Saul Bellow's Heart (25 page)

Back in California, I felt a minimum of sadness at Saul’s passing. Alexandra’s comment, that he had lived life to the fullest, pretty much summed up my feelings. The grief I experienced was balanced by my family’s love and the kind wishes of innumerable friends.

Three memorials emphasizing Saul Bellow, the famous author, were orchestrated by his literary agent. They began to reshape my views about my father and his legacy. The New York and Boston memorials included no family members and took little note of the father or the man. Being considered irrelevant to memorials celebrating our father angered all of
Saul’s sons. I ardently wished to speak at the service in his honor at the University of Chicago, the school that had profoundly influenced him but also shaped the intellectual life of my mother, me, my wife, along with dozens of family members and friends.

My request to Janis was placed in the hands of the Wylie Agency. Somehow five minutes were found. I spoke after Mayor Daley’s amusing anecdotes about Saul lecturing at a campaign rally until the mayor had to remind my father that he, not Saul, was the candidate. I carefully chose my words, expressing a collective family debt to the university and emphasizing how Saul embodied its pervasive questioning spirit.

I was followed by Jeffrey Eugenides, whose uneasy tribute to a man he had never met typified how I felt Saul’s new literary agent had turned what should have been a moment of sorrow for those who knew and loved Saul as a human being into a marketing opportunity. I shared my father’s concerns, and likely those of Janis, about the waning of Saul’s literary star during his final decades. My father’s lack of political correctness and bitter criticism of African American and women authors did little to endear him to critics, readers, or academia. Saul was pained by the infrequent use of his books in the classroom as novels with more nuanced considerations of race and gender gained popularity on college campuses.

Making the memorial services into publicity events filled with literary lights who didn’t even know my father brought to my mind Andrew Wylie’s boast (published in Harriet Wasserman’s memoir) about turning a client “from a cash cow into a cash bull.” I remember thinking that Saul Bellow, who was being promoted even in death, was now clearly in the grip of the
Philistines, people who emphasized money rather than culture, about whom he had complained for decades.

My personal communication with Janis had slowed before Saul died. Now letters came from lawyers, junior members of Walter Pozen’s firm, who were all very proper as they distributed the funds willed to Saul’s children and grandchildren. In stages the extent of Janis’s control in the shaping of my father’s literary image became more and more clear. After a suitable interval, Janis asked Zachary Leader to be Saul’s new biographer and enlisted Benjamin Taylor to collect and publish his letters, which show Saul’s magnificent way of expressing himself and may well encourage new readers. Saul’s archive was placed under the control of a committee headed by Janis, Walter Pozen, Martin Amis, and Philip Roth. At first, I despaired of gaining access to a portion of his literary side that was not published. Then I got mad and decided not to ask again.

Anita and Basil’s house was filled with art, pottery, and books they had collected for decades, and now those objects populate my house and those of Basil’s children. In his seventy years of the gypsy life, Saul had always traveled light. He had made no mention of personal items that might remind his sons of him. In anticipation, on my last visit I pinched one of the fedoras he so loved. Later, at my request, Janis sent one of the recorders Saul loved to play, canes for Lesha and me, bow ties for Andrew, baseball caps for Juliet, as well as a few more items I shared with my brothers and their children.

Saul did bequeath a few items. When my brothers went to Vermont to pick up a desk that Saul had left to Dan, Janis
once again extolled the unique love she felt for our father. In an obviously prepared speech, Janis insisted, over and over, that there had been no problems between them, but her tone was so shrill that she demonstrated to my bewildered brothers the huge toll nursing Saul for a decade had actually taken.

During the quiet lull that mercifully followed the hubbub right after Saul’s death, I decided to reread all of my father’s published works. Slowly, what began as a reaction to a grave robbery became an opportunity to appreciate his public side and even to reconsider my lifelong protective behavior toward him, as well as my silence. To better understand why I had so fiercely protected Saul, I had to turn the question about family loyalty I had for Philip Roth after reading
Patrimony
—has Philip no shame?—back onto myself.

