The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  The Prufrock parody is funny as well as clever and has been extravagantly praised by poets and Yiddishists alike. It was known by word of mouth and only published in 1996, in an article by Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish at Harvard and Bellow’s friend.108 When asked in 1999 to name the finest poem published by an American in the twentieth century, Robert Pinsky, U.S. poet laureate, listed the Prufrock parody first, wrongly crediting it to Bellow alone (Bellow always acknowledged that Rosenfeld was the prime author).109 Wisse is almost as extravagant as Pinsky. In The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (2000), she says of the poem: “If asked at what point American Jewish letters gave notice of its independence from Anglo-American Modernism, I would cite the day Isaac Rosenfeld, with the help of Saul Bellow, composed the Yiddish parody of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ T. S. Eliot was the giant who could not be ignored. The giant had charged the Jews with corrupting his culture. What better way to credit him as a poet and discredit him as an anti-Semite than by Yiddishing the poet who so feared the Yid?”110 The parody’s best-known couplet is the original’s best-known couplet: “I grow old, I grow old, / I shall wear my trousers rolled,” which becomes “Ikh ver alt, ikh ver alt / Un der pupik vert mir kalt” (“I grow old, I grow old / And my belly-button grows cold”). Eliot’s “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” becomes “In tsimer ve di vaybere senen / Redt men fun Karl Marx un Lenin” (“In the room where the wives are / Speaking of Karl Marx and Lenin”). The parody’s title is “Der shir hashirim fun Mendl Pumshtok,” “The Song of Songs of Mendl Pumshtok.” Pumshtok’s song is more down to earth, more bodily, than Prufrock’s: not “Do I dare to eat a peach?” but “Meg ikh oyfesen a floym?,” “May I eat a prune?” Throughout, Eliot’s fear of physicality is mocked. In Zipperstein’s words, the poem “is packed with wet socks and dirty bedding; its women are ‘wives,’ not the desiccated seductresses of Eliot’s imagination.” Zipperstein connects the poem to the Yiddish stage, with its “long, odd, gloriously sectarian tradition of translations (of Shakespeare and other canonic works, most famously King Lear) that announced themselves as ‘translations and improvements.’ ” Bellow and Rosenfeld knew this tradition as well as they knew Eliot and Pound, and though the parody pokes fun, it is serious. Through it, Zipperstein argues, the authors “denounced their own exclusion as Jews from the English canon … and sought to underscore what they could bring to English if only it opened itself to them.”111

  Bellow and Rosenfeld worked hard in their courses at Wisconsin, at least at the beginning. Vivas thought them “the two best students in the class.”112 In a letter to Tarcov postmarked September 29, Bellow reported that Rosenfeld was “a serious scholar now, and if he doesn’t break down into his characteristic monadic delivery he’ll be a gent of substance when the year is out. He reads earnestly and constantly. He is suddenly grave, and for the past week he has given no sign of surrealism.” Rosenfeld was comparably upbeat, in a letter of his own to Tarcov: “We are together most of the time.… He peppers me with anthropological references, and I counter with casuistries, nice logical buts and ifs and whereases. If neither of us is driven to the wall he will say—‘All right—granted! So where is the argument?’ By this trick of admission the argument is usually forgotten. The trick always works.”113 Bellow’s letters say nothing of the political scene at Madison, but Rosenfeld describes it in the letter postmarked September 19. “So far we have met only Stalinists,” he writes to Tarcov, “who are confused, New Yorkers, nice, snooty people. Know nothing, never heard of Trotskyism. I am posing as a liberal, biding my time.” As for girls, Rosenfeld adds, “the Movement, I must confess, offers the richest possibilities. The Stalinists here, judging from the ones I have met, are a bunch of impotent flirts.” Bellow encouraged the younger Rosenfeld in this area, as in others. With “you gone,” Rosenfeld writes to Tarcov on September 25, after the latter’s visit to Madison, Bellow “has devoted his paternal solicitude to me, as next in line in the rank of his juniors, and edifies me endlessly with advice, example and apothegm. Most recently, fathering me, he said ‘Gentle Isaac, alas, you are all marrow and no bone.’ By way of setting the improving example, he has been all bone, these last few days. All in order to help me overcome my pitiful marrowness. He has even begun taking off weight by way of bringing out the bone!”

