Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

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  BLOOM’S HAPPY RETURN to Chicago for the belated birthday party was soon followed by debilitating illness. He was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological disease that causes paralysis and atrophy. The initial onset of the disease almost killed him, wrecking his body, leaving his limbs stick-thin. He was bedridden for months, had to relearn to walk, and never regained full use of his hands. On December 3, 1990, Bellow wrote to John Auerbach about Bloom’s condition and its effect on those close to him. “Since he has no wife, no children, no one to take care of him but his friends, Janis and I would run back to Chicago from San Antonio, Montreal, Miami, etcetera as often as possible. For a while he was in mortal danger. He’s better now. His chances for recovery are good. He may be able to walk again.” By December 30, writing to Martin Amis, Bellow was less sanguine. He and Janis had planned to spend the winter quarter, from February to May, in Paris, where Bellow would be loosely connected to the Centre des Recherches Politiques Raymond Aron, a research branch of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He had been invited by the historian François Furet, the center’s founder, who spent every autumn at the University of Chicago and had recently joined the Committee on Social Thought from the Department of History.2 The trip to Paris was canceled. “Our friend Bloom has for some months been down with the paralyzing Guillain-Barré syndrome, and we can make no travel plans until we know whether the paralysis is temporary. Or not. He’s making progress but there won’t be any holidays until we’ve seen him through.” A month later, on January 29, 1991, Bellow wrote to his old friend Julian Behrstock with no better news: “We couldn’t possibly take a holiday in Paris under the circumstances.”

  Although Bloom never fully recovered his health, for a few months he was able to return to his normal routine, or much of it. He taught seminars, held reading groups, and kept up with politics and debates over higher education. Clifford Orwin, his student at Cornell and his colleague at Toronto, who was in Chicago for most of 1992, was impressed with the way Bloom fought to keep up appearances. “As he had always done, he welcomed countless visitors and spent hours on the telephone with friends, many of them his former students.” He also worked steadily to complete a book he had contracted with Simon & Schuster, for which Harriet Wasserman had secured a large advance. The book was Love & Friendship (1993), described by Orwin as “the work for which he wanted most to be remembered.”3 All the novels and plays discussed in the book were ones Bloom had taught with Bellow over the preceding twelve years. On its posthumous acknowledgments pages, his executors, Nathan Tarcov and Hillel G. Fradkin, report that Bloom “often remarked upon how much he learned about them from this experience.”

  Love & Friendship was dictated in its entirety to Tim Spiekerman, a student at the Committee and an Olin Fellow. Spiekerman wrote his dissertation under Bloom and Bellow and took on part-time jobs for both men. For much of Bloom’s last year, he spent mornings with him on the book, staying on for lunch. “Every afternoon,” Spiekerman recalls, Bellow would come over to visit. The work Spiekerman did for Bellow was office correspondence. So voluminous was this correspondence that “I found myself becoming rather protective. There were lots of requests to sign petitions, which I rarely passed on.” Spiekerman had first encountered Bellow as a teacher in a joint Bellow-Bloom seminar on Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Bloom was “more dynamic,” “the superior teacher,” but he treated Bellow respectfully, as “the one in the room who had actually made great literature.” Spiekerman was surprised to find Bellow “rather shy,” both in and out of class; what did not surprise him was his “quick and astute” judgment of people.4

  On several occasions when Bellow and Janis were away, Spiekerman looked after the apartment at 5825 Dorchester. In the bedroom, he noticed a full bookshelf devoted to the works of Rudolf Steiner and his followers. This interest of Bellow’s “infuriated” Bloom. “If he has to dabble in mysticism,” Spiekerman remembers Bloom complaining, “why not Jewish mysticism?”5 Bloom, though, “adored” Bellow, and Bellow “went out of his way on a couple of occasions to tell me how smart and thoughtful Allan was.” To Spiekerman, the relationship between the two men fed Bloom’s intellectual interest in friendship. Bellow appears twice in Love & Friendship, both times briefly. In a chapter on Madame Bovary, Bloom recalls: “Once in class I said, with a rhetorical flourish, that all nineteenth-century novels were about adultery. A student objected that she knew some which were not. My co-teacher, Saul Bellow, interjected, ‘Well, of course, you can have a circus without elephants.’ ” In a chapter on Romeo and Juliet, Bloom claims that, with the possible exception of Tybalt, everybody in the play “is nice, and there are no villains. Good intentions are to be found everywhere and one cannot help remembering Saul Bellow’s firm, ‘The Good Intentions Paving Company.’ ”6

