Love and Strife (1965-2005) Read online

  ALSO BY ZACHARY LEADER

  Reading Blake’s Songs

  Writer’s Block

  Revision and Romantic Authorship

  The Life of Kingsley Amis

  The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964

  EDITED BY ZACHARY LEADER

  Romantic Period Writings, 1798–1832: An Anthology

  (with Ian Haywood)

  The Letters of Kingsley Amis

  On Modern British Fiction

  Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works

  (with Michael O’Neill)

  The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and Their Contemporaries

  On Life-Writing

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2018 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 distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

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

  Permissions for use of previously published and unpublished materials can be found on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Leader, Zachary, author.

  Title: The life of Saul Bellow : love and strife, 1965–2005 / By Zachary Leader.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017053381 (print) | LCCN 2017056393 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101875179 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101875162 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Bellow, Saul. | Novelists, American—20th century—Biography.

  Classification: LCC PS 3503.E4488 (ebook) | LCC PS3503.E4488 Z7355 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.52 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017053381

  Ebook ISBN 9781101875179

  Cover photograph © Ferdinando Scianna / Magnum Photos

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Zachary Leader

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  1. Fame and Politics in the 1960s

  2. “All My Ladies Seem Furious”

  3. Bad Behavior

  4. A Better Man

  5. Distraction/Divorce/Anthroposophy

  6. The “Chicago Book” and The Dean’s December

  7. Nadir

  8. Janis Freedman/Allan Bloom/Politics

  9. To Seventy-Five

  10. Papuans and Zulus

  11. Intensive Care

  12. Ravelstein

  13. Love and Strife

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources

  Notes

  Permissions

  A Note About the Author

  Illustrations

  To Alice

  List of Illustrations

  1SB and Susan, Martha’s Vineyard, mid-1960s

  2Maggie Staats, New York, late 1960s

  3SB and students, Montreal, 1968

  4SB and Alexandra, London, mid-1970s

  5SB at Nobel Prize press conference, University of Chicago, 1976

  6SB at the second Jefferson Lecture, Chicago, 1977

  7Maury and Sam Bellows

  8Protesters at Cornell, 1969

  9SB and Janis on their wedding day, Vermont, August 25, 1989

  10Janis, SB, and Allan Bloom, Chicago, 1990

  11Grand Case, St. Martin, undated

  12Janis, Marje Horvitz, SB, and Beena Kamlani, Vermont, 2000

  13SB and Will Lautzenheiser, 2003

  14SB outside the Belasco Theatre, New York, 1964

  15Sam Levene as Bummidge, Broadway, 1964

  16Pat Covici and SB, early 1960s

  17Playbill for Under the Weather, 1966

  18Maggie Staats, SB, and Sam Goldberg at the French Consulate in New York, 1968

  19Arlette Landes and daughter Bonnie, Chicago, 1967

  20Bette Howland, 1985

  21Frances Gendlin, mid-1970s

  22SB and sons Adam and Daniel on Martha’s Vineyard, 1965

  23SB and Adam in England, 1969

  24SB and Daniel on Nantucket, 1969

  25Greg Bellow, 1969

  26Saul Steinberg drawing of Murchison Falls, Uganda

  27SB and David Peltz

  28Edward Shils lecturing

  29David Grene

