Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Relations between the two friends began to cool for several reasons. Epstein thought Bellow had defamed his friend Hilton Kramer, the art critic and editor of The New Criterion, gratuitously portraying him in Humboldt’s Gift as cowardly and a careerist (“he threw it in at no extra charge,” writes Epstein of the novel’s Kramer-like character). When Kramer rang Bellow to complain, according to Epstein, Bellow blew him off. “Call the police,” Bellow told him. It was Bellow who ended the friendship, according to Epstein. “I didn’t pull away, I was pulled away from.” This was in part because of Epstein’s growing closeness to Shils, to whom Bellow had introduced him. Shils and Bellow had themselves drifted apart by 1983, for several reasons. Shils had blocked Bellow’s attempts to get jobs for Edith Hartnett and Bette Howland at the Committee on Social Thought, telling Epstein, “I refuse to let him use the Committee as a rest home for his old nafkas” (Yiddish for “whores”).27 Epstein does not believe, as do others, that Shils became jealous of Bellow after the Nobel Prize; Shils had “a sure sense of his merit.” Nor does he believe that politics broke them up. “The split was not political but ‘characterological.’ ”

  The critic David Mikics believes the roots of the breakup between Bellow and Shils can be detected in Mr. Sammler’s Planet. After publication of the novel, which Shils read and commented on in draft, the two friends began to quarrel. Mikics thinks that this is because Shils saw Sammler, correctly, as a version of himself, “mandarin, detached, and professorial,” and that the novel was Bellow’s way of “working through his relationship with Shils.” By the end of the novel, in this view, Sammler has changed, learning to appreciate the value of human particulars, of individual personality or character. “Sammler gets shaken out of his theorizing, his arm’s-length way of fending off the chaos that surrounds him. By the book’s conclusion he no longer looks down on people—he looks at them….Sammler passes the test; Shils, to Bellow’s mind, failed it. This is Bellow’s trick on the intellectual type: trap him in life and see what happens. Shils remained aloof, refusing to be captivated by Bellow’s key value, personality.”28

  Jonathan Kleinbard, a friend of both Shils and Bellow, lends support to the first part of Mikics’s account of the estrangement. Shils “deeply resented Sammler, as he thought the character was based on him.” Although there is little direct evidence to suggest that Shils himself saw the novel as an implicit attack on theory or sociology, his annotations of the Sammler manuscript lend indirect support to Mikics’s view. Nowhere are these annotations more agitated and emphatic than in the scene at the end of the novel in which the nameless black pickpocket is beaten by Eisen, Sammler’s former son-in-law. What Shils objects to about this episode is its praise for the pickpocket. Here is the offending passage, from the manuscript version:

  Sammler was in a rage with Eisen. He had given those atrocious blows to a better man than himself. It wasn’t hard to be better than Eisen. And you had to reckon in Eisen’s madness, he counted as a War-victim, even though he might have been mad. But he belonged in the mental-hospital. Homicidal maniac: Artist-type. Maybe this is why his life-studies had a mortuary look. But why was the Black man better? The impression was based on a certain princeliness—the clothing, the Dior shades, the sumptuous matching colors. And his manner, barbarous-majestical. Cornering a poor old White man, but not violent, making a superior noble gesture. He showed his patent of nobility and let the obvious conclusion be made.

  “I don’t understand at all,” Shils writes in the margin of this passage. “Why did or would S. think the pickpocket better than Eisen? This is too far-fetched either as an argument in itself or as reasoning in character for S.” On the back of the page, Shils reiterates his objection: “I think that the whole episode…deforms the character of the old man as you have presented it so far.” In a marginal comment on the page that follows, he adds that Sammler’s disapproval of Eisen’s “ecstasy of murder” might be “OK, but not the imputation of majesty to the megalomaniac negro. It is just this that S. opposes throughout the book and having him turn around 180 degrees…is not well prepared and undoes all the moral good sense of the book so far. I am very perplexed.”29

  Bellow responded to Shils’s objections by altering the passages slightly. He removed the sentence “He had given these atrocious blows to a better man than himself.” He also rewrote the passage imputing nobility to the pickpocket.

