Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (106 page)

In 1956 Bellow published
Seize the Day
, a work which has clear resemblances to Arthur Miller’s play,
Death of a Salesman
, with the difference that Bellow is unafraid to make his salesman protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm, clearly Jewish; something that Miller was too nervous, or too calculating, to do with Willy Loman. Bellow’s fantasia, the strangely Rider Haggard-like
Henderson the Rain King
(1959), about an American millionaire (enriched by pig-farming) who does a burlesque Hemingway in Africa, widened his international readership despite a slashing review in the
New York Times
, which pronounced the novel ‘silly’ and Henderson ‘a bore cursed with the most embarrassing flow of fancy talk in a library of recent fiction. Henderson’s ravings are almost enough to make one yearn for Tarzan’s subhuman dialogue (“I Tarzan. You Jane.”).’ None the less it was the comically quixotic Gene Henderson whom Bellow regarded himself as closest to.

Bellow heeded the warning, and reined in his grotesquerie. With
Herzog
(1964), and its protagonist Moses Herzog, he tuned the Bellovian ‘voice’ which distinctively marks the fiction of the novelist’s prime – a kind of eloquent rant against the times, the United States, the human condition and the universe. Cuckolded by his best friend, Moses lets off steam with letters to, among others, President Eisenhower. The result is a blend of the classic epistolary novel and the Marx Brothers. The funniest of his creations,
Herzog
ends, unfunnily, ‘At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.’

Humboldt’s Gift
(1975) is a depiction of the literary life, with all the complexities (principally those to do with sexual relationships) that frustrate creativity. At this point in his career, Bellow’s fiction becomes even more autobiographical and the tenor of his thought more radically conservative.
Mr Sammler’s Planet
(1970) has a hero who is a Holocaust survivor and a jaundiced eye for young radicals and the decay of American civility. Bellow is estimated to have won more prizes than any other American novelist. The award of the Nobel Prize in 1976 would not, he insisted, sink him under its gravestone weight. Nor did it. But it complicated his writing. The dilemmas of establishment fame are depicted, ironically as ever, in
The Dean’s December
(1982).

Bellow recorded himself as being poor until his early forties, and not rich until his later years. Alimony and child support drained those riches. He married five times (James Atlas, his biographer, believes that Bellow needed the crack-up of a good divorce to get his creative juices flowing for the next novel) and was analysed four times (like divorce, an expensive luxury). His later work is, much of it, concerned with the pathos of ageing, in such works as
More Die of Heartbreak
(1987) and
The Actual
(1997). One of the
Partisan Review
circle, Bellow had dabbled with Trotskyism in the wild days of his youth. In age he veered as far to the opposite political position. The older he got the less Bellow seemed to like the world he inhabited. He was often accused of racism and prejudice and seemed at times pugnaciously to invite controversy. In a
New Yorker
interview in 1988, he notoriously asked, apropos of Black and Multicultural Studies, ‘Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?’ When, in 1993, he left Chicago to take up a lectureship at Boston University, a delegation went to the
Boston Globe
and asked if they knew that the city was harbouring a racist. ‘Banned in Boston,’ as they used to say.

He remained unusually vigorous in his old age, becoming a father (with the last and youngest of the mothers of his children) in his mid-eighties. It was at this period that he produced his late, and controversial, masterpiece,
Ravelstein
(2000), a portrait of the artist as a very old man. The Abe Ravelstein of the title was everywhere recognised to be the author’s close friend and colleague at Chicago University, Allan Bloom, the author of the bestselling jeremiad,
The Closing of the American Mind
(1987, 1994) – ‘woe upon this philistine country!’ Equally, the narrator Chick was recognised to be Saul Bellow. Bloom, a homosexual and, according to the novel, an odiously self-indulgent sybarite, had died in 1997 – of Aids, the novel asserted.

