The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  88. ​According to Time, 14 April 1952, in an article entitled “Bishop Fulton Sheen: The First ‘Televangelist.’ ”

  89. ​According to Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 79.

  90. ​This quotation is from an interview with the author.

  91. ​On p. 7 of the memoir, Sasha mentions a recent story about her family having Turkish origins: “untrue as it may be … I am truly sorry I did not know of this rumor in my younger years. I could have made much of it in creating my own exotic background. After all, in my twenties I wore black all the time and smoked Turkish cigarettes—gold-tipped black Sobranies, in an ivory cigarette holder, no kidding.”

  92. ​Vidal’s Iago comment comes from an interview with the author; Hecht’s from Atlas, Biography, p. 258.

  93. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 257, where Elsa is identified as Elsa Hester and Ellison’s remark is quoted on p. 258. That it was Ludwig who told Sasha that SB was sleeping with a girl named Elsa is recalled in “What’s in a Name?,” p. 99. Botsford paints a similar picture in Fragments, using piscatorial rather than barnyard imagery: “We, the faculty, fished for students; they, the students, fished for faculty. Relations which began as intellectual, as discipleships, often enough became intimate and emotional” (p. 10).

  94. ​Elsewhere Botsford calls Ludwig “the Golem [Saul] had conjured up, the alter ego of his carnal self” (p. 4).

  95. ​Alfred Kazin to SB, 22 February 1965.

  96. ​Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 103.

  97. ​See SB, Herzog: “Moses recognized that under his own rules the man who had suffered more was more special, and he conceded willingly that Gersbach had suffered harder, that his agony under the wheels of the boxcar must have been far deeper than anything Moses had ever suffered” (p. 479).

  98. ​Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 103.

  99. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 257.

  100. ​Ibid.

  101. ​Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 99.

  102. ​See, for example, Don Morrison, “Popular ‘U’ Teacher Finds Self Jobless,” Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, 16 April 1961, or “ ‘U’ Humanities Lecturer Takes Post in N.Y.,” Minneapolis Tribune, 24 April 1961, and letters of 28 April and 4 May, also in the Tribune. The student newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, ran numerous articles in Ludwig’s defense. That the Ludwig “case” involved controversial questions about the status and autonomy of the Humanities Program at Minnesota may partly account for the attention it received, as may Ludwig’s appearance on local educational television (which broadcast one of his regular college classes, “Humanities in the Modern World,” from 9 to 10 p.m., Monday through Friday).

  103. ​Email, 3 April 2013.

  104. ​Botsford email, 28 July 2014.

  105. ​Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 75.

  106. ​This judgment of Anita as reserved is based only on the handful of letters and postscripted remarks I have seen among correspondence in the SB and Tarcov Papers in the Regenstein.

  107. ​Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 75.

  108. ​Ibid., pp. 75, 76.

  109. ​New World Writing was published by New American Library’s Mentor imprint. The Wrecker appears in Number 6. It was reprinted in the first edition of Seize the Day (New York: Viking, 1956).

