“I’m glad I got it. I could live without it.” SB at a press conference announcing the award of the Nobel Prize, University of Chicago, October 22, 1976 (courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library)
6
The “Chicago Book” and The Dean’s December
ON MARCH 30, 1977, in Washington, D.C., Bellow delivered the first of his two Jefferson Lectures. The lectures were sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities under the title of “The Writer and His Country Look Each Other Over.” Both lectures contain moving evocations of the Chicago of Bellow’s youth. The first opens with a contrast between the Gold Coast houses of the ultra-rich, who lived within sight of Lake Michigan, and those of the landlocked slum dwellers who passed them in summer on their way to the shore. “This was how the children of immigrant laborers first came to know the smell of money and the look of luxury.”1 Bellow writes about the disparity between rich and poor without rancor, partly because, as we learn in the lecture’s second paragraph, he now lives, as do many of the friends he grew up with in landlocked Humboldt Park, in one of the tall apartment buildings “that have risen along the shore on the north side of the city” (p. 117).
It isn’t just that Bellow and his fellow immigrant children feel they have made it. Life in the working-class neighborhoods of their youth wasn’t that bad: “No one had money, but you needed very little” (p. 119). Bellow’s memories of Chicago during the Depression, of Tuley High School, of the University of Chicago, of his early years as an impecunious “romancier,” are affectionate. It was a professor, Nathan Leites, a political scientist, who called Bellow a romancier, a mocking term that Bellow hated but admits he deserved, having accepted “the prevailing assumption—and the Romantic presumption still prevailed—that man could find the true meaning of life and of his own unique being by separating himself from society and its activities and collective illusions” (p. 125). Undiscouraged—charged, in fact—by this assumption, Bellow set out, “for the sake of us all (I was very young then), narrow and poor as I was, [to] try myself to leap towards the marvelous,” a phrase borrowed from Harold Rosenberg’s 1940 essay “On the Fall of Paris.”2
Two days after delivering the first Jefferson lecture, Bellow delivered the second, a darker talk, in the Gold Coast Room of the Drake Hotel, a venerable Chicago landmark. The Drake overlooks Oak Street Beach, the destination of the slum dwellers he described in lecture one as heading to the lakeshore. As in Washington, the Chicago audience was glittering, on this occasion made up of officials and guests of Chicago’s cultural establishment, including members of the Chicago Historical Society, the Field Museum, the Illinois Humanities Council, the Newberry Library, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. In Washington, the ball-gowned and dinner-jacketed audience included very few Chicagoans. In Chicago, friends, colleagues, and cultural notables were joined by local big-money benefactors, the sort who funded rather than ran museums, opera companies, orchestras, and arts clubs. Bellow distrusted such types, seeing their motives as boosterish, materialistic.3 But he looked just like them: prosperous, silver-haired, expensively dressed.
At the conclusion of the second Jefferson lecture, according to an article by Paul Carroll, who attended as the cofounder of the Chicago Poetry Center, Bellow received only muted applause.4 The lecture opened with several paragraphs about American success, then turned on its audience, who embodied it, attributing to them an unspoken or repressed “feeling that this miraculously successful country has done evil, spoiled and contaminated nature, waged cruel wars, failed in its obligations to its weaker citizens, the blacks, the children, the women, the aged, the poor of the entire world” (p. 138). That women and blacks were listed as among the country’s “weaker citizens” may have unsettled some listeners. Other unsettling passages were to follow. Bellow returned to Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, to the neighborhoods populated by immigrants from Poland, Italy, Ireland, and Eastern Europe. These neighborhoods he described as places of relative harmony and industry. Today, thanks to the 1924 Immigration Act, everything had changed.
No more carpenters, printers, mechanics, pastry cooks, cobblers, sign painters, street musicians, and small entrepreneurs entered the country from Greece, Serbia, Pomerania, Sicily. Such trades were infra dig for the children of immigrants. They improved themselves and moved upward. The neighborhoods they left were repopulated by an internal immigration from the South and from Puerto Rico. The country people, black or white, from Kentucky or Alabama, brought with them no such urban skills and customs as the immigrants had. Assembly-line industries had no need for skilled labor.
What we have taken now to calling “ethnic neighborhoods” fell into decay long ago. The slums, as a friend of mine [Harold Rosenberg] once observed, were ruined. He was not joking. The slums as we knew them in the twenties were, when they were still maintained by European immigrants, excellent places, attractive to artists and bohemians as well as to WASPs who longed for a touch of Europe. The major consequences of the devastation of these neighborhoods, invariably discussed on these occasions—the increase in crime, the narcotics addiction, the welfare problem, the whole inventory of urban anarchy—I will spare you. I will appease the analytical furies by mentioning only three side effects of the change: the disappearance of genial street life from American cities; the dank and depressing odors of cultural mildew rising from the giant suburbs, which continue to grow; the shift of bohemia from the slums to the universities [p. 145].
