The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  112. ​Pearl’s only other appearance in SB’s correspondence is in a letter to Oscar Tarcov, postmarked 29 September 1937: “Your elaborate, desperate rakishness was more than I could take. It went back beyond New York, beyond your mother, beyond Pearl too.”

  113. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 34n.

  114. ​See SB, Humboldt’s Gift, p. 210.

  115. ​Dolnick’s letter to Ruth Miller is dated 22 July 1994; SB’s letter to Dolnick is dated 10 October 1995; and Eleanor Fox Simmons’s letter to SB is undated. The originals of all three letters are in the possession of Eleanor Fox Simmons.

  116. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 37.

  117. ​Notes to Roth about Isaac Rosenfeld, p. 2.

  5. POLITICS/ANTHROPOLOGY

  1. ​This quotation is from an interview conducted with David Peltz by the journalist D. J. R. Bruckner, who was at work on a television documentary about SB. The program, Saul Bellow’s Chicago, was aired on Channel 5 in Chicago on 27 March 1981. Bruckner conducted interviews in 1980 and his recordings are in the Regenstein.

  2. ​For this quote and the quote from Glotzer, see Atlas, Biography, pp. 35, 37.

  3. ​In SB, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), p. 526, SB describes this program as “a city-sponsored introduction to higher notions and an accidental break into Shakespeare and other great masters along with the science and math leveled at the Civil-Service exam.”

  4. ​SB, “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt,” originally printed in Esquire, December 1983, reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 17.

  5. ​Ibid., p. 17. Details both of the history of Crane Junior College and of educational funding in Chicago in the Depression come from Dominic A. Pacyga, Chicago: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 259–60; the entry for “Colleges, Junior and Community,” in The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago (2005), compiled by the Chicago Historical Society (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/312./html); and the entry for “Crane Junior College,” in the “City Colleges of Chicago” website (http://www.ccc.edu/MissionHistory.asp).

  6. ​SB, “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt,” SB, IAAU, p. 22.

  7. ​SB, “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” first published in The National Interest (Spring 1993), reprinted in IAAU, p. 99.

  8. ​Ibid.

  9. ​It is possible that by “the forum” SB meant Bronstein’s Friday night forum, mistakenly locating it on California Avenue. In an email of 26 May 2011, Peltz provides more detail: “My uncle, David Bronstein, tailor and Torah scholar, with his wife, my Aunt Esther, as newly arrived immigrants fell in with a wealthy born-again Christian, the wife of the president of the Bowman Dairy Company. Hugely wealthy and zealously born-again, Mrs. Peck spent weeks proselytizing Uncle David, who had a true connection to the biblical story of Jesus. Not as the Messiah but as another in the long line of prophets. Aunt Esther seeing an opportunity … dragged her husband into the business of running a community center that became a cover for a mission house to bring Jews to Jesus. They took over an abandoned Lutheran church with high gables and turned it into a basketball court and a debating arena giving full sway to the Stalinists, the Trotskyists, the Norman Thomas Socialists and more, all waiting their turn at the podium, fiercely advocating the overthrow of the failed capitalist system. Aunt Esther pounding her ample breasts just as fiercely answering their solutions as stupidly unworkable. ‘Only by changing the hearts of men through Jesus’ could any system for the good work. The wealthy ‘born againers’ were enthralled, slumming Friday nights among the poor and getting turned on by Aunt Esther’s passion for Jesus. The mission house was on Washtenaw and Crystal. Not California Avenue.”

  10. ​This quotation and the one about being a socialist in high school come from Manea, “Conversation,” p. 12. The quotation about being a Trotskyist in college comes from “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” SB, IAAU, p. 100. SB’s conversion experience was like that of F. W. Dupee, the literary critic, who would become his friend and colleague in the early 1950s. He, too, joined the Trotskyists after reading Trotsky’s History (see Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987]), pp. 87–88.

  11. ​Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, tr. P. S. Falla (1978; New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 961 (this is the one-volume paperback, containing the three volumes: The Founders, The Golden Age, and The Breakdown).

