by Saul Bellow
But there is no need to make an inventory of the times. It is demoralizing to describe ourselves to ourselves yet again. It is especially hard on us since we believe (as we have been educated to believe) that history has formed us and that we are all mini-summaries of the present age.
When I say, however, that the mind that takes in the “Dallas” melodrama is capable of absorbing Homer and Shakespeare—or Mozart, since he is the focus of our attention—I am saying also that we have transhistorical powers. The source of these powers is in our curious nature. We have concentrated with immense determination on what forms us externally but that need not actually govern us internally. It can do that only if we grant it the right.
But we as individuals, in inner freedom, need not grant any such thing. This is a good moment to remind ourselves of this—now that the great ideological machines of the century have stopped forever and are already covered with rust.
What is attractive about Mozart (against this background of rusting ideological machinery) is that he is an individual. He learned for himself (as in Così Fan Tutte) the taste of disappointment, betrayal, suffering, the weakness, foolishness, and vanity of flesh and blood, as well as the emptiness of cynicism. In him we see a person who has only himself to rely on. But what a self it is, and what an art it has generated. How deeply (beyond words) he speaks to us about the mysteries of our common human nature. And how unstrained and easy his greatness is.
Part One
RIDING OFF IN ALL DIRECTIONS
In the days of Mr. Roosevelt
(1983)
Esquire, December 1983.
It was in Chicago that Roosevelt was nominated in 1932, when I was seventeen years of age, just getting out of high school. When he defeated Hoover in November of that year, he didn’t become President, merely. He became the President, presiding over us for so long that in a movie of the early forties, Billie Burke—Silly Billie—said to a fat, flummoxed senator that she had just been to Washington to see the coronation.
Early in the Depression, my algebra teacher, an elderly lady whose white hair was piled in a cumulus formation over her square face and her blue-tinted square glasses, allowed herself a show of feeling and sang “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Our astonishment was great. As a rule, Miss Scherbarth was all business. Teachers seldom sounded off on topics of the day. It’s true that when Lindbergh flew to Paris, Mrs. Davis told the class, “I do hope, from my heart, that he is as good a young man as he is brave, and will never disappoint us.” A revelation to the sixth grade. But that Miss Scherbarth should interrupt her equations to sing out for FDR showed that the country had indeed been shaken to its foundations. It wasn’t until later that I understood that City Hall was busted and that Miss Scherbarth wasn’t being paid. In the winter of ’33, when I was a freshman at Crane College, the whole faculty went to the Loop to demonstrate at City Hall. Shopkeepers were taking their scrip (municipal funny money) at a discount. My English teacher, Miss Ferguson, said to us afterward, “We forced our way into the mayor’s office and chased him round his desk.”
Miss Ferguson, a splendid, somewhat distorted, but vigorous old thing, believed in giving full particulars. To chant the rules of composition was part of her teaching method. She would dance before the blackboard and sing out, “Be! Specific!” to the tune of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” A charming woman, she had overlapping front teeth, like the new First Lady. As she flourished her arms while singing her messages, it was not difficult to imagine her in the crowd that burst through the mayor’s doors. They cried, “Pay us!”
In 1931, Chicago had elected its first foreign-born mayor. He was a Bohemian—Anton Cermak—and a formidable politician, one of the builders of the Democratic machine, soon to be taken over by the Irish. Cermak, who had tried to block Roosevelt’s nomination, went down to Florida to make peace with the President-elect. According to Len O’Connor, one of the most knowledgeable historians of Chicago, Pushcart Tony was urged by alderman Paddy Bauler, who bossed the German vote, to come to terms with FDR. “Cermak,” Bauler later recalled, “said he didn’t like the sonofabitch. I sez, ‘Listen, for Cry sakes, you ain’t got any money for the Chicago schoolteachers, and this Roosevelt is the only one who can get it for you. You better get over there and kiss his ass or whatever you got to do. Only you better get the goddamn money for them teachers, or we ain’t goin’ to have a city that’s worth runnin’.’ So he goes over and, Christ Almighty, next thing I hear on the radio is that Cermak’s got shot.”
