Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea Bellow
BELLOW MARRIED AGAIN in 1974, this time to a woman who was the polar opposite of Susan Glassman: an academic with a taste for solitary work. Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea was a celebrated mathematician who taught at Northwestern. When she met Bellow at a party in 1973, she had no idea who he was. He said he wrote books, and she apologized that she hadn’t read any of them. Bellow responded, “Well, I haven’t read any of your books either.” Then he asked her to name a book she’d written, and she said Topics in the Theory of Lifting. Both Saul and Alexandra liked to recite this meet-cute. At their first meeting, Alexandra told me, “suddenly he looked up at me and asked, ‘How would you like to be my wife?’ I was very taken aback, but much later I realized this was one of his opening lines with women he found attractive.”
Saul and Alexandra were proud of their closeness, their special bond. One friend remembers them eating off the same plate at a dinner party. “He was everything that the mathematicians were not,” Alexandra recalled. “One of the first things he taught me was that life is not really black and white; not every problem is solvable.”
Alexandra taught Bellow as well. He asked her about mathematics, and even took a calculus course for a little while. She showed him a few basic proofs from Euclid. And she gave him to read A Mathematician’s Apology by G. H. Hardy, a book he thought wonderful. Hardy was an English don whose math was reportedly as elegant as his writing. His Apology, which explains the lure of math to a nonmathematical audience, is a beautiful book. It is also a mournful one: Hardy, in his sixties when he wrote it, had lost his mathematical abilities. Few mathematicians achieve anything past sixty, and most reach their peak in their twenties or thirties. When Alexandra married Bellow, she was thirty-nine—twenty years younger than Bellow—and still labored tirelessly at her field. “Saul was a devil about work,” she recalled; and so was she. But she feared that she would soon be too old to do major work in mathematics. Bellow must have been asking himself the same thing about his writing career: Would he ever again have the stamina for another five hundred pages like the wild, loose-limbed Humboldt’s Gift?
Alexandra’s fears of a creative drought proved to be unfounded. In the 1980s, during her marriage to Bellow, she made groundbreaking advances in an area of math called ergodic theory. She continued to do math, and write significant papers, even in her sixties. Decades earlier, she had done her work in collaboration with her first husband, in the feverish workaholic excitement that young mathematicians know so well. Now she remade her life with someone from the other side of the tracks: a writer.
Bellow’s marriage to Alexandra lasted a little more than a decade. She incarnated a surprising otherworldliness that Bellow found himself drawn to in his sixties. She was the absentminded professor who liked to tap-dance on the porch of the house they lived in during summers in Vermont, girlishly charming and warm but intensely devoted to her work. Bellow’s agent Harriet Wasserman remembers her saying quietly to herself “Yup, yup,” working out a problem in her head while she flipped burgers for lunch.
Alexandra was born in Bucharest, the daughter of two doctors. Her mother was a child psychiatrist. Alexandra’s father, Dumitru Bagdasar, was born the twelfth child in a Moldovan peasant family, but against all odds became a spectacularly innovative brain and spinal-cord surgeon. After a stint as a military doctor in World War I, where he almost died of typhus, he studied in Boston with the world-renowned Dr. Harvey Cushing. Cushing worked slowly, with excruciating care, determined to spare as much of the brain as he could. Bagdasar later described Cushing’s operations: “They had something of the atmosphere of a sacred act, a severe, sustained ritual.” Bagdasar was a brilliant pupil and Cushing took him under his wing. “You could have had a penthouse on Park Avenue,” an American friend remarked, shaking his head at Bagdasar’s decision to return to Romania. Bagdasar established a pioneering neurosurgical clinic in Bucharest and performed thousands of surgeries, during which he achieved near miracles. After one of his exhausting multihour brain operations, his wife joked, “Do you think Hades will be upset that you’ve stolen one of his subjects?”
Roza Samet Zaloziecki, a Jewish obstetrician and gynecologist, was hidden with Alexandra’s family near the end of the war. (Roza’s husband, Alexis Zaloziecki, also a famous neurologist, was, Alexandra wrote later, “a princely personality and a force of nature”: when Alexandra and her new husband left Romania in 1957 he told them affectionately, “Get out and never come back.”) On April 4, 1944, with American planes heavily bombing Bucharest, Alexandra’s parents set out for the shelter, only to realize that Roza and her infant son weren’t following them. They returned to find the baby still on the potty. This saved their lives: the shelter was destroyed that day, and everyone inside was killed. When the Bagdasars visited the shelter to give first aid, they were appalled by the carnage, with limbs strewn through the rubble and lakes of blood everywhere.