  Bellow’s reading at Wisconsin—anthropological, philosophical, sociological—served his writing, as ballast, corroboration. In To Jerusalem and Back (1976), he recalls reading David Wight Prall for Vivas’s course Philosophy of the Arts and being struck by Prall’s notion of “aesthetic surfaces”: “Prall was speaking of ordinary life and common experiences, of a cup of coffee or the folds of a curtain, a bucket under the rain pipe: ‘Lingering, loving contemplation’ of flavors, colors, shapes, fragrances,’ ” a contemplation Bellow valued and drew on as a writer. Later in To Jerusalem and Back, Bellow recalls a question that absorbed him “when I was a graduate student in anthropology.” It involved “bands of Eskimos who were reported to have chosen to starve rather than eat foods that were abundant but under taboo. How much, I asked myself, did people yield to culture or to their lifelong preoccupations, and at what point would their animal need to survive break through the restraints of custom and belief?”114 The immediate context here is Israel’s survival; in 1937 it was Bellow’s survival as a writer, in defiance of his family and of material considerations.

  The left politics of many anthropologists in the 1930s was part of what drew Bellow to study the subject. At the heart of anthropology, he told Keith Botsford, was “a very democratic idea. Everybody is entitled to equal time. They have their culture and we have ours, and we should not get carried away by our ethnocentrism.”115 For an outsider in particular, it was encouraging to learn that “what was right among the African Masai was wrong with the Eskimos.” Later, Bellow came to see this teaching as “a treacherous doctrine—morality should be made of sterner stuff. But in my youth my head was turned by the study of erratic—or goofy—customs. In my early twenties I was a cultural relativist.”116 The appeal of erratic or goofy customs persisted for Bellow, even as an antirelativist, and can be seen especially in Henderson the Rain King, a novel set in Africa written by an author who had not yet been there. The customs Bellow devises for the fictional Wariri and Arnewi tribes, partly drawn from the anthropological texts he studied at Northwestern and Wisconsin, are what make his fictional Africa so magical and funny (the book was composed, Bellow told a journalist, “during a time of great personal difficulty. The worse things got for me personally the more amusing I began to think the whole thing was”).117 They also connect to the novel’s main themes. Henderson, its protagonist, is in despair when he leaves home, lacking or having neglected dimensions of life—mystical, bodily—that he hopes to find in Africa. Anthropology, Bellow thought, illuminates these dimensions by studying cultures in which they are especially prominent or visible. Unfortunately, most anthropologists, even the “very best” (Bellow cites Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown), describe them reductively. “I soon realized,” Bellow told Botsford, “simply because you read Malinowski and Company didn’t mean that you knew the Trobriand Islanders. What you knew was the version of an educated civilized European.” Bellow detected “a kind of buried arrogance in the whole idea of the anthropologist: in the idea that because the Trobrianders are simpler, their depths can be sounded. Thoroughly. With simple peoples we can nail down the meaning of life.”118 Such arrogance is possible only if one misses out or undervalues the mystical dimension of life, reducing its “meaning” to an idea or theory.

  Bellow’s story “Cousins” (1975) attributes the prominence of Jews in anthropology to an affinity with this mystical dimension, despite the “educated civilized European” (that is, reductive) nature of their attempts to describe the cultures in which it figures. According to the story’s narrator, Ijah Brodsky, who first becomes acquainted with anthropological studies in Madison, Wisconsin
, “rooming with my cousin Ezekiel on the wrong side of the tracks” (Ezekiel is lecturing on primitive languages at the university), Jewish anthropologists “may have believed they were demystifiers, that science was their motive and that their ultimate aim was to increase universalism,” but they were wrong to do so.

  A truer explanation is the nearness of ghettos to the sphere of Revelation, an easy move for the mind from rotting streets and rancid dishes, a direct ascent into transcendence. This of course was the situation of Eastern Jews. The Western ones were prancing and preening like learned Germans. And were Polish and Russian Jews (in disgrace with civilized judgment, afflicted with tuberculosis and diseased eyes) so far from the imagination of savage practices? They didn’t have to make a Symbolist decision to derange their senses; they were born that way. Exotics going out to do science upon exotics. And then it all came out in Rabbinic-Germanic or Cartesian-Talmudic forms (p. 213).

