Political Companions to Great American Authors

Gloria L. Cronin, Lee Trepanier, Gloria L. Cronin, Lee Trepanier

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813141862
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Saul Bellow is one of the twentieth century's most influential, respected, and honored writers. His novels The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet won the National Book Award, and Humboldt's Gift was awarded the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In addition, his plays garnered popular and critical acclaim, and some were produced on Broadway. Known for his insights into life in a post-Holocaust world, Bellow's explorations of modernity, Jewish identity, and the relationship between art and society have resonated with his readers, but because his writing is not overtly political, his politics have largely been ignored.

A Political Companion to Saul Bellow examines the author's novels, essays, short stories, and letters in order to illuminate his evolution from liberal to neoconservative. It investigates Bellow's exploration of the United States as a democratic system, the religious and ideological influences on his work, and his views on race relations, religious identity, and multiculturalism in the academy. Featuring a fascinating conclusion that draws from interviews with Bellow's sons, this accessible companion is an excellent resource for understanding the political thought of one of America's most acclaimed writers.

1

Trotskyism in the Early Work of Saul Bellow

Judie Newman

Bellow’s enthusiasm for Trotskyism tends to be summarily dismissed as a youthful peccadillo, or as just one among many of the weltering ideas which populate his fiction. As Edward Shils commented, “If there’s a bad idea out there—Trotskyism, Reichism, Steinerism—leave it to our friend Saul to swallow it.”¹ Arguably, however, the later Bellow’s reputation as a neoconservative has obscured the importance to his life and writings of his early enthusiasm for Trotskyism. The 2010 publication of a selection of his letters opens with Bellow aged seventeen writing to Yetta Barshevsky, a fellow high school student who introduced him to Trotskyism. In the letter, the callow Bellow, disappointed in love, writes, “I sever relations with you,” conceding only that “We may still be casual friends.”² In fact, they stayed friends for more than sixty years. When she died, Bellow wrote her eulogy, describing how she had introduced him to world politics when they were in high school, and had given him Trotsky’s pamphlet on the German question.³

Bellow was still thinking about Trotsky in the 1990s in his correspondence with Albert Glotzer (his lifelong friend and at one point Trotsky’s secretary).⁴ Bellow’s involvement in radical left-wing politics, at Tuley High School and at university, produced his first publications (political pieces) in left-wing journals (the Beacon and Soapbox) and his first published short story, an antifascist fable. Although critics have tended to see Bellow’s Trotskyism as a product of his involvement with the Partisan Review group during that journal’s Trotskyist phase, he appears to have been recruited to the journal because of his established political reputation rather than for his as yet unproven literary talent. Writing to F. W. Dupee in 1941, the editor Philip Rahv described Bellow as one of the “apprentice writers” he had met in Chicago.⁵ In fact, Partisan Review was the least radical of the journals to which the young Bellow contributed. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, Bellow’s literary output centered on the political specificities of the time, most notably in “The Mexican General” (1942), based on Bellow’s visit to Trotsky in Mexico, where he arrived within hours of the assassination.

In some respects, Bellow’s enthusiasm for Trotsky is unsurprising. Writing in 1993, Bellow pointed out that when the Russian Revolution took place in 1917, he was two years old and his parents, who had emigrated from Saint Petersburg to Montreal in 1913, followed subsequent events in Russia very keenly: “At the dinner table the Tsar, the war, the front, Lenin, Trotsky were mentioned as often as parents, sisters and brothers in the old country.”⁶ Grandfather Bellow had taken refuge in the Winter Palace during the revolution; his mother’s relatives were famous Mensheviks. While the older generation assumed that the Bolsheviks would soon be suppressed, their children were keen to join the revolution, including the son of Bellow’s Hebrew teacher: “He went off to build a new order under Lenin and Trotsky. And he disappeared.”⁷ Despite embracing Americanization, Bellow’s friends believed that “they were also somehow Russian” and read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, going on to Lenin’s State and Revolution and the pamphlets of Trotsky.⁸ The Tuley High School debating society discussed The Communist Manifesto. Bellow read it and described himself as “swept away by the power of the analysis.”⁹ When a Commission of Inquiry was set up in Mexico in 1937 to consider the charges made against Trotsky in the Moscow Show Trials (in which he was alleged to be a fascist collaborator, and condemned to death in his absence), Bellow and his Trotskyist friends “followed the proceedings bitterly, passionately, for we were of course the Outs; the Stalinists were the Ins.”¹⁰ Even much later in his life, Bellow still admired Trotsky, both for his politics and his culture: “How could I forget that Trotsky had created the Red Army, that he had read French novels at the front while defeating Denikin? That great crowds had been swayed by his coruscating speeches?”¹¹

Bellow’s political education began in earnest at “The Forum,” a church hall on California Avenue which hosted debates between socialists, communists, and anarchists. He read Marx and Engels, “blasting away at Value, Price and Profit while the police raided a brothel across the street.”¹² When the Young Communist League attempted to recruit him in the late 1930s, they were far, far too late. “I had already read Trotsky’s pamphlet on the German question and was convinced that Stalin’s errors had brought Hitler to power.”¹³ Trotsky wrote two major pamphlets on the German question. The first, in 1930, to which Bellow is referring, argued that the ideological error of the Comintern (Stalin) consisted in always seeing the main enemy as social democracy, and therefore not standing up to Hitler. Trotsky called instead for a united struggle against fascism, to include democratic forces as well as socialists, not an enticing prospect for the purists of the Communist Party. In the second pamphlet, written in 1932, Trotsky foresaw the radicalization of the American working class once the country began to emerge from its economic crisis.¹⁴ Reflecting his Trotskyist beliefs, Bellow’s early short stories, much more political than his novels, are marked by a profound ambivalence to war, distrust of democratic reforms, and a belief that capitalism had failed.

