The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Tolstoi (1828–1910) said, “Kings are history’s slaves.” The higher one stands in the scale of power, the more his actions are determined. To Tolstoi freedom is entirely personal. That man is free whose condition is simple, truthful—real. To be free is to be released from historical limitation. On the other hand, GWF Hegel (1770–1831) understood the essence of human life to be derived from history. …

  The letter goes on for a few more sentences before Herzog realizes, “not without humor in his despair,” that Ike would pay no more attention to Tolstoy and Hegel than to Pascal. “I’m bugging all these people—Nehru, Churchill, and now Ike, whom I apparently want to give a Great Books course” (p. 579). Had President Kennedy survived, Moses thinks, perhaps he “would have been interested,” though to no effect, nothing would change. The governments of Eisenhower and Johnson “could not function without intellectuals—physicists, statisticians—but these are whirling lost in the arms of industrial chiefs and billionaire brass. Kennedy was not about to change this situation, either. Only he seemed to have acknowledged, privately, that it existed.” Moses therefore turns from men of power to men of intellect, offering an outline of his ideas to Harris Pulver, “who had been his tutor in 1939 and was now the editor of Atlantic Civilization” (p. 580). In 1961 Bellow was commissioned to write a profile of Khrushchev for Esquire. Like Herzog, he took what might be called a meta-political or antipolitical approach, focusing not on policy but on character, what he saw as Khrushchev’s archetypal character. “Other statesmen are satisfied to represent their countries. Not so Khrushchev. He wishes to personify Russia and the communist cause,” a point Bellow makes (as we saw in Chapter 1) through comparisons with Dostoyevsky’s Father Karamazov. Herzog might well have drawn such parallels, though without Bellow’s light touch; he would have been drawn into abstraction, gone on too long. Bellow differs from Herzog in having a sense of audience and of proportion, but he engages with politics and world affairs at Herzog’s level.36

  RICHARD STERN WANTED Bellow to stay on at the University of Chicago. The English Department, however, was reluctant to hire another creative writer (“I think they felt one was enough”). That Stern was on leave during Winter Quarter, in Rome and Venice, made lobbying on Bellow’s behalf difficult. It was Edward Shils, a sociologist on the faculty of the Committee on Social Thought, who was, as Stern puts it, “the moving force.” Shils had known Bellow since the 1930s. He was aware that Bellow had applied for and failed to get a job at the Committee in 1943, and rightly thought it would be a better fit for him than the English Department, being something of an academic salon des refusés, home to scholars and thinkers whose wide interests and independent characters often put them at odds with traditional departments. Committee faculty were drawn from literature, philosophy, history, religion, art, politics, and society, and encouraged to pursue general themes and questions, often of an interdisciplinary nature. The ethos was that of the Humanities programs Bellow had taught in at Minneapolis and NYU, but the student body was quite different, as the Committee admitted only a small number of carefully screened graduate students. In addition to taking seminars from Committee faculty, these students were required to pass a “Fundamentals Examination” before writing a dissertation. As is still the case today, each student was required to draw up a list of a dozen or so classic texts, both ancient and modern, in consultation with faculty. These lists were to include works of imaginative literature, of philosophy, religion, and theology, and of history and social theory, and at least one of the works on the list had to be read in the original language. Each list had to be approved by every member of the faculty and every member of the faculty was invited to provide questions for examination. According to the current Committee website, preparation for the Fundamentals Exam provides “a kind of liberal education on the graduate level.”37 It is “the defining experience for students in the Committee on Social Thought.” For a writer like Bellow, drawn to philosophy and theory, teaching in the Committee was a way to renew acquaintance with classic texts from a range of disciplines, and to discuss them with able students and eminent authorities. His responsibilities as a Committee member would be light and largely self-determined. It was common for faculty with similar interests to co-teach seminars. The financial and personal incentives for joining the Committee also drew Bellow: Greg would be able to attend the university tuition-free; Bellow could see Adam regularly, as Sasha was still in Skokie; and Bellow preferred living in Chicago to living in New York. That Susan didn’t like living in Chicago was a difficulty, but Susan had friends and family in the city and might like it better when living with Bellow than with her parents.