  110. ​In a postcard of 14 June 1954, SB announces to Arabel J. Porter, executive editor of New World Writing, that “I have a full length play in process,” probably an early version of The Last Analysis (1965), parts of which were published as “Scenes from ‘Humanitis’—A Farce,” in Partisan Review in 1962. In addition to The Last Analysis, which was first produced on Broadway in 1964, SB produced three one-act plays in this period, A Wen, Orange Soufflé, and Out from Under. The first two of these plays were published in Esquire in January and October 1965, and all three were performed in 1966 in London and on Broadway as Under the Weather. Citations from The Wrecker are given within the text; page numbers refer to the edition printed in Seize the Day. SB begins his theater chronicle, “The Pleasures and Pains of Playgoing,” Partisan Review (May–June 1954), with an experience that put him off Broadway for some time, a production of Harvey, “the last play I saw prior to this season”: “I have not been able to forget that evening, though I have tried.” This negative reaction, he claims, had nothing to do with intellectual snobbery. “To anticipate a criticism, I am not a highbrow, though I do not disclaim intelligence, and I do not go to the theater in quest of ideas but to be diverted, delighted, awed, and in search of opportunities to laugh and to cry” (p. 312). There follows an attack both on symbol mongering and humorlessness. On the surface, T. S. Eliot’s The Confidential Clerk looks like a simple play, but audiences today “know that everything simple is not really simple.… Jack and Jill can no more be merely Jack and Jill than Moby Dick can be nothing but a whale. Critics have proved to us that mythological and religious entities inhabit ordinary Midwestern personalities. Passengers descending from street-cars illustrate the Reisemotiv. Little boys in Mississippi are really Aeneas” (p. 314). The play’s “emotional albinism” also puts SB off. The impressive self-command of its characters “made me wonder whether anything so close to death was really suitable to dramatic representation and, also, why this aridity of the British character should be admired and associated with culture or religion” (p. 314). The pleasures playgoing offers, it turns out, are afforded by SB’s friends: Ted Hoffman’s off-Broadway production of Sartre’s No Exit is praised for refusing “to let the philosophical element devour the theatrical.” Though not even Sartre’s “stubbornnest admirers can read his novels … his plays can, as Mr. Hoffman has just shown, be stirring” (p. 315). Also praised are Lionel Abel’s The Death of Odysseus and Robert Hivnor’s comedy The Ticklish Acrobat. At Hivnor’s play, “everyone looked happy. Later, I am sure, the spectators thought of love and history, ritual and religion, but that was in continuation of their pleasure, and they did not have to suffer the pains of culture-anxiety or agonies of ignorance, wondering which sip of the cocktail represented the eucharist” (p. 317).

  111. ​SB to the McCloskys, undated letter of spring 1954. See “I Got a Scheme!”: “I found a nice apartment on Riverside Drive. But somehow it just didn’t work. I never knew any real comfort in New York. I always felt challenge and injury around the corner. I had always considered it a very risky place, where one was easily lost. And I think I saw New York through the being of Isaac Rosenfeld.… He came to take the town and he got took. From his standpoint it proved to be a very dangerous place” (pp. 83–84).

  112. ​These quotations from Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, pp. 72, 77.

  113. ​Ibid., p. 78.

  114. ​According to Botsford, Fragments V, p. 32, at the very beginning of the summer, he and SB, “needing extra money,” stayed on at Bard “and explained America to Israeli and Pakistani Fulbrights.”

  115. ​Entry of 6 August 1962 in Richard M. Cook, Alfred Kazin’s Journals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 287.

  116. ​Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (1992; London: Secker & Warburg, 1993), p. 371. SB was wary rather than unfriendly. As he explained in his interview to Botsford: “Mary was unquestionably a witty writer, but she had a taste for low sadism. She would brutally work over people it wasn’t really necessary to attack.… You’d run into her on the street, as Nicola Chiaromonte once told me he did. She was blooming, he said, and he asked, ‘Why are you looking so well, Mary?’ She said, ‘I just finished a piece against So-and-so, and now I’m writing another, about such and such. Next I’m going to tear You-know-who to pieces’ ” (Botsford interview, “A Second Half Life,” SB, IAAU, pp. 319–20). In Randall Jarrell’s novel about a college like Bard, Pictures from an Institution (1954; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 134, which SB thought “much more amusing” than The Groves of Academe, the main character, Gertrude Johnson, based on McCarth
y, writes books described as “a systematic, detailed, and conclusive condemnation of mankind for being stupid and bad”; as a teacher, “she was always able to fail the clever for being bad, the good for being stupid.”

  117. ​Ann Birstein, What I Saw at the Fair (New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2003), pp. 158–59.

  118. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 219.

  119. ​For “potato love,” see Herzog: “Do not deceive yourself, dear Moses Elkanah, with childish jingles and Mother Goose. Hearts quaking with cheap and feeble charity or oozing potato love have not written history” (p. 493); “He gave Moses a kiss. Moses felt the potato love. Amorphous, swelling, hungry, indiscriminate, cowardly potato love” (p. 507).

  120. ​According to Maury Bellows’s daughter, Lynn Rotblatt, as quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 337: “The crescent moon in the doorbell, the chimes that play ‘Merrily We Roll Along,’ his stepmother’s shuffling footsteps in her slippers—I’m reading this and the tears are rolling down my face. He was writing my life. That’s when I knew he was a genius.”

  121. ​Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, pp. 83, 84.

