Letters Page 3

  1938 After two semesters, abandons graduate study and returns to Chicago. Works briefly for the WPA, writing biographies of Midwestern writers. Marries Anita Goshkin of Lafayette, Indiana, prominent in Northwestern radical circles, daughter of immigrant Jews from Crimea, “straightforward, big-bosomed, and very assertive,” as Herb Passin would recall her. Bellow takes job at Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College on South Michigan Avenue, teaching courses in anthropology and English. Works of literature he assigns include novels by Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Dreiser and Lawrence.

  1939 Sets to work on Ruben Whitfield, first attempt at a novel. “I met on the street a professor who put a difficult question to me. He, Dr. L, was a European scholar, immensely learned. Growing bald, he had shaved his head; he knew the great world; he was severe, smiling primarily because he had occasion to smile, not because anything amused him. He read books while walking rapidly through traffic, taking notes in Latin shorthand, using a system of his own devising. In his round, gold-rimmed specs, with rising wrinkles of polite inquiry, he asked, ‘Ah? And how is the romancier?’ The romancier was not so hot. The romancier’s ill-educated senses made love to the world, but he was as powerfully attached to silliness and squalor as to grandeur. His unwelcome singularity made his heart ache. He was, so far as he knew, the only full-time romancier in Chicago (apart from Nelson Algren), and he felt the queerness (sometimes he thought it the amputation) of his condition. [ . . . ] I am bound to point out that the market man, the furniture mover, the steamfitter, the tool-and-diemaker, had easier lives. They were spared the labor of explaining themselves.”

  1940 Reads Stendhal. Also D. H. Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico. Travels to Mexico City with Passin. (“We had an appointment with Trotsky and we came to the door of the house: an unusual amount of excitement. We asked for Trotsky and they said who are you, and we said we were newspapermen. They said Trotsky’s in the hospital. So we went to the hospital and we asked to see Trotsky and they opened the door and said, he’s in there, so we went in and there was Trotsky. He had just died. He had been assassinated that morning. He was covered in blood and bloody bandages and his white beard was full of blood.”)

  1941 Short story “Two Morning Monologues” accepted by Philip Rahv for publication in Partisan Review.

  1942 Ruben Whitfield evidently abandoned. Completed draft of another novel, The Very Dark Trees, accepted by William Roth of Colt Press; payment is one hundred fifty dollars. In New York, Bellow stays with Rosenfeld. (“On Seventy-sixth Street there sometimes were cockroaches springing from the toaster with the slices of bread. Smoky, the rakish little short-legged brown dog, was only partly housebroken and chewed books; the shades were always drawn (harmful sunlight!), the ashtrays spilled over.”) Engages literary agent Maxim Lieber and meets Alfred Kazin and Delmore Schwartz. Draft board defers Bellow twice owing to hernia. Forced to suspend operations at Colt Press. William Roth sends fifty-dollar consolation fee. Bellow burns manuscript of The Very Dark Trees. Reads and is influenced by Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. (“When I find a writer like that he generally turns into a kind of underground song whose voice I hear all the time, day and night.”) Begins work on novel The Notebook of a Dangling Man.

  1943 Fails to win Guggenheim Fellowship. Whittaker Chambers rejects his application for employment as film reviewer at Time. Gets part-time job at Encyclopaedia Britannica. (“Isaac Rosenfeld said that it cost less than a thousand dollars a year to be poor—you could make it on seven or eight hundred.”) Excerpt from novel in progress appears in Partisan Review. Is draft-deferred a third time.

  1944 Dangling Man published by James Henle at Vanguard Press on March 23, 1944; praised by Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker as “one of the most honest pieces of testimony on the psychology of a whole generation who have grown up during the Depression and the war.” Anita gives birth to son Gregory in April. Henry Volkening, co-founder of literary agency Russell & Volkening, acting now as Bellow’s agent.

  1945 Accepted into Merchant Marine. Posted to Atlantic headquarters at Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Following Japanese surrender, released to inactive status. Begins work on next novel, The Victim, “a story of guilt,” as he proposes it.

  1946 Second application for Guggenheim Fellowship unsuccessful. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, hires him as assistant professor of English. Among senior colleagues is Robert Penn Warren, who will be lifelong friend. Also comes to know Hubert Humphrey, then mayor of Minneapolis.

