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BELLOW WAS LIONIZED IN LONDON. Herzog had received glowing reviews, and even his plays had been well received. Once he arrived, serious profiles appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, and The Sunday Times. “For days he has been pursued for interviews,” Terry Coleman wrote in The Guardian, “for days he has eluded pursuit; he has been a much wanted man.” When Norman Mailer came to London, he and his publishers hired the Mayfair Theatre and filled it, Coleman recalled; Bellow “went one better,” having the cultural attaché of the U.S. Embassy send out invitations for his talk, filling the embassy theater with “celebrated people [who] sat in the gangways to hear him, or sat in a little hall at the side, in a little overflow hall, where they could hear but hardly see him.” Before reading his talk, Bellow explained that it would be “a rambling discourse. And this, he said, might be all to the good; literature could do with a little more inattention.” In the event, the talk was “closely reasoned” rather than rambling. Coleman makes it sound like a version of the talk Bellow would go on to give at San Francisco State. When the talk finished, according to the Observer profile, Bellow scurried out “before the audience could leave their seats.”30
Penguin paperbacks, 1966 (courtesy of Penguin Books, Ltd.)
Having dismissed the Penguin people, Bellow turned his anger on Weidenfeld. On September 16, a week before she left Viking to take up a job in London at Chatto & Windus, Katy Carver wrote to Bellow detailing arrangements for the trip, assuring him that Penguin knew neither where he was staying nor for how long, also that the lecture at the Cochrane would be hosted “by the Traverse people, not by anybody you’re disagreeing with.”31 She had a warning for him as well: “Word is out in New York that you are moving to Cape, and may be current in London too when you get there, so don’t be surprised at anything.” London was where the rumors had started, and Bellow did nothing to counter them, pointedly failing to contact Weidenfeld. Only after he had left Britain did Cyrus Brooks raise the possibility of Bellow’s changing publishers. In response, on October 18, George Weidenfeld wrote directly to Bellow, pleading his case. He had been Bellow’s publisher for fourteen years. They had a personal relationship “which on my part I dared to hope amounted to a friendship.” Bellow could have no complaints—had voiced none—about the job Weidenfeld & Nicolson did in launching Herzog.32 As far as Weidenfeld could judge, his central complaint was over the Penguin covers. “I beg you to believe that we are just as upset as you are.” Nobody at the firm (or at his British agents, Weidenfeld added) expected Penguin would “ ‘go it alone’ and not let us see the designs in good time….This lapse was very unfortunate but I do beg you not to take too draconian and merciless an attitude.” He then reported his distress at discovering that an unnamed British publisher (it was Tom Maschler of Cape) “had not only announced throughout the length and breadth of literary London that he had ‘captured’ you but that he had also written to another of our most important writers [Margaret Drabble]…stating that he had your authority to wean her away from us.”
Although Bellow failed to contact Weidenfeld in London, he gave Barley Alison, an editor at Weidenfeld and a friend, a few “brief moments” at Brown’s Hotel, where he was staying. To her he indicated that the book he was working on (the “Pawlyk” book) “would not be ready for some time” and that, as Weidenfeld confirmed in his letter of October 18, “your decision about your British publishing plans might be delayed until its completion.” Weidenfeld asked that the decision be deferred at least until his annual visit to New York, between Christmas and the New Year. Alison, in a letter of October 22, made a similar request. When Weidenfeld showed up in Chicago on December 19, putting Bellow before other business in New York, he brought with him an offer the author couldn’t refuse. The meeting was unexpectedly pleasant, Bellow reported to Alison on January 24, given that he “was vexed with [Weidenfeld] and came prepared to say no.” What Weidenfeld offered was a first printing of forty thousand copies for the next book and a uniform edition of all the others. Although Bellow felt obliged to tell Maschler the terms of the deal—the rumors of his moving were true—“it would be insane of me to turn down George’s proposal.” He was now, he told Alison, waiting to hear from Maschler. He added that he “would not have stayed with W and N had you not been there…[and] that the prospect of injuring you by going to Cape did not make me at all happy.” He also assured Alison that he had said nothing to Weidenfeld about her own unhappiness at the firm, an unhappiness which led her, in February 1967, to move to Secker & Warburg, with her own imprint, the Alison Press.33
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BELLOW DID NOT RETURN to the United States immediately after leaving London. He traveled to Holland briefly, and then on to Poland to conduct research for the new novel.34 The hero of this novel, Meyer Pawlyk, was a Polish émigré living in Queens (in an even earlier manuscript, he lives on the South Side of Chicago). By the time he became Artur Sammler (he’ll be Sammler from now on), Bellow had moved him to Manhattan, on the Upper West Side.35 Sammler is haunted by his experiences during World War II, and Bellow went to Poland to meet survivors of similar experiences and to get a feel for their settings. Among the war veterans he interviewed was Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He met other Polish survivors back in New York, thanks to Edith Tarcov. In reconstructing Sammler’s wartime history not only in the camps but “in forests, cellars, passageways, cemeteries” (p. 38), Bellow also drew on printed accounts, in particular David Rousset’s L’Univers concentrationnaire (1946), discussed in chapter 9 of To Fame and Fortune, and Alexander Donat’s description of the Polish death camps in The Holocaust Kingdom (1965).
