Proud of his new wife’s distinction as a mathematician, Bellow made efforts to understand her work. “We would go out, and he’d often say, We have to go home because my wife has to prepare her class on stochastic integrals for tomorrow. Or I don’t know much about Martingale theory, but she has to give a talk on it, so we cannot stay very long.” Alexandra tried to explain her work “grosso modo,” and when Bellow asked her to give him a simple mathematical proof involving numbers, she gave him a proof “that the square root of 2 is an irrational number. This is a consequence of the Pythagorean theorem, and he was extremely taken with that, and he tried to understand it and then he memorized the steps and he reviewed it a number of times, and eventually he got sick and tired of it. He really never developed that kind of interest. I think he was smart enough to understand mathematics if he applied himself to it, but he was so completely involved in literature and writing and everything else that there was no room left for it.” Alexandra was comparably involved in mathematics, and though she had more access to Bellow’s work than he did to hers, she, too, lacked the interest or time fully to understand or appreciate it.55
Alexandra likens mathematicians to gold miners. “You have to be prepared to work hard, to sweat, to overcome long periods of frustration for the sake of getting those few gold nuggets that illuminate your whole existence.” The most important of the nuggets to come her way before she met Bellow involved “Martingale theory.” In “A Mathematical Life,” Alexandra offers the following grosso modo explanation of Martingale theory, in a single sentence: “The notion of Martingale in Probability Theory is a model for a fair game of chance.”56 To nonmathematicians, this sentence is of little help. An equally unenlightening footnote (again, to nonmathematicians) is provided in Atlas’s biography, where Alexandra is described as “an authority on Banach spaces, named after the Polish mathematician Stefan Banach, a pioneer in the field of topological vector spaces.”57 Alexandra’s working methods were as incomprehensible to Bellow as the substance of her work, but, then, his working methods were incomprehensible to her. The concentration demanded of the mathematical prospector meant physical and mental removal for long periods. “When I worked hard on a Math problem,” she writes, “I went into seclusion for hours.”58 Bellow worked with comparable intensity, but for shorter periods and with music blaring. Alexandra marveled at the “ironclad discipline” of Bellow’s morning work routine, from nine till about twelve or one, but also at his ability to handle distractions: “He very often answered the phone and engaged in these very lively conversations, and then he’d go back to work with just as much energy and zest as before.” With her own work, “I need complete silence, no distractions. I even close the curtain. It is to shut out the lake, the magnificent view of the lake [from her Sheridan Road apartment]. Saul, on the other hand, opened the curtains wide, listened to Don Giovanni full blast.” Bellow’s apartment, fortunately, was big enough for them to work without disturbing each other. “We worked in different quarters,” Alexandra recalls. “He did not interrupt me.”
Alexandra is the model for several characters in Bellow’s fiction, most obviously Minna in The Dean’s December and Vela in Ravelstein. There are also traces of her in Benn Crader, the genius botanist in More Die of Heartbreak, described by his nephew Kenneth as “humanly more confused than many persons of normal gifts.” (Benn resembles Bellow in that his confusions concern Matilda Layamon, a woman modeled largely on Susan.) In The Dean’s December, the preoccupations of Minna, the scientist wife of Albert Corde, the dean, are “astrophysical, mathematical.” The closest Corde comes to describing them is through metaphor: “bringing together a needle from one end of the universe with a thread from the opposite end. Once this was accomplished, Corde couldn’t say what there was to be sewn….Face it, the cosmos was beyond him” (p. 14). On the flight to Bucharest, where her mother is dying (as Alexandra’s mother was dying in 1978, when she and Bellow flew to Bucharest), Minna’s valise is packed with astronomical papers, “giving them priority over dresses. On the trip she couldn’t be separated from these books and reprints. They weren’t checked through but had to be carried as cabin luggage” (p. 18). Minna is “superconscientious” about her work:
Nothing was allowed to interfere with duties. Mostly it amused [Corde] that this beautiful and elegant woman should behave like a schoolgirl, with satchel and pencil box. When she was getting ready to set out for the day, he sometimes joked with her. “Got your compass and your protractor? Your apple for teacher?” Together with her big fragrant purse, a bag of scientific books and papers was slung over her shoulder—ten times more stuff than she needed. But occasionally the gold-star pupil stuff did get him down, and she was cross with him, interpreting his irritation as disrespect for her profession. It had nothing to do with that. She put in a ten-hour day, never missed a visiting lecturer, a departmental seminar. Her tutorials, rehearsed far into the night, must have been like concerts. What he minded was her fanatical absorption. He often had dinner waiting for her, and toward seven o’clock began to listen for the sound of the key in the lock….She gave him (it was absurd!) wifely anxieties [pp. 253–54].59
Minna’s mother, like Alexandra’s mother, was a forceful woman who had fought hard to secure her daughter’s well-being. “For safety” she had assigned Minna “to the physical universe—not exactly the mysterium tremendum; that was religion. But science! Science would save her from evil.” As a consequence, Minna is “an innocent person….She did stars; human matters were her husband’s field” (p. 256); Corde’s responsibility is “keeping his wife posted on sublunary matters” (p. 261). Her innocence of human matters, though, is deceptive. “She was as intelligent—phenomenally intelligent—as she was childlike. The boundaries between intellect and the rest meandered so intricately that you could never guess when you were about to trespass, when words addressed to the child might be interpreted by a mind more powerful than yours” (p. 257). When “brought back to earth,” Corde tells us, Minna is not only superintelligent but “a tigress” (p. 24), like her mother. Unlike her mother, though, “she had no practical abilities, she had never needed them. Valeria had done all that” (pp. 170–71). Nor has she much knowledge of the issues that matter most to Corde. “My wife is a simple person,” he declares. “No politics. Her mother wanted her out of it, brought her up that way. No politics, no history” (p. 63). Valeria sends her “directly into cosmic space. Nothing but particle physics, galaxies, equations. Minna had never read the Communist Manifesto, had never heard of Stalin’s Great Terror” (p. 65). As he gets to know her, Corde is amused to discover that Minna, “who had grown up in a Communist country, should have to be told by her American husband who Dzerzhinsky was, or Zinoviev” (p. 261). Nor has Minna any interest in contemporary issues, particularly those of the city she lives in. After Bucharest, she can’t stand to hear of them. “Her mother’s death had taught her death. Triviality was insupportable to her. Her judgment was rigorous, angry. She wanted no part of his journalism, articles, squalor. Suburban pimps or smart-ass lawyers beneath contempt and the great hordes, even of the doomed, of no concern to her, nor the city of destruction, nor its assaults, arsons, prisons and deaths” (p. 288).
With her mother’s death, Minna is engulfed by “mortal weakness, perplexity, grief—the whole human claim. Minna hadn’t made the moves frequently made by scientists to disown this claim: ‘Don’t bother me with this ephemeral stuff—wives, kids, diapers, death’ ” (p. 256). Alexandra speaks of herself as having been comparably engulfed at the time of her mother’s death. “That trip to Romania was so traumatic and so somber and so macabre that, to tell you the truth, many of the details have faded for me, perhaps out of an instinct of self-defense. It was so dramatic that Saul didn’t have to invent much or to change much. It was probably quite close to the real story.” To Corde, the trip to Romania, in which the authorities are punitively obstructive, immovable, makes clear that Minna is “rich…in human qua
lities” (p. 57) as well as “unskilled in human dealings” (p. 308), a mixture Adam Bellow sees in Alexandra, who is warm and full of feeling while also “treating emotional life as if it were mathematics.” Hence, in part, Alexandra’s adherence to etiquette and decorum. Minna “disliked noise, disorder, notoriety, any publicity” (p. 261), as does Alexandra (she can be reticent and uncomfortable in interviews, for example, while clearly wishing to help). Minna is no more comfortable speculating about social or philosophical matters. At her mother’s death, she is appalled at how angry she feels. Her emotions, she says, are “horrible. Not like a grown woman. I feel vicious” (p. 258). Corde tries to explain her fury in wider terms, talking of “how schizoid the modern personality is,” invoking Jung on “the civilized psyche” as “tapeworm.” “Why do you think you should tell me this now?” Minna asks. “It might be useful to take an overall view,” Corde replies. “Then you mightn’t blame yourself too much for not feeling as you should about Valeria.”
