Saul Bellow's Heart Page 17
At seventy and recently divorced for the fourth time, it is no wonder that my father was cautious about love. Saul wanted to look carefully before leaping into another marriage, especially one so tinged by imbalances that his self-interest was too transparent to deny. I expected that my father, after following so much bad advice over a lifetime, would have been able to kick the reality instructor habit. But, like his advice-giving predecessors, Bloom sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. His advice about love was good enough for Saul to put his faith in a gay man dying of AIDS. Ignoring a lifetime of lambasting similar romantic notions he decried in Beebee, my father opted to let Bloom ply his philosophical wares and followed his advice because it offered a rationale to divorce Alexandra and marry Janis.
Bloom’s theories are manifest in the wisdom of Abe Ravelstein, the novel’s title character, who has it all figured out—history, politics, philosophy, money, and the relationship between the sexes, to mention a few subjects. Why shouldn’t Chick, the novel’s pseudo naive narrator, allow Abe to instruct him in matters of love? After all, Abe has already made an assessment of Chick’s problem with women: what he calls Chick’s nihilism is insufficient to allow him to recognize and accept the love Rosamund feels for him. Abe thinks that Chick is so constrained by knots of conventional morality that he cannot take the necessary, though self-interested, steps that would make him happy, dumping his wife, Vela, for Rosamund. Abe argues that Vela is insufficiently feminine. There is no cooking, no loving, too much independence, and not enough warmth in the marriage. Abe thinks it’s no wonder Chick’s soul is in a state of need. Furthermore, Abe will have none of his friend’s self-denial and urges Chick to say to himself, “To hell with convention. The woman loves you. Go for it.”
Saul’s two dearest friends, Isaac Rosenfeld and Allan Bloom—the men who understood him most fully, represented by two literary characters—make an identical and wholly accurate assessment of my father. Isaac as King Dafu and Allan as Abe Ravelstein realize that their complementary characters, Gene Henderson and Chick, both suffer from an inability to give and take love freely. I believe that to have been Saul’s greatest personal flaw, and through the mouths of Dafu and Abe, my father seems to agree.
Saul demanded more from family than he gave. As witness to all of his marriages, I saw that my mother, her successors, and all three sons expected more attention and emotional support than my father could provide. Our hard edges were rightly sharpened by disappointment, but Saul could give no more.
However, Allan Bloom’s formula fueled a genuine love and a long marriage between Saul and Janis. Despite my initial reservations, their relationship stands apart. There is no doubt that she broke through the icy cold to which Saul had resigned himself after his marriage to Alexandra failed. And, I would add, Janis is unique in maintaining that she does not suffer from the disappointments other family members feel.
I have concluded that Saul’s observation about love in Ravelstein holds the key. Matters of the heart should not to be second-guessed by “objective” outsiders, including myself, who thought Janis’s love was overly selfless. As far as my father was concerned, her love was “just the ticket,” as he used to say when highly pleased.
Chapter Ten
Saul in Decline: 1994–2005
Saul almost died during the Thanksgiving weekend of 1994. A winter trip to the Caribbean intended to cheer my father, who was still grieving Allan Bloom’s 1992 death, went totally wrong. Saul’s fictionalized account in Ravelstein closely matches the whirlwind chain of events as I understand them: a warm swim, a toxic fish at dinner, confusion over a man who was very sick, a flight to Boston, an ambulance ride to the emergency room, more confusion, and a life almost lost several times during his first night in the hospital. Dan, Adam, and I soon joined Janis in Boston. Saul’s diagnosis remained uncertain and he lay in a medically induced coma as day after day passed and we sat in his hospital room, analyzing each new tidbit of medical news. Janis, saying that Saul would want a full report when he awoke, took notes on a large yellow pad.
