Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  In To Jerusalem and Back, published in 1976 and based in part on his Newsday articles, Bellow offers a slightly different sense of what was “real” for him about the Six-Day War. It was not merely that it was a war but that it was this particular war. He quotes Professor Jacob Talmon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a figure of “plump professorial propriety…finely dressed, tie well chosen…not one of your open-at-the-throat, bushy Israeli types,”82 on the significance of the Israeli victory. In 1967, after the war, Israel could think of itself “ ‘as one of the few countries in the contemporary jaded world with a sense of purpose,’ ” an assertion Bellow considers “of first importance.”

  The Israelis had war, and not the moral equivalent of war William James was looking for, to give them firmness. They had, in their concern for the decay of civilization and in their pride (pride and concern in equal proportions), something to teach the world. The stunned remnant that had crept from Auschwitz had demonstrated that they could farm a barren land, industrialize it, build cities, make a society, do research, philosophize, write books, sustain a great moral tradition, and, finally, create an army of tough fighters [p. 135].

  In To Jerusalem and Back, Bellow wrestles with the injustices visited upon the Palestinians by the creation of the state of Israel and with the selective nature of the moral outrage these injustices evoke (especially from European radicals, who appear to believe “that the Jews, with their precious and refining record of suffering, have a unique obligation to hold up the moral burdens everyone else has dumped” [p. 136]). He paraphrases another professor, Yehoshafat Harkabi of Stanford: “ ‘Zionists were not deliberately unjust, the Arabs were not guiltless. To rectify the evil as the Arabs would wish it rectified would mean the destruction of Israel. Arab refugees must be relieved and compensated, but Israel will not commit suicide for their sake’ ” (p. 158). At the time of the war, these and other demoralizing complications were briefly swept aside by the direct threat Israel faced, a reality which drew Bellow.

  The following autumn, at a dinner at Marshall and Doris Holleb’s apartment, Bellow met the journalist David Halberstam, who was in Chicago to write a profile of Mayor Daley. According to Doris Holleb, Halberstam told Bellow he loved his novels but that he “shouldn’t do reporting, why waste your time on reporting.” According to another woman at the dinner, Halberstam also accused Bellow of having “missed the real story” of the war.83 What Bellow remembers is that Halberstam “made fun of my dispatches, saying that I ran up large Telex bills to describe to Long Island readers the look of a battlefield.” Bellow asked Halberstam what he thought “real” journalism was. “ ‘When an Egyptian general and his entire army were captured,’ said Halberstam, ‘and a newspaperman asked him why not a shot had been fired, he answered that firing a shot would have given away his position.’ And that, in Halberstam’s view, was one of the most brilliant stories filed in the 1967 war” (To Jerusalem and Back, pp. 58–59). Bellow spent the rest of the evening, according to Doris Holleb, silent and angry, though “Halberstam didn’t have a clue that he’d insulted him.” From Bellow’s perspective, Halberstam was superficial, the sort of writer “who was interested in war, but not the things that cause war.”84 Bellow looked for deeper meanings, as he did when considering Vietnam and the controversy it provoked. In Mark Harris’s words, as “the debate over Vietnam divided the country, Bellow maintained his view of history as time, breadth, transcendent. In a letter to me he had sarcastically described ‘an age’ as ‘the interval between appearances of the Sunday Times News of the Week in Review.’ ”85 As Bellow put it in a 1975 interview in Newsweek, “What man with his eyes open at this hour could not be interested in politics?…I only wish people talked about it at a deeper level than Chappaquiddick or Scoop Jackson or who’s-gonna-get-the-nomination. I don’t think we know where we are or where we’re going. I see politics—ultimately—as a buzzing preoccupation that swallows up art and the life of the spirit.”86 In Israel, Bellow’s family connection, Sabina Mazursky, was struck by the intensity with which he listened: “He listened not only to the story, but beyond that: he listened with all his senses, to body language, to intonation, noticing all details thoroughly and in depth. He was very friendly but needed a lot of space. He was brilliant, sensitive, a unique person.”87

