15. SB, in 1974 handwritten source for the Brandeis address, p. 6 (cut from both the address and “Starting Out in Chicago”).
16. SB, “Cousins” (1974), reprinted in SB, CS, p. 228.
17. SB, “Starting Out in Chicago,” p. 76.
18. Ibid., pp. 76–77. In the handwritten source for the Brandeis address, SB writes of Jack: “He made a bid for personal freedom and he was deluded.… In his dying days he spoke Yiddish again” (p. 6).
19. SB to Marjorie Janis, 10 April 1994.
20. This quotation, like the one in parentheses, comes from the second of two videotaped interviews SB gave in 1987 to Sigmund Koch, a “University Professor” (as SB himself would become) at Boston University. For details of these interviews, see Chapter 2, note 7. All subsequent quotations from the interview in this chapter are taken from the second videotape.
21. Ibid.
22. Ruth Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), p. xvi.
23. Ibid., p. xvii.
24. SB, first “Jefferson Lecture,” in SB, IAAU, p. 124.
25. Atlas, Biography, p. 62. For SB journalism and fiction were hardly incompatible, especially for a Chicago writer. In “Chicago and American Culture: One Writer’s View,” a talk delivered at the Centennial Celebration of the Chicago Public Library on 10 October 1972, SB remembered his situation in the 1930s: “Times had changed for, at the turn of the century, young writers could and often did become newspaper reporters. The papers in those days were willing to take them on. Ambrose Bierce was hired by Hearst. Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Ring Lardner were journalists. The papers, the public and literature itself benefited from this” (p. 11). 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.
26. SB to the journalist and writer Adam Lisberg, 21 October 1992.
27. SB, “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence” (1993), in SB, IAAU, p. 103. Algren joined the Writers’ Project in September 1936. According to his biographer, Bettina Drew, in Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side (1989; London: Bloomsbury, 1990), p. 104, “whatever his official status, Algren worked actively and openly for the Communist Movement, and he definitely considered himself a Communist.… Algren sided with the Stalinists, was enthralled by Baudelaire, but was vehement in his distaste for ‘decadent’ writers such as T. S. Eliot.” He got on well with Louis Wright, the Writers’ Project’s first director, and less well with Frederick, whose political sympathies were closer to those of SB and his fellow Trotskyists than to Algren’s or Conroy’s.
28. For Morris, see his interview with 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 interviews in 1980 and his recordings of the interviews are in the Regenstein.
29. Quoted in Joyce Illig, “An Interview with Saul Bellow,” Publishers Weekly, 22 October 1973, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 104.
30. “Midwestern” in ibid., p. 105; “Illinois” in Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 306; “American” authors in Atlas, Biography, p. 63.
31. Illig, “An Interview with Saul Bellow,” in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 105. The Illinois State Historical Society has a collection of WPA Federal Writers’ Project material, including several of SB’s profiles for Frederick. Atlas, Biography, pp. 63–64, names several of the writers SB wrote about—Dos Passos, Farrell, Anderson—quoting him on Farrell and Anderson.
32. Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” in SB, IAAU, p. 306. The quote about never having it so good is from the Koch interview.
33. Other close Hyde Park friends from this period are Hyman Slate and his wife, Evelyn (Hyman was a fellow classmate of SB’s at Tuley, as well as at the University of Chicago, and would remain a lifelong friend), and Abe Kaufman, also from Tuley, who figures prominently in the early correspondence with Tarcov, went on to do a PhD in philosophy at Harvard, but dropped out of SB’s life in the 1960s. When Kaufman died in 1996, SB wrote to Slate on 9 September saying he hadn’t heard from him for thirty years. Relations with Slate were warm in the late 1930s and got warmer over the years. Kaufman was a more difficult character. “I frequently offered Kaufman friendship in as many ways as I could think of,” SB wrote to Slate in the 9 September 1996 letter, “but he was comically high and mighty with me.”
34. In the 1972 “Address at the Chicago Public Library,” SB recalls his family’s reactions to him in this period, writing away in Ravenswood or Hyde Park, “while real people were at work”: “His existence could not be explained to the neighbors by his family. If he were any good, he would be on the Riviera with E. Phillips Oppenheim or in the South Seas, like Somerset Maugham. Or at least in New York, the center of things” (p. 15).
