The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  I am grateful for that. I am in other hands, relieved of self-determination, freedom cancelled.

  Hurray for regular hours!

  And for supervision of the spirit!

  Long live regimentation!

  When chided by a friend, the writer and sociologist David T. Bazelon, about the novel’s dispiriting conclusion, Bellow defended it, in a letter of March 22, 1944, as “ironic”: “I don’t advise others to follow the Dangling Man into regimentation. I don’t encourage surrender. I’m speaking of wretchedness and saying that no man by his own effort finds his way out of it. To some extent the artist does. But the moral man, the citizen, doesn’t. He can’t.” That the artist “to some extent” finds his way out is a Flaubertian notion. In the 1960 essay “The Sealed Treasure,” Bellow writes of Flaubert’s belief that “the writer by means of imagery and style must supply the human qualities that the exterior world lacked.… The important humanity of the novel must be the writer’s own.” This view Bellow sees more widely in modern or modernist fiction: if “the insistent aesthetic purpose in novelists like Flaubert and Henry James and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce is tyrannical at times,” crowding out other forms of purpose, “we are greatly compensated with poetry and insight, but it often seems as though the writer were deprived of all power except the power to see and to despair.”96 In Dangling Man, views like these are voiced by Joseph’s friend John Pearl, a painter who supports himself by working in an advertising firm. “The real world,” Pearl writes, “is the world of art and of thought. There is only one worth-while sort of work, that of the imagination” (p. 64). When in despair about modernity, Joseph agrees: “In spite of the calamity, the lies and the moral buggery, the odium, the detritus of wrong and sorrow dropped on every heart,” an artist like Pearl “can keep a measure of cleanliness and freedom” (p. 65).

  Joseph is no artist, but Bellow describes him, in an undated letter to Tumin, as a man who strives “with all his heart” to resist the pressures of modernity. That he succumbs to them in the end is “because his age requires it.”97 Joseph writes of being “harried, pushed, badgered,” not only by external forces but by “the world internalized”: “It wants me to stop living this way [i.e., in pursuit of “pure freedom”]. It’s prodding me to the point where I shall no longer care what happens to me” (p. 120). In another letter to Tumin, Bellow offers a nonliterary source for Joseph’s sense of his situation:

  Passin is back, and I was never more glad to see him. We were together on Monday. To talk to him made me realize how badly my thinking had been going. I tried to discuss Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. The book had impressed me greatly and affected me emotionally. I believed it, swallowed it and could find no words to explain or arguments to defend it. Lack of steady contact with people is beginning to have a deleterious effect on me.

  I don’t know if you have read the book. Its thesis is that freedom has proved too burdensome to modern man. Historically it has been hard-won through revolution and martyrdom and against nature, inward and outward. Its premium has been a more highly perceptive and dignified race of men. Its shortcoming loneliness and anxiety. Man’s lot in a civilized world is to be lonely unless he can reunite himself with it on a higher level, that is on a level where he continues to be free. Now you can see why it had such appeal. It suddenly became clear that I was eager to go into the army from weariness. I too wanted submission, like any Stuttgart grocer. For a while I was ashamed of myself, until it came to me that autonomy is a peacetime luxury and when one doesn’t know whether to plan one month, two months or three weeks ahead freedom of choice narrows down to the way one fixes one’s hair or to the way one words his prayers. I think you will find your Indians more self-determined.98

  It is hard to make out from this letter what in the end Bellow thinks of Fromm’s ideas. He begins by being impressed and persuaded by them; then finds he can’t explain or defend them properly to Passin. When he says he was ashamed to find himself submitting “like any Stuttgart grocer,” until he realized that autonomy was impossible in wartime, one cannot tell if he still believes this, or if he now believes he was wrong to believe it. When he says a “lack of steady contact with people” (like Passin) has had “a deleterious effect” on his thinking, does he mean “because it allowed me to take Fromm seriously”? One cannot tell, as one cannot wholly or confidently accept the conclusion of Dangling Man as ironic. Ironic on Bellow’s part but not Joseph’s? Or on Joseph’s as well? “I think it will have to end with questions not answers,” Bellow rightly predicts in the letter to Tumin.99 In a letter of March 25, 1944, to Alfred Kazin, Bellow begins with familiar misgivings about the novel, which he calls “not what it should be, not what I can write.” Nevertheless, “the idea—the impossibility of working out one’s own destiny freely in such a world—is a genuine one.” By “such a world” does Bellow mean this specific world, of impending war and induction, or the world of Fromm’s “modern man,” the world also of fashionable European or modernist pessimism? The latter, Philip Rahv would have said, given his praise of the novel as instrumental in “the Europeanization of American literature”;100 the former, Edmund Wilson implied in The New Yorker, praising the novel as “one of the most honest pieces of testimony on the psychology of a whole generation who have grown up during the depression and the war.”101

