SAUL BELLOW
527
ploughboy-poet. "I was no Bobby Burns," Frost often said. He was trying
to establish
his
version or picture of a significant chapter of literary histo–
ry and to spray it with a fixative of his own.
Ralph's purpose was very different from Frost's. He took pleasure in
returning again and again to the story of his development not in order to
revise or to gild it but to recover old feelings and also to consider and
reconsider how he might find a way to write his story.
He and I had our differences. I am not inclined to be sentimental about
those Arcadian or Utopian days. He didn't approve of my way of running
the place. I had complained also that his dog relieved himself in my herb
garden. I asked, "Can't you arrange to have him do his shitting elsewhere?"
This offended Ralph greatly, and he was outraged when in a fit of nas–
tiness I took a swipe at the dog with a broom for fouling the terrace. He
complained to John Cheever that, with my upbringing, I was incapable of
understanding, I had no feeling for pedigrees and breeds and that I knew
only mongrels and had treated his
chien de race
like a mongrel.
Cheever was broken up by this. Well, it was very funny. Cheever never
spoke of it to me. I learned of Ralph's complaint when Cheever's diary
was posthumously published.
When I told Ralph that perhaps it would be a good idea to thin out
the locust trees along the driveway he said, "Well, they're your trees."
Immediately I telephoned a woodsman with a power-saw. I don't
recall that there was such a saw in the trunk of the Chrysler. But in my
place Ralph would have cut the trees himself. Nor would he have consult–
ed anyone about it.
But the main cause of trouble between us was the dog. Ralph believed
that I had taken against the dog.
I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we all are put
together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize
how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One
of the booby traps of freedom-which is bordered on all sides by isola–
tion-is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped
myself to the best cuts at life's banquet.
But our boiling paranoias do simmer down, and later on Ralph and I
resolved our differences. His dog was after all handsome, intelligent, lively.
I didn't hold it against him that he was a thoroughbred, a
chien de race.
We
made peace and parted on the best of terms.
Ralph and I later agreed that our Tivoli life had been extraordinarily
pleasant. It's no longer a shored-up ruin. Its new proprietor has turned it
into a showplace. But Ralph and I, two literary squatters, comically spiky,
apart though living together, had been very lucky in the two years we spent
together in what I called the House of Usher. We did not form a great
