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FOR A LONG PERIOD, the couple was “not out of the closet, as it were.” Steering clear of Hyde Park, they drove into Chicago “in a regular sort of way. He’d take me to the Loop and we’d go to Marshall Field and we’d do little errands here and there.” “There was a place he went for fruit in the old neighborhood, and a place he went to for a special type of bread. Then he’d take me to the zoo. We spent a lot of our courtship looking at animals in the zoo.” As Janis remembers it, “He seemed much of that time like a seventeen-year-old….He really did think of himself as a kid. He had a lot of energy. He was always singing. He’d be teaching me songs from vaudeville Chicago. He had endless opera.” Bellow read her poetry or recited poetry he knew: “It was very moving. I think he felt he was being resurrected, and so some of the poems were about that. He had kind of been a flop at the end, after Alexandra, and he didn’t really feel like there was going to be a reawakening or another chance or the possibility that somebody would ever love him. And it was astonishing to him, that we immediately and deeply fell in love with each other.”
The final break with Alexandra, who had wanted a divorce for a while but insisted on it sometime in December 1985, had occurred in the new year, in humiliating circumstances for Bellow. On returning to the Sheridan Road apartment after a visit to Greg and his family in California, he opened the door to discover that every item in the apartment had been marked with either a blue dot or a red dot—blue for her, red for him. There was a note as well. Bellow was to vacate the apartment as soon as possible and should take all his possessions with him. The night was bitterly cold, according to Bellow’s friend Eugene Kennedy, and when Bellow called to tell him, “Alexandra has left me,” Kennedy agreed to come over the next morning. What he saw shocked him: “You knew this was very strange behavior.” Bellow seemed “dazed” by what Alexandra had done. “He looked around the apartment and he looked at me and he said, ‘I guess she just went dotty.’ ”37
When Bellow recovered from the initial shock, and the severe flu that accompanied it, he became angry. Alexandra, he wrote to Barley Alison, had “done one of her most exquisite snowjobs [on Alison, he means]….You are one of a regiment of friends whom she has entirely convinced that I wanted to divorce her….It all makes exquisite sense: two brothers die, I turn seventy, and then I put myself out on the street. Do you know this anecdote about the Duke of Wellington? He is approached on the street by a gentleman who asks, ‘Sir, are you Mr. Jones?’ Wellington answers, ‘Sir, if you can believe that, you can believe anything.’ ” Bellow’s view of the breakup was no easier to believe. “Suddenly there was an outbreak of bitterness about Alexandra,” Richard Stern recalls. It made Stern “uncomfortable,” as when Bellow told him that The Dean’s December didn’t work “because I let her off too easily.”38 “She’s got parts missing,” Bellow told the attorney Walter Pozen, “her heart, for example.”
Some friends took Bellow’s side unquestioningly. Eugene Kennedy thought Alexandra “paranoid” and believed Bellow’s claims that she took less care of him than he did of her and offered little in the way of companionship. Not only did Kennedy think Alexandra was suspicious of a homosexual element in the relationship between Bellow and Bloom, but he thought she entertained similar suspicions about his own friendship with Bellow.39 In the spring of 1986, Bellow wrote again to Barley Alison, saying that he would give his account of Alexandra and the breakup when he came to London. “Like one of the more forbidding tales in Herodotus, that will be, the one in which the severed head of a defeated prince is plunged into a tub of blood by the barbarian who has killed him. A little of that will go a long way.”40
For Adam and Daniel, Bellow’s anger at Alexandra was difficult to handle. Greg, who knew Alexandra least well, simply “accepted Saul’s rationale” about her leaving because she lacked the emotional strength to see him through old age. “Out of what I considered loyalty to him,” Greg admits, he “kept my distance from Alexandra for a number of years.”41 For Daniel, now twenty-one, the divorce “was so upsetting. It was like my own parents….It was worse.” When Bellow said “mean things” about Alexandra, Daniel thought, “This is all bullshit, it just doesn’t square with what I know about her….She was a good wife to him. She took care of him. She put up with his shit.” Adam felt that a key factor in the breakup with Alexandra was her resentment of Bloom. “He was being put in the position of having to choose” (the position Maggie Staats Simmons felt she’d be likely to put Bellow in if she took up with him again). Adam does not believe Bellow’s attraction to Bloom was homosexual (“Saul would have been repelled by that”), but he does believe that it was intense. For Adam, the precipitating moment in the breakup, the moment that caused Alexandra finally to put a stop to the marriage, was when Bloom barged into the room where she was dressing, a scene fictionalized in Ravelstein (and discussed in chapter 12). As if in reaction to Alexandra’s suspicions, Bellow spread rumors about her. She was seeing someone else, he had been told, the mathematician Alberto P. Calderon—whom she would marry three years later. “This was his line—he wanted it to be that she was unfaithful,” Adam recalls. “When Saul would enter the endgame of a marriage, he would start building a case that the wife was crazy [Adam is obviously thinking of his own mother], and he had an enormous theoretical construct around it, having to do with modernity…and television.”
