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(Bellow, a Trotskyist in his youth, was a total prick in his middle ages
until his death. You might even say that he was a prick when he was a
young Trotskyist since that sort of goes with the territory. But I might
read this biography anyhow. I wrote a review 14 years ago of another
Bellow biography for Swans that was a major assault on his reputation.
http://www.swans.com/library/art11/lproy25.html)
NY Review, MARCH 21, 2019 ISSUE
Swiveling Man
Nathaniel Rich
The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965–2005
by Zachary Leader
Knopf, 767 pp., $40.00
“Guys, I’m rich.”
So begins the second volume of Zachary Leader’s Life of Saul Bellow, and
so begins the second half of Bellow’s life. The publication of Herzog in
1964 had elevated a respected if underselling midcareer novelist to the
status of publishing darling, national celebrity, golden-fingertipped
literary divinity. Bellow’s income that year was the equivalent in
today’s dollars of approximately $1 million. It was higher each of the
next three years. He began to turn down lucrative awards and lecture
fees to avoid the tax liability. “The earlier Saul had disappeared,”
said his friend Mitzi McClosky, referring to the Saul who was tyrannized
by his father and the financial success of his businessmen brothers, the
Saul who hustled to secure time for his work amid low advances, grants,
and teaching gigs, the Saul aggrieved by being pigeonholed as a “Jewish
writer.” The new Saul had made it, all right. But he was no less
besieged. If the great enemy of the writer was, as he often put it in
speeches and essays, the “frantic distraction” that intruded on “the
quiet of the soul that art demands,” that enemy now came swarming over
the barricades.
It came in the form of family members hawking investment schemes in
Miami real estate and Oklahoma oilfields; grifting accountants; literary
agents touting stock tips; divorce lawyers (his third divorce, out of an
eventual four, may have set the record for the most expensive in
Illinois history); academic and literary institutions offering positions
and prizes and other compensated entanglements; writers hoisting protest
letters; invitations to judge the Booker Prize, the MacArthur “genius”
award, and the Miss USA Beauty Pageant; and a new class of professional
admirers (“career parasites,” he called them) who sought his mentorship,
founded the Saul Bellow Journal, and proposed writing his biography.
There were also the girlfriends, mistresses, and wives—and with them,
the three sons, though these were more easily evaded (Bellow’s parental
strategy, in the words of Adam Bellow, was “benign neglect until their
minds had matured enough to be somewhat interesting”). But the incursion
that most acutely tested Bellow came from the “great public noise”: the
convulsive debates over race, war, gender, and inner-city crime that
dominated American life in the decades following Herzog’s publication.
Bellow reigned as the nation’s preeminent novelist during much of this
time, a station that forced him, again and again, to confront the
paradox that lay at the heart of his identity as a writer.
“It excites me, it distresses me to be so immersed,” wrote Bellow during
this period. He was referring to a reporting trip to Jerusalem, but he
might have been describing his new position in American culture:
insisting on the writer’s need for independence from worldly affairs
while throwing himself into them. Bellow was much closer to F. Scott
Fitzgerald than Thomas Pynchon on the novelist-sociability scale. He
joined boards, political committees, and neighborhood study groups. He
developed an international reputation as a charmer at dinner parties; a
predilection for alligator shoes, Savile Row fedoras, camel-hair
overcoats, and bespoke suits in wool and shantung (“a king’s
haberdashery would not have surpassed his wardrobe,” says the writer
Dana Gioia, who met him in 1976 as a graduate student); and a wide,
ever-growing circle of friends with whom he took pains to keep in touch.
His hostility to distraction was more figurative than literal. His
working day ran from nine until noon or one, but it was not inviolable;
Alexandra, his wife from Humboldt’s Gift to More Die of Heartbreak, an
accomplished mathematician who required total isolation in order to
work, reports with astonishment that when the phone rang, he “engaged in
these very lively conversations, and then he’d go back to work with just
as much energy and zest as before.” The afternoons left him plenty of
time for his abundant correspondence (see Benjamin Taylor’s Saul Bellow:
Letters), long walks, and his academic responsibilities, which he
assumed with an enthusiasm that far outpaced financial need or
professional obligation.
