The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  39. ​Delmore Schwartz, “Adventure in America,” a review of SB, The Adventures of Augie March, in Partisan Review(January–February 1954). The review opens: “Saul Bellow’s new novel is a new kind of book. The only other American novels to which it can be compared with any profit are Huckleberry Finn and U.S.A., and it is superior to the first by virtue of the complexity of its subject matter and to the second by virtue of a realized unity of composition” (p. 112).

  40. ​Robert Gorham Davis, “Augie Just Wouldn’t Settle Down,” and Harvey Breit, “Talk with Bellow,” both in New York Times Book Review, 20 September 1953.

  41. ​In the first sentence of Harvey Curtis Webster’s review of Augie, “Quest Through the Modern World,” Saturday Review, 19 September 1953. Later in the review Webster contrasts the nature of the perplexity occasioned by the two novels: Joyce in Ulysses perplexes from the start, whereas “like Rabelais and Cervantes, Mr. Bellow makes easy sense from page to page, yet his total meaning is elusive.”

  42. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 198.

  43. ​“Have letter here from Librairie Plon claiming first shot at Augie, the which claim I wish to acknowledge as Plon has translated my first book,” SB writes to Volkening in an undated letter that Volkening answers on 29 September 1953. “Look Henry,” SB had earlier written to Volkening, on 25 August 1953, after being informed of an offer from the British publisher André Deutsch: “Would you marry your daughter off to her first suitor. This book, old man, is a child of mine. Let’s have not so simply a figure but some notion of the Deutsch intentions. Heavens! You should know this!!!” Augie was published in Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

  44. ​West’s review, “A Crash of Symbols,” New Yorker, 26 September 1953, made SB out, he complained in the same letter to White, as “a disciple of the New Criticism … [but] in writing the book I was aware of no symbolic aims”: “ ‘Simon’ and ‘Simony,’ ‘eagles’ and ‘virility,’ ‘sex’ and ‘culture’—really, it is simply too much!”

  45. ​The originals of SB’s correspondence with Katherine White are deposited in the archives of The New Yorker in the New York Public Library; copies, along with White’s replies, can be found among SB’s papers in the Regenstein.

  46. ​Norman Podhoretz, Making It (1967; New York: Bantam, 1969), pp. 116–17.

  47. ​In the undated response to Bernard Malamud’s letter of 28 November: “I made many mistakes; I must plead guilty to several of your charges. Yes, Augie is too passive, perhaps. Yes, the episodes do not have enough variety; the pressure of language is too constant and uniform.”

  48. ​Norman Podhoretz, “The Adventures of Saul Bellow, 1953–1959,” originally appeared in Podhoretz, Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964), reprinted in Thomas L. Jeffers, ed., The Norman Podhoretz Reader: A Selection of His Writings from the 1950s Through the 1990s (New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 14, 16.

  49. ​Norman Podhoretz, Making It, pp. 114, 118, 119, 120.

  50. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 201.

  51. ​Excerpted from Ex-Friends (New York: Free Press, 1999), in Jeffers, ed., The Norman Podhoretz Reader, p. 382. Berryman’s drunken threat to Podhoretz can be paired with Delmore Schwartz’s joking offer to threaten Anthony West: “I take it you would like to have Anthony West’s head broken in,” he writes to SB on 9 October 1953: “I will. Before I’m thru West will be East.”

  52. ​Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), p. 47, for all quotations.

  53. ​The phrase “the whole American question” comes from Percy Lubbock, James’s friend and editor, in “Henry James, O.M.,” Lubbock’s eulogy in The Times (London), 29 February 1916: “Through all his long residence in Europe, his relations with America were closer and more constant than may perhaps have been generally understood; and the whole American question, in whatever aspect, was one in which he was always eager to keep himself instructed.” And see Philip Rahv, “Henry James’s America,” a review of F. O. Matthiessen, The American Novels and Stories of Henry James, in New York Times Book Review, 2 March 1947: “for a writer who, as the legend goes, was enamored of old-world privilege and by no means aglow with belligerent fervor in dealing with the national ideals, the work collected in this volume is astonishing, in that it shows us to what an extent James was able to express creatively the meaning and quality of American life.”

