Love and Strife (1965-2005)
Page 30
Bellow’s impressions of the Israelis he meets, also of the Americans he interviews before and after his Jerusalem stay, are characteristically vivid. Extended sketches are offered of Mayor Kollek, the writer John Auerbach, Foreign Minister Abba Eban, Minister of Defense Shimon Peres, and the philanthropist Meyer Weisgal, founder of the Weizmann Institute. Deft touches appear throughout. The curmudgeonly columnist Joseph Alsop “argues by linking a long series of aggressive questions, punctuated by ‘Hey?’ ‘Eh?’ ‘Isn’t that so—ekh?’ ” (p. 178). At lunch, Abba Eban, “a type with which I am completely familiar,” orders chicken. “It is Jewish chicken, boiled in its skin, sitting on waves of mashed potatoes and surrounded by shores of rice and brown gravy….Hungry Mr. Eban is full under the chin. His voice is Oxonian, his views are highly organized. He is not a listener” (p. 40). Harold Fisch, an Orthodox professor of English, tells Bellow that “ ‘the liberated territories’ must be colonized and reclaimed by the Jews. The West Bank is Promised Land.” Fisch is English by birth and declares “fiercely in his Oxbridge voice that we American Jews are not Jews at all. It is a strange experience to hear such a judgment in such an accent” (p. 70). At dinner, the children of friends of Alexandra’s from the Hebrew University, a boy and a girl, “come up to the table and examine us boldly, pacing around the room like small lions. They look into our plates to see how foreigners eat cutlets.” Everyone laughs. Then, “as usual” (p. 116), the conversation becomes serious.
That Bellow was exotic was a feeling shared by adult Israelis. Amos Oz saw him twice during his stay in Jerusalem, both times at Mishkenot. In the first visit, in the early hours of the afternoon, the two novelists spoke for ninety minutes, mostly about the revival of Hebrew. Oz remembers “a certain undertone of disbelief that Hebrew could be used as a living language after being virtually dead for seventeen centuries.” “He asked me about writing modern literature in Hebrew. How is it possible?” Oz found Bellow “very formal and schoolteacherly. He asked polite questions and kept his distance, curious, eager to know, almost impersonal, though in the course of conversation he warmed up.” The second meeting took place five or six weeks later, and this time they talked about politics, American as well as Israeli, and about the translation of Bellow’s novels into Hebrew. Oz was struck by the fierceness of Bellow’s anti-communism, in particular his resentment of Soviet policies toward the Middle East.43 What he remembered “most vividly,” however, was “a brief exchange about death. I don’t know how we came to speak about death, I don’t remember the context,” but Bellow “made a stunning remark. I said I was hoping to die in my sleep, and Saul responded by saying that, on the contrary, he would like to die wide awake and fully conscious, because death is such a crucial experience he wouldn’t want to miss it.”
