Rather than dig up some of Bellow’s more reliable academic pals, I went to see an old schoolfriend of his, a criminal lawyer whom I had better call Iggy. He was friendly. We were soon on first-name terms. ‘You come all the way from London to talk with Saul?’ he asked. Yes, it takes all sorts. Pushing seventy, pouchy, paunchy, yet still ignited with the American vigour, Iggy elegantly explained that there might be the odd ‘telephonic interruption’ from his clients — the fuddled rapists, bail-jumpers and drug-dealers he represented. At once there was a telephonic interruption. I looked round the file-heaped office. Lawyers Make It Stand Up In Court, said a sign. ‘Will you shut up and listen?’ said Iggy to his client.
Iggy and Saul studied at Tuley High. ‘Ninety per cent of us came from illiterate immigrant families. They had a wonderful faculty corps there. At the last reunion dinner we had Saul come along. And you know? Of that 90 per cent, 90 per cent of them — no, 98 per cent — had made it. We’d all made it.’
Bellow had also told me about Tuley High. Fleeing the pogroms, his parents had left St Petersburg (he calls it ‘Pettersburg’) for Montreal in 1913. Bellow himself arrived two years later, the only child of four to be born on the far side of the Atlantic. (His writing, one reflects, has much of the candour, the adultness of the Russian voice.) In 1924 they moved to Chicago, to the slums of the Northwest Side. Bellow’s father was an onion-dealer and part-time bootlegger.
‘There was something oppressive’, said Bellow, ‘about being an alien, a hybrid — but then everyone was. You knew you were always going to have dirt under your fingernails, but this is a natural twentieth-century feeling. There was no bar to learning. And I wondered — by what right or title was I reading great books, while also discovering America: pool halls, ball parks. It was one of the worst slums in Chicago. By the time I was twelve, I had seen everything.’ During the Depression the likes of Saul and Iggy lived off welfare hand-outs and municipal !OUs. ‘But we came through,’ Iggy affirmed. ‘Even during that bad time we were full of energy and hope. We made it.’
I asked Iggy what he thought of Bellow’s portrayal of Chicago chicanery. ‘When it comes to corruption in Chicago’, he said with deep satisfaction, ‘Saul is a child. It’s much much worse than he says.’ Iggy ought to know. He was disbarred and jailed, after a lucrative misunderstanding, many years ago. ‘In my opinion’, he said, ‘the best of Saul’s titles is The Dangling Man [sic]. I have the first edition. Someone told me it’s worth $400! When he dies it’ll be worth even more. So I say to Saul, I say, “When you gonna die!”‘
Has Iggy made it? His generation was among the most amibitious and resilient that America has ever produced. The slums of the Northwest Side still exist, but there aren’t many bookish Russians and Czechs and Poles queueing on the library steps. They watch TV these days. And they’re all just Americans now.
The next evening I met up with Bellow at the Cultural Center in the Old Library Building. Today’s Activities’, said the billboard wistfully: ‘Chicago as a Literary City’. I had spent the day strolling round Chicago and wondering what literature or art or culture could seriously be expected to do about the place.
‘The Dorm That Dripped Blood’ announced the cinema sign. ‘The Hounds of Hell dogs leaping up at you in 3d’. In the beanery thin old ladies in tracksuits serve enormous meals to the working people of Chicago, tribally gruff, hoarse, one-lining. ‘I switched from Ultrason to Coherent,’ booms a diner. Does he mean corporations or cigarette brands? At the next table a young couple discuss a portly paperback. ‘I’m getting into Kate now,’ says the girl. ‘Kate’s gonna marry Greg. That’s what I think. Or David. She’s pregnint but she won’t make a commitmint.’
I went to see the Impressionist collection at the Institute of Art. It rivals that of the Jeu de Paume — but there is a tangible air of donation, patronage, social power, all the tax-exempt American money that goes into religion, opera, academic quangos, writing fellowships. A highschool teacher was telling her class about seurats La Grande Jatte. ‘It’s set on a hot afternoon in Paris a century ago, long before air-conditioning. So what people used to do was, they…’ A businessman stared at a Monet. ‘First class,’ he decided, before moving on.