The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  83. ​For a slightly different print version of this exchange, see Gold, Still Alive!, pp. 226–27. When SB was biting about Baldwin it was about his conduct rather than his writing. See SB to David Bazelon, 10 April 1949: “There’s Jimmy Bald win, for instance, who seems to be down and out and is sponging mercilessly. He hasn’t applied his sponge to me yet. He doesn’t do a great deal. Whenever I pass the Flore and the Deux Magots he’s in company, drinking beer.”

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

  85. ​H. J. Kaplan, The Plenipotentiaries (New York: Harper Brothers, 1950), p. 19 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  86. ​Strauss is described as “the most Parisian of foreigners, the prototype and founding father of the American-of-Paris!” (p. 154). He writes “chit-chat” for a magazine catering to expatriates and knows everything that’s going on in the city. Although he is nonpolitical, when invited to a party attended by a well-known Communist poet, he refuses to go: “I’ve got to the point where I can no longer shake his hand.… It’s a feeling of physical repulsion.… Like the feeling I had before the war, when I was invited to dine at the German Embassy. Does one ask a lamb chop to dine with a hyena?” (p. 58).

  87. ​The episode recalls Feiler in SB’s story “The Gonzaga Manuscripts,” rebuked as if personally responsible for the atom bomb and carbon 14. Toward the end of the novel, Tony not only marvels at the powers the French attribute to him, but begins to see himself as possessed of these powers, by virtue of being seen as representatively American: “Full powers! How conceive a world in which the outsiders become plenipotentiaries, solemn emissaries with portfolios bulging with secrets? Consulates, Embassies, Information Services—these are nothing compared to the activity of our astonished double agents!” (p. 206).

  88. ​The irony and knowingness of the Tarskis is neither approved nor rejected. That Pierre Tarski really has journeyed to the end of the night, having survived Buchenwald, makes his affectless adulteries hard to condemn, for all the pain they occasion. Tarski loves Marie, his wife, but can only admit it “with a purposely underscored insincerity” (p. 108). In The Spirit and the Bride, also set in postwar Paris, John Clifford, the protagonist, is as knowing and ironic as Tarski, but determined to free himself from “the world he lived in and the world that lived in him” (p. 233). A middle-aged American professor, he is as much a “realist” as Tarski, but he also believes in the possibility of a better life. Though “at the top of his profession” (p. 85), Clifford is “deeply unhappy,” both with work and with his marriage: “Now that his irony had corroded everything, protected him from everything, there was an awesome void at the core of him” (p. 117) (which is how Tarski is presented in The Plenipotentiaries). For Clifford, “there was no god in his universe, the old worlds had come to their ends” (p. 236). Though the life he leads is real in the sense of unillusioned, it is unreal in being no life at all.

  89. ​At the end of the novel, the exotic Arab girl whose lovemaking helps him to “la vraie vie,” returns to her thuggish boyfriend. Clifford does not protest.

  90. ​Kaplan, “Autobiography,” p. 131.

  91. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 141.

  92. ​All direct quotations from Mme. Nimier come from a letter to the author, 2 September 2014. With the exception of Kappy, the staff at Rapports were French; the articles were in French, written by French and American authors. The magazine had a wide circulation, was intellectually respectable, and wrote about the failings as well as the virtues of American society, while being open about its propaganda aims. James Baldwin, for example, wrote on “Le Problème Noir en Amérique.” See Brian Angus McKenzie, Remaking France: Americanization, Public Diplomacy and the Marshall Plan (New York: Berghahn, 2008), pp. 200–205.

  93. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 141.

  94. ​See Gold, Still Alive!, p. 208. For SB’s reasons for the trip to Spain, see his letter to Herbert and Mitzi McClosky, 21 October 1949: “Things got to be a little too hot for me in September, and I took off for Spain again. I stayed for several weeks on the Catalan coast and in Barcelona and Mallorca.”

  95. ​Gold, Still Alive!, p. 209. In the quote about dreading the meal, Gold writes “we” about the trip south into Spain. In fact, as he told me in an interview, he and Edith parted company with SB (amicably) in Banyuls-sur-Mer.

