Love and Strife (1965-2005) Read online

  In addition to cutting and rewriting, Bellow faced, in Pete Hamill’s words, “the kind of tampering with the original idea that causes a writer either to walk out in a huff, or make the small compromises that make most things possible.”31 Bellow didn’t walk out, but in staying, he told Ruth Miller, he was party “to the dismantling of his play.”32 At one point, he and Toby Cole were so alarmed that they tried to get Roger Stevens to shut down the production. That may have been the moment, recounted to Atlas by Joe Anthony, when Bellow was banned from rehearsals. “It was when Saul sensed that we had made wrong judgments that the conflict occurred. There’s a bad side to Saul’s nature, and once he sensed that the production wasn’t going to work, he was quite capable of ruthless indifference to human values—to the point where I had to prevent him from working with us in the theater.”33 According to Bellow’s writer friend Edward Hoagland, “an air of despair pervaded the rehearsals”; the playwright’s posture, Hoagland recalled, was that of “a man awaiting an announced punishment.”34

  Punishment is what he got. In a brief “Author’s Note” to the rewritten version of the play published a year later, Bellow described the Broadway production as “a shipwreck” (p. vii). Several critics laid the blame on the actors and the director. Sam Levene was thought to lack the stature to play Bummidge. Levene had been much praised for his performances in Guys and Dolls and Dinner at Eight, but the part of Bummidge, with its long speeches and arcane references, intimidated him, as did Bellow himself, whom he referred to in rehearsals as “the Scholar.” Bellow, in turn, described Levene as “a dear man” who “found it hard to speak a sentence with a subordinate clause.”35 Levene’s “charming and attractive” girlfriend attended all the rehearsals and took notes for him. “She always had a certain number of questions for me about the words the star couldn’t pronounce.” “She would ask: ‘Is this word pronounced fin-it? Fin-yet? Fynyte? Or what?’ And I would have to tell her. She would then inform the star. Once again the next day he would mispronounce the words.”36 Howard Taubman, reviewing the play in The New York Times, praised Levene’s performance, but noted that he several times stumbled over lines, which was especially distracting in a role like that of Bummidge, a figure of angst and slapstick, difficult to pin down. “Poor Sam Levene,” wrote Robert Brustein, in his review in The New Republic, “has been abysmally miscast. At a loss with the part, he has fallen back on the only character he has confidence in, the Jewish garment manufacturer, mugging, grimacing, and ogling until he has flattened the values of the play.” For John Simon, writing in The Hudson Review, Levene as Bummidge was least convincing when puncturing cultural cliché, “rather as if Milton Berle were reading the lines of, say, Coriolanus.” Walter Kerr spread the blame more widely. Are we to take Bummidge seriously or to think of him as a clown? “Bellow sayeth not. Levene sayeth not. Director Joseph Anthony sayeth not.”37

  But Bellow had sayeth, in an article of September 27 in The New York Times Book Review, published just days before the play’s opening. Like the articles Bellow published in the Book Review before the publication of Henderson and Herzog, the purpose of “My Man Bummidge” was to shape the work’s reception as well as to explain its character and origins. The aim of the play, Bellow declared, was “to put ideas on the stage in what is possibly their most acceptable form, farce.” The Last Analysis is only in part a spoof of psychoanalysis; what Bellow “really wanted to reproduce was the common modern mixture of high seriousness and low seriousness” (the mixture of Henderson, Herzog, Berryman’s Dream Songs). Bummidge, like Henderson, is in search of his essential self; he’s also an autodidact, like Dr. Pep (in “A Sermon by Dr. Pep,” a monologue published in May 1949 in Partisan Review, discussed in chapter 11 of To Fame and Fortune) and Tamkin (in Seize the Day). “I am attracted to autodidacts,” Bellow explained, “those brave souls who rise to encounter ideas.” Bellow claimed to have a specific type of autodidact in mind, though a type that only emerged in the course of revisions.

