Saul Bellow's Heart Read online

  As part of his development as a writer, Saul thought it necessary to move away from his cultural and religious roots. He rejected religious practice and custom, but his identification as a Jew was apparent in his resentment of the anti-Semitic biases in academia. And, according to Anita, if pushed too hard in an argument, Saul’s fallback position was to accuse his opponent of anti-Semitism.

  The anti-Semitism embedded in New York’s literary and critical hierarchies permeates his 1948 novel, The Victim. In a crucial scene, a magazine editor refuses to consider hiring the narrator, Asa Leventhal, a Jewish job applicant with moxie. During the interview a nasty argument ensues after the busy editor gruffly asks Asa why he applied for a job without the requisite background, a broad allusion to Asa’s Jewish roots.

  A similar scene occurred between my father and Whittaker Chambers, then arts and literature editor at Time magazine, who turned Saul down for a job. During the interview they had a heated dispute about Romantic poets. Saul often repeated the story, although he did not describe their literary disagreement or bring up the editor’s anti-Semitism. More than once he said the reason for Chambers’s rejection was his envy of Saul’s good looks.

  Leaving the contentious job interview, Asa, Saul’s narrator, also fumes. But in The Victim, which I consider my father’s most optimistic novel, even a subject as dark as anti-Semitism does not alter “young Saul’s” benign view of human nature. The images of harmony and reconciliation with which Saul ends the novel convince me that my father’s optimism still prevailed in 1948. Several times he mentioned that the theme of reconciliation received scant critical attention, but his tolerance and universal humanism resonate with me because they were the prevalent values in our household. I find a confirming residue of Saul’s utopian hopes in a letter to Oscar Tarcov that contains a comment about meeting the world’s material needs as a prelude that will “enable Hamlet.” I believe Saul refers to the Trotskyite idealism he and Oscar shared a decade earlier: that in order for the appreciation of culture to be more than a luxury for mankind, a new world order must first provide food and shelter.

  In 1980, in Chicago to celebrate Saul’s sixty-fifth birthday, I learned a bit more about Saul’s youthful optimism. My father and I were taking a walk and encountered the aged Nathan Leites, who greeted us stiffly on the street and then passed on. As we continued walking, Saul told me that he was the former professor who, forty-five years earlier, greeted him in Hyde Park with the friendly question “How is the romancier?” Even decades later, Saul remained mystified that Leites could have so mischaracterized him as a romantic. To the contrary, I was mystified that my father could not see, or could no longer see, that his youthful idealism had been readily apparent to his teacher.

  By 1948 Saul had published two novels, but his sales were minuscule and did not generate enough money to live on. But my father was granted a one-year Guggenheim Fellowship that enabled us to go to Paris for a year. The three of us squeezed into a tiny cabin on a broken-down tub named the De Grasse. Saul chose Paris because of its literary and cultural history. Cold, dreary, and uninviting, postwar Paris was nothing like what he imagined. A biting wind or a pea-soup fog made my walks to school miserable. Saul’s constant run-ins with landlords and bureaucrats reminded him of Dostoyevsky’s accounts of life in Paris. When I was ill, my father sought permission to buy an extra ration of coal from the Parisian authorities. After filling out numerous forms, the clerk would not approve the request because the perforations on the doctor’s authorization form were on the wrong side. My father, angered at a useless bureaucratic exercise, threatened to buy the coal on the black market. The clerk merely shrugged.

  But Anita did not want to leave Minneapolis. Our gypsy lifestyle was wearing on her. She wanted to settle down and have another child. Somewhere in Europe, frustrated by too many moves, she went on strike, planting her bottom on our trunks and refusing to go to our next destination. Saul had to move the luggage and carry my intransigent mother as well.

