Sounding like Al Capone or Jeff Fort staking out their turf, Saul Bellow once declared, “The streets of Chicago are mine.” Even if he did make good on that boast, in such patently Chicago novels as “The Adventures of Augie March” and “The Dean’s December,” Bellow relinquished all claim to the city’s streets, gangways and alleys when he left for Boston, a move that brought him nearly as much ink in Chicago papers as his Nobel Prize.
Nearly a year later, sitting in the parlor/dining room of his spacious Boston flat, Bellow still seems amused by the media commotion over his decision to pull out of Chicago. “Business people leave Chicago all the time,” he says, somewhat disingenuously. “They retire to Florida or Hawaii or the West Indies, and nobody ever gives it a thought. When writers leave, it seems more noticeable.”
Bellow’s leaving was all the more noticeable because of his royal eminence as a writer, making it less a defection than an abdication. But Bellow points out that he has simply gone the way of all Chicago writers, from Carl Sandburg to James T. Farrell to Nelson Algren. “For decades, people had been saying to me: `Why do you hang around Chicago? After all, you’re a writer. You don’t have to be here. You can live on the French Riviera.’ “
Bellow smiles, suggesting that no matter how attractive the prospect, it’s naive to presume that a writer with his uniquely urban disposition could set up shop beside the Mediterranean. When he belatedly made his move, Bellow chose Boston rather than the French, Italian or Florida Rivieras for a number of reasons. High on his checklist was the offer from Boston University, which came through with teaching positions not only for him but for his wife, Janis, who has a Ph.D. in the humanities from the University of Chicago.
Boston’s attractions were physical and spiritual as well as economic, Bellow indicates. It’s a compact, picturesque city with a European flavor, resembling Montreal, where he was born and spent his first nine years. “This is the sort of atmosphere I got used to at an early age. It seemed a fit thing to come back to my earliest haunts.”
As he checks off Boston’s virtues, Bellow still sounds a little uncertain about the wisdom of the move. The best thing about Boston, he indicates, may be that it’s only two hours from his isolated weekend/vacation home in Vermont. Aside from its pastoral solitude, Bellow also likes Vermont because the TV reception is so much better than in Boston, where “it isn’t worth turning on. . . . Out in the country, we have a satellite dish. I can watch the Bulls play. And I can get the crime news on WGN.”
After vacating what a journalist described as a “shabby” lakefront apartment in Chicago’s Hyde Park, Bellow has taken up residence near Fenway Park, in the Kenmore Square neighborhood, which serves as Checkpoint Charlie for Boston University. But in giving directions to a visitor, Bellow says, “Just look for the Citgo sign,” a garish landmark that towers over the Red Sox ballpark and the BU campus.
“Quite a pad, isn’t it?” says Bellow, as he leads the way into his apartment. The baronial ceilings and staircase, the polished wooden floors and plush rugs make it feel like the private chambers of a British palace. He and his wife occupy two floors of the four-story brick rowhouse, on a street that looks as if it would quickly convert into the location for a movie set in Regency England or Revolutionary New England. “It’s almost too grand,” Bellow says of the apartment.
But he surely appreciated its grandeur in the depths of a harsh and claustrophobic winter, during which he must have periodically questioned his sanity for not settling in a more congenial climate. In the months he has been in Boston, Bellow says he has hardly been able to set foot in the streets, much less put a tentative claim on them for his fiction. “We were snowbound for three, four weeks. You can’t know much about a place when you’re snowbound, except that there’s lots of snow.”
Though it’s a spring afternoon and the streets are free of snow, Bellow is housebound by the drab, blustery weather. Cold rain, sleet and wind shake the windows at the rear of his apartment, clouding what he promises on more temperate afternoons is a splendid view of the Charles River, only slightly obstructed by the shoreline expressway. From this vantage, Boston, not Chicago, might have been “that somber city” to which Bellow referred in the memorable opening lines of “Augie March.”
In his sporty green windbreaker, Bellow looks as if he’s eager for the storm to quit so he can hit the streets and warm up for the Boston Marathon. Approaching his 80th year, he seems exceptionally trim and agile, if not entirely in the pink. Time, weather and personal tempests have bleached and eroded his avian face and hairline. He wears a hearing aid. And his prominent eyes are marbled, perhaps from the strain of a morning spent at the typewriter.”
“I generally get to work by 9:30,” says Bellow, who has claimed a small corner of the upstairs living room for his writing desk, as far as possible from the the drafty windows with their distracting view of the river. “I work till 1:30 or 2, and that’s it. Then I’m just washed out for the rest of the day.”
As an antidote to the chill, Bellow offers tea. Waiting for the water to boil, he explains that it was not so much the physical as the emotional climate that caused him to leave Chicago. “After so many years in Hyde Park, I couldn’t walk a block without remembering who had lived there and when they had died. It got so depressing it was hard for me even to get out of the house and walk down the street.”
