Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Relations between author and agent also improved, without any of the difficulties there had been with Wasserman, including those experienced by Janis, whom she treated, according to Adam, “like a servant.”28 The only tricky moment between Wylie and Bellow occurred when Wylie acquired James Atlas as a client. “I had not negotiated Jim’s relationship with Saul, and I had not negotiated his contract for the book….Later, when the Bellows became disenchanted with Jim’s biography, obviously, the issue was raised: How could you represent him? And I said, How could I not? I’m his agent….So I had conversations with Saul and Janis, advising them. I had conversations with Jim, advising him….It was difficult for Saul. I know he got paranoid at one point, and I tried to calm him down.”29

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  ON DECEMBER 5, 1995, two weeks before gallbladder surgery in Boston, Bellow returned to the University of Chicago to deliver a talk to an audience of a thousand in Mandel Hall. The title of the talk, cosponsored by the Committee on Social Thought, was “Literature in a Democracy: From Tocqueville to the Present.” It began with memories of Bellow’s undergraduate days at the University of Chicago—of Mandel Hall in particular, where he claimed to have spent more hours playing pool than he could afford, “trying to master reverse-English while my conscience grew more and more swollen.”30 As in “By the St. Lawrence,” the talk draws heavily on “old troops,” and not only in the opening pages of reminiscence. The claims of the novel are once more forwarded, even though the present is an age in which “we, the likes of us, are its material” (no Julius Caesars, etc.). So, too, the claims of the imagination (as opposed to “ideas,” “cognitions,” “ideologies”) (p. 4). The dangers of distraction are again emphasized (“around us ideas proliferate madly”) (p. 8). Tocqueville does not figure until the second half of the talk, when he is quoted as saying that in democratic America “each man instantly sees all his fellows when he surveys himself” and that “in the end democracy diverts the imagination from all that is external [social rank, wealth] and fixes it on man alone….Here, and here alone, the rude sources of poetry among such nations are to be found” (p. 10).

  For Bellow, Tocqueville is thus “a younger contemporary of Wordsworth, and like Tocqueville Wordsworth in his lyrical ballads wrote of simple people….In low, rustic life Wordsworth looked for ‘the essential passions of the heart’…aiming at a poetry purged of civilized prejudices” (p. 11). Toward the end of the talk, Bellow deplores “contemporary writers functioning as mere illustrators for leading thinkers. With a little practice you can see easily where these writers are coming from philosophically” (p. 17). Where they should be coming from is the human heart, “the inner life.” In an expanded version of the talk, published in a 1999 Festschrift for David Grene, Bellow describes the inner life as opposed not only to the exposition or illustration of “leading thinkers” but to “the paltriness of our daily doings, the events we read in the papers and watch on television” (an allusion to Tocqueville’s complaint about the “paltry interests” that crowd the lives of most Americans). The inner life may be “intimidated and frightened,” but it “nevertheless persists,” in the work of true novelists and poets, the source of “a multitude of mysterious qualities and powers.”31

  Richard Stern, who was at the lecture, pronounced his old friend “about 75% of what he was a dozen years ago, maybe a bit less.” When they were alone, “he was much the old Saul, inquisitive, full of memories.”32 In the run-up to the talk, Bellow was characteristically finicky, revising it at least five times “and still fiddling with it just before he eased on stage.” The talk was difficult in places (the printed version is also difficult), and “not everyone absorbed every word,” according to the reporter from the Chicago Tribune. “To some it was enough to be in Bellow’s presence, to welcome him back to the place where his career took off.” As Stern told the reporter, laying it on thick: “If Shakespeare were going to make his last appearance somewhere, wouldn’t you want to see him?”33 In the course of making a case for instinct or the heart over intellect or ideas, Bellow refers to dozens of works and writers, including philosophers and social theorists as well as novelists and poets. He points to Crime and Punishment as illustrating the dangers of intellectual hubris, as when Raskolnikov compares himself “not only to Napoleon but to Mohammed and other founders.” For Bellow, “Raskolnikov is fighting the impotency of thought. As he lies in his attic revolving entire universes in his mind, he is incapable of freeing his sister from her humiliations or of obtaining a few rubles for his rent. His crime is committed, and he swings his murderous axe, in order to save his intellectual honor” (p. 7).

