The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  The Chicago Trotskyists were fierce factionalists, but their fierceness was mostly verbal or intellectual rather than physical. Stalinist fierceness was often physical. In an interview, Sydney Harris mocked the internecine wars and splits of the Trotskyists (“they wandered off into the fifth and sixth dimensions with Lovestoneites and Shachtmanites”),25 but preferred their politics to those of the Stalinists. “In those days the Stalinists were a terribly brutal lot. They were like thugs. They’d go up and down Division Street and North Avenue and they’d break up the Socialist Party meetings, and they were really real hoodlums.” Zita Samson (later Cogan), who lived on the corner of Kedzie and Le Moyne, near Eleanor Fox, and was a lifelong friend of Bellow’s, remembered being visited at Tuley by “a party of three fellow travelers telling me I should stop seeing Bellow,” because Bellow and his friends “were anti-Stalinist.” Dropping or cutting politically incorrect friends or acquaintances was a matter of principle to many Communists; it was also party policy. The sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, another City College Trotskyist, explains: “As far as the Communists were concerned the Trotskyists were not only traitors, they were fascists. They had a policy that no Communists were supposed to talk to a Trotskyist or debate them. They could talk to socialists”26 (even though in Germany, according to Stalin, socialists were more dangerous than fascists). Sacrificing the personal to the political was a frequent theme in fiction of and about left politics in the period, as was the ineffectuality of Trotskyist types. In Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey (1947), set in the mid-1930s, just after the Moscow Trials, the central character, John Laskell, a Trotskyist-sounding liberal (“we pretty much limit ourselves to ideas—and ideals. When we act, if we can call it action, it’s only in a peripheral way”), describes the faces of more politically engaged friends: “both had that brooding blind look that is given by men to the abstractions they admire, in the belief that a lack of personal being is the mark of all great and admirable things.”27

  In Dangling Man, Joseph is enraged when a past party acquaintance refuses to speak to him. Revisiting an old hangout, “where, at almost any hour of the afternoon or evening, you could hear discussions of socialism, psychopathology, or the fate of European man,” Joseph spots Jimmy Burns, whom he’s barely seen “since the days when we had been Comrade Joe and Comrade Jim” (p. 20). In those days, Joseph recalls, Burns had a large-scale map of Chicago in his room, with pins in it: “he was preparing a guide for street-fighting, the day of the insurrection” (p. 23). Burns cuts Joseph: “he looked through me in the way which is, I suppose, officially prescribed for ‘renegades’ ” (p. 20). Joseph, however, won’t ignore Burns’s slight, for reasons he details:

  Forbid one man to talk to another, forbid him to communicate with someone else, and you’ve forbidden him to think, because, as a great many writers will tell you, thought is a kind of communication. And his party doesn’t want him to think, but to follow its discipline. So there you are. Because it’s supposed to be a revolutionary party. That’s what’s offending me. When a man obeys an order like that he’s helping to abolish freedom and begin tyranny (p. 21).

  Joseph forces Burns to acknowledge him, which Burns does curtly, reluctantly. Joseph has made a scene, he explains to a companion, because “I haven’t forgotten that I believed they were devoted to the service of some grand flapdoodle, the Race, le genre humain. Oh, yes, they were! By the time I got out, I realized that any hospital nurse did more with one bedpan for le genre humain than they did with their entire organization. It’s odd to think that there was a time when to hear that would have filled me with horror” (p. 22).