Alexandra’s father was an ardent Communist during the war. Profoundly opposed to the Nazi barbarism, he welcomed a Soviet victory with open arms. The new regime named him ambassador to the United States. But by this time he was slowly dying of lung cancer. “The day when he realized he could not keep the knife in his hand was the saddest day of his life,” Alexandra wrote many years later in a memoir of her parents.
When her father died in 1946, just as the Soviet Union was setting its iron grip on Romania, Alexandra was ten years old. That same year her mother, Florica Bagdasar, became Romania’s minister of health. She had to confront typhus, famine, malaria: in the wake of the war Romania was devastated by disease. She fought hard against the Romanian government, which didn’t want her to request American aid for the starving masses in Moldova—and she won. The American help came, the Red Cross distributed supplies, and the famine was stopped. But the regime did not forget Florica’s defiance. By the end of 1947, Stalinism had taken full possession of Romania, and the next year Florica was fired as health minister, while the Stalinist press denounced the Marshall Plan’s effort to “enslave” Eastern Europe with food aid—a clear slap in the face to the now embattled Florica.
Florica went on to head an innovative psychiatric clinic for children. But that ended in 1953, when the regime condemned her for corrupting working-class children with bourgeois ideas. Child psychology, especially if it drew on Freud, was now taboo. Such so-called science “demeans and slanders” man, the government announced, by distracting workers from the class struggle. Alexandra was in high school, and she found herself shunned by her classmates because of her mother’s downfall. A few years later, as a result of Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, Florica was rehabilitated and even given permission to travel abroad. But the shock of her mother’s disgrace had permanently marked Alexandra.
Alexandra attended the University of Bucharest and married a young professor in the Math Department, Cassius Ionescu Tulcea. He was invited to a research program at Yale in 1957, Alexandra came along, and they both defected. Their academic careers flourished: by the mid-sixties both were professors at Northwestern. The couple divorced in 1969, the same year that their book on lifting theory was published. Cassius went on in later years to write books on casino gambling, including craps and blackjack.
The Romanian regime allowed Alexandra’s mother to visit her in Chicago several times during the two decades after Alexandra came to America. But Alexandra returned to Romania only in the weeks before Florica’s death in 1978—the story Bellow retells in The Dean’s December. Then, she would be treated as a traitor to the Romanian state and punished by being denied access to her dying mother.
In a 1984 interview with Bellow, D. J. R. Bruckner described Bellow’s and Alexandra’s apartment—or, rather, apartments. Bellow’s writing studio, he reported, is
A room thirteen floors above Lake Michigan at the east end of the long apartment that could give one a fit of geometric hallucination. In the 1970s, Bellow and his wife, Alexandra, bought two flats in the brick high-rise on Chicago’s north side and cut a door into the wall separating them; they left the rest of the structure unchanged. From the doors the resulting apartment unfolds both ways, each half a mirror image of the other. There are doubles of everything—baths, sets of bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens.
Alexandra’s studio was at the distant end of their apartment, as far away from Bellow’s as possible. In the morning, when he sat down to work, Bellow would open the curtains on his lakeside view and crank up Mozart on the stereo. “It was loud as can be,” Alexandra remembered. “He would surround himself with sunshine and music. I, on the other hand, would close the door to my office and shut the curtains, because even the view of the lake and the beach was a distraction.” Alexandra added that “early in the marriage I remembered Saul saying, ‘Oh what a relief to have a woman who doesn’t breathe down my neck, who has her own professional interests, and who lets me be all morning.’ ” But Bellow’s gratefulness for the parallel lives that he and Alexandra led would later turn to resentment at what he saw as her coldness, her distance.
Bellow was careful to allow Alexandra her private space. In his 1984 interview he said, “You cannot believe how oblivious a mathematician becomes doing mathematics,” but he added that he didn’t play his violin in the Chicago apartment: “I am afraid that around here my scratching would be painful to Alexandra’s ears.”
