Saul Bellow's Heart (19 page)

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 freed 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.

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.