Yes it was. It threw great blame on the Jews, which was supported by my treatment in the hospital. For the first time I was in a hospital was the first time I was aware I’d left my street and my family. I couldn’t see my parents. I was allowed one visitor a week. My mother and father came on alternate weeks. I always saw them separately. This was the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. The Children’s Ward. Ward H. It was a Protestant hospital.
But restrictive. Was it an infectious thing? Or were they just obeying the rules? Did you read much when you were in the hospital, besides the New Testament?
I read everything I could get my hands on. There were very few books. Mostly there were funny papers, which were stacked beside the kids’ beds. Piles of funny papers. Characters that disappeared long ago, like Slim Jim, Happy Hooligan, and the Katzenjammer Kids.
You were growing up in a culture, in and around Montreal, that was very French. Did that create any sense of difference?
I was aware of being un juif. That was driven home quite early. I don’t know if it was bad, really. I got some light on it when I read the New Testament.
So in essence, as with many people, the first ideas are religious, eschatological?
Yes, and they were very keen. They were driven home very sharply. By my isolation first of all, then by the fact that I knew I was in danger of death. My reading was not so bad for a child of eight—my reading ability. I got out of bed occasionally; they used to hang your chart at the foot of the bed. I would read my chart, and I knew it was very unpromising.
So in a sense you are a survivor. You have a feeling of that?
It’s fundamental, I think, with me. I felt forever after that I had been excused from death and that I was, as gamblers in Chicago used to say in those days, when I was ten or so, “playing on velvet”—ahead of the game.
One does feel strongly about survival as a child; election is added to what one is likely to have gone through, and that causes a special concentration in the mind, doesn’t it?
Anyone who’s faced death at that age is likely to remember something of what I felt—that it was a triumph, that I had gotten away with it. Not only was I ahead of the game. I was privileged. And there was some kind of bookkeeping going on. I did my own mental bookkeeping. I thought I owed something to some entity for the privilege of surviving.
So there was a debt as well? A debt that had to be paid off?
A duty that came with survival. Those are the primitive facts.
How did you describe that debt to yourself?
That I’d better make it worth the while of whoever it was that authorized all this. I’ve always had some such feeling. Overjoyed. Full of welling vitality and perhaps that I’ve gotten away with something but that it had been by permission of some high authority. Occasionally I talk to others about this, and I find they are dead on the subject. That they didn’t have this sense for themselves. Some kind of central connection, in the telephonic sense.
So one comes out of surviving one’s childhood with a sense of being privileged; then one goes home and finds the reality—one is back in a family that has proceeded without you and quite well? Did you have this feeling of imagining one’s death and the tragedy it would cause to the world? Imagining your funeral and your parents weeping?
No, but what I did see was a great many kids dying in the ward. This happened regularly. A lot of fussing in the night and a screen around the kid’s bed and nurses running back and forth with flashlights. And in the morning an empty bed. You just saw the bed made up for another kid. Before long there was a kid in it. You understood very well what had happened, but it wasn’t discussed or explained.
So you’re back home, aware you have caused grief, suffering, and anxiety to your parents. Your brothers are there. How do they behave?
At first they were sympathetic, but that wore off. Then I was just an obnoxious kid soaking up all the attention and affection and concern of the family, and I was greatly resented by my brothers. One of them was four years and the other eight years my senior. The brother who was four years older had in the meantime used and broken such toys as I had. Especially my sled.
And then came the move to Chicago?
My father left for Chicago in the winter of 1924. It was nearly summer when I rejoined the family. I didn’t go back to school. That same summer, my mother brought the children to Chicago.
Did you view the world differently?
I must have. Of course, there’s no such thing as thinking this through, but I certainly made decisions based on my condition. I had to decide, for instance, whether I would accept the role of convalescent sickly child or whether I would beef myself up. I decided on course two. I set myself on a very hard course of exercise. I ran a great deal.
So this is an idea in its very primitive form: I have survived. I must survive. I should survive. And the way to survive, to pay this debt, is to become good or better. When did this notion of “better” come into your life?
By the time we got to Chicago I was a confirmed reader, and so I picked up all sorts of self-improvement, self-development, books, especially physical self-improvement, at the public library. There was a famous football coach named Walter Camp, who had written a book called How to Get Fit and How to Stay So. This involved carrying coal scuttles at arms’ length, and I did that because we had coal in the shed (this was in Chicago) and one of my jobs, which I was glad to do, was to go up and down the stairs. Up with the coal and down with the ashes. I became quite fanatical about training.
So in surviving, the mind’s not really what you think about. It is the body that carries the structure of the mind. Without it, you’re not going to have a mind. Had you not lived, you wouldn’t have been able to develop any form of betterment, so you decide you are going to protect it in some way?
My alternatives were to remain weak and be coddled.
A delightful state for some children … Look at Marcel Proust: be got a cold, and it lasted a lifetime. Most people would probably think that the family that could have produced you would have been one of argumentation, dispute, rational analysis, logic, order, and violence, mental and other kinds. A picture that corresponds in any way?