IN 1976, the year after Humboldt’s Gift was published, Bellow won the Nobel Prize. Only Americans won Nobels that year, and so at the prize ceremony a Swedish band, wearing eighteenth-century wigs, played tunes from West Side Story. “It was magical, it was like a whole week of fairy tale, this very young and handsome king and queen,” Alexandra remembered. Sixteen Bellows traveled to Stockholm for the ceremony, including Bellow’s brother Sam, who was about to go to federal prison for money laundering (though Sam had done nothing wrong, he took the rap for a relative). “How was Stockholm?” Bellow’s friend Sam Goldberg asked him on his return. “Meshuga!” Bellow replied.
More than meshuga was Bellow’s alimony trouble. Salary checks from the Committee on Social Thought were not keeping pace with Susan’s demands. He later confessed that the Nobel money had gone directly into Susan’s bank account.
Bellow’s son Daniel had his coming of age during the trip to Stockholm for the Nobel ceremony. When I mentioned a photograph of Daniel between his two elder brothers, Greg and Adam, Daniel told me, “I was drunk for the first time in my life. That photo with the brothers—I’m in the middle because they’re propping me up, I’m so drunk. I’m shit-faced, I’m twelve years old, and I’m looking for the queen so I can ask her to dance. I’m asking Adam, Where’s the queen? It was my bar mitzvah. Pop taught me the lines from ‘Minnie the Moocher’: ‘She had a dream about the king of Sweden / He gave her things that she was needin’.’ ”
Alexandra was the only non-Jew among Bellow’s wives. But for the last few decades of his career he would become more and more interested in Jewish matters, especially when the fate of the Jews intersected with world politics. To Jerusalem and Back tells the story of Bellow’s stay in Israel in 1975, recounting the conversations he had there about the Jewish people and the Jewish state. He sketches a loving portrait of Alexandra in the book: she was essential to his journey.
Alexandra was Bellow’s ideal partner in his tour of Israel. She was a gentile without a trace of bad feeling toward Jews, open to experience and willing to be instructed. Decades later she remembered her time with Bellow in the Holy Land as one of the best periods of her life, full of social gatherings and friendship, the antithesis to grim Romania under communism. In Israel she visited her friend from childhood Roza Zaloziecki, then in her seventies and still a practicing obstetrician.
Both before and after she left Romania, Alexandra’s political naïveté protected her to some extent. Bellow had to tell her about Stalin’s crimes. Concentrated on her mathematics, she knew little about the NKVD or the Gulag. Now, she would plunge into a place where politics seemed like life itself.
On their 1975 trip to Israel, Alexandra lectured in mathematics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Here she and Bellow met the Latvian mathematician Eliyahu Rips, a “very dramatic and heroic figure,” Alexandra recalled. Rips embodied the solitary self-sufficiency of so many mathematicians, including Alexandra, but there was something dangerously extreme about him also, a fanatical integrity. In his Jerusalem book Bellow tells Rips’s astonishing story: “When the Russians went into Czechoslovakia, Rips, a mathematics student, set himself on fire in protest. The flames were beaten out and Rips was sent to an insane asylum. While there, without books, he solved a famous problem in algebra.”
Rips immigrated to Israel just before the Yom Kippur War, got a job at a gas station and, Bellow writes, “offered to work for nothing, feeling that he must make a contribution to Israel’s defense. So for some months he pumped gas, unpaid.” Eliyahu Rips was a living emblem of Jewish resurrection, like the country of Israel itself. “No people has to work so hard on so many levels as this one,” Bellow observed.
In 1982 Bellow wrote The Dean’s December, his gloomiest novel, based on his and Alexandra’s 1978 trip to Romania, three years after their stay in Israel. Alexandra, here called Minna, provides a slate, steady light: she is the novel’s anchor. Bellow’s Dean is really, in spite of its bleak mood, a love poem for Alexandra, whose seeming absentmindedness hides an invisible and charming depth. “You might love a woman for her tactfulness alone,” Albert Corde, the dean of the title, thinks about the subdued and tenacious Minna.
