Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Roger had been an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and did graduate work in the Department of Theology. But he knew and was taught by a number of people in the Committee on Social Thought, and he and Bellow sometimes discussed them. What he remembered of Shils is that he was “fantastically brilliant and often very funny in a deadpan way.” He knew nothing of the chill between Shils and Bellow until Bellow told him of it. He admired Mircea Eliade, and in discussion with Bellow was upset to learn of Eliade’s support for the fascist Iron Guard in the 1930s and 1940s. There were lots of stories about Bloom. When Bloom came to Paris, flush from the success of The Closing of the American Mind, he and Roger saw a fair bit of each other. He was “like Groucho Marx,” Roger remembers, living in a palatial duplex apartment near the U.S. Embassy, excitedly showing off “the kinds of beds you see in French castles and Hollywood movies,” “the most ornate bathroom I had ever seen,” “the rustic kitchen with the latest equipment.” Roger noticed a copy of Plato’s Republic on a small table next to the bathtub. “You know, I always wanted to study business,” Bloom declared, “but there’s so much more money teaching philosophy. I couldn’t afford to pass it up.” When Roger was asked to host a Reader’s Digest dinner for Bloom, he and the guest of honor spent the evening cracking “outrageous jokes.” “Allan and I had an uproarious time,” Roger remembers, “but it was a disaster.” People thought they were making inside jokes. Bloom kept “talking with food in his mouth and spilling wine all over the place,” to the horror of the wife of Roger’s boss, a prim matron from a conservative Catholic family. “It was the beginning of my falling out of favor,” Roger believes. When he asked Bellow what Bloom thought of him, Bellow answered, “He was quite fond of you, about as fond as he could be of a young man who did not know Greek and did not study philosophy.”

  Bellow’s manner with Roger was avuncular, like Benn’s with Kenneth in More Die of Heartbreak. After Roger told him of a second awkward moment with the boss’s wife, Bellow urged caution. He also spoke respectfully of the Reader’s Digest, which surprised Roger. “You can’t be juvenile in an important job like this,” he recalls that Bellow warned him. “These people take their jobs seriously. They should, too. Don’t underestimate them or what they do.” Roger was struck again on this visit by how carefully Bellow chose his words, especially about Bloom, how level his tone was, how clearly expressed his opinions were. Janis also had advice for Roger—it was “not nice” to let colleagues think you were mocking them—advice Roger took seriously. “Janis is extremely sensitive about that. She had antennae that could detect the line between meanness and humor. She was really good at that.” Much of the advice Bellow gave Roger, or the support he offered him, concerned his problems with women. At the time of the Bellows’ stay in Paris, Roger owned an apartment on the Boulevard St-Michel. He also kept a small studio off the Rue de l’Ouest, a few blocks from the apartment Bellow and Janis had rented. He was now sleeping on a pull-out couch in the studio, having been kicked out of the other apartment by his second wife, Nancy, the mother of their son, Josh. During the Bellows’ stay, Nancy asked Roger to give them her phone number: “I thought about it for a while and gave it to Saul without comment. He did not comment either and did not call her.”

  On their first night in Paris, Roger took Bellow and Janis to dinner at a local Vietnamese restaurant, “for months the only place I ate at.” “I wouldn’t eat anywhere else, either,” said Bellow after their meal. The restaurant was a favorite of Roger’s current girlfriend, Rabia, who also lived in the neighborhood, and whom the Bellows, Janis in particular, would see much of in the coming months. Rabia, an Arab woman from Algeria, was a professor of sociology. The Bellows pumped Roger about her, “smiling as I hemmed and ah’ed.” He described her as “very cute…but ferocious when roused.” “I have no confidence in sociology Ph.D.s in general,” he added, “but she’s an exception.” He told them of her “crazy ideas about Zionism and international Jews. ‘La Juiverie internationale,’ she would say. But she said it with such heavy sarcasm that you knew it was complete and utter nonsense, she had just not figured out what else it was….She knew it was a lie but she did not know what the truth was.”