All but the most pressing practical considerations were blotted out. Our tiny world was like a series of concentric circles that surrounded and protected him. In the innermost ring was Saul, protected by Janis. She was in a complete state of exhaustion after staying up for days, and her health worried the nurses and the three of us. But Janis refused to go home, claiming she needed nothing but a toothbrush and a few clean T-shirts. The next ring held Dan, Adam, and me; we agreed our primary job was to protect Janis and Saul. Once the news of his illness got out, that job expanded to keeping people who were worried about him informed but at bay. Lesha wanted to come to Boston but agreed to settle for phone calls several times a day. She, in turn, kept the rest of the Bellow family up-to-date.
The ring beyond immediate family included his agent, Harriet Wasserman, his lawyer, his friends, and his colleagues. Harriet, who had recently recovered from her own serious medical problems, was convinced that only the doctor who had saved her life could save Saul’s. She pressed to come to Boston even before I got there, but Adam and I knew Harriet’s meddling would upset Janis. We tried to keep her occupied with a chore: securing some ready cash for Janis, who, it turned out, did not have access to Saul’s bank accounts. But Harriet soon started hounding me again and would not agree to stay in New York until I lost my temper and she relented.
As I sat by Saul’s bedside on what would have been Anita’s eightieth birthday, Janis played a CD of Handel’s Water Music, a composition that always reminded me of the good times during my childhood. I burst into tears and ran out of the room as the impact of having lost one parent and the possibility that I’d lose the other hit me. When I returned I explained my tears to a sympathetic Janis. While Saul was still in a coma, another loss occurred. I received a call from my wife telling me that George Sarant, Isaac Rosenfeld’s son, had died of a fatal heart attack, much like the one that had killed Isaac almost forty years earlier. With my emotions already worn thin, I could not remain sitting in a hospital room. I needed a break and went to New York, where my daughter, Juliet, then a college student, and Beebee sustained me for several days. I made sure that my visit allowed me to attend the memorial service for George. After Saul’s failure to attend Isaac’s or Oscar Tarcov’s funeral, I was determined to ensure a Bellow was present this time.
Janis and I talked about how to tell my father, knowing that the news of George’s death would devastate Saul, who would awaken frail and weakened. I needed to hold off telling him until Janis told me Saul was strong enough to tolerate such a blow. But about two weeks after my return to California, I became concerned that one of his visitors would let slip that George had died. After consulting with Janis, I called to deliver the awful news. In one of our most painful yet binding moments, tears flowed on both ends of the phone after Saul’s wail of pain as he learned that Isaac’s son had died just like his father had.
As Saul was about to be wakened from his induced coma, Janis made it clear that she was in charge and, despite appearances, had the strength for the job. After two weeks of sitting in his hospital room, hanging on every medical detail, sharing concern for Saul’s welfare, and cooperating in the plan to tell Saul that George Sarant had died, I had no reason not to trust Janis. I told her that I had no wish to be burdened with his physical care or to make decisions. Silently I thought that a man who had left three sons in the custody of their mothers could not expect to call on those sons to care for his day-to-day welfare. And my conversations with Saul about Alexandra’s inability to take care of him and about the sacrifices Janis would make by marrying him showed how well he understood the need to bank on someone other than us during the years when he feared, correctly, he would be in decline.
I ardently hoped that nearly dying would change Saul into a man glad to be alive and desirous of improving our tattered relationship. Not so. After several months dominated by reports of Saul’s returning strength, Lesha visited with him
in Vermont. With Janis sitting quietly by, Saul, in a rage at his sons, told her that while he was in a coma, Adam, Dan, and I expressed a desire for our father to die so that we could inherit his estate. Lesha shot back, “That’s ridiculous, the boys came to Boston to help.” Further angered, Saul challenged Lesha to check it out for herself if she didn’t believe him. Shocked and frightened by the damage that could result, Lesha called me. Angry about a report I knew to be false, I grudgingly repeated the entire chronology that I had relayed to her over the phone from Boston while Saul was in a coma.
Lesha and I speculated whether Janis could be the source of Saul’s information. No one but she and his three sons were present. And Janis had taken notes throughout those days because, she said, Saul would want to be fully informed when he awakened. As well, both of us knew that touching on filial greed and parricidal wishes elicited the most powerful of forces in the Bellow family—the specter of Abraham’s chronic threats to disinherit his children, along with images of King Lear and the hated father Karamazov.
