Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Nine days later, on July 24, 1975, on the eve of his return to Chicago from Spain, Bellow writes to Barfield that he continues “to pore over Unancestral Voice.” He wants another meeting: “It is most important that you should be willing to discuss it with me.” The origin of his pursuit of the truths of spirit is deep disillusion, a feeling “that the interest of much of life as represented in the books I read (and perhaps some that I wrote) had been exhausted.” The source of this feeling Bellow explains in terms familiar from his writing on distraction. “I concluded that the ideas and modes by which it [the interest of life] was represented were exhausted, that individuality had been overwhelmed by power or ‘sociality,’ by technology and politics.” That Barfield and Steiner make similar points accounts in part for Bellow’s attraction to them. The letter ends with a deferential bow. “You speak of yourself as the servant of your readers, but this reader, though eager to talk with you, hesitates to impose himself.”

  Edward Mendelson connects Bellow’s deference here to a passage in a later letter to Barfield, of February 25, 1976, in which Bellow recounts what he thought was a joke on Barfield’s part:

  You asked me, very properly, how I thought a writer of novels might be affected by esoteric studies. I answered that I was ready for the consequences. That was a nice thing to say, but it wasn’t terribly intelligent. It must have struck you as very adolescent. You asked me how old I was. “Sixty,” I said. Then you smiled and said, “Sixteen?” It was the one joke you allowed yourself at my expense, and it was entirely justified. It’s a very American thing to believe that it’s never too late to make a new start in life. Always decades to burn.

  Barfield replied on March 17 that Bellow had “read into that ‘sixty’ and ‘sixteen’ exchange a whole lot of meaning that simply wasn’t there. All that actually happened was that I did for an instant actually hear ‘sixteen’ and thought the error ludicrous enough to be worth sharing.”78

  After the letter of March 17, Bellow begins to temper his earlier manner toward Barfield—partly, one suspects, because of this exchange, partly because Barfield admits to having trouble reading Bellow’s novels. “I did get hold of Humboldt’s Gift,” Barfield tells Bellow, “and may as well confess that I couldn’t get up enough interest in enough of what was going on to be held by it. If it’s any comfort to you—and the possibility that you don’t particularly need comforting ought not to be altogether ruled out—I had very much the same experience with the Lord of the Rings.” Not only did Humboldt’s Gift fail to interest Barfield, but he found its passages about anthroposophy confused. These passages had been copied out by a friend and sent to Barfield, who “read them through and then sat back and then asked myself what exactly you had got from Anthroposophy; and I found I couldn’t answer. Your literary mind is so active—or perhaps agile is the word I really want—that it was like trying to catch a flea!” Though Bellow is unlikely to have appreciated the flea comparison, he was relatively restrained in response. “Perhaps it was wrong of me to put this longing for spiritual fruit in a comic setting,” he wrote to Barfield some months later, on August 13, 1976. “I knew that you could never approve and would think it idiotic and perhaps even perverse. But I followed my hunch as a writer, trusting that this eccentric construction would somehow stand steady.”

  Barfield was precisely the sort of reader for whom Bellow’s construction was unlikely to appeal or “stand steady.” A believer, he had little patience with Charlie Citrine’s persistent doubts and equivocations. Nor, as he later revealed, was he much inclined to distinguish between author and character, especially in cases like Humboldt’s Gift, where the two share similar traits. One aspect of Barfield’s Englishness was the “robust” nature of his observations, at times indistinguishable from tactlessness. Yet he was not without sensitivity or self-knowledge. He knew full well the sort of figure Bellow wanted him to be, and firmly but not unkindly declined to meet expectations. In the letter of March 17, Barfield begins by apologizing for addressing Bellow as “Bellow.” “I feel uneasy with ‘Mr.’ but have never got comfortably acclimatized to the contemporary practice of jumping straight from there to first names.” He then turns to Bellow’s projected sense of him. “I daresay you noticed, during our two conversations, that, whatever I may have somehow managed to write in some book or other, I am not personally much at home in a ‘wise old Dr. Barfield’ role.”

