Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  As Bellow put it in the JPS lecture, the American writer who is Jewish has a responsibility to track “the history of the Jews in our time” (p. 22). By combining the European refugee Fonstein’s story with the American narrator’s unwillingness to face it, as well as with his overcoming his unwillingness, Bellow hoped to fulfill his responsibility as a Jewish writer in America.

  On June 12, 1988, two days after his seventy-third birthday, Bellow announced to Janis that he’d started the Hillman story over again from scratch. Among other things, he’d crammed too much into the beginning: “All this stuff about the American versus the European Jew. This must unfold gradually.” Behind the contrast between European and American Jews lay a larger Jewish theme. As he told Janis, “What the story is really about is memory and faith.” For the Jew, “there is no religion without remembering. As Jews we remember what was told to us at Sinai; at the Seder we remember the Exodus; Yiskor is about remembering a father, a mother. We are told not to forget the Patriarchs; we admonish ourselves, ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…’ And we are constantly reminding God not to forget his Covenant with us. This is what the ‘chosenness’ of the Chosen People is all about. We are chosen to be God’s privileged mind readers. All of it, what binds us together, is our history, and we are a people because we remember” (p. xi).

  At some point in the summer of 1988, Bellow decided that the American Jew in the Fonstein story, its unnamed narrator, would be “founder of the Mnemosyne Institute in Philadelphia,” the business of which was to train “executives, politicians, and members of the defense establishment.” Now retired and in his “twilight years,” the narrator would like “to forget about remembering,” in part because of fears he was losing his own memory.61 This fear began one day as he was walking down the street humming “Way down upon the…” and failed to remember the name of the Swanee River, “a song I’d sung from childhood, upwards of seventy years, part of the foundation of one’s mind. A classic song, known to all Americans” (p. 72): it is also a song about remembering. According to Janis, “This actually did happen to Saul during the winter in Chicago, while strolling around downtown on his way back from the dentist.” Like Fonstein, “until Suwannee came to him he was beside himself” (pp. xi–xii). Although the narrator laments having lost touch with Fonstein, he remembers details from their times together, a number drawn from Bellow’s own life. In their youth, Fonstein was an object of admiration to the narrator’s father, having survived real suffering and danger—unlike his son, the narrator—a judgment Abraham Bellow had leveled at his sons. Fonstein’s aunt, the narrator’s stepmother, like Bellow’s stepmother, “parted her hair in the middle and baked delicious strudel” (p. ix); Fonstein’s aversion to a particular shade of blue-gray, the color of the shroud in which his mother was buried, was Bellow’s aversion, that being the color of the shroud in which his mother had been buried.

  Although the narrator’s memory has earned him “an income of X millions soundly invested” and “an antebellum house in Philadelphia” (p. 35), it hasn’t made him wise. The data that fill his memory not only lack significance but distract from significance. Bellow writes of distraction and information overload as dangers of the modern age in “The Distracted Public,” his Romanes Lecture, and again in “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About” (1992), and, as we’ve seen, they were themes of his fiction as well.62 Augie March complains, “There’s too much history and culture to keep track of, too many details, too much news, too much example, too much influence, too many guys who tell you to be as they are, and all this hugeness, abundance, turbulence, Niagara Falls torrent. Which who is supposed to interpret? Me?” (pp. 902–3). Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift is not so much overwhelmed as knocked out by information, or so he claims, having “an exceptional gift for passing out.” In snapshots of himself from the 1930s and 1940s, when, he adds, millions were being killed, he is pictured in “an ill-fitting double-breasted suit…smoking a pipe, standing under a tree, holding hands with a plump and pretty bimbo—and I am asleep on my feet, out cold. I have snoozed through many a crisis” (p. 108). Like Charlie, the narrator of The Bellarosa Connection has missed the crisis at the heart of Fonstein’s story, partly because he’s been distracted, partly because he couldn’t face it. “I wouldn’t do it,” he recalls of his “snoozing through” the Holocaust. “First those people murdered you, then they forced you to brood on their crimes. It suffocated me to do this. Hunting for causes was a horrible imposition added to the original ‘selection,’ gassing, cremation. I didn’t want to think of the history and psychology of these abominations, death chambers and furnaces….Such things are utterly beyond me, a pointless exercise.” Hence his advice to Fonstein, brooding on Billy Rose’s refusal to meet him: “My advice to Fonstein—given mentally—was: Forget it. Go American” (p. 49).

