Saul Bellow's Heart Read online

  In 1987 Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, in which he argued that overly liberal attitudes had actually closed the American mind in the name of openness. After a careful reading, I found the book so closely paralleled views I was hearing from my father that I considered it a joint intellectual venture by two friends who had grown ideologically close. Bloom put forth views that appealed to social, cultural, and political conservatives in the Reagan White House, and Saul did not protest being included among thinkers with whom he often agreed. When Saul and I discussed the book I expressed distress that it was filled with “aristocratic notions.” I took his silence about my characterization as tacit agreement and as a measure of the extent to which my father’s mind had closed to anything but “superior” forms of culture, an attitude that bordered on the elitism I found in Allan’s book that was the exact opposite of my understanding of “young Saul’s” views. Bloom went after his enemies in public much as Saul had to me in private, with venom, ridicule, and contempt designed to obliterate opposing views rather than to consider any potential worth in them or offering a contrasting position.

  When “young Saul” became “old Saul,” my father changed from a young man full of questions to an old man full of answers. Virtually gone was Saul’s early optimism about making the world a better place. Worse, from my point of view, was the loss of his puzzlement about human nature, which I shared and treasured. “Old Saul” now took everything, including himself, so seriously that he lost the ability to laugh at himself or at the comic side of life’s contradictions. In earlier years, his pointed questioning of abstract solutions that offered little help to suffering human beings had seemed to me a form of leveling that brought great thinkers down to earth. My father was now siding with the thinkers he had once challenged, promulgating a set of answers and solutions to problems, both social and personal, that I found distinctly patriarchal, authoritarian, and hierarchical. My gut impressions of Saul’s reversals—that what he was backing away from was the basic fairness of the family ethos with which I had been raised—never wavered. I was and remain saddened by the toll Saul’s disillusionment and pessimism took on him and on us.

  In midwinter 1978, Saul and Alexandra hurriedly flew to Bucharest to help her gravely ill mother. Her parents had many former colleagues in the medical community, and Alexandra tried to pull strings in order to secure the help of the doctors her father had trained. The Romanian authorities were bent on making Florica and her daughter, who had escaped to the West, suffer. The government officials adhered to harsh bureaucratic regulations, refusing to call in specialists and limiting family visits. Alexandra’s mother died a few days after their arrival. Family and friends helped as much as they could, but it was a bitter experience. When they returned to Chicago, Alexandra fell into a state of nervous exhaustion, and it took months for her to recover fully.

  The Dean’s December is set in Bucharest, where Dean Albert Corde and his wife, Minna, go to help her dying mother. In the novel my father contrasts the brutality of the Romanian regime that makes it impossible for a woman to die with her family nearby against an equally ghastly series of events in Chicago, where political and social anarchy have eroded the social fabric. Contrasting what Saul called the hard nihilism of the Eastern Bloc and the soft nihilism of the West, he found little fundamental difference in the pervasive evil within human nature under a totalitarian government and in a political system where freedom had run amok.

  Despite being in poor health, Basil, Anita’s husband, had ambitious retirement plans that included a desire to live at the beach and to travel. Anita was happy to stay in the home they had shared. Work, pottery, her garden, and walks with Basil along the beach they so loved were sufficient for her. Their differences became so pronounced that Basil rented an apartment near the Pacific Ocean, though he stopped by their home after his classes almost every day. At first Anita was upset, but she soon accommodated herself to living alone and to visiting us without her peripatetic husband.

  Basil moved back into their home about a year later, but by then his energy and health had waned. In late 1984, he died of a massive stroke in mercifully brief seconds. When I told Saul about Basil’s death, he asked whether he should call Anita to offer his condolences. Unsure how she would react, my father feared stirring up Anita’s unrequited love for him. Unwilling to push my father to do something he really did not want to do, I left it up to him. He never called, though he should have.

