The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  The other philosopher to influence the adolescent Bellow was Arthur Schopenhauer. Nietzsche’s first and most accessible book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), begins with a quotation from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea (1818), in which reality is likened to “a stormy sea that, unbounded in all directions, raises and drops mountainous waves, howling … a world of torments.”68 For Schopenhauer, only the veil of Maya—“mere appearance,” “illusion,” in particular the illusion of individual identity—makes this reality bearable. In The Birth of Tragedy, however, Nietzsche identifies a way of experiencing Schopenhauer’s reality more directly than through illusion or appearance: through Dionysian art, Greek tragedy. As Moses Herzog puts it in his letter to “Dear Herr Nietzsche,” the Dionysian is to be commended for allowing us to face the howling storm, “to endure the sight of the Terrible, the Questionable … to witness Decomposition, Hideousness, Evil … to live with the void” (p. 740). In a later novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), Schopenhauer figures more directly. Artur Sammler, named after Schopenhauer, has survived the Holocaust and knows all about reality as “Decomposition, Hideousness, Evil.” He, too, has read Schopenhauer—at sixteen, like Bellow—as well as Nietzsche, but has little faith in the claims of the Dionysian, at least in the “debased” form the Dionysian takes in the 1960s. Nor has he anything to say for Schopenhauer’s related view that the sex organs are the seat of the Will, “the single narrow door to the truth.”69 For Schopenhauer, in Sammler’s words, Will is “the cosmic force … which drives all things. A blinding power. The inner creative fury of the world. What we see are only its manifestations. Like Hindu philosophy—Maya, the veil of appearances that hangs over all human experience.”70 At a controversial moment in the novel, a black pickpocket whom the elderly Sammler has spotted at work, and who knows he’s been spotted, corners him in the lobby of his building, shoves him up against a wall, and exposes himself, in an attempt to frighten, silence, assert dominance. When reflecting on the incident, Sammler invokes Schopenhauer: “He [the pickpocket] took out the instrument of the Will. He drew aside not the veil of Maya itself but one of its forehangings [his unzipped trousers] and showed Sammler his metaphysical warrant” (pp. 172–73). From veil of Maya to unzipped trousers; the idea of the sex organ as metaphysical warrant is treated with defeated contempt by Sammler, whose reaction the narrator is here recording. “Humankind lives mainly on perverted ideas,” Herzog writes in his letter to Dear Herr Nietzsche, “any philosopher who wants to keep his contact with mankind should pervert his own system in advance to see how it will really look a few decades after adoption” (p. 741).

  All Bellow says of his initial reaction to The World as Will and Idea is that “as a high-school junior” (hence at sixteen) he “tried to read [it]. I think I grasped it fairly well.” He also mentions passing along his copy, the copy he bought for 19 cents from a barrel outside Walgreen’s, to his friend Sydney J. Harris, and that Harris covered its margins with “mad scribbles.”71 The Tuley “expert” on Schopenhauer (also on Kant, Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire, Dewey, et al.) was the youngest and most gifted of Bellow’s friends, Isaac Rosenfeld. In a brief obituary in Partisan Review, published in 1956, shortly after Rosenfeld’s death at thirty-eight, Bellow describes him addressing the Tuley Debating Club as a fourteen-year-old freshman: “I hold the gavel. Isaac rises and asks for the floor. He has a round face, somewhat pale, glasses, and his light hair is combed back with earnestness and maturity. He is wearing short pants. His subject is The World as Will and Idea, and he speaks with perfect authority. He is very serious. He has read Schopenhauer.”72 Neither from this memoir, nor its fictional counterpart, the story “Zetland: By a Character Witness,” nor from “Charm and Death,” the unpublished novel that is the story’s source, can one tell how much Schopenhauer fourteen-year-old Rosenfeld or his gavel-wielding friend understood. A lot, one imagines. In the story, the Rosenfeld character, “still wearing knickers … was invited by neighborhood study groups to speak on the élan vital, on the differences between Kant and Hegel.” The narrator describes him as “professorial, Germanic, the wunderkind.”73 Rosenfeld himself left a possible account of his understanding in Passage from Home (1946), his only novel, whose hero, Bernard, is in several ways like his creator. Bernard recalls being fourteen “when I had first begun to read books that were well above my head”:

  What exaltation that had been! I remember how I had read First Principles [Herbert Spencer] all of a fall and winter, had gone over each page several times and copied whole sections in a notebook to force what sense and meaning I could out of a heavy text. I had also read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and had gone about for days in a great wild excitement, feeling there was light in me, strength and courage, an infinite capacity and hunger to understand life.74

  From the time Rosenfeld entered Tuley in September 1932, he was the star of Bellow’s intellectual circle. Rosenfeld’s precocity owed much to his father, as difficult a man as Abraham Bellow, though differently difficult. Rosenfeld’s mother, Miriam, died in the flu epidemic of 1918, when he was not yet two, and his father married twice more. When Bellow met Isaac in 1932, relations between Rosenfeld’s father and stepmother, the third wife, were terrible, with many fights and threats of leaving, mostly on the father’s part. The family lived in a spacious apartment on Spaulding Avenue, just east of Humboldt Park, a few blocks from the Bellow apartment on Le Moyne. Rosenfeld’s grandparents lived in the apartment below and his two maiden aunts, his father’s sisters, in the apartment above. The aunts worked as “practical” or home nurses, often for dying patients (like the dying Liza Bellow); they thought of themselves as surrogate mothers to Rosenfeld, to whom they were fiercely devoted. According to his biographer, Steven J. Zipperstein, Rosenfeld found this devotion “intrusive … more an extension of their own hunger to be loved than an expression of their feelings for him. Nowhere, not even in the bath tub, could he escape them.”75 Rosenfeld’s father was also intrusive in his demands and expectations. Unlike Abraham Bellow, Sam Rosenfeld spoke good English and had long held a steady job, as a buyer of dairy products for Stop and Shop, an enormous retail food store on Wabash Avenue in the Loop.76 Zipperstein describes him as “a closed man, easily bruised, with a vast capacity for recollecting hurts and slights.”77 In “Zetland,” Bellow describes the father’s fictional alter ego, Max Zetland, as “surly,” “bullheaded,” “built like a fullback, with a black cleft in the chin and a long mouth. You would wear yourself out to win this mouth from its permanent expression of disapproval” (p. 242). Zetland’s father and aunts “read Russian novels, Yiddish poetry, and were mad about culture”; it was the father who pushed Zetland to be “a junior Immanuel Kant” (p. 241). In his spare time, Rosenfeld’s father visited Ceshinsky’s on Division Street, “at home” as Bellow puts it, “among the Jewish writers who polished their aphorisms at the back of the bookstore.”78 That some people were smarter or fitter to survive than others, Sam Rosenfeld knew in his bones, without recourse to Mencken, Nietzsche, or Spengler. When Zetland senior rides the El to work each morning, he barely registers the little bungalows below, where “Poles, Swedes, micks, spics, Greeks, and niggers lived out their foolish dramas of drunkenness, gambling, rape, bastardy, syphilis, and roaring death.” Nor has he more time for the WASP overclass, judging “with furious Jewish snobbery the laxity and brainlessness of the golf-playing goy” (p. 243). When Rosenfeld’s father met Bellow in 1933, his disapproval was immediate: “To me he had every objection imaginable—I was a senior, just about to get my diploma. Isaac was just ending his freshman year. I was a lightweight, leading Isaac astray and the ‘old guy’—in his early forties—was determined to get rid of me. He was downright about it. He said, ‘You’re not in Isaac’s class.’ ”79

  Rosenfeld did his best to become the wunderkind his father required, “a winning number in the Jewish-father sweepstakes.”80 That he was a wunderkind helped. But the effort left him a “rigid … nervous, fastidious boy,”81 and was to
have dire consequences in later life. At Tuley, part of his “oddity,” as Bellow saw it, was the seeming equanimity with which he accepted the identity imposed upon him, with attendant social disadvantages. Pale, bespectacled, stocky but sickly, an obvious non-fighter, oblivious to baseball, street-corner games, the newspaper life of the nation (prizefights, gangsters, scandal), and almost all low-cultural pursuits, Isaac failed, as Bellow puts it, “to be an American.” That he seems not to have been bullied—“a merciful impossibility”82—was partly a product of sweetness of character, a quality attested to by several Tuley contemporaries. In “Zetland,” the adolescent hero is described as “loving, virtually Franciscan, a simpleton for God’s sake, easy to cheat. An ingenu” (p. 246). The real-life Zetland had what Bellow calls “ingenuous charm,” which he illustrates in the way Rosenfeld told wisecracks, “often preceded by [a] pale-blue glance. He began, he paused, a sort of mild slyness formed about his lips, and then he said something devastating.”83 Zipperstein recounts an example of sly ingenuous charm, apparently at the age of two. During a visit from one of his father’s friends, infant Isaac was making noise and his father yelled at him. “Isaac turned to his father and said, in a mixture of Yiddish and English, ‘fun a bissel tummel [from a little bit of noise] the world comes an end.’ ”84

