Saul Bellow's Heart Page 5

  While my parents claimed not to care about social convention, they were not completely immune. On a visit to the Goshkin home Oscar Tarcov, Saul, and Anita were eating a watermelon on the porch and spitting the seeds into a neighbor’s yard. Later that night, Saul had to go over to collect them on his hands and knees in the dark before the irritable neighbor complained to my grandmother about the mess.

  A smoldering 1937 picture of Anita and Saul, cherished for the rest of their lives by both, shows how beautiful my parents were. But it did not take long for Saul to develop a taste for sex outside of marriage. As part of their left-wing political belief system, Saul and Isaac Rosenfeld adopted a belief that fidelity was a bourgeois ideology. It was just like the two men to draw an ideological cloak around their infidelities. When Hyman Slate visited my father in his writing studio in 1939, as they walked up the stairs Saul warned Hyman that he had a girl stashed there and asked him to keep it from Anita.

  Saul was now well able to construct rationales to justify his sexual behavior. But his feelings toward women were grounded, I believe, in deeply maternal forms of love like that I find in the selfless, protective love of Grandma Lescha. Whether or not Saul actually received uncritical acceptance from his mother, or merely wished for it, is an unanswerable question buried in the past. A bit more tangible are stories he told about Lescha’s ability to inspire compassion, to soften Abraham’s temper, and to understand the human heart.

  Mitzi McClosky, loyal wife of the often-critical Herb, exemplifies that kind, good-hearted woman. A friend for sixty years, she dearly loved Saul and he returned her affections. His telling Yiddish description of her to a mutual friend was “Sie hat keine biene,” which translates as “She has no bones”—that is, no hardness.

  The selfless, unspoken love of a mother for a son comes through in The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog. Though barely able to communicate outside of her home, Mrs. March possesses an unerring intuition about people that is readily apparent to her son Augie. And the palpable love of Mother Herzog is captured in her last moments as she strokes Moses’s hand with fingers that have turned blue.

  The protective love of women is often tacit and so subtle in Saul’s writing as to be easily missed. In the short story “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” Victor Wulpy’s mistress Katrina Goliger puts the welfare of her children at risk as she drops everything just to be with Victor because he is anticipating an unpleasant controversy with an intellectual adversary. Katrina makes herself available emotionally and sexually just to suit Victor’s transient moods and needs. Only as the story ends does the self-preoccupied Victor even pause long enough to inquire after her by asking the question that forms the story’s title. In the short story “Cousins,” Saul’s narrator, Ijah Brodsky, catalogs the help he has offered family throughout a lifetime marked by having taken no support in return until he quietly slips his arm into that offered by a strong young female cousin who notices a momentary flicker of physical weakness in him.

  Saul battled with his tender sentiments over a lifetime, but I cannot be certain how clearly he saw them as an essential aspect of himself. However, he knew that the softness he sought from women was central to his happiness. Perhaps most clearly illustrated in his letters, his need for comfort from a woman when he felt alone, bereft, or anxious could overpower his logic, his common sense, and his memory of previous errors in judgment. Fifteen years after their bitter divorce, he frantically called Sasha, his second wife, at work the day after being awarded the Nobel Prize. Incredibly, he sought her solace for the burdens that winning the prize placed on him!

  Saul, who described himself as a serial monogamist, sought more than a lover or even an unending series of them could offer. For reasons no doubt unclear to him at the time, Saul married women who possessed some measure of the hardness that I see as necessary to be able to take care of him. Though he took little initial note of the constraint that accompanies such strengths, Saul became acutely aware of them and chafed when each wife, in turn, exerted her will, causing various forms of conflict that were severe enough to sour his first four marriages.

  No single factor can explain Saul’s sexual exploits, during and between his marriages. High on my list of causes is competition, particularly with his brother Morrie, who turned his own extramarital conquests into a public spectacle by keeping a second household, complete with children. Saul’s intellectual competition with his peers certainly extended to their seduction of women. There was lust, of course, but also the boost to Saul’s vanity that came when women expressed sexual interest in him. Success with new women helped restore Saul’s prowess and self-esteem after his second and third marriages failed.

