In the matter of Saul Bellow and his biographer Zachary Leader (and the bit about Chomsky vs Bellow)
Random reading can have interesting consequences, so, when I picked up a paperback from my library and seeing I hadn’t read it, I took a second look: Saul Bellow Him with his foot in his mouth and other stories. In a previous discussion I had confused the author of Voltaire’s Bastards, John Ralston Saul with Saul Bellow, not knowing much about either author, except that the latter was a Nobel Prize winner, so, now was a chance to clear up the misunderstanding and find out what this Saul Bellow is all about. Not that winning (sic) a Nobel Prize for Literature is necessarily a guarantee of quality writing, but one can at least investigate, in retrospect, the (un)reasons why and how the nebulous Nobel committee concluded to award Saul Bellow the prize in 1976.
Hence I read the short stories and was amazed but not sure for what reason. Next I learned that HERZOGwas Bellow’s most ‘famous’ novel, and I duly borrowed it from our local library. Upon reading it I was even more amazed and even more unsure why.
Upon some on-line research I further learned that a fairly recent two-volume biography (2015/18) of Bellow by Zachary Leader is the most up-to-date source for finding out how Bellow got to be an American superstar of literature.
At this juncture I should confess that when amongst other research I come across the story of Noam Chomsky mentioning Saul Bellow as a mindless Zionist who had endorsed a fraudulent book about the Palestinians (declaring them as recent immigrants in line with the Israelis). This was followed by Chomsky debunking Saul Bellow’s pro-Israel/Zionist and anti-Palestinian/Arab book (1977) entitled To Jerusalem and back – and reading the Chomsky article in detail – I should have stopped the whole enterprise since Bellow was revealed to be a right-wing propagandist writer, as Chomsky noted:
In fact, he is a propagandist’s delight. He has produced a catalogue of What Every Good American Should Believe, as compiled by the Israeli Information Ministry. Everything is predictable. No cliche is missing.
and
Bellow has an engaging ability to skim the surface of ideas. He also
has a craftsman’s talent for capturing a chance encounter or an odd
circumstance. Beyond that, his account of what he has seen and heard is
a disaster. The critical acclaim it has received is revealing, with regard to
the state of American intellectual life.
Nevertheless, I seemed to detect a slightly begrudging acknowledgement that Bellow does have some talent as a ‘craftsman’ with an ‘engaging ability to skim the surface of ideas’. What with Chomsky being an eminent linguist, philosopher and political commentator (being a sympathetic Chomsky biographer (2006) I naturally take his side) but not engaged in literary criticism (I doubt Chomsky had read HERZOG), I took a gamble in giving Bellow the benefit of the doubt and delve into the pros and cons of his literary life, a life, as it turns out, that is turned into literature, done in a way that is quite amazing to me and therefore worthy of a lengthy critique. As a linguist who knows much more about Chomsky than Bellow, I nevertheless confess to my literary (as an amateur poet and novelist) and philosophical ambitions (the latter aided also by Chomsky et al.) as well as dabbling in political (Chomsky again) and psychological studies (having studied psychology at the LMU for a year or so, and considering, again as Chomsky, that the study of language is a branch of psychology). Having pried into Chomsky’s private life I did learn quite a lot about his Jewish background that can now be compared with Bellow’s – not to speak about me being German by birth in 1948, lumbered with the horrific history of the Holocaust – I felt a certain familiarity with all the Yiddish expressions that Bellow so masterfully employs, recognising the German etymology of its vocabulary. Finally, while having been born in Germany – as Bellow was born in Canada – my ancestors were refugees from the Slavic East, just like Bellow’s ancestors were from even further Russian East. So much for my claims to be allowed to write semi-coherently on these subjects.
When I first read the first two short stories ‘Him with his foot in his mouth’ and ‘What kind of day did you have?’ without any background knowledge, I was struck, in the first story (of some 55 pages in the paperback version), by the casual dropping of names and literary allusions, like Swedenborg, Goya, Hamlet and Polonius, Dewey, Pergolesi, T. S. Eliot, Brecht and Weill, Ginsberg, Whitman, Dr Pangloss, megillah, Haman, Blake, Haydn, Mozart, Salieri, Wagner, Rossini, Mc Govern, Alexander Pope, Kissinger, Leviticus, van der Weyden, Cranach, La Rochefoucauld, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Mellon, Ford, the Volkswagen Foundation, Nietzsche, Freud, Churchill, Stalin, Voltaire, Gibbons, Saint -Simon, Heine, Dionysus, Daumier, Spencer Tracy, Balzac, Marx, Lionel Abel, Andre Breton, Leon Trotsky, Goneril in King Lear, J. da Todi, Handel, Stanislavski, Götterdämmerung, Monteverdi, Clemenceau, Poincaré, Elisabeth II, Queen of Tonga, Queen Victoria, Disraeli, Meissen, and then all the invented ones, what with Shawmut as the main protagonist. Wow, this guy (Bellow) must be a very learned writer, reeling off all these giants (major and minor) of cultural and political significance. I mean, I am familiar with most of the names but would be hard pressed to quote snippets from all their works, musical or otherwise.
He goes on with Ginsburg in particular, a man to my liking as a sort of counter-culture icon. Shawmut (Bellow?) on the whole sounds rather conservative in his tastes, so what’s up with Ginsberg? Is it a bit of sexual voyeurism and the use of some explicit language? Says Shawmut:
What Ginsberg opts for is the warmth of a freely copulating, manly, womanly, comradely, open road humanity which doesn’t neglect to pray and meditate.
Sounds very 1960s, far out man! I can dig it. Shawmut, however, seems to not follow it through what with his misogynist quips and unnecessarily obscene remarks about “whores” and cunts (there cannot be ‘whores” in Ginsberg’s definition above).
Maybe he likes Ginsberg only because he is Jewish and most of all American Jewish, which may or may not be a misinterpretation when Shawmut (Bellow?) assigns him to the following:
As an American Jew he must also affirm and justify democracy. The United States is destined to become one of the great achievements of humanity …
Isn’t this in contradiction when he writes of Ginsberg earlier on as:
He speaks of horror of our plastic culture …
Shawmut (Bellow?) gets to be more extreme when commenting on Ginsberg’s ironic appeal to Jew-haters:
… by exaggerating everything that they ascribe to Jews in their pathological fantasies. He puts them on, I think … with his dreams of finding an anus in his sandwich … this bottom-line materialistic eroticism is most attractive to Americans … although the deformities and obscenities must of course be assigned to somebody else, some “morphodite” faggot or exotic junkie queer.
What is Shawmut saying here? About Americans? About Jews? About American Jews?
To me, of German birth (1948) the mere mention of anything Jewish arouses my interest. Being an anti-fascist (of Reichian proportions – much more about Bellow and Reich later on) I have always struggled to come to terms with a history that involves my parents and grandparents’ generation. When at Gymnasium Hohenschwangau in the late 60s, some of us asked the history teacher about the Holocaust and he said it was not part of the curriculum. We wrote to the Wiesenthal Foundation for information, and they sent us a package that included some of the most horrific photographs of the concentration camps. We showed it to the teacher who informed the Direktor who in turn informed us that we faced expulsion lest we apologized for our misdeed. The Direktor, by-the-way had been an acquaintance of Heinrich Harrer when interned in India, and after the war often invited Harrer to give talks on his Tibetan exploits. Harrer, as is well known, was eventually exposed as a card-carrying Nazi who briefly served as a SS sergeant.
