The young man pressed the switch for the descent. “Never saw the sky like this, did you?”
“No. I was told how cold it would be. It is damn cold.”
“Does that really get you, do you really mind it all that much?”
They were traveling slowly in the hooked path of their beam towards the big circle on the floor.
“The cold? Yes. But I almost think I mind coming down more” [p. 312].
Because the worlds below are so terrible. In this ambivalence, Bellow resembles Keats in the sonnet “Bright Star,” where the desire to be “stedfast as thou art,” addressed to the star, is immediately qualified: “Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,” but “Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, / To feel for ever its soft fall and swell.” The immortality Keats seeks is human (living, breathing, warm), an impossibility given the dependence of human beauty and pleasure on time and mortality (the true love’s breast is “ripening,” as in the “Ode on Melancholy,” where melancholy “dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die,” or with “Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu”). Wordsworth, too, registers this impossibility. In the “Lucy” poem “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” the beloved is imagined “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees” (echoed in Corde’s “rocks, trees, animals, men and women”). Like Keats and Wordsworth, Bellow will not pretend. To embrace the cold of the stars, to seek oneness with “rocks, and stones, and trees,” is impossible, for all the horrors of the human realm, including those of the inner city.
SB about to deliver the second Jefferson Lecture to an audience of cultural “notables” in the Gold Coast Room of the Drake Hotel in Chicago, April 1, 1977 (courtesy of The Chicago Maroon; photo by Dan Wise)
7
Nadir
ESCAPE WAS ON Bellow’s mind when he finished The Dean’s December. Exhausted and apprehensive about the novel’s reception, he accepted an invitation from the English Department at the University of Victoria in British Columbia to spend the winter term as a visiting professor, from January to March 1982. The invitation was issued by the chair of the English Department at the time, Michael Best, a Shakespearean, but the impetus for it came from two other figures in the department: Lionel Adey, an authority on C. S. Lewis, who was to write a monograph on what he called the “Great War” between Lewis and Owen Barfield, and Patrick Grant, a specialist, like Adey, on the relations between religion and literature.1 Both Adey and Grant had corresponded with Barfield and knew of Bellow’s interest in his writings and in anthroposophy more generally. This interest was still very much alive in 1982. In Victoria, Bellow agreed to write, and may well have written, a foreword to a new translation of eight lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in 1920 entitled The Boundaries of Natural Science (1983). After describing the lectures, he ends the foreword by quoting Barfield approvingly, calling him “one of the best interpreters of Steiner.”2 Winter term in Canada promised not only a vacation from the horrors of Chicago and American materialism, but spiritual allies.
The city of Victoria is small and attractive. Although it is the capital of British Columbia, its population in 1982 was less than seventy thousand. In “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” the story Bellow wrote, or began writing, in Victoria, the narrator, Herschel Shawmut, flees the United States for Canada (the city of Vancouver, to be precise, seventy-one miles from Victoria). Shawmut has money and legal problems (Bellow had similar difficulties, in addition to his divorce from Susan, and at one point was advised by his lawyer, as was Shawmut, to flee the United States for Canada3). As he lies in bed, Herschel realizes “there isn’t a soul in British Columbia I can discuss this with. My only acquaintance is Mrs. Gracewell…who studies occult literature, and I can’t bother her with so different a branch of experience. Our conversations are entirely theoretical” (p. 382).
What Bellow wanted in Victoria, for a while at least, was to disappear. On September 26, 1981, some months before publication of The Dean’s December, he wrote to his friend Julian Behrstock to say that he and Alexandra would be in Canada “hiding from the anticipated publication storm.” On November 18, 1981, he described his reasons for going to Victoria to Bette Howland as “partly to get out of Chicago, partly to escape the Sturm und Drang of publication….Once I reach Victoria I’m not likely to communicate with anybody.” Philip Roth understood this decision. On December 5, after reading The Dean’s December, he wrote to Bellow describing the novel as “terrific” but also issuing a warning: “You look the worst right in the face and will take much shit as a result.”4 Some weeks later, in a reply to Roth written on the last day of the year, Bellow described himself as “clearing out for the winter to British Columbia which I look forward to as a sanitarium.”
