Though he would have denied it and said only, “The parables are at the heart of what I am.”
Of course, there is this double, triple, or multidimensional ply in the great hawsers that attach you to life. That’s why you can read Dostoyevsky without being particularly fazed by the anti-Semitism, because you know there’s something at a deeper level, there’s much more power at work, though many of his opinions may be trashy.
What did you make of your university education as a whole? By then you were becoming critical.
At Chicago we were educated by Hutchins, really, or by the spirit of Hutchins in which the place was saturated. You were there for four years, or for less if you were good at passing examinations. You followed at your own pace. But if you met all the requirements, you would graduate knowing everything there was to know about the physical sciences, the biological sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. Everything. You would then be fit to stand with anybody on an equal footing and hold your own. Do more than hold your own. There was a kind of crazy, cockeyed arrogance in all this, which really appealed to young Jews from the West Side. But when I went over to Northwestern, I met just a lot of agreeable, old-fashioned WASP English professors who were eccentric, limited. They made no claims, no universal claims.
What governed the choice? Why did you go to Northwestern?
I was tired of marching with three or four hundred other students to vast lecture halls, where four days a week nobody in particular was talking to you. And on the fifth day you had a quiz section, where you actually got to see your quiz instructor for an hour and you would go over the lectures with your master tutors. And they were masters. Very good people gave those general courses. But you never got to know anybody, and nobody ever knew you. I got tired of this anonymity. I wanted a chance to distinguish myself. You took a comprehensive examination, and even if you got a good mark, you were still answering multiple-choice questions, you weren’t being asked to write essays. I was in shallow waters here. So I shifted over to the other place. I suppose I wanted attention.
And got it, no doubt. Had the writing begun then?
Yes, I was already writing.
When did that fundamental idea of all writers, that this is what you are going to do with yourself, write, first strike you? In what form did it come?
It came early in my high school years, when I began to realize that I thought of myself all along as a writer. God knows there were plenty like me, so we formed a society of people with literary ambitions.
Did you think of these early texts as literary, or did you think of them as vehicles for ideas?
There were wonderful magazines available in those days. You could give yourself quite a case of ambition poisoning.
What magazines were you reading back then?
The American Mercury, first of all, and then the New Republic, The Nation, the Times Literary Supplement, the Manchester Guardian. You could go downtown to Monroe Street and buy all these things. There were these great shops where you could get all the English papers, the French too, if you knew how to read them. And German and Spanish.
Did you detect a visible difference between what they produced and what your local papers produced, for instance?
In Chicago, there were newspapers like the Evening Journal and even the Daily News, with people like Ben Hecht on the staff. Their book departments were flourishing, and there were reviewers on the staff like Burton Rascoe, quite good book reviewers. And Harriet Monroe was still around at Poetry magazine. You did get some sense that Chicago had briefly been a literary center. It was already coming apart when I was in high school. But there were still Edgar Lee Masters, who lived in Chicago, and Vachel Lindsay, who was in Springfield, and Carl Sandburg. And Sherwood Anderson had worked in Chicago. And Dreiser had been there and quite a few more. And the Hull House lady, Jane Addams, and Robert Morss Lovett and Thornton Wilder. Lots of people who had made the national literary scene. You felt this to be accessible in Chicago.
Did literature seem a career?
I never thought of it as that. I don’t seem to have been aiming at a career. I never thought how will I live by it? Or how does one make a living? It never entered my mind that this was a problem. Of course I was the despair of my father.
You finished university, went to New York, and basically put together the makings of a literary career.
I reviewed books and lived from hand to mouth and was very happy. I was on the Writers’ Project, the Federal Writers’ Project. My special assignment was to cover Illinois writers. I suppose that on the WPA I was able to justify the idea that I was a writer.
That excursus took us away from New York just before the war. You are leading the life of poverty and literary grandeur. The idea floating about is that this is an unlimited universe; possibility and total potentiality are everywhere. What did the war bring into your life in the way of ideas?
I misunderstood the war completely. I was so much under the influence of Marxism—I took it at first to be just another imperialist war.
Had you done your Partisan Review bit by then? Had you started?
No. The war began in ’39. I wasn’t published in Partisan until the forties. I stood by that junky old doctrine, the Leninist line: the main enemy is at home, it’s an imperialist war. I was still at that time officially sold on Marxism and revolution, but I sobered up when France fell.
You knew nothing of what was really going on in Germany then?
I began to have an idea when the Germans got to Warsaw in 1939 and began to attack Jews in the streets.
But the Kristallnacht had made no real impression?
Well, it had. I considered it an evil and dangerous thing. I began to have my first strong doubts when the Russians invaded Finland. But I was still in the grip of left-wing ideology. And the Trotskyists (because I was closer to the Trotskyists than any other Marxist group). The Trotsky line was that a workers’ state, no matter how degenerate, could not wage an imperialist war. He also argued that though it was degenerate, it would nevertheless advance the historical cause of socialism by bringing the forms of organization of a more advanced development into Finland; the land would be nationalized, cooperatives would be established, soviets or workers’ councils set up, and so on. Although Stalin had done his best to annul the Revolution, it still had been a revolution, and Trotsky told his followers they must not oppose this war, because it was a war against the whitest of white regimes, a white-guard, antirevolutionary regime. But when the Germans reached Warsaw, I began to feel differently about things. When Paris fell, of course it was devastating.
