{"id":138437,"date":"2021-04-13T17:14:05","date_gmt":"2021-04-14T01:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=138437"},"modified":"2021-04-20T19:46:10","modified_gmt":"2021-04-21T03:46:10","slug":"bellow-a-biography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=138437","title":{"rendered":"Bellow: A Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Atlas writes in 2000<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* A sickly child, afflicted with respiratory ailments, he was his mother\u2019s favorite; she treated him like an invalid.<\/p>\n

* It was in temperament that Bellow diverged from the family line. He was the designated \u201cnostalgia-man,\u201d as he described himself, the keeper of warm memories; the brothers were aggressive and practical. Idealized versions of them showed up in Bellow\u2019s books: the wealthy, satisfied Amos in Dangling Man; the woman-hungry, larger-than-life Simon in The Adventures of Augie March; the Cadillac-driving, capable Will in Herzog; the rich, brutish entrepreneur Ulick in Humboldt\u2019s Gift . Likewise, the heroes of these books were all versions of Bellow\u2014variously depicted as a dreamer, a bookish, head-in-the-clouds intellectual, a confused soul in need of guidance from his fraternal \u201creality instructors.\u201d<\/p>\n

* In life, the two older brothers loomed over the youngest one. While even in middle age Bellow had trouble patching together the rent, their empire-building feats\u2014and, on occasion, their criminal deeds\u2014were reported regularly in the Chicago newspapers: Sam\u2019s nursing homes, Maurice\u2019s hotels and landfill ventures. Their worldly success was a persistent rebuke to the impecuniousness of their intermittently broke and never wealthy brother. Together with Abram, who at last became a prosperous businessman in his forties, they formed a triumvirate from whose judgmental gaze the novelist struggled to free himself\u2014without much success\u2014throughout his days.<\/p>\n

* \u201cWe read British books and sang God Save the King and recited the Lord\u2019s Prayer and all the rest of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Abram was a proud man who\u2014in his own estimation\u2014had lost status. In Russia, he had considered himself a gentleman; in America, he was a laborer. Like his wife, he felt he\u2019d come down in the world.<\/p>\n

* he romanticized their relationship, casting it as all sweetness and light. In reality, he was erratic in his constancy, greedy for attention, and fiercely jealous. On one memorable occasion, when he noticed that Fox was wearing the fraternity pin of a lanky basketball player who was popular with Tuley girls, Bellow grabbed it and tore it off, ripping her blouse. \u201cI was afraid of the guy,\u201d she recalled. (This scene, too, found its way into Humboldt\u2019s Gift . \u201cYou were a violent kid,\u201d Citrine\u2019s high-school girlfriend Naomi Lutz recalls. \u201cYou almost choked me to death because I went to a dance with some basketball player.\u201d)<\/p>\n

* His mother\u2019s death made him\u2014in the words of Herzog\u2014\u201cmother-bound.\u201d It was a bondage doomed to play itself out in five marriages and a string of failed relationships, as Bellow struggled to free himself from the intensity of his need by denying its primal hold over him.<\/p>\n

* Bellow\u2019s self-dramatizing impulse, so crucial to his development as a writer, grew out of a need to make himself heard. To his siblings, he would always be the baby of the family.<\/p>\n

* Maurice lost patience with his brother\u2019s habit of reading on the job, and they parted after a bitter confrontation.<\/p>\n

* His parents spoke to each other in Russian and Yiddish; he and his three siblings spoke English and Yiddish at home; on the streets of Montreal they spoke French, and in public school they spoke English.<\/p>\n

* The University of Chicago was a place where Jewish professors taught Roman Catholicism to Protestant students. <\/p>\n

* Bellow was discouraged by his teachers\u2019 failure to recognize his promise. \u201cI suppose I wanted attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

* For many years after he graduated, Bellow was too insecure to let on that he had gone to Northwestern. It was a good school, but it could hardly compete with the University of Chicago. As his own fame grew, he began to look more favorably upon the place and seemed almost defiant about his affiliation. It was less prestigious, he conceded, but his teachers there had shown greater appreciation of his talents.
\n Yet Northwestern was in many ways more elitist than Chicago. In the 1930s, the teaching of literature in universities was a career for gentlemen. English departments were dominated by New Critics and Southern Agrarians for whom all literature was English. \u201cUniversity English departments were still under the vigilant protection of something called the Anglo-Saxon tradition,\u201d wrote Diana Trilling in an account of the early career tribulations of her husband, Lionel.<\/p>\n