  In the post-Tuley years, Rosenfeld gave voice to what he saw as the costs of his upbringing. As the adolescent Bernard puts it in Passage from Home, “Everything I did marked me as his son. My whole life was an acknowledgement and a denial” (p. 53). “I was a very serious young man,” writes Rosenfeld in an autobiographical story, “The World on the Ceiling” (1956), “interested only in philosophy and politics, with a way of wrinkling my face in thought which I had copied from a portrait of Hegel. I had no girlfriends, no frivolities; I had a Weltanschauung. This pleased my father, but he kept his pleasure to himself.”85 Of Zetland’s father, Bellow has the son say,

  “He wanted me to be John Stuart Mill.… Or some shrunken little Irzkowitz of a prodigy—Greek and calculus at the age of eight, damn him!” Zet believed he had been cheated of his childhood, robbed of the angelic birthright. He believed all that old stuff about the sufferings of childhood, the lost paradise, the crucifixion of innocence. Why was he sickly, why was he myopic, why did he have a greenish color? Why, grim old Zet wanted him to be all marrow, no bone. He caged him in reprehending punitive silence, he demanded that he dazzle the world. And he never—but never—approved of anything (pp. 244–45).

  According to Zipperstein, Rosenfeld “was certain that he had never experienced the pleasurable abandon nor the wholeness that he associated with childhood,”86 gifts Bellow was absolutely certain of, carried with him through life, and drew on repeatedly as a writer. This difference between the friends played a part in their later rivalry and estrangement. In some respects, the relationship resembled that of Wordsworth and Coleridge, with Rosenfeld the Coleridge figure: brilliant, wildly precocious, damaged, burdened by abstraction, then by an exaggerated embrace of feeling. What Wordsworth drew from Coleridge, particularly in the early years of their friendship, Bellow drew from Rosenfeld: intellectual stimulation, philosophical ballast, qualities he would seek out later in life from figures in some ways similar. In looking back on the gradual dissolution of their friendship in the 1940s, Bellow takes a lot of the blame. “I loved him,” he recalls in the foreword to a collection of Rosenfeld’s writings, “but we were rivals, and I was peculiarly touchy, vulnerable, hard to deal with—at times, as I can see now, insufferable—and not always a constant friend.”87 In the Tuley years, however, when Rosenfeld was widely perceived as Bellow’s intellectual superior, there were relatively few such tensions.

  The other key member of Bellow’s social group, certainly in intellectual terms, was Oscar Tarcov, whose parents, like Bellow’s and Rosenfeld’s, were Russian Jewish immigrants. Tarcov’s father dealt in carpets and was often away from home on business. He had escaped the Ukraine in 1905, accused of killing a Cossack during the pogroms of that year. His wife, Manya, is remembered by her grandson, the political philosopher Nathan Tarcov, as “illiterate in three languages” (Russian, English, Yiddish), a description originating from his father. Oscar Tarcov grew up in a large family. When Bellow knew him in the Tuley years, it consisted of his parents, sister Ruth, who was a year younger than Oscar, sister Jeanne, who died of TB in 1940, and two much older sisters, Anita and Florence, and their husbands. By 1933, there were ten people in the Tarcov apartment on Le Moyne Street.88 Oscar’s intellectual interests were literary, philosophical, and political, though as with Bellow and Rosenfeld, politics were secondary (in Nathan Tarcov’s words, “what literary and intellectual people were supposed to do”). Tarcov graduated from Tuley in 1935, two years after Bellow, a year ahead of Rosenfeld. Then he attended the University of Chicago, where he studied anthropology with Robert Redfield (Rosenfeld would study philosophy). At the end of the 1930s, Tarcov went to New York to become a writer, returned to Chicago, went to graduate school for a year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, went to New York again, returned, got married, and two years after that, in 1943, had a child, Nathan’s sister, Miriam. To support his family he eventually took a job with the Anti-Defamation League, writing at night. He would publish his first and only novel, Bravo, My Monster (1953), nine years after Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man, and seven years after Rosenfeld’s Passage from Home.