In my family nobody ever talked about the war. Only my grandmother told me that as she was only 1/16thJewish she escaped deportation (as a Sudetendeutsche, she and her remaining family were instead deported to Bavaria after the war; some of my uncles were active in reclaiming the Sudetenland, alas, to no effect). Hopefully this explains why I am so interested in all things Jewish, not least because if my grandmother had been designated 1/8th Jewish, I might not be writing this. Not that anyone in my family or even in my circle of acquittances and friends in Germany professed to be Jewish. In fact, even after migrating to New Zealand I remained ignorant in term of personal knowledge until our daughter’s partner turned out to be of Jewish, Māori and Samoan descent. Of course, he follows the Chomsky point of view, as exemplified above in Chomsky’s critique of Bellow. Consequently, I still had no idea about Jewish orthodoxy through personal connections or otherwise, so, this story about Shawmut seemed to open a window of a certain fascination. As Shawmut explains his name (sic, what is in a name?) as having been tampered with from the Yiddish original, so as to disguise the Jewish immigrants’ origins to the American WASPs, or worse, as in this case (somewhat comically), to hide the lowliest status even amongst American Jews, namely, to have originated from untershamus, ‘the lowest of the low in the Old World synagogue’:
“Orm,” as my father would say, “auf steiffleivent”. Steifffleivent was the stiff linen-and-horsehair fabric that tailors would put into the lining of jackets to give it shape …. Cheaper than a shroud.
Shawmut (Bellow? I keep putting a question mark because at the time of reading this the first time round, I didn’t equate Shawmut with Bellow other than he being the narrator) then explains Yiddish:
… Yiddish is a hard language … it is often delicate, lovely, but can be explosive as well … this violent unsparing language.
As a linguist I disagree with this characterization lest it applies to all languages. However, what attracted me (also as a linguist) to these snippets of Yiddish is the obvious source of German vocabulary, e.g. “orm” = arm (poor), “steiff-leivent” = steiff (stiff) Leinwand (linen). I take it that some varieties of American English are replete with Yiddish expressions, as opposed to WASPish New Zealand English (which is my bread and butter), so, I always found it refreshing when the former liberal PM David Lange called out various scumbags as “shysters”.
Keeping with the linguistic theme, one is of course impressed with the French language samples sprinkled in the English text, even when in the context of a bit of misogyny (as mentioned above):
Miss Rose was never pretty, not even what the French call une belle laide, or ugly beauty, a woman whose command of sexual forces makes ugliness itself contribute to her erotic power.
Obviously Shawmut suffers from a whole range of Freudian sexual hang-ups, unable to deal with mothers, sisters, lovers, women in general. At some level he loves them but always afraid they will castrate him – as they probably should.
Bellow is obviously very clever in writing (skimming?) about human foibles, both in the raw and in the most elevated intellectual spheres. In the middle of all that it is difficult to make sense. Take one more theme from the story: Shawmut’s brother Philip as the sibling from hell, whom he loves, nevertheless, and who doesn’t want to be reminded of his dreary upbringing in Chicago now that he is a rich businessman in Texas, slumming it out with his even more business-minded, money-grabbing wife on his park-like estate, being involved in shady deals and tax evasion, and ends up in prison where he dies. Philip’s evil wife then bankrupts Shawmut who has been an unsuspecting business partner. Shawmut’s crazy lawyer recommends him to flee to Canada to escape the tax man. And here the crazy story ends, somewhere in Vancouver, waiting for the extradition.
Now re-reading the story with all the background facts (and fictions) extracted from Zachary Leader’s exhaustive (exhausting? – some 1,500 pages in total), I can add some context that seems to be the same, over and over again, for the rest of Bellow’s oeuvre, the stories, novellas, novels, plays, non-fiction (esp. From Jerusalem and Back discussed above with Chomsky in mind), namely that Bellow turned his private life into a public spectacle of grand proportions, unlike anything ever done before, at least in term of the success achieved (e.g. the Nobel Prize in Literature and many more awards). So, the real story, according to Leader goes somewhat as follows: After Bellow received the Nobel Prize in 1976, one of his former colleagues at Bard College, Ted Hoffmann (now at NYU) writes Bellow a long letter (Leader thinks Hoffman may have been drunk when he wrote it) in which he reminds Bellow of insulting the librarian of Bard College with his ‘and you look like something I just dug up’. He also tells Bellow that he doesn’t like his books, but he still loves him as a friend. Leader does not tell us if Bellow wrote back to Hoffman, but what we certainly know is that Bellow turned this whole episode into Him with his foot in his mouth, with Ted Hoffman becoming Eddie Wallish (Bellow’s knack with naming his characters is astounding), who like Hoffman has a Harvard background and a limp. Eddie Wallish writes a letter to Shawmut in his old age, reminding him of what he did in his company at Riedier College to that poor old (actually young) librarian, now called Rose. Shawmut now writes a letter of apology to Miss Rose, also writing about writing the letter and various other details (sometimes interesting, sometimes a bit boring) that fill out a short story of some 55 pages. Without background knowledge one might characterise the story in Chomsky’s terms of ‘nothing is impossible, but many things are unlikely’, i.e. the whole story is a concoction that fits the description of ‘unlikely’, at least in terms of social realism. But hey, now we know it’s all based on a likely reality show, recorded by none other than Saul Bellow, written up, published and sold. Who cares? Ted Hoffman? Leader does not record any responses, and by all accounts Hoffman did reasonably well in his job at NYU. By now they are all dead and gone. It’s just a minor history lesson about the players that were once strutting the stage.
Not all of Bellow’s real people escaped without much personal harm from their literary ill-treatment. A particularly sad story involves the illegitimate (sic) son of Bellow’s brother Maury, i.e. Bellow’s nephew Dean Borok. The fictionalized story is played out in The Adventures of Augie March whereby Simon (aka Maury) keeps a mistress Renée (aka Marcie Borok) described in the typical misogynist terms as ‘a zaftige piece’ and later called a ‘little whore’ when she tries to sue for paternity for her son fathered by Simon (Maury). Simon pays her off and both mother and son disappear from the scene. In real life, the grown-up son, Dean Borok, eventually approached his ‘old man’ (Maury Bellow) who rejected him brutally (in Leader’s words), the evidence being in a letter Dean Borok wrote to Saul Bellow:
The last time I saw my old man, he gave me fifty bucks and told me to get lost.
Dean who had decamped to Montreal to avoid the draft, had set up a leather-ware shop and kept writing ever more desperate letters to Saul Bellow, wanting some acknowledgement from the Bellow clan as belonging to the ‘gene’ pool of the family. Saul Bellow only ever replied once, telling Dean that he himself has very little contact with his brother, warning him
… about the genes you seem to be so proud of. If you’ve inherited them … many of them will have to be subdued or lived down. I myself have had some hard going with them.
Obviously no consolation for Dean, given the considerable financial resources the Bellow clan had accumulated by that time (1980), not to speak of fame and glory for Saul Bellow, i.e. if the ‘genes’ have anything to do with it, he, Dean, son of Maury Bellow, ought not be cut out from it. Dean then wrote ever more bizarre letters (accompanied by porn clips) that Saul Bellow judiciously ignored but kept in his archive (for Leader et al. to peruse, eventually). One other piece of advice Saul had given Dean in that singular letter was that in writing a successful account of his life
… you will forgive everyone in the process. Yes, all those who sinned against you will be forgiven.
