“YOU KNOW I carry a knife,” Ralph Ellison sometimes liked to say when he sensed a fight might be brewing at a party. Ellison never pulled his knife, but he wanted people to think there was something dangerous lurking beneath his composed, steely-yet-mild exterior. The parties, in New York or Princeton or at Bard College, were mostly populated by intellectuals like Ellison, almost all of them, unlike Ellison, white. It was a long way from Oklahoma City, Ellison’s hometown, where he had heard the satisfying, bold voice of Jimmy Rushing wafting down the streets, where he snuck into juke joints, and where he became a professional-grade trumpet player as a teenager.
For Bellow, Ellison was the anti-Morrie: a man of style, elegant not brutal, unashamedly taking the side of culture. He and Bellow became close friends in the early fifties in New York, when Ellison was writing his masterpiece Invisible Man and Bellow was writing Augie March. Bellow thought that Ellison resembled a Hemingway type, showing grace under pressure—the natural aristocrat, the man under control. Nowhere in Bellow’s fiction does such a man appear. Bellow was simply unable to depict Ellison. He was too quiet, too subtle, for a Bellow novel. But Ellison’s stylish composure exerted a pull on Bellow nevertheless. Being with Ellison helped Bellow define himself as Ellison’s opposite: a man of shreds and patches, brimming with love and rage, thirsty for actual human presence. Ellison was peculiarly unable to describe love in his work, and his anger was crafty, hidden like his knife. Bellow’s passion was all on the surface, bursting out. Ellison’s invisible man was a subterranean, born to silence, exile, and cunning. Henderson and Herzog would have access to none of these weapons. Instead they were wide open, their lives unruly, confused.
There was a temperamental kinship between Bellow and Ellison. Bellow, like Ellison, preferred to keep his guard up; he often had the wary self-protective manner that Roth described in The Ghost Writer. Once, at a Rice University dinner in Houston, Bellow turned to the writer Max Apple and asked in Yiddish, “Vos voln zey fun mir?”—“What do they want from me?” Bellow’s defensive streak ran deep. Ellison showed him a way of defending oneself that would not be cagey and fraught but solid, dignified. Yet the two men were separated by their career paths. Within a few years after the success of Invisible Man, Ellison, his creative work a shambles, was falling apart within. He would never publish another novel, whereas Bellow’s career kept ascending.
Like Bellow, Ellison came from working people. He was born in Oklahoma City in 1913 (he would later shave a year off his age and say 1914). When Ellison was three, his father, who delivered ice and coal, lost his grip on a huge block of ice, a shard pierced his abdomen, and he eventually died from the wound. The boy Ellison was with his father when the accident happened, and he remembered forever the visits to his dying father in the hospital. Ellison’s father had little money, but he loved books, and he had literary ambitions for his son, so he had named him Ralph Waldo Ellison. For the rest of his life, Ellison was nervously and proudly conscious of the distinction his father intended for him. Bellow, whose mother died when he was a teenager, yearns in his fiction after women with maternal talents who can soothe the anxious, fast-thinking male. Ellison, who lost his father as a child, invented in his work a series of male authority figures, all of them lacking in one way or another. As for women, they were a minor presence: sex is nearly absent in Invisible Man, as if under a taboo.
At twenty Ellison left Oklahoma for Tuskegee Institute, where he studied music composition. He decided that, like his idol Wagner, he would have his first symphony performed before he reached age twenty-six. That ambition didn’t quite pan out: Ellison had talent as a composer, but not enough. In 1936, after three years at Tuskegee, Ellison left without a degree and drifted north until he hit Harlem. He left music for painting, photography, and then, at last, writing. He worked for the Federal Writers’ Project, wrote for the Communist-aligned New Masses, and got to know Richard Wright, who first urged him to try his hand at writing fiction. In the early forties, disillusioned with the Party, he became an ally of the intellectuals who had turned their backs on Stalinism. Like Bellow, he was a youthful leftist who changed his stripes and embraced anti-Communist liberalism.
“It all began during the summer of 1945, in a barn in Waitsfield, Vermont,” Ellison recalled. He was on sick leave from the Merchant Marine. Walking through the Vermont village he saw a poster for a “Tom show,” a blackface rendition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ellison imagined he heard a “taunting, disembodied voice” reminding him of the image-ridden history of black life in America. In Vermont Ellison was possessed by the idea that something central about African American life might be captured through a voice from underground, a voice inspired by one of the many “superfluous men” who populated the Russian novels that Ellison adored. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground seemed to Ellison the right model for what he started on that summer in Vermont: a monologue by a hidden, haunted young black man, who later became the hero of Invisible Man. To be black in America, Ellison knew, was to be ignored, slighted, and unseen, even though color was the first, maybe the only, thing most people noticed about you.
Ellison had realized an astonishing fact about our country: that African Americans are invisible not just to whites, but at times even to one another. Because to be African American is to be reduced to the appearance of blackness, the black man or woman becomes a sign rather than a living reality—born to be looked through, an ambulating ghost. Yet America, Ellison saw with a shock, couldn’t be explained any other way than through blackness, so potent was the role the slaves and their descendants had played in the nation’s culture.
