The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  34. ​SB, “Ralph Ellison in Tivoli.”

  35. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 241.

  36. ​In 1926, the owner of the house, William B. Ward, of the Ward Baking Company, gave it to a local charity as a site for an old folks’ home and for summer camps for underprivileged residents of New York City’s Lower East Side. Later it served as a settlement house for young girls from Manhattan.

  37. ​SB to Gertrude Buckman, 2 August 1956; also 23 August 1956 to Ruth Miller: “If the house were in better repair I’d ask you up for Labor Day. But now the well has given out.”

  38. ​SB to Ruth Miller, 23 August 1956.

  39. ​SB to Pascal Covici, received on 12 September 1956.

  40. ​Covici’s letter describes his discussion with Volkening about the advance: “He would like me to ask, he said, for $2,500. My feeling was, since our option calls for a book of short stories with an advance of only $300, that his asking figure was a little bit ‘mishuga [crazy],’ and I, therefore, suggested $1,500. When I got back to the office and told Harold [Guinzburg, the publisher] about it there was no hesitation on his part—$1,500 was O.K. And nobody, including myself, had read a single short story before hand.”

  41. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 231.

  42. ​The title of Kazin’s 18 November 1956 review was “In Search of Light.”

  43. ​Hollis Alpert, “Uptown Dilemmas,” review of SB, Seize the Day, Saturday Review (24 November 1956).

  44. ​Chirantan Kulshrestha, “A Conversation with Saul Bellow,” Chicago Review 23.4–24.1 (1972), reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 89.

  45. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 38.

  46. ​From a note made of a conversation with the author on 10 January 2009 in New York City. See also Atlas, Biography, p. 526.

  47. ​On 24 December 1956 SB received a letter on headed paper from Arthur S. Tamkin, PhD, of Florence, Massachusetts: “Dear Mr. Bellow, I found your novella ‘Seize the Day’ very entertaining particularly because of the coincidence of the similarities between myself and your fictitious character Dr. Tamkin. It struck me as astounding that we both shared the same name, title, profession, religion, and even interests, viz., financial speculation. How did you ever dream up such a character?”

  48. ​Both SB quotations from “I Got a Scheme!,” p. 83.

  49. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 236.

  50. ​Dr. Tamkin had a real-life original, SB told Roth in “I Got a Scheme!,” p. 84: “He was a friend of two friends. The second friends were a European couple whom I liked very much, and their only child had been killed in an accident and ‘Dr. Tamkin’ came and took charge, emotional charge, of the family, as he would. And I hated him for it. I saw what he was doing; he had no feeling for these people. He was just a scatterbrain, a poseur. Self-anointed helper of mankind, full of generosity to everybody. That was the real background of this foolish grotesque. She was a Jewish Frenchwoman. He was a German Jew. Their child, about fifteen years old, was knocked down in the street by a truck on his way home from school.”

  51. ​For a reading of Seize the Day that takes Tommy as an overgrown child, see Judith Oster, “The Reader as Parent in Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day,” in the Saul Bellow Journal 24, no 1 (Winter–Spring 2011): “the adult Tommy—himself by contrast a devoted father—is portrayed as a child at the same time that we are reminded of his adult status. No matter how often we are made aware of his full-grown size (given Tommy’s self-descriptions as ‘hippopotamus’ or ‘rhino’) as well as his very adult concerns, he is called a child by others, talked to as one would talk to a child, cries out—cries—and therefore sees himself as childlike, telling himself, ‘It’s time I stopped feeling like a kid toward him, a small son’ ” (p. 20). Greg Bellow, in Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 85, describes Abraham’s opinion of SB as follows: “an overgrown crybaby who had failed to absorb the lesson life taught him: the necessity of emotional toughness. I think that my father agreed but could do little to control his emotions.”

  52. ​According to Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 70, he and his father would roar together in the subway in New York whenever a train came rattling into the station.

