The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  18. ​Biographical information about Kappy comes from interviews with the author; also 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 these interviews I provide page numbers from the Roger Kaplan translation.

  19. ​Kappy interview with Philippe Meyer, pp. 45, 15.

  20. ​Ibid., p. 53.

  21. ​Rousset became a friend of Kappy’s and Kappy “watched him, a skeleton, just back from Buchenwald in 1945, become David Rousset, a plethoric jolly fat man” (“Autobiography,” p. 98).

  22. ​In an interview, Kappy identified his Jewishness as a major source of his anti-Communism, in terms that recall Rousset on the kapos of Buchenwald: “I was affronted by the fact that so much of the Soviet leadership was Jewish, so much of their leadership in all of Eastern Europe was Jewish, until Stalin himself became anti-Semitic and began to purge all that.… There was an element, I realized later, of saying that’s sort of the last indignity to be visited upon the Jewish people, to be associated with this hideous, hideous regime. I was a great admirer of Mr. Conquest [Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror, 1964, among other studies of Soviet history and politics] and all the research he did, even before the archives were open.”

  23. ​SB, “The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them,” SB, IAAU, p. 39. According to Kappy, “Autobiography,” p. 7, writing of the late 1940s, “from early November to mid-March you practically never saw the sun.”

  24. ​SB, “The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them,” SB, IAAU, p. 41.

  25. ​Ibid., p. 39.

  26. ​Ibid., p. 41. SB’s friend Herbert Gold in “Notes from La Vie Bohème (Avec Tout Confort),” Hudson Review 5, no. 2 (Summer 1952): 262, is good on these matters. He attributes the French reluctance to invite Americans into their homes as in part a matter of money (“almost all families are aware of decline within their lifetimes, and the process of gradual impoverishment has been a condition of bourgeois life”), in part a symptom of the Parisian’s traditional “separation of family life from the life connected with his work en ville, his impulse to keep his wife unsullied by contact with his friends, his desire to master his family and to guard its purity.… Skepticism about the possibility of monogamy associates itself with an assumption all the more stern concerning the sanctity of the home.”

  27. ​SB, “The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them,” SB, IAAU, pp. 41–42. SB means Etienne Cabet, the philosopher and Utopian sociologist, not Sebastien Cabet.

  28. ​In “My Paris,” SB, IAAU, p. 238, SB writes: “Paris, which had been a center, still looked like a center and could not bring itself to concede that it was a center no longer.”

  29. ​Ibid., p. 234. See also SB to Henry Volkening, 13 April 1949, on “The Crab and the Butterfly”: “it’s certainly full of astonishing things—I mean things that astonish me. I’m hunting for point of view with a long gun and shoot at anything that moves, especially Henry James.” Madame Vionnet is the sophisticated French hostess in The Ambassadors.

  30. ​Flanner, Paris Journal, entry of 23 June 1948, p. 92. In “My Paris,” SB, IAAU, p. 234, the equivalent of what Flanner calls the “tourist intelligentsia” is described by SB as made up of “travelers, poets, painters, and philosophers … students of art history, cathedral lovers, refugees from the South and the Midwest.”

  31. ​SB, “My Paris,” SB, IAAU, p. 235. Lionel Abel makes a similar point in his Partisan Review “Paris Letter” of April 1949: “It is often said in New York: Well, all this talk of intellectual life in France is bunk. What have the French produced after all, that is, in recent years? The best things they have done have been translated, and are not so hot.… Here I think my friends in America miss the point, and quite characteristically. What makes for a living intellectual milieu is not the continuous production of masterpieces … but the readiness to give expression to a persistent intellectual curiosity” (p. 399).

  32. ​SB, “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” originally printed in The National Interest, Spring 1993, reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 106.

  33. ​Ibid., p. 106. SB’s view of Sartre’s philosophical antecedents, not just Husserl but Heidegger, is like Sidney Hook’s, in “Reflections on the Jewish Question,” a review of Anti-Semite and Jew in the May 1949 issue of Partisan Review. In the review Hook argues that the true democrat “only wants to destroy those individuals and social institutions which seek to deprive human beings of their power of uncoerced choice. That is what is perennially valid in the liberating ideas of the French and Anglo-American Enlightenment which Sartre has renounced for a noisome mess of Heideggarian anguish and neo-Marxist historicism” (p. 482).

