Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

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  THE THEME OF LOVE IS DISCUSSED with Janis in several notes. On July 9, 1991, she records Bellow’s conclusion, contra Rousseau, that “there IS such a thing as love. It isn’t a manipulative product of the imagination. It’s a real power. Not a winning one, no one ever said that, but real nonetheless. We’re always talking about the EMILE and B has been dipping into Bloom’s essay on Rousseau in GIANTS AND DWARFS. He succeeds in offering a counter-example to the modern type in Ursula.” At the end of the entry, in which possible plot schemes for “Case” are discussed, Janis concludes: “OK. So there’s much going on. And B., for all his troubles has produced 152 manuscript pages (I have barely put 100 into the computer, and have barely touched my own work).” Less than a week later, on July 14, 1991, Bellow announces another breakthrough:

  When he came in (for his salade nicoise) at 1:00 yesterday, and read me the morning’s work, he was triumphant. He called time-out and made room for a very serious core statement by Amanda. About what love is. A spiritual power. First you know nothing but your own reality, the fact of your own being. When you fall in love for the first time you know about the existence of another: in the fullest sense, you discover being. (Take that Heidegger.) Amanda delivers her soliloquy on love so simply. Just stating the facts…Here is B. speaking to people who, through their yearning, have earned the right to hear such things. I think readers will respond to this revolutionary statement with the same kind of longing that they poured into Henderson’s “I want I want.”

  B. was very emotional as he read those pages to me. This is straight from the heart stuff. Later in the afternoon, as we were driving back from our town-run he voiced doubts about how such a message would be received. “Critics will attack me for delivering a highfalutin’ sermon, as though I was looking down on them about the most important things.” He reminded me that there were all sorts of creeps out there waiting to take pot-shots at him. I told him that anyone hearing Amanda’s statement who has any drop of soul left in him will immediately understand what’s being said.

  …

  Over lunch he wasn’t having any of these doubts—he was just on fire with what he’d written in his blue notebook. He told me that he’s waited all his life to understand these things, and that part of his understanding came from me….He said it was the reciprocal love that was so new, so important. I laughed and told him I was glad to be able to teach him about something.

  Later in the entry, Janis talks of reading bits of her dissertation to Bellow, “from my pages on Emma riding in the woods with Rodolphe. He was pleased by my tone—more authoritative….It was a high pressure day yesterday. Clear crystal blue sky without a trace of cloud. Perfect conditions said B., for his best work. We biked and swam. He was so much himself….B. asked me to try to remember some of what we’d talked about at breakfast, and to take some notes.”

  Janis’s notes make clear not only how involved she and Bellow were in each other’s work but how they shared a sense that they were living out the themes of their writing. Bellow had always worked on several things at once, but had mostly done so alone. He had regular readers—Bette Howland in particular, also Harriet Wasserman—but neither had anything like the daily contact Janis had, or the daily access to his thoughts. In their early years together, Susan Glassman had been intimately involved in Bellow’s writing, but Janis was better informed about Bellow’s tradition than Susan, in addition to being wholly sympathetic, untricky, and, in Martin Amis’s words from an interview, “barbarically loyal.” As Howland puts it, “Janis really could combine all these things. She could tie his shoes and she knows Greek and she’s from Canada and she was Jewish and she was trained in the Committee….They really were a couple, and she did laugh at all his jokes.”

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  BELLOW’S PROBLEMS WITH “Case” and “Marbles” led him to fears about his powers as a novelist, worries about what he could or should write. Such worries, he told Janis, were “a torment once you hit fifty.” His propensity to start over rather than to rework was especially hard on Janis: “Every time he’d start again, I’d go down with him.” Bellow confided his fears to close friends as well as to Janis. After telling Amis that he’d completed The Bellarosa Connection, in a letter of November 14, 1988, he announced that he was “ ‘kissing off’ the lengthy novel (‘kissing off’ being an older form of ‘spinning off,’ both expressions refer to the stifling of a relationship, or the slow and gentle suffocation of the beloved). ‘Too little time’ is, I suppose, what people of my age keenly feel, and if you add to that Sydney Smith’s plea, ‘Short views, for God’s sake!’ you can see where I’m at.” Complaining to John Auerbach, in a letter of October 23, 1989, he provides a striking image to illustrate the drawbacks of “free-style” composing: “Lack of time comes in the nick of time for I haven’t got anything to work on. I wrote one hundred pages of a very funny narrative [“Marbles”] during the summer, but it was like a skyscraper in the desert. I had overlooked the water problem.” In another letter to Auerbach, of July 7, 1991, he describes similar problems with “Case”:

  I have X-plus pages to write and I do it under the shadowy threat of “too late.” So…I am trying to meet a deadline imposed by a contract I signed in order to spur myself to work more quickly. But I haven’t got the energy I once had. Well into my late sixties I could work all day long. Now I fold at one o’clock. Most days I can’t work without a siesta. I get out of bed and try to wake up. I ride the bike or swim in the pond. After such activities I have to rest again. It’s evening, it’s dinnertime. Nine-tenths of what I should have done it now seems too late to do….I water the garden and promise myself to do better tomorrow.