Saul’s life was filled with misunderstandings and conflicts. For years I observed that despite his denials, personal and literary criticisms stung my father, prompting running battles with family, former friends, reviewers, and critics. With few exceptions, he thought these battles stemmed from the inability of others to understand the artist in him, not from his own sensitivity. He took umbrage at disagreements small and large. For decades, I volunteered to protect the author, but I had actually been shielding the private man I knew to be so easily hurt. In telling him and myself that I was protecting our private relationship, I was subscribing to my father’s taboo about crossing a line between work and art that he had created and then proceeded to cross from the first pages of
Dangling Man
to the end of
Ravelstein
.

My insistence on protecting Saul Bellow the author was to change only after I spoke in depth with Janna Malamud two
years after my father’s death. Janna’s early life mirrored mine. She had been raised in a household devoted to writing, and her father, Bernard Malamud, had promulgated artistic values similar to Saul’s. Janna had written two books about her father. The first defended the artist’s privacy, while the second, written years later, was a revealing literary memoir of growing up with a writer father.

After reading both, I contacted Janna to ask why she had changed her mind. Her candor about protecting herself as she protected her father helped me realize that my public silence extended beyond shielding Saul’s creativity as he wrote. The /files/14/15/94/f141594/public/private line I had refused to cross combined
two
of Saul’s views: one on protecting the art, and another on protecting the artist. But Janna’s father and mine had conflated the precarious state of art in creation that literally took place behind a closed door with the absolute need to protect them just because they were
artists
, period. Janna confessed to blindly buying into the merger, and so, I realized, had I.

Andrew’s wedding, about a year later, gave me an opportunity to have a meeting of the minds with Adam and Dan. We all resented being shunted aside, barred from access to Saul’s archive, and rued the costs of continued silence. Each brother wished to come to terms with being Saul’s son. As it turned out, my lack of access to his archive proved to be a blessing in disguise. With my conversation with Janna fresh in my mind, I found a truer inheritance in my memories of Saul as a father, as a man, and in the traces of himself in his novels and essays. Humanizing the complexity of all three aspects of Saul Bellow in this memoir is my contribution to a franchise my father deserves.

Chapter Twelve
A Glance Back and a Glance Forward

Writer
is the one-word descriptor on Saul Bellow’s gravestone, a final testament to a life where everything and everyone was subordinated to art. After rereading his soul-searching novels, this time as a memoirist, I find a man trying to understand his inability to live in harmony with others and with himself. Saul simply never fit in, and every corner of his life was strewn with evidence of an inability to just get along. Musing about his character with his longtime friend Gene Good-heart shortly before his death, Saul remained plagued by doubts, asking aloud, “Was I a man or a jerk?”

My easily wounded father received partial protection from his opacity, his rational explanations, his disinclination to introspect, and the firm mental line he maintained between his art and his life. Writing a memoir enabled me to see that by making himself the only one able to cross that line in the privacy of his study was what allowed Saul to plumb his feelings, place them into his narrators, and imbue his fiction with the power to deeply touch his readers. Saul Bellow could not do so without tapping into the emotions that were inseparable from the life he most cared about: his own.

In the end I do not know how well Saul understood himself. But his frequent and vehement protests about being misunderstood and about the inaccessibility of the inner life shed an essential light. It was and remains my distinct impression that he believed the real action occurs inside human beings. I am sure his cultivation of
my
looking inward during the decades of our “real conversations” was to impart that all-important message to his son.

But looking back at how he used the term
inner life
over a lifetime, even “young Saul” did not identify the content of his. His “inner life,” like the human imagination, was infinite but private. What little my father said directly about feelings needs to be supplemented by observing how he acted and considering what he wrote. When “old Saul” added a more spiritual meaning that encompassed a soul that might outlive the human body, the “inner life” became even less accessible to Saul and, in his eyes, to mankind. In his essays, in his books, and in person he complained that modern man had lost his inner moral compass and the guidance it provides. But alienation from the “inner life” represented a danger for Saul in this life and an even greater one as he contemplated how to move into the next.

