The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Like Susan, Rosette claimed to know what was best for Bellow and how to make him happy. She, too, was a serious person, often earnest in manner, and earnest about sex. Her fictional counterpart in Herzog, Ramona Donsell, is a student rather than a professor, but a serious student; this is a problem for Moses, since “in principle, he opposed affairs with students, even with students like Ramona Donsell, who were obviously made for them.” Though Moses describes himself as “a wild man,” he remains “in frightful earnest.” “Of course it was just this earnestness,” he adds, “that attracted Ramona” (pp. 430, 431). Rosette was assertive and quick to take offense, though Susan, too, could take offense (as when she objects to Bellow writing, in a letter of January 23, 1961, that “I really do miss you—even your earnestness; sometimes it has struck me as funny, but I miss it”).17 Rosette writes on October 1, 1960, that her “blood boiled” when Bellow claimed “that I made you break with your friend Susie” (something he seems to have told her he’d done, though the extant correspondence suggests otherwise). It is hardly surprising that Bellow’s complicated love life involved him in deception. The Rosette letter gives a sense of what it was like to be romantically involved with Bellow in this period:

  Please remember that when you asked me to bear with you through July [when Susan was with him at Tivoli] it was I who suggested we stop seeing each other for two weeks or more. Then she arrived and you wrote me a frantic note signed The Repentant Sinner and in which you asked me “not to keep my countenance from you.” Then we saw each other. You said it was good to come back to me and you suggested that after your return from Chicago [where he was with Susan as well as Adam] we go away together and really try “to make it.” You came to spend a week with me while your friend Susie was still in the city. This was ample proof of what you wanted. You made all the decisions and I simply agreed. Then, when I saw how serious you were I broke with all my previous attachments in order to be completely fair to you, to me, to us. You say it’s important for you to feel you make the decisions. You made them all. The only decision I made was that of stopping our relationship, since it did not seem to live and develop.

  Rosette did not stop the relationship, responding in a letter of November 3 to a “gentle, tender letter” from Bellow, “full of the grief of hesitancy.” Bellow was to go to Puerto Rico, she was to go to Greece, then the Soviet Union. But after these trips? “As for ‘choosing’ I do not want you to make any choice, nor am I choosing either. I have a strange awareness that something has been chosen for us.” Later Rosette asks “how can it be weakness to choose someone vital, someone who has warmth and self-respect, someone who comes to you with love and trust. I think it is weakness to reject this vital love, to say it is too good, to suspect and fear it.” In describing herself as a woman of “warmth and self-respect,” Rosette may be implying a contrast with Susan. But Susan’s letters do not lack these qualities. While Bellow was in Puerto Rico, he asked her to run errands for him. Her accounts of meetings with Volkening, Asher, Covici, the man from Laurel-Dell (publisher of Great Jew ish Stories), are perfectly confident, as are her written responses to the pages of Herzog Bellow sent her. In More Die of Heartbreak, Matilda lacks warmth but hardly self-respect. “You’ll be much happier,” she tells Benn toward the end of the novel, “if I feel my standards are being met” (p. 287). In Humboldt’s Gift, Denise is fierce rather than warm (understandably, since we mostly see her battling with Citrine over the divorce) and hardly lacking in self-respect. Before the divorce, however, according to Citrine, she “would start up in the night and sob and say that she was nothing” (p. 302). There is no such note in Susan’s letters to Bellow during their separation, unless one counts a persistent strain of longing. Though she was busy at her job and often out with friends, her life in New York seems, from the letters, mostly to have been spent waiting to be summoned to Puerto Rico.