* \u201cAnthropology students were the farthest out in the 1930s,\u201d Bellow recalled, looking back on his Northwestern days:
\n“They seemed to be preparing to criticize society from its roots. Radicalism was implicit in anthropology, especially sexual radicalism\u2014the study of the sexual life of savages was gratifying to radicals. It indicated that human life was much broader than the present. And it gave young Jews a greater sense of freedom from the surrounding restrictions. They were seeking immunity from Anglo-Saxon custom: being accepted or rejected by a society of Christian gentlemen.”<\/p>\n

* Anthropology, the study of foreign cultures, provided expression for Bellow\u2019s own sense of exclusion from American society\u2014a condition that haunted him long after he had become an exemplary (and deeply assimilated) spokesman for the opportunities it offered. Like many Jewish intellectuals of his generation, Bellow never rid himself of the suspicion that he wasn\u2019t quite part of America.<\/p>\n

* As graduation approached, the question of what he was going to do with his life acquired a certain urgency. In search of career advice, Bellow called upon the chairman of the English department, William Frank Bryan. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a very good record,\u201d Bryan told him, \u201cbut I wouldn\u2019t recommend that you study English. You weren\u2019t born to it.\u201d No Jew could really grasp the tradition of English literature, the chairman explained. No Jew would ever have the right feeling for it.<\/p>\n

* The history of modernist literature is in large measure a history of discipleship: Joyce saluting Ibsen; Beckett apprenticing himself to Joyce; Pound sitting at the feet of Yeats. But Chicago-area literary masters were in short supply in 1938. Apart from a few bookish friends, his Proustian \u201clittle band,\u201d Bellow was on his own. When it came to the lonely work of mastering his craft, he turned to the works of the writers he loved best: Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Joyce, and his local hero, Theodore Dreiser.<\/p>\n

* In 1938, American novels written by Jews\u2014as opposed to more ethnic Jewish-American novels such as Ludwig Lewisohn\u2019s The Island Within or Abraham Cahan\u2019s The Rise of David Levinsky \u2014didn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

* Referring to the best that has been thought and said was a literary tic. Yet he was suspicious of high culture for the same reason that he was suspicious of all efforts, real and imaginary, to impose on his freedom, whether in the form of brothers or wives or in the forms of institutions: They were all aspects of authority. One of the most striking features of Bellow\u2019s work is its refusal to be bound by the conventional definitions of what constitutes literary seriousness. Unlike so many Jewish writers of his generation\u2014Leon Edel, Lionel Trilling, Harvard professor and critic Harry Levin\u2014he was drawn to the gritty side of life. \u201cHe has a nose for bad odors to the point where he seldom smells anything else,\u201d as Edward Shils, Bellow\u2019s longtime colleague at the University of Chicago, put it. He worshiped European literature as much as these eminent professors did and was just as eager to demonstrate that he knew his way around it; but he disdained their habit of using their familiarity with the Great Books to put distance between themselves and their immigrant roots, invoking their preoccupation with Jane Austen or Henry James as evidence of their newly elevated class status. For all his assiduous reading\u2014and pretense of reading\u2014Bellow was impatient with the civilizing imperatives he\u2019d encountered in the Great Books, eager to renounce what he called the \u201chigh-culture gymnasium route of Thomas Mann\u201d and explore a subterranean realm. \u201cMortimer Adler had much to tell us about Aristotle\u2019s Ethics , but I had only to look at him to see that he had nothing useful to offer on the conduct of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

* His real education was formed by a different set of books. In the deserted second-floor library of the psychology building on Ellis Avenue, he was boning up on the works of G\u00e9za R\u00f3heim. A trained psychologist, R\u00f3heim was a pioneer of psychoanalytic anthropology. He was convinced that it was possible to discover within the rituals and customs of any human group the structure of its collective unconscious\u2014a structure, R\u00f3heim hypothesized, that was invariably the same: The psyche of the most advanced European was identical to that of the most rudimentary tribesman. \u00a7
\n R\u00f3heim\u2019s work was a revelation. It supplemented the lessons about supposedly primitive cultures that Bellow had learned from his undergraduate work in anthropology anthropology (and from Dostoyevsky), positing the existence of a more spontaneous and robust human nature\u2014what Lawrence in his book on Mexico called \u201cthe great origin-power of life.\u201d Bellow was a great believer in the quest for the essential self. In the fifties, he turned to the sexual-liberationist teachings of Wilhelm Reich, in the seventies to the mystical teachings of the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, who exhorted people to escape the prison of consciousness and experience the world the way it really is\u2014to \u201cburst the bonds that fetter the human spirit,\u201d as Bellow once proclaimed in a moment of rhetorical overheatedness. Lawrence was only one literary guru among many.<\/p>\n