  Politics notwithstanding, Rabia and Janis became friends. The day after they met, Rabia walked over to Rue Raymond Losserand in the morning, and while Bellow read the International Herald Tribune, she told Janis which butchers to use in the neighborhood, where the better boulangerie was, which were the best wine stores and markets. Later, she took her to the marché découvert and pointed out the best stands. To illustrate what he liked about Rabia, Roger tells a story about his deafness, a characteristic shared by Kenneth in More Die of Heartbreak. “I always hated talking about myself,” he writes, “but I often met girls who wanted to know about me….Girls are nosy creatures, like spies and tabloid reporters.” Instead of describing himself, “both the public me or the private me,” or explaining his hearing problems, Roger sometimes told them to read Bellow’s novel, where “you’ll learn more about me than you ever could by listening to my evasions.” If a woman had no idea who Bellow was, or no interest in reading him, “I knew in advance our fling wasn’t going anywhere.” Rabia was no such woman. As for the deafness, “one of the things I liked about Rabia was that (in this she foreshadowed the African girls I successively fell in love with), she did not seem to give a hoot.”

  Roger was aware that the Bellows had a wider social life, “were taken to fancy places by Furet and whoever Furet delegated,” or by people Bellow knew “from way back and all over,” but his impression was that they preferred staying close to home, eating at L’Univers, or climbing the stairs to Rabia’s tiny apartment, where she served “something simple and delicious.” At 141 Rue Raymond Losserand, Bellow worked on the lectures he owed Furet and “the important work he was starting on Allan.” In the late afternoon, he and Roger sometimes met at a local café, while Janis and Rabia were “out carousing or shopping or having fun.” Roger suspects that Bellow had begun writing his book about Bloom, “but he had not figured it out yet. It seemed to me he was thinking about a memoir or a biography, or both together. But the event was close and I did not think he was ready to decide for sure what form this book would take.” (He heard nothing of Bellow’s two unfinished novels, “Case” and “Marbles.”) Janis’s memories of the Paris stay confirm Roger’s impression that simple pleasures were those that mattered: strolling, arm in arm, through the city, walking home at night after dinner without fear, an impossibility in Hyde Park. The Paris spring, with its little embedded holidays, was for Janis “the most free and enjoyable time of our lives.”

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  THE DANGERS OF HYDE PARK influenced the decision Bellow and Janis made to leave Chicago, a decision they arrived at in the months after Bloom’s death. In Paris, that spring, Bellow wrote to friends to say that he had finally agreed to take up John Silber’s offer to become a University Professor at Boston University.19 He and Janis would be returning to Chicago on May 17 to pack their belongings and move them to Vermont and Boston. John Silber had waited only a matter of weeks after Bloom’s death in October to approach Bellow with a new offer. Bellow took a while to reply, but on December 27, 1992, he wrote encouragingly. The offer was “splendid” and “generous,” the effect it had on him was to make “my whole life flash before me like the experience of the drowning.” There were, however, matters to consider:

  Problems of moving and resettlement arise. And then as I grow older I think of reducing the time spent in teaching.

  Since Boston and BU have a great many attractions, would it be possible to teach half-time? I could make the public appearances—I don’t mind those too much, and it would be agreeable to live in Brookline or the Back Bay. Would it be possible to find a teaching position for Janis? She has just gotten her Ph.D. while studying in the Committee on Social Thought. She taught college courses in political theory and also
in literature, and she would be ideally suited for your undergraduate Humanities program.

  Silber quickly dealt with these problems, offering Janis a job and Bellow a salary of $155,000 to teach two courses a year, both in the period from January to June, spring being mud season in Vermont.

