At the Barons’, the living room furniture had been pushed to the side and the floor swept. It was on the floor that the Bellows were to sleep. Flora welcomed the family with deep feeling and a meal of “smoked Great Lakes whitefish.”15 “Cousin Flora was like her brother,” Bellow recalled, “large, handsomely expressive, much moved by our coming. The table was set for us, the beds were ready. She and her round, bald, smiling husband Baron with his blinking tic—these large people gave us tacit assurances that we had come to a place where human qualities were what they were elsewhere.”16 In “Cousins,” Bellow uses Flora Baron as a model for Shana Metzger, “a person of great force … a wide woman, a kind of human blast furnace” (p. 200). In Augie March, she becomes Anna Coblin, as memorable as her brother. Anna’s “great size and terrific energy of constitution … produced all kinds of excesses. Even physical ones: moles, blebs, hairs, bumps in her forehead, huge concentration in her neck” (like her brother’s “thick band of muscle as original as a bole”). What immediately identified Anna as modeled on Flora, according to relatives, was her “spiralling reddish hair” (Louis Dworkin’s hair, a crested Iroquois or Mohican stripe, was also red, as is Shana Metzger’s in “Cousins”). Anna’s hair, an index of her energy, sprang “with no negligible beauty and definiteness from her scalp, tangling as it widened up and out, cut ducktail fashion in the back and scrawled out high above her ears” (p. 399).17
With so many relatives crowded into the Barons’ small bungalow—five adults, including cousin Jack, and five children, including the Barons’ daughter, Rose—housekeeping was difficult, as it was at the Coblins’. “The filth of the house,” writes Bellow in Augie, “and particularly of the kitchen, was stupendous. Nevertheless, swollen and fire-eyed, slow on her feet, shouting incomprehensibly on the telephone, and her face as if lit by that gorgeous hair which finally advanced her into royalty, [Anna] somehow kept up with her duties” (pp. 401–2). Chief among these duties was the provision of meals. These meals were “of amazing character altogether and of huge quantity.… Bowls of macaroni without salt or pepper or butter or sauce, brain stews and lung stews, calves’-foot jelly with bits of calves’ hair and sliced egg, cold pickled fish, crumb-stuffed tripes, canned corn chowder, and big bottles of orange pop. All this went down well with Five Properties, who spread the butter on his bread with his fingers” (p. 405). Bellow plays up the crudity of the Coblins for comic effect, but the prevailing emotion in these passages is affection. In “Cousins,” Ijah Brodsky, the story’s narrator, explains his attraction to Shana Metzger and her family: “It may be that persons of her type have become extinct in America. She made an immense impression on me. We were fond of each other, and I went to the Metzgers’ because I was at home there, and also to see and hear primordial family life” (pp. 200–201).
After they had spent some weeks with the Barons, Cousin Rose, Louis’s wife, found the Bellows a place of their own. This was the top-floor apartment in a brick two-flat at 2629 West Augusta Street, between Rockwell and Washtenaw, near the southeast corner of Humboldt Park. The apartment was two streets away from Lafayette Elementary School, which Bellow attended, and six from the Imperial Bakery. Originally German, the neighborhood was now mostly Polish, intermixed with Scandinavians, Ukrainians, and Jews (African Americans were a rarity in Humboldt Park, though Bellow had a black schoolfriend, Milton Littlejohn); the Bellows’ landlord, a Polish laborer named Lusczowiak, lived in the apartment below. Augusta Street was unpaved, with horses and few cars. It was lined with bungalows and brick two-flats, three-flats, and six-flats. The clumsily constructed back porches of the flats looked out onto ill-kempt yards and alleyways dotted with crabgrass, ragweed, and burdock.18 The sidewalks in front were broad (“land was cheap, and the government was liberal with it”),19 at least in comparison with those of St. Dominique Street in Montreal, and the front yards and steps well tended. After work, house-proud Polish workers—locksmiths, electricians, factory employees—clipped hedges and cut grass, planted geraniums in old washtubs (Chicago geraniums seemed to Bellow “to have been cranked up from the soil”),20 and pointed the brickwork on their buildings, which they then covered “with many layers of waxy red, chocolate or green paint.”21 There were a few shops on Augusta Street (“Novison the cobbler, Brown the dry-goods man, Raskin the Grocer”),22 but street life proper began on Division Street, the neighborhood’s main east–west artery, four blocks north of Augusta, where there were many Jewish retail stores.23