  54. ​For Henry James on Yiddish speakers, see The American Scene (London: Chapman Hall, 1907), pp. 132, 139, 135. To James, the Lower East Side was marked by “a sense of great swarming.… There is no swarming like that of Israel when once Israel has got a start … multiplication of everything was the dominant note, at the bottom of some vast sallow aquarium in which innumerable fish, of over-developed probiscus, were to bump together” (p. 131). In discussing The American Scene, Jonathan Freedman in The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), argues that “for all [James’s] worrying about the threat posed by Jews to the English language, there is a countervailing and envious sense of the vitality of Yiddish culture” (p. 121). For SB’s references to The American Scene, see for example the final paragraphs of the second of the “Jefferson Lectures” (1977) or “My Paris” (originally printed in New York Times Magazine, 13 March 1983), both reprinted in SB, IAAU, pp. 151–52, 234.

  55. ​Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James, Volume II: 1899–1916 (2 vols.; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 599.

  56. ​This account, including the quote from Edel, is taken from Atlas, Biography, p. 210.

  57. ​Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), p. 87. Diana Trilling may be right that SB was testing Lionel, but if so he seems not to have been pleased at his guest’s discomfort. See SB to Susan Glassman, 23 January 1962: “A little discouraging last night. Dave Peltz and I took Trilling out slumming. A cold coming we had of it.”

  58. ​This journal entry does not appear in Richard M. Cook, ed., Alfred Kazin’s Journals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), but Cook provided it to me, along with a sheaf of references to SB not printed in his selection. The journals are to found among the Alfred Kazin Papers held in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. When Kazin’s essay collection, The Inmost Leaf (1955), was published, Cleanth Brooks, a New Critic and Southern Agrarian, the target also of attacks by Kazin in On Native Grounds (1942) and elsewhere, gave it a hostile review in The New York Times Book Review. In an undated letter to Kazin, SB denounced Brooks in full battle mode: “I haven’t seen your book yet. But I did chance to see the review in the Times, which I thought so foul that I wanted to bang Brooks on the head. Eastern white-collar? Why, he might as well have come out flatly with ‘Jew.’ What vileness! How I detest these ‘rooted’ southerners among us poor deracinated Hebes of the north. I notice that they teach at Yale, though, or Minnesota. If they are not missionaries from southern culture they are liars and cowards. Christly heavens, what chutzpah!”

  59. ​Lynn Hoffman, email to the author, 3 October 2012. Because SB found negative reviews of Augie so painful, he sought sustenance and reassurance from friends, colleagues, and family. On 20 September, the day of the New York Times review, he wrote to Freifeld to thank him for his friendship: “When I want to know who I am I must still turn to you.” Nine days later, Isaac Rosenfeld wrote from Minneapolis, where Ralph Ross, now head of Humanities at the University of Minnesota, had gotten him a job. “I may not have been able to get along with you in recent years,” Rosenfeld writes, “but I got along famously with Augie. I loved it, immensely, most every bit of it, and even the parts I didn’t like I liked.… I tell you, it’s encouraged me more than anything I’ve read in a long time.” Herbert Gold wrote on 24 September in similar vein, pleased to find in Augie “so much of you … of you relaxed and letting go, enjoying yourself.” Leslie Fiedler, in a letter of 9 October, wondered admiringly how SB “had managed to write
such an American book—such a Huckleberry Finn-ish, Melvillian, go-to-hell ragbag.… Your only sin against the American spirit was to make sex so infallibly (the infallible part raised your sex to a pastoral level that troubled even me) enjoyable; I’ll bet yours is the first ‘serious’ American book to show a boy’s initiation in a whore house as anything but torture!” In a letter of 21 October, Zita Cogan, a friend from Tuley days, reported the complaints of “the young orthodox Jewry of Chicago,” for whom Augie presents the Jewish people “very, very unfavorably.” Her letter ends: “take care of yourself at all those cocktail parties you’re probably being guested.” On Thanksgiving Day 1953 SB writes to thank Edith Tarcov for her warm praise of Augie, commending her “for having observed, as no one else has, Augie’s bent for the illicit. I have often felt that the effort to lead a normal American life would make an outlaw out of me.” The reaction of SB’s family was slow in coming and mixed. For Jane, Sam, and their families, pride mixed with embarrassment (over the Simon/Renée episode); Maury was simply angry. Father Abraham, in the letter quoted in full at the end of Chapter 1, congratulated SB on the book’s success, sent money for further copies, and signed off as patriarch: “Still I am The head of all of U.” Perhaps the most heartening of the letters of congratulation SB received came from the punch-press operator and would-be opera singer who roomed with the family at 2629 West Augusta Avenue. It was signed “Your old friend, Ezra Davis.”