The Bucharest section of The Dean’s December centers on Minna’s effort to see her dying mother in the hospital. The Communist regime puts obstacles in her way designed to break her heart, and nearly succeeds. Alexandra told me, “There’s no doubt that was the finest moment in our life together. Saul stood by me and helped in any way he could. Tried to protect me, to make it possible to visit my mother. He was really wonderful. It was very tough on him; he wasn’t used to doing this kind of thing.” The Bucharest scenes of The Dean stay close to the facts. “He didn’t actually have to invent anything,” Alexandra remarked, “there was so much going on and it was all so dramatic and so brutal. He didn’t exaggerate one iota. It was real life, told poetically by a great writer.”
Romania takes up one half of The Dean’s December; the other half is about Chicago. The 1980s was the winter of Bellow’s own discontent with his home city. He was sometimes accused of squirreling himself away in Chicago—evidence that he must have had something to hide from the New York intellectual world. But what Bellow called his Chicago mood made him come back to the gray, sardonic, and coarse city, with its blunt-mannered men who had shoving cynicism written in their faces and who swore by an iron realism.
Chicago, dull and industrial, has always meant for many the wintry cramped reality of lives given up to hard, unforgiving work. For many more it was, and is, a bitter jail cell of poverty, crime, and chaos. By the early eighties, the time of The Dean’s December, frozen-hell ghetto Chicago was bleeding over into wealthy white Chicago: when you walked around Hyde Park at night, you had best look over your shoulder; there were many neighborhoods whose red lights it would have been unwise to stop at; and even Lakeshore millionaires were not immune to mugging. It is this Chicago, looking like Dante’s Dis transplanted to the Midwest, that Bellow describes in The Dean. The novel has a morgue atmosphere provided by its two cities, Chicago and Bucharest, both of them kingdoms of chill death, grimy and infernally cold. One of the book’s scenes actually takes place in a morgue, where Bellow’s hero identifies his mother-in-law’s body.
Albert Corde, Bellow’s hero, resembles a less imaginatively fertile Sammler. He is a balding middle-aged fellow, Scotch-Irish by heritage, and a Chicagoan of long vintage. His looks are aggressively plain; he is “a dish-faced man, long in the mouth.” Bellow is experimenting here: never before did he feature a staid, stolid hero. A profound agitation is hidden inside Corde, but on the surface he shows not a ripple. Corde was a newspaperman for the Paris Herald before he entered academe. He is an outsider: a paltry white man to black Chicago, a fool to his university’s provost, and a naïve American to his Romanian in-laws. Corde feels, Prufrock style, that he is “something of a stand-in, a journalist passing for a dean.”
Corde is also, for once in Bellow, a nearly silent hero. “And now it seemed he had even forgotten how to open his mouth,” Bellow writes. Like a James or Conrad protagonist, he is a reverberator. So is his wife, the famous astronomer who long ago left Romania for the West. Alexandra was the inspiration for both characters, Corde and Minna, both of them thoughtful, inward, and slow to ignite.
Yet the quiet Corde has his wild streak. “Corde had let himself go, indignant, cutting, reckless. He had made the college unhappy,” Bellow writes. In the early pages of the novel, we learn that Corde has published two long articles in Harper’s about the desperate state of inner city Chicago. (Bellow at the time had a nonfiction book contract for a volume on Chicago, which he never finished; he wrote The Dean instead.) Corde describes for his Harper’s audience “the torments and wildness of black prisoners” in Cook County jail; the otherworldly shambles of a welfare hospital; and the frightening hell on earth of the Robert Taylor Homes, with their “young men getting on top of the elevator cabs, opening the hatch and threatening to pour in gas, to douse people with gasoline and set them afire.”
Corde did something else along with his Harper’s articles to stir the waters of university life: in his official role as dean, he involved himself in the Rick Lester case. Lester was a U. of C. student who was thrown through a window and killed during a robbery. Corde’s own nephew, Mason, has been campaigning on behalf of the accused killer, a black man from the ghetto named Lucas Ebry.