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ANGRY, FEARFUL FOR HIS FUTURE, depressed: this was Bellow’s state in early January 1986, when he boarded a plane for New York to attend the forty-eighth International PEN Congress, a weeklong gathering of seven hundred delegates, including four dozen all-expenses-paid “guests of honor,” plus assorted journalists, commentators, and celebrities. The congress did not improve his mood. Like fellow members and guests, he was put up at the St. Moritz Hotel, in one of two hundred rooms donated by the young real-estate tycoon Donald J. Trump. There were glitzy parties at Gracie Mansion, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Arts Club, the New York Public Library, and the “quintaplex” penthouse (floors fifteen to nineteen) of Saul P. Steinberg, described by Richard Stern as “the virtuoso of leverage, arbitrage, and golden parachutes.”42 Steinberg and his wife, Gayfryd, served dinner to two hundred members and guests. According to Rhoda Koenig, who was covering the congress for New York magazine, the foreign writers who attended the party “had been deeply alienated, indeed stupefied, by the superabundance of brocade, marble, old masters, and Louis this and that.”43
The congress was organized by Norman Mailer, president of American PEN, together with his vice presidents, Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Barthelme.44 Bellow had been persuaded to attend by generous letters of invitation from Mailer and Vonnegut. The theme of the congress was “The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State,” a title dreamed up by Barthelme, and in addition to attending parties, dinners, press conferences, and speeches, Bellow agreed to address a panel on the topic “The State and the Alienation of the Writer.” David Lehman, reporting on the conference for Partisan Review, described the panel as bound to appeal, since most writers were “presumed ‘alienated’ unless proven otherwise” (at Partisan Review in the 1940s, according to an old joke, the office typewriters were said to have “a special key that typed out ‘alienation’ on command”).45 The panel was held at the Essex House Hotel on January 13, and its other members were the South African writers Nadine Gordimer and Breyten Breytenbach, the Spanish novelist Juan Benet, the exiled Soviet novelist Vassily Aksyonov, and the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. Among the writers in the audience were Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie, and the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies.
