Isaac Rosenfeld and Chanler Chapman
IN HIS FOREWORD to a collection of Isaac Rosenfeld’s essays, An Age of Enormity, Bellow described his boyhood friend, dead at the age of thirty-eight:
Isaac had a round face and yellowish-brown hair which he combed straight back. He was nearsighted, his eyes pale blue, and he wore round glasses. The space between his large teeth gave his smile an ingenuous charm. He had a belly laugh. It came on him abruptly and often doubled him up. His smiles, however, kindled slowly. He liked to look with avuncular owlishness over the tops of his specs. His wisecracks were often preceded by the pale blue glance. He began, he paused, a sort of mild slyness formed about his lips, and then he said something devastating. More seriously, developing an argument, he gestured like a Russian-Jewish intellectual, a cigarette between two fingers. When he was in real earnest, he put aside these mannerisms, too. A look of strength, sometimes of angry strength, came into his eyes.
For Bellow, as for many others, Rosenfeld was an irresistible presence, a Yiddish Puck or Cherubino, the winning, mischievous child-man. Rosenfeld stayed with Bellow all the way through their youth, from Tuley High School to the University of Chicago to the University of Wisconsin, where Bellow studied anthropology and Rosenfeld philosophy. (Before Wisconsin, Bellow completed his undergraduate degree at Northwestern; Rosenfeld remained at Chicago.) They both moved to New York around the same time: Rosenfeld came in 1941; Bellow, after a number of trips to the city during the war years, arrived with Anita and Greg in 1945.
When they were boys together in Chicago, Bellow and Rosenfeld were nicknamed Kamenev and Zinoviev, after the Soviet Jewish commissars. A rumor was even going around Madison that Isaac was Trotsky’s nephew; Isaac had started it himself, as a joke, but people began to believe it. Isaac adored the fierce dishevelment of Russian passion, which he saw as very close to the Jewish style. He once jokingly suggested that Chekhov actually wrote in Yiddish, but that this fact had been concealed to make him more universally appealing. In New York in the forties, Bellow, Rosenfeld, and Oscar Tarcov, another Tuley High School pal, were known as “the Chicago Dostoevskyans.”
Rosenfeld’s own fiction was not turbulently Russian in temper but rather dreamy and gentle. His novel Passage from Home, published in 1946 when Rosenfeld was twenty-eight, received rapturous reviews from the New York intelligentsia, including Diana Trilling, a very tough critic. The book was tender and Proustian, told through the eyes of a small boy, befitting Rosenfeld’s image as the perpetual child. In its opening pages the fourteen-year-old narrator gets drunk on one too many cups of wine at a Passover seder. He has the otherworldly privilege of boyhood, which Rosenfeld himself clung to throughout his life.
Rosenfeld’s own dreaminess, his luftmensch nature, was a reaction against his father, who pushed him to be an overachiever, a little boy genius. Bellow described Sam Rosenfeld in “Zetland,” his fictional portrait of Isaac, as “white-jowled, a sarcastic bear.” Sam was easily wounded, and authoritarian when offended. Behind his back his son called him the General or the Commissar. Isaac played the flute and read Kant, obedient to his father’s wish that he should pursue music and high culture. He felt stunted, a deformed prodigy. Throughout his short life Rosenfeld yearned after the pure, untroubled childhood he never had. At Rosenfeld’s core, writes his biographer Steven Zipperstein, was an “emotional hunger incapable of being sated.”
Bellow adored Rosenfeld but also scorned his innocence. Bellow suggested in “Zetland” that Isaac was “virtually a Franciscan, a simpleton for God’s sake, easy to cheat.” Isaac did play the holy fool at times. In one letter to Tarcov, from November 1941, Isaac wrote, “I will say to you and to Saul, and to every body, believe in God. That means believe, have faith in yourselves, love, be cheerful. . . . Paste it on Saul’s forehead, paste it on your own.”
In a comic piece he wrote for the college newspaper when they were U. of C. undergraduates, Isaac called Bellow Raskolnikov, while he described himself as “simper[ing] self-consciously.” Bellow played the role of ruthless Morrie, while Rosenfeld was the young Saul being wised up by his more worldly older brother. Bellow wrote to Tarcov in September 1937 about “the renaissance of Isaac,” who, thanks to Bellow, was “beginning to spring a little gristle in his marrow. Who knows, he may develop bone if he continues.”
