The Life of Saul Bellow
Page 108
88. When Berryman published Love & Fame (1970) he dropped the distinction between voice and creator. SB corresponded with Anne Sexton in this period. In a brief undated letter he writes, “At this particular point we seem to have entered each other’s minds. A marriage of true minds, or meeting arranged by Agape. (Where has Eros gotten me?) … Your poem is genuinely Hendersonian—‘breathing in loops like a green hen’ is absolutely IT! Yours in true-minded friendship, Saul Bellow.”
89. Fitzpatrick, “John Berryman and Saul Bellow,” p. 83, dates this letter, found among the SB papers in the Regenstein, “probably June 1 1964”; Fitzpatrick also draws attention to a structural debt Herzog owes to The Dream Songs. Herzog’s letters, she argues, function as do Henry’s dreams: “both are inherently self-contained, and allow for the full and forcible expression of an idea or image and at the same time for absolute contingency, or deniability” (p. 109).
90. SB, “John Berryman,” SB, IAAU, p. 271. In addition to this sequence of “inter-relations” there were specific borrowings, of favorite phrases (“pal,” “jerk”) and anecdotes. “Let us suppose, valleys & such ago,” begins Dream Song 15, which retells an SB anecdote in its first two stanzas, about a Polish girl SB encountered in a bar. “Excusez mon vol,” wrote Berryman to SB on 14 August 1962, “but I warned you ten years ago that if by some point you hadn’t used this, I would.”
91. See Sheila Wolfe, “Seek Industry to Use Site of Trailer Camp,”27 May 1957, also “Trailer Park Suit Trial to Begin,” 9 May 1957, in Chicago Tribune.
92. Richard Stern was born in New York in 1928 and from the age “of twelve or thirteen” knew he wanted to be a writer. He studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he befriended the poets Edgar Bowers and Donald Justice, and got to know Justice’s sister, Eleanor, who was married to the Tennessee writer Peter Taylor. Through Taylor, he connected with John Crowe Ransom (who would publish his first stories in The Kenyon Review) and other Southern writers in and around Vanderbilt. Stern got an MA in English from Harvard, taught in France and Germany for two years on a Fulbright Fellowship, and then returned to the United States to do a PhD at the University of Iowa, the only place in the country where one could get a doctorate for creative writing (in his case for a collection of stories). After teaching for a year at Connecticut College, he got the job at Chicago.
93. SB, “The Swamp of Prosperity,” review of Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, in Commentary (July 1959).
94. In Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (1979; New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 57 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers), Abravanel’s books are described by Zuckerman as “seething with unbuttoned and aggressive innocence.… [Abravanel] found irresistible all vital and dubious types, not excluding the swindlers of both sexes who trampled upon the hearts of his optimistic, undone heroes; the writer who could locate the hypnotic core in the most devious American self-seeker and lead him to disclose, in spirited locutions all his own, the depths of his conniving soul; the writer whose absorption with ‘the grand human discord’ made every paragraph a little novel in itself, every page packed as tight as Dickens or Dostoyevsky with the latest news of manias, temptations, passions, and dreams, with mankind aflame with feeling.”
95. There were commercial airline flights from Minneapolis to Chicago. When Rosenfeld died early in the summer of 1956, Phil Siegelman took one to attend the funeral (according to an email from Ellen Siegelman, 30 June 2013). In class the students criticize Zuckerman’s story in ways that explain what Roth means by “the points of view that criticism came in.” When Abravanel discusses the story he does so “with oblique admiration, defending it, largely with his laugh, from criticism brought by the orthodox Forsterites that my narrator was ‘two-dimensional’ instead of being ‘round’ like the characters he’s read about in Aspects of the Novel” (p. 63).
96. Zuckerman describes how he felt as he listened to what the mistress was telling him:
the effect would have been no more stunning if she had said, “After the reception I have to get back to the hotel to interview Marshal Tito in the bar—but while I do, Felix can rise into Heaven from the lobby and discuss your funny little mimeographed story with the author of The Brothers Karamazov. We all met in Siberia when Felix and I did the prison tour.” Somewhere behind me I heard Abravanel applying himself to another serious question from the graduate division. “Alienation? Oh,” he said, with that light laugh, “let the other guy be alienated” (p. 62).
