Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  6. Clifford Orwin, in “Remembering Allan Bloom,” American Scholar, vol. 62, no. 3 (Summer 1993), describes Bloom’s reaction to an attempt in 1974 on the part of “some New Leftists” at the University of Toronto physically to prevent a distinguished visitor from speaking. “In fielding a question about the dramatic character of the Republic, he spoke more movingly than ever about the rarity of the kind of discussion reported therein. He talked of how in times of darkness and crisis for Athens, a few people had gathered to consider the timeless issues of politics, of how the trial of Socrates cast its long shadow over the conversation, and how we must cherish and defend the opportunities for such discussions that the university afforded us today.”

  7. This account of the Cornell student revolt derives from Rossiter, and also from George Lowery, “A Campus Takeover That Symbolized an Era of Change,” Cornell Chronicle, 22 May 2016; and Donald Alexander Downs, Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (1999; Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2012). For Sowell’s remark about the protesters, see Thomas Sowell, “The Day Cornell Died,” Hoover Digest, 30 November 1999.

  8. Nathan Tarcov, “The Last Four Years at Cornell,” Public Interest, vol. 13 (1968).

  9. According to Nicholas Lemann, “The Republicans: A Government Waits in the Wings,” Washington Post, 27 May 1980, most of the so-called neoconservatives who worked for Ronald Reagan, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Eugene Rostow, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, and Douglas Feith, “have one problem: most of them are registered Democrats.”

  10. Allan Bloom, “Western Civ,” in Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960–1990 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 17; Bloom blames the misattribution on “the fact that I am also not in any current sense a liberal, although the preservation of liberal society is of central concern to me.”

  11. Orwin, “Remembering Allan Bloom.”

  12. Ibid.

  13. Bloom, “Western Civ,” p. 14.

  14. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 25.

  15. Mark Lilla, “Leo Strauss: The European,” New York Review of Books, 21 October 2004, part 1 of a two-part omnibus review of books about Strauss and his influence.

  16. See Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, p. 73: “Rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire—not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored….Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse. That is why Ravel’s Bolero is the one piece of classical music that is commonly known and liked by them.”

  17. Harriet Wasserman, Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow (New York: Fromm International, 1997), p. 137.

  18. Ibid, p. 142.

  19. See Mark Lilla, “The Closing of the Straussian Mind,” New York Review of Books, 4 November 2004, part 2 of the omnibus review mentioned in note 15, above. The Mark Blitz quotation is from Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime, ed. Kenneth L. Deutsch and John A. Murley (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).

  20. Lilla, “Closing of the Straussian Mind.”

  21. Ibid. See also, Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 6, where Strauss asserts that the historicist “voice of reason…tells us that our principles are in themselves as good or as bad as any other principles. The more we cultivate reason, the more we cultivate nihilism” (p. 6). In defense of historicism in “Straussianism, Democracy, and Allan Bloom I: That Old Time Philosophy,” New Republic, 4 April 1988, reprinted in Essays on the Closing, ed. Stone, Richard Rorty quotes John Rawls, an eloquent defender of historicism: “What justifies a conception of justice is not its being true to an order antecedent to and given to us, but its congruence with our deeper understanding of ourselves and our aspirations, and our realization that, given our history and the traditions embedded in our public lives, it is the most reasonable doctrine for us.” For Rorty, a fellow historicist, “we shall never have anything firmer to fall back on than our accumulated experience of the advantages and disadvantages of various concrete alternatives (judged by nothing more immutable than our common sense, the judgment of the latest, best-informed, and freest of the children of time).”

  22. Critics of John M. Olin see his conservatism as a product in part of opposition to government interference, in particular the prosecution of industrial malfeasance. See Bill McKibben, “The Koch Brothers’ New Brand,” New York Review of Books, 10 March 2016, a review of Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right: “John M. Olin, for instance, who would fund an unprecedented effort to push his libertarian philosophy on campuses across America, was constantly embroiled in defending egregious pollution at his chemical plants across America. The company was pouring mercury into the Niagara River, and turning a Virginia town so toxic that it became one of the first names on the EPA’s ‘Superfund’ list of especially dirty sites.”