  Soon after Basil’s death, Anita and I sorted out her finances. She said that for the first time in her life she felt rich and asked me what she should do with the money. Referring to her fantasy about Saul’s fame and fortune after their divorce, I joked that she should buy herself a gold Cadillac and drive past Saul’s house. That was our final good laugh together.

  A few years earlier, Anita had suffered a “silent” heart attack. Though she was not hospitalized, her heart had sustained damage. Basil had to force the usually stoic Anita to tell me about the attack. Within weeks of Basil’s death, my mother began an accelerating downward spiral of cardiac illness that soon took her life. A lifelong smoker whose heart was much weaker than I realized, she could not be stabilized with medications, and surgery was impossible.

  On her last day in the ICU, several of her closest friends and I took turns keeping her company. None of us could bear watching her die. There were tubes everywhere, including one that prevented her from speaking. From somewhere deep within me, the right words came. I thanked her for her years of devotion and expressed regret that we seldom spoke aloud about loving one another. I said I knew she loved me, and she nodded her head in vigorous affirmation. Rick and Jeanne Busacca, Basil’s children, each said a private goodbye to their stepmother of twenty-five years. After a brief flicker of green light on the monitors, Anita died. I sat alone with her before turning her body over to the hospital staff.

  The next day Saul called. My father was at his absolute best as I sobbed into the phone. Saul’s tenderness was palpable as he said, “Come to Chicago. Your loving father will be waiting.” By then many barriers existed between us, but seeing me suffer always cut through to our fundamental emotional connection. After the loss of my mother, I could better understand Saul’s sensitivity to suffering and why death remained a constant thought. When Anita’s estate was settled, I tearfully told Saul I missed her so much that I’d gladly forgo every cent for just five minutes with her. “I know,” he said.

  Three months after Anita’s death, Juliet and I went to Chicago to visit Alexandra and Saul. He asked for the details of Anita’s final illness, and commented that she had gotten “a quick ticket,” meaning that she did not linger or suffer. A few days before we arrived, my uncle Morrie had passed away, and my uncle Sam was on his deathbed in Chicago. The month before, Saul had visited a terminally ill Morrie at his home in Georgia and offered to return on a moment’s notice. But Morrie was hours from death when his second wife, Joyce, called. Saul and his niece Lesha hurried to Georgia. When they arrived, Joyce said, “He’s in there,” indicating the next room, and both Saul and Lesha were shocked when they found only a jar of ashes. Saul had just returned from Georgia when we arrived, and as my shaken father sat next to Juliet, then about eleven, and stroked her hair, I watched as his granddaughter’s touch sustained him.

  Sam’s prostate cancer had metastasized. He was at home but had stopped eating in order to speed death along. Nina was beside herself. Sam relented and asked for veal Marengo, one of his favorites. Nina insisted that no one tell him that Morrie had died, but Sam, no fool, had gotten the picture when his brother Saul and his daughter Lesha hurried out of town without explanation and when nobody gave him a straight answer when he asked after his older brother’s health. Sam died a few weeks later. He was buried in Israel, where he and Nina had lived for part of each year. With Anita, Morrie, and Sam dead, Saul and I were down in the dumps, but, he added, “at least we’re down there together!”

  The three deaths
were the beginning of the end for Saul and Alexandra. After the trip to Romania, her energy had returned, and it appeared to me that they spent a number of happy years together. I particularly remember how much he and I enjoyed explaining American idioms to her. They took a vacation in Spain and returned with elegant capes they wore to a family dinner at their favorite Italian restaurant, where as favored fans of the Chicago Light Opera, Saul and Alexandra often joined the singers and their colorful director for postperformance meals that ran late into the night. During an academic semester they spent in Israel, Alexandra taught and Saul studied the Middle East in preparation for writing To Jerusalem and Back.