“What comfort is it to hear that everybody is some kind of schizophrenic tapeworm? Why bring me out in the cold to tell me this. For my own good, I suppose.”
“This might not have been the moment,” he said.
“I tell you how horrible my mother’s death is, and the way you comfort me is to say everything is monstrous. You make me a speech. And it’s a speech I’ve heard more than once” [p. 263].
The events that were fictionalized in The Dean’s December took place in the winter of 1978. In addition to stressing the accuracy of the novel’s account of these events, Alexandra describes Bellow’s fictional portrait of her in the novel as “loving and respectful.” In Romania, his behavior was exemplary, both in relation to her and her family and to the hostile officials with whom he had to deal. “That was probably his finest hour in our marriage.” The novel depicts Corde’s attraction to Minna in terms that recall Adam Bellow on his father’s attraction to Alexandra. In chapter 16, toward the novel’s close, Corde describes himself as having behaved badly in the past, though this behavior is nowhere dramatized in the novel.60 At times, Corde is insensitive and self-absorbed (as in his speech to Minna about the civilized psyche), or cruel and cutting, but never do we see him lash out because he is in a mood, or insult admirers, or slap a woman. There is little evidence of underlying bad character, the sort Bellow began to suspect in himself after leaving Susan. Hence the puzzling nature of his account of the risks Minna takes in marrying him, an account which encourages biographical readings.
She loved him but he was suspect. And so he should be. We were a bad lot. For a complex monster like her husband, goodness might be just a mood, and love simply an investment that looked good for the moment. Today you bought Xerox. Next month, if it didn’t work out, you sold it. It was an uncomfortable sort of judgment, but Corde was beginning to realize that this was how he wanted to be judged. Minna gave him a true reflection of his entire self. The intention was to recognize yourself for what you (pitiably, preposterously) were. Then whatever good you found, if any, would also be yours. Corde bought that. He wasn’t looking for accommodation, comfort [p. 289].
* * *
—
IN THE EARLY 1970S, what Bellow was looking for was to be a man or a mensch, not a jerk. He sought to become a man in several ways: in his conduct as chair of the Committee on Social Thought; in his relations with family, both immediate and extended; and in wider social and political engagement. On October 3, 1975, on the eve of stepping down as chair of the Committee, Bellow hosted a dinner in celebration of its thirty-fifth anniversary and in honor of its founder, Professor Emeritus John U. Nef. The dinner was held in the university’s Swift Hall, and Bellow paid for the banquet. Two years earlier, in the manner of Elya Gruner in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, he had mounted a campaign to get his maternal cousin Mischa Ulman, an electronics engineer and “refusenik,” out of Latvia.61 With the help of Walter Pozen in Washington, Bellow made appeals on Mischa’s behalf to Hubert Humphrey, Henry Kissinger, Senator Charles Percy, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, Senator Jacob Javits, and President Richard Nixon (though Bellow had voted against Nixon and had openly supported George McGovern, both as Democratic nominee and as presidential candidate62). He also wrote telegrams to the Soviet minister of culture and the chair of the Soviet Writers Union. Mischa Ulman’s mother, Bella, had been allowed to immigrate to Israel. Mischa was her only child, and the plan was for him to join her. After he lost his job in Latvia, however, she did not hear from him for several months, and feared that he might be in prison, as a “parasite” as well as a refusenik. In the spring of 1973, she flew to New York, where she telephoned her Chicago Bellow relatives. Soon after the call, Bellow came to New York, met Bella, and began a campaign to persuade the Soviet authorities to allow Mischa to emigrate. (Sam and Nina Bellows also campaigned on Mischa’s behalf, as did several Jewish organizations.) On May 1, 1973, Bellow wrote to “Dear Cousin Mischa” to inform him that he had “made formal application to bring you to the United States. My desire is that you should live in Chicago where I will make myself responsible for you, seeing to all your needs until you are able to make your own way….I speak for the entire family when I say that we shall be very happy to have you here.” By December, the campaign had succeeded. Mischa was allowed to leave Latvia for Israel, from where he would eventually move to the United States; he later returned to Israel to make his home.