  This admission may have helped to put the relationship on a truer level. In subsequent letters, Bellow feels freer to confess to his difficulties in reading Steiner. On February 5, 1977, he writes: “I am drawn to him because he confirms that a perspective, the rudiments of which I always had, contained the truth….I keep my doubts and questions behind a turnstile and admit them one at a time, but the queue is long.” Nor would it be right, he tells Barfield, to omit these doubts and questions in his fiction: “I can’t put into what I write the faint outlines I am only beginning to see. That would muddle everything, and it would be dishonest, too, in a novice.” He remained eager, however, to stay in touch with Barfield and sought to arrange a third meeting in April 1977, when next he would be in London. This eagerness is especially remarkable given the letter to which Bellow is responding, one written by Barfield almost five months earlier, on September 18, 1976. In this letter Barfield fails to acknowledge or comment on To Jerusalem and Back, a copy of which Bellow had sent him “in lieu of a letter.” Instead, Barfield draws Bellow’s attention to a hostile review of Humboldt’s Gift by Seymour Epstein in the Winter 1976 issue of the University of Denver Quarterly. The review, “Bellow’s Gift,” complains of the novel’s “self-indulgent clownishness and cultural detritus,” its repetitiveness, its inability or refusal to offer any solution to “the failure of Western Civilization to sustain the individual,” identified as “Bellow’s theme.” “Bellow—or any novelist—owes us no answers,” Epstein’s review concludes, “but the novelist who has raised important questions owes us the integrity not to trivialize those questions by repetitive improvisations on a theme, no matter how adroit.” Unsurprisingly, Bellow “disliked” Epstein’s review, as he confessed to Barfield in the February 5 letter. He also “felt sure you would ask me about it.” He identifies the review with “the work of Ahriman, his chilling of everything in human thinking which depends on a certain warmth,” an accusation that might in part have been leveled at Barfield himself, formal or “English” in manner, a thinker with little gift for humor, ambivalence, or fictional indirectness.

  Yet Bellow continued to be interested in Barfield’s writings. A little over a year later, in the spring of 1978, one of the participants in the Demay reading group, an enterprising University of Chicago undergraduate, persuaded Bellow to organize a Barfield reading group, to discuss Saving the Appearances and Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s (1963).79 The other participants in the group were Wayne Booth of the English Department, a Kantian philosopher named Warren Wick, also from the University of Chicago, and a young mathematical colleague of Alexandra’s at Northwestern named Sandy Zabell, “who had seen a copy of Saving the Appearances on my table,” Bellow recalled to Barfield in a letter of September 19, 1978, “and was keen to discuss it with me.” As Bellow reported to Barfield, “Booth was extremely sympathetic, keenly interested, Wick was laconic and pulled at his pipe and told us that we didn’t really know Kant; we would be hopelessly muddled until we had put in a year or two at the critiques of This or That. But even he found you an attractive writer.” Booth later commended the balance the group struck “between having a seminar of inquiry and a seminar that is merely an excuse for spiritual meditation.”80 Yet the group did not last long: it disbanded in May 1978, after only four sessions.

  A year or so later, in a friendly letter of August 15, 1979, Bellow apologized to Barfield for being a poor correspondent, insisting that he was neither “fickle” nor had “dropped away.”

  No, it is not at all like that. I am however bound to
tell you that I am troubled by your judgment of the books I have written. I don’t ask you to like what you obviously can’t help disliking, but I can’t easily accept your dismissal of so much investment of soul…and although I can tolerate rejection I am uneasy with what I sometimes suspect to be prejudice….You don’t like novels?—very well. But novels have been for forty years my trade; and if I do acquire some wisdom it will inevitably, so I suppose, take some “novelistic” expression. Why not?…I find some support in Steiner “…if a man has no ordinary sense of realities, no interest in ordinary realities, no interest in the details of another’s likes, if he is so ‘superior’ that he sails through life without troubling about its details, he shows he is not a genuine seer.” (Anthroposophy: An Introduction, p. 202).

