All language subtitles for American.Masters.S36E07.The.Adventures.of.Saul.Bellow.REAL.XviD-AFG[eztv.re]

The National Endowment for the
Humanities, bringing you the stories

us.

The following program contains

mature content, including depictions of
derogatory imagery in historical

context. Viewer discretion advised.

I love that portrait of the streets.
Bellow should use the city as a

almost.

And he talks about being a Columbus of
the near at hand.

That idea that you're exploring not
distant lands, but the world that's

immediately around you, and that's just
as big an exploration.

I found that very inspiring, I suppose,
as a young writer.

I believe that any aspiring writer or
reader will

have to stop at the books of Saul Bellow
at some point. He's one of the most

elegant prose stylists you could ever
expect to read.

But even more than that, he will
challenge your thinking.

There's no Bellow book that didn't shake
me.

when I read it. He certainly gave me a
sense of the capaciousness of fiction,

everything you could do, that you could
do anything, really.

You made the standard yourself.

You made the aesthetic yourself.

But there were no rules.

For most of his life, Saul Bellow was
the most acclaimed novelist in America.

When he was on his deathbed, He said,
was I a man or was I a jerk?

Mensch is a human being showing the best
of human qualities. Need have nothing

to do with how many awards you've got.

Jerk is a bellow word. It appears in
lots of his stories. No, you don't want

be a jerk.

And I'll be needing you, sir.

He liked Chicago and he liked it that
we'd be walking down the street and

would recognize him.

at a certain point and actually pretty
quick he wanted everybody to leave him

alone so that he could do his work even
me he wanted me to leave him alone

and he liked me better than most people

Although he came here every morning
after his coffee, he would sit here at

desk looking out at the Green Mountains
and write, sitting here and

sweating. He got very hot when he wrote.
He would strip down to his T -shirt and

it was laborious.

It wasn't just, oh, here I am having a
little fun writing. He would sort of

a whistling noise under his breath as he
worked.

and he would labor over the fences. His
head turned slightly to the side.

It was magic to see.

Terribly hard work was taking place.

Hard, hard work.

Excavation and digging, mining, mowing
through tunnels.

heaving, pushing, moving rock, working,
working, working, working, working,

panting, hauling, hoisting.

And none of this work is seen from the
outside.

It's internally done.

It happens because you are powerless,
and therefore in yourself you labor, you

wage and combat, settle scores, remember
insults. Where is everybody?

Inside your breast and skin, the entire
cast.

The Adventures of Orgy March, which I
think is the great American novel.

You say he writes with his brain, he
writes with his heart.

Saul writes with his soul.

i am an american chicago born chicago
that somber city

and go with things as i have taught
myself freestyle and will make the

record in my own way first to knock
first admitted sometimes an innocent

sometimes a not so innocent i'm an
american chicago born that's what

i've been stamped I've been stamped with
America. I've been stamped with

Chicago. He didn't begin by saying, I'm
a Jewish child of immigrants.

He unloaded that.

He claimed his fundamental
identification, which was to America.

Bella was born in Lachine, Quebec.

He has two older brothers and older
sister, born in St. Petersburg.

He grew up in a family in which Russian,
Yiddish, and English were spoken.

He really didn't know what language he
was speaking when he was growing up.

It must have been important to me that
at a very early age, like so many Jewish

children, I began to read the Old
Testament in Hebrew. We were all taught

the age of four.

Well, I didn't know whether these were
stories or facts.

And this puts one in a sort of magical
fear.

I am an American Chicago -born. Up to
that point, it's straight Walt Whitman.

Walt Whitman, a cosmos of Manhattan, the
sun.

But the next line is...

First to knock, first admitted.

Sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes
not so innocent.

That's the child of Jewish immigrants
from Eastern Europe speaking.

That is, Walt Whitman didn't have to
knock on the door to get in.

Abraham, father of Saul, became a
bootlegger on a small scale.

Agents of the revenue.

in canada were after them and finally it
was decided montreal they were smuggled

into the united states there for a very
long time they lived in chicago without

proper citizenship the streets were
freedom to us when i was a kid in

chicago everything was happening
legitimate and illegitimate

on the streets they were filled with the
babble of immigrants

Full of hustle.

Well, as described in Augie March.

Augie March just changed my sense of
what a novel could do.

Of what a Jewish writer could do with
his experience.

Because up until then, there wasn't any
Jewish writer who was comparable.

Who was not in the public relations
business.

Who was not busy honoring Jews or
praising Jews.

or defending Jews.

He just presented Jews, you know. That
was very liberating.

You look like your uncle, Solbelo. I got
a haircut just for you yesterday.

And I asked the barber to give me a
haircut like my dear uncle.

Okay?

It's a good picture.

Saul's novels are so very, very largely
autobiographical.

These books are centered on the
protagonist, the Saul figure, and the

counterpoint is the older brother.

And the older brother is obviously my
father.

It's a guy who can't control his
appetite.

Any of his appetites.

The guy can't control any of his
appetites.

Goodness knows, you know, what's going
to happen.

I'm getting married now.

What? To whom? To whom?

To a woman with money.

She's pretty.

She's not bad.

I'll ask for a yard as a wedding
present.

What's the matter? Do you like her? I
barely know her. What's the difference?

But she said yes. I haven't asked her
yet, but she will. Don't worry about

What makes you think that this girl and
her family want you?

They'll get full value out of me, those
people.

I won't lie down and take it easy. I
can. I want money, and I mean want.

He used his older brother, Maury, six
times in his fiction. He was obviously

filled to sky for Saul when he was a
child.

and was a very vivid character.

He had 300 pairs of shoes and as many
suits, and he had a kind of suburban

dukedom where he lived, and he was
American money, American materialism.

