The Life of Saul Bellow Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2015 by Zachary Leader

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House, Ltd., Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Permissions acknowledgments can be found following the index.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Leader, Zachary, author.

  The life of Saul Bellow : to fame and fortune, 1915–1964 / by Zachary Leader.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-307-26883-9 (hardcover)—isbn 978-1-101-87467-7 (eBook)

  1. Bellow, Saul. 2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography.

  I. Title.

  PS3503.E4488Z736 2015

  813′.52—dc23

  [B] 2014020092

  Cover photograph courtesy of the Saul Bellow Literary Estate

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  v3.1

  To Alice

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction: Bellow and Biography

  1. Russia/Abraham

  2. Canada/Liza

  3. Chicago/Maury

  4. Tuley

  5. Politics/Anthropology

  6. Anita/Dangling

  7. New York

  8. Minneapolis

  9. Paris

  10. Princeton/Delmore

  11. Augie/Bard/Sasha

  12. Pyramid Lake

  13. Betrayal

  14. Susan/Herzog

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources

  Notes

  Index

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Additional Illustrations

  Other Books by This Author

  List of Illustrations

  1 Abraham Bellow

  2 Liza and the children, Lachine, 1918

  3 Lynne, Marge, Maury, and Joel

  4 Eleanor Fox at eighteen

  5 Front page, The Daily Northwestern, February 19, 1936

  6 SB and Anita

  7 The editorial board of Partisan Review

  8 SB and Herbert McClosky on the Marine Tiger

  9 “Kappy” and Celia Kaplan in a Paris nightclub

  10 Sondra “Sasha” Tschacbasov

  11 Bard College Literature Division

  12 Pyramid Lake

  13 SB and Jack Ludwig

  14 Susan Glassman Bellow

  Additional Illustrations

  15 Moses Gordin, SB’s maternal grandfather

  16 Shulamith Belo, SB’s paternal grandmother

  17 Sara Gordin, SB’s maternal grandmother

  18 Houses in the Jewish district, Druya

  19 Jewish cemetery, Druya

  20 Abraham Bellow, SB’s father

  21 Liza Bellow, SB’s mother

  22 Lachine Canal, Canada

  23 130 Eighth Avenue, Lachine, Canada

  24 Rue Napoleon, at the crossing with rue St. Dominique, in the Jewish district of Montreal

  25 The Bellow family, Montreal, c. 1920

  26 Royal Victoria Hospital

  27 Sam and SB, c. 1924

  28 SB and sister Jane

  29 SB’s first home in Chicago, 2629 West Augusta Street, in Humboldt Park, 2014

  30 Sam Freifeld, SB’s friend, early twenties

  31 David Peltz, SB’s friend, late teens

  32 Ethel and Ben Freifeld, Chicago, early 1940s

  33 Sydney J. Harris

  34 Oscar Tarcov at sixteen, 1935

  35 Saul Bellow at fourteen, summer 1929

  36 Isaac Rosenfeld

  37 The wedding of Maury and Marge Bellows, 1934

  38 Maury Bellows

  39 Sam Bellows

  40 University of Chicago

  41 SB revisiting Goff House, 1957

  42 Northwestern University, mid-1930s

  43 Melville Herskovits, professor of anthropology, Northwestern University, early 1930s

  44 SB and Anita

  45 Edith and Oscar Tarcov

  46 Cora and Herb Passin

  47 Vasiliki and Isaac Rosenfeld

  48 SB, Anita, Kappy, New York, 1940

  49 SB and Mel Tumin, Evanston, 1942

  50 Daniel P. and Jule Mannix and their American bald eagle, Mexico, 1940

  51 Trotsky assassinated, Mexico City, 1940

  52 SB and Anita, Mexico, 1940

  53 Lionel and Diana Trilling, in Riverside Park, near Columbia University, 1942

  54 Alfred Kazin, New York, 1946

  55 Heinrich Blücher and Hannah Arendt, 1960

  56 New York intellectuals

  57 David Bazelon, SB’s friend from Greenwich Village days