Ellison started writing his novel in Vermont, and he continued when he returned to New York later in 1945. The world war was over, and Ellison’s questions about the future of our racially divided country began to sink in. His book was about a young, unnamed black man “bent upon finding his way in areas of society whose manners, motives and rituals were baffling,” Ellison wrote years later. The novel’s hero was neither a firebrand seeking self-realization Emerson style, nor one of Hemingway’s stoics standing a manly test, but an unformed youth who seemed notably—pardon the joke—colorless.
“No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe,” Ellison’s protagonist tells the reader on his first page, but rather someone you meet, though without noticing him, all the time. The world the invisible man travels through is not nightmarish or surreal, but oddly normal. The low-key nature of Invisible Man proves all-important: Ellison refuses melodrama in order to show us the plain and palpable strangeness of a society that sees everywhere a polar contrast between black and white. When the color line defines everything, yet runs through nothing deeper than mere physical appearance, we enter a story weird as any science fiction. But because much of American history tells this story, we have long since stopped thinking about the disturbingly unreal idea of race that lies behind it.
Readers of Invisible Man have often felt that they can slip into the skin of Ellison’s protagonist with no effort at all. I remember talking about the book some years ago to a high school class in Harlem that had just read Hamlet and now was on to Invisible Man. “I like Hamlet because he has chutzpah,” one girl in the class sweetly remarked, but there is no one in literature less chutzpahdik than Ellison’s unnamed hero. Even when he stirs things up late in the book by making an incendiary speech in the streets of Harlem, he seems to be doing nothing at all. He is a mere bystander at the conflagration. The oddly absent quality of Ellison’s hero spoke to me when I first encountered Invisible Man as a teenager, and it continues to send its uncanny message whenever I read it again in middle age. The central figures of Bellow’s first two novels, Joseph in Dangling Man and Asa Leventhal in The Victim, are similarly slight in stature, background men who find themselves unexpectedly in the foreground. Bellow, like Ellison, began his career by depicting superfluous people.
Ellison could be prickly, he was often a hard drinker, and he found it easy, even diverting, to infuriate people. All these traits—except the drinking—Ellison shared with Bellow. When Ellison was writing Invisible Man, his intellectual circle was the mostly Jewish Partisan Review crowd, and Bellow was his main compatriot among that group of writers and critics. Ellison and his wife, Fanny, often visited Bellow and Anita in their apartment in Forest Hills, and the two novelists liked to go fishing with Bellow’s son Greg tagging along. Ellison built a hi-fi system for Bellow’s birthday (a committed tinkerer, Ellison loved electronics, a fact reflected in the invisible man’s intricately rigged basement). At this time, in the very early fifties, the Bellows were flat broke, and Saul and Anita were barely talking to each other. Their sojourn in Mexico, marked by brief affairs on both sides, had strained their marriage. Bellow’s philandering was constant, and it deeply distressed Anita. The once young novelist, now pushing forty, felt pent up by bourgeois existence and confined by lack of money. Bellow had started Reichian therapy, egged on by his friend Isaac Rosenfeld. Twice a week he lay naked on the therapist’s couch and roared like a lion, “being my animal self,” he said.
While Ellison was wrapping up Invisible Man (an effort that so exhausted him that, he said later, he had to lie in bed for weeks afterward), Bellow was putting the finishing touches on Augie March. Invisible Man was published in 1952, hit the best seller lists, and won the National Book Award. Augie March, which came out the following year, also won the National Book Award, though Bellow had to wait eleven more years for his first best seller, Herzog.
While Bellow and Ellison waited for their fame, they had Partisan Review to argue over and, sometimes, to write for. Bellow’s fledgling short stories had appeared there in the early forties, and in 1952 the magazine published Ellison’s “Invisible Man: Prologue to a Novel,” the first taste of his forthcoming masterpiece. Partisan Review was the home of the anti-Communist left, and also the home base for worshippers of the European avant-garde who were trying to transplant such cutting-edge art to America. The world capital of visual art was moving from Paris to New York, and Partisan Review’s trailblazing critics, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, worked hard to make that westward migration occur. The titanic Rosenberg, a whirlwind of bold speech and thinking, walked with a limp from a childhood illness and was an endless source of verbal and intellectual fireworks; he became a lifelong friend to Bellow.
Bellow later cracked that the editors of Partisan Review had the mentality of Sixth Avenue cigar importers, but, he added, at least what they were importing, European culture, was worth something. Yet Bellow and Ellison stood apart from the other members of the Partisan Review group because they thought that America had plenty of cultural resources of its own. What joined Bellow and Ellison together was their sense that Americans, including Jewish and black Americans, had something to say for themselves quite apart from European models. True, Ellison revered Malraux and Bellow was soaked in Tolstoy (Bellow’s son Adam told me that his father reread War and Peace every year). They had absorbed the lessons of Dostoevsky, Conrad, Joyce, and Dickens. But at a “little lower layer,” as Captain Ahab put it, they knew themselves to be sons of Melville and, especially, Mark Twain, the first writer to make American colloquial speech the very substance of his novels. Twain made no apologies for America’s lack of the highfalutin manners and high-art traditions of Europe. America had something of its own, Twain argued: an illiterate slave or a mixed-up teenage boy from the Missouri frontier might be as distinguished as any duchess. Twain’s lesson would be unmistakable to both Bellow and Ellison as they thought about how their American upbringing, whether in its Jewish or its black variation, was going to enter into the books they would write.