  53. ​There is much in the story to suggest SB’s continuing faith in Reichian concepts. It is the narrator (not Tamkin, not Tommy) who employs Reichian terms to describe Tommy’s state. For Reich, the chest is the seat of physical and psychic stress. Tommy’s chest, we are told, is “congested with anger” (p. 25). When criticized by his father for giving money to his ex-wife, Tommy’s lips work in silence before he speaks: a sign that “the congestion was growing” (p. 38). He feels “a great knot of wrong tied tight within his chest” (p. 44). He can’t swallow, for “his chest pained him still” (p. 76). As Tommy hardens himself to avoid crying, he feels “a violent, vertical pain go through his chest, like that caused by a pocket of air under the collar bone” (p. 87). In the steam room with his father, “my chest is all up—I feel choked” (p. 91).

  54. ​For Malamud on Seize the Day, the source of this anecdote, see Philip Davis, Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 187–88.

  55. ​James Wood, How Fiction Works (2008; London: Vintage, 2009), p. 30. After praising the novel, Monroe Engel had a similar criticism (in an undated letter to SB, now among SB’s papers at the Regenstein): “I am shaken by the cry of anguish I know and remember well—which is your own voice. Only this is my trouble with the story too. That the voice is almost always your voice in the crises. That I don’t believe it belongs to Tommy Wilhelm. That when he’s in the telephone booth, for example, I hear you in there with him, like Cyrano making love for his friend.”

  56. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 83; the quote in parentheses is from David D. Galloway, “An Interview with Saul Bellow,” Audit-Poetry 3 (1963), reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 21.

  57. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 83.

  58. ​Here are the relevant stanzas from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in the 1817 version. The mariner, having shot the albatross, is marooned at sea:

  The many men so beautiful!

  And they all dead did lie:

  And a thousand thousand slimy things

  Lived on; and so did I. (ll.236–39)

  Then comes the moment of breakthrough:

  Beyond the shadow of the ship,

  I watched the water snakes:

  They moved in tracks of shining white,

  And when they reared, the elfish light

  Fell off in hoary flakes.

  Within the shadow of the ship

  I watched their rich attire:

  Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,

  They coiled and swam; and every track

  Was a flash of golden fire.

  O happy living things!

  No tongue their beauty might declare:

  A spring of love gushed from my heart,

  And I blessed them unaware:

  Sure my kind saint took pity on me,

  And I blessed them unaware.

  The selfsame moment I could pray;

  And from my neck so free

  The albatross fell off and sank

  Like lead into the sea. (ll.272–91)

  In Herzog Moses experiences “breakthroughs” like Tommy’s, of an orgasmic character. But he distrusts them: “What I seem to do, thought Herzog, is to inflame myself with drama, with ridicule, failure, denunciation, distortion, to inflame myself voluptuously, esthetically, until I reach a sexual climax. And that climax looks like a resolution and an answer to many ‘higher’ problems” (pp. 626–27).

  59. ​I am much indebted to Pifer’s reading of the novella in Saul Bellow Against the Grain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 78–95.

  60. ​Tommy’s experience with Hollywood begins in a way that recalls his creator’s experience. As was mentioned in Chapter 7, when Dangling Man was published in 1944 SB received a telephone cal
l from a studio executive at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The executive had seen the photograph of him from the jacket of Dangling Man and thought he could become a movie star. Though Bellow was neither handsome nor tough enough to be the male lead, the executive thought he could have a good career, so SB recalled, as the man “who loses the girl to the George Raft or Errol Flynn type” (Atlas, Biography, p. 101). In Seize the Day the agent tells Tommy: “I have you placed as the type that loses the girl to the George Raft type or the William Powell type” (p. 18).

  61. ​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), pp. 29–30, makes much of the name change; she also connects “Tommy” and Tommy’s story to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Gimpel the Fool,” in Yiddish, “Gimpel Tam” (pronounced “Tom”).