  12. ​Interview with D. J. R. Bruckner.

  13. ​SB, “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” SB, IAAU, p. 100.

  14. ​SB, “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt,” SB, IAAU, p. 25.

  15. ​Quoted in Joseph Dorman, Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words (New York: Free Press, 2000), p. 54.

  16. ​SB, “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” SB, IAAU, p. 101.

  17. ​Quoted in Paul N. Siegel, Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), p. 9.

  18. ​SB, “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” SB, IAAU, p. 100.

  19. ​Dorman, Arguing the World, p. 60. For how few Trotskyists there were, see Albert Glotzer, Trotsky: Memoir and Critique (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1989), p. 310: “I doubt if the total combined world membership ever surpassed a thousand.”

  20. ​Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 33.

  21. ​SB, “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” SB, IAAU, p. 100. For the Burnham quote on Trotsky’s style, see Wald, The New York Intellectuals, p. 177.

  22. ​William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805 version, Book 9, ll. 41–110.

  23. ​Glotzer belonged to the majority Foster-Cannon faction of the American Communist Party, led by William Z. Foster and James P. Cannon, which was soon suspected of having Trotskyist leanings and ousted from leadership. After Foster and Cannon split, Cannon and his allies, Martin Abern and Max Shachtman, were put on trial by the party. In November 1928, they and their followers, Glotzer included, were expelled.

  24. ​Glotzer’s association with the CLA was relatively short-lived. As factionalism engulfed the Trotskyists, with divisions over the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the beginnings of World War II, including the invasion of Finland (defended by Trotsky as progressive on the grounds that it would lead to the nationalization of property) and continued support of the Soviet Union as a workers’ state, Glotzer became disillusioned. Eventually, in 1940, he joined Max Shachtman and others in founding the breakaway Workers Party, later named the Independent Socialist League (in 1949).

  25. ​The Harris quotation is from his interview with D. J. R. Bruckner. Jay Lovestone (1897–1990) briefly headed the Communist Party in the United States before being deposed by Stalin in 1929. He and his followers then formed the Communist Party of the United States, later titled the Independent Labor League of America, and were called Lovestoneites. The group disbanded in 1940 and Lovestone turned against Communism, heading the pro-war Committee to Defend America, which sought support for Britain and the other Allies. He later worked for many years in the International Affairs Department of the merged AFL-CIO.

  26. ​Dorman, Arguing the World, p. 51.

  27. ​Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (1947; New York: New York Review Books, 2002), pp. 168, 140.

  28. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 17.

  29. ​SB, “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt,” SB, IAAU, p. 27.

  30. ​For the first and third of the three quotations from SB, see “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” SB, IAAU, p. 102; for the second, see “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt,” SB, IAAU, p. 23.

  31. ​SB, “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt,” SB, IAAU, pp. 28–29.

  32. ​SB, “A Silver Dish” (1978), reprinted in SB, CS, p. 23, where Morris Peltz’s talk is said to be “about washing
under the arms or in the crotch or of drying between your toes or of cooking supper, of baked beans and fried onions, of draw poker or of a certain horse in the fifth race at Arlington.”

  33. ​David Peltz, email, 24 March 2011.

  34. ​Peltz is not sure of the year SB made his request. Arendt came to Chicago to deliver a lecture at the University of Chicago in 1956, was a visiting professor at Northwestern University in 1961, and taught at the Committee on Social Thought from 1963 to 1973, so the request is likely to have come sometime in either 1956, 1961, or 1963.

  35. ​This quotation, like the earlier one about Hannah Arendt’s “peculiar gift,” comes from the Koch interview.

  36. ​In SB, “Problems in American Literature,” in Literary Imagination, Ancient and Modern: Essays in Honor of David Grene, ed. Todd Breyfogle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 375, a revised version of a lecture SB gave at the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall in December 1995, he wrongly says he was seventeen when he entered the University of Chicago.

