A Writer Captivated By the
Chaos Of New York
By JOSEPH BERGER
Saul Bellow, in 1984
New York was Saul Bellow's Second City.
Chicago was where he grew up, went to college and eventually settled.
But he lived in New York as a young writer, and New York's frenzied streets,
its apartments with bathtubs in the kitchen and cockroaches in the toaster, the
benches on its traffic islands filled with idlers and the old, the onion rolls
from Zabar's, even the pigeons, exerted a powerful and deeply ambivalent pull
on him.
He went on to evoke the city's émigré intellectuals and eccentrics, its
connivers and kooks, its complicated women and vacillating men in novels like
''Seize the Day,'' ''Herzog'' and ''Mr. Sammler's Planet.'' Mr. Bellow
described their stage with all his crusty precision. He told of Moses Herzog,
who suffers on his sofa, while in the background lies ''the trembling energy of
the city, a sense and flavor of river water, a stripe of beautifying and
dramatic filth contributed by New Jersey to the sunset.''
Mr. Bellow was the poet of a single building, the Ansonia Hotel on
Broadway and 73rd Street, the setting for a large portion of his 1956 novella
''Seize the Day.'' He described it as a Baroque palace, ''with towers, domes,
huge swells and bubbles of metal gone green from exposure, iron fretwork and
festoons.''
''Under the changes of weather it may look like marble or like sea
water, black as slate in the fog, white as tufa in sunlight,'' he wrote. ''This
morning it looked like the image of itself reflected in deep water, white and
cumulous above, with cavernous distortions underneath.''
But he was more often the poet of a particular kind of tormented New
Yorker, the kind like Herzog who can dash off letter after letter to people in
power -- even if they're no longer alive -- to air his aching grievances,
knowing redress is far in the distance. Or he could depict a characteristic
sidewalk speculator like Dr. Tamkin in ''Seize the Day,'' a psychologist more
obsessed with the agonies of the stock market than those of his patients.
''I think about people, just because they have a few bucks to invest,
making fortunes,'' Tamkin lectures Tommy Wilhelm, a poignant schnook who, like
many a New Yorker saddled with alimony payments and a disapproving parent,
dreams of a killing. ''They have no sense, they have no talent, they just have
the extra dough and it makes them more dough.''
Mr. Bellow was smitten too with the vigor of certain New York women,
like Ramona, Herzog's girlfriend, who ''walked with quick efficiency, rapping
her heels in energetic Castilian style.''
''Herzog was intoxicated by this clatter,'' he wrote.
Dr. Norman Doidge, a psychiatrist who befriended Mr. Bellow and his
wife, Janice, in his last decade, said, ''Everyone identifies him with Chicago,
but there was a deep New York tie.''
''It seemed that there was something about the mania and tumult of New
York City that matched the mania and tumult of some of the characters,'' Dr.
Doidge said.
The critic Stanley Crouch speculated in an introduction to the 1995
edition of ''Mr. Sammler's Planet'' that Mr. Bellow picked New York for the
novel's backdrop because it was the ''place of action,'' where he could have
his hero say significant things about America.
''Mr. Sammler could not be in a better setting if he were to wrestle
with the identity of the United States,'' Mr. Crouch wrote.
Mr. Bellow came to New York, like many Midwesterners, hoping to conquer,
but he did not live in New York all that long, mostly in the 1940's and early
50's, when he wrote a few pieces for the legendary Partisan Review. (He, Irving
Howe and Eliezer Greenberg translated Isaac Bashevis Singer's ''Gimpel the
Fool'' from Yiddish into English in 1952, winning Singer a larger American
audience.) As a writer, Mr. Bellow found New York claustrophobic, a place with
too many other writers who would paralyze his muse with shoptalk and gossip.
But he had some quintessential New York experiences. He underwent
Reichian therapy, then in vogue, with a Queens therapist and, according to his
biographer James Atlas, lay naked on a couch trying to purge his body of its
defenses ''by acting out rage and sexual tension, shouting, gagging, grimacing,
pounding the couch.'' Mr. Bellow's later comic skepticism may explain why more
than a few New York analysands and ex-analysands were Bellow devotees.
Mr. Bellow hated the apartment where he lived with his first wife,
Anita, in a red brick building in Forest Hills in what he described in an
unpublished story as ''the colossal dingy borough of Queens.'' But for an
escape valve he often visited the book-crammed Village apartments of friends
like the poet and short-story writer Delmore Schwartz, the model for the
charmingly mad Humboldt of ''Humboldt's Gift.'' According to Mr. Atlas, Mr.
Bellow, whose marriage was breaking up, had his own room ''off to the side'' in
Macdougal Alley.
But after he returned to Chicago he visited New York often, befriending
people like the cultural critic Harold Rosenberg, the novelist Ralph Ellison
and Saul Steinberg, the cartoonist who captured the solipsism of this city. His
publishers and his agent, Harriet Wasserman, were here, and so were his
girlfriends, and he often combined business with pleasure -- or whatever
pleasure a man often at war with women could take.
Mr. Bellow was never sentimental about New York. In ''Mr. Sammler's
Planet,'' the story of an aging Holocaust refugee, an intellectual with Old
World manners, he describes a quandary many New Yorkers faced in the days when
the city was plagued by criminals. Sammler daily rides a bus from the 42nd
Street library to his West Side apartment, and with his one good eye is
fascinated by a pickpocket he regularly encounters. Sammler says nothing and
wonders instead whether he had ''been seen seeing.''
''Must he give up the bus?'' the story continues. ''It was always Mr.
Sammler's problem that he didn't know his proper age, didn't appreciate his
situation, unprotected here by position, by privileges of remoteness made
possible by an income of fifty thousand in New York -- club membership, taxis,
doormen, guarded approaches. For him it was the buses, or the grinding subway,
lunch at the automat.''
Mr. Bellow describes Sammler's thoughts in ways that some critics
labeled racist and others said exemplified his fearless exactitude in shaping a
fictional character. But there was no quarreling from New Yorkers with Mr.
Bellow's accuracy in describing the reaction Sammler got to an earlier effort to
report the pickpocket.
The phone booth he first tried to use was smashed and smelled of urine,
and after other pay phones failed and he finally got through from his
apartment, the police were not greatly interested. The officer told Sammler
that he would have to put his name on a waiting list.
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