Saul Bellow's Heart Page 10

  Herzog describes a man, Moses, clawing his way back to sanity after a terrible betrayal by two people he dearly loved has sorely taxed his grasp on what is real. Saul’s protagonist rights himself much as my father must have. After the infidelity, Moses engages in a highly erotic affair that reaffirms his sexual desirability and, after a mishap, finds reassurance in belonging to a protective family. A highly agitated Moses gets into a car accident during a custodial visit with his young daughter, and is pulled over by the Chicago police. Instead of keeping his wits, he takes flight into a set of abstract, speculative ideas, which is exactly what my father did when he was overwhelmed by real events. But Moses Herzog cannot find sufficient solace in mere ideas, and I am convinced Saul was never sufficiently comforted by them either.

  It is not until Moses is enveloped in the warm, protective care of his brother that he can calm down and regain his bearings. Most important, after having his trust betrayed, Moses retreats to fond memories of scene after scene from his childhood and finally pens a letter of gratitude to his mother in the great beyond. Like his narrator, my father found the solace he so desperately needed in his Rock of Gibraltar during troubled times, the reassuring memories of Grandma Lescha’s great heart.

  While Saul and Sasha battled, the advent of puberty and high school did me a world of good. I developed an active social life, which included hours playing schoolyard basketball, going to dances, and dating. I went to Manhattan on the subway, dropping in on Vasiliki Rosenfeld because girls from Forest Hills were very impressed that I actually knew someone who lived in the Village. Anita was happy to see me out and about after school and on weekends, and she supported my independence by insisting that I learn the full range of domestic skills, so I could take care of myself when I moved out.

  My childhood sadness turned to adolescent anger. Arguments with both parents were open, direct, fierce, and usually grounded in my highly moralistic sense of right and wrong. My mother always took pride in how well she tolerated my anger, but when I exasperated her, she would say, “I can’t wait until you grow out of this stage.” I grew to hate that remark for trivializing something I felt strongly, and would sarcastically urge her to go back to her books on child rearing if she didn’t know what to do with me. My father loved my retort, since Anita’s formulaic child-rearing techniques confirmed the rigidity of her views that he often cited as his reason for leaving us.

  For years Saul told me that he had found an angry teenager much easier to deal with than a morose child. No doubt he was relieved to see me put the sadness caused by his departure behind me. In later years, when I had established myself as a child therapist, Saul commented that I had turned the misery of my childhood into a career. I’d characterize my gift as being able to relate to boys who suffered broken hearts.

  But Saul was sensitive to my criticism when directed at him. After discovering that he had not paid Anita’s alimony for several months, I turned my moral indignation on him in a scathing letter. Anita, who had fought with Saul over money, knew I was putting my head in the lion’s mouth and advised me to temper my outrage. Rather than telling me that his finances were none of my business, Saul sent me a letter justifying his behavior. He asked me to be fair to both parents. But he also accused me, now an avowed socialist, of being inconsistent and played on his status as a writer who cared little about money. There’s a wonderful line about blood, rather than dimes, running through his veins. Fifty years later, what most surprises me most is how I took his response in stride. Doubtless I was already subscribing to his self-justification: that his career as an artist entitled him to let people down with impunity.

  By the early 1960s Anita took a medical social work position at HIP, a prepaid group medical plan. For her, it was as good as the socialized medicine she had dreamed of for decades. I was at school and Anita was at work all week, but we usually spent a few hours together Sunday morning reading the New York Times. After years of avoiding men, Anita dated a widower with three children who lived in Westchester County, just north of Manhattan, for a year and we spent some weekends there. She and I drove back to Forest Hills on Sunday nights, laughing aloud at Jean Shepherd’s funny, nostalgic monologues on the car radio.