* Like the self-regarding heroes of his books, proud of their flat stomachs and their stamina on the paddleball courts, Bellow delighted in his physical appeal. (\u201cYou know you\u2019re a good-looking man,\u201d Ramona, one of Herzog\u2019s many women, chides him: \u201cAnd you even take pride in being one. In Argentina they\u2019d call you macho \u2014masculine.\u201d) The narcissistic traits that a succession of psychiatrists diagnosed in him were no doubt fed by this gift from nature\u2014as was his prose, which suffered at times from an excess of self-delight.
\n It didn\u2019t take Bellow long to embrace the progressive morals of New York bohemia circa 1943\u2014to discover, as Alfred Kazin memorably put it, that \u201ceverything could fall apart at the sight of a young girl with very wide cheekbones standing at an overcrowded party in Greenwich Village.\u201d For Jewish intellectuals of that generation, sex was a revelation as charged as their first encounters with Marx and Freud. It opened up a whole new world. Their parents\u2019 marriages, constrained by provincialism and the pressures of adapting to the New World, seemed intolerably suffocating to their newly liberated children.
\n Bellow claimed not to feel guilty about his infidelities\u2014indeed, he considered them his due. But the satisfactions of conquest outweighed the physical transaction; his sexual appetite was never voracious. (\u201cIt was his pride that must be satisfied,\u201d as Herzog acknowledges. \u201cHis flesh got what was left over.\u201d) \u201cI miss Anita, but not carnally,\u201d he wrote to Sam Freifeld during one of his sojourns in New York. \u201cStrangely enough I haven\u2019t had an erection in two weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n

* He was deeply suspicious of people, intent upon fending off any entanglement that might interfere with the ambitious work he was preparing himself to undertake. Friends noted that Bellow was \u201ctouchy,\u201d unnervingly quick to take offense; on more than one occasion, Kazin watched him \u201cnail with quiet ferocity someone who had astonished him by offering the mildest criticism.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Keeping himself free from encumbrance was a strategy that was to govern Bellow\u2019s life. Whether it was wives, children, publishers, lawyers, friends, or even ideas, he maintained his distance as a way of preserving his fragile sense of self.<\/p>\n

* He also got a call from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer\u2014but not, as expected, for an option on the novel\u2019s movie rights. A studio executive had seen his photograph in a newspaper and offered to make him a star. Bellow wasn\u2019t an Errol Flynn type or a George Raft type, the man from Hollywood explained\u2014that is to say, he wasn\u2019t handsome or tough in the conventional sense. But he could have a great screen career in the sensitive role, the guy \u201cwho loses the girl to the George Raft type or the Errol Flynn type.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Like many powerful figures, Bellow preferred the company of lesser lights who made few demands on him, didn\u2019t compete for attention, and enjoyed\u2014or at least were satisfied with\u2014reflected glory.<\/p>\n

* Like the talmid khokhem of his distant shtetl past, wise men revered for their learning, he spent his days hunched over books.<\/p>\n

* Soul mates had to be men, but they didn\u2019t have to be Jewish; they just had to possess what he considered Jewish qualities: emotional intensity, a reverence for Russian literature, a love of high-minded gossip.<\/p>\n

* Anita was too practical, too controlling; she didn\u2019t give him room to breathe. Someday he would be \u201cclaimed\u201d by a woman who appreciated him, Bellow vowed to Mitzi McCloskey, \u201cand I will go.\u201d
\n The passive construction was significant. For Bellow, choosing a lover meant allowing himself to be chosen. It was the same way that he \u201cchose\u201d jobs and domiciles and wives: He waited for someone else to make the first move. In his work, Bellow asserted himself with courage and tenacity, but when it came to domestic arrangements, others dictated the terms\u2014until he chafed at them. Saul does what he wants: The phrase recurs among his friends and associates. Pretending to be at the mercy of others was a way of disguising his fiercely independent will. By denying responsibility for the choices he made in life, he could circumvent the powerful forces\u2014father, brothers, society\u2014ranged against his ambition. Passivity in Bellow\u2019s hands was an instrument of freedom.<\/p>\n

