The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  23. ​SB, “Zetland: By a Character Witness,” first printed in Philip Rahv, ed., Modern Occasions 2 (1974), reprinted in SB, CS, p. 243.

  24. ​Greg Bellow, “Anita Goshkin Bellow Busacca—A Biographic Sketch,” a fourteen-page memoir of his mother written in 2007 and deposited among SB’s papers in the Regenstein. The quotation from Mitzi McClosky is on p. 5.

  25. ​SB, “A Father-to-Be,” first published in The New Yorker, 5 February 1955, reprinted in Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories (1968; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 145 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  26. ​Men and women can also be comic and pathetic at the same time, as in the following exchange in Humboldt’s Gift between Charlie and Renata:

  I once suggested to her, “A woman like you can be called a dumb broad only if Being and Knowledge are entirely separate. But if Being is also a form of Knowledge, one’s own Being is one’s own accomplishment in some degree …”

  “Then I’m not a dumb broad after all. I can’t be, if I’m so beautiful. That’s super! You’ve always been kind to me, Charlie.”

  “Because I really love you, kid” (p. 394).

  27. ​For SB on female rather than male offspring, see his letter of 18 December 1948 to J. F. Powers: “Congratulations on the baby. It’s an excellent thing to have daughters, once one has accepted fatherhood in principle, and to be spared the Oedipal struggle. Sons don’t light your cigar and bring your slippers.”

  28. ​SB to David Bazelon, undated letter of 1947.

  29. ​SPAN website: www.minnesotaspan.org/history.

  30. ​According to Atlas, Biography, p. 119, presumably recounting memories from SB himself and/or the McCloskys, SB spent much of his time “languishing queasily in a deck chair reading the galleys of his novel. The task bored him so much that he muttered about throwing them overboard.” In my interviews with Mitzi McClosky, however, she insisted that SB did not read proofs until the journey home.

  31. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 120.

  32. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 311.

  33. ​Ibid.

  34. ​For Atlas’s reference to the “blonde, buxom girl,” see Biography, p. 121; all SB quotations, aside from the one from the “Spanish Letter,” are from the Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 311.

  35. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 311.

  36. ​Ibid.

  37. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 123.

  38. ​SB, “The Gonzaga Manuscripts,” first published in Discovery 4 (New York: Pocket Books, 1954), reprinted in Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories, p. 122 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  39. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 123.

  40. ​The Trilling quotation about The Plenipotentiaries is taken from the dust jacket of The Spirit and the Bride.

  41. ​From a transcript of four radio conversations between Kappy and Philippe Meyer broadcast on France Culture on 27, 28, 29, and 30 October 2009 under the title “Un américain peu ordinaire,” in a translation by Roger Kaplan, Kappy’s son. An edited version of these conversations appeared in the French periodical Commentaire nos. 129 and 130 (printemps et été, 2010) under the titles “Conversations avec le vieil Harold (I) and (II).” When quoting from the interviews I provide page numbers from the Roger Kaplan translation. This particular quotation comes from p. 14; see also p. 429 of part two of the Commentaire version.

  42. ​Though SB did not share Siegelman’s view of Sam Monk, he did, it seems, share his view of Huntington Brown, Robert Penn Warren’s affection for Brown notwithstanding. See SB to David Bazelon, 10 April 1949: “Yah, I’ll write to Huntington Brown for you. I hope it does you good, for Huntington and I had difficult times with each other. He’s the archetype of the learned idiot. He’s a Harvard Ph.d., conservative to the flap of his long underwear, collects pornographic poetry, has a pistol range in his basement, knows how to mend a dog sled in driving snow and is an Admiral Peary manqué, is president of the burial society of Minneapolis and takes vitamin B1 all summer long on the belief that mosquitos will not bite a man whose perspiration is saturated with it. And that’s not all.”