  American money went far in postwar Paris, and we lived in relative comfort. But daily life was a physical challenge. All three of our apartments during the time in Paris were coal heated, and there was no refrigeration. Shopping was a daily or even twice-daily matter; Anita would go out with her filet, or net, to shop, and then return to cook our next meal. Fresh milk was hard to come by, but we had access to the military PX, where we bought dreadful-tasting powdered milk. Anita resorted to adding cocoa to make the mixture more palatable, although a repellent scum still formed as soon as it cooled. My parents hired a maid named Augusta to cook, clean, and look after me. She came to her job interview immaculately dressed but showed up to work in carpet slippers and hair curlers, and minus her false teeth. Augusta made me sit in the stairwell while my parents were out, and they fired her after I told them. Lillian Bodnia, a Danish Jew who had hidden with her family during the Holocaust, became my nanny. She and I cut and pasted hearts and made long chains of colored paper ovals, and she introduced me to stamp collecting.

  Anita did not want me to begin first grade in a French public school, so I spent an extra year in a private bilingual kindergarten. I was already shy, and our frequent moves made it worse. The few children among my parents’ friends were my only playmates. Surrounded by adults, I became proficient at amusing them. My imitation of Americans trying to speak French was a big hit. I roller-skated in the Tuileries and liked to jump over the fences and run in the grass. However, I was poorly coordinated and fell so often that I acquired the nickname “Tomato Knees,” as they were always painted in red Mercurochrome. Years later, on a visit to Paris, I was surprised to see how low the barriers around the lawns in the Tuileries actually are.

  Paris was teeming with young American expatriates, among them Herbert Gold, Truman Capote, and James Baldwin, whose apartment had no shower. Baldwin came over regularly to use ours, usually showing up around dinnertime, Saul wryly noted. Saul and Jesse Reichek, a young American painter, used to meet after work in a café and play casino over beer in the summer and hot cocoa in the winter. Several Chicago friends, including Julian Behrstock and Harold “Kappy” Kaplan, who worked for the U.S. State Department, now lived there. But even friendships held little cheer for a very depressed Saul during our early months in a dreary Paris.

  I learned about how Saul’s mood was intertwined with a literary dilemma from the letters he wrote years later to Philip Roth, which Roth published right after my father died. Saul was stuck on a novel with a morbid theme titled The Crab and the Butterfly. Though abandoned and never published, the novel reveals the literary breakthrough brewing within my father. It centers on two men: one is in a hospital dying while the other urges him to cling to life. The death of one character and the survival of the other, I think, reflect two parts of Saul Bellow, a novelist in transition. The character who dies is the part of Saul that clung to the familiar, though doomed, academic fictional forms of his European “mentors.” The survivor is the writer with a freewheeling style of writing who was about to burst forth in the pages of The Adventures of Augie March.

  As this struggle was going on within, Saul was walking down the street watching merchants hose fruit and vegetables that had gone bad into the Seine, ridding themselves of once useful commodities that had lost their value and creating tiny rainbows of water in the gutter. At that very moment, the first lines of The Adventures of Augie March poured out of him as if they had been sitting there for a long time. Saul Bellow threw out his garbage—ending his literary apprenticeship by abandoning a fictional style designed to please academics in favor of a naturally flowing prose style that signaled a breakthrough in American literature.

  Saul’s grant money was running out after our first year, but Anita now did not want to leave Paris. My father later maintained that going back to the States meant “facing the music” about ending a marriage they both knew could not survive. In order to support our second year, Anita got a job at Joint Distribution, where she was to find adoptive p
arents for Jewish orphans who still had no homes four years after the war. I recall sitting in long, frightening hallways when my mother had no choice but to take me on a last-minute visit to an orphanage.

  With a novel that seemed to be writing itself, Saul’s dark mood and demeanor changed radically. He became a jauntily dressed young man about town who participated in a free-spirited café life with writers, painters, and intellectuals. Saul and Kappy Kaplan readily took to these Parisian circles. Both men maintained that they should explore all that life had to offer, including adopting the French tolerance of infidelity as yet another rationale. Fashioning himself an unofficial cultural attaché, Kappy threw large parties where my father often met women who were attracted to him and did not see his marriage as an obstacle to sleeping with him. Soon Anita refused to accompany him, and finally grew intolerant of Saul’s now epic philandering. My parents would rarely complain about each other to friends, but Saul’s sexual roving got so bad that Anita openly commiserated with Celia Kaplan, who suffered even more deeply from her own husband’s open sexual liaisons. A particularly sore point was a serious affair Saul had with a woman named Nadine, whom he had met at one of Kappy’s parties. Nadine had been Kappy’s lover at the time, and threw him over for Saul. The men fell out over it, and Anita, claiming Celia was responsible for introducing Saul to Nadine, ended their friendship, wounding a close friend with a false accusation.

