Saul Bellow calls up our courage

Saul Bellow and Richard M. Daley, 1989 (Sun-Times files)

     I am an American, Northbrook borne—Northbrook, that virtuous village—and since being carried here by indifferent fate, have suffered a few knocks, none too hard and most of my own infliction.
     I am also on vacation this week. But rather than leave you stranded, I'd like to rescue a digression from yesterday's column, on cowardice and our craven Republican non-leaders, that ended up on the cutting room floor. Not that there is a cutting room—a movie term—though in my world there is certainly much cutting and many floors too.
     I had an interesting conversation with Chris Walsh, head of the Boston University College of Arts & Sciences Writing Program, ranging from Dante to Kipling. He floated an idea that I thought was very trenchant, one that did get into the column:
     "Before you accuse somebody else of cowardice, think what your own duty is, what you should do, out of excessive fear, out of complacency, or love of security."
     And then he did something extraordinary, particularly among academics: he applied is own advice to himself, speaking of "a sense of my own failures, from excessive fear" offering up "a more prosaic fact"—he was going to write his dissertation about Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road," but was dissuaded by his first reader, Saul Bellow.
     "Bellow said I would get bored and grow to hate the guy," Walsh said.
     That's the sort of stray detail that catches the eye of a professional journalist. I sought elaboration. Walsh explained that he was Bellow's assistant for the last five years of the novelist's life.
     Here my interest grew focused and practical, almost mercenary. Bellow has a cameo in the new book I'm working on, and I couldn't resist doing a little fact-checking. Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 and, as per the James Atlas biography, the next year when the Nobel was handed out, by necessity to someone else, Bellow was depressed because he could not win it a second time. That seemed to speak to the essence of the man.
     "Was Atlas being fair?" I wondered. "He presents Bellow as something of a cocksman. Bellow was also very unfair to his friend, Sydney J. Harris in 'Humboldt's Gift.' The colostomy bag."
     Harris was a Daily News columnist I admired, with a lying-under-cherry-trees, thinking-about-stuff style not unlike my own, or should I say, my style is rather an echo of his. Bellow depicts him wearing a colostomy bag, a not-subtle, almost cruel comment on the quality of Harris' writerly output. They were friends from childhood. Harris was a proud supporter of Bellow's. It seemed unkind of Bellow to depict Harris churning out shit.
     Walsh told a story about the book coming out, and Bellow asking his latest wife—he had five—not to read it, and asking Walsh not to read it. I noted that he did not contradict the account. Bellow was a jerk averse to the hard truth about himself, at least when presented by somebody else.
     In the spirit of loathing cowardice, conquering fear and banishing complacency, I should probably admit that I didn't read Bellow as a young man. I was an aspiring humorist, and preferred writers who were funny (James Thurber, Kurt Vonnegut) or eccentric stylists (Thomas Pynchon, Stanley Elkin) or tortured Germans (Herman Hesse, Thomas Mann). 

     To me, Saul Bellow was John Cheever with a circumcision, the John Updike of Maxwell Street. I read "Humboldt's Gift" only because part of it takes place at the Division Street Russian Baths, which, as a former card-carrying member, I was writing about in my Chicago book. I think I just read the parts that took place in the baths. 

     The only reason I eventually read "The Adventures of Augie March"—and I am half horrified, half proud to admit this—is my older son shamed me into doing so. He read it, and would taunt me by periodically firing the famous first line, "I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago that somber city" in my direction, a shot over my bow, until I broke down and read the thing, just to make him stop.
     It's good.
     Chris Walsh and I got to discussing Bellow's work, briefly.
     "It seems to me he is totally passé," Walsh said "He's virtually disappeared. It's a shame, because I think he's worth reading."
     "The wrong race," I observed, quietly. In the 1950s, Jewish writers were the Other. Now we are the Man.
     When Walsh mentioned the need to confront one's own cowardice, and ask what is not being done out of fear, I of course silently wondered what I wasn't doing, out of love of security, but should do. Since were were talking politics, my thought was that firing these columns into the night sky and watching them pop and sparkle for a moment against the swirling darkness is about the best I can do, and anything more—go to Washington, protest the existence of Donald Trump by solemnly setting myself on fire in front of the White House gates, like those Cambodian monks during the Vietnam War—would be not bravery but overkill.