  The black man? The black man was a megalomaniac. But there was a certain—a certain princeliness. The clothing, the shades, the sumptuous colors, the barbarous-majestical manner. He was probably a mad spirit. But mad with the idea of noblesse. And how much Sammler sympathized with him—how much he would have done to prevent such atrocious blows [p. 293].

  The references to the pickpocket’s “superior noble gesture” and “patent of nobility” (his exposed phallus) are cut, and in their place comes Sammler’s admiration for his “idea of noblesse.” What Bellow refuses to give up is the complexity of Sammler’s reaction to the pickpocket, which is in part ironic, in part an acknowledgment of the princeliness with which he manifests his “idea,” that of the supremacy of the body, both in itself and as metonym for the material realm. As Mikics puts it, “By dunking Sammler so thoroughly in the mad social reality of his time, Bellow argues that a novelist can do something that a sociologist simply can’t. The novelist gravitates toward the chaos that sociology tries to tame and categorize. Novels give disorder a voice [not the best phrase, given that the pickpocket never speaks], letting us see our own strange or hidden thoughts.”30 Shils was perfectly capable of acknowledging anomalies or inconsistencies of thought, the awkward particulars of personality, but his need to judge or place or “tame” them, on moral grounds or in the service of coherent character-drawing, seems to have taken precedence in this instance over the novelist’s desire to depict human complexity. The differences Mikics points to between novelist and sociologist are not so much “characterological,” in Epstein’s phrase, as discipline-based or vocational.

  But character is involved. Joan Kleinbard, Jonathan’s wife, attributes the deterioration of the relations between Bellow and Shils to Shils’s annotations: “At one point, Saul just got tired of Shils trying to change it [the Sammler manuscript].” Janis takes a similar line: “He tried to form and shape and direct people, and Saul wasn’t having any of that….There are six or seven people who had had a close relation to Shils….There was the embrace and then after that complete rupture.” Epstein thinks Shils did not give Bellow “enough deference,” a view exactly opposite that of Richard Stern, who attributed the break between the two men to Bellow’s no longer deferring to Shils. According to Daniel Bell, “The big problem was the implication that Shils was giving Saul the ideas in the novel”; the person who spread this idea, Bell claimed, was “Joe Epstein, who adored Shils.” By the time Janis arrived on the scene, though Bellow and Shils saw each other in Committee corridors or at meetings or university functions, they had ceased dining together or seeing each other alone. Masters of invective, each would entertain Epstein with insults about the other, until Bellow broke with Epstein. “Have you noticed that our friend Saul is the kind of Jew who wears a hat in the house?” Shils once asked Epstein. Bellow, learning that Epstein had dined the previous night at Shils’s apartment, asked, “Still got the leather palate, Joe?” Bellow once described Shils as looking like “an unlanced boil”;31 Shils took to referring to Bellow as “the Old Gentleman” (though Shils was five years older than Bellow). “If the old Gentleman were allowed to sit for two hours on the lap of the Queen of England,” Shils told Epstein, “our good friend Saul Bellow would say two things about the Queen: she understands nothing of the condition of the modern artist and she’s an anti-Semite.”

  Shils was marginally less insulting about Bloom, whom he described to Epstein as “a gifted teacher but a fool.” Epstein suspects Bloom chose Bellow over Shils partly because Bellow was easier to get on with, partly
because, “although Shils was much the greater man than Bellow, Bellow, for Allan, had more social cachet.” According to Bloom’s partner, Michael Z. Wu, Bloom was “very grateful” to Shils for having brought him to the Committee, and early on the two men often dined together. But Shils “could be unpleasant.” As Leon Kass, also a member of the Committee, later chair of President Reagan’s Council of Bioethics, puts it, Shils “had the nastiest wit of any person I’d ever met.” In Committee meetings, however, again in Kass’s words, “a very nice courtesy” prevailed. Animosity rarely colored discussion of student admissions or the marking of fundamentals examinations. “It wasn’t Harlan County,” another Committee member, Ralph Lerner, a political theorist and philosopher, told me. Social occasions, however, could be awkward. Janis remembers going to a party with Bellow at the home of Jack Cella, manager of the Seminary Bookstore, a Hyde Park institution. When Shils and Epstein entered the elevator to Cella’s apartment and discovered it occupied by Bellow and Janis, they turned their backs on the couple without acknowledgment. All four occupants traveled up to the party in silence, as Janis recalls.32

