The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Isaac’s difficulties with Tina recall Sam’s with Jane. Maury and Bellow distanced themselves from Jane’s complaints (in Tina’s words, “Does he remember his brothers when there is a deal going?” “Does he give his only sister a chance to come in?” [p. 98]). Maury, according to Rachel Schultz, “couldn’t be bothered with her; his ego was as big as hers.”31 Bellow was outwardly respectful, humored her, and tried not to get involved. This was Sam’s way as well, but it was harder for him to ignore her. They were in each other’s world. When the Bellows moved to Le Moyne Street, at the beginning of the Depression, they were all in each other’s world, everyone living at home. Liza was ill with cancer and often bedridden, or resting on the sofa in the parlor. Jane and Charlie lived in Jane’s room (presumably Charlie helped with the rent). The three brothers still shared a room. Every morning Sam and Maury set off for work with Abraham, whom Bellow described as “frantic” with worry over Liza. Sam went dutifully, his hopes of medical school dashed, Maury impatiently, eager to be his own boss. Around this time, according to Atlas, Sam and Maury added the “s” to their surname, “as part of their Americanization—and to get some distance from their father.”32 Despite the modest success of Carroll Coal, business remained a struggle and a worry. All the Bellow men—Jane, too—were tough, quick-witted, and sharp-tongued, given to Yiddish sarcasm and invective. Lesha Greengus attributes the harshness of their language—harsher to outsiders, perhaps, than to the Bellows themselves—in part to Yiddish, a view Bellow, whose Yiddish was edel or refined, would endorse. Speaking of his father as stern patriarch, he recalled him also as humorist,

  a great joker and kidder and very sharp sometimes, in a nasty way, getting at you, in Yiddish, which is a language … which someone once described as two-thirds invective.… No matter what you said you could easily turn it around and it would be the reverse. If your mother called you an angel it meant you were a devil. If she said your hands were clean, it meant that your hands were filthy. If your nose was running you were complimented on your well-wiped nose. So everything was turned around, comically, and sometimes quite relentlessly; we wouldn’t spare each other in those days.33

  Thus Bellow’s family life in the early 1930s: crowded, tense, loving, fractious. In comparable circumstances, Louie, in “Something to Remember Me By,” describes himself as “secretive about my family life. The truth is that I didn’t want to talk about my mother. Besides, I had no language as yet for the oddity of my peculiar interests” (p. 414).

  BELLOW’S PECULIAR INTERESTS—peculiar in the eyes of his family—were formed in the years at Tuley, from September 3, 1930, to January 26, 1933.34 Tuley was founded in 1892 as Northwest Division High School. In 1906 it was renamed Murray F. Tuley High School, after Judge Murray F. Tuley (1827–1905), a Cook County judge, the “Nestor” of the Chicago bench, and author of the state of Illinois’s Act of Incorporation of Cities.35 Ten years before Bellow entered the school, it had been extensively expanded and modernized, with new classrooms, laboratories, gymnasiums, a swimming pool, shop rooms, and a large assembly hall seating 1,500. It had a reputation as one of the most modern and academic high schools in the city, and its pupils, for the most part, came from immigrant families. Bellow described his classmates as “the children of bakers, tailors, peddlers, insurance agents, pressers, cutters, grocers, the sons of families on relief.”36 The education he received was sound but undemanding: “You knew something of American history. And by the time you got out of high school, no one had to tell you who Socrates was.”37 The older Tuley English teachers, drawn “from the State universities, from Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin,” were “innocent fogies … who actually loved Shakespeare and Milton and Edmund Burke and Shelley.”38 Bellow was grateful to them for being made to memorize passages from Wordsworth, Keats, Shakespeare, Milton (writing in 1972, he imagines that “a majority of [today’s] high school students would probably identify ‘Lycidas’ as a sexual perversion, a hard drug or a mafia leader”).39 He mentions no inspirational teachers or courses. On July 9, 1984, in response to a request for information about his education from William J. Bennett, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bellow recalls being assigned Plutarch and Holinshed to read alongside Julius Caesar and Macbeth. As his English classes advanced through the centuries, Dickens, George Eliot, Macaulay, “and a great many nineteenth century poets” were assigned. Elsewhere, he singles out Wordsworth as a lasting influence: “ ‘The World Is Too Much with Us’ may, for all I know, have been my introduction to the subject of distraction.… Nor did I miss his point about emotion recollected in tranquillity—or his emphasis on the supreme importance of a state of attention or aesthetic concentration that would put the world of profit and loss in its place.” Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” another classroom text, also struck deep: “when I think of the power of a tale-teller to obtain attention, I remember that glittering eye.”40 Lessons in English composition provoked mixed feelings: “We, the sons of immigrants, were taught to write grammatically. Knowing the rules filled you with pride. I deeply felt the constraints of ‘correct’ English. It wasn’t always easy, but we kept at it conscientiously, and in my twenties I published two decently written books.” Then correctness became inhibiting, “the wrong track.”41

