Saul Bellow's Heart (14 page)

Part of Susan’s appeal to Saul was her promise to take care of the practical details he hated. Susan, who did not relish domestic chores, hired a good-hearted woman named Gussie to take care of Daniel and keep house. But her lavish tastes and Saul’s newly acquired wealth soon infiltrated their new lifestyle. They bought a co-op apartment facing a lovely park on the shore of Lake Michigan. White plush carpets were installed throughout, and the apartment’s eleven rooms were filled with fancy furniture and modern art. The room designated as Saul’s study had floor-to-ceiling mirrors on all four walls. Many of his friends thought the mirrors were Susan’s idea, symbolizing her desire to bask in Saul’s glory and fame, but in fact they were already there when Susan and Saul moved in.

I was raised by a frugal mother and a father who had no steady income until I was eighteen. I never suffered privation, but there was always a lot of anxiety about money along with contempt for the kind of ostentation my uncle Morrie personified. I found the trappings of wealth in their new apartment so repellent that I complained bitterly to Saul. He said that they were of no interest to him, and that wealth did not stop him from writing. “We both know,” he ended, “that writing is what I truly care about.” As I always had, I accepted
what he said about art at face value, but took to visiting Saul in his barren office on the fifth floor of the social sciences building.

When he realized I was staying away from the fancy co-op, he accused me of coming over only when I wanted a check. I told him to mail me the checks, sarcastically adding that when I did come over it was because I wanted to be there! The coercive and divisive influence of money in the Bellow family was never far from my mind, as threats to disinherit had been Abraham’s instrument of control. The connection between money and the power of parents over children remained strong in the next generation of Bellows. No doubt my avoidance of that financial trap explained why in later years Saul always spoke glowingly of my financial independence.

By acting like Morrie, the oldest son who forswore his father’s promised inheritance, I was trying to sow the seeds of an emotional independence I equated with not taking a cent from either parent. When I graduated from college, I told Saul that the June check was to be the last. Fortunately, I was able to pay for graduate school by combining a scholarship with summer earnings. I did not fully realize until Saul’s death that by avoiding the erosive effects of his newfound wealth, I was also trying to maintain a link with the artistic and moral values that prevailed as I grew up.

It did not take long for Saul’s marriage with Susan to sour. He was unhappy with her social agenda and the hours she spent playing tennis at the faculty’s Quadrangle Club. One of his first complaints was that the tennis was making her “too muscular,” but he was more irritated by the lifestyle, which he would take
to task in
Humboldt’s Gift
. The most serious marital frictions arose when Susan’s plans to “civilize” Saul began to include life changes such as leaving Chicago for a more cosmopolitan city like New York or London. Over the years several people told me that she even urged Saul to stop writing, a request that was tantamount to asking my father to stop breathing. By the time I began at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration in the fall of 1966, the atmosphere in their apartment had turned poisonous. A stony silence prevailed at the dinner table. But it was not until the marriage was deteriorating that he started to complain about their opulent surroundings and Susan’s spending habits, infuriating me because Saul had defended her when I made exactly those complaints a few years earlier.

As their marriage spiraled downward, Susan urged Saul to see Dr. Heinz Kohut for what turned out to be a brief stint of therapy. Troubled by yet another marital failure, Saul began to weep during the session. My father told me that Dr. Kohut pushed a box of Kleenex forward, commenting that there should be no more of that! After Dr. Rayfield’s encouragement of the uninhibited expression of emotions, Saul was dismayed now that he was being urged to control himself. Not surprisingly, he stopped the sessions.

Three-year-old Daniel was very upset by his father’s departure, and this was compounded when Susan fired Gussie, who had become a luxury she could no longer afford. Fond of my cute little brother, I continued to visit them. Dan took to expressing his distress by peeing on the white carpets I so hated, and I have to admit that the yellow stains on them greatly pleased me.

Saul came to enjoy affluence in his own way. He hired a tailor
named Armando to make his suits, which always featured colorful silk linings. My graduation present from college was one of Armando’s suits, although I chose a conservative lining. Some years later, at Adam’s wedding, we were joking about the suits and, to prove my point, I went over and exposed the paisley lining of our father’s jacket. He also started buying custom shoes from a shop in London that had wooden lasts of my father’s feet.