  Bellow’s letters during this period are briefer than Susan’s. When Susan did not immediately respond to the pages of Herzog he sent her, he worried that she didn’t like them. He kept her abreast of developments with The Noble Savage, informing her on January 30, 1961, that “Ludwig hasn’t answered Keith’s letter. He has two days more and we pull the trapdoor.” (When the question arose of whether and how to announce Ludwig’s departure from the magazine, Susan offered advice. “I certainly don’t think an editorial statement has to be made in the magazine, enclosed in a black-bordered box yet,” she writes on February 7. “Why call attention and who is it you have in mind that you feel you have to explain to?”) About her work at Horizon, Bellow offers encouragement and sympathy, as he does when she complains of problems with her family. Toward the end of January, he, too, begins to chafe under the separation. In an undated letter, probably written at the very end of the month, he writes: “So you’ll be here March 1st! A long wait, but it was my idea, so I’ll teach myself patience.” Later he declares: “Dolly, I love you dearly. Use a typewriter” (Susan’s handwriting is maddeningly illegible). She writes back that she misses him so much she can’t sleep at night; she finds their separation “more and more pointless every day.… I’m tired of building my character. Henderson says ‘enough becoming’ (more or less he says that).” On February 3 Bellow writes that he “got drunk last night on something that might be called a date, but more awful. I filled up with rum and when I got home I couldn’t sleep.… I want you to come. Will you come, dolly? I’ll find out when Easter holiday is. It’s toward the end of March, like. I shall fight off the mañana and inform myself definitely today.” The letter ends with news about the University of Chicago, where work is offered for next year. “I wouldn’t want to go there without you either,” he writes, “be assured. But I’m thinking.” On February 6 Bellow offers a confession: “I feel so very sweet towards you, I’d melt your snows for you if I were there, on 68th St. You know it puzzles me not to have feelings for anyone else. I was once ubiquitously rousable and I even worry, I grieve at times, at my lack of interest in these passing chicks. Is it maturity or frost? I ask myself. Perhaps you can tell me.”

  AS BELLOW WORKED ON Herzog and wrote letters to Susan, he worried about the year ahead. Greg was doing well in high school, getting good grades, and had shown an interest in the University of Chicago. “I don’t see how I can turn down the U of C—because of him,” he writes to Susan. “He’s applied for a scholarship. So the money I’m paid there will be the least of it. As for you and me, dolly, I am not supposing that by next winter there’ll be such a problem ab’t Chicago as you anticipate.… I love you very much, Susie.” The job at Chicago was one he had been offered earlier but had been forced to turn down because of the Ford grant (Ralph Ellison got it instead, partly at Bellow’s suggestion). Richard Stern had arranged the original offer and renewed it now for Winter Quarter 1962, January to March. Bellow would be “Celebrity in Residence” in the English Department, a job title concocted by the university’s public relations office. On February 27, 1961, Bellow wrote to Stern from Puerto Rico to say he expected to be in Chicago at the end of May, when he would be “quite willing to talk [about the post, he means]. Even about Susan, if you like. I think by now I know her quite well. I can tell you more about her than most others can tell me. I shrink from marriage still, but not from Susan.”

  Bellow stayed on in Puerto Rico until mid-May, describing himself in an undated reply to a letter of April 7 from Susan as the only person “in all the island … steadily at work.” Back in Manhattan, after her March visit, Susan was job hunting, having given up the Horizon job to come to Puerto Rico “for us, and you wanted me to.” On May 6, she writes of a fifth-grade teaching job at the Dalton School, a fashionable private school on the Upper East Side (“not too interested in fifth grade but very interested in Dalton”). In the letter of April 7, Susan is loving but also recalls rocky moments during the visit to Puerto Rico: “your getting irritable, my getting resentful … you only spoke your mind in rages … and then I was angry, and worse, withdrew.” But Bellow
was unperturbed, writing on April 8, “first I missed you hungrily, and now I’m more peaceful, and in about ten days I’ll have gotten every advantage of solitude and I’ll have a head full of ache and a void at heart.” Four days later, in “cheerful” mood, he wrote to Ralph Ross to say “I have a very sweet girl, Susan, and one of these days, when I stop trembling at the word, I may get married again.” Susan herself “ached” for Bellow’s return in the April 7 letter.