  96. ​See Atlas, Biography, p. 148, for these discrepancies and quotes. If Edith was in the backseat during the drive south, with the window open—it was summer and there was no air conditioning—she may well have missed SB’s complaints.

  97. ​This letter is in the Regenstein. According to Atlas, Biography, p. 148, SB “had commandeered Julian Behrstock’s beat-up old car, a Deux Chevaux.” Behrstock, SB’s friend from Northwestern, came to Paris in 1948 to work at UNESCO in its Department of Mass Information.

  98. ​For the date of this morning, see SB to J. F. Powers, 30 March 1949, which suggests that Augie must have begun life in April or May, since he describes himself still at work on “The Crab and the Butterfly”: “I’m about half done with a book; the subject’s a gloomy one but the book is funny, a combination I can trust you to understand. The title I’ve chosen for it is The Crab and the Butterfly, which I think does the tendency justice, and if I don’t go anywhere—it isn’t likely; the slack has just about been run out of Mr. Guggenheim’s bounty—I ought to be done with it in the summer.” The date can be further narrowed, to the second half of April, by SB to Henry Volkening, 13 April 1949, which makes no mention of Augie and is confident of delivery of “The Crab and the Butterfly”: “With a book to show [i.e., the completed “The Crab and the Butterfly”], I can apply in 1950 for a Guggenheim renewal.” Corroboration for a late April or early May date is provided in SB to Herbert and Mitzi McClosky, undated, but written sometime in March 1950, in which he explains the difficulty he’ll have getting the Guggenheim renewed: “I worked eight months on a book I decided to put aside [“The Crab and the Butterfly”]. Since October [1949], I’ve finished about two-thirds of Augie March.” The “eight months” in question must be from the time he arrived in Paris, which would fit the epiphanal moment’s being in April or May of 1949. That the trip to Spain was partly motivated by the “jump” to Augie is suggested in SB to Henry Volkening, 9 October 1949: “Just back from a recuperative visit to Spain; and the reason recuperation was necessary is that after months of writing a book nearly finished, I read it all through and found it wasn’t what I had wanted at all. Much, most of it, in fact, is still good and only needs to be recast in a more satisfactory way. But I haven’t got the patience or the perspective necessary and so I have taken to Augie March instead. It goes very fast.”

  99. ​It is not clear whether the writing room SB was walking toward was at the Hôtel de l’Académie or the room at 33 rue Vaneau. In “I Got a Scheme!,” SB calls the room a “small studio,” which suggests rue Vaneau; but in a letter to John Lehmann of 3 October 1949, long after he’d begun work on Augie, he says “I don’t live in the Académie, I only write there.”

  100. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” pp. 74, 75; also the Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 318.

  101. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 78. SB first used the Warren quote in “How I Wrote Augie March’s Story,” New York Times Book Review, 31 January 1954.

  102. ​For an account of this moment in Wordsworth’s life, see Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 161.

  103. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” pp. 77, 78.

  104. ​See SB to Henry Volkening, 28 November 1949.

  105. ​On p. 116 of the Guggenheim’s records for “1950 Matters re Fellows,” dated “March 17, 18, 19, 1950,” is an entry for SB. It reads: “Denied. The Secretary [Henry Moe] reported that his Fellowship novel did not mark any advance.” SB’s worries that this might happen were recalled to him by Julian Behrstock in a letter of 27 December 1979. Something SB said in an interview about how easily Augie came to him “brought t
o mind a moment together over a late afternoon coffee at the Deux Magots in which you reported that you were supposed to be writing a serious book for Guggenheim but that another book kept intruding and that this irrepressible one was disconcertingly sexy and generally rather wild and unstoppable (or words to that effect).”

  106. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 147.

  107. ​Heller was later Fernand Braudel’s assistant at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris.

