The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  BELLOW’S ABRUPT WITHDRAWAL from the University of Chicago in the spring of 1935 came about as the result of an accident at Carroll Coal. “For years we all worked to pay it off,” Bellow recalled in an interview of February 9, 1970, in Time magazine, his only published reference to the accident. According to James Atlas, a truck driver was killed when unloading a shipment of coal, the company’s insurance policy had lapsed, Bellow’s brother Sam having forgotten to renew it, and Abraham was forced to pay costs, which meant he couldn’t come up with Bellow’s university fees. Because money was now especially tight in the family, Bellow was enlisted to work on the scales at Carroll Coal. Maury’s son, Joel Bellows, remembers hearing a different version of the accident, both from Bellow and from Maury: one of Carroll Coal’s trucks ran over a little boy, and the lack of insurance was Abraham’s fault, the result of a conscious decision not to renew the policy. For Joel, invariably hard on his grandfather, the “feature event” in the story was Abraham’s reaction: “he takes to his bed because of this thing and lays in bed for days, crying, weeping, trying to work through so that he was not the perp, the one responsible for what happened.” By June, Bellow had found the money to attend summer school at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he took three English courses, earning two As and a B. That autumn he returned to Chicago and enrolled as a junior at Northwestern. “I suppose I wanted attention” is how he explained the decision not to return to the University of Chicago.68

  The attention Bellow received at Northwestern had several sources: he was Jewish, unlike 95 percent of the student population (26 percent of the student population at the University of Chicago was Jewish),69 he was politically radical, and he was an aspiring writer. That he was very smart and good-looking, “though shy and introverted,” according to Helen Jaffe, a fellow student, also attracted notice.70 Northwestern was founded by Methodists in 1851, almost four decades before the University of Chicago. Evanston, the North Shore suburban town where it is located, is ten miles from downtown Chicago, and nothing at all like Hyde Park or Humboldt Park. Its main street, Sheridan Road, winds through the university’s pretty lakeside campus, past spacious Victorian and turn-of-the-century mansions with wide manicured lawns. Staid, affluent, and overwhelmingly Republican, Evanston is where attractive but not so bright Katrina Goliger lives, rich mistress of Victor Wulpy in “What Kind of a Day Did You Have?” It is also the home of rich Mrs. Skogland in “A Silver Dish,” where it is described by Bellow as “High Episcopal Christian Science Women’s Temperance Evanston” (p. 24). In Augie March, Mr. and Mrs. Renling live in Evanston, where they own an upmarket sporting goods store, selling hunting, shooting, yachting, and tennis equipment to “country-club sports and university students” (p. 531). The first question Mr. Renling asks Augie when interviewing him for a job is: “Jehudim?” Augie answers: “Yes. I guess.” To which Renling replies: “Well, out there on the North Shore they don’t like Jews.” Then, “brimming frostily with a smile,” he adds, “they like hardly anybody” (p. 530). Augie gets the job, is decked out in handsome tweeds, and succumbs to the allure of WASP style: “It was social enthusiasm that moved in me, smartness, clotheshorseyness. The way a pair of tight Argyle socks showed in the crossing of legs, a match to the bow tie settled on a Princeton collar, took me in the heart with enormous power and hunger. I was given over to it” (p. 535). Bellow’s clothes at Northwestern, many from Marshall Field, were more formal than those of his fellow students, but they didn’t fit, being hand-me-downs from Maury.71

  Bellow began his first year at Northwestern commuting from Hyde Park, then from his father and Fannie’s one-bedroom apartment at 3434 Evergreen Street.72 Eventually he moved into a room in a boardinghouse on Gaffield Place, a quiet street just blocks from the center of campus. In university records, under “Activities,” for junior year he lists “Daily [for The Daily Northwestern] reporter,” though he wrote only occasionally for the paper,73 and for senior year, “A.S.U.” (for American Student Union). Under “Rebates,” for junior year he lists “Odd Jobs,” averaging ten hours per week, amounting to $100 for the year; for senior year “Ss Ptime” (Sales Part-time), averaging eight hours per week, amounting to $80. In a pseudonymous profile of the university published in the December 1936 issue of Soapbox, Bellow disparages his fellow students as bound “for bond houses, insurance companies, Dad’s business, storm troops; and perhaps a few for the breadlines. Only food for the suburbs, first nights, bridge clubs, Daughters of the Eastern Star [affiliated to the Masons], writers of new Red Networks.”74 Red Network, A Who’s Who and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots (1934) was the work of Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling, an Evanston resident and virulent anti-Communist. According to Mrs. Dilling, Marxism and “Jewry” were synonymous, and the president of Northwestern, Walter Dill Scott, was “on the payrolls of Moscow.” The ludicrousness of President Scott as Communist is Bellow’s starting point in the Soapbox article, entitled “This Is the Way We Go to School.” The only reason Scott seems liberal (“Red” to Mrs. Dilling) is that he has nothing radical to resist: “Whenever any objector arises, the inmates of the Greek Houses, the cheerers, the swaggerlads, the boys who put things over, attend to his complaints.… Anyone who rashly aspires, in the first bloom of optimism, to raise his voice against the food, the social order, the Republican Party, or God is quickly overhung intellectually and morally by the thick, inert, dispiriting fog that the North Shore brews. Evanston, the home of Northwestern, is not only intellectually flatchested, but holds it a virtue.”

