A reliable source tells me that Johnson’s view of the White House culture gala was as follows: “They insult me by comin’, they insult me by staying away.” Could Dwight Macdonald have been more succinct? In fact they have a lot in common.
Bellow’s knowledge of what he calls “American revolutionaries” owed as much to his time as a college professor in the 1960s as to his Trotskyist student days in the 1930s. The protesters at the University of Chicago in the 1960s were especially active and prominent, on and off campus. On January 24, 1966, students from the Chicago branch of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) blocked the entrance to the Illinois Continental National Bank on LaSalle Street, in protest against the bank’s part in a forty-million-dollar loan to South Africa. In May 1966, after a week of fruitless negotiations, more than four hundred students occupied the Administration Building for six days. They were protesting against the university’s agreement to provide rankings and other academic information to Selective Service draft boards. During the occupation, the students organized a teach-in about the war, in which Dick Gregory, the comedian, made a speech urging them not to give up their fight, and a hundred faculty members signed a petition in their support. Edward Levi, the provost, took the sort of stand Bellow approved: “While the University may work to change the law, it may not disobey it, and in the process endanger its students.” Levi also argued that “a student’s rank is an individual matter and the University has no right to deny it to him.” A year later, a second anti-draft demonstration took place; this time, 120 students took over the Administration Building for a “study-in.” Fifty-seven of these students were suspended for Winter Quarter 1967, although many of the suspensions were not carried out.69 In April 1968, there were riots in Chicago after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., leading to Mayor Daley’s notorious “shoot to kill” order. Then came the violence of the police at the Democratic Convention (watched by Bellow on television in East Hampton, in the company of Gore Vidal and an old Tuley High School friend, Lou Sidran), when seven hundred people were arrested and more than a thousand injured. In October 1968, the Maroon reported, fifteen thousand people, many of them students, marched down Michigan Avenue to protest against police brutality. When Edward Levi was appointed university president at the end of the year, SDS members and members of the Hyde Park Area Draft Resisters’ Union demonstrated at a dinner held in his honor, in part against the guest speaker at the dinner, McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation and former national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
Several weeks later, on January 30, 1969, four hundred students again occupied the Administration Building, this time in protest against the university’s decision not to rehire Marlene Dixon, an assistant professor of sociology, later founder of the Marxist-Leninist Democratic Workers Party, which she led for seven years. The students claimed that Dixon had been treated unfairly because she was a radical, because she put teaching before scholarly publication, and because she was a woman, one of a very small number on the faculty at the time. Edward Levi responded to the occupation by evacuating all staff in the building and placing security guards in the hallways. Unlike other university presidents, he refused to summon the city police to maintain order. The administrators were moved to other campus locations and a faculty committee chaired by Hanna Gray, associate professor of history, later a president of the university, concluded on February 12 that there had been no violation of appointment procedures. Three days later, the students voted to end their sit-in. In the month that followed, forty-one students were expelled from the university, eighty-one students were suspended, and three were placed on probation.
Richard Stern recalled the student radicals as angry and humorless. They formed “improvisatory theater groups, passed out material about such professors as Daniel Boorstin and held rallies. I attended one of these and believe I learned more about revolution there than I’d learned from Carlyle or Barnaby Rudge. The radicals were led by the Weatherman, Howie Machtinger. He conducted the meeting masterfully, a young Lenin….My own contribution to the U. of Chicago uprising was a series of satiric poems published in the student newspaper—site of the warring opinions—which earned a denunciation in which Machtinger called me a motherfucker.”70 James Redfield, of the Committee on Social Thought, who describes himself as the most left-leaning member of the Committee, was involved in the negotiations with the students and remembers the 1960s as having “a really shattering effect on people,” moving a number of figures on the faculty to the right. He recalls Hannah Arendt, a member of the Committee at the time, arguing with Edward Shils about the protesters. “These children are not criminals,” she insisted. According to Atlas, when one of the students at the Committee sought to negotiate with university administrators on behalf of the protesters, Shils, Bellow, and David Grene “threatened to take away his fellowship.” Atlas also describes Bellow’s outrage when a female student in his Joyce seminar “swept into class in the midst of the national student strike with a list of ‘non-negotiable’ demands.” Bellow’s response was to shout: “You women’s liberationists! All you’re going to have to show for your movement ten years from now are sagging breasts!”71 What Redfield remembers of Bellow at the time of the student power movement was that he was “very quiet” on campus, but “he was heard from in the press.” This impression was shared by Jonathan Kleinbard, an assistant to Levi when the sit-ins began. Whereas Shils, in Kleinbard’s words, “played a role, I don’t think Saul did. I think he was just divorced from it.”