  23. For the John M. Olin Center Web site, see http://olincenter.uchicago.edu/. According to Nathan Tarcov, in Jeff Wolf and Jeff Taylor, “Profs See Olin Foundation as Asset Here,” Chicago Maroon, 14 October 1983, the center “is not meant to be just another policy-oriented think tank, but a home for inquiry into the practical problems and policy dilemmas of contemporary democracy on the basis of theoretical reflection,” principally on classic texts of political theory. “The Olin Foundation is a conservative one,” Tarcov admitted, “but their interest in this case is to support a completely independent center which will examine the problems of free institutions.” The Olin Center at the University of Chicago closed in 2001, after twenty-one years’ existence.

  24. Here is SB to Rudi Lissau, in a letter of 23 July 1990: “I can’t blame you for saying that my interest in anthroposophy is waning. All doctrines have to be squared with my own outlook—I nearly said my innate outlook. It was in fact that same outlook that led me to find Steiner so compelling.”

  25. The Committee on the Present Danger shared this view, declaring in an early position paper, “The Soviet military buildup of all its armed forces over the past quarter century is, in part, reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s rearmament in the 1930s.” It was fruitless to negotiate arms reduction with Hitler, and it would be no less fruitless to try to do so with Soviet Russia: “The Salt 1 arms limitation agreements have had no visible effect on the Soviet buildup. Indeed, their principal effect so far has been to restrain the United States in the development of those weapons in which it enjoys an advantage” (quoted in Alerting America: The Papers of the Committee on the Present Danger, ed. Charles Tyroler II, intro. Max Kampelman [New York: Pergamon-Brassey, 1984]).

  26. The press releases of the Committee on the Present Danger issued on 11 November 1976 were entitled “How the Committee Will Operate—What It Will Do, and What It Will Not Do” and “Common Sense and the Common Danger.”

  27. Quoted in David Mikics, Bellow’s People: How Saul Bellow Made Life into Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), p. 146. In an interview, Epstein says the phrase Shils used in describing what he didn’t want the Committee to become was a “farm team” (for non–North American readers, a baseball term, denoting a second-division team), not a “rest home” for SB’s “nafkas.” Quotations from Epstein come from interviews with the author, plus emails of 7, 8, 14, and 17 June 2016.

  28. Mikics, Bellow’s People, pp. 147, 148.

  29. The Sammler manuscript containing Shils’s annotations is located in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library. The passages quoted are from pp. 272, 273.

  30. Mikics, Bellow’s People, p. 148.

  31. In fact, according to SB to François Furet, 2 February 1992, the “unlanced boil” description came from David Grene. In reply to Furet’s description of an awkward Committee on Social Thought meeting, SB regrets missing it: “I should have liked at l
east to have been there in spirit, haunting the walls. Nasty Shils the ultimate Dickensian funny monster giving his wickedest performance. Bloom is mad with delight, beside himself when he describes the scene. David Grene once said that Edward was an unlanced boil (un furuncle, to you).”

  32. This is not how Epstein remembers the encounter, according to an email to the author, 24 January 2018: “I recall getting into the very small elevator at Jack Cella’s (and Edward Shils’s) apartment building, and seeing Saul and Janis B. I greeted Saul (I did not know his wife), and then turned around, if only because the elevator was too small for five people (I believe my wife was with us) for easy conversation. Later, at Jack C’s, Saul came up to talk with me. In any case, I did not snub the Bellows.”

  33. Peter Ahrensdorf, email to the author, 22 June 2016; Janis Freedman Bellow, email to the author, 19 June 2016.

  34. Janis Freedman Bellow, “Passionate Longing: Women in the Novel from Rousseau to Flaubert” (1992), a dissertation submitted to the Committee on Social Thought, pp. 3–4. Henceforth cited within the text by page number.

