Love and Strife (1965-2005)
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Bellow’s agreeing to give the English PEN address may have been influenced by the success of a visit to London five months earlier. On that visit, he was filmed in conversation with Martin Amis, for the first of four television programs on Channel 4 in a series entitled Modernity and Its Discontents. The first program’s title was “The Moronic Inferno” and it was moderated by Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian author and public intellectual, later leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. According to Amis’s account of the visit, which features as an episode in a draft of his forthcoming autobiographical novel, Inside Story, Bellow judged the filming to have gone “very smoothly.” Bellow was staying at Durrants Hotel, not far from Oxford Street, and he and Amis had tea there the day after filming. Amis describes the hotel as “all lace and chintz” and Bellow as “very sure of himself in London,” “very Asser and Kisser” [from Turnbull & Asser, the Jermyn Street shop where Bellow bought his shirts]. At one point in the novel, Bellow “delighted” Amis when he said, “They treat me very well here—he meant his publishers and facilitators—because they think me a toff” (that is, upper-class, from “tuft,” which, according to Amis, was “used to denote the gold tassel worn on the cap by Oxbridge undergraduates”). “London was a town where Saul Bellow could legitimately feel like a toff,” the fictional Amis recalls, an impression confirmed by the real-life Amis, in an interview. “The universal eligibility to be noble: this was one of Saul Bellow’s core principles.”61 Four or so months had elapsed by the date of this visit since the deaths of Bellow’s brothers, and although relations with Alexandra were poor, she had not yet kicked him out. He was no longer stricken. Amis likens his voice—in the novel, that is—to Ijah Brodsky’s voice in the short story “Cousins” (1974), “dreamy, prosperous,” having deepened over the years into a basso profundo. “When I offer a chair to a lady at a dinner party,” says Ijah, “she is enveloped in a deep syllable.”62
In Inside Story, Amis invites Bellow to dinner after the filming, as he did in real life. The novel’s version of the dinner corresponds to Amis’s account of it in an interview, but it also draws on details from an earlier Bellow visit and dinner in 1983. (In the novel, to complicate matters further, the dinner is set in 1984, for what Amis calls “reasons of my own.”) “I happen to know you like a nice piece of fish,” Amis tells Bellow, when issuing the invitation. Bellow replies, “It would be futile to deny it.” Amis tells Bellow he will be bringing along what he calls his “serious girlfriend,” a philosophy lecturer, soon to be his wife (it was at the 1983 dinner, not the 1985 one, that the philosophy lecturer Antonia Phillips, soon to be Amis’s wife, met Bellow for the first time). “Do you mean that she’s serious or you’re serious?” Bellow asks. Amis means both. Would Bellow be bringing anyone? “My dear wife is in Chicago, so, no, I’ll be alone.” The dinner is at Odins, a fashionable restaurant in Marylebone; it is paid for by The Observer, as was the real-life 1983 dinner. Bellow arrives elaborately turned out in “fedora, checked suit with a crimson lining (not loud exactly, but a bit sudden, as the English say).” He is sixty-nine, making Amis “exactly half” his age. Physically, Bellow is described in the novel as “just below average height,” but with “that ever-surprising solidity of chest and shoulder, like a stevedore.” At the dinner in the Inside Story draft, Amis’s philosopher girlfriend is reserved at first (as Antonia Phillips was in 1983, though less so in 1985), and she has mixed feelings about Bellow’s fiction. She had liked Henderson the Rain King, but when Amis presses The Adventures of Augie March on her, her response after twenty-five pages is “Does anything actually happen?” She also has reservations about To Jerusalem and Back, on political grounds. Bellow soon wins her over, using a recent scandal involving a West Virginia pastor to explain the difference between ethics and morals in American public life. Ethics involves money, morals involves sex, so that “relieving old believers of their disability cheques—that’s ethics. Pairing hookers in a hot-sheets motel—that’s morals.” Like Antonia Phillips in real life, at this the fictional girlfriend lets out a laugh Amis “never dreamt she had in her….Then they ordered their nice pieces of fish and their expensive white wine, and the evening began.”63
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BEFORE BELLOW’S VISIT to London in March 1986, he had a business errand to attend to, a toff’s business errand. On February 4, he wrote to Mr. J. Carnera, High Class Boot and Shoemaker, at New & Lingwood, a Jermyn Street shop across from Asser and Kisser:
Dear Mr. Carnera,
The last pair of shoes you made for me are cruel to my feet. I have patiently tried to break them in and have not been able to soften them at all. They cut into my foot below the ankle bone and I doubt that you can do anything with them. I shall appear in London the week of March 22 to return them. As you can see, the Atlantic is not broad enough to obstruct my claim for justice. Yours in much disappointment,
Saul Bellow
The writer Bellow saw most of on this March 1986 visit to London was Philip Roth, who had been living there with the English actress Claire Bloom since 1976. “He was very lonely,” Roth recalled. “He was seventy; he had to start all over again.”64 It was on this visit that Roth’s wariness of Bellow began to soften. “He was so needy, one’s instinct was to help him out.” The first of Bellow’s needs was to change his hotel. “I phoned him and he said this hotel is terrible or they didn’t have a room or something.” So Roth got him a room at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, where he was a member (Roth liked to swim, and the RAC has a large swimming pool). “I went over in a taxi to his hotel, and there he was, sitting in the lobby, looking utterly defeated, sitting in a chair.” Roth and Bloom had tickets that Sunday for the Borodin Quartet playing the last three Shostakovich string quartets, and were able to get a ticket for Bellow. In the taxi to the concert, thinking of Malamud, Bellow stared out the window and said, “Well, Schaffner is gone,” an allusion to his joke about how Bellow, Malamud, and Roth were the Hart, Schaffner & Marx of the Jewish American novel (Hart, Schaffner & Marx are upscale men’s clothiers). In his present mood, Roth realized, Bellow “needed the last quartets by the Borodin Quartet like a hole in the head.” After the concert, which Roth remembered as “astonishingly beautiful,” Bellow “was very silent.”65
Later in the visit, at a dinner given by Roth and Bloom, Bellow perked up slightly, after an awkward beginning. The Irish novelist Edna O’Brien was there, along with the writer-journalist Timothy Garton Ash and his Polish wife, Danuta. Garton Ash had just read The Dean’s December and started asking Bellow about “his very interesting Romanian wife,” not knowing of the recent breakup. It was Edna O’Brien who lifted the mood, being, “of course, anything but Romanian, and refusing to be brought down by any of this gloom, East European or otherwise. I’m not sure how much of it was her influence, but I remember it in the end as a good evening, with the two American novelists matching each other with acid doses of wit.”66 Bellow also attended a dinner given by George Weidenfeld, his old publisher, who found him “sweet and touchingly vulnerable in his self-pity.” Weidenfeld listened patiently as Bellow “kvetched about this one and that one.” He also recalled that Bellow asked him, before the dinner, to “screen the female guest list for availability.”67
By Easter weekend, Bellow was back in Chicago, and sometime in the next month or so, he and Janis began living together. In June, Bellow traveled to New York, where on the fifteenth Adam and Rachel were married in an outdoor ceremony in Riverdale, at the home of old friends of Rachel’s family. Alexandra was not there, despite Adam’s affection for her. Nor was Janis. Harriet Wasserman had been invited; she remembers the newlyweds standing “together between two ‘majestic’ trees,” with Bellow standing against the tree on the right, in a “white suit and panama hat,” and Sasha standing against the tree on the left, “the two parents framing the young couple, and glaring at each other.”68
It was at the wedding that Bel
low told Adam about Janis. Adam was shocked. He knew Janis well, not only from his year as a fellow student at the Committee, but from her role as Bellow’s secretary, “the go-to person for me.” Adam liked Janis and speculates that “if Janis and I had dated I would have stayed in Chicago.” But Janis was with Peter Ahrensdorf, “and we were very good buddies.” As news of Bellow’s relationship with Janis spread, Adam says, “everyone was horrified by Saul.” The split with Alexandra had left him “clearly very frightened and worried about his situation.” Adam told Janis that he understood why she would be attracted to Saul, but he was concerned for her: “Life with him would not be a picnic.” He thought of Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer, with Bellow as Lonoff, not Abravanel, and Janis as both Amy Bellette and Lonoff’s wife, Hope (with the prospect of a life like Hope’s). “I knew what Saul expected of his wife: secretarial services, household major domo, surrogate parent.” What Adam didn’t know, what he underestimated, “was their potential to make it work. They did make it work.” He also underestimated “the amount of steel in Janis.”
