The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  The letter is pure fantasy, a satire; Fitzgerald had been dead for nearly a decade. The wish fulfillment it plays on is that of what Janet Flanner calls “the tourist intelligentsia.”30 The wish Bellow wanted fulfilled in Paris was less fanciful: that the city would prove a place where art and ideas mattered (even if no longer a place to “leap towards the marvelous,” in Rosenberg’s phrase). “In politics continental Europe was infantile—horrifying,” certainly in comparison to America or American democracy. What America lacked, however, “was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This was what Europe offered, or was said to offer.”31 But intellectual pleasures proved hard for Bellow to find in his Paris years. “I did keep up with French ideas,” he recalls in “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” “read Sartre in Les Temps Modernes and Camus in Combat. I also took in an occasional lecture at the Collège de Philosophie.”32 At the bar of the Pont Royal, haunt of Sartre and Beauvoir, he met Richard Wright, the author of Native Son (1940). Wright, who knew both Kappy and Bellow, arrived in Paris in 1946 and was “immediately welcomed” by the existentialists, who “soon had him reading Husserl” (a figure “I ignorantly held in great respect”).33 Wright, however, was an exception; most Americans, Bellow believed, were “hated” by the existentialists, as by the French in general.

  One source of this hatred was political. On April 30, 1949, at the suggestion of David Rousset, its chief initiator, an International Day of Resistance to Dictatorship and War was held in Paris, a response to a Communist-inspired World Congress of Peace, scheduled for April 1949, also in Paris. Rousset was on the Executive Committee of the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionanaire (RDR), a group of left-leaning writers and critics, among them Jean-Paul Sartre. Invitations to the event were issued jointly under the name of the Executive Committee and the editorial staff of the breakaway left-wing daily newspaper Franc-Tireur. Sidney Hook, implacably anti-Communist, attended the proceedings and reported on them in the July 1949 issue of Partisan Review.34 He pronounced the level of political sophistication of the twelve thousand or so delegates—from England, the United States, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Western Germany, Spain, and France—“incredibly low … in tone, expression, and content” (p. 726). He deplored the “obsessive fear among avowed non-Communists in France, particularly in French literary and intellectual circles, to challenge in any fundamental way the Soviet myth. Ignorance of conditions in the Soviet Union was matched only by ignorance of conditions in the United States” (p. 724). Hook was appalled that the organizers “refused to invite men like Koestler, Burnham, and Raymond Aron” (p. 724). Most speakers were openly critical of the Atlantic Pact, pleading for neutrality between the two blocs, “as if the liberties of Western Europe were threatened equally by the Soviet Union and the United States.… One got the impression that they believed that the Atlantic Pact was imposed upon the governments of Western Europe in the same way as Vishinsky [sic] set up a government in Rumania. In a statement read to the Sorbonne audience, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Wright made an explicit equation between the terroristic annexations of the Soviet Union in the East and the Atlantic Pact in the West, condemning both ‘equally and for the same reason’ ” (p. 727). When questioned as to the nature of American imperialism, “no coherent or consistent account could be elicited. It was hard to separate opposition to chewing gum, Coca-Cola, the Reader’s Digest (bestselling periodical in France) from condemnation of segregation, the monopoly of the atom bomb, and the ‘colonization’ of Europe achieved by the Machiavellian device of sending bread and machinery to rebuild Europe” (p. 728).35

  Bellow attended the conference and described it, in a letter of May 19, 1949, to J. F. Powers, as “an awful fiasco. Hook and James Farrell upheld the Marshall Plan and the Atlantic Pact. They couldn’t have made themselves less popular, for that reason. The Pact is death, as far as the French left is concerned.” He shared Hook’s scorn for the equation of American and Soviet systems, as well as Hook’s sense that for French intellectuals and their American admirers “it costs nothing—there are absolutely no risks—in denouncing American culture and foreign policy,” whereas criticizing the Soviet Union was considered daring, even dangerous, given France’s proximity to “Soviet outposts in Europe” (p. 732). Bellow “strongly suspected,” he told Botsford in an interview, that Sartre and the French intellectuals who published in Les Temps Modernes “expected the West to fall to communism and they would be advantageously placed when this happened.” “Why was it they were unable to criticize the Russians in 1956? To behave as they did, you had to be attracted by more than doctrine. You had to have some idea of possible advantages.”36 “The sad fact is,” Hook concludes in his “Report on the International Day Against Dictatorship and War,” “that at present the fears of France are deeper than its hopes and courage” (p. 732). What is needed, he suggests, is what Kappy provides, in person and through his work: contact with patriotic Americans who are politically and culturally sophisticated and willing to admit to and protest against injustices in the United States: “The informational re-education of the French public seems to me to be the most fundamental as well as the most pressing task of American democratic policy in France” (p. 731). This idea lay behind Hook’s involvement a year later in the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, which sought to spread “informational re-education” throughout Europe.37 Looking back on the period, in “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” Bellow declared that “activists like Hook made a difference. Their contribution to victory in the cold war can’t be measured but must be acknowledged.… I give Hook full marks for the wars he fought and admire him.”38