  1947 First trip to Europe: Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Málaga, Granada. The Victim published in November by Vanguard. (“In writing The Victim I accepted a Flaubertian standard. Not a bad standard, to be sure, but one which, in the end, I found repressive [ . . . ] A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously in a form which frees his mind, his energies. Why should he hobble himself with formalities? With a borrowed sensibility? With the desire to be ‘correct’? Why should I force myself to write like an Englishman or a contributor to The New Yorker? I soon saw that it was simply not in me to be a mandarin.”)

  1948-49 Receives Guggenheim Fellowship. Publishes “Spanish Letter” in Partisan Review. Breaking with Vanguard Press, goes to Viking; Monroe Engel is his editor. Journeys with Anita and Gregory to Paris, their home for next two years. American friends and acquaintances there include Mary McCarthy, Lionel Abel, William Phillips, Herbert Gold, James Baldwin and Harold “Kappy” Kaplan, friend from early Chicago days. Through Kappy, meets Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, Czeslaw Milosz and Nicola Chiaromonte. Develops strong distaste for French intellectual life: “One of the things that was clear to me when I went to Paris on a Guggenheim grant was that Les Temps Modernes understood less about Marxism and left-wing politics than I had understood as a high-school boy.” Embarks on new work, The Crab and the Butterfly, then stalls. One spring morning while watching sanitation sweepers opening hydrants and sunlit water sparkling in gutters, resolves to write different sort of novel. (“I had walked away from the street-washing crew saying under my breath, ‘I am an American—Chicago-born.’ The ‘I’ in this case was not autobiographical. I had in mind a boyhood friend from Augusta Street in Chicago of the mid-Twenties. I hadn’t seen Augie since the late Twenties; the Forties were now ending. What had become of my friend, I couldn’t say. It struck me that a fictional biography of this impulsive, handsome, intelligent, spirited boy would certainly be worth writing. Augie had introduced me to the American language and the charm of that language was one of the charms of his personality. From him I had unwittingly learned to go at things free-style, making the record in my own way—first to knock, first admitted.”) In March 1949, publishes “Sermon by Dr. Pep” in Partisan Review. In October publishes “The Jewish Writer and the English Literary Tradition” in Commentary . In Rome, meets Ignazio Silone, Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante. Evenings at Antico Caffè Greco. Story “Dora” appears in Harper’s Bazaar. In December visits London; in addition to publisher John Lehmann, meets Cyril Connolly, Henry Green and Stephen Spender.

  1950 Lectures in April at Salzburg Seminars. Visits Venice, Florence, Rome, Positano and Capri. Returns to America in September and settles with family in Queens, New York. “Italian Fiction: Without Hope” in The New Leader; “Trip to Galena” in Partisan Review.

  1951 “Dreiser and the Triumph of Art” ( review of F. O. Matthiessen’s Theodore Dreiser) in Commentary. Story “By the Rock Wall” in Harper’s Bazaar. In New York begins course of Reichian therapy with Dr. Chester Raphael. (“I turned into a follower of Wilhelm Reich and, for two years, I had this nude therapy on the couch, being my animal self. Which was a ridiculous thing for me to have done, but I was always attracted by these ridiculous activities.”) “Gide as Autobiographer” (review of André Gide’s The Counterfeiters) in New Leader. “Address by Gooley MacDowell to the Hasbeens Club of Chicago” in Hudson Review (reprinted in Algren’s Book of Lonesome Monsters, edited by Nelson Algren). Second visit to Salzbur
g.

  1952 In spring term, lectures at Reed College and the Universities of Oregon and Washington. Meets Theodore Roethke and Dylan Thomas. Translates I. B. Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool” for Partisan, Singer’s first appearance in English. Bellow’s “Laughter in the Ghetto” (review of Sholem Aleichem’s The Adventures of Mottel the Cantor’s Son) in Saturday Review of Literature. Reviews Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for Commentary; Ellison and wife Fanny will be lifelong friends. In June, first residency at Yaddo, artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. In autumn, takes post at Princeton as Delmore Schwartz’s assistant and comes to know John Berryman, who will be among his greatest friends. (“What he mainly had on his mind was literature. When he saw me coming, he often said, ‘Ah?’ meaning that a literary discussion was about to begin. It might be The Tempest that he was considering that day, or Don Quixote; it might be Graham Greene or John O’Hara; or [Maurice] Goguel on Jesus, or Freud on dreams. [ . . . ] There was only one important topic. We had no small talk.”) “Interval in a Lifeboat,” extract from Augie March, published in The New Yorker. Meets Sondra Tschacbasov, newly graduated from Bennington College and working as receptionist at Partisan. (“I could have gone out with Philip Rahv or Saul,” she would later recall. “I chose Saul.”)

