Saul Bellow's Heart Page 15

  As their romance developed in private, I heard little about Janis until a 1986 family wedding, when Saul told me he wanted to marry a woman forty years his junior. He talked freely about the sacrifices a young woman makes when she marries a man over seventy. After the decline and death of his brothers, Saul was acutely aware that he could soon become a physical burden to her and that he was depriving Janis of a long marriage and children. Saul also repeated doubts expressed by Lesha and others who explicitly discouraged him from fathering another child. I did not express an opinion about the merits of the marriage, but added my doubts about having a child. Saul readily agreed.

  Our one-sided talk ended with him concluding that Janis was a grown woman who understood what she was doing. But he had already made up his mind. Talking over his doubts with me was only an exercise to reduce his guilt over what he knew to be a selfish act. As the marriage became a real possibility, people close to Janis tried to talk her out of this May—December arrangement, but she was unmoved.

  I never heard another word from my father about her sacrifice. But More Die of Heartbreak is about love and was written as Saul’s marriage to Alexandra was ending and his romance with Janis was blooming. The novel’s main characters, Benn Crader and his nephew Kenneth Trachtenberg, are mystified by women. Benn, after turning himself inside out for yet another romance, gives up on them. But Kenneth, after pursuing an ex-wife who does not love him, becomes romantically involved with a former student, Dita, who has decided that they are suited for each other and takes the romantic initiative. Dissatisfied with her physical appearance, Dita undergoes painful cosmetic surgery, a procedure during which facial skin is sanded off. As Ken nurses Dita back to health, he finds her sympathetic and straightforward in her desire for him. What I find most personally revealing is that Ken finds, in Dita, the essential ingredients Saul found missing in his previous wives—uncritical acceptance and warmth.

  I believe Janis’s support was more palatable to Saul than the forms offered by my mother, Sasha, Susan, and Alexandra. All four previous wives were self-assured women who never appeared daunted by being married to him, who expected a measure of respect for their views and credit for the work involved in keeping a household afloat. The imbalances of age and life experience between Saul and Janis were obvious enough, but he highlighted them by making demands that underscored her compliance; she did every little chore he asked of her. To top it off, Saul adopted “baby” as a term of endearment that, given the disparities, I found disconcerting.

  At Saul’s request, Lesha arranged a small wedding in Cincinnati attended by Janis’s family. Soon thereafter they visited California, where she met me, my family, and Saul’s old friends Herb and Mitzi McClosky. Perhaps feeling she needed to justify herself, Janis made her case to Mitzi for marrying a man so many years older, saying that she’d rather be married to Saul for five years than to somebody else for fifty. Janis planned to complete her stalled dissertation about women in the Romantic literary tradition, such as Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, who make personal sacrifices for an ideal form of great love that no longer exists in our modern world. According to Saul, Janis set herself a quota of two pages a day and quickly finished her dissertation. He got all dressed up in his full academic garb and thoroughly enjoyed himself at Janis’s Ph.D. graduation ceremony.

  By the time Saul reached seventy, the man he had been between his teens and his late forties so filled my father with regret and shame that he felt a need to alter, repudiate, and occasionally deny that past while he still could do so. Saul forgot nothing and he forgave little in himself. Plagued by self-criticisms that came from astronomically high standards, my father was acutely aware of what he had done and not done. At the same time Saul hated admitting that he was wrong or even had once been so. Revisions of such magnitude forced Saul to call upon and often blend his mental and verbal agility; his ability to compartmentalize his life; his firm inner division between life and art; and his propensity to avoid introspection.

  But his past was my past, and the years he wanted to bury were filled for me with pleasant memories and people I loved. I looked back on them with fondness, but Saul’s nostalgia was highly selective. Distancing himself from “young Saul” drove yet another wedge between me and the young father I loved and wanted to preserve. Though I had established a life in California apart from him, revisions of his personal history compounded the reversals of his socio-cultural beliefs and became new hot spots in a long cold war that further eroded our already tenuous common ground.