  30Floyd Salas in the 1960s

  31David Shapiro and student protesters at Columbia University, 1968

  32SB in Japan, April 1972

  33Honorary degree recipients, Harvard University, 1972

  34SB and Herman Wouk in Aspen, 1970s

  35James Salter in Aspen, 1970s

  36Walter Pozen, 1967

  37SB in Aspen, 1974

  38SB, Alexandra, and her mother, Florica Bagdasar, 1970s

  39The Bellow family in Stockholm, December 1976

  40SB receiving the Nobel Prize, Stockholm, December 1976

  41The Saint Lucia ceremony, Stockholm, December 1976

  42SB and his publishers, Stockholm, December 13, 1976

  43Greg, Daniel, and Adam Bellow, Stockholm, December 1976

  44Alexandra, SB, Leon Wieseltier, and Daniel, Vermont, 1977

  45SB’s house in Vermont, 2008, built in the late 1970s

  46The Cloisters, 5805 Dorchester Avenue, Hyde Park

  47The Cloisters, ground floor corridor, Hyde Park

  485490 South Shore Drive, “The Vatican,” Hyde Park

  495825 Dorchester Avenue, Hyde Park

  50Rudolf Steiner

  51Owen Barfield, c. 1975

  52Peter Demay

  53William Hunt, early 1970s

  54SB and Joseph Epstein, 1970s

  55John Cheever, John Updike, and their wives at the National Book Award ceremony, 1964

  56SB and Edward H. Levi at the Jefferson Lecture, Chicago, 1977

  57SB and President Jimmy Carter, Washington, D.C., March 1979

  58Children at play, Robert Taylor Homes

  59Clair Patterson, Pasadena, California, 1993

  60Winston Moore, Warden of Cook County Jail, playing horseshoes, 1971

  61Philip Grew as a University of Chicago undergraduate, 1977

  625344 South Woodlawn Avenue, Hyde Park

  63Jonathan Kleinbard, 1983

  64Philip Grew, Umbria, 2016

  65T. J. McCarthy, early 1980s

  66Marion Siegel, Barney Singer, SB, Alexandra, and Howie Siegel in Victoria, British Columbia

  67Lesha Greengus, Jane Bellow Kauffman, and SB in Montreal

  68Eugene Kennedy and SB, early 1980s, Chicago

  69SB and Allan Bloom, Vermont

  70Harriet Wasserman

  71Andrew Wylie

  72Barley Alison

  73Joel Bellows

  74Adam Bellow and Rachel Newton at the time of their marriage, 1986

  75Daniel and Susan Bellow

  76Susan Bellow, Daniel Bellow and Heather Hershman (groom and bri
de), and SB, January 1996

  77Billy Rose, 1948

  78Nathan Tarcov

  79Allan Bloom, 1987

  80Leo Strauss

  81Faculty of the Committee on Social Thought, 1987

  82SB and Ada Aharoni, Haifa, 1987

  83SB, Shimon Peres, and a University of Haifa official, April 1987

  84SB and Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem, 1987

  85SB and President Ronald Reagan, Washington, D.C., 1988

  86Mark Harris, 1984

  87Ruth Miller, 1987

  88James Atlas, 2016

  89Brent Staples, 2005

  90SB, Rosie, and Martin Amis, Vermont

  91Cynthia Ozick

  92James Wood and SB, c. 2000

  93Ruth Wisse and SB, 2001, Brookline

  94SB and Chris Walsh in front of Crowninshield Road house, Brookline, mid-1990s

  95SB and Keith Botsford, Boston University, early 2000s

  96Crowninshield Road house, Brookline, 2017

  97John Silber

  98Guests assembled outside the Vermont house the day after SB’s surprise seventy-fifth birthday party

  99SB, Richard Stern, and Alane Rollings

  100SB and Philip Roth on the Connecticut River, Brattleboro, Vermont, 1998

  101David Peltz, 2008, Chicago

  102Stephanie Nelson and Janis Freedman Bellow awarded Ph.D.s, with David Grene and SB, University of Chicago, 1993

  103Roger Kaplan and daughter Chloe, Paris, early 1990s

  104François Furet

  105SB and Janis, with Sonia and Harvey Freedman in the background, Rosie barely visible