Dean, in his later life in New York did write some stories but was unsuccessful as a litterateur. In any case Saul Bellow’s advice sounds rather hollow, when his main aim in life was to seek revenge via his literary output. Dean was however tickled pink when Zachary Leader contacted him about the whole affair, supplying him with further details about his mother and Maury, and being very pleased when Leader’s first volume appeared in 2015 with his name in it. He also managed to get his side of the story published in an obscure on-line site called ‘hackwriter’, which is a long rant about how he was shafted again and again, first in Montreal by some moronic journalist who ruined his fashion cum X-rated comedy show, then of course by the Bellow clan. Dean Borok died in New York in 2016 of leukemia – totally unknown, like a rolling stone, like most of us. To be immortalized by a famous Bellow, or merely mentioned by a lesser Leader, is of interest only to those of us who delve into books and become thoroughly submerged.
Books, books and more books. Some people seem to think that all of civilisation is based on bookworms who read great writers for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So, it might be worth pointing out that this strange obsession with so-called Great Books is exactly what started Saul Bellow off, namely as a bookworm from his early age. At Tuley High School in Chicago, his English lessons included deep dives into Shakespeare, Dickens, Plutarch and Wordsworth – the latter especially leaving a deep impression on him. The debating club revolved around Revolution, Radicalism, Religion, Race … the Rs. Outside school he also read and read - Flaubert, Swinburne, Wilde, Nietzsche – the latter also shaping his philosophical outlook, especially regarding Nietzsche’s idea of Fatum.
But reading such books does not necessarily mean that they were understood in the way the authors wanted it to be. Selective reading may result in misunderstandings that in turn generate false/fake ideas that are forever referenced to the great author as infallible evidence. For example, having ploughed through Nietzsche’s collected works – in the original German – myself, I have some misgivings on Bellow’s take. I like Nietzsche as a humourist philosopher-writer who has been misinterpreted/misappropriated so many times, from being a forerunner of Nazism to being a wicked nihilist. Bellow’s fixation on Fatum is in comparison quite benign, even as he misses the bigger picture. The intellectual confusion might be exemplified by Bellow’s quite extreme revulsion of modern ‘nihilism’ while never discussing Nietzsche’s supposed nihilism (cf. Bertrand Russell’s distaste of Nietzsche). Nihilism as a dirty word is a typical misunderstanding of Nietzsche’s denial of any objective truths, appropriately calling die fröhliche Wissenschaft as yet another fiction telling stories like any other stories (foreshadowing French deconstructionist philosophy). Nietzsche’s snake-like sentences lead you down all the rabbit holes known to philosophical (and musical) mankind. It is best to read works like Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen as a poetic ensemble without analysing it for deep meanings (the title alone gives away the ironic style). I think Bellow’s misappropriates Nietzsche’s Fatum concept into the realm of individual fate when Nietzsche applied the term to mankind in general, and more in the sense of a question, i.e. what is the fate of mankind (Menschheit)?
Maybe it was inevitable that wide reading would eventually lead young Bellow to political theorists, mainly Marxists, then moving onto novelists Balzac, Zola, Dostoyevsky, Americans like Dreiser, Anderson, Lewis, Dos Passos, Whitman, and back again to the Europeans like Shaw, Ibsen and Strindberg. Oswald Spengler seemed to be a particular fascination for Jewish schoolboys, making them ‘sick with rage’. Leader goes on to list more and more of the Great Book Authors that show up later in Bellows novels, be it Schopenhauer or Kant. Bellow’s best friend, Isaac Rosenfeld (eventually immortalized by Bellow in Zetland) was even more bookish, aged only fourteen, he read and discussed the likes of Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire, Dewey, Hegel, Spencer … and so we have a real intellectual wunderkind. Is Saul Bellow one too?
Possibly, I mean, after a lifetime of reading I cannot claim having read all the books/authors mentioned above, and even then I cannot remember half of what I have read. Bellow’s long history as a literature teacher, teaching the Great Books, over and over again, can explain some of the memory developed, e.g. in my not so long career as an English teacher I used a certain iconic New Zealand poem over and over again, with the effect that I can still recite the poem (with effect) at the drop of a hat. Still, Bellow’s facility to quote passages from the Great Books at a drop of the hat is quite remarkable, even if some critics (cf. Chomsky) might call it a superficial feat, skimming over ideas. Alternatively, one can attribute such great memory to Bellow’s apparently assiduous research and editing that went into all his works.
Let me just briefly touch on the next short story I read, namely ‘What kind of a day did you have?”. Now, with Leader’s hindsight we know that the main protagonist Victor Wulpy is none other than one Harold Rosenberg, by all accounts a grey eminence in the field of art and literary criticism but obviously a big influence on Bellow, especially in his younger years. Without this key to this roman à clef, the story is just one crazy tour de force, hurried along by the vivid (sic) characterisation of all the players in the story, as sort of lovable monstrosities who live in a world of mixed-up emotions, unable to shake off Americana and what Chomsky above calls ‘the state of American intellectual life’. As Bellow frames Victor Wulpy as ‘no category could hold’ him, we are confronted with an avalanche of seemingly erudite snippets of everything known to Western Civilisation, dropping names and the associated books like salt and pepper on a salad of words. Interestingly Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night is much discussed, notwithstanding that Celine was an antisemitic writer. Does this make sense? Bellow likes mixing it up and throw in the odd piece from left field just to confuse himself and the reader. Equally, Wulpy gives Marxist lectures to a corporate audience, an unlikely scenario if there ever was one. Maybe Bellow examined his own turn-coat story from Trotskyist to cozying up to Ronald Reagan, wondering what would happen if he’d lecture the White House on Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist political theory. Leader does not tell us what if anything Harold Rosenberg thought about Bellow’s ‘use’ of everyone he knew as fodder for his fiction, but since Rosenberg was also at the centre of Bellow’s academic life at the Committee of Social Thought at Chicago University, he would have been aware of Bellow’s fictional use of his colleagues at the Committee. I will deal with the most blatant case, that of Allen Bloom later on.
Having been initially seduced by Him with his foot in his mouth and What kind of day did you have? I quickly established that HERZOG was his most famous novel, so I borrowed the book from the Auckland Library and read it without further ado. This was my immediate impression (interspersed with some quick background knowledge gleaned from the likes of Wikipedia but not yet from Zachary Leader’s two-volume biography):
I find HERZOG to be the craziest novel I have ever read. Not ‘crazy’ in the sense of mental disorder – even so HERZOG often descends into a psychotherapy that is so embraced by American intellectuals – but in the sense of a ‘crazy’ ride that is sometimes exhilarating and sometimes boring as hell. When there is action, like the road accident and subsequent police interrogation about his gun, we get the sense of accelerated movement that is often lacking during his extensive letter writing, that while amusing at times, goes, literally, nowhere. Nevertheless, I do like the occasional letter, like the one addressed to Herr Nietzsche – being a bit of an expert on the subject – even though he dwells a bit too much on Nietzsche’s presumed extremism. Showing off his academic erudition – even though he seems to loathe academia – is one of his hallmarks, and it is truly impressive. I read that he, even as a child, soaked up books like a sponge, with a photographic memory that allows him to quote and quote and quote. Having read hundreds of books myself but unable to remember most of them, I do admire anyone, like Bellow and Chomsky (the latter in quite a different, far superior league) who have vast knowledge at their fingertips. Or are there other ways, like the German Eselsbrücke (מנעמאָניק בריק)? Given Bellow’s many Yiddish expressions - Yiddish being a West-Germanic language – I can make out some of the vocabulary even though I do not speak/understand Yiddish, which is a bonus and a reminder that Jewish and Germanic worlds are closely and positively connected – despite the horrible interludes to the contrary. Then there is the title HERZOG which in German is a common surname (not necessarily Jewish) or the word for ‘duke’. Given Bellow’s multitude of named (mainly Jewish) characters, one wonders how he stumbled on HERZOG other than being a common name in his Chicago neighbourhood.
