The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  83. ​Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, p. 285. Randall Jarrell, a visitor to Princeton in 1952–53, who had in the previous year taught in the writing program at Princeton with Berryman, shared Schwartz’s Shelleyan view. “Any American poet under a certain age,” he writes in Poetry and the Age (1953; New York: Ecco, 1980), p. 10, “has inherited a situation in which no one looks at him and in which, consequently, everyone complains that he is invisible.”

  84. ​Howe, A Margin of Hope, p. 164.

  85. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 84.

  86. ​Though Anita-like characters are invariably rigid in SB’s fiction they are not incapable of love. In an interview, Mitzi McClosky stressed Anita’s toughness but not her lack of love. The closest one can come to the Anita of SB’s letter to Freifeld is in an undated letter of Rosenfeld to Tarcov: “The original attraction is gone. Nothing has taken its place, except an increased domesticity which he doesn’t want. Anita acts sour and cranky at times” (quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 166).

  87. ​From p. 8 of 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.

  88. ​Presuming the split occurred before 12 December, Anita having been born on that date in 1914.

  89. ​Botsford interview, “A Second Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 316. Monroe Engel tells the story of Riggs’s death: “In the summer of 1953 we rented a house for a month in the Adirondacks and Tom was going to come out and visit us and he’d taken up with some Englishwoman who was having affairs with quite some number of people and she was going to come up with him. And they stopped at Blue Mountain Lake and Tom dove into the water and apparently hit his head on a stone and killed himself. We were having dinner and I got a call from the morgue saying that I had to come down and identify the body. And I must say that young Englishwoman had been very gutsy. She looked through Tom’s address book and found the names of people to call.”

  90. ​Mrs. Riggs’s young helper gives her name in the letter as Mrs. Paul Ripley. She writes from Ireland.

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

  92. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 180, locates the party in Riggs’s apartment, though in Delmore Schwartz, p. 296, he calls it “one of the Blackmurs’ Christmas gatherings.” Simpson says it took place in the Blackmur apartment, which SB was renting.

  93. ​Simpson, Poets in Their Youth, pp. 218–19.

  94. ​Ibid., p. 219.

  95. ​The description of Schwartz “literally dragging” his wife out of the room comes from p. 67 of Sasha Bellow’s unpublished memoir, “What’s in a Name?” (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers). The memoir consists of two parts, 121 typed pages written sometime in 2006, and a postscript entitled “The Years Between” written in 2008. The numbering of this postscript, which deals with Sasha’s life from twelve to twenty, continues from pp. 122–30, and is followed by a letter to her son, Adam, dated May 2008, in which she explains how difficult it was “to dredge up memories” for what she calls the “dark ages” of her life. The memoir, she tells Adam, “is not an autobiography. In fact, it is fairly fragmented, surprisingly incomplete in many respects and, significantly, does not even touch on the last thirty plus years (my best) at all.” The letter is numbered as though part of the memoir (pp. 131–32). My dating of the first two parts of the manuscript is conjectural, based on the May 2008 letter to Adam and the first sentence of the postscript: “I spent nearly two years trying to tackle the years 12–20 that are missing in the memoir.” Sasha gave me a copy of the memoir in 2010, the year before she died. The memoir records the difficulties she encountered over her various names when at Bennington. In her second year she needed a birth certificate to travel to Mexico with a roommate: “Because I had no other recent, official record of my legal existence, I had to get signed and notarized affidavits from my mother and my aunt, attesting that Saundra and Sandra Richter, Sondra and Alexandra Tschacbasov were all the same person” (p. 2).

  96. ​The quotation is from p. 65 of “What’s in a Name?” According to Ted Hoffman, as quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 180, when Schwartz, in fury, dragged Elizabeth away from the party, SB set out after them; then Hoffman and Monroe Engel set out after SB: “We found Saul on Nassau Street at two o’clock in the morning … having coffee with Sondra.”

  97. ​Ann Birstein, What I Saw at the Fair (New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2003), p. 154.

  98. ​From p. 139 of the unpublished, untitled, and unfinished memoir of Lillian Blumberg McCall, a copy of which can be found among SB’s papers in the Regenstein.

  99. ​Nina Steers, “Successor to Faulkner?,” Show 4, September 1964, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 35.

