Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  In the extract, Staples sketches the plot of Humboldt’s Gift and describes it as “cast as a farce.” Then he says, “The novel ceases to be a farce when a black man steps out of the shadows and with no motive slits a white woman’s throat. Black people in the novel were sinister characters. Rinaldo [Cantabile, “a would-be mafiosi”] refers to them as ‘crazy buffaloes’ and ‘pork chops.’ Crazy buffaloes populate the slums around Hyde Park. A pork chop chases Charlie down the middle of his street, presumably at night. These passages made me angry. It was the same anger I felt when white people cowered as I passed them in the street.” As Staples knows, and documents in the extract, and as early chapters of this book have made clear, Hyde Park in the 1970s was a dangerous place, with many instances of assault, theft, and murder, crimes mostly perpetrated by young African Americans from the surrounding neighborhoods. As for “crazy buffaloes” and “pork chops,” a character like Rinaldo Cantabile would hardly refer to the perpetrators of these crimes as “African Americans” or “Negroes” or even “blacks” (certainly without an accompanying profanity); “crazy buffaloes” and “pork chops” are uncomplimentary, but they are already concessions to liberal opinion. It is hardly unfair or inaccurate or racist of Bellow to have imagined as black the perpetrators of seemingly motiveless assaults and street crimes in Hyde Park. Nevertheless, Staples’s anger is understandable. There are no counterbalancing black characters in the novel (though neither are there any admirable Italian Americans to counterbalance Cantabile), and little is said of the discriminatory practices that help to create these crimes, practices outlined in earlier passages from the Staples extract.

  Matters are more complicated in the case of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, where questions of race figure centrally. For Staples, as for many readers, the novel’s “most vivid description,” that of the black pickpocket’s penis (discussed in chapter 2 of this book), returns “again and again as a symbol of spiritual decay, of the ‘sexual niggerhood’ that ‘millions of civilized people’ had deluded themselves into wanting.” Given the anger and hurt the description produced in Staples, it is striking that he not only went on to read a third Bellow novel, but that he found in it something like a portrait of his world. The novel was Dangling Man, which “captured it all: the chrysalis character of graduate school. The idleness and sterility of Hyde Park. The vast emptiness of the wintertime streets. The ice clinging to the gutters in spring, and the desperate longing for warmth. This novel was the ground beneath my feet.”

  The conflicted nature of Staples’s feelings about Bellow is nowhere more obvious than in the extract’s most controversial passages. “I felt for Bellow what the young Charlie Citrine had felt for Von Humboldt Fleisher. I envied his luck, his talent and his fame. I wanted to be near him—but not too near. His sentiments about black people made me wary. So did the way he dissected you with his eyes.” That young Charlie Citrine envied Humboldt “his luck, his talent, and his fame” we learn midway through the novel’s first paragraph; by the end of the paragraph, envy and wariness fall away. “Humboldt was very kind. He introduced me to people in the Village and got me books to review. I always loved him.” Young Staples wants to get close to Bellow, as Citrine wants to get close to Humboldt, but he also wants to punish Bellow. When Staples learns that Bellow’s apartment at 5825 Dorchester overlooks his running route, “I envisioned him looking down at the lone runner trudging along. I raised my arm and waved.”

  The wave is not altogether friendly. On evening walks, Staples makes it a point to pass Bellow’s building. The nearby intersection at Fifty-Ninth and Dorchester “was the dark stretch of sidewalk where I had played the cruelest innings of Scatter the Pigeons.” This game was invented as a form of revenge. Staples explains:

  I liked walking at night. I found the quadrangles tranquil and beautiful after dark, the turrets and towers lit by the autumn moon. At night, the quiet beauty was mine alone. If I had attended the official tours and lectures of orientation week, perhaps I’d have found out why. People were frightened of crime, and with good reason.