Bellow spoke from notes rather than a finished text. He began by agreeing with Aksyonov, the previous speaker, that exile was not necessarily equated with alienation. He then offered five meanings or “resonances” of the term: “Rousseau’s amour propre…the vanity which is the fast route to hyp
ocrisy and self-distortion”; “Stendhal’s Julien Sorel as an example of amour propre transcending itself to amour passion”; “Marxist alienation, in which history is a nightmare from which only the proletariat can awaken us”; “spiritual alienation,” in which “the soul does not seem to count for much…Life has lost its sacredness”; and the naïve belief, especially relevant in the context of this congress, in “a simple natural goodness that is vitiated by our government” (or, as Amos Oz put it in a later session, the “Rousseauian assumption that governments and establishments are wicked—all of them—whereas ‘common people’ are born pure and sweet in heart”).46 In America, Bellow argued, our present “spiritual alienation” derived from the strengths of democratic capitalism. “We didn’t start very high, and we didn’t rise very high either….We have shelter, health, protection, and a certain amount of security against injustice….American democracy recognized no gods, no demons, and no philosophical idealisms; Romanticism was routinized and demystified….Consequently, we do not believe in the existence of powers not guaranteed by the senses.”47 That these views owed something to Bellow’s conversations with Bloom, to their joint seminars, and to his reading of The Closing of the American Mind, which he encouraged Bloom to write, discussed with him, helped to get published, and commented on in draft, is suggested by his account of the congress in “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence” (1993), in which he paraphrases his address and then offers “a brief quotation from an exceptionally clear-minded political theorist, Allan Bloom.” This quotation, Bellow adds, “will show better than I can the direction I meant to take in my speech….‘Civil societies dedicated to the end of self-preservation cannot be expected to provide fertile soil for the heroic or the inspired. They do not require or encourage the noble….One who holds the “economic” view of man cannot consistently believe in the dignity of man or in the special status of art and science.’ ”48
As Bellow also recalls in the 1993 essay, when he finished his speech, Günter Grass rose to attack him. This Grass did by completely ignoring the main thrust of the speech, its stress on “spiritual” alienation. “He said he had just visited the South Bronx and the poor blacks who lived in those monstrous streets could not agree that they were free and equal” (p. 111).49 In effect, Grass “lighted the ideological fuse and out came a tremendous boom, a blast of anger from delegates and visitors. Replying as well as I could in the uproar, I said that of course American cities were going to hell in a hurry; they had become monstrous. I tried also to indicate that corrective actions could be taken only by a rich society, and this seemed to prove that the material objectives of the Founders [the objectives that marginalize American writers, along with notions of spirit or soul] had indeed been met” (p. 111). As Rhoda Koenig reported, after admitting that “no writer is devoid of political feelings,” Bellow went on to say that, “on the other hand, one must not get megalomaniac notions of the powers of writers.”50 “In this connection,” Bellow recalls in the essay, “I mentioned Brecht and Feuchtwanger in Germany. Grass protested that he was always being put down as a Communist” (pp. 110–11).
“You have to hand it to the social visionaries and liberators,” Bellow continued in the essay: “They know how to get the high ground and keep it. They are masters also of the equivalence game: you have spoken well of the American system [though hardly unreservedly in Bellow’s speech] because you are an apologist for it and a stooge; you are not concerned about the poor, and you are a racist to boot….Grass seemed to believe I was justifying the establishment—that moth-eaten shroud. No, I was simply describing what there is to see” (p. 111). Time magazine reported the exact words that Bellow here paraphrases. After saying that it was admirable of Grass to think of the South Bronx, and that he, too, thought of it, Bellow answered: “I was simply saying the philosophers of freedom of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provided a structure which created society by and large free, by and large an example of prosperity. I did not say there are no pockets of poverty.” The Time reporter, R. Z. Sheppard, described the tone of this reply as one of “patient grace.”51 Not all observers agreed. “The man looks as if he was born sneering,” Robertston Davies said to Rhoda Koenig. Koenig herself described Bellow’s speech as “maddening for its frigid superiority.” When Grass said he often thought of the dictatorships propped up by the United States, Bellow replied “acidulously”: “That’s very commendable. I think of them, too.”52
Salman Rushdie also rose to challenge Bellow, asking him what he thought the writer’s “task” was in the context of America’s international power. Irritated by now, Bellow replied, “We don’t have any tasks, we just have inspirations,” a view seconded at another congress session by Nadine Gordimer, for whom the imagination of the writer “must be private not collective.” In Gordimer’s view, the state thinks of the imagination of the writer as merely “something that can be put into service.”53 The tensions debated at the congress between the writer’s responsibility to his craft and to the state, between art and politics, were ones Bellow had negotiated throughout his life, with leftist groups in the 1930s and 1940s, with liberals and conservatives alike in the 1950s and 1960s, and then with the various groupings, mostly on the right, discussed in this chapter. While refusing to be cowed by what he saw as liberal prejudice, he was equally vigilant, in public settings at least, in resisting identification with conservative and neoconservative doctrine, especially in relation to cultural issues.
