Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  The vigilance with which Shils looked after what he thought of as the Committee’s interests is clear from a letter he wrote to Bellow on December 27, 1962, a few months after Bellow had joined the faculty. After expressing great pleasure in their correspondence (“You have been very sweet to write so frequently”) and excitement over Herzog (which he was “pining” to read in draft), Shils turns to Committee matters. He has learned that Erich Heller, an influential literary scholar, intellectual historian, and professor of German at Northwestern University, a man Bellow knew and admired, was being considered for the Committee. Shils, too, admired Heller, but with reservations: “I would much prefer to see him in the University rather than at Northwestern. I would much prefer to see him in the German Department in the University with a loose attachment to the Committee on Social Thought rather than solely in the Committee on Social Thought.” Heller was lively, and his voice and personality “fill up too much space. They make him too prominent and I would not like him to be the unofficial ambassador of the Committee, which I am sure he would become simply by virtue of the fact that those provincials out there are such suckers for such a ‘worldly,’ ‘sophisticated’ person, so flattering and charming, so full of anecdotes about the Common Rooms of the old world and, having no home of his own and no one to cook for him, he would surely be dining out with such frequency and such éclat that he would become ‘Mr. Committee on Social Thought.’ ” Shils also voiced “peripheral” objections to Heller’s ideas: “He is such a denigrator of the contemporary world. Everything is wrong with us. We are not organic. We have lost our sense for metaphysics. We are just so no good nowadays.” Such views, Shils writes, were already over-represented in the Committee and the university. He felt “no bad conscience” about seeking to suppress them, something he might have felt had they been minority views. “Still and all,” Shils concludes, “if we are to have him, I will certainly try to make him welcome because, whatever else is wrong with him, he reads widely and is intellectually wide awake.” He did not get the job. Months later, on October 14, 1963, Shils offered his views about two potential junior appointments: “I suppose the young’uns must be thrown a bone or a piece of suet occasionally….We cannot have everything that is good. We do have you and Hannah Arendt and we do not have Heller, and all three should be occasion for much gratitude to seen and unseen powers.”

  Hiring faculty was the most important and difficult part of Bellow’s job as chair. The Committee attracted scholars and intellectuals often uncomfortable in traditional disciplines and departments and seen as awkward by colleagues. “Classics wouldn’t touch me,” admits James Redfield, whose book on the Iliad was to employ the methods of social science and ethnography rather than those of traditional Homeric studies. “Philosophy didn’t want Hannah Arendt, Art didn’t want Harold Rosenberg. They didn’t want them around, thought they were destructive personalities.” “Every one of them was a prima donna,” is how Jonathan Kleinbard, at the time assistant to Edward Levi, later Bellow’s close friend and ally (“If he had a problem I was there to help him”), described the Committee faculty. That candidates for the Committee had to be vetted by university departments meant there were bound to be clashes. In 1966, Bellow and Shils were keen to bring Gertrude Himmelfarb to the Committee. When Himmelfarb came to give a talk to the History Department, she was, Bellow and others thought, poorly treated. Shils was in England at the time but was told about her reception by Bellow. On March 3, he wrote to Levi in protest. “She was treated, I am reliably told, with a degree of discourtesy which one would not even expect at a meeting of the mafia. If she were an obscure and inconsequential person, such conduct would have been utterly unacceptable in any respectable university. Given the considerable magnitude of her achievements and her own high reputation and dignity of bearing, the conduct of the History Department was all the more unacceptable.” In the same letter, Shils protested about the treatment Daniel Moynihan had received at the hands of the Department of Sociology: “It might be that he is good enough to be the Director of the Harvard M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies and not good enough to be appointed to the very remarkable Department of Sociology in the University of Chicago. That is not a view which I myself hold, and I do not think that it could be argued rationally, but even if Moynihan were much less good a man than he is, his own public distinction and the complete propriety of his own bearing merit his being treated in a more gentlemanly fashion than he was treated at the reception which was accorded to him by the sociologists.”