* The Victim , Martin Greenberg declared in a prescient review in Commentary , was \u201cthe first attempt in American literature to consider Jewishness not in its singularity, not as constitutive of a special world of experience, but as a quality that informs all of modern life, as the quality of modernity itself.\u201d It was through Bellow\u2019s efforts that Jewish literature was to become American.<\/p>\n

* As a teacher, Bellow was \u201ca clock-watcher,\u201d according to Herb McCloskey. He wasn\u2019t one to nurture talent.<\/p>\n

* He, too, delivered high-minded lectures on the modern world and dabbled in improbable investments. He borrowed money from his brothers. He made advances to other men\u2019s girlfriends and on occasion to their wives; and he proposed marriage with unnatural frequency. He craved affection from those he antagonized.<\/p>\n

* Philosophy, then and later, was one of the unfortunate legacies of Bellow\u2019s immersion in the University of Chicago Great Books culture. His heroes shared a penchant for belaboring ideas. They were the products of a provincial Chicago boy\u2019s effort to show that he wasn\u2019t provincial, that he was at home with the whole of Western thought; unconsciously, perhaps, they expressed an impulse to distance himself from his true and more painful material\u2014a flight into abstraction.<\/p>\n

* Domestic life was thought to stifle the artist; it was middle-class. \u201cTo be modern,\u201d as Bellow glossed this encounter, \u201cmeant to be detached from tradition, traditional sentiments, from national politics and the family.\u201d<\/p>\n

* The main problem with Paris was the Parisians: They didn\u2019t seem to know who Saul Bellow was. At parties, Bellow talked about his book in a \u201cheavy-handed\u201d way, recalled a fellow expatriate, and vacillated between grandiosity and self-doubt. He was unaware that in Parisian literary circles to discuss one\u2019s work was considered gauche.<\/p>\n

* For Bellow, the hunger for approval was outweighed by an even deeper hunger to express himself on his own unique and unnegotiable terms.<\/p>\n

* While Bellow had been in Europe discovering the voice of Augie March, Rosenfeld had been in the Village discovering Wilhelm Reich. \u201cVillage thought in the late Forties had a strong psychoanalytic tendency,\u201d Bellow noted in his \u201cZetland\u201d manuscript. Reich\u2019s The Function of the Orgasm was as widely read in progressive circles as Trotsky\u2019s Art and Revolution had been a decade before. Paul Goodman, a reliable indicator of intellectual trends, was a Reichian, as were a number of former Barrow Street regulars, for whom Reich\u2019s emphasis on sexual gratification merely validated long-standing practice. Reich was an intellectual fashion of the day, and Bellow wasn\u2019t above embracing such fashions; a decade earlier, he had been just as enthusiastic about Trotsky. But the attraction of Reich went deeper; his method represented the psychoanalytic equivalent of what Bellow aspired to in his own work (and in his life): the freedom of unfettered self-expression.
\n Reichianism wasn\u2019t a philosophy, its founder insisted, but a science. Reich considered himself an heir of Freud and had developed an elaborate physiological explanation for his theories. It was his belief that cathartic total orgasm was the key to health, or what he called full genitality; but most human beings were prevented from achieving these convulsive orgasms by the presence of what Reich termed character armor: rigid defenses that stifle development and block the free flow of sexuality. Damming up the libido not only causes neurosis, he postulated, but represses psychic energy. For Reich, there was nothing hypothetical about the existence of this energy; it was organic, biological. He had even found a name for it: orgone energy, which was said to be a primordial cosmic power latent in all things. Thus was born the science of orgonomy.<\/p>\n

* Bellow was a master of self-exculpation; he was never to blame for the breakups of his marriages or friendships, the books that found disfavor with the critics, the plans that went awry. He could always find an explanation\u2014one that revolved around the notion of himself as victim. It was important for Bellow to see his life this way: He lacked the reserves of self-esteem needed to engage in rigorous self-criticism. \u201cI never gave psychoanalysis so much as a two-year lease,\u201d he testified, depicting himself as a reluctant participant in Rosenfeld\u2019s Reichian experiments: \u201cI enjoyed it as a game then being played.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Even by the standards of artistic touchiness, Bellow\u2019s fragile grandiosity stood out. He was capable of bearing a grudge for decades, but he was capable of forgiveness, too.<\/p>\n

