Bellow's People by David Mikics

Author:David Mikics
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

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.

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