Sondra Tschacbasov and Jack Ludwig
WHEN HE WROTE Herzog, Bellow hit a nerve. The book reached the best seller list in October 1964, and quickly ascended to the top; it stayed at number one for a little over six months, until mid-May 1965. Herzog was not manically profane like Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, which stuck its richly obscene tongue out at America and its Jews five years later, causing a scandalous shonde-quake heard round the Jewish world, but it was just as intent on unsettling readers in what would come to seem a distinctively Jewish way, by bringing an agitated psyche out into the open.
Herzog was in many ways an improbable candidate for bestsellerdom. Here was a novel about a failed professor, a nervous wreck who spent his time writing letters to famous men living and dead, when he wasn’t meditating revenge on his estranged wife and her lover. The book was peppered with references to philosophers and religious thinkers: Buber, Berdyaev, Heidegger. It was an overwrought book, soaked in anxiety, full of what Jews call tsures. In Herzog Bellow made the emotionally muddled Jewish intellectual a novelistic hero. He joined obsessive rumination with comedy and sensuality: his novel was for long stretches a thought-monologue, but at the same time awash in perverse, colorful human presences. The book is transparently autobiographical, a slumming tour of the author’s tragical farce of a marriage. No one, John Berryman wrote to Bellow, had so far “wallow[ed] with full art” the way he had done in Herzog.
What accounts for Herzog’s appeal to a public otherwise devoted to taut suspense tales like John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or topical potboilers like Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase, about a teacher at an inner-city school, and Irving Wallace’s The Man, about the first black president, all of them best sellers in 1964? The answer lies in the way Bellow tied his culture’s crisis to the trauma of an individual soul, a man separated from his children, betrayed by his wife, the strident, wrathful Madeleine, and his best friend, ruddy, wooden-legged Valentine Gersbach. The well-worn themes of the era flow through Herzog: alienation, anomie, the organization man. Bellow’s hero strikes out against the “lousy, cringing, grudging conception of human nature” that was “Protestant Freudianism” in the early sixties, the golden age of psychoanalysis in America. Herzog, who writes letters to presidents and generals as well as philosophers, bears witness to the enthrallment of intellectuals with political power during the Kennedy years. The love affair is absurdly one-sided. No one writes back to Herzog: he never even mails his letters.
Bellow once gave a capsule summary of Herzog that went something like this: A man’s wife ditches him, and he turns to Spinoza. There is something unstoppably comical about Herzog’s flurry of letters to Herr Nietzsche, Doktor Professor Heidegger, and the others. The big minds won’t help him out of his emotional morass. Yet Bellow never plays philosophy for laughs. In Herzog he takes up in an utterly different key Henry James’s question about the meeting between European ways of thinking and American life, a question that the American novelists between James and Bellow had for the most part ignored. And even for James Europe was not an intellectual presence so much as a rigorous source of social distinctions and habits. Bellow’s Herzog is strung between life and high ideas and approaches both in full, desperate earnest. He is in this respect a rarity among the heroes of the American novel.
What most interests Bellow in Herzog is the troubled heart. His own trouble is front and center in the book: the affair between his second wife, Sondra Tschacbasov, and his close friend Jack Ludwig. In Bellow’s novel, the crass and hearty Ludwig, who had a clubfoot, becomes the unforgettable peg-legged Gersbach. This crude showman-shaman worshipfully attaches himself to Herzog just as Ludwig did to Bellow. From time to time, when he’s not flattering Herzog, Gersbach lets loose short bursts of scorn at the man he has cuckolded.
The other troubles that Bellow’s novel evokes reach far beyond the ruin of his marriage. Herzog is, in the Jewish sense of the word, a prophetic book. Hosea, too, was done wrong by a bad woman: so Madeleine’s departure unleashes high thoughts in Herzog. Like Job, he refuses to accept suffering as reasonable. Restless, he demands answers. Herzog’s sorrows are not just personal; they ask for an unreachable justice. Full of pain, he visits a city courtroom and sees a pair of defendants who have murdered a small boy, “Lying down to copulate, and standing up to kill.” Bellow will revisit this same wounded theme, the disordered, violent life, two decades later in The Dean’s December. In Herzog the glimpse of ravaged murderous poverty is almost too much for Moses, and for us, to bear; it brings out our unsettled, futile wish to heal the world. The radical impulse at the heart of the courtroom scene—its Herz—is sorrow for the sheer wrongness of the state of things. Herzog has some kinship with Malamud’s talented sufferers, although Bellow, unlike Malamud, never turns Herzog’s pain into a shrewd, stifling ascetic vocation. His suffering is more open, a public question.
