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IN CHICAGO IN THE SPRING of 1988, while wrestling with “A Case of Love” and the final revisions to A Theft, Bellow spent much time thinking about Jewishness and the history of the Jews in the twentieth century. He had agreed to deliver a talk in Philadelphia entitled “A Jewish Writer in America” on May 1, before traveling to New Hampshire as a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth, a four-day visiting lectureship for which he was paid seventy-five hundred dollars plus travel and expenses. The venue for the Philadelphia talk was the Jewish Publication Society, the oldest publisher of Jewish books in the United States, with roots predating the Civil War. This was the hundredth anniversary of the society, and Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, and the ninety-three-year-old historian Salo Baron were being awarded Centennial Medals. Like many of Bellow’s talks, the JPS talk took the form of a “personal history.” It begins, though, at a stage before personal history, what Bellow thinks of as a less “mental” or “educated” stage, that of “my first consciousness.”55 In this consciousness, “I was among other things a Jew. We were all Jews. We spoke Yiddish, we spoke English, we observed Jewish customs, accepted Jewish superstitions, we prayed and blessed in Hebrew, our parents spoke in Russian….My first consciousness was that of a cosmos, and in that cosmos I was a Jew” (p. 1). When Bellow outgrew this consciousness, the thought of turning away from or rejecting his Jewishness “always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness, my core consciousness, to unJew myself…to go beyond the given and re-enter life at a more advantageous point” (pp. 1–2).
Bellow illustrates the disadvantages of Jewish identity, as they pertain to a young American Jew who wishes to be a writer, with examples drawn from his own experience. In high school, he read Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918–22), in which he learned that Jews were Magians in a Faustian age, representatives “of an earlier type totally incapable of comprehending the Faustian spirit…fossils, spiritually archaic” (p. 2). In college, he encountered the anti-Jewish slights and suspicions of “the Protestant Majority” (p. 3), in academic as well as literary circles, including those of such literary idols as Henry Adams, Henry James, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot, whose traditionalism Bellow describes as “profoundly racist” (p. 15). Whereas fellow aspiring writers who were Jewish worried “what T. S. Eliot or Edmund Wilson would be thinking of them,” or flirted with Anglicanism, or “came up with different evasions, dodges, ruses and disguises,” Bellow was unmoved. “If the Wasp aristocrats wanted to look upon me as a poacher on their precious cultural estates then let them. It was in this defiant spirit that I wrote The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King” (p. 4).
Slights and suspicions notwithstanding, Bellow knew early on that he was better off in America than in Europe. The hostility faced by the Jewish writer in America was of a different order from that faced by the Jewish writer in Europe, where, inevitably, “Wagnerism in one form or another would reject them” (p. 8). Although the Jewish writer in America “could not afford to be unaware of his detractors,” his identity as an American was not denied. When Bellow’s friend Paolo Milano died in April, exactly a month before the JPS lecture, “his obituaries mentioned that this brilliant man was of Hebrew birth. So he was. No mention was made of the fact that his Jewish ancestors had lived in Italy for two millennia” (p. 25). Although less discriminated against than his European counterparts, Bellow felt, like other American Jewish writers of his generation, that “without coarsening himself, he had to thicken his armor” (p. 10), adopting “the Nietzschean Spernere se sperni, to despise being despised” (p. 11). “Irreverent, prickly, rude,” these were the qualities many American Jewish writers, particularly those from New York, cultivated; their arrogance “was partly defensive….You had to train yourself in infighting and counterpunching” (p. 14). Bellow quotes Irving Howe: “When up against the walls of gentile politeness we would aggressively proclaim our ‘difference,’ as if to raise Jewishness to a higher cosmopolitan power” (p. 12). In his early seventies, Bellow believed he had passed “this phase of meeting arrogance with arrogance, I appear to have grown calmer. More philosophical,” a condition belied by the vehemence with which he explains it:
“Philosophical,” in common usage, often translates as passive. I don’t think I grew passive. I was less easily nettled, harder to offend, increasingly indifferent to criticism and to the cultural claims of self-appointed Wasp spokesmen. In the end their Ivy League fortresses capitulated in the Sixties to protesters and strikers and after Kingman Brewster had declared that no black could expect a fair trial in a Federal Court, the Establishment could no longer be taken seriously. There was no point in fighting a gutless antagonist [p. 15].
