Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

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  SOMETIME TOWARD THE END of 1979, Bellow put aside the “Chicago Book” and “Far Out,” the novel about 1950s Greenwich Village he was working on simultaneously (it is discussed in chapter 6 of To Fame and Fortune), to begin work on what would become The Dean’s December. “I brought with me to California a bundle of work in progress,” Bellow wrote to Bette Howland on January 31. “Instead of progressing I laid it aside, quickly sketched out the plan of a short book, altogether new, and proceeded quickly to write it. I’ve done more than half of it since Christmas and am subject to nightly vibrations that prevent me from sleeping. The usual flood of the nerves, breathless excitement and insomniac happiness.” Three weeks later, in a letter of February 25 to Hyman Slate, he was complaining that he had “overworked myself, and consequently I don’t sleep well. I go around like a Zombie.” Bellow was writing from Pasadena, at Caltech, where Alexandra had been invited as a Sherman Fairchild Fellow in Mathematics. In January, the historian Daniel Kevles, executive officer for the humanities at Caltech, was asked to arrange something for Bellow to do. The chair of the Mathematics Department had been told that Alexandra’s husband was “well-known in his field.” Kevles arranged for Bellow to offer a series of seminars, after agreeing to certain Bellow provisos—namely, “no assignments, no agenda, just literary discussions for the Caltech community.”59 The seminars were held in the new Beckman Laboratories, right across from Baxter Hall, home of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech, where Bellow had an end office with a view of the San Gabriel Mountains. “The term ‘seminar’ suggests an intimate and informal discussion,” Kevles’s wife, Bettyann, writes in a recollection of Bellow’s time at Caltech, “but these meetings were neither. Saul Bellow’s fame then [the chair of the Mathematics Department notwithstanding] was akin to Richard Feynman’s after the Challenger hearings, so it was not surprising that the auditorium was filled from the first meeting to the last.” Bellow’s subject was the early-twentieth-century novel, and at the end of each session he took questions. “The students who signed up for it,” Bellow remembered, “were as mystified by Joseph Conrad as I was by jet propulsion.”

  When we discussed Typhoon one of them said that he was bothered by the disorderly thinking of Captain MacWhirr. He began his analysis by assigning the Captain and his first mate to subset-a, the crew to subset-b, and the Chinese passengers to subset-c. Then he went to the blackboard and began to write out an equation.

  “I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” I said.

  Then all the boys and I stared at each other in shocked silence.60

  Bettyann Kevles remembers a question period in which Bellow was asked, “Just how do you start writing every day?” He answered, “By explaining that first he checked his typewriter to see that all the letters of the alphabet were still there.”61

  Not all Bellow’s interactions with the Caltech audience were like this. One listener in particular caught his attention, “a white haired, close-cropped man of about my own age” whose attendance record he recalled as “flatteringly perfect.” Bellow thought the man might be a faculty member and wondered if he “might possibly explain how these clever boys, elite engineers and technocrats in training, viewed the paleo-technic freighter Nan Shan [from Typhoon], its old fashioned, literal-minded Captain, its engineer and all the Coolie passengers in the hold.” The man’s name was Clair Patterson, and he was, indeed, a faculty member, as Bellow had guessed, a professor of geology. In addition, Bellow learned, he was a graduate of the University of Chicago. As Bellow wrote many years later, in his foreword to Clear Hands, Dirty Hands (1999), a Festschrift for Patterson, “In the early thirties, the worst years of the great Depression, both of us had been Chicago undergraduates, on opposite sides of the quadrangle—the sciences and the humanities separated by lawns, trees and tennis courts.” Over lunch at the Faculty Club, Bellow asked Patterson his question about what the Caltech students were likely to make of Typhoon. “Patterson’s answer was that these brainy students had been brought up on Mickey Mouse and Superman and their picture of human life was inevitably a caricature.” At later lunches and on walks, Bellow learned just why Patterson lamented this ignorance. He also learned a great deal about lead.