It didn’t affect most Americans.
But I wasn’t most Americans. I belonged to a special group of cranks that knew a little history and some Marxist doctrine and used to discuss matters on an “elevated plane.”
Would you say that historical ideas played a major part, that history played a role in your development at the time?
Something like the knowledge of history. We thought that the French Communist Party was in part to blame for the defeat of France in 1940. The armies had been demoralized by the Communist line. So the word went around. La France est pourrie. That wasn’t really enough of an explanation, no substitute for understanding. But still the people around Partisan Review, who then had considerable influence with me, stuck to that Marxist view. The PR people were the best we could do in the cosmopolitan line. They thrilled us by importing the finest European writers and familiarizing the American literary public with them. Where else would you find Malraux, Silone, Koestler, and Company but in Partisan Review? It’s true that some of the editors had the mentality of Sixth Avenue cigar store proprietors, but they were importing good things. Some of them I liked very much. They were not only mentally influential, they charmed me personally. People like Dwight Macdonald and Philip Rahv, Delmore Schwartz and Will Barrett and Clem Greenberg. But Clem and Dwight were obstinately, rigorously orthodox in their Marxism and kept saying, “Don’t kid yourself,
this is just another imperialist war. Don’t be seduced by propaganda as people were in World War I.”
Did you feel that you were, as a young litterateur, easily influenced?
I wouldn’t belong to anything. I wouldn’t join any group. I was never institutionally connected with any of these people. I was the cat who walked by himself.
You look frightfully intense in the pictures of the day.
There were sexual reasons for this intense look. Then, too, the politics and literature of the period put you under great pressure. I had read all these never-again war writers like Barbusse and Remarque. There was the revolutionary myth that the masses had taken things into their own hands in 1917 and destroyed the power of capitalist imperialism. It took me a long time to get over that. It was probably the most potent political mixture in the twentieth century.
What caused the myth to collapse?
Stalin himself did a great deal to discredit it. I knew about the purges. I knew the Moscow trials were a put-on and a hoax. All of that was quite clear. And like everybody else who invests in doctrines at a young age, I couldn’t give them up.
Does the adult Bellow criticize himself for this?
No, I don’t see how I can. To avoid every temptation of modern life, every pitfall, one would need a distinct genius. No one could be so many kinds of genius.
At what point does it become impossible to forgive people for holding ideas that are patently false?
It depends on the weight of the evidence available. People who clung to Stalinism after the Hitler-Stalin pact deserve harsh criticism, of course. But then most people somehow failed to—they were reluctant to—grasp the meaning of the concentration camps, both the German and the Russian kind.
Could you tell us something about your circle of affinities, about close friends like Isaac Rosenfeld and Delmore Schwartz and John Berryman? The forming of ideas with one’s close friends at a critical age between eighteen and thirty is absolutely fundamental. What was the energy flow of those ideas, and how would you describe the people and the ideas they represented?
After some years full of love and admiration, I began to suspect Isaac of having a weakness for orthodoxies. He was in many ways an orthodox left-winger. Which I found curious. He couldn’t relinquish some of these fixed convictions. But even some of the best people I knew, and I include Isaac among the best, were unable to divest themselves of their Marxism.
Did you know anybody contrary to that flow?
Jewish friends who had a more American orientation, yes. They didn’t drift leftward. Mostly schoolmates of mine in Chicago. I use the word “intellectual” nowadays in a much more pejorative sense. I never did like the idea of being an intellectual, because I felt that the intellectuals had no power to resist the great orthodoxies and were very easily caught up in Marxism and Stalinism.
Did they lack the penetration, or did they fall for the romance?
They were intellectuals. I think they saw there was an advantage for them in following a certain line. One of the things that was very clear to me when I went to Paris on a Guggenheim grant was that Temps Modernes understood less about Marxism and left-wing politics than I had understood as a high school boy. I strongly suspected they expected the West to fall to communism and they would be advantageously placed when this happened. I don’t know how else to explain some of Sartre’s positions and those of the people around Temps Modernes. Why was it they were unable to criticize the Russians in 1956? To behave as they did, you had to be attracted by more than doctrine. You had to have some idea of possible advantages. One saw so much of this, especially in France and Italy.
What were you doing during the war?
When I was called up, I was rejected because I had a hernia. Immediately I went into the hospital to have surgery. The operation was not successful. I didn’t recover for about a year and a half. The war in Europe was then coming to an end. So I went into the Merchant Marine. I was in Merchant Marine training when the bomb fell on Hiroshima. I had recognized Hitler for “what he was.” I knew most of the story, and not only did I feel that my Jewish Marxist friends were wrong in theory, but I was horrified by the positions they—we—had taken. That was the end of that. And I felt that I should do something in the war.
Did the break with these people hurt?
