Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  What Charlie wants is escape, most immediately from the ruinous divorce proceedings. So he flees to Europe, pursued by dunning letters from Chicago: “I knew that Tomchek and Srole would send in a staggering bill for losing my case and that Judge Urbanovitch would let Cannibal Pinsker help himself from the impounded funds” (p. 425). “Long ago I read a book called Ils ne M’Auront Pas (They Aren’t Going to Get Me),” he says earlier in the novel, “and at certain moments I whisper, ‘Ils ne m’auront pas’ ” (p. 141). He several times invokes Harry Houdini, “with whom I think I have some affinities” (p. 66). “The great Jewish escape artist,” from Appleton, Wisconsin, Charlie’s hometown, “defied all forms of restraint and confinement, including the grave. He broke out of everything. They buried him and he escaped. They sank him in boxes and he escaped. They put him in a strait jacket and manacles and hung him upside-down by one ankle from the flagpole of the Flatiron Building in New York” and he escaped. Charlie has written an article on Houdini, about his escapes but also about the intensity of his love for his mother, his years spent debunking spiritualists (“he exposed all the tricks of the medium-racket”), and his death, when he was “punched experimentally in the belly by a medical student and died of peritonitis. So you see nobody can overcome the final fact of the material world” (p. 424). “As a boy I was not a remarkable runner,” Charlie tells us at the beginning of the novel. “How was it that in my middle fifties I became inspired with flight?” (p. 12).

  Charlie means figurative flight, but he might also mean literal flight. Here he is on an airplane, with luscious Renata at his side:

  My head lay on the bib and bosom of the seat and when the Jack Daniel’s came I strained it through my irregular multicolored teeth, curling my forefinger over the top of the glass to hold back the big, perforated ice cubes—they always put in too many. The thread of whisky burned pleasantly in the gullet and then my stomach, like the sun outside, began to glow, and the delight of freedom also began to expand within me. Renata was right, I was away. Once in a while I get shocked into upper wakefulness, I turn a corner, see the ocean, and my heart tips over with happiness—it feels so free!

  Charlie explains this feeling of freedom in terms that recall the Romantic poets and their followers, in particular spiritualists like Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield. As he looks out the window of the plane, “I have the idea that, as well as beholding, I can also be beheld from yonder and am not a discrete object but incorporated with the rest….For what is this sea, this atmosphere, doing within the eight-inch diameter of your skull?” (p. 306). In such seeing, “the earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts” (p. 256), perceiver and perceived unite. The glow Charlie feels links him to the glowing sun, recalling a similar glow in childhood, a time of “personal connection with the external world” (p. 199). “In the first decade of life” he recalls, “I knew this light and even knew how to breathe it in.” Hemmed in by shades of the prison house, Charlie loses touch with the light, or dismisses it, “for the sake of maturity or realism (practicality, self-preservation, the fight for survival).” Now, however, he finds it “edging back” (p. 175), as at moments like the one on the airplane with Renata. Such moments, though, are only in part spiritual or elevated. They also have lower or worldly origins. “Sipping whisky, feeling the radiant heat that rose inside, I experienced a bliss that I knew perfectly well was not mad. They hadn’t done me in back there, Tomchek, Pinsker, Denise, Urbanovich. I had gotten away from them….I could find no shadow of wistful yearning, no remorse, no anxiety. I was with a beautiful bim” (p. 306).

  Charlie’s mystical tendencies are undermined not only by the fact of women like Renata and Denise but by their cutting impatience with higher aspirations. “What you really want is to get rid of everybody,” he reports Denise telling him, “to turn out to be a law unto yourself. Just you and your misunderstood heart” (p. 45), a judgment Charlie “would not argue with” (p. 45). Reading Barfield or Rudolf Steiner may help him to feel “the one life within us and abroad” (a phrase from Coleridge, the subject of a book by Barfield), but it may also be a way of blotting out the needs of others.63 When he reads Steiner, Charlie often feels “unusually light and swift-paced, as if I were on a weightless bicycle and skipping through the star world. Occasionally I saw myself with exhilarating objectivity, literally as an object among objects—the physical universe. One day that object world would cease to move and when the body collapsed the soul would simply remove itself” (p. 216). The image of a “weightless bicycle” floating away like a balloon suggests the child’s world, as does “skipping,” just as the spiritual insights Charlie finds in Steiner corroborate emotional certainties from earliest infancy, the sort challenged or disputed by reason. “Matters of the spirit are widely and instantly grasped,” Charlie asserts. “Except of course by people who are in heavily fortified positions, mental opponents trained to resist what everyone is born knowing” (p. 91). As Charlie puts it at the end of the novel, speaking of death and the afterlife, “the prevailing beliefs seldom satisfy my need for truth….I never believed that oblivion was the case” (p. 348).