  When Halberstam asked Bellow “why waste your time on reporting,” it is likely that he hit a nerve. On September 15, 1968, Bellow published an article in the Chicago Sun-Times deploring writers who use up their energy “asserting and publicly establishing the fact that they are indeed writers. They quickly become actors who behave like writers.”88 What matters to these writers is “to be mentioned by the papers or to be seen on television or in the art landscape, to enlist in causes, or to line up with the SDS or the Black Panthers.” What also matters is that the public recognize their views as the sort of views writers hold:

  In politics, writers are romantic. They are for dissent, against authority; for the “natural,” against the “social”; for sickness and madness, against the square or “normal”; for violence, opposed to bourgeois tameness; for excess and against restraint. This is fairly old stuff, but the public seems to want it, and artists deliver it. People want emancipation….Art itself is secondary now, for the public rejoices in artists rather than in art.

  Art itself is seen as secondary, Bellow adds, not only because it is complicated, nuanced, and ambiguous, but because it is often concerned with aesthetic or metaphysical questions, “the life of the spirit.” For today’s artist, “public and social events dominate all others. News, rumor, scandal, political campaigns, wars, assassinations, youth movements, race riots loom over religion, philosophy, art, private feelings, personal loyalties, love. These are considered the Action, the Center of common experience….The emphasis falls on collective experience and not upon individual vision.”89 In refusing to line up or sign on, in preserving his individuality, in refusing to be “drafted” or “pressed” by politics, Bellow believed he was serving art or literature. When engaged in public debate, he was often irritable or resentful in manner, as if he were wasting his time or angry with himself for wasting his time (having given in to the temptation to play the artist). This was particularly the case when giving talks, undertaken mainly for financial reasons.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE MID-1960S, Bellow was much in demand as a speaker on college campuses, so much so that he hired Bill Cooper Associates (BCA), a New York speakers’ agent, to handle requests for talks and readings.90 In April 1968, BCA organized a five-day tour to five Illinois colleges. Bellow spoke to audiences of 1,000 to 1,800 people, for fees ranging from $1,200 to $1,300. On May 1, he spoke at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, then at William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, on May 3, then the University of Washington in Seattle, on May 9, for $1,750 a talk. After speaking in Seattle, he went on to San Francisco State University, where he was to give a talk on May 10. The talk was held in the university’s theater-arts auditorium, to an overflowing audience. Bellow had friends at San Francisco State: Wright Morris, whose writing he had praised and published in the magazine The Noble Savage; Kay House, Sand House Higson’s sister, who was also in the English Department (Sand House Higson was a friend of Bellow’s second wife, Sasha); and Phil Siegelman, whom Bellow knew from the University of Minnesota, now teaching political science at San Francisco State. Herb and Mitzi McClosky, close friends also from Minnesota, who now lived in Berkeley, were to put Bellow up a few days after the event. The talk itself, entitled “What Are Writers Doing in the University?” (an alternative to or variant of another talk given on tour, “The Writer and the Public Today”), passed without incident. A friend of Mark Harris’s, Hannah Koler, described it as “witty, entertaining & definitely cynical.”91 Matters didn’t get out of hand until the question period. After Bellow gave his opinion of LeRoi Jones’s distinction between black art and white art (“Why w
orry about that sort of thing?”), an audience member who had missed all but the final five minutes of the talk stood up in the aisle to ask a question. His name was Floyd Salas, and the year before, he had published a novel entitled Tattoo the Wicked Cross, which won several awards and had been optioned by Hollywood (for twenty-five thousand dollars according to a letter of May 22, 1968, Bellow received from Kay House). Salas, who was thirty-seven at the time, had gone to Berkeley on a boxing scholarship, was a prominent radical in the Bay Area (“I was pre–Mario Savio; we set the groundwork”), and claims to have been a fan of Bellow’s fiction. “I had read all of his books up to that time, and two of them, Henderson the Rain King and The Adventures of Augie March, I thought were great. I respected all of his books.” Salas had taught writing for several years at San Francisco State but had left in 1967, mostly because “I felt a snobbism and rigidity in the teaching staff that cut itself off from the students.”92