The father was always upbraiding him for
not entering into the business that he

had started with his brothers.

His father and brothers detained his
literary ambitions.

They thought he was...

A schmuck with a pen.

Augie March is dedicated to his father,
but his father's not a presence in the

novel. The parent who figures
prominently in the novel is his mother.

And she has a feeling and spiritual side
that Augie inherits.

I think American writers have always
felt a very particular obligation to

a morality.

Why? That if they didn't do it, the
businessmen would.

And then all hell would break loose.

This is a picture of my mother and
father on a street corner in 1937.

According to my father, they were having
a very intense political argument.

My parents were both left -wing.

They were both Trotskyites.

and it is just about the time they got
married.

This picture really captures something
of the passion between the two of them.

They look very happy.

They were happy at the beginning. They
were very happy at the beginning.

He went off to the university to study
anthropology, and his anthropology

professor told him that all his papers
were like short stories and he should

give up anthropology.

And one of the nicest things about my
mother, she was a great facilitator.

She worked in their marriage for 15
years.

She worked so he could write.

Well, that, of course, applied to him.

But it was very much part of her
character.

Somebody who said, follow your dreams.

Riding the elevator train in Chicago
between Humboldt Park and Hyde

Park took an hour and a half.

You were on these racketing, speedy,
gimpy trains which looked as if they

going to be derailed any minute.

Passing through the plumb, you could
look into the bedroom, you could look

the yards, all kinds of horror there
too, comedy, whatever they were.

And you were reading a book. What did
the book have to do with the Chicago

landscape that you were speeding through
on your way to the university? Where I

was signed up for Economics 201 and I
was reading Joseph Conrad.

dead. Because Conrad meant more to me,
humanly, well.

And then I would found myself doing the
odd thing and say, I would read one of

those marvelous paragraphs and then I
would take it apart to see if I could

it together better.

Because I wanted to get the secret of
the verbal organization.

Sometimes I thought I could make a
little improvement. Mostly I couldn't.

It was the most fascinating occupation.

It involved me totally.

All for that.

That doesn't mean that I was unaware of
Chicago speeding by.

The year was 1937. It was the heart of
the Depression.

I went to see Mr.

Bryant, who was the chairman of the
English department at Northwestern.

And he said, you've got a very good
record here at the university, but I

wouldn't recommend...

that you study English literature, you
weren't born to it.

I'm an American Chicago -born.

Of course he was not.

What he was really saying is, I'm an
American writer, Chicago -born, and

you're going to have to deal with me.

He developed a prose style that allowed
him to give voice.

to a segment of the American population
that hadn't previously been heard in

high culture.

Augie has interest in philosophy and
politics and literature, but he knows

about gambling and street life and scams
and baseball and so forth.

He could glide, the Bolovian glide.

He could glide from the street demotic
language to the elegant language to the

philosophical language.

Not that I can see my big, gentle,
dilapidated, grubbing and lugging mother

as a fugitive of immense beauty from
such classy wrath.

Wrath is the language of the Bible. The
gods express wrath.

Classy is a word that people who know
they are high class never use.

Belle was not afraid of hybridity.

Bellows celebrates hybridity, and it's
the clash of register and tone that

this innovative writing.

Well, I think it's characteristic of
American literature altogether that it

speaks with the voices of the American
people. It transposes that voice into

something literary.

It's a discovery made by Mark Twain and
Huckleberry Finn.

That is to say, to take spoken language,
the language of the streets, and to

blend it with another kind of thing to
make literature of it.

Boggy Marsh was a very important novel
at the moment that it came out because

reinvented the American novel in a
certain way.

What he did is he blew the lid off of
the sentence.

The lid had been put on by Hemingway.

Hemingway was the reigning master of the
American sentence.

Hemingway had stripped away all the
stuffing that had gotten into the

sentence in the 19th century and got
down to the bare, shaker -like beauty of

the declarative sentence.

And his motto was, don't think about it.
He lived off the surface of things.

And Bellows' motto was, think about it.
And so the sentences were...

full not just of description, not just
of verbal energy, but of mentalness,

experience, and consciousness.

That enriches the sentence, you know?
And this was a great shift in the

notion of what a great prose style was.

In the scene, you obviously are madly in
love with this woman, and she has this

pet eagle.

Yeah. And Thea seems to be obsessed
about this pet eagle.

And you want to do everything possible
to have her be happy.

Happy eagle, happy wife, happy life.
Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly.

The bird? Yes.

It's a bird.

What if he's hopeless?

What if he is? We'll figure out some
other way to make money. I'll figure it

out. It's not the money, Augie. My God.

Don't you understand that? I'd like him
to drop dead, but I see the other side

of it, too.

It fills you with this brilliant energy.

That's what I love. I want it to fill
you. I don't need him to love you.

Get it?

Love isn't the end. It's the avenue. To
what?

To the thing.

Whatever you choose it to be. The
necessary thing.

There's a kind of action that love makes
you ready for and sets you free to do.

You worry about me, too.

whether I can make the move from love to
the next step.

This is the picture of my mother and my
father and I, and even though they

looked rather amiable, they were about
this close to being divorced.

My father once said, you know, your
mother brought out the worst in me.

I think the questions of freedom were
perplexing him.

You see it in all you march.

That's what I think he meant by your
mother brought out the worst in me

she was kind of rigid.

They were fighting a lot? Oh, like
crazy, yeah.

About what?

He wanted to go and she wanted him to
stay.

Very simple.

My mother was trying to hold on to the
marriage. She loved my father very much.

She had a very hard time.

She was alone for 10 years after they
got divorced.

He said something in late life about
feeling he shouldn't have divorced her,

I thought he was crazy.

