The Beacon was short-lived, lasting less than a year. Its raison d’être is explained in “A Declaration of Policy,” a leader immediately preceding Bellow’s article. In it the editors describe the magazine as “a response to the thousands of people in Chicago and the middle-west who until now have had no medium for the expression of their liberal and progressive activities.” The Beacon “will give a voice and an audience to such activities,” including those of “student groups, labor unions, liberal organizations, church groups working for peace.” It belongs to no faction: “The Communists may call us ‘Trotskyites’; the Socialists may call us ‘Stalinites’; Mr. Hearst will look at the cover and call us ‘reds.’ We are none of these.” Harris described the monthly as “like the Nation or the New Republic,” in form as well as content, with a first half devoted to politics and commentary, and a second half to books and the arts. He found financial backers for the magazine and persuaded well-known public figures to write for it, including Norman Thomas, James T. Farrell, and Paul Douglas (later senator of Illinois).85 Other contributors included Isaac Rosenfeld and Arthur Behrstock. The Beacon folded when it lost its funding. As Harris explains, “in ’38 there was a very hard bump, which meant nothing to people like us who were on salaries but a couple of men who were supporting the magazine got very nervous.… They pulled their horns in and the magazine just folded.”
Bellow had already left, quitting The Beacon in the autumn of 1937, perhaps for political reasons, perhaps because he was no longer in Chicago, having enrolled as a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. A political motive is suggested by an undated letter he wrote to James T. Farrell earlier in 1937, presumably in his capacity as literary editor. Bellow had not yet met Farrell, but admired his writing, defending the novel A World I Never Made in a review in the same April 1937 issue as “Northwestern Is a Prison” (the review appeared under the byline “Saul Gordon Bellow”).86 Farrell was to become an influential supporter of Bellow, as well as an influence on his writing. For some time Bellow had been pestering Al Glotzer to arrange an introduction. In his 1937 letter, he asks Farrell if he thinks The Beacon serves a useful function. If the answer is yes, “I for my part will undertake a long narrative of the whole venture and try to explain my position on it.” He then distances himself from Harris, whom he describes as “a shrewd, opportunistic bastard.” Bellow hopes to move Harris to the left by “load[ing] the magazine with Bolshevik writers of national reputation,” the sort too celebrated for Harris to reject. For Harris, the magazine’s fortunes take precedence over politics. Though the Stalinists “pronounced the magazine anathema,” the Popular Front strategy of broad alliances meant that as “the liberals swarm around us … so do Broder’s [sic] minions flock to the liberals” (Earl Browder was chairman of the Communist Party). A number of organizations affiliated with, or infiltrated by, Communist Party members, have asked for advertising space, “which Harris freely, even prodigally gives.” Bellow suspects he may one day give space to openly Stalinist organizations: “Harris thinks nothing of assassinating a scruple or knifing a principle if thereby he can profit.”
IN HIS TESTIMONY to the FBI, Bergen Evans admits that he did not know Jack Harris well, recommending that the agency speak to Melville J. Herskovits, professor of anthropology at Northwestern, under whom Harris had studied. Harris had listed Herskovits as a referee in his application for a position with the OSS. In the FBI report, Herskovits is described as “sponsor for the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties, the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, and the American League Against War and Fascism, all of which are reported to be Communist Front organizations.” “In view of this fact,” it concludes, “Professor HERSKOVITS was not interviewed.” Of all Bellow’s university teachers, Herskovits (1895–1963) was the most influential, both in his field and with Bellow himself. Like Bellow, he came from Jewish immigrant parents. His father, described by his biographer as “a clothing merchant,” came from Hungary, his mother from Germany.87 The family was middle-class and Herskovits grew up in medium-size towns and cities in the Midwest, most with relatively small Jewish populations. Though his parents sent him to Hebrew school and he briefly considered studying for the rabbinate, the family celebrated Christian as well as Jewish holidays. From the start, questions of difference and identity—cultural, social, national, racial—preoccupied Herskovits, precisely the questions that drew him, as they were to draw Bellow, to anthropology.