  Bellow’s manner during the question period seemed to Salas to show this snobbism and rigidity. “His arrogance was offensive,” he told me. “He spoke down to the students. He was supercilious, he was vain.” According to Kay House, one of his hosts, Bellow “invited this [hostility] by reacting very sharply to questioners.”93 Another woman present at the talk had seen Bellow provoke similar reactions at previous talks.94 “I don’t think I handled myself well,” he admitted many years later, “but I don’t think that anyone behaved well.”95 The question Salas asked was whether Bellow had said “that the university should be a haven from vulgarity.” Bellow’s reply, according to Salas, was that he was “sorry that I hadn’t been able to get in and knew he looked like a father figure to the students but he wasn’t going to answer that question.”96 After this reply, again according to Salas, “the faculty sitting on the stage behind him dutifully clapped at how artfully he had put down this supposedly hostile student.” In the account given by Atlas, provided in part by House and Leo Litwak, also of the English Department, what Bellow “coldly” replied was “Since you came in late, I have the right to refuse to answer your question,” a response he then softened. “I mean, I’m sorry you couldn’t get in, but at least other people have notes and you can find out what I said.”97

  According to Atlas’s sources, Salas persisted—“I want to challenge you”—and Bellow replied, “But you don’t know what you’re challenging.” “I’ve read your books,” Salas answered. The audience laughed nervously at this exchange. Then a female student asked Bellow how much autobiography there was in his novels, and, according to Salas, “he told her it was none of her business.” Another questioner, identified by Salas as a student writer named Frank Olson, stood up and asked Bellow why he didn’t call his novel Bellow instead of Herzog, and why he wrote a novel about a university professor in which not a single student appears, even though “students all over America were demonstrating over the factory machine education they were receiving from faculties that were out of touch with them.” Olson, Salas said in an interview, was “brilliant,” “a rebel,” and striking in appearance, tall, thin, dressed “like a bum…like a walking corpse” (Artur Sammler describes a comparably hostile audience at Columbia as “a large, spreading, shaggy, composite human bloom….malodorous, peculiarly rancid, sulphurous” [p. 32]). According to Atlas, Bellow tried to answer the first part of Olson’s question seriously: “If you knew more about literature, you’d realize it’s very hard to write an autobiography, and once you begin to write, even if it’s about yourself, you’ve invented a fiction and you have to be consistent.” Here is Salas’s account of what followed:

  The faculty who were sitting behind Bellow on the stage got upset and a low murmur of disapproval rose up from them and spread over the audience at Frank’s insolence in bringing up the question of Bellow’s autobiographical input in his fiction again when he had already told a student it was none of her business. I then stood up in the aisle where I was sitting and said that they, the faculty, all worshipped this man in his camel hair suit and alligator shoes and got annoyed when he was asked important questions, this effete person who refused to enter into a dialogue with the students (I was implying that this was what was wrong with a university of strictly middle-class white kids and a nearly all white male faculty) when he was the epitome of what was wrong with the university in the first place and probably couldn’t even come. (An apt if rather crude comment on the fact that he was obviously separated from the essential, and totally out of touch with the student mood on campuses nationwide, which wanted to bring the common life into the university, not protect the university from it.)98

  The place went wild.