Ellison and the Jewish writers who surrounded him cross-fertilized one another, most of all in the questions they asked themselves. Does it make sense to talk about “authentic” blackness or Jewishness? Is authenticity an outworn concept, and if so, what might replace it? Are folk tale and history the keys to a people’s identity? What happens when folk habits fade and histories are forgotten? These were matters that both Jews and African Americans wrestled with. Like the Jewish writers, Ellison wanted to go beyond just documenting the customs of his tribe. Ethnic life was something more subtle and encompassing, a whole way of being, even when it blended with the larger culture’s ways.
Invisible Man catapulted Ellison into celebrity. Instantly he was the most famous black author in America. Bellow in his Commentary review called Invisible Man “a superb book, a book of the very first order.” The review cemented the connection between Ellison and Bellow. In April 1955, Ellison wrote in a letter to his friend Albert Murray that he’d been “having once a week sessions with Bellow, listening to him read from his work-in-progress and reading to him from mine. For about thirty minutes we cuss out all the sonsabitches who say the novel’s dead, then we read and discuss.” A few months later, in July, Ellison took part in a panel discussion called “What’s Wrong with the American Novel?” He criticized Hemingway for his narrow fixation on technique and he came down hard on Wright for his addiction to sociology. But he praised Bellow, the author of Augie March, as the rightful successor to Faulkner. When Augie March had appeared two years earlier, Ellison remarked to Wright that it was “the first real novel by an American Jew.”
One could say something similar about Invisible Man: that with all due respect to Wright’s Native Son, it was the first real novel by an African American. Invisible Man let loose the imagination, unlike Native Son, which kept to a flat naturalist style sprinkled with melodrama and social protest. Ellison the novelist, like Zora Neale Hurston in her then little noticed Their Eyes Were Watching God, did what the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois could not do in The Souls of Black Folk: draw on the passing currents of African American talk and manners to make a permanent work of art. Ellison accomplished for black America what Faulkner had done for the white South—he fashioned its epic.
To understand Bellow, we need to take a deeper look at Invisible Man, since Bellow thought about Ellison’s work with an intensity he gave to no other of his fellow authors, at a time when he was still figuring out his own path. Ellison’s novel charts the journey of a naïve black youth from a Tuskegee-like university in the South up to Harlem, where he becomes a rabble-rouser for the Communist Party, called the Brotherhood in the novel. The unnamed protagonist becomes disillusioned with the Brotherhood, and rejects his budding career as a left-wing orator. Instead of Frederick Douglass, he turns into a Kafkaesque burrower. He escapes from a race riot in Harlem by popping into a sewer, and ends the book by retreating into a subterranean lair lit by 1369 lightbulbs. There he watches and waits: for what, he does not quite know.
Invisible Man’s momentous last line is “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” The “you” in that sentence is anyone, black or white, who can smell the air and discern that the time might soon be ripe to slide down the hatch, to hide out and stay wary. Ellison’s novel broadcast the dark signals running beneath the tame surface of the fifties. Ellison challenged us to tune in, not to a high Emersonian pitch, but to a low-down portent of future strife, not to aspire, but to lay low like Jack the Bear. The invisible man, that nondescript Kleinmensch, is actually a sophisticated human antenna getting a radio station the rest of us can’t yet hear. Even belowground and unseen, he knows which way the wind blows, and possesses the key for times to come. There is an edge of prophecy in the final pages of Ellison’s great novel, an omen of future pestilence: Invisible Man’s closing race riot presages the wildfires of rebellion that would sweep across the country little more than a decade after the book was published.
Most of Ellison’s spectacular set pieces occur early on in Invisible Man. Taken together, they feel like the heart of the book. First comes the Battle Royal, a stag party in which young black men are teased by a naked white blonde, then forced to fight each other in front of a rich white audience. Then there’s the Trueblood episode, in which the hero, now at college, takes a wealthy white donor to the shack of an incestuous sharecropper. Trueblood mesmerizes and sickens the white man with his monologue about having sex with his own daughter. Ellison uses Trueblood’s speech as a send-up of the traumatic revelations in Greek tragedy, but also an homage to the sly, rough and tumble powers of black speech, which, when Trueblood speaks it, can recognize and make light of horrors in the same breath. Bellow would devise voices just as marvelous, from Mintouchian in Augie to Humboldt’s Cantabile, but none of them have what one hears in Ellison’s Trueblood: the sheer terrifying freedom drawn from a personal doom.