  62. ​Pifer, Saul Bellow Against the Grain, p. 84. Though I agree with Pifer’s reading here, the passage lists other reasons for Tommy’s rejection: “when Venice saw the results of the screen test he did a quick about-face. In those days Wilhelm had a speech difficulty. It was not a true stammer, it was a thickness of speech which the soundtrack exaggerated. The film showed that he had many peculiarities, otherwise unnoticeable. When he shrugged, his hands drew up within his sleeves. The vault of his chest was huge, but he really didn’t look strong under the lights” (p. 19).

  63. ​For the “hassle” with Brendan Gill, see Atlas, Biography, p. 247. As Gill told Atlas, it “barely even qualified as a dispute: At a literary conference at Smith College two years earlier, Bellow made a disparaging comment about The New Yorker, and Gill had risen to its defense. ‘Bellow replied in a way calculated to give further offense,’ as William Maxwell remembered the episode. In the ensuing debate, neither one ‘ever hesitated for a second before replying, and they had to an equal degree the talent for giving expression to anger, contempt, deliberate insolence, and personal dislike.’ ” SB’s animus toward The New Yorker derived not only from the Anthony West review of Augie and the decision to turn down Seize the Day, but from the rejection of another story SB submitted entitled “Legacies,” which sounds at first as though it might be about a character like his sister, Jane (the character is married to a dentist, has two sons, is overly protective, so much so that her son refuses to see her when she turns up at his fraternity house, a detail Katherine White canvassed her fellow New Yorker editors about, reporting in a letter of 6 April 1956 to Volkening, “I can find no man in the office who can believe that the son would utterly refuse to see his mother if she arrived with soup and blankets”). The story does not appear among SB’s papers in the Regenstein. Interestingly, though White thought it had potential—“it could have, I feel, a good deal of the wonderful crazy quality and the subtle overtones of that last Saul Bellow short story, “A Father-to-Be”—it was turned down, ultimately, because of length. “To go so deeply into Annie’s family and youth seems more like novel technique than like that of a short story.… All I can honestly say is that we like elements of the story very much, but feel that it is a slight one for its forty-six page length.”

  64. ​The appointment was only confirmed at the last minute, too late to be listed in the February 1957 Budget for Interdisciplinary Studies (previously General Studies, the department that housed the Humanities Program).

  65. ​SB, “John Berryman,” reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 268, a reprinting of SB’s foreword to Berryman’s novel Recovery (1973), also published in the New York Times Book Review, 27 May 1973 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  66. ​Eileen Simpson, Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir (1982; New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 267. See also Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (New York: William Morrow, 1990), p. 213: “Bellow he met at a friend’s house [in Princeton, in the fall of 1952], where he listened to him play Purcell ‘very sweetly’ on the recorder.”

  67. ​In Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 310.

  68. ​This note is from the Berryman Papers in the Special Collections of the University Library of the University of Minnesota, Unpublished Prose, Box 1, Folder “Amer. Writer 1958.” It is quoted in Catherine Fitzpatrick’s PhD thesis, “John Berryman and Saul Bellow: Literary Friendship and Mutual Influence” (University of Sheffield, August 2011), p. 44, which is where I found it, along with much other useful information on SB and Berryman, as well as much shrewd interpretation of their writings.

  69. ​Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), pp. 163–64.

  70. ​From the author’s note to John Berryman, The Dream Songs (2007; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), p. xx. In the author’s note Berryman explains the work’s titling: “This volume combines 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, comprising Books I through VII of a poem whose working title, since 1955, has been The Dream Songs.”

  71. ​SB visited Berryman in several drying-out facilities: “It’s always Pleasant St. Golden Valley Lotos Island” (Atlas, Biography, p. 425).

  72. ​The phrase comes from Chapter 31 of Lewis’s Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography (1950; Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1984), p. 183.

  73. ​John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, preface by Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976), p. 13.

  74. ​From Merwin’s introduction to Berryman, The Dream Songs, p. xxiii.

  75. ​For a sample of Berryman’s compellingly eccentric style of reading and speaking, see YouTube versions of him introducing and reciting Dream Song 14, “Life, friends, is boring.”