  Shils’s sense of what makes Himmelfarb a person of distinction is not only “the magnitude of her achievement” but her “dignity of bearing.” Moynihan’s distinction comes partly from the “complete propriety” of his bearing. Although he could be cruelly funny and irreverent, Shils had an old-fashioned sense of dignity; he took himself and his values seriously. Bellow was drawn to and influenced by this seriousness, which shaped or reinforced not only his sense of himself as a writer but what he chose to write about, particularly in his essays. Nor was Shils the only figure at the Committee to take an elevated view of its mission or importance. Redfield opposed Shils and Bellow on a number of issues, was a “young’un,” at least in Committee terms, and on the left politically. Here he is in a letter of August 19, 1966, writing to Bellow about the possibility that Irving Kristol, Himmelfarb’s husband, might join the Committee.

  In brief, my position is this. Kristol is not an academic, or as you put it, “he’s no scholar.” There is no doubt that he is a man of considerable quality, but not of that particular quality. Is he then a man for us? The answer to that question depends, I think, on the answer to a prior question: is there a special intellectual tradition, a special form of cultivation, which is kept alive in and transmitted through the universities? I think so. Therefore I think that while it is certainly true that the universities do not contain everything that is valuable, so also not everything that is valuable belongs in the universities….I think the CST has a special obligation, if I may put it this way, of keeping the academic tradition alive; I think that tradition is in danger, and if we don’t keep it going, who will?

  Bellow himself, of course, was “no scholar,” but Redfield pronounces his appointment to the Committee “a complete success.” This is because “your work, while not academic, is of quite exceptional substance; at the top all forms of excellence come together.” On second thoughts, he decides “your work is, in a curious way, academic; I think some of the things you have been saying about the novel fit curiously well with what I just said about the universities.” Redfield raises such issues “not because I want to make a fuss about this matter in particular, but because I think the Committee should have a sense of itself, and of its special place.” Bellow’s sense of himself and his specialness was no doubt fed by this way of thinking and speaking, a way determined in part by the Committee’s principled origins, its sense of fostering the highest aims of education.

  How Bellow did as chair of the Committee resembled how he did in business—not all that well, judging, at least, by his ability to recruit new appointments. At the end of his tenure, which was extended from three to five years, Bellow wrote despairingly to Shils, in a letter of December 18, 1975: the Committee was “going to disintegrate quite soon, at this rate, divided by disagreements and feuds. I’ve not been able to do anything to build it up.” As in business dealings and investments, he lacked the time, ultimately the inclination, to engage himself fully. “I had books to write and problems to face, many of these arising from my own unsatisfactory character, but I have nevertheless taken my duties seriously….Unless new appointments are made the Committee will cease to exist. In about five years it’ll be gone.” Redfield thought Bellow lacked political skills, not so much with members of the Committee, with whom he had mostly cordial relations, as with department heads and university administrators. “I think I’m a bit of a joke to the administration,” Bellow wrote to Shils on Februa
ry 27, 1971. “At executive committee meetings the other chairmen seem determined not to let me inhibit their game. I feel like the fifth man in a doubles match and try to stay out of the way. They take a strongly elite view of themselves and behave like crack performers, strong hitters. Some of them seem quite intelligent, but even the intelligent ones betray foolish prejudices.” Bellow quotes one of their number: “We don’t socialize our Ph.D.s to take ordinary teaching positions in obscure colleges.”

  This sort of arrogance irritated Bellow. At the beginning of his second year as chair, in a “private communication” to the dean of social sciences, Robert McCormick Adams, an anthropologist and archaeologist, later secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Bellow made his feelings clear. David Grene was up for reappointment. He was a classical scholar and translator of international reputation, had been teaching at the University of Chicago since the 1930s, and had been a member of the Committee since its inception. Yet Bellow was being asked to furnish detailed documentation in support of Grene’s reappointment. “You shall have the David Grene material you requested,” he wrote to Adams, but “I think it odd that his case should be studied as if he were an Assistant Professor up for his first renewal. He should be reappointed for the duration, that is, until retirement, and with the usual right to be considered for a final extension.” Then Bellow raised “a personal matter.”