Mr. Sammler’s Planet was the first Bellow novel to confront the Holocaust directly. In The Victim, its presence is implicit, the underlying source of Leventhal’s sensitivity to prejudice; it is referred to only once, when Leventhal angrily reminds the anti-Semitic Kirby Allbee that “millions of us have been killed” (pp. 260–61).36 In Herzog, the Holocaust is referred to more frequently, but not centrally. It is one of a host of twentieth-century horrors, “part of the program of destruction into which the human spirit has poured itself with energy, even with joy” (p. 565).37 The decision finally to confront the fate of the Jews in the Second World War may owe something to Hannah Arendt, Bellow’s colleague at the Committee on Social Thought, not only as a result of continuing controversy over Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), but in reaction to her stand in support of student protest. Although she is never named, Arendt’s notions of the banality of evil and of Jewish passivity are attacked in all drafts of Mr. Sammler’s Planet.38 Sammler himself is hardly passive in resistance, and his views on the banality of evil are clear and forceful: “The idea of making the century’s great crime look dull is not banal. Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite….Do you think the Nazis didn’t know what murder was? Everybody (except certain blue-stockings) knows what murder is” (p. 13). The difference between Bellow’s treatment of Arendt’s ideas in early versions and in late ones is that in early ones Arendt’s views are simply wrong; in late versions, certainly the published version, they are also shameful. According to a letter of March 12, 1982, to Leon Wieseltier, Bellow thought that Arendt lacked “human understanding,” her imaginative faculties were “stunted”; in thrall to theory, she was blind to “simple facts,” by which Bellow means the facts of Jewish death and suffering.39 Instead, she uses these facts, in Sammler’s words, “to attack modern civilization itself. She is using the Germans to attack the twentieth century—to denounce it in terms invented by Germans. Making use of a tragic history to promote the foolish ideas of Weimar intellectuals” (p. 14), “whose popular American embodiment,” according to Daniel Fuchs, “is the Stalinoid Herbert Marcuse.”40 As Ruth Wisse,
professor of Yiddish at Harvard, points out, there is a psychological reason for Sammler to be so hard on Arendt: “Had he not undergone the compulsory education that was forced on him by Hitler, he might have sounded just like her. ‘Alert to the peril and disgrace of explanations, he was himself no mean explainer.’ ”41
It is shameful to have to explain that life is sacred, a truth understood intuitively, “from the beginning of time.” To defy what Sammler calls “that old understanding” is not banality: “Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience” (p. 14). The phrase “old understanding” calls to mind the title of the Bellow story “The Old System” (1968), composed at roughly the same time not only as Sammler, but as the “ur-Humboldt” Schwartz memoir and the “Olduvai” fragments. “The Old System” first appeared in print in January 1968 in Playboy, after being rejected by The New Yorker on grounds of length. (“The New Yorker wanted deletions,” Bellow wrote to Meyer Schapiro on March 18, 1968, “so I gave it to Playboy in protest—lucrative protest….Hugh Hefner has pleasanter vices than Wm. Phillips.”) It was reprinted later in the year in Bellow’s first collection of short fiction, Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories, published by Viking. The story sheds interesting light on Sammler, and makes clear the complex of ideas and feelings Bellow was wrestling with in the late 1960s, when he was writing at his peak.
