In this letter to Ozick, Bellow, who had restrained himself over dinner, lets rip. Hitchens represents “the political press in its silliest disheveled left-wing form.” “These Hitchenses…drink, drug, lie, cheat, chase, seduce, gossip, libel, borrow money, never pay child support, etc. They’re the bohemians who made Marx foam with rage in The Eighteenth Brumaire.” Amis’s attraction to Hitchens Bellow forgives. “This is a temptation I understand. But the sort of people you like to write about aren’t always fit company, especially at the dinner table.” Looking back on the visit, after some twenty years, Hitchens believed Amis “suffered more agony than he needed to, because Bellow as an old former Trotskyist and Chicago streetfighter was used to much warmer work and hardly took offence at all.” He reported that Bellow later wrote him “a warm letter about my introduction to a new edition of Augie March.”11 The edition did not appear until 2003, however, when Bellow’s memory had largely disappeared.
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BEFORE THE 1987 CONFERENCE in Haifa, which took place on April 27–29, Bellow and Janis went on a holiday to Europe. They flew from Chicago to Zürich to Lugano, where Bellow was to film an interview, a nine-hour journey; after visiting Milan on a side trip, they flew to Nice, where Bellow rented a car and drove through pouring rain to Aix-en-Provence. They stayed there from April 11 to 14, giving Bellow a chance to collapse and collect himself. From Aix they drove to Avignon and spent the night there. The next morning, they walked the ramparts in bright sunshine, lugging their bags, which were full of books and lecture manuscripts. They had to run to catch their train to Lyon, an episode remembered by Janis as a “terrible ordeal.” In Lyon they stayed two nights on the forty-eighth floor of a hot, airless, modern hotel. “The trip had not given Bellow his much-needed rest,” Janis recalled. “Packing, moving, worrying. We were tremendously dispirited.” One morning in Aix they sat in a café, planning what to do with the rest of their holiday. “We’d pretty much decided that a trip to Torino would suit us best. And just as we were about to leave the café and head to the agency to book the tickets B spotted the headline in the paper: Primo Levi dies….B was crushed. We were going to Turin so that B could meet with Levi again (they had met only once in NY). We staggered away from the café and I could feel how shaken B was by the arm I’d taken to guide him through the crowd.”12 From April 15 to 23, they finally got some rest, staying just outside Avignon at the Auberge de Cassagne in Le Pontet, in a quiet, dark room, with walks along an avenue of sycamores. On April 24, they took a 6:00 a.m. flight from Lyon to Zürich to Haifa. Though close and loving throughout the trip, Janis and Bellow were often exhausted, and Bellow was sometimes depressed. “It was the difference in years, his pattern of unsuitable mates, and of course always death and what approaches a need sometimes, to give yourself to it.” Against such darkness, there was for Bellow “this aching need for life. There’s this spring all around us in Le Pontet.” In such a state, the couple arrived in Haifa.
The conference, the first to be devoted exclusively to his work, was not easy for Bellow, and at times he was unwilling or unable or barely able to disguise his feelings of discomfort, disapproval, boredom. The idea for the conference came from its organizer, Ada Aharoni, a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Haifa. Aharoni had completed her Ph.D., on Bellow, in 1975, and claims to have been the only Israeli academic working on him that year. She also met him in 1975, during his stay in Jerusalem with Alexandra. At a conference in the autumn of that year, she asked him, “When will you come to Haifa?” He answered: “If you invite me, I’ll come.” Eleven years later, having got approval for the conference from the rector of the University of Haifa, Aharoni enlisted the help of the novelist A. B. (“Bully”) Yehoshua, who also taught at the university. In addition, she contacted the American founders of the Saul Bellow Society, Leila Goldman and Gloria L. Cronin, academics “who were very helpful in organizing people from Japan and all over.”
