The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  35. ​In 1979 it was renamed the Roberto Clemente Community Academy or Clemente High School.

  36. ​From the first of two “Jefferson Lectures” (1977), reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 120. According to SB’s friend and classmate Sydney J. Harris, “Tuley was a very good school in that it was tremendously heterogeneous. I mean you’d have the children of a shoemaker there and one of the Goldblatt kids [of Goldblatts department stores, where SB worked on Saturdays in a branch near Charlie Kauffman’s dental practice].… You really had a splendid cross-section of the city and nobody was concerned about who anybody’s father was. It was a very pleasant way to grow up, on the whole.” This quotation is from an interview conducted with Harris by the journalist D. J. R. Bruckner, who was at work on a television documentary about SB. The program, Saul Bellow’s Chicago, was aired on Channel 5 in Chicago on 27 March 1981. Bruckner conducted his interviews in 1980 and his recordings are in the Regenstein.

  37. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 30.

  38. ​“Chicago and American Culture: One Writer’s View,” p. 7.

  39. ​Ibid., p. 8. In “Variations on a Theme from Division Street,” the second of his 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: University of Utah Press, 1982), p. 201, SB mentions memorizing “Hence loathed melancholy” and “Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain.”

  40. ​SB, “The Distracted Public,” originally delivered as the Romanes Lecture, Oxford University, 10 May 1990, reprinted in SB, IAAU, pp. 152, 153–54.

  41. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 76.

  42. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 296.

  43. ​SB to Danny Godfrey, 16 October 1992.

  44. ​In “Charm and Death,” the unpublished novel (the manuscript is in the Regenstein) from which the story “Zetland: By a Character Witness” is drawn, what sounds like “Boys Shop” is recalled. The narrator describes “the stannic fragrance of the metal shop at school in Chicago, years ago … the square little table furnace soldering irons gaping fire through the helmet-mouth” (p. 9).

  45. ​“I was a determined athlete, but not outstanding. I was not in a class with Julius Echeles, now a criminal lawyer, who was the school’s (Tuley High) basketball star. ‘Lucky’ was his nickname. I’d been a sickly child and was determined in adolescence not to be a convalescent adolescent. And I drove myself hard. Characteristically, I read a great deal about body building. I studied physical development books like How to Get Strong and How to Stay So. From the great Walter Camp I learned to carry scuttles filled with coal, holding them out at arm’s length” (interview with Steve Neal, “The Quintessential Chicago Writer,” Chicago Tribune Magazine, 6 September 1979, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 173.

  46. ​The last digit in the handwritten number “254” on the Chicago Public Schools “Official Record” is hard to decipher, written over or above a “2,” perhaps. It looks like “4” to me.

  47. ​Dave Schwab’s recollection comes from Atlas, Biography, p. 26; Arthur Wineberg’s from a 1980 interview with D. J. R. Bruckner.

  48. ​Koch interview. Tuley was easygoing about its student radicals. According to Sidney Passin, brother of SB’s close friend Herb Passin, the principal of Tuley, Mr. Yebutz, was an “elderly guy, warm-hearted”; the assistant principal, Mr. Jacobson, “Jake,” was “a disciplinarian everyone liked.” Sydney J. Harris, a year below SB, remembers Jacobson as “a very amusing fellow”: “We were very militant, and we’d picket the school and instead of upbraiding us he’d march with us, eating peanuts.” Arthur Wineberg recalls this march, at which Jacobson offered him peanuts with the greeting “Nuts for the nuts?” These recollections from Harris and Wineberg come from 1980 interviews with D. J. R. Bruckner.

  49. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 6.

  50. ​See SB, “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt,” originally printed in Esquire, December 1983, reprinted in SB, IAAU, pp. 19–20: “For older citizens it was a grim time—for the educated and professional classes the Depression was grievously humiliating—but for the young this faltering of order and authority made possible an escape from family and routine.”

  51. ​This quotation comes from p. 2 of an untitled sixteen-page handwritten manuscript in the Regenstein, dated March 1974, and beginning “How, in the city of Chicago, does a young person become a writer?” Much of it appears in “Starting Out in Chicago, The American Scholar 44 (Winter 1974–75), originally delivered as a commencement address at Brandeis University on 22 May 1974.