  58 Clement Greenberg and Barnett Newman at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, 1959

  59 Harold Rosenberg

  60 Arthur Lidov

  61 Mitzi and Herb McClosky, c. 1943

  62 SB and Greg (seven weeks old), August 25, 1944

  63 Eleanor Clark, Robert Penn Warren, and their daughter, 1954

  64 SB in Spain, 1947

  65 Max Kampelman, SB’s lodger in Minneapolis

  66 Bellow home, 58 Orlin Avenue, Prospect Park, Minneapolis

  67 Diarmuid Russell and Henry Volkening, SB’s agents

  68 Monroe Engel, SB’s editor at Viking, late 1950s

  69 Sidney Hook, 1949

  70 24 rue Marbeuf, site of the Bellows’ first Paris apartment

  71 The cafés of Saint-Germain, 1946

  72 Kappy in his apartment at 132 boulevard du Montparnasse, 1940s

  73 Paolo Milano

  74 SB in Salzburg, 1950

  75 Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Austria

  76 SB, Anita, and Greg in Rome, 1950

  77 Joel Bellows’s Bar Mitzvah, 1952

  78 Group photo at Yaddo, 1953

  79 Theodore Roethke

  80 Bernard Malamud, 1957

  81 R. P. Blackmur, a model for Professor Sewall

  82 Delmore Schwartz at the White Horse Tavern, 1959

  83 John Berryman, 1966

  84 Irving Howe, 1961

  85 Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, London, 1954

  86 Chanler Chapman, the model for Eugene Henderson

  87 Fanny and Ralph Ellison, c. 1960

  88 Ted Hoffman and Greg Bellow, Tivoli, 1957

  89 SB, Greg Bellow, Jesse Reichek, at Tivoli, Dutchess County, New York, 1957

  90 Gore Vidal on the porch of Edgewater

  91 Pyramid Lake Guest Ranch

  92 Joan and Harry Drackert, proprietors of the Pyramid Lake Guest Ranch

  93 Pascal “Pat” Covici, SB’s editor at Viking

  94 Richard Stern, novelist, professor of English, University of Chicago

  95 Philip Roth, Martha’s Vineyard

  96 SB, guest lecturer in Richard Stern’s creative writing class

  97 Sasha, SB, and Adam, Tivoli, c. 1957

  98 SB and Adam, Chicago, 1957

  99 Paul Meehl, professor of psychology, University of Minnesota

  100 3139 East Calhoun Parkway, Minneapolis

  101 Ralph Ross, chair of humanities, University of Minnesota, 1961

  102 Greg Bellow and Joseph Warren Beach, Minneapolis

  103 Bette Howland, c. 1956

  104 Rosette Lamont


  105 Susan and SB, Martha’s Vineyard, 1964

  106 Susan Glassman Bellow

  107 Penny and Tom McMahon, Keith Botsford, and SB, Puerto Rico, 1961

  108 John U. Nef, founding chair of the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago

  109 Edward Shils, a friend and colleague at the Committee on Social Thought

  110 SB, 1964

  Introduction: Bellow and Biography

  SAUL BELLOW WAS the most decorated writer in American history, the winner, among other awards, of the Nobel Prize for Literature, three National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Formentor Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for the Novel, and the titles Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, awarded by the French Republic. At his death in 2005, as for much of his adult life, his standing in American literature could not have been higher.1 On his deathbed, however, for a moment at least, none of this worldly acclaim mattered. As he slipped in and out of consciousness, Bellow opened his eyes, looked intently at his friend Eugene Goodheart, and asked: “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” “Jerk” is a Bellow word (“he always thought I was a jerk,” Bellow has said of his father2); “man” here means “mensch,” human being, someone to rely on, someone admirable, responsible, a person of character; being a mensch need have nothing to do with success, status, or wealth. What mattered at the end, Bellow’s question implies, was the life he had led as a man.

