Bellow liked at least one other thing aside from the visit to Strindberg’s house. Amidst ceremonial and familial distractions, he and Wasserman worked feverishly on his speech, which was far from ready when he arrived. He had three days to finish it, each fully scheduled. Ingemar Lindahl, who had been assigned to look after Bellow by the Swedish Foreign Office, made arrangements to allow him at least a couple of hours each day to work on it. On the second morning, he found an exhausted-looking Bellow staring at heaps of scribbled paper spread out on his desk. He was drinking a glass of greenish liquor and offered Lindahl some. “This is a kind of moonshine Romanian plum vodka,” Bellow explained. “It’s called Zuica. My mother-in-law has brought it. Romania produces two good things: that drink and beautiful women” (a remark partly addressed to Alexandra).35 Bellow’s difficulties with the speech may have come from worry about losing his powers, an effect winning the prize was said to have had on previous winners, John Steinbeck most recently. This worry Bellow voiced shortly after the award was announced, both privately and publicly. He confided it to Sasha in a tearful phone call on the day of the announcement, to her astonishment. He also admitted it to The New York Times, in an article of October 22, 1976. When Bellow’s old Reichian therapist, Dr. Chester Raphael, read the article, he immediately wrote encouragingly: “Your writings already give assurance that the trauma of the ‘ultimate’ recognition you have just received will not inhibit you but will spur you on to ever greater literary achievements.”
At the grand ball held the night before Bellow was to deliver his speech, he watched with alarm as twelve-year-old Daniel joined in all the toasts, “beginning to glow with the excitement and the wine.”36 Before leaving, “under great pressure,” he asked Harriet Wasserman to come to his suite at nine-thirty the next morning to type out his speech, which was to be picked up by the press at noon. When Wasserman arrived in the morning, she discovered there was no script. Pale from worry and the night’s festivities, Bellow began dictating from notes, “revising as he went along.” “When he finished, he looked at me and asked what I thought. ‘Good,’ I replied.” Then they went off for lunch at the hotel’s Wintergarden restaurant, where the orchestra immediately started playing “Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin’ town.” Bellow waved in acknowledgment and told Wasserman, “Now this part I really like.”37
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THE DISTRACTIONS OF the Nobel Prize followed what was meant to have been a year of recuperation. It had begun in June 1975, when Bellow delivered the proofs of Humboldt’s Gift to Viking. He had been at work on the novel for almost a decade and was glad finally to have it off his hands. This time, as he explained in a letter of April 15, 1975, to Joyce Carol Oates, there would be no “essay to go with it, hitting everyone on the head. I did that when Henderson the Rain King appeared [also with The Adventures of Augie March] and a very bad idea it was too—guaranteed misinterpretation….You shouldn’t give readers two misinterpretable texts at the same time.” While at work on the proofs, Bellow had turned sixty. He and Alexandra were scheduled to be in New York for the week of his birthday, to attend Adam’s graduation from the Dalton School, and Harriet Wasserman had planned an elaborate surprise birthday party. On June 9, the day before the birthday, thirty-five of Bellow’s and Alexandra’s friends were invited to a cocktail party at Wasserman’s apartment. Twenty of these friends were also given secret instructions to go on from the party to a “birthday banquet” at a nearby Chinese restaurant. It was Herb Passin’s job to get Bellow to the restaurant after the party, which was not easy. In addition to being tired and not particularly hungry, Bellow was upset at having to cut short a conversation he had been having with John Cheever, a particular favorite. When, reluctantly, he entered the restaurant and was greeted with cries of “Surprise!” and a chorus of “Happy Birthday” from a crowd including Philip Roth, Saul Steinberg, Aaron Asher, and Cheever himself, “Saul took a look at John, and threw his head back and laughed.”38
Soon after the birthday party and the final submission of galley proofs, the Bellows headed off to Europe, to a mathematics conference in the Black Forest in Germany, where Alexandra had a paper to deliver. From there they traveled to London, where Bellow met Alexandra’s mother for the first time. “He deliberately set out to win her over,” Alexandra recalled, “and when we met abroad he really spent lots of time talking to her and endeared himself to her…and she was not easily swayed.” Bellow was helped in his campaign by Barley Alison and her younger brother, Michael, a Conservative MP, who later became Margaret Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary. Barley entertained the Bellows and Alexandra’s mother in the evening and Michael took them to lunch at the House of Commons and gave them a tour of the Parliament buildings. There was another important first meeting on this London visit, with Owen Barfield (1898–1997), the English writer and barrister. Barfield was an authority on anthroposophy, a “spiritual philosophy” developed by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Bellow had written to Barfield, having read several of his books, and thought of him, with Steiner, as allied against the forces of distraction, and also as capable of helping him “to become fit to hear the essence of things,” as Charlie Citrine puts it in Humboldt’s Gift (p. 305).
