The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  The editorial board of the “new” Partisan Review, circa 1937. Clockwise from upper left: George L. K. Morris, Philip Rahv, Dwight Macdonald, William Phillips, and F. W. Dupee. (ill. 7.1)

  You people take care of yourselves before everything. You keep your spirit under lock and key. That’s the way you’re brought up. You make it your business assistant, and it’s safe and tame and never leads you toward anything risky. Nothing dangerous and nothing glorious. Nothing ever tempts you to dissolve yourself. What for? What’s in it? No percentage (p. 260).

  “Dissolve yourself,” Allbee means, in the void, Schopenhauer’s howling storm. For all its surface attractions, the promise New York seemed to hold out to Bellow, the esteem it held him in, in his fiction it is seen as overwhelming, a threat to the self.126 Hence, in life, the distance he kept from it, even when in its midst.

  8

  Minneapolis

  BELLOW’S TULEY FRIEND Sam Freifeld helped him get the job at Minnesota. Freifeld entered the Army in the autumn of 1943 after working in his father’s insurance business and studying at the John Marshall Law School at night. When he finished basic training he was assigned to the Office of the Provost Marshal General, in charge of law enforcement issues, where his duties were to investigate major felonies, murder, rape, robbery. In 1944 he was sent for CID (Criminal Investigation Division) training in Fort Custer, Michigan, followed in 1945 by six months further training at the CID German Language and Criminal Law School, at the University of Minnesota.1 While at Minnesota, Freifeld met and befriended a bright, energetic assistant professor in political science named Herbert McClosky. McClosky was born in 1916, a year after Bellow, and grew up in the slums of Newark, New Jersey, the son of a Polish Russian immigrant named Michalovsky or Maglusky (“McClosky” was the flippant or hasty invention of an Ellis Island official). At the University of Newark (now Rutgers University–Newark), McClosky majored in political science, moving in 1940 to the University of Minnesota for graduate work. Exempted from military service on medical grounds, he was appointed assistant professor of political science early in 1946, teaching courses in political science and in the university’s Humanities Program.

  Early in his career at Minnesota, McClosky gravitated toward a cluster of influential social psychologists teaching on the Minneapolis campus, among them Paul Meehl, chair of the Department of Psychology, a key figure in developing the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, later a president of the American Psychological Association. Meehl became McClosky’s close friend at the university, and was respected by Bellow. A therapist as well as a psychologist, he treated Bellow as a patient for a brief period in 1958.2 Meehl helped McClosky to win a grant from the Social Sciences Research Council to pursue training in social psychology, psychometrics, and survey research, and from the mid-1950s on the two friends pioneered the application of social science techniques (empirical, behaviorist) to the study of politics, designing and applying elaborate surveys to determine voter preferences and beliefs. This approach, according to the political scientist Philip Siegelman, inaugurated a revolution in American social science, one that divided the field for at least thirty years. McClosky’s literary friends, Bellow included, disapproved of the turn his research had taken, and his wife, Mitzi McClosky, remembers strenuous arguments between the two men, “like a fast moving tennis match.” Both could be “ruthless in attack, but they weren’t [ruthless] with each other.”3 Over specific political policies, parties, and personalities, at least in the 1940s, the two friends were more compatible, though Bellow had less faith or interest in politics than McClosky. By the mid-1940s McClosky, like Bellow, had turned against Trotskyism. He became a friend and supporter of Hubert Humphrey, a doctoral candidate in political science at Minnesota who had left graduate work in 1943 to run for mayor of Minneapolis (a post he held from 1945 to 1948). McClosky was part of the brain trust Humphrey assembled to combat local government corruption, racism, and anti-Semitism (in 1946, the year Bellow arrived, Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, described Minnesota as “the capital of anti-Semitism in America”).4 McClosky also helped Humphrey to create the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), and to fight off Communist attempts to take over the new party.