I never questioned Janis’s love or devotion to Saul. However, I have come to believe that after caring for a husband in a weakened condition for six months and the prospect of having to do so perhaps for years, Allan Bloom’s notions about making sacrifices purely for love no longer proved a sufficient rationale. Based on a series of actions taken over the next months and years that, in my mind, amounted to a coup d’état, I can only presume Janis had come to feel a need to go beyond ensuring her primacy in Saul’s affections to exert a level of control that expanded well past his daily life to include financial, legal, and literary decision making. Her actions could have easily driven a powerful wedge between Saul and his sons, but had the opposite effect on my father and me.
I did not mind honoring Janis’s authority by fading further into the background than I already had. What I did mind was being demonized when my brothers and I had tried to protect Janis and our father while both were so vulnerable. I remained incensed at his accusation of malice and greed which followed on the heels of what appeared to be Janis’s friendliness and cooperation, and my accession to her status as Saul’s caretaker.
Eighteen months later, when Saul had recovered most of his strength, I visited him in Boston determined to clear the air. I said that I wanted to speak with him about what had transpired during his illness. Saul interrupted with an apology for not remembering that I was in Boston while he was in a coma. “Hard as I’ve tried, I can’t remember a thing, and everything I know about what happened comes from Janis.” I told Saul I didn’t expect him to remember me but continued by asking whether he believed I was “sitting around in the hospital waiting for him to die so I could get my hands on some dough.” “No, we don’t have that kind of relationship” was his immediate response. My father was alluding to my thirty years of financial independence, which had spared us the arguments over money that had so plagued the other branches of the Bellow family.
My question whetted Saul’s curiosity, as the rumors about Janis’s state of mind must have reached him. In response to his question, I described the concentric circles around them and how Janis had protected Saul for days on end with little sleep and eating almost nothing. I continued, “Lord knows what she went through, but it must have been hell. In a crisis like that everyone is affected, but I’ve learned never to draw any permanent connotations from how people act when under duress.” Saul, in his usual response to having received a satisfactory explanation, was silent.
A decade later, Zachary Leader, a new biographer for Saul who had been selected by Janis, shed a clearer light on her behavior toward me and Lesha during and after Saul’s illness. According to Leader, a biographical source had told him that Lesha and I had hatched a secret plan to declare Janis legally incompetent, strip her of her control over Saul, and take him to Cincinnati to be near his sister, Jane. Leader asked Adam and Dan about the plan. Of course they knew nothing of a nonexistent plan to disenfranchise Janis and essentially kidnap Saul. Until that point, I had not been willing to discuss my father with Leader, but my brothers were so distressed by his questions that they insisted I speak freely with the biographer about the matter. After denying a story about events that were never contemplated, let alone discussed, I asked Leader about his source for such a wild idea. He refused to identify the person other than assuring me that it was not Janis. I took the opportunity to caution Mr. Leader about the credibility of anyone who would spread such a story without evidence and added that my brothers and I had been similarly maligned and remained sensitive.
Such a ridiculous story reveals what extreme concern there must have been about the influence of Saul’s family. And, ironically, a form of “kidnapping” akin to what Lesha and I had been accused of did occur. Over the next five years, Janis gradually broadened her control over every aspect of my father’s life. She spoke for him and, at times, substituted her own desires for those I believed to have been his. Soon Saul was represented by a new literary agent, a new lawyer, and new financial advisers. In the end Janis was installed as Saul’s literary executor, a new will was drafted, Lesha was removed as executor/trustee, and the inheritance Adam, Dan, and I were told to expect was, at a minimum, halved. We were excluded from any posthumous financial benefit from Saul’s literary estate. And the changes did not stop at financial and legal control. Eventually Janis was to become a mother and, most symbolically, to have the final say over where Saul would be buried.