* Bellow had trouble engaging his students; they simply weren\u2019t real to him. He preferred\u2014a remarkable act of chutzpah\u2014to read from \u201cThe Life of Augie March.\u201d \u201cIt was obvious that he had work of more importance than writing lectures,\u201d as one of his auditors remarked magnanimously. One afternoon, Bellow read a passage about Augie\u2019s adventures in Mexico, laughing delightedly at what he considered the funny parts. \u201cHe was having a wonderful time,\u201d said John McCormick, \u201cbetter than the rest of us.\u201d His self-delight was typical: Bellow always laughed at his own jokes and derived huge enjoyment from the recital of his work. He wasn\u2019t looking for criticism; he was looking for praise. By setting the tone himself, he had a better chance of getting the response he wanted\u2014at least in the short run.<\/p>\n

* An increase in his already frenetic pace of travel came to be a reliable portent of the dissolution of a marriage.<\/p>\n

* That he refused to give up on the idea of marriage long after it should have been apparent to him that he was unsuited to the institution shows only how powerful its hold over him was. Bellow longed for a home and family, but he longed for them much as a child might: The need for constant attention and devotion alternated in him with a powerful need to go off and explore the world on his own at will. The contradiction seems never to have occurred to him. He was to pursue his fantasy of the perfect marriage and wife again and again, yet the marital bond was strongest with Anita. More than any of his subsequent wives, she belonged to Bellow\u2019s world\u2014which helps to explain why his first marriage lasted as long as it did. Anita was part of him.<\/p>\n

* \u201cSaul had always had trouble with women; maybe he thought he wouldn\u2019t have all these troubles with a girl.\u201d (There was also a practical motive: As Bellow crudely put it to R. W. B. Lewis, he \u201cneeded to get his ashes hauled.\u201d)<\/p>\n

* As Thea Fenchel, one of Augie\u2019s lovers, says: \u201cYou want people to pour love on you, and you soak it up and swallow it. You can\u2019t get enough. And when another woman runs after you, you\u2019ll go with her. You\u2019re so happy when somebody begs you to oblige. You can\u2019t stand up under flattery.\u201d The autobiographical note is hard to ignore; Thea\u2019s critique of Augie was Bellow\u2019s pointed recognition of his own passivity, his suspension of judgment in the face of praise.<\/p>\n

* The heroes of his novels aren\u2019t renderings of Bellow the man; they\u2019re idealized versions of himself. They are very often tall, like Artur Sammler in Mr. Sammler\u2019s Planet and Dean Corde in The Dean\u2019s December (Bellow is five foot seven); of distinguished lineage, like Eugene Henderson in Henderson the Rain King; or of indeterminate ethnic origin\u2014even the characters who are obviously Jewish make little of the fact. And why should it be otherwise? Bellow was writing fiction, he impatiently reminded those who probed his work for clues about his life. What\u2019s remarkable about his inventions is the balancing act they negotiate between proximity to the truth and deviation from it: It was as if, by altering the details to suit him, Bellow could become, in his books, the person he wanted to be.<\/p>\n

* He was ardently loyal to anyone who passed the rigorous test of friendship\u2014for as long as they served his needs.<\/p>\n

* Bellow wasn\u2019t a nurturing person\u2014to students, children, wives, or parents. He wanted the nurturing.<\/p>\n

* For Bellow, like Rogin in his story \u201cA Father-to-Be,\u201d children represented another encroachment on his \u201cfreedom,\u201d the life force \u201ctrampling on our individual humanity, using us for its own ends like mere dinosaurs or bees.\u201d Less grandly put, children\u2014like wives and friends and lovers\u2014were always in danger of making emotional demands, requiring attention, expecting to be loved.<\/p>\n

* Covici belonged to the long line of powerful and disapproving businessmen on whom Bellow focused his need for approval and the anger that insatiable need engendered.<\/p>\n

* No amount of praise was enough. The void could never be filled. In the words of Bellow\u2019s Bard colleague Theodore Weiss, \u201cHe was a hungry man.\u201d<\/p>\n

* His excitement at finding acceptance among the New York intellectuals had given way to contempt, his sense of inadequacy vanquished by grandiosity. He no longer needed their approbation, and the more his reputation grew in the literary world, the more distasteful he found that world.<\/p>\n