  As Bellow writes in the foreword, Patterson struck him as being like William Jennings Bryan, “speaking for the Free Silver Democrats almost exactly a century ago.” Whereas Bryan “cried out against the Cross of Gold. Pat Patterson’s cross was made of lead.” It was made of lead because Pattterson was convinced that lead was contaminating the whole planet:

  He told me that for several millennia now the lead levels of sea water and of the air had risen steeply. Patterson had measured lead residues in human and animal bones, in arctic ice strata and was able to prove, I was persuaded, that the brains of civilized man had suffered lead damage as well. Moving to conquer nature as the Enlightenment had told us we must, man had fatally damaged the earth, had poisoned its air and its waters. Already our brains were affected by the lead wastes we had ingested, our descendants would be even more seriously and progressively brain-damaged.

  Patterson’s theories and dire predictions recall Wieseltier’s sense of Bellow as drawn to “outlandish totalizing explanations.” For Bellow, what Patterson had to say resembled “prophetic revelation”; “as such, I could appreciate it for its comprehensiveness and its somehow poetic splendor.”

  Patterson was hardly alone as prophet of doom. As Bellow puts it, “Many great thinkers have held that we are sick creatures.” He cites two examples: “Baudelaire wrote that modern man was like a hospital patient who believed that he would recover if only he were moved to another bed. Freud was convinced that the repression of our instinctual desires was the cause of our lifelong illnesses.” For much of his life, Bellow opposed views like these, which he accused of creating the sickness they diagnosed, a sickness he thought of as spiritual. Patterson’s diagnosis attracted him in part because it was neither Freudian nor modernist (that is, void-mongering, Waste Land–like), in part because it attributed sickness to science. The science Patterson attributed it to, though, was of a particular kind: not pure or classical science but the science of engineering technology. Pure scientists like himself, according to Bellow, writing to the Norsk Nobel-Komité, strive “for non-utilitarian knowledge, appreciate the value of human life and hold the worth of humanity in high regard.”62 Hence the crusade against lead, one aspect of which, affecting the inner city, was bound to attract Bellow, leading him to create the character of Sam Beech in The Dean’s December. That Beech is meant to be recognized as Patterson is clear. His fame as a scientist, like Patterson’s, derives initially from his use of radioactivity “to measure the age of the planet”; his campaign against lead promises to bring about the sort of crucial reform Patterson’s campaign brought about in 1970, the year Congress passed the Clean Air Act, which not only called for the removal of lead from gasoline in the United States but encouraged comparable acts on an international scale. The Clean Air Act was largely Patterson’s achievement, the product of a decade of lonely proselytizing. In a letter recommending Patterson to the Nobel Prize Committee, on January 20, 1981, Bellow praised him for his refusal “to accommodate or placate special interests, either within the scientific community or outside.” In The Dean’s December, when Corde contemplates taking on Beech’s cause, he realizes it will mean challenging powerful industrial interests, the sort that “bring the university much financial support” (p. 221).

  Given the issues that obsessed Bellow in the late 1970s, he was bound to be drawn to Patterson’s claim that the poisonous effects of lead contamination were especially dangerous to children in urban settings. As Beech puts it, “Millions of tons of intractable lead residues [are] poisoning the children of the poor….It’s the growing children who assimilate the lead fastest. The calcium takes it up” (p. 137). Sam Beech has read Corde’s Harper’s articles a
bout blacks “in public housing and the jails….And when I read your description of the inner city, I said, ‘Here’s a man who will want the real explanation of what goes on in those slums….The concentration is immeasurably heaviest in those old slum neighborhoods, piled up there for decades” (p. 137). Using almost exactly the words Bellow uses in his foreword to the Patterson Festschrift, Beech explains: “If you watch the behavior of those kids with a clinical eye, you see the classic symptoms of chronic lead poisoning….It comes down to the nerves, to brain poisoning” (p. 137). The symptoms of such poisoning are “irritability, emotional instability, general restlessness, reduced acuity of the reasoning powers, the difficulty of focusing, et cetera” (p. 139).