What came next in the lecture seemed at first a digression: a detailed description of the domestic architecture of working-class Chicago, in particular its bungalows and six-flats (residential buildings containing six apartments one on top of another, with separate entrances), mass-produced but nevertheless bearing “trimmings, nifty touches, notes of elegance and aspiration” (p. 147), saving graces like those of the city’s “loutish-looking” cottonwood trees, which nevertheless produce a day or two of fragrant spring catkins and summery white fluff (p. 147). The faculty of the University of Chicago live peacefully in the six-flats of Hyde Park. Only a few blocks away, in the black slums, “a different sort of life, in Woodlawn and Oakwood, tears apart the six-flats and leaves them looking bombed out. They are stripped of saleable metals, innards torn out, copper cable chopped to pieces and sold for scrap, windows all smashed, and finally fire and emptiness. Sometimes there is no one at all in these devastated streets—a dog, a rat or two.” The wooden fences meant to enclose the front lawns of slum six-flats have been “torn up…stolen, burned. The grass plots themselves have been stamped into hollow clay” (p. 148).
In an attempt to discover why, Bellow had talked to police and firemen, welfare and community workers. He had visited inner-city schools, hospitals, courts, clinics, the county jail, read learned articles about race and crime, interviewed their authors. “The first fact that strikes you,” Bellow declared of his visits to criminal court, “is that so large a part of Chicago’s black population is armed—men, women, children even” (p. 148). The slum schools are “now almost entirely black and Puerto Rican” (p. 149); they could not be more different from the schools of Bellow’s youth. Their teachers “have the highest salary scale in the country,” but what they teach “is hard to determine, and whom they teach is even more mysterious. I have entered classrooms in which pupils wandered about knocking out rhythms on the walls absorbed in their transistors. No one seemed to grasp that the room had a center. No one heeded the teacher when she spoke” (pp. 149–50). “Some of the kids are like little Kaspar Hausers—blank, unformed, they live convulsively, in turbulence and darkness of mind. They do not know the meaning of words like ‘above,’ ‘below,’ ‘beyond.’ But they are unlike poor innocent Kaspar in that they have a demonic knowledge of sexual acts, guns, drugs, and of vices, which are not vices here” (p. 150). Similarly, in the courts, the young black men or women on trial strike Bellow as “unreachable, i
ncomprehensible. It is impossible to know what they are thinking or feeling.” In a rare qualification, he adds: “I am speaking, please notice, of what sociologists call the underclass, not of black Chicago as a whole, the orderly, churchgoing black working people or members of the growing middle class. These struggle to maintain themselves in a seemingly disintegrating city and to protect their children from beatings in school corridors and assaults in hallways and toilets, from shootings in the playgrounds. No one goes out carefree for a breath of air at night” (p. 150). After this nightmare vision, Bellow ends the lecture with a moment of self-correction, like the moment of sympathy and fellowship extended to the black pickpocket at the end of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, when Eisen, the Israeli sculptor, batters the pickpocket to the ground. Here are the lecture’s final sentences:
When he visited the Lower East Side, [Henry] James was alarmed by the Jewish immigrants he saw, appalled by their alien, ill-omened presence, their antics and their gabble.
There is no end to the curious ironies all this offers to an active imagination—and, in particular, to a descendant of East European Jews like myself [p. 152].
The muted applause that greeted these words was followed by a reception. As Carroll reports, “Much of the audience is missing; few who do come to sip champagne bother to shake the hand of the Nobel laureate or to congratulate him on his success.” Carroll suggests that the audience was put off by Bellow’s crack about the “stench of cultural mildew from the suburbs.” They may also have been irked that Bellow “failed to tell his audience—the Cultural Establishment—how important they were and how grateful he was for their support.” Perhaps the prominent blacks who were present (Carroll could see no prominent Puerto Ricans or Appalachians) “and hard-line liberals from the universities and Highland Park took umbrage at that ‘lack of culture’ business.”