  Initially, when encountering others at night, Staples would smile reassuringly. Then he realized, “I’d been grinning good evening at people who were frightened to death of me. I did violence to them by just being….I kept walking at night, but from then on I paid attention. I became expert in the language of fear….It occurred to me for the first time that I was big. I was 6 feet 1½ inches tall and my long hair made me look bigger.”35 In addition to smiling reassuringly, Staples took to whistling Beatles tunes or Vivaldi, which had a similarly calming effect. Then one night, for reasons he didn’t understand, he stopped smiling and whistling. A couple was walking toward him, laughing and talking. As he approached them, they grew silent. Instead of giving way, he headed straight at them, forcing them to separate to avoid walking into him. “A few steps beyond them I stopped and howled with laughter. I came to call this game ‘Scatter the Pigeons.’ ”

  A security gate and steps separate visitors from 5825 Dorchester. When Staples fantasized about confronting Bellow, he wished he could do so at the base of the building, “because there were shadows there to linger in.” What exactly he’d do in such a confrontation he was not sure. “Perhaps I’d lift him bodily and pin him against a wall. Perhaps I’d corner him on the stairs and take up questions about ‘pork chops’ and ‘crazy buffaloes’ and barbarous black pickpockets. I wanted to trophy his fear.” After several months of what he calls “stalking,” Staples finally spotted Bellow twenty yards ahead of him at Fifty-Eighth and Dorchester, “a little man in an overcoat, hurrying along the sidewalk.” He could have caught up with Bellow if he’d run, but “the game was to wait for a chance to place me squarely between the tower [what he calls Bellow’s building] and him. That way, he’d have to face me in the dark. This was not to be the night. He threw back a glance, wisps of white hair flying, then picked up his pace. He showed surprising bounce getting up the stairs. When I reached the tower, I saw only his shoe disappearing through the gate.”36

  Bellow was outraged when he read this description of his scurrying to safety, and he even had Walter Pozen call the Times to threaten suit. The effects of the extract, when combined a month later with Kazin’s article, were rapid. On March 13, Bellow delivered the opening remarks at the annual Literary Lights Award fund-raising dinner for the Boston Public Library, the oldest free municipal library in the United States. He himself had received one of its awards. As Harriet Wasserman recalls in her memoir, “Preceding the ceremony by days was a column in the Boston Globe that began by stating that the chairman of the Literary Lights Committee had been asked to uninvite Saul as honored guest.” According to the column, this request had been “prompted” by the Staples and Kazin articles.37 After other such incidents were brought to Bellow’s attention, he decided to respond. On March 10, three days after the Kazin article, he published an op-ed piece in the Times defending himself against accusations of racism. The title the Times gave the piece was “Papuans and Zulus.” Bellow’s decision to write the piece is explained in a letter of May 31 to Milton Hindus of Brandeis:

  My “awful” remarks about the Zulus had gone out on the networks, nationwide. MacNeil and Lehrer had asked Camille Paglia whether I wasn’t a racist. All garbage, of course…And yet one should step up to the plate every now and then and try for a homer. So my black friend Stanley Crouch opined (do you know his essays?) and so when Brent Staples went after me in the Times a few months ago, Crouch advised me to pick up my bat and step forward.

  The key point Bellow makes in his defense in the op-ed piece is that the quotation about Papuans and Zulus was taken out of context. It was made, he claims, in the course of a telephone interview with a journalist (“I can’t remember who the interviewer was”) and in reference to “the distinction between literate and preliterate societies.” Kazin’s heart sank when he read the remark in Atlas’s profile of Bloom, Bellow implies, because there it loo
ks like “an insult to Papuans and Zulus, and…a proof that I was at best insensitive and at worst an elitist, a reactionary and a racist—in a word, a monster.” In Kazin’s article, the remark is recalled in a similarly damaging context, that of Bellow’s “moving right…like many Jewish intellectuals from the immigrant working class.” No mention is made in either Kazin’s article or Atlas’s of the distinction between literate and preliterate cultures. Atlas remembers no such distinction being made by Bellow during their interview; the “Zulu” remark, he felt, was an allusion to the growing “culture war” debate.38 In his op-ed piece, Bellow says nothing of Atlas’s profile of Bloom, though it is hard to believe that he hadn’t remembered it. As was reported in chapter 8, he told Atlas he had read and liked it; he said the same to his son Adam. It is possible that, when writing the op-ed piece, he had some other interview in mind—a telephone interview—in which he made the remark while distinguishing between literate and preliterate societies. I have found no such interview.39 In the op-ed piece, Bellow explains why it would have been natural for him to have made such a distinction: “I was once an anthropology student…a pupil of the famous Africanist M. J. Herskovits, who also devoted many decades to the study of the American Negro.” In fact, “immediately after the telephone interview I remembered that there was a Zulu novel after all: ‘Chaka’ by Thomas Mofolo, published in the early 30’s. In my Herskovits days, I had read it in translation. It was a profoundly, unbearably tragic book about a tribal Achilles.”

