The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Eleanor Fox was not the only person troubled by Bellow’s volatility: “My mother, who was unfamiliar with America and didn’t really know how things worked here, was frightened by my excess. I was a bohemian and a left-winger and all of these serious, unusual things and she was worried. She was dying and wouldn’t be here to take care of me.” Bellow knew of his mother’s worry at first hand, but also from the testimony of “a girlfriend in high school whose mother was my mother’s seamstress.” His mother would “unburden herself to the seamstress whom she liked very much. Then the word would get back to me by way of the girl. I really looked very bad in those days. I looked like a lost cause.”116 As his mother’s health deteriorated, her anxiety about Bellow was fed by Abraham, who “was often heard to say that I had been a clever child,” but was now “succumbing to American emptiness and narishkeit [foolishnesss].”117 Soon, however, Liza’s dying subsumed all other worries. In a tiny spiral notebook in the Regenstein, undated, Bellow recalled that “my mother towards the last had the look of a woman waking from an ill-omened dream—whose happiness (happiness within misery, family happiness unaffected, really, by poverty) was now to end in death. Her face became dark. Good nature ended. She often looked sullen, like a sleeper roused from his siesta by a loud noise on the roof. Her face was dark. The look was calm, but withdrawn.” Liza had been ill with breast cancer for years and was often heavily sedated. At her death, on February 28, 1933, at ten at night, the family fell apart. In Herzog, Bellow presents a powerful fictional account of her last weeks. Late in “a frightful January, streets coated with steely ice,” Moses sits at the kitchen table in a rage, reading Spengler, his heart “infected with ambition, and the bacteria of vengeance.” From her sickroom, his mother sees light under the door and walks the length of the house to the kitchen.

  Her hair had to be cut during her illness, and this made those eyes hard to recognize. Or no, the shortness of her hair merely made their message simpler: My son, this is death.

  I chose not to read this text.

  “I saw the light,” she said. “What are you doing up so late?” But the dying, for themselves, have given up hours. She only pitied me, her orphan, understood I was a gesture-maker, ambitious, a fool; thought I would need my eyesight and my strength on a certain day of reckoning.

  A few days afterward, when she had lost the power to speak, she was still trying to comfort Moses. Just as when he knew she was breathless from trudging with his sled in Montreal but would not get up. He came into her room when she was dying, holding his school books, and began to say something to her. But she lifted up her hands and showed him her fingernails. They were blue. As he stared, she slowly began to nod her head up and down as if to say, “That’s right, Moses, I am dying now.” He sat by the bed. Presently she began to stroke his hand. She did this as well as she could; her fingers had lost their flexibility. Under the nails they seemed to him to be turning already into the blue loam of graves. She had begun to change into earth! (pp. 652–53).

  Eleanor Fox at eighteen (ill. 4.1)

  5

  Politics/Anthropology

  IN THE SPRING of 1934, just a year after Liza Bellow’s death, Abraham married Fannie Gebler, a widow who lived in the neighborhood. It is Jewish custom for widows or widowers to wait a year before remarrying. Fannie came from Galicia, had no children, and brought with her a sum of money, between $7,500 and $10,000, which she gave to Abraham for his business. She was kind to Abraham’s children, who remembered her fondly. From photographs taken at Maury and Marge’s wedding she looks a handsome woman, like Father Herzog’s second wife, the Widow Kaplinsky, who “had been a stunning girl” and in her sixties “had thick handsome strong brows and a heavy braid of animal brown” (p. 664). In her eighties, when we encounter her in Herzog, the Widow Kaplinsky is slow but shrewd, careful with fraught Moses. Moses remembers Father Herzog complaining toward the end of his life that “he had brought his iron to a cold forge. A kalte kuzhnya, Moshe. Kein fire. Divorce was impossible because he owed her too much money” (p. 667). According to Joel Bellows, Abraham complained in similar terms about Fannie Gebler, though Joel also recalls being told that Fannie “took great pride in the fact that Abraham wanted to have sex the night he died, and she had to turn him down” (Abraham died in 1955, at seventy-four). Soon after the marriage, Jane and Charlie moved to their own apartment in Rogers Park, Sam and Nina married and moved to an apartment in Lincoln Park, and Maury and Marge married and moved to an apartment on the South Side. A month before Liza’s death, Bellow enrolled as a student at Crane Junior College in the Loop, where he stayed until the beginning of the next academic year. At some point in 1935, probably in the autumn, Abraham and Fannie moved from Le Moyne Street to a one-bedroom apartment at 3434 Evergreen Avenue, a few blocks away.