Mason is a young radical “with a light, bright Huckleberry Finn air” and a calmly vicious streak, an air of “bright bitterness”; he resembles a shadowy figure of ressentiment out of Conrad. Bellow based Mason on Philip Grew, a nineteen-year-old U. of C. junior. Grew had threatened a witness who was ready to testify against his friend Ellis McInnis, his co-worker at an inner-city restaurant. In the summer of 1977 Ellis McInnis and Deola Johnson invaded the apartment of Mark and Crystal Gromer, tied up Mrs. Gromer, and threw her husband out the window when he tried to protect his wife. Mark Gromer was twenty-four, a graduate student in English at Chicago. His wife survived the ordeal. In The Dean’s December Bellow turns Gromer into Rick Lester and Crystal into Lester’s wife, whose suffering Bellow describes with tender respect.
The Dean directs itself to the filthy incorrigible facts of life in Chicago and Romania, but the book is also oriented toward the stars. It is Minna, with her farsighted astronomer’s stance, who possesses the badly needed upward metaphysical angle. About Minna, Corde says, “She preferred looking up, definitely”: “Why should slums, guns, drugs, jails, politics, intrigues, disorders matter? Leaving Hell, Dante saw the stars again. Minna saw them all the time.” When she looks up, Minna also looks away from the urban inferno that troubles her husband. But Bellow insists that we remember both Minna’s ethereal gaze and the irredeemable sorrows of black Chicago.
The Dean makes sure we cannot forget the hell of Chicago’s ghettos. The black underclass, Corde sees, has been written off—doomed. We do not know how to attach them to life, because we ourselves, he argues, are not sufficiently attached either. The deeper question, Corde realizes, is “the slums we carry around inside us”: Bellow tries in this phrase to forge a tie between his well-educated, mostly white audience and the deprivations he chronicles in The Dean. These black men and women are not aliens, he is saying, but our kindred who have been denied, turned away at society’s gates. And no one knows how to welcome them in.
The terrible case of a rapist and murderer named Spofford Mitchell obsesses Corde. Mitchell is closely based on the real-life Hernando Williams. In 1978 Williams, the son of an African American minister, kidnapped a woman named Linda Goldstone, raped her, and locked her in the trunk of his car. He actually showed up to a court hearing for a previous rape and kidnapping with the victim still in his trunk. (People in the parking lot talked to Goldstone through the trunk lid and gave the car’s license plate number to the police, but the police did nothing.) After Williams left the courtroom, still free on bail for his earlier crime, he raped Goldstone repeatedly and then killed her. The jury took less than an hour to decide on the death penalty for Williams.
In the novel, Corde discusses the murderer’s case with Mitchell’s public defender, who coolly fails to see the true horror of it. The conversation with the public defender, which appears in one of Corde’s Harper’s articles, contains Corde’s own intense diagnosis of the problem. He says of Mitchell that “the man himself is filled with a staggering passion to break through,” but can conceive only “the literalness of bodies and their members.” When the woman begged for her life, what did he hear, what did he see? Corde wonders. The evil is in us, too, not just the murderer. “Our conception of physical life and of pleasure is completely death-saturated,” Corde thinks. “The full physical emphasis is fatal. It cuts us off.” Corde eloquently defends the murderer’s victim against Mitchell’s lawyer, who suggests she may have gone with Mitchell willingly.
The Dean is a book about character. Corde thinks of Valeria, Minna’s mother, “with extraordinary respect,” because “her humanity came from the old sources.” In the hospital room that he and Minna have finally been allowed to visit, he leans close to her face and in a low voice impulsively tells her, “I also love you, Valeria.” At this she becomes highly agitated, her face spasms and the monitors go wild. Valeria, Corde thinks, knows the truth of what he says. In Ravelstein, written after Bellow’s divorce from Alexandra, the Romanian mother-in-law is far less sympathetic: the fact of having a Jewish son-in-law had poisoned her old age, decides Chick, Ravelstein’s narrator.
Valeria, all of her, will be consumed by death. After he sees her corpse in the hospital’s morgue, Corde imagines her cremation. “At this very instant Valeria might be going into the fire,” Corde thinks, “the roaring furnace which took off her hair, the silk scarf, grabbed away the green suit, melted the chased silver buttons, consumed the skin, flashed away the fat, blew up the organs, reached the bones, bore down on the skull—that refining fire, a ball of raging gold, a tiny sun, a star.” The mystery of a human being’s physical presence here takes on metaphysical coloring: behold the luminous center that so absurdly is just a material thing. In the end we will all be so reduced. Fired to a few pounds of hot ash, Valeria becomes mere matter, a little collapsed star.