  What Charlie looks for in Steiner and other mystical writers is corroborating evidence, support for what he knows is true. His faith, the faith he’s tempted by, is in instinct, “an illusion, perhaps a marvellous illusion, or perhaps only a lazy one, that by a kind of inspired levitation I could rise and dart straight to the truth” (p. 156). That this faith is “religious” he is prepared to admit, if by religious one means believing “there’s something in human beings beyond the body and brain and that we have ways of knowing that go beyond the organism and its senses. I’ve always believed that. My misery comes, maybe, from ignoring my metaphysical hunches” (p. 131). For too long, Charlie has allowed himself to be governed by received opinion, “the going mental rules of a civilization that proved its right to impose [its] rules by the many practical miracles it performed” (p. 50). To fight against its hold, he practices Steinerian meditative exercises, aimed at strengthening spiritual perception, as in “my exercise in contemplation of Spirit-recollection (the purpose of which was to penetrate into the depths of the soul and to recognize the connection between the self and the divine powers)” (p. 141). Charlie gets these exercises from Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (1947) and finds them difficult to perform, because “characteristically I had been trying too hard” (p. 110). Bellow, too, performed Steiner’s exercises, in particular the “I Am, It Thinks” meditation, to which he was “particularly faithful,” crediting it with giving him “a certain daily stability.”64

  Yet Charlie, like Bellow, never fully commits to his metaphysical hunches or to Steiner. “It was now apparent to me that I was neither of Chicago nor sufficiently beyond it, and that Chicago’s material and daily interests and phenomena were neither actual and vivid enough nor symbolically clear enough to me, so that I had neither vivid actuality nor symbolic clarity and for the time being I was utterly nowhere.” Charlie’s unclarity drives him to “long esoteric conversations” (p. 254) with an anthroposophist named Professor Scheldt, father of the nubile Doris. What he hopes to gain from these conversations, as from his reading of Steiner and Barfield, is “once and for all…to find out whether there was anything behind the incessant hints of immortality that kept dropping on me” (p. 347). These hints are supported by a sense that “each thing in nature was an emblem for something in my own soul” (p. 348), a sense which promises, in ways not explained, reunion with his “significant dead, remembered every day” (p. 110). So intense is Charlie’s longing for this reunion that he is willing to put up with Professor Scheldt’s esoteric idiom, with its talk of “Moon Evolution, the fire spirits, the Sons of Life, with Atlantis, with the lotus-flower organs of spiritual perception or the strange mingling of Abraham with Zarathustra, or the coming together of Jesus and the Buddha” (p. 257). These are the equivalents of Steiner�
��s talk of Angels and Spirits, as in the “bewitching pamphlet” in which he identifies “our duty…to collaborate with the Angels. They appear within us (as the Spirit called the Maggid manifested itself to the great Rabbi Joseph Karo). Guided by the Spirits of Form, Angels sow seeds of the future in us….Among other things they wish to make us see the concealed divinity of other human beings. They show man how he can cross by means of thought the abyss that separates him from Spirit” (p. 287). How literally Charlie takes this sort of thing is not clear, to himself or to the reader. “There were passages in Steiner that set my teeth on edge. I said to myself, this is lunacy. Then I said, this is poetry, a great vision” (p. 427), a doubleness that recalls Bellow on Reich, or Henderson on King Dahfu, who has life wisdom but whose “enthusiasms and visions swept him far out” (p. 221). “The strange things he said,” Charlie recalls of Professor Scheldt, “were at least deep things” (p. 255).