Trueblood is comic and repellent at once, a folk monster out of the country blues, the music whose profound tones ripple through his speech. Even more memorable is Bledsoe, the masterful head of the black college. Proud, cynical, insidious, Bledsoe appears to kowtow to white power but in fact manipulates the white world for his own purposes. Bledsoe punishes the invisible man in underhanded, cruel fashion. He expels him from school after the Trueblood debacle, then sends him north with false letters of recommendation urging the recipient to deny him a job. His biographer Arnold Rampersad writes that Ellison saw Bledsoe as “the epitome of Negro psychological and even spiritual ingenuity in response to white terror.” Bledsoe is the closest thing to the devil in Ellison’s novel, and like the devil he exerts an uncanny charm. He is a powerful potential father, and the invisible man fails this father’s test. Ellison’s young hero is not hard enough, not deceptive enough—in short, not bad enough—to be a Bledsoe. So Bledsoe kicks him out, and the invisible man comes close to being nobody at all. Here, as always, Ellison’s novel is full of the risk that a black man encounters in a white world. Bellow’s Augie March is never treacherous like Ellison’s book. Like the invisible man, Bellow’s wholehearted Augie lacks cunning and real-world pith, but unlike Ellison’s hero, he thrives.
In his forty-year-long career of essay writing after Invisible Man, Ellison often argued that African Americans do not live in a sealed bubble—a “jug,” as he put it. To think so would be downright un-American, and deeply mistaken. He never tired of reiterating that white Americans are who they are in part because of black style and artistry, black ways of talking and being. “You cannot have an American experience without having a black experience,” Ellison wrote in one of his essays. The same could surely be said of America and Jewish experience.
“All us old-fashioned Negroes are Jews,” Ellison once remarked in an interview. He was responding to Leslie Fiedler’s jibe that Ellison was, as Fiedler put it at one panel discussion in 1969, “a black Jew.” Fiedler probably meant that Ellison was too immersed in the world of the New York intellectuals, not sufficiently tied to his people. But Ellison turned Fiedler’s snap into a compliment. As he saw it, blacks and Jews shared a few traits that were admirable and, for an underdog, crucial: a shrewd, self-reliant, practical sense of the world, an ingrained distrust of stiff and pompous ways, and most of all that essential survival strategy, the ability to keep one’s cool. Fiedler and his like just didn’t get it. The white leftist critic wanted blacks to be righteously angry. If they weren’t, then they just weren’t black enough—at least that was Ellison’s take on Fiedler’s impromptu ribbing.
In his essay “The World and the Jug,” written in 1963, eleven years after Invisible Man, Ellison described some of the characteristics that African Americans had relied on to survive among whites: “Their resistance to provocation, their coolness under pressure, their sense of timing and their tenacious hold on the ideal of their ultimate freedom.” The essay was a response to Irving Howe’s “Black Boys and Native Sons,” an attack on Ellison in which Howe suggested that Wright’s blunt anger, not Ellison’s suave and resourceful manner, was the proper answer to the brutal conditions of black American life. Swinging with the punches, staying cool, acting free even when one wasn’t: none of these traits were valuable in Howe’s eyes, Ellison implies, at least when it came to African Americans. Although Howe had memorably praised the comic resilience of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye, he preferred his black characters hate-filled and vindictive. In black life the authentic was the raw, the slice of reality so narrow that, for Ellison, it ceased to be real. Howe, Ellison damagingly wrote, was “carried away by that intellectual abandon, that lack of restraint, which seizes those who regard blackness as an absolute and see in it a release from the complications of the world.”
Being Jewish was, for Ellison, similar to being black: not an absolute fact but a complicated one. Jews knew something more, lived something more, than most whites, he thought. In some ways, Jews didn’t seem white at all. Ellison remarked in “The World and the Jug,” “Speaking personally, both as writer and as Negro American, I would like to see the more positive distinctions between whites and Jewish Americans maintained.” The closeness Ellison felt with Jewish Americans, so visible in his friendship with Bellow, was striking, and set him apart from the Black Power generation that succeeded him (in the sixties, black activists frequently and cruelly accused Ellison of being an Uncle Tom).
Ellison felt at home with liberal Jews, then, more than with radical black leftists. He knew Yiddish, too, and not just a little. He must have picked up the language when, as a boy, he worked at Lewisohn’s Department Store in Oklahoma City. According to Arnold Rampersad’s biography, one of Ellison’s New England summer-home neighbors, Harriet Davidson, reported that Ellison “and my husband would sit on the porch and converse very easily in Yiddish. Ralph had no trouble speaking or understanding it.” This is another thing that brought Ellison and Bellow together: Yiddish was Bellow’s native language, and he spoke it to the end of his life.
In a 1955 letter to Ruth Miller, his future biographer, Bellow discussed Ellison’s and his own writing in tandem. The first third of Invisible Man is “beautiful,” Bellow wrote to Miller, but the novel’s later section on the Brotherhood is “ordinary,” because it so strenuously looks for meaning. “I think this is a fault of all American books, including my own,” Bellow continued. “They pant so after meaning . . . they exhort and plead and refine, and they are, insofar, books of error.” Bellow went on to trace this error to two masters of modernist prose, Proust and James: the “original guilty parties,” with their “passion for adding meaning to meaning in a work of art, and making meaning proliferate from ordinary incidents.” Bellow, who late in life derived, he said, considerable naches from reading Proust, added, “Let us assume that Proust at least could not help himself. But this is a hanging matter with James, and with the rest of us.” Bellow was trying to slay the devil of contrivance, of making meaning, a devil to whom, he thought, Ellison had sold his soul.