The Dean’s December favors subdued, reliable characters, and—unusually for Bellow—flamboyance comes in for serious knocks. One of the book’s showy and false men is Corde’s lawyer cousin Maxie (derived from Bellow’s high school friend Sam Freifeld), who defends Lucas Ebry in court: “flashy, elderly, corrupt Maxie, with his bold eyes and his illiterate, furiously repetitious eloquence,” who to impress women on the dance floor swings “his wide buttocks with crazy grace,” his “massive, ecstatic face” like a Rouault.
Two stalwart black men uphold Bellow’s book: Rufus Ridpath, a warden who tries to improve conditions at the county jail, and Toby Winthrop, an ex-hit man and drug addict who opens a community center in the ghetto. Another character describes Ridpath as “a plain kind of a man. He goes for duty”— the Conrad note again.
Bellow’s two African American heroes are men of plain words and plain deeds. Winthrop physically demonstrates for Corde the work of his Operation Contact, leaning down to the floor and scooping upward with a powerful hand: “We reach for them and try to get a hold,” he says. Mostly, he adds, his recovery center doesn’t succeed, but there are always a few who can be saved. Once again, Bellow channels Conrad: it’s the idea of the thing you must be loyal to, not the poor practical results. If Elya was the figure of duty in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, here it is Winthrop, a man who tries desperately to prevent poor black America from being “written off”—words that Bellow also used to describe the fate of the European Jews in the 1930s and ’40s. “His feeling for his people is real,” Bellow writes of Ridpath. “Are they part of American society, or are they going to be eliminated from it?” More than thirty years later, Bellow’s words still stand as a warning. Even though he was often typed as a conservative—and there is something conservative about the loyalty to duty that he champions in The Dean’s December, and about his pessimism, too—Bellow’s concern for what black America has to suffer is genuine.
The Dean is a sparse and unsparing book, its style deliberately matte, with no exuberance anywhere. Chicago looks like “a dirty snow brocade over the empty lots, and black men keeping warm at oil-drum bonfires,” Bellow writes. But the novel has its metaphysics, too, with Bellow in an urgent downcast mood, whetted for philosophy. When Corde watches a class of black schoolchildren listening to Macbeth (“pity like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast”), “restlessness stopped,” he says. Corde, like the children, waits for an answer, but none exists. And so Bellow speaks quietly of lacrimae rerum, of love and mortality warring it out. Corde ruminates aloud to Minna’s friend Vlada, “Tears may be intellectual, but they can never be political. They save no man from being shot, no child from being thrown alive into the furnace.” These words are the credo of The Dean, which moves into Ivan Karamazov territory with the image of the dead child. Our tears of protest come from a whole heart and a whole mind, but they do not alter the world. Corde is a good man who cannot make life win out over death.
Bellow leaves us with the spare Cather-like epiphany of his conclusion, bringing us back to Alexandra, the upward-directed thinker in love with the stars. For her, truth is beauty. Corde gazes into the night sky above Palomar Observatory, where Minna has taken him to observe the sky. “This Mount Palomar coldness was not to be compared to the cold of the death house,” Corde thinks. “Here the living heavens looked as if they would take you in.” Such a fade-out into some far-off yet real depth, represented by Minna’s astronomy, always lures Corde. The deep feeling between Corde and Minna—Bellow and Alexandra—generates the novel. Alexandra, like Minna, devotes herself to an abstract realm. But she needs Bellow, as Minna needs Corde. After the death of her mother, “what came through Minna’s words was that she was alone in the world; and with him; she did have him, with all his troubling oddities; and he had her.” Bellow here sounds, unusually, like James.
In The Dean Bellow gives us an unusually stripped-down, even slightly desolate, portrait of a loving relationship, with no marital hysterics, no crazy drama—no Herzog-like stunt work. Years earlier Bellow was Herzog; now he aspired to be Corde. The ambition was honorable, but in the end this was an impossible role for Bellow, with his wary, excitable sensibility. He needed a more provoking energy than Alexandra could give him. A crucial character was missing from The Dean’s severe landscapes: the comic, stormy iconoclast Allan Bloom, who would be the subject of Bellow’s last book, Ravelstein.