  Countless women were taken by Saul’s humor, charm, and great physical beauty, and he was frequently on the receiving end of their attention. Saul never said a word, but I have been told repeatedly that women made their sexual interest apparent and often went so far as to throw themselves at him. The Adventures of Augie March offers a nonerotic explanation for why women found the title protagonist irresistible that very much applies to Saul. During Augie’s late teens, the Renlings, a wealthy childless couple, take a liking to the handsome lad. Throughout the novel, Augie repeatedly, though briefly, allows himself to be shaped by the desires of others, and Mrs. Renling sees in him a young man she can tutor and guide. Augie, musing about his appeal, characterizes himself as adoptable, a word that suggests my father communicated a hint of softness and pliability that drew out protective feelings in women along with the illusion that they could shape Saul into what they wanted him to be.

  Anita also subscribed to the ideology of sexual liberation, at least in name. Saul, defending his own conduct, said Anita came home once or twice and announced in what he described as a mechanical tone that she had slept with this or that communist comrade. Her lack of emotion made me wonder if, rather than feeling passion, she was just trying to impress upon Saul the consequences of his infidelities. Anita had chosen one comrade in particular to make him jealous. She likely hoped to hurt Saul and provoke him into stopping the pain he was causing her. But Anita, a stoic and an ideologue, never complained or admitted to me how hurt she was by Saul’s infidelities.

  Infidelity almost ended my parents’ marriage in 1940 during their three months in Mexico. A windfall of five hundred dollars from an insurance policy on Lescha’s life financed the trip. My father was the beneficiary, but Abraham demanded the money for the coal business. Saul refused. He wanted to go to Europe, but World War II made that journey impossible, so he and Anita boarded a bus for Mexico, which was then home to the exiled Leon Trotsky and a haven for expatriates from around the globe. In Taxco, Saul and Anita frequented a lively cantina, where they danced and Saul drank a good deal. During their first few weeks, my father took off with another woman for several days. Angered, and knowing Saul’s vulnerability to public shame, Anita retaliated by having a public affair. The only time Anita ever mentioned it, she told me her lover was a very handsome Mexican. A nasty fight ensued when Saul returned, and Anita went to Acapulco by herself for a few days. Herb and Cora Passin joined my parents after they had been in Taxco for a month. While the two couples shared a house, Herb and Cora saw no signs of discord. Both Saul and Anita, no doubt chastened, had decided to paper over the infidelities, a solution that lasted a decade and brought me into the world. But Saul was intoxicated by the idea of freedom in Mexico, and the seeds of his discontent with my mother had been planted.

  Herb and Saul, both admirers of Trotsky, arranged to meet with him in Mexico City through the intercession of a Chicago friend. The day before the scheduled meeting, Trotsky was murdered by a Stalinist agent. In the postmortem confusion, Herb and Saul went to the morgue and, mistaken for American journalists, were allowed in to view the corpse. Both men were deeply affected by seeing Trotsky, whose head was still wrapped in bandages and streaked with blood and iodine.

  When Saul and Anita returned to Chicago in the fall of 1940, the war in Europe was
raging. Anita went to work at Michael Reese Hospital. Saul wrote and taught part-time. In the early 1940s the Partisan Review, a magazine based in New York and run by a circle of left-wing intellectuals, published several of my father’s short stories. By then Isaac Rosenfeld, having left graduate school in Madison, had moved to Greenwich Village. Isaac and Saul, two Chicagoans who shared a passion for literature and left-wing politics, were welcomed into what my mother called the “PR crowd.” Saul’s Partisan Review colleagues believed his talents as a writer made him the best candidate to counter the prevalent anti-Semitism in American literary and academic hierarchies. Saul later maintained that the magazine was primarily political. At the PR office, he once overheard the editor Philip Rahv on the phone with a fellow editor, who was inquiring if any worthwhile submissions had arrived. Rahv replied, “No, nothing interesting, just fiction.”

