Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck
Harris, Mark
SAUL BELLOW: DRUMLIN WOODCHUCK Mark Harris / University of Georgia Press / $9-95 John Podhoretz At is certainly only natural for a minor writer to envy a major writer; and it is also only natural...
...Where there are no free trade unions, without the right to strike, we have a system of forced labor...
...Suffice it to say that if Mr...
...But let's also not rewrite the recent past to satisfy anyone's pet peeves...
...Add this to Bellow's refusal to join Harris on the barricades-"It was confusing to me," considers Harris, "that Bellow, who hated guns and war, was never associated with the protest against the war in Vietnam''-and you have a man who, despite his "greatness," is hardly the salt of the earth...
...Indeed, the Soviet Union owes as much to the technology and industry of the West in developing its economy as to its own efforts...
...indeed, not long before his death (when the present tide toward recognizing the role of business in resuscitating a sick economy was just beginning to rise), Meany loudly opted for a "public jobs" program, rather than for tax relief for business and creation of jobs by the market mechanism...
...What did he tell you...
...But I submit that the historical record is overwhelmingly clear...
...Harris writes Bellow...
...The scrap metal we sold to them came back to us in the form of shot and shell...
...Richard Stern lives at 4901 South Kimbark...
...Harris's astonishing misreading of Bellow's writing ("a political radi-ical," Harris calls him at one point...
...Bellow goes to Europe...
...He wishes us to believe that "the most embattled defenders" of the West in its struggle against "the expansion of Soviet totalitarianism have not been free-market fetishists, libertarians, and other representatives of theological and economic fundamentalism but the members of the organized labor movement of the United States-the AFL-CIO...
...The distinction was unimportant to Susan, but she saw that it was important to me...
...Little did Bellow know what his sycophant had in store for " him in this book...
...With respect to Professor Gottfried's communication, I am far from desiring "to rewrite-history," nor have I a "peeve" against American corporations eager to do business with the Soviet Union regardless of its consequences in strengthening the military and economic potential of the Soviet Union...
...I do not share the Weltanschauung of Aleks-andr Solzhenitsyn or vouch for the literal historical accuracy of his quotations, but the insight he expressed in his memorable address before the AFL-CIO on June 30, 1975, after President Ford on the advice of Henry Kissinger refused to receive him, remains valid: Lenin, who spent most of his life in the West and not in Russia, who knew the West much better than Russia, always wrote and said that the Western capitalists would do anything to strengthen the economy of the USSR...
...Embattled or battling anti-Communists the American labor movement's members clearly were-at least during the lifetime of George Meany...
...A small comedy suddenly became serious, full of disturbing implications...
...Some Johnson for an eager and noble Boswell like Harris...
...Sammler's Planet, "For that is the truth of it-that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know," does not, it seems, apply to Mark Harris, failed biographer and failed important writer...
...Trade only in non-essentials under rigorous controls should be the rule...
...his fatuousness ("This is a book about a man whose talent expresses hope...
...Bellow and Wright Morris suffer a rift in their friendship...
...Bellow is cool to Harris on the telephone...
...And I believe this holds true of the large unions not affiliated with the AFL-CIO...
...If economic libertarians like Murray Rothbard, moreover, have joined with McGovernite isolationists in deploring the Cold War, such a stand is still seen as idosyncratic and distressing by most of the American Right...
...Harris, author of a few baseball novels and a writer held in some small repute twenty or so years ago, wishes to be Bellow's Boswell...
...I felt the same way about corporations that did a thriving business with Japan and Nazi Germany in the mid-thirties when their threat to the free world was clear...
...Of course I am not impugning the loyalty to the ideals of a free society of all American corporations...
...Freedom of association, of which trade unionism is one expression, is integral to a free society...
...They will compete with each other to sell us goods cheaper and sell them quicker so that the Soviets will buy from one rather than another...
...And on and on...
...who, after all, can resist someone who can quote you chapter and verse...
...On the contrary, it has consistently sought and regularly achieved immunity and insulation from market forces, whether it was engaged in organizing or bargaining...
...Harris does manage to restrain himself from making a play for the hostess, but does instead go after Bellow's ex-wife Susan, who regretfully turns him down...
...Bellow comes to Purdue to speak, at Harris's request...
...after having "learned" so much from Bellow's work, Harris now wants to get the man on paper for the ages...
...Bos-well, however, never seemed to share Harris's unspoken but all-too-clear desire to do his subject in...
...Bellow, a very intelligent man in addition to being a very, very good writer, knew what he was doing when he did not allow Harris to be his authorized biographer...
...it remains to be seen how resolute their anti-Communism will be in the years immediately ahead under a new leadership with newly won influence for the left-leaning members of the federation...
...They are betraying the ideals of a free society as I understand them...
...Even making allowances for the unprofessional sneers at religious traditionalists and defenders of the free market, Hook's statement has only limited historical accuracy...