  The strained relations between Shils and Bellow are clear from a letter Shils wrote to Bellow on April 29, 1988:

  Dear Saul:

  I was not indifferent to your having turned and come back to speak with me yesterday afternoon. I was also a little surprised. In the gloom of the late afternoon and the surprise of your approach, as well as the fact that I had been thinking about something quite remote, it was not possible to engage in a conversation. Perhaps that’s what you desired but I might be quite wrong about that. But if you do desire a conversation I would not be averse.

  I still have the same telephone number. I do not have yours. You may call me if you wish or you may come to see me.

  Please do not misunderstand this note. It intends no more than it says.

  Yours sincerely,

  Edward

  * * *

  —

  JANIS DESCRIBES HERSELF in her first year at the Committee as intimidated by Bellow and Bloom. In the initial seminar she took with them, “I didn’t talk at all.” Like other first-year students, she angled to sit as far away from the two men as possible: “I didn’t want to be called on.” Seminar discussions were lively but scary. Bloom and Bellow would “mostly come in laughing,” often about aspects of the text they’d been discussing over lunch. With the students there was “lots of laughing and also sassy talk, a lot of quick, American-style banter, back-and-forth, put-downs.” “You’d say something and you’d be chopped down and then you’d come back. Bloom loved that, loved if his students were witty.” “I didn’t have any of that.” The only banter Janis remembers directed toward her was when Bloom asked, “Don’t you ever do anything but read?” There were other reasons Janis was quiet in seminar. She was busy “writing it all down, every word.” She also felt in a minority among the students, most of whom “were tilted toward political philosophy,” whereas she was “tilted toward literature.” “I had high-minded ideas about how I was going to write about Shakespeare. I also loved the Romantics.” She considered writing about Wordsworth’s Prelude as well.

  At first Janis lived in the International House on the corner of Fifty-Ninth Street and Dorchester, the next building along from Bellow’s apartment. Everything seemed new to her. “The things I was used to, like living in the countryside and privacy, I lost, but it was very exciting.” All the students read a newspaper, something she hadn’t done in Toronto (“That’s how I blew the Rhodes”). The university was also, she felt, “the first really Jewish place I’d ever been” (ever lived in, she means: she’d visited Israel with her family). She had little time to examine Chicago beyond Hyde Park, because the courses she took—not just the Bloom-and-Bellow seminars and the language courses, but Ralph Lerner on Maimonides and Spinoza, Nathan Tarcov on Plato’s Laws—were demanding as well as absorbing. Also absorbing was her relationship with Peter Ahrensdorf. They began seeing each other in October 1980, a month after she arrived in Chicago, traveled together in the States, often with another couple from the Committee—Richard Ruderman, Peter’s best friend, and Anne Crippen, both of whom would go on to teach political philosophy in Texas. On a trip to Paris in September 1984, Ahrensdorf proposed to Janis, “but she wanted me to convert to Judaism before she accepted my proposal.” This he never did. When he finished his dissertation in 1985, he was offered a job at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. He and Janis were still together, and he asked her to come with him, but she was at work on her own dissertation and reluctant to leave Chicago. After much soul-searching, she decided to stay. “I thought if I go to Kenyon College, I’m never going to finish, and that was probably true.” They ended their relationship in May 1986, according to Ahrensdorf, by what he calls “mutual agreement.” “It ended well,” Janis believes. “We had already decided we were not getting married, and neither of us felt bitter about parting.” “I think we both knew it made sense not to carry on.”33

  Janis had great difficulty finishing her dissertation, for several reasons. Although she began it under the supervision of Bloom and David Grene, she had been thinking about its themes since her undergraduate days at Toronto. The title of the dissertation was “Passionate Longing: Women in the Novel from Rousseau to Flaubert,” though originally Janis had intended to include later examples. The kernel of the dissertation derived from Bloom’s lectures on Madame Bovary in Politics 101, a popular undergraduate course at Toronto. It also owed something to Bloom and Bellow’s seminars on Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse at the Committee, and to Bloom’s reading of Rousseau’s Émile, as elaborated in essays and the introduction to his translation of the work.