From London, the Bellows, accompanied by Adam, flew to southern Spain, to recuperate in Carboneras, as described in the previous chapter. “I arrived in an exhausted state and have been sleeping, eating, swimming, reading and little else,” Bellow wrote to David Peltz in the letter of July 2, 1975 (this is the letter in which Alexandra is described as eating mathematical bread and honey). “Life lays a heavy material weight on us in the States—things, cares, money. But I think that the reason why I feel it so much is that I let myself go, here, and let myself feel six decades of trying hard, and of fatigue. My character is like a taste in my mouth. I’ve tasted better tastes.” A day earlier, he had written to Harriet Wasserman to apologize for taking so long to thank her “for the magnificent party and the dinner.” He was “oddly tired. This is Sixties fatigue, and I’m not talking about the last decade. It’s only now, after a week in Carboneras, that I’m able to face a piece of paper.” On August 8, in a letter to Philip Roth, Bellow described the birthday party in New York as “the one and only party in memory that felt to me like a real party. I didn’t know what I was saying or doing. It was bliss. I do remember trying to talk to you about The Jewish Writer but I was quite drunk and you were wasting your time. So let’s try again.”
By the time Bellow returned to Chicago for the launch of Humboldt’s Gift, he had recovered sufficiently to impress interviewers with his appearance and good humor. The reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times was struck by his clothes: “A subtle, rich-looking green-and-blue tie, the shirt turquoise, the suit olive, single-breasted with a quarter belt in back, the shoes two-tone dark chocolate brown and black. Completing the look are a neat, pinched black Savile Row fedora, a tightly rolled umbrella.”39 To Martha Fay, in an interview for the Book of the Month Club, “Bellow, face to face, is a natural charmer, a laugher, amused and playful, no matter how ascetic, how mournful he sometimes appears.”40 John Aldridge, not a Bellow favorite, began an admiring review of Humboldt’s Gift in the Saturday Review by noting Bellow’s age. At sixty, “most American novelists have ceased to live in expectation of doing important new work and many have given themselves up to producing menopausal recapitulations of their important old work. Bellow on turning sixty has done neither. He has marked the occasion by publishing a novel, his eighth, that contains abundant evidence of the continued expansion and deepening of his creative powers.”41 Alfred Kazin, too, was impressed. “How marvelous. How grateful I am,” he records in his journal, on July 23, 1975. “Here I have been mooching along, more than half wishing for easeful death, waiting for the fire to blot me out completely…and Saul is insisting that he must continue! continue!”42
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ONCE PUBLICITY DUTIES for Humboldt’s Gift were out of the way, Bellow took a three-month sabbatical. Alexandra had been invited to Israel in the autumn of 1975 to give a series of lectures on probability theory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As early as the PEN Congress of the previous December, Bellow had expressed an interest in an extended visit to Jerusalem, and on learning of this interest, the mayor, Teddy Kollek, wrote on December 29, 1974, to say how delighted he was at the prospect, asking “if there are any special arrangements you would like me to make.” On April 14, 1975, as soon as Alexandra had received her invitation, Bellow wrote to John T. Wilson, at the time only acting president of the University of Chicago, to tell him he planned to accompany her. Though he could simply have taken the autumn off, confining his teaching at the Committee on Social Thought to the winter and spring quarters, he decided “to make a gift of my salary for the Fall quarter.” The British philosopher Stephen Toulmin had agreed to stay on through the autumn, “so that we won’t be short-handed.” In addition to taking it easy, Bellow thought he might use the visit to write what he described to Kollek, in a letter of September 26, 1975, as “a short personal book about Israel.” “It would be best for me to avoid VIP treatment…(interviews, lectures, television programs, etc.). If I’m to write a book, I should avoid all such entanglements.” To Owen Barfield, in a letter of February 25, 1976, he said that, though his intention had been “to wander about the Old City and sit contemplatively in gardens and churches,” once he arrived, he realized what he must already have known: that “it is impossible in Jerusalem to detach oneself from the frightful political problems of Israel. I found myself ‘doing something.’ I read a great many books, talked with scores of people, and before the first month was out I was writing a small book about the endless crisis and immersed in politics. It excites me, it distresses me to be so immersed.”