Rosenfeld was a hopped-up performer, a card. When he and Bellow were at the University of Chicago, they performed surreal comic sketches in the library (“foaming rabbis rub electrical fish”) and composed together a famous Yiddish parody of Eliot’s Prufrock (a sample: “ikh ver alt, ikh ver alt, / Un di pupik vert mir kalt”: “I grow old, I grow old, / And my belly-button is getting cold”). In “Zetland” the Rosenfeld character walks down the street practicing string quartets: he “made the violin stops inside his fuzz-lined gloves and puffed the music in his throat and cheeks. . . . He did the cello in his chest and the violins high in the nose.” He is Bellow’s version of Rameau’s nephew, a freak of nature with a happy talent for imitation and parody.
Rosenfeld was a talented humorist. Zipperstein cites a letter that Rosenfeld wrote to his high school girlfriend Freda Davis (who returned to him shortly before his death, after his marriage had broken up). In the letter, Rosenfeld defines matzoh as
An old Roman article of diet introduced into Roman life by POMPEIUS ATTLATICUS MANISHEWITZ in the year 57 B.C. The Romans used Matzoh for fuel, they built barricades and bridges out of it. Many of the bridges built by the early Romans out of Matzoh are still standing. Matzoh was also widely used as food and it formed the chief article of diet among invalids, prisoners, imbeciles, and Senators. The Roman Matrons of the Patrician Class found it indispensable to the instruction of their young daughters.
Isaac’s passion for Freda was like Bellow’s for Eleanor Fox, a rapturous first love that both men dwelt on later with intense nostalgia. “ ‘Yet there lives the dearest freshness deep down things’—Freda,” Rosenfeld wrote in his journal. But Isaac, like Bellow, moved on romantically. In 1940, in Chicago, Isaac met Vasiliki Sarantakis, a petite “pagan beauty” with a wild streak and “Harpo Marx hair.” “She wears earrings, looks Jewish, acts crazy, and I think the world of her,” Isaac wrote to Oscar Tarcov. He added that “she is quite easygoing, hedonistic to a fault, at the exclusion of certain moral, intellectual and metaphysical values.” Isaac wanted the hedonism; he saw in it a promise of freedom.
In another letter to Tarcov, from March 1941, Isaac voiced his misgivings about studying philosophy. Melville and Whitman sparked him: “I have been reading Moby-Dick (Have you read it?),” he wrote:
It is a magnificent book, devil brewed, metaphysical and compassionate. Between Moby-Dick and Leaves of Grass, and a few other books, so full of soul, may I some day discover them all, there is enough to make all philosophy stemming from the U. of C. ridiculous.
Rosenfeld recounted that the previous night, after reading Whitman, “It grew late, and I had to return to my paper. There it lay, curled in the typewriter, a nice long neat list of definitions and postulates. I broke out laughing!”
Despite his doubts about the field, Rosenfeld accepted a fellowship to study philosophy at New York University, beginning in the fall of 1941. Isaac and Vasiliki shared a disorderly lifestyle in New York: an open marriage in a series of cramped, dirty apartments. At first they lived on the Upper West Side, with their bathtub in the kitchen and cockroaches leaping from the toaster. Later, they moved to the Village, the city’s teeming, unkempt intellectual and artistic center.
Before the end of his first year at NYU, Rosenfeld dropped out of school and started to make his way as a writer, while Vasiliki worked as a secretary to bring home the money. He started with the trade journal Ice Cream World, but quickly moved up. Rosenfeld’s essays and stories began to come out in Partisan Review, the place that counted most, and he reviewed books for the New Republic. “It was still a shame and a disgrace to work for the New Republic—because they had defended the Moscow trials,” Rosenfeld’s friend David Bazelon recalled in an essay.
“Isaac was my friend from the time we were boys,” Bellow said in a 1984 interview. “He became successful in New York when he was young and fresh from Chicago, as a reviewer and essayist. He was in a lot of the journals and magazines and was doing very well. But then he went through analysis with someone following the program of Reich.” Wilhelm Reich, whose influence on Bellow I have already mentioned, was most famous for his invention of the orgone box, a container in which one was supposed to sit naked and absorb orgone energy. The goal was to achieve total orgasm, a sexual fulfillment that would release the self from its lockstep adherence to society’s norms, the conventions that clamp us down and rob us of erotic and spiritual wholeness.
