Bellow’s Warning
What we can learn from the blacklisting of one of America’s most prestigious writers.
In the late 1980s, the early Cancel Culture movement scored its first-ever prime kill: the writer Saul Bellow. At the time of his blacklisting, Bellow had been publishing for more than four decades, managing to rack up along the way a Pulitzer, the Nobel Prize for Literature and three National Book Awards for Fiction—a record that stands to this day.
Bellow was easily the most garlanded novelist in the whole of American Letters. But that meant nothing to the P.C. mobs out for his scalp who, when they finally got it, pushed us ever closer to the sort of dystopian future that Bellow had been warning the public about for years, in both fiction and non-fiction. On March 10, 1994, a now-cancelled Bellow, age 78, wrote in The New York Times:
My critics, many of whom could not locate Papua New Guinea on the map, want to convict me of contempt for multiculturalism and defamation of the third world. I am an elderly white male—a Jew, to boot. Ideal for their purposes… Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists.
Bellow was defending himself, at long last, against the thing that had gotten him cancelled: charges of racism stemming from an article published in The New York Times Magazine in January 1988, in which he had, in the course of a conversation about ongoing efforts to cancel the Western Civilization class at Stanford, allegedly made the comment to journalist James Atlas, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read them”—a seeming slap against non-white authors.
Atlas naturally included the comment in his piece, which set off a fury against Bellow in the press, in bookchat land, and in academe, whose uniform groves were beginning to squeeze out conservatives, or any indeed anyone whose viewpoints were not approved by the authorities. Political correctness was kicking into high gear, even in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
Bellow wrote elsewhere that he had not meant to imply that non-white societies are inferior. “Of course primitive societies have their arts and their wisdom,” he noted, “and in the West books are under attack.”
But the damage was done. Bellow’s biographer Zachary Leader reports:
Few words by Bellow [the “Papuans and Zulus” remark] have done more to alienate liberal and academic opinion than these, or to banish his fiction from college syllabuses. Robert Pippin [political philosophy professor at the University of Chicago] remembers being “stunned that even at the University of Chicago so many people expressed contempt for Bellow, hated him, for that remark.”
And so, thanks to a single remark made in the presence of a journalist, Saul Bellow was effectively cancelled. His banishment made for an unhappy ending to one of the great American literary careers.
At present, Bellow’s absence from our literary landscape is noticeable. His name, I’ve found, more often than not draws a blank, even among literary types. In 2019, liberal writer Aviya Kushner, writing for the Jewish news website The Forward, remarked that she had great difficulty finding Bellow’s books even in Chicago, Bellow’s hometown. She notes: “I remembered that in my undergraduate and graduate education, including two graduate degrees in creative writing, I was never taught any work by Bellow, and this might be his real problem: he’s not taught anymore, so younger readers don’t encounter him, and therefore don’t have him in their home libraries.”
But it wasn’t just the “Papuans and Zulus” comment that did Bellow in. At the time of his canceling, Bellow had been irritating the left for years. In 1977 he gave a lecture in Chicago at the Drake Hotel (also reported in Leader’s biography) in which he mused on a growing sense among the intelligentsia that America was a bad country that cares only about profit, warmongering, and neglects the well-being of “the blacks, the children, the women, the aged, the poor.” (Where have we heard that before?) He specifically mourns the decay of the American city thanks to crime, drugs and welfare, and the decay of schools, whose teachers are among the highest-paid in the country, yet:
I have entered classrooms in which pupils wandered about knocking out rhythms on the walls absorbed in their transistors. No one seemed to grasp that the room had a center. No one heeded the teacher when she spoke... [The kids] are blank, unformed [who] live convulsively, in turbulence and darkness of mind. They do not know the meaning of words like ‘above,’ ‘below,’ ‘beyond’… [yet] they have a demonic knowledge of sexual acts, guns, drugs, and devices, which are not vices here.
The observation was published in the Chicago Sun-Times and set off a predictable firestorm of criticism among black intellectuals—“the analytical furies,” as Bellow called them. Academics from the University of Chicago published a letter denouncing the speech as racist, and demanded a public apology, and further demanded that such “racist statements” not be published in a newspaper. A key part of their opposition to Bellow’s remarks was that he had not given sufficient consideration to the “causes” of the problems he mentioned.