  I’m sure your duties as Dean are trying and that you are under considerable pressure. But I don’t like the bullying tone of the communications you’ve sent me. I took this job because I wanted to be of service to the Committee and the University. I don’t need the glory of a chairmanship. I can easily do without that. If I must take a lot of foolish abuse I will do without it. I think I have done my job properly. If you disagree I will be glad to send in my resignation. I suggest that you find a tone more appropriate to our respective positions in the University.

  Bellow could get away with such a letter because the university did not want to lose or upset him. At the end of his time as chair, he sought to secure reappointment for an old friend, Edith Hartnett, whom he’d first known in Paris in the late 1940s, when she was married to the novelist Herb Gold. By 1975, there were powerful forces within the Committee ranged against Hartnett’s continuing on the faculty, though, in Redfield’s words, she was “not a trivial person” or without credentials. She had a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Michigan and had been an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago before coming to the Committee in 1973, also as an assistant professor. At the time the decision on reappointment was made, Bellow was away in Israel, and David Grene, his temporary replacement, wrote on November 29, 1975, to say that Hartnett’s only hope was that the provost “was sufficiently afraid of you to yield.” The strongest case for reappointing Hartnett, the dean of social sciences had told Grene, “was that they wanted you to be happy.” In the end, Hartnett was given a two-year reappointment, presumably to placate Bellow and other supporters; there was no question of a permanent appointment.

  Within the Committee, Bellow’s chief difficulty was managing the tensions between Grene and Shils.31 In an undated letter of 1976, when Bellow was still on leave in Israel, Grene sought to persuade him to stay on as chair when he returned: “I am afraid that the opposition between Shils and myself has made the job harder to discharge. I hope that it is not true to say that it has been the entire difficulty. It has played a part in your troubles about appointments.” Grene then offers to step aside as temporary chair, since, “with me out of any official position in CST, other than teacher, possibly Shils would be easier for you to handle.” The tension between Grene and Shils had become obvious almost as soon as Bellow was appointed chair. In addition to the chair and the chair’s secretary, the Committee required a third administrator, the executive secretary, a post in the chair’s gift (this was the post Edith Hartnett held in the Committee). The job of the executive secretary was to administer the complicated arrangements for predissertation fundamentals exams and to advise students. In 1970, at the beginning of Bellow’s tenure as chair, the executive secretary was Herman Sinaiko, who had been a student of Grene’s.32

  Sinaiko was convinced that Shils had opposed his joining the Committee from the start. When Bellow became chair in 1970, according to Sinaiko, Grene and Shils “could hardly be in the same room together,” and Sinaiko himself “was always uncomfortable with Shils and Bellow.” The case against Sinaiko’s reappointment was that he hadn’t published enough, but he believed the real problem was that Shils did not rate him as a scholar or a thinker, and that Bellow “depended a lot on Shils.” Shils “would make global decisions. This guy is a second-rater.” When such decisions were made about students, including those Shils had recommended to the Committee but then found wanting, it was Sinaiko’s job to warn them, “You better find somebody else, he’s not going to support you.”33 In the end, a deal was struck. Sinaiko was given a year to produce a significant publication. This deal Sinaiko described as “bullshit.” The truth, he felt, was that Bellow and Shils wanted him out; he, in turn, “didn’t want to be in a place where I’m not accepted.”34