  When the University of Chicago learned of Silber’s offer, it made efforts to match it. Robert Pippin’s understanding of these efforts, drawn “from those on the inside,” is that Hanna Gray, the president of the university, offered pretty much the same salary and teaching load, and that the only differences between the offers concerned secretarial help and the nature of the teaching position Janis would be given. On paper, the position offered her at BU looked better, though in the end, Pippin believes, it may not have been. Some observers thought that Hanna Gray could have been more accommodating, though her letters to Bellow, at least those I have seen, are warm and friendly. Bellow’s decision to accept Silber’s offer was communicated to Gray in a letter of April 25, 1993, from Paris. Although some friends suggested that he felt he had been neglected by the university, this is not what the letter suggests.20

  Dear Hanna,

  As of June 30th I am resigning from the University. This, after thirty years or more, makes my heart very heavy. I have always been happy in my situation and will always think of the Committee on Social Thought as my intellectual home. I shall miss my colleagues—David Grene, Nathan Tarcov, François Furet—and friends like the Kleinbards. My resignation is not due to any dissatisfaction with the University, which has shown me nothing but generosity.

  I feel that I must leave the city. It has become unendurably difficult. I am less and less able, at my age, to cope with the streets. So I have decided to end my life where it began, on the Eastern seaboard. I can get away from Boston to Vermont as often as I need to. After dinner I can walk without fear on the country roads. I hope to find as much intelligent conversation as I may require in my declining years.

  With thanks for your many kindnesses and best wishes for the future.

  Yours sincerely,

  Saul Bellow

  The same day, Bellow sent Jonathan Kleinbard a copy of the letter, along with a personal note describing it as “largely true. I can’t cope with Chicago. A month in Paris had brought back to me the life I knew in the past—free movement, peaceable crowds in parks….I don’t feel like breathing my last in the Maginot Line (5825, Apt 11E).” The note hints at other reasons for the decision. “Allan said to me, ‘You’re planning the moves you’ll make when I die.’ That was a bad moment for me, but he was right of course, and I was silent. But after a time I said, ‘Yes, but I’ll be catching up with you soon enough.’ He agreed with that and we went back to discussing the Bulls’ chances against the Knicks.” On May 24, after failing to persuade Bellow to stay, Hanna Gray wrote to say that she was “very sad that you are leaving.” Although “no one could understand better than I the attraction of being so close to Vermont…it is a great loss for your colleagues and for the University, and a real personal loss as well.” On May 12, David Grene wrote to express “great sorrow that you had at last decided on Boston,” and to assure Bellow that their friendship of over thirty years “won’t dissolve.” Nevertheless, “the joy in it gets diminished by not having the fruits of it, in the every-now-and-then lunches and the times at meetings of CST, and otherwise, when I could find you on my side. Not at all least when we taught together both in the old days, quite long ago, and in the last three or four years with Allan…Please give Janis my dear love and tell her that I will miss her bitterly also.”

  By May 24, the news of Bellow’s decision had reached the newspapers. Eugene Kennedy wrote an article about it in the Chicago Tribune headlined “Say It Isn’t So: Another Legend Leaves Chicago.” Two days later, in The Chicago Maroon, Richard Stern was quoted offering reasons for Bellow’s decision: the closeness of Boston to Vermont, a lighter teaching load, the effect of his recent stay in Paris. “These things are not defined,” he added. “You decide at a certain time of your life to move on. He’s a marvelous, unique man and we’ve been lucky to have him here, but maybe Boston should have a shot at him.”21 Before the decision, in a letter of April 24, Bette Howland emphasized the part Janis’s needs played in Bellow’s decision. “I’ve thought all along you should go to Boston, because, though your choices weren’t so clear, it seemed clearly better for Janis. That was good and sufficient reason, but there is more to it. The central question is making a life, now, for the two of you. I’ve seen your life in Chicago, and I’ve seen your life in Vermont, and Vermont is better,” a comparison, she admits, that’s not “entirely fair.” In Vermont, “Alexandra isn’t in the picture; there is something very satisfactory about the way things play out.—You built the house to appease a woman who couldn’t be appeased; now you have it to make another woman happy….Anyway, you will be doing this, whatever you do, because you want to make Janis happy; and the experience will be blessed.”