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  INTENSE PERIODS OF WORK and Vermont quiet were broken for Bellow and Janis by glamorous outings and occasions. On December 8, 1987, they attended a state dinner at the White House to celebrate the signing that afternoon of the INF Treaty, in which the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to ban the use of intermediate-range nuclear weapons. According to The New York Times, this dinner was “the most coveted invitation in the capital in many a year,” attended by “126 stars of business, science, sports, politics and the arts.” Bellow sat next to Jimmy Stewart’s wife and enjoyed meeting Joe DiMaggio; Janis tried out her Russian. After toasts by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev and a lavish meal, they decided to skip the entertainment (Van Cliburn playing Shostakovich) and hailed a cab back to their hotel, as Ursula and Milo do in “Case.” Bellow enjoyed himself at the dinner, but Janis sensed that he wasn’t all that interested in the occasion and had accepted the invitation “for me.” The treaty itself was controversial, criticized by former president Richard M. Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and William F. Buckley, Jr., as well as by prominent members of the Committee on the Present Danger and the Committee for the Free World.

  Bellow’s attitude to the politicians and political types he met in Washington is captured in an article he wrote for Newsday about the March 1979 signing of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, a companion piece to “White House and Artists” (1962), which describes the state dinner President Kennedy gave for André Malraux (discussed in chapter 14 of To Fame and Fortune).26 Here, too, as with the Malraux dinner and the INF Treaty dinner, Bellow notes the pleasure the assembled “eminences” take in recognizing and greeting each other, “embracing enthusiastically, grappling affectionately, kissing.” The treaty itself is greeted realistically, as the INF Treaty was to be. “Most of those present were moved. Some said they were moved against their better judgment.” In his capacity as reporter, Bellow visits Egyptian Foreign Minister Boutros Boutros-Ghali, “a diplomat whose smooth Egyptian-French surfaces easily deflected unwelcome questions. There were no unmannerly rejections, only an easy, practiced turning aside of things he didn’t care to discuss. For these things he substituted certain rhetorical practices of his own. I have
done much the same on some occasions, with less style.”

  The Newsday article ends with a description of Bellow’s brief encounters with major political figures: Fritz Mondale, Henry Kissinger, Daniel Moynihan, and James Schlesinger, “a person of monumental presence, a great pillar smoking his pipe…Senator Moynihan told me how greatly the afternoon ceremony had moved him. Mr. Kissinger told me nothing, but coldly endured my handshake. He was very like Queen Victoria, it struck me. Some of my mischievous remarks in print apparently had displeased him. ‘We are not amused.’ ” That Bellow says so little about James Schlesinger, Carter’s secretary of energy, previously secretary of defense under Nixon and Ford, is odd. Among the Saul Bellow Papers at the Regenstein is the draft of a letter dated October 23, 1998. Whether the letter was sent is not clear.

  Attention: James Schlesinger

  A Piece of unfinished business

  You and I met at Carter’s dinner celebrating the Camp David Agreement. When we were introduced you tilted your wine glass, picked up my necktie and poured a large amount of wine over it. I was about to punch you in the nose but friends—probably friends of yours—said that a fist fight would be out of place and I was pulled from the scene. I’ve had this on my mind for many years now [almost twenty], and when I saw your name in the Wall Street Journal recently I decided to send you a note.

  I don’t know if you were malicious or merely drunk. In some places you may be an eminent statesman but in my book you are a shit.

  Saul Bellow

  Bellow was not alone in his view of Schlesinger. President Ford fired him in 1975, and President Carter fired him in 1979. According to the journalist and Clinton speechwriter Paul Glastris, writing in the Washington Monthly, Carter fired Schlesinger “in part for the same reason Gerald Ford had—he was unbearably arrogant and impatient with lesser minds who disagreed with him, and hence inept at dealing with Congress.”27 Janis several times heard Bellow tell the story of his encounter with Schlesinger; each time “he threw back his head and laughed….This was the kind of episode he adored.” There is also a fictionalized version of the encounter in “All Marbles Still Accounted For,” in which Secretary of Defense Schlesinger becomes Secretary of Defense Brushmore.28

  After the INF Treaty dinner, there was one other visit to the White House. In July 1988, President Reagan awarded Bellow the National Medal of Arts, along with eleven other recipients, among them Helen Hayes, I. M. Pei, Rudolf Serkin, Jerome Robbins, and Brooke Astor. When asked about Reagan by Norman Manea, Bellow said of him: “I never saw anybody in public life who was so at ease and who played his role so well, with the vitality of an artist. I think that this was his great moment as an actor, when he was President.”29 Whether Bellow had voted for Reagan is not clear. Adam Bellow thinks he probably did not, which is what Janis thinks. “I think Saul’s view of Reagan evolved as mine did,” Adam told Gloria L. Cronin in an interview. “He probably considered Reagan to be a sort of third-rate actor, though he may have been more aware of Reagan’s record as governor than I was. Ultimately, it was Reagan’s anticommunism that drew his approval….Although for my father and I as Jews it was still very difficult to identify as Republicans, socially and culturally.”30 Daniel Bellow believes: “When Ronald Reagan got elected he [Bellow] was happy because he thought Reagan was a man of character and an anticommunist. I would say ‘He deregulated the banks and let the thieves loose in the treasury,’ but Pop had lived through the Harding administration so he wasn’t impressed. He thought Adlai Stevenson was a fool, easy pickings for Mayor Daley. Pop respected strength and savvy in a politician, and when a politician did not display those qualities, Pop considered that he was not fit for office.”31