  I have been especially stirred by jazz musicians, prize fighters and television comics who put on the philosopher’s mantle. I find them peculiarly touching. In the tumult of Birdland they are thinking of Kierkegaard. When they turn away from the microphone their painted smiles grow pensive. They are often preoccupied with Freud and Ferenczi, with Rollo May and Erik Erikson, and their private correspondence is very rich in analytic concepts. The self-absorption of people who never tire of exploring their depths is the source of our comedy. Bummidge in “The Last Analysis” is, as another character says, “like a junky on thought.”

  Getting the balance right between seriousness and comedy was a problem, and as the opening night approached, Levene was not alone in tipping the performance too far toward comedy. Among Bellow’s papers in the Regenstein is a set of typed notes, presumably from the producers, titled “Checklist of essential production details which can be achieved readily immediately.” The first of these notes concerns Bummidge: “Levene should be given an identifying signature gesture, like Jackie Gleason’s ‘Away we go’ movement, which establishes that he is a national comic figure. This could be used by other characters as well, e.g. television technicians could mock him with this instead of words. Every good comic has his signature and Bummidge should have one too.”

  “Like a junky on thought.” Or a junky on speed, jabbering away. In “My Man Bummidge,” Bellow recalls the 1962 reading at Aaron and Linda Asher’s apartment. He read “as fast as I could. Wildly, excitedly I began to lose my voice before I reached Act II. My own virtuosity exhausted me, and the first victim of my invention was myself.” To Pete Hamill, Bellow recalled how one of the theater people present at the reading told him he had “a month’s work to do on it,” a remark Bellow recounted “with a rueful smile.” The play’s wordiness was as much a problem for the critics as its mixture of high and low seriousness. Bellow defended himself against the charge of verbosity on generic grounds. “Ask a writer what he thinks of the American theater and he will tell you that it has no language, that it lacks rhetoric or gesture. Ask any professional in the theater what is wrong with plays written by novelists and he will answer that they don’t know the difference between the page and the stage.” This latter view was Walter Kerr’s. Bellow might be a gifted novelist, but he showed “an almost frightening naïveté as a dramatist.” To the UPI reviewer, Jack Garver, what the play lacked was “discipline.” Bellow called it a farce, Garver speculated, “on the theory that in farce you can get away with any sort of clutter.”38 Several critics complained of the number of minor roles (fretful lawyer, demanding wife, sexy mistress, selfish sister, aggressive son, and so forth). In the published version, several of these hangers-on were dropped, as Bellow “attempted to simplify the cluttered and inconsequential plot, which puzzled the audience (and even the playwright), and tried to eliminate pointless noises and distracting bits of business” (p. vii).

  The classicist David Grene, Bellow’s colleague at the Committee on Social Thought (an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago, also a sort of high-powered academic salon des refusés), drew an intriguing parallel between Greek comedy and The Last Analysis.39 In an undated letter to Bellow, Grene sought to clarify comments he’d made at a recent reading of the play for an unspecified student audience. Grene felt the students had missed the play’s “explosive” quality, or the nature of its explosive quality. “They wanted to disintegrate the intellectual elements out of which the explosion came,” missing what he thought was “most interesting about the work.” Though the play mines “a new vein of comedy,” it has “something in common with Aristophanes,” more so than with “the recent stuff with which people may compare it” (the plays of Ionesco, for example, the current specialty of Rosette Lamont, Bellow’s ex-girlfriend). To extrapolate from Grene’s suggestion, one might compare Bellow’s spoof of psychoanalysis to Aristophanes’s spoof of philosophy in The Clouds, both plays being simultaneously knockabout
and deadly serious. What Aristophanes took aim at in The Clouds—the supposed indifference of the sophist philosophers to the truth as opposed to the power of arguments—was a fifth-century B.C. equivalent of mid-twentieth-century nihilism, long Bellow’s enemy. Bellow and Grene sometimes taught classes together and had adjoining offices at the Committee. Grene had written a book on Aristophanes and often taught him. That Bummidge dons a toga at the end of the play and sets out to form a center or “school” to be “run like Plato’s Academy” (p. 118) partly licenses the comparison. Bummidge, however, is a more serious figure than Strepsiades or any other Aristophanic protagonist. As Daniel Fuchs puts it, he’s “ridiculous but in the sympathetic (Don Quixote) rather than the classical (Tartuffe) strain. Like a Don Quixote or a Parson Adams, he is the holy fool mucking through and somehow triumphing in a world of cupidity.”40