For all the crankish lunacy of his later career, which was replete with bizarre inventions like the cloud-buster (a rainmaking device), Reich was a serious thinker. With his Weimar toughness, he judged that liberalism had shown itself a patent failure, whereas fascism had succeeded in harnessing the primitive energies deep within human beings. Reich, the Austrian-Jewish refugee from the Nazis, would compete with fascism for the human soul. Fascism was authoritarian through and through; Reich wanted to crush the authoritarian strain that runs so deep in us. His patients screamed, raged, acted out their craziest passions so that they could be free.
Reichian therapy was sometimes brutal: the analyst vigorously massaged patients to release them from deadening “character armor.” The patient’s defenses had to be broken down through verbal attack so that he could be freed from his rigid day-to-day character. In “Charm and Death,” an unpublished Bellow manuscript, the Rosenfeld character gets abused by his Reichian therapist, and not just verbally: he comes out of the office covered in bruises.
Isaac, Bellow remembered in his 1984 interview, “became a fanatical Reichian,” and even “applied Reich to the raising of his children. He built an orgone box. Finally he became a kind of Dostoyevskian clown. He was ruined by this stuff. He got a divorce and was leading a radical sex life. It had a terrible effect, and finally his life on Barrow Street just blew up.” Bellow added, “I didn’t want to lose him when all that was happening. So I went through the analysis too, just to stay close. It was very difficult. You know, I think Isaac thought I was a patsy for sentimentality and that Freud and Reich would make one hard.”
Even though he sometimes spoke of his Reichian therapy as just an effort to be loyal to Isaac, Bellow’s long commitment to Reichian ideas was a major part of his life. He knew he was a rigid, nervous man, often competitive and vain, carrying on unsatisfying affairs with women. His character armor was thick, encrusted. Part of Bellow wanted liberation, a breakthrough into Reichian orgasmic fulfillment. But he could never be liberation-minded in the way that Rosenfeld was. Rosenfeld made himself vulnerable with his open marriage to Vasiliki—an unthinkable arrangement for Bellow, who was incapable by nature of Isaac’s unruly bohemianism. Yet he admired, he loved, Rosenfeld’s boldness.
Not just Rosenfeld’s chaotic sexuality but his other drastic life choices show him to be, unlike Bellow, daring and incautious. In 1944 he quit a job as assistant literary editor of the New Republic to work for a few months on a barge in New York harbor. Rosenfeld was an incendiary writer, too, at least once. His essay “Adam and Eve on Delancey Street,” published in 1949 in Commentary, caused a scandal. Rosenfeld described an eager crowd watching “kosher fry beef,” a Jewish substitute for bacon, being cooked at a store on New York’s Lower East Side. Salivating at the sight of so much delectable meat, the crowd lines up for egg creams instead. Rosenfeld went on to speculate that kosher dietary law has its roots in sexual taboo: to mix milk and meat is to dangerously mingle female and male. Kashrut, Rosenfeld claimed, perfectly expresses the sexual repression so central to the orthodox Jewish household. The article provoked outrage from some respectable Jewish quarters, and the well-known rabbi and author Milton Steinberg campaigned vigorously against Rosenfeld. All told, the affair enhanced Rosenfeld’s brave bohemian reputation.
Rosenfeld, the pudgy, round-faced, and bespectacled prodigy, was the eternal boy. His happy animation made those around him feel free. Irving Howe remembered his “air of yeshiva purity” and added, “Isaac made me feel the world is spacious.” But in his thirties Rosenfeld himself was feeling trapped and melancholic. He was separated, on and off, from Vasiliki and their two children. In his letters and journals, gaiety alternated with despair. He wrote to Tarcov in April 1951 that “I feel much more alive and younger than I’ve been in years. . . . Underneath it all, there’s still a certain desperateness, but I hope it will pass.” Two years later, again to Tarcov, he lamented, “I feel 500,000 years older. The prolonged crisis of the last 18 months has taken that much out of me. I’ve decided to try it with Vasiliki and the kids again. Wish us well.”