Well, some of the elements are there. My father was violent, strong, authoritarian. He seemed to us as children an angel of strength, beauty, and punishment. His affections were strong too. He was a passionate person. My mother was that way also. Within the family, Jewish life is very different from life outward, facing the world. You saw your parents in two separate connections: one the domestic and internal; and the other meeting the external challenge.
Is this an idea that’s formed? Is that part of the formation of an idea? The sort of double role?
I suppose so, because it was translated later in life. The contrast between strength, the strength that I felt inwardly, and the absurdity of my trying to express that strength outwardly.
There are two distinct aspects to life: in one you cope with everyone else’s world, and the other you cultivate within yourself. Was there a degree of concealment involved in this?
Not concealment so much as a deep sense of strangeness in what I was doing. First I translated from the Old Testament into my inner life, then I translated from books I read at the public library, again into the inner life. In the first instance, this had the approval of Judaism—that is, mainly from my family. In the second form, it could only be fantasy. You had to be wary of what was in truth both stirring and ennobling but at the same time dangerous to reveal.
Do you remember any of the fantasies? Did any of them approximate what you’ve become?
No. At first they were fairly obvious fantasies. Pioneers, frontiersmen, independent men. Going into the wilderness with your ax and gun (and your smarts). Very important.
When you arrived there, Chicago was not yet in any sense a sophisticated city—the frontier was not that far off.
No, it wasn’t. We lived on an unpaved street, a dirt street with horses. Cars were
few and far between. Kids used to throw themselves on the ground under a parked car to see if it had four-wheel brakes.
Was America talked about as a subject? As such? After all, back then, Montreal must have had its own flavor.
Yes, we did talk about the change. Montreal—that is, eastern Canada—was very European. I didn’t realize until later in what ways the eastern seaboard is very different from the Midwest. I had a strong sense of that difference as a child. Matter seemed to me to be cruder: as if Chicago molecules were bigger or coarser. The very soil seemed different. The trees were certainly different. Chicago’s trees were elms, cottonwoods. Montreal trees (maples) were bigger. The ferocious winters, boiling summers.
Did you talk about politics?
Very much so. Because my parents were following the Russian Revolution. They had a very specific interest in it. Their parents and brothers and sisters were still there. I was born in 1915. Before I was three, the Russian Revolution was fully under way.
Were you aware of it? You knew about it? That must have had an effect on your ideas.
I knew all about Lenin and Trotsky. I didn’t know what the Revolution as such meant. My mother’s relatives were Mensheviks. I was too young to understand that during the Kerensky period the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were nip and tuck.
Since it later came to have considerable meaning for you, do you recall any effect it had on your ideas back then?
I remember as quite a small kid being in the street with my father. We met a young man called Lyova walking down the street. Lyova told my father he was going back to Russia. Lyova’s father was our Hebrew teacher, and his mother, Mary, a fat lady with a huge hat, was my mother’s friend. My father said, “That’s a foolish thing you are doing. Don’t go.” He was counseling Lyova not to go, but Lyova must have had some kind of politics. He couldn’t have been older than eighteen or nineteen. But things like that happened every day. Lyova went back and vanished.
How about the structure of politics? Did you have any idea how American politics were put together, how they differed from Russian or European?
In those early days your political ideas came from the papers. Al Smith was a Catholic candidate for the presidency. Newspapers were very important. There was no radio as yet. Everybody took positions based on the paper he read, whether it was the Hearst paper or the McCormick paper in Chicago. There were two Hearst papers: the Herald Examiner and the Evening American, both long since gone. And there was the Republican McCormick Tribune. The papers provided our daily drama. The Leopold and Loeb case, for instance. In the early twenties, the children were reading about Clarence Darrow and the Leopold and Loeb murder.
Did your fantasies ever involve such things as politics or law as ideas? Did you think about them in terms of eternal justice?
No, not really. We didn’t think that way. More important to the family was Americanization and assimilation. The family was divided on this. My eldest brother pulled for total Americanization; he was ashamed of being an immigrant. He didn’t want at all to be known as a back-street immigrant type. He made a beeline for the Loop.
How did you react?
I was keenly interested. I didn’t have any position. It was hard not to observe my eldest brother. His histrionics had a dramatic influence on our feelings, and the fact that he was physically impressive—big and stout, aggressive, clever—simply added to the effect. By the time we got to Chicago he was a high school senior and I was in the third grade.
Were there ideas as such in the schools of those days?
“Americanism” was very strong, and there was a core program of literary patriotism. Overwhelming. Terribly important. Chicago consisted of endless strings of immigrant societies. We were in sort of a Polish-Ukrainian-Scandinavian enclave, and across Chicago Avenue (there was usually some car line that intervened) were Italians. There were also Germans, Irish, Greeks.
The “I am an American, Chicago born” with which The Adventures of Augie March begins is a recrudescence of that in you, isn’t it? You have a cosmopolitan and catholic mind, yet by far the strongest streak in you is the American.