I’ve warned them in the English Department there that if they run me too hard I may have a breakdown. I’m not pretending, I’m ready for a padded cell. The Dean took it out of me. I can’t even describe it.
I discovered some time ago that there was nothing to stop me from saying exactly what I thought. I expected flak, and unpleasant results are beginning to come in but I’m getting support too, which I hadn’t looked for.
The English Department took Bellow at his word. As Lansdowne Visiting Professor, he had only a couple of public lectures and readings to deliver, in addition to meeting informally with students and faculty.5 With no scheduled classes, he held office hours on Tuesday afternoons (in an office bare of books, he noted indignantly, apart from a short row of first-year textbooks on English composition).6 At Caltech, Alexandra had been the celebrity, with Bellow’s light duties arranged at the behest of the Math Department; at UVic (as it is known locally), the English Department arranged with the Math Department for Alexandra to have a visiting professorship as well. The house the English Department rented for the Bellows in Victoria was at the edge of town, near a nature preserve and a small lake (Swan Lake). Bellow thought the house “dinky,” like Herschel Shawmut’s “little box of a house, which is scarcely insulated” (p. 381). He also found the house “full of kitsch.”7 British Columbia was mild in January. “Because of the Japanese current,” Shawmut’s lawyer tells him about Vancouver, “flowers grow in midwinter, and the air is purer.” Shawmut observes that “there are indeed primroses out in the snow” (pp. 378–79). “It is very beautiful here,” he later adds, “with snow mountains and still harbors.” Watching the freighters at anchor “is pleasant. They suggest the ‘Invitation au Voyage,’ and also ‘Anywhere, anywhere, Out of the world!’ [poems of escape by Baudelaire]. But what a clean and civilized city this is, with its clear northern waters and, beyond, the sense of an unlimited wilderness beginning where the forests bristle, spreading northwards for millions of square miles and ending in ice whorls around the Pole” (p. 384). On February 4, 1982, in a letter to William Kennedy, Bellow described his first reactions to British Columbia in similar terms. “ ‘The Dean’ ” was written over “eighteen months of high excitement, a long spree for a codger.” By fleeing to Victoria, not only had he and Alexandra escaped “the ensuing noise of battle…We got away from a disastrous winter, too. Here it rains and rains, but the green moss is delicious to see and there are snowdrops out already. The nervous system was not attuned to this sanctuary. For the first month I suffered acutely from what I called boredom: it was boredom but with a wash of deep fatigue, black-and-blue spread over the gray.” When asked what he wished to do in Victoria, Bellow answered, “Take silent nature walks” (this to the loquacious Barnett “Barney” Singer, his fan, a historian at UVic); the stay in Victoria, he told Singer, was “my kuhr ort” (rest cure).8
It was a rest cure with outings and parties. The Bellows were much entertained in Victoria, as always on academic visits. The Adeys invited them to tea and dinner; Lionel Adey took them on “long, picturesque nature walks.”9 The poet Charles (“Mike”) Doyle remembers inviting Bellow to accompany him and his elde
st son “on a hike or walk, ninety minutes or so through light woods around a lagoon.” Doyle “felt responsible for the conversation,” which he did not find easy. When at one point he mentioned that the English Department’s next Lansdowne Professor would be Hugh Kenner, “this was met with silence. Some time later, however, Bellow stopped us on the woodland pathway, and confronted me….‘Did you do that on purpose?’ he asked, looking indignant. ‘What?’ I said, perplexed. ‘Mention Kenner,’ he said. ‘No. He just happens to be our next visitor,’ or some such. ‘Have you read Harper’s?’ ” Doyle had not read the issue of Harper’s to which Bellow referred, missing Kenner’s harsh review of The Dean’s December. “Bellow needed convincing that my Kenner reference was by chance. We completed the walk affably enough.”10
Doyle had been recommended to Bellow by the poet and artist P. K. Page, “a charming sociable person, who welcomed all visiting writers/artists.”11 On at least one occasion, however, Page and Bellow, according to one witness, “nearly came to blows” (“she took issue with me” is how Bellow put it). The argument was over Canadian culture, which Bellow claimed was borrowed from the United States. It was popular or low culture he had in mind. As Singer puts it, “The way Canucks believe they are cleaner than Americans, more upright, less sullied—the way they condescend to watch American films, switch on American TV, eat American foods, etc. ‘They don’t like hearing these things,’ Bellow continued.”12