  Bloom’s relative recovery lasted until December 1991, when, according to Orwin, he suffered “a sudden and nearly fatal onset of acute diabetes.” From this setback he again recovered, and again sought to resume normal activities.7 He then suffered a perforated ulcer and liver failure, and rallied only briefly. He died on October 7, 1992, almost two years from the initial diagnosis of Guillain-Barré syndrome. Throughout his ordeal, Bloom was nursed by his partner, Michael Z. Wu, and attended by a host of friends and students. Bellow, in particular, “was my salvation.”8 In Ravelstein, Bloom’s end is controversially fictionalized (it will be discussed in chapter 12). What Wu remembers of Bloom’s death was how “impressive” it was: “He was not frightened at all….He was very, very clear-minded. He really didn’t care, in a way. He was not trying to prove anything. He was trying to finish his book; he was just too weak. He did what he had to do till the end. A serious person.” What Orwin remembers of Bloom’s final months is somewhat different. “The last thing he would have wanted was for me to depict him as J.-L. David painted Socrates, all noble gesture and moral uplift. He feared death as much as (and loved life more than) the next man, but he faced it squarely. He wanted his friends around him, and he wanted to prepare them for the worst, but he also wanted to make this as easy for them as possible. For a man who had so many books in his head and who had taught them so eloquently, a signal achievement of his last months was that he never struck an edifying note.”9

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  BELLOW WAS “HAMMERED FLAT” by Bloom’s death.10 He was also softened by it, though there had been signs of softening earlier. In February 1992, during a period of remission for Bloom, he and Janis flew to the University of Florida, where he had agreed to participate in its annual Writers Festival. On the evening of February 21, Bellow gave a half-hour reading from Humboldt’s Gift (Citrine’s visit to Humboldt’s “rural slum”) to an audience of nine hundred. He left directly after the reading, without answering questions or signing autographs, though that evening he briefly attended a reception in his honor at a local writers’ hangout. The next morning, he spent an hour answering questions from a smaller gathering of students, and returned to Chicago later in the day. He was paid sixty-five hundred dollars for the two-day visit. The invitation had been issued by the novelist Padgett Powell, whose work Bellow admired. Powell, the director of the creative writing program at Florida, hosted a dinner for the Bellows the night before the reading in a downtown Gainesville restaurant. Among those at the dinner was Andrew Gordon, who had last seen the Bellows at the Haifa conference five years earlier, when Bellow had struck him as uncomfortable and standoffish.

  At the dinner in Gainesville, Bellow’s behavior was quite different. “He was hospitable and gracious,” Gordon writes, “showing a side of him I had not seen at the conference.” At the question-and-answer session the next morning, Bellow patiently answered queries from graduate students and faculty in the Department of English. Gordon describes him as “in fine form, relaxed but sharp and witty.”11 Many of his comments concerned aging, a sense that “life i
s running a lot thinner now.” He also stressed the prominence of early memories in his work, nowhere more so than in “Something to Remember Me By” and The Bellarosa Connection, his most recent writings (reprinted the previous autumn, along with A Theft, in a single volume entitled Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales). Early memories mattered to Bellow for the reasons they mattered to Wordsworth: because they come from the period when one is most alive or awake, and because they concern individuals (recent Jewish immigrants in Montreal and Chicago) who, like the rural inhabitants of Wordsworth’s poems, “had not yet been pressed into shape by the forces of modern life.”12 There was a new openness in Bellow’s answers. In talking about The Bellarosa Connection, he gave the impression, to Gordon at least, “that he felt he had done the same thing to some people in his life that the elderly narrator had done….Like the narrator, Bellow judges himself harshly because he has a tendency to put people in storage, to place them in a ‘mental warehouse’ and assume he is intimate with them but not have to deal with them further. ‘If he loved them, then how could he find it in his heart to check them in his locker and lose the key? When he tries to find these people he loves so much, they’ve all been filed away. If you live long enough, you’ll do this to people. You say “Yes, I’ve got them inside me.” ’ ”