  43. ​After 1948 McGehee returned to the South and published an excerpt from a novel in progress in Partisan Review (April 1949). As SB explained in a letter of 30 March 1949 to the novelist J. F. Powers, McGehee “was planning to return to Minnesota [for the academic year 1948–49], but didn’t quite fit into the budget, which was unexpectedly cut.” He had almost finished his novel and was about to send it to an agent. The excerpt of the novel was titled “The Photograph’s If.” The novel from which it was taken was called “Face to Face” and seems never to have been published. It was set in the South before the Civil War. In an undated letter to Robert Hivnor, a playwright and professor of theater at Minnesota, written early in 1950, SB says that “McGehee writes occasionally, terribly depressed about Southern (American) mentality.… Also he says that Leiper had a sort of heart attack and has been very ill.” McGehee and Leiper were in Paris in the autumn of 1948 and the Bellows saw them shortly after arrival. In a letter of 25 October to Henry Volkening, SB praised the manuscript of McGehee’s novel as “very unusually good,” while also reporting that his interview with Diarmuid Russell had gone badly and that he was “rather angry with Russell.” According to Greg Bellow (in an email of 17 July 2012), the Bellows ran into Leiper on the street one day quite unexpectedly. Greg is uncertain whether the meeting occurred at the beginning of the family’s stay in Paris or later. Leiper told them that his French was so poor that the only thing he could order in restaurants was “côte de porc.” In 1950, Leiper wrote a story called “The Magnolias,” which took second prize in the O. Henry Short Story competition and was later published in The Atlantic Monthly. According to Robert Penn Warren, in a letter to Paul Engle, 21 July 1950, in Randy Hendricks and James A. Perkins, eds., Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren, 6 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 3:364, Leiper was in 1950 living in Blauvelt, New York, working on a novel on a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Fellowship (an award associated with Harper and Row). At some point he abandoned fiction, returned to the South, and became general manager of the Chamber of Commerce in Gatlinburg City, Tennessee, his hometown, later writing a history of the city’s Christus Gardens.

  44. ​Greg Bellow, “Biographic Sketch,” p. 6.

  45. ​SB to Henry Volkening, in an undated letter, in Taylor, ed., Letters, p. 48.

  46. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 130. According to Mitzi McClosky, Kampelman’s linking of McClosky and SB is misleading: “Herb was a ‘culinary’ and Jewish-joke-telling Jew, whereas Saul was deeply versed in Jewish history and religion. He taught us both about Judaism, and to me, he came off as the voice of the Prophets themselves. From him I learned to be proud of my heritage.”

  47. ​SB to David Bazelon, 8 March 1948.

  48. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 33.

  49. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 131. See also an undated spring 1948 letter from SB to Henry Volkening beginning “Thanks for your note”: “I’m teaching, not too conscientiously, three courses and though I have assistants (two of them) to grade papers I cannot rule from afar. My presence is indispensable.” He seems to have been more engaged, or more interested, with the creative writing students (see another, later undated letter to Volkening that begins: “How am I? In the real world walking a sober path with the schizophrenics wheeling round me like pigeons round a breeder. I’m speaking of my students, my clients, my patients, my putative writers, and I mean to say that I’m happy and thriving.… I leave here on Saturday and will be in Chicago until August 7th or 8th”).

  50. ​In “I Got a Scheme!,” p. 72, SB says: “I got a Guggenheim, thanks to Jim Farrell.” Farrell wrote on his behalf in two earlier Guggenheim applications, but his name does not appear as a referee on the third application, nor does a third reference survive in the Guggenheim files, nor does SB refer to such a refe
rence in his letters from the period, to Farrell or anyone else.

  51. ​Diana Trilling’s review appeared in her “Fiction Review” in The Nation, 3 January 1948. I have been unable to trace the New Leader article. A second regret SB had about his New Leader article concerned R. P. Blackmur, who, he was told by Bazelon, “thinks well of me.… I had it in mind to exempt him personally [from the article’s negative remarks about critics], for I really learned a great deal from The Double Agent and The Expense of Greatness” (SB to Tumin, undated letter, in Taylor, ed., Letters, p. 53). I have been unable to trace the New Leader article.

  52. ​SB to David Bazelon, 1 December 1947; the undated SB letter to James Henle is quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 130; the New York Times review was by Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,”22 November 1947; the anonymous Time magazine review, “Suffering for Nothing,” appeared in the issue of 1 December 1947.

  53. ​In Taylor, ed., Letters, p. 50; the letter is said to be undated.

  54. ​These passages, extracted from the unsent letter to Henle, are included in SB to Henry Volkening, received 9 January 1948.

