Racial comment stalls
effort to honor Saul Bellow

CHICAGO — In a city whose streets commemorate literary notables like the German Goethe and the Frenchman Jean Racine, naming an avenue, a statue, or maybe a school after the American giant Saul Bellow should come without hesitation or controversy.

However, when Bellow’s longtime friend and University of Chicago colleague Richard Stern sent the idea along to Mayor Richard Daley’s office, which consulted the alderman representing Bellow’s old Hyde Park neighborhood about the request, it was promptly denied.

Alderman Toni Preckwinkle isn’t commenting on the rejection of the idea, but Stern said he received a letter from the alderman saying she heard remarks from Bellow she considered racist and would not agree to name anything after the author, who died two years ago at age 89 after moving to the Boston area.

Stern wrote to a neighborhood newspaper that Bellow was far from being a racist. But he acknowledged there are sentences in his work that could be taken as Preckwinkle took them, adding he argued with Bellow about them.

Stern and other friends of the 1976 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature argue his thoughts and feelings about race and ethnicity were complex. Bellow often explored racial and ethnic issues in essays and books.

“If you look at the black character who stalks Sammler in his novel ‘Mr. Sammler’s Planet,’ you get a sense that Bellow himself felt threatened by or could feel threatened by blacks,” James Atlas, Bellow’s biographer, told the Chicago Tribune. “On the other hand, he also expressed tremendous pain and sympathy about the conditions of blacks in the South and West Side ghettos of Chicago.”

Bellow’s love affair with the vanishing ethnic neighborhoods of Chicago was paralleled by a traditional way of educating. He was a believer in the Great Books program established in the 1930s and 1940s at the University of Chicago by President Robert Maynard Hutchins. For Hutchins and Bellow, great books were essentially books written by Greeks, Romans and those who came after them in the Western tradition.

Bellow headed Chicago’s elite Committee on Social Thought, and a protégé was Allan Bloom, whom he encouraged to publish his ideas that standards in American higher education were being sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism and political correctness.

The perception of Bellow’s views toward blacks can be countered by his close friendship with the black novelist Ralph Ellison. The two were roommates during the 1950s, and Bellow was a constant source of encouragement both before and after Ellison’s now classic “Invisible Man.”

“I don’t think he was a racist; I think he was a bit more scared of black-skinned people than he should have been,” said the venerable Chicago writer Studs Terkel.

But Stern and others believe that shouldn’t bar something being named after Bellow. Several Chicago authors have places named in their honor in the city, among them novelist Nelson Algren and poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

(Associated Press)