  122. ​See Mark Harris, Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 13; for Ruth Miller, see Atlas, Biography, p. 222. Harris’s book is about his failed attempts to become SB’s biographer. The title comes from a Robert Frost poem, “A Drumlin Woodchuck,” which characterizes the woodchuck as a peaceful creature who “shrewdly pretends that he and the world are friends.” A “drumlin” is a ridge made by a glacier pushing its way through prehistoric land. It serves as an ideal retreat, a sort of rocky burrow, for the woodchuck, or ground hog. In Seize the Day, Tommy Wilhelm admits that he “wasn’t what I thought I was. And wasn’t even careful to take a few precautions, as most people do—like a woodchuck has a few exits to his tunnel” (p. 41).

  123. ​Manea, Conversation, p. 9. Here is SB on Father Herzog’s funeral: “This day was just like—he braced himself and faced it—like the day of Father Herzog’s funeral. Then, too, it was flowering weather—roses, magnolias. Moses, the night before, had cried, slept, the air was wickedly perfumed; he had had luxuri ant dreams, painful, evil, and rich, interrupted by the rare ecstasy of nocturnal emission—how death dangles freedom before the enslaved instincts: the pitiful sons of Adam whose minds and bodies must answer strange signals” (p. 699).

  124. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 83.

  125. ​Atlas, Biography, pp. 214, 215, 216.

  12. PYRAMID LAKE

  1. ​SB to Henry Volkening, undated letter, written from Reno, hence after 28 September 1955.

  2. ​SB, “Illinois Journey,” reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 196. Subsequent references to “Illinois Journey” cited within the text by page numbers.

  3. ​James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977; New York: Avon, 1978), p. 305.

  4. ​The first quotation about the drive west comes from p. 84 of Sasha’s 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.

  5. ​Mark Lundahl, “A Part of Old Reno Gone,” obituary of Harry Drackert in the Reno Gazette Journal, 29 December 1990. Liebling published two articles on the Drackerts and their guest ranch entitled “The Mustang Busters” in The New Yorker (3 and 10 April 1954) and four articles on Pyramid Lake and the Paiute Indians under the heading “The Lake of the Cui-ui Eaters,” also in The New Yorker (1, 8, 15, 22 January 1955). The four “Cui-ui” articles are reprinted in A. J. Liebling, A Reporter at Large: Dateline: Pyramid Lake, Nevada, ed. Elmer R. Rusco (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000).

  6. ​Perhaps the best known of the sci-fi movies shot at Pyramid Lake was Planet of the Apes (1968). The lake doubled for the Sea of Galilee in another Charlton Heston movie, The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

  7. ​Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 378.

  8. ​Ibid., pp. 377–82.

  9. ​See SB, Henderson the Rain King (1958), p. 143: “I got clean away from everything, and we came into a region like a floor surrounded by mountains. It was hot, clear, and arid and after several days we saw no human footprints. Nor were there many plants; for that matter there was not much of anything here; it was all simplified and splendid, and I felt I was entering the past—the real past, no history or junk like that. The prehuman past. And I believed that there was something between the stones and me. The mountains were naked, and often snakelike in their forms, without trees, and you could see the clouds being born on the slopes. From this rock came vapor, but it was not like ordinary vapor, it cast a brilliant shadow. Anyway I was in tremendous shape those first long days, hot as they were. At night, after Romilayu had prayed, and we lay on the ground, the face of the air breathed back on us, breath for breath. And then there were the calm stars, turning around and singing, and the birds of the night with heavy bodies, fanning by. I couldn’t have asked for anything better.” On the way to the Wariri, Henderson notices “jumbled white stones that looked as if they had been combed out by an ignorant hand from the elements that make least sense.… I am no geologist but the word calcareous seemed to fit them. They were composed of lime and my guess was that they must have originated in a body of water. Now they were ultra-dry but filled with little caves.… The cave mouths were open and there was this coarse and clumsy gnarled white stone” (p. 207)—like the tufa-encrusted stones of Pyramid Lake.

  10. ​SB to Grace Wade, 7 March 1972.

  11. ​A. J. Liebling, “The Mustang Busters,” New Yorker (3 April 1954).

  12. ​See Noriko M. Lippit, “A Perennial Survivor: Saul Bellow’s Heroine in the Desert,” Studies in Short Fiction 12 (1975).

