Saul Bellow has gone on to the Big Library in the sky. He was a major member of the so-called Jewish Mafia that came to dominate our literature in the latter 20th century: Bellow, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer. Together, they must have been married more than 20 times. In fact, Bellow left a widow more than 40 years his junior and an infant daughter. I wonder if he was approached by Viagra, Levitra, or Cialis for a celebrity endorsement? If this is (fair & balanced) fecundity, so be it.
[x Salon]
Twilight of the Old Goats
by D.T. MAX
They're all past retirement age, they've been thoroughly trashed by feminists and the (many) women in their lives, they seem sadly out of touch with the multicultural literary fashions of the day. But Mailer, Roth and Bellow refuse to go quietly.
"I think if 'Portnoy's Complaint' were written today, it would be taken as a humorous novelty," Joseph Heller said. "Today even women write books in which they happily masturbate."
I particularly liked that "even."
I was talking to the 74-year-old Heller because three works of fiction by his grizzled Jewish peers have recently come out: Saul Bellow's "The Actual," Norman Mailer's "The Gospel According to the Son," and Philip Roth's "American Pastoral." I doubt this literary equivalent of harmonic convergence has ever happened before, and though it's obviously mere coincidence, the simultaneous appearance of the Father, the Son and the Ghost Writer seemed to me to suggest a cultural watershed of sorts, or at least a chance to take stock as the twilight of the machers draws near.
These were the novelists who took over American culture at precisely the moment when American culture was taking over the world. Bellow wrestled American writing from the grip of Hemingway; Mailer, through his protean, highly uneven talent, moved the American intellectual from bookworm past activist to showman; and Roth invested American fiction with a depth many thought beyond our national capacity. They were an aggressive clan -- offensive to women, to the squeamish and, most of all, by their very prominence, to the WASP establishment. And as part of the power shift that carried the Jew from outsider to insider, for all the jangled nerves they caused among caretakers of the Jewish image, they made other American Jews -- particularly urban Jews -- proud.
But that was a long time ago. In "Humboldt's Gift," Bellow writes that Americans like their poets to die young because it makes the rest of us feel tough. I had begun to wonder whether something similar hadn't become true for novelists. These writers have left no heirs, and nearly 40 years after the youngest, Roth, debuted with "Goodbye, Columbus," we know they won't. Thirty-one-year-old fiction writer Thomas Beller met Bellow at a cocktail party in 1991 and introduced himself. "Beller?" he recalls the response, "that sounds enough like Bellow that I think I can remember it." No, mentoring is not in their make-up. Either they are still the game or the game is over.
Having grown up across the street from the West Side's old New Yorker bookstore, I can remember people climbing the treacherous stairs in search of the new Bellow, the new Roth, the new Malamud (Bellow dubbed their troika Hart, Schaffner & Marx). You knew writers from their work and the black-and-white photograph on the dust jacket. That peek-a-boo was all you got. But how do such literary lions play now that fiction readers are addicted to memoirs? As Bellow might put it, you'd have to be a fool not to realize the literary racket has changed. In 1964, Esquire ran a map of the literary universe that placed the Partisan Review in the "red hot center." Twenty-five years later, Esquire updated the feature, with ICM agent Amanda "Binky" Urban where the Review had been. Today it would have to be "Oprah."
Still, the machers have shown remarkable staying power in our cultural imagination, outlasting not only their contemporaries but changes that have altered beyond recognition the vast literary and cultural machine that created them. Literacy rates have plummeted, the Web competes with television for scarcer and scarcer free time, universities that gave shelter to novelists after the magazine fiction market disappeared are out of money, and women have come to dominate not just publishing, but the means -- bookstores, talk shows, college courses -- by which authors' reputations are made. This would seem like a death sentence. And yet, a book by Norman Mailer is still an event. The question should perhaps be, then, not how much these male writers have lost, but how well they've come through. They are routinely portrayed as static or even reactionary talents in a swirling cultural cauldron, but in truth Mailer, Bellow and Roth have shown a keen ability to adapt, to stay current, to remain, in that favorite '60s phrase, relevant. Compare them, for example, to Heller today. For that matter, where is Susan Sontag?
I called the novelists for their own take. Mailer's assistant said he would agree to be interviewed only if the article were solely about him. I thought of Woody Allen's suggestion that he donate his ego to science.
