During the years Bellow worked on the “Chicago Book,” the Maroon amply documented crime and violence in Hyde Park. On April 13, 1976, it reported, a university student was shot at and wounded in an attempted robbery just outside a university building on Fifty-Ninth Street, on the north side of the Midway. In an article of October 13, 1978, entitled “Crimes Mark Year’s Start: Area Crime Rate Goes Down,” it was reported that, in the first three weeks of the autumn quarter, more than twenty university students had been assaulted within a few blocks of campus, and that one week before classes a student and a female research technician were raped. Three other rapes occurred in Hyde Park between September 15 and 24. The technician was raped on a weekday morning while jogging on the lakefront, moving the assistant dean of students to advise women never to jog alone. The article was prefaced by a claim from the dean that the crime rate had gone down in Hyde Park; it was accompanied by a photograph of one of the university’s one hundred security men. In the winter quarter, in an article of January 19, 1979, it was reported that the sixty-six-year-old university track-and-field coach was robbed and shot in the leg in front of his house. Three months later, in an article of April 24, 1979, the Maroon reported the sudden appearance of bright-red graffiti all over the campus and surrounding streets. The words “Woman Raped Here” or “Women Against Rape” were sprayed over fifty separate Hyde Park locations. According to the Maroon, the spray painters, twenty-five of them, were “drawn from the community, the University, and the student body.” Their aim was not only to warn women to be on guard and to avoid certain areas, but “to prompt University officials to release crime statistics for Hyde Park.” A report on these statistics had been commissioned and completed and was supposed to have been made available at a long-planned meeting between university officials and the Women’s Union. When the meeting was canceled, Hanna Gray, the university president, was questioned about the report, which she claimed not to have read. Meanwhile, the university was seeking to discover the identity of the spray painters in order to bring them before a disciplinary committee.
As Bellow turned from the “Chicago Book” to The Dean’s December, crime and violence continued to figure in Hyde Park. According to an article in the Maroon on July 27, 1979, a twenty-four-year-old university hospital worker was shot and killed as he tried to flee a holdup attempt on Harper Street, one block west of Dorchester, the street Bellow had lived on for many years. A year later, the Maroon reported the shooting of an off-duty police officer on East Fifty-Fifth Street, and the robbery at gunpoint of a student in her apartment. The robbery of the student took place in the afternoon. “She escaped a rape-attempt by leaping from her second-floor window,” breaking her hip.29 The next year, in an article of April 3, 1981, the Maroon reported the abduction late in the winter quarter of two male University of Chicago students, who were forced into a car at knifepoint and driven to Cabrini-Green, a notorious black housing project. The students were taken in an elevator to the eighth floor of one of its high-rises and robbed; they eventually escaped, when their abductors began fighting over whether to “get rid of them.” In the fall of the same year, on October 7, at 10:00 p.m., a foreign student at the university was beaten outside the university’s Rockefeller Chapel by three teenage boys, two from Woodlawn and one from Hyde Park.30
In a welcoming article at the beginning of the autumn quarter of 1981, the Maroon devoted a page to “Fear, Crime and Urban Living.” After acknowledging that “one of the first things a new student will hear in Hyde Park is a scary crime story,” it sought to reassure. “By being conscious of the problems, using common sense and the security facilities available to students, your time at UC can be a safe one.” Students who were nervous about walking in Hyde Park alone could get an escort from campus security; student government organized a bus service to the Loop on Friday and Saturday nights, for those “who wish to avoid the more dangerous public transportation”; white emergency telephones on and around campus connected callers directly to the university police. Students were advised “at all times” to carry a whistle, “to alert others and the police if a crime is occurring.” Of the three means of rail transportation between Hyde Park and downtown, the safest was the Illinois Central, which has two Hyde Park stations, one for Fifty-Fifth, Fifty-Sixth, and Fifty-Seventh Streets, and one for Fifty-Ninth Street. Although the wait for trains was shorter at Fifty-Ninth Street, “that station was the site of a series of rapes not long ago, and the shooting of an IC security officer earlier this month. It would be best to get a schedule and not arrive at the station much before the train.”31 In a separate article on the same page by Susan Aaron entitled “Starting a Personal Security System,” female students were given advice about how to walk in Hyde Park: “briskly, with a sense of purpose, towards your destination. Have your keys (preferably with a whistle attached) in your hand when you walk. Carrying them can make you appear and feel more alert. Wear shoes and clothing you can run in. Carry your books and possessions so that you always have a free hand.” If you are attacked, “your chances are best if you resist immediately,” though resisting “doesn’t insure that you won’t be hurt further in addition to being raped.”
