The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  9. ​Steven J. Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 100.

  10. ​Ibid., p. 134.

  11. ​Rosenfeld’s undated letter to Tarcov is among the Tarcov Papers in the Regenstein.

  12. ​Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives, p. 193.

  13. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 37.

  14. ​There are discrepancies between SB’s earlier and later accounts of his experiences with Reichian therapy, as there are in accounts of other aspects of his life. The quotation from Atlas, Biography, is from p. 165, where Dr. Raphael comments: “That’s a peculiar way to put it. He came because he had problems. He never expressed any of this to me.” For the account given to Roth in their interview, see “I Got a Scheme!,” p. 84.

  15. ​Wilhelm Reich, Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), p. 37.

  16. ​Christopher Turner, Adventures in the Orgasmatron: William Reich and the Invention of Sex (London: Fourth Estate, 2011), p. 222. The subtitle for the American edition is How the Sexual Revolution Came to America.

  17. ​In Chester M. Raphael and Mary Higgins, eds., Reich Speaks of Freud (New York: Noonday, 1968), p. 109, quoted in Turner, Orgasmatron, p. 93, Reich describes “character armor” as an “artificial mask of self-control, of compulsive, insincere politeness and of artificial sociality.”

  18. ​See Turner, Orgasmatron, pp. 224, 5, 8, 232.

  19. ​Ibid., pp. 331, 6; see also p. 226, where Turner quotes Reich’s letter of 30 December 1940 to Einstein. In it Reich claims to have discovered “a specific, biologically effective energy which in many ways behaves differently from anything that is known about electromagnetic energy. The matter is too complicated and sounds too improbable to be explained clearly in a brief letter. I can only indicate that I have evidence that this energy, which I have called orgone, exists not only in living organisms but also in the soil and the atmosphere; it is visible and can be concentrated and measured, and I am using it with some success in research on cancer therapy.” Turner comments: “Einstein, full of good will towards a fellow émigré and attracted to any idea that might help to fight fascism, invited Reich to come to see him in Princeton two weeks later.… Reich had mentioned that he’d been the late Sigmund Freud’s assistant at the Ambulatorium in Vienna for eight years; this would have recommended him to Einstein, who had met Freud in Berlin in 1926.”

  20. ​See ibid., pp. 246–47, 248, 6, 7, for quotations from Baldwin and Rieff and preceding details of Reich’s influence among intellectual and bohemian types.

  21. SB, foreword to Isaac Rosenfeld, An Age of Enormity: Life and Writing in the Forties and Fifties, ed. Theodore Solotaroff (Cleveland: World, 1962), p. 11.

  22. ​Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives, p. 191.

  23. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 163.

  24. ​From Solotaroff’s introduction to Reich, An Age of Enormity, pp. 38–39.

  25. ​See Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives, pp. 119–20, which quotes the recollections of both SB and Rosenfeld’s son, George Sarant.

  26. ​See Turner, Orgasmatron, p. 259.

  27. ​Mark Shechner, ed., Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), p. 27.

  28. ​Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives, p. 191. According to SB, in later years Rosenfeld turned against Reichianism and the destructive behavior it seemed to license or encourage. “Isaac ended by believing that therapy had done him great harm,” SB wrote to Rosenfeld’s son, George Sarant, in a letter of 9 September 1990. “We had a long conversation a month or two before he died and he declared that he had been out of his mind for a decade.”

  29. ​Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), p. 51.

  30. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 37, for this and the following quotation about the expressive properties of the face and body.

  31. ​Not in Queens, as the unnamed acquaintance claimed to Atlas.

  32. ​After Reich moved to Maine in 1950, the house became the Orgone Institute Diagnostic Clinic.

  33. ​SB’s remarks about Reichianism first appeared in print in 1962, in the foreword to the Rosenfeld anthology, An Age of Enormity. When Dr. Raphael read them he wrote to SB in a letter of 12 October 1962, expressing “surprise and consternation” and asking a series of questions. The series begins: “Do you deny that the genital misery of the human animal is a basic cause of his suffering? Do you deny that the human animal develops a protective apparatus in the form of characterological and muscular defenses against his inner impulses and the threatening outer world and that he is crippled by them?” When the series of questions ends, Raphael concludes: “I am sure that you would give honest answers to these questions. And I am equally sure that those answers would make you a ‘Reichian.’ ” Whether SB answered Raphael’s questions is not known.