HERZOG, a ‘duke’ amongst true intellectuals, nevertheless has a knack to cut back to the bone on his own exalted ideas – or is this a condition to be a true intellectual? – noting perhaps his own intellectual (not sexual) impotence when he writes:
Intelligent people without influence feel a certain self-contempt, reflecting the contempt of those who hold real political or social power, or think they do (p.161).
I suppose Bellow did feel that he had some sort of influence, at least in the realm of literature as a Nobel Prize winner, although he seemed to increasingly alienate his peers, such as Gunter Grass, with his outlandish claims and ideas. With some humour he admitted to his deteriorating mental state in old age:
I’ve got a good strong body, and my mind is only slightly attached.
From this point of view, it is not surprising that he became a father again at the age of 84, albeit achieved via IVF, which is even more bizarre in its implications. I wonder if he finally uttered Hineni (as Leonard Cohen did in his deathbed song You want it darker), for Bellow did use it in HERZOG in a typical reversal of use:
Hineni! How marvellously beautiful it is today (p.310).
Happy moments are few and far between as HERZOG is of course preoccupied with death or the ‘void’ – a central concept in Judaism - as the destiny of man, including all the suffering along the way, but even here HERZOG/Bellow has a clever quip, namely that there is no evidence that the void exists. Indeed!
There is a funny take on HERZOG by John Crace, the Guardian comedic writer, taking the piss:
Dear Einstein, why does everybody hate me? Dear Herzog, because you are relatively annoying.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/16/herzog-saul-bellow-digested
The agony and the ecstasy, one might add. Like I said, reading HERZOG (and Bellow) today in 2025, from some 64 years ago is like a crazy flash-back to times immemorial when Chicago and New York were the centres of the universe, when the cold war was hot, when sanitised sex was on every billboard, when things went on in the backseats of the Cadillacs, when Chomsky revolutionised linguistics, when theoretical Marxists and behaviourists battled it out at Ivy League universities, when Afro-Americans became radical in Oakland and Cornell, when, when … when you want to know what happened then and realise that nothing has changed, as HERZOG ruminates:
Annihilation is no longer a metaphor. Good and Evil are real (p.165).
That we are still here after 64 years, is a miracle in itself. The old Hollywood philosophy of the good guys always winning in the end has shifted to the more exciting take of the bad guys spilling blood by the gallons, whetting the appetites of the middle classes:
The bigger our mild, basically ethical, safe middle classes grow the more radical excitement is in demand. Mild or moderate truthfulness or accuracy seems to have no pull at all (p.316).
How prescient in the time of Trump and social media fakery! Not that Bellow is the only one who has predicted our future let me copy John Crace from above:
Dear Herr Nietzsche, I would write, your Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft (1886) has indeed predicted the Zukunft (future) quite well. To overcome the dichotomy of Good and Evil still seems as impossible as it was then. There is no new Mensch (Übermensch) to accomplish the task.
Dear Herr Trump, I would write, being of German extraction I recommend you read HERZOG to cure you of your delusions of grandeur.
Dear Herr Musk, I would write, being of South-African apartheid extraction, please read HERZOG or at least Him with his foot in his mouth to reset the artificial intelligence embedded in your small brain.
Dear Herr Dr Reich, you could have told this Bellow/HERZOG character that he does not seem a prime example of sexual liberation – he missed the boat in the 60s – his somewhat coy descriptions of sex have a certain French savoir faire, as has his oeuvre in general, as far as I understand (Bellow was fluent in French and savoured French literature, I am told). On the other hand, one may contrast his extremely detailed descriptions of faces, mannerisms and accoutres with the lack of what goes on below the waistline. Again, contrast this too with Ginsberg’s Howl – not that Bellow was into gay sex, I just mean the language. It is an odd idea that Bellow and his protagonists hate their ex-wires – and they hate him – while all the lovers on the side truly love him/them, or so he says/writes. Please remind HERZOG that Allen Ginsberg was active in RESIST (as was Chomsky).
In HERZOG there are many quotable expressions, and below is a selection that took my fancy (now annotated with the occasional insights gained from Leader’s biography):
Paranoia is perhaps the normal state of mind in savages (p.57).
As we know from Bellow’s academic career (via Leader), his only university college degree was in anthropology, a subject that interested him to the end of his life. His strange connection with anthropologist Gajdusek (who was eventually jailed for sexual abuse of boys he had brought over from Papua New Guinea) might have convinced him of Gajdusek’s take on ‘primitive’ practices as ‘paranoic’. Another by now infamous low point in Bellow’s anthropology was his remark ‘Where is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read them’. In any case if one reads ‘savages’ pertaining to Americans as well, the quote seems to hit the nail on the head.
HERZOG’s evolving anti-communism (preceded by anti-Stalinism) sinks to lows like proclaiming that ‘plebian envy (p. 76)’ is the inevitable outcome of any communist revolution, including of the sexual privileges enjoyed by the aristocracy, insinuating that the revolutionary plebs will inevitably engage in large-scale orgies of rape and pillage.
HERZOG does, however, on occasion put his finger on the pulse, arriving at the correct diagnosis as it were, but unfortunately then prescribing a totally wrong cure:
The strength to do evil is sovereignty. (p.126)
Indeed, to be the ‘sovereign’ bestows unlimited privileges and when transferred to so-called nations’ ‘sovereignty’, the consequence is that such nationhood equals the padded cell of a lunatic asylum, such as the United Nations are today, a club of weirdos who veto each other over who should or should not be the best nuclear armed sheriff of the world while all the while calling for peace in Gaza.
What would HERZOG have to say in today’s world of ‘influencers’? In Chomsky’s time the problem was of the intelligentsia to turn into intellectual commissars (Chomsky speaking as the anti-Stalinist in America) desperately holding onto the coat tails of ‘those who hold real political or social power’. HERZOG who mainly operates in the politically corrupt Chicago might have had something to say about the University of Chicago whose onetime president served as Attorney General under Gerald Ford. Bellow as long-time chair of the Committee of Social Thought is deeply implicated (more on this topic later on).
HERZOG while identifying many societal and political problems always falls back on a Hollywood cliché, namely that this is an issue between Good and Evil.
Will the good American sheriff prevail, or will the high noon shootout wipe out both good and evil – thus presumably giving evil the ultimate satisfaction? Hasn’t Nietzsche got this figured out with his Jenseits von Gut und Böse?
Playing with such death wishes brings us to the next level of HERZOG’s problems, namely pandering to another Hollywood dictum, namely that violence (annihilation) has to be constantly elevated to new heights lest the audiences fall asleep. This seems to be the case for so-called literature as well (and isn’t script writing in the same league?) and Bellow’s HERZOG is up there with was HERZOG calls
We all love extreme cases ...
And what better combination than violence and sex. Let the bitch have it. As an excuse for all the sanitised sex and violence one must propose a nice platform:
The erotic must be admitted to its rightful place, at last, in an emancipated society which understands the relation of sexual repression to sickness, war, property, money, totalitarianism … (p.166)
Echoing Reich – as I will elaborate in detail further on – is always a good idea as long as one restricts oneself to his Mass Psychology of Fascism hence above quote by HERZOG is fair enough but seems a contradiction when at the same time proclaiming that ‘we all love extreme cases’ … extreme violence, extreme sex, extreme fascism, extreme money?