  In Bucharest, Corde wonders if, when he returns to Chicago, he should publicize Beech’s views. Did he, to begin with, believe them? Beech might be a “crank,” but he was “an eminent man of science. That was unanimous. He had authoritatively dated the age of the earth, had analyzed the rocks brought back from the moon” (p. 138). Patterson’s standing at Caltech was similarly elevated. What first impressed Jane Dietrich, editor of the Caltech magazine, about Bellow was that he took up so quickly with Patterson, by no means the most famous but arguably the most interesting scientist at Caltech. In The Dean’s December, Minna is keen for Corde to take up Beech’s cause, “thinks it would upgrade me to associate with a man of science” (p. 223). But Corde has other worries aside from whether Beech is a crank. Of course the anti-lead campaign is worthy—Corde, too, wants “bad things to stop and good things to go forward”—but “I don’t want to become an environmentalist. For me it would be a waste of time, and I haven’t the time to waste” (p. 219). The prospect of having to read Beech’s “stuff” makes Corde gag. “I’d rather eat a pound of dry starch with a demitasse spoon than read this. Truth should have some style” (p. 226). That Patterson sensed comparable reservations on Bellow’s part is suggested in a letter of March 12, 1981. “What seems easy to you is difficult to me,” Patterson wrote, of his efforts to publicize his findings. “I work to gain knowledge and, through a chain of circumstances involuntary but unfortunate for me, have learned vast and terrible things. This in itself is laborious, but it is even more difficult for me to turn to the role of an educator and explain what I have learned because there are no existing terms and concepts to use—they have to be forged.” As for “what is, in turn, difficult for you”—Patterson means both the science of the cause and understanding the sort of person he is, for fictional purposes—“I can help you…without too much effort on my part.”

  As he describes himself, Patterson is like Beech, who “wants his case stated not only to the general public but also to the Humanists” (p. 136). Patterson knows Bellow “is writing some fiction about scientists, which includes my work.” In the March 12 letter, he promises to send Bellow a tape “concerning emotional insights in to my past life that are of no value to me but perhaps may be useful to you.” Corde listens to a comparable tape sent him by Beech. The incidents both men recount, to quote again from the March 12 letter, will “help to define for you the scientist personality,” and thus to create the scientist Beech. Though he is pressed with deadlines for scientific papers and grant proposals, Patterson assures Bellow, “you loom large in my world.” In the future, Patterson is certain, scientists will need to turn their attention from “discovering knowledge of the world we live in to discovering new knowledge concerning our place as humans in that world….Our contact may prove either unproductive or ineffectual, nevertheless it is actually a part of the leading edge of an activity which will in time constitute a new era in the relationship among science, the humanities, and society.” A striking feature of Patterson’s letter, written more than thirty years ago, is the other great danger he singles out, one only now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, coming into prominence. “I assure you with absolute certainty,” the letter concludes, “that my scientist followers will, in the future, inexorably disclose which of your followers are hollow men—defeated by the android world of misguided engineering technology, and which are true artists—fighting for humans with every new advantage they can seize—always—even if we humans are eventually destroyed by the androids.”

  For all Patterson’s scientific eminence, it was hard for Bellow to accept lead poisoning as the fons et origo of urban violence, squalor, and despair. As with Charlie Citrine’s attraction to the theories of Steiner and Barfield, so with Albert Corde’s attraction to Beech’s theories. He can’t bring himself to make the leap.

  “There would be no difficulty in agreeing that inner city black kids should be saved from poisoning by lead or heroin or synthetic narcotics like the Tees and Blues. The doubtful part of his [Beech’s] proposition is that human wickedness is absolutely a public health problem, and nothing but. No tragic density, no thickening of the substance of the soul, only chemistry or physiology. I can’t bring myself to go with this medical point of view, whether it applies to murderers or to geniuses. At one end of the scale is Spofford Mitchell. Did he rape and murder a woman because he put flakes of lead paint in his mouth when he was an infant? At the other end, are Beethoven and Nietzsche great because they had syphilis?”

