Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison: a friendship

In the June 1952 issue of “Commentary”, Saul Bellow wrote a long and extremely enthusiastic review of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”. He called it “a book of the very first order, a superb book… It is an immensely moving novel and it has greatness… It is tragicomic, poetic, [has] the tone of the very strongest sort of creative intelligence.”

He thought it represented a new hope for the novel: “what a great thing it is when a brilliant individual victory occurs, like Mr. Ellison’s, proving that a truly heroic quality can exist among our contemporaries.” To show some even-handed judgment, Bellow offered only mild criticism: “I don’t think the hero’s experiences in the Communist Party are as original in conception as other parts of the book and his love affair with a white woman is all too brief.” Though a great living author had praised Ellison’s first novel in an important intellectual magazine, he was dissatisfied rather than grateful.

Bellow later explained, “I took Ralph very seriously. He had the subject, the rhetoric — all the gifts… But Ralph was not satisfied with my highly favorable review. He gently complained that I had failed to find a mythic substructure of his people,” which may have been as elusive as the unnamed invisible hero. Bellow’s later thoughts about Ellison’s vision and art were more incisive and discriminating: “[Critics] should have judged the disparate parts of “Invisible Man”, as some false, some authentic, have seen that the parts on the Brotherhood, the hospital, the seduction were commonplace, present to expand or continue Ellison’s argument, and the sweet potato seller, the eviction, the riot were far, far superior because they stemmed from Ellison’s perception of how things were, not what they ought to be.”

Bellow’s prestigious review soon led to their close friendship. He and Ellison met in New York when they both lived on Riverside Drive, took long walks together along the Hudson River and found they had a temperamental affinity. They went fishing for striped bass in Long Island Sound. When Bellow taught at Princeton in the spring of 1952 Ellison came down regularly to attend literary parties with the poets Theodore Roethke, John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz. Ellison’s letter to the Black writer Albert Murray gave a lively account of their stimulating conversations when Bellow was writing “The Adventures of Augie March”: “Been having once a week sessions with Bellow, listening to him read from his work-in-progress and reading to him from mine. For about thirty minutes we cuss out all the sonsabitches who say the novel’s dead, then [like students] we read and discuss.”

Both Ellison and Bellow, whose parents were Russian emigrants, came from poor backgrounds and, as a Black and a Jew, were outsiders in American society. Bellow (1915-2005) had served in the Merchant Marine during the war. In the 1950s, when their friendship flourished, he had appeared in the “Partisan Review” and was part of that intellectually influential crowd. He’d published “Dangling Man” (1944), “The Victim” (1947) and “Augie March” (1953), which won the first of his three National Book Awards. Ellison alerted Richard Wright but limited the theme and depth of the book by calling it Jewish: “Watch out for Bellow’s novel. It’s the first real novel by an American Jew, full of variety, sharp characterization and sheer magical prose.”

When Bellow won the National Book Award in 1954, Ellison told Murray about the malicious attacks on his own novel: “He’s getting some of the same shit I received last year; the envy, the snobbery, the general display of lousiness, which some of the bright boys tried to pass on to me. He’s shamed them by winning something that they want and by writing about them as they really are, without love, without generosity, sans talent, sans life. I thought they were simply reacting to my being [Black],” but it cut even deeper than racial hatred.

After publishing “Seize the Day” (1956) Bellow won a Guggenheim Fellowship to Paris and Rome; lectured at Reed College and the universities of Oregon and Washington; taught at Bard College; made his second visit to the Yaddo writers’ colony; and worked on “Henderson the Rain King” (1959). In 1956 he married his second wife, Sasha Tschacbashov; went on to rack up five wives and four children; published many brilliant novels, including “Herzog” (1964) and “Humboldt’s Gift” (1975); won the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes; and became the greatest postwar American novelist.

Ellison (1913-94), who was two years older than Bellow and had been a cook in the Merchant Marine, had published essays and stories in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He won the National Book Award for “Invisible Man” in 1953 (the year before Bellow); won a Rockefeller Foundation grant for a lecture tour of Europe and the Prix de Rome to the residential American Academy in Italy (1955-57); and followed Bellow to Bard from 1958 to 1961. Both Ellison and his wife Fanny, who worked for a Burma medical charity, had previously been divorced. They wanted, but did not have, children.