  Bellow stood out. Being in a minority appealed, made his radicalism more meaningful; his intellectual ambition was noticed and approved by his professors.75 In the Soapbox piece, Bellow declared that “on the whole the faculty is quite hopeless,” “the students do not require fine teachers; the university does not require students who require fine teachers.” In reality, as he knew from experience, Northwestern had a number of fine teachers, professors of distinction. By the time he wrote the Soapbox piece he had established good relations with several of them, both in the English Department and in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, where he also found a small pocket of fellow radicals. The most important of the literature teachers were Edward B. Hungerford and John T. Frederick, both of whom taught courses in writing. Hungerford, a Shakespeare scholar, “confessed he couldn’t handle me,” Bellow later recalled, but they remained lifelong friends; he was, Bellow remembered, “a loveable man who did me a great deal of good.”76 Frederick, a novelist as well as a scholar, whose courses mostly ran in the journalism school, never taught Bellow in a class, but took an interest in his fiction, at least once meeting him in a restaurant in downtown Evanston to discuss it. In the autumn of 1938, after Bellow left the university, Frederick got him a job with the WPA, at the Illinois Branch of the Federal Writers’ Project. Bellow also got on well with Moody Prior, whose Elizabethan drama course he took. Northwestern did not have the prestige of the University of Chicago—its academic rank was solid rather than outstanding—but Bellow thrived there. In his first or junior year, he took eight English courses, plus French and Geology. In his senior year he took five courses in Anthropology, one in Zoology, and three in History. In all but one of his courses in English and Anthropology he received A grades, the exception being a first semester English course, for which he received a B. His marks in History and French were As and Bs. His only Cs were in Zoology and Geology.

  And he was writing stories. According to Helen Jaffe, these were mostly character sketches, “generally plotless.” Only one of them has survived, his first to be published and the earliest example we have of his fiction (there is no manuscript material from his university or high school years). “The Hell It Can’t!,” a story of 1,300 words, appeared in The Daily Northwestern on February 19, 1936, having been awarded third prize in a “Campus in Print” contest from the previous semester (John T. Frederick was one of the contest’s three faculty judges). The story takes its title from the Sinclair Lewis nov
el It Can’t Happen Here, published on October 21, 1935. At the end of the second chapter of the novel the following exchange occurs, involving Mr. Falck, the Episcopal reverend in a small Vermont town, Doremus Jessup, editor-proprietor of the town’s newspaper, and several local businessmen much exercised by “Jew Communists and Jew financiers plotting together to control the country”: “ ‘Didn’t Hitler save Germany from the Red Plague of Marxism? I got cousins there. I know!’ ” “ ‘Hm,’ said Doremus, as often Doremus did say it. ‘Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics.’ ” This exchange prompts the wealthiest of the businessmen to say that it “might be a good thing to have a strong man in the saddle, but—it just can’t happen here in America.” The chapter ends: “And it seemed to Doremus that the softly moving lips of the Reverend Mr. Falck were framing, ‘The hell it can’t!’ ”77

  Bellow’s story takes place in America, but a largely unspecified America (a mention of the Chicago Cubs is the sole clue to its setting). The absence of particulars is Kafkaesque, as is the utter helplessness of its protagonist, Henry Howland, in the face of state-sanctioned lawlessness. The style is spare, with little verbal flourish. America is at war in Europe and Henry has somehow evaded conscription. The story begins when he is discovered, awakened in the middle of the night, marched through town by thuggish citizen-vigilantes, and brought to “a low room with a narrow brown-boarded ceiling.” Here his captors beat him “steadily, grimly, taking turns.” Henry insists he is no coward, which makes his refusal to go to war a matter of principle, though the principle in question is never identified. All we know of the war itself is that it is happening in Europe. The story ends with Henry inspecting his wounds, “the tenuous red tracks” of a whipping. The last sentence reads: “He was five blocks from home,” and the message is “the hell it can’t!” A state that behaves as this one does, allowing resisters to be beaten with impunity, whipping its citizens literally, also figuratively, into a patriotic or nationalist frenzy like that of the rioting townsfolk in Babel’s “The Story of My Dovecote” (“shop windows and walls plastered with signs … FIGHT. DON’T BE AN ENEMY AT HOME”), is as bad as the states it opposes, a view easier to credit when the crimes and provocations of the enemy are unspecified. At the date the story was written, Germany was steadily rearming, Hitler having repudiated the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty and introduced conscription in March 1935, the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws had been announced in September of the same year, and Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia in October. As the poet Delmore Schwartz, soon to become Bellow’s friend, put it, looking back on these years, “the slow, loud, ticking imminence of a new war” shadowed everything.78 The implicit line Bellow’s story takes on this new war is Trotsky’s, that there is little to choose from between the two sides. “A modern war between the great powers does not signify a conflict between democracy and fascism,” Trotsky wrote in his June 1934 manifesto, “War and the Fourth International,” “but a struggle of two imperialisms for the redivision of the world.”79 The story’s acceptance of this view is easier to credit in 1936, even in 1944, when its influence is felt in Dangling Man, than it would be when the full scale of Nazi atrocities was clear, though Bellow himself admits “we knew what happened to the Jews in Europe: we knew and we didn’t know. Somehow it didn’t come through.”80

