The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  To support himself, Bellow took on Saturday jobs, at Woolworth’s, at the windowshade section of Goldblatt’s department store (previously he’d worked in the shoe section), and “other little jobs, anything I could get. I stuffed mailboxes for politicians when there was an election.” These jobs earned him $3 a week, not quite enough for El fares and lunches at the Commons. There was no question of a scholarship: “I was mentally not steady enough,”38 partly because he was still mourning Liza’s death, perhaps also because of the strain of defying his father and brothers. Bellow was now open about his ambitions, always carrying a briefcase full of his stories and manuscripts: “In college I behaved as though my career was to be a writer, and that guided me. Not a career as a teacher or any other professional activity but as a writer.”39 On transferring to Northwestern University in 1935, Bellow was asked to fill out an admissions form. In answer to a question about “your reasons for desiring a college education, your reasons for entering the school which you have checked [Liberal Arts], and your reasons for believing you will be successful,” he wrote: “I am pursuing a course which has dominated my life for ten years.”40 When teased or doubted in pursuit of this course, he bristled. As he told an interviewer: “I didn’t feel like being intimidated by anybody. It got my dander up.”41

  Bellow was detached as a college student, partly for these reasons, partly because of the undergraduate program at the University of Chicago, which had been revised in 1930–31 by Robert M. Hutchins, its recently appointed president. Hutchins was thirty in 1929 when he came to the university. He was inaugurated as president just after the stock market crashed. A witty and attractive figure (to the sociologist Edward Shils, “the most handsome man I have ever seen”),42 Hutchins was also forceful and impatient in pursuit of his goals. At the beginning of the Depression, the number of graduate and professional students at the University of Chicago numbered four times that of the undergraduates; from its inception in 1892, the university favored research. The radical restructuring Hutchins introduced, stressed compulsory yearlong interdisciplinary courses.43 The four-year degree Bellow embarked on as a freshman was divided into two parts: a “College” component, with required General Courses in the first two years, followed by more specialized or advanced courses offered to juniors and seniors by the departments. Students moved out of the college by passing examinations, and Hutchins made much of the fact that these examinations could be taken or retaken whenever a student wished, regardless of course credits or attendance. The idea behind the College component, which Hutchins tried and failed to extend over all four years, was to tailor undergraduate training to undergraduate needs. Before Hutchins, many courses offered to undergraduates, only 2 percent of whom would go on to do academic research, focused on the collection and description of data, rather than on a discussion of the ends to which this data should be put. To Hutchins, and what Bellow called Hutchins’s “whippers-in,”44 the philosopher-administrators Mortimer Adler and Richard McKeon, metaphysics and the great books of Western culture offered the best way of fostering such discussion. Philosophy was preferred to empirical, fact-based disciplines partly in response to the great crises of the period. As Hutchins and his followers saw it, economics, sociology and political science, particular strengths of the university, had done little to predict or prevent the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe. What was needed, they argued, was the development of “intellectual virtues,” the sort that would help students to determine for themselves what were just or proper codes of conduct, laws, and social arrangements.45

  In his first year, Bellow was required to take four courses each quarter: two yearlong General Courses (Biological Sciences and Social Sciences), a yearlong English course (Introduction to the Study of Poetry in the Autumn, Introduction to the Study of Drama in the Winter, and Shakespeare in the Spring), and a year of elementary French.46 In the second year, which he did not complete, he took three more yearlong General Courses (Humanities, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences II), plus a single elective each quarter (Bellow chose an introductory anthropology course in the Autumn and an introductory economics course in the Winter, and withdrew from the university in the Spring). As at Tuley, his marks were mediocre, exclusively Bs and Cs in his examinations, mostly S (Satisfactory) in course reports.47