When Saul moved out he was determined that his new apartment be furnished in better taste than the co-op Susan now occupied. He took unusual care in the selection of his furniture, and purchased a fancy Oriental rug and a Mercedes. Susan continued to drive their white Chevy around Hyde Park for years, which Saul attributed to her desire to shame him for withholding money. Bent on making Saul pay for leaving her, Susan used their joint credit cards to force him to pay for whatever she bought, and she proved to be a formidable adversary in court. Charges and countercharges flew back and forth. Several legal cases went on for years, becoming incredibly expensive, and Daniel was eventually dragged into court, much to his detriment. According to Saul, a series of legal teams did not satisfy him. They were no doubt hampered by his custom of expecting quick, positive results. Saul’s increasing wealth allowed him to hire wave after wave of lawyers and financial advisers who each in turn were fired, vilified, and then replaced by willing teams who suffered their predetermined fate.

Alone after their separation, Saul rekindled friendships with earthy pals from the old neighborhood whom Susan found objectionable as well as friends around Hyde Park. Dick Stern was
a frequent late-afternoon and evening companion who blundered by encouraging Mark Harris to become Saul’s biographer. Harris’s
Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck
, published in 1980, is his account of how my father, no doubt flattered and amused, led his hopeful biographer on a merry chase. Obviously Saul wanted no part of the project but was incapable of directly refusing. Instead he emulates his favorite rodent, the woodchuck, who, when it perceives danger, disappears into a burrow that has enough exits to ensure a ready escape. It was an apt description of my father’s indirect style of communication; he simply absented himself rather than saying a hurtful no directly to Harris.

In
Drumlin Woodchuck
Harris catalogs the flood of Saul’s attractive women companions just after his breakup from Susan. Saul disliked evenings spent alone in Hyde Park and felt a keen desire to reaffirm his sex appeal at fifty-five. Sam Freifeld and Dave Peltz, his old pals from Humboldt Park, introduced him to available women. These casual liaisons occurred when I wasn’t around, but once Saul rushed me out of his apartment so he could prepare for “some guests.” As I left, I saw Dave walking down the street joking affably with two women in tow. My father would have called them “suicide blondes,” as such women, Saul punned, had “dyed by their own hand.”

The intellectual companionship afforded by the university also appealed to Saul, notably the crusty Edward Shils. The three of us often walked through a dangerous neighborhood to a dreary Chinese restaurant under the Sixty-third Street El. For reasons that escaped me, both men liked the place, which was staffed by waiters in ill-fitting tuxedos. Edward called the restaurant “the Chinks.” When I complained to Saul about what a
sign of prejudice this was, my father, always loyal to the friend or wife who was currently in favor, defended him. Eventually Edward and Saul fell out. I do not know the details of their disagreements, but years later when I was visiting my father in Boston, Philip Roth called him to ask about his relationship with Edward. I overheard Saul say that he could not tolerate Edward’s trying to control his thinking. Saul’s breaking free of the powerful intellect of a pure rationalist like Edward appears to come from a resistance to control that is also apparent in many of his novels, most notably
Augie March
. But while he frequently severed ties when he felt too controlled by someone as forceful as Edward or by wives who made demands he didn’t want to fulfill, he waited to complain until after decadelong relationships had soured; these complaints were largely for public consumption and to disguise how dependent Saul had felt. In one such instance that involved Alexandra, his fourth wife, Saul and Morrie were fighting over the financial proceeds of a real estate deal in which my father had invested with his older brother. Alexandra offered to go to Florida to mediate and try to make peace between the brothers. At the time Saul extolled her offer as an act of nobility, but after their marriage fell apart Saul reversed course, complaining bitterly about her greed as they were negotiating a settlement, completely ignoring his previous praise.

Saul also reconnected to Chicago and a neighborhood structure that he found sustaining. He met my girlfriend, now wife, while I was in graduate school. After about ten minutes of conversation, Saul asked if JoAnn had been raised in West Rogers Park, a Chicago neighborhood. Shocked and a little irritated, she asked how he had figured it out. Saul said, “I’ve made
a study of Chicago accents, neighborhood by neighborhood. I could tell by the way you pronounce certain words.”