The Jewish community in Humboldt Park had a distinct character. In 1931, seven years after the Bellows arrived in Chicago, the number of Jews in the city was close to 300,000. Roughly a third of this number lived in Lawndale, just below Humboldt Park (many having moved there from Maxwell Street, to the east, a shtetl-like neighborhood increasingly populated by African Americans, the site of a famous open-air market). The Jewish population of Humboldt Park was a third the size of that of Lawndale and a quarter the size of the population of Humboldt Park as a whole. It was less Orthodox than the Lawndale population and less insular. Of Lawndale’s sixty synagogues, fifty-eight were Orthodox. Humboldt Park, in contrast, contained Reform and Conservative Jews, had a reputation for promoting Yiddish culture, and attracted political and religious radicals, many of whom held forth from soapboxes on Division Street. The Division Street soapbox orators, Bellow writes, included “revivalists, vegetarians, pacifists, Zionists, followers of Henry George, Karl Marx or Bakunin.”24 Often they spilled over into the park itself, where “tailors and pressers read their Yiddish poems to each other.”25 On Division Street men carrying office typewriters or “uprights” could be hired, for 25 cents, to write letters to family and friends in the Old Country.26 Ceshinsky’s bookstore was “where the Polish-Russian-Yiddish intelligentsia” gathered to gossip and declaim (“They wore pince-nez. They smoked with curious gestures”).27 In front of the neighborhood Walgreen’s drugstore at Division and California, barrels of used books were sold, for 25, 19, or 12 cents. In junior high school, Bellow found a copy of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea in the 19-cent barrel.28 Among the places to eat on Division Street was the Tolstoy Vegetarian Restaurant, with a large photograph of the novelist in its front window. Other Division Street landmarks were the Russian Baths, at the corner of Wolcott Avenue, and a constellation of movie houses: the Harmony, the Biltmore, the Crown, the Crystal. To get into the movies as a boy, Bellow and his friends refunded empty pop bottles, at a penny each, or retrieved tennis balls on the park courts, at 10 cents an hour. Bellow also dug for coins among the cushions and springs of the parlor sofa, where his exhausted father sometimes stretched out for a rest.
The major social division in Humboldt Park was between the streets to the east and west of the park. West was better, more affluent, and it took several years for the Bellows to move there. The Augusta Street apartment found by cousin Rose, in which they lived for two years, consisted of five rooms: three bedrooms, a parlor, and a kitchen, dominated by a large iron-and-nickel cooker. As Abraham earned only $25 a week, to support a family of six, it was all they could afford. Abraham would come home in the morning in time to have breakfast with the children before they went off to school. After they left, he would hang his floured work clothes in the bathroom and sleep all day. “If we made noise and woke him,” recalls Bellow, “he sprang from bed like a tiger. He went white, he went red most abruptly. His rages transformed him extraordinarily.”29 The three boys shared the bedroom at the back of the apartment, off the kitchen, Jane shared a bedroom with her parents (mostly her mother, given Abraham’s work schedule), and the third bedroom, the best, fronting Augusta Street, was rented to a “roomer,” Ezra Davis, a punch press operator the Bellows had known in Montreal. (When the roomer left, the bedroom became Jane’s, a sore point with the three boys, who continued to share.) Ezra Davis’s dream was to be an opera singer. In the autobiographical essay “A Matter of the Soul” (1975), Bellow gives him the pseudonym Jeremiah, and describes him as “this gentle,
hopeless man, my particular friend” (as the boarder Daitch had been his particular friend in Montreal). Davis took singing lessons with Alexander Nakutin in the Fine Arts Building in Chicago and gave impromptu concerts in the Bellows’ kitchen. “He rose on his toes, his octagonal glasses sweated,” writes Bellow, “talentless and fervent, he made his friends smile.”30 At the end of Humboldt’s Gift, with a characteristic rush of plot, the lodger, Menasha Klinger, helps to bring the novel to a providential close. Menasha, like Davis, came to Chicago in the 1920s to study singing, supporting himself as a punch press operator, and Charlie Citrine was his favorite: “I could talk to him when he was only nine or ten, and he was my only friend” (p. 322). Menasha’s simple goodness and appearance out of nowhere are like something from Dickens. Charlie calls his appearance “dreamlike.” But as Menasha reminds him, “When you turn into a personage, Charlie, it’s much less of a coincidence than you think” (p. 22), a private reference, perhaps, to a fan letter Davis sent Bellow on January 30, 1964, praising Augie—the first contact the two men had had in thirty years.