  On Thanksgiving weekend 1961, Shirley Camper, an old friend of Anita’s who had spent many years in Madison, Wisconsin, invited her to a party. Her goal was to introduce Anita to Basil Busacca, a recent widower Shirley knew from Madison who was now teaching comparative literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Anita and Basil hit it off immediately. Less than a month later, at Christmas, my mother went to California to meet Basil’s college-aged children while I visited Saul in Tivoli.

  As I began my last semester of high school, I remember drifting off to sleep to the sound of Anita banging away on her typewriter, writing long letters to Basil while chain-smoking. Meanwhile, across the country, Basil was banging away on his typewriter and then going out at midnight to post letters to Anita. By March 1962, only four months after they had met, they decided to marry. At my request Anita held off the wedding until June; I did not want to change high schools for the final three months of my senior year.

  Basil planned to spend the summer in Forest Hills and teach a course at Queens College. In September he and Anita would move to his house in South Pasadena, California, and I would go off to college. Their plan, while practical, was a disaster. Basil tried to impose his will on me, and I fought him at every turn. All that summer Anita was trapped between us as Basil and I battled. Saul tried to mollify me by predicting that I’d be grateful one day that Basil was there to protect and care for Anita. That would eventually prove true, but not during the hellish summer that marked the end of my childhood.

  I met Susan Glassman, who would become my father’s third wife, during my last years of high school. Susan was teaching English at the Dalton School, a private school in Manhattan, and had a small apartment in the city. She began to join us in Tivoli, and I always enjoyed her energy and engaging personality. Susan stopped teaching at Dalton but not before introducing me to a student named Lucy Saroyan, daughter of the author William Saroyan. I soon had a crush on Lucy and tried to dazzle her with my wit during long phone calls, but her interest in me faded after a few dates.

  Susan was the only daughter of a successful orthopedic surgeon named Frank and a beautiful, stylish mother named Delores. Susan and her younger brother, Philip, grew up in material comfort. She graduated from a public high school and then from Wellesley College. Her father did not want her to go to graduate school, but Susan used her graduation gift to fund a master’s program. I do not know how she met Philip Roth, whom she dated in the mid-fifties, but on one of their dates they went to a reading Saul gave at the University of Chicago, where she introduced herself to my father. Several years later, Susan was living in New York and seeing Saul romantically; she visited him while he was teaching in Puerto Rico. After their wedding in 1961, they spent an academic winter quarter at the University of Chicago, which was a prelude to leaving New York for Chicago and a permanent appointment for Saul on the university’s Committee for Social Thought. He began in September 1962, the same month I began as a freshman at the College of the University of Chicago.

  In the decade after we returned from Europe, Saul lost his father and his dear friend Isaac Rosenfeld. He failed in two marriages and had a son from both. Death, divorce, and betrayal shattered many of Saul’s youthful hopes and naive illusions about how the world and human relationships were supposed to work. Apparently blessed with more lives than a cat, my father bounced back. What remains unclear is the extent to which he blamed himself for the marital failures and personal misery during that ten-year span and, perhaps more important, whether Saul’s inner life had been affected by all the heartache he poured into the four novels that he produced: The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, and Herzog.

  GROWING APART

  Chapter Seven

  Fame and Misfortune: 1963–76<
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  A reception for freshmen foreshadowed changes to come. The event included a receiving line of university officials, to whom I introduced myself as Gregory Bellow. By the third handshake, they were calling me “Saul’s son.” Though Saul had just been appointed to the faculty, I chafed at his eminence on campus, and immediately it became clear to me that I could not stay in Chicago after my education and fully be my own person. Little did I suspect that, during the next dozen years, his fame would mushroom well beyond Chicago.

  The undergraduate education I so wished for was a rude awakening. Everyone in the College was bright, and many were brilliant. For the first time in my life, I was trying as hard as I could but getting poor results that made me feel stupid. I became a frequent guest at Susan and Saul’s modest two-bedroom apartment on Fifty-fifth Street during my freshman year. I sought their help with my papers, and her cooking was a decided improvement over dorm food. Susan’s charm and wit were substantial, and we had many lively conversations. When I decided to major in psychology two years later, we had spirited but amicable disagreements about psychoanalytic schools of thought. However, I rarely made a visit there without having to perform a time-consuming physical chore for Susan, which I came to resent. Saul and I had a terrible argument in front of my dorm at the end of my freshman year when he broke a promise to take my suitcase to New York because Susan had filled the car with her own belongings.