...This was particularly true in the mid- and even late forties, when the isolationist impulse still survived in such otherwise splendid defenders of freedom as Hoover and Taft...
...Richard Stern and his wife Gay break up...
...SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE (Continuedfrom page 25...
...Hook reminds us that- even in spite of Winpisinger, Woodcock, and Fraser-the mainstream of American organized labor has a decent record of fighting Communism...
...effortlessly replied: "They'll supply us with it...
...Harris is upset by Bellow's inactivity against the Vietnam War and by his stand against the college protestors...
...of History Rockford College Rockford, Illinois Sidney Hook replies: I can hardly do justice to the theme raised by these letters in a few lines...
...The great last sentence of Bellow's best novel, Mr...
...nor am I absolving all American trade unions or trade-union leaders from guilt in collaborating with the Soviet Union by furthering causes that undermine the defenses of a free society...
...When, many years ago, Professor Hook perceived Communism for what it is, he promptly and courageously abandoned its defense and, in doing so, he earned our eternal respect and gratitude, for he became one of our most dedicated defenders of freedom...
...I take the liberty of referring him to my Political Power and Personal Freedom and my Philosophy and Public Policy for an alternative approach...
...As a dedicated champion of freedom, Professor Hook, I submit, if he is to be a consistent champion, needs to update his view of Labor in the cold light of those facts, rather than continuing to view it in the warm glow of youthful sentiment...
...Hook is of course right in suggesting that American conservatives have not always advocated resistance to Soviet aggression...
...Admittedly, George Meany was a fervently anti-Communist labor leader, but it might be difficult to prove the same for Walter Reuther or for many of the current Democratic Party loyalists in the AFL-CIO...
...This indicates the inadequacy and intellectual poverty of his definition of a free society...
...and all that megalomaniacal detail cribbed from his tiresome diary com-bine with his ever-present envy ("my first novel was published in 1946, only two years after Bellow's first novel, in spite of his being seven years older than 1" [his italics]) to make Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck an unnecessary and even reprehensible book...
...Harris moves from a post at San Francisco State University to another at Purdue University...
...Harris protests American involvement in the Vietnam War...
...When Harris relates that Bellow had left for Europe before the publication of Henderson the Rain King, he cannot resist quoting the words of a character in Bellow's Humboldt's Gift: "So you're going to Europe ? Any special reason ? Are you on a job...
...Given a choice between government intervention and a market solution, he would tout the former every time...
...I conclude with a reassertion of my position...
...His (and the AFL-CIO's) abhorrence of any attempt to moderate (much less repeal) the minimum wage laws, in the effort to make unskilled workers-particularly teenagers-more employable, was constant, unvarying, and effective...
...O'Connell indicts leaders of the labor movement as principled enemies of the free society, as he defines it, because of the restrictive effects of some trade union practices on the free market, he must also indict every industrialist who has ever favored a tariff or lobbied for a subsidy as an enemy of the free society...
...What is unusual, quite unusual indeed, is to see this kind of overbearing and ill-motivated hatred expressed in terms of praise and even of adulation...
...The foreign policy positions of organized labor in the United States have been more consistently opposed to Communism than those of the churches, the universities, the press, the media, the business establishments, and all other segments of American society...
...In gratitude for Stern's support, Harris both dedicates the book to him and even has gone so far in a recent New Republic to describe a Stern short story as perhaps the best in the English language...
...In a free society various degrees of economic freedom and control are possible...
...Meany's economics and his domestic politics were of a "resolute" socialist stripe...
...Using his overflowing diary, Harris relates every detail of that weekend to us, from the kind of steak Bellow was eating to the number of phone calls Bellow makes to Stern's house on Saturday afternoon...
...That he was saving friends' books to read later," I replied...
...You never go alone, always with some bim...
...An acquaintance, correspondent, and sometime sycophant of Bellow's, Harris had encountered John Podhoretz is editor of Counterpoint and film critic ofThe American Spectator...
...Rarely has a less successful and less interesting acquaintanceship been described in such blizzards of tedious detail...
...II In a spirited review of Norman Pod-horetz's The Present Danger, Sidney Hook makes an assertion that is half-truth and half-fiction...
...At the end of the book, looking back upon his experience, Harris writes: "I felt myself approaching •Bellow's wisdom...
...Bellow does not...
...Barry Goldwater, William Buckley, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Erhard, Wilhelm Ropke, and Margaret Thatcher-have been more numerous and influential...
...Harris sends Bellow a copy of his book, Twentyone Twice, then asks if Bellow has read it...
...As for free marketeers and conspicuously religious Americans, Hook unfairly identifies them collectively with isolationist politics...
...But defenders of "the values of a free society" the AFL-CIO unions are not and never were, not in the palmiest days of the Meany regnum...
...That corollary simply did not carry...
...And, in a difficult moment, at a party meeting in Moscow, he said: "Comrades, don't panic, when things go very hard for us, we will give a rope to the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie will hang itself...