WHAT FIRST STRUCK nine-year-old Bellow about his new surroundings were the gaps or spaces between buildings, “which gave me a sense of an unreasonable kind of emptiness.” He often played in empty lots as a boy in Chicago, “on the cinders, broken glass and flattened bottle-tops.”31 Montreal for him, the Montreal of the Main, had been “tightly packed,” “closebacked”; Chicago was “more open, more spacious, more empty … mysteriously empty despite the humanity in it, a steppe, a prairie,” with “street after street without variety, eight blocks to the mile, sector after sector, framed in that colossal and mysterious emptiness.” This emptiness spread far beyond the city, and was later seen by Bellow as formative.32 Among his papers in the Regenstein is a photocopy of Rebecca West’s introduction to a selection of Carl Sandburg’s poems. Bellow has underlined several passages, beginning with a discussion of the “curious loquacity” of Chicagoans, and moving on to the city’s unique geographical attributes. Given the Bellow family’s Russian background, and Bellow’s debt to Russian writing, he was bound to be struck by the following passage, one of the first he underlines:
Chicago, like Leningrad, like Moscow, is a high spot [this is figurative, Chicago has no hills], to use its own idiom, on the monotony of great plains, a catchment area of vitality that rejoices extravagantly in its preservation because elsewhere in this region it might have trickled away from its source and been swallowed up in the vastness of the earth.
One consequence of the threat of being swallowed up is a quality of vehemence and significance common, West writes, to both Chicagoans and Russians. As she puts it in another underlined passage: “a man who is self-conscious will emphasize his actions so that his self can the better come to a conclusion regarding them, and since he is desirous that his self shall be able to draw some meaning from them he will be careful to put much meaning into them.”33 “You needed the good,” writes Bellow. “Refused to be cheated of it, dug for it under paved streets and in vacant lots as it were and inevitably imagined it where it was not.”34
You needed the beautiful, too. Unpaved Augusta Street was not beautiful, nor were the streets surrounding it. Humboldt Park, however, was, with its rose gardens and lagoon. On hot summer nights, whole families, including Bellow’s, would sleep out of doors there. Also beautiful was Lake Michigan, but the lake played little part in the lives of immigrants from the northwest side. As Isaac Rosenfeld, a boyhood friend and fellow writer, puts it, the Chicago of Humboldt Park was “dry-docked.” “You did not enter into imaginative relations with it,” writes Bellow of the lake. “Venetian or Neapolitan possibilities never entered your mind. You lived inland in a kind of unconscious austerity or penance.”35 Trips to the lake in summer, to escape the heat, proved to be of sociological rather than aesthetic interest. The North Avenue streetcar stopped at Clark Street, five blocks short of the lake, and the Division Street line stopped at Wells, another five blocks inland (to ride the Division Street trolley cost 3 cents, “a thrilling ride, too, because at that time … the streetcar would dive under the Chicago River and you came up inside the Loop”36). To get to the water from Wells Street involved a walk through the Gold Coast, “the seat of wealth and high style between Clark Street and the lakefront.”37 Laden with towels, lunch baskets, brown paper bags, and bottles of soda, beach-bound immigrants glimpsed the rich “in classy restaurants cutting fabulous steaks.” To hurry the crowds across Lake Shore Drive, a policeman “now and then gave you a hard prod in the ribs.” Otherwise, the Gold Coast “suffered these slum hordes with quiet hostility.” Once at the water, the beauty of the lake was obscured by standing crowds. Rebecca West thought the beaches were jammed because there was no room to swim. “They stood in crowds,” Bellow writes, “because many of them were unable to swim.”38
As for the city’s flora and fauna, in Herzog Bellow writes of “certain flowers, peculiar to Chicago, crude, waxy things like red and purple crayon bits, in a special class of false-looking natural objects” (p. 661). The commonest Chicago tree, the cottonwood, he describes as “loutish-looking,” “graceless” (in Herzog he calls it “shabby”).39 Matter per se seemed to have “a special Chicago character, as though its molecules were coarser, cruder, without Eastern or European delicacy, the soil more lumpy, the weeds and grasses clumsier.”40 Even the atmosphere was coarse: “no air but Chicago’s was ever so oddly dark at midday.”41 “There was not much beauty to look at,” Bellow writes, recalling his first impressions of the city, “unless you had the gift of deeper perception.” Chicago refined this gift in Bellow, making him a “connoisseur of the near-nothing.” He could even find beauty in the cottonwood. In spring, he writes of the tree, it produces “soft curling red catkins which fall on the pavement and are wonderfully fragrant underfoot”; later it releases “fluffy floating seeds which hover and slide in the slow currents of late spring.”42 He recalls sitting in back rooms—perhaps the back bedroom on Augusta Street—on winter afternoons looking out “at the first hardened snow and the dragging smoke which rises with difficulty in zero weather,”43 a perception as “deep” as that of Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey,” in which the smoke of vagrants, seen from high above the Wye Valley, rises “in silence, from among the trees.”