97. The phrase is Moody Prior’s, quoted in an article in the Daily Northwestern (26 November 1957) entitled “Author on NU Faculty During Next Quarter,” the source also of details of SB’s teaching.
98. SB to Ralph Ellison, 14 February 1958.
99. Atlas, Biography, p. 259. Sasha thought the look likely to have been misinterpreted (it probably meant nothing more than “pick up a glass”).
100. The press release is dated 14 February 1958. It is among the SB papers in University Archives, Northwestern University Library. Others elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in SB’s year were Louise Bogan, Aaron Copland, Malcolm Cowley, and Robert Penn Warren.
101. See Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell, A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982), pp. 142–43.
102. SB, “Distractions of a Fiction Writer,” in Granville Hicks, ed., The Living Novel: A Symposium (New York, Macmillan, 1957), pp. 3–4 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).
103. See Rosette Lamont, “Bellow Observed: A Serial Portrait,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas 8, no. 1 (Fall 1974): 256: “A woman painter who imagined herself to be a salonnière was told by Bellow, as she was lionizing him and attempting to discuss with him the American Novel: ‘Literature is too serious a topic to waste on those who know nothing about it.’ ”
104. SB’s dictating Henderson has been compared to Henry James composing in his head (see Atlas, Biography, p. 262), though James was composing in his head and SB reading from a handwritten manuscript, which he corrected, cut, and added to as he went along.
13. BETRAYAL
1. This quotation comes from p. 100 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.
2. From an interview with the author. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent Sasha quotations or recollections are from interviews with the author.
3. Though Sasha does not specify, there were a number of reasons why “no one could talk to Saul”: because of the humiliation it would cause him, or the fury it would provoke, or the fear that he would retaliate “and try to take Adam from me” (p. 102), or the damage his knowing might cause Ludwig’s career.
4. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 93.
5. Ibid., p. 93 (for the quote about Reichek and the rickety bicycle), p. 94 (for Greg and capitalism).
6. Tom Fitzpatrick, Chicago Sun-Times, “Bellow’s Books Too Deep,”16 March 1972.
7. Nathan Tarcov was ten and his sister, Miriam, fifteen, at the time of their father’s heart attack in early July. Oscar was taken to a hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire, and after a brief stay at a nearby bed-and-breakfast, the children were taken first to Beebee de Regnier’s apartment in Manhattan, then to Tivoli. During this time Edith Tarcov stayed in Hanover with Oscar. The children spent several weeks in camp in Cold Spring, New York, by which time Oscar and Edith had returned home. Neither Nathan nor Miriam recalls anything about Saul and Sasha that summer (email from Nathan Tarcov, 17 July 2013).
8. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 94.
9. Both Ross quotations from Atlas, Biography, p. 263.
10. Ruth Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), pp. 134, 135.
11. Atlas, Biography, p. 262, says SB drove from Tivoli, a view supported by SB to Jos
ephine Herbst, 4 January 1959; Sasha’s memoir suggests he drove from Minneapolis.
12. SB’s description of what happened to Larry, in the letter of 31 January 1959 to Josephine Herbst, was simple and poignant: “being in great trouble, and seeing no way out, he killed himself.” Larry had joined the army the previous year, was caught stealing “and perhaps more” (Greg’s phrase) and was being held in a stockade in the Presidio, a military base in San Francisco, now a park (Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 95, also for Sam’s having “stopped asking questions”).
13. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart, p. 95.
14. Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007; New York: Vintage, 2008), p. 349.
15. Granville Hicks, ed., The Living Novel: A Symposium (New York: Macmillan, 1957), pp. 83, 76 (Ellison’s essay henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).
16. Ellison’s skills as a handyman came from an unhappy stint as a janitor. He had a lifelong interest in technology and electronics. According to his friend David Sarser, “He was always for anything new … and he loved gadgets and devices and machines. He would stop his writing in a second if there was something fresh to explore in science or technology” (Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography, p. 252).
