It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future

by Saul Bellow

  And what were the campaigns that he was running from the twelfth floor of the Cloisters—dressed in his Japanese robe, drinking powerful coffee, and smoking something like five or six packs of cigarettes daily? They were the wars of a frail civilization on the point of being shattered. In the early years of our friendship, I would kid him about this—“You’re holding the whole thing together”—but it presently became clear to me that it was all most serious and most real: that he actually did have what it took to put it all together. He was no mere armchair savior. He had also the moral courage to declare himself, to take positions, to fight. He had the nerve to show American society to itself nakedly, and for this he was denounced—he was blasted, he provoked deadly hostility and became the enemy, the bête noire of armies of kindly, gentle, liberal people here and abroad who held all the most desirable, advanced views on every public question: people who did good works but, through some queer inexplicable shift of psychic currents, were converted into a killer mob. You can lie and be rewarded, you can fake and be elected president, but telling people what is obviously true will not be tolerated.

  His detractors made Allan out to be a rigid conservative bound to a traditional canon. In his famous (or notorious) address at Harvard in 1988, he said that he was not a conservative, adding that he was not trying to curry favor in a university setting where conservatism is anything but popular. “Any superficial reading of my book will show how I differ from both theoretical and practical conservative positions. My teachers—Socrates, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche—could hardly be called conservatives. All foundings are radical, and conservatism always has to be judged by the radical thought or events it intends to conserve.” He went on to say that he was not in any current sense a liberal either, although the preservation of a liberal society was a central concern to him. There was an observable tendency, he went on, to suspect that every theoretical stance was covertly attached to brought to a some party or other, and, he said, it seems we have been brought to a point where the mind itself must be dominated by a spirit of party. Here Allan touched upon one of the most repulsive aspects of modern life. All theoretical speculation is made to look dishonest, a mask for secret connivance and a camouflage for partisanship.

  Fully grounded in his Plato, Machiavelli, and Rousseau, Allan was an academic, but he was a literary man too—he had too much intelligence and versatility, too much humanity, to be confined to a single category. The publication of The Closing of the American Mind had made a public man of him, a celebrity; he had money, he was admired, he acquired enemies and detractors, and he learned what it was to cut a figure and to be attacked for it. Watching him narrowly, I saw with pleasure that he became more and more and more characteristic. Let me give you an example. When he was paralyzed by Guillain-Barré syndrome and sent down to the intensive care unit, he was not expected to survive. I was in his hospital room when he was brought upstairs and returned to his bed. He was no sooner in it than the phone rang—a saleswoman from Loeber Motors was calling. He indicated that he wanted to talk to her and held the phone in his strongly trembling hand. He then began to discuss the upholstery of the Mercedes he had ordered, trying to decide between gray leather and black. Hardly able to speak, he went from the upholstery to the CD player. When all this was settled, he asked my wife to buy cigarettes for him. Some time later, when he had recovered sufficiently to go home, he wanted to be taken in the new Mercedes, by his friend Michael Wu. His doctor said that he couldn’t yet sit up and would have to go in an ambulance, and he agreed in the end, very reluctant to submit.

  He was provided at home with a high-tech sickbed. When he was able at last to sit, he was lifted into a chair by a hydraulic rig—the base of a metal triangle was set under him: something like a bosun’s seat—and he was swung out and lowered into a wheelchair. The essential Bloom was still there, intact—with never a sign of inner weakness. The therapist came to teach him to walk again. He shuffled around the room speaking of Jane Austen or Flaubert, of the Sviatoslav Richter Schubert recordings he had ordered, of the season’s prospects for the Chicago Bulls. He gossiped and bantered. He was sometimes strained but never grim.