  The reviews in general seconded Wilson’s view that Bellow had captured the mood of a generation. In the words of Kenneth Fearing, from the The New York Times Book Review, Dangling Man portrayed “what must seem to many others an uncannily accurate delineation of themselves.” Delmore Schwartz, in a review in the Summer 1944 issue of Partisan Review entitled “A Man in His Time,” began by declaring: “Here, for the first time I think, the experience of a new generation has been seized.” This experience Schwartz describes as a series of disillusions: first with faith; then with democratic capitalism (under the influence of Marxism); then with Marxism. “In what seems to be utter desolation,” Joseph is forced “stage by stage, to even greater stages of disillusion.”102 Of the negative reviews, the one that most upset Bellow was Diana Trilling’s in The Nation. “Mr. Bellow is talented and clever and he writes with control and precision,” she conceded, but “I find myself deeply opposed to novels of sterility—or, rather, to small novels of sterility.” “Yes, Dangling Man is bitter,” Bellow allowed, in an indignant letter to James Henle protesting the review, “but the book is square and honest. It is probably not great, but it is not ‘small.’ As for the accusation that my physical world lacks dimensions [Trilling called it “non-dimensional”], that is just nonsense; she hasn’t read the book if she says that.” Bellow rightly dismisses this last accusation. Though the novel’s Chicago feeds Joseph’s sense of fallen modernity, its wintry landscape is vividly evoked, with snow “wreathing back and forth over the street” (p. 104), streetcars “rocking on [their] trucks from side to side and nicking sparks from the waving cable” (p. 75), cheap rooming houses in which one breathes “the staleness of cabbage and bacon and of the dust sifting behind the wallpaper” (p. 74). Inside these rooming houses, according to Delmore Schwartz, the lives lived, like the furnishings, are familiar:

  Here are the typical objects of a generation’s sensibility: the phonograph records, the studio couch, the reproductions of Van Gogh, the cafeteria; and the typical relationships: the small intellectual circle which gradually breaks up, the easy and meaningless love affairs, the marriage which is neither important nor necessary, the party which ends in hysterical outbreaks of sickness of heart, the gulf separating this generation from the previous one and the family life from which it came.

  When Mel Tumin counseled Bellow to forget the Trilling review, “Bellow flew into a rage and ordered him to leave the table. They didn’t speak to each other for almost a year.”103

  As Bellow’s literary career took off, his draft and citizenship status began to clarify. On June 29, 1943, as part of the naturalization process, Tumin and Oscar Tarcov signed swo
rn affidavits of witness that Bellow was “in every way qualified to be admitted as a citizen of the United States.” Five weeks later, on August 3, 1943, “Saul Gordon Bellow” was issued a Certificate of Naturalization and became a United States citizen. The certificate describes Bellow as “formerly of British nationality,” twenty-eight, with fair complexion, brown eyes, black hair, five foot, eight and a half inches tall, 165 pounds. In the letter to Dwight Macdonald, written at roughly the same period, “nearing the end of Notes of a Dangling Man,” Bellow declares that “as a IA, [I] cannot go back to teaching” (this is also when he complains that the uncertainty of his draft status makes it “impossible to make the best use of one’s capacities”). The summer of 1943 was eventful in other ways. Anita became pregnant with Greg, who was born on April 16, 1944, a month after publication of Dangling Man. The birth was difficult, involving an emergency cesarean. Both mother and infant nearly died and Greg spent the first five days of his life in an oxygen tent. Bellow stayed up all night at the hospital waiting for his son to be delivered, kept company by Irving Kristol, recently arrived from New York to be with his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a graduate student at the university. Kristol remembers walking around the hospital with the expectant father “for at least two hours.” After the birth, Bellow went to Beebee Schenk’s to deliver the news and to eat a breakfast of a dozen fried eggs. In the summer, he was called up for a physical, and once more deferred, having been diagnosed with an inguinal hernia. “Immediately I went into the hospital to have surgery,” he recalled to Botsford, but “the operation was not successful.”104 It took many months for Bellow to recover, and he spent weeks in constant pain.