  35. The opening pages of the dissertation offer an example of the extremity of female longing. Janis focuses on the real-life model for Sophie in Émile, a character who falls passionately in love with the hero of Fénelon’s novel The Adventures of Telemachus (1699). Fénelon’s Telemachus is much more hot-blooded than Homer’s Telemachus, and the real-life Sophie, Rousseau tells us, sees him, in Janis’s paraphrase, as “emotionally identical with herself. Both share a taste for the beautiful, the noble and virtuous, a longing for self-mastery” (p. 10). As it turns out, Telemachus’s longings, as depicted in Fénelon’s novel, “may be fierce, but they are in no way a match for hers [that is, the real-life Sophie’s]. She is an uncompromising extremist” (p. 17). Nor are Sophie’s longings sublimated, as Rousseau says they are in most women. After her account of Sophie in Émile and of Julie in La Nouvelle Héloïse, Janis turns to Flaubert’s Novembre, in chapter 2 of the dissertation, before devoting a final three chapters to Madame Bovary.

  36. The books she considers are Margaret Diehl’s Men (1988) and Elizabeth McNeill’s Nine and a Half Weeks (1978). (Elizabeth McNeill is a pseudonym; the author’s real name is Ingeborg Day.)

  37. Atlas, Biography, pp. 520–21, offers an account of the breakup that mixes together SB’s January return from California with the earlier ultimatum—either the December one, the date of which SB may have misremembered, or one sometime earlier: “The final parting from Alexandra was acrimonious. As Bellow told it, he had arrived back from Vermont and was standing in the living room with his suitcase when she announced that she wanted a divorce. She had put red tags on his possessions. To Stuart Brent, he described in lurid detail how she had stormed about the apartment, slamming doors. The four bathrooms were employed to dramatic effect: ‘She used the first bathroom to get dressed, the second to put on her lipstick; the third to put on her stockings, shoes and gloves; then she came out of the fourth and said, “You used me for your fucking novels and you drained me dry; go ahead and sue me. I want you out of the house in 24 hours.” ’ ”

  38. Remarks like these played a part in a temporary cooling of the friendship between SB and Stern, as did Bellow’s tendency “to simplify me as a liberal,” testing him by making illiberal remarks.

  39. Kennedy claimed in an interview that once, when he was visiting SB at the apartment at Sheridan Road, Alexandra said goodbye, then returned unexpectedly, trying, Kennedy was certain, to catch them in flagrante. The closeness between the two men is affirmed in “Saul Bellow’s Tribute to Gene Kennedy in Celebration of His 70th Birthday,” an undated document from 1998 (Kennedy was born on 28 August 1928) among the SB Papers in the Regenstein: “I can tell him openly what I am thinking, feeling, dreading, down to the most shameful, corrosive details. We speak very directly and plainly to each other and this is possible not because I am good (I am too cockeyed to be good) but because he is. He is a big man and his size frequently suggests full occupancy of the physical plant by the superabundant goodness of the man.”

  40. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 521.

  41. Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 163.

  42. Richard Stern, “Penned In,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 1 (Autumn 1986), p. 24.

  43. Rhoda Koenig, “At Play in the Fields of the Word: Alienation, Imagination, Feminism, and the Foolishness of PEN,” New York, 3 February 1986.

  44. PEN was founded at the end of the First World War by H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and others, with the aim of “rescuing the world’s writers from the political consequences of their work,” a phrase from Stern, “Penned Up,” p. 3n.

  45. David Lehman, “When Pen Pals Collide,” Partisan Review, vol. 53, no. 2 (1986), p. 190.

  46. Daniel Fuchs, “Literature and Politics: The Bellow/Grass Confrontation,” in Writers and Thinkers: Selected Literary Criticism (Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2015), pp. 144–45.

  47. Ibid., p. 144.

  48. SB, “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” in IAAU, pp. 111–12. Henceforth cited within the text by page number.