The assassin, Zangara, had supposedly aimed at Roosevelt, although there were those in Chicago who asserted that Cermak was his real target. Lots of people were in a position to benefit from Cermak’s death. As he was rushed to the hospital, Cermak supposedly whispered to Roosevelt, “I’m glad it was me instead of you.” This legend was the invention of a Hearst reporter, John Dienhart, who was a drinking pal of the mayor, as well as his public relations man. Dienhart’s last word on this subject, as quoted in O’Connor’s Clout, was: “I couldn’t very well have put out a story that Tony would have wanted it the other way around.”
Years later, the Chicago Tribune reported that in a letter of thanks to Mrs. W. F. Cross, the Florida woman who had struck away Zangara’s arm as he was pulling the trigger, the White House had written: “By your quick thinking a far greater tragedy was averted.” Colonel McCormick’s files collected anti-Roosevelt facts as Atlantic beaches gather stones. The Colonel’s heart never softened toward the Roosevelts. But the writer of the White House letter, perhaps Roosevelt himself, had it right. Alas for Pushcart Tony Cermak, the tragedy would have been far greater.
The Roosevelt era began, therefore, with the unwilling martyrdom of a commonplace Chicago politician who had gone to make a deal—an old deal—with the new guy, an Eastern swell, old money from an estate on the Hudson, snooty people, governor of New York (so what!), a president with pince-nez and a long cigarette holder. How was Pushcart Tony to know that he had been killed by a bullet aimed at the very greatest of American politicians? Jefferson (himself no mean manipulator) and Madison had had eighteenth-century class. Jackson had had fire. Lincoln was our great-souled man. Wilson was the best America had to show in the way of professorial WASPdom. But FDR was a genius in politics. He was not an intellectual. He browsed in books of naval history, preferring those that were handsomely illustrated, and he pored over his stamp albums like many another patrician. Great politicians are seldom readers or scholars. When he needed brainy men, he sent to Columbia University for them. Following the traditions of monarchy, he created a privy council of brain trusters, who had more influence, more money to spend, than the members of his cabinet. Experts now tell us that Roosevelt was an ignoramus in economic matters, and the experts are probably right. But it wasn’t the brain trusters who saved the U.S.A. from disintegration; it was—oddity of oddities—a country squire from Dutchess County, a man described by a shrewd foreign observer as the Clubman Caesar and by the witty if dangerous Huey Long as Franklin De La No. The unemployed masses, working stiffs, mechanics, laid-off streetcar conductors, file clerks, shoe salesmen, pants pressers, egg candlers, truckdrivers, the residents of huge, drab neighborhoods of “furriners,” the greenhorns today described as ethnics—all these swore by him. They trusted only Roosevelt, a Groton boy, a Social Register nob, a rich gentleman from Harvard and Hyde Park. They did not call for a proletarian president.
There are many for whom it was bliss then to be alive. For older citizens it was a grim time—for the educated and professional classes the Depression was grievously humiliating—but for the young this faltering of order and authority made possible an escape from family and routine. As a friend of mine observed during the complacent Eisenhower period: “The cost of being poor has gone so high. You have to have a couple of hundred bucks a month. Back in the thirties we were doing it on peanuts.” He was dead right. Weekly rent in a rooming house was seldom more than three dollars. Breakfast at a drugstore counter cost fifteen cents.
The blue-plate-special dinner of, say, fried liver and onions, shoestring potatoes, and coleslaw, with a dessert of Kosto pudding, appeared on the hectographed menu for thirty-five cents. Young hustlers could get by on something like eight or ten dollars a week, with a bit of scrounging. The National Youth Administration paid you a few bucks for nominal assistance to a teacher, you picked up a few more at Goldblatt’s department store as a stockroom boy, you wore hand-me-downs, and you nevertheless had plenty of time to read the files of the old Dial at the Crerar Library or in the public library among harmless old men who took shelter from the cold in the reading room. At the Newberry, you became acquainted also with Anarchist-Wobbly theoreticians and other self-made intellectuals who lectured from soapboxes in Bughouse Square, weather permitting.