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  BELLOW’S INTEREST IN STEINER was supported by his reading of Barfield’s Saving the Appearances (1957) and Unancestral Voice (1965).65 Barfield, whose background was literary, was the most influential of Steiner’s English-speaking disciples. At Oxford, where he read English, he became a founding member of the Inklings, along with C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams (none of whom shared his anthroposophical beliefs). When Lewis left Oxford at the end of 1954 to take up a chair at Cambridge, he lobbied for Barfield to replace him as lecturer in English at Magdalen College, but the appointment fell through. Barfield’s first work of nonfiction was Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1928), a revised version of his Oxford B.Litt. thesis. It was published five years after he joined the Anthroposophical Society of Great Britain and is “anthroposophical” in aiming to show not only how words change their meanings over time but how consciousness changes as well, in the process unfixing supposedly objective “representations,” what in Saving the Appearances Barfield calls “collective representations” or “idols.” For Barfield, as for Steiner, perception is “participatory”; “the actual evolution of the earth we know must have been at the same time an evolution of consciousness. For consciousness is correlative to phenomenon.”66

  This is Romanticism, derived ultimately from Goethe, Steiner’s great mentor (“Barfield is to Steiner,” G. B. Tennyson has written, “as Steiner was to Goethe”67). For Steiner, it is Goethe the scientist who matters, author of The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) and The Theory of Colors (1810), works that challenge, respectively, Linnaean taxonomy and Newton’s theory of optics. Goethe’s science is “Romantic” not only in these challenges, but in its belief in a supersensible reality wholly different from that of mainstream science. To the physicist, the underlying or supersensible reality, Goethe’s Ur-Phänomen, is the subatomic particle, inaccessible to human perception; for Goethe, as for the English Romantic poets, the Ur-Phänomen is accessible through “creative” perception, an active, which is to say imaginative, attention to surface reality.68 “He who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole,” Blake writes, “Must see it in its Minute Particulars.”69 In Goethe’s science, the outer form or natura naturata discloses an inner form or natura naturans that shapes the outer appearance. From infancy, Bellow believed something similar. “If a man or woman looked a certain way it meant something to me, about their characters.” In such cases, what is seen is in part the creation of the perceiver, as in Blake’s famous answer when questioned about the rising sun: “Do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? Oh! No, no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying ‘Holy, holy holy is the Lord God Almighty!’ I question not my corporeal or vegetative eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it and not with it.”70

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  IT WAS BARFIELD who put Bellow in touch with the Chicago branch of the Anthroposophical Society in America. There Bellow joined a study group organized by one of its senior members, Peter Demay, a seventy-five-year-old retired mechanical engineer. Demay was in several ways unlike Professor Scheldt in Humboldt’s Gift, being a bachelor (no nubile daughter), well under six feet, and born and educated in France.71 He became a member of the Chicago branch of the Anthroposophical Society in 1931, and in 1942 was elected its president. Demay took on the task of guiding members in discussion of Steiner’s books and lectures. He also conducted discussions for the general public. The study group Bellow joined met weekly at 7:00 p.m. in Demay’s apartment, overlooking Lincoln Park, on the North Side of the city. The group consisted of seven or eight men, of whom Bellow was the oldest. Each week they were assigned readings, usually one of Steiner’s lectures. Sessions lasted two hours. Bellow joined the group in 1975 and attended sessions regularly for a little over a year.72

  Only one other member of the group was literary: William Hunt, a poet, urban reformer, and school administrator.73 Hunt, a light-skinned African American, born in 1937, had studied at the University of Chicago. After university, he worked for the community organizer Saul Alinsky, with whom Barack Obama later worked, and then, less happily, at the Department of Labor. In 1975, he was employed as an administrator at the Esperanza School, for children with developmental difficulties, mental health problems, or other special needs. The teachers at Esperanza mostly came from Steiner-based Waldorf schools and the Camphill Movement, which also ran Steiner-inspired schools for children with learning difficulties. Although Hunt met Bellow for the first time in Peter Demay’s study group, he had known Susan Bellow since 1970, through Richard Hunt, an African American sculptor (no relation) whom she dated after the break with Bellow. At the time of their meeting, William Hunt was looking for a Waldorf kindergarten for his son, and Susan was considering a Waldorf school for Daniel (who did attend such a school in New York). Either through Susan or through one of the teachers at Esperanza, Hunt came across a pamphlet by Steiner entitled The Work of the Angels in Man’s Astral Body (1918), which led to his joining Demay’s study group.74 He and Bellow became friends and soon began meeting for dinner before the sessions.