Well, cosmopolitanism found its point of exit from local confinement in the direction of the melting pot. But it wasn’t a melting pot. It didn’t melt. If you played with Polish children in the streets, you didn’t also go to school with them. They went to parochial schools, where they were taught Polish only. And even until recently, the descendants of Polish immigrants, succeeding generations, spoke with an accent, a recognizable, identifiable touch of Polish.
What ideas surfaced in your mind that most subtracted from or most supported that notion of Americanism?
My father was all for Americanism. At the table, he would tell us, This really is the land of opportunity; you’re free to do whatever you like, within the law, and you’re free either to run yourself into the ground or improve your chances. The gospel of improvement came through my father, whose English was not very good as yet.
But you also felt that virtually from the time you came on the scene. The notion of progress was already built into you; it’s part of your nineteenth-century heritage, Comte’s idea of progress.
Comte wouldn’t have liked the religious elements. The idea of the Author of Your Life (and I’m not speaking of my father here) was very powerful and received continual support from the Bible. It was a strange mixture, not an easily blending one. Let’s say you went to an American school, you played baseball in cinder lots, and then you went to Hebrew school at three in the afternoon. Until five, you were studying the first five books of Moses and learning to write Yiddish in Hebrew characters—and all the rest of it. So there it was. I didn’t go to a parochial school, but the religious vein was very strong and lasted until I was old enough to make a choice between Jewish life and street life. The power of street life made itself felt.
Conventionally, the next stage in the formation of ideas would be puberty, schooling, reading, making oneself different from other kids, creating an identity for oneself. By then one is really conscious of ideas. You were well-read? Long past Natty Bumppo?
By the time I was in high school I was reading Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Mencken. Dreiser was fresh stuff, active and of the moment, right up to date. You could understand Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy if you were a kid of religious background on his way up. Full of longings and of lusts.
Did greed constitute something of an idea?
There was enough social Darwinism in the air to justify greed and a lot of other things, short of murder. It wasn’t just the writers I named who had that influence, but people like Jack London and Upton Sinclair. Those two socialist apostles, who were at the same time Darwinists, taught the struggle for survival. Victory to the strong.
Two striking things about your childhood compared to most: the first is common to Jewish, Catholic, or any good religious education in general—that enormous insistence on the power of memory, on the fact that you actually had to know and be able to reproduce that. Second, you didn’t read any junk.
But there was a certain amount of junk. And my Americanizing brother brought the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s into the house. Fannie Hurst, Edna Ferber, Peter B. Kyne, James Oliver Curwood. You read all those as well. Of course, philosophically they were usually in the Jack London vein. I imagine that even Dreiser had a good deal of it. And there were also the Horatio Alger books.
That business of memory—the retentiveness of it. How do you get it in childhood?
I didn’t even think of it as memory. I always had an open channel to the past. It was accessible from the first. It was like turning around, looking backward while going down the street. You were looking behind while advancing.
Kids on the whole are not great retrospectors. They are prospectors.
Well, maybe the retrospective was strong in me because of my parents. They were both full of the notion that they were falling, falling. They had been prosperous cosmopolitans in Saint Petersburg
. My mother never stopped talking about the family dacha, her privileged life, and how all of that was now gone. She was working in the kitchen. Cooking, washing, mending for a family of four children. There had been servants in Russia.
A sense of aristocracy, of a fallen aristocracy, in there?
Max Weber says the Jews are aristocratic pariahs, pariahs with a patrician streak. I suppose it’s true that Jews are naturally inclined to think of themselves as such.
Surely the Jewish “aristocracy” in that sense is rather religious than social. It’s not personal, it doesn’t belong to the individual.
But you could always transpose from your humiliating condition with the help of a sort of embittered irony. Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe, we read at school. The Merchant of Venice went pretty deep. We didn’t have apologetics when we did Shakespeare as high school sophomores. That’s one of the curious features of American society. Everything was out in the open in those days. And while prejudice and chauvinism were almost as ugly as in Europe, they were, in real terms, ineffectual. The absence of an idea of defamation was very liberating. Everybody was exposed in the same way. Nobody could claim any protection. Of course, the respectable WASPs were somehow out of it, but even they came under attack. Nobody was immune. Not Jews, not Italians, not Greeks, not Germans, not Blacks. Everything was out in the open. Which gave an opening to freedom of opinion. Everybody took abuse. This is what’s disappeared since then. Without any increase in liberty.
And certainly no increase in communication, because by papering over differences with pieties about how people differ from one another, in aptitudes and in myriad other ways, one simply reinforces prejudice. People who pretend that difference doesn’t exist make a fundamental error. If you marry, you quickly realize that.
That’s happened to me quite a few times. I think it’s an important point to make. It’s true there were unpleasant comic strips like “Abie Kabibble” with pudgy hook-nosed Jews and all the rest of that. Nobody was immune. People did strike back. But there was a kind of openness for everybody. It was a far more open society than before ethnic protectionism began.