THE SAUL BELLOW
SPEEDING TICKET

 

Saul Bellow crazy, I drove the Interstate from Rhode Island out to Chicago in the fall of 1971 in a sputtering blue Plymouth Duster. The junk packed enough pep, however, to attract the attention of a radar-wielding state trooper somewhere in the farmland flatness of western New York right before you hit Erie. As he scrawled out a speeding ticket, he seemed as surprised as I was that I’d gotten the thing up to the ninety-one miles an hour at which he had clocked me.

I always thought the incident was somehow in the spirit of those Saul Bellow sentences that had done such a number on me at the time in Mr. Sammler’s Planet or Augie March—reckless and a little out of control, but solid in their genuine direction, nevertheless, which was what made them so pure.

I was in a hurry. I was enrolling to take a master’s in English, with a creative writing concentration, at the University of Chicago for the simple reason that Bellow was there.

It didn’t take me long to learn (I still can’t believe I hadn’t read the fat graduate school catalog more carefully on this) that Bellow himself wasn’t even a member of the English department at the university’s gray gothic campus on the city’s South Side, with the glassy new Regenstein Library— built smack on the spot where Fermi and company had first achieved nuclear fission in a makeshift underground lab— adding at least a touch of modernism to the otherwise prevailing staid architecture. Dick Stern was the resident novelist in the English department, and he explained to a very disappointed me that Bellow—who taught literature and philosophy, it seemed, rather than any creative writing—was a member of the faculty of the Committee on Social Thought. Said “committee” turned out to be a decidedly elite degree program for carefully selected advanced Ph.D. students, interdisciplinary and maybe the kind of pedagogically nonconformist operation that could exist only at a place like U. of Chicago, which in its utter intellectualism then—and probably now—had to be the closest thing to a real European university here in America. (Once a Big Ten sports school with the famous coach Amos Alonzo Stagg at the gridiron helm, Chicago eventually relegated football to the status of a mere club; it was almost an ongoing parody of intercollegiate athletics when I was there, supposedly a varsity sport again but in essence remaining more of a club, as the bunch of nerdy guys who sometimes had trouble buckling the football helmet chin straps under their beards played their games to marching-band music supplied by assorted fellow undergrads in street clothes happily blowing away on kazoos. Honestly.)

Stern was a big, kind, energetic specimen, and he told me there was no reason to feel let down—in his big and kind and entirely energetic way, he assured me that Bellow was a “great guy.” He said he would do some of the spadework for me, mention my name, and all I had to do after that was to drop by during Bellow’s office hours to see The Man himself.

Which I often did.

The first time, Bellow was at his administrative desk, his post as chairman of the Committee on Social Thought. As the secretary ushered me in, what struck me, besides the impeccable haberdashery of a double-breasted, dark blue wool blazer and maroon silk foulard tie, was the pile of paperwork he was plowing through. It looked like forms to be filled out, paper-clipped-together dissertation proposals too, maybe, and I was amazed that this eminence who hadn’t quite won the Nobel Prize yet, though he had won nearly everything else on the literary front in this country and much abroad, was occupying himself with such mundane matters. On other occasions I sat across a big desk from him in his personal office upstairs in that same building with its standard U. of C. gargoyles under the eaves, usually the only student coming to see him. My good luck on that count surprised me. While I didn’t take particular note each visit of what he was wearing, it seems to stick in my mind that the outfit was often a well-tailored silvery suit more fit for a high-rolling international businessman than an academic, or possibly it was just the way that the silver light poured through the mullioned windows behind him and his hair itself being very silver that rendered him, well, such a presence (vision?). The steam heat radiators clanked, occasionally somebody thundered up or down the stairwell in the corridor, and soon I realized that Stern had been right, Bellow was a great guy, willing to listen to my own talk about reading, also my talk about work and travels since finishing college, all of which I blabbed and blabbed to him.