American intellectuals of the fifties and early sixties were often complacent judges who chided the culture for its shortcomings: its lack of deep thought, its materialism. But Herzog is no such calm master. He is consciously vain, buffeted by his passions, and rancorous, not least against Madeleine, who looks to Herzog like an iron-willed, self-adoring fiend. Herzog, like Hamlet, rips into “woman,” when he’s not enjoying the homely comforts his girlfriends give him. Herzog wins no prizes for male sensitivity to woman’s plight: Bellow is honest on this score, perhaps to a fault.
Bellow’s earliest conflict appeared in Augie March: the literary soul’s battle with the brass-tacks business world that his father and brothers represented. Next in Bellow’s career came the breaking down of intellectual defenses, his tour of Reichian therapy, the weeping Tommy Wilhelm and the wild man Henderson. Herzog carries further Bellow’s doubts about lofty mental posturing. By the late fifties Bellow had become skeptical about the New York intellectual way of looking down on America from above. Herzog crumbles to pieces, defeated by ex-wives, leaky pipes, and indecision; he knows that high-mindedness won’t save him. And so he becomes a romantic and returns to the sources of feeling, the early family life that he remembers from Jewish immigrant Montreal and Chicago.
Herzog recalls his “ancient times,” “remoter than Egypt,” life as a child on Napoleon Street in Montreal; his father with his smoker’s cough, his mother who “did the wash, and mourned,” his brother Shura (Morrie), who “with staring disingenuous eyes was plotting to master the world,” his brother Willie’s (Sam’s) asthma—“Trying to breathe he gripped the table and rose on his toes like a cock about to crow”— and finally “his soft prim sister who played the piano”: Jane, the eldest Bellow sibling.
These are some of the novel’s best pages, with a heartfelt paean to Jewish memory: “The children of the race, by a never-failing miracle, opened their eyes on one strange world after another, age after age, and uttered the same prayer in each, eagerly loving what they found. What was wrong with Napoleon Street? thought Herzog. All he ever wanted was there.” But it’s not true. Herzog wants more: a chapter after his memory of Napoleon Street, Moses the Jew rests in uneasy erotic bliss with his girlfriend Ramona while an Egyptian singer croons “Mi Port Said.” Finally Herzog centers not on childhood reminiscence but on the trials of grown-up sexuality. And at the core of those trials is Madeleine, who was originally Sondra.
SONDRA TSCHACBASOV met Bellow in 1952, when she was twenty-one. After Bennington, Philip Rahv had hired her to be a receptionist at Partisan Review even though she couldn’t type, couldn’t take dictation, and was a bad speller. She had exotic flair, though. Sondra, also known as Sasha, mesmerized men: to parties she would wear a low-cut black dress with a heavy silver Maltese cross between her breasts, hair piled high on her head. One day Bellow called the Partisan Review office and Sondra answered. You must be the new girl, he said. It wasn’t long before Bellow started dating Sondra, who was living in the Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side, later the setting of Seize the Day.
Bellow was teaching at Princeton at the time, and he took Sondra to a wild party there. A drunken Berryman recited his poetry flat on his back while caressing Sondra’s foot. Years later Sondra remembered that R. W. B. Lewis, her teacher at Bennington, asked “point-blank if I was sleeping with Saul yet, because they were all placing bets.” Sondra’s insouciant posturing put off the women at the party, and they despised her wild attractiveness to the PR circle’s men. But her seeming poise came from insecurity: at twenty-one, she was out of her depth in this intellectual and emotional shark tank.
We know much more than we did before about Sondra Tschacbasov thanks to Zachary Leader’s Bellow biography. Leader relies on an unpublished memoir by Sondra which reveals that her father, a modernist painter friendly with Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, sexually abused her from the time she was twelve through high school, when the family lived in the Chelsea Hotel. This long-running trauma left a heavy mark on Sondra. Herzog alludes to the abuse in veiled terms, and relays as well Bellow’s suspicion that she might have been inventing it—Sondra was known to fictionalize her past, claiming, for example, that her family were emigrés who had fled the Russian Revolution. In part as a result of her father’s abuse, Sondra was hungry for authority. The handsome, charismatic Bishop Fulton Sheen converted Sondra to Catholicism in December 1952: he called her his dushka (“the Russian word for soul,” he said).
Sondra was attracted to Bellow as a sober, work-minded man with a strict writing routine. “What a relief from my whirling dervish of a parent, all untrammeled passions and unbridled habits and desires,” she wrote in her memoir. But Bellow’s professional anxiety and his rigid character soon led to trouble. Early in their marriage there were heated arguments about money (he thought she was extravagant), about sex (“you expect too much,” Bellow charged), about her neglect of housework. Bellow briefly persuaded her to see a Reichian therapist. Stuck in the vast, ramshackle Tivoli house, Sondra became an upstate Emma Bovary desperate for romantic escape.