The North Side neighborhood Bellow moved to in October 1976 was not much safer, or so he suggests in the second Tanner Lecture, in which he describes local condominium residents as “afraid to go out at night. They triple-lock their doors and set the alarm system….They fear, with good reason, that in the garages below their cars are being ripped off. There are gangs of thieves who prop the axles up on bricks. Cars themselves are driven away to the chop shops and taken apart, engines and transmissions sold in other cities, even in Central America” (p. 211). Alexandra’s apartment, on the twelfth floor of a luxury building, was in fact two adjacent apartments, both of which she owned. Dave Peltz had knocked a wall through to connect them. They looked out onto the lake. At their back, just across Sheridan Avenue, the neighborhood was dangerous, and beyond that, only a few miles farther west, lay Cabrini-Green. In an interview in U.S. News & World Report, Bellow recalls an encounter with a woman in the neighborhood. “We bought this condominium,” she told Bellow, “and now look what’s happening right across the way. I can’t even go across the street to shop. My neighbor’s arm was broken by a purse snatcher because she had the strap wound around her arm. I can’t have my grown daughters come here from the suburbs to see us, because I am afraid for them. We thought we were providing for our old age, and we are trapped here now.”32 In a letter of October 21, 1982, to his son Adam, who was traveling at the time in Africa, Bellow writes of arriving home from the airport by cab. The cab pulled up in front of Alexandra’s building, and while Bellow was paying the driver,
a black woman who pretended to be studying the names of the tenants on the board panhandled me for a dollar, which in my distraction I handed over with uncustomary softness to the touch, but then the cabdriver, a young Iranian, also surrendered a dollar when she said she was hungry. My impression was that she was hungry for human flesh. She was a strong and very tough woman who towered over us both. The driver had taken out a roll of bills, and when she saw how much money he was carrying, she asked him for a ride to Broadway, where she could buy a sandwich. Alexandra said I should have warned him, but I was tired and without my normal presence of mind.
That night, too distressed to eat supper, Bellow was unable to sleep. The next morning, he “combed” the Tribune for items about cabdrivers. In this state, he wrote the letter to Adam, the main purpose of which was to convey upsetting news about a planned meeting he and Adam were to have in Jerusalem, to interview Menachem Begin together. Begin’s schedule had changed, the interview was off, and Bellow would not be traveling to Israel. The letter opens, though, with the tough woman panhandler. It begins: “By now you must be off in the bush running over lions or being raided at night by baboons, and I can’t feel terribly sorry for you when I look out the window at the baboons on the sidewalk.” Thi
s remark comes in a private letter. In The Dean’s December, as was mentioned, Corde deplores the depiction of Rufus Ridpath as a gorilla, as, in the “Chicago Book,” Bellow deplores the depiction of Ridpath’s real-life model, Winston Moore, as a gorilla. In the William Kennedy interview in Esquire, Bellow described the Chicago sections of The Dean’s December as a protest against “the dehumanization of the blacks in big cities. I’m speaking up for the black underclass and telling the whites they’re not approaching the problem correctly.” As he also points out, “the people (in the book) who stand out in moral stature, who each in his own way tries to do something, are blacks.” In private, however, when upset or distracted or angry, he was capable of remarks like the one in the letter to Adam, comparing black women to baboons, especially when such remarks accompanied or facilitated wordplay or verbal flourishes or jokes, even feeble ones, as here.