What Bellow had to say in the press was tough on the students. On November 30, 1967, he published an article in the Chicago Sun-Times entitled “The Young Lack Faith in Leaders.” It begins by deploring the Johnson administration’s “passion for secrecy,” the “harshness and arrogance” of administration spokesmen, the “brutality and abandonment of principle in Vietnam,” the president’s “refusal to give convincing reasons for his policies,” and “his meekness with his generals.” Then it turns to the “primitivism” at the heart not only of student protest but of the counterculture in general: “As Marie Antoinette played with sheep, as Gauguin turned to the South Seas, as Rimbaud went primitive, so the kids of Haight Ashbury require from the civilization that produced them the freedom and happiness of primitives.” Bellow had little love for “the Washington big business power racket,” but the hippie alternative was no answer. “You do not destroy yourself because you think your father a bad man, your mother a fool. Courting dirt because the family was neurotically clean, lying in a trance because Daddy ran to punch the time clock, consenting to a structureless, formless and chaotic inner life, and rejecting all former ideas of order—one cannot make an existence out of such negatives.” When Bellow met Mark Harris’s daughter, Hester, a high-school senior, who greeted him barefoot, in a long green shawl and a bright-orange leotard, he “appeared not to approve of her, gazing upon her coldly, making her uncomfortable.”72 As for student radicals: “Youth movements are not invariably a good thing. Germany’s Hitlerjugend certainly was not. Nor Benito Mussolini’s Society of the Wolf. Nor Stalin’s Komsomol. Nor do the young Maoist gangs fill one with confidence and hope.”
Passages like these alarmed Bellow’s acquaintances on the left. A year earlier, on November 12, 1966, Irving Howe had written to thank Bellow for purchasing fifty subscriptions to his quarterly magazine, Dissent, presumably to send to friends (that Edith Tarcov was the magazine’s managing editor played a part in this purchase). Dissent was critical of national liberation theories and the culture of the New Left, but it supported the civil rights movement and organized labor and was sharply critical of Cold War hawks such as Sidney Hook and Irving Kristol. In addition to thanking Bellow, Howe expressed a wish to talk with him when he was next in New York. “I know you’re harassed these days. But I’ve found myself mentally wanting to hold a conversation with you. (We’ve never really known each other, except through others, li
ke Isaac [Rosenfeld].) There are certain things in what you’ve recently been writing in articles with which I strongly agree, except that I feel your anger leads you to say things that leave you open to needless demagogic charges. There’s a lot of empty verbal radicalism in the air these days: ‘peasant revolution’ plus tenure.”73
Howe’s letter was sent about a month after Bellow received a letter from his old friend Irving Kristol, at the time executive vice-president of Basic Books and a founding editor, with Daniel Bell, of the quarterly The Public Interest. Bellow had raised doubts about Kristol’s “editorial integrity” at Encounter, the magazine Kristol coedited with Stephen Spender from 1953 to 1958. Encounter had been covertly funded in those years by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, at the time a CIA conduit, and though Kristol denied all knowledge of CIA funding and influence, doubts persisted. When Bellow voiced these doubts, Kristol wrote a detailed letter protesting his innocence. “This is one of the few letters I’ve written defending myself. I’ve not argued this matter with Jason Epstein, William Phillips, et al, because I suspect their motives and am indifferent to their good opinion. But I am not at all indifferent to your good opinion, and I do want you to understand that, whatever may have been wrong with Encounter’s editorial outlook while I was editor, the wrongness was mine, by God, and no one else’s. I may have been, technically, a ‘dupe’; but the magazine was not.” Like Howe, Kristol hoped he and Bellow could get together “when next you are in New York”; they had known each other for many years, and in 1965 Bellow attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring Kristol and his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, to Chicago.74 The events of the late 1960s drew Bellow closer to the worldview of the Kristols and did little to temper his public pronouncements; they also found their way into a new novel he was writing, about a man named Pawlyk, later named Sammler.