It was the street that impressed, particularly now that Bellow felt more grown up. He was determined, after his experiences in the hospital, to be out in the world, active, no longer weak or sickly.44 Neither home nor Lafayette Elementary School nor the basement cheder in the synagogue at Rockwell and Augusta nor Sunday School at the Jewish People’s Institute in Lawndale could keep him from the street. “The books spoke one language and the streets another,” and both appealed. Street language was “rough cheerful energetic clanging largely good-natured Philistine irresistible” and American. “The children wanted the streets,” Bellow writes in the “Chicago Book,” “they were passionate Americans, they talked baseball, prizefights, speakeasies, graft, jazz, crap games, gang wars.” Part of this passion derived from the high spirits of the 1920s: no foreign wars, “a public made good-natured by prosperity, the Philistine booboisie engrossed in cranking its flivvers [like the Ford Model T], playing golf in knickers, and mixing bathtub gin. Juvenile, circus-parade Chicago suited children immensely, especially the children of immigrants.” Especially the children of Jewish immigrants. It was the Jews who threw themselves into American life most fully (the word Bellow uses is “hysterically,” citing the “eagle screams of Al Jolson and the Yankee Doodle prancing of George M. Cohan”).45 The Poles sent their children to parochial school; there were few Polish pupils at Lafayette Elementary or the succeeding schools Bellow attended (“although we played with them, we played ‘Piggy Move Up,’ a ball game”).46 Bellow went from school to cheder every weekday, studying the Talmud from three to five, learning to write Yiddish in Hebrew characters. He retained his mother’s deep religious sense, her “dreaming” side. But once he was old enough to choose, “the po
wer of street life made itself felt,”47 as it did, in different ways, for his brothers and sister, and his father. Only Liza, cut off by language, domestic duties, and gathering ill health, remained untouched by its appeal. “A few blocks from the house she was lost,” recalled Bellow. “In those days, every drugstore had an electric mortar-and-pestle on the sign, you know, the pharmacist’s pestle and mortar. Whenever she saw one from the streetcar, she would say, ‘we’re here!’ No Mom, we’re not home; it’s just another drugstore.”48
Assimilation was harder for Abraham than for his children, but from the start he was pro-American. “At the table, he would tell us, This really is the land of opportunity; you’re free to do whatever you like, within the law.”49 Such views, Bellow thought, were encouraged by the Yiddish papers, “which were very helpful to the immigrant Jews—to explain things and acquaint them with the history of the U.S.” Abraham would surprise Bellow with facts about the American Constitution, the founding of the colonies, the religious tolerance of Roger Williams of Rhode Island, all gleaned from Der Forvertz.50 What also encouraged assimilation, Bellow came to realize, was the abstract, propositional character of American identity. Phrases like “conceived in liberty” and “dedicated to the proposition that,” from Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” point to a nation born of intellectual choices. “To be an American,” writes Bellow in the second of his Jefferson Lectures, “was neither a territorial nor a linguistic phenomenon but a concept—a set of ideas, really.”51 “Being an American always had been something of an abstract project,” declares Ijah Brodsky, the narrator of “Cousins.” “You came as an immigrant. You were offered a most reasonable proposition and you said yes to it” (p. 231). Experience, however, the reality of daily life in America, is what mattered most. “You were safe, as Jews had never been in Europe,” Bellow explained in an interview. “Here you could realize all the secular ambitions of the Jew, to be rich, to be happy, to be safe, and that was never real for European Jewry. At least that was how it appeared to Jews of the older generation, to Jews of my father’s generation.”52
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