The conference was large and ambitious. There were six sessions spread over three days, plus social events on either side, stretching the proceedings to five days. Among the speakers were three of Israel’s most prominent novelists: Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, and Amos Oz. Martin Amis was invited by Yehoshua and gave a talk on More Die of Heartbreak, due out in June. The novelist Alan Lelchuk, a friend of Bellow’s, talked about the story “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” Lelchuk and Amis appeared together in a session chaired by Allan Bloom, who was in ebullient form after the initial rave reviews of The Closing of the American Mind, published the month before. That night, the second night of the conference, Bellow gave an address entitled “The Silent Assumptions of the Novelist.” It was introduced by Shimon Peres, at the time leader of the Israeli Labor Party and foreign secretary of Israel, formerly prime minister. The academics were impressed by how well Peres knew Bellow’s works and how intelligently he talked about them. Bellow, too, was impressed, commenting that not since Woodrow Wilson had an American president shown a comparable interest in literature. Among the academics who gave papers were Daniel Fuchs, whose work Bellow approved, Ellen Pifer, and Jonathan Wilson. Like most of the other speakers, they had all published articles in the Saul Bellow Journal, founded in 1982 and edited by Cronin and Goldman. The conference was attended by more than a hundred scholars and writers from Israel, the United States, Canada, Britain, Italy, Germany, Japan, and India. Bellow’s talk was attended by an audience of a thousand.
According to Ada Aharoni, Bellow “sat through all the sessions.” But he was not always happy with what he heard. Bellow was wary of academics who presumed to explain his works, particularly English-literature academics. “I love coming to Israel,” he told Aharoni and Goldman in an interview conducted during the conference and published a year later. “I am grateful for the opportunity of being in Haifa again. However, the experience of being dissected and laid on the table for three days reminds me of the anecdote about the three Jewish mothers who boasted about how much their sons loved them. The first one said: ‘My son loves me so much he bought me a mink coat.’ The second one said: ‘My son loves me more; he bought me a brand new Cadillac.’ The third one said: ‘My son loves me the most; he goes to the psychoanalyst every week, pays $100 for each visit and talks, talks, talks, all about me!’ That’s how I feel about it. I am grateful to the Saul Bellow Society and to Haifa University for inviting me and for organizing this conference, but sometimes people think a celebrity has all the answers. To myself I’m not a celebrity, and I don’t have all the answers.”13 Bellow bridled at being pinned down or pigeonholed; he thought of scholars and critics of his work as denying him the freedom to grow or change. Reading the Saul Bellow Journal, Atlas quotes him as saying, gave him an “in-memoriam” chill: “I’m not about to order my cenotaph.”14
On the eve of the conference, Aharoni gave a party for the speakers and conference organizers and baked a big cake with Bellow’s name on it. An American academic came up to Bellow and told him he thought parts of Dangling Man were taken from Jean-Paul Sartre. As Aharoni remembers it, Bellow “became very defensive about that, and the man tried to explain: ‘It’s all right, I loved it.’ It sort of got Bellow in a bad mood, and he went off to talk with Allan Bloom.” Andrew Gordon, a scholar from the University of Florida, the author of several essays published in the Saul Bellow Journal, introduced himself to Bellow. They talked of the Robin Williams film of Seize the Day, released the year before, which Bellow did not like: “They got it wrong; it’s supposed to be a funny story. There were no humorous lines.” Bellow admitted he didn’t care much for American movies. He told how Jack Nicholson had bought the rights to Henderson the Rain King in 1979 but said he had heard nothing since. This was fine with Bellow, who had been paid his option money. “I got the best of it—the movie without the movie being made.” Then Gordon asked Bellow if he’d been involved in training and hunting eagles in Mexico, as had Augie in Augie March. “He said nothing a
nd glared at me.” This glare Gordon describes as “withering.” Yet, minutes later, Gordon and Bellow were telling jokes and laughing. An Indian scholar joined them and said to Bellow, “I’ve spent ten years studying your work.” Bellow’s reply, described as “mordant” by Gordon, was “I hope your time wasn’t wasted.” A young assistant professor told Bellow he’d just written a book about him, a revised version of his dissertation. “ ‘I see,’ said Bellow. ‘I was your ticket. Well, I won’t read it.’ And he turned away.” When Gordon’s wife met Bellow, she said he reminded her “of some senior professor who’s had tenure so long that all he does is sneer down his nose at everyone.”15 Ann Weinstein, the most ardent of fans, recalls getting into an elevator with Bellow and finding Leila Goldman there. Weinstein introduced Goldman to Bellow as the editor of the Saul Bellow Journal, president of the Saul Bellow Society, and “the woman who made the conference possible.” “Much to my disappointment as to Leila’s, all Bellow did was nod, acknowledge her presence, without so much as expressing one word of thanks for her grandiose [sic] efforts to promote his work….My heart ached for her.”16 Bellow may have been embarrassed or preoccupied when confronted with Goldman, but he may also consciously have slighted her; he had no high opinion of the Saul Bellow Society or of its members, most of whom he thought second-rate, and made little effort to hide his feelings.