     Although ... there is one thing. While on the topic. I met Saul Bellow once. I've never mentioned the details before for reasons that will be clear. But as Napoleon said, if you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna. In 1989, I was a general assignment night shift reporter, and began work at 5 p.m. My old college roommate, Didier, was in town, and we were celebrating each other's company by passing the hours at a beer hall on Roosevelt Road famous for its 100 types of beer. We didn't hit them all, but certainly tried. He introduced me to the glories of Belgian beer. The nickname of Chimay Ale in Belgium is "Death." It is an apt nickname.
     I was supposed to start work at 5 p.m. At some point I realized I was smashed and tried to call in sick to the city desk, which I guess is a kind of responsibility. It didn't work. You can't call in sick, the eternally patient city editor, Steve Huntley explained, you need to get over to Saul Bellow's condo at Hyde Park. He's going to endorse Richard M. Daley for mayor.
     The fire bell rings, the horse stirs from the straw. That's professionalism. So I went, and was there, and have the haziest memory of the event, viewed through the dark lake of Chimay sloshing around inside me. The resultant article turned out fine, they always did. I came away with a dim impression of Bellow—that he was a racist, endorsing Daley as a bulwark against Black people invading Hyde Park. Daley won. Bellow fled Chicago anyway, heading toward the East Coast and his rendezvous with Walsh. When I got out of his condo, I couldn't find my car, and had to search for it a long time, almost frantic, practically calling the car's name aloud. That's the strongest memory of that visit, and not a good one. 

Struggling to understand GOP cowardice

"Shield with the Face of Medusa" by Arnold Böcklin (Musée d'Orsay)

      Enough about President Donald Trump. I’m sick of him, too. He isn’t conceding. Not today, anyway. He may never concede the election he lost but will be dragged from the White House sobbing and pleading like James Cagney going to the electric chair at the end of “Angels With Dirty Faces,” his hands pried off a radiator.
     Let’s talk instead about the Republicans who support Trump as he tries to overturn an American election. How can they shirk from their sworn duty at this moment of national peril? Is there anything in history to help us understand?
     There’s no trouble finding traitors: Benedict Arnold, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Jonathan Pollard, and of course our current president, catspaw of the Russians, friend of dictators.
     But when reflecting on the moral repugnance of men like Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — four powerful Republican senators who know better, who see what Trump is attempting, yet do nothing, or worse abet him — I search history in vain for similar craven cowardice.
     Literature offers a few: “Lord Jim,” by Joseph Conrad. Jim is a British sailor on the crew of the Patna, a ship on the Red Sea. The ship founders, and the captain and crew — and after some hesitation, Jim — abandon the ship and its 800 Muslim pilgrims.
     Only the Patna doesn’t sink. It’s towed into port, and Jim and his shipmates are publicly vilified. He wanders the world, fleeing his shame. But that’s fiction.
     I turned to Chris Walsh, author of “Cowardice” and director of the College of Arts & Science’s Writing Program at Boston University. So many leaders are hiding from their duty; why am I having trouble finding parallels in history?

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Flashback 2007: Dorothy Goldberg is mad at the Bulls

 

     Jews have a lovely tradition called "yahrzeit"—lighting a candle in memory of lost loved ones on the anniversaries of their deaths. My wife lit one Saturday for her mother, who passed away in 2011. Between that, and the holiday season approaching, I was reminded of this column.

     For Jews, Christmas is a void to be filled with Chinese food.
     So I am at my sister-in-law's on Christmas Eve, digging into the spare ribs—yes, I know—when my mother-in-law addresses me from across the crowded table.
     "Who can I write a letter to?" she says. "I want to write a letter, even though they probably won't care what I write. Who should I tell?"
     Now, Dorothy Goldberg is the refutation of every mother-in-law joke in the world. I've known her for 25 years, and if she has ever uttered an unkind word about me, or about any other member of her family, for that matter, I haven't heard it. She's 82 now, red-haired, feisty and a moral lesson to all those lonely seniors puzzling over their own fractured family relations. Sixty years of common sense, unconditional love, hard work and rectitude, and your children and grandchildren will jostle each other to shovel your walk, change your light bulbs, take you shopping.
     Or, in this instance, air your grievances.
     "Why don't you tell me?" I say, setting down a rib.
     "I'm very upset," she confides. "About Scott Skiles."
     Scott Skiles? Scott Skiles? The name means nothing to me. 