  That Trotskyists did little practical good was a charge leveled at Bellow and his friends from the left as well as the right. David Peltz was no Stalinist, no Communist of any sort, but he approved certain activities of the Stalinists. Always the most physically active and practical of Bellow’s friends, as well as the most street, he saw the local Stalinists as engaged in the community, unlike the Trotskyists: “They [the Stalinists] formed a group, when people were being dispossessed, were being evicted from their apartments. Their furniture would be moved in the street, to the sidewalks, by sheriffs. There were a group of us—Bellow never belonged to that group, none of them [he means the Trotskyists] did. I joined in order to move the furniture back into the house after the sheriffs left. This was a band of people formed by the Communists. I was not a Communist but I engaged in the moving.” That Bellow himself suspected the practical irrelevance of his politics is suggested by a letter of January 30, 1995, to Glotzer. “When Banowitz’s bakers went on strike,” he writes, of an incident in the early 1930s, “they chanted while picketing ‘6 cents! Union bread!—and Hands off China!’ I was standing next to Banowitz whom I knew because my father sold him scrap for wood for the ovens and he said to me ‘6 cents, union bread maybe I could do it but what could I do about China?’ ” Bellow was also conscious of the dangers of toeing the line. “Every ideology at that age,” he recalled of the 1930s, “presented itself to me as an orthodoxy; and there was something about radical orthodoxy that resembled [religious] orthodoxy in that it was enforced by people who insisted rigidly on the legitimacy of their political position. After all, being a Trotskyite was in a way like being a Jew. Although Trotsky denied that he was a Jew.”28 Political engagement threatened what Bellow believed one of his strengths as a writer: truth to particulars, truth through particulars, however complicating.

  Bellow’s view of Franklin Roosevelt illustrates this strength. To both Trotskyists and Stalinists, Roosevelt, for all his support from working people and the foreign-born (“it was bliss to hear FDR say that in this country we were all of us aliens”),29 was an agent of capitalism; that was the line, even during the Popular Front (1934–39), in which Stalinists supported broad alliances on the left, adopting, in Bellow’s words, a “temperate and apparently conciliatory” rhetoric. Bellow himself had few illusions about FDR, who was “no crusader, no enemy of entrenched privilege, ‘no tribune of the people,’ ” and no intellectual. Though “a not ungrateful beneficiary”30 of Roosevelt’s policies, Bellow liked them “less and less as time went by.” But even when most radical, early in his college years, he gave Roosevelt his due, acknowledging his appeal as politician and leader. This appeal, Bellow suggests, was a matter of touch or feel. Here is how “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt” ends. Bellow describes being an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, “fully armored in skepticism, for Roosevelt was very smooth and one couldn’t be careful enough. But under the armor I was nonetheless vulnerable.” At nine o’clock one summer evening, Bellow walks east along the Chicago Midway, listening to Roosevelt’s broadcast on the radios of parked cars:

  You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the President’s words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it. You had some sense of the weight of troubles that made them so attentive, and of the ponderable fact, the one common element (Roosevelt), on which so many unknowns could agree. Just as memorable to me, perhaps, was to learn how long clover flowers could hold their color in the dusk.31

  ONE OF THE PLACES Bellow might have been going that evening was the World’s Fair, which was still open in the summer of 1933. The fair was located on the South Side of the city, in a narrow strip of shore along Lake Michigan, between 39th and 12th Streets. There David Peltz had a job pulling a rickshaw, while being pestered for whores by boozy tourists, and for boozy tourists by whores. Bellow’s friendship with Peltz was the longest of his life, but was not always easy. Peltz was born a month after Bellow, on July 9, 1915; when they first met, walking home from Tuley in 1930 at the start of the school year, Peltz lived on Robey Street, a block or two from Cortez. He had four sisters, three younger and one older. His mother, like her sister, was a convert to Christianity, and his father was wild, an operator. Peltz w
as street from the start, of necessity. In 1925 his father escaped bankruptcy by fleeing Baltimore for Chicago. Previously he’d fled Europe, scabbing in a seaman’s strike and jumping ship in New York. Escaping to Chicago did little for the Peltz family fortunes. After Peltz’s first and only year at Tuley High School, his father couldn’t pay the rent and the family moved apartments. This was pretty much the end of Peltz’s formal education, though he kept up his Tuley friendships. He took on various jobs: helping in his father’s pants-making shop (a “cut, make and trim” shop); lugging coal for Bellow’s family; tending to Ben Freifeld; caddieing in summers in Winnetka.