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ALTHOUGH To Jerusalem and Back does not ignore the injustices visited on the Palestinians, the bulk of Bellow’s indignation is reserved for the hypocrisy of their supporters, the French in particular, an emphasis or tactic urged on him by Edward Shils. In a letter of February 12, 1976, Shils confessed that he had “been thinking a lot about your book on Israel. I attach great importance to it. There is no one who has written or who is likely to write on this subject whose eminence in the world of letters is such as to guarantee him a considerable audience. This audience will be European as well as American; the book is likely to be translated into the major European languages.” If Bellow keeps in mind “the dominant prejudices against Israel in the Western European societies, you will be directing yourself toward them, and that will make your book more effective.” Bellow was unlikely to have needed this advice, though it may have buoyed him. Soon after describing the airplane flight to Israel and settling into Mishkenot, he rehearses the story of Le Monde’s refusal to print his 1973 letter, criticizing Sartre for his selective outrage (and for the naïve belief “that more popular or leftist Arab regimes would find Israel’s existence easier to accept” [p. 123]). But it is not just Europeans he criticizes. “Between 1950 and June 1975 the United States contributed more than $600 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency fund for the relief of Palestinian refugees. Israel gave more than $6 million. The Soviet Union contributed nothing, the Chinese nothing, the Algerian government, so concerned about the Palestinians, nothing” (p. 127). Bellow openly admits “that Israel might have done more for the refugees, over the years. The efforts made to indemnify those who had lost their lands were far from adequate.” He cites Hannah Arendt, approvingly for a change, for her suggestion “that a part of the German reparations should have been set aside by Israel for the relief of the Palestinians.” The responsibility of other interested parties, however, must not be forgotten. “Many Palestinians have suffered greatly, but it was not because of their suffering that Nasser went to war in 1967. Nasser didn’t want them resettled; he kept them rotting in refugee camps and used them against Israel. The British did not create the Arab-Jewish conflict, though they may have aggravated it. If the Arab states did not deliberately exploit the Palestinians for political purposes, then the kindest interpretation of their conduct is that they were utterly incompetent” (pp. 121–22).44 More broadly: “In India, in Africa, in Europe, millions of human beings have been put to flight, transported, enslaved, stampeded over the borders, left to starve, but only the case of the Palestinians is held permanently open. Where Israel is concerned, the world swells with moral consciousness. Moral judgment, a wraith in Europe, becomes a full-blooded giant when Israel and the Palestinians are mentioned” (p. 135).
Bellow describes a single visit to the West Bank, with Alexandra, Sam and Nina Bellows, a friend of theirs named Shimshon (described as “religious, philanthropic” [p. 13]), and Cousin Nota, “two years out of the Soviet Union” (p. 19), a tough reality-instructor. “You are no match for them,” Nota tells Bellow, speaking of the Russians. “You do not understand with whom you are dealing” (p. 19). Nota Gordin was a captain in the Russian army and fought the Germans until 1945: “He has the family look—the brown eyes, arched brows, dark coloring, and white hair.” Nota’s view of Bellow is his view of Americans in general: “amiable, good-natured, attractive perhaps, but undeveloped, helpless” (p. 19). Shimshon, it turns out, is a supporter of the settlements, a benefactor of those “determined for religious reasons to colonize the West Bank.” Bellow disapproves, though his disapproval is implicit, partly, one suspects, to maintain a pose of reportorial neutrality; the settlements are “held by some to imply a rejection of Zionism, for the Zionist pioneers were satisfied with a sanctuary and did not try to recover the Promised Land” (pp. 131–32). Shimshon, “very observant and busy in Jewish affairs,” takes the party to Gush Etzion, where a Jewish colony had been wiped out by the Arabs before the war. A benefactor of the settlers there, he “proudly shows us the yeshiva, a newly built fortress of Orthodoxy” (p. 132). Bellow notes the rugged appearance of the settlers: “The young men wear skullcaps but their frames are big and their forearms thick with muscle. Their beards are far from tame and rabbinical; they bristle” (p. 132).