  100. ​According to Joel Bellows in an interview: “He would start out early in the morning with a terrycloth towel around his neck and he would sweat, as you would with Indian clubs. And when you saw him at noon or one o’clock—drenched. The concentration was so incredible and he was developing those habits in the year with Anita. So she must have made it very, very convenient.”

  101. ​See SB’s 1981 interview with Michiko Kakutani, “A Talk with Saul Bellow,” reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 186: “ ‘For many years,’ he explains, ‘Mozart was a kind of idol to me—this rapturous singing for me that’s always on the edge of sadness and melancholy and disappointment and heartbreak, but always ready for an outburst of the most delicious music.’ ”

  102. ​SB’s answers were dictated to a secretary on 16 September 1965, in reply to a questionnaire sent him by A. C. Ohlson, “studying the methods and techniques of contemporary creative writing.”

  103. ​Nina Steers, “Successor to Faulkner?,” in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 31.

  104. ​SB, “Mozart: An Overture,” the first essay in SB, IAAU, p. 11, first published in Bostonia magazine (Spring 1992), from a speech delivered at the Mozart Bicentennial, 5 December 1991, in Florence, Italy.

  105. ​Berryman, before he grew his beard, could look like a young businessman (to Leon Edel, at least), and Schwartz was full of moneymaking schemes, but neither was likely to be called businesslike.

  106. ​SB, “The Distracted Public,” originally delivered as the Romanes Lecture, Oxford University, 10 May 1990, reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 153.

  107. ​Ibid., pp. 168, 169.

  108. ​“An Interview with Myself,” originally titled “Some Answers and Questions,” New Review (1975), pp. 51–61, reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 80. Later in the interview SB says: “In busy America there was no Weimar, there were no cultivated Princes” (p. 87), and again one wonders: no Guggenheims or Morgans or Rockefellers or Mellons or MacArthurs or Fords?

  109. ​The contributors in May–June were Newton Arvin, James Burnham, Allan Dowling, Leslie Fiedler, Norman Mailer, Reinhold Niebuhr, Philip Rahv, David Riesman, Mark Schorer, and Lionel Trilling; in July–August they were William Barrett, Jacques Barzun, Joseph Frank, Horace Gregory, Louis Kronenberger, and C. Wright Mills; in September–October they were Louise Bogan, Richard Chase, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Max Lerner, William Phillips, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Delmore Schwartz. Louise Bogan was the only woman to contribute.

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

  111. ​The Macdonald essays that helped to popularize the concept of mass culture were “A Theory of Popular Culture,” which appeared in the first issue of politics (February 1944) and a revised and expanded version of the essay, entitled “A Theory of Mass Culture,” which appeared in Diogenes in 1953. In this second essay Macdonald cited the influence of writers of the Frankfurt School, notably Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Leo Löwenthal.

  112. ​Irving Howe, the only other contributor to “Our Country and Our Culture” to take an oppositional stance, was to expand his piece into an essay entitled “The Age of Conformity: Protest and Rejoinder,” pu
blished by PR in the issue of March–April 1954.

  113. ​Joseph Frank, in an essay entitled “Lionel Trilling and the Conservative Imagination,” Sewanee Review 64, no. 2 (Spring 1955), suggests that the publication of Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1950) played an important part in these trends. For Frank, the book’s “disillusionment with politics” is less disturbing than Trilling’s “confining his criticism to the liberal imagination, and not extending it to politics in general.” To Irving Howe, extrapolating on Frank’s view, Trilling “provided a rationale for a dominant trend within the intellectual community,” one that helped not only to dissuade people from “a militant politics in behalf of both social reform and a measure of egalitarianism” but helped to hasten or license “the absorption … of large numbers of intellectuals into government bureaucracy, the industries of pseudoculture, and the corporations. As advisors helpers, and spokesmen, intellectuals gained power” (pp. 231, 234). One remembers the Trillings praising SB at the dinner table of the Rockefeller Foundation’s John Marshall. A similar line to Howe and Frank is taken by Thomas Bender, “Lionel Trilling and American Culture,” American Quarterly 42, no. 2 (June 1990): 339.

  114. ​Barrett, Truants, pp. 189–90.

  115. ​Quoted in Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, p. 298.

  116. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 176.

  11. AUGIE/BARD/SASHA

  1. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 76.