  34. ​“Fine isolated verisimilitude” is from Keats’s definition of “negative capability” in a letter of 21 December 1817 to his brothers, George and Thomas.

  35. ​Later in the “Far Out” manuscript, Vallis declares that “truth itself has a dreamlike character. We’ve been bullied out of it by hatred and calculation. To get a glimpse of truth you have to go to the zoo” (p. 39).

  36. ​Vallis grew up in such a city and speaks of the coarsening effect it has on sexual attitudes: “Schoolyards, factories, alleys, poolhalls sexually saturated. ‘You put the blocks to a broad, as you did with a car to stop it from rolling while you worked on the engine. You gave her a jump, gave her a bang. What else … you fry the fat, you tear off a piece, punch her in the pants, you service her.… That’s a mixture of the farm and the gas station’ ” (p. 33).

  37. ​In later years, as explained in a letter of 8 January 1991 to George Demetriou, SB admitted a silver lining to the “otherwise somber and threatening cloud” of his years with Dr. Raphael. On nights of terrible insomnia, “when I find that I have almost stopped breathing,” he often puts Reich’s techniques to work: “my fingers creep toward the points of muscle attachment—the shoulders, the pectorals, and other places where normal people are not aware of having any muscles at all: the forehead, the eyebrows, the cheeks, and jaws and the eyes themselves. I find those ultra-sore places that can be relaxed by hard rubbing with the knuckles. And then one does begin to breathe again.”

  38. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 171.

  39. ​In a 1953 application for a return visit to Yaddo, from 5–31 July, in answer to the question “What work have you planned for another visit, if it can be arranged?” The application is found among the Yaddo Papers in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. The idea for the novella may have come from a letter Ted Hoffman sent him on 5 January 1950, prior to his arrival in Salzburg: “There is one small plum attached to our spring activities. We are now in rather well with the American Hauser in Germany and they have offered to invite any of our faculty on a German lecture tour, including Berlin. Not too many lectures would be asked, the choice of topic would be largely up to you, the same lecture or lectures could be repeated in different cities.” This offer SB declined in a letter to Hoffman of 25 January 1950: “I am interested in the Amerika Hauser lectures, but I don’t think I can go. I do have to finish a book, and while I haven’t been slack about it I haven’t made record-time either.”

  40. ​Bernage is on a fellowship and at work on a biography of Friedrich von der Trenck (1726–94), a Prussian officer, adventurer, and author who was guillotined in the French Revolution. Von der Trenck is the subject also of the play Charlie Citrine writes in Humboldt’s Gift, which wins him the Pulitzer Prize.

  41. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 170.

  42. ​Karl Shapiro, The Younger Son (1990), volume 1 of Poet: An Autobiography in Three Parts (1988–90) (Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 1990), p. 89. SB was not the only lecturer to attract female students. An English girl knocked on Shapiro’s door to show h
im her poems and tell him “which girl was pairing off with which man and why.” Two nights later, as Shapiro was getting ready for bed, there was a soft knock at his door “and he opened it to find about ten of the girls in their pajamas who asked to come in” (p. 89), for a pajama party. The English girl was not among them. Later Shapiro went to bed with a German girl, a student from Munich.