Escape came in the unlikely form of Bellow’s colleague Jack Ludwig. Bellow and Ludwig first met at a party given by Chanler Chapman for new Bard faculty in 1953. Leader reports that Keith Botsford, who taught at Bard, remembered Ludwig as a backwoods Canadian Jew with a loud, low voice: “A bulky Winnipeg hockey body, a heft arm leaning against the wall, a mass of hair, bristling and thick.” Ludwig accosted Bellow with back-slapping laughter and what Bellow called “butcher boy Yiddish,” and Botsford had to rescue him from the over-hearty Ludwig’s clutches.
When Sondra first met Ludwig at a party later that same year, just before the Bard term started, she was feeling alienated from the faculty wives and cocktail-sipping husbands. Suddenly, she remembered, “this very round faced, fat guy, wearing a hideous checked jacket that even a bookie might have rejected, gave me a joyful, humorous smile.” And they were off—though it would be five years before the affair between Sondra and Jack began.
Sondra wrote in her memoir that Ludwig and Bellow were two starkly different personalities. “Ludwig was very expansive, warm, big, big-hearted, . . . a larger than life character.” But Saul looked at the world askance—“His head was always [slightly] turned away from you, . . . like a magpie, going to take something and use it.”
The affair between Sondra and Jack began in Tivoli in May or June 1958. Since the birth of Adam in January 1957, the Sondra-Saul relationship had been more fractured than ever. Sondra was relying on both Jack and his wife, Leya, for emotional support against Bellow. “Saul was disapproving, constantly finding fault, selfish beyond belief in every way in bed and out,” Sondra recalled. At the same time Bellow was seeking out Jack’s marital advice, complaining (in Sondra’s later words) that “I was too demanding, imperious, too centered around the baby, immature, spoiled, a sexual flop.” While Leya was in labor with their second child, and Jack and Sondra sat in the hospital waiting room, Jack revealed to Sondra Saul’s complaints about her. He also told her about Bellow’s infidelities, which, he said, were common knowledge at Bard. Jack had been coming to the Tivoli house to talk to Sondra over coffee in the late mornings, while Bellow was still working. He became her brotherly confidant, then one day he confessed—don’t you know? he asked—that he loved her. Soon after, their affair began.
Meanwhile, Ludwig had attached himself even more firmly to Bellow than to Sondra. On walks Ludwig would join Bellow in Reichian roaring, then give him sex advice. He imitated Bellow’s expressions and mannerisms, his way of talking. “He wanted to be Saul Bellow,” remarked a student who knew them both.
Bellow was offered a job teaching at the University of Minnesota for the fall of 1958. He accepted on one condition: that Ludwig also be given a position. He was, and the Bellows and Ludwigs moved to Minneapolis. That fall Sondra decided to end the affair, but she wavered, and soon she was sleeping with both Bellow and Ludwig. In the spring of 1959 she had an abortion, unknown to Bellow. That summer, back in Tivoli, she knew she had to get out. In October, in Minneapolis, she announced to Bellow that their marriage was over.
Sondra only gradually became the vengeful, driven fury who tormented Moses Herzog. In the early days of their relationship, Bellow thought he was the master and teacher, with Sondra his eager pupil. In a letter to Berryman probably written sometime in 1954, near the beginning of his romance with Sondra, Bellow wrote, “A young girl requires making. A man makes her into a woman. Whither then? I hope she’ll become my wife, but it is a great thing to have waked someone into life, and Sasha is a very considerable human being.” Sleeping Beauty was Bellow’s favorite fairy tale: he must have seen himself as the fortunate prince who had not only woken Sondra up, but also shaped her, Pygmalion style. In the end, though, his creation had a mind of her own. When Jack declared his love for her, Sondra wrote in her memoir, “I looked into his eyes, really looked, and somehow fell into them. A coup de foudre. . . . I was Sleeping Beauty.” Now Jack was her awakener, her prince. By the time Sondra walked out, in October 1959, Bellow had revised his story line of their relationship. The next month, he wrote to Keith Botsford, “Sasha is an absolutist. I think I’ve loved even that, in her. I believe I learned with her how to love a woman.” He had come to adore Sondra’s dominating will, her effort to take control over her wounded psyche.
All along Sondra proved decisive, determined, not least in her work habits. She was an obsessive student. In October 1958 Bellow wrote to his editor Pat Covici that his wife was reading medieval history “sixteen hours a day and has little time for anything else,” and in a letter to Ellison he said, “Boring subjects delight her.” Bellow had met someone who outdid even him in her work ethic: Sondra, so much younger than her husband, was declaring herself his superior.