  During that year I had an up-and-down relationship with Saul. He was sympathetic about my academic struggles and my bitter arguments with my mother. Anita had reneged on her earlier commitment to pay half of my college expenses after she and Basil went through my education fund settling into their new life. Saul was supportive of her new marriage and assumed Anita’s portion of my expenses. But he also decided that our physical proximity would afford him an opportunity to make up for past absences. At eighteen, the last thing I wanted was to get closer to my father, but Saul refused to take no for an answer. I enlisted the help of Ted Hoffman, who was passing through town. Somehow, over a drink, Ted got through to Saul, who backed off from a son who was now a young man.

  We all knew Oscar Tarcov’s heart was weak, but his death during my sophomore year and the events that surrounded his funeral dealt a serious blow to my trust in Saul. We all loved Oscar and I felt it imperative that Saul, Anita, or I attend the funeral. As the plans took shape I offered to go if Saul could not because Susan was pregnant. Saul assured me he’d go, but Susan began to have medical problems and he could not leave her. Thoughtlessly, he only told me after the funeral that he had not attended. I was livid that he hadn’t called me in time to go in his place.

  Oscar’s death upset me deeply and aggravated my academic struggles. By the middle of my sophomore year, I became quite depressed that I was trying so hard yet achieving such poor results. By then Anita and I had mended fences after a huge air-clearing fight with Basil that had been brewing since the tension-filled summer of 1962. I spoke with Saul and Anita about my frustrations, and we agreed I should go into therapy.

  My psychiatrist followed the contemporary therapeutic custom of sitting in silence. I expected more direct help. His lack of participation strengthened my already fierce independence but only made it harder for me to appreciate the importance of other people. His occasional comments about my disinclination to say anything about our relationship fell on particularly deaf ears. Irritated by his lack of help, I had few insights in his office. Despite my resistance to him, I learned a great deal about myself thinking about our sessions when I was alone. As my therapy drew to a close, I said something in passing about Anita. My psychiatrist noted that my mother had been conspicuous in her absence from our sessions. It was then that I began a serious discussion of the way I protected myself by refusing to admit that I was affected by anyone—my mother, my father, my girlfriend, or him. I began to understand how my pessimism about permanent relationships with women was shaped by Saul’s failed marriages and the ensuing enmity I witnessed. As the therapy progressed, I stopped fighting with my father and my current girlfriend. My academic problems faded after I became passionate about psychology.

  During the Indian summer of 1964, my twentieth year, my father became Saul Bellow the famous author. Herzog was published, and his play The Last Analysis was produced on Broadway. In late August I joined Saul, Susan, and my infant brother Daniel in New York. One sunny morning, Saul and I were walking down Fifth Avenue, having been instructed by Susan to buy me a “proper” suit for the upcoming festivities. We passed several bookstores, their enormous front windows filled with blue-jacketed copies of Herzog. Though we tried to ignore them, Saul and I finally stopped to gaze at one of the displays. He shrugged his shoulders, seemingly resigned to the changes that such public exposure was going to bring. For better or worse his life, as well as mine, was changed forever in those celebratory weeks. I chafed in my new wool suit and the loss of anonymity it represented. Susan, however, was in her element. Outgoing and dressed to kill for every event, she found living in the public eye in New York to be precisely how she had envisioned being married to Saul Bellow.