17. Ralph Ellison to SB, 21 September 1958, quoted in ibid., p. 362.
18. SB to Albert Murray, 27 June 1959, quoted in ibid., p. 361.
19. The nature of Cookie’s help is unspecified by either SB or Sasha.
20. Atlas, Biography, p. 264.
21. Ibid., p. 263.
22. The intimacy of this letter to Herbst is explained by SB’s long silence in correspondence: “I don’t tell you this to have it weigh on your heart … but only because it will seem loutish of me not to have answered.”
23. For “queenliness,” see SB to Ralph Ellison, 10 February 1959: “it’s a relief to know that Sasha’s behavior has an organic cause in part, and all the queenliness is in the same class as my gray hairs or my freckles.”
24. Swados shared the editors’ feeling that writers should get out into the world. As he wrote to SB in a letter of 14 April 1959: “Only The Nation wants me to do things … that involve seeing and talking to real living human beings. Everybody else wants to know what I think, sitting on my ass in the country, about the beats, the angries, and Jesus Christ Salinger, and it is all such a fucking bore I could scream.”
25. SB to Josephine Herbst, 18 February 1959. See also, from same letter: “To some extent it will of course be literary, but we want to avoid overemphasis on literature. There’ll be no criticism in it, or very little.”
26. See SB, “Great and Not So Great Expectations,” The Noble Savage, issue 3 (May 1961), reprinted in SB and Keith Botsford, eds. Editors: The Best from Five Decades (London: Toby Press, 2001), p. 11.
27. Atlas, Biography, p. 279.
28. Keith Botsford, email to the author, 30 July 2013.
29. Keith Botsford, “On the Facts,” in SB and Botsford, eds., Editors, p. 5.
30. The letter to Slate, presumably undated, is quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 281.
31. Alfred Kazin, 26 May 1961, Journal 47. Kazin’s Journals are located in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Unpublished entries involving SB were kindly provided to me by Richard M. Cook, ed. of Alfred Kazin’s Journals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Atlas, Biography, p. 281, describes the quintessential Noble Savage piece as “caustic, irreverent, at once erudite and deflating of pretension.”
32. Botsford replied to SB: “Frankly you are too ready to be suspicious of the motives of others,” quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 280. In Botsford’s Fragments VI, he takes issue with Atlas’s account: “Pace Jimmy Atlas or next-generation readers like Jim Burns, Saul was no Mother Hen with Jack and myself as quarrelsome chicks. Jack was early out: published once, he never re-surfaced” (p. 40). Ludwig was officially and unwillingly out by February 1961, when most of issue 3 (May 1961) had been assembled, though, as we’ve seen, according to SB he’d done little work for the issue.
33. SB, “Great and Not So Great Expectations,” in SB and Botsford, eds., Editors, p. 7.
34. SB to Josephine Herbst, 19 February 1959, in which he also elaborates on his attitude to reviews: “I can’t allow myself to brood on any of it, good or bad. I’ve seen more than one reader stop his work to concern himself for a year or two or three with the fate of a particular book then to discover that he had lost a thread.” For reviews, see Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination, p. 132: “Writing for the New Republic, a month after Henderson appeared, Reed Whittemore reviewed the early reviews and counted four approvals with qualifications, five disapprovals, with qualifications, and then he registered his vote and brought the tally to four and six.” The Whittemore review was titled “Safari Among the Wariri,” New Republic, 16 March 1959. On 6 April 1959, SB wrote to Pat Covici asking about sales: “you said it wouldn’t sell a hundred fifty thousand copies. Of course not. But forty? Thirty? Even thirty would be very good. It would pay the mortgage at Tivoli.” In the event, the novel failed to earn back his advance, amounting to $15,000. It lasted only three weeks on the bestseller list and in the end, according to Atlas, “just about” sold twenty thousand copies, “respectable sales but hardly a commercial triumph” (Biography, pp. 268, 276).