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IN MARCH 1986, while Bellow was in London, Allan Bloom was putting the final touches on The Closing of the American Mind, which was published a year later by Simon & Schuster with a foreword by Bellow. The book grew in part out of an essay Bloom had published in the National Review on December 10, 1982, entitled “Our Listless Universities,” the themes of which he had been airing and expanding to Bellow and others in Hyde Park.69 Harriet Wasserman was pressed by Bellow into representing the book and finding Bloom a good deal with a trade publisher (not an easy task for a book with chapter titles like “From Socrates’ Apology to Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede”). The initial print run was ten thousand, but by the end of the year, to the surprise of all concerned, Bloom in particular, five hundred thousand copies had been sold. It was Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times who set the ball rolling. Within two weeks of his rave review of March 23, 1987 (“remarkable…hits with the approximate force and effect of what electric shock-therapy must be like”), the book was number eleven on the paper’s best-seller list, at a date, in Wasserman’s words, “too soon after publication to even think of the best-seller list.”70 “All the reviews came at once, so no matter where people looked—TV, radio, newspapers—within a two-week period they were somewhere made aware of the book….William Buckley called, MacNeil/Lehrer called. Newsweek did a spread, Time did a spread, the Washington Post did a spread in the Style section.”71 There were cartoons about the book in The New Yorker and The Washington Post; Bloom appeared “on almost all the shows—Evans and Novak, Open Mind, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN—but he longed for only one: ‘I want Oprah. I want Oprah.’ ” Harriet Wasserman is good on Bloom’s appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show:
The theme of the program was General Knowledge, and it opened with a quiz of the audience. One of the questions: “What is the Magna Carta?” Oprah pointed the microphone at some guy, who answered “It’s a bottle of champagne!” Then she asked, “Does the earth move around the sun, or does the sun move around the earth?” Oprah pointed her microphone, and this woman answered, “I think the sun moves around the earth, because we don’t feel it!” Then a schoolteacher was asked, “Who was the second president of the United States?” She didn’t know! There was one more question. It was a very good one: “What is Gdansk?” And somebody answered, “A polka.”
Then Oprah brought out Allan Bloom. He loved being on her show. He said she was just wonderful. He loved her. She felt the material of his suit and complimented him.72
Sales of The Closing of the American Mind were remarkable from the start, well before Oprah. A week after publication, Bloom got his friend Leonard Garment, Richard Nixon’s lawyer, to call the head of Simon & Schuster, who approved a twenty-five-thousand-a-week reprint. Within weeks of publication, the book went from number eleven on the New York Times Best Seller list to number five, then to number four. Then it reached number one, where it stayed for ten weeks; both hardcover and paperback editions were on the list for a year. When Bellow’s novel More Die of Heartbreak came out in June 1987, it stayed at number four for two weeks, then dropped to nine or ten, then, after fifteen weeks, disappeared completely, while The Closing of the American Mind remained at one or two. In addition to its year on the New York Times list and the sale of over a million copies in the United States, it was a worldwide best-seller. Bloom was a millionaire, and famous. Wasserman negotiated a large contract for his next book, Giants and Dwarfs (1990), a collection of essays, and signed him up for lucrative lectures.73 When Simon & Schuster sent Bloom his first royalty check, “a nice round number,”74 he paid off all his debts and then went out and bought new Persian rugs, a Lalique chandelier, giant stereo speakers, medieval tapestries, Renaissance paintings, and a twenty-three-hundred-year-old Greek torso on a pedestal.