  The competing claims of life and art—the writer’s “choice,” according to Yeats—is a prominent theme in many biographies.3 It was also a theme in Bellow’s fiction, where it figures most obviously in his use of real-life episodes and characters, often only thinly disguised. In some novels and stories, people he knew, including friends and relations, were not only bound to see themselves depicted but they were meant to do so. “By the time I’m through with him,” he is reported to have said of the model for Valentine Gersbach in Herzog (1964), “he’ll be laughed right out of the literature business.”4 “I’ll get you,” he threatened his third wife, Susan, before he “loused her up” as the shrewish Denise in Humboldt’s Gift (1975) (“I loved the way he loused up Sewell,” comments Charlie Citrine, of Humboldt’s depiction of a character based on R. P. Blackmur). “You’ve been a real Klondike,” he told her; “I’ll grind you to powder. Your name will be mud.”5 Bellow’s fury in these instances (at the close friend who was cuckolding him, at the ex-wife he thought was bleeding him dry) was put to artistic use, though not without collateral damage. “My fictional life in a Bellow novel put me in the public domain,” Susan Bellow wrote in an unpublished essay entitled “Mugging the Muse.” “Not one of the outrageous questions over the years, however, asked about the dark heart of the matter. How does the prize winner’s young and vulnerable son feel when asked in school if his mother is really so awful? Or when told by a buddy, who had the word from his mother, ‘Don’t read it. Your father did a number on your mom.’ ”6 “I was horrified,” writes one of the real-life models for Katrina Goliger, the mistress of Victor Wulpy, an unmistakable portrait of the art critic Harold Rosenberg, in the story “What Kind of a Day Did You Have?” On the eve of the story’s appearance the real-life model was called by a friend who had read it and recognized her in Katrina: “I was dumbfounded … I never meant her to know.” Bellow was Rosenberg’s colleague and friend and was fully aware “that more than five years after Harold’s death, May Rosenberg [his widow], and his daughter, Patia, were still very much alive. Not only were they still grieving—I was sure they were still furious enough with me about this.”7

  Bellow openly acknowledged the costs involved in such instances, to the user as well as the used. In Humboldt’s Gift, Citrine, the Bellow-like protagonist, has made a fortune out of a play based on the character of his friend, the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher. “You took my personality and exploited it in writing your Trenck” (p. 338), protests Humboldt, a charge Citrine does not deny. Humboldt is himself based in large part on the poet Delmore Schwartz, whom Bellow met in the 1940s, when Schwartz worked at Partisan Review. By all accounts Schwartz was as brilliant and unstable a character as Humboldt is in Bellow’s novel. Like Schwartz, Humboldt is manic-depressive, and in one of his manic moods, when he thinks Stevenson will defeat Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential election, he confides to Citrine that he expects to become a sort of cultural advisor in the new administration, in charge of subsidies and grants. In this, as in other respects, he recalls Falstaff (“the laws of England are at my commandment,” Falstaff declares, when he wrongly thinks Henry IV dead), making Citrine a sort of Prince Hal, using and discarding Humboldt for a greater good (“art” rather than the state) or for ambition.8

  This reading is bolstered by biographical fact: the Humboldt strand of the novel was born out of an incident in 1966 on a street in New York, when Bellow caught sight of the unhinged and impoverished Schwartz and hid from him (as Citrine hides from Humboldt in a similar scene in the novel). According to his friend Maggie Staats Simmons, who was with him at the time, Bellow was as distressed by his own behavior (“I know thee not, old man,”9 says the newly elevated Henry) as by Schwartz’s condition. When Schwartz passed by, Simmons told me, Bellow sat down with her and recounted what would become “pretty much the whole of the Humboldt part of Humboldt’s Gift.” The experience was put to immediate use. Citrine’s behavior as a writer is comparable: “While I shed tears for my dead I was also patting down their graves with my shovel. For I did write biographies, and the deceased were my bread and butter. The deceased had earned my French decoration and got me into the White House” (p. 115). Those words report Denise’s view, but elsewhere they are seconded by Citrine himself. “I did incorporate other people into myself and consume them. When they died I passionately mourned. I said I would continue their work and their lives. But wasn’t it a fact that I added their strength to mine? Didn’t I have an eye on them in the days of their vigor and glory?” (p. 282). The “gift” Humboldt gives Citrine, the literal gift, is a screenplay about a writer, Corcoran, whose “marvelous” book cannot be published because “it would hurt his wife and destroy his marriage.” Yet “not to publish would kill him.” “I have borrowed from you to create this Corcoran” (p. 338), Humboldt writes to Citrine.