Harriet Wasserman, Saul’s literary agent for more than twenty-five years and a daily presence in his life, was first to go. New literary agents were only too happy to court Saul Bellow. A young man from the Wylie Agency arrived in Vermont while I was visiting, quoting the poet Wordsworth at length, much to my father’s delight.
I cannot provide a better description of the end of Harriet’s tenure as Saul’s agent than hers in Handsome Is, her memoir. Harriet, who had delivered thousands of unpleasant messages on Saul’s behalf, knew how he hated delivering bad news in person. Indirect hints were dropped and her power quickly slipped away. Personnel from the Wylie Agency took over so many of her responsibilities, it was obvious Saul had already changed agents in all but name. Harriet rightly felt her years of loyalty warranted that Saul should deliver the bad news himself, and she doggedly pushed for a personal resolution. Saul kept putting her off, perhaps because he was not necessarily 100 percent in favor of firing her. Harriet waited for the inevitable call. When it finally came, she asked if Saul wanted her to fire herself, shielding him from one last unpleasant confrontation. The changing of the guard continued as Saul’s lawyer, who had worked closely with Harriet, was replaced by Walter Pozen.
Janis nursed Saul back to health during two painful years of recuperation. By 1996, Saul had regained sufficient strength to attend Dan and Heather’s wedding in Miami. In private, Saul informed Lesha of the legal and financial changes he had made. Outraged, particularly by their potential effects on his sons, she argued bitterly with her uncle behind closed doors. But Lesha was also loyal to Saul and gave us few indications of the radical changes he had authorized. Even in death, our father left the telling of bad news to the lawyers for his estate.
My first clear glimpse of a very personal change came by accident when, at their home on a visit in 1997 or ’98, I took a phone message about an appointment for Janis from the fertility clinic at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. I realized that Janis, and perhaps Saul, was intent on having a child. After telling Saul about the message, I expressed my surprise in light of our conversation during which he had disavowed having any more children. A clearly embarrassed Saul meekly said that he had asked Janis not to discuss the matter with him. I concluded that Janis was now intent on motherhood and Saul had no say other than asking her to keep the details to herself. Her desire to have a child was easy to understand, but at forty and with a husband over eighty, parenthood required a purposeful commitment. When that child, Rosie, arrived in 1999, her birth caused a stir inside and
outside of the family. Saul gave multiple and contradictory versions of her conception. Knowing what steps Janis had taken, I found his differing accounts highly amusing. Saul enjoyed watching Rosie play and laugh. But when I visited my waning father, I was struck by the irony of a house occupied by a little creature so full of life and an old man who was rapidly declining and often bedridden.
The year 2000 saw two publications: my father’s last novel, Ravelstein, and James Atlas’s biography, Bellow. Writing Ravelstein was to be the proof that Saul Bellow had recovered his physical strength and his intellect. Saul’s acknowledged portrait of Allan Bloom was generally well received, but he confirmed Allan’s homosexuality publicly and identified AIDS as the likely cause of his death. In the minds of many political conservatives for whom Allan had become an intellectual mainstay after writing The Closing of the American Mind, publication of these personal details was an act of betrayal. Quickly Saul became embroiled in a firestorm that revealed his failing mental powers. He repeatedly told me that Allan had requested an honest portrait, and Saul reiterated that point to reporters until he realized the interviews he granted were only aggravating the controversy he had stirred up. Saul’s memory and concentration had begun to weaken, and he could no longer parry reporters’ questions or present himself the way he wanted to. He cut off interviews for good.
Considering Ravelstein a betrayal ignores Saul’s basic approach to politics. Though he had supported many conservative social and cultural positions, Saul was never a true believer in the left or right. His sympathy with any position never extended to loyalty to an entire belief system, as even a cursory reading of his novels or the Atlas biography reveals. Soon after Ravelstein’s publication, we had a conversation about the inconsistency between espousing individual liberty and trying to control what happens in the bedroom, which pleasantly reminded me of times long ago when he and I puzzled together over the ironic and contradictory behavior of human beings.