Rosenfeld wrote in one of his notebooks, “I have attacks of hatefulness during which I can see only the evil in others and am overcome by fear. At such times I think all men are unconscious murderers.” But, he added, “out of this hatred and panic fear, I must release my love for men and women.” Rosenfeld filled pages in his journal with Freudian analyses of Crime and Punishment. He wanted to break free of his guilt the way Dostoevsky’s murderer does at the end of the novel. But he never found liberation.
In October 1955, close to the end (Rosenfeld died in July 1956), he wrote, “It’s awful, being alone in Chicago.” In his desperate last journal, Isaac laments that he cannot love Vasiliki and asks, “Maybe I have learned something? That I have been wrong for the last 7–9 years. One does not, must not live by or for passions alone: that a life of such a kind is destructive?”
Rosenfeld wound up dying alone, in a rented room in Chicago—the kind of dingy place, one of Rosenfeld’s friends said, where you could imagine Raskolnikov sharpening his axe. Bellow wrote in his Partisan Review obituary for his friend, “He died in a seedy, furnished room on Walton Street, alone—a bitter death to his children, his wife, his lovers, his father.”
When he was an undergraduate at Chicago, Rosenfeld had performed with the Compass Players, a student troupe that included Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and Shelly Berman. One of his skits was peeling an onion with intense silent concentration, only to discover nothing at the center. A tour de force of comedy that ends in baffled frustration: such was Rosenfeld’s own tragic course.
“Zetland” has a unique ending for a Bellow story: it concludes with an elated wish fulfillment. Astonished by his reading of Moby-Dick, Zetland quits NYU with heartfelt support from Lottie, the Vasiliki character. The story concludes, “Lottie was always for him, and she supported him against his father, who of course disapproved.” Bellow airbrushes out of his story the heated quarrels between Isaac and Vasiliki, along with the fact that their marriage cracked up. To have published more of “Charm and Death” would have been to show Rosenfeld as a victim, Bellow knew, and perhaps also as an unpleasant manipulator at times (the way he appears in Wallace Markfield’s novel To an Early Grave, the basis for Sidney Lumet’s 1968 movie Bye Bye Braverman). He needed Isaac to remain pure, an innocent to the end.
Rosenfeld also wrote about Bellow, in veiled form. In his short story “King Solomon,” the Israelite monarch is transparently Bellow, transformed into a fat, pinochle-playing old man who can still attract women. The story is a slow-moving, pomp-dusted fable, full of creaky oriental trappings and heavily suggesting Rosenfeld’s envy of his more successful friend.
Bellow had an intense sense of guilt about Rosenfeld’s failures and his own triumphs. “I loved him, but we were rivals,” he wrote in a 1956 letter. Bellow admits that he was sometimes “insufferable, and not at all a constant friend.” (“I was naughty with Saul,” Vasiliki confessed to a mutual friend.)
In March 1952, Bellow wrote Tarcov that he was “tired of being envied or grudged every bit of success or imagined success,” and complained about Isaac’s “not too well hidden hope that I fall on my face.” Later, Bellow felt guilty over his success with Augie March, while Rosenfeld expressed his disappointment with Bellow’s novel. Rosenfeld remarked to the writer and editor Monroe Engel in the fifties, “Someday Saul or I will win the Nobel Prize.” When Bellow won the Nobel, decades after Rosenfeld’s death, he is reported to have said, “It should have been Isaac.”
Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, the novel he completed shortly after Rosenfeld’s death, was both a reaching out to Isaac and a way of getting beyond him. In a nod to Rosenfeld’s “King Solomon,” Isaac appears as the African King Dahfu. But the hero, Eugene Henderson, was based on Chanler Chapman, Bellow’s landlord and friend while he was teaching at Bard. Bellow discovered in Chapman the antidote to Isaac’s powerful lingering presence. Chapman lived in the present with gusto, never plagued by the shadows of failure that clung to Rosenfeld.
“THERE ARE TIMES when I must, and literally do, howl,” Bellow wrote to Henry Volkening, his literary agent, about his Reichian exercises in 1956, when he was going out behind his cottage in Reno and shouting into the desert air. Henderson is one long howl, an outburst, a letting go. “The worse my personal disasters became,” Bellow said, “the funnier Henderson seemed to get.”