Ravelstein
provoked indignant protest on two counts. First, that Bellow had ‘outed’ Bloom, whom he claimed to love, which was disloyal. Secondly, that there was no evidence Bloom had in fact died of Aids (something that after the novel’s publication Bellow accepted), or that he bore any resemblance to the
À Rebours
,
Des Esseintes-like hedonist that Bellow had portrayed. On the surface, nothing very much happens in the novel except hospitals, Jewish jokes and talk. A lot of
Ravelstein
is like overhearing two old codgers rabbit on about what it is like to be two old codgers. But major themes gradually emerge. The novel explores, in its attractively rambling way, two dauntingly large and touchy themes: death and American Jewishness. ‘What is it to die?’ the old men ask each other. ‘No more pictures’ is the best they can come up with.

I felt there’s a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I’d be a jerk not to take advantage of it.

Wouk (pronounced ‘Woke’) was born in New York, the son of first-generation Russian Jewish immigrants. He was raised in the Bronx, and at the precocious age of sixteen went to Columbia University, graduating in 1934. At college Wouk edited Columbia’s humour magazine, the
Jester
. An account of his childhood and young manhood during the Depression and New Deal years is given in
The City Boy
(1948) and, in greater detail, in
Inside, Outside
(1985). Wouk’s first employment was in radio and from 1936 to 1941 he was a gag writer for the comedian Fred Allen – this furnished the background to his novel,
Aurora Dawn
(1947). Snappy dialogue was to be a strength in his subsequent fiction. After a brief hiatus working for the US Treasury, he joined the US Naval Reserve in 1942, seeing active service (winning four campaign stars) on destroyer minesweepers and rising to the rank of lieutenant. It was on board ship that he began writing his first serious fiction in 1943, advised by his former Columbia teacher, Irwin Edman.

Wouk was discharged in 1946, having married his sweetheart, Betty Brown, the previous year; they were to have three sons. On re-entering civilian life, Wouk became a full-time writer.
Aurora Dawn, or, The true History of Andrew Reale
(1947) is a satire on hucksterism in the radio industry. Written in a sub-Fieldingesque style, it was found ‘unbearably arch’ by the
New Yorker
. It was followed the next year by
The City Boy: the Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder and his cousin, Cliff
(1948). A story of life in the Bronx in the 1920s, the novel is a
hommage
to Booth Tarkington and
Tom Sawyer
.

Wouk was finding his way. He established himself as a bestselling writer of literary substance with his fourth published novel,
The Caine Mutiny
(1951), subtitled ‘a Novel of World War II’. It narrates the story of a regular-service captain, Philip Queeg, who – after sustaining a protracted mental breakdown – is relieved of his command during a typhoon in which his obstinacy threatens to sink the
Caine
minesweeper on which they are sailing. The mutineer is a Princeton graduate who has recently joined the service, Willie Keith. In the subsequent court martial, Keith is successfully defended, and Queeg broken down on the witness stand, by a Jewish lawyer, Lieutenant Barney Greenwald. In a stroke of theatre, Greenwald subsequently denounces Keith and praises the Queegs of the US Navy as the saviours of Western civilisation from fascism. It was people like Queeg, he says, who had saved those like his grandmother from becoming soap with which to wash Goering’s fat backside. Contemporary reviewers were slightly suspicious that – coming as soon as it did after the war –
The Caine Mutiny
smacked of something less than patriotism. But the novel made the bestseller list and earned its author a Pulitzer Prize. A successful, and faithful, film was made starring Humphrey Bogart as Queeg, in 1954.

Marjorie Morningstar
(1955) is the story of a stunningly beautiful Jewish girl from her late adolescence, through love affairs and a failed stage career, to respectably dull matronhood. It was, in terms of sales, the most popular hardback novel of 1955. Although praised by one critic as a ‘modern Jewish
Vanity Fair
’, others applied the term ‘soap opera’ (a recurrent slur on Wouk’s fiction) and the
New Yorker
, never a friend, labelled it ‘a damp and endless tale’.
Youngblood Hawke
(1961), even longer, is the story of a novelist, transparently based on the life of Thomas Wolfe. It attracted mainly negative reviews, but sold strongly and, like
Marjorie Morningstar,
was made into a successful film. The ease with which Wouk’s narratives converted to the screen fattened his wallet but did not raise his stock with the literary critics. His love of large, saga-like novels, his workmanlike, realistic narrative technique, and his adherence (in a world destabilised by existentialism and beatnik rebellion) to old-fashioned moral categories led one commentator to label him ‘the only living nineteenth-century novelist’.

