A Political Companion to Saul Bellow

1. Trotskyism in the Early Work of Saul Bellow

9 1 Trotskyism in the Early Work of Saul Bellow Judie Newman Bellow’s enthusiasm for Trotskyism tends to be summarily dismissed as a youthful peccadillo, or as just one among many of the weltering ideas which populate his fiction. As Edward Shils commented, “If there’s a bad idea out there—Trotskyism, reichism, Steinerism—leave it to our friend Saul to swallow it.”1 Arguably, however, the later Bellow’s reputation as a neoconservative has obscured the importance to his life and writings of his early enthusiasm for Trotskyism. The 2010 publication of a selection of his letters opens with Bellow aged seventeen writing to Yetta Barshevsky, a fellow high school student who introduced him to Trotskyism. In the letter, the callow Bellow, disappointed in love, writes, “I sever relations with you,” conceding only that “We may still be casual friends.”2 In fact, they stayed friends for more than sixty years. When she died, Bellow wrote her eulogy, describing how she had introduced him to world politics when they were in high school, and had given him Trotsky’s pamphlet on the German question.3 Bellow was still thinking about Trotsky in the 1990s in his correspondence with Albert Glotzer (his lifelong friend and at one point Trotsky’s secretary).4 Bellow’s involvement in radical left-wing politics, at Tuley High School and at university, produced his first publications (political pieces) in left-wing journals (the Beacon and Soapbox) and his first published short story, an antifascist fable. Although critics have tended to see Bellow’s Trotskyism as a product of his involvement with the Partisan Review group during that journal’s Trotskyist phase, he appears to have been recruited to the journal because of his established political reputation rather than for his 10 Judie Newman as yet unproven literary talent. Writing to F. W. Dupee in 1941, the editor Philip rahv described Bellow as one of the “apprentice writers” he had met in Chicago.5 In fact, Partisan Review was the least radical of the journals to which the young Bellow contributed. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, Bellow’s literary output centered on the political specificities of the time, most notably in “The Mexican General” (1942), based on Bellow’s visit to Trotsky in Mexico, where he arrived within hours of the assassination. In some respects, Bellow’s enthusiasm for Trotsky is unsurprising. Writing in 1993, Bellow pointed out that when the russian revolution took place in 1917, he was two years old and his parents, who had emigrated from Saint Petersburg to Montreal in 1913, followed subsequent events in russia very keenly: “At the dinner table the Tsar, the war, the front, Lenin, Trotsky were mentioned as often as parents, sisters and brothers in the old country.”6 Grandfather Bellow had taken refuge in the Winter Palace during the revolution; his mother’s relatives were famous Mensheviks. While the older generation assumed that the Bolsheviks would soon be suppressed , their children were keen to join the revolution, including the son of Bellow’s Hebrew teacher: “He went off to build a new order under Lenin and Trotsky. And he disappeared.”7 Despite embracing Americanization, Bellow’s friends believed that “they were also somehow russian” and read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, going on to Lenin’s State and Revolution and the pamphlets of Trotsky.8 The Tuley High School debating society discussed The Communist Manifesto. Bellow read it and described himself as “swept away by the power of the analysis.”9 When a Commission of Inquiry was set up in Mexico in 1937 to consider the charges made against Trotsky in the Moscow Show Trials (in which he was alleged to be a fascist collaborator, and condemned to death in his absence), Bellow and his Trotskyist friends “followed the proceedings bitterly, passionately, for we were of course the Outs; the Stalinists were the Ins.”10 Even much later in his life, Bellow still admired Trotsky, both for his politics and his culture: “How could I forget that Trotsky had created the red Army, that he had read French novels at the front while defeating Denikin? That great crowds had been swayed by his coruscating speeches?”11 Bellow’s political education began in earnest at “The Forum,” a church hall on California Avenue which hosted debates between socialists, communists , and anarchists. He read Marx and Engels, “blasting away at Value, Price and Profit while the police raided a brothel across the street.”12 When [18.117.91...