There’s little doubt that Bellow was most affected by the death two years ago of Allan Bloom, his close friend, neighbor and colleague at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. “He lived right next door, and I couldn’t leave without walking past his house,” he says of Bloom, author of the rabble-rousing best seller, “The Closing of the American Mind.”
“It finally just got me down.
“There comes a time, I suppose, whether you’re a writer or not, when your dead outnumber your living by about 10 to 1,” Bellow continues. “You have to live with all these extinguished lives, and because you’ve encouraged your own sentimentality and nostalgia about a place, perhaps you feel it all the more.”
It wasn’t just the ghosts of old friends that persuaded him to leave Chicago, Bellow says, but the tomblike atmosphere of Hyde Park. Long identified with the University of Chicago community (sardonically dubbed “Mr. Bellow’s Planet” by Brent Staples in his recent memoir, “Parallel Time”), Bellow says it was also the Hyde Park liberals’ refusal to deal with reality that helped set him on the road to Boston.
“They live in an enclave there,” he says. “They enjoy a lower crime rate because of the university services, and they just don’t like to hear how bad things are in the city. They have an ideological stake in saying there’s nothing wrong. The less they know, the better they like it. It’s a way of protecting their liberal beliefs.”
No matter how dispirited, Bellow required a long, hard sell before he could be wrenched from Chicago, said his friend, “fellow snob” and confidant of many years, Keith Botsford, editor of Bostonia magazine. “When I first went to Chicago in the early ’50s,” Botsford said, “he showed me around his entire childhood. We went to all sorts of dry-cleaning establishments, secondhand clothing stores. . . . He felt the geography was in his bones.
“It took him three years to make up his mind,” said Botsford, who co-edited a literary magazine, the Noble Savage, with Bellow. “But with the death of Allan, he had no really close friends left in Chicago. He had a newish wife, and she loved New England, their house in Vermont. So it makes great sense for him to be here.”
Without the aggressive salesmanship of John Silber, president of Boston University, Bellow might still be teaching classes in Hyde Park, however. Silber traced his interest in the author to a mishap that occurred four decades earlier. Then a philosophy student, he heard Bellow talking about “Augie March” on his car radio during a snowstorm. “I got to listening so intently,” Silber recalled, “that I skidded into the back of a truck. I got the book immediately and was very impressed.”
So impressed, Silber added, that after assuming the BU presidency, he decided Bellow belonged on the faculty, along with two other Nobel laureates he’d recruited, Derek Walcott and Elie Wiesel. Encountering Bellow at academic and social occasions over the years, Silber said, “I just kept on his case until he agreed to come.”
Though Bellow contends he wasn’t eager to quit the U. of C. after 30 years, friends say the administration’s reluctance to provide him with an assistant to help out with the phone, his mail and other clerical matters contributed to the author’s decision to move on. As Botsford said, “He might have stayed if they’d given him a proper secretary.”
But Nathan Tarcov, co-chairman of the Committee on Social Thought, doubted that “was an issue in his going,” insisting that Bellow was offered all the clerical help he needed. “Obviously, we were very sad that he left, but we could understand the personal reasons why he and Janis chose to go. . . . His name will always be associated with that of Chicago.”
It isn’t as if Bellow has permanently disconnected. “There are bonds that can’t be broken,” he says. “I spent so much of my life there that I carry it with me when I’m gone. And we plan to go back frequently.”
Since alighting in Boston, Bellow has already returned to Chicago twice: last November, when his bust went on display at the Harold Washington Library Center-joking about the bronze likeness, he observes, “I would rather it had been done by Picasso, with two noses, but for a one-nose job, it’s not bad”- and again last month, accompanying his wife to a University of Chicago symposium, where she spoke on Flaubert.
Judging by his remarks in a May issue of the New Yorker, Bellow sounded almost despondent about leaving Chicago. Asked by a Talk of the Town reporter how he was finding Boston, the novelist replied, “Not so hot.” But Bellow says he “didn’t mean him to understand I was sorry I left Chicago. The interviewer, David Remnick, had written a very successful book (`Lenin’s Tomb’). The success must have fatigued him, so he put it on to me.”
By coincidence, Bellow’s arrival in Boston preceded by only a few months the publication of his latest book, “It All Adds Up” (Viking),” which offers his most explicitly nostalgic and sentimental view of Chicago. Subtitled “From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future,” the compilation of autobiographical essays and reportage contains Bellow’s first published journalism, the “Spanish Letter,” which he wrote for the Partisan Review in 1948.
The book has numerous other dispatches from distant places (Israel in 1967, Paris in 1983, the Little Egypt region of southern Illinois in 1957). But Bellow is continually drawn back to Chicago, reminiscing about its gangsters (“who did as they liked, murdered one another, seldom harming ordinary citizens”) and its “sprawling network of immigrant villages smelling of sauerkraut and home-brewed beer, of meat processing and soap manufacture,” all of which, he writes, gave the city an air of “philistine repose.”