In 1971, Wouk returned to the subject which had been calling him since the early 1950s.
The Winds of War
(1971) inaugurated his Tolstoyan narrative of the Second World War, based on the career of Victor ‘Pug’ Henry, who rises from the rank of Commander to Admiral, and is an eye-witness to many great events and historical figures (including Churchill, Roosevelt and Hitler).
The New York Times
affected to find the work ‘long, mildly interesting, moderately informative’, but readers devoured it by the million. It was followed in 1978 by the sequel,
War and Remembrance
. Taken together, the 2,000-page narrative was – unironically
– compared by the
Christian Science Monitor
to Thucydides, although the by now familiar ‘soap opera’ criticisms were levelled by less respectful commentators. The two novels were given vast popular currency by the fifteen-hour TV ‘miniseries’ made of them in 1983 and 1989. Wouk’s subsequent work,
Inside, Outside
(1985), a story of ‘being Jewish’ in America;
The Hope
(1993) and
The Glory
(1994) – two fictional accounts of the history of post-1947 Israel – reveal his twin interests in using fiction to explore his personal heritage and the vast geopolitical events of the twentieth century. In the 2008 presidential election, John McCain divulged that his favourite author was Herman Wouk. Obama went for Philip Roth. How many votes it swung either way is hard to say.

Hemingway was a jerk.

Despite the date of death inscribed above, and the fact that his ashes rest in a gilt urn ‘in the form of one of his bestselling books’ in the Palm Springs mortuary, California, ‘new’ Harold Robbins novels continue to appear. He is not channelling from the next world, however: the estate – unwilling to let a goose that lays such golden eggs honk its last – authorises chosen scribes to write up the scenarios and plot lines which, allegedly, the great teller of tales
would have composed
were he still with us. Robbins would have chortled. He always liked a joke on those suckers, his readers. He was ‘beyond cynicism’, as one of his friends put it. Enemies said worse things.

Robbins’s life was a remarkable one, but nowhere near as remarkable as the version of that life that he publicised. According to the account given in his obituaries and in the source used elsewhere in this book, the
American National Biography
, his early years were a mixture of Horatio Alger rags-to-riches and downright roguery. This is how the Robbins history of Robbins (as confirmed by the
ANB
) goes. He was born in New York of unknown parents and abandoned at birth. A birth certificate named him ‘Francis Kane’. Although presumed Jewish, he was placed in a Roman Catholic orphanage, where he learned to use his fists. Aged eleven he was adopted by a Manhattan pharmacist named Rubin, whose surname (along with ‘Harold’) he took and later adapted.

Harold dropped out of school and ran away from home at fifteen. No ingénu, he had started to smoke grass at the age of eight and had graduated to cocaine at the age of twelve. At the same age he lost his virginity to a prostitute. When pressed for cash, he would jerk street-perverts off for a quarter (he would provide the Kleenex – the tools of the trade). ‘I thought that was normal,’ he later recalled. ‘I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.’ Nor, presumably, with his next line of work as a numbers’ runner for illegal gambling syndicates in Black Harlem. There he pushed drugs on a more ambitious scale. One of his clients, he claimed, was Cole Porter. True to the Alger model, Harold the dead-end kid eventually saw the light, ‘went straight’ and, to quote the lucklessly suckered
ANB
: ‘On his savings, he took flying lessons and bought an old airplane. With an $800 loan, he flew to Virginia and the Carolinas, bought entire fields of unharvested crops, and sold the produce to New York stores. By age twenty, he was worth $1.5 million. In 1939 he sought to profiteer on sugar, buying shiploads at $4.85 per hundred pounds, but he was wiped out when the Roosevelt administration froze the price of sugar at $4.65 per hundred.’ It was Howard Hughes, he claimed on other occasions, who had taught him to fly. He returned the compliment by making the tycoon the hero of
Nevada Smith
(the film of 1966, based on the characters in
The Carpetbaggers
).