Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

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  ONE WAY FOR BELLOW to deal with his problems, particularly with women, was to get away from them, a familiar tactic. Shortly after the February 1970 publication of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, he set off for Africa with David Peltz, who had been there twice before.19 The new trip was Bellow’s idea, sparked by Peltz’s telling him of letters he’d received from a friend he’d made in Nairobi, a guide he’d hired on the second trip, “an ex–Mau Mau terrorist.” The guide had written of a beryllium mine in Kenya that Peltz could invest in. Peltz showed the letters to Bellow, who got excited about the prospect not so much of making money as of traveling to Africa. He knew someone at the University of Chicago who could provide him with a letter of introduction to the naturalist George Schaller, who was studying lions and other big cats in Tanzania, in the Serengeti. According to Peltz, both he and Bellow put up fifteen hundred dollars for new equipment for the mine. Bellow told Peltz that if he accompanied him he’d pay his way, a promise Peltz says he failed to honor, perhaps because the investment came to nothing.

  The trip began for Bellow with a flight to London, where he stayed “just long enough to get a yellow-fever injection and two visas.”20 Here he also was given the names of some English lawyers in Nairobi. He then flew to Rome, where he met Peltz. The two friends spent several days in Rome, visiting Paolo Milano and Gore Vidal, the latter eager to tell stories of Jacqueline Kennedy. “Gore and I hit it off splendidly,” Peltz remembers. “He invited me to Hollywood to meet all the ladies.” On the day of their flight to Nairobi, they had a meal with Vidal in his favorite restaurant before taking a cab straight to the airport. Bellow was exhausted on the flight, “knocked out” from the stress of the preceding months. As Peltz recalled, “I said, Put your head down [on his shoulder, he indicated], come and sleep,” which Bellow did, soothed as he’d been four years earlier in Jackson Park, when distraught over Susan. Once in Nairobi, Bellow reported in a letter of February 9 to Frances Gendlin, he and Peltz discovered that “the whole mining deal was pure con. Peltz’s man w’d not appear. Evidently it was an international swindle. Hugely funny.” In a letter to Shils of February 25, after returning to Chicago, Bellow says nothing of being swindled: “In Nairobi, Peltz and I seem to have acquired an interest in a beryllium mine. Of course it is mere playfulness for me. I did it in carnival spirit. Peltz I think is very earnest about it. In any case, it absorbed and amused me for a while and helped to clear my mind of shadows.” That the beryllium deal was still on, or back on, is suggested by a note Bellow received on March 13, in which Peltz informed him that he had loaned three thousand dollars to the “Mogul Mining Company Limited,” to buy mining rights, equipment, and a Land Rover. Thirty years later, Bellow offered a slightly fuller though no clearer account of the deal. Peltz had been “the intended mark of a gang of con artists who pretended that they had an unlimited supply of semi-precious stones. They had proposed that Peltz should set up a company and that this company should buy them the necessary mining machinery and trucks. Peltz and I had discussed the deal with an English lawyer who advised us to leave town. ‘Get away from Nairobi awhile,’ he said when he saw copies of the letters Peltz had sent to his associates, ‘lest you end up in a courtroom.’ ”

  As Peltz remembers it, he and Bellow did just that. They set out to rent a Land Rover, and, in a crowded street in downtown Nairobi, ran straight into Saul Steinberg, Bellow’s neighbor in the Hamptons, who also knew Peltz. Once over the shock, Bellow was struck by the fact that he and Steinberg were decked out in identical tourist gear from Brooks Brothers (including, according to Steinberg’s biographer, “a bush jacket of many pockets, shorts, knee socks, sturdy boots, and a pith helmet”).21 Steinberg had been to Africa twice before and was planning a trip to Uganda to visit Murchison Falls and the White Nile, partly to observe crocodiles. Bellow had written a novel about Africa and never actually been there; Steinberg had been drawing crocodiles all his life. He was fascinated by them and found them hateful, “part of the primitive system of nature where certain privileges were given unevenly to different species…the son of a bitch is vicious, has terrific teeth, is a great swimmer, and on top of it he’s armored.” Crocodiles were like dragons, symbolizing any “administration in evil form, political power in general, specifically economic, artistic and cultural. Anything you want—it’s a crock.”22