This moment of political aggression presages—derives from?—reflections on the Holocaust and Israel, which begin with a quotation from Lionel Abel’s memoir The Intellectual Follies (1984). During the war, Abel heard vague reports of extermination camps in Eastern Europe:
But I had no real revelation of what had occurred until sometime in 1946, more than a year after the German surrender, when I took my mother to a motion picture and we saw in a newsreel some details of the entrance of the American army into the concentration camp at Buchenwald. We witnessed the discovery of mounds of dead bodies, the emaciated, wasted but still living prisoners who were being liberated, and of various means of extermination in the camp, the various gallows and also the buildings where gas was employed to kill the Nazis’ victims en masse. It was an unforgettable sight on the screen, but as remarkable is what my mother said to me when we left the theatre: She said, I don’t think the Jews can ever get over the disgrace of this. She said nothing about the moral disgrace to the German nation, only…about a more than moral disgrace, and one incurred by the Jews. How would they ever get over it? By succeeding in emigrating to Palestine and setting up the state of Israel [p. 17].
Bellow describes his own reaction to such newsreels as “identical to that of Mrs. Abel” (p. 17). He also shares a belief that “the founders of Israel restored the lost respect of the Jews by their manliness. They removed the curse of the Holocaust, of the abasement of victimization from them, and for this the Jews of the diaspora were grateful, and repaid Israel with their loyal support” (p. 16). Yet he recognizes the still-living dangers of the “curse” and “abasement,” both for individual Jews, himself included, and for the Jewish nation. “I sometimes glimpse in myself, an elderly Jew, a certain craziness of extremism, the crumbling of my mental boundaries. I sometimes think I see evidences in Israeli politics of rationality damaged by memories coming from the Jewish experiences of this century” (p. 19). The violence of Eisen, the Israeli sculptor, at the end of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, provides a fictional example of such damage.
In one respect, Bellow sees the Holocaust as lending force to Jewish values, principally to an aversion to “the modern world of nihilistic abysses and voids” (p. 18). “Through the horror of their sufferings and their responses to suffering [Jews] stand apart from the prevailing nihilism of the West” (p. 19). When true to their culture and their vocation, American Jewish writers “remind the convulsive modern psyche of ancient visions of order or moral law, of something opposed to the prevailing polarity: at one end a hideously vivid consciousness stirred by terror and slaughter, and at the other pole unconsciousness, the light of the critical mind put out” (p. 21). As Bellow says later in the talk, American Jewish writers must give voice to a “Jewish preoccupation with the redemption of mankind from its sins and injustices….Somebody should be representing the decencies….Somebody should remember the eternal background of our ephemeral doings” (p. 29). In such representing and remembering, certainly in Bellow’s case, “contemporary wisdom,” the wisdom of “historians, psychologists, and behavioral scientists,” proves of little assistance. Bellow turns instead “to philosophy, to Kabbala and to Christian hermeticism. And there I find, curiously enough, the
help I have not found among exoteric intellectuals” (p. 23). The esoteric as opposed to exoteric authority Bellow cites in the lecture is Valentin Tomberg (1900–1973), an Estonian Russian mystic. What interests Bellow about Tomberg is his theory of the egregore, “ ‘an artificial being who owes his existence to collective generation from below’…To the Hermetics egregores are phantoms of humanity. That is to say, they are nourished by men collectively. In thinking of a catastrophe like the Holocaust one cannot overlook the possibility that such an evil had its origin in a powerful collective fantasy, a ghostly double or egregore of the German people” (pp. 23–24).56