35. Tarcov graduated from the University of Chicago in August 1939. In December 1939 SB writes to him in New York; three months later, in March 1940, he is writing to him in Urbana-Champaign, where he had enrolled as a graduate student in anthropology. He’s still writing to him there in May 1941. Nathan Tarcov says his father went to New York “after graduating in 1939.” At the time, in his son’s words, he was still “a Trotskyist, and met the City College people, Irving Kristol, Martin Diamond.” It seems likely that his stay in New York was brief, for he started doing graduate work in anthropology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign at midyear, early in 1940.
36. SB’s letters to Tarcov are in the Tarcov Papers at the Regenstein.
37. How openly these doubts were expressed is uncertain. “On the University of Chicago campus,” Lionel Abel writes of this period in The Intellectual Follies: A Memoir of the Literary Venture in New York and Paris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 69, “I knew two people who thought the Trotskyist political line on the war ridiculous and said so openly.” These were Nathan Leites, a political scientist acquaintance of SB’s, the instructor who amused him by crossing the road while reading a book (and who annoyed him by calling him a romancier), and Edward Shils, who would for a period become one of SB’s closest friends.
38. SB, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth” (1982), reprinted in SB, CS, p. 408.
39. “I Got a Scheme!,” p. 76.
40. Ibid., p. 76.
41. Ibid., p. 77.
42. SB to Edward Simmen, director, Division of Graduate Studies, Universidad de las Américas, Puebla, Mexico, 13 January 1981, and editor of an anthology of American short stories about Mexico entitled Gringos in Mexico (1988).
43. A version of the work Passin did in Chihuahua for the PhD, which he never completed, was published as The Place of Kinship in Tarahumara Social Organization, first in 1941, then in an expanded edition in 1943, both editions by the University of Chicago Press.
44. Atlas, Biography, p. 68.
45. SB, “I Got a Scheme!,” p. 77.
46. Ibid.
47. Atlas, Biography, p. 191, puts Mannix’s side in the dispute, which claims that SB “lifted” the whole episode of the eagle’s training from an article Mannix published in The Saturday Evening Post (“Hunting Dragons with an Eagle,”18 January 1941): “The most dramatic scenes in the Mexico chapter—Augie’s tense efforts to train the eagle, the sensation their entourage causes in the village squares of dusty Mexican towns, the lizard hunts in the desert—are a detailed rendering of the Mannixes’ experience. Too detailed, according to Mannix. When Bellow’s account appeared … Mannix threatened to sue; Bellow was forced to insert a passage obliquely crediting him. Thus the curious sentence in Chapter 14 of the book explaining that Thea ‘had gotten the idea for this hunt from reading articles by Dan and Julie [sic] Mannix, who actually had gone to Taxco
some years before with a trained bald eagle and used the bird to catch iguanas.’ ” Presumably this sentence (p. 627) is what SB refers to as a “footnote” in the interview with Roth. Atlas’s account of the borrowings derives in part from “a telephone interview with Daniel Mannix; a letter from Mannix elaborating on our conversation (November 13, 1991); and a letter to me from Keith Jennison” (p. 627). Atlas also cites Eusebio Rodrigues, “Augie March’s Mexican Adventures,” Indiana Journal of American Studies 8, no. 2 (1978): pp. 39–43, which traces both SB’s borrowings and their transformation into fiction in Augie. Rodrigues, too, received a letter from Mannix, on 29 July 1977, thirty-seven years after the event (though at least a decade and a half earlier than the one Atlas received). In it, Mannix tells him of one crucial respect in which Aguila resembled Caligula: “After a number of flights, an iguana bit our eagle’s toe off. After that, she was afraid of them, so when we made the motion picture, we had to get another eagle.… Jack Champion, a ‘pulp’ writer who was living in Taxco and was showing Bellow around probably told him that our bird was afraid of the lizards but didn’t know why” (quoted on p. 42). In defense of SB, Rodrigues points to a number of “concrete visual details” that vivify the Caligula episode, “adding to and enriching his material”; most important, “Bellow changed the Mannix success story into a story of failure to suit his own fictional purposes” (p. 41).
48. “I Got a Scheme!,” p. 78.