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IN PUBLIC CONTEXTS, both in his writing and in his actions, Bellow’s concern for black people, together with his insistence on facing hard truths, was obvious, which is not to say that what he thought of as “truths” were unchallengeable. For Bellow, the first truth to face about “the hard core of the welfare society” is that it is “doomed.” He elaborates in the U.S. News & World Report interview:
There are no prospects for these people. Nobody ever took the trouble to teach them anything. They live in a kind of perpetual chaos, in a great noise. And, you know, they really are startled souls. They cannot be reasoned with or talked to about anything.
Isn’t it time for us to admit this? For a long time the subject lay under a taboo. Nobody was going to talk about it. Now people are beginning to do so. Though I consider myself a kind of liberal, I have to admit that the taboos were partly of liberal origin. It was supposed to be wrong to speak with candor. But lying in a good cause only aggravates disorder….
Writers are part of this whole dismal picture that is dominated by an evasion and unwillingness to come to grips with the profoundest human facts….I include myself in this. I seem to have been overtaken by a kind of fit in my old age [he is 67] in which I want to say things definitely and firmly—and hit hard.
The Chicago sections of The Dean’s December set out to do just this, picking up the baton, wrenching it, from the “Chicago Book.” In the interview with William Kennedy, Bellow described the decision to expand Corde’s backstory, importing material from the “Chicago Book,” as inadvertent, “one of these things that came over me.” In the same interview, he also connected the decision with an encounter in 1965, at the ceremony at which he was presented with the National Book Award for Herzog. That year, the journalist and biographer Louis Fischer was also presented with a National Book Award, for The Life of Lenin. After the ceremony, Fischer and Bellow exchanged inscribed copies of their books. Fischer’s inscription read “To Saul Bellow, for deeper thought,” which Bellow took to mean “his book had bigger status than mine, that he was writing about great disasters of the 20th century and that they should be described properly, but I was only writing about private life….Let’s think big. Let’s not think about these schnook professors (like Moses Herzog) with their cuckoldries and broken hearts.” The Fischer anecdote was recalled by Bellow in the Kennedy interview in the midst of a defense of fiction over journalism, “new” as well as old. Although Bellow had done a fair bit of journalism in his life, covering Khrushchev’s visit to the United Nations, the Six-Day War, contemporary Israel (in To Jerusalem and Back), to Kennedy he announced, “I’ll never have any more to do with it.” “The very language you have to use as a journalist works against the true material.” To say what needs saying about Chicago, to communicate “what’s happening humanly,” one needs fiction or poetry. “We live in this age of communication, drowned with communication which comes in the form of distracting substitutes for reality. But the reality of our day comes in art.”
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THE MARK GROMER MURDER CASE, as fictionalized in The Dean’s December, provides a way of testing Bellow’s faith in art over journalism, in fiction as a path to reality. Although by no means the most gruesome of the real-life Chicago stories the novel draws on, it is especially tightly and centrally woven into the narrative. The Gromer case began in the early hours of July 6, 1977, when Mark Gromer, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student in English at the University of Chicago, fell to his death through the window of his third-floor apartment in Hyde Park, at 5344 South Woodlawn Avenue, three blocks west of Dorchester. The cause of the fall was disputed, as was almost every aspect of the case. According to an article in the Chicago Tribune published in a late edition on July 6, the police were seeking two black youths who had attempted to rob the apartment. The youths had threatened Gromer with a knife, stuffed a rag in his mouth to stop him from crying out, and tied a cloth strip around his head in an attempt to blindfold him. They then filled a suitcase with items, apparently including a small television and a stereo. Gromer’s wife was asleep at the time, but, when wakened by voices, wandered into the hallway leading from the bedroom to the living room. One of the youths grabbed her from behind, pushed her into the kitchen, and ordered her at knifepoint to kneel on the floor. She heard the sounds of a struggle in the living room, of breaking glass, and of the attackers fleeing. When she ran to the living-room window and looked down, she saw her husband lying motionless on the sidewalk. Although still alive when the ambulance arrived, he died two hours after being admitted to hospital.33