  Why the narrator finally decides to face Fonstein’s story is explained partly by his understanding of Billy Rose, who wants nothing to do with memory, whose Americanness is connected with letting memory go. Billy Rose (“Bellarosa” to Fonstein, before he learns who he is) shares qualities with Bellow’s brother Maury. He has gangland connections, is “the business partner of Prohibition hoodlums, the sidekick of Arnold Rothstein” (p. 40). He is a voracious consumer, of paintings, fancy clothes (“the tailored wardrobe was indispensable—like having an executive lavatory of your own” [p. 58]), of “bimbos.” A syndicated newspaper columnist, he deals in Broadway gossip and scandal and has “a buglike tropism for celebrity” (p. 41). He is hard, hot-tempered, when pushed will retaliate, believing, like the narrator, that “if you can retaliate you’ve got your self-respect” (p. 57). Although unsentimental, he has “spots of deep feeling.” The narrator describes him as “spattered,” like a Jackson Pollock painting: “and among the main trickles was his Jewishness, with other streaks flowing toward secrecy” (p. 41). Like Maury, he wants nothing to do with the old times and old ways, and this is partly why “he refused to be thanked by the Jews his Broadway underground had rescued” (p. 41). He has no interest in his own old times. “I don’t care for stories,” he says. “I don’t care for my own story. If I had to listen to it, I’d break out in a cold sweat” (p. 65). The narrator speculates about Billy’s motives for never looking back: “Afraid of the emotions? Too Jewish a moment for him? Drags him down from his standing as a full-fledged American?” (p. 46). (This is what Fonstein thinks: “It’s some kind of change in the descendants of immigrants in this country” [p. 46].) Money and material goods mark Billy’s sense of having made it as an American, as they did for Maury. In addition, though, for Billy, celebrity matters, however vulgar or tawdry. As the narrator describes him:

  Billy Rose wasn’t big; he was about the size of Peter Lorre. But oh! He was American. There was a penny-arcade jingle about Billy, the popping of shooting galleries, the rattling of pinballs, the weak human cry of the Times Square geckos, the lizard gaze of sideshow freaks. To see him as he was, you have to place him against the whitewash glare of Broadway in the wee hours. But even such places have their grandees—people whose defects can be converted to seed money for enterprises. There’s nothing in this country that you can’t sell, nothing too weird to bring to market and found a fortune on. And once you got as much major real estate as Billy had, then it didn’t matter that you were one of the human deer that came uptown from the Lower East Side to graze on greasy sandwich papers [p. 47].

  Although Fonstein takes offense at Rose’s refusal to meet with him, it is his wife, Sorella, who “made up my mind that Billy was going to do right by him” (p. 65). Sorella’s determination recalls Bellow’s Philadelphia lecture. She sees facing Billy Rose as a way of concluding a chapter in her husband’s life, one that “should be concluded….It was a part of the destruction of the Jews. On our side of the Atlantic, where we weren’t threatened, we have a special duty to come to terms with it” (p. 66). In what will be her final meeting with the narrator, she expresses an anxi
ety shared both by him and by Bellow: “If you want my basic view, here it is: The Jews could survive everything that Europe threw at them. I mean the lucky remnant. But now comes the next test—America. Can they hold their ground, or will the U.S.A. be too much for them?” (p. 69). The narrator has an additional anxiety, a larger one: “If you go back to the assertion that memory is life and forgetting death…I have established at the very least that I am still able to keep up my struggle for existence” (p. 73). Facing the Holocaust means facing the impossibility of forgetting death. For all his mnemonic powers, the narrator will never defeat death, as he will never fathom the Holocaust, a truth the American in him could not face—and so chose not to face. “I had discovered how long I had shielded myself from unbearable imaginations—no, not imaginations, but recognitions—of murder, of relish of torture, of the ground bass of brutality, without which no human music is ever performed” (p. 82), a companion image to one in Humboldt’s Gift, of death as “the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything” (p. 256).