  37. ​For Abraham’s reluctance to pay tuition, see the Koch interview; for SB on classmates, see SB, “Problems in American Literature,” pp. 375–76.

  38. ​Koch interview.

  39. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 12.

  40. ​These and other materials pertaining to SB’s years at Northwestern come from the Archives of the Northwestern University Library, either from the Saul Bellow Papers, as in this case; or from the Melville J. Herskovits Papers, which contain letters of reference Herskovits, a professor of anthropology, wrote on SB’s behalf; or from the papers of SB’s friend Julian Behrstock; or from those of Behrstock’s friend Jack Harris.

  41. ​From an interview with Dick Cavett, broadcast on ABC in three half-hour episodes (12–14 May 1982).

  42. ​Edward Shils, Portraits: A Gallery of Intellectuals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 124. My account of Hutchins and the University of Chicago in the 1930s comes principally from Mary Ann Dzuback, Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Shils’s chapter on Hutchins in Portraits, pp. 124–54; and William H. McNeill, Hutchins’ University: A Memoir of the University of Chicago, 1929–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

  43. ​In the years immediately prior to Hutchins’s arrival, preliminary attempts had been made to reform the largely elective undergraduate program, in which specialized faculty interests determined undergraduate offerings. Hutchins’s restructuring built on these attempts.

  44. ​Koch interview.

  45. ​For Hutchins’s and his supporters’ rationale, see Dzuback, Robert M. Hutchins, pp. 105–6. For corroborating accounts of the inadequacy of undergraduate provision in the most prestigious research universities, see Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), on her undergraduate education at Radcliffe (1921–25): “The Radcliffe-Harvard education of my day was very much a training in scholarship. It did not encourage the exercise of the critical intelligence” (p. 69); “What we were learning were facts, more facts, and yet more facts, how to gather them, how to memorize them and how to put them together in orderly fashion” (p. 75).

  46. ​The structure of the undergraduate curriculum Hutchins introduced was simple. There were four required General Courses for students at the College, each organized by one of the university’s four academic divisions: the Humanities, the Social Sciences, the Biological Sciences, and the Physical Sciences. These large lecture courses were devised and taught by faculty from their respective divisions; weekly discussion groups were led by instructors, who were supervised by the faculty.

  47. ​SB’s courses and grades while a student at the University of Chicago come from his Official Academic Record, Office of the University Registrar. According to the record, which provides marks and dates for “Examinations Taken” as well as “Courses,” SB twice failed his English “Qualifying Test” (in November 1933 and February 1934) and was given a U (Unsatisfactory) in Winter Quarter 1935 in Biological Sciences.

  48. ​This quotation and the one that precedes it come from the Botsford interview “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 305. The General Courses met four days a week and on the fifth day “you actually got to see your quiz instructor for an hour and you would go over the lectures with your master tutors. And they were masters. Very good people gave those general courses. But you never got to know anybody, and nobody ever knew you.”

  49. ​Koch interview.

  50. ​Ibid.; “Venus Urania” figures in Shelley’s Adonais (1821).

  51. ​SB, “Chicago and American Culture: One Writer’s View,” p. 81, a talk delivered at the Centennial Celebration of the Chicago Public Library on 10 October 1972. A version of this talk was later printed under the same title in Chicago (May 1973), pp. 82–89. I have quoted from a twenty-one-page typescript of the talk, with handwritten corrections, in the Regenstein.

  52. ​Koch interview.

  53. ​The anecdote about Professor Scott comes from SB, “Problems in American Literature,” p. 375; for Mortimer Adler, see Rockwell Gray, Harry White, and Gerald Nemanic, “Interview with Saul Bellow,” TriQuarterly 60 (1984): 12–34, reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 215.

  54. ​SB, “Nobel Lecture” (1976), reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 88. Walter Blair’s quotation is from his interview with D. J. R. Bruckner.

  55. ​SB, “Problems in American Literature,” p. 357.

  56. ​A version of these lines occurs in the first of the two Jefferson Lectures (1977), reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 124.

