Biography Explores ‘Love and Strife’ of Legendary Author Saul Bellow


Saul Bellow is widely considered one of the greatest American novelists, a Chicagoan through and through whose connection to the city is apparent across his wide body of work.

His 1953 novel “The Adventures of Augie March” elevated him to celebrity – a position he resented, despite enjoying its spoils.

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In 1977, Bellow appeared on WTTW’s “Book Beat” just after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, and described the chaos the announcement caused.

“The media broke into my house on that day while I was moving and confronted me with cameras,” Bellow said. “Television people are really extremely aggressive and rough to unwilling celebrities. Some people seem to enjoy this sort of thing. I find it hateful.”

  • Bellow accepting Nobel Prize (Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library)

    Bellow accepting Nobel Prize (Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library)

  • Bellow in NYC 1964 (Courtesy of Howard Gotfryd; photo by Bernard Gotfryd)

    Bellow in NYC 1964 (Courtesy of Howard Gotfryd; photo by Bernard Gotfryd)

  • Bellow with Ronald Reagan (Courtesy of the University of Chicago News Office; photo by Mary-Anne Fackleman-Miner/The White House)

    Bellow with Ronald Reagan (Courtesy of the University of Chicago News Office; photo by Mary-Anne Fackleman-Miner/The White House)

Bellow’s anger, appetites and enormous talent are captured in the newly released biography “The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005.” It’s the second volume in a series by Zachary Leader, the first of which, “The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964,” was published in 2015.

Leader, a professor of English literature at the University of Roehampton in London, has also written a biography of author Kingsely Amis, among other books. He joins “Chicago Tonight” in discussion.

Below, an excerpt from “The Life of Saul Bellow.”

The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife 1965-2005

Chapter 1—Fame and Politics in the 1960s

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

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

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

Within a month of publication, Herzog was number one on the best- seller list, supplanting John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Money began rolling in. New American Library purchased the paperback rights to Dangling Man and The Victim for $77,000 and Fawcett paid $371,350 for the paperback rights to The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog.(3) “Guys, I’m rich,” Mitzi McClosky remembers Bellow declaring. “What can I get for you? Can I buy you something? Do you need any money?” On October 30, Sam Goldberg, his lawyer friend, wrote to Bellow to ask what he should do about the manuscript of Augie. “I am sitting with a $25,000 manuscript. I have no safe here which can hold it. . . . Are you going to dispose of the manuscripts this year or are you saving it for 1965”—for tax purposes, that is. On November 18, Bellow received an invitation from Mark Schorer, of the English Department at Berkeley, to teach one course for one semester and deliver two public lectures, for a fee of twelve thousand dollars. He turned it down. In December, he donated the Augie and Henderson manuscripts to the University of Chicago and turned down a five- thousand- dollar award from The Kenyon Review, in both cases because of taxes. He donated Tivoli, the ramshackle house he’d bought in 1956, to nearby Bard College, including the household contents: washing machine, refrigerator, walnut dining table, hi- fi, garden furniture, gas rotary lawn mower, garden tools. Meanwhile, the University of Chicago raised his salary to twenty thousand dollars. (4) Henry Volkening, his agent, negotiated offers for the film rights to Henderson (as did Sam Freifeld, to Volkening’s consternation) (5). “Don’t laugh,” wrote Volkening to Bellow on March 24, 1965, “but Peter Sellers is among the other stars with whom it is being discussed.” There were also inquiries about Herzog. Robert Bolt, Richard Burton, and Fred Zinnemann were interested in filming the novel; Zinnemann suggested that Harold Pinter write the screenplay. (6)

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

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

1. See Julian Moynihan, “The Way Up from Rock Bottom,” New York Times Book Review, 20 September 1964; and Philip Rahv, “Bellow the Brain King,” New York Herald Tribune Book Week, 20 September 1964.

2. Kazin’s Journals are located in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Unpublished entries involving SB were kindly provided to me by Richard M. Cook, ed., Alfred Kazin’s Journals (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), and are reprinted here by permission of the Berg Collection. The entry for 22 September 1964 is printed on pp. 335–36 of Cook’s edition; subsequent entries are unpublished.

3. These figures come from James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2000), p. 339 (henceforth cited as Atlas, Biography).

4. These and other financial details come from Atlas, Biography, pp. 339, 368–69. But see also chap. 5, n. 47.

5. After Volkening had complained of Freifeld’s interference, SB wrote on 25 February: “When I do the mental balance of what people playfully call my ‘career,’ I find that my love for H. Volkening is among the biggest of the credits. You can never get into the Freifeld class. He’s a sort of brother I must always make allowances for, dependably incompetent Sam. He’ll never understand.”

6. According to Robert Goldfarb of CMA (Creative Management Associates), in a letter of April 1965 to Henry Volkening, forwarded to SB in a letter of 19 October 1965. “On the subject of movies agents . . . the three of us have chosen Mr. Goldfarb and CMA to work with us after long and careful thought.”

7. Atlas, Biography, p. 368.

8. Quoted in ibid., p. 339.

9. Letter of Robert Hatch to Dwight Macdonald, 14 July 1965, quoted in ibid., p. 347.

10. SB to David Goldknopf, n.d. Goldknopf, a writer, had known SB for over a decade. He was the author of Hills on the Highway (1948), a novel, and of a critical study, The Life of the Novel (1972).

11. In an interview, Mitzi McClosky recalled the following exchange. “How has success affected you?” she asked SB. “I used to get letters: ‘You should have done this, you should have done that in your book.’ . . . I’d believe them but I’d feel terrible about it when I didn’t do anything about it. Now when I get these letters I say: ‘So! Write your own Herzog!’ ”

Excerpted from THE LIFE OF SAUL BELLOW: Love and Strife, 1965-2005 by Zachary Leader. Copyright © 2018 by Zachary Leader. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.


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