  BELLOW’S USE OF PEOPLE he knew, his responsibility toward them, the effect using them has on his character, figure as fictionalized topics throughout his writing, from The Adventures of Augie March (1953) (whose hero, “a Columbus of those near-at-hand,” is nicknamed Bolingbroke, a user as ruthless and calculating as his son, Prince Hal) to Ravelstein (2000) (the fictional memoir of a figure as Falstaffian as Humboldt). Augie is called “Bolingbroke” at the poker table: “I can’t tell when you’re bluffing because you always look so innocent. Nobody can really be as innocent as all that,” a view Augie confirms: “My invention and special thing was simplicity. I wanted simplicity and denied complexity, and in this I was guileful and suppressed many patents in my secret heart.”10 Bolingbroke is comparably guileful. He may see his way to Richard’s throne, as Hazlitt puts it, “afar off,” but he bides his time, “only seizing it when he has it within reach, humble, crafty, bold, and aspiring.”11 These are accusations leveled at the writer-figures in Bellow’s novels, among whom I would number Augie, the author, after all, of his adventures. It is not true, as Robert Penn Warren complained in an admiring review, that Augie “has no commitments”; the freedom he seeks is a writer’s freedom, a detachment that allows him, as he puts it of the international circle that makes up his poker school, to learn “their language fast” (p. 802), even while they are boring him. When friends complain that he “couldn’t be hurt enough by the fate of other people” (p. 899), Augie does not demur.12 At times his charm recalls that of his creator, described by Philip Roth in an acknowledged fictional portrait as “like a moat so oceanic that you could not even see the great turreted and buttressed thing it had been dug to protect. You couldn’t even find the dr
awbridge.”13

  The real-life model for Ravelstein, Allan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind (1987), had thought long and hard about the relation between Hal and Falstaff. Shortly before his death in 1992, he completed the final revision of Love and Friendship (1993), a collection of essays on Plato, Rousseau, four nineteenth-century novels, four Shakespeare plays, and “Two Strange Couples: Hal and Falstaff, Montaigne and La Boétie.” In the dozen years before the book’s publication, Bloom and Bellow, colleagues at the University of Chicago, “team-taught” all the works and authors it discusses, and Bellow had read and commented on the book in draft.14 Two aspects of Bloom’s treatment of the Hal-Falstaff relation stand out. The first is his depiction of Falstaff as a type of Socrates, a friend of the young and enemy not only of paternal authority but of convention and worldly accomplishment. Shakespeare describes Falstaff’s death exactly as Plato describes Socrates’s death, his body growing cold “from the feet up.” Bloom himself, like Ravelstein, combined Socrates’s refusal to be frightened of death with Falstaff’s hedonism: “He will not change his life,” writes Bloom of Falstaff, “for example his sexual behavior, in order to preserve it. He wishes to live as long as possible enjoying the real pleasures of food, drink, sex and wit.”15

  The second striking feature of Bloom’s account of the Hal-Falstaff friendship is its implicit approval of Hal’s rejection of Falstaff. Once he returns to the world of his father, Hal “succeeds, at least in his own lifetime, in bringing an end to the plague of civil war, establishing his own monarchy solidly, and expanding England’s territory and influence. He has none of the defects of the other kings Shakespeare treats. His rule provides a textbook for future rulers.”16 These achievements derive in part from the skills or lessons Hal learns in Falstaff’s company: “I’ll so offend,” he says, “to make offence a skill” (King Henry IV, Part One, I.ii.211–12). As Henry V, he rouses his men at Agincourt with a common touch imbibed at the Boar’s Head. Calculation as well as self-disgust underlie the Prince’s consorting with tapsters, so that “I can drink with any tinker in his own language.” When the Dauphin mocks Henry V for his “wilder days,” he does so, “not measuring what use we made of them” (King Henry V, I.ii.266–67). Bloom offers no criticism of Hal’s use of others, his calculating watchfulness. Bloom approves this calculation.