The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  This sense of safety applied as much, or almost as much, to illegal immigrants as to legal ones. “My father could never get over it. He would say, ‘Look, I carry no papers. I can do whatever I please. I can go wherever I like. There is no one to deny me my rights of citizenship. If there were any attempts to undermine my rights of citizenship, it would become a scandal. The country would never stand for a thing like that. So I go around without papers, without passports, without identification, and it’s perfectly alright.”53 That Abraham was not, in fact, a citizen, did nothing to temper the pride he took in America’s protection of his rights. In Bellow’s story “A Silver Dish” (1978), the protagonist’s father, like Bellow’s father, is an illegal immigrant: “He became an American, and America never knew it. He voted without papers, he drove without a licence, he paid no taxes, he cut every corner.”54 Abraham voted without papers, but he paid his taxes, never learned to drive, and cut fewer corners than the father in “A Silver Dish.” He liked voting because, as Bellow puts it, “he’d pull the Roosevelt lever and Roosevelt would be the President” (in later years, results were less automatic). “ ‘I always loved to vote,’ ” he told Bellow, “with a real kind of sentimental reverence.” As for paying taxes, “he’d say, ‘Well it’s almost April 15th’ and ‘I don’t mind giving, I don’t mind paying my taxes in a country like this.’ ”55 These sentiments were common among Jewish immigrants of Abraham’s generation. Bellow tells of going to see a friend from school, Joey Sugarman, who lived on Division Street. It was election time and from the convention hall the radio was broadcasting the roll call of states: “Joey’s father, a big, bearded Orthodox Jew, a shochet, or ritual slaughterer, was calling out the names of states in alphabetical order, singing them out like a cantor, just ahead of the radio: ‘Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts.’ Very red in the face, very fond of his citizenship.”56

  Abraham felt guilty about his illegal residence, but accepted its necessity. After all, Chicago accepted Al Capone and Big Bill Thompson, the mayor, who was in Capone’s pocket. “Information about corruption, if you had grown up in Chicago, was easy to accept,” says Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift, “it harmonized with one’s Chicago view of society” (p. 99). This view derived in part from the local press, the “verbal swagger” of which both echoed and inspired the street (good government reformers were labeled “goo goos” by the Chicago papers).57 But it also derived from political reality. Thompson was mayor from 1915 to 1923, and was reelected in 1927, when Bellow was twelve. That year, for 25 cents, Bellow stuffed mailboxes for a precinct captain in his ward, the Twenty-sixth, “a party man [who] belonged to the machine.” He also happily accepted free tickets to the Riverview Amusement Park on Western Avenue, courtesy of City Hall. In Thompson’s second term, which lasted until 1931, “even schoolchildren understood that the real power in the city was divided between the Johnny Torrio–Al Capone organization to the south, and Dion O’Banion and Bugs Moran’s North Side bootleggers. Racketeers, gangs were in charge.” A similar understanding or acceptance—knowing, street-smart—extended to national politics. Under President Harding, scandals proliferated. As Chicagoans saw it, in Bellow’s words, “this was the tempo of the decade. Prohibition led to racketeering, and racketeering produced a popular belief that everyone was on the take.”58 According to the street, “there were always two sets of facts, two languages, two codes—there was the beau ideal and there was the hustle.”59

