Love and Strife (1965-2005)

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Love and Strife (1965-2005) Page 93

by Zachary Leader


  59. Susan Bellow to Dr. Sandor Abend, 7 May 1979.

  60. In a letter of 27 June 1996 to Andrew Wylie, Daniel explained his having to testify and what happened after he did:

  My father had sued for my custody, on the grounds that my mother was allowing me to wander the streets at all hours. This was not strictly true. On the stand, under cross examination by my father’s lawyer, I said I would rather move to New York with my mom, and so we did, the evidence against her being weak and the judge being unwilling to rule against me.

  In New York, on the old upper West Side of kosher butchers and bodegas and movie six-plexes, I realized that my mother, upon whom I had always relied, had no better grip on things than I did. As she struggled in a dead-end city job, I had trouble in school….I skipped a lot of class, wandering the streets and watching people, scared to death half the time.

  61. SB was convinced Daniel did not need further psychiatric care. In a letter of February 9, 1979, to Dr. Sandor Abend, the psychiatrist who was to testify as to whether Daniel needed more therapy, Bellow insisted, “I have never refused Daniel anything that might help him. The prospect of more psychiatry, however, does not cheer me. Daniel has seen some eight or ten psychiatrists over the years, and I am not at all sure that they were able to do much for him….When Daniel’s last therapist died, Susan consulted five child psychiatrists in Chicago. Each of them opined that Daniel was not ready to resume treatment.”

  62. Charlie’s condition recalls Wordsworth in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, on the age’s “craving for extraordinary incident…this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation.”

  63. The Coleridge quotation is from “The Eolian Harp” (1795): “Oh! The one life within us and abroad, / Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, / A light in sound, a sound-like power in light, / Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere.” Barfield’s book is What Coleridge Thought (1971).

  64. SB to Owen Barfield, 25 February 1976. Steiner identified six essential exercises, one for the cultivation of objectivity; one for the cultivation of will; one for the control of feeling, in which one practiced expressing a quiet or contained emotion; one for the cultivation of positivity; one for the cultivation of open-mindedness (the how in this case is not specified); and one for harmony, which involves practicing the other five exercises in various combinations to find a balance between them. Other Steinerian exercises involve drawing the same landscape or plant over a year, and reviewing the day’s events in one’s mind, at night going backward in sequence, an exercise Bellow especially valued and taught to his sons and to various wives and girlfriends. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Fran Gendlin remembers performing Steinerian memory exercises with SB in the early 1970s. For more on the exercises see http://steinerbooks.org/​research/​archive/​outline_of_esoteric_science/​outline_of_esoteric_science.pdf.

  65. In a letter of 2 July 1976 to Howard Nemerov, SB suggests that it was Barfield who brought him to Steiner: “I admire Barfield and I owe him a great deal….Yes, he did get me to read Steiner. I’m still at it.”

  66. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 65.

  67. The G. B. Tennyson quotation comes from Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning, a documentary he and David Lavey co-wrote and produced in 1996. It was directed and edited by David Levin and is available via the Owen Barfield Web site at http://davidlavery.net/​barfield/.

  68. Accessible but ineffable, gestured at in vague strivings, as in Wordsworth’s “a presence,” “a motion and a spirit,” “a sense sublime,” from “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798).

  69. William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–20), plate 30, ll. 20–21.

  70. These are the concluding words of William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgement (1810), a prose description of an 1808 painting of the same name exhibited by Blake in 1810. SB’s quote about the relation of looks to character come from an interview he gave in 1987 to Sigmund Koch, a University Professor (as SB would become) at Boston University. See “Abbreviations Used in the Notes” for further details of the interview.

  71. Like Peter Demay, however, Professor Scheldt worked in science and technology, having been “a physicist at the old Armour Institute, an executive of IBM, a NASA consultant who improved the metal used in space ships” (p. 255).

  72. These details about Peter Demay (not Lemay, as in earlier biographies) come from interviews with William Hunt as well as Hunt’s emails to the author, 12, 14 July, 3, 11 August, and 16 September 2010. I have also benefited from a typescript Hunt sent me of a talk he gave on 18 September 2009 (“Talk Given at Rudolf Steiner Library”) about Bellow and anthroposophy. The library in question was the Rudolf Steiner Library in Ghent, New York.