This is what he felt.

I know that, but he also has to take
into account that he wrote five or six

novels about his other marital failures,
which he wouldn't have had if he'd

stayed married to her. It's illogical.

This is the library where all of Saul's
books live.

This corner here, this is Yiddish and
Hebrew literature.

This is the Greek and Latin section.

He could read Don Quixote in Spanish. He
was fluent in French.

Very widely read in history, philosophy,
poetry, literature of all kinds.

If I am out of my mind, it's all right
with me, thought Moses Herzog.

Some people thought he was cracked, and
for a time he himself had doubted that

he was all there.

He had fallen under a spell and was
writing letters to everyone under the

He wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the
newspapers, to people in public life,

to friends and relatives, and at last to
the dead, his own obscure dead, and

finally. the famous dead.

He was taking a turn around the empty
house and saw the shadow of his face in

gray, webby window.

He looked weirdly tranquil.

A radiant line went from mid -forehead
over his straight nose and full, violent

lips.

He took a new sheet of paper and wrote,
Dear Sono, You were right about Madeline

Sono. I shouldn't have married her.

I should have married you.

He's saying that he shouldn't have
married my mother.

I beg to differ.

Herzog was published in 1964, and at its
heart is this episode of betrayal

on the part of Bellow's supposed close
friend and his second wife.

Sasha, Sandra, who becomes Madeline in
the story.

The novel is an account of his coming to
health after a breakdown

occasioned by this betrayal.

This chair that you can see behind me is
the, I think, the last

relic of my parents' marriage.

It's a... chair that they bought on
their honeymoon in Mexico. I guess it

1955. On the day that she left him, he
was sitting in this chair reading a book

by Kierkegaard, a gloomy philosophical
book.

And she informed him that she was
leaving and walked out with me on her

in the car and drove away.

The character of Moses Herzog is a
scholar. He's an academic.

He's devoting his research to a book
about the failings of romanticism, and

fails to complete that book.

As he writes about that, he can't
sustain this solitude, so he writes

living people and to the dead.

He writes letters to President
Eisenhower, General de Gaulle,

forget who else he writes letters to.
And in those letters, he packs his

thinking. And so...

The narrative doesn't stop.

The narrative is propelled by the rage
to communicate that's in the Herzog,

the hero.

No, really, Herr Nietzsche, I have great
admiration for you, sympathy.

You want to make us able to live with a
void, not lie ourselves into good

-naturedness, trust, ordinary middling
human considerations.

but to question as has never been
questioned before, relentlessly, with

determination, into evil, through evil,

past evil.

Okay.

Still, your extremists must survive.

Humankind lives mainly upon perverted
ideas.

Any philosopher who wants to keep his
contact with mankind should pervert his

own system in advance to see how it will
really look a few decades after

adoption.

Yours under the veil of Maya, Moses
Herzog.

It's really hard to do. It's really hard
to have a metaphysical argument in the

middle of a novel.

And he's one of the few writers, I
think, who's successfully done that.

Nietzsche says God is dead. Herzog says
death is God.

Whom do you stand with?

I think Herzog is out of his mind.

If your wife leaves you, do you start
pulling Spinoza and Hegel off the shelf

find out why he did it or what you
should do now?

Where are you going to find the text for
this?

In a way, it really is a sort of comic
comment on our devotion

to theory.

The essential comic premise in all of
his novels, particularly Herzog,

is that here is a man with a PhD and a
doctorate who's written books

about romanticism, and yet he cannot
manage his own love life.

Herzog was an enormous bestseller.

It sold over 140 ,000 copies in hardback
and was on the bestseller list for 42

weeks. It displanted John Le Carre's
novel as number one on the bestseller

and yet it's highly intellectual and
full of arcane references.

I think it might have helped that Herzog
comes to the conclusion that his

elaborate and expensive education won't
help him at all to solve such personal

problems as the disaffection of his
wife.

Nothing you'll read in Spinoza will help
you with that.

The water stormed from the faucet and
Herzog watched as Madeline transformed

herself into an older woman.

She had a job at Fordham and the first
requirement to her mind was to look

and mature.

Whatever she did, it was with
unhesitating speed and efficiency.

Headlong, but with the confidence of an
expert.

Engravers, pastry cooks, acrobats on the
trapeze worked in this manner.

He thought she was too reckless at it,
going too fast, about to have a spill,

but that never happened.

First she spread a layer of cream on her
cheeks, rubbing it into her straight

nose, her childish chin, and soft
throat.

Despite the soft rings of feminine
flesh, there was already something

discernibly dictatorial about that
extended throat.

She would not let Herzog caress her face
downward. It was bad for the muscles.

Seated, watching, on the edge of the
luxurious tub, he put on his pants,

in his shirt.

She took no notice of him. She was
trying in some way to be rid of him as

daytime life began.

I grew up thinking of this book as that
awful book about my mother.

Anybody who ever read the book that met
her would say, oh, you're Madeline.

I know all about you.

It was a torment for her, you know, to
be portrayed in that very sort of

negative, angry way by a... great writer
who could really capture you in such a

way that anybody walking down the street
who had read the book would be able to

recognize you.

I don't like to write from a flat, cold
position.

You must either like the people, either
like them or hate them. You can't be

indifferent.

If the question of abuse of trust does
come up, then it comes up

with the ex -wives.

An uncomfortable fact, I think.

I talked to my mother about the portrait
of her in the book, and then I said to

her, you know, you don't get a sense
from reading this book that there was

any affection or love between the two of
you.

What was it like when you first met? Why
did you marry him?

And she said, oh, well, you know, here's
the story.

I was a young woman. He was a lot older.