The excitement, the distraction, the immersion began as Bellow and Alexandra waited to board the flight from London to Tel Aviv. As he reports at the opening of To Jerusalem and Back, in the departure lounge they found themselves surrounded by Hasidim (“the corridors are jumping with them”) on their way to Israel to attend the circumcision of the firstborn son of their spiritual leader, the Belzer Rebbe. “Far too restless to wait in line [they] rush in and out, gesticulating, exclaiming,” behavior that anticipates Israeli driving: “cars as a matter of course rushing into the reserved bus lanes, screwing everything up and honking madly” (p. 24). As the Bellows entered the plane, they were “enfiladed by eyes that lie dark in hairy ambush” (p. 1). The young Hasid seated next to Alexandra leaned across to ask Bellow if he spoke Yiddish. “I cannot be next to your wife,” he says. “Please sit between us. Be so good.” Pimply, unprepossessing, not permitted even to look at women unrelated to him, let alone to sit next to them, “he seems a good-hearted young man and he is visibly enjoying himself.” Bellow was amused—as he had been fifteen years earlier, on a comparably noisy flight from New York to Puerto Rico (described in chapter 14 of To Fame and Fortune). His neighbor then, a cigar-smoking priest, carried a dozen cigars in his upper coat pocket, which he described to Bellow as “just about enough for the trip.” The Hasidim, like the earlier Puerto Ricans, are described as “vividly enjoying themselves, dodging through the aisles, visiting chatting standing impatiently in the long lavatory lines, amiable, busy as geese. They pay no attention to signs” (p. 2).
When the young Hasid discovers Bellow has not ordered a kosher meal, he sets out to convert him.
“I must talk to you. You won’t be offended?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“You may want to give me a slap in the face.”
“Why should I?”
“You are a Jew. You must be a Jew, we are speaking Yiddish. How can you eat—that!”
“It looks awful, doesn’t it?”
“You mustn’t touch it. My womenfolk packed kosher-beef sandwiches for me. Is your wife Jewish?”
Here I’m obliged to lie. Alexandra is Rumanian. But I can’t give him too many shocks at once, and I say, “She has not had a Jewish upbringing.”
“She doesn’t speak Yiddish?”
“Not a word. But excuse me, I want my lunch.”
“Will you eat some of my kosher food instead, as a favor?”
“With pleasure.”
“Then I will give you a sandwich, but only on one condition. You must never—never—eat trephena [unkosher] food again.”
Clearly enjoying himself, Bellow cannot make such a promise. So the youth offers him a deal. If Bellow will from now on eat nothing but kosher food, “for the rest of your life I will send you fifteen dollars a week” (p. 3). When Bellow demurs, the Hasid offers him twenty-five dollars a week, to which Bellow answers, “I can’t accept such a sacrifice from you,” turning to his British Airways chicken “with the chill of death upon it” (p. 2), his appetite spoiled.
Though keen not to receive VIP treatment, Bellow was happy to be put up by Mayor Kollek in the guest house of Mishkenot Sha’ananim, southeast of the Old City, not far from the King David Hotel. Mishkenot serves as a cultural center for Jerusalem, hosting visiting celebrities, conferences, recitals, exhibitions, and readings. Its name means “peaceful habitation” (from Isaiah 32:18: “My people shall dwell in a peaceful habitation, and in sure dwellings, and in quiet resting places”). Surrounded by a park and gardens, it directly overlooks the Old City, in a district of small stone causeways and elegant white stone dwellings. The Victorian banker and philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore was its founder, acting on behalf of a wealthy Jewish merchant from New Orleans. When it was created, in 1860, Mishkenot was intended as an almshouse, but since 1973 it has served its current function. Several days after his arrival, Bellow wrote to eleven-year-old Daniel to tell him about his new surroundings. At “this very moment,” he was looking across at Mount Zion. Like Daniel, he was studying Hebrew, “to write something about the city. It’s a funny experience, at the age of 60, to do the things you did as a small boy.” In To Jerusalem and Back, Bellow describes the white stone of Jerusalem, the stone of Mishkenot, as “hoarier than anything I ever saw.” Its “brilliant” light, like the “broadcast” light he found in Mexico in 1940, makes “the American commonplace ‘out of this world’ true enough to give your soul a start” (p. 10). Later in the book, Bellow describes the light as having “purifying powers,” likening it to “the outer garment of God” (p. 93), a comparison that recalls the “angelic” hoops of light reflected off the water glasses in Seize the Day. Yet “even on a sunny morning the stone buildings of Jerusalem chill your hands and feet. Stepping out, I feel a bit numb, like a wasp in autumn” (p. 22).