Herskovits received his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago. He then moved to New York for graduate study, first at the New School for Social Research, then at Columbia. Both professionally and personally, he was on the left. As a social scientist, he opposed biological determinism, laissez-faire economic theory, and hierarchies of race, gender, and culture. In politics, he was briefly a member of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), writing in defense of union activism and attacking the “staunch, unerring stupidity” of the Republican Party.88 Bellow may first have encountered him in the pages of Mencken’s American Mercury, where he wrote articles mocking a range of middle-class pieties. At Columbia, Herskovits studied under Franz Boas, at the suggestion of two of his New School professors, Thorstein Veblen and Alexander Goldenweiser. Like Herskovits and other pioneers of modern anthropology, including Emile Durkheim, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss, Edward Sapir, and Robert Lowie, Boas was Jewish. Chief among the prevailing notions and practices of traditional or nineteenth-century anthropology Boas questioned were the supposed interdependence of race, language, and culture, the evolution and ranking of races (“a race is commonly described as the lower,” Boas wrote, “the more fundamentally it differs from our own”),89 and the “scientific” basis of racial superiority, in particular that provided by “anthropometry,” a subfield of physical anthropology that distinguished between races by measuring visible traits or “phenotypes” (for example, skull or brain shape and size). According to Herskovits’s biographer, Jerry Gershenhorn, three factors influenced Boas’s attacks on mainstream anthropology: “his liberal philosophy, his strict attachment to scientific accuracy, and, perhaps most important, his Jewish identity,” factors that also underlay his identification with the plight of African Americans.90
After lecturing in anthropology at Columbia (where Zora Neale Hurston was one of his assistants) and at Howard University, in Washington, D.C., Herskovits moved to Northwestern in 1927 as the sole anthropologist in the Department of Sociology. He was one of only two professors at the university of Jewish background (the other was an economic historian, William Jaffe). Like Bellow, Herskovits thrived at Northwestern, staying there for the rest of his career. In 1929 he convinced the university to rename the Sociology Department the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, but it was not until 1938, a year after Bellow left Northwestern, that a separate Department of Anthropology was established at the university, with Herskovits as its chair. Herskovits’s book The American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossing (1928) established him as an authority not just on the relations between African culture and African American culture, but on the interrelation of cultures in general, a new field of study in anthropology. In addition, he was seen by many American anthropologists, as one recent authority puts it, as “the founder of African studies in this country.”91 Among the courses Bellow took in anthropology as a senior were “The Races of Man,” “Primitive Social Organization,” and “Primitive Art” (he skipped “Primitive Economics”). At the time, Herskovits was at work on The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), a pioneering text in African American studies. The myth exposed by the book was that the “Negro” had no past. Through patient field study in the mid-1930s in the West African kingdom of Dahomey, Herskovits exposed this myth, revealing the cultural continuity of black Africans and black Americans.92
Herskovits was a charismatic lecturer and a conscientious teacher and mentor, adept at finding his students scholarships and places in graduate school. In an
interview in 2008, Jack Harris remembered him as “very generous and kind,” though also possessed of “a tremendous ego.