People thought he was important, but I
didn't quite see it. But I kept him at

arm's length.

And then she said, you know, one day I
was going down the steps on the subway,

and I tripped, and I turned my ankle,
and I had to spend a few days in bed.

And he came to see me every day, and he
read to me from The Adventures of Augie

March. He read me the whole thing.

And I fell in love with him.

I had applied only to one place for
graduate work. It was the University of

Chicago's Committee on Social Thought.

I believe I had my 21st birthday that
September.

My first glimpse of Saul would have been
sitting at a seminar table, and all of

us were a little bit anxious. The great
man was coming in, and I felt I didn't

even want to look at him throughout the
entire class, but I did notice he had...

kind of exquisite hands all spoke in
full sentences he was like something out

a book i listened to everything he said
and i washed his hands

samler

with growing interest and confidence
lectured on cosmopolis for half an hour

until he was interrupted by a clear,
loud voice.

A man in Levi's, thick -bearded but
possibly young, a figure of compact

distortion, was standing, shouting at
him. Hey, old man!

In the silence, Mr. Thamler drew down
his tinted spectacles, seeing this

with his effective eye.

Why do you listen to this effete old
man? What has he got to tell you? His

are dry.

He's dead.

He can't come back.

Sammler later thought that voices had
been raised on his side, but no one

tried to defend him.

Most of the young people seemed to be
against him.

I know where the most effective way of
change is, and it isn't in the academy,

and it isn't behind an easel, and it
isn't in theaters.

What we're talking about has to do with
a whole system of values that has got to

be turned over.

He did have what I would call a bad
reaction to the 1960s, and he reflected

this. in his writing, and most famously
in Mr. Samuel's Planet.

Well, I think that a great many writers
have associated themselves with the

youth and with the revolution and with
these feelings.

But that was at an earlier moment. Now
the young don't have very much use for

them or even for literature, and they're
in a highly anti -cultural mood.

They've gotten hold of the idea of the
cultural revolution, which, as far as I

can see, consists in...

not reading and destroying books,
libraries, and other cultural property.

All the books he wrote were about
somebody like himself.

And when he came to Mr. Sandler's
planet, he chose someone much older and

someone who was European because he had
seen the world collapse once.

My father lived through the 1930s and
the upheavals of the German universities

where the Nazi movement was born. And
there was kind of a feeling that an

outbreak of barbarism and savagery could
explode out of the university system in

America. They thought, well, this is
going to happen again. It's all going to

happen again.

At the center of Mr. Thamla's planet is
a Polish intellectual survivor of the

Holocaust who's witness to the
activities of a criminal, a black

very elegant figure, princely figure
he's called, who picks the pockets of

elderly, often Jewish, riders on the
bus.

I really want you to hear this. If you
don't know this passage, this is one of

the most controversial passages in the
work of Mr. Bellow.

What is the matter? What do you want,
said Mr. Sammler?

He was never to hear the black man's
voice.

He no more spoke than a puma would.

What he did was to force Sammler into a
corner beside the long, blackish carved

table, a sort of Renaissance piece.

The pickpocket unbuttoned himself.

Sammler heard the zipper descend.

Then the smoke glasses were removed from
Sammler's face and dropped on the

table. He was directed silently to look
downward.

The black man had opened his fly and
taken out his penis. It was displayed to

Sandler with great oval testicles, a
large tan and purple uncircumcised

thing, a tube, a snake, metallic hairs
bristled at the thick base, and the

tip curled beyond the supporting...

demonstrating hand, suggesting the
fleshy mobility of an elephant's trunk,

though the skin was somewhat iridescent
rather than thick or rough.

The thing was shown with mystifying
certitude, lordliness.

Then it was returned to the trousers.

Samler was released.

He picked up Samler's dark glasses and
returned them to his nose.

What do you think of that passage?

That is a remarkably strange way

of describing the racial other.

And the racial other is presenting his
member in a way that's menacing, in a

that is supposed to be overwhelming,
similar, right?

This is unfortunately racist.

And so what this passage represents is a
kind of white fear of the racial other.

I've been identified with all kinds of
racism. It's all too easy.

What I have strong feelings about is
the...

invasion of every human being to the
depth of his soul by a kind of

violence and the admiration of a cult of
extremism, I

fear it.

You are gathered here this afternoon to
hear the Honorable Elijah Muhammad's

message, which you knew in advance was
titled, Separation or Death.

What I most fear is separatism.

These are white man's laws. We don't
have to obey them.

We are a different people. We have a
different culture. You don't understand

this. We don't want to assimilate
ourselves.

The black guy who was a robber on the
bus, to show them his penis, is more

Roy Jones and the people who were around
at that time and what became known

later as black exploitation, where...
The people promoted stereotypes and so

-called revolutionary black art because
they felt that the idea of nonviolence

was actually an Uncle Tom proposition.

I have never seen, even in Mississippi
and Alabama, mobs as hostile

and as hate -filled as I've seen in
Chicago.

It's definitely a closed society, and
we're going to make it an open society.

And we feel that we have to do it this
way in order to bring the evil out into

the open.

We have never known any minority group
of people in this society itself who

actually changed the majority opinion of
people the way Martin

Luther King did.

in the nonviolent civil rights movement.

And see, Bellow always knew that.

Bellow creates for Thamler a daughter,
and the daughter's ex

-husband is an Israeli.

The pickpocket is spotted by Thamler and

Eisen, the ex -son -in -law.

appears on the scene and he attacks the
black pickpocket.

Eisen now heaved his weapon back over
the shoulder, prepared to slam it

down on the man's skull.

Sandler seized his arm and twisted him
away.

You'll murder him. Do you want to beat
out his brain?

You said, father -in -law. They
quarreled in Russian before the crowd.