Bellow’s anti-modernist battle cry in his letter to Miller was that “writing should derive from the Creation, and not attempt to add to it. We should require things to be simpler and simpler, greater and greater.” He is being true to one of his favorite aphorisms, which he cited in Humboldt’s Gift: Tolstoy’s exhortation that we must cease the false and unnecessary comedy of history and begin simply to live. Tolstoy himself, of course, worked history into the vast fabric of War and Peace, but on every page of that great work, he transmitted his sense that when we think about history, we assume false, too-grand postures. Ideas about the large-scale meaning of nationalism, communism, or any other ism can never hold true to the fact of our passions and our characters, the human essence that shows in how we cook an egg, smash a plate, or talk to a child. Ideas surround us, we swim in them, but they frustrate too. They can never get us far enough into life, and so we desperately wish to break through them and begin simply to live. Tolstoy’s Levin, who is in part the sublime Russian novelist’s alter ego, embodies this wish for pure life, unfettered by the ideas that throw an interfering shadow between us and our experiences.
As Bellow saw it, Ellison bogged down in his attempt to write the follow-up to Invisible Man because he had succumbed to the urge to make things idea-bound, dense and complex rather than simple. He was searching for the meaning that he thought would spring from symbol and allegory; for him, every object was a golden bowl. He began to use Joycean stream of consciousness, and to litter his work with allusions. Such manipulations worked for Joyce, but they became a dangerous precedent, drawing so many novelists after Joyce away from life with its awkward simplicities. For Bellow, the Dreiser of Jennie Gerhardt, clumsy as his prose may have been at times, was a better guide than Joyce and Woolf. Dreiser’s people lived. Because they were themselves, they did not need to be symbols of anything. Joyce wanted to make his characters’ thoughts interesting; Dreiser was too primal to need to do this, since for him human personalities were worthy from the start. Already toward the end of Invisible Man, Ellison had started down the wrong road: his Brother Jack and Brother Tarp were not people but mouthpieces for ideas.
THE BOND BETWEEN Ellison and Bellow was at its most intense in the late fifties. During these years Ellison was on the slow mend. Since 1955 he had been a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, where he had a serious love affair that turned disastrous. Bellow too was in pain. He had suffered a string of losses: his father’s death in 1955, his divorce from his first wife, Anita, the same year, and the death the following year of his best friend, the exuberant writer and critic Isaac Rosenfeld, at the tragically early age of thirty-eight.
There was exhilaration for Bellow too during these difficult years. He had fallen rapturously in love with the glamorous Sondra Tschacbasov, a Bennington grad who was working as a receptionist at the Partisan Review. “I could have gone out with Philip Rahv or Saul,” she recalled later. “I chose Saul.” After their marriage broke up, Bellow portrayed Sondra as a neurotic, high-strung manipulator in Herzog, a con artist of the soul, but for the time being he was head over heels.
In 1956 Bellow married Sondra in Reno. After the wedding, in a cabin at the edge of the desert, he read aloud to the assembled guests from the novel that would become Henderson the Rain King. Henderson, which came out three years later, is a crazy romp through Africa taken by a rich, roughhousing Connecticut Yankee, the steepest roller-coaster ride among all Bellow’s books. While he was writing his wild saga, Bellow said to Ellison in a letter that he didn’t “know which parts of the book originate in gaiety and which in desperation.”
Bellow had been living in Reno so that he could get a divorce from Anita; Arthur Miller was there for the same reason. Miller, along with his fiancée, Marilyn Monroe, occupied the cottage next to Bellow. He remembered the novelist standing behind a hill and “emptying his lungs roaring at the stillness”: a vigorous Reichian shout worthy of Henderson himself. A few years later, Bellow and Sondra sometimes met Miller and Monroe in New York for double dates—Greg Bellow remembers Sondra advising Marilyn about what to wear before the two couples went out together in Little Italy. “I have yet to see anything in Marilyn that isn’t genuine,” Bellow wrote his editor, Pat Covici. “Surrounded by thousands she conducts herself like a philosopher.”
In October 1956 Ellison, AWOL from the American Academy and depressed over his affair in Rome, had lunch with Bellow and Sondra in New York. Bellow was still distraught over Isaac Rosenfeld’s death that summer; he would later write a poignant, troubled memoir of Rosenfeld in short story form, “Zetland: By a Character Witness.” (He had planned for “Zetland” to be a whole book, but he never finished it; the loss was too close.) At that lunch Bellow gave Ellison a copy of his new book, Seize the Day, and invited him to share the house he had just bought with a small inheritance from his father.
“We’ve bought ourselves a wreck of a house in Tivoli (New York),” Bellow wrote to Ellison earlier in 1956. The three-story run-down Italianate villa in the Hudson Valley hamlet, near Bard College, would be immortalized in Bellow’s Herzog. Perched on a hilltop with a fine view of verdant countryside, it was impossible to heat because of its floor-to-ceiling windows. The floorboards drooped and cratered, and cracked paint peeled off the walls. The grand ballroom was falling to pieces. There was little water, so Bellow dug a well. During the summer of 1956, the novelist, who sardonically called his manse “Bellowview,” spent much of his time painting, sanding, digging, weeding the garden, and trying to fix the plumbing, while Sondra was pregnant with Adam, Bellow’s second son.
