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PERSONAL ESSAYS
posted 4/12/2005
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I got up in the middle of the night, walked down the hall in the dark to my office and nudged the Mac alive. Google News told me Saul Bellow was dead. I wanted to cry or whoop, but instead I bumped the box asleep, went back to bed, touched my wife's thigh and thought about what it means to love and to mourn and how it all gets mixed up with self-pity. Losing a girl, losing a favorite writer — it feels a lot the same, another option foreclosed.
I started young with Bellow; his work matters to me in ways I'm still not sure I completely understand. He put the whammy on me when I was improbably young — I read Humboldt's Gift in high school. Was I the only cracker kid in Shreveport, Louisiana, who identified with the urbane anxieties of Charlie Citrine, or with Moses Herzog's flirtation with suicide? Nothing stuck from my first reading of Augie March except that second sentence, the one that followed the famous opening salvo about being an American blah blah: "But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles."
You is what you is, in other words, and not what you aspire to be. I was a Bellow man before I went off to a land grant university to try to play basketball, and I remain one to this day. I've absorbed his cadences, his talent for indirection and, I hope, something of his fierce unwillingness to mitigate and soothe, for the world is what it is no matter what we call it.
Yet when I had the chance to meet Saul Bellow, I didn't care to meet him.
I wasn't quite living in Chicago in those days, but my then-wife was. She was a graduate student in Committee on Social Thought, the University of Chicago program dominated by Bellow and his friend and intellectual helpmeet Allan Bloom, the classics professor who'd become an academic superstar after the publication of his jeremiad against pop culture and university education, The Closing of the American Mind in 1987.
My wife and I were young and pretty; a handsome blond couple with interesting credentials. We'd landed in Little Rock, Arkansas, where I was editing an alternative newspaper, when she finally got accepted.
We had no money in reserve, just enough to send her. I was to follow when I found appropriate work. I drove her there, with cartons of books and clothes, and moved her into married students' housing. Then I turned around and
Bellow worked from life, but I held him beyond sex.
drove back — straight through a dozen hours — and loaded up again. Then I drove back to Chicago and we spent most of a weekend kicking around the neighborhood, poking our heads into the bookstores, sitting cross-legged on the bed and eating take-out food.
We undressed and tried to make love, but she began to cry. She was apologetic; she claimed it felt incestuous. She knew me too well. She couldn't explain. So I left her shivering in the middle of the night, fuming back to Little Rock.
But I came back the next weekend, and the next and the next; we talked on the phone almost every day. She told me about the faculty, about the great men sweeping down the street — about Bloom and his coterie of boys, about Bellow and his leering — she thought it cute that such an old and distinguished dean would exhibit such naked fascination with the girls like her who typed and answered phones and sat in lecture halls.
I never thought of sex as Bellow's subject. There was sex in his books, of course: Augie March slept with his neighbor Mimi Villars, whose body was a "recruiting place," and Arthur Sammler's niece Angela has "fucked-out eyes" and "white vital heat in the flesh of her throat" and there's that scene in Humboldt's Gift where the marvelous Renata puts Charlie Citrine's socked foot between her legs while lunching at the Plaza. She pleasures herself, then runs off to catch an afternoon showing of Deep Throat. But sex belonged to Updike, to Philip Roth, to Marguerite Duras and Anais Nin. Bellow worked from life, but I held him beyond sex. He was great on death, beautiful on death, but sex was not his metier.
My wife herself was a bit beyond sex then, I thought, as she explained her happiness to me — the warmshock tremor she felt in those great halls of learning, the pheromone rush. She sounded happy, and I tried to be happy for her. At the end of the semester we rented a too-expensive apartment, and I brought up most of my clothes, some of my books and her cat. I had an interview lined up with the Sun-Times. There was reason to hope things would work out.
But she wouldn't have me up there playing faculty spouse or whatever it was I intended to do. Her work was too important. She had papers to type for great men. Her nerves could not take the smothering boyfriend kind. I would feel odd at the parties, she said; I would not enjoy them and she could not take another distraction.
I suppose she meant for me to find the letters and the condoms. It was easier than telling me. I picked up her phone and pressed redial and her lover answered. I had a calm talk with him. His name was Jefferson and he was just a kid, a fellow student, and it was no big deal. Nothing I wouldn't have forgiven.
But we had a ugly scene. I made an ass of myself, spent the night in a motel, and didn't go back.
As I saw it, Bellow and his ilk had stolen my love from me. They'd scrubbed her mind, turned her into their slave. I heard a rumor that the "members of the committee," as the grad students referred to themselves, disapproved of outside relationships. I'd met some of them, at parties, at bars. I didn't like them, and I'm sure they dismissed me: the starter husband, the boy back home. How much I imagined and how much I actually heard whispered I can't reliably answer, but I pictured them like the radicalized Yippies who joined the Weather Underground, piled naked together in groaning beds, screwing their way toward some high-minded ideal.