  108. ​See the obituary for Clemens Heller published in the Austrian Press and Information Service, Washington, D.C., vol. 55, September–October 2002, titled “Clemens Heller—Founder of the ‘Marshall Plan of the Mind.’ ” For a history of the early years of the seminar, see Henry Nash Smith (SB’s colleague at Minnesota), “The Salzburg Seminar,” American Quarterly 1 (1949): 30–37; also Timothy W. Ryback (a former director of the seminar), “The Salzburg Seminar—A Community of Scholars,” http://www.salzburgglobal.org/current/history-b.cfm?goto=community.

  109. ​Kingsley Ervin was in charge of the winter program for the Salzburg Seminar.

  110. ​John McCormick would later become a professor of comparative literature at Rutgers and write a scholarly biography of Santayana. In 1952, Hoffman and Baker married and returned to the States: Baker to work as a reader at Viking, a low-paying but prestigious job SB helped her to obtain; Hoffman to undertake graduate work in English at Columbia, then to seek work in the theater and as a lecturer in theater studies. In 1953, he was appointed head of the Theater Department at Bard College, where he helped to get SB a job for the academic year 1953–54, the year Augie was published.

  111. ​According to a letter of 2 May 1950 to Henry Volkening.

  112. ​See Atlas, Biography, p. 156, for these details; also the Archives of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Austria.

  113. ​Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), p. 168. The camp held some fourteen hundred adults and five hundred children.

  114. ​SB to Olivier Schmidt, 7 June 1996, dictated by Chris Walsh.

  115. ​Kazin, New York Jew, pp. 169–70.

  116. ​SB, “How I Wrote Augie March’s Story.” This routine SB gives to Augie at the end of the novel: “I got into the habit of going every afternoon to the Café Valadier in the Borghese Gardens on top of the Pincio, with the whole cumulous Rome underneath, where I sat at a table and declared that I was an American, Chicago born, and all these other events and notions” (p. 975).

  117. ​SB to Robert Hivnor, 18 June 1950.

  118. ​The poem is included in SB to Oscar Tarcov, 26 June 1950, reprinted in Taylor, ed., Letters, pp. 105–6. Though jokey, as well as crudely rhymed and end-stopped, it points to SB’s creative health and high spirits in the post-Salzburg period:

  “SPRING ODE”

  Thunder brings the end of winter,

  Rinsing the yellow snow from the gutter;

  Calico spots flare at the window;

  I lie in my bathrobe, eating butter.

  Grease on my cheeks—the fat of the season

  Now dead and sealed, now dead and waxy.

  Foxes yap on the tenement stairs;

  Hope arrives in a Checker taxi.

  His clever face is now surveying

  The hallway with its sooty tatters,

  The playing-card banners overhead,

  The cymbals, scales and other matters.

  My bathrobe sleeves are stiff with yolks,

  Speckled with crumbs of my winter’s eating;

  Bottles and eggshells on the floor

  Lie between us at our meeting.

  He falls into my arms, we kiss,

  We cry like reunited brothers.

  He tells me how he searched for me

  Among the others.

  My cheeks are fat, my eyes are wet,

  His hand rests sadly on my shoulder;

  We cannot help but see how much

  Each has grown older.

  119. ​SB to Henry Volkening, 10 November 1949.

  120. ​SB to Monroe Engel, 30 April 1950. For the Briggs-Copeland job at Harvard, see SB to Robert Hivnor (the undated letter about his trip to London) and SB to Monroe Engel, 12 January 1950.

  121. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 166.

  122. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 317.

  123. ​For this and subsequent quotes, see Greg Bellow, “Biographic Sketch,” pp. 6–7.

  10. ​PRINCETON/DELMORE

  1. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 490. Unless otherwise indicated, all other quotations from Dean Borok are from letters to SB in the Regenstein.

  2. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 490.

  3. ​Dean Borok to SB, 1 January 1982. Borok never personally harassed SB or anyone else from the family. As he writes in a letter of 12 December 1997: “Your attitude has been, if I ignore him maybe he’ll go away. And I did go away. I wrote some insulting letters to you, but I never tried to call you or see you or interfere with you in any way. I am way too proud for that.”