The narrator of “The Old System” is Dr. Samuel Braun, a scientist and deep thinker. In the story’s opening paragraph, we find Braun in bed at noon on a Saturday, pondering the question of whether human existence is “necessary.” Braun distrusts his sense that it is, which might only be “the aggressive, instinctive vitality we share with an ape or a dog.”42 The detachment here is characteristic, crucial to Braun’s success as a scientist (his work on the chemistry of heredity has been “written up in Time” [p. 91]). Recently, however, “self-observation and objectivity” have begun to strike him as unhealthy: “Existence for the sake of such practices did not seem worthwhile” (p. 90). In lamenting the “great traditions” dislodged by modernity, Braun uses terms that identify the narrative present as contemporary: “Elevation? Beauty? Torn into shreds, into ribbons for girls’ costumes, or trailed like the tail of a kite at Happenings. Plato and the Buddha raided by looters. The tombs of the Pharaohs broken into by desert rabble” (p. 91).
In his youth, Braun spent summers with relatives in the Mohawk Valley, in upstate New York. Two of these relatives, Cousin Isaac and Cousin Tina, are recalled in vivid and loving detail.43 Cousin Isaac embraced the values of the Old System, the intuitive, traditional certainties; Cousin Tina consciously resisted them, though she, too, was “old-fashioned, for all her modern slang” (p. 103). There are parallels here with Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Like Braun, Artur Sammler is drawn to traditional ways, which he sees as embodied in his nephew, Arnold “Elya” Gruner, a figure not unlike Cousin Isaac. It was Elya, a wealthy gynecologist, who rescued Sammler and his daughter, Shula, from a DP camp in Salzburg in 1947, and it is Elya who has been their protector ever since. Cousin Isaac, fifteen years Dr. Braun’s senior, was his protector in childhood, when he showed him great affection and kindness. The differences between Braun and Sammler are of temperament, a product of radically different life experiences. Sammler is only outwardly detached: polite, a considerate father, “muttering appreciation of each piece of rubbish presented to him” (by his daughter, Shula, an urban scavenger); inwardly, he boils with prophetic anger and contempt, and is at times “explosive, under provocation more violent than other people” (p. 20). In the novel’s opening paragraph, the practices of detachment and objectivity Braun doubts are called into question by Sammler as well. Ours is an age of explanation, of “fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul.” The effect of these explanations, when not minimal (“for the most part, in one ear and out the other,” a conclusion perhaps anticipated by the inversion of “wives to husbands”) is pernicious. For Sammler, as for Braun, the knowledge that matters is a product of deep feeling: “The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly” (p. 1).
What leads Braun to recall Cousin Isaac and Cousin Tina is the reputation his detachment has earned him. “It was said of him, occasionally, that he did not love anyone. This was not true. He did not love anyone steadily. But unsteadily he loved, he guessed, at an average rate.” For example, “he and Cousin Isaac had loved each other” (p. 91). Isaac is now dead, which leads Braun to wonder, once again characteristically, if he loved him more than his other cousins because he was dead. “There one might have something,” he thinks. Isaac’s soulfulness is suggested in a metaphor that recalls Sammler on the soul. Already in youth, in the 1920s, Isaac “had a mature business face. Born to be a man in the direct Old Testament sense, as that bird in the sycamore was born to fish in water” (p. 92). Isaac is a millionaire property developer, but for all his success as a New World businessman, “his old-country Jewish dignity was very firm and strong. He had the outlook of ancient generations on the New World” (p. 92). Elya Gruner, too, is a millionaire, and no less dignified an Old System figure, “devoted to ideas of conduct which seemed discredited, which few people explicitly defended” (pp. 215–16).