  52. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 300.

  53. ​SB, “Starting Out in Chicago,” p. 73.

  54. ​SB, “Chicago and American Culture: One Writer’s View,” pp. 10–11.

  55. ​Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. James L. W. West III (1981; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 62 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  56. ​Theodore Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt, ed. James L. W. West III (1992; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 125–26.

  57. ​SB quoted in 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. 205. See also, from the same interview: “Dreiser loves … to theorize clumsily about their motives [he is talking about the “money titans” in his novels], the ‘chemisms’ that drive them. He’s crammed himself with T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Darwin and a heavy diet of ‘artistry,’ but he’s such a passionate materialist that he carries you with him even while you are dismissing his theories, and his clumsy artiness” (p. 206). In the “American Materialism” section of “CB,” p. 15, where SB quotes Mencken on Dreiser’s “inexorable particularity,” he also describes Dreiser as “fact-intoxicated,” his novels being “stuffed to surfeit with money, property, deals, interest rates, bookkeeping, bribery, and the bottomless appetite of acquisition,” an appetite matched only by his characters’ “predatory and almost carnivorous sexuality” (pp. 15–16).

  58. ​Interview with Gordon Lloyd Harper, “The Art of Fiction: Saul Bellow,” Paris Review 9, no. 36 (1966): 48–73, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, pp. 60–61. See also SB, “Chicago and American Culture: One Writer’s View,” p. 12: “The young novelists and would-be novelists working on the newspapers were charged with a sense of the place. Coming from bleak villages from the sticks, they were overcome by the color and power of Chicago. One sees this most vividly in Theodore Dreiser who so movingly combines great strength of judgement and sympathy with gee whiz—the gee whiz of the dazzled country boy.”

  59. ​From p. 3 of a typed manuscript in the Regenstein entitled “Literature and de Tocqueville,” the transcript of a talk entitled “Literature in a Democracy: From de Tocqueville to the Present,” delivered by SB in Mandel Hall, University of Chicago, 6 December 1995.

  60. ​Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 103.

  61. ​From SB to William J. Bennett, 9 July 1984.

  62. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 76.

  63. ​Ibid., p. 82, for the Nietzsche quote; for Herzog and Nietzsche, see Daniel Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), p. 16. For the Leopold and Loeb case see Chapter 3, Note 74.

  64. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 76.

  65. ​From p. 4 of an eight-page “Memorial Speech for Sydney J. Harris,” who died on 8 December 1986, a typescript of which is in the Regenstein (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  66. ​Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 25.

  67. ​Rockwell Gray, Harry White, and Gerald Nemanic, “Interview with Saul Bellow,” reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 220.

  68. ​Quoted in Friedrich Niet
zsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage: New York, 1967), p. 36.

  69. ​Arthur [Artur] Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, tr. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, 3 vols. (London: 1906), 2.248.

  70. ​SB, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, p. 172 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  71. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 300.

  72. ​SB, “Isaac Rosenfeld,” originally published in Partisan Review 23, no. 4 (Fall 1956): 565–67, and reprinted three times: as the foreword to Isaac Rosenfeld, An Age of Enormity: Life and Writing in the Forties and Fifties, ed., Theodore Solotaroff (Cleveland: World, 1962); as the foreword to Mark Shechner, ed. Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), pp. 17–19; and as “Isaac Rosenfeld,” SB, IAAU, pp. 264–66. The quoted passage is one of several omitted in the reprints, which offer an edited version of the original Partisan Review piece.

  73. ​SB, “Zetland: By a Character Witness” (1974), reprinted in SB, CS, p. 244.

  74. ​Isaac Rosenfeld, Passage from Home (1946: Cleveland: Meridian, 1965), p. 210 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  75. ​Steven J. Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 26.

  76. ​From the first page of a four-page typescript in the Regenstein, mostly about Isaac Rosenfeld, with handwritten corrections. For an account of this typescript see Chapter 3, note 116.

  77. ​Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives, p. 20.

  78. ​Four-page typescript to Roth, p. 1; see Chapter 3, note 116.

