Saul Bellow's Heart (11 page)
Our years in the Hudson Valley anchored the only domestic life I had with my father after the divorce. Saul got a job teaching at Bard College and I summered on or near campus for
years. At first he lived in a carriage house on the estate of Chanler Chapman, a wealthy local character who was related to the Astor family. Saul attended parties at the mansion house and must have been treated as a celebrity because he had to explain the word
lionize
to me when he used it to describe how he was treated there.
Ted and Lynn Hoffman, whom I already knew from Salzburg, lived on campus and often looked out for me. The Hoffman girls were too young to be of any interest, but I delighted in Ted’s wit and infectious laugh. Curled up in a big chair in the Hoffman living room, I spent hours poring over the joke books Ted bought me. During Saul’s second year at Bard, he shared the house with Ted during the week because Lynn had an editorial job at the Viking Press and stayed in Manhattan. Lynn told me that her presentation to the Viking marketing department about
The Adventures of Augie March
was interrupted by the delivery of an elegant package from California. John Steinbeck had sent his manuscript
East of Eden
in a hand-carved wooden box. It so impressed everyone that she could not turn their attention back to Saul’s novel.
In fair weather we played volleyball or swam at the Bard pool. In foul we played basketball in the gym, where Sasha taught me to shoot the ball with one hand, since Saul knew only the old-fashioned two-handed set shot of his youth. Keith Botsford, a flamboyant character who attached himself to Saul for decades, lived on campus with his then wife, Ann. Saul, always in search of child care and entertainment for me, hit on the fine idea that Keith should give me tennis lessons. I believe Keith’s father had played tennis on the Olympic team, and he was an excellent player. “Tennis lessons” consisted of his
hitting shots difficult even for a skilled adult to return and me running after tennis balls. One of the most transparently competitive people I ever encountered, Keith could not stand to lose. Even in a game of Scrabble at the Hoffmans’, he used the word
nuncio
, but substituted a
t
for the
c
. When challenged by Lynn, he went wild, claiming that it was an alternate spelling and refusing to admit defeat even when the dictionary failed to back him up.
Jack Ludwig was another flamboyant Bard character. He had a deep basso voice and sang in a college choral group that included Sasha. I don’t know when Sasha and Jack’s affair began, but by 1956 it was common for Saul, Sasha, and me, in some combination, to see Jack and his family almost daily. I spent endless adolescent hours in a nearby tree. In that favorite niche I was able to avoid both the boring adult conversation and having to play with Jack’s daughter Susie, who was five years my junior, though, no doubt, bored as well.
Saul jokingly called the house he bought with his inheritance “Bellowview.” Several miles from Bard, it was in a town called Tivoli. Just before we moved in, the Lane brothers, antique dealers who owned the house, held an auction I attended with Saul and his constant companion Jack. Included in the sale were the house’s huge window screens; Saul was furious at having to pay for something he thought he already owned. He was convinced that the Lane brothers had removed valuable chandeliers too as well.
The house was huge. Half of the first floor was taken up by an elegant ballroom longer than a bowling alley, its fourteen-foot ceilings replete with ornate plaster foliage. The cost of heating the ballroom was beyond Saul, but the African violets that
Ralph Ellison, who visited often and later lived in the house, cultivated in its cool air flourished, even if we did not. Across the hall were the living room and Saul’s study. Four large bedrooms, also with high ceilings, made up the next floor. You could see the Hudson River from the second-floor windows when the leaves had fallen. Above that was another floor, with smaller rooms once used to house servants but which was now sealed off also to prevent losing heat. Across from our front lawn, Chanler Chapman grew feed corn for his cows in a large field, and Saul often walked the narrow path around its perimeter alone or with adult friends. Behind the house there was a large overgrown garden where he and I picked our dessert from the raspberry bushes that grew half-wild on its edges.
For months we cooked and ate in an upper room because the basement, where the kitchen was planned, had no viable plumbing. Saul hired a contractor that fall but found that the interminable hammering interfered with his writing. He took off for the quiet of Yaddo, a writers’ colony a few hours away, leaving Sasha to manage the contracting, which greatly irritated her and set the stage for disaster.