* Bellow got to a point in every book, he confided to one of his girlfriends, at which he had to \u201c tear up his life.\u201d The opposite of Flaubert, he cultivated chaos at home. \u201cI have everything I need here, but it\u2019s getting to be too safe,\u201d he said of his Tivoli haven, acknowledging that he \u201cthrived on adversity.\u201d<\/p>\n

* At a literary dinner party in New York, one of the guests came up to Ludwig and said, \u201cI understand you know Saul Bellow.\u201d
\n \u201cKnow him?\u201d [Jack] Ludwig replied. \u201cHell, I\u2019m fucking his wife.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Theodore Weiss summed up Ludwig\u2019s motive best: \u201cIf he couldn\u2019t go to bed with Saul, he\u2019d go to bed with his wife.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Nor was Bellow\u2019s friendship with Ludwig the only one with sexual overtones. Sam Freifeld and Bellow shared \u201ca boyhood closeness that was almost like a teenager\u2019s homosexuality,\u201d said Freifeld\u2019s second wife, Marilyn Mann. \u201cThere was something funny about it.\u201d Aaron Asher, his editor for many years, also remarked on the unnatural intensity of Bellow\u2019s friendships with men: \u201cPeople noticed.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Writers who posed a threat to Bellow\u2019s hegemony got the cold shoulder; writers who occupied a place safely below his own on the literary ladder were seen as comrades in the \u201ctravail business,\u201d as Bellow liked to refer to his profession. Toward these needy souls he gladly extended a helping hand.<\/p>\n

* There was something indiscriminate about Bellow\u2019s letter writing; it denoted a kind of literary profligacy. That he wrote so openly to so many correspondents reflected his egalitarian spirit, his willingness\u2014as he put it to Hyman Slate\u2014to \u201caccept the wider range of other people\u2019s facts.\u201d But it also reflected his loneliness, his eagerness for company, any company. There was a certain impersonality in his boisterous epistolary style; no matter whom Bellow was writing to, his letters have a single tone. It was as if he was writing to just one person: himself.<\/p>\n

* Nevertheless, in the spring of 1960, he was once again on the couch, this time under the care of the sexologist Dr. Albert Ellis. (\u201cThat wasn\u2019t psychology,\u201d Bellow said of the Reichian Dr. Raphael, \u201cthat was zoology.\u201d) A famous figure in his day, Ellis shared with Bellow a Jewish-immigrant background and a reputation as a ladies\u2019 man. He\u2019d already been through several wives and bragged openly about his conquests; Bellow diagnosed him as a \u201cphallic-narcissistic type\u201d (the same diagnosis diagnosis Ellis applied to Bellow). Flamboyantly eccentric, Ellis, a tall, hawk-nosed figure with a long, sallow face, munched on sandwiches during sessions, explaining that he was a diabetic and required a special diet. Apparently, it didn\u2019t agree with him: Bellow later remembered Ellis\u2019s \u201c high-smelling farts.\u201d
\n Ellis\u2019s libertine views found a sympathetic ear in Bellow. Speaking to packed halls around the country, Ellis anticipated the \u201cfree love\u201d movement of the late sixties, espousing the credo that puritanical views about sex \u201ccreate untold havoc in our love, marriage, and family relations,\u201d as he put it in one of his popular manuals. The goal of therapy, Ellis proclaimed, was sexual pleasure, pure and simple. Freud \u201cdidn\u2019t know a fucking thing about sex.\u201d Part of Ellis\u2019s persona included talking like a drill sergeant: Reich was \u201cfull of horse-shit\u201d; the human race was \u201cout of its fucking mind.\u201d For Ellis, therapy was a matter of common sense: \u201c I talk people out of their bullshit.\u201d His method was to get his patients to act on their wishes and not feel bad. No one was perfect: Even Hitler, he said, was just \u201ca fallible, fucked-up human being.\u201d (There Bellow drew the line: He and Ellis had a heated argument over Hitler.)
\n Bellow entered treatment to cope with his rage at Sondra. \u201cMy goal was to get him unangry,\u201d Ellis recalled, \u201cwhich wasn\u2019t easy with a person like that because he was a novelist, and novelists think that all emotions are good.\u201d Bellow minimized the therapy, as he always did. He went into therapy when he was desperate and left as soon as he could tolerate the level of pain. \u201cIt was poolroom grad work: what to do, how to lay a girl, getting rid of character problems that are an obstacle to pleasure.\u201d He broke off treatment after a few months.
\n Ellis, like Meehl, never reached a formal diagnosis\u2014not that Bellow would have accepted one. In the end, he was convinced that psychoanalysis could no more \u201cexplain\u201d him than any other dogma could. \u201cWhat a man thinks he is doing counts for nothing,\u201d he wrote in a draft of Herzog . \u201cAll his work in the world is done by impulses he will never understand.\u201d As with marriage, Bellow went through the therapeutic process but never engaged with it\u2014instead he found material for satire.<\/p>\n

