Love and Strife (1965-2005) Read online

  * * *

  —

  ALMOST A YEAR BEFORE Herzog was published, while Bellow was frantically at work on the last stages of the novel, he lost one of his oldest and closest friends. On October 16, 1963, Oscar Tarcov suffered a second heart attack and died at forty-five. The death was especially cruel because Tarcov’s fortunes as a writer were at last on the rise. The decision he made in 1958, after his first coronary, to give up work at the Anti-Defamation League in order to write, had been a risk; by 1963, it seemed to be paying off. Tarcov had been writing plays, and they’d been getting some notice. Two of his one-act plays were produced at the Herbert Berghof Studio (Berghof was later to direct a workshop production of Seize the Day, with Mike Nichols as Tommy Wilhelm). On March 2, 1963, Bellow wrote to Tarcov, praising his most recent play, “The Interviewer,” which he called “thorough, subtle and complete. By far the best thing you’ve written.” He added that he’d “be more than surprised if it’s not successfully produced; I’ll be shocked.” The praise was a great tonic. “I could have kissed you,” Tarcov replied.12 Two months later, on May 11, Tarcov wrote a newsy letter in which he talked about his children and a new play he’d written; he was looking forward to having Bellow and Susan visit soon, but his health was not good: “I’m in a little trouble again.” He was experiencing chest pains and other disturbing symptoms and was scheduled to return to hospital for tests. “This will be the eighth hospital visit in less than ten years.” In early October, however, there was good news. Kermit Bloomgarden, who had produced Death of a Salesman, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Music Man, and Look Homeward, Angel, on Broadway, had taken out an option on “The Interviewer.” A summer tour was projected, then a Broadway run. Bellow sent congratulations, in an undated letter written only a week or two before Tarcov died. On October 19, three days after Tarcov’s death, a distraught Bellow wrote to John Berryman that he’d “rather die myself than endure these deaths, one after another, of all my dearest friends….Eventually survival feels degrading.”

  Bellow did not attend Oscar Tarcov’s funeral, as he had not attended Isaac Rosenfeld’s funeral; he apologized to Tarcov’s son, Nathan, in a moving letter of October 22 and visited the family some days later. As Greg Bellow remembers it, his father did not attend the funeral because his wife, Susan, some four months pregnant, “began to have medical problems and he could not leave her.”13 Presumably, the problems cleared up quickly. When Bellow arrived at the Tarcov apartment, he was, according to Ted Hoffman, “distraught,” “spooked,” “very tender.”14 Edith Tarcov was understanding, or so correspondence suggests, but Greg Bellow, now a sophomore at the University of Chicago, was angry, not so much that Bellow had failed to attend, but that he’d failed to tell him he wasn’t going to attend. “We all loved Oscar and I felt it imperative that Saul, Anita [Greg’s mother, Bellow’s first wife] or I attend the funeral,” Greg writes. If Bellow wasn’t going to attend, Greg would go in his place, but Bellow “thoughtlessly…only told me after the funeral that he had not attended.”15 In the letter to Nathan Tarcov, who was fifteen, Bellow expressed sorrow at Oscar’s death and acute sympathy for Nathan. Bellow had been Tarcov’s friend for thirty years. That the friendship was unbroken, he wrote to Nathan, in a passage quoted in part in chapter 4 of the first volume of this biography (henceforth referred to by its subtitle, To Fame and Fortune), was Oscar’s doing, “since I was sometimes hasty and bad-tempered.” The friendship began, as did the friendship with Rosenfeld, in the year Bellow’s mother died, something Bellow makes much of in the letter.

  I’m sure I brought to these relationships emotions caused by that death. I was seventeen—not much older than you. If I explain this to you, it’s not because I want to talk about myself. What I mean to say is that I have a very special feeling about your situation. I experienced something like it. I hope that you will find—perhaps you have found—such friends as I had on Lemoyne St. in 1933. Not in order to “replace” your father, you never will, but to be the sort of human being he was. He invested his life in relationships. In making such a choice a man sooner or later realizes that to love others is his answer to inevitable death. Other answers we often hear are anger, rebellion, bitterness. Your father, by temperament, could make no other choice. Perhaps you wondered why I was so attached to him. He never turned me away when I needed him. I hope I never failed him, either.