  “Young Saul’s” questioning of authority had encompassed rebellion against his father, political radicalism, and departure from his Jewish roots; these were formative components of my own ethos. Becoming a famous writer and the literary persona he cultivated came, for reasons I cannot fully understand, to necessitate repudiating his youthful questioning and demeaning people toward whom I felt loyal. When he went too far, I disinterred what he was trying to bury, which infuriated him because he knew I had a historical point.

  But independence was not a simple matter for either of us. I felt conflicted because I loved and I wanted to please him. Saul, too, was limited because he could not allow himself to mimic Abraham’s overt demands for filial compliance, yet he desired just that from his own sons. Instead, Saul used a number of subtler forms of direct and indirect pressure on me and family members, often calling upon “family feeling,” a relic of communal sacrifice left over from Lachine, to get his way with us.

  The choice of a single financial adviser for several family members illustrates Saul’s pressure to conform with his wishes irrespective of our needs. During the 1980s, Saul used Jeff Krol as an accountant and was pleased with his work and his investment advice. Soon he urged Lesha, Aunt Jane, and me to follow suit and use him. I resisted for several years, but I had a growing interest in my own finances and had made a small investment in Sam and Shael’s chain of nursing homes in Chicago, which made Jeff’s location appealing. Saul was delighted when I switched, and matters went along smoothly for a few years until he reversed course, unceremoniously ended his relationship with Jeff, and expected me to follow suit immediately. I was happy with Jeff’s work and refused, but had to endure several years of my father’s direct pressure to stop using him. Eventually, I moved back to my California accountant. Saul was greatly pleased, but even that did not stop him from complaining about how long I had taken to follow his wishes. This was just one of many episodes contributing to my fatigue with the overused phrase family feeling, which lost its power to sway me after I realized Saul’s demands for loyalty translated as following his current whim and expecting sacrifices that vastly outnumbered any he made for me or my family.

  Among the beliefs Saul distanced himself from were Reichianism and the hedonistic behavior it had helped him to rationalize. In the 1950s, however, he had been in dead earnest. After sitting in Isaac Rosenfeld’s orgone box, before he built his own, Saul told Arthur Lidov that a wart on one of his fingers had disappeared. When Arthur scoffed, Saul withdrew, hurt. Arthur’s widow recently told me that it was not long after this incident that their friendship ended, an ending Arthur attributed to his open skepticism about Reich.

  A glimmer of shame over his personal selfishness and the harm he had inflicted on Anita occurred during my visit with Saul and Janis during an academic quarter they spent in Paris. He and I took long walks around town, during which he pointed out places where we had lived. On a Paris street he confessed to being plagued by guilt toward Anita, saying, “I can’t go around a corner without seeing a reminder of your mother and the pain I caused her.”

  Shame was part of Saul’s reason for protecting me from his philandering, but that comment in Paris was the only time he mentioned it. And I only brought it up once after becoming upset by a sexual liaison reported in James Atlas’s biography. When I asked Saul about it, he denied the event, derided Atlas, and asked if there was anything else I wanted to know about the past. I demurred. Later I felt I had
let Anita’s memory down by not telling him how angry I was whenever I thought about the unhappiness his chronic infidelity had caused her.

  Saul had become disillusioned long before with the kind of doctrinaire rigidity that compelled the Trotskyite Oscar Tarcov to end his romance with a Stalinist girlfriend. In a scene from Dangling Man, written in 1944, Joseph is outraged when a former comrade he encounters in a restaurant will not even say hello. Saul saw the Marxist beliefs that had fueled his philandering, bohemianism, and permissive parenting as shameful errors and minimized them. Saul’s rebellion against his father had included refusing to go into the coal business, pursuing a career as a writer, arguing about politics and money, and flaunting his rejection of Abraham’s adherence to Jewish customs. Saul eventually stopped mentioning his arguments with Abraham altogether and came to speak about Grandpa with a fondness that surprised me. Perhaps because they had had so many bitter confrontations, he tried not to argue with me. Trying to avoid his tirades, I usually did the same, although I was always troubled by his revised versions of family life that omitted his painful relationship with his father.