  To help out with money in the early years in Chicago, the older Bellow boys took on after-school jobs. For the same reason, immediately after finishing high school, Jane became a stenographer, working in offices. Sam and Maury were “what we used to call hustlers. They sold papers in the streets, peddled chocolate bars on the commuter trains.”60 Maury worked for a while at the American Express Company, as a “baggage-smasher,” loading trunks and suitcases on trucks.61 When old enough, Saul also took on after-school jobs, but was no great shakes as a hustler, certainly in comparison with his brothers. The excited idealism of his youth, an extension of his childhood sense of wonder and belonging, “made it easy for practical people to pick your pockets as soon as there was something in them worth stealing.”62 In The Adventures of Augie March, Augie’s older brother, Simon, tries to instruct him, as does Grandma Lausch, in the ways of the street. Simon works at newsstands and Grandma Lausch pesters him to get Augie a job at the stand in the La Salle Street station. She urges Simon to offer his boss a bribe (“Believe me, he’s waiting for you to offer him one” [p. 420]). When Augie finally gets the job, his customers shortchange him and he’s fired. “They throw the money down and grab a paper; you can’t leave the stand to shag them,” Augie complains. Simon’s contemptuous reply is: “You couldn’t get that money out of somebody else’s change, could you?” (p. 421). Even before Augie goes out to work, he’s enlisted in scams. Grandma Lausch coaches him on how to hoodwink Mr. Lubin, the caseworker. Then she coaches him on how to hustle the opticians at the dispensary, to obtain cheap spectacles for Mother March. In like manner, Bellow was instructed to shortchange the dentist, not by Maury, but by their mother. When one of his teeth went bad she accompanied Bellow to have it pulled, waiting outside. She said, “After he pulls it give him this fifty-cent piece. Say it’s all you’ve got.”63 Liza was the least street of the Bellows, but was hardly naive or timorous. When she and Abraham went over household bills, deciding “whether to pay the landlord first or the grocer or the coal bill,”64 Bellow was enlisted to add up the figures. It was a way of checking on his progress in arithmetic, but it also introduced him to the calculating and corner cutting needed to support the family.

  Calculating, corner cutting, hustling, petty illegality—this element of street life entered the Bellow household through the very heating system. In Prohibition Era Chicago, the Slav population brewed its own beer (in Polish, piva) which invariably exceeded the 0.5 percent limit imposed by the Volstead Act. In winter, beer fumes from the landlord’s ground-floor apartment mingled with the heat rising from the single furnace vent in the Bellows’ parlor. On Division Street, local hardware stores openly displayed equipment for home brewing. Fraudsters and confidence men as well as radicals and crackpot theorists mounted Division Street soapboxes, some of them as celebrated as the city’s gangsters. In 1956, three years after the publication of Augie, Bellow published a portrait of Chicago’s “Yellow Kid” Weil, “one of the greatest confidence men of his day.” The Kid was famous for having made and lost $8 million in his lifetime, and for claiming never to have cheated an honest man, “only rascals.”65 After a big score, he bragged to Bellow, he would rent an entire floor of the Edgewater Beach Hotel (now demolished) “and fill it with naked hookers.”66 He was also a thinker and a reader: “His favorite authors seem to be Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer.”67 Some criminals, “the baser sort,” disapproved of the Kid: “In their view, you should sneak up on people to pick their pockets, or break and enter to burglarize their houses, but to look them in the eyes, gain their confidence, that is impure.” Bellow depicts the Kid in his eighties, “spruce and firm-footed, with his beard and wind-curled hat … the living figure of tradition in the city.”68 The other living figure of tradition in the city—the gangster or racketeer—rarely bothered locals in the street. Baby Face Nelson was born and raised in the Humboldt Park area, at 942–44 North California Avenue. John Dillinger’s gang hid out in an apartment at 1740 Humboldt Boulevard, from which Dillinger often strolled to and through the park, entering from the northwest corner, at North and Kedzie. The Circus Gang, a subsidiary of the Capone Syndicate, had headquarters at 1857 North Avenue, at the eastern edge of Humboldt Park. From here, on February 14, 1929, the killers in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre set out for North Clark Street, where the massacre took place. Bellow was thirteen at the time.

