Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  On March 8, 1987, an article by Bellow appeared in The New York Times seeking to shape the reception both of More Die of Heartbreak and of The Closing of the American Mind. The article, entitled “The Civilized Barbarian Reader,” was adapted from Bellow’s foreword to The Closing of the American Mind. In it, Bellow is much concerned with his depiction of know-it-all intellectuals, Kenneth Trachtenberg’s predecessors. What the critics missed in these depictions was the humor extracted from them, the fact that “many of my books, in retrospect, are comedies of wide reading.” What makes characters like Moses Herzog and Charlie Citrine comic is partly America’s indifference to their concerns, partly the fact that the books they read “led to deserts of abstraction. After many years of attentive and diligent study, we are left with little more than systems of opinions and formulas that hide reality from us. Personal judgment is disabled, crippled by theoretic borrowing….I was making fun of pedantry!…I meant to show how little strength ‘higher education’ had to offer a troubled man.” What the critics also missed was the moments of insight his disillusioned characters were offered. In terms that pave the way for More Die of Heartbreak as much as The Closing of the American Mind, Bellow recalls Moses Herzog’s return to balance at the end of Herzog:

  In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves—to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make final judgments and put everything together.

  The independence of this stricter consciousness, which has the strength to be immune to the noise of history and the distractions of our immediate surroundings, is what the life struggle is all about. The soul has to hold and find its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas that frequently deny its very existence, and indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.104

  * * *

  —

  MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK ends with Benn fleeing Matilda, tricking her in the process, a sign that something of her family’s ethos has rubbed off on him.105 Benn lights out for the frozen North: “I signed on three days ago, to check out lichens from both poles, a comparative study, and work out certain morphological puzzles….Nothing but night and ice will help me now. Night so that I can’t see myself. Ice as a corrective. Ice for the rigor” (p. 326). As in The Dean’s December, the purer realm looked for is an inhuman one, the cold of the frozen North like that of the starry heavens viewed from the Palomar Observatory. If not a defeat, the ending is for Benn a tactical withdrawal, the sort Bellow might well have imagined for himself after the failure of his marriage to Alexandra. Benn is left with his work and with Kenneth. While producing the novel, Bellow may have thought of himself as left with his writing and teaching—or co-teaching—with Allan Bloom. Kenneth, with his nonstop loquacity, his theorizing and philosophizing, can be seen as a figure of Allan Bloom as well as Roger Kaplan. Though the novel at times sees Kenneth as comical, in the line of Moses Herzog, Benn takes his advice seriously, as he does Kenneth’s habit of viewing personal problems from the most elevated perspective (“As is evident by now,” Kenneth admits, “I have a weakness for the big issues” [p. 284]). The bond between the two men owes something to the bond between Bellow and Bloom. If Bellow was tempted, like Benn, to give up on “love longings,” settling for work and friendship, the temptation was short-lived. By the time More Die of Heartbreak was published, he and Janis were inseparable. When I asked Janis why she thought Bellow had married so many times, she answered, “He was looking for me.”

  Black students at Cornell leaving Willard Straight Hall, Ithaca, New York, April 1969 (courtesy of Steve Starr/AP/Rex/Shutterstock)

  9

  To Seventy-Five

  IN APRIL 1987, ten months after the wedding of Adam and Rachel, Bellow and Janis set off for Europe and then Haifa, where an international conference had been organized to discuss Bellow’s writing. The trip was their debut as a couple. The intervening months had been spent by Janis learning how to live what Bellow called “a literary life.” At last, he told her, he was “with somebody who understands me. We can talk about everything.” (After Philip Roth read Janis’s admiring reviews of his work, he said much the same thing: “At last Bellow married a woman who understands me.”1) To Bette Howland, Janis was not only in love with Bellow, she “idolized him.” Janis also says she was unperturbed to discover how powerful his will was, “not just in terms of his ideas and writing but everything. And I was receptive to that. I didn’t buck it….That didn’t matter to me. I enjoyed it.” Bellow had “very definite habits, and everything about him had his stamp.” In the morning, he got up early, and it was important that the coffee was right, “so he wouldn’t be juddering and he wouldn’t be sluggish, so he could wake the right way.” She learned to make coffee “the Ralph Ellison way, the right amount, in a particular cup.” He was also particular about breakfast. With cereal, he liked bananas, but “only seven slices.” Getting the morning right “was directed toward an end…the sanctity of the writing time.” In the morning, often in the afternoon as well, “he was essentially solitary, and we fit together very well that way.”