  Bellow’s critics had a field day with his remark, taking it, as he says in the op-ed piece, as signifying “contempt for multiculturalism and defamation of the third world. I am an elderly white male—a Jew, to boot. Ideal for their purposes.” He reminds readers, “Nowhere in print, under my name, is there a single reference to Papuans or Zulus.” He insists that the remark, in what he claims was its original context—a claim Atlas disputes—was neither contemptuous nor defamatory in intent: “It is no slander to describe a people as preliterate.” Although he implies he was not alluding to the culture wars when making the remark, in defending it he implicitly supports Bloom’s position. “Preliterate societies have their own kinds of wisdom, no doubt, and primitive Papuans probably have a better grasp of their myths than most educated Americans have of their own literature. But without years of study we can’t begin to understand a culture very different from our own.” Nor can it simply be assumed that we understand our own culture. “The literacy of which we are so proud often amounts to very little. You may take the word of a practicing novelist for it that not all novel readers are good readers….Besides, as we all know, certain forms of literacy are decidedly repulsive.”

  Bellow does not name his critics. He does, however, venture the opinion that “many…could not locate Papua New Guinea on a map.” He might also have pointed out that he had been a student of preliterate cultures throughout his life, not just at university. At the time he was writing “All Marbles Still Accounted For,” a work begun before December 16, 1987, the date Atlas says he heard him make the remark about Papuans and Zulus. “Marbles” was to be partly set in New Guinea, about which, as we shall see, Bellow had been reading widely, particularly among anthropological studies. In addition to naming no critics, Bellow makes no explicit reference to accusations of racism in his fiction. What he does say, perhaps with Staples in mind, is that “the ground rules of the art of fiction are not widely understood. No writer can take for granted that the views of characters will not be attributed to him personally.” He ends the op-ed piece by likening his unnamed critics to “thought-police” and “Stalinists.” Nothing controversial or jokey is permitted today, all is “righteousness and rage.” “As a onetime anthropologist, I know a taboo when I see one. Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists.”

  In the week in which Bellow’s op-ed piece appeared, Sarah Lyall referred to it in a “Book Notes” column in The New York Times Book Review.40 Bellow “seemed to feel quite put upon,” she notes. Staples, her colleague, “finds himself under attack, too, both for his account of following Mr. Bellow and for his views, which he says are misunderstood. (The New Republic called him a ‘political corrector.’)”41 Staples points out that his memoir contains “page after page of laudatory examinations of the guy’s work. Nowhere did I mean to imply that his work was any less brilliant for the flaws I found in it.” When Staples accuses Bellow of “being a bit sensitive,” he does so, Lyall points out, “oddly enough, in the same way Mr. Bellow himself condemned in his recent Op-Ed piece.” Staples concedes that there’s “room for discussion” over the extent to which “an author is responsible for the opinions of his characters,” but he also says, somewhat incoherently, that it “just shows how far gone we are that every discussion of race quickly generates [degenerates?] into a discussion of character.”

  Three days after Lyall’s piece appeared, on March 19, Bellow wrote to his friend George Walden, who had sent him the draft of an article provisionally titled “A Non-Interview with Saul Bellow.” In the article, Walden discusses the Papuans-and-Zulus quote, which he calls “rash”:

  Was he sorry he said it? No, because it’s true. Not that he despises primitive cultures: he read anthropology at University (later even a Zulu novel, Achaka) and shares the universal attraction to simple truths. But he has an uncomplicated truth of his own: that the greatest cultures accrete over millennia—the writing, the music, the cities. This, he implies (he dislikes cultural big talk) is the soil we should be tilling and planting now.