Tomberg was a Christian mystic, but Bellow describes the willingness to take concepts like the egregore seriously as Jewish. “Since the Old Testament assumes the intercourse of man and spiritual beings, since God, in our Jewish tradition, reveals himself to Man face to face, a respect for revelation has been bred into the Jewish mind. So that when secular education fails us we are tempted by religious thought. Secular accounts of evil—political, anthropological, psychological—do not go deep enough to meet our extraordinary needs….If to a Marxist Nazism is explainable by the failures of capitalism I far prefer the Hermetic serpent or Antichrist and that collective phenomenon, the egregore” (p. 24). In the end, Bellow urges the American Jewish writer to combine the role of “participant-observer in the life of his country” with a more traditional Jewish role, that of tracking “the history of the Jews in our time” (pp. 21–22). These have been his own roles, he implies on the lecture’s last page. “A writer who is an American and a Jew,” he declares, “has been able to explore and develop his own consciousness freely, and in this consciousness, a Jewish preoccupation with the redemption of mankind from its sins and injustices. To hold to this in barbarous times without pretensions is the decent thing to attempt” (pp. 29–30).57
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AFTER THE JPS LECTURE, banquet, and attendant speeches of commemoration (“These got worse and worse with the rank and wealth of the speakers”58), Bellow and Janis traveled to Vermont, and to Bellow’s visiting lectureship at Dartmouth. There and in Vermont, they waited to hear the fate of A Theft, already rejected by Esquire and Atlantic Monthly, soon to be rejected by The New Yorker. In Vermont, Bellow also came up with the idea for The Bellarosa Connection, the second of his novellas to be published in 1989. The idea came to him toward the end of May, partly as an outgrowth of the JPS lecture, partly inspired by a story he had been told at a dinner party in Vermont. In her preface to Bellow’s Collected Stories (2001), Janis Bellow gives a vivid account of this dinner party and of its effect on Bellow.59 The dinner took place at the home of Herb and Libby Hillman and was arranged partly to cheer everybody up after weeks of black flies and bad weather. In the course of the dinner, Bellow raised the question he had been brooding over since the Philadelphia lecture: “Should the Jews feel shame over the Holocaust? Is there a particular disgrace in being victimized?” Janis describes herself as “ferociously opposed to this argument,” which soon gave way to “gags, jokes, old chestnuts” and dessert. As Janis and Bellow were getting ready to leave, Herb Hillman, a retired chemist, recounted the story of a colleague of his who had been a European refugee in the 1940s. Hillman’s story provided Bellow with the starting point for The Bellarosa Connection. On May 24, “the first fine day of the season,” Bellow returned from the studio Frank Maltese had built for him behind his Vermont house; he had an announcement to make: “I’m on to something new. I don’t want to talk about it just yet.” The next day, on the drive to Brattleboro for weekly supplies, he revealed what it was he was on to, as recounted by Janis in her preface:
“I haven’t found a shape for the new story yet, but it’s based on what Herb told us over dinner….A refugee is imprisoned by the Italian fascists, but prior to his imprisonment, having become aware that his arrest is imminent, he has written overseas to the Broadway impresario Billy Rose on the advice of a friend. (In the story as Saul eventually wrote it, the hero makes no such appeal to Billy Rose and in fact has never even heard of him.) A mysterious plan is concocted while he waits in his prison cell….All happens as planned, and with the aid of…emissaries he escapes to the States. There, he is denied entry because of the quotas, but makes it to Cuba. Years later when he is back in the United States he tries to contact Billy Rose and to thank him in person. But it seems Rose, who has helped a lot of people, will have nothing to do with the refugees he has saved, perhaps fearing that they will lean on him or mooch from him indefinitely. The rescued man is quite shaken by the cold shoulder he gets from Broadway Billy” [p. vii].