  IN 1962, the Committee on Social Thought consisted of nine faculty members, among them John U. Nef, a historian, the founding chair; Mircea Eliade, a scholar of comparative religion; David Grene, a classicist; Friedrich A. Hayek, the economist; Frank Knight, another economist, a key figure in the creation of the Committee; James Redfield, a classicist, the son of Robert Redfield, the anthropologist, a third key figure in the Committee’s creation; and Edward Shils. In founding the Committee, Nef hoped to bring together not only scholars but people “in other creative walks of life than the academic.” That no such person was on the Committee in 1962 was a help with Shils’s efforts on Bellow’s behalf. The man who took persuading was Edward Levi, the provost of the university, later its president (also, from 1975 to 1977, attorney general under Gerald Ford). In an interview with James Atlas, Levi described himself as disapproving of writers in academic posts. Shils knew of this disapproval but was undaunted. He was a skillful academic politician and once confessed to his friend, the writer Joseph Epstein, that he dreamt of being a cardinal in Rome, a job he would have loved. While Levi ran the university, according to Epstein, Shils was something of the figure he dreamt of being, “a powerful and not at all behind the scenes influence.”38 Shils arranged a lunch with Bellow and Levi. After “reluctantly” agreeing to the lunch, Levi told Atlas, “I changed my mind completely.… It was quite clear that I was talking to a learned person who was serious about his learning and serious about teaching.”39

  Edward Shils became Bellow’s closest friend at the university and was for almost a decade an important influence on his life. He was a polarizing figure: irascible, fierce in his loyalties and enmities, confrontational, learned, charming at times, and bitingly funny. In appearance he was like a bullock: five foot eight, stocky, with a reddish complexion and once red hair. He dressed in heavy tweeds, never went out in public without a tie, and carried a cudgel-like walking stick. He was as formal in manner as in dress. According to Epstein, “he had students, acquaintances, really quite dear friends of several decades whom he continued to call Mr. or Mrs. or Miss; they usually called him Professor Shils” (p. 3). Shils taught half the year at the Committee on Social Thought and half in Britain, first at the London School of Economics, then at King’s College, Cambridge, then at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He had what Epstein describes as a mid-Atlantic accent and people often thought he was British or rich or both. “When the man who wrote Edward’s obituary for the Times of London, a Cambridge don [the political theorist Maurice Cowling] who I believe knew Edward longer than I, called me for information, he said. ‘He came from railroad money, didn’t he?’ ” (p. 4). In fact, he came from ostjuden immigrants from Philadelphia. His father was a cigar maker in a factory, and Shils went to Philadelphia public schools, acquiring his learning, in the first instance, in public libraries. Like Bellow, Shils made no secret of his Jewishness and loved Yiddish, perhaps because it suited his talent for denigration, or helped to form it. A favorite Yiddish word, Epstein recalls, was chachem or chachema, meaning greatly learned man or woman, “always used sarcastically” (p. 15). “Joseph,” Epstein recalls Shils saying, “pointing to three thuggish-looking youths standing on the opposite corner as we emerged one gray winter afternoon from Bishop’s chili parlor on Chicago’s light-industrial near West Side, ‘note those three schlumgazim.’ ”
When Epstein asked for a translation, Shils replied: “ ‘schlumgazim are highwaymen who, after stealing your purse, out of sheer malice also slice off your testicles’ ” (p. 4).

