Where Words Took Shape: Saul Bellow’s Chicago

By JON FASMAN

DIVISION STREET runs from east to west. It begins (or ends, if you prefer) in Chicago’s wealthy Near North Side, where high-rise condo buildings offer views across Lake Michigan, and continues through the bar- and club-infested area around State and Rush Streets. It is the main thoroughfare of hip Wicker Park; then it traverses Humboldt Park, before heading — like so many residents who once lived on or near it, including a few generations of my own family — into the suburbs.

Solomon Belo moved from Lachine, Quebec, to the Humboldt Park neighborhood when he was 9. About a decade later, shortly after publishing a short story called “The Hell It Can’t” about a savage, unexplained beating, he changed his first name to Saul and his last to Bellow. If the rest isn’t quite history, by now it’s certainly biography.

Late in his life, Bellow reflected on spending summer nights in Humboldt Park, “on the back porch, your neighbors on their back porches all down the line, the graceless cottonwoods reaching toward you and you listened to the accordions and player pianos and harmonicas below, across the way, down the street, playing mazurkas ... One of the children was sent to the corner to bring home a pitcherful of soda pop (the druggist called it a phosphate). Over every drugstore in Chicago there swung a large mortar and pestle outlined in electric bulbs and every summer the sandflies with green light transparent wings covered the windows.”

Though you get the classic Bellovian sense of motion at the end of the passage, with the children running, sandflies beating their wings against the drugstore window, the tone is calm, quiet, almost pastoral. It lacks Augie March’s antic good humor, Herzog’s generative sense of woundedness, Charlie Citrine’s obsessing over his friend Humboldt eating a pretzel while already covered with “the dust of the grave.” But it retains (to my eye and ear, at least) an essential Chicagoness — or at least it evokes the Chicago I knew through my grandparents: a city of immigrants and first-generation Americans living close together, with an ear cocked toward the old country (accordions, mazurkas) while running toward the new (phosphates, electric bulbs).

These days in much of Humboldt Park, you are more likely to hear a tight horn section than accordions, the declining syncopated arpeggios of a piano used in a Latin band than a player piano, salsa, hip-hop or reggaetón than mazurkas. Heading down Division Street, from Western Avenue to the park itself, you pass beneath a row of abstract steel representations of the Puerto Rican flag flying over the street. Most of the signs are in Spanish; the gentrification that has transformed the neighboring areas of Wicker Park, Bucktown and Logan Square is barely a ripple here. And yet, the essential feel that Bellow evokes — a cozy, cheek-by-jowl urbanity — remains palpable. The modest but solid apartment buildings — three flats and six flats — lining the side streets all across Chicago’s Northwest Side are snug and solid, the sorts of places that some people use as a first American toehold and others never leave. Bellow referred to the animal smells, the rawness of Chicago that struck him when his family first moved from Lachine; if the animal smells are gone — the huge Union Stockyards, just southeast of Humboldt Park, closed in the early 1970s, after decades of decline — Chicago’s rough vitality remains stronger here than almost anywhere else in the city.

The second house into which Abraham Belo moved his family is a brick three flat on Cortez Street. The house is on the ragged edge of Ukrainian Village; walking along these streets you’ll hear Ukrainian, Russian and Spanish with equal frequency. Some hipsters, but not many, have started to make inroads this far west. At the end of Bellow’s old block, on the corner of Cortez and Western, is a bar called the Empty Bottle where the new and old communities have made a tentative accommodation: it has an old-time, corner-tavern feeling (which in this area still tends to mean Polish), it serves a largely Latino community and in the evenings it features an eclectic array of experimental jazz and rock bands, along with some of the best D.J.’s in the city. It achieves this mix matter-of-factly, unsentimentally.

My grandmother and her two sisters, like Bellow, attended Tuley High School in Humboldt Park; he and my great-aunt Dorothy were almost exact contemporaries, and there appears in “More Die of Heartbreak” a character with their surname, Vilatzer (Bellow spelled it “Vilitzer”). The apocryphal family legend says that he was fond of Dorothy when they were in high school, but her father, Elie, who owned a furniture store, shooed the dreamer away.