  That affair became a tipping point between Anita and Saul, but according to Herb Gold, Saul had women stashed all over town. In the late 1980s, I spent a week in Paris with my father. During my stay Kappy explained the mores that had prevailed in their youth, which included classifying lovers as first-, second-, and third-tier in emotional, but not sexual, priority. On that visit a belatedly chastened Saul told me how guilty he felt about his behavior forty years earlier, saying “I can’t walk around a corner without thinking of the pain I caused your mother.” But indulging so fully in the sexual freedom Saul found in Paris was just a symptom of the sad state of my parents’ marriage. Anita had had her fill of the gypsy lifestyle. My elementary school education could no longer be postponed, so we left Europe. But by then the marriage was doomed.

  Before returning to the United States, we took a grand cultural tour of Europe. Saul taught at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, which was housed in the Schloss Leopoldskron. I had the run of a castle filled with suits of armor on the landings. It was heaven for a six-year-old boy. I recall playing in a marshy area dotted with statues of sea horses, which I joyfully rode. A very young Ted Hoffman, who became a longtime friend of Saul’s, ran the seminar in an informal way. Eric Bentley was also there with his wife, Maja. Fluent in English and German, Maja got a job with the U.S. government’s occupying forces, which required travel between Salzburg and Vienna, a city still cordoned off by Russian troops. When our month was over Maja took Anita and me to Vienna in her car. I was curled up on the backseat in the middle of the night when we were stopped by Russian soldiers. Flashlights shone in my face and I was terrified, but Maja’s U.S. papers got us through, and I remember the performance of The Magic Flute we saw in Vienna.

  During a brutally hot summer, we spent a month in Rome living above a pasta shop where large sheets of dough were hung up to dry before being cut into spaghetti. The odor of latterias, milk and cheese shops, carried for blocks. Bored stiff, Anita and I often went to Rome’s zoo, which featured a pink-skinned newborn baby elephant and a bicycle-riding chimp named Gregorio, my name in Italian. By then I had seen dozens of churches. When Saul tried to pique my flagging interest by telling me St. Peter’s was the biggest church in the world, I responded, “In that case we don’t need to see any more!”

  Our final Italian stop was Positano, a town on the Amalfi coast noted for its beauty. Every morning for six weeks, while Saul wrote, Anita and I descended a long staircase to the beach, where she taught me to swim. Our daily routine included a siesta after lunch and a late-afternoon walk to the main part of town, where we feasted on freshly made mozzarella Anita said tasted sweeter than ice cream. One afternoon my parents mis-communicated and I was left alone at the town’s only intersection. I remained perfectly calm and walked home as my parents panicked. On our drive back to Paris, it was my turn to panic. We stopped for ice cream, and when I finished before the others, I climbed into my father’s lap. Bronzed by daily swimming and without a haircut for weeks, I must have looked like an urchin trying to beg money from the rich Americans. A white-helmeted officer tried to shoo me away and, after failing to dislodge me from Saul’s lap, he threatened to arrest me. Saul said “He’s my son” in Italian, but the policeman thought my father was just trying to protect a beggar. Finally, the waiter confirmed that I had arrived with the adults and the officer went on his way.

  When we returned from Europe, we spent a month in Chicago. By now Anita and Saul were barely speaking, and both complained openly to family and friends as never before. They were dead broke, but Saul’s manuscript of Augie March was far enough along to attract the interest of Harold Guinzburg, publisher of the Viking Press, who helped us rent an apartment in Forest Hills, a neighborhood in Queens, New York.