  I observed that he was bearing up like a philosopher. He didn’t like these helpful-to-the-sick clichés or conventional get-well encouragements, and I was rather ashamed of myself, to tell the truth. What I was seeing, as I well knew, was the avidity for life particularly keen in him and clearly manifest in his relations to his friends—people exceptionally close to him, like Nathan Tarcov, Werner Dannhauser, Michael Wu, and a great many others (there was room for many a more). On a lesser level, this avidity was apparent also in his consumption of coffee and cigarettes, and in the delight he took in acquiring Persian carpets, Chinese chests, Hermès porcelain, Ultimo cashmere coats, and Mercedes-Benzes. In general, his attitude toward money was that it was something to be thrown away, scattered from the rear platform of luxury trains. With the same keenness, he was presently to resume his tutorials on Xenophon or on Aristotle’s Politics. Teaching was something he could never bring himself to give up.

  And then, still partially paralyzed and unable even to sign his name; he wrote a book. He dictated it over many months to Tim Spiekerman; the early chapters were devoted to Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice, The Red and the Black. He wrote also on a group of Shakespeare’s plays and on Montaigne and finally on Plato’s Symposium. I mention this because it was a remarkable thing for a sick man and a convalescent to do and because it was equally remarkable that a political theorist should choose at such a moment in his life to write about literature. I come of a generation, now largely vanished, that was passionate about literature, believing it to be an indispensable source of illumination of the present, of reflective power. Allan’s friend Marc Fumaroli, in a recent number of the Times Literary Supplement, puts it as it should be put: “Nothing has come to replace this delicate, living, reflective organ, not the different technological media, nor the various disciplines which are described as Human Science.”

  This new book, to be brief about it, was Allan’s sequel to The Closing of the American Mind. I like to think that his free and powerful intelligence, responding to great inner impulses under the stimulus of life-threatening sickness, turned to the nineteenth-century novel, to Shakespeare’s love plays, and to the Platonic Eros, summoning us to the great poetry of affects and asking us to see what has happened to our own deepest feelings in this age of artificial euphorias forced upon us by managers and manipulators.

  For Allan was a deeply feeling, a powerfully feeling man—a superior man. What did the people who reproached him for his elitism want him to do about his evident and—I might add—benevolent superiority? He was not a sentimental person; he was hard on many of us, hard and even cruel, but no less cruel to himself when intellectual probity demanded it.

  I have known and admired many extraordinary persons in the long life I have been granted, but none more extraordinary than Allan Bloom. And I answered spontaneously when I was asked not long ago whether I had known any great men in my time. Yes, to be sure, I had indeed known some—had even loved some of them. I do believe that Allan’s is a clear case of greatness. And the truth is, about those who were taught by him or who grew to be close to him, that he changed us. Nobody was ever the same again. We are here today to testify to that.

  William Arrowsmith

  (1993)

  Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, November 1993.

  In the early fifties, I landed in Princeton—I have never understood how or why this happened. I recall that Richard Blackmur, who was taking a year’s leave, had asked Delmore Schwartz to substitute for him. Delmore, who was very generous to his troubled friends, had wangled a job for me as his assistant. That I made no great impression on Blackmur is hardly surprising, for I had little or nothing to say to him. My mind was on other things; I was sleepwalking, I think. Not quite with it. I shared an apartment with Tom Riggs, a charming, troubled man
who diverted himself by giving parties. The flat smelled like a barroom. Staid neighbors upstairs would occasionally complain. In the end, they found Riggs’s evenings diverting and watched the comings and goings. When I came down with pneumonia late in the term and was taken away in an ambulance, the lady overhead said, “There goes the last of the guests.”