  Was Sinaiko unfairly treated? As he himself admits, he was “not a heavy publisher. I never pretended to be.” What he resented was Bellow’s manner toward him, which he described as “offensive…sly.” Bellow should have come to him to tell him what the problem was. But if the problem with Sinaiko was that Bellow didn’t rate him, one can understand his reluctance. Sinaiko suspected that there was a political component in Bellow’s and Shils’s opposition to his reappointment. He was on the left, had taught and sympathized with student protesters. No doubt Bellow and Shils “thought of me as someone who was a bleeding heart for the students.” But Redfield was also on the left, sympathized with the protesters, and, unlike Sinaiko, hadn’t published a book (his book on the Iliad would not be published until 1975). Yet he was not challenged. The difference, Redfield believes, is that Shils and Bellow “were reading my stuff” and recognized its merit. Although Bellow complained about Redfield in correspondence, and often found him exasperating, he had a high opinion of his intellect.35 He even taught a course on Joyce’s Ulysses with him. Shils also differed with Redfield on many issues, and there were clashes in temperament. As Redfield puts it, “Shils had an enormous need for deference, which I was ill-suited to supply.”36

  Shils was not alone in being high-handed as well as quick and implacable in judgment. “He really only had two categories of people,” Redfield recalls of Grene. “He had people whom he adored and people about whom he’d say, ‘Well, you can have my bit of him for Christmas.’ ” As a teacher, Grene “could be absolutely brutal in seminars and in classes….He talked to the people he wanted to talk to, he had no interest in students per se.” Redfield recalls the story of a student who answered a question for the first time in one of Grene’s classes. “ ‘Well, you know, I’ve been teaching a while,’ Grene replied. ‘I care about it quite a lot. But when you get an answer like that you just want to give the whole thing up.’ ” Bellow could be tough, but he was more guarded in expressing his opinions than Shils and Grene, especially toward the end of his tenure as chair. He was also more considerate of people’s feelings, as in a letter of December 18, 1975, to Shils about the Hartnett case. Shils had opposed Hartnett’s retention, again on the grounds that she hadn’t published enough (according to Atlas, Shils also complained that Bellow “was filling the department with his ‘whores’ ”37). “Hartnett has gotten a two year appointment,” Bellow announces in the letter to Shils, “so the matter is settled. I wouldn’t have wanted her permanently appointed to the Committee now, nor does she think herself good enough. But I feel that it is no more than fair to give this timid, unassertive woman a chance. She is not frivolous, she knows a lot, and I believe that she will do something with the subject she has chosen. It would have been very damaging to turn her out now.” What is striking here is
that for Bellow the interests of the Committee—as conceived of by Shils and initially shared by Bellow—take second place to the needs of a friend. Hartnett had published several strong articles, but she was nowhere near as productive or promising a scholar as the Committee usually sought, nowhere near Shils’s notions of distinction.

  These notions are seen in the list of eminent historians and social and political theorists Shils urged Bellow to pursue during his tenure as chair: Stephen Toulmin, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, Clifford Geertz, and Arnaldo Momigliano. Shils’s notion of a promising junior appointment was the conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton. Eventually, at the end of Bellow’s time as chair, Shils managed to bring Momigliano, a historian of Greek, Roman, and Jewish antiquity, to the Committee. In Portraits: A Gallery of Intellectuals (1997), Shils has a chapter on Momigliano, who is presented not only as an ideal scholar but as an ideal Committee candidate:

  He was a person of extraordinary range and variety of intellectual and technical competence, and fearless originality. His bibliography lists about 750 papers, books, monographs, and book reviews, excluding innumerable translations into languages other than those in which they were originally written. He also wrote more than 400 articles, some quite long, for encyclopaedias….His name was not bruited about in the newspapers. He did not appear on television. He never became fashionable through the denunciation of bourgeois society and the espousal of Communism; his name did not circulate in the same milieux as those of Chomsky, Habermas, Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, or Foucault. Nevertheless, he was widely known and greatly appreciated by the educated public in Europe and America….His fame rested on the proliferating, tentacular reach of his scholarship.38