  In his sophomore year, Bellow read The Merchant of Venice, which “went pretty deep.” Of the way it was taught, he mentions only the absence of “apologetics” or “an idea of defamation,” which he found “very liberating.” “Everything was out in the open in those days,” he recalled. “Nobody was immune. Not Jews, not Italians, not Greeks, not Germans, not Blacks.… It was a far more open society than before ethnic protectionism began.”42 When a high school student wrote to him in 1992 asking why he should study Latin, Bellow replied that he was grateful for the three years he’d spent studying the language. His teacher, Mrs. Klinsik, the sister of a famous vaudeville comedian, used to decorate the walls of the classroom with Latin mottos (Dum spiro spero, Est avis in dextra melior quam quattuor extra), never allowed her students to read any texts, and constantly drilled them on conjugations and declensions. As a consequence, he still remembered his nouns and verbs, could “now and then” amuse himself by translating Latin texts, and was able to identify the Latin roots of English words.43 He reports almost nothing of the other subjects he studied: Spanish, General Science, Mathematics, Civil and Social Studies (including Economics and Common Law), European History, U.S. History, Drawing, Music, Physical Education, Boys’ Shop, and Dramatics.44 He was not, according to official records, an outstanding student. Even in his best subjects (English, European History, U.S. History, Civics, and Social Studies), he earned twice as many “G” (Good) marks as “E” (Excellent) ones. Only in Physical Education do “E” marks predominate (Bellow played basketball and tennis, and was a good distance runner, lettering on the track team).45 After three years at Tuley, his class rank was 97 out of 254,46 a number that accords with accounts from his classmates and from Bellow himself. According to Dave Schwab, who worked on the school paper: “He seldom spoke out.… I doubt whether anyone could have detected anything special about him.” According to Arthur Wineberg, his exact contemporary at Tuley, Bellow graduated without “any of the top honors.” Wineberg remembers him in class as “intense,” “determined,” and “very quiet.” When he did speak, though, “he always had something important to say,” especially about literature.47

  “Unwilling to study, I was bookish nevertheless,” recalls Louie in “Something to Remember Me By” (p. 414). Where Bellow shone was outside class, among a circle of precocious and ambitious students, several of whom became lifelong friends, all of whom figure in Bellow’s reminiscences, some in his fiction, thinly disguised. In this circle, “there was a certain amount of defiance on the level of ideas,” but no disobedience. When the debate club got together, “Miss Johnson or whoever said ‘What are we going to talk about today?’ and the kids would shout ‘Revolution, Radicalism, Religion, R
ace, any of those Rs.’ ”48 In a letter of reference of February 22, 1979, for his nephew Mark Rotblatt, whose grades had suffered from the death of his father, Bellow recalls how “it took me some years to recover from my mother’s death at about the same age, and my own record was quite poor. I managed before too long to pull myself together. I have considerable feeling for Mark on this account. I know what it is to be stupefied by mourning.” Bellow is talking here of his first year of college, but throughout his three years at Tuley his mother’s illness weighed on the family. Performance in school was low on his parents’ list of concerns. As Abraham saw it, formal education was a luxury given economic uncertainty; to Liza, it was largely incomprehensible. Though both parents read nineteenth-century Russian novels, and Abraham knew something of American history, they rarely inquired about Bellow’s intellectual or literary interests: “For one thing there wasn’t time enough for the parents to listen, or interest enough, because they were so busy.… So each child in the family went his own way at an early age and my way happened to be American History, American Literature, English Literature especially.”49 Even if they’d wanted to intervene—to monitor homework or free time—they’d not have succeeded. Aside from insisting on after-school jobs, “the parents didn’t try to control us too much,” recalls Sidney Passin, the younger brother of Bellow’s friend Herb Passin, “because they wouldn’t be able to. We were all American kids and they were Old World.” The Depression, too, paradoxically, helped free Bellow to pursue his interests. In a world of Hooverville slums, soup lines, foreclosures and evictions, jockeying for grades, to get ahead, for a career, seemed pointless.50

