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NINETEEN

From time to time, Saul Bellow would appear in Rome, usually alone. He had, by the end, five wives, I think, and since they were all so alike I never put their names to memory. Each had a tendency to nag him for trivial lapses; “I told you not to forget the yogurt when you went into Red Hook,” our common village. At one point he shared a house with Ralph Ellison between Edgewater where I lived and Bard College. I don’t recall which of his wives was in residence while Ralph’s brilliant wife lived in New York City and visited on weekends. Of contemporary American novelists only Saul was, properly speaking, an intellectual with a wide knowledge of philosophy and that small amount of history he felt connected to. It was always a relief to talk to him about many things as opposed to such dead-end subjects as academic tenure, bestsellerdom, and, inevitably, adultery, a major theme in the postwar novel. I was fascinated by Saul’s Herzog, none of which, as far as I could tell, was invented, including the villainous Valentine based on one Jack Ludwig, a sort of primitive Iago never quite at home on the Hudson or in those groves of Academe where Mary McCarthy had also served time at Bard, giving rise to a brilliant satire of the world of Bard and what Terry Southern liked to call Quality Lit. The novel Pictures from an Institution was Randall Jarrell’s response to Mary whom he calls Gertrude. “Although,” he wrote, “Gertrude was not much of a novelist, she was a marvelous liar.” What feuds there were in those days when Partisan Review ruled the roost and Delmore Schwartz was the great poet of the second Jewish generation! But Delmore’s reign ended with the appearance of Robert Lowell who proved to be a far more brilliant careerist than the rest of the field despite occasional bouts of madness from which Delmore also suffered. In the end, Lowell was king of the castle while Delmore ended up as the protagonist in one of Saul’s most generous novels, Humboldt’s Gift. As I write these lines I find myself suddenly in the Gotham Book Mart, the bookstore that Frances Steloff had made a center of the “New York School” of the forties.

Life magazine did a famous photograph of twenty or thirty writers honoring Edith and Osbert Sitwell on their first tour of America. Although the N.Y. School did not think much of the Sitwells, Auden and Spender were also on hand. Auden, perched atop a ladder, picked a book off the shelf nearest him and handed it to me: Problems of Men by John Dewey. Riotously funny. Nearby, side by side, sit Jarrell and Schwartz. Tennessee and I are at the rear of this company. He had been amused when his old friend and fellow poet, Elizabeth Bishop, complimented him on a poem of his that she had just read in Mademoiselle. What else had he been doing? she asked. He mentioned A Streetcar Named Desire. Bishop simply smiled fondly and turned to Marianne Moore.

Saul Bellow, a Hudson Valley neighbor, also liked to visit Rome where he paid us a call at our Largo Argentina flat not far from a restaurant run by an order of third-world nuns. Alberto Moravia occasionally joined us, to listen to their hymn-singing, he declared.

Sometime in the early sixties Saul came to me with a play he had written. I had already done two plays on Broadway so he wondered if…The play was called The Upper Depths and was not only funny but original; he had taken on the self-importance of entirely ordinary people who, thanks to the then current vogue for Freudian analysis, regarded themselves and their various tics not only seriously but solemnly because in the fraudulent would-be democracy of the postwar world everyone, by definition, was equally interesting and significant—and so if only enough attention were paid…Saul for a time had been a Reichian and had even sampled that guru’s orgone box. Joseph Anthony, who had directed my play The Best Man, agreed to direct The Upper Depths, a perfect title that metamorphosed into The Last Analysis, dealing with a TV comic far gone in megalomania as he conducts his own psychoanalysis on his own TV program. I still think the original script might work. But Saul never tried the theater again that I know of.

From time to time, even when Saul was well off from the success of his books, he would go back to teaching. When I asked why, he said: “Well, I know all sorts of people here in Chicago and I certainly like them better than that New York crowd but every now and then I want to talk about literature and so, when I do, I can call a class.” Saul’s dislike of New York where he had undergone coronation as the great novelist of his generation had been symbolically shadowed by a review of one of his later novels in The New York Review of Books: V.S. Pritchett’s review was characteristically polite but unenthusiastic; worse, it was entitled “Alien Corn.” Bellow never forgave the Epsteins who were among the founders of the Review or, indeed, the entire New York School that had raised him so high. He retreated to the “real” world of Chicago where he celebrated the likes of Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss in books like Ravelstein.

I seldom saw Saul in the last years. I think that the last time we saw each other was when he came to see me at our Rome flat in Largo Argentina. Since he liked Alberto Moravia (whose first name he always pronounced in three slowly deliberate syllables: Al-Bare-Toe), I took them to a restaurant run by a lay order of beautiful third-world nuns. I fear the two lecherous old masters ogled these psalm-singing nubilities. All in all, a cheery evening. At one point we spoke of death and what each expected to die of. Saul was very positive. “I expect to just wear out.” And so he did, a man of Benthamite utility.