Greg Bellow, then twelve years old, was there for much of that first summer in Tivoli, along with Rosenfeld’s widow, Vasiliki. There were plenty of bedrooms, all of them in bad repair. Two years later, in late summer 1958, Ellison moved into the Tivoli house and began teaching at Bard. Ellison’s wife, Fanny, arrived on Friday evening and went back to the city on Sunday afternoon. Bellow and Ellison together applied themselves to gardening. In time the Tivoli garden would become a source of pride for Bellow: Rosette Lamont, later a Bellow girlfriend, remembers him crowing, “Look at my tomatoes, they’re the size of dinosaur’s balls.”
At the end of the fifties Bellow was teaching at the University of Minnesota, another short-term gig for the gypsy novelist. He came back to stay in Tivoli for the summers of 1959 and 1960. The first summer, the Bellows shared the vast, rambling mansion with Ralph and Fanny. The second summer, Bellow came alone: his marriage had dissolved in June 1960 amid Sondra’s ferocious recriminations, followed by Bellow’s discovery that Sondra had been having an affair with his sycophantic friend Jack Ludwig. Bellow would provide his own marital therapy in Herzog, where he caricatured both Sondra and Jack in high, raging style.
Bellow, who had taught at Bard earlier in the fifties, described the college in a letter to his fellow faculty member Ted Weiss as a “pays de merveilles, cloud-cuckoo, monkey-on-the-back, avant-garde booby cosmos.” Bard was a bastion of scruffy young bohemians, prep-school outcasts, and seekers. Ellison complained in a letter that the Bard students “wear beards and let their unwashed tits bounce around in their low-cut blouses and are still, literally, chewing gum.” (Ellison himself was always a fastidious dresser.) But he seems to have been popular with the students, a charismatic, hardworking teacher who led them through Conrad, Stephen Crane, Dostoevsky, and Faulkner.
Bard was at times a rocky experience for Ellison. He once so angered a faculty wife from Arkansas that she called him a nigger. (Ellison kept his cool and, without skipping a beat, said to her, “Kiss me.”) Gore Vidal, who lived nearby, is said to have asked Ellison, “What’s a jungle bunny like you doing in these parts?” When Ellison and Bellow later came to dinner at Vidal’s home, Ellison had his revenge. After sitting through one of Vidal’s fervent sermons against American imperialism, Ellison blandly remarked, “Gore, I just don’t understand your problem with this country. You rich, you white, and you pretty. What’ve you got to complain about?”
In Tivoli Bellow charged Ellison no rent, and paid for utilities and expenses as well. “I get a few hundred dollars a year from my father’s estate which just about covers the fuel costs,” he wrote Ellison from Minneapolis. He knew that Ellison was suffering from both marital and creative worries (Fanny had found out about Ellison’s Rome affair), and he did what he could to help.
The cure worked, at least in part. Ellison at the Tivoli mansion was “like a nineteenth century Englishman living in Africa,” he wrote to Albert Murray. He hunted rabbits and ducks, sipped wine by the fire, read and cooked, and tended to his African violets, which he watered with a turkey baster.
“As writers are natural solitaries, Ralph and I did not seek each other out during the day,” Bellow remembered about life at Tivoli. In the morning Ellison came down to breakfast in a djellaba and pointed-toe Persian slippers and made coffee in his expert manner. He then went to the study he had set up in the ballroom, while Bellow stayed at his own desk, where he listened to Mozart operas and wrote feverishly. Bellow and Ellison had breakfast and dinner together almost every day.
Ellison, coming off the mammoth success of Invisible Man, still had “a writer’s block as big as the Ritz,” as he put it. But he spent long hours each day at the typewriter, as he would throughout his life. By the time Ellison died, he had amassed thousands of pages of his unfinished second novel, a work that, he often promised his eager readership, was all but ready for publication. But the manuscript remained a chaos, encrusted with labyrinthine digressions. Bellow blamed Ellison’s friend Stanley Edgar Hyman, the critic who had advised him on the drafts of Invisible Man; he said that Hyman had “encouraged Ralph to be ponderous.” Ellison should have been more like his slippery con artist Rinehart in Invisible Man, vanished from the scene before you could blink twice. Or, as you might say in Yiddish, neylm gevorn.
Ellison’s second novel would become a massive tangle, wild and ungoverned. In the end, after four decades of work, he never finished the book. (Ellison’s literary executor, John Callahan, eventually edited two volumes of selections from Ellison’s manuscript, Juneteenth and Three Days Before the Shooting.) In his reminiscence of their time together, Bellow voiced his admiration for Ellison’s “powers of organization”: when going on a trip, Ellison would beautifully arrange the car trunk, with water, blanket, suitcase, flashlight, and tools all in place. Bellow didn’t have to add that, in the arena of writing, Ellison’s organizational powers were failing him.