  Having decided to join forces, Peltz, Steinberg, and Bellow flew immediately to Entebbe, where they hired a Volkswagen van and driver. Then they drove to Kampala, from which they traveled to the Paraa Safari Lodge, below Murchison Falls, a well-known tourist destination (it has a swimming pool overlooking the Nile). Bellow described the falls in an address delivered at a 1999 memorial service for Steinberg:

  The huge waters crashed non-stop like a world congress of washing machines and then circled below as if considering what to do next—the hippo mothers and their calves showing nostrils and ears above the surface. The crocodiles, cruising under an agreement millions of years old, gave them a wide pass.23

  Steinberg had sketched this scene for Bellow, “and there now hangs on the wall behind my desk a Steinberg drawing of a huge hippo looking very much like a New York Department of Sanitation truck. This huge beast came every morning to the Paraa Lodge with her calf and together they overturned the large garbage cans and rummaged in the kitchen waste.”24

  Steinberg was interested in hippos because they were the only creatures crocodiles feared. According to his biographer, Steinberg was especially struck by the way crocodiles could “lie in the mud like a dead log and then suddenly flash into action to devour unwitting prey. Most of all he was mesmerized by the ‘toothpick bird’ who sat inside the crocodile’s open mouth, unconcernedly pecking its food off the gigantic teeth. ‘Nobody in the world is as safe as that bird in the crocodile’s mouth. They have an understanding, a pact between them, a deep relationship between the two,’ ”25 like the “agreement millions of years old” between the hippo and the crocodile.

  In the mornings, before the heat built up, the three friends went sightseeing, a rare intrusion on Bellow’s writing schedule. One afternoon, they took a motorboat cruise on the Nile. The lodge had arranged the cruise for them and for another of its guests, “a young woman traveling alone—quite a pretty Scandinavian in poplin.” Steinberg tried to engage the young woman in conversation, with little success. Bellow describes a moment of drama on the cruise:

  The boat approached a sand bar where crocodiles had laid and buried their eggs and seemed to be dozing in the sunshine and as we drifted by a croc braced herself on her short legs and in a combined swift movement came to her feet and rushed at the boat. The speed of these creatures, because of their Gothic construction and their look of clumsy torpor, takes watchers aback. They pull their prey to the bottom and drown it. The animal tried to board on Steinberg’s side of the boat. The young Danish traveler had one elbow on the gunwale, and she went down [inside the boat]. Steinberg also fell into the aisle. I thought: “This is it! Killed in Africa by a crocodile!” The creature had forced its head into the seat….I saw us at the mercy of this overpowering monster. I thought, “Steinberg will be killed. I’ll have to write his obituary. But we’ll all be killed. There’s nothing but an oar to defend yourself with.”

  But with his oar one of the boatman pushed against the sand-bank and the croc slid or fell back into the water, the domain of the hippos and the crocs. All the men laughed at this innocent fun. Steinberg helped the Danish lady to her feet, but there was nothing he could do to please her.26

  In Atlas’s account of this incident, Bellow, too, made a play for the Danish lady, and also got nowhere.27

  It was in Africa, according to Peltz, that Bellow had his first experience with hashish. On the drive to the falls, Steinberg said to Peltz: “David, we’re in Africa, where’s the pot? It’s time to get a little pot.” Peltz asked their guide to procure some and was soon presented
with “eighty dynamite joints, rolled like an ice-cream cone, tapered at the end and thick at the top. So I lit up and I called Steinberg and he said I’ll be right over, and he got high and we both got high and we were laughing and we met Saul in the lobby.” The plan was to go to an Indian restaurant, and Steinberg and Peltz couldn’t stop laughing: “Bellow was pissed off, mad we got high.” After dinner, Bellow asked to try a joint. “He’d never had one before. He lay down on the bed and I put a lighted one in his mouth and he never inhaled. He was afraid of something unexpected within himself.” According to Bellow, he took one puff but the hashish made him sick. It made Peltz and Steinberg, in contrast, “preternaturally cheerful,”28 a mood maintained all the way back to Entebbe. When it came time to return to the United States, Steinberg and Bellow took a twelve-hour flight to Rome, stopping at Addis Ababa, Asmara, Khartoum, Cairo, and Athens. Peltz took a more direct flight, on which he smuggled all the remaining hashish. When he and Bellow met in Rome, Peltz informed him that he intended to smuggle the hashish into the United States (in the pocket of his raincoat, as he’d done on the flight to Rome). Bellow refused to stand next to him as they went through customs.