The evenhandedness of To Jerusalem and Back infuriated hard-liners from both camps. For Isabella Fey in The Jerusalem Post, the book was a “weary little collection of hedgings and evasions….It is the careful neutrality of the current book which grates on the truth-nerve of the reader.” She accuses Bellow of withdrawing from “the real issues of Israel,” which mostly means from Arab intractability, though intractability—the fact that “the Arabs would not agree to the existence of Israel”—is what the book sees as “the root of the problem” (p. 179).45 On its final page, Bellow praises the May 1976 Israeli peace proposals, recently reported in the wire services of the Chicago Tribune. “They indicate that Israel has not become immobile, inflexible, paralyzed by stubbornness of political rivals, or lacking in leadership” (p. 182). Fey was not impressed: “This reproach is the very heart of Arab and left-wing propaganda against the State of
Israel. Did Bellow ever believe it, that he seems so relieved to find some big American paper denying it?” The response from the left was even more scornful. For Noam Chomsky, Bellow’s book might have been written by the Israeli Information Ministry. He takes issue with almost every political assertion made in the book, quoting myriad sources and filling his review with phrases such as “of this we hear nothing,” “he fails to mention,” “had he bothered to look,” “hardly the most objective source.” Bellow’s attacks on Le Monde and Sartre are treated with particular contempt, as gross distortions. The review ends: “Bellow has an engaging ability to skim the surface of ideas. He also has a craftsman’s talent for capturing a chance encounter or an odd circumstance. Beyond that, his account of what he has seen and heard is a disaster. The critical acclaim it has received is revealing, with regard to the state of American intellectual life.”46
The final view of the Arab-Israeli conflict offered in To Jerusalem and Back is the one Bellow openly declared two years after its publication as a supporter of Peace Now. He was a signatory, along with Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, and Lucy Dawidowicz, of the “Letter of 37” published in Moment Magazine in 1978, a declaration organized by Leonard Fein, the magazine’s cofounding editor (the other cofounding editor was Elie Wiesel). The aim of the “Letter of 37” was to express solidarity with the Israeli Peace Now movement, spearheaded by Amos Oz and others, which urged Prime Minister Begin not to let talks with President Sadat of Egypt collapse, and advocated both a two-state solution and a negotiated settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. That these were Bellow’s implicit positions in To Jerusalem and Back is suggested by the prominence he gives toward the end of the book to the views of Yehoshafat Harkabi in Israel, whose objectivity is scoffed at by Chomsky, and of the sociologist Morris Janowitz back in Chicago. In a passage partially quoted in chapter 1, the once hard-line Harkabi—chief of Israeli Intelligence from 1955 to 1959, now, at the time of writing, professor of international relations at the Hebrew University—is initially unencouraging, at least as paraphrased by Bellow:
He concedes that the Arabs have been wronged, but he insists upon the moral meaning of Israel’s existence. Israel stands for something in Western history. The questions are not as simple as ideological partisans try to make them. The 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. By now the Arabs see themselves as returning in blood and fire, and Israel will not agree to bleed and burn [p. 158].
These views Bellow characterizes as “rather better balanced than [those of] most of the people with whom I have discussed Arab-Israeli problems” (p. 158). They are also properly attentive to moral questions. They would lead Harkabi to support the movement for a two-state solution and to advocate negotiations with the PLO. A similar position is voiced by Janowitz, an old friend and colleague of Bellow’s at the University of Chicago. Soon after his return to Chicago, Bellow tells us, he invited Janowitz, described as “torrentially sensible” and coming from “a family deeply involved in the issues of Zionism…a supporter of Israel” (p. 164), to meet him in Hyde Park, at the Eagle, to discuss the Middle East. It is Janowitz’s belief “that the West Bank territory, with mutual adjustments, would serve as the basis of a Palestine state” (p. 167); “that while ‘military force created Israel and keeps it alive, only a political settlement will insure its survival—physically and morally’ ”; that “Israel’s leaders must oppose the further expansion of…settlements”; and that there must be “guarantees of military security and the prevention of terrorism” (p. 167).