Which brings me to the final unadulterated reading of HERZOG, foreshadowing what I learnt later about Bellow from one of his great fans, Ruth Wisse:
Bellow Was So Jewish He Could Travel Any Distance Without Risking That Allegiance. His reputation will fall and rise with his people’s.
HERZOG expresses it thus:
The Jews were strange to the world for a great length of time, and now the world is being strange to them in return. ( p.170)
HERZOG towards the end of his story exclaims (as mentioned already above):
Hineni … (p.310)
an iconic expression that I immediately recognised from Leonard Cohen’s equally iconic song You want it darker which has the lines:
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my Lord
Cohen who as a secular Jew produced some of the best song lyrics of the modern age must have succumbed to ‘my Lord’ when standing at death’s door at old age. The comparatively young HERZOG (a college professor in his 40s) in contrast unburdens his misery and welcomes a beautiful new day - with hineni, a powerful Hebrew word, they say.
HERZOG’s Jewish history somehow explains the emotional turmoils, somewhere between love and hate – a lesson for me at least, in beginning to understand the Jewish question from a perspective I had never known before – say, as opposed to that of a Noam Chomsky and his Jewish background.
Now let us re-visit and re-analyse HERZOG with the backstory provided by Zachary Leader (and a few others). It came as a bit of a shock to me to learn that HERZOG skims close to the surface of a reality that strongly resembles Bellow’s personal life. Viewed from this perspective, is the novel some kind of literary revenge porn (porn defined here as misogynistic violence and not explicit sex – nothing wrong with the latter)? The who is who in HERZOG has been detailed in various literary tomes, so let us just concentrate on the main ones:
Moses Herzog = Saul Bellow
Madeleine/Maddy = Sasha/Sondra (Bellow’s second wife)
Valentine Gersbach = Jack Ludwig
June = Adam (Bellow’s son by Sasha)
As the main thrust is to show up Jack/Valentine as the bad guy who shacks up with his wife who is by turns a mad bitch and lovely, let us examine the real story that culminates in Bellow writing a letter to Jack Ludwig that in itself has become a literary event (which I reproduce in full, as I could not believe what I was reading):
Dear Jack;
I have tried very hard to avoid writing this letter, but I suppose there’s nothing else to do now. Your phenomenal reply of February 4th forces me to tell you a few of the things I feel about your relations to the magazine and me, personally.
[…] I don’t think you are a fit editor of the magazine. You have, in some departments, good judgment. I trusted your taste and thought you might be reliable as an editor, but you are too woolly, self-absorbed, rambling, ill-organized, slovenly, heedless and insensitive to get on with. And you must be in a grotesque mess, to have lost your sense of reality to the last shred. I think you never had much to start with, and your letter reveals that that’s gone, too.
In fact it’s a fantastic document and I’m thinking of framing it for my museum. You thought I’d be at the boat to greet Keith? Which boat? I’ve heard of no boat. You took Sondra’s word for it that I was in Tivoli? Well, for several days with Adam I was there. But I was in New York a good deal of the time, and so were you, before Sondra arrived. And besides, why take Sondra’s word for it? She and I exchanged no personal information. How would she know where I was? Did I write her that I would be at Tivoli? Without consulting me, you phoned John Goetz in Mpls to find out whether I was giving you an accurate account of the legal situation last Spring, but without a second thought you simply accept what Sondra tells you of my whereabouts. There seems to me to be a small imbalance here. Especially since we’re not only colleagues buy “friends,” and haven’t seen each other in nearly a year. Pretty odd, isn’t it. And if you had phone (and I believe you’d have had the strength to resist my invitation to Tivoli) wouldn’t I have come to New York to see you? In all this there is some ugliness, something, I don’t want explained, though I’m sure that as a disciple of the Hasidim and believer in Dialogue and an enthusiast for Heschel, and a man of honor from whom I have heard and endured many lectures and reproaches and whose correction I have accepted you have a clear and truthful explanation. All the worse for you if you are not hypocritical. The amount of internal garbage you haven’t taken cognizance of must be, since you never do things on a small scale, colossal.
It wouldn’t do much good to see matters clearly. With the sharpest eye in the world I’d see nothing but the stinking fog of falsehood. And I haven’t got the sharpest eyes in the world; I’m not a superman but superidiot. Only a giant among idiots would marry Sondra and offer you friendship. God knows I am not stainless faultless Bellow. I leave infinities on every side to be desired. But love her as my wife? Love you as my friend? I might as well have gone to work for Ringling Brothers and been shot out of the cannon twice a day. At least they would have let me wear a costume.
Coventry, pal, is not the place.
So, this shyster Jack Ludwig, Bellow’s erstwhile friend and fellow editor of the Noble Savage literary magazine founded by Bellow and fiends, does the dirty on him. A photograph of Bellow and Ludwig in 1957 at Tivoli shows Bellow to be the bigger and weirder looking guy while Ludwig looks like your average, well-fed American, and nothing like the monstrous, sculking Valentine Gersbach with a wooden leg in HERZOG. Bellow certainly succeeds in serving his revenge cold, eliciting from Ludwig a strange sort of reply in the form of his own roman-à-clef called Above Ground which deals mainly with his own life-story and in which Bellow aka Louie only appears as a minor character. Sasha/Maddie/Marva, however, comes off worse than the real or Bellow’s Maddie, namely as a nymphomaniac that has a lot of problems. Ludwig cites at length from Sasha’s ‘soft-porn’ (according to Leader) letters to Bellow which are indeed rather bizarre to read (although I could not detect any ‘soft porn’ as alleged by Leader – presumably we have a different definition of the term). Sasha/Marva is portrayed by Ludwig as frigid when with Bellow but very active with him – maybe this is revenge served hot. That Sasha/Sondra/Maggie/Marva is portrayed in turns as rather psychotic by both Bellow and Ludwig may be due to both having to explain to themselves their own failures – the latter also having to explain his affair to his wife. If one is to believe the real-life story of Sondra being sexually abused by her father from the age of 12 or so, one has to accept Sondra/Sasha as a conflicted person that deserves empathy rather than the scorn heaped upon her by both Bellow and Ludwig. Leader scored a coup by interviewing Sasha/Sondra and having access to her unpublished memoir, although the only insight offered by Sasha was that she thought the marriage to Bellow was only very short and that afterwards she was married happily for another 40 years – which seems to belie the whole sordid affairs fictionalised by both Bellow and Ludwig. Rereading HERZOG with all this information at hand one can only wonder what went on in Bellow’s mind, shifting the evidence of his own question – was I a man or a jerk? – emphatically to the ‘jerk’ side. That HERZOG can be considered a great literary achievement, reading the novel not as a roman-à-clef, but as some literary critics suggest, as a picaresque novel – not that Moses Herzog comes off as particularly picaresque – might have some justification in that the novel is unlike anything I have ever read (and allowing me to be the great arbiter as to what amounts to great literature and what not).