  34. ​The “Report on the International Day Against Dictatorship and War” begins with an account of the International Day’s origins: “The idea of the International Day of Resistance to Dictatorship and War, held in Paris on April 30, 1949 was suggested to David Rousset, its chief initiator, by the meeting conducted in Freedom House in New York City on March 26, by Americans for Intellectual Freedom” (p. 722). See also William Phillips, A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life (New York: Stein & Day, 1983), pp. 147–49, on the origins of two organizations with which SB would become peripherally involved, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and the Congress for Cultural Freedom: “It all started with the staging of a peace conference of writers and some people from the other arts at the Waldorf in April 1949. The auspices and most of the participants were pro-Communist, with official delegates and speakers from the Soviet Union.… There were three thousand delegates, but the meeting was totally controlled by the Communists.… To counter this big circus for peace and Communist propaganda, a number of writers, including myself, hastily organized another group, called Americans for Intellectual Freedom [the nucleus for the American Committee for Cultural Freedom], which operated from a suite at the Waldorf, to expose the true character and false claims of the Peace Conference.… The leading figure, non-elected but by common consent, was Sidney Hook.” For the role played by the CIA in funding and inspiring anti-Communist efforts such as the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, the International Day of Resistance to Dictatorship and War, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom see Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, in particular Chapters 4 and 5.

  35. ​Janet Flanner, in an 11 January 1950 entry in her Paris Journal, quotes an article in Le Monde about the evils of Coca-Cola: “What the French criticize is less Coca-Cola than its orchestration, is less the drink itself than the civilization, the style of life of which it is a sign and in a certain sense a symbol. For the implanting of Coca-Cola in a country is generally accompanied by advertising in the American manner, with red delivery trucks promenading publicity, neon lights, and walls covered with signs, placards, and advertisements.… It is now a question of the whole panorama and morale of French civilization” (p. 118).

  36. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” reprinted in SB, IAAU, pp. 309, 308.

  37. ​Phillips, A Partisan View, lays out the differences between the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The chief difference was that the American Committee had no CIA funding. In both groups, hard-line anti-Communists predominated; both were critical of Senator McCarthy, contrary to the “various charges that have been made by people who have not been disinterested” (p. 151). It was the secrecy of the funding that mattered most: “the essence of work in culture and the arts is that it must be open and freewheeling. Hidden financing means hidden control, despite any denials about pressure or censorship” (p. 156). In “The CIA and the Intellectuals,” an influential article of 20 April 1967 in The Ne
w York Review of Books, Jason Epstein elaborates: what the the CIA funding created, through the Ford Foundation and other ostensibly independent funding agencies, was

  An apparatus of intellectuals selected for their correct cold-war positions, as an alternative to what one might call a free intellectual market where ideology was presumed to count for less than individual talent and achievement, and where doubts about established orthodoxies were taken to be the beginning of all inquiry.… It was not a matter of buying off and subverting individual writers and scholars, but of setting up an arbitrary and factitious system of values by which academic personnel were advanced, magazine editors appointed, and scholars subsidized and published, not necessarily on their merits, though these were sometimes considerable, but because of their allegiances.

  Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 151, 201–3, discusses the relations of the CIA and its affiliates to the American Congress for Cultural Freedom in terms of supervision or oversight rather than funding.

  38. ​SB. “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” SB, IAAU, p. 109.

  39. ​For accounts of the politics surrounding the Europe-America Groups, see Richard M. Cook, Alfred Kazin: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 131; and Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (1992; London: Secker & Warburg, 1993), pp. 303–7.

  40. ​Flanner, Paris Journal, p. 98.

  41. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 74.