In January 1959 Bellow wrote to Josie Herbst about the “blowup” between him and Sondra the preceding June. “She took the kid and went to the city,” Bellow lamented. “I had to hold together the house and my impossible book and take care of my older son who came to spend the summer with me.” During this time Bellow was revising Henderson, dictating to a typist “eight, ten, twelve and fourteen hours a day for six weeks.” After the rocky summer of 1958, Bellow said to Herbst, he and Sondra had “patched things up” back in Minneapolis. She had been suffering from a nervous disorder, he was convinced. In February 1959 Bellow reported to Covici that “Sondra too is much better. All’s well in the sack, unusually well, and we’ve begun to feel much affection for each other.” Bellow’s word “begun,” like his choice of “affection” rather than “love,” looks ominous—Bellow and Sondra had been together for four years at this point. Before the year was out, their marriage would be history.
HERZOG’S opening line rings with a desperate man’s strange wit: “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.” Madeleine, Moses’ wife, has walked out on him, and so he spends his time writing letters to the famous dead, to public figures, and to his own dead friends. Herzog sits alone in his house in the Berkshires, surrounded by the shards of his scholarly work on romanticism. While he was gone, hikers camped out in the house and left a used tampon on his desk. Here in the backwoods non-town of Ludeyville, too small to be found on any map, Herzog eats beans from the can with white bread. A rat, he notices, has tunneled through the loaf.
Not much happens in Herzog. Moses, shaking himself into action, buys some summer clothes. He decides to take a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, then changes his mind. He remembers his affairs with a Polish woman, Wanda, and a Japanese woman, Sono, and he thinks often of his current girlfriend, Ramona. He remembers, with sharp pain, his discovery of the affair between Madeleine and Gersbach. On a trip back to Chicago to see his and Madeleine’s little daughter, Junie, Herzog takes along his dead father’s pistol and some of his Russian rubles. He is thinking of shooting Gersbach: a silly idea, he knows. Like Dmitri Karamazov, he will kill no one. Instead he has a small traffic accident with Junie in the car, the police discover the pistol and the rubles, and he is briefly arrested. The book ends with Herzog back in Ludeyville, getting ready for an evening date with Ramona, who is coming to visit him.
Bellow takes aim at himself more directly in Herzog than ever before or since in his fiction. The hero knows full well how ludicrous, how vengeful, he can be. Some readers think Bellow was moved by self-pity more than anything else when he wrote Herzog. But soon after the novel begins Herzog rapidly, flatly indicts himself, admitting “that he had been a bad husband—twice,” “a loving but bad father,” and “an ungrateful child.”
Herzog is a far more actual father than Henderson or Tommy Wilhelm. He knows the pain that comes with missing his children. And Herzog’s picture of a child with her father is the most tender of all its tableaux. Herzog remembers his little daughter Junie, who here stands in for Adam: “She stood on her father’s lap to comb his hair. His thighs were trodden by her feet. He embraced her small bones with fatherly hunger while her breath on his face stirred his deepest feelings.” To be separated from one’s children is a cruel fate, and Bellow knew this fate well. “I sometimes long for Adam,” he wrote to the lawyer Jonas Schwartz in October 1960, begging that Sondra send “one postcard a month” about the boy.
Bellow’s portrait of Madeleine is cold and raging, just like Mady herself. Adam Bellow, who is Sondra’s son as well as Saul’s, told me, “It was impossible to recognize my mother in that portrait. I told him when I was fifteen,” Adam added, speaking calmly, “that woman is not my mother.” Herzog sees in Mady only a relentless blind narcissism. Herzog too has his narcissism, but unlike Mady, he senses his foolish side, whereas she takes herself with utter, steely earnest. It was Sondra’s icy composure that most perturbed Bellow and convinced him that her heart was cold and alien too. Bellow wrote to Pat Covici in November 1959, when he was still in the dark about Sondra and Jack, “I have good grounds, many, many wounds to hate her for. But I’m not very good at it, and I succeed best when I think of her as her father’s daughter. For she is Tschacbasov. She has a Tschacbasov heart—an insect heart.” Bellow’s use of “insect” comes from The Brothers Karamazov, where it means perverse, greedy, and plotting. Bellow wrote to the novelist Stanley Elkin in 1992 that “old Tschacbasov . . . was a repulsive old phony and low self-dramatizer, a would-be Father Karamazov but without intelligence or wit.”
Bellow thought Sondra had inherited her father’s insectlike cold mastery, though he knew his young wife was also shaken by self-doubt. She was at her most chilly and decisive when she finally told Bellow she wanted a divorce. “Anyway she walked into the living room with icy control about three weeks ago and told me she wanted a divorce,” Bellow wrote in his letter to Covici. “There’s no one else involved. There doesn’t need to be. She does everything on principle, a perfect ideologist.” And so it happens in Herzog. When Mady rejects Moses, she touches narcissistic triumph: “Her color grew very rich, and her brows, and that Byzantine nose of hers, rose, moved; her blue eyes gained by the flush that kept deepening, rising from her chest and her throat. She was in an ecstasy of consciousness.”
