Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Like Bellow, Charlie Citrine is offered the chance of writing a profile of Robert Kennedy for Life magazine. “For once my business in the East was legitimate and I was not chasing some broad but preparing a magazine article. And just that morning I had been flying over New York in a procession of Coast Guard helicopters with Senators Javits and Robert Kennedy. Then I had attended a political luncheon in Central Park at the Tavern on the Green, where all the celebrities became ecstatic at the sight of one another.” In the helicopter, “whopping over Manhattan,” Charlie feels at the top of his game. His physical appearance, like Bellow’s, can change radically: “If I don’t look well, I look busted” (“Bellow could look eighty one day and much younger the next,” according to his friend and ex-lover Bette Howland); while following Kennedy, Charlie “knew that I looked well. Besides, there was money in my pockets and I had been window-shopping on Madison Avenue. If any Cardin or Hermès necktie pleased me I could buy it without asking the price. My belly was flat, I wore boxer shorts of combed Sea Island cotton at eight bucks a pair. I had joined an athletic club in Chicago and with elderly effort kept myself in shape” (p. 11). Charlie likes Bobby Kennedy, who “even seemed to like me. I say ‘seemed’ because it was his business to leave such an impression with a journalist who proposed to write about him….His desire was to be continually briefed. He asked questions of everyone in the party. From me he wanted historical information—‘What should I know about William Jennings Bryan?’ or, ‘Tell me about H. L. Mencken’—receiving what I said with an inward glitter that did not tell me what he thought or whether he could use such facts” (p. 113). Charlie, who is mourning the death of his old buddy Humboldt, decides to abandon the Life magazine assignment and return to Chicago, to the dismay of Denise. Riding in helicopters and hobnobbing with Kennedys is just what Denise wants for him. He returns home on a steamy summer night, the sort when “old smells of the stockyard revive….Old Chicago breathed again through leaves and screens” (p. 114). Denise sits nude on the bed, brushing her hair. “Her enormous violet and gray eyes were impatient, her tenderness was mixed with glowering….It tired Denise to support me emotionally. She didn’t take much stock in these emotions of mine” (p. 115).

  Politics and public affairs intruded themselves on Bellow throughout the 1960s. In the summer of 1964, when LBJ picked Humphrey as his running mate, the Republicans chose Barry Goldwater as their presidential candidate. The day of the nomination, July 16, 1964, race riots broke out in Harlem after a policeman shot and killed a fifteen-year-old boy. The riots lasted six days and set off a string of violent disturbances, in Philadelphia, Rochester, Chicago, and several cities in New Jersey. Sometime after the nomination, Bellow wrote to Richard Goodwin, the special assistant to President Johnson credited with inventing the term the “Great Society.” The two men had met when Goodwin was working in the White House as a speechwriter to President Kennedy. Bellow’s letter expressed disquiet at Goldwater’s nomination, and Goodwin, in an undated letter, offered reassurance. “It would be, I believe, a mistake to look at this as a vast groundswell of philosophical reaction to liberalism, etc. If it wasn’t for the race issue—which transcends philosophy—Goldwater would be lucky to get 35–40% of the vote….Unfortunately the race issue makes him dangerous. No one can assess the ‘backlash.’ But all agree it is growing in size and intensity.”

  Bellow was a supporter of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and that year, at its invitation, had written the preface to a book to be entitled “They Shall Overcome,” sponsored by CORE’s “Scholarship, Education and Defense Fund” (SEDF). The preface, which was clearly written after the riots, is tough-minded and moving. It begins with a simple factual statement: “The lives of Southern Negroes are not protected by law.” The truth of this statement, Bellow asserted, was accepted by Republican and Democratic politicians alike, and “until the civil rights movement became effective most Americans accepted it as well.” In demanding the vote, the leaders of the civil rights movement, “Negroes and those who joined with them…have been persecuted, bullied, terrorized, beaten, abused, jailed, maimed and killed,” a situation “documented on every page of this book.”57

  Bellow’s introduction devotes several paragraphs to the rural poor, the source, he argues, of most racial violence in the South. He writes with the murders of the Mississippi Freedom Summer volunteers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Earl Chaney fresh in mind, their bodies having been discovered just outside the small town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, in August 1964, six or so weeks after they had been arrested by the local police.58 “Everyone knows what a modern metropolis is,” Bellow begins, but the myth of Southern agrarian virtue lives on. “Rural America has had a long history of overvaluation,” even among “sophisticated social theorists”; the idea that “everyone was better and sounder on the farm, in the woods and hills, less anomic, more self-reliant, fairer, more American. This is simply not so. In provincial America, North no less than South, lives the most unhappy, troubled and alienated portion of the population….In the South the glamor of Confederacy and insurrection, of ‘tradition’ and ‘gentility’ has been laid in poster colors over provincial pride, backwardness, xenophobia and rage.” The racism of rural Southerners, however, will no longer be tolerated. In the past few years, “a majority of the American people” have signaled that they wish to see an end to “the open and repeated rejection of liberty and equality….Though it may be amorphous and difficult to define, something like a national conscience actually does exist,” a conscience activated by volunteers from CORE and other civil rights organizations. In making radical constitutional demands and making them peacefully, they and their followers “have contributed to the moral growth of the American nation. They might have released hatred and destruction, as outcasts often do when their rebellion at last occurs. The peaceful and legal growth of their freedom, for it is bound to increase, will benefit us all.”

