Saul Bellow Way is a one-block stretch of West Augusta Boulevard in Humboldt Park, running from Rockwell to Washtenaw, and named, of course, for the Chicago writer, who would have been 100 on June 10. He died in 2005 and received this honorary street seven years later, after his adopted neighborhood, Hyde Park, rejected a proposal for a similar honor.
Which was for the better: Saul Bellow Way feels more fitting in Humboldt Park, Bellow’s first Chicago residence. Assimilated into the landscape and barely noticed, it’s a portrait of unadorned familiarity: rows of two-and-three-flats, facades of red brick and gray stone, a fancy porch railing here and there. Otherwise, unremarkable. In fact, the house Bellow lived in at 9 years old stands out only as less distinctive than the rest, a cement block the color of a baseball glove losing its dye.
A few weeks ago, I rang its buzzer and a woman who lives there came to the door and said no, she didn’t know who Saul Bellow was, but someone doing research on him came by a few years ago. On the sidewalk out front, I stopped a young couple and asked if they knew Bellow and they said they probably should but they didn’t. I asked a dozen more passers-by and not one had a clue who the man on that street sign was. The closest I came to recognition was in the store at the end of his old block, Puerto Rican Food & Liquors. The man at the counter, the owner, Domingo Claudio Jr., grinned: “He was a poet, right? He was a writer — a writer-poet?”
Bellow came here from Montreal in the 1920s, his family lived down the street and he stayed in Chicago most of his life, I explained. The neighborhood was Jewish, Polish and Scandinavian then, full of Eastern European immigrants. And now, Claudio said, Puerto Rican, “though you see more white people — something new!”
Gentrification, I said. Saul Bellow’s Chicago is coming full circle.
Maybe, he said, but still, nobody knows who he is anymore.
Which is a persistent theme in the newspaper and magazine essays and reviews written this spring to acknowledge the Bellow centennial:No one reads him now, his reputation has suffered, he is being lost to history — a highbrow author who regarded himself as a highbrow author and, therefore, hard to like today.
And he was difficult at times — is difficult at times. Particularly in Chicago.
In 1953, the Tribune published a dismissive review of “The Adventures of Augie March,” which a year later would win Bellow his first of three National Book Awards. It is the story of a Chicagoan making his way in the world. Bellow would later say that he wrote it picturing a childhood friend from Augusta. It is prismatic and virtuosic, and though it is arguably the most important book to ever come out of Chicago, the Tribune noted an inconsistent tone, fragmentary style and “shapeless series of episodes.” All of which is accurate, and intentional.
Historically speaking, that review is telling, and in hindsight, reflective of the author’s long, caustic, complicated relationship with his hometown, which, he wrote a friend in the 1940s, “grows more like Siberia all the time.” Even decades later, in “Humboldt’s Gift” — for which he won a 1976 Pulitzer Prize, leading soon after to a Nobel Prize — a character wonders why any successful Chicago writer would “bury himself in the sticks?”
Bellow appreciated the perks of being famous here — dinner with Marilyn Monroe at the Pump Room is not so bad — but he was never much of a booster. He hated Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” poem (too boosterish), and didn’t care for Nelson Algren (too proletariat). At his Nobel press conference, Bellow said Chicago saw itself as a cultural hub and “in its clumsy way” encourages art, but “most of the life in the city is philistine.”
That is not to say he hated Chicago.
He loved it the way a family member loves a family member whom they grow tired of. He refused to take Chicago for granted, or be defined by it. As Philip Roth once wrote: “I wonder if at the outset Bellow shied away from seizing Chicago as his because he didn’t want to be known as a Chicago writer, any more perhaps, than he wanted to be known as a Jewish writer.” Bellow did not want to become a parody, and though he once wrote, somewhat reductively, “Tell me where you come from and I will tell you what you are,” his finest works and even his life carry the fragmentary, contradictory and self-made qualities of Chicago itself.
Like that other combative hometown extraterrestrial, Kanye West, Bellow has always seemed both of Chicago and apart from it. So perhaps it’s not surprising Bellow writes of Chicago as if stepping around a distant planet or gliding through a foreign film. His descriptions of the light here alone are full of otherworldly detail. In “Humboldt’s Gift,” “a ragged sun spreads orange light over the dark shapes of the town, over the branches of the river and the black trusses of bridges.” In a 1983 Esquire essay, he recalled the Chicago Midway in summer, “the light held long after nine o’clock and the ground was covered with clover, more than a mile of green between Cottage Grove and Stony Island,” the clover holding its “color in the dusk.”