  As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, Shils “deliberately set out to make himself European.” Yet he loved America, “with all its philistinism and coarseness” (p. 5). He knew Chicago and its ethnic neighborhoods, especially its ethnic restaurants, better than most native Chicagoans; he had an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball, until he decided baseball no longer interested him. As an undergraduate at Pennsylvania he studied languages and Continental thought, in particular German social thought. As a graduate student and young instructor at the University of Chicago, he was influenced by Frank Knight and by the sociologist Robert Park. He wrote books and papers on a range of topics: tradition, intellectuals, naturalism, civil society, the primordial. He taught Hegel, Hobbes, Tocqueville, and Weber. He read widely in literature as well as the social sciences, taught a course on T. S. Eliot at the Committee, and admired Conrad “above all authors” (p. 7). In the living room of his Hyde Park apartment he kept a bust of Conrad by Jacob Epstein alongside one of Weber. He had no television, didn’t drive, type, or use a computer, but he kept up with the modern world and American culture through newspapers and periodicals. He could be extremely generous. Before Richard Stern broke with him he frequently received expensive gifts from Shils: a silver marrow spoon at Christmas, two or three volumes of a collected Heine to complete a set. Shils also found Stern his first British publisher. Epstein reports that Shils once gave a graduate student $10,000 “to help her finish a difficult final year of her studies. He might give another young couple a five thousand dollar Christmas gift, merely because he wanted them to know he loved them” (p. 22). If crossed, however, Shils could be rough. When invited to give a talk at Reed College in Portland (a college known for its progressive views—Bellow had visited it in 1953), he was interrupted by a student who informed him that it was customary at Reed to have dialogue between speaker and audience. “I didn’t come two thousand miles,” Shils told the student, “to listen to children.”

  In Humboldt’s Gift Bellow depicts a character much like Shils. In appearance, Charlie Citrine’s friend Richard Durnwald was “reddish, elderly but powerful, thickset and bald, a bachelor of cranky habits but a kind man” (p. 109). Durnwald and George Swiebel, the Dave Peltz character, are Citrine’s closest friends during the period of his marriage to Denise; they are also rivals for his affection, with very different notions of what is good for him. George “always came down heavily on Durnwald,” Citrine explains, because “he knew how attached I was to Dick Durnwald. In crude Chicago Durnwald, whom I admired and even adored, was the only man with whom I exchanged ideas. But for six months Durnwald had been at the University of Edinburgh, lecturing on Comte, Durkheim, Tönnies, Weber, and so on. ‘This abstract stuff is poison to a guy like you,’ said George. ‘I’m going to introduce you to guys from South Chicago.’ He began to shout. ‘You’re too exclusive, you’re going to dry out’ ” (p. 62). George calls Durnwald “the professor’s professor.… He’s heard it or read it all. When I try to talk to him I feel that I’m playing the ping-pong champion of China. I serve the ball, he smashes it back, and that’s the end of that” (pp. 61–62) (later in the novel Citrine describes Durnwald as having “a peremptory blunt butting even bullying manner” [p. 109]). If George shouts at Citrine, Durnwald scolds him. For Durnwald, as for Shils, “the only brave, the only passionate, the only manly life was a life of thought” (p. 183). For a while, but only for a while, Citrine agrees, just as for a period Bellow fell under Shils’s influence. What draws Swiebel and Durnwald together is their disapproval of Citrine’s interest in Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy, an interest Bellow began to develop in the mid-1970s. “Durnwald dismissed the subject sharply because he wished to protect his esteem for me” (p. 270).

  It was not until July 26, 1963, that Bellow received a formal invitation from John Nef to join the Committee. The appointment was at professorial level, for an initial period of five years, and at a salary of $14,000 a year. Bellow was to have the office of Friedrich Hayek, who was leaving the Committee to go to the University of Freiburg. Bellow’s letter of acceptance, dated August 10, has some of the formality of Professors Nef and Shils. “To be invited to join the faculty of the Committee on Social Thought is a great honor,” he writes, adding that he hopes “you will have no objection to my honoring some previous commitments. They will take me away from the University very seldom, and for brief periods.” Nef’s reply on August 14 begins: “Your warm letter accepting our invitation to join the Faculty of the Committee on Social Thought delighted me, and I know my colleagues will share my pleasure.” It ends: “Let me add that the whole purpose of the Committee on Social Thought is to facilitate the creative life of its members, and I hope consequently that we can be of use to you. You will be of enormous use to us. Let me say again how grateful I am for your acceptance.” On September 12, Shils wrote from King’s College, Cambridge: “My dear Saul: First, I must tell you how marvelous it will be for me and for the University to have you with us.” Later in the letter he informs Bellow that he will soon hear from “a very fine, very intelligent, very lively young friend of mine, Tony Tanner, a Fellow of this college, who is spending a year in the United States and whom I would warmly commend to your attention simply on the grounds of his personal and intellectual merits. In addition to this, however, he is writing a little book about your work.… I am sure you will appreciate him as much as I do.” Tanner’s book, published in 1965, was the first critical study devoted solely to Bellow’s writing.

