Saul Bellow's Heart (6 page)

The newlyweds had no income and nowhere to live. Saul didn’t have a job and Anita was a full-time student. They moved into the Goshkin home, and Saul briefly acceded to his father’s pressure to work in the family coal business. According to Anita, he had to get up at the crack of dawn in freezing weather to go to work, and he soon quit in order to pursue writing. The already crowded Goshkin household was occupied by a widowed Sonia; Uncle Jack, who was practicing law; and my aunts, Catherine and Ida, who were librarians. In this lively place with distinct socialist leanings, Depression-era politics, philosophy, and literature were often debated.

Sonia supported the literary pursuits of her new son-in-law. Every morning, while Anita was at school and the others were at work, Saul wrote at a card table in a back room. He grew close to his mother-in-law, so close that my father was stung by her praise of his high school friend and rival Sydney Harris when Sydney published an article. Saul was full of envy then and remained so even at eighty-five, when he complained, “Your grandmother went on and on about what a success he was. There I was, brimming with talent, and Sonia kept going on about Harris.” Oscar Tarcov speculated that Saul’s affection for Sonia was so strong because he had recently lost his mother. Lescha had encouraged her son’s scholarly aptitudes, and in her world that meant becoming a rabbi. I suspect Sonia’s support of Saul’s aspiration to write was similar to the way that Lescha might have acted.

After nine months, in the fall of 1938, Anita and Saul took an apartment in Hyde Park near Isaac and Vasiliki Rosenfeld, Sam and Rochelle Freifeld, Oscar and Edith Tarcov, Herb and Cora Passin, Hyman and Elaine Slate, and Beebee and Peter
Schenk. These friends and the neighborhood around the University of Chicago made for a stimulating intellectual atmosphere. Arguments between the Stalinists and the Trotskyites reached a peak, intensified by the Moscow show trials where Stalin consolidated his hold on the Communist Party. Hitler was becoming more bellicose and the Spanish Civil War pitted Franco against the Spanish Republican Army. Several of their friends joined the Lincoln Brigade, went to Spain, and were killed, bringing tears to Anita’s eyes every time she remembered them.

Anita always found writing difficult, so Saul wrote most of her graduate school term papers. Daunted by the prospect of the thesis that a master’s degree required, she did not complete the social work program. Anita took a job at the Chicago Relief Administration, where she gave out welfare checks in a South Side neighborhood for the then princely sum of twenty-five dollars a week. Both told me they were on easy street, because they could eat steak, at twenty-five cents a pound, whenever they wanted. Saul rented a small studio, where he wrote, and taught a few courses downtown at Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College. He took brief assignments for the WPA Writers Project and also worked on the Great Books of the Western World project at the University of Chicago. The editors kept shifting perspectives and Anita reported that he had to read
War and Peace
four times, each from a different point of view.

In
Shop Talk
, a book about writers and writing, Philip Roth portrays Saul’s early literary development, particularly what my father considered the necessary step of moving beyond his roots. Roth describes how Saul was so enthralled by the great European
literary masters—Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Kafka—that he sought distance from what he considered at the time to be the narrowing confines of Chicago, including his background as the son of a Jewish immigrant.

Saul also actively distanced himself from family traditions and made a point to the Bellows of Anita’s status as a professional woman. The newlyweds were radicals who refused to observe formal religious practices and did not keep kosher. My aunt Marge described Abraham’s agitated reaction after a visit to Saul and Anita’s Hyde Park home. She and Morrie lived nearby and my grandfather stormed into their home, saying to Marge, “Cook me an egg in the shell,” implying that this was all he could eat in their house, as they did not keep kosher either. As he ate the egg, Abraham expressed horror at having found a ham in my parents’ icebox. Saul’s defiance of family customs continued. Ten years later, while we were living in Minneapolis, Saul visited Chicago on the Jewish High Holiday Yom Kippur. To the chagrin of all the Bellows except Sam, Saul borrowed the family car and drove to the South Side to visit his friends, while the rest of the family, as prescribed by Jewish law, walked to the synagogue and prayed.

My father’s desire to write continued to mystify Abraham, who could more easily understand Morrie’s outstripping him in business than Saul’s pursuit of an impecunious life devoted to culture. Decades later, after my aunt Jane fell asleep in the front row at his Nobel lecture, Saul complained bitterly on the way back to the hotel that she typified the family’s attitude toward his devotion to culture.

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.”