  Though an uninspired student, Bellow approved “the spirit of Hutchins in which the place was saturated,” in particular the intoxicating illusion the General Courses offered that “if you met all the requirements, you would graduate knowing everything there was to know about the physical sciences, the biological sciences, humanities, and the social sciences.… There was a kind of crazy, cockeyed arrogance in all this, which really appealed to young Jews from the West Side.” What did not appeal was the anonymity of large lecture classes, with as many as four hundred students marching into large lecture halls: “I got tired of this anonymity. I wanted a chance to distinguish myself. You took a comprehensive examination, and even if you got a good mark, you were still answering multiple-choice questions, you weren’t being asked to write essays. I was in shallow waters here.”48 Among the lecturers Bellow remembers hearing were Professors Ferdinand Schevill, the American historian, Norman MacLean, from the English Department, and Thornton Wilder, a visiting professor brought in especially by Hutchins, who had been a classmate of his at Oberlin College. Bellow remembered Wilder as “very excitable, a pacer, and a very demonstrative orator.” He was “the first real writer I’d had any contact with” (“real,” here, meaning “of quality,” “contact” meaning being part of a large lecture audience). “It was really lovely to listen to him,” Bellow told an interviewer, “though I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Really, it was beyond me.” Gertrude Stein also lectured in the College when Bellow was there. Her lectures, too, were beyond him: “I didn’t understand word two. Word one I may have understood, but by the time I got to the second, it was just no go.”49

  What Bellow did understand, in English lectures at least, often bored him. “It was just no go. I wasn’t interested in English prosody and I didn’t care about a caesura, and I didn’t care about Venus Urania, as in Shelley’s poetry.”50 He also didn’t care for the way some lecturers “had eyes only for the glorious classical past, dismissing the contemporary. Only greatness need apply. Local boys and girls, swarming in the foreground, were ephemerists; high-and-mighty professors admitted no connection between James T. Farrell [author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy] and Sophocles.”51 In the Social Sciences, much of what Bellow was asked to read was “dreadful pedestrian stuff in political science and sociology.” He was required to read Plato and Aristotle, “so I read Plato and Aristotle, and I enjoyed Plato a great deal and Aristotle was a little rougher for me” (Aristotle was “the going thing on campus,” which counted against him. “I would naturally resist that”). In Winter Quarter 1935, he took Economics 201, a nonstarter: “I spent the whole term reading George Bernard Shaw.… I couldn’t help it. I didn’t crack a book.” Speaking in general of his undergraduate experience at Chicago, Bellow concludes: “I was always just a little bit to the side, from whatever was going on. I would do it, but I didn’t feel I was a part of it.”52 In a letter of June 3, 1984, to the widow of the social scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool, a contemporary of Bellow’s at Chicago, he describes how different they were as students: “He studied his Aristotle and Sorel. I merely read them. He was absorbed in his teachers. I only watched those teachers from my own angle.” Among University of Chicago teachers, Bellow mentions Nathan Leites, an instructor in political science. Bellow “adored” Leites—though Leites teased him by calling him a romancier, “which was just a cut above rentier, another category with a jeer in it”—but “for his eccentricities, not his learning.” In the letter to Pool’s widow, he recalls the way Leites walked down 57th Street, “very fast while reading some thick foreign book, not slowing his pace while crossing busy Woodlawn Ave.” In a letter of June 29, 1987, to the historian Robert
a Wohlstetter, after reading of Leites’s death in The New York Times, Bellow again writes affectionately of his oddity: “there was something in him I appreciated—an unwarmable coldness that he himself deplored.” Bellow’s angle is that of the novelist rather than the student. What he remembers of Professor Scott, of the English Department, is the tailcoat he wore to proctor final examinations, “making fun of the old-fashioned academic formality of his own youth.” What he remembers of Mortimer Adler, who lectured on Aristotle, was that there was something absurd about him: “I had only to look at him, even as an undergraduate, to see that he had nothing useful to offer on the conduct of life. He lectured on Prudence, or Magnanimity. It was—well, tomfoolery.”53 “I was a very contrary undergraduate” is how Bellow describes himself in his 1976 Nobel Lecture. Though Walter Blair, who taught Bellow on both the Shakespeare and introductory poetry courses, claimed he thought him “outstanding” (in discussion sections, presumably), the marks he gave him on his course were “Satisfactory.” What especially struck Blair was Bellow’s manner: he didn’t seem “a damned bit intimidated.”54

  This manner was deceptive. When not in class, Bellow spent “more hours than I could afford” playing pool on the second floor of Mandel Hall, where lectures for the General Courses were held. A would-be pool shark, he tried and failed to master the technique of reverse-English, and “my conscience grew more swollen and painful with every failure.”55 Nor was he completely comfortable with the role of bohemian romancier. In an undated notebook in the Regenstein, probably from the mid-1970s, later drawn on in the first of the 1977 Jefferson Lectures, Bellow offers an account of “the furnished rooms in which I lived” when a student in Hyde Park in the 1930s, including in boardinghouses on Kenwood Avenue and 57th Street, at the eastern edge of campus, and at Ellis Avenue and 56th Street, on the western edge:

  the rooms were silent as a rule—abandoned by life and purpose—that was what you felt. They were characteristically musty and sour, the wallpaper paste had dried and sifted down in powder.… Wood-boring insects were inside gnawing for years in a chair leg, making a trail of fecal dust, cockroaches in the toilet, mice everywhere, traces of innumerable roomers who smoked and ate and copulated or were ill, or grieved or lost themselves in books. To be thoroughly bohemian was best here and to accept your condition, your style of life cheerfully, driving your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead. As a bohemian you had strength, you stood for something, you took an attitude towards work or towards property. But if you were not a bohemian at heart you might be depressed, you were certain to suffer. The first day in one of these rooms was always harrowing. I unpacked my books. They had the power to exorcise fear and strangeness, or should have had it. I turned the large green blotter to its clean side, if it had one, and arranged my manuscripts.56

  In 1934, in the Spring Quarter of his freshman year, Bellow shared the room on Ellis Avenue with an unnamed friend from Tuley.57 The room looked out over what was then the Home for Incurables and Bellow was fascinated by the ingenious wheelchairs, arm-propelled and foot-propelled, passing outside: “I was absorbed by these contraptions more than by the texts I should have been studying.” When his roommate told him about the fate of an aunt, Dora Kaplan, the woman who shot Lenin early in the 1920s, Bellow suspected that “knowing me to be something of a Marxist,” he “was warning me to sober up and stick to my books.”58 As such instances suggest, Bellow was sensitive to concerns about the course he had set himself, at some level sharing them. Nor was he impervious to the humiliations of poverty, the sort Joseph resentfully records in Dangling Man, inflicted both by circumstances (“your condition, your style of life”) and belittling relatives.

  “I unpacked my books”: for protection, reassurance. When threatened by guilt—for wasting time, while the family sacrificed to meet university fees—books preserved a “delicious freedom.” Instead of feeling guilty, “you could have wonderful discussions about remorse, drawing on Freud or on the class morality denounced by Marx and Engels. You could talk of Balzac’s ungrateful children on the make in Paris, of Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, the student with the ax, or of the queer bad boys of André Gide.” “I did stick to books,” Bellow recalls, “but those were not the books connected with the courses I was taking.”59 More likely, they were books he’d heard of in the lounge in Wieboldt Hall, where a group of Modern Language students gathered, “rather interesting young men.”60 Among these young men Bellow mentions Paul Goodman, recently graduated from City College in New York, at work on a PhD in English, soon to become a prominent writer and public intellectual; Edouard Roditi, a twenty-three-year-old undergraduate, previously at Balliol College, Oxford, a French-born American whose poems and translations had already appeared in transition and T. S. Eliot’s Criterion; William Barrett, who started graduate work at City College at fifteen, received his PhD from Columbia at twenty-two, and was teaching at Chicago at twenty-three. When Isaac Rosenfeld arrived at the university in 1936, he befriended this group. Later, Harold Kaplan, studying French on a scholarship, would join in their discussions. All the Wieboldt Hall men went on to have distinguished careers in New York or further afield. When Rosenfeld moved to New York in 1942, with a small stipend to do graduate work in philosophy at NYU, or Bellow came to visit, which he frequently did from the late 1930s onward, the contacts they’d made at Wieboldt Hall helped to smooth their way, particularly among writers and editors at Partisan Review.61

  The young men in Wieboldt Hall argued over André Gide, Proust, Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Hemingway, none of whose writings, Bellow recalled, appeared in the College curriculum. “There were no courses of that sort offered on campus that I was eligible for. If you knew a lot of French you could read Proust in the French Department. I didn’t know that much.” In the university library and reading room, however, there were shelves of contemporary literary magazines: transition, The Dial, The Little Review, The Times Literary Supplement. The look of the university also helped. As Bellow puts it, “these modern books and authors were certified or accredited physically by the Quadrangles themselves, by the gothic gables and ornaments of the campus.” The surrounding city, though not unliterary, was literary in ways too local or provincial for “Roditi and company.” The Stockyards were nearby and everyone had read The Jungle, but Upton Sinclair was not discussed (nor, presumably, were Theodore Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson). “We were concerned with modern civilization in its entirety, as seen by Freud, as described by Marx, Lenin, and Sorel, as presented by Cocteau, or sent up by the Surrealists and the postwar Dadaists.”62 These concerns were unique less in their intellectual seriousness than in their avant-garde and European character; everyone at the university was intellectually serious. As Rosenfeld puts it in “Life in Chicago,” an article published in 1957 in Commentary, students at the University of Chicago, especially in the 1930s, “made up a fairly uniform body. Football was out, and with it went the usual rah-rah accessories of collegiate and fraternity life. Raccoon coats, pennants, beanies, megaphones and sloganized flivvers may have flourished in the twenties; but the thirties and forties … were lean and studious years, with students forming a self-conscious intellectual elite, newly introduced to Aristotle, Aquinas, and a revolutionary college program which gave great advantages to the bright and more industrious.”63