Along with fortune came fame. Initially refusing to become what he called a “ribbon cutter,” someone who presides over public cultural events, Saul gained a reputation for being publicity shy. But the public eye also appealed. He enjoyed readings, any opportunity to joust with reporters, to respond to critics, and to make known his views on cultural and social issues. Symbolic of his status, Saul had a bit part in Woody Allen’s movie
Zelig
where he, the child psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, and Irving Howe, author of
The World of Our Fathers
, were cast as three contemporary Jewish wise men. Dissatisfied with the script, he rewrote his dialogue before filming. Saul was also made a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government. He proudly wore the ribbon for decades until encountering a Frenchman with an identical one in his lapel. When Saul discovered the man’s award was for raising prize pigs, his ribbon disappeared.

A long line of admirers now flocked to my father’s door. Brent Staples, a young black man from Hyde Park, wanted to meet my father and published a strange account of trying to approach him. Mystified by Staples’s quandary, Saul wondered why he didn’t simply call and make an appointment with his secretary. But I found Staples’s awe an illustration of how Saul’s public persona had taken on a mythical quality, drawing people who were interested because he was famous, and feeding his already substantial self-centeredness. And Saul was not blind to the price of fame and how it interfered with the honest give-and-take that characterized his early friendships and rivalries with respected peers like Isaac Rosenfeld, Alfred Kazin, and
dozens of other intellectuals. After the art critic Harold Rosenberg died, Saul said he most missed the sound of Harold’s voice on the phone excoriating him with “I can’t believe the latest crap you just wrote.”

Humboldt’s Gift
, published in 1973, even before he won the Nobel Prize, is my father’s literary meditation on the fame that “good” fortune brings and on the two meanings of “culture” in American society. Von Humboldt Fleisher, a poet destroyed by modern life, pickets the opening of a play by his old friend Charlie Citrine, who has achieved critical and financial success. Humboldt accuses Citrine of modeling the play’s main character after him and exploiting their treasured ideas about spreading high culture. Citrine’s success stands in stark contrast to Humboldt’s failure and his later anonymous death. The danger for the poet in America is voluntary isolation from society, a painful but necessary self-exclusion that can contribute to the frequent madness of poets, who are too often celebrated, if at all, after death. The opposite danger is of being smothered by architects and psychiatrists anxious to rub shoulders with cultural heroes at cocktail parties. Meditating on Humboldt’s fate and upon his own commercial success, Citrine confesses to having been seduced by consorting with the enemy they had both once despised: the rich, successful Philistines with no real commitment to culture.

Humboldt’s Gift
mirrors the decline and death of Delmore Schwartz. Delmore’s health had spiraled downward as his substance abuse grew out of control. He lived with Isaac Rosenfeld’s widow, Vasiliki. Her son George, even as a young adolescent, understood that Delmore was mad but found his antics amusing. During Delmore’s last years, Saul, flush with fame, saw his
decrepit friend on the street in New York and hid, a shameful act to which he confessed in the novel.

The 1972 suicide of Saul’s dear friend John Berryman also confirmed his view of the price poets pay. Soon after Berryman’s death, we were at a dinner given by the McCloskys in Berkeley. Saul spoke with Ellen Sigelman, a good friend of Berryman’s in Minneapolis, about his suicide. My father said he could easily understand why John would not want to stay in this world. What he could not comprehend was how he could turn his back on
King Lear
—that is, on art.

I understood that writing is hard work whether the results are poems or novels. I remember seeing Saul, winter and summer, emerge from his study with his shirt soaked through with sweat. The physical and mental toll that writing took on my father was like the effect of climbing an electric pole, taking hold of the high-tension wires, and letting the current run through him for a long, long time. Saul occasionally quipped, “It was safer to be addicted to sex.” He meant that sex was a more favorable vice for a writer than the alcohol that plagued John Berryman, Ralph Ellison, and Delmore Schwartz, and the high price his friends paid for their devotion to writing.