  Daniel’s view is given support by Bellow’s encounter with another head of state. In a trip to Britain in 1990, George Walden arranged for him to meet the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Walden was at the time minister of higher education and knew Bellow through Allan Bloom. Having been greatly impressed by The Closing of the American Mind, Walden and his wife, Sarah, called on Bloom in Chicago on a trip to the United States in the spring of 1988. The two men liked each other, and Bloom invited Walden to return that autumn to give a lecture at the Olin Center. At the lecture, Bellow sat in the front row, “an unnerving experience” for Walden, and joined the Waldens and Bloom for dinner afterward at the Italian Village. For Walden, the dinner was “the funniest, most free-spirited evening I could remember,” “a perpetual double act” in which Bloom and Bellow “kicked around the gravest of ideas in a series of running gags.”32

  In February 1989, Bloom came to London to appear on television, and Walden arranged for him to be introduced to Mrs. Thatcher.33 His motive for arranging the meeting was to counter the view, fashionable in government circles and shared by Mrs. Thatcher, that university courses of no direct importance to the economy were an indulgence. To Walden’s surprise, Mrs. Thatcher invited Bloom to Sunday lunch at Chequers, the country-house retreat of the prime minister. To his greater surprise, she stayed up the night before until 2:30 a.m. reading Bloom’s book. “It had never occurred to me that she would open it, let alone read it.” Over lunch she was at her best: “Instead of telling Bloom the book he ought to have written, as she might easily have done, she not only asked detailed questions: she listened to the answers.”34

  In May 1990, Bellow and Janis came to England, where Bellow was to deliver the Romanes Lecture at Oxford, the Annual Public Lecture of the University. His subject was “The Distracted Public.” When Walden learned of the visit, he “made the mistake of trying to repeat the success of the Bloom-Thatcher encounter.” This time the meeting was at Downing Street, for tea. When the prime minister’s office rang Walden to ask what would be discussed, he suggested “the black problem in America,” which he knew was much on Bellow’s mind at the time. In St. James’s Park, on the way to Number 10, Bellow asked Walden the same question, and got the same answer. This time, Mrs. Thatcher was not at her best. She arrived for tea “between meetings, pretending not to be exhausted, and on a talking high.” “She was all keyed up and tired,” Walden recalls, “and, of course, she hadn’t read any of Bellow’s novels.”

  “You’re from Chicago. Now that’s most interesting. They tell me Chicago has a bad racial problem. I would much like to hear your views.”

  “Well…” Bellow made to put down his tea.

  “My own feeling is…”

  Bellow stuck with his tea, listening with every appearance of interest while Thatcher told him all there was to know about the problem of blacks in America. When she seemed on the verge of talking herself out her guest was finally invited to give his view.

  “If you’d really like to know my opinion…” Bellow began with a lightning smile.

  “Absolutely!” said Thatcher.

  And off she went again.

  In the final minutes of the meeting, Bellow was able to say what he thought, “which was mild and unprovocative.” When he finished speaking, “the Prime Minister said how much she had enjoyed the conversation, thanked me for bringing the most interesting people to meet her, and away she swept. Subsequently Bellow remarked, with amusement: ‘I didn’t get a word in. Not even edgeways.’ ”35

  Janis records in her journal how she was greeted by Mrs. Thatcher. “Her glance went by me without a second’s pause and it felt as though a searchlight had swept by.” She was “much more attractive than she appears in photos,” “impeccably groomed, skin glowing, radiant, smooth.” Her first words to Bellow were “They can’t have given you the Nobel Prize for nothing—you must have something to tell me.” Later, after speaking briefly of Allan Bloom, she declared: “The problem with intellectuals is that they are unwilling to speak out, and if they do speak out they are unwilling to act. There is no force behind their pronouncements.” The meeting lasted thirty minutes, “but it all seemed to happen in the blink of a steel blue eye.”
To Martin Amis, in a letter of June 3, 1990, Bellow offered a metaphorical account of the meeting: “Well, you’re cruising on an interstate highway and a few hundred feet ahead you see a perfectly ordinary automobile like any other GM, Chrysler or Japanese product, and then suddenly it turns on its dangerous blue police lights and you realize that what you took for a perfectly ordinary vehicle is packed with power. It’s that unearthly blue flash that makes the difference.” “Packed with power” recalls Daniel Bellow’s view of his father’s respect for strength. Though the visit was not a success, Walden did not regret introducing Bellow to Thatcher: “I thought she really ought to know that this man exists, because he was generally recognized as the greatest novelist of the day.”