  I have no doubt Saul came to rue the freedom he and Anita had given me, perhaps because the independence it nurtured drew me away from him and made me resistant to the influence he belatedly tried to assert. Occasional bitter disagreements emerged when I rejected a return to a world, or a family, held together by the accumulated wisdom of previous generations as defined by my father. Generational conflicts grounded in his assumption of the kind of authority he had formerly rejected now largely replaced our differences over cultural politics.

  Of all of Saul’s revisions of the life he had led, none was more startling than a comment he made about five years before his death. On a walk in Boston, he volunteered out of the blue, “I should never have divorced your mother.” Flabbergasted, I expressed my doubt that he could have written his novels without divorcing Anita and pursuing the more independent life of a writer. He brushed my objections off, as if he could have written Herzog, a book filled with the misery of his second failed marriage, anyway. I can only conclude that Saul never forgave himself for leaving us.

  That comment and another he made late in life touched directly upon the way he wrote about himself and about people in his life, and, by extension, on the ways he separated art and life. I visited Saul in Boston, deeply troubled by a recent ethical violation by a colleague. I brought up my concern over the frightening power of therapists to shape the lives of their patients. My father’s response was that he’d never want to be married to any of his women characters. I was speechless at how he could see no resemblance between his wives and the women married to his narrators, but he genuinely felt that he had created his characters entirely from imagination. When asked about his characters, Saul always maintained that he gave them the traits he deemed necessary to make a larger literary point.

  On the other hand, Saul certainly wrote in the heat of anger after his second and third divorces. And, to the chagrin of many, his published works gave him the last word. Ex-wives, failed reality instructors, and “disloyal” friends were irritated and hurt but defenseless as Saul pinpointed their eccentricities and cataloged their wrongs. And I will confess to breathing easier after finishing each novel without, as far as I know, being the object of his scorn. But I remain convinced that his novels were not simply or even primarily written to get even with those who hurt him because, were that the case, Saul Bellow would never have become the great writer that he was.

  That is not to say that Saul’s firm line between life and art is not open to serious question. He crossed it freely in novel after novel while attacking anyone who asserted that he had done so. Such literary license can and often does bleed into blatant thievery. And stealing someone’s personhood is not a victimless crime. To the contrary, it is a crime whose victims simply have no voice. It is not—as I recently heard Benjamin Taylor, editor of my father’s recently published letters, assert—an honor to be immortalized in a great work of art.

  Though not at my father’s hands, I was a minor victim who can testify. Philip Roth’s Everyman contains a funeral scene reminiscent of Saul’s during which a fictional character speaks, almost verbatim, my final graveside words to my father as I tossed a ceremonial handful of dirt onto Saul’s coffin. I was barely grazed in this literary skirmish but felt ill-used enough to better understand that people I care about were hurt by my father’s books. Edith Tarcov, feeling overly exposed by a loving portrait in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, did not want to go out in public for a year after the novel was published. Even Jack Ludwig, who openly spoke about being the model for Valentine Gersbach in Herzog, has, I’ve been told, changed his tune since becoming a grandfather. And I can barely imagine the effects on Sasha, Susan, and Alexandra of being pilloried in a novel and having no defense.

  No aspect of Saul’s past conduct became more shameful to him than having distanced himself from his Jewish roots for over thirty years out of Marxist conviction, as a part of his literary apprenticeship he considered necessary, and because organized religious observance so little moved him. During those years he resisted the label of “Jewish writer,” once pointedly declaring that he liked hockey, but no critic labeled him a Blackhawk fan. And he had allowed me to decide not to go to Hebrew school without uttering a word for three decades.

