to Ludwig. In writing Herzog he would exact revenge, but he would also seek the truth of what happened, searching out its causes in the widest as well as the most narrowly personal contexts. He would delve into the motives of the betrayers but also of the betrayed. And he would shape his findings to his needs as an artist. Terrible as it was to be so humiliated, he was energized by the effort of turning his humiliation into art. Some years later, as we shall see, Ludwig, ever imitative, wrote his own novel about the affair, or drawing on the affair, the only public account he has given of his part in the betrayal. With characteristic bravado or chutzpah he also reviewed Herzog, adopting a “man of honor” silence about its real-life origins, praising it dispassionately while including subtle digs. When asked if he would agree to be interviewed for this book, Ludwig politely declined. His children “want an end to this matter, which of course is not possible.” He had been traduced by previous biographers; James Atlas had “Swiftboated” him (a reference to the campaign to discredit John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign). Kerry had a venue for responding to his “Swiftboating,” one that he “stupidly” did not use; “I neither had a venue nor did I want to engage Tar Baby.” When, ten years later, such a “venue” was offered him, he several times declined: “Alas, I have no ‘side’ to offer … no ‘record’ to ‘set straight.’ Saul was hurt. By his friend. That’s it. Tags—‘Iago,’ ‘overbearing,’ ‘boastful’ will be gospelized, sans dissent. Tough. Yay Atlas!”94 Ludwig cannot have wanted the echo here: “Demand me nothing, what you know you know, / From this time forth I never will speak word.”95

  SB and Jack Ludwig, Tivoli, 1957 (ill. 13.1)

  14

  Susan/Herzog

  BELLOW ARRIVED AT the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras on January 12, 1961, to teach for a term. It was his first university post in more than two years and he took the job because he needed the money: he owed Viking $10,000, he had to pay Anita and Sasha more than $5,000 a year in alimony and child support, and repairs at the Tivoli house continued to be a financial drain.1 The salary he received from the university was $6,000 for three months’ teaching (Keith Botsford’s yearly salary). His duties were to teach one literature course, one writing course, and deliver one public lecture, a schedule that took up three afternoons a week, Wednesday through Friday, leaving plenty of time for Herzog.2 He got the job through Botsford, who had come to the university in December 1958 from CBS, the television network, where he’d worked after Bard. Botsford is vague about his position at the university. “I was supposed to ‘run’ the University’s media, film, television, radio and all their respective bits and pieces.”3 Within a year Botsford had the ear of the rector of the university, the “formidable” (p. 329) Jaime Benítez Rexach, as well as that of his assistant, Jorge Enjuto Bernal, described by Botsford in Fragment VI of his memoirs as “a man of the most distinguished manners and bearing” (p. 334), and persuaded them to fund a trip in the summer of 1959 to Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York. “Now I had money in my pocket and a first-class ticket,” he writes, “and I had a mission—to bring Saul to Puerto Rico.”4 That the mission succeeded was due in part to the University of Minnesota’s discovering, prior assurances notwithstanding, that it had no post for Bellow (presumably because of the recent scandal of his breakup with Sasha, a reason also for suspecting that Bellow would be unlikely to accept such a post). Only after he had agreed to come to Puerto Rico did Bellow realize, as he wrote to Botsford on March 19, 1960, that he couldn’t in fact begin teaching until March 1961, when the Ford grant ran out (otherwise “the Fords would be justifiably outraged”). Nevertheless, he arranged to come to the university in January. On the eve of his departure, his feelings were mixed. “I’ll leave reluctantly for Puerto Rico,” he wrote to Alice Adams in an undated letter. “But who knows? It may do me good.”