One morning in the summer of 1956 a phone call woke us with news that Isaac Rosenfeld had died in Chicago. Saul was inconsolable. Although I had only scattered memories of Isaac, I was saddened as well. According to his daughter Miriam, Oscar Tarcov lay on the couch all day immobilized in shock after he got the news. Saul could not make himself go to Isaac’s funeral. Vasiliki, his widow, was furious with him, but my father was unable to see beyond his own grief.
Yet death, spiritual maladies, and suffering pervade
Henderson the Rain King
, written soon after Isaac and Grandpa died. Chanler
Chapman, a huge physical specimen who had correspondingly large appetites and a disdain for convention, served as the model for Eugene Henderson, Saul’s tragicomic title character. Saul included Chanler’s nihilistic habit of breaking bottles with his slingshot on a beach in Miami, leaving it covered with dangerous shards of glass. That oft-repeated story was a source of family amusement, but many years later Chanler’s nephew (who became a friend of mine in California) told me his uncle was hurt by Saul’s novelistic exaggeration of his eccentricities.
In
Henderson the Rain King
, Gene Henderson chooses a life path that brings him into contact with suffering and death. He is haunted by the biblical line “a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief,” a phrase embedded in my memory after listening to Handel’s
Messiah
over and over on Saul’s hi-fi. Born to material ease, Henderson’s deepest desire is to be helpful. A zealous blunderer who cannot contain his impulse to improve the lives of others, he brings only more trouble to his intended beneficiaries. The scorn he heaps on himself when he fails merely fans his desire to be even more helpful. In the middle of Africa, Gene meets a soul mate, King Dafu, a highly educated man to whom he confides his dreams and fears. Dafu is on a quest to find his deepest nature by calmly approaching a lioness who has been captured and kept in a cave but is allowed to move unfettered in an attempt to commune with the spirit of an animal that can kill him at any moment. Inspired by his friend’s courage and eager to capture the beast’s powers with his own soul, Henderson agrees to follow along. Neither falls prey to the wild beast, but Dafu is done in by lethal human ambition.
I believe the rapport between the literary characters Gene Henderson and Dafu touches on my father’s deep connection
with Isaac Rosenfeld. First in the books they read and later in the larger scale of their own lives, these soul mates searched in ideas and in experience for the deepest essences of humanity. After Isaac’s death, Saul compared himself unfavorably with his friend, who was willing to take risks my hesitant and more skeptical father was not. Isaac fully embraced life, including Wilhelm Reich’s emphasis on the body and on powerful emotion. Isaac showed courage that bordered on recklessness, for which Saul believed he paid the ultimate price of an early death. As opposed to
Seize the Day
, where Saul caricatured Reichianism,
Henderson the Rain King
expresses my father’s respect for Reich’s emphasis on emotion as an unadulterated expression of what is essentially human, an emphasis that Saul’s rational side could never fully accept.
Sasha said that when she became pregnant with Adam, Saul told her that raising one child was enough for him, pretty much disavowing the responsibilities of parenthood. However, I remember walking up hills with them to prepare her for childbirth, conversations about the baby’s arrival, and going to see Adam in the hospital with an excited Saul. I recall Sasha at Tivoli when Adam was an infant. But by that summer Sasha and Adam were nowhere to be seen. My father, in a deadpan tone of voice, announced that she was moving to Brooklyn to “get away and think.” Meanwhile Jack Ludwig was driving down to Brooklyn on a regular basis, ostensibly to “mediate” between Saul and Sasha.
The kitchen was finished and Jesse Reichek, our friend from Paris, joined us while his wife, Laura, visited her family in France. Jesse drew and Saul wrote all morning, but by then I had a rickety bicycle to get me to the local swimming pool. The three of us christened the new kitchen by making potato pancakes and several batches of jam from our raspberry bushes, which turned every surface red. After dinner we played poker for matchsticks at our new dining room table. Our neighbors
owned a dachshund that we mated with Lizzie. During the act, a loud noise frightened the dogs, who could not uncouple even with human help. It was quite a scene as Saul and Jesse tried to put an ice pack where the yelping dogs were joined. Jesse was with us, as he reminded me years later, when I was talking to Saul about an interest in the stock market, which I developed at thirteen with a friend from forest Hills. Apparently Saul was so distressed about the affinity I expressed for capitalism that it brought him to tears.