A year after Mischa’s arrival in Israel, Bellow and Alexandra flew to Jerusalem. Bellow had agreed to address the thirty-ninth annual PEN International Congress, a visit agreed to the previous June. Here he met Mischa for the first time, at family gatherings of the Gordins, Mazurskys, and Ulmans, maternal relatives. Bella, “a medical worker of some sort” in Riga, was now a department-store cashier; Mischa, however, had found work with Sony as an electronics engineer.63 In his PEN address, among his papers in the Regenstein, Bellow quoted a recent statement by Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny warning Russian writers against deviating from the principles of Soviet realism, and stressing the need for Soviet art “to constantly raise its ideological arsenal, its irreconcilability to manifestations of alien views, to combine the assertion of the Soviet way of life with the deflation of apolitical consumerism.” He then contrasted these quotations from Podgorny with one from Goethe: “I have never bothered or asked in what way I was useful to society as a whole. I contented myself with what I recognized was good or true.” A similar stress on the artist’s obligation to the good and the true is sounded in a letter Bellow wrote on January 7, 1974, to The New York Times in defense of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “a man of perfect intellectual honor.” To Solzhenitsyn, as to all “the best Russian writers of this hellish century it has been perfectly clear that only the power of the truth is equal to the power of the state.” In a period of détente, it was unlikely that American diplomats or the heads of great corporations would protest against the Soviet treatment of Solzhenitsyn, “but physicists and mathematicians, biologists, engineers, artists and intellectuals should make clear that they stand by [him]….Americans have a special responsibility in this matter. What Solzhenitsyn has done in revealing the unchecked brutality of Stalinism, he has done also for us. He has reminded every one of us what we owe to truth.”
An earlier letter of protest, from October 15, 1973, written nine days after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, never appeared in print, though Bellow alludes to it at the beginning of To Jerusalem and Back (p. 6). Addressed to the editors of Le Monde, it opened as follows: “It was France at the end of the eighteenth century that began the political liberation of the European Jews. In our own times, however, the French attitude toward the Jews has been painfully variable. The century began with the Dreyfus Case. In the Forties there was Vichy. Now there is the Pompidou government which, with a small show of neutrality and objectivity, has taken the Arab side in the present war. It associates itself politically with all of Israel’s enemies, even the most bizarre of
African and Asian demagogues [Idi Amin, most recently].” Bellow then asks what France would do if Israel lost the war “to the attacking coalition of Egypt, Syria, the oil billionaires and the Russians….For everyone understands that there are two questions here. One is the question of justice to the Arabs, the other is that of the destruction of the Jews. There are also two traditions involved in this matter, those of Revolutionary France on the one hand and those of French anti-Semitism on the other.” The letter ends:
Why should France not take into account the fact that Israel is democratic, while the Arab nations are oppressive, xenophobic, feudal? Does a French government owe no loyalties whatever to liberty and equality, to what is best in French civilization? Or shall we on the outside begin to think of that civilization as nothing but another export commodity like wine and cheese and perfumes and armaments?
To make sure that the letter reached Le Monde, Bellow gave one copy to the playwright Eugene Ionesco and a second to the novelist Manès Sperber, both to be delivered directly to the paper’s editor. “The letter was never acknowledged.”64
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