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BELLOW WROTE ABOUT Chicago throughout his life, but the city only became an object of direct or systematic investigation for him in the late 1970s, sometime after he returned from Jerusalem. The Jefferson Lectures were the first fruit of this investigation, but they were merely an offshoot of a larger project, commonly referred to by researchers as the “Chicago Book,” a work that was never published and exists only in parts. Other offshoots of the “Chicago Book” include the two Tanner Lectures, delivered at Brasenose College, Oxford, on May 18 and 25, 1981, the television program Saul Bellow’s Chicago, aired locally on March 27, 1981, and the Chicago sections of The Dean’s December (1982), a novel that seems to have begun life as a long short story or novella set in Romania.12 In the course of fictionalizing the trip he and Alexandra made to Bucharest in December 1978, a trip discussed in chapter 4, Bellow began adding to the backstory of the Alexandra figure’s husband, Albert Corde, a Bellow-like dean of students at an unnamed Chicago university. Soon the story had grown into a novel, a tale of two cities, Chicago and Bucharest, each depressing in its own way. “I wrote it in a year and a half,” Bellow told an interviewer, “and had no idea it was coming.”13 Many passages in the novel are taken from the “Chicago Book,” sometimes word for word.
What survives of the “Chicago Book” is an eighty-four-page autobiographical manuscript and shorter notelike sections with such titles as “American Materialism,” “A Visit to County Jail,” “Newspapers.” (The book’s title is taken from the heading of a section dated April 5, 1979.) In addition, Bellow compiled sixteen research files or folders for the book, containing clippings, notes, ephemeral publications, and correspondence on a range of Chicago topics and personalities. There are folders on Jake “The Barber” Factor, the gangster pardoned by President Kennedy; on Mayor Daley; on the 1979 mayoral race between Jane Byrne and the incumbent Michael Bilandic, Daley’s successor.14 The book was to resemble To Jerusalem and Back (1976), mixing reportage and reminiscence in a way that appears influenced by the “New Journalism” of Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, and Norman Mailer. In 1974, Wolfe edited an influential anthology of such journalism, claiming in its introduction that the novel was dead and New Journalism was its rightful successor, and issuing a direct Kipling-inspired challenge to Bellow: “The Huns are at the Gate, Saul!” Two years earlier, in New York magazine, Wolfe’s challenge was “Damn it all, Saul, the Huns have arrived!”15
William Hunt, Bellow’s friend from the Steiner reading group, was a sounding board for his thoughts about the city. By the late 1970s, their discussions in The Spot in Evanston were as likely to be about race and city politics as about anthroposophy. Hunt was born and raised in Woodlawn, just to the south of Hyde Park, a no-go area for many whites by the late 1970s. Before working at the Esperanza School, he was employed by several social-service organizations in the area. As the projects he worked on were for the most part federally funded, they were less corrupt than city projects, so his knowledge of city corruption was “like what a child would imbibe while overhearing his elders arguing behind closed doors.” He had one city job, as the director of a public-information division of Chicago’s anti-poverty agency. Here he learned how employees were hired. There was “a two-tiered structure. One tier involved professionals hired to maintain the requirements of services; the professionals included attorneys, medical personnel, social workers, city planners, and the like. The other tier was composed of the personnel recommended for jobs by the city’s ward committeemen; their work credentials were validated by the expectation that they would do the bidding of the ward committeemen during the weeks leading up to elections, especially local elections.”