  Yet in a letter that hasn’t survived, Susan announced that she would not be accompanying Bellow to Chicago in January. Bellow describes this letter, in an undated reply, as “downcast,” admitting that he “didn’t like [it] very much.” He wonders if Susan’s decision was a product of parental pressure or depression, even suggesting she consider medication (“It can’t hurt, I hear, to take this Librium”). He also wonders if the contrast between New York and Chicago, which she seems to have visited shortly after returning from Puerto Rico, may have played a part in the decision, “the normal swing of coming in safe to New York, and being in your own place, and the friends and the glamour after all of the Big Town, to solitude again [in Chicago] and bitter thoughts.” There were practical reasons for the decision as well, which may account for the parental pressure. Bellow was going to Chicago for Winter Quarter only and Susan would have to quit whatever job she’d gotten in New York only months after getting it. Then she’d have to find another job when she and Bellow returned from Chicago in early spring. Though Bellow seems on the surface to have accepted Susan’s decision, in another undated letter he subtly disparages it. He has had dinner in Puerto Rico with a friend of his brother Maury. This friend, a woman from Washington, who worked as a lobbyist, “told me how a Senator tried to lay her in the Capitol during a roll-call vote.… She said, ‘Only after the vote.’ ” The anecdote reminds Bellow of something Susan once said about the role of material advantage in love relations. “You are right about these marriage-business alliances, of course, but I suppose this represents the efforts of people who have given up the love-quest to find a reason for being together.” He was not such a person: “my only vote, dolly, I cast for beautiful you.” Then, perhaps with Susan’s decision about Chicago in mind, he adds, “but people who see God in one another … [the ellipsis is his] aren’t on the make in NYC.” “How gladly I’d have crept into your bed last night,” he writes on April 24. “I missed you badly. And today, and daily and especially nightly.… My heart is on 68th St. Love, you say? Love.” Yet the separation and the solitude served him well. On May 1 he writes of receiving “a raving letter from Pat [Covici, about Herzog], foaming with superlatives.” On the eve of his departure for New York, Bellow writes that “getting off this island is to me identical in feeling with the finishing of this book—two prongs of the same force.”

  WHEN BELLOW RETURNED TO Tivoli in May 1961, Ralph Ellison was preparing to leave. He and Fanny had a new apartment overlooking the Hudson, one in which Ellison felt he could write; he would move out when the Bard semester ended in June. Ellison’s time at Tivoli, according to his biographer, Arnold Rampersad, had been “often a joy, albeit at times also lonely and melancholy. But he had arrived expecting to polish off his novel. He hadn’t.”18 Bellow, meanwhile, had Herzog to finish, and another rewrite of his play, which, if he could get it produced, would make him, he told William Phillips, “rich as a pig.”19 Bellow looked forward to the spring at Tivoli—“fall and spring are Tivoli’s best seasons,” he told the Kazins in a letter of July 26—but almost as soon as he got there he was on the move, “a run at top speed, from my descent at Pan Am.”20 Money was part of the motive. To make ends meet he agreed to teach at a two-week writing conference at Wagner College in Staten Island, to deliver an endowed lecture at the University of Michigan, and to write lots of reviews of books but also of films (for Horizon, where Susan had worked).21 “I have no money coming in and I must hack,” he wrote to Botsford in a letter of June 7, “and since I’m not too good at it I hack for a long time at some trifle and spend weeks brooding unhappily over assignments then push them over in a single morning, usually a Sunday when I have a headache and a nightmare beforehand to stir me up.”

  The title of the Hopwood Lecture at the University of Michigan, delivered on May 25, was “Where Do We Go from Here? The Future of Fiction,” a theme rehearsed and returned to in other essays of the period, including the twenty-thousand-word “Literature” chapter for The Great Ideas Today (discussed in Chapter 12). As with the essays Bellow produced in the period immediately preceding the publication of Henderson the Rain King, these can be seen as attempts to prepare the ground for Herzog. The lecture begins by examining the fashionable assertion that the novel is dead and with Bellow’s claim that whatever truth there is in this assertion derives from the disappearance of “the person, the character, as we knew him in the plays of Sophocles or Shakespeare, in Cervantes, Fielding, and Balzac.”22 He then identifies a second cause of decline: the fact that in much modern fiction, “drama has passed from external action to internal movement. In Proust and Joyce we are enclosed by and held within a single consciousness” (not a consistent “personality,” with reliable qualities like courage, fearfulness, even unreliability, but “a quaintly organized chaos of instinct and spirit”). A third claim is that the novel’s future requires a return to character as disclosed in action in the world. This claim, which is implicit in the Hopwood Lecture, is made explicit in a long article Bellow published on February 11, 1962, in The New York Times Book Review, “Facts That Put Fancy to Flight,” in which he sees the internality or introspection of modern fiction as having provoked a reaction in readers and novelists who overvalue the external world, the world of fact.23