  Bellow claimed not to have been put off the theater by his experiences with The Last Analysis. During rehearsals, he told John Barkham, the interviewer from the Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin, that his next project would be another play. “You derive a certain comfort from not being in your room alone with four walls. In the theater you are in the company of a cast of ten or twelve people. I often envy people who work in offices: they don’t have to face the frightful solitude.” After the play flopped, he was only briefly daunted, or so he implies in the “Author’s Note” to the printed version: “the rehearsals, the previews, the cold and peevish first-night audience, the judgments of the critics, were of the greatest value to me” (p. vii). As he wrote to Stanley Burnshaw on February 19, 1965: “The play was a great disappointment. But instead of making me wretched it only made me obstinate. I’ve reconstructed (in my field hospital after the massacre) and Viking is printing the text. I’d root out my desire to write plays if I could; I found theater people to be miserable, untrustworthy creatures.” Waiting for the reviews in Sardi’s, as tradition dictates, was difficult, though in an undated note to Kazin, Bellow describes the opening night party as “very lively.” The first reviews were mixed, and the good ones weren’t strong enough to save the run. Ten days later, writing to a Viking publicist named Julie, Bellow declined to be interviewed for the New York Herald Tribune. “First of all, I don’t want to leave Chicago and secondly I don’t see why I should come to a Herald Tribune affair still wearing the lumps that Walter Kerr gave me.” In later years, Bellow joked that the only lesson he’d learned from Broadway was “that prostitution doesn’t pay.”41 Yet, within a year, he was at work with Herbert Berghof and Mike Nichols on the stage version of Seize the Day, in negotiation with the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis for a new production of The Last Analysis, and consulting with the New York actress and comedienne Nancy Walker, who had come to Chicago in hopes of an Off Broadway staging of “A Wen,” a one-act play by Bellow published in Esquire in January 1965. Only the Guthrie production failed to materialize.

  Nancy Walker, a Broadway veteran, who later earned fame as a television actress, had never directed a play before, but Bellow liked her, and her enthusiasm “stirred my imagination so that on the spot I dreamed up two one-acters.”42 These one-acters were “Orange Soufflé” and “Out from Under.” In April 1965, under the auspices of the producer Lyn Austin, an associate producer of The Last Analysis, “A Wen” and “Orange Soufflé” were staged by Walker for an invited audience in the Loft on Bleecker Street. Brendan Gill, the New Yorker critic whose dismissive review of Seize the Day had irked Bellow, was in the audience (presumably, he and Bellow had made up their disagreement). In a note of April 26, Gill praised the plays and the production hyperbolically: “I can’t remember ever having had such a good time at the theatre” (this from a man who reviewed plays for The New Yorker for over twenty years). In the next two years, all three of Bellow’s one-acters were staged as a trilogy, in both London and New York, though without Walker as director.43 A fourth play, “A Work of Art,” also written in this period, exists in draft and was never produced. In addition to these theatrical ventures, Bellow lobbied the University of Chicago for a university repertory company, to be housed in two purpose-built theaters, one seating eight hundred persons, the other three hundred. According to a document in the Regenstein headed “Draft/Bellow to the Trustees,” he described the function of theater as “bringing the high and the low together in closing the rift between bumps and grinds and the activities of the intelligence. The theater is also—like all the arts—a teacher. It instructs people in conduct. It gives them a style of life. It makes them perhaps more thoughtful.” Even so, playwriting remained for Bellow, or so he confessed to Toby Cole, “a holiday from responsibility and earnestness,” by which he meant from novel writing. “I enjoy writing these trifles,” he told Cole in an undated letter. “Here you are,” he wrote on July 12, 1965, “a new trifle, sillier than ever.”44 It is hard not to take Bellow’s plays at this estimate, despite moments of cleverness and humor.