  55. ​This quotation is also from the 9 January 1948 letter. In an earlier, undated letter to Volkening (it begins “Thank the Lord, we’re off”), SB reported that Ed McGehee had recently visited Chicago and couldn’t find The Victim “in any Loop bookstore,” despite the fact that “Guy Henle had been through less than a month ago on his semiannual selling trip. The distributor for the area didn’t have a copy in the warehouse.” See also SB to Volkening, in another undated letter, in Taylor, ed., Letters, p. 58: “I got a jog today from some friends in Philadelphia who couldn’t obtain The Victim. They wrote to friends in Passaic, and they couldn’t get it. The results in Rochester were no better.”

  56. ​SB to Volkening, received 9 January 1948.

  57. ​SB to Henry Volkening, 18 February 1948.

  58. ​This is from the undated letter to Volkening beginning “Thank the Lord, we’re off” (see note 55).

  59. ​SB to David Bazelon, 8 March 1948.

  60. ​SB to Henry Volkening, April 1948; in an earlier undated letter to Volkening, SB writes that “in the last two weeks I’ve had feelers from Random, Whittlesey and Harper’s and have replied honorably to all that I am pledged, betrothed. Promised and bound and indentured to Vanguard. It’s not, however, a joking matter” (the letter begins, “No, I never again heard from Auerbach”).

  61. ​The letter is undated.

  62. ​SB to Henry Volkening, undated; the letter begins “Henle has released me.”

  63. ​Ibid. See also SB to Volkening, April 1948: “I know you favor my staying with Vanguard. At least you don’t want to be the instrument of divorce. But I can’t see why I should stay. I think I’d be better off with another house.”

  64. ​Harriet Wasserman, Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow: A Memoir (New York: Fromm International, 1997), p. 17.

  65. ​See Henry Volkening, “Tom Wolfe: Penance No More,” Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 1939): 196–215.

  66. ​Michael Kreyling, Agent and Author: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992), p. 46. Volkening represented Ellison from 1943 to 1951, shortly after Ellison submitted the manuscript of Invisible Man. Ellison’s split with Volkening puzzles his biographer, Arnold Rampersad: “Though over the years Ralph had given Volkening very little to sell, Ralph clearly believed that his agent didn’t deserve a cut of his royalties. For some reason he was unhappy about the way Volkening had treated him during his years in the wilderness. Volkening … settled with Random House, although he knew he could have prevailed over Ralph in almost any court of law. After a pleasant lunch with Albert Erskine [of Random House], he let Ralph know that ‘we hereby relinquish all rights and interests’ in [Invisible Man]. It was an ‘amicable release’ ” (Ralph Ellison: A Biography [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007], p. 256).

  67. Wasserman, Handsome Is, p. 101.

  68. ​See note 62.

  69. ​SB to Henry Volkening, undated. The letter begins “I have your fascinating letter.”

  70. ​SB to Frank Taylor, 5 July 1948. Atlas, Biography, p. 136, reads what looks to me like “intuitions” (the letter is handwritten) as “instructions,” and sees the letter as characteristic in trying to evade responsibility.

  71. ​SB to Melvin Tumin, undated, in Taylor, ed., Letters, p. 59.

  72. ​The novella’s title comes from the Schiller ballad “The Diver” (“Der Taucher”) (1797), “Es freue sich, / Wer da atmet im rosigten Licht” (lines 91–92); the English translation is that given in SB to David Bazelon, 5 January 1948. The story is “about the amor fati, the vein of enjoyment that runs through our deepest suffering, and it centers about a man who is rotting to death in a hospital room. His stink offends the other patients. The hero of the story defends him because nothing is, for him, more valuable than life or more sacred than the struggle to remain alive.”

  73. ​The undated letter to Volkening, with the reference to “25,000 words,” begins “Thank the Lord, we’re off.”

  74. ​For this quotation from Ecce Homo, see Walter Kaufmann, ed. and trans., Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 1967), p. 714.

  75. ​SB, “The Trip to Galena,” Partisan Review (November–December 1950), p. 779 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers). Atlas, Biography, p. 143, refers to Scampi as Weyl’s “bedridden neighbor,” but the story is set, we are told on its first page, “here on the fire escape of the sixth floor of the hospital where this young Weyl had brought him [i.e., Scampi]” (p. 779).

  76. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 74.

  77. ​SB to Melvin Tumin, undated letter, in Taylor, ed., Letters, p. 59.