To David Lehman, the confrontation between Bellow and Grass “was, perhaps, the week’s pivotal moment, the one that most observers remembered most vividly after the shouting had died down.”54 Lehman was also struck by an exchange between Aksyonov and Allen Ginsberg during the discussion period. Ginsberg, addressing his fellow delegates as “members of the so-called free world,” accused them of failing to recognize, or to acknowledge, that their freedom was dependent on “the exploitation of others.” Aksyonov then called on delegates, especially Grass and his fellow German delegates (among them, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Peter Schneider), “to think twice before making parallels between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. [which had boycotted the congress].” The next day, in a panel on “The Utopian Imagination,” Grass showed no second thoughts, “wondering out loud whether capitalism is any better than gulag communism. Grass later denied saying this, but dozens of reporters, several of them armed with microcassette recorders, heard him answer his own rhetorical question by saying: ‘I don’t think so.’ ” The bellicose attitude taken by German delegates toward the depredations of American capitalism was much discussed at the congress. Lehman quotes an unnamed writer speculating that “the burden of guilt for the Nazi past supplied a secret subtext to Grass’s South Bronx–equals–gulag gambit. If the South Bronx is no better than the gulag, and the gulag is not much better than the death camps, doesn’t that somehow let the Germans off the hook?”55 Bellow was more generous in his attitude toward the Germans. In the press conference after the panel, he claimed to understand why Grass, described by Stern as “the Chief Confronter,”56 took the positions he did. He felt “sympathetic” to German writers, caught as they were between East and West, in the middle of “a life and death struggle” between the two superpowers. At the same time, in a complaint made equally of pressure groups on the right, he resented not only the “stampeding of writers into political boxes,” but the language used by both those who do the stampeding and those who are stampeded: “You immediately hear anchormen jargon and the jargon of militant radicals going back to the thirties. The language we use is heavily polluted by politics. And we’re forced to speak about life-and-death matters on these unfavorable terms.”57
At a party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the night after Bellow’s panel, the critic Daniel Fuchs, author of one of the few studies of his writing that Bellow approved, confronted Grass. Had he read The Dean’s December or Bellow’s story “Looking for Mr. Green,” works that clear
ly show Bellow had thought about places like the South Bronx? Had he read Mr. Sammler’s Planet, for that matter, or Seize the Day, which show that Bellow was “hardly oblivious to the negative effect of capitalism. Grass seemed to agree but repeated that he objected to Bellow’s saying that people in America were not alienated. (Is that what Bellow said?)”58 Bellow himself confronted Grass the next morning, at breakfast at the St. Moritz. Adam Bellow, who was with his father at the time, describes the confrontation.
We entered the room and everyone was looking at him. He went directly up to Günter Grass, who had attacked him the day before. He was sitting at a table with Bill and Rose Styron. Saul went straight up to Grass and shook his finger in his face and said, “That was very bad what you did yesterday.” You could see that he was hurt by what had happened.
Adam’s view of his father’s speech at the panel, or his manner in delivering it, was that “he’d asked for it, hadn’t he?” Presumably by identifying writerly hostility to the state, to all states, as naïve or “Rousseauistic.”59
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ON MARCH 18, 1986, two months after Bellow’s return to Chicago, Bernard Malamud dropped dead of a heart attack. He was only a year older than Bellow. At the PEN Congress, Malamud had not looked well. Richard Stern, who hadn’t seen him in years, “felt queasy at how age and illness had worked him over.”60 The day after Malamud’s death, Bellow flew to London to give another PEN talk, this one entitled “American Writers and Their Public—The American Public and Its Writers.” English PEN paid for his flight and put him up at the Capital Hotel in Knightsbridge, which he didn’t like, though London itself he had grown to like. He was close to Barley Alison, his London publisher, and on previous visits had befriended her brother, Michael, Mrs. Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary since 1983. Michael and his wife, Sylvia, dined with Bellow several times at the House of Commons, and Bellow became a friend of their family as well.
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