Bellow was listed among the center’s Senior Fellows and often attended its lectures, frequently dining afterward with visiting speakers. “Bloom provided a very rich social life,” Janis recalls, “much good talk and laughter.” A lot of this talk and laughter came from the political right. Among the visiting speakers Bloom invited Bellow to dine with were Antonin Scalia, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Vladimir Bukovsky, Robert Conquest, Irving Kristol, and Bernard Lewis. He may also have dined with more left-leaning visitors, including Christopher Lasch, Michael Walzer, Conor Cruise O’Brien, and Bill Bradley. Bellow also attended and spoke at the center’s first conference, held in the summer of 1984, in Marlboro, Vermont, a short drive from his house. The title of this five-day conference was “The Writer in the Contemporary World,” and contributors included Czesław Miłosz, A. B. Yehoshua, Leszek Kołakowski, Andrei Sinyavsky, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Allan Bloom, Werner J. Dannhauser (who was, like his friend Bloom, a student of Strauss’s), and Bellow himself. There were also fourteen student fellows, including Janis (who joined the conference after her stay at Bellow’s house to help him sort out his mail) and her boyfriend, Peter Ahrensdorf, who would later go on to teach political science and classics at Davidson College. During the conference, the student fellows were put up in a modest hotel, while, as Janis puts it, “the big shots stayed at the White House,” a historic inn in Wilmington, Vermont, near Bellow’s home. The Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua remembers being met at the airport in New York by Janis and another student, and being driven, together with his wife, to the conference. The other things he remembers about the conference were how lavish it was (he and his wife were given a car to use during their stay, and there were lots of grand meals at restaurants) and “the way that Allan Bloom was all the time surrounded by students, like Socrates surrounded by students. This impressed me very much.”
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BELLOW’S INTEREST IN the philosophical underpinnings of Bloom’s politics, in particular its Straussian stress on natural right, derived in part from his attraction to the sorts of extra-rational “truths” required of, say, a follower of Rudolf Steiner. As ever, what he sought was intellectual support for his intuitions, principally about the soul and the afterlife, his conviction (in The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom calls it an “awareness” or “divination”) “that there is a human nature, and that assisting its fulfillment is his task” (p. 20).24 In More Die of Heartbreak, Bellow identifies this need for intellectual ballast as characteristically American. “If you venture to think in America,” declares the novel’s narrator, Kenneth Trachtenberg, in some respects a Bellow stand-in, “you also feel an obligation to provide a historical sketch to go with it, to authenticate or legitimize your thoughts. So it’s one moment of flashing insight and then a quarter of an hour of pedantry and tiresome elaboration—academic gabble. Locke to Freud with stops at local stations like Bentham and Kierkegaard. One has to feel sorry for people in such an explanatory bind. Or else (a better alternative) one can develop an eye for the comical side of this” (p. 183).
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BELLOW’S INTEREST IN domestic politics and foreign affairs, as opposed to cultural politics, remained peripheral. He was wary of joining political movements and organizations. Although happy to listen to and help to entertain the Olin Center’s parade of mostly right-wing speakers, he was quick to withdraw his support from other groups. In late 1976, he agreed to lend his name to the Board of Directors of the recently formed Committee on the Present Danger, which sought to alert the country to what it saw as the weakness of America’s foreign and defense policies. In To Jerusalem and Back, Bellow himself had expressed dismay at America’s ignorance of “the real dangers of Russian ambitions,” particularly but not exclusively in the Middle East.25 Bellow had little problem at first with the committee, none at all with its initial statements of intent, released at an inaugural press conference on November 11, 1976.26 These statements listed the committee’s chief tenets: that détente was “illusory” and ought to be abandoned; that defense spending, which “is lower than at any time in twenty-five years,” ought to be increased; and that “there is a crucial moral difference between the two super powers in their character and objectives. The United States—imperfect as it is—is essential to the hopes of those countries which desire to develop their societies in their own ways, free of coercion.” The committee claimed to have “no political axe to grind,” welcoming the support of all political parties. It also claimed to have “no organizational affiliates. All members serve in their individual capacities.” Its concern would be “with broad principles and policy objectives,” as opposed to “short-range tactics or maneuvers.” It would “not urge the election or defeat of individual candidates for office.” Instead, it would “encourage, conduct, and participate in conferences and seminars across the nation, involving as many sectors of society as our resources permit.”
Among the names listed on the committee’s stationery were Eugene V. Rostow, executive director; Paul Nitze, chairman, Policy Studies; Max Kampelman (Bellow’s old lodger), general counsel; and Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Richard E. Pipes, Dean Rusk, Norman Podhoretz, Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Clare Boothe Luce. Just one month after its inaugurating press conference, the committee published a letter in The New York Times that took what Bellow judged to be precisely the sort of specific position it had said it would avoid. On January 13, 1977, Bellow wrote to Rostow, withdrawing from the committee and requesting that it make no further use of his name. As he explained:
I joined the Committee on the Present Danger because I agreed in principle with your views on the growth of Russian military power—I do still. But it was my impression that yours was a group formed for the purpose of discussion and for public information and enlightenment….What I did not know was that the Committee was prepared to take specific political actions. Now, I don’t know enough about military matters to back legislation, to recommend appropriations, etc. That is not my dish. As a writer I have no business to assume such a role. It is necessary for me to do things in my own way and to impose my own limits on positions publicly taken. I certainly cannot allow others to write my own letters for me….I shall continue to support you in my own fashion on specific occasions, but I am obliged to withdraw from the Committee and request that you make no further use of my name. I have gotten out of my depth. With good wishes.
