Saul Bellow's Heart (20 page)

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 herself. 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.

I fully agree that the academic study of literature offered little to him as a writer, but by cultivating a literary persona that included the notion that he was tutored only by the great writers, Saul ignored the support and criticism he received from friends, colleagues, family, and even strangers. Saul revered Isaac Rosenfeld and, no doubt, profited from his friend’s prescient judgments and criticism as well as from others with whom “young Saul” eagerly shared work in progress. He read aloud to
visitors in our home, but I have no recollection of his doing that in his later years.

According to Mitzi McClosky, Saul bristled when Robert Penn Warren praised
The Victim
but also noted its linear form, which disappeared in Saul’s next novel,
The Adventures of Augie March
. And I witnessed a similar moment when we met Robert Frost. I was ten and Saul had brought me to his reading in the Bard College gym. All I remember is Frost’s flowing white hair, but an intrepid Saul introduced himself to the poet, saying he had “come down from New York” to hear him. Frost brought him up short by saying, “You mean up from New York.” No doubt stung, Saul often repeated the story without comment. But I now realize that he also took to heart Frost’s tacit lesson that every word counts.

I was most troubled by the ways he revised the personal side of his early career. His late-life version went beyond minimizing the support he got to including chronic harsh criticism of those he knew had helped him. Although Anita had urged Saul to take a year off from work to write while she supported them and offered emotional support when his self-confidence wavered, he buried the respect in which he had once openly held my mother. He said nothing about her support, irritating both her and me. His private revision extended to my daughter, Juliet, who was twelve when her grandmother died. When, as a graduate student, she asked Saul to tell her about Anita, all he could muster from a fifteen-year marriage was the disappointing answer that she was a good dancer. As if that were not enough, Saul felt it necessary to go on the offensive, complaining about how my grandmother Goshkin’s control emasculated her sons. Over and over he scoffed at the
cultural shortcomings of the Goshkins and derided Beebee’s romantic frivolity.

I was angered by these personal attacks because Beebee, Edith Tarcov, and my aging Goshkin aunts were very important to me and still alive. By the 1980s they all lived in New York and looked out for one another. My brothers and former stepmothers had also moved to New York. Sasha had remarried happily. Susan, who never remarried, lived nearby too. These two little groups made up the East Coast branch of my family, and I visited at least once a year.