  In the weeks that followed Tarcov’s death, Bellow agreed to help with “The Interviewer,” not only by lending his name to the production but by working on revisions. On January 1, 1964, he wrote to Kermit Bloomgarden with a detailed list of “specific proposals” for the play’s revision, mostly having to do with a certain vagueness or mystery about the Interviewer’s work, but also suggesting ways of speeding up the action and sharpening the dialogue. The letter concludes with a promise to provide Bloomgarden with “a detailed scheme for the revision…as soon as there is a practical necessity for it. I expect to have time to work on this play later this winter or early in the summer of 1964. I will do what I can to help the production. My belief in its ultimate success is strong.” After what Nathan calls “a certain amount of work,” however, Bellow withdrew from the project. Without an author, the producers lost heart and the play was never produced. Edith Tarcov was very upset, and her daughter, Miriam Tarcov, looking back, accuses Bellow of “putting his reputation above his friendship,” though she admits that “it was difficult for Saul to lend his name to it or immerse himself in the work when he couldn’t quite get it, couldn’t find his voice in it.” Bellow’s claim that her father was a man who “invests his life in relationships” also bothers her. In precarious health, with a wife and two children to support, Tarcov quit a steady job, cashed in an insurance policy of twenty-five thousand dollars, and devoted himself to writing. He, too, she argues, put writing first. “To be a good father, a good husband, that wasn’t for him the driving force,” Miriam claims.16

  Tarcov’s was not the only death to shake Bellow at this period. A year later, on October 14, 1964, Pat Covici, his editor at Viking, died, also of a heart attack. He was seventy-six, and his death occurred the month after Herzog was published and only days before it topped the best-seller list.17 The novel is dedicated to Covici, “A great editor and, better yet, an affectionate friend.” Bellow attended the funeral and contributed to a collection of tributes privately printed a year later by Viking.18 “I loathe funerals and wasn’t planning to attend,” he wrote to the novelist Norman Rosten, “but I did love the old man dearly and at the last minute I found I was unable to sit it out in Chicago.”19 Covici and his wife, Dorothy, with the Ludwigs, had been the only out-of-town guests when Bellow and his second wife, Sasha, got married in Reno. In the years leading up to Herzog, it was Covici who persuaded Viking to carry Bellow with advances totaling ten thousand dollars, who smoothed over Bellow’s tantrums and anxieties, keeping the value of the work squarely in view. “It was years before I understood how necessary his quixotic belief was to me,” Bellow wrote in his tribute. “When I sometimes observed that things were not as simple as he thought, he answered that neither were they so very complicated.” To Bellow, Covici was “an old prospector” mining for literary treasure, “never doubting he would strike it rich.” He’d done it before—others among his authors who wrote tributes were Arthur Miller, Joseph Campbell, John Steinbeck, and Malcolm Cowley—and would do so again. “He would not behave like an elderly man.” After his death, Bellow kept in touch with Dorothy Covici and with their son, Pascal, Jr., who was to become chair of the English Department at Southern Methodist University. Shortly after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bellow accepted an invitation from Pascal, Jr., to give a reading at SMU. It was attended by sixteen hundred people. When Bellow finished the reading, he received a standing ovation.

  * * *

  —

  ALTHOUGH BELLOW WAS FAMOUS and successful as a novelist, he received no standing ovations as a playwright. His first
play, The Last Analysis, opened on Broadway on October 1, 1964, and closed within a month. The most painful review it received was from Walter Kerr, the influential drama critic of the New York Herald Tribune, later drama critic of The New York Times.20 Like Herzog, the play went through many drafts and versions. The earliest manuscript dates from the beginning of 1958, when Bellow was still writing Henderson the Rain King, a work not dissimilar in comic register. In the years leading up to its Broadway production, Bellow worked on the play while working on Herzog (having several projects on the boil simultaneously was a common practice with him, one he encouraged other writers to emulate as a way of overcoming creative blockage). On March 6, 1958, Lillian Hellman wrote in praise of the first draft but also with “one small suggestion: remember that on a stage, with people doing the talking, one can cut, hit, sharpen, move on with greater speed, than one can in a novel.” Bellow had written the first version “in a week,” thinking “like many writers…what the hell, anyone can write a play.” When Hellman pointed out that his play would take eight hours to perform, he began cutting. Six and a half years later, on the eve of its production, he confessed, “I feel like I’ve been cutting it ever since.”21 At the end of the summer of 1959, after sending a second version to Hellman, he went to visit her on Martha’s Vineyard to hear what she thought. He was not encouraged. “She says I’ve written a lot of interesting soliloquies, but there’s not a play in sight,” he reported to his friend Keith Botsford, in an undated letter. A year later, after extensive reworking, Hellman’s verdict, in a letter of June 7, 1960, remained unchanged. Though “brilliant in places, very funny, imaginative, the best kind of wonderful wacky…I just don’t think it’s a play. I don’t think it’s found it’s [sic] form, it doesn’t move far enough from the basic joke.”22