Sincerely yours,
Saul Bellow
In 1984, Bellow resigned from a similar group, the Committee for the Free World. Bellow’s reasons for joining this committee were partly personal. It was founded in February 1981 with the help of the Olin Foundation and other conservative philanthropies. Its director was Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz’s wife. Bellow liked Decter, he told Kazin in a letter of January 24, 1983, and agreed to join the board of her committee “for old times’ sake,” but he disliked the other board members, many of whom had been members of the Committee on the Present Danger. “I belong because the other side smells so bad. Unbearable!” At the time of the committee’s launch, in a letter of February 4, Bellow provided Decter with a statement: “Sensible people charged with anxiety over the state of the world and bitterly frustrated every day by the lack of sense, principle and coherency they feel when they read the newspapers welcome the founding of the Committee for the Free World. Someone to monitor the long long slide of the Gadarene swine is just what I need. And when my tongue is in traction the Committee can speak for me.” What Bellow expected it to speak about, however, was foreign and defense policy.
In the 1983 letter to Kazin, Bellow confessed to being a lax member of the committee board. “I never attend the meetings, because it interferes with the writing of stories.” The following year, he resigned over an issue of the committee’s newsletter, Contentions (known to its detractors as Conniptions, misnamed by Bellow as Confrontations). In 1983, Decter had
been a Pulitzer Prize juror for fiction, which she described to Bellow in a letter of January 24, 1984, as “one of the most appalling experiences of my life.” “With perfect accuracy,” she predicted that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple would win, “an outcome entirely unaffected by the fact that I may have been the only juror who actually read, carefully and conscientiously, every one of the books submitted.” At Decter’s suggestion, Contentions, edited by her daughter, Naomi Podhoretz Munson, whose husband, Steven Munson, was deputy director, devoted an entire issue (October 1983) to reviews of the books chosen as winners that year by Pulitzer, National Book Critics Circle, and American Book Award jurors. In an editor’s note on the first page, readers were advised that, though the jurors’ choices “may tell us little about the nature of genuine literary achievement, they nevertheless speak volumes about the current condition of our cultural life and the values that govern it.”
The Contentions reviewers were unimpressed, in almost every case deploring the authors’ political opinions and ways of life, with much briefer discussion, if any, of literary or stylistic features. The reviewers, identified only by initials, were Decter herself, her daughter Naomi, her son John, her son-in-law Steven, and Neal Kozodoy, the committee secretary, later editor of Commentary. Among the authors pilloried or patronized, in addition to Alice Walker, were Gore Vidal (for a collection of essays), Robert A. Caro (for the first volume of his LBJ biography), and Stanley Elkin (for the novel George Mills). Tom Gidwitz, a writer and editor who did not know Bellow, wrote to him on December 23, 1983, after having read the October issue of Contentions, a publication he had never seen until he was loaned this particular issue by a friend, and about whose politics he knew nothing. Having noticed Bellow’s name listed among board members, he wrote to ask if he endorsed the contents of the issue. “These books may not deserve awards,” Gidwitz wrote, “but if they don’t, the critics have not shown why. The articles struck me as being malicious and smug and highlighted these critics’ intolerance of lifestyles and philosophies, rather than their perceptions. Your association with the Committee for the Free World is understandable, however your connection to this issue of Contentions is not. Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted the articles or your own position.”
Bellow replied a month later, on January 23, 1984: “I have read the pages you sent, and I agree in part with your objections. I have resigned from the Committee (I had been contemplating resignation anyway).” The resignation had been submitted five days earlier, on January 18, in a letter to Midge Decter.
Inquiries and complaints—mainly complaints—having been made about my participation in or sponsorship of your Special Issue of Confrontations (“Winners”), I read the offending number, which I had missed, and although the prize books you attacked seemed squalid enough your own reviews were in such bad taste that it depressed me to be associated with them….About Nicaragua we can agree well enough but as soon as you begin to speak of culture you give me the willies….I can’t allow the editors of Contentions to speak in my name. When there are enemies to be made I prefer to make them myself, on my own grounds and in my own language….
I am resigning from the board and request that you remove my name from your announcements. Sorry.