Over the course of their meetings, Hunt found Bellow’s views on the city “increasingly dystopian.” In addition to political and judicial corruption, and the lawlessness and nihilism of the black slums, Bellow was much preoccupied with the influence of drugs on college youth culture, by the willful blindness of liberals, and by the irrelevance and frivolity of the press. Bellow was as hard on newspapers in the “Chicago Book” as he is in The Dean’s December. When Clayton Kirkpatrick, editor of the Chicago Tribune, tried to defend his paper’s reporting, sending reprints of articles he thought supported his defense, Bellow was unmoved. In the “Newspapers” section of the “Chicago Book,” he complains that as much as 80 percent of the Tribune, as of other Chicago papers, is made up of advertising. “It would be impossible if one read only the Chicago papers to know what was happening in the world” (p. 1). But readers want the ads, Kirkpatrick answered, and they read them “with passionate attention. To the majority of Chicagoans they are really the most valuable part of the paper.” This claim Bellow thought “we have no way to ascertain,” though admitting, “It is impossible to estimate [i.e., overestimate] the place of commodities in the life of the city” (p. 7). Albert Corde, in The Dean’s December, a journalist before becoming a dean, is a figure of notoriety in Chicago, having written two articles for Harper’s magazine detailing the horrors of the city, articles that reproduce material from the “Chicago Book.” The hostility these articles provoke is Bellow’s imagining of the hostility he himself would have faced had the “Chicago Book” been published (a taste of which he received after the second Jefferson Lecture). “Where the press is concerned,” Corde is told, “you caused great resentment by your articles, implying they were lazy and cynical, and now you are their target of opportunity” (p. 150). Dewey Spangler, an old friend of Corde’s from high school, now a globe-trotting columnist in the mode of Joseph Alsop, congratulates him privately on the articles (“You were eloquent, you were superexpressive” [p. 113]), then accuses him in print of having been “carried away by an earnestness too great for his capacities.” Spangler also quotes private remarks bound to upset Corde’s bosses at the university, notably a crack about how “a tenured professor and a welfare mother with eight kids have much in common” (p. 303).
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A GOOD DEAL OF THE MATERIAL Bellow gathered for the “Chicago Book” is lurid—newspaper articles and interview accounts of grisly murders and sexual crimes—and a number of these accounts find their way into the Dean’s articles for Harper’s. They are part of what makes the experience of reading The Dean’s December, as Bellow himself put it, “hard”: “The language knocks you hard….It demands your attention, the way a man does when he grabs you by the lapels.”16 One case concerns a retired air force pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Duane Swimley, who had to go to court a number of times, at great expense, to divorce his wife, an attractive brunette in her thirties who had been convicted of hiring a hit man to kill him. The wife appealed her conviction, posted bond, and resisted Swimley’s attempts to obtain a divorce. Bellow saved clippings about the case, went to interview Swimley, as the Dean does his fictional equivalent, and wrote up his notes from the interview.17 According to the Chicago Tribune, when the divorce finally came through, Swimley was “obliged under the property settlement to pay [his wife] $147,000 as her share of the home in which they had lived.”18 The newspaper reported Swimley asking, “Why should a guy whose wife tried to kill him get horsed around by these judges?”
Bellow’s sympathies in this case may account for an uncharacteristic mistake. Swimley, in his mid-forties, is described in the notes as “in his early sixties,” Bellow’s age at the time. In the notes, Swimley describes the several attempts his wife made to murder him. First she put ant poison in his food; then she paid a neighbor’s son twenty-five hundred dollars to shoot him. On a hunting trip with the neighbor’s son, when Swimley realized what was going on, he stopped his truck, held a pistol to the boy’s head, and said, “If you don’t tell me what the hell you’re doing you’ll never leave this truck alive.” Later, Mrs. Swimley tried to get her son from her first marriage to murder Swimley. She also retained two Mafia hit men from California, who were picked up by the police and gave test
imony against her, after which she “tried to beat his brains out with a telephone while he slept” (p. 1). In addition to the cartoon comedy aspects of the case, Bellow highlights the behavior of the judiciary, which he, like Swimley, sees as corrupt and incompetent, a judgment based as much on “research” as on personal experience. While working on the “Chicago Book,” according to William Hunt, Bellow regularly attended early-morning sessions at the State Street courthouse. In addition to courtroom proceedings, “he was also able to sit in on backroom negotiations in chambers, where the litigants were represented by their attorneys.”19 Bellow’s old Tuley pal, Julius “Lucky” Echeles, a criminal lawyer known for defending mobsters, accused murderers, and loan sharks, was one of several attorneys who helped him obtain access. Here is Bellow’s description of the treatment Swimley received from the courts:
She [the wife] was convicted and appealed the case, posting a bond. She and the children occupied the family house. The Circuit Court made him pay $1,000 a month in alimony and support. He could not obtain a divorce. The house was owned in joint tenancy and it was impossible to agree on the division of property. Besides, he wanted a divorce on the grounds that she had tried to kill him and the court would not allow this. Judge Feltman insisted that the grounds be mental cruelty….The matter dragged on. For nearly four years he paid her $1,000 a month in maintenance and there were other expenses and fees. At one time the Colonel was held in contempt and sentenced to fifty days in County Jail. He detested the four judges before whom he appeared [p. 3].