  1953 “Hemingway and the Image of Man” (review of Philip Young’s Ernest Hemingway) in Partisan. Bellow begins teaching at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Lives in nearby Barrytown on the estate of Chanler Chapman, son of eminent American man of letters John Jay Chapman. In July, second residency at Yaddo. In September, publishes The Adventures of Augie March to tremendous critical acclaim. (“My earlier books had been straight and respectable. As if I had to satisfy the demands of H. W. Fowler. But in Augie March I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence. Something like a fusion of colloquialism and elegance. What you find in the best English writing of the twentieth century—in Joyce or E. E. Cummings. Street language combined with a high style. [ . . . ] I think The Adventures of Augie March represented a rebellion against small-public art and the inhibitions it imposed. My real desire was to reach ‘everybody.’ I had found—or believed I had found—a new way to flow. For better or for worse, this set me apart. Or so I wished to think. It may not have been a good thing to stand apart, but my character demanded it. It was inevitable—and the best way to treat the inevitable is to regard it as a good thing.”) At Bard, comes to know Irma Brandeis, Heinrich Blücher, Hannah Arendt, Theodore Hoffman, Anthony Hecht, Theodore Weiss, Keith Botsford and Jack Ludwig.

  1954 “The Gonzaga Manuscripts” in Discover. “How I Wrote Augie March’s Story” in The New York Times Book Review. “A Personal Record” (review of Joyce Cary’s Except the Lord ) in The New Republic. Receives National Book Award for Augie. Separates from Anita and resigns position at Bard. Spends summer at Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where friends and acquaintances include Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy and Harvard professor Harry Levin.

  1955 Abram Bellow dies of aneurysm. (“[W]hen I wept at the funeral, my eldest brother said to me, ‘Don’t carry on like an immigrant!’ He had business friends there and he was ashamed of all this open emotionalism.”) Story “A Father-to-Be” in The New Yorker. Interviews “Yellow Kid” Weil, legendary Chicago con man, for The Reporter. Receives second Guggenheim Fellowship. “The French as Dostoyevsky Saw Them” in The New Republic. Establishes residence at Reno, Nevada, awaiting divorce.

  1956 In Reno, marries Sondra in February. Arthur Miller, awaiting his own divorce, settles into nearby bungalow with Marilyn Monroe. “Rabbi’s Boy in Edinburgh” (review of Two Worlds by David Daiches) in Saturday Review of Literature . At Yaddo in September, meets John Cheever, whom he will rank highest among contemporary American writers of fiction. With eight-thousand-dollar inheritance from father, buys ramshackle residence at Tivoli, New York. Teaches at the New School for Social Research. Seize the Day published in Partisan Review in November. (“I think that for old-time Chicagoans the New Yorkers of Seize the Day are emotionally thinner, or one-dimensional. We had fuller or, if you prefer, richer emotions in the Middle West. I think I congratulated myself on having been able to deal with New York, but I never won any of my struggles there, and I never responded with full human warmth to anything that happened there.”) “The University as Villain” in The Nation.

  1957 Sondra gives birth to son Adam in January. Bellow at work on new novel based freely on former Barrytown landlord Chanler Chapman. Teaches spring term at University of Minnesota, where Berryman is on faculty. In the Bellows’ absence, Ralph and Fanny Ellison living at Tivoli house. In May, visits Richard Stern’s writing seminar at University of Chicago where he meets twenty-four-year-old Philip Roth, instructor of English and author of unpublished story “The Conversion of the Jews,” which Bellow admires. Fourth and final residency at Yaddo. Autumn semester at Northwestern.

  1958 Continues work on novel based on Chapman, now called Henderson the Rain King. In Minneapolis again for autumn term.

  1959 “Deep Readers of the World, Beware!” in The New York Times Book Review. Henderson the Rain King published in March. (“I was much criticized by reviewers for yielding to anarchic or mad impulses, and abandoning urban settings and Jewish themes. But I continue to insist that my subject ultimately was America.”) “The Swamp of Prosperity” (review of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus) in Commentary. Comes to know young fiction writer Alice Adams. At work on play variously entitled Bummidge, The Upper Depths, Scenes from Humanitis and, ultimately, The Last Analysis. Separates from Sondra.

