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Studs Terkel fished into his shirt pocket and took out a folded piece of white paper. It was a Garry Wills column unseen in Chicago, and Studs wanted me to give it some ink. Studs has been Wills’s champion for a long time. Their friendship reaches back to the early 70s, when Wills and Studs’s wife, Ida, wound up in jail together after a Washington, D.C., demonstration against the war in Vietnam. Studs admired one Wills column so much back then that he ran off a stack of copies and passed them out to everybody on his bus. Today, Wills’s syndicate sends Studs a copy of every column Wills writes. I’d run into Studs one night last week at Midway Airport—he’d been in New York to accept a Sidney Hillman Foundation award—and gave him a lift home. “You gotta read this,” said Studs. He’d apparently stuffed the Wills column into his pocket so he could show it around on his trip. He told me gleefully that Wills was weighing in on the new Saul Bellow literary controversy. By Bellow’s own admission, his new novel, Ravelstein, is based on his long friendship at the University of Chicago with Allan Bloom, whose 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, gave him a taste of the high fame Bellow has known for decades. If you accept as fact everything Bellow says in his roman a clef, Bloom was not only gay—something apparently everybody close to him knew—but when he died in 1992 he died of AIDS. In short, Bellow outed him. Depending on who’s passing judgment, Bellow’s treatment of his late friend is either forgivable or unforgivable or neither, because it’s art. What no one’s questioned is that Bellow and Bloom are giants. No one until Wills. As Studs poured the port in his kitchen, I read the Wills column. There have been some wise and sympathetic reviews of Ravelstein, notably one by Louis Menand in the New York Review of Books. Menand told us that Bloom was someone Bellow never knew quite what to make of—“a man who spent the millions he made from the publication of a cultural jeremiad on wall-mounted television screens, high-end audio systems, four-star hotel rooms, and Armani suits.” Menand argued that it isn’t Bloom whom Bellow outs, but Bellow himself, whose surrogate in the book is the unattractive narrator “Chick,” a brittle, resentful, needy Jewish writer. According to Menand, Chick’s hidden agenda in telling Ravelstein’s story is to settle scores with his narcissistic witch of an ex-wife. “Not a single incident or character feels truly fictional,” reported Menand, who concluded, “Subtle but unsparing honesty.” Wills thinks Ravelstein is awful. Ditto The Closing of the American Mind, which he dismisses here as a “sophomoric rant against modernity” that was “pretentious but shallow” and also “grim, humorless and vindictive.” Wills says Bellow wants to show that “the crank was really funny, warm, and ready to accept much of the indulgent modern life castigated in his book.” The scandal, according to Wills, isn’t that Bellow invaded his friend’s private life but that he subscribes “to the superstition that Bloom was a deep thinker.” Bloom wasn’t and Ravelstein isn’t, says Wills, who dismisses the purported wisdom of Bellow’s hero as “self-important sloganizing.” Bellow’s book is so “shockingly bad,” Wills tells us, that the only thing that kept him slogging through it was “a morbid interest to see what Bellow will do in outing other members of the Chicago faculty.” Wills marvels at Bellow’s “cruel violation” of one of his former wives, brought into the novel to be torn to pieces by “two pompous intellectual vultures,” and concludes that he put the book down grateful to escape “the fetid enclosure of Bellow’s mind.” Wonderful stuff, said Studs, who’s partial to any eloquent shiv job on the University of Chicago, he being an alumnus who laughs at its pretensions. As he told me in the car, he thinks it’s a hoot that U. of C. traditionalists have gone to the barricades vowing not to let their school turn itself into another Northwestern. “Northwestern’s a better school,” said Studs. “How many innocent people did Chicago get off death row?” Wills teaches at Northwestern. Studs has no use for The Closing of the American Mind either. In his view the idea of a literary “canon” is ridiculous. “At one time it was only the Greek and Latin classics—that was the canon,” he said. “If it was written in English—that was no good! Then anything written by an American was unacceptable. Hawthorne and Twain—especially Twain.” Bellow doesn’t impress Studs either. He told me, “As Leon Despres said once, ‘If only Algren had been writing about middle-aged Jewish intellectuals, then he’d have won the Nobel Prize.’” Studs wanted to know why the Sun-Times passed up Wills’s critique. Now and then that newspaper publishes a Wills column, including his recent tribute to the late Ida Terkel. But the Ravelstein dissection didn’t see print, and Studs was puzzled. “I didn’t see a point in launching an intense personal attack on Saul Bellow and the late Mr. Bloom,” explains Steve Huntley, the editorial-page editor. He says he admires Wills as an author but decided that because the Sun-Times hadn’t covered the Ravelstein debate when it erupted its readers wouldn’t know what to make of Wills’s revisionist contribution. I think Huntley missed a golden opportunity. The Sun-Times could have played an important role in fostering a major local intercollegiate literary pissing match. What’s a newspaper for anyway?
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