Liberals, Corde would claim, rarely talk of the city’s real or deep problems. Corde tells Varennes of a recent magazine article in which prominent Chicagoans were interviewed about how to make the city “more exciting and dynamic.” These were the Chicagoans Susan Glassman wanted Bellow to entertain: gallery owners, architects, business executives, lawyers, advertising men, journalists, TV commentators, artistic directors, publishers, city planners. From Corde’s and Bellow’s perspective, their suggestions are criminally myopic: “Some said we needed outdoor cafés like Paris or Venice, and others that we should have developments like Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco or Faneuil Hall in Boston. One wanted a gambling casino atop the Hancock Building; another that the banks of the Chicago River should be handsomely laid out.” All the suggestions are of this sort. “But no one mentioned the terror. About the terrible wildness and dread in this huge place—nothing. About drugs, about guns…” When Varennes objects that the magazine article is “hardly a serious matter, the opinions of those people, what the interior decorators are saying, what the features editors print,” Corde agrees: “Quite right, but it made me think it was high time to write a piece, since I grew up here” (p. 202). When he does write his piece or pieces, “most of the poison-pen notes” he receives are from “the suburbs, where the diehard Chicago boosters all lived” (also the “hard-line liberals” from Highland Park). “Commuters who escaped from race problems and crime were indignant because he had told it as it was” (pp. 144–45).
That Bellow thought something similar when he began work on the “Chicago Book” accounts for folders with titles like “Blacks—Criminal Activity” and “Black Welfare,” or his lengthy detailing of living conditions in Cook County Jail and the Robert Taylor Homes. Hence also his detailed portrait of Winston Moore, the first black man to serve as County Jail’s warden and to try seriously to reform it, wresting control from the barn bosses, convicts with whom previous wardens felt forced to cooperate. In County Jail, we learn from the portrait, “money has always been in circulation, guards have always been on the take. Dope and weapons have always been obtainable, sodomizing rapists have always had their way unchecked….In winter, prisoners have been known to make their own weapons by soaking rolls of newspaper in the toilet and hanging them out of the window to freeze. A blow from these ice-clubs can maim or kill” (p. 15). During Moore’s tenure there were no killings, fewer suicides, and, “yearly, [he] returned more than a million unspent dollars to the County treasury” (p. 16). Despite these successes, Moore was relieved of his post. He was accused of beating prisoners and condoning their beating, trumped-up charges ultimately dropped. Like Rufus Ridpath in The Dean’s December, Moore was ousted for ignoring “Chicago rules.” Ridpath’s lawyer explains: “County Jail has a big budget. Suppliers and contractors came to the office (you understand who was sending ’em) and he wouldn’t do business. He said, ‘If I don’t buy your meat boned I can save sixty cents a pound. I’m having it boned right here.’ Too many savings. He saved a million dollars out of his budget and refunded it to the county….Rufus got a bad name with the top guys. They thought he might become dangerous politically, too” (p. 154). Albert Corde interviews the head of the meatpackers’ union to ask about these matters, encountering the closed-mouthed G. O. O’Meara, “about ninety years old…packed with guile, terribly pleased with himself!” O’Meara “still cut a figure among the big shots of Chicago.” He answers none of Corde’s questions, and when Corde gets up to leave says, “You wanted me to talk, but I didn’t tell you a thing, did I?” (pp. 155–56). Whether Bellow actually went to Meat Cutters’ Hall to check out the real-life version of O’Meara is unclear, though among the “Chicago Book” materials is a copy of the meatpacking union’s magazine, The Butcher Workman. The visit Bellow made to County Jail, in contrast, is recorded. By May 17, 1979, the date of the visit, Moore had been relieved of his post. No one Bellow met mentioned Moore’s name, though the improvements he had brought to the jail were visible. “The new modern prison technology exhibits itself in all its pride. Medical and dental facilities, gymnasiums and recreation halls, computerized supervision, modern highly sanitized guard posts, the remote control of locks.” Only the rodent population remains unalterable: “The rats come at night and eat the crumbs or lick what gravy or icing have fallen to the lower gratings.”24