Having ‘read’ Bellow’s other works only via summaries in Leader – some quite extensive – and reading in Leader how many of his novels (and some minor plays) came about, and what sort of influences shaped his ideas, one cannot be but impressed with the wide range of ‘influencers’ - notwithstanding the Great Books discussed earlier. Two of the more intriguing ones, at least for me, are Reich and Steiner. Having already alluded to Reich’s influence on me via his The Mass Psychology of Fascism, I also noted how I viewed Reich’s American phase, especially his orgone theories/therapies as a silly aberration, and yet the tragic ending of Reich in an American prison. While the 60s youth revolutions are often linked to the idea that ‘free love’ is somehow a realisation of Reichian theories on sexual repression, it is very odd that Bellow was totally opposed to the 60s liberation, denouncing it as some sort of psychotic ‘free sex’ prostitution, while he himself engaged in a staggering number of sexual affairs thinly disguised as affairs of the heart. By all accounts Bellow was not a stud in the ‘sack’ but somehow he had a magnetic attraction to archetypal femmes fatales (yes, also of the French version) who devoured him in short order. When marrying Sondra/Sasha in the Nevada Pyramids, he has a one-night stand with the landlady while every morning doing his Reichian primal howls. Was Bellow a sex addict deflecting the addiction via Reichian theory/therapy? His best childhood friend Isaac Rosenfeld who with his ‘sexy’ wife lived it up the Reichean way at Greenwich Village in New York, sitting in his orgone box, practicing free love and sex from a purely philosophical perspective, could not maintain the schedule and … died of lonely sloth... according to Irvine Howe. Hence in my estimation, Bellow (and his friends) who subscribed to Reich were sadly mistaken in their interpretation of Reich – at least the Reich of the seminal The Mass Psychology of Fascism which – published in 1933 – describes in insightful terms of what was to become the greatest horror story of all time: Nazi Germany and a warning how history can be repeated again and again if the root cause of fascism, namely sexual repression, is not dealt with. Fast forwarding to 2025 we see history repeating Bellow’s failure. Leader also notes another link to Reich, namely Bellow’s Henderson the rainmakerwherein the African teachings are modelled on Reich. Leader comments on Reich himself as overreaching his enthusiasm with the orgone theories and practices, but not mentioning, as I make the point above, Reich’s major achievements. Leader ultimately likes Henderson, as most of Bellow’s oeuvre, because of his sense of humour in all matters spiritual, quoting Bellow:
Henderson is not Reichian confusion, but comedy … to put humor between myself and final claims … (p.559)
This sounds quite cute and one is almost convinced of Bellow’s benign nature, were it not for his often viscous, humorless assaults on friends and family.
Next Rudolf Steiner: as a young man my first lover introduced me to a Steiner group in Munich where one was supposed to learn how to generate heat in one’s extremities and direct it to other parts of the body, should there be a need to assist healing. There also seemed to be a Reichian undercurrent of generating sexual heat which seemed more interesting to me. Having thus lost interest in Steiner, I rediscovered the Waldorf education system many years later in New Zealand, where I trained as a teacher, occasionally applying for jobs at Waldorf schools (but never getting one even though I read up on the relevant literature). The intense spirituality in forming a circle holding hands as a morning exercise at a Waldorf school where I did some practice teaching appeared to me a false ritual, reminding me of my catholic upbringing which I also rejected later on account of its hypocrisies. Our grandchildren in Auckland attended a Steiner school for a few years, so I followed their progress with some interest, visiting the school on several occasions. There seemed to be quite a heavy Christian orientation which was to my disliking. Anyway, Bellow’s fascination with Steiner, especially via the British Steiner disciple Owen Barfield, might reflect his own intellectual life, seeking out all manner of sources, from the esoteric to the downright weird spiritualist practices but always with a critical eye, mixing it up with the science of the day. Steiner having been deeply influenced by Goethe and Nietzsche would also suit Bellow’s orientations. Reich’s Jewish background and Steiner’s sympathies with the Jewish people, especially as an early anti-fascist like Reich, would also resonate with Bellow. While Bellow neither fully embraced Steiner or Reich, he would in his old age embrace the spiritualist version of God bless America, something much closer to Steiner than to Reich.
Now something about Zachary Leader’s monumental biography of Bellow in two volumes (The Life of Saul Bellow – to fame and fortune 1915 – 1964 and love and strife 1965 – 2005). Apart from the biography itself, this is a grand lesson in 20th century literature and politics, recognising bits (names) and pieces (events) here and there, congratulating myself that I am not totally ignorant and ultimately, perhaps, taking it from Noam Chomsky that Saul Bellow, in terms of his later politics at least, is a forerunner of the American right, culminating, as I write now, in the bizarre happenings called MAGA. How Bellow as an early Trotskyist transitions to the right is an interesting story in itself, rising to become an intellectual commissar, as Chomsky puts it. Leader in discussing in some detail the academics behind Bellow, especially in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, opened up to me a hitherto unknown – but sometimes suspected – academic swamp (to use the term in reverse to Trump’s) that Chomsky decries (but without too many details). As an academic linguist myself who has always skirted around the academic establishment without much success (reaching only the heights of an Assistant Professor) I have experienced more than my share of conceited academics who belittle their underlings with such sadistic scorn as to ruin many a life. Having attended various international conferences where celebrated academic grandees promote their protegees and hand down academic death sentences (i.e. all submissions to academic journals will be rejected) to those who dare to criticize even in the mildest of terms their dogmas (established paradigms), I also have an inkling of academic departments, from the dean down to the PhD students, where the mighty chairs operate like academic gods, dispensing witty remarks laced with acid, back-stabbing and self-aggrandisement. I once saw a fellow graduate philosophy student at Auckland University reduced to nothing by a lecturer who wielded the red pen on this student’s term essay with a single line: ‘lacking in understanding’. When we questioned the lecturer he merely said that this was the way he was treated at Oxford and that he got over it, and see where it got him (one could at least congratulate him for this sense of irony in not having succeeded to get a post at Oxford but only at the colonial outpost of Auckland). So, when Bellow was appointed to the prestigious Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago – almost like an Oxford of the USA – he already had fashioned a career in academia, teaching literature classes at various establishments like Bard, Minnesota, NYU and Northwestern. His initial position at the English Department of English at the University of Chicago was not renewed, so he tried again with the Committee to which he had applied as early as 1943 but was rejected. This time it worked, mainly due to the influence of Edward Shils who admired Bellow’s writing. Shils being a grandee at the Committee could not be overruled. After some eight years teaching literature courses – the Great Books – Bellow was appointed chair of the Committee in 1970. Such a position was highly influential in American academia, affording the holder an almost unlimited scope for ‘have paper will travel’ with secretarial support (after all his last wife was his erstwhile secretary), hobnobbing in the Ivy League circuit, all the while with sufficient time on his hands to do his novel writing (agreed that Bellow was a very disciplined writer, rising early and devoting the morning to lunchtime exclusively to writing with absolutely no disturbances allowed). Obviously the generous income received from this chairmanship merely augmented his already considerable income from royalties. Leader calls this scenario ‘celebrity in residence’. Also, according to Leader, Bellow got the job because the university faced the unprecedented youth and student revolutions sweeping the Western World (in 1970, I was enrolled at the LMU as a psychology student, spending most of my time in the APO and anarchist factions railing against the Vietnam War and French nuclear testing in French Polynesia). Bellow was already well known to have turned the corner from his Trotskyist times in Chicago, to have become a conservative academic and writer (as far as his politics are concerned) who disapproved of the ‘filthy’ left-wing student mobs who invaded university campuses across the US, including Chicago. Given his public persona as a free-wheeling intellectual who appealed to middle- and upper-class female students and fellow