  The dissertation seeks to describe what “passionate longing” is for women, to identify its sources, and to trace its consequences, in fiction and in life. For Janis, as for Bloom, Rousseau begins the discussion by dividing woman’s nature in two. In Janis’s paraphrase: “On the one hand she is drawn towards her children and has social needs which can be satisfied only in the family. Women, he asserts, are bound by a strong instinctive sense of duty and loyalty. On the other hand, they are also in the grip of passionate (and frequently lawless) desires and are by nature less tractable than males. Their drives are more urgent and their love-longings more extreme.”34 It is these wild urges, particularly as depicted in Flaubert’s writing, both early and late, that the dissertation examines, beginning with Rousseau’s account of them in La Nouvelle Héloïse and Émile and ending with their depiction in Madame Bovary.35

  In the chapters on Madame Bovary, Emma is seen as both Baudelaire and Allan Bloom see her, as a passionate extremist. In Baudelaire’s words, “elle poursuit l’idéal”; in Bloom’s words, she is the novel’s “true high stakes player” (p. 173). The cruelty of Flaubert’s treatment of Emma derives from what he saw as the inadequacy of the object of her longing: “The rewards of flesh and blood are simply insufficient….Far from leading to ‘tous les mystères’ love only stands in the way of higher aspirations”; “Flaubert fiercely resists the idea that love between a man and a woman could bring us to the blue [a reference to Emma’s search for a “realm of purity,” “the azure realm”] or be at the center of existence” (p. 168); for Flaubert, “to the blue spaces [Emma] brings nothing but love-clichés” (p. 175).

  In her conclusion, Janis describes passionate female longing as “mysterious”: “Far from being the donnée, or given, of every woman, it apparently is found only in the most powerful, excitable, responsive natures” (p. 182). In the works Janis discusses, “these women lacked the gifts, the imagination, the scope for independent striving; they had neither the ability to ask the right questions nor the guides to whom they might have put their questions” (p. 180). Rousseau had no hope for such women; Flaubert’s account of them was “bleak and nihilist” as well as hostile. “To the question what are women to do with their highest longings, [Flaube
rt’s] answer is: Nothing.”

  In the next sentence, Janis asks: “Is there no other reply possible?” (p. 183). Her answer comes in an afterword to the dissertation, where she cites contemporary novels and memoirs in which female longing is less hostilely treated. She also discusses the fate of such longing in an age in which “women have fully realized freedoms previously reserved for males” (p. 185). Do the types of women she has been examining belong only “to the literature of days gone by” (p. 185)? Not by the evidence of the afterword’s “small foray” (p. 188) into contemporary fiction.36 “Although we may have expected the sexual revolution to have snapped this thematic thread, no break in feminine feeling appears to have occurred….Many remote descendants of the Julies and the Emmas are springing up in every corner.” Women still seek through love for “azure-tinted tranquillity,” though “the complete and perfect satisfaction of persistent longings is as elusive as ever” (p. 192). The question of whether these longings are a product of “the nature of women” or “an ideological product springing from ideas about happiness” (p. 190) is left open, here and throughout the dissertation.

  These themes were at the heart of Janis’s thinking when she began work as Bellow’s secretary, became his lover, and then his wife. Shortly after she and Peter Ahrensdorf broke off their engagement, in the spring of 1986, she met Bellow as she was coming out of the Regenstein Library. It was late in the afternoon, perhaps four or five, and Janis had had enough of studying and was going home. Bellow told her she looked tired, and she admitted as much. In fact, she had been unhappy for a while and had become “a little bit of a recluse,” “dragging through my dissertation.” Since the break with Ahrensdorf, “people would try to fix me up, and I was a little disgusted by all this.” Bellow said to her, “why don’t you come over to my house for dinner, and I said sure. I didn’t think anything of that, and when I arrived he was wearing an apron and holding a spatula, which was very funny….I’d never seen him wearing an apron.” “It was a fish dinner and we had a very lovely conversation and I ended up staying there and after that we never had a night apart.” By this date, Janis was living in an apartment on Blackstone, one street east of Dorchester: “I never spent another night in that apartment.”