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TWO PUBLIC EVENTS of the 1960s were especially influential in Bellow’s life: the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967, and a speech Bellow gave a year later at San Francisco State University, where he was rudely heckled. It was Bellow’s idea to go to Israel to cover the war, as does Artur Sammler. In a letter of May 31, 1967, to Ruth Miller, he announced, “On Saturday it struck me that I should go to Israel to report the crisis for Life, Look, or The New Yorker. I have made myself available, there is some interest, and I may be gone in a day or two.” Within a week, he was on his way, for Newsday, a newspaper rather than a magazine. He wrote four articles for the paper, the first of which appeared on June 9, a day before the war ended, and a day before his fifty-second birthday. It was datelined Tel Aviv and titled “After the Battle: Troops, Sightseers.” Like the articles to follow, it stressed the oddity of observing the horrors of war, the bloated corpses of the Sinai, “black and stinking in the desert sun,” then returning to a plush hotel in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. “From the comfortable veranda and the smooth grounds of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem,” he reports on June 12, “guests watched the violent fighting last Monday in the Old City. One eyewitness told me that he had just finished his breakfast when he went to look at the battle. He saw an Israeli serviceman hit by a mortar, blown out of his boots; just a moment before, the man had been reading a newspaper.”75 Throughout his dispatches, Bellow stressed the culpability of the great powers in allowing Nasser, Hussein, and the Syrians to arm themselves and threaten “to run the Israelis into the sea, to drown them like rats, to annihilate everyone.”76 In the third dispatch, of June 13, Bellow reports a conversation with a veteran of the 1956 Sinai campaign. The veteran thinks the Egyptian armed forces much improved. “They had prepared their positions skillfully. They had extensive trenches. Their Russian or Nazi teachers—for there are, said my informant, a good many Germans in Egypt who settled down to a useful life after World War II—had some reason to feel encouraged.” But the Egyptians had no air cover, and without air cover their army was helpless. The Israelis won the war because they blew up the Arab airfields, even those supposedly out of range, and then shot their aircraft to pieces. “If they had not done this, the war would have been long and bloody.”77
In the final dispatch, Bellow visits Nablus, in the Jordan Valley, territory taken by the Israelis the previous week. Although unashamedly pro-Israel, he registers the suffering and injustice visited on the Palestinians. “No one can reasonably claim that right is entirely on the Israeli side, and though some Arab leaders exploited the misery of the refugees to intensify hatred of Israel, the Israelis might have done more for the Arabs. It should have been possible, for instance, to set aside money for indemnity and reconstruction. Part of the money paid to Israel by West Germany might have been used for this purpose.” If the numbers of rotting slums and demoralized refugees increase, “only Arab extremists can profit from this.”78 The article ends, however, by implying that the misery of the region has its roots not so much in Palestinian displacement as in the Arab mentality, or the current Arab mentality. Bellow and Sydney Gruson, of The New York Times, stop in a barbershop in Nablus where an elderly Arab dairy farmer, “very handsome, dark-browed,” with “a furious nonsmile,” engages them in conversation. He begins by calling Americans spies and complaining about being unable to purchase gas to drive to the relief of his cows (at which point Bellow notes that his farm is only two miles out of town, and that there are plenty of donkeys in the street, as well as many idle men). The farmer talks about “the future, Arab unity, hints of vengeance.” Bellow describes him as looking like the actor John Gilbert “playing an Arab role,” a description which leads to the article’s concluding paragraphs:
It is instructive to see what Middle Eastern poster artists do with the faces of Hollywood stars, the feelings they impart to them. Robert Mitchum Arabized is strong, honorable, but his features are twisted with foreknowledge of defeat. Fate is dead against him. We know that he is not going to make it. Our gentleman farmer is like that.