  73. Hunt’s poems have been published in Poetry, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, New American Writing, and The Nation. In 1974, he received the Langston Hughes Memorial Award from Poetry magazine; in 1967, he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Among the places he has taught creative writing are Loyola University in Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois.

  74. Hunt says he was drawn to Steiner and anthroposophy for the same reasons Bellow was. Both were distressed “by the direction the country seemed hell-bent on pursuing,” a direction depicted in Bellow’s novels Mr. Sammler’s Planet and The Dean’s December. As Hunt puts it in his “Talk Given at Rudolf Steiner Library,” on reflection not altogether tactfully, “his [SB’s] interest and mine in Steiner and Anthroposophy was like the behavior of shipwreck victims bobbing in the water and reaching out for any bits of floating debris to hold them afloat” (p. 3).

  75. Also in private conversations. As Hunt recalled, in an email to the author, 12 July 2015: “He went nearly over the edge with anger the few times I said anything about his writing. So we mostly talked about Steiner, about Chicago politics, and about other matters.” See also SB to Herman Kogan, 22 August 1976: “You know how it is—it gives me the willies to face cultural gatherings in Chicago.”

  76. According to Hunt in an interview: “Peter said that while he was unconscious from the heart attack he experienced a specific joy: ‘I felt that I was about to learn all that I ever wanted to know.’ But then someone began pounding on his chest to get the heart started up again. Peter said, ‘So then I regained consciousness—I was never so disappointed in all my life.’ ”

  77. Owen Barfield, Unancestral Voice (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 163. Henceforth cited within the text by page numbers.

  78. See Edward Mendelson, “The Obedient Bellow,” New York Review of Books, 28 April 2011 (a review of Benjamin Taylor, ed., Saul Bellow: Letters). The entirety of the SB-Barfield correspondence is reprinted and discussed in Simon Blaxland-de-Lange, Romanticism Come of Age: A Biography of Owen Barfield (Forest Row: Temple Lodge, 2006), pp. 49–66.

  79. Like some of Barfield’s other books, including Saving the Appearances, Worlds Apart takes the form of a fictional dialogue, in this case between a physicist, a biologist, a psychiatrist, a lawyer-philologist, a linguistic analyst, a theologian, a retired Waldolf schoolteacher, and a young man employed at a rocket-research station. During a period of three days, the characters discuss and debate spiritual issues.

  80. Wayne Booth, The Vocation of a Teacher: Rhetorical Occasions, 1967–1988 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 256.

  81. The title of the review was “East, West, and Saul Bellow.” Towards magazine was published periodically from 1977 to 1989 by Clifford Monks, an English-born Waldorf educator living in California. Its aim was “to explore and make better known the work of Owen Barfield, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wolfgang Von Goethe, Rudolf Steiner and related authors” (see http://davidlavery.net/​barfield/​Barfield_Resources/​Towards/​Towards.html).

  82. See Blaxland-de-L
ange, Romanticism Come of Age, p. 62, which paraphrases this objection. As Barfield saw it, SB preferred “to regard the modern disintegration of the individual human spirit as an incentive to study the disintegration of society,” as opposed to the other way around, “which would by implication be Barfield’s way.”

  83. Ibid., p. 65.

  84. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 43. See also SB to M. Thomas (unidentified), 6 March 1985: “I have never been able to accept the idea of random collisions and am revolted by the thought that our existence is accounted for by probability theory. It makes creation feel so boring. But natural scientists are in love with this hypothesis. Their preference may have some connection with the vulgar origins of most of them. My origins are probably as vulgar as theirs, but my aspirations are as lofty as can be.”

  85. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 18.

