Zachary Leader - The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2015 by Zachary Leader

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House, Ltd., Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Permissions acknowledgments can be found following the index.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leader, Zachary, author.
The life of Saul Bellow : to fame and fortune, 19151964 / by Zachary Leader.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-307-26883-9 (hardcover)isbn 978-1-101-87467-7 (eBook)
1. Bellow, Saul. 2. Novelists, American20th centuryBiography.
I. Title.
PS 3503. E 4488 Z 736 2015
813.52dc23
[B] 2014020092

Cover photograph courtesy of the Saul Bellow Literary Estate
Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

v3.1

To Alice

Abraham Bellow

Liza and the children, Lachine, 1918

Lynne, Marge, Maury, and Joel

Eleanor Fox at eighteen

Front page, The Daily Northwestern, February 19, 1936

SB and Anita

The editorial board of Partisan Review

SB and Herbert McClosky on the Marine Tiger

Kappy and Celia Kaplan in a Paris nightclub

Sondra Sasha Tschacbasov

Bard College Literature Division

Pyramid Lake

SB and Jack Ludwig

Susan Glassman Bellow

Additional Illustrations

Moses Gordin, SBs maternal grandfather

Shulamith Belo, SBs paternal grandmother

Sara Gordin, SBs maternal grandmother

Houses in the Jewish district, Druya

Jewish cemetery, Druya

Abraham Bellow, SBs father

Liza Bellow, SBs mother

Lachine Canal, Canada

130 Eighth Avenue, Lachine, Canada

Rue Napoleon, at the crossing with rue St. Dominique, in the Jewish district of Montreal

The Bellow family, Montreal, c. 1920

Royal Victoria Hospital

Sam and SB, c. 1924

SB and sister Jane

SBs first home in Chicago, 2629 West Augusta Street, in Humboldt Park, 2014

Sam Freifeld, SBs friend, early twenties

David Peltz, SBs friend, late teens

Ethel and Ben Freifeld, Chicago, early 1940s

Sydney J. Harris

Oscar Tarcov at sixteen, 1935

Saul Bellow at fourteen, summer 1929

Isaac Rosenfeld

The wedding of Maury and Marge Bellows, 1934

Maury Bellows

Sam Bellows

University of Chicago

SB revisiting Goff House, 1957

Northwestern University, mid-1930s

Melville Herskovits, professor of anthropology, Northwestern University, early 1930s

SB and Anita

Edith and Oscar Tarcov

Cora and Herb Passin

Vasiliki and Isaac Rosenfeld

SB, Anita, Kappy, New York, 1940

SB and Mel Tumin, Evanston, 1942

Daniel P. and Jule Mannix and their American bald eagle, Mexico, 1940

Trotsky assassinated, Mexico City, 1940

SB and Anita, Mexico, 1940

Lionel and Diana Trilling, in Riverside Park, near Columbia University, 1942

Alfred Kazin, New York, 1946

Heinrich Blcher and Hannah Arendt, 1960

New York intellectuals

David Bazelon, SBs friend from Greenwich Village days

Clement Greenberg and Barnett Newman at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, 1959

Harold Rosenberg

Arthur Lidov

Mitzi and Herb McClosky, c. 1943

SB and Greg (seven weeks old), August 25, 1944

Eleanor Clark, Robert Penn Warren, and their daughter, 1954

SB in Spain, 1947

Max Kampelman, SBs lodger in Minneapolis

Bellow home, 58 Orlin Avenue, Prospect Park, Minneapolis

Diarmuid Russell and Henry Volkening, SBs agents

Monroe Engel, SBs editor at Viking, late 1950s

Sidney Hook, 1949

24 rue Marbeuf, site of the Bellows first Paris apartment

The cafs of Saint-Germain, 1946

Kappy in his apartment at 132 boulevard du Montparnasse, 1940s

Paolo Milano

SB in Salzburg, 1950

Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Austria

SB, Anita, and Greg in Rome, 1950

Joel Bellowss Bar Mitzvah, 1952

Group photo at Yaddo, 1953

Theodore Roethke

Bernard Malamud, 1957

81 R. P. Blackmur, a model for Professor Sewall

Delmore Schwartz at the White Horse Tavern, 1959

John Berryman, 1966

Irving Howe, 1961

Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, London, 1954

Chanler Chapman, the model for Eugene Henderson

Fanny and Ralph Ellison, c. 1960

Ted Hoffman and Greg Bellow, Tivoli, 1957

SB, Greg Bellow, Jesse Reichek, at Tivoli, Dutchess County, New York, 1957

Gore Vidal on the porch of Edgewater

Pyramid Lake Guest Ranch

Joan and Harry Drackert, proprietors of the Pyramid Lake Guest Ranch

Pascal Pat Covici, SBs editor at Viking

Richard Stern, novelist, professor of English, University of Chicago

Philip Roth, Marthas Vineyard

SB, guest lecturer in Richard Sterns creative writing class

Sasha, SB, and Adam, Tivoli, c. 1957

SB and Adam, Chicago, 1957

Paul Meehl, professor of psychology, University of Minnesota

3139 East Calhoun Parkway, Minneapolis

Ralph Ross, chair of humanities, University of Minnesota, 1961

Greg Bellow and Joseph Warren Beach, Minneapolis

Bette Howland, c. 1956

Rosette Lamont

Susan and SB, Marthas Vineyard, 1964

Susan Glassman Bellow

Penny and Tom McMahon, Keith Botsford, and SB, Puerto Rico, 1961

John U. Nef, founding chair of the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago

Edward Shils, a friend and colleague at the Committee on Social Thought

SB, 1964

S AUL BELLOW WAS aul Bellow was the most decorated writer in American history, the winner, among other awards, of the Nobel Prize for Literature, three National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Formentor Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for the Novel, and the titles Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, awarded by the French Republic. At his death in 2005, as for much of his adult life, his standing in American literature could not have been higher.); man here means mensch, human being, someone to rely on, someone admirable, responsible, a person of character; being a mensch need have nothing to do with success, status, or wealth. What mattered at the end, Bellows question implies, was the life he had led as a man.

The competing claims of life and artthe writers choice, according to Yeatsis a prominent theme in many biographies.

Bellow openly acknowledged the costs involved in such instances, to the user as well as the used. In