  Bellow increasingly sought to counter his tendency to lose touch with people, both those he loved and those he liked or admired. After he left Chicago for Boston, he received a note from Tim Spiekerman asking for a reference. Bellow readily agreed and produced a glowing letter. He also wrote Spiekerman a personal letter, the quiet tone of which may owe something to their shared connection with Bloom. The letter is dated July 26, 1993.

  Dear Tim,

  There are not many Chicago people whom I miss, but somewhat to my surprise you are one of that small number. I say to my surprise because our relations were never intimate. If anything they were on the cool side, but as I am increasingly aware they were not as cool as they seemed. Behind the formal style adopted by both of us I sensed a good deal of thoroughly concealed warmth in you as well as a considerable gift for clear thought and expression. If you can be lured away from your defenses and give out a bit I am convinced that a significant number of people will sit up and take notice. For one reason or another I didn’t reply as I should have done to the letter you wrote two or three years ago, but it’s not too late now I feel for us to begin to level with each other.

  As a for a letter of recommendation, I am only too glad to write one and to work in what to my certain knowledge Bloom would have said in his letter of recommendation about you.

  All best,

  Saul

  A similar example of softening or mellowing can be seen in Bellow’s relations with his colleagues at the Committee on Social Thought. By the end of the 1980s, the Committee was in a bad way. Its members had been unable to agree on new faculty for almost a decade. Bloom and Leszek Kołakowski, the philosopher and historian of Marxism, were its most recent members, Bloom in 1979 and Kołakowski in 1981. So exercised was the dean of social sciences about the Committee’s failure to hire anyone that he raised the possibility of shutting it down if it failed to agree to recruit four or five new members from within the university and two from without. It was then agreed that François Furet would join the Committee from the Department of History and be appointed chair, even though he would continue to spend only the autumn quarter in Chicago, ten weeks a year. The other internal appointments agreed on were the anthropologist and linguist Paul Friedrich, the historian Mark Kishlansky (who was poached by Harvard almost as soon as he joined), the theologian David Tracy, and Nathan Tarcov. The external appointments were two philosophers, Robert Pippin and Jonathan Lear. Ralph Lerner was appointed co-chair, to conduct meetings and arrange Committee business during the quarters when Furet was in Paris; in 1991, Lerner was succeeded as co-chair by Tarcov.

  Tarcov attributes the Committee’s failure to hire anyone in the 1980s in part to Edward Shils. Although Shils was “always very nice to me, very encouraging,” to others he could be “ferocious and rude.” “Unlike most of us, if he didn’t think well of people he didn’t feel obligated to treat them with courtesy or respect, or just to ignore them. It was unusual enough for me to note it.” Tarcov remembers one occasion on which a job candidate, a sociologist, was brought to Chicago at Shils’s suggestion to give a talk to the Committee. She was regarded as Shils’s candidate. “When she spoke, he tore her apart, in a humiliating way, and opposed her appointment. No wonder we weren’t making appointments.” By 1990, Tarcov believes, Shils “had no allies, though some people, including Wheatley [Paul Wheatley, the chair before Furet], were clearly afraid of him,” which made them equivalent to allies, “as we know from great power politics.”