  Bellow usually spent four hours a day at his desk, with distractions. After a bad phone call with an accountant or a family member, he’d go right back to work. “Use your anger,” he told Janis; “your anger is burnable fuel.” When not writing, he read, “always reading, reading aloud. We read in bed. I read to him while he was driving sometimes.” In Chicago, he wrote until one, then took his bath. When not teaching or attending meetings, “he liked to kick off in the afternoon.” They visited old neighborhoods, shopped in the Loop. In Vermont, there was the garden to tend to, long walks along tree-canopied dirt roads, swimming in the spring-fed pond behind the house. For both of them, Vermont was “The Good Place,” the name Bellow gave to a 1990 article for Travel Holiday magazine, an article rich with loving details. In Vermont, on warm rainy days, “you are kept almost dry by the packed leaves, and you hear the drops falling from level to level.” In the morning, “the dew takes up every particle of light….Grass snakes come out of their sheltering rocks to get some sun. The poplar leaves, when you narrow your eyes, are like a shower of small change. And when you walk down to the pond, you may feel what the psalmist felt about still waters and green pastures.”2 On their walks, Janis recalls, “he’d spin out all kinds of ideas,” or he’d ask her about the philosophy she’d studied, seeking “a survey of Kant or Strauss.” It mattered that Janis knew Bellow’s tradition. It mattered also that she was a good cook, since “every food item had interest for him” and he had strong preferences. “He loved persimmons, but they had to look a certain way, have a certain ripeness.” The spices he favored were lemon, ginger, dill. Earlier in his life, he drank Jack Daniel’s. In his last twenty years, he drank only wine, two glasses at dinner, or they’d split a bottle of beer. On expeditions to town—Brattleboro in Vermont, the Loop in Chicago—or on a trip, he’d buy Janis presents, “when he happened upon them.” He was not one for flowers or valentines—“he hated that.” As Janis sees it, speaking more widely, “I felt like he was giving me stuff all the time…a feeling of such luck…and delicious intimacy.”

  When Janis read More Die of Heartbreak, she recognized “a lot of Saul” in Benn. He, too, like Benn, suffered from “the many mistakes he’d made. He beat himself up over these things. He didn’t shy away from examining all of his mistakes, big mistakes, tragic, ugly, wrongheaded moves, that whole Reichian period when he was perfectly crazy.” Bellow could be frightening to new acquaintances—mostly, Janis believes, because “his powers were exponentially greater than those of other people.” When displeased, he didn’t mince words. “He wasn’t diplomatic abo
ut what he didn’t like” is how Janis puts it. “He wasn’t going to pretend or mollify,” and she came to respect this. “Certain people hold you up to high standards. It’s very exacting and can seem—is—harsh. But with this person you’re going to see something and achieve something.” The example Janis gives concerns cooking. “There was no one on earth more appreciative of food, but if he didn’t like it, you knew that, too. And the first few times it happened it’s like a knife wound: ‘You know what? Flush this down the toilet.’ ”

  A story about Bellow, purportedly told by Bellow himself, sheds light on this side of his character. The story exists in several versions, including a version fictionalized by Joseph Epstein in a story entitled “Another Rare Visit with Noah Danzig” (1990). It turns on a harsh remark Bellow made at a dinner, in one version to a visitor to the Committee on Social Thought, in another to a pompous German Jewish psychoanalyst. In the latter version, the psychoanalyst is a guest of Bellow’s sister, Jane, who, having just moved into a new apartment, invites her neighbors to dinner. Her famous brother is invited as well, to impress them. At some point during the meal, the talk turns to literature, and the German Jewish psychoanalyst pronounces Shakespeare much better in Schiller’s translation than in English. Bellow looks up and says: “You know, I don’t need to listen to any more of this German-Jewish bullshit.” He then picks up his knife and fork and resumes eating. In Epstein’s fictional version, the dinner takes place at the Whitehall Club and involves “Noah Danzig,” obviously based on Bellow, and his host, a man he had met at a party who speaks four or five languages. The host’s daughter, a senior at Radcliffe, is also present. Danzig makes the same remark about “German-Jewish bullshit” that Bellow is said to have made to the psychoanalyst but prefaces it by saying, “I’m sorry to have to say this with your daughter at the table.” “What did you do then,” asks the narrator, “walk out?” “ ‘No,’ said Noah. ‘Why should I? He invites me to dinner, why should I leave just because he proves a bore? But I have to admit that what I said did put a chill on the wine.’ ”3 Bellow, when in good humor, could be considerate and charming, but when in a mood or faced with nonsense, he could be consciously offensive. He could also offend unintentionally. In social situations, according to Bette Howland, “he could only handle one person at a time. If he’s talking to X and you’re standing next to him, then he’s not going to introduce Y.” There was also the matter of his being unable to stop himself from making hurtful remarks, wisecracks, jokes—like Herschel Shawmut in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth.” Most of Shawmut’s wounding remarks Bellow himself had made.4