35. SB quotations from “I Got a Scheme!,” p. 85.
36. Dwight Macdonald, no longer at PR, was so angered by Hardwick’s review that he sent a letter of rebuttal to the magazine insisting that they print it in the same issue. SB himself wrote in protest to William Phillips on 13 July 1959: “Every few months in PR your rats gnaw at my toes. It would be unnatural if I did not notice.”
37. Orville Prescott voices similar complaints in his 23 February 1959 review in the daily New York Times: “many readers will probably conclude that Mr. Bellow has tried to convey it [the book’s meaning or message] in an unfortunate form. His African background and his melodramatic adventures are not intended to be realistic. But somehow they can’t be accepted as either fantasy or allegory. Too often they just seem silly. And Henderson himself is not an interesting character. It may well be that he actually resembles other wastrels who have tried to escape from themselves on expeditions to far places, but, for all his bluster and ego, all his kindness and humility, all his recondite references to art, literature and history, Henderson remains only a bore cursed with the most embarrassing flow of fancy talk in a library of recent fiction.”
38. “I Got a Scheme!,” p. 85.
39. Daniel Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), p. 106, points to what he calls the “College Outline Romanticism” of an earlier version of the novel, which is “subdued” in revision: “the final version gives us a more sophisticated Romanticism.” According to Atlas, Biography, p. 271n., “Bellow carried a copy of The Portable Blake around with him for years and told Richard Stern that when he was writing Henderson the lion imagery of ‘Little Girl Lost’ in Songs of Innocence and [of] Experience had ‘sunk deeply’ into his unconscious.”
40. Eusebio L. Rodrigues, “Saul Bellow’s Henderson as America,” The Centennial Review 20, no. 2 (1976): 190.
41. Richard Stern, “Henderson’s Bellow,” The Kenyon Review 21, no. 4 (Autumn 1959): p. 661n.
42. Atlas, Biography, p. 272. For Daniel Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, p. 112, “it was not Reich but Paul Schilder who was the greater influence. Bellow has explicitly said as much in a letter to the writer and translator Jascha Kessler: ‘It was not … Reich who got me going in Henderson but a neurophysiologist named Paul Schilder whose book The Image and Idea (sic Appearance) of the Human Body came highly recommended.’ ” Schilder is explicitly named in manuscript versions but not in the finished novel.
43. Eusebio L. Rodrigues, “Reichianism in ‘Henderson the Rain King,’ ” Criticism 15, no. 3 (Summer 1973): 225.
44. According to Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, p. 111.
45. Manea, “Conversation,” pp. 31, 18.
46. Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination, p. 122.
47. David D. Galloway, “An Interview with Saul Bellow, Audit-Poetry 3 (1963), reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 21.
48. Interview with Nina Steers, “Successor to Faulkner?,” Show 4 1964, in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 34.
49. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 48.
50. From an interview with the author. That the language of Henderson was made possible by Augie, SB himself suggests in a letter of 29 June 1960 to Susan Glassman: “I made the discovery in it [Augie, that is] about language and character from which Henderson arose.”
51. “I Got a Scheme!,” p. 85.
52. Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision, p. 100.
53. Podhoretz’s review, “Saul Bellow’s Power-Filled, Puzzling Novel of a Millionaire in Africa,” appeared in the New York Herald-Tribune on 22 February 1959.
54. Atlas, Biography, p. 277.
55. SB to Covici, 27 February 1959. The letter from Malamud was dated
26 February; from Miller, 21 April 1959. On 18 March, the art historian Meyer Schapiro wrote to SB praising “the strange Africa you’ve created, which is neither the ethnologists’ nor the modern traveller’s—it is something more human, more poetic, too.”
56. Harris was teaching at San Francisco State University and saw a letter of reference SB had written for Catherine Lindsay, who had applied for a teaching post there, which she got. He was so taken with the reference that he wrote instantly to SB praising both the letter and SB’s fiction. In his account of this episode in Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 10, Harris mentions that Lindsay “told me that she was Lily in Henderson the Rain King. True, she was one of ‘these big beauties,’ as Henderson calls her.”