The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  6. ​SB, “CB,” p. 26.

  7. ​SB, Henderson the Rain King (1958), p. 193 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  8. ​SB, “CB,” p. 26.

  9. ​Ibid.

  10. ​SB, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), p. 403 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  11. ​For the Bellows’ arrival in Chicago, see SB, “CB,” p. 27ff; Roth/SB interview typescript; and “ ‘I Got a Scheme!’: The Words of Saul Bellow,” New Yorker (25 April 2005) (henceforth cited as “I Got a Scheme!”), which draws on the typescript. Both typescript and New Yorker article were products of a proposal Roth made to SB in the summer of 1998, when SB was eighty-three—that they conduct “an extensive written interview” about his “life’s work.” “I would reread the books,” Roth explains in the article, p. 72, “then send my thoughts on each, structured as questions, for him to respond to at length however he liked. As it turned out, we never got much beyond a beginning, despite Saul’s willingness and my prodding. Every few months, in response to a letter or a phone call from me, some pages would arrive in the mail or through the fax machine, but then months would pass without a word from him, and, despite a weeklong visit I made to his Boston home one December, when he and I sat together for several hours every day talking about the books … the project petered out, and, reluctantly, I let him be.” Eventually, Roth gathered his thoughts on SB’s novels into an essay, “Re-reading Saul Bellow: A Novelist’s Notes on Half a Century’s Achievement,” New Yorker (9 October 2000), and shortly after SB’s death Roth reread the pages he had been sent and offered them to The New Yorker, where they were printed as “I Got a Scheme!” They appear, Roth explains, “as [Bellow] wrote them, without any editorial correction or alteration.” Hence the arrival in Chicago of the Bellow family at the Harrison Street Station on p. 78 and at the Dearborn Street Station on p. 80. After the appearance of “Re-reading Saul Bellow,” SB wrote to Roth to praise the piece: “no Eng. Lit. Prof. would be capable of doing what you’ve done with my books. And I too have learned from you” (the letter, written from Brookline, Massachusetts, is undated; see Benjamin Taylor, ed., Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), p. 550 (henceforth cited as Taylor, ed., Letters).

  SB’s niece Lesha Greengus has unearthed documents that complicate the accounts SB gave of the family’s arrival in Chicago. In an email to the author of 6 February 2011 she writes: “I went through Jane’s [this is Jane Bellow Kauffman, SB’s sister] naturalization file and discovered an affidavit by Louis Dworkin, dated April 14, 1967. In his affidavit Louie states that he was married in December 1923 and that both Grandpa and Jane were present at the wedding. Jane’s application states that she and Grandpa entered the U.S.A. (Syracuse, NY) on November 4, 1923. My father (Sam) wrote a notarized letter in the file, stating that he—and evidently Saul, Maury and their mother—arrived in the United States in July 1924.” This is the only account of the family’s removal from Canada to Chicago in which Jane is said to have accompanied her father, arriving six months before the rest of the family. It seems improbable that no one in the family would have mentioned the fact. Where did she stay? What did she do while Abraham worked at Imperial? She was sixteen at the time. Perhaps she was there only to attend the wedding and returned shortly afterward, presumably illegally, since she had entered the United States illegally. Had she finished her schooling by November 1923? The overworked Liza would have needed her to help out at home with the housework and cooking, particularly as SB was in the hospital at the time. The date of November 4, 1923, however, fits with existing accounts of his father’s arrival in the United States. See note 84 in Chapter 2 for the account of illegal border crossing in Chapter 9 of The Adventures of Augie March (p. 567).

  12. ​SB, “CB,” p. 27.

  13. ​See the first page of SB, “America and Augie,” a five-page typescript in the Regenstein, dated 3 March 2000, probably part of the “extensive written interview” (see note 11 above) on which he and Roth were working.

  14. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 80.

  15. ​Ibid., p. 78.

  16. ​Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 19.

  17. ​See Ijah, the narrator of “Cousins,” on “the furious upright growth of Cousin Shana’s ruddy hair” (p. 203), and “I Got a Scheme!,” p. 78, for Louis Dworkin’s red Mohawk stripe.

  18. ​SB, “CB,” p. 33.

  19. ​SB, “Jefferson Lectures,” IAAU, p. 146.

  20. ​“Variations on a Theme from Division Street,” the second of SB’s two Tanner Lectures, delivered on 25 May 1981 at Brasenose College, Oxford, under the general title “A Writer from Chicago,” and printed in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Sterling M. McMurrin (Salt Lake City: Univerity of Utah Press, 1982), p. 202.

