Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Had Grew threatened Lewis? Did he say to him, “You better watch your back”? By now, after lengthy interviews, my impression of Grew was that he could not have shot at Lewis. He would not have owned a gun. He was not a person to use a gun. Lewis may have heard gunshots after his encounter with Grew, but if he did, there is no proof that they were directed at him. It was not until 1983, Grew claims, six years after his indictment, that he realized what really happened that night at the Tiki. The realization, an “epiphany,” came to him while recounting to a friend the events of the summer of 1977. When Levar stomped out,

  I realized he’d left behind a pack of Kool Lights, Newports, something on the table, a soft pack. It was sopped with beer, mentholated cigarettes. I smoked Gauloises, so I had no interest in them. But almost a full pack of cigarettes. I wasn’t going to hold his cigarettes for him—what if he had hidden something else in the pack? I went as far as the door of the Tiki, and as he was leaving, I yelled, “Levar, Levar, want your pack?”

  I was interrogated by my lawyer, by my lawyer’s lawyer, by my father…for years and years, by everybody in the world for hours and hours and hours, and nobody could even get close enough to me to loosen me up to the point where I could recount in such detail that particular conversation with Levar, that little detail I’d completely forgotten about. When Levar said I had said, “Watch your back,” he really believed it, he thought that’s what I said.

  I believe this story. I certainly believe that Grew believes it. He had always wondered why Levar had not retrieved his cigarettes (“I could never figure it out”). What Bellow would have done with the story, had he known it, is hard to say. When Bellow interviewed McCarthy, McCarthy recalled, “he was completely prepped, he had his questions in mind, he had his notes.” McCarthy was uncomfortable in the interview, because Bellow persistently asked him about a possible sexual dimension to the case. His questions, McCarthy thought, were not only irrelevant but prurient; the information he sought was “confidential, privileged.” Bellow, like Corde, seems to have thought not only that sex played a part in what happened to Gromer, but that it did so in a way important to an understanding of American culture generally, particularly of American youth culture. For Corde, the material, the sexual, and the mortal go together: “Our conception of physical life and pleasure is completely death-saturated.” For African Americans reduced to “savagery and criminality,” as for the youth who glamorize them, “the full physical emphasis is fatal” (p. 196). The Dean’s December pays no more attention to the prejudice and discrimination that have produced black “savagery and criminality” than Bellow does in the second Jefferson Lecture. Bellow’s focus here, as in the lecture, is on the behavior bred by prejudice and discrimination. He is comparably “hard” in his attitude to those who endanger the existence of the university, while openly admitting the injustices visited on them by the university’s protectors. In the words of Julian Levi, “The University had taken the initiative in the organization of the South East Chicago Commission to combat the forces of uncertainty and deterioration at work in the neighborhood.” The aim of the commission was to create “a community in which our faculty and students will be secure.”47 Bellow allows Mason, Jr., to list, unchallenged, the unfair practices the creation of this community involved, the collateral damage suffered by those who lost their properties and businesses, however “blighted” or “slum,” to the forces of renewal.48

  In The Dean’s December, as in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, no member of the black underclass is given a voice. For Corde, as for Bellow in the second Jefferson Lecture, types like Ellis McInnis and Deola Johnson are “unreachable, incomprehensible. You will never know what they are thinking or feeling,” at least not directly. The closest Bellow gets to depicting such types “humanly” in The Dean’s December is through the characters who deal with them daily: Rufus Ridpath, modeled, as we’ve seen, on Winston Moore, and Toby Winthrop, also an African American, modeled on Matt Wright, who was described in the “Chicago Book” as having been “a criminal, a Mafioso dope addict in and out of prison, tried more than once on a charge of murder.”49 Bellow went to interview Wright at the detoxification center he ran, as Corde interviews Winthrop at “Operation Contact,” his detoxification center. Both real-life and fictional African Americans are described as tough-minded, willing to face illiberal-sounding realities (about welfare, the black family). “There are two black men in the book,” Bellow told Eugene Kennedy in the interview in the Chicago Tribune: “I looked far and wide for men of moral imagination. And I found only these two. One was an ex–hit-man….The other the former director of Cook County Jail…They had grasped the real problem, which has had every unavailing solution thrown at it. Programs, plans, money. Theirs was an elementary application of the imagination,” which is to say, one involving courage, firsthand knowledge or experience, intense caring, and passionate judging.50 To some, the complications and contradictions I’ve been tracing in Bellow’s attitudes to race will be seen as evasions. “As he grew older,” James Atlas declares of Bellow, “the bones of a deeply conservative, xenophobic vision of life emerged more clearly. Like his ill-concealed racism, which made exceptions for blacks who were his friends (Ralph Ellison, William Hunt, Stanley Crouch), Bellow’s misogyny was a cultural anachronism for which he almost gleefully refused to apologize.”51 Atlas is comparably certain about both the “murder” of Mark Gromer, “who was pushed to his death,” and the subsequent trial, “in the midst of which potential witnesses were shot at by a student radical sympathetic to the defendants.”52