  79. ​Ibid., p. 2. On the same page SB describes what his own father’s opinion of the Rosenfelds “as a category” would have been: “Yiddish culture types it was safe to say that he despised. My father’s good opinion was not easy to obtain. He would have thought it infra-dig to meddle with the adolescent friendships of your gifted son.”

  80. ​Ibid. See also, from the same page: “He had agreed to be the boy wonder, the prodigy and prize-winner who would compensate his father for the death of two wives and the poor moron daughter [born of the second wife] who pounded through the rooms giving harsh cries—an incomprehensible, unreasonable girl.”

  81. ​Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives, p. 22.

  82. ​Four-page typescript to Roth; see Chapter 3, note 116.

  83. ​SB, “Isaac Rosenfeld,” SB, IAAU, p. 263.

  84. ​Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives, p. 21.

  85. ​Isaac Rosenfeld, “The World of the Ceiling,” first printed in Midstream 2, no. 1 (1956), reprinted in Shechner, ed., Preserving the Hunger, p. 367.

  86. ​Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives, p. 26.

  87. ​SB, foreword to Shechner, ed., Preserving the Hunger, p. 14; also “Isaac Rosenfeld,” SB, IAAU, p. 264.

  88. ​Ten counting Jeanne and Anita’s son Irving, born in 1933.

  89. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 30. The quote from Allen Tate comes from the dust jacket of Bravo, My Monster, published in 1953 by the Chicago publishing firm Henry Regnery.

  90. ​SB felt bad that the review, entitled “Suicide by Proxy,” was brief and not quite as effusive as it might have been. As he wrote to Edith Tarcov on Thanksgiving Day 1953: “The review in Saturday Review had to be done as I did it because I was in the position of having asked for the book. I could not have reviewed it in the tone I would have taken had the book come unsolicited. They would not have accepted from me a review they considered obviously written for a friend. The political problem was a delicate one. I say this only because I have intimations of Oscar’s dissatisfaction with the piece I wrote. You have my assurance that I did my utmost.”

  91. ​Daniel Bell, “A Parable of Alienation,” Jewish Frontier 13, no. 11 (November 1946): 12–19; Irving Howe, “The Lost Young Intellectual,” Commentary 2, no. 4 (October 1946), pp. 361–67.

  92. ​Isaac Rosenfeld, “Kafka and His Critics,” first published in The New Leader 30, no. 15 (April 12, 1947), as a review of Angel Flores, The Kafka Problem; reprinted in Shechner, ed., Preserving the Hunger, pp. 170, 171.

  93. ​Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives, p. 96.

  94. ​Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), pp. 50, 49. That Rosenfeld could “do” manners is clear from Passage from Home, as in details describing Bernard’s grandparents: the grandmother in the kitchen “doing more than she could successfully manage and therefore getting in the way”; the grandfather, at the table, whom Bernard watches “tear out a deep, doughy chunk, avoiding the crust, chewing with his mouth open and rolling the bread over his gums. He smeared his fingers with his beard, and wiped his hands on his jacket before drawing out a crusty handkerchief with which he dabbed his lips.” Bernard recalls: “I hated to see him placed, by his weaknesses, in a position of such obvious inferiority to myself” (p. 86).

  95. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, pp. 298–99; interview with Nina Steers, “Successor to Faulkner?,” Show 4 (September 1964), pp. 36–38, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 35.

  96. ​SB to George Sarant, 9 September 1990. “Sarant” was a shortened version of Rosenfeld’s wife’s name, Sarantakis, which she readopted shortly after his death. In A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), Irving Howe describes Rosenfeld as “profligate with his being, his time, his thought, [lacking] only that cunning economy that enables writers to sustain lengthy careers” (p. 134). He also offers this description of Rosenfeld in the late 1940s and early 1950s: “Isaac seemed a literary offspring of Sholem Aleichem but his mind had succumbed to Kafka—not, as it turned out, a happy affair. Still, he was our golden boy, more so than Bellow, for there was an air of Yeshiva purity about Isaac that made one hope wildly for his future” (p. 133). According to Zipperstein, in Rosenfeld’s Lives, had Rosenfeld lived he might well have redeemed his promise; the myth of inexorable decline is a myth: “Rosenfeld died of a fatal heart attack, not writer’s block” (p. 206); at his death at thirty-eight he was writing, had a teaching job, a girlfriend, a new, airy apartment in Chicago, a red convertible, and on the morning of his death “announced that he’d finally made a breakthrough on his novel” (p. 234). What remained after his death, however, was relatively little, given both the promise and ability: Passage from Home, published when he was twenty-eight; a book of stories, Alpha and Omega (1966), published posthumously; and two collections of reviews and stories: The Age of Enormity (1962) and Preserving the Hunger (1988).