  42. ​Kim Wilshire, “Hollande Sorry for Wartime Deportation of Jews,” Guardian, 22 July 2012, an account of a speech given on 22 July 2012 by French president François Hollande to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Vél d’Hiv Rafle. Hollande’s speech is reprinted and translated in The New York Review of Books, 27 September 2012. The figures given in the speech by President Hollande are different from those reported in the Guardian article: “Seventy-six thousand French Jews were deported to the death camps. Only 2,500 returned.” Hollande states that “no German soldiers—not a single one—were mobilized at any stage of the operation. The truth is that this crime was committed in France, by France.” SB never mentions the Rafle, but in an interview with Rockwell Gray, Harry White, and Gerald Nemanic in TriQuarterly 60 (1984), reprinted in Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 217, he remembers “in Paris in ’48 and ’49, being perfectly aware that the Nazis had just left. And I knew that when I took a deep breath I was inhaling the crematorium gases still circulating in the air.”

  43. ​SB, “My Paris,” SB, IAAU, p. 235.

  44. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 74. SB shared his gloomy thoughts with his friends. See Herbert Gold to SB, 24 November 1955, recounting a recent meeting with an executive at the publisher Little, Brown: “Meeting Arthur Thornhill, Senior, is an experience which comes closer than your walk with me in Paris to making me wish I had chosen some other life.”

  45. ​The reference to “signing up with the blacks” is puzzling, probably metaphorical. In the past, Weyl “sold black-market francs to tourists in front of the American Express in Nice” and “dealt in rationed gas, and I ran with the voyous [hoodlums] and Arabs, and so on” (p. 782); elsewhere, he is said to hang out with “Sheridan Road whores” (p. 786). Sister Fanny, before her Simon-like marriage for money, had been with a “black bookie’s clerk” (p. 787). Perhaps the phrase means something like “walking on the wild side.”

  46. ​Manea “Conversation,” p.14; the quotation from SB interview with Botsford, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, occurs on p. 319. William Barrett, in The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (New York: Doubleday, 1982), p. 120, offers a suggestive account of the relation of Sartre’s background, as sketched in The Words (1964), to his philosophy of personal freedom, including freedom from conventional morality: “His father died while he was an infant and thus remained unknown to him. Sartre therefore grew up, he tells us, without a superego; without that moral conscience that usually comes through the authoritarian figure of the father. And Sartre is exuberant in telling this about himself; he grew up more free and unencumbered than other young men he knew, who had to carry the burden of their fathers on their backs, like Aeneas lugging the aged Anchises from the ruins of Troy. In a sense, his whole philosophy, with its doctrine of unencumbered liberty, is the expression of a man without a superego; it pursues the notion of an absolute liberty not hedged by the ordinary restraints of human nature.” Nothing, of course, could be further from SB’s background.

  47. ​SB, “My Paris,” SB, IAAU, pp. 235–36.

  48. ​Daniel Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), p. 287.

  49. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 74.

  50. ​SB to Henry Volkening, undated.

  51. ​SB, “My Paris,” SB, IAAU, pp. 232, 236, 237.

  52. ​In ibid., p. 233, SB unaccountably locates Le Rouquet on rue du Bac.

  53. ​See SB to Oscar Tarcov, undated, in Taylor, ed., Letters, p. 90. Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968) was a Swiss historian and critic of architecture. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History was published in 1948.

  54. ​Flanner, Paris Journal, pp. 91–92.

  55. ​As Laure Reichek remembers it, when the Marxes moved from 33 rue Vaneau, the Bellows took over their apartment. In “How I Wrote Augie March’s Story,” SB describes the apartment at 33 rue Vaneau as half of Mme Lemelle’s apartment, and in an undated letter to Herb and Mitzi McClosky, Anita describes it as “three rooms and a kitchen in someone else’s apartment, coal stoves—and a bathtub in the kitchen! We did have a beautiful apartment but we had to move.” If Laure Reichek is correct, the Marxes, too, had previously shared the apartment with Mme Lemelle, which is hard to believe, as the Marxes had money. SB gave up his writing room at 33 rue Vaneau and “since I had by this time gotten used to writing away from home I found another room in the vicinity of St. Sulpice, a gloomy region of shops specializing in ecclesiastical goods.” The new writing room was no more than five minutes south of the cafés of Saint-Germain.

  56. ​For SB, “Nothing Succeeds,” see note 7; this quotation is from pp. 4–5.

  57. ​According to Laure Reichek, in an interview with the author.