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  DURING THE RUN-UP to the launch of Herzog and the opening of The Last Analysis, Bellow was accompanied not only by Susan but by the newest member of the family, six-month-old Daniel Oscar Bellow, who was born on March 17, 1964. Susan’s parents, Dr. and Mrs. Frank Glassman, were in attendance as well. In late August, Greg Bellow, now twenty and about to enter his junior year at the University of Chicago, arrived. In addition, there were visits from seven-year-old Adam, who was living in Long Island with Sasha. Greg remembers walking down Fifth Avenue one sunny morning with his father, who had been ordered by Susan “to buy me a ‘proper’ suit” for the launch party and the opening night of the play. “We passed several bookstores, their enormous front windows filled with blue-jacketed copies of Herzog.”45 Gregory was as uncomfortable with Bellow’s new fame as he was with the wool suit they bought that morning. He was often prickly at this period, prone to anger. In his high-school and college years, he writes, “arguments with both parents were open, direct, fierce, and usually grounded in my highly moralistic sense of right and wrong.”46 It was this sense that had led Greg at sixteen to send Bellow a “scathing letter” early in 1960, upbraiding him for missing his alimony payments to Anita. Bellow wrote back from Puerto Rico in unexpectedly mild terms, explaining his circumstances. He denied being venal or a swindler, told about owing Viking ten thousand dollars, plus other debts and expenses, and asked Greg if he’d ever considered that his mother might be better off financially than his father. Anita had a job and a steady income and was “neither sick nor in dire need.” Had Greg forgotten that his father was a writer? “Obviously my unreliable financial situation is related to the fact that I write books. And you might try thinking of this in terms other than the dollar. Those are blood cells in my eccentric veins, not dimes. It’s odd that I should have to persuade my son that I’m human.” The letter ends: “I’ll get by somehow, scrape by, steal by, squeak by. I always have. If I strike it rich, why, I’ll buy ice cream and Cadillacs for everybody. And then everyone will say how honest I am and your good opinion of me will return, and your faith in me. It’s all silly. Your devoted, Papa.” In his memoir, Greg is unforgiving: “Fifty years later, what most surprises me…is how I took his response in stride. Doubtless I was already subscribing to his self-justification: that his career as an artist entitled him to let people down with impunity.”47

  Greg’s relations with his mother in these years were even more strained than those with his father. In June 1962, at the end of his senior year in high school, Anita remarried. Mutual friends had introduced her to a widower, Basil Busacca, who taught comparative literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. After the marriage, the couple planned to spend the summer in Forest Hills, while Basil taught a course at Queens College. When Greg went off to the University of Chicago in September, Anita would move with her husband to his house in South Pasadena. This plan, as Greg puts it in his memoir, proved “a disaster. Basil tried to impose his will on me, and I fought him at every turn. All that summer Anita was trapp
ed between us as Basil and I battled.” Once at university, still smarting from the quarrels of the summer, Greg faced academic difficulties. “For the first time in my life I was trying as hard as I could but getting poor results that made me feel stupid.” Bellow and Susan offered advice and sympathy, and Greg often visited their apartment for chats and meals. Susan’s cooking was “a decided improvement over dorm food,” and there were “many lively conversations.”48 Greg liked Susan, but he also felt that she took advantage of him. “I rarely made a visit there without having to perform a time-consuming physical chore for Susan, which I came to resent.” It was, however, Anita with whom he was most at odds. Bellow tried to smooth relations between son and mother; he supported Anita’s marriage and, when she was unable to pay her share of Greg’s college expenses, took on her half. Greg was furious with his mother: “Anita had reneged on her earlier commitment…after she and Basil went through my education fund settling into their new life.” The main quarrels Greg had with Bellow during this period, in addition to his anger over his father’s having missed Oscar Tarcov’s funeral, derived from Bellow’s wish “to make up for past absences.” Greg needed his space: “At eighteen, the last thing I wanted was to get closer to my father.” Only after Ted Hoffman was enlisted by Greg and “got through” to Bellow did he back off.49 At the end of Greg’s freshman year, however, father and son had a “terrible argument” in front of Greg’s dorm. Bellow “broke a promise to take my suitcase to New York because Susan had filled the car with her own belongings.”50