  In the summer of 1934, at the end of his freshman year, Bellow went on a road trip with Herb Passin, still a student at Marshall High School, an adventure like that of Harris’s 1932 trip to New York to sell “Herbert Sanders.” The two boys hopped a freight train heading for Canada. Bellow had just turned nineteen, Passin was seventeen, but had already bummed around on boxcars with Nelson Algren. They set off with $3 between them. In South Bend, Indiana, their train passed a Studebaker plant where the workers were on strike, yelling and cheering from the rooftops and the open windows. “We shouted and joked with them, rolling at about five miles an hour in summer warmth through the fresh June weeds.” “It was very dangerous, very rough,
” Passin recalled, with armed police patrolling the rail yards and hardened and ragged hobos crowding into the boxcars.64 In Detroit they were arrested on false charges and kept in jail overnight. At Canada, they were turned away at the border, lacking papers. Here they split up: Passin headed to New York City, Bellow sneaked into Canada at Niagara Falls. Once past the border, he headed straight for the Gameroffs in Lachine and Montreal, where he stayed a few weeks visiting with his cousins and aunts and uncles. After wiring Maury for money, he rode home by bus. Maury made him repay his fare by working as weighmaster at his coal yard, until he fired him for reading on the job. A version of this episode appears in Chapter 9 of The Adventures of Augie March, in which Augie is variously chased by police, molested by a hobo, and awed by the passing landscape, “the jointed spine of the train racing and swerving, the steels, rusts, bloodlike paints extended space after space in the sky, and then other existence, space after space” (p. 577).

  Politics figured in Bellow’s life at the University of Chicago rather as they had at Tuley. He went to meetings of the Spartacist Youth League, a Trotskyist organization, partly to meet girls; handed out leaflets; denounced the Stalinists of the YCL (Young Communist League), who dominated the American Student Union; and debated with liberals and socialists at meetings of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), defending the Trotskyist line. When he transferred to Northwestern University in September 1935, he became more active politically, perhaps because the administration and student body at Northwestern were conservative, certainly in comparison to staff and students at the University of Chicago. While at Northwestern, he wrote for Soapbox, published by the University of Chicago Socialist Club (Rosenfeld, Tarcov, and Reedy were among its editors), helped to found a comparable Socialist Club at his own university (Northwestern was predictably “shocked at the idea of radical politics on campus”),65 and joined up with Sydney Harris in 1937 as associate editor of The Beacon, subtitled “Chicago’s Liberal Magazine,” writing political articles and book reviews and arguing with Harris in favor of a more radical line for the paper. At some point in 1936, according to an undated letter to Irving Halperin, he considered joining the Loyalists in Spain until he discovered “that I couldn’t go anywhere because I had no papers.” To get these papers, he learned, would involve “a good deal of legal work,” which he couldn’t afford. Abraham professed himself “perfectly willing that I should fight in Spain, but then he knew that I had no way of getting out of the country.”66 It was also at Northwestern, in his senior year, that Bellow took a job as a union organizer for the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), presumably through Trotskyist contacts. “This was more than I could resist,” he recalled in a letter of August 9, 1994, to Alvin Edelman: “My task was to sign up dishwashers and chambermaids for elections under the provisions of the Wagner Labor Relations Act. I was poaching on AF of L [American Federation of Labor] territory and the hoodlums of the hotels and restaurants local were chasing me around the city with intent to do physical harm. Thus my straight-A average was disfigured by a ‘C’ in a required course.”67 This episode in Bellow’s life is fictionalized in Chapter 13 of The Adventures of Augie March, where there is little to choose from between corrupt bosses and corrupt union officials and where Augie barely escapes a vicious beating. “I just didn’t have the calling to be a union man or in politics,” he concludes. “It wasn’t what I was meant to be” (p. 739).