You said I had to do something. You said
you had to go.

I must do something.

So I did.

I didn't say to hit him with these
damned irons. I didn't say to hit him at

You're crazy, Ivan. Crazy enough to
murder him.

The pickpocket had tried to brace
himself on his elbows. His body now

his doubled arms. He bled thickly on the
asphalt.

I am horrified, Sammler said.

What happens to the black pickpocket
elicits our sympathy, provides a point

contact between the victimizing of Jews
and the victimizing of blacks.

That's an interesting reading.

And maybe Bellows' intention to show
compassion because Sandler is trying to

this, this vicious attack on this black
character.

Um, to be honest about it, I don't know.

For Bellow, being human is the big
question.

We have sentimental, melodramatic plots
with people who think they're going to

shoot other people, but in the end they
don't.

And yet also introspection that has to
do with the big question.

What is the right way to behave?

This is part of a loop we used to do on
our bikes. We're going to come to the

right -hand turn, and the whole thing
would loop around back to where we

from, and it would take a couple of
hours to do that ride.

He took up mountain biking at the age of

70 -something.

He said his internal age was 17.

He behaved like he was 17.

This woman, the mother of my children,
though she made so much trouble for me,

often reminded me of something Samuel
Johnson said about pretty ladies.

They might be foolish.

they might be wicked but beauty was of
itself very estimable denise was in this

way estimable my mother was susan bellow
she

was the third of my father's wives she
was really smart she was beautiful

altogether magnificent person which is
why my father liked her in the first

place

They met when she came to a reading as
the date of Philip Roth, who was

another very fine writer and more my
mother's age. My mother's, I guess, 18

years younger than my father.

And I'm very sorry that my father stole
his girlfriend. But if he hadn't, I

wouldn't be here.

So it's just one of these things that we
have to accept in life.

They were married in 1961, and I was
born in 1964, and things went

downhill quick between them.

Oh, I said, she may think she's offering
me the blessings of an American

marriage. Real Americans are supposed to
suffer with their wives and wives with

husbands, like Mr. and Mrs. Abraham
Lincoln.

It's the classic U .S. grief, and a
child of immigrants like me ought to be

grateful for a Jew.

It's a step up.

He liked to have a lot of ladies.

My mother caught him at it with the
phone bill.

She said, who is Margaret Stats? And he
said, I don't want to discuss Margaret

Stats with you.

That was pretty much it.

For my dear friend Maggie, in whose
literary and other judgments I have

faith, love Saul.

Humboldt's gift is about two writers.

Humboldt himself, who had a brilliant
first book of poems published, and then

found himself sucked down into
depressions. And Charlie Citrine, who's

protagonist of the book, he's moderately
successful.

He teaches in Chicago, and he's attached
to Humboldt.

I knew that Humboldt would die soon
because I had seen him on the street two

months before, and he had death all over
him.

He didn't see me.

He was gray, stout, sick, dusty.

He had brought a pretzel stick and was
eating it, his lunch.

I can tell you about the pretzel,
particularly.

We were on one side of...

44th, let's say, and Delmar was walking
across on the other side and he sort of

staggered across the street and he was
eating a large pretzel and he was very

distracted. He was very disheveled and
it was very sad.

Saul was so taken aback. There was a
friend and a friend he couldn't reach

to. Delmar was beyond any help at that
point.

And we sat there.

on a bench, and he told me the entire
story of Delmore from beginning to end,

all of it. I would say we were there at
least two hours.

It was very moving. It was about
friendship, and it just happened to be

inspiration for a book.

Delmore Schwartz was born in 1913 in New
York and was appraised

by T .S. Eliot.

the poet of his generation.

This amazing, sudden, precocious
recognition.

But Dunwall also became a symbol of the
artist in America who's doomed by the

pressures of capitalism and has to be
crazy because he's a poet.

People like that have no proper place in
American life.

They just don't.

High tech, high finance, rationally
organized.

kind of society in which people normally
don't have such motives as Humboldt

had. They just don't.

He himself looks upon himself as an
alien object because he is aware that he

does not guide his life by the standards
that prevail.

But in his saner moments, I would have
thought that he would say that art was

something

That life couldn't do without.

And there was not this sort of divorce
at all.

But that art was one of the powers that
made life, life.

I think we all believed that.

I think I still do.

That's the engagement ring that he
bought for me in Chicago.

Surrounded by 13 diamonds. And I used to
think, this is not a lucky sign.

But it's a lovely ring.

You managed to be his girlfriend for a
long time.

How did you do it?

I did it by not marrying him.

My father left maybe a couple months
short of my third birthday.

and they fought forever in the courts of
Cook County so that it became a scandal

even in the courts of Cook County how
long Bellow v. Bellow was taking to

settle, which is all too bad, but over
now.

Putting it simply, if he didn't have so
much money, would Denise be as ferocious

with him?

No, I'm sure that if he didn't have the
money, Denise would not be such a blood

drinker. But she is a blood drinker
because he's got the money.

And she's being extraordinarily
vengeful.

But he's rather grateful to her because
he thinks it is

liberating.

It wakes him up.

It's rousing. And he says to Thaxter, I
think, if I remember correctly, if you

weren't suing me, I'd never get out of
the house at all.

I owe it to her that I'm downtown among
all these people. Aren't they wonderful?

So my father writes this novel, and in
the novel there's this terrible ex -wife

character, Denise, the purple -eyed
castrating bitch, and everyone hates her

sympathizes with Charlie because
Charlie's the hero.

And so what happens in Humboldt's Gift
is just the world

is fellow -like to remake it. It doesn't
bear any relation.

to what actually happened between the
two people. There's no way to defend

yourself against a literary portrait.