  At the end of the novella, in a telephone conversation, the narrator learns of the recent deaths of the Fonsteins and of the fate of their only son, Gilbert, a mathematical prodigy and compulsive professional gambler. Gilbert’s system when playing cards is to memorize the deck. “That’s up your alley,” says the young man who answers the Fonsteins’ telephone. Gilbert, he tells the narrator, is now living in Las Vegas with his girlfriend. “Does she enjoy Las Vegas?” the narrator asks. “How could she not?” the young man replies, cynically. “It’s the biggest showplace in the world—the heart of the American entertainment industry. Which city today is closest to a holy city—like Lhasa or Calcutta or Chartres or Jerusalem? Here it could be New York for money, Washington for power, or Las Vegas attracting people by the millions. Nothing to compare with it in the history of the whole world” (p. 88). In the course of the phone call, the young man mocks the narrator, who is concerned about the fate of the Fonsteins and Gilbert. “He was taunting me—for my Jewish sentiment” (p. 88). The episode seems to confirm Sorella’s fears about the fate of the Jews, or of Jewish values, in America, what in his Philadelphia lecture Bellow calls “the old decencies,” “the eternal background.” After hanging up on the young man, the narrator considers phoning him back to “call him on his low-grade cheap-shot nihilism,” to talk to him “about the roots of memory in feeling…what retention of the past really means. Things like: ‘If sleep is forgetting, forgetting is also sleep, and sleep is to consciousness what death is to life. So that the Jews ask even God to remember, “Yiskor Elohim.” ’ God doesn’t forget, but your prayer requests him particularly to remember your dead. But how was I to make an impression on a kid like that? I chose instead to record everything I could remember about the Bellarosa Connection, and to set it all down with a Mnemosyne flourish” (p. 89).

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  SORELLA FONSTEIN, the novella’s heroine, is both autonomous seeker and paradise sought, to adapt Updike’s formulation. A French teacher before her marriage, knowledgeable as well as intelligent, she is the only American character in the story to understand from the start the value of facing the Holocaust—something she forces the narrator to understand as well.

  I wasn’t inclined to discuss Jewish history with her—it put my teeth on edge at first—but she overcame my resistance. She was well up on the subject, and besides, damn it, you couldn’t say no to Jewish history after what had happened in Nazi Germany. You had to listen. It turned out that as the wife of a refugee she had set herself to master the subject, and I heard a great deal from her about the technics of annihilation, the large-scale-industry aspect of it. What she occasionally talked about…was the black humor, the slapstick side of certain camp operations. Being a French teacher, she was familiar with Jarry and Ubu Roi, Pataphysics, Absurdism, Dada, Surrealism….I didn’t want to hear this [p. 49].

  Sorella’s problems in finding a husband are attributed by the narrator to her stupendous girth (“She made you look twice at a doorway. When she came to it, she filled the space like a freighter in a canal lock” [p. 60]). She meets Fonstein through her uncle, his employer in Cuba. Like many “worthy girls to whom men never proposed,” Sorella had to find a husband “in Mexico, Honduras, [or] Cuba” (p. 44), among European refugees anxious to gain entry to the United States. Initially, the narrator thinks of the marriage as one of convenience, unable “to imagine what Fonstein and Sorella saw in each other when they were introduced….My tastes would have been more like Billy Rose” (p. 44). It takes a while for him to recognize Sorella’s intelligence and charm, in part because, as his father puts it, he’s a “spoiled American.” “Eastern European men had more sober standards,” the narrator admits, adding, “Your stoical forebears took their lumps in bed” (p. 44), a remark Billy Rose might have made. Soon, however, he recognizes that, though “technically she was a housewife,” none of the “things, or powers, or forces [of housewives] (for I see them as powers, or even spirits), could keep a woman like Sorella in subjection” (p. 56). “She was an ingenious and powerful woman who devised intricate, glittering, bristling, needling schemes” (p. 61). These schemes, like her strengths, are fully dramatized, unlike those of Clara Velde. Nor, as he gets to know her, is Sorella without physical attraction to the narrator. As was pointed out in chapter 2 of To Fame and Fortune, the narrator admires her neat ankles, small feet, and pleasant feminine voice. “She set her lady self before him, massively,” the narrator says. “The more I think of Sorella,” he later admits, “the more charm she has for me” (p. 68).63

  Bellow’s capacity to imagine a woman like Sorella may have been influenced by several real-life models, none like Sorella in appearance. In the late 1980s, directly after they were together at the centennial celebrations of the JPS in Philadelphia, he and Cynthia Ozick conducted a serious correspondence about the Holocaust, Israel, and the Jewish writer’s responsibilities. Ozick is among Bellow’s greatest admirers, describing her feelings for him as “something more than admiration, something closer to adoration.” They first corresponded when a poem of hers, “The Street Criers,” was published in Noble Savage, volume 2 (1960). Over the years, they met only very occasionally. “When I looked around you were gone, and I was greatly disappointed,” wrote Bellow after the JPS ceremony. “Our contacts make me think of a billiard game—one light touch and then we’re again at the opposite ends of the table….It always does me good to see you, and I think it’s time we met face to face for a conversation. Perhaps you and your husband would like to take in a Marlboro concert. If so, we could give you dinner and a night’s lodging.” Ozick was too shy to take up the offer (from the letter of May 18, 1988). “I never had the nerve to be a friend,” Ozick confessed in an interview. “There were invitations that might have led to [friendship] but I never felt equal to those invitations….I’m told that in writing I’m ferocious, but in life not.”