The shameful treatment Moore received from the Chicago newspapers was proof for Bellow of their collusion with the city’s ruling powers or “big shots.” In headlines and photographs, Moore was depicted as “a dangerous gorilla…more violent than the wild men of County Jail…a crude giant, swollen with self-importance.” In fact, as Bellow discovered when he met him, Moore was mild in manner, “firm” in build but not big, with “a certain reserve, an air of watchfulness” (p. 17). (That Corde accuses the Chicago newspapers of depicting Rufus Ridpath in just this way is partly what earns him the enmity of Dewey Spangler and his fellow journalists.25) Though defamed in the press, Moore was exonerated in court. After a lengthy Federal Grand Jury financial audit (“eight or nine months of combing through his checkbooks and savings accounts”), no evidence was found of corruption. Another lengthy examination followed, in which Moore was acquitted of all charges of prisoner abuse (though, as Bellow says of Ridpath, “people remembered the charges and forgot the acquittal—the usual pattern” [p. 149]). On the day of the acquittal, Moore was sacked by the county sheriff, Richard Elrod, a Democratic Party loyalist, the son of a West Side committeeman. In 1969, Elrod had been paralyzed when trying to restrain a demonstrator during the “Days of Rage” protests staged by the Weathermen faction of SDS. A hero to the police and the Democratic machine, Elrod got his way over Moore, despite Daley’s having initially hired Moore and approved his work. In the end, Moore lost his job because “he was determined to keep County Jail out of politics.” How he lost it “is not difficult for seasoned Chicagoans to conceive”: “Someone sets the fix apparatus going and arranges with more or less finesse to destroy a man’s career and his reputation. The intention is not necessarily malicious. You may rig a jury or spray your man with sewage but you don’t necessarily bear him ill will. As for the man, it is not a good idea for him to accuse his enemies, they sit safely in their offices and by reaching for the telephone can easily make him unhappy” (p. 18). Having allowed Elrod his way, Daley found Moore another job, as director of security for the Chicago Housing Authority, heading up the police in public housing.
In discussing black crime and black communities, Bellow concludes that no one knows what to do—neither the press nor the city government nor the courts nor liberals, nor the federal government, nor its advisers, including sociologists, economists, criminologists, professors of urban studies. “None of the poverty programs ever had a sense of what to do,” Bellow told the novelist William Kennedy, in their interview in Esquire. “We’re now in the fourth or fifth welfare generation, people who’ve never worked, people sealed out, set aside, and they look to me like a doomed population. And from the social organizations, educators, psychologists, bureaucrats—nothing. Just zilch. They’ve racked up a most extensive failure which has cost billions of dollars and employed millions of people and achieved nothing. The cities continue on this giant slide.” Later in the interview, Bellow complains, “You read Encounter, Commentary, Foreign Affairs, books by psychologists, sociologists, and you can’t find out what’s happening—at least what’s happening humanly.”26 “Excuse me if I offend,” Rufus Ridpath’s lawyer tells Corde in The Dean’s December, talking of conditions in County Jail, “but professor-criminologists were brought in, but they were afraid to go into the tiers and put down the barn bosses, or even look at them. You can’t blame them for it, but they sat in the office and wrote reports, or articles for criminology journals, while the suicide figures went up and up, the murders higher and higher. They didn’t dare go into the jails and they couldn’t take charge” (p. 153).