  John Berryman regularly came to these parties; and R.W.B. Lewis and his wife, Nancy, who lived across the hall; and the Monroe Engels, who lived around the corner; and Delmore, and Elizabeth Pollet; and Edmund Wilson, who had returned to Princeton to lecture on the Civil War and study Hebrew. Ralph Ellison occasionally drove down from New York, as did Theodore Roethke, on holiday from Seattle. Among the graduate students who were part of the university community were Robert Towers, Robert Keeley, and Bill Arrowsmith. Of this Princeton group, Arrowsmith was the one I knew best. We had met years before, in Minneapolis, where he was taking an army course in Japanese. I had liked him then, and in Princeton I came to like him better and better. Riggs was a heavy drinker. His wife was divorcing him, and he was in despair. Others had reasons of their own for boozing. I tried to keep up but had no gift for it. Nor did Arrowsmith. We commented to each other on the Fitzgerald beautiful-and-damned atmosphere of Riggs’s parties, which we found agreeable. Wilson, like Wordsworth’s moon looking around in delight, would say, “This is what Greenwich Village was in the twenties.” Bill and I often went outside to escape the noise and walked up and down, talking about the books we were then reading. He was strong on Euripides, but he was not one of those classicists who take sanctuary in the fifth century B.C. and claim immunity forever from the enormities of this present age. I was at that time winding up Augie March, and Bill was kind enough to say that I had hit upon a new way to write about life in the U.S.A. The Hudson Review, of which he was an editor, had published a chapter from my novel. He and John Berryman both saw something in my experiments with language. These experiments influenced Arrowsmith, he said, when he translated the Satyricon.

  But it wasn’t what we had in common as writers that attached me to him. I liked him first of all for his face. It was delicate and feeling, without the effect of effeminacy often produced in men by sensitivity. He had a pale, wide, strong face. His eyes have sometimes been described as small; I saw them rather as long. He had the frame of a strong man, but he was frequently ailing, and his many sicknesses brought a hint of care into his appearance—as if he were braced to defend himself. He was, moreover, highly assertive and obstinate in his opinions but very open to comic suggestion and capable of laughing at himself—a trait I value highly. We started by agreeing passionately that Silone’s Fontamara was a wonderful book and went on from there. Agreement was not a mental matter with us, nor even an emotional coincidence, but was based, as we both understood, on an underlying human premise for which no terms are available. If I was sleepwalking when I was introduced to Blackmur, I was wide awake with Arrow-smith. I was at that time in a state of agitation, and it calmed and rested me to be with him.

  I saw a good deal of Arrowsmith later in Rome. The U.S. Information Service invited me to give a talk in the embassy, on the Via Veneto, and Bill came to hear what I had to say. I had Flaubert on the brain in those days. Emma Bovary, I argued, was in a sense the mother of the art novel. But the art-novel masterpieces by Flaubert’s twentieth-century successors were not accessible to the majority of readers, the great public. There was a rift, pointed out by Wyndham Lewis, between the great-public novel of Dickens and the small-public novel of the modern connoisseurs. Flaubert had assumed that the subject of Madame Bovary was humanly impoverished and that a reduction in human scope must be compensated or justified by brilliant workmanship—by art. My argument was only partly true, I now concede. Emma was elevated in stature by the horrors of her last state, the insupportable suffering that drove her to suicide. Flaubert himself was perhaps mistaken about her insignificance.

  Still, my argument was at least partly right. Bill thought I was making a considerable point. The heavyweight intellectuals of Rome, however, didn’t much care for my lecture. Nicola Chiaromonte settled his chin on his collar and sank in his auditorium seat in silent disapproval. Alberto Moravia brushed my talk aside. Yet they did the right thing afterward. Bill and I were taken by the two of them to a café on the Via Veneto, where they immediately fell into a roaring political dispute (about China, I think). I said to Bill, “Bye-bye, Bovary.”

  Our departure was unnoticed.

  We walked back and forth on the famous via. Again Bill told me how wrong Chiaromonte and Moravia were to dismiss my talk. “They’re a pair of dumb bastards,” he said. “You’re onto something they never heard before. Those lousy intellectuals are so sure they’ve already heard everything, they go stone deaf when something new is said.”