  In September of 1950 I began at P.S. 175, where the school day for first graders ended at noon. If my mother was late, I often cried. One day, late because she had waited for Saul to finish writing, Anita brought him along to pick me up. I was already in tears. Recognizing my father’s ability to cheer me up, she said, “Look who came to pick you up from school.” But Anita had to earn a salary and got a job at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Far Rockaway that prevented her from picking me up at noon. Saul and Anita sought advice about a suitable school from Rachel and Paulo Milano, friends who lived nearby. Their son Andy attended a private school that offered a full academic day supplemented by what my mother called “after-school supervision.” In practice that meant simply letting the kids with working parents have the run of the school and its playground until they were picked up.

  The Queens School was populated by red-diaper babies, a term used to describe the children of communists. It was run along lines so egalitarian that we called adults by their first names and once locked our teacher out of the classroom after “going on strike.” The learning model was based on the progressive educational philosophy of John Dewey, which included studying a single theme in depth for a whole school year. I remember that we built a working model of the solar system; made a huge plywood copy of the New York City transit system and took a field trip to see how the subway works; and studied all the American Indian tribes, even fabricating miniature birch-bark canoes. The school was racially integrated; among its black students were the sons of the Brooklyn Dodger greats Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, who chose it because their all-white neighborhood schools had turned them away. Everything was freely discussed. Saul, on a visit to our classroom, watched as my class used sex to divert the teacher from a math lesson. As she began, one of us would raise a hand and ask what fuck meant. After carefully outlining the mechanics of sexual intercourse, the teacher tried to return to the lesson, only to be derailed by a variation of the same question—a process that ended only at recess.

  Permissive attitudes also prevailed in our home. My table manners were nonexistent by the time we returned from Europe. In Italy, I developed a fondness for eating spaghetti by twirling it around my fork to form a big ball and working my way up the thin strands. It was a great hit with waiters but very messy. Soon we were invited to dinner by our new Forest Hills neighbors. To their chagrin, my habit of eating chocolate pudding with my fingers elicited nary a word from either parent. In conscious contrast to his father, Saul took pride in not hitting me and made a point of telling me so. Yet, while I had no physical fear of my father, his tongue was withering when he was angry. As a young mother, Anita attended the child psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim’s workshops and adopted many of his child-rearing ideas. One was that sweets should not be used as a reward. I remember plates of candy in our apa
rtment that I barely touched because they were there all the time. During my adolescence, Anita’s permissiveness extended to leaving cigarettes out; my friends loved to come over and smoke them.

  In 1951 The Adventures of Augie March and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man were nearing completion. We spent a good deal of time with Ralph and Fanny Ellison at our apartment and vacationing on Long Island, where Saul, Ralph, and I went fishing. Anita told me that writing Invisible Man took so much out of Ralph that when he finished, he got into bed for weeks, convinced that he was going to die. Ralph had a number of talents that included electronics; as a birthday gift for Saul, Anita had him put together a Heathkit hi-fi system. My parents tested it by playing Laurence Olivier’s recording of Hamlet with the volume turned up. Frightened by Olivier’s ominous tones, I fled our apartment, bounding down the stairs. A neighbor, alarmed by the noise, came out and asked me if anything was wrong. I told her, “I am up to here with Shakespeare!”

  I was an awkward kid and had so much trouble learning to ride a bike that for weeks Saul ran along with his hand on the seat to steady me. Shy and with few friends because I didn’t go to the neighborhood school, I rarely went beyond the sidewalk in front of our apartment. On one of my rare solo excursions, I was threatened by several bullies. After I pointed them out to Saul, he threatened to beat them up if they ever bothered me again—which they did not. Before I went to bed, Saul read Joseph A. Altsheler’s heroic tales of Henry Ware’s frontier adventures aloud to me. Anita and I chuckled for years because Saul became so caught up in the stories that he continued reading long after I had fallen asleep. Flush with money after the publication of Augie March, Saul bought me a pogo stick, a sleeping bag, and stilts for my ninth birthday. “These are things I wanted as a kid but we couldn’t afford them,” he said. The pogo stick didn’t last long, but I walked around the apartment on the stilts for years.