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  BELLOW HAD RECENTLY REREAD Crime and Punishment, for the first time in forty years. He did so because it figured in a course he was to teach in January 1996 at BU, “The Ambitious Young Man” (other texts for the course were Bellow staples: Père Goriot, The Red and the Black, Great Expectations, Sister Carrie, and The Great Gatsby). Chris Walsh was by this time Bellow’s assistant, but he took no part in conducting the class. He did, however, devise instructions for student papers, under Bellow’s supervision. The instructions give a sense of the mood Bellow sought to establish in class and of his manner with students. On the question of due dates, the instructions were firm. “As a favor to you, no late papers will be accepted.” In choosing a topic for final papers, students were advised to “consult with Professor Bellow.” The topic they chose to write on had to be “substantial enough to justify your essay’s length” (eight to twelve pages). One topic was banned: “No papers on Color in The Great Gatsby, please.” As for titles, they should be “brief but informative,” or, better still, “brief but provocatively informative, without being contrivedly cute.” The main stylistic advice was “write concisely.” More specifically, verbs should be “strong, expressive, active,” and special care should be taken with words “that seem ready at hand,” including “parameters transcend irony ironic dichotomy mindset thus therefore furthermore relationship showcase paradox internal parallel closure utilize it would seem one might argue.” In addition, students were encouraged to “take special care with every other word you use.” The instructions end with the heading “Ignore”: “Ignore the above, and try to write in your own voice. Read your paper aloud, to a friend if possible. Then read the above. Revise. Don’t lose your own voice. Revising helps singing.”34

  In addition to teaching, Bellow was a responsible colleague, assessing job candidates, fellowship applicants, marking comprehensive examinations (the equivalent of “fundamentals” exams at the Committee on Social Thought). He also involved himself in the politics of the University Professors program. The director of the program, Claudio Véliz, a Chilean economic historian, had been appointed by Silber in 1990. Rosanna Warren—poet, daughter of Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark, and one of the younger University Professors—remembers a banquet at which Véliz rose to offer a toast to Pinochet, at the time under house arrest in Britain. Véliz ran the University Professors program as his personal fiefdom, “wanted to control everything. No faculty meetings, everything private.” The arts-and-literature group among the University Professors (Warren, Bellow, Roger Shattuck, William Arrowsmith, Geoffrey Hill, Donald Carne-Ross, Mary Ann McGrail) were soon openly hostile to him. There were disputes over fellowships for arts-and-literature students; hiring preferences; bias in favor of social-science faculty; the intellectual standing of new hires; extravagant banquets and glitzy “conversaciones” (“flummery,” in Christopher Ricks’s phrase). At one point, relations reached the boiling point, and Silber called an emergency meeting. In the course of the meeting, which was held in the wood-paneled splendor of the president’s office, Véliz insulted Roger Shattuck, who told him, “In another era, Claudio, I would challenge you to a duel.” Shattuck was serious. During these crises and confrontations, according to Warren, Bellow “was very generous as a colleague….He got inv
olved. He wasted a lot of his precious energy and time fighting shoulder to shoulder with us….He cared about the quality of the program he was teaching in.” Warren credits Bellow with giving the arts-and-literature group “a sense of solidarity with each other.”