  In 1999, looking back on the decision at the age of eighty-four, Bellow offered Norman Manea other reasons for the move.

  When people asked me why are you leaving Chicago, I said because I can’t walk down the street any more without thinking of my Dead, and it was time. I had a girlfriend here or went to a party there or attended a meeting there and so forth. Most of the people whom I had known so well and loved so well were gone, and I didn’t want to be occupying a cemetery. Because that was how it was beginning to feel. There was also another angle. That is to say, I had become a cultural big shot in the town. I didn’t really like to play that role. I thought there was something very bad about it. I didn’t want to be idolized by people for whom I had no respect….Just didn’t want to play their game, to any degree. Because I knew them too well. So I thought, let’s have a new cast of characters.22

  By the time of this interview, David Peltz, Bellow’s oldest friend, had fallen out with him, for reasons that will be discussed in chapter 13. When asked by Atlas to explain Bellow’s move to Boston, Peltz offered exactly the opposite reason from the one Bellow gave to Manea: “fresh adoration.” Atlas also quotes the reaction of Bellow’s bookseller friend, Stuart Brent: “Who will you have to talk Yiddish with? Not those farshtinkener Goyim.”23 To which Bellow might have answered, Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish at Harvard, among others.

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  AT THE END OF MAY, over the Memorial Day weekend, Bellow attended the sixtieth reunion of the Tuley High School Class of 1933. After lunch, he gave a brief speech to 124 of his fellow graduates. The speech was in praise of their teachers. Bellow looked terrible, worn out from recent travels and the emotional and other difficulties associated with relocation. “It was Janis who actually moved us,” he wrote to John and Chantel Hunt on August 5, 1993, from Vermont. “I was spared the worst. My end of the deal was to keep anarchy from overwhelming us. I didn’t do at all well at my detail.” To Julian Behrstock, on August 18, Bellow confessed that he hadn’t fully appreciated his stay in Paris “until we arrived in Chicago on a particularly morne [dismal] afternoon, got into a taxi cab stinking like a latrine and plunged through the bungalow belt….I turned to Janis and said, ‘This ain’t Paris!’ ” In his short stay in Chicago, “I visited a few doctors.” He and Janis flew to Boston directly after the Tuley reunion, then drove to Vermont. Two weeks later, Janis returned to Chicago to complete the move. Then they set about finding a place to live near BU, a process that Bellow says took “a few months.” “Under such circumstances one doesn’t get much work done.” In addition to news, the letter to Behrstock conveys warm feelings. Behrstock was one more person Bellow was determined to keep from “the warehouse of intentions.” “Although I have always enjoyed your company,” he wrote, “our recent encounters moved me very much. I thought that I already knew how gently, quietly intelligent you were. Well, you were even more so this time. Or maybe we feel these things more as we grow old
er.”

  Shortly after Bellow’s arrival in Vermont, he received a letter of June 4 from Nathan Tarcov, in his capacity as chair of the Committee on Social Thought, formally extending “the invitation I made to you last week.” He asked Bellow to return to Chicago for a week next autumn, perhaps in November, to give an informal two or three seminars to Committee students on “some short text you would like to talk about with us. It would surely be the highpoint of the Committee’s year, give your many friends in the Committee a chance to see you, and help us all to take your departure as less of a rupture.” Bellow accepted the invitation, and returned to Chicago early in November, when he also unveiled the bust of himself that Mayor Daley had promised to commission and install in the recently opened Harold Washington Library Center, the main Chicago public library. Two hundred people attended the unveiling ceremony, over which the mayor presided. Bellow approved the bust, but joked that he was “sorry Picasso wasn’t around to do one of me with two noses. For one nose, it’s fine.”24 He then flew on to the University of Iowa, where he lectured to Frank Conroy’s writing group, and to Toronto, where he and Janis visited her parents, and he delivered the convocation address at the University of Toronto.

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