  In the case of anthropology’s treatment of the bodily or sexual dimension, the attraction was chiefly political. “Radicalism was implied by the study of anthropology,” Bellow recalled, “especially sexual radicalism—the study of the sexual life of savages was gratifying to radicals. It indicated that human life was much broader than the present.” The broadness of sexual habits and mores in the cultures studied “gave young Jews a greater sense of freedom from the surrounding restrictions. They were seeking immunity from Anglo-Saxon custom: being accepted or rejected by a society of Christian gentlemen.”119 For Bellow, anthropology’s attitudes toward the body and sexuality folded into those of Freudian and other psychologies, including the theories of Wilhelm Reich, as important to Henderson as those of the anthropologists.

  LIKE IJAH BRODSKY, Bellow read and pondered anthropological and ethnographic studies throughout his life. In Henderson, he returns, as he would in To Jerusalem and Back, to the question of food and cultural taboos, drawing on Herskovits’s The Cattle Complex in East Africa (1926). Like the tribes studied by Herskovits, Bellow’s fictional Arnewi risk starvation because of their extreme reluctance to kill their cattle for food. Elsewhere, Bellow gives the Arnewi more than fifty terms for the various shapes of the horns of their cattle, which recalls the twenty-eight words used for “cattle” by the East African tribes in Herskovits’s book. These and other resemblances are identified by Eusebio L. Rodrigues in “Bellow’s Africa,” a study of the novel’s sources. Rodrigues also identifies Arnewi traits borrowed from the writings of the Reverend John Roscoe (1861–1932), who led the Mackie Ethnological expedition in Central Africa, particularly in The Soul of Central Africa (1922) and The Banyankole (1923). For Wariri traits and customs, he points to Frederick E. Forbes’s two-volume study, Dahomey and the Dahomans (1851), Tor Irstam’s The King of Ganda (1944), and Sir Richard Burton’s A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahomey (1864) and First Footsteps in East Africa (1856) (the source of “Joxi,” the Wariri’s form of “trample massage”). Rodrigues also points out that Bellow has Henderson mention Burton, disparagingly, in a letter to his wife. Rodrigues is at pains to demonstrate the originality of Henderson as well as its indebtedness, providing ample evidence of “Bellow’s genius for transmuting bare facts into vivid dramatic event.”120 But Bellow was open about his sources. “During the Depression I wasn’t having much luck with the sorority girls,” he told a Montreal reporter, “so I spent two years in library stacks reading missionary accounts of life in Africa. After a while it all melted into a glowing lump and became Henderson the Rain King.… Herskovits, my old professor at Northwestern, had his nose put out of joint by it.… He claimed it was a serious subject that I was making light of, but other specialists have told me it was an accurate account.”121

  Bellow’s interest in “primitive” cultures started well before college. For example, in a letter of December 10, 1988, to Professor Ronald Rompkey, a Canadian English professor and the biographer of Sir Wilfred Grenfell, he suggests a much earlier ethnographic source for Henderson than those identified by Rodrigues. Grenfell (1865–1940) was a medical missionary to the aboriginal peoples and other inhabitants of Newfoundland and Labrador. Rompkey had written to Bellow to inquire about him in connection with Henderson. “In boyhood, two books by Sir Wilfred Grenfell deeply influenced me,” Bellow replied, “one was A Labrador Doctor [1919] and the other a stirring narrative called Adrift on an Iceflow [Adrift on an Ice-Pan (1909)].” Bellow then suggested tentative connections between Eugene Henderson and Grenfell: “Henderson had a great appetite for free spirits (for other free spirits, I should perhaps say). Besides, Sir Wilfred was a self-sacrificing physician and you will remember that on his return from Africa Henderson meant to enter medical school.” At the end of the novel, Bellow might have added, Henderson’s plane stops in Newfoundland to refuel. The hero is let out onto a “frozen ground of almost eternal winter, drawing breaths so deep they shook me, pure happiness, while the cold smote me from all sides.” He begins to gallop around “the shining and riveted body of the plane, behind the fuel trucks. Dark faces were looking from within. The great, beautiful propellers were still, all four of them.” In the novel’s last sentence, Bellow describes him “running—leaping, leaping, pounding, and tingling over the pure white lining of the gray Arctic silence” (p. 413).