academics, especially via his sexual antics, Bellow was an ideal figurehead that on occasion even confused left-wing academia. A photograph in Leader’s biography of a partial gathering of the faculty of the Committee in 1987 shows a bunch of mainly male academics decked out in bow ties (including Bellow) and ties, a cartoon-like image of the proverbial academic in a shabby suit (Bellow of course was a sharp dresser whose Italian suits were supplied by his millionaire brother Maury). When I did my PhD at the University of Auckland around 1985 (as a mature student) the faculty was a mixture of bow tie wearing professors and liberal staff that eschewed shabby suits (the obligatory, solitary Marxist wore his jeans and his hair long). The public image of a university being a liberal institution (cf. liberal arts) is of course a false one, its main function being to ‘manufacture consent’ (à la Chomsky and Herman). To maintain any credibility a university must allow a maximum 10% staff ratio of so-called dissident academics (like Chomsky) who serve as liberal evidence (for Ivy League universities this ratio probably reduces to 1%). In terms of the composition of Bellow’s Committee, as described by Leader (pp. 127-36), the liberal 1% was embodied by Hannah Arendt (whom Bellow did not like due to her concept of the ‘banality of evil’ and the fact that she supported the student protests) and the worst of the 99%, in my estimation, was embodied by Allen Bloom who was a graduate of the Committee and joined the staff in 1976 (Bellow and Shils were influential in appointing him, although Bellow was no longer the chair). Bellow and Bloom co-taught many literature classes and became best of friends. Bloom had left Cornell in 1969 after black student protests. Bloom attributed the uprising at Cornell to affirmative action. Leader quotes Bloom as saying that ‘democratic society cannot accept any principle of achievement other than merit’ and then makes the following comment:
Of the need for a level playing field in determining merit, Bloom says little. This is similar to Bellow’s failure in the Jefferson Lectures to acknowledge, or adequately acknowledge, the role of discriminatory practices in the disintegration of the black slums. (p.363)
So, even a conservative biographer like Leader cannot help noticing the underlying racism in both Bloom and Bellow. Bloom benefitted from a huge grant from a neo-con oligarch by the name of John M. Olin whose fortune was distributed amongst neo-cons to influence government policies. Bloom’s sideline via the Committee was to run a student fellowship, Olin Junior Fellows, who turned out a significant number of graduates who later served under Reagan and Bush and Co. I am not going into the details of Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students except to point out the bizarre attack on Mick Jagger as some sort of symbol of nihilistic decadence that is embodied in pop and rock music. Ironically perhaps, the Rolling Stone journalist William Greider wrote of Bloom’s book:
Bloom's real agenda is much darker—to launch a nasty, reactionary attack on the values of young people and everyone else under forty. His multi-count indictment is a laundry list of cheap slanders made to sound vaguely authoritative, because, after all, Bloom is a teacher who supposedly hangs out with students. In fact, Bloom sounds bewildered by young people—and strangely out of touch with them.
Bellow’s lengthy preface to the book is mainly about Bellow and quite a bit about HERZOG but in the end it is an enthusiastic endorsement of Bloom’s reactionary position:
The heart of Professor Bloom's argument is that the university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. Liberal democracy in its generosity made this possible, but by consenting to play an active or "positive," a participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society's "problems." Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes and the university has become society's conceptual warehouse of often harmful influences. Any proposed reforms of liberal education which might bring the university into conflict with the whole of the U.S.A. are unthinkable. Increasingly, the people "inside" are identical in their appetites and motives with the people "outside" the university.
When Bellow immortalizes/fictionalizes Bloom in his Ravenstein novel, the most contentious point seems to be the suggestion that Bloom aka Ravenstein dies of AIDS. That Bloom was a closeted ‘gay’ academic is well attested, and as such adds another layer of bizarre circumstance, such as when Shils, fictionalised as Kogan, is also outed as gay. Outing such imponderable scandals inside the rarefied atmosphere of academe are considered a no-no in polite society, but Bellow must up the ante lest the story becomes tedious otherwise. Perversely perhaps, this is what makes Bellow an interesting writer – compensating for his own tedious conservatism. That Bloom’s homosexuality was somehow a hitherto undetected sign of his supposed liberal mind is like saying that the Nazis killed Rõhm as being too liberal, i.e. sexual orientation has nothing to do with anything but sex. In some ways Bellow also contradicts his own endorsement of Bloom who bizarrely complains about liberal academics as being ‘the people "inside" who are identical in their appetites and motives with the people "outside" the university’, i.e. isn’t sex an ‘appetite with people outside the university’? Bloom as Bellow, of course, do not make much sense, hence birds of the feather flock together. Still, Bellow, as opposed to Bloom, is clever enough to turn his warped view of reality into even more warped fiction which can be quite entertaining – and puzzling in its novelty – and so much so that a reader like myself is transported to a literary cuckoo land that defies easy comprehension.
Leader too seems confused at times about sex and Eros, keen to debunk Reich’s orgone theories, i.e. following on Bellow’s contradictory attitude to bad sex and good Eros. Reich never said that sex per se is all good: sex/orgasm is only good when freed from repression. Leader cites the fictional Vallis (Bellow) whose sex with his wife (Bellow’s Anita) is ‘it’s not a matter of seeing stars when you have an orgasm, but rather getting nothing but disappointment from the embrace, only bitterness and ashes in your mouth’. Seemingly in support of Bellow’s bad (repressed) sex example, Leader then at some stage also provides another supposedly anti-Reich quote by James Baldwin saying ‘the people I had been raised among had orgasms all the time, and still chopped each other with razors on Saturday nights’. Bellow, Bloom, Baldwin and Leader all get the wrong end of the stick, so to speak.
Just one more of the many problematic issues unearthed by Leader: in Volume One he devotes many pages to Bellow’s Russian ancestors who migrated to the Americas. The myths of the American melting pot are more legend than fact, especially when treated as a uniquely American phenomenon. Leader does reflect Bellow’s interpretation – Leader being American himself – as a unique story that sets up people like Bellow, born in the USA (Canada actually, but soon to be a state of the USA), of migrant parents. Migration being as old as humanity itself has always been problematic, good and bad. The hardships of the refugee migrants – even as colonisers – were always remembered as some sort of necessary sacrifice to enable the next generation a better life than they had. Many a bitter pill had to be swallowed. Endless permutations of migrations can lead to fairly bizarre outcomes, like in my case. My ancestors, German and Czech speaking farmers from the Sudetenland were expelled after WWII and arrived in Bavaria and were mainly placed in small Bavarian farm holdings as farm labourers (the male Bavarian farmers of military age were often dead, missing in action or came back as crippled POWs in the late 1940s). Hence many of these farms were run by women, e.g. the Bavarian farmer’s wife and the women refugees from the Sudetenland. By 1948 many of the POWs returned, Bavarian and Sudetendeutsche. My mother who had been married to a Czech farmer who served in the German Army was missing in action, presumed dead. The farm where my grandmother and mother had been placed, also had the Bavarian wife’s husband missing in action, and was declared dead eventually. My mother, after three years of not hearing anything from her husband, engaged with a returned POW, a Sudetendeutscher she had briefly known before the war. I was born in 1948. The Bavarian farms in those days were quite primitive in comparison to the farms my ancestors had in the Sudetenland. Now they had to work under the command of the Bavarians. They spoke different German dialects. They complained of the primitive conditions. The menfolk moved from the farms to find work in other industries, being part of the German Wirtschaftswunder helped along by the American Marshall Plan (as occasionally mentioned by Bellow). My mother died when I was three years old, and I was brought up by my grandmother who stayed on the farm. My father disappeared from the scene forever. I grew up on that farm with my grandmother, the farmer’s wife and her daughter. As a child born to immigrant refugees, as Bellow and Leader recount again and again, one does not have a historical outlook but sooner or later one notices the strange dichotomy of the situation. The locals call you