  In addition to supporting the civil rights movement, Bellow took public positions on two other issues of the day: nuclear disarmament and the war in Vietnam. He agreed to act as a sponsor of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), writing to the press to publicize his support, and he made clear his opposition to LBJ’s Vietnam policies in letters to The New York Times and the Chicago Sun-Times. In both cases, however, he was careful to speak out against violent or illegal protest. It was when a SANE rally in Washington turned rowdy that he wrote to The New York Times and the Chicago Sun-Times, on October 29, 1965, to “make clear that I am wholly opposed to civil disobedience and that I dislike unreasonable rebelliousness and pointless defiance of authority.” In the same letter, headed “Author’s Testimony on Vietnam” in the Sun-Times, he criticized the Johnson administration for its aggressive attitude to political protest: “The government is wrong to attack the political liberties of those who wish to debate its policies and who appeal to it for broader, franker and more responsible explanations….Seldom has any administration dealt so roughly with its foreign policy critics as this one.” “That was a wonderful letter of yours in the TIMES,” Benjamin Spock wrote to Bellow on November 3, “and it should help the March on Washington.”

  Although Bellow was outspoken in his opposition to particular government policies, he was unwilling to join protest movements, for reasons he explained in a 1981 interview with Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times: “People became organized in camps, and while I was opposed to the war, I just refused to line up with the new groups.” Bellow’s wariness of groups or camps was particularly intense in New York, where literary alliances were confused with political ones and “you were always being solicited for this cause or that, always being drafted for one thing or another.”59 As he told another interviewer, Susan Crosland, six years later, “Vietnam, civil rights meant writers were ‘pressed’—if not quite in the old sense—to line up with the Mailer group, or Commentary group, lashed into one ideological column or another. I got tired
of having my arm twisted to sign statements insulting Lyndon Johnson and so on.”60 These comments were made in response to a question about why Bellow decided to leave New York, but that decision had been made earlier, before the political pressures he remembered from the 1960s. Nor was life in Chicago free from such pressures. From mid-1965 to the early 1970s, the University of Chicago student newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, ran almost daily articles about students protesting the draft and the war in Vietnam; the campus was alive with rallies, teach-ins, demonstrations, occupations. There was similar pressure from Greg, who was in graduate school in social work from 1966 to 1968. He told me that he and his father “were severely at odds over the war, and we were severely at odds over whether I should go to Canada as well. I went to the March on Washington. I went to the civil rights protests….During my senior year, two of my roommates were part of the occupation. There was something about it [the occupation] that put him off…too much self-interest.”

  A very public demonstration of Bellow’s reluctance to “line up” was his refusal to join Robert Lowell in rejecting an invitation in the summer of 1965 to a White House Festival of the Arts. Lowell had agreed to attend the Festival, then took back his acceptance, arguing in a letter copied to The New York Times, “Every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebrations without making subtle public commitments.” Bellow’s position, as reported on June 4 in The New York Times and the Chicago Sun-Times, was that “the President intends, in his own way, to encourage American artists,” an intention Bellow approved. In addition, “I consider this event to be an official function, not a political occasion which demands agreement with Mr. Johnson on all policies of his administration.” The administration is “more than the policies of which I disapprove” (these included the “wicked and harmful” intervention in Santo Domingo, as well as the war in Vietnam). The president’s record on civil rights was a good one, and the institution of the presidency mattered. He accepted the invitation, he said, “in order to show my respect for his intentions and to honor his high office.” In his letter of acceptance, Bellow wrote of his pleasure at being invited but wished “to make it clear that to accept your invitation is not to accept all the policies and actions of your administration.”61 He knew his attendance had “political meaning,” but differed with “my friend, Mr. Lowell,” in interpreting his responsibility “as citizen and writer.” He also differed, he soon discovered, from many other friends, the signatories of a petition supporting Lowell’s stand which was circulated by Robert Silvers, co-editor of The New York Review of Books, and the poet Stanley Kunitz, and reported on the front page of The New York Times. Among those who signed the petition were John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Mary McCarthy, William Styron, Lillian Hellman, Harvey Swados, and Alfred Kazin.62

