Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  To decompress from the rigors of Oxford and Mrs. Thatcher, Bellow and Janis boarded a train to Sidmouth, a resort on the South Devon coast. There they stayed in an “ancient” hotel, were relieved not to be talked to by any of the other guests, ate gigantic cooked breakfasts, and went for long walks in the countryside and along the Esplanade, not returning to the hotel until dinner. On country walks, they came across little tearooms “out of nowhere.” Janis was reading Hardy, in whose Wessex novels Sidmouth is “Idmouth” (in Thackeray it is “Baymouth”). The local railway stopped at the village of Ottery St. Mary, Coleridge’s birthplace. The break was idyllic; in Janis’s summary, “We loved it.”

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  THAT “THE BLACK PROBLEM IN AMERICA” was much on Bellow’s mind in 1990 was a product of recent developments in Chicago. In 1988, there was an outbreak of anti-Semitism among African Americans. Steve Cokely, an aide to Eugene Sawyer, the city’s black mayor, claimed that Jews were involved in an international conspiracy to control the world and that “the AIDS epidemic is a result of doctors, especially Jewish ones, who inject AIDS into blacks.” It took Mayor Sawyer a week to fire Cokely, an act only three of Chicago’s eighteen city councilmen approved. In addition to his remarks about Jewish doctors, Cokely attacked Sawyer’s predecessor, Mayor Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor, for having Jewish advisers. The previous November, on the forty-ninth anniversary of Kristallnacht, Cokely accused North Side Jewish merchants of breaking their own windows in an effort to gain sympathy. When Cokely was invited to explain his views to the City Council’s health committee, its chairman, Alderman Allan Streeter, also an African American, criticized the “continued Jewish dominance of the news media” and accused the Anti-Defamation League of having a “hit-list” of black leaders.

  There were other well-publicized instances of black anti-Semitism in Chicago. In May 1988, a student exhibition at the Art Institute was criticized for including a painting of Mayor Washington dressed in women’s underwear. Streeter and two other black aldermen arrived with police officers and confiscated the painting, triggering a First Amendment crisis and a civil lawsuit. Streeter claimed, incorrectly, that “the fellow who drew that picture is Jewish.” The influential black activist Lutrelle (“Lu”) Palmer, in a column in the Metro News, defended Cokely and Streeter, defying “anyone to deny that Jews as a group are greatly disliked by our community. Cokely said it publicly. Most blacks say it privately.” The head of the city’s Commission on Human Relations, the Reverend B. Herbert Martin, also defended Cokely. The black community, he claimed, heard “a ring of truth” in Cokely’s remarks about an international Jewish conspiracy: “There is a growing opinion among younger blacks, grassroots black people, that Jews are running things, that Jews are unfair, unloving.” When Jewish leaders objected to Martin’s remarks, State Representative William Shaw, an African American, threatened to organize a boycott “on everything dealing with the Jewish community.” He also claimed that black leaders were being “picked off one by one” by Jews.

  These details come from articles in The New York Times, in particular an article of July 26, 1988, written by Bellow’s friend Eugene Kennedy.36 The title of the article, “Anti-Semitism in Chicago: A Stunning Silence,” derived from Kennedy’s claim that aside from the deceased Mayor Richard J. Daley’s son Richard M. Daley, the Cook County state’s attorney and soon to be Chicago’s mayor, “hardly any Chicagoan of major influence in government, religion, education and business has spoken out strongly, unambiguously and consistently against the anti-Semitism that has infected the city’s life.” As Kennedy put it in an interview, “The Jewish people, of course, had been in the vanguard of fighting for the rights of African Americans, but there was a hysterical paranoid fervor in this city, and there were guys getting on television programs and talking about this. It was really bizarre.” Kennedy’s article upset many Chicagoans, and the Chicago Tribune ran an editorial denouncing him for writing about Chicago’s problems in The New York Times. When Bellow read the editorial, he called Kennedy and told him, “I’ll never forget you for doing this” (Allan Bloom, Kennedy remembers, was also “very grateful”). As Kennedy saw it, “The Jewish people needed someone who wasn’t Jewish to raise the issue and to raise it as strongly as possible.”