Biographies, memoirs, volumes of letters by friends and acquaintances keep arriving and are stacked in piles all around my workroom. Sometimes there are unwelcome surprises. Christopher Isherwood, a friend for forty years or so, wrote endless diaries, all reverently published word for word by his heirs. Since Chris seldom awakened without a horrendous hangover, the “hangover diaries,” as I dubbed them, report his morning sickness, as it were, and give no sense of what the often joyous evenings before had been really like. With jaundiced gloom he took us all on. I had thought that between his native shrewdness and whatever Vedanta is supposed to do to heal or palliate the wounded psyche he might have written in a more generous vein. But he is often hard on those who had been good—and often more than helpful—friends like John Van Druten whose play I Am a Camera and subsequent musical, Cabaret, supported Christopher in his final decades. I come off fairly well. My political toughness was admired. But there is something claustrophobic about his total obsession with himself and domestic life. Little news from the outside world got through to him or, if it does, he promptly ignores it. The diaries to one side, he was still, in life, the consummate boy-charmer despite whatever age he had so unexpectedly found himself at. Of his new celebrity as a “Gay Icon” he reveled in the limelight. “Literally,” he said. “When I’m out there on the stage with all the lights blazing away I am so relaxed—so at home—that I am in serious danger of falling asleep.” The obituary style still clings, as it were, to my pen. After a successful prostate operation, he was told to check back, regularly, with the doctor, which he forgot to do. The cancer spread. Soon he was dwindling away. I had just come from London and paid him a visit. He was hardly present. I chattered nervously. Talked of mutual friends whom I had seen. Remarked upon the fecklessness of the British. After the bonanza of striking oil in the North Sea, the Thatcher government seemed to have gone through the money. I was censorious: “A nation of grasshoppers,” I said. The old Isherwood, the Isherwood of legend, suddenly opened his eyes and smiled. “So what,” he asked, “is wrong with grasshoppers?” Thus we parted, each in approximate character.

Although I answer letters from friends and even interesting requests for information, most of the fan mail goes into a large box which is eventually shipped off to the Houghton Library at Harvard. I’ve always kept just about everything that comes my way as did Lord Byron, Thomas Wolfe, and not many others, or so I’ve been told by university archivists. Fortunately, as a twentieth–twenty-first-century writer, ladies and page boys don’t send me locks of hair as they did Byron. On the other hand, Vladimir Nabokov (whom I never met) and I liked to exchange elaborate insults through the press. In an interview he said that Graham Greene’s conversion to Catholicism seemed entirely bogus to him while he had it, on the best authority, that I had gone over to Rome. These épingles as Vera Nabokov termed them ended when I remarked in an interview how odd it was that Russia’s two greatest writers were of African descent. Before he could think of an answer, death ended these joyous exchanges.

Over the years, Louis Auchincloss and I exchanged a number of letters on many subjects from our common family to friends and, best of all, literary matters but where Saul could call a class I was obliged to write letters to only a few people like Louis Auchincloss, Paul Bowles, Isherwood, the Glorious Bird himself as I called Tennessee; we had a number of imaginary characters whose adventures cropped up in our correspondence. One was the mysterious Lesbia Ghoul, a ubiquitous figure forever on the move. April 5, 1948, Tennessee reports: “Lesbia passed through Rome, heavily veiled.” (It was common knowledge that she had more than once submitted her tragic mask of a face to the surgeon’s knife.) The Bird continues: “No sign of Willard. No word. Only a whisper of silk and a few rose leaves floating after. The scent of frangipangi. A few days later a gilt-edged card, saying ‘Sorry’ post-marked Istanbul, dictated, unsigned. With Lesbia one is never certain, such a thin line so easily crossed over! Nerves…”

There were numerous Lesbias and Willards in our peripatetic lives mostly around Europe and, thanks to Paul Bowles’s urgings, Morocco which I disliked as much as the Bird did. But for the pleasure of Paul’s company, each paid him calls, never together as it happened. Also, on the road, hunting in a pack, there were a number of remittance men, writers with no time to write, for which the Bird and I at least were grateful. Mostly Americans, they inclined to alcohol, kif, and to all the needy lads in the postwar poor countries. Since in those days I neither drank, nor smoked pot or kif, I had little in common with most of them. But Tennessee’s love of the grotesque was positively Franciscan and he let them cadge money and not entirely empty bottles from the tourist hotels we stopped at if such places had, as he put it in that no-known language he sometimes used, progresso libero. In any case, spring and summer were for travel and constant work for each of us: he on his typewriter and I in longhand on yellow legal pads.