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THROUGHOUT THE 1970S and beyond, Bellow was bedeviled by legal problems. These began on February 14, 1968, when, after seven years of marriage, Susan divorced him on the grounds of desertion and mental cruelty. The terms of the divorce, as laid out in a written order from the Circuit Court of Cook County, were that Susan was to get $150,000 in alimony and $250 a month in child support. The child-support figure was pegged at 10 percent of $30,000, Bellow’s estimate of his annual projected income, an estimate that would get him into serious trouble. He arrived at it by adding $10,000 for speaking fees, royalties, and investments to his University of Chicago salary of $20,000, describing the resulting figure as “an attempt to average out into the future as I had averaged back into the past.” In court, when questioned about the estimate, he admitted that his lawyer “seemed to feel that the lower the figure the better.”47
According to court records, in 1964 Bellow earned $89,670; in 1965, he earned $79,157; in 1966, he earned $90,085; in 1967, he earned $128,104; in 1968, the year of the estimate, he earned $149,631. As for later years, in 1969 he earned $163,622, and in 1970 he earned $169,165, figures that were dwarfed by his earnings in the mid-1970s, particularly after 1976, when he won the Nobel Prize and when the royalties from Humboldt’s Gift, which won a Pulitzer Prize, started to come in.48 In 1977, Susan calculated that Bellow earned $461,303, a figure derived largely from Humboldt’s Gift, which spent nine months on the best-seller list, and for which Avon paid $175,000 for paperback rights. In addition, he received $160,000 for winning the Nobel Prize. Despite these figures, Bellow argued that he had been fair in his estimates. In a letter of July 26, 1976, to his lawyer friend Sam Goldberg, he complained, “Judges and lawyers simply don’t understand how a writer makes his way through life….I didn’t misrepresent. I simply had no idea what my future income would be. It’s true that I took an advance of fifty thousand [for Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories, several of which, Susan argued, were written “in the marital residence” and “discussed with me”49], but suppose I had been unable to complete the book?” In addition to underestimating his projected earnings, Bellow was accused of a second misrepresentation, involving the co-op apartment at 5940 South Shore Drive. Although Bellow claimed to be sole owner of the apartment (“I paid for it and assumed that it was mine”), in fact it was held in joint tenancy. When Susan realized the importance of this finding, she filed a petition on June 30, 1969, to vacate the original settlement. To his lawyer, Bellow countered that Susan had signed the settlement “in full knowledge of everything. She knew of my income from the prosperous years (’64 through ’67). She knew also of the lean years and understood beyond any doubt that the figure of $30,000 was an estimate based on my lean year income. She knew of the title of the co-op apartment because she signed the joint tenancy document. She lived in the apartment and she had every opportunity to check ownership. She knew all the facts relating to our joint bank account….She need not have accepted the figures I named.”50 It would take five years of legal wrangling for the courts to rule on Susan’s June 1969 petition.
Bellow’s lawyer in the original settlement was Stanton Ehrlich, of Ehrlich, Bundesen and Cohn, an expensive firm on LaSalle Street, Chicago’s Wall Street. Ehrlich was recommended to Bellow by Marshall Holleb, who did not do divorce work. Joel Bellows, himself now a LaSalle Street lawyer (he would later act on Bellow’s behalf), thinks the failure to report co-tenancy of the apartment was an oversight on Ehrlich’s part rather than a deliberate act of deception. In his ruling on Susan’s petition on July 25, 1974, Judge David Linn declared that Bellow had procured the original agreement “by fraud and misrepresentation” and ordered him to pay Susan $2,500 a month in alimony, backdated to 1968, plus $600 a month child support, plus lawyers’ fees. As Joel remembers it, Linn didn’t like Bellow at all. “Susan was a good witness. Bellow wasn’t a good witness, and he was successful and he was an intellectual.” In Humboldt’s Gift, Charlie Citrine provokes similar hostility from Judge Urbanovich, who sides with Denise in divorce proceedings. Denise claims Charlie will earn at least $100,000 a year for the next fourteen years, until he’s seventy. “I can’t help being a little amused by this, your honor,” Charlie
responds. “Ha ha! I don’t think my brain is strong enough, it’s my only real asset. Other people have land, rent, inventories, management, capital gains, price supports, depletion allowances, federal subsidies. I have no such advantages.” Judge Urbanovich is genial but having none of this. “You’re a clever person, Mr. Citrine. Even in Chicago that’s obvious….In the property division under the decree Mrs. Citrine got less than half and she alleges that records were falsified. You are a bit dreamy, and probably were not aware of this. Perhaps the records were falsified by others. Nevertheless you are responsible under the law.” After raising the possibility that Charlie’s recent lowered productivity might be a deliberate attempt “to balk the plaintiff,” the judge begins “diverting himself” with Charlie.