Mady loves to admire herself in the mirror, gazing at “the great blue eyes, the vivid bangs, the medallion profile. The satisfaction she took in herself was positively plural—imperial,” Moses remembers. A Jewish convert like Sondra, Mady clings to her Catholicism as a bulwark against her crazy upbringing. Her parents were bohemians: her mother fragile, her father a vain theatrical impresario—“You know how I learned my ABC’s? From Lenin’s State and Revolution. Those people are insane!” weeps Mady.
Herzog is full of snapshots of fury: Bellow shows Mady utterly out of control, absorbed in the richness of her rage. In the country, on the rocks with Mady, Herzog plays his oboe while she storms off in the car. (Bellow was an accomplished recorder player who loved to perform at parties.) Pregnant Mady shrieks as she denounces her husband, who notes the “wild blue glare” of her eyes, her nostrils trembling with indignation. She seems not a woman but an unnatural force.
Like Mady, Gersbach, a near-mythic beast, rides the chariot of narcissism in Herzog. Gersbach, Herzog muses, resembles Hitler’s pianist Putzi Hanfstaengel—a palpable hit. “But Gersbach had a pair of extraordinary eyes for a red-haired man, brown, deep, hot eyes, full of life. The lashes, too, were vital, ruddy-dark, long and childlike. And that hair was bearishly thick.” Gersbach, like Jack Ludwig, speaks a mangled kitchen-table Yiddish full of errors. (Bellow’s friend Stuart Brent, according to his son Jonathan, loved to talk Yiddish with Bellow until Bellow, pained by Brent’s mistakes, ordered him to speak English.) After he corrects Gersbach’s Yiddish during a winter walk in Minnesota, with “Gersbach in his great storm coat, belted, bareheaded, exhaling vapor, kicking through the snow with the all-battering leg,” Herzog thinks, “Dealing with Valentine was like dealing with a king. He had a thick grip. He might have held a scepter. He was a king, an emotional king, and the depth of his heart was his kingdom.”
“But Gersbach almost always cried, and it was strange,” Moses ruminates. He concedes that Gersbach has suffered more than he has, during “his agony under the wheels of the boxcar” when, as a boy, he lost his leg. “Gersbach’s tormented face was stony white, pierced by the radiant bristles of his red beard. His lower lip had almost disappeared beneath the upper. His great, his hot sorrow! Molten sorrow!” Gersbach’s performing ardor is his reality: he leans on it like a wooden leg.
Gersbach is the life of the party, a romping knave who far outstrips Moses’ sad involuntary clowning. He is, Herzog comes to realize, a heroic fraud: “Innocent. Sadistic. Dancing around. Instinctive. Heartless. . . . Laughing at jokes. Deep, too. Exclaiming ‘I love you!’ or ‘This I believe.’ And while moved by these ‘beliefs’ he steals you blind.” Gersbach is the opposite of Herzog, focused and certain, with total belief in himself. His pride naturally appeals to Mady.
Looking for escape from his thoughts of narcissistic Mady and rapacious Gersbach, Herzog seeks out the cultured seductress Ramona, a flower-shop owner of exotic mixed ancestry. Ramona captivates Moses with her continental flair. “She walked with quick efficiency,” Bellow says of Ramona, “rapping her heels in energetic Castilian style. . . . She entered a room provocatively, swaggering slightly, one hand touching her thigh, as though she carried a knife in her garter belt.” The Japanese Sono is an even more exotic girlfriend, given a tender portrait by Bellow. Like Ramona, Sono is a latter-day Calypso, adept at pampering her man. The comforts these two women offer—the beautiful dinners, hot baths, massages—are the weary traveler’s delight; they give the flavor of home without the strife of marriage. With both Ramona and Sono, Moses becomes a grateful boy, while the woman is maternal giver, playmate, and pal. The fragile, even foolish character of such idylls doesn’t keep Bellow from treasuring them, in Herzog as in the later Humboldt’s Gift.
The real-life basis for Ramona, Rosette Lamont, was an Ionesco scholar, a professor of literature in New York, and a glamorous, brilliant figure in Bellow’s life. In 1974 she wrote a reminiscence of Bellow’s years in Tivoli for the magazine Mosaic. Lamont’s essay shows that she adores Bellow. “The profile is that of a witty, half-domesticated fox,” she writes. “Cheeks, mouth and chin are soft, the vulnerable clay of a thinker. Exquisitely delicate, high-arched feet suggest the aristocrat, the dandy.” But there are some hilarious bursts of tongue in cheek too. She describes Bellow answering his correspondence. “The most arduous task,” Lamont says, “was that of dealing with the trail of women left throughout European capitals.” Lamont adds that “Bellow rarely gets involved with the so-called liberated female, and if it happens by accident, the results are disastrous.”