  Bellow tried to hide his distress at Liza’s illness and death. “It was a very shattering experience for him when she died,” David Peltz remembered, “he couldn’t talk much about it, but he did talk about it”1—to Peltz, not to Eleanor Fox, who remembered “very little reaction,” by which she means very little talk, for she also sensed “something lonely” about him, an impression shared by Fred Glotzer, who recalled Bellow at the same time as “kind of a lonely guy who needed approval from his friends.” This was the period in which Bellow slept nights at the Harris apartment. “I was turned loose—freed, in a sense: free, but also stunned.”2 Albert Corde’s family in The Dean’s December is very different from Bellow’s, having money and connections, but the illness and death of Corde’s mother suggest the last days of Liza Bellow, as Corde’s feelings suggest those reported by Bellow himself. “I was grieving so hard,” Corde recalls to Dewey Spangler, “just back from the cemetery. It was one of those winter days of cast-iron gloom, nothing but gray ice” (p. 233).

  Bellow was not alone in moving from Tuley to Crane. Yetta Barshevsky was already there, as was Nate Gould; Arthur Wineberg entered at the same time as Bellow. Crane was founded in 1911, after Jane Addams, John Dewey, and other influential progressives lobbied the city to provide higher education for the poor. It offered an abbreviated baccalaureate program, modeled on the first two years of a four-year undergraduate degree.3 Its first students (thirty-two in 1911) were mostly immigrants from the near West Side. By 1931, it had a student body of more than three thousand. In The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow describes this student body as made up of “children of immigrants from all parts, coming up from Hell’s Kitchen, Little Sicily, the Black Belt, the mass of Polonia, the Jewish streets of Humboldt Park.” During the early years of the Depression, Crane was both overcrowded and underfunded (in Augie’s words, “they filled the factory-length corridors and giant classrooms with every human character and germ” [p. 524]), and for periods its teachers went unpaid, the fate of other municipal workers in 1930s Chicago, including police and firemen. Bellow’s English teacher at Crane, Miss Ferguson, remembered one protest in which unpaid teachers pushed their way into the mayor’s office “and chased him round his desk.”4 This mayor, Anton “Pushcart Tony” Cermak, was forced by the deepening crisis to go cap-in-hand to FDR, whose nomination as Democratic candidate for president he had tried to block in 1932. The president-elect was in Florida, recovering from a difficult campaign, and on February 15, (two weeks before Liza Bellow’s death) an attempt was made to assassinate him at an outdoor speech at which Cermak was present. Roosevelt was unhurt but Cermak and four others were shot, and nineteen days later, on March 6, 1933, the mayor died of his wounds. As the funding crisis intensified over the spring and summer, Cermak’s successor, Mayor Edward Kelly, was forced to sack 1,400 teachers, shorten the workweek, and close Crane. Chicago’s most progressive educational institution, “the people’s college,” was shut down two months after the opening of the city’s much touted World’s Fair, “A Century of Progress.” There were mass protests against the closure and cuts, including a meeting of over thirty thousand at the Chicago Stadium on July 21. Students and teachers, supported b
y prominent allies such as Clarence Darrow, as well as an increasingly radicalized union movement, marched together “to save educational opportunity for working people.” Embarrassed and alarmed by the public outcry, Mayor Kelly was forced not only to authorize the reopening of Crane in 1934, but to add two new sites, one in the heart of the Lawndale district on the northwest side. By this date, Bellow had enrolled in the University of Chicago. His half year at Crane had been marked as much by political unrest over the funding crisis as by coursework (English 101, Spanish, Math, English History), and he reports very little of what he learned (except to say that Miss Ferguson of English 101 was keen on rules of composition, which she sang out in class to the tune of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus”).5 Augie March, a more easygoing type than Bellow, contrasted the work he did at Crane with that of his fellow students:

  demon-brained physicists, historians bred under pushcarts, and many hard-grain poor boys who were going to starve and work themselves bitterly eight years or so to become doctors, engineers, scholars, and experts. I had no special eagerness of this kind and never had been led to think I should have, nor gave myself anxious cares about being revealed a profession. I didn’t feel moved to take it seriously. Nevertheless I turned in a fairly good performance in French and History. In things like Botany, my drawings were cockeyed and smudgy and I was behind the class (p. 526).