  The connection between McClosky and Freifeld came about through Mel Tumin. While a freshman at the University of Newark, McClosky met and became friends with Tumin, a fellow undergraduate and Newark native. Before Tumin transferred to Wisconsin, where he met Bellow and Rosenfeld through his roommate, Leslie Fiedler, a Newark friend,5 he introduced McClosky to the girl who would become his wife, Mildred Gurkin, known as Mitzi. After graduating from Wisconsin, Tumin went to Northwestern to do a PhD in anthropology with Herskovits. There he met a number of Bellow’s friends, including Sam Freifeld. When the Freifelds arrived at Minnesota for Sam to begin CID training, they looked up the McCloskys at Tumin’s urging. In 1945, McClosky was interviewed for a job at the University of Chicago, and Freifeld urged him to contact the Bellows in Hyde Park. McClosky had never met Bellow but had read Dangling Man at Tumin’s suggestion and admired it. Freifeld assured him that the Bellows would welcome a houseguest. “Sam was a fixer,” Mitzi McClosky remembers, “he said don’t worry about it. I’ll tell him you’re coming, he’ll put you up,” which he did, in a room with nine-month-old Greg. Though McClosky didn’t get the Chicago job, the trip was worth it: he and Bellow “hit it off from the beginning”; Anita was “very generous, as always … very open and welcoming to Saul’s friends,” and McClosky found himself staying longer than he’d intended. When Bellow came to Minneapolis to visit the Freifelds, he spent an afternoon with the McCloskys. He was as impressive as he’d been in Chicago. In Mitzi’s words, “Herb just fell in love with him, and after that it was total unconditional love and admiration.”

  Philip Siegelman, a colleague and friend, describes McClosky as “very tough, very aggressive. He was a street kid from the slums of Newark.” Though an intellectual with “a tremendous appetite for reading,” he was “not at all a conventional academic.” Short, wiry, pugnacious, with “an aggressive and gleeful glint in his eye,” McClosky prized intelligence and strength of mind, and “didn’t take any shit in any way, had no tolerance for nonsense or equivocation.” As Mitzi puts it: “intellectually, he liked to travel first class, and boy was that [Bellow’s mind] first class.” “He prided himself on knowing the top novelists and one of the top psychologists and he had this pantheon of heroes, and once you were in … he was extraordinarily loyal,” remembers Siegelman’s wife, Ellen, a graduate student at the time. From the start, McClosky was Bellow’s advocate at the university. “Herb was a fierce friend and a great appreciator,” Mitzi explains, “and he could protect Saul. He had that part of him, Saul felt safe with him.” He was “one of Saul’s life managers.” “Saul formed very special friendships with men who were forceful,” she continues, “who would kind of take control.” Freifeld was one of the earliest of such men, helping with business affairs, car insurance, storage, what his daughter Susan calls “the most mundane tasks” (“My Dad was just so proud to be his boyhood friend. So proud of his accomplishments”). “Cancel the policy, please, as of the 25th,” Bellow writes to Freifeld in November 1946, in a warm, newsy letter, “and send me the bill, or better yet bring it in. Kiss Rochelle for me, whom I prize above all women.” After he passed the bar in the mid-1950s, Freifeld became for a period Bellow’s unofficial lawyer.

  When Mitzi first met Bellow, she was struck not only by his intelligence but by the way he presented himself. He wore a suit: “he was dressed very differently from the campus crowd.” At their second meeting, when the McCloskys visited the house in Dutchess County, Bellow was alone, Anita having returned to Chicago with Greg to be with her dying brother. This time he appeared in “a green velvet corduroy shirt and a cap.” She remembers him as “very proud that he kept the place neat.” When the McCloskys learned that the Bellows could no longer afford the Dutchess County house and had to return to Chicago
, Herb set out to bring Bellow to Minneapolis: “He steered the whole thing through,” Mitzi remembers, “for Saul it was a miracle.” The “thing” was an instructorship in the Humanities program at the University of Minnesota. The program was part of the university’s Department of General Studies (later the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies), created only a year before Bellow’s arrival. It was modeled on general education and contemporary civilization programs at Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago, and had practical as well as pedagogical aims, principally that of meeting an anticipated increase in enrollment after the war. The large interdisciplinary courses offered in the Humanities program were devised by two distinguished faculty members, Alburey Castell (philosophy) and Joseph Warren Beach (English), assisted by interested younger faculty, among them Herb McClosky.6 The comparable Social Sciences program was headed by Arthur Naftalin, chair of Political Science, who years later would succeed Humphrey as mayor of Minneapolis. Among Naftalin’s assistants were the historian and social theorist Benjamin Nelson, who became a friend of Bellow’s (also a model for the scholar-theorist Egbert Shapiro in Herzog), and Andreas Papandreou, the economist, later the Greek prime minister. Bellow was in several ways a good fit for the Humanities program: he had been an undergraduate at Hutchins’s University of Chicago, taught widely at Pestalozzi-Froebel (“Anthropology, English, anything”), and worked on the Syntopicon. But he had no higher degree or scholarly publications.