Bellow’s notes on the case end with the news of Mrs. Swimley’s conviction and sentence: six years in prison (her son got four). “I hate what to think they’re up to,” Swimley tells Bellow, “and she’ll be out in about three years.” “What then?” Bellow asks. “She’ll probably try again,” Swimley replies. “What, with her record, and people watching her?” Swimley gives Bellow a cool look. “What people?” “Good question” (p. 4).
Much darker and more demonic is the case of Linda Goldstone, a young Evanston housewife, a mother and natural-childbirth instructor, who was raped and murdered in 1978 by Hernando Williams, an African American from the South Side. Williams, who was twenty-three and the son of a preacher, kidnapped Mrs. Goldstone while out on bail for a previous kidnapping and rape. Clippings about the case are in one of the “Chicago Book” folders, and Bellow lightly fictionalizes it as the “Spofford Mitchell” case in The Dean’s December. Corde goes to interview the public defender assigned to Spofford Mitchell, and his account of the interview and of the case itself proves “by far the most controversial part of his article” (that is, of the Harper’s article) (p. 193). The terrible details of the real-life case, which are almost identical to those of the fictional case, show the depravity both Corde and his creator are obsessed with and try to force readers to face. Corde’s account stresses not only the horrors of the crime but the varied forms of civic evasion that accompanied it, the refusal to intervene, the looking the other way.
The victim was a young suburban housewife, the mother of two small children. She had just parked in a lot near the Loop when Mitchell approached and forced her at gunpoint into his own car. The time was about 2 p.m. Spofford Mitchell’s Pontiac had been bought from a Clark Street dealer just after his recent release from prison. Corde didn’t know how the purchase was financed. (The dealer wouldn’t say.) In the front seat, Mitchell forced Mrs. Sathers to remove her slacks, to prevent escape. He drove to a remote alley and assaulted her sexually. Then he locked her into the trunk of his Pontiac. He took her out later in the day and then raped her again. By his own testimony this happened several times. At night he registered in a hotel in the far South Side. He managed to get her from the trunk into the room without her being seen. Possibly he was seen; it didn’t seem to matter to those who saw. In the morning he led her out and locked her in the trunk again. At ten o’clock he was obliged to appear at a court hearing to answer an earlier rape charge. He parked the Pontiac, with Mrs. Sathers still in the trunk, in the official lot adjoining the court building. The rape hearing was inconclusive. When it ended he drove at random about the city. On the West Side that afternoon passersby heard cries from the trunk of a parked car. No one thought to take down the license number; besides, the car pulled away quickly. Towards daybreak of the second day, for reasons not explained in the record, Spofford Mitchell let Mrs. Sather go, warning her not to call the police. He watched from his car as she went down the street. This was a white working-class neighborhood. She rang several doorbells, but no one would let her in. An incomprehensibly frantic woman at five in the morning—people wanted no part of her. They were afraid. As she turned away from the third or fourth closed door, Mitchell pulled up and reclaimed her. He drove to an empty lot, where he shot her in the head. He covered her body with trash [p. 194].
“The dealer wouldn’t say.” “Possibly he was seen; it didn’t seem to matter to those who saw.” “The rape hearing was inconclusive.” “Passersby heard cries from the trunk….No one thought to take down the license number.” “No one would let her in.” In the real-life case, one of the passersby did take down the car’s license plate and gave it to the police. They did not act on the tip. Another difference is that when Mrs. Goldstone rang doorbells one person answered, a Chicago fireman, who said he’d call the police, which he did; but he did not let Mrs. Goldstone into the house, and Williams, who had been following her, led her away to a back alley, where he shot and killed her.