  On August 14, 1988, some weeks after its editorial, the Tribune published an article by Bellow defending Kennedy. The article began by accusing the paper of sweeping the issues raised by Kennedy’s piece under the rug (there to form “gruesome lumps”), shifting attention “from Cokely’s illiterate mob incitement to Kennedy himself, as if Kennedy were the guilty party.” The Tribune complained in its editorial that Kennedy was wrong to take Cokely seriously, describing the mayoral aide as “barely able to keep a grip on himself, let alone Chicago’s black community,” and citing a June poll it had commissioned in which only 8 percent of blacks opposed Cokely’s firing.37 Of the support Cokely received from the leaders of black Chicago, detailed by Kennedy and repeated by Bellow, the Tribune said nothing, though the paper’s star columnist, Mike Royko, had earlier warned of a dangerous rise in “inflammatory, irresponsible racial rhetoric,” virtually all of it “coming from blacks.” Royko’s column, “Put Up or Shut Up Time in Chicago,” appeared on May 18, 1988, and in a personal letter of May 26 Bellow praised him as “the brainiest and the bravest of newspapermen. It takes guts to do what you are doing.” The articles by Royko, Kennedy, and Bellow eventually bore fruit when Cokely was condemned by the city’s most widely read African American columnists, Clarence Page in the Tribune and Vernon Jarrett in the Sun-Times. What most upset Bellow about the whole episode, he wrote in his Tribune piece, was the “curious inability” of Chicago journalists and politicians “to respond to what is monstrous in a monstrous situation. Does no one remember Stalin and his ‘Jewish doctors’ plot’? Has everyone forgotten Hitler?”

  That Richard M. Daley was one of the few Chicago politicians to take an early stand against Cokely and his defenders earned him Bellow’s support. When Daley ran for mayor the following year, Bellow and Kennedy agreed to campaign for him in Jewish neighborhoods. After he was elected, Daley gave them a tour of the mayor’s office, the whole time holding an unlit cigar in his hand, the very image of a big-time Chicago pol. “We had a hilarious time,” Kennedy remembers. “Saul just loved that sort of stuff.” Daley asked Bellow to speak at his inauguration in April 1989, and Bellow agreed, movingly describing his love for the city. He also spoke of how pleased he was that Daley had chosen a writer to speak. “This is a first for Chicago,” he told the assembled notables. “Our mayor-elect might have asked Mike Ditka [the football player] to say a few words, but Chicago is already sufficiently identified with Bears, Bulls, with Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park. And I take it as a good sign for the city that he put a writer on the program….[Chicago] has a place in American literature and world literature which it owes to the writers I represent here today.” About Daley himself, Bellow was cautiously optimistic. “I take seriously his efforts to bring together a divided city and his determination to remind the people that a city of this size and complexity cannot afford wild dissent, dramatics and demagoguery.”38

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  IN THE SUMMER OF 1989, in Vermont, after living together for three years, Bellow and Janis married. Bellow wanted no fuss over the wedding. Janis invited her parents to Vermont, but said nothing about her getting married. There was some question whether the parents would be able to come, and when they called back to say the trip was on, she told them the news. The wedding took place on August 25, 1989. The Freedmans arrived from Toronto with champagne and flowers. They and Walter Pozen, who also spent summers in Vermont, were the only witnesses (Allan Bloom was in Paris and could not attend, but he knew of the planned wedding and approved). Janis wore a dress Bellow had bought for her in Paris, and Bellow wore one of Maury’s suits. They were married in the town hall in Wilmi
ngton, Vermont, and then drove with Pozen and Janis’s parents to the home of their friends and neighbors, Herb and Libby Hillman, where everyone drank the champagne and ate challah and honey. It was the wedding Bellow and Janis wanted. There was “absolutely no valentine stuff,” as there’d been no valentine stuff when Bellow proposed, which was fine with Janis. Both partners felt they were taking “a gamble” in getting married. Bellow “must have had terrible fears,” Janis believes, physical equivalents of his fears about writing. As it turned out, they were “very lucky, hugely happy.” “We had more than most married couples in terms of married happiness and passion.” At seventy-four, Bellow was to Janis “still physically beautiful. He didn’t have the skin and the body of an old man….He had this incredible strength.”