He taught university literature seminars for nearly his entire adult
life. Between 1962 and 1993 he served on the Committee on Social Thought
at the University of Chicago, the august interdisciplinary graduate
program that championed a wide reading of the fundamental works of
Western thought. In 1970, at the height of his fame, he agreed to chair
the committee, recruiting new appointments, quarreling with deans over
bureaucratic demands, managing tensions between professors, and
evaluating the academic achievements of art historians, philosophers,
and political theorists—grueling, often dull work that might have cost
him a novel’s worth of labor.
He came close to writing books about Hubert Humphrey and Robert Kennedy,
and he wrote letters to the editor and published articles in the Chicago
Sun-Times about student protests and the Johnson administration. He also
attacked authors who wrote about “political campaigns, wars,
assassinations, youth movements” instead of “private feelings, personal
loyalties, love.” One thinks of Moses Herzog, swiveling in consecutive
lines from Tolstoy (“to be free is to be released from historical
limitation”) to Hegel (“the essence of human life [is] to be derived
from history”). Bellow swiveled in just this way between engagement and
disengagement, from jealous isolation to cocktail hour, morning to
afternoon and back again.
If novelists have some responsibility to write about the political
crises of their day, what is the appropriate register? And what form
should such writing take? Bellow didn’t think highly of journalism. When
Albert Corde in The Dean’s December is praised for being “a journalist
of unusual talent,” he replies, “Don’t you believe it. There is no such
thing. That’s just the way journalists pump, promote, gild and bedizen
themselves, and build up their profession, which is basically a bad
profession.” But Bellow was a dogged, deeply perceptive journalist, and
for decades returned to the form when he wished to write about matters
of urgent public interest. A family connection in Israel was struck by
his reporting style: “He listened not only to the story, but beyond
that: he listened with all his senses, to body language, to intonation,
noticing all details thoroughly and in depth.”
The reported pieces in It All Adds Up, a collection of Bellow’s
nonfiction reissued last year by Penguin Classics, flash with such
sensual detail. A Spanish commandante in postwar Madrid, “lean, correct,
compressed, and rancorous,” carries a black-market white loaf “under his
arm like a swagger stick” (“Spanish Letter,” 1948); the bloated Egyptian
dead in the streets of Sinai “resemble balloon figures in a parade”
(“Israel: The Six-Day War,” 1967); the skyscrapers of downtown Chicago
are “armored like Eisenstein’s Teutonic knights staring over the ice of
no-man’s-land at Alexander Nevsky” (“Chicago: The City That Was, the
City That Is,” 1983). In his nonfiction Bellow was often political. But
he was rarely polemical. This got him in trouble. The more furious the
political debate, the less tolerance for nuance, uncertainty, moral
complexity. As his fame grew, Bellow came under increasing pressures to
take a stand on the issues of the day. But he refused to be an activist,
a refusal that was as artistically heroic as it was personally disastrous.
In 1965 he defied more than a dozen of the nations’ leading writers to
attend a White House Festival of the Arts, after Robert Lowell had
denounced the event in a letter sent to The New York Times. “Every
serious artist,” wrote Lowell, “knows that he cannot enjoy public
celebrations without making subtle public commitments.” Bellow
disagreed. Despite publishing letters in the Times and the Chicago
Sun-Times condemning the Johnson administration’s policies in Vietnam,
he saw no reason to follow Lowell’s example. “The President intends, in
his own way, to encourage American artists,” said Bellow. “I consider
this event to be an official function, not a political occasion which
demands agreement with Mr. Johnson on all policies of his
administration.” He later called his decision to attend “foolish,” given
the uproar, which made the possibility of a dignified ceremony
impossible—an expression not so much of regret as disgust for the
showmanship of the other writers.