  Bellow’s response to this passage was to correct the name of the Zulu novel; to amend the third sentence by adding, after “primitive cultures,” “of course primitive societies have their arts and their wisdom”; and to add a concluding sentence: “And in the West the books are under attack” (he might also have cut the parenthesis about disliking cultural big talk). Perhaps the most welcome letter he received about the controversy was written by Melville Herskovits’s daughter, Jean, a professor of African history and politics, who had recently visited the State Department to discuss African affairs. The “Papuans and Zulus” article had just appeared, and “all through that day and the next…at the State Department, on the Hill, even at the Pentagon, and meals with friends, including some who work at AID [Agency for International Development] on matters nearly Papuan and others who are journalists, your piece was resonating and they were cheering.” Once she was back in New York, a Nigerian friend, an ex-soldier and minister, asked her to “convey his applause.”

  The op-ed piece did Bellow little good, even among the minority who read it carefully. For Hilton Kramer, on the right, Bellow’s claim that the “Papuans and Zulus” remark was made in reference to the distinction between literate and preliterate cultures “is such a transparent copout—such an egregious attempt to by-pass the explosive subject of multiculturalism—that one feels embarrassed on his behalf.”42 In answering his attackers, Bellow “never really engages the central charge that Brent Staples and Alfred Kazin have brought against him, which has little, if anything, to do with distinctions between literate and preliterate cultures.” This is not fair, or not quite fair, given what Bellow implies when he speaks of the difficulty of understanding preliterate cultures or the ignorance of supposedly literate Westerners. Still, Kramer has a point. It takes some unpacking to get to Bellow’s position on multiculturalism in the op-ed piece, which suggests to Kramer that he, too, was “fearful of the cultural ostracism that awaits the writer today, no matter how famous, who goes into battle against the radicalization of our culture.”43 Fearfulness or uneasiness may also underlie Bellow’s description of himself as attacked for “a remark I was alleged to have made.” But he did make the remark. “Alleged” is bound to raise doubts, the sort raised by his claim not to remember to whom the remark was made or to mention its appea
rance in Atlas’s profile of Bloom.

  It is hard to believe that when Bellow made the Papuans-and-Zulus remark—and when he read it in Atlas’s article—he was unaware of what it sounded like. It was meant to be funny, but it was also meant to provoke. Herschel Shawmut might have said something like this, or Albert Corde in The Dean’s December. Twelve years before the op-ed piece, Bellow has Corde make a similar remark, with disastrous consequences. In conversation with his journalist friend Dewey Spangler, Corde says: “Some professors work hard….Most of them do. But a professor when he gets tenure doesn’t have to do anything. A tenured professor and a welfare mother with eight kids have much in common.” In the next sentence we read, “The damage that these sentences would do was as clear as the print itself” (p. 303); Dewey Spangler prints the sentences, and Corde is forced by his provost to resign. “Read charitably,” Robert Pippin claims, Bellow’s Papuans-and-Zulus remark “didn’t say anything all that controversial. It was more the way he said it.” The way he said it derived from contempt not for preliterate societies or third-world countries but for thought-police, verbal hygienists.

  It may also owe something to anger at the black anti-Semitism discussed in the previous chapter. In his biography of Bellow, in the course of discussing the Papuans-and-Zulus remark, Atlas quotes Richard Stern on Bellow’s “obsession with black-Jewish relations….He couldn’t leave it alone.” Bellow deeply resented the anti-Jewish remarks made by African American politicians and commentators in Chicago in the late 1980s. To others of his friends, according to Atlas, Bellow complained that the city of Chicago gave black workers preferential treatment. Again, these complaints were spoken, not written, a distinction Bellow invokes in his defense. But the Papuans-and-Zulus remark was made to a journalist who was embarked on his biography.