  97. ​SB to Nathan Tarcov, 22 October 1963. For fuller discussion of this letter and of SB’s claim that Tarcov “invested his life in relationships,” see Chapter 1 of volume 2 of this biography, forthcoming.

  98. ​According to Susan Freifeld, “the family loved it [Augie]. My father thought it was pretty accurate.” According to her sister, Judith, “he was very proud that the family appeared as characters in the novel. He felt that some of the portrayals came very much from him and his close association with Saul … [though] not every event that happens to Einhorn happened to my father [that is, Ben Freifeld].” According to Judith Freifeld Ward, “my grandmother is in there, my Uncle Louie is Dingbat.”

  99. ​SB, “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt,” SB, IAAU, p. 21.

  100. ​The undated letter is reprinted in Taylor, ed., Letters, pp. 45–46. Rosenfeld’s biographical sketch is quoted in Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives, p. 29.

  101. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 82.

  102. ​This quotation and the earlier reference to a first meeting are from page one of SB’s “Memorial Speech for Sydney J. Harris.” All quotations from Harris are from the Bruckner interview.

  103. ​Koch interview.

  104. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 82.

  105. ​SB, “Memorial Speech for Sydney J. Harris,” p. 2. See also Manea, “Conversation,” p. 11, in which SB describes his
Tuley circle as “all fairly wild, but of course people seemed a lot wilder to me than they may have been in reality because I came from a family where parental control was so strong. They did things that I envied but I didn’t dare do.”

  106. ​SB, “Memorial Speech for Sydney J. Harris,” p. 2. The stories SB and Harris wrote were submitted to Argosy magazine, without success. Argosy and True Confessions published the stories of the first writer SB ever met, an elderly neighbor in Chicago, “a tool-and-diemaker who turned out pulp stories” (see “Skepticism and the Depth of Life,” in J. E. Miller, Jr., and P. D. Herring, eds., The Arts and the Public [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967], p. 13).

  107. ​SB, “How, in the city of Chicago, does a young person become a writer?,” pp. 3–4 (see note 51 above).

  108. ​SB recounts the story of “Herbert Sanders” in “I Got a Scheme!,” pp. 82–83, in Roth/SB interview typescript “Arriving in Chicago and Sydney J. Harris,” pp. 3–4, and in the “Memorial Speech for Sydney J. Harris,” pp. 5–8. These versions do not contradict each other but add different details. My account draws on all three sources.

  109. ​In the April–May 1937 issue of Soapbox, the magazine of the University of Chicago Socialist Club, which contains articles by several Tuleyites, including SB, Tarcov, and Nate Gould, there is a poem by S. G. Fairfield, who might just be Freifeld, since the poem has an Eliot-like epigraph from John Webster, the Jacobean dramatist; but it might also be Harris, posing as a version of his creation, Farefield, now Fairfield.

  110. ​George Reedy to Al Glotzer, 26 September 1996, among SB’s papers in the Regenstein, along with “In Memory of Yetta Barshevsky.”

  111. ​For Nathan Gould’s name I am indebted to his son, Andrew Gould: “ ‘Nathan Goldstein’ and ‘Nathan Gould’ are the same person.… My father was born ‘Nathan Goldstein’ but gave his name as ‘Nathan Gould’ at the time of an early politically-related arrest (so as to avoid having his mother find out about the arrest). He then adopted this name and legally changed it. I am not sure what name he was using in High School, but I would be surprised if it were ‘Gould’ since he could not have legally changed it until he was of age, and the high school certainly would have insisted that he use his legal name” (email, 1 June 2011).