  86. There are other instances of Bellow’s caution or reservation. In 1983, at the age of sixty-eight, Bellow was invited to address a seminar on Steiner at the Goethe Institute in Chicago. The seminar was also to be addressed by Hagen Biesantz, a member of the Vorstand at the Goetheanum in Dornach (Bellow had met Biesantz on a second visit to Dornach, in April 1977). One of the organizers of the seminar was Traute Lafrenz Page, head of the Esperanza School and a prominent Chicago anthroposophist (also, in the late 1930s, a member of the White Rose, twice imprisoned by the Gestapo for anti-Hitler activities). In declining the invitation to speak, Bellow confessed to Page, who was only four years his junior, “that he was too old to get his head around the subject of Steiner sufficiently to speak about him in public.” Hunt, the source of this anecdote, partly connects Bellow’s withdrawal from Steiner and anthroposophy to an increasing interest in Judaism and in Jewish mysticism, with a concomitant distrust, perhaps unconscious, of the Christian element in Steiner’s and Barfield’s thinking, their belief in Christ’s incarnation as a key moment in human evolution, not only redeeming the Fall but unifying and inspiring all religions. Support for Hunt’s view comes from SB’s letter of 23 July 1990 to the anthroposophist Rudi Lissau: “One remark in your letter is certainly straight to target. I have always had peculiarly Jewish difficulties with Christianity in all its forms….I have read much and thought much about the Jewish side of life during two Christian millennia, about being one of those on whom so much evil has been cast and I can’t help but trace some of this evil back to the Gospels themselves. On this question none of the Steiner literature has satisfied me.”

  Another anecdote from Hunt comes from near the end of SB’s life. Hunt had told him of a meeting he had had with James Atlas in which Atlas referred to SB’s “anthroposophic episode.” “Bellow laughed heartily at that. He repeated the word ‘episode’ and laughed more.” Yet, in one sense, Atlas was right. “Are you an anthroposophist?” Hunt heard an interviewer ask Bellow in the early 1980s. “The tone of the question sounded a bit like the McCarthy era question ‘Are you or have you ever been a Communist?’ ” Bellow’s answer was “I’m trying to become one” (from Hunt’s “Talk Given at Rudolf Steiner Library,” p. 2). In 1985, Ruth Miller asked Bellow if Steiner and Barfield “had been of much use to him during those years of turmoil [from 1976 to 1982, between Humboldt’s Gift and The Dean’s December]. Bellow replied no. He was less involved in anthroposophy since the friend with whom he had long discussions died”—Peter Demay, who died in 1983 (Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination, p. 231).

  6. THE “CHICAGO BOOK” AND THE DEAN’S DECEMBER

  1. SB, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection (New York: Viking Penguin, 1994), p. 117 (henceforth cited as SB, IAAU).

  2. Rosenberg’s essay and SB’s reaction to it are discussed in chapter 7 of To Fame and Fortune, pp. 273–74.

  3. In the first of SB’s two Tanner Lectures, delivered in Oxford in May 1981, at Brasenose College, he quotes Wyndham Lewis in America and Cosmic Man (1949). The cultural monuments of big American cities, Lewis writes, include “big universities, theaters, art schools, and a Symphony Orchestra—the latter de rigueur. There are large libraries, usually very good museums….But all this immense apparatus of culture, of learning and taste, is a discreet screen to cover the void….And, of course, such things are there to advertise the city, not to promote letters, fine arts and science” (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Sterling M. McMurrin [Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982], pp. 178–79).

  4. See Paul Carroll, “Bellow’s Culture Shock,” Chicago, September 1977, the source of all subsequent quotes from Carroll.

  5. The names of the signatories are not given in the Maroon, nor has the paper any record of them.

  6. I could find no such claim in the published version of the lecture in IAAU.

  7. For discussion of “Acatla,” see chapter 6 of To Fame and Fortune, pp. 231–32; for discussion of “The Very Dark Trees,” see the same chapter, pp. 222–23, 238–42.

  8. Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, Social Change and Prejudice (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), an updating of their 1950 collaboration, The Dynamics of Prejudice.