  But the appearance of contentment papered over growing marital frictions. After summering in Vermont for years, they decided to build a vacation home. It quickly became a sore point when Alexandra did not take sufficient interest in the myriad construction decisions, placing those burdens on Saul. Lesha, who vacationed nearby, saw their marriage deteriorate into the same cold war of interminable silences that I had witnessed between Saul and Susan twenty years earlier. During their last few years together, Saul told me that Alexandra’s devotion to her career wore on him, but, as he did not want to go through another divorce, he claimed to be reconciled to living in a marriage that lacked warmth.

  I do not know when Allan Bloom began meddling directly in Saul and Alexandra’s marriage, but he and my father loudly espoused views about gender roles so slanted toward men that they irritated the women who heard them. Alexandra was a professor of mathematics, a field dominated by men, and she was duly proud of her accomplishments. She found Bloom arrogant and came to resent his persistent claims on her husband’s favor. She was furious when Allan barged into their bedroom once when she had not finished dressing. Worse, both men trivialized her complaints and Allan made it worse by chalking up her anger to her “conventional attitudes.”

  The fundamental incompatibilities between Saul and Alexandra are reflected in a scene from The Dean’s December. In the first private moment between husband and wife after the funeral of Minna’s mother, they take a walk in the bitter cold. Though Minna has rejected Corde’s physical comfort, she seeks his help in understanding the flood of confusing emotions brought on by her bereavement. Corde knows it is impossible, but he tries to translate a lifetime of his attempts to understand the human condition into the scientific forms of thought Minna uses to understand the physical world. All too soon, his explanation begins to sound like a lecture. Minna, infuriated for a moment, soon comes to see that she has asked the impossible.

  Both knew the marriage was all but over, but Alexandra took the final steps to end it that, as usual, my father could not initiate. After they separated, Saul visited me in California. Characteristically, he showed his disappointment by finding an explanation embedded in the material concerns of a defective society. Obviously infuriated by being forced to spend his time on the practical details involved in building a house that Alexandra refused to deal with, after being forced to choose from a catalog filled with bathroom fixtures, Saul railed about American materialism for upwards of fifteen minutes before saying, “Enough of that,” and changing the subject.

  More fundamentally I understood that the end of their marriage was linked to the three recent deaths that had brought Saul’s demise clearly into focus. He had convinced himself that Alexandra lacked the emotional strength to see him through his final passage. I had witnessed a scene in Vermont when she came upon a long-lost letter from her father and was inconsolable. Between that reaction and her collapse after her mother’s death, Saul made clear to me his view that she could not contend with his old age and physical deterioration.

  Based on my memory of that incident in Vermont, I accepted Saul’s rationale and, out of what I considered loyalty to him, kept my distance from Alexandra for a number of years. As it turned out, Alexandra married a mathematician of note, Alberto Calderón, who died before Saul. Contrary to Saul’s expectations, she faced Alberto’s death with fortitude and rebounded into an active retirement. She and I have long since mended fences.

  On that same visit Saul told me he had an open invitation from Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences to come for a semester and write. The center was right down the road from us, and I encouraged him to accept. I thought a break from Chicago might do him good, and I hoped that more time near my family would generate a better relationship between my father and my children.

  Saul’s usual routine as he was about to leave was to sing a rendition of Groucho Marx’s song “Hello, I Must Be Going” to lighten the moment. But this time he left for Chicago with a parting shot about being where people cared about him. A comment that implied that my family and I were not sufficiently demonstrative to suit Saul, coupled with the absence of the philandering that had followed the end of his first three marriages, were hints that he already had a romantic agenda in place.