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  SHORTLY AFTER THE WEDDING, the Bellows left Vermont for Boston, where Bellow had been invited to teach for a term at Boston University. This was a golden period for Janis. “I was somebody nobody knew,” she remembers, no longer Bellow’s “student or secretary or wife number 657 or whatever, as in Chicago.” The invitation came from John Silber, president of the university, previously a friend and colleague of Keith Botsford’s at the University of Texas. Silber, a Texan, trained as a philosopher at Yale and chaired the Philosophy Department at Texas from 1962 to 1967. In 1967, he became dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, a post he held until 1970, when he was fired by the chair of the regents of the university. For much of his life, Silber was a figure of controversy. On social issues, he was a liberal, supporting racial integration and Head Start programs for preschool pupils and opposing capital punishment. As a university administrator, he was a radical. In his three years as dean at Texas, in an attempt to clear out what he called “dead wood,” he replaced twenty-two heads of department. According to a lengthy obituary in The New York Times, both his politics and his “executive aspirations” led to his firing.

  That same year, 1970, Silber was appointed president of Boston University, a job he held from 1971 to 1996, ruling with what the Times called “tigerish ferocity.” When he arrived at BU, he faced falling enrollment and budget deficits. He froze salaries, cut budgets, refused to negotiate with staff, and came down hard on student protest, actions reported in the national news media. In the course of many battles, he built Boston University into one of the country’s largest private universities, raising endowments from $18 million to $422 million and research grants from $15 million to $180 million. Although tuition fees rose to Ivy League levels, enrollment increased, from twenty to thirty thousand. The university’s property portfolio was tripled, and $700 million was raised for new construction. For these and other initiatives, Silber paid himself the highest salary of any college president in the United States, twice that of the president of Harvard. When he resigned in 2005, he received a record severance package of $6.1 million.39

  Silber had been in pursuit of Bellow for some time, first as dean at Texas then as president of BU. While a graduate student at Yale, listening to a books program on the car radio, he heard Bellow discuss The Adventures of Augie March. It was winter, and snowing in New Haven, and “I thought, This guy is fascinating, this guy is wonderful, and I got to thinking about him and ran into a truck in front of me. Saul is embedded in my mind in connection with this little accident.” Silber then read The Adventures of Augie March, and he thought, “This is a figure to contend with.” He first met Bellow in the late 1960s in Texas, at Keith Botsford’s house. Botsford had moved around a good deal since Bellow lodged with him in Puerto Rico in 1961, living in locations in Europe and South America. In 1965, he was appointed director of the Ford Foundation’s National Translation Center, which was to be based at Texas. At the same time, he was made a professor of English at Texas.40

  Bellow several times flew to Austin in the late 1960s to consult with Botsford about a successor publication to The Noble Savage. At a dinner party Botsford gave for him on one of these visits, the guests included Silber and a philosopher named Oets Bouwsma (an American, born of Dutch American parents), an authority on Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard. Silber was Bouwsma’s head of department at the time and admired his work. During dinner, Bellow made a point that interested Bouwsma, who began peppering him with questions. Although Silber could not remember what this point was, he remembered that Bellow stopped Bouwsma in his tracks. “I don’t play these games,” he told him calmly. Some guests thought this reply rude. Others suspected that Bellow refused to answer “because he wasn’t smart enough.” This is not what Silber thought. “I thought he was just as smart as a rat in a barn. I really liked the idea that this wasn’t his area, something he cared about, so why the hell should he get in the ring with a guy who boxes by rules he didn’t even know. I thought he’d done enough in his life and he didn’t need that, so why should he subject himself to it.” After he became dean, Silber tried unsuccessfully to lure Bellow to Texas.