  Harvey Swados wrote a harsh letter to Bellow when he heard of his decision to attend the Festival: “Going to the White House on June 1965 is not an innocent amusement [but] an act of solidarity with those who will be bombing and shelling even as you read from your works to the assembled culture bureaucrats.” On June 14, the day of the Festival, Bellow responded to Swados’s “slap-in-the-face formula and the implied responsibility for death in Vietnam.” Swados knew perfectly well that Bellow had publicly opposed what Johnson was doing in Vietnam and Santo Domingo, “but I don’t see that holding these positions requires me to treat Johnson as a Hitler. He’s not that. He may be a brute in some ways (by no means all) but he is the President, and I haven’t yet decided to go in for civil disobedience. Have you? You sound ready to stop paying taxes.” Four days later, Swados replied, denying that he had written or implied that Johnson was a Hitler and asking, “Do you really believe it suffices to say, ‘but he is the President’? This might do from somebody like say Rex Stout, but not from somebody like Saul Bellow.” As for civil disobedience, Swados’s answer was “yes, unequivocally,” though he would not be withholding his taxes. Instead, he would continue to advise young people “against serving in the armed forces when they are committing criminal acts against other populations,” and, more vaguely, to join forces “with ‘responsible’ others to get it [the army] to stop killing peasants.” Swados ended his letter of June 18 by saying he was sorry if his previous letter had wounded Bellow. “I hope you will join us and not be put off by my intemperateness and rudeness.” At the Festival itself, Dwight Macdonald, despite signing the Silvers-and-Kunitz petition, was in attendance. Bellow described him as “walking into the Rose Garden in sneakers, the great bohemian himself going around with a resolution endorsing Lowell’s boycott.”63 Near the stairs to the East Room, Bellow found himself cornered by Saul Maloff, the editor of the books pages of Newsweek. Maloff, described by Atlas as “a noisy ex-radical,” was there as a reporter. He berated Bellow for attending and reading from Herzog, muttering “ominously: ‘We made you, and we can break you.’ ”64

  Bellow stuck to his dual view, opposing the Vietnam War and the intervention in Santo Domingo while supporting Johnson’s domestic policies. “I had a difficult time knowing where Bellow stood,” Mark Harris remembers. Though Bellow clearly opposed the war, “Why then was he embattled with anti-war people when they met?”65 One answer is that he refused to be a person “who just lined up,” the phrase his son Daniel remembers him using (and one found in an article of September 1968 in the Chicago Sun-Times, quoted later in the chapter). On July 13, 1966, Bellow and fourteen University of Chicago colleagues had dinner in Chicago with Joseph A. Califano, Jr., special assistant to the president, and two other White House aides, to discuss the Great Society. Califano organized comparable meetings throughout the country, with a total of eighty-one academics and experts from sixteen universities. Bellow was the sole literary academic, the sole writer, consulted. In a letter composed the day after the dinner, Califano asked Bellow and the other academics to produce a memorandum “reflecting your thoughts on the problems that were discussed there and any other problems with which you are concerned. We are particularly interested in these questions: Where should the Great Society go from here? What needs have we left unmet? What new problems do we create as we solve old problems?” Califano also conveyed the president’s “personal appreciation for your taking the time to meet with us and pass along your ideas to him through us.”66 When Bellow complained to Philip Rahv about the fallout from his attendance at the White House Festival, Rahv wrote back, on October 15, commiserating with his friend but also reminding him of his new status and visibility. “Success, like failure, has its problems. You were, of course, successful before Herzog, though not on the same scale. But on the whole I would say that your position is more secure than that of any novelist in America. But to suffer is our fate.”67

  Political requests and demands arrived almost daily. On November 12, 1965, Nicolas Nabokov asked him to sign a letter to Premier Kosygin of Russia protesting the imprisonment of the dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. On December 1, Dwight Macdonald, with Robert Lowell, asked him to sign a similar letter. Bellow signed. The following August, he was asked to contribute to a book entitled “Authors Take Sides on Vietnam.”68 He declined. On October 21, 1967, Norman Mailer wrote asking Bellow to “take a look again” at the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest,” which Mailer himself had agreed to support. Joining the protest, Mailer conceded, would be for Bellow “an unpleasant test of conscience,” possibly costing him “a large, even disruptive sum of money” (a possibility that had not deterred Mailer). “So I request you to read this accompanying literature and suffer conceivably the unhappy recognition that one is probably obliged to sign, for until then our protest against the war may be literary yet notably unengaged. Viet Nam, hot damn. Your brother in penmanship, Norman Mailer.” Bellow did not sign. On February 17, 1968, he received a telegram from Blair Clark, campaign manager of the anti-Vietnam presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. Would Bellow serve on a “Committee of Arts and Letters for McCarthy for President�
�? He would—he scribbled across the telegram, “OK—but have no time for fundraising.”

  Part of Bellow’s reluctance to be pressed by movements and activists derived from firsthand experience. In a letter of August 30, 1969, after agreeing to read a draft of Swados’s new novel, he returned to their earlier disagreement over the White House Festival.

  No other two college Trotskyites can have gotten so very far apart. I doubt that I have more use for Nixon and Johnson than you have. My going to the White House was nonsense, probably. It pleased no one, myself least of all. I wouldn’t have gone at all if I hadn’t been obliged by my own obstinacy to mark my disagreement with all parties. First I made my views on Vietnam and San Domingo as clear as possible in the Times, and then declared that I would go to show my respect for the President’s office—the office of Lincoln. I know about Harding, too, and Chester A. Arthur, but I am not at all prepared to secede. I am not a revolutionary. I have little respect for American revolutionaries as I know them, and I have known them quite well. I don’t like the Susan Sontag bit about a doomed America. I had my fill of the funnyhouse in Coney Island.