  BELLOW’S INVOLVEMENT IN politics in the 1930s began at Tuley and continued throughout his college years, first at Crane, then at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin. His rich friend Sam Freifeld helped to introduce him to political theory and commentary, generously lending him influential journals and texts. “What he wanted from them,” Bellow recalls in “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt,” an article published in December 1983 in Esquire, “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.”6 Bellow mentions reading Marx’s Value, Price and Profit (1898) in the office of Carroll Coal; he also mentions reading Lenin’s The State and Revolution (1917) and Leon Trotsky’s pamphlets, singling out “Germany: The Key to the International Situation” (1931), in which Trotsky argues, in Bellow’s words, that “Stalin’s errors had brought Hitler to power”7 (principally by identifying the Social Democrats as a greater threat to Germany than the Nazis). Bellow’s skills as a public speaker were tested at Tuley in the debating club, where local and national issues, as well as works of political theory (The Communist Manifesto on one occasion) were debated. “My oratory has not improved since I debated the chain-store issue at Tuley,” Bellow wrote to Nate Gould, in a letter of February 1, 1967. Outside school there were debates on soapboxes and in the halls and clubs around Division Street. Bellow singles out those at what he calls “the forum,” a church hall on California Avenue, where the arguments of “socialists, communists and anarchists attracted a fair number of people.” Such arguments were “the beginning of my radical education.”8 David Peltz’s uncle, David Bronstein, ran a similar forum on Friday nights at his mission house, the Peniel Community Center (“Peniel” is Hebrew for “face of God”) on Washtenaw and Crystal, just off California and Division. Bronstein, a convert to Christianity, had married Peltz’s father’s sister, who also converted. The forum he ran discussed political as well as religious issues, which is only partly why the Tuley crowd attended. “He’d have a huge audience,” Peltz explains, “because cocoa was served and coffee was served and donuts at the end, and anyone could say what they wanted.” After an appeal from Bronstein or his wife or a guest speaker to accept Jesus, “the Stalinists got up and they made speeches and the Trotskyites got up and they made their speeches and the Norman Thomas supporters gave their speeches.” Peltz remembers Freifeld and Herb Passin speaking at Peniel, though never Bellow.9

  “In high school I was a socialist,” Bellow told an interviewer. “In college (1933) I was a Trotskyist.” What made Bellow a Trotskyist, he claims, was reading Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1932), “even though most of it was party-line.”10 Trotsky’s History attacks Stalin’s personal dictatorship and intolerance of criticism, the parasitic Soviet state bureaucracy, the doctrine of socialism in one country (as opposed to world or permanent revolution), and what Leszek Kolakowski calls “the forgeries of Stalinist historiography.”11 It also defends Bolshevism as a political system, arguing that the Soviet Union, for all its defects, remained a worker’s state, because it owned the means of production. In 1932, Bellow and his friends (minus Sydney Harris, who “never became a Marxist.… We kind of split because I was looked upon as a betrayer of the cause”12) were prepared to accept this defense. “We belonged to the movement,” Bellow continues, “we were faithful to Leninism and could expound its historical lessons and describe Stalin’s crimes.”13 The Tuley Trotskyists could talk the talk—of “surplus value,” “rate of profit,” “the fetishism of commodities,” “hegemony” (much invoked by Freifeld), what Marx “really” meant, whether FDR’s reforms “were saving the country for capitalism, only the capitalists were too stupid to understand this.”14 Presumably they also pondered what Irving Kristol, speaking of his fellow Trotskyists at City College in New York, called “the overwhelming question that haunted us, namely whether there was something in Marxism and Leninism that led to Stalinism? To what degree was there a connection? This was the question that all along bothered us, that was a prelude to our future politics.”15