I next turned to Bellow, who is the most collegial of the three. He helped put Roth on the map when the Weequahican was his graduate student at the University of Chicago. Soon after, he exercised droit du seigneur and picked Roth's pocket of a girlfriend who would later become his second wife, Susan Glassman. Roth got a bit of his own back in "The Ghost Writer" with his portrait of Chicago literary mandarin Felix Abravamal, a novelist so hoity-toity he lives in his own "egosphere." Bellow was not amused, but somehow the friendship survived. Bellow recently suggested Roth for the Nobel Prize. (He also joked he would give Mailer the one he had if Mailer had anything to trade for it.) But Bellow turned out to be a tease. His assistant said he might call; he would call; if he did call, it would be without warning, stay by the phone. I felt like Tommy Wilhelm in "Seize the Day," a "childish mind that thinks people are ready to give it just because (you) need it." And I wound up just as disappointed. It turned out that he'd already given a long, raunchy interview to Playboy. He was tapped out.
Roth exhibited a bunker mentality worthy of "Operation Shylock." His Manhattan and Connecticut numbers had been changed. He prefers to initiate calls to people outside his inner circle to keep his number secret. "He wants to stay away from interviews and that sort of thing for the moment," says William Styron, a longtime friend, adding that Claire Bloom's memoir, "Leaving the Doll House," caused Roth "a lot of pain."
In "The Ghost Writer," Nathan Zuckerman, essentially Roth with libel protection, tells novelist E.I. Lonoff, a stand-in for Bernard Malamud, "No one with seven books in New York City settles for one piece of ass. That's what you get for a couplet." Bellow and Mailer, with 39 books and 11 wives between them, are bracing for a taste of what Roth (two wives, 21 books) got last year from Bloom. "They obviously aren't anything you'd want your sister to date," says a publisher friendly with all three.
In "Handsome Is," Harriet Wasserman, Bellow's longtime agent, recounts their one-night stand, their intense collaboration and the end of their professional romance, a Bellovian denouement in which he tried to get her to fire herself. Ultimately Bellow joined Mailer and Roth at the Andrew Wylie agency. He and the woman he talked to every day for more than 20 years have not spoken since. Like Bloom, Wasserman, equally unconvincingly, says she isn't interested in revenge. "I always felt like a character in a Saul Bellow novel," she says, "so I thought, why not write it?"
And Mailer's second wife, Adele Mailer, in her new memoir, "Life of the Party," details a nightmarish marriage to a '50s Mailer even more drug-addled, horny and socially ambitious than he has portrayed himself to be. This was the period when "Barbary Shore" and "Deer Park" were landing with a thud not equaled until the Brat Packers stumbled in the late '80s. We already know that Mailer stabbed this wife during a drunken rage after a poor turnout at a campaign fund-raiser for his mayoral race. But now we learn Mailer liked to unwind by listening to Dave Brubeck played at full volume. And that at a 1961 nudist party in Provincetown thrown by Dwight MacDonald, he was too shy to take off his undershorts. Recently, Gloria Steinem's biographer wrote that when Steinem and Mailer went to bed, Mailer could not perform. For the man who dubbed himself the Prizewinner in "The Prisoner of Sex," this is rough stuff.
It's been a tough few years all around for Mailer. Michiko Kakutani crucified "The Gospel According to the Son" in the New York Times, calling it "a pale, user-friendly version of ... the Bible ... flattened out (with) New Agey language." It was Kakutani's second killer review in a row of Mailer's work. And both ran ahead of the book's publication date, as if Kakutani wanted to make sure no one missed her point. In truth, "Gospel" has little to recommend it -- a more timid writer would have put it in the drawer -- but Mailer could be forgiven for sharing a little of Roth's paranoia as he goes back to work. Besides, with "Gospel" now on the bestseller list and "American Pastoral" and "The Actual" nowhere in sight, Mailer may have achieved the long-sought grail of the novelist: he may be review-proof.
Kakutani has slapped Roth's hand too, though the blow seemed delivered more for instruction than punishment. His "Sabbath's Theatre" features an unrepentant sexual harasser named Mickey Sabbath who is ultimately brought up on charges before a humorless dean named by Roth, perhaps unwisely, Kimiko Kakuzaki. Kakutani trounced "Sabbath's Theatre" so thoroughly that even Mailer, who feels little love for Roth, came to his defense in a letter to the Times. "It was pretty funny, Norman chinning himself up on Philip," remembers novelist Richard Stern, a friend of Roth's and Bellow's from their Chicago days. The book went on to win the National Book Award.
But Kakutani has fallen in love with "American Pastoral," Roth's big novel of the turmoil of the '60s, praising in particular its handling of women, especially the character of Dawn, the wife of the protagonist, aging sports legend Seymour "Swede" Levov. Dawn, Kakutani wrote, with somewhat confusing syntax, is "a woman who is neither a castrating witch nor a passive doormat -- something of a rare occurrence in recent Roth novels -- but a fully fashioned human being."