  21. ​See SB, “CB,” p. 26, and “Jefferson Lectures,” IAAU, p. 144.

  22. ​SB, “CB,” p. 33.

  23. ​“That was where you really saw it,” SB remembered in the Koch interview, speaking of street life. “You didn’t see it so much on the back streets. On the back streets you saw immigrant families.”

  24. ​SB, “CB,” p. 43; also SB’s speech given to the Council of Scholars at the Library of Congress on 20 November 1980, p. 1, which lists “Evolutionists, Nietzscheans, Single-Taxers, Anarchists and Wobblies … Nudists … Fundamentalists.” This speech exists in manuscript and was revised into the second of the Tanner Lectures, where the list of speakers now includes “Nietzscheans, Anarchists, Zionists, followers of Max Nordau, Henry George, Brann the Iconoclast, interpreters of Karl Kautsky or Rosa Luxemburg” (pp. 201–2). In the Koch interview, SB’s list of speakers also includes ballet dancers and “Fletcherians,” who advocated “chewing every mouthful one hundred times.” For details about the Jewish population of Chicago and the city’s Jewish neighborhoods, see Irving Cutler, The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).

  25. ​Council of Scholars speech (20 November 1980), p. 2. In the second Tanner Lecture, “Variations on a Theme from Division Street,” p. 2, the park bench intellectuals become “garment workers and carpenters read[ing] Ibsen.”

  26. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 75.

  27. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 297.

  28. ​Ibid., p. 300. To find such a book in front of a Humboldt Park drugstore was, perhaps, unsurprising, given that it was the sort of neighborhood in which the tailor, Finer, subscribed to The New Republic (Atlas, Biography, p. 25).

  29. ​SB, “CB,” p. 39.

  30. ​SB, “A Matter of the Soul,” first published in Opera News, 11 January 1975, reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 74.

  31. ​SB, “Chicago and American Culture: One Writer’s View,” a talk delivered at the Centennial Celebration of the Chicago Public Library on 10 October 1972. A version of this talk was later printed under the same title in Chicago (May 1973), pp. 82–89. I have quoted from a twenty-one-page typescript of the talk itself, with handwritten corrections, in the Regenstein.

  32. ​SB, “CB,” pp. 29–30.

  33. ​Preface, Rebecca West, ed., Selected Poems of Carl Sandburg (1926; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), pp. 18–19, 20–21.

  34. ​SB, “CB,” p. 36.

  35. ​Rosenfeld is quoted in ibid., p. 30; for the subsequent quotation about “Venetian or Neapolitan possibilities,” see p. 31.

  36. ​Koch interview.

  37. ​SB, “CB,” p. 32. In the Council of Scholars speech (20 November 1980), p. 14, SB cites Harvey W. Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), on the boundaries between rich and poor, not only in the Gold Coast but in the city as a whole.

  38. ​SB, “CB,” pp. 31–32.

  39. ​For the cottonwood, see SB, “CB,” pp. 33, 42, 48; “Jefferson Lectures,” SB, IAAU, p. 147; and the Council of Scholars speech (20 November 1980), p. 3, where he talks of the tree’s “yellow leather leaves.” For “shabby,” see Herzog, p. 661. />
  40. ​SB, “CB,” p. 30.

  41. ​SB, “Chicago and American Culture: One Writer’s View,” p. 4.

  42. ​SB, “CB,” p. 41; for “connoisseur of the near-nothing,” see p. 15 of the nineteen-page section of “CB” entitled “American Materialism”; for the “catkins,” see p. 33 of the main eighty-four-page section.

  43. ​SB, “CB,” p. 48.

  44. ​When asked by Keith Botsford if he viewed the world differently on first coming to Chicago, SB answered: “I must have.… I certainly made decisions based on my condition. I had to decide, for instance, whether I would accept the role of convalescent sickly child or whether I would beef myself up. I decided on course two.” He recalls reading a book written by the football coach Walter Camp entitled How to Get Fit and How to Stay So (the actual title was Keeping Fit All the Way), which involved “carrying coal scuttles at arms’ length, and I did that because we had coal in the shed (this was in Chicago) and one of my jobs, which I was glad to do, was to go up and down the stairs. Up with the coal and down with the ashes. I became quite fanatical about training” (Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 290).