Dorothy in 2010

     

     "The coach of the Bulls," my sister-in-law adds, helpfully.
     It turns out that my mother-in-law, widowed two years ago, watches all the Bulls games. Or did.
     "I probably won't watch them anymore," Dorothy sighs. "[Skiles] was the Bulls! Who do I write to? Really. It's not his fault because his boys don't throw the ball in, and the other team, well, they throw the ball in, and it goes through the hoop. It's not his fault. He's worked hard. And right before Christmas! I imagine he felt bad."
     She practically scowls, perhaps thinking about Skiles breaking the bad news to his kiddies that Santa won't be bringing any presents this year. My wife interjects that Skiles will be OK.
     "I'm sure he tried," my mother-in-law continues, angry now. "It's the players, they just didn't throw the damn ball in! That's all. I'm sure they practiced, trying to. They throw the ball, and it doesn't go in. They can be two feet away, and it doesn't go in!"
     "Two feet away, and it doesn't go in" sets the table laughing. Conversation stops as the family regards her with something approaching wonder. This is out of character for her. She looks at our smiling faces and is sincerely indignant. "What gets me is none of you feel bad—you don't, do you?"
     I admit I don't.
     "If you put a gun to my head on the way here and asked me who the manager of the Bulls was, I couldn't have told you," I explain.
     "Coach," my wife corrects me. "Coach of the Bulls. The manager is John Paxson."
     "I watched them, and I really enjoyed them, with him sitting there!" says Dorothy. "He was the Bulls! I was really upset. I was shocked."
     I tell her not to worry—the Bulls will be apprised of their folly at the first opportunity. You can't eat at a woman's table for two dozen years, shoveling in the high-quality Kosher chow with both hands while basking in the warmth of unconditional love and not spring to your duty when called upon. After dessert—homemade ice cream and three kinds of home-baked cookies—Dorothy asks when she might expect this in the paper.
    "Wednesday," I say. "Take it to the bank."

                                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 26, 2007

Voting rights swept away in Trump era

     I’m old enough to remember 1965. A year when Americans were churning cream into butter, learning the alphabet and singing “All the colors that I know/Live up in the rainbow.”

     Oh wait, that was just me, in Miss McCloud’s kindergarten class. The most significant event for the rest of our country in 1965 was passage of the Voting Rights Act.
     When the media revisits Selma, it’s too bad we focus on state troopers attacking marchers with their nightsticks and dogs but skate past the reason the protesters are there in the first place: trying to give Black Americans the ability to vote. They already had the right, by law, thanks to the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. 

     But what the law allows and what people are actually permitted to do can be two very different things. African Americans were turned away from voting by all sorts of sham literacy tests and poll taxes. For 100 years.
     Today “voter fraud” is the 2020 version of literacy tests, and restricting vote-by-mail and ballot drop boxes was the latest incarnation of poll taxes: vehicles for disenfranchising voters. Turns out that the same folks who so adore the 2nd Amendment don’t care at all about the 15th.
     As we blink into the roaring cyclone of lies that is the Trump administration, it’s easy to overlook the ever bolder racism. But where in Pennsylvania does Trump lie about, over and over, as having a corrupt voting process? Philadelphia. And what is the largest racial group in Philadelphia? African Americans, at 44 percent.