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  DURING THE YEARS Bellow worked on the “Chicago Book” and The Dean’s December, he and Alexandra spent their summers in Vermont, initially at her suggestion. Alexandra knew the area through friends from Northwestern, Lynda and Arthur Copeland, who had a house in West Halifax, just over the Massachusetts border. “I knew he liked New England,” Alexandra recalled, and that “he missed the house in Tivoli in New York.” Bellow himself had friends locally: “He was particularly fond of Robert Penn Warren, Bernard Malamud, and Meyer Schapiro, whom he adored…so I thought it made perfectly good sense.” The Copelands scouted out summer rentals for the Bellows for the first few years, and in 1981 helped them to find land on which to build a house of their own, on property in West Halifax known as the Old Larrabee Farm. Arthur Copeland, a colleague of Alexandra’s in the Department of Mathematics at Northwestern, was one of several mathematicians who summered in the area, among them Shizuo Kakutani, who had taught Alexandra at Yale, and Marshall Stone, retired chair of the University of Chicago Mathematics Department, and a former colleague of Bellow’s at the Committee on Social Thought. To William Kennedy, Bellow described his Vermont social life as “at the heart of an extended group of mathematicians from Yale, Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth.” At least once or twice a week, the Bellows joined members of this extended group at dinner parties or concerts at the nearby Marlboro Music Festival. Lynda Copeland remembers Bellow in Vermont summers with amused affection. “Saul was King of the Earth wherever he was.” At social gatherings, “he was a quiet, a very quiet presence, but let me tell you, you knew he was there.” Mostly Bellow’s talk took the form of “interjections, one-liners, often barbed…never a wasted word.” “You always knew that he was a powerful intellect, someone to reckon with, he did not suffer fools gladly, and was probably half the time in social occasions bored to death, but he did not indicate it.” Although Bellow liked to tease the Copelands about their liberal politics, “we never saw Saul behave in a rude manner. I’m sure he did, but never with us.”

  In the unedited typescript of his Esquire interview with Bellow, conducted in Vermont in the summer of 1981, William Kennedy describes Bellow and Alexandra’s daily routine. “Rise about seven or eight, long leisurely breakfast, workdays in separate studios in the old house, a long afternoon walk together. They have been summering here five years, renting, mostly in willful i
solation from the assault on their time that goes with life back home in Chicago. Sometimes, Alexandra said, the phone doesn’t ring once all day long.” Bellow did his writing in a sparsely furnished second-floor room with a double skylight and a balcony looking out onto the Vermont landscape, composing in longhand on a lapboard. Among the many books scattered in the living room, Kennedy noted “Zamyatin’s essays, The Teachings of Gurdjieff, Chaucer’s Bawdy by Thomas Ross, and four novels: Joseph Andrews, Feyodor Sologub’s The Pretty Demon, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, and Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse.” To break the daily routine, there were afternoon excursions to Brattleboro, where old friends often turned up. In a letter of August 22, 1980, to Edward Shils, Bellow describes his part of Vermont as “thickly populated with writers and savants. I don’t see them often but I never know when I may run into them. Last week in Brattleboro (Kipling’s old haunt) I bumped into Sidney Hook on Main Street. He was spry but shaky, assisted in mid-street by his wife and calling out to numerous grandchildren who ran in and out of ice-cream parlors and Dunkin’ Donuts. And a few days later Meyer Schapiro telephoned, keenly alert but his voice quite weak. He told me how hard he was working, and he was vigorous and amusing—and doddering a little, and also a shade melancholy. I suppose that description covers all of us.”