  45. ​All quotes about the Chicago street from SB, “CB,” pp. 34, 35, 37, 38–39. SB is mistaken here about George M. Cohan, who was 100 percent Irish, not Jewish.

  46. ​Koch interview, where SB adds of the Polish community in Humboldt Park that it “was very tight, so that the third and fourth generation people still weren’t speaking English very well. This was not the way it was with the rest of us.”

  47. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 294.

  48. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 294.

  49. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 294.

  50. ​See “I Got a Scheme!,” p. 79: “I discovered that Cahan of the Yiddish Forward made a serious effort to educate his immigrant readers. Though he was a socialist he understood that the older Europeans had little use for Marxism.”

  51. ​SB, “Jefferson Lectures,” IAAU, p. 144.

  52. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 22.

  53. ​Ibid.

  54. ​SB, “A Silver Dish,” reprinted in SB, CS, p. 17.

  55. ​From the unedited Roth/SB interview typescript, 2 December 1999.

  56. ​SB, “Mr. Sugarman’s Pledge of Allegiance,” Chicago Tribune, 25 August 1996.

  57. ​See Dominic A. Pacyga, Chicago: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 155; also James L. Merriner, Grafters and Goo Goos: Corruption and Reform in Chicago, 1833–2003 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). For “verbal swagger,” see “I Got a Scheme!,” pp. 75–76: “In the papers, you followed the events leading to the killing of Dion O’Bannion [sic], of the Northside bootlegging gang, and of the indictment of Al Capone for tax evasion. You knew all the facts about the death of Lingle, the Tribune’s gang reporter, who was shot down in the Illinois Central Randolph Street tunnel. The papers informed you that Big Bill Thompson, the mayor, was in the pocket of Capone.… Chicago was big on gab in the twenties and thirties, and under the influence of gab you came to feel yourself an insider. Verbal swagger was a limited art cultivated in the Hearst papers.”

  58. ​SB, “Mr. Sugarman’s Pledge of Allegiance.” See also SB, “CB,” p. 79: “In a single year, during Thompson’s mayoralty, gang boss Johnny Torrio, who preceded Al Capone, Chicago’s most famous gangster, grossed $4,000,000 from his Chicago beer peddling, $3,000,000 from gambling, $3,000,000 from prostitution and another $4,000,000 from similar enterprises in the suburbs. Payoffs to police officials and politicians were high and frequent, but Torrio had no objections as long as he could carry on without too much harassment. Chicago alone had more than 12,000 speakeasies, beerflats and brothels that sold illegal liquor.”

  59. ​SB, “Chicago and American Culture: One Writer’s View,” p. 8.

  60. ​Manea “Conversation,” p. 10.

  61. ​SB, “CB,” p. 40.

  62. ​Ibid., p. 36.

  63. ​Ibid., p. 45.

  64. ​Ibid., p. 40.

  65. ​SB, “A Talk with the Yellow Kid,” first published in The Reporter (6 September 1956), reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 47.

  66. ​SB, “Chicago: Once Over Lightly,” the first of the Tanner Lectures, p. 192.

  67. ​SB, “A Talk with the Yellow Kid,” p. 49.

  68. ​Ibid., pp. 52, 53.

  69. ​SB, “A Cry of Strength: The Unfashionably Uncynical Saul Bellow,” interview with Cathleen Medwick, Vogue (March 1982), reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 192.

  70. ​SB, “Chicago and American Culture: One Writer’s View,” p. 1; Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 291.

  71. ​SB, “Chicago and American Culture: One Writer’s View,” pp. 1, 5.

  72. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, pp. 291, 292.

  73. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 25.

  74. ​There were three main Chicago newspapers at this time: two Hearst papers, the Herald Examiner and the Evening American, and a McCormick paper, the Republican Tribune, the only one of the three to survive. SB does not say which of these he read. In “I Got a Scheme!,” the source of the quote about reconciling the Trojan War with Prohibition (p. 78), SB also mentions “the Chicago Journal, a paper that did not survive the Depression.” The Journal was noteworthy for publishing “a weekly literary supplement” (p. 82). The Leopold and Loeb case concerned a famous murder trial, that of two wealthy law students from the University of Chicago motivated by a desire to commit the perfect murder. In 1924 Nathan Leopold, Jr. (1904–71) and Richard Loeb (1905–36) kidnapped and murdered fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. After their arrest they retained Clarence Darrow as their lawyer. They were sentenced to life imprisonment. Alfred Hitchcock made a movie about the case, Rope (1948), based on the play by Patrick Hamilton (1929).