In the early 1970s, I was one of that
generation, the second wave of

And I, as well as all many others, we
began rereading our own literature.

We'll never understand what women want.
What do they want? They eat green salad

and drink human blood.

I now know the whole funny, nasty,
perverted truth about Madeline.

Much to think about.

He now had ended.

Yes, that's a famous line, which many of
us picked up on, right? They

eat green salad and they drink human
blood.

I wrote a long piece then of the way I
have come to experience

the writing by this very brilliant man
who is in a constant state of grieving.

The beginning was bellow.

And all the men who were born around
1915, they're all in love with America.

then the war comes and they wake up and
suddenly have the right to be really

enraged over having been marginalized by
being Jewish in a Christian world. It

is completely open to them to say it
like it is. And that grievance

gives them all the vitality in the
world.

It releases this astonishing brilliance
of language.

No holds barred. Now, that grievance, in
my view, becomes pathological.

Once assimilation began to make it less
and less potent, they didn't know what

to do with it, so they turned it on
women.

Denise, Madeline, they were all doing me
in.

And of course, the culture was prodding
it on. It was the time.

You said somewhere, and it sounded
almost like a paraphrase of the famous

quote, what does woman want? He said
he'd never been able to figure out what

women really wanted.

Well, why should he have figured out
what women wanted?

Yeah, and you might say, which women?

Yeah, that's right. It's especially true
about virtuous women.

That is to say, I've never turned over a
fig leaf that didn't have a price tag

on the other side.

Who said that?

Me? Oh.

I was at a party a couple of weeks after
that. A piece was published all those

years ago in the Village Voice, and a
woman came up to me and said to me, I'm

the second Mrs. Bellow. The third Mrs.
Bellow, I want to shake your hand.

It was Susan Glassman.

Reactionary misogynist is the label
that's got itself attached to him.

It has nothing to do with literature,
this idea of misogyny. There have been

many great misogynistic writers and
misanthropic writers.

The only thing I have to say about women
is that my wish always was to make them

happier than I found them.

Do you feel you've succeeded?

Well, yes, I think in a way.

Of course, I'm not a social service
agency.

That's not what the thing is about.

I think in Humboldt's Gifts, the poet
says, or Charlie Citrine says

about the poet,

he wanted to do them good, but they
wouldn't hold still for it.

From insult, Denise went into prophecy.

Well, you wrote a few books. You wrote a
famous play, and even that was half

-ghosted. You associated with people
like von Humboldt's Fleischer. You took

into your head that you were some kind
of artist.

We know better, don't we?

And what you really want is to get rid
of everybody, to tune out and be a law

unto yourself, just you and your
misunderstood heart, Charlie.

You couldn't bear a serious
relationship. That's why you got rid of

children.

There's a kind of brilliance to the way
in which he's caricaturing his own male

characters. They're not just entirely
meant to be taken seriously. And I think

he has a kind of critical energy towards
them. And they are an examination, an

analysis of a kind of sadness, certain
failure of intimacy and intimate

connection. So it's not just a
celebration of sheer male dominance.

critique on and a commentary on this.

kind of arrogant, dominant male.

In the second half of Bellow's life, he
had made it.

He'd tasted everything that American
material life could give you, but it

enough. He wanted something else.

As Charlie Citrine searches for
something else, something outside the

realm.

These are notes that I took from the
Bellows seminars.

I probably sat in on every single class
from the beginning of the

time I was there until 13 years later.

So everything I wrote down, including
jokes and

funny moments, it's all here.

My first meeting with Saul was
memorable.

We met at this academic reception.

I said to him, I'm sorry, I have not
read any of your books.

I'm a mathematician.

His answer was, well, don't worry, I
haven't read your books either.

I found him very seductive.

And very appealing.

But in the meantime, I was beginning to
hear stories about

Saul and women and his previous
marriages.

So it took a while before we started
dating.

Eventually, Saul moved into this
apartment.

The moving day actually coincided with
the day he was

informed that he got the Nobel Prize.

Winning the Nobel Prize, at first it was
very agreeable.

You wear a claw hammer coat and a white
tie. The king and the queen shake your

hand. You dine in a palace.

And you feel a little bit like
Cinderella.

But then 20 people burst into your
bedroom with cameras in the morning

you've gotten out of bed or brushed your
teeth or anything else.

And you realize that you're no longer
your own master.

The only remedy is to hide from this,
which is what I'm doing in Chicago.

a graceful old Hyde Park neighborhood.

It is the kind of place that attracted
Mark Gromer and his wife Crystal, both

students at the University of Chicago.

But that quiet life was disrupted before
dawn today by the sound of crashing

glass as Mark Gromer was pushed, or
perhaps fell, to his death while

to stop two armed burglars who had
entered his apartment.

Area 1 homicide detectives are searching
for two teenage suspects.

A $5 ,000 reward has been offered to
anyone who gives information leading to

their arrest.

The Dean of December has some claims to
be the most somber of Bellow's novels,

in which Bellow fictionalized a real
-life murder that took place in July of

1977.

Now, in the real -life story...

An undergraduate at the University of
Chicago worked in the same restaurant as

the black person who was accused of the
murder.

And he was sure that the man could not
have committed a murder, that the

circumstances were more complicated and
that he was being railroaded.

A not uncommon phenomenon among police
and judiciary in Chicago in the 1970s.

They wanted the case settled.

As soon as the reward was announced,
witnesses came forward, sure enough. And

within 24 hours, two suspects were
arrested on their evidence.

One of these was Lucas Ebrey, Mason's
friend.

After this, the case developed quickly.

Student reaction was also quick. That
was Mason's doing.

Immediately, he organized something.

Cord couldn't tell you what that
something was.