Bellow was delighted with Bloom’s success. Delighted also to see his friend’s ideas so widely and sympathetically received. In his foreword, he confesses to being especially moved by the book’s concluding pages, in which “what is essential” about the Platonic dialogues is said to be “reproducible in almost all times and places,” a statement Bellow sees as containing “the seed from which my life grew.”75 In supporting this statement, and confronting the forces or trends ranged against it in the modern university, Bloom provides the sort of exegesis Bellow especially sought from him: “He explains with an admirable command of political theory how all this came to be, how modern democracy originated, what Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the other philosophers of enlightenment intended, and how their intentions succeeded or failed” (p. 18). Bloom also deliberately sets out to cause controversy, accusing American universities of claiming to support “openness” (principally by removing core requirements) while in fact stifling it. Among the many causes of this stifling or “closing” are radical feminism (which he accuses of defying “nature”), the decline of parental authority, divorce, drugs, rock music, the New Left, Black Power, historicism, cultural relativism, and political correctness (a term not yet in wide use). Higher education, according to the book’s subtitle, has Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. The remedy, Bloom believes, is to return to a core curriculum composed of the Great Books.
The Closing of the American Mind was widely attacked as well as praised, its author denounced as racist, sexist, reactionary, and elitist. To his friend Werner J. Dannhauser, a fellow student of Strauss’s and professor of government at Cornell, these attacks were inevitable; Bloom “was hitting the left where it lived, the universities, the stronghold it has always taken for granted, and with good reason.”76 Bloom was accused of lacking “a sense of compassion” as opposed to a sense of justice.77 He was also accused of being a Straussian—which he was, though Strauss’s name appears only once in the book—and of therefore indulging in what Strauss calls esoteric writing. “When Bloom writes about democracy,” goes the charge, as paraphrased by Dannhauser, “he does not mean what he says or say what he means.”78 Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher at Brown University, later at the University of Chicago, attacked Bloom’s scholarship in The New York Review of Books, pointing out his failure to give “any indication that these texts [of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Plutarch] are difficult to interpret, that scholars disagree about their meaning.” Bloom, she also claims, is “silent” about evidence that goes against his views, “evidence that is not obscure, but is well-known and essential.” She argues that a distinction needs to be drawn “between Bloom’s official allegiance to Socrates [the self-described “idiot questioner”] and the more dogmatic and religious conception of philosophy to which he is deeply drawn.”79
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ON JANUARY 3, 1988, The New York Times Magazine published a profile of Bloom by James Atlas, a staffer on the magazine. The article was entitled “Chicago’s Grumpy Guru: Best-Selling Professor Allan Bloom and the Chicago Intellectuals.�
� A month before the article’s appearance, Atlas had flown to Chicago from New York to conduct interviews. He interviewed Bellow on December 2, 1987. At some point before this, Philip Roth, among others, had suggested to Atlas that he write a biography of Bellow, who had admired Atlas’s life of Delmore Schwartz. Atlas had signed a contract to write a biography of Edmund Wilson, but after five years he had not written a word, principally because “I felt no emotional connection with my subject, no ‘elective affinity,’ to borrow Goethe’s phrase. As a figure with whom I could identify—or at the very least through whom I could tease out, however subliminally, the hidden themes of my own life—Wilson left me cold.”80 Bellow, by contrast, was a “natural choice for me.” Atlas’s parents came from the same Chicago milieu as Bellow. Atlas was Jewish, also a writer, the author of a recent novel he describes as having “annoyed the critics.” “To write a biography of Saul Bellow would be, in a sense, to write my own autobiography, a generation removed.”81 He had sent a letter to Bellow in the summer of 1987 about the possibility of writing such a biography, “broaching the matter in a gingerly fashion,” and after a few weeks telephoned to ask him if he had given the matter any thought. Bellow “professed to be flattered that I thought him worthy of a biography, and he had kind words for my biography of Delmore Schwartz. But he was intending to write a memoir of his own and didn’t think he could both reminisce to me and write. Maybe later on…And there we left it.”82