  The Africa trip was just what Bellow needed. As he wrote to Frances Gendlin from Rome: “This trip I think has met the purpose. I am better, more settled in mind and am willing—no, longing, to come back to 5805 [the address of his Cloisters apartment on Dorchester Avenue].” Back in Chicago, Bellow remained in good spirits. As he wrote to Shils on February 25, partly to explain their missing each other in England: “I didn’t want to spend time in Europe: I was eager to get to Africa. It did not disappoint me. Murchison Falls and the White Nile stunned me….I had thought myself ready for nature’s grandeur (having seen the movies) but all my preparations were (luckily) driven away by the actual sight of the great river.” In addition to settling him, the trip provided material for future stories. In “A Silver Dish”—a loving portrait of Peltz and his father, published in The New Yorker on September 25, 1978—Bellow draws on two episodes from the trip: Peltz’s hashish smuggling and the motorboat cruise on the Nile. Woody Selbst, a contractor like Peltz, smuggles a bundle of hashish from Kampala to the United States in his trench-coat pocket, “banking perhaps on his broad build, frank face, high color. He didn’t look like a wrongdoer, a bad guy; he looked like a good guy. But he liked taking chances. Risk was a wonderful stimulus.” Once home, Woody plants the hashish seeds in his backyard. They don’t take, “but behind his warehouse, where the Lincoln Continental was parked, he kept a patch of marijuana. There was no harm at all in Woody, but he didn’t like being entirely within the law. It was simply a question of self-respect.”29

  The episode from the cruise had been recounted to Bellow by Peltz and Steinberg (Bellow had missed it, Atlas implies, because he was busy chatting up the young Danish woman). A buffalo calf on the shore was suddenly dragged into the water by a crocodile. In “A Silver Dish,” Bellow imagines how “under the water the calf still thrashed, fought, churned the mud. Woody, the robust traveler, took this in as he sailed by, and to him it looked as if the parent cattle were asking each other dumbly what had happened. He chose to assume that there was pain in this, he read brute grief into it” (p. 13). Woody makes this assumption because he is incapable of seeing the world as loveless, exclusively red in tooth and claw. His “one idea,” from childhood onward, was that love was “the goal, the project, God’s purpose…that this world should be a love world, that it should eventually recover and be entirely a world of love. He wouldn’t have said this to a soul, for he could see how stupid it was—personal and stupid. Nevertheless, there it was at the center of his feelings.” At the same time, Woody’s aunt wasn’t wrong when she said to him, “strictly private, close to his ear even, ‘You’re a little crook, like your father’ ” (p. 18).

  “A Silver Dish” provides a test of Woody’s “one idea,” primarily through its account of his father, Morris, whose self-willed energies are presented as admirable but brutish. Just as it is unlikely the water buffalo feels grief, it is unlikely that Morris feels for his son anything like what his son feels for him. When Woody is still a teenager, he takes his father to meet his benefactress, a devout Christian lady, in the hope of securing a loan for the father’s laundry-and-cleaning business. When the benefactress leaves the room for a moment, the father steals a silver dish and hides it under his trousers. When Woody insists that he put the dish back before she returns, the father refuses. Woody wrestles him to the floor, there in the Christian lady’s parlor; Morris struggles to free himself from his son’s grip, punching him several times in the face, kneeing him, butting him with his chin, rattling his teeth. Woody is twenty pounds heavier and eventually subdues him. “Gradually Pop stopped thrashing and struggling. His eyes stuck out and his mouth was open, sullen. Like a stout fish. Woody released him and gave him a hand up. He was then overcome with many bad feelings of a sort he knew the old man never suffered. Never, never. Pop never had these groveling emotions. There was his whole superiority. Pop had no such feelings” (p. 28).