  Then it was back to waiting. Earlier, in an undated letter of 1942 to Mel Tumin, he had claimed to be looking forward to being drafted, out of exasperation:

  The organization which has sent you so many hundreds of miles away to study aborigines [in Guatemala] might more profitably have engaged you at home. Goosing-relationships between the wives of siblings have fewer mysteries than the operation of a single draft board. In two months my status has changed three times and so far as I can tell will change again within the next two weeks or so. Is it any wonder that I longed to be called? Is it strange to prefer no future to an uncertain one? Juge en toi-même.

  He also had “more serious” reasons for longing to be called:

  SB and Anita, 1937 (ill. 6.1)

  I find the prospect of enjoying the benefits of a peace without having contributed to the peace (of whatever sort; I am hoping for the best) intensely disagreeable. I realize that as an artist I have the principled right to claim exemption. It would be just, but in all conscience I could not plead for it. Besides it would be foolish, don’t you think so? Like filing an appeal to be released from an epidemic on the grounds that someone should live to record it. No. You remember the advice of the old German in Lord Jim—“In the destructive element immerse.”

  It took him three years to act, because “I was writing.”105 By April 1945, however, though still writing, he had had enough, like Joseph, and enlisted. He joined the Merchant Marine and was assigned to the Atlantic District Headquarters of the United States Maritime Service in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. The war in Europe was coming to an end, VE Day less than a month away; the war in the Pacific was still on, the atom bomb had not yet been dropped. One other consideration underlay Bellow’s decision. As he recalled to Botsford, by 1945 he had “recognized Hitler for ‘what he was.’ I knew most of the story, and not only did I feel that my Jewish Marxist friends were wrong in theory, but I was horrified by the positions they—we—had taken. That was the end of that. And I felt that I should do something in the war.”106

  7

  New York

  WHEN ANITA BECAME PREGNANT in late summer 1943, she and Bellow were on the verge of leaving Chicago for New York. They had given up their apartment at 5532 Kenwood Avenue and were living in a rooming house nearby, the Huppeler house, at 5524 Kenwood, where they had lived for some months in early 1941. The Huppeler house was a popular residence for graduate students in the early 1940s, several of whom were ex-Trotskyists known to the Bellows. Mrs. Huppeler, the owner, was a tiny white-haired old lady who lived in the building and guarded it “like a dragon.”1 Gertrude Himmelfarb, who had come to the University of Chicago in 1943 on an Encyclopaedia Britannica fellowship, was already in residence when the Bellows moved in. She remembers Mrs. Huppeler as “very alert,” with “red eyes,” “the scariest little thing, we were all in awe of her.” Himmelfarb’s husband, Irving Kristol, was in the Army for most of the time the Bellows lived in the Huppeler house (serving in the infantry from 1941 to 1945). Gertrude Jaeger, another graduate student, later an eminent sociologist, also roomed in the house. Her husband, Philip Selznick, was a figure of some fame on the left, leader of the Trotskyist faction known as Shermanites (“Sherman” was Selznick’s party alias); he, too, became an eminent sociologist, an authority on law and sociology, and, like Kristol, was mostly away in the Army from 1943 to 1946. Another political couple from the Huppeler house were Bess and Martin Diamond. Martin Diamond preceded Bellow into the Merchant Marine, serving from 1943–45. An ardent socialist and stump orator, he, too, like the Kristols, later turned to the right. After the war he studied political philosophy with Leo Strauss at Chicago, eventually becoming a professor of political theory at Claremont College and a leading Straussian.