Bellow’s Vilitzer was the apotheosis of a corrupt big-city pol — a caricature, in a sense, of Elie’s cautious immigrant materialism. Harold (The Big Heat) Vilitzer was a physically imposing city councilman who squeezed a man’s head in a vise, maneuvered his sister out of proceeds from a real-estate sale and shunned his nephew before climbing into the back of a limousine.

Perhaps as an act of rebellion — Bellow was pretty close to sainthood in my secular Jewish home — I came to him late, not reading a word of him until I was almost 30. I was then in the middle of a three-year spell in London, restless and homesick, and I picked up “The Adventures of Augie March” less from a burning desire to read Bellow than because the mere title reminded me of home.

Of course, it took all of three sentences to hook me; the voice coming out of those pages was so strong, so familiar, and seemed to be speaking directly to me. I suppose all aesthetic loves carry with them a sense of ownership, but since then I’ve worked my way through much of the rest of the canon, and there remains something categorically different — both welcoming, almost haimishe, and a little eerie — in my encounters with Bellow than with other authors I revere.

My early memories are full of characters I would come to recognize (or at least call) Bellovian: Jewish wiseguys, street-smart autodidacts like my grandfather, an orphan raised in military school who became first a professional saxophonist and then a lawyer, who taught me how to play poker when I was 6. My grandfather also read voraciously, everything he could get his hands on; when he came across an unfamiliar word he wrote it on the book’s inside flap, then looked it up and used it as soon as he could. My grandmother could curse in Yiddish and quote Browning from memory with equal felicity. Art and commerce coexisted, rather than competing, in these people and in their milieu. Augie, Einhorn and Maurice spoke in their accents: adenoidal Midwestern with an unerasable Yiddish twang.

All of them were forged — were made Americans — in the crucible of Chicago’s Northwest Side. Their stories have been re-enacted hundreds, thousands of times over; a more fertile writer’s ground is difficult to imagine. Naturally, Bellow wasn’t the only writer patrolling this patch of earth. Nelson Algren’s stories were mostly set on the Northwest Side. Algren memorably described a fondness for Chicago as being “like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

Division Street has always been the Northwest Side’s main thoroughfare. It once held more bars per capita than any other street in the world. Today you have to hunt around a bit more — the center of drinking-gravity has moved a bit east, toward Wicker Park and Bucktown — but there are still plenty of dark, quiet spots for an afternoon beer and no conversation. You still see bars with Old Style signs out front advertising “Zimne pivo” (Polish for “cold beer”), even if the drinkers are speaking Spanish.

Division Street also houses Chicago’s last remaining Russian bathhouse, which inspired the greatest paragraph of Chicago anthropology in Bellow’s most Chicago-centric book, “Humboldt’s Gift”:

“The patrons of the Russian Bath are cast in an antique form. They have swelling buttocks and fatty breasts as yellow as buttermilk. They stand on thick pillar legs affected with a sort of creeping verdigris or blue-cheese mottling of the ankles. After steaming, these old fellows eat enormous snacks of bread and salt herring or large ovals of salami and dripping skirt-steak and they drink schnapps. They could knock down walls with their hard stout old-fashioned bellies. Things are very elementary here. You feel that these people are almost conscious of obsolescence, of a line of evolution abandoned by nature and culture. So down in the super-heated subcellars all these Slavonic cavemen and wood demons with hanging laps of fat and legs of stone and lichen boil themselves and splash ice water on their heads by the bucket. Upstairs, on the television screen in the locker room, little dudes and grinning broads make smart talk or leap up and down. They are unheeded ... There may be no village in the Carpathians where such practices still prevail.”

If my grandfather didn’t eat red meat every day of his 87 years, he came pretty close. Their house always smelled like roast beef and garlic; from time spent on the floor as a child I can confirm it worked itself into the very fibers of the shag carpet.

And me? As much as I love a good shvitz, it has an antique, almost kitsch feel to it. In that paragraph I fear that I am at best the little dude making smart talk and going unheeded. I don’t feel terrible about it: that’s Americanization; that’s what Humboldt Park is for: to turn a family from antique forms to twittering little dudes in three short generations.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/travel/02Footsteps.html?ref=saulbellow&pagewanted=print