  Woody, in middle age, close to the age of Dave Peltz on the Africa trip, is described as “open, lavish, familiar, fleshier and fleshier but still muscular (he jogged, he lifted weights)…becoming ruddier every year, an outdoor type with freckles on his back and spots across the flaming forehead and the honest nose. In Addis Ababa he took an Ethiopian beauty to his room from the street and washed her, getting into the shower with her to soap her with his broad, kindly hands. In Kenya he taught certain American obscenities to a black woman so that she could shout them out during the act. On the Nile, below Murchison Falls, those fever trees rose huge from the mud, and hippos on the sandbars belched at the passing launch, hostile. One of them danced on his spit of sand, springing from the ground and coming down heavy, on all fours. There, Woody saw the buffalo calf disappear, snatched by the crocodile” (pp. 32–33). When Woody felt heartache, he would go for a run: “He felt truth coming to him from the sun—a communication that was also light and warmth….And again out of the flaming of the sun would come to him a secret certainty that the goal set for this earth was that it should be filled with good, saturated with it. After everything preposterous, after dog had eaten dog, after the crocodile death had pulled everyone into his mud…This was his clumsy intuition. It went no further. Subsequently, he proceeded through life as life seemed to want him to do it” (p. 33). This is how Bellow felt Peltz proceeded through life, a feeling shared by others who knew him.

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  ONCE BASED BACK IN CHICAGO, Bellow continued his travels: to Washington, D.C., to attend a Jewish Heritage Award Luncheon, to New York for Adam’s bar mitzvah, to Texas to consult with Botsford about the new magazine (Bette Howland had been working on the magazine in Chicago while Bellow was in Africa), to Florida to visit Maury and consult with him about business deals. In addition to the deals with Maury, Bellow invested twenty-five thousand dollars in a company drilling for oil and gas in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and elsewhere, a venture in which Maury’s son, Joel, was also involved. A month later, on May 27, Edward Levi, the university president, wrote to Bellow formally appointing him chair of the Committee on Social Thought, “upon the recommendation of the Provost and the Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences.” Bellow’s appointment was to commence on July 1, 1970, when James Redfield, the current chair, would be on leave in Italy. Redfield expected Bellow’s appointment to be for a year only and was upset to learn that it was for three years.

  When Bellow agreed to become chair of the Committee, he was probably the most acclaimed novelist in America. He hardly needed the post for his CV, or for his pocket. He was not used to doing things he didn’t want to do, and he was not easy to bully or shame. On May 10, writing to Robert M. Adams, the literary scholar and critic, to decline an invitation to deliver the Ewing Lectures at UCLA (two talks for twenty-five hundred dollars), Bellow wondered how being ch
air would affect him “emotionally” as well as “what freedom it will leave me for junkets.” He admitted to being “astonished” at his recent decisions and moods: “I am dégagé where I expected to be anxious, or frantic when I would have predicted nonchalance.” One reason why he accepted the post is that he respected the Committee and felt it his duty to take on his share of administrative responsibility. Another is that it provided a distraction from personal difficulties. He owed much to the educational traditions the Committee upheld, which he saw as threatened not only by academic specialization but by recent cultural and political trends. The Chairmanship was meant to rotate among Committee members, and Bellow had been a member for eight years; it was his turn.30 The influence of Edward Shils may also have figured. Shils was devoted to the Committee. As James Redfield puts it, “Anything that threatened the professional integrity of the Committee was felt by Shils as a personal threat.” He was also devoted to Bellow, whom he thought of at this time rather as Barley Alison thought of him. “I…want you to be my idea of perfection,” she had written to him; “I expect you to become eventually a very distinguished person,” declares her fictional alter ego, Rita. What Shils wanted for the Committee, he wanted for Bellow: that they meet his ideas of distinction, perfection. While teaching at Cambridge, which he did part of each year, Shils frequently wrote to Bellow about Committee business, offering opinions and advice. He also made clear how much he admired Bellow’s writing and valued their friendship.