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IN THE COURSE OF immersing himself in Israeli culture and politics, Bellow interviews government leaders and public figures, journalists, professors (of history, sociology, international relations, philosophy, mathematics, English), novelists and poets, relatives, the barber at the King David Hotel, a masseur who comes to Mishkenot to unknot his back. Accounts of these meetings, in the form of sketches or vignettes, are interwoven in the book with snippets and summaries of his reading, from Elie Kedourie, Malcolm Kerr, Bernard Lewis, Theodore Draper, Walter Laqueur, Yehoshafat Harkabi. Pro-Palestinian and Israeli positions are presented as intractable, even when outlined by moderates. Mahmud Abu Zuluf, the editor of El Kuds, the largest Arab newspaper in Jerusalem, sets out the Palestinian case in a tone “somewhere between boredom and passion.” The Jews “must divide authority with the Arabs. They are too reluctant to accept realities, too slow. The longer they wait the worse things will be.” Bellow describes Abu Zuluf as “hated by the leftists. His life and the lives of his children have been threatened. His automobile was once blown up, but he continues to follow the line of conciliation and peace.” As Abu Zuluf talks, he grows more agitated, smacking the to
p of his desk with the flat of his hand. The only solution is for Israel to “come forward quickly with peace plans and initiate negotiations, show a willingness to negotiate.” Later that day, Bellow takes tea with David Shahar, an Israeli novelist (“a good one”). “The Jews have not been inflexible and negative,” begins Shahar. “Concessions are continually offered. They are rejected. The original U.N. partition plan of 1947 was turned down because the Arabs could not tolerate any Jewish state, not even a minuscule one. If a state was what they wanted, they might have had it years ago. They rejected it. And they invaded the country from all sides, hoping to drive the Jews out and take the wealth they had created” (pp. 36–37). Soon Shahar is shouting and banging on the table, like Abu Zuluf at his desk. Six generations of Shahar’s family have lived in Jerusalem. “You don’t know them,” he says of the Arabs, “the West doesn’t know them. They will not let us live.” Bellow had come to have tea with Shahar, but “there are no peaceful moments in Jerusalem, not for those who are making inquiries. Immediately you are involved in a tormenting discussion” (p. 36).
Part of what inflames Shahar is what Bellow calls “my American evenhandedness, my objectivity at his expense. It is so easy for outsiders to say that there are two sides to the question” (pp. 37–38). In Chicago, when the brutality and injustice reported in the newspapers oppresses Bellow, he refuses to open his newspaper. “In Israel, one has no such choice. There the violent total is added up every day. And nothing can be omitted….Unremitting thought about the world situation parallels the defense effort. These people are actively, individually involved in universal history. I don’t see how they can bear it” (p. 46). In Israel, when you put down the newspaper, immediately you are met with “a gale of conversation—exposition, argument, harangue, analysis, theory, expostulation, threat, and prophecy….I listen carefully, closely, more closely than I’ve ever listened in my life, utterly attentive, but I often feel that I have dropped into a shoreless sea” (p. 25). The only relief Bellow finds outside his rooms in Mishkenot, at least the only relief he records, is with the poets Harold Schimmel and Dennis Silk, who take him sightseeing. They want to know what Theodore Roethke was like. Silk has written an article about John Berryman and asks Bellow to recite some of Berryman’s poems “in Berryman’s own manner” (p. 78). Returning to Mishkenot, Silk offers details about Moses Montefiore, about whom he has written “a curious, half-imaginary account.” Bellow thinks Montefiore sounds “as indefatigable as Kollek himself” (for Kollek, Montefiore’s founding of Mishkenot, the first settlement outside the Old City, matters for political reasons, as a way to buttress “the legitimacy of Jewish claims in Jerusalem”) (p. 79). At the end of his outing with the poets, Bellow tells them: “When I came to Jerusalem, I thought to take it easy here. This is the first easy day I’ve enjoyed in a month” (p. 79).
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