Remembering Saul Bellow, the Teacher
By Robert Howse
In the novels of Saul Bellow, who died two weeks ago, lawyers take a real beating; it was his lawyer that announced to the world Bellow’s passing, and I’m inclined to believe that was no accident—conveying bad news, he probably thought, was among our few professional strengths.
It’s hard to write about my own experience of Saul Bellow—it happened in my early twenties, when I came to the University of Chicago for graduate studies in political theory. At the time, I was fascinated by Allan Bloom, the student of Leo Strauss who eventually went on to pen the best-selling Closing of the American Mind. At the University of Toronto, I had been seduced by Bloom’s readings of Plato, Rousseau and Alexandre Kojeve. There was a slight problem, though: I was, mostly, a left liberal (with some communitarian leanings back then, making me what they call in Canada a “red Tory”); my politics in every sense were opposed to Bloom’s and especially to those of his circle of disciples, almost all budding neocons. Self-destructively, but hoping to learn more from Bloom about the history of ideas, I followed him from Toronto to Chicago. While Bloom wasn’t supportive of my idea to study at the Committee on Social Thought, his own lair at Chicago, I did manage to get admitted to the Political Science department.
Bellow was co-teaching with Bloom seminars on literature—Stendhal, Flaubert, Celine, Machiavelli’s drama, Moliere, Dostoevsky, and so forth. It amazes me now just how pushy a fellow I was in those days, but I found a way to barge into those classes despite Allan Bloom at first denying me entry. (I imagine he liked to keep access to Bellow as a perk for his favorite students, and I sure wasn’t in that ballpark.)
Was it perhaps Bellow himself who saved me from expulsion, causing Bloom to relent? I’ll never know.
What I do know is that Bellow largely salvaged my mental health.
I was miserable at Chicago; these were the early Reagan years, where the mood there was one of conservative triumphalism. While the neocons are now claiming him as a fellow traveler — albeit not a full adherent, see John Podhoretz’s op-ed in the London Times a few days ago — Bellow was truly beyond left and right. He was as ruthless in dissecting conservative prejudices as leftist ones.
And he could and did stand up to Allan Bloom’s prejudices: the repartee in those seminars created an oasis of freedom of thought in a desert of intellectual Reaganism. (It wasn’t that there weren’t theoretical alternatives to the Right at Chicago—Raymond Geuss’s classes on Hegel and Leszek Kolokowski’s on Pascal supplied that; but there wasn’t the same liberating effect as when Bellow took on the high priest of the American philosophical Right.)
Bellow had a magical gift for diving into the human depths and resurfacing with a smile on his face; he saw the comic side of even the most weighty matters. It isn’t too much of an exaggeration to say that he taught me how to laugh again. He knew all the jokes in Dostoevsky. He cautioned the students against gratuitous ponderousness in their engagement with literature: “That’s practicing psychoanalysis without a license!” I remember him once quipping, when one of my classmates attempted to see through a character without seeing the character.
His differences with Bloom and Bloom’s circle are well expressed in his roman a clef about Bloom, Ravelstein: Bellow suggests that, as a writer, you have to give people “due process.” You can’t just dismiss them as unworthy if they don’t fit into your own circle; nor can you overlook the vices and failings of those who are your friends and flatterers.
Saul Bellow was like Bloom a critic of American culture and morals, but an admiring and constructive one: he liked the fact that in America ordinary men and women could pick up a work of Shakespeare or Tolstoy and make of it what they wanted, without the baggage of literary criticism or academic interpretation. He just regretted that it happened not so often these days. He would have none of the Bloom elitism that deep spiritual experiences were the preserve of a (pre-) chosen few, requiring a very special kind of education; this was, to Bellow, European or Europhile snobbism—in one of his novels, he refers to the “canned sauerkraut of Weimar intellectuals.”
Bellow’s disagreements with Bloom gained all the more credibility and weight from the obvious fact (again so evident in Ravelstein) that, far from being one of the thousands of Bloom’s enemies, he respected Bloom and loved him as a friend. Bellow’s Olympian status as Novel laureate and confirmed grand man of American letters would have made a snobbish, anti-egalitarian pose almost acceptable in Bellow—but he turned out to be Olympian enough to be above that. Podhoretz suggests that Bellow turned from left to right; but, in fact, his politics were as complex as Goethe’s—like Goethe he saw matters from very many angles. His politics are reminiscent of the multifaceted reactions of Goethe to the French Revolution and its consequences. Just as one can use the elderly Goethe’s words to condemn the French Revolution, one can find sound bites of Bellow’s that seem to confirm his “conservatism.” But this is a very impoverished and one-sided picture of a man, who—to translate loosely an expression of Tocqueville’s—was not always unpartisan but saw into the human condition far beyond the partisans.
I never tried to make a personal connection with Bellow; I was a silent observer in his classes, basking in the liberating, therapeutic atmosphere. Many years later, I happened to have a chance encounter with him. I apologized for being such a passive pupil. With characteristic grace, he absolved me, saying that there are worse things than being a quiet student. I even might have mentioned having dropped out of Chicago; he didn’t seem to take that as something shameful. After all, he himself had done okay after leaving Hyde Park degreeless.
Posted by Administrators on April 18, 2005 at 11:37 AM
Comments
Sorry, I forgot to add that this was an amazing post. I love Bloom and love to hear anecdotes about him. Especially interesting memories of Bellow. You have honoured him well.
Posted by: Jonathan | Apr 19, 2005 2:35:28 AM
“a left liberal (with some communitarian leanings back then, making me what they call in Canada a “red Tory”)”
I don’t mean to get picky on the definitions, but I believe a left-liberal is closer to a New Democrat. Red Tory’s are right leaning liberals.
Posted by: Jonathan | Apr 19, 2005 2:28:37 AM