  Trotsky’s appeal to the Tuley circle, as to the Trotskyists at City College, had several sources. That he was Jewish played a part, as did his reputation as an intellectual. The “vanguard fighters” of the October Revolution, especially Lenin and Trotsky, whose names Bellow first heard “in the high chair while eating my mashed potatoes,” were thinkers and theorists as well as men of action. Trotsky had been president of the Military Revolutionary Committee in the October Revolution, the creator and first commander of the Red Army, the Soviet Union’s first commissar of foreign affairs, Lenin’s right-hand man. He also “read French novels at the front while defeating Deniken,”16 wrote literary criticism as well as political theory, was a friend of André Breton and Diego Rivera, and was first championed in America by Max Eastman, editor of The Masses, a socialist periodical mixing art and politics. In 1935, Trotsky declared that “politics and literature constitute in essence the contents of my personal life.”17 Trotsky’s embrace of cosmopolitanism, his outsider status, his exile and persecution, also contributed to his appeal. As Bellow puts it, “we were, of course, the Outs; the Stalinists were the Ins. We alone in the U.S.A. knew what a bad lot they were.”18 Though greatly outnumbered by the Stalinists, the Trotskyists embraced their minority status, thought of themselves as smarter and more cultured than the Stalinists. “The Stalinists were middlebrow,” remembered Irving Howe, at City College with Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Bell. “The Trotskyists were highbrow, because they thought in the kind of terms that you had when Partisan Review started coming out [in 1934], the union of two avant gardes, a political avant garde and a cultural avant garde. We prided ourselves on reading Joyce and Thomas Mann and Proust, maybe not completely, but at least dipping in, whereas they were reading palookas like Howard Fast.”19 Prominent figures in the American Trotskyist movement were professors of philosophy, like James Burnham and Sidney Hook, witty and brilliant polemicists, like Max Shachtman, mixing, in Howe’s phrase, “intellectual rigor and destructive quarrelsomeness.”20 To Burnham, The History of the Russian Revolution was distinguished by Trotsky’s style, which “cannot be separated from his view of history.” Trotskyists, in other words, cared about language and writing. “My closest friends and I were not … activists,” Bellow recalls, “we were writers.… Through ‘revolutionary politics’ [the quotation marks are knowing, retrospective] we met the demands of the
times for action. But what really mattered was the vital personal nourishment we took from Dostoyevsky or Herman Melville, from Dreiser and John Dos Passos and Faulkner.”21 In this admission, Bellow again resembles Wordsworth, who at a comparable age, and in a comparable period, that of the French Revolution, “skimmed, and sometimes read / With care the master pamphlets of the day” (Paine, Burke, Godwin), toured revolutionary Paris, at one point pocketing a stone from the Bastille, but did so “affecting more emotion than I felt,” less moved by revolutionary sites than by a work of art, “the painted Magdalene of Le Brun, / A beauty exquisitely wrought.”22 Like Joseph in Dangling Man, who cites Plato, like young Wordsworth, Bellow ultimately regarded politics “as an inferior activity.” As Joseph admits, “I never enjoyed being a revolutionary.” “No? Didn’t you hate anyone?” “I hated, but I didn’t enjoy” (pp. 100–101).

  Abraham Bellow was scornful of his son’s politics. When Bellow brought political friends home, Abraham gave them a hard time. One such friend was Albert Glotzer, Fred Glotzer’s younger brother. Glotzer’s Russian immigrant parents had been members of the Bund, and Albert recalls being taken as a child to socialist debates on Division Street at the Old Style Inn, opposite the entrance to Humboldt Park. At eight he was selling socialist literature on Division Street. At fifteen, in 1923, he joined the American Communist Party, founded in Chicago in 1919, quickly rising to prominence in its youth section. He then joined a Trotskyist faction of the party. By 1928 Trotskyism was a state crime in the Soviet Union and Glotzer’s faction was expelled before the end of the year; in May 1929, its members formed a rival party, the Communist League of America (CLA), headquartered in New York.23 Glotzer, at twenty, was named to the new party’s National Committee, and two years later was sent to Europe on a fact-finding mission. Here he met with French and British Trotskyists before traveling to Turkey to meet with the exiled Trotsky himself. Glotzer spent six weeks with Trotsky, discussing the activities of the CLA and helping him with his correspondence (including letters to H. L. Mencken and Upton Sinclair). After returning to the United States, Glotzer met up with Trotsky two more times: in France in 1934 and then in 1937 at the Dewey Commission hearings in Mexico, where he acted as court reporter. Bellow saw a good deal of Glotzer after his return to Chicago in the mid-1930s, often with Glotzer’s brother, Fred, or at political meetings.24