  106Gregory Bellow, 2005

  107Juliet Bellow, late 1990s

  108Janis and SB, Brookline, 1996

  109SB’s grave

  1

  Fame and Politics in the 1960s

  THE LAUNCH PARTY for Herzog was held on September 22, 1964, two days after Julian Moynihan pronounced the novel “a masterpiece” on the front page of The New York Times Book Review and Philip Rahv called Bellow “the finest stylist at present writing fiction in America” in a review in the New York Herald Tribune Book Week.1 Alfred Kazin was among the guests at the launch, and while waiting for his wife to arrive he amused himself by picking out “the customers for Saul’s party from the regulars at 21. It was so easy!” The regulars were better looking, the partygoers, “stamped with the difference of their background and their trade,” deeply depressing. In they came, “Arabel Porter and Katy Carver and all the old loves, would-be loves, friends and near friends, the hits and misses—even Vassiliki [Rosenfeld]. All so stale, isn’t it? All so bloody familiar?” Only Bellow impressed:

  Saul, our plebeian princeling and imaginative king, standing there, gray, compact, friendly and aloof, receiving his old friends whom he had invited to 21…Saul alone of all the old gang has achieved first-class status….Saul alone has made it, with the furious resistance of personal imagination to the staleness of the round. There’s more yet for me, he cries in his heart, more, much more! Nothing is stale, he cries, if only you look at it hard enough, see in it aspects of human fate in general. Put your story on the universal stage of time, and the old Chicago friends will seem as interesting as kings in the old history books.2

  Two days earlier, when the first reviews of Herzog appeared, Kazin had pondered Bellow’s public persona. The face he presented to the world, Kazin decided, resembled Charlie Chaplin’s “in that first photograph of the tramp—the face absolutely open to life, open, humble, almost childlike, in its concentrated wistfulness and naïve expectancy. Above all a face submissive to the fates.” This face, Kazin imagined, was worn by Herzog, and “Saul himself now wears [it] in company. He sits in the waiting room, prepared to be ushered into anything. What will you do with me? he asks, recognising a stronger power than himself.” Kazin admired Bellow’s air of containment, expectancy, passivity, but also found it irritating. “Saul now wears an aspect mild and submissive,” he writes in a journal entry of September 5, before the book was published. “He puts his ear willing to anything you may have to say to him. He is available to you, he is interested in you, and he is most polite. But the minute he has registered what you have to say, he turns it into food for thought—and you find yourself sacrificing ‘your’ thought for the pleasure of having him develop it.” Almost a year later, in a journal entry of August 1, 1965, Kazin complains of “Saul’s usual trick of having others make the effort, his immobility in company….Saul is in an interesting state of self-consciousness, of course, because of his present fame and fortune. Having worked so long to make it, he now is suffering even more than usual because he has. He intimated, making almost a physical point of it as usual, that he sought anonymity….He was, as usual, making mental lassos of everyone to himself. And I was tired of adjusting to him.”

  Within a month of publication, Herzog was number one on the best-seller list, supplanting John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Money began rolling in. New American Library purchased the paperback rights to Dangling Man and The Victim for $77,000 and Fawcett paid $371,350 for the paperback rights to The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog.3 “Guys, I’m rich,” Mitzi McClosky remembers Bellow declaring. “What can I get for you? Can I buy you something? Do you need any money?” On October 30, Sam Goldberg, his lawyer friend, wrote to Bellow to ask what he should do about the manuscript of Augie. “I am sitting with a $25,000 manuscript. I have no safe here which can hold it….Are you going to dispose of the manuscripts this year or are you saving it for 1965”—for tax purposes, that is. On November 18, Bellow received an invitation from Mark Schorer, of the English Department at Berkeley, to teach one course for one semester and deliver two public lectures, for a fee of twelve thousand dollars. He turned it down. In December, he donated the Augie and Henderson manuscripts to the University of Chicago and turned down a five-thousand-dollar award from The Kenyon Review, in both cases because of taxes. He donated Tivoli, the ramshackle house he’d bought in 1956, to nearby Bard College, including the household contents: washing machine, refrigerator, walnut dining table, hi-fi, garden furniture, gas rotary lawn mower, garden tools. Meanwhile, the University of Chicago raised his salary to twenty thousand dollars.4 Henry Volkening, his agent, negotiated offers for the film rights to Henderson (as did Sam Freifeld, to Volkening’s consternation5). “Don’t laugh,” wrote Volkening to Bellow on March 24, 1965, “but Peter Sellers is among the other stars with whom it is being discussed.” There were also inquiries about Herzog. Robert Bolt, Richard Burton, and Fred Zinnemann were interested in filming the novel; Zinnemann suggested that Harold Pinter write the screenplay.6

