SAUL BELLOW
R alph
Ellison In Tivoli
Some forty years ago I came into a small legacy and with it I bought a
house in Tivoli, New York. "House" is not the word for it; it was, or once
had been, a Hudson River mansion.
It
had a Dutch cellar kitchen of flag–
stones and a kitchen fireplace. There was a dumb-waiter to the vanished
dining room above. The first floor had a ballroom but according to my
informants, Tivoli's townspeople, no one had danced in it for eighty years.
Tivoli had been the birthplace of Eleanor Roosevelt. The villagers were
the descendants of the servants and grounds-keepers of the Dutchess
County aristocrats.
I shan't be going into the social history of the township or the coun–
ty. There were great names in the vicinity- the Livingstones, the
Chapmans and the Roosevelts, but I didn't know much about them. I had
sunk my $16,000 legacy into a decaying mansion. To repair the roof and
to put in new plumbing I drew an advance of $10,000 from the Viking
Press to write a novel called
H enderson the Rain King.
There was a furnace of sorts and a warm-air sys tern that took the
moisture out of your nostrils. I was too busy with
H enderson
and with my
then wife to take full notice of my surroundings. The times were revolu–
tionary-I refer to the sexual revolution. Marriages were lamentably
unstable and un-serious. My wife, tired of life with me in the gloomy
house, packed her bags and moved to Brooklyn.
I was naturally wretched about this. I now found the solitude (and the
decay of the house) insupportable. Determined to save my $16,000, I
threw myself into the work of salvage. I painted the kitchen walls and the
bedrooms, as much for therapeutic reasons as to improve the property.
Then Ralph Ellison, who was teaching at Bard College, accepted my
invitation to move in. I have always believed that this was an act of chari–
ty on his part.
We had known each other in Manhattan. I had reviewed
Invisible Man
for
Commentary.
I was aware that it was an extremely important novel and
that, in what he did, Ralph had no rivals. What he did no one else could
do-a glorious piece of good fortune for a wri ter.
Both of us at one time had lived on Riverside Drive. We met often
and walked together in the park, along the Hudson. There we discussed all
kinds of questions and exchanged personal histories. I was greatly taken