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"Thank you for writing to the office of Neil Steinberg"

   

     As much as I complain about email, I still like it. Receiving email shows that what I'm writing is touching people, for good or ill. I read and respond to every one—with the exception of the perennially negative, who get one response, and then are immediately put into the filter and never read again.  My never responding does not seem to faze them. Many continue hectoring me, unperceived—I glance into the filter sometimes to see if anything wanted is there—like patients in some dim locked ward gibbering to the wall. I feel sorry for them, but helping is not within my power.
     The complimentary are received with gratitude. Those raising valid points have those points addressed. Rare is the email that evokes something extra, but such was the case with the email below, which arrived with the dawn Saturday. Why don't you read it and see if what leapt out to me leaps out to you:

Hello Neil, or Neil's staff,
     I want to comment that it looks like the Republicans have been holding their collective noses for so long that their noses have now become permanently pinched (hence, the label, "The Pinched Nose Party.")
     My dad was a staunch Republican all of his life, but he finally became disgusted with the GOP in the last years of his life and felt forced to switch allegiance.
     My father died in 2018, but I think that I can picture him, holding his fatherly nose and saying in a nasally voice, "desperado." It's not a good thing when our politicians, on either side of the aisle, become a bunch of desperate desperadoes.

     Notice anything? It's the salutation: "Hello Neil, or Neil's staff." I thought that was incredibly sweet. "Neil's staff"? I mean, who could possibly live in a world where a guy like me would have a staff? And suddenly I was plunged into the dream that my reader, who asked that her name not be used, had evoked. I thought a moment, and replied with the following:

     Thank you for writing to the office of Neil Steinberg. Unfortunately, due to the incredible volume of email he receives, not all correspondence can be shared with him. However, you can be certain that were he to read   your remarks about your father considering Republicans to be "The Pinched Nose Party,"     he would be gratified to learn them, and would in addition     express condolences for the loss of your father, 2018 not being all that long ago.

     Thank you also for reading the Neil Steinberg column. It is readers such as yourself, in Chicago, the United States and around the world, who have made the Neil Steinberg column a Chicago Sun-Times institution for nearly 25 years. Thank you as well for taking the time to write to Neil Steinberg. He highly values all his readers, and would wish you a good day, warmly and personally, if only he could.

          Best regards,
          Pierce Bronard
          Senior Assistant to Mr. Steinberg

P.S. Kidding. I'm lucky to have a job, never mind a staff. I've never had an assistant or legman and, the economics of newspapering being what it is, if I did I would have lost him long ago. But it gave me a smile to imagine what that might be like, having a staff, and I hope you will forgive me a bit of Saturday morning levity. I of course feel all the sentiments above, having written them myself. Thanks again for writing.

          Sincerely,
          Neil Steinberg

     Alas, no reply, so I have no idea how that was received, unless the reply is coming, via channels, some wildly indignant complaint even now filtering down through the Sun-Times hierarchy. But I didn't find anything offensive in it, and it certainly enlivened my morning, and as I say to new hires at the Sun-Times—or as I said, anyway, back when we actually had the chance to talk to each other—"Welcome aboard. If you're not having fun, you're doing this wrong."

Texas notes: Twinkies

Nancy Peppin was a Reno artist who painted Twinkies (Nevada Museum of Art)

     My usual role in the presentation of Austin Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey's much-anticipated Saturday report consists entirely of providing the medium by which is it conveyed to you. But this entry is different since, in our friendly email communications during the week, I mentioned that I had spent the day ... wait for it .. researching Bozo's Circus, the beloved children's show. And thus a seed was planted...

     I have been thinking of my grandmother a lot. She lived on 95th near Commercial in an industrial part of Chicago, under the shadow of the skyway to Indiana. Acrid steel mill odors filled the air and choked us as we arrived. After an hour or two we’d acclimated and no longer detected the smell. We played in fields of overgrown prairie grasses and hid in the jungle of green bean vines in her backyard. We snapped bean pods off the vine and chomped on their sweet crispy shells and tiny green seeds inside. 