  In the early spring of 1988, as Bellow was revolving the themes of “A Jewish Writer in America,” Ozick wrote him a response to a letter of July 17, 1987, one she described as “the most elating I have ever had in my life.” This was the letter in which Bellow confessed his guilt at having been “too busy becoming a novelist to take note of what was happening in the Forties.” That the letter also praised and criticized Ozick’s writing (for its “virtuosity”) accounted in part for Ozick’s eight-month delay in replying, though ill-health played a part as well. In her reply, on March 22, 1988, Ozick mentions her reaction to Bellow’s foreword to The Closing of the American Mind. In that foreword, Bellow writes of his determination “to decide for myself to what extent my Jewish origins, my surroundings (the accidental circumstances of Chicago), my schooling, were to be allowed to determine the course of my life.” For Ozick, in contrast, as she writes in the March 22 letter, “it’s otherwise….I keep wanting to become my mother and father—day and night I long for my parents’ drugstore (may it be reconstituted in E
den!), and as I get older, I’m surprised now and again by the discovery of the music of their brains in my brain. I’m not any sort of runaway.” Elsewhere in the letter, Ozick fiercely defends Israel against its critics, “those who put the onus for progress entirely on Israel, as if the Arabs were some sort of impersonal force of nature from whom it would be foolish to expect fundamental human responsibility or accountability,” or for whom “the establishment of Israel was a ‘historic injustice.’ ” Ozick’s obvious intelligence and learning are as clear in her letters to Bellow as in her published writing. Together with the embrace of her Jewish heritage, and her willingness to take on Israel’s critics, she anticipates Sorella, just as Bellow’s acknowledged unwillingness to be determined by his Jewish heritage or to confront the Holocaust underlies his creation of the narrator in The Bellarosa Connection.

  Bellow sent Ozick galleys of The Bellarosa Connection with an inscription that scared her, since it said she would “instantly see” what he was up to (“Suppose I didn’t, couldn’t, wasn’t smart enough? But I saw, I saw”). Of Sorella (“I decided to pronounce her name not SorELLa, but as the Yiddish diminutive, SORella”), she wrote: “Oh, tremendous. One mourns her when her death is unveiled. She knows it all, and asks the question YOU are the only American novelist with the guts to ask.” This is the question about whether the Jews can “hold their ground” in America, or whether “the U.S.A. will be too much for them.” Of this question Ozick writes: “Answer: Broadway Billy Rose, in all his manifestations (including the universities).” As for the narrator, he is “ten times more ingenious” (as a fictional creation, she means): “The Memory Master, the baal-zikaron has attenuated all the old connections and in certain ways now begins to stand for America. ‘Half-Jewish, half-Wasp,’ in a mansion next door to the Biddles. A big American money-maker. But on memory! Memory isn’t an American commodity. In an ironic flash you put the Mnemosyne Institute practically on top of Independence Hall. (The closest thing America has got to a Mnemosyne Institute.)” The letter ends as unsentimentally as the novella, lamenting others who “made the Billy Rose connection. In one form or another. But without Billy Rose’s ‘spurt of feeling’ for his fellow Jews,” an absence that “scandalizes” Ozick. Bellow’s answer to this letter, on August 29, 1989, is the one where he tells of the Vermont visit of Hitchens and Amis and lets rip over Hitchens and other “Fourth Estate playboys.” In the same spirit, he writes that “the movement to assimilate [on the part of European Jews] coincided with the arrival of nihilism. The nihilism reached its climax with Hitler. The Jewish answer to the Holocaust was the creation of a state.” Enemies of this state are everywhere, but, then, “it’s so easy to make trouble for the Jews. Nothing easier. The networks love it, the big papers let it be made, there’s a receptive university population for which Arafat is Good and Israel is Bad, even genocidal.” These, of course, were and are Ozick’s views, as they are the views of Ruth Wisse and Janis, who are also like Sorella—in their Jewishness, their intelligence, and their fierce loyalties. “It’s like your family,” Wisse says of Israel. “You protect it instinctively and you don’t put it at risk….Janis and I share views very, very much. I don’t know the subjects we’d ever differed about.”