  To help meet divorce costs and lawyers’ fees, Bellow took on more than his usual number of guest lectureships, talks, and readings. Shortly after the visit from William Kennedy, Bellow and Alexandra traveled to Syracuse University, where for three weeks Bellow would be the Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities, an appointment for which he was paid fifteen thousand dollars plus hotel and transport costs. His duties were minimal: to deliver one public lecture, one reading, and four seminars. Almost four years earlier, in the fall of 1977, Bellow and Alexandra had accepted jobs for the fall quarter at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, Bellow as Frances and Jacob Hiatt Visiting Professor of English. Bellow taught a weekly seminar on Conrad at Brandeis, but was otherwise rarely seen on campus. At a Halloween costume party in an undergraduate dormitory, the first prize went to a young man who put a sheet over his head and wore a sign saying simply “Saul Bellow.” The Bellows were more visible in Cambridge, where they took an apartment in a high-rise on the Charles River, at 1010 Memorial Drive, and led a busy social life. “I am much in his doghouse because of a social error,” Bellow wrote on November 7, 1977, to Bernard Malamud, who had asked after a mutual friend, “a confusion among Wednesdays. We missed a cocktail party and have not yet been forgiven.”

  In Cambridge, as in Vermont, Bellow and Alexandra saw “quite a number of mathematicians.” Alexandra had friends in Harvard’s Department of Mathematics and served on its “ad hoc” committee, to evaluate job candidates. Graeme Segal, a young visiting professor from Oxford, remembers meeting the Bellows at a lunch on Christmas Day given by the chair of the department, Shlomo Sternberg, and his wife, Aviva Green, a painter. At sixty-two, Bellow was much the oldest of the guests (Alexandra and the Sternbergs were in their early forties, Segal and a friend he’d brought in their early thirties). Segal was struck by how well dressed Bellow was, and how he was “very much like the guest of honor.” The Sternbergs are Orthodox Jews. Segal, though Jewish, describes himself as “aggressively secular,” from a family of outspoken anti-Zionists. When the subject of Israel came up, Segal recalled, Bellow “played a very straight bat”53 (Segal had not read To Jerusalem and Back, published the previous year). There was also “some sort of Jewish grace” before the meal, and Bellow asked Sternberg if he wanted him to wear a yarmulke. After the lunch, the Bellows drove the young English guests back to Harvard and got stuck in Cambridge’s one-way traffic system. When Segal and his friend volunteered to walk the short distance to Currier House, Bellow insisted on driving them to their door, “with only a slight hint of testiness.” Segal remembers no literary conversation, no friction, no putting on of airs, nothing but good humor on Bellow’s part. Of Alexandra, whose reputation as a mathematician he knew, all he remembers is how beautiful she was. What Aviva Green wished to emphasize about Bellow at this time (they’d met previously in Jerusalem, where the Sternbergs have a house) is how supportive he was to her as an artist. In addition to buying one of her paintings, he gave her two pieces of invaluable advice: first, to go to her studio every day, since “nothing can happen in the studio unless you are in the studio”; second, to put aside “the business of art…just don’t think about it. He recognized I was very ambitious and was saying, Don’t let the business of art intrude.”

  Although Bellow had several old friends living in the Cambridge-Boston area (Monroe and Brenda Engel, whom he’d known since the 1940s; Eugene Goodheart, whom he’d known from Tivoli days), he made new friends as well. In the case of Alan Lelchuk, a novelist who taught creative writing at Brandeis, he firmed up a friendship. Lelchuk had met Bellow in May 1966, when he was twenty-eight and in his last year as a graduate student in English at Stanford. That spring, Bellow had been invited to Stanford by the Creative Writing Center to give a public lecture and teach a few classes. When Lelchuk gave him a tour of the Stanford campus, they got on well, and the next afternoon Bellow invited him to lunch. Later, he asked to see some of Lelchuk’s writing, and recommended his stories to Gordon Lish at Esquire. In the intervening years, he had written several Guggenheim letters for Lelchuk. When Lelchuk finished at Stanford, he got a job at Brandeis. There he befriended Philip Rahv, Bellow’s old editor from Partisan Review. In addition to teaching in the English Department, Rahv edited a short-lived periodical while at Brandeis, Modern Occasions, on which Lelchuk worked as associate editor. Bellow published “Culture Now: Some Animadversions, Some Laughs” (1971) and “Zetland: By a Character Witness” (1974) in Modern Occasions (the latter appearing in the year after Rahv’s death), which helped to keep him in contact with Lelchuk. Before he came to Cambridge, he wrote to Lelchuk asking about Brandeis, and about where in the Boston-Cambridge area he and Alexandra should live.54 Lelchuk thought Bellow would like Brandeis. He would be a “big figure” at the university (along with Abraham Maslow, the psychologist, and Herbert Marcuse, the radical Frankfurt School critical theorist, no Bellow favorite).55 Lelchuk’s wife, Betty, who was writing her Ph.D. dissertation on Bellow, audited his Conrad seminar. She thought the seminar brilliant, though others in the class complained both about Bellow’s views and about the certainty with which he expressed them. Like the Sternbergs, the Lelchuks have only positive memories of Bellow that autumn. They named their son after him.56