  FROM HIS FIRST DAYS in Chicago, North Avenue was a key destination for Bellow, almost as alluring as Division Street. Near the intersection with Rockwell Street were Scandinavian shops and
fraternal lodges, a tiny movie house specializing in Hoot Gibson and Yakima Canutt westerns, the Anarchist Forum was nearby at the corner of Evergreen Avenue and California, the Daughters of Zion Charity Day nursery and the Association House (“the Sosh”), a settlement house, also at 2150 West North Avenue, where Bellow and his friends played basketball and hung out. Most important was the Humboldt Park Branch of the Chicago Public Library (in the choice between Hebrew school and poolroom or playground, Bellow told an interviewer, “the playground won out—together with the public library”69). Bellow became a user of the library, which was about half a mile from his home on Augusta Street, at the age of nine, already “a confirmed reader.”70 He describes trips to the library in winter, in zero-degree weather, books in hand, feeling as if his toes “had been guillotined.” Inside, the library was “pleasantly rank,” the pages of its buckram-bound books, stained “by soup or cocoa or tears” were often “fiercely annotated.” Among the library’s habitués were autodidacts, loafers, compulsives (“memorizing long poems, historical documents or statistical tables”).71 From the Anarchist Forum came Tolstoyan vegetarians, Swedenborgians, single taxers. Bellow’s initial borrowings were “all sorts of self-improvement, self-development, books,” a legacy of his lengthy stay in the hospital and consequent determination not “to remain weak and be coddled.” The same motive partly drew him to boys’ books, with their clean-cut heroes (he mentions Frank Merriwell and Dink Stover of Yale, and Nick Carter, detective). Frontier and adventure novels also appealed, as in the fiction of Rafael Sabatini, Jack London, and James Fenimore Cooper (a favorite of his brother Maury), with their “pioneers … independent men. Going into the wilderness with your ax and gun (and your smarts). Very important.”72

  The breadth and maturity of Bellow’s early reading in Chicago is sometimes hard to credit. Ezra Davis, the singing roomer, remembers coming in from work to see him at the kitchen table reading War and Peace and The Possessed. If this was the kitchen table at Augusta Street, Bellow was ten at most. In another account, Bellow is said to have gone through all the books in the children’s section of the library by nine and graduated to the adult section, “where he began with Gogol’s Dead Souls.”73 He read the stories of Maupassant and O. Henry, Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe, The Wizard of Oz, The Decameron, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the Encyclopedia Americana (bought for the March brothers by Grandma Lausch in Augie), as well as a coverless prose translation of The Iliad, which he found in a closet shelf in the Barons’ bungalow. He also read Chicago newspapers, following the Leopold and Loeb case when it broke in 1924, and two years later the Dempsey-Tunney fight and Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush (“It was up to me to find ways to reconcile the Trojan War with Prohibition, major-league baseball, and the Old Country as my mother remembered it”).74 “I read everything I could lay my hands on,” he recalled in an interview, “brought home armloads of books … all kinds of books. It was hit or miss. I’d finish one at four o’clock and start another at five o’clock.”75 According to Ruth Miller, by nine Bellow was writing stories in imitation of O. Henry and Jack London and “by ten, he knew he wanted to be a writer.”76 Bellow speaks of his earliest writing, “in grade school,” as imitating “things that stirred me greatly,” often things from popular magazines or bestsellers (he cites the wilderness adventure stories of James Oliver Curwood).77 But he dated his ambition to become a writer to later years, sometimes to high school, sometimes to college.78 According to a childhood sweetheart, Esther Robbins, who met him when they were “twelve or thirteen,” Bellow’s writing ambitions, like her acting ambitions, were clear early on. She recalls the following exchange from junior high school days “as though it were yesterday”: “ ‘When you’re a famous actress, Es, will you remember me?’ ” Bellow asked. “And I answered, with all the prophetic wisdom of childhood, ‘You will be a famous author, Saul, long before I become an actress.’ I must have been psychic, although it was easy to recognize his potential, even at that age.”79 Robbins also remembers spending “many a pleasant evening together in the Chicago public library on North Avenue,” though “after we entered Tuley High, Saul and I went our separate ways.”