     Her house was simple with brown vinyl siding and a concrete staircase with a black metal railing leading to the front door. She’d be standing on the porch waiting when we arrived. My sister and I scrambled out of the wood paneled station wagon and into Grandma’s warm embrace, racing to see who could get there first. She’d have freshly baked bread on a cutting board in the kitchen, and toasted as many pieces as we wanted, each drenched in butter.
     If we were lucky we’d be spending the whole weekend there, along with our black standard poodle Felix. We’d wave at my folks as they drove off and then we were instantly lured back into Grandma’s cozy house. She spoke to us in a baby voice and used the same voice with Felix, who she also fed hot buttered toast. The love in her voice was tangible; she adored us to pieces.
     Grandma Marie spent most of her time in the kitchen, sitting at the oblong dark wooden table on a sturdy wooden chair with a rounded back and arm rests. She chain smoked and always had WBBM Newsradio 780 AM on a little black transistor with the antenna extended as high as it could go. When my sister and I were otherwise occupied, Grandma would play solitaire and sometimes pray with her rosary. She cried sometimes. A wooden plaque with an inlay of Jesus and his disciples at The Last Supper hung on the kitchen wall that she faced at all times, yellowed from years of cigarette smoke. I remember them looking sad and longing, as though they wanted things to be different.
     Grandma Marie was an ardent church goer and we’d join her for Latin masses— we’d genuflect, sit, stand, and kneel along with the rest of the congregation, a silent dance of sorts. The nave was drenched in Frankincense that wafted out of an ornate vessel attached to a chain that the priest waved hypnotically up and down and side to side. I had no idea what the priest was saying, but I simply loved being at my grandmother’s side. The smell of her Walgreen’s perfume, Emeraude, enveloped me. If I reached up to touch her arm it was crepe-like and as soft as a baby bunny.
     One day Grandma told us something that was such big news for little girls that we are lucky our little hearts did not palpitate straight out of our chests. She was taking us to Bozo’s Circus. As my mother recalls it, Grandma had requested tickets for us when we were babies, and maybe that’s true. What I remember is that we’d be leaving from the elementary school she worked at as a kitchen manager and taking a yellow school bus with the students to WGN studios. I was 8 or 9.
     That day I meticulously picked out my flared jeans with the roller skates on the back pockets that I had gotten at Wee Modern on Devon. I put my giant tube of Bonnie Bell Lipsmackers into my back pocket and I was set. My sister and I met my Grandmother at the school and piled on the bus with children we did not know. I felt at ease since all that mattered was Bozo. I remember being on the expressway and as we got closer I felt that I was about to achieve something great.
     We lined up in the hallway cordoned off by velvet ropes waiting to be allowed in. All of a sudden a man was talking to me, urgently. What was he saying? They needed girls in pants (most were wearing skirts) to play a game on the show and if I wanted to play I’d have to go with him right away. I got the clearance from my Grandmother and off I went.
     A dozen or so other kids and I were given a quick set of instructions. We divided into two teams and sat next to our teammates, across from the other team, our legs in V-shapes and our feet touching to create a human chain. We were tossed a balloon and used it to play volleyball, our only job to keep it afloat when it reached our side. The whole thing happened so quickly that I barely remember it, or the show at all. All I knew is that I was sitting on the stage of the Bozo show, cameras all around and felt very special. We lost the game so each won a box of Twinkies.
     As we rode the yellow bus back to the south side school I held my Twinkie box and fell asleep. It had been a long day.

Trump beast draws flies like Jim Oberweis

 

The Fortune-Teller, by Georges de La Tour (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Satire doesn’t belong in a newspaper. And by “satire” I mean stating what is not true for humorous or rhetorical effect.
     Why? Because people believe what they read in a newspaper. I learned that 20 years ago when, attempting a bit of Christmastime levity, I wrote a parody column thanking all the imaginary people who make my life a bed of ease: our gardener, chef, nannies, plus various assistants and a non-existent secretary:
     “If you’ve ever phoned my office, you’ve heard the lovely Georgia drawl of Miss Annie Sherman, and it’s a pleasure to start every morning with her always cheery “Hiya, chief!” and one of her homemade pralines.”
      All good fun. Until my mother phoned and said, “I didn’t know you had a secretary ... ” Ah, yes. No. Satire. Ever.
     That is a long way of explaining why today’s column originally began:
     “Is Oberweis milk merely watered-down white paint? Do Chicagoans need to be concerned that their Oberweis cottage cheese is actually made from the clotted secretions of alligators? They will be relieved to discover the answer is an emphatic ‘no.’”
     Actually, that wasn’t the first version. The first version involved poison. But as much as I wanted to start this column with a series of outrageous lies, I didn’t, even jokingly. Because people glance at stories. They misunderstand. And they believe what they read in the newspaper. It’s a weighty responsibility that journalists take very seriously. 

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