  This joke derives from the play’s lead character, Philip Bummidge, a fading television comedian tired of comedy routines and longing for a deeper, more meaningful life. To attain such a life, he sets out to free himself, both from neuroses, variously characterized as “Humanitis” and “Pagliacci Gangrene” (“Caused as all gangrene is by a failure of circulation. Cut off by self-pity. Passivity. Fear. Masochistic rage”),23 and from his many hangers-on, described by the critic Daniel Fuchs as “a pack of fugitives from Volpone.”24 (“I hope you’re having a restful vacation,” Greg wrote to his father on July 30, 1968, “and that you’ve escaped all those people who persecute you as a matter of course.”) Bummidge has devised a form of therapy called “Existenz-Action-Self-analysis” (p. 4), which he intends to demonstrate on himself, broadcasting his treatment on closed-circuit television to an audience of psychiatrists, artists, and comedians gathered at the Waldorf. “It’s like a lecture at the New School,” his son, Max, explains, “but crazier” (p. 78). The hangers-on, who batten on Bummidge “like green fungus on pumpernickel” (p. 62), are appalled, both at the cost of the scheme and at Bummidge’s decision to quit performing as a comic. In the first act, they seek to dissuade him; in the second, they and we watch the broadcast, in which the traumas of Bummidge’s life are re-enacted, interspersed with passages from comedy routines. The broadcast ends with Bummidge acting out a rebirth. To the amazement and dismay of the hangers-on, who want him to continue making money in television, the audience of professionals is deeply impressed. The hangers-on are routed, and Bummidge is reborn. Donning a toga, he declares his intention to teach “the poor, the sad, the bored and tedious of the earth.” He buys an old theater, the Trilby, to be turned into a center for “Existenz-Action-Self-analysis.” Graduates of the center will become “missionaries to England, to Germany, to all those bleak and sadistic countries.” Bummidge’s last words are “I am ready for the sublime.” Then he “raises his arms in a great gesture” (p. 118), and the curtain falls.

  Finding a producer for the play was a protracted business. On April 26, 1962, in a letter to his novelist friend Dick Stern, Bellow reported from Tivoli that Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen were interested, as was Zero Mostel, the ideal Bummidge. Two weeks later, he reported to Toby Cole, the agent Volkening had enlisted to handle theater and film rights for Bellow (also Zero Mostel’s agent), that Gore Vidal had requested a copy of the play. Vidal had had his own play The Best Man produced on Broadway in 1960. Now he sent Bellow’s play to Roger L. Stevens, who had produced The Best Man, and to Joe Anthony, who had directed it. “I got him his director and I got him his producer,” Vidal boasted in an interview (though it took Stevens and Anthony over a year to sign on formally). On August 26, 1962, while Bellow and Susan were on Martha’s Vineyard, Herbert Berghof wrote to reiterate his desire to direct the play. He had a producer in mind, and Walter Matthau was interested in playing Bummidge. Other names Berghof mentioned in connection with the part were Jack Warden, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger, Milton Berle, and Martin Balsam. On October 28, Bellow wrote to Cole about Mostel, who was being difficult, both indecisive and moody, “Tell Zero from me that what his mood wants is a swift kick in the rear to hasten its departure,” a message Bellow thought better of after a few sentences: “Just give him my regards and say ‘Bellow’s compliments, and please hurry up a little.’ ”25 Five months later, on March 21, 1963, Bellow reported to Cole that Anthony still hoped to direct the play but was at the moment busy with other projects. “Joe is hoping that Zero will accept. He hopes thereby to gain time since Zero is tied up for some months to come.” If Mostel didn’t accept, Bellow doubted Anthony would. But Anthony remained on board. On July 20, 1963, Bellow told Dave Peltz, the most “street” of his Humboldt Park friends (much discussed in chapter 5 of To Fame and Fortune), that he and Anthony had been working on the play for the past five weeks and that, “amazingly, it looks like plays I’ve read….I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder.” His other news was that Mostel would soon return from a holiday in Europe, and that a first production meeting was tentatively scheduled for August. On September 3, 1963, Bellow wrote again to Peltz. He and Susan would arrive in Chicago from Tivoli on September 26 but would return to New York in January, “to spend three months on Broadway. Whether we spend them with Zero is still unknown.”