* As a lover, Bellow received indifferent marks. He was \u201cthe put-it-in-and-take-it-out type,\u201d noted the poet Sandra Hochman, a self-proclaimed \u201cart tart\u201d who took up with Bellow not long after Henderson the Rain King came out: \u201cHe didn\u2019t know a clitoris from a kneecap.\u201d Another lover, who found him \u201cpassionate and virile,\u201d remarked on his lack of interest in \u201cexperimentation.\u201d Like Herzog, he was \u201ca Quaker in his lovemaking\u201d who \u201ccouldn\u2019t abandon himself sexually.\u201d \u201cThe compulsive seducer invariably turns out to be the most insecure man,\u201d observed Helen Garrie, an actress who had a brief affair with Bellow in the sixties. She also remarked on Bellow\u2019s \u201csexual dos and don\u2019ts.\u201d
\n Sex was never the driving impulse behind his conquests. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t seem to have chosen women merely out of lustful desire, and I had no reports which described him as a stud,\u201d said Ted Hoffman, who knew a number of Bellow\u2019s women. \u201cI think he sought some kind of uncommitted temporary intimacy, perhaps even affection, rather than sexual possession.\u201d The truth was, he found women \u201coverly demanding sexually.\u201d Their sexual aggressiveness was just another effort to impose upon his freedom\u2014another demand.
\n Bellow, however, persisted in viewing himself as an old-fashioned romantic spurned by unfeeling women.<\/p>\n

* \u201cHe met these women and he made them up,\u201d a friend said of Bellow\u2019s wives.<\/p>\n

* \u201cSo many of these ladies who hungered after Saul wanted to be touched by the magic of his artistry and they would willingly give themselves to Saul\u2014to be touched by his magic wand, so to speak,\u201d said Dave Peltz.<\/p>\n

* Literary fame could still leave an empty bank account, as Bellow (like generations of writers before and after him) was beginning to discover. Not only had Henderson not made him rich, it hadn\u2019t even made him solvent.<\/p>\n

* For someone as cynical as he was about the virtues of marriage, Bellow was notably casual about proposing it. Sandra Hochman, who had met Bellow on the pretext of interviewing him for a magazine, claimed that he talked about marriage on their second date\u2014a story that would seem unlikely had other women not reported similar discussions at premature phases of an affair. Bellow made much of the fact that Hochman was his \u201cphysical type,\u201d the woman he\u2019d been looking for all his life. But after he took up with Glassman, Hochman realized she \u201cwas just someone he wanted to fuck.\u201d<\/p>\n

Helen Garrie, whom Bellow invited to join him in Puerto Rico, also sensed that a proposal was in the works. She recalled resisting: \u201cIf I got involved in his grinder, it would be bad news.\u201d Bellow made light of these refusals. \u201cDon\u2019t you think the Bennington alumnae association owes us both wound-stripes?\u201d he joked to John Berryman, whose second marriage, to Ann Levine, a roommate of Sondra at Bennington, had rapidly fallen apart. Bellow called himself \u201cthe Nathan Hale of sex\u201d: He would sacrifice his life to it. The only time he liked being married, he quipped, was at dinnertime.
\n Bellow\u2019s insouciance about his irregular marital history masked his deep confusion about it. On the one hand, he missed his boys. \u201cTwelve years in one marriage, seven in another, two sons whose lives are withdrawn from me,\u201d he summed up his situation to Keith Botsford, sounding a rare note of regret (while getting the dates wrong; his marriage to Anita lasted fifteen years, to Sondra four). \u201cI measure my complaints. I try to come to clarity with grief.\u201d But he never made a concerted effort to grapple with the issues that underlay his propensity for serial marriage, preferring to attribute it to women\u2019s supposedly predatory natures. (\u201cWhat do women want?\u201d Herzog says plaintively, supplying a histrionic answer to Freud\u2019s question: \u201cThey eat green salad and drink human blood.\u201d)<\/p>\n