  75. ​Koch interview.

  76. ​Ruth Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), p. 7.

  77. ​Koch interview.

  78. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 305: Botsford: “When did that fundamental idea of all writers, that this is what you are going to do with yourself, write, first strike you? In what form did it come?” SB: “It came early in my high school years, when I began to realize that I thought of myself all along as a writer.”

  79. ​From “Saul Bellow—A Boy I Knew,” the text of a talk Esther Robbins delivered “a number of times for various organizations.” A copy of the talk is included in a letter to SB of 24 July 1989 (Regenstein). All subsequent quotations from Robbins come from this text.

  80. ​Koch interview.

  81. ​SB, “CB,” p. 34.

  82. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 82.

  83. ​SB, “CB,” p. 34 for Mrs. Cox; SB, “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt,” originally printed in Esquire (December 1983), reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 17, for Mrs. Davis, who made the remark on the occasion of Lindbergh’s flight to Paris on 20–22 May 1927 (when SB was twelve); for the Santayana quote see Character and Opinion in the United States (1920; New York: Anchor, 1967), p. 29.

  84. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 293.

  85. ​SB, “The Distracted Public,” the Romanes Lecture, Oxford University, 10 May 1990, reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 153.

  86. ​Koch interview.

  87. ​SB, “America and Augie,” pp. 4, 2.

  88. ​SB, “CB,” p. 36.

  89. ​To David Peltz, for example, what was most notable about SB the adolescent (they met when they were both fifteen) was his sense of self: “He was focused, he was dedicated to becoming what he was, from the beginning. I mean, he never veered. He believed in himself.”

  90. ​“Deck the Tisch with Sabbath Cholly” is the example Robbins recalls.

  91. ​In Manea, “Conversation,” p. 7, SB says that his sidelocks were cut off at three, that “until late adol
escence” he attended synagogue each Saturday, sitting downstairs with his father and the other men, while his mother and sister sat upstairs, and that for the same period he ate only kosher. SB had his Bar Mitzvah at the Spaulding Street synagogue west of the Park.

  92. ​Rebecca West describes looking down at the beach from the dining room “of a magnificent hotel built like an Italian palazzo,” which, in SB, “CB,” p. 31, SB decides must be the Drake Hotel, making the beach the Oak Street Beach.

  93. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 10.

  94. ​Rockwell Gray, Harry White, and Gerald Nemanic, “Interview with Saul Bellow,” TriQuarterly 60 (1984): 12–34, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 209.

  95. ​In “Starting Out in Chicago,” originally a 1974 Brandeis University commencement address, reprinted in the American Scholar 44 (Winter 1974–75), SB describes a person that could be the model for Cousin Mendy, the brother of his first wife, Anita: “J.J., my brother-in-law, born Jascha in the old country, practiced law in the Loop” (p. 76). For more on J.J. or Jack Goshkin, see Chapter 6, pp. 216–17.

  96. ​Ibid., pp. 76, 77. Arkady was Anita’s cousin, not SB’s.

  97. ​SB, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” originally published in The Atlantic Monthly (November 1982), reprinted in SB, CS, p. 378.

  98. ​SB, “Mozart: An Overture,” Bostonia Magazine (Spring 1992), originally a speech delivered at the Mozart Bicentennial, 5 December 1991, in Florence, Italy, reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 2. It is Atlas, Biography, p. 24, who locates these lessons in the Fine Arts Building; but on p. 3 of a section of “CB” entitled “Notes on Meeting with Sen. Niestein—April 30, 1979,” SB writes that Borushek had a studio “on the second floor of a much-ornamented building on the southeast corner of California and North Avenues.”

  99. ​SB, “Mozart: An Overture,” pp. 2, 1.

  100. ​When the Bellow family got its first radio is not clear. In “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 293, SB says that “in those early days” in Chicago he got his political ideas from the newspapers, since “there was no radio as yet.” However, in hand written notes in the Regenstein for the 1974 Brandeis commencement address, later printed under the title “Starting Out in Chicago,” he writes: “As I make these notes on March 4, 1974, I remember that on March 4, 1928, I had a sore throat and sat at home listening to the inauguration of Herbert Hoover on the Majestic radio.” In the Koch interview SB tells this story, adding “we had just bought a radio.”