...Bellow five or six times in person before the fateful day of March 23, 1966, when he arrives in Chicago to ask for Bellow's permission and cooperation (he had received no reply to a letter he had written...
...Bellow seems not to like Harris very much, and for what appears to be good reason...
...He said: they will bring it themselves without thinking about their future...
...To him and to it a free society is equivalent to a free market economy or, to put it differently, a free market economy is a sufficient condition of a free society...
...But subsequently Harris learns from Bellow's ex-wife, Susan, that Bellow had left his copy of the book behind: I asked whether he had "left it behind" or didn 't intend to take it at all...
...It is this second kind of literary and personal envy that informs every page of Mark Harris's Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck (the title comes from a Robert Frost poem), a book so filled with loathing for its titular subject that one can only feel sorry for Harris as he vainly attempts to prove to his reader his never-ending admiration for Bellow's work...
...But, if that vision of Labor-as-Hero ever had validity, it has long since disappeared in impressive demonstrations of the economic power to crush economic opponents and the political power to work its will...
...He seems still to view it through the misty, sentimental eyes of his youth...
...A few years later, Bellow expresses discomfort with the title of Harris's latest novel, The Goy, but, hypocrite that he is, himself a few hours later uses the word "kike" in a joke...
...This freedom of choice presupposes a functioning system of basic civil rights...
...What kind of c--t is taking you this time...
...He won't say No," their mutual friend Richard Stern tells Harris, but, as becomes clear, Bellow won't say Yes either...
...he only writes it down in his diary so that 14 years later we can appreciate, as no doubt he did, Bellow's absolute callousness...
...Harris teaches Bellow's first novel, Dangling Man, in a class...
...Harris is offended by Bellow's unspoken but evident "displeasure" with Harris's hippie daughter Hester, but is even more offended when Bellow leaves a party that the two attended together without him: Bellow's explanation, that he thought Harris wanted some romantic time alone with the hostess, falls on deaf ears...
...She asked, "What friends...
...Bellow brings a girl to Purdue with him, with whom he stays in one room at the Union...
...a reply on a postcard...
...No, he was saving all books of friends to read at a later date...
...O'Connell's letter epitomizes the basic confusion of a very influential conservative school of thought...
...By all means let's not smear anti-Communist labor, leaders...
...Most religious traditionalists are, and have been, vigorously anti-Communist, which is one of the overriding reasons that leftist intellectuals abuse them...
...when there, the two go to an antique shop together...
...George Meany often benefitted by the sloppy tendency to confuse his political anti-Communism with (what everybody assumed was a corollary of) a staunchly pro-capitalism/free market/free society stance...
...his ability to take everything said about Bellow at face value (bitter ex-wife Susan complains that Bellow is neglectful of their son Daniel, so Harris unquestioningly quotes Bellow's words concerning his character Herzog: "a loving but bad father...
...Paul Gottfried Dept...
...Here is not the place to discuss the many uses and abuses of trade unionism...
...To those of us who put freedom first, a free society is one in which the citizens are free to choose the economic system under which they wish to live (as well as the other institutions of society...
...The years go by: Harris writes Bellow...
...The American labor movement never subscribed to the illusion harbored by Western statesmen from Lloyd George to Nixon and Kissinger that expanded trade with the Soviet Union would guarantee peace and strengthen the defenses of the free world...
...I was shocked," Harris writes, "to hear Bellow employ such an expression...
...Frank 0 'Connell Aptos, California An Inordinate Fear of Labor...
...Or just running, as usual...
...and it is also only natural to see such envy expressed in the sort of excessively virulent criticism and attack so hostile that only one of the seven deadly sins could have prompted it...
...Then Karl Radek, who was a very resourceful wit, said: "Vladimir Ilyich, but where are we going to get enough rope to hang the whole bourgeoisie ?'' Lenin effortlessly replied: "They'll supply us with it...
...to which Harris says nothing...
...My charge is much more serious...
...The classical liberals, both here and in Europe, who have opposed Communist expansion- e.g...
...no reply...
...The book chronicles Harris's attempt to become Bellow's authorized biographer...
...Poor Mark Harris doesn't know, doesn't know...
...by 1967, he tells us, he had filed more than a million words away in diaries first begun in 1934...
...We are no less free today (it can be argued that politically and culturally we are much more free) although the market is far less free, than we were in 1890, the halcyon days of free enterprise...
...How friendly...
...Yet Harris, ever effusive about Bellow's novels, must not have made all that unappealing a companion for the great man...
...Indeed, Organized Labor, in its modern and powerful heyday, has never been willing to submit its case to the marketplace-either forensic or economic...
...Even great Homer sometimes nods, we were told long ago, and so it is with Sidney Hook...
...We know of this date, and of the fact that Harris stayed that weekend at the Del Prado Hotel in Hyde Park, because Harris is an obsessive diarist...
...Is it not time that he similarly allowed the scales to drop from his eyes concerning the economic and the political colossus that is Organized Labor...
Vol. 14 • January 1981 • No. 1