Rosette Lamont lost out to Susan Glassman in the marriage race: it was Susan, not Rosette, who became Bellow’s third wife. But in fiction Rosette won. Ramona and Herzog end the novel together, as Moses prepares on Herzog’s last page to welcome her to Ludeyville. The upbeat ending of Herzog drew mixed reactions when the book was published: if this was a tale of midlife breakdown, some critics complained, it should come to a more dire end. Lamont herself reviewed Herzog for the Massachusetts Review, and she praised the “wonderful sense of peace” at the novel’s end.
In her essay-memoir Lamont depicts Bellow’s fine unregulated manhood surrounded by pickers and stealers, especially women. Bellow to her mind is a noble and dashing knight but one under great duress. In Herzog Moses feels the urge to escape, and so did Bellow. At one point during a heated parley with the lawyer Sandor Himmelstein about his marital woes, Moses hears a ship’s horn out on Lake Michigan. “Herzog would have given anything to be a deckhand bound for Duluth,” Bellow writes.
Bellow was living through a crack-up in late 1959, after Sondra walked out. Early the following year he wrote to the Viking editor Marshall Best, “If I hadn’t gone off in November [to Europe] I might now be in the loony bin and not in London. This has a metaphorical sound but I mean it literally.” Bellow was in Europe until March 1960, in part on a lecture tour sponsored by the State Department. His divorce from Sondra became final in June.
Moses’ saving grace is his lack of resolution. Herzog’s odd, thwarted climax occurs when with his father’s antique gun in his hand, he sees “Uncle Val” giving Junie a bath. Here Gersbach is Quilty to Herzog’s Humbert, as Moses reflects, “To shoot him—an absurd thought! As soon as Herzog saw the actual person giving an actual bath, the reality of it, the tenderness of such a buffoon to a little child, his intended violence turned into theater, into something ludicrous.” Herzog never seriously contemplates murder. (Nor did Bellow, though he seems to have suggested to friends that he might shoot Ludwig.) Instead, he is touched by the tender gesture of his clownish enemy.
Bellow finally discovered Sondra’s affair in the fall of 1960, after the divorce was final. Months later, in early 1961, he wrote a letter to Ludwig that remains a small masterpiece of acerbic wit. Soon after, the agonized Bellow jumped into writing a novel about his wrecked marriage: Herzog was the four-hundred-page extension of the letter.
In his letter, Bellow admitted to Ludwig that
I haven’t got the sharpest eyes in the world; I’m not superman but superidiot. Only a giant among idiots would marry Sondra and offer you friendship. God knows I am not stainless faultless Bellow. I leave infinities on every side to be desired. But love her as my wife? Love you as a friend? I might as well have gone to work for Ringling Brothers and been shot out of the cannon twice a day. At least they would have let me wear a costume.
The Saul, Sondra, and Jack triangle that produced the wonder of Herzog was a three-ring circus. Astonishingly, there was more to come. The vexed relation between real people and the fictional characters based on them has rarely taken on so bizarre and fascinating a form.
Ludwig’s three-year job at Minnesota was ending. He was a popular teacher, and well-known to the public too: he taught a class on educational television called “Humanities in the Modern World.” Three hundred students signed a petition begging the administration to keep Ludwig, and his colleagues pleaded his case too, to no avail. But Ludwig landed on his feet: he secured a job at SUNY Stony Brook and got tenure there. Jack and Sondra continued their affair after the move to Long Island.
Meanwhile, the roman à clef tangle became stranger still. In an act of high-wire chutzpah, Ludwig reviewed Herzog favorably for Holiday magazine, pausing only to deride Herzog’s (that is, Bellow’s) “siege of self-justification.” Ludwig punctured Herzog’s claims to victimhood and also denounced his “tasteless” remarks about “ ‘cripples.’ ” At the end of his review, Ludwig named Bellow, along with Ralph Ellison, the heir to Hemingway and Faulkner. He proclaimed that “the novel is in good hands. Herzog is here to stay.” Years later, Bellow wrote to Kazin that Ludwig’s review of Herzog was “ingenious, shrewd, supersubtle, shamanistic, Rasputin-like.” Ludwig also lectured on Bellow at the Modern Language Association, to an audience of nearly a thousand people drawn by the hope of scandalous tidbits.