  2. ​SB interview with Bernard Kalb, 19 September 1953, Saturday Review (previously, until 1952, The Saturday Review of Literature). SB uses the identical words in an interview with Bruce Cook, “Saul Bellow: A Mood of Protest,” Perspectives on Ideas and the Arts, 12 February 1963, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 14.

  3. ​Martin Amis, “The American Eagle: The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow,” originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, October 1995, reprinted in The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), p. 466.

  4. ​SB, “The Thoughts of Sergeant George Flavin,” in John Lehmann, ed., Penguin New Writing 38 (London: Penguin, 1949), p. 48 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  5. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 77.

  6. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 152.

  7. ​Adam Thirlwell, Miss Herbert (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), p. 267.

  8. ​Daniel Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), p. 58.

  9. ​Thirlwell, Miss Herbert, pp. 270–71.

  10. ​See the first page of Randall Jarrell’s introduction to the 1965 reprint of Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children (1940), itself reprinted in the Picador paperback edition (2001).

  11. ​The phrase is from the preface to volume 7 of the New York edition of James’s novels, which introduces The Tragic Muse. James asks of the novels of Thackeray, Dumas, and Tolstoy, “what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?” (p. x).

  12. ​In Botsford interview “A Second Half Life,” reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 325. On the same page, SB attributes the “small-public”/“great-public” distinction to Wyndham Lewis.

  13. ​From Manea, “Conversation,” p. 21.

  14. ​Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, p. 69.

  15. ​Elsewhere Einhorn is likened to Francis Bacon, Hephaestus, Anchises, Sardanapalus, and Socrates. Augie is “Achilles among the maidens” (which should really be Odysseus among the maidens); even Five Properties is seen in heroic terms, though calling him “that Apollo” (p. 408) is clearly ironic.

  16. ​Lionel Trilling makes a similar point at the beginning of his review of Augie March in The Griffin, a version of which he reprinted as the introduction to the Modern Library edition of the novel (New York, 1965). He calls The Victim “the kind of novel in which the author develops a single controlling idea with skill and precision, calling upon his conscious intelligence to do a considerable amount of the work of creation” (p. vii).

  17. ​Not all the real-life models for characters in Augie responded as SB feared. On 18 June 1960, Ben Shapiro, a childhood companion, recognized himself as Jimmy Klein and wrote to say: “I enjoyed Augie March. I appreciate what it is that you did for me, the implied conversion was absolutely painless, from petty thief to store detective. To me it meant only that the old love for each other still existed.” In the letter to Freifeld, SB adds, apropos of the depiction of his father: “I feel that I have kept things [from] obscurity which should not sink and for that reason the book is as much intended for you as for myself. The personal identification is altogether warranted. If you didn’t make it I’d feel that I had missed the mark.”

  18. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 188, takes a different view, calling Augie “an American bildungsroman—a novel of education” and describing its hero as “the prototypical sensitive young man of modern literature, a variant of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel and Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and D. H. Lawrence’s Paul Morel.” In support of this view he quotes a terse manuscript note reading: “Doesn’t want to be what others want to make of him. Stendhal exceptional champion of this.” However, the problem of development remains. Trilling, in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of the novel, p. xi, specifically contrasts SB with Stendhal, calling Augie “the inversion or negation of the kind of nineteenth-century novel of which The Red and the Black may be taken as the prototype, in which the hero, rising from poor or provincial beginnings, directs his heroic ambitious will upon the world of power and glory. For Augie makes it the great point of his life to reject the power and the glory.… He refuses the ‘heroic’ in favor of what he believes the heroic destroys, a complete humanity. It is in this formulated, programmatic rejection of the heroic will that Augie March is most specifically and essentially comic.”

  19. ​Trilling, introduction to The Adventures of Augie March, pp. xii, xiii.

  20. ​From the previously quoted response, undated, to Malamud’s letter of 28 November 1953. Malamud’s “baseball” novel, The Natural, was published in 1952.

  21. ​For quotes on control in Augie, see SB interviews with Nina Steers, “Successor to Faulkner?,” originally published in Show 4 (September 1964), and Gordon Lloyd Harper, “The Art of Fiction: Saul Bellow,” originally published in Paris Review 9, no. 36 (1966), both reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, pp. 34, 63.

  22. ​According to Richard Stern, in an interview.

  23. ​Philip Roth, “Rereading Saul Bellow,” originally published in The New Yorker (9 October 2000), reprinted in Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), p. 140.