Elsewhere in the book, Bellow’s abiding affection for the city is evident in his autobiographical Jefferson Lecture, with its descriptions of “winter afternoons when the soil was frozen to a depth of five feet and the Chicago cold seemed to have the headhunter’s power of shrinking your face”; and of his early Bohemian life as a writer, feeling like a “strange deviant” in the dusty, three-dollar cubicles of rooming houses he shared with mice and cockroaches.
During those apprentice years, Bellow’s literary career was on a track with that of another romancier, Nelson Algren, who was six years his senior and his supervisor on the Illinois Writers Project, a New Deal program for out-of-work authors. Though Bellow would take a higher road in his fiction than Algren, avoiding Chicago’s meaner streets, he says: “We grew up in the same Division Street neighborhood, and I knew the joints he was writing about, the poolrooms and the restaurants. I won’t go so far as to say the brothels, but I knew where they were.”
In picking up the pieces for the new collection, which includes “many things I’d completely forgotten,” Bellow observes: “The first thing I noticed was how long and painful a process it was for me to write clearly. How many redundant habits I had, how timid and flat-footed I was in approaching the subject.
“I think it was Samuel Butler who said, `Life is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument.’ There’s a lot to that. I was certainly passable in my early years. But I think my writing has gotten much better . . . much more resonant.”
However tempted, Bellow didn’t revise these early pieces, so that some of them leave him vulnerable to ironic hindsight. This is particularly true of the essay “Chicago: The City That Was, the City That Is,” published by Life magazine 11 years ago, in which he writes of “those, like myself, who have never abandoned Chicago-the faithful. . . .”
What caused him to eventually lose faith in Chicago, Bellow says, was not simply the passing of so many friends and relatives but the disappearance of the institutions, monuments and hangouts he had known since his parents brought him to Chicago from Montreal as a boy. “It’s not a good place for nostalgia. The places I lived, in the old Humboldt Park neighborhood, were either torn down or turned into slums. And you can’t go down to the Loop anymore, as you used to do in the old days, and pass an enjoyable afternoon.
Along with the vanished urban haunts and traditions, Bellow says he came to miss the “freedom of movement we used to have when we were younger there. We could go anywhere in the city without fear. But now, if I wanted to go down to the Loop for an evening or see a play or an opera, I always had to think of what would happen on the way back if my car broke down on Lake Shore Drive.”
Drinking tea in the twilight shadows of his townhouse, Bellow might be a dethroned and exiled potentate looking back on the ruins of a fallen empire. But his words, though often regretful, are neither lachrymose nor bitter. His voice is even, measured, occasionally dropping to a whisper. If there’s any lingering sadness, he conceals it behind a distant smile, which often turns into hardy laughter.
One such outburst comes when he talks about the “sublime anonymity” that life in Chicago provided him. Repeating a cherished anecdote, he tells how he handed his credit card to a clerk at Marshall Field’s. “She said: `I’ve heard your name before. Were you an Olympic athlete?’ I said: `Yes, I was a swimmer. I did the breast stroke.’
“On the other hand,” he says, “a Negro bus driver on Halsted Street once pulled to the curb when he saw me, opened his window and said, `Hey, you’re Saul Bellow!’ ” While flattered by the recognition, Bellow admits, incidents like this were extremely rare “and very few people bothered me at all.”
In a way, he adds, the lack of public recognition seemed to epitomize the city that works for lawyers, judges, plumbers, industrialists, merchants, brokers and wardheelers-but not for writers. “It’s a miracle that Chicago should have any writers at all, that the city has bred so many articulate people. The general feeling is that a writer doesn’t amount to very much, that he’s not an important person.”
As Bellow is talking about Chicago’s legendary indifference to writers, Janis Bellow returns from her office at Boston University. Overhearing his lament, she comes over with a photograph that proves at least one writer was officially considered a VIP. It shows Bellow, his arms raised like an Olympic gold medalist, at his 75th birthday party, with Mayor Richard M. Daley and his wife, Maggie, leading the cheers.
To some extent, the birthday tribute, at the Art Institute, was Daley’s present to Bellow for having campaigned on his behalf, a rare political alliance between a Chicago mayor and a Chicago writer. Bellow says he “felt rather strongly about Daley being elected,” after the decline that set in during Harold Washington’s regime.
“I liked Harold Washington personally, but he was 100 percent politician. . . . After his unfortunate death, things really seemed to go down.”
Setting aside the photograph, Janis Bellow produces another trophy, a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino Narda, a red wine from a case the Italian government awarded him for his 1992 travel essay, “Winter in Tuscany.” Then she sits and quietly listens as he continues to reminisce, an attentive wife and an alert student, waiting for him to deliver the shrewd insight, the eloquent wisecrack, the inspired epigram.