Finally, and most outrageously, Ludwig’s next novel, Above Ground, was a dreadfully written revision of Herzog, this time told from the seducer’s rather than the husband’s point of view. The Bellow figure, Louie, is a sculptor rather than a writer, but his real identity is clear. The Ludwig character suffers constantly because he is unable to choose between his wife and his mistress. By the time Above Ground was published, in 1966, Jack and Sondra’s relationship had fallen apart, giving Ludwig a free hand to come down on Sondra even harder than Bellow had.
Ludwig’s Above Ground apes Herzog in style and subject matter, with some intermissions for inept Joycean stream of consciousness. It is a dismal, nearly unreadable slog except for one incendiary section near the end, a series of letters from Mavra, the Sondra character: a part of the book so much better than the rest it might have been written by someone else. And perhaps—so some have speculated—it was. “The letters of the heroine are conspicuously superior in style, but the book is garbage,” Bellow wrote suspiciously to Sondra.
Mavra’s letters are wicked, pornographic, and taunting. She tells Josh (Ludwig) about her casual pick-ups, her insatiable sexual curiosity: “I threw one leg up on the couch and he just had to stroke upwards. . . . I mean I can get something started and like a spectator watch it unfold—like a movie I’ve never seen.” She blends grandiose erotic fantasy with low-down vengefulness. She tells Josh, “We can do terrible things to each other, let strangers into our beds, but on the highest level be priest and priestess, shuck off dead snakeskin and be born again, younger, more beautiful. Please don’t tell me—or think—this is rationale.”
In another letter Mavra waxes resentful, threatening, insecure:
I could maybe stand you taking a bitch to bed. But if you loved her I’d slit my throat. . . . I want a detailed checklist, to bury the past and establish my primacy (sp?).
You’d say sure Titsy was great and Snatchy was terrific and Dimple-ass was lovely but Mavra Mavra you are the greatest. . . . I’d say how great was Titsy, really, and you’d say Titsy had a frozen pelvis and screwed as if she was in a dentist’s chair, was middlebrow, smelled all wrong, had hair like a Barbie Doll’s, was always dry, peed like a horse, put on a big show but never came once in her life, not even at her own hand. We’d bury them all like that, one after the other, and never send flowers.
The verbal tics are Sondra’s: she was unsure of her spelling. And some of the jokes must have been hers, too (“If I had like Rebecca to carry an urn of water I’d slosh it all over the intermediaries,” she tells Josh). Ludwig, it seems, wanted Bellow to think that these were Sondra’s true confessions, that he had copied them from her hand.
Ludwig takes Bellow’s side against Sondra in Above Ground. He even makes Mavra condemn herself. Louie is a fool and a “playactor,” Mavra says, but she herself is the guilty one: she mauled his psyche for the sheer pleasure of it. “That was really me, dirty me. Turning love into a murderous anti thing, to cut a sad man like Louie to bits.” Maggie, Josh’s wife, says to him, “She engineered the fights with Louie, the flight to the city; the whole scenario worked out as she wrote it. . . . She can manipulate settings, environments. Like a middling fighter, Josh, she picks her spots.” For Ludwig, Sondra, with her insect soul, was the sadistic author of the whole disastrous romantic triangle.
“The tragedies of my life were not over Saul. They were over Ludwig,” Sondra wrote many years later in her memoir. Later still, Ludwig revealed his final word on the matter in an email to Bellow’s biographer Zachary Leader: “Saul was hurt. By his friend. That’s it.”
HERZOG MADE BELLOW a famous and wealthy man. The late sixties were years of celebrity for him, but much of the money he made would go to alimony and child support, especially after his ill-fated third marriage to Susan Glassman. In 1961, the same year he moved back to Chicago to teach at the university, and about a year and a half after his divorce from Sondra, Bellow married Susan, an ex-girlfriend of Philip Roth. Their marriage lasted a scant five years, until 1966. Its rancorous aftermath stretched over an additional decade, as Susan pursued Bellow through the courts, trying to secure a larger share of his income.
Bellow had first met Susan in 1957. He was giving a talk at the University of Chicago Hillel, and the young Roth attended with Susan. After Bellow’s lecture, Susan went up to chat with him. She would soon switch her allegiance from Roth to Bellow. When Bellow’s marriage to Sondra broke up, Susan was there waiting.
Susan, the daughter of a prominent Chicago surgeon, became Bellow’s intellectual confidante as well as his lover. She encouraged him through his feverish, excited work on Herzog, some of it done while Bellow, then chronically short of money, was teaching at the University of Puerto Rico for a few months at the beginning of 1961. Keith Botsford, his old Bard colleague who was also teaching at Puerto Rico, got Bellow the job. In San Juan Botsford proved himself a dedicated friend and an eccentric whirlwind of energy, but the tropical heat, Bellow wrote, always gave him “the depressed sense of having come out of the movies at midday.” Bellow’s letters to Susan from Puerto Rico are energetic, erotic, breathlessly high-pitched. “From your nutty but devoted and adoring lover,” he wrote, “here are a few pages more of this impossible Herzog whom I love like a foster brother.”