  Like Morris Selbst in Bellow’s story “A Silver Dish” (1978), Peltz’s father was “elemental,” “digestive, circulatory, sexual,” and strong, as was Peltz himself.32 “Most of my life I was in superb physical condition,” Peltz declared to me in an interview in 2008 when he was ninety-two. Yet he also admitted to “a lot of medical events.” Here is a flavor of his talk: “I’ve had tumors excised, radiated. I’ve had one of the most dangerous tumors known, called the Merkle cell carcinoma. I have a tumor on my prostate. When your PSA reaches five, people get the prostate taken out. Well mine is 340 and I said, ‘When I’m sick, I’ll do something about it.’ The doctors don’t understand it.” Bellow makes much of these sorts of medical miracles and of his friend’s vitality in Humboldt’s Gift. A character very much like Peltz, George Swiebel, teaches Charlie Citrine to cure neck pain by standing on his head, a technique Peltz learned in real life from a ballerina and one Bellow employed into his seventies. Other Swiebel remedies, originally Peltz remedies, are more extreme:

  Immediately after his gall-bladder operation [George] got out of bed and did fifty push-ups.… From this exertion, he got peritonitis and for two days we thought he was dying. But ailments seemed to inspire him, and he had his own cures for everything. Recently he told me, “I woke up day before yesterday and found a lump under my arm.”

  “Did you go to the doctor?”

  “No. I tied it with dental floss. I tied it tight, tight, tight … ”

  “What happened?”

  “Yesterday when I examined it, it had swelled up to the size of an egg. Still I didn’t call the doctor. To hell with that! I took more dental floss and tied it tight, tight, even tighter. And now it’s cured, it’s gone. You want to see?” (pp. 50–51).

  Bellow draws on Peltz and his adventures not only in Humboldt’s Gift and “A Silver Dish,” where his name is Woody Selbst (Billy Seltzer in draft), but also in several unpublished works: “The Closer,” a story about aluminum siding salesmen in Los Angeles (Peltz’s job after failing as a Hollywood screenwriter, the start of what became a lucrative career as a contractor), and “Olduvai George,” an unfinished novel the first fifty pages of which exist in draft.

  From the beginning of their friendship Peltz offered Bellow advice about emotional as well as physical problems, including about his love life. He also kept Bellow informed, as George Swiebel keeps Charlie Citrine informed, “about criminals, whores, racing, the rackets, narcotics, politics, and Syndicate operations” (p. 41). It was Peltz who introduced Bellow to the Russian Baths on Division Street. And it was Peltz who was threatened there with a baseball bat, having stopped payment on a gambling debt, as does Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift. The real-life debt was incurred at a poker game in the 1950s at Nelson Algren’s apartment on Wabansia Street, in one of the city’s Polish districts. Peltz met Algren in the WPA (Works Progress Administration), when he was writing for the Federal Theatre Project: “He was my kind of guy. We drank together. We went to the track together.” Studs Terkel was in the game, as was William Friedkin, who would go on to direct The French Connection and The Exorcist. Algren thought the big winner, a guy who owned currency exchanges, was flashing cards to his associate, “Big Injun,” employed to collect on bad checks. “They played out of each other’s pockets,” Algren told Peltz. “I want you to stop your check.” Algren then left town on a freighter to China. As was mentioned in the introduction to this book, when the Humboldt’s Gift version of the story was excerpted in Playboy, Peltz was outraged. He was saving it for a novel of his own, and Bellow had “given his word” that he wouldn’t use it. It took Peltz a long time to forgive his friend, or to say he forgave him.