  Saul’s dissatisfaction with the answers offered by spirituality had been growing long before he won the Nobel Prize. In Humboldt’s Gift, a novel permeated by death consciousness, Saul considers Rudolf Steiner and spirituality in the most depth. His narrator, Charlie Citrine, does regular meditative exercises to clear his mind. But, like my father’s, Charlie’s mind is too clouded with the material world and a need for human contact to prepare his soul to move on. Knowing that he has failed to right himself, Saul’s narrator expresses what I consider my father’s implicit acceptance of responsibility for his own spiritual failure. Charlie is nearly resigned to living with his all-too-human shortcomings when the memory of Von Humboldt Fleisher reminds him of the transcendent value of art, which is Humboldt’s true gift. In a gift from the great beyond that lightens the sting of physical death, Charlie’s deceased friend offers him the hope of another chance to do things right next time around in an existence to come that is free of material distractions and the pain of loss.

  As much as my father wished to become more spiritual, Saul knew he could never allow himself to follow Steiner’s first instruction to all seekers of spiritual truth: to abandon one’s critical faculties and take a leap of faith. Saul’s mental and verbal agility allowed him to suppress parts of himself for a time, but his lifelong embrace of reason combined with the undeniable reality of physical death ate away like an acid at his desire to believe in any form of immortality. In the end, Saul found the hope offered by Steiner insufficient to get him through the end of a fourth marriage and his grief over three family deaths in the span of six months.

  Saul was equally disappointed in his connections with the living after his fourth marriage failed. The unsuccessful conversation between Corde and Minna in The Dean’s December shows how well Saul recognized the unbridgeable gap between man and wife but it also highlights a crucial distinction between my father’s magnificent descriptive capacities and the inability to explain what cannot be fully understood: the unbridgeable gaps between human beings. Saul’s observational capacities and his descriptive abilities have been universally praised. My cousin Lynn remarked on how her uncle Saul captured the experience of walking up the steps to Abraham and Fanny’s house, steps she had often trod. In another instance, analogizing Jack Ludwig’s body movements to rowing a Venetian gondola is a descriptive triumph, but any description of Jack, no matter how accurate or complete, does not explain how he was able to cast a Svengali-like spell over Sasha and Saul, why Sasha betrayed Saul, or why Saul so trusted his deceitful friend.

  Perhaps an explanation for Saul’s failed marriages lies in the excessively romanticized notions of love—the same notions Saul chronically complained about in Beebee—held by a man who thought he acted for rational reasons. But it was Saul who was not sufficiently in touch with reality when in love. And when his second and third marriages ended in misery, it was he who claimed “temporary insanity” to Mitzi McClosky, explaining that his courtships of Sasha and Susan occurred when he was finishing a novel and was “half insane.” But his first marriage to Anita, which fre
ed him from Abraham’s control, and his fourth to Alexandra, a marriage more consciously chosen, ended only slightly less bitterly.

  While romanticized expectations may or may not have clouded his judgment, after a fourth marital failure, my father appeared to have nearly given up on finding love. In More Die of Heartbreak, published in 1987, the novel’s main character, Benn Crader, accepts a life of icy solitude and goes off to the arctic to study a form of lichen that enters a state of dormancy so deep that it appears to be dead. But my father, despite his disappointment, did not give up on love or on seeking a path to immortality. He found a new metaphor for the soul’s rebirth in the apparent death of lichen that spring back to life when conditions of sufficient physical warmth permit, and he discovered a new source of the human warmth he found so necessary in the selfless love of Janis Freedman.

  Chapter Nine

  Burying “Young Saul” Alive: 1987–93

  Janis downplayed the years before she arrived at the University of Chicago and Saul entered her life. My brother Adam briefly took graduate classes with her at Chicago. They became friends, and he reported that Janis was so in awe of her mentors that she took down every word, including Allan Bloom’s jokes.

  Janis was raised in Toronto and has a brother and a sister who is an astronomer. I have exchanged only a few words with Janis’s parents. Her father was a psychoanalyst and an admirer of Saul’s. According to Adam, he urged Janis to pursue a Ph.D. at the university’s Committee on Social Thought, where my father and Allan Bloom were professors. After some years her studies hit a snag and she took a position as Saul’s secretary; her loyalty and selflessness were just the traits my father valued.