  57. ​Among SB’s friends, Tarcov and Rosenfeld were still at Tuley, Passin still at Marshall High School. Nate Gould and Herman Slate, among others, could have been the unnamed roommate, though when Gould and SB overcame their political differences (not to mention rivalry over Yetta Barshevsky) is not clear.

  58. ​SB, “Problems in American Literature,” pp. 375, 376.

  59. ​SB, “Jefferson Lectures,” SB, IAAU, p. 120; “Problems in American Literature,” p. 376.

  60. ​Koch interview.

  61. ​After Chicago, Barrett went on to teach philosophy at NYU and to serve as an associate editor at Partisan Review; Goodman became a prominent figure on the Greenwich Village scene, grouped with SB in Daniel Bell’s chart of “New York Jewish Intellectuals” (see Daniel Bell, “The ‘Intelligentsia’ in American Society,” a lecture given in 1976 at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, first published in Samuel Sandmel, ed., Tomorrow’s American: The Weil Lectures of 1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), reprinted in Daniel Bell, The Winding Passage: Sociological Essays and Journeys (1980; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1991), pp. 127–29. SB was included in the chart, along with Leslie Fiedler and Seymour Lipset, with an asterisk: “Outside New York but had status as members”; Roditi worked in the Office of Wartime Information in New York (with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Klaus Mann, André Breton, André Maurois, and Julien Green); as did Kaplan, before joining a special group of French-speakers recruited to work in North Africa, a small branch of what was soon to become “a very big and swollen propaganda services,” the CIA. Kaplan would later write the “Paris Letter” for Partisan Review, while working in Paris in the U.S. embassy. Wieboldt Hall was to SB’s generation of University of Chicago student-intellectuals what Hartley Hall was to Lionel Trilling’s comparable generation ten years earlier at Columbia. Along with Trilling, “many of the Hartley Hall group—Meyer Schapiro, Jacques Barzun, Clifton Fadiman, Francis Steegmuller, Edgar Johnson—would be known in one or another sphere of the intellectual activity of the country” (Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey, p. 83).

  62. ​SB, “Problems in American Literature,” p. 376.

  63. ​Isaac Rosenfeld, “Life in Chicago,” reprinted in Mark Shechner, ed., Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), p. 95.

  64.
​The quotation from Passin is in Atlas, Biography, p. 44; SB’s quotation is from “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt,” SB, IAAU, p. 24.

  65. ​See 1963 interview with Bruce Cook, “Saul Bellow: A Mood of Protest,” reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 14. By “Socialist Club,” SB may mean the ASU, American Student Union.

  66. ​This quotation is from an undated letter of SB to Irving Halperin, professor of Humanities at San Francisco State University, written sometime after 1968, when they’d first met.

  67. ​The course was Zoology, and the average was that of his senior year.

  68. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 305.

  69. ​Figures for Jewish undergraduates at Northwestern come from Atlas, Biography, p. 47, which cites Harold F. Williamson and Payson S. Wild, Northwestern University: A History, 1850–1975 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1975). The University of Chicago figures come from Dzuback, Robert M. Hutchins, p. 286.

  70. ​Interview with D. J. R. Bruckner.

  71. ​According to Helen Jaffe, in ibid., Jaffe and SB were “very, very good friends,” though they were only together for the academic year 1935–36 (in SB’s senior year Jaffe went off to work).

  72. ​Cook interview, in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 14: “In the beginning, he continued to live on the south side near the Midway, commuting to classes on the El”; Atlas, Biography, p. 53, says SB lived at home when he began at Northwestern.

  73. ​On April Fools’ Day 1936 The Daily Northwestern published a humorous piece by SB entitled “Pets of the North Shore,” which makes gentle fun of Evanston women and their dogs. This is the most notable of SB’s contributions to the paper.

  74. ​SB’s pseudonym was “John Paul,” an Americanized version of “Jean Paul,” the pseudonym of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), the German satirist.