As Cousin Isaac grows rich, he becomes more Orthodox, “an old-fashioned Jewish paterfamilias” (p. 97). He keeps a copy of the Psalms near him at all times, including “in the glove compartment of his Cadillac,” “as active, worldly Jews for centuries had done” (p. 98). What set Isaac on the path to millions was the purchase of a WASP country club.44 After Isaac demolishes the country club, tearing up its golf course as well, he builds a shopping center in its place. So ugly is this shopping center that Braun thinks it might have been a form of revenge, “an unconscious assertion of triumph” (p. 101) against WASP exclusion—though, as he also points out, “all such places are ugly” (p. 101). Braun wonders if Cousin Isaac felt anything for the lost elms and greenery, “reserved, it was true, for mild idleness, for hitting a ball with a stick” (p. 101) (a remark that recalls Max Zetland in “Zetland: By a Character Witness,” on “the laxity and brainlessness of the golf-playing goy”45). It seems not. Isaac goes on to fill the Mohawk Valley with housing developments. Although proud of his work, he builds “too densely,” is “stingy with land” (p. 101). He is no miser, but he lives modestly, Cadillac notwithstanding. A pillar of the local Jewish community, he is president of its new synagogue, described by Braun as looking like “a World’s Fair pavilion.” The rabbi of the synagogue, a Madison Avenue type, is “like a Christian minister except for the play of Jewish cleverness in his face.” Isaac was elected president, Braun tells us, over “the father of a famous hoodlum, once executioner for the Mob in the Northeast” (p. 101).
To Braun, Isaac is in essential ways untouched by the ugliness and corruption that not only surround him but that he himself contributes to, or is obliged to contribute to. In this, he is like Elya in Sammler, whose fortune has come in part from performing abortions for the Mob. Elya’s taste is no better than Isaac’s, as can be seen from the crowded furnishings of his house, the work of a decorator with “an Oscar Wilde hairdo, suave little belly, and perfumed fingers” (p. 198), or from his dress: the too-narrow trousers (producing a “virile bulge” when he sits), the “matching ties and handkerchiefs from Countess Mara…sharp swaggering shoes which connected him less with medicine than with Las Vegas, with racing, broads, and singers in the rackets.” Instead of a Cadillac, Elya has a Rolls-Royce and a driver (who once drove for Lucky Luciano). Otherwise, he, too, lives modestly. Aside from the Rolls-Royce, “his one glamorous eccentricity was to fly to Israel on short notice and stroll into the King David Hotel without baggage, his hands in his pockets” (p. 234). Sammler’s ability to overlook Elya’s aesthetic deficiencies and dubious connections deriv
es in part from an Old World attitude to the law: “The rich men he knew were winners in struggles of criminality, of permissible criminality.” Whenever Sammler tried to imagine a just social order, “he could not do it. A non-corrupt society? He could not do that either” (p. 61). In the Old World, ambitious and able Jews broke or bent the law out of necessity, with no injury to their “Jewish dignity”; to be “a man in the Old Testament sense” meant to provide for one’s family, to serve God, and to serve God’s chosen people; the needs of the larger community, of the rest of the world, figured only distantly. To be a socialist was likely to put one at odds with Old System values.
Something like this point is made by Braun when he recalls Cousin Isaac’s experiences as a member of the governor’s commission on pollution. On a boat sent by the Fish and Game Department, Isaac and his fellow commissioners tour the Hudson River from Albany to Germantown. “The towns were dumping raw sewage into the Mohawk and the Hudson. You could watch the flow from giant pipes” (p. 108). Many of the inhabitants of these towns live in dwellings built by Isaac, “squalid settlements of which he was so proud…Had been proud” (p. 110). Although he is revolted by the pollution he sees, Isaac’s thoughts are elsewhere, with his family. What he thinks should be done about the pollution is hard to discern. The local communities expect the federal government to pay for sewage treatment, which Isaac thinks “only fair, since Internal Revenue took away to Washington billions in taxes and left small change for the locals.” When no federal help was forthcoming, the local communities pumped their excrement into the rivers. The next sentence reads: “Isaac, building along the Mohawk, had always taken this for granted” (p. 110) (where “this” means either “this polluting of the waterways” or “this assumption that Washington would help”). At the end of the boat trip, the state game commissioner fishes an eel from the Hudson and drops it on the deck. “It was writhing toward the river in swift, powerful loops, tearing its skin on the planks, its crest of fin standing. Treph! [Unclean, not kosher.] And slimy black, the perishing mouth open” (p. 110). Isaac registers the horror of the eel, then turns away, back to family troubles, to Tina in particular. Often during business he thinks not only of family but of God. At building sites he says psalms: “When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers…what is Man that Thou art mindful of him?” Many doubted Isaac’s piety, because he had been “a strong, raunchy young man, and this had never entirely left him (it remained only as witty comment),” also because his mind seemed “a web of computations, of frontages, elevations, drainage, mortgages, turn-around money.” “But he evidently meant it all” (p. 105).
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