This would be, in retrospect, a quaint prelude to the attacks Bellow
would receive for To Jerusalem and Back, a portrait of Israel drawn from
reportage, memoir, and, in the spirit of the Committee on Social
Thought, a deep reading of philosophy, history, and literature, mixing
his own observations with those of Stendhal and Sinyavsky and Sartre.
“Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances is also to reach the
heart of politics,” wrote Bellow, explaining his method. “Then human
feelings, human experience, the human form and face, recover their
proper place—the foreground.” He used the novelist’s devices of analogy,
description, and deep questioning, always being careful to avoid the
imperatives of activist writing. This enraged partisans and close
observers of Israel. The Jerusalem Post attacked him for mimicking “Arab
and left-wing propaganda against the State of Israel”; for Noam Chomsky,
Leader writes, “Bellow’s book might have been written by the Israeli
Information Ministry.” Both camps held Bellow guilty of humanizing the
enemy.
“The Chicago Book,” as Bellovian scholars now refer to it, was to be a
work of nonfiction in the mode of To Jerusalem and Back but was never
completed. Bellow instead harvested the draft for use in lectures,
essays, and The Dean’s December, in which the university dean Albert
Corde invites personal and professional trouble by publishing in
Harper’s two essays about the city’s criminal justice system and
inner-city crime. The resentment stirred up by the articles—“Liberals
found him reactionary. Conservatives called him crazy”—is the same
Bellow anticipated he would receive should he publish the Chicago Book,
and that he did receive when he let loose about Chicago in interviews
and speeches.
Leader gives an agonizing account of Bellow’s two Jefferson lectures in
1977, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bellow
delivered the second, more tendentious lecture in the Gold Coast Room of
the Drake Hotel, before an audience of museum donors, university
bigwigs, and arts club members. Insulting these paragons of American
prosperity from the start, Bellow spoke of a feeling that “this
miraculously successful country has done evil under the Sun, has spoiled
and contaminated nature, waged cruel wars, failed in its obligations to
its weaker citizens.” The audience also failed to be charmed by Bellow’s
insinuation that wealthy Chicagoans were complicit in their city’s
deterioration, immured in their Lake Shore Drive high-rises, in “strange
isolation” from the reality of the streets below or, worse, had escaped
to the suburbs, from which wafted the “dank and depressing odors of
cultural mildew.” The hometown Nobel laureate was greeted with “muted
applause” and largely ignored at the cocktail reception.
The response was not quite as decorous from students and faculty
(“Bellow: False and Racist?” was the title of a protest letter in The
Chicago Maroon, the University of Chicago student paper), who were
shocked by Bellow’s depiction of neighborhoods that in his youth were
inhabited by immigrants who “improved themselves and moved upward” and
that now he described as dystopic, third-world, savage. In the
inner-city schools, “76 percent black and Puerto Rican,” the children
“are like little Kaspar Hausers—blank, unformed, they live convulsively,
in turbulence and darkness of mind…. But they are unlike poor innocent
Kaspar in that they have a demonic knowledge of sexual acts, guns,
drugs, and of vices, which are not vices here.” A similar uproar
followed the publication of The Dean’s December. It did not help that
Bellow, in his defense, explained that he was speaking up “for the black
underclass and telling the whites they’re not approaching the problem
correctly.” A novel intended as a protest against “the dehumanization of
the blacks in big cities” furthered the dehumanization.
Leader points out that racial injustice had been a dominant theme for
Bellow since the beginning of his career. In the fragment “Acatla”
(1940), an interracial couple is victimized by prejudice, and Bellow’s
first completed novel, The Very Dark Trees (1942), was about a white man
who wakes up black (after selling it to a publisher Bellow threw the
only copy into a furnace). In essays written in the 1950s Bellow
attacked depictions of black primitivism, later espoused most flagrantly
by Norman Mailer in “The White Negro,” as dangerous, provoking “envious
rage and murder,” and he supported the Congress of Racial Equality, for
which he wrote the preface to a book to be titled “They Shall Overcome.”