  NEF’S LETTER OF August 14, 1962, was received by Bellow on Martha’s Vineyard, where he and Susan had taken a house for part of the summer. “The Vineyard is beautiful—we love it,” Bellow wrote to Stern on August 22. “Herzog in final stages—TNS put to bed. Freud should have had such a beach—he wouldn’t have had so many theories.” On August 31, however, soon after leaving the Vineyard, Bellow’s mood was darkened by another terrible fight with Sasha, the worst they’d ever had. The fight took place in Peekskill, New York, in Westchester County, where Sasha and Adam were visiting Ann Berryman. Bellow had gone to pick Adam up for a weekend at Tivoli. Sasha describes the fight in her memoir:

  He was spoiling for it, I could see his tense lip and twitch that always telegraphed a simmering rage. But I was reckless and confronted him about the lateness of the checks, and said it was a problem now, since I was running out of money. He made some remark, about how the money was for Adam not for me. I brought up the money he never paid my mother and should give to me, now that she was dead. He countered with something nasty about not supporting my lover, so I slapped him and he grabbed me by the pony tail and swung me around punching me with his other hand. I was bruised for a week and took out a restraining order. I knew that I had really provoked him, but the extraordinary violence was bubbling inside him, barely controlled, waiting for a trigger (p. 107).

  In a letter of September 10 to her lawyer, Jonas Schwartz, Sasha described the fight somewhat differently. The trouble started “after some unpleasant exchanges between us concerning getting my things from Tivoli—he refused to let me pick them up.” She says nothing of slapping Bellow nor of refusing to let him take Adam for the weekend, as he later claimed. In a passage underlined for emphasis, she writes “I did not provoke this attack, nor did I make any physical gesture towards him which could even remotely [be] mistaken for an attack,” adding that “it was only the intervention of Ann Berryman whose houseguest I was for a few weeks, which ended the attack.” Bellow, she claims, threatened to cut off divorce payments, so she asks Schwartz to subpoena his income tax records to ensure that he lived up to the terms of the divorce agreement, which stipulates that over a certain income a percentage sum should be set aside in trust for Adam. She elaborates on her injuries: “severe bone bruises behind one ear, cuts on my left temple and left eyelid, and a bad
bruise on my left breast. My scalp is a mess of lumps and bruises.”

  The letter to Schwartz was written from Tarrytown, New York, where Sasha and Adam were now living. “Chicago was not for me,” Sasha explains in the memoir, “too parochial” (p. 106). Tarrytown was hardly the big city but it was near Ludwig, who was now teaching at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After a period of estrangement on Ludwig’s part, a product of paranoid suspicions about other men, according to Sasha, and while she and Adam were still living in Skokie, Ludwig had begun calling and writing again, and she found herself “flying to NY for a weekend here and there to see him” (p. 106). The move to Tarrytown came about during a visit to Ann Berryman, perhaps the one that included the fight. Sasha saw an advertisement in the local paper for a post at the Hudson Institute, a research organization in Tarrytown, answered it, and got the job. She was to be an assistant to the head of the institute, Herman Kahn, a military strategist and systems analyst, a model for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Three or so weeks after the fight, on September 24, Sasha wrote to Bellow about visiting arrangements for Adam. He could see Adam “anytime” but he was “not to call or come for him or return him yourself but to make these arrangements through someone else.” Her lawyer and doctor had advised her to take out an injunction against him “should you fail to live up to these arrangements.” The police had been given his photograph “in the interests of my personal safety” and they would be called if she saw him anywhere near her apartment. “There are a number of people around here and in Minnesota who remember your threats to beat me up, and others who remember that you did, in fact, do so on two occasions during our marriage. I advise you to remember that.”