  76. ​See the 1850 version of Wordsworth’s Prelude, the “poem addressed to Coleridge,” Book XIV, lines 437–45.

  77. ​Catherine Fitzpatrick, “John Berryman and Saul Bellow,” p. 47 (see note 68). In the summer of 1951 Berryman lectured at the University of Vermont’s School of Modern Critical Studies in Burlington. One of Berryman’s lectures was “Africa,” though it was in fact about the modern American novel. It began by pointing out the number of novels—thirty—published by Americans and Britons during the last two decades that dealt with or were set in Africa. Paul Mariani, in Dream Song, p. 238, summarizes the lecture’s main point: “America itself had become so complex in the past forty years that even Henry James could not have dealt with what it had become.… So, just as Shakespeare and other Elizabethans had been drawn to Italy as to an idealized and exotic place, American novelists had been drawn to Africa.”

  78. ​Catherine Fitzpatrick, “John Berryman and Saul Bellow,” p. 47.

  79. ​These quotations are from pp. 389 and 155, but similar ones can be found throughout Henderson. Atlas, Biography, p. 273, offers “Wo, dem be trouble” while also claiming that the African women in the novel are “notable mainly for their big behinds.” Presumably it is the Wariri amazons Atlas is referring to: “Corset-like vests were the only garments worn by these large women, which were rather heavy or bunchy in build, and unusally expanded behind” (p. 235).

  80. ​Fitzpatrick, “John Berryman and Saul Bellow,” p. 48, where she dates Berryman’s reading of Wittke’s Tambo and Bones.

  81. ​For SB on Henderson, see Nina Steers, “Successor to Faulkner?,” Show 4, September 1964, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 34.

  82. ​SB, “Literature,” in The Great Ideas Today, ed. W. Benton (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1963), pp. 164, 170, 171. See also SB, ed., Great Jewish Short Stories (New York: Dell, 1963), p. 12, in which he claims that in Jewish literature “laughter and trembling are so curiously mingled that it is not easy to determine the relations of the two.”

  83. ​For the quoted Berryman phrases from the note of 1955, see Mariani, Dream Song, p. 301. Uncharacteristically, SB in “The Distracted Public,” his Romanes Lecture at Oxford (10 May 1990), reprinted in SB, IAAU, pp. 161–64, cites Nabokov as an ally in the matter of seriocomic he
roes, describing Humbert in Lolita in terms that recall Henry or Henderson. Such views about the changing nature of literary heroes were much in the air in the 1950s, as in Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957), an unavoidable topic in this period in university English Departments (and among the literature teachers in Humanities Programs). Frye, it has been suggested, was an indirect spur or stimulus for Ellison’s essay on blackface, which responds to an earlier essay by Ellison’s friend Stanley Edgar Hyman. According to Arnold Rampersad, in Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007; New York: Vintage, 2008), p. 351, Hyman’s essay applied Frye’s “archytypal” criticism to black stereotypes. SB’s talk of the turning inside out of late-Romantic attitudes recalls Frye’s sequencing of genres in Anatomy of Criticism. This sequencing ends with a phase of satire in which comedy derives from the humiliation and embarrassment of the antihero.

  84. ​SB, “John Berryman,” SB, IAAU, p. 272.

  85. ​Here is Chapman, SB’s acknowledged starting point for Henderson, in an interview with Robert H. Boyle, “Step in and Enjoy the Tumult,” Sports Illustrated (13 June 1977): “You can abolish rectitude, you can abolish the laws of gravity, but don’t do away with good old American hogwash”; “ ‘Winty’ [Aldrich, Chapman’s cousin] is the essence of nothing. He has the personality of an unsuccessful undertaker and uses semicolons when he writes. He knits with his toes.”

  86. ​See, for example, Dream Song 60: “You may be right, Friend Bones. / Indeed you is. Dey flyin ober de world, / de pilots ober ofays” (etc.).

  87. ​“An Interview with John Berryman,” conducted by John Plotz of the Harvard Advocate, 27 October 1968, reprinted in Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry Thomas (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), p. 7.