  9. Richard Biernacki, “Faculty S. Africa Reaction Mixed: Bellow Takes Human Rights Stand,” Chicago Maroon, 4 April 1978.

  10. For a detailed account of the university’s policies concerning Woodlawn, which between 1950 and 1960 changed from 86 percent white to 86 percent black, see John Hall Fish, Black Power/White Control: The Struggle of the Woodlawn Organization in Chicago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 15: “The University, in danger of being engulfed by a blighted and black neighborhood, spearheaded a major renewal and rehabilitation effort as the only alternative to moving from the area. The goal of the renewal program was to stop the cycle of deterioration and to develop a stable, integrated, middle- and upper-income neighborhood which would be compatible with the style and goals of an academic institution.” In 1960, as part of this effort, the university proposed to expand its campus to the south, clearing a one-block-deep and one-mile-wide section of Woodlawn. The university already owned 60 percent of the land it hoped to develop, and most of the buildings to be cleared, it argued, could be termed “blighted” or “slum” properties.

  11. In January 1972, perhaps to counter such accusations, the university gave three hundred thousand dollars to the Black Culture Center “to improve black social life,” prompting the Maroon to ask “why blacks should have a social life when no one else does” (according to the timeline accompanying Mark Wallach, “The University: Notes on the 70s,” Chicago Maroon, 22 January 1980).

  12. SB often worked on several manuscripts at once. In the period 1977–82, in addition to the “Chicago Book” and its offshoots, he was also at work on “Far Out,” an unpublished novel that survives in a typescript of a hundred pages. These pages were sent by Harriet Wasserman to Harvey Ginsburg of Harper & Row, the novel’s contracted publisher. “Far Out” is set in the 1950s and is discussed most fully in To Fame and Fortune, chapter 6, pp. 215–16, and chapter 10, pp. 395–97.

  13. Interview with William Kennedy, “If Saul Bellow Doesn’t Have a True Word to Say, He Keeps His Mouth Shut,” Esquire, February 1982. A fuller typescript of this interview can be found among the SB Papers in the Regenstein. The interview was conducted in the summer of 1981 but not printed until February 1982, the month when The Dean’s December was published.

  14. Each of these topics offers examples of corruption, incompetence, or malfeasance. Michael Bilandic lost the mayorship in part because of the disastrous job the city did in cleaning up two terrible snowstorms before the election. SB saved a Mike Royko column from the Chicago Daily News that discussed, with knowing Chicago irony, what went wrong. Peter Schivarelli, who was in charge of the city’s Snow Command, had been passed over by Bilandic, in favor of a comparably “connected” figure from Buffalo. “If I were one of Schivarelli’s many Chicago mob friends,” Royko wrote, “
I would be hurt that he didn’t think of me first.” In a section of “the Chicago Book” entitled “Notes on Meeting with Sen. Neistein—April 30, 1979,” Neistein gives SB a different reason for Bilandic’s loss. “Bilandic just didn’t belong to the Irish City Hall gang. Those are the boys who understand the art of politics. They know what to do for everybody. Change Crawford to Pulaski Road for the Poles, parade for the Puerto Ricans, a couple of judgeships for the Jews—you’ve got to give them that—and keep all the main things for themselves. You’ve got to hand it to them, they’re born with the knack” (p. 3).

  15. See Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson, eds., The New Journalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), and “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism,’ ” New York, 14 February 1972 (reprinted as the first of the four Wolfe essays that make up the first section of the 1973 book, entitled “Manifesto”). In an interview in the May 1997 issue of Playboy, SB was asked about Tom Wolfe’s jokey call to arms. He was not in good humor at the time: “Yes, and the Huns were taught to read English and then they bought The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was a whole series of the most stunning billboards along the highway I ever saw. Let me tell you something: I’m a Jew, and when Jews hear the language of the Holocaust, because that’s what it is—the world will be Novelrein, just as Hitler wanted to make Germany Judenrein, OK?—I say to myself it’s all meshuga. I am used to hearing this eliminationist talk.”

  16. Quoted in Eugene Kennedy, “Bellow Awaits Heat from a Novel of Hard Knocks,” Chicago Tribune, 10 January 1982.

  17. See “Notes on Meeting with Lt. Col. Duane Swimley, 21 April 1979,” in the “Chicago Book” papers in the Regenstein (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

 

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