  60. ​Sasha had only recently been fired from Partisan Review, edited by Phillips and Rahv. Her description of the launch party comes from p. 73 of her unpublished memoir, “What’s in a Name?” (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers). For the origins and nature of the memoir, see Chapter 10, note 95.

  61. ​Languages and Literature was one of four academic divisions into which Bard was organized. The other three were Social Studies; Art, Music, Drama, and Dance; and Natural Sciences. For Ted Hoffman as “Consigliori,” see Lynn Hoffman email to the author, 3 October 2012.

  62. ​Botsford interview, “A Second Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 320.

  63. ​See pages 86 and 87 of the Bard College Bulletin for 1953–54, also for a description of John Bard, the college’s founder, as “a country-squire of wide interests and deep religiosity,” and for the “pioneering efforts” referred to two sentences later in the text.

  64. ​Ibid., p. 7. In Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952; Harcourt/Harvest paperback, 1992), p. 61, “Jocelyn College,” the novel’s Bard-like setting, has “a ratio of one teacher to every 6.9 students, which made possible the practice of ‘individual instruction’ as carried on at Bennington (6.4:1), Bard (6.9:1), and St. John’s (7.7:1).”

  65. ​SB to Alfred Kazin, 7 January 1954. A high number of Bard students, according to SB, were troubled or in analysis. Atlas, Biography, p. 197, reports the complaint of one such student that SB was inadequate as an advisor because he’d not been in analysis (apparently Reichian therapy didn’t count). In “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” Herschel Shawmut has a similarly minded student at Ribier College: “A girl I was assigned as an advisor has asked for another one because I haven’t been psychoanalyzed and can’t even begin to relate to her” (SB, CS, p. 377).

  66. ​For SB on Bard, see Botsford interview, “A Second Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 320; Sasha Bellow described Bard as “Bennington with boys” in several places (to me in an interview; to Atlas, Biography, p. 197).

  67. ​Mary McCarthy, The Groves of Academe, pp. 25–27, 36–37.

  68. ​Michael Rubin, A Trip into Town (1961; New York: MacFadden-Bartell, 1964), pp. 76, 75, 78–79, 83.

  69. ​Ibid., pp. 92, 139, 140.

  70. ​Botsford interview, “A Second Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 320.

  71. ​Artine Artinian, who taught French, was on leave, as was Ted Weiss.

  72. ​Keith Botsford, from a draft version of pp. 2–3 of the fifth volume of Botsford’s memoir Fragments. In finished form, the memoir will appear as Fragments I–VI, 2 vols. (Las Vegas and London: Republic of Letters Books, 2014). Volume 2, comprised of Fragments IV–VI, will contain material on SB, Bard, Ludwig, et al. “The text of V is ok as is,” Botsford writes in an email of 26 July 2014, “but it will doubtless be very different by the time your first volume comes out. You should probably say, ‘references to Fragments in this volume are as of July, 2014’—as are page numbers” (henceforth cited within the text).