The essay attacked the rural white poor, whom he held responsible for
much of the nation’s racial animosity and violence. “Rural America has
had a long history of overvaluation,” he wrote, thanks to the mistaken
notion that
everyone was better and sounder on the farm, in the woods and hills,
less anomic, more self-reliant, fairer, more American. This is simply
not so. In provincial America, North no less than South, lives the most
unhappy, troubled and alienated portion of the population….The glamor of
Confederacy and insurrection, of “tradition” and “gentility” has been
laid in poster colors over provincial pride, backwardness, xenophobia
and rage.
Such bona fides would win Bellow no public mercy, however, and his
political statements brought increasing scorn in his final decades. What
Adam Bellow called his “irreverent attitude toward reigning intellectual
authorities” had been responsible for his singular voice—vernacular
scrambled with elevated, crude with transcendent, Humboldt Park with
Hyde Park. Carried into the political sphere, the same impulse
translated into a lifelong aversion to ideological factions, with their
enforced orthodoxies, slogans, and public mantras—any group in which
“the emphasis falls on collective experience and not upon individual
vision.” He would lecture his sons: “Don’t disappoint me, don’t be one
of those people who just line up.” Bellow’s antipathy to just lining up
derived from his view of what literature should be, and by extension,
how artists should direct their energies, and it tended to overwhelm any
political beliefs he held.
Broadly speaking, he was a young Trotskyite who migrated, in stages, to
a fuddy-duddy conservativism. But even the slightest scrutiny revealed
inconsistencies that would alienate any natural ally—what he called his
“obstinacy to mark my disagreement with all parties,” and what Leader
sees, more decorously, as a compulsion “to wound, to force his listeners
and readers to face what they have chosen not to face.” The force of
Bellow’s opposition to the Vietnam War and US nuclear policy was matched
by his opposition to the civil disobedience of their youthful
protesters. If Bellow was so antiwar, an earlier biographer wondered,
“why then was he embattled with anti-war people when they met?” Bellow
voted for Adlai Stevenson but hated “Stevenson people,” which Leader
translates as “liberals interested in political personalities and
electoral politics.” He ridiculed women’s liberationists and hippies but
supported George McGovern against Richard Nixon in 1972. In the 1970s
and 1980s he joined a series of conservative foreign policy groups, only
to resign from each in turn when they issued statements in his name with
which he vehemently disagreed.
His reputation as a conservative grew after a 1988 New York Times
Magazine profile of his friend Allan Bloom, which quoted Bellow’s
remarks mocking a student movement at Stanford to cancel a Western
civilization class on the grounds that it was racist, remarks that to
this day haunt his ghost: “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust
of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read them.” When he was asked by a
Washington Post interviewer about his unflattering portrayal of a female
character in his story “What Kind of Day Did You Have?,” a woman who is
“old-fashioned and sexually enslaved without a mind of her own,” Bellow
responded, “Well, I’m sorry girls—but many of you are like that, very
much so. It’s going to take a lot more than a few books by Germaine
Greer or whatshername Betty Friedan to root out completely the Sleeping
Beauty syndrome.” Bellow nevertheless considered himself “some sort of
liberal,” despite his distaste for the left’s “taboo on open discussion.”
He violated a major taboo on the right, however, when he suggested in
Ravelstein (2000), his fictionalized eulogy for Bloom, that his late
friend was a homosexual who had died of AIDS. Bloom’s friends had known
of his homosexuality but kept it private out of fear that the revelation
would destroy his reputation in conservative circles. “They see
themselves as having a special pious duty to protect Bloom,” Bellow told
the Times, once again forced to defend himself. “I can understand that,
because for them it’s not just a friend, it’s a movement.” The piece was
titled “With Friends Like Saul Bellow” and illustrated with an image of
a dagger; a Wall Street Journal article about the controversy was
accompanied by a drawing of a man being stabbed in the back.