For Bellow, 1933 marked graduation from Tuley and entry into the University of Chicago, where he and Isaac Rosenfeld organized “Cell Number Five” of the Trotskyist Youth Group. As Alan Wald records, the Socialist Club of the University of Chicago published Soapbox, a sixteen-page magazine with a quotation on its masthead from William Randolph Hearst: “Red Radicalism has planted a soapbox on every campus of America.”¹⁵ Under the leadership of Nathan Gould, Soapbox made no secret of its political allegiances. It hailed Trotsky’s fifty-seventh birthday enthusiastically and attracted endorsements from Max Shachtman, James T. Farrell, Sidney Hook, and Meyer Shapiro, among others. Bellow published political commentary, including “This Is the Way We Go to School” in December 1936, under the pseudonym John Paul.¹⁶ Bellow had moved to Northwestern University in Evanston in 1935, and may have used a pseudonym to deflect undue attention from his instructors.¹⁷ The piece attacked a local resident of Evanston who had published a “handbook” for patriots, giving an exposé of Communist activity in the United States. Bellow was scathing about bourgeois Evanston and Northwestern, which he described as “intellectually flat-chested,” and supplied details of the poor working conditions and pay of the grounds and building staff.¹⁸ In 1934, the general strikes had produced a new mood of activism in America, and Bellow rode the rails with his friend Herb Passin to see for himself, cheering on the sit-in strikers at the Studebaker plant from a boxcar. “Of course, I sympathized with the strikers.”¹⁹ When his old friend Sydney J. Harris founded a journal, the Beacon, which featured articles about local political disputes and union activities, he appointed Bellow as associate editor. For the young Bellow, however, Harris was not nearly radical enough, and he was incensed when Harris allowed the Stalinist Young Communist League to advertise in the journal. In 1936, “Saul Gordon Bellow” had reviewed J. T. Farrell’s A World I Never Made in the Beacon, applauding its left-wing politics. Writing to Farrell in 1937, he complained: “Editorially I can’t push the magazine to the left because Harris is a shrewd opportunistic bastard who won’t permit it. However, if we load the magazine with Bolshevik writers of national reputation, we can have Harris hanging on a ledge before long.”²⁰ In this, however, he was sadly mistaken; it was Bellow who would leave the Beacon.

Bellow also published pieces for the radical student newspaper the Daily Northwestern. “Pets on the North Shore” (1936) again targeted the Evanston bourgeoisie via their pampered pooches. More importantly, Bellow’s first published story, “The Hell It Can’t,” appeared there in 1936. The story takes its title from the response of a character in Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here (1935) to the suggestion that America could never turn fascist.²¹ In the novel, “Buzz” Windrip, the populist leader of a “patriotic” movement in America, creates his own militia (the Minute Men, or “MM,” modeled on Hitler’s “SS”), seizes power, and sets up a fascist dictatorship with martial law and concentration camps. The hero writes for a radical paper and survives to see Windrip’s power waning. Lewis’s novel was more optimistic than Bellow’s story, in which Henry Howland is seized in the night by a group of paramilitary “patriots” and taken away for a brutal whipping which is still in progress as the story ends. Set in Chicago (the hero recalls friendly neighborhood exchanges about the Cubs), the story draws its horror from the absolute familiarity of the surroundings, emphasizing that militarism and fascism could be right at home in America. As the story opens, the enemy is already within the door. Henry hears a bell ringing, a hinge creaking, boots on the stairs, and the door of his room flying open. The action then consists entirely of the walk along the familiar street, past everyday landmarks, with Henry longing for a familiar face to appear, to witness his fate, “Now they were about to end him.”²² The story ends “he was five blocks from home” (8). The street teems with military activity, including young soldiers fresh from “some high school camp,” who ignore Henry’s plight, their faces “young, hard and unforgiving.” “They were getting them young now, and well-trained” (5). The walls are plastered with propaganda posters, “Fight. Don’t Be An Enemy At Home” (5) runs the caption to the face of a soldier with a bayonet, in front of a girl holding bandages. In the background, men sing war songs in saloons, chorusing “it won’t be long till we’re there” (5), with “there” meaning London, Lisbon, or Rome. Whereas in Lewis’s novel, Windrip decides to invade Mexico and introduces the draft, Bellow’s emphasis is on the European theater of war. Henry recalls newsreels of Austrian troops on the run, and French troops leaving a fortress. Henry’s crime is to have opposed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Introduction: Saul Bellow’s Political Thought
• 1. Trotskyism in the Early Work of Saul Bellow
• 2. Bellow as Jew and Jewish Writer
• 3. Saul Bellow and the Absent Woman Syndrome: Traces of India in “Leaving the Yellow House”
• 4. The Politics of Art: The Colonial Library Meets the Carnivalesque in Henderson the Rain King
• 5. The Jewish Atlantic—The Deployment of Blackness in Saul Bellow
• 6. “Washed Up on the Shores of Truth”: Saul Bellow’s Post-Holocaust America
• 7. Mr. Sammler’s Planet: Saul Bellow’s 1968 Speech at San Francisco State University
• 8. Biography, Elegy, and the Politics of Modernity in Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein
• 9. Our Father’s Politics: Gregory, Adam, and Daniel Bellow
• Saul Bellow’s Politics: A Selected Annotated Bibliography, 1947–Present
• List of Contributors
• Index