  The most important of the new friends Bellow made in the autumn of 1977 in Cambridge was Leon Wieseltier, recently arrived at Harvard from Oxford to do a Ph.D. in Jewish studies. Like Lelchuk, Wieseltier had grown up in Brooklyn. Shortly after arriving at Harvard, he was given Bellow’s number and told to call him (by whom, Wieseltier can’t remember). He and Bellow quickly struck up a friendship. “We just were crazy about each other. We used to see each other a lot,” often for walks along the Charles or for lunch. “I took a shine to Wieseltier immediately,” Bellow recalled in a letter of January 31, 1977, to the Israeli novelist John Auerbach. “I should be happy to feel he returned my warm feelings.” Wieseltier, facetiously, describes himself in 1977 as having “this reputation that preceded me as the hottest thing in Jewish Studies since white bread.” Like Bellow, he had—still has—a sharp tongue, and a taste for intellectual gossip. He also shared Bellow’s love of English Romantic poetry (Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley’s Epipsychidion). Metaphysics, however, was the real key to their friendship: “We bonded over Steiner and Barfield.” Wieseltier remembers Bellow as “very respectful of Steiner, very interested in Steiner, in, what shall we call it, nonmaterialistic understanding. He was prepared to give the benefit of the doubt.” Though Wieseltier himself had “a high tolerance” for such figures, he remembers asking Bellow, “What’s a rough stringent Jew like [you] doing corresponding with Owen Barfield?” Bell
ow’s answer, which made clear that Saving the Appearances “meant a lot to him,” contained a remark that especially struck Wieseltier: “The truth, whatever it is, is strange.” To Wieseltier, this remark, at once “anti-rational, but sort of reasonable to understand,” became “a sort of principle about how he operated.” Later in the same interview, Wieseltier described Bellow as “the most brilliant dupe I ever knew,” drawn to “outlandish totalistic explanations…one doctrine after another, as long as it explained everything.” Yet “the fiction doesn’t fall for these types,” never “makes the leap.” Bellow may have “deeply resented rationalism,” sought to “épater the rationalists,” but he was too smart to oppose reason itself.

  Wieseltier thinks his friendship with Bellow was helped by the fact that “I didn’t want anything from him.” At Columbia, he had been taught and befriended by Lionel Trilling and Meyer Schapiro. At Oxford, Isaiah Berlin “more or less adopted me” (he also studied with A. J. Ayer and Peter Strawson). “I was the luckiest student who ever lived.”57 At Harvard, though, Wieseltier was determined that there would be no more “sitting at the feet of great men.” “Enough fathers. I was done with discipleship.” Instead, he and Bellow “were true, raucous, spiritually bonded friends.” The raucousness owed something to Yiddish. On his first visit to 1010 Memorial Drive, Wieseltier and Bellow watched the televised arrival of Pope Paul VI in Boston. As the Pope got off the plane, he bent down to kiss the tarmac. “Habemas Pacem” (“We have [come in] peace”), he declared. To which Bellow muttered, “Habemas behaymes,” from the Yiddish behayme, meaning “dolt” (or, literally, “beast”). The only politics Wieseltier recalls discussing with Bellow concerned Israel (Wieseltier, “a mere graduate student,” organized a letter of protest that Bellow and others signed against settlement activity on the West Bank). Like the Sternbergs and the Lelchuks, he remembers no talk of race or inner-city crime and corruption, issues Bellow would immediately return to in Chicago. Nor did Bellow talk much of legal problems, though that September he was threatened with jail over the failure to post bond. Only after the Bellows left Cambridge in the new year did Wieseltier get a full sense of Bellow’s difficulties at home. In a letter of January 18, 1978, Bellow apologized for not responding earlier: “I thought I knew corrupt Chicago, the money world, the legal and accounting professions and all their psychological types and all the political parallels—I did, of course, but it was an intelligent person’s closet knowledge and fate decided that I should get a finishing course, that I should feel all the fingers on my skin and have my internal organs well squeezed.”58