  “Intermittently the husbands would be there,” Himmelfarb remembers, “until they had to go off to the war.” Bellow did not go off to the war until after he and Anita had left the Huppeler house. They had moved into an apartment at 5400 Dorchester Avenue, next to what Daniel Bell, who would take it over in 1945, called “a sort of student complex” (now demolished). Among the new apartment’s attractions, Bellow wrote, was “a wonder of a bath in which I can lie at full length.”2 Bellow’s presence in Chicago was intermittent because of his many trips to New York from the later 1930s onward. That the Bellows could afford the Dorchester Avenue apartment was partly the result of “a whopper of a job,”3 one that fed Bellow’s passion for ideas and books. The job was to work in the editorial department of Encyclopaedia Britannica on a project initiated by Mortimer Adler and promoted by Robert Hutchins, who was chairman of the Board of Editors of the Encyclopaedia, as well as president of the University of Chicago: a two-volume index or Syntopicon (Adler’s coinage, meaning “a collection of topics”) of the major ideas contained within the fifty-two volumes of the Hutchins and Adler series Great Books of the Western World. This series comprised 431 works by seventy-one different authors, to be prefaced by three introductory volumes: The Great Conversation, a rationale or defense of the “Great Books” concept and of liberal education in general, written by Hutchins, and the two-volume Syntopicon. It took ten years and close to $2 million to complete the project, which was published in 1952.4

  Bellow’s work on the Syntopicon began toward the end of the summer of 1943, on the heels of his failure to secure a job at the Committee on Social Thought. The Committee (also “Social Thought”) was a small interdisciplinary faculty at the University of Chicago founded in 1941 by the historian John U. Nef, the economist Frank Knight, the anthropologist Robert Redfield, and Hutchins. Its aim was to break down the barriers between intellectual fields or disciplines, principally literature, philosophy, religion, art, politics, and society. In the early 1960s, it became Bellow’s academic home for almost thirty years. “Nothing less than this job could keep me in Chicago,” Bellow wrote to his publisher, James Henle, in 1943, about the possibility of joining the Committee.5 Nothing except the Syntopicon job, a kindred enterprise. Bellow’s duties on the Syntopicon were partly managerial, to oversee the work of readers (a hundred altogether, split into teams), meeting with them, or some of them, twice a week. The readers were responsible for specified “Great Books,” noting the appearance within them of one or other of 102 “Great Ideas” Adler and an earlier team of assistants had come up with as keys to Western
literature and thought. These ideas were divided into as many as fifteen subtopics, for which citations and cross references were noted. The resulting two-volume work was arranged alphabetically, from “Angels” to “Love” (Volume 1) and “Man” to “World” (Volume 2). Adler and his team included topics such as “Art,” “Truth,” “Courage,” “Law,” and “Theology,” while rejecting, for reasons hard to discern, “Belief,” “Authority,” “Friendship,” “Intuition,” and “Utopia.” The aim of the Syntopicon, in Adler’s words, was to overcome a key problem of knowledge, that “different authors say the same thing in different ways, or use the same words to say quite different things.”6 Among the topics Bellow oversaw as editor were “Happiness,” “War,” “Statesmanship,” and “The Good.” The works and authors he himself indexed were Plutarch and Tacitus, Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Herodotus, and Thucydides.7 The Syntopicon offices were in the basement of the Social Sciences building, bordering the Midway. Bellow’s pay was $2 an hour. Himmelfarb, who later became an intellectual historian, was also employed by Encyclopaedia Britannica as part of her fellowship. “I remember they sent me a whole set of the Encyclopaedia and then I would have tear sheets of the articles I was supposed to review.… I was a first-year graduate student … actually editing articles on Robespierre and I know not what.” For Himmelfarb as for Bellow, such work was intellectually engaging, as was Hyde Park itself. Irving Kristol tells a story of his first visit there, in the early 1940s: “I came from New York where the only college discussions had been on Marxist themes. I walked into the drugstore on the corner of 57th Street and Kimbark and there was a group of four people sitting … passionately discussing something by Plato. It never happened in City College. I never saw such a thing.… I was so impressed.” To New Yorkers, Himmelfarb recalls, “Chicago was a kind of intellectual center. Harvard, Yale, they were all very prestigious universities, but if you wanted to be an intellectual, Chicago was the place to be.”