  Fifteen or so years after Henderson, in “Cousins,” Bellow again drew directly on anthropological and ethnographic sources. The story opens with Ijah “playing hooky” from work with two “huge faded green books, dating from the beginning of this century.” These books contain reports “of the Jessup Expedition, published by the American Museum of Natural History. Siberian ethnography. Fascinating. I was beguiled of my griefs (considerable griefs) by these monographs. Two tribes, the Koryak and the Chukchee, as described by Jochelson and Bo[r]goras, absorbed me totally.” The Jessup North Pacific Expedition (1897–1902) was directed by Franz Boas. Its aim was to study the relationships between tribes on either side of the Bering Strait. Waldemar Jochelson and Waldemar Borgoras were Russian Jews and political radicals. While exiled in Siberia they acted as field-workers on the expedition, examining the tribes on the Russian side of the strait, and writing a number of expedition reports. Ijah, a wealthy lawyer, shuts himself away in his fancy Loop office and is transported to Siberia by these reports, with their descriptions of customs and beliefs as erratic, goofy, and mystical as those of the Wariri, the Arnewi, or the ghetto Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe (Jochelson’s and Borgoras’s people). Here is how Ijah describes his reading:

  About this arctic desert, purified by frosts as severe as fire, I read for my relief as if I were reading the Bible. In winter darkness, even within a Siberian settlement you might be lost if the wind blew you down, for the speed of the snow was such as to bury you before you could recover your feet. If you tied up your dogs you would find them sometimes smothered when you dug them out in the morning. In this dark land you entered the house by a ladder inside the chimney. As the snows rose, the dogs climbed up to smell what was cooking. They fought for places at the chimney tops and sometimes fell into the cauldron. There were photographs of dogs crucified, a common form of sacrifice. The powers of darkness surrounded you. A Chukchee informant told Bo[r]goras that there were invisible enemies who beset human beings from all sides, demanding spirits whose mouths were always gaping. The people cringed and gave ransom, buying protection from these raving ghosts (pp. 210–11).

  “Cousins” raises questions of kinship on several levels, including those Bellow was introduced to as a student of anthropology. “The important works by people like Malinowski,” he told an interviewer in 1980, “were not only studies of Trobriand Islanders.” In reading these works, “you felt that you were really onto something much bigger than a study of savages—besides there were so many savages in Chicago it was only realistic to turn your attention to anthropology.”122 The story rejects naive universalism, while also rejecting Enlightenment presumptions of superiority. Ijah advises bankers on foreign loans, governments on the rescheduling of debts, s
peaks at the Council on Foreign Relations. What absorbs him, however, is “spiritual investigation,” a search for “real being under the debris of modern ideas.” This search he conducts by reading works of ethnography and anthropology, “in a magical trance, if you like, or with a lucidity altogether different from the lucidity of approved types of knowledge” (p. 221).

  From the mid-1980s until his death in 2005, Bellow worked intermittently on a novel titled “All Marbles Still Accounted For.” By 1994 he had written 294 pages of the work and on August 9 informed Rebecca Sinkler of The New York Times that “my aim is to wrap up ‘Marbles’ (the title of the book I have sworn to deliver to Viking Press) no later than January.” According to Janis Bellow, he would have finished the novel had a near-fatal illness, other projects, and suddenly diminishing powers, not intervened. “Marbles” takes its protagonist to New Guinea, about which Bellow read widely. Much of this reading was recommended to him by the controversial American medical researcher and physician D. Carleton Gajdusek, whom Bellow met in 1976, when he and Gajdusek were awarded Nobel Prizes. Gajdusek’s prize, which he shared with Baruch S. Blumberg, was in Physiology or Medicine. It derived from the study of kuru, a disease widespread in the 1950s and 1960s among the South Fore people of New Guinea. Gajdusek lived among the Fore, studied their cultures, and performed autopsies on kuru victims. These autopsies led him to the conclusion that the disease was spread by the practice of funerary cannibalism. Gajdusek provided Bellow with copies of his journals, containing photographs as well as descriptions of Fore customs, and with a four-page list of periodical articles and books on South Pacific tribes. Among Bellow’s papers in the Regenstein are reprints of a number of these articles, as well as bound copies of the journals.