  Peltz’s initial attraction to Bellow derived from Bellow’s knowledge of books. At sixteen, Peltz “fell into” War and Peace, discussing it with Bellow on long, exhilarating evenings in Humboldt Park; then he “went into” Crime and Punishment. Peltz loved Bellow but is hard on him; Bellow, through the character of George Swiebel, is hard back about Dave, but also loving:

  George with his brown, humanly comprehensive eyes is not stupid except when he proclaims his ideas. He does this loudly, fiercely. And then I only grin at him because I know how kindly he is. He takes care of his old parents, of his sisters, of his ex-wife and their grown children. He denounces eggheads, but he really loves culture. He spends whole days trying to read difficult books, knocking himself out. Not with great success. And when I introduce him to intellectuals … he shouts and baits them and talks dirty, his face gets red (p. 61).

  Peltz’s warmth and vigor, clear from adolescence and still obvious at ninety-five, combined with a streak of crudeness, as in the following description of how and when he and other boys of his era first had sex:

  In those days losing one’s virginity had enormous male status. Almost all of my generation lied about it. The earlier you lost it the greater the status. My fear of entrapment brought on a late encounter at the age of eighteen for the cost of a dollar with a neighborhood hooker who was loving and who sandwiched my penis in the cleavage of her breasts almost blowing the top of my head off. Lasco [a Tuley friend] paid for it, needing support for his first encounter, with money pilfered from his mother’s purse. Saul never discussed his feelings about sexuality only the dropping of some names. I don’t have the slightest notion as to when he lost it.33

  For Bellow as a “connoisseur of Chicago street talk,” Peltz was a great resource. Nor is his language always coarse; sometimes it is lyrical, as when describing the shvitz-bod (steam bath), with its furnace rocks “molten white and red.” In the Russian Baths, Peltz says, “you go to hell to get purified.” Then you have a plaitsa (rubdown), “with eucalyptus leaves and pin oak leaves tied together into a brush, dunked in a bucket of soap and water, and lathered over the body.” Though Charlie Citrine cannot always count on George Swiebel getting on with his intellectual friends, he often introduces him to them, as Bellow introduced Peltz to colleagues from the University of Chicago. When Hannah Arendt, who, in Bellow’s words, thought her “peculiar gift in this life [was] to be the representative of German High Culture,” came to Chicago, it was Peltz he chose to show her around.34 Mischief may have played its part in the introduction, but Bellow may also have wanted to expose Arendt to something of the vitality of Chicago street life, which Peltz both knew and embodied. Peltz declined, nervous of Arendt and touchy about being presented as “a Chicago character.” But Bellow valued Peltz, as he valued the street, and was careful to acknowledge his attraction to both. In an interview in 1980, when asked to describe his life in the 1930s, he begins with his reading, then his intellectual friends, then his knowledge of Chicago street types, including “the low-life … the tough guys … the boys training to be hoodlums”—neither Peltz nor Lasco, but people they knew, people Maury knew, people who tickled Bellow and whom he watched closely. “One of my baseball pals at Tuley High School,” he told the interviewer, “became chief executioner for the Chicago mob when he grew up. Dave Yaris. Dead now so I can mention his name. We had no idea. He had a violent temper. A very violent temper. I never saw anybody’s face turn as red as his, when he was frustrated, when somebody blocked him in the middle of a shot on the basketball court. He was transformed. He had this strange murderous seizure. But, of course, he soon recovered and went on with the game.… It was useful to him in his career later.”35
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  BELLOW ENROLLED IN the University of Chicago on October 3, 1933, at eighteen.36 His father “very unwillingly” agreed to pay the tuition fee of $300 a year ($100 for each of the year’s three quarters, Autumn, Winter, and Spring). As Bellow explains:

  I was not doing a pre-med course, like so many of my high school classmates. Nor did I study chemistry. Nor law. Nor economics. My father couldn’t readily explain to his friends just what I was doing at the university, and perhaps he resented the embarrassment I caused him. Most of my classmates knew exactly what they were here for; they plugged away at their biochemistry. Even the mathematicians thoroughly understood that it was wrong to dream away three hundred dollars in tuition at a time when the banks were tottering. Serious energetic students understood what sacrifices their families were making. Their outlook was practical.37