But Bellow did not apologize, nor did he shut up. He told William Kennedy in Esquire in 1982:
We’re now in the fourth or fifth welfare generation, people who’ve never worked, people sealed out, set aside, and they looked to me like a doomed population… They’ve racked up a most extensive failure which has cost billions of dollars and employed millions of people and achieved nothing. The cities continue on this giant slide.
A lifelong Democrat, Bellow became increasingly convinced that liberal policies were harming, not helping, the nation. He became an admirer of Ronald Reagan and an outspoken supporter of Israel: a “neocon,” per his critics, a word no less a pejorative then than it is now.
“He did have what I would call a bad reaction to the 1960s,” his son Adam Bellow says in the 2022 PBS “American Masters” documentary, a film which comes with a disclaimer warning of the “depictions of derogatory imagery in historical context” for adults at risk of meltdown.
Bellow’s outrage at the lawlessness and decay of the Sixties, and his own burgeoning conservatism, are most visible in his 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet, one of the fullest and most stinging indictments of this much-gloried-in decade. Often called a “neoconservative classic,” the novel follows one Artur Sammler, an elderly Jewish professor at Columbia, as he watches his place of work, his city, and his country descend into chaos. In the book’s most famous scene, Professor Sammler is giving a talk on British writers. When he mentions Orwell, a genius long reviled by the left as a right-winger for his anti-authoritarian stances, he is interrupted and heckled by goonish students who begin hurling personal insults at the old chap for his age and suspected sexual impotence. Sammler eventually has to be hustled out of the auditorium by a female student.
Pondering the abuse he’d suffered at the hands of the hecklers, Sammler is astonished at how braindead and anti-thought American youth have become in the very places where they were to have been educated. He notes that the reasoned debates of the ages have been replaced by shallowness, intolerance and ignorance, by “militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth-showing, Barbary ape howling.”
I couldn’t help but think about all this some months ago as I watched the hordes of protesters take over numerous university campuses (including Columbia), shouting anti-U.S., anti-Israel mantras. In fact, Mr. Sammler’s Planet was born out of the campus takeover of Columbia in April of ‘68, which Bellow, and the entire country, had witnessed. Left-wing agitators made demands about a number of things, including the divestment of university businesses associations linked to the Department of Defense. Leader’s biography of Bellow reports that numerous campus buildings were occupied over the course of that hateful spring, including Hamilton Hall, which was also taken over this past spring. A dean was taken hostage. Students posed for pictures in the president’s chair, and black protesters insisted that white protesters move to a segregated space, as neo-segregation and reverse racism, presently celebrated by the left, made their first appearances. One student jumped on a policeman from an upper-story window, leaving the cop permanently paralyzed. Columbia finally called in the NYPD a week into the madness and arrested 700 people. 130 protesters were injured, including faculty.
The American intellectual world seemed to be hurdling toward Stalinism. Neither Sammler nor his creator approved. “I think that a great many writers have associated themselves with the youth and with revolution and with these feelings,” Bellow says in a grainy interview clip included in the PBS film. “But that was at an earlier moment. Now the young don’t have very much use for them or even for literature and they’re in a highly anti-cultural mood. They’ve gotten hold of the idea of the Cultural Revolution, which as far as I can see consists in not reading, and destroying books, libraries and other cultural property.”
One can’t talk about Saul Bellow’s politics without talking about Israel. No dummy, Bellow was a sophisticated political thinker—a theorist, even—and was a vocal supporter of the state of Israel from its inception. The existence of the tiny, beleaguered state was a decisive factor, I believe, in his thinking, and in his left-to-right transformation—and his cancellation.
As a Jew, he took anti-Semitism, and anti-Israelism of the sort that’s fashionable now, very personally, and did not hesitate to make his feelings known on these subjects, which he did most fully in his 1976 memoir-travelogue To Jerusalem and Back—his only book-length work of nonfiction, just 182 pages, which was based on notes he took while visiting Israel in 1975. In the book’s opening pages, Bellow states flatly that the left loathes Israel, seeing it “as a reactionary small country [that] abuses its Arab population,” a prejudice that is easily detectable in the press. He mentions his own spat with Le Monde, France’s major newspaper, to whom he wrote a letter in 1973 criticizing, among other things, Sartre’s public statements on Israel. The French paper did not publish the letter, or even acknowledge it, despite its being hand-delivered.