At this point, only a day after the Hillman dinner, “the story was no longer about Herb’s friend, but already about a character—Harry Fonstein—‘Surviving Harry,’ as Saul would later call him, borrowing from John Berryman’s ‘Dreamsong’ (dedicated to Saul) about ‘Surviving Henry’ ” (p. vii). Several things drew Bellow to the story Herb Hillman told him. In the 1950s, when Bellow was often in Greenwich Village, he knew a man who worked as a ghostwriter for Billy Rose: Bernie Wolfe. Bellow described Wolfe to Janis as “a very bright, very savvy and strange man who took an unusual interest in New York people and their motivations.” If he was to do something with Herb Hillman’s story, Wolfe could act as the point of contact between Rose and the Fonstein character—an idea he later dropped, though Wolfe is mentioned in the story. That Bellow had once seen Billy Rose in Jerusalem and was struck by his appearance was another draw. Janis asked what Rose looked like: “Well, he was small, Jewish; he might have been handsome but for the tense lines in his face. He looked strained, greedy, dissatisfied with himself” (p. vii).60
On May 29, Bellow had pages to read to Janis, including those that recount Fonstein’s escape from prison. He had by now also decided to contrast Fonstein, a European Jew, with the narrator, an American Jew. “He wanted his reader to feel the difference in tone between the two men’s lives. He could mine his own experience and call upon his memories of Wolfe for the American” (p. viii). Bellow had already made use of such a contrast in his story “The Old System” (1968), in which Samuel Braun, the narrator, is a New World, American figure, with much of Bellow’s childhood experience and relatives modeled on Bellow’s Canadian relatives, the Gameroffs, and Isaac Braun, his much older cousin, the story’s central character, is a fictional version of Shmuel Gameroff. Though not a European, Isaac has “the outlook of ancient generations on the New World” (p. 92). A successful businessman from upstate New York, a millionaire like Fonstein, he leads “an ample old-fashioned respectable domestic life on an Eastern European model completely destroyed in 1939 by Hitler and Stalin” (p. 104). In Janis Bellow’s recollection, Bellow had not yet, by May 29, given Fonstein a comparably respectable domestic life. Nor had he dreamed up Fonstein’s wife, Sorella. On June 2, however, he told Janis he’d found a possible model for Fonstein. This was the nephew of his stepmother, Fannie Gebler Bellow, a “chess-playing sober young refugee” (p. viii) of whom Bellow was especially fond. “This late immigrant arrival with his singsong Polish accent, his gift for languages, and his business smarts…would give flavor to his European character, Harry Fonstein” (p. ix).
The memory of the young refugee provided another key ingredient in the novella. Despite Bellow’s fondness for him, they had been out of touch for three decades. Over the winter, Bellow learned that the nephew had been dead for some years. He brooded over the fact that he hadn’t known of the man’s death. In Janis’s summary, what struck Bellow about having lost touch with the nephew was the importance of memory in his life: “Someone occupies a place in your life, takes on some special significance—what it is you can’t really say. But you have made a real connection—this person has come to stand for something in your life. Time goes by, he may even be dead for all you know, and yet you hang on to the idea of the unique importance of that individual. What a shock to discover that memories have become a stand-in for that
warehoused person” (pp.viii–ix) (“warehoused” comes from an earlier phrase in the novella, “the warehouse of intentions” [p. 70]). As the narrator of The Bellarosa Connection broods over the meaning and significance of Fonstein, “who had survived the greatest ordeal in Jewish history” (p. 38), and of his having lost touch with Fonstein, he sets about recollecting and reconstructing Fonstein’s life, to write a memoir about him.
The importance of memory to Bellow, as to the novella’s narrator, is hard to overstate: memory provided him with material for his fiction, and hence with a livelihood; it was a way of keeping the past alive, also a way of keeping alive the people he valued or loved; the vividness and intensity of Bellow’s memories of departed loved ones offered the hope of reunion in an afterlife. Less happily, memory served as reprimand, for misdeeds as well as inattention, for inattention to misdeeds, or to something much worse, as in his failure or unwillingness for many years to face or remember the Holocaust. In a letter to Cynthia Ozick, written on July 17, 1987, Bellow openly admits his culpability in the 1940s and 1950s. He had averted his gaze from the destruction of European Jewry, the central event of modern Jewish history:
I was too busy becoming a novelist to take much note of what was happening in the Forties. I was involved with “literature” and given over to preoccupations with art, with language, with my struggle on the American scene, with claims for recognition of my talent or, like my pals of the Partisan Review, with modernism, Marxism, New Criticism, with Eliot, Yeats, Proust, etc.—with anything except the terrible events in Poland. Growing slowly aware of this unspeakable evasion I didn’t even know how to begin to admit it into my inner life.
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