  After the Hopwood Lecture, Bellow went on to Chicago to visit Adam, now aged four. They went to the zoo and the aquarium and shopped for toys. “I saw Sondra, too, for a moment,” he wrote to Botsford on June 7, “and I might have seen Jack, I suppose, if I’d cared to look for him.” Sasha’s father was suing Sasha over her mother’s will, and had let Bellow know (presumably through their mutual friend, Sam Goldberg) “that he would go to court to witness against Jack and his daughter if I wanted to bring suit for custody of the child.” This offer did not appeal: “I want nothing to do with any of them. Through the kid, I’m already involved, but I mean to hold relations with the whole bunch to a sanitary minimum.” While in Chicago, Bellow also saw Dick Stern about the “Celebrity in Residence” job. In July an early version of the first chapter of Herzog was published in Esquire, raising expectations. Alfred Kazin wrote to say how much he liked it; Ralph Ross told Bellow he had “the best prose of anyone writing fiction in the country”; Harvey Swados even described Bellow as “the only one of my contemporaries in whom I feel the capacity for greatness that I do in myself.”24 Now began the steady stream of invitations, job offers, honors, and awards that was to accompany Bellow until the day he died. Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, husband and wife, wrote separately to recruit him as a contributor to the first issue of The New York Review of Books. Hardwick put aside her views on Henderson and pressed Bellow to join Auden, Kazin, Trilling, and other distinguished recruits: “You are the one we want more than anything, truly. I can’t tell you how seriously we feel we need you because of your absolute leadership (it was decided at our meeting) in what is called ‘the field of fiction.’ ”25 Shortly after the Herzog extract appeared, Bellow arrived at Wagner College for the writing conference, which was organized by Rust Hills, the literary editor of Esquire. Hills chose three tutors for the conference: Robert Lowell for poetry, Edward Albee for drama, and Bellow for fiction.

  The conference worked them hard. Staten Island, Bellow wrote to Botsford, was boiling in July, with “an average heat of 106 degrees, like a stokehold.”26 He describes himself as “sweating over papers and talking 12 hours a day till my mouth was like an ashpit.” There were seventeen students in his fiction class, several with talent. Donald Barthelme, described by a fellow student, Susan Dworkin, a
s “wry—drunk a lot,” produced a story which Bellow didn’t think much of, but that was later widely anthologized. Barthelme had a good time at the conference and, in Dworkin’s words, “didn’t care what Saul Bellow thought of his work.” The same could not be said for other students, including “Buzz” Farbar, later a close friend of Norman Mailer’s and an actor in his movies, Arno Karlen, already published and “said to be the most promising writer among us,” and Dworkin herself, nineteen at the time. When Bellow described Dworkin’s writing as “just fine,” “very good,” she “couldn’t remember ever being so happy.” Then she overheard him at a party confessing “that he always told young writers they were good. He hadn’t the heart to do otherwise. They needed encouragement so much, much more than they needed hard criticism.” She went to her room in tears and “for weeks after at home, I cried.” Something else Bellow said at the party helped to explain the peculiar manner in which he listened when the students read their work: “He sat with his thumb pressed to his temple, like a man rehearsing suicide. Sometimes he gazed into space—and when he was forced to look at us it was with fear.” What Bellow said at the party was that “he was scared by the need in their faces; he remembered his own need when he was young.”27