  43. ​Lillian Blumberg McCall, a clinical psychologist, had written a dissertation on Freud, parts of which were published as articles in Commentary (“Does Psychoanalysis Cure?,” November 1950; “The Hidden Springs of Sigmund Freud,” April 1954). These articles were critical of Freud and caused a stir. McCall had been a girlfriend of Clement Greenberg, moved in Partisan Review circles, and lived in the building where she found SB his apartment. This building she describes as located on Minetta Lane not Minetta Street. See p. 107 of her partial, unpublished, and untitled 1982 memoir, a copy of which, with SB’s handwritten annotations, is among his papers in the Regenstein. SB encouraged McCall to write the memoir. “He not only tried to persuade me, he got his editor to write me several letters. The late Pat Covici of Viking, to whom Herzog, which I think is Saul’s master work, is dedicated, was very persistent.… I’m writing the book now because for reasons I cannot comprehend, my daughter’s generation seems fascinated by that period of Greenwich Village life and because, finally, I understand what happened” (p. 31)(henceforth cited within the text by page numbers). After her time in New York, she moved to Colorado, divorced, and then moved to Berkeley, where she and Mitzi McClosky became close friends.

  44. ​That Minetta Lane was where SB lived rather than wrote is suggested by the letter to Hivnor of 25 January 1952, written from Salzburg: “If Clark is happy in that room [presumably MacDougal Alley] I think he can stay there. I’d take over Rosenfeld’s flat on Hudson St., opposite Carver” (Katie Carver also had a room in the Casbah). In “How I Wrote Augie March’s Story,” in The New York Times, 31 January 1954, SB mentions writing a chapter of the novel in the Hudson Street apartment.

  45. ​The review in Billboard appeared on 10 May 1952; the play’s opening was on 2 May. The play, in two acts, was adapted by Leonard Lesley and produced by David Hellwell and Robert Winter-Berger. When informed by Volkening of plans to stage an adaptation, SB’s response, in an undated letter from Salzburg, was “sure, go ahead, tell them to proceed to make a fortune with it. I took out the most obnoxious things, I think, and it’s no longer a bloodbath.” The review in The New York Times appeared on 3 May 1952.

  46. ​The letter is found in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library.

  47. ​Two previous excerpts, subsequently revised, appeared in Partisan Review: “From the Life of Augie March,” appeared in the issue of November 1949, published when SB was in Paris; and “The Einhorns” appeared in the issue of November–December 1951.

  48. ​For SB’s dealings with the Rockefeller Foundation, see Atlas, Biography, p. 168, which draws on the archives of the Rockefeller Foundation, Pocantico Hills, North Tarrytown, New York. The Trilling episode is discussed on p. 182. Marshall was associate director of the Rockefeller Foundation. He was an admirer of The Victim and in January 1951 invited SB to come in for a chat. In the course of the chat SB asked him for a grant. Marshall in turn asked SB to write an essay on “the responsibility of the novelist in society,” for which he was given a $75 honorarium. SB’s essay focused on the diminishing stature of fictional heroes: “As the external social factor grows larger, more powerful and tyrannical, man appears in the novel reduced in will, strength, freedom and scope.” Two weeks later SB met with another foundation director, Edward “Chet” D’Arms (Marshall was away), whose minutes of the meeting record that he “was not greatly impressed at B’s intellectual position nor encouraged by his slight but persistent truculence.” D’Arms could not square what he called the “narrow focus” of SB’s first two novels with his call for heroes of greater stature and was unimpressed with SB’s claims for the unfinished Augie March. In early May 1951 the board decided it could not help SB, a decision that involved, in Marshall’s words, “a certain regret for all of us.”

  49. ​SB’s memorial eulogy for Bernard Malamud was delivered in his absence by Howard Nemerov on 5 December 1986 at the annual luncheon of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; it is reprinted in Taylor, ed., Letters, p. 435.

  50. ​See, for example, Michiko Kakutani, “A Talk with Saul Bellow: On His Work and Himself,” in New York Times Book Review, 13 December 1981, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 185.

  51. ​That the Rockefeller funded the Gauss Seminars, which Blackmur ran and originated, may help account for their generosity toward him.

  52. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 173.

  53. ​Al Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right? (1999; London: Bloomsbury, 2002), p. 167.