I once asked him why, to be frank, with all the money he had obviously made on his books, had he returned to teach at a university, anyway; to which he replied, somewhat softly, “Where else could I go?” I felt an idiot for even asking it, the answer was so simple and so damn right. I remember my going on during another visit about how I’d hastily fled a city newspaper job and lived in Dublin the year before. There I worked on my own writing and did some freelance journalism, even hooked up for a while with the fine, and quite raucous, Irish writer Christy Brown, who was handicapped due to cerebral palsy and typed with his toes. I had interviewed him for a feature article and then sometimes helped him with tasks like answering fan mail from the load of it that flooded in from the U.S. after the success of his best-selling autobiographical novel about growing up in a rough Dublin slum, Down All the Days, later largely the basis of the award-winning movie My Left Foot. Bellow wanted to hear all the details, from a description of Christy’s flat in Dublin’s city-owned housing (the little living room’s red linoleum, the cheesy hi-fi, the cadre of working-class Brown brothers who spent less time working now that Christy, suddenly well-off, had made it and who hung around that Kimmage flat in frilly Mod suits)—yes, everything from specifics of the premises to a play-by-play description of how ever-smiling Christy managed to actually pick up a sheet of yellow foolscap with his left foot and put it into the Smith-Corona electric placed on the floor, to start writing another story or poem. In grad school I was avidly immersed in John Hawkes’s edgy, surreal fare, and one day I told Bellow of my enthusiasm. Bellow himself didn’t exactly appreciate Hawkes’s novels, and there in the office something seemed to have clicked for him.

“Hawkes,” Bellow said, smiling with his gapped front teeth and his head perking, as apparently a thought just came to mind.

“What?” I said.

“Hawkes,” he continued, “this is it—if your friend Christy Brown in Ireland types with his toes, maybe Hawkes types with his arse!”

Perfect.

The year wound down. I did manage to earn an M.A. in my several months of residence, Stern helping me with his overseeing some independent study courses for credit and my using for a thesis a novel I had written in Ireland about the usual Catholic-boyhood hijinks. Bellow was generous enough to read the entire novel, stressing I was a writer, as far as he was concerned, but gingerly suggesting that in this attempt I was working a vein that Joyce and James T. Farrell had pretty much thoroughly mined years before. By way of Stern, the manuscript was returned to me with a note from Bellow saying as much. I knew by then the novel wasn’t very substantial, and I thought I was already writing better stuff, so it wasn’t a crushing assessment. I ran into Bellow crossing the campus quadrangles, and he invited me to stroll with him for a bit to discuss what he had said in the note. It was one of those almost warm spring afternoons in Chicago where the grass is green and the fleshy crocuses are starting to puff from their loam beds, but you’d still best wear heavy clothes if you have any sense about you, Bellow that day in a black homburg and spiffy topcoat. More so than Bellow’s explanation of his critique of my novel, what probably interested me at that stage, sad to say, was being seen with Bellow by other students, the two of us walking together and chatting like that (there was a certain M.A. student—a pretty girl with gray eyes and strawberry-blond hair named Harriet who had a part-time job as an editorial researcher in the downtown offices of Playboy, no less—and I was at long last making progress toward a dating relationship with her), but I do remember one comment from Bellow then, his saying, “Character is everything, Peter,” and he liked my sense of character in the manuscript. I suppose I can say now that the most magnetic thing about Bellow was that like any of his own fictional protagonists— Herzog or Henderson or the wonderful Augie himself—he wielded a real fullness of personality: part wisecracker, part clotheshorse, part Big-Hearted Otis, and a giant part keen intellectual. He was a character and he was indeed a great guy, as Stern would have it, and in all my subsequent years of teaching I have learned that such is the one rare ingredient that surely makes for a special teacher, or special writer, when you think of it—that quality as simple as being a “great guy,” male or female.

People I ran into later who knew Bellow well would ask me if he was even approachable then, because they remembered that my particular year of study was the time when he was apparently having little luck in his final drive to assemble what turned out to be for me his masterpiece, Humboldt’s Gift. They claimed he was cranky during that.

Not a chance, I told them.

And again, could there be any moment finer in life for a young, would-be writer than to be so excited that you let your desert boot get the better of your judgment on the accelerator, as you glanced in the rearview mirror to notice a red roof beacon pulsatingly flashing? And about to be clipped for fifty bucks or so in fines that you really couldn’t afford to shell out at a time when you were close to flat broke, at least you had been speeding for a noble cause, maybe not just toward the City of Chicago and Saul Bellow reportedly there, but now—with the drudgery of a stretch of newspaper work well behind you and a novel manuscript packed lovingly in your own battered suitcase (only later would you admit it was apprentice work, imitative)—you were racing as fast as that body-rotted Duster could carry you toward what you saw awaiting in the distance as the nicest of all ideas—a future with a life where Literature itself, with the old capital L, would hopefully always matter.

But for the moment there was the cop car behind me, my stomach already no more than a nest of slithering grass snakes. I pulled over to the breakdown lane.

I would have to learn to take my time.

1998, FROM PROFILS AMÉRICAINS (FRANCE)