  The letter ends with Bellow declaring that “my affection for you is very great, and I am sure you know how much I respect you. For my part I feel safe with you—i.e. I know you will forgive my idiocies.” In reply, in a letter of August 23, 1979, Barfield gives evidence of having “an ordinary sense of realities.” He admits to having been troubled by the effect his comments about Humboldt have had on Bellow. “You speak of my judging….I thought I had made it clear that I did not feel confident enough to do anything of the sort….Seriously, I imagined you regarding it as something of a joke that in spite of all we have philosophically and spiritually in common my personal limitations (you know I was born in the reign of Queen Victoria) prevented me from seeing in Humboldt’s Gift what nearly everyone else sees plainly enough.” Bellow did not realize, Barfield adds, “what a Nobel prizewinner feels like from outside. I wrote as breezily as I did because I supposed that any lack of appreciation from this quarter could do about as much damage as a peashooter will do to an armoured car.” Then, in a moment of self-doubt, Barfield wonders if the continued affection in Bellow’s letter, which makes him feel “unpleasantly guilty,” might have “misled me into a sort of cantankerous exaggeration of the remoteness and imperviousness of an armoured car. Whatever the cause I am seriously distressed by the thought of having wounded you, however slightly.”

  Bellow replied to Barfield on November 11, 1979, by saying that his letter “moved me by its warmth, kindness and candor.” He apologized for having put Barfield in the position of judge, though the position not only “carries no duties, you owe me nothing,” but was earned. “I see you—it came through in your letter—as a man who has learned what to do with the consciousness-soul, has managed to regenerate severed connections and found passages that lead from thought to feeling.” For Bellow, though, what is sought is a move from feeling to thought, which, for all his reading of Steiner, he has not yet found. Bellow knows that his praise embarrasses Barfield (“you may think it bad form”), but he means it. He thinks of himself as a lesser person than Barfield: “So it amused me to be described as a tank surrounded by pea-shooters.” After “four or five years of reading Steiner,” he has been altered “considerably.” He believes that he is undergoing “some sort of metamorphosis.” But when he sits down to write to Barfield, he finds himself “at a loss for words.”

  It would be another three years before the two men again exchanged letters. On July 23, 1982, Barfield wrote to Bellow about The Dean’s December, which he had recently reviewed for the anthroposophical journal Towards. Barfield reports having suggested to the journal’s editor that Bellow be sent a copy of the review, which was not due to appear until the issue of Spring 1983. Perhaps Bellow would like to write a reply.81 Bellow declined, but a month later, on August 21, 1982, he wrote directly to Barfield. The letter is polite, but makes clear that he was hurt by the review. Chief among Barfield’s objections to the novel was that it focuses on social and political issues.82 Barfield also complains, in the manner of Seymour Epstein, of the Dean’s limitations, which he sees as Bellow’s and the twentieth century’s limitations, the cause of what he describes as the book’s formlessness:

  Extremity of self-consciousness, together with unwillingness to essay the leap beyond it, is the general problem of the age in which we live. Its inherent antagonism to any sort of form or structure is the particular problem of literature and the arts; and there are those who believe that the correct solution is to abandon structure altogether. The author of The Dean’s December drops an occasional hint that he is well aware of the problem….He has confirmed as much, too, in interviews given since the Nobel Prize, and he had already disclosed in the novel that came before it, Humboldt’s Gift, that he is no stranger to the writings of Rudolf Steiner. In The Dean’s December he has chosen to remain, with most of his contemporaries, perched on the apex of excruciating self-consciousness at which the Western mind has arrived, ignoring any prospect of taking flight above it.