“I couldn’t be both truthful and camouflaged.” Bellow meant true to the
requirements of fiction, which demands that any believable character
must be full of contradictions, secrets, regrets. For Ravelstein to
succeed as fiction, it required “the elasticity provided by sin.” Absent
disclosure of Bloom’s secret life, the character would be false—a
two-dimensional public figure instead of the private person, who was the
only one worth writing a novel about.
There were two kinds of writers, Bellow said in a 1975 interview:
“great-public writers” and “small-public writers.” The second category
was typified by the modernists, who emphasized stylistic artistry over
social protest: Flaubert, Joyce, and Baudelaire. The great-public
writers, who had largely fallen out of fashion, “thought of themselves
as spokesmen for a national conscience. They addressed grand issues of
social justice and political concern.” He cited as examples Dreiser,
Dickens, Zola, Upton Sinclair, and Sherwood Anderson—and himself. Bellow
did not, in the interview, acknowledge that he had started out as a
small-public writer. Dangling Man, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie
March, Seize the Day, and Henderson the Rain King, though wildly
divergent in sensibility and plot, shared a narrative emphasis on the
forging of an identity and, for Bellow himself, the forging of a
personal style. Later in life he regretted, as the narrator of The
Bellarosa Connection (1989) puts it, “snoozing through” the Holocaust.
But he went great-public with Herzog for good; like the Romantic scholar
Moses Herzog, Bellow became the author of a “new sort of
history…personal, engagée.” In the later novels, Bellow achieved what he
could not do in his essays, speeches, and reportage: he allowed the
great public noise of his age into the innermost reaches of his
characters’ thoughts and feelings. He made the public personal.
These novels perform a double trick. They dramatize Bellow’s own
struggle to connect the outer world with his inner world; and, in so
doing, they provide a model for how to pursue what Charlie Citrine and
Artur Sammler call “higher consciousness” without fleeing society and
joining a monastery. “The practical questions have thus become the
ultimate questions,” says Moses Herzog. “To live in an inspired
condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate
existence…is not reserved for gods, kings, poets, priests, shrines, but
belongs to mankind and to all of existence.” The path to enlightenment
lies not in renouncing the world but in seeing it more clearly.
So we get Sammler emerging at night onto Riverside Drive, its
urine-soaked phone booths lit bright by the streetlamps: “All
metaphysicians please note. Here is how it is. You will never see more
clearly. And what do you make of it?” Citrine seeking transcendence in
daily ephemera: “Often I sat at the end of the day remembering
everything that had happened, in minute detail.” And Albert Corde
throwing himself headlong, heedlessly, into a painful scrutiny of the
Chicago Criminal Courts Building and Cabrini Green: as long as “the
spirit of the time” doesn’t “come to us with some kind of reality, as
facts of experience, then all we can have instead of good and evil
is…well, concepts. Then we’ll never learn how the soul is worked on.”
Edward Shils, a don of the Committee on Social Thought with whom Bellow
fell out late in their lives, condemned Bellow’s refusal to “take
sides.” A “great novelist,” groused Shils, “has to have some moral
sense. That has been Bellow’s blind spot.” Shils cited Bellow’s
“self-indulgent” characters and Bellow’s own self-indulgence, “as he
floated from one woman to the other.” Leader is unstinting on Bellow’s
personal moral failings—the infidelities and cruelties to the women who
loved him, the high-handedness with close friends who asked for favors,
professional underlings (his agents nicknamed him “God”), and his sons.
But the novels themselves do articulate a consistent moral vision. They
reveal how the soul is worked on by an age of radical social
upheaval—and how the soul must respond.
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