Eventually Sasha moved back to Tivoli, where she and I drew closer in rural isolation. Desperate for any distraction, I tagged along when she took Adam to Red Hook to grocery shop. By that time I had taken to bringing friends from Forest Hills with me for weekend visits, prompting Saul to complain, accurately, that I was putting barriers between us. One lad, Michael Riff, hit it off so well with my father that Michael confided his adolescent confusion about religion to Saul. Michael’s father, a former communist and a nonpracticing Jew, sent him to an Orthodox Hebrew school to prepare for his bar mitzvah. The school insisted that Michael wear phylacteries, a cloth with fringes, commonly called
tsitsis
, worn under one’s shirt. He confessed to Saul that he’d come home after studying Hebrew only to find that his mother had left him a snack of ham, a food forbidden to Jews. After carefully taking off his shirt before eating, Michael was concerned about getting nonkosher grease on his
tsitsis
. My father found Michael’s dilemma amusing, and over the years he and I joked about it so often that the story became part of family lore.
Another visitor at Tivoli was my aunt Jane’s son Larry, who spent several days there during one of my summer stays. According
to our cousin Lynn, Larry idealized his uncle Morrie (Lynn’s father). Morrie, always one to impress, encouraged his slavish admiration by lavishing money on Larry, further encouraging his sycophancy. During Larry’s visit, money started to disappear from several purses. No doubt hoping to dispel his worst fears about his nephew, my father asked if I knew about the missing money. Outraged, I took him to my room, where my allowance for the last few weeks, except what I had spent on stamps for my collection, was spread out on the mantelpiece. “That’s all the money I have,” I yelled, pointing to several dollars and a handful of change. Saul left my room in a silence that typified his response to being outflanked. In the arguments that were to come between us I came to understand his rare lack of words as acquiescence without having to admit defeat.
The money continued to disappear. Apparently, cash left out in the open did not appeal to Larry’s kleptomania, which turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. Larry joined the army, got into trouble for stealing and perhaps more, and ended up in the military prison at the San Francisco Presidio. The night before he was scheduled to be released, he was found hanged in his cell. The events that surrounded his death were vague, so our uncle Sam went to San Francisco to try to get to the bottom of a matter that grew more sordid with every detail he was able to uncover. Sam stopped asking questions, but the whole family was devastated by Larry’s suspicious death.
Life with Anita continued in Forest Hills and I began to settle in. After my years at the Queens School, in the fall of 1955, I returned to P.S. 175, which was right down the street, for the fifth grade. For the first time in my life I started to make friends
with classmates who lived nearby. Academically, a traditional elementary school was a rude awakening, as I lacked several skills, including writing in longhand. I was so far behind that my teacher hinted to Anita at their parent-teacher conference that I might be a bit “slow.” Despite her concerns, the next year I passed a test that allowed me to do three years of junior high school in two. Unfortunately, my lack of academic discipline caught up with me again and I had to return to regularly paced classes. It was around this time, when Saul brought me home after a custodial visit, that my permissive parents sat me down and simply asked me whether or not I wanted to have a bar mitzvah. Since my new friends all complained about the Hebrew lessons they had to attend after school, I said no, and they accepted my decision as final.
During the mid-1950s, my New York family consisted of Anita, me, and Anita’s cousin Beebee, who was by then married to Francis de Regniers. Francis was a stuffy Frenchman she had met working in an Egyptian refugee camp after World War II, and Beebee had invented an entirely new identity for him that included a last name “borrowed” from a blue-blooded French family. Suspicious of the whole story, her parents had asked Saul to investigate his background when we were living in Paris. It turned out Francis was an accountant named Gahlager, and Saul used Beebee’s invention of an aristocratic identity for him as a primary example of her excessive romanticism.