It was in his new capacity as
director of security that Moore showed Bellow around the Robert Taylor Homes, offering the novelist a firsthand view of life “in the great public highrises on the South Side where thousands of welfare families live” (p. 19). Bellow knew something of the black areas of the city in the 1930s, but almost nothing of them in the late 1970s. “For many years I lived in Hyde Park,” he writes in the “Chicago Book,” “on the thirteenth floor of an apartment house and I could see the city for many miles around, the Gothic university buildings in the foreground, and beyond them endless miles of slum. On summer evenings, there were often spectacular fires to watch, and every night the dazzling blocks of the projects along South Street. They stood in the midst of vast clearings” (p. 19). The first thing Bellow noticed when he visited the projects was just this sense of separation and ruin, how they were “isolated from the rest of the city by acres, miles of devastation” (p. 20)—as they still are. Most of the inhabitants Bellow saw on his tour were children, “thousands of black kids and their mothers. There are few fathers….Most of the mothers are young women on welfare. Busy with their infants, busy with men, it is inevitable that they should neglect the older children” (p. 20). The Robert Taylor Homes house “twenty-eight thousand people, six thousand of whom are adult”; 80 percent of families in the Homes are fatherless (pp. 20, 22).27
The state of the high-rises that make up the Homes appalled Bellow, in particular the galleries and common areas.
These galleries are fenced to the ceiling with strong wire grills to prevent falling or being pushed or thrown over the railings and also to protect people on the ground from being pelted with garbage or bricks or pieces of iron. Every fixture is sure to be tested. Detached, it can be thrown, used as a weapon. Everything will be pried, wrenched, burned, scrawled over, pounded, sprayed with urine. There is an ammoniac stench on the open staircases and in the elevators. The paint has been knocked from the metal elevator walls. Built to last thirty or forty years, an elevator in one of these buildings has a life of about six months. Young men lying in wait for the guards to take their guns have been known to ride atop the elevator cabs and to open the escape hatch and threaten to douse the trapped guard with gasoline and set him afire. At the Robert Taylor project, I was told, one guard was burned this way. Garbage collects in the galleries near the incinerator drop on every floor, for the tenants bring it in bags too large for the opening and the spillage kicked aside is not often swept up [p. 20].
The tenants of such projects are mugged for their welfare checks and food stamps, sexually assaulted in elevators and janitors’ closets, especially on the higher floors.
In these housing developments there is a direct statistical correlation between the number of stories and the figures for robbery, rape and killing. The taller the building, the higher the crime rate. These highrises making “economical” use of the land for which there was no special demand, gave the politicians, the managers, the sellers of services every advantage. You could crowd two precincts into one housing project, and on election day the voters did not have to leave the premises but could be herded down to the polls by the captains. In these buildings it was intended that a potentially threatening population should be cut off and controlled and that there should be, of course, the usual boodling opportunities for suppliers, contractors, labor unions and patronage bosses [pp. 21–22].
Corde’s descriptions in Harper’s of the real-life horrors in such places are at times surreal. In the Cabrini-Green projects, “some man had butchered a hog in his apartment and had thrown the guts on the staircase, where a woman, slipping on them, had broken her arm, and screamed curses in the ambulance. She was smeared with pig’s blood and shriller than the siren” (p. 131).
On the day Bellow visited the Robert Taylor Homes, a five-year-old child had been killed in a fall from an eighth-floor window. She had been left alone in the apartment with the television set on. Moore introduced Bellow to the maintenance engineer at the Homes, who explained to him that vandalism in the projects cost the city a million dollars a year in repairs and replacements, a third of his budget. As an example, he told Bellow of ninety new “commodes” designated for the apartments. Within two months of their arrival, only three were unbroken. The tenants “flush the garbage down them because they are afraid at night to go to the incinerator drop. Then the bones stick in the pipes and they try to snake them out. There goes your commode—cracked” (p. 22). The destruction of property, Bellow adds, is as widespread among the white uptown slums of the Appalachians (“the more respectful word for hillbillies” [p. 23]) as among black and Latino slum dwellers. Why this urge to destroy property, he asks, to destroy one’s own habitat? Liberals see it as “a revolutionary protest against deprivation and oppression”; conservatives believe that “where you have loyalties—even loyalties to property—you have persons; not perhaps of the most desirable sort, but persons nevertheless who are aware of being such,” an answer Bellow sees as “equally lacking in imagination” (p. 24). But, then, it isn’t an answer at all, not to the question of why slum dwellers act as they do, how they came to be “unpersoned.”