… I did not think less of him for it.”93 Herskovits could be demanding and possessive, and his “close attention to the work of his students was viewed by some as meddling paternalism.”94 His relations with Bellow were friendly, though with moments of irritation on both sides.95 Bellow’s settled ambition was to write, but he had also to consider ways of supporting himself (or to postpone having to support himself). One such way was to go to graduate school. When he approached the chairman of the Northwestern English Department, William Frank Bryan, a specialist in Old and Middle English, about doing graduate work in English, he was told: “You’ve got a very good record, but I wouldn’t recommend that you study English. You weren’t born to it.” Getting a job, being accepted by the students, would be difficult. Perhaps he should consider anthropology. Bellow described this moment as “one of my earlier significant encounters with this view that because I was not born to an English-speaking family I had no business in that line of work. I was told that. So I accepted a fellowship in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin.” As Bellow told an interviewer, Bryan “did me a great favor. My secret reaction was ‘Well, the hell with you,’ as I walked out.”96 The encounter produced a lifelong antipathy, mild but real, to English Departments and English Department types, including Jewish English Department types.97
It was Herskovits who arranged the fellowship at Wisconsin.98 In a letter of reference, he described Bellow as hoping to make “a study of acculturation among the French Canadians whom he knows intimately, having lived the earlier years of his life in a French Canadian town.” Wisconsin was the perfect place for such a study: “I don’t know where he could be better prepared.” Herskovits was fulsome in praise of Bellow in his references: he was “a first rate student,” “unusually mature in his approach to problems which require originality of attack,” a writer of “unusual ability”; in addition, he was “a pleasant person. He seems to make friends readily and to hold them.”99 Wisconsin had several advantages. It was close to Chicago, now the site of serious romantic as well as family ties, as we shall see; Isaac Rosenfeld would be there as a junior transfer student from the University of Chicago (whether he or Bellow applied first, or whether they applied together, is unremembered), and Herskovits’s old teacher, Alexander Goldenweiser, late of the New School, was to be visiting professor of anthropology for 1937–38. Bellow and Rosenfeld may have roomed together for a period at Wisconsin, at 112 South Mills Street, a twenty-minute walk south from campus.100 In letters to Oscar Tarcov, Bellow reported on his studies and on how he and Rosenfeld were getting on. Tarcov was himself considering studying anthropology and Bellow was encouraging, in a letter postmarked October 2, 1937: “It’s a hell of a lot better than the English department. And if you are not going to train yourself in a money-making technique you could choose no better field. It is the liveliest, by far, of all the social sciences.” Bellow calls anthropology “the best discipline, the one that will aid you most,” by which he means as a writer. Its only drawbacks are “prehistory and physical anthropology and parts of descriptive anthropology.… Necessary implements, the tools of social philosophy. With a little effort and application you can brush them out of the way. Moreover, if you are good at rationalizing, you can find certain charms in even the tools.”
In the same letter, Bellow offers an account of his Chicago leave-taking. “There was an awful blowout before I left,” he reports; Abraham “started giving me a Polonius,” in the process damning “all the things I stood for, which was the equivalent of damning me also.” Arthur Behrstock was visiting, “and no sooner did the old man discover Art had been in Russia than he withered him with arguments and with insults.” Once Behrstock left, Bellow “blew up,” telling Abraham what he thought of his advice, vowing “to live as I saw fit.” This speech he delivered “without faltering, and I didn’t do it in subdued terms.… The coalbins resounded with my shouts and imprecations, till the old man as a defense measure decided that he was needed somewhere and swam off into the gloom.” Money was involved in the argument. Bellow declared “that if he didn’t want to give me his measly allowance in Madison, I would as lief stay in Chicago”; there he would get a job, marry, “and live independent of the family forever more.” According to Bellow’s brother Sam, Abraham was “heartbroken because I have not written to him. Did he expect a manifesto of love after such a clash?” Sam encouraged Bellow to get in touch, which Bellow says he will do. “But what have I to say to him [Abraham].… To him I am a perverse child growing into manhood with no prospects of bourgeois ambitions, utterly unequipped to meet the world (he is wrong, not unequipped but unwilling).” Then the letter calms down and Bellow describes his family as “good folk, when they are not neurotic.” “What, after all, can we expect,” he asks Tarcov. “Such conflicts must come if we are to honestly follow out the concepts we learn or teach ourselves.”