  So Bellow read and read. On the streetcar heading to Saturday jobs, either at Carroll Coal or Goldblatt’s department store on 47th and Ashland, where he worked in the shoe department, or the Sunset Ridge Golf Course in Winnetka, he was never without a book, either a pocket-sized Modern Library volume (Flaubert, Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche), or one of the 5-cent blue books published in Kansas by Haldeman-Julius (stories by Maupassant, “little essays on Darwin and on agnosticism, if not atheism”).51 Louie in “Something to Remember Me By” also reads on streetcars: “Reading shut out the sights. In fact there were no sights.” In addition, Louie remembers reading late at night, in the kitchen, “in deep silence, snowdrifts under the windows, and below, the janitor’s shovel rasping on the cement and clanging on the furnace door. I read banned books circulated by my classmates, political pamphlets, read ‘Prufrock’ and ‘Mauberley.’ I also studied arcane books, too far out to discuss with anyone” (p. 416). The writers Bellow most frequently recalls, aside from those assigned in class, fall into three broad categories: twentieth-century American novelists; nineteenth-century European, including Russian, novelists and philosophers; and political theorists, mostly Marxist. Of European novelists, he singles out Balzac, Zola, and Dostoyevsky.52 Of American novelists, the names that recur are Theodore Dreiser, “whom I admired most,”53 Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and John Dos Passos (among American poets he most frequently mentions Whitman). What linked the American authors and acted as a special encouragement for the young Bellow was that they “resisted the material weight of American society,” a weight that pressed upon him directly through his father and brothers. Dreiser in particular proved “what was not immediately obvious—that the life lived in great manufacturing, shipping, and banking centers, with their slaughter stink, their great slums, prisons, hospitals, and schools, was also a human life.” That Dreiser, Anderson, and Lewis had lived in Chicago, meant that “here, too, right here, the raw materials of literature were present.… Sister Carrie and the Spoon River Anthology [of Edgar Lee Masters] proved it.”54

  Dreiser’s attraction for Bellow had several sources. Dreiser’s social theorizing—about materialism, desire, consumer culture, American manners—appealed to the adolescent intellectual. “The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended,” begins Chapter 7 of Sister Carrie (1900).55 “For all the liberal analysis of Spencer and our modern naturalistic philosophers, we have but an infantile perception of morals,” Dreiser announces at the beginning of Chapter 10 (p. 87). When drinking with his cronies, George Hurstwood, who makes Carrie his mistress, tells droll stories, the sort that compose “the major portion of the conversation among American men under such circumstances” (p. 266). Hurstwood’s more substantial counterpart in Jennie Gerhardt (1911), the other Dreiser novel Bellow especially admired, is Lester Kane. Kane has a powerful intellect but acts foolishly. Dreiser explains: “We live in an age in which the impact of materialized forces is well-nigh irresistible; the spiritual nature is overwhelmed by the shock.” After several paragraphs in this vein, Dreiser concludes that Kane “was a product of a combination of elements—religious, commercial, social—modified by the overruling, circumambient atmosphere of liberty in our national life which is productive of almost uncounted freedoms of thought and action.”56 Passages like these combine with what H. L. Mencken, another early influence on Bellow, calls Dreiser’s “inexorable particularity,” a quality Bellow, with his faith in the revelatory power of detail, approves. “Everything fascinates him,” Bellow says of Dreiser, “factories, horsecars, hotel lobbies, a machine which makes keys, a hardware warehouse, luxury shops, fast women, plausible salesmen, exponents of social Darwinism and other bookish ninnies, sturdy railroad men. He’s drunk with all this, thinks The Windy City the most marvelous thing that ever happened. When I read him I am inclined to think so, too.”57 Bellow praises Dreiser most warmly, however, for his depth of feeling. Beyond the “clumsy, cumbersome” theorizing and “many familiar ‘art’ gestures, borrowed from the art-fashions of his day, and even from the slick magazines,” lies a profound respect for his characters. In Jennie Gerhardt, “the delicacy with which Jenny allows Lester Kane to pursue his conventional life while she herself lives unrecognized with her illegitimate daughter, the depth of her understanding, and the depth of her sympathy and of her truthfulness impress me. She is not a sentimental figure. She has a natural sort of honor.”58