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  A YEAR AFTER BELLOW’S RECOVERY from the poisoned-fish episode, he and Janis flew to Florida to attend the wedding of his youngest son, Daniel, and Heather Hershman, who had recently completed an M.A. in criminal justice at American University in Washington, D.C. The family all liked Heather. To Janis she was “always a love to Saul and to me. Quiet, kind, sensitive, generous.” The wedding was held on Sunday, January 14, 1996, at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, the Art Deco palace where Al Capone stayed before his arrest for income-tax evasion in 1931. Heather’s father, a Miami physician, spared no expense. The three hundred guests dined from lavish buffet tables organized by region (Middle Eastern, Chinese, Southwestern), drinking champagne and twenty-year-old Scotch.35 Janis remembers getting “all gussied up….It was a very swank occasion.” Adam described it as a wedding “out of Goodbye, Columbus, which amused everybody.” Bellow hadn’t seen Susan since Daniel’s bar mitzvah, and Adam was relieved to find that at the wedding he was “gracious to her, he was on good behavior.” Daniel, however, remembers his father’s refusal to go to the rehearsal dinner hosted by Susan, dining instead at a “fancy restaurant.” (Daniel later learned from Lesha that Bellow had “tried to talk the rest of the family into boycotting it as well, and Lesha gave him hell for it.”) Only at the last minute did Daniel ask Bellow to escort Susan down the aisle during the ceremony. “I didn’t ask you before,” Daniel admitted, “because I didn’t want to give you a chance to back out on standing up with me.” As he put it in an interview, “He had to take his medicine like a big boy.” When Daniel stomped on the glass, “everyone said mazel tov, and then there was dancing with chairs up in the air, and it was a tremendous party.”

  Bellow had been determined to attend the wedding and to behave well at it, despite having a note from his doctor saying that he was too weak to expose himself to fatigue. As he wrote to Sophie Wilkins on January 19, 1996, “I didn’t want the kid accusing me of disappearing on all important occasions. So I did it all, including a second trip to the altar with my ex-wife, Daniel’s mother. There wouldn’t have been a Stoic in all of Rome who wouldn’t have congratulated me on my philosophic poise.” Father, son, and stepmother had recovered from the painful confrontation in Vermont. Or, rather, they had got over it enough to be civil, even cordial, at the wedding. Nor were there difficulties with Bellow’s other sons, with his two wives, with Lesha and her family, or with Maggie Simmons. “Who was that attractive woman you were talking to?” Susan’s friend Margo Howard asked her. “One of Saul’s old mistresses,” Susan said. “During whose marriage?” the friend asked. “Mine,” she answered.

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  SOME MONTHS AFTER THE WEDDING, in the spring of 1996, relations between Daniel and Bellow were tested again, by an autobiographical story Daniel wrote and sent to Andrew Wylie for comment. Before doing so, he showed Bellow what seems to have been a proposal for the story “where I name names and refer to actual events” (presumably to be altered in the story itself). Bellow objected to parts of the proposal, and in an undated letter Daniel responded to his objections. “After careful consideration,” he writes, he has decided to rework “the discussion of my parents. I believe I make it clear I am not talking about the way things are now, but about the way they were then.” The parents, he reminds Bellow, won’t be the main focus of the story, but they need to be characterized “in order to show how the narrator leaves home and begins his journey of self-discovery.” The memories Daniel will recount are as painful to him as to Bellow, but, then, “describing our own experiences in literature can be hurtful to those around us, as you know.” His justification sounds familiar: “My career and my desire to be a writer must be weighed against my immortal soul and the effect of my actions on those I love. In 100 years, we’ll all be dead.” The letter ends with controlled feeling: “I was glad this morning that you were still speaking to me. I hope your visit to the doctor was not serious. I doubt you would tell me anyway. I look forward to seeing you this weekend.”

  After hearing from Wylie that he liked the story, Daniel sent him a rewritten version, on June 27, 1996. His parents appear now, he writes in a cover letter, only briefly, in two “tantalizing glimpses.” Daniel then describes his father to Wylie in a way that captures not only the complexity of his feelings about him but the state of their current relationship:

  My father, whom you know, is a brilliantly talented writer and thinker who should never have been allowed around small children. His reaction when he read the story: “You little bastard! I knew you were up to no good, and this just filled me in on the details.”