BELLOW’S INITIAL IMPRESSIONS of Wisconsin were positive. The classes he mentions in the letter to Tarcov are a seminar in advanced social psychology “with the great Kimball Young” (a sociologist, the grandson of Brigham Young), with readings from Durkheim, Baldwin, Cooley, Dewey, Mead, Thomas, and others (according to the university course catalogue); a philosophy class “with friend Vivas, about whom Isaac will be delighted to write you” (this was “Philosophy of the Arts,” taught by Eliseo Vivas); a course in European prehistory (taught by Charlotte Gower, an assistant professor); and a course on classical economists (“Smith, Ricardo, Mill and their contemporaries”).101 The only course not mentioned was “Anthropological Problems,” taught by Goldenweiser, an introduction to “current anthropological literature and methods.” Goldenweiser, Bellow’s advisor, especially impressed: “Even Isaac is completely won by the man. A perfect cosmopolite, a perfect intellect. He knows as much Picasso as he does Tshimshian religion, he knows Mozart as well as Bastian, and Thomism as well as Polynesia. You ought to see the books that line his shelves. Next to Kroeber stands Sidney Hook, and Lenin, and of course many of Trotsky’s pamphlets.… He is a piano virtuoso, an esthetician, a Bolshevik, a deeply cultured man.” When Tarcov suggested a visit to Madison, Bellow, in a letter postmarked November 8, 1937, encouraged him to come during the week; on a weekend, “you will have no opportunity to see our pets perform” (he means Goldenweiser and Vivas). Goldenweiser was a big drinker and bon vivant and enjoyed entertaining students (according to Atlas, he had come to Wisconsin after being dismissed from Columbia “for various sexual misdemeanors”).102 In a letter of May 31, 1989, to T. Douglas Price, himself a professor of anthropology at Wisconsin, Bellow recalled “many a drunken party with Goldenweiser, Charlotte Gower, [Morris] Swadesh, the linguist (we shared three small rooms in the house of a railroader’s widow), and Eliseo Vivas, the philosopher, and Isaac Rosenfeld, one of Vivas’s students.” Tarcov was not the only Chicago friend to visit. Ithiel Pool came through town “on one of his political trips (4th International business),” bunking in Bellow’s room.103 Money was tight at Wisconsin and Bellow applied for an NYA (National Youth Administration) part-time job, as an assistant either to Swadesh, who had a research appointment in the department, or to Charlotte Gower, who was at work on a study of New Glarus, a Wisconsin village that retained many of the customs of its Swiss namesake.104
The first months at Wisconsin went well. Rosenfeld arrived a few weeks before Bellow and found a room near campus, at 1314 St. James Court, though he seems not to have stayed there long (by September 19 he was writing to Tarcov from 11 North Mills Street, nearby). “There is a loveliness, wistfulness here,” Rosenfeld reported in the letter. Later, on September 25, he writes that “we are not antagonizing each other—or, considering his [Bellow’s] far more gentle nervous organization, let me say that I am not antagonizing him.” “The first days of the term were warm and hazy,” Bellow remembered. “We went canoeing on Lake Mendota. I capsized the canoe—Isaac luckily was still on
the dock and helped me up the wooden ladder.” Back inside Rosenfeld’s room, Bellow wrapped himself in a towel, “and we began to talk.” It was Indian summer, “beautiful and somnolent,” and the room was “filled with sunlight.” What the two friends talked about was neither philosophy nor anthropology but literature. “We went from Shakespeare to Dickens to Kafka, from Tolstoy to Isaac Babel, from Balzac to Proust to Malraux. We were big on Theodore Dreiser, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe and Faulkner. Delmore Schwartz’s ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’ [published in 1937 in Partisan Review] I considered then to be a masterpiece.”105
The two friends were never to be closer, happy, as Steven Zipperstein puts it, to be “outside the reach, finally, of both parental homes.”106 They wrote poems and playlets together, traded jokes and literary schemes and ambitions. “Saul and I have batted the old surrealist ball around quite a bit,” wrote Rosenfeld to Tarcov. In this period, perhaps on a visit from Tarcov, the friends worked on his surrealist play “Twin Bananas,” which they later performed in the lobby of the Harper Library at the University of Chicago.107 The finest of their joint productions, variously dated, was a Yiddish parody of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Rosenfeld was enormously proud of the parody, as is clear from an article he wrote in the first issue of The Beacon, the one that contained Bellow’s article “Northwestern Is a Prison.” “The Precocious Student at the University of Chicago” was written by Rosenfeld under his own name, but uses pseudonyms for the students it describes. In Harper Corridor, “a Trotskyite is holding the Y.C.L. at bay,” an “accredited clever girl” sits smoking on a bench, while poets “stand about letting themselves be admired.” One of these poets “bespectacled and dull-faced, with loosely hanging clothes (he was fat at one time) has translated T. S. Eliot into Yiddish. He quotes his translations twice a day and pretends that he feels he is making a fool of himself so that people (who have already memorized his translations) will have to beg him to quote.” This poet has a friend named Raskolnikov (Bellow, presumably, given his love of Dostoyevsky and his volatility) who is “also a surrealist” and has written a poem “about a comma spreading mustard on its sides.”
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 26