“Ralph had the bearing of a distinguished man,” Bellow wrote later about Ellison in Tivoli: an aristocratic posture, native independence, and courage. Ellison for his part was deeply amused at Bellow’s lack of sartorial class, his jeans and torn T-shirts. (After living with Ellison, Bellow would become a self-consciously dapper dresser.) At cocktail hour Ellison talked to Bellow about his youth in Oklahoma and about American history, a subject he knew much better than Bellow. He was, Bellow sensed, going over the facts of his own life so he could join them together with the collective story of black America. But in his manuscript Ellison’s memories would become recursive, clotted. Bellow by contrast was moving in the direction of Herzog, which takes the dark obsessive meditations of a betrayed husband and makes them agile and comic. Bellow was achieving lightness in his art; Ellison’s writing had begun to turn slow and heavy.
Tuckatarby, Ellison’s puppy, was the snake in the Eden that was Tivoli. Tucka chewed books and defecated in the herb garden and on the Persian rugs. Bellow loudly objected, but the childless Ellison cherished his dog: in his eyes Tucka could do no wrong. Ellison complained to John Cheever, who lived nearby, that Bellow, having grown up with mongrels, was unused to the habits of a purebred dog. In a few years’ time, Ellison would choose Cheever over Bellow. Always a hard fighter on awards committees, Ellison battled strenuously in 1965 to award the Howells Medal for Fiction to Cheever’s The Wapshot Scandal instead of Herzog. He won the fight, and Cheever reported himself embarrassed that “Ralph wouldn’t let them give the thing to Saul.”
It’s not clear what, besides the bad behavior of Tucka, broke up the companionship between Bellow and Ellison. After Bellow moved to Chicago in 1961 and married his third wife, Susan Glassman, his meetings and exchanges of letters with Ellison dwindled to almost nothing. Ellison’s heavy drinking must have played a significant role: for Bellow alcohol was a goyishe affliction for which he had little sympathy. It may be too that both Ellison and Bellow recognized the growing gap between them. Ellison, the stalled novelist, was becoming a spokesman on the racial crisis in America. His independent-minded liberal stance let him keep his distance from Black Power and the New Left. He liked LBJ, who had him to dinner more than a few times, and unlike nearly all of his fellow writers, supported the Vietnam War. Bellow, in contrast to the post–Invisible Man Ellison, spoke to and about his era through his novels.
Bellow the Jew could avoid becoming a political and cultural spokesman as Ellison the African American could not. Ellison wrote in a 1953 essay that “the Negro stereotype is really an image of the unorganized, irrational forces of American life.” To combat that stereotype was the inevitable role for Ellison; there was no escape. Bellow was free to declare, as he did more than once, that he was really an American rather than a Jewish writer. Being black in America was not and is not like being Jewish in America.
When Bellow considered chaos and irrational forces, he thought not about race but the rampant emotional battles that made his marriages collapse. “He was always making and breaking families,” Bellow’s son Adam says. His repeated marital catastrophes seemed to Bellow to be happening to him, events rather than acts of will on his part. Yet he decided to leave Anita; he made the disastrous choice of Sondra, and then, after his second marriage caved in, he picked a third bride uncannily similar to Sondra, Susan Glassman. Bellow’s two novels of the late fifties, Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King, are both about men who have made a staggering mess of their lives. Bellow was waxing autobiographical.
In the summer of 1956, Partisan Review published Seize the Day, a pure, efficient, small masterpiece. Its hero is a trapped, hopeless loser, and Bellow feels for his case as he does for his own. The powerfully concentrated Seize the Day looks back to a taut noir style: if we didn’t know better we might guess that it belongs to the thirties or forties rather than the mid-fifties. Bellow’s hero, Tommy Wilhelm, lives in the narrow straits of debt and discouragement, persecuted by a harsh, business-minded father and tempted by a con artist named Tamkin. In Tamkin Bellow produced his only portrait of a smoothly fraudulent, wizardlike seducer; at times he appears to have come straight out of Iris Murdoch. Tamkin’s monologues hypnotize the reader of Seize the Day just as they do the hapless Tommy. He also resembles one of Invisible Man’s fluent, crooked mentors, a Bledsoe ready to lead the young narrator astray. Seize the Day is the only novel by Bellow that is not at all about women. Like Ellison, he focuses on the father figures who keep you running, who either refuse to provide or else provide the wrong thing.
Tommy Wilhelm is a sweating, slowly desperate middle-aged man: short of money, separated from his wife and kids, with no visible prospects in life. Tommy reflects Bellow’s own fearful self-image in the mid-fifties, the feeling of stymied failure reinforced by his brother Morrie’s disdain. In Seize the Day Tommy begs for money from his father, who lives in the same Upper West Side hotel that he does, and the father bluntly refuses. The fraught relation between father and son springs from Bellow’s own sense that he had disappointed the recently dead Abraham by becoming a hand-to-mouth novelist rather than a businessman. “There’s no need to carry on like an opera, Wilky,” his father, Dr. Adler, tells him (Tommy used to be Wilky Adler; he has changed both his first and his last name). “This is only your side of things.” And again: “ ‘I don’t understand your problems,’ said the old man. ‘I never had any like them.’ ” Dr. Adler, cool and by the book, is ready to calmly wash his hands of a good-for-nothing son, not at all like Bellow’s own violent-tempered father. But Abraham Bellow had the same readiness to turn his back on his sons: he regularly warned them that they might be cut out of his will.