  Bellow was kept advised of all these matters in lengthy, at times weekly, letters from Volkening. Throughout the 1960s, he himself was advising foundations and institutes: Yaddo, the Rockefeller, the Guggenheim, the Longview (from Texas, administered by Harold Rosenberg), the Ford, the Salk, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Peace Corps, the Princeton University Department of Philosophy. On January 21, 1965, Volkening wrote to Philip Heller of Heller, Strauss and Moses, a Chicago accounting firm, listing payments made to Bellow in 1964 (royalties, serial rights, foreign rights, movie options, etc.). They amounted to $121,682.91 gross and $109,447.22 net. His 1966 tax return reported income of $140,000 (estimated by James Atlas at “about $800,000 in today’s terms”7), a figure nearly matched in the returns for 1967 and 1968. On February 19, 1965, Bellow wrote to the poet Stanley Burnshaw about his newfound prosperity: “In my simplicity I thought the noise of Herzog would presently die down, but it seems only to get louder. I can’t pretend it’s entirely unpleasant. After all, I wanted something to happen, and if I find now that I can’t control the volume I can always stuff my ears with money.” In March 1965, Herzog won the National Book Award, which Bellow had previously won for The Adventures of Augie March. Also in March, Volk
ening and Denver Lindley, of Viking, put Bellow up for membership in the Century Association. As money, honors, and front-page profiles accumulated, even his brother Maury took notice. “The kid finally did it,” he declared.8 On November 15, 1964, at the end of a typed single-spaced letter devoted to money and business, Henry Volkening apologized and offered advice and reassurance. “Adjustment to success, though less harrowing than adjustment to shall we say figuring out how to ‘get along,’ does nevertheless pose its problems, does it not? But look, I know how these things distract you from things you want to think about….And I’ll do my level best to minimize them, and have them be a benefit.”

  Money and its management were distractions for Bellow, but they were also ways of connecting to his brothers and sister. Now Bellow could enter into family business discussions—if not as an equal, at least as a participant. Volkening cautioned Bellow against getting involved in the market (“You have earned all of this big money the hard way,” he wrote on May 19, 1965; “it is very much easier to lose money than to increase it”), but when Bellow began to dabble, he put him in touch with his brother, a stockbroker. Now Volkening’s letters contained stock tips as well as news of contracts and foreign sales. This was the period when Lesha, Bellow’s niece, began to hear him utter the phrase “Vu bin ikh?” (“Where am I in this?”) when deals and investments were discussed at family gatherings. He hired a Wall Street stockbroker and a prominent Chicago lawyer, Marshall Holleb, who was involved in real estate and property development. Because Bellow never fully engaged with business affairs, he was never very good at them, alternately too trusting or not trusting enough, impatient, shocked at setbacks. After almost fifty years of hard work and money worry, he found it difficult to accept the realities of prosperity. When Robert Hatch, an editor of The New Republic, met him in the summer of 1965, all Bellow could talk about was taxes. He had just written a check for forty thousand dollars to the Internal Revenue Service.9 When David Goldknopf, an old acquaintance, asked Bellow about acquiring an agent, he recommended “a young woman named Candida Donadio” from Volkening’s office, later an important agent in her own right; Volkening himself, like Bellow, was “overbusy, all too successful and risen into the nirvana of the harassed.”10 When not harassed about money, Bellow glowed with success. Mitzi McClosky remembers him after Herzog as “like a phoenix. The earlier Saul had disappeared. He was on top of the world.”11