Bellow biographer Zachary Leader, whose new book, “The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune,” is the first of a two-part opus, said: “Though Bellow said he never saw the world as clearly and vibrantly as he did in Humboldt Park, and though he is forever associated with urban landscapes, he was so attentive in general that place itself was a key to his work.” You might argue no Chicago writer ever felt Chicago so clearly: Its cold possessing a “headhunter’s power of shrinking your face,” its air saturated with “animal-flavored” smells, its neighborhoods packed with naive, small-town Midwesterners who feel drawn here to make contact “with civilization and culture,” its urbanites who share “a familiar look of summer damnation” on sweltering days.
Outside the city, driving on the monotony of Illinois highways, “the car eats into the distances, you begin gradually to feel that you are riding upon the floor of the continent, the very bottom of it, low and flat …”
But any tour of Bellow’s Chicago starts at Humboldt Park. His father arrived first from Canada, and soon after, with the help of local bootleggers, smuggled the Bellow family across the U.S. border. Bellow said it happened July 4, 1924. He would write about streetcars on Milwaukee Avenue that day, of powder caps taped to the rails by neighborhood children and the subsequent acrid stink of fireworks. He would say that molecules in Chicago felt different, that everything “was louder, rawer, cruder, noisier, hotter, bigger,” that breathing itself “would not be here what it had been” in Quebec. (He became a citizen in 1943, but his father never did.)
His Augusta was unpaved, his Humboldt Park a dusty place where new immigrants sat in their backyards in summer and on hot evenings slept in the park. The family, which moved several times around Humboldt Park and the Ukrainian Village, lived for a while on Le Moyne Street, a short walk to the green. Or a long walk to the lake, a trek Bellow would remember as a pilgrimage of lower-class Chicagoans carrying towels, passing through the Gold Coast and drawing wary upper-class resentment.
Walking his neighborhood streets now, some of those echoes remain, if faintly: Bellow attended Tuley High School, which is now Roberto Clemente Community Academy and dominates the corner of Western and Division. The Russian bathhouses on Division that he once wrote vividly about (“superheated subcellars full of Slavonic cavemen”) are closed, but signs along Division advertise carnitas and support centers. On nearby Cortez Street, where the Bellows moved into a larger home, a bedraggled elderly man walked an ancient bicycle, padding along the pavement, passing well-heeled hipsters headed in the direction of the Empty Bottle, which sits at the end of the street.
These are not bad places for a young family to move in 2015. Still, Bellow, never the sentimental sort, regarded his old neighborhood as a kind of nostalgic slum — as Chicago at its ugliest. And later, when its ethnicity transformed radically, he saw Humboldt Park as “unsavory,” his oldest son, Greg Bellow, told me.
Saul Bellow was never a generous sort.
Indeed, James Atlas, his first biographer (“Bellow: A Biography”), showed little fondness for him, and even Leader’s new biography — which reads like a kinder correction to Atlas’ jaundiced eye — is occasionally a picture of a soulless striver, an increasingly renowned, paranoid man who liked flattery but showed little respect to those who flatter. Perhaps because Bellow was always thoroughly himself, an autodidact who understood the value of being self-made. Or, as Atlas put it: “Bellow may have been a Midwestern provincial, but he was a provincial with a plan.” His early years were a cobbled-together Chicago hustle: He caddied at the Sunset Ridge Country Club in Northfield and worked at Encyclopedia Britannica downtown; took the streetcar to his job selling shoes at Goldblatt’s at 47th Street and Ashland, worked as an usher at the Auditorium Theatre; attended the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, transferred to Northwestern University in Evanston. In the late 1930s he lived with his first wife, Anita (Greg’s mother), in her family’s Ravenswood home, writing in their back room and strolling to the Sanitary Canal (now the north branch of the Chicago River) when he required a break.
Separating Bellow from his body of work would never be for the faint of heart, his novels so full of thinly-veiled renderings of friends and family, his famous opening of “Augie March” a kind of autobiography itself, rife with contradictions: “I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first to be admitted, sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”
He was sensitive to corruption and less so to race, exuberantly inventive but rooted in classics.
He found a spiritual home in Hyde Park.