  Offense and consideration figure in an evening that has been written about by Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens as well as by Bellow himself. The evening took place on a visit Amis and Hitchens paid to Bellow and Janis in Vermont in the summer of 1989. This was Amis’s third Vermont visit; Hitchens, who had never met Bellow, “knew I was being greatly honored by the invitation” (elicited by Amis). On the way to Vermont from Cape Cod, where Amis was staying that summer, Hitchens was warned not to say anything political, “let alone left-wing, let alone anything to do with Israel. (‘No sinister balls,’ which was our colloquialism for a certain kind of too-easy leftism).”5 Over drinks and most of dinner, which Hitchens describes in his memoir, the conversation was “by turns genial and sparkling.” Then Bellow made a remark about anti-Zionism, reaching for a periodical Hitchens had noticed lying nearby on a small wicker table. The headline for its bannered cover story read: “Edward Said: Professor of Terror.” Bellow read several passages from the article, which Hitchens, a friend of Said, described as “a very coarse attack.”6

  As he listened to Bellow’s “disgusted summary” of the anti-Zionism detailed in the article, Hitchens decided he would have to say something. Amis describes what happened next:

  Very soon Janis and I were reduced to the occasional phoneme of remonstration. And Saul, packed down over the table, shoulders forward, legs tensed beneath his chair, became more laconic in his contributions, steadily submitting to a cataract of pure reason, matter-of-fact chapter and verse, with its interjected historical precedents, its high-decibel statistics, its fortissimo fine distinctions—Christopher’s cerebral stampede.7

  After the stampede, no one said a word. As Amis recalls, “A consensus was forming in the room, silently: that the evening could not be salvaged….But for the time being we sat there rigid, as the silence raged on. Christopher was still softly compacting his little gold box of Benson & Hedges. He seemed to be giving this job his full attention.” He also seemed to Amis uncharacteristically abashed.

  During the argument the opinions of Professor Edward Said had been weighed, and this is what Christopher, in closing, wished to emphasise. The silence still felt like a gnat in my ear.

  —Well, he said. I’m sorry if I went on a bit. But Edward is a friend of mine. And if I hadn’t defended him…I would have felt bad.

  —How d’you feel now? said Saul.

  In addition to being funny, Bellow’s rejoinder is simultaneously cutting and considerate—cutting to Hitchens, considerate to Amis, whose distress at the turn the evening had taken was visible. The next day, after he and Hitchens returned to the Cape, Amis was still, in his wife, Antonia Phillips’s words, “very upset…regretful.” He called Bellow to apologize, feeling “shocked, indignant and guilty.”

  —And tell Janis I’m sorry.

  —Please don’t worry about it.

  —You deserved a night off, I thought.

  Saul was emphatic:

  —Martin, you’re not to be hard on yourself about it.

  —Thank you. But when you bring—

  —Listen, I’m used to it. I get that kind of thing all the time.

  —That’s what the Hitch said!

  We couldn’t avoid laughing at that; and accordingly the case began to close.8

  Bellow’s account of the evening, in a letter of August 29, 1989, to the novelist Cynthia Ozick, a passionate supporter of Israel, differs in several respects from the account Hitchens and Amis give. As Bellow remembers it in the letter, the offending article was by Said, not about him. The article Hitchens remembers appeared in Commentary, in the issue of August 1, 1989, and was written by Edward Alexander, a professor of English at the University of Washington and a friend of Ozick’s. Bellow says nothing of this article, instead mentioning something Said had written in the latest issue of Critical Inquiry, a left-leaning University of Chicago periodical.9

  My young friend Martin Amis, whom I love and admire, came to see me last week. He was brought here from Cape Cod by a chum [in fact, it was Amis who did the bringing] whom I had never met, not even heard of. They stayed overnight. When we sat down to dinner the friend identified himself as a journalist and a regular contributor to the Nation. I last looked into the Nation when Gore Vidal wrote his piece about the disloyalty of Jews to the USA and their blood-preference for Israel….His [the chum’s] name is Christopher Hitchens. During dinner he mentioned that he was a great friend of Edward Said. Leon Wieseltier and Noam Chomsky were also great buddies of his. At the mention of Said’s name, Janis grumbled. I doubt that this was unexpected, for Hitchens almost certainly thinks of me as a terrible reactionary—the Jewish Right. Brought up to respect and to reject politeness at the same time, the guest wrestled briefly and silently with the louche journalist and finally spoke up. He said that Said was a great friend and that he must apologize to Janis but loyalty to a friend demanded that he set the record straight. Everybody remained polite. For Amis’s sake I didn’t want a scene. Fortunately (or not) I had within reach several excerpts from Said’s Critical Inquiry piece, which I offered in evidence. Jews were (more or less) Nazis. But of course, said Hitchens, it was well known that [Yitzhak] Shamir had approached Hitler during the war to make deals. I objected that Shamir was Shamir, he wasn’t the Jews. Besides I didn’t trust
the evidence.10