  54. ​The passage from Humboldt’s Gift continues: “And if I later became such a formidable mass of credentials it was because I put such slights to good use. I avenged myself by making progress. So I owed Sewell quite a lot and it was ungrateful of me, years later when I read in the Chicago paper that he was dead, to say, as I sipped my whisky, what I occasionally did say at such moments—death is good for some people.” In the Botsford interview, “A Second Half Life,” in SB, IAAU, p. 316, SB says of Blackmur: “I never got to know him at all well. I observed that he liked to have an entourage sitting on the floor listening to his labyrinthine muttered monologues. I listed him as a brilliant court-holder.” In Monroe Engel’s words: “I don’t think Bellow liked Blackmur at all and I don’t think Delmore liked him very much.… I didn’t like him either, even though he gave me a job for a year.”

  55. ​Quoted from a report to the dean of the faculty (now in the Seeley Mudd Library in Princeton).

  56. ​For SB on his Princeton students, see Robert Gutwillig, “Talk with Saul Bellow,” New York Times Book Review, 20 September 1964, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 26; for SB on not assuming a posture of disaffection, see “A Second Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 315.

  57. ​“Berryman, John,” in American National Biography, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), in association with the American Council of Learned Societies, p. 690.

  58. ​Botsford interview, “A Second Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 316.

  59. ​Lewis was at work on what would become The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955), a landmark study of American literature.

  60. ​Edmund Wilson, The Fifties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, ed., Leon Edel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), p. 46, from Edel’s introduction to the section titled “Princeton, 1952–1953.”

  61. ​Roethke had on several occasions been committed to mental hospitals during his time at the University of Washington, most recently in the spring of 1950, when Berryman was employed to replace him. For Roethke at Princeton, see Eileen Simpson, Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir (1982; New York: Vintage, 1983), pp. 219–22; see also Allan Seager, The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 206–7. Seager’s description of the Wilson party omits any reference to the poet’s knocking down Percy Wood. He describes Roethke’s behavior at the party as “aggressively sober” and manic, mentioning how he invited one female guest to accompany him “immediately” to the Caribbean. Later in the evening he took Wilson, his host, aside, and suggested: “Let’s blow this and go upstairs and I’ll show you some of my stuff.”

  62. ​SB, “My Paris,” New York Times Magazine, 13 March 1983, reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 236. A slightly different version of this meeting is given in Manea, “Conversation,” p. 34: “We ran into Koestler and he said, ‘is this your child?’ and I said, ‘yes,’ and he said, ‘should a writer have children? Isn’t it irresponsible of you?’ I said, ‘what do you want me to do, give him back?’ ”

  63. ​For the quote about Ellison,
see Botsford interview, “A Second Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 316; for SB’s review of Invisible Man, see “Man Underground,” Commentary, June 1952.

  64. ​Botsford interview, “A Second Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 318.

  65. ​James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977; New York: Avon, 1978), p. 291.

  66. ​William Phillips, Partisan Review: Five Decades of the Literary Life (New York: Stein & Day, 1983), p. 76.

  67. ​William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1982), p. 27.

  68. ​In 1939 Schwartz wrote an essay in The Kenyon Review on Eliot’s journal, Criterion. In November of that year Eliot wrote back thanking Schwartz. “You are certainly a critic,” the letter ended, “but I want to see more poetry from you; I was much impressed by In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Eliot’s letter is quoted in Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, p. 145.

  69. ​See Simpson, Poets in Their Youth, p. 217.

  70. ​According to Atlas, in Biography, p. xii, SB had “kind words” to say about the Schwartz biography.

  71. ​Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, pp. 261–62.

  72. ​Ibid., p. 285.

  73. ​Ibid., p. 280.

  74. ​Ibid., pp. 280–81.

  75. ​Ibid., pp. 286–87.

  76. ​Simpson, Poets in Their Youth, p. 217.

  77. ​Both quotations from Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 165.

  78. ​Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, p. 288.

  79. ​Simpson, Poets in Their Youth, p. 222.

  80. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 179.

  81. ​Richard J. Kelly, ed., We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 244.

  82. ​The Wordsworth quotations are from the concluding lines of The Prelude: “deliverance” in the 1850 version was originally “redemption” in the 1805 version; the “savage torpor” quotation is from Wordsworth’s 1800 preface to his and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798). The “unacknowledged legislators” quotation is from Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” (1821).