The biographer Arnold Rampersad wrote that in Rome in 1956 Ellison “had begun an affair with a woman about twenty years his junior. Neither an artist nor an intellectual, she was beautiful and vivacious. She was also married to a man who knew nothing about the affair. Not so lucky, Fanny was feeling pain so intense that at times she feared she would crack.” His lover may have been the wife of a visiting scholar at the Academy and Ellison would have met her on social occasions. He revealed the depth of his friendship with Bellow by confiding in him and seeking advice about the most intimate and troubling aspect of his life — “something eating my innards which I can’t write about.” Bellow, a handsome ladies’ man who had lots of sexual experience and great difficulty with his wives, wisely advised Ellison to sever all ties with his lover and remain with the devoted Fanny. He also lent his friend money and tried to help him with what Ellison, alluding to Scott Fitzgerald’s story, called his “writer’s block as big as the Ritz.”

Bellow constantly encouraged Ellison and helped further his career. In 1953 he was on the committee that chose “Invisible Man”, over Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and Steinbeck’s “East of Eden”, for the National Book Award. In 1956 he asked Yaddo to invite Ellison. In 1958 he helped him get the job at Bard. When Ellison was teaching at Bard, Bellow said his country house “is open to you for as long a time as you like or need” and Ellison lived there, rent free, for three years. Bellow, who came during the summer, even paid for the high cost of utilities and the expensive repairs that were needed after the harsh eastern winters. In 1959 Bellow raised Ellison’s morale by publishing a chapter of his work-in-progress in the first issue of his journal the “Noble Savage”.

Bellow had used the $16,000 he’d inherited from his father to buy a charming but decaying three-story Italianate Hudson River mansion. It was located on Kidd Lane in Tivoli, northwest of Red Hook in Dutchess County, New York. Built in the seventeenth century and boasting a massive ballroom, “its problems included peeling paint, cracked plaster, sagging floorboards, a leaking roof and an uncertain supply of water.” To repair the roof and put in new plumbing Bellow extracted a $10,000 advance from Viking for “Henderson the Rain King”. To suggest his grandiose folly, he alluded to the Manhattan hospital for the mentally ill and called it “Bellowview.”

Bellow had previous experience in living with a famous writer. From September 1955 to June 1956, while waiting for a Nevada divorce from his first wife, he lived in a cabin on Pyramid Lake, forty miles from Reno. In the spring of 1956 Arthur Miller, waiting for a divorce so he could marry Marilyn Monroe, lived in the next-door cabin. Bellow never wrote about Miller as he did in his affectionate essay “Ralph Ellison in Tivoli” (Partisan Review, Fall 1998), and Ellison never wrote about his cohabitation with Bellow on the upper Hudson. He portrays Ellison as a perfectionist and himself as slovenly, ineffectual and ill-tempered. Like T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, he is deferential, politic, glad to be of use. Though Bellow owned the house and was Ellison’s patron, it amused him to achieve dramatic effects in his narrative by reversing traditional roles and making the white man subservient to the black.

In the essay Ellison drives a huge Chrysler and Bellow, his legacy sunk into the wrecked villa, is comparatively poor. But Bellow doesn’t ask for rent and Ellison doesn’t offer to pay it. He disapproves of Bellow’s shabby clothes and the way he runs the house. Ellison fills his car trunk with expert tools, fishing rods and creel, and guns to shoot ducks and rabbits. He had once worked as an electronic technician and knows how to fix radios and hi-fi equipment. He has a taste for finery, wears colorful garments and descends to breakfast, like Aladdin, in a striped Moroccan caftan and slippers with an oriental curved toe. On more formal occasions he dresses fastidiously in well-cut Ivy League suits. He brews pretentiously dripped coffee. He self-consciously cultivates exotic African violets and owns a beloved pedigree black Labrador — his substitute child. They quarrel when Ellison’s dog sh*ts on the terrace and herb garden and Bellow gives the dog a well-deserved swipe with a broom. Winding down from work in the evening, they exchange literary gossip and talk about their personal histories and the Merchant Marine; about their novel writing and contributors to the Noble Savage; about Marx, Malraux, Hemingway and Faulkner; and about the Kennedy-Nixon presidential campaign. Bellow and Ellison (who’d been a jazz trumpeter) both play the recorder, and listen to music by Bach and Scarlatti.

Ellison was both lord and labourer when he was alone in the mansion. He’d also worked as a janitor and handyman, and assured Bellow, “I’m used to cleaning the apartment in the city… and have vacuumed and scrubbed and dusted and am quite concerned that the place be and remain shipshape.” Rampersad confirms that he was a conscientious caretaker: “Briskly he dealt with local workmen, and he was vigilant about leaks when rain drenched the region. When high winds blew off the garage door, he replaced it himself. Fixing broken windowpanes, he also took care of a massive old tree out front that he knew Saul loved. Respectfully he left Bellow’s bedroom and study untouched and fixed up a guestroom for himself and set up his office in the ballroom.”