  The appointment seems to have been arranged very late (too late for Bellow to be listed in the projected General Studies Budget for 1946), perhaps facilitated by the influx of returning veterans. Undergraduate enrollment at the University of Minnesota jumped from 12,000 in 1945 to 27,000 in 1946.7 Some 18,000 of these new students were ex-GIs, beneficiaries of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, the GI Bill. Returning servicemen were offered $500 for tuition, free textbooks, and a living allowance of $50 a month if single or $75 a month if married. The huge new student body meant more housing as well as more faculty, much of it arranged, like Bellow’s appointment, at the last minute. Barracks-style housing was constructed in the football stadium, existing dorms were “double-decked,” and a University Village was set up on the St. Paul campus (the University has campuses in each of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis–St. Paul), consisting of a row of trailers, Quonset huts, and metal barracks originally owned by the federal government. The Quonset hut section of the village was set aside for nonresident and foreign graduate students. By 1950 it accommodated 674 families. It is here that the Bellows ended up when they arrived at the university in September 1946. “The hut is of presswood and paper,” Bellow wrote to David Bazelon on November 22, 1946. “If it were of stone it would resemble a cave and I a caveman. Since it is the aforementioned material it is more like a barrel and my affinity is to Diogenes.” “We’re in a kind of paper-walled hutch that looks like something wasps make,” Bellow wrote to Robert Penn Warren. “I know that rabbits live in hutches, but this isn’t a hive either. But hutch or hive it has no running water and no dividing wall or partition.”8 Real rabbits were the Bellows’ neighbors, scurrying across the grassy areas between the huts. Each hut was equipped with a sleeper-sofa, a two- or three-burner hot plate, and a small bathroom, but no shower. Showers were taken in a central bathroom across Como Avenue, on the southern end of the St. Paul campus, where there were also facilities for laundry. Heating was provided by a small kerosene stove. Bellow was so cold in the hut he feared he would develop arthritis.

  The Bellows lived in University Village through December. Abraham paid them a visit that autumn and was appalled to find members of his family living in such conditions. The McCloskys put him up, but because they did not keep kosher, he took nothing but black coffee in their house (Abraham “did not eat out,” according to his granddaughter Lesha Bellows Greengus9). Yet he loved “talking for hours about Saul’s foolish choice of working for such a small salary when he could have joined him in the coal business.” A distant relation from the Old Country, Wolf Kissin, lived in Minneapolis, and Abraham looked him up; he and Kissin had been to cheder together in Druya, and Kissin was a rabbi (so he could eat with the Kissin family). Over coffee at the McCloskys’, Abraham kept up what Herb McClosky described as “a threnody of complaint.” “He was heartbroken,” McClosky told Atlas. “He really thought Saul was a failure.”10 How father and son got on during the visit is not recorded, nor is it known if Bellow asked his father for money. Asking for money humiliated Bellow and provoked fierce fights, the screaming arguments recalled by Greg. In Herzog, Moses describes the time Father Herzog threatened to shoot him when asked to underwrite a loan. With such requests, the father “lost his temper every time, and when he wanted to shoot me it was because he could no longer bear the sight of me, that look of mine, the look of conceit or proud trouble. The elite look. I don’t blame him, thought Moses.… His heart ached angrily because of me. And Papa was not like some old men who become blunted toward their own death. No, his despair was keen and continual. And Herzog again was pierced with pain for his father” (p. 667).