49. Grandma Lausch had a cousin who used to recite “The Eagle” by Lermontov, in Russian, “which,” Augie says, “I didn’t dig” (p. 764).
50. Caligula is also said to be “an Attila’s horseman” (p. 782, already quoted), to be “gliding like a Satan” (p. 770), and to be “close kin to the [bird] that lit on Prometheus once a day” (p. 762).
51. “I Got a Scheme!,” p. 77.
52. SB, “Mosby’s Memoirs,” first printed in The New Yorker, 21 July 1968, reprinted in SB, CS, p. 362 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).
53. For Aztec and Mayan myth and civilization, their influence on modern Mexico, and SB’s use of them in his fiction, see Michael C. Meyer, William L. Sherman, and Susan M. Deeds, The Course of Mexican History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Rosemary Gipson, “Los Voladores, The Flyers of Mexico,” Western Folklore 30, no. 4 (1971): 269–78; D. W. Gunn, American and British Writers in Mexico, 1556–1973 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974); and the Rodrigues article mentioned above (note 47). I am grateful to Ariel Marcus, a graduate student in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, for discovering the Gipson article, and for an illuminating paper he wrote on “Bellow in Mexico” in the class on SB’s fiction I taught in the Committee in Winter Quarter 2008.
54. D. H. Lawrence, “Corasmin and the Parrots” (1925), reprinted in Selected Essays (1950; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 203. The essay was originally published in Adelphi (1925), reprinted in Mornings in Mexico (1925).
55. Atlas, Biography, p. 68.
56. Ibid., p. 68.
57. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 20.
58. For Smyth, see “The Press: Jap Agents,” Time, 14 September 1942.
59. Eventually Passin and Bennett drew these interviews to the attention of Margaret Mead and officials of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and in the fall they received funds from the Department of Agriculture to return to the Kincaid area and conduct further interviews. For these and other details, see John W. Bennett, “Doing Photography and Social Research in the Allied Occupation of Japan, 1948–1951: A Personal and Professional Memoir” (2008), from the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Ohio State University. Passin, who was in Japan with Bennett, contributes footnotes to the memoir. See also Jon Muller, Archeology of the Lower Ohio River Valley (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2009), p. 18.
60. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 13.
61. The question of Mercader’s name is complex. According to the assassin himself, the name he used when entering Mexico in October 1939 on a false passport was Frank Jacson, the name given to him in Paris by a member of the Fourth International. His real name, he said, was Jacques Mornard-Vandendreschd. He claimed to be a Belgian citizen, born in Iran. The truth of this claim is called into question, however, by Leandro A. Salazar and Julián Gorkin, Murder in Mexico: The Assasination of Leon Trotsky (London: Secker & Warburg, 1950), pp. 105–6; see also Albert Goldman, The Assassination of Leon Trotsky (1944; New York: Pioneer, 2007), and Alain Dugrand, Trotsky in Mexico, 1937–1940 (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1992).
62. SB, IAAU, p. 101. In a letter to Albert Glotzer of 7 August 1990, among the Albert Glotzer Papers in the Hoover Institution, Box 48, SB confirms this passage’s assertion that he and Passin had pretended to be newspapermen in order to get in to see Trotsky’s body. I owe this reference to Richard O’Brien, whose PhD dissertation, “The Radical Politics of American Fiction: Saul Bellow and Partisan Review, 1941–1953” (Leeds Metropolitan University, December 2010) is extremely useful for SB’s early writings and political and literary connections.
63. Atlas, Biography, p. 69.
64. Since the story’s original publication, it has been reprinted only once, in William Phillips and Philip Rahv, eds., The Partisan Reader: Ten Years of Partisan Review, 1934–1944: An Anthology (New York: Dial, 1946), from which, cited within the text, my page numbers are taken.
65. SB to Edward Simmen, 13 January 1981. Simmen had written to SB to inquire about “The Mexican General.”
66. Julián Gorkin (1901–87), a leader of the Spanish worker’s party, POUM (Partido Obrero e Unificacíon Marxista), a splinter group with Trotskyist sympathies, had escaped to Mexico after the Civil War. Like other opponents of the Communist International, he was accused both by the Mexican Communist Party and influential political supporters of the party of being an agent of Hitler. From 1942 onward, PR exposed and condemned the wider Stalinist campaign in Mexico against “anti-fascist refugees,” with its threats of deportation, internment, even murder.