Henderson is an adventure story about an American traveling to the other side of the world—deepest, darkest Africa—in an effort to find reality, meaning, and self-knowledge: in short, all the therapeutic big ideas of the fifties (and now), ideas that Bellow burlesques in his novel but also takes seriously. He plays existential anxiety for laughs, yet we are also drawn by Henderson’s quest. There is nothing somber about Bellow the author of Henderson, unlike the European modernists and existentialists who had impressed Americans with their high sobriety—and unlike Bellow himself in Seize the Day. In Henderson, Bellow proves that an American Heart of Darkness will look very different from its Conradian precursor: strong and lusty, absentminded and sometimes cloddish, full of crazy light and self-pleased guffaws.
Where is authenticity to be found? Bellow asked in Henderson, and implied that the New York intellectuals, with their love of high modernism, were looking for it in the wrong place. The authentic is not at the bottom of the abyss with Conrad’s sublime-solemn Kurtz. Bellow’s stance has nothing in common with those of Beckett or Kafka. He turns decisively away from the modernist cult of being in extremis that Rosenfeld, like most of the Partisan Review writers, had taken so seriously. Bellow is instead a comic novelist, looking for freedom anywhere he can find it. Eugene Henderson becomes Bellow’s brawny exemplar of personality: ready, even eager, to make any mistake in the hope of answering the unruly open question that is his life.
Henderson was also Bellow’s first WASP hero, and he broke the usual mold of such characters in fifties fiction. Henderson’s midlife crisis comes out with garrulous and unembarrassed frankness, rather than in the poignant, yearning manner of John Cheever’s alienated suburbanites or John Updike’s Rabbit (Rabbit, Run came out in 1960, the year after Henderson).
The clownlike Henderson, a physical giant with great stamina, is large in feeling, passionately frustrated. He is as unflappable as Don Quixote, able to shrug off his failures and plow ahead. Henderson leaves his wife and children in Connecticut—“Christ, I’ve got plenty of kids”—and takes a brave and aimless trip to Africa. He wants to get as far away as he can from everything he knows. Henderson is fifty-five, about ten years older than his author, and is recklessly determined to bash his head against reality, willy-nilly—to see what’s out there, and what better place than Africa?
Years later, Bellow would visit Kenya with his Henderson-like friend Dave Peltz, who was considering putting money into some beryllium mines. On the streets of Nairobi, by pure chance, Bellow ran into the artist Saul Steinberg. Bellow and Steinberg then took a river cruise together and were gaped at by a hungry crocodile, whereupon the novelist imagined a fitting news headline: “Crocodile Eats Two Sauls.” This was as close as Bellow ever came to a harrowing African adventure. He made up Henderson out of whole cloth, though he took some snippets from Sir Richard Burton and other storied travelers. Bellow’s old anthropology teacher at Northwestern, Melville Herskovits, didn’t approve: Africa was too serious a subject for a writer to be inventing tribal names and customs, he said. Bellow had clearly drawn on H. Rider Haggard and Burton as well as anthropology—in one letter he asked a friend to find for him a copy of Burton’s A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome, since “I need it for some of the details.”
“In my own way, I worked very hard. Violent suffering is labor, and frequently I was drunk before lunch,” Henderson marvelously says about his life before Africa. Well over six feet and two hundred pounds, Henderson has the strength of a linebacker but remains, at bottom, a big child. He avoids both alcohol and sex during his time in Africa. The huge homunculus Henderson, a shy, polite fellow for all his bluster, resembles the Odysseus who shrinks before Nausicaa. He lacks, however, Odysseus’s skill at diplomacy. He hears a voice inside him calling, “I want, I want, I want!”—but what he wants, he doesn’t begin to know.
Henderson gives us a loud, moaning catalogue on the book’s first page: “The facts begin to crowd me and soon I get a pressure in the chest. A disorderly rush begins—my parents, my wives, my girls, my children, my farm, my animals, my habits, my money, my music lessons, my drunkenness, my prejudices, my brutality, my teeth, my face, my soul!” Rosenfeld had that same pressure in the chest, the same sharp sense that his life was a mountain of grief. Despite his Reichian practices, he could never find the release that Henderson discovers on his African trip.