I have come to believe Saul feared that he had harmed or even deadened not only his heart but even his soul by erecting so many self-protective barriers. What if the precious vessel, the soul that was to carry him into the next life, proved inaccessible because the gap between his rational side and his inner life was too great to traverse? Saul’s incessant late-life refrain about the inaccessibility of mankind’s deepest human feelings reflects a recognition that he, too, was afflicted with
the condition he so accurately diagnosed in society but could not alter there or in himself. And worse, that the damage may have been self-inflicted.

Saul’s soul may or may not live on, but, judging by the public reactions to the recent publication of his letters, the conflation of the man and his work persists outside of the Bellow family. Reviewers, swept away by reexposure to his lofty prose, seemed unwilling to ask the obvious final question that Saul posed about his character: How could the same man so inspire in a literary letter and be so prickly, bilious, and self-justifying in a personal one?

The answer lies in the ambiguities that were Saul Bellow, which spawned so many narratives tinged with filial overtones. He was, after all, a man who lived for a singular creative purpose; a man who struggled with his deepest emotions; an author touched with literary genius; an author who became duly famous; an authority with wisdom to impart; a father recently passed away; a father largely absent but emotionally present; and a man, father, and husband who promised more than he could deliver. And I was his little boy: a boy who felt deeply cared about; a grown son deeply influenced by the kind of love he received; and a man wrestling with the challenges of relating to a difficult father who walked away from shared family ideals.

The public aspects of my father have infused the image of Saul Bellow, the famous author, with the same universal magnetic power to live on that is afforded to heroes, to symbols, and to the literary characters that he created. But emphasizing the literary lion overlooks the very human man and masks the essential soft side of Saul I find in his final published letter, wherein a dreamy old man returns to the paradise he made of Lachine. He recalls
standing at his mother’s side as they looked longingly at a pair of patent leather shoes Saul called “elegantissimo” in a store window. Somehow Lescha procured them, and Saul honored her use of scarce family assets by polishing them with butter. An already touching story of maternal indulgence takes on added meaning when compared to Sam’s request to his father for a suit to commemorate his bar mitzvah, which resulted in a beating.

Parents, tender or harsh, die. Heroes and symbols do not. When readers continue to imbue his characters and their creator with personal meaning, they bring to Saul Bellow a form of immortality—though one vastly different from the spiritual forms he worked and hoped for. It is, nonetheless, a form I believe he would have found most pleasing.

Even though a heroic status masks crucial aspects of the man, I have resigned myself to sharing my father with his literary public because I have no real choice. As a man whose respect for symbols to carry deep meaning equals that of my father, I must graciously bow to his status as a literary hero that will continue to influence public perceptions of Saul Bellow, the famous author.

Writing a memoir has made Saul a more nuanced man to his firstborn: a father, a duly famous writer, and a symbol of literary heroism. Writing a memoir was not, as I anticipated, about staying close to “young Saul.” By adopting his daily writing habits, I found a delightful new connection with the parts of my father that I once found alien and intimidating, which have now brought me closer to the “old Saul” on whom I turned my back. And doubtless the loss of privacy, his and mine, that will follow publication of my memoir will bring more—I hope positive—surprises.

Acknowledgments

I have long struggled to capture subtle personal meanings in a written form that will touch readers who are strangers to me and to my father.

Three people who knew both of us proved invaluable as the work progressed. To my wife, who found love on every page of a shaky first draft I could show no one else, I owe a debt that cannot be measured. Mitzi McClosky and Gene Goodheart, longtime friends of Saul’s and of mine, generously agreed to be my first outside readers. I took heart from Mitzi’s praise for a book I knew Saul would have hated and wisdom from Gene telling me I could and should do better.