A resistance movement?

A defense campaign?

The radical student line was that the
college waged a secret war to nail the

black man.

The story of what happened in 1977 was a
story of madness.

It was a searing experience for me.

It tore me apart on many levels.

But then Saul Bellow goes, takes his
story and writes it up. Took me into the

book as the student radical, Mason
Zahner in the book.

the nephew of Albert Cord.

The main character in Saul Bellows' new
novel, The Dean's December, is a

journalist passing as a dean.

And because Albert Cord is a better
journalist than academic, he's in

for telling the truth.

The Cord character in the book has
gotten into a great deal of trouble at

university for having written tracks
that are denouncing the corrupt

of Chicago, things that needed to be
said.

Cities were moved.

Emotional states, for the most part,
collective distortions, where human

thrived and suffered, where they
invested their souls in pains and

taking these pleasures and pains as
proof of reality.

Thus, Cain's city built with murder, and
other cities built with mystery or

pride. all of them emotional conditions
and great centers of delusion and

bondage, death.

It seemed to Cord that he had made an
effort to find out what Chicago, USA,

built with.

So here was the emptiness before him,
water, and there was the filling of

emptiness behind him, the slums.

The 10th of December was the book in
which Saul introduced what used to be

called the inner city into contemporary
American fiction.

Here was this American writer, a white
man, a

Jew, conservative or a neoconservative,
call it what you want.

who realized that this was a primary
subject for American concern.

You can't live in Chicago without being
sharply aware of the presence of this

underclass.

People saying, we have to live this, why
do we have to read it too?

Isn't that enough?

I think it's a question of what the
power of imagination still might be.

in a condition like this, and what the
power of word might be.

In the American moral crisis, the first
requirement was to experience what was

happening and to see what must be seen.

The facts were covered from our
perception.

More than they had been in the past?

Yes. The increase of theories and
discourse, itself the cause of new

forms of blindness.

The false representations of
communication led to horrible

consciousness.

Therefore, the first act of morality was
to disinter the reality, retrieve

reality, dig it out from the trash,
represent it anew as art would represent

This is your city. This is your American
democracy.

It's also my city. I have a right to
picture it as I see it.

Well, it seems to me...

Everybody in America needs to read that
passage right now. It seems to me that

that particular rant, well, it's a
classic, you know, bellow rant, is more

valuable today than in the early 80s
when it was written.

When I'm really on to something, I'm in
such a state of excitement that I feel

that I'm galvanized by messages from all
over the place.

I don't sleep well. I'm up in the night.
The thing pass through me.

I feel as though I were some sort of
medium.

I'm unlivable with, my wife tells me,
you have to be very patient with me.

not like that.

He had so many facets to his
personality.

He certainly had a very strong spiritual
side.

Perhaps that was the reason why he was
attracted to me when he learned I was a

mathematician, because of the
spirituality of mathematics.

end of any marriage is a very sad
affair.

It was actually a cold war, and the
scientists were accused

of having imperialistic tendencies
trying to take over the humanities.

He had gone through the experience of
being married to a East European woman,

to a mathematician, and...

he needed to move on.

That was my feeling.

wedding was here.

I can't remember how old I was, 27 or
something like that.

A la bella donna della mia mente.

To Janice, the star without whom I could
not navigate, and to the real Rosie.

I was grateful for the bay.

It gave us an enclosure.

I'm thankful for boundaries. I'm fond of
having the lines drawn around me.

I wasn't here to battle the seas, but to
swim and to float quietly, to open my

mind to Ravelstein.

Often Rosamund towed or carried me in
water just shoulder high.

She put her arms under me.

It was love. I was very much in love
with him, and I felt very lucky

to be with him. I was overwhelmed

at the beginning by this feeling of
bliss.

And he returned that, which was kind of
astonishing.

He would read a George Herbert poem.

Can it be that I am he on whom thy
tempest reigned all night?

He'd been through a lot, and he loved to
play that up in a kind of Othello

manner. I don't think I knew at the time
that that story had probably been told

to many, many, many, many women over
many, many years. But to me, it was the

story of somebody who had been seeking
his other half, and that was me. The

other half was me. So it had a very nice
ending.

We had a lot in common, strangely.

We felt lucky to be with one another.

And the only thing that people thought
strange was the gap in years, but I

think either of us ever felt it.

We were demonstrative. We were laughing.
We were like a couple of kids.

Everything for him was tied into
writing.

When he was writing, all of his energies
were on fire.

And when he was having a good day at
work, sky's the limit for him. I mean,

was just young.

Rabelstein was the last of Bellow's
novels.

It's a sort of fictional memoir of his
friend and colleague at the Committee on

Social Thought, the political
philosopher Alan Bloom.

The novel's about love in that it's
about how he loved this man, Ravelstein,

it's also about the love that he and his
fifth wife had for each other.

It makes for a rather moving novel and a
terrific accomplishment for someone in

his 80s.

We had a memorable visit with Alan Bloom
here.

There was endless conversation, most of
it in the kitchen, all day into much of

the night.

And Salk would have asked that question.
Hey, don't you want to go outside?

Don't you want to see some of my
beautiful trees? There's a 400 -year

maple. There's a hickory in the yard
that's beyond imagining.

What do I need to go see trees? I'm here
to have a conversation with you.

That, of course, was Socrates.

There is no conversation with trees.

But there was endless laughing and
joking and gossiping and

deep... important things that could
change at that kitchen table.

Alan Bloom has written what is probably
the most provocative book of the decade.

The subtitle of his book is How Higher
Education Has Failed Democracy and

Impoverished the Souls of Today's
Students.

The title of the book is The Closing of
the American Mind.