The young public defender assigned to Mitchell in The Dean’s December, Sam Varennes, answers Corde’s questions about the case coolly, collectedly. Corde knows that to be appointed public defender in Chicago “you generally needed some sort of backup or sponsorship” (p. 195), to be connected in some way. Varennes, however, strikes Corde as conscientious, well qualified, and liberal. In the course of their conversation, Varennes pays close attention to the way Corde phrases his questions, looking for signs of bigotry. What Varennes reveals about his planned defense is that it will make much of the victim’s opportunities to flee and of her failure to do so. Corde’s view is that she may have been “dazed” by what happened to her (“As dazed as all that?” Varennes asks). In addition, Corde suggests that she may have “felt that she was already destroyed” (p. 196). From here, with the recklessness that marks his Harper’s articles, Corde weaves a theory about the human “sex nerves” and how, “if people think they’re going to get murdered anyway when it’s over, they may desperately let go.” “That’s quite a theory,” says Varennes. Heedlessly, Corde begins a riff about “the peculiar curse of sexuality or carnality we’re under—we’ve placed it right in the center of life and connect it with savagery and criminality” (p. 196). For Corde, as for Artur Sammler, “our conception of physical life and of pleasure is completely death-saturated….Spofford Mitchell was on the fast track for death—fast, clutching, dreamlike, orgastic. Grab it, do it, die” (pp. 196–97). Varennes comments: “My team and I are on these homicides year in year out. We can’t get up the same fervor as an outsider” (p. 197).
The effect of these words is to return Corde to his “interviewer’s detachment or professional cool.” He looks again at Varennes, whose “serious eyes and strong bald head” he admires; he thinks Varennes “a nice man” (p. 197), even as he knows he’s being checked out by him, to see “whether I could be trusted, what my angle was, why I wasn’t somehow one hundred percent contemporary in my opinions” (p. 198), which means not only “did I play by Chicago rules” (p. 198), acknowledging traditional powers and practices, but were “my liberal sympathies…in order.” “Chicago rules” are anathematized throughout both the “Chicago Book” and The Dean’s December. As for “liberal sympathies,” here is Corde’s scornful summary, versions of which Bellow used to tease liberal friends:20
We are for everything nice and against cruelty, wickedness, craftiness, monstrousness. Worshippers of progress, its dependents, we are unwilling
to reckon with villainy and misanthropy, we reject the horrible….Our outlook requires that each of us is naturally decent and wills the good. The English-speaking world is temperamentally like this. You see it in the novels of Dickens, clearly. In his world, there is suffering, there is evil, betrayal, corruption, savagery, sadism, but the ordeals end and decent people arrange a comfortable existence for themselves, make themselves cozy [p. 199].
Bellow had his Dickensian side, as well as his Dickensian brilliance, but in the late 1970s the more likely influence, given the bleakness and intensity of his focus on the ruinous consequences of materialism, is Dostoevsky. In the second Tanner Lecture, Bellow declares: “The overwhelming power in Chicago remains the power of money and goods. People of course wanted fun, they seemed to want religion too—they joined hands, they prayed, they joined the Moral Majority and responded to appeals for contributions. But as you watched the programs and turned the pages of the Sun-Times and the Tribune, you were aware that the economy was a sort of divinity. You said, with some reluctance, a bit dazed, somewhat disheartened—but this was confirmation, not a fresh discovery—‘These be your gods!’ ”21 (p. 188). For Corde, America’s children are as unreachable as the black underclass: “It was impossible to educate either, or to bind either to life. It [America] was not itself securely attached to life just now. Sensing this, the children attached themselves to the black underclass, achieving a kind of coalescence with the demand-mass,” characterized by Bellow in a 1980 interview as a “malignant Mammonism…very different from what I knew as a kid.”22 As Bellow explains in the second Tanner Lecture, “It was not so much the inner city slum that threatened us as the slum of innermost being, of which the inner city was perhaps a material representation” (p. 201). He quotes Morris Janowitz on “the shift in popular culture from ‘idols of production’ to ‘idols of consumption.’ He bases his observations on a study by Leo Lowenthal which shows that before 1924 the idols of the mass media, such as they were then, were the Fords and the Edisons, empire builders, makers of goods and machinery. By the end of the twenties, idols of consumption were, however, at the center of the pantheon. The gods were fat, eating and drinking and driving about in luxurious machines” (p. 196).23 In The Dean’s December, Corde describes the effective black “image” today as that of the “outlaw chieftains” who run gangs like the Rangers and the El Rukins—“black princes in their beautiful and elegant furs, boots, foreign cars” (p. 149), a passage that recalls the black pickpocket in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, also princely, also expensively dressed.
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