  Bellow’s reply to this criticism makes clear what he must long have known: Barfield would never approve his fiction. “I felt as I read your review, that you found me very strange indeed. I was aware from our first meeting that I was far more alien to you than you were to me. American, Jew, novelist, modernist—well of course I am all of those things. And I wouldn’t have the shadow of a claim on anybody’s attention if I weren’t the last, for a novelist who is not contemporary can be nothing at all.” Barfield, in contrast, has qualities Bellow knows: “English, of an earlier generation, educated in classics, saturated in English literature. Your history is clearer to me than mine can ever be to you….Few Europeans really know anything about America….And I hope you won’t take offense at this, but in my opinion you failed to find the American key, the musical signature without which books like mine can’t be read. You won’t find anything like it in any of the old manuals. There is nothing arbitrary in this newness.” Barfield thinks Bellow’s fiction formless, Bellow claims, because form grows out of “one’s experience of the total human situation,” in his case the total American situation. That the reflections of the Dean are “crowded” into small corners of sentences (Barfield had complained that the Dean “was, more or less in secret, serious about matters he couldn’t discuss…for instance, the union of spirit and nature”) is what that situation demands, fits “the American key, the musical signature.” “Without the signature the Dean is impossible to play. Reading becomes a labor, and then of course one needs frequent rest, and the book has to be put down. And what is this mysterious signature? It is Corde’s passion. If the reader misses that he has missed everything.”

  Bellow also takes issue with complaints about Corde’s “extreme interior self-awareness” and “abnormally vivid external” awareness, qualities that Barfield thinks obscure spiritual knowledge. It is not true, as Barfeld implies, that The Dean’s December is “Henry James in shorthand. Not at all. Nothing like it. The Dean is a hard, militant and angry book and Corde, far from being a brooding introvert, attacks Chicago (American society) with a boldness that puts him in considerable danger.” As for the most important of Barfield’s objections to the novel—its failure to “leap beyond” self-consciousness, “the general problem of the age in which we live”—this objection Bellow deals with in a postscript. It is the last thing he would write to Barfield.

  About the “leap beyond”: certain knowledge isn’t it either, but it would have to be a leap into a world of which one has some experience. I have had foreshadowing very moving adumbrations, but the whole vision of reality must change in every particular and the idols dismissed. Then one can take flight. It can’t be done by fiat, however much one may long for it.

  The leap of faith was no more possible for Bellow in 1982 than it had been seven years earlier, when he first contacted Barfield. “From Barfield’s perspective,” writes Simon Blaxland-de-Lange, his biographer, “there could be no reconciliation with such a standpoint.”83 Even toward the end of his life, as his hold on the world weakened, Bellow continued to equivocate. In the interview with Norman Manea, conducted when Bellow was eighty-five, he had “no trouble at all” admitting that he didn’t think “the world developed or evolved at r
andom, hit-or-miss. It seems to me inconceivable that all this development should have been random and not directed by some sublime intelligence.” He then adds, “I don’t say that the conclusions I reached are the correct conclusions. All I say is that it’s time I stopped pretending I don’t believe in them.”84 As for the existence of God, “it’s not a real question. The real question is how have I really felt all these years, and all these years I have believed in God; so there it is,”85 an answer that is also an evasion. Bellow’s belief in the afterlife is similarly powered by intense feeling rather than thought. “I say to myself, very often, when you die you will see them again, and it’s a kind of perennial attachment, and so you wish you will see those people you loved again. My mother, first and foremost. We probably all have such feelings, that we’ll be reunited with those people whom we loved.” A wish is not a leap. In a letter of October 17, 1997, to Cynthia Ozick, Bellow writes of reunion with the dead with irony. “As might be expected at my age, I think a lot about the life to come, but for me it always begins with a reunion. I see my parents again and my dead brothers and cousins and friends. Since my life has not been as virtuous as I would have liked it to be, I expect to be reproached by those I have injured and punished. But afterwards, eternity will have to be filled up, and it’s eternity that stops me in my tracks. Will God give us work of eternal significance to do in the billions of worlds he’s developing?” In the end, Bellow never fully commits to the ideas of Steiner and Barfield, as he never fully committed to the ideas of Reich. Yet these ideas were important for the man and the writer—as a way of combatting the dominance of science and technology, as an encouragement in the search for higher truths, as a form of escape.86