Politics played a part in Bellow’s uneasiness during the conference, mostly concerning questions of national identity and gender. In the unedited transcript of his interview with Goldman and Aharoni, among his papers in the Regenstein, he is asked to “say something about the women in your novels,” a topic raised by several speakers at the conference. “That has the air of an FBI question,” he replies. The interviewers press him: “The issue is very important.” He answers “that we belong to the same spirit and are mutually dependent upon one another and that after all we are all possessors of a soul….I think we should be very careful about these things and not go crazy in the field of ideology because it has gotten us into so much trouble in this century.” He is asked if there will be a heroine in his next book, since “your central character is always a hero.” He replies, “Well I know more about people who wear trousers, but now the women are wearing them too, perhaps I can be more at home with them.” “You’re not helping very much,” the interviewers tell him. “Of course I’m not helping very much,” he replies. Later in the interview, when talking of the dual loyalties and responsibilities of American Jews, Bellow argues that it would be wrong to abandon the American project, the democratic project, “which you Israelis [only Aharoni was Israeli] also have an interest in.” Israelis often argue that only in Israel is a Jew safe and wholly or truly a Jew, a view Bellow rejects. “I think it would be both inconsistent and even cowardly, I won’t say unmanly for fear of being stoned, but how can one turn his back on his own life?”
Martin Amis’s recollections of Bellow at the conference differ from those of Aharoni. Amis remembers Bellow as “not often to be found at the Saul Bellow Conference Centre.” After sitting through a talk that Amis characterizes as “hopelessly academic and abstract,” Bellow “was heard to say that if he had to listen to much more of this he would die, not of heartbreak but of inanition” (the title of the talk, Amis believes, was something like “The Caged Cash Register: Tensions Between Existentialism and Materialism in Dangling Man”). Bellow’s unhappiness at the conference, Amis thinks, may have been a product not only of boredom and embarrassment but of a principled opposition to the way literature was taught in American universities. He quotes Bellow’s essay “A Matter of the Soul” (1975), in which American English departments are said to teach students to discuss “what Ahab’s harpoon symbolizes or what Christian symbols there are in Light in August,” but fail to instill “passion for novels and poems.”17
In addition to Bellow’s disapproval of literary academics, there were awkwardnesses over Janis, the sort they would encounter elsewhere. The conference paid for flights and accommodation for Bloom, Janis, and Bellow, putting them up in the city’s most expensive hotel. Aharoni’s secretary was instructed to ring Bellow in Chicago to ask if she should book him a double room or a single room. He said a single room. Then he rang back and said a double room. The organizers knew he was divorcing Alexandra but weren’t sure about Janis’s status. When she arrived, according to Aharoni, “everyone was saying, Is she your daughter?” Ellen Pifer remembers that Janis was at Bellow’s side throughout the conference. At a reception hosted by the rector of the university, Janis and Pifer chatted for a few minutes. When Pifer asked her if she was Bellow’s secretary, “with great timing, poise, and a subtle sense of irony, she answered deftly: ‘Sometimes.’ ”18 Yehoshua and his wife had met and liked Janis during the 1984 Olin Center conference, but they were disturbed to find that Bellow was now in a relationship with her, in part because she was his student and forty-three years his junior, in part because they had also met and liked Alexandra. “The difference of ages,” Yehoshua admits, “we didn’t like it. I’m very much a conservative in my marriage, in my relationship with my wife.” Bellow enjoyed Yehoshua’s company, admired his writing, and expected that they would spend time together in Haifa. They barely exchanged a word, and in a letter of July 10, 1987, he hinted at his disappointment. The reasons for this disappointment come in a letter of August 5. It was at Yehoshua’s urging, Bellow reminds him, that he had accepted the invitation to come to Haifa, and “all my arrangements were made solely with you.” Once he arrived, though, “I fell into the hands of the ladies who had organized the conference.” These ladies he calls “career parasites,” just the types he had “done everything possible to avoid….I found myself surrounded and utterly cut off….Nor was there a single private conversation in which I might have explained all this to you. I thought that I should have had at least fifteen minutes of your private time and I don’t think you can blame me for wondering why you and I were unable to manage even a brief conversation.”