Reaction from the university community was swift. Citing a description of the lecture in the Chicago Sun-Times, the University of Chicago newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, published a two-column letter of protest to the editor on April 14. It was titled “Bellow: False and Racist?” and signed by “The University of Chicago Committee Against Racism, accompanied by 14 signatures by members of the University community.”5 The authors of the letter described the remarks quoted from the lecture in the Sun-Times as “outrageous,” hoping they were inaccurately reported. They then “strongly” urged Bellow to “1) Issue a statement clarifying his position. 2) Issue an apology for what, regardless of his intentions, can only be regarded as racist statements. 3) Take steps to insure that the racist statements are eliminated before the lectures appear in published form.” Bellow did not reply, but at least one of the quotations excerpted in the Sun-Times was cut in the published version of his lectures. The Sun-Times quoted Bellow as having said, “In the slums today comes a savage fury directed at the middle class.” When the lectures were published in It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future (1994), this sentence did not appear, perhaps because the preponderance of black crime in the slums is lower-class black-on-black crime. The signatories also complained of Bellow’s failure to mention the causes of disintegration in the black slums, in particular “the discriminatory policies of real estate companies and banks,” the redlining that consigned blacks and Latinos to old or shabby housing by refusing them home-improvement loans or insurance (on the grounds that they lived in areas deemed a poor financial risk). Far from holding the city together, as the signatories to the letter claim Bellow implied, the banks and universities “are among the principal beneficiaries of racism, and in fact…have promoted the disintegration of the city….The University of Chicago is directly responsible for the devastation of Woodlawn.”6
What upset Carroll about the lecture was Bellow’s claim that the black, Appalachian, and Latin slums were without culture. They might be without high culture, but what of popular or street culture, the black or Latino equivalents of the culture celebrated in The Adventures of Augie March, “largely unwritten, oral, and often ungrammatical, lacking the paintings and the great royal and private collections of Europe, and involving worship in such ‘low’ churches as the Baptist and the Methodist. About this, Bellow left his audience in the dark, and uncomfortable stirrings and quick, uneasy whispers were heard.” Bellow, of course, knew a great deal about the popular culture of black immigrants from the South, not only from the classes he took with Melville Herskovits at Northwestern, but from his time as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, renowned for its research into “Negro-White relations.” Bellow’s friend Herb Passin was also a source of such knowledge. When he and Bellow were closest, in the early 1940s, Passin was a student of the anthropologist and ethnographer Robert Redfield, director of the American Council on Race Relations from 1947 to 1950. This was also the time when Bellow’s fiction was centrally concerned with racial discrimination. The earliest of his manuscripts, the unpublished novel fragment “Acatla” (1940), contains scenes in which an interracial couple are victims of prejudice; his first completed novel, “The Very Dark Trees” (1942), concerns a white man who wakes to find he’s turned black.7 In the first Jefferson Lecture, however, racial prejudice, like black street culture, is barely mentioned. Bellow’s concern in the lecture is with the consequences, not the causes of discrimination, their destructive effect on African Americans, the anger, fear, and incomprehension they breed in whites, emotions dramatized in the story “Looking for Mr. Green” (1951) and in Mr. Sammler’s Planet. The refusal to focus on causes in the lecture is a matter of calculation rather than ignorance, a strategy, like the refusal to qualify or hedge. The lecture means to wound, to force his listeners and readers to face what they have chosen not to face. Like Socrates, the stinging fly, Bellow sees or treats the elite of his city as complacent, a handsome horse in need of a good shock, what in The Apology Socrates calls “stimulation.”
Though he did not reply to the letter in the Maroon, Bellow was himself stung by the reaction to the lecture, or so a letter of May 19, 1977, from the University of Chicago sociologist Morris Janowitz suggests. In addition to talking to Janowitz about Arab-Israeli relations, Bellow consulted him on race (Janowitz had served as consultant to the 1947 Commission on Civil Rights established by President Truman and had co-authored a book about racial prejudice with Bruno Bettelheim8). “Please do not feel sensitive about those handful of students—if they can be called students—who talk about racism,” Janowitz reassured Bellow. “There is no doubt that there is no racism in your lecture—and no one on campus believes that there is any. A small group of students—and the striking aspect is that they are so personally unhappy—on all campuses are searching for a new issue. Nuclear power plants, university investments in South African companies, tuition rises—and very little seems to come of all of this, it looks like.”
There were many demonstrations at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, as at other universities, the biggest being against the Vietnam War, which Bellow also opposed. In May 1970, an estimated 75 percent of students stayed away from classes in protest against the war. In November 1974, two hundred students protested against the visit of Henry Kissinger to the university. In addition, as Janowitz suggests, there were calls for the university to stop investing in South Africa, a move Bellow, too, approved, arguing that the trustees should consider human-rights decisions in all investments. “ ‘We have relations with all kinds of governments that seem pretty wicked,’ he told reporters from the Maroon. ‘If you want to divest from all of them I’m with you.’ ”9 The undergraduate Philip Grew remembers being told that Bellow had watched him as, with a bullhorn, he addressed a campus demonstration against investment in South Africa in 1977. For Grew and others, the university was as culpable in its investment policies in Hyde Park and surrounding black neighborhoods as it was in South Africa.10 In January 1970, thirteen students, all from SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), were briefly suspended for demonstrating against the university�
�s “racist policies.” In April 1972, Dwight Ingle, professor of physiology at the university, was shouted down in a debate about black IQ scores. A year later, the political scientist Edward Banfield was prevented from speaking, also accused of racist beliefs.11 In these cases, the number of student protesters involved, as Janowitz suggests, was small. How he knew they were “personally unhappy” is unclear.
Love and Strife (1965-2005) Page 34