In Herschel Shawmut’s case, what the Canadians don’t like hearing about is politics. “When I arrived, I was invited to a party by local musicians [Shawmut is a musicologist], and I failed to please. They gave me their Canadian test for U.S. visitors: Was I a Reaganite? I couldn’t be that, but the key question was whether El Salvador might not be another Vietnam, and I lost half the company at once by my reply: ‘Nothing of the kind. The North Vietnamese are seasoned soldiers with a military tradition of many centuries—really tough people. Salvadorans are Indian peasants.’…Two or three sympathetic guests remained, and these I drove away as follows: A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing really bad ever happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, ‘Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?’ ” (p. 384). This is the exact line Bellow uttered at a dinner in Victoria, after Singer had told him of an old friend who often said, “Nothing bad ever happens.” “He went right home that night or the next morning and put it into the short story he produced from his Victoria stay, attributing the line ‘nothing bad ever happens’ to a fictional Vancouver professor.”13 Alexandra also remembers an awkward moment at a dinner party given by Connie and Leon Rooke, “a glamorous literary couple in the English Department” (both writers—he a novelist, she the author of short stories and also fiction editor of The Malahat Review). Over dinner, Bellow raised the question of Poland and Solidarity; Łech Wałe¸sa and Marek Edelman had disappeared without trace. After “lashing out” against Pierre Trudeau, who had recently criticized Solidarity in the newspapers, he was greeted by an awkward silence. According to Alexandra, the source of the anecdote, “This was a Trudeau stronghold and we had not realized it.”14
For the most part, however, Bellow was in good humor, nonconfrontational, during his stay in Victoria, uncomplainingly attending dinners and parties given by Alexandra’s Math Department colleagues, including one who lectured him at length on “the subtleties of the English language.” The chair of the department cheerfully announced on another occasion that he’d not read a single one of Bellow’s novels and that he never read fiction. He was, however, a good cook, and served Oysters Toscanini. “Naturally,” as Alexandra puts it, Bellow found a pearl in his oyster.15
During the visit, Bellow’s irony, as recalled by Barnett Singer and others, was mostly benign. When cautioned to watch out for the traffic in town (“They whiz along at fifty. You can get killed”), he smilingly replied, “I better not get killed. I only came for a rest.” At the end of the stay, when asked by a professor in the UVic English Department how he could go back to Chicago after having enjoyed the beauty of Vancouver Island, he “replied quietly that he wasn’t yet ready for utopia.” To Singer, the most ardent of his admirers, Bellow seemed nearest “not to Henderson, as some critics maintain, or to Herzog (except perhaps when he’s around women), or to natty Citrine, but to old Mr. Sammler, ‘distant from life.’ I realize that his performances [the stories and novels] bring out the blood and the guts, maybe the truest spirit; but this daily Bellow beside me is a bit thin-blooded. Academe and the monasticism of the writer’s life, a certain New England model, must have taken away some of the original bite.” Elsewhere, Singer describes Bellow’s face “in its usual neutral. He has the artist’s essential aloofness at almost all moments of outward life. Inwardly it’s another story—oh, another. With him what you get is emphatically what you don’t get.” When Singer apologized “for not knowing exactly how to be around him,” Bellow, who had been critical of Singer’s self-deprecation, “apologized for having reproved me too much.”16 “Him with His Foot in His Mouth” ends with Mrs. Gracewell, who talks to Shawmut of the withdrawal of the Divine Spirit from the visible world. Shawmut listens to this talk with “no mischievous impulses.” After what he calls “much monkey business,” he is ready “to listen to words of ultimate seriousness” (p. 413). In Victoria, Bellow seems to have been comparably unmischievous—under the influence, perhaps, of Shawmut’s example.