  24. ​In “A Personal Record,” a review of Joyce Cary’s novel Except the Lord, in The New Republic (22 February 1954), SB declares that “a novel cannot matter to us if it fails to inform us about the elementary circumstances of the lives of its characters. The novelist need not flaunt the hero’s socks continually at us, but he must be able to exhibit them on demand—the socks of Dmitri Karamazov, the socks even of Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors.”

  25. ​These profiles, in the form of typed manuscripts, have been preserved, along with all Illinois Federal Writers’ Project Records, in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois (formerly the Illinois State Historical Library). Subsequent references are cited within the text by page numbers.

  26. ​Quoted by John Updike in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of Winesburg, Ohio (New York: Modern Library, 2002), p. xvi.

  27. ​An extract from Anderson’s “Apology” appears after the text in ibid., p. 243; the quoted sentences conclude the original Dial article.

  28. ​Ibid., p. 88 (further quotations cited within the text by page numbers).

  29. ​Anderson’s attention to bodily features, gestures, and movements also recalls SB. See Chapter 2, note 21.

  30. ​James T. F
arrell, “A Note on Sherwood Anderson,” in Reflections at Fifty and Other Essays (New York: Vanguard, 1966), pp. 166, 164.

  31. ​SB, “Looking for Mr. Green,” first published in Commentary (March 1951), reprinted in SB, CS, p. 174.

  32. ​The novel is dotted with Yiddish phrases and sayings, plus occasional Yiddish-inflected locutions: “I could not find myself in love without it should have some peculiarity” (p. 750); “I don’t want you should have anything against me” (Five Properties) (p. 587); “Owgie, the telephone ringt. Hear!” (Anna Coblin) (p. 402).

  33. ​Roth, “Rereading Saul Bellow,” Shop Talk, pp. 142–43.

  34. ​SB, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” first published in The Atlantic Monthly, November 1982, reprinted in SB, CS, p. 383.

  35. ​Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1954; New York: Meridian, 1958). The quotations at the end of the previous paragraph come from pp. 10, 25.

  36. ​Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 262.

  37. ​Howe and Greenberg, eds., A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, p. 46.

  38. ​Examples from SB’s translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Gimpel the Fool,” in ibid., pp. 402, 410, 406. For a detailed account of SB’s translation, see Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “State and Real Estate: Territoriality and the Modern Jewish Imagination,” in Terms of Survival: The Jewish World Since 1945 (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 50, in which it is argued that SB’s translation was “as much cover-up as exposure [of the lost Old World of the shtetl]”. According to Hana Wirth-Nesher, “ ‘Who’s He When He’s at Home?’: Saul Bellow’s Translations,” in Michael P. Kramer, ed., New Essays on Seize the Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 4: “In translating for a Partisan Review readership removed from Judaic texts and sources a story originally intended for an audience well versed in Jewish tradition, SB retained only seven Yiddish words: golem, mezuzah, challah, kreplach, schnorrer, dybbuk and Tisha B’av. With the exception of the last term, an annual day of mourning and fasting to commemorate the destruction of the second Temple and the resulting two millennia of exile, these terms had already seeped into the American Jewish lexicon.… Actual liturgical references, however, no matter how common, were converted into American equivalents. And this is where the cross-cultural plot thickens. For in the English translation of ‘Gimpel,’ Bellow translated the well-known Hebrew prayer for the dead, ‘El molei rachamim’ into the Christian ‘God ’a mercy,’ a shift that transformed Gimpel’s Eastern European setting into Southern Baptist terrain.” Though SB’s dialect translation properly associates the prayer with American folk and regional customs, it sounds incongruous, and as Wirth-Nesher points out, “the linguistic shift from Hebrew [“El molei rachamim” is a Hebrew name] to Yiddish, from the sacred to the profane, is not retained but flattened into one language” (p. 31). See also David Roskies, “Gimpel the Simple and on Reading from Right to Left,” in Justin Cammy et al., eds., Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), in which Roskies argues that “in English Gimpel the Fool is less of a male, less of a folk artist, less of a Jew. The cup that Bellow handed the English reader in 1953 was at best half empty. Not so, Gimpel the Simple, who is endowed with the fullness of years, of voice, of human emotion, and of mystical knowledge. In celebration thereof, on the eve of the Passover festival in 1945, Yitshok Bashevis presented the Yiddish reader with an Elijah cup, filled to overflowing” (pp. 339–40).