Bellow’s marriage to Susan was on the rocks almost as soon as it started. While Bellow typed manically, Susan devoted herself to decorating the couple’s lavish new Chicago apartment. She loved socializing and tennis, and delighted in being the wife of a famous novelist. Bellow, with his strict work ethic—five hours a day at his desk, then the afternoon reserved either for teaching or cruising through the streets of Chicago with old friends, his main method of novelistic research—was often at odds with Susan. His new wife was a voracious and alert reader who wrote short stories that she hoped to publish. She was a more than fit intellectual companion for Bellow, but, just like Sondra, she disdained Bellow’s friendships with the Chicago pals of his youth, and criticized his Montreal relatives as crude Yiddish-speaking proletarians.
Bellow’s strenuous writing routine continued after his third marriage fell apart. Adam, Bellow’s son from his marriage to Sondra, was three when his parents were divorced. During his childhood he lived alternately with his father and mother, and spent much time in the apartment on East Fifty-Fifth Street in Chicago’s Hyde Park that Bellow shared with Susan and later lived in alone, after Susan’s departure. “He used to work up a sweat,” Adam told me. “He would stink up the house, literally, because he’d start working in the morning without taking a shower. He’d be sitting there in his bathrobe, with the sun coming in across Lake Michigan.” Thomas Mann’s children remembered their father’s perpetually closed study door. Bellow’s son recalls him not closeted off but in the middle of things, furiously writing, with the phone ringing and domestic life bouncing on around him.
It was Bellow’s affair with Maggie Staats, whom he met in early 1966, that endangered his marriage to Susan. Maggie, who was then twenty-four—twenty-seven years younger than Bellow—was a typist at The New Yorker who had studied literature at Northwestern and Yale; she later became a magazine editor. She was from an old East Coast family, and was not only sharply intelligent but blonde, pert-nosed, and pixielike. It wasn’t long before Bellow was talking marriage to her, but she rebuffed him. Maggie Staats (later Simmons) was married five times, and through it all remained close friends with Bellow.
Maggie’s relationship with Bellow was on-and-off, but it was always intimate and electric. Maggie later summed up her years with Bellow with one word: wonderful. “I miss you so much, it’s like sickness, or hunger,” Bellow wrote to Maggie near the beginning of their affair, “childish lovesickness.” There were other women too, among them the exuberant painter Arlette Landes. Both Maggie and Arlette would be depicted in Humboldt’s Gift: Maggie with great tenderness, Arlette less so.
Bellow connected his headlong love for Maggie Staats to his ardent belief in the importance of childhood memories. In a journal passage from mid-1966, the fifty-one-year-old Bellow wrote,
Unwillingness, reluctance to recognize the reality of the present moment because of attachment to something in childhood.
Therefore a brother rather than a father to the children. . . .
Locate the Old System with passion—not so other things.
Maggie is part of this. Has the purity of earliest connections. Miraculous to have accomplished so much in the world while in such bondage.
The Old System was Bellow’s term for the tangled bank of early family relationships, always the most intense locale for him. In 1966 he was working on his story with that title, about a man who pays his estranged sister twenty thousand dollars so that he can see her on her deathbed. Parts of the story were borrowed from Bellow’s Montreal relatives, the Gameroffs, but it spoke to Bellow’s own sweet, pained knowledge that his earliest attachments had formed him indelibly, that there was no substitute for the first love of mother, father, and siblings. “He kept making and breaking families, but his only real family was the original family,” Adam Bellow remarked to me. “He just loved them all. That’s how he apprehended people, through the innocent power of love.” Because Maggie Staats shared in the “purity of earliest connections” that is both nostalgic freedom and “bondage,” as Bellow put it in his journal, she was, to his mind, his truest companion.
Bellow’s separation from Susan came in 1966; they were divorced two years later. He now had three sons by three different wives (and, he once joked, by “three different husbands”). Stretched thin by the money he owed, and aching from the ruin of yet another marriage, Bellow looked to his constant anchor, novel writing. “He wanted to be a patriarch,” Adam Bellow remembered, “but he wasn’t very good at it. He wasn’t very easy in his conscience, and he didn’t like having us [his sons] together.” While his marriage to Susan broke apart, Bellow started writing a novel about a man of solid conscience, a man profoundly unlike both Herzog and Herzog’s creator: Artur Sammler.