  Bellow’s interest in philosophy is variously traced. In 1995, in a talk at the University of Chicago, he recalled being “an enthusiastic Shavian” in high school. “Shaw had put me on to Ibsen,” he explained, “from Ibsen I passed to Strindberg, and from Strindberg I got into Nietzsche.”59 Mencken may also have led Bellow to Nietzsche, as he led him to Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt (“the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn”).60 Bellow read Mencken in The American Mercury in the 1920s and described his Selected Prejudices (1927) as one of “the going things in 1930, when I was fifteen years old.”61 Mencken’s attacks on “booboisie” America, Bellow recalled, “found [their] largest public among schoolboys like me or village atheists and campus radicals.”62 In 1907 Mencken published The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the first book on Nietzsche to appear in English, and in 1920 he translated Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ (1888). Despite Nietzsche’s explicit criticisms of Herbert Spencer and Darwin, in Mencken’s eyes he was a social Darwinist, as were Dreiser and other early Bellow influences, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, H. G. Wells. How much of Nietzsche Bellow understood or approved as a schoolboy is hard to tell. He closely followed the Leopold and Loeb case in the papers, and would have read the attacks on Nietzsche by Clarence Darrow, Loeb’s lawyer. In notes to Philip Roth, he talks of Leopold and Loeb in Darrow’s terms, as having had their heads turned “by the Nietzschean ideas they wildly misunderstood,” and in Herzog, he lets Moses express qualified admiration for Nietzsche (in comparison, at least, to the distaste he feels for Nietzsche’s followers),63 though Moses does so as an adult, a professor of intellectual history.

  Mencken saw in Nietzsche confirmation of his long-held belief that life was a struggle to which some people were well suited by birth and others were not, a view the adolescent Bellow might have accepted when voiced by Mencken, or when Mencken claimed it
for Nietzsche. When voiced by Oswald Spengler, however, also an important early influence, it was disturbing. “Smart Jewish schoolboys were poring over Spengler at night,” Bellow recalls (see the adolescent Moses Herzog, “struggling and drowning in the oceanic visions of that sinister kraut” [p. 652]).64 Bellow kept his copy of Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918) on the mantelpiece at Le Moyne Street, where it was seen by a stout man who came periodically to collect 25 cents from his mother for an insurance policy. “He would carry a heavy ledger under his arm and engage me in deep conversation about Spengler, he had great interest. And also the Polish barber in the neighborhood was a Spenglerian.”65 Spengler’s view that the great civilizations of the West were “Faustian” but that Jews were “Magians,” naturally at odds with Faustians, was hard for young Bellow to take. “When I read this I was deeply wounded,” he recalls. “I envied the Faustians, and I cursed my luck because I had prepared myself to be part of a civilization, one of whose prominent interpreters told me that I was by heredity disqualified.”66 Reading Spengler had much the same effect on the adolescent Herzog, making him “sick with rage” (p. 652). In later years, Bellow would associate Spengler with Henry Adams and T. S. Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), which made him more American, since “I knew there would be no place for me as a Jew in that sort of civilization. Therefore all the greater was my enthusiasm for embracing the American democracy with all its crudities, which nevertheless granted me an equality which I felt was mine by right. I wasn’t going to be ruled off the grounds by those WASP hotshots.”67