  49. Grass’s exact words, as quoted in Lehman, “When Pen Pals Collide,” p. 197, were: “I’m wondering when you’re explaining that democracy gave people not only freedom but also shelter and food. I would like to see the echo of your words in the South Bronx, where people don’t have shelter, don’t have food and no possibility to have the freedom you have, or some have in this country.”

  50. Koenig, “At Play in the Fields of the Word.”

  51. R. Z. Sheppard, “Independent States of Mind,” Time, 27 January 1986.

  52. Koenig, “At Play in the Fields of the Word.”

  53. For the quotations from Rushdie and Gordimer, see Fuchs, “Literature and Politics,” p. 150, which also quotes the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, another delegate to the congress, who had rejected political office two years earlier on the grounds that once a writer “becomes an instrument of power he is not a writer anymore.” In a later session, as reported by Richard Stern in “Some Members of the Congress,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 14, no. 4 (Summer 1988), p. 885, the second of Stern’s articles on the congress, Vargas Llosa said: “The writer in totalitarian states was reduced to being either a courtesan or a dissident. In other societies his problem was how not to become an ambassador or minister of state. In countries which pay serious attention to writers, they’re frequently arrested. In countries like the United States, writers feel they’re simply entertainers.”

  54. David Lehman, “When Pen Pals Collide,” p. 197.

  55. Ibid., p. 198.

  56. Stern, “Some Members of the Congress,” p. 863.

  57. Lehman, “When Pen Pals Collide,” pp. 198–99.

  58. Fuchs, “Literature and Politics,” p. 149.

  59. Adam Bellow, in “Our Father’s Politics: Gregory, Adam, and Daniel Bellow,” in A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria L. Cronin and Lee Trepanier (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), p. 205. Adam’s summary of his father’s congress speech, also on p. 205, is that “he basically got up in front of a room full of writers from all over the world and insulted them. I mean really insulted them, calling them (in effect) political ninnies who should be minding their own business. He was like a bullfighter who was constantly concealing his sword behind his cape.” SB’s memory of the confrontation with Grass, in James Wood, “Einstein of the Common Life,” Guardian, 21 April 1990, was still bitter, four years later:

  I was supposed to talk about alienation and the state, and I said that certain things had been promised by the American constitution, which were more or less provided—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, goods, laws—but that the higher things had never been promised by the constitution; in other words, it was for
the middle range of life that everything was arranged in this country.

  And Grass said, “Yes, but what about the people in the South Bronx?” Well, I know more about the people in the South Bronx than he does. What had he done? He’d got someone to take him on a tour. I live in the midst of it. What the hell does he know about it?

  60. Stern, “Penned In,” p. 13.

  61. This SB phrase comes from The Adventures of Augie March (1953), reprinted in Saul Bellow: Novels 1944–1953 (New York: Library of America, 2003), p. 414.

  62. From a draft of Martin Amis’s autobiographical novel Inside Story, pages of which he sent to the author on 25 September 2009. For Ijah’s “basso profundo” see “Cousins,” SB, CS, p. 205.

  63. Amis, Inside Story.

  64. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 522.

  65. This last quote, about SB’s silence, comes from ibid., p. 522.

  66. Timothy Garton Ash, from an email to the author, 15 April 2010.

  67. Atlas, Biography, p. 522.

  68. Wasserman, Handsome Is, p. 129.

  69. The article caused a stir at the University of Chicago in particular, where on 7 January 1983, an undergraduate Maroon staffer, David Brooks, later a columnist in The New York Times and a PBS commentator, wrote a riposte entitled “To Allan Bloom: We’re Not Empty, Just Self-Centered.” Brooks calls Bloom’s article “courageous and important” but takes issue with its claim that today’s students are “aimless,” or that “our relativism, our tolerance,” destroys “moral rules or the notions of good and evil, or even God.” As for Bloom’s views on rock music, they are “nonsense.”