Alan Bloom was a professor of philosophy
who came to the University of Chicago.

from Cornell, where he was terrorized by
demonstrating students, and wrote a

book that Bellow urged him to write. It
was on the bestsellers for a year,

Heidegger and Rousseau aside, because it
said what conservative people felt,

which is that the country was being
destroyed by radicals, and radical

especially.

Ravelstein is an intellectual, a
philosopher. He's a man of the mind.

But he cares about where he shops, how
much he spends on his clothing, what

brands he's wearing, how these two
things sit together.

This is what Bellow has done throughout
his career.

But Ravelstein is bolder, louder, more
colorful.

And the irony here is that he's with a
greater appetite for life just as he's

dying.

The top half of Rabelstein was as lively
as ever, but the disease was gaining on

him, and he knew it as well as any
doctor.

Not only did he talk more about the
memoir I was appointed to write, but he

purer things to tell me, about the
persistence of sexual feelings, for

I've never gotten so hot, he said, and
it's too late in the day for partners.

I have to ease myself.

What do you do?

What else is there?

The thought of it made me flinch.

I'm fatally polluted.

I think a lot about those pretty boys in
Paris.

If they catch the disease, they often go
back to their mothers who care for

them.

A significant part of Bloom's story was
that he was gay, but...

Being gay did not comport with being
conservative.

In Raffelstein, Bellow was the one who
outed Bloom and acknowledged

that he died of AIDS.

There were friends of Bellow's and of
Alan Bloom's who broke off their

relationship with Saul Bellow
completely.

They felt that he had belittled him in
some way.

Well, Saul had the realist's big,
staring, calculating

eye. He's an observer of what Saul
called the near at hand.

There's no way he wasn't going to write
about who he knew, what he knew about

them. What he thought about them.

You can't be a novelist and manage your
reputation at the same time.

You have to forget about managing your
reputation.

The world will take care of it very
nicely without you.

He could never leave the linear at hand.

Why should he?

He was not a nice fellow.

Well, I don't like to hurt anybody's
feelings.

But I'm involved with it myself up to
here.

You know, and people are allowed to,
naturally, their motto is,

oh, I'm, you know, I'm a decent person.

I'm for all the good things.

I'm against all the bad things.

Nobody's going to hang a bad rap on me,
ever.

I'm open, I'm liberal, I'm friendly, I'm
caring, I am not a racist,

I'm a progressive, you know.

It's a highly organized form of self
-congratulation.

Of course, you have to see through that
if

you're writing fiction.

Now the waiter had brought a dish of
chocolate truffles with the bill, and it

broke Ravelstein up to see Rosamund
opening her purse and wrapping up the

peaked chocolates covered with cocoa
dust.

Take them, take every last one, said
Ravelstein, the Jewish comedian.

What made Rosamund scooping up of the
truffles particularly appealing was that

she was a very pretty, well -brought
-up, mannerly, intelligent young woman.

pleased him that she had fallen in love
with an old guy like me.

There's a class of women who naturally
go for old men, he said.

How did you feel to be portrayed in
Ravelstein?

I didn't like it at all.

That's the simple answer, the plain
truth.

When Saul began writing Ravelstein, I
had very much hoped I wouldn't be a part

of the book when it looked like there's
a little pretty character named Rosamund

who was going to be...

Based on me, I was not at all happy.

And especially as the book got further
and further along, I said, oh, for God's

sake, just pull that little minor
character out. It would make me a lot

if she wasn't there at all.

And I think I continued to feel that way
but learned to keep my mouth shut

because you don't talk to a writer about
what he's doing in that way.

And I just had to put up with it. That's
the way.

I thought I didn't enjoy that.

I was always the driver, by the way.

I was always in the passenger seat. In
fact, to this day,

when I come to my car, I go to the wrong
side. I try to get in on the passenger

side.

He insisted on driving even when it was
no longer such a good idea.

We were sitting around a big round table
at this restaurant laughing.

I had a wine bottle in front of me. I
poured myself and I went to Janice's

and she said, no, I'm not drinking.

I said, all right, fine. And then...

They exchanged a look and Saul said, you
can tell them why.

And she said, I'm pregnant.

And that produced a pause in the
conversation.

Saul sat there very proudly and Janet
very happy and the

rest of us startled.

I am about to become a great grandfather
to my own child.

Well, that's a novelty, to say the
least.

Maybe I can have some kind of special
connection with this child.

When I visited him towards the end of
his life, he took me upstairs,

and at the top of the stairs, there were
family pictures.

And he talked about the fact that he was
looking forward to seeing them again.

I always liked that about him, that he
had religious feelings.

And I thought he wouldn't be Saul
without that.

I don't know how he arrived at those.

Those mystical thoughts.

I think it was life love that made him
say that.

He couldn't bear that this miracle could
end.

Am I sorry life is so short? Well, you
come to terms with it, and you had

better.

Americans have a strange sort of
perennial youthfulness which prevents

coming to terms with it, but I'm not all
that American, probably.

Bellow is not read as often.

He has been found offensive.

So he is read less, yes.

Writers are human beings.

We are not gods. We are not omniscient.

Writers can have a lack of vision on a
particular day.

And on a different day, they might have
perfect clarity.

All I know is the sentences on the page.
And the point about those sentences is

that they're adventurous and daring and
they go into all kinds of new places and

some risky places.

It's very mold -breaking, adventurous
writing.

I'm stamped with his presence.

I'm stamped with his prose.

I'm stamped with his influence.

He was a great conquistador, a great
liberator.

And my good friends, with their eyes on
what

it takes, I could kill them.

But the breathers make mistakes.

In pallid walls with nowhere, I'll get
in trouble.

Bye.

Bye. Bye.