  Anita, whose job curtailed her ability to travel, remained in Chicago, but Saul, excited by his Partisan Review connections and the freedom of New York, began to make regular visits there. On our frequent walks around the Village during the early 1960s, Saul used to point out places where he had stayed years earlier, omitting the women he no doubt saw on those trips.

  My father was at loose ends in Chicago during most of World War II. He had to have a hernia operation in order to be healthy enough to join the military. However, the entire Bellow family lacked U.S. citizenship, which prevented Saul from joining the service and Morrie from taking the bar exam. A friend of Anita’s who worked at the Immigration Department helped the Bellow family resolve the problem caused by its illegal entry fifteen years earlier. Saul had to return to Canada and reenter the country legally. He later told me that Anita and her friend’s success with the family’s immigration status “made his stock go up in the Bellow household.”

  Saul’s narrator in Dangling Man, his first published novel, is at loose ends as well. Looking toward an ill-defined future, an increasingly alienated Joseph finds himself at odds with family, friends, neighbors, and even a wife who is growing more independent of him. Plagued by paralytic doubts, he dangles between the job he has quit and the army, which he hopes to join. Whatever personal insecurities my father may have felt as he dangled in the early 1940s did not stop him, an unknown Jewish novelist, from throwing down the gauntlet to the American literary establishment personified by Ernest Hemingway. In the first pages of Dangling Man, published in 1944, Saul advocated redefining heroism as resulting not from outer accomplishments achieved in distant battle but rather from the inner world of thought, reflection, and emotional turmoil. According to Anita, Saul and his friends would read Hemingway out loud, deriding his spare and choppy prose. Given Saul’s eventual impact on American fiction, his first published paragraphs, about the centrality of what my father called the “inner life,” contain a literary prophecy. My father’s strong critical sensibility already extended to his own work. When John Howard Griffin published Black Like Me in 1961, Anita told me that during the mid-1940s Saul had written a novel entitled The Very Dark Trees, in which a white man wakes up black. Saul was dissatisfied with the manuscript and burned it. Only years later did I learn that his novel had been favorably received by a potential publisher. Saul must have had a lot of faith in himself to burn The Very Dark Trees.

  Chapter Four

  Our Gypsy Life Ends: 1944–51

  My 1944 birth was harrowing. I became detached from the placenta and Anita had to have an emergency cesarean. Saul did not know if either of us would live through my first night. Every April 16 my father repeated the story of my birth: the heroic Dr. Koffman who saved our lives, the cold and drizzly sky that greeted a much-relieved Saul as he walked over to Beebee’s, and the breakfast of a dozen fried eggs she cooked him.

  From the time I was an infant, Saul thought that the upper half of my face resembled the Bellow side of the family, while the bottom half resembled the Goshkins. My baby book is replete with revealing comments in Anita’s hand about my father taking an active role, as neither parent wanted me to become a “mama’s boy.” As soon I could chew solids, Saul insisted on feeding me pickled herring. After I could understand directions, he involved me in his irreverent sense of humor. Saul would say, “Gregory, point to your ass.” When I did so, he followed with “Point to your elbow,” and would break into gales of laughter as he said, “Now you know more than a Harvard graduate.”

  As World War II came to an end, Saul was finally able to join the merchant marine. Anita and I lived with the Goshkins during the six months he was stationed in Brooklyn and Baltimore. Saul spent most of his free time reading in the Baltimore public library, which he preferred to visiting what his fellow sailors called “Clapp Hill.” Saul was given a psychiatric examination because he refused officers’ training despite a high IQ. When the psychiatrist asked about his interests, Saul said he was reading about John Dewey’s theory of pragmatism. The psychiatrist’s notes, which Saul read when the doctor left the room (perhaps purposefully), indicated that my father’s lack of purpose disqualified him from being an officer. Saul was so deeply wounded by the psychiatrist’s comments that years later, he had his narrator Moses Herzog address a letter to a Dr. Zozo, candidly telling his psychiatric examiner of the anguish he had caused in an uncannily similar incident.