  My attitude towards him has mellowed in recent years as I realized that while he never took me sledding, he made sure I had read Dickens, Twain, Conrad, London and Kipling before I was 12. What I took for neglect and cruelty I now recognize as the standard Russian Jewish child rearing method, seldom seen in this country anymore.36

  A similar mixture of feelings underlie several stories Daniel tells about his father’s political attitudes. In the years since his graduation from Wesleyan University in 1987, Daniel had worked as a reporter in New England. At the time of his wedding, he was covering politics and government as a city-hall reporter on The Berkshire Eagle, a seven-day morning newspaper in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Daniel’s politics lay somewhere between Adam’s on the right and Greg’s on the left, but at times he could say things that set his father’s teeth on edge. “He hated to hear me repeat propaganda. Almost to the point of physical violence he hated it. He would say, ‘No son of mine is going to be ignorant about this. Read this book and don’t talk to me until you’re finished.’ ”37 What Bellow especially liked was when Daniel’s articles attacked government, either civic or national. “Pop loved all this. He thought my ideals were a bunch of misty bullshit, but he liked to watch me make trouble. When I worked for the [Brattleboro] Reformer, he read my stories every day. If a couple of days went by and I didn’t have a by-line in the paper, he’d call me up and say, ‘Are you alright, is everything okay, you sick?’ Once he said to me, ‘I’ve been watching you and you’re very interesting. You don’t join the organizations. You are not a joiner. You’re a cat who walks by himself….So I’m very proud of you.”38

  Daniel describes Bellow as “a great chain-yanker” in argument. “He liked to dig a pit and cover it with branches so you’d come walking along, whistling away, and fall right in it. Then he would stand at the edge and watch you as you sort of thrashed around. He liked that.”39 But he could, of course, also lose control. Daniel recounts a conversation about Bernie Sanders, at the time the mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Daniel followed Sanders for the Reformer and “knew how Bernie would say one thing in Brattleboro and another in White River Junction.” When Bellow launched into a “tirade,” denouncing Sanders and the political left for its nihilism, insincerity, and hypocrisy, Daniel thought the tirade directed at him, despite his having voiced doubts about the mayor. “Did Abbie Hoffman just walk into the room behind me?” he asked Bellow. “I mean, who are you talking to? Don’t you know me any better than that?” Bellow stopped fulminating, “and on the way to the car, he apologized. Pop was the best. I’m so proud to be his son.”40

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  A YEAR AFTER THE JULY 1995 publication of “By the St. Lawrence,” Bellow was back at work on “Marbles.” He had never abandoned it, even in hospital, when weak and despairing. “On the first night when he almost died,” Janis recalled, in a journal entry of June 1, 1995, “he was talking to me about the book. Before and after, and the next day in MICU [Medical Intensive Care Unit] too.” At one point while in the hospital, according to Ja
nis, Bellow announced he “would never go back to it,” a view connected to the darkness of the New Guinea scenes he had been working on in St. Martin, involving cannibalism, the disease called kuru, and the findings of the American physician and medical researcher Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, whose journals he’d brought with him from Boston. Gajdusek had also won a Nobel Prize in 1976, in Physiology or Medicine (shared with Baruch S. Blumberg), and he and Bellow had kept in touch. His best-known work was on kuru, a degenerative disorder of the nervous system that turned the brain to sponge. In New Guinea, where Gajdusek conducted his research, the spread of kuru, known as “the laughing death” (for the smilelike rictus it produced), was connected to the practice of funerary cannibalism, the ritualistic consumption of the brains of deceased relatives. This connection Gajdusek proved by infecting primates with liquefied brain samples from New Guinea natives. Gajdusek’s Nobel citation described his discoveries as representing an “extraordinarily fundamental advance in human neurology and in mammalian biology and microbiology,” an advance crucial to the investigation of other forms of spongiform diseases of the brain, including bovine and human forms of “mad cow disease.”