  On the plane to Puerto Rico, first impressions were inauspicious. “Only I had bathed,” he reported to Susan Glassman in a letter of January 16. “There were 300 passengers and 600 children. Next to me a priest smoked cigars. He had a dozen in his upper coat pocket and said that’ll be just about enough for the trip. Then came cold supper. Ham wrapped around asparagus, roast beef in red something and glazed chicken breast with a first lieutenant’s stripe in red pimento.… Everybody dying of heat.”5 What struck Bellow upon arrival was the beauty of the island’s vegetation, beginning with the “great mahogany tree waving its skirts at my window,” and the constant noise, especially at night: “loud trailer-trucks, Sherman tanks, juke boxes. The Puerto Riqueños adore noise. It proves something to them. Ah yes—dog fights, too. At 3 am” (dogs appear in a later, undated letter to Ralph Ellison, where they are described as “Asiatic—wandering tribes of mongrels. They turn up in all the fashionable places, and in the modern university buildings, the cafeterias—there are always a few hounds sleeping in a cool classroom”). “Perhaps the noise means something,” Bellow reiterates in the Ellison letter, which is why, at least at the beginning, he “tr[ied] to tune in.” Soon, though, Botsford’s offer to have him lodge at his place in Cupey Alto, a forty-five-minute drive from the noise of Río Piedras, began to appeal. In the memoir Botsford describes the road to Cupey Alto as flanked by avocado trees, while on the far side of the house “the property declines with prickly pineapples, pink grapefruit, oranges, lemons and limes” (p. 324). Later in Bellow’s stay, the Botsfords moved to a second house in San Lorenzo, to the east of Cupey Alto.

  Lodging with the Botsfords had its drawbacks. In addition to Botsford and his wife, Annie, whom Bellow describes in the letter of January 16 to Susan as kind and generous, there were “three kids, and maid.” The kids were “lovely” but they were noisy. The noise bothered Bellow in the mornings in particular, when he worked in a dark cool room at the back of the house. There was also the matter of transport. Until he got a car of his own he had to be driven everywhere; the buses were unreliable and “I see now that a Vespa is suicidal. The driving makes Rome and Paris look like Wellesley and Vassar” (in the undated letter to Ellison he reports that the “drivers read at the wheel, they sing, they eat and they screw while driving”). The Botsfords, however, were keen. Annie doted on Bellow, calling him “dear … like a child you want to cuddle” (p. 471). The children doted as well, when not being yelled at for making noise. Away from his desk, Bellow giggled a lot with the ch
ildren and talked to them like adults, something he could do, Botsford thought, because they weren’t his. The Botsfords lived well in Puerto Rico (Botsford seems always to have lived well, at times with no visible means of support). On January 18 Bellow wrote to Susan from Botsford’s tennis club, “two Cuba libres in me,” “tropical sunset,” “the palm trees doing their job in front.… The island is marvelous. You will fall in love with it.” On weekends he joined the family and other visitors on expeditions. “Often we drove into town together,” Botsford writes in the memoir, “we lollygagged on the beach. Saul was partial to clear water and to the lechoncito on which we lunch. He swam ably and did calisthenics on his beach-towel” (p. 452).6

  At first Bellow found the heat of the island stupefying. “I feel the tropics. I have bad dreams,” he writes to Susan on January 20. “Still, I have been getting up earlier because the cows low and the sun bursts in, and at the same time mildly excited as well as depressed. It’s probably a great deal physiological.” Three days later he again writes to Susan—they are writing almost daily now—of trying “to wake up from this pressing, beautiful heat, everlasting summer and the depressed sense of having come out of the movies at midday.” He has been advised “to rest more and give up the Northern tempo” but he can’t. “I adore running and dislike repose.… Shall I lie under a tree with eyes shut and mouth open, like a child, and let the lizards chase over me?” (or, to Ellison, in another undated letter, “drift with the stray dogs and the lizards and wonder how many ways a banana leaf can split”). A week later, on January 28, he announces that he has left the Botsfords and taken a room on campus while looking for a place where he and Susan, who was to visit in March, could be on their own. “I begin now to thrive better.” On January 30 he reports to Susan that he has a car, the product of “a very elaborate financial arrangement” engineered by Botsford. “I take a loan, Keith buys a station wagon with it, and I have his Volkswagen for the term and it is or should be tax-deductible.” The place he eventually found was on the outskirts of Río Piedras, a basement apartment in a house belonging to Jack Delano, a colleague of Botsford’s, for a time manager of the island’s state-owned television station. Delano, according to Botsford, was “a charmer, a gifted musician, photographer, and idealist agitator” (p. 328), part of a loose circle of leftist exiles and expats from both the New Deal and the Spanish Civil War (p. 334). Jorge Enjuto Bernal, the rector’s assistant, was “a remnant of republican pre-war Spain” (p. 334).