No. By this time I was estranged from them. I was still going through an educational self-wrestling routine. I do it all the time. Trying continually to correct, correct, correct. And I also find that the more isolated you are, the more you develop a terrible book-dependency; you begin to see how you protected yourself from what you thought to be brutal, vulgar, and squalid. Building a fortress of highmindedness. Really bad stuff. I don’t mean to say books are bad. I mean to say that I have used them like a dope addict. I still catch myself doing that. I’m not accusing myself of anything. I’m just saying that this has been the case. Zola wrote J’accuse over the Dreyfus case, but our mighty book is Je m’accuse. On the other hand, silence is enriching. The more you keep your mouth shut, the more fertile you become.
Would you say you had any mentors between eighteen and thirty? Did they play a role in the formation of ideas?
I would like to have had some, and some people came forward in that role; but I had trouble accepting them. In fact, I was always looking for guidance. A leading art critic of the day offered to take me in hand. He was strangely persuaded that a young man needed to be formed by an older woman, preferably a European woman, who would civilize him, teach him something about sex, and introduce him to a higher social sphere—smooth his rough edges. Somehow I didn’t take to that, especially not when I saw whom he had in mind for me—his castoffs. Another senior intellectual who took an interest in me was Dwight Macdonald, but he was himself nervous and unfocused. I suppose Isaac had really a great influence on me. After Isaac, Delmore Schwartz was really an important guide and, later, John Berryman. But these were friends, not shapers of my character.
When did you first know Berryman?
In the Village, around the Partisan Review, and then I went down to Princeton for one year when Delmore and I replaced Blackmur. That was about 1952.
Tell us something about your first contact with Europe.
My first trip over (to Spain) was in 1947, when I was in charge of a student group from the University of Minnesota. I was an assistant professor there in 1946. That promotion came thanks to Red [Robert Penn] Warren, because I was brought in as an instructor and he twisted Joseph Warren Beach’s arm and got him to advance me. He rescued me from freshman comp papers. Madrid in 1947 was a great eye-opener for me. In Spain, I felt as if I was returning to some kind of ancestral homeland. I felt that I was among people very much like myself, and I even had notions that in an earlier incarnation I might have been in the Mediterranean. I was absolutely charmed by it, by everything. The air seemed to be different. Something especially nourishing. And then, of course, I had followed the Spanish Civil War and knew as much about what had gone on in Spain between 1936 and 1938 as a young American of that time could learn.
The place was still shot up. Virtually as it had been during the war. The buildings were all pockmarked. Madrid itself was like a throwback to a much earlier time. The streetcars, for instance, were strictly Toonerville trolleys. I wrote a piece about all this for Partisan Review. I met a great many Spaniards; it was my first prolonged contact with Europeans and the European intelligentsia. At least the members of a tertulia in the café near my pension, which was in the middle of Puerta del Sol. I had a letter to some people—Germans, who had been journalists during the Civil War. They received me and introduced me to people like Jiménez Caballero, a fascist and a literary man in the Cortes, with whom I had a few dinners. People were curious. They hadn’t seen many Americans. Spain had been completely sealed off for years. They felt so isolated that even a trifling instructor from Minnesota was eagerly taken up by them.
I met the papal nuncio in Madrid. Since when does a kid from Chicago g
et to meet a papal nuncio? And had dinner at the Nunciatura. And had one of his assistants say to me that these Spaniards were not Europeans—son moros, they are Moors. They don’t really belong to the European community. I also spent a lot of time in the Prado, which was then empty and soiled-looking. I brooded for hours over Goya and Velázquez and Bosch. I banged around Spain in antique railroad cars. I went to Málaga. We had come by way of Paris, so I spent a preliminary week there and, on the way out, a second week. London in ’47 was absolutely miserable. All those vacant lots, flowers growing everywhere in bomb craters. There was nothing to eat in the restaurants, and you strongly suspected they were serving you horse meat.
When did you finally hit the heart of the matter, Germany, and what had happened there?
I went to Salzburg in 1949 and then to Vienna. The Russians were still in occupation. I had been invited to the Salzburg Seminar, but I took a trip to Vienna. I was fascinated, of course. I went to see the monuments. I didn’t like Vienna much. I knew a lot of Central European literature. My favorites were Kafka and Rilke. In Rilke, the poetry meant less to me than the Brigge book, which I loved. It had a great effect on me. Thomas Mann I always viewed with some mistrust.
You are then in your early thirties. You are on the verge of writing The Adventures of Augie March. Would you have called yourself a formed man by then? Or is this really a half life that doesn’t conclude?
No, I don’t really think I was formed. There were lots of things I hadn’t been able to incorporate. Things that got away from me. The Holocaust, for one. I was really very incompletely informed. I may even have been partly sealed off from it, because I had certainly met lots of people in Paris when I lived there who had been through it. I understood what had happened. Somehow I couldn’t tear myself away from my American life.
That’s what I see now when I look back at the writing of The Adventures of Augie March. That I was still focused on the American portion of my life. Jewish criticism has been harsh on this score. People charge me with being an assimilationist in that book. They say I was really still showing how the Jews might make it and that I used my best colors to paint America. As if I were arguing that what happened in Europe happened because Europe was corrupt and faulty. Thus clearing the U.S.A. of all blame.