Bellow finished Seize the Day in the Hudson Valley, but it is a New York City book. A noirish flourish appears on its very first page. Tommy is walking through the lobby of the hotel where he lives: “In the blue air Tommy saw a pigeon about to light on the great chain that supported the marquee of the movie house directly underneath the lobby. For one moment he heard the wings beating strongly.”
With this dour portent supplied by that typical New York beast, the pigeon, Bellow glances at time’s iron-winged chariot. Tommy’s character is his fate, and he changes very little from first to last: he is as static as any hard-boiled pulp hero. Seize the Day, a controlled story of repression and quiet defeat, draws on the American noir tradition but without its macho sternness. The book’s conclusion is not austere but instead flowing, passionate, and grave, as Tommy Wilhelm weeps for his own life at the funeral of a stranger.
Bellow’s own favorite character in Seize the Day was Tamkin, the memorable confidence man who recites his half-literate inspirational verse to the bewildered Tommy. Tamkin is a slick and genuinely strange man, a false father ready to replace Tommy’s real one. Tamkin bets on the commodities market, and he gets Tommy to invest with him in lard futures. The outcome is disastrous—Tommy loses his shirt. A consummate flimflam man, Tamkin trumpets fake-Emersonian self-reliance (“You should try some of my ‘here-and-now’ mental exercises,” he says to Tommy). Mintouchian’s inspired talk in Augie March has become advice for suckers. But astoundingly Tamkin speaks truth as well. He condemns the “pretender soul” that, he says, obeys the “society mechanism”; the pretender is in a duel to the death with the buried “true soul.” “I hear them, poor human beasts. I can’t help hearing,” Tamkin laments. “And my eyes are open to it. I have to cry, too. This is the human tragedy-comedy.” “How can he be such a jerk,” Tommy asks himself, “and even perhaps an operator, a swindler, and understand so well what gives?”
The crooked Tamkin is in fact a psychoanalyst of the hidden life. When he asks Tommy, “You love your old man?” Tommy stammers an answer, and Bellow gives a superbly tense image for his hero’s undercover emotion:
Wilhelm grasped at this. “Of course, of course I love him. My father. My mother—” As he said this there was a great pull at the very center of his soul. When a fish strikes the line you feel the live force in your hand. A mysterious being beneath the water, driven by hunger, has taken the hook and rushes away and fights, writhing. Wilhelm never identified what struck within him. It did not reveal itself. It got away.
The tight-lipped repression signaled by the fish that got away does not satisfy in the end. Bellow and his hero need catharsis.
Passion comes out in the book’s last scene, when Tommy weeps at the funeral and sinks “deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of the heart’s ultimate need.” Bellow gives us a Wagnerian Liebestod, with grief rather than love sounding “the great and happy oblivion of tears.” Bellow was clearly remembering the end of Joyce’s “The Dead,” but he drives the hero’s emotion much harder than Joyce does.
At his father’s funeral in 1955, Bellow wept uncontrollably, much as Tommy Wilhelm does at the end of Seize the Day. Morrie told him angrily, “Don’t carry on like an immigrant.” (Morrie wasn’t alone: Philip Roth complained in print about the “schmaltzed-up” ending of Seize the Day.)
The jaws close on Tommy Wilhelm, and his mistakes add up to disaster. There is no room for an enlarged self, no appetite for more life such as we see in Augie, Henderson, Humboldt, Ravelstein and even Herzog. In Seize the Day Bellow turns his spotlight on the constricted mood of the fifties in America. Tommy’s father provides an insidious guilt-tripping, intended to smother or erase his son, which was also present in Bellow’s first two novels. It appears that Abraham’s death returned Bellow, the mourning son, to the anxious, airless world of his first two books. His next novel, the rip-roaring Henderson the Rain King, would leave that world forever behind.
Tommy Wilhelm of Seize the Day is Bellow’s purest image of failure in his work. While Bellow was writing the book, he knew Ellison was in profound trouble both as a writer and as a husband. I have already mentioned that at the lunch in 1956 when he gave Ellison his copy of the just published Seize the Day, Bellow invited Ellison to live with him and Sondra in Tivoli. He wanted to rescue Ellison from Tommy’s fate.
There was another friend who would never be rescued—Isaac Rosenfeld, who died just after Seize the Day came out. Bellow had been thinking of Isaac too when he created Tommy Wilhelm, his most trapped and hopeless protagonist.
In an August 1956 letter to Gertrude Buckman, Delmore Schwartz’s first wife, Bellow said he had been “thrown millions of light years by Isaac Rosenfeld’s death” earlier that summer, and to John Berryman he wrote in December, “I think and think about Isaac, and my recollections are endless—twenty-six years, of which I’ve forgotten very little.” For a time Ellison in Tivoli substituted for Bellow’s dead friend, but he could never rival Isaac in Bellow’s memory.
Like Ellison, Rosenfeld became a brilliant failure in Bellow’s eyes. He tried hard to escape the prison of respectability that loomed over his friend Bellow. Isaac was another shadow self for Bellow, like Morrie, like Ralph.