  It was not just Trotskyists, of course, who resisted the coming war. Many liberals, as well as pacifists and old-line isolationists did so, as did Norman Thomas, the spokesman for American socialism. Bellow was not alone at Northwestern in his antiwar views, or on other issues. The closest of his friends at the university was Julian Behrstock, literary editor of The Daily Northwestern. Behrstock came from a similar Chicago background to Bellow’s, went on to have a distinguished career at UNESCO in Paris, and remained Bellow’s friend and correspondent throughout his life. He was political at the university, active in the ASU, as was his older brother, Arthur, a graduate student in English. As an undergraduate, Arthur, too, had also been literary editor of The Daily Northwestern. Before returning as a graduate student in 1936, when Bellow and Julian were seniors, he traveled to the Soviet Union, taking a job as a reporter on the Moscow Daily News. Neither Behrstock brother, according to Julian, was a Communist, though both were subsequently pursued by investigative bodies, Arthur by Senator James Eastland’s Internal Security Subcommittee, Julian by Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.81

  Bellow was a friend of both Behrstocks and is likely to have known, or known about, their close friend, Jack Harris (né Herscovitz), an anthropology major at Northwestern who went on to Columbia University to do graduate work in 1935. In the war, Harris was a secret agent with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), precursor to the CIA.82 Like the Behrstocks, he was pursued by anti-Communist investigators. In 1952 he was called to testify before Senator Pat McCarran of the Internal Security Subcommittee. He repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, the constitutional guarantee against self-incrimination, as had the Behrstocks, to protect friends and associates.83 As early as 1943, Harris was under investigation by J. Edgar Hoover, and the first of his three FBI files, dated July 27, 1943, sheds interesting light on political attitudes at Northwestern in Bellow’s undergraduate years.84 According to the testimony of Professor Bergen Evans of the English Department, Harris “was a close friend of JULIAN and ARTHUR BEHRSTOCK, Jewish students, who attended Northwestern University. EVANS stated that JULIAN BEHRSTOCK was a leader of the American Student Union, an organization that flourished on the campus of Northwestern University during the early 1930’s.… He described this organization as being made up of a group of students, who were of a poor class, some of whom were ‘crackpots,’ and all of whom did not have a chance of getting anywhere socially with the social click [sic] on the campus. He said the group used to delight in doing things that would shock the townspeople of Evanston, as well as the Chicago Tribune.” Though Harris “never at any time said anything to EVANS in any way indicating any affiliation with the Communist Party,” and though Evans “stated that he personally did not understand exactly what a Communist was,” he (Evans) “personally believed that of all the individuals he ever knew, he felt that HARRIS would be the most likely one to be a Communist.”

  Evans’s account of the “crackpot” nature of the Behrstocks and the American Student Union doubtless owed something to a campus-wide dispute in Bellow’s senior year, one Bellow reported on, involving Julian Behrstock and Northwestern’s Department of Naval Science and Tactics (established in 1919 to protect Lake Michigan from invasion). The department had banned Navy students from participating in what it called “communistic discussion,” principally a war symposium. In March 1937, Julian Behrstock, at the time editorial chairman of The Daily Northwestern, wrote an article criticizing the ban. When ordered to retract the article and print a statement vindicating the Navy, Behrstock resigned, as did the entire editorial board. Bellow wrote about the episode in an article in the very first issue of The Beacon, published in April 1937. Though listed on the magazine’s masthead as “S. G. Bellow,” the article appeared under his Soapbox pseudonym, John Paul (an attack on the anti–New Deal journalist Westbrook Pegler in the same issue was written by “Herbert Sanders,” the hero of Harris’s novel). The article was entitled “Northwestern Is a Prison” and is full of undergraduate indignation. After the editorial board of the Daily resigned, what Bellow calls “an intrepid but small band of professors voted to declare Navy credits invalid in the Liberal Arts school.” Their motion was defeated, but the administration, fearing that the conflict “would become a matter of national interest,” capitulated, admitting that Behrstock “had every right to protest against censorship.” The article ends with a smack at Northwestern. “There is no doubt,” Bellow writes, “that the university intends to keep a careful eye on him. He is too close to the campus radicals. He began his term with an abortive campaign for Norman Thomas; abortive because the University would have non
e of it.” Now, the article concludes, Behrstock “has another chance. More properly speaking, he is paroled. For Northwestern is in this respect an intellectual prison.”