  It remained unknown for some time. As Mostel procrastinated, author and director decided “to proceed to cast the play as if he didn’t exist” (this to Toby Cole, in an undated note). On November 18, Bellow wrote again to Cole, this time with concerns about Roger Stevens, the producer. “Perhaps we might investigate Lincoln Center further to see whether, if Stevens should poop out in April, we might give the play to [Elia] Kazan etc. Is it unethical? That is still a cut above chaos.” On December 3, once more to Cole, Bellow reported that Joe Anthony had begun to waver. “I’ve taken a very considerable run-around from Zero first (on Joe’s say-so) and then from Joe himself, and I’m a bit fed up.” At last, Mostel said no, having instead, in Robert Brustein’s words, elected “to entertain the Hadassah ladies in Fiddler on the Roof.”26 When Milton Berle also passed on the part, it went to the veteran Broadway actor Sam Levene. That summer, Bellow and Susan spent July and August in a rented house on Martha’s Vineyard, part of the time with Bellow’s son Adam. Bellow was exhausted, as he explained to his friend and first biographer, Ruth Miller, in a letter of June 13, 1964:

  Since November, things have gone something like this: Finished Herzog, rewrote my silly play. Taught school; rewrote Herzog, did another version of the play; prepared the novel for the printer, went to NYC to see Adam and cast the play; came home and found galleys, rewrote the book again on the galleys. A batch of fifty of these galleys were taken in a holdup of the Hyde Park post-office. The thieves were caught and the money recovered, but my work was torn to bits (first critical reception?).

  The thieves had driven all over the West Side of Chicago in a yellow Cadillac, scattering unwanted mail bags in vacant lots, and it took several days to recover the galleys. In the interim, Bellow received a phone call late at night from a man with a voice like a gangster. He knew where the galleys were and was willing to dis
cuss their return. Bellow was to meet him at midnight beneath the Illinois Central tracks. “Then he let out a loud cackling laugh. It was his brother Maurice.”27 It took the summer for Bellow to recover his energy. In a letter of July 22 to Alfred Kazin, he writes of having “weaned myself from the pills I was taking during the final months of Herzog” and of seeing “a bit of Island society.” What he says of this society is that “Styron is our leader, here in little Fitzgeraldville. Then there is Lillian Hellman, in whom I produce symptoms of shyness” (perhaps because she’d been so tough on the play, or continued to have problems with it). The letter is upbeat: “life is after all simple, decides a complicated mind.” Though a momentous autumn loomed, Bellow was gathering strength to meet it. Herzog would be published on September 19; The Last Analysis would open on Broadway less than two weeks later.

  Readying The Last Analysis for Broadway was nerve-racking, involving tense meetings with actors and producers and late-night rewrites. Rehearsals took place in the Belasco Theatre, where the play was to open (and where Charlie Citrine’s hit, Von Trenck, makes his fortune, earning Von Humboldt Fleisher’s enduring enmity). Bellow took a room nearby, in the “furnished squalor” of the Hotel Alden on Central Park West. After rehearsals there were interviews, with streams of reporters. Early in the rehearsal period, an interviewer for the Saturday Review described Bellow in terms similar to those used by Kazin after the launch of Herzog. “At a time when his career seemed to be moving toward a stunning climax, Bellow appears remarkably calm, modest, yet quietly self-assured.”28 Soon after rehearsals began, John Barkham, an interviewer for the Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin, described Bellow as “exhilarated by the experience.”29 The interviewer for The New York Times, Robert Gutwillig, himself a novelist, had not seen Bellow for four or five years. He described him as “almost alarmingly handsome,” with “gray-white” hair and a face that seemed to express “all the life he has seen and understood”: “here’s a guy who’s got more talent than everyone else in the country, and now he’s running for Robert Frost, too.”30 With Gutwillig, Bellow was easy, full of jokes; as opening night approached, his mood darkened.