The next day, more details were revealed in the newspapers. The police said the youths entered the apartment around 4:30 a.m. through a back door that had been left open because of the heat—it was a typically steamy July night in Chicago. According to his wife, Gromer had been up late, studying in the living room (the dean of humanities at the university described him as “an excellent student and well thought of”).34 It was also reported that the South East Chicago Commission—formed in 1952, partly to plan and implement the urban renewal of Hyde Park, partly to monitor crime in the Hyde Park–Woodlawn area—had offered a five-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Gromer’s attackers, urging anyone with information to contact the police, and promising anonymity.35 The executive director of the commission and one of its founders was Julian Levi, professor of urban studies at the University of Chicago Law School, who was the older brother of Edward Levi, president of the university from 1968 to 1975. It took a day for the offer of the reward to bear fruit. On July 8, the papers reported that Deola (Dee Dee) Johnson, thirty-four, a prostitute and heroin addict, had been linked with a piece of jewelry stolen from the Gromer apartment. It was Gromer’s wedding ring, which Johnson had left with a friend to hide. It was also reported that Johnson had been seen the night of Gromer’s death dressed boyishly, and that she had a boyish Afro hairdo. This information was passed to the police by Johnson’s friend Joseph Booth, an ex-convict and reputed South Side drug dealer, in search of the reward.36
Then a new witness, Levar Lewis, came forward, claiming that on July 6 an acquaintance of his named Ellis McInnis, with whom he worked at a deli-restaurant in Hyde Park called Unique, had told him in confidence that he and Johnson had been in a nearby bar, the Tiki Lounge, on the night of Gromer’s death, and that there they met a white guy, Gromer, who invited them to his apartment for a “party.”37 McInnis and Johnson quickly hatched a plan to “rip him off.” McInnis claimed that neither he nor Johnson pushed Gromer out the window, but that he fell in the course of a struggle. The next day, Lewis saw McInnis at work. He showed McInnis a newspaper article about the death. McInnis said he was worried that Gromer might have talked before he died. He asked Lewis to find out if Johnson had been arrested. Later that day, Lewis learned of the reward and went to the police to report what McInnis had told him. Four months earlier, Lewis had pleaded guilty to a charge of attempted burglary and received sixty days work release and three years
on probation. At the time he came forward as a witness, he had a violation of parole pending.38
After Lewis spoke to the police, and McInnis and Johnson were arrested, Lewis was again in the Tiki, where he ran into a young white undergraduate, Philip Grew, the bullhorn-wielding demonstrator, who also worked part-time at Unique. Grew had just finished his second year at the University of Chicago. He was nineteen, a prominent protester on campus, active in student government, and a photographer for the Maroon. Lewis claimed that Grew threatened him for talking to the police, warning him not to testify against McInnis. He said Grew told him, “You better watch your back,” and that the next night, walking home from work at Unique, he’d been shot at by an unknown person standing in a gangway. In late August, it was incorrectly reported in the press that the assistant state’s attorney, T. J. McCarthy, had issued an arrest warrant for Grew, whom he described as having “fled” Hyde Park for Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his parents lived. Grew denied that he had threatened or shot at anyone, and that he had fled. Four months later, in December 1977, after Grew’s parents were forced to remortgage their house and his mother to postpone retirement in order to meet legal expenses, a criminal-court judge dismissed the indictment, citing “prosecutorial abuse” of a county grand jury.39 The assistant state’s attorney, the judge ruled, had acted improperly in not waiting for a preliminary hearing before testifying to the grand jury (in The Dean’s December, Corde is advised, of the McCarthy character, “The court will give your friend Grady hell for rushing to the grand jury” [p. 88]). In effect, Grew was let off on a technicality. On October 9, 1980, after lengthy appeals, Ellis McInnis, having been found guilty of murder and armed robbery, began serving a term of twenty-five to forty years in prison. Because Deola Johnson had pleaded guilty to the same charges, her sentence was only fourteen years. After sentencing, Johnson told lawyers for McInnis that she was now willing to testify on his behalf and that her testimony would corroborate his. “She said her previous refusal to testify was based on the mistaken belief that the defendant’s counsel was responsible for her having to plead guilty.”40 A motion to reopen the trial to allow Johnson to change her testimony was denied.
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