Yehoshua admits he could have behaved better: “I was faulty for not inviting him to the house.” On July 27, in reply to Bellow’s letter of July 10, he wrote that he understood why Bellow was “slightly annoyed with me,” but reiterated his belief that “from a completely objective point of view the conference was a great success.” There were several “outstanding” lectures; Bellow’s “left a lasting and deep impression”; the conference was “widely reported” in the Israeli press; “good and friendly relations” were established among conference participants; and “people who had not met with you before were impressed by your easygoing personality and humanism.” From the evidence of Gordon and others, this last assertion is hard to credit. Bellow’s behavior with the academics was sometimes ill-mannered.
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BELLOW’S WILLINGNESS TO OFFEND, particularly when it came to questions of literary value or standing, extended to close friends. At around this time, Edith Tarcov sought to publish a collection of the writings of her deceased husband, Oscar. She went to see Morris Philipson, director of the University of Chicago Press, to see what he thought of the idea. Philipson was interested, but would only publish if Bellow agreed to write an introduction to the volume. When Edith sent Bellow a letter about her meeting with Philipson, she heard nothing back. After weeks of silence, Nathan Tarcov went to Bellow’s office to ask him if he’d received his mother’s letter, “because I knew she was suffering from not having heard back from him.”
It took him a while to answer at all, and finally he said something like “Oscar was a better husband and father but he wasn’t that good a writer and I don’t really see any point in your doing this.” I was quite shocked….I think he was trying to say this in a calm and respectful way, but to me it just seemed some kind of reappearance of this long-ago teenage rivalry which he should have gotten over already. He had a Nobel Prize and was the most famous American novelist, and my father was dead and no com
petition and all Edith was asking was that he write an introduction to this volume, and he could do that even if he didn’t think these were the greatest writings ever. So I was pretty shocked and horrified….Maybe he was just very busy and always being bombarded with requests….But, then, he could have said that.
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AFTER THE HAIFA CONFERENCE, Bellow, Janis, Bloom, Martin Amis, and Antonia Phillips, Amis’s wife, traveled to Jerusalem, where they were put up at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, the guesthouse for writers and artists. “We’ll have a ball yet,” Bellow told Amis, and they did. “We were very privileged,” Amis remembers, “it was a fantastic week,” the highlight being a dinner they all had with Mayor Teddy Kollek to celebrate Jacob Rothschild’s birthday. The Amises had met Rothschild, a friend of Antonia’s, on the plane to Israel. Also at the dinner were Jacob’s younger half-brother, Amschel Rothschild, and his wife, Anita, whom the Amises knew from London. Kollek was much as Bellow depicts him in To Jerusalem and Back, a bustling figure who disappeared between courses and then, in Amis’s words, “potently rematerialized, his city so much the calmer or the more solvent after some appearance he had put in or phone call he had made.” Jacob and Amschel were visiting Jerusalem in their capacity as trustees of Yad Hanadiv, the Rothschild family foundation which gave the Knesset and the Supreme Court buildings to Israel. They operated in what Amis calls “that (to me) mysterious arena of power and public relations, of endowments, of pro-bono unveilings. ‘I’m the Princess Di of Israel,’ said Anita (née Guinness), semi-seriously: ‘I am.’ ”
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