  1960 Sondra asks for divorce. Bellow does State Department lecture tour of Poland and Yugoslavia; Mary McCarthy also on tour. (“Saul and I parted good friends,” McCarthy afterward writes to Hannah Arendt, “though he is too wary and raw-nerved to be friends, really, even with people he decides to like. He is in better shape than he was in Poland, yet I felt very sorry for him when I saw him go off yesterday, all alone on his way to Italy, like Augie with a cocky sad smile disappearing into the distance.”) In Israel, meets S. Y. Agnon, greatest of modern Hebrew prose writers. Journeys to Naples, Rome, Paris, Edinburgh and Man-chester. In London, meets his new publisher, George Weidenfeld; reception in Bellow’s honor attended by Stephen Spender, Anthony Powell, Louis MacNeice, Karl Miller, J. B. Priestley and others. “The Sealed Treasure” in Times Literary Supplement. Begins work on novel Herzog. Founds The Noble Savage, quarterly magazine coedited with Keith Botsford and Jack Ludwig; contributors will include Ralph Ellison, Arthur Miller, Nelson Algren, Josephine Herbst, Harold Rosenberg, John Berryman, Howard Nemerov, Herbert Gold, Harvey Swados, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, Jules Feiffer, Edward Hoagland, B. H. Fried-man, Dan Wakefield, Cynthia Ozick, John Hollander, Donald Finkel, Seymour Krim, Thomas Berger, Marjorie Farber and Louis Gallo. Realizes Sondra has been having affair for more than a year with his colleague (and obsessive emulator) Jack Ludwig. Divorce from Sondra final in June. Bellow falls in love with Susan Glassman, daughter of prominent Chicago physician.

  1961 Teaches spring term at the University of Puerto Rico. “Literary Notes on Khrushchev” in Esquire. Marries Susan Glassman in November and teaches autumn term at University of Chicago.

  1962 “Facts That Put Fancy to Flight” in The New York Times Book Review. With other leading American writers and cultural figures, attends White House dinner to honor André Malraux. (President Kennedy, Bellow later remarks, “could be on good terms with the intellectuals because, thank God, he didn’t have to be one himself.”) Writes foreword to An Age of Enormity, Theodore Solotaroff ’s collection of essays by Rosenfeld. Northwestern awards Bellow honorary doctorate. “Scenes from Humanitis—A Farce,” early version of The Last Analysis, appears in Partisan Review. Bellow receives five-year appointment as professor in Committee on Social Thought at University of Chicago, where colleagues include sociologist Edward Shils, historian of religions Mircea Eliade and classicist David Grene. Death of William Faulkner. Co-teaches seminar, first of many, with Grene. I
n English department, novelist Richard Stern will be another close associate and friend. “Where Do We Go from Here? The Future of Fiction” in Michigan Quarterly Review. Writes movie reviews for Cyril Connolly’s Horizon.

  1963 Childhood friend Oscar Tarcov dies of heart attack, aged forty-eight. Bellow publishes “The Writer as Moralist” in Atlantic Monthly. Honorary doctorate from Bard. Edits and provides introduction for anthology Great Jewish Short Stories. (“We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it—the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.”) Reviews Beatrice Webb’s American Diary in The Nation.

  1964 Susan gives birth to son Daniel in March. Bellows spend summer on Martha’s Vineyard, where friends and acquaintances include Lillian Hellman, William and Rose Styron and Robert Brustein; Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen are houseguests. Herzog published in September. (“Herzog says, ‘What do you propose to do now that your wife has taken a lover? Pull Spinoza from the shelf and look into what he says about adultery? About human bondage?’ You discover, in other words, the inapplicability of your higher learning, the absurdity of the culture it cost you so much to acquire.”) Forty-two weeks on best-seller lists; one hundred forty-two thousand copies in hardcover. The Last Analysis premieres on Broadway in October at Belasco Theater. (“In The Last Analysis a clown is driven to thought, and, like modern painters, poets, and musicians before him, turns into a theoretician. I have always had a weakness for autodidacts and amateur philosophers and scientists, and enjoy observing the democratic diffusion of high culture.”) Reviews negative; closes after twenty-eight performances. In October, Pascal Covici, trusted editor at Viking after Engel’s departure, dies of heart attack. Bellow donates Tivoli house to Bard College.