  4. ​The two-year-old was Dean Borok and the seven-month-old was his brother, Robert. According to Dean Borok, in an email of 9 August 2014, Robert was knocked off his bike by a car and killed when he was nine. He was not Maury’s son. Immediately after Robert’s death, Borok remembers, his mother telegraphed a man in Chicago named Joel, telling him what had happened. Borok has no idea who the man was: “my belief is that Bobby was fathered by the guy and later denied by him, the same pattern she had followed with my father, Morrie Bellow, which was to entrap the guy with pregnancy and then separate him from his money. What she never figured out was that these guys were as mean and desperate as she was.” In a subsequent email of 20 October 2014, Borok offers some background on his mother, “who was not just a trashy homeless waif that my father picked up at the bus station on Randolph Street. She had eloped with the scion of one of New Jersey’s finest Jewish families, Howard Borok of the Borok furniture company, but she couldn’t stand the idea of being a New Jersey housewife so she walked out on him and caught a bus to Chicago. That’s how I got the name Borok.”

  5. ​The subpoena story also appeared on 30 December in the Chicago Herald-American, under the headline “Name Chicagoan in Paternity Suit.” Joel recalls another incident, even more dramatic: “Marcie had lain in wait for Maury to come out of the Sherry Hotel [in Chicago, owned by Maury and Marge], and from across the street had fired three or four shots.… She had just taken a bunch of shots at him.” The date of this incident, which Joel says appeared in all the Chicago papers, is unknown; I could not find any references to it in the Chicago papers. Dean Borok offers a somewhat different account of this episode, one he heard from his mother, in an email of 12 August 2014 titled “Gun Shy,” which is posted in its entirety on his website 200motels.net. Here are the relevant extracts:

  My mother recounted a story to me about how she chased my father with the intent to shoot him down like Frankie shot Johnny. I only know what she told me, and she only told me what she wanted me to know. When Morrie came over to see her, he would leave his pistol lying around to take his clothes off. Like the character of Charles IX of France, as portrayed in Queen Margot by Alexandre Dumas, my father, Morrie, kept a little pied-à-terre across town where he could put his feet up in front of the fire and indulge in a few sentimental moments of reflection in the company of his devoted peasant mistress and their tiny lovechild. That was the deal that my father had with my mother, except that he was the King of the Planet of the Apes and my mother was Miss Jersey Shore, with a big Hollywood complex, and she wasn’t about to let herself get shoved off to the side. …

  New Jersey women are known for their ferocity. “Is that what you think you’re going to do to me, keep me locked up in a cage?” she screamed violently. When he first met her, my father would take my mother around with him in his Caddy all day and introduced her to his tough-guy mob associates, which she adored. Now she wasn’t about to let herself get reduced to the level o
f a freakin milkmaid, waiting faithfully at the door with papi’s pipe and slippers, and the baby sleeping peacefully in the cradle. She wanted some ACTION. She picked up a perfume bottle and threw it at his head, and then a glass. “Morrie, I’ll kill you and kill myself.” She ran to a table where he had put his pistol while disrobing, grabbed the handgun, and screamed, “Now I’m going to kill you and kill me!” She waved the gun and it went off, shocking herself. She fired again as Morrie ran for his life. She tried to shoot again, but she did something wrong and the gun didn’t shoot. Sensing his opportunity, Morrie ran over and took the gun away from her. “When the cops get here, you don’t say anything,” he told her.

  Morrie fixed the cops in five minutes. It cost him a couple of long ones but, hey, that’s Saturday Night in Chicago. Nevertheless the beat cops and station cops would sell the item to a reporter for five bucks, and the story got out anyway. After it appeared in the papers, Morrie told my mother, “Well, you wanted to get your name in the papers. Are you happy now?”

  6. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 190, makes the five-year claim.

  7. ​This is exactly what Wordsworth does upon his return from France in The Prelude, resulting in blockage and breakdown. “Wearied out with contrarieties” (those of political theory, of Burke, Paine, and Godwin), he “yielded up moral questions in despair” (Book 11:304–5, 1805 version).

  8. ​Daniel Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), p. 61. The immediately preceding discussion of excised political material from the final chapter of Augie, including Augie’s remark about the Germans and politics, is from pp. 60–61.