  58. ​See SB to Herb and Mitzi McClosky, 21 October 1949: “I’ve rented a room where my typewriter is less likely to be stolen and have set myself up in business once more.” It is not clear where in number 33 this room was; whether it was in someone else’s apartment or self-contained.

  59. ​SB, “My Paris,” SB, IAAU, p. 233. The comments about Mme Lemelle come from “How I Wrote Augie March’s Story.”

  60. ​Phillips, A Partisan View, p. 195.

  61. ​Barrett, The Truants, p. 90.

  62. ​See SB to J. F. Powers, 18 December 1948.

  63. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 79. These words appear also in SB, “How I Wrote Augie March’s Story,” where Caffi is called “Scaferlati” (“to protect his privacy”) and where he is described when reading as “favoring his left eye” and “engaged in a study of heavy books at close range.”

  64. ​Lionel Abel, The Intellectual Follies: A Memoir of the Literary Venture in New York and Paris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 177.

  65. ​Ibid., p. 166.

  66. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 80.

  67. ​When SB and Abel knew Caffi, however, at the very end of the 1940s, he had taken to defending the pro-Communist line of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in Les Temps Modernes, on the grounds that his formerly held views would “lead to nothing,” “offered no plan for action or reform” (Abel, Intellectual Follies, p. 189).

  68. ​Ibid., p. 183.

  69. ​Ibid., p. 182.

  70. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 79.

  71. ​Anita’s quotes come from an undated letter to Herbert and Mitzi McClosky; see also SB to Henry Volkening, 13 April 1949; Greg’s memory of visiting the orphanage comes from page 7 of Greg Bellow, “Anita Goshkin Bellow Busacca—A Biographic Ske
tch,” a fourteen-page memoir of his mother written by Greg in 2007 and deposited among SB’s papers in the Regenstein.

  72. ​Greg Bellow, “Biographic Sketch,” p. 7.

  73. ​See SB to John Lehmann, 12 December 1949, in which he writes of his plans for the visit.

  74. ​Phillips, A Partisan View, p. 202.

  75. ​Lehmann was also the editor of Penguin New Writing, which had recently published, in issue no. 38, SB’s monologue “The Thoughts of Sergeant George Flavin.”

  76. ​SB to Robert Hivnor, undated, in Taylor, ed., Letters, p. 97.

  77. ​See SB to Henry Volkening, 9 October 1949: “Just back from a recuperative visit in Spain.” Anita reports in an undated letter to the Tarcovs, written sometime in 1949, having met Capote at a party at the Richard Wrights’.

  78. ​This quotation comes from the undated letter to Hivnor in Taylor, ed., Letters, p. 97.

  79. ​Phillips, A Partisan View, p. 201.

  80. ​Herbert Gold, Still Alive! A Temporary Condition: A Memoir (New York: Arcade, 2008), pp. 204–5.

  81. ​Ibid., 206. See also SB to Monroe Engel, 15 July 1950: “I know Gold well, and like him; some of his things that I’ve read, the most recent, are very good; the very last thing he sent me was well-nigh perfect. One of a series, he says, I believe he’s going to call it The Economic Life. You ought to ask him for it.”

  82. ​These quotations come from interviews with the author. In an article entitled “Notes from La Vie Bohème (Avec Tout Confort),” in The Hudson Review 5, no. 2 (Summer 1952): 264, Gold offers the following portrait of an American expatriate couple: “The litterateur who uses his wife’s mother’s money to court poets and critics, fancying himself the poor student of Flaubert and Mallarmé but hiring a cook with a high cauliflower hat when he invites his aesthetic friends to dinner. This one, having been an American in Paris for four years, lives in a world of abstractions and gossip, culture and fierce incestuous rivalries with his local compatriots.” According to W. J. Weatherby, James Baldwin: Artist on Fire (London: Michael Joseph, 1990), p. 78, Baldwin had the impression that SB disliked him: “Bellow was already an established novelist, but Baldwin’s essays had established him in the American colony. Otto Friedrich recalled: ‘I was touting Jimmy as a great writer in the Latin Quarter and various Jewish writers were touting Bellow. My hero is better than your hero! They were used as rivals.’ ”