In the end, Victoria provided the Bellows with the escape they sought. Alexandra regretted they hadn’t done more sightseeing and told Singer she hoped “to return some spring” for a proper visit. In addition to wanting, as Bellow put it, to “lay low,” they’d had visitors.17 Alexandra’s seventy-six-year-old aunt, Ana Paunescu, the model for Aunt Gigi in The Dean’s December, came for a week in January. Bellow had been instrumental in getting Ana a passport to leave Romania and reunite with her daughter in Los Angeles.18 In Victoria, Ana had many stories to tell of her last months in Bucharest. According to Alexandra, Bellow “was quite fond of her, endearingly calling her jeune fille roumaine and encouraging her on the verge of her new chapter in life, the American chapter.” In February, there was a second visit, from Bellow’s son Greg and his family, again for a week. Greg, his wife, JoAnn, with their eight-year-old daughter, Juliet, and the infant Andy, stayed in the house while Bellow and Alexandra moved into a hotel nearby, “a decision that everybody was happy with.” Alexandra remembers the week as a success, with “plenty of fun family activities, very little work.” She recalls only a single unsunny moment. After Greg and Bellow managed to find time to be alone, “both looked preoccupied” when they returned. Alexandra never found out why. What she mostly remembers is “love, genuine love, between Saul and Greg.”19
* * *
—
BARNETT SINGER, whose memoir, “Looking for Mr. Bellow,” is the source of many of these anecdotes about the Victoria stay, is among the most perceptive of Bellow obsessives (or ex-obsessives, he would now claim), a type that often interested Bellow. In 1970, when Singer was twenty-four, Seize the Day set his obsession in motion, revealing “emotions that were in me and that had never been properly articulated.” Singer grew up “in Toronto (the Good)…in the cocoon of a bourgeois family.” The appeal of Bellow’s writing partly derived from “my condition as a Canadian, trying to become more flamboyantly American and elude the decorousness of my home.” It was Herzog, however, that hooked Singer. “I devoured my new find—reading Herzog once, twice, four times, ten times….Herzog entirely took me over.” The novel altered many aspects of Singer’s life, including his attitude to his career. “I was seduced by the way Bellow dropped his feet into the intellectual pool but refused to take the full bath—refused to become only abstract and give in to shorthand views of life….After getting a Ph.D., I myself would be both intellectual
and wary of being intellectual. I henceforth played a tightrope game in academe.”20 Refusing to confine himself solely to scholarship (studies of French colonial proconsuls and military figures), Singer wrote a well-regarded biography of Brigitte Bardot and dozens of local newspaper columns, and appeared frequently on local radio.
He also began writing unsent letters to Bellow, in the manner of Moses Herzog. It was not until the autumn of 1972 that he finally mailed one of these letters, “noting my admiration for Bellow’s work and how it followed similar passions I’d had for the historian D. W. Brogan, the sportswriter Arthur Daley, the philosopher Pascal.”21 Three weeks later, Bellow replied, briefly, in what Singer aptly describes as “unornate deft handwriting.” After apologizing for his delay in responding, Bellow revealed that “he only acknowledged good letters, and that mine was very good.”22 Though the letter closed “with a formula that invited no further intimacy,” its effect on Singer was “magical”:
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