  A panhandler stopped us on a dark corner and got us into a conversation, his pitch being that he was a man of breeding and education. Bill, who took pleasure in the Roman streets, chatted him up. When the panhandler learned that Bill taught Greek and Latin literature, he was ravished, and he brought his hands together at his breast. “Listen to this,” he said. He dived like a seabird into a sea of Latin, and when he surfaced, he turned his head under Bill’s face, looked up, and asked, “Who was I quoting?” “Suetonius?” Bill guessed. “Suetonius!” the panhandler said, full of contempt. “You can’t tell Tacitus from Suetonius? Now hear this.” He spoke with gestures, and we offended him when we laughed. “A second chance for you. Who wrote those lines?” “Pliny,” said Bill. “Cicero,” the panhandler shouted. “Is this how professors are in America? They have no education. It’s disgraceful.”

  We laughed again and gave him money.

  “How good was he?” I said.

  “I counted up to twenty errors. Those texts were neither Suetonius nor Tacitus nor Cicero nor Pliny. Just some stuff kids from a lycée memorize, probably. Well, now we’ve both been put down today, haven’t we.”

  In your seventies, it becomes clear who your psychic perennials have been, the permanent characters of your dramatis personae, the persons you really reckoned with and took into your feelings, the ones you should be happy to see in the afterlife. Bill Arrowsmith is on my list. Has been for many decades.

  Part Six

  IMPRESSIONS AND NOTIONS

  A Half Life

  (1990)

  Bostonia magazine, November / December 1990.

  Ideas come in two different ways—conscious ideas acquired through education and reading, and things that pop into your head willy-nilly. When were you first conscious of having an idea bit you—an idea that went beyond “Let’s go down and get bubble gum”? —Keith Botsford, Bostonia magazine

  I certainly wasn’t conscious of ideas as such before I was ten. I did have ideas of some sort earlier, but they were the sort of primitive metaphysical ideas a small child has. —Saul Bellow

  Such as?

  Sitting on the curbstone, looking at the sky, thinking: Where did it all come from? Why was I here? Epistemological questions. Of course, that’s how many philosophers nowadays would like to handle such questions: essentially as childlike epistemology.

  Were ideas much batted about in your early childhood?

  I don’t know that they were batted about. They were just present. At the age of about four, we began to study Hebrew and read the Old Testament, but we didn’t necessarily consider the idea of creation and the present, nor where the world had come from and the explanation for its existence. I felt very cozy with God, the primal parent, and by the time I was up to the Patriarchs (I was five or six years old), I felt they were very much like members of my family. I couldn’t readily distinguish between a parent and the heroic ancestors—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the sons of Jacob, especially Joseph.

  So shul played a part.

  It wasn’t so much shul as the Torah.

  In the first stages, did you feel you were challenging these ideas, or were you largely accepting?

  No; it nev
er occurred to me that reality could be anything but what I was being offered. Not then.

  When did that notion strike you?

  Well, I had a great shock at about eight. I was hospitalized for a half year or so. A missionary lady came and gave me a New Testament for children. I read that. I was very moved by the life of Jesus, and I recognized him as a fellow Jew. I think the hospital drove a lot of that home to me. Because I’d never been away from my parents before.

  But had you felt the fragility of life? Did you then?

  Oh, yes. Death was something very familiar from an early age. During the great flu epidemic, my brother Sam and I used to sit in the front window, watching the procession of funerals.

  This was in Montreal?

  Yes. I can remember the corbillard [hearse], the bands, the funeral marches, and the cortège with its black horses.

  So memory is part of the way we form ideas, isn’t it? Much of our thinking does spring from remembering very specific things.

  I have to think whether what I’ve learned is true. I never suspected that it was ever anything but true. Then it was brought home to me that other approaches were possible. I had to struggle with the charge against the Jews that they had been responsible for the crucifixion.

  But that wasn’t implicit in the New Testament. How did you come to that?

  Oh, yes, because there were these passages in which the Pharisees especially were prominent as the enemies of Jesus. The Jews preferred Barabbas.

  But in Jewish terms, Jesus was another Jew. Consequently it wasn’t anti-Semitic in the modern sense of the word. It wasn’t anti-Jewish.