  BELLOW’S PERIPHERAL CONNECTIONS with the task of “informational re-education” began early. In New York, in March 1948, he had attended a meeting, as did Kappy, who was visiting at the time, of the newly formed and short-lived Europe-America Groups (EAG). The aim of the EAG was to provide support to European intellectuals “in the face of the extreme polarity of Soviet and American power.” Stalinism was identified as “the main enemy in Europe today,” but American capitalism was also attacked, for “the social and economic and racial iniquities this system perpetuates.”39 The purpose of the March meeting was to discuss money, the proceeds from recent fundraising activities, to be used to facilitate travel and contacts between French, German, Italian, and Spanish intellectuals. The money would also go to purchase and distribute a “ ‘Standard’ Book Bundle,” a list of recommended titles: Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown, Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine, William Faulkner’s Light in August, The Partisan Reader: Ten Years of Partisan Review, 1934–1944: An Anthology, and Bellow’s The Victim. From the start, the EAG was riven by factions. Bellow and Kappy had been brought to the meeting to support what Mary McCarthy called “the Sidney Hook gang” (“the purists,” in her novel The Oasis), for whom neutralist positions and “outreach” (to pro-Soviet or hard-left organizations) were considered naive if not actually treasonous. That “gang” included the PR editors, Meyer Schapiro, Saul Steinberg and Nicolas Nabokov, as well as Hook, and was opposed by a group spearheaded by Dwight and Mary Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, and Nicola Chiaromonte, the Italian critic and journalist. Whether Bellow knew he had been invited to the meeting to support a particular faction is unclear. Also unclear is how seriously he weighed the potential dangers from the right, the sort stressed by Chiaromonte and Dwight Macdonald and minimized by “the purists”: Franco in Spain, the Christian Democrats in Italy, antidemocratic elements among the Gaullists in France. What is clear is that under the direct influence of French anti-Americanism, particularly from the non-Communist left, Bellow moved to the right.

  In analyzing this anti-Americanism, Bellow stressed the role played by guilt and national pride. In his “Report,” Hook expresses surprise at how little criticism of the Mar
shall Plan there was at the International Day. “When I asked for an explanation of this one Frenchman dryly remarked that they had all put on some weight as a result of it. More significant was the admission many were prepared to make in private but not in public that the Marshall Plan had saved France from the Communists and De Gaullists” (p. 727). Two weeks before the International Day, in an entry of April 15, 1949, Janet Flanner offered support for this view in her journal. The Marshall Plan’s European Recovery Program was now a year old; in celebration, the French minister of finance and economic affairs, Maurice Petsche, “thanked the Americans for the millions of tons of coal that have kept the wheels of French industry turning; the cotton that the French mills weave two days out of three; the wheat that has lately supplied a quarter of the French bread; and the gasoline on which French trucks roll one day out of two. ‘All this merchandise,’ he said with emotion, ‘has been given us gratis by the American government.’ ”40 To French patriots, such indebtedness was shaming. Also shaming was French conduct during the war, in particular the conduct of the French Communists and their sympathizers, what Hook calls “the eloquent and, if properly construed, damning fact that the Soviet Union and the Communists everywhere had actively collaborated with the Nazis, that the French Communists had sabotaged the French war effort until Hitler took the initiative against Stalin.” What made protesting against this history difficult was “the bad conscience of most Frenchmen and the seeming futility of raking up the past” (p. 731). Hook was undeterred: “Despite the myths and legends that sprang up after the liberation, there was not much of a resistance movement to the Nazis in France. In 1940 when the war seemed irretrievably lost, almost the entire population collaborated in some form or other with the Vichy government and passively accepted the occupation” (p. 730).

  This was Bellow’s view. “Bad conscience,” he told Philip Roth, underlay French anti-Americanism:

  Not only had they been overrun by the Germans in three weeks, but they had collaborated. Vichy had made them cynical. They pretended that there was a vast underground throughout the war, but the fact seemed to be that they had spent the war years scrounging for food in the countryside. And these fuckers were also patriots. La France had been humiliated and it was all the fault of their liberators, the Brits and the G.I.s.41

  When patronized and subjected to ignorant prejudice about America, Bellow thought of the conduct of the French during the war. On July 16 and 17, 1942, a mere six years prior to his arrival in Paris, 13,152 Jews were rounded up in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, just south of the Eiffel Tower, and sent to concentration camps. Of the 42,000 Jews in France who were deported to the camps, only 811 returned. This figure came from an article of July 22, 2012, in the Guardian reporting on a speech given by François Hollande at the site of the Vélodrome. Not one German soldier was mobilized for the roundup, known to the French as the Vél d’Hiv Rafle. The entire operation, the article reports, was conducted by French police “said to have worked with an enthusiasm that surprised the German occupiers who had commanded them.”42 Hook mentions in his “Report” that the evening session of the International Day was held in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, but says nothing—may not have known—of its connection to the Rafle.