Yours sincerely,
Saul Bellow
Bellow’s letter to Decter offers another reason for his unhappiness with the Committee for the Free World. On February 12–13, 1983, the committee held a conference at the Plaza Hotel in New York entitled “Our Country and Our Culture” (a title taken from the 1952 Partisan Review symposium discussed in chapter 10 of To Fame and Fortune). According to Joseph Epstein, who spoke at the conference, Ruth Miller told Bellow that Epstein had attacked him in his speech. In his resignation letter to Decter, Bellow accused Epstein of “ascribing to me views I do not hold and pushing me in a direction I wouldn’t dream of taking….It was uncomfortable to be misunderstood and misused in a meeting of which I was one of the sponsors and even more uncomfortable to see his speech reprinted in Commentary.”
Epstein had been a fan and friend of Bellow’s since the early 1970s. In 1973, as we’ve seen, in a lengthy profile in The New York Times Book Review, he called Bellow “the premier American novelist: the best writer we have in the literary form that has been dominant in the literature of the past hundred years.” Although ten years later Epstein’s feelings about Bellow as friend and writer had changed somewhat, he did not, he insists, attack him in his conference speech. What he said, to quote from the expanded version of the speech published in Commentary (“Anti-Americanism and Other Clichés,” April 1, 1983), is that American literature had begun to seem “rather backwater, a bit beside the point, somehow or other less than first-rate.”
In support of this judgment, Epstein invoked Bellow, whose views, voiced “not long ago” in an unidentified interview, he paraphrased. In the interview, Epstein says, Bellow complained that American writers “no longer had the great subject.”
The great subject of our day, he said, belonged to those writers who had survived totalitarian regimes and lived to write about them: Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Kundera….What Bellow seemed to be saying was that these writers, often wretched in the conditions of their lives, were nonetheless privileged as writers in their experience, for their experience had brought them face to face with terror and evil, goodness and heroism—in short, with the largest human feelings and with destiny played out on the grand scale.
Bellow, according to Epstein, thought contemporary American writers faced a more complicated task:
They had to come at things less directly, more obliquely, with comedy and irony being perhaps their chief literary weapons. That is, of course, a description of the way Saul Bellow himself proceeds. But at an even slightly lower level than Bellow is able to work it, this vein of writing, relying so heavily on irony and comedy, quickly becomes desiccated and dreary in the extreme.
This is hardly an attack on Bellow. Epstein today has very little to say in Bellow’s favor, but in this case, “I thought—and still think—this a legitimate and honorable thing to say.” He goes on to add: “None of this would have occurred if he had called me and asked if Ruth Miller was correct about my defaming him. But, as you know, he was a man with a short fuse, especially when it came to the defense of his own reputation.” When Miller wrote to Commentary to support Bellow’s complaint that Epstein had ascribed to him views that he did not hold, Epstein answered in the same issue by referring readers to an interview printed in the Chicago Tribune Magazine on September 16, 1979. He quotes the following passage from the interview: “We American writers can hardly expect to compete with those who have known the worst of war in their own cities, or who have been condemned to slave-labor camps….But perhaps we can do in the realm of comedy what we are unable to do in the realm of horror.”
In the Commentary version of Epstein’s speech, which Bellow claims to have read, Epstein disparages not only ironists but also those authors who “feel that they are writing with the wind of history at their back.” These are the writers who “think the worst” of America. “The contemporary literary scene is rife with writers whose chief stock in the trade of ideas is a crude anti-Americanism.” Among their number he includes Robert Coover, Robert Stone, Joseph Heller, E. L. Doctorow, Ann Beattie, and John Updike. Someone listening to rather than reading these sentences (Ruth Miller, for example) might well have received the impression that for Bellow American literature was bound to be second-rate, a view he fiercely rejected throughout his life, though this is not what a careful reading of the printed version of the speech suggests.
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JOSEPH EPSTEIN’S DETERIORATING RELATIONS with Bellow involved Bellow’s relations with Edward Shils and Allan Bloom. Epstein, born in Chicago in 1937, was closer in age to Bloom than to Bellow or Shils. He was educated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the Universi
ty of Chicago, and taught for thirty years at Northwestern, from 1972 to 2002. From 1974 to 1997, he edited The American Scholar. A very funny man, Epstein can also be cutting, making him, in this respect at least, a worthy companion of either Shils or Bellow. During the period of his friendship with Bellow, which began soon after the interview in The New York Times Book Review, they met “perhaps every other week.” There were racquetball games at the Riviera Club in Chicago, where Bellow met the dapper gangster Gus Alex, the model for Vito Langobardi in Humboldt’s Gift; they dined frequently at the Whitehall Club in the Whitehall Hotel, just west of Michigan Avenue on Delaware Place; they browsed bookstores after lunch, and occasionally “went out together with lady friends.” “We got on very well,” Epstein told me in an interview, “but it was never a relationship of equals. I never pressed him, never said, ‘Oh, Saul, that’s bullshit.’ ” “We were fairly close friends for nearly a decade,” Epstein explains, “close but not intimate, if such a distinction is permissible.” Bellow read portions of Humboldt’s Gift to Epstein, who would offer occasional corrections (for example, “the weight of a linebacker—he didn’t really know”). “I felt honored to be read to by this fellow I thought was a great man.”
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