  73. ​Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir (1995; London: Abacus, 1996), pp. 243, 259.

  74. ​See SB, Henderson the Rain King (1958), pp. 135–36: “She had remodeled a building on the property, one of the few I didn’t take for the pigs because it was old and out of the way. I told her to go ahead, but then I held back on the dough, and instead of wood, wallboard was put in, with other economies on down the line. She made the place over with a new toilet and had it painted inside and out. But it had no insulation. Came November and the tenant began to feel cool. Well, they were bookish people; they didn’t move around enough to keep their body heat up.”

  75. ​Jim Detjen, “ ‘Rain King’ Recalls Nobel Prize Winner’s Years in Barrytown,” Poughkeepsie Journal, 22 October 1976.

  76. ​Aldrich’s claim comes from a note of 13 April 2005 by Helene Tieger, the Bard College archivist, in the library’s collection of SB’s papers. According to Sasha in an interview, “once he’d written that Henderson shot the cat he told the story that Chanler Chapman shot the cat—but he didn’t”; “once he found a better story, it was his story and he’s sticking to it.” The episode in which Henderson shoots the cat is recounted in Chapter 8, pp. 183–85. The cat belonged to the tenants who rented the apartment on Henderson’s property remodeled by his wife, Lily. These tenants, a mathematics teacher and his wife, complained because the place was too cold.

  77. ​See SB to Robert Penn Warren, 27 March 1954; see also Atlas, Biography, p. 210, for Lynn Hoffman quotation.

  78. ​Detjen, “ ‘Rain King’ Recalls Nobel Prize Winner’s Years in Barrytown,” Poughkeepsie Journal. Detjen identifies Wilson as teaching English at Bard, which he did for four decades, though he was not in the Division of Languages and Literature the year SB was there. He had been an undergraduate at Bard (class of ’48) and in 1953–54 was a graduate student in English at Columbia.

  79. ​This quotation is from the third page of a five-page speech, undated, written by SB for a 1995 memorial for Ralph Ellison. It is among SB’s papers in the Regenstein.

  80. ​Vidal, Palimpsest, p. 259.

  81. ​Botsford interview, “A Second Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 321.

  82. ​Vidal, Palimpsest, pp. 259, 260.

  83. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 208.

  84. ​It is not clear how seriously to take these complaints, recalled by Vidal in an interview. According to Atlas, Biography, p. 210, they came at a time when “for once in his life, he had money; Pat Covici sent him a second royalty check for five thousand dollars, and Bellow gave his brother Sam ten thousand dollars to invest for him.” See SB to Sam Freifeld in an undated letter of spring 1956: “Sam says he is investing $10,000 for me. I’m grateful for his efforts. He really does seem to have good business instincts. Without pride, I confess I have not.”

  85. ​The school was set in four hundred acres of farmland, woods, and streams; it had horses, cows, goats, and chickens; there were “no grades, no scores, no tests, no competitive sports” (p. 40); all the teachers were called by their first names. Paul Goodman taught at Manumit and in 1951 published a novel about his time there; two of Pete Seeger’s children were pupils when Sasha attended, as was Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, and Sholom Aleichem’s grandchildren.

  86. ​On p. 127, Sasha describes how “night after night, he would creep down the stairs from the bedroom he shared with my mother, put his hand over my mouth while I slept, insatiable, sometimes violent (I often had bruises on my upper arms), pinning me down, while the tears leaked from my tightly shut eyes, but I knew to be silent.”

/>   87. ​In the main body of the memoir Sasha describes her mother as “afraid to make the break [from the marriage], and still too tied to her compelling but unstable husband, and seduced, as well, by the fantasy of the glamorous artistic life in New York. She did not want the ‘bourgeois’ life that a return to Chicago would mean, and the image of her as a failure was insupportable, I think” (p. 25).