My wife and I put an end to things, but I carried on with Bellow, reading every word he wrote and nearly every word written about him. My attitude toward him had changed. As the biographies came out, I nodded my assent. He was a monster, a greedy man, a cribbed and narrow villain, a collector of toadies, a nasty piece of work. He might have been a crank and in some respects a fool and maybe even a bit of a shame-slinging prude — the kind of overcompensating
I learned about Bellow. He made me tougher and more callous.
cocksman who insists he can't imagine what sort of things two men might do in bed, or what service a male prostitute might provide that would be worth $500 to a wealthy, priapic john.
This sort of naive sexual astonishment was one of the themes of Ravelstein, Bellow's final novel. The title character was transparently based on his University of Chicago pal Bloom. Bellow also appears in the book, in the guise of the writer Chick, Ravelstein's confidante and intellectual fellow traveler. In the novel, Ravelstein, dying of AIDS — "destroyed by his reckless sex habits," in Chick's words — specifically charges his friend with the task of writing a memoir of their friendship.
When Ravelstein talks about “relieving himself” — he’s too sick to find a partner — with a handjob, the very idea makes Chick “flinch.” Is it the idea of Ravelstein’s virus-laden come, or just the idea of whacking off that repulses Chick? Was Augie March clear of the onanistic impulse?
When Ravelstein was published in 2000, eight years after Bloom's death, many of Bloom's culturally conservative followers, many of whom were unaware of their hero's sexual orientation, decried Bellow as a Judas. What the critics had always said, and what I discovered for myself, was that Bellow was essentially an autobiographer. He used his friends, pressing them like flowers in the pages of his books. He kidnapped them for his own purposes. Like Philip Roth, Bellow's former student (old Saul snaked away Roth's girlfriend), Bellow applied aliases as spray-on libel blocker; if you're in the club, it's not difficult to see who is supposed to be whom.
But even as Bloom's partisans railed against Bellow's book as a betrayal, the truth was that Ravelstein rehabilitated Bloom as a member of the species. From the stuff friends make available to friends — offered confidences, self-serving insights, unguarded moments — Bellow constructs a plausible and generous version of a man recognizable as Allan Bloom.
However much Bellow may have made up, there’s nothing at all untrue about the book.
It makes clear there was a unique connection between the men, that Bellow not only respected Bloom but loved him. Ravelstein is an eloquent mash note, and it is evidence that even Allan Bloom was lovable. It is exactly the kind of kaddish the atheist Bloom would have wanted, a clear-eyed accounting that doesn't discount the mysteries of the human soul.
I learned from Bellow. For a time, he probably made me tougher and more callous. I fucked pretty freely for a couple of years; I felt I had license. For the first time in my life, I felt okay about having a couple of lovers at a time. That lasted for a while. I went out west and screwed in Phoenix and in Hollywood, and I wrote stories about my ex-wife; I changed her name and told them in my own self-flattering way, but they were as true as anything I've ever written. Years after she fled, I snatched her back and put her in my stories. I used her, like I'm using Bellow's corpse now.
Bellow and his sort taught me that. And I'm grateful for the lesson. If anything, I wish I could be more ruthless.
An artist owes us art, if that, and nothing more. Yet enough people got close enough to Bellow over the years to expose "his secrets," to shove him into a reluctant celebrity. He was a famous writer but his fame, in large part, proceeded from his reputation as an alleged masher and
What Bellow found was often odd and misshapen, suspicious of love, yet utterly human.
racist who famously denigrated the Zulus and wrote about barbarous black pickpockets — he so infuriated a black U of C undergraduate named Brent Staples that for a time Staples shadowed Bellow, looking for an opportunity to confront the old writer, "to trophy his fear," as Staples, now a editorial writer for The New York Times, put it in his book, Parallel Time.
Maybe to be famous is simply to make enemies of those you've never met. Bellow had a gift for turning away admirers with reflexive, unconscious gestures. He didn't need our approbation, he didn't seek our friendship.
Whether he was a bigot is another question, one that Bellow himself may have found unanswerable, one that every thinking person determined to be intellectually honest might find not be able to answer. Such self-directed interrogations lie at the heart of Bellow's work, and his unflinching willingness to report the results of his research is generous in the extreme. You dig deep into the depths, you pull up ugly stuff.
What Bellow found was often odd and misshapen, venomous, suspicious of love, yet utterly human, eternally fragile. Maybe in his heart he did disdain his readers; maybe that is none of our business. Our business may be to read what he has written and to leave the final call — if there is one — to another power.
In the end, I want to say I loved Bellow, or that I still love him if there's any of him left to love. Like I still love that girl I knew a long time ago, who doesn't exist anymore either.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Philip Martin is the author of The Artificial Southerner and The Shortstop's Son.