  Bellow was capable of such a look. Mitzi McClosky remembers him as frequently proud and defensive in this period, especially in company. His instructorship had to be approved by the English Department, which was responsible for half his $2,500 salary. Joseph Warren Beach, cofounder of the Humanities Program, was also chair of the English Department, and when McClosky set out to bring Bellow to Minnesota, the first thing he did was to loan Beach a copy of Dangling Man. “I have this friend who I think is incredible,” Mitzi recalls Herb telling Beach, “and I’d like you to read his book.” A couple of weeks later, Beach met McClosky in the bookstore and said: “Very interesting, your friend. He has a wonderful Jewish mind.” McClosky realized immediately that Beach did not know he was Jewish (“it hadn’t come up”). “He has a wonderful mind,” he replied. Beach saw the look on McClosky’s face and when he called him later, according to Mitzi, “Herb was fuming. Beach said, ‘I know you were upset, but I don’t know why you were so upset.’ But he did know, Herb thought, it was on his mind.” “To his credit,” Mitzi continues, “I think Beach was appalled at what he said when he saw the look on Herb’s face; he apologized profusely, but it was the way he saw [the book], what he thought.”

  Bellow was not the first Jew to be employed by the English Department at Minnesota. The Miltonist Arnold Stein was a member of the department from 1940 to 1942 and Leonard Unger was hired as an assistant professor in 1945, the year before Bellow’s arrival. Unger was born into a Yiddish-speaking family in Corona, New York, and brought up in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was educated at Vanderbilt University, home to the Fugitive and Southern Agrarian writers. Among these writers were John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Andrew Lytle, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren, all of them at one time teachers or students at Vanderbilt. Ransom, Brooks, and Warren were founding fathers of the New Criticism, by the late 1940s the dominant literary theory or methodology in American English departments. When Warren came to Minnesota in 1942 from Louisiana State University, he had already published two novels, two books of poetry, and two works of literary criticism, one a key text of the New Criticism, Understanding Poetry (1939), coauthored with Cleanth Brooks. That Unger had studied with Warren at LSU played a part in his hiring. Unger and Bellow soon became friends, chatting in Yiddish (“unashamedly” says Atlas11) in the corridors of the English Department. “Leonard and I have sized each other up as people from the same layer of the upper air (or lower depths; whichever you like),” Bellow wrote to Warren, with whom he also got on well.12

  It was Warren, ten years Bellow’s senior, who helped to smooth his way with the WASP grandees of the department, not just Beach but Samuel Holt Monk, Huntington Brown, E. E. Stoll, and Henry Nash Smith, distinguished scholars all. The extent to which these figures looked down on Jews and nonscholars, as Bellow suspected, is difficult to determine. Mitzi McClosky, who knew them as a graduate student in English, a f
aculty wife, and a friend of Bellow’s (later of John Berryman and Isaac Rosenfeld, who were also to teach in the English Department), recalls a certain “scorn for new writers.” The grandees were “good in their field,” she acknowledges, but “fuddy-duddies.” She also speaks of “a very strong prejudice in the universities and the English departments: we were supposed to be very upper class, British even.” Siegelman concurs: Beach, Monk, Brown, et al. “were all Englishmen. They were like English dons.” Though Leonard Unger got on well with his senior colleagues, he “conceded” that some of them “weren’t above ‘unwitting’ anti-Semitism,” as in Beach’s remark about Bellow’s “wonderful Jewish mind.” Atlas describes Bellow as “intimidated by these ‘well-bred WASPs,’ with their charming, acidic condescension, their moneyed airs, and their ‘Emersonian, gaunt New England’ looks” (presumably Bellow is the source of these quotes).13 “We went to parties,” Mitzi McClosky remembers, and Bellow “was always bristling after he got the job, always bristling with imagined insults and possible insults.”