* What animates Bummidge is what animates all of Bellow\u2019s heroes: pure rage.<\/p>\n

* Unlike so many of his tragic predecessors, for whom success itself became a hazard\u2014F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrecked by hackwork and drink; Faulkner, squandering his genius in Hollywood; Hemingway, destroyed by his own myth\u2014Bellow adapted easily to fame. \u201c Herzog hasn\u2019t changed my life so much,\u201d he told Gloria Steinem. Apart from the new suits in his closet and his new co-op and a new car\u2014\u201ca modest, American-made sedan\u201d\u2014he showed few signs of outward alteration. Successful writers, he noted in a lecture called \u201c The Arts and the Public,\u201d which he delivered around this time, are transformed into major literary figures and for the rest of their lives do little more than give solemn interviews to prestigious journals or serve on White House committees or fly to the Bermudas to participate in international panel discussions on the crisis in the arts. The writer is eclipsed by the celebrity.
\n Bellow was adept at managing both. If he was comfortable in his new role, it was because, on some level, it fit his self-image, ratifying his conviction that he had been destined for greatness: Fame was only the world\u2019s belated confirmation of S. Bellow\u2019s genius. As far as he was concerned, nothing had changed.<\/p>\n

* The arrival of a child meant that Bellow himself was no longer the child; he had been displaced by his own son. This was always the moment he chose to leave.<\/p>\n

* Bellow\u2019s sexual conduct was a paradox: He regarded with increasing dismay the so-called sexual revolution, inveighing against the unregulated sex of the permissive sixties while passing up no opportunity to indulge in it himself.<\/p>\n

* \u201cHe had a biblical Old World morality, but his fly was entirely unzipped at all times,\u201d said Arlette Landes, a young painter who met Bellow in the elevator of the Windermere that year. Landes was twenty-six and had recently come to Chicago from Stanford with her first husband, an assistant professor in the economics department. Their marriage had just broken up, and it was her apartment that Bellow had sublet. \u201c \u2018You\u2019re living in my apartment,\u2019 I said to him, and he said, \u2018Would you like to see what it looks like now?\u2019 \u201d The apartment tour marked the beginning of their affair. \u201cIt was the sixties,\u201d explained Landes.
\n Bellow\u2019s \u201cquota of adultery\u201d\u2014as he had described his needs to Anthony Hecht\u2014wasn\u2019t satisfied by extramarital affairs; he cheated on his girlfriends, too. \u201cI don\u2019t know when he was first unfaithful, but he certainly was,\u201d said Maggie Staats. \u201cOnce the chase was over and he had me, he began to wander.\u201d On one occasion, when Staats was staying with Bellow at the Windermere, Landes stormed in and confronted them in a jealous rage. \u201cDon\u2019t you want to marry me?\u201d she demanded. Bellow hesitated, then answered firmly, \u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Updike\u2019s stealthily cruel reviews of Bellow\u2019s novels, which he dismembered one by one in The New Yorker , were collectivized by Bellow into \u201cthe fastidious goy critics on guard for the Protestant establishment and the genteel tradition.\u201d Bellow discerned a subtext in Updike\u2019s harsh review of Humboldt\u2019s Gift: \u201cIsn\u2019t it wonderful that he can use English so well considering that it\u2019s not his native language?\u201d<\/p>\n

* Age was also a factor. While Bellow grew older, his successive wives remained the same age; as each one approached her forties, she was replaced by one a decade younger\u2014an innovative way of arresting the aging process. Alexandra was now well beyond that disconcerting marker.<\/p>\n

* John Updike, who had an unnerving capacity for getting at a book\u2019s deficiencies, remarked on the novel\u2019s \u201caggressive breathlessness\u201d and \u201cgossipy tone, as if fictional characters were a subdivision of the rich and famous.\u201d With magisterial condescension masquerading as generosity, Updike acknowledged Bellow as \u201cour most exuberant and melodious postwar novelist.\u201d Even this thin performance at times \u201cflared into an arresting vividness,\u201d but not often enough to save it.<\/p>\n

* The praise and attention he received somehow never felt like the right amount to him: It was either too little or too much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Atlas writes in 2000: * A sickly child, afflicted with respiratory ailments, he was his mother\u2019s favorite; she treated him like an invalid. * It was in temperament that Bellow diverged from the family line. He was the designated … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=138437"}],"version-history":[{"count":66,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138610,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138437\/revisions\/138610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=138437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=138437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=138437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}