  WHAT BELLOW SAW AS the nihilism of modern French literature and thought, of existentialism in particular, he linked to atrocities like that of the Vél d’Hiv Rafle. The Paris years forged the link. While conceding the thinness of American culture, “I was aware also of a seldom-mentioned force visible in Europe itself to anyone who had eyes—the force of a nihilism that had destroyed most of its cities and millions of lives in a war of six long years. I could not easily accept the plausible sets: America, the thinning of the life impulses; Europe, the cultivation of the subtler senses still valued, still going on.”43 This awareness helped to sink “The Crab and the Butterfly.” Bellow had arrived in the city with “several hundred pages of manuscript.” The grimness of those pages deepened in the Parisian grisaille. “I was terribly downcast,” Bellow recalled to Roth. “Thinking my gloomy thoughts beside the medicinal Seine and getting no relief from the great monuments of Paris, I sometimes wondered whether I shouldn’t be thinking about a different course of life. Maybe I should apprentice myself to an undertaker.”44 Even “The Trip to Galena,” a chapter of “The Crab and the Butterfly” he approved of, explains why he might feel this way. Weyl, the character meant to make the case for life in the novel, has a peculiar way of going about it. What he recounts of his past makes him sound a familiar type: alienated, ruthlessly honest or “authentic,” violent, more like Joseph in Dangling Man than Leventhal in The Victim. Weyl’s sister, Fanny, though of similar temperament, chooses, like Simon in The Adventures of Augie March, to marry into money and respectability, urging her brother to do so as well. Where Augie is tempted, Weyl is adamant: good faith outweighs not just material but moral considerations: “I’d take up anything I thought feeling had stayed in. If in the right things, okay. If not, I wouldn’t have stopped at grave-robbing” (p. 782). Yet nothing moves him. “I was bored,” he confesses, “but because I’m energetic, energetically bored, melancholy. And if there’s anything I hate, it’s that romantic Hamlet-melancholy. I despise it. I despise it in myself” (p. 791). Speaking of himself in the third person, Weyl declares: “If he can’t keep himself going a little under the angels, he ought to be a nihilist” (p. 792).

  But Weyl already is a nihilist or has been one. He recounts a senseless act of violence committed as a soldier in Rome at the end of the war. Unprovoked and perfectly sober, Weyl smashes a whiskey bottle over the head of a man he’d stopped to ask for directions. “What was the reason?” asks Scampi; Weyl replies:

  I haven’t found out. Maybe it was my personal act of war. Or an idea that a man is bound to do everything in his lifetime.… Yes, it must have been my act of war, since I was there, to do something lousy and hateful on my own, and did it spontaneously, a piece of violence in my personal quality. Since I was on the ride of the world, to ride the hateful thing through. All right, I joined; I became a member. I signed up with the blacks, if you like. It doesn’t make any difference, does it? (p. 793).45

  The echoes here are of Camus’s Meursault in The Outsider or Gide’s Lafcadio in The Caves of the Vatican, even of Céline’s Robinson in Journey to the End of the Night, a book Bellow read and admired in his early twenties. In Paris, Bellow read Céline’s Les Beaux Draps, appalled by its virulent anti-Semitism. “By putting a hand to my neck,” he told Alice Kaplan in a letter of August 9, 1991, “I can still feel the hackles those fine sheets raised.” Though “a superb writer,” Céline was “nihilism plus,” “impossible” as a human being. In an interview with Bellow, Norman Manea recalls reading somewhere “that in the first period in Paris, after the war, you were speaking about Céline and Sartre in the same way” (he has in mind the first Botsford interview, in which Sartre’s essay on Frantz Fanon is described by Bellow as “trying to do on the left what Céline had done on the right—Kill! Kill! Kill!”).46 “In Paris,” Bellow replies, “I had friends with whom these were the subjects that were discussed, not only Céline and Sartre but all of those European ideas and subjects.” Céline’s Paris “was still there” in the late 1940s, he writes elsewhere, “more there than Sainte-Chapelle or the Louvre.”47 In “The Trip to Galena,” Céline’s presence is evoked by Weyl’s belief that “the ride of the world” is inevitably “hateful,” or that to live life fully is “to ride the hateful thing through,” as if journeying “to the end of the night.” In Paris, more strongly than ever, Bellow came to see this view as wrong, both morally and in fact. The ride could be exhilarating, funny (though not in Céline’s way), even heroic, an idea hard to square with a protagonist like Weyl. For Bellow, “lousy and hateful” acts, no matter how “spontaneous” or invested with “personal quality,” remain lousy and hateful. As the critic Daniel Fuchs puts it: “Weyl is an instance of the negativism he resists. He lacks the liberating tone and that tone wo
uld come only with the creation of Augie March.”48 Though in “The Crab and the Butterfly” Bellow made use of a currently fashionable negativism, “there was something in me perhaps of a Jewish origin which had nothing to do with nihilism, I was terribly downcast and writing about a hospital room, and coaxing a dying man to assert himself and claim his share of life.”49 Being stuck with Weyl was like suffering a debilitating disease.