  When Silber became president of BU, he poached a number of faculty from Texas, including William Arrowsmith, whom Bellow had known and admired at Princeton in the 1950s; Donald Carne-Ross, another eminent classicist; “and a lot of other bright people,” among them Botsford. It was Botsford who suggested to Silber that Bellow’s love of Vermont might be a way of getting him to BU. As Silber recalled: “I said, You know, it’s a shame to be about eight or nine hundred miles from your house in Vermont when you could be just a couple of hours or three hours’ driving from Boston. Why don’t we just move you to Boston? We’d make it as convenient for you as possible, see to housing, which is always a problem.” Again Bellow declined. In 1988, Silber tried a third time, laying out terms in a letter of March 6. If Bellow came to BU, he would receive “a University Professorship and a Professorship in English with a salary of $80,000.” University Professors, Silber explained in an interview, were appointed not just because they were well known but “because the caliber of their work went beyond a single discipline. You take a person like Saul, who is working in the fields of sociology, philosophy, psychology, history, as well as literature. There’s no way that he could have done his work just sticking to literary matters….Look at the range of that man….And every University Professor was like that.” Bellow’s teaching responsibilities, Silber assured him, would be light. He would be expected to teach “one course and give one public lecture and a public reading.”

  Bellow offered a counterproposal. He and Janis would come to Boston for a term, in the autumn of 1989 (when Bloom would still be in Paris). They would only come, however, if certain conditions were met. In a letter of March 11, Bellow spelled out these conditions:

  I would have to have suitable living quarters (with an unlisted telephone number) because I work at home; I should not be able to pay two rents—I can’t sublet my Chicago apartment, and it costs me $1,200 a month to maintain. An appropriate salary would be more like fifty than $40,000. That would be no more than fair since I am paid somewhere between five and $10,000 for each lecture or reading. In Chicago I teach one course per term, a seminar for fifteen to twenty students, meeting once a week, and here I do not have the headaches and disorder of new surroundings. What I had envisioned for B.U. was a course in selected literary classics of the Twentieth Century, Italian, French, German, English and American—perhaps a Russian or two for good measure. I function best when my mornings and early afternoons are given over to the intensest kind of work. It seems to me that if I am to sing a divinely beautiful swan song it is better not to have to cope with geese. Decades in Chicago have taught me how to protect my privacy….No luncheons, no cocktail parties, few dinners and no banquet speeches….I am mindful of the tasks I want to finish and I believe that I can count on your understanding and perhaps even your sympathy.

  He could count on both. In September, Bellow and Janis moved into an apartment Janis describes as “like a palazzo” at 69 Bay State Road, overlooking the Charles River. They were very well treated by everyone, espec
ially Silber, who “bent over backwards,” and Botsford, who was “incredibly good to us.” “I know a lot of people say negative things about him,” Janis says of Silber, “but he was so good to Saul. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to court him or to woo him. There were dinner parties with Christopher Ricks [lured to BU from Cambridge University]. He [Ricks] was so funny. The atmosphere there seemed so lively….Saul needed that. I think Bloom was the only person who brought that out in him, that kind of back-and-forth wit.” Although he’d sworn off banquet speeches, Bellow gave several talks and readings that autumn term, always to packed audiences. Charles U. Daly, the head of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, previously an administrator at the University of Chicago and at Harvard, arranged for him to speak at the Harvard Kennedy School. On November 9, he gave an early version of the Romanes Lecture (it was titled “A Writer Looks at Twentieth-Century History”). He also gave a reading of “A Silver Dish” at the Tremont Temple Baptist Church in Boston, where Charles Dickens and Abraham Lincoln had once spoken.41 The church was packed, though the night was cold and rain-swept, almost as inclement as the night Woody and Morris Selbst trudged through in “A Silver Dish.” Weekends were spent in Vermont, in a glorious New England autumn. On December 6, Bellow wrote to Catherine Lindsay (now Catherine Choate), the “big beauty” John Berryman had once pursued, to congratulate her on a new job and to tell her his news. He had “taken some time off from Chicago to spend a few months in Boston, not far from my place in Vermont.” Boston he “rather liked”; it was a respite from Chicago, which “has been taken over by racial politics—blacks and whites in a contest for control. I find it very disagreeable. On the 15th the Boston holiday ends and we go back.”

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