Not every reader will love Henderson, self-centered buffo that he is. “Why should I care about this guy?” asked my wife when I showed her the first page of the book. “He’s an asshole.” Yet Henderson exists in a world of his own, head, heart, and soul—like Don Quixote, who can be just as bullish and brutal. He exults in harsh reality even when it rubs him raw. “When I was in the Army and caught the crabs,” he says, his fellow soldiers washed him, shaved him naked, and left him “bald and shivering,” “prickling between the legs and under the arms, raging, laughing, and swearing revenge.” Henderson remembers “that beautiful sky, and the mad itch and the razors; and the Mediterranean, which is the cradle of mankind; the towering softness of the air; the sinking softness of the water, where Ulysses got lost, where he, too, was naked as the sirens sang.” This hearty yet lyrical barracks humor plops us back in the world of the Spanish picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes, of Smollett, and of Fielding. The gross bodily satire is that of an overgrown boy who delights in health and who hears the song of wind, water, and sky.
Henderson finds a mentor during his African trip: Dahfu, ruler of the Wariri tribe (invented by Bellow). Dahfu has captured a lioness that becomes his spiritual companion. The king cavorts with and caresses the beast, and even clings to her belly for a ride around the perimeter of her cell. He teaches the terrified Henderson to conquer his fear of the lioness, to play with her as he would a cat.
Bellow’s son Greg, in his moving memoir of his father, argues convincingly that Dahfu represents Rosenfeld, Bellow’s risk-taking alter ego. Critics have noticed that Dahfu sounds like a Reichian therapist, expounding ideas about breathing and physiognomy similar to Reich’s. Bellow first encountered Reich through Rosenfeld, Reich’s truest disciple among their circle of friends. The proud African king was Bellow’s idealized image of what Rosenfeld longed for but could never achieve, a brave freedom.
Dahfu says to Henderson, speaking of the gifts the lioness will bring him, “Oh, you have accomplished momentous avoidances. But she will change that. She will make consciousness to shine. She will burnish you. She will force the present moment upon you.” Dahfu tasks Henderson with opening himself up to the present, something that the habitually cagey and cautious Bellow could never do. Like the lost Rosenfeld, Dahfu sees into Henderson’s core.
Dahfu will eventually be killed by a lion during a hunt. Henderson becomes a helpless spectator to the tragedy of Dahfu, which he can do nothing to prevent; he has been so absorbed in his own quest for selfhood that he becomes useless to Dahfu. There is an autobiographical message here: Henderson reads like a critique of the way Bellow’s own personal struggles eclipsed his duty to his closest friend.
Praised be rashness is Dahfu’s lesson—in this he echoes the rash Rosenfeld—and there is something rash in the mighty undirected gusto of Bellow’s novel. The book ends with Henderson headed back home, on an airplane that has stopped in Newfoundland for refueling. On the flight he cuddles a Persian orphan in his arms, and he also has with him, outlandishly, a lion cub from Africa. Now he takes eager laps around the Newfoundland ice, with the plane gleaming above him. Bellow seems to have forgotten that Henderson is returning to his wife and children, the family he has given so little thought to during his travels. The end of the novel avoids the question that Bellow himself was dodging in the late fifties, when his marriage to Sondra broke apart: How strong are the ties to wife and child measured against the need for lone adventure and self-discovery?
BELLOW LOVINGLY ECHOED Rosenfeld in his portrait of King Dahfu, but, as I have mentioned, he based his hero Henderson on Chanler Chapman, his roughneck aristocrat neighbor and onetime landlord in Barrytown, New York. The two men got to know each other when Bellow was at Bard in the mid-fifties, before he bought the Tivoli house. Bellow and Chanler frequently shared dinner together, where the hard-drinking, outspoken Chanler, a “tragic or near-tragic comedian and buffoon heir of a great name,” as Bellow later described him to Philip Roth, regaled Bellow with tales of his adventurous past. Chanler Chapman was the antithesis to Isaac Rosenfeld: not a trapped, yearning spirit but a free and genuinely rough one, not a Jew but a well-born WASP. Yet, as with Isaac, there was a “tragic or near-tragic” side to Chanler. His slapstick antics and loudmouthed self-confidence seemed to Bellow to mask a troubled existential knot. As in the case of Morrie, Bellow was fascinated by but finally unable to diagnose what might lie beneath a hectoring masculine temper.