  13. ​SB, “Leaving the Yellow House,” first published in Esquire, January 1958, reprinted in SB, CS, p. 265 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  14. ​Daniel Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, p. 295.

  15. ​Miller, Timebends, pp. 384–85. Nothing is said of Malibu in SB’s correspondence, but Henderson recalls meeting his son Edward there. Edward lived in a cabin beside the Pacific, which is nicely caught, especially in the movement of the surf: “The water was ghostly, lazy, slow, stupefying, with a vast dull shine. Coppery. A womb of white. Pallor; smoke; vacancy; dull gold; vastness; dimness; fulgor; ghostly flashing” (p. 213).

  16. ​In 1990, SB received a letter from Robert M. Gorrell, vice president for academic affairs emeritus at the University of Nevada, in which he relayed the news of Harry Drackert’s death, also of the activities of other people SB knew. Though Reno had now “spread all over the valley,” “Pyramid remains pretty much unspoiled … with the Paiutes resisting the temptation to let developers take it over.”

  17. ​SB to Sam Freifeld, 5 November 1955.

  18. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 229.

  19. ​SB to Henry Volkening, undated.

  20. ​SB to Pascal Covici, undated.

  21. ​Miller, Timebends, p. 377. The identity of the “cottage” Miller stayed in is unclear, as SB and Sasha were in the pink house and Peggy in the shack, at least at the beginning of Miller’s stay.

  22. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 233.

  23. ​Ibid., p. 242.

  24. ​William Moore, “Reveal Gems in Love Nest of Hoffa Aide,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 August 1958.

  25. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 235.

  26. ​Steven J. Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion and the Furies of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 200ff.

  27. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 235.

  28. ​Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 90.

  29. ​The depth of SB’s feeling for Rosenfeld is clear in his many writings about him, beginning with the Partisan Review memorial piece, “Isaac Rosenfeld” (Fall 1956). That he was devastated by the news of his death is clear from his correspondence. See SB to Gertrude Buckman, 2 August 1956: “
I had been thrown millions of light years by Isaac Rosenfeld’s death”; also 23 August 1956 to Ruth Miller: “I myself have been none too hot, either, since Isaac’s death.” In a letter postmarked 6 December 1956 to John Berryman he writes: “I think and think about Isaac, and my recollections are endless—twenty-six years, of which I’ve forgotten very little.” SB to Ralph Ellison, 2 April 1956, suggests that August was the month when Greg was going to be with SB, but plans seem to have changed. See Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 90: “One morning in the summer of 1956 a phone call woke us with news that Isaac Rosenfeld had died in Chicago. Saul was inconsolable.” As Rosenfeld died on 14 July, this suggests that Greg and SB reconnected as soon as SB returned from Nevada; attending the funeral would have meant leaving Greg again, almost as soon as they’d gotten together. Returning to Chicago for Isaac’s funeral would also have meant leaving Sasha to take care of him—alone in the house in Germantown, while she was suffering from morning sickness.

  30. ​See SB to Ralph Ellison, 2 April 1956, for Greg’s height; for Sasha’s nausea, see p. 91 of her unpublished memoir.

  31. ​Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, pp. 88–89.

  32. ​According to Atlas, Biography, p. 241, SB received an $8,000 legacy plus stock in Carroll Coal, which was valued at around $12,000. The $16,000 figure comes from SB, “Ralph Ellison in Tivoli,” in News from the Republic of Letters 3 (January 1998), later reprinted in Partisan Review 65:4 (Fall 1998) and the Bard College magazine, The Bardian (Spring 1999). For the $20,000 legacy Moses Herzog inherits, see SB, Herzog (1964), p. 536.

  33. ​Monroe had been scheduled to visit Miller at Pyramid Lake the week after SB and Sasha left, but the day before she was due to arrive a reporter from the New York Daily News showed up. Miller tried to put him off but the next morning, according to a letter he wrote to SB on 2 June 1956, “the front page of the News has us about to be married, and me ‘readying’ my divorce here. All hell breaks loose. The phones all around never stop ringing. Television trucks—(as I live!)—drive up, cameras grinding, screams, yells, —I say nothing, give them some pictures, retire into the cabin.” Two hours before Monroe’s flight to Reno, Miller got ahold of her by phone and canceled the visit.