“Since 1973,” Bellow writes, “Le Monde has openly taken the side of the Arabs in their struggle with Israel. It supports terrorists.” Bellow notes that Israel, like the United States, is frequently accused of perpetrating all sorts of evil against others by actors not fit to hurl stones:
Where Israel is concerned, the world swells with moral consciousness... They do not ask that the African peasant or the illiterate fellah should be moral by our standards... But some of them do appear to believe that the Jews, with their precious and refining record of suffering, have a unique obligation to hold up the moral burdens everyone else has dumped.
Upon publication, and even more so now, To Jerusalem and Back is skewered by critics for Bellow’s supposed inability to criticize Israel. But that is not true. He does criticize Israelis, mainly for their seeming lassitude regarding their own survival. Bellow notes the decline he sees among the general population, and how much worse it is since his last visit to Israel years before, fresh off its victory in the 1967 war. “Everyone looks much shabbier,” he writes, like a grandparent sizing up his own progeny.
For this noticeable slide, Bellow credits Israel’s near-defeat by the Egyptians in the 1973 war. He wonders if Israelis are losing the will to fight, or even to care. And with the extremely high Arab birth rate, much higher than that of Israelis, the burgeoning wealth and technology of the Arab states (to include military technology), and the increasing prevalence of the Arab narrative in world opinion, he reaches the fateful, worrisome conclusion: Israel’s future is not guaranteed.
“The Arabs are continually gaining strength,” he writes, “while Israel becomes weaker.”
Looking at the attacks of October 7, how the Israelis were taken by surprise and infiltrated by relative amateurs in mere hang gliders, and massacred in such large numbers, and how quickly the pro-Hamas narrative took hold in the world media, particularly among our youth—with, according to one poll, six in ten Americans ages 18-24 saying what Hamas did was “justified”—one finds it difficult to shrug off Bellow’s warning. He ends To Jerusalem and Back by stating flatly, “The root of the problem is simply this—that the Arabs will not agree to the existence of Israel.”
Reading Bellow, one gets the sense that his concern was not just for the existence of the state of Israel, but for Western Civilization itself. He was fascinated by the future, and futurists—the name “Wells,” referencing H.G., appears 26 times, by my count, in Mr. Sammler’s Planet—but it’s clear that he did not believe the future looked particularly bright for any of us, particularly not for those of us in the Free World. Recall the title of his 1994 essay collection: It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future.
In his 1982 novel The Dean’s December, another book that deals with political correctness, academe, and futurism, there is a character named Spangler, which is, of course, very close to “Spengler,” i.e. Oswald, author of the famously pessimistic The Decline of the West. Oswald Spengler is mentioned by name in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, and The Decline of the West is mentioned several times in his 1964 novel Herzog. Like Spengler, Bellow seems not at all confident that the West’s future is secure.
But his starkest warnings about the world shaping up around us are to be found in To Jerusalem and Back:
Liberal democracy is as brief as a bubble … We forget … that as a species we are generally close to the “state of nature,” as Thomas Hobbes described—a nasty, brutish, pitiless condition in which men are too fearful of death to give much thought to freedom (…) In world history liberty is an exceptional condition… Periods of liberty have been very brief… The free countries are curiously lethargic about their freedom.
As a political scientist and political critic of literature, I can say that the foregoing is among the best summations of human politics that I’ve ever read, from a man who describes himself in the same book merely as “an interested amateur—a learner.” John Locke couldn’t have put it better.
This was the voice, and mind, of Solomon “Saul” Bellow working at its most prodigious level—he whom the left saw fit to cancel, but whose prescient work and Orwellian voice ring true through the decades. His warning should be heeded if we are to save our civilization from the double poison of neo-Marxism and anti-Semitism presently being injected into the heart of the West. That can’t be accomplished if his books remain blacklisted.
Erik Lewis holds a Bachelor’s in Political Science from Clemson University and a Master’s in Politics of the Middle East and North Africa from the University of London.
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