Now, having his neck trimmed with a Schick electric razor, he sits with stilted suffering pride. I am unable to give a T. E. Lawrence/Freya Stark interpretation to this look. In my cruder Midwestern judgment, it seems all wrong. What good are these traditional dignities? No good at all if they lead to the Sinai roads with their blasted Russian tanks, the black faces of the dead dissolving, and the survivors fighting for a sip of ditch water.79
What prompted Bellow to go to Israel as the war approached? He had been there before, several times, though “I have never been a Zionist. I never had strong feelings on the subject. But something about that particular occasion—the fact that for the second time in a quarter of a century the Jews were having a gun pressed to their heads—led me to ask Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, to send me as a correspondent.”80 To get to Israel was no easy business. Bellow flew to Rome, where he was told his flight to Tel Aviv would be diverted to Athens. He stayed in the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens. After much difficulty, he managed to get a seat on a packed El Al flight (Artur Sammler does this by visiting the Israeli consulate in Athens, then “waiting again at the airport until four a.m. among journalists and hippies” [p. 205]). It was worth it, Bellow wrote in a letter of June 7: “It puts one in touch with reality. Otherwise one’s decades begin to feel empty like an old amusement park no longer patronized and oneself the caretaker remembering childhood, boyhood-youth as side shows….This is much better.”81 It is hard to think of the 1960s as empty of stimulus, or insufficiently real, especially for Bellow, but he seems here to have felt that. For Artur Sammler they certainly were, mostly for reasons to do with his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. In explaining why he went to Israel to report on the war, Sammler sounds like Bellow. In the late spring of 1967, Sammler is exhausted by “minor things which people insisted upon enlarging, magnifying, moving into the center: relationships, interior decorations, family wrangles….”
Civilian matters. Civilian one and all! The high-minded, like Plato (now he was not only lecturing, but even lecturing himself), wished to g
et rid of such stuff—wrangles, lawsuits, hysterias, all such hole-and-corner pettiness. Other powerful minds denied that this could be done. They held (like Freud) that the mightiest instincts were bound up in just such stuff, each trifle the symptom of a deep disease in a creature whose whole fate was disease. What to do about such things? Absurd in form, but possibly real? But possibly not real? Relief from this had become imperative. And that was why, during the Aqaba crisis, Mr. Sammler had had to go to the Middle East [p. 204].
The entanglements Sammler wishes to escape are different from Bellow’s entanglements, but not all that different. (Bellow’s entanglements are more direct or personal, involving his own erotic and marital life rather than those of relatives and friends.) Once in Israel, Sammler, “a man of seventy-plus” (p. 1), heads off to the front “in a white cap and a striped seersucker jacket” (chosen to make him look younger, and worn also by Bellow in Israel). In Gaza, Sammler notices the women in the market: “The black veils were transparent. You saw the heavy-boned mannish faces underneath—large noses, the stern mouths projecting over stonelike teeth” (p. 206). On the battlefield, he, like Bellow, fixes on the strewn corpses: “swollen gigantic arms, legs, roasted in the sun. The dogs ate human roast. In the trenches the bodies leaned on the parapets. The dogs came cringing, flattening up….In the sun the faces softened, blackened, melted, and flowed away….A strange flavor of human grease. Of wet paper pulp” (p. 207). To Sammler, the dead bodies are “the one subject the soul was sure to take seriously” (p. 209). Like Bellow, Sammler sees very few live Egyptians, only a group of captured snipers bound and blindfolded. When he sees them he has to master the trembling of his legs and a wish to cry.
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