Hips and lips.” Learning of the separation, Harris’s libido begins to race, and he toys with the notion of moving in on those hips and lips, just as Boswell had worked his way into the alluring arms of Rousseau’s mistress, Therese. “I remembered that she had worn dark pants fitting snugly, and her face shone. Arriving in Chicago, Harris phones Bellow’s estranged wife, Susan. Nostrils aflare, Harris sniffs through Bellow’s personal life for secrets and indiscretions, appraising the women in Bellow’s life with a tail-wagging enthusiasm that’s truly-no gentle word will do-insipid. Perhaps Harris seems to be staggering about in a haze because facts aren’t really what he’s after. I believe, I think, I guessed: no, Harris isn’t one to nail down details with Boswellian rigor. The Sterns arrived with Paul Fussell, of Rutgers, and Fussell’s wife, whose name I never learned and with Bellow and his companion, a woman of twenty-five (I guessed or was told) named or called Stat or Stats or Stap or Staps. I think this restaurant was a favorite of the Sterns, who had taken me there April 5, 1961. Our party assembled at a Chinese restaurant on 63rd Street, near Dorchester, I believe, on the South Side. They were discussing either Tolstoy’s story, “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,” or the social critic by that name. …I changed direction and drove back past the Sterns’ house, where I was pleased to see Bellow’s car parked, and he within the house in the company of Harold Rosenberg. What high school?… I didn’t quite catch it…. Soon I was engaged in conversation with Zita Cogan, who had attended high school with Bellow. Men had broken over less.” It should be noted however that Harris’s ear is not one of nature’s keener instruments, and that his memory is as riddled with holes as a gangster’s getaway car. And ‘Harvard kike’ cast me down altogether. “Bellow’s views on Vietnam discouraged me. According to Harris, Bellow once sideswiped someone by referring to him as “a Harvard kike.” Harris’s heart takes a disillusioned dive, and he wonders whether or not he should roll up his sleeping bag and haul his weary soul home. The malice consists of niggling, needling comments sprinkled throughout the book to make Bellow look vain, grumpy, petty, politically complacent, even a touch anti-Semitic. For though Harris professes unfaltering devotion to King Saul and dismisses as envious upstarts those writers who refuse to share that admiration (the nit-pickers include critic Marvin Mudrick and John Updike), his memoir is acidly laced with malice-malice and prurience. No such affection springs between Bellow and Harris wary, irritated, Bellow keeps a frosty distance from Harris, as well he might. Brash and dissolute as he often was, Boswell was amusing company, a rakish charmer who drew from Johnson a friendly love: “I love the young dogs of this age,” said Johnson, and Boswell was always cocksup for a frisk. Johnson-a fancy born out of chutzpah and self-deception. Harris, who is currently whittling away at Boswell’s journals to produce a single-volume edition, has fond hopes of playing Bozzy to Bellow’s Dr. Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck-the title comes from a Robert Frost poem-is not a biography of Saul Bellow but a self-deprecating memoir about trying to win the confidence of Herzog’s creator. Blood drains from Bellow’s face in the bathroom, the white towels tremble. Why should he have answered my mail? Never mind, I went to him.” One evening in Bellow’s Chicago apartment, Harris springs the grim news on his hero: he wants to write Bellow’s biography. So smitten with Bellow is Harris that even his hero’s aloofness draws him on. Undaunted, Harris sends Bellow his new book the gift goes…unacknowledged. Harris broods about Bellow, sends him letters which gush and flatter, letters Bellow (mostly) ignores. (He now teaches at Arizona State University.) In 1961, Harris visited Bellow at his house in New York’s Hudson Valley a few days later, they had dinner together in Manhattan. Harris, the author of Bang the Drum Slowly and several other baseball novels, began corresponding with Bellow in 1959 after Bellow had recommended a friend for a teaching job at San Francisco State, where Harris taught English literature. In moments of agitation and dismay, Saul Bellow must have longed to issue the same order to his would-be biographer Mark Harris, for the evidence of Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck suggests that subtle hints (coughing, yawning, glancing at one’s watch) wouldn’t throw a persistent admirer like Harris off the scent-only rudeness would do. “Go, and never darken my towels again!” cried Groucho Marx, showing a pushy nuisance the door.
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