67. As O’Brien points out in “The Radical Politics of American Fiction: Saul Bellow and Partisan Review, 1941–1953,” p. 130, the general is also unable to identify the portrait of Vasco de Quiroga (c. 1470/78–1565), first bishop of Michoacán, and defender of the Indians, which hangs in the hotel bedroom occupied by his “nieces.” O’Brien quotes Michael C. Meyer, in Meyer, Sherman and Deeds, The Course of Mexican History, p. 196: “Quiroga attempted, with considerable success, to create an ideal society in the New World. He formed communities in which the Indians received training … in the rudiments of self-government.… Under Quiroga’s tutelage, the Indians became self-sufficient.… With his death the utopian villages declined, but he had established some fine traditions that persisted.”
68. These questions, presumably, included Trotsky’s defense of the invasion of Finland, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and the Soviet Union as a workers’ state.
69. Manea, “Conversation,” pp. 13, 14.
70. SB to Tarcov, postmarked 21 January 1941.
71. It may also allude to, without actually endorsing, Trotskyist policy. Constance Ashton Myers, in The Prophet’s Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928–1941 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1977), p. 50, sees this policy as rooted in fear: that entry into the war would lead to tyranny and the suppression of workers’ rights. Hence, “rather than support a national war effort, even against reactionary or fascist powers, [Trotskyists] were expected to embrace ‘revolutionary defeatism’; they were to sabotage the home government to precipitate revolution in obedience to the slogan, ‘Turn the Imperialist War into a Civil War!’ ‘Defeatism’ meant to carry the class struggle to its highest level—civil war—never flinching for patriotic niceties” (I owe this quotation to O’Brien, “The Radical Politics of American Fiction: Saul Bellow and Partisan Review, 1941–1953,” p. 111).
72. Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” in SB, IAAU, pp. 307, 308.
> 73. Ibid., p. 307; the quotation from Hugh Wilford is from The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 50. For wartime censorship see O’Brien, “The Radical Politics of American Fiction: Saul Bellow and Partisan Review, 1941–1953,” p. 134: “Non-interventionist newsletters like Uncensored were forced to cease publication as contributions began to dry up; the Institute for Propaganda Analysis was forced to shut down, its staff called upon to manufacture rather than debunk items of misinformation. The editor of the Emporia Gazette dropped the syndicated ‘Washington Merry-Go-Round’ column because he was anxious for its ‘too enterprising’ authors not to ‘possibly give aid and comfort to our enemies.’ … More importantly, a ‘friend’ of Partisan Review informed the magazine that the Post Office News Company (a large books and magazine store, and PR’s biggest Chicago outlet) had cancelled with immediate effect its standing order of the magazine following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Indeed, the outlet had purged its shelves of all left-wing publications in a sweeping act of unofficial self-censorship.”
74. Atlas, Biography, p. 79.
75. Though it was a triumph to have “Two Morning Monologues” accepted by PR, even the acceptance had its humiliations. Originally, there were four morning monologues: “Macdonald wrote me asking if he could print the first two monologues,” SB wrote to Tarcov in the 8 February 1941 letter, “the other two, he said, weakened the whole effect and should be left out.”
76. In a letter of 21 May 1941 to Tarcov, SB asks him to “stop in and tell the editors either to publish it or get off the pot. They have no business holding it for two months if they don’t intend to use it.” The story was returned. One story that was published, in an obscure periodical entitled Retort: A Quarterly of Social Philosophy and the Arts 1, no. 2 (June 1942): 14–20, entitled “Mr. Katz, Mr. Cohen and Cosmology,” is set in Montreal in 1922. The two title characters, a clothing cutter and a tailor, are friends and board in the same rooming house. Mr. Katz knows many things—about the stars, the movement of the planets, the formation of mountains, the age of the earth; Mr. Cohen, though older, is ignorant, his world is simple, but he is outgoing and content. At the end of the story, ignorant Mr. Cohen says a striking thing, leading Katz to conclude “that Time is a subject on which the simplest cannot help being profound” (p. 19). That night, alone in his room, looking out at the stars, Mr. Katz has a moment of sublime insight:
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 96