In March 1959 he gratefully wrote to Bellow, “I now have some idea of what it costs to keep the place going during the winter, and I feel guilty that you’ve paid for so much of my comfort here.”

Rampersad concludes, after Ellison left Tivoli in June 1961, that it had been “often a joy, albeit at times also lonely and melancholy. But he had arrived expecting to polish off his novel. He hadn’t.” Bellow, who played the pupil to Ellison’s master, recalled: “Ralph and I afterward agreed that our Tivoli life had been extraordinarily pleasant… Two literary squatters, comically spiky, apart though living together, had been very lucky in the years we spent in what I called [Poe’s] House of Usher. We did not form a great friendship. What we had was a warm attachment. He respected me. I admired him. He had a great deal to teach me; I did my best to learn.”

In his April 1995 speech at the American Academy, “In Memory of Ralph Ellison,” Bellow said: “Toward the end of the Fifties, the Ellisons and the Bellows lived together in a spooky Dutchess County house with the Catskills on the western horizon and the Hudson River in between. As writers are natural solitaries, Ralph and I did not seek each other out during the day. A nod in passing was enough. But late in the afternoon Ralph mixed the martinis and we did not always drink in silence. During our long conversations I came to know his views.” This account, written thirty-five years later, is not quite accurate. Bellow was absent most of the time and they lived together only during the summer. His wife left him in 1959; Ellison’s wife had a job in Manhattan and visited on weekends.

Ellison spent the lucrative royalties from his bestselling novel on expensive equipment, clothing and cars. He hid his impoverished and humiliating background behind a façade of expertise and elegance, and Bellow pretended to admire his newly created persona. But it’s pretty unlikely that Bellow, the supreme intellectual, would be impressed — like Daisy by Gatsby’s lavish display of his shirts — by Ellison’s tools and weapons, which he did not want or need or know how to use. If the brainy and quick-witted Bellow, always the smartest guy in the room, had asserted his intellectual superiority, his touchy and hypersensitive friend might well have been offended and angered.

The most traumatic event occurred when Bellow’s wife Sasha, whom Ellison knew, suddenly abandoned him. In a mournful confession of October 1959, Bellow confided in Ellison about his marital failure as Ellison had confided in him about his lover in Rome: “Sash and I are no longer together — not by my choice… She has no complaint to make of me this time. All she has is a decision. She says she likes me, respects me, enjoys going to bed with me — and no longer wants to be my wife. I have no explanations to offer, only the facts… I have to say only that I’m in misery, and especially over Adam,” their two-year-old son. This emotional disaster was even more damaging when unexpected and unexplained, and Bellow was glad to have Ellison’s company to assuage the pain when he was left on his own.

A great beauty and formidable personality, Sasha had distanced herself from Bellow by converting to Catholicism. In Herzog, Bellow explained that she “considered herself too young, too intelligent, too vital, too sociable to be buried in the remote countryside.” He confessed to his editor Pascal Covici, “It all comes down to this: She doesn’t love me, never did, never could… Really I love her too much and understand her too well to feel the murderous hatred that would help me (therapeutically).” But Bellow did not understand her very well. He did not realize for a whole year that she was having an affair with and had deserted him for his parasitic close friend Jack Ludwig. When someone asked Ludwig if he knew Bellow, he replied: “Know him? I’m f*cking his wife.”

The two eminent writers were not entirely alone in the posh Hudson valley. Continuing his literary exaltation of Ellison and denigration of himself, Bellow cunningly misrepresented their roles in local high society. Ellison’s dance card was full, Bellow was the wallflower and wrote: “the County was rather dumb about me. I wasn’t received in the ‘best’ places. It was funny, at times. Ellison and I would drink martinis together, and then he’d go off in his Chrysler to dinner, leaving me to grill my solitary steak. He and the nobs loved one another. I was amused. Almost no damage to my self-esteem (not easily dented).” But this reversal of roles is unconvincing. It’s not likely that the (s)nobs would reject the brilliant Bellow and accept the Black Ellison. Gore Vidal’s biographer Fred Kaplan revealed that Bellow was indeed “received” and that he rejected them. Vidal said Bellow was “standoffish with me. But [I] couldn’t tell whether it was anti-fag or [my] commercial success or both.”