  According to Atlas, drawing on Hannah Koler’s account, Salas then “went berserk,” uttering a string of obscenities. (In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, the Salas figure addresses the audience directly: “Why do you listen to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry. He can’t come” [p. 34].) In an interview, Salas denied uttering obscenities, adducing the testimony of several witnesses.99 He also denies saying, “I want to challenge you.” “It’s all a lie,” he told me, denying also that the following exchange, again reported in Atlas, ever happened: “ ‘It would have been better if you had heard my speech,’ Bellow said patiently. ‘I mean, I’m an old soap-box speaker. I used to be a Trotskyite in my youth, and I’m well accustomed to handling this sort of thing, but I don’t really like to do it.’ ‘Because it’s vulgar?’ Salas shot back.” To general laughter, Bellow then declared: “I think this meeting is pretty well broken up now. I don’t mind answering questions but it’s not hospitable to insult your speakers, so let’s call it off.”

  Kay House drove Bellow and Wright Morris to her home in Sausalito, where, “after three drinks in the sun on the deck over there, Saul and Wright started to come out of shock.” Bellow was scheduled to spend the night in the St. Francis Hotel in the city but was so shaken that he asked to be taken directly to the McCloskys’. Looking back on the incident, he complained of being “undefended by the bullied elders of the faculty,” and found it odd that no one had anticipated trouble. House later said she was “not surprised” at what had happened, having seen, at a talk the historian Richard Hofstadter gave on Black Power, “how much sheer hate and rage could build up in a crowd on our campus.”100 There had been angry student demonstrations on campus before Bellow’s talk, and a few weeks later the university’s Administration Building was occupied, with protesters demanding ten new minority faculty positions, a “La Raza” Department, a Black Studies Department, the admission of a thousand minority students, and the elimination of ROTC. As Salas puts it, “We, the activists, gave it a good shot and forced the college to set up the Black Studies Department with a Black Panther associate as chair. From that department came the strike that fall.” The strike of the autumn and winter of 1968–69 was prolonged and violent, and even Salas thought the strikers went too far, “talking guns, guns, ordering people around, and hostile stuff like that, frightening and alienating lots of faculty and students on the campus…making them fear that fascism was going to come from the underclasses instead of the upper classes.” In a letter of October 22, 1968, to Mark Harris, who had taught at San Francisco State for thirteen years before moving to Purdue, Bellow described his experiences there as “very bad….Being denounced by Salas as an old shit to an assembly which seemed to find the whole thing deliciously thrilling…I left the platform in defeat….It was very poor stuff, I assure you. You don’t found universities in order to destroy culture. For that you want a Nazi party.” As in his reflections on the Six-Day War, the Holocaust was much in Bellow’s mind.

  SB and Susan on Martha’s Vineyard, mid-1960s (private collection)

  2

  “All My Ladies Seem Furious”

  WHEN FLOYD SALAS JEERED that he bet Saul Bellow “probably couldn’t even come,” one young woman in the audience felt like standing up and declaring herself a witness in Bellow’s defense. The
young woman was Maggie Staats, and she had been seeing Bellow for more than two years. They had met in New York in March 1966, at a party given by Harold Taylor, the former president of Sarah Lawrence College. Maggie was twenty-four and worked at The New Yorker. She had been brought to the party by Brendan Gill, not Bellow’s favorite person, one of two men at the magazine she’d been warned to avoid (the other was the cartoonist Frank Modelli; she later married the magazine’s science writer, Paul Brodeur, the first of her five husbands). Maggie had no idea who Saul Bellow was, had never heard of him, despite having done graduate work in English at Yale. “He was good-looking, and he was older, and I had never been with a man who was that old.” Bellow was fifty-one. Gill, Maggie’s date, was fifty-two, and Joseph Mitchell, another New Yorker writer, “one of my closest friends in my whole life,” was fifty-eight. “I’d say a lot of Saul’s attraction was his age, and he was witty and amusing.” They left the party together and set out to find a late-night bookstore where Bellow could buy a copy of Henderson the Rain King. Then they went back to his room at the Plaza Hotel, took their clothes off, and got into bed, and Bellow read her the entire novel. It took “two or three days; we were in the Plaza for two or three days.” She fell for him completely, as Sasha had done when Bellow read her The Adventures of Augie March for a day and a night, “until he was hoarse and, finally, croaked to a halt.”1