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Saul Bellow didn’t like WASPs

Last month the New York Review of Books published a 1988 lecture by Saul Bellow on being a Jewish writer in America that is noteworthy for the antipathy Bellow expressed toward WASPs. There is so much venom toward WASPs on the part of a 73-year-old writer who had won the Nobel Prize and any number of literary accolades that I wonder why the New York Review published it, also whether it is an accurate portrait of American culture. Somehow I doubt it.

Below is a string of fragmentary excerpts from the talk. The thrust of the remarks is that when Bellow came along there was tremendous rage on the part of the aristocratic establishment toward Jewish and ethnic writers. But apart from one snarky anti-Semitic quote from Truman Capote in an exchange with his cleaning lady in 1979, when he was a mean drunk, and vague allusions to TS Eliot, Henry James, Ezra Pound and Henry Adams, I’m not sure where all this anti-semitism in our culture was in 1988. Bellow does nothing to document the alleged stiffarm he received.

For me the essay comes off as a whine. I remind you: this was a guy who was on the cover of our leading magazines, won any number of prizes, including the Nobel. 

I’m not saying that there was not anti-Semitism in American culture. My father suffered for it in academia. Digby Baltzell wrote in the 1960s that the Protestant Establishment excluded Jews; he called for opening the doors. In 1967, Norman Podhoretz wrote in Making It that the WASP establishment demanded a “brutal bargain” of Jews–that they become “facsimile WASPs” in manners in order to get prestige appointments. And Jacob Heilbrunn has written of the neoconservatives, in They Knew They Were Right, that they felt so much resentment at being excluded by the Protestant establishment that they had to create their own “parallel establishment” in Washington and in academia.

But these observers were writing about the 1950s and 60s by and large. And if Saul Bellow had to make that “brutal bargain” I would like to see how it really affected his career or his writing. When Podhoretz talks in his book about all the exciting writers emerging after the war, they are all blacks and Jews, Malamud, Roth, Ellison, Baldwin– a phenomenon John Updike acknowledged with his Jewish book, Beck–A Book. A writer whom Bellow cites, Karl Shapiro, wrote in his autobiography, Reports of My Death, that in the 1960s the “curtain was coming down on Wasp gentility” and English departments became Jewish.

But with Bellow it’s all fresh. Here are some quotes from his lecture:

The young man [Jewish aspirant writer] is challenged from all sides. Representatives of the Protestant majority want to see his credentials.

…My own view is that since Henry James and Henry Adams did not hesitate to express their dislike of Jews there is no reason why Jews, while full of respect for these masters, should not be free to write as they please about them. To let them (the hostile American WASPs) determine once and for all what the American psyche is, not to challenge their views…. would be disloyal and cowardly.

… If the WASP aristocrats wanted to think of me as a Jewish poacher on their precious cultural estates then let them.

…When… Jewish, Italian, and Armenian descendants of immigrants, began after World War I to write novels, they caused great discomfort, and in some quarters, alarm and anger.

…Capote said that a Jewish mafia was taking over American literature and New York publishing as well. He was to write in a later book that Jews should be stuffed and put in a natural history museum. [The quote is inaccurate; check out the footnote of the NYRB piece; Capote said Jews were so stuffy they should all be in the Natural History museum]

… a Jewish writer… had to thicken his skin without coarsening himself when he heard from a poet he much admired that America had become the land of the wop and the kike; or from an even more famous literary figure that his fellow Jews were the master criminals who had imposed their usura on long-suffering gentiles, that they had plunged the world into war, and that the goyim were cattle driven to the slaughterhouse by Yids. [wow. I have no idea what this means, do you?]…

…The dislike of Jews was a ready way for WASP literati to identify themselves with the great tradition. Besides, it is something like a hereditary option for non-Jews to exercise at a certain moment when they discover that they have a born right to decide whether they are for the Jews or against them. (Jews have no such right.) ….

A genteel dictatorship inspired by T.S. Eliot (with a roughneck faction headed by Ezra Pound) and describing itself as traditionalist was in fact profoundly racist…. [Eliot [1888-1965] was born and died more than 25 years before Bellow [1915-2005]. Ditto Pound. Did they really affect him?]….

These merely social matters (unpleasant, uncomfortable) are reduced to triviality by the crushing weight of the Jewish experience of our own time. [Bellow brings in the Holocaust.]

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It’s generational. And it works both ways. It’s 20th C. yammer jamming, but these tropes won’t die until all these old people die off.

Actual age isn’t the point—witness Blankfort and Hostage here on this board—it’s old thinking, the fossilized inability to adjust and change to a newer consciousness as it arises, as facts are discovered that alter our knowledge of the past, or who have an innate curiosity to address or uncover the truth wherever it may lead.

My 83-year-old mentor in NYC had a mind like a steel trap. He would not brook historical lies. I have nieces and nephews who in their late teens and early 20s have lost all mental agility. I find most Zios, including the Christian ones, to be IQ-deficient. The world has changed and they can’t keep up. (A great example of the ability to change is Frank Schaeffer, the Christian Right guy who made a 180.)

I was under the impression that Bellow — well, mellowed as he grew older, but there’s always the temptation in the old to return to return to their “greatest hits” and reopen old wounds.

See this interview (if that’s what it was) with Harold Bloom — http://www.thejewishweek.com/arts/books/blooms_day_or_year

“Christianity? Christianity?” he said in a recent phone interview, when asked about his views on the Christian interpretation of Judaism. “The New Testament is a violently anti-Semitic reading of the Hebrew Bible.”
Interfaith groups that try to patch over the differences today, he went on, do so in vain: “Christianity is our enemy. It’s an uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to deal with. It’s a ghastly religion founded on the cross, a symbol of torture.”

If it’s legit, it’s not exactly what you’d expect someone to have gleaned from a lifetime of wide and close reading, but in old age many return to the comforting prejudices of youth.

Bellow wrote an entire book about his experience in Israel in spring of 76 called “To Jerusalem and Back”

I found many interesting aspects to the Bellow interview, beyond his comments on Zionism and the aspects of the WASP establishment that you have quoted. His disdain for assimilation (colleagues who found their way to Anglicanism) and his Jewish second and American writer first were two of the items that I picked up just now skimming for the second time.

Bellow never appealed to me for whatever reason. I can’t remember my exact reason for not being interested in reading him, but I wasn’t….I just had some “impression” of his work .
But it’s plain to see he had a severe inferiority complex with a ting of bitterness…maybe that’s what my impression was and why I wasn’t interested in him.

“…the WASP establishment demanded a “brutal bargain” of Jews–that they become “facsimile WASPs” in manners in order to get prestige appointments.”

I know just how he feels, I had to make the same bargain, not to get “prestige appointments”, but simply to avoid having the crap beaten out of me daily. But I eventually learned to enjoy a daily bath.
And you know, it wasn’t so bad.
But my blood boils when I think of the way a certain other dusky minority was brought here on first-class pleasure cruises, and immediately given cushy sinecures.

Another words, can anybody tell me that the Jews in America have suffered a more brutal bargain than any other somewhat exotic minority which arrived here of their own free will?