  Bravo, My Monster is spare and horrific, a parable of the Holocaust, and its debt to Kafka, remarked on in admiring reviews, is clear: the monster is a man, a “maniac,” neither named nor described in any detail; his unnamed victim, the novel’s narrator, lets him into the apartment; the monster’s motives, the origins of his malice, are unspecified; the puzzling and ingenious punishments he inflicts are unrelenting; the victim’s cries and calls are not heard, no one comes to his rescue or to inquire of his whereabouts; the city he lives in is unnamed; step by step, as the victim fears will happen but cannot bring himself to believe, the monster tortures him to death. The novel ends with an italicized envoi: “This phantasy is dedicated to those who, like the victim of this tale, answered their doorbell and on the threshold met evil in the likeness of man.” The poet and critic Allen Tate called Bravo, My Monster “a brilliant, highly original exploration of a realm of experience opened up by Franz Kafka.” Bellow, too, associated Kafka with the Holocaust, calling The Metamorphosis, “the most impressive story that I know of in that line.”89 In a brief review of the novel in Saturday Review (October 31, 1953), Bellow declared that “Mr. Tarcov has learned from Poe and from Kafka how to cut us off from the normal world at one stroke. This does not mean that he is to be thought of as a brilliant imitator. He has his own understanding of this mystery and is a writer of no small independence and of very considerable literary talent.”90

  TARCOV, LIKE ROSENFELD, died young, at forty-five of a heart attack. His first heart attack occurred in 1958 at thirty-nine. After a lengthy recuperation, he quit his job with the Anti-Defamation League and determined to devote his life to writing. In the five years that remained to him, he produced stories and dramatic pieces, and at his death a play had been optioned, though it was never produced. The dramatic pieces, mostly one-act plays, were produced off-Broadway, several by the Herbert Berghof Group (with which Bellow later had dealings). The first was a realistic family drama, but the later pieces were lighter, more abstract, with surrealist elements reminiscent of Ionesco. The stories appeared in The Reconstructionist, The Antioch Review, The New Mexico Quarterly Review, and Chicago magazine, and often take the form of fables. Though, in Nathan Tarcov’s words, “warmer, more humane, more Jewish, more humorous” than Kafka’s stories, they are Kafkaesque in form: abstract, spare, symbolic. The influence of Kafka was a point of connection between Tarcov and Rosenfeld, one that was to distinguish their writing from Bellow’s, certainly in the post-Tuley years. In 1944, two years before Passage from Home was published, Rosenfeld won the first Partisan Re
view–Dial Press novelette award for a Kafkaesque novella, “The Colony.” When Passage from Home appeared it was praised by the sociologist Daniel Bell in a review entitled “A Parable of Alienation,” as a retelling of the story of the prodigal son. Irving Howe also praised the novel for its parable-like qualities: its spareness, focus on the internal rather than the external, and consequent openness to symbolic identifications.91 In a review essay of 1947 in The New Leader entitled “Kafka and His Critics,” Rosenfeld both championed Kafka for his symbolic richness and chided critics for the “partial” character of their readings, “which are mistaken in thinking themselves mutually exclusive.” For Rosenfeld, “there is no other writer whose subject matter … is so broad, or whose symbols, whatever their partial explanation, are so closely articulated in a statement that embraces and gives the quality of so much of modern experience.”92 Kafka’s influence on Rosenfeld was to prove inhibiting. In Zipperstein’s words, Rosenfeld “more than embraced Kafka, aiming to make himself into his prime, contemporary disciple.”93 His stories grew increasingly spare, laboring under a burden of symbolic correspondences. “When I read his fiction,” Alfred Kazin recalled, “I could see the theoretician standing apart from the writer of fiction and waiting to comment on the action that had been impatiently sketched in.… Isaac, even as a novelist, was more interested in ideas than in manners.”94