  Shils’s waning influence, and Furet’s abilities as chair, meant that Committee business became less contentious. Tarcov remembers the first meetings he attended in 1990 as “rather congenial.” Bellow, an obvious power because of his eminence, was “charming and witty,” with “an ironic gleam,” “a certain remove.” His association with Bloom could not have been closer, and Bloom not only had great influence, because of the Olin money, but also managed to get on with everyone, including left-leaning members of the Committee (James Redfield, Wendy Doniger), as well as Shils. As Tarcov puts it, Bellow was surrounded by “many friends, Allan, François, Ralph Lerner, myself. I didn’t see the Iron Age. What I saw was a period when he was rather comfortable.” This was an impression shared by Robert Pippin, who would eventually take over from Furet as chair. He remembers Bellow as quiet during the several job talks he gave before joining the Committee but easy and welcoming at subsequent dinners. The Committee had been looking for years for someone who wrote on and could teach Hegel and Nietzsche and Heidegger. After coming close to hiring the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who accepted the post but then withdrew, the Committee turned to Pippin, a much younger man. Pippin accepted on condition that the appointment be approved by the Department of Philosophy, with which he wished also to be affiliated. He had come from the University of California at San Diego, where he was chair of the Department of Philosophy, and it was assumed that at some point he would become chair of the Committee.

  Pippin and Tarcov were both born in 1948, and this constituted something of a generational change for the Committee. “They hadn’t hired anyone our age virtually ever,” Pippin believes. At a time of great interest in French and German theory in American universities, Pippin was much in demand, for he knew the primary texts that influenced Derrida and Foucault (texts by Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche) “better than anyone in the Committee or the English Department.” His courses were very popular (they are still), and his approach to the philosophers he writes and lectures about is acceptable to those who are wary of Continental philosophy and the use to which it is put by “theorists.” Bellow’s de haut en bas attitude to theory is seen in a letter of October 27, 1994, to Huston Smith, a professor of religious studies at Berkeley (a former colleague of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert): “My own view of the questions raised by Derrida and company is that they don’t really need to be raised and that the incredulity of sophisticated theorists does not concern me very much.” Yet Bellow approved Pippin. As did Edward Shils. In the winter quarter of his first year at the Committee, Pippin taught a course on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. “Shils came to every class, staring at me for fifty minutes, never said a word.” When the course was over, Shils told Pippin, “The approach you used was the right one.”

  Bellow’s relations with Pippin were not without tension. From the start, Pippin made it clear that he thought that students at the Committee should be accredited by traditional departments as well as by the Committee; that their Ph.D.s should be issued jointly. As a consequence, most doctoral candidates would need to satisfy coursework requirements from outside the Committee. In the case of the Department of Philosophy, “the most
conservative of the departments we deal with,” Committee students were required to take its courses for two years. Pippin concedes that this was a high price to pay, and that some Committee students might end up taking very few Committee courses. He thought that joint degrees would help Committee students find better jobs, and in doing so they would help the Committee to recruit better students. “Our students weren’t getting good jobs,” he recalls, and if the trend continued, enrollment would suffer. Few top universities and colleges hired applicants from interdepartmental programs, and it would be “professional suicide” to allow Committee graduates to be disadvantaged in this way.

  Bellow did not agree, nor did Bloom, though it was Bellow who made the case against joint degrees to Pippin. This was because, a week after Pippin moved to Chicago to take up his post, in August 1992, “Bloom went into a tailspin, went into the hospital, and never came out.” Pippin had long admired Bellow, who was “an important writer to me since high school. I was pretty much in awe of him and he was very nice to me…never indicating anything other than enthusiastic support.” When Pippin’s advocacy of joint degrees became known, however, Bellow intervened: “One day Saul came to my office.” Although it might be true, Bellow admitted, that Committee students weren’t getting the jobs they merited, “we ought to respect the choice they made when they came to the Committee.” Pippin stuck to his guns, “but I could tell that he was very disappointed.” Soon he began hearing that Bellow had voiced his disappointment to others. When told this was happening, Pippin recalls, “I’d always say how sad I was.” Shortly before Bellow left Chicago for Boston University, however, in the spring of 1993, he wrote Pippin “a little note.” This note Pippin has lost, but he remembers its gist: “I understand you think I’m disappointed with your hire. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m very glad we hired you. I’m very glad you’re here.”