  Immediately after his discharge, Saul decided on a move to New York. We stored our furniture in the basement of a hotel Morrie owned. Through Alfred Kazin he met Arthur Lidov, a painter whose wife, Vicki, Saul had known since his undergraduate years. They had been living in Brooklyn but had decided on a move to the country. Anita, Saul, and I joined them in upstate New York during a bitterly cold winter. Just as the adults thought they had succeeded in warming up the house, they looked down at two-year-old me toddling closer to the floor and could see my breath. Vicki told me my parents’ relationship was very physically passionate. But that did not deter Saul from openly seeing other women when he went down to New York to teach at NYU. Arthur made a sketch of my father hitchhiking as an available woman passes by riding a bull, which captures Saul’s passive yet eager availability to engage in extramarital sexual liaisons. Even after eight years of a marriage plagued by infidelities, Anita tolerated Saul’s affairs, telling herself and Vicki that he was still sowing his wild oats.

  We returned to New York City, but by the fall of 1947 we were off to Minneapolis, where Herb McClosky helped my father get a job in the humanities department of the University of Minnesota. Eric Bentley, who became a distinguished theater critic, was also invited there by Joseph Warren Beach, the department chairman who attracted talented young faculty members with a small teaching load that allowed time to write. As late as the late 1940s, academic departments of English would not hire Jews, who were presumed incapable of understanding great literature, let alone creating it. The systemic exclusion of Jews angered Saul, and Mitzi McClosky described how his nostrils flared at even a hint of that pervasive anti-Semitism. But Saul frequently described his early novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, as his M.A. and Ph.D. My father’s point was that he was self-taught as a writer and that academia had little to offer him. Yet he was still writing in a style largely shaped by the same scholars who had rejected Jewish writers, trying, I believe, to prove his worth to them.

  Our domestic life in Minneapolis began with residing in a Quonset hut—basically half of a large inverted tin can with no insulation. The two families it housed were separated by a barrier of sheet metal. The heating was terrible and, according to Anita, we had to choose between the half with a kitchen sink and the half with a toilet. We chose the side with the sink because, she said, “at least you could pee in a sink.” Grandpa Abraham visited us in Minneapolis but stayed with the McCloskys, as the Quonset hut was unsuitable. Every day, dressed in a suit and tie, he sat at their dining room table, though he refused to eat their nonkosher food, and regaled Herb and Mitzi with boastful stories about the financial success of his other children.

  We lived in a large house during our s
econd year in Minneapolis and rented a room to Max Kampelman, a conscientious objector during World War II who had just been discharged. Max’s alternative service was to participate in a study of human survival, recently described by Todd Tucker in The Great Starvation Experiment. Max had had to live on a minimal number of calories and was so thin that Anita said he looked as if he had been in a concentration camp. She joked about his raiding the icebox at all hours.

  Anita and Eric Bentley’s beautiful young wife, Maja, were faculty wives who took care of the everyday details of life for their creative husbands. Anita and Mitzi also became friends, and I was frequently at the McClosky house playing with Jane, Herb and Mitzi’s daughter. According to Mitzi, at four o’clock, Saul would excuse himself from campus activities to “go home and play with my kid.” He entertained me while Anita made dinner.

  Our house became a social center where my increasingly gregarious father brought people over at all hours. Saul entertained visitors with jokes, stories, and readings from drafts of The Victim. Anita did her best to accommodate the guests, often feeding large numbers of people with no forewarning. Eventually, she became irked with entertaining and bored by hearing the same stories and jokes. Just as Saul got to a punch line, Anita would show her frustration by interrupting him to say the garbage needed to be taken out. According to Mitzi, Saul’s chronic philandering finally became an increasing irritant to my mother. As a way to undermine his running around, Anita cultivated friendships with the women who showed interest in her husband.