Most critics have agreed with Kakutani this time, similarly relieved that Roth/Zuckerman bows out one-quarter of the way through "American Pastoral" and leaves the field to a more likable fellow. I felt the exact opposite, missing every page the solipsistic and prickly Roth/Zuckerman was gone. "Sabbath's Theatre" may be the less uplifting but it is by far the better of the two novels: "American Pastoral" reads like a self-conscious try at a book with Big Themes, full of undigested American history, undigested Newark history, undigested glove-industry history. It is as if Thomas Wolfe, whom Roth loved as an adolescent, had reinfected him.
It is also the first of Roth's novels, according to his friends, to be composed on a word processor. "The muse needs its harness," cautions John Updike. According to Bloom's memoir, Roth blamed Updike's harsh New Yorker review of "Operation Shylock" for his decision to check into a psychiatric hospital. But Updike says he is not honing the blade for "American Pastoral," which seems to take more than a page from "Rabbit Redux."
"You could as well say I've gone Rothean," says Updike, "My last novel ('In the Beauty of the Lillies') starts out in New Jersey."
Like Roth, Updike knows what it's like to be tagged as a misogynist. He has had his own battles, especially after "The Witches of Eastwick." "I responded by trying to write more about women and to write more deeply. You look into your heart and ask, 'Am I really a male chauvinist? Am I really a sexist?'"
Friends say Bellow resists such introspection. "He's smart about the money he's made," says a longtime friend. "He doesn't live high. He doesn't give a shit." "Bellow's writing for the angels," is Updike's take.
Bellow's new novella confirms both opinions. "The Actual" is a brief, elegant, unapologetic story of a retired Chicago businessman and the zaftig woman he has loved and fantasized about through four decades. It proves, if nothing else, that Bellow, is still a tit man. In the end he wins his beloved's hand in a cemetery.
Bellow too feels the hot breath of the P.C. culture on his back. His too-quotable defense of Western literature in 1994 -- "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?" -- left him working damage control on the op-ed page of the Times, claiming he had been misunderstood. Novelists, after all, need young readers if they are to last. The year after "Herzog" became a hit in 1964, Glamour magazine dispatched a correspondent to Chicago to interview the then-little-known writer. "It's so easy to play a role before the public," Bellow told a kittenish freelancer, none other than Gloria Steinem. "Women write you letters asking how they should entertain a Jewish intellectual. (But) how much time have you got?"
Eleven years later Vivian Gornick wrote a cover story for the Village Voice with mug shots of Roth, Mailer, Bellow and Henry Miller, and the cover line "Why Do These Men Hate Women?" Part of the evidence was the very same "Herzog" book, whose women Gornick found "dreadful caricatures." "When I read Mailer, Roth and the later Bellow," Gornick wrote, "not much lives except the self-absorption ... the sullen vanities ... the forfeited talents." The article was a sensation. Gornick recalls Susan Glassman, now divorced from Bellow, coming up to her at a party and shaking her hand. Today Gornick says she would not bother. "At the time they were in the cat-bird seat. They were the enemy. Now their readership is limited to the Jewish Community Center."
Some rough numbers suggest she has a point. Roth's three-book contract for "Deception," "Patrimony" and "Operation Shylock," said to be for $1.7 million, left Simon & Schuster deeply in the red. For "Sabbath's Theatre," he changed publishers. Mailer, his new bestseller notwithstanding, has been a huge loss-leader for his publisher. "I can see why Mailer writes the books he's writing," a writer who admires him told me. "What I can't see is why Random House lets him."
Bellow's fastest selling book was "Herzog," which sold 430,000 hardcover copies in 1964-65 alone. "More Die of Heartbreak," his last full-length novel, published in 1985, sold 60,000 copies. "Bellow said to me once," recalls his biographer, James Atlas, "and it was very touching actually, that he had no idea that their moment would be so brief. They feel superseded by the advent of multiculturalism and the demands of other literary constituencies."
But the streets of Chicago, Newark and Brooklyn made these writers nothing if not tough. Bellow, 81, Mailer, 74, Roth, 64 -- with a Nobel Prize, three Pulitzers and six National Book Awards among them -- aren't giving up the brass ring yet. Roth, despite a recent bypass operation, has said he expects to maintain his current book-every-other-year clip. Bellow, who nearly died two years ago from contaminated seafood he ate on vacation, has two novels started. In one, he has told friends, he will lay to rest the myth he cannot write a fully-fleshed out female character. And Mailer is now supposed to be at work on his "Harlot's Ghost" Part II.
"That's the one thing you have to say for the boys," says Roger W. Straus, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "In many instances they still succeed in writing serious books. They don't just sit there and fart around."
May 16, 1997
D.T. Max, a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, will publish The Dark Eye: A Scientific and Cultural History of Mad Cow and Other Prion Diseases in fall 2005.
Copyright ©1997 Salon Magazine