  Hunt was struck by Bellow’s contained manner in the study group. He remembered him as “snooty and on edge” in literary discussion, as in question periods after talks and readings.75 With Demay he was “deferential,” also “professorial, letting others talk.” Demay could be hard to follow, carrying his thoughts into what Hunt calls “the imaginal.” Bellow was “very circumspect and kind and sort of amazed at some of the things Peter would go off on—he couldn’t follow him, I couldn’t follow him.” After Bellow won the Nobel Prize, he was often away from Chicago, especially burdened by requests and invitations, and he attended the group infrequently. When Demay had a serious heart attack, the group disbanded.76 Bellow and Hunt, however, continued to meet, at first at Bellow and Alexandra’s apartment at 5901 North Sheridan Road—though, as Hunt recalls, Alexandra “didn’t stay in the room much after the topic of Rudolf Steiner came up”—then at several bookstores in Evanston, one an Evanston landmark called Great Expectations, the other, nearby, devoted to historical books, particularly having to do with Chicago. Although Hunt made a point of arriving at these meetings on time, Bellow was always there ahead of him. Bellow’s attention “was very intense,” and Hunt felt he “needed to be a bit more alert” at their meetings. After meeting, they’d adjourn to The Spot, a neighboring coffee shop, to talk not only about anthroposophy but about Chicago politics, social issues, race relations, prison violence. The meetings, often weekly, continued from 1976 to 1982, when Hunt moved to Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Hunt, who had been raised on the South Side of Chicago, knew the problems of the inner city firsthand, though in the years he and Bellow were closest and would meet in Evanston, he lived in Wilmette, immediately to its north. After the move to Massachusetts, the two men would visit each other every summer.

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  WHEN BELLOW INTRODUCED HIMSELF to Barfield in a lett
er of June 3, 1975, he was almost sixty. He would be in London, he wrote, from June 10, the birthday itself, to June 15, after which he and Alexandra would travel to Dornach, Switzerland, to visit the Steiner Center, and then go on to Spain for the holiday with Adam described earlier. Would Barfield come up to London from Kent to talk with him about spiritual matters? He would, and the two men met in London on the fifteenth. Bellow’s manner with Barfield was deferential, disciplelike, as it had been in his initial letter. A month later, on July 15, he wrote a belated letter of thanks. “That you should come down to London to answer the ignorant questions of a stranger greatly impressed me. I daresay I found the occasion far more interesting than you could.” In the initial letter of June 3, Bellow played down any doubts and uncertainties: “There are things that seem to me self-evident, so markedly self-evident and felt that the problem of proving or disproving their reality becomes academic.” Yet he also confessed to finding aspects of Unancestral Voice puzzling. In the book, a fictional English lawyer named Burgeon (Barfield was a lawyer) reads of Rabbi Joseph Karo and the Maggid, and begins to hear a voice of his own, speaking in English not Hebrew. This voice, the titular “unancestral voice,” comes “from the depths within himself.”77 Burgeon calls it the “Meggid,” after Rabbi Karo’s voice, and quizzes it about pressing social issues. The answers he receives derive, the Meggid tells him, from the archangels Gabriel and Michael, who initiate and preside over stages in the evolution of consciousness. The archangel Gabriel is responsible for the period between the scientific revolution and the end of the nineteenth century, a period when matter was most fully the vehicle of spirit; Michael, in contrast, “does not work indirectly through the flesh or through the senses. His field is the thinking that has been set free from the flesh” (p. 44). The two great antagonists of Gabriel and Michael are Lucifer and Ahriman, enemies of cultural development. Lucifer’s aim is “to conserve the past too long; to maintain, in the present, conditions that rightly obtain in the past, but should now be superseded.” Ahriman, in contrast, would destroy the past completely in the name of the future, in the process creating what “can only appear in the present as a wicked caricature….Ahriman is both the peculiar opponent and the peculiar underling of Michael. He is in truth the dragon underneath the Archangel’s feet” (pp. 58, 59). These are the “powers of darkness” whom Bellow professed not to understand in his June 3 letter to Barfield. In the letter of July 15, he continues to find Unancestral Voice “hard going” while retaining “a strong hunch that you are giving a true account of things.” The illumination Bellow seeks still eludes him, though “lately I have become aware, not of illumination itself, but of a kind of illuminated fringe—a peripheral glimpse of a different state of things.”