Between the twenties and the thirties, a change occurred in the country that was as much imaginative as it was economic. In the twenties, America’s stability was guaranteed by big business, by industrialists and statesmen whose Anglo-Saxon names were as sound as the gold standard. On March 4, 1929, when Herbert Hoover was inaugurated, I was out of school with a sore throat and had the new Majestic radio in its absurd large cabinet all to myself. I turned the switch—and there was the new Chief Executive taking the oath of office before a great crowd. From the papers, I knew what he looked like. His hair was parted down the middle, he wore a high collar and a top hat and looked like Mr. Tomato on the College Inn juice bottle. Full and sedate, he was one of those balanced and solid engineering-and-money types who would maintain the secure Republican reign of Silent Cal, the successor of the unhappy Harding. Big Bill Thompson, Chicago’s Republican mayor, was a crook—all the local politicians were grafters and boodlers, but nobody actually felt injured by them. Great men like Samuel Insull or General Dawes were very sharp, certainly, but on the whole they were probably OK. The gangsters, who did as they liked, murdered one another, seldom harming ordinary citizens. Chicago, a sprawling network of immigrant villages smelling of sauerkraut and home-brewed beer, of meat processing and soap manufacture, was at peace—a stale and queasy peace, the philistine repose apparently anticipated by the Federalists. The founders had foreseen that all would be well, life would be orderly; no great excesses, no sublimity.
The sun shone as well as it could through a haze of prosperous gases, the river moved slowly under a chemical iridescence, the streetcars rocked across the level and endless miles of the huge Chicago grid. The city greeter, Mr. Gaw, who manufactured envelopes, met all prominent visitors at the railroad stations with old-style pizzazz and comical bombast. Chicago belonged to the Boosters, to the real estate men and the utilities magnates, to William Randolph Hearst and Bertie McCormick, to Al Capone and Big Bill Thompson, and in the leafy back streets where we lived, all was well.
A seven-cent streetcar fare took us to the Loop. On Randolph Street, we found free entertainment at Bensinger’s billiard salon and at Trafton’s gymnasium, where boxers sparred. The street was filled with jazz musicians and City Hall types. My boyhood friend Fish, who was allowed to help himself to a quarter from the cash register in his father’s poolroom, occasionally treated me to a hot dog and a stein of Hires root beer on Randolph Street. When we overspent, we came back from the Loop on foot—some five miles of freightyards and factories; joints that manufactured garden statuary, like gnomes, trolls, and undines; Klee Brothers, where you got a baseball bat with the purchase of a two-pants suit; Polish sausage shops; the Crown Theater at Division and Ashland, with its posters of Lon Chaney or Renée Adorée, its popcorn machine crackling; then the United Cigar Store; then Brown and Koppel’s restaurant, with the nonstop poker game upstairs. It was a good dullness, this Hoover dullness. Higher activities were not prohibited, but you had to find them for yourself. If you subscribed to the Literary Digest, you might get the complete works of Flaubert as a bonus. Not that anybody read those red buckram-bound books.
Fish matured before the rest of us. At fourteen, he was being shaved by the barber, paying grandly with two bits from his papa’s cash register. His virile Oriental face was massaged with witch hazel, his chin was powdered, he came on boldly with the girls. He spent money also on books, pamphlets, and magazines. What he wanted from them was no more than a few quick impressions—he was no scholar—and after he had read a few pages he passed the magazines and pamphlets on to me. Through him I became familiar with Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin; also with Marie Stopes, Havelock Ellis, V. F. Calverton, Max Eastman, and Edmund Wilson. The beginning of the Great Depression was also the beginning of my mental life. But suddenly the comedy of comfort stopped, the good-natured absurdities of the painted flivver, Pikes Peak or Bust, the Babbitt capers. There were no more quarters in the till.
The tale of America as told in the twenties by America’s leaders was that this country had scored one of the most brilliant successes in history. Hoover boasted in a 1928 campaign speech that the conquest of poverty in the United States was a palpable reality. “The poorhouse is vanishing from among us … our industrial output has increased as never before, and our wages have grown steadily in buying power. Our workers, with their average weekly wages, can today buy two and often three times more bread and butter than any wage earner of Europe. At one time we demanded for our workers a full dinner pail. We have now gone far beyond that conception. Today we demand larger comfort and greater participation in life and leisure.”
How bitterly Hoover must have regretted the full dinner pail. He had, after all, meant well. To postwar Europe he had been a benefactor. But now the big businessmen who boasted of the bread and butter they were stuffing us with (Silvercup, not European bread) became once more what Eleanor Roosevelt’s uncle Teddy had called “malefactors of great wealth.” Their factories closed and their banks failed.
Private misery could not be confined: it quickly overflowed into the streets. Foreclosures, evictions, Hooverville shanties, soup lines—old Dr. Townsend of Long Beach, California, was inspired with his plan for the aged when he saw elderly women rooting for food in garbage cans. Maggoty meat for Americans? Were Chicago and Los Angeles to become Oriental cities like Shanghai or Calcutta?
The great engineer had botched his job. What would his successor do? Reputable analysts, taking Roosevelt’s measure, were not encouraged by their findings. Walter Lippmann wrote in 1932 that FDR was “an amiable man with many philanthropic impulses” but accused him of “carrying water on both shoulders,” of hanging on to both right-wing and left-wing supporters, a politician lavish with “two-faced platitudes.” Roosevelt was no crusader, no enemy of entrenched privilege, “no tribune of the people,” and Lippmann saw in him no more than “a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would like very much to be President.”
But Lippmann had examined the wrong musician, studied a different score, for when Roosevelt sat down to play, he stormed over the executive keyboard, producing music no one had ever heard before. He was dazzling. And the secret of his political genius was that he knew exactly what the public needed to hear. It amounted to that, a personal declaration by the President that took into account the feelings of the people, and especially their fears. In his first inaugural address he told the great crowd before the Capitol: “This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.” And then: “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy. The people of the United States … have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes.”
With this powerful statement the tale of the twenties concluded, and a new tale began. Against the boastfulness of the Coolidge-and-Hoover decade were set the humiliations and defeats of the Depression. It was generally agreed that the Depression was to be viewed as what insurance companies term an act of God, a natural disaster. Peter F. Drucker puts the matter correctly in his memoirs: “As after an earthquake, a flood, a hurricane, the community c
losed ranks and came to each other’s rescue … the commitment to mutual help and the willingness to take chances on a person were peculiar to Depression America.” Professor Drucker adds that there was nothing like this on the other side, in Europe, “where the Depression evoked only suspicion, surliness, fear, and envy.” In the opinion of Europeans, the only choice was between communism and fascism. Among world leaders, Roosevelt alone spoke with assurance about “essential democracy.” It is not too much to say that another America was imaginatively formed under his influence. Recovery programs were introduced with public noise and flourishes during his first hundred days, and although huge sums were spent, it presently became apparent that there would be no recovery. That he was nevertheless elected repeatedly proves that what the voters wanted was to live in a Rooseveltian America, which turned the square old U.S.A. of the Hoovers topsy-turvy. I can remember an autumnal Chicago street very early one morning when I heard clinking and ringing noises. The source of these sounds was hidden in a cloud, and when I entered the sphere of fog just beginning to be lighted by the sun, I saw a crowd of men with hammers chipping mortar from old paving bricks—fifty or sixty of the unemployed pretending to do a job, “picking them up and laying ’em down again,” as people then were saying. Every day Colonel McCormick’s Tribune denounced these boondoggles. In the center of the front page there was always a cartoon of moronic professors with donkey tails hanging from their academic mortarboards. They were killing little pigs, plowing under crops, and centupling the national debt, while genial FDR, presiding at the Mad Hatter’s tea party, lightheartedly poured out money. The brick chippers, however, were grateful to him. These jobless bookkeepers, civil engineers, or tool-and-diemakers were glad to work on the streets for some twenty dollars a week. The national debt, which enraged the Colonel, that dotty patriot, meant nothing to them. They desperately needed the small wages the government paid them. The drama of professional dignity sacrificed also appealed to many of them.