Chanler was the son of John Jay Chapman, a famous essayist, lawyer, and political reformer, author of a handbook called Practical Agitation, and master writer of letters. John Jay Chapman was a dyed-in-the-wool agitator. “Politics takes physique,” he remarked in one letter, “and being odious takes physique. I feel like Atlas, lifting the entire universe.” Chapman passed the hard-lifting trait on to his son Chanler. Both father and son had a taint of craziness to go with their strenuous practical drive. “As for insanity,” commented Chapman père, “why, I was once examined for insanity by the two most distinguished physicians in Boston. It has no terrors. I talked to them like Plato.”
The elder Chapman was suspected of insanity because he had burned off his hand in a fit of love madness. At twenty-five, while at Harvard, Chapman read Dante together with a dark-eyed fervent half-Italian girl named Minna. “The case was simple,” he wrote, “but the tension was blind and terrible. I was completely unaware that I was in love.” One night Chapman, strangely roiled within, sat down in front of his fireplace, tied a pair of suspenders about his left arm just above the wrist, then thrust his left hand deep into the blazing fire and held it there. When he pulled the hand out, he saw charred bones and smoking flesh. He went resolutely to Massachusetts General Hospital, was put under ether, and woke up “without the hand and very calm in my spirits,” he later wrote. He now realized he was in love. It was not long before he married Minna.
Chapman’s son Chanler lacked the savage masochistic impulse that the father showed when he mutilated himself. But he was, like Bellow’s Henderson, volatile and rough-hewn. Once he drenched a passing couple with a pitcher of whiskey; another time he showed up at the local bank in his bathrobe to plead the case of his caretaker, who had overdrawn her account by two dollars. He walked around town in overalls, carrying a slingshot. “Who was this outrageous Ahab shaking his fist at the sea?” asked Daniel Middleton, a local journalist, about Chanler, who died in 1982.
Chanler was by turns dairy farmer, journalist, and soldier. He also wrote a book called The Wrong Attitude: A Bad Boy at a Good School, a memoir of his time at St. Paul’s, “a great big school named after a great big powerful Saint, whom some of us boys thought a little narrow-minded.” At school, in order to win a bet with a group of boys, he once filled his mouth with kerosene and struck a match in front of his face: a blaze of fire shot across the room. He sold guns to his schoolmates, too, or rather one gun, a Smith & Wesson .32, which jammed repeatedly. Chanler would buy the gun back from his dissatisfied customer and sell it to another boy.
On his Barrytown farm, Chanler used a bullhorn to command his cattle. “He seemed to know every farmer within fifty miles,” notes Middleton. His stamina was legendary. Torpedoed by a U-boat during World War II, he was stranded in British Guiana and wrote to his wife, “I never had a better time in all my life.” Chanler wrote a rapturous report for Life on his eight days in a lifeboat on the way to Guiana; there he noted, “The two things I liked best about the trip were learning to get along on very little water and sailing the lifeboat. . . . I liked nothing better than sending that swell little cockle shooting down those endless waves.” Later on, Chanler served as an ambulance driver in North Africa, where he tried briefly to set up a brothel behind enemy lines.
In later years, Chanler was taunted by a cousin who asked him how he felt about the fact that his son worked as a postman, since John Jay Chapman was, according to Edmund Wilson, the greatest letter writer America had ever seen. The unruffled Chanler replied that his son was thrilled by his job, and could hardly wait for Christmas.
Bellow must have seen in Chanler an image of needy, vital activity as far removed as could be from the clenched-up Tommy Wilhelm—or his beloved Isaac Rosenfeld. If Seize the Day was about being trapped, Henderson was about being free. Like Chanler, Henderson roared, “I want! I want!” but in contrast to Isaac, he was able to put his needs into action. “Step in and enjoy the turmoil,” Chanler liked to say. Chanler Chapman had a simplicity far removed from Rosenfeld’s anxious nature. But Bellow was a Rosenfeld rather than a Chapman at heart, a worrier, not a man of action.
“I’m aware that it gets mixed up between comedy and earnestness,” Bellow commented in a letter to the novelist Josephine Herbst in August 1959, expressing his doubts about Henderson. When he wrote to the writer Richard Stern that November, Bellow was more definite about the book’s fault: “Every ability was brought to it except one—the talent for self-candor which so far I have been able to invest only in the language of what I’ve written. I should be able to do better than that. People are waiting. My own soul is waiting.” With Herzog the wait would be over.