Two of the nobs, Vidal and Frederick Dupee, a second-generation Yale graduate and professor of English at Columbia, did not love Ellison. They invited him to their homes, but saw through his carefully constructed but false façade and attacked — even insulted — him. James Atlas wrote, “Fred Dupee liked to make jokes about Ellison’s African violets. ‘It’s funny,’ he remarked when Ellison arrived at the house and set off the Dupees’ dog, ‘he only barks at the garbage man and you.’ Gore Vidal, who maintained a grand house in the neighborhood, wasn’t too hospitable either… He once asked Ellison, ‘What’s a jungle bunny like you doing in these parts?’” According to the literary critic Richard Poirier, Dupee and Vidal “thought he was pompous and overbearing, and they let him know it.” By contrast, Bellow treated Ellison respectfully and would never dream of insulting his friend.

Dupee’s wife recalled, “Ellison was a very proper man. To get a rise out of him, Gore teased him about the contrast between Ellison’s formal manners and prejudiced white attitudes about black culture, and then danced with Ralph’s wife, Fanny, in a very suggestive way.” After listening to one of Vidal’s rants against American imperialism, Ellison assumed down-home speech and remarked, “Gore, I just don’t understand your problem with this country. You rich, you white, and you pretty. What you got to complain about?”

Still blocked on his novel, Ellison sought solace from Bellow. In February 1958, when a Time magazine writer criticised him for his self-exile in Rome, Ellison furiously exclaimed, “I could have kicked his nose till his ass bled.” Two years later, quoting Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” he explained that he was frustrated when his own fictional creations eluded him and that it was important to publish this chapter in the Noble Savage: “I feel that I’m falling apart. I find myself in strange places in my dreams and during the days” his characters seemed unreal. “They need desperately to be affirmed while I seem incapable of bringing them fully to life. I hope seeing some of the book in print will improve my morale.”

Ellison had spent long hours pounding the typewriter in the echoing grand ballroom of Tivoli, writing a paragraph in the morning, correcting, crossing out and obliterating it in the afternoon. The mania for sentences dried his heart. Though his life was strictly organised, his novel was chaotic and out of control. As Ezra Pound said of the “Cantos”, he could not “make it cohere.” Intractably blocked, Ellison must have envied and been depressed by Bellow, who listened to loud opera records while pouring out a series of masterpieces with full-throated ease.

Ellison lived for another forty-two years after publishing Invisible Man and continued to receive rich rewards: numerous grants and medals, and (though he never graduated from college) twelve honorary doctorates and prestigious teaching posts. But he never completed his long-awaited second novel and no longer felt worthy of the glittering prizes heaped upon him. Bellow blamed Ellison’s friend and critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, who’d helped him when he was writing Invisible Man, for encouraging Ralph to be ponderous, over-ambitious and self-consciously literary. Unable to meet the overwhelming expectations of his readers, repeat his previous achievement and engage with the turmoil of contemporary race relations, Ellison also faced a more subtle problem. He had remade himself — remarkably like a Hollywood movie star — from a poor Oklahoma boy to a rich Eastern sophisticate. In doing so, he had lost part of his essential identity. This had damaged him and impeded his writing.

After their years in Tivoli, Bellow and Ellison rarely met and wrote few letters. Their political views clashed when Bellow opposed the Vietnam war and Ellison supported it. Blocked and drinking heavily to dull his frustration, bitterness and pain, Ellison was ashamed of his own stagnation and could not bear to confront Bellow’s meteoric success. In 1962 Bellow beat out Ellison for appointment to the Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago. The following year he got Ellison a job at Chicago. In 1965 Ellison repaid Bellow’s years of generosity by fighting successfully to award the Howells Medal for Fiction to John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle instead of to Herzog. Jealous of Bellow, Ellison voted for the inferior novel by the less threatening rival.

In his most important letter to Bellow, Ellison linked himself to his old friend and condemned the current fashion for confessional poetry: “Surely we, you and I, must be as nutty as Cal Lowell or Berryman or Roethke, we just aren’t the type to enjoy exploiting it. Mythomania compels us to seek extreme relationships as a means of affirming our reality. Thus we fight and argue and produce wild fictions inhabited by wild men. But perhaps we are hopelessly sane.” But this comparison was inaccurate. The poets were certifiably insane, had been confined to asylums and treated for mental illness. Like Flaubert, Ellison believed, “One should live like a bourgeois and think like a demi-god.”

Ellison thought work was cathartic and kept him sane, and feared if he could no longer write that his sanity would be threatened. More than any other modern writer, he exemplified Fitzgerald’s belief in his confessional “Crack-Up,” “There were no second acts in American life.” When Thomas Mann was lecturing at Princeton, he compared the marathon writers in Europe to sprinters in the United States: “Here in America, the writers are short-lived; they write one book… and then are finished.” Even Bellow, with all his respect and sympathy, friendship and assistance, could not save Ellison from his inner demons.