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IN THE “CHICAGO BOOK,” as in The Dean’s December, a reforming impulse wars with despair, the roots of which lie for Bellow not only in material culture, the culture of commodities, but in matter itself, in particular the human body. The refusal to see—and the punitive element in forcing truth on the reader (to William Kennedy, in a letter of August 22, 1980, Bellow described the “Chicago Book” as “something of a cherry bomb or small grenade”)—is ultimately a refusal to face death, about which Bellow, having entered his sixties, was increasingly preoccupied. Although he had many years to live, the anger in the “Chicago Book” and The Dean’s December is the sort one sometimes sees in the eyes of the dying. At the funeral of the Dean’s mother-in-law, Corde imagines her cremation:
At this very instant Valeria might be going into the fire, the roaring furnace which took off her hair, the silk scarf, grabbed away the green suit, melted the chased silver buttons, consumed the skin, flashed away the fat, blew up the organs, reached the bones, bore down on the skull—that refining fire, a ball of raging gold, a tiny sun, a star [p. 220].
First the carefully assembled burial outfit, then the body itself, devoured by a “refining” fire. The passage, like the novel as a whole, undermines material claims; they are easily engulfed, liquidated. A similar motive underlies a scene at County Hospital, also recounted in the “Chicago Book.” In The Dean’s December, a Chinese medical technician tending an aged patient blunders:
A valve has been left open on the tray, and immediately everything is covered with blood. The suddenness of this silent appearance and the volume of blood with which the tray fills makes my heart go faint. I am almost overcome by a thick and sweet nausea, as if my organs were melting like chocolate in hot weather [p. 167].
There are other such passages in The Dean’s December. Corde recalls to Varennes “an eyewitness account of rats eating their way into corpses, entering at the liver and gnawing their way upwards, getting so fat they had trouble squeezing out again at the mouth” (p. 200). Dewey Spangler is especially struck by a long passage in the Harper’s article about a mammoth sewer project costing the city “more than the Alaska pipeline.”
Capacity forty billion gallons, as wide as three locomotives side by side, running for a hundred miles deep under the city, maybe weakening the foundations of the skyscrapers. And all those tons of excrement, stunning to the imagination. It won’t be the face of Helen that topples those great towers, it’ll be you-know-what, and that’s the difference between Chicago and Ilium.
Recounting this passage, Spangler asks Corde: “Now tell me, whom were you writing for? You pushed the poetry too hard” (p. 238). In passages like these, Corde is writing for everyone. In Troy, the facts of death, dissolution, bodily mess are both openly admitted and heroically defied. In Chicag
o, they are buried deep underground or in the unconscious.
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BELLOW’S ANGER AT the material values that dominated the city, shaming and inflaming the poor, particularly the black poor, was accompanied by fear. The dangers of living in Hyde Park in the late 1970s were real and well publicized—too well publicized, according to some. In the July 1975 issue of Chicago magazine, an article entitled “How Hyde Park Made Me a Racist” caused widespread comment. Its author, Terry Curtis Fox, a recent alumnus of the university, moved to New York the week after the article was published, for reasons the article makes clear. A second article in the same issue, entitled “Magnums on the Midway,” by C. D. Jaco, another university alumnus, concerned faculty members who carried guns. On July 11, in response to the two articles, the Maroon, which had been planning its own series on crime in Hyde Park, published a lengthy survey of reactions. “Absolute nonsense!” was the first quoted response. What followed were qualified and embarrassed assents. “It’s hard to answer the Terry Curtis Fox article,” a Hyde Park mother is quoted as admitting, “because it’s reality here….We live around the fear. You tell your kid not to argue if someone wants your bike. Don’t argue. It’s hard to get used to it.” Another parent, once active in community affairs, moved his family to Winnetka because of fear of crime. “With his four daughters growing up, he and his wife felt that they were being overprotective of them in response to the threat of crime in Hyde Park. ‘We restricted their lives in a way that wasn’t fair….We were developing a fortress mentality.’ ” As an inducement to live locally, the university offered faculty special mortgage benefits. It also sought, with only minor success, to overcome the reluctance of stores and restaurants to locate in the neighborhood.28
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