  I watched rehearsals of The Last Analysis from the back rows of the dark Belasco Theater. Bummidge, the play’s main character, is a self-styled philosopher-king who has an ambitious scheme to bring about an explosion of high culture in America by psychoanalyzing the masses over the radio. With a weak cast, the play was already foundering in rehearsal when Saul called in Ted Hoffman, who was then teaching drama in Pittsburgh. My father hoped Ted could help him negotiate the move from the familiar format of the novel to the unfamiliar stage. On opening night, I went to Sardi’s with the cast to await reviews. Saul hoped for a critical success and was mindful of the money that comes with a hit Broadway play: six thousand dollars for Saul every week the play ran. But the reviews were harsh, and the play closed after two weeks.

  The New York festivities for the novel and play were over by October, and Saul, Susan, and I returned to Chicago. I began my junior year of college, and Saul resumed his routine of writing and teaching. But his finances were permanently altered by the success of Herzog. Soon after its publication, I sat silently through a conversation in Yiddish between Saul, my uncle Sam, and my aunt Jane. Fresh from my high school German, I knew that Saul was telling them about the thousands of dollars that were pouring in.

  Part of Susan’s appeal to Saul was her promise to take care of the practical details he hated. Susan, who did not relish domestic chores, hired a good-hearted woman named Gussie to take care of Daniel and keep house. But her lavish tastes and Saul’s newly acquired wealth soon infiltrated their new lifestyle. They bought a co-op apartment facing a lovely park on the shore of Lake Michigan. White plush carpets were installed throughout, and the apartment’s eleven rooms were filled with fancy furniture and modern art. The room designated as Saul’s study had floor-to-ceiling mirrors on all four walls. Many of his friends thought the mirrors were Susan’s idea, symbolizing her desire to bask in Saul’s glory and fame, but in fact they were already there when Susan and Saul moved in.

  I was raised by a frugal mother and a father who had no steady income until I was eighteen. I never suffered privation, but there was always a lot of anxiety about money along with contempt for the kind of ostentation my uncle Morrie personified. I found the trappings of wealth in their new apartment so repellent that I complained bitterly to Saul. He said that they were of no interest to him, and that wealth did not stop him from writing. “We both know,” he ended, “that writing is what I truly care about.” As I always had, I accepted what he said about art at face value, but took to visiting Saul in his barren office on the fifth floor of the social sciences building.

  When he realized I was staying away from the fancy co-op, he accused me of coming over only when I wanted a check. I told him to mail me the checks, sarcastically adding that when I did come over it was because I wanted to be there! The coercive and divisive influence of money in the Bellow family was never far from
my mind, as threats to disinherit had been Abraham’s instrument of control. The connection between money and the power of parents over children remained strong in the next generation of Bellows. No doubt my avoidance of that financial trap explained why in later years Saul always spoke glowingly of my financial independence.

  By acting like Morrie, the oldest son who forswore his father’s promised inheritance, I was trying to sow the seeds of an emotional independence I equated with not taking a cent from either parent. When I graduated from college, I told Saul that the June check was to be the last. Fortunately, I was able to pay for graduate school by combining a scholarship with summer earnings. I did not fully realize until Saul’s death that by avoiding the erosive effects of his newfound wealth, I was also trying to maintain a link with the artistic and moral values that prevailed as I grew up.

  It did not take long for Saul’s marriage with Susan to sour. He was unhappy with her social agenda and the hours she spent playing tennis at the faculty’s Quadrangle Club. One of his first complaints was that the tennis was making her “too muscular,” but he was more irritated by the lifestyle, which he would take to task in Humboldt’s Gift. The most serious marital frictions arose when Susan’s plans to “civilize” Saul began to include life changes such as leaving Chicago for a more cosmopolitan city like New York or London. Over the years several people told me that she even urged Saul to stop writing, a request that was tantamount to asking my father to stop breathing. By the time I began at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration in the fall of 1966, the atmosphere in their apartment had turned poisonous. A stony silence prevailed at the dinner table. But it was not until the marriage was deteriorating that he started to complain about their opulent surroundings and Susan’s spending habits, infuriating me because Saul had defended her when I made exactly those complaints a few years earlier.