  The time Saul spent in Israel during the 1967 war touched something deep within and, no doubt, made him feel ashamed of having blinded himself to the full impact of the horrors of the Holocaust and to his departure from Jewish self-identification. As an older man and an established author, he reversed himself and publicly embraced being a Jewish writer. He signed petitions in support of Israel and offered his support to writers who had suffered from anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.

  He also covered over his personal rejection of Jewish customs. It was during the years when he was busily revising his past that my aunt Marge told me the story about Grandpa Abraham’s horror at finding a ham in Saul and Anita’s icebox. When I relayed the amusing story to an eighty-five-year-old Saul, he vehemently denied it. But knowing my parents’ attitudes, the details Marge had provided, and a plethora of stories told by other family members—like Saul borrowing Sam’s car to visit his friends on Yom Kippur—I tend to believe her.

  Saul never admitted to being ashamed of having let me choose not to have a bar mitzvah, but by the mid-1980s he must have concluded that he had erred decades earlier. His change of heart and the pressure he exerted boiled down generational disagreements into a battle over how to raise a child who knows right from wrong. As my son approached his teens, Saul began to urge me to force Andrew to attend Hebrew school and have a bar mitzvah. He began by chiding me about ignorance of my religious heritage, a charge that I readily admitted as true but that also sidestepped an argument. Dissatisfied with his failure to change my attitudes or behavior vis-à-vis my son, he ratcheted up the pressure by telling me how important it was that Andrew should learn about his heritage (although he never made any mention of Juliet’s need for a Jewish education).

  In the face of direct pressure from Saul I remained unwilling to force my son to go through a public ritual that I considered empty. I became convinced that his reversal after years of silence was an attempt to make up for his own departure from his Jewish roots. When he persevered, I countered his arguments about the virtue of religious training by cataloging the moral failures of observant men and maintaining that faith was too often the last refuge of scoundrels. When even that failed to silence Saul, I reminded him of his acquiescence in my lack of Jewish education and he backed off.

  Finally Saul stopped lobbying me directly, but as often happened when he remained displeased, a messenger soon arrived in the person of Ruth Wisse, a Harvard scholar of Yiddish who had befriended Saul and Janis in Boston. I had not met Ruth, but he told me how much he loved speaking Yiddish with her. Ruth attended a conference at Stanford, and I was invited to a reception where she introduced he
rself. I was glad to meet a friend of Saul’s until, after exchanging a few pleasantries, she began to badger me about Andrew’s bar mitzvah. I don’t know whether Ruth had taken it upon herself to deliver Saul’s message or whether he had charged her to do so. In either case, it was apparent that Ruth knew about the details of a conflict I considered a private family matter.

  Still angry on my next trip to Boston, I triggered a final brutal argument about Andrew’s religious training when I refused to let our long-standing joke about Michael Riff’s religious confusion pass for humor. I accused Morris Riff, the atheist father of my childhood friend, of being a hypocrite because he forced his son to have a bar mitzvah. “You don’t teach your child about good and evil by saying one thing and doing another,” I told Saul, who went ballistic. He said that Michael’s father, whom he had never met, was a poor immigrant father trying to cling to his traditions in a new world. As Janis wisely told both of us to knock it off, I realized that Saul saw his own immigrant father in Morris Riff and that I was calling my father and grandfather hypocrites for insisting on the ritual. Incidentally, Michael ended up as a fine scholar of twentieth-century Jewish history.

  Even before Saul became famous, people told me they did not know how to approach him, whether to do so at all, or what to say. Now, after being fed by decades of celebrity, the awe in which people held my father made what he said about his past incontrovertible. His fame fostered a literary persona that Saul fueled by saying he was born to write. When someone asked if he had considered another career, his clever answer was to ask whether they would pose the same question to an earthworm. Saul also fostered the notion that academia had offered him little in his development as a writer and that he was largely self-taught. Saul’s characterization of his first two novels as his M.A. and Ph.D. is meant to portray a young writer patterning himself after the European masters, but he omits that the novels were partly tailored to prove his worth to anti-Semitic academicians.