He once told this newspaper he couldn’t walk a block there without being reminded of its history, of friends and acquaintances dead and alive. He lived there from the early 1960s until the early 1990s — longer, if you take into account his undergraduate years. As a student he stayed in boarding houses on Kenwood Avenue (“to be thoroughly bohemian was best”); as a young newlywed he lived in a cheap apartment on Everett Avenue, across from the Museum of Science and Industry (“the quintessential post-graduate, minimal existence,” Greg Bellow said). But when “Herzog” — his 1965 National Book Award winner about a floundering academic from Montreal who goes through divorce and lands in Hyde Park — became a best-seller, Bellow bought a condo across from Promontory Point. He was teaching at the University of Chicago, but he was also a star, that rarest kind of American writer — a literary novelist whose name is well-known to people who do not read. (Indeed, Bellow often told a story about being honored at city hall by Richard J. Daley. Asked by a reporter if he had read “Herzog,” the mayor replied: “I’ve looked into it.”)
Hyde Park’s seriousness and austerity was becoming to Bellow. Not that he was misty-eyed about the place: “Herzog” has descriptions of Woodlawn (“smelling of mud and decay, dog turds; sooty facades, slabs of structural nothing”), Hyde Park apartments (“spacious, comfortably dowdy”) and school children at the museum (“redolent of milk and pee”) as harsh as anything he wrote about the city. Still, in this famously bookish community, he became a cornerstone. Later, when he lived in the tony Cloisters on Dorchester, his building was home to three other Nobelists, including economist Milton Friedman and Allan Bloom, the philosopher/author of “The Closing of the American Mind” (and inspiration for the title character of “Ravelstein,” Bellow’s last novel). Though Bellow would eventually move into the apartment building next door, the walk to his office, at the university’s prestigious Committee on Social Thought, remained unchanged for years, sounding even somewhat like a metaphor for his entire history with Chicago itself.
Said Leader: “If you believe in the footsteps school of biography, it’s actually a vital walk. He would leave for the office around noon or so and pass Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, Rockefeller Chapel, pass the old Seminary Bookstore. He would go down Dorchester to 59th and walk along the Midway, and from there, he would see the university culture he knew on one side and a huge black inner-city Chicago on the other side.”
Given Bellow’s meager beginnings, to read interviews, essays and speeches from his later years — the fine new nonfiction collection “There is Simply Too Much to Think About,” is a good starting point — is to develop an image of a hypocrite frightened by race, frustrated by change itself, academically (a student of the Great Books tradition at the University of Chicago, he resisted bringing diversity to the canon) and demographically. He would paint himself as closed-off and remarkably callow, claiming Chicago slums “are best seen from the elevation of the ninety-five story sky-top restaurant” and even describing his own apartment as an austere barricade against the poverty to his west: “My bookish defenses are inadequate.”
Later, after moving to Edgewater in the mid ’70s — 5901 N. Sheridan Road, the Thorndale Beach North condos — at a low point in that neighborhood’s decline, he would compare a cold walk on the North Side to “a winter safari.” Paired with the lingering cringe-worthiness of “Henderson the Rain King,” his 1959 novel set in Africa (written before he visited), and the casual instances of racism mentioned in Atlas’ 2000 biography, it’s no surprise that the 2007 proposal for an honorary street in Hyde Park was quashed on the grounds of Bellow’s own paper trail. And yet, for his part, in the decades before his death, Bellow would say nothing distinguished Chicago now anyway, that being a writer in Chicago meant little, to him and Chicago. He would have seen the poetry of his honorary street in Humboldt Park, his name jutting from a street post, as unrecognized as the other honorary street names around it, swallowed up by his hometown.
Taking a cue from Leader, I walked in Bellow’s footsteps the other day. I started at the Cloisters, still grand and solid-looking. The security guard at the front didn’t know much about Bellow but the name was familiar to her from walking tours that come through, she said. I stopped an elderly couple leaving who said, disappointedly, they moved into the building too late to know him. I followed them out and turned south on Dorchester. The day was impossibly peaceful and quiet, the soccer fields to the west a bright green.
I followed 59th Street west, passing children at recess outside U. of C.’s Laboratory Schools, then crossed Woodlawn, the bing-bong-bing of towering Rockefeller Chapel sounding across the Midway — which is manicured now, prettier than when Bellow, in his 70s, never left home without a $20, in case of mugging. I came to Foster Hall, home of the Committee on Social Thought, a building more green with vines now than gray with stone. The building was overheated for May and smelled musty and old. There were posters noting an upcoming lecture on Bellow’s centennial, but I noticed nothing more with his name. The offices were closed, and the floor was dead silent. I read a bulletin board, which listed classes on Henry James, Nietzche, “the novels of individualism.” It was the only place in Chicago I could imagine Bellow feeling at home.
Twitter @borrelli
