Saul Bellow: To be poor meant also to be free

I used to do my writing forty years ago on yellow second sheets from the five-and-dime, and I became attached to this coarse yellow paper, which caught the tip of the pen and absorbed too much ink. It was used by those young men and women in Chicago who carried rolls of manuscript in their pockets and read aloud to one another in hall bedrooms or at Thompson's or Pixley's—cafeterias known as "one-arm joints." No one had money, but you needed very little to be independent. You could rent a small bedroom for three dollars. A fifteen-cent breakfast was served at all soda fountains. The blue-plate dinner at thirty-five cents was perfectly satisfactory. We smoked, but we hadn't yet learned to drink. And my late friend Isaac Rosenfeld said that it cost less than a thousand dollars a year to be poor—you could make it on seven or eight hundred. But to be poor in this way meant also to be free. We were in our early twenties. Some of us were released from our families by the death of parents; some of us were supposed to be university students. Stenographer sisters who should have been laying up a trousseau were sacrificing their savings for student brothers, but no one was studying much. To feel these sisterly sacrifices too keenly was to lose some of your delicious freedom. Instead you could have wonderful discussions about remorse, drawing on Freud or on the class morality denounced by Marx and Engels. You could talk of Balzac's ungrateful children on the make in Paris, of Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, the student with the ax, or of the queer bad boys of André Gide. The children of Chicago bakers, tailors, peddlers, insurance agents, pressers, cutters, grocers, the sons of families on relief, were reading buckram-bound books from the public library and were in a state of enthusiasm, having found themselves on the shore of a novelistic land to which they really belonged, discovering their birthright, hearing incredible news from the great world of culture, talking to one another about the mind, society, art, religion, epistemology, and doing all this in Chicago, of all places. What did—what could—Chicago have to do with the mind and with art? Chicago was a complex of industrial neighborhoods, a string of immigrant communities, Germans, Irish, Italians, Lithuanians, Swedes, German Jews on the South Side, Russian Jews on the West, blacks from Mississippi and Alabama in gloomy vast slums; even more vast were the respectable endless bungalow-filled middle-class neighborhoods. What else was there? There was the central business district where adventurous architects had pioneered the skyscraper. And we were known to the world for our towers, stockyards, railroads, steel mills, our gangsters and boosters. Oscar Wilde had come here and tried to be nice, Rudyard Kipling had looked us over and written a nasty report. Mr. Yerkes had made millions out of car lines and el trains and Mr. Insull out of the utilities. Jane Addams had worked in the slums, and Harriet Monroe had worked in poetry. But the slums got bigger, while the poets left for New York, London, and Rapallo. If you looked here for the sort of natural beauty described by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Yeats, you would never find it. Nature on the prairies was different, coarser. The soil, the air, the plants, the blasting heat, the blasting cold, the winds, the storms, the horizons—all different. Modern Europeans might complain of their excessively humanized environment—too much history and tradition, too many ghosts, the soil sifted by the hands of too many generations, the landscapes too smooth and the flowers too tame—but they didn't now what it was like here, you thought. Were the spirits of this place going to be friends to art and culture? Most of the time you felt that those spirits would have no truck with your effeminate European cultural frills.
So you sat in your three-dollar room, which you had anxiously civilized with books (your principal support in life) and with a few prints from the Art Institute: a Velázquez Job who said Noli Me Condemnare, a Daumier Don Quixote riding featureless over the Castilian wasteland; and in this dusty cubicle you recognized that you were out of line, you were a strange deviant. With the steelmaking dinosaurs just to the south, and the stockyards, the slaughter rooms blazing with aereated blood where Croat or Negro workers sloshed in rubber boots, right at your back, and the great farm-machinery works and the automobile assembly lines and mail order houses, and the endless railyards and the gloomy Roman pillars of the downtown banks, this was a powerful place, but the power was something felt, not shared. And what had these labors or these transactions to do with you and your books? The meaning of this prodigious power lay in things and the methods by which things were produced. What Chicago gave to the world was goods—a standard of living sufficient for millions. Bread, bacon, overalls, gas ranges, radio sets, telephone directories, false teeth, light bulbs, tractors, settle rails, gasoline. I asked a German-Jewish refugee, just arrived, to tell me quickly, without thinking, his opinion of the city. What had impressed him most in Chicago? He said at once, "Stop and Shop"—the great food store on Washington Street, with its mountains of cheese, its vats of coffee, its ramparts of canned goods, curtains of sausage, stacks of steaks. Goods unlimited and cheap, the highest standards of living in the world, "and for the broad masses, not for an elite." The "struggle for existence" went on under your eyes, but the very fact that we could even think about such a struggle meant that millions of well-fed people could afford to sit theorizing about the human condition.