  …

  “Where Beech sees poison lead I see poison thought or poison theory. The view we hold of the material world may put us into a case as heavy as lead….The end of philosophy and of art will do to ‘advanced’ thought what flakes of lead paint or leaded exhaust fumes do to infants” [p. 227].

  Bellow’s time at Caltech introduced one other element into The Dean’s December. Shortly before he and Alexandra were to leave Pasadena, Dan and Bettyann Kevles decided to give a dinner party for them. Bettyann Kevles in particular was grateful to Bellow, for reasons similar to those of Aviva Green at Cambridge. Bellow had offered her advice about a historical novel she was writing and had encouraged her. She was also keen to meet Alexandra. The other guests at the dinner were carefully picked. They were an astronomer named Marshall Cohen, and his wife, Shirley, who taught mathematics at a local public high school, and a philosophy professor named Will Jones, whose wife was a child psychologist at Pomona College. The evening was a great success, no one wanted to leave, and Cohen suggested that they all get together the following week for a visit to the Palomar Observatory. Cohen would make arrangements, ensuring access to the telescope and arranging a Caltech limo for the drive. The plan was to have a picnic supper on the way and arrive at Palomar just at dark. Unfortunately, the day was drizzly and overcast (“California is drowned sodden, tormented by mudslides,” Bellow wrote on February 20 to his new colleague at the Committee on Social Thought, Allan Bloom; “the land of beautiful living, of exquisite lawn-cultivation and of saran-wrapped lotus flowers is suffering, quivering under the vertical indignities of nature. I rather like the place, though”). When the party arrived at Palomar, they were told that the dome would not be opened unless it stopped raining. So they sat down in an office in the observatory and ate their picnic, then explored the enormous space of the closed dome. Suddenly, as Bettyann Kevles describes it, “I heard a grinding noise and looked up to see the dome parting. As I stared, it opened with deliberate speed and the stars—seemingly closer than they would have appeared were I standing outside in the woods—glowed in the clear sky. We were all excited by our change of fortune and sought each other to share the moment.” All, that is, except Bellow, who as soon as the dome began to open had gone directly to the gondola and was rising slowly above the rest of the party in the direction of the prime-focus cage at the top.

  What Bettyann Kevles remembers of the ride back to Pasadena is that Bellow was silent, “struck mute by the experience, perhaps, or fixing the impression in his mind.” At the end of The Dean’s December, Corde and Minna journey to California, where Minna has booked time on the twenty-four-inch telescope at Palomar. Corde thinks Minna too frail to go up in the cage, after all she’s been through in Romania an
d then in the hospital. But Minna insists. What strikes Corde about the observatory is how cold it is: “If you came to look at astral space it was appropriate that you should have a taste of the cold out there, its power to cancel everything merely human” (p. 310). The cold makes him recall how freezing the crematorium was at his mother-in-law’s cremation, “the killing cold when you returned and thought your head was being split by an ax” (p. 311). Invited to go up in the cage with Minna, Corde sees a sky “tense with stars.” This is not “the real heavens.” Rather, it is “as much as could be taken in through the distortions of the atmosphere.” What he thinks is that, in seeing, “you were drawn to feel and to penetrate further, as if you were being informed that what was spread over you had to do with your existence, down to the very blood and the crystal forms inside your bones. Rocks, trees, animals, men and women, these also drew you to penetrate further, under the distortions (comparable to the atmospheric ones, shadows within shadows), to find their real being with their own.” Here, on the novel’s penultimate page, Corde offers a poetical condensation of Barfield’s Saving the Appearances. It is not enough. The Dean’s December ends with a fragment of dialogue between Corde and the largely unintelligible young astronomer, a junior colleague of Minna’s, with whom he has toured the dome.