names while you try your best to be a local. Your guardians (my grandmother, Bellow’s parents and extended family) stick to their clan of fellow refugees who now live dispersed, but not too far away for frequent visits to talk about the good old times and the bad times since. As a child one finds these events quite boring because they are isolating you from the local environment into which you want to be accepted at all costs. Bellow has a domineering father, but little Saul already knows how to escape. I am controlled by womenfolk who let me run loose on the farm. On Sundays we travel by bus to the village to attend church (catholic). Saul Bellow attends the basement cheder after school, a somewhat different idea to what I was exposed to in terms of religion. In rural Bavaria at the time everyone was catholic, and so were we. The primary village school (going by bus), although supposed to be secular, was also very catholic. My uncle (my mother’s brother) had become a foreman for a road working crew and became the ‘man’ about town, even owning a car. He was nominally catholic too but was dismissive of the Bavarian Catholics who were holier than holy in church but total hypocrites once outside, the males drinking beer at the pub next to the church, swearing and molesting everyone in sight. I learnt from my uncle – my father figure – early on to be circumspect when it comes to religion. Saul Bellow on the other hand was fully indoctrinated, or so I understand. Obviously I knew nothing about Judaism other than the occasional reference by the village priest – who also conducted the religious instruction at the primary school – that Jesus was crucified by the Romans, having been betrayed by the Jews, or some such crazy story. Only in later high school years did I get a grasp of things, one, officially leaving the Catholic Church (with the stipulation I cannot be buried in a cemetery that also has Catholics in it) and two, questioning my school why the Holocaust was not part of the history curriculum. We wrote to the Wiesenthal Foundation for information and were sent a package that included horrific photographs from the liberated concentration camps which we showed our history teacher. The director of the school, a friend of Heinrich Harrer (a card-carrying Nazi) from his time in India, and now often invited to give us uplifting speeches about mountaineering, threatened us with expulsion lest we desist from such activities. Bellow, by the time at Tuley high school was apparently much more advanced, in his reading at least, and in the early 1930s becoming aware of the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism in Germany. He was nevertheless much more interested in the development of Russian and international communism. By then Bellow was thoroughly Americanised, proud of American society that seemed to welcome all and sundry, regardless of race and religion, a state of affairs Bellow thinks was eroded in more modern times. Even his father had achieved a measure of wealth and dignity that goes with it. This assimilation process was also true of us refugees in Bavaria. I was more Bavarian than the Bavarians until I began to wear my hair long which occasioned another set of problems: becoming a Bavarian hippy was OK in the Big Apple (Munich) but not in my village. Bellow who made the real Big Apple and Chicago his home – most of his time – and travelled widely amongst the metropolitan cities of the world, never entertained to grow his hair long, and must have stood out perversely in his tuxedos and bow ties when walking down Broadway – not that the establishment in the Americas and Europe ever abandoned the Kleider machen Leute cliché, or worse waved to the adoring sycophants as Emperors without clothes. In any case, when Bellow first saw the cinema reels, in 1946, of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, his reaction is reported by Leader as being the same by Lionel Abel’ mother in his 1984 memoir:
She said, I don’t think the Jews can ever get over the disgrace of this … How would they ever get over it? By succeeding in emigrating to Palestine and setting up the state of Israel.
This is a deeply disturbing reaction. Leader also claims that Bellow shared the belief that ‘the founders of Israel restored the lost respect of the Jews by their manliness’. Having now lived in New Zealand for most of my life -as a permanent immigrant – one could advance a similarly crazy scenario: the indigenous Māori, brutally colonized by British settlers, can only regain their manhood by establishing a Māori nation and drive out the British settlers (not that such ideas are unheard of). The idea that any victim is to blame for his or her own defeat might be one of extreme social Darwinism or Might is Right ideologies, but has no place in any rational evaluation of brutal injustices done. Maybe Bellow learnt his from his often overly aggressive father or from his brothers who took no prisoners in their business dealings, or from the Chicago Mafia mobsters and politicians. And where did the German Nazis get their ideas from? From their ancestors? I always found Alfred Andersch’s Der Vater eines Mörders problematic inasmuch Himmler’s father was of course one of those idiotic headmasters (Direktor) of a Munich Gymnasium (high school) who may have instilled in his son a racist ideology but in the end cannot be made responsible for his son’s insane criminality. That Bellow rose above his father’s violent rages must be viewed as a normal response. I do agree with Bellow occasionally in his denouncement of modern confusions of ‘explanation’ with ‘excuse’, e.g. giving sentencing credit to the sexual abuser because he was abused himself as a child. I do have an acute sense of this when contemplating German/European history, including the strained historische Aufarbeitung in Germany that is increasingly questioned by the neo-Nazi AfD. In a review of Heimat by Nora Krug, I make the point that few Germans today have any clues what the Holocaust was, and yet pretend official guilt that allows the German state to support Israel in her genocidal acts against the Palestinians. While Bellow often rails against the general tendencies of a world gone mad, e.g.
In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest … I mean the leaders (p.51)
he never applies this to Israel (and the USA). Bellow the fully integrated immigrant child-writer might feel that it is rude to bite the hand that feeds you so well, that has helped your parents to escape a life of misery, that provides freedom lacking elsewhere in the world, that grips you with a sentimentality so severe, it is impossible to escape its hold on you. That too is a myth. My brother’s wife is American and has lived in Germany quite happily for the last 50 years or so. To invoke the impossibility of such a scenario the detractors do at least invoke the saying of ‘you can take her out of America, but you cannot take the American out of her’ or some such nonsense. Bellow obviously subscribes to this ultra-nationalist idea – as do some people in other parts of the world – that he is destined to live in Godzone, the greatest country in the world, and what with Chicago being the capitalist essence of the USA. Me, as an immigrant child, I have evolved to be a citizen of the world, never to be one of one country (or of one city). Leader’s lengthy dive into Saul Bellow’s upbringing as a Jewish migrant kid (born in Canada) does explain a lot but it’s not an excuse for Bellow’s late life as an insufferable old fogey. Leader, it must be admitted, does not shy from the odd criticism of his beloved subject, but in the end succumbs to his judgement that Bellow has asked about himself: man or jerk? MAN it is, and Bellow would agree- but not me.
In my estimation, Leader’s meticulously researched biography could be called a literary event on its own, although not all critics agree. Ruth Franklin in Harper’s Magazine reviews the first volume of Leader’s biography with the telling headline ‘Dissolution by detail’:
For all the detail, Leader’s Bellow is oddly bloodless. As a youth, he dabbled briefly in Communism, without any lasting effects. (In accordance with Leader’s no-fact-left-behind policy, we learn that the uncle of Bellow’s childhood friend David Peltz ran a political group at his mission house, the Peniel Community Center; that peniel is Hebrew for “face of God”; that Peltz’s uncle converted to Christianity; that he served coffee, cocoa, and doughnuts at the meetings; and that after an appeal to accept Jesus, speeches were made by Stalinists, Trotskyists, and supporters of Norman Thomas. Surely a place described so carefully must have played an important role in Bellow’s life? Well, no. It’s not clear that he ever attended a meeting there.)
https://harpers.org/archive/2015/05/dissolution-by-details/
Maybe a bit penibel but one might agree with her that too much detail can obscure the big picture. In retrospect, I too would not have cared to know so much about his life, however luridly fascinating it is on occasion. HERZOG and the short stories are quite enough for me. On the strength of these works alone, did Bellow deserve to win the Nobel Prize in Literature? Probably not, but then again it is not a question of deserving, but a question of ‘winning’ recognition in a pool of small fish whom the literary academic establishment had set loose. Bellow with all the right connections could not fail to be seen flashing his goldfish colours.