  78. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 149.

  79. ​Ibid. The letter begins “Dearest Betty—You’ll be wondering why I’m writing now and why I haven’t written earlier.” If SB had simply wanted to drop Betty, felt no “chemistry of the soul,” he wouldn’t have written at all.

  9. PARIS

  1. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 72.

  2. ​His fictional equivalent, Ryehurst in The Adventures of Augie March (1953), p. 976, an “old crook of a Britisher,” has an even more peculiar suit, “like for burial, purple flannel without lapels or buttons or buttonholes.”

  3. ​SB, “The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them,” foreword to Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (New York: Criterion, 1955); first published in The New Republic, 23 May 1955, SB, IAAU, p. 38.

  4. ​See SB to Monroe Engel, 25 October 1948: “I don’t get out very often now and when I think of it resent this voluntary encapsulation and damn writing as an occupation.”

  5. ​Janet Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1965, ed. William Shawn (New York: Atheneum, 1965), pp. 95–96.

  6. ​Ibid., entries of 23 June and 26 May, 1948, pp. 91, 86.

  7. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 74. In “My Paris,” originally printed in The New York Times Magazine, Part 2, The Sophisticated Traveler, 13 March 1983, reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 234, SB writes of Americans who came to Paris with “schemes for getting rich.” One friend, a young man from Minnesota, “came over to open a caramel-corn factory in Florence,” the obvious inspiration for a character in an unfinished and undated SB story titled “Nothing Succeeds.” The story exists in a typed manuscript of eighteen pages, is set in Paris in 1948, and concerns the narrator’s cousin, Sam Hammersmark, from Minnesota, who attempts to enlist a friend, Herbie Shaffer, in “a scheme to go into the caramel-corn business on the Riviera” (p. 7). Herbie, another business schemer, spends his time “with black-market types” (p. 2). He wants the narrator to get him gasoline ration stamps, as they fetch “fancy prices on the black market, bringing the value of your dollar to six hundred plus” (p. 17). Herbie and his wife, Violet, a student of twelve-tone music and Erik Satie, came to Paris in 1947 loaded with “nylons, cigarette lighters, and other marketable items, the tinier the better.” These t
hey purchased by liquidating all their assets in the United States except Herbie’s Marxist library, “which was in storage” (p. 12). Having been a lifelong reader of Marx and Lenin, Herbie claims, “gave him superior business powers” (p. 14). Herbie is clearly the model for the hapless Lustgarten in “Mosby’s Memoirs” (and, more distantly, for Nachman in Herzog), archetypal schlemiels.

  8. ​SB, “The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them,” SB, IAAU, pp. 38–39.

  9. ​SB to Jane Vogel, 25 January 1984.

  10. ​SB, “The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them,” SB, IAAU, p. 38.

  11. ​SB, “My Paris,” SB, IAAU, p. 231.

  12. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 139.

  13. ​See SB to Henry Volkening, 25 October 1948: “something tells me my real affinity is for Italy.” The remark about having several novels in mind comes from this letter. Rome, SB declared in a letter to David Bazelon of 25 January 1949, was “magnificent,” though the spaghetti was better “at Eddie’s Aurora of W. 4th St.”

  14. ​In “How I Wrote Augie March’s Story,” New York Times Book Review, 31 January 1954, SB recalls that “across the street pneumatic drills were at work on the concrete of a hospital whose construction had been abandoned at the outbreak of the war.”

  15. ​This quotation comes from page 12 of “Paris, France: The Autobiography of HJK,” a copy of which I was given by Kappy shortly before his death in 2011. The work exists in a typed manuscript of 166 pages and is unfinished (henceforth cited as “Autobiography”).

  16. ​Ibid., pp. 131, 4.

  17. ​Or so Kappy claims in ibid., p. 59. Barrett’s review dealt with all of Sartre’s work, not just Being and Nothingness, and was particularly harsh on what he described as Sartre’s “naïve” assessment of the role of the Soviet Union and the French Communist Party. If Kappy was a CIA agent, he does not appear in Frances Stonor Saunders’s Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (1999; London: Granta, 2000), which devotes several chapters to CIA-funded and -inspired propaganda efforts in postwar Paris, naming not only agents but writers and intellectuals who knew of or suspected CIA involvement.