  Bellow spent two years at Lafayette Elementary School, entering in the third grade (“I was a little behind because of my half-year in the hospital”).80 Then he transferred for a year to the Columbus School, presumably because of the family’s move to the first of two apartments on Cortez Avenue, one street north of Augusta. This apartment, at 2226 Cortez, was on the ground floor of a three-flat just east of Oakley Boulevard (hence three blocks east of the old Augusta Street apartment). Cortez was a quieter street than Augusta, the three-flat had a sun porch in front, a garden in the back, better furniture (bought from the departing tenants), and a pay telephone in the kitchen. Columbus Elementary School was closer to the new apartment than was Lafayette. A year later, in 1927, Bellow enrolled in Sabin Junior High School, where he was to stay for three years, before entering Tuley High School on September 3, 1930, at fifteen. The only elementary school records that survive for him are a Registration Card and a Progress Report from Lafayette. The Registration Card lists his age, the names of his parents (Liza is wrongly “Lillian”), date and place of birth, date of entry to school, and date of leaving school; the Progress Report contains entries for year and grade of instruction, but nothing under the headings “Mentality,” “Interest,” “Industry,” “Scholarship,” “Special Aptitudes,” and “Conduct.” There are no Chicago public school transcripts or reports for Bellow’s single year at Columbus or the three at Sabin Junior High. All Bellow records of Lafayette School in his writing or in interviews is lining up in the playground by twos “in the stinging wind,” marching in the corridors, sitting stiffly at his desk during roll call, “hands clasped on the top of the desk or folded behind one’s back—the two fundamental disciplinary positions,”81 and being baffled by baseball (when a ground ball was hit past him, one of the boys said, “You looked at that ball as if it was an object of idle curiosity”).82 He remembered the teachers at Lafayette as mostly unmarried women, exceptions being Mrs. Davis, who, in a rare departure from classroom business said of Charles Lindbergh, “I do hope, from my heart, that he is as good a young man as he is brave, and will never disappoint us,” and Mrs. Cox, “a long gaunt woman in her fifties,” who spoke of Tennyson and Longfellow. In the “Chicago Book,” Bellow quotes Santayana on such teachers: “sensitive, faithful and feeble; their influence helps to establish that separation which is so characteristic of America between things intellectual, which remain wrapped in a feminine veil, and, as it were, under glass, and the rough business and passions of life.”83

  Of the education Bellow received at Sabin, he records that “ ‘Americanism’ was very strong, and there was a core program of literary patriotism.”84 “Our schoolteachers, when I was a boy in Chicago, were something like missionaries,” he writes in “The Distracted Public,” a lecture he gave in Oxford on May 10, 1990. “They earnestly tried to convert or to civilize their pupils, the children of immigrants from every European country. To civilize was to Americanize us all.”85 For many pupils, Bellow included, these teachers were the first “real” Americans (“that is to say, American Americans … whose fathers fought in the Spanish-American War, or Civil War”) they’d ever met. That such teachers thought “we were of right Americans” was a special encouragement (“of course, the true social facts were very different,” Bellow adds. “You learned those later”).86 Mrs. Jenkins, who taught eighth-grade history and drama, was Bellow’s favorite, “a wonderful old woman” whose father had been in Andersonville prison camp during the Civil War. Mrs. Jenkins recounted her father’s stories to her pupils, leading Bellow to “read a lot about the Civil War, Grant’s memoirs and Sherman’s as well.” As for literary works, “when you read Melville or Mark Twain or Fenimore Cooper, you were greatly excited … and you thought—well, you know, I too am on patrol in the wilderness, or I too am floating down the Mississippi.
You identify yourself so thoroughly with these things as a child, that later you’re surprised when anyone tries to pry you away from them, or question your authenticity, your right to these things, as was later to happen.… I didn’t really begin to learn about these things until I went to High School.” In literary terms, by 1930, the year he entered Tuley, Bellow “was an American entirely. I read the American Mercury, the novels of Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson.”87

  In addition to Americanizing its pupils, a “family of man” or universalist dimension marked Bellow’s early schooling, another welcome encouragement to pupils whose parents were foreign-born. In “Cousins,” Ijah Brodsky, the narrator, recalls his geography lessons in the Chicago public schools of the mid-1920s:

  We were issued a series of booklets: “Our Little Japanese Cousins,” “Our Little Moroccan Cousins,” “Our Little Russian Cousins,” “Our Little Spanish Cousins.” I read all these gentle descriptions about little Ivan and tiny Conchita, and my eager heart opened to them. Why, we were close, we were one under it all.… We were not guineas, dagos, krauts; we were cousins. It was a splendid conception, and